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That scared the hell out of me.

That's what I was trying to do.

I did not want her to see where we was going.

I just pointed to him and said, look, you're a professional.

You know there's some risk to what you've been doing.

If you do exactly what I tell you, you're not going to get hurt.

You're just going to accomplish off the bad experience and be a little bit more

careful next time who you're going to proposition or go out with.

Welcome to Very Scary People. I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

He was one of the most notorious murderers in Alaska's history.

A skilled hunter, Robert Hansen had a particular brand of terror.

He brought his young female victims out into the wilderness, where he chased

them down and shot them like prey.

He got away with his crimes for years, disguising himself as an unassuming

family man who owned a neighborhood bakery.

Tonight, we'll hear from Robert Hansen in his own words.

a rare glimpse into the twisted mind of a dangerous and sadistic predator.

This is part one of The Butcher Baker.

I had just gotten a small boat, and the Kinnick River was right there, so I

thought it would be an excellent time to go down the river and do a quick

hunting trip, along with my friend Adi Holloway, and find some moose.

The Kinnick River is actually a very short river. It's a glacial river that

just far enough away from Anchorage to be in the wilderness, but still close

enough to get back and forth fairly quickly.

As we were coming down the river, wind was blowing. We were getting blown

on the river pretty bad.

A group of trees that were down by the river seemed like a good place to get

of the wind, put a tent up, and camp for the night.

I think probably the first thing that drew attention was the moon boot that we

saw. It just didn't fit in with the area. And then as we were looking a

bit closer, I saw a patch of denim.

It had been torn some, so I could tell underneath that there was a kneecap

there. And that pretty much hold us what we had there.

There was a body.

It was too far out for most people, like a hiker, to just fall over.

My sense was there was some kind of a homicide.

So it was, let's hike out and get the troopers and bring them out here.

They started working their way down to the body.

One of the first things that came visible was the victim's head.

She has an ace bandage wrapped around her head.

You see that and you start thinking, my God, she's probably been kidnapped from

somewhere. She's sitting there not knowing what's happening, where she's

She was shot in the chest when they shifted to the dirt. There was a .223

that they ended up finding there.

The .223 caliber come with a number of semi -automatic weapons.

They're light, very powerful shell.

They're designed to kill.

The bullets were from...

High -power hunting rifle used to kill large game.

The first inklings was probably someone who knows his way around hunting.

The victim was identified as 23 -year -old Sherry Morrow.

She'd been missing about 10 months.

She was working as a dancer in Anchorage.

The morning she disappeared, she left a note.

to her friend Lisa and said she was going to a photo shoot. She was going to

Alice's 210 restaurant in downtown Anchorage and that whoever was going to

was going to pay her $300 and she never saw her again.

Her boyfriend reported her missing and one of the things he pointed out was

she had this arrowhead necklace that she always wore. Now when they find her,

And they identify her.

That jewelry is not with her. That piece of jewelry is missing. It wasn't found

in her grave with her.

Sherry Morrow wasn't the only dancer who had vanished. There were others.

Almost all were in their early 20s who had disappeared after an afternoon date.

She's left everything she owns.

She's gone out on a date.

The people that she keeps her contact with is not hearing from her.

And she's gone.

Alaska in the 1970s is a boom town.

If there's anything like the wild, wild west, it was Anchorage, Alaska in the

1970s.

They discovered oil in the North Slope.

And then they have to build a pipeline.

The pipeline started up very quickly in the early 70s. Anchorage was relatively

small and compact.

And in the span of basically 10 years, from 73 to 83, its population almost

doubled. And there was lots of money, lots of drugs, lots of illegal

activity. There's a lot of people from the outside coming up to Alaska, and

land on 4th Avenue, which Bob Hope once described as the longest bar in the

world. There's girls.

There's booze.

The area became known as the Tenderloin District because all of a sudden there

was a lot of topless, bottomless bars and a lot of women working on the

Some of the ladies were, especially during the pipeline days, were here

gone tomorrow.

There had been several women reported missing from that area.

So a stripper is missing, so what? She just went somewhere else. Nobody known

for...

where a lot of these people are at, and they disappear.

