Hansen Transcripts: Part One

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Catching a serial killer is not easy. By definition a serial killer not only wants to kill, he — sometimes she — wants to keep on killing, no matter what. The killing has its own impetus, its own logic, its own rhythm. Nothing can stop it. Nothing, that is, except a combination of luck, perspicacity and doggedness, the latter sometimes called “shoe leather.” While much has been written about serial killer Robert C. Hansen — not all of it accurate, by the way — I am using this series of posts to expose some of that shoe leather, based on an in-depth look at official transcripts. While we’re at it, my publisher is offering some exclusive deals on Butcher, Baker!

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Robert Hansen line-up photo, Courtesy AST

We start with the beginning of the end for Robert Hansen’s sordid crime spree.

The long slog toward putting away serial killer and bakery owner Robert Hansen turned a corner on October 27, 1983. By then, the cops had more than a decade’s worth of damaging evidence, enough to get the comprehensive search warrant they needed. It was to be a huge undertaking. Officers were going to be out in force. By 6:30 a.m. that morning, Alaska State Trooper Sgt. Smith and Trooper Bullington were surveilling Hansen’s bakery, waiting for him to finish work so they could pounce and take him in. Two other troopers were enroute to locate one of the baker’s key alibi witnesses. Twelve additional troopers, as well as Anchorage Police Investigator Maxine Farrell, spread out across the city, hoping to find every scrap of evidence. At his bakery. His airplane. His vehicle. His residence. Everything. The transcripts don’t lie.

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Alaska State trooper Robert Hansen memorialization: Courtesy AST

Getting A Break

By 8:26 a.m., things were starting to break. Suspect Robert Christopher Hansen agreed to be transported to the Alaska State Trooper office for an interview. As with (most) great police work, the interview started slow. Really slow. As in, getting to know you slow. The game was to seduce Robert Hansen into a careless moment. A mistake. A hiccup. A goof. And maybe… A confession.

HANSEN AUDIO: Initial Arrest Interview
transcripts
Click image to enlarge: Courtesy AST

The Action Begins

The first stab — the first real stab — came One minute and 44 seconds into the interview. It seemed innocent enough. Sgt. Daryl Galyan asked Hansen a simple question, seemingly about nothing in particular. Here’s what the transcripts reveal:

Galyan: Okay. And while I'm thinking of it, we were talking about hunting. You have an airplane. You fly, correct?

Hansen: Yes, uh huh.

What Robert Hansen didn’t know was that his simple “yes” was more than a little incriminating. Troopers had already interviewed multiple men in Anchorage. All of them with proclivities for violence toward women. Toward, specifically, the street women of Anchorage. Troopers also knew — having already found the bodies of two dancers on the Knik River — that the presumed killer had an airplane. The reason? The second body they’d found was in a spot accessible only by boat or airplane. They’d said as much — well, half as much — publicly.

transcripts
Courtesy: Anchorage Times, 7 Sep 1983

So there it was: Robert Hansen had just admitted he owned and flew an airplane. More than that, of the several men that cops interviewed, only Robert Hansen owned and flew an airplane. It was a start. But only a start. There was more digging to do. The transcripts tell the tale.

A Little Problem

The next big step was to drill into Hansen’s criminal past. There was a lot to choose from. One thing was soon clear: Galyan and Flothe had done their homework. Their reading had taken them all the way back to December 7, 1960 and a basketball game in the small farm community of Pocahontas, Iowa. They’d read all about the fire that hit the school bus barn that night. Had read the reports from local folks, including one Marvin Wiseman.

I was drinking coffee [and] heard the fire siren blow, so I immediately got back into the Police car and drove back towards Main Street on Highway 3; as I approached the area just south of the Community School football field, I noticed the entire highway engulfed in thick smoke and I could see reflection of flames flickering on the south wall of the Ag shop and the flames appeared to be in the northeast corner of the school bus barn. I arrived at the intersection of the bus barn driveway and Highway 3 and stopped my Police car and got out to direct traffic.

Pocahontas Chief of Police, Marvin Wiseman

transcripts
Pocahontas Police Chief Marvin Wiseman
Galyan: BOB, back in... After you got out of high school and you went into the military and you got out of the military, ah, you got yourself into a little trouble back there.

Hansen: Um'hum. [...]

Galyan: So you guys set fire to this old bus barn.

Hansen: Right.

Galyan: And what happened after that?

Hansen: Well, in relation to the... the barn... the damn thing burned down. [...]

