Israel Keyes: The Meticulous Monster
The birth of a serial killer
Feb. 1, 2012, Anchorage, Alaska: When 18-year-old Samantha Koenig’s boyfriend came to pick her up after her shift at the Common Grounds coffee stand, she wasn’t there. Inside the small stand, located in a lonely parking lot, the lights were out, but Samantha was nowhere to be found. He texted her to find out where she was.
Some time later, he received a text message from her phone saying she had had a hard day at work and needed to get away. It stated she’d decided to take a short vacation with a friend.
The message seemed very strange to him, not like something Samantha would say. So her boyfriend went to Samantha’s father, James, with his concerns.
James was suspicious as well. So he went to the police. Police went to the manager of the coffee stand and obtained the surveillance footage from the previous night.
On the footage, Samantha is shown tidying up for the end of her shift. Then, she fixes a coffee for a late customer. When she opens the window to give the customer their coffee, she suddenly backs up with her hands up. She turns off the lights — but doesn’t hit the panic button next to the light switch. Despite the darkness, a figure can be seen crawling through a window. The figure then takes Samantha out of the small building and off into the snowy parking lot.
Surveillance footage from a nearby business shows the two walking towards a white Chevy pickup truck, late 90s to early 2000s model, then driving away. Unfortunately, there are thousands of those trucks in the Anchorage area.
But that was all investigators had to go on.
The police, along with the community, organized searches. Community members posted flyers and donated to a reward fund, which would eventually grow to $70,000.
The police enlisted the help of Samantha’s bank to alert them whenever her ATM card was used. It was — over the course of the next three days, someone used it to withdraw $1,500. However, the person’s face was obscured with a bandanna, and was gone by the time police arrived at the scene.
Nearly two weeks went by without any more leads.
Then, Samantha’s boyfriend received another message from her phone:
Conner park sign under pic of Albert ain’t she purty
So investigators rushed to Conner’s Lake Park, just outside Anchorage. There, on a bulletin board, tacked beneath a poster for a lost dog named Albert, was a plastic sandwich bag. Inside was a long, typewritten ransom note, demanding $30,000 to be deposited into Samantha’s bank account. There was also a fuzzy Polaroid picture of Samantha, bound, next to a four-day-old issue of the Anchorage Daily News.
Samantha’s father didn’t have that kind of money, but was able to secure $5,000 as “good-faith” money and deposited it in Samantha’s account. Again, a man with his face covered withdrew the money from her account.
A week went by with no more leads. Then there was another alert for activity on her ATM card — this time, the withdrawal took place nearly 2,700 miles away, in Wilcox, Arizona.
The next day, there was another withdrawal, this time in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Then there were two more withdrawals for $480 each in east Texas. During the final withdrawal, in Shepherd, Texas, the man’s rental car was captured by the surveillance camera: a white Ford Focus. Police put out a BOLO alert for the car.
On March 3, a Texas highway patrol officer spotted the white Ford Focus in a motel parking lot in Lufkin, Texas. Suspicious, he watched the vehicle, and when its driver returned to it and drove away, he followed it. Soon the driver exceeded the speed limit, and so the officer pulled him over.
The driver produced an Alaska driver’s license in the name of Israel Keyes. Now the officer had more reason to be suspicious.
The Arrest
When he searched the car, he found rolls of cash held with rubber bands, a T-shirt cut to make a face covering like the one seen on the ATM footage, and a map with a route through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas highlighted. And he found Samantha Koenig’s ID, ATM card, and cell phone.
Keyes was arrested on the spot.
When questioned, he denied any knowledge of Samantha Koenig.
Two weeks later, Keyes was extradited to Alaska. At first he continued to deny any involvement in the case, but then, he agreed to sit for an interview with the police without his lawyer present. He agreed to tell them everything in exchange for a coffee, a candy bar, and a cigar. So FBI investigators gave him what he asked for.
Keyes
Through background searches and interviews with Keyes himself, investigators were able to learn more about the seemingly upstanding man, a self-employed carpenter with a long-term girlfriend and young daughter at home.
Keyes was born in Utah in 1978, the second of 10 children, into a strict, fundamentalist family. They belonged to a Christian Identity church called The Ark, which has been designated by the SPLC as a hate group because of its white supremacist and anti-semitic views.
