dichotomization:
“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, given to wetting his pants, setting fires, and shoplifting. He moved to Anchorage, Alaska, following in the footsteps of his father, and there he opened a bakery. During times when his wife and kids were away, he started trolling areas where prostitutes plied their trade, and eventually he started to murder them. Sometimes he would pick them up in his truck and go to his house. He was a licensed pilot, so other times he would fly them into the Alaskan wild, release them, and then hunt them down with a rifle or bow and arrow. Hansen admitted to seventeen murders, but Alaska state investigator Glenn Forthe felt that Hansen had killed four or five women a year from the early 1970s to 1983, the year he was tracked down.
Hansen was finally caught when one of the women, Kitty Larson, he took to his house escaped, running from his house dressed only in the handcuffs he had put on her. Larson went to the police. In February of 1984, he admitted to some of the killings during questioning, though at times for investigators it was like pulling teeth. In his confession Hansen went into great pains to rationalize his behaviour. He explained that he had had problems with women since he was a teenager and that women wouldn’t go out with him because of his acne and his stutter, “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 said he always “loved” women, but he made a distinction - a sharp distinction - between good and bad girls. Bad girls could die, “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.”
