Hi, crime junkies.
Today, I have a solo episode for you.
It's about a case that rocked the quiet California community where it unfolded.
Twin teenage sisters were shot while their house was set on fire and the identity of the biggest suspect fractured the family at the heart of the story.
But as we dug in, I couldn't help but think, maybe there's more to this story.
Like, on the surface, I can see how someone could think it's an open and shut case.
But the more I learned, the more I wondered if it was as straightforward as police initially portrayed it to be.
Or did they miss evidence pointing in other directions?
This is the story of Jill and Julie Hanson.
It's around 3 am on Saturday, November 15th 1986, in Willow Creek California, when 40-year-old Hans Hansen suddenly jolts awake from a deep sleep.
His feet are on his bedroom floor before.
He knows what woke him up, but he immediately smells smoke and hears something popping.
His wife Betty, is already out of bed scrambling to get her robe on.
And when they throw open their bedroom door, they are met with a hellscape.
The bathroom across the hall is engulfed in flames, and Hans hears that popping noise again.
He's assuming it's some hairspray cans exploding in the heat of the fire or something like that, and he knows he has to move quickly.
He, Betty, and three of their children are home, and they all need to get out now.
They live in a double-wide trailer.
The bedrooms and bathrooms are on one side, then a hallway leads to the kitchen, living room and front room.
And a fire is going to move through the home fast.
Hans rushes to the living room where he knows his 21-year-old stepson Donnie, was sleeping on the couch.
But the sliding glass doors open and Donnie's gone, so he must have gotten out.
Donnie, check.
Hans just needs to find their 16-year-old twin daughters, Jill and Julie.
He tries to get to the bedroom that they were sleeping in, but his stomach drops as he realizes that the fire's blocking the door.
He grabs a fire extinguisher from a closet and starts frantically spraying down the hallway, yelling at Betty to call for help.
But the fire is out of control.
So he runs to his warehouse to get another fire extinguisher.
Betty's on the phone inside the warehouse and their son Donnie, is also there grabbing more fire extinguishers.
But they soon realize it's not going to help.
The fire is just too big.
So Hans gets the garden hose, breaks the window leading to the bedroom where the girls are and throws the hose inside.
Which is when, according to the time standard, he hears one of the girls call out for help.
So at least one of them is still in the trailer.
And within minutes, firefighters are on the scene battling the blaze.
It's not until that moment that Hans realizes Julie is already outside.
In all of the commotion, he missed her getting out.
First responders are working on her, but she is in bad shape.
She's clutching her stomach and paramedics think that the fire caused an explosion that severely injured her.
And she needs to go to the hospital immediately.
Hans knows that he and Betty have to go with her, but there's still no sign of her sister Jill.
First responders have taken over the scene so, as torn as they are, Hans and Betty ask Donnie to wait for word on Jill as they rush to the hospital.
Hans and Betty have nothing to do but sit and wait for news.
And when a doctor finally comes out to give them an update, it's something that they're not expecting at all.
Julie's stomach injury isn't from the fire.
The doctor tells them that she was shot at close range.
As the reality of what happened to his daughter strikes Hans and he thinks back to the fire.
It hits him.
That popping sound he heard when he woke up.
That could have been gunshots.
But none of it is making sense.
As doctors work to save Julie, Hans and Betty stand by for any updates on Jill.
They're holding on to the hope that maybe Jill will be okay.
But between 10 and 11 that same morning they get news that while combing through what's left of the house, first responders found Jill in the kitchen.
She died in the fire.
And while they were still reeling from the revelation about Julie's injuries, they get Jill's autopsy results and find that she had also been shot.
So this is now a murder investigation.
And as police start cataloging evidence at the crime scene, they find two empty gas cans, one in the house and one on the deck, the same kind Han says he kept in his warehouse.
And investigators quickly realize gas was used to start the fire intentionally.
Investigators want to know who would want to harm Jill and Julie, and they start looking into the girls and their lives.
