He Was a Beloved Baker in Alaska — Until Police Learned He Hunted Women Like Animals | HO

Anchorage, Alaska — For six years, the disappearance of a 24-year-old hotel cleaner was treated as routine: another adult who “probably ran off.” Last week, newly unearthed records and survivor testimony pulled back the façade on a cherished community figure.

Robert “Bob” Harlo, a popular Anchorage baker and hobby pilot long regarded as a hometown saint, was revealed as a serial predator who used the Alaskan wilderness as a private hunting ground — abducting women under the cover of kindness, flying them to remote terrain, and pursuing them like game.

The case traces back to November 1983, when Angela Brooks failed to return home after a late shift. Her partner, auto mechanic Darnell Carter, awoke to the absence that defined the next six years. He called police before dawn, frantic and demanding action.

That urgency, officers later admitted, was read as volatility. Within hours, the disappearance was coded the way so many Anchorage cases were in that era: “probable voluntary missing.” A short search followed — a few patrol cars, one helicopter pass — and then the file cooled.

What investigators missed in those crucial first days became grimly clear over time. Harlo, then in his late 30s, ran The Daily Bread, a warm, yeasty refuge in downtown Anchorage known for cinnamon rolls and quiet generosity.

He also kept a Cessna at the municipal airfield. Residents saw a benevolent small-business owner who donated day-old loaves to churches and handed cookies to kids. No one saw the other life: a meticulous student of backcountry isolation who perfected a ritual he later romanticized as “the predator and the prey.”

According to officials and court records, Harlo approached women on bitter winter nights with offers of a ride — gestures that felt like survival in subzero wind. Once in his truck, victims were subdued and flown to a remote cabin accessible only by ski-equipped plane or overgrown logging tracks.

There, authorities say, Harlo staged a “hunt,” providing scant supplies and a head start before tracking them across the snow. The wilderness — empty lake ice, black spruce, low cloud — concealed the crimes as effectively as any city’s underbelly.

Anchorage police initially focused on Carter. “Son, calm down,” the assigned detective told him, according to contemporaneous notes. Absent a crime scene, the working theory defaulted to domestic strife and a voluntary exit. That judgment, rooted in the department’s triage culture and a steady stream of transient disappearances, effectively granted a suspect time — and insulated a civic myth.

Carter refused the premise. He printed flyers, led volunteer searches, and scraped together funds from double shifts to keep the effort alive. Months became years. Friends drifted. He became a familiar figure in a city that wanted to move on. The one place that never turned him away was Harlo’s bakery.

The baker refilled his coffee, offered pastries “on the house,” and asked with practiced sorrow if there was any news. To patrons, Harlo’s empathy reinforced his standing. To Carter, it felt like the last human kindness in a town growing colder by the week.

In 1989, a private investigator broke the stalemate. Frank Holloway, a retired state trooper turned PI, took Carter’s case after warning there might be nothing to find. He did what the original investigation had not: reinterviewed Angela’s coworkers and built a profile inconsistent with a runaway; audited other missing women cases coded as “voluntary”; and spent months shaking loose flight logs from small airfields, drinking bad coffee with mechanics in dusty offices.

His pattern was stark. In the immediate wake of three disappearances, logs showed solo recreational flights filed by Robert Harlo — short backcountry trips into uninhabited terrain, out and back over a day or two. In the 1980s, those plans weren’t unusual. In this context, the timing was chilling. Holloway had motive, means, and opportunity circled in red. What he lacked was a witness.

The witness arrived by miracle and grit. Late that summer, a 20-year-old woman — whom authorities have not publicly named — escaped from a remote cabin after enduring two days of pursuit. Rather than continue deeper into the woods, she doubled back under cover of night, broke a window, grabbed a set of keys, and coaxed an old pickup truck to life.

She rattled over forgotten roads until she reached a logging camp. The men there delivered her to a state trooper outpost, where she told her story: the friendly baker, the airplane, the rules of the “game.” Troopers listened — and recognized the name everyone in Anchorage knew.

