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

Keyes described his brutal assault and murder of Bill and Lorraine Currier, a middle-aged married couple. In June of 2011, he explained, he traveled to visit his brothers in Maine. The interrogators noted that as he told this story, he became “physically excited” and rocked back and forth in a way that they later called a substitute for masturbation (148). In Essex, Vermont, Keyes decided to find potential victims. He had buried caches of murder accessories—including zip ties, ammunition, guns and silencers, duct tape, and Drano to help dissolve a body—in five-gallon buckets all over the country. He dug up one of his caches in Vermont to help him on his mission. After a couple of false starts and close calls with other victims, Keyes started looking for a house. He specifically avoided houses with signs of children in them, stating that he would never “mess with kids” (150). He noted that he also avoided dogs, calling them a hassle.

He found the Curriers’ house, and using his construction experience, removed a ventilation fan from the garage window and entered through the hole. He made his way into the house and found Bill and Lorraine in their bed. He forced them at gunpoint to flip over in their bed and he zip tied their wrists while demanding to know about their valuables. He told the interrogators that, this time, he didn’t really care about money: His motives were “purely sexual” (152). He then forced them into their own car and drove them to an abandoned farmhouse he had spotted earlier. The couple begged him to let them go, but Keyes assured them they were just being held for ransom, and that they would be fine. He walked Bill into the basement of the decrepit building, and bound him to a stool. Lorraine tried to escape, running for the highway. Keyes tackled her, marched her back, and bound her to a bed with duct tape. 

Bill started to destroy the stool to which he was bound, and when Keyes entered the basement Bill yelled for his wife and fought him. Keyes grew angry, stating that he had wanted everything to go a specific way, and when Bill fought back, it ruined his plans. The interrogators intuited that Keyes planned to rape Bill, and when Bill fought, it made Keyes angry enough that he hit him with a shovel and eventually shot him with a silenced .22. He shot Bill multiple times before he went down. Keyes stated that this blundered encounter shocked him and he had to go smoke to calm down.

He then went upstairs and raped Lorraine, torturing and choking her as well. He took her down to the basement and made her look at her dead husband, then strangled her to death with rope. He poured Drano over their hands and faces, then bagged their bodies in garbage bags and left them in the basement. He knew that the owner of the property would eventually demolish or burn the house and destroy the evidence: anyone who smelled the decay of the bodies would assume that a wild animal had died inside and wouldn’t investigate.

Horrified, the investigators questioned his motive. Keyes argued that he wasn’t “that different than hundreds and thousands of people” and pointed to more sadistic types of pornography as proof that people fantasized about what he did (158). Payne realized that Keyes was like an “ambush predator” in the wilderness, an apex killer who snatched their prey and then disappeared just as fast.

Keyes told the investigators about the time he disappeared in Texas in February 2012—the incident that had worried his mother. He confessed that he had burned a house down in Alto, Texas. He stated that he “was on a supersonic high” after killing Samantha in his own backyard, and he loved following the search and knowing that only he knew the truth (162). He admitted to Payne and Bell that he intended to find another victim in Alto and went cruising to find another abandoned house and ideally at an ATM somewhere so he could take their money too. He mentioned that he particularly wanted to burn down a church. If he could find an abandoned church, where he could rape and torture his victims before killing them and then burn down the whole thing, that would be ideal to Keyes.

While Keyes confessed, the investigators’ teams scrambled to verify information. They discovered that Keyes had misremembered the name of the town, which was actually Aledo, but there had been a house fire on the day he described. There was also a bank robbery in Azle, Texas, a nearby town. Keyes didn’t confess to that but had spoken about robbing small rural banks for quick cash. Payne and his team observed that Keyes, after so many years lying low and staying under the radar, leaving little to no digital footprint, seemed to be ramping up and out of control. Keyes confirmed this theory, speaking to his frustration at his crimes not being recognized. He wanted everyone to know that “in the history of monsters, he was a great” (169).

In his narration of the arson, the investigators noted that he accounted for his actions on the 13th, 14th, and 16th of February, but not the 15th. They began to suspect that he had killed someone else on the 15th and wouldn’t tell them unless he had no choice.

The investigators discovered that a man named Jimmy Tidwell disappeared in Longview, Texas, on February 15th, 2012. A 58-year-old night shift electrician, he had left work at 5:30 am to head home. Married with two adult children, Jimmy was widely seen as dependable, punctual, and calm. His white Ford pickup truck was discovered parked five miles from his home, with his eyeglasses left on a seat. His family refused to believe he would have willingly left them. Tidwell was known to wear a white hard hat on the job, and the chestnut-haired man who robbed the bank in Azle the next day wore a white hard hat in surveillance footage. Keyes admitted, after the photo surfaced, that the hair was not a wig, and had, in fact, belonged Tidwell.

