Crime Junkie - SERIAL KILLER: The Butcher Baker of Alaska

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Robert Hansen owned and operated a successful bakery in Anchorage, Alaska in the 1970s and 80s, selling donuts and danishes to everyone in town. He was a well-known and well-respected member of the business community, living in a nice home in the suburbs with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he liked to fly his plane to the remote area around the Knik River and hunt for wolves and caribou and other large game. But sometimes the wild animals just weren’t enough. He needed something else to hunt, to chase along the river flats, to stalk and kill. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/serial-killer-butcher-baker-alaska/ 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Britt, and the story I've got for you today is, in many ways, really familiar. It's a story about missing women, marginalized victims, police and politicians who look the other way, and at the center of it all, a man. A man whose violence against women grew out of the rejection he felt as a teenager. This is the story of The Butcher Baker of Alaska. It's midnight on June 13, 1983, and a 17-year-old sex worker named Cindy Paulson is standing on a street corner in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, waiting for a date.

Now, she isn't waiting long when a car pulls up. The man inside offers her $200, and Cindy agrees and climbs into the front seat. The guy seems shy, and he's quiet, kind of unassuming, and they agree that they'll head to a nearby parking lot. When they get there, he shuts off the engine, and Cindy begins. The guy is kind of playing with her hair, and with her jewelry around her neck, and then, based on Cindy's own account of her story on author Leland Hale's blog, out of nowhere, this guy yanks her head up from the back of her hair, and as she gets her bearings,

he blinks and realizes she is face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. The man tells her to keep quiet, and that if she listens to what he says, he's not going to hurt her. Now, she's already in survival mode at this point, so she listens. The man drives her to a blue house not far away from where he parked, and then drags her inside and down a set of stairs into a dark basement. The man sexually assaults Cindy before chaining her to a support beam while he sleeps on the couch for five hours.

While he sleeps, Cindy looks around, basically memorizing her surroundings. There's a rack of clothing, a pool table, a foosball table, and there's a lot of hunting trophies, like literal heads of animals all over the walls, and there's a bare skin rug on the floor and a pile of wolf hides in the corner. It's obvious that this guy likes to kill things, and he's not shy about it. Eventually, when he wakes up, he finally lets Cindy get dressed and use the washroom. Now, she's obviously terrified and frankly is starting to wonder if she'll ever even make it out of here alive, and her fear of being stuck with this man spikes when he says,

You know what, before I let you go, there's one more place I want to take you to. I want you to see my cabin, just real quick, and then I'll bring you back and let you go. According to Bernard Duclos book Fair Game, the man tells Cindy that they can only get to his cabin by air, and he has a plane, but in the back of her mind, Cindy is thinking, if I get onto that plane, I'm never coming back. So up until this point, Cindy has listened to every word this guy said, but this has already been the worst night of her life, and she knows it's not going to get better

from here. So when he's busy loading the plane, she makes a run for it, jumping out of the door and sprinting toward the highway. The man hears her and he begins to chase, like he is right behind her so close that she can hear him closing in, but Cindy is quite literally running for her life at this point and by some kind of miracle, she's able to flag down a passing truck. Now she is still handcuffed, half naked and barefoot in the gravel and completely hysterical when she climbs into this truck and asks the driver to hurry up and get her to the big

timber motel. Wait, a hotel, not the police station? That's what the trucker said too. He's like, you know, shouldn't we go to the police first? But she says, no, take me to big timber motel. That's where my boyfriend is. So he does or at least close to it. But the moment the young woman is out of his cab, he is driving to the nearest phone to

call Anchorage PD because even though she didn't want to go, he knows something is up, like something is wrong here. He literally saw the man chasing her with his own eyes and he wants to report it. Call to Anchorage PD comes into officer Greg Baker, who tracks Cindy down upset and alone at the motel. She was still handcuffed when he finds her, still half naked, still hysterical, and the boyfriend that she was planning to meet, actually her pimp, not her boyfriend, though she uses the term interchangeably, this guy wasn't around because he was out actually looking

