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

Through their research, the investigators finally eliminated Kimberly Anderson as an accomplice. However, Keyes often used her credit card to purchase tickets for his travel, so they had to sift out her travel and their travel together from Keyes’s solo trips. They found that he had traveled solo to dozens of states and frequented busy cities within those states. He admitted to traveling to Canada and hiring sex workers there. With additional research, they found that he hired sex workers in Texas, Louisiana, and Anchorage as well. Callahan notes that the hiring of sex workers is a common trait in sexually sadistic criminals, who often view prostitutes as “practice, especially with bondage” since sex workers who go missing are often not high priority for law enforcement (226).

The investigators also found that while living in Neah Bay, Keyes had traveled to California and Tijuana, Mexico, for surgeries and dental work, including a gastric bypass. The investigators were surprised by this: Keyes had always been lean and athletic, so why did he choose to have a surgery that would limit his food intake? They considered his minimal needs for eating and sleeping as he traveled great distances and spent dedicated hours torturing his victims as a possible motive. They also considered that Keyes may have “begun biohacking his own body in his quest to become the perfect serial killer” (228).

The investigators then turned their attention to the former soldiers Keyes served with in the US Army. His former colleagues told the FBI that Keyes stood out for his “sheer size” and strength, but when it came to his personality, people gave contradicting information (230). Keyes was polite and nonconfrontational with some people, while violent, homophobic, and bigoted with others. Some described him as clumsy, and others as graceful and athletic. However, all the soldiers agreed that Keyes was a “supersoldier” (231). He was known for his strength, endurance, and ability to fix anything and expertly customize his gear.

A member of Keyes’s unit described an incident that occurred when they were both stationed in Sinai, Egypt. While off-duty, he, Keyes, and a couple of other soldiers rented a hotel suite and hired a sex worker. Keyes disappeared with her into a separate room and after half an hour she sprinted out, refusing the money Keyes offered her. When he blocked the door to keep her from leaving, she kicked him hard enough to get away. The soldiers questioned him as to why she was so frightened, and Keyes admitted to being physically violent with her, unwilling, he said, to “let her run the show” (233).

This incident, along with instances of cruelty toward animals witnessed by his unit, led Keyes to become estranged from his fellow soldiers, all of whom would eventually realize that “Israel Keyes was fucked up” (233).

On May 23rd, 2012, Keyes had his first public court date. He tried to escape the courtroom, mysteriously freeing himself from his leg irons and handcuffs and running for it. Bell, Payne, and four security guards tackled him as he tried to escape, and they had to Taser him to bring him down. Samantha’s father, James, witnessed the debacle, and the FBI team was humiliated by the close call and how badly they had “just let him down” (236). The near-escape represented one more expression of Keyes’s power as well as his intelligence.

It was also seen as a sign of how ill-equipped Anchorage (and, more broadly, Alaska as a state) was to deal with such a “high-value, high-risk inmate” (236). Payne and Bell acknowledged that, in their quest not to ruffle any feathers at the local police level so they could maintain rapport, they had let some mistakes go, and Keyes had taken advantage of the lax nature of his security. Specifically, the guards had allowed Keyes to have pencils, which Keyes broke and chewed into lockpicks. They allowed him to have cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and dental floss, not ensuring that the materials were disposed of afterwards. Bell had warned them that Keyes could use those materials to escape or harm others, but the guards disregarded their warnings. Bell showed them later that the pencil pieces and the cellophane enabled Keyes to break free: He picked the locks to his leg cuffs and hand restraints, then rolled up and compressed the cellophane into faux links of chain, so he looked like he was still bound. Bell made sure that Keyes was bound with double leg cuffs in the future— though he still believed Keyes could escape them, at least it would take him double the time.

Payne and Bell utilized this debacle to take back some power from Keyes, pointing to the escape attempt as “attention and media coverage he’d drawn to himself,” the opposite of his stated intentions (238). In recompense, Keyes offered up more murders in Washington State.

Keyes told the investigators that he had killed a pair of people between 2001 and 2005, and another pair in 2005 or 2006. He told them one pair was male and female, and the other was two females. He said that in one case he used a boat he bought from Tammie’s ex-husband to dispose of at least one body in Lake Crescent. Keyes taunted the investigators, reminding them of all the missing hikers and campers in Washington State and telling them that without his confession they would never find his victims. 

Payne and Bell suspected that Keyes was lying about dates and locations to play with them, but the investigators eventually uncovered a “very high-profile” double murder in Washington in 2006 (242). In July of 2006, a husband and wife and a mother and daughter met by chance on the Pinnacle Lake Trail in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. They made friends and hiked together until they split up. The husband and wife headed for Pinnacle Lake, while the mother, Mary Cooper, and daughter, Susanna Stodden, headed for Bear Lake. Later, the husband and wife found Mary and Susanna dead along the trail, their bodies posed in awkward, squatting postures. They ran back down the trail for help. It was later found that the mother and daughter had each been shot in the head with a .22. This “arbitrary double murder in broad daylight” terrified the entire nation (243).

