Notable Fact
Some (investigators) think Hansen played a kind of hunt-and-kill game with his victims, releasing them in the wilderness and then hunting them down with a bow and arrow or gun.
If Robert Hansen were murdering women today, the chances of him being caught would be a lot greater than they were in the early 1980s, when he was finally tracked down. For one thing, films, books, television, and other media have made the average person - and average police officer - much more aware of the existence of serial killers. For another, many people now know that serial killers often prey on prostitutes. Prostitutes had complained about how Hansen had treated them long before he was apprehended, but the police had a jaundiced view of them and doubted their credibility because of their profession. Also, record keeping is a lot better now. Robert Hansen’s criminal record was revealing, but it was kept by separate police jurisdictions, and therefore not all the people who needed to know about his past were aware of it. And, of course, there is that remarkable new investigative tool, DNA.
The bottom line, though, was that no one put it all together before it was too late for Hansen’s victims. Although he was a serial killer, Hansen was not, of course, a wild-eyed hunchbacked monster slavering at the mouth. He was a wiry, 5´10½ forty-four-year-old who was married with children. He lived in a log cabin on Old Harbor Avenue in Anchorage, Alaska, and owned and operated a successful bakery there. He was even the object of sympathy: He had a severely pockmarked face, a remnant of his teen years when he suffered from very bad acne, and he stuttered.
But he was extremely dangerous. In the end, he admitted to having raped and killed seventeen women - mostly dancers and prostitutes who worked the strip joints in Anchorage on Fourth Street - but state troopers who investigated the case believe Hansen’s death toll to be a lot more. Glenn Flothe, one of the state investigators, believes that Hansen killed four or five women a year from the early 1970s until police tracked him down in 1984.
Fire Starter
Hansen was raised in the tiny town of Pocahontas, Iowa. His first recorded offense against the law was in 1960, when at the age of twenty-one he and a friend set fire to the Pocahontas school bus garage, burning it to the ground and destroying three of the seven school buses. He would have gotten away with it, but his accomplice friend was seized with a surge of guilt over the act and confessed, implicating Hansen.
For this, he was sentenced to three years in the Iowa Men’s Reformatory with recommended psychiatric treatment. Hansen spoke in a forthright way with the psychiatrists about his compulsion to set fires, until one day in court he got a rude awakening: Prosecutors were using the information Hansen had given the doctors against him.
Hansen said to himself, as reported much later in the Anchorage Daily News, “Wait a minute, Bob, you Goddamn fool, they suckered you . . . So right away I think, well now boy, you know you’re never going to make that mistake again.”
Hansen was paroled in May 1963 but had some more interaction with the law in Minnesota - he was picked up for shoplifting, an activity that he had been enjoying for a long time and one that continued even after he started to kill. In a confession to police, he explained that it aroused him sexually to steal. Once outside the store, many times he would give away the stolen articles. The stealing was its own reward. He was not incarcerated on the shoplifting charge.
He had been married for one year and then in 1967 married for the second time and moved to Anchorage, where he opened his bakery. His father had been a baker - in fact, the only one in Pocahontas - and Hansen had learned the trade from him.
Criminal Escalation
In November 1971, Hansen was arrested - he was driving in the town of Spenard, had stopped for a light, and glanced over at the woman in the car next to him. She smiled at him, and he regarded this as an open invitation to point his gun at her and demand she come with him. The woman didn’t oblige him.
He was released on his own recognizance, but while awaiting trial he was arrested again, this time accused of having picked up an eighteen-year-old prostitute outside a bar in downtown Anchorage, kidnapping her, and raping her at gunpoint. But the district attorney was forced to drop this case - the prostitute who filed the complaint failed to appear in court.
Superior Court Judge James Fitzgerald sentenced Hansen to five years for drawing the gun on the Spenard woman, basing the punishment “heavily on the psychiatric evaluation.” Judge Fitzgerald could clearly see that Hansen was dangerous. However, because of the way offenders like Hansen were treated in those days in Alaska, he got out of jail quickly despite objections from the prosecutor. He had immediately applied for parole and was in jail only from March to June. In June he was assigned to a halfway house, where he received psychiatric treatment until November
In December, he was let out of the halfway house on a workfurlough program. In the confession he gave to investigators later, he stated that the very first night he was free he went down to Fourth Avenue in Anchorage and started cruising the area, watching the prostitutes and fantasizing about how he would capture them again.
