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Alaska is one of the most beautiful places in the world with its snow-capped mountains, enormous forests, winding rivers & stretches of wilderness that seem to go on forever. Not only is it the 49th state in the U.S, but it’s also the largest state by far at 2 ½ times larger than the second largest state of Texas.
This isolation can also make Alaska a very dangerous place since there are millions of acres of remote land where a person can disappear without anyone around to see what happened. Bodies can be hidden miles from the nearest road, left along isolated rivers where they may not be discovered for years, if they’re ever found at all.
Years before Alaska was aware that it had one of America’s most notorious serial killers living among them, an 18-year-old girl named Celia “Beth” van Zanten vanished in Anchorage. Although her killer has never been officially identified, decades later, one name would continue to linger over her case, Robert Hansen, the man who confessed to murdering 17 young women in 1984, taking them out into the wilderness so he could hunt them like wild game.
Christmas Day in Anchorage in 1971 reached a balmy 40℉ which was a welcome reprieve from the arctic cold that had gripped the city only days before. During the height of the recent storm, gale-force winds brought power lines down while a chunk of mountainside came tumbling down onto the middle of the Seward Highway.
Since blue skies & warmer air was upon the community, people were coming out in droves to enjoy the reprieve from the cold. This included Gary Lawler & his brother, Dennis. After they traveled south on Seward Highway along an area of water that feeds into the Gulf of Alaska called Turnagain Arm, the wilderness lay before them & they planned to take photos of the gorgeous landscape they called home.
The brothers stopped off at Bird Point, one of their favorite locations, & then they planned to work their way back north, snapping photos with Dennis’s ancient camera.
In a spur-of-the-moment decision, they decided to stop at McHugh Creek State Park in Anchorage 12 miles north of Bird Point. The park had stunning views of Turnagain Arm as well as the surrounding mountains.
After Dennis climbed down toward the waterfall in search of the best angle, he reached a small ledge about 20 feet below a picnic area that overlooked the creek bank. While he began to focus his camera while maintaining his balance on his little perch, he craned his neck forward to get a better view. This was when he suddenly spotted the body of a young woman who was lying in a ravine below, nude from the waist down.
Dennis came running back to the parking lot where Gary waited, telling him that they had to contact the police immediately.
18-year-old Beth van Zanten had been missing for three days at this point. On Wednesday, December 22, 1971, she had been at home with two of her three older brothers who were smoking marijuana & watching the movie, The Whole World is Watching.
According to her brother Tom, Beth came in & watched part of the movie with them, but otherwise, she’d been off on her own somewhere else in the house.
Beth lived in a large house at 2900 Knik Avenue in south Anchorage near Northern Lights Boulevard with her three older brothers, Tom, David & Joe as well as their cousin, Greg Nicholas. Since their parents were living in another house nearby in Anchorage, they were essentially on their own.
Regardless of the fact that Beth wasn’t living with her parents, they were still very much connected. Just that afternoon, Beth had gone shopping with her mom, her aunt & her cousin. Her aunt Eloise Swoboda recalls that during their outing, Beth had been in great spirits & very much looking forward to the upcoming Christmas holiday.
While the kids had been watching a movie at their home that evening on Knik Avenue, Beth’s parents were hanging out at the Swoboda’s house where they stayed until midnight.
When Beth went into the kitchen for some soda that night, she realized that they were out, so she decided to walk over to the nearby BI-LO grocery store. As she bundled up to head out, putting on her green, down-filled winter coat & rubber-soled hiking boots, she told her brothers that she was supposed to babysit for one of Greg’s friends & she would be back soon.
Since it was 8:30 pm & the grocery store closed at 9 pm, Beth knew she needed to get going. A witness reported seeing her walking toward the store somewhere between 8:45-9 pm while a neighbor said they saw her on Northern Lights Boulevard at about 9 pm.
Sadly, Beth never made it to BI-LO. Under the assumption that their cousin Greg had picked her up on her way to the store & had taken her to her babysitting job, her brothers didn’t report her missing until two days later on Christmas Eve, Friday, December 24, 1971.