to find a way to get her out of those handcuffs. Peter Baker uses a master key to get them off of her and that makes a huge difference in Cindy's mental state. Finally, she's able to speak to him and when she does, she describes in detail everything that happened to her. The man and what he looked like, what he sounded like, his vehicle, plane, what he was wearing, what his house looked like, what he did, I mean, everything in excruciating detail. And I mean, there was so much detail right down to this guy's crooked front teeth, his

acne scars, and the stutter that she tells him this guy had. Officer Baker takes Cindy to the hospital for a physical exam and a rape kit. And on the way, they drive past the same airfield Cindy had escaped from just a few hours before. And just as they're going by, there is this plane taking off. And you will never believe this, but just then Cindy yells out, that's him. That's the plane. Please hurry and order the plane to land, but it turns out it's not actually the one that belonged to Cindy's assailant.

It just looked super, super similar. But while they're there, they do find the right plane and they get everything they need to start tracking down its owner. Now in the meantime, they do get Cindy to the hospital and when they get her physical exam results back, they show clear signs of sexual assault. There was semen in her body and abrasions on her wrist from the restraints, which is all the confirmation police need to start tracking down the guy responsible for kidnapping and sexually assaulting her.

Now they're able to track this guy down because of the plane that was registered to him. And when officers arrive at his house, it's a perfect match to the description Cindy gave. A blue ranch style house with caribou antlers above the garage. And when they see the guy who owns the house, he is a dead ringer for Cindy's description too. His name is Robert Hansen. He's a local business owner, a baker actually, and he agrees to go in for questioning. And of course, he flat out denies having anything to do with Cindy's abduction and assault.

I mean, that's not a huge surprise to me, but they basically have this guy, right? Well, not quite, because Robert actually has an alibi. What? He says that he spent the first part of that evening working on a seat for his airplane with a friend. And then later that night, around midnight or so, he went to a different friend's house where they drank beer and planned some kind of fishing trip. At some point, the two of them had gone to the airfield, he said, to install the new

seat, that one that he'd been working on earlier. According to Tom Brennan's book, Murder at 40 Below, police actually call both of these guys that Robert says that he was with. And they both say, listen, he's telling the truth. And the thing about these guys, I mean, not only his two alibi witnesses, but Robert himself, they're all well-known, respected men with solid reputation within the community. So someone that you would trust with an alibi. Yeah.

And they don't just support Robert's alibi, they also support his character. They say he's a husband, a father, again, this respectable businessman who owns and operates a successful bakery in town. Not to mention he's got a house, he's got several vehicles, this airplane, like he's someone that people look up to, someone that they would want to be. And to top it all off, Robert even consents to a search of his property, too, just to prove you have the wrong guy. When police do the search, they look at his car first.

Not only is it the same make, model, and color Cindy described, but she also gave them details of inside the car, right down to candy wrappers on the seat. And when they look at it, it's all there. And the house is the same thing. Cindy described this house to a T, but no matter how well she described it, police find no physical evidence. I mean, they're looking for the ropes, the chains that he would have used on her. And there is a support pillar there, yes, but there's nothing on it or around it that

she could have been chained to the way she described. They did find several firearms in the home, which is almost to be expected for someone who hunts all the time like he clearly does. But Cindy had described the gun that she said had been pulled on her as a 357 magnum with a wooden handle. And that wasn't one of the weapons that police found inside his house. At this point, there's a bit of divide among police. Officer Baker, who met Cindy, who heard her story firsthand and the one who was with her

during that physical exam, he believes that she's telling the truth. But the officer who just joined the case from the sexual assault division and their lieutenant, those two disagree. They're saying this isn't rape. They think it's just some kind of trick gone wrong. They say, you know what, we need to get Cindy down here for a polygraph, and that's going to clear this whole thing up. Wait, so they're trying to prove that she's making up her story?

Pretty much. Like they think there was some kind of dust up between Cindy and her John, like maybe over money or whatever. And now she's reporting a rape to get back at him. Was there a theory it seems? Okay, so let me get this straight. The woman who was found handcuffed, half naked on the side of the road, the woman who has to be violated a second time by undergoing a physical exam and a rape kit.

