Robert Hansen

• 1. Introduction

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  Behind the headboard of a bed in an Anchorage home, investigators found an aeronautical chart marked with thirty-seven handwritten x symbols. The home belonged to Robert Hansen, a baker nicknamed the Butcher Baker. Between 1971 and 1983 he abducted, raped and murdered at least seventeen women in and around Anchorage, Alaska. Many were taken into the wilderness, released, and hunted with a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and hunting knives. A court sentenced him to 461 years in prison without the possibility of parole.

  This documentary asks how a well-liked neighbor with a bakery avoided suspicion for so long. It asks why one teenager's escape mattered so much, and what the marks on that chart led police to find. It also asks what became of the women the chart recorded.

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• 2. Making of a Baker

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  Estherville, Iowa, is where Robert Christian Boes Hansen was born on the 15th of February 1939. He was the elder of two children. His mother, Edna, was American, and his father, Christian, was Danish. The family moved to Richmond, California, in 1942, then returned to Iowa in 1949 and settled in Pocahontas. There Hansen worked in a bakery owned by his father.

  As a boy, Hansen was painfully shy and had a stutter. Severe acne left his face permanently scarred. He was described as a quiet loner whose relationship with his domineering father was difficult. He found refuge in hunting and archery.

  In 1957 Hansen enlisted in the United States Army Reserve and served a year at Fort Polk in Louisiana before his discharge. Back home he worked as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas. There he began a relationship with a younger woman, and he married her in 1960.

  On the 7th of December 1960, Hansen was arrested for burning down a school bus garage in Pocahontas County. The fire was revenge for the way he felt he had been treated in high school. He served twenty months of a three-year sentence at Anamosa State Penitentiary, and his first wife divorced him during that time. Inside, a psychiatrist diagnosed manic depression with periodic schizophrenic episodes. The doctor noted an "infantile personality" and an obsession with getting back at people Hansen felt had wronged him.

  Over the following years Hansen was jailed several times for petty theft. In 1967 he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, with his second wife, whom he had married in 1963. The couple had two children. In Anchorage he opened his own bakery, won the goodwill of his neighbors and set several local hunting records.

  In December 1971, Hansen was arrested twice. The first arrest was for abducting a housewife and attempting to rape her. The second was for raping a sex worker. Neither woman was named publicly. He pleaded no contest to assault with a deadly weapon in the first case, and the rape charge was dropped as part of a plea bargain. The sentence was five years. After six months he was moved to a work release program and then to a halfway house.

  In 1976 Hansen pleaded guilty to larceny after trying to steal a chainsaw from an Anchorage Fred Meyer store. He received another five-year sentence and an order to get psychiatric treatment for his manic depression. The Alaska Supreme Court reduced that sentence, and he was released with time served.

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• 3. Hunting Ground

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  Three days after the assault that sent Hansen to prison, eighteen-year-old Celia Beth van Zanten left her home on Knik Avenue in Anchorage. It was late in the evening of the 22nd of December 1971. She meant to walk a few blocks to a BI-LO supermarket and never arrived. Her body was found in Chugach State Park on the 25th of December. She had died of exposure after escaping her abductor, and forensic evidence showed she tried to climb back up a slope but could not.

  Authorities believe she was Hansen's first victim, because an x on his map matched the place where she lay. Hansen denied any part in her death. No conclusive evidence ties him to it.

  Hansen is known to have raped and assaulted more than thirty women. His victims ranged in age from 16 to 41, and law enforcement suspect he killed at least twenty-one.

  Money was often the lure. On the 17th of November 1981, Sherry Morrow, aged twenty-three, told friends that a photographer had promised her $300 for nude photographs. Sue Luna, also twenty-three, agreed to a $300 photo shoot with a nightclub patron and met Hansen in a diner parking lot on the 26th of May 1982. In March 1983, twenty-two-year-old Teresa Watson told her roommate that a man would pay her $300 for an hour or two of company. Hansen later described "hunting" Luna like an animal in the forest.

