Local playwright shines spotlight on lives of 17 murdered women

[cleofus1]

http://www.adn.com/life/story/6960077p-6860036c.html


Suppose you wrote a play about a real-life serial killer and for the most part ignored the killer, focusing nearly all your dramatic interest on the killer's victims instead.

Would the killer be disappointed? Would the audience object? Would your play be a critical flop?

Not if you're veteran Anchorage filmmaker and first-time playwright Mary Katzke, whose painfully close-to-home docudrama, "Dancing for the Hunter," ponders the lives of 17 Anchorage nightclub dancers and prostitutes murdered in Southcentral a quarter-century ago by former Anchorage baker Robert Hansen.

That's because (a) Hansen won't be reviewing the play anytime soon -- he's still got more than 400 years to go on the life sentence without parole he's serving in his cellblock in a Seward prison -- and (b) audiences and critics who've seen preliminary readings of the play say they really like it.

[lildreamer316]

1. Justice for my sisters.

(the nightclub dancers--just to be clear)I would be interested in hearing more; and I bet benburch might also........

[cleofus1]

2. here's the man

Born at Pocahontas, Idaho, in 1940, Hansen was the son of a Danish immigrant who followed in his father's footsteps as a baker. In his youth, Hansen was skinny and painfully shy, afflicted with a stammer and a severe case of acne that left him permanently scarred. (In later years, he would recall his face as "one big pimple.") Shunned by the attractive girls in school, he grew up hating them and nursing fantasies of cruel revenge. Hansen was married in 1961 and divorced within the year, following his first arrest, on charges of arson . Six years later, he wed another Pocahontas native and she followed him to Anchorage, Alaska, where he opened his own bakery and prospered in a new land, safely removed from the painful memories of childhood and adolescence . Hansen took flying lessons and purchased his own private plane, earning a reputation as an outdoors man and hunter who stalked Dahl sheep, wolves, and bear with a rifle or bow and arrow. In 1972, Hansen was arrested twice more, charged with the abduction and attempted rape of a housewife (who escaped his clutches) and the rape of a prostitute (who did not). Serving less than six months on a reduced charge, he was picked up again, for shoplifting a chain saw, in 1976. Convicted of larceny, he was sentenced to five years in prison, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, the Alaska Supreme Court regarding his sentence as "too harsh."

[cleofus1]

3. more

>snip<

"researching the film, Katzke talked to drunks and pimps and strippers. But some of the dancers didn't want to talk about town beautification, she says. They wanted to talk about their dancer-roommates who'd recently disappeared -- and how no one seemed to care.

"So I thought there was a story happening there," Katzke says, "and I tried to raise funds to do a documentary just on that. ... (But) I couldn't even get the club owners to put up a dime. I thought maybe they would want to know what was happening to their employees. But no, that wasn't the case. So I just started interviewing them on my own."

A year later, however -- in 1984 -- the story broke wide open. Hansen was arrested. Ultimately, he confessed to separately killing 17 Anchorage dancers and prostitutes and raping 30 more women over the previous 12 years."

[BikeWriter]

4. I recall reading the book...

That is one weird story!

[cleofus1]

5. there is probobly another serial killer still loose up here

http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives/documentea8c.html

Quiet Carnage
While the APD and the FBI investigate whether a serial killer is hunting Alaska Native women, the city of Anchorage sees no evil.

An older woman nearby shakes her head. She’s heard worse, she says, and nods at a police department poster behind them on the wall. The poster depicts photos of five Alaska Native women who have been murdered in Anchorage in the last 15 months.

The murders of Della Brown, Tina Shangin, Annie Mann, Ginny Tetpon and Vera Hapoff remain unsolved, and police are seriously considering the possibility of a serial killer.

The Anchorage Police Department has requested assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Center for Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, a new FBI division formed when the FBI combined its Serial Killer and Profiling and Behavioral Assessment units.

"Anchorage police intelligence has been forwarded to Quantico so the behavioral science unit there can work up a profile," says Special Agent Eric Gonzalez, spokesman for the FBI’s Anchorage division.

[cleofus1]

6. more from the anchorage press

According to ANSAC statistics, Alaska Natives make up 7.5 percent of the population in Anchorage but account for 40 to 45 percent of the rape victims each year.

"What really scares me is what happens if this is not a serial killer and this is the work of many different people," says Pennington. "That that the men in this community think that they can kill Native women and get way with it. They have been sexually assaulting Native women probably since before this town was founded."

In 1992 and 1993, a serial rapist named Henry Buchholz cruised the now-defunct Hub bar at closing time, offering rides home. Buchholz tortured and raped six women, and killing, before he was caught.

Bernice Thorpe, a former bartender at The Hub, remembers the Buchholz case and makes an easy comparison to the recent murders.

"I don’t know what to surmise... It just seems like someone is targeting us. We’ve heard there’s a serial killer. We want to know how come nothing’s being done, how come we don’t hear more about it," she says.

"We girls talk a lot and we are scared. We feel like things have been kind of swept under the rug."