Payne and his team started to search for more of Keyes’s potential victims. They were overwhelmed by the breadth of possibilities: Keyes’s rapid-fire strategy, his truly random choices of victims, and his extensive travels meant that he could have struck anywhere, at any time. Keyes directed the team to some of his caches he had buried throughout the United States, and they found them exactly where he said they would be. They started with the hundreds of missing-person images found on the computer, and were able to identify 44 of them. They decided on an unprecedented approach: They would cross-reference all missing people in the United States with Keyes’s known travel dates and routes.

The forensic team who searched Keyes’s home and shed for evidence of Samantha were “at a loss” (177). There was no DNA found at the scene. Keyes had seemed to be grandiose and prone to exaggeration when he spoke about his skills as a killer but, they admitted, once again, that if he hadn’t confessed, they would never have been able to connect him to the crime. The investigators realized that Keyes represented a totally new kind of serial killer, with no specific victim type or fixed hunting grounds. He displayed impressive “efficiency and time management” in his approach, dedicating all his intellect and energy toward the single goal of truly random, undetectable murders (177).

Payne started to build a psychological profile of this new kind of serial killer. Keyes had mentioned other infamous serial killers while explaining his operations, and they used them, as well as books written by pioneering behavioral profilers in the FBI, to start building up their understanding. Payne realized that Keyes, despite some of his unique tendencies, fit the profile of a “sexually sadistic criminal,” including a lack of criminal record, an outwardly happy domestic life, and compulsive driving (178).

Keyes referred to the serial killer Ted Bundy as “his great hero,” citing Bundy’s freewheeling travels as he killed all over the country (178). Other serial killers introduced Keyes to strategies like stowing “kill kits” in different places, killing victims in one location, then moving them to another, and sexually degrading and torturing them in the process.

Keyes, like the agents, had also read the same books by the behavioral profilers, and told them that he had “felt like he was reading about himself”  for the first time (180). He especially identified with passages that stated that the serial killer, despite not believing in a higher power, made himself feel like God through torturing and killing.

Keyes forcefully denied that he had had a troubled childhood or had been abused or mistreated in any way, stymying some of the investigators’ theories. However, to give him the death penalty as he requested, Keyes had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. This, the investigators hoped, would provide insight about how Keyes the killer had come to be.

Keyes cooperated with his psychiatric evaluation, providing all the details the forensic psychologist requested. He was born in Utah to Heidi and Jeff Keyes, both Mormons. Jeff hated modern medicine, and helped Heidi deliver all ten of their children at home. They didn’t believe in vaccines or government records, and none of their children had Social Security numbers, birth certificates, or attended school. They moved to Colville, Washington, in search of greater isolation and privacy. They lived in a one-room cabin on 160 acres without heat, plumbing, or electricity. The Keyes children provided free labor on the farm and had no contact with the outside world or any friends. Keyes “emerged as a leader” among his siblings and was especially kind and nurturing with his sisters (185). He learned to cook and sew and braid his sisters’ hair for them.

In Colville, Heidi and Jeff started attending services at a “militia-based white supremacist anti-Semitic church called the Ark” (186). Keyes thrived in that environment. He made his first friends, Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe, who belonged to the same church. The brothers taught him about guns, a topic they were expert in, since their father was preparing for a race war. Keyes was obsessed with guns and quickly learned all about them. He started to steal them from other people’s homes and sell them “at local sales or swaps”(187).

Keyes once tied one of their family’s cats to a tree as punishment for getting in the trash. The Kehoe boys and one of his sisters accompanied him. When he shot the cat, it ran around the tree in panic, crashed into the tree, and started vomiting, which made Keyes laugh. When he turned back to his friends, he saw that one of the brothers had vomited as well and was “traumatized” (188). Keyes realized then that he was different from his peers in a fundamental way. He built himself a cabin in the woods a mile from his family and began to “hunt anything with a heartbeat”(189). He became an expert in stalking prey, and would often hide in the woods and watch other people, thinking about how easy it would be to make them disappear like the deer he killed.

Keyes started to reject his parents’ way of life and their religion, which devastated Heidi and Jeff. They moved to the small town of Maupin, Oregon, then to upstate New York, then Smyrna, Maine, where they lived among the Amish. At 19, Keyes finally lost patience with “itinerant living and what he saw as cult shopping” (192). He separated from his family, got his high school diploma, and enlisted in the military.

