Robert Hansen ran a bakery in an Anchorage strip mall, flew a small airplane and hunted big game. In February 1984 he pleaded guilty to murdering four women whose bodies had been found in the wilderness of Southcentral Alaska, and in a taped confession he told prosecutors and Alaska State Troopers that he had killed 17 women over about a decade. Most of them, police and prosecutors said, were young women who worked as dancers or sex workers in downtown Anchorage during the years when construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was drawing thousands of newcomers to the city. He was sentenced to life plus 461 years without parole and died in custody in Anchorage in August 2014, aged 75.
Twelve bodies were eventually found, most of them at sites he pointed out to investigators from the air. Eleven have been identified, the most recent in 2021, when genetic genealogy gave a name, Robin Pelkey, to a 19-year-old woman who had been buried for 37 years as "Horseshoe Harriet." The twelfth, a woman found near Eklutna in 1980 and believed by troopers to be his first victim, was still unidentified when the troopers discussed the case in 2021.
The case turned on a 17-year-old who escaped from him in handcuffs in June 1983 and reported what he had done. Before that, Hansen had passed through Alaska's courts more than once. When he was sentenced for murder, the judge pointed to that record. "We've turned him loose several times," he said.
Robert Christian Hansen was born on February 15, 1939, in Estherville, Iowa, and grew up in Pocahontas, Iowa, according to the Associated Press. He was the first child of his parents and, as the Alaska Supreme Court recorded in 1978, spent his youth working for his father in the family bakery. He followed his father into the trade and trained as a baker. The court, drawing on the presentence materials, said Hansen described an ambivalent relationship with his father, whom he called very demanding.
After his arrest in Alaska, the Anchorage district attorney, Victor Krumm, told reporters that Hansen had grown up in Pocahontas with "a severe inferiority complex with girls," according to the Associated Press. Hansen himself told investigators, according to United Press International, that he had had trouble dealing with women since his youth.
His first felony conviction came in Iowa. The Alaska Supreme Court later recorded it as a 1961 conviction for willfully and maliciously setting fire to a motor vehicle, for which he served 23 months in a reformatory and completed parole a year later. Associated Press reports describe the same case as the burning of a school-bus garage in Pocahontas; a 1984 AP report said he pleaded guilty to arson in 1961, was held at the Iowa Men's Reformatory in Anamosa, and was paroled in 1963.
Hansen moved to Anchorage in 1967. By the mid-1970s, the Alaska Supreme Court wrote, he had been steadily employed as a baker and a warehouseman, with good references from his employers. He owned a house and three vehicles and was the main support of his wife and two young children. UPI described him in 1984 as a twice-married father of two. He later opened his own bakery, in a strip mall at Ninth Avenue and Ingra Street, according to the Anchorage Daily News, and in news reports of the 1970s and 1980s the business gave him the nickname by which he became known, "the Butcher Baker."
Colleagues and acquaintances saw a mild family man. The Anchorage Daily News described him in 2014 as mousy and easygoing in manner. He was also, as UPI put it in 1984, a pilot and a big-game hunter. His wife and children lived across town from the bakery and, the Associated Press reported, knew nothing of the life he led away from them. A 1984 AP report quoted the prosecutor Frank Rothschild as saying that even Hansen's wife of 20 years had had no idea.
The first Alaska case against him came in 1971. According to the Anchorage Daily News, a woman accused him that year of rape while he was awaiting trial on a charge of trying to kidnap another woman at gunpoint. In 1972 he was convicted of assault with a dangerous weapon, the Alaska Supreme Court recorded, and was sentenced to five years with a recommendation that he receive psychiatric treatment. He served about six months, moved to a halfway house and a work-release program, and was paroled about a year later. His parole ended after roughly three years.
A court-ordered psychiatric report in that case, dated February 28, 1972, was written by Dr. J. Ray Langdon. According to the Supreme Court's later summary, Langdon found that Hansen suffered from a dissociative mental illness, suggested that his criminal conduct stemmed from it, and warned that disorders of that type were difficult to treat successfully. Eight months later a letter from a second psychiatrist, Dr. Allen H. Parker, reported that Hansen had made enough progress in therapy to justify parole.
