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And all are welcome to a nefarious nightmare.
Hi everyone.
This is Deb from Dying to be Found.
Before we get started, I just wanted to say that episodes contain disturbing discussions
on harmful acts and crimes against animals and or humankind.
Recordings are not intended for young or sensitive audiences due to the content nature of this
podcast.
Under discretion is strongly advised.
Well hello everyone.
This is Deb.
And this is Beth.
And we want to welcome you to episode number 18 of Dying to be Found.
We work on making sure that our podcast is designed to address a wide range of true crime
cases.
So if you have a story you would like to hear, please email us at dying the number two, the
letter B found at gmail.com or visit us on our website at dying to be found.com.
Before we get started, Beth, it's good to see you as always.
What's new with you?
Well, it's good to see you too, Deb.
Today, Al is taking out the boat.
So we're going to have a summer of boating.
Hopefully last summer was quite cold and rainy, so we didn't get a lot of boating in, but
hopefully this year we will.
What's new with you?
I have been really doing a ton of procrastinating more than anything else.
I have a ton of things to do on my to do list.
So maybe I'll get that done in the next week or so.
Who knows?
Can I just say you've been a procrastinator all your life?
Of course you can.
We are honest with each other here.
That's important to do.
My birthday cards would always come a month late.
Well, okay.
You're right.
Okay.
I'm not going to deny that.
Look, I just sent Kathy's birthday card out and I know it's not going to get there until
after her birthday, but I tried.
At least I had it in the car for the last week.
I just didn't mail it.
How bad is that?
So you better buy my now, put a postage stamp on it.
Okay.
Julie noted.
Let me write that on my list of things to do because I'm actually doing that.
I'm writing a to do list.
I live by lists.
I do too, but I don't know, man.
If I'm not in the mood, I'm not going to do it or I don't know.
I have no excuse.
I guess I'll work on it.
In the meantime, Hey, I wanted to give a shout out to Amanda and Courtney with nefarious
nightmare.
Ooh yeah.
That's a new podcast that I came across.
I was just kind of scrolling through looking to see what was new and I'm going to say a
couple of months ago, I came across them and I've been really listening.
So I wanted to say you guys will hear at the very beginning of this episode, we had a promo
for them.
So if you get a chance, definitely go listen to them.
But in the meantime, Beth, do you have anything else to talk about before we get started?
Not at all.
Let's get started.
Okay.
I just wanted to start by saying that I think by this point, everybody knows one, I'm a
procrastinator.
All right.
Yes.
The second one is that I'm not really good at math, but the weird thing is I don't know
how you are, Beth.
How are you with math?
Bad, bad, bad.
I'm pretty bad too, but when it comes to numbers and statistics, I'm not the best.
I mean, statistics honestly stress me out, but I just do this little weird thing.
I look up figures, I look up data and I count things.
Like I count steps when I'm going up and down.
I don't know if you've ever done that, but that's a weird little thing that I do.
Yes, I have.
You do?
Okay.
So it's not completely out there.
Did you know that according to the National Crime Information Center and the World Population
Review that your chances of being murdered in Alaska are greater than any other state
in the United States?
No, it's hard to believe.
I wonder though if it's because it's per capita, because I know that in Canada, the population
is nowhere near the United States, but Ontario is probably the most populated province in
Canada.
So you've got Alaska that's way up there with you.
And my thoughts are that per capita, meaning population, your chances would be greater
as opposed to where there's higher populations.
Does that make sense?
I think you're right on that one.
So what is my point, you ask?
What is it?
I'm going to take us to Alaska today.
Okay.
So today we're going to talk about Robert Christian Hansen, also known as the butcher
baker or the bakery killer.
Have you heard of this guy?
No, but I'm interested.
Well, Robert was born on February 15th of 1939 in Esterville, Iowa to Edna and Christian
Hansen.
Robert's father was a Danish immigrant who owned a bakery and was commonly described
around town as the big old mean guy.
If you haven't guessed yet, Robert eventually by his nickname follows in his dad's footsteps
and opens his own bakery in the future.
