Don’t Look Behind You

hidden her body in many places. I left it alone for ten years,” Ty remembers today. “I don’t know why it took so long. Other things got in the way, but the mystery of my mother haunted me, popping up when I didn’t expect it. I knew that one day I would have to face it head-on.”
    The millennium was approaching, and the last decade of the twentieth century was to bring more changes than anyone close to the Hansens’ chaotic family could foresee.
    Ty Hansen was in his forties when he told his old friend Cindy Tyler what he had learned about his parents’ marriage and divorce: that several people he’d talked to believed Bob Hansen had killed his wife. Ty was ready toavenge his mother—if he could. Cindy was both horrified and captivated by this information.
    “I had some free time,” Cindy explained. “I decided that I would work with Ty to find the truth, and I told him, ‘You know what, Ty? I’m gonna help you.’ We didn’t have much money; we sure couldn’t afford to dig deep into places where Joann might be, but we hoped we could convince the county to help us.”
    Cindy agreed that there were so many aspects of Ty’s mother’s disappearance that hadn’t been checked.
    “Even though she had been gone for more than thirty years, I believed we could still find something.”
    The two old school friends made a good match; every time either one of them got discouraged about their seemingly futile search for Joann Hansen, the other was able to drum up enthusiasm. Cindy was more outgoing; she usually made the best cheerleader, and she was always able to get Ty to believe that they would find an answer—some day, some way.

Chapter Thirteen
AN IMPOSSIBLE CRIME
    Given that many people who knew Bob Hansen through the years believed he had killed his first wife and gotten away with it, I wanted to be sure that Cecilia Hansen—his second wife—was alive and well. He must have been very angry when he realized that she wanted a divorce. She had been such a sweet and docile twenty-year-old woman when they met, and he had taken her to so many wonderful places.
    Cecilia is alive, living in Costa Rica.
    There was a second Cecilia, and they may or may not have been married. She abandoned Bob Hansen as soon as she got her green card. She, too, is living—in the United States—but, quite understandably, she doesn’t want to discuss her brief relationship with Bob Hansen.
    Although he was chagrined at how the two Cecilias had turned out, Bob was still entranced by Costa Rica. He wanted to settle there, and he kept his eye out for property to buy. In 1997, he also started sending checks and moneyorders to officials who he was told would make it easier for him to immigrate.
    They accepted his money eagerly.
    Bob was secretive about his Costa Rican connections. His old friend Marv Milosevich and his wife, LaVonne, suspect that Bob may have been married several times without announcing it. One photograph, with no notations on the back, may support that theory. Bob and an attractive American woman are standing together in front of an altar. She has an orchid corsage, and it certainly looks like a wedding photo. Who she is—or was—no one knows.
    Bob approached several “possibles” in Costa Rica for his next bride. He took one young woman on a long hike, but he came back alone. Asked where his companion was, he explained, “She just went walking off and left me behind.” Bob, however, was carrying the girl’s backpack with all of her most valuable possessions.
    The “disappearing” girl drew the attention of Costa Rican police, and they noted Bob as a possible suspect if she should have met with foul play. But despite the fact that the young woman was still missing, Bob wasn’t arrested or charged with anything.
    In about 1998, Bob met a beautiful girl named Flory Maria Villalobos-Perez in Costa Rica. She looked a great deal like the first Cecilia. The only bona fide way to tell them apart in photographs is to read the dates in Bob’s scrawled writing.
    Flory’s birthday was June 27, 1974. That made her exactly—minus four months—fifty years younger than Bob Hansen. He was seventy-four, and Flory was twenty-four.
    He found a way to win Flory’s heart. When he saw that her parents were living in a broken-down house where a plague of bees had built hives, a home with few creature comforts, he offered to build them a new house.
    He was still a skilled carpenter and soon finished a solid,