The investigators realized that in this time period, Keyes lived about three hours away from Pinnacle Lake trail. He had a .22, he was a sniper, and he was comfortable in national parks and forests. He liked to target pairs, and had talked about staging bodies in degrading positions. Most crucially, they found that at the time Mary and Susanna died, Keyes’s cell phone had gone dark, as if he had pulled out the battery.

To tighten security, the FBI searched Keyes’s prison cell while he was absent. They found letters to his siblings which implied suicidal ideation and a noose made from a bedsheet. The guards still allowed Keyes to use disposable razors to shave. When Bell expressed his frustration to one of the prison supervisors, the supervisor argued that if the guards didn’t listen to his instructions; there was nothing he could do.

For Payne and Bell, this apathy seemed to sum up a lot of the government’s response to Keyes. Payne and his team couldn’t get the guards to take security more seriously, they couldn’t get Feldis to leave the case alone, and they couldn’t even get an execution date for Keyes.

In the summer of 2012, Payne was informed that he was being taken off the case and sent to his next assignment. One of his team would take lead, dealing with Feldis on her own.

Keyes exploited the turmoil, demanding more privileges. After the escape attempt, he had been denied shoes with laces, but now he had them again. He also received newspapers and a wilderness survival guide. Callahan notes that it was as if the inevitability of his next escape attempt was not even questioned anymore.

Another blow came when prosecutors in Vermont decided to renege on their agreement with the FBI to keep Keyes’s name out of the media. Despite the fact that they never found the bodies, they named Keyes as the killer of the Curriers. Keyes was incensed. This situation broke the illusion that Payne and Bell had been selling of “the all-powerful FBI” who could do whatever they needed, whenever they decided (247). They needed to convince him that they still had power over him.

The FBI found a missing-persons case that matched Keyes’s travels to Vermont to kill the Curriers. He had mentioned that he traveled through Indiana, and Payne’s team found Keyes’s card used in three Indiana tollbooths the night of June 3rd, 2011, verifying his story. A 20-year-old girl, Lauren Spierer, who reminded the investigators of Samantha, had disappeared that night. Confronted with this timeline and possibility, Keyes laughed in their faces and told them that from now on, “that’s how hard it’s going to be” to figure out his crimes (248).

The investigators realized that, throughout his criminal career, Keyes had allowed a few of his victims to live after raping them. He described an incident when he was 19 and grabbed a strange girl he saw tubing on the Deschutes River at dusk. He described her as white and dirty-blond. He forced the girl into a permanent outhouse that he knew had a “big concrete tank” for waste under it that would only be emptied once a year or so (251). He planned to rape her, kill her, and dump her body in the tank. He tied her to the bar that ran along the side of the shack for handicap accessibility, then raped her.

The girl, Keyes stated, seemed unsurprised, and prepared for the scenario. She talked to him calmly while he raped her. She assured him that he was handsome, that she would have dated him if she met him in a different circumstance, what he was doing wasn’t a big deal and that if he let her go, she wouldn’t tell anyone. He was surprised, and her lack of expressed fear threw him off his planned rhythm. He let her go. He regretted it almost immediately afterward, and waited to read about it in the newspaper, and to get arrested. However, it appeared that the girl actually didn’t tell anyone. Keyes admitted to investigators that her silence was a stroke of luck for him.

The investigators, especially Bell, also suspected Keyes of committing the same kind of crime in Florida. Specifically, a serial killer called the Boca Killer shared a Modus Operandi (MO) with Keyes and had never been caught. Keyes had family in Florida and had spent time there working construction. In 2007, a woman known only as Jane Doe put her toddler son in the backseat of her black SUV and then walked to the back to stash his stroller. When she locked it and came back around, a strange man was in the backseat with her son, holding a gun. He made her drive him to ATMs to pull out cash until her limit was reached, then tied her to the passenger seat with zip ties, drove her around the town until they finally came back to the Boca Raton Mall. He instructed her to tell the police that he was short, fat and Black and warned her that if he saw his description anywhere, he would find and harm her and her child. He left her zip tied to the seat, with blacked-out swimming goggles over her eyes.

Jane Doe reported the crime, but no one believed her. That type of abduction seemed too strange and arbitrary to be real. However, three months later, another woman was abducted in much the same way, and her body was dumped five miles from the Boca Raton Mall. Her shoes and handbag were missing but her valuable necklace, ring, and Cartier watch were all intact. Her black SUV was found abandoned nearby. The victim, Randi Gorenberg, the wealthy wife of a successful chiropractor, had no enemies, no serious problems, and no debts to anyone. It seemed like a truly random act, and the police began to take Jane Doe’s account more seriously. Next, a mother and young daughter, Nancy and Joey Bochicchio, were found dead in another black SUV, each restrained with zip ties and with the same blacked-out swimming goggles over their eyes.

