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Robert Hansen, a convicted serial killer who abducted women and hunted them down in the Alaska wilderness in the 1970s, died on Thursday in Anchorage. He was 75 and serving a 461-year prison sentence.
An Alaska Department of Corrections spokeswoman said the state medical examiner would determine the cause of death. Mr. Hansen had been in declining health and died at Alaska Regional Hospital, having been moved there from a state prison.
He was convicted in 1984 after confessing to killing 17 women, mostly strippers and prostitutes, over 12 years. He also confessed to raping 30 other women.
Mr. Hansen had owned a bakery in downtown Anchorage, living across town with his wife and children, who knew nothing of his other life.
Glenn Flothe, who as a state trooper helped put Mr. Hansen behind bars, told The Anchorage Daily News in 2008 that Mr. Hansen’s victims initially included any woman who caught his eye, but that he quickly learned that strippers and prostitutes were harder to track and less likely to be missed.
A licensed pilot, Mr. Hansen abducted women and took them to remote places outside the city, sometimes by his private plane.
Investigators said that in some instances Mr. Hansen raped the women, then returned them to Anchorage and warned them not to contact the authorities. Other times, he let the women go in the wilderness and then hunted them with his rifle.
The bodies of only 12 of the 17 women that Mr. Hansen confessed to killing have been found.
Mr. Hansen was the subject of a 2013 film, “The Frozen Ground,” in which he was played by John Cusack. Nicolas Cage played a state trooper investigating the killings.
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