HE CAUGHT THE MONSTER WHO HUNTED HUMANS
HUMANS hunting humans to death has captivated people for decades. The disturbing idea has appeared in the plots of novels, movies and TV shows – Netflix’s current hit show Squid Game a prime example – but
ROBERT Hansen was born on February 15, 1939, to a strict disciplinarian Danish immigrant father who owned a bakery.
Young Robert would work long hours in the family business.
Naturally left-handed, he was forced to use his right hand instead, a switch that resulted in a lifelong stutter.
As a teenager he was painfully shy, had bad acne and was mocked for his stutter.
The boys at his school in Estherville, Iowa, made fun of him. Girls he liked rejected him.
A social outcast, he took refuge in time spent alone.
He became an avid game hunter, channelling his rage and fantasies of vengeance into the sport of stalking animals. In 1967, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, about as far from Iowa as he could get.
He had two children with his new wife and settled into a quiet life, where he was well-liked, and opened up a small bakery. But the cracks began to show. In 1972, he was arrested once for the abduction and attempted rape of a housewife and again for raping a prostitute. He was cleared on both accounts.
In 1983, 17-year-old Cindy Paulson was found running frantically down a main road, barefoot and in handcuffs.
Paulson, a prostitute, told police she had been held hostage by a man who’d cuffed her to his car, held her at gunpoint, and took her to his house where he chained her by the neck.
Escape
The man raped and tortured her repeatedly, before attempting to load her onto a plane and take her to his cabin in the MatanuskaSusitna Valley, 35 miles north of Anchorage.
As the man prepared the plane for take-off, Paulson managed to escape, leaving her shoes as evidence.
Hansen fitted the description of the kidnapper perfectly.
She even described his stutter and clearly identified his plane.
He admitted that he had met the girl but claimed she was setting him up because he had refused to pay her he targeted sex workers and exotic dancers, abducting women to turn them loose in the remote woods of Alaska to hunt them like animals. This is the terrifying true story of the Butcher Baker serial killer.
mainly it has been strictly the stuff of fiction. But in the 1970s, Robert Hansen turned the idea into a horrifying, decade-long reality. Throughout the 70s and early 80s,
extortionate demands. And when he told police about his strong alibi, he was released.
But Alaska State Troopers were totally convinced a serial killer was on the loose.
Several sex workers and dancers had gone missing and corpses were turning up.
When two bodies were discovered in the Matanuska- Susitna Valley, along with .223 shell casings nearby, Hansen was a prime suspect.
That brought in the FBI, including nowretired agent John Douglas, who helped pioneer the field of criminal profiling and whose story is depicted in the Netflix series Mindhunter.
Douglas reckoned that the perpetrator was an experienced hunter with low selfesteem and a history of being rejected by women – and that he likely had a stutter.
Hansen fitted the profile almost exactly.
And he owned a plane and a cabin in the Matanuska- Susitna Valley.
His home was full of hunting trophies and animals mounted on the walls, and he even set a few bowhunting records.
But the hunter had also been collecting trophies from another kind of kill.
Hansen targeted sex workers and exotic dancers in Anchorage.
He would kidnap the women and either drive or fly them in his plane out to his cabin in the remote Alaskan bush.
If the women didn’t put up a fight, he would rape them and bring them to town, threatening them into secrecy.
Raping
Those who did not co-operate suffered a truly nightmarish fate.
Hansen eventually confessed to killing 17 women and raping 30 others.
Out in the wilderness – his favourite location was along Knik River – Hansen would set the women free. For a moment or two they’d have hope that there was a chance to escape.
Then, as they ran for their lives, he would track them down, taking his time, hunting them like wild animals.
Armed with a hunting knife and a .223-calibre Ruger Mini-14 rifle, he’d torture the women with the chase for hours or sometimes days, until he located his prey and shot them like game.
The story of Hansen’s horrific 12-year killing spree later became the subject of the 2013 movie Frozen Ground, starring John Cusack as Robert Hansen and Nicolas Cage as the State Trooper probing the murders.
Cage’s character was
fictional but based on a local sergeant named Glenn Flothe of the Alaska State Troopers who was instrumental in Hansen’s capture.
Flothe had pursued potential suspects but noticed that Hansen fitted the bill.
It was a combination of the testimony of Cindy Paulson, the woman who escaped death, and Douglas’s profiling which were key to a search warrant being obtained for the baker’s house.
Burial
While searching Hansen’s home, police found an aviation map of the area hidden in the headboard of his bed.
It was covered with tiny “X” marks denoting the kill and burial sites of his victims.
Some of the “X” tags matched up with where police had found bodies. There were 24 in all. In his psychological profile of the killer, Douglas had predicted that the murderer would keep souvenirs from his prey. In the basement of Hansen’s home, police found a large stash of jewellery.
And in the haul was a necklace that belonged to one of the victims.
Faced with telling evidence in 1984, Hansen – the Butcher Baker – confessed to murdering 17 women and raping another 30 over a 12-year period.
He was sentenced to 461 years plus life in prison without any chance of parole.
He was imprisoned at Spring Creek jail in Seward, Alaska, where he died in 2014 aged 75.
As part of a plea bargain, the Butcher Baker was only ever charged with four of the 17 murders he confessed to.
In exchange for the reduced conviction, Hansen agreed to assist in locating the other bodies plotted on his kill map.
Some have still not been found to this day.
But just last month, a woman known for decades as “Horseshoe
Harriet” was finally identified through new genetic genealogy and DNA technology.
“Horseshoe Harriet” was actually homeless teenager Robin Pelkey, who was living in Anchorage when she was killed by Hansen in the early 1980s.
Pelkey was just 19 years old when she disappeared.
Hero
Flothe did not want his name to be used in the film Frozen Ground because he felt that he was just doing his job.
“The reality is from my perspective is that I’m not the hero,” he said.
“Cindy Paulson is the hero.”
On hearing the news of Hansen’s death, Flothe said: “On this day we should only remember his many victims and all of their families, and my heart goes out to all of them.
“As far as Hansen is concerned, this world is better without him.”