This is the person who's being polygraphed, not Robert. Right. But as backwards as this is, the officers reach out to Cindy to try and bring her back in a second time to be questioned, this time with a polygraph. But here's the thing. When they go to look for her, they find out that Cindy is gone. Cindy Paulson and her pimp had both left town in a hurry when they found out police wanted Cindy back in for a polygraph.

They don't want to get tied up with law enforcement since technically they are both breaking the law and especially so since Cindy is technically a minor, though I have to say sadly that doesn't seem to be that uncommon in Anchorage during this time and wasn't even really a thing that got pointed out a ton as I was doing my research. It was clear she was only 17, but there isn't a lot of discussion about her and how she got in that situation. Was she trafficked? She's a minor.

Right. It was like no one cared that she was a minor. Right. And honestly, I can't blame her for wanting to get the heck out of Dodge. Whether she realized it or not, clearly they were looking at her like it was her fault or she was lying and I'm sorry, but I'd want no part of it either. Well, yeah. And I mean, here's the thing.

It was even worse back in the 80s when we're talking about like, I know we still have a long way to go with how marginalized groups like sex workers are treated, but back then it was somehow even worse. Yeah. Yeah. Like it wasn't uncommon for people to think that it can't even be rape if the woman is a sex worker, which seems so absolutely bananas today, but back then it kind of was very common things.

Yeah. It was totally the common thought. Now, obviously this social context, it doesn't excuse anything about how Cindy was treated by police, but it does help explain why they might have done the things that they did. And don't forget, Robert Alibi was backed up by not one, but two other people, two well-respected people, and police were, you know, finding it hard-pressed to like come up with the physical evidence to back up Cindy's claims. It's literally a he said, she said, and he is a respected businessman, whereas she is

a sex worker. So when they can't find her, nothing happened. The district attorney decides not to pursue charges because of the lack of evidence and the investigators with the Ingrid PD just dropped the case, but they don't completely shut the door just yet because you see, Robert Hansen isn't as squeaky clean as his friends made him out to be. This guy has a reputation in his book, Murder at 40 Below, Tom Brennan says police in the area know him well enough to have a nickname for him, Bad Bob the Baker.

According to an article by Laurel Andrews and Kyle Hopkins for the Anchorage Daily News, Robert was accused of rape in 1971, 12 years before Cindy Paulson told her story. And at that time, he was actually awaiting trial for charges of attempted kidnapping. And that was a whole separate incident. Wait, what? And they knew about this when 17 year old Cindy is found half naked, traumatized, and in handcuffs? You better believe it.

And none of this made law enforcement think, hey, maybe we should take a better look at this guy, even though his two friends were like, oh yeah, he's fine. He's cool. Because what that says to me is he's done this exact same thing before kidnapping and sexual assault and not like he's rumored to have done it. Some people say that he may have participated in the past like he's been charged and convicted and served time. It blows my mind because yeah, they didn't find this out like way later when Cindy was

gone. They knew who this guy was. He was known to them. Yeah. According to Butcher Baker by Walter Gilmore and Leeland Hale, Robert ended up cutting a deal with the DA who actually dropped the attempted kidnapping charges if he pled no contest to the sexual assault. And basically in the end, according to Alaska court records, he only spent six months in

jail before being transferred to a halfway house and a work release program. But here is the crazy part to me. That wasn't even the beginning. His first conviction was in his hometown in Iowa for, and I quote, willfully and maliciously setting fire to and burning a motor vehicle. End quote. So basically arson. Yeah.

He served 23 months for that before being paroled and his most recent conviction was related to theft. He actually attempted to steal a power saw from a department store. So like we said, this guy is known to police. So instead of like completing the file and putting it away and moving on, what Anchorage PD do is they actually send Cindy's file over to the Alaska state troopers who were investigating a series of murders in Anchorage. All women, many of them involved in sex work.