That's kind of what we're going to be talking about today.
All right.
Hansen had what you might consider somewhat of a challenging childhood.
He was expected to work long hours at the family bakery, even at a young age.
Although he was naturally left-handed, he was forced to use his right hand, which resulted
in Hansen acquiring a lifelong stutter.
Beth, I feel like I was told when you were young, you were left-handed, but you were
made to write with your right hand.
Is that true?
Yes, it is.
We lived in Germany when dad was stationed over there and that's what the Germans wanted,
use your right hand.
Okay.
Well, same here.
Robert Hansen was forced to use his right hand.
I don't know if that has anything to do with along the same lines of what you just said,
or maybe he used equipment at the bakery that was more right-hand geared.
I myself am left-handed, so I know really I live in a right-handed world and a lot of
machinery and even scissors, Beth.
Scissors are made for right-handed people.
So not really sure why he was forced to write with his right hand, but that caused him to
have a lifelong stutter.
Also as an adolescent, Hansen suffered from acute acne and received a lot of ridiculing
from other kids his age because of it.
Between his stutter and his acne, Hansen became quite a social outcast and was painfully shy
because of it.
It doesn't sound like he's off to a good start.
No, unfortunately, and it gets worse.
Well, in high school, boys made fun of him and girls rejected him.
So Hansen did what anybody would do and pretty much became a loner after that.
And because he was socially awkward in his youth, Hansen took refuge in spending a lot
of time alone where he found that he enjoyed hunting.
So he became an avid game hunter and turned to hunting an archery to help channel his
rage that was building Beth and fantasizing about gaining vengeance upon the girls who
rejected him.
I'm curious to know why he's not thinking about vengeance upon the boys who were rejecting
him as well socially, because if they're making fun of him just as much as the girls are,
I suppose maybe though it's a little bit different if you're trying to ask a girl out on a date,
then you're rejected a little bit different than boys will be boys.
Well in 1957, when Hansen turned 18, he enlisted in the US Army Reserves and served for about
a year.
And following that, Hansen began working as an assistant drill instructor for a police
academy located in Pocahontas, Iowa.
Now Hansen married a woman that he had met at the academy about a year later.
However, by December of 1960, he had been arrested after he and another bakery employee
had set fire to a local school bus facility.
I'm not really sure.
I haven't found nothing in my notes or nothing in my research as to why he targeted a local
school bus facility.
Yeah, it seems kind of funny.
It is.
It's like really out there.
Well, Hansen's coworker eventually confessed to this crime and pinpointed the finger at
Hansen.
So he was arrested and given a three year sentence, but only served 20 months in prison
at the Anamosa Penitentiary.
While he was in prison, wife number one served him with divorce papers.
I never found her name.
So I'm just going to call her wife number one.
Over the next couple of years, Hansen was in and out of prison for petty theft, things
like that.
Now by the 1960s, Hansen had married again.
And this time he married a woman named Darla, who was a special education teacher.
Hansen felt that he needed a change from Iowa.
So he picked up and moved the family to Anchorage, Alaska.
This is in the mid sixties.
He and Darla ended up having two children together and became a well respected business
owner in his community.
He had moved his family to Alaska at the height of the Trans Alaska Oil Pipeline development.
And he set up his bakery close to the nightlife where all the pipeline workers worked, where
they would go to unwind every night.
But this is also where the drug dealers and topless dancers came and went without much
notice.
Hansen also broke many records in hunting and proudly displayed some of his trophies
on his wall in his home.
Have you ever gone into somebody's house, Beth, and just seen a bunch of animal heads
on the wall?
Thank goodness.
No.
Have you?
Oh, sure.
I live in the sticks, man.
They're proud of those things around here.
All right.
Well, Hansen couldn't seem to keep himself out of trouble and by the early to mid seventies,
he was again in and out of jail for assault and petty theft.
So we're going to talk about his history in the early seventies.
Hansen was ordered to spend six months in prison for assault with a deadly weapon when
he attempted to assault a housewife.
He was allowed to plea bargain while the attempted rape of a sex worker was dropped.
