The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (27 page)

However, after the discovery of Paula Golding’s body three months later, the investigating team decided that the case was worth pursuing.
If Hansen had tortured a prostitute, then decided to take her out to the wilderness, he could well be the killer they were seeking.

The investigators decided to contact the NCAVC team in Quantico, Virginia.
What they wanted was not a ‘profile’ of the killer – they already had their suspect – but to know whether Robert Hansen was a viable suspect.
What the Alaska authorities were able to tell the Quantico team was that Hansen was a well-known big-game hunter, who had achieved celebrity by bagging a Dall sheep with a crossbow in the Kuskokwim Mountains.
The answer was that Hansen was indeed a viable suspect.
A big-game hunter might well decide to hunt girls.
Since he collected trophies, then it would be likely that he had kept items belonging to his victims.
If the police could obtain a search warrant, they might well find their evidence.

What was also clear was that if Hansen knew he was a suspect, he would destroy the evidence; it was therefore necessary to work quickly and secretly.
The first step was to try to break his alibi.
No doubt his friends had been willing to provide a false alibi because it would cost them nothing.
If they could be convinced that it might cost them two years in prison for perjury, they might feel differently.
The police approached the public prosecutor and asked him to authorise a grand jury to investigate the charges of torture against the prostitute.
Then the businessmen were approached, and told that they would be called to repeat their alibi on oath.
It worked; both admitted that they had provided Hansen with an alibi merely to help him out of a difficult situation.
They agreed to testify to that effect.

Now Hansen was arrested on a charge of rape and kidnapping.
A search warrant enabled the police to enter his home.
There they found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle, which a ballistics expert identified as the one that had fired the shells found near the graves.
Under the floor in the attic the searchers found more rifles, and items of cheap jewellery and adornment, including a Timex watch.
Most important of all, they found an aviation map with twenty asterisks marking various spots.
Two of these marked the places where the two bodies had so far been found.
Another indicated the place where the unidentified corpse of a woman had been found on the south side of the Kenai Peninsula in August 1980, a crime that had not been linked with the Anchorage killings.
The investigators discovered that her name was Joanna Messina, and that she had last been seen alive with a red-headed, pockmarked man who stuttered.

At first Hansen denied all knowledge of the killings, but faced with the evidence against him, he finally decided to confess.
The twenty asterisks, he admitted, marked graves of prostitutes.
But he had not killed all the women he had taken out to the wilderness.
What he wanted was oral sex.
If the woman satisfied him, he took her back home.
If not, he pointed a gun at her, ordered her to strip naked, and then run.
He gave the girl a start, then would stalk her as if hunting a game animal.
Sometimes the girl would think she had escaped, and Hansen would allow her to think so – until he once again flushed her out and made her run.
Finally, when she was too exhausted to run further, he killed her and buried the body.
Killing, he said, was an anticlimax; ‘the excitement was in the stalking’.

In court on 28 February 1984 the prosecutor told the judge (a jury was unnecessary since Hansen had pleaded guilty): ‘Before you sits a monster, an extreme aberration of a human being.
A man who has walked among us for seventeen years, selling us doughbuts [
sic
], Danish buns, coffee, all with a pleasant smile on his face.
That smile concealed crimes that would numb the mind.’ Judge Ralph Moody then imposed sentences totalling 461 years.

For the investigating detectives, the most interesting part of Hansen’s confession was the explanation of why and how he had become a serial killer.
Born in a small rural community – Pocahontas, Iowa – he had been an ugly and unpopular child.
His schoolfellows found his combination of a stutter and running acne sores repellent.
‘Because I looked and talked like a freak, every time I looked at a girl she would turn away.’ He had married, but his wife had left him – he felt that it was because he was ugly.
He married again, came to Alaska, and started a successful bakery business – his own father’s trade.
But marriage could not satisfy his raging sexual obsession, his desire to have a docile girl performing oral sex.
Since Anchorage had so many topless bars and strip joints, it was a temptation to satisfy his voyeurism in them; then, sexually excited, he needed to pick up a prostitute.
What he craved was oral sex, and many of them were unwilling.
Hansen would drive out into the woods, then announce what he wanted; if they refused, he produced a gun.