So like something had to have made them suspect this guy more than just thinking, you know, he might have been involved in Cindy's like, I don't know if it was the guy who initially interviewed her. I don't know if collectively they decided to do this, but like they knew something was wrong, right? And they knew that there was this other bigger case going on. So in the 1970s and 80s, Alaska was in the midst of a major oil boom and it drew people in from all over the country, especially young women and even girls like Cindy looking for

easy money or a fresh start. They were being actively recruited and told that they could make up to $500 a day dancing. So a lot of women came to Alaska during that time, but a lot of them didn't often stay long in the area. I mean, it was very much a transient population, which is why when someone disappeared, it often went unnoticed or at least unreported. But by the early 80s, police were noticing a pattern. A woman, often a topless dancer as they are called in most of the sources that I've consulted

for this episode or even a sex worker would be offered a generous sum of money for some kind of innocuous act like taking photos or even just having lunch. But then she would just never come back from the date. Eventually she'd be reported missing by family or friends, but that's kind of it. There'd be no sign of her at all. And this was happening over and over again. Were the police investigating these disappearances back then? Well, that's part of the issue here.

I wasn't able to find much information about any kind of investigation because like I said, I don't really think they were getting a lot of attention. So even if some of the small things were being done by police, it wasn't getting picked up by the press. And there's actually a paragraph in Tom Brennan's book that explains this, I think really well. Brad, I'd love for you to read like directly from that excerpt. Sure thing. The quote says, police were not alarmed when dancers went missing from 4th Avenue.

Vanished girls could either be good news or bad news, depending on where they went and how. Worst case, it could mean that a girl had overdosed on drugs. If not found sooner, her body would turn up when the snow melted. If a dancer died, it was sad, but not surprising. After all, they lived high risk lives. The thing about living on the edge is that sometimes you fell or were pushed over that edge.

End quote. Man, that quote is just really kind of devastating. Like no one really cared. Well, and I think that's part of the thing, right? Like it seemed almost like this inevitable thing within the community. Like these girls were disposable. Yeah. And it was just kind of accepted is what it seems like.

But then in the summer of 1980, a woman's skeleton was found buried in a shallow grave in Eklutna. Police weren't able to identify her at the time. And honestly, to this day, she still doesn't have a name. They call her Eklutna Annie. But I think having more than just a missing person, having an actual skeleton started to alert people that something was wrong. This isn't something we should accept.

After that same year, the body of Joanne Messina was found partially buried in a gravel pit badly decomposed and picked apart by animals. Now during this time and after women continued to disappear, some were reported missing. Others flew entirely under the radar. But it wasn't until September 1982 when two off-duty officers found the remains of a woman named Sherry Morrow. She was a dancer from a local nightclub and they found her half-buried in a sandbar in the Knick River.

And that's when things started to really come together for police. Sherry had been murdered. It was clear. And at her grave site, police found a bullet casing and an ace bandage, the kind you would use to like wrap a sprained ankle. According to Butcher Baker, there were seven murdered women in total in the unofficial list created by a cop named Glenn Flothe. And I mean, this guy, he had the whole quintessential murder detective grid on his wall of his office.

You know the kind with like pictures of the victims intertwined and connected with different people in places. Yeah, the string board. So when Cindy Paulson's file hits this guy's desk, right away, he's thinking, this is it. This is the break that we've been waiting for. So was Robert Hansen's name new to him or was he on some list to him already? So Bad Bob the Baker was on a list, yes, but so were about 30 other names. But when they get this file on Cindy's case, I mean, that moves his name right up to the

tippy top. Yeah. When Sergeant Flothe starts looking through the arrest records for Robert Hansen, a terrifying pattern starts to emerge. The same pattern the Anchorage police saw but didn't really do anything about when they were investigating Cindy's case. Like there was a case of a young woman named Robin who reported that Robert kidnapped her at gunpoint in a cafe parking lot, bound her hands behind her back, sexually assaulted

her. And she thought for sure he was going to kill her because instead of taking her back home, he just kept driving deeper and deeper into the Alaska wilderness. According to Leland Hale's book, Robin was able to convince Robert to let her go, which he did, but not before threatening to kill her parents and son if she told anyone what happened. But clearly she reported it. So what happened with that case?

