American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  But while in Texas, Keyes couldn’t stop thinking about Samantha.

  “I was checking the Alaska news a lot and I just got kind of amped up I guess, and decided I wanted to go out and do something. Preferably take someone. But . . . I don’t know.”

  “Did you take someone?”

  “No.”

  Feldis interjected. “Why not?” he asked. After all, Keyes told them he’d planned to go back to Vermont within the year and burn down the farmhouse where he’d left the Curriers. If Keyes was going to use arson to cover up a double homicide there, why not in Texas?

  Keyes shifted to minimizing.

  “I mean . . . it’s a pretty good way to cover up a burglary too,” he said. “When I was in Vermont, I was looking for a church to burn. That’s what I really wanted to do. And when I was in Texas I was looking at a lot of churches too.”

  Bell stopped him here. Why churches?

  “Oh, just . . . It’s like a personal thing. It’s not so much that I care, but . . . I had it in my mind that I was going to start using churches.”

  This wasn’t a surprise to Bell. He had spent a lot of time looking at Keyes’s computers, and Keyes had spent a lot of time looking at two kinds of real estate online: abandoned houses and remote churches. What was your plan with those? Bell asked.

  “Well, if it’s an out-of-the-way church, there’s usually nobody there on the weekdays. That’s what I was looking for in Vermont, was a church.”

  “To take the Curriers?” Bell’s tone was calm and low key.

  “To take someone to,” Keyes said. “Yeah.”

  Keyes thought about holding his victims, whoever they might be, in a small-town church, raping and torturing these strangers as they begged for their lives to a God who didn’t exist. Keyes would maybe stage their bodies on the altar, a tableau of sex and mortification waiting to be discovered by a priest, a nun, or better, the next day’s congregation. Or maybe he would just burn the church down with his victims in it.

  But, Keyes said, neither plan worked out.

  “Let me just—you said it was a personal thing,” Feldis said. “Does that come from the thing that your mom is involved in?” Feldis asked. “The religious group?”

  “Naw,” Keyes said. “It just has to do with my general—I mean I’m sure it has something to do with the way I was raised. But for the most part it’s just my general outlook on life and humanity, I guess.”

  Keyes would say no more about his childhood, and his refusal to discuss it convinced the team, Goeden and Nelson especially, that this was fertile ground. For these two investigators, the mystery of how Israel Keyes got this way was as compelling as discovering other victims.

  * * *

  —

  Back to the morning of February 13. Bell, Goeden, Russo, and Feldis wanted the full account, as promised, of his lost time in Texas. Heidi had said Israel snuck out of her house in Dallas and left a note on his bed, reading in part, “Gone to find a place to hide my guns.”

  That was true, Keyes said. He really did want to bury his guns.

  Caches in Texas, Bell wrote.

  Did this alarm his mother? His sisters?

  No, Keyes said. They all had guns.

  Anyway, he had flown down from Alaska with all the pistols he had—he wouldn’t say how many, or how he bypassed the TSA—and was looking to stash them somewhere. Maybe Texas, maybe near the Grand Canyon.

  “There were two reasons for that,” Keyes said. “One of them was, I was planning on leaving Alaska, and I knew I couldn’t drive them through Canada so—”

  The investigators’ phones began to buzz. Keyes traveled through Canada? He knew where he could and couldn’t travel with guns?

  “—I was going to leave them down in the States.”

  But, Keyes said, he didn’t immediately bury the guns. That night and the night after, he went looking for victims, driving around tiny towns in the northeastern part of the state. One town was Cleburne. The other was Glen Rose. He’d been looking at cemeteries.

  Bell knew about that too. They had found a MapQuest search for a Glen Rose cemetery on Keyes’s phone.

  “What did you go to the cemetery for?” Bell asked. “Is that a disposal site? An abduction site?”

  “Not an abduction site,” Keyes said. “Just somewhere to take somebody.”

  Take in this context, Bell realized, could also mean bring.

  Keyes spoke in a low voice now, rubbing his arms hard against his pants.

  “A lot of those cemeteries have maintenance sheds and stuff that are pretty easy to get into,” he said. And with any public outdoor space—campgrounds, trailheads, the mountains, riverbanks, lakes, cemeteries—it’s always way easier, he said, to explain what you’re doing there, especially in areas that happen to be remote.

  Churches and cemeteries. Birth and death. Celebration and grief. Hope and abandon.

  Next, Keyes said, he staked out some river trails. That’s when he saw her.

  Nelson Googled “Glen Rose TX river trails.” Up came the top two hits: the Paluxy River and the Dinosaur Valley State Park. Knowing how much Keyes loved state and national parks, there was a good chance it was the latter.

  “It was getting pretty late, and there was a woman that came, and she was going for a walk on the trails up and down the river,” Keyes said. “And I almost went after her. She had a big dog, like a mastiff or something. I was going to shoot the dog.”

  He thought about it: moving a woman and a large dog—too much trouble. He let them pass.

  Texas was proving harder than Keyes thought. People here were openly suspicious of outsiders. At least one person actually came right up to him while he smoked a cigar, right across from the bank he was about to rob, and asked who he was and what he was doing there.

