American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

“Payne had never seen a case like this: zero physical evidence, nothing to indicate Samantha had been abducted. Yet here was an eighteen-year-old girl, her face all over the news, a city of three hundred thousand people looking for her, with no money—and even if she had stolen from the register, that was maybe two hundred dollars at best—no proof she had even left town. If Samantha hadn’t been abducted but also hadn’t left town, what was the answer?”

This passage highlights the relative rarity of stranger abductions in Anchorage that led the investigators to initially dismiss that theory out of hand, introducing the ways in which Keyes’s crimes deviated from traditional patterns of serial murder. Keyes selected Samantha precisely because they were not tied to each other in any way, and so law enforcement would never consider him as a suspect, a technique that he utilized in earlier crimes as well.

“Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson were all working twenty-hour days, frayed to the point of exhaustion. No one shut off, ever. They’d all go home and log on to their computers, looking for leads, and despite their access to top-secret databases, they all relied most heavily on Google.”

Callahan explores the psychological toll of the investigation, highlighting the challenges posed by Keyes’s non-traditional methods. The mystifying nature of the case meant that the most seasoned investigators in the FBI could follow every lead they had and still get nowhere.

“In his twenty-two years doing traffic stops, Henry had never pulled over anyone from Alaska.”

This quote illustrates the insular nature of law enforcement in America. Despite the relatively free movement of citizens from state to state, most law enforcement officers are accustomed to dealing with perpetrators native to their own area. The isolated nature of Alaska as a state, thousands of miles away from the ‘lower 48,’ created an additional challenge for the Keyes manhunt.

“Doll would take the lead: Rayburn had gotten nowhere yesterday. Maybe Keyes would respond to a pretty blond detective who’d flown all the way from Alaska just to talk to him.”

This passage outlines the strategy the investigators used in dealing with a murder suspect. They carefully planned every aspect of the interrogation, trying to guess at Keyes’s particular proclivities in order to catch him off-guard and build rapport, conditions they would need to get a confession from him. Callahan’s exploration of investigative strategy points to the text’s thematic engagement with The Strengths and Limitations of Criminal Investigation Procedure.

“How did this young man—athletic, fairly good-looking, smart, skilled, with a clear sense of adventure—end up in such poor, rural, isolated pockets of the Pacific Northwest?”

This quote shows the initial confusion that the investigators felt when considering Keyes as a suspect. He didn’t fit the conventionally accepted profile of a remorseless killer, and his itinerant, poverty-adjacent lifestyle felt incongruous with his apparent intelligence and high potential.

“No one ever fought back against Kevin Feldis, This was Anchorage and her insularity at its worst: in any other place, an agent in this position might call his boss and have it shut down. If that went nowhere, he could threaten a leak to the media, hoping public accusations of abuse of power would make Feldis back down.”

Here, Callahan showcases one of the major vulnerabilities of Keyes’s case. The political jockeying of Feldis as an egoistic prosecutor hungry for fame ultimately compromised the case by making Keyes lose faith in the FBI’s power and infallibility.

“Less than one minute into the interrogation and Keyes was perilously close to realizing how little they knew. If Keyes had killed Samantha—and with the lack of urgency in Keyes’s voice, even Payne had come to accept this likelihood—they had no physical evidence.”

Callahan raises the stakes of the narrative by highlighting the ways Feldis’s decisions, dictated by his over-confidence combined with his lack of experience in interrogation, made Payne and the other FBI investigators realize how tenuous their case really was. Eliciting a confession was crucial to resolving the case: Without a confession, Keyes could potentially walk free.

“Keyes had a burgeoning sense of defiance now, and the more power he took, the weaker every other investigator in the room became. For Payne, the tension was agonizing. Feldis didn’t even seem to be aware of the shift.”

Callahan continues to explore Feldis’s disastrous effect on the interrogation, by revealing the ways that Keyes exploited the assistant US attorney’s mistakes. From Payne and Bell’s perspective, Feldis was too incompetent to even understand the level of his incompetence, and Keyes was later able to leverage this to his advantage.