Not a single thing. Now police did an investigation and they say it's thorough probably because her dad was a state trooper. But in the end, the DA decided not to pursue charges. Basically, he just made a deal with Robert instead. Looking at his file, he was accused of yet another kidnapping back in 1979. And that victim was also able to escape, barely. She ran from Robert's camper, stark naked to the nearest house.

And again, police investigated that one too. But again, nothing happened. Wait, are you kidding me? No, nothing happened. That is so, like, I can't even think of a better word other than frustrating or infuriating. And it only brings me to the question of were these victims or potential victims all sex workers? And is that the reason that maybe the DA didn't want to pursue or like charges?

Yeah. I mean, knowing how they viewed sex workers in this time, yeah, it's a big part of it. But unlike the DA, Sergeant Flothe knows in his gut that Robert Hanson is his guy. He had access to the victims. His airplane gave him access to the murder sites. He was a marksman and an award-winning hunter. So he had the skills too. And I mean, we know he had a history of both kidnapping and sexual assault.

So for Sergeant Flothe, like, this is a slam dunk, but here's the thing. The DA doesn't agree. Not once, but twice, Flothe's request for a search warrant is denied. But instead of spinning his wheels, he decides to make a call, a call that gives him the insight he needs to take this case to the next level. Sergeant Flothe knows he needs a more compelling argument for the DA if he's going to finally nail his suspect Robert Hanson. So he reaches out to the FBI, and their behavioral science unit connects him with two agents,

James Horn and John Douglas. Wait, like, 900 John Douglas? The very same. Now the officers aren't told anything about the suspect, just the victims and the crime scene, so they can make a fresh assessment with, like, no bias and the profile they come up with. For it, like, I just have to have you read it directly for us. Their analysis says, quote, the suspect is probably around 40 years of age, a thrill

killer who may well be a setterer. He's probably an upstanding and respected member of the community, a person who was rejected as a youth, and most likely of above average intelligence. In 5 Will Get You 10, he's been involved in arson, shoplifting, or both at one time or another. End quote. Ashley, that is uncanny. Isn't it?

Again, without having seen anything about Robert Hanson, the thing that, like, chills me to my bone is when they said that he might very well be a stutterer, how would you even... How do you decide that? How would you find that out or, like, decipher that just from, like you said, it's nothing about him. It's just the crime scenes and the victim profiles. It's so spot on that it's creepy. Now the other thing they tell Flothe is that their killer probably keeps a murder kit,

like disguises and stuff like that so he can be anonymous when he picks up women. And they say he probably keeps mementos from his victims, things like driver's license or clothing or jewelry, stuff like that. Like trophies. Exactly. But we know that they searched his house after Cindy's assault and I assume they didn't turn up anything that they would consider a trophy or something left over from a crime they committed.

No, it didn't. But here's the thing is I'm not sure that they were really looking that hard or hard enough to find trophies if they were there because, I mean, during that search, really all they were doing, they weren't suspecting him of being a serial killer. They were just trying to back up the story Cindy told with evidence from the scene. So I don't think they're looking for random pieces of women's clothing or jewelry or whatever or even if they found something that didn't belong to Cindy, again, this guy's married. Like, I don't think they were going in with that mindset and if they did see something

like that, like I said, they probably just would have assumed it belonged to his wife. But to your point, like that stuff would have been in his house at the time for sure. And if there is evidence of the murders in the house or somewhere, Flothe knows that he needs to get it now before Robert figures out what's going on and destroys if it exists. So finally, in late October, 1983, after months and months of crossing all the T's and dotting all the I's, police finally get their search warrants. When officers arrive at the Hanson House, Robert's wife, Darla, is there along with their two children and Robert's mother, who just kind of so happens to be in town for a visit.

