In the army, he tried LSD twice, but only hallucinated lights, never voices. Then he tried cocaine, which he loved. He snorted a hundred dollars a day in coke for weeks and then stopped cold turkey. He didn’t like the way it was making him feel, out of control. He wanted to stay in control.
Drinking was different. Keyes really took to alcohol. It relaxed him and made it easier to talk. He began drinking fairly regularly, then every night. He didn’t think he had a problem, because he could go weeks without alcohol while training, but there were a few times, he said, when he got blackout drunk. He got a DUI in the army, not long after he got back from Egypt, arrested on post by the military police. Losing control was still a concern, Keyes said, but he quickly built a high tolerance and was careful not to drink around his family, afraid he’d let something slip about the things he had done.
Could he mean things he had done before the army? He never clarified, but from what he had said so far, it seemed his psyche had split long before fourteen years ago.
On base, Keyes began watching football games with the other guys and learning everything he could about the game and the players. Someone took him to his first rock concert, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stone Temple Pilots at Seattle’s KeyArena. He was still involved with the girl in Colville, who knew none of this. In fact, despite this chaste long-distance relationship—they had never had sex—they had recently become engaged. That moment was the first they had ever kissed. She was a virgin who wanted to wait until marriage, and Keyes told her he felt the same way.
He was already very good at lying. His fiancée did not know that Keyes was out looking for other women, ones willing to have sex, and that he had been with at least one prostitute.
There was something else Keyes kept from her: He was bisexual. He spoke of this in his psychiatric evaluation as something he always knew and accepted about himself. Only Kimberly ever found out, he said, and that was because he got sloppy after drinking too much one night and cruising online. She found those chats on his computer and confronted him, but that was all he would say about that.
In late 2000, still engaged, he met another woman online. Tammie.
She was ten years older, had an eight-year-old son from a previous marriage, and lived less than ten miles from his army base in Neah Bay, a postage-stamp-sized reservation in Washington State.
They had their first date, lunch, in early December. Tammie recalled seeing Keyes for the first time and being unimpressed. She was pretty and voluptuous. He was lanky, with a narrow face and large nose. He wore small, wire-rimmed glasses and seemed like a nerd. He said he went by Iz. He was white and she was half Native American, half black.
They hit it off. Lunch turned into a drive and then dinner and a movie. They bonded over their traumatic childhoods. Tammie had grown up in Neah Bay without plumbing or electricity and knew the deprivation and humiliation, what it was to never feel clean enough, worried that others were snickering over poor personal hygiene that you, a child, had little control over. She knew what it was to be raised in squalid conditions yet surrounded by a breathtaking landscape, emerald trees and water of the clearest blue. She knew how this could comfort and could hurt.
Her home life was so chaotic and violent that Tammie wound up cycling through multiple foster homes. By seventeen she was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
But Tammie never felt sorry for herself. She tried hard at school, made friends, worked for the tribe from age thirteen, and tried to build a good life. Her optimism and independence were attractive to Keyes. He was surprised to find an older woman out in the real world, not part of his parents’ lunatic fringe, who had such a similar backstory. He had nothing to feel ashamed of with her. For the next two months, he and Tammie were inseparable.
Keyes never shared with her his white supremacist past. Nothing in his demeanor, nothing he said, ever caused her suspicion.
They had other things in common. They both loved heavy metal and hard-core slasher films, but were most bound by lust and alcohol. Despite Tammie’s time in recovery, she drank with Keyes, a lot. The sex was amazing. The best lover, hands down, I have ever had, Tammie said.
At the end of eight weeks she was pregnant. She called Keyes at Fort Lewis. She knew his reaction could go either way.
I’m not ready for this, Keyes told her. I think you should get an abortion.
Tammie was heartbroken. She wanted this baby, and she wanted him.
I’m going to have it, she said. So just forget about me and move on with your life.
She had no idea there was another woman in Colville.
* * *
—
In a journal entry dated September 25, 2000, Keyes wrote that for all his guilt, he also felt relieved on the day he left his parents. On October first, he made a down payment on an engagement ring, and picked it up on October 10.
He did not write about the proposal, but the girl in Colville said yes. The last known entry about her is dated November 4, 2000.
His ex-fiancée, in talking to agents, filled in the rest. In spring of 2001, she said, after visiting Keyes at Fort Lewis, she felt something was off. He made it clear that he didn’t want her meeting any of his army buddies. He would tell her he wouldn’t be able to call for days, that he was off on a training exercise, then call her incessantly. Or weeks would pass when she wouldn’t hear from him, even though she knew he was on base, because she’d reach his commanding officer and he would tell her: Yes, he’s here, he’s fine, I have no idea why he’s not calling you back.
They were due to be married in August or September. Keyes had told her he was depressed, but in May he told her more, that she didn’t really know who he was. He had slept with someone else, and he no longer believed in God.
He did not tell her about Tammie, who he had begun seeing again. He had changed his mind about the abortion. He felt she was his best shot at a stable life.