“The way Keyes talked to Feldis was markedly different than the way he talked to Doll. She, he wanted to help. He referenced their first meeting in Texas. ‘You’ve got your monster,’ he said. It was almost like he was proud of her. Feldis, he wanted to dominate. Humiliate.”

Callahan emphasizes the minute detail that goes into planning a successful interrogation. Suspects don’t just respond to words or evidence; they also respond profoundly to the rhetorical presence of different interrogators. Keyes felt contempt for Feldis and wanted to frustrate him, but showed compassion and patience for Doll. Feldis reacted to Keyes’s taunts with grandstanding of his own, while Doll leveraged Keyes’s condescension and care for her, prompting him to let down his guard.

“To James, the least he could do for his daughter was bear witness to those last hours of her life. All Samantha’s hard-won hope and promise, her essential sweetness, taken at random. His little girl had fought to the end.”

Callahan’s focus on Samantha’s father, James, keeps the emotional consequences of Keyes’s crimes at the forefront of the narrative, underscoring The Human Impact of Tragedy and Loss. True crime narratives that exclusively center the perpetrator risk unconsciously lionizing the killer as the driving force of the narrative. Callahan makes sure to highlight the love and care for Samantha shown by her family and community, whom she positions as the heroes of the story along with Payne, Bell, and Doll.

“As Keyes approached this part of the story, he became physically excited, bobbing his knees, jangling his shackles, rubbing against his armchair so hard he scraped a layer of wood clean off. This would become another tell, his signature expression of sexual excitement. A substitute, essentially, for masturbation.”

Callahan depicts this scene from Keyes’s interrogation in minute detail to highlight his essential pathology. He became physically excited and aroused at the thought of the violence he’d visited on others. Callahan suggests this excitement as the driving force of his violence—he raped and killed his victims simply because he liked it.

“Keyes felt rage. Bill wasn’t just disrupting his plans. He was fighting back hard. He was actually managing to shove Keyes around. Where was the abject fear? How was Keyes on the verge of losing control?”

Callahan suggests Keyes’s desire to exert the ultimate form of control over his victims as the central motivator for his crimes. She notes that when people fought back, behaved unpredictably, or forced Keyes to acknowledge their humanity, it threw him off his rhythm and even led to him letting at least two of his victims free after they talked him down. In contrast, he was more experienced when he attacked the Curriers, and Bill Currier’s anger and survival instinct only prompted Keyes to kill him faster.

“Keyes thought about holding his victims, whoever they might be, in a small-town church, raping and torturing these strangers as they begged for their lives to a God who didn’t exist. Keyes would maybe stage their bodies on the altar, a tableau of sex and mortification waiting to be discovered by a priest, a nun, or better, the next day’s congregation. Or maybe he would just burn the church down with his victims in it.”

Callahan indicates that Keyes’s hatred for organized religion, prompted by the deep religiosity of his neglectful parents, informs his psychological profile. Not only did Keyes want to destroy a church, he also wanted to torture and kill faithful people to prove that he was the ultimate higher power as a violent, sexual predator.

“By now investigators had learned Keyes had nine siblings scattered all over the country, but they listened when he said, leave my brothers and sisters alone. Heidi was another story. If she still wanted to talk, Keyes said. Let her talk. If she decided to stop, leave her alone.”

Callahan explores Keyes’s care for his family, particularly his daughter, to create a complex portrait of a killer. The wellbeing and privacy of Keyes’s daughter remained at the fore of his negotiations with the investigative team. In return for his cooperation, they kept his name out of the press to ensure his daughter and former partners could live normal lives. Callahan positions this desire to protect his daughter as an anomaly when juxtaposed with his assault and murder of Samantha—also someone’s daughter.

“All of forensic criminal psychology is haunted by one questions: Are psychopaths born or made? The debate is as old as Socrates, who believed that human beings were incapable of deliberate evil. Wrongdoing was born of ignorance or delusion.”

Callahan situates her profile of Keyes within a broader canon of research on the of the nature of killers and psychopaths in society to highlight the complexity of human beings and their psychological makeup. Throughout the narrative, she discusses Keyes’s nature in the context of his upbringing, pointing out the Herculean task of trying to untangle the two.

