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I showed her a firearm, told her what was going to happen.

Told her, you know, that she would not be hurt in any way, shape, or form. She

would just go along with me.

Things went exactly as I wanted them to.

By that evening, she'd be back.

Then all of a sudden, she just turned around and tried to discuss me out,

with me, and so forth. And it just went from bad to worse.

Welcome to Very Scary People.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

In the early 1980s, a steady stream of young dancers and sex workers were

vanishing off the streets of Anchorage, Alaska.

Soon, bodies started turning up in the wilderness, buried in shallow graves.

When investigators found matching bullet casings in two of the sites, they

suspected that a serial killer was at work. But who?

Investigators believe they may have a suspect.

The teenage prostitute told police a man assaulted her and tried to fly her to

his cabin in the woods.

Could it be the same man investigators were looking for?

This is part two of The Butcher Baker.

I got thrilled doing something wrong and getting away with it.

There's been rumor on the streets about something going on.

There have been reports of dancers and prostitutes suddenly turning up

missing.

Then they found a body around the Kinnick River.

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

And she has an ace bandage wrapped around her head.

There was a .223 shell casing they ended up finding there.

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

They're designed to kill.

One of the first inklings was probably someone who knows his way around

I've thought a number of times about what those women must have gone through.

The horror.

They all knew they were going to die.

No question about it.

One of these girls got out of the car on the way to the airport. She'd been able

to escape.

Cindy Paulson got away.

She was absolutely able to identify Robert Hanson.

Robert Hanson had a bakery downtown.

Just about everybody frequented that bakery.

He always usually worked graveyard shift.

Like all bakers, they bake all night so they can have fresh goods in the

morning. That's why it wasn't unusual for him to be out at all hours of night.

And the other thing with the hunting.

He's a world -class hunter.

He would be gone for days at a time.

But there was a woman of the street versus a respectable guy.

Two folks gave some pretty strong alibis. Our assumption was the matter

and done with.

And then the body of Paula Goulding was found near the Kinnick River.

Both Sherry Morrow's and Paula Goulding's graves contained one single

casing from a .223 rifle. And that length of two cases immediately.

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

Alaska State Trooper Glenn Flothy has been trying to dig up everything that

exists on Robert Hansen. Glenn Flothy is pretty sure he has a potential suspect.

When they started digging, they found out that Robert Hansen actually had

a history.

In November of 1971,

A real estate secretary named Susie Heppard exchanged glances with a man at

traffic light.

And I can remember very much thinking, I pulled up to the side of her and I

looked over and she looked at me and smiled.

And it was kind of a reflex smile because he was looking at her,

And the light changed and then they drove on.

They all started going off in my head. This was a young girl that looked kind

attractive, but maybe she likes me just for me, you know.

This young woman, this real estate secretary, was all of 18 years old.

She drove home, and I followed her home, and I seen where she lived.

Pepper got back home, and she decided to take a shower.

And he decided to come up to the house, knock on the door.

She came to the door just with a towel in her pocket.

He had an excuse that nobody would use now, but it was, hey, I need to use a

phone book. Do you have a phone book? I need to make a phone call.

And she agrees amazingly.

And he goes in and he says, can we have a date?

Susan Heppard says, no, I've got a boyfriend.

And so Anson departs.

Heppard gets up at

a very early hour, 5 o 'clock.

and dresses and goes out to her car.

He's there waiting for her with a gun.

She was petrified, started to scream.

And one of her roommates comes to the window and sees her down there with this

guy holding a gun and calls the police.

He runs, ditches his gun, ditches his hat.

The police show up relatively quickly.

They had a K -9 unit, a K -9 unit tracking on some clothing, I believe,

.357 Revolver.

They see this guy walking, and he doesn't have a coat, and he looks kind

of place, and they stop him, and he's five hands.

His excuse of why he was on foot was that he had been driving and started to

feel woozy.

and had stopped his car and got out. And when he was told about what he was

considered a suspect for, his response was, well, if I did that, I don't

remember it because I blacked out.

There's really something insidious about this guy.

That he looks so harmless, his answers don't make any sense.

I thought at least we had the beginnings of a kidnap because he'd moved her with

a gun. And any time you do that, that's kidnapping.

I couldn't convince the DA of that, and what they finally wound up doing is

charging what he saw with a dangerous weapon, which is a following.

We knew we were not going to see the last of him, so I took my own camera

and started what we called a sex offender book, and he's the first

it.

We all knew that we were going to see him again, and it was going to get worse

the next time.

Prostitutes and dancers were being murdered.

