[dramatic music]
JIM MCCANN: Elkutna Lake, nestled in the mountains,
fed by glacial runoff.
It's a drop-dead gorgeous place.
Very remote.
It's just one of those places that nobody goes to unless they
have a need to go there.
Two power line workers were up in that Elkutna Road region,
and they found skeletal remains.
Troopers went up there and examined the scene,
and they found skeletal remains and clothing, jewelry,
some high-top red boots, but nothing
to help them really identify exactly who she was.
Any time you find skeletal remains, there's an autopsy.
You lay out the bones, and a forensic expert
will look at those bones and try and give you a better
picture of who this victim was.
In this case, she was most likely
a young girl, maybe late teens.
This particular female victim was stabbed in the back.
Then they started doing facial reconstruction,
and she got the name Elkutna Annie.
No disrespect, but just some way to identify her.
Looking at the tall, red boots and the type of clothing,
investigators thought that perhaps
this victim was a prostitute.
When a sex worker is murdered, it makes all sorts
of problems for investigators.
They don't use their real names.
They don't have contact with their families.
Yeah, it was really hard back then.
We didn't have the internet to help us.
It was a very poor system, but it was the only system we had.
In the mid-'70s, when the pipeline started to build up,
there was an influx of criminals and prostitutes.
In the '70s, Anchorage went from
60,000 people to about 200,000 in just
that short length of time.
A lot of strip joints sprung up, a lot
of bars, all to capture that almighty dollar
from the pipeline.
The first time I met him was when I moved into my home
on East 6th, and he was my neighbor.
Bob was a baker.
His wife, Darla, was a teacher at a Christian school.
They eventually had two children.
She's this gentle person who has time for Bob,
was probably the first person who's
ever really listened to him.
Getting a woman like Darla to love him, although that's
an achievement that he might have thought
would never have happened, she's not
the type of woman he was after.
Bob was very excitable.
If you're talking about something
he really loves, like hunting, you could get him going.
Sometimes if he got real excited,
a little saliva would come out the edge of his mouth.
Bob loved the challenge.
It was the skill required to do the sneaking up part,
to do the stalking and get close enough where
you can make the kill shot.
And once you do that, trust me, it's a thrill.
It's a rush.
From all outward appearances, he was a great guy.
But he was a Jekyll and Hyde kind of person, evidently.
GARY BRUCATO: At this stage in Hansen's life,
what we see is him performing a modus operandi initially
that looked an awful lot like what he had
been doing for quite some time.
He picked up a young woman.
This woman did not follow the plan.
She broke away and ran away from Hansen.
KATHERINE RAMSLAND: There was something exciting for him
about the kind of danger and the challenge in getting to her
and then taking her down, similar to the way
he had been hunting animals.
Based on what Hansen said about killing this young woman,
he crossed the line out of desperation.
And any kind of resistance, that just made him
want to punish them more.
WILLIAM SHAW: I was watching national news,
and there was Bob Hansen.
I thought, what the hell is Bob Hansen doing on national news?
And I turned it up, and it said this
is the greatest mass murderer in the history of Alaska.
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather.
I had no idea.
LARRY BIVINS: That guy was in my house, at my dinner table.
Just sends a chill up my back.
JIM MCCANN: In 2020, they produced a new rendering
of Elkutna Annie, and there's still
hope to identify the victim.
I hope that someday they solve that.
But there's a lot of families that still don't have closure.
LARRY BIVINS: I think why I couldn't read him,
and that's the only guy I ever know that I couldn't read.
Had I been able to read him, maybe
I could have stopped him a lot earlier
than he finally got stopped and maybe
saved some of those girls.
Such a waste of young lives.