Mindhunter (34 page)

But though they lacked proof, both the Anchorage police and Alaska state troopers office smelled smoke and knew a fire was out there somewhere. Back in 1980, construction workers had been excavating on Eklutna Road when they came upon the partial remains of a woman. Her body had been partly eaten by bears and bore the signs of having been stabbed to death and buried in a shallow grave. Known only as "Eklutna Annie," she had never been identified and her killer had never been caught.

Later in the year, the body of Joanne Messina was discovered in a gravel pit near Seward. Then, in September 1982, hunters near the Knik River found the body of twenty-three-year-old Sherry Morrow in a shallow grave. She was a topless dancer who’d been missing since the previous November. She’d been shot three times. Shell casings found at the scene identified the bullets as coming from a .223 Ruger Mini-14, a high-powered hunting rifle. Unfortunately, it was a common weapon in Alaska, so it would have been difficult to track down and interview every hunter who owned one. But one peculiar aspect to the case was that no bullet holes were in her clothing, indicating she must have been naked when shot.

Almost exactly a year later another body was discovered in a shallow grave along the bank of the Knik. This time it was Paula Golding, an out-of-work secretary who had rather desperately taken a job in a topless bar to make ends meet. She had also been shot with a Ruger Mini-14. She’d gone missing in April, and since then the seventeen-year-old prostitute had been abducted and escaped. Now, with Golding to add to the list of unsolved crimes, the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Alaska state troopers office decided they’d better follow up on Mr. Hansen.

Even though the police had a suspect before I heard about him, I wanted to make sure my judgment wouldn’t be clouded by the investigative work already done. So before I let them give me the specifics on their man during our first phone conference, I said, "First tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about the guy."

They described the unsolved murders and the details of the young woman’s story. I described a scenario and an individual they said sounded very much like their suspect, down to the stuttering. Then they told me about Hansen, his job and family, his position in the community, his reputation as an outstanding game hunter. Did this sound like the kind of guy who could be capable of these crimes?

He sure did, I told them. The problem was, while they had a lot of secondhand information, they just didn’t have physical evidence to charge him. The only way to get him off the street, which they were extremely anxious to do, was to get a confession. They asked me to come on-scene and help them develop their case.

In a sense, this was the opposite of what we normally do in that we were working from a known subject, trying to determine whether his background, personality, and behavior fit a set of crimes.

I brought along Jim Horn, who had recently joined my unit from the Boulder, Colorado, Resident Agency. We’d gone through new-agents training together back in the old days, and when I finally got authorization for four agents to work with me, I’d asked Jim to come back to Quantico. Along with Jim Reese, Jim Horn is now one of the two top stress-management experts in the Bureau, a critical function in our line of work. But in 1983, this was one of his first cases on the behavioral side.

Getting to Anchorage was one of the more exciting and least pleasurable business trips I’ve had. It ended up with a red-eye, white-knuckle flight over water. When we arrived, the police picked us up and took us to our hotel. On the way, we passed some of the bars where the victims had worked. It was too cold most of the time for hookers to work outside, so they made their business connections in the bars, which were open practically twenty-four hours a day. They closed for maybe an hour to clean up and sweep out the drunks. At the time, largely as a result of the huge transient population that came in for the construction of the oil pipeline, Alaska had among the highest rates in the country of suicide, alcoholism, and venereal disease. It had very much become the modern version of our Wild West frontier.

I found the entire atmosphere very strange. There appeared to be an ongoing conflict between the native people and those who had come from "the lower forty-eight." You had all these macho men walking around with big tattoos and looking as if they’d come straight out of a Marlboro ad. With the great distances people had to travel, it seemed as though almost everyone had an airplane, so Hansen wasn’t unusual in that respect.

What was significant to us about this case was that it was the first time profiling was used to support a search warrant. We began analyzing everything we knew about the crimes and about Robert Hansen.

As far as victimology was concerned, the known victims had been prostitutes or topless dancers. They were part of a great crop of available victims who traveled up and down the West Coast. Because they were so transient, and because prostitutes are not in the habit of reporting their whereabouts to the police, it was difficult to know if anything had happened to any one of them until a body turned up. This was exactly the same problem the police and FBI faced with the Green River Killer down in Washington State. So the choice of victims was highly significant. The murderer was targeting only women who would not be missed.

We didn’t know everything about Hansen’s background, but what we did know fit into a pattern. He was short and slight, heavily pockmarked, and spoke with a severe stutter. I surmised that he had had severe skin problems as a teenager and, between that and the speech impediment, was probably teased or shunned by his peers, particularly girls. So his self-esteem would have been low. That might also have been why he moved to Alaska—the idea of a new start in a new frontier. And, psychologically speaking, abusing prostitutes is a pretty standard way of getting back at women in general.

I also made much of the fact that Hansen was known as a proficient hunter. He had made a local reputation for himself by taking down a wild Dall sheep with a crossbow while hunting in the Kuskokwim Mountains. I don’t mean to imply that most hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have an inadequate type to begin with, one of the ways he might try to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or knives. The severe stutter reminded me of David Carpenter, San Francisco’s "Trailside Killer." As in Carpenter’s case, I was betting that Hansen’s speech problem disappeared when he felt most dominant and in control.

Putting this all together, even though this was a scenario we’d never seen before, I was beginning to get an image of what I thought was going on. Prostitutes and "exotic dancers" had been found dead in remote wooded areas of gunshot wounds suggestive of those made with a hunting rifle. In at least one case, the shots had been fired at an undressed body. The seventeen-year-old who said she had escaped claimed Robert Hansen wanted to fly her to his cabin in the woods. Hansen had packed his wife and children off to Europe for the summer and was home alone.

