Alaska Serial Killer Robert Hansen: The Baker Who Hunted His Victims Like Game

0:00 He was a baker, a family man, a world record hunter with trophies on the walls, and a good word from practically everyone in Anchorage. Behind all of that, he had an aerononical chart hidden behind his headboard with 37 X marks on it. The only person who ever got close enough to expose him was a 17-year-old girl with no shoes and a pair of handcuffs on her wrists.

0:47 Robert Hansen grew up in a house where the emotional vocabulary was essentially "labor." His father, Christian Hansen, was a Danish immigrant who had built a modest life in Esterville, Iowa, around a local bakery that he ran with the warmth of a tax audit. Robert started working there practically before he was old enough to see over the counter, 35 cents a day, which even adjusting for 1940's Iowa economics isn't very much money. Christian also decided that Robert's natural left-handedness was a problem requiring correction. So he had his son retrained to use his right hand. This was considered "recentible parenting" at the time.

1:28 Researchers have since linked forced-hand retraining to the development of speech impediments, and that is exactly what followed. Robert Hansen grew up with a severe, debilitating stutter that shattered him through every classroom, every attempted conversation, every moment of trying to be just a normal kid. Girls teased him relentlessly in junior high. Sistic acne left permanent scarring across his face by high school. He graduated in 1957 from a class of 31 students, and the yearbook staff managed to misspell his name, 31 people, and you still managed to misspell one of them. The activities that actually worked for Robert Hansen were the solitary ones, hunting, fishing, archery.

2:13 Out there, no one was laughing at him. He turned out to be genuinely gifted at all of it. Years later in Alaska, he would earn multiple world record designations through the Pope and Young Club for archery big game hunting. His ability to track animals, read terrain, and be patient and precise in the wilderness was something his peers admired openly. In another version of this story, that is just a man with impressive trophies and a good reputation at the sporting goods store. We're not in that version. After a brief stint in the army reserve, Hansen returned to Iowa, married in 1960 and found work as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas.

2:57 He was also a volunteer fireman. In December 7, 1960, he recruited a teenager acquaintance and they set fire to a school bus garage in Pocahontas County. This was deliberate, calculated revenge against people he felt had mistreated him during his school years. He had been keeping a ledger of people that had wronged him, and apparently the bus garage was on it. His accomplice confessed almost immediately. Hansen was convicted and sentenced to three years at state penitentiary, serving about 20 months of that three years. Prison psychiatrist evaluated him and left behind findings worth paying attention to, manic depression with periodic schizophrenic episodes, and something they specifically labeled infantile personality.

3:42 In practice, that describes a person who cannot process perceived slides, and instead converts them directly into a need for retaliation. No resolution, no moving on, a running tally that kept growing. His first wife divorced him when he was incarcerated. The state of Iowa documented all of this carefully, filed it, and then released him. In 1967, Hansen moved with his new wife, Darla, and their two children to Anchorage, Alaska. He opened a small bakery downtown. Bob the Baker. Cheerful, reliable, genuinely well liked by everyone. The cops started popping in regularly for coffee and donuts.

4:23 His pastries were apparently excellent. In the mid-1970s, arrived with the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, an Anchorage transformed almost overnight. Workers arrived by the thousands. Oil money moved in loud and fast, and an entire secondary economy assembled itself around 4th Avenue. Strip clubs, sex workers, men rotating in and out of pipeline schedules. The Bush Company was the best known club on the strip. A woman disappearing from that world could go almost entirely unnoticed, because the people around her were already in constant motion and often not in close contact with anyone who would file a report.

5:03 Hansen understood this the way that a hunter understands where game travels before dawn. His method developed deliberately over time. He would approach women working at the clubs or streets of 4th Avenue, offer cash for sexual services, and once they were inside his vehicle, produce a firearm. Some he drove back to his home in the Moldon neighborhood. To a basement den, with a post he'd used to restrain victims by the neck. He held them there for hours, sometimes for days. Then came his Piper Super Cub. A blue and white airplane he kept at Merrill Field. He would fly captives out to remote locations, with no road access and no witnesses, release them into the wilderness, and then hunt them with his rifle.

5:50 The skills he had built as a lonely kid in Iowa, in the woods where nobody was watching, had been quietly converted over the years into the architecture of murder. His first confirmed victim is known only as Eclutna Annie. Her remains were found in 1980 near Eclutna Lake, north of Vancrich, buried in a shallow grave. She was somewhere between 16 and 25 years old, wearing a brown leather jacket and red knee-high heeled boots. Her real name has never been established. Hanson told investigators she was his first murder, and that when she realized what was happening to her she tried to run. He chased her down while she was begging for her life.

6:31 He later confessed to 17 murders in total. And behind the headboard of his bed, investigators would find an aeronautical chart with 37 X marks on it. June 13, 1983, a 17 year old named Cindy Paulson was picked up by Hanson under the pretense of a paid encounter. Once inside his vehicle he produced a gun, drove her to his home in Muldoon, and held her there for several hours. During every moment of that ordeal, Cindy Paulson was paying close attention to everything she could observe. The bar is on the window. A bullet hole in the floor, the hunting trophies covering the walls. From one of those trophies there was a name, Robert Hanson.

7:15 She understood immediately what knowing his name meant for her chances of leaving. When Hanson drove her to Merrill Field to load her onto his plane, she was in handcuffs and had no shoes on. He turned his back while preparing the cockpit, and she crawled out of the backseat and ran. She made it to the road, flagged down a passing driver, and eventually the police were called. What followed is worth saying plainly. The Anchorage Police Department weighed the account of a 17-year-old sex worker against the word of one of the most respected businessmen in the city. Hanson told investigators she was trying to extort money from him. He was refusing to pay her. He produced a friend as an alibi.

7:57 The department did not believe Cindy Paulson. So Robert Hanson went home. Alaska State Trooper, Glen Floth, had been building a separate case, connecting bodies found in the Matsu Valley into a pattern that he believed belonged to a single perpetrator. He pulled Cindy's report and recognized the same signature. He then contacted FBI Special Agent John Douglas of the Behavioral Science Unit. Douglas built a profile from the Graveside evidence and Cindy's testimony. Experienced hunter, chronic low self-esteem, a documented history of rejection by women, almost certainly keeping physical trophies from victims. Then Douglas added one more characteristic.

8:38 The perpetrator likely had a stutter. In a city that size, that detail does not describe a long list of people. On October 27, 1983, the State Trooper executed a search warrant on Hanson's property. In a hidden attic area, investigators found jewelry belonging to multiple missing women. A gunsafe held the rifle which forensic testing matched to shell casings recovered near a victim's grave. Behind the headboard of his bed, they found the chart. The assistant DA told Hanson the plan. Once the spring-thaw made the ground workable, tracking dogs would be deployed at every single one of those 37 marked locations.

9:20 He later described what happened in that room. Hanson's face went deep red. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. After 12 years of selling donuts and hunting women in the Alaskan wilderness, Robert Hanson finally stopped performing. In February 1984, he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and confessed to rape being an additional 30 women across his 12-year spree. He received life plus 461 years without the possibility of parole. Robert Hanson died in prison August 21, 2014, at 75 years old. Twelve of the 17 bodies were ultimately recovered, and 11 of those have been identified.

10:03 The woman found, with a brown leather jacket and the big red boots, is still unknown. Some of those 37 X marks on the map have never led to anyone. No one knows what they mean. The Alaskan wilderness is keeping whatever secrets are buried there. Cindy Paulson was 17, barefoot, and handcuffs. She outran him anyway, and everything that mattered came after that. [Music]