Then he started to hang around the strip joints, trying to lure dancers and prostitutes with the promise of money for a good time. He was always flashing a big wad of money, which was tempting to some women even though, at the time, many thought of Hansen as weird.
In 1975, another prostitute complained about Hansen to a rape crisis center, and the center reported the assault to the police. But Hansen was lucky. After a while the woman refused to cooperate - prostitutes worry about talking to the police and he was not charged, even though officers at the time were convinced he was guilty. Hansen, however, claimed that it was merely a dispute about money. Then, in 1976, Hansen was picked up for shoplifting a chain saw from a Fred Meyer’s store in Anchorage. This time the law treated Hansen’s offense severely because of his two previous felony convictions, the fire in Iowa and pointing his gun at the woman in Spenard. The judge sentenced him to five years - the sentence may have been harder if the judge had known of the two rape charges that had been filed against Hansen but thrown out.
Hansen appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court, arguing that his sentence was excessive - the court agreed, setting Hansen free in August 1978. In doing so, the court cited Hansen’s apparently stable family life and his job. Other than his shoplifting and two prior felonies, the court believed that Hansen lived a fairly normal life and thought that with psychiatric help he should be fine. They recommended that he be put on probation and treated, but the treatment never happened. Hansen was free again.
Also in 1978, Hansen applied for a pilot’s license. On his application he said he was taking lithium, a drug used to control bipolar disorder. He was denied a license because of this. In a subsequent application he did not list any drugs - and was granted the license.
There was only one complaint on record against Hansen from that time until he was tracked down for murder, a complaint filed by a prostitute. She claimed that he held her hostage in his camper in Anchorage and that she had become convinced that Hansen was going to rape and kill her. Nude and desperate, she had broken a window in the trailer and gotten out, running down the street, screaming as she went. The police got involved, but again nothing came of the case. There was no physical evidence and it came down to the word of a respected businessman against that of a prostitute.
Finding a Suspect
Anchorage city police - and then Alaskan state police - had been receiving complaints about missing topless dancers and others who frequented the strip joint scene on Fourth Avenue, complaints that the police dismissed at first. Topless dancers tend to be a fairly transient group; when a few disappear, it doesn’t necessarily mean foul play.
Added up, though, the complaints were significant. The police realized that, since 1980, six dancers had disappeared from the Fourth Avenue clubs, and Anchorage police quietly formed what they called a “dancer task force” to look into the disappearances. Then, on September 13, 1982, a female body was discovered in a shallow grave by the Knik River, in the wilds about fifteen miles northwest of Anchorage. She had been shot once with a .223 caliber bullet; a shell casing was found nearby. In late September, the police got an ID: The victim’s name was Sherry Morrow, and she was a dancer at the Wild Cherry Club who had disappeared in November 1981. With the discovery of this woman - with a profile identical to that of the other missing women - the police department’s fears that a serial killer was at work in Anchorage were confirmed.
Since Morrow’s body was found outside the jurisdiction of city police, the state and city police combined forces to develop a list of suspects. One of the most important things they did was question again and again the women on the Fourth Avenue scene, women who had been bothered at the clubs, or who had been approached and offered money. One of the names that came up repeatedly in their questioning of these women was Robert Hansen.
Then, on June 13, 1983, a patrolman saw a seventeen-year-old prostitute running down Fifth Avenue. She was handcuffed and screaming, terrified. The patrolman, Gregg Baker, tracked
the woman through two motels and found her in one of them, still wearing handcuffs. She told him a man had taken her to his house and raped her. Baker found out about Hansen’s criminal history and passed it on to the task force. Immediately, Hansen became a prime suspect. Then something happened that made him the only suspect.
The remains of Paula Goulding were found in a remote area near the Knik River about twenty miles north of Anchorage. The grave site could not be reached by foot or vehicle - only by plane. Robert Hansen was the only one of the suspects who owned and flew an airplane.
The cops gathered everything they could and on October 27, 1983, brought Hansen in on the kidnapping and assault charges of the seventeen-year-old prostitute. They questioned him for five hours and were convinced that they had their perp, not only on the kidnapping and assault but also on the killings. But Hansen didn’t confess, even though police were able to blow away his alibi. (The wife of the friend who supplied him with the alibi said her husband had lied.)
