What Happened After Police Let Robert Hansen Walk Despite Cindy Paulson's Report?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
On June 13th, 1983, a 17-year-old girl gave the Anchorage police everything they needed to stop a serial killer. His name, his address, his car, his airplane, the specific parking spot at an airfield where the plane was sitting. She was still wearing his handcuffs when she told them, but they had independent corroboration from a security guard who saw the same man at the same airfield. They had a girl with metal on her wrist and a story that checked out in every verifiable detail. They didn't believe her and women kept dying. Welcome to Surviving Serial Killers, part of our History's Hidden Killer series. In every episode of this series, the survivors saved themselves because the system didn't. But, Cindy Paulson's story is the purest version of that failure. She did everything right. She escaped, she reported, she identified, and the institution whose entire job was to act on that information chose to act on something else instead. The reputation of a man who baked cakes for the community.
And I welcome your thoughts, your feedback, your opinions on this case in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Robert Hansen, owned a bakery in Anchorage, Alaska. Family man, churchgoer, respected. Where have we heard this before? BTK? He also had a record that should have set off alarms in every precinct in the state. In December of 1971, he was arrested twice in the same month, once for abducting a woman, once for attacking another. He pled no contest to assault with a deadly weapon. Sentenced five years, time served six months. That suggests a system working exactly as designed for a well-liked white man with a bakery and a family and a good reputation. Six months. Then he was back in Anchorage with a clean enough slate that nobody kept an eye on him.
By approximately 1973, Robert Hansen started killing. His methods tell you everything about who he was. He targeted women on the margins in Anchorage, women whose disappearances weren't going to make the evening news. Women the city wouldn't look for very hard when they disappeared. He brought them to his home. He did what he wanted. Then he loaded them into his Cessna 206, a private plane, his pride and joy and flew them into the Alaskan bush. Remote wilderness, no roads, no cell towers, no help for a hundred miles. He released them into the trees and then hunted them with a rifle like they were big game. Afterward, he marked the burial locations on an aviation map with small X's. The X's were neat, organized. The map was a ledger. He did this for over a decade, year after year after year. Maker by day, killer on the weekends and holidays. Flying his Cessna over the Alaska Range with someone handcuffed in the back seat. As many as 17 women were killed. Their bodies were scattered across remote Alaska. Some of them were reported missing. Others weren't. The border community barely registered the disappearances. These were not women whose absences generated search parties or front page headlines. They vanished and the world moved on.
On June 13th, 1983, Hansen picked up Cindy Paulson. She was 17
He took her to his home, handcuffed her, held her for hours, did things to her that she would later describe in meticulous detail to an investigator who actually gave a damn.
Then he put her in his car and drove to Merrill Field, a small airstrip and anchorage, and started loading her into the Cessna. Cindy didn't know about the wilderness or the rifle or the map or the axis. She didn't need to. She understood the essential truth. Wherever that plane was going, she was not coming back. At the airfield, she made the decision that saved her life. The Cessna was small. The bush was vast. And Cindy Paulson, 17 years old, understood with absolute certainty that there was one moment to act. And it was now. And she ran barefoot handcuffs on across the tarmac and onto the highway. A driver named Robert Yountch, just a guy on the road, picked her up and took her to a motel where her boyfriend was staying. Meanwhile, a security guard at Merrill Field noticed Hansen acting strangely near his plane and wrote down the license plate and car model. Two independent sources of information, the girl and the guard pointing at the same man.
The police arrived at the motel within the hour. The call had come from a motel employee who saw the girl in handcuffs at the front desk. Cindy was still in the handcuffs. Officers put her in the squad car and drove her to the hospital. And on the way, they passed the airfield. Cindy pointed out the window and told them exactly where Hansen's blue and white Cessna was parked. The security guard flagged the officers down, gave them the plate number and vehicle description. So at this point, the Anchorage Police had a name, a physical description, a home address, a vehicle, an airplane, a specific location on the airfield. Independent corroboration from a civilian witness and a 17-year-old girl still wearing the guy's handcuffs. You cannot ask for more specific, more verifiable, more actionable set of facts from a witness.