*Please be aware that the details in this post are very disturbing. As always, I have tried to be as sensitive as I can be whilst sharing the facts of the case. If you have any questions or comments about this post or any case that I have covered and would like to contact me in confidence, please do so at jocaledoniankitty@gmail.com*
You would think that with Robert Hansen being one of the most terrifying and sadistic Serial Killers in American history, that he would be more widely known but surprisingly few have heard of him. Those who may be unfamiliar with his sickening crimes will never forget about him once you learn the horrors of what this monster did during his reign of terror, which reportedly lasted just over a decade (12 years to be exact).
Those who have watched the 2013 movie 'The Frozen Ground' may have learned about him and decided to look him up online and found yourself on my blog, in which case...hello and welcome! I hope that some of the details that I share in this post will give you even more insight to how truly evil this man was, his background, his crimes and the aftermath. Other people who have joined me in this horrific story in this particular post (my regular readers) welcome back to you too. This is my first post of 2026 and to say I have begun this year on this blog, on a very dark note...is an understatement, but this is reality and these heartbreaking, disturbing stories need to be told, the victims remembered and the monsters put on full display for all to see for we must never forget the pain and suffering such evil individuals have caused. We also have to remind ourselves how fragile we truly are and as much as you can never predict what is around the corner, the best we can all do is try to keep ourselves as safe as possible.
So with all that being said, let's get into the background and story of the monster nicknamed 'The Butcher Baker'
Robert Christian Boes Hansen was born in Estherville, Iowa (USA) on the 15th of February 1939. His father was a Danish Immigrant and baker who ran a successful bakery business which kept the family afloat. His upbringing was quite strict with a lot of focus on hard work, Robert would be under orders to help out in his father's business and that often meant very long hours. Robert's father taught him from scratch how to have a successful career as a skilled baker. His life at school was quite a difficult one, he struggled with social gatherings, was often described as a loner and had battled with low self-esteem due to a stammer which he was viciously mocked for. The more the other kids bullied him, the worse his stammer would get and he would feel powerless to stop it. To add to the difficulties he faced at school, his confidence with girls was also very low and he wouldn't know how to hold a conversation or behave around them, he appeared awkward, strange, and this would add to the bullying with girls laughing at him which he found even more difficult to deal with. He dreamed of a day that he could stand up to everyone, control his stammer and get some sort of revenge on all who wronged him.
His experiences at school had a profound effect on him and the anger he felt during these times would forever flash back in his mind throughout the rest of his life. To him, the bullying went on beyond just immature kids teasing, he took everything personal and his experiences at school mentally scarred him. From his early beginnings at school all the way up to his teenage years, school continued to be a never-ending nightmare and the bullies had more fuel because Robert had a serious problem with Acne. No matter what he tried to do to help his skin condition clear up, it just got more irritated and worse. It seemed in his mind that he couldn't win no matter what he did and still the girls continued to laugh at him, nobody would go on a date with him, the isolation became immense.
Overworked as a child, lonely, no confidence and no friends, Robert retreated into himself completely and created his own dark world, a world in which he was truly powerful. Because he couldn't take his anger and frustration out on the bullies and all who he deemed had wronged him, he chose innocent animals who were smaller and weaker than him. He would hunt animals, torture them, kill them and this gave him a sick sense of control and power. He lived in a world of sick fantasies and as well as having a real taste for hunting, he was fascinated with fire and enjoyed destroying things with fire.
It was clear that Robert was on a really dark road and at this point he became aware of what he was doing and for some reason or another, he decided he wanted to stop and make a real proper go of things at life. He joined the United States Army Reserves and lasted about a year but it wasn't to be, however he did meet a woman and fell in love which gave him a confidence boost but by then the rot had already set in years before. The moment he started to hunt animals and enjoyed their suffering was a pivotal moment. He took joy in destruction, in causing pain, it gave him a sense of control and power which he felt eluded him in the past. By 1960 he was 21 and married but still had an axe to grind due to pent up anger, regrets and scars he couldn't shake off. Along with a friend he decided to set fire to a school bus garage and ended up behind bars. His wife decided she'd had enough and refused to stand by him so at the age of just 21 he found himself divorced, on the wrong side of the law with no direction in life.
He didn't serve a full sentence for the arson and was released early, instead of this being a lesson to be learned, he managed to get himself into trouble on a regular basis after this, a prison cell became a regular sight at this period of his life. Despite racking up a criminal record he managed to meet and find love with another woman who he married and later had two children with. For some time after his troubled stint on the wrong side of the law it looked like he was ready to settle down. He and his family moved to Anchorage, Alaska and opened a successful bakery which was a hit with the local community, everyone found him to be a pleasant guy, even the cops would drop by and order donuts and pastries from his store. He had a reputation for being a successful businessman who, like his father, had built his business from the ground up so he had a lot of respect from people.
Despite the success with the bakery and being a family man you'd have thought that the demons of the past that had continued to haunt him over the years had finally been banished. After all, he'd overcome so many challenges, he had a wife and children who loved him and was a well-liked and popular member of the community but no matter the good things in his life (good things that would have been enough for other people) he couldn't shake off the memories and the blood-lust or the craving for the high that he would get from hunting and destroying things. This time however, as sickening as it was that his targets were animals, his fantasies deepened and spiralled out of control. He wanted to have women at his disposal. For years he fantasised about getting revenge for all those years before when they all laughed at him, he still felt not good enough and he wanted people to suffer.