So when police tell them what's going on, they are, I mean, completely taken aback. Oh, I can't imagine. Yeah. Have no idea what's going on. They seem totally shocked, but Darla cooperates like she's hustling her kids and her mother-in-law out of the house so they can get to work and they're not like having to be there in the middle of all of this. And police do end up questioning Darla later that night, again, totally cooperative, but

it's clear to them, at least they say that she knows nothing about her husband's double life. But when they question Robert, that's when things get really interesting. When they ask him about all of these women who have come forward and accused him of kidnapping and sexual assault over the years, he doesn't deny it. I mean, here's the thing. He doesn't deny having been with these women. What he denies is the kidnapping or sexually assaulting them.

Robert says like, yeah, I was with all these women, none of this is a lie, but it was all consensual and they agreed to it. Yeah. Like all some big misunderstanding. Like he said, there was this one case, for example, where a woman had quoted him one price for sex and then demanded more after and he said he wouldn't pay. And so he's saying that to get him back, she reported it to police. This might have worked for Robert before, but I mean, at this point, they are so deep

in that the officers are not buying it and they aren't going to let him, you know, pass the buck to his victims either. Because here's the thing. The officers back at the Hansen House are turning up some really interesting stuff. Like a map that they find stashed behind the headboard of Robert's bed. When they open it up, it is an aviation map covered in X's, 24 X's to be exact. And wouldn't you know it? Police are familiar with at least four of these X's because four of those X's mark

grave sites where women's bodies had been found. And you want to know what else they find? So according to Tom Brennan's account of the story, this one cop searching the Hansen House was like crammed into the attic, literally going inch by inch, pulling out insulation, not wanting to leave a single area untouched. And I mean, he's in there for hours. And eventually, in a hollowed out area in the very back corner, he finds exactly what they were looking for.

A stash of firearms, including the one very specific one that they've been looking for. The type that ties back to the murders. And with this, they also find a bag of women's jewelry. All of this is enough to place Robert under arrest. And for days, again, he's denying everything. But then remember those two friends who were his alibi for the night that Cindy Paulson was kidnapped and raped? Yeah, who were like, yeah, we were with him the whole time.

He's a great guy. Whatever. Exactly. Well, once he's in police custody, they both come forward and say, oh, by the way, we were lying. Just like that? Just like that. So apparently, police had chatted with these guys a couple of times before, thinking that

they were probably covering for their friend. But their story was always staying the same. However, now that Robert's under arrest for murder, the whole bottom. Okay, maybe we should tell the truth now. Yeah, the whole bottom falls out of their story. And it turns out that neither of those men was with Robert or anywhere near him that night. And like Cindy already knew, like we all obviously knew, he had no real alibi after all. With the evidence against him mounting, a grand jury charges Robert with first degree

assault and kidnapping, theft, insurance fraud, and five firearms related offenses. Wait, insurance fraud? That and murder are very different things. Yeah. And this is like a total kind of side story here, but at one point, Robert had reported a bunch of things stolen, like valuable hunting trophies, like stuff like that. And he actually ended up submitting an insurance claim that was paid out was like $13,000 or whatever.

But when police were in Robert's house searching for stuff related to the murders of the women, they found everything that he'd submitted a claim for. Yeah. Wouldn't you know it? Like half of the stuff that he said was stolen was back on the walls of his basement, like a man cave. But yet to your point, it's not a murder charge yet, but it is enough to get him held in remand while he waits for trial, which is set for February of 1984.

In the meantime, the Alaska State Troopers and the DA keep building their case against Robert. They confirm that four of the X's on Robert's map match four gravesites of murdered women. And they're able to match the jewelry from Robert's attic to another woman entirely, a missing woman. And the results come back from ballistics testing that confirms that the bullet casings found in their crime scenes out of the Kinnick River flats were fired by Robert's rifle. So the case against Robert is building, but before they even get a chance to take him

to trial, they get a call from Robert's lawyer who says Robert is ready to talk. In mid-February, 1984, Robert Hansen's lawyers call the state troopers to say that their client is ready to talk, and boy does he talk. He says he did have Cindy Paulson in his house, that he did chain her to the support beam in his basement and threaten her with a gun if she didn't comply. He says that stuff all happened. Okay, but wait a second. The police searched his house back when Cindy first came forward, and there was zero evidence,

