True Detective Night Country brings a new twist to the thrilling series. This man disappeared 48 hours ago. In this podcast, we hear from the show's creators and creatives. I love the feeling of a darkness. There's things deeper than what you can see. Alaska felt like a natural place to explore these themes. Uvonga Khannik. I'm Alice Khannik Glen, and this is the True Detective Night Country podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcast. Watch the HBO original True Detective Night Country We exclusively on Max. A cast recommends, Podcasts We Love. Chris and Rosie Ramsey here.

Listen to our British podcast award and Comedy Award-winning podcast.

I also won the most handsome podcast co-host award, didn't I? Yeah, okay. About that, I might have made that one up. What? Yeah. In our podcast, we talk beefs, parenting, grown up, and so much more. What about me most improved podcast I'd trophy? Yeah, that one as well. Just search married annoyed wherever you get your podcast. Don't you dare tell me that you made up my podcast participation certificate as well. We need to have a chat. Acast is home to the world's best podcasts, including The Blindboy podcast, Ready to be Real with Sheila Shoiger, and the one you're listening to right now. This podcast explores themes of murder and rape. Listener discretion is advised.

I was upset when I saw the case was suspended. I just thought Hansen should have been looked at harder. I knew there were a number of missing girls, and they weren't showing up.

Patrol cop Greg Baker is convinced bakery owner Robert Hansen is responsible for the rape and kidnapping of 17-year-old sex worker Cindy Paulson. But his superiors have shut down the case.

It just seemed to me like something further should have been done. I proceeded I needed to look up any background I could find on Robert Hansen. Turned out to be quite a thick bundle of paper.

I'm Dr. Michelle Ward, and this is Mind of a Monster: The Butcher Baker. Episode 3, Robert C. Hansen versus the World. It's the summer of 1983, and dancers and sex workers have been going missing in the town of Anchorage for years. For Patrol cop, Greg Baker, Robert C. Hansen is emerging as a prime suspect. So who is Robert or Bob Hansen? What is his past? In this episode, we're going to dive deep to find out. If you own a bakery, you bake at night, so you have fresh stuff in the day. It was entirely possible for him to have a completely separate life than Darla. Robert Hansen owns a bakery in downtown Anchorage. His wife, Darla, is a teacher, and he has two kids, a girl and a boy aged 13 and eight. When he was home sleeping, she was at school. He would get up. When they would come home from school, they would eat dinner. He would spend time with the kids. Then he would go to work. This is Diana Hansen, who the Mind of a Monster team interviewed in 2019. In the early '80s, Darla was her teacher, and Hansen's daughter was her classmate.

Just in case you're wondering, her last name is just a coincidence. She's not a relative. Darla, she was such an amazing teacher. She was so just fair about things. Each kid, she really helped them with whatever it was they had, which I don't think back then I can tell you back then that didn't happen. She made a big impression on me. This isn't just Diana's point of view. Others who knew Darla well talked about how kind she was and how much teaching kids with dyslexia meant to her. As a teacher, she was called, quote, a miracle worker. Author Leland Hale met Darla in the 1980s and spoke with her several times. What were your impressions of Darla when you met her?

She's that person. She's a little passive. I don't know if naive is the right word, but she's no dummy. She was the one who decided, I'm going to get my degree no matter what. No matter what Bob wants to do. She was the one who had continued to get credits toward a master's degree. She had teacher jobs. She was really the essential breadwinner.

We know that Darla is well-liked in her community and that she's smart. Robert Hansen has this neat nuclear family, right? With two kids, one boy, one girl. He owns a business. But is that the whole story?

I want to read you a passage, though. We talked about reading from some of Darla's stuff.

Leland is reaching for some 35-year-old paper notes he took on a phone call with Darla.

