Don’t Look Behind You

the husband of the missing woman. Brenneman won that landmark case. (See
Empty Promises: Ann Rule’s Crime Files
, Vol. 7.)
    Patricia Martin was a woman on fire who refused to stand by and see Joann Hansen’s disappearance be ignored. She contacted the Des Moines Police Department, then located in the upstairs of an old wooden building owned by the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elkswho occupied the first floor. There were only a handful of commissioned officers in the department in 1962.
    When she tried to report Joann as a probable murder victim, she was told that the Des Moines police could not investigate a suspected homicide where there was no body to validate that a missing person had died of homicidal violence.
    Next, she called the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, one of Seattle’s two newspapers, a publication that was known for its probing investigative articles.
    But Pat was stymied when a reporter told her that they could possibly write an “unsolved” murder case
if
there was a body. “Without a body, we can’t write anything,” he finished.
    “I knew there was no place Joann could have gone,” Pat says today. “She had no money except for about six dollars and fifty cents. She loved her kids so much that nothing could have made her abandon them—nothing beyond her own death. She would have been so worried about what would happen to them if they were alone with Bob.”
    Duncan Bonjorni was troubled when he heard from a young woman who had babysat with Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty the night their mother disappeared. She and a girlfriend had looked through Joann’s closet, admiring her clothes—especially a sparkling blue cocktail dress that had been one of Joann’s favorites.
    “When the babysitter looked for that dress the next day,” Bonjorni recalls, “it was gone. I sometimes wonder if Bob put it on Joann after he killed her. No way to prove it, though.”
    There was another possibility; perhaps the self-made widower had deliberately removed the cocktail dress, hoping it would validate his story that Joann had left him to run off and live the high life with another man.
    Belatedly, Bob Hansen filed a missing person report on Joann on August 15. Joann had been gone five days, and he may have realized that spouses who don’t even attempt to find their missing mates become suspect in the eyes of law enforcement.

Chapter Eight
A NASTY DIVORCE—IN ABSENTIA
    Weeks after she disappeared, Joann’s Chevy Biscayne was located in the lower Queen Anne Hill neighborhood in Seattle. So there
was
something left behind, but it’s doubtful it was Joann who abandoned it. It was filthy and cluttered with junk, food wrappers, cigarette butts, and empty bottles. The windows were open and the interior was covered with dust. All the tires had gone flat.
    “Joann kept her car immaculate,” Patricia Martin insists. “She would never have let it get in that condition.”
    There were no usable fingerprints in the Chevrolet, nor was there any physical evidence that might have given the Western Washington Crime Lab something to examine with the tools they had in 1962. The use of DNA in solving crimes or identifying people was more than thirty years in the future, and there was no nationwide clearinghouse for fingerprints, nothing like the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) structure that exists now. In a sense, 1962 was in the dark ages of forensic science.
    More than likely, the suspect(s) in Joann’s disappearance had abandoned the car with keys in it, an open invitation to car thieves and/or joy riders.
    Life went on in the brown house—without Joann. Bob hired the first of a series of babysitters to watch Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty.
    “There were so many babysitters,” Ty remembers. “We had
tons
of babysitters, so many that I can’t possibly remember them all.”
    Joann’s divorce action against Bob was still on Judge Story Birdseye’s docket, and November 21 was the date for hearing evidence.
    By October 23, Bob Hansen had hired a new attorney and filed a cross-complaint for divorce. He signed an affidavit he gave to Duncan Bonjorni in which he disputed all of Joann’s claims in her May divorce filing.
    He asserted: “The Plaintiff served her complaint upon me on or about the eighth day of August, 1962, and I thereupon voluntarily vacated the family residence. Shortly thereafter—on or about the tenth day of August, the Plaintiff disappeared, leaving the three minor children