It was my belief that, like General Zaroff in "The Most Dangerous Game," Robert Hansen had tired of elk and bear and Dall sheep and turned his attention to a more interesting prey. Zaroff explained that he used captured sailors who shipwrecked on the intentionally unmarked rocks in the channel leading to his island: "I hunt the scum of the earth—sailors from tramp ships—a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them."

Hansen, I was surmising, regarded prostitutes in much the same way. They were people he could regard as lower and more worthless than himself. And he wouldn’t need the gift of gab to get one to come with him. He would pick her up, make her his prisoner, fly her out into the wilderness, strip her naked, let her loose, then hunt her down with a gun or knife.

His MO wouldn’t have started this way. He would have started simply by killing the early ones, then using the plane to fly their bodies far away. These were crimes of anger. He would have gotten off on having his victims beg for their lives. Being a hunter, at a certain point it would have occurred to him that he could combine these various activities by flying them out into the wilderness alive, then hunting them down for sport and further sexual gratification. This would have been the ultimate control. And it would have become addictive. He would want to do it again and again.

And this led me to the details of the search warrant. What they wanted from Jim and me was an affidavit they could take to court explaining what profiling was all about, what we would expect to find in the search, and our rationale for being able to say so.

Unlike a common criminal or someone whose gun is an interchangeable tool, Hansen’s hunting rifle would be important to him. Therefore, I predicted the rifle would be somewhere in his house, though not in open view. It would be in a crawl space, behind paneling or a false wall, hidden in the attic; someplace like that.

I also predicted our guy would be a "saver," though not entirely for the normal reasons. A lot of sexual killers take souvenirs from their victims and give them to the women in their lives as a sign of dominance and a way of being able to relive the experience. But Hansen couldn’t very well put a woman’s head on the wall the way he would a big-game animal’s, so I thought it likely he would take some other kind of trophy. Since there was no evidence of human mutilation on the bodies, I expected him to have taken jewelry, which he would have given to his wife or daughter, making up a story about where the piece came from. He didn’t appear to have kept the victims’ underwear or any other item we could account for, but he might have kept small photographs or something else from a wallet. And from my experience with this type of personality, I thought we might find a journal or list documenting his exploits.

The next order of business was cracking his alibi. It was no big deal for his two business associates to say they were with him the night in question if nothing was at stake for them. If we could create some high stakes, however, that could change things. Anchorage police got the district attorney to authorize a grand jury to investigate the abduction and assault of the young prostitute who had identified Hansen. The businessmen were then approached by the police and asked to give their stories again. Only this time they were informed that if they were found to be lying to the grand jury, they’d each be facing hard time.

As we’d anticipated, that was enough to break things open. Both men admitted they had not been with Hansen that night, that he’d asked them to help him out of what he characterized as an awkward situation.

So Hansen was arrested on charges of kidnapping and rape. A search warrant of his home was immediately executed. There police found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle. Ballistics tests matched it to the shell casings found near the bodies. As we’d figured, Hansen had a well-outfitted trophy room where he watched television, full of animal heads, walrus tusks, horns and antlers, mounted birds, and skins on the floor. Under the floorboards in the attic they found more weapons, and various cheap items of jewelry belonging to the victims. One of these was a Timex watch. He had given other items to his wife and daughter. They also found a driver’s license and other ID cards from some of the dead women. They didn’t come across a journal, but they did find the equivalent: an aviation map marked with where he had left various bodies.

All of this evidence, of course, was enough to make a case to nail him. But without the warrant, we wouldn’t have had it. And the only way we could get a warrant in this instance was to demonstrate to a judge’s satisfaction that there was sufficient
behavioral
evidence to justify a search. We have successfully aided in search-warrant affidavits leading to arrests many times since then, perhaps most notably in the Delaware case of Steven Pennell, the "I-40 Killer," who was executed in 1992 for torturing and killing women he picked up in his specially outfitted van.

By the time Anchorage police and Alaska state troopers actually interrogated Robert Hansen in February 1984, I was home recovering from my collapse in Seattle. Roy Hazelwood, who was heroically covering for me while still handling all his own work, coached the police on interview techniques.

As he had when police first confronted him with the abduction charge, Hansen denied everything. He pointed to his happy home life and his success in business. At first he claimed that the reason shells from his rifle had been found at various sites was that he had been there and practiced his shooting. Apparently, the presence of dead bodies at each of the locations was merely coincidental. But eventually, faced with a mountain of evidence and the prospect of an angry prosecutor seeking the death penalty if he didn’t come clean, he admitted to the murders.

In trying to rationalize and justify himself, he claimed that he only wanted oral sex from the prostitutes he picked up—something he didn’t feel he should ask from his proper, respectable wife. If the hooker satisfied him, he said, that would be that. The ones who didn’t comply—who tried to control the situation—those were the ones he punished.

In this way, Hansen’s behavior mirrored what we learned in our prison interview with Monte Rissell. Both Hansen and Rissell were inadequate types with bad backgrounds. The women who received the worst of Rissell’s wrath were the ones who tried to feign friendship or enjoyment to placate him. What they didn’t realize was that for this type of individual, the power and domination of the situation is everything.

Hansen also asserted that thirty to forty prostitutes had gone with him willingly in his plane and that he had brought them back alive. I found this proposition hard to believe. The class of prostitutes Hansen picked up are in business to turn a quick trick and move on to the next customer. If they’ve been in the business for any time, they’re generally pretty good assessors of people. They’re not willingly going to take a plane ride into the country with some john they’ve just met. If they made a mistake with him, it would be in letting him convince them to come with him to his house. Once he got them inside, it was too late.