20

Thursday, November 3, 1983

Now was the critical time in the investigation. After the adrenaline rush of the arrest came weariness and the pressure of the 120-day rule. Flothe had four months to put Hansen in front of a judge. If he failed, Hansen would go free without ever facing trial. Flothe had two immediate concerns. Send the Mini-14 to the FBI for analysis. And keep an eye on Kitty Larson.

It was the FBI who could determine if the firing pin and extractor markings matched the spent shell casings found at the gravesites. Of course, even a match would not make an ironclad case. The best evidence is match between the bullets and the weapon. The bullets they’d found were shattered almost beyond recognition. It was a gap that a clever defense attorney could no doubt exploit. Flothe just had to believe that a match between the Mini-14 and the shell casings found in the graves would carry the day. But in his heart he knew better.

Flothe wanted someone to hand carry the rifle to the FBI, four thousand miles away in Washington, D.C. It was a costly security measure, considering how much had been spent already, and the reception Flothe’s request received was chilly. Someone suggested they send the rifle by Express Mail instead. “If we send it today, it’ll be there tomorrow,” somebody pointed out. Flothe protested, but to no avail.

Kitty Larson, meanwhile, was a critical link between Hansen’s past and present. At that very minute she was working in a massage parlor run by her pimp. Flothe knew it was nothing but a brothel, but he could not simply snatch her up out of that environment, because she wasn’t ready to leave it of her own volition.

Flothe knew it was crucial to establish a feeling of trust between them. Kitty had to know he wouldn’t punish her but was willing to accept her faults. If he let her decide when the time was right, maybe she’d come to trust him enough to call him and say: “Glenn, I need your help. I’ve had enough.”

Flothe decided to meet Kitty once a week for coffee. Just to talk. They would not talk about murder, or pimps, or the streets. They’d talk about the things that interested her, whatever they might be.

For their first post-arrest meeting, Kitty came dressed in rabbit fur: rabbit skin pants, rabbit skin coat, rabbit skin hat. She was wearing cheap jewelry and to Flothe’s eye, looked like a whore. He tried to be complimentary.

“That’s a pretty nice suit of clothes you have on,” he said.

“Thanks,” she replied. “My man bought ‘em for me.”

“Do you like nice clothes?” Flothe asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling, her voice sounding dreamy. “If I’m ever rich, that’s the first thing I’ll buy. And then I’ll buy a new car.”

“What kind?” Flothe wondered.

“Oh, I don’t know. A Camaro, or a Corvette, or…”

Suddenly, Kitty Larson the prostitute reminded Flothe of his eleven year old daughter. Not because their lives were in any way alike, but because this street wise young woman shared many of the same innocent longings. His daughter wanted nice clothes, too, wanted what was “in,” wanted a Corvette. It was an intriguing parallel. Flothe decided to follow this line of conversation.

“What else would you do if you were rich?” he asked.

“Go to Disneyland and see Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck,” she said, unabashedly.

“And what else?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Buy a lot of stuffed toys and teddy bears. I really love stuffed animals. And you know what else I’d do?”

“What?”

“I know you won’t believe this, but I’ve never even seen the Portage Glacier. Been up here all this time, and I still ain’t seen it. That’s what I’d love to do. And go to Fun World, and slide down the water slides.”

What Flothe learned in the next months was that Kitty was a little girl who’d never grown up. He also sensed that, despite her harsh life on the streets, she was very sensitive, a person who had a sense of right and wrong. And although Kitty was uneducated, she had a lot of street smarts. She was also very articulate and had an excellent memory. Flothe found her to be the best witness he’d ever had.

As the sergeant got to know her better, and she started to trust him more, he learned just why she had never grown up.

“Started running away from home when I was twelve,” she told him. “Started hanging out on the street. And then I met this guy — he was a pimp — and he took me in. Bought me nice clothes, which I’d never had before. I mean, we didn’t have shit when I was a kid. And he gave me nice jewelry. And we drove around in a Lincoln Continental.”

“That must have been all right.”

“It was okay. But it’s all a front, you know? It’s for show.”

“Did you stay with this guy very long?” Flothe asked.

“Long enough to become his main lady,” she said, smiling again. “I remember once… I was about fifteen. And I was all dressed up in furs. He let me drive his Lincoln. That was a trip.”

“I bet.”

The barriers between them started to fall. Kitty told Flothe about things she was doing, though she was smart enough not to tell him the things he could arrest her for. In that developing relationship, Glenn Flothe became somewhat of a father figure to her. He supported Kitty like a father, scolded her like a father. He had a lot to worry about.

Kitty’s pimp sometimes took her and his other women to one of the after hours clubs in town. He made them take their clothes off and stand on the bar or a table, like meat at an auction. The customers took their pick of the women and had sex with them on the spot. If the women resisted, the pimp beat them or took away their status as his “main lady.”

Flothe took these revelations as a sign that he needed to make plans to arrest Kitty and get her off the street. He desperately needed her help if he was going to keep Hansen in jail. The last thing he wanted was for her to be busted in a raid on an after-hours joint. Still, he resisted the impulse to bring her in. He sensed that Kitty understood her importance, even if she wasn’t always able to control her own behavior.

Only days after Flothe mailed Hansen’s rifle, the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., called. “The rifle hasn’t arrived. Did you send it?”

“Yeah,” Flothe said. “I sent it yesterday. Maybe it’ll get there on Monday.”

Flothe called the FBI on Monday morning. The rifle still wasn’t there. Flothe contacted the Post Office, and put in a tracer. They had to find that rifle. Days passed, without word. He called the Post Office again.

“It’s lost,” they told him.