Galyan: And you wound up going to trial over it and you wound up being incarcerated for a period of time... Let's face it, that must have been a very troublesome time for you. Just served some time in a correctional institution, your wife divorced you... Did you move after that?

Hansen: Well, okay. I went back to... Well, my folks had this resort up in Minnesota... I done some, I don't know, just work around the resort. Took quite a few people fishing, so forth... And while I was at the resort there that summer, I met a girl there, ah... DARLA. She's the gal I'm married to now.

Married To Bob

Darla Henrichsen — then as always — was a serious person. Serious as in attending the University of Minnesota in search of a teaching degree. Of course, she succeeded. She was cut from determined midwest stock. She went on, in fact, to get her Master’s Degree. Darla also proved quite blind to her husband’s fantasies. Or maybe “indulgent” is the better characterization; she had her own enthusiasms. Certainly that’s how Bob describes her.

Deep down, Robert Hansen was a man on the run. A man sprinting from his past. Like many a man before him, Alaska loomed as the place to start over.

Indeed, there were moments when things seemed to be going his way. Early on, in the Iowa prison, the transcripts tell us he helped fellow inmates write letters home. In Alaska, he soon got a cake decorator job at Safeway — a step up from being a “mere” baker. That, in turn, kicked off a series of real estate investments, brokered in part by a man from their church. They bought a duplex. It jumped in value, so they sold it and purchased a single-family home just north of the duplex. Ended up selling that and stepping into to a third home in Muldoon, at the northeast corner of Anchorage. It was in Muldoon where our transcripts show Bob Hansen reaching the pinnacle of evil.

hansen house Muldoon
Robert Hansen’s house in Muldoon. Copyright Leland E. Hale

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Bob and Darla arrived in Anchorage in August of 1967. For his part, Bob seemed to live under the radar. Part of that was attributable to Darla. She kept him at church, although by Darla’s own recollection, he “probably heard things he didn’t want to hear.” Like sin, like mankind’s fall from grace. You know, things he’d already experienced. There were also two kids in the offing, a daughter and a son. What more could he ask?

Then came a discovery about his own prowess. Specifically, his prowess as a hunter. By the fall of 1971, he had taken a world record Dall Sheep the hard way: he shot the animal with a bow and arrow. That was manly man territory. Of course, the bit in the article about why he switched to bow hunting was… A crock. As our transcripts reveal, Hansen was a convicted felon. He could not legally own firearms. Oh well. In Alaska things like that could be… Overlooked?

Anchorage Daily Times, 19 August 1971

Getting Over His Skis

Maybe I’m reading too much into Bob’s 1971 arrest, coming as it did only months after his moment of glory as the Great White Hunter. On November 1971, Hansen had a random encounter at an Anchorage stoplight, with two cars side-by-side. Thought the woman in the other car, an 18 year old real estate secretary named Susan Heppeard, was giving him the eye. He followed her home, then concocted the dumbest dumb shit ruse known to humankind. Said he needed to use her phonebook. Yeah. Good one, Bob. Worse, he came back eleven days later with a handgun.

State of Alaska v Robert C. Hansen, Case #71-1862: Assault with a Dangerous Weapon
Armed with a handgun. Attempts to abduct Susan Heppeard. Threatens to shoot her if she screams. Gun to head. She screams anyway. Hansen runs.

Search Warrant Affidavit, Robert C. Hansen, Oct 26, 1983
Found walking nearby with no coat or hat on, APD officers trace footprints in snow, retrieve orange baseball cap and loaded .38 revolver. Heppeard IDs Hansen as the man who assaulted her.

Really, Bob?

This returns us to the interview room at Alaska State Trooper headquarters in October of 1983. We’re back in the room with Sgts. Daryl Galyan and Glenn Flothe. The tape recorder is running. Bob Hansen is responding to ever more piercing questions. No need to memorize these things. They’re in the transcripts. When Galyan asks Bob another probing question, Bob does his best to answer.

Galyan: Everything was going along fine for you. You moved to a new state, you got a job, ah, money, a new wife. Everything is just going along great. And then you got involved with Miss Heppeard. What happened?

Hansen: Well, I guess more or less, ah (pause)… Ah… ah… I don't know what to say. I guess, um, it may have just been an urge, I don't [know] if you want to call it that or not. Ah, it
happened, I'm not… I'm sorry it happened, but it did happen. I can't, you know, dispute that.

An urge? Come on, man.


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Craig

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