Robert Hansen

What the record shows

Robert Hansen was an Anchorage, Alaska, bakery owner who pleaded guilty in February 1984 to murdering four women in south-central Alaska and later admitted to killing 17. He was never tried: under a plea agreement he was convicted of the four murders, along with related felonies, and was sentenced to 461 years in prison. He died in state custody on August 21, 2014, aged 75, at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, after a year of declining health, according to the Anchorage Daily News and the Associated Press.

Hansen was born on February 15, 1939, in Estherville, Iowa, and moved to Anchorage in 1967, where he opened a bakery. According to the Wikipedia article, he had earlier served about twenty months of a three-year sentence for arson in Iowa and, in Alaska, had several arrests for theft and a 1971 conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. A woman accused him of rape in 1971, the Anchorage Daily News reported. He was a licensed pilot who owned a Piper Super Cub, and the press later called him the Butcher Baker.

Investigators and later court proceedings described a pattern in which Hansen picked up young women in Anchorage, many of them dancers or sex workers, took them to his home and then flew them to remote areas north and east of the city, where he killed them and buried them in shallow graves. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that he abducted and hunted women in the wilderness north of Anchorage in the early 1980s. His most frequent burial area, according to the AP's 2014 obituary, was along the Knik River northeast of Anchorage. The remains of an unidentified young woman, later known as Eklutna Annie, were found near Eklutna Lake Road in July 1980; Hansen told investigators she was his first victim. Further remains were found along the Knik River in 1982 and 1983.

The case turned in June 1983, when a 17-year-old woman ran into a Fifth Avenue motel in Anchorage wearing handcuffs and told police that Hansen had held her captive, raped her and put her on his plane, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Police did not at first treat him as a serious suspect. Alaska State Trooper investigator Glenn Flothe linked three bodies found in the region, and the FBI helped build an offender profile, according to the Wikipedia article. Hansen was arrested in October 1983. A search of his home turned up jewelry belonging to missing women, firearms including a Ruger Mini-14 rifle, and an aviation chart marked with locations; the Anchorage Daily News described the map as marked with 17 locations.

After ballistics tests matched bullets from crime scenes to his rifle, Hansen agreed to a plea bargain. In February 1984 he pleaded guilty to four murders, those of Sherry Morrow, Joanna Messina, Paula Goulding and the woman known as Eklutna Annie, and received a 461-year sentence. The AP reported that the agreement spared prosecutors 17 separate trials. As part of the deal he confessed to killing 17 women and raping about 30 others over roughly a dozen years, and he showed investigators from a helicopter where he had left bodies. Troopers recovered 12 sets of remains; the rest have never been found. The Anchorage Daily News reported in 2014 that he may have killed as many as 21 women, though that figure is not a confession or conviction count.

Hansen served his sentence first in a federal prison in Pennsylvania and in Minnesota, then at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, where officials found escape plans, and finally at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, the Anchorage Daily News reported. On May 11, 2014, he was moved to the Anchorage Correctional Complex for medical care. The Department of Corrections said he appeared to have died of natural causes; a do-not-resuscitate order was on file, according to the AP.

Identification of the victims continued after his death. In October 2021 the Alaska Bureau of Investigation's Cold Case Investigation Unit announced that a woman whose remains were recovered near Horseshoe Lake in 1984, and who had been buried as an unknown under the name Horseshoe Harriet, was Robin Pelkey, a 19-year-old born in Colorado. Her remains were exhumed in 2014, and the identification was made through genetic genealogy and a DNA match with a relative in Arkansas, according to the Associated Press and Alaska Public Media. As of that announcement, Eklutna Annie remained the one recovered victim still unidentified, and troopers said they were working with genealogy laboratories to identify her. Hansen's case was the basis for the 2013 film The Frozen Ground.