“RUN, BITCH, RUN!” Teen Sex Worker’s Split-Second Escape from Alaska Serial Killer Robert Hansen

Cindy Paulson was a teenage runaway in Alaska when she crossed paths with Robert Hansen, a predator linked to at least 17 murders. Somehow, she emerged alive

More than 40 years later, Cindy Paulson still isn’t exactly sure how she managed to get the back door of the Buick open—but she clearly remembers thinking that if she didn’t find a way to escape, she’d soon be dead. “I heard voices in my head telling me, ‘Run, bitch. Run,’ ” recalls Paulson. Seconds later the then-17-year-old sex worker from Yakima, Wash., was sprinting barefoot, her wrists shackled and covered in blood, down the gravel runway of Anchorage’s Merrill Field Airport and onto a highway. Not far behind her, clutching a .357 Magnum, was the driver of the Buick, who, hours earlier, had brutally raped and tortured Paulson in the basement of his home. He was now preparing to fly her in his private plane to a remote cabin in the Alaska wilderness on what she realized would be a one-way trip. “Stop! Stop!” Paulson recalls screaming at the driver of a passing pickup truck who pulled over. “This guy is trying to kill me.”

Little did Paulson know, on that morning in June 1983, that she had become the sole survivor of one of the nation’s most prolific and twisted serial killers. Since 1971, Robert Hansen, an unassuming 44-year-old Anchorage bakery owner and married father of two, had been abducting dancers and prostitutes, flying them to the backcountry on his Piper Super Cub plane and then releasing them and—armed with a gun and hunting knife—stalking them like wild prey. “What Robert Hansen did was probably the most horrific crime that I’ve been involved in,” says retired Anchorage Police Department detective John Daily. “Nobody has killed more people and did it in such a cold-blooded, ruthless manner.”

Paulson’s account of her brutal encounter with the serial killer gave Alaska authorities investigating the disappearance of dozens of women the information they needed to arrest Hansen. After pleading guilty to four first-degree murders while admitting to killing 17 women and raping dozens, he was sentenced to nearly 500 years in prison. (Hansen died of natural causes in 2014.)

“Somebody had to make him stop,” says Paulson, who tells her story in “Surviving the Butcher Baker,” the season premiere episode of People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer, airing on Investigation Discovery on June 2 at 9/8c and streaming on HBO Max. “I was that somebody.”

The path that led Paulson to her narrow escape began when, at 9 years old, her happy upbringing with four older sisters in Yakima was thrown into chaos. “I learned that my mother was [in reality] my oldest sister, and my father and mom were really my grandma and grandfather,” she recalls. “It broke me.” Months later Paulson ran away for the first time. At 15, she was living in Anchorage and began working as a prostitute at a time when the city was crowded with petroleum industry workers flush with cash from the North Slope oil boom. “My slowest night [was] $800, and sometimes it could be $5,000,” says Paulson. “There was money up there.”

And danger. Police were already investigating reports of sex workers vanishing off the streets, and beginning in 1980, bodies of women were found in the rugged wilderness outside the city. And in September 1982, Daily stumbled upon the remains of a 22-year-old topless dancer named Sherry Morrow on a remote stretch of the Knik River during an off-duty hunting trip. Nearby, investigators also found a valuable piece of evidence—a .223 caliber rifle cartridge casing. “We knew there was something wrong out there,” remembers Daily. “We just didn’t know what it was.”

Paulson had no clue her life was about to take a dark turn on the June night in 1983 when Hansen pulled up to the sidewalk where she was working and offered her $200 for oral sex. “He looked totally cool, like somebody’s grandpa,” she recalls. Yet when they arrived at Hansen’s house on the outskirts of the city, she says, he threatened her with a gun and handcuffed her. Hansen, whose wife and two children were visiting relatives in Arkansas, took her to the basement—with the stuffed heads of animals he’d shot lining the walls—where he raped and tortured her, then chained her to a post. “I prayed the whole time,” Paulson recalls. Hansen told her he was going to fly her to a cabin to have sex and then set her free. “I knew I wasn’t going to come back,” she says.

After Paulson’s brave escape at the Anchorage ­airfield, she provided authorities with the missing pieces to the macabre puzzle they were trying to solve. In October 1983, weeks after yet another woman’s body was discovered on Alaska’s Knik River, police arrested Hansen at his bakery—where local cops often fueled up on donuts and coffee—and searched his house, discovering jewelry belonging to victims, a map indicating where bodies were buried and a .223-caliber rifle used in the killings. “I’ve got a . . . maybe you want to call it a sickness or whatever, but a virtual hate for prostitutes,” Hansen told investigators before pleading guilty in 1984 to the murders of four women.

Today memories of the nightmare that she survived four decades ago are never far from Paulson, who feared the monster she met on the streets of Anchorage might dispatch a criminal associate to kill her. But since Hansen’s death in 2014, the Yakima-based mother of three grown sons says, she can finally breathe again. “I have 10 years clean and sober. I see my sons and grandchildren regularly. I love life, and I love me,” says Paulson.

And perhaps even more importantly, the woman who spent much of her life believing that she should never have been born is now convinced she was destined to be here for a purpose: to take a serial killer off the streets. “I just think about all the women whose lives I saved and all the women who I got revenge for,” she says. “Because I caught that son of a gun.”