  Seward, a coastal town, appears twice in the record. Seventeen-year-old Megan Siobhan Emerick vanished there on the 7th of July 1973 after leaving a dormitory laundry room at the Seward Skill Center, a boarding school. Her roommate searched for three days before contacting police. On the 5th of July 1975, Mary Kathleen Thill, aged twenty-two, disappeared in Seward after a friend dropped her at a local bakery. Hansen admitted being in Seward on both days and denied killing either woman. A former inmate said Hansen told him Emerick was killed and buried at a cabin reachable only by boat, and that Thill's body was dumped in Resurrection Bay.

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• 4. The Thirteenth of June

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  On the 13th of June 1983, Hansen offered seventeen-year-old Cindy Paulson $200 in Anchorage. When she got into his car, he pulled out a gun and drove her to his home in the Muldoon neighborhood. Paulson later told police that he held her captive and assaulted her there. She said he chained her by the neck to a post in his basement and then took a nap on a nearby couch.

  Merrill Field, an Anchorage airfield, was the next stop. Hansen told Paulson he meant to fly her to his cabin near the Knik River, in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. The cabin could be reached only by boat or bush plane. Paulson crouched in the back seat of his car with her wrists cuffed in front of her. Hansen turned away to load the cockpit of his Piper PA-18 Super Cub.

  That was her chance. Paulson crawled out of the back seat, opened the driver's side door and ran toward Sixth Avenue. She had left her blue sneakers on the back-seat floor so that police would know she had been in the car. Hansen panicked and chased her, but she flagged down a passing truck.

  The driver, Robert Yount, was alarmed by her disheveled appearance and stopped to help. He took her to the Mush Inn, where she jumped out and ran inside. She begged the clerk to phone her boyfriend at the Big Timber Motel. Yount drove on to work and called police from there.

  Anchorage Police Department officers reached the Mush Inn and were told Paulson had left in a cab for the Big Timber Motel. They went there and found her in Room 110, alone and still handcuffed. At police headquarters she described her attacker. A security guard at Merrill Field had also noticed suspicious activity and written down the license tag of Hansen's car, although he made no contact.

  When investigators questioned Hansen, he denied everything. He said Paulson was making trouble because he had refused her extortion demands. His friend John Henning gave him an alibi. Hansen's meek manner and humble job as a baker did the rest, and police did not treat him as a serious suspect. He would use the extortion excuse again on other occasions.

  Elsewhere in the state, a trooper named Glenn Flothe was already following a different trail of bodies.

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• 5. Profile and Warrant

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  Detective Glenn Flothe of the Alaska State Troopers was working with a team on bodies found in and around Anchorage, Seward and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. The first was discovered near Eklutna Road. Investigators called her "Eklutna Annie," and she has never been identified. In 1980 the body of Joanna Messina turned up in a gravel pit near Seward. In 1982 hunters found the remains of twenty-three-year-old Sherry Morrow in a shallow grave near the Knik River. Cartridges near her body showed that a .223 Ruger Mini-14 hunting rifle had been used. Flothe believed one man had killed all three women.

  Flothe asked Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent John E. Douglas for an offender profile. Douglas predicted an experienced hunter with low self-esteem and a history of rejection by women. He thought the killer would feel compelled to keep "souvenirs," such as a victim's jewelry. He added that the man might stutter.

  Flothe worked through possible suspects with that profile until he reached Hansen, who fit it and owned a plane. Together with Paulson's testimony and the profile, that was enough. Flothe and the Anchorage police obtained a warrant to search Hansen's plane, vehicles and home.

  On the 27th of October 1983, investigators found jewelry belonging to some of the missing women. In a corner hideaway of the attic they also found an array of firearms, including a .223-caliber Ruger Mini-14. An aeronautical chart turned up as well. Many of its marks matched sites where bodies had been found, and the rest were located later.

  Hansen denied the evidence for as long as he could. Then he began blaming his victims and trying to justify his actions. As each item was put in front of him, he confessed to it. He admitted to attacks on women that began in 1971.

  Among the items taken from the house were several possessions of Andrea Mona Altiery, whom friends called "Fish." One of them was her fish necklace.

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• 6. Bargain and Burial Sites

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  Hunting trophies that Hansen reported stolen paid for his airplane. After his arrest he faced charges of assault, kidnapping, multiple weapons offenses, theft and insurance fraud. The fraud charge came from the insurance claim for those trophies, and the payout bought the plane. At trial Hansen said he later found the trophies in his backyard but forgot to tell the insurer.