  How he replied, Keyes didn’t say. It wasn’t enough to stop him, but Texans were living up to their image as straight-talking shitkickers. Also, too many people had guns! He said this in all seriousness: Almost no one took their personal safety for granted. “I was surprised that security is actually pretty tight,” Keyes said. “Most people have locked gates and so it took me awhile to find that place.”

  It was February 16, he said, when he found the house.

  “Probably the easiest way to find it is to do a Google search for ‘Fire, Alto, Texas,’” Keyes said.

  Kat Nelson didn’t find a fire in Alto, but there had been a house fire in Aledo, Texas, on February 16, 2012. It was easy to see how Keyes could mix up the names. Aledo was probably the one. She texted Bell.

  Goeden spoke up, her tone gentle. “How did you pick that house?”

  “It was a ways out of town,” Keyes said. “I couldn’t really tell if there were local police or not, but I figured if I started the fire, that would get them all away from town and then I’d hit the bank right after that.”

  An arson and a bank robbery on the same day, Bell thought. Hunting right before. By his own admission out of control. What were the chances this arson was used to cover up a body, just liked he’d planned in Vermont?

  While Keyes was proud of his crimes and his MO, he had made it clear from the outset: He was only going to give them information that they would inevitably discover themselves. If they somehow found a body without him, that would be their win, and he would confess. Otherwise his victims were his alone. It was strange for him to be talking about any of this. He never had and thought he never would.

  And he was ramping up his crimes, he said. For so much time, all he wanted to do was stay off the radar. He traveled like a ghost, leaving no digital footprint or cell tower ping. He lived all the way up in Alaska. A house burns down, fueled by accelerant, in a desolate part of Texas? Police are looking at the owner for insurance fraud. Someone goes missing? Police are looking at the victim’s friends and family. Maybe the person he kills isn�
��t even from, say, Texas. Maybe they’re on vacation from another state or another country. Who’s going to link him to that? Keyes knew that stranger abductions are rare. He knew his way of doing things was even more so.

  But now he found himself conceiving of elaborate crimes, ones that would make the news—not just local, national. That was why the churches. A serial killer targeting churches would cause a nationwide panic.

  Keyes said his urge for infamy built over time. For years he would only ever check media coverage of what he had done at airports or libraries, public computers only. But as his crimes became more brazen, news lasting not days or weeks but months or years, Keyes became frustrated. He wanted the world to know: In the history of monsters, he was a great. “I definitely got carried away with the publicity,” Keyes said.

  “And the Curriers were big news,” Goeden said. “Big news for that area.”

  “Yeah, they were,” Keyes said. “And I think that’s when it started. I just kept checking back on the story and getting kind of a kick out of . . . because obviously, I know what happened. And seeing the difference from their perspective versus my perspective, and then on top of that, when people would read the news story everyone wants to comment on their theories of what happened. And so I got really hooked on that too.”

  He could no longer wait. “I would be home late at night and be like, Wow, I wonder if there’s any more stories. A couple of glasses of whiskey and I’d be like, I’m going to check on that. And I’d do searches and read and start commenting on stuff. I knew that I was—I knew that I was getting stupid, I guess. But I was still planning ahead.”

  He still believed that he would never get caught.

  * * *

  —

  Keyes said he found the Aledo house while driving around and just broke in. “It was a mess,” he said. “Every room was packed. The place was a freaking fire hazard—they had like two or three freezers running around the house and extension cords running to everything. The place basically looked like it had just been abandoned.”

  This was interesting. Keyes was describing a house similar to where he took the Curriers. His vocation was building houses, but what he really wanted to do was burn them down.

  He found gas in the garage. He opened all the windows plus the attic door, then made a trail out of clothes and bedding, front to back, doused everything in gasoline, and set it all on fire.

  “It went up really fast,” Keyes said. He watched for a while, longer than he’d planned, hiding far back, near a church on a hill. The response to this fire was so much bigger than he’d hoped, cops and firetrucks and regular people rubbernecking, local news media speeding in while traffic backed up everywhere.

  Was this planned as a diversion—get all the first responders here so he could go rob a bank?

  Keyes was offended. “I didn’t need a diversion,” he said. Another contradiction. Just minutes earlier, Keyes said he considered that very eventuality.

  And he took advantage, driving half an hour north to the tiny town of Azle and robbing a bank, a takeover with a disguise and a gun, walking out with ten thousand dollars. “You got a lot of money in that bank robbery,” Bell said.

  “Not really,” Keyes said.

  “You’ve gotten more?”

  Keyes laughed.

  Over the course of this conversation, investigators noted that Keyes had accounted for what he did on February 13, 14, and 16, but had skipped over February 15 altogether.

  That was the day Keyes had been found next to his rental car, filthy and erratic after two days missing.

  “Did you actually get stuck in the mud somewhere?” Bell asked.

  “Yeah,” Keyes said. “I just—the longer I stayed out of Dallas, the longer I was down south, the more I was thinking I . . . wanted to do something else.”

  * * *

  —

  What happened in Texas in the early morning hours of February 15? By his own description, Keyes had been driving thousands of miles on very little sleep, fueled by adrenaline, watching the police, as he said, “running around like ants in a frying pan” trying to solve the crime back in Anchorage.