So he led a double life, one was the popular, hard-working family man, devoted father and keen hunter (it's not my cup of tea as an animal lover but in some cultures, that horrific act is considered a sport. I have my opinions on hunting, I think it should be banned all over the world, but that's another discussion for elsewhere). The other was a complete monster who had a thirst for abducting, torturing, raping and murdering women. His fantasies of what he wanted to do to women was reportedly to have became a terrifying reality around 1972. At first it began with abductions and sexual assaults which soon escalated to murder. He had an addiction to targeting sex workers who he determined to be easy prey, he would pretend to some of the girls that he was a photographer who could help them out with photographs. He would befriend the girls and offer them money to gain their trust. In 1976 there was a brief pause of his evil crimes when he was imprisoned for theft but he was soon back on the streets again. He just went right back to his sick activities.
Robert Hansen was a skilled flyer and had his own private plane, he would use his plane as part of his sick ritual with his victims. The women would be abducted and he would have handcuffs in his car, one side of the cuffs was locked into the car so that when the victim was in the passenger seat he would grab them and slap the other cuff onto them preventing them from escaping. He said that it became like second nature. He would tell the girls to go along with what he said and do what he wanted, he promised he would let them go. The girls would be taken aboard his plane and flown to his remote cabin in the Alaskan bush. Sometimes on a rare occasion he would let a girl go, take her back on to his plane and she would be able to escape under the threat that if she ever told anyone what happened, he would tell the police that she was a sex worker. With the majority of young girls and women (his victims were aged between 16 and 41) he would take them to the cabin, torture them, rape them and then play an even sickening game of cat and mouse with them along a river known as the Knik River. He would take the majority of his victims there and he would have them stripped naked and set them out into this location where he would take sickening joy chasing these terrified young women and girls for hours and days at a time as they tried to survive the bitter cold and his raging bullets. He would hunt them, shoot them like he did in the past with the animals he killed. Some of the women died due to the freezing temperatures and their bodies later found during police searches, their remains found in the very same places they tried to hide from him.
The exact known number of murdered victims of Robert Hansen is not known, the number 17 is thrown around but there are victims who have been identified and so many that have not. His weapons of choice were a .22 Caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife. One of his victims who had managed to escape was a 17 year old girl by the name of Cindy Paulson in 1983. Cindy had been a working girl who had been abducted and repeatedly tortured and raped by Robert Hansen. It was a miracle that she survived and how she did manage to escape is gut-wrenching. Like so many other terrified women and girls, Cindy had been kidnapped by this monster, taken back to his cabin, chained up, tortured and raped for hours before being taken aboard his private plane to be thrown out into the wilderness to be hunted to death. Cindy in a split second took her chance to escape when he was briefly distracted as they were boarding the plane. She got out and ran for her life. Cindy was quick on her feet and in her mind, she made sure that she left her shoes behind on the plane so that if he did catch-up with her and kill her (in the hope that he was eventually captured by the police) there would be evidence on the plane that she had been there and that she had sadly been one of his victims.
Cindy was able to get to safety by a kind passer-by and told the police everything that happened. One of the sad facts about this horrible case is the police's narrow-minded opinion in regards to sex work and the whole negative opinion about sex workers not being taken seriously as victims. Robert Hansen was seen as this well-liked, hardworking family man and sadly, Cindy was seen as a (in their words) prostitute who was full of trouble and not to be trusted. Cindy described in details everything that happened, everything about Robert Hansen himself, the locations, the furniture, the plane....everything....but the police were not taking her seriously. Robert Hansen told the police that he did meet Cindy for sexual services and that she was just bitter and wanting revenge because he refused to pay her for sex. Robert had also managed to get a friend to lie for him so he had an alibi. Sickeningly, the cops let him go. This alibi was later retracted as his friend's wife came forward to say that her husband had indeed lied for Robert as he thought that he was just helping his friend, who he had believed, at the time, to be an innocent man.
You may have seen me talk a lot about the legendary John Douglas (FBI Criminal Profiler) and he was instrumental in this case along with a patrolman known as Officer Baker (who had believed Cindy's story from the start). During the investigation into the missing women and discovering of certain victims, the cops suspected they were on the trail of a serial killer, with John's help they were able to have a complete profile of the suspect they were looking for and incredibly, John had described Robert Hansen completely, all the way down to his speech impediment.
Robert Hansen's property was eventually searched and the amount of evidence was overwhelming. Like so many serial killers, Robert had kept trophies of his victims, jewelry etc. At first he refused to co-operate but gave up in the end when he knew the odds were all stacked against him. The cops had also found a chilling map which covered the location of where Robert would take his victims to hunt them. On this map there was 37 X's in various locations, some of these X's were identified as burial places but the majority have never been identified. As I mentioned before, he is believed to be responsible for more than the 17 murders he was accused of. He was also accused of raping at least 30 women who had survived their horrific ordeal. In the 12 years of horror that this monster had been carrying out these sick fantasies and murders, nobody knows for sure how many deaths he is responsible for and if the unknown and unidentified victims will ever be found.
Robert Hansen confessed to just four murders as part of a plea deal and was sentenced to four counts of first-degree murder without the possibility of parole. He died at the age of 75 in August of 2014 after suffering years of ill health.
RIP to all of the victims of Robert Hansen, the small number who were identified and the ones who may never be identified. My thoughts also to the numerous survivors and to Cindy who by some miracle had managed to escape and tell the world what this monster had done. So much respect also to Officer Baker, John Douglas and the cops who did do the right thing and brought this monster to justice.
Further Reading & Sources:
- The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers | Book by Michael Newton
- Hunter's Game: The FBI Files (Documentary)
- The Frozen Ground (Movie based on the Robert Hansen case)
- Robert Hansen Victim Article | Alaska.Gov
- Anchorage, Alaska | Wikipedia
- The Butcher Baker | Discovery Plus (Documentary)
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Stay safe, until next time x
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