They were finding bodies. They knew there was something happening.

Cindy Paulson was a 17 -year -old sex worker who had ID'd Robert Hanson as the

man who had kidnapped, tortured, and raped her. When they started looking

they realized that Robert Hanson had quite a track record.

Bobby is out on his own recording, so there's no bail required. It's just you

promise to come back for your court date.

It's very late at night, 3 o 'clock in the morning.

A young woman, Patty Roberts, had done some dancing at some nightclub in

Anchorage. She stopped at a cafe to get a cup of hot tea.

Her stopping at that cafe was just a random thing.

She ordered her tea, and then she recalled that she'd left her car

she went back out to shut off the engine.

Here comes this man with a gun, forces her into his car,

and he's kidnapping her.

They drive down the road, and then he stops and binds her with shoelaces.

He said,

I'm taking you down to the Kenai. We're going to be together for a few days.

If you try to do anything, I'll kill you and anybody who sees you. Kenai is

about three hours south of Anchorage.

You are in the bush.

There are only pockets of people living that far south.

He undresses her at various points because he doesn't want her to get away.

Hansen drove them down and stopped at the Sunrise Motel and, of course, told

she better not do anything stupid or he'd kill her.

He did rape her.

He's really kind of looking for rough sex.

Patty is trying her best to do whatever he wants because she feels it's her life

if she doesn't.

While he was in there, you know, never giving me any trouble whatsoever.

Quite the contrary.

It seemed like she would work her butt off to make sure that I stayed happy,

I liked that.

I liked it very much.

He told her that she was good, that he liked her, and so he was going to then

take her to some cabin.

Now she's really scared.

But she just keeps talking.

I'm not going to tell on you.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

Pat told him that she was a single mother, that she had a baby.

And he learns that her child is staying with her parents.

It was a double -edged sword for her because he's going to use this as power

over her.

Because when he goes through her purse, he finds a slip of paper that

has her son's name and her father's name and address.

He told her, I know where your parents are, so if you ever mention this or I

called up on this, I'll harm your parents and your child.

That sort of gave him enough confidence. Okay, I can let her go because he has

the address and their names.

For him, it's the threat. I'll come after you.

Hanson took her back to the cafe where her car was parked and let her go.

She never told him that her dad was a state trooper. No doubt.

Did she ever tell him that?

Patty was reluctant.

She didn't come forward immediately, but she eventually came forward and filed a

complaint. I got a call from a state trooper investigator who said he had a

victim with him and that they wanted to look at the book. They know we started

this book, what we called a sex offender book.

Hanson was number one in our sex offender book for assault with a deadly

The case with Susan Happard.

She immediately identified Robert Hanson as the person who did it.

So we got her an arrest warrant, went to his residence, arrested him.

His wife was there.

She didn't say much. The wife didn't. It had to be terribly difficult for her.

And, of course, Hanson, when he was confronted by police with the story

Patty Roberts, mentions she's a prostitute, and we had a fight over the

That's all that happened.

What I would have hoped that the DA's officer would have done is taken those

two, combined those two together, and then let him plead to 20 years.

And he probably would have done it.

But unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

They have a strong case against Robert Hanson in both cases. But the problem is

that one of the victims was a dancer.

For some reason or other, DA's are scared to death to take a case like that

before a jury, thinking the jury will prejudge her.

So they essentially said, we're going to drop the case against Patty Roberts.

go hard on the case with Susan Heppard. They made a deal.

Hansen didn't have to go to trial.

He learned a lesson there, albeit indirectly.

Oh. So I'm not getting in trouble for the dancer, but I'm getting in trouble

the real estate secretary.

Okay, I got it.

But Hansen told officers he couldn't remember attacking Susie Heppard.

So a psych eval is ordered.

They say he's schizophrenic.

He has a disassociative personality with schizophrenia.

And they're like, he needs counseling more than he needs prison.

I still can't believe it. I mean, with his history, why he did three months, I

don't have a clue.

He's reformable.

You know, he's got skills. He's got a family. He's got kids.

Even while I was in the halfway house.

or I was supposed to drive just to and from work. But I had to drive uptown in

hurry and sit there and just look at the prostitutes walking up and down the

street. He was right there, and of course, he could help it.

He was just in the shadows.

The things that we'd done there, or we'd looked at the street robbers in the

motel room there, excited me like I'd never been excited before in my life.

I got to thinking, boy, I couldn't wait to do it again.

In 1983, Glenn Flothy, who's been investigating this case of the missing

dancers, approached the FBI and asked the Behavioral Science Unit to develop a

profile of the subject responsible for these crimes.

