Don’t Look Behind You

made plans with her mother and her three sisters to visit the World’s Fair in Seattle the next day. She really looked forward to being with them again. Bob had forbidden her to tell their three children that they
had
aunts and cousins and grandparents on their mother’s side. Her world had grown smaller and smaller, without her realizing how confining it was—until it was too late.
    As Joann prepared to leave, Patricia Martin hugged her and Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty. They would be five, four, and three in three months.
    “Joann had five dollars,” Pat remembers. “I know she wanted to buy some hair dye and she didn’t even have enough for that. So I gave her enough to make up the difference.”
    Pat asked Joann to call her as soon as she got home. It wasn’t that far from Auburn to Des Moines. She watched them drive away, and then went inside to wait for Joann’s call.
    “It was about forty-five minutes before she called me, and she said everything was okay—that she was ‘all right.’ She even thought it was probably a good decision for her to go home. She was feeling not so scared, and beginning to relax. We were both relieved …
    “Suddenly, Joann said, ‘Pat! Wait a minute—’
    “And then she said, ‘Oh, Pat! He’s in the basement! Oh, God—he’s here, he’s coming up—’”
    Joann started screaming as if she was terrified, as Pat frantically asked her what was wrong.
    “But then the phone went dead,” Pat remembers, and it’s obvious Pat is right back where she was forty-eight years ago.
    Patricia Martin dialed Joann’s phone number, only to get a busy signal. She kept redialing, but for half an hour, no one answered.
    After so many calls, Bob Hansen finally picked up the phone, his voice calm. Pat asked to speak to Joann.
    “Stop that crap, Pat,” Bob said. “You know she’s with you.”
    But, of course, she wasn’t. Joann Hansen was gone.
    Pat wanted to call the police right away, but her husband discouraged her, explaining that adults couldn’t be reported as missing until they’d been gone for forty-eight hours. And she didn’t know which department to call. The King County Sheriff’s Office or the Des Moines Police Department.
    As it turned out, even if she had filed a missing report on that Friday afternoon in August 1962, it probably would have made no difference.

Chapter Seven
AUGUST 11, 1962
    Patricia Martin held the tiniest hope that Joann Hansen had escaped and found some safe haven other than her own house and spent the night there. That seemed highly unlikely; Joann wouldn’t have let her worry all night without finding a way to check in.
    And then there was the outing where Joann was supposed to meet her mother and her three sisters at the Seattle World’s Fair on that Saturday after her Friday disappearance. Joann had really been looking forward to that, especially since she didn’t get to see her family very often. Bob wanted nothing to do with her relatives, but the restraining order had given her the courage to arrange to meet them.
    But they had gone to the designated spot where they were to meet on August 11. They waited and waited, and she didn’t show up. In case they had the time wrong, they kept returning to the meeting spot, but she was never there.
    Patricia Martin didn’t know what to do. She calledDuncan Bonjorni and told him that she didn’t know what had happened to Joann and she feared for her safety.
    Duncan called the King County Sheriff’s Office and persuaded them to send out an All Points Bulletin if Joann didn’t show up in twenty-four hours. Adults who disappear often do so because they want to leave, and police departments set a time period before they will act on a missing report—
unless
there are overt signs that the person has been injured such as blood, bullet holes, or signs of a struggle.
    The brown house showed no signs that anything violent had happened there.
    Although Pat’s husband was a police officer in Auburn, the last place Joann was known to be was in Des Moines.
    Louie Malesis warned Pat that he doubted that any police department would investigate a case without a body.
    She soon found that he was right. Indeed, the first time prosecutors in Washington State would win a case where there was no body of an alleged victim would be in 2000, almost forty years in the future. Even then, the victim had been missing for nine years before a gutsy prosecutor, Marilyn Brenneman, agreed to file murder charges against