When Superior Court Judge Ralph Moody sentenced Hansen for murder in 1984, he noted that Hansen had been arrested three times in the previous 12 years, twice on kidnapping or sexual assault charges, and had been freed each time, according to UPI.
On November 3, 1976, a security guard at an Anchorage department store watched Hansen in the sporting goods section. According to the Alaska Supreme Court, the guard saw him place an old sales receipt on the box of a chainsaw and walk out of the store with it, and stopped him in the parking lot. The saw was returned in full to the store, and the court described its value as relatively low.
Hansen pleaded guilty to larceny in a building. In a written statement quoted by the court, he said that about five weeks earlier he and his father had been cutting wood for a fireplace, and that his father, who was 69, overweight and had had one heart attack, had wished for a chainsaw. He had offered his father his own, he wrote, but his father refused. "I wanted almost more than anything to please my father," he wrote, and he had thought nobody would know whether he had paid if they saw a receipt on the box. "I know what I did was wrong and I am very sorry for doing so."
At his sentencing, a new psychiatrist, Dr. Robert McManmon, testified that Hansen had a bipolar affective disorder, a variant of manic-depressive illness, and that kleptomania could be one of its expressions. McManmon said Hansen's earlier offenses were probably related to the same illness, that the drug lithium had stabilized him, and that his outlook was favorable, though lithium controlled the illness rather than curing it. A 1976 letter from Dr. Parker described Hansen's stealing as probably obsessive, marked by "an inability to resist it and a feeling of being forced."
The sentencing judge, applying the factors set out in an earlier Alaska case, State v. Chaney, said that if rehabilitation were the only goal, probation with strict conditions on therapy and lithium would be enough. But he feared that Hansen was dangerous during manic episodes and believed he had to be isolated from society during them. He also gave weight to deterrence, to the fact that this was Hansen's third felony, and to the failure of earlier supervision. He imposed five years, with parole eligibility at the earliest possible date and a requirement of psychiatric therapy. At a later hearing on a motion to reduce the sentence, testimony showed that the prison in Juneau had no psychiatric programs and that a term of two years or more would delay Hansen's transfer to the facility at Eagle River. The judge declined to change the sentence. Hansen filed a notice of appeal on April 7, 1977.
The Alaska Supreme Court decided the appeal, Hansen v. State, on August 11, 1978. Justice Connor wrote the opinion. The court held that "the court below was clearly mistaken in imposing a five year sentence."
The theft, the court said, involved no violence, threat or injury, and the property had been recovered. Under the American Bar Association sentencing standard the court had adopted, prison terms above five years were reserved for particularly serious cases. The court gave weight to Hansen's clear psychiatric diagnosis, to evidence that he responded to treatment, and to his stable home and working life. It described him as a man who "has earned the reputation of a hard worker and a respectable member of his community," and wrote that it was "quite possible" that the theft and his earlier convictions had "stemmed as much from psychological aberration" as from a general tendency to crime.
The court accepted that Hansen's record called for some time in custody. It reduced the sentence to the more than one year he had already served, with the rest to be spent on probation, and directed the trial court to set probation terms that put the emphasis on continued psychiatric treatment. Chief Justice Boochever, joined by Justice Rabinowitz, agreed with the result but disagreed with a footnote about how parole should be weighed in reviewing sentences. Justice Burke dissented. "Given Hansen's prior record," he wrote, "I am unable to agree that the trial court erred in imposing a five year sentence."
When Judge Moody sentenced Hansen in 1984, he singled out this decision, according to UPI, as the most recent of the releases that had put Hansen back on the street.
The killings Hansen later confessed to took place in an Anchorage reshaped by the building of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline in the 1970s. The Associated Press wrote that the boom drew prostitutes, pimps, con artists and drug dealers to the city, and that many newcomers left as suddenly as they arrived, so that disappearances drew little notice. A prosecutor explained at the time, according to KTUU, that Hansen chose women he believed nobody would miss.