In fact, this is one I find very illuminating, and I find it doubly illuminating when I reread it recently. So I'm talking to her about Bob's temper because she's told me that he has a temper, and there's some anger issues that he has. And she says, I guess I really don't know why he lost his temper. In his mind, if he wanted the house perfect, wanted you to read his mind, if he wanted something, he wanted to make sure you got it right now when he wanted it. Just was hard to please, I guess. Always had a quick temper with short views. He got mad at things other people would not get mad at. People couldn't do things fast enough for him or something like that. My opinion was he intimidated her.

I want to pick up here because when people recount the story of this case, there's this tendency to focus on the respectability of Robert Hansen and his perfect family life. Of course, it wasn't that simple. It never is. That word respectability, it's something I want you to think about throughout this episode because the meaning of it and its implication keeps coming back up in this case. It's 30 years earlier, and we're in Pocahontas, Iowa. Robert Hansen, or Bob, as he's often known, is a kid, aged 10 or so. His parents are Danish immigrants, Chris and Edna, and they own a bakery right in the center of Pocahontas.

This is a farming community. It's a Bohemian community. A lot of communities in the Midwest were peopleed by folks leaving other places.

Leland Hale visited Pocahontas, Iowa in the 1980s and spoke to a number of people who knew the Hansons. Along with his notes, we've pulled some newspaper reports and documents that I'm hoping can help us build a picture of Hansen and his early life. I mean, it's fascinating looking at some of these articles and what kid he was.

So one of the people I talked to when I went to Pocahontas was Robert Hansen, one of his grade school teachers.

You did? Tell me about that.

So she's in a retirement home now. She said, I can't say much about him. There was nothing really about him. He didn't speak in class. And there's a pause. And she says, But there was this one time, he usually sat at the back of the room and I could see him with this pencil and he was just like he was stabbing something. And I go back and I see that he's stabbing the webbing between his fingers with the pencil. And I stopped him and she said he had permanent scars. It was like a tattoo that the lead was left behind in his hand.

Wow.

And he was in grade school.

Having kids myself, this moment in the story just makes me a little sad. He's a little kid. He's not even a teenager yet who's already self-harming. But self-harmed doesn't make anyone become a criminal. Leland, as a neurocriminologist, I need to know more about Hansen's family life, because as we all know, childhood is a really crucial time. We need to know if there are any events that happened to him that could affect his brain while it's developing.

If you talk to some of the local people who knew Bob growing up, and you ask about his father, he would say, Good guy, hardworking, but strict disciplinarian. It could be rough.

I'm reading here, you're talking about his dad, and I'm reading here a quote from this paper, and it says, His father, Chris, was a good person, but was very domineering. They had a dysfunctional relationship together. His dad would just lay into him.

That's absolutely correct. Darla talks a lot about the sense of his father and parents saying he's worthless. That's a recurring theme.

Here's another element to this, Leland. Chris Hansen, Robert Hansen's father, made him start at the bakery at 2:00 AM before he went to school, and then he's sent off to school. One of his teachers said, Hansen was an average student whose performance was below average. The reason being, I always felt, was the fact that his dad made him work hard.

He would fall asleep in class. It turns out, of course, he had other difficulties in school. He had learning disabilities. Darla talks about her specialty as an educator, which is with children with dyslexia, children with learning disabilities. It's almost like Bob chose her career for her. She said sometimes he would get emotional when she was talking about the things she was helping her students do, do their homework and figure out ways. She said he would get emotional and say, I wish I had that help when I was that age. That was complicated. Pile that on the fact that you're tired. He stutters.

Right. And it's his stutter that seems to come up again and again when he describes his childhood. Here's Robert Hansen himself talking about this time in his life, recorded in in a later police interview.

I couldn't say hardly a word. I hated to be around people in general. Hated to but wanted to, so doggone bad esthetic. I can remember going up and talking to someone, man or woman, classmate or whatever, start to say something and start to stutter so badly that especially in the younger years, I'd run away crying, went off some places and hide for a day or so.

I think it's clear to say that for Hansen, his stutter was a big thing.

Absolutely.

And while we cannot take everything he says in these later statements at face value, we do know that Robert Hansen was born left-handed, and his parents forced him to use his right-hand.

