ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Police said Tuesday they will search after the spring thaw for the graves of 13 long-missing Anchorage dances and prostitutes, using a map kept by convicted killer Robert Hansen, sentenced to life plus 461 years in four similar cases.
Hansen, a 44-year-old baker, was sentenced Monday after he confessed to killing four women and burying their bodies in shallow graves in the wilderness between the Seward and Susitna rivers.
In passing the prison sentence, Superior Court Judge Ralph Moody noted that Hansen had been arrested three times over the past 12 years, twice on charges associated with kidnapping or sexual assault. Each time he was allowed to go free, most recently when the Alaska Supreme Court reduced a five-year sentence for larceny in 1978 to time served.
'I cannot think of a bigger indictment of society than we have here,' Moody said. 'This gentleman here has been known to us for several years ... We've turned him loose several times.'
Police, who have been investigating the disappearances for a decade, plan to search for the remaining graves after the spring thaw, aided by a map Hansen kept that authorities believe marks grave sites.
'We don't think for a moment he's told us the whole story,' said Assistant District Attorney Frank Rothschild.
Hansen, a native of the small town of Pocahontas, Iowa, will not be charged with murder in any of the 13 unsolved disappearances because it is not necessary and police anticipate trouble finding all the graves, said District Attorney Victor Krumm.
Hansen, in a 12-hour taped confession concerning the four murders of which he was convicted, said he had had problems since a youth in dealing with women.
But the twice-married father of two said he did not hate all women. He said he liked women in general, 'but I guess prostitues are women I'm putting down as lower than myself.'
