The dense and rugged Alaskan wilderness, a place of breathtaking beauty and profound isolation, provided the perfect cover for a fierce and sadistic killer who preyed on women for over a decade, kidnapping them, raping them, and torturing them before hunting them like animals for his own twisted pleasure.
In the 1970s and 80s, people flocked to Alaska looking for a fresh start, to reinvent themselves, or to disappear for a while. But for a growing number of young women, those disappearances weren’t by choice. The serial killer’s rampage was 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 when the bodies of young women began turning up in shallow graves that dotted the Alaskan wilderness, a grim testament to a predator who was entirely at home in the rugged terrain.
The hunt for him, however, began more than 3,000 miles away, where FBI profilers mapped the criminal’s mind. The case would ultimately expose a double life of staggering depravity, revealing a seemingly respectable family man and successful business owner as one of the most prolific and sadistic serial killers in American history.
On August 13th, 1982, two off-duty Anchorage police officers were hunting moose near the Knik River in a wilderness area about 20 miles from Anchorage. As they made their way through the dense forest, they happened upon partially buried human remains. They left the scene undisturbed, and the next day, crime scene technicians from the Alaska State Troopers arrived to investigate.
Besides clothing and an elastic bandage, troopers found a . 223 caliber shell casing in the shallow grave.
Dental records identified the remains as 23-year-old Sherry Morrow, an exotic dancer reported missing a year earlier by her boyfriend. Her clothes matched the ones he reported her missing in, but her good luck charm, a gold arrowhead pendant she never took off, was gone. It was clear that Morrow was probably murdered shortly after she disappeared, giving the killer more than a year to cover his tracks.
Finding him would be next to impossible.
In the year following the discovery of Sherry Morrow’s body, more women began turning up. It’s a sad truth that finding bodies in the Alaskan wilderness wasn’t all that unusual, as two or three times a year, some novice hiker or hunter would get lost and succumb to the elements. But a growing number of bodies had a different story to tell.
During new road construction on September 2nd, 1983, a crew unearthed human skeletal remains not far from where Sherry Morrow’s body had been found one year earlier.
The remains were identified as 17-year-old Paula Goulding, an out-of-work secretary who had moved to Alaska from Hawaii. She had been missing for five months. Like Sherry Morrow, she had taken a job as an exotic dancer to make ends meet, and like Sherry Morrow, a .
223 caliber cartridge was found at the site. For Alaska State Trooper Wayne Van Clawson, the connection was frightening. The profile was the same; they were topless dancers from the clubs downtown.
It was certainly when there was the belief that there was a serial murderer out there.
Two bodies had been found, but now troopers believed there were more. They began to revisit missing person’s reports, many of which involved exotic dancers. But in Alaska, their disappearance was not unusual.
Missing persons was a relatively low priority, as statutorily, if you’re an adult, you have a right to be missing, and there were many instances where these girls would just jump on a plane and go away. Between 1980 and 1983, 12 women had been reported missing, a fraction of the unreported total. Troopers now wondered how many of the missing women were victims of the killer.
The Alaska State Troopers sent the evidence from the Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding crime scenes to the FBI’s laboratory in Washington DC for analysis. The FBI ran ballistics tests on both shell casings to see if they were shot from the same gun. The lab results were conclusive: both women were killed by the same high-powered rifle.
There was little doubt Alaska troopers were dealing with a serial killer.
While they began their hunt for him in the wilderness, the Anchorage police were dealing with their own problems. Every city has its dark side, and Anchorage is no different, except that in Alaska, the nights are longer and darker. In the 70s and 80s, Anchorage was a frontier town.
Men came here to work hard, and women followed to ease their loneliness. Some women were lured to the strip clubs, hoping to earn a quick buck. Others, looking for more respectable opportunities, worked in the clubs until something better came up.
For many, it never did. And in the city’s streets roamed a stalker who chose his victims carefully.
On the early morning of June 13th, 1983, Cindy Paulson, aged 17, ran down an Anchorage highway. She was partially dressed and in handcuffs, managing to flag down a passing truck. She was running for her life.
