American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  Each man told the FBI that Keyes stood out in several ways. One was his sheer size. Keyes stood between six foot two and six foot four and was built like a rock, 230 pounds of muscle. They recalled him having a huge nose, just enormous. He was about twenty-two years old.

  Keyes described his family as Amish or like the Amish. He said he had been disowned for joining the military. He occasionally talked about his mother and some siblings but never his father. His commanding officer told agents that Keyes called his parents “‘nomadic hippies’ who moved from ‘cult to cult to cult.’” At the time, Keyes said his parents were living in Idaho—something the agents hadn’t heard before—with the Amish. “Keyes was close to his younger sisters and was trying to save money to get them out of the lifestyle,” the CO said. “It was never spoken, but [my] impression was that Keyes or his sisters were abused by their father.”

  * * *

  —

  Some of the guys said Keyes was so nonviolent he took a punch and never hit back. Others said he broke someone’s nose and once threw a mortar tube through a TV. Some said he had at least one girlfriend who came to visit. Others said they never saw her. Some recalled him as clumsy. Others recalled a superior athlete. Some swore Keyes had no prejudice at all. Others recalled a homophobic white supremacist.

  On a few things, they all agreed. It was immediately obvious that, for all his physical strength, Keyes was an “awkward dude” who was probably still a virgin.

  There was one guy in particular who Keyes worshipped. In fact, some of the guys often joked that they were more like a couple than army buddies. This was probably the same individual who took Keyes to his first concert, at the KeyArena on September 22, 2000, and from that night on, “Keyes liked what [the other soldier] liked.” This transparent and somewhat desperate desire Keyes had to belong, to have someone help him become something he hadn’t known existed—cool—explained so much: the bingeing on alcohol and drugs, the secrecy about his childhood, even the brandings. No one thought the brandings were about anything more than rebellion.

  But they were. This was something Keyes would share with agents. His brandings, at first, represented his rejection of God and his interest in Satanism. Initially, Keyes thought, there had to be a higher reason he was like this—why it was he liked hurting animals and people and never felt guilt or even shame. Ultimately that logic didn’t hold, because Keyes realized he couldn’t believe in the devil without believing in God. Evil was something else entirely.

  “At first I was pretty conflicted it about it,” Keyes said. “But that was all because of the way I had been raised and stuff. And I grew up with good people. I was never—everybody’s nice to each other and everything’s all sunshine and roses and uh—so that’s why it was disturbing to me. Because it seemed like for a long time I was—I thought everybody else was faking it and everybody was like me and they just didn’t act like it. Or I figured that I was a demon child or whatever. I don’t know.”

  At some point in his twenties, Keyes said, he had come to accept himself. He had also come to accept that he, too, might never know a why.

  * * *

  —

  Another thing the guys in his platoon agreed on: All that heavy drinking never impacted his performance. Keyes was a “supersoldier” who thrived in training. He once carried over 110 pounds on a 15-mile march. He could fix anything. He was extremely intelligent, a jack-of-all-trades. He spent a lot of time and money at the tactical tailor near base, improving his gear and even building his own ghillie suit, an elaborate, three-dimensional piece of head-to-toe camouflage.

  It’s not clear how Keyes learned to do this; even specialists need months to make just one. And why would he even need it? He was in mortar. Ghillies are for snipers. Most military snipers make their own.

  Was Keyes trained as a sniper?

  That remains unclear. The Department of the Army released only a few pages of his military record. Missing was any mention of the monthlong special training he underwent in Panama in 1999, training a fellow soldier recounted to the FBI, or his time on the Egypt-Israel border from 2001–2002, or his visit to Saudi Arabia, or how close he came to joining the Army Rangers.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Anchorage, the team was at least relieved that Keyes, so far, had been largely truthful. He had been the best soldier in his unit, a model one. Even his CO called Keyes’s performance excellent. He was such a star that when the FBI called, his CO assumed it was for a background check so Keyes could work for the government.

  Yet there were two incidents the CO didn’t seem to know about. One was the night Keyes left Egypt for some “rest and relaxation” in Israel.

  * * *

  —

  Keyes often crossed that border while in Egypt, but this night stood out. A member of their unit said that he, Keyes, and some other guys rented a hotel suite and hired a prostitute. They had all been drinking, and when the woman arrived, she went into a separate room with Keyes.

  Half an hour had elapsed when the woman came flying out, Keyes close behind. He tried giving her cash but she wouldn’t take it, and he got in front of her and blocked the door. In a panic, she kicked Keyes hard enough to get away.

  The other guys, this soldier claimed, were in shock. They kept asking: What did you do to freak her out so much? Nothing, Keyes said. “I threw her around a little bit,” he later told Jeff Bell. “I wasn’t going to let her run the show.”

  Again: control.

  There had been another girl, Keyes said, this one a Norwegian exchange student, very young, who he met in Tel Aviv. Keyes knew where her dorm room was because she had told him, so of course he went to see her.

