American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  The FBI had no say in attorney-client relations, but they could talk to Keyes about other possible crimes, because Curtner only represented him on charges related to Samantha Koenig. All Keyes had to do was forgo his lawyer and say he was representing himself in other cases.

  Payne set the next interrogation for less than twenty-four hours later, Friday, April 6.

  This boded well. Keyes would be limited to talking only about another victim. This was incredible movement, two confessions in less than one week.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning Payne, Doll, Russo, and Feldis sat at a conference table at the US Attorney’s Office, Keyes at the head.

  Feldis, like an unwieldy bull, led off. He rambled about Samantha and about everything the investigators had done so far. He tried to threaten Keyes. You only have leverage now, Feldis said, because you have information. But if we find another body, or investigators somewhere across the country find one—and we know how much you like to travel—we won’t be able to control it. We won’t be able to control local cops and we won’t be able to control the media. You’ll lose all your power here.

  Keyes didn’t buy it. “They won’t find enough,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Feldis said. “I don’t know that. I’m not bluffing you.”

  Feldis told Keyes he had maps of his travels. This meant nothing to Keyes. Maps? So what? They’d never put together the way he traveled. He didn’t travel like other people.

  But Feldis would not be humbled. “I’m never going to bluff you, Israel, okay? I’ve got maps that I know come up with a bunch of other states. I’ve got Washington, Texas, Utah, Montana, I’ve got like—I can’t list them out for you. I didn’t bring them all here today.”

  “Here’s. The deal.” Keyes spoke now with contempt. “I know what you have, because I know you have the computer. I’m only going to give you the dots that I know you’re going to eventually connect. And frankly, if I hadn’t been picked up in Texas, that computer would be in the landfill right now. So I’m telling you—I’m not going to talk about those things unless I know that I’m going to get what I want.”

  “Tell me what you want,” Feldis said. “I don’t know what you want.”

  “I want an execution date.”

  The room went silent. This was the exact opposite of Keyes’s initial demand—no death penalty. After a few beats, Feldis sought to clarify.

  “For you?”

  “Yes. I want this whole thing wrapped up and over with as soon as possible. I mean I could end up in federal Supermax prison somewhere for the rest of my life, which is what—if my attorney had his way, that’s where he wants me to go, and that’s not what I want.”

  It all made sense now. Curtner was among the staunchest anti-death-penalty defense lawyers in the state, if not the country. He would never be party to a client’s wish to be put to death even if guilty, as Keyes was. And Keyes had given this a lot of thought. He wanted to make that clear, to the people in this room and to anyone else listening, that he was of sound mind.

  “I want this whole thing done in a year,” he said. “From today, start to finish, basically. I’ll tell you about everything, I’ll give you—plead guilty to whatever, I’ll give you every single gory detail you want, but that’s what I want.”

  He had a very simple reason. “I want my kid to have a chance to grow up,” Keyes said. “She’s in a safe place now. She’s not going to see any of this. I want her to have a chance to grow up and not have all this hanging over her head. If I end up in prison for who knows how many years—ten years, twenty years down the road—I know how this works. You’re going to keep looking, you’re going to keep going back, and I don’t want news about me. And frankly I already talked to my attorney about this, there’s no—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Feldis said. It was against the law for the prosecutor on this case to have any information about constitutionally protected conversations between Keyes and his attorney; Feldis should have removed himself from the room right then. But he would not. He would never. Keyes kept going.

  “There’s no jury in the world, or in America, that if I went to trial and got convicted, there’s no jury in the US that would not vote for the death penalty. I already know that.”

  “I can help you with that,” Feldis said. “Give me something to start with.” He meant another body.

  “You already have something to start with.”

  Feldis said that Samantha wasn’t enough. “You give me a body, let’s move on that.”

  “Like I say, there’s only so many cards I’m going to play.”

  “Hold most of ’em back, Israel, hold most of ’em back. Give me something that I’m going to find anyway. Don’t let this take years and years.”

  “It’s not going to,” Keyes said. He sounded like a petulant teenager.

  Payne had enough. Feldis couldn’t see it, but Payne could: the opening. Keyes had something to give in exchange for something he wanted. Desperation was not the play here.

  “There’s a firestorm coming, Israel,” Payne said. His voice was low and gravelly. “Bosses get nervous. They’ll get out their FBI playbook—and I can tell you that there is one—and that playbook says we send out leads to all the field offices and they go and interview people and they put pictures in the media and then it takes on a life of its own. That gives us less control. If we have a card to play with those people, those bosses, to say, ‘Hey, we want to control this and do it a little quieter, and he is going to cooperate on this’—maybe there is something we can do to put the brakes on that.”

  Keyes looked at Payne, then sighed. He said nothing.

  Please no one rush to fill in this silence, Payne thought. Please.

  More than a minute went by.

  “All right,” Keyes said. “I’ll give you . . . two bodies. Two bodies and a name.”

  Seventeen

  In that very conference room moments later another map was pulled up, this one a Google Earth view of Burlington, Vermont. As Keyes had with Samantha, he wanted to tell this story backward, starting with the end.

