They begged. Bill needed his medicine. They had no money. They hadn’t even seen his face. If he’d just let them go, he could take the car, the little cash they had—everything. They’d never tell a soul.
Oh, don’t worry, Keyes told them. This is just a kidnapping for ransom. I’m bringing you to a drop house. Other people will take it from there. You’ll be fine.
Inside his backpack was a pan, water bottles, fifty feet of coiled nylon rope, duct tape, latex gloves, and that small propane stove.
* * *
—
It was around 4:00 A.M., quiet and dark, the road and sky horizonless when Keyes pulled the Saturn up to an abandoned farmhouse off Route 15. That had been the reason for his drive earlier that day, to look at houses for just this moment.
The house he’d settled on was empty, a FOR SALE sign staked in the brown grass.
“I always stop at empty houses,” Keyes said. “Especially if they have FOR SALE signs.”
This one was an old-school farmhouse, ancient, two stories, falling apart, set back on a hill from the main road and partly obscured by a large tree. Forbidding, even in broad daylight as he’d walked right inside, through the decrepit screened-in porch, sure that no one had lived here for a long, long time.
He was right. The living room had only a couch, a recliner, and a fifty-year-old console TV. Otherwise the house was largely free of furniture. Most of the inside doors were off their hinges and propped up against walls. Boilers had been left in more than one room. The basement, aside from a shovel and some garbage, was empty. Up in one bedroom were two mattresses stripped bare on a bed frame. A gaping hole in the roof shot right through the second floor down to the living room, as if a cannonball had been dropped from above.
This house was perfect.
* * *
—
When Keyes took people, he was acutely attuned to their animal response: the acid flush of adrenaline flooding the veins, color draining from faces, pupils dilating in fear. He could smell it in their sweat. He liked to extend that response as long as possible.
In tonight’s setting, he’d imagined his victims bound in a car, driven into the rural blackness, the only light for miles around coming off the headlights as they came closer and closer to a place they’d never leave. Down the road was a police car, parked about a hundred yards away. Keyes imagined his captives catching a glimpse of that car and having hope.
* * *
—
Keyes cut the lights and ignition, leaving Lorraine tied in the front seat. He marched Bill through the basement’s outdoor entrance and down the stairs, tying him to a stool within minutes. Impassively, Keyes walked up and outside.
There was Lorraine, out of the car, standing up.
She saw him. She ran as fast as she could, straight toward Route 15, but Keyes was faster. He tackled her and dragged her back to the house, pushing her up the stairs and into the bedroom, the one with the holes in the roof and the floor. He couldn’t believe it: She almost got away. This made him angrier.
He strapped Lorraine’s arms and legs to the bed with duct tape, then wrapped a rope around her neck and under the mattress, tying it off with a compound knot. She fought the whole time.
Shouts came from the basement, echoing through the house.
Where’s my wife? Where’s my wife?
Keyes checked his knots: secure. He grabbed his knife—the one he had on him in Texas, he said—his .40-caliber revolver and his water bottle. He went down to the basement.
Why the water bottle?
I’m not sure I want to get into that, Keyes said.
Bill was partway free, the stool in pieces. The only light came from Keyes’s headlamp, the sight of Bill thrashing around as if under a strobe light.
Why are you doing this? Bill asked him. You don’t need to do this. Just leave and we’ll never tell. You haven’t done anything that bad yet. Why not just go?
Now Keyes felt rage. Bill wasn’t just disrupting his plans. He was fighting back hard. He was actually managing to shove Keyes around.
Where was the abject fear? How was Keyes on the verge on losing control?
“When things got physical . . . That pissed me off,” Keyes said. “Because there’s a very specific way I want things done, very specific way I want things to happen, and I have the whole thing planned out, I have everything I need to do it.”
What were his plans for Bill?
“I’m not going to say what I was going to do to him.”
Investigators didn’t need to hear it. They knew: Keyes had planned to rape Bill too.
“And so when somebody messes up that plan—it kind of surprised even me,” Keyes said, “that I lost control that way.”
He hit Bill with a shovel he’d found in the basement, but Bill didn’t go down. It took at least one more hit to knock him to the floor.
Keyes ran upstairs. The propane stove he had set up had fallen through the hole in the bedroom floor. He panicked. The house was dry wood. It wouldn’t take much for it to flame up fast.
He raced down to the living room and retrieved it, then back upstairs and went through his options.
He couldn’t shoot Bill with his .40 caliber, he said. It would make too much noise. But he had a 10-.22 upstairs, loaded with a 10-round magazine and equipped with a silencer. He grabbed that and flew down to the basement, where, incredibly, Bill was back up on his feet and yelling.
Keyes said he just started firing, like a reflex. He shot Bill in the arms, head, neck, and chest.
Bill Currier was still standing. Keyes had never seen anything like it.
Then, with his last breath, Bill fell to the floor. His eyes were closed.
Unnerved, Keyes stood there for a moment. He took the silencer off his gun. He went outside to have a cigar and pull himself together. This night was going sideways.
