An Alaskan's View of Robert Hansen

I recently came across this great remembrance of Robert Hansen by Alaska novelist Dana Stabenow.

She perfectly captures the ambivalence Alaskan’s feel about the Hansen movie. Yes, it’s a quintessential Alaska story. But as we note in the Epilogue of Butcher, Baker, “Those were real women Bob Hansen killed, real families who wept, and real graves that had been dug…”

Stabenow says this: “In Alaska, there is a lingering sense of unrealized ‘frontier justice’ surrounding Robert Hansen. No movie can change that. But if the Frozen Ground stays true to its focus on the sensitive trooper (Glenn Flothe), and the teenage prostitute whose escape led Troopers back to Hansen, it can put feelings and faces on Hansen’s crimes. From where I sit, that’s a good thing.

“Too many women died in Hansen’s ‘summer project.’ It took a ton of dedication by a lot of people, including a decade of police work, to put the man away. This is their story, as much as it is Robert Hansen’s.”

Update: The Anchorage Daily News reports that, “BTW, we (the media) keep calling “The Frozen Ground” a movie about Hansen. Actually… the movie is more about Hansen’s final victim, Cindy Paulson, who escaped and helped investigators nail him.”

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