A Butcher, Baker Special Offer
When spring comes around, I often find myself reminiscing about my late, great friend and co-author, Walter J. Gilmour. Known to his many friends simply as “Gilmour” — or, if you were a rookie Trooper, The Major — his vision for what became “Butcher, Baker” was strikingly straightforward. To paraphrase, he wanted us to “write a book that helps prevent other police agencies from making the same mistakes we made.” The “we” in that last sentence is doing a lot of work. There was, as Gilmour duly noted, plenty of blame to go around. And that, in itself, was the core issue.
What neither of us anticipated forty years on, however, was the “mythification” of Robert C. Hansen. I’ll come back to that later.
Because what still strikes me most about this time of the year — Alaska’s Spring Thaw — is how fastidious attention to detail led to an arrest that finally put Butcher, Baker Robert Hansen where he belonged. Confined to prison for the rest of his natural life. And in a sense, an early visit to the Knik River grave of Sherry Morrow proved to be a metaphor for our entire Butcher, Baker adventure.
A Slog, Then Victory
Let it be said that, when it came to writing books, both Gilmour and I were neophytes. Yes, I’d been a professional writer for at least a decade, but nothing this big had crossed my desk before. Not even my Master’s thesis. Equally, Gilmour had been in law enforcement for decades. And… Nothing this big had crossed his desk before. What we saw along the Knik River on that spring day in 1984… It brought it all home.
It was there, at that remote spot, that we witnessed the utter depravity of Robert Hansen. Sherry Morrow’s body was close to where her killer took her, hard along the Knik River flood plain, within walking distance of the rough dirt road that led there. As Hansen himself later noted, in his confession, she never got a chance to run. For him, for that “dimple dicked little shit” as Gilmour liked to call him, Sherry Morrow was a nothing, a nobody he could toss like a used Kleenex.
Not A Nobody
And, I don’t know, maybe I naively shared some of those “nobody” thoughts at the time. But those thoughts, if I ever had them, were fleeting. Fleeting the moment AST Sgt. Rollie Port reached into Sherry Morrow’s “empty” grave and found some “evidence.” What the two troopers hinted could be a bullet fragment from Hansen’s murder weapon turned out to be a bone. A human bone. A finger bone that belonged to Sherry Morrow. “This shit is absolutely real,” I remember thinking at the time. “There’s no faking what just happened.”
For Gilmour’s part, this was all a good omen. [1]
That said, Walter and I were on what turned out to be a seven year journey, from the first drafts of Butcher, Baker in 1984 to its eventual publication in the Fall of 1991. There were rejection slips. An entire reorganization and rewrite of our initial drafts. Our “firing” and then “rehiring” by Robert Lescher, our literary agent. Which takes me to another topic…
The Enshittification of History
Watching the myth of Robert Hansen grow, grow, grow over time is reminiscent, I suppose, of watching Henry McCarty transformed into Billy The Kid by the tabloids of the day. As humans, we seem to have an unwillingness — or worse, an inability — to confront the banality of evil. Instead, we like our evil assembled into big, unwieldy packages that require a demonic half-human transformed into a larger-than-life Übermensch. Because… Otherwise, we’d (collectively) have to assume a much bigger share of the blame. And that ain’t gonna happen.
At the same time, we should not be too surprised to learn that the mythification was started, even aided and abetted, by contemporary Alaska authorities. It served their purposes well. Here’s two select quotes from a February 1984 newspaper article in the Daily Sitka Sentinel, entitled “Game Hunter Stalked His Human Victims?” At least the newspaper had the good sense to keep the question mark.
“They always seemed to get away and were found some distance from where he intended to take them,” said Sgt. Glenn Flothe… “Ultimately, it enabled him to hunt a human…” [2]
“This hunter, this man who kept trophies on the wall, he now has trophies scattered throughout south-central Alaska,” said Prosecutor Frank Rothschild.
