Robert Hansen Hunted 17 Women in the Alaska Woods, but Police Didn’t Even Know Most Were Missing. Here’s How the Serial Killer Was Finally Caught

Robert Hansen, who was given the name the “Butcher Baker,” was a serial killer and rapist who killed at least 17 women.

He abducted, rape and killed women by bringing them to remote locations and hunting them in the woods of Anchorage, Alaska, per The Washington Post. After more than 10 years of haunting the women of Alaska, Hansen was finally caught in 1983.

At the time of his arrest, Hansen was only charged with the murders of four women, but he later confessed to killing 17. He was sentenced to 461 years in prison and died on Aug. 21, 2014, from natural causes. He was 75.

Although Hansen was eventually arrested, it took investigators over 10 years to look into the disappearances of several women. Some critics of the investigation have noted that the delay in finding Hansen could be due in part to most of his victims’ identities as sex workers and vulnerable teenagers.

In 1983, the tide turned when he abducted then-17-year-old Cindy Paulson, she escaped and purposely left evidence in Hansen’s car that gave a substantial lead to the FBI and police. Her story became the centerpiece for the star-studded 2013 movie The Frozen Ground with Vanessa Hudgens, John Cusack and Nicolas Cage.

Here’s everything to know about the serial killer Robert Hansen and how he was caught after his 12-year killing spree.

Who was Robert Hansen?

Hansen, who was born in 1939, was raised in Iowa and had difficulty growing up because of a stutter and acne.

“Going back in my life … I was … I guess what you might call very frustrated,” Hansen told police, according to the New York Daily News. “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 … During my junior high or high school days I could not control my speech at all,” he added. “I was always so embarrassed and upset with it from people making fun of me that I hated the word school.”

Before Hansen was detained for the murders in 1983, he had been arrested at least five times in 12 years. Hansen committed his first known criminal act in 1960 when he burnt down a school bus garage in his hometown of Pocahontas, Iowa, per the New York Daily News. He served 20 months in prison and was diagnosed with manic depression with periodic schizophrenic episodes, according to Dr. Robert McManmon in his later murder trial.

In 1967, Hansen moved to Anchorage, Alaska, with his wife, Darla Hansen, and their two children, and he opened a bakery. Hansen continued committing crimes and was arrested twice in 1971 for the abduction and attempted rape of a housewife and for raping a sex worker. He pleaded guilty to the first offense and the second was dropped in a plea deal, leading him to serve six months of a five-year sentence, per All That’s Interesting.

Hansen is believed to have started his murder spree in 1972, but during that time, he was also arrested for larceny after trying to steal a chainsaw. He was sentenced to five years in prison but was released with time served two years later.

Alaska’s Assistant District Attorney Frank Rothschild later told The New York Times that at least three of his four convicted murders took place during the time that he would have been in prison had he served the full five years.

In addition to his criminal exploits, Hansen also took an interest in hunting in Alaska, got his pilot’s licence and bought a small plane.

What did Robert Hansen do?

Hansen is a convicted serial killer who eventually confessed to killing 17 women in the Alaskan wilderness. Authorities believe that he escalated to killing his sexual assault victims around 1971.

Hansen was known to stalk a woman, who was often a teenager or sex worker, pick her up in his car and abduct her, according to USA Today. He would take his victims to remote places outside Anchorage via his car or sometimes by flying his small plane. From there, he would hunt his victims, rape them and murder them.

Although Hansen eventually confessed to killing 17 women, he is believed to have raped or assaulted over 30 women, per The Washington Post. Police have also listed several other women who disappeared during this time who may have been Hansen’s victims. The 17 known murder victims ranged in age from 16 to 41.

Hansen’s first victim is believed to be Celia van Zanten, an 18-year-old who was abducted while walking to a supermarket, per the Line-Up. Celia’s body was later discovered in a remote park, and police later believed that Hansen was responsible; however, Hansen denied responsibility for her death and other women who weren’t sex workers.

