9

Glenn Flothe soon found that his nights belonged to the prostitutes. They were the victims, he reasoned, they should know something. But, if he was going to use them, he had to work their hours. They weren’t going to work his.

They also weren’t going to willingly talk to the cops. Take the case of Sue Luna. From the missing persons file, Flothe knew she had been a dancer at the Good Times bar. Her sister reported her missing on May 30, 1982, and her roommate, also a dancer at the Good Times, supplied the details.

According to the roommate Sue made a date with a man she’d just met at the bar. He offered her $300.00 for a hour’s worth of sex. She agreed to meet him on May 26th at Alice’s 210 Restaurant. Sue left their apartment at noon, but the roommate said she did not appear for work that night. Neither the roommate nor Sue’s sister had seen her since.

Since more than a year had passed, Flothe felt it was a safe bet that Sue Luna had met with foul play. That put him on the avenues, looking for Tanya, Sue Luna’s roommate. If he could find her, maybe she could recall, however faintly, the identity of the man who made the lunch date.

Alice’s 210 Restaurant, however, became a metaphor for the whole adventure. This was Alice as in Alice in Wonderland. And Tanya was the rabbit, disappearing down a hole.

“I’m looking for Tanya,” Flothe announced each time he went into one of the topless clubs.

“Tanya who?” came the reply.

There were lots of Tanya’s, as it turned out. Teenage runaways with wholesome names like “Carol,” “Mary” or “Barbara” become “Tanya” the second they hit the street. Secretaries on the run from boredom painted “Tanya” on their dressing room door the minute they put on a G-string. There was a “Tanya” everywhere Flothe went. Not one was the right one. The rabbit had gotten away.

On Thursday, September 22, 1983, Flothe received an unusual visitor: Officer Gregg Baker of the Anchorage Police Department. Baker had made the first call on Kitty Larson, and he was troubled by what had happened since that time.

Later, Flothe would realize how courageous Baker was to come in and talk. Because what he had to say was not complimentary to the Anchorage Police Department. As far as Baker was concerned, APD had blown the investigation of the Larson incident.

They’d talked to Hansen, all right, and gone to his house, but Baker was convinced they could have done a much better job. Baker had seen at least two potentially incriminating items. One was some surgical gloves in Hansen’s car. The other was a Thompson Contender pistol, which he knew came with interchangeable barrels, including a .223 caliber barrel. The Thompson Contender seemed particularly important, because a .223 caliber weapon killed both women on the Knik River. But the APD had done nothing about it.

To make matters worse, Baker told Flothe, the APD had as much as told Kitty Larson she was a liar. Yet as far as Baker was concerned Kitty had been telling the truth. Not only that, but he was convinced that Bob Hansen was the man responsible for killing the two dancers up on the Knik, and who knows how many more. He’d come to Flothe because he felt something had to be done to get the Kitty Larson case going again.

Bolstered by this opinion so close to his own, Flothe decided he had to find Kitty Larson, even if he had to fly down to Seattle. He asked his boss for permission to go south. “Do what you have to do,” Lt. Jent told him.

The problem was, Kitty was could be anywhere. “The life” was a fluid through which people free-floated and got lost. Flothe had no reason to think Kitty’s case would be any different.

The sergeant also knew that only someone who understood the mean streets of Anchorage could guide him to the young woman. Only two categories of people fit that description: pimps and vice cops. pimps were out, so that left him only one choice: Go to APD and find the sharpest street cop around.

Word had it that a vice cop named Gentile was the man Flothe should talk to. Since night was approaching, Flothe had to take to the streets to find him. Street cops are night cops because street people are night people.

The trooper finally found Gentile in the heart of the city’s red light district: a collection of seedy taverns, pawnshops and topless bars sandwiched between the Alaska Railroad right-of-way and the “respectable” hotels up on Fifth Avenue. It was a zone where a person could buy drugs, proposition women, and get stinking drunk.