Three days after Beth was last seen & one day after her brothers reported her missing, Gary & Dennis Lawler called authorities about finding the body of a female in McHugh Creek State Park.
After Alaska State Trooper Sergeant Walter Gilmour had come home from a day off cross-country skiing with his family, he was just about ready to leave for Christmas dinner at his in-law’s house when his phone rang. A female voice from dispatch was on the other end, explaining that a woman had been found dead in the state park. Patrol was already on the way, but she wanted to alert him to the situation.
Sergeant Gilmour instantly knew that Christmas dinner would just have to wait.
Troopers at the scene were made aware that 18-year-old Beth had been missing for the past three days after she left her home on foot to go to a local convenience store. They could see that the victim lying in the ravine matched her description: young, a fair complexion & long blond hair.
She had been stripped of her green winter coat & hiking boots, she was gagged while her wrists had been bound behind her back with a speaker wire. The pathologist later determined she had been sexually assaulted & there was a diagonal slash wound across her chest that likely occurred when her killer slashed her bra off.
Based on the evidence at the scene, authorities determined that Beth had somehow managed to escape her captor’s car. As she ran for her life through the cold night, shoeless, mostly naked, with her hands bound behind her back, she made her way down the steep, snow-covered ravine, repeatedly falling as she tried to escape. Unable to climb her way back out, Beth eventually succumbed to the freezing temperatures & died from exposure.
Investigators found an array of tire prints that were turning in concentric circles as her captor drove through the parking lot, no doubt in search of her. Unable to find her, he finally left.
Sergeant Gilmour saw that the drizzle was turning into a full-fledged rain as the tire prints began melting away. Rather than taking casts, investigators had no choice but to rely on photos. During their search of the area, they found a silver belt buckle & later a black leather belt. Lying in the snow near Beth’s body, they found tufts of yellow tissue paper.
As they canvassed Beth’s neighborhood, speaking with residents as well as her family members, people began offering statements that contradicted one another. It was Sergeant Gilmour’s opinion that her brothers seemed to be stoners who barely registered their sister’s comings & goings.
His best suspect at the point was Beth’s foster cousin Greg, an Alaska native who was said to have a fractured relationship with her. He indicated that while he had been out drinking & clubbing on the night of her disappearance, he contacted her, asking if she could babysit for one of his friends.
Investigators came to find that although he had mostly been with other people that night, his whereabouts were vague to incorrect. Despite the fact that he claimed to have talked to Beth in person at their house that night about babysitting, her brothers maintained that they hadn’t seen him.
Greg had been so intoxicated that the Anchorage Police had to step in, forcing him & his friends to take a taxi back home.
Area witnesses reported seeing Beth out as late as 11 pm. Because many reported that she had been hitchhiking, some of Gilmour’s investigators believed that a stranger likely picked her up under the guise of a ride & then drove out to the state park to sexually assault her.
Although Greg was eventually cleared by a polygraph, Sergeant Gilmour still considered him their top suspect, but as time went on, this became less likely.
Twenty-four hours after Beth’s body was found, Sergeant Gilmour was contacted by a senior officer in the troopers on December 26, 1971. The man, only known as J.P., was one of the first Alaska natives to join the troopers.
J.P. contacted him to tell him that his daughter, Patricia Roberts, had been abducted & raped only three nights before Beth had vanished.
18-year-old Patty Roberts had sadly turned to sex work to pay for her heroin habit. She told Sergeant Gilmour that on Sunday, December 19, 1971, she was in the parking lot of the Nevada Club, a notoriously rowdy bar on Fourth Avenue in downtown Anchorage, about three miles from Beth van Zanten’s house, when a man pulled up, offering her money for sex.
After she got into his car, he kidnapped her at gunpoint. As he drove south on the Seward Highway, he bound her wrists with leather shoelaces, pulling off the road, telling her that he wanted to make love to her. He tried to kiss her, forcing her to strip down naked so that she wouldn’t be tempted to escape. He also mentioned wanting to slash her bra off with a knife.