Profiles were one of the most important tools in the toolbox for solving murder

cases.

What do you look for when you're investigating a serial killer?

The FBI would help work up a profile.

They pointed to so many things that fit Robert Hansen, who he was.

He's an avid hunter.

He had a speech impediment.

A man who had a wife would be extremely religious, and he would probably be a

very successful businessman.

Someone living a double life, departmentalized to the max.

In 1976...

Robert Hansen attempts to steal a chainsaw from a Fred Meyer department

His explanation of that was so circuitous, I never quite followed that.

He wanted to steal a chainsaw to give to his dad for his birthday.

I mean, here's a guy that's got plenty of money.

There was a thing about taking things.

I'd love to see if I can get by with it. So if I could walk into a store and

take something and get out the damn door with it and not pay for it.

Then when he stole the chainsaw, they looked at that, and that was his third

felony.

And there was a lot of, should we throw the book at him? His wife, Darla, had

this whole coterie of people to come for it. He's a good guy, deserves a break.

I think that she thought that she could help him, and each time that he would

get arrested, he would go back to church for a while and try to, you know, walk

that kind of path with her.

He was sentenced to five years, and then his lawyer appealed to the Alaska

Supreme Court.

They argue that as long as Robert Hansen can get treatment for his mental

illness, he can be a productive member of society.

Things have fallen through the cracks.

Hansen's release.

in 1978, ended up being totally unsupervised.

Still had the obsessions. When he was out on parole, he'd still glide down to

4th Avenue, just like he always did, to see the girls.

What was Stark?

Stark was the one body that you found on the Plutonium. I

can't remember if I picked her up as a dancer or if she was a prostitute of

town.

The fantasy that he built up about this, being out in the wilderness and having

that opportunity to do with these women what he wanted to do, had something to

do with his wilderness experience.

It's a harrowing drive. It's rutted roads.

He ended up getting stuck out there.

I'll try and back it up so we can get the hell out of here.

She started running down the road.

What kicks in there is this sort of fight or fight reaction.

She's fought.

I stood up and yelled out to her, hey, stay there.

And I ran after her.

I grabbed her in the hair and...

She had a big knife in her purse. I mean, I tripped her down. She started

screaming at me. Don't kill me. Don't kill me.

She was laying face down, and

I just stuck her.

You can't believe he did that.

I was literally sick to my stomach.

I can remember I cried.

I knew what I did was totally, totally...

It had come so close to happening before with Patricia Roberts.

The daughter of the trooper?

Right. At this time, it went too far.

Her body is not discovered until the following year.

They found her body in 1980, and they have not identified her son.

Welcome back to Very Scary People.

Investigators, looking into the disappearance and murder of several

prostitutes, suddenly discovered Robert Hansen had a disturbing criminal history

dating back to the 1970s. Could the Quiet Baker be the man terrorizing the

streets of Anchorage?

Probably the most important case that existed in Alaska at the time was the

missing dancers case.

The state troopers had a group that was just looking at what's happening to

these girls.

The bodies of Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding had both been found in the same

general area along the Kinnick River.

And in both their graves were matching shell casings.

So they're sending off the shells to the FBI lab in Quantico, and they come back

and they say, same gun.

Not just that they're the same kind of shell, but they have the same kind of

markings. So they're definitely tied to one particular weapon.

Specifically the Mini -14.

They really want that Mini -14.

What really started the focus on Hansen was the escape of Cindy Paulson.

I think that's when the realization that there was a connection with the bodies

that we were recovering from the Kinnick area may have been related to Bob

Hansen. The police have circumstantial evidence connecting Bob Hansen to these

crimes, but they don't have proof.

And remember, DNA was in its infancy.

They had no DNA connection.

They had some bullet casings, but they didn't have the gun that they came from.

It was going to take something very specific, a hair, a fiber, or a piece of

jewelry, a memento, something that could link these women directly to Robert

Hansen.

from their kills and hide them and bring them out select periods of time and

relive the kill.

One of the things they're looking for is something that Sherry Morrow's

boyfriend talked about, which is the arrowhead necklace.

It's like a mini invasion.

They have to hit the plane. They have to hit his house.

They have to hit the bakery.

So it's a very coordinated operation.

Really, it felt like it was a race against time.

They brought Hansen in. This was an emerging FBI technique where you

witness with some of the evidence you have that may scare them into a

confession. So they had case files all over the desk. They had photos of the

victims. And they had a big map of the connect with a circle drawn saying Bob

Hanson was spotted here.

