Keyes told Samantha to get down on her knees and turn around at the window. She did. He leaned over, binding her wrists behind her back with the zip ties.
He told Samantha to move out of the way, then jumped inside. He moved his headlamp over the countertop and spotted a set of keys.
“Where’s your car?” Keyes asked.
“I don’t have one,” Samantha said. “But my dad’s coming to get me in half an hour. I mean—he’s going to be here any minute.”
Keyes had second thoughts. He couldn’t tell which was the truth. “Did you hit an alarm?” Keyes asked. “Don’t lie to me. I have a police scanner in my ear. I’ll know.”
“No,” she said.
“If I hear the police being dispatched here,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
“I didn’t,” Samantha said. “I swear.”
The investigators nodded, silently encouraging Keyes to continue. He did, his tone getting deeper, quieter. His speech slowed down and his voice began to quake. It was the eeriest thing: Keyes sounded both ashamed and enraptured.
He said he asked her what her name was, then shut the windows, barred them, took some napkins and stuffed them in her mouth.
Then he told her they were going for a walk.
* * *
—
This story, so far, was lining up with the surveillance video. Except for the napkin detail. No one had seen that. Now Payne knew why Samantha hadn’t screamed that night: She couldn’t.
FELDIS: What were you thinking at that time?
KEYES: What, about taking her with me?
FELDIS: Yeah.
KEYES: I liked her.
RUSSO: You’re scheduled to go on a cruise the next day.
KEYES: In a few hours, yeah. That was kind of part of the idea.
* * *
—
As Keyes led Samantha through the parking lot, he found a new Canon camera on the ground. It had to be worth about three hundred dollars. This was new information.
• • •
“I took that as a good omen, I guess,” Keyes said.
He bent over to pick it up. Samantha, feeling his distraction, broke away and ran.
“What did you do?” Feldis asked.
“Tackled her,” Keyes said. He stopped here to pour himself some water. “There were people everywhere.”
Could this be true? Were there, in fact, witnesses to the most high-profile crime in Anchorage in years? Or was Keyes bragging? If there had been witnesses, wouldn’t someone have come forward by now?
Keyes regained control of Samantha quickly, he said, by pressing his .22 against her ribs. That gun was small, light, easy to conceal, but most of all, it was quiet. You could shoot someone on a busy street and no one would hear a thing. Keyes knew what he was doing.
He threatened to kill her if she tried to escape again.
Samantha nodded. Keyes told her to stumble around a little, lean against him like she was drunk. He took her across Tudor Road and walked her through the Home Depot lot, then to his truck at the IHOP.
A few people, he said, were lingering around a Chevy Suburban right in front of Keyes’s truck. Now he had to rely on Samantha’s fear to paralyze her.
In a way, that first escape attempt worked to his advantage.
He moved Samantha to the passenger door as though he were chivalrously opening it. He leaned down and whispered in her ear.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “But this .22 is loaded with very quiet ammo. It will kill you, so don’t make me do it.”
As Keyes opened the door and began clearing out his cluttered passenger seat—he hadn’t planned on using his own truck—Samantha silently watched these strangers, just feet in front of her, clamber into the Chevy and drive away.
FELDIS: So, we saw in the video you’re getting her into the car, into your truck, and then you walked around and you got into your truck and you paused for a few seconds before you drove off.
If Feldis, limited by his position as prosecutor, actually did see this video, it was yet another strike if this case went to trial. That video was evidence.
Compounding this mess, it was clear that neither the Bureau nor APD had thought to pull all the surveillance footage from every business near the kiosk. They’d had no idea about the witnesses at IHOP.
Back in the truck, Keyes was talking to Samantha.
KEYES: I was just telling her how it was going to work.
FELDIS: Wh—which was—what did you tell her?
KEYES: I asked her a lot of questions. . . . She still had her hands behind her when I put her in the truck. I helped her into the truck and I put the seat belt around her and I told her we were going to drive somewhere.
Payne and Bell knew where this was going. Keyes was already using language that minimized what he had done: Samantha “having” her hands behind her rather than forcibly restrained, Keyes “helping” her into his truck rather than pushing, “putting” the seat belt around her rather than strapping her down, “going for a drive” rather than kidnapping her. These were subtleties that Feldis wasn’t picking up on, linguistic cues that told Payne and Bell they were dealing with a very cunning suspect.
Keyes continued. He explained what he told Samantha after pulling the napkins out of her mouth. He was going to hold her for ransom and she would be fine.
KEYES: She kept saying, “Well, my family doesn’t have any money.” I said, “Oh, though the way this works [is] they’ll get the money, so you don’t need to worry about that. I’m going to take care of all that, but you need to do what I say.” After that it seemed like the more I talked to her the more she—I mean, I wasn’t being mean or anything. I wasn’t scaring her at that point. I was trying, you know, to seem like a normal person.
“A normal person.” Keyes had just given them another clue: There was something wrong with him.
He had probably done this before.
There was no way Feldis picked up on this. Jeff Bell would no longer cede the floor.
