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Butcher Baker: Robert Hansen who hunted down prostitutes like animals was a shy boy with a 'rough' childhood

'I guess prostitutes are women I am putting down as lower than myself. I could do things with them that I couldn't do with a good woman,' Hansen said in is confession tape
PUBLISHED SEP 3, 2020
Robert Hansen (Investigation Discovery)
Robert Hansen (Investigation Discovery)

Robert Hansen was a reputed baker and a married man with two children living in Anchorage, Alaska. But he also had a dark secret - he liked abducting prostitutes and exotic dancers and letting them loose in the wilderness so he could hunt them down like animals. Eventually, he confessed to 17 murders and was sentenced to 461 years in prison.

Nicknamed the 'Butcher Baker' for the way he killed his victims in a decade-long killing spree that started in the 70s and continued into the early 80s, Investigation Discovery's 'Serial Killer Week' featuring unscripted films about some of the most notorious murderers in history, explores the profile of the mild-mannered Hansen and details his life leading up to his murder confession on February 22, 1984. The episode titled 'The Butcher Baker: Mind of a Monster' premieres on  Wednesday, September 2 at 9/8c on ID.

The two-hour-long documentary also features the confession tapes of Hansen which up till that point was believed to have been largely lost. In the tapes, the notorious serial killer not only gave detailed descriptions of how, when, and where he killed his victims, he also elaborated on what made him kill them. During a search of his house, detectives found a map of the area around Knik River, north of Anchorage, Alaska, marked with small asterisks to point out where he had buried the various bodies. Despite there being 21 markings, Hansen only confessed to 17 murders. Apart from the map, the investigators also recovered jewelry pieces that he had kept from his victims, hidden inside his attic and a collection of hunting rifles believed to have been used to kill the women.

Robert Hansen (Investigation Discovery)

There are also never-before-heard details about his childhood and why he targeted certain kinds of women as victims. 

Hansen's 'rough' childhood

Karen O' Leary, a woman who dated Hansen after meeting through an Anchorage dating ad, said that Hansen told her that he did not have the best of childhoods because he had a speech problem when he was young and people made fun of him because of that. Rosemary Shaw Sackett, Hansen's classmate corroborated Leary's account and said that Hansen was a shy boy at school. '''My gosh I looked like a freak and I sounded like one. Consequently, I never had many girls that were interested in me,'' Hansen said in the confession tape. 

His father, who originally started the bakery that Hansen eventually inherited, was quite strict and often punished him. However, to make sure that people remember him, Hansen burned down the school bus barn. He was given a 3-year sentence for arson in 1961. He was released in 1963 after serving 20 months. By then, his family had sold the bakery out of embarrassment and bought a resort in Minnesota. 

It is where Hansen met his wife, Darla. The couple moved to Alaska in 1967. 

Robert Hansen mugshot (Investigation Discovery)

Why he hunted prostitutes

After finishing high school, he joined the army. It was there that he lost his virginity to a sex worker in New York City. He described the experience of losing his virginity as a ''disappointment." "I think that was part of the reason I figured that if a person was going to pay for it, they should be in the driver's seat,'' Hansen said. 

Although it's hard to determine if that experience had any role in the killer mostly opting for prostitutes and dancers as his victims, his choice was definitely influenced by the first couple of times he attempted to sexually assault women in the 1970s. While he was sentenced to 5 years in prison for threatening a woman named Susan Heppeared, with a gun on November 22, 1971, the charges for kidnapping another woman named Patricia Roberts on Dec 19, 1971 were dropped as part of a plea deal struck with the prosecutors. Incidentally, Roberts was a sex worker. 

"I guess prostitutes are women I am putting down as lower than myself. I could do things with them that I couldn't do with a good woman," Hansen said. One of the experts said that to Hansen, 'good girls' were those who were genuinely interested in him and bad girls were those who asked him for money and in that case he could do whatever he wanted with them. 

Being a church-attending Christian, it was also clear from his tapes that he had a clear definition in his mind about what his wife was allowed to do. In the early days of interrogation, when Hansen was denying ever assaulting the victims, he was asked why he was down in the streets with his wife at home. Hansen said there were no problems at home and he just wanted oral sex and he was old fashioned so he would under no circumstances ask his wife to perform it.

Hansen died in prison in 2014 of natural causes at the age of 75.

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