13

Wednesday, October 5, 1983

Flothe’s request for FBI help was approved within days. Two FBI officers from Quantico would arrive in Anchorage on October 11th. Flothe was temporarily ecstatic. All the same, Flothe was worried he didn’t have enough on Hansen. He needed more witnesses, for one. More criminal charges, for another.

To correct that situation Flothe met with a black topless dancer who had reported being kidnapped by Hansen in October 1979. The trooper met the woman at a rundown café, where even the coffee cups were worn. The dancer smoked one Kool cigarette after another and the air turned gunmetal blue during their interview.

The woman’s face twitched involuntarily as she told Flothe how her assailant pulled a .357 magnum on her, forced her to take her clothes off at the back of his camper, then tied her hands and feet with guitar wire. He kept his own clothes on, she said, and locked her in the back while he drove to an unknown location. She managed to free herself, she said, but Hansen noticed; he slammed on the brakes and came around the back of the camper with his gun.

This was her chance, she reported. She climbed into the cab through the open window connecting it with the camper. She locked herself in, and started pulling at the wires, madly trying to get the car started. Furious, Hansen came back to the cab and smashed the window with his fist. The dancer escaped by jumping out the passenger side, still naked. She fled to the nearest house. Hansen sped away.

When the dancer finished her story, Flothe pulled out a photographic line-up with six pictures. The woman immediately pointed to the photo of Hansen. “He’s the one,” she said softly. Still looking at his picture in the line-up, she began to update her story.

“What’s weird, you know,” she said, “is that just a couple months ago, I went to Hansen’s Bakery to apply for a job? And the lady, she gave me an application to fill out, which I did. But then I seen him and I said, ‘unh unh, I’m gettin’ my ass outa here.’ I never even looked back.”

“Did you talk to him, or did you just see him and leave?” Flothe wanted to know.

“I talked to him,” she said. “’Cause, see, I didn’t recognize him at first. But when he was talkin’ about the job and stuff, then I knew it was him, ‘cause he stuttered a lot. I don’t know if he recognized me or not, but it was him. No doubt about it. Like I said, I got my ass outa there.”

The essential point to emerge from the interview, however, was the woman’s willingness to testify in court. Even at that, Flothe had to wonder how important it would really be, given that 1979 was ancient history.

Still, the dancer’s lack of hesitancy to testify was proof enough of an undercurrent of truth in Flothe’s basic logic. Robert Hansen had a pattern of abducting and raping women, and here was a woman who was still terrified of this man four years after the incident.

More important to his cause, however, was the Kitty Larson case. Perhaps Kitty herself wouldn’t make such a good impression, but her supporting witnesses would. These were people like Robert Yount, the Good Samaritan who stopped his truck to pick Kitty up as she ran from her assailant. And Louis Bennet, the desk clerk at the Mush Inn Motel, where Yount finally dropped her off so she could run to her pimp.

One by one, Flothe got these people into his cramped office at trooper headquarters, where he re-interviewed them on tape. Clearly Yount was one of the better witnesses, although he could not positively identify Hansen in a line-up. But he had seen a man with a gun and had picked up Kitty Larson as she ran from that man, of that there was no doubt. Would it help? Was this time-consuming, almost redundant activity really going to help Flothe solidify his case? Or was it just a straw-clutching exercise?

The puzzle that this case had become was too delicate—he had eggshell evidence, gingerly glued together. He had to get more.

Flothe’s persistence did start to pay off. In the ensuing days, he managed to contact a doctor whose cabin had been burglarized. The doctor, in turn, led him to an associate who’d also been burglarized, who told a fantastic tale of sleuthing in the far north.

“There were several cabins broken into,” said the man. “Mine, the doc’s, another guy’s. And every single one of them was broken into by someone in an airplane. This was in the wintertime, see, and it left some ski marks out there, going right up to the cabins. Well, when the troopers shut down our cases, we decided we were going to find that airplane ourselves, ‘cause to tell you the truth, we were pissed.”