And it's an understatement to say that Jill and Julie were adored in their community.
Everyone knows the Hanson twins because when they were just 10 years old, Jill was diagnosed with leukemia.
And the whole town of Willow Creek rallied behind the family in her six-year road to recovery.
And just recently, she had been given a clean bill of health.
As far as the family can tell, there is no one who would want to hurt them.
And while the town where the Hansons lived was relatively safe, the county around it was a different story.
It is literally known as Murder Mountain because of the number of killings and disappearances thought to be connected to massive drug deals in the area.
And we know crime does spill over.
And I'm sure investigators have that in the back of their minds as they start to investigate.
They ask witnesses in the area about what they saw that night.
And they seem to get some, like, half-leads.
One neighbor tells them that sometime after the fire she saw two teen boys standing near the trailer watching the fire unfold.
And one had what looked like ashes on his shoulder.
Some neighbors report having heard two blasts and then a car peeling off in the distance.
And other neighbors say they saw a car driving toward Highway 199, according to the Times Standard.
And I wish I could tell you what kind of car it was, but we couldn't get investigative records for this case.
So most of the information we have is from archives of local papers.
The Time Standard reported that investigators also find spent shotgun shells in the trailer and hidden behind some boxes in the back of Hans' warehouse.
They find a 12-gauge shotgun with an obvious palm print and they send the shells and the gun off for testing to see if they match.
This discovery of course sets off alarm bells for police, and they ask Hans about the gun and he tells them it's not his.
He only has an old rifle that he kept from his childhood, not a 12-gauge shotgun like the one they found.
But that's when investigators find something else, something that turns the idea of a random attack into something totally different.
A few unspent shotgun shells somewhere else, inside Hans' stepson Donnie's car.
They send those unspent shotgun shells off for testing too.
And they immediately want to talk to Donnie to get his story of what happened that night.
And like I mentioned, our request for investigative files was denied.
So we had to piece together what Donnie told police from reporting by the time standard unsolved mysteries and other records.
And from those sources, here's what we know.
Donnie says he was asleep on the couch in the living room the night of the fire and he was woken up by a shotgun blast.
He sat up on the couch and in the flash from the gun going off, he saw Julie collapse at the end of the hallway that opens up into the living room.
He says the house was already on fire, and he ran over to pick Julie up and carried her outside.
And Donnie told police that he didn't get a good look at who else was in the house.
He just said he saw a, quote, dark figure.
They ask Donnie about the unspent shotgun shells in his car and Donnie says he'd bought them because they were in the store.
He'd borrowed a 12-gauge shotgun from his friend and they took it target shooting earlier that week.
He had meant to return the gun but forgot it in the backseat of his car, which Donnie's friend later backs up.
And with no ballistics back yet, investigators are still waiting to see if they're all a match.
The gun in the warehouse, the unspent shells in Donnie's car, and the spent shells in the house.
As police continue their investigation, they're surveilling the Hanson property to see if anybody comes back to the scene of the crime.
And during their stakeout, their waiting pays off.
Patrol officers watch as a man lurks around the warehouse.
Officers call a detective to the scene.
And when the detective confronts this person, it's Donnie.
According to an episode about the case on Unsolved Mysteries, Donnie tells them he's looking for the family dog who sleeps in the warehouse at night.
But the police don't buy it.
Hans and Betty have been camping out in a motorhome outside the hospital as they wait for Julie to wake up.
And when police later ask Hans, he tells them that Donnie knew the dog was being watched by a friend and wasn't at the house.
So police think he might be looking for the shotgun that they now think he hid.
Now Donnie doesn't know that the police already found it because they didn't mention that to him when they first interviewed him.
And it doesn't help Donnie, when ballistics come back and police are able to confirm that the shotgun found in the back of Hans' warehouse was the same gun used to shoot the girls.
And the same gun Donnie had borrowed and taken target shooting.
The unspent shells in his car?
Also a match.
