Robert (Bob the Baker) Hansen blamed his tortured adolescence for the rape and murder of dozens of women in Alaska in 1970s
By DAVID J. KRAJICEK
A high school loser, Robert (Bob the Baker) Hansen tortured and murdered as many as 21 women in Alaska in the 1970s. (Anchorage Daily News/MCT)
The face of evil in Alaska was scarred from adolescent acne.
And so was his psyche.
Robert (Bob the Baker) Hansen raped, tortured and murdered a young woman every six months or so from the early 1970s until he was stopped by arrest in 1983.
Like a brigade of other serial killers, he found his victims among women who worked in the sex trades.
In the '70s, scores of young women were drawn to Anchorage from the Lower 48 by the thousands of workmen with bulging wallets who were building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and its parallel road, the Dalton Highway.
Hansen plucked his prey at strip clubs like the Wild Cherry or along the curbs of Fourth Ave., then the city's Tenderloin.
Baker led police to 17 remote gravesites where they tallied a dozen bodies. (Paul Brown/MCT)
And in a stock plot point from a familiar true crime script, no one paid attention when strippers and hookers began disappearing on the transient edges of Anchorage.
Hansen, a mousy man, gave a compelling self-diagnosis of his pathologies when he finally sat down for a chat with police.
He linked his psychopathy to unfulfilled sexual yearning, which he blamed on the twin turnoffs of acne and stuttering during his boyhood in small-town Iowa.
"Going back in my life … I was ... I guess what you might call very frustrated," Hansen said. "I would see my friends and so forth going out on dates and so forth and had a tremendous desire to do the same thing.
"From the scars and so forth on my face you can probably see, I could see why girls wouldn't want to get close to me…During my junior high or high school days I could not control my speech at all. I was always so embarrassed and upset with it from people making fun of me that I hated the word school."
Map of Anchorage, Alaska, where serial killer Robert Hansen raped around 30 women and murdered over 20. (JR/New York Daily News)
In 1960, two years after high school, he exacted revenge by burning down the school bus garage in his hometown, Pocahontas, Iowa.
It was his first step down a crooked path through life.
Hansen spent 20 months in the Iowa pen, where a shrink judged him to have "infantile personality," marked by childlike hysteria, volatile emotions and clingy fixations on others.
After parole, Hansen married and decided to make a start fresh in Alaska. The couple arrived in 1967.
The Iowa outdoors had provided an escape from his teenage anxieties, and Hansen brought a formable set of hunting skills to the Last Frontier. He stalked game with a cat's stealth, and he had deadeye aim with both a rifle and a bow.
He filled his Anchorage home with trophy animal mounts, including record-breaking Dall sheep and grizzlies that earned him local publicity.
He lived with his wife and two children in a modest home at the edge of town, and he earned a living as his father had, as proprietor of a small bakery.
He got a flying license, bought a Piper Cub and became a competent bush pilot, handy for hunting adventures.
Though cloaked in respectability, Bob the Baker lived a secret shadow life.
He was a regular at strip clubs and on Fourth Ave., where potential partners learned to conform to one of Hansen's quirks: They had to make the first move, part of his elaborate fantasy to demean women.
Criminal investigators search for bodies along the Knik River in Alaska on April 1984. (Paul Brown/MCT)
"She had to come out and say we could do it but it's going to cost you some money," he later said. "Then she was no longer I guess what you might call a decent girl."
In the mid-'70s, at least two prostitutes told cops that Hansen was a nut job with rape fantasies. Neither complaint found much traction with police, who judged the victims flighty.
He finally came under scrutiny in 1983.
On June 13, a teenage prostitute narrowly escaped from a man who kidnapped and raped her in the basement of his house. The next day, he spirited the woman away in handcuffs to his small airplane at an airfield in Anchorage.
As the man was loading gear, she bolted from the plane - still cuffed - and flagged down a motorist. The woman told police her assailant was Bob Hansen.
Robert (Bob the Baker) Hansen died at age 75 on Aug. 21, after 30 years behind bars. (Alaska Department of Corrections)
He claimed to be a victim of the hooker's attempted extortion. But her story led state police Detective Glenn Flothe to take a look at the old and new allegations against Bob the Baker.
A few months later, police searched his property and found incriminating evidence, including jewelry that belonged to several missing women and an aviation map that marked about 20 gravesites.
During a 12-hour sit-down with a prosecutor, Hansen gradually unfurled a shocking account of his shadow life, concealed even from his wife.
He said he raped some 30 women and murdered as many as 21. He released many of his victims into the Alaskan bush then stalked and shot them, like trophy sheep.
He led police to 17 remote gravesites, where they tallied a dozen bodies.
Hansen was charged with four murders where the evidence against him was strongest. He pleaded guilty in 1984 and was sentenced to 461 years in prison. (Alaska has no death penalty.) He survived 30 years behind bars. He died on Aug. 21, likely of natural causes, at age 75.
Good riddance, retired Det. Flothe told the Alaska Dispatch. "This world is better without him."