The men divvied up all the airports in and around the Anchorage area: Merrill Field, Lake Hood, Birchwood, Hillside, Inlet, Eagle River. They had one thing going for them: The ski on the suspect aircraft was quite unusual. The skegs looked like they were either homemade or some type of a conversion done for a Super Cub.

“Now we searched and searched,” said the mountain of a man, “and of all the planes we looked at, only one plane matched the description.”

“And?” Flothe asked. The man kept him waiting. “What was it?”

“A plane belonging to a guy named Bob Hansen.” The way the guy said it told Flothe volumes. The man not only knew the suspect, but there was no love lost between them.

“Sounds like you know him,” the sergeant ventured.

“We used to be in the same bow-hunting association,” the man said disgustedly. “Yeah, I know him.”

“He’s a pretty good hunter, from what I hear,” Flothe responded.

“Yeah, you know he has all them world’s records,” the man said. “But some of us in the bow association wonder if maybe he shouldn’t. See, that-there Dall Sheep that he got—that number one sheep? That sheep had a bullet lodged in one of the horns. A fresh bullet. So whether he connived or cheated on that record, I don’t know.”

“So how come they accepted it into the books?” Flothe asked. “Or did they?”

“Hansen’s friend John Sumrall came out and said he was with Bob when they bagged the sheep, and swore he never heard a shot. And that was that, because John Sumrall is a stand-up kind of guy.”

The man had passed the test. Flothe decided to take him into his confidence. “It may be important for you to tell a judge the story you just told me,” Flothe told him. “I’ve got reason to believe that Hansen is a murderer. I may need your help in getting him off the street until we can pin him for murder.”

“No problem,” the man said without flinching.

In addition, the man gave Flothe another witness, this a man who’d recently been at Hansen’s house and had reportedly seen his trophies.

Flothe contacted him immediately. “I was just at Hansen’s place,” the witness told him. “He took me downstairs and showed me his hunting trophy mounts. You know, the world’s records?”

“Including the Dall Sheep?”

“Yeah. I think so…”

“If I got some photos, could you identify the ones you saw?”

“Yeah.”

Flothe was now excited. This man had probably seen the Dall Sheep that Hansen had reported stolen. If that head was back on the wall, it was insurance fraud, pure and simple. Flothe’s pulse quickened even more the next day, when the witness told him that the stolen heads were now hanging on Hansen’s wall.

The minute patches of Hansen’s guilt were starting to form a mosaic of Hansen’s criminal patterns. Flothe was finding it easier and easier to contemplate another bout with the District Attorney’s office. What the hell – this time he’d have the FBI behind him.

Just the thought of the FBI tripped another circuit in Flothe’s brain. Wasn’t there something he still had to send them on the Larson case?

He checked off a mental list. Had he sent the file materials? Check. Had he sent the stuff on a half dozen other cases? Check. Then he realized that he’d failed to send them the frozen tampon, frozen filter paper stain and stained underpants Kitty had been wearing the night Hansen raped her. The FBI at Quantico was waiting for it. And where was it? Still in the trooper lab. Why hadn’t he sent the stuff straight to the FBI? Why had he given in to the argument that it would be quicker to do the lab work locally? Sometimes, there was just too much to think about.

On the same day, Tuesday, October 11, 1983, Flothe finally shipped off the Kitty Larson evidence, FBI Agents James Horn and John Douglas arrived in Anchorage from Quantico, Virginia. The feds got right down to brass tacks.

“From the stuff you sent us,” they told him, “we were able to confirm Agent Hazelwood’s analysis. The man you want probably stutters. Is likely an excellent hunter. His wife is probably religious, and not totally aware of her husband’s activities. He’s known as a good provider and hardworking businessman. He’s successful, or at least we wouldn’t be surprised if he is.”

“So far so good,” Flothe said. “The profile fits.” Was it a coincidence or just plain old good police work? Whatever it was, Flothe approved.

