Don’t Look Behind You

wanted to brag about.

Chapter Fifteen
LOOKING FOR JOANN
    In the early years of the new century, Cindy Tyler and Ty Hansen were still searching avidly for Joann Hansen, missing now for more than forty years. Beginning with Patricia Martin, they talked with everyone and anyone who might have some memory of Joann and what had happened to her. At one point, they hired an investigator to help them canvass possible witnesses to the lives of Bob and Joann back in the fifties and sixties.
    “It seemed that each time we talked to someone new,” Ty recalls, “they said the same thing. ‘Wasn’t she murdered and buried under a cement slab by Bob Hansen?’
    “At first this response was shocking. But at some point, we were used to hearing the same thing. No one should become used to hearing about his mother being murdered and buried under a slab of cement.”
    Even when Cindy Tyler located one of Bob’s attorneys who had retired to Chicago and asked him about his former client, she was shocked by his response.
    “Oh—yeah,” the attorney said. “He was the ‘cement man,’ wasn’t he?”
    Ty felt a sense of outrage that the mother he couldn’t even remember had been accepted by people living in the south county area as a homicide victim and then quickly forgotten. Had everyone known but no one pursued the mystery of her disappearance when it had happened? Was it a matter of not wanting to be involved?
    Well, Pat Martin had gotten involved, and so had Duncan Bonjorni. They were rays of hope and encouragement that someone still cared.
    Ty and Cindy had never found a police file that might have existed shortly after Joann disappeared in August 1962. Patricia Martin had tried her best to file missing reports but no one would listen to her then.
    They learned that there
had
been a case file more than forty years earlier, but it had been destroyed. That was a fairly common practice in the days before computers provided incredible amounts of storage space; very old files were shredded to make room for more recent cases.
    At one point in 2004 or 2005 when Ty was in California, Cindy, hoping for clues—or even daring to hope Bob might confess to her—gathered her courage and knocked on Bob Hansen’s door. No one answered, and she knocked again. She was just about to leave when the door swung open and she saw Bob towering over her.
    “He let me in,” she said, still surprised that he had.“I stayed almost an hour. He showed me some clippings he had saved from the time Ty’s ‘Loan Arranger’ car lot failed. He seemed happy that Ty had gotten into trouble.
    “His whole conversation was about making everyone else look bad—even his own children.”
    At Ty’s urging, the King County Sheriff’s Office had updated his mother’s case. She would remain officially listed as missing, and they periodically reviewed her case. They certainly had more recent files on Bob Hansen’s temper tantrums, fights, and assaults. Of course, there was the case where he had held the young woman captive in his barn. Detective Jim Allen still did whatever he could to unravel the details of the long-vanished woman. If Joann was alive, she would be in her seventies.
    If she was alive
…
    Some of the people Ty and Cindy had talked to thought that Joann was buried under Bob Hansen’s barn (which no longer existed); some believed she was even closer to where she was killed; Bob had built the Willows Apartments next door to their house close to the same time she vanished. Pat Martin said, “I think she’s in the foundation of those apartments on the Kent Des Moines Road.”
    That was an eerie thought; Bob had moved his children into those apartment units when they were in their mid- to late teens.
    Under construction, the Willows Apartments had little vegetation around them and could be clearly seen from the heavy traffic that moved up and down the Kent Des Moines Road, and from the Chevron station across thestreet. It would have been extremely difficult for Bob to bury a body beneath the strip of half-built apartments without someone noticing.
    But there were other apartments that Bob Hansen had constructed. The Valley Apartments were virtually identical to the Willows, and the one-story brick building stood a few feet from where the old white barn had once been.
    Although Detective Sergeant Jim Allen and prosecutor Jeff Baird had turned Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler away so many times, it didn’t mean they didn’t care or didn’t believe