On June 13, 1983, a seventeen-year-old named Cindy Paulson ran for Sixth Avenue in Anchorage in handcuffs, having left her blue sneakers on the floor of a car so the police would know she had been in it. A passing truck driver, Robert Yount, picked her up, and she told police a red-haired man with a stutter had raped her in a house in Muldoon and was about to load her into a small airplane at Merrill Field. The man was Robert Hansen, a forty-four-year-old baker whose shop on Ninth Avenue supplied the downtown coffee crowd and whose name was in the record books of the Pope and Young Club for a Dall sheep taken with a bow. Anchorage police talked to him that day. He said the girl was a prostitute trying to shake him down, produced two friends who said he had been with them all night, and went home. Twelve women were in the ground along the Knik River and around Eklutna and Horseshoe Lake by then. The police who let him go did not know that. The state trooper who picked the case up three months later found out.
Hansen had offered her two hundred dollars for sex and, once she was in his car, pulled a .357 Magnum and driven her to his house in the Muldoon neighborhood. There he raped and tortured her, chained her by the neck to a post in the basement and took a nap on a couch nearby. When he woke he drove her to Merrill Field, told her he was taking her to his cabin near the Knik River, reachable only by boat or bush plane, and left her crouched in the back seat with her wrists cuffed in front of her while he loaded his Piper Super Cub. She crawled out through the driver's door and ran. Yount dropped her at the Mush Inn and called the police from work; a security guard at the airfield had noted the license number of the car. Officers found her alone in Room 110 of the Big Timber Motel, still in handcuffs.
Hansen was born in Estherville, Iowa, on February 15, 1939, the elder of the two children of Christian Hansen, a Danish immigrant baker, and his wife, Edna, born Petersen. The family moved to Richmond, California, in 1942 and back to Iowa in 1949, settling in Pocahontas, where his father put him to work in the bakery and where he grew up small, left-handed, acne-scarred and stammering so badly he avoided speaking. He told a psychiatrist later that the girls at school had laughed at him and that he had spent his adolescence imagining getting even. He served a year in the Army Reserve at Fort Polk, Louisiana, from 1957, then worked as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas, where he began a relationship with a younger woman and married her. In December 1960, a few months into the marriage, he paid a friend to help him burn down the Pocahontas County school bus garage; he served twenty months of a three-year sentence at Anamosa State Penitentiary, where a psychiatrist diagnosed manic depression with periodic schizophrenic episodes and noted an "infantile personality" fixed on getting back at people he felt had wronged him; his wife divorced him while he was inside. Over the next few years he was jailed several times for petty theft. He married again in 1963, to a woman named Darla he met at church, and in 1967 they moved to Anchorage, where the oil boom was starting and a man with a trade could do well. He opened Hansen's Bakery, had two children, joined a church, and hunted. He took a record Dall sheep and a record mountain goat with a bow, and he flew, in a Piper Super Cub he bought with the proceeds of an insurance claim for stolen trophies that had not been stolen. Accounts differ on whether he ever held a pilot's license. When the insurance fraud came out, he claimed he had later found the trophies in his backyard and forgotten to tell the insurer.
He was also, from the beginning, attacking women. In December 1971 he was arrested twice, first for abducting and trying to rape a housewife, then for raping a sex worker. He pleaded no contest to assault with a deadly weapon in the first case, the rape charge was dropped in a plea bargain, and he was sentenced to five years; after six months he was moved to a work-release program and a halfway house. Three days after the assault on the sex worker, on December 22, 1971, Celia Beth van Zanten, eighteen, left her house on Knik Avenue to walk a few blocks to a supermarket and never arrived. She was found in Chugach State Park on Christmas Day, bound, sexually assaulted and cut across the chest; she had been thrown alive into a deep ravine and died of exposure trying to climb out. A mark on his map matched the place. He always denied it, and nothing conclusive ties him to her death. In 1976 he pleaded guilty to larceny for trying to steal a chainsaw from a Fred Meyer store and was sentenced to five years with psychiatric treatment for his manic depression; the Alaska Supreme Court reduced the sentence and he was let out with time served. Each time the record showed a man the courts regarded as an oddity rather than a danger, and each time he went back to the bakery.
