The (Supposed) Costs of Crime
Robert Hansen talked a good game. All the lectures from the bench, all the counselors and psychiatrists trying to reform him — each had trained him with the proper phrases. Accept your responsibility. Don’t minimize or excuse the things you’ve done. Apologize to those you’ve hurt. In Bob’s case, as so often happens, his crimes inevitably involved his family. It was a family affair and, in his telling, his attempted theft of a chain saw hit the hardest.
Hansen was, he claimed, a reformed man. No longer did he feel compelled, he said, to steal something when he went into a store. “It makes me feel good to walk out of the store,” Hansen proclaimed, “knowing that, hey, there ain’t going to be somebody coming up behind me, grabbing my arm.”
Or, worse yet, someone shoving him into a convict chorusline line and dragging his ass off to jail, a shared set of handcuffs on his wrist. It was, however, an affair all too familiar to the man.
All The Grief
Bob went to great lengths to acknowledge these disruptions. Purports to see the impacts of his crimes — beyond the arrests and jail time. Or pretends to. They must have been handing out Academy Award nominations that day. The wife! This children! Oh, my.
I put not only myself in trouble, but when I’ve done this here I’ve done it to my family too… And I don’t want to do that anymore, okay? My children went through an awful lot of grief… I did not want [Darla] to bring my children out to Eagle River (state prison), but she was saying, Bob, the children are asking all the time, “where’s Daddy, where’s Daddy?” Don’t he want to be around us anymore?
Robert Hansen, October 27, 1983
(BELOW) Robert Hansen’s basement, his son and a friend playing with a train set while Hansen’s mute hunting trophies look on. This is, after all, an affair of the heart.
At points, Hansen is convincing as he chats it up with Galyan and Flothe. See, he seems to be telling them, I get it. I’ve learned my lessons. There’s no way I’m guilty of any of these gory affairs you might consider charging me with. Which, by the way, I cannot even imagine. Still, Galyan, ever the Trooper, digs deeper into the morass. Addressing Bob’s legal troubles head-on, he asks: “Did your family handle it very well?”
Well, yeah, my son, yet today don’t, I can feel that, maybe it’s just myself over-reacting, but ah, if we take a drive and we drive by Eagle River, the turn-off going into the Eagle River Jail, he’ll look at that, and he’ll look down, hang his head for a while.
I go flying up here with my son and we go duck, duck hunting or something like that up here in the flats, and I fly him out there, why ah, a time or two ah, I made the mistake of flying across the Eagle River Jail there with him in the airplane, and ah, looked around and there was some almost tears comin’ out of his eyes, and he said, Daddy he said, ah, please don’t go back there again.
Well, you know, now when I take him, when we’re going places I make damn sure, I don’t want to bring these memories back to him…
Robert Hansen, October 27, 1983
Galyan was not the type to let Hansen ramble on endlessly with his calculated distractions. This was not about warm reminiscing or anything remotely resembling mercy. Within minutes, the trooper was back on him, digging through his past, pulling up the man’s chronic deceptions. He confronts him about a piece of paper he heisted from a young woman he kidnapped and raped, a slip that had her son’s name on it — “You know enough to know that, that piece of paper will get you in trouble and cause you headaches,” Galyan reminds him. “You tried to hide it in the pocket of your coveralls.”
What I’m wondering about Bob is, I tried to play it up front with you and tell you anything that I don’t believe to be true, and ah, if you’re lying to me, it’s going to put a real wall between us and neither one of us are going to accomplish anything here, and if you lie to me about one thing then I have problems, you know, determining where your truth is, so if you tell me anything I prefer that it be true.
Daryl Galyan to Robert Hansen, October 27, 1983
Admit Nothing
At this point, Hansen was full of short grunts of acknowledgement. When asked if he picked up girls, or gave them money for sex, he said, “I did. Now, I’m not denying that.” For Galyan, that was progress. Was it time to put the hammer down? Galyan seemed to think so. History was now on parade and Robert Hansen was sitting in the front row of the grandstands. The whole affair was meant to remind him of the trouble he was in.
After all, the cops were trying to force Hansen to admit the truth, bitter truth. And ultimately, Bob Hansen — veteran of the criminal justice system that he was — understood precisely what his tormenter was doing. He just didn’t want to go there. Hansen was nothing if not perspicacious. He tried to turn the tables, “when we first started talking,” Hansen declared, “you started talking about my past and, gosh, about way back where I was born in Estherville, Iowa. So, ah… Where is this all comin’ from?”
Patterns, Galyan replied. A sequence of events over a long period of time. These things have occurred and they are similar, he added. Then they pulled out the photo of Sherry Morrow and the Knik River affair. “There’s something terribly wrong with this lady here,” Flothe intoned, his voice low and steady. “A .223 shell casing was found at her gravesite, fired from your weapon. Something went terribly wrong. She was shot and killed.”
“Well,” Hansen replied, “not by me.”
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