“Permanent-type bathroom or like rent-a-can?”
“Permanent, like the ones you see at forest service campgrounds with the big concrete tank under them. That’s why I picked it. I was waiting for someone who was pretty small ’cause I was gonna dump them down in the tank.”
Just like human waste. But Keyes said he chose the tank as the best place to hide a body, nothing more. “It was a really dark tank,” he said. “They probably wouldn’t have been found for a year or something. I don’t know.”
A smaller victim, again, would have been easier for a teenage Keyes to control.
Keyes forced the girl into the outhouse, a handicap-accessible shack with bars along the walls, then roped her neck to one of the bars and tied her arms out so she couldn’t move, similar to the way he restrained Samantha and Lorraine. “And I had, like, the lid of the outhouse closed and I had her tied over that, on her stomach.” The knots were tight enough to leave bruises. He raped her once, he said.
“You didn’t cut her or anything,” Goeden asked, “with a knife?”
“No,” Keyes said. “But I had all the knives and stuff with me. I probably would have choked her.”
“So what do you think stopped you from taking it to that level?”
“She just, um . . . I think maybe she had had something like that happen or thought about what she would do. It seemed like she knew what to say and stuff. Like everybody else I took always seemed completely surprised, like they didn’t expect it, like they had never even thought of a scenario like what they were in.”
The girl kept talking, Keyes said. She told him he was a good-looking guy who didn’t need to be doing this. She would have gone out with someone like him. What he was doing right now wasn’t that big of a deal, she said. He could let her go and she’d never tell anyone. Through the whole attack, she also hadn’t shown much fear. A sadist like Keyes needed real fear. It startled him.
“I mean, she was scared, but in a lot of ways I think she was more calm about it than I was. I kept telling her to shut up and she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. So I guess I kind of changed my . . . I just lost my nerve right at the end.” She had managed to make Keyes see her as a person. She had even told him her name. “Lea, I think,” Keyes said. “Lena? Something L. But she didn’t tell me her last name. I didn’t ask.”
After the rape, Keyes said, he untied her and let her go, putting her back on her inner tube and pushing her down the river.
“That was major,” he said. “That to me at the time was a big deal, a big deal. I don’t remember if I was worried about DNA at the time but I was convinced that there was, like, some big investigation trying to figure out who had done this. When in reality, twenty-twenty hindsight, maybe she never even told anybody.”
The moment Keyes let her go he regretted it. He checked the local papers constantly, waiting for the day her story appeared, for the cops to arrest him. When months passed with his name never coming up, no phone call or door knock, no investigation that he knew of, he didn’t feel smart. He felt lucky.
“For years after that I kept telling myself, ‘I should have killed her.’”
“So,” Bell asked, “you didn’t make that mistake again?”
“HA HA!” Keyes leaned back in his chair. “Well . . .”
THIRTY-TWO
For Jeff Bell, Florida was a particular state of interest. Why? He never said specifically, but Keyes had family there and had spent time working construction. And a serial killer there shared an MO with Keyes.
This one was known as the Boca Killer.
* * *
—
At around one in the afternoon on August 7, 2007, a woman and her toddler son roamed the posh Boca Raton mall. After a few hours, the woman took her son through the Nordstrom exit to the mall’s parking lot, remotely unlocking her black SUV and opening the hatch. She put her son in his car seat first and walked around back to stash his stroller.
“Mama! Mama!”
She leaned forward and saw, sitting right next to her two-year-old, a man in sunglasses and a floppy green hat, holding a gun. She froze. She couldn’t believe this was real.
“Get in the car,” he told her.
She couldn’t move.
“Get in the car.” He pointed the gun at her son.
She got in the car.
* * *
—
This woman, even today, is known only as Jane Doe.
The man ordered her to get in the driver’s seat, to give him her cell phone, and head to an ATM. “Just do what I say,” he told her, “and I’ll take you back to the mall.” He kept his gun pointed at her baby.
Jane Doe did everything he said. She gave him her cell phone, then drove to an ATM, where she withdrew two hundred dollars and gave it to him, then another two hundred and another two hundred and another two hundred, and on that last one was denied. She’d hit her daily limit.
The man told her to get back on the road. Traffic was slow, and in her rearview mirror she could see her son’s little face. He had somehow fallen asleep, which told Jane Doe that, on some level, she was keeping it together. She stole small glances out of her tinted windows. No one had any idea of the terror inside. She thought to herself: Nobody knows I’m going to die today.
She thought about crashing her car. Then she thought, What if I fail? What if that makes him madder?
She kept driving. The man told her to pull into the parking lot of a Hilton hotel. It was deserted. He told her to get out of the car. She didn’t want to leave her baby.
“Please don’t kill me,” she begged. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not going to,” he said. “I don’t need any more problems than I already have.”
He wanted to switch places, him driving, her in the backseat. Then she saw the glint of the sun bounce off something in his hands. A pair of silver handcuffs.
Oh, God, she thought. This is it. She’d already given him money—what else could he want? Was he going to rape her? Kill her and her baby? Leave their bodies in the middle of nowhere? He cuffed her wrists behind her back and put her in the backseat. Out came the zip ties. He bound her ankles first, then her neck around the headrest, pulling tight. He took out a pair of dark sunglasses and duct-taped them around her eyes. Now she could hardly see.