  The Bureau’s top criminal profilers were listening in at Quantico, always. Whenever Keyes said something of interest, or an interrogator was on the verge of making a mistake or said the wrong thing, a text would come in and the room would vibrate with a low-level telltale hum:

  BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  Watching and listening from another room, Goeden and Nelson Googled “Missing couple, Vermont” and found a picture of Bill and Lorraine Currier. The photo was taken outside, under a tree. It looked like a picnic or a family gathering. They were dressed casually except for Lorraine’s corsage and Bill’s boutonniere. They were smiling, Bill’s arm around Lorraine.

  They sent the picture to Feldis.

  “Are those the two people you killed?” Feldis asked.

  “Yup,” Keyes said.

  “Had you ever met them before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Had you run into them before?”

  “Nope.”

  The Curriers looked to be in their fifties, an average, middle-class couple easing into retirement. They were both overweight, but Bill especially was a big guy. It wouldn’t be easy to take and control one of them, let alone two.

  * * *

  —

  On June 2, 2011, Keyes flew from Anchorage to Seattle to Chicago, where he rented a car and began driving east. He was going to visit his brothers in Maine, he said, but along the way he stopped in Indiana for a couple of days, then at an old farmhouse he owned in upstate New York, then on to Burlington before reaching his final destination.

  Two days in another state? Jeff Bell made a note: Missing persons, Indiana, June 2011.

  Nelson made her own: They needed the address of that farmhouse.

  Five days later, on Jun
e 7, Keyes checked into the Handy Suites in Essex, Vermont. He said he had never been to Essex before.

  That afternoon, he went shopping at Lowe’s, then drove around a bit. He went fishing that day and the next in a national park, a three-day fishing license in his pocket. As the sun went down, he took a stroll around town. It was a beautiful spring night.

  As Keyes approached this part of the story, he became physically excited, bobbing his knees, jangling his shackles, rubbing against his armchair so hard he scraped a layer of wood clean off. This would become another tell, his signature expression of sexual excitement. A substitute, essentially, for masturbation. It would be the way investigators knew there was much truth to his story. Stories.

  * * *

  —

  On that night, his last in Essex, Keyes waited until the sun went down, then left his hotel on foot. He dreamed this scenario back in Anchorage, but like all his plans it also required improvisation. Challenging himself to greater degrees made each new experience that much more exciting.

  Keyes carried a backpack of supplies, some brought from home, some, like the portable camping stove, newly purchased at Lowe’s. He’d unearthed other supplies earlier that afternoon from a cache he’d buried in Vermont two years before.

  A cache? Feldis wanted to know what that meant.

  Several years back, Keyes said, he had taken a five-gallon Home Depot bucket and filled it with zip ties, ammunition, guns and silencers, duct tape, plus Drano to accelerate human decomposition—things like that—and buried it there. He had more buried all over the country. He’d get to that detail later. Maybe.

  It was around eight or nine o’clock now in Essex, raining and dark. Most people would be home from work. He wandered around with his cell phone off, battery out.

  As Keyes got deeper into his story, he went into another trance, his voice dropping two octaves and trembling.

  KEYES: [I] went across the road from the hotel and had an apartment complex there staked out. And I was waiting for someone to come in. Alone. I was actually looking for a guy. And it was pouring rain, big lightning storm, and there was a guy who came in. He was in a yellow V-dub Bug, a newer one. So I walked out of this little wooded area, and I was walking up behind his car—[I’m] walking along the line of cars toward his car and he kind of jumped out and he had like a newspaper over his head and he ran into the apartment to keep from getting wet. And he almost—he almost got it that night. If he had been about five seconds slower getting out of his car and going into his apartment, he would have been The One that night.

  Keyes was disappointed but not deterred.

  KEYES: So when that didn’t work out, I wasn’t worried about it. I was just walking around, and I think I went back to the hotel for a little while, to wait till after midnight. And there was nobody out that night, ’cause it was still raining off and on. I decided I was going to look for a house. With a couple in it.

  * * *

  —

  A little after midnight, about three hours after his aborted kidnapping, Keyes again left the Handy Suites. He was on foot. He found himself, five minutes later, looking at the house at 8 Colbert Street.

  The home was a simple ranch with an attached garage. He peered in the windows, walked around the backyard. He got the sense an older couple lived here, which was good, because he had another idea, but this one required a woman. There was an aboveground pool and a barbecue in the backyard, no toys or floaties, no sign of children or pets.

  Keyes interrupted his reverie. That was part of his code, he told them. No children. Or dogs. Dogs were just a hassle, but children were different.

  “The one thing I won’t do is mess with kids,” Keyes said.

  Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson were intrigued but unmoved.

  * * *

  —

  Keyes crept around the house, found the phone line and cut it: no alarm system. His work in construction, he said, helped him predict floor plans pretty easily. He found only one window-installed air-conditioning unit and figured that was the master bedroom.

  It faced the street.

  Keyes waited in the backyard, in the trees and the dark, as a next-door neighbor and his dog came in and out, the man smoking each time. That house had sensor lights. He wouldn’t go near it.

