On May 19, 1980, White Female, age 24, Joanna Messina was in Seward, Alaska, where she crossed paths with Anchorage baker Robert Hansen. Contemporary accounts later reconstructed her final evening: she went to dinner with Hansen, after which he forced her out of town toward the Snow River area outside Seward. There, according to Hansen's own confession years later, an argument escalated; he struck her with a.
22-caliber revolver and shot her twice before discarding her remains in a nearby gravel pit and throwing her belongings and the gun elsewhere in the landscape. Weeks later, in early July 1980, her body—badly scavenged by wildlife after exposure—was discovered in that gravel pit near Seward. The precise date of death is placed around May 19, 1980, based on Hansen's timeline and her last-known movements.
Joanna Messina's case did not stand alone. Earlier that summer, workers had found a different victim along Eklutna Lake Road outside Anchorage, the still-unidentified “Eklutna Annie,” which helped investigators see a pattern linking multiple remote burials around Anchorage, Seward, and the Matanuska–Susitna Valley. That growing pattern drew Alaska State Troopers into a broader hunt for one perpetrator operating across Southcentral Alaska's backcountry.
The suspect who emerged was Robert Hansen, an avid hunter whose public persona as a family man and baker masked years of abductions and murders. After a 17-year-old victim escaped in 1983 and left detailed evidence, investigators obtained a search warrant, uncovering trophies from victims and a marked aviation map that matched hidden gravesites. Hansen ultimately admitted to at least 17 murders. As part of the state's charging decisions, the district attorney included four counts of first-degree murder—among them the murder of Joanna Messina—along with the abduction and rape of the surviving victim. Hansen was arrested on October 27, 1983, pleaded guilty, and received a sentence of 461 years without the possibility of parole; he died in prison in 2014.
Although some memorial listings place Joanna Messina's death location as Eklutna, primary narrative sources and investigative summaries locate her recovery site at a gravel pit near Seward, consistent with Hansen's account of driving her out toward the Snow River area before the murder. That tension reflects how the geography of Hansen's crimes—Anchorage, Eklutna, Knik River, Seward—can blur in secondary retellings, but the investigative record implicating Hansen in the killing of Joanna Messina, female and 24, is firm, and her murder is among the crimes for which he was charged in Alaska state court.
