Don’t Look Behind You

a drawer.
    The PI told Captain Frank Adamson where they were; they weren’t salacious. They were, oddly, mug-shot-type photos. They weren’t official booking photos, but Hansen had apparently taken them to look that way—snapping both front and profile views of about forty women. None of them were on the list of women—over fifty now—who were missing or whose remains had been found thus far.
    Although Jim Allen found nothing definite that might tend to incriminate Bob Hansen in the string of serial murders, his home’s location on Green River Road and his apparent taste for young prostitutes still made him a suspect.
    For Frank Adamson and other investigators, Bob Hansen seemed to be a strong “person of interest.” Then FBI profiler John Douglas and psychologist John Kelly from New Jersey—both of whom were often dead-on in their profiles of suspects—disagreed, and Hansen slipped toward the bottom of their “persons of interest” lists.
    Dr. Kelly wrote of Hansen: “A wealthy and eccentric farmer … I believe him to have been a lonely, elderly man who wanted a woman to live with him and take care of him. He even advertised for such a woman. His house was important to him; he felt secure behind the heavy wooden door. I believe his house was much more important to him than the river or the woods. He was too conservative and concerned about his wealth and success, and would not endanger that by being in the river or woods with corpses or transporting them long distances. If he was the ‘River Killer,’ that girl would never have escaped from his house.”
    In some areas, Kelly was right about Bob Hansen. In others, he was very wrong. Bob knew the woods, rivers, lakes, and wilderness extremely well and had spent much of his life enjoying the outdoors as he fished, hunted, and camped out. He was not housebound in the least.
    Had the psychologist known about the “elderly man’s” long missing wife or the girl who never came back from a hike with Bob in Costa Rica, Kelly might have rethought his profile.
    Bob Hansen wasn’t charged with anything connected to the Green River cases, but he was charged with indecent liberties and unlawful imprisonment for his allegedsexual advances toward the young woman who had answered his ad for a housekeeper. He was booked into the King County jail on August 4, 1984, and his bail was initially set at $25,000. When a records check showed his 1981 arrest for indecent liberties, his bail was raised to $100,000.
    There is, however, no record that he was convicted of his second sexual crime. Bob could handle his bail easily, and he could afford the best defense attorneys.
    One thing about the search warrant of his barn concerned Bob Hansen. He’d had a wig and some kind of costume, Marv Milosevich recalled, and the investigators took that, along with his collection of knives. The disguise in the barn could have been a Halloween costume or it might have been used for something more sinister.
    Bob told Marv that he had kept $5,000 in cash under the rim of a sink, and the sheriff’s men hadn’t taken that. “I don’t think they knew it was there,” he said to his old friend.
    “Don’t fool yourself,” Marv said. “They knew it was there—they weren’t looking for money.”
    A few days later, Bob came out to Marv’s place in the country. He had $10,000 in a mason jar that was wrapped in rubber bands. He wanted Marv to keep it for him—just in case he needed emergency money. Marv wasn’t sure where he should put it, and he really didn’t want that much cash secreted on his property.
    But Bob insisted, and he dug a hole on the edge ofLaVonne’s flower garden and put the mason jar in it. He left, sure that his emergency money was secure.
    “It wasn’t a very safe hiding place,” Marv said with a laugh. “My Labrador found it the first day and dug it up! I made Bob take it home and hide it at his place.”
    Bob Hansen’s life had taken a downturn, and the older he got, the more paranoid he became. He begged Marv Milosevich to be the executor of his will. He wanted to be sure that none of his children or
their
children inherited any of his assets—money or property.
    “They sent me pictures of their kids,” he told the man he considered his best friend. “But I sent them back, unopened. I don’t want to know anything about them.”
    That was hard for Marv to understand; his living room was full of photographs and mementoes of his children and