Barefoot, handcuffed and covered in blood, 17-year-old Cindy Paulson opened a car door and sprinted down the gravel runway of Anchorage's Merrill Field Airport and onto a highway.

Just seconds before, voices in her head screamed at her to get out of the car she was trapped in and run as fast as she could, per People.

As she ran for her life, a man closely followed with a gun.

Hours earlier, he had abducted her. Then he raped and tortured her in his basement.

The man planned to fly Paulson on his private plane to a remote cabin in the Alaska wilderness, where the torture would continue.

"This guy is trying to kill me," Paulson screamed for help from someone driving past, People reports.

She never could have imagined just how depraved his plans truly were.

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More than 40 years on, Paulson still isn't sure how she managed to open the car's back door. But she knows one thing for sure: that split-second decision saved her life.

That man, Paulson's attacker, was Robert Hansen — an unassuming bakery owner and married father-of-two with a horrifying double life.

How was Robert Hansen caught?

On that June night in 1983, Hansen pulled up to the side of the street where Paulson was working as a sex worker, per People.

"He looked totally cool, like somebody's grandpa," she told the publication. Then Hansen offered her $200 for oral sex and drove her to his house.

Paulson told People that when they arrived at his house, Hansen threatened her with a gun, handcuffed her and took her to his basement, where he raped and tortured her.

He then told her he was going to fly her to a cabin in the woods and began driving them to the airport.

"I knew I wasn't going to come back," Paulson said.

So when she saw her opportunity, she pulled the car door open and ran for her life. The driver she flagged down stopped and she was able to report Hansen to police.

At the time, police were already investigating reports of sex workers disappearing. According to People, bodies of women were appearing in wilderness outside the city.

"We knew there was something wrong out there," retired Anchorage Police Department detective John Daily told People. "We just didn't know what it was."

It was Paulson who led police to Hansen's door. Her escape would end up spelling the end of a serial killer's years-long run of rape, torture and murder.

Paulson provided authorities with the information they were missing.

According to People, in October 1983, weeks after another woman's body was found, police arrested Hansen at his bakery. A search of his house uncovered jewellery belonging to victims, a map indicating where the bodies were buried and a rifle used in the killings.

Police finally had their man — the "Butcher Baker" killer.

Hansen's arrest came after more than 10 years of hunting women in Alaska.

Since 1971, he had been abducting women, raping them, flying them out to remote locations, releasing them and hunting them like prey, per the Washington Post.

Before he was detained for the murders he had committed, he had been arrested at least five times in 12 years.

What happened to Robert Hansen?

When Hansen was arrested, he was charged with the murders of four women.

But he later confessed to killing 17 women, mostly dancers and sex workers, over 12 years, per the Washington Post.

He also confessed to raping 30 other women during that time, according to the publication.

Hansen was eventually sentenced to 461 years behind bars, without the possibility of parole.

"I would have wished every breath he took had an element of pain to it," Alaska's Assistant District Attorney Frank Rothschild told A&E True Crime.

"But here's how I thought about it — here's a guy whose passion in life is going out into the wilderness and hunting, the great Alaska wild.

"Instead of being able to do that, he was put in a cell with no view of anything — forget the mountains — with rancid air and horrific people around him. That, to me, is supreme punishment.

The convicted serial killer died in August 2014 at a hospital in Anchorage, per the Washington Post.

"On this day we should only remember his many victims and all of their families, and my heart goes out to all of them," Glenn Flothe, a retired Alaska state trooper who was involved in Hansen's arrest, told Anchorage Daily News at the time.

"As far as Hansen is concerned, this world is better without him."

"He will not be missed," Rothschild said, per the publication. "Good riddance to him".

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Life and crimes documented.

Hansen's horrific crimes have since been documented in film, podcasts and documentaries.

He was the subject of the 2013 film The Frozen Ground, which starred Nicolas Cage as an Alaska State trooper investigating the murders. John Cusak portrayed the serial killer in the film and Vanessa Hudgens played Paulson.

The story of his crimes has also been told in an episode of the true-crime series Mind of a Monster, titled The Butcher Baker which aired in 2020.

Now, the story is being told again in an upcoming episode of People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer, titled Surviving the Butcher Baker.

For the episode, Paulson gave an interview about the horrors she encountered and her role in stopping the serial killer.

"Somebody had to make him stop," Paulson says in the interview, per PEOPLE.

"I was that somebody."

Feature image: Investigation Discovery.