Lost? The crucial piece of evidence, the only piece of evidence that could directly link Hansen to the murders on the Knik, was lost? And all because they decided they couldn’t afford to buy a trooper plane ticket?

Flothe could hardly believe it. That piece of evidence they’d worked months to find and, damn it, they’d found it. But now? Who knew where it was? It was more than Flothe could take.

As far as he was concerned, there was only one fact that mattered here: Hansen had murdered over and over and over. Now, with his rifle lost somewhere between Anchorage and Washington, D.C., there was a chance he’d be able to pick up where he left off. Using an entirely new weapon.

Misery loves company, as the cliché goes. In that mood Flothe decided to pay the first of what would be several visits with Darla Hansen. He was concerned that, with Bob’s arrest, the bakery would go under. That could devastate the family.

“How will you support yourself?” he asked her.

“I’ve always supported the children,” she replied.

“You must have gotten some support from Bob,” Flothe responded.

“Well, I pay the house payments and I buy the food, and I buy the kid’s clothes for school,” she said in a bland monotone.

“What about the money from the bakery?” Flothe asked.

“The bakery is Bob’s,” she said simply.

As they continued to talk, the subject turned to Bob’s arrest, and the allegations made against him. It was a sensitive issue. Flothe couldn’t talk openly, because a judge had placed restrictions on what could be said about the case. Only what was said in open court could be publicly revealed. Flothe did the best he could.

“Are you sure it’s him?” she asked. “Could you give me a little more to convince me?”

“We’ve done an extensive investigation over the past few months,” Flothe told her. “And everything points to your husband.”

“Well, I guess if he’s the one he should be in jail,” she said, her voice plain and uninflected. She looked well in control of her life.

“Why did you live with him all these years?” Flothe asked, wanting to pierce her armor and find out how she really felt.

“Well,” she replied, “so the kids would have a father.”

“You know, Darla,” Flothe continued, “when we searched the house, we turned up item upon item that was stolen. Didn’t you ever wonder where all this stuff was coming from?”

“Well, I kind of suspected that maybe he was taking things, but…”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. And if I did something about it, he’d go to jail again. I felt I had to keep the family together.”

Flothe was amazed by Darla Hansen. Despite everything that had happened, she wasn’t enraged, didn’t scream, didn’t raise her voice at him. She didn’t cry, wasn’t aghast, didn’t appear emotionally distraught. She didn’t appear to be suffering from lack of sleep or depression. Throughout it all her voice never wavered from its bland monotone. And she seemed incredibly accepting of her husband, no matter what he’d done.

After his meeting, Flothe found himself thinking back to the interview of her husband at trooper headquarters. He remembered thinking that Bob’s relationship with his wife couldn’t have been all that terrific. There was no way she was into all the sexual antics that Bob was.

After six days, the missing rifle was found on a loading deck in Chicago. The rifle was sent to Washington, D.C. immediately. True to their word, the FBI finished the lab work quickly. “You’ve got a match,” the FBI agent told Flothe. “The shell casings you found at the gravesites were fired from this rifle. The firing pin, the extractor markings—everything’s identical.”

On November 20, Anchorage Daily News writer Sheila Toomey wrote that trooper investigators had reportedly “linked a bullet from at least one of the victims to a gun found hidden in the attic insulation of a suspect’s home,” and were preparing the case for a grand jury.

The unidentified “suspect” was Robert Hansen. Flothe wanted to take the evidence linking Hansen’s rifle with the shell casings before a grand jury so he could get murder charges brought against the man.

In addition, Flothe had John Henning served with a subpoena to appear before the grand jury. “Let’s see if he lies now,” Flothe told himself. Maybe the potential of a perjury charge would serve as a wakeup call.

Nonetheless, the thinking at the DA’s office was that even with the link between the murder weapon and the shell casings found at the gravesites, they still didn’t have enough to indict Hansen on murder. If they did indict him, it would be a risky proposition. There were several reasons for this.

First, just because they had the murder weapon didn’t automatically make Hansen the murderer. Just because they’d linked the rifle to the shell casings at the gravesites didn’t make him a murderer, either. He could have been flying with somebody else, for example, and that “somebody else” could have been the triggerman.

Related to this assessment was the feeling that the case still wasn’t tight enough. That meant that Flothe had more work to do, including trying to track down people who could identify the jewelry found in Hansen’s attic stash.

That was the source of the second problem. Even if they tracked down people who could identify the jewelry, would the id’s be specific or hold up under cross-examination? There were also questions about the search warrant—not only regarding its legality but its timeliness. Given the uniqueness of the search warrant, and the grounds upon which it was granted—particularly the “criminal history” of the suspect—it was felt that this aspect of the case alone might provide grounds for an automatic appeal.

When these reservations were combined, the prosecution decided it was better to stick to the charges for which Hansen had been indicted. The murder charges were a gamble they could lose. There would be no murder indictment.

That decision didn’t affect John Henning’s appearance before the grand jury, of course. The troopers served him the subpoena in King Salmon, and accompanied him back to Anchorage to testify. When his wife went to meet him at the airport, she saw a man whose face looked paralyzed on one side, like he’d had a stroke or something. Spittle was dribbling from the corner of his mouth. A doctor told him it was a nervous reaction to stress. His attorney, meanwhile, told him to tell the truth to the grand jury.

In his testimony, John Henning admitted that he’d lied to the police about what happened on June 13, 1983. He’d done it, he said, to protect his friend. Even so, he privately felt that he hadn’t done anything wrong. As far as his wife could tell, he didn’t feel Bob Hansen had done anything wrong either. From Flothe’s point of view, however, what was essential was that John Henning had rolled over. Finally.