Since he was by nature frugal, he preferred not to pay them.
In fact, it emerged in his confession that he was a lifelong thief, and that this was a result of his meanness.
‘I hate to spend money . . .1 damn near ejaculate in my pants if I could walk into a store and take something . . .1 stole more stuff in this damn town than Carter got little green pills.’ Yet his next sentence reveals that it was more than simply meanness that made him steal.
‘Giving stuff away, you know, walk out in the parking lot and walk to somebody’s car, and throw it in the damn car.
But I was taking it . . .1 was smarter than people in the damn store.
It would give me – uh – the same satisfaction – I don’t know if you want to call it that – but I got a lot the same feeling as I did with a prostitute.’ The link between stealing and oral sex was ‘the forbidden’.
This seems to explain why many serial killers – Ted Bundy is another example – begin as habitual thieves.

The murders had started, he said, with Joanna Messina, the woman he had met in a town called Seward.
She was living in a tent in the woods with her dog, waiting for a job in a cannery.
Hansen had got into conversation with her and taken her out to dinner.
Afterwards, they went back to her tent, near a gravel pit, where Hansen hoped she would be prepared to let him stay the night.
When they were in bed, she told him she needed money.
His natural meanness affronted, he called her a whore and shot her with a .22 pistol; then shot her dog, destroyed the camp, and dumped her body into the gravel pit.

According to Hansen, he was violently sick after the murder.
Not long afterwards, he picked up a prostitute and asked her if she would fellate him.
She agreed, and they drove out along the Eklutna Road.
Then, according to Hansen, she became nervous and ran away; when he gave chase, she drew a knife.
He took it from her and stabbed her to death.
That was how the unidentified corpse known as ‘Eklutna Annie’ came to lie in a shallow grave, to be dug up by a hungry bear.

This time, Hansen did not feel nauseated.
In fact, he said, when he looked back on the murder, he experienced an odd pleasure.
Then he began to fantasise about how enjoyable it would be to hunt down a woman like an animal . . .
Like so many other serial killers, Hansen had discovered that murder is addictive.

Over the next three years he drove about sixty prostitutes out into the wilderness and demanded oral sex.
If they complied satisfactorily, he drove them back to Anchorage.
If not, he forced them to strip at gunpoint, then to flee into the woods.
When the hunt was over and the girl lay dead, he buried the body, and made a mark on a map – he even tried to guide officers back to some of the murder sites, but had usually forgotten exactly where they were.
Once, when they were hovering over Grouse Lake in a helicopter, he pointed down.
‘There’s a blonde down there.
And over there there’s a redhead with the biggest tits you ever saw.’

When Robert Hansen was tried in Anchorage, the death sentence had been abolished in Alaska, but it had still been in existence thirty-four years earlier, when another sadistic killer had been tried there for murder.
The case of Harvey Carignan provides some interesting parallels with that of Robert Hansen.
On Sunday 31 July 1949, stationed in Anchorage, he went on a drinking spree, and picked up a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Laura Showalter.
They walked to a nearby park, but when the soldier tried to remove her underwear in broad daylight, she fought him off.
The soldier went into a frenzy, and beat her violently with his fists – so violently that her face was virtually obliterated.
Then he tried to rape her.
At that moment, a man walked towards them.
The soldier looked up and snarled: ‘Move on.’ The man, assuming that they were engaged in lovemaking, hurried away.
The next morning he went past the same spot, and found the woman still lying there.
The rape had not been completed.

Six weeks later, on 16 September a soldier tried to rape a girl on a deserted Anchorage street at eleven o’clock in the morning; she succeeded in fighting him off.
She described him as tall, and as strong as an ape.
Later, the police picked up a man answering to her description – a soldier named Harvey Louis Carignan, born in 1927.
Carignan eventually confessed to the murder of Laura Showalter, and was sentenced to death.
However, the police had omitted a vital step in the legal proceedings – to charge him with the murder before taking him before a marshal for interrogation – and on appeal, the sentence was overturned.
Harvey Carignan might have gone free but for the second rape attempt; for this he was sentenced to fifteen years.

