The trans-Alaska pipeline project helped bring large numbers of people to Anchorage in the middle of the 1970s, transforming it into a factory town of oil barons, laborers, and a vice financial system of unauthorized sex and drugs. Anchorage, a market town in the Last Frontier state, was inhabited by people who had left everything behind: many without connections to their society or origins, those who were starting over. Those who wouldn’t be noticed if they vanished from their private label homes in Alaska.
As a result, once Anchorage’s sex workers started to vanish in the late 1970s, nobody started noticing. However, state police were placed on alert on September 2, 1983. At that time, a road building crew discovered Paula Goulding, a 17-year-old exotic dancer, dead on the Knik River’s banks. Her remains, which had been missing for five months, were discovered close to those of Sherry Morrow, a 23-year-old exotic dancer.
Near the bodies of both women were.223 bullet casings and ballistics analysis revealed that they had all been shot using the same powerful deer rifle. They had been hunted and killed like wild animals in the Alaskan wilderness, away from the developing city where they had previously resided. Let’s know who did it (you already know from the title) and why.
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Early Life Of Baker Butcher
The older of 2 kids, Robert Christian Boes Hansen, was born to a Danish mother and a Danish father on February 15, 1939, in Estherville, Iowa’s Coleman Hospital. In 1942, the family relocated to California; however, in 1949, they came back to Iowa and settled in Pocahontas. Edna Margret Petersen was his mom. Robert worked at the city bakery owned by Robert’s father, Christian Hansen (1907–1983).
He used to suffer from uncomfortable shyness, speech impediment, and severe skin problems that left a permanent mark. Hansen grew to dislike the good-looking girls at school because he didn’t get the recognition he wished from them and harbored imaginations of horrific retaliatory action. Hansen was mentioned as quiet and a loner throughout the whole of his adolescent years, and he struggled to get along with his controlling father. He began to practice archery and hunting and frequently sought comfort in these activities.
Hansen joined the US Army Reserve in 1957 and continued to serve a year before being released. Later, he was employed as a drill trainer’s assistant at a training academy in Pocahontas, Iowa. In that location, he started dating a younger woman. In the summer of 1960, he wed her. Carolyn Jean Willis was one of his wives, according to Ancestry.com.
The Serial Killer Of Alaska
Very little about Robert Hansen, the ordinary-looking native of Anchorage who finally admitted to murdering 17 women in the Alaskan wilderness, seemed suspicious at first glance. Before the pipeline boom in the 1960s, he had relocated from Iowa to Alaska. He was married and had two kids. He started a bakery in the city’s center, and it was a stable and successful small business.
According to Frank Rothschild, the district attorney’s assistant who attempted Hansen’s case, “the cops frequented there for coffee and pastries all the time.” During his teenage years, Hansen found it challenging to converse with girls because of his stammer. He turned to crime as a way to express his feelings of sexual refusal and resentment. He began with smaller acts of violence like robbery and advanced to criminal damage, destroying a school bus garage in his hometown of Pocahontas, Iowa, in 1960, for which he was sentenced to 20 months behind bars.
He loved to hunt as well. He obtained his pilot’s license and bought a small airplane after getting married and relocating to Alaska, ostensibly for use in the Alaskan woods hunting. Hansen was charged with rape as early as 1971, but it wasn’t until June 13, 1983, when Cindy Paulson, an Anchorage sex worker, was apprehended while hitchhiking and uncontrollable, partially naked and handcuffed.
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How Butcher Got Caught
Paulson described the circumstances of her kidnapping to police that seemed too traumatic to be true: She had been picked up in the car of a gangly, unshaven man who was asking for sex. Paulson claimed that after being cuffed to the car and grabbed with a revolver, she was taken to the man’s house, where he tied her to the roof of his den before continually raping and torturing her.
Paulson was then taken to a small nearby airport where she managed to flee while her attacker filled his shrub plane. Paulson recognized Hansen’s aircraft at the airport after being taken there by police. A security staff there confirmed her account and claimed to have recorded the offender’s license plate. When cops went to the address provided on the vehicle number, the residence’s interior matched the description Paulson had provided.
That plane belonged to Robert Hansen. According to Rothschild, “We had him fairly cold on a kidnapping and raping case.” A case that was strangely similar to what was actually going to happen to all these other women, according to us, was this one.
The Confinement
In return for a simpler time going through the legal system, Hansen finally admitted to 17 murders after realizing the game was up. Because although Alaska didn’t have the death sentence, Hansen asked to be detained outside of the state (to reduce the chance that he would run into those who knew him or his survivors) and wanted his case maintained out of the spotlight. The terms were accepted by Rothschild’s office, and Hansen was given a life sentence plus 461 years. At the age of 75, he passed away in 2014.
According to Rothschild, he does not feel guilty about not being able to seek the death penalty.
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