The women he killed came mostly from the strip of Fourth Avenue between the bus station and the bars, where Anchorage's pipeline money had drawn dancers and sex workers from the Lower 48 in the late 1970s. Hansen would approach one of them with an offer, of three hundred dollars for nude photographs or a straightforward date, drive her toward his house or to his airplane, and then produce a gun. Some he raped and released with a warning that he knew where they worked and that no one would believe them. Others he flew from Merrill Field across the Knik Arm to the gravel bars of the Knik River, or to the meadows around his cabin, took off their blindfolds, and let them run. He carried a Ruger Mini-14 rifle in .223 and a hunting knife, and by his own account he did not always shoot to kill at once. A trooper who heard the confession said Hansen described it the way another man would describe a moose hunt. By his own account his earliest victims, in the early 1970s, were girls and young women of sixteen to nineteen who were not sex workers, and he sometimes let a woman go if she convinced him she would not report him.
The first body was found by construction workers off Eklutna Road in July 1980, a woman in her twenties who had been stabbed in the back and left in the brush the summer before; investigators called her Eklutna Annie, and Hansen said later she had been a dancer who fought him in the truck. She was still unidentified when the state troopers said in 2021 that genealogy work on her was under way. Joanna Messina was twenty-four, a cannery worker from the Seward docks who had come to Alaska for the summer, and was last seen in May 1980 walking away from the harbor with her dog and a red-haired man her workmates did not know. By Hansen's account they had dinner on May 19, and he drove her and the dog to a remote spot near the Snow River, struck her with a .22 revolver, shot her twice and the dog once, left her in a gravel pit and threw the gun in the river. She was found on July 8. Lisa Futrell was forty-one, the oldest of the dead, known on the street as Betty, and disappeared on September 6, 1980; she was found south of the old Knik bridge on May 9, 1984. Roxane Easland, twenty-four, who had been staying with her boyfriend at the Budget Motel on Spenard Road, went to meet a man on Fourth Avenue on June 28, 1980, and has never been found; Hansen admitted killing her. Andrea Altiery, twenty-four, called Fish because of the gold fish necklace she wore, took a cab to the Boniface Mall on December 2, 1981, to meet a man about a photo shoot, and has never been found; her necklace was in Hansen's house. He said he shot her with a .22 pistol off a service road near the Knik Arm Bridge when she fought back, tied her to a duffel bag weighted with gravel and threw her from the bridge. Sherry Morrow was twenty-three, a dancer at the Wild Cherry who told friends on November 17, 1981, that a photographer was paying three hundred dollars for pictures; hunters found her on a sandbar of the Knik River on September 12, 1982, blindfolded, her hands bound behind her, shot three times with a .223, with the shell casings still in the sand; there were no bullet holes in her clothes, which suggested she had been shot naked and dressed again before she was buried. Hansen took her arrowhead necklace. Sue Luna, twenty-three, agreed to a three-hundred-dollar photo session with a nightclub customer and met him in a diner parking lot on May 26, 1982; he told the troopers he had made her run naked into the trees and hunted her. Her sister spent years pressing the police, and Sue was found near the Knik River on April 24, 1984. DeLynn Frey, twenty-two, known as Sugar, vanished in the spring of 1983 and was found on a Knik River sandbar on August 20, 1985, by a bush pilot practicing landings there; she was buried as a Jane Doe and identified only in 1989, when a trooper recognized her jewelry in a case photograph. Malai Larsen, twenty-eight, was reported missing on July 10, 1981. Tamera Pederson, twenty, known as Tami, a dancer, called her family on August 7, 1982, to say she had been offered money to pose for photographs, and was not heard from again. Angela Feddern, twenty-four, a dancer last seen on Fourth Avenue in February 1983, and Teresa Watson, twenty-two, who told her roommate on March 25, 1983, that a man was paying her three hundred dollars for an hour or two of company, were taken in the spring of 1983, when he was killing fastest; he left Watson where she died at Scenic Lake because the ground was too frozen to dig. The bodies of Larsen, Feddern, Watson and Pederson were all recovered in late April 1984. Paula Goulding, thirty, a dancer who had come north only weeks earlier, disappeared on April 25, 1983, and was found by hunters on the Knik on September 2, 1983, shot with the same rifle as Sherry Morrow. Robin Pelkey was nineteen, from Colorado, homeless in Anchorage; she vanished on July 19, 1983, and her partial skeleton, stabbed and shot, was found near Horseshoe Lake outside Palmer on April 25, 1984, and she was known for thirty-seven years as Horseshoe Harriet until DNA gave her name back in October 2021. Megan Emerick, seventeen, vanished from a dormitory laundry room at the Seward Skill Center on July 7, 1973, and Mary Thill, twenty-two, was last seen near a waterfall by her home on Lowell Point Road in Seward on July 5, 1975. Hansen admitted being in Seward on both days and denied killing either woman; the case against him is the marks on his map near Resurrection Bay and a former inmate's claim that he confessed to both, and neither woman has been found.
