Original subtitles

[suspenseful music]

- The murders of 17 women, prostitutes and topless dancers,

the biggest mass murder case in Alaskas history.

- This woman did not follow the plan.

- She broke away, he chased her.

[thrilling music]

- He's stalking women,

chasing women,

he's killing women.

He can't stop himself.

- There is a monster walking amongst us.

[eerie music]

- He had to have that godlike feeling.

[suspenseful music]

- Eklutna Lake nestled in the mountains,

fed by glacial runoff.

It's a drop dead gorgeous place.

Very remote.

- It's just one of those places that nobody goes to

unless they have a need to go there.

- Two power line workers

were up in that Eklutna road region

And they found skeletal remains.

Troopers went up there and examined the scene

and they found skeletal remains and clothing,

jewelry, some high top red boots,

but nothing to help them really identify

exactly who she was.

Anytime you find skeletal remains, there's an autopsy.

You lay out the bones,

and a forensic expert will look at those bones

and try and give you a better picture

of who this victim was.

In this case, she was most likely a young girl,

maybe late teens.

This particular female victim was stabbed in the back.

Then they started doing facial reconstruction

and she got the name Eklutna Annie.

No disrespect but just some way to identify her.

Looking at the tall red boots and the type of clothing,

investigators thought

that perhaps this victim was a prostitute.

When a sex worker's murdered.

It makes all sorts of problems for investigators.

They don't use their real names.

They don't have contact with their families.

Yeah, it was really hard back then.

We didn't have the internet to help us.

It was a very poor system,

but it was the only system we had.

In the mid 70s, when the pipeline started to build up,

there was an influx of criminals and prostitutes.

- In the 70s,

Anchorage went from 60,000 people to about 200,000

in just that short length of time.

A lot of strip joints sprung up, a lot of bars,

all to capture that almighty dollar from the pipeline.

- I arrived in 77.

I just wanted to get away from the situation I was in.

So I went to a strip joint.

Got up on the stage, started to dance.

The crowd went crazy.

To tell you the truth,

I love getting up on that stage.

I love hearing the men whoop hurray.

It seemed like all of us girls had a connection.

I mean, if you're gonna go to a wilderness country like that

and not know anybody,

you're definitely running from something.

[men hooting]

They had no idea that they were running into more danger

than they did at home.

[crowd cheering]

[somber music]

[child laughs]

- Robert Hansen lived in Pocahontas in

his youth as did I.

It was a great place to grow up,

but he had to get up and help his father bake things

at a fairly young age.

- Because his dad was a baker,

Bob was gonna be a baker, whether he wanted to or not.

But Bob wasn't interested in becoming a baker.

Baker's hours are early.

You need to get into the bakery at midnight.

He's working all night,

and his father was a harsh task master.

And his father was like,

"This is how I learned,

I'm going to treat you the same way I was treated."

- Hansen struggled to internalize the role

that was being impressed upon him by his father.

His father dreamed of a son

who was more strapping,

did what he was told,

but he struggled in every way to fit that role.

There were a lot of things about him

that made him seem inadequate.

He spoke with a stammer,

he was short of stature,

And found little support

in the relationship with his mother.

- There was resentment that build up.

He was forced to get up and bake

and then he was forced to go to class,

and he was unhappy throughout the whole process.

- He was a very quiet person,

a little odd,

but if you got him onto subjects like hunting or fishing,

he could be somewhat engaging.

Or guns. He knew a lot about guns.

When I hunted with him a couple of times,

he always would get more birds than the rest of us.

And he was proud of that fact.

- So for the first time, he's found something he's good at

and feels like a man.

- After almost a year,

troopers couldn't identify any missing persons

that matched up with the remains

that they found up off Eklutna Road.

The troopers exhausted all possible leads on that case.

And like any other case like that, it just, it goes cold.

Sherry Morrow was a young dancer at the Wild Cherry,

a strip joint in Anchorage.

