Original subtitles

♪♪

Hansen: I scared the [bleep] out of them.

That's what I was trying to do.

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

I just pointed the gun at her and said,

"Look, you're a professional.

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

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

You're just going to count this off as a bad experience

and be a little bit more careful next time

who you're gonna proposition or, uh, go out with."

[ Gunshot ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

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 Knik 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 Audi Hallaway

and find some moose.

Hale: The Knik River is actually a very short river.

It's a glacial river that is just far enough away

from Anchorage to be in the wilderness,

but still close enough to get back and forth fairly quickly.

Daily: As we're coming down the river, wind was blowing,

we were getting blown around on the river pretty bad,

and a group of trees that were down by the river

seemed like a good place to get out of the wind,

put a tent up, and camp for the night.

I think probably the first thing that drew our attention

was the moon boot that we saw.

It just didn't fit in with the area.

And then as we were looking at it a little bit closer,

I saw a patch of denim.

It had been torn some, so I could tell underneath

that there was a kneecap under there,

and that pretty much told us what we had there.

It was a body.

It was too far out for most people,

like a hiker, to just have fallen 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.

Hale: She has an Ace bandage wrapped around her head.

Daily: 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 going."

She was shot in the chest.

Daily: When they sifted through the dirt there was a .223 shell

that they end up finding there.

A .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 a high-power hunting rifle

used to kill large game.

The first inklings was,

this is probably someone who knows his way around hunting.

♪♪

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

Hale: She'd been missing about 10 months.

She was working as a dancer in Anchorage.

Hale: 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 do it 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 that 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.

Jordan: 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 in contact with

has not heard from her, and she's gone.

♪♪

Evans: Alaska in the 1970s is a boom town.

If there's anything like the wild, wild West,

it was Anchorage, Alaska, in the 1970s.

Hale: They discovered oil on the North Slope,

and then they have to build a pipeline.

Evans: 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.

Hale: There's a lot of people from the outside coming up to Alaska,

and they land on 4th Avenue,

which Bob Hope once described as the longest bar in the world.

There's girls. There's booze.

Duclos: 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 street.

Daily: Some of the ladies, especially during the pipeline days,

were here today, gone tomorrow.

There had been several women reported missing from that area.

So a stripper is missing. So what?

She just went somewhere else.

Daily: Nobody's known for years where a lot of these people are at,

and they disappear.

Unless something happens and somebody gets caught,

they're never gonna know.

♪♪

Hale: 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.

Evans: And so this monster that he turned out to be,

for many people, I think it was truly an aberration.

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

[ Gunshot ]

♪♪

Hale: 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.

The people who are close to them say, "You know, she went.

The guy offered her $200 for a photography shot.

She never came back."

Daily: There was a big rumor on the streets

about something going on.

I was working foot patrol

down on the avenue for a number of years.

The prostitutes were nervous. The dancers were nervous.

Of course, most of us were

way behind the power curve on that one.

♪♪

Hale: And then, in the spring,

another woman disappears off the face of the Earth.

Her name was Paula Goulding.

Paula Goulding had got into dancing kind of sideways.

She'd worked as a secretary, she didn't much like it,

thought she would 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.

Jordan: Paula shows up at the pre-arranged meeting place

and gets into his car.

Then, he threatens her with a gun and handcuffs her.

Hale: From there, he would go to Merrill Field.

He had an airplane, a Piper Super Cub.

♪♪

Hale: He's flown them to this remote place,

so just being there is scary.

Daily: A 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 using it to preserve the game that you got.

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 in airplane speak, "How you doing, okay?"

By then, she's totally freaked.

[ Gunshot ]

♪♪

He knew what he was doing was evil,

but he got, apparently, pleasure from it.

♪♪

♪♪

At this time, what we're trying to do

is make some determination

as to whether or not we have one suspect

involved in a number of these missing person cases

or whether or not we have a series of multiple suspects.

♪♪

Jordan: 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 at her head.

So he takes her to his house.

He took her down to the basement,

where he had a trophy room.

Hale: There are at least three Dall sheep heads on the wall.

There's goat heads on the wall.

There's rabbits, there's birds.

And he immediately says,

"I want to make love to you, but I want you to be chained."

He raped her, assaulted her several times,

and then he chained her up

and went to sleep on a couch and left her there.

