Heidi relayed this information as though it were utterly normal, and Gannaway kept her face blank. Was Israel a member of their church? Gannaway asked.
No, Heidi said. Israel doesn’t believe in God. His atheism was a great tragedy of her life.
Had anything unusual happened? Gannaway asked.
Actually, a few things, Heidi said. She had heard that at least one of Israel’s sisters had begged him to accept the Lord, and Israel, normally so contemptuous of such talk, instead became very emotional. He wept, Heidi said. He told his sister, “You don’t know the things that I have done.”
Had Heidi ever heard the name Samantha Koenig?
No, Heidi said. I have never heard of her until now.
But there was something else Gannaway might want to know.
The week prior, on the night of Thursday, March 8, Israel and his daughter arrived at Heidi’s house at around 10:00 P.M. Israel said that they had flown from Anchorage to Seattle, and then to Las Vegas, where he rented a car and drove to Texas.
This was the itinerary that had raised Payne’s and Gannaway’s antennae during the roadside traffic stop. Had Heidi found it odd, Gannaway asked, that Israel chose such a complicated way to travel, especially with his little girl in tow?
Not really, Heidi said. His sister’s wedding had come up suddenly and Israel said those were the cheapest plane tickets he could find.
Gannaway wanted to know more about another trip Israel had taken to Texas back in February, beginning hours after Samantha disappeared. Heidi recalled that one vividly too.
Israel and his daughter, Heidi said, flew from Anchorage to Seattle and then on to Houston, where they rented a car and drove to New Orleans. That’s where they met up with Kimberly and boarded their five-day cruise to Mexico.
Another serpentine route from point A to point B.
When the cruise was over, Israel rented another car and drove with his daughter to Dallas, where Heidi was still living. Kimberly had gone off on a road trip with a friend.
This visit, Heidi said, had been the weirdest. It was clear something was very wrong with Israel, because once at Heidi’s he snuck out of the house sometime early in the morning, like a teenager. It was February 13, one day before he and his daughter were due on a flight back to Anchorage. He had left a note on his bed.
“Gone to fix the window and find a place to hide my guns,” he wrote.
That wasn’t unusual, Heidi said. The window referred to the rental car. And Israel always had guns, even as a boy. The whole family had guns.
Gannaway asked gently: What happened after Israel left? When did he come back?
That was the thing, Heidi said. He didn’t come back. She showed Gannaway exchanges from a family group text beginning that morning, two hours after they found Israel’s note.
8:05 A.M.: “Izy, we can take your guns to [redacted] if you want, no problem.”
No word all day. Later that night, Israel texted back. He was stuck in the mud, he said, in the middle of nowhere.
8:34 P.M.: “We wanna get you if you have any idea where you are.”
No response.
8:52 P.M.: “We have 4 w drive if you give us an idea where you are we’ll come get you.”
The next day, February 14, Israel texted to say he was parked near a big shopping center in Cleburne, an hour away. The family drove to pick him up, but when they arrived, no sign of Israel. So they spent the night sleeping in the parking lot, in their van, waiting for his next text. Gannaway did not ask the obvious: Why not just go home, take a shower, get some sleep? Or, if they were that worried, why not call the police? But she didn’t want to put Heidi on the defensive. Gannaway let her continue.
On the morning of the fifteenth, finally, a call. Israel said he was on the other side of the mall.
And there they found him, disheveled and incoherent. His rental car, a little blue Kia Soul, was splattered with mud. Israel had a litany of excuses. He ran out of gas, he said. His credit cards had been frozen. He had no cash. He hadn’t eaten or slept in two days.
This was unlike the Israel Heidi and his siblings knew. That Israel was calm, neat, and resourceful. He was able to build or fix anything. He could spend hours in the deep woods and never get lost. He was like a superhero. The notion that Israel couldn’t find his way around suburban Texas in daylight was ridiculous.
But no one asked him where he had been or what he had been doing. Instead, on February 16, Heidi booked two more plane tickets to Anchorage. And again, Israel left the house for much of the day and the next, finally returning with nine hundred dollars in cash to reimburse Heidi for the flight. Israel and his daughter flew out on the eighteenth, and that was everything Heidi remembered about those two trips.
In relaying all this to Gannaway, Heidi had to admit: Something had been very wrong. There was the extreme emotionality. And Israel seemed to be drinking a lot. Heidi was worried enough to call upon her church elders, who came by to offer counsel.
She had no idea what was discussed, but Israel’s willingness to talk to them was another sign something was amiss. He must have been truly distraught to sit with those self-proclaimed elders, who were really much younger than Israel.
For all the things she didn’t know, Heidi had given Gannaway more than she realized: Israel’s pattern of unusual travel, a burgeoning sense of the Keyes family dynamic, what seemed to be his mental unraveling immediately after Samantha’s disappearance, and one crucial takeaway.
As curious as this family was, Israel’s behavior disturbed even them, and no one felt they could say a thing. But to Goeden, Bell, Payne, and Nelson, those two days Keyes went missing in Texas weren’t such a mystery. He had to have done something.