* * *
—
If Keyes was so careful about not leaving any DNA behind, what did he do with his cigar butts—here and in the Curriers’ backyard?
Never a problem, Keyes said. As long as you crush them up good with your foot, they just look like any other leaves on the ground. He let Lorraine smoke that night too, he said, in between what he did to her.
What was that?
Keyes went back inside and upstairs. It started raining again, and he remembered water pouring in through that hole. He lifted some of the freestanding doors and covered the bedroom windows, which faced the road.
Then he boiled water on the propane stove.
What was that for?
Keyes chuckled. “I don’t know if I want to get into that today,” he said.
He cut off Lorraine’s clothes with his knife, Lorraine still fighting. He gagged her with paper towels and duct tape and raped her twice, using condoms both times. During the second rape, he said, he choked Lorraine until she lost consciousness.
He wasn’t ready to kill her yet, Keyes said. But these investigators had seen enough to know that Keyes was trying to reassert his dominance here. Bill had emasculated him.
In this scenario, Keyes was supposed to be God.
* * *
—
How much time elapsed Keyes didn’t say, but once Lorraine came to, he untied her and brought her down to the basement, where he sat her on a bench and presented his final scene: her husband, shot to death, lying in his own blood.
There was so much blood, Keyes said. That wasn’t a mistake he usually made.
He put on his pair of leather batting gloves. Then he stood behind Lorraine Currier and strangled her with a rope. Even after he felt the life go out of her, he needed to make sure; this couple, though older and sick, were tougher than Keyes could have imagined.
He wrapped a zip tie around Lorraine’s neck and pulled. Nothing.
Keyes was running
out of time now. He dragged Lorraine’s body over to Bill’s and cut off their restraints. He poured Drano over their hands and faces, bagged each of their bodies in two fifty-five-gallon trash bags, then rolled their remains over to the basement’s southeast corner, piling garbage and wood on top. He was in such a rush he left all his shell casings on the basement floor.
The sun was up, people traveling Route 15 on their way to work. He had planned to burn the house with the bodies inside but it was too late. Not really a problem—he was sure that whoever bought this house would do it for the property and tear down or torch it. The smell from the basement would be so putrid it would keep the most curious at bay—plus, the likely assumption would be that a wild animal wandered in and died. No, he was not worried about anyone finding the remains.
Keyes grabbed most of his stuff and drove the Curriers’ car to the nearby Rite-Aid parking lot, where he’d left his rental the night before. He left the green Saturn as far from surveillance cameras as he could and walked to his own car, head down and covered with a hoodie. Keyes got in and left the state, headed up to Maine.
* * *
—
Six hours, start to finish.
The investigators were stupefied. Why would he do this? Keyes didn’t understand.
“I don’t consider myself that different than hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. Look at the pornography they’d found on his computer: bondage, S&M, gay, transgender. Did they really think he was the only person on earth attracted to that stuff?
“I just take it to the next level,” Keyes said. “The sexual fantasies, the money, the adrenaline rush . . . Once you get started, there’s nothing like it.”
Payne thought of a documentary he’d seen the other night about ambush predators: animals that kill with lightning speed and vanish just as fast.
That’s what this guy is, Payne realized. A true ambush predator.
All those gruesome details had given them another insight: the similarities between what Keyes did to Lorraine and Samantha. Both had rope tied around their necks. Both had been bound and gagged almost identically, down to stuffing their mouths with paper products used, typically, to clean. He allowed Lorraine and Samantha to smoke with him. He used a knife on both and raped each of them twice, the same exact way.
In this regard, an MO was surfacing. To a lesser extent, there were similarities with the Curriers’ ATM card too. The couple had told Keyes there was only a hundred dollars in their account, and he believed them. He decided it wasn’t worth the risk, an admission that meant he knew he could be tracked that way.
As with Samantha, Keyes put hundreds of miles between himself and the crime scene within hours of killing and hiding the remains, hopscotching through multiple states in a compressed time frame. His actual itinerary, it turned out, was even more complicated than he had led them to believe. He always had a plan.
On this trip, he had flown from Anchorage to Seattle to Chicago and, as he’d said, driven to Indiana to visit family, then to New York and Vermont. But after killing the Curriers, he also went to New Hampshire, where he visited a campground and went deep into the woods, burning most of their belongings. Then he drove to Maine to visit his brothers, and on the way home drove back through Vermont—right past the Curriers’ home. He was satisfied to see the police, clueless and flummoxed, investigating.
Oh, and one other thing: Keyes was also aware that a witness had come forward, claiming to have seen a white man with long brown hair driving the Curriers’ car. He had seen the police sketch but wasn’t worried. It bore very little resemblance to him.
Before Payne could absorb the enormity of it all, Keyes offered a little more. He had another story to tell if they were interested.
About the curious incident his mother had described to investigators: that time he went missing in Texas.
EIGHTEEN
The town, he thought, was called Alto. A-L-T-O. Once again, up came a map.
