Patty Roberts, now in Hansen’s vehicle, is on a ride to no place. No place she knows, at least. No place she can predict. What she knows is it’s Robert Hansen’s 1967 Pontiac. And that her senses are suddenly super-tuned. Here, in her own words, is the account of that fearful drive.
Patty Roberts: “After getting into the car, he held the gun on me, holding it with his left hand and driving with his right hand. The gun looked like an automatic rather than a revolver. He drove out of the parking area onto Gambell Street and went south. We turned right, either on Fireweed Lane or Northern Lights Boulevard.”
Roberts: “[Then we] drove on to Arctic Boulevard, where we made a left turn and continued south on Arctic. Just before getting to Campbell Creek, he stopped and tied my hands and feet with leather shoe laces. He tied my hands behind my back. I think he had the shoe laces in his pocket. He told me he would beat me up if I gave him any trouble at all.”
Roberts: “He said he intended to keep me for two days and then if I cooperated with him, he would bring me back to town and let me off within a block of my car. He told me he was going to take me to Kenai to some cabins. He had blankets, they looked like green navy type, and sandwiches in the car.”
Sandwiches. He brought sandwiches. The bread, no doubt, from the bakery where he worked. Probably white bread. Safeway bread. Such a mundane detail, but so telling. He had no intention of stopping anywhere to eat. It was too risky, what with a young woman bound with shoelaces in his car.
He had to get her to a place — wherever it was, Hansen didn’t actually have a cabin — where he could perform whatever foul deeds his twisted psyche could imagine. His stomach would be sated with sandwiches. Maybe she’d like one, too. It was, in its own strange way, a Darla Hansen detail. The dutiful wife, full of Midwest nice.
I don’t know about you, but I’d have no appetite for fricking sandwiches.
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2020). All rights reserved.
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