  Ballistics tests then matched bullets from the crime scenes to Hansen's rifle, and he agreed to a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to the four homicides police could prove: Morrow, Messina, Paula Goulding and Eklutna Annie. In return he would serve his sentence in a federal prison, and the press would not publicize his case. He also had to help decode the markings on his aviation map and find his victims' bodies.

  Hansen confirmed the police theory of how the women had been abducted. He added that he sometimes let a possible victim go if she convinced him she would not report him. He said the killings began in the early 1970s.

  He led investigators to seventeen grave sites in and around Southcentral Alaska. Twelve of them were unknown to police. Police exhumed the remains of twelve women from a probable twenty-one to thirty-seven victims and returned them to their families.

  Three marks in Resurrection Bay, near Seward, were among those Hansen would not explain. Authorities suspect two of them are the graves of Thill and Emerick, although he denied killing them.

  Roxane Easland, who vanished on the 28th of June 1980, remains one whose body was never found, though Hansen admitted killing her.

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• 7. Names Returned

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  DeLynne Renee Frey, aged twenty-two, was buried in an Anchorage cemetery as a "Jane Doe." A bush pilot practicing landings had found her body on a Knik River sandbar on the 20th of August 1985. Her name came back in 1989, when an Alaska State Trooper recognized her jewelry in a photograph in a case file.

  Robin Pelkey, aged nineteen, was living in Anchorage when she vanished on the 19th of July 1983. Her partial skeletal remains were found on the 25th of April 1984 near Horseshoe Lake in Palmer. She had been stabbed and shot, and for decades she was known as "Horseshoe Harriet." In October 2021, forensic genealogy finally identified her.

  Eklutna Annie remains unidentified. Hansen claimed she was his first victim and suggested she might have come from Kodiak. Troopers think she may have reached Alaska by way of California.

  Hansen's wife and their two children left Anchorage permanently after his capture and moved to Arkansas. The children's names have never been made public, and they live in anonymity.

  Hansen himself was first held at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1988 he was returned to Alaska and briefly held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau. He later served time at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, the town where Emerick and Thill had vanished. In May 2014 he was moved to the Anchorage Correctional Complex for health reasons. He died at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage on the 21st of August 2014, aged 75, of natural causes related to lingering health conditions.

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• 8. On Screen

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  The Frozen Ground, released in 2013, brought the case to a wide audience. John Cusack played Hansen, and Nicolas Cage played Sergeant Jack Halcombe, a character based on Glenn Flothe. Vanessa Hudgens played Cindy Paulson. An earlier film, Naked Fear from 2007, was loosely based on Hansen but moved the story to the wilderness of New Mexico.

  Documentary makers returned to the case again and again. An episode of The FBI Files called "Hunter's Game" aired in 1999. Investigation Discovery covered the case in an Alaska: Ice Cold Killers episode, "Hunting Humans," on the 25th of January 2012. The Travel Channel series Hidden City dealt with it in an episode that aired on the 21st of February 2012. Oxygen's Mark of a Killer made an episode called "Hunted to Death." Investigation Discovery later aired The Butcher Baker: Mind of a Monster on the 2nd of September 2020.

  Scripted television borrowed from the case too. Two episodes of the CBS series Cold Case, "Mind Hunters" and "The Woods," were inspired by Hansen's crimes. Criminal Minds named him in the season 5 episode "Exit Wounds," which aired on the 12th of May 2010. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit drew on the case for "Hunting Ground," which aired on the 22nd of February 2012. Kurt Caldwell, the Runaway Killer played by Clancy Brown in Dexter: New Blood, was loosely based on Hansen.

  Podcasts followed. Morbid covered the case in two parts in February 2019, and Casefile did the same in September and October 2021. In 2023 the electronic industrial band SKYND released a song about Hansen.

  Of all these retellings, The Frozen Ground alone puts Cindy Paulson on screen by name, with Vanessa Hudgens playing the girl whose escape on Sixth Avenue led police to Hansen's door.

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