KEYES: No. Just to keep anything from her transferring to the shed.
DOLL: Gotcha.
Keyes said he prepped the shed a couple of days earlier. He had no specific plan or person in mind, he said, though he’d been “looking at the Huffman area” because it was also full of coffee stands that were open late, in isolated areas, staffed by teenage girls, almost all of whom were alone.
That night, he’d come upon Samantha. He liked the look of her and he went ahead. “Even, I guess you could say, against my judgment.” He had thought about waiting for whoever was going to pick her up—a boyfriend, as he had correctly guessed—and taking both of them, but decided not to risk it.
After breaking into Samantha’s truck, stealing her ATM card, and testing the PIN number at a local machine, he returned home. He went into the kitchen and poured a glass of wine for himself and water for Samantha.
Then he returned to the shed.
Samantha was remarkably composed. She asked if everything was working out.
Did you reach my dad? she asked.
Yeah, Keyes told her. It’s fine.
He knelt down and unscrewed the rope from the wall. He cut her cable ties. He knew what he was doing: Igniting that last spark of hope, letting her think he’d be getting the ransom money while untying her, allowing her to think that surely, this was the end. That, as he had promised all night, he’d be letting her go.
He would not.
Keyes restrained Samantha again, this time in a more complicated way, using ropes rather than cable ties.
“She knew at that point,” Keyes said.
He left the shed again and checked on Kimberly.
“She was awake,” he said.
* * *
—
This was different from what Keyes had said yesterday. In that version, he waited until Kimberly had gone to sleep. What was going on here? Did Keyes really act alone? The timeline he was insisting on—Payne and his team still didn’t buy it.
* * *
—
Again, Keyes returned to the shed. Space heaters had pushed the temperature inside to 90 degrees. Deafening heavy metal shook the walls. The acrid smell of smoke and urine and sweat permeated.
Keyes said he raped Samantha twice. It took, he said, “awhile . . . maybe two or three songs” on the radio. When he was done, he stood above her, naked. Samantha asked if he was going to kill her. She tried to talk him out of it. Her fortitude was remarkable, Keyes said. Admirable. But it left him unmoved.
KEYES: Then, uh, I put my leather gloves on.
DOLL: Why did you put leather gloves on and not rubber gloves?
KEYES: ’Cause it’s hard work to strangle somebody. . . . I knew—I knew from the minute she walked out of that coffee stand she wasn’t—she wasn’t gonna live. . . . She never made a sound.
DOLL: How long did it take her to die?
KEYES: It was taking—I mean, it’s always—it’s hard to tell when, um . . . It was taking awhile. I remember thinking, “I still have to shower.” . . . Anyway, I’m not gonna tell all that part but I, um . . .
DOLL: Why?
KEYES: I stabbed her once right below her right shoulder blade in her back . . . and it wasn’t going very deep. I’m not gonna go into that, but anyway she—I didn’t really stab her to make her die faster or anything. It was something else, but, um, I took . . .
DOLL: Did you stab her because you were still attracted to her?
KEYES: No, I’m not gonna go into that. . . . I finished my wine and put my pants on and went back into the house and took a shower.
Then he woke his daughter. While she got ready, Keyes returned to the shed yet again. The space heaters had been left on to slow rigor mortis. He rolled Samantha’s body in a tarp, opened up his lower cabinets, hid her remains, turned off the heaters, double-locked the shed door, and called a cab.
FELDIS: What was your plan? You were getting on a plane and her body was in your shed. What were you thinking?
KEYES: I was thinking it was twenty degrees outside and I didn’t have anything to worry about.
FELDIS: Were you worried about getting caught?
KEYES: No.
FELDIS: Why not?