specifically that even though the support beam that she described had been there, there was nothing on it that she could have been changed to, right? Well, right. So, but it turns out there's a reason that there was no sign of Cindy, like, or the assault in his house. So, according to the book Butcher Baker, after Cindy escapes from the airfield, I guess Robert had immediately raced back home to, like, hide all the evidence, like, he's stashing that gun in, like, the ceiling tiles, and he took out the bolt and chain out of the

support beam. Like, basically, I mean, like, he knew that they were probably going to come to him. She saw his face, like, she saw his car, she saw his plane, his house. So he was, like, preemptively, that's why he was so willing to let them search his place because he knew. Because he knew it would be clean. Exactly. Okay, but this could not have been a very thorough or well done search.

Like, obviously, they aren't looking for her or anything. They're just looking for things that corroborate her story. What corroborate her story? Right, right. And with this support beam thing, there would have had to been patched up whole or something showing that there had been a bolt through it where she would have been chained. Yeah. So that's the thing.

There was. And police at the time. We're just, like, okay, whatever. Police? Yeah. So they saw it. It's not even like they said, oh, we didn't notice it. They saw it and either they asked him and just took his word for it or they're making

the assumption. But basically, they thought that he had shot a bullet into it and then fixed it. Which seems way more likely than this girl, girl, because she's a minor who's like, no, I was actually chained here. What? Yeah. I can't quite get it to add up. But by the time Robert finishes with police, Bad Bob the Baker has actually at this point

confessed to 17 murders. And he says many of those women were just passing through Anchorage. Most were young, like in their late teens, early 20s, and he said some were topless dancers, but most were involved in sex work in one way or another. And he goes on to tell police that his MO was always the same. Find a woman, ask her on a date or request her services as a John. Like, and just so you know, if you don't see a picture of this guy, he's kind of this like small guy, really unassuming.

Remember, he speaks with a stutter so no one finds him intimidated. And once the women were in his car, he would cuff them and then drive them somewhere remote, where he would sexually assault them. And then he would tell them that he would let them go, but not until they took a trip to his cabin. Except for here's the thing, Robert Hansen didn't have a cabin. What he had was an airplane and miles and miles of Alaskan wilderness. If he could get them to go with him, sometimes he broke into cabins or fishing buildings

out there along the Kinnick River, and he would confine the women inside, sexually assault them there. But most of the time, there would be an opportunity for his victims to get away. And when they took that opportunity, that's when Robert's fun really began. Because then, that's when the prize-winning marksman did what he did best. He hunted them. The same way he hunted wolves and deer and caribou. Most of his victims died running from him, usually with a bullet to the back.

During his confession, Robert opened up about what drove him to commit such senseless heinous crimes. He said that he'd been rejected all of his life, especially as a young kid in high school with a face full of acne and this serious stutter. And he said, you know, kidnapping women, restraining women, assaulting women. That was how he was able to take some sort of control back. Well, and even the FBI profile mentioned that he likely experienced a lot of rejection in his youth and teen years.

And I think something that we have to mention is that rape is really about control at the very root of things. Which is just what he said he wanted, right? Exactly. Not to mention the hostility towards women, which is clear in this case. Well, yeah. And what's really interesting, though, about Robert, and I'm sure we've seen this in other offenders, is Robert wasn't hostile towards all women, just some women.

Some women, right? Yeah. As police sit in the room with this guy going point by point through 12 years of kidnapping sexual assault and murder, it becomes clear to them that for Robert, there are two kinds of women. There's good women like his wife and the wives of his friends. And then there were bad women who were, to him, topless dancers, sex workers. And so he treated the women that he thought were good with a great deal of respect.

But then he treated these ones that he called bad as if they were less than. And for Robert, those women were expendable. This reminds me so much of the Robert Pickton case. It does, yeah. He was also known to talk about the idea that in his mind, there were two different kinds of women. The good ones and the bad ones. And he only really targeted the quote unquote bad ones.