He was paroled in 1960, but his freedom did not last long.
Four months later he was arrested for burglary and attempted rape; for this he received five and a half years.
Paroled in 1964, he was soon sentenced to another fifteen years for burglary.
Good conduct earned him so much remission that he was back on the streets by 1969.
This time he made a determined attempt to adjust to ‘life on the outside’, and found himself a wife in Seattle.
The marriage soon failed, and Carignan narrowly avoided another life sentence – he was waiting for his wife with a hammer, but it was his stepdaughter who came down to the basement.
He packed up and left.
A second marriage in 1972 was slightly more successful; he leased a gas station in Seattle and settled into his wife’s home.
But after almost twenty years in jail, his sexual daydreams were all of teenage girls.
On 1 May 1972 he placed an advertisement in the want-ads column of the Seattle
Times
, offering a job at the Sav Mor Garage.
It was answered by a fifteen-year-old girl named Kathy Sue Miller, who wanted a job for the summer vacation.
The next day, she went off to meet the owner of the station.
It was the last time she was seen alive by her family.
Her schoolbooks were found in Everett, twenty-six miles from her home.
Harvey Carignan was questioned by police – he had been away for several hours on that day – but he continued to deny meeting Kathy.
Her violated body was found on 3 June 1972 among dense undergrowth north of Everett.
She had been killed by a tremendous blow from some blunt instrument.
There was still no proof that Harvey Carignan had ever met Kathy Miller.

When he became tired of being questioned by the police, Carignan decided to leave town.
He drove south to California.
Between February 1972 and December 1973, eleven girls were murdered in the Sonoma County area, near San Francisco.
Most had been battered to death, one with a crushing blow to the back of the skull, and seven had been raped.
Carignan has never been accused of any of these crimes, but they are consistent with his method.
Early in 1974 he moved back to his former home, Minneapolis.
On 28 June a woman waiting at a bus stop was knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head.
When she woke up, she was in a pick-up truck with a scowling, bald-headed man.
When he tried to place her hand on his flies, she made a grab for the door handle.
He seized her by the hair, but it proved to be a wig; the woman fled, leaving it in his hand.

On 9 September 1973 a thirteen-year-old runaway named Jerri Billings was hitchhiking in north-eastern Minneapolis.
The pick-up truck that stopped for her was driven by a huge man with a bald head and a receding, ape-like chin.
When they had driven a short distance, he unzipped his fly, then grabbed her by the back of the neck and forced her head down to his penis; she was made to perform fellatio on him.
Then, still driving fast, he order her to remove her jeans and panties.
She thought it was a preliminary to rape, but was mistaken.
What he did was to force a hammer handle into her vagina, and move it up and down as though it were a penis.
After that he made her fellate him again.
When she tried to raise her head, he hit her a blow with the hammer.
Soon after this he stopped in a cornfield, and made an attempt to sodomise her.
Unable to penetrate, he made her fellate him again, then – amazingly – allowed her to dress and drove her to the nearest town.
He ordered her to tell no-one what had happened.
She kept her secret for nearly two months, then went to the police.
They had no leads on the rapist, and the investigation lost momentum.

In January 1974 Carignan offered help to three Jehovah’s Witnesses whose car had broken down.
One of them was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old named Eileen Hunley.
In May of that year, they began to see a great deal of one another, but by July, she was disillusioned; he drank too much and had a hair-trigger temper.
She told him she did not want to see him any more.
On 10 August 1974 Eileen Hunley vanished.

A month later, on 8 September two teenage girls, June Lynch and Lisa King, were hitchhiking in Minneapolis when a big middle-aged man stopped to offer them a lift, and offered them money if they would help him bring down a truck from Mora.
He turned off into some woods and asked June Lynch to go with him.
Lisa King heard her friend scream and ran to see what was the matter.
June was lying on the ground, bleeding from the head, and the man had gone.
In hospital, it was established that June had been hit on the head with a hammer seven times and was suffering severe concussion.