He was moving them alive out to a remote stretch of the Knik River, releasing them into the wilderness only to hunt them down, gun them down, and bury them where they fell. Between 1971 and 1983, Robert Hansen, known later as the Butcher Baker, carried out a string of killings across Alaska. He would eventually confess to the murders of seventeen women, making him the most prolific serial killer in the history of the state. But he enjoyed it.

He was a hunter by nature, and it was all part of a sick fantasy. This is the story of how investigators finally caught him, told with the help of retired Alaska State Trooper Sergeant James McCann, who helped investigate Robert Hansen and bring him to justice. Alaska is a land of splendor and beauty, remote and rugged, and everything people say about it rings true. But its people are among the gentlest you will ever meet, except for the few who come here to hide.

They arrive with no friends, no family, no acquaintances, and they somehow blend into the community. For law enforcement, it was a difficult time. Crime overwhelmed the state during the days of pipeline construction, and troopers worked around the clock, sometimes seven days a week. There was no such thing as overtime.

You just worked, and it was exhausting. McCann gained a lot of experience quickly, but during the pipeline era, prostitution was a major problem. Drugs became a major issue, and the murders they encountered were usually drug-related, or involuntary manslaughter, crimes of passion. Those were the ordinary killings.

They didn’t know much about this thing called serial murder. Viewers need to understand that Alaska, and indeed anywhere in the 1970s, had no internet. They couldn’t Google terms like serial murder. They had never even heard of such terminology.

In 1980, the body of a woman was discovered in a remote area outside Anchorage. Investigators found a corpse they could not identify, and lab personnel reconstructed her facial features out of clay and other materials. They had a sketch made which they released to the public, and they dubbed her Eklutna Annie. Her body was found in a wooded area off the Eklutna Lake Road.

It is a beautiful road, busier now than it was back then. It leads to Eklutna Lake, a postcard place with towering mountains, some snow on the peaks, and a beautiful emerald green lake fed by glacial waters. It is a gorgeous spot. There are a number of things that work in favor of law enforcement in eventually revealing a body like that.

The conditions of rain and snow wash away some of the soil, work it down into the ground, and shift part of it. Then there is animal predation. Bears. The Eklutna area is teeming with bears, black bears and grizzlies, as well as marten, wolves, and lynx.

They can smell it. It might take a year or two or three, but eventually someone will come along and find that body. That is how they found Eklutna Annie. As more bodies surfaced, investigators began searching for links between the cases.

Alaska State Troopers headquarters is in Anchorage, the state’s largest city, about 370 miles south of Fairbanks, where McCann lived and worked at the time of the Hansen case. His primary role was heading and supervising the investigation unit for the entire interior region of Alaska. Trooper investigators in Anchorage had a number of female victims whose bodies had been found in a rural area along what is known as the Knik River. It is a large, glacier-fed river flowing toward the Mat-Su Valley on out to Turnagain Arm.

McCann has to admit he didn’t really know about all these crimes happening in Anchorage. He didn’t read the Anchorage newspaper every day. He assumed his men in the south were on top of things, aware of the situation, and would notify outside units like his. They didn’t.

Most of the victims were sex workers, so it was very difficult to trace their backgrounds. They had no families there. Investigators processed the crime scenes and treated the cases as individual sexual murders, not as serial murders. One woman’s account becomes central to the investigation.

Cindy Paulson, seventeen years old. McCann knew there was one case being handled by the Anchorage Police Department that was central to all their efforts. It involved a young woman named Cindy Paulson, the girl who managed to escape. From the Anchorage Police Department’s investigation into the charges against Robert Hansen for kidnapping and raping Miss Paulson, they know that he kept her overnight at his home, committed his crimes against her, then cuffed her hands and placed her in his vehicle, driving her to a small airfield just on the outskirts of bustling downtown Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city.

Robert Hansen was known in hunting circles as a skilled bowhunter with a small business, a bakery. He took her there, and he was very confident and reckless. He placed her in the back seat of his aircraft, the seats arranged in tandem. But before takeoff, you first have to untie the airplane.

It is secured from the wings to tie-down bolts in the ground. You have to do a pre-flight inspection. You need to make sure the ailerons and flaps are working, all of that, and that there is no damage to the aircraft. You walk around and inspect it.