Unless something happens and somebody gets caught, they're never going to

This part of town, it comes alive at night.

There's all the clubs, there's the topless clubs, the bottomless clubs, the

women on the street.

He was right there. And of course, it was like a smorgasbord to him.

All these women.

It gave me a thrill.

And so this monster

that he turned out to be, for many people, I think it was truly an

don't think they had any idea what he was capable of doing.

I'm not saying that I hate all women. I don't.

Quite the contrary. If I get to my own mind, what I would classify as a good

woman, not a prostitute, I'd do everything in my power,

any way, shape, or form, to do anything for her.

I guess prostitutes are one that I'm putting down as lower than myself.

This is 1983. For the last two or three years, there have been reports in

Anchorage to the police of dancers and prostitutes suddenly turning up

missing. People who are close to them say, you know, she went. The guy offered

her $200 for a photography shot. She never came back.

There was a big rumor on the streets about something going on.

I was working foot to toe down on the avenue for a number of years.

The prostitutes were nervous. The dancers were nervous. Of course, most of

were way behind the power curve on that one.

And then in the spring, another woman disappears off the face of the earth.

Her name was Paula Golding.

Paula Golding had got into dancing kind of sideways. She'd worked as a

secretary. She didn't much like it.

Thought she'd try her hand at dancing. She kind of got the hint that if you go

bottomless, you'll make more money. The night she decides to go bottomless is

the same night she met this guy, and he offers her $200 for a photo shoot.

Paula shows up at the prearranged meeting place and gets into his car.

Then he threatens her with a gun and handcuffs her.

From there, he would go to Merrill Field.

He had an airplane, Piper Super Cub.

He's flown them to this remote place.

So just being there is scary.

And then they have a meat shack out here.

Meat shack is where once you get the game, you need to get it off the ground.

You need to get it dry.

So a meat shack is a place where you put poles up inside, tie the meat up to it,

and just use it to preserve the game that you've got.

That's a door.

This is where we're going to spend the day.

But maybe I should have called her to check to her.

Maybe that's what got her lying to think.

As we were walking in here, a damn plane came down the river.

He made a pass around.

I said, oh, some bitch is going to stop.

And I said, there comes a plane. I said, let's get out of sight. Some bitch

lands, we're going to have a problem.

He decides he can't let this pilot see her. And it doesn't look like he's

going away because he flies and then he's coming back around.

The pilot comes around again and he waggles

his wings, which is kind of like an airplane speak.

How you doing? Okay.

By then, she's totally freaked.

But she just got more and more hysterical.

She broke away from me again and started to run.

And, oh, you're going to kill me right now. And everything just went back.

How many times was she shot?

I remember the gun going off.

How many times went off? I don't know.

Once, twice, three times. I don't know.

He knew what he was doing was evil, but he got, apparently,

pleasure from it.

What we're trying to do is make some determination as to whether or not we

one suspect involved in a number of these missing person cases or whether or

we have a series of multiple suspects.

Nine months after Sherry Morrow's body was found, a young woman is working the

streets at about 11 .30 at night.

Her name is Cindy Paulson.

17 years old.

She's been a prostitute for a while, even though she's only 17.

She

gets

into the car, and almost immediately, she's in handcuffs with a gun in her

So he takes her to his house.

He took her down to the basement where he had a trophy room.

There are at least three doll sheep heads on the wall.

There's goat heads on the wall. There's rabbits. There's birds.

And he immediately says, and I want to make love to you, but I want you to be

chained.

Did he say anything to you or talk to you when

he was having sexual relations?

He raped her, assaulted her several times, and then chained her up and

went to sleep on a couch and left her there.

So when she's down there in this basement, all she sees are animals and

clock ticking, ticking.

And she thinks, I'm not going to live.

I can't imagine the horror of that. He goes to sleep and she's sitting there

thinking she's going to die, taking note of all the things she sees while she's

also figuring out how to get out of it.

And I lived with my mom.

And I would never tell nobody.

And he told me that since he liked me so good, that he would take me to his

cabin and would make love to me one time and bring me back.