So let's just put it this way. It may have doubled his propensity to stutter rather than eliminated his stutter.

The research on stutters is mixed, but some studies show that a stutter is associated with a disturbed signal transmission between the right and left brain hemispheres. That can occur when you try to force a left-handed person to make their right-hand dominant.

He was the guy who sat at the back of the class and didn't say much. He was the observer, observing people's behavior and observing how they acted because his observational skills were great, his speaking skills were not so great. And in fact, these observational skills that he perfected also made him a very good hunter.

That's right, because even from an early age, he loved to hunt animals. Let's dig a bit deeper with criminal profiler Dr. Brent Turvie.

I don't take anybody's statement that... To me, statements are not evidence. To me, statements are theories that need to be checked against the evidence.

I would argue we do this with every type of criminal. We dig deep into their past to find the aha moment, and I'm always arguing that's not what it is. You'll remember that we discussed complex trauma with Brent in our last episode. Well, this is important here, too. There is no aha moment. There are a series of events, relationships, biological and genetic predispositions, and unresolved trauma that affect how someone interacts with the world. I mean, I grew up in a very strict Scandinavian household. My family is fresh off the boat from Denmark. So when they're talking about how he gets up to work in the bakery at 2:00 AM, I'm thinking, well, shoot, if my grandparents had a bakery, that's what they would have done to us, too. So for me, this part doesn't really stand out, but it It did stand out in terms of his educators, his peers, his coaches, because he couldn't even stay awake in class.

Sleep is a big deal. I think that's a really good conversation to have. Sleep is one of the biggest causes of mental problems that exists. It can induce mental disorders. It can induce problems, especially if you're a teenager. It can create a problem with your memory, with your cognition, with your understanding. It can lead to huge misinterpretations.

Okay, the fact that he was deprived of an incredibly the important biological necessity of sleep, particularly in that age.

Right. So the age and the context are what give that meaning, because there are periods of time in everyone's life who isn't a millionaire, where you've had to work very long hours with very little sleep, and you aren't out there committing violent crimes. So that's not an explanation for the behavior. It's a contextual variable that we have to look at, along with other contextual variables like the strictness of the father, like the culture, and how he was taught to regard women.

I'm glad How did you mentioned that because it's a really important point. How he views his high school peers and how they view him are pretty much two different things.

But the worst there was that I was the rebuttal of all the girls around the school. I had a tremendous amount of acne or pimples and so forth in my face. Now, I could see why many girls wouldn't want to get close to me. I could count the number of girls I went out with probably one hand. That set me very high.

So, Brent, you have his testimony here, and then you read this, a A fellow classmate heard that Hansen thought fellow high school students talked about him in the hallways and girls shunt him. And she says, That's funny. I thought everyone in the hall was talking about me. I think it's pretty indicative of our ages. And then there's another from a second female last mate. Did we reject him? I don't think we treated him any different to anyone else. To me, it's like we can't really trust either of those statements, right? I mean, they're both made with hindsight and pretty much just defending a position.

Lots of people have traits or characteristics that make them feel embarrassed or make them feel marginalized. Anybody who looks just a little bit different, they're going to get targeted for bullying. What I'd be interested in is accounts of him actually being bullied, not just being rejected, because when he's saying, I'm getting rejected or I can't communicate, he's talking from a position of entitlement.

You mean that this reveals his perception of the events, not necessarily the events themselves?

That's it.

I think something else is relevant here, too, because we know from a later document a psychiatric evaluation in 1972, how he processed those rejections. It says at high school, He fantasized about doing all sorts of harmful things to girls who rejected him. That, to me, is almost looks like a modern day incel.

Yeah. I mean, he is a person who has problems with relationships, expectations based on his culture and his upbringing that are not being met, and then a regard for women as property or objects, not people. This does not distinguish him from anyone else at that time. At that time, that was the prevailing philosophy of the people that he was living with and living around.

Right. Blame women who don't want you because you are entitled to a date with that girl.