Shunning society, the family was extremely isolated, living without electricity or running water and homeschooling their children. They wouldn’t even file birth certificates or obtain Social Security cards for their children. However, despite their strict religious beliefs, Keyes insisted there was never any kind of abuse.
When he was 5, the family moved to Washington state, into a similarly isolated one-room cabin near the town of Colville. There Keyes met and befriended a neighbor and fellow church members Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe (more on them here).
As Keyes got older, he began engaging in increasingly violent behavior. By the age of 10, he was breaking into neighbors’ houses and stealing guns, and sometimes starting fires. He also began torturing animals.
Keyes said that by the time he was 14, he knew that he wasn’t “normal,” either because everyone else was like him and just hid their true nature, or that he truly was different than most people. So he learned to hide his cruelty.
He also rejected religion. When he told his parents he was an atheist, he was kicked out of the house.
In 1998, he joined the Army, where he was a model soldier. He was honorably discharged in 2001, and moved to Neah Bay, Washington, to be with a woman he’d met over the internet. The two married and had a daughter.
However, according to Keyes, his wife had a drinking problem, so in 2007 he took their daughter and moved to Anchorage to move in with a new girlfriend. While there, he opened his own remodeling business, which was fairly successful. Keyes was known as a good worker and skillful carpenter. He made several improvements to their home, and neighbors thought of him as a hard-working family man.
So it must have come as quite a shock to them when police in body armor, carrying shotguns, raided his house.
The Interview
Back in the interrogation room, Keyes put two more conditions on his confession. First, he wanted complete anonymity. There was to be no media coverage of his crime, so as to protect his daughter. Second, he wanted the death penalty — and he wanted it quickly: “I want this over and done with as soon as possible.”
Investigators agreed to his terms. So Keyes told them what he’d done on that cold February night.
He hadn’t targeted Samantha specifically, he told them. She just happened to be alone, working the late shift, at an isolated coffee stand. He’d ordered his coffee, then when she went to hand it to him, he pointed a gun at her and told her to turn the lights off. When she did, he came through the window and quickly bound her wrists with zip ties. As he was leading her across the parking lot, she broke free and started to run, but he was able to catch her almost immediately.
He said he took Samantha to his shed, and while his wife and kids slept in the house nearby, he raped her repeatedly throughout the night. The whole time he kept telling her that he was holding her for ransom, and if her family paid, he would let her go.
He said he went back to the coffee stand to retrieve her cell phone and wallet. He sent the message to her boyfriend to cover for her disappearance, and used her ATM card to test whether the PIN she had given him was valid.
When he returned to the shed, he strangled her and stabbed her to death. He then stuffed her body into a box before leaving with his family to go on a two-week Caribbean cruise.
When he got back, he discovered that her body had frozen solid in the Alaskan winter. So he used a space heater to thaw her out. He then put make-up on her and sewed her eyes open with fishing line before posing her for the photograph.
Once the ransom note and picture were dropped off, he dismembered her. He then went to Matanuska Lake to go ice fishing, dropping her remains into the hole he cut into the ice.
Cold-water divers were sent into the water where Keyes described. There, they found Samantha’s remains, just as Keyes had told them they would.
As he confessed, Keyes was very calm and nonchalant. At times he even laughed. His callous demeanor, coupled with his history of arson and animal cruelty, led investigators to believe that this was not his first victim.
Keyes, however, wasn’t willing to talk. So investigators told him that if he truly wanted the death penalty, they would need evidence of more than just one homicide.
The Birth of a Serial Killer
So, after some back and forth, Keyes agreed to give them “two more bodies.” There was a couple in Vermont, he said.
Bill and Lorraine Currier both worked for the University of Vermont and lived alone in the nearby town of Essex. They had gone missing June 9, 2011, and no one had seen or heard from them since.
Keyes told investigators that he had decided he wanted to kill a couple. He flew into Chicago and drove nearly 16 hours to Essex, stopping to dig up one of his “kill caches” on the way.
Kill caches, he explained, were buckets filled with guns, ammo, ropes, zip-ties, money, and other items he might need to commit his crimes. This way, he didn’t have to carry a weapon on any of his flights. He told investigators that he had about a dozen of them buried around the US, another clue that there were more victims.
