Don’t Look Behind You

that Joann Hansen had been murdered decades earlier. The biggest problem was the ever-shrinking budget the King County executive and the county commissioners specified for both their departments.
    Ty and Cindy were convinced that the most likely place to dig on the grounds would be where the old barn had been; it had been reduced to rubble, and that area was now covered by an asphalt road with the Green River only steps away. Another likely spot was under the Valley Apartments.
    Ty and Cindy were exploring the possibility that new forensic tools said to spot bodies hidden in the earth might help to find Joann’s remains. It seemed such a long shot, and they knew it would be expensive.
    In 2003, they contacted Bernard Housen, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, to see if it might be possible to use some kind of imaging—such as radar—to reveal a body buried in the ground. Cindy had read that an infrared process was being utilized in police investigations to spot disturbed earth and vegetation even though it wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. Red splotchesoften meant that plants and trees were slowly dying because their roots had been disturbed when murder victims’ graves were dug.
    Housen explained that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) could reveal clandestine grave sites up to twenty feet below the surface. It wasn’t foolproof, but with careful measurement of the areas to be searched,
and
by marking known objects already in the ground such as utility lines, buried storage tanks, or foundations long covered over with dirt, something unusual—an “anomaly”—might be seen and evaluated.
    The old white barn where Ty and Nick used to play in the rafters, where Bob Hansen had temporarily imprisoned young women, was long gone now. An asphalt county road—S. 251st Street—had been built two to four feet over the barn’s concrete floor.
    And the Valley Apartments had been constructed some years after Joann had disappeared.
    Joann had technically received this land and the barn that once stood there in the division of the Hansens’ assets in 1962. But both had somehow ended up on Bob’s side of the ledger soon after she disappeared.
    One of the renters in the Valley Apartments told Ty Hansen that she had always felt there was something odd about the cement floor in the laundry room, which all the tenants could use.
    The laundry room, too, was added to the proposed radar search.
    There would be four “digs” that followed this first attempt on October 7, 2003.
    Bernard Housen worked from a scale map drawn to the dimensions of the area to be searched. Fifty-three transect lines were run so that any finding could be triangulated and both suspicious anomalies and benign anomalies located could be marked on the map.
    A GSSI SIR 2000 Ground Penetrating Radar unit with a 400 MHz antenna would be used to detect data. Working between four large steel nails that were placed in the ground to mark the corners of the site, Housen dragged the antenna along the surface of each transect line. He walked at a slow but steady pace.
    Would he find an anomaly that proved to be Joann Hansen’s bones? The conditions were perfect for the GPR search and both benign and unknown objects showed up.
    Housen found three areas of “disturbed soil anomalies” from two to four feet below the cement barn floor pad.
    “Areas A, B, and E are all consistent in depth and size to represent a clandestine grave site.”
    He warned, however, that there might be other causes for disturbed soil—such as the removal of stumps or rocks.
    A GPR search of the Valley Apartments’ laundry room showed some similar findings. The concrete slab floor was inordinately thick for a laundry area—two to three feet. It had no rebar to stabilize it.
    The only way to be sure of what lay beneath the old barn floor or the laundry room was to dig, take core samples, and bring in cadaver dogs. Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler were prepared to do that, even if they had to do the shoveling themselves.
    Twice, Ty used an excavator to explore the area under S. 251st Street, digging six-foot chunks out of the dirt beneath the road.
    He found nothing.
    With fellow volunteers, Cindy Tyler and Ty began to cut through the cement slab in the Valley Apartments’ laundry area and the lawn outside.
    “When Ty and I started digging there,” Cindy recalls, “both Detective Jim Allen and deputy prosecutor Jeff Baird grabbed shovels and joined us.
    “There was