Don’t Look Behind You

declared legally dead.
    Ty Hansen remembers visiting at his uncle Ken Hansen’s house and playing with Ken and their aunt Lorene’s two daughters. “They had a real family—a real home. I always wished that I could be in a family like that. We had Thanksgivings and Christmases with them.
    “Our life was, ah …
isolated
… that’s the only way I can describe it. We weren’t like other families at all.”
    Nick, too, has good memories of being in his paternal uncle’s home for holidays. “They were all good to us,” he says. “And they had a player piano. I used to love that.”
    Both the Hansen boys remember that their father took them and their sister on trips and vacations. “We were kids—we had fun on some of the trips,” Ty says. “We stopped asking about our mother because he didn’t like to hear anything about that.”
    Patricia Martin could not forget Joann Hansen, and she didn’t want to. Every time she looked at the palm prints that Joann had pressed into the wet cement in the foundation of Pat’s house, she felt the pang of loss—and of frustration. Pat was afraid to confront Bob, but she called him fifty times a day, only to hang up when he answered. If all she could do was make him nervous, she was going to do that.
    “He figured out soon enough that it was me calling him. He called the police, and they called me and told me to stop, that he was dangerous.”
    If they thought he was dangerous, she wondered why they weren’t out looking for Joann.
    Bob Hansen was eager to take his boys hunting and fishing, and as soon as they could hold a light rifle or a fishing pole, he took them with him to his favorite hunting spots, mostly on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, particularly Banks Lake in Grant and Douglas counties. They camped out, sped around lakes on a boat Bob owned, and went waterskiing.
    Bob always insisted that they take a camera with them, and he took myriad photographs—at their camp sites orof his small boys holding up their unfortunate, dead and bleeding prey.
    Although his hobbies were violent, Bob bragged that his children enjoyed their hunting trips with him. He appeared to be the epitome of the loving father who was doing his best to spend time with his motherless children. Joann had long since become known as the heedless, selfish mother who had followed her own dreams—even if it meant abandoning her children.
    Joannn’s family, friends, and her attorney were convinced that wasn’t what happened, and they did what they could to find her. They had no luck. Neither did the private investigators who Joann’s parents hired. Bob wouldn’t talk to them, and they found no other paths they could follow.
    Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty didn’t know they had a half brother: Bobby Morrison. Nick and Kandy Kay might have had a vague memory of him from when they were toddlers, but Ty certainly wasn’t old enough to remember him. They didn’t know Patricia Martin. Nor did they know they had relatives on their mother’s side who loved them. Bob had cut all ties with anyone connected to Joann. Their father filled their world—figuratively and actually. He was so tall, so big, and his voice rumbled. He didn’t want them to bond with anyone but him.
    In his way, he may have cared for them more than he cared for anyone else in his life—but Bob Hansen seemed incapable of any real sensitivity except how he himself felt. He acted without thinking, particularly when he was angry. He seemed incapable of empathy, never understanding howother people felt—even his own small children. He gave them everything material that he thought they needed—but, most of all, he lacked tenderness.
    And they needed that.
    When Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty were barely out of Mrs. Moses’s private kindergarten in Des Moines, they were pretty much on their own. They no longer had babysitters. Bob was making good money in the construction boom that hit America in the sixties and early seventies, and that meant long hours on the job. His three children quickly learned to fend for themselves.
    “Nobody knew it,” Ty says, “but we walked to Mrs. Moses’s kindergarten class, which was in the basement of Des Moines Elementary. It was about seven or eight blocks from our house, and we had to cross Kent Des Moines Road first, which was a really busy street. Sometimes a babysitter would see us across that road, and sometimes not.”
    In the annual photos that Mrs. Moses had taken of her class, the