It was a man’s world. The bars were for efficient drinking and little else. The one-way streets through the five-block area were perfect for cruising. Native men overflowed the beer and wine joints and fell into nearby doorways. Pimps with Cadillac’s and Lincolns parked nearby.

“So, you want me to help you find this girl, huh?” Gentile asked as they walked. “What’d you say her name was?”

“Larson. Kitty Larson.” They stepped around a group of native men drunkenly arguing about which bar to go to next. Flothe could already tell that Gentile knew this world; he moved through it with confidence, even élan.

“Excuse me a second, okay, sergeant?” Gentile said as he approached a young woman with bright red hair. “Hey now, you know I can’t let you stay here,” he said gently. He tugged on her long rabbit-fur coat. “You’re gonna have to get moving.”

Flothe noticed that the cop cocked his head as he talked. he was animated, used his hands a lot.

“I’m just waiting for my ride, sergeant,” she whispered.

“Well, okay. We’ll see. You know how the game works. This time it’s just a warning.” Gentile raised three fingers on his right hand, like an umpire calling a baseball game. “Three strikes and you’re out, right? Right?”

“Right.”

And then they were off down the street again, Gentile’s eyes sentinels scanning the horizon. Without missing a beat, he was back to Flothe. “Don’t think I know this Kitty Larson. But I’ll check around. Know her pimp’s name?”

“Reggie Roosevelt.”

“He’s also a coke dealer.”

It was an old game: pimps used drugs to gain control over the women in their “stable.”

“Big-time coke dealer?” Flothe asked.

“Not that big. You said you thought this girl might be in Seattle? Why Seattle? Family?”

“Where else do you go when you’ve been picked up off the street at gunpoint?”

“I’d get an indoors job. The streets are too goddamned dangerous.”

Flothe liked what he was hearing. This guy knew the streets. Here’s my connection right here, he told himself.

Ahead of them, a rip-roaringly drunk fisherman cursed the sidewalk under his feet. He’d been tossed from one of the taverns, and served a slice of frontier justice. He was so drunk he swayed on the sidewalk as if it was a ship’s deck.

At the next corner stood another working woman. blonde and eighteen, she was trying to look like she was waiting for the light to turn green. Though the streets were a march of people out on the night, Gentile snaked his way straight to her, never varying his pace, walking with an easygoing but firm stride. When he reached her, he acted like they were old buddies.

“Well, sorry, honey,” he said, his manner fatherly and almost apologetic. “But this is it. You gotta go. I told you three times, you know.”

“Okay officer,” she said with mock solemnity.

Back at the station, where they took the young woman and booked her for soliciting, Flothe asked Gentile why she’d been so cooperative. Gentile shrugged his shoulders. “This pimp beat her up. I put his ass in jail.” No wonder the hookers loved him.

Two days later, Gentile called Flothe back. “I found Kitty,” he said. “She’s in a massage parlor right here in town. She’s back.”

“Great.”

“Not only that,” Gentile said. “I even know her. You know her as Kitty Larson, right? And I know her as Vicky Matthew. Small world, ain’t it?”

“You think she’ll let me talk to her?”

“She better. She owes me a favor. A while back I got her off on a theft charge she should’ve done time on. She and her pimp rolled some pillar of the community. You know the scene: He comes to us, says all he wants is his gold watch and checkbook back. Says he doesn’t want to press no charges. So I tell Vicky – Kitty, whatever you wanna call her – ‘Just give me the watch and the checkbook and I’ll see if we can make this guy forget about it.’ I told her I’d try to talk the guy out of it. Which I did. Yeah, she’ll talk to you.”

“I’d like to meet with her right away.”

“I understand.”

The first meeting was in one of those hotels where the plaster is cracked and rust-stained from leaking steam radiators. It looked like big pools of tea were on the ceiling, and the hallways smelled of drugs and stale semen. It was the kind of place where the desk clerk raised a momentary eyebrow and then forgot about you.