Hansen was ordered to a halfway house after six months in lieu of serving his full five
year sentence.
In 1973, Hansen was also arrested for the abduction and attempted rape of a local woman
and then again for raping a sex worker.
This is when the judge ordered Hansen to see a psychiatrist where he was soon diagnosed
with bipolar disorder.
I want to say that back in the seventies, they didn't call it bipolar disorder.
They had a different term and if I'm not mistaken, it was called manic depression.
Yes, I do recall that.
Yeah, because I've looked that up and it just goes back to that.
So beginning in 1973, police began a heavy search for the person who was raping and murdering
young women in and around Anchorage, Alaska.
Well throughout the seventies and eighties, Hansen unbeknownst to the police was beginning
to target sex workers and exotic dancers by abducting these women and turning them loose
into the woods just north of Anchorage so that he could stalk them like wild animals.
As things progressed through the seventies, in 1976, he was again arrested for shoplifting
a chainsaw.
He was sentenced to five years but appealed to the sentence and was released free and
clear.
So I kind of wanted to paint a picture as to his habitual criminal record because again,
back in 1973, the police were looking for somebody who was murdering young women in
the area and the police didn't actually know what was him.
I'm going to jump ahead just a little bit.
It'll all make sense in just a little while when I put the pieces together.
But in early of 1983, so this is 10 years after the women were starting to come up missing
and murdered.
Well, the turning point of this case bath blew wide open when a 17 year old girl named
Cindy Paulson, a sex worker in the area was lured into Hanson's car.
He suggested that they go to a nearby park to be inconspicuous about what they were about
to do.
But once she was inside the car, Hanson held Cindy at gunpoint and basically kept her captive
to do with her what he wished.
He basically abducted her off the streets, took her to his home and decided that he was
going to hold her captive.
Now being Cindy, and I like to call these people a renegade, Beth, when you've got survivors,
Cindy is definitely a renegade because after Hanson took her to his house, she began taking
mental notes of her surroundings, including the fact that the house that she had been
taken to was blue.
And once he had finished assaulting her, Hanson chained her by her neck to a beam in the basement
and went off to sleep.
Oh my.
Yeah.
Well, while he was asleep, Cindy continued to take those mental notes, which included
some of the hunting trophies and mounted taxidermy that he had on his walls.
So she's looking around, he's sleeping, he eventually wakes up Beth and he released Cindy
from that next shackle and told her to go get cleaned up in the bathroom because he
was going to go take her to his cabin.
Well, they drove to Merrill Field Airport where Hanson was preparing a flight because
he owned a little bush plane.
And as he was attempting to load her into that plane to take her to the Matanuska-Sasitna
Valley, somewhere around 35 miles away, Cindy made her run for it.
So she took off, she ran half naked and barefoot while in handcuffs to a nearby road and flagged
down Robert Yont, who was driving by at the time.
Now, Cindy asked him to take her to the Mush Inn Motel rather than the police station.
Not really sure why she would do that, but apparently she knew what she was doing.
Once the police were called, they had found out that Cindy had moved again and gone to
another motel where she was just hidden in her room and they did end up locating her,
but she was quite hysterical in her room.
She was still handcuffed and barefoot, but police were able to take those handcuffs off
of her.
And because, Beth, the story could be a little bizarre, police didn't really know what to
think, but Cindy, in her mental notes, she was able to describe her attacker's stutter,
the acne scars and the car that he had, plus the blue house that he had taken her to, and
she was able to describe that plane at the airport.
So that's a ton of information that she was able to tell the police in her report.
Sure was.
Yeah.
Well, the police went to Henson's home and basically walked up the door and knocked because,
again, he is a well-known person in the community.
He owns a family bakery and he greeted them with a smile.
He also was able to provide two alibis and the police checked them out.
Two of his friends were able to corroborate that he had spent the portions of the day
with him and the police really didn't have any more to question after that.
I will say this later on, these two friends did admit that they were lying, but in this
moment, Henson had begged his innocence, said that Cindy was trying to extort him,
and he just basically refused to pay her extra money.
