KILLER PROFILES: Robert Hansen - "The Butcher Baker"

Alaska boomed in the mid-1970s with the construction of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline, bringing scores of jobs and an influx of men-along with strippers, prostitues, pimps, and drug dealers.

It proved to be a recipe for murder as women- mostly dancers and hookers- started turning up dead in the wilderness around Anchorage in the early 1980s, a crime spree that stumped investigators until one of the victims escaped.

On June 13, 1983, a man picked up 17-year-old Cindy Paulson and offered her $200 for oral sex in his car. He pointed a gun at her, handcuffed her and drove her to his home where he chained her to a post in the basement and raped and tortured her before taking her to Merrill Field airport.

As he loaded his private plane, she ran away-still cuffed and barefoot-and flagged down a passing truck and contacted the police. Her description of her attacker led investigators to Robert Hansen, a mild-mannered baker with a wife and two children who had moved to Alaska from Iowa in the 1960s.

Claiming the woman was trying to extort him, Hansen was released but remained a suspect. In 1983, police searched his home, cars and plane and found jewelry from some of the victims and a flight chart with 37 X’s matching the location of the known bodies and many more.

Hansen would confess to murdering 17 woman and attacking at least another dozen more starting in 1971, targeting victims he thought nobody would miss. He would fly some of them out to the woods in his private plane and chase them down like a game. Some he shot or stabbed to death, others he let go, but they were too terrified to report him.

Dubbed “The Butcher Baker”, he pleaded guilty to four murders and helped lead police to the graves of his other victims. Hansen died in 2014 at the age of 75 while serving a 461-year sentence.

[He] learned he needed to take women who weren’t easily believed or cared about by the community or police.