  “I wouldn’t say that was, like, an outright rape, because were we hanging out and stuff,” he said. “And I was going to—I almost—well, I did lose control a little bit as things progressed. And that’s when I realized that if I was going to do that kind of stuff it had to be just complete strangers from then on.” He realized he couldn’t do anything where he lived or while he was in the army.

  And once he got out, he said, “It didn’t take long.”

  * * *

  —

  Yet Keyes still didn’t seem to recognize his other defects. He didn’t see that his attitude toward animals, what he called his hatred of them, was not normal. It’s possible Keyes thought it was impressive to tell some of the guys about the cat he tortured and killed in Colville, or how he loved chasing squirrels with a chainsaw, or to volunteer what he called “the best way” to kill a goat, offering specifics of the violent and agonizing death to follow, or to put two scorpions in an ammo can, as he sometimes did on base, and watch them fight to the death, inviting the guys to watch too.

  It didn’t take long for most of his platoon to realize Israel Keyes was fucked up. This assessment, Keyes knew. He had told the agents in Anchorage that almost everyone recognized what he euphemistically called his “psychosocial issues.” They all began keeping their distance.

  Except for one guy, he said, a soldier named Perkins. Keyes still called him “Perk”; they had been very close. This was the one Keyes mentioned to investigators, the one he recognized as most like himself.

  When the FBI found Perkins, he agreed to talk. He and Keyes were such confidantes that Keyes had told Perkins all about his future plans.

  * * *

  —

  Back then, Perkins said, he and Keyes had “normal Army talk,” about how to commit crimes and steal money. Lots of it. This would begin once Keyes got out of the military. First, Keyes said, he had a plan to rob a string of banks along one stretch of rural highway. He thought he could get away with it as long as he struck at the right time in the right town.

  But he had an even bigger idea. Keyes, Perkins said, “talked about his plans to kidnap people and hold them for ransom on a mass scale.”

  Did Perkin
s think Keyes was kidding?

  He did not.

  It remains unclear if by “mass scale” Keyes meant many people at once, or a large number of people he would take individually and incrementally. It’s certainly possible he envisioned the former, or wanted to work toward that, but if the FBI ever thought they needed more proof, here it was: Israel Keyes wasn’t exaggerating. They had been right to cast their net across the United States. Now they had to alert Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Panama for missing persons that fit his timeline.

  Perkins continued. Keyes said the ransoms would have to be “a reasonable amount of money that people could actually come up with.”

  Then what?

  Well, Keyes said, of course he could never give anyone back. His captives could identify him.

  When Keyes said he’d never “give anyone back,” agents asked Perkins, what did he take that to mean?

  “I assumed he meant that he’d have to kill them,” Perkins said. “Or dispose of them.”

  Are you surprised, they asked, that Keyes has been arrested for kidnapping and murder?

  “I’m surprised he . . . got caught,” Perkins said. “He was smarter than that.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  On Wednesday, May 23, 2012, in a packed federal courtroom, bound by leg irons and handcuffed to a belly chain, seated at the defense table surrounded by eight armed guards, four on each side, with at least six US Marshals in the back, Keyes had another surprise.

  He made a run for it.

  * * *

  —

  Jeff Bell, seated next to Steve Payne in the gallery, thought that Keyes was planning something. Bell had watched as Keyes turned away from the defense table and looked off to Bell’s right, where an attractive young woman was seated. What was he doing? Bell and Payne watched as Keyes’s expression hardened.

  Bell got up and moved two seats over, positioning himself between Keyes and the woman. Frustrated, Keyes turned around to face the judge, and as his lawyer began addressing the court, Keyes sprung out of his chair, free from his leg irons and handcuffs.

  Suddenly he was over the gallery’s railing and jumping rows, leaping from chair to chair to chair, never making a sound as he dragged one guard trying to stop him. Bell and Payne leapt up and reached for him, ending up in a tumble of three more guards all trying to restrain Keyes.

  Such was his strength that it took a Taser to bring him down. Bell watched as electricity coursed through his body, eyes wide open, Keyes in ecstasy.

  * * *

  —

  It lasted mere seconds, but the escape attempt was a grave embarrassment. The most wanted man in Anchorage, now under guard by the FBI and the US Marshals, had nearly escaped federal court. Everyone who had eyes on Keyes that day, from his transport from the Anchorage Correctional Complex to the unmarked van to the hearing, bore responsibility.

  James Koenig had been in the courtroom. He had done everything the FBI asked, and the task force had just let him down.

  For Keyes, the attempt was in line with his overall philosophy: Why not? They could lock him up with chains and bolts and he’d break them. He could show brazen contempt for the court and still represent himself. He could not be contained, even in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day.

  Now that Keyes had almost escaped, there was no reason he wouldn’t try again.

  * * *

  —

  Payne and Bell talked to Keyes the next day. In a less official capacity, Payne would deal with Feldis and Bell would deal with the jail. In typical Alaskan fashion, all involved knew best: Let’s not leave a paper trail.

  * * *

  —

  Bell had known Lieutenant Rick Chandler, the officer who ran the Anchorage Correctional Complex, for years. He made it a point to play in a monthly poker game with corrections officers. In his line of work, rapport was everything.