And he said that he had a plane over at Merrill Airfield, that we would go

there, and that he would take me to his cabin and bring me back.

And I knew that I was going to come back.

Cindy was handcuffed, barefoot, and he put her in his car and covered her with

an Army blanket and then drove to Merrill Field and was in the process of

getting his plane ready.

Cindy was smart enough to know that she better make her move and escape now that

it would be her last chance.

She's running.

She's barefoot.

She's in handcuffs. There's a man behind her with a gun, and a truck drives by.

She screams. He stops. She gets in.

She did not even want to go to the police.

She wants to be let out at a motel that's very close to where she's been

staying.

He was a good Samaritan and he dropped her off.

And then he contacts the police.

The APD officer, Greg Baker, and his partner were on patrol and they found

the room that Cindy Paulson was in. She was still handcuffed and hysterical.

She was highly traumatized.

The cops get her out of the cuffs, and then she calms down and she starts to be

able to tell him what happened.

She saw what he looked like. She could describe him quite well.

He had some distinctive characteristics, one of which was that he stuttered and

he had bad complexion.

But she was a reluctant victim.

She was afraid of coming forward because she was convinced that you would be

able to kill her.

Prostitutes also don't want to get involved with the police.

They live an illegal lifestyle too, so to go to the police seems against your

own best interests in a way, especially when you don't think they'll even

believe you.

But Baker's...

Instincts led him to believe her right away.

They take her to the hospital for what's called a rape kit.

On the way to the hospital, Officer Baker takes Cindy to Merrill Airfield to

if she can identify her attacker's plane.

Cindy was able to point to the Super Cub. She said, oh, there's the plane,

there's the plane.

And so, of course, they can read the tail numbers, and they can check who

the plane. And while they're standing there, a security guard comes by and

I've got this license number on his car. And so they match those two things, and

boom, they have a name, they have an address.

His name is Robert Chris Hansen.

And they go to that address, and Cindy says, it's that house right there. It's

the one with the antlers above the garage.

Welcome back to Very Scary People.

By the summer of 1983, several dancers and prostitutes had disappeared from

downtown Anchorage.

In the meantime, Robert Hansen continued to live an ordinary life as a baker and

family man.

When his wife and children left town on vacation, Hansen planned what he'd call

his summertime project, which included the kidnapping, rape, and torture of

vulnerable young women.

You know, there's just some things that until you're married to a woman, you

just don't do with your wife.

It was all right to unleash your prostitutes. I could do things with them

couldn't do with a good woman.

Bob Hanson, he really differentiated women. You know, you had your good girls

and your bad girls. But his wife was a good girl. She was pious and went to

church, and she very much focused on raising the children.

They lived very separate lives.

He was into hunting. She was into church. She was...

A very hard worker, very dutiful, very intelligent, very sensitive.

Darla was somewhat of a loner herself.

Robert Hansen's bakery was on a one -way street that leads up to downtown

Anchorage. You make a turn, and there's all the clubs.

Unknown to Bob Hansen's wife, when she thought that he was working at the

bakery, he was actually hanging out at the strip club.

He was not the guy who looked dangerous, really presented himself.

He's kind of shy.

He would always sit toward the back of the club so that the women had to come

him while he's in the corner.

He doesn't ever want to be seen with these women. So the deal is he would

her not then, but later.

Then when they come to meet him, he's always like parked somewhere so that he

can see them coming.

They had to come by a taxi or something like that.

And if someone pulled up with them, they turned around and left.

He's gone.

When you met with women like this, was it always when your family was away?

No. I did not attempt to go to my home or my family. It was around town.

Why did you drive out the road instead of just going to a motel in town?

That made it more commercialized.

You know, if you go to a motel, it's more or less like a prostitution.

I guess I was trying to convince myself maybe I wasn't really buying sex. It was

being given to me.

Around town, Bob Hanson has a reputation of standing successful business owner

who is in a successful marriage with two kids.

People talk about how you'd go into the bakery, and Robert Hanson was there

still in the morning. He was very pleasant.

He was, if anything, humble, meek, quiet.

He was strange, but he was harmless strange as far as I was concerned.

He was a good baker.