Glenn Flothe, the state trooper who led the investigation that caught him, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2008 that Hansen's victims at first were any women who caught his eye, but that he soon learned that dancers and sex workers were harder to trace and less likely to be reported missing, the Associated Press later reported. After his arrest, according to KTUU, Hansen said that he usually picked women up as dates from strip clubs. Rothschild, the prosecutor, said in 2014 that in Hansen's mind "there were good girls and bad girls," and that he did not regard his victims as human.
By his own account to investigators, Hansen took the women at gunpoint to remote places outside the city, sometimes by car and sometimes in his private plane. The Associated Press reported in 2014 that he was a licensed pilot; in 1984 it reported that he had flown some of the women to their deaths in his Piper Super Cub, an airplane fitted with oversized tires for landing on rough ground. He told investigators that one of his favorite places was the Knik River, northeast of Anchorage. Investigators said that some women were raped and then returned to Anchorage with warnings not to go to the police. Others were released in the wilderness and hunted with his rifle. He used handcuffs, elastic bandages and chains as restraints, according to officers quoted by the AP in 1984.
Hansen confessed to killing 17 women. Twelve bodies were found.
The earliest of the recovered women has never been named. She was found in 1980 in a shallow grave off Eklutna Lake Road, north of Anchorage, according to KTUU; the Anchorage Daily News reported that electrical workers found her near Eagle River and described her as a brunette of about 20, buried along a power line outside Eklutna. Investigators believe she was killed in the fall of 1979. Troopers have called her "Eklutna Annie" and believe she was Hansen's first victim. Almost everything known about her came from Hansen. He told investigators she was a sex worker he had met in Anchorage and that she had "maybe" said she was from Kodiak. "He wasn't really interested in her as a person," the trooper cold case investigator Randy McPherron told KTUU in 2020. Forensic examiners estimate that she was between 16 and 25 years old and about five feet tall, and believe she was white, possibly with Native American ancestry. She wore handmade jewelry that investigators believe to be Native American work: a hammered copper bracelet set with turquoise, a beaded necklace with a turquoise shell and a heart charm, gold earrings with the word "hope," a gold ring with a white stone, and a Timex watch on a gold chain. She is buried under a granite headstone marked "Jane Doe" at the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery.
Joanna Messina, Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding were the three identified women among the four whose murders Hansen admitted in court in February 1984, according to the Associated Press. All four had been found between 1980 and 1983, the troopers have said. A .223-caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle belonging to Hansen was identified as the weapon in two of those killings, the AP reported at the time.
Robin Pelkey was born in Colorado in 1963. According to her relatives, as reported by the Associated Press, she lived in Anchorage in the late 1970s, moved to Arkansas as a teenager, and came back to Alaska in 1981 to live with her father and stepmother. She ended up on the streets of Anchorage and had vanished by late 1982 or early 1983. No missing person report was ever filed; her parents, who have since died, never reported her missing, and her relatives do not know why. Hansen told investigators that in the winter of 1983 he had picked up a woman, a sex worker, in downtown Anchorage, flown her to a lake in his small plane and killed her there; he did not know her name. Her remains were found near Horseshoe Lake, near the Little Susitna River north of Anchorage, on April 25, 1984. An autopsy found only that she was a white woman between 17 and 23. She was buried as an unknown in the Anchorage municipal cemetery, and for 37 years investigators called her "Horseshoe Harriet."
In June 1983 a 17-year-old who had been working on Anchorage's streets ran, handcuffed, into a motel on Fifth Avenue, according to the Anchorage Daily News. She told police that Hansen had held her captive at his home and raped her. Her report, UPI wrote in 1984, led to a renewed investigation into the women who had disappeared from the bars and clubs of the city's downtown.
The case stalled for months. According to the Associated Press, a friend of Hansen's and another person gave him a false alibi for the time she described. One of them later recanted before a grand jury.