I just started to hate. My friends, classmates were young boys that I ran around. There were some that I think we're out of the way to prove to me that they were my friend. And to this, I appreciate it, oh my God, to no end. But knowing that they were trying on my behalf seemed to make it worse. Worse for me inside.

Here, he's also talking about being pitied and how it upset him to be pitied.

That's an in-cell ideological belief. The man is strong and should be respected. The love language of men who have these traditional views about themselves is unquestioning respect. Because that's what society has told me, that I'm a man and you're a woman, and you should be quiet or getting me coffee or be available for sex.

You hit on something really interesting, this attitude of his that, I just need to be respected just because I was born. Do you think his dad being super strict instilled any of that in him? The father was unquestioned and just respected because he had that role of father. Do you think that affected Hansen at all?

Well, undeniable. It's what his father modeled to him. And that's the other thing. To me, you have this context where this guy is growing and developing. He's not getting any feedback from anybody about how to improve or get better. He's not developing healthy relationships. And it's because of his context. It's because of his background, and it's because of how he feels he was being treated.

Now, there's something that happens when Hansen is 21 that might give us some insight into how he processes teenage years and childhood. I have the documentation right here. It's on very fated paper in brown type. Robert Hansen, it reads, who was on the ninth day of October, 1961, in the district Court of Pocahontas County, convicted of the crime of arson. True Detective Night Country brings a new twist to the thrilling series. His man disappeared 48 hours ago. In this podcast, we hear from the show's creators and creatives. I love the feeling of a darkness. There's things deeper than what you can see. Alaska felt like a natural place to explore these themes.. I'm Alice Khannik Glen, and this is the True Detective Night Country podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcast. Watch the HBO original True Detective Night Country exclusively on Max. A cast recommends, podcasts we love. Chris and Rosie Ramsey here.

Listen to our British podcast award and Comedy Award-winning podcast.

I also won the most Handsome Podcast Co-Host Award, didn't I? Yeah, okay. About that, I might have made that one up. What? Yeah. In our podcast, we talk beefs, parenting, grown up, and so much more. What about me most improved podcaster trophy? Yeah, that one as well. Just search married annoyed wherever you get your podcast. Don't you dare tell me that you made up my podcast participation certificate as well. We need to have a chat. Acast is home to the world's best podcasts, including The Blindboy podcast, Ready to be Real with Sheila Shoiger, and the one you're listening to right now.

There was a basketball game. It was between the Pocahontas Public School and the Pocahontas Catholic School. And so everybody's going to be at the game. It's the big game.

On this night in July 1960, Robert Hansen is 21. And as almost the entire town gathers for the big game, just a few hundred feet away, Hansen is in a field next to the school Bus Barn with a 16-year-old accomplice. He throws gasoline over its roof and lights a match. Author Leland Hale.

What better time under the guise of this big event to pull off this fire? And of course, it's aided and abetted because Bob is a volunteer fireman. Many is the story, unfortunately, a volunteer fireman setting a fire so they can come be the hero and put the fire out.

As Leland says, the fire Hansen sets is dramatic. The barn He's completely destroyed and in front of a huge audience who gathered to watch the high school game. For a year, he gets away with it until the rumor mill on the teenage party scene catches up with him and a friend of a friend goes to the police. Leland, you spoke with the police chief of Pocahontas yourself, Marvin Wiseman, right? He knew Hanson pretty well because Hansen had been in the police cadets. Could you tell me about your perspective when you spoke with him?

Yeah, It was like, he's a small town cop. He reminded me of the Andrew Griffith character, like this avuncular, friendly. In all the pictures I have of him, all two, he's smiling smiling. His police uniform doesn't quite fit. His tie is a little short, but he's a good guy who wants to do good things.

One of Marvin's statements to the press, and as I understand it, he basically said the same thing to you was, Hanson had a resentment inside of him against authority.

Yeah. I think he was perplexed by him, right? That here is this kid who he had elevated to a leadership role in the police cadets. And yet he was off. More resentment toward him and toward the people of Pocahontas than he suspected. Nobody's expecting this Bob Hanson guy to act out the way he did. It's not a very small town.

