Don’t Look Behind You by Ann Rule

Author:Ann Rule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2011-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

ESCAPE

It was too much.

When Bob Hansen left for the construction site the next morning—July 25—Joann gathered up her children and fled to Patricia Martin’s house. Pat hid Joann’s blue Chevrolet so Bob wouldn’t know where she and the children were, and Joann got a restraining order that forbade his coming close to her. She believed that if he did, she could call the police and they would protect her.

She was adamant that she wanted a divorce, even though she was fearful of Bob’s reaction. She and the children drove back to Pat’s house.

Joann didn’t know any attorneys or where to start. She knew a Realtor in Auburn who shared his office with an attorney named Luther Martin (no relation to Patricia Martin). As fate would have it, Martin was out of town for some time. But she saw another lawyer’s shingle right across the street. Determined, she asked the Realtor to take her over and introduce her to Duncan Bonjorni.

If any attorney could have helped Joann, it was Bonjorni. A former justice of the peace and police judge, Bonjorni was both brilliant and fearless. He had paid his way through law school by working forty-eight hours a week, much of the time as a Capitol policeman in Olympia.

He studied Joann Hansen.

“I knew her husband,” the now-retired Bonjorni recalls. “He was a mean son of a bitch. There’s no other way to put it. He appeared before me once when I was a judge—he got into a shouting match with another driver at a place in Renton we called ‘suicide corner.’ I remember that he cut the other guy off, and they argued. When the other driver pulled away, Bob followed him, caught up with him, and took out a crowbar or tire jack and started hitting his car, breaking the windshield and denting the vehicle, and he was threatening the guy.”

Police were called and Bonjorni sentenced Hansen to twenty-four hours in jail, knowing he’d made an enemy. “I was too dumb to be afraid of him, I guess. But I still wouldn’t have wanted to meet him in a dark alley. His hands were as big as hams.”

Now, in late April 1962, Duncan Bonjorni asked Joann Hansen: “Are there any marks on you?”

Without saying a word, Joann stood up, removed her sleeveless blouse, and lowered her pedal pushers.

Bonjorni had seen cases of spousal abuse before—but nothing like this. “She was covered with bruises. She had one huge bruise—as big as a saucer—on her left side. Her husband had hit her mostly on that side—her ribs, her breasts, her thigh,” Bonjorni remembers. “She didn’t have a mark on her face—or anywhere that showed.”

Knowing how big Bob Hansen was, the attorney realized that Joann would have “looked like a small child” next to him.

“She was tremendously afraid of her husband,” Bonjorni recalls. “But she had a lot of spirit. Even though she was frightened, she didn’t come across as downtrodden or intimidated.”

Duncan Bonjorni agreed to represent Joann in a divorce proceeding. They would talk about money later.

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