KEYES: Partly because it’s Anchorage. . . . I’d been listening to the police scanner a lot recently and just kind of felt like by the time anybody figured out what had actually happened, the trail would already be cold, and even if they had pictures of my truck, they wouldn’t know whose truck it was. They wouldn’t have tire tracks. They wouldn’t have forensic evidence. They wouldn’t have shoe prints. They certainly wouldn’t have fingerprints or DNA or anything so I didn’t worry about it.
This was sobering and, if the investigators were honest with themselves, more than a little embarrassing. Keyes was right. He had predicted their response, or, really, lack thereof. To commit a crime of this magnitude, to drive around with a missing teenage girl for three hours with plenty of witnesses, and not worry about getting caught “because it’s Anchorage”—that was a damning indictment of the police department. It was true. James Koenig knew it. The hundreds of people who showed up for Samantha’s candlelight vigil knew it. If the media ever heard this, all of Alaska would know it. This confession would never be logged with the court or documented anywhere. It would be kept hidden for years.
That morning, aware only that the FBI had a suspect in custody, James had posted another plea on Facebook.
NOW THAT IT’S GETTING WARMER AND THE SNOW’S MELTING PLEASE KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN FOR ANYTHING THAT MIGHT BE OUT OF PLACE, CHECK YOUR SURROUNDINGS YOU JUST NEVER KNOW WHERE THAT ONE LEAD MIGHT COME FROM TO BRING OUR SAMANTHA HOME!!
FOURTEEN
Steve Payne was most interested in the ransom note. Keyes had already told them that Samantha wasn’t alive when he photographed her. Now they knew her body had been left in his shed for two weeks while he was traveling with his daughter.
How did he do it?
Keyes returned home to Anchorage in the early morning hours of February 18. He’d been checking the weather remotely and knew it was getting warmer in Anchorage.
He went to the shed to assess the body. Kimberly was still traveling in the Lower 48, until the twenty-second. He had a little time.
Keyes waited until Monday the twenty-first, after his daughter went to school, and began taking the shed apart from the inside. He dismantled cabinets, shelving, lights. He worked around Samantha’s remains, still in the lower cabinet, and chopped everything he’d ripped out of the shed into firewood.
He rolled Samantha’s body—triply cocooned in the foam mat, sleeping bag, and tarp—out of the cabinet and onto a piece of Visqueen. The sleeping bag she’d been on, he said, “was pretty much soaked with blood.”
He contradicted himself here. Earlier, he’d characterized Samantha’s stab wound as minimal. They’d have to be extra alert to every detail.
Keyes took everything Samantha had been wrapped in, cut it all up, and tossed each piece into a double-layer contractor bag. The clothes he wore that night, along with his shoes, would get burned or go in the landfill. He took out Samantha’s purse and riffled through it, tossing aside almost everything except her cell phone and a small amount of change. He took the coins inside and mixed them with his own in a jar.
Why bother with that?
KEYES: I was probably really paranoid, but I was thinking like technically there could be some of her DNA on that, so.
DOLL: Did you braid her hair?
KEYES: Not right away.
After his daughter got back from school, did her homework, had dinner, and gone to bed, Keyes built a fire in the living-room fireplace. It was about 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., now February 22. He burned the tarp and everything Samantha had touched.
Back in the shed, Keyes took a large piece of plastic and tacked it all along th
e floor and walls, which he had scrubbed earlier with a bleach-filled grout sponge. To keep the surface area of the floor unobstructed, he’d hung Samantha’s body up, lifting her arms above her head, tying rope around her wrists, and screwing the rope into the wall.
DOLL: What happened next?
KEYES: Well, this is where you get the abridged version. Let’s just say I, um, thawed her out and, um, had a table made in the shed at that point.
DOLL: After you thawed her out, was she still—was she not rigid?
KEYES: No. No, she was very floppy.
FELDIS: What’d you do?
KEYES: [sighs] Well, I wouldn’t tell you this part except you’re gonna find out anyways, so.
FELDIS: Why wouldn’t you tell us? If we’re gonna—
KEYES: I told you the stuff is—
FELDIS: —find out.
