Don’t Look Behind You

years when Bob didn’t have it rented out.
    Kandy was not quite twenty when she began dancing in the disco night spots that popped up close to the highway and army and air force bases around Seattle and Tacoma. She hadn’t gone to college and she was bored and sick of jobs in fast-food restaurants. She was, of course, very beautiful and a natural as a cocktail waitress and then as a scantily clad dancer.
    She was dancing in Tacoma when she was attracted to a new man. He was a bad boy and exciting. His name was Ron Wakefield. Kandy married him.
    Wakefield introduced Kandy to heroin.
    “He was charming and good-looking,” her brother Ty says. “But he was a junkie. Once Kandy hooked up with him, she went down fast. He dragged her down with him. They were both just junkies looking for heroin wherever they could find it.”
    Barbara, too, saw that Kandy’s drug use had escalated, and Barb feared she was almost certainly using heroin. She also knew that Kandy was making her living as a topless dancer and sometimes stripping entirely. She even heard rumors that Kandy was working for an escort service.
    “One of the last times I saw her,” Barbara Kuehne Snyder remembers, “it may have been the very last time—this was in the eighties, and we were in our early twenties. I went over to her house to see her. She excused herself and came back with a syringe and some heroin. I couldn’t stand to see that, and I told her so, but she didn’t stop. I had to leave.”
    Shortly after that, Kandy and Ron Wakefield were in trouble for some kind of incident in a state liquor store.Ty thinks Ron robbed it. Her brothers were never sure just what happened, but they believed that it was Wakefield who pulled it off and that he somehow involved Kandy.
    “At any rate,” Ty says, “they left town in a hurry, and on the run. They planned to head south and then drive cross-country.”
    They were in Wendover, Utah, when their car broke down.
    Wendover sits on the Utah-Nevada border and each state claims half the city. It is a gambler’s paradise.
    “The cops stopped to help them when they spotted Ron’s car beside the road,” Ty continues. “They checked on Ron and found he had a warrant out of Washington for his arrest, so they handcuffed him and took him away in the back of their squad car.
    “Kandy was left alone in the broken-down car, strung out and broke. She hitched a ride into town and managed to get a job as a cocktail waitress in a casino there.”
    Tom Yarbrough was the manager of the casino, and he was also the “go-to man” in Wendover. He had numerous friends and a reputation as a good guy. Tom was much older than Kandy—close to her father’s age, near sixty—but he was quite handsome; he looked very much like the actor Omar Sharif.
    Yarbrough noticed Kandy in the casino and they began talking, then dating. It was probably the first time in her life when a man had unselfishly wanted to do what was best for Kandy Hansen. Tom truly cared for her. She was only twenty-five, and still had a chance to change her life.
    In time, Kandy moved in with Tom. With his help, she managed to get completely off drugs. Although it was a painful struggle, Kandy escaped her terrifying addiction to heroin. She was the picture of health in photographs taken of the couple at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. They looked like two movie stars. Kandy wore a one-shouldered black sequined dress, and Tom was dressed in a white suit, wine-colored shirt, white satin tie, and a chunky gold bracelet.
    “Tom was a prince,” Ty Hansen declares. “He was a good influence on Kandy. He wanted to marry her; he even asked my dad for permission to marry her, and my father saw that she was clean and happy, and he said yes. But they never did get married.”
    Ty Hansen had suffered the most physical abuse over the years, and he had the scars to prove it. From the time he and Nick were in first or second grade, they started working with Bob Hansen on his construction jobs. One of their jobs was picking up endpieces of wood and debris around the construction sites.
    Marv Milosevich thought Bob was too hard on the boys. “They were just little kids, and they would play with the scrap wood—making cars and boats. That made Bob angry.
    “He had different kinds of punishment for them. If he thought Nick and Ty were deliberately sloughing off when they should be working, he would get out his hatchet. Then he made them put their hands flat on a stump, and