You might check the oil and things like that. It is a routine you always get used to. You might think a serial killer wouldn’t do that. But he was going through his normal routine.

Perhaps he felt he would never be caught. He had done this before. He felt he had complete control over his victim. It never crossed his mind, as he walked around the aircraft, that she, with great cleverness, and it is difficult to get in and out of these small planes, managed to slip out, leaving her shoes behind, and ran barefoot down the airstrip.

She ran until a passerby saw her. Police were called and the investigation began. Of course Hansen had fled. He had taken off in his plane.

But they called him in. They were able to identify him through Miss Paulson. A little digging in the records would have revealed that Hansen had prior convictions for assaulting women. That should tell you something.

So they interrogated Hansen. He denied it. Then they went and interrogated the alibi witness who provided him with his excuse, and who destroyed their investigation at that moment. He had a solid alibi.

They couldn’t make him change his story or tell the truth. They leaned toward believing him and did not believe the victim who worked as a prostitute. That is unfortunate. Cindy Paulson identified Robert Hansen as her attacker.

And despite another man coming forward to confirm Hansen’s alibi, the police had already found evidence inside his home supporting Cindy’s account. Anchorage Police, having searched Hansen’s home earlier based on what Miss Paulson told them, found exactly what she described. She said she was chained to a support post in the basement. She was held there overnight.

She was sexually assaulted over a period of time. She was forced to urinate on the floor. She said he had a number of wildlife trophies he had hunted hanging on his walls. And she said he went into a hidden chamber in one of the basement walls.

Anchorage Police found those things to be true. They found the hidden chamber. Inside they found various disguises, beards, wigs, glasses, and things like that, and a mustache. Interesting, but it stopped there.

Whatever was happening in the Anchorage Police Department, at least two investigators went to the state troopers because they knew they had the bodies of women found at the Knik River, a very rural area. They disobeyed orders and came to the troopers and talked to them about it, raising the idea that Robert Hansen might be a serial killer and responsible for these crimes. McCann salutes them for that. At any rate, because of his experience and success in crime scene investigation as well as his success in interviewing and interrogating criminals, Colonel Gient told his investigation unit that McCann should be brought to Anchorage to help.

So he headed south, and that is where it all began for him. Investigators now suspected Robert Hansen was responsible for several murders, but they still needed evidence linking him directly to the crimes. The goal was to go back and execute a search warrant on Robert Hansen’s home to see if they could find evidence linking him to the crime scenes of the victims found within the jurisdiction of the Alaska State Troopers, the girls buried at the Knik River. Because as it turned out, Hansen, for all his supposed cleverness, had left some spent shell casings at those crime scenes.

They were . 223 caliber, most likely fired from a semi-automatic rifle. So the troopers wanted to obtain another search warrant. They wanted to find a weapon that matched those casings.

That was the most important element. McCann took it upon himself to contact the former alibi witness in the Paulson case, the witness for Robert Hansen who had completely derailed their investigation. He was able to get him to admit that he had lied to police, that Hansen in fact had not been with him, and this gave them probably the first glimmer of hope that they were on the right track to building this case. But they still had to find some evidence in Hansen’s home.

After Hansen’s alibi was disproven, investigators obtained a new warrant to search his home. McCann personally went to Hansen’s house to assist the other investigators in executing the search warrant and looking for evidence. The men in charge there, the Anchorage Police, went to the hidden cabinet in the wall, and laughably assigned McCann to the closet in the basement that was full of stuff. It was packed with boxes of things, completely crammed.

They told him, “Yeah, this is your job. ” Fine. He will accept this assignment. He remained in that closet for a long time.

He knew that behind him, in the rest of the basement, his investigators and their Anchorage team had found the same masks that Hansen had hidden there earlier. He hadn’t gotten rid of them. That is the way of serial killers, in a way. They become emboldened by these things.

They commit their crimes in plain sight of law enforcement. McCann continued searching that closet and looked at a box in the corner. He opened it, and inside were a large number of sectional aviation charts. At the time, he was a pilot, a private pilot, sometimes flying for the state in their aircraft.

