American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  “I do want to continue to cooperate,” Keyes said. “I have a few ideas . . . It all depends on how we can work it out.”

  “What are your ideas?” Payne asked.

  Keyes had a question about Washington State. He had some things he might like to talk about, but he wasn’t sure they would help his case unless they were federal. Russo could help. Washington, Russo said, had two federal districts, east and west. Seattle, for example, was eastern.

  “Ellensburg,” Keyes asked, “is west or east?”

  “East,” Russo said.

  Keyes laughed. “You’re going to need both districts,” he said. He had something of a makeup gift for them.

  Bodies in Washington State.

  TWENTY-NINE

  There were four, Keyes said. Two on one side of the state, two on the other.

  The first two victims he murdered sometime between July 2001 and 2005. They had been together.

  The other two he took and killed separately, sometime in the summer or fall of 2005, he said. Maybe 2006.

  In one case he used a Bayliner boat he’d purchased years ago—from Tammie’s ex-husband, actually—to dispose of at least one body, maybe two, in Lake Crescent. Keyes said he had a lot of plans for that boat but wouldn’t elaborate. He chose that lake because it’s one of the deepest in Washington, maybe seven hundred feet at its lowest point. Keyes didn’t think anyone had ever been to its bottom.

  He took one male and female pair, he said, and another female-female pair, but wouldn’t explain their relationships to each other. And for today and going forward, there wasn’t much more Keyes would say about these victims. He gave investigators just enough to tantalize, Washington the perfect state with all of her missing hikers and campers and boaters, so many disappearances and deaths presumed accidental. There were two states he went through a lot, he said: New York and Washington. They thought they could solve cold cases without him? He’d like to see them try.

  And they would. Investigators had to work Washington State alone, but his taunting here raised a possibility: just as he liked to move his victims’ cars or bikes far from where he took them, could Keyes be moving details and dates to fool investigators? He remembered every single aspect of his crimes; the names of all his victims; how, where, and when he killed them; where and how he left them; the locations of every single buried kill kit; how he got in and out of every town, city, and state. Why give such a huge time frame for the first two victims? Why say he took the latter two separately yet also imply they were together? Was he worried that investigators might be able to identify them?

  He very well might have been, because when Kat Nelson looked at his cell phone records, she found him in close proximity to a double murder in Washington. A very high profile one.

  * * *

  —

  Early on July 11, 2006, four people set out on the remote Pinnacle Lake Trail in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. It was a warm and clear summer day, a Tuesday, no wind, sight lines for miles. One pair were mother and daughter, who made fast friends with the other pair, husband and wife. They set out together, chatting amiably, until they reached a Y-shaped fork.

  The husband and wife went right, toward Bear Lake.

  The mother and daughter went left, toward Pinnacle Lake.

  Sometime after, the wife heard a loud noise off in the distance, like thunder. But the sky was blue and clear, so the couple hiked on, eventually stopping to picnic before slowly making their way back.

  It was 2:30 in the afternoon, four and a half hours since their hike began, when the couple encountered the mother and daughter again. They looked like they were squatting, or hunched over. Their bodies had been posed right along the trail.

  The man grabbed his ice ax and the couple rushed down the rocky terrain. “We have never spent a more terrifying half hour than our hike back to the trailhead,” he recalled.

  Mary Cooper had been fifty-six years old. Her daughter, Susanna Stodden, was twenty-seven.

  First responders—park staff—couldn’t tell how Susanna and Mary had been killed. There were no visible wounds. Homicides in Washington State parks were extremely rare. Or so went the thinking.

  The case was so odd, so random and macabre, it made national headlines and was covered in People magazine. Both women were kind, bookish, well-loved in their community—hardly your typical murder victims. Weeks into the investigation, even with the FBI’s help, authorities had to admit: This was likely the rarest of crimes, an arbitrary double murder in broad daylight. Mary and Susanna had each been shot once in the head with a .22. Unclear, though, was whether the shooter was at close range or a sniper.

  No real leads ever emerged.

  Nelson put Keyes near that park. His cell had pinged towers in Neah Bay and Port Angeles that day starting at 3:53 A.M. and ending at 5:54 P.M.

  Port Angeles, where Keyes spent a lot of time, is a three-hour drive from the Pinnacle Lake trailhead. Someone like him could make it in two. Also: He liked a .22. He was a sniper. He liked national parks and forests and loved naive and inexperienced rangers. He liked remote locations. He liked targeting pairs. He talked about staging bodies. He had spent hundreds of hours in the woods, utterly still, waiting for the perfect victims.

  “Back when I was smart,” Keyes told them, “I would let them come to me.”

  Between the hours of 1:48 and 4:41 P.M. the day Mary and Susanna were murdered, Nelson found that signature tell: Keyes’s cell phone had gone dark.

  THIRTY

  Sometime after the escape attempt—when, exactly, the FBI will not say—Keyes’s prison cell was searched while he was not in it. Inside was a letter to one of his brothers. “They can’t convict a dead man,” Keyes wrote. He had also written, in a separate document, of at least six victims, all unnamed, but three identifiable as Samantha and the Curriers. The Bureau would spend months trying to analyze this.