Hale: So when she's down there in this basement,

all she sees are animals and the clock ticking, ticking,

and she thinks, "I'm not gonna live."

Beeman: I can't imagine the horror of that.

He goes to sleep and she's sitting there

thinking she's gonna die,

taking note of all the things she sees,

while she's also figuring out how to get out of it.

Duclos: 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.

Duclos: Cindy was smart enough to know that she better make her move

and escape now, that it would be her last chance.

Hale: 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.

Duclos: He was a good Samaritan and he dropped her off.

Hale: And then he contacts the police.

The APD officer, Gregg 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

[ Handcuffs clicking ] and then she calms down

and she starts to be able to tell them 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 he would be able to kill her.

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

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

[ Siren wails ] seems against your own best interest in a way,

especially when you don't think they'll even believe you.

But Baker's instincts lead him to believe her right away.

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

Jordan: On the way to the hospital,

Officer Baker takes Cindy to Merrill Airfield

to see if she can identify her attacker's plane.

Duclos: Cindy was able to point to the Super Cub.

She said, "Oh, there's the plane. There's the plane."

Hale: And so, of course, they can read the tail numbers

and they can check who owns the plane.

And while they're standing there,

a security guard comes by and said,

"I've got his 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.

Beeman: Bob Hansen, 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.

Hale: She was a very hard worker, very dutiful,

very intelligent, very sensitive.

Darla was somewhat of a loner herself.

Hale: 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 clubs.

Hale: He was not the guy who looked dangerous,

really presented himself as kind of shy.

He would always sit toward the back of the club

so that the women had to come to him while he's in the corner.

He doesn't ever want to be seen with these women,

so the deal was he would meet 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.

Hale: He's gone.

♪♪

Beeman: Around town, Bob Hansen has a reputation

of an upstanding, successful business owner

who is in a successful marriage with two kids.

Evans: People talk about how you'd go into the bakery,

and if Robert Hansen 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.

Daily: He was a good baker.

I went there many times and got coffee and doughnuts.

Hale: He had 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 Hansen grew up

in a very small town in Iowa called Pocahontas.

Shaw: Pocahontas, Iowa. Wonderful town.

Great people. It was a farming community.

It was just a great place to grow up.

Hale: His dad was a baker,

and Robert had learned the bakery business by apprenticing.

His father expected a lot of him.

Duclos: Mr. Hansen 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.

Hale: Bob was never good enough.

He's not very good in school and he was born left-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.

Duclos: He ended up with a pockmarked face.

Generally, he was made fun of by girls.

He was a bit of a loner.

His demeanor was non-threatening.

I'd never thought he'd step on an ant.

I'd say he was sort of boring, actually.

He didn't have very much to say.

He's quiet-ish,

'cause to talk is to expose himself to ridicule.

Bob held this grudge against his high school

because he had endured a lot of abuse.

He had this resentment toward women,

toward figures of authority, people 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 gonna burn down the bus barn,

and it's really an act of revenge against the school.

Duclos: 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.

[ Sirens wail ] 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.

Hale: 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,

and he essentially informed on Hansen.

♪♪

Shaw: His father and mother left town 'cause they were so embarrassed.

Burning down the bus barn 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 his bakery, bought a resort up in Minnesota.

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

Hale: He meets a woman named Darla Henrichsen.

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.

Hale: 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.

Beeman: In 1967, they ended up in Anchorage.

I think a fresh start was what he wanted,

away from the humiliations of his childhood.

Hale: Bob got a job as a cake decorator almost immediately.

Darla got a job as a teacher almost immediately,

so they were already on their way to fitting in

to 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.

Beeman: He was really good at hunting.

So I think that, for a guy who lacks 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.

Hale: He's a world-class bow hunter.

Beeman: He broke a record for getting

the biggest Dall sheep at that time.

Bivins: I was impressed.

He was a pretty good bow-and-arrow guy.

He preferred the bow and arrow because you got to get close.

You 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.

Hale: He was really adept at stalking, finding, getting,

killing the animals that he chased.

And this skill really sort of transferred

to the hunting and stalking of the young women of Anchorage.

♪♪

Hale: 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 gonna try

and fly her somewhere up to a cabin in the Knik.

So the police are doing the tour around the house,

and Bob Hansen shows up, and they say,

"Mr. Hansen, we have this incident,

this woman who says you kidnapped her and raped her.

And would you mind showing us your house?"

