American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  * * *

  —

  Jeff Bell was equally shocked. He’d seen a lot of politicking in Anchorage but never anything like this. Everybody wanted to be in that room for the first interrogation—of course they did—but you would think that the integrity of the case and the hunt for an eighteen-year-old girl would come first.

  Bell talked it over with Payne. As alarmed as they were, they agreed that they had only one option: Try to coach Feldis as best they could. That he had a thin, reedy voice—in contrast to Payne’s whiskey-and-nicotine-soaked twang, or Bell’s open-throated midwestern warmth—was a distinct weakness, one related to Feldis never having sat across from a bloodless criminal, one sure he’s smarter than you. They all think they’re smarter than you, which is yet another thing they’d have to explain to Feldis.

  At least they had the script worked up. Payne consoled himself with the thought that he’d still be in the room and could redirect the interview if it went off course. Plus, Frank Russo would be there. Both Payne and Bell liked Russo, a careworn, middle-aged New Yorker who had worked gangs and violent crime in Manhattan.

  Payne and Bell made the five-minute drive over to the Anchorage Correctional Complex to meet Keyes before transport. For Payne, this would be his first face-to-face with the man who took Samantha. Yet both men wondered the same things: What kind of person did they have in custody? What kind of criminal? Was this a crime of passion? Opportunity? Or was it motivated by something they hadn’t identified yet? What was Keyes’s baseline personality? Would he give any hint as to the best way to approach him, let alone to get a confession?

  When they arrived, Payne thought Keyes looked like the figure in the surveillance video: tall, broad-shouldered, athletic. Leaping into Samantha’s kiosk through that window, which was about three and a half feet off the ground, would take agility and upper-body strength, and Keyes seemed to have that. He also easily followed direction. This was not someone who suffered from mental illness or cognitive defects. Keyes was clearly sane.

  One thing everyone on this case knew but couldn’t say publicly: The Anchorage Correctional Complex wasn’t secure enough for a criminal like Keyes. Anchorage, for all its violent crime, doesn’t have a federal penitentiary.

  * * *

  —

  Goeden and Nelson, already at the Assistant US Attorney’s Office, were setting up their laptops just outside a conference room. Bell and Payne had little time to give Feldis his crash course in breaking a suspect, skills honed over years of training at police academies, taught to agents and police officers at Quantico by top minds, where even the most experienced investigators will return, again and again, to replenish these perishable skills and learn new techniques.

  The information that agents and officers call upon in every interrogation, these deep, vast archives, is most akin to muscle memory. There is no algorithm for eliciting a confession. A good interrogator works with the confidence born of experience yet is smart enough to be humbled by each new suspect and each new challenge.

  The best of the breed are psychologically and intellectually nimble. They have to be able to pick up on the smallest tells, the microexpressions that give a suspect away: a slight smirk, shifting feet, a glance at a photo that goes on a beat longer than it should. They have to be so confident that they never even think about how they’re coming across to a suspect. The best interrogators are outside of themselves, focused totally on the subject in front of them, improvising from a sad, solid foundation, verbally cornering the worst humanity has to offer.

  It is an art form.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” they asked Feldis. “No one will think less of you if you don’t.”

  Feldis insisted. This was his case now.

  Payne and Bell, still in disbelief, gave Feldis the only advice they could.

  Keep your voice low and steady, they told him. Don’t be afraid of silence. Let it hang. Don’t rush in to talk. Silence makes people uncomfortable, and you want this subject talking as much as possible. Find out what he wants, and we find Samantha.

  TEN

  At 5:48 P.M. on Friday, March 30, the team sat down with Keyes at the US Attorney’s Office. Of those physically present, only Bell had attempted a face-to-face interrogation with Keyes before, and the detective was not surprised to see his demeanor unchanged. Keyes sat expressionless and when he spoke his affect was flat, as if this was all a bother. Bell could sense the resentment and resignation Keyes felt at having been caught, especially when Keyes said that he was talking now only to make things easier on himself and his family. Down the line, Keyes said, he might have other requests, and he would expect those to be met as well.

  Bell put his small tape recorder on the conference table and hit the red button, hoping for the best.

  Finally, the story began.

  * * *

  —

  Shortly after 7:00 P.M. on February 1, 2012, Israel Keyes pulled his white Chevrolet pickup out of his driveway and drove to the Home Depot on Tudor Road, fifteen minutes away. He had made the same drive, at the same time, several different days that week, curious about the comings and goings at the Common Grounds kiosk.

  After several evenings of observation, Keyes decided to rob it. Even though the kiosk sat alongside a highly trafficked main road, there had been such heavy snowfall that the shack was obscured behind five-foot snowdrifts. The night was cold and extremely dark. He would wait until near closing time, when there would probably be no other customers.

  Keyes first stopped at Carrs grocery store, where he’d picked up two favorites, Snickers bars and Wild ’n Mild cigars. Then he made his way over to the Home Depot and parked in the lot, closer to the IHOP. He grabbed his coffee mug, a pair of plastic zip ties, his headlamp, and his .22 Taurus revolver. He wore a tiny police scanner in his ear.