  Also recovered was a noose, likely made from a bedsheet. Keyes had made allusions to suicide all along, but now the FBI knew for sure that Keyes had imminent plans. And surprise, surprise: Bell’s warnings still went unheeded. Whether it was haplessness or stupidity or laziness, nothing had changed at ACC. Even when Chandler learned that Keyes was still shaving with disposable razors—against express orders—he did nothing more than tape a handwritten sign to Keyes’s cell.

  DO NOT GIVE THIS MAN A RAZOR BLADE.

  Chandler had purchased an electric razor, which Keyes was only to use under direct supervision, but guards were ignoring that. Bell asked Chandler, in essence: What the fuck? Did his guards want Keyes to kill himself? Or were they just that dumb?

  Chandler sighed. He could only write the note and post it on the door. “And if these idiots don’t read it,” Chandler said, “there’s nothing I can do.”

  * * *

  —

  There’s nothing I can do.

  No sentiment captured this stage of the investigation more. Bell couldn’t get Chandler to do his job. Payne couldn’t get Feldis out of the room. Keyes couldn’t fire his attorney or get an execution date. There was no one in charge, not one person or panel or institution that could fix it.

  And they couldn’t even keep their core team together. Payne, Bell, and Goeden, who had come to regard themselves as the Three Musketeers—who had developed the best rapport with Keyes, who shared everything from their theories of his crimes to the emotional toll this case was taking—were breaking up. Payne got word that summer that the Bureau was taking him off the case. He would be out formally by October, when he would report to Quantico for his next assignment. It was time to start transferring himself out and turning the role of case agent over to Goeden.

  Now Feldis would be her problem.

  And Feldis, who kept telling Keyes “the buck stops with me,” who kept saying he alone could keep Keyes out of the news and get the death penalty, was the
one Keyes trusted least. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Keyes recently told Feldis, “but no offense, I don’t believe you.”

  And Keyes exploited their desperation, soon trading his hated paper slippers for sneakers and shoelaces and getting his newspapers. He even had a wilderness survival guide in his cell. Shock didn’t begin to cover Bell’s reaction when he found out. Didn’t Chandler know that Ted Bundy had escaped from prison twice? Keyes idolized Bundy.

  Chandler wasn’t all that open to criticism. Bell may have issues with him and his guards, but at ACC, they were all suspicious of the feds. The big rumor was that the FBI had cut a backroom deal with Keyes, who seemingly got whatever he wanted. How else had his mandatory stay in psych suddenly been commuted?

  Bell and the team denied it, but whatever the truth, it didn’t really matter. There was nothing they could do.

  * * *

  —

  Things got worse. Early on the morning of July 18, Bell, Goeden, and Russo sat down with Keyes at the FBI. They had to admit their latest failure before he heard it from someone else.

  The Bureau was calling off the landfill search. “Throwing in the towel,” was the dispiriting cliché Russo used. Keyes had beaten them again.

  Right now, Russo informed Keyes, prosecutors in Vermont were meeting with the Curriers’ families. Then they would issue a statement to the local media, which had questions about the hundreds of FBI agents in their small town, picking through the landfill. It hadn’t been hard for reporters to figure it out and demand answers.

  Vermont, Russo said, wanted to renege on their earlier agreement and name Keyes for the murders. Not just that—they wanted to charge him. Russo’s voice was shaking.

  “I wish I kept my mouth shut,” Keyes said. “How is it that they even have any evidence on me for the Curriers? Because it’s all your evidence. All you have is my interviews.”

  Russo tried deflection. He said he didn’t really know. It was probably some rogue reporter out east, and what could he do about it all the way up in Alaska? Besides, Vermont had the right—the responsibility—to reassure the community, to get justice for the Curriers’ families.

  “It’s a tough sell,” Russo said.

  Not really, Keyes replied. “They haven’t found anything at the dump. They can tell the family whatever they want.” He was rubbing himself now.

  Russo kept going. There could be positives to this, he said. Keyes could spin it to his family however he wanted—maybe even make himself look kind of good here, giving answers to two grieving families. Despite all the plans he’d presented to Keyes for a global agreement with the feds, Russo never had a plan for dealing with potential fallout in Vermont, and he admitted this to Keyes. But, Russo said, he could definitely come up with one going forward.

  Not to worry, he continued. These things move slowly. It would probably be a month before Vermont even decided whether to name Keyes.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, an NBC affiliate in Vermont named Keyes.

  Bell knew they might not ever recover from this. For months, they had been selling themselves as the all-powerful FBI, keeping this case under seal. They promised over and over they could tell other jurisdictions what to do and when to do it.

  They had fucked up. Keyes was incensed.

  “I told you from the get-go, before I told you where the freaking bodies were left, I told you that I didn’t want the locals involved. And the first thing you do is make a big scene and do a big freaking archaeological dig right alongside a main road.”

  Russo backpedaled furiously.

  “You can’t just walk in there and say, ‘We’re the feds.’”

  “Well, you told me you could.”

  “I—I don’t think we did.”