Keyes also did not tell her that Tammie, unlike his fiancée, never really held him to account. Tammie never called him on his obvious lies, like when he’d claim to be working late but come home wasted, or ask him why he was talking to other women online, or ask where he’d been after he’d disappeared for days at a time. Life was pretty easy.
And he had thought about becoming a dad a lot. He thought he would be good at it. He had practically raised all his younger siblings; part of him was a natural caretaker. He liked cooking and cleaning. He liked little kids. This would be a chance to break the cycle, to give a child all the care and attention he never got.
And a child who was part Native American, part black, would be yet another rebellion.
So he left his fiancée and went back to Tammie, who had never stopped loving him. And of course, she didn’t ask him what he had been thinking all that time or why he had left in the first place.
* * *
—
That July, Keyes was honorably discharged from the army and the expecting couple set up house on the reservation. Keyes got a job in Parks and Recreation, an outsider hired out of goodwill toward Tammie. Their three-bedroom, one-bathroom rental was yet another dilapidated house, but Keyes spent months fixing it up. He made sure Keaton, her son from a previous relationship, felt included—not threatened by a new baby, or this new man living with his mom. Keyes was sensitive to this small boy’s anxieties, and over time Keaton would come to accept and love Keyes as a father figure.
That wasn’t to say that their family life was harmonic; far from it. His time in the army, especially his six months in Egypt, had made Keyes insufferable on the topics of American foreign policy and economic injustice. He would hector Tammie and her friends about how unsophisticated they were, how ill informed and ill traveled, how they were just like the worst of America, caught up in superficiality and materialism while entire populations lived in extreme poverty. It was not lost on Tammie that she and Keyes knew exactly what ex
treme poverty was like. But he would become so smug and superior she’d just let him talk himself out.
Tammie began to see his insistence on tending to all the housekeeping for what it was, control. Keyes always needed to be in control—except at the end of the day, every day. That’s when he began drinking, far more than he had during their brief courtship. Now he was putting away a bottle of wine, a fifth of Jim Beam, and a six-pack of beer every night. Sometimes when he was drunk, he would tell her things that didn’t make sense to her. “I’m a bad person,” he would say. “I have a black heart.”
She refused to believe it. This was his childhood trauma talking, she thought. Even when he began marking himself with satanic imagery, branding an upside-down cross on his chest and getting a pentagram tattooed on the back of his neck, Tammie rationalized it as a delayed reaction to his religious upbringing. His parents had driven him to it, Tammie thought, his mother especially. She could hear the condescension and piety dripping through Heidi’s voice whenever she called, reciting Old Testament invective. Heidi had no plans to meet Tammie and Tammie didn’t see that changing, not even once the baby was born.
This was another area that was off-limits with Keyes: his parents. He almost never mentioned his father and clearly had a complicated relationship with his mother. He yearned for Heidi’s approval even as he felt contempt for her choices. His childhood, too, remained a mystery to Tammie. He rarely described anything so detailed—a story, an experience, a significant moment—that she could picture in her mind’s eye, evoke the boy he was and what had helped him survive.
An aperture opened briefly one night while the couple watched a true-crime special. The subjects were Cheyne and Chevie Kehoe, who were fugitives even before cable news began playing and replaying dashcam footage of a highway shootout between the brothers and two police officers who had attempted to arrest them. Eventually the Kehoes were captured, and in 1998, after receiving a sentence of twenty-four years, Cheyne implicated his brother in the Oklahoma City bombing, claiming Chevie was Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice. Chevie denied it and was never charged.
One year later, Chevie was convicted in the 1996 triple homicide of a young family, including an eight-year-old girl, and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.
I know them, Keyes said. I grew up with them.
Tammie was stunned. The Kehoes were terrifying. She wanted to know: Were you friends? Were they part of your church? Were they violent? Did you believe the same things? Did you ever do anything bad with them?
Keyes would only give Tammie vague answers and shoulder shrugs. He made it very clear: I don’t want to talk about this. And not wanting to get into a fight, Tammie let it go.
* * *
—
Early in the morning of October 31, 2002, Tammie and Israel’s daughter was born. This was one fight Tammie had not backed down from: she insisted on a hospital birth, and Keyes went along even though, he said, he had birthed enough lambs growing up to deliver a baby.
But once Tammie went into labor, Keyes was a wreck. He was by her side the whole time, and when their daughter came into the world, Tammie saw it with her own eyes. His entire being shifted. “I saw his life change when she was born,” Tammie said.
Two weeks later, on November 13, Keyes got word that his father had died. The circumstances would remain murky, and even Tammie would not know much, but as best the FBI could piece together the Keyes family had been traveling by train—flying was against their new Amish belief system—from Maine to Indiana, where they were relocating yet again. At some point during the trip, Jeff became ill and his condition worsened rapidly. He had long suffered from a thyroid disorder that could have been treated medically, but again, medicine was forbidden. Jeff deteriorated to the point where the train’s staff intervened and told the family: You have got to get off this train and get this man to a hospital.
The Keyes family was removed from the train, but it’s unclear whether Jeff ever saw an emergency room. It’s doubtful. No record of his death exists—no obituary, no death certificate the FBI could find, no gravesite. All Tammie recalls is Keyes flying to Maine for the funeral.