Jane Doe disobeyed the killer’s order and described him in detail to the police. The police sketch produced based on her description bore a “startling” resemblance to Keyes (259). The killer’s MO was also the same: He described his abduction tools as his “kit,” and tried to get as much money from the victims as possible before abandoning or killing them. Jane Doe also reported that, like the young victim from the Deschutes river, she kept talking to him and showing little fear, which perhaps threw him off.

Another woman reported a man with a gun trying to abduct her from a parking lot as she walked to her car. Thinking quickly, she threw her purse as far as she could and began screaming at him to leave. He escaped. She later saw the sketch that Jane Doe had helped create, and said her attacker looked exactly the same.

The investigators identified Keyes’s New York victim as Debra Feldman, a drug addict and sex worker who had gone missing in New Jersey in 2008. They used her identity as leverage to get Keyes to talk.

New officers, Halla and Sanders, came up from Poulsbo, Washington, to speak to Keyes about his activities in Neah Bay. The FBI believed their novelty might “potentially dislodge new information” (264). They also maintained contact with Keyes’s ex-girlfriend Tammie, who now had custody of their daughter, which gave them some insight on Keyes. They tentatively and gently pushed him on the murders and disappearances in Colville and at Pinnacle Lake. Keyes provided some small details, becoming physically excited at the line of questioning, but gave them nothing substantial. They questioned him about his motivations, but in the end, they had to admit that he killed simply because he “wanted to do it” (267). The rush provided by rape and murder was unique and drove him to escalate his crimes.

During this conversation, Keyes also admitted, casually, that he not only collected, used, and customized guns, but also built explosives. This admission stunned the investigators. They tried not to let on that this information was new to them, and instead gently pushed him to elaborate. He admitted to using “black-powder-based explosives” to blow the lock on a forest service gate at a national park (268). This admission placed the case in a whole different category. Bomb squads on both sides of the country were deployed, one to the Anchorage house, and the other to his small farmhouse in New York State. In Anchorage, agents found doors with the hinges removed at his house, which were spraypainted with church slogans. They suspected that Keyes, as part of his hatred of organized religion, planned to burn down churches by bombing them. Investigators also remembered that his childhood friends, Cheyne and Chevie Kehoe, were implicated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Keyes also told the investigators that the people he grew up with regarded Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, as a hero. Deep distrust and hatred of the federal government and organized religion seemed to point to plans to destroy buildings and people on a mass scale. Callahan notes that the FBI did not release details of what they found in New York that day, but they have confirmed that the Keyes case was not just an investigation of murder, but of terrorism as well.

On December 1st, 2012, Keyes died by suicide in his prison cell with a razor blade and a noose. Before his death, he drew 12 skulls on the wall in his own blood with the words “WE ARE ONE” written underneath them (270). He also wrote one final word: “BELIZE.”

The FBI never got answers about Keyes’s ultimate plans because of his death. To this day, Payne believes that Keyes killed 11 people and the final skull in his drawing represented himself. Others on Payne’s team believe that Keyes killed “far more people than that” (270).

Callahan closes by stating that “any one of us could have been a victim of Israel Keyes” (271). After the FBI went public with the case, multiple people told the FBI they thought they had been approached by Keyes in rural, natural environments, like national parks and beaches. Very few of their claims could be reasonably ruled out, since Keyes traveled so extensively and worked so randomly. By the time of the text’s publication, the FBI, plagued with budget problems, had not been able to have their requests to search for remains approved.

After Keyes’s death by suicide, a closed-door hearing on procedural failings at the Anchorage Correctional Complex was held. According to investigators, Keyes died around 10 pm on the 1st and wasn’t found until 6 am when the day shift officer checked on him. This negligence was yet another reason why the Alaska Department of Corrections and the state attorneys were viewed as irrevocably corrupt. They never released the audio or video recordings of that night or the medical examiner’s report. However, an incident report was obtained by Callahan through the Freedom of Information Act.

The corrections officer on duty claimed to have patrolled the hallways at 5:30 am before leaving, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. The next officer to patrol at 6 am saw blood on the floor and yelled for help. The entire floor went on lockdown. Keyes had slashed his left wrist with a razor blade embedded in a pencil, and had also strangled himself with a bedsheet as insurance. He left behind a “multipage suicide note soaked in blood” that rambled about his victims and indicted American culture at large (270).

Bell and Payne believe that his death by suicide was the ultimate expression of control and sadism. Before Keyes died, he told the investigation team that the only regrets he had were telling them about the Curriers and not killing more people. He told them that if he was free, his plan was to become a traveling carpenter and take advantage of the weather disasters provoked by global warming. He planned to kidnap and murder people who were already presumed dead after a disaster. He spoke of his dream to build a house with a dungeon, so he could keep his victims alive much longer. The multitude of clues he dropped before dying, Callahan states, ensures that “his case will never be closed” (276).