And so was it subtle?

Something's going terribly wrong for some lady.

She was shot and killed.

What does that mean?

We have a team of investigators at your residence right now. We just determined.

He asked why.

Something was terrible.

You guys are telling me that I shot this person?

That's correct.

You're wrong.

They asked Hanson, we found some of your brass out there on the connect.

What was he doing there?

Oh, I just go up there and practice shooting wolves. Oh, you do? Yeah, in my

plane. They just fly over and shoot at wolves in my plane.

He's got an excuse for it

all. He's not biting.

And all they're really looking for is something to hold him, keep him in jail,

continue to develop.

There are evidence.

While they're doing that, they're in touch with the people in the house. Are

finding anything?

And they keep saying, no, we haven't found the .223.

No, we haven't found any mementos. And Flothy's freaking because he's not

breaking either.

I have never shot anyone, okay?

It's possible I've seen them in the bar, but as far as being with these girls,

no way.

And they have a long interrogation. It takes several hours.

And then at some point, you know, he asks for a lawyer.

And so that's over.

The search took hours. I mean, they are going through boxes in storage rooms,

out in the garage.

They're at the house so long that Glenn Flothy finishes with Hanson and comes to

the house to help look.

So they're going through the basement. That's where all the trophies are. They

find guns.

They don't find the one they're looking for.

They were not finding what they had hoped to find. The strongest case they

was kidnapping, rape, assault with a dangerous weapon, Cindy Paulson.

And then when they're doing the investigation, the wife of one of the

witnesses showed up at the Hanson house, and she sees everything that's going

on, and she gets a hold of her husband and say, that story that you told the

cops about your good buddy Hanson, you better tell them the truth.

And he rolls over. And once he rolls over, they both roll over. The whole

kind of falls apart.

But they still need to make the murder case.

They need something that that's going to tie him.

Behind Robert Hansen's headboard, the police discovered an incredible piece of

evidence. It's kind of like a light clicked and they went, oh my gosh.

There was only one other time it went bad.

Down by Seward.

This was a girl that was, maybe she was desperate.

That one I've had enough of back and talked about.

They met in the harbor area where he had his boat.

Things kind of started

off being a little flirtatious. He always kind of craved having a normal

relationship.

She was originally from New York State.

She trained as a nurse.

And he thinks maybe he'll have a real kind of date with her.

She asked him for money, and in his brain, she's now a prostitute.

I guess it was just a final hope that she would want me, just for me, not for

money. We drove north of Seward there.

And we went back there and grabbed the pistol I had jumped on that door.

And she, come on again, you know. Well, when are we going to do our business

deal? And she's going to give me some money.

And now we're backing out.

He started screaming at me, and I just told her, hey, now, you, that's it here.

This is all of your work.

And I think it was something like $5 or something like that. I threw him in the

face.

And they ended up, he says, struggling and fighting.

And took the pistol and went, oh, look at your head with it. He was up in my

face again.

And he pulled and took the pistol.

He stopped her.

in a sleeping bag and just left her. She had a dog. He shot the dog.

The house had been being searched by several investigators throughout the

of the entire day.

There's only one place left to look.

That's in the attic.

And they send a guy named Kasnick up there.

The search actually required you to be down on all fours.

He's going bat by bat, pulling it up, gets to the very rear of the house.

And it was about a third of the way up from the end of the structure under the

insulation. I found the stash of guns and the Mini -14.

And then as the one officer is getting ready to come down out of the attic, he

pulls up a couple of bats, and that's where they find the bags.

I found the plastic bag with the jewelry in it, and that was pretty chilling.

I was absolutely convinced that it was, in fact, a collection of jewelry and

items from the women that he had murdered.

There were rings, there were watches, there was driver's licenses.

They find the arrowhead necklace that belongs to Sherry Morrow.

So they're searching the house. They find a map. It's an aviation map. It's

some marks on it. It's behind the headboard of his bed.

And they don't initially think much of it. They think it's maybe hunting spots.

But they show it to the guy who investigated the murder of Joanna

And they say, hey, where did you find her body?

And he said, right here, but you've already marked it. You've already got it

marked.

And Flothy says, we didn't mark it.

Bob Hanson marked it. And then they knew.

That was really the, oh, my.

So immediately they assumed all those other exes.

represent relatively the same thing.

There's 24 X's.

These are where bodies are buried.

It was very difficult to have an airtight case against Hansen. And at the

the day, Hansen had not.

confessed any of the homicides.