I went there many times and got coffee and donuts. He established himself as a

community man.

Everybody came by the bakery.

Hi, Bob. Bye, Bob. And so, yes, he was definitely a known entity.

So Robert Hanson grew up in a very small town in Iowa called Pocahontas.

Pocahontas, Iowa, wonderful town, great people. It was a farming community.

It was just a great place to grow up.

His dad was a baker, and Robert had learned the bakery business by

His father expected a lot of him. Mr. Hanson worked his son pretty hard.

He was a hard -nosed authoritarian.

Robert felt worked to death.

and getting hardly anything for it. His dad was demeaning toward him. His own

dad would make fun of him.

Bob was never good enough. He was not very good in school, and he was born

-handed, and they made him be right -handed, and he stutters, and he doesn't

have many friends.

He had a very noticeable stutter and really bad acne as well.

He ended up with a pockmarked face.

Generally, he was made fun of by girls.

I didn't start to hate all women.

He was a bit of a loner. His demeanor was non -threatening. I never thought

step on an ant. I'd say he was sort of boring, actually.

He didn't have very much to say.

All through high school, if I knew that I would have to say anything in class, I

would literally break out in sweats. And getting so excited about it, it just

made it worse.

He was quiet -ish.

Because to talk is to expose himself to ridicule.

I hated the word school.

I just hated that place with a divine passion. I would do anything and

everything I could think of to get back at that monster school that...

I convinced myself not to do Bob Hanson's personal wrong.

Bob held the grudge against his high school because he had endured a lot of

abuse. He had this resentment toward women, toward figures of authority,

at the school, the cops.

He's in his early 20s. He's hanging around with these group of kids, and he

decides they're going to burn down the bus bar. And it's really an act of

revenge against the school.

They took some gasoline up into the bus barn, and

Hansen spread the gasoline around, lit a match.

Bob Hansen was also on the fire department.

I mean, after he set the bus barn on fire, he went to the fire station. I

remember seeing Bob Hansen there that night.

He was fighting the fire. He denies knowing anything about it. And for about

nine months, they don't know who did it.

What broke the case ultimately was the young kid that Hansen had recruited just

couldn't live with what he'd helped do.

But he essentially informed on Hansen.

His father and mother left town because they were so embarrassed.

Burning down the bus fire was a big deal. You just didn't have that sort of

thing in Pocahontas. His dad is so ashamed of what his kid did that he sold

bakery, bought a resort up in Minnesota.

And when Bob got out of prison, he went up there.

He meets some woman named Darla Henriksen.

They fall in love and they get married.

And at one point Bob says, Why don't we go to Alaska?

Alaska was the place where a lot of people went and hid out.

It's where a lot of people go when they want to start over again and get a

second chance, where no one knows you. Many people in Alaska know somebody who

has a story that they'd rather not tell.

In 1967, they ended up in Anchorage.

I think a fresh start was what he wanted, away from the humiliations of

childhood.

Bob got a job as a cake decorator almost immediately.

Darla got a job as a teacher almost immediately. So they were already on

way to fitting into this frontier society.

I first got to know Bob because I bought the house right next door to him.

And we both had an interest in bow hunting, and so we would practice.

And we hunted together. We hunted with bows and arrows. We hunted with rifles.

He was really good at hunting.

So I think that for a guy who lacked self -esteem in a lot of areas, he found

something that he was not only good at but better than a lot of other people.

He's a world -class bow hunter.

He broke a record for getting the biggest bell sheep at that time.

I was impressed.

He was a pretty good bow and arrow guy.

He preferred to bow and arrow because, you know, you've got to get close.

You've got to get within about 25 yards of your animal.

That's the exciting part, is being able to do that. And trust me, your

adrenaline really starts to rush when you start getting close.

He was really adept at stalking, finding, getting, killing the animals

chased. And this skill really sort of transferred to the hunting and stalking

young women of Anchorage.

you going to be flying Cindy Paulson in the airplane?

Did you have a place in mind?

Probably going to go up on Connect River, yes.

What was your plan?

To spend that day there out there with her.

And what?

Come back.

I have taken other girls out there before and simply come back.

