American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  Yet he didn’t settle with Kimberly in Anchorage right away. Over the next three months Keyes traveled up and down the West Coast and into Mexico. He spent most of his time in California, ostensibly working in Oakland, Anaheim, San Diego, Martinez, Kettleman City, Napa Valley, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Calistoga, Long Beach, and Los Angeles. He traveled to Seattle and Tukwila, Washington. He crossed the border into Mexico at San Ysidro and San Diego and frequently visited Tijuana.

  And he had nothing to say to the doctor or the FBI about that either.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Now that Keyes had finally revealed parts of himself, investigators had a new challenge: Identify and locate victims without his help.

  Quantico had flown in two analysts to help Nelson. Their timeline was blooming.

  They went back to the teenage Keyes, in near isolation, training himself in the Colville woods. Investigators had to ask themselves: Could he have taken someone back then?

  * * *

  —

  Julie Harris went missing in 1996. She was twelve years old, five foot one and 115 pounds, a double amputee who wore prosthetic feet. She had won a gold medal in downhill skiing at the Special Olympics and was the most famous person in Colville.

  Julie left home early on the morning of March 3, wearing a black skirt and a sweater with pink-and-black stripes. She left behind the stuffed puppy she otherwise carried everywhere. She was never seen again.

  Initial suspicion fell on her mother’s live-in boyfriend, who had admitted to yelling at Julie the night before to finish her homework. But her mother insisted he was innocent, and he was never charged in connection with her disappearance.

  Police later reported that Julie had last been seen “with a man in a trench coat.” Keyes, nearly six feet tall by age fourteen, would have been eighteen years old.

  One month later, Julie’s prosthetic feet were found by the banks of the Colville River. In 1997 the rest of her remains were discovered three miles from Colville by children playing in the woods.

  Bell would ask Keyes about Julie Harris. A child with such a disability, literally unable to run away, would be a low-risk—and cowardly—target for a beginning serial killer.

  Investigators were also curious about another little girl who’d gone missing in Colville in late June 1997. Like Julie, Cassie Emerson had been twelve years old when she vanished. She had lived with her mom, Marlene, in a trailer and she was reported missing after their trailer was destroyed by arson, her mother’s body found inside.

  I’d start fires in the woods, Keyes had said. Arson covers up murder.

  As with Julie, police had no leads and very few suspects.

  Cassie’s remains, decomposed and ravaged by animals, were found the following April in the woods near Kettle Falls, a thirteen-minute drive from Colville. Police believed the same person killed Cassie and her mother.

  Neither case has ever been solved. Keyes left for Maupin, Oregon, in 1997, and the kidnapping and murders of little girls in Colville ceased.

  Keyes would never admit to killing either girl, but later he would tell investigators: The first thing I ever burned down was a trailer. And when his ex-fiancée really thought about it, she remembered something one of his relatives said to her after they broke up.

  “You were his last hope. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him.” She wondered at the time what that meant. Now the realization was dawning.

  At the end of the interview, agents asked if she had any questions for them. Yes, she said. “Did he kill those two little girls in Colville?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The psychiatric evaluation was filed with Kevin Feldis on Monday, April 29. The next afternoon, Feldis, along with two agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, secretly interviewed Keyes. Feldis never logged this interview with the court and it seems he planned to keep its contents and existence from Payne and his team. Exactly why is unknown, but the turf war was escalating.

  Almost immediately, Feldis blew it.

  * * *

  —

  Keyes began by asking about Vermont. He knew that FBI agents had been sent to the farmhouse and wanted to know if the Curriers’ remains had been recovered yet. More than three weeks had passed since he confessed to that crime.

  The FBI was beginning a search, that very morning, of a landfill in Coventry. Payne and Bell wanted to limit the amount of information they passed along to Keyes about this; the chances of finding Bill’s or Lorraine’s body in one hundred acres containing four hundred thousand tons of trash six months after the murders were, to put it mildly, not great.

  “So what is the deal with the Curriers as far as the investigation?” Keyes asked Feldis. His tone was as casual as if he were asking about the weather. “I mean, where are they at, the people back east?”

  “They haven’t found the bodies yet,” Feldis said.

  Keyes was incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure they have the right house?”

  “I think so. We could get out Google Maps and go over it again.”

  Feldis had forgotten: Keyes had access to the internet. He was following local coverage of the investigation.

  “’Cause the article I read said they quit digging a week ago Friday or something,” Keyes said. Today was Tuesday.

  Feldis paused. “They’re still looking, I guess is what I’m saying.”

  “Well, you just said they haven’t found the bodies. That’s pretty—”

  “They haven’t found the bodies,” Feldis said. “Yeah, so . . . they’re going to have to keep looking.”

  The power had shifted, once again, to Keyes. Feldis didn’t seem to realize this.

  “It wasn’t that big of a house,” Keyes said.

  “Well, I think what the concern is, Israel, is that they may not be in the house anymore. The house was demolished and stuff was carted away.”

