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

Keyes immediately cooperated during his interrogation on March 30th, though he displayed “resentment and resignation” that he had been caught (80). He stated that around 7 pm on February 12th, 2012, he pulled up in his white Chevy truck to the Common Grounds coffee kiosk and decided to rob it. He ran some errands, got snacks, then set up in the parking lot to watch and see when the kiosk seemed most deserted. He stated that he’d never met Samantha before and only chose that location because it was open late.

In response, Feldis made his first mistake by telling Keyes truthfully that they didn’t have many images of his car or him. Payne, anxious, prayed that Keyes would continue to confess. Feldis displayed uncertainty and unprofessionalism, reacting with surprise to unexpected information provided by Keyes. Nevertheless, Keyes told him that he had dumped Samantha’s body in pieces in a hole in the ice in Matanuska Lake under the pretext of going ice fishing.

Payne felt both devastated and relieved. He dreaded telling James about his daughter’s death, but he was grateful that Keyes had confessed so quickly before Feldis exposed the tenuousness of the FBI’s position in the interrogation. Keyes himself seemed suspicious, asking Feldis at one point “did I just tell you guys all this for nothing?” Payne privately admitted to himself that Keyes had done just that, and if he had kept his mouth shut, he could likely have walked away.

Noting Feldis’s inexperience, Keyes started to display a “burgeoning sense of defiance,” trying to take control of the interrogation (86). Payne and Bell tried to delicately take charge of the interrogation without upsetting Feldis. Luckily, Keyes seemed to want to talk about his actions, “going into something like a trance” while speaking (87).

Five minutes before 8 pm, Keyes approached the kiosk and saw Samantha for the first time. He asked her for coffee and when she brought it he pulled out his gun and told her she was being robbed. She obeyed instructions, clearly frightened, and turned out the lights, then emptied the cash register for him. He vaulted inside the kiosk and bound her hands behind her back. She told him her father would pick her up any minute, and swore to him that she hadn’t hit a panic button to call the police. He told her that if she had, he would hear it on his police scanner and kill her. As he spoke, the interrogators noted that Keyes’s voice changed noticeably. It slowed and trembled, as if he were ashamed and delighted at the same time.

Keyes shoved napkins into Samantha’s mouth to gag her, then walked her to his car. She tried to escape at one point, and Keyes tackled her, shoving his .22 revolver into her ribs from behind, telling her that he would kill her if she tried to speak again. She obeyed, terrified. As Keyes spoke, he minimized his actions, saying that he “helped her into the truck” instead of pushed her, and that he took her for a drive instead of kidnapped her (91). He told her that he was going to hold her for ransom and assured her that nothing bad would happen. He emphasized that he tried to “seem like a normal person” throughout the kidnapping (91). This bit of information, combined with his analytical and calm approach, convinced Payne and Bell that Keyes had done this before.

Keyes stated that Samantha behaved herself, even when a patrol car with two policemen pulled up beside them at a light, so he felt comfortable making a more lenient restraint out of several zip ties looped together and letting her lie down in the backseat with drop cloths over her. He decided to return to the kiosk for Samantha’s phone, intending to use it as a burner phone for himself. During the trip, he ensured Samantha’s obedience by threatening to hurt her if she tried to escape. Payne and Bell noted that the strategies he used on her were the “mind control of an experienced criminal,” another sign that this crime wasn’t his first (95).

He then let Samantha pee outside, with a rope around her neck to control her. He claimed that they shared a cigar, and he held it to her lips while her hands were bound. He stated that Samantha tried to talk to him a few times. He told her to be quiet. He sent texts to Samantha’s loved ones from her phone, pretending that she was angry and didn’t want to accept their calls. He then removed the phone’s battery to ensure it couldn’t be tracked. Keyes pulled into his own driveway, conscious of the fact that he had to wake his daughter up for their vacation at 5 am. He told investigators that his neighbors and girlfriend were used to him working in the middle of the night and wouldn’t have been alarmed by it.

Keyes described moving Samantha from his truck into his shed. He had already set up his shed to hold a prisoner, with two heaters, a tarp on top of a foam mat, a sleeping bag on the floor, and a radio. He blindfolded her and led her into the shed between 1 am and 2 am. He played heavy metal on the radio, knowing his neighbors would simply think he was working. He obtained Samantha’s address from her and went to her house to go through her car for her ATM card and license, validating Duane’s story of a stranger rifling through their car in the early hours of the morning. Keyes’s story differed from Duane’s in that he said Duane turned and went back inside before Keyes had a chance to run. Realizing he didn’t know the PIN for the card, Keyes went back to his house and got the number from Samantha. There was less than a dollar in the account and his attempt to get money was unsuccessful.

Keyes confirmed that before calling a cab to pick his daughter and himself up at 5 am, he had killed Samantha. The investigators were baffled at this truncated time frame and his apparent lack of worry, as he crisscrossed Anchorage in the middle of the night, encountering multiple witnesses along the way.

Keyes grew defiant, responding to Feldis’s fumbling questions with outright refusals. He told the interrogators that he would only confess the story to Doll. He then demanded that they stop raiding his girlfriend’s house, and ask his permission to search it in the future. He also required that they never speak to or interrogate his girlfriend, insisting that she had nothing to do with his crimes. Keyes admitted that no one who knew him really knew him at all, saying that he was “two different people, basically” (105). He stated that he had been “two different people” for the last 14 years.