- Me and Sherry Morrow, we were working at the strip club.

She was a friend of mine.

Sherry wasn't built for this kind of work.

She was a sweet girl.

One night,

one of our customers started to talk about

how he was a modeling agent

and how he wanted to take pictures of us,

and that he'd pay us $500.

The way he was talking, I got on edge about it.

So I whispered to Sherry,

"There's something about this guy that's not right."

She goes, "Brenda, I have to go.

I need the money."

Well, she went.

I knew she did not go on her own.

He took her.

I was very scared for her.

Very scared.

Because the boogieman really does exist.

And he's walking amongst us.

[eerie music]

After Sherry went missing,

Sherry's boyfriend went to the police.

He was very desperate to find her.

I cried my eyes out because that's all I could do is cry.

After the first body was found,

which was the beginning of it all.

I was very scared for her.

And then more and more girls started coming up missing.

- Tami was involved in dancing,

tap dancing, stage dancing.

She was never afraid of anything.

She just would go.

Something sounded like fun, let's just go do it.

Tami participated in an amateur contest

in a club just north of Seattle.

And she won.

And then immediately after,

she was contacted to go dance in the clubs in Alaska.

She went to Anchorage in 1981 before her 20th birthday.

Tami and my mom would talk every week.

And then a couple of weeks went by

and my mom hadn't spoken to her.

We have no idea where she's at.

And we were very worried.

[suspenseful music]

The police's response was basically,

"Okay, we'll take the information.

But women come to Anchorage

because they don't want to be found.

At this point, I know that my sister's in danger.

[eerie music]

- As Hansen's growing up and becoming a teenager,

he develops terrible acne.

He also was a stutterer.

So now, even if he wanted

to try to have any kind of social relationship

and in particular with girls, they reject him.

- Bob felt that maybe that women were mean to him

when they were just ignoring him.

[chilling music]

- Hansen was an individual

who probably from birth had a certain brain style

that predisposed him to poor judgment,

lack of empathy.

And then what happens is difficult adverse experiences

that anybody would experience,

are interpreted a different way

because they're seen through the lens of slights

and being judged negatively

or not being seen as adequate or so forth.

And I think that set the stage

for all kinds of later aggression or criminal behavior.

- He had this thing that we've seen in some of these people

who call themselves incels.

He wanted a particular type of girl to be interested in him,

the ones at the top of the social stratum

and they rejected him.

And so he developed revenge fantasies.

[eerie music]

- My mom contacted the Anchorage police again

and told them that she had not heard from her daughter,

and that she was concerned for her safety.

- I started the buddy system after Sherry went missing.

And then the second girl, Tami,

that's when the managers of the clubs made it a thing.

They would not let you leave alone.

- A body was found in a shallow grave off the Knik River.

And she was identified through dental records

as the missing Sherry Morrow.

[suspenseful music]

Sherry had been shot in the back three times

and cartridge cases were found in the vicinity by troopers.

223-caliber cartridge cases.

Now, we know that Eklutna Annie was stabbed in the back.

But just because another victim is not stabbed,

that they're shot instead,

doesn't mean that it's not by the same murderer.

But the troopers couldn't draw the connection

to Eklutna Annie.

And we really didn't know how to find the killer.

There just wasn't enough leads.

[thrilling music]

- It's early morning,

a truck driver is driving up 5th Avenue,

and suddenly, there is a woman in the middle of the street

trying to get him to stop.

She's in handcuffs.

There's a guy who's chasing after her with a gun.

[suspenseful music]

A truck driver is on his way to work.

And suddenly, there is a woman.

She's barefoot, in tears and handcuffs.

So he brings her to the police department.

And the chief proceeds to tell the story.

[eerie music]

- The first time I met him

was when I moved into my home on E 6th.

He was my neighbor.

Bob was a baker.

His wife Darla was a teacher at a Christian school.

