Here's what you need to know about Christian Hansen from Netflix's new documentary, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.
This week, Netflix released a new limited series of four episodes titled, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders. In the first episode, fans were introduced to Christian Hansen a journalist who became obsessed with the death of Danny Casalero.
Danny was a journalist who was about to uncover something huge called 'The Octopus', but committed suicide before he could release his findings - or so the public were told. Christian, like many others, found the death suspicious and ended up taking on a 10-year investigation into this unsolved case - which remains unsolved to this day.
The first episode shows that Christian had been completely consumed with uncovering the truth for more than a decade and footage showed him discussing the case with his friend over the years since 2014.
But what happened to Christian and where is he now? Here's what you need to know...
Who is Christian Hansen?
Christian Hansen was a Virginia-based Photojournalist who uncovered the truth about Danny Casalero and the Octopus murders.
He revealed to Netflix's Tudum, that he learned about this case by chance when he was studying. "I was writing a paper for class about the private prison industry," he said. "While researching the history of Wackenhut, I found an article in Spy magazine about Danny Casolaro. He was also looking into The Wackenhut Corporation. I read the article and I was fascinated by it."
By the end of the four-part series, it is clear that Christian was not a conspiracy theorist and in fact onto something huge. However, his close friends have said that they were concerned about him during this investigation.
"When [Christian] started working on this, he would tell his friends about what he’s looking at, and we would all say, ‘That’s cool. Oh, that’s interesting.’ And then, eventually, it became like, ‘Oh, man, still talking about this, huh?’ ‘Oh, that sounds really weird,’" he says.
"There were times where I think everybody was a little worried about Christian, and we would try to intervene in a small way," said his close friend and documentary series director, Zachary Treitz.
Where is Christian Hansen now?
Although Christian put himself in harm's way in order to uncover the truth, he is still alive and well and has promoted the series on his social media accounts, revealing that he worked on the series for years. "The trailer for the documentary series my friends and I have been working on for last three years is finally here. The show premiers horizontally on Netflix on February 28th. Please watch. Tell your friends!" read the caption of the trailer on his Instagram.
The journalist has revealed that he hopes that the documentary can encourage people to seek the truth and said that he found the investigation very 'rewarding'.
"I hope that [the series] will inspire people to do real, heavy research and write [Freedom of Information Act requests] and really dive in if they want to know the answer to something," said Christian. "What we did, it was a fascinating and fun process, very rewarding."
Director and Christian's friend, Zachary Treitz, argued that the series is more of a 'cautionary tale'. "It’s like a horror movie in some respects for me, getting sucked into a story like this," he said. "What happened to Danny, what happened to me and Christian - there’s a cautionary tale there."