Doll arrived on Sunday, April 1. The “stunning young detective” with years of experience on the force, specifically in narcotics, created a new opportunity for a successful interrogation (107). Feldis, however, refused to cede control of the interrogation, leading to Keyes’s refusal to speak about Samantha’s death in full. Doll interjected gently, showing skill in her interrogation. She displayed humility, asking Keyes for his help in getting her up to speed since she hadn’t been present for the first part. 

Her approach was calculated: The investigators had found “scores of books, fiction and nonfiction, about serial killers” in his home (108). Doll and Payne had decided that Doll should imitate Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs, building rapport and even showing some faux admiration for him. Payne believed that Doll’s beauty would make Keyes feel as if he were in a movie, prompting him to give a good show. Payne observed that Keyes treated Doll warmly, helping and encouraging her, “almost like he was proud of her”(109). In contrast, “he wanted to dominate” Feldis, humiliating him with contradictions and refusals (109).

With Doll, Keyes returned to his narrative of Samantha’s abduction and murder. He described bringing Samantha water from the house and pouring some wine for himself. She was “remarkably composed” and asked him if the ransom was working out (111). He assured her it was, then cut her bonds to give her a moment of false hope, before restraining her again with ropes. He went back inside to check on his girlfriend and daughter, and stated that his girlfriend, Kimberly, was now awake, and apparently oblivious to everything. He returned to the shed and raped Samantha twice, while heavy metal blared. After the rapes, Samantha tried to persuade him not to kill her. Keyes, unmoved, put on leather gloves and strangled her to death. Before she was dead, he stabbed her in the right shoulder as well. He refused to give a reason for the stabbing. He finished his wine, put his pants back on, went inside and took a shower. He woke his daughter so she could get ready for the trip. He had left the space heaters on in the shed, leaving it at 90 degrees to slow rigor mortis. He rolled Samantha’s body in a tarp, hid it in his lower cabinets, turned off the heaters, then called a cab. He stated that since it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside, he didn’t have to worry about the body being discovered. 

When questioned about the risk of this plan, he stated that he didn’t have to worry “because it’s Anchorage” (112). This indictment of Anchorage police was damning and proved justified—because of Keyes’s answer to this question, the confession “would never be logged with the court or documented anywhere” and wouldn’t be shared with the media for years afterward (113).

Payne asked Keyes about the ransom note. The photos that accompanied it were taken after Samantha’s death, and now they knew it was also after Keyes’s trip. Keyes started “taking the shed apart from the inside,” chopping up the cabinet where Samantha had been stored in into pieces for firewood. He methodically destroyed everything he was wearing and everything Samantha’s body had touched. He tacked plastic material on the floor and walls, and built a table inside the shed. He used heaters to thaw her body back out, then repeatedly raped her corpse. Keyes laughed while describing this, stating that he lost track of time, and mentioned that his daughter had knocked on the shed door at one point, looking for him.

He collected supplies for the ransom note, the photographs, and the eventual corpse disposal next, traveling to two different Targets in order to get everything together. He found a newspaper from the 13th of February, when he was out of the state, to use. He put makeup on Samantha’s face, taped her mouth, then used fishing line and a needle to pull her dead skin into a more lifelike shape. He caked foundation on her face and braided her hair. He typed the ransom note, included the two best Polaroids he took, then dropped off the ransom note at Connors Bog Park. 

He cut up Samantha’s body into pieces and stored it in a rolling tote bag. He told his family he was ice fishing, and he brought Samantha’s body to Matanuska Lake. He built an ice shack around an area in the center of the frozen lake, used a chainsaw to laboriously cut a hole in the ice, and then dropped the pieces in, weighting them so they would sink. He did this methodically over four days, at one point driving straight to a parent-teacher conference for his daughter. After dumping all the body parts, Keyes stayed to actually go ice fishing.

The investigators, now aware that they had the full confession, decided that they had to recover Samantha’s body. Without physical evidence, Keyes could recant his confession. At this point, they were sure that Samantha wasn’t his first murder, so they had to make sure he had no chance of going free.

Payne and Bell drove out to Matanuska Lake to see if Keyes’s account of his disposal of the body in this “popular ice-fishing spot” was accurate (125). Keyes had provided coordinates of his location, and the two men found a scar in the ice exactly where he said it would be.

Normally, it was difficult to convince the specially trained FBI Dive Team to expedite a rescue for a dead body: They prioritize people who might still be alive. However, when they were told it was a teenage girl who had been murdered and dismembered, the team sprang into action. On April 2nd, 2012, the FBI diving team started the process of recovering the body. Using certified, experienced rescue divers, sonar, and an underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) which could take pictures. The dismembered parts were wired to weights, which the divers had to make sure to retain as evidence. They finally surfaced Samantha’s body in the evening. The divers later admitted that this was one of the most challenging and complicated recoveries they had ever performed, because of the weights, the dismemberment, and the punishingly icy water. If Keyes hadn’t confessed and explained the exact location of the body, they were unlikely to ever have found it.

James tried to persuade Payne to tell him everything that had happened to his daughter. Payne was initially reluctant, but James insisted and Payne gave in. James believed that it was his duty as a parent to bear witness to the entire tragedy of his daughter’s cruel death.