congenitaldisease:

“I didn’t start to hate all women; as a matter of fact, I would venture to say I started to fall in love with every one of them. Every one of them became so precious to me ‘cause I wanted their friendship.”

Robert Hansen was born in Pocahontas, Iowa, and was a troubled child - he was known to wet his pants, commit arson, and shoplift. When he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, he followed in the footsteps of his father and opened up a bakery. When his wife and children were away on vacation, he began to stalk the areas where prostitutes were known to work, and he eventually began to murder them. He would sometimes pick them up in his truck and take them back to his house where he would rape and kill them. He was a licensed pilot, so at other times he would fly women out into the Alaskan wild, release them, and then hunt them down with his rifle or bow and arrow. When he was apprehended he admitted to seventeen murders, but Glenn Forthe, an Alaskan state investigator, believed that Hansen had most likely killed four or five women a year from the early 1970s until 1983.

He was finally caught when one of his intended victims escaped from his home, wearing only the handcuffs he had put on her wrists. During Hansen’s confession he went into great pains to rationalise his murders. He explained that he had always had problems with women, claiming as a teenager women refused to date him because of his acne and stuffer - “I was I guess what you might call very frustrated, upset all the time. I would see my friends and so forth going out on dates and so forth and I had tremendous desire to do the same thing.” He tried to make it clear that he always “loved” women but he made a distinction between good and bad girls. Bad girls were “fair game” to him - “I’m not saying that I hate all women. I don’t. Quite the contrary, if, I guess in my own mind what I’m classifying is a good woman, not a prostitute.”