Paul Jenkins, Associated Press, February 29, 1984
So, small wonder that today Robert Hansen is the man who apparently flew all his victims to the Alaska Bush. Who apparently stalked them all like wild game before methodically shooting and killing them. These women were not humans, they were trophies. Wild game, as it were.
Like all proto-myths, there is an element of truth to this characterization. But never forget what Gilmour called him: “a dimple-dicked little shit.” Because… He was. It was, in fact, the man’s essence. Gilmour also called Hansen a “chicken killer.” Too afraid to kill himself over his own self-hatred, he took it out on others.
Word Up, Homies
Truth: Robert Hansen only owned an airplane for the last two years of his decade-long homicidal spree. Most of the time, he used one of his personal vehicles. Car. Truck. Camper. He was deathly afraid police would pull him over with a young woman inside. Always drove under the speed limit. Did the airplane make him deadlier? Probably… But we’ll never really know, because he was stopped. Just in time.
Truth: Robert Hansen was more often a bumbler than not. His first forays into “capturing” and “keeping” women were clumsy at best. So clumsy he ultimately did jail time for, among other things, trying to abduct a young real estate secretary. He demonstrated an overwhelming lack of cleverness in that ill-fated endeavor. And yes, the man got better with practice. Don’t we all? But remember, too, that Cindy Paulson escaped while Hansen lapsed into carelessness. That when the man was allegedly at his peak.
Truth: Authorities missed a gigantic opportunity to put Hansen away for a very long time when they dropped charges of kidnapping and rape involving an 18-year-old sex worker– in 1971. They sent him instead to a halfway house for Assault With A Dangerous Weapon (for the attempted kidnapping of the real estate secretary). On work-release, he cruised the Anchorage strip before returning to the halfway house. Yes, he had plans. Once on parole, he hit every topless-bottomless joint in town. He wanted more.
And of course I realize that none of this will make a whit of difference. Myths defy reality. In fact, somebody’s probably going to accuse me of trying to rewrite history. Too late.
Now A Word From Our Sponsor
As you no doubt know by now, it’s sales of Butcher, Baker that keep this enterprise humming. We are very fortunate to have Open Road Media fulfill that role. That’s because, in addition to offering Butcher, Baker in multiple formats, they also periodically offer my work on discount. That’s an “everybody wins” proposition.
As proof, their latest offering gives you a spectacular discount in a format (Kindle) everybody loves:
| Title | Author | Promo Type | Ctry | Start | End | Promo Price |
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| Butcher, Baker | Gilmour/ Hale | Amazon KMD | CA | Jul. 01, 2026 | Jul. 31, 2026 | $1.99 |
| Butcher, Baker | Gilmour/ Hale | Amazon KMD | US | Jul. 01, 2026 | Jul. 31, 2026 | $1.99 |
Butcher Baker Discounts
So with that little sales pitch out of the way… Grab the thankfulness. Get the book. Butcher, Baker is a great way to celebrate something, anything. Summer? Yes, definitely. So head on over to one of the fine sites below and grab a prize. You will never regret it.
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[1] First, we should expect some of the women to “get away.” It’s called “fight or flight.” Second, the gravesite find of Sherry Morrow’s bone fragment revealed more than one might expect. Gilmour considered it “good luck,” which would ensure our success in this venture. To that end, he insisted I keep and preserve it. The only “appropriate” container I had was one of those old plastic film canisters. The finger fragment went inside, and I carried it with me for the next twenty years. And then I finally performed a burial ritual, putting it back into what is now sacred ground.
[2] “Ultimately” is doing a lot of work in that quote. As it turns out, my detailed interviews with Glenn Flothe revealed that he was specifically referring to the latter stages of Hansen’s spree, when the sexual underpinnings of his crimes vanished, overtaken by his need to dominate — and then permanently rid himself — of his victims. Subtlety, it seems, is the first victim in all mythologies.
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You can also order “What Happened In Craig,” HERE and HERE. True crime on Epicenter Press about Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder.
NOW available: Kill Brother, Kill Sister, part three of my Alaska Trilogy. Don’t miss this one! Three millionaires face off and only one of them survives!