The troopers' file connected the young woman's report to the bodies that had been turning up outside the city. In October 1983, the Alaska Department of Public Safety has said, troopers arrested Hansen as a suspect in the murders of four women whose bodies had been found in Southcentral Alaska between 1980 and 1983. Police executed several search warrants at his home, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and the evidence they found was enough to support four murder charges. Among it was an aviation chart. UPI reported in 1984 that police had seized from his home a map marking the places where the bodies lay; the AP reported that prosecutors were working from three aviation charts found in his home and car, and another AP report counted 21 marked areas near Anchorage, some of which Hansen said were graves and others possible sites. He had been in custody since the fall, the AP said, on charges of attempted kidnapping and assault arising from the June report.
Hansen confessed in February 1984. Rothschild, the assistant district attorney, later described the meeting at which prosecutors laid out their evidence, including the marked map. "He was mild-mannered Bob the Baker, and as I'm looking at him, all of a sudden he transformed," Rothschild told the Anchorage Daily News in 2014. Hansen grew furious, asked to speak with his lawyers and went into another room. "You could hear him screaming at his lawyers," Rothschild said.
In a 12-hour taped confession, according to UPI, Hansen described the four murders the state could prove and much more. He told prosecutors and troopers that he had killed 17 women and raped about 30 others whom he let live. Krumm, the district attorney, said Hansen confessed to avoid the embarrassment of a long investigation and trial. "He got off on the killing, but he didn't like people talking about him," Krumm told the Associated Press. Rothschild quoted Hansen as telling police that he killed because "I was just seeing everybody else got theirs, and it was my turn to have fun now."
On Monday, February 27, 1984, Hansen pleaded guilty in Anchorage Superior Court to four counts of first-degree murder and to theft and weapons offenses, and Judge Ralph Moody sentenced him the same day to life in prison plus 461 years, with no parole. Alaska had no death penalty. The troopers have since described the plea as covering the four murders and "several other felony crimes."
Krumm said that Hansen had been charged with only four killings because police had found only four bodies, and that there was no need to charge him over the 13 other disappearances, particularly as the police expected trouble finding all the graves. In return for the plea, Hansen agreed to help investigators locate the graves, the Anchorage Daily News reported; the Associated Press described the arrangement as a plea deal that spared him 17 separate trials. Prosecutors warned that the count might rise. "We don't think for a moment he's told us the whole story," Rothschild told UPI. "There very well may be more victims." He told the court that Hansen was "the most prolific mass murderer in modern Alaskan history."
Moody's remarks from the bench were directed at the system as much as the defendant. "I cannot think of a bigger indictment of society than we have here," he said, according to UPI, before reciting the arrests and releases of the previous 12 years.
Prosecutors also told reporters that two girls had been missing from the Resurrection Bay area, near Seward, since 1973, and that they believed the bodies were in the water, the AP reported. Hansen was never charged in connection with either disappearance.
The ground was frozen when Hansen pleaded guilty, and the searches had to wait for the spring thaw. Hansen flew with investigators, in a helicopter according to the troopers, and pointed out the places where he said he had buried 17 women.
In late April 1984 troopers began to dig. On Tuesday, April 24, they found two bodies along the Knik River where Hansen had directed them, and on Wednesday, April 25, a third near Horseshoe Lake, in the same general area, UPI reported. Lieutenant Bob Jent of the troopers' Criminal Investigation Bureau said the records Hansen kept were so exact that "we didn't have to dig more than (once) for each body." Police said at the time that Hansen had by then admitted killing 20 women over 10 years, and that they suspected him in other deaths in Alaska.
That spring and summer troopers recovered the remains of eight women from the areas Hansen had shown them, according to the Associated Press. With the four found before his arrest, the total reached 12. Five of the women he confessed to killing have never been found.
After his sentencing Hansen was held for a time in Anchorage and then sent to a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania, as the AP reported at the end of 1984. He did not get along with other inmates there, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and he was later held in Minnesota. A prison records official explained in 2014 why Hansen had feared being sent back to Alaska: "When you kill that many women ... there's a good chance you may have killed some convict's girlfriend."