The motorist dropped her off at her motel apartment, and the desk clerk called the Anchorage police. Anchorage police officer Greg Baker recalls the incident: they found her in handcuffs with very little clothes on. She was very scared and very frightened, and she told them her story.
Paulson, a prostitute, told Baker that she picked up a trick the night before. She described him as wiry, scruffy, about 6 feet tall with glasses and a stutter. As soon as she stepped into his car, he handcuffed her and put a wood-handled revolver to her head.
They drove to a respectable residential neighborhood, and he pulled her into his house. The place was well-kept and full of hunting trophies. He had a chain hanging from the ceiling of his den, and he chained her up and stripped her.
There she was tortured and raped repeatedly for hours.
Then he went to take a nap, leaving her there. He said he was going to take her to his cabin in the wilderness, and if she tried to get anyone’s attention, he’d 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her and them as well. He told her he already had his alibi worked out, that his friends were willing to lie for him, and no one would believe her story.
They ended up at the airport, where she could see him loading a weapon into a small aircraft. She also saw her chance for escape, her one chance to save her life.
The story sounded outrageous, but her genuine terror compelled Officer Baker to check it out. She described the interior of the location, including a den with various animals mounted on the wall. In route to the hospital for an examination, Paulson insisted on stopping at the airport to show police the airplane she had seen earlier, which she positively identified.
While they were there, a security guard stopped them and described the car the same way Cindy had described it, giving them a license number that confirmed the address Cindy had given them regarding where the house was.
Police went to the address to speak to the owner of the car, arriving moments before he pulled up, driving the vehicle described by Cindy Paulson. According to the motor vehicle records, the car belonged to Robert Hansen, a baker in Anchorage. Hansen, who fit the description of the man Paulson described, calmly answered questions, claiming he was at a friend’s house from 5:00 p.
m. to 11:30 p. m.
preparing a seat for his airplane, and then stayed at another friend’s home until around 5:30 that morning.
Hansen gave police his consent to search his house, which was exactly as Paulson had described. That only proved she’d been in the house, not that Hansen had raped and tortured her there. They could find no evidence of that.
They did notice a loose-fitting wall panel, behind which they found a collection of weapons. They found a revolver, but it didn’t match the one Paulson described. The gun, the chain, and the blanket she was wrapped in were nowhere to be found.
Hansen’s car appeared equally clean.
Those alibis were corroborated and verified, and Mr. Hansen was released after a consent search of his house. Paulson, still shaken from her ordeal, was able to pick Hansen’s picture out of a photo lineup.
But when given the chance to take a lie detector test, she refused. Her occupation gave her an inherent distrust of the police and gave police an inherent distrust of her. Soon after, she left town for a while to try to put the nightmare behind her.
Anchorage authorities were willing to let it drop, too, because the alibis were corroborated and because they had a problem with Cindy Paulson appearing and disappearing, and of course her lifestyle left a lot to be desired.
But for officer Greg Baker, it wasn’t over. He was one officer who believed Paulson’s story and wouldn’t let it go. The predator roaming the streets of Anchorage was still out there, free to claim more victims.
Baker continued his investigation, finding nothing on the surface in Hansen’s record to arouse suspicion. He had moved to Anchorage from Iowa 16 years earlier and opened a bakery, which was a huge success. He had a wife and children and, except for his stutter, he fit in completely.
When he wasn’t in the kitchen, Hansen enjoyed flying his small airplane, a Super Cub Piper, and taking to the woods. He was a solid citizen who just didn’t fit the model of a serial killer.
A little digging revealed that Hansen’s criminal history was extensive. Twelve years earlier in 1971, he’d been arrested twice for kidnapping, rape, and assault with a deadly weapon, crimes that bore an eerie resemblance to what Cindy Paulson had endured. Baker couldn’t bring this information to his supervisor, as the Paulson case had been officially suspended and Baker was bucking authority.
That left him no alternative but to gather up all the reports and background he could find on Mr. Hansen and carry it over to the troopers.
When the troopers received the file from officer Baker, they were optimistic. Paulson’s testimony along with Hansen’s police record from Anchorage made him a prime suspect in the state case. The troopers’ investigation dovetailed with Baker’s, and they were both dealing with the same maniac.