Keyes was a good soldier, thriving under the structure and community the military provided. He was introduced to drugs and alcohol while serving, and especially liked alcohol. He started having sexual experiences as well, and discovered he was bisexual. He met Tammie, his first serious girlfriend, in Neah Bay in 2000. They bonded over their childhoods which were both spent in deprivation. Tammie, who was half Native American and half Black, later said she had no inkling of his white supremacist past, and he never behaved oddly about her race. Her child from a previous relationship, Keaton, learned to “accept and love Keyes as a father figure”  and Keyes fixed up a house for himself, a now-pregnant Tammie, and Keaton to live. 

Tammie appreciated Keyes’s attention and discipline regarding household work, but eventually started to realize that he did everything because he needed control. He dominated conversations, belittling her friends and calling them uneducated. Late at night, he drank to excess and told Tammie he had a “black heart” (198). He branded an upside-down cross on his chest and tattooed a pentagram on his neck.

When Keyes’s daughter was born in 2002, he underwent a psychological shift. He became totally devoted to his daughter. Tammie had a horrific birth experience, requiring a hysterectomy. She became addicted to opiates after the surgery, and Keyes took on “the role of a single father,”  eventually moving out and taking their daughter with him. He met Kimberly, a travel nurse, in nearby Port Angeles and moved to Anchorage with her.

While Keyes underwent his evaluation, the investigators attempted to identify and locate victims based on Keyes’s location information. A 12-year-old girl, Julie Harris, had disappeared from Colville, Washington, in 1996. She was a Special Olympics gold medalist with two prosthetic feet, and had disappeared on March 3, last seen with a man in a trench coat. One month later, her prosthetic feet were found by the banks of the Colville River, and a year later, her remains were found in the woods. Another girl, 12-year-old Cassie Emerson, went missing in 1997 after her trailer was set on fire, her mother’s body found inside. Disappearances of little girls in Colville ceased after the Keyes family left for Maupin in 1997.

After the psychiatric evaluation, Feldis decided to conduct a secret interview with Keyes, which was never logged in the court system. He never explained this decision, but it was possible that he saw it as part of his turf war with Payne in Anchorage. However, “almost immediately, Feldis blew it”(206).

Feldis admitted to Keyes that they had no evidence to tie him to the Curriers’ deaths except for Keyes’s confession. Payne and his team had been trying to keep that information from Keyes in order to make him feel less powerful and believe his downfall more inevitable. Feldis, instead, made Keyes feel “better than he even knew” (207).

Feldis also implied that some agents were impressed by Keyes’s ability to build guns and silencers. Keyes was happy to hear this, and it led to him discussing his love of customizing guns. In his discussion, he admitted to a couple of “close calls” in Anchorage, contradicting his earlier claims that his attack on Samantha was the first time he’d tried anything in Anchorage (209). He steered the conversation back to the Curriers, demanding to see pictures of their bodies. He refused to give any more information until Feldis proved he had found the bodies, an impossible task since the house had been demolished and its contents put in a landfill. At that moment, Feldis realized that Keyes truly held all the power: Callahan notes that Feldis “was petrified, and Keyes saw it all over his face” (210).

After finding out about Feldis’s secret interview, Payne was enraged. They had worked incredibly hard to both build rapport with Keyes and make him feel a sense of powerlessness to encourage him to confess everything. Feldis’s misguided intervention destroyed that, making Keyes clam up and demand evidence they’d uncovered his crimes. It also made Keyes aware of the schism between the prosecutor and the investigators, a conflict he would later try to exploit. Keyes’s demand for the death penalty had to go through the highest level of the Department of Justice for approval—if they sensed even a whiff of misconduct on the part of investigators, they were unlikely to grant this request. 

Feldis’s behavior could destroy the trust they had built with Keyes in an instant and potentially keep this dangerous predator alive in prison for decades, nursing a grudge and indulging his appetites. The investigators knew enough to be afraid of Keyes, who might try to escape any minute and would never hesitate to kill any of them if given the chance, but “Feldis remained clueless” about the danger (213). Payne knew that Keyes could kill Feldis during a secret interview and then escape with no recording or footage to prove it had happened. Feldis, despite being warned by the Department of Justice itself, continued to lead the charge in the interrogations. Callahan notes that no one fully knows why this was allowed to happen, but Feldis’s ego and the local justice system’s capitulation to it represented one of the biggest threats to the investigation.

Keyes’s demand for an expedited execution caused problems in the case. Keyes started refusing to give more information without being told an execution date. They tried to use this request to motivate him to confess to other murders, but he refused, despite investigators telling him more victims might lead to a quicker result. Keyes displayed his trademark condescension and self-centeredness, and Payne and Bell found themselves exhausted at the cyclical repetitions of “Keyes’s manipulations and Feldis’s grandstanding” that was dragging down the momentum of the case (216).