I hated the word school. I guess this is why I burnt down the bus barn way back in Iowa. Back then, I just hated that place with a divine passion. I would do anything and everything I could think of to get back at that monster school that I convinced myself was out to do a Bob Hanson personal wrong.

So basically, think about the school bus incident. Three years after he graduated high school, he is holding on to some grudge. This burning is like the motivation related to that is either going to be money or rage. And there's no money for him in it. And he's holding this grudge for three years. So it's not just that he is perceiving these wrongs. It's not just that he's not getting enough sleep. It's not just his cultural upbringing and being overworked. It's that his perception is that he has been wronged and he has a trait in himself where he's holding it. For some reason, he holds on to that. I'd like to know where came from. That holding on to this grudge forever, and then expressing it so violently, that's interesting to me.

It's like he's entitled to seek revenge, seek his own justice, and to have the girls he wants to have. It's like Robert C. Hansen versus the world.

Exactly.

Hansen pleads guilty to the arson to get a reduced sentence, but he maintains his innocence to the community. In fact, right around when all this was happening, Hansen gets married for the first time to a local woman. He even somewhat dramatically swears his innocence to her father before the ceremony. But after six months in jail, he confesses. Her reaction? She divorces him right away. I see it here on the divorce decree, it says marriage, April first, and then a short year later, a divorce. I mean, That date sealed the deal, right?

I'm imagining now, but I can imagine her finally, Well, you can get married. We got one day for you. The only one available, April first. Take it or leave it.

I know, right? Something funny about this divorce decree is look at the reason for the divorce. I've got to find it over here. Okay, here it is. Intolerable indignities.

I mean, it was intolerable indignities, for her. I mean, it was like, You lie to me and you lie to everyone in town. Here I am married to this guy.

Hansen gets out on parole after just a year in jail for arson, and he pretty soon meets his second wife, Darla, in 1963. They moved to Anchorage in 1967 and have a child. It's 1971 before Hansen has another brush with the law. He had a gun, tied my hand from my... I was I've been shot or beaten up. I'm going to have to repeat this for you because this is such an old recording. It's taken from a pre-trial hearing in 1972. A young sex worker, Patty Roberts, just 18 years old is on the stand. And she says, He had a gun, tied my hands behind my back. He said, If I shout, I will get beaten up. Sound familiar? Patty is one of two young women to report Hansen to the police in 1971. The first is another 18-year-old named Susan Hepard. She's not a dancer or a sex worker. She's a real estate secretary. Hansen sees Susie in town as he's driving along, and then he follows her home and knocks on her door. He tells her that he needs to use her phone, and they end up talking for a few minutes. The next day, he comes back in the early morning winter darkness and tries to abduct her.

She screams bloody murder, and he runs off into the snowfield of darkness, leaving his car behind. Police officer Ron Rice was on call for investigations that morning, and the Mind of a Monster team spoke to him in 2019.

Probably within 30 minutes or an hour, Anchorage Police Patrol stopped him. You're under arrest. And that's when he was actually arrested over that one. That's when I was called in and did the interviews with him. Sit down there. He denies everything, but his head is down like that. He's not looking at you. He's just an innocent person. He doesn't know why they would do this. If it was anybody that he thought had more control over him, in this particular case, it's going to be the law enforcement folks. He was good and mild and meek. Could have been him.

But it's a pretty clear-cut case. Hansen is charged with assault with a deadly weapon and released on bail. Before he leaves the station, Ron takes a picture of him and puts it in the Anchorage Police Department PERP book. I ask author Leland Hale to explain.

In the old days before computers were ubiquitous, troopers and police agencies kept a book, a PERP book, sometimes referred to as the Asshole Book. And it was photos of either Peeping Toms or rapists or people like that. The reason for that was because these are crimes that tend to recur.

Now, that becomes important because a month later, while Hansen is still on bail from assaulting Susan a state trooper, brings 18-year-old Patty Roberts into the Anchorage Police Department to see Ron's perp butt.

