Robert Christian Hansen abducted women in and around Anchorage, Alaska between 1971 and 1983, flew a number of them into the bush and hunted them. He pleaded guilty in February 1984 to four murders and was sentenced to 461 years plus life. He confessed to seventeen. He died in an Anchorage hospital on August 21, 2014, aged seventy-five.
He was born in Estherville, Iowa on February 15, 1939, the son of a Danish baker. He stammered badly and was heavily scarred by acne, and by his own account was humiliated by girls. He served time in Iowa for burning down a school bus garage. He moved to Anchorage in 1967, ran a successful bakery on Ninth Avenue, married, had two children, and became a well-known competitive big-game hunter with several Pope and Young records. He ran a bakery on Ninth Avenue in Anchorage, which is where the name the press gave him came from: the Butcher Baker.
He took women at gunpoint, most of them dancers and sex workers from the bars along Fourth Avenue. Some he raped and released. Others he flew out of Merrill Field in his Piper Super Cub to the Knik River valley, set loose, and pursued through the bush with a hunting knife and a Ruger Mini-14. He was a very good hunter and it was his own country.
On June 13, 1983 a seventeen-year-old named Cindy Paulson escaped from his car in handcuffs at Merrill Field and flagged down a lorry driver. Police interviewed Hansen. He produced two friends who said he had been with them, and no further action was taken. That interview is the point at which the case could have ended two months earlier than it did.
Alaska State Trooper Glenn Flothe did not let it go. He took the case to the FBI's behavioural science unit and got a profile from John Douglas describing a local businessman who stuttered, hunted, and owned an aircraft. A search of the house in October 1983 produced weapons hidden in the loft insulation, jewellery belonging to missing women, and an aviation chart marked with small crosses.
That chart is why the count is what it is. In the plea negotiations he confessed to seventeen killings and then flew with investigators over his own marks to show them where the bodies were. Twelve were recovered.
He pleaded guilty to four murders and one count of kidnapping and rape, and the sentence, 461 years plus life, was constructed so that release was arithmetically impossible. Four convictions stand against seventeen he admitted to, and the gap exists because he traded the locations for the plea.