The women Hansen admitted to kidnapping, assaulting and murdering included Mary Kathleen Thill, 22; an unidentified woman called “Eklutna Annie”; Joanna Messina, 24; Roxane Easland, 24; Andrea Mona “Fish” Altiery, 24; Sue Luna, 23; DeLynne “Sugar” Renee Frey, 22; Paula Goulding, 30; Teresa Watson, 22; Angela Lynn Feddern, 24; and Tamera “Tami” Pederson, 20. Authorities also believe that Hansen killed Megan Siobhan Emerick, 17; Lisa Futrell, 41; Sherry Morrow, 23; Robin Pelkey (formerly known as “Horseshoe Harriet” before she was identified in 2021), 19; and Malai Larsen, 28.

Why did it take so long for the police to find Hansen?

There were several reasons why investigators didn’t immediately look into the disappearances of the local women and why they didn’t think of Hansen as the perpetrator. Rothschild, the assistant district attorney who tried Hansen’s case, claimed to Fox News in 2020 that Hansen’s victims were “hardly missed,” as many of them weren’t close with their families or had troubled pasts.

In addition, Anchorage was bustling with construction workers, sex workers and drug dealers in the 1970s because of the development of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, per The New York Times.

“Anchorage at the time was perfect for someone like Robert Hansen,” Rothschild told Fox News. “It was a place for someone like Hansen to easily lure women into his grasp. … [His victims] were all young women, mostly runaways, who really had no family support and were out in the world on their own. Most of them didn’t even make it through high school. … For many, this was a place for them to make money and survive.”

He added, “Hansen learned he needed to take women who weren’t easily believed or cared about by the community or police the same way. He thought like a hunter.”

Those factors also contributed to authorities allegedly not pursuing the leads of some of the women who reported their abductions and assaults if they escaped Hansen or if he let them go.

“There just wasn’t a drop of empathy for a rape victim. … That always upsets me,” Rothschild said.

To make matters even more challenging, Hansen was a local business owner whom all the policemen knew from shopping at his bakery, Rothschild told A&E True Crime in 2019. Hansen portrayed himself as a dutiful husband and father and later claimed that his wife was unaware of his crimes.

“He was a small guy,” Rothschild recalled to Fox News. “He came across as a little mild-mannered sort of fellow. You didn’t initially have any sense of what he was hiding behind the mask.”

How was Hansen eventually caught?

After terrorizing the surrounding areas of Anchorage for over a decade, Hansen finally came on the police’s radar in 1983. In June of that year, Hansen abducted 17-year-old sex worker Cindy. He brought her to his home and later transported her to his plane, but she escaped while he was loading cargo, per the Alaska Daily News.

Cindy made her way to a busy street, was rescued by a local driver and later reported her assault to the police. She accurately described Hansen and told authorities that she left her sneakers inside Hansen’s car as evidence. Police brought in Hansen for questioning, but he claimed he had an alibi, denied the allegations and was later released.

However, after police began discovering more bodies and learned more about the psychological profile of the killer, they issued a search warrant for Hansen’s properties in October 1983.

Police discovered jewelry that belonged to some of the women, potential murder weapons and a map with several “X” marks, per Newsweek. Hansen initially denied the murders before eventually confessing to the attacks.

What was Hansen charged with?

In October 1983, Hansen was officially arrested and formally charged with the murders of four women, whose bodies had been discovered.

The following year, Hansen pleaded guilty to the murders of Sherry, Joanna, “Eklutna Annie” and Paula. He was also charged with the abduction and rape of Cindy.

Although Hansen was only formally charged with murdering four women, he eventually admitted to murdering 17 women and worked with investigators to identify some of the sites where he buried the victims as part of his plea deal.

What happened to Hansen?

After pleading guilty to the four murders and one abduction and rape in February 1984, Hansen was sentenced to 461 years in prison without the possibility of parole. He began his sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Penn., before he was briefly transferred to Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, Alaska. After that, he lived the rest of his life at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska.

“I would’ve wished every breath he took had an element of pain to it,” Rothschild told A&E True Crime. “But here’s how I thought about it — here’s a guy whose passion in life is going out into the wilderness and hunting, the great Alaska wild. Instead of being able to do that, he was put in a cell with no view of anything — forget the mountains — with rancid air and horrific people around him. That, to me, is supreme punishment.”

On Aug. 21, 2014, Hansen died from natural causes at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, per The New York Times.

“On this day we should only remember his many victims and all of their families, and my heart goes out to all of them,” Glenn Flothe, a retired Alaska state trooper who worked on Hansen’s 1984 arrest, told Anchorage Daily News at the time. “As far as Hansen is concerned, this world is better without him.”