Robert Hansen had a bakery in Anchorage, a wife, children, and a spotless reputation.
No one in that Alaskan city imagined that this quiet neighbor was an expert pilot and hunter, or that he used both skills for something that appears in no hunting manual: he took women, many of them sex workers, to remote areas of the forest in his own small plane, released them, and then pursued them with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle. For more than a decade, between 1971 and 1983, no one connected the dots.
Everything fell apart in 1983, when Cindy Paulson, just 17 years old, managed to escape and tell the police everything. That escape led investigators to a map marked with the locations where Hansen buried his victims and jewelry that identified them. He confessed to 17 murders and received a 461-year prison sentence. He died at Spring Creek prison in 2014, never having set foot again on the street where he had his business.
