in the three dozen true crime books she authored. She was also fascinated by the methods her family used to solve crimes. Not only was her grandfather the Montcalm County sheriff, an uncle was the undersheriff, another uncle was the medical examiner, and her aunt worked in the juvenile court.
How do they do it? little Ann wondered as she watched her grandfather and uncles solve crimes. How do they take a button and trace it back to the killer? Sometimes she was allowed to watch them work, and sometimes she helped. She was about eleven when her grandfather and uncle recovered the remains of a John Doe. The man had apparently gone missing a long time before and had been reduced to a pile of bones by the time he was discovered. Ann helped spread the bones out on a table as they attempted to identify him.
While forensic science has changed tremendously since my great-grandfather’s day, evil has not. It still comes in all shapes and sizes, and he saw his share of it when he hosted some of the Midwest’s most dangerous criminals at his jailhouse. He treated them all with respect, and that might be one of the reasons he was legendary for his uncanny ability to coax confessions from killers. He was also famous for the fact he’d never fired a gun in the line of duty in his twenty-four-year career, a distinction so unusual that the story was picked up by wire services in November 1939 and published in dozens of newspapers, along with the caveat, “he still is mighty quick on the draw and a tolerably good marksman.”
One of Sheriff Hansen’s most widely publicized cases occurred on a cold January night in 1941. It was a little after 6 P.M. when seventy-three-year-old farmer Benjamin Perrien bent over a washbasin in his kitchen in his Clearlake, Michigan, home. He splashed water on his face, unaware of the gun pointed at him. Had he known of the rage building in his killer, he probably wouldn’t have turned his back on him. The blast from the 16-gauge shotgun ended Ben’s life.
Sheriff Hansen and his deputies drove to the crime scene, forty miles west of their Stanton headquarters. They were greeted by thirteen-year-old Robert Eberhardt and the victim’s wife, Sylvia, sixty-three, who’d been milking the cow in the barn at the time of the attack. Partially deaf, she was unaware of the trouble until she found her husband crumpled on the kitchen floor.
Young Robert, however, had seen everything. A sixth-grader at a rural schoolhouse, he was small for his age. He’d moved in with the Perriens two years earlier because his poverty-stricken family had too many children to feed. Robert did chores to earn his keep. Now, he said he’d witnessed the shooting and gave a detailed description of the intruders.
The bullet had entered the back of Ben’s head, just as Robert had indicated, but Sheriff Hansen doubted the story—especially when it kept changing. His suspicions were confirmed when the Perriens’ dog retrieved evidence from a snowdrift, carrying it gingerly in his mouth as he trotted back to the house. The killer was none other than the small boy with the wild story. His four-footed friend had watched him throw the shotgun shell into the snowbank. Whether the pooch thought they were playing a game of fetch or somehow understood that Robert had harmed Ben, the evidence was undeniable.
When the dog dropped the shell on the floor, Robert hastily hid it beneath his bed, but deputies soon found it, along with the boy’s gun. Confronted with the proof, he claimed intruders had placed the shotgun in his hands and forced him to kill Ben. Eventually Hansen persuaded him to reveal the truth and sign a confession. While Robert admitted to the murder, he was later quoted saying he felt only a little sorry about what he’d done. In the kid’s mind, it was justified. He told Sheriff Hansen that Ben had been “mean” to him, refusing to give him a vacation and had once thumped him on the head with a pail.
The Perrien case was one of many shocking crimes that Hansen helped to solve. Inspired by her grandfather, Ann dreamed of becoming a police woman, a dream she achieved at age twenty-two when she was hired by the Seattle Police Department. Her beat was the city’s Pioneer Square area. In a skirt and high heels—part of the required uniform for female cops in the 1950s—she was not allowed