The trial was held for the kidnapping and assault, while the investigation into the killings continued. Police, armed with search warrants, came up with some very damaging evidence against Hansen in his home, including an aeronautical map of south-central Alaska with twenty-one sites marked off, presumably for the graves of murder victims; a gun hidden under attic insulation, which was eventually linked to the killings of two women; a bag of jewelry containing a distinctive necklace worn by a missing dancer; and business cards of two missing dancers. These things, of course, were the trophies that Hansen used to relive the killings.
A Chilling Confession
At one point, Hansen “gave it up,” in police lingo (though no officer believes he gave it all up). He gave police a twelve hour confession during which he admitted to killing seventeen women and burying their remains in the wilds outside Anchorage.
He took a plane ride with the police and pointed out the burial sites he remembered. During his confession, Hansen went to great pains to rationalize his behavior. He said he would never kill “good women,” but prostitutes were something else. He could kill them with impunity. He explained that he had had problems with women since he was a teenager in Iowa and that women wouldn’t go out with him because of his acne and his stutter.
He said he always “loved” women, but he made a distinction — a sharp distinction — between good girls and bad girls. Bad girls could die. In the portion of his confession that follows, District Attorney Victor Krumm is questioning Hansen. The excerpt provides some insight into the mind of Robert Hansen. The final question is from Glenn Flothe, state investigator, and Hansen’s simple answer is quite chilling when one realizes its homicidal implications.
KRUMM: Why did you drive out to the road, instead of just going to a hotel or motel in town?
HANSEN: You know if you go to a motel or something with it, it’s more or less like a prostitution deal. I’m going and, or I’d — I guess I’m trying to even convince myself maybe I wasn’t really buying sex, it was being given to me, in the aspect that I was good enough that it was being given to me. Uh, if I can explain that a little bit better gentlemen. Going back in my life, way back to my high school days and so forth, I was, I guess what you might call very frustrated, upset all the time. I would see my friends and so forth going out on dates and so forth and had a tremendous desire to do the same thing. From the scars and so forth on my face you can probably see, I could see why girls wouldn’t want to get close to me and when I’m nervous and upset like this here; if I, I’ll try to demonstrate if I can think about exactly what I’m going to say and if I talk slow I can keep myself from stuttering. But at the time during my junior high or high school days I could not control my speech at all. I was always so embarrassed and upset with it from people making fun of me that I hated the word school, I guess this is why I burned down the bus way back in Iowa . . . I can remember going up and talking to someone, man or woman, classmate or whatever and start to say something and start to stutter so badly that especially in the younger years I would run away crying, run off someplace and hide for a day or so. The worst there was that I was the rebuttal of all the girls around the school and so forth. The jokes. If I could have faced it, I know now if I could have faced it and laughed along with them it would have stopped but I couldn’t at the time and it just, it got so it controlled me, I didn’t control it. I didn’t start to hate all women, as a matter of fact I would venture to say I started to fall in love with every one of them. Every one of them become so precious to me ’cause I wanted their — I wanted their friendship . . . I wanted them to like me so much. On top of things that have happened, I don’t want to, I’m not saying that I hate all women, I don’t. Quite to the contrary, if, I guess in my own mind what I’m classifying is a good woman, not a prostitute. I’d do everything in my power, any way, shape or form to do anything for her and to see that no harm ever came to her, but I guess prostitutes are women I’m putting down as lower than myself. I don’t know if I’m making sense or not. And you know, when this started to happen I wanted —
you know . . . It happened the first time there, you know, and I went home and I was literally sick to my stomach . . . Over the years I’ve gone in many many topless and bottomless bars in town and so forth and never, never touched one of the girls in there in any way, shape, or form until they asked. It’s like, it’s like it was a game — they had to pitch the ball before I could bat. They had to approach me first saying about I get off at a certain time, we could go out and have a good time, or something like this here. If they don’t, we weren’t playing the game right. They had to approach me. I’ve talked to, I suppose I made it a point to try to talk to, every girl in there. Sometimes if I thought there was a possibility that she didn’t say it the first time but she might come back and say it again, now I’ve invited two or three table dances with her and comment to her how nice she looked and everything else and I try to keep it in a joking tone, “Gosh you know, you sure would be some thing, you know, for later on,” but that’s as far as it would go until she, then she had to make, I guess play out my fantasy. She had to come out and say we could do it but it’s going to cost you some money. Then she was no longer—I guess what you might call a decent girl. I didn’t look down at the girls dancing, what the hell they’re just trying to make a buck.
FLOTHE: But when they propositioned you, then it made things different?