They also find that on Wednesday, which would be a couple of days before the shooting, Donnie had asked Hans for the credit card that the family used for gas to fill up his car.
Investigators look at the credit card statements and see that there was a charge for five gallons of gas at a gas station nearby.
Police look into the gas station Donnie purchased the gas from.
They're able to confirm that he purchased gas that day.
But Donnie didn't fill his car with the gas.
He filled a gas can.
When police ask Donnie about this, he tells them that the fuel spout was bent on his car, so he had to use a gas can to fill up.
But all of this coupled together isn't looking great.
My question is, why would Donnie do this?
By all accounts, Donnie was a good kid.
He wasn't into drugs or partying.
He was a star student in high school.
But his parents did say that after graduation, he began to drift a little.
After one semester in college, he dropped out and didn't seem to have the drive that he used to.
He'd moved in with his grandmother in Fortuna, about an hour and a half away.
He would come down to Willow Creek every once in a while to help with the family business, and that's actually what he was doing there, why he was sleeping on the couch the night of the fire.
The Thursday before the fire, Donnie and Betty got into a squabble.
Betty asked Donnie to take something out of the freezer for her, and he had an attitude.
Apparently, Donnie stormed out and said he was going back to Fortuna.
But Donnie ended up calling Betty later, apologizing for this back and coming back to Willow Creek the next day, Friday the 14th.
That's the day before the fire.
But that fight that Betty and Donnie had wasn't anything new.
Donnie and Betty got into low-stakes arguments often, mostly because Betty would get on Donnie about not working or being in school.
And to me, it seems like kind of a huge leap to go from just bickering with his mom to murder.
It seems like just run-of-the-mill family stuff.
Like, my son is only 17, but I kind of get it.
Like, it seems so normal.
And other than that moment between Donnie and his mom, Hans said Donnie was in a great mood that week.
Hans is Donnie's stepdad, but the two were so close that he called Hans dad.
And his family said that Donnie also had a good relationship with Jill and Julie, so it doesn't make a lot of sense why he'd just shoot them.
And while investigators are trying to parse out a motive, a few days after the fire, Julie wakes up.
And this could be the moment that police find out what really happened.
At first she's only able to communicate through writing, but about a week from the fire she starts talking.
Investigators waste no time asking her what she can remember.
Julie tells police a noise woke her up just before 3 a.m. the night of the fire.
It sounded like someone loading batteries into a flashlight.
She left Jill asleep in the room that they shared that night and walked toward the living room.
Julie later told Hans that she didn't remember any smoke or fire at that point, which is a little weird to me, because by the time Hans said he heard popping, he already smelled smoke and the fire was spreading fast.
But Julie's memory is actually pretty shaky.
Like she does remember being ambushed at the end of the hallway, but in the darkness she didn't see who shot her.
As she gets better.
She tells police that as the shotgun fired, she could make out Donnie's face for a split second.
But Julie doesn't actually say he was the shooter.
And Donnie did say he was woken up in the living room by a shotgun blast too.
So it really just proves that Donnie was in the room, which we know.
And Julie's story changes.
Detectives speak to a doctor who treated Julie at the hospital who says Julie never mentioned that she saw anyone when she was shot.
A first responder who was in the ambulance with Julie says that she told them Donnie carried her outside after she was shot, which does confirm what he said.
And even though she's awake, she's still needing round-the-clock medical care.
Hans and Betty are still camped outside the hospital and they haven't seen Donnie much since the fire.
And that's been bothering Hans.
Police told Hans about the shotgun that was found in the warehouse and they asked him specifically not to bring it up with Donnie while they looked into him more.
But Hans has a bad feeling about the whole thing.
And despite the directive from police, he just wants to talk to Donnie.
So one night, Donnie stops by the motorhome.
And Hans just straight out asks Donnie about the 12-gauge shotgun.
Donnie flips out.
As if the question was an accusation.
He yells at his stepdad that he didn't do it and runs out of the motorhome.
