Don’t Look Behind You

don’t know why.”
    One of Bob’s most egregious punishments for Ty happened when he and his children were camping on the shore of Banks Lake.
    “Maybe Ty didn’t tell you about this,” Nick suggests. “It was so awful I don’t think he chooses to remember it.”
    Banks Lake is a twenty-seven-mile-long manmade reservoir with clear blue water, formed by the north dam near Grand Coulee and the Dry Falls Dam near Coulee City, and filled with water from Lake Roosevelt. Surrounded by rocky outcroppings—basalt cliffs and talus slopes—the land around Banks Lake looks like it belongs on another planet, or in a desert. It is a draw for vacationers and tourists, an unexpected oasis.
    “Dad was trying to teach us to water-ski while we were camping on the beach at Banks Lake,” Nick recalls. “Ty was about six or seven and he just couldn’t seem to get up on his skis, and Dad got really angry. He got out of the boat, took the rope, and wrapped it several times around Ty’s neck. Then he got back in the boat and revved it up.”
    Ty was almost strangled. If Bob Hansen hadn’t cut the throttle when he did, Ty could have broken his neck—or been decapitated.
    “That was the worst day of my life,” Ty remembers today. “I really thought he was finally going to kill me.”
    “Kandy slept in our tent on the beach that night,” Nick said, “but Ty and I were so shaken about what could have happened that we slept up on the hill—away from Dad.”
    Remembering the incident, Nick mused, “The only thing that ever kept us alive was that my dad wanted the public to see him as a great family man.”
    Unlike some of the other true cases I’ve researched, the mystifying story of the Hansen family was told to me by a score of witnesses who related it with almost identical memories and opinions. There was general agreement that Bob Hansen was an alarming man.
    Attorney Duncan Bonjorni, perhaps, summed him up most accurately: “He was warped. I never saw a man so devoid of a real personality. He was an aberration all the way. Bob Hansen was evil personified!”
    Kandy Kay’s best friend, Barb Snyder, is not as vehement as Bonjorni is. She was more puzzled by the dynamics in Kandy’s home, but she came to feel used to the way things were there.
    “Who took care of the Hansen kids while their father was out on the job?” I asked Barb.
    “They took care of themselves.” She shrugged. “One time, I asked Kandy where her mother was—I didn’t know any other family where there wasn’t a mother. She told me her mother was hit by a train and killed. We were both eight, and I accepted that. She didn’t talk any more about her mother.”
    Barb said she stayed at the Hansen house for supper many times. “Bob cooked, and he was pretty good. I was kind of scared of him, though. It was his temper. Something would irritate him and he got angry so quickly. It didn’t last long, but it was frightening for me. His own kids got real quiet when he blew up. We were all afraid of him.”
    Although the Hansen children could do pretty much what they wanted if they didn’t get in their father’s way, there was one area that was forbidden to them. None of them was ever allowed in Bob’s bedroom. Beyond his warning of what would happen to anyone who snooped in there, they couldn’t get in anyway; he had deadbolt locks to keep them out.
    Barb Snyder remembers incidents where Kandy’s father acted inappropriately and she and Kandy were both embarrassed.
    “Bob took us to the circus once when we were eleven or twelve. We were watching the elephants, and Bobpointed out that one of the elephants was mounting the elephant in front of him. We didn’t even know what an erection was then, but Bob poked us and made us look at its penis. He said, ‘Wow! Look at the size of that!’ I was just mortified.”
    When they were older, Barb recalls that a man whom Kandy called “Uncle” told someone she knew that Bob was sexually molesting Kandy. Incest was something Barb had never heard of and, again, she was far too embarrassed to ever question Kandy. And Kandy had certainly never even hinted at that. If it was true, it wasn’t anything the two girls could talk about.
    “Kandy got whatever she wanted, and her ‘uncle’ said that was because Bob was messing with her,” Barb said. “I never thought that. But, as we got older, she had so much freedom and Bob gave her so many expensive presents. I just thought it was because they were