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The Butcher Baker of Alaska
Robert Hansen hunted his victims and crossed them off on a map.
When the police walked into Cindy Paulson’s motel room at Big Timber, she was shaking and hysterical, trying to remove the handcuffs digging into her wrists. She’d survived an attack by a man who had paid her for sex and instead abducted her, tied her up in his home, and would have eventually killed her if she hadn’t escaped.
Cindy’s quick thinking and luck helped her get away from her captor, but there were many more who came before her, who weren’t as fortunate.
The man who would soon be known as the Butcher Baker of Alaska was Robert Hansen. He was born in 1939 and grew up in Estherville, Iowa to Danish immigrants. He had a stutter and was incredibly shy because of it. He also had terrible acne scarring, which didn’t help him with girls at school, and he hated them for their rejection.
When he finished school, he followed in his father’s footsteps and trained as a baker, but he also enrolled in the Army for a year. After this, he worked as a drill instructor at the police academy in Pocahontas, Iowa and this is where he met his first wife.
In the winter of 1960, Hansen was arrested for burning down the bus garage of a school in Pocahontas. He was sentenced to three years at Anamosa State…