They eventually had two children.

- She's this gentle person who has time for Bob,

who is probably the first person

who's ever really listened to him.

- Getting a woman like Darla to love him.

Although that's an achievement

that he might have thought would never have happened,

she's not the type of woman he was after.

- Bob was very excitable.

If you're talking about something he really loves,

like hunting,

you could get him going.

Some time, if he got real excited,

a little saliva would come out the edge of his mouth.

Bob loved the challenge.

It was the skill required to do the sneaking up part,

do the stalking,

and get close enough where you can make the kill shot.

And once you do that, trust me, it's a thrill.

It's a rush.

From all outward appearances, he was a great guy.

But he was a Jekyll and Hyde kind of person evidently.

[somber music]

- What you're beginning to see here

is the roots of the split in the personality.

A fragmentation of the self,

where he is harboring all this kind of stuff

that he wants to do to women.

Equating human beings to the beasts that they hunt down

in order to right some of these wrongs from his childhood

and take revenge so that you can say,

"See what I really am?

I'm actually very powerful

underneath this veneer of weakness and insecurity."

[somber music]

- Hanson had a little shack.

- It's a remote place not too far out of the city.

He could take off from Merrill Field

where he kept his airplane.

So he unchained Cindy Paulson

and took her in his car out to Merrill Field.

- He is going back and forth

between the trunk and the plane.

And she notices that the door is a little bit ajar.

- They learned that the person who owns the plane

is a man named Bob Hansen.

Cindy Paulson,

she remembers many, many details.

And when they went back to the house, it matched.

- Unfortunately Hansen did have alibis

and that's pretty much what killed

the Anchorage police department's case right there.

The investigator supervisor said,

"That's it. No case."

- Authorities believe the body of a woman

found near the Knik River was Paula Goulding.

Her friends says she was going to meet a man

who was going to pay her hundreds of dollars.

- Paula Goulding's body was found in a shallow grave,

not too far from where Sherry Morrow's body had been found.

Just like Sherry, this victim was also shot in the back.

Law enforcement found a fired 223 cartridge case.

So troopers now have two cases

that look to be very clearly perpetrated by the same killer.

It's horrifying.

Because this could be, in fact, a serial murderer.

[suspenseful music]

- This is the east end of downtown Anchorage.

Many bars, several strip joints.

Now a number of unsolved disappearances of women,

most of whom were topless dancers.

- [Reporter] Sherry Morrow was a topless dancer.

Paula Goulding was also a topless dancer.

Police say there are at least four other women

who are missing under similar circumstances.

There are striking similarities between these four women

and the two who were killed.

They were all dancers or prostitutes.

All were new in town.

- Everybody's taking a closer look at disappearances

in the Anchorage area

and trying to connect them.

Eventually, two APD detectives

came over to troopers headquarters

and directed their attention to this guy named Robert Hansen

and the Cindy Paulson case.

And then maybe the connection

between the other missing girls.

And then all of a sudden the lights started to come on.

- Hansen's keeping baker's hours, he's up late.

And in Anchorage, there's sex for sale.

He meets this woman at the Nevada Cafe.

- He comes up to her with a gun and says,

- He starts to drive South.

He stops to put restraints on her.

So they rent a motel,

and he sexually assaults her in the motel room.

- Usually, there is some event

that pushes the individual over the edge

from fantasy into action.

In the life of Robert Hansen,

it's difficult to tell what that factor might have been.

So one gets the sense of a person

that was increasingly needing a fix,

where first we have the double life

and interacting with sex workers,

and then ultimately feeling comfortable enough

to play out the fantasies.

- Now here we are sitting around

believing that Hansen did this.

What do you do?

You need to search his house.

We needed a search warrant.

But in order to get that search warrant,

you have to come up with probable cause.

So we had to refreshen evidence in order to impress a judge

and grant us a search warrant.

The decision is made to interrogate him

on the same day that we served that search warrant

on his home.