And so it was still a circumstantial case and very complicated, a lot of

legalities.

They put Hansen in jail and he stews and they keep dropping hints that they're

finding more information. In February, they get a call from his attorneys and

the exact quote is he wants to clear the decks.

It was clear to us that what he wanted to do was confess.

We weren't quite sure the extent of the confession, but it was clear that what

he wanted to do was go over and confess his sins.

Are we on

record? Yes, we are.

This is Frank Rothschild. Sergeant, what time is it now?

8 .50 a .m.

I think the driver in all of this was the publicity, that he was very, very

concerned about the long -term effects that would have on Darla and the

children.

Mr. Hanson, I just assume that you have been giving this a lot of thought, and

rather than our asking you a lot of questions, perhaps you just would like

start wherever is most comfortable.

They start the interview off very low -key, very slow.

He knows they've got four, and the four are the ones they've already found. So

Sherry Amaro, Paula Golding, including Annie, and Joanna Messina. That's it.

That's all.

There's no more.

When they got down to specific details about murders, He would try and shift

responsibility, the blame to the women.

She attacked me. She tried to run.

She tried to escape.

She started screaming.

If they'd only done what I asked them, I would have brought them back.

The minute that a girl stood up for herself, that hit a very vulnerable

heel that Bob Hanson had never gotten over from his teen years.

He just wanted an excuse.

to kill these women almost as a symbolic revenge on every woman that had ever

rejected him.

So he does confess to some of the killings, but he makes a mistake, and he

reveals one that's not one of those four.

What did you do with her?

Did you bury her out there?

No. I carried her down the railroad tracks, and she went in the river.

He doesn't know their names.

And he doesn't really know their pictures. He just knows locations.

And so now he's up to five. But by this point, the troopers have a map, an

aviation map that they found.

There's at least 24 marks on this map.

They do believe there's more people who he killed because of how many exits

there were.

Presumably we can have a meeting of the mind right now.

How many women, sir, have killed in Alaska?

It was certainly clear to me that it was not five.

It was an eye -opener, to say the least. From the beginning, he had not been

open with us.

If you tell us today that a certain asterisk does not have a body assigned,

we're still going to look for that body.

And every body we find, we're going to charge you with murder.

There's a lot of marks here.

I'm going to be very honest about this.

These marks represent something.

They do.

It was like a scorecard for him.

I think he insisted.

that only 17 of them had the body there. For some of those, he specifically

said, there's nothing there.

So they fly up to the Kinnick River.

Bob Hanson's wearing nothing but a sweatshirt and some snowshoes, and he

leaps out like a rabbit.

They said, there's one there, and then there's one there.

He went with investigators around the area and pointed out various grave

In a very real way, he's reliving his crimes. This is better than mementos.

out seeing.

That he went down on his knees and started frantically digging through the

with his hands.

And the recovery of the body is really irrelevant to him. It's the idea.

that he can taste it, feel it, smell it. The fantasy is going to flood over him

all over again.

He was able to recall within a few feet where he had left bodies.

That in itself is pretty remarkable, pretty chilling.

I was up on the banks of the Kinnick River with a number of other people and

been to a number of the grave sites and recovered remains.

That's one of those things that will stay with me forever.

It's hard to think about what those women went through, it really is.

The final autopsy report on the victims of Robert Hansen indicated that towards

the end, he was literally spraying them with bullets in the back.

He wasn't content to shoot them, but he had to stab them as well.

He's destroying.

He's trying to utterly destroy them.

So he did become the big game hunter, and the women became his prey.

The judge hands down the longest sentence he can under the sentencing

guidelines, which is 461 years.

The judge is unsparing.

courts, police, everybody along the line failed.

He called this case an indictment of society.

If they'd have stopped him in 1971, there would have been a lot of women

right now.

We let those gals down. I mean, we did.

Law enforcement chose to follow their biases that just because a

woman is living as a prostitute or a topless dancer, she's not to be trusted.

I think Robert Hansen was very adept at fooling everybody.

He was really good at hiding his evil side.

I always think of Darla. Darla, did you know he was doing these things? And, you

know, her response was, who could imagine anybody was doing these things,

less your husband.

And he basically looked like Joe Citizen. He gave off an impression of

mild -mannered, but he was able to take that and flick of a switch.

and turn into the monster.

Investigators are still trying to identify a Plutna Annie using modern

and genetic genealogy. They're hopeful that one day they will be able to give

Annie a proper name.

In 2014, Robert Hansen died in prison of natural causes.

He was 75 years old.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg. Thanks for watching. Good night.

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