* * *
—
On Friday, March 30, Steve Payne got word that Keyes, who’d just been transported to Anchorage by US marshals—by way of an unexplained stop in Oklahoma City—wanted to talk.
Here it is, Payne thought. He’s going to confess.
Payne’s elation was tempered by two demands. One, Keyes wanted the death penalty off the table. Two, he wanted very little information released to the media. He knew his name had appeared in news reports since his arrest in Texas, but anything else he might tell them could not be made public. He didn’t want his child to know any of it.
For their first true interrogation, Payne and his team had only a few hours to prepare, and what happened in that room would set the tone for everything to come. Keyes needed to believe the FBI knew more than they actually did. He needed to feel boxed in by evidence that the FBI didn’t yet have, to feel not just afraid but terrified. Keyes needed to believe, in his bones, that the person speaking to him had heard it all before, had dealt with criminals far more hardened and depraved, and really didn’t care what happened to him—but, if he wanted to talk, maybe the FBI could work something out.
The flip side: If Keyes kept his mouth shut, they’d only be able to charge him with fraudulent ATM card use, nothing more. Even as a federal crime, he’d see six months to a year maximum in prison. With his clean record, though, he’d probably face a fine and probation. Samantha might never be found. Keyes might very well walk. And having committed a crime this severe, Keyes would surely do it again. Or worse.
Do it right the first time, Payne told himself. You only get one chance.
* * *
—
Payne called Bell, Goeden, and Nelson into a conference room at the FBI. Doll was away, and as much as it killed her to physically miss the first sit-down with Keyes, she would listen in by phone.
Payne decided he and Bell should run the interrogation, which would be held, per protocol, at the FBI’s offices. No other facility in Anchorage was equipped to deal with such a potentially dangerous suspect: They had the necessary security, down to the consistent, uniform torquing of all the window shades to keep anyone from seeing
inside. The interrogation rooms were wired for audio and video. Goeden and Nelson, along with federal prosecutors, would be able to watch and listen from another room, at their computers, verifying or debunking any statements Keyes made in real time. Agents from the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico would be dialed in to direct questioning via text message.
Based on everything they had uncovered so far, the team was confident that Keyes knew where Samantha was.
That morning, an anxious Payne called his contact at BAU and was given one main piece of advice: Let your suspect keep talking. The smarter ones usually like to talk.
Now it was up to Payne and his team to decide what to reveal to Keyes, what to avoid, what to say, and how to say it. The opening salvo was critical. Payne always likened the first meeting with a suspect to telling an author his own story.
And, of course, only the author knows how that story ends.
How to leverage what little they had to get a confession? Especially now that Rich Curtner, one of Alaska’s best public defenders, had been appointed by the court to represent Keyes.
“Let’s be prepared for the worst,” Payne told his team. “If we take the death penalty off the table, we don’t have much to bargain with down the road.”
“We shouldn’t make our presentation too complicated,” Bell said.
They debated telling the story backward, beginning with the evidence seized from Keyes’s rental car in Texas, but they ultimately decided to present the evidence in chronological order. It was smarter to keep the narrative tight, which would hopefully make Keyes feel overwhelmed by what they did have and worried about what they might be holding back. They all agreed they should stay away from the biggest hole in their knowledge: Keyes’s connection to Samantha.
The script they worked up for Keyes was strong, but it needed the right messenger. Payne asked Bell to do it; he had a quiet confidence, an ability to build rapport while communicating authority.
Bell agreed. He and Payne would enter the room and Bell would open with this:
“Listen,” he’d say. Then he would take a slight pause, letting Keyes know that Bell was in control. “We’re not going to show you all our evidence, because frankly we don’t have that kind of time. And even if we had the time, that’s not the way the process works. But we’re going to make a good faith effort. We’re not going to bullshit you.”
Then they’d bring out the photos. Payne loved photos, because suspects couldn’t lie their way out of them. In this case, they’d keep it to six pictures, another weakness they hoped to turn into a strength.
“Here’s your pickup truck across the street from Samantha’s kiosk the night she disappeared,” Bell would say. “Oh, and by the way, we have a lot more footage, and all of it is with the FBI’s specialists back at Quantico. By the time they’re done I’m going to have eight-by-ten glossies I can hang on my wall.”
They’d let that hang and see if Keyes said anything.
If not, they’d pull out more photos. This was the part that really excited Payne. Some agents loved going into an interrogation room with lots of props, stacking up boxes and binders and saying, “This is what we’ve got.” Payne found less was more. After Bell showed Keyes the truck, Payne would jump back in.
“Here’s the mask, the sunglasses, and the hoodie you wore during those ATM withdrawals,” Payne would say. “Here’s Duane’s ATM card in your wallet. Here’s Samantha Koenig’s cell phone, broken apart and hidden in the trunk of your rental car.”
They’d pause again. If Keyes still said nothing, Payne would continue.