Hans told us Donnie's reaction that night changed everything for him.
From then on, he believed that Donnie had something to do with what happened.
And look.
I can see how high emotions must have been for Hans.
But to be fair, if I'm Donnie and I'm innocent I just lost my sister and I'm now feeling accused of having something to do with it I'm probably going to react pretty strongly too.
And around two weeks after the fire, Donnie voluntarily goes into the station and sits through about two hours of questioning.
And according to Unsolved Mysteries, police also give Donnie two polygraph tests.
And he fails.
Not one, but both polygraphs.
And he tells something new to the cops.
Something he didn't mention in his first interview.
He said he did hide the shotgun that they found in the warehouse, but not for the reason they might think.
He says in the midst of the fire he was scared he would be framed for shooting the girls if they found the shotgun in the backseat of his car.
So he moved it.
And I don't know, it's kind of tough to follow this thought process, right?
I mean, your family is dying in a house fire and you're thinking pause, let me go hide this shotgun, so I don't get blamed.
But it's obvious that police aren't buying any of this.
And it's not just this interview and the two failed polygraphs.
Remember that ham print on the gun?
Well, it comes back that it's Donnie's.
The print is encased in fire extinguisher residue, so it shows that Donnie had handled both the gun and a fire extinguisher that night.
And police are thinking all roads lead to Donnie at this point, and they arrest him.
And he's charged with arson and Jill's murder.
But then, two weeks after his arrest, Julie suddenly dies.
And it's a shock to everyone because she was getting better.
But after about a month in the hospital, an air bubble entered her bloodstream through an IV feeding tube and ultimately stopped her heart.
It was a super rare medical accident.
But it's then that Donnie's charges are upgraded to another count of murder.
So now, the family has to cope with the loss of two children.
And in another way, the loss of a third child.
Because Han said after that night, when he confronted Donnie about the shotgun and he reacted the way he did, Donnie has been dead to him.
And that could have been it.
Like, case closed, right?
Donnie's prints, encased in fire extinguisher residue or on the gun.
The gun that he admitted he had borrowed from a friend just days before.
And the matching shells.
The evidence seems pretty damning.
But when it goes to trial, it becomes clear that the case against Donnie has some significant holes.
And this case that seemed so cut and dry suddenly seems to fall apart.
Donnie spends the next 18 months in the Santa Rita jail in Alameda County, awaiting his trial.
He maintains his innocence the whole time and is convinced there's not enough to convict him.
There's a lot on the line for Donnie because the district attorney, Terry Farmer, decides to seek the death penalty.
And the case is making waves.
Local newspapers cover the trial extensively and, according to Richard Muha, the private investigator on Donnie's defense, there was a general belief in town that Donnie was guilty.
So Donnie's defense team has their work cut out for them.
While Donnie is in jail, they do an investigation of their own and they uncover some pretty outstanding gaps left by the official police investigation.
Donnie's defense team finds that the police allegedly refused to pursue evidence that could rule him out as a suspect.
For example, on the gun, investigators only tested the obvious palm print.
They didn't check for any other possible fingerprints.
They also didn't test the gun or the box of shells in Donnie's car for other fingerprints.
And remember those teens and the car peeling off?
Well, neither of those two things seems to have been thoroughly investigated.
And here's the thing.
According to reporting by the Time Standard, police actually did question those two teens.
And Hans told us he actually knows who they are because they live in the area.
But the deputy who questioned them is one of the boys' uncle.
And apparently the entire conversation between the deputy and his nephew was excluded from his report.
And no note of their relationship was made, according to newspaper archives.
Which is like a huge conflict of interest.
And maybe it's nothing.
But maybe it's everything.
And the fact that it's just never mentioned is pretty wild to me.
And we actually found one of the boys who was there that night ourselves.
And he told our reporter that he doesn't remember much because he was high on acid.
All he remembers seeing is a fire and walking over to it.
But police were focused on Donnie, so it doesn't seem like those boys were ever investigated any further.