KEYES: —private. There’s too many people in here. But, um, I had sex with her. Her corpse. And, um, you know, she was warm and . . . I guess I lost track of time.
It was morning now. His daughter came looking for him, knocking on the shed’s door.
KEYES: I said, you know, “I’ll be out in a minute. Go back inside and eat your breakfast.” And, uh, ’cause she was—I mean at that point, anytime I opened the door, she was like right there.
He laughed softly in the retelling.
Keyes cleaned himself up and went inside to get his daughter ready for school, leaving Samantha’s body out in the shed all day. Once his daughter was gone, he ran through his checklist. Kimberly was getting back the next day. He still had a lot to do.
The ransom note was next.
Keyes picked his daughter up from school that afternoon and took her to their local Target, where he bought a Polaroid camera. To his frustration, the store didn’t stock matching film. He’d have to wait until after homework and dinner. Once his daughter was asleep, he left her alone in the house and made the hour-long drive to a Target in Wasilla.
At some point he also bought a big foam sled, tote bags at Home Depot, carbon ribbon and paper for a typewriter he’d found at Goodwill, a sewing kit, and ten-pound fishing line. He pulled a copy of the Anchorage Daily News, dated February 13, 2012, from a dumpster behind Carrs supermarket.
DOLL: Why did you pick the thirteenth?
KEYES: ’Cause I wasn’t in Anchorage on the thirteenth [clearing throat]. And yeah, so once I had all that stuff—I really can’t remember. But I know it took me all night to do it.
DOLL: To do what?
KEYES: All night. To get the makeup done.
Aside from the cell phone and ATM card, Keyes had saved the makeup Samantha kept in her handbag. He bought more at Walmart and also used makeup that Kimberly had left stashed in their garage. It seemed another day had gone by.
“Kimberly was home for sure at that point,” Keyes told them, “because I waited until it was really late one night.”
Keyes spent hours trying to position Samantha’s body for the ransom photo, but the biggest challenge was her face. Samantha’s muscles had gone slack, and no amount of makeup was going to give her an expression. She had been dead for approximately twenty-one days.
KEYES: That’s when I kind of gave up on, on like the mouth and stuff. I just, uh, decided to tape it. I taped it so that, you know, it looked like her face had some texture to it, I guess. And then I was still having problems with her eyes—or her forehead, you know, ’cause there was no expression. And, um, I tried superglue; that didn’t work. And so I took the needles I had—I had a big, curved needle. I forget what they call it. But I had that and then I had that ten-pound test fishing line and I, uh, sewed, uh, took the needle and went down through her brow, like right between her eyebrows and down—up, uh, along her nose cartilage, under the skin, and came out and then went back up along the same path and did it again and then pulled it tight to make it look like she was squeezing her eyes shut. And then I took a test picture, just to kinda see what it was gonna look like. And I think I put a little more makeup on her after that and I already had her hair braided at that point and, uh . . .
PAYNE: Where did you put the makeup on her?
KEYES: Everywhere. I had to put foundation—like every part you see in that picture has foundation on it, two or three different kinds.
PAYNE: Why did you do that?
KEYES: Well, she didn’t look good. I mean her skin—you could see it, start to see the blood under the skin and, um, I mean she was still in good shape but, you know, she definitely didn’t look alive.
Keyes said it took between three and five hours to get the makeup done. Then he began taking test pictures, which was also more difficult than he’d anticipated. He’d need to hold Samantha’s head up.
KEYES: I think it took about five or six pictures before I finally had one that showed what I wanted.
DOLL: Did you cut the corner off?
KEYES: Yeah. Well, I cut the edges off the whole photograph. At first I was thinking of giving the Polaroid [picture] and have the note separate. And then I decided it would be harder for you to figure out if I scanned the picture with a printer. Not through the computer, but just with the scanner onto the paper, and that way you probably wouldn’t know for sure that it was a Polaroid. So, yeah. That’s what I did.