* * *
—
Keyes drove out of the parking lot.
He noticed that Samantha’s belt buckle wasn’t secure. His truck was old and didn’t have electronic locks on the doors, so if she twisted free and jumped out the passenger door, there wouldn’t be much he could do. He’d have to abandon the plan altogether.
And then, as he stopped at a red light just minutes in, a police car pulled up next to Samantha, two officers inside.
What were the chances of this? Keyes picked this part of Anchorage, on this night, because there was a huge festival across town. He knew from his scanner that almost all the police were over there.
Keyes watched Samantha silently work out her options.
What should she do? If she started screaming or banging her head against the window or even tried to wrest herself free and the cops pulled away before seeing her, this man would kill her. She believed him. He just wanted ransom money and then he’d release her. The cops next to her had their windows all the way up, dispatches constantly coming over their radio—dispatches her abductor was hearing in real time, in his ear! Maybe she should go along with what he wanted.
Keyes, too, was assessing his risks. That same scanner told him that these officers weren’t looking for a missing teenage girl. If Samantha tried something—and really, he thought, at this moment, she should—and the cops pulled him over, well . . . he had his gun. But if he stayed calm and just sat at the light, if he was able to control Samantha here without saying a word, this night would surely go as planned.
The light turned green.
The patrol car drove away, Samantha watching its red taillights dwindle in the darkness.
KEYES: She didn’t do anything and then I turned left and drove. . . . I had my cell phone off [and] had the battery out of it the whole time
and drove to—I don’t know the name of the park. It’s the park actually not far from my house.
BELL: Lynn Ary?
KEYES: Yeah, Lynn Ary. Did somebody tell you that?
Bell needed a moment to weigh his answer. Would it matter to Keyes either way? Repeat the question and buy some time.
BELL: Did somebody tell me that?
KEYES: Yeah.
What would matter, Bell realized, would be Keyes catching him in a lie. He’d lose all leverage.
BELL: No, I . . .
KEYES: I was just wondering if anybody saw us down there ’cause I was down there for a while, the lower park in Lynn Ary.
BELL: Down by the baseball fields?
KEYES: Yep.
At the park, Keyes noticed several people in silhouette shouldering ski equipment. They were heading toward his truck. This was yet another opportunity for Samantha to escape, but Keyes felt more confident after that moment with the police.
Samantha sat quietly.
The cross-country skiers loaded up their car and drove away. After waiting a few minutes to be sure they wouldn’t double back, Keyes got out of the pickup. He opened the back door, cleared out all his tools on the backseat, and put them in the truck’s bed. He covered the seat with drop cloths, tucking them securely.
As he worked, he kept his eyes on Samantha. He noticed her trembling.
“Are you cold?” Keyes asked.
She said she was.
Keyes walked over to her. He quickly looped a bunch of zip ties around each other, the way kids make chains out of construction paper, and made a longer restraint to secure Samantha’s wrists to her seat belt. He told her to lay down in the backseat and covered her in drop cloths.
Keyes got back in the driver’s seat and thought about what to do next. His daughter was probably asleep, but Kimberly was a night owl. It was closing in on 11:00 P.M.
“That’s when I kind of realized I had a lot to do and not very much time to do it,” Keyes said.
He needed a phone to make his ransom demand. Keyes decided to drive to Walmart and buy a burner, which he figured would be untraceable.
But once he pulled into the parking lot he had second thoughts. There were a surprising number of cars parked outside for this time of night. Surveillance cameras were everywhere. Keyes remembered that Walmart had some of the best in the country.
Another clue for Bell: Keyes not only knew what he was doing, he was probably an expert.
Oddly, Keyes realized, the better option might be returning to the kiosk and grabbing Samantha’s phone. As it was, he’d forgotten to lock the kiosk’s door, and if he went back to do that, it might give him a greater head start. It would look like Samantha had locked up and left on her own.
Keyes made the ten-minute drive back to Tudor Road, parking behind the Alaska Club. He saw no cars, no people.
“I was sure she was gonna get away at that point, even though I had her tied up pretty good,” Keyes said. “I was like, ‘I’m only gonna be gone a couple of minutes. . . . If I come back and it looks like you’ve been trying anything, you know, it’s not—not gonna be—not gonna be happy.’”
Payne and Bell recognized Keyes’s threat as the mind control of an experienced criminal. Payne had learned it at Quantico and heard variations in countless confessions.
“You’ll regret it.” “I’ll hurt you.”
Neither is: “I’ll kill you,” and that gives a victim hope. The best criminals always leave that window open, because it makes manipulating and controlling someone so much easier. And victims often believe, fatally, that they’ll be let go.
* * *
—
Keyes got out of the pickup. The kiosk was as dark as he’d left it when he first took Samantha. He opened the door and found her cell phone, then noticed stray zip ties on the kiosk’s floor. He picked them up, his gloves still on, rearranged a few things so it looked like she had cleaned up, then left.