So because of his alibis that he had provided and smooth talking and he was a respected
citizen in the community, the police did let him go.
And Cindy had to work really hard to convince the local authorities that what had happened
to her was real.
She was the one that was able to get away and she's trying to tell this story and unfortunately,
people were not believing her at the time.
Well, in October of 1983, in addition, Henson owned a small bush plane that I had mentioned
and he loved to go hunting.
So he had a hunting cabin in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley where several of the victims had been
found over that 10-year period, Beth.
Remember these disappearances had started back in 1973.
Well, in October of 1983, 223 shell casings were found near two victims out in the wilderness
and this was near Henson's cabin where he had his hunting cabin, you know, about 35
miles away from his home.
Police however, did not have any proof that it was Henson, so they went ahead and called
the FBI and this included the now retired FBI agent, John Douglas and he's the one
that pioneered criminal profiling, Beth.
Wow.
Yeah.
I don't know if you've ever seen that show called Mindhunter on Netflix.
I actually have it on my list to watch.
Yeah, I've watched maybe the first couple of episodes and it's actually pretty good
and I had no idea that he was the name behind this, but it's interesting that we find cases
that really connect with how people do forensics these days.
Yeah, so John Douglas was called in on this as a profiler and after several months of
trying to figure out who this killer was, Douglas profiled Henson unbeknownst to him.
Douglas profiled the perpetrator with the following characteristics connected to this
case.
He profiled that the suspect was around 40 years old.
He was a well-respected individual in his community.
He had low self-esteem, a history of being rejected by women and likely had a stutter.
He also shoplifted and could have been an arsonist.
He was an avid and experienced hunter and he likely kept souvenirs from his victims.
Beth, how do they get that out of this?
I mean, I've looked into this case and it's definitely spot on, especially what I've already
told you in this story, but how do they profile and come up with such accuracy?
Well, especially the stutter.
Yeah.
Like not too many people have that.
No, exactly.
That's interesting.
I'm going to have to research that just because how are they able to come up with such accurate
profiles is my question.
I've always been intrigued when we were watching Criminal Minds, how they can do that.
Well, on October 27th of 1983, search warrants were issued and police showed up at Hanson's
home and his wife Darla and his children were at home at the time that they arrived.
Darla had absolutely no clue what was happening and why the police were there.
So it seemed that Hanson led a double life for the last 10 years and she knew nothing
about it.
However, I will say this, throughout their marriage, Darla and her husband kept separate
bank accounts, which likely contributed to her being left in the dark on this.
I can understand that, but too though, it was a little odd back in the, I would say
seventies and eighties for husbands and wives not to have the same account.
So I'm kind of curious to know why they didn't have a joint account.
Yes, that is very interesting.
Yeah.
Well, after Hanson was arrested, they continued to search his home, his cabin and private
plane for evidence of his crimes.
And they eventually discovered an aviation map in the headboard of Darla's and Hanson's
bed.
Hanson had drawn an X on this map, which indicated the areas that he had killed or buried his
victims.
And there were a total of get this Beth, there were 24 X's on that map.
How can all those people have gone missing and nobody report them?
Well, remember now they had moved to town when the Alaskan pipeline was getting built
as well.
So you had a ton of workers coming in, depending on their expertise, they might have come in
for a month or two and then left and other people came in.
So you always had a rotation of workers.
But then also the area where the bakery was, there was also known drug dealers, known sex
workers, people like that also come and go frequently.
And of course, not a whole lot of attention is being brought to the people coming and
going.
So I think that was a big contributor.
I don't know if Robert scoped the area out on where he wanted to put his bakery before
he set up shop.
But just given the area that he worked in, there was just a lot of transients.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Based on the map, authorities were able to find additional victims in and around Acreage,
Seward and the Matanuska-Sasitna Valley areas of Alaska.
They also found jewelry from some of his victims in his basement, which I had mentioned outlined
in his profile.
He probably kept some souvenirs.