  But even Bell was having a hard time remaining affable. Keyes was the most high-value, high-risk inmate Alaska had ever seen. If Bell had his way, Keyes would be held in a federal Supermax—if only Alaska had one.

  What had Chandler been doing all this time? Keyes had been held at ACC since extradition in late March. That was two months to get it through his officers’ heads: This prisoner was not like the others.

  Yet Chandler and his guards remained ill-equipped for an inmate like Keyes. Really, they should have been trained and retrained. Chandler should have called in the warden and top corrections officers from Spring Creek, the maximum-security prison for men down in Seward, for help. Chandler should have been looking into high-security, high-tech restraints: Taser-like Stun-Cuffs or coded-key handcuffs and leg irons. Or he could have just put Keyes’s cuffed hands in a box and locked that.

  It was time for a come-to-Jesus moment, but Bell needed to be honest about his own failings here too. In the go-along-to-get-along culture of Anchorage, Bell had been reluctant to officially sound the alarm about ACC. As it was, he had already let some mistakes go.

  Like the day he came to strip-search Keyes before transport and had been left with him, alone, in a small, locked room. No armed guards had been stationed inside, and the armed guard who stood watch outside had simply wandered off. Bell knew that Keyes could kill him with his bare hands. He had had to put his face to the window and yell—with more authority than panic, hopefully—for a guard to come unlock that door.

  Bell had truly been afraid that day. He didn’t think Keyes would actually harm him, but what did his best guess matter? Then there was the day Bell caught sight of Keyes from across the table at the FBI’s offices making ever-so-slight motions with his jaw. Bell, more suspicious than anyone in the room, forced Keyes to spit out what was in his mouth—a sliver of wood. The guards were giving Keyes pencils. He had been whittling them into lock picks with his teeth.

  Bell warned Chandler, and Chandler had promised: No more pencils.

  Then came the day Bell caught Keyes wearing a thin plastic bracelet. Out of Keyes’s earshot, Bell asked the guards: What’s this? Oh, came the reply. He takes a bagged lunch to court. That’s the cellophane from his sandwiches.

  Bell was floored. “You know, he can make stuff out of that,” Bell said. Same with the dental floss they kept giving him. Bell told the guards: From now on, unwrap his food and throw everything away.

  Bell’s warnings had not been taken seriously. In fact, they had not been taken at all, because that was how Keyes had nearly escaped. In the three hours between transport and the court hearing, Keyes had been given lunch, the standard meal for the standard inmate: a brown bag containing a carton of milk, an apple, and a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. Keyes had used his stored-up pencil slivers to pick the locks on his cuffs and leg irons, then used the cellophane to make his leg irons look tied together.

  Chandler promised Bell that they would do better. Keyes was in a ground-floor cell with thick Plexiglas frontage, and the unit’s guard had a desk ten feet away and a straight, unobstructed sight line to Keyes—except when seated, but no big deal. Sneakers and shoelaces had been confiscated; now Keyes would only wear slippers. And no more pencils, no more cellophane.

  Bell wasn’t sure this would be enough, but at least he had some say in Keyes’s transport. Double leg irons, now and forever. The first time Bell strapped them on, Keyes cracked a joke. “This gives me six hours,” he said—he had needed only three to unlock the single.

  Bell couldn’t help but chuckle, even as he wondered: Where did Keyes learn to do this? All of this? What would he do next?

  * * *

  —

  Twenty-four hours after the escape attempt, Payne and Bell spoke to Keyes at the FBI. Their goal was two pronged: Get Keyes back on track by highlighting a problem he’d created—the attention and media coverage he’d drawn to himself—while promising they could fix it. Vermont would still withhold his name. The prosecutors were still o
n board with getting him an execution date, quickly and without a trial. The team hadn’t made anything public about the body in New York, even though they had, without his help, identified ten missing persons that fit his timeline. They weren’t even punishing him for attempting to escape. The unspoken consensus in that room was that really, it was pointless. There was no point in pretending otherwise.

  Bell wanted to know, aside from the obvious, why Keyes had done it. “What’s changed since yesterday?” he asked.

  “Everybody knows what my bottom-line concern is,” Keyes said. “That I wanted this all wrapped up as quickly as possible. And I was in open court yesterday and obviously that’s not happening.” He believed that lawyers on both sides were dragging out the process. He was beginning to turn on Russo and Feldis—nothing against Payne and Bell, whom he trusted. To a point. But they were more than two months in and no closer to an execution date, let alone a global agreement covering future confessions.

  “If I have to do it, I will,” Keyes said. “If I have to take the next step and just freaking . . . it’s going to turn into even more of a three-ring circus.”

  * * *

  —

  Five days later, Frank Russo presented Keyes with a letter signed by Vermont’s federal prosecutor promising not to charge Keyes in the Curriers’ homicide and, as best they could, to shield Keyes’s name from the press. Russo told Keyes he was still working on the global agreement, but the escape attempt had made that more difficult. It would still happen, Russo said, but the delay wasn’t their fault. Keyes understood that.

  “I think this is a great amount of progress,” Russo said. “I think it’s going to help us move the ball forward.”