HANSEN: Then, yes.
Afterword
In the spring of 1990, Robert Hansen was moved from the Lemon Creek Prison in Juneau to the maximum-security facility at Spring Creek in Seward, about 120 miles southwest of Anchorage. It was discovered that Hansen was collecting materials - including aeronautical maps - that indicated he was planning to try to escape from Lemon Creek.
More than one investigator thinks Robert Hansen has killed many more women than he has admitted to. He played a kind of hunt-and-kill game with them, releasing them in the wilderness and then hunting them down with a bow and arrow or rifle.
Some killers, police officers will tell you, have something likable about them. Monsters with charm, you might say. But according to exmajor Walter Gilmore of the Alaskan state police, there were no redeeming qualities about Hansen, and others have reflected Gilmore’s sentiments. The house where Hansen lived on Old Harbor Avenue is still there.
Hansen was raised in the tiny town of Pocahontas, Iowa. His first recorded offense against the law was in 1960, when at the age of twenty-one he and a friend set fire to the Pocahontas school bus garage, burning it to the ground and destroying three of the seven school buses. He would have gotten away with it, but his accomplice friend was seized with a surge of guilt over the act and confessed, implicating Hansen.
For this, he was sentenced to three years in the Iowa Men’s Reformatory with recommended psychiatric treatment. Hansen spoke in a forthright way with the psychiatrists about his compulsion to set fires, until one day in court he got a rude awakening: Prosecutors were using the information Hansen had given the doctors against him.
Hansen said to himself, as reported much later in the Anchorage Daily News, “Wait a minute, Bob, you Goddamn fool, they suckered you . . . So right away I think, well now boy, you know you’re never going to make that mistake again.”
Hansen was paroled in May 1963 but had some more interaction with the law in Minnesota - he was picked up for shoplifting, an activity that he had been enjoying for a long time and one that continued even after he started to kill. In a confession to police, he explained that it aroused him sexually to steal. Once outside the store, many times he would give away the stolen articles. The stealing was its own reward. He was not incarcerated on the shoplifting charge.
He had been married for one year and then in 1967 married for the second time and moved to Anchorage, where he opened his bakery. His father had been a baker - in fact, the only one in Pocahontas - and Hansen had learned the trade from him.
Criminal Escalation
In November 1971, Hansen was arrested - he was driving in the town of Spenard, had stopped for a light, and glanced over at the woman in the car next to him. She smiled at him, and he regarded this as an open invitation to point his gun at her and demand she come with him. The woman didn’t oblige him.
He was released on his own recognizance, but while awaiting trial he was arrested again, this time accused of having picked up an eighteen-year-old prostitute outside a bar in downtown Anchorage, kidnapping her, and raping her at gunpoint. But the district attorney was forced to drop this case - the prostitute who filed the complaint failed to appear in court.
Superior Court Judge James Fitzgerald sentenced Hansen to five years for drawing the gun on the Spenard woman, basing the punishment “heavily on the psychiatric evaluation.” Judge Fitzgerald could clearly see that Hansen was dangerous. However, because of the way offenders like Hansen were treated in those days in Alaska, he got out of jail quickly despite objections from the prosecutor. He had immediately applied for parole and was in jail only from March to June. In June he was assigned to a halfway house, where he received psychiatric treatment until November
In December, he was let out of the halfway house on a workfurlough program. In the confession he gave to investigators later, he stated that the very first night he was free he went down to Fourth Avenue in Anchorage and started cruising the area, watching the prostitutes and fantasizing about how he would capture them again.
Then he started to hang around the strip joints, trying to lure dancers and prostitutes with the promise of money for a good time. He was always flashing a big wad of money, which was tempting to some women even though, at the time, many thought of Hansen as weird.
In 1975, another prostitute complained about Hansen to a rape crisis center, and the center reported the assault to the police. But Hansen was lucky. After a while the woman refused to cooperate - prostitutes worry about talking to the police and he was not charged, even though officers at the time were convinced he was guilty. Hansen, however, claimed that it was merely a dispute about money. Then, in 1976, Hansen was picked up for shoplifting a chain saw from a Fred Meyer’s store in Anchorage. This time the law treated Hansen’s offense severely because of his two previous felony convictions, the fire in Iowa and pointing his gun at the woman in Spenard. The judge sentenced him to five years - the sentence may have been harder if the judge had known of the two rape charges that had been filed against Hansen but thrown out.