Robert Hansen was their best suspect. The only problem was the proof. Though Hansen was a violent 𝒔𝒆𝒙 offender, his record indicated nothing about being capable of homicide, nor was there any direct link from him to Sherry Morrow, Paula Goulding, and the other missing women.
At this point, troopers didn’t even have enough for a search warrant.
Troopers needed to catch him before he killed again, and they needed help. They knew they had a mass murder on their hands, something Alaska had no experience with. To catch a killer in their own backyard, the troopers called on help from over 3,000 miles away.
Only the FBI had the resources needed to get inside a killer’s head. Quantico, Virginia is home to the FBI’s investigative support unit, where agents attempt to predict behavioral patterns by analyzing a criminal’s actions.
Retired FBI agent John Douglas helped pioneer behavioral profiling. His profiles are based on 25 years interviewing convicted killers, which taught him how to think like they do. He’s learned that serial killers are acting out their fantasies of control and conquest.
From these interviews, he distilled a checklist of traits and habits that serial killers share. They start young with lesser crimes such as arson or cruelty to animals, and over the years, their violence builds. Profilers bring the knowledge of how killers evolve to understand the criminal by looking at the crime.
The troopers contacted the FBI to see if the bureau could work up an analysis of the Anchorage killer. They hoped the profile would sharpen the investigation and bring overlooked clues to light. For a scrupulous, accurate profile, they required only facts from the troopers, no analysis or theories.
While the profile was being developed, Trooper Van Clawson went to Juneau to collect Hansen’s records from the Superior and Supreme Court archives, researching every town that Hansen had ever lived in and finding reports dating back to 1961.
While he was in Juneau, the FBI had come through with a criminal profile of the serial killer. The fact that the killer was so prolific meant to Douglas that he could function unnoticed within the community, someone who worked independently, most likely a business owner. The killer would be an avid outdoorsman since the bodies were recovered in remote areas of wilderness.
Since he preyed on prostitutes, Douglas concluded the killer had difficulty talking to women, had low self-esteem, and grew up feeling like an outcast.
Based on killers with similar profiles, Douglas provided a specific characteristic to explain the cause of those feelings of inadequacy, a feature that bore an eerie resemblance to Robert Hansen. The one thing that totally blew them all away was that the profile suggested he would either be a stutterer or someone who has a lisp, a speech defect. Upon Van Clawson’s return, troopers studied the files.
The records showed that Hansen had spent three years in a reformatory for setting fire to his old high school’s bus garage, matching the profiler’s prediction of a history of arson.
The profile painted the killer as a social misfit, and Hansen’s court-ordered psychiatric reports from his days at the reformatory bore this out. His stutter was a social barrier that undermined his self-confidence. Whenever he tried to assert himself, he’d be slapped down, and he never forgot the sting.
The profile said the killer would learn to function as a normal member of society while his perversions festered within. His record showed that in his 30s, Hansen began working at a bakery, bragging to co-workers about his kleptomania and the sense of power it gave him.
He also bragged about his love of hunting, taking great pleasure in exerting power over his prey, stalking it, then wounding it, and he became good at the 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁, winning prestigious awards. In 1967, he moved to Alaska to start a new life and for better hunting. Three years after moving there, his record showed he was arrested for the attempted rape of a young receptionist at gunpoint, pleading no contest to assault with a deadly weapon.
A little more than a month later, he was indicted for the attempted assault of an 18-year-old woman he followed home.
True to the profile, Hansen seemed a respectable citizen, so the courts were lenient. In one case, he claimed to have memory lapses and was given psychiatric treatment and five years in a work release program. He abducted one of his early victims outside a coffee shop, took her to a cabin in the wilderness, and raped her at gunpoint.
She was 17 at the time. He told her that if she called the police, he would hunt her down and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her, and that he was a fine, outstanding businessman, and she was just a kid and nobody would believe her. And he was right.
Everything the profiler said about the perpetrator of the serial killings fit suspect Robert Hansen, a truly dangerous man who was passing as a nondescript face in the crowd. While troopers zeroed in on Hansen, they spread out to search for more victims in the Knik River area where three bodies had been found, but they came up empty. The area was too large and remote to cover completely.