What made you decide not to bring some of them back?

What happened?

Once out there, as long as...

They were to go along with what I wanted out there, okay?

Go home, and that was it.

And that's it?

They stayed.

Cindy Paulson, 17 years old.

She dresses up, lipstick, and, you know, makes herself look older.

But she's a kid.

She starts to be able to tell the cops what happened.

You know, that she'd been kidnapped, that she'd been raped, that this guy was

going to try and fly her somewhere up to a cabin in the Knick.

So the police are doing the tour around the house, and Bob Hanson shows up.

And they say, Mr.

Hanson, we have this incident. This woman says you kidnapped her and raped

Would you mind showing us your house? Oh, no, no problem at all.

So he brings them in, and they look around.

Cindy, being a good victim, had detailed a description of Hanson's den. They saw

all those hunting trophies.

She describes his basement to a T.

Stuffed heads are everywhere.

She describes the critters on the wall.

She describes the post where he handcuffed her to that after he finished

assaulting her so he could get a few hours of sleep.

The house matches, the inside of the house matches.

She described the car, car matches.

A lot of things were falling into place, certainly verifying her story.

They see an ace bandage in Hansen's car.

They notice some gloves.

They notice a little hole in one of the posts that they thought could have been

used to put an eye bolt in. It's where she was chained.

But turns out he's got an alibi. In fact, he's got two alibis.

I was with this insurance executive almost all night.

And then this other buddy of mine, we went out and had some beers and pizza.

I don't even know who this woman was.

It couldn't have been me.

The friends went along with it.

Hansen's story to his friends to get them to support his alibi, he told them

that he was lonely, so he had propositioned this gal, and all of a

tried to change the price.

He portrayed this as, I don't want Darla to realize that I've strayed, and I

don't know what made me do this.

But this is an aberration. This is not me. I'm a family man. I'm a church man.

I'm a small business owner.

So what I'm asking you to do is cover up this little indiscretion.

The two folks gave some pretty strong alibis. And it's versus the word of a

prostitute. You're going to take my word or her word.

Robert was not emotional.

He was not overly hyper when he described what went on. Very low -key,

meek. He looked you right in the eye when he talked to you.

When the Anchorage police first try to find Hansen's criminal records, they

don't find anything.

Alaska decided they're going to convert all their records to digital format.

They're going to computerize them.

So Hansen's crimes in Alaska are not available.

because they're over at the center being converted.

Remember, this is the 80s. During that period of time, you don't have the

Internet. You don't have jurisdictions exchanging information.

Even the court system was very antiquated.

The investigator asked Cindy to take a lie detector test, and she didn't show

for it. And when he tried to find her, the motel said she and her pimp had

checked out.

Cindy Paulson and her pimp had relocated to Portland, Oregon.

He called Portland Police Department and was told by a detective there that

Cindy Paulson had other aliases and she'd been arrested several times for

soliciting for prostitution.

They started to think of Cindy as this crazy woman.

It was a woman of the streets versus a respectable guy. So ultimately, when the

investigator couldn't find her, he closed the case, labeling it exceptional

clearance, which means there was no evidence or that the complainant has

charges or, in Cindy's case, disappeared.

Our assumption was the matter was over and done with.

Do you ever have in mind trying to teach these young girls a lesson?

I would say next time be a little bit more careful who you want to have sex

for money, you know.

You're doing an act of prostitution here.

Most of them I've never seen again.

Prostitutes on the streets just left, period.

Maybe I was trying to rid the town of chasing them all the way or whatever. I

don't know, but they sure left.

Cindy Paulson told police that she narrowly survived a terrifying night

Robert Hanson. There are only a couple of people who find her story quite

convincing. One of them is Greg Baker, who was the original investigator.

Greg was believing Cindy, and for some reason the detectives didn't give it any

credibility. They didn't believe the whole story of the abduction.

And Officer Greg Baker was very frustrated.

He said, they're not doing a thing about this.

I said, I'll tell you what you do, Greg. You go to the state troopers, tell them

I sent you, take whatever you got out there, and he did.