The response was immediate and highly visible. SWAT officers entered The Daily Bread during business hours. Harlo, dusted with flour, offered no resistance. He was led past patrons in handcuffs, an image that ripped through the city faster than the baking heat dissipating into the street.

At his home, officers found a hidden storage compartment in the basement: IDs that belonged to missing women, a single silver earring, a dog-eared paperback, and a velvet-lined box of bracelets. Among them, a delicate silver band engraved with a single name: Jordan �� the gift Carter had given Angela after their son was born.

For Carter, the discovery was both vindication and funeral. “They can’t ignore her anymore,” he told his teenage son after identifying the bracelet. The small piece of jewelry became the gravestone the wilderness had denied.

Prosecutors assembled a case that was as much a civic reckoning as a criminal trial. The survivor testified to the mechanics of the hunt and the calm philosophy Harlo articulated to justify it. He was no blustering sadist, she said. He was patient and precise, an “artist” of a ritual he believed stripped away the pretense of civilization.

The jurors heard from Holloway, who described the flight-log mosaic, and from Carter, who reframed Angela not as a statistic but as a mother who worked nights to buy her son a winter coat.

Anchorage had to confront its part. The initial classification that sidelined the case. The way community affection insulated a suspect. The tendency to see a grieving, angry partner as the likely problem and a pillar of the community as the solution.

Detectives acknowledged on the stand that judgment and bandwidth shaped choices: a flooded caseload in a city with high transience led to probability-based triage. In Angela’s case, that calculus proved catastrophic.

The jury deliberated briefly. Harlo was convicted on multiple counts tied to abduction, assault, and homicide. He offered no apology and displayed little emotion as the verdict was read.

The man who had poured coffee for search volunteers, who had urged Carter to “keep the faith,” left the courthouse for a life sentence. In the gallery, residents sat in stunned silence. The bakery had been the city’s hearth; it was now a crime scene in memory.

The fallout went beyond a single conviction. Police leaders announced reforms to missing person protocols, including stricter thresholds for labeling adult disappearances as voluntary, a dedicated review of cases involving victims from the city’s margins, and a practice of cross-referencing aviation activity with disappearance timelines when relevant.

The department also launched an audit of older files coded as “runaway” or “voluntary,” searching for patterns obscured by assumptions.

Advocates for victims praised the changes but urged sustained attention. “Systems default to the path of least resistance,” one said. “The lesson is to slow down and take people seriously — especially when the story challenges our picture of who we think is dangerous.”

For Carter, the reforms are abstract comfort. The bracelet was proof, but not closure. On a bluff above Cook Inlet, he pressed the silver band into his son’s hand — a symbol that Angela’s life would not be footnoted as a domestic dispute gone wrong.

“Your mother was a fighter,” he told him. In the years that followed, he continued to appear at the precinct on the anniversary of her disappearance, less to demand action than to ensure memory did not collapse back into myth.

As for Harlo’s public persona, it dissolved almost overnight. The Daily Bread shuttered, its sign removed, its windows papered over. The cinnamon-sugar warmth that once greeted residents now exists mostly in courtroom transcripts, testimony, and a set of inventory tags in an evidence locker. The man at the center of it all receded into the gray of prison life, his “game” replaced by the routine of a cell.

Anchorage, a city forged by extremes, has long understood how the landscape can swallow truth. This case underscored how community narratives can do the same. A beloved baker’s reputation became a kind of shelter — for him, and from a harder reality. It took a survivor’s defiance, a partner’s relentless loyalty, and a retired trooper’s patience to crack that shelter open.

The cold, as residents like to say, writes its own stories here. For six years, it kept this one. Now, the record reflects something messier and more human: that kindness can be camouflage; that “probable” can be wrong; that a single engraved name can pull a person back from the blank space where a file once slept.