Hansen appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court, arguing that his sentence was excessive - the court agreed, setting Hansen free in August 1978. In doing so, the court cited Hansen’s apparently stable family life and his job. Other than his shoplifting and two prior felonies, the court believed that Hansen lived a fairly normal life and thought that with psychiatric help he should be fine. They recommended that he be put on probation and treated, but the treatment never happened. Hansen was free again.
Also in 1978, Hansen applied for a pilot’s license. On his application he said he was taking lithium, a drug used to control bipolar disorder. He was denied a license because of this. In a subsequent application he did not list any drugs - and was granted the license.
There was only one complaint on record against Hansen from that time until he was tracked down for murder, a complaint filed by a prostitute. She claimed that he held her hostage in his camper in Anchorage and that she had become convinced that Hansen was going to rape and kill her. Nude and desperate, she had broken a window in the trailer and gotten out, running down the street, screaming as she went. The police got involved, but again nothing came of the case. There was no physical evidence and it came down to the word of a respected businessman against that of a prostitute.
Finding a Suspect
Anchorage city police - and then Alaskan state police - had been receiving complaints about missing topless dancers and others who frequented the strip joint scene on Fourth Avenue, complaints that the police dismissed at first. Topless dancers tend to be a fairly transient group; when a few disappear, it doesn’t necessarily mean foul play.
Added up, though, the complaints were significant. The police realized that, since 1980, six dancers had disappeared from the Fourth Avenue clubs, and Anchorage police quietly formed what they called a “dancer task force” to look into the disappearances. Then, on September 13, 1982, a female body was discovered in a shallow grave by the Knik River, in the wilds about fifteen miles northwest of Anchorage. She had been shot once with a .223 caliber bullet; a shell casing was found nearby. In late September, the police got an ID: The victim’s name was Sherry Morrow, and she was a dancer at the Wild Cherry Club who had disappeared in November 1981. With the discovery of this woman - with a profile identical to that of the other missing women - the police department’s fears that a serial killer was at work in Anchorage were confirmed.
Since Morrow’s body was found outside the jurisdiction of city police, the state and city police combined forces to develop a list of suspects. One of the most important things they did was question again and again the women on the Fourth Avenue scene, women who had been bothered at the clubs, or who had been approached and offered money. One of the names that came up repeatedly in their questioning of these women was Robert Hansen.
Then, on June 13, 1983, a patrolman saw a seventeen-year-old prostitute running down Fifth Avenue. She was handcuffed and screaming, terrified. The patrolman, Gregg Baker, tracked
the woman through two motels and found her in one of them, still wearing handcuffs. She told him a man had taken her to his house and raped her. Baker found out about Hansen’s criminal history and passed it on to the task force. Immediately, Hansen became a prime suspect. Then something happened that made him the only suspect.
The remains of Paula Goulding were found in a remote area near the Knik River about twenty miles north of Anchorage. The grave site could not be reached by foot or vehicle - only by plane. Robert Hansen was the only one of the suspects who owned and flew an airplane.
The cops gathered everything they could and on October 27, 1983, brought Hansen in on the kidnapping and assault charges of the seventeen-year-old prostitute. They questioned him for five hours and were convinced that they had their perp, not only on the kidnapping and assault but also on the killings. But Hansen didn’t confess, even though police were able to blow away his alibi. (The wife of the friend who supplied him with the alibi said her husband had lied.)
The trial was held for the kidnapping and assault, while the investigation into the killings continued. Police, armed with search warrants, came up with some very damaging evidence against Hansen in his home, including an aeronautical map of south-central Alaska with twenty-one sites marked off, presumably for the graves of murder victims; a gun hidden under attic insulation, which was eventually linked to the killings of two women; a bag of jewelry containing a distinctive necklace worn by a missing dancer; and business cards of two missing dancers. These things, of course, were the trophies that Hansen used to relive the killings.
A Chilling Confession
At one point, Hansen “gave it up,” in police lingo (though no officer believes he gave it all up). He gave police a twelve hour confession during which he admitted to killing seventeen women and burying their remains in the wilds outside Anchorage.
He took a plane ride with the police and pointed out the burial sites he remembered. During his confession, Hansen went to great pains to rationalize his behavior. He said he would never kill “good women,” but prostitutes were something else. He could kill them with impunity. He explained that he had had problems with women since he was a teenager in Iowa and that women wouldn’t go out with him because of his acne and his stutter.