Whether there was ever a funeral in Maine is unknown.
Keyes never spoke of his father with Tammie or anyone else, really. A few of his army buddies got the distinct sense that Keyes and some of his siblings had been abused by Jeff. One recalled Keyes telling a younger sister, about to run away from home, to stay put, that she was too sheltered to go it alone. If worse comes to worst, Keyes told her, I will come and get you.
Payne and Goeden, too, would also wonder. That Keyes never spoke of Jeff implied, paradoxically, that Jeff had a profound impact on Keyes, likely a bad one. They would always wonder if Keyes had been abused by him. Payne, on nothing more than his gut, would always wonder if Keyes had anything to do with his father’s untimely death. That there was no record of Keyes near his father in the months and weeks prior to his demise, Payne knew, meant nothing.
* * *
—
After his trip back east, Keyes returned to Tammie. He seemed fine, focusing all his attention on the baby. He would let Tammie sleep in and change their daughter’s diaper, feed her, and take her to day care. Both Tammie and Keyes needed to work now, and Tammie’s job with the reservation’s Education Department demanded a lot of overtime.
When their daughter was eight months old, things began to fray. The baby developed a serious respiratory infection, and they fought over how best to treat it. Then Tammie, who had suffered severe abdominal pain since giving birth, was diagnosed with uterine cancer and forced to have a hysterectomy. Everything that had once seemed so perfect was now so tenuous. Tammie could have died. Now she was entering menopause in her early thirties. Would Keyes, so much younger than her, stick around?
Doctors had given Tammie opiates for postsurgery pain, and she found they also helped with her anxiety. She became increasingly reliant on the drugs, and it was easy to tell herself that since Keyes was so good with their daughter, it was fine if she slept in or nodded out. He really loved the toddler phase, picking out clothes, braiding his little girl’s hair, packing her lunch. Tammie couldn’t see it then, but she was outside the family now. Keyes had effectively taken on the role of a single father.
There was, for Keyes, an unspoken upside to Tammie’s numbness. Now she really never knew where he was or what he was doing. The worse she got the more freedom he had. It was a fine line, what was good for him and what was safe for the baby. He watched Tammie’s calibrations carefully.
By 2003, Tammie was worsening and Keyes withdrew. He was done. In the summer of 2004 he took their daughter and moved to a nearby house on the reservation. A part of him would always love Tammie, but he would not expose his daughter to chaos.
Among the tribe, Keyes was a catch—a hard worker, talented, able to fix anything, devoted to his child. He dated at least three women in Neah Bay before meeting Kimberly Anderson, a travel nurse living in Port Angeles, on a dating website in 2005.
At forty-one, Kimberly was older than Tammie. She was financially successful, independent, and well traveled, a real threat to any chance Tammie had at winning Keyes back. And Tammie wanted to reconcile badly. The more it seemed Keyes would truly leave the reservation, the more Tammie self-medicated, and she created her own worst fear: Driving while high, she crashed her car in Neah Bay. Tammie was sentenced to twenty-five days in jail and two months of inpatient rehab, and if she had ever had a flicker of a chance with Keyes, she had just extinguished it for good.
But Keyes, out of concern or self-interest—probably both—allowed Tammie to believe they still might work it out. Once she got out of rehab, Tammie began coming around his house more often, partly to see the baby, partly to see Keyes, and even though she knew he was still seeing Kimberly, they began sleeping together again. That fall, Tammie assumed they would celebrate their daughter’s birthday t
ogether, but the night of, Keyes surprised her and said he’d already made plans to see Kimberly. Tammie stifled her hurt. If you want to go, she told him, you should go.
He went.
Desperate, Tammie snooped online and found Kimberly’s work address in Port Angeles. She made the nearly two-hour drive one afternoon and left a vicious little tell-all note on Kimberly’s windshield.
Kimberly didn’t engage. Tammie had no idea what was really going on until one day in late 2006 or early 2007, when Keyes told her that Kimberly was moving to Anchorage and had asked him to join her. He wanted to go. He was burned out on Neah Bay. He needed a change. There was no chance he and Tammie would ever be a couple again.
Tammie had one last move, her checkmate. Their child. I won’t allow you to take her, she said. So now you have to choose. Some woman you met online? Or your daughter?
Keyes wasn’t prepared for Tammie to fight him in court, but this had at least one positive outcome: To prove she was a fit parent, Tammie really had to get sober. She began functioning better. And this, ironically, allowed Keyes to say to her: Okay, you win. You can have custody. I am going to Alaska to start over with Kimberly.
It was the first time Tammie saw this side of Keyes—cold-blooded. He outmaneuvered her. There was really no fighting him. He was going to do whatever he wanted.
Tammie was devastated. She recalled him driving away, for good, on March 1, 2007. But even the best memories are fungible, and all that is known for sure is that at twenty-nine years old, Israel Keyes moved to Alaska on March 9 of that year. Immigration records showed him crossing through the Alaska Highway and telling US officials he was moving to the state, and that’s backed up by his journal entry for that same day. “Get keys and move to new house,” he wrote.
American Predator Page 19