  It felt like an eternity, Keyes said, waiting for this guy to go to bed. In actuality, Keyes waited out there an hour, smoking a cigar himself, risking detection each time he inhaled, each time the tip lit up red then went to black, blinking like a light on a Christmas tree.

  Keyes was sure he hadn’t been spotted. He was wearing leather batting gloves and a backpack, dressed head to toe in black. Strapped to his skull was an unlit headlamp.

  Finally, at 2:00 A.M., the chain-smoking neighbor went in for the night.

  Keyes waited a while more to be sure. He would have about three hours before sunrise.

  He tied a cloth mask over the lower two thirds of his face, took a plastic patio chair from the back deck, and carried that to the side of the house. He climbed up, removed a ventilation fan lodged in the garage window, then hoisted himself through and set the fan down. A green Saturn sedan was parked inside. He unlocked the garage’s main door, which lead to the backyard. From there, he could come and go without making a sound. He grabbed a crowbar from the wall. A man lived here.

  What was Keyes doing? Was he planning to rob the house?

  No, Keyes said. “The main reason I was there was for them.”

  He opened the Saturn’s door and slid inside. He opened the glove box and found the car was registered to a Lorraine Currier. His hunches were proving right: a man and woman lived here.

  He unlocked the screen door to the kitchen, prying it open with his knife. “It’s a pretty low-quality lock on those storm doors,” he said.

  But Keyes was surprised to find the inner door locked too. When people have two doors, he said, they usually lock just one. This inner door had a dead bolt, which he could have broken with the crowbar, but that would have created too much noise and taken too long. Faster to just break one of the door’s windowpanes and open the lock from the inside.

  So he did.

  Keyes switched on his headlamp and found himself in the kitchen. It was a straight shot down the hallway and into the bedroom.

  The headlamp’s beam kept his field of vision narrow. He passed a birdcage with a blanket over it.

  The whole thing took six seconds, he said, from breaking in to the bedroom to getting the Curriers awake and zip-tied. A blitz attack, he called it.

  At first, Keyes said, Bill and Lorraine didn’t understand what was happening. It took a few seconds for them to fully wake and realize: This wasn’t a nightmare. A large masked man with a gun, a total stranger, was really in their bedroom.

  Keyes knew how they would react. He knew the tactical advantage that would give him.

  He turned his attention to Lorraine, demanding to know if there were any guns in the house. Yes, Lorraine said, a loaded .38 Smith & Wesson in her nightstand.

  Keyes was pointing his own gun at her, steady and assured. He opened her nightstand drawer and grabbed her .38.

  Lorraine had been sleeping in a T-shirt and shorts, Keyes said, but he took lingerie from her dresser drawer.

  Did he make her change clothes?

  “I don’t know if I want to go into that,” Keyes said.

  He did say that his motive with both Curriers was purely sexual. This completely defied a truism among BAU analysts: A couple like the Curriers taken at random is almost unheard of. A couple taken for sexual purposes? Also extremely unusual.

  Keyes ordered Bill and Lorraine to roll over on the bed, on their stomachs, and zip-tied their wrists while barraging them with questions: Do you have a safe? Other guns? Prescription drugs? Where’s your jewelry? ATM card? He demanded their PIN number and scratched it into the ca
rd’s surface, then grabbed two suitcases and began stuffing them with clothes and jewelry. He found some bottles of Vicodin and Percocet and took those too.

  At one point, while Keyes was stripping everything off the bed, Lorraine took her chance. She fought hard, attempting to roll herself onto the floor. Before she knew it, Keyes was grabbing her by the neck and smashing her face into the pillow. He threatened her the way he had Samantha: If you try that again, I won’t be happy.

  That really made him angry, Keyes said, the idea that these people weren’t taking him seriously.

  Lorraine went still, and Keyes went back to rummaging through their drawers, then riffled through a spare room where he found a military insignia called an Electric Strawberry. What a coincidence. Bill Currier had served in the same unit as Keyes, the Army’s 25th Infantry Division. Keyes mentioned that to Bill. He allowed Bill to think that this might affect the night’s outcome.

  After fifteen minutes, he told them they were all leaving the house. Mindful of the broken glass he’d left on the kitchen floor, Keyes made Bill and Lorraine put on their slippers. No blood trail. No DNA.

  He interrupted his story to brag a little. He never left physical evidence behind, ever. It was a point of pride. “I seriously doubt you’re going to find DNA or fingerprints anywhere,” Keyes said. As he had with Samantha, he wore leather batting gloves.

  Keyes marched the Curriers out to the garage, putting Lorraine into the front passenger seat, hands still zip-tied behind her back, and belted her in. He restrained Bill the same way in the back passenger seat, then put the garage’s ventilator fan back in the window and the crowbar back on its hook.

  He got in the driver’s seat. With the car’s interior dome light on, he saw both of them watching him. Yes, he was wearing a mask, but he knew they could see his eyes, could see that he was white with long brown hair in a ponytail.

  He slowly drove the Saturn out of the garage.