Alaska Serial Killer Robert Hansen: The Baker Who Hunted His Victims Like Game
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1983, Anchorage, Alaska investigators connected respected local businessman Robert Christian Hansen to the murders of at least seventeen women, building their criminal profile case through FBI behavioral analysis, forensic evidence recovered from a hidden attic cache, and the survivor testimony of seventeen-year-old Cindy Paulson, who escaped Hansen in handcuffs before her scheduled flight into the Alaskan wilderness. Hansen pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree homicide and was sentenced to life plus 461 years without the possibility of parole. Robert Hansen sold donuts. He had hunting trophies on his walls, a solid reputation around Anchorage, and a family who had no idea what was happening a few miles out past the city limits, where the roads stopped, and the wilderness swallowed everything. For twelve years, he used the Last Frontier like a private hunting ground, and the only thing standing between him and another twelve years of it was a teenager with no shoes and a pair of handcuffs around her wrists. This is the story of how a man builds two completely separate lives in the same small city, what a pipeline boom made possible for a predator who knew exactly how to read the terrain, and the girl who, with about thirty seconds of nerve and nothing else, ended all of it.
#TrueCrime #RobertHansen #ButcherBaker #AlaskaTrueCrime #SerialKiller #CindyPaulson #TrueCrimePodcast
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He was a baker, a family man, a world record hunter with trophies on the walls, and a good word from practically everyone in Anchorage. |
| 0:09.8 | And behind all of that, he had an aeronautical chart hidden behind his headboard with 37 X marks on it. |
| 0:17.4 | The only person who ever got close enough to expose him was a 17-year-old girl with no shoes |
| 0:22.6 | and a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. |
| 0:25.6 | The Robert Hansen grew up in a house where the emotional vocabulary was essentially labor. |
| 0:53.0 | His father, Christian Hansen, was a Danish immigrant who had built a modest life in Estherville, Iowa, around the local bakery that he ran with the warmth of a tax audit. |
| 1:03.0 | Robert started working there practically before he was old enough to see over the counter, 35 cents a day, which even adjusting for 1940s Iowa economics isn't very much money. |
| 1:15.2 | Christian also decided that Robert's natural left-handedness was a problem requiring correction. |
| 1:21.8 | So he had his son retrained to use his right hand. |
| 1:25.4 | This was considered reasonable parenting at the time. Researchers have |
| 1:29.1 | since linked forced hand retraining to the development of speech impediments, and that is exactly |
| 1:34.0 | what followed. Robert Hansen grew up with a severe, debilitating stutter that shattered him |
| 1:39.4 | through every classroom, every attempted conversation, every moment of trying to be just a normal kid. |
| 1:46.6 | Girls teased him relentlessly in junior high. |
| 1:50.0 | Cystic acne left permanent scarring across his face by high school. |
| 1:54.5 | He graduated in 1957 from a class of 31 students, and the yearbook staff managed to misspell his name. 31 people, and |
| 2:03.3 | you still managed to misspell one of them. The activities that actually worked for Robert |
| 2:08.3 | Hansen were the solitary ones, hunting, fishing, archery. Out there, no one was laughing at him. He |
| 2:16.5 | turned out to be genuinely gifted at all of it. |
| 2:19.3 | Years later, in Alaska, he would earn multiple world record designations |
| 2:24.3 | through the Pope and Young Club for Archery Big Game Hunting. |
| 2:27.3 | His ability to track animals, read terrain, and be patient and precise in the wilderness |
... |
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