“What I need to know now,” Flothe told the agents, “is what I can expect to find in a search warrant. As soon as we can put a profile together, I want to put it in front of the District Attorney’s Office.”

“No problem,” one of the agents said. “We think that the killer may keep a murder kit—disguises, that type of thing – so he is anonymous when he picks these women up.”

“He probably stashes things,” said the other. “Like maybe rings or jewelry or driver’s licenses or maybe clothing.”

“He likes to keep it close to him, so he can view it in private,” the first agent continued. “He takes it out and re-lives the killings. It’s a movie in his brain, and he’s turned on by the objects he’s taken from the scene.”

“If he’s really into it,” the other agent said, “the killings are all he thinks about twenty-four hours a day. Everything else is just a motion to him. His work, his normal routine, are just a motion. Everything is wrapped up with murder. His whole life, his whole thinking. He probably plans the kills far in advance…”

“What am I going to do to catch him?” Flothe asked.

“You’ve got a couple of choices,” the other agent continued. “If you can get a warrant, fine. If not…”

“If not you may have to catch him in the act. Do you have him under surveillance?” asked the first agent.

“Sure do. Twenty-four hours a day. But we’re using the narcs and I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to keep them.”

“It’s what you gotta do, though,” the agent responded.

If there was any strong message communicated in this exchange, it was that of urgency. It had been there all along; now it was razor-sharp. He couldn’t afford to lose the mementos. They were almost everything now. That and the murder weapon, or murder weapons. He had to get a search warrant.

“One way to get him to make a mistake is to do something to force his hand,” one of the agents suggested.

“For instance, you can get a picture of one of his victims and blow it up real big. Tape it to the window of his car and roll the window down. When he rolls the window back up, there she is,” said the other agent.

“It really freaks ‘em out,” the first agent said.

Flothe didn’t know whether the agents were serious or not. It was hard for him to take their last suggestion seriously. If he did what they suggested, Hansen would freak, all right. He would freak and start destroying evidence. Better to get the search warrants before the baker destroyed his sordid treasures, he reasoned.

Flothe wasn’t going to risk the DA again without having all his ducks in a row. He’d taken the DA’s wish list and he’d completed it. This time he had to be successful. If not Flothe would be reduced to desperate measures, like playing “Blow Up” with pictures on car windows. Come on, he told himself. There’s got to be a better way.

What he needed now, he decided was a Plan B, an alternate to go to in case everything else failed. His first visit would be with Lt. Jent. Not only was Jent duck number one, but without him, Flothe felt utterly alone when it came to dealing with the cold anonymity of the criminal justice bureaucracy.

“Lieutenant, there’s a couple of things,” Flothe said, taking his superior aside for a quick chat in the dimly lit hallway of trooper headquarters. “The FBI is behind us one hundred percent. They’re putting a profile of Hansen together, and they say it’s urgent that we get a search warrant. We need to have another meeting with the DA’s office, Lieutenant. I’ve got an idea, too. Have the colonel call them. Have him tell them it’s absolutely necessary. That the FBI’s here and we’re certain we’ve got the Anchorage serial killer.”

“Are we ready for the colonel?” Jent asked.

“Yeah. We gotta let ‘em know we’re ready. Oh, and another thing. If they don’t go for it, I’m bringing Pat Doogan down to help me write the warrant,” Flothe said. There it was. Plan B. He’d just announced it.

Jent could only shake his head. Flothe felt like he was all alone and out on a limb on this thing. Maybe he didn’t realize that he was sharing that limb with others. That included the colonel who, after all, was the man responsible for the twenty-four hour watch on Bob Hansen and who knew better than anyone the strain it was putting on trooper resources.

“No problem, Glenn,” Jent finally said. “I’ll get the colonel immediately. I don’t think there’ll be any problem with him. Anything you want to get this killer off the street, he’s willing to go with it. Just so you know.”

Less than an hour later, Colonel Kolovosky, Jent, and Flothe had set up an appointment for the next afternoon with Vic Krumm, the Anchorage District Attorney.