  Keyes got out of his truck, walked west, then crossed the street toward the kiosk.

  He wandered around the parking lot for a few minutes. No one else was there.

  The investigators stopped him. When did he first meet Samantha Koenig? What was their connection?

  “Never met her,” Keyes said. “Never even seen her before.”

  Payne and his team had not expected that. They didn’t believe it.

  So why did Keyes go to the Common Grounds coffee stand on that night, at that time?

  “’Cause,” Keyes said. “They’re open late.”

  * * *

  —

  The room felt taut. Before saying anything else, Keyes wanted to see what evidence they had.

  This was what Payne was afraid of. He held his breath.

  FELDIS: All right. Where do you want to start?

  KEYES: Um, do you have pictures of the raid you did on my place?

  FELDIS: I—I do have some, not a lot of ’em.

  KEYES: Like . . .

  FELDIS: . . . Not a lot of ’em are printed off.

  Already, Payne was anxious. This was not how you leveraged a lack of evidence. Now was the moment where you say that you’ve got way too many photos to sort through, that FBI headquarters is enhancing all of them, and suspects don’t get to see everything law enforcement has anyway.

  Less than one minute into this 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.

  They needed to know who else was involved. They needed a confession.

  Feldis asked Keyes if he’d prefer telling his story backward.

  KEYES: Yeah, we can, um—yeah, we can start.

  RUSSO: Yeah, I mean I don’t know for—for some context, I mean, you wanna tell us, you know, what happened with her?

  Keyes paused. He let out a deep exhale.

  KEYES: Yeah, I don’t know if I’m
gonna go into the whole story, like, blow by blow.

  FELDIS: Okay.

  KEYES: Um, well just—let’s—let’s just—we’ll just start with the end and then we’ll work backward so, you, um, pull up a map there of the Palmer area.

  A laptop sat on the conference table, and a Google Earth map of Anchorage popped up. Keyes told them to zoom in on Matanuska Lakes State Park, then the lake itself. He said he’d been ice fishing on that lake for about three days in late February, and they’d probably already found proof of that in his shed. That’s where he’d built his shack.

  Where was this going?

  Feldis needed to nail it.

  KEYES: Um . . . Pieces of my ice fishing shack, which I mean that’s—I don’t know if you guys probably have that stuff out of the shed.

  FELDIS: Okay, that’s the shack from your shed?

  KEYES: Yeah . . . You probably don’t have all the pieces to it but, um, there was some pieces that I had behind the shed too.

  Here was Payne’s Murphy. They didn’t have any pieces of the shack because they hadn’t found any in the shed they took. Jesus. Was there another shed? How would Feldis navigate this?

  FELDIS: Okay. I’m—I’m gonna—I don’t know what—what they took out of your shed, Israel, so, that’s why I’m gonna ask about it because I haven’t seen everything they took out of your shed just yet so, um . . .

  There was only one right response here, as Payne and Bell well knew: Tell him he doesn’t get to know that. Tell him the FBI has specialists taking that thing apart piece by piece, and when they’re done no jury in Alaska will care about anything else Israel Keyes has to say.

  KEYES: Did they take everything out of it?

  FELDIS: I don’t know that they took everything out of it, but why don’t you tell me what—what they should be looking for in the shed.

  KEYES: Uh, there is a sled.

  FELDIS: ’Kay.

  KEYES: And a big tote. I think it’s a—I don’t know, it’s like a thirty- or forty-gallon tote in the sled. . . . That’s why I figured once you got a search warrant on my house that’s probably—you’re probably gonna find something on it.

  On that first day ice fishing, Keyes said, he drove out to Matanuska Lake, parked right off the highway, and dragged his sled far along the surface of the ice. He set up his shack out in the middle. Once inside, he cut an 8 x 8-foot hole in the ice, covered it with plywood, and left.

  KEYES: I had my truck. You can’t—you can’t park down by the lake. . . . [I] couldn’t pull down more than about, I don’t know, maybe one hundred fifty pounds at a time in the sled so that’s why I had to make three trips and you’re gonna need five different bags.

  FELDIS: Okay. Can you tell us what you pulled out in each one of those trips?

  KEYES: Uh, the first day was the head, legs, and the arms.

  FELDIS: Of Samantha Koenig?

  KEYES: Yep.

  There it was. Payne was stricken. James Koenig didn’t know yet, and these passing hours were the last James would have hope. Spring was coming, the most beautiful time in Alaska, snow and white light, and James would never be able to think of it the same way again.

  * * *

  —

  Feldis pulled up a Google Earth Street View of the home Keyes shared with Kimberly and his young daughter. Keyes was impressed. “Wow, that’s really—that’s a recent picture, huh?” He chuckled.