He returned to Alaska in May 1988 and was held briefly at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, where he worked in a supply room. In 1990 staff found among his belongings an aeronautical chart, a hand-knit winter hat, magazine articles about plastic explosives, and letters exchanged with a Juneau boat broker. The superintendent, Dan Carothers, called the discovery "the bust of the decade" for Alaska prison officials. "We nabbed him before he could do any damage to anyone," he said. Hansen was moved to Seward and became one of the first prisoners at the new Spring Creek Correctional Center, where he spent most of the rest of his life. For much of that time he worked as the prison barber, and corrections officials described him as well behaved and undemanding.
He refused an interview request from the Associated Press in 2006. In an unsigned letter from Spring Creek he wrote: "I do not care so much for myself, but you journalist (sic) have hurt my family so very much."
Hansen's health declined through his last year. On May 11, 2014, the Department of Corrections moved him from Spring Creek to the Anchorage Correctional Complex, one of the state's few prisons with a medical unit, and placed him in medical segregation; the department's deputy director, Sherrie Daigle, said at the time that his condition was stable. On August 20, 2014, he was taken to Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage. He died there at about 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 21, 2014, at the age of 75. The department said he appeared to have died of natural causes, with the cause to be determined by the medical examiner. The troopers said he had a do-not-resuscitate order on file.
Flothe, by then retired, asked that the day be given to the women. "On this day we should only remember his many victims and all of their families, and my heart goes out to all of them," he said. "As far as Hansen is concerned, this world is better without him." Rothschild said simply: "He will not be missed."
In 2014, the year Hansen died, troopers reopened the effort to identify the two women still known only by nicknames. In September 2014 the remains known as Horseshoe Harriet were exhumed from the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery so that DNA could be taken. A profile was added to the FBI's national missing persons database but produced no match. Both women were by then the only Alaska cases among the roughly 650 unidentified remains listed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and the center had already tested Eklutna Annie's DNA and made a facial reconstruction of her.
In September 2020 the center released an updated composite image of Eklutna Annie, and the troopers released photographs of her jewelry, asking anyone who recognized her to call. That same month investigators sent a bone sample from Horseshoe Harriet to a private laboratory for further DNA extraction and whole genome sequencing. "DNA evidence has been a real game changer," McPherron told KTUU.
The new profile was uploaded to a public genealogy database in 2021. Close matches let researchers from Parabon NanoLabs and the Alaska Bureau of Investigation build a family tree that pointed to Robin Pelkey. The Arkansas State Police helped obtain a DNA sample from a close relative, and the State Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage completed a kinship analysis in September 2021 that confirmed the match. The family was told that month and asked not to be contacted by the media. The Department of Public Safety announced the identification on October 22, 2021, and bought a new grave marker for her at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery. "Without their hard work and tenacity, the identity of Ms. Pelkey may have never been known," the public safety commissioner, James Cockrell, said of the investigators. "Obviously, I'm very happy to have finally figured out who she is and give her family some closure," McPherron said.
The troopers said in 2021 that they were working with out-of-state genealogy laboratories on a DNA profile and family tree for Eklutna Annie, and McPherron said the work could take up to a year. No identification of her has been reported since.
Two books about the case appeared within a decade of the plea: Butcher, Baker, by Walter Gilmour and Leland E. Hale, in 1991, and Fair Game, by Bernard Du Clos, published by St. Martin's in 1993. Publishers Weekly said in its review of Fair Game that the author had interviewed surviving victims and examined how police and judges had failed to stop Hansen, including by not making sure he received the psychotherapy and lithium the courts had relied on.
The 2013 film The Frozen Ground dramatized the investigation, with John Cusack as Hansen, Nicolas Cage as a state trooper and Vanessa Hudgens as a young woman who survived him. A corrections spokeswoman said in 2014 that, as far as she knew, Hansen never saw it.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of four women, Joanna Messina, Sherry Morrow, Paula Goulding and a woman then unidentified, by guilty plea on February 27, 1984, together with theft and weapons offenses.