  Long pause. If that was true, Keyes knew, the bodies would be in the landfill by now.

  “Hmmm,” Keyes said. “Wow. That is . . . crazy.”

  “Well, what do you think?” Feldis asked. “Any other things you want to tell us to help about it, or . . . ?”

  Keyes didn’t think so. He wouldn’t be giving them anything else about the Curriers, or any other victims, because one thing was now clear: The FBI would never have tied Keyes to the Curriers without his confession, even though stories about their disappearance were all over his computer. The Bureau had not one piece of evidence connecting him in any way.

  He was better than he even knew.

  * * *

  —

  Feldis did one thing right. He hinted that the ATF agents were impressed by Keyes’s ability to build guns and silencers, which Keyes found gratifying. He had never been able to talk about his inventiveness with guns or show anyone how beautifully he built them. This he would happily discuss.

  Keyes may have borrowed ideas here and there, but he continued to stress his originality. He broke apart revolvers and rifles and retrofitted them to his own specifications. He built his own silencers and used scopes and infrared sights. He devised a moving target system that he’d practice on in the woods. He tested the silencer he used to kill Bill Currier in his own front yard. “You could do a headshot at fifty yards, easy,” he said. “When I was building it I was shooting in my shed right next door to the neighbors. . . . I had big plans for that gun.”

  Keyes declined to elaborate. He would, however, share some other plots and fantasies.

  One involved staking out a backwoods road, late at night, a place where people “don’t really expect any[thing] to happen to them,” he said. There would be very little traffic, one car every five or ten minutes, and Keyes pictured himself set back on the side, watching drivers through binoculars. “You know, like shopping,” he said. “Y
ou shoot out someone’s tire, she’s by herself, and she doesn’t have much choice but to stop. . . . Probably within half a mile of where you shoot it out.”

  That plan wasn’t original. One of Hazelwood’s subjects relayed the same thing in Dark Dreams.

  But talking about that planned ambush led Keyes to a surprising admission. Even though he had sworn that before taking Samantha he had never done anything in Anchorage, that wasn’t totally true. He had tried, more than once. As he’d said, over the past year or so he’d been having trouble suppressing his urges. He admitted to staking out Earthquake Park over several nights in spring 2011, looking to take a couple, ultimately deciding there was too much traffic.

  He told them about the night he bicycled out to a smaller park, a well-known lovers’ lane located at the end of an unlit shore. The area was isolated and silent, flat and open. The only place to hide was behind the lone outhouse, and that’s where Keyes took position. He had his scope and his silencer.

  “It was about ten or eleven o’clock,” Keyes said. His voice got low and his speech came slower. “There was a young couple out there in a car. I was just itching for trouble.” Keyes was about fifty yards away, enveloped by darkness, the water and sky a seamless black.

  Keyes heard another vehicle snaking down the narrow road and into the lot. It was a patrol car, but this wasn’t an obstacle. It was exciting. “I was thinking about shooting the cop,” Keyes said. “Ever since I was a kid, it’s like . . . [my] white supremacist roots or something, that I was going to ambush a cop. And for some reason that night I had been sitting there long enough, and I was just bored enough and just amped up enough that I almost did it.”

  But the first police officer called for backup, an unusual move for busting trespassers. Within minutes, another patrol car arrived. “I almost got myself into a lot of trouble with that one,” Keyes said. “That one got really close, because I had no way—I didn’t think that he would call in for backup just for some kids sitting out in a park. Almost pulled the trigger, even with him there. . . . I mean nobody would have known.” Keyes was physically excited now, rocking back and forth and jangling his chains.

  “Even if I had shot them, you wouldn’t have heard anything. You would’ve just been standing at the window one minute and the next minute they just would have been on the ground. They wouldn’t have even known what happened. But fortunately for everybody, once the other guy showed up I just decided to get back under control for a couple of more weeks or whatever.” Keyes got on his bicycle and rode off into the night, four unwitting people still alive only because he chose restraint.

  He resolved to buy a police scanner and never to hunt in Anchorage again.

  Except, he said. He had also buried a cache near two hiking trails at the North Fork at Eagle River. He had gone out there a couple of times to see if an opportunity would present itself. None had, he swore to it. Instead, “I decided to go back to my old stomping grounds,” he said. “Back east.”

  Another clue. Had Keyes killed more on the East Coast than the West? They could tell he was getting off on telling investigators things they’d never heard nor had ever known to fear. It could be difficult to tell how much he was exaggerating, but so much of what he had told them bore out. They were inclined to believe him.

  “I have hundreds of plans,” Keyes said, “and a grand plan.”

  Feldis asked what that was, but Keyes was done giving them anything more. Not until the Curriers were found, and not until he got to see pictures. Feldis didn’t follow.

  “Pictures of what?” he asked.

  “The crime scene,” Keyes said.

  “For what?”

  “Where they find the bodies.”

  “Oh.” Feldis still didn’t understand. “Explain that just so I know what you’re talking about.”