  Keyes directed Feldis to the back of the house and told him where to find the gray conduit he used to pull the sled, the wood for building the ice shack, the steel bar he used to cut the hole in the iced-over lake, a serrated utility knife with a yellow handle, and the blood on the floor and one wall of the shed now sitting in his driveway.

  There was another shed. How did not one specialist from evidence recovery find it in such a small yard?

  Feldis didn’t know anything about this, so he plowed on, pulling out photos of stuff the FBI had taken from the seized shed. The wrong one.

  FELDIS: We’re showing you some pictures that . . .

  KEYES: No.

  FELDIS: I think they must’ve printed out.

  KEYES: No, none of that stuff.

  FELDIS: Okay, but these—these are taken in the same shed, correct?

  KEYES: No.

  FELDIS: No, this is not the same location?

  KEYES: No, that’s the one in the backyard.

  FELDIS: Okay, sounds like they got the wrong shed. Okay.

  KEYES: Did I just tell you guys all this for nothing?

  Yes. Yes, Keyes had. If Payne was honest, that mistake was on the FBI, and the only thing saving this interrogation right now was luck. If this conversation had played out in any other order—if they had first started talking about the wrong shed—Keyes would have had no reason to keep talking. He would have known right then: The FBI had nothing tying him to Samantha’s body.

  In that moment, Keyes didn’t quite realize the magnitude of this error.

  “I’m just kidding,” Keyes said. “I know you guys already have this stuff, or would have. The bottom line is the computer—that was the only lake I printed out. . . . I’m sure if enough time went by you guys probably would have found her.”

  Not a chance. Payne knew it.

  Phones on the table began buzzing on the conference table like downed bees. Quantico was calling.

  ELEVEN

  Payne and Bell were the only ones who could regain control of this interrogation. It was clear their biggest challenge wasn’t Israel Keyes but Feldis, who picked up on Keyes’s last statement about the FBI having access to everything on his computer with this:

  “They are—they are gonna need to collect everything, um, so we need to—we need to hear about everything uh, ’cause they’re gonna—like you said they’re gonna . . .”

  “No,” Keyes said. “Everything is in that, the white shed. You don’t need anything out of that back shed.”

  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 this shift. Payne and Bell would just have to interrupt Feldis in a way that Keyes, hopefully, wouldn’t notice.

  Payne and Bell tried to get Keyes back to establishing a timeline. They needed to focus on facts—dates, times, locations—so they could walk Keyes up to the stuff he was reluctant to talk about. They needed to hear how Samantha traveled forty miles from her kiosk to the bottom of a lake with nobody seeing a thing. They needed details they could corroborate, to make sure they had the person responsible. And since they verified that Keyes and his ten-year-old daughter had left for the airport at five o’clock the next morning, they needed to know who else was involved.

  Keyes kept talking, going into something like a trance.

  * * *

  —

  He walked around the Common Grounds kiosk. He couldn’t see who was working inside, but he figured it was a young woman. Whoever was working didn’t seem to have a car; there wasn’t one parked nearby.

  Young girls almost exclusively worked these kiosks. So probably a boyfriend was on the way any minute.

  Keyes walked up to the kiosk at five minutes to eight, just before closing, and stood at the large, open window, which he knew would have no Plexiglas, not even a screen. He put down his empty thermos and asked the barista for an Americano. Now he had a good look: She was young, small, pretty, alone.

  Samantha Koenig.

  As she moved back and forth from the window to the espresso machine in this tiny space, about three feet wide, Keyes began silently running through his plan. Now there was a hitch: Someone was suddenly sitting in a nearby car, engine idling, watching him. It made what he wanted to do all the more challenging.

  Samantha handed him the Americano and Keyes pulled out
his gun. “This is a robbery,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Samantha put her hands in the air. He could tell she was terrified.

  “Turn off the lights,” Keyes said.

  Samantha moved to the back of the kiosk and switched off the lights, then returned to the window. She didn’t scream. If there was a panic button and she’d somehow hit it, Keyes would hear about it on his police scanner. He’d have to wait and see.

  “Give me all the cash in the register,” Keyes said.

  Samantha stiffly moved toward the right of the window, where the register sat hidden from customers. She emptied the drawer and handed the money over.

  “Get down on the floor,” he said. She did.

  Keyes was still outside the kiosk.

  Now he broke from his reverie and addressed Feldis.

  “I was feeling a little invincible,” he said.

  “Why?” Feldis asked.

  “’Cause she was scared,” Keyes said. “And she did everything I said, and I had an adrenaline rush, I guess. Just decided to do it, see what happened. And, well, you guys have the video so you know what happened.”

  Feldis played this part right. “Yeah,” he said, “but I kind of want to get [it] from your perspective.”

  It took a moment as Keyes shifted back into his altered state.

  He told Samantha to turn off the lights and the OPEN sign. She did.

  He watched Samantha while scanning the parking lot. Off in the distance he saw people coming and going from the Alaska Club, the nearby gym.

  Whoever was in that idling car finally pulled away and drove off. It was quiet now, just the soft whoosh of cars going back and forth on Tudor Road.