American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Every day revealed a new complication in a case that was already complex, but its biggest problem was Keyes’s demand for an expedited execution. Keyes had six conversations with investigators throughout April, and in each one he wanted to know: What was going on with the death penalty? They could talk all day, but Keyes wasn’t giving up any other victims without a date.

  * * *

  —

  As early as April 12, one month after his arrest, Keyes was in a room with Feldis, Russo, Goeden, and Bell, hammering away on this very topic as Feldis tried to claw the conversation back. Death-penalty cases take a long time, he’d say. Federal death-penalty cases take even longer. There are far too many mechanisms in place, immovable ones, to avoid a wrongful death at the hands of the US government. There were protocols, multiple players, paperwork. There was no way to get an execution date within a year.

  Keyes sighed.

  “If it’s that much paperwork then the federal government needs to discover email. Because there is no way it should take a year, regardless of how many people you have to talk to or how much paperwork you have to file. It should not take a year.”

  Keyes wasn’t naive about the law. Ever self-motivated, he had been clocking time in the prison’s law library and knew the right questions to ask. He wanted to see if Feldis had done his homework, or was incompetent, or was maybe just stalling.

  “I’d like to know recent history, last ten years, federal cases: What was the average body count? What do I have to do to get that?”

  Keyes knew his request wasn’t unprecedented. “Timothy McVeigh, after Oklahoma City, he waived all his appeals and he went to death row pretty quick.”

  Feldis acknowledged that. “But you have to understand people look at that very, very differently—a terrorism thing.”

  “To a point,” Keyes said. “But there’s a lot of people, people that I grew up with, who looked at him as a patriot. As a hero.” Whether Keyes felt the same, he did not say. Bell circled back to McVeigh’s execution, which had been fast-tracked at McVeigh’s request.

  “You know why it went so quickly for him?” Bell asked. “The sheer numbers of what he did. To put it bluntly, and we can’t put it any more bluntly than this, sheer volume is going to get you toward your goal.”

  “But I don’t want volume,” Keyes said. “I think what I’ve given you is enough to get me to my goal and if it’s not, so be it. I mean, I’m not at all convinced that you can at this point, ’cause you said a lot of this stuff is out of your hands.”

  Checkmate. Feldis and Russo had told Keyes repeatedly that the final decision rested not with them but the Capital Case Section at the Department of Justice.

  “Maybe I should do some of my own reading,” Keyes said. “I mean, there haven’t even really been that many federal death-penalty cases, have there?”

  Feldis reacted as if this was news to him. “Oh!” he said. “No. There aren’t as many as there are in some states. That’s true.”

  Russo tried this as a way in. “If there are states that there are victims in, we can research what the laws of that state are in case it gets you closer to what your goal is.”

  “I would rather involve as few states as possible, let’s put it that way,” Keyes said. “We’ve already got two states involved, so . . .”

  Russo tried another tactic. “Local cops, man—if they start getting wind that they can close some cases by blaming it on you? They may do that. They may give you credit for things you didn’t even do.”

  Keyes laughed. “I don’t think they’ll go that far. They’ve got to have remains at least.”

  This was another clue for Bell. It was possible Keyes had burned most of his victims, or buried them, or dumped them in bodies of water. Even victims left above ground, as the Curriers had been, would be long decomposed.

  Russo went another way. Keyes was a father. Surely he could understand that parents needed closure, right?

  Not really, Keyes said. “I’d feel better off thinking they were just on a beach somewhere in Mexico than knowing they were horribly raped and murdered.” He laughed. “The bottom line 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. So, I mean obviously we’re all working toward the same goals, whether or not we agree on how we get there.”

  For Bell, the entire exchange was a waste of time. Keyes had hijacked an interrogation about other victims and turned it into a debate over the death penalty. “All right,” Bell replied. His tone, normally so unflappable, was clipped. He switched off the tape recorder in disgust.

  It was all so frustrating, not just Keyes’s manipulations but Feldis’s grandstanding. All of it was costing momentum. That they had identified three possible victims without Keyes didn’t matter; they couldn’t close those cases, let alone inform the families, unless he confessed. Risky as it was, they had to keep pushing. They needed more bodies.

  PART IV

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The FBI threw all its resources behind the search for the Curriers. Each morning, hundreds of agents set out shoulder to shoulder in the summer heat, beneath gulls and vultures in shape-shifting formations. Some of these agents were volunteering their own vacation time to help, picking through ten thousand tons of molting trash with potato rakes, fighting through the stench of methane gas and pure rot.

  Weeks went by. As Payne and Bell understood it, this was the largest such recovery search in FBI history.

  And guess what?

  * * *

  —

  “They have not found the bodies.”

  Keyes sat across from Feldis at the FBI’s offices. It was May 16, and when Feldis told him this, actually began the conversation with this, Keyes laughed in his face. The FBI had been searching since he confessed that first week of April.

  “Guess I spoke too soon on that one,” Keyes said. “Why don’t they turn the dogs loose?”