Gentile arranged for a room and the three had coffee. Gentile did most of the talking.

“Glenn is a straight-arrow guy, Kitty,” Gentile said. “He’ll treat you right. And if I tell you that’s right, that’s right, right?”

“Right.”

“Now, you know what I’m talking about, right? Have I ever steered you wrong? Of course, I haven’t, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. Now Glenn tells me that you had a little trouble with some guy, and he wants to help you out. And you know what, Kitty? I think he really wants to help you out. Hard to believe, ain’t it? But Glenn’s a good guy, Kitty. And look, you don’t have to tell him anything right now if you don’t want to. I just want you to think about it, maybe get to know him a little better first. Glenn’s good people, Kitty.”

They met again a few days later, in a homey cafe chosen for its ability to provide them some anonymity. Gentile built up Flothe. Again. Before they left, Flothe felt confident enough to ask Kitty if she’d mind coming down to the trooper office and examining the statement she’d given the APD She agreed.

In the full light of his office at trooper headquarters, Flothe got his first good look at Kitty Larson. She was a gaudy tramp weighed down by a tangle of costume jewelry and a cheap fur coat. Underneath the make up, though, was a child trying to look like a woman. She was, Flothe decided, a good-looking girl despite it all. She had dark hair and small features—a small mouth, a small nose. A big-busted girl, she stood about 5’5” and weighed about 135 pounds. She also seemed vulnerable beneath her tough exterior, and looked like she could show either face on a moment’s notice.

Though anxious to get Kitty’s story, Flothe was a gentle interviewer. His voice never varied from a soft tone, the kind of voice a therapist uses, with all the threat washed away. Each question flowed naturally from the conversation.

Kitty started off with a torrent, unraveling a steady, chronological monologue that captured all the terror of her experience at the hands of Bob Hansen. It was a horrifying tale, and when she finished, she was in tears. Flothe stopped the interview, got her some Kleenex, and gave her time to compose herself.

“Do you feel he was going to hurt you?” Flothe asked when they went back on record.

“You know, I didn’t feel nothing, ‘cause I knew I wasn’t going to live. I mean, the man, what he did to me, he had to kill me.”

Then Kitty’s story circled back to the beginning. She told how Hansen had first driven by and made a date for the next day, which she missed when she overslept. She told about how he appeared the next day, a Sunday. “He said, ‘How about two hundred dollars for a blowjob in the car?’ ‘cause I wouldn’t go to his place. ‘Sure, no problem,’ I said.’”

“Two hundred dollars is a lot of money…”

“Hey, for a blowjob in the car? Hell, yeah.” For a second Kitty sounded like a tough streetwalker again.

Kitty confessed to Flothe that she didn’t want to go to Hansen’s house because she was new to Alaska and didn’t want to go to anybody’s house. She ended up at his house anyway. And from there on out, her story was far more graphic than anything she’d told APD.

“Every time the gun was in my face I knew I was in trouble,” she said. She barely paused for breath. “He said to take my shirt off. I did. Shit, with a gun in your face, you would too. After he raped me on the bearskin rug I was handcuffed, and as he was taking the rope off my neck he put chains on me. And I stayed there for five hours while he slept.”

When he woke up, Kitty said, he told her that he would take her to his cabin. “And like, you know, I told him, ‘Okay, fine, that’s good.’ I acted like I wanted to go, you know.”

“What if you had acted differently, what would have happened?” Flothe asked.

“I don’t think he would have took me.”

“What would he have done?”

“Probably would have killed me there in the house.”

After listening to Kitty’s story and seeing her emotional response, Flothe had little doubt that she had been the victim of a dangerous man. A killer.

He also decided the case would take a lot more work than he’d originally thought. It would take time, and Flothe decided to place Hansen under twenty-four-hour surveillance. going to the colonel of the troopers to get permission to do it was a major commitment. But from the way Kitty described him, it was obvious Hansen could kill again. At any time.