Confessed but never charged: the killings of 13 more women, which make up the total of 17 that Hansen gave in February 1984, among them Robin Pelkey and the woman known as Eklutna Annie. Police said in April 1984 that he had by then admitted 20 killings; the 17 figure is the one officials and news reports have used since. A 1993 book review put the number of women he killed at more than 20. He also confessed to raping about 30 women whom he did not kill; none of those were charged.
Not proven: the disappearances of two girls from the Resurrection Bay area in 1973, which prosecutors connected to him in 1984 but which were never charged. Police in 1984 also said they suspected him in other deaths in Alaska; no further charges followed.
Accounts differ on whether he was 44 or 45 at sentencing (UPI used both figures in two reports the same day; the AP gave 44); how many places his chart or charts marked (17, 21, or "three aviation charts"); whether the June 1983 report led to his arrest in June (one UPI report) or, as the troopers say, in October 1983; and the arson case in Iowa, which the Alaska Supreme Court recorded as setting fire to a motor vehicle and the AP described as burning a school-bus garage. A UPI report of his death in 2014 said he pleaded guilty in 1983; the plea was in February 1984. A 1984 UPI report called him a banker, a misprint for baker.
February 15, 1939: Robert Christian Hansen is born in Estherville, Iowa; he grows up in Pocahontas, working in his father's bakery.
1961: convicted in Iowa of setting fire to a motor vehicle (described by the AP as a school-bus garage); serves 23 months in the reformatory at Anamosa.
1963: paroled.
1967: moves to Anchorage; works as a baker and warehouseman.
1971: accused of rape while awaiting trial for an attempted kidnapping at gunpoint.
February 28, 1972: court-ordered psychiatric report by Dr. J. Ray Langdon.
1972: convicted of assault with a dangerous weapon; sentenced to five years, serves about six months before a halfway house and work release.
November 3, 1976: stopped leaving an Anchorage department store with a chainsaw; pleads guilty to larceny in a building; sentenced to five years.
April 7, 1977: files notice of appeal.
August 11, 1978: the Alaska Supreme Court cuts the sentence to time served plus probation (Hansen v. State, 582 P.2d 1041).
Fall 1979: investigators believe the woman later called Eklutna Annie is killed.
1980: her body is found off Eklutna Lake Road.
1980 to 1983: the bodies of Joanna Messina, Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding are found in Southcentral Alaska.
Late 1982 or early 1983: Robin Pelkey, 19, disappears from Anchorage.
June 1983: a 17-year-old escapes from Hansen in handcuffs and reports him to police; a false alibi stalls the case.
October 1983: Alaska State Troopers arrest Hansen after searching his home.
February 1984: 12-hour taped confession to 17 killings and about 30 rapes.
February 27, 1984: pleads guilty to four first-degree murders and theft and weapons offenses; sentenced by Judge Ralph Moody to life plus 461 years without parole.
April 24 and 25, 1984: troopers recover two bodies along the Knik River and a third, later identified as Robin Pelkey, near Horseshoe Lake.
1984: eight bodies recovered in all from sites Hansen pointed out; total of 12 found. He is sent to a federal prison in Pennsylvania.
May 1988: returns to Alaska; held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center, Juneau.
1990: escape materials found among his belongings at Lemon Creek; moved to Seward, later to the new Spring Creek Correctional Center.
1991: Butcher, Baker is published.
1993: Fair Game is published.
2006: declines an AP interview request.
2013: The Frozen Ground is released.
May 11, 2014: moved to the Anchorage Correctional Complex for medical care.
August 21, 2014: dies at Alaska Regional Hospital, Anchorage, aged 75.
September 2014: Horseshoe Harriet's remains are exhumed for DNA testing.
September 2020: new composite image of Eklutna Annie released.
October 22, 2021: troopers announce that Horseshoe Harriet was Robin Pelkey.