  “It is a dump,” Bell said. “It’s not safe for . . .” Even he was reaching.

  Now Keyes wanted to wait to see if the FBI would ever find the bodies.

  With each day that passed, Bell knew the FBI was losing credibility. He tried to pierce Keyes’s sense of omnipotence, the idea only he could give them other homicides.

  “In just the little bit of investigating that we’ve done,” Bell said, “you’re probably not going to be shocked at how many people are missing. Thirty trips that we have, there are at least as many missing people or more, everywhere you’ve been.”

  “Right,” Keyes said.

  Again, Bell stressed control. So far, even with this massive search in Vermont, they had kept Keyes’s name out of the media, and this was a big story there. The Dive Team had recovered the murder weapon at Blake Falls with zero media coverage. The only way, Bell said, to keep his bosses from reaching out to other jurisdictions was another confession. After all, Keyes was trying to protect his family, wasn’t he?

  “They’ve been getting threats and things like that from the public,” Keyes admitted. “And it’s hard for them because they’re all still convinced I’m innocent.”

  Bell couldn’t hide his surprise. “Your family in Texas? Or your family here?”

  “Mostly here,” Keyes said. Kimberly would come visit and say things like, “I know you didn’t do this,” and Keyes wouldn’t reply, allowing her to think it was true. Keyes was concerned what would happen to Kimberly when she finally accepted the truth.

  “Everybody I’ve known, to a certain extent, you could say they’re my victims too,” Keyes said. “Because they’re going to have to pay for this for a lot of years to come.”

  Bell circled back to keeping Keyes’s existence secret. And there was a part of Keyes that wanted to talk. He was
enamored with all the attention in this room, the fascination he held for the FBI and the behavioral analysts. He impressed and confounded them all.

  “Well . . .” Keyes said. “Do I get a cigar today?”

  “If it’ll help,” Bell said.

  “It’ll help,” Keyes replied. “I can give you something on—I’m not going to give you a body yet, and I’m not going to talk about anything that happened on that trip, but I will give you something that can verify the timeline of what I’m talking about.”

  Amazing. Keyes was getting close to giving them another victim.

  “All right,” he said. “So New York. Don’t remember the exact year but there was a bank robbery in Tupper Lake. That was me and I’m sure that was probably the only bank robbery in that town for a while, so that will give you a time stamp or whatever. A time frame.”

  Listening in from another room, Kat Nelson Googled “Bank robbery, Tupper Lake, NY.” The top hit was a news report dated April 21, 2009. She texted Bell the date.

  Keyes said he had first gone to Vermont to dig up some guns, one of which he would use, two years later, in kidnapping the Curriers. He used this same gun in Tupper Lake, a town so small that the bank robbery brought out the entire police force and the SWAT team, which put the local school on lockdown. This was the biggest thing that happened there in years, if ever. Keyes read one or two news stories about it but never followed up, burying the guns and money in two different locations before driving away.

  So there: They had a new piece of information to trade to Vermont.

  That wasn’t good enough, Feldis said. They needed something bigger, something high stakes. “I thought you were going to tell us that there’s a body in New York,” Feldis said. “I can take that and say, ‘We’ve got something solid.’”

  “Well, like I say, there are—” Keyes paused, then chuckled. “There are . . . more things I could talk about in New York, but I’m not going to give any specifics right now.”

  Feldis asked again. They needed a show of good faith to convince their bosses. If Keyes wanted to protect his family, if he wanted to remain largely unknown, he had to give them something big. Not a name, not a date, just a body. Or bodies. How many bodies in New York?

  Keyes mulled this over in silence. Four minutes went by.

  “There’s one in New York.”

  Was this person from New York?

  Keyes wouldn’t say.

  Did that person make the news? Feldis asked.

  Keyes wouldn’t answer.

  “So there was some news about it,” Bell said.

  “Yeah,” Keyes said.

  “The remains,” Bell said. “Are they buried or in water? Are they going to be retrievable eventually?”

  “Good question.”

  “Buried?”

  Keyes grunted. “There should be something.”

  Now they had a fourth victim. No age, no gender, no home state, but recent enough that Kat Nelson could retrace Keyes’s movements all along the northeast, then match his travels against people who went missing in that time frame. If they could crack this, if they could identify this body, they might make Keyes begin to doubt himself.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Meanwhile, Nelson’s joint timeline for Keyes and Kimberly was coming together. The team now believed that Keyes and Kimberly were telling the truth, that Kimberly knew nothing of his crimes or his true self. But he did travel with her extensively and often put plane tickets and hotel rooms on her credit cards, so Nelson would now have to merge the couple’s travels together, then break apart the dates when Keyes left Kimberly to travel alone.

  The Bureau would eventually make one of their timelines public. A much more detailed one would be kept for the FBI’s internal use only.

  Agents were getting a broader sense of Keyes’s most frequent destinations: Oregon, California, Wyoming, Utah, New York, Maine, Indiana. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont. Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida. Ohio, Minnesota, Arizona, North Dakota, Oklahoma. Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico. Kansas, Illinois. Hawaii.