Patty described the man as slender, about 5’8” or 5’9”, somewhere between 23-28-years-old & wearing horn-rimmed glasses.
She continued to tell the man that she didn’t want to have sex with him in the car so he decided to take her to a motel. A hundred miles later, they reached the motel deep into the Kenai Peninsula at Cooper Landing. Although he tried to rape Patty, he was unable to finish. He told her that he wanted her to fight just like the other girls had.
On their drive back to Anchorage, he warned that if she reported him to the police, he would kill her.
Patty kept what happened to her quiet until she heard about Beth’s murder. Thinking that the same man was likely responsible, she decided to come forward to tell authorities her story.
When she was shown five black & white photos of men of a similar age range, each wearing horn-rimmed glasses, she immediately pointed at the photo of 32-year-old Robert C. Hansen as the man who had abducted her. When she was shown a book containing sixty photos, she once again immediately pointed to Hansen’s photo on the last page.
His photo had been added to the book after he was arrested less than a month earlier when he tried to abduct an 18-year-old real estate agent named Susan Heppeard. He first noticed her on November 15, 1971 when they had both been at a stop light & Susie smiled at him. Taking her smile as an invitation, he followed her home.
After she went inside, he knocked on her door & asked if he could use her phone book. When he asked her out on a date, she declined, letting him know that she had a boyfriend. He returned eleven days later with a gun, but thankfully her screams alerted her roommates who called the police while Hansen fled. He was caught & arrested about 30 minutes later before he was released on bond on December 2, 1971, less than three weeks before Patty’s abduction.
Despite the fact that he denied attempting to abduct Susie, his photo was taken & placed into the book of sexual offenders.
Patty felt certain that Hansen was someone who had killed before based on some of the things he said to her during their time together. Learning that Beth had been abducted & raped so close to her attack, she fully believed that he was the person responsible.
Robert Hansen was charged in Anchorage Superior Court with assault with a deadly weapon for the attempted abduction of real estate secretary Susan Heppeard as well as rape, kidnapping & assault with a deadly weapon in Patty’s case.
On March 24, 1972, Patty’s case was sadly dismissed in exchange for a no contest plea for Susie’s attempted abduction. Prosecutors & authorites viewed Patty as a liability on the witness stand rather than a victim who was deserving of justice because of her profession as well as her history of substance abuse.
Hansen was sentenced to five years, but ended up serving only six months. Fast forward thirteen years to 1984 when Robert Hansen confessed to murdering 17 women, most of which had been excotic dancers & sex workers as he believed they were less likely to be missed or taken seriously by law enforcement.
Although Hansen never admitted to being responsible for Beth’s murder, the similarities between her case & Patty Roberts was worth noting: both of their hands had been bound, they were stripped naked, he slashed Beth’s bra & threatened to slash Patty’s & they had both been sexually assaulted.
Investigators also knew that he was familiar with the area of Beth’s neighborhood since Susie’s apartment was within a mile of Beth’s house.
To this day, authorities remain unsure if Beth was murdered by Robert Hansen, by someone she knew, by a random killer, or by another brutal serial killer named Gary Zieger.
Gary Zieger, who has an unknown number of victims, was stalking the streets of Anchorage during the early 1970s, during the same time that Hansen was roaming around. While Hansen carefully selected & hunted his victims, Zieger used both women & men for his satisfaction before simply tossing them away.
On August 28, 1972, eight months after Beth’s murder, the body of 20-year-od Zingre “ZeZe” Manson was found by children playing in a remote gravel pit near Sand Lake south of Anchorage. Based on a large pool of blood found near her body, after she was stabbed multiple times, she was left to bleed out.
ZeZe, who lived locally & worked for an airline, had been out hitchhiking. In the aftermath of her death, Gary Zieger was implicated in her murder. He was someone that police were well aware of as two years earlier in 1970, at the urging of his girlfriend, a man came forward to say that he witnessed a murder six months previously.