Five days after the Currier confession, Keyes was back at the US Attorney’s Office. He had reason to talk about Texas: He knew the FBI already had some information about his time there, and he knew he had been getting sloppy. He wasn’t always turning his cell phone off. He was using credit cards and ATMs. And there was all that marked money in his rental car, the dye pack exploded after what was clearly a bank robbery, seized upon his arrest. Keyes knew that they knew the National Bank in Azle, Texas, had been robbed during Keyes’s time there. Bell had gone to Bandit Tracker, the website that catalogs surveillance images of bank robbers, and found a masked man who looked like Keyes robbing that bank. And guess what else was on Keyes’s laptop? Links upon links to Bandit Tracker.
In a conversation the week before, Keyes had reiterated his motive for confessing. “The bottom line,” he said, “is everybody sitting in this room wants the same thing. You want all the information I can give you. I want to give you all the information I can reasonably give you. You want me to be punished and I want to be punished. I’d like to try and make it happen, because that’ll make it easier on everybody. I’m not a patient person. I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere more than five or six years. I get bored easily. So you can see why sitting in jail year after year, waiting for this stuff to resolve, is not really that attractive to me.”
Payne’s and Bell’s suggestions, so far, were working. Keyes believed it was smarter to control his narrative and build goodwill before the FBI discovered anything else. He needed that execution date.
“You already have a lot of information about the bank robbery in Texas,” Keyes said. “If you want, I can give you arson in Texas. I burned a house down. But I want a cigar for it.”
He laughed. Bell had come prepared, a box of Wild ’n Mild at the ready.
* * *
—
One of the things Keyes liked to do in Alaska was pull up small towns on his computer, ones all over the Lower 48, out-of-the-way places that had about three or four different routes in and out. Towns that rarely saw crime and had inexperienced police.
Next, Keyes would research how many banks were in any given area and how many surveillance cameras each bank probably had. He preferred small banks, which often had limited surveillance, little infrastructure, and were completely unprepared for an armed robbery. He would research the best place to park and how far each bank was from the local police department, timing out his escape while evaluating what direction cops would most likely come from once the alarm was tripped.
Keyes was on a supersonic high after what he’d done in Alaska. It was all he could think about. Killing Samantha in his own backyard was the biggest, riskiest thing he’d ever done, and he had gotten away with it. He admitted that yes, he felt so emboldened he was commenting online, on the Anchorage Daily News website, using his own first name to offer theories as to why the police would never find Samantha Koenig.
No one suspected him, yet people were paying attention. He liked it more than he ever expected, this paradoxical anonymous recognition. He loved seeing an investigation play out in the news, he alone knowing the gap between what police suspected and what really happened. He was omnipotent. He felt an overwhelming urge to do something else immediately.
He had hoped that the family cruise would take the edge off. It had not.
“Did you take someone?” Bell asked.
“No,” Keyes said.
Bell was skeptical. Two days missing just to rob a bank? Not likely. But Bell kept that to himself.
Okay, he said. So what did you do?
Drove around, Keyes said.
“What all did you find to do?” Bell asked again. “You found the house to burn?”
“Yeah,” Keyes said. “I was thinking about taking someone too.”
Once again, Bell’s instincts were right.
“I was looking for an abandoned house,” Keyes said, “and I was looking for out-
of-the-way ATMs. I was going to grab somebody from an ATM and take them to the house. But there were a lot of cops in Texas so I guess I chickened out a little bit on that. I don’t know.”
Bell thought Keyes was lying here. He may not have taken someone from an ATM, but he took someone. Keyes insisted he did not.
“I didn’t have my gun with me, the one I usually bring. You’ll find two of them in New York.”
Another kill kit to find.
“With the silencer?” Bell asked.
“Not the silencer but those 10-.22s,” Keyes said. “Normally if I’m going to do something like, broad daylight, that crazy”—e.g., crazy things are normal to me—“then I have one of those. They’re like a sawed-off .22 rifle basically, and I carry them under my coat. My logic being that if I ever did get caught in the act, and if it’s a small enough town, and I have, if I have one of those sawed-off .22s, they’re really accurate. And I have like a hundred rounds in different magazines for them, and usually I have a scope or a sight on them, so . . . I was never planning on being taken alive. Let’s put it that way.” He laughed.
Bell wouldn’t let his suspicion go.
“But when you left on this trip your intention was to find a house, take somebody, use the ATM, and then the bank ended up being what you did because the other didn’t work out? Or did you plan on robbing banks?”
“I didn’t plan on doing anything in Texas,” Keyes said. “If I had stuck with my plan when I left Alaska, the plan was to bury the guns somewhere.”
“So when you were out there looking,” Bell said, “you didn’t find anybody that you had an opportunity to—”
“Well,” Keyes said, “it was one of those things.”
Bell was wearing him down.
“I got there and . . . we had just got back from vacation”—the cruise—“and I was thinking that would mellow me out. I was thinking about banks, I guess, a little bit, but I don’t think I was thinking seriously—it was one of those things like where if I found the ideal one, a one-horse town with one bank in it and virtually no risk, then I was thinking I might do it.”
American Predator Page 15