  All that time he went missing, Keyes said, was only to bury his guns. Bell remained skeptical. He was sure at least one kill kit was buried in Texas, probably more—Keyes’s family gave perfect cover for regular visits.

  Another thing: In searching Kimberly’s house, police recovered a piece of paper with random numbers listed: 5, 79, 105, 633, 1.5, 5, 5.

  Bell Googled them. Up came “Police frequency, Stephenville, Texas.” He pulled up a map of Stephenville—5 was the highway coming into it; 105 was the highway out.

  Then Bell Googled “1.5-5-5, Stephenville TX.” Up came the scanner frequency.

  Keyes told them the truth: He had planned these escape routes in advance, back in Anchorage, four thousand miles away. Stephenville was only an hour’s drive from Aledo and Cleburne, where Keyes had been found by his family. He had used his police scanner on that trip.

  “He took someone in Texas,” Bell said. “He had to. He wasn’t capable of stopping. I know it. I know it.”

  NINETEEN

  Missing persons, Texas, February 15, 2012.

  Jimmy Tidwell.

  * * *

  —

  Tidwell had been last seen in Longview, two hours outside of Dallas, on February 15, 2012. He was an electrician on the night shift, leaving work at 5:30 in the morning to head home.

  He was never seen again.

  Days later, police found Tidwell’s white Ford pickup truck parked five miles from his residence, near the intersection of I-315 and Farm to Market 95. There was no sign of forced entry or foul play. Nothing was found inside the vehicle except Tidwell’s eyeglasses lying on a seat. His cell phone, wallet, and keys were all gone. No clues or foreign DNA had been left behind.

  Nothing about Tidwell made him a high-risk victim. He was fifty-eight years old and married with two grown children. He had worked at the same company for ten years. He was close to his family. He was a punctual and reliable employee. In his spare time, he carved wood. He had no enemies, no dangerous pastimes, no criminal record.

  Jimmy Tidwell was an average American in every way. The notion that he would suddenly park his truck parallel to an interstate highway and walk off into the woods, or hitchhike somewhere to start a new life, was unfathomable.

  “I do not believe that he voluntarily, willingly left that truck he loved and walked away,” Tidwell’s sister said.

  The police didn’t either. They set off on a days-long manhunt. State and local law enforcement, mounted patrol, and canine units searched a five-mile radius deep in the woods. Friends and family joined in. A three-thousand-dollar reward was offered, one thousand dollars of that by his employers.

  Not a single clue.

  This would fit Keyes’s MO. Tidwell had been driving in the early morning hours when few other cars were on the road. Keyes said he liked to take people from one location, move their cars to another, and dispose of their bodies at a third site to confuse police, then disappear.

  Tidwell often wore a white hard hat on the job. The bank robber picked up on camera in Azle, Texas, the day after Tidwell went missing was wearing a white hard hat, long wavy chestnut hair flowing below.

  Keyes wore his hair shorter than that, but Tidwell’s hair looked just like the bank robber’s. And Keyes had let a tantalizing clue slip: While committing the Azle bank robbery, he hadn’t been wearing a wig. Bell and Russo, in their casual way, would broach the disguise with Keyes.

  “Where do you buy real hair?” Russo asked.

  Keyes knew there was nothing casual about this question. He went silent for quite a while.

  “You don’t have to buy real hair to get real hair,” Keyes said. He laughed.

  “You just take it, don’t ’cha?” Bell said.


  Keyes laughed again.

  “Hair is free. Everything’s free if you take it,” he said. “Well, famous last words. You’ve got to pay for it eventually.”

  TWENTY

  Over at the FBI’s offices, in what they now called the War Room, Jeff Bell tacked a large map of the United States to the wall. On it, he drew five big circles. The circumference of each was based on what they knew of Keyes’s travels: which city he flew into, where he rented a car, how many miles he put on that car over how many days. One circle went around Alaska. One went around Washington State. Another around Texas. One around Illinois and Indiana. The last went around the entire northeast: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine.

  Bell began with the trip Keyes took to Texas right after killing Samantha. Keyes had rented a car at a Thrifty in Houston and put 2,847 miles on it over ten days.

  “Worst-case scenario,” Bell said. “If he picked up that car and drove as far as he could, and still had that car back with 2,800 miles, what—what are we looking at, for areas where he could have killed somebody or robbed a bank?”

  To begin, Bell halved the mileage. It wasn’t scientific, but it was a starting point: half for Keyes to get where he was going, half to return. Using a compass, a pencil, and a string, Bell began drawing circles radiating 1,423.5 miles outside of Keyes’s known travels. When he finished, he stepped back and looked at the map in total.

  “This is unbelievable,” Bell said. He had drawn circles around thirteen states.

  A theory was coalescing. What if Keyes moved some of his victims through multiple states? Killed them in one, dumped them in another? That would make it nearly impossible for any local or state agency to find a victim. In confessing to killing the Curriers, Keyes said he had never settled on Vermont; it just worked out that way. “It could have been New York,” he said. “It could have been Maine. It could have been New Hampshire.”