"Oh, no, no problem at all."

So he brings them in and they look around.

Duclos: Cindy, being a good victim,

had detailed a description of Hansen's den.

They saw all those hunting trophies.

She describes his basement to a tee.

Stuffed heads are everywhere.

Evans: 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.

Hale: 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've been used to put an eye bolt in,

that'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.

So I don't even know who this woman was.

It couldn't have been me."

Duclos: The friends went along 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 sudden, she tried to change the price.

He portrayed this as,

"I don't want Darla to realize that I 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."

And the two folks gave some pretty strong alibis.

Hale: And it's versus the word of a prostitute.

"You're gonna take my word or her word?"

Robert was not emotional, he was not overly hyper

when he described what went on --

very low-key, very meek.

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

Jordan: When the Anchorage police first try to find

Hansen's criminal records, they don't find anything.

Hale: Alaska decided they're gonna convert

all their records to digital format.

They're gonna computerize them,

so Hansen's crimes in Alaska are not available,

because they're over at the center being converted.

Evans: 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.

Duclos: The investigator asked Cindy to take a lie-detector test,

and she didn't show up 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.

Duclos: He called Portland Police Department

and was told by a detective there

that Cindy Paulson had other aliases

and she had been arrested several times

for soliciting, for prostitution.

They started to think of Cindy as this crazy woman.

Duclos: 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 dropped charges

or in Cindy's case, disappeared.

Our assumption was, the matter was over and done with.

♪♪

Jordan: Cindy Paulson told police that she narrowly survived

a terrifying night with Robert Hansen.

Hale: There are only a couple of people

who find her story quite convincing.

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

Gregg 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.

Rice: And Officer Gregg Baker was very frustrated.

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

I said, "I'll tell you what you do, Gregg.

You go to the state troopers, tell them I sent you.

Take whatever you go out there to them."

And he did.

Duclos: So, ultimately, he decided to put it all together

and 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 Eklutna power line might also be connected.

She became known as Eklutna Annie.

They weren't able to identify her.

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

Jordan: Hers was the first body found,

but, really, very little is known about her.

Rothschild: If you pick on people who come to Anchorage,

stay for a few weeks under some false name,

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

nobody knows who 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 Gregg Baker

gave Cindy's file to the state troopers,

the body of 31-year-old Paula Goulding

was found near the Knik River.

Hale: Paula Goulding -- she was the woman taken to the meat shack.

[ Gunshot ]

When hunters found her body, her pants were unzipped.

Her sweater had been ripped, as had her bra.

It's a fairly shallow grave, advanced state of decay.

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

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

and they were able to find dental records.

She had been reported missing.

Duclos: In Paula Goulding's grave,

there was a single shell casing from a .223 rifle.

So now they had two on the Knik.

Duclos: Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding.

Probably within a half mile of each other.

Duclos: Both graves with a .223 shell casing.

That linked the two cases immediately.

Hale: 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.

Hale: And now they have Cindy Paulson saying,

"This guy was gonna fly me to his cabin in a plane

and he was gonna kill me."

And so the stars are starting to align.

Glenn Flothe 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 Flothe starts looking for her,

he learns that she's actually back in Anchorage,

working in a massage parlor.

And they go find her, and he interviews Cindy Paulson.

He spends about 45 minutes talking to her.

Beeman: She told him everything that she remembered, all the details.

Hale: She identified Robert Hansen, but there's obstacles.

Hansen's got such strong alibis,

and unless you can break those alibi witnesses

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

Beeman: Glenn Flothe couldn't find any criminal records

on Robert Hansen, but there were investigators

who could remember pieces of Hansen's past.

Hale: They come forward and say,

"Hansen? Let me tell you about Hansen."

Glenn Flothe is pretty sure he has a potential suspect.

He has some problems in the investigation,

because he doesn't have all the records.

Evans: 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 record.

Hale: 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.

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

"All we've taught this guy how to do is kill."

Hale: Did his violence grow more gruesome

and more full with rage as he went on?

Absolutely.

Can't even fathom the terror to take somebody, 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 his prey.

He wasn't coming home without a trophy.

They are horrible crimes. He was a devil.

It's haunting to know you knew

somebody that could do something like that.

♪♪

Robert Hansen, the neighborhood baker,

served up Danish and doughnuts

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 2 of "The Butcher Baker."

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.