“Heidi and Jeff loved their children but also regarded them as what they sometimes called assets, sources of free labor. The Keyes children had few friends, just a small menagerie of dogs and cats. There was no TV, no radio, no computer or telephone, no contact with the outside world.”

Callahan roots Keyes’s resentment of religion and authority in his isolated and emotionally deprived upbringing. She explores the ways his religious fundamentalist and off-the-grid parents forced him to work as a farm laborer and caregiver for his younger siblings as the basis for his need for control and dominance.

“Feldis, along with two agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, secretly interviewed Keyes. Feldis never logged this interview with the court and it seems he planned to keep its contents and existence from Payne and his team. Exactly why is unknown, but the turf war was escalating.

Almost immediately, Feldis blew it.”

This passage showcases Feldis’s incompetence at its most egregious. Callahan details Feldis’s prosecutorial misconduct on several occasions during the Keyes investigation, emphasizing the ways his desire to garner high-profile recognition led to Keyes getting the upper hand and allowed him to leverage the inter-agency disconnect to his advantage during later interrogations.

“Feldis’s bravado only grew as the rest of them maintained a healthy respect for the very real threat that was Israel Keyes. The team was never unarmed in a room with him. Agents watched as his eyes roamed around, alighting on a plastic utensil or a straw or an electrical outlet, the wheels visibly turning in his head.”

This passage demonstrates Keyes as an inherent threat even while in custody. Experienced interrogators kept a close eye on Keyes, knowing that he could attack them and try to escape. In contrast, Feldis ignored the threat that Keyes posed to everyone in pursuit of establishing his own dominance.

“It didn’t take long for most of his platoon to realize Israel Keyes was fucked up. This assessment, Keyes knew. He had told the agents in Anchorage that almost everyone recognized what he euphemistically called his ‘psychosocial issues.’ They all began keeping their distance.”

Callahan cites Keyes’s military training and the impressions he left on his fellow soldiers as evidence of his skill to coordinate a successful attack. A private person, Keyes both impressed and unnerved his comrades in the US Army with his “supersoldier” abilities combined with his sadistic tendencies.

“It lasted mere seconds, but the escape attempt was a grave embarrassment. The most wanted man in Anchorage, now under guard by the FBI and the US Marshals, had nearly escaped federal court.”

Callahan positions the public failures of the Anchorage Correctional Complex as indicative of broader systemic challenges. Keyes’s near-escape from custody tormented the FBI agents, who saw the trauma it caused to the loved ones of Keyes’s victims. Callahan notes that the FBI agents’ advocacy for reform resulted in little to no change in procedure at the prison.

“What had Keyes plotted? He spoke to agents of his many plans, and then his grand plan. He had been looking to burn down churches, it wasn’t hard to believe he might blow them up instead. He told agents he fantasized about killing police.”

Keyes’s admission during the late stages of his interrogation that he built explosives as a hobby reinforces the unpredictability of his MO as a serial killer. His confession motivated investigators to frantically send bomb squads to all of Keyes’s known houses to see if he had planted bombs, raising the stakes of the investigation further.

“Israel Keyes committed suicide in his prison cell with a razor blade and a noose. He left twelve skulls on the wall, drawn with his own blood, the words WE ARE ONE written underneath.”

Callahan positions Keyes’s death by suicide as the final failure of the justice system in his case. She indicates that the prison guards’ neglect of Keyes enabled his death and denied many of his victims’ families closure. Callahan reinforces this failure by noting that Keyes was not discovered until about eight hours after his death—a lack of oversight that remains unexplained to this day.

“What else he had planned we may never know, as we will never know his full victim count. But just as Keyes told his stories backward—starting at the end—the end of his life is perhaps another beginning.”

Callahan acknowledges that many questions will never be answered in Keyes’s case because of his death—a fact she hypothesizes as Keyes’s goal. His death by suicide prevented further confession or information about the extent of his crimes, ensuring his enduring infamy.