  “I want to see the pic-tures.”

  “Of the bodies?” Feldis was shocked.

  “Yeah.”

  Feldis got very quiet. In this moment, finally, he was humbled. The Curriers had been dead for nearly a year.

  “Why do you want to see them?”

  Keyes laughed. “So I know that you found them,” he said.

  Feldis understood: That wasn’t the reason. Keyes wanted to revel in what he had done. Feldis wasn’t just scared now. He was petrified, and Keyes saw it all over his face.

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t take long for Steve Payne to find out about Feldis’s secret interrogation, and when he did, there was, finally, a confrontation. A friend of Goeden’s had first heard about the interview down at the courthouse, and when Goeden was told she didn’t believe it at first. This stuff just didn’t happen, especially with such a high-value suspect. Goeden had to make several phone calls to find out: Yes, it’s true. The prosecutor on your case is totally out of control.

  The potential damage could be incalculable. In the micro, Payne’s team had worked so hard, with so much deliberation and forethought, to build rapport with Keyes. Jeff Bell was the one who went over to the jail every day just to see if Keyes wanted to talk. Bell was the one who strip-searched him before every visit and was in the room for every interrogation. Keyes liked Bell, his outdoorsy bent and no-bullshit demeanor, the best. They all knew it.

  They had also successfully navigated the removal of Doll. Once the case went federal, it was up to Payne and his superiors whom to retain. Bell was concerned about taking Doll out of the room because Keyes had asked for her specifically, and Doll’s presence in that second confession had elicited more details. Keyes was a control freak, and if he insisted Doll be present, they would have to make that happen.

  But after Doll left the case Keyes asked for her once or twice, then never mentioned her again. He was likely more concerned with firing his lawyer and getting an execution date.

  Otherwise, Payne stressed stability. He was a constant presence, his role to answer any questions Keyes had about the status of the investigation and FBI protocol. Payne and Bell were the ones who realized, early on, that if any member of the team didn’t know something they should just admit it, because Keyes would undoubtedly see through them.

  Goeden’s prior experience was invaluable, and as the lone woman in the room she was their secret weapon. Women in authority—women Keyes wasn’t attracted to—made him uncomfortable. Goeden was to their advantage this way. There were times they wanted her to press a specific question or point, to make him embarrassed enough to slip up. And Goeden had a finely honed sense of when to push forward and when to retreat. She never raised her voice.

  Adding to this sense of routine, Payne’s team brought Keyes the same candy and cigars each time, letting him know, even in small ways, that these agents were people he could rely on and who knew exactly what they were doing.

  If Goeden and Payne hadn’t learned of Feldis’s sit-down and Keyes brought it up their next interview—and why wouldn’t he? He was obsessed with every aspect of their backroom dealings, the veracity of their stated attempts to fast-track the death penalty—all he would see was confusion. These agents, for all their experience and training, were human. There was no way they’d be able to hide their surprise. In that moment, all the credibility they’d so carefully built over six weeks would evaporate, probably for good.

  It would also tell Keyes: There’s a schism here. The left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. He would know to exploit this.

  In the macro, they were in new territory. Keyes wanted that execution date and they were working hard against fixed institutional roadblocks to make that happen. Even without that demand, this was an extraordinarily complex case comprised of multiple jurisdictions across the country; state and local law enforcement that needed to be involved but not informed; and a unicorn of a deal secretly made at the highest levels of government. If the FBI hadn’t been informed of this interview, it was highly unlikely the Departm
ent of Justice had—and DOJ was the final word, the lone authorizing agency on federal death-penalty cases.

  Investigators and prosecutors had to do everything—everything—by the book. And Kevin Feldis was pissing all over it.

  Nor was this an isolated example. At one point, Feldis wrote up an actual script, lines for himself, Russo, Payne, Bell, and Goeden to say during an interrogation, along with the responses he expected Keyes to give.

  The team had pushed back. This was never the tactic in conducting an interrogation. Besides, wasn’t it clear by now that there was no way to predict anything Israel Keyes would have to say?

  That’s how they do it in the Lower 48, Feldis had said.

  No, it wasn’t.

  Feldis’s bravado only grew as the rest of them maintained a healthy respect for the very real threat that was Israel Keyes. The team was never unarmed in a room with him. Agents watched as his eyes roamed around, alighting on a plastic utensil or a straw or an electrical outlet, the wheels visibly turning in his head. They knew Keyes was thinking of ways to escape and was smart enough to try it. There were times Jeff Bell felt real fear, especially when Keyes started rubbing himself.

  This guy would just as soon kill me as talk to me, Bell thought.

  Feldis remained clueless.

  Finally, complaints about the federal prosecutor were made through the proper channels, and these went all the way through chain of command to Washington, DC. Word came back to Feldis: Your behavior is unacceptable.

  And yet, incredibly, Kevin Feldis remained in the interrogation room, often leading the charge. To this day, no one will say why that was allowed to happen.