  “No. You said you would control it.”

  “Yeah,” Russo said, his voice going slack. “And to whatever extent we could, we did.”

  “You haven’t controlled it at all,” Keyes said. Where was his global agreement? Where was his execution date? Four months had gone by. What was their problem? If the FBI wanted more names and locations, they’d better move faster, because all those bodies?

  “Frankly,” Keyes said, “they’ll keep.”

  * * *

  —

  Bell wanted to throw Keyes off, to find a victim without his help. He had taken Keyes at his word, that if they could identify a victim without his help, he’d confess. During the Currier confession, Keyes said he’d traveled through Indiana on the way to Vermont. He had typed “Missing persons, Indiana, June 2011” into Google’s search bar.

  And what do you know: There was a missing persons case that fit. Another high-profile one.

  * * *

  —

  On the night of June 3, 2011, Lauren Spierer, a twenty-year-old sophomore at Indiana University, went out for a night of drinking and was never seen again.

  Her station in life—young, white, pretty, blond, a well-raised coed who doesn’t just run away—made her case national, covered by CNN, People, Fox News, The Huffington Post, The Jewish Daily Forward, USA Today, America’s Most Wanted, Dateline, and 20/20.

  Kat Nelson had been able to put Keyes driving through three tollbooths in Indiana that night. Like Samantha, Spierer was an attractive young woman who’d vanished in the dark. Like the Curriers, there had been not a single clue to go on.

  Bell talked it over with the team and they concluded: Why not ask him about Lauren? If they could show Keyes they knew where he was that night, at a tollbooth right outside Bloomington—and Bloomington was where Lauren was last seen—maybe they could dazzle him with their CSI-ish powers.

  So Bell brought in a photo of Spierer and confronted him.

  “Did you do this?” Bell asked. “People are going to think you did this. You were in Indiana that night.”

  Keyes laughed.

  “That’s how hard it’s going to be,” he said, “for you guys to figure it out.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  There were, investigators believed, a few victims that Keyes might have allowed to live. This hunch was the product of a moment when luck swung the right way, days before Keyes was named in Vermont, days before he decided to stop talking, stonewalling investigators for six weeks.

  It had been a Saturday in July. Keyes, out of boredom or frustration or just to toy with them, decided he wanted to talk. Bell, Goeden, and Feldis met him at the FBI’s offices.

  Bell opened gently. He reminded Keyes of his comment that he had been two different people for fourteen years, and they were curious. What happened back then? “It’s about the time you went into the military,” Bell said, “isn’t it?”

  “It’s significant,” Keyes said. But he had gotten going earlier than that. It was at least a couple of years before he went into the military, he said, that “I could do it and get away with it.”

  “What kinds of things?” Bell asked.

  It was around 1996 or 1997, Keyes said, the summer his family had moved to Oregon. He would have been eighteen or nineteen at the time. There was a beach they all went to alongside the Deschutes River.

  “That’s what gave me the idea, I guess.” His voice got lower and his words sounded physically smaller, mangled somehow. “There were these, um, like remote restrooms in these random little beach areas. And I took somebody to one of those but I didn’t, you know . . . I didn’t kill her.”

  “How long had you planned to take somebody before you actually got up the nerve to do it?” Feldis asked.

  “For that one?” Keyes asked. “Or—”

  Feldis cut him off. “For that one, yeah.”

  This was a mistake. Keyes had opened a door and Feldis had slammed it shut.

  “Well, that one—” His voice was trembling. “I got down there in the spring and I think that was late summer when I, when I
did it but I—I had been thinking about it for years before that.”

  Bell suspected just how much Keyes had planned. “So back then, did you develop some kind of kit where you had rope and—”

  “Oh, yeah,” Keyes said. His voice was so low. “I had all the stuff with me.”

  The beach was accessed through a gate that was locked at night. Keyes got there late one afternoon wearing only his swimsuit and hid in the trees, watching. He was waiting for inner tubers on the river to thin out with the waning sun, as they always did. And as dusk began to fall, along came a group of teenagers, four or five of them, one girl bobbing behind all her friends.

  “I just jumped out of the bushes and grabbed her.”

  “How’d you get her to the bathroom?” Bell asked. “I guess I’m assuming you didn’t know her.”

  “No, I didn’t know her,” Keyes said.

  “She white, black, Asian?”

  “She was white.”

  “About your age?”

  “I don’t know . . . She could have been anywhere from fourteen to eighteen.”

  Eighteen sounded better than fourteen, Keyes knew. She had likely been a child.

  “Blond, brunette?”

  “Uh, she was like dirty-blond.”

  “Was that the first time you sexually assaulted somebody?”

  “No, but I mean that was the first time I took it to that level. I had it all planned out.”

  * * *

  —

  Keyes was giving them the formation of his dark matter, the things he considered mistakes, the budding patterns that would reappear in his later crimes. And he had just admitted that he had taken someone before, which could only have meant Colville.

  “It was a small bathroom,” Keyes said. “There wasn’t running water or anything. They probably only cleaned it out maybe once a year.” Another site of filth and degradation, but Bell focused on the logistics.