Yeah. There are really a lot of similarities here. Pickton and Hanson were also both right under police's noses the whole time, right? Like they were both on their radar. They were both on lists of suspects well before they were arrested and charged, which is also so upsetting because how many women could have been saved if we wouldn't have continued like time after time to cut him deal after deal. Could some of these women still be alive and you know, just something to like keep in mind

during all of this because I don't feel like we hear about this guy a lot. But this investigation into Robert Hanson was kind of unfolding in the wake of Ted Bundy's conviction in the late seventies and right at the tail end of the heyday of the American serial killer. I mean, you had Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac killer, I mean, so many around this time. And Robert Hanson, though not nearly as high profile as some of those men, belongs on this list too.

I mean, he admitted to 17 murders, but police believe he's possibly responsible for many more. And there were 24 X's on that map, right? Right. So back to the map, police actually used that and they searched miles and miles of land in South Central Alaska over the course of several weeks in like late April, early May 1984. And they at one point even took Robert out with them to show them where some of the gravesites

were and they needed him because each one of those X's represented about 10 square miles. Like, you know, this isn't just like, oh, it's by this tree, it's a huge area of land. And they thought that maybe he could help them narrow down their search. Eventually, on April 24th, investigators found the bodies of two women, Sue Luna and Malai Larson. Then the next day, they found the remains of DeLynn Frey and a day after that, they found the bodies of Teresa Watson and Angela Federn. The last two sets of remains were found on April 29th and then May 9th.

They found the bodies of Tamara Peterson and Lisa Fetrell, respectively. None of these bodies were far from Robert's favorite hunting grounds near the Kinect River. And like I said, Brett, I don't know about you, but Robert Hanson's name wasn't a name that I had ever really heard a ton about, not in the way that we hear about those other people I mentioned, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy. And there's probably a lot of reasons for that, but one of which I think is the victim profile. But I read in Bernard du Clos's book, Fair Game, that part of Robert's deal with the

state was to limit the publicity around the case. And I mean, apparently he succeeded in that since even the picture that the press used of him when they reported on this was one from 1971, over 10 years before his arrest for murder. Oh, wow. Which honestly, a little bit reminds me of the Israel Keys case. Like again, one of these killers we really didn't know about because there wasn't a ton of publicity, but that was something that Israel Keys wanted to make sure didn't happen

when he talked to police. And it sound like Robert Hansen had the same kind of mindset, I don't know if it was for his own preservation, if he actually cared about his kids in the way that Israel Keys said that was his reason, I don't know. But in the end, he didn't go to trial. He pled guilty to the four murders that he was charged with, the ones where there was enough evidence to convict. And he admitted to committing 13 more murders and at least 30 sexual assaults.

So the DA didn't bring formal charges against him for those. According to a 1984 article in the New York Times, three of the four murders he pled guilty to were committed when for all intents and purposes, he should have been in jail on other charges. So what you're saying is, if they had done what they were supposed to do, three women could still be alive. Exactly. The judge ultimately sentenced him to 461 years plus life in prison, and he was whisked

away to a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania to serve his time, which was another request that he made in his deal with the DA. He ended up back in Alaska by 1988, first at the Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, but only until correctional officers found escape plans. After that, he went to Spring Creek, also in Alaska, which is where he served out the rest of his sentence. In 1990, his wife ended up filing for divorce before she and their two children packed their bags and left Alaska for good to escape the harassment that they all faced.

Robert Christian Hansen died in August 2014 at 75 years old, and like Laurel Andrews and Kyle Hopkins said in the Anchorage Daily News, when he died, he took with him the true details of his crimes, his victims, how many, their names, and the locations of their bodies. In media reported on Robert's death, they reached out to Sergeant Flothe for comment, and he said, quote, on this day, we should only remember his victims and all of their families, and my heart goes out to them. As far as Hansen is concerned, this world is better without him, end quote. You can find all of the pictures and our source material for this episode on our website at

crimejunkiepodcast.com. And remember to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production, so what do you think Chuck, do you approve?