Paula Goulding's body is what changed the investigation. Alaska State Trooper Sergeant Glenn Flothe went to the Knik River scene on September 2, 1983, saw the .223 casings and the blindfold, and pulled the Morrow file: same river, same caliber, same binding. He asked the FBI's behavioral science unit for help, and John Douglas sent back a portrait of a man who would be a local, an experienced hunter, a stutterer with a history of rejection by women, a collector of trophies who would keep souvenirs, and very likely a pilot. Flothe then read the Anchorage police report on Cindy Paulson, whose description of the house, the airplane and the man fit the profile in every particular, and found that the case had been closed on the word of two friends. He reinterviewed her and reinterviewed them. One of the alibi witnesses, John Henning, admitted that Hansen had asked him to lie.
On October 27, 1983, troopers with a search warrant went through the house on Old Harbor Avenue and the bakery. In the attic, under the insulation, they found the Mini-14, a Thompson Contender pistol, a .22 rifle, and an assortment of women's jewelry including the fish necklace and the arrowhead. Behind the headboard of the bed was an aviation chart of the Cook Inlet region marked with small X's in pen, twenty-four by some counts and thirty-seven by others. The state crime laboratory matched the Mini-14 to the casings found at the Morrow and Goulding graves. Hansen was arrested that day on the Paulson kidnapping and rape and on weapons and insurance charges, and held on a bond he could not make.
He talked in February 1984, when the ballistics left him nowhere to go. In a twelve-hour session on February 22 with Flothe and District Attorney Victor Krumm, with the chart on the table, he admitted seventeen murders and about thirty rapes, went through the X's one by one, and described flying women out of Merrill Field and turning them loose. In April he flew with troopers over the Knik and pointed out graves from the air, and the searches that followed recovered most of them; twelve bodies in all were eventually tied to him, the last in 1985. The bargain he got for it was narrow. On February 27, 1984, he pleaded guilty to the four murders the state could prove without his help, of Sherry Morrow, Joanna Messina, Paula Goulding and Eklutna Annie, and to the kidnapping and rape of Cindy Paulson, theft and weapons offenses. Superior Court Judge Ralph Moody sentenced him the next day to 461 years plus life without parole, and remarked that the case was the worst he had seen in twenty-five years on the bench. In return Hansen was to serve his time in a federal prison, with no publicity, and the state agreed not to try him for the other thirteen. He showed the troopers seventeen grave sites, twelve of them unknown to them, and refused to explain other marks on the chart, three of them in Resurrection Bay. Nobody objected on behalf of the thirteen.
He went to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg and in 1988 was brought back to Alaska, briefly to Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau and then to Spring Creek Correctional Center at Seward, the town two of his victims had come from. Darla and the children left Anchorage for good and moved to Arkansas, and the children's names have never been made public. In 2008 he asked to have his sentence reduced on account of his age and was refused. In May 2014 he was moved to the Anchorage Correctional Complex for medical care, and he died at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage on August 21, 2014, aged seventy-five, of what the state described as lingering health conditions.
Cindy Paulson testified at the sentencing and then disappeared into a life of her own, the only one of his victims who ever got to. Glenn Flothe spent the rest of his career being asked why Anchorage had needed a body on a sandbar to believe a seventeen-year-old in handcuffs. Sue Luna's sister got her answer in 1984. Andrea Altiery's family, and Roxane Easland's, and Mary Thill's and Megan Emerick's, are still waiting for a grave.