And the defense's investigation also found that the lock on the trailer's sliding glass door had been tampered with, evidence that someone could have broken into the house that night.
So, Donnie's trial begins in April of 1988.
It takes place in Alameda County, hundreds of miles south of Humboldt.
A Superior Court judge moved the proceedings because he didn't think Donnie would get a fair trial back home.
And at trial, Donnie's defense paints a picture of how the night of the fire played out.
A scenario where Donnie was one of the victims, not the perpetrator.
They say Donnie's asleep on the couch in the living room while two mysterious men are casing the property outside.
Maybe they're the two teens on acid.
Maybe they're someone else.
They notice a shotgun inside Donnie's car, grab it just in case.
They pick the lock to the sliding glass door near where Donnie is sleeping, and the two assailants quietly come inside.
They don't notice Donnie sleeping on the couch in the darkness and they set about starting a fire when Julie comes down the hall.
They panic, shoot her with the shotgun they found in the car outside.
And that's when Donnie wakes up and when Julie sees his face in the blast.
The perpetrators are surprised by Donnie's presence and hesitate long enough for Donnie to grab Julie and run outside.
He leaves her on the ground and takes off until he's seen next by Hans and Betty in the warehouse.
Hans and Betty wake up as the inferno is picking up.
And remember.
Hans doesn't remember exactly what woke him up, but he heard those pops and smelled smoke.
Everyone rushes to get out of the house and Jill is the last one up.
Jill comes out of the room that she was in and into the kitchen.
The gunman, who is still inside the house, shoots Jill, who falls to the ground.
The defense claims that everyone was outside of the trailer when Jill was shot and therefore Donnie couldn't have shot Jill.
After shooting Jill, the perpetrators flee.
But before they leave the property, they drop the gun back in Donnie's car.
Later, when Donnie sees it sitting in a different position in his car, he takes it and hides it in the warehouse, which I still think that's strange behavior in the middle of a fire.
But it's also important to note that all the evidence against Donnie is circumstantial.
Like, his handprint could be on the gun because Donnie shot the girls.
Or because he simply panicked and moved the gun.
Or because he had used the gun for target practice like he admitted to.
There's one more small detail that the defense picks up on, and I mentioned it earlier, but Han said that when he was outside wrestling with the garden hose, he heard someone call for help from inside the burning trailer.
According to the defense's narrative, Julie and Donnie were already outside, so this could have been Jill calling for help, meaning she was still alive when Donnie was outside.
Therefore, he couldn't have been the one to shoot her.
Which could be huge, but I'm just not sure how seriously to take that detail, because just about everyone involved had a slightly different recollection of how the night went down and who was where or when.
But say Donnie didn't do it.
Why would someone go through all of this trouble and take the gun out of his car?
Like, you're just walking by and you decide to try and kill a family.
Oh, and return the murder weapon where you, by chance, found it.
And that's what I can't make sense of.
And it doesn't seem like it was a robbery or anything like that, because Hans said nothing in the house, seemed to be missing.
Their brand new VCR was still sitting on the TV right beside the sliding glass door where someone would have entered.
And in 1986, a VCR was a luxury.
During the trial, William Bragg, Donnie's attorney, brought in a criminal psychologist to testify that he examined Donnie and found no reason to conclude that he was capable of this crime.
But the prosecution painted a completely different picture.
They described Donnie as an irresponsible kid who loves expensive, fast cars and was looking for quick money.
And Hans' logging supply business is booming.
Hans and some relatives also own a really nice ranch in Fortuna, like million dollars nice.
And Hans openly talked about their 250000 life insurance policies with the kids, including Donnie, so that they knew that there was money if anything ever happened to Hans and Betty.
And that policy would double to $500,000 in the case of an accident.
But Donnie would still have to split this with his older sister, who wasn't at the trailer that night.
Hans buys this narrative.
He says that he and Betty bought Donnie a reliable car, but Donnie sold it for this old Corvette that always broke down on him.