So ultimately, he decided to put it all together, gather the files, and he

walked it over to the Alaska state troopers because he knew that they were

investigating some missing dancers.

By the time the Cindy Paulson case came to light, There was at least nine

dancers on that list.

And investigators believe that the body of a woman found in 1980 by the

occlusion of Powerline might also be connected.

She became known as Alupna Annie.

They weren't able to identify her.

She's in very close proximity to the Kinnick River.

Hers was the first body found, but really very little is known about her.

If you pick on people who come to Anchorage, say, for a few weeks under

false name, nobody knows who they are, where they're from, nobody knows where

their family is. They hang around for a while and then leave.

If you pick on that kind of a person, it's likely no one will even miss them.

Several weeks after Greg Baker gave Cindy's file to the state troopers, the

of 31 -year -old Paula Goulding was found near the Kinnick River.

Paula Goulding, she was the woman taken to the meat shack.

When hunters found her body, her pants were unzipped. Her sweater had been

ripped, as had her bra.

It's a fairly shallow grave. Vents had a decay.

In fact, the hunters who find it smell it first.

It was skeletal, but they were able to retrieve a jawbone. They were able to

find dental records. She had been reported missing.

In Paula Goulding's grave, there was a single shell casing from a .223 rifle.

So now they had two on the connect.

Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding.

Probably within a half mile of each other. Both graves with a .223 shell

that length of two cases immediately.

They're starting to think about the remoteness of the location.

That's a signature now.

And they're starting to think now that they have a serial killer on their hand.

They started to figure out somebody was killing prostitutes.

And now they have Cindy Paulson saying, this guy was going to fly me to his

cabin in a plane, and he was going to kill me. And so the stars are starting

align. Glenn Flothy took the case. He'd broken a bunch of cases. He was up in

Fairbanks, and he'd broken case after case after case.

He has to have Cindy.

When Glenn Flothy starts looking for her, he learns that she's actually back

Anchorage working in a massage parlor. They go find her, and he interviews

Paulton. He spends about 45 minutes talking to her. He told him everything

she remembered, all the details.

What was he driving? Remember how he was dressed on Sunday?

In jeans. He had a tan or an army green tank coat.

Workin' loose.

I want to show you six pictures, Cindy, and the person that we're talking about

may or may not be in here.

Be sure to look at all six pictures.

Which photograph?

Number five.

You're positive.

I'm positive.

She identified Robert Hansen.

But there's obstacles.

Hansen's got such strong alibis. Unless you can break those alibi witnesses or

find additional evidence, you're in a tough spot.

Glenn Flothy couldn't find any criminal records on Robert Hansen. But there were

investigators who could remember pieces of Hansen's past.

They come forward and say, Hansen? Let me tell you about Hansen. Glenn Flothy

pretty sure he has a potential suspect.

He has to...

problems in the investigation because he doesn't have all the records.

It wasn't all in one place.

He eventually gets those records.

When they started looking back, they realized that he had quite a track

Nobody knows he's not supposed to have a pilot license.

Nobody knows he's not supposed to have guns because he's a felon.

Suddenly you start having these.

Pieces come together.

It's kind of like a light clicked and they went, oh my gosh. And it turned out

to be the tip of the iceberg.

Kind of a shock. He basically looked like Joe Citizen.

He was really good at hiding his evil side.

He had learned that if you have witnesses, you have problems.

This wasn't our finest hour as a police department.

All we're talking about to do is kill.

It is violent.

grow more gruesome and more full with rage as he went on?

Absolutely.

You can't even fathom the terror that somebody would kidnap them and put them

out in the woods and then go hunt them down.

Did he thrive somehow on knowing how scared they were? He was going to get

prey. He wasn't coming home without a trophy.

They are horrible criminals.

He was the devil.

It's haunting to know you knew somebody that could do something like that.

Robert Hansen, the neighborhood baker, served up Danish and donuts, all while

committing monstrous crimes against the city's most vulnerable women.

But one woman's escape had investigators looking twice at the meek man behind

the counter.

Could the baker be the serial killer leaving bodies in the wilderness?

And could there be others? In part two of The Butcher Baker.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching. Good night.

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