They also found firearms hidden in the back of the attic, including the gun that Hansen
had used when he kidnapped Cindy, plus the rifle he used on the other women at his cabin
when he went out hunting for them.
Cindy Paulson's shoes were eventually found in Hansen's plane and she was able to identify
her captor based on that as well.
Police had noted that after Hansen was confronted with evidence in the case, he turned into
this little mousy, mild-mannered Bob the Baker to an angry ticked off monster.
Hansen screamed at the lawyers and brushed off all of his victims as bad girls.
That's all he would say about them.
They're bad girls.
Now, how did Robert Hansen hunt his victims?
I had mentioned that he had used a rifle.
So I was curious to know what a.223 was.
So when I looked up this rifle, typically the type of bullet is used for an AR-15, which
is commonly used for hunting.
And I also saw one report that he used a Ruger Mini-14 rifle.
And to me, it looked just like an average rifle that you would see people going out
and hunting deer with.
Well, on top of this, Hansen was also a skilled bow hunter and won several trophies for his
kills, which he had mounted on his walls.
Besides his hunting expeditions, Hansen admitted that one of the women had tried to run and
a knife was in her purse.
Well, he used that to stab her to death.
Oh, that's tragic.
Yeah.
Well, Hansen originally targeted sex workers and exotic dancers in the area, like I said,
where he lived, because the shop was located very close to where the sex workers were at
during the day.
He was also a baker.
I don't know if you know anything about baker's hours.
What time do they work, Beth?
Night round, I think.
Yep.
Night round into the early mornings, right?
Exactly.
Yes.
So as they are still working their shift, or at least finishing it up, Robert Hansen
comes into work to open up his bakery.
That's perfect timing.
So he would go around looking for sex workers, luring them into his car, and then he would
kidnap them at gunpoint, just like he did with Cindy Paulson.
If the sex worker complied, he would rape them and simply put them back in town and
threaten them to secrecy.
For those women who did not comply and resisted, he would fly them out to his cabin in Matanuska,
Sassitna Valley, then set them loose by the Nick River and begin his hunt.
That's terrifying, because you imagine.
That's gross.
That's awful.
Well, what do you, do you know any hunters?
Yes, I do.
Do they ever talk about what they do all day?
They sit very quietly.
Yes.
They can sit in silence for hours, just waiting, just watching and looking for their prey.
So this is what Hansen would do.
He could spend hours in the woods, very quietly, waiting, watching, listening.
And in the meantime, when he set the women loose, he took his time and tracked them,
basically hunting them like wild animals.
He was not in a hurry, because he's an accomplished hunter.
He's won trophies.
He knows how long it can take.
So obviously he was not in any hurry to end the hunt, if that makes sense.
Sometimes it could take a couple hours to find them, and sometimes a couple days.
On February 27th of 1984, Hansen was eventually charged with four murders, along with the
kidnapping and rape of Cindy Paulson, and received a 461 year life sentence without
the possibility of parole.
He was originally sent to federal prison in Pennsylvania, but didn't get along with the
inmates.
So was sent to Minnesota before going back to Alaska.
And what do you think he went to Pennsylvania, do you ask?
Why was he sent to Pennsylvania?
Well, because he was afraid that he would run into inmates who knew his victims.
Because again, the population is very small in Alaska.
So his thoughts were, I'm going to run into an inmate whose girlfriend was out there that
I hunted.
Well, in 1990, once he returned to Alaska, he was originally sent to the Lemon Creek
Correctional Facility in Juneau, Alaska, until Beth guards discovered escape plan drawings
amongst his possessions.
They discovered an aeronautical chart, a hand knitted winter hat, magazine articles on how
to make plastic explosives, and some correspondence letters to a Juneau, Alaska boat broker.
So obviously he was setting up to escape, right?
Oh, it sounds like it.
Yeah.
Well, he was then sent to serve out his sentence in Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward,
Alaska, until he died in 2014.
He was 75 years old.
Now one of the Alaska State Troopers who had helped capture Hanson in 1984, said after
Hanson's death that this world is a better place without him, and went on to say that
we should only remember his victims and their families.
