7

Friday, September 16, 1983

In what was now becoming a twelve-hour-a-day job, Sgts. Flothe and Haugsven trekked out to the suburb of Muldoon, where they photographed the Hansen home. It was a ranch-style house in an attractive, woodsy setting on a dead end street. There was a big garage, with moose antlers on the roof. From the outside, you could see the windows of a daylight basement. The house neatly matched Kitty Larson’s description.

Back at the office, they found a truckload of reports from Juneau. The package included the report detailing the kidnapping and rape of Robyn Patterson. There was the report on Hansen’s attempted kidnapping of the eighteen-year-old real estate receptionist, who he jumped in the shadows of a carport in the pre-dawn darkness, the one who was not afraid to scream, whose scream doubtless saved her life. And then there was the report from 1979, when he kidnapped a topless dancer, who was stark naked by the time she managed to escape. Already, Flothe was starting to see a pattern in Hansen’s explanation of the incidents.

Hansen’s explanation for the 1979 kidnapping was typical. He denied having bound or abducted the dancer. He said he had met the women several months before at the Embers, but only offered to give her a ride home after she got off work. He said that during the ride, she put her hand on his leg and asked him if he wanted to stop somewhere. Hansen stopped the truck, he said, and they got in the back of the camper.

According to him the dancer stripped off her clothes and performed oral sex on him. When she finished, she demanded seventy-five dollars. Hansen refused to pay, he said, because no one had mentioned money. The dancer got upset. Hansen panicked and threw her out the back door of his camper.

What Flothe couldn’t figure out from the report was why the investigating officer didn’t ask Hansen to explain the broken window of his truck, or the glass that must have been at the scene. According to the topless dancer, just before she escaped Hansen smashed his fist through the driver’s window in an attempt to grab her. No wonder she ran naked through the streets.

Coincidentally, the State of Iowa also called to inform Flothe and Haugsven of Hansen’s 1961 arson conviction in that state. Reports of the conviction would follow. Gilmour was right, Flothe thought. This man has an extensive record. “The light came on,” Flothe would later say. “Hansen was no longer the gentleman businessman who ran a bakery downtown. His past was starting to catch up with him.”

Yet there was one remarkable fact that struck Flothe. Despite his nefarious activities, Hansen had done very little time for his crimes. Some complaints had disappeared after the initial investigation. The authorities had done little more even when he was convicted of crimes.

In the assault on the real estate receptionist, Hansen pleaded no contest. He was sentenced in March 1972, transferred to a halfway house three months later (where he was placed on work release), and paroled in November 1973, just twenty months after his conviction. In the stolen chain saw incident, Hansen was convicted of larceny in a building in Superior Court on April 5, 1977, and sentenced to five years in prison. He appealed his sentence as excessive in a brief to the State Supreme Court, a right guaranteed to him under Alaska case law whenever the sentence is longer than one year. On August 21, 1978, the Supreme Court reversed the sentence and remanded it to the Superior Court with directions to place Hansen on probation “as expeditiously as possible.” This time he had served all of sixteen months in prison. This man, Flothe decided, was as slippery as a seal on ice.

As the case reports chronicling Hansen’s past started to roll in, there seemed less and less question whether the man was capable of murder. And if Bob Hansen was capable of murder, and those were his victims up on the Knik River, then probably more bodies were strewn among the willow sand bars. On Tuesday, therefore, just two days after Haugsven had returned from leave, he and Flothe took a trip north to the Knik to search for more bodies. “Negative results,” Flothe’s report said.

Associated Press writer Paul Jenkins, getting wind of the unusual Saturday search on the Knik, made some inquiries the following Monday. The resulting story, which appeared on the 20th, was titled, “Authorities Fear List of Dead Women May Grow.” All seven women named as possible victims in Jenkins’ story were on Flothe’s tentative list. Jenkins reported that, although investigators said there might be more than one killer, they suspected one man may have murdered them all.

“He’s still here,” said Maxine Farrell of APD “The publicity may have pushed him under a little, but he’s here.”

“They’re going off with somebody they trust,” Farrell added. “I believe he’s in his late thirties, early forties, probably clean-cut and soft-spoken to where the girls feel really safe with him. He may be affluent. If not, he pretends to be.”

“These girls aren’t stupid,” she said. “He’s got to be able to show he can pay. I don’t think they just ran away. These girls are leaving behind things they would not normally leave.”

Haugsven, meanwhile, told Jenkins that troopers were trying to assemble a psychological profile of the killer. He said one man, possibly from the Anchorage area, might have been responsible for killing the two women whose bodies were found on the Knik River. “The graves were so similar—shallow,” he said. “No great effort was made to bury them, but there may not have been time. Just to know the area where he took the girls—yeah, it’s a local.”

Haugsven also told Jenkins that troopers had made checks with other states for similar crimes, but had found nothing. The names on their list of possible victims, meanwhile, were being fed into a computer, in hopes of “finding another thread.”

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Haugsven said. “You think you’ve got a lot of things going, then, ‘Boom,’ you’re back to square one. If it is a mass killer, maybe he’s on a mission or something.”

Almost by accident, Glenn Flothe had become the lead investigator in the Sherry Morrow and Kitty Larson cases which were now part of who knew how many more cases. At least that was how Flothe felt. He still had to convince his fellow officers — except Gilmour and sometimes Haugsven — that Bob Hansen was the one whodunit. More important, he had to convince the DA.

What he needed, Flothe decided, was the most extensive package he could put together – a kind of criminal collage. The package was to have a bit of everything in it: the Kitty Larson case — the cornerstone — a recent case with a live (if unfound) witness; the four earlier cases involving women he’d kidnapped; and anything else he could find.

Reading the reports on the 1976 larceny in a building charge, for instance, he became convinced that Hansen stole continually. The psychiatric report labeled him a kleptomaniac. Flothe figured the man’s range had to be incredible. He’d driven all the way to the Kenai with Robyn Patterson. He had his own plane. Flothe decided to start culling out all the cabin robberies of the past twelve years, especially those that used a plane.

Flothe called the Palmer-Wasilla trooper post up by the Knik River where the bodies had been found. He called Soldotna post, deep in the Kenai. He got records from the Anchorage post, too. Simultaneously, he put out a Police Operational Line System (POLS) message to all police agencies in southcentral and southeastern Alaska, asking them to forward any unsolved missing persons cases, or strange murders, in the past twelve or so years.

The plan also included a decision to talk to people who’d hunted with Hansen, and could verify his knowledge of the tangled willow scrubs on the Knik where the bodies had been found. Flothe knew he had to be very circumspect; he could talk only to people he trusted, a hard item to come by in any circumstances. He would have to swear them to secrecy lest they tip off Hansen, wittingly or unwittingly.

Yet even a trial run proved useful. Flothe learned, for example, that Hansen held several world’s bow-and-arrow records. He had the world’s top mark for a Dall Sheep taken by bow, set in 1971 when he killed a ram with forty-two-inch horns in the Chugach Mountains. The second-ranked caribou in the world was also his, according to the Pope & Young Club, the official judge of trophies taken by bow. Hansen killed that animal in 1971, along the Susitna River, on the northern edge of Cook Inlet. There was more. The twelfth ranked mountain goat, the thirteenth ranked Dall sheep, the thirty-fourth ranked black bear. This man is a true hunter, Flothe thought. His hands are always in blood.