Despite the compelling FBI profile and the past police records, troopers lacked anything tangible to link Hansen to the killings. His police records were too stale, the evidence too circumstantial to hold any weight in a court of law.
Investigators hoped that Cindy Paulson could help, as she was the only surviving victim to Hansen’s current wave of violence. Paulson gave another statement, and this time, she was able to ID one of the guns Hansen had in his possession. Aside from Paulson, Hansen had not been implicated in a rape or abduction for more than 10 years.
But in the hopes of strengthening their case and establishing a pattern of behavior, investigators searched for another of Hansen’s victims from years earlier, whose experience matched Paulson’s. Although this prior victim no longer lived in the area, troopers tracked her down and asked for her help.
She agreed to testify when the time came, but troopers still had a weak case. According to Anchorage Police Officer Greg Baker, Hansen knew that authorities were on to something. Baker recalled watching Hansen at his bakery, and you could tell he was nervous, as he kept putting frosting on his thumb.
Although investigators had Hansen in their sights, they still lacked the evidence to connect him directly to the crimes. Because Hansen matched the profile so closely, Douglas flew to Alaska to review the case and to brief the troopers and prosecutor Frank Rothschild on how to proceed with the suspect.
Douglas was confident that Hansen was their serial killer. The hunter was now the hunted. Douglas’s idea was to bring Hansen in for questioning while simultaneously searching his house.
To obtain a warrant, investigators needed to list specific items they believed to be in the house. They knew to look for the gun that Cindy Paulson described and the one that fired the bullets found in the graves of Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding. But that wasn’t enough.
They needed a home run, something that would prove Hansen’s guilt in no uncertain terms.
They asked Douglas if there was anything else to list in the warrant. Yes. Some of the research findings is we’re dealing here with a serial killer.
And serial killers, it starts off as fantasy. And one of the things to keep the fantasy going after the crime is because they’re on the hunt nightly looking for victims, they take some type of memento, we call them either souvenirs or trophies, something belonging to the victims. Douglas helped prosecutors write the affidavit based on the likelihood of finding mementos mentioned in the profile.
But a behavioral profile had never been used as the basis of a search warrant in the United States before. Rothschild knew he’d need to back it up with more conventional information. The district attorney’s office wanted this search warrant to be bulletproof, absolutely positively without flaw, because they knew this was a big, big case.
The affidavit swelled to 48 pages. The judge granted eight search warrants for Hansen’s property. Now they just needed Hansen.
On October 23rd, 1983, they went to pick him up at his bakery, but Hansen wasn’t there. He’d gotten off to a late start, unwittingly keeping the troopers waiting 20 minutes. When asked to come in for questioning, he didn’t resist.
The interrogation room was ready for him, designed for the biggest psychological impact. Crime scene photos and related materials were strewn everywhere for Hansen to contemplate before his interview. The FBI coached Rothschild on how to play it, asking him questions in a way that would prompt more discussion.
While Rothschild tried to get Hansen to open up and confess, troopers served the search warrants. Hansen’s wife was home, and the troopers were extra cautious, videotaping the entire procedure. Hansen knew the troopers had access to his police and psychological records.
He spoke of his painful upbringing, his strict family, his anger. He admitted to picking up dancers and prostitutes in the early 70s and how enraged he became when they tried to raise their prices, but he denied threatening any of them. He admitted nothing.
While Hansen told his story and his house was being turned inside out, other troopers headed to his bakery and to the airport to search his plane. Both were clean. The house became the focal point of the investigation.
A careful search of the upstairs bedroom finally yielded a curious and eerie discovery: an aerial map of the region peppered with 37 X’s. They seemed to be clustered mainly around the area where bodies have been found, but there were dozens more marks than bodies, at least so far.
The searchers continued up to the attic, where under insulation, the troopers found weapons. Among the items found were a . 223 Ruger Mini-14 rifle like the one used to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding and a wood-handled revolver resembling the one described by Cindy Paulson.