After walking a few feet, he remembered: Samantha’s car keys were still in the kiosk. He might need those for later. These were small mistakes, but they were piling up, and he needed to get it together or risk getting caught.
He got the keys and left the kiosk for the third and final time.
This was yet another crushing blow. If someone at APD or the FBI had watched the surveillance video all the way through, they would have known, without a doubt, that Samantha Koenig had been kidnapped that night. Keyes returning not once but twice, without Samantha, would have weakened the theory that Samantha had staged her own kidnapping. In fact, if you watch the surveillance video APD eventually made public frame by frame, you can see, in the final moments as Keyes and Samantha leave, that Samantha’s face is fully visible, eyes glistening with tears, her hand over her mouth in terror.
* * *
—
Keyes looked back at Samantha, immobile under the tarp. He checked her cell, a flip phone. She was telling the truth about not having any money.
He drove. After a few moments of silence, Samantha spoke. She had to go to the bathroom.
Keyes thought it could be a ploy, but he couldn’t risk an accident in his truck. Her DNA would be everywhere.
He pulled into Earthquake Park’s vast, empty lot. They were on the edge of town, near the water, just fifteen minutes from the kiosk. Keyes grabbed some rope from the truck’s bed and tied it around Samantha’s neck, then cut the binds to her seat belt. He walked her out on the grass, no trees or any sort of brush around, nothing she could hide behind. There was just enough slack in the rope for her to bend down and relieve herself.
KEYES: [I] let her out and by that time you know, we were smoking cigars and stuff I mean.
FELDIS: Who was smoking cigars?
KEYES: Both of us. I mean, we were sharing.
Sharing. Again, Payne and Bell went into overdrive. The only way a bound Samantha could have been smoking was if Keyes held the cigar for her. And how terrifying, to be bound up at night, no one giving you a second look, a large stranger wielding a lit cigar in your face? If this man would kidnap you and hold you for ransom and tie you up and make you pee outside like an animal, what was to stop him from burning you?
Brave girl, Bell thought. She was trying to connect.
FELDIS: When was that?
KEYES: Well, it was about from the time of Lynn Ary on. I mean, I—I—she kept trying to talk to me, you know, so I had to tell her to shut up a few times, but for the—I was still being nice about it . . . So, after Earthquake Park—we were out there a few minutes. There were other people out there.
Other people? This was the sixth time Keyes mentioned potential witnesses. There was the suspicious driver parked near the coffee kiosk, the passersby as Keyes walked Samantha across Tudor Road to the parking lot, the people at the Chevy Suburban in front of his pickup truck near IHOP, the cops at the red traffic light, the skiers at Lynn Ary Park, and now this.
Brazen doesn’t begin to describe this guy, Payne thought.
Keyes had another surprise. Out at Earthquake Park, he realized he hadn’t planned for such a long night. He was literally running out of gas.
KEYES: [I] realized my truck—the empty light had been on, for, I don’t know . . . I was like, “Boy, that would be great. Run out of gas in the middle of nowhere with all this going on.” So—so yeah, just pulled right into the Tesoro, had already changed—I kept changing jackets. I had the dark jacket and I had my other jacket. . . . Just in case it ever came up.
* * *
—
Next, Keyes sent text messages to people who’d been calling Samantha: one to her boyfriend, one to her boss. He wrote as though Samantha was extremely pissed off.
KEYES: And after that I pulled the battery out of the phone.
BELL: What’s that do? Why did you do that?
KEYES: You can’t track it
as far as I know.
BELL: Why not just shut it off?
KEYES: I’m paranoid.
And smarter than most, Bell thought. Keyes was wrong to think a burner phone can’t be tracked but right about that.
* * *
—
Finally, Keyes drove home and pulled into his driveway. It was around midnight now, freezing cold, yet there were people out, neighbors walking their dogs. Keyes would have to wait some more.
“I think I told her, ‘Don’t try and sit up, don’t say anything, just chill out back here and be quiet and I’ll talk to you in a minute, there’s some stuff I gotta do.’”
He got out of the truck and closed the door. The cab went pitch black.
Samantha probably had no idea where she was. Even if she heard dogs barking, she’d have no way of knowing there were people with them just feet away. She remained quiet as the truck lurched up and down and side to side, Keyes replacing a large rack and toolbox he’d removed earlier.
Not one neighbor said anything to Keyes. They had before, a couple of times, when he had worked with power tools late into the night, but otherwise they left him alone. This was Alaska. If Keyes wanted to do some hard manual labor in the middle of the night—labor, by the way, that had no urgency to it whatsoever—well, God bless you, have at it. No one’s business but your own.
KEYES: That rack is heavy. I think it weighs about a hundred twenty to a hundred fifty pounds. [I] screwed in some two-by-fours on it so I could lift it from the middle and put it on there. Bolted that down—I don’t know what time it was. It was getting late. Kimberly was still up.
BELL: She really didn’t—didn’t hear you out there making all that racket putting the toolbox back on?
KEYES: No, she’s pretty—she’s pretty oblivious when it comes to what I do, so.
American Predator Page 9
