Dismissed Girl Triggers Serial Killer Takedown

A 17-year-old girl, ignored for days by authorities because she was a sex worker, ended up stopping one of America’s most sadistic serial killers almost by herself.

Story Snapshot

Cindy Paulson escaped serial killer Robert “Butcher Baker” Hansen while handcuffed and barefoot, then ran for her life through Anchorage.^[2]
Her eyewitness account helped expose a predator who had been hunting women in Alaska’s wilderness for years.^[2]
Police and prosecutors relied heavily on her report to finally pin down a killer the system had missed.^[2]
The way her story was first brushed aside shows how easily vulnerable women can be sacrificed when institutions stop doing their job.^[2]

The Teen Who Broke Open Alaska’s Most Chilling Serial Killer Case

On June 13, 1983, Anchorage resident Robert Hansen picked up seventeen-year-old Cindy Paulson, offering her $200 for oral sex before pulling a gun and forcing her to his home.^[2] There, according to later summaries, he chained her by the neck in his basement, repeatedly raping and torturing her through the night.^[2] The next morning, he drove her to Merrill Field, intending to fly her to a remote cabin accessible only by boat or bush plane, where many victims were never seen again.^[2]

When Hansen turned his back to load his Piper Super Cub, Paulson—still handcuffed with her wrists in front—saw a narrow opening.^[2] She crawled across the back seat, slipped out the driver’s door, and sprinted barefoot toward Sixth Avenue, leaving her sneakers on the car floor as proof she had been there.^[2] Hansen panicked and gave chase, but she reached the roadway and managed to flag down driver Robert Yount, who took her to safety at the Mush Inn motel.^[2]

From Dismissed Victim to Key Witness Against a Serial Predator

After Yount brought Paulson to the Mush Inn, motel staff quickly contacted law enforcement, and Anchorage police arrived to take her statement.^[2]^[1] Paulson gave officers concrete details: Hansen’s description, his home in the Muldoon neighborhood, the basement where she was chained, and his small aircraft at Merrill Field.^[2] A security guard at the airfield had already noted suspicious behavior and recorded Hansen’s license plate, providing independent support for Paulson’s account.^[2] That mix of victim testimony and corroborating details forced investigators to take her seriously.

As detectives dug deeper, Paulson’s report became the thread that unraveled a decade-long pattern of abductions and murders.^[2] Investigators connected Hansen to a series of missing women, many of them dancers or prostitutes who had vanished after late-night encounters.^[2] Evidence and later confessions showed Hansen flew victims into Alaska’s wilderness, released them, then hunted them like game using a rifle and hunting knives.^[2] Faced with mounting proof, Hansen eventually admitted to assaulting dozens of women and murdering at least seventeen, though authorities believe there may have been more.^[2]

How Media Retellings Preserve—and Blur—the Evidence Trail

Over forty years later, Paulson’s escape is retold in documentaries, podcasts, and dramatized films, almost always with the same core elements: the chained basement, the bush plane at Merrill Field, the barefoot flight, and the rescue by a passing driver.^[2]^[3] Investigation Discovery, long-form podcasts, and written features all follow this sequence, which suggests a stable narrative but often without quoting the original 1983 police files directly.^[3]^[5] That repetition can cement details in the public mind while leaving gaps in how each fact was originally documented.

Researchers who have examined the case warn that true-crime storytelling can flatten important distinctions between firsthand evidence, police summaries, and later reconstructions. In Paulson’s case, the public record strongly supports that she escaped while handcuffed, fled from Hansen’s car near his plane, and helped identify him to law enforcement.^[2] At the same time, many accessible sources are secondary, and key materials—such as full interview transcripts, medical reports, or complete airport logs—remain hard for the public to review.^[2] That tension illustrates why serious investigations still depend on original records, not just dramatic retellings.