According to the Time Standard, during the trial, an auto mechanic testified that Donnie told him he was planning on running into some money soon, in the six-figure range, and had made a deposit on a Corvette, which I assume was a new one.
But investigators were never able to track down any proof of deposit.
And my thought is, if he wanted the money, why wouldn't he shoot his parents first?
I feel like if you're trying to get life insurance, they're the main targets, right?
But maybe he shot his sisters because he didn't want to share his inheritance and he assumed his parents would die in the fire.
Now I don't think you'd carry someone to safety that you just shot.
But we actually don't know if Donnie did carry Julie to safety or he just told people he did.
Then again, Julie told the paramedic that he did.
The only other alternative we can think of is that she crawled out of a burning house and across the street, which seems unlikely if you're bleeding from a gunshot wound.
Still, from what we know, the idea that Donnie, who by all accounts is a normal guy, would have schemed up a plan to murder his family for a few hundred thousand dollars.
I'm not sure how convincing that is.
And other people feel that way too, or felt that way at the time.
One of the most dramatic moments of the trial is when Betty goes on the stand.
Bragg asks Betty, in front of the entire courtroom, if she thinks her son is capable of doing something like this.
And she says no.
The trial wraps up in mid-June.
When it comes time to deliberate, the jury takes just six hours before coming back with their verdict.
Not guilty.
According to the Times Standard, jurors were concerned that the prosecution couldn't really show what exactly happened in the Hansen house that night.
And you're not going to believe this, but Bragg and Donnie actually go out to dinner and drinks with some of the jurors after he's found not guilty.
I mean, I guess there's no rule against it, the trial is over, but it doesn't look great.
Apparently, the defense was able to discredit the prosecution's narrative so much that the jury members wanted to hang out with the guy accused of the crime.
Donnie's other attorney, Alan Chelsea, later told a reporter that Donnie was acquitted because the jurors were stuck on the fact that the sheriff's department and the district attorney's office poorly investigated the crime.
He went as far as to say that there was quote flat-out incompetence bordering on deliberate malfeasance.
End quote.
And I can agree to a certain extent, right?
There were a lot of holes in the investigation, from not testing for other fingerprints to not pursuing other potential suspects and not painting a clear picture as to what happened that night in the trailer.
And really one of the teen's uncles, questioning them and it not being reported truly takes the cake for me.
So listen, I'm not saying Donnie is definitely innocent, but I can see why he would be acquitted, because I don't think anyone considering how the investigation was conducted could confidently say he did this without a reasonable doubt.
In the years after he was acquitted, Donnie completely disconnected from Hans and Betty.
They never spoke again.
Donnie changed his last name to his biological father's last name and later on married and had a family.
He was quoted in a newspaper as thanking his biological father and a couple other friends and family members for being there throughout this rough time in his life.
As we were reporting on this case for this episode, we tracked Donnie down, but he declined to speak with us.
And in late May of 2025, he was killed in a car accident in Indiana.
His obituary describes him as a man of character, full of love and generosity, who left behind a loving wife and children.
Hans told us Donnie's death didn't really feel like a huge blow because Donnie's been dead to him since that November night all those years ago.
The last time he spoke to Donnie was that tense conversation outside the hospital.
And in the years since, he's heard so many theories and stories from people who claim to know what happened.
But to this day, he's still convinced that Donnie is responsible for the deaths of Jill and Julie.
He says Betty has had a harder time grappling with the thought that her only son could do something like this.
And after all this time, the family is still desperate for answers from someone who may truly know what happened.
And it's Hans' hope that those answers, that closure, could still come.
In 1992 Hans and Betty took Jill and Julie's 50000 college fund and offered it as a reward for answers.
And that same $50,000 is still being offered today.
If you know anything about the deaths of Jill and Julie Hansen, please reach out to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office at 707-268-2539 or fill out their online tip form on their website.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, CrimeJunkie.com.
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