He knew the value of sectional aviation charts. He learned that from old bush pilots, because they have very few airports outside the busy urban areas. Things can go wrong when you are flying. If the engine quits or there is a mechanical failure, you might want to know where you can land if possible.

He learned to fly with his thumb on his sectional chart resting on his knee, tracking his course. If he looked down and saw an old mining site with a small grass or gravel airstrip, or even a mountainside covered in tundra where he could land the plane one time, he would mark it on his chart. That is what Hansen had done. He had followed the same methods of marking his chart.

But McCann found one chart where he could see nothing but a number of X marks, some of them in the middle of Kenai Lake. It is a huge lake south of Anchorage. They were right in the middle of the lake. But other marks drew his attention, especially those on the Knik River, where the troopers had investigated bodies found there.

So he called over his colleagues from Anchorage and said, “What do you have here? Look at this. ” Those marks on the aviation chart corresponded to crime scenes they already knew about or would later come to know. So that sectional chart became a very important piece of evidence.

The last place to search was the attic. They went up there, and it was very dusty and dirty, and the fiberglass insulation makes you sneeze and cough and your eyes itch. It is a nasty place. They asked them, “What is up there?

” Well, there were some boxes of Christmas decorations hidden there. “What else? ” “Nothing. ” “Well, what does it look like?

” “Just insulation on the roof framing, then the roof. ” Then they said, “Well, just lift it. ” “You want us to lift this insulation? ” “Yes, lift it.

” “And they found what we were looking for. ” Upon lifting some of that insulation, they found jewelry. At another section of insulation, they lifted it and found a number of long guns, hunting rifles and maybe a shotgun. But the rifle they were looking for was a Ruger Mini-14, .

223 caliber. That made them very happy. Later, their firearms experts were able to match the bolt marks on the rifle microscopically to the firing pin and bolt marks on the empty casings found at their crime scenes along the Knik River. They knew then they had won.

They had him on the alibi witness in the Paulson case who admitted to McCann he had lied. They had the X marks on his map. They had his disguises in the hide he had in the basement. Yes, they now had a case against Robert Hansen, and smiles were on everyone’s faces.

Later, Hansen himself, as part of an agreement, was able to show investigators where he had committed some of the other murders and where the victims were buried. Not all of them, but many of them matched those marks. That aviation chart was crucial evidence. The investigation also revealed how Hansen used his plane to transport his victims far from Anchorage.

He was a private pilot who owned a small plane, a Piper Super Cub, a two-seater that was in high demand. They call them rag wings because they are covered in fabric on the wings and the fuselage. It is very lightweight. It can land in places other planes cannot reach, and hunters use them all over Alaska and, in fact, all over the world.

They are highly sought after for off-airport landings. Hansen had his Super Cub, which he used to transport his victims alive to his remote area on the Knik River. He had a cabin in that area. Hansen knew that territory well.

He felt comfortable there. And whatever fear he felt of being caught in the city, once the plane was in the air, he must have felt euphoria. That he had done it again. That he had gotten away with it again.

He would go there, fly low over the area. There is no one there. He lands the plane. Then, as mentioned, he would release them and let them run, then chase them, shoot them, and bury their bodies.

Burying a body is not easy work. Hansen, like most other serial killers, is truly that odd person standing next to you. Hansen’s appearance did not make him stand out in a crowd at all. He was just an ordinary man.

He lived in an ordinary neighborhood in a small wooden home with a small family and a dog or two. He owned a small business, a bakery. McCann thinks he was probably thrilled by that part. He even gave away free donuts to the Anchorage Police.

And for a serial killer, that must have been a moment of delight for him. That must have been something he thoroughly enjoyed. To be that killer and be so close to the police without being discovered. Robert Hansen pleaded guilty to four murders and confessed to killing seventeen women.

In February 1984, he was sentenced to life plus 461 years without the possibility of parole, and he remained there until his death on August 21, 2014. He was 75 years old. But one part of the case remains unsolved. The woman investigators called Eklutna Annie, whose body was discovered in 1980, has never been identified.

After more than four decades, investigators continue to search for her real name. Who was Eklutna Annie, and could advances in DNA technology finally provide the answer?