Come on in.

This is the same Patty Roberts you heard from earlier. Patty claimed she'd been kidnapped and that her attacker drove her out to the Kenai Peninsula, 160 miles south of Anchorage, and raped her. She thought he was going to kill her, but she persuaded him to bring her back to town by telling him she had a son and giving him the name of her parents and their address.

The Patricia Roberts is her name, and she looked at the book, and she selected Robert Chris Hansen as the person who had abducted her.

That's him.

It was that same evening, I went with the trooper, and we arrested Robert Chris Hansen. We got there to his house. His wife was there, a small girl, two or three years old, a blonde-haired girl.

This was Darla Hansen and their tiny daughter.

I was trying to keep the little girl away. She's a three-year-old girl, and the mother was holding on to her. Didn't say much. I mean, she was just withdrawn, so I I don't know. She was just that person that didn't say much. And maybe he was the one that was the aggressor in that outfit. I don't know. She didn't say a whole bunch.

So now Hansen has two charges, one for kidnapping and rape and the other for assault with a deadly weapon. But he denies sex worker Patty's story outright.

He indicated that it was a money dispute. She was a working prostitute, and that this was all over money, and there was nothing all involved that he was going to do over that.

I hope you recognize that phrase money dispute because Hansen is still using it many years later in 1983. Back in 1972, both assault cases go to the Assistant district attorney for prosecution, and this is where everything takes a left turn. The Assistant DA does a plea deal with Hansen. If Hansen agrees to plea guilty to assaulting the real estate secretary, Susan Hepard, he will get off got free for the rape and kidnapping of sex worker Patty Roberts and avoid a trial.

Because she was a worker. What a shame. I mean, really, really was. That's all that they were doing. They thought they would have credibility problem with the jury. My answer to that is, once again, it's a jury question. Let's let the jury decide. They didn't have an opportunity to do that, and they should have. He would have probably got 20 years to do in jail.

It's the old boy network. It's hard at work. It's like, Oh, I see, Bob. There was a dispute over money, and now she's going to come after you. Don't worry, we'll protect you. It's just a beef with the hooker.

Hansen gets a five-year sentence for the assault of the real estate secretary, but he's paroled to a halfway house after less than a year in jail. He is, by all accounts, a model prisoner.

He's got this, I'd say, practiced passivity. He knows when to be passive because his father was quite strict and could be cruel, so he knows when to shut up. He knows when to say, Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir. All the while, he's thinking other things. He really did not spend much time in jail. I mean, if you talk to Darla, it was way too much because that means she lost an income and sometimes she wasn't working. It was a struggle. If the kids were sick, it was either prayer or having them scream because we couldn't afford medicine and we couldn't afford doctors.

That's difficult enough, but he's also in the local paper for kidnapping and raping a prostitute.

She has suspicions, and it was suspicion, of course, that he was seeing prostitutes. She went to a woman in the church who she trusted, who's an elder, and she said, You need to talk to pastor about it. You need to talk to the male authority about it.

What did the pastor say?

It's a very fundamentalist Christian-American, which is the male is the head of the household. You are the servant. I mean, all this stuff. She was very religious. She's got two kids. There's this sense of keeping the marriage together no No matter what.

Criminal profiler, Brent Turvie.

How many women do you know that are in relationships with very violent men who avoid certain trigger words or trigger context just to keep the guy happy because they don't want to deal with the aftermath? They're trapped by economics, by children, by resources, by culture, they're trapped. So they don't have a choice. So their only choice is keep your head down, keep your mouth shut. That's a normal environment for many women in the United States today.

So Let's rewind a moment because Hansen just got a big break, right? I mean, he goes to jail for three months, and then he's out of there. I feel like that's a really big deal. What do you think that did in terms of emboldening him?

On the one case, he gets in trouble. Eighteen-year-old real estate secretary, upstanding citizen. And then there's this other citizen who doesn't quite fit into that bucket. And that case just gets tossed. And so if you look back on it from hindsight, it's absolutely the turning point for Hansen.

