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The Story of the Man Who Hunted Women

 Author: Ryan Green

The story starts in the mind of a victim in the middle of chase that will end in murder. But at the moment, she is still alive, barely clothed, abandoned in the wilderness, surrounded by snow and cold. She’s trying to figure out how to survive, how to navigate this barren terrain and find the town again. That’s when she sees him, gun cocked, emerging from the snow. The hunt has begun.

Robert Hansen began his reign of terror with rape. Then he escalated to murder, to silence his victims. Then he found his true joy: hunting humans. The Hunt is the story of this man who started by feeling ostracized and criticized in his own childhood and grew into a deeply unstable monster who spent twelve years abducting women, flying them into the Alaskan wilderness, and hunting them there.

The Hunt is a quick book weighing in at only 129 pages (just a little over four hours for the Audible). It’s unique for a true crime book, in that it starts in the mind of a victim – one who does not survive. Obviously, this takes some guesswork, some patching together from the killer’s confessions to the revelations of the few survivors, to the knowledge of the personalities of the deceased, to sheer guessing. While this dynamic approach makes for good story telling, it makes us question just how much of this true crime is based on fact and how much has merged into fiction. We know it can’t all be true – it would be impossible to know victims’ thoughts, secret conversations, last moments and sights. Yet, this approach does drop the reader into the story, and this fictional feel increases the terror on our part and immortalizes what the final hours for Hansen’s victims must have felt like.

Having set the scene, author Ryan Green wind back the clock and tries to understand how this all came to be. How did Hansen go from a misunderstood, sulky boy into this proficient, cold killing machine? How did no one notice, including his wife? How did it take police so long to detect the string of disappearances?

Oscillating between fact and creative fiction, Green paints a portrait that tries to guess at all Hansen has hidden. Hansen did, in fact, die in secret, having never revealed the true extent or reasoning behind his rampage. The police and hence Green as a biographer are left with suspicions that Hansen killed and raped more than we will ever know. But we have enough of the story to guess at the greater scope.

Image by MariaD42530 from Pixabay

We start out with Green, feeling some empathy for the boy that would later grow into the man without mercy. Hansen had a rough upbringing. He was never good enough for his father, and later his isolation and inability to socialize left him lonely, with an intense and not altogether unwarranted feeling of rejection. But time and place changed, and the unlucky, unloved boy grew into a man who had everything: a loving second-wife and a flourishing bakery business. Away from his homeland of Wisconsin, Hansen earned a good reputation for himself in Alaska. He was a man’s-man, by all accounts. An expert hunter, someone to be respected and sought out.

And that, we suppose, was how he hid behind a respectable persona, despite a prior police record. Despite later accusations of rape. Despite what his game evolved into.

This short book is gripping and sad, all at the same time. We get hints of an answer about Hansen, from the scars of his childhood to his untreated schizophrenia, but ultimately, Green cannot do what others before him in true crime have tried to do: explain why someone would do something so horrible. Green himself owns that there have been people with worse childhoods, others with schizophrenia, who have never done or wanted to do anything of this nature. Ultimately, Hansen and people like him remain a mystery. There is evil in the world. Some people are attracted to it, embrace it, become it. Why these people and not others? Why this man and not his neighbors, his friends, his wife? Well, that’s the great mystery.

In the end The Hunt is a short, but memorable and chilling true crime story. The fictionalization destroys a lot of our trust in the facts of the narrative, but the author keeps the story interesting and gives us good details without providing too much of the gory and horrible. Recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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