Robert Hansen, the "Butcher Baker"

The Women Who Disappeared

Robert Hansen's victims were young women living on the margins of Anchorage, Alaska, during the city's oil pipeline boom. Many worked as topless dancers or in the sex trade downtown, and some had few people who would report them missing. That vulnerability shaped both how he chose them and how long it took for their deaths to be noticed and, in several cases, for their names to be known.

One of them was Robin Pelkey, born in Colorado in 1963. She had lived in Anchorage as a child, spent part of her teens in Arkansas, and returned to Alaska in 1981 to live with her father and stepmother. She vanished in late 1982 or early 1983, at about 19, and her parents never filed a missing person report. For decades she was known to investigators only as "Horseshoe Harriet." Another victim, found in 1980 and called "Eklutna Annie," has never been identified, and Hansen himself never learned her name.

A Baker With a Second Life

Outwardly, Hansen was a family man who ran a successful bakery in Anchorage, which later earned him the nickname "Butcher Baker." He was also a pilot with his own small plane. According to his later admissions, over roughly a dozen years spanning the 1970s and early 1980s, he abducted women from downtown Anchorage, often at gunpoint, and flew them to remote spots in the wilderness north of the city, where he killed them. He had come to the attention of police well before then: in 1971, while awaiting trial for an attempted kidnapping in the Spenard area, he was accused of rape by another woman.

The Escape That Broke the Case

The turning point came in 1983, when a teenage girl, Cindy Paulson, ran into a motel on Anchorage's Fifth Avenue still wearing handcuffs. She told police that Hansen had held her captive at his home and assaulted her. Her account gave investigators a named suspect. Alaska State Trooper Glenn Flothe, who was later credited as instrumental in the capture, helped build the case. Search warrants executed at Hansen's home turned up a map marked with 17 locations that investigators believed were burial sites, along with enough evidence to charge him with four murders.

Guilty Plea and Prison

In February 1984, Hansen pleaded guilty to murdering four women and was sentenced to 461 years in prison. Under the plea agreement he helped authorities locate graves. He confessed to killing 17 women and raping about 30 others, and he flew with investigators over the area north of Anchorage to point out burial sites. Sources differ on the aircraft: some reports say an airplane, while Alaska Public Media described a helicopter. Troopers recovered the remains of eight women from the burial areas in 1984, and in total 12 bodies have been found. Hansen was convicted only of the four murders in his plea; the other deaths rest on his confessions.

He served time in Pennsylvania and Minnesota before returning to Alaska in 1988. While held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, officials found escape plans, and in 1990 they discovered an aeronautical chart and other suspicious material. He spent many years at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward. After about a year of declining health, he was moved to Anchorage for medical care in 2014 and died in a hospital there in August 2014, aged 75. Officials said his death appeared to be from natural causes. The prosecutor who handled the case, Frank Rothschild, said he would not be missed.

Naming Horseshoe Harriet

The state's Cold Case Investigation Unit reopened the Horseshoe Harriet file in 2014 and exhumed her remains from the municipal cemetery, where she had been buried as an unknown woman. In September 2020 investigators sent a bone sample to a private laboratory for whole genome sequencing, and in April 2021 the resulting profile was uploaded to a public genealogy database. Matches led to a family tree pointing to Robin Pelkey, and a DNA comparison with a close relative in Arkansas confirmed it. Troopers informed the family in September 2021, announced the identification on October 22, 2021, and bought a new grave marker. Of the 12 recovered victims, 11 now have names.

Eklutna Annie remains the exception. Accounts place her discovery near Eklutna Lake or near Eagle River, north of Anchorage; Hansen claimed she was his first victim. Troopers said in 2021 that genetic genealogy work on her case was under way, but no identification of her has since been publicly announced.

Why the Case Still Matters

The Hansen case showed how a man with a respectable public profile could prey on women whom society overlooked, in a city transformed by rapid pipeline-era growth and surrounded by roadless wilderness reachable by small plane. It also showed how much depended on a single survivor being believed. Decades later, the Pelkey identification became an example for Alaska of what genetic genealogy can do: the same troopers unit has used the technique to pursue suspects in at least three other Alaska cold case murders. With at least five of Hansen's confessed victims never recovered, the full toll of his crimes may never be known.