So now he knows to go for the sex workers only, and he knows that he can tell a compelling story. He's believed.

Well, as long as he says it was a dispute over money, then he could pretty much get away with it. They're coming after me. And even the most callous of cops can identify with, Well, I wouldn't want my wife to find out if I... I can put myself in his situation.

The reality is that it emboldens someone who thinks that they're getting away with it. Now, one, you teach them what not to do in the future, and two, you teach them what they're doing is actually okay.

I think we tend to have this idea that these terrible injustices, they happened in the past, and somehow that makes us feel better that life has moved on and we're all better people now. But when you work in the criminal sphere today, it doesn't take long to realize that that just isn't true.

We had this problem in Alaska back in 2017. We had a judge who sat on a case involving a white guy who worked for, I think, the FAA, and he was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting and nearly attempted to murder a native girl. And she was found in a snowbank with the the semen on her, and she was almost dead, but she survived. They dropped all the charges down to almost nothing. When he did the sentencing, he basically said, Okay, you're a good young man. You're one of us. I understand you're one of us. I understand you're here doing the good things for the community. So we're going to let this go this time. But don't let it get out of hand. And to the native community, they heard, You get to rape one native girl.

It telegraphs to the community that you're unimportant and to the perpetrator that, as long as I If I see you in my courtroom too often, I'm going to let you slide. Let's head back to 1983 in the office of the Anchorage Police Department. Greg Bakers pulled all the information he can on Robert Hansen's past record. He doesn't have everything we've gone over in this episode, but he's got a fair bit of it.

Started out with theft and shoplifting. He had some shoplifting. I think he was involved with an arson. He had had contact with other prostitutes in the past. I had printed out copies of all this and bound all these reports up. I think they went back probably 10 years, maybe 15 years. Turned it all over the troopers.

The Alaska State Troopers. At this point, they're still investigating the murder of Sherry Moreau, whose body was found on the Knik River over 10 months ago.

I knew that the task force was still in effect and no one was making any headway in it. I told him I had had this experience with this guy and a prostitute, and I don't know if they were looking at him as far as the missing girls were concerned. But if they weren't, I thought they should be. Here's why.

What Greg did, it's a bigger deal than it sounds. Sharing files with agencies is pretty much against every unwritten police code.

I knew that if anybody found out that I took the information over to the troopers, that I would reap some consequences of some kind. I mean, I was not trying to make APD look bad by any stretch of the imagination. But I was also interested in seeing if we could stop these women from disappearing off the face of the earth with no idea what was happening to them.

Who knows exactly what would have happened to it and how the troopers would have proceeded with the case had a couple of hunters not found another body, that of 31-year-old dancer Paula Goulding on the Knik River in September 1983, a year after Sherry Morrow's body was found nearby.

They do the examination. What do they find? They find two, two, three shell casings in the grave, just like they found him. Sherry Morrow's gravesite. And the whole tenor of things changes.

The troopers considered there could be a serial killer out there?

Yes. Well, for sure. I mean, they've been hearing it, and there's some skepticism. But they can no longer avoid that reality.

Next time on episode 4 of Mind of a Monster, the survivor of Kidnapping speaks out for the first time as the circle tightens around Robert Hansen.

I ran out of the passenger side. I escaped, running butt naked through rocks and sticks and trees and wire.

Mind of a Monster: The Butcher Baker is produced by AeroMedia for ID. The executive producer for ID is Jessica Lauher. Aeromedia's producer is Jess Liendivier. Editor, Millie Tapner. Audio engineering by Mahony Audio Post. Our Line producer is Philippa Wittle. Our Production Manager is Alexandra Kelly. Our Junior Production Manager is Jody Tanner-Wild. Our Production Coordinator is Shannon Tunacliff. Our Archive producer is Katya Long, and our Assistant producer is Isabel Wilson. Aeromedia Series producer is Gabrielle Nash, and executive producer is Stuart Pender. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Ward. Please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help spread the word.