The net was closing on Hansen, and he knew it, but he wasn’t ready to talk just yet. The interview dragged on for hours, and it didn’t seem like a confession was likely.
While troopers collected the evidence, the case unwound even further. Hansen’s friend and neighbors stopped by, curious about the activity. One friend was stunned by the news, then made a confession that demolished the last of Hansen’s story.
She told troopers that her husband provided Hansen with his alibi on the night of Cindy Paulson’s abduction. He’d lied to protect his friend, not realizing how serious Hansen’s charges were. The husband later called police and retracted his statement.
Hansen’s alibi evaporated.
As the search continued, the troopers found the most incriminating evidence so far, evidence that Douglas knew had to be there somewhere. They found Sherry Morrow’s necklace and other personal property belonging to the dead or missing women. They had found Hansen’s stash of trophies.
Though they had Hansen where they wanted him, still he wouldn’t confess. But they had enough to lock him up on the Cindy Paulson case. Bail was set at $500,000.
Investigators now had time to build their case against Hansen as a serial killer. They called the prior victim to see if she was still on board. Three points on the map found in his bedroom match the locations of bodies recovered by the troopers.
Another X marked the location of a body recovered by Seward police years earlier. The remaining X’s presumably marked the graves of more victims, dozens of them. Looking at the map obviously was pretty chilling because they believed the map was a body count as far as they were concerned.
The man had kept track.
When the troopers believed they had enough to convict Hansen on at least four murders, they confronted him and his lawyer with the evidence. Hansen couldn’t refute it. He had no place left to hide.
Finally, it was time to confess, time for Hansen to cut a deal. Hansen said he would confess to the murders that could be proven as long as the trial was given no publicity and that his family be left alone. He demanded that he be imprisoned outside of Alaska when the trial was over.
In exchange for only four convictions, he agreed to show the troopers where more bodies were buried.
Investigators called the prior victim to tell her the good news. The third time they called back and said that he had confessed and they wouldn’t need her. She hung up the phone, got her son off to school, got her husband out the door, and proceeded to fall apart.
She started crying and couldn’t stop. She could see each and every one of those women and how they died, probably hunted down like dogs, wounded, and then hunted more.
In his confession, Hansen described how he would take his victims into the woods and hunt them as prey. Over the dozen years that he lived in Alaska, he’d raped more than 30 women and developed many strategies for capturing them. Once he found a likely target, a solitary woman like Sherry Morrow, he would befriend her and arrange to meet her at a fast food place.
If they were dancers or aspiring models, he’d offer to pay to photograph them. He’d arrive early and stay in his car, ensuring the woman arrived alone and had no one waiting for her in the parking lot. No witnesses.
One half of the handcuff was already fastened to the seat. Hansen boasted that snapping the other half onto his victim’s wrist while reaching for his gun became like a reflex. Then he would take them home or to a remote motel to rape and torture them.
Afterwards, he’d blindfold them and drive or fly them to the outskirts of town until he arrived at a secluded spot, his hunting ground. His habit was to toy with his prey before he made the 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. Hansen confessed that in the summer of 83 he devised what he called his summer plan, sending his family away so he could bring his victims home.
On February 27th, 1984, Robert Hansen was convicted of murdering four women and sentenced to 461 years plus life with no chance of parole. After his sentencing, Hansen accompanied troopers into the field to find more of his victims, represented by X’s on his map. A total of eight victims were found.
Some places on the map went unexplored, and bears scavenged others, scattering the remains. Investigators will never know how many of the 37 X’s represented one of Hansen’s victims.
According to John Douglas, the map might have depicted only a small part of his hunting grounds. Killers like Hansen will come into contact with a lot of women, but fantasy is everything. They may not like the way the person talks or the person dresses, and so they’ll make a decision.
This one will live, this one over here will die. Douglas believes Hansen was good for a lot more cases, and there was a chance that one of the reasons that caused him to go up to Alaska was that he was running away from homicides back in the lower 48. In the United States, an estimated 35 to 50 serial killers are active at any given time.
Profiling has made them easier to spot and apprehend, and each time one is captured, investigators learn more about their twisted motivations, making it easier to catch the next one.