Once in Essex, he drove around, searching for a home where there was an attached garage, no cars parked in the driveway, and no kids or dogs. He picked the Curriers’ house because it fit his criteria; he could tell the people who lived there were older and didn’t have kids.
First, he cut the phone line, then waited for a couple of hours in case that had set off any kind of alarm.
Satisfied there was no home alarm, he broke into the garage through a window and grabbed a tire iron he found there. As soon as he went through the door into the house, he rushed into their bedroom, and in a blitz attack, bound the couple’s wrists before they knew what was happening.
He then led them out to their car and drove them to an abandoned farmhouse in a rural area. When asked how he knew about this place, Keyes told investigators that whenever he would go anywhere, he would drive around, looking for good places to “do stuff.”
While in the farmhouse, he raped Lorraine repeatedly while Bill was tied up in the basement. At one point, Bill nearly escaped, so Keyes shot him multiple times. He said Lorraine fought the hardest, but in the end, he strangled her to death as well. He put both of their bodies in garbage bags and left them in the basement.
Investigators went out to the place where Keyes described, only to find that the farmhouse had been demolished and taken to the dump. For three weeks, investigators searched through the landfill, looking for any trace of Bill or Lorraine’s remains. But they found nothing.
And in a stroke of bad luck, somehow the fact that Keyes was linked to the Curriers’ murders was leaked to the media. This skunked the deal Keyes had made with investigators; from then on, he was extremely unwilling to offer any more information.
But investigators didn’t give up. Over the next few months, they were able to glean some more information, but only in bits and pieces.
He told investigators that the first time he tried to kill someone was in ’97 or ’98. He was staking out a hiking trail on the Deshutes River near Maupin, Oregon. There, a young woman got separated from her companions, and Keyes abducted her and took her to a remote bathroom. There, he raped her — and he admitted to investigators it wasn’t his first rape. He was going to kill her; however, the young woman “got into his head” by talking with him. She convinced him to let her go. He said he continued to regret doing so afterwards.
He told them that he didn’t kill anyone until after he got out of the Army in ’01. Then, he said he would look for victims in campgrounds, on trails, or in cemeteries. Without giving any names or details, he admitted to four murders in Washington state — one of which he had sunk to the bottom of Cresent Lake — and one on the East Coast, who investigators believe to be Deborah Feldman, based on evidence found on Keyes’ computer.
He also admitted to committing burglaries, bank robberies, and arsons. In fact, while he was in Texas just before he was arrested, he had robbed a home and set it on fire.
He explained how he had been able to get away with his crimes for so long. He would travel frequently, rent a car, and drive many hours to hunt for his victims. The victims were chosen at random, and were never the same type — sometimes they were young women, sometimes older women, sometimes a couple. He would commit his crimes in one state and dispose of the bodies in another.
The level of meticulous planning was impressive. His kill caches would stay buried, sometimes for years, before he would dig them up to use them.
When asked for his motive, Keyes only responded, “Why not?”
But with Samantha, he had violated several of his rules. He had chosen a victim who lived nearby. He had taken her to his home and had communicated with her family after he killed her. And, of course, he had used her ATM card, the mistake that finally brought him to justice. Profilers believed that by the time he killed Samantha, he was beginning to mentally unravel. Besides making so many mistakes, he had attended his sister’s wedding in Texas right before his arrest. While there, he had made a dramatic scene, yelling about how he wasn’t who everyone thought he was. It was after this outburst that he’d set fire to the house.
But on Dec. 2, 2012, Keyes stopped talking for good. He was found in his jail cell, his wrists slashed with a smuggled-in razor. Beneath his body was a four-page suicide note. It didn’t offer any new information, just a rambling, semi-poetic ode to murder. When searching his cell, investigators found 12 sheets of paper hidden under his mattress. Drawn in blood were 11 skulls and one Satanic pentagram.
Investigators believe that the 11 skulls was a kind of confession, pointing to the number of people Keyes killed. However, investigators have only been able to tie him to nine victims, including Samantha Koenig, the Curriers, and Deborah Feldman.
Samantha’s was the only body to be recovered. The FBI continues to try to find his remaining victims, and to seek the public’s help in identifying any more possible victims.