He’d been riding in Zieger’s truck when he picked up a male hitchhiker. Zieger asked to borrow the witness’ gun before he drove out to an isolated area, forcing the hitchhiker to perform oral sex on him at gun point. He then shot the man to death before throwing his body into a pit at the Anchorage landfill.
Investigators found bullets exactly where the witness said they would. When they went to his house in hopes of getting the gun to compare markings on the casings, a police officer was stationed outside waiting for the search warrant to come through when Gary Zieger came over.
After Zieger stayed for a few minutes, he left & by the time the police came with the warrant, the gun was gone.
Because there was little evidence to tie him to the crime, he was never held responsible.
When investigators began looking at him in connection with ZeZe’s murder, not only did a gravel truck driver identify both Zieger & his truck, but the tires on his truck matched what was found at the scene. His friend’s statement also placed him at the scene with a young, female hitchhiker. When they found three small bloodspots on the dash of his truck, although he claimed he had been out hunting rabbits, they tested positive for human blood.
Unfortunately, things went terribly wrong at his trial & Gary Zieger ended up being acquitted. There was confusion in the presentation of the tire tracks as well as the blood. A hematology expert was asked if there is any blood that can result in a positive reaction other than a human’s. Although the expert said yes, he failed to mention that the only other living organism that could produce a positive result is an orangutan.
Two months after Beth’s murder, 18-year-old Shirley Ann Jones was last seen leaving an Anchorage nightclub with a man in February 1972. The next day, she was found clinging to life in a truck yard on the east side of town, but sadly, after having been beaten & raped, she died a short time later at the hospital.
Zieger went on to commit several more murders, including the execution of a club owner named Johnny Rich as well as the murder of nightclub owner Jimmy Sumpter’s wife & his stepson in a burglary where he got away with $20,000 in cash & jewelry.
Before troopers could make an arrest, on November 27, 1973, 20-year-old Gary Zieger’s body was found sprawled out in the middle of the pavement at mile 110 of the Seward Highway with a shotgun blast to the gut in what was believed to be a contract murder.
Although investigators couldn’t confirm his involvement in Beth’s murder, his behavior matched what happened to her. There were also witnesses who felt that he looked a lot like the composite sketch of a man reportedly seen with her on the night she vanished.
An informant also went on to tell officers that Beth’s cousin, Greg Nicholas, had lived with Zieger in the months after her murder after he was presumably no longer welcome in the van Zanten household after her death.
More than five decades later, no one has ever been charged for the murder of 18-year-old Celia “Beth” van Zanten, who innocently left her house for a soda run days before Christmas in 1971.
While Robert Hansen would eventually confess to murdering 17 women in the Anchorage area, Beth was never one of the victims he admitted to murdering. Whether he was responsible will likely never be known for certain.
Everything that makes Alaska so beautiful, the vast stretches of wilderness that allow you to feel separated from the rest of the world, also make it an ideal playground for violent predators like Gary Zieger & Robert Hansen.
It’s very possible that Beth crossed paths with one of these two serial predators that night. Someone knows what happened to Beth, but until that person is identified, her story remains another haunting mystery buried beneath the extraordinary beauty & at times, terrifying isolation, of the Last Frontier.
References:
- Butcher Baker – True Crime Alaska: The lonesome death of Beth van Zanten: Disappearance
- Butcher Baker – True Crime Alaska: Butcher, Baker: The early years, pt. 1
- Butcher Baker – True Crime Alaska: Butcher, Baker: The early years, pt. 2
- Butcher Baker – True Crime Alaska: Butcher, Baker: The early years, pt. 3
- Butcher Baker – True Crime Alaska: Lonesome death of Beth van Zanten: Whodunit?
- Newspapers: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: Troopers ask help in hunt for murderer
- Newspapers: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: Gary Zieger innocent of girl’s death
- Wicked Horror: Victims spotlight: Remembering the victims of Alaska’s Butcher Baker
- Murder & Mystery in the Last Frontier: Serial murderer Gary Zieger
- Wikipedia: Alaska
- Seeing Red: Gary Zieger – serial killer with unknown number of victims
- The Lineup: Unsolved murder: Did Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen kill Beth van Zanten?