In a nutshell, Beth, more than 30 women were raped and sexually assaulted, and at least
17 women were killed.
Authorities suspected more, but Hanson accepted a plea bargain to say he would only be charged
with the 17 deaths if he assisted police in locating their bodies.
To this day, five of the bodies have yet to be discovered.
I want to spend a couple minutes on giving you the names of the victims because they
had families too.
They're in my opinion, Beth, they were somebody's daughter, sister, aunt, and maybe even a grandmother.
So I'm going to link these names in our show notes so that you can take a look at this,
but I do want to acknowledge that each woman here was a real person.
Celia Beth Van Zenten was age 17.
She would have been marked on Hanson's map with one of the X's.
Megan Emerick, age 17, also marked with an X on the map.
Mary Kathleen Thill, age 22, marked with the X on the map.
An unidentified female between the age of 16 and 25.
The authorities named her Eklutna Annie after the road where she was found.
And she was a victim who Hanson had said that she had the knife in her purse and tried to
run.
So Annie was a 20 something year old brunette who was found by an electrician who was out
repairing a power line outside of Eagle River.
And Hanson also could not or would not identify her because he said he never learned her real
name so we don't really know who that person is.
Joanna Messina, age 24.
Roxanne Eastland, age 24.
One of the five victims still missing today.
Lisa Futrell, age 41.
Sherry Morrow, age 23.
Andrea Fish Altieri, age 22.
And she's the second victim still missing today.
Sue Luna, age 23.
Robin Pelkey, age 19.
Beth, this is one of his victims that was originally named Horseshoe Harriet but she
was just identified in October of 2021 through DNA and genealogy testing.
It's amazing what they can do.
I know.
Delin Sugar Frey, age 20.
Paula Golding, age 21.
Malai Larson, age 25.
Teresa Watson, age 22.
Angela Federn, age 24.
Tamara Tammy Peterson, age 20.
So there is the list of the 17 people that Hanson confessed to.
Deb, I'm very glad that you brought all their names because they are certainly everybody's
family, mother, et cetera.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we need to remember the victims.
We do.
And I think that's one of the things that I really communicate with this podcast is
that we do try to do justice for the families.
I know that we can't do a ton just by talking about these stories.
But again, yes, these are people's family members, so they need to be remembered.
Well, nobody really is sure on what happened to Cindy Paulson, but bravo, Cindy.
You are a renegade.
We appreciate you.
You have got guts and thank you for being a survivor and getting out there and telling
your story.
Well, she was originally placed in a safe house before Hanson was arrested because obviously
nobody wanted him to come after her.
And she eventually left Anchorage for a short period of time.
And some reports also say that she had returned to sex work.
But the last that anybody has heard or believes is that she has returned to Alaska and lives
with her husband and children today.
So that's kind of the story of Robert Hanson, the butcher baker.
Now I did want to mention, Beth, that there is a movie out there with John Cusack and
it was made in 2013 called The Frozen Ground.
And I do remember watching this years ago before I even looked up this case, but it's
a really good movie and I'm not sure where you can find it.
It might be on Netflix.
It might be on Amazon Prime.
It's one of those two because those are the two streaming companies that I use.
But that's a really, really good movie if you've not watched that yet.
It's called Frozen Ground.
That's where I first heard of this case and that's the story of the butcher baker.
Well, I'm copying down Frozen Ground so that I can go look at it.
I've been taking a lot of notes.
Oh, okay.
Thank you for bringing that story forward to us, Deb.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Deb, do you have any teachable moment for us?
Teachable moment.
Beth, we cover a lot of cases and all I can say is you've got to fight.
Just fight to the end.
Fight for every chance you get.
Cindy Paulson is a great example on what it takes to get out of that situation.
Nobody knows if and when that will ever happen, but never let somebody get you to point B.
And Cindy did a great job of showing us that it can be done.
Just fight with all your might and that's all I got to say.
Okay then, I guess that's a wrap.
That is a wrap.
So thanks for listening today, everyone.
We appreciate you taking the time with us and before we go, we'd love for you to leave
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