“We don’t have all the answers yet,” he’d say.
This admission, counterintuitively, would work as a sign of confidence.
“But we’re not going to stop until we do. We have more evidence, and we’re learning more every day.” They’d tell Keyes they knew about his girlfriend and his daughter, plus his ex-wife back in Washington State. That they knew he had a rocky relationship with his parents and about the odd religious community in Texas, implying that they knew embarrassing details of his life, his issues with his mother—not that they were here to embarrass him, not at all.
Of everything, this had the best chance to unmoor him.
The final piece of evidence would be the computers they took from his house. True, they hadn’t yet found any communication between Keyes and Samantha, but there were some disturbing things on those hard drives. Chief among them were links to news articles about Samantha, contemporaneous coverage of the investigation, and more than one reader comment posted by someone named Israel.
“We have all your computers,” Bell would say. “Again, we’re not going to bullshit you. It’s going to take a while to go through them. But we’re going to analyze every cache, every conversation, everything you think you deleted or destroyed. We’re very, very good at what we do.”
Most suspects believe this, because most suspects learn their tradecraft by watching CSI.
Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson all thought it was a winning strategy.
Then they got a phone call. To their horror, the top federal prosecutor in Alaska had another idea.
* * *
—
Kevin Feldis had worked for the US Attorney’s Office since 1999 and had been in Alaska since 1997. Feldis was slender and middle-aged with thinning brown hair. He was a graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago Law School who had never been involved with street crime, let alone homicide. He worked strictly white-collar crime, yet here he was, telling Payne that this was his show now.
Israel Keyes, Feldis said, was going to be interrogated not at the FBI but at the US Attorney’s Office, and not only would he himself be in the room, but he would be leading the interview alongside his deputy, Frank Russo. The FBI would be his backup.
Payne was dumbstruck. This was not just a supremely bad idea—it was prosecutorial misconduct. But every agent and police officer in Anchorage wanted to stay on Feldis’s good side, because it was up to him to put their suspects in prison. 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. If that didn’t work, one could actually leak it.
But that just wasn’t done here.
Payne would have to try another way.
* * *
—
There were many reasons Feldis had no business being in that room, let alone co-opting the investigation. For one, the US Attorney’s Office wasn’t wired for audio and video recording of the interrogation. Nor did the building have proper security. Keyes wouldn’t be as intimidated, psychologically or physically, as he’d be at the FBI’s offices. These were all very real concerns.
Feldis didn’t care.
How about this liability? Police officers and FBI agents can, by law, lie to elicit a confession; prosecutors cannot. Investigators can dangle the prospect of a deal with the prosecutor and shade that deal positively or negatively. All that leverage, the ability to distract and distress a criminal who probably wants a deal, would be lost if the prosecutor himself was sitting right there and the suspect could just turn and ask, “Will you give me what I want?”
Then there was the need to physically box Keyes in. There’s a reason interrogation rooms are tiny and windowless. It makes the interview subject literally feel like the walls are closing in. There’s also a reason only two officers or agents run an interrogation: It keeps the conversational thread narrow and strict. It allows for rapport building and the classic good-cop/bad-cop dynamic. Interrogating a suspect at a conference table of six or more people would only make Keyes feel important and powerful, not small and weak.
This would be the FBI’s first interview with Keyes on their
home turf, the place where the crime was committed. It would be the first chance for the team to get a sense of Israel Keyes, and for Keyes to get a sense of them. No one on this team was a better interrogator than Jeff Bell; Payne’s ego was healthy enough to admit it. If Keyes sensed that Feldis was intimidated or nervous, or if Feldis let on how little they actually knew, they could lose their last, best chance at finding Samantha.
Feldis was Murphy personified.
This was egregious behavior. If this case went to trial, which right now looked likely, every move the prosecution made from the very beginning would be a matter of public record, because the onus is on the prosecution to prove their case. And public scrutiny allows everyone to walk away certain, as much as possible, that justice has been done fairly. By leading this interrogation, Feldis would be both prosecutor and a witness who could be called by Keyes’s defense team.
If at any point prosecutorial misconduct were discovered, even as early as an interrogation, the case could be thrown out. Even a convicted felon could be set free, never to be tried on the same charges again. Prosecutors literally cannot handle real evidence at this stage; it contaminates chain of custody. Any halfway decent defense attorney could say to a judge, “The government shouldn’t be able to prosecute,” and any halfway decent judge would agree.
Simply put, the consequences could be devastating.
But Feldis would not be dissuaded. This was the biggest case in Alaska since Joshua Wade, the serial killer who had made headlines in 2007, and the Keyes case could be even bigger. Samantha Koenig’s disappearance was national news. All of their profiles, especially in the Lower 48, could be elevated. This case was made for Dateline or 48 Hours or any number of true-crime documentaries. It could be a career maker.
Surely Payne and Bell could give Feldis a crash tutorial in Investigation Techniques 101. How hard could it be?
American Predator Page 7