  And not just tiny towns but major cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, Boston, New Haven, Manchester, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Jackson, Mobile, Omaha, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Orlando, New Orleans, Denver, Albuquerque, Houston, Oklahoma City.

  He crossed the border into Canada often. “Canadians don’t count,” he once told them, and though he tried to pass it off as a joke, investigators took that seriously. He spent time in Montreal as a young man, easy enough travel from upstate New York, and Keyes would eventually admit only to hiring prostitutes there. But investigators knew what that was about: practice, especially with bondage. It’s common among serial killers, allowing for the bifurcation between public face—good husband, solid family man—and the true one. If something goes wrong, risk is minimal; missing prostitutes are rarely high priority, and Keyes hired them often. Upon his arrest in Texas, investigators found a list of names and numbers for sex workers, some transgender, in Louisiana. He hired prostitutes in Anchorage, meeting them at local motels. He wouldn’t go into detail, but admitted that investigators had a good sense of his proclivities. After all, they had his porn collection.

  * * *

  —

  Keyes also crossed the border into Mexico often, sometimes on foot. But as Kat Nelson learned from his journal entries, these trips were about more than prostitutes or hunting. And they were fairly recent.

  May 12, 2006: “Travel to surgery,” entered one day after he’d driven to San Diego. Keyes noted an unspecified procedure the next day and a two-day stay in an unnamed hospital. “Travel back to Washington” on May 15.

  June 21, 2006: “Mexico for surgery follow-up.”

  There was no reason to believe these entries were about anyone else. The Keyes family didn’t believe in doctors or medicine. Israel himself had no close friends. He was still living with Tammie in Neah Bay, and she reported getting all her medical care locally. These were surgeries that Keyes kept secret. Why?

  April 24, 2007: “Travel to SD for dental work and medical lap band fill.”

  April 27, 2007: “Fill & DDS 11 am”; “10 am fill.”

  Nelson noted here that a Google search of a phone number Keyes logged was for the office of Dr. Lourdes Perez in Tijuana, Mexico.

  April 28, 2007: “Fill.”

  These entries, a little less than two months after he moved to Anchorage, were very odd. Not so much the dental work but the gastric band. Keyes was a tall, rangy guy, always had been. Aside from his military record, investigators learned he had also been a marathoner. His first recorded race was in early 2006 in Olympia, Washington, and he later ran at least one more in Port Angeles. He had been a manual laborer from a very young age. Why was a lean, strong athlete, then just twenty-eight years old, getting elective surgery to limit his food intake?

  That wasn’t all. On April 29, 2007, Keyes had an appointment at COSMED, a plastic surgery clinic in Tijuana. Travel records put him there. The FBI had some pictures of Keyes in the army, and those were nearly twenty years old. He didn’t look all that different. What, exactly, had he changed?

  Keyes spent the next two days, likely recovering, at the Calistoga Golden Haven Hot Springs Spa and Resort in Napa Valley, California.

  An entry for October 8, 2007, read only, “Pre-op.”

  October 10, 2007: “Op.”

  It’s unclear if investigators ever asked Keyes about these entries or elective surgeries, or why he would schedule them out of state or out of the country, keeping them secret from Kimberly and his daughter. That said: DNA cannot be altered, but science can minimize how much of it someone might leave behind. Fingerprints can be surgically modified. Body hair can be lasered off. Perspiration can be short-circuited with Botox. Keyes admitted the one thing he worried about leaving at
the Currier’s house was DNA from his sweat that night.

  Most telling was the gastric surgery. Keyes was nothing if not a time-management master. If investigators thought about it, Keyes could easily go at least twelve hours without eating, as he seemed to have done on the nights he took Samantha and the Curriers. Here was something else—far less pressing but no less sinister—to consider: Had Keyes begun biohacking his own body in his quest to become the perfect serial killer?

  As Jeff Bell would come to say: “Anything’s possible with him.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  For all they had learned about Keyes, agents still knew little about his time in the army. As promised, Keyes had given Payne and his team names of guys he had served with, all in the interest of containing media attention. In truth, this was just faster than waiting on the Department of the Army to dig up records from 1998, no doubt boxed in some warehouse basement.

  They worked up a list of questions for all his fellow soldiers:

  Was Keyes ever physically violent?

  Did they know him to harm animals?

  How did he describe his upbringing?

  What was his religion?

  Was he a white supremacist?

  Where were you stationed?

  What kind of training did Keyes have?

  Did he display any particular aptitude?

  Did he drink? Use drugs?

  Did he have any pornography? If so, do you know what kind?

  What did they know about his brandings?

  Was Keyes homosexual?

  Was Keyes racist?

  How old was he?

  What were his plans after the army?

  What was his physical appearance back then?

  Could that last question have gone to those elective procedures? At the very least, it had to do with the brandings, some of which predated his army service.