DOLL: Did you cut the corner off because it showed the mark on your arm?
KEYES: Well, it wasn’t so much the brand that was showing, but I have some moles on my arm and I was—I looked at it pretty carefully, and I—yeah, I guess I was just thinking that it might show something. I was thinking to keep a minimum amount of my arm in there and get the message across.
PAYNE: Why did you go to all the trouble to do this? You did a lot of work.
KEYES: Um, well, it—put it this way: I mean, it’s obvious why I did it. I did it—the bottom line was to get money out of it. But at the same time, it’s not like I didn’t want to do it.
Earlier Keyes had told them the opposite: That he wasn’t in it for the money—that was just a bonus. Yet Keyes was poor enough to warrant a public defender. One of his last trips, that flight and cruise with his daughter, had been expensive. It would take time to go through his finances, but obviously he was struggling. How could this elaborate scheme not, in part, be about money?
Doll asked him how he came upon thirty thousand dollars as the ransom amount. Keyes said he’d begun following media coverage of Samantha’s disappearance and was astonished by how much money was raised so quickly.
That’s why, Keyes said, he saved only Samantha’s cell phone and ATM card, to demand money and retrieve it. He told them he had no idea his movements could be tracked by using that card, which was hard to believe. He had been scrupulous. He really didn’t know ATM cards could be tracked?
Keyes swore he didn’t.
With Kimberly back from her travels, her friend Kevin now a houseguest, Keyes needed to remove Samantha’s body. The weather was getting warmer. There was no way he could contain the burgeoning smell and he couldn’t risk a wild animal demolishing the shed. He had to move fast.
KEYES: I remember that there was a lot going on, but there was one day that there was nobody around at the house and I brought the typewriter into the house and it didn’t take me that long. I opened that pack of computer paper I got and put it in the typewriter and the thing worked fine and [I] typed up one draft of the ransom note, stuck it in the printer feed tray, hit copy with the picture in there . . . I had latex gloves on the whole time I was typing it and I never touched the paper or anything.
RUSSO: So you purposefully misspelled stuff in the ransom note?
KEYES: I didn’t, no. I wasn’t really that concerned about the wording of it. I had an idea with, like, the message I wanted to get across.
FELDIS: What was with the desert? You said she escaped on Tudor and that was true—almost escaped on Tudor. That was true,
right? And then you said, “and once in the desert.”
KEYES: That was a calculation that I had in my head. From the time the picture was taken to the time the ransom note was given was about ten days.
This too conflicted with what Keyes had just said—that he purchased the camera and film used for the ransom demand two days before posting the note. In the interest of momentum, investigators let him continue.
KEYES: I was thinking, Make it sound as if she had been sold as a sex slave somewhere in Mexico. That’s about how long it would take to drive there from the thirteenth and get back to Anchorage.
* * *
—
Latex gloves still on, Keyes put the ransom note and the photo into one ziplock baggie, which he then put into another ziplock baggie. He tacked the package to the Connors Bog Park community board around 6:00 A.M. He knew someone would find it.
Keyes used Kimberly’s car that morning, and the light snowfall meant fresh tire tracks. He wanted to see the response but knew he’d need to wait.
Later that day, after dropping Kimberly and Kevin at a friend’s house, he found his opportunity. Most of Anchorage was down at the annual Fur Rondy winter festival. Keyes practically had run of the town.
He drove to the Carrs parking lot, went to a back corner, and turned on Samantha’s phone. As soon as he sent the text to Duane, Keyes removed the phone’s battery and headed home. It was 7:56 P.M.
Keyes wasn’t sure how much time elapsed, but he got back in Kimberly’s car and drove back to the park, where, to his satisfaction, he saw a couple of patrol cars and a crime scene van. The cops, he said, were extremely low key. This pleased him.
“I knew right away,” Keyes said, “that the message had got through.”
American Predator Page 11