[suspenseful music]

- Two investigators came in

to do the interrogation of Hansen,

and the end result is that he didn't talk.

So everyone converged on his house,

served the search warrant,

and went inside and started searching.

I found a number of aircraft sectional maps.

I picked out the one that he had

for the Anchorage Bowl area,

including the Kenai and out on the Eklutna River.

And I noticed a number of Xs.

And I knew that some of these were in the areas

where they had found bodies.

- Sherry Morrow, Paula Goulding,

were very close to marks that were already on this map.

And that was the biggest oh-my-god moment.

Because now you have 21 marks on that map

and there can be bodies at every single one.

- It's big.

We have now even more momentum,

more belief that we have the right guy

and we're gonna get 'em for killing all these women.

The last place to search

was up in that crawl space in the roof.

Two troopers went up in there.

I just said, "Rip up the insulation."

So they were doing that

and choking and coughing on the insulation dust

until they found guns.

One of which was the Ruger Mini-14

that Hansen eventually was connected

to the crime scenes with

and identified him as certainly the murderer.

- The prosecutors

get a phone call from Bob Hansen's attorneys.

And the phrase they use is he wants to call clear the decks.

He's going to confess.

[eerie music]

- At this stage in Hansen's life.

What we see is him performing a modus operandi initially

that looked an awful lot

like we had been doing for quite some time.

He picked up a young woman.

- This woman did not follow the plan.

She broke away and ran away from Hansen.

- There was something exciting for him

about the kind of danger and the challenge in getting to her

and then taking her down

similar to the way he had been hunting animals.

[eerie music]

- Based on what Hansen said about killing this young woman,

he crossed a line out of desperation.

And any kind of resistance,

that just made him wanna punish them more.

- Robert Hansen is a well known businessman in Alaska.

Respectable.

Or so everyone thought.

Yesterday, Hansen admitted that he murdered 17 women.

It's the biggest mass murder case in Alaska's history.

- I was watching national news and there was Bob Hansen.

And I thought,

what the hell is Bob Hansen doing on national news?

And I turned it up and it said,

"This is the greatest mass murder

in the history of Alaska."

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

I had no idea.

- That guy was in my house.

At my dinner table.

Just sends a chill up my back.

- What we know is that he took them into remote places.

Often they were shot in the back

indicating that he either let them go,

or if they had run.

He's stalking women,

he's chasing women,

he's killing women.

And he can't stop himself.

- It was a celebration in my heart

that they finally got him.

How could he kill women?

I couldn't understand how a man could do this to a woman,

to a girl.

- You have an individual

with a basically psychopathic,

narcissistic personality structure

who has had a complicated relationship with his father,

who left him feeling emasculated.

This, coupled with the difficulties of

adolescence for him created a perfect storm

which ultimately led to compensating for those feelings

through acts of domination control

over the people he felt were rejecting him.

When everything got rocked out of control

by the first victim,

putting up a fight was very, very exciting

because he had to have that godlike feeling

of I can control even this.

Hansen unexpectedly discovered greater thrill

through murder,

to what is ultimately going to be the culmination of arousal

in the hunting and the killing of the victim.

[eerie music]

- In 2020, they produce new rendering of Eklutna Annie.

And there's still hope to identify the victim.

I hope that someday they solve that,

but there's a lot of families that still don't have closure.

- I lost my big sister when I was 17.

I miss Tami most just having that person in your life,

spending your life your whole time, your whole life.

You know.

She wasn't there when I graduated high school.

She wasn't there when I fell in love.

She wasn't there for my wedding.

I missed her having kids,

me being an uncle to her kids.

Missed having a big sister.

- I think why I couldn't read him.

And that's the only guy I ever know that I couldn't read.

Had I been able to read him,

maybe I could have stopped him

a lot earlier than he finally got stopped.

And maybe saved some of those girls.

Such a waste of young lives.