He said he always “loved” women, but he made a distinction — a sharp distinction — between good girls and bad girls. Bad girls could die. In the portion of his confession that follows, District Attorney Victor Krumm is questioning Hansen. The excerpt provides some insight into the mind of Robert Hansen. The final question is from Glenn Flothe, state investigator, and Hansen’s simple answer is quite chilling when one realizes its homicidal implications.
KRUMM: Why did you drive out to the road, instead of just going to a hotel or motel in town?
HANSEN: You know if you go to a motel or something with it, it’s more or less like a prostitution deal. I’m going and, or I’d — I guess I’m trying to even convince myself maybe I wasn’t really buying sex, it was being given to me, in the aspect that I was good enough that it was being given to me. Uh, if I can explain that a little bit better gentlemen. Going back in my life, way back to my high school days and so forth, I was, I guess what you might call very frustrated, upset all the time. I would see my friends and so forth going out on dates and so forth and had a tremendous desire to do the same thing. From the scars and so forth on my face you can probably see, I could see why girls wouldn’t want to get close to me and when I’m nervous and upset like this here; if I, I’ll try to demonstrate if I can think about exactly what I’m going to say and if I talk slow I can keep myself from stuttering. But at the time during my junior high or high school days I could not control my speech at all. I was always so embarrassed and upset with it from people making fun of me that I hated the word school, I guess this is why I burned down the bus way back in Iowa . . . I can remember going up and talking to someone, man or woman, classmate or whatever and start to say something and start to stutter so badly that especially in the younger years I would run away crying, run off someplace and hide for a day or so. The worst there was that I was the rebuttal of all the girls around the school and so forth. The jokes. If I could have faced it, I know now if I could have faced it and laughed along with them it would have stopped but I couldn’t at the time and it just, it got so it controlled me, I didn’t control it. I didn’t start to hate all women, as a matter of fact I would venture to say I started to fall in love with every one of them. Every one of them become so precious to me ’cause I wanted their — I wanted their friendship . . . I wanted them to like me so much. On top of things that have happened, I don’t want to, I’m not saying that I hate all women, I don’t. Quite to the contrary, if, I guess in my own mind what I’m classifying is a good woman, not a prostitute. I’d do everything in my power, any way, shape or form to do anything for her and to see that no harm ever came to her, but I guess prostitutes are women I’m putting down as lower than myself. I don’t know if I’m making sense or not. And you know, when this started to happen I wanted —
you know . . . It happened the first time there, you know, and I went home and I was literally sick to my stomach . . . Over the years I’ve gone in many many topless and bottomless bars in town and so forth and never, never touched one of the girls in there in any way, shape, or form until they asked. It’s like, it’s like it was a game — they had to pitch the ball before I could bat. They had to approach me first saying about I get off at a certain time, we could go out and have a good time, or something like this here. If they don’t, we weren’t playing the game right. They had to approach me. I’ve talked to, I suppose I made it a point to try to talk to, every girl in there. Sometimes if I thought there was a possibility that she didn’t say it the first time but she might come back and say it again, now I’ve invited two or three table dances with her and comment to her how nice she looked and everything else and I try to keep it in a joking tone, “Gosh you know, you sure would be some thing, you know, for later on,” but that’s as far as it would go until she, then she had to make, I guess play out my fantasy. She had to come out and say we could do it but it’s going to cost you some money. Then she was no longer—I guess what you might call a decent girl. I didn’t look down at the girls dancing, what the hell they’re just trying to make a buck.
FLOTHE: But when they propositioned you, then it made things different?
HANSEN: Then, yes.
Afterword
In the spring of 1990, Robert Hansen was moved from the Lemon Creek Prison in Juneau to the maximum-security facility at Spring Creek in Seward, about 120 miles southwest of Anchorage. It was discovered that Hansen was collecting materials - including aeronautical maps - that indicated he was planning to try to escape from Lemon Creek.
More than one investigator thinks Robert Hansen has killed many more women than he has admitted to. He played a kind of hunt-and-kill game with them, releasing them in the wilderness and then hunting them down with a bow and arrow or rifle.
Some killers, police officers will tell you, have something likable about them. Monsters with charm, you might say. But according to exmajor Walter Gilmore of the Alaskan state police, there were no redeeming qualities about Hansen, and others have reflected Gilmore’s sentiments. The house where Hansen lived on Old Harbor Avenue is still there.
