"I'm not an emotional guy," Wayne von Clausen says, "but to me, the Knik River is a graveyard."

One of the investigating officers on the Robert Hansen murders, Wayne spoke to the September meeting of Alaska Sisters in Crime about the case. A burly man with the detached demeanor common to so many law enforcement professionals, Wayne nevertheless can't hide the intense feelings raised by the case of Alaska's first known serial killer, apprehended in 1983 after a career of kidnapping and killing that Wayne estimates began in 1968.

In 1983 the first body was found on the Knik by two moose hunters. The following spring a second body was found, and Sheila Toomey wrote a column about it in the Anchorage Daily News. Both bodies were of topless dancers were also prostitutes. Both bodies were found in places accessible only by air or boat. "There's not much you can do with a case like that," Wayne says. They collected shell casings from the sites and opened files. "A lot of people looked good for this," he says, scaring everyone in the room. "Robert Hansen wasn't one of them."

Then another hooker, 17-year old Cindy Paulsen, was kidnapped. Held for two days in a basement, she escaped when her kidnapper drove her to Merrill Field to put her on his Super Cub. When she talked to the police she identified Robert Hansen, a local baker, bow hunter and pilot, as her kidnapper, but the district attorney refused to prosecute, saying she wasn't a credible witness. Besides, Hansen had two alibi witnesses, a local insurance agent and a local construction worker. Like Hansen, they were bow hunters and pilots, and, Wayne thinks, might have been involved in the murders as well, although nothing was ever proved.

Cindy had a blind sister, so she was used to describing things, Wayne says. "She was one of the best witnesses I've ever heard." The details of her account were enough to convince the investigators that she was telling the truth. They put Hansen under surveillance for two weeks, twenty-four hours a day. When he took to the air in his Super Cub, they sent a pilot after him. "We talked to the ladies on the street," he says, "and when they started to trust us they were a big help." This had its down side after the case was closed, he says. "I'd be driving with my wife in the car and every hooker on the street would wave and say, `Hi Wayne, how you doing?'"

They put a case together and two months after Cindy Paulsen's escape sent it to the FBI. Two agents flew to Alaska a day later, and wrote a profile that formed the basis for an arrest warrant. Hansen was apprehended, and fourteen officers went out to his house in Muldoon, where secreted beneath insulation in the attic they found a .223-caliber Mini-14 which would be identified as the weapon used to kill the two women whose bodies had been found on the Knik, and hidden in the headboard of Hansen's bed a map of the Knik with locations marked on it.

Faced with the weapon, Hansen admitted to the two murders. Confronted with the map, he led the investigators to seventeen sites, where he'd flown in a woman he'd kidnapped off the Anchorage streets, turned loose, chased down and shot them. Every one of the investigating officers had the same nightmare the night before we went out with him in a helicopter to look for those bodies, Wayne says. They weren't the only ones. "Hansen's attorney called up the next morning and said, `This guy can't incriminate himself any more than he already has. I'm not going. Good luck.'"

Hansen, manacled and chained, was "eager to visit" his victims, "proud" when he found them again. All they discovered of one body was a piece of a jawbone that, as luck would have it, contained the one tooth they had an x-ray of with which to identify the victim. "There were thirty-seven marks on his charts," Wayne says. "He only led us to seventeen gravesites, all topless dancers and prostitutes. His first known victim was a schoolteacher who escaped. Who were the other victims?" Some, Wayne speculates, were victims less likely to be written off by society than a prostitute or a topless dancer.

If there is one thing Wayne wanted us to take away from his appearance that evening, if there is one reason he can bring himself to talk about the Robert Hansen case at all, it is that he wants us to realize just how tenuous is our grip on personal safety. "He had Cindy Paulsen on the floor of his truck in seconds, a gun pointed at her head. It could happen to any of you driving home at night on the Glenn."

I checked the backseat of my car before I got in it after the meeting. I know I wasn't the only one.