Jane panicked. She strained against the plastic zip tie, her face reddening, her tears hot and thick. She was gagging and choking. She couldn’t breathe. And just like that, her kidnapper loosened the tie. “Is that better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. The man pulled back into traffic and drove for a while. Jane had no idea where they were going, but this act of kindness—how odd to think of it that way—gave her a bit of hope.
Suddenly the man stopped driving. She could hear him rummaging through something, like a plastic bag. The knife, she could see. “Please don’t hurt me,” she begged. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not,” he said. “Just stay still. Don’t move.” He twisted around and pushed himself off the driver’s seat to reach her, moving the cold blade along her face and down her neck.
He cut the tie and started driving again, saying nothing. Her toddler, now awake, dropped his bottle. He started crying, watching as it rolled right under the driver’s seat. Jane braced herself. Would this push the man over the edge?
He picked up the bottle, turned sideways, and gave it to her son. The boy stopped crying.
Four hours had gone by. He had shown them two small mercies. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Then he said, “I’m going to put the zip tie back around your neck.” In the next breath, he promised to let her go—not her and her baby, just her. She had no idea what to believe.
“I’m going to let you call someone,” he continued. “You can say your truck broke down and they need to come get you. Who do you want me to call?”
Why would he tie her by the neck again if he was letting them go? It didn’t make sense, but she didn’t question it, just gave him the name of her son’s father. If something was going to happen, he should be her last phone call. He would know she would never disappear with their child.
By now Jane’s eyes had adjusted, and she saw that they were back at the Boca Raton mall. The man dialed and held the phone to her face. Her ex picked up. “My truck’s broken down,” she told him. “Please come get me.” The man zip-tied her to the headrest.
“Now,” he said, “when the police come, I want you to tell them I am short, fat, and black.” Here he made a mistake: He removed the sunglasses he’d taped to her face, and Jane Doe got a good look at her captor. He was tall, athletic, and white, with long, wavy brown hair, but otherwise seemingly hairless. He still wore that olive-green floppy cap, which she now recognized as military style, and sunglasses.
He took her driver’s license, then pulled out a pair of blacked-out swim goggles and strapped them over her eyes.
“If I see anything on the news,” he told her, “with my face or my picture, my description—I will come after you.”
He closed the door and was gone.
* * *
—
Once the man left, Jane pulled her bound hands under and over her legs, then ripped off the goggles and somehow cut the neck tie. She got in the driver’s seat and raced to the mall’s valet stand, where she begged the valet to call the cops.
“I was just kidnapped,” she said.
“Are you kidding me?”
But the valet called the police, and when they arrived they didn’t believe Jane Doe either. Things like this didn’t happen in Boca Raton. There had been no witnesses. There was no physical evidence found in her SUV. They didn’t believe a young woman, tied up as Jane described, could have escaped such restraints. They didn’t believe she and her son could be driven around for hours with no one seeing a thing. Her story, frankly, was bizarre.
Detectives asked Jane Doe to take a lie detector test. She told them she had nothing to hide.
Three months went by with no word. Then, one day in November, Jane got a call from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. They were working a cold case, the abduction of a woman from the Boca Raton mall back in March. She, too, had been driving a black SUV with tinted windows and had been taken from the garage around the same time as Jane Doe, 1:15 in the afternoon.
Her name was Randi Gorenberg. Thirty-nine minutes after her abduction, a call came in to 911. The caller said he had seen the passenger door of a black Mercedes SUV open and a woman, slumped over, fall to the ground. It looked like the driver had pushed her out and taken off.
The caller got closer to the body. “Oh, my God. She—she’s dead. She got two shots in her head, my gosh.”
* * *
—
Gorenberg had been fifty-two years old, married to a wealthy chiropractor, and living with her husband and their two children in a $2 million house in Palm Beach. She had no enemies, no serious problems, no debts. No one in her life had motive. She had been found five miles from the Boca Raton mall, her shoes and handbag missing but her valuable jewelry—a diamond necklace and ring and Cartier watch—intact.
Gorenberg’s SUV was found nearby, abandoned behind a Home Depot. Jane Doe was their only lead.
* * *
—
Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, December 12, nearly four months to the day after Jane Doe and her toddler were abducted, a Boca Raton mall guard approached an idling black SUV in the Sears parking lot. Inside were the bodies of forty-seven-year-old Nancy Bochicchio and her seven-year-old daughter, Joey. Nancy’s wrists and ankles were bound, her neck strapped to the headrest, blacked-out swimming goggles over her eyes. Joey had also been restrained with zip ties.
Both had a single gunshot wound to the head.
Responding officers thought of Jane Doe, and when Jane saw the story on the news her heart dropped. She knew this was the same man.
So did police. In reconstructing Nancy and Joey’s movements that day, they found striking similarities to the two earlier abductions. Surveillance video showed mother and daughter last seen exiting the same doorway as Randi Gorenberg. Nancy was captured on security cameras withdrawing money from the same ATM Jane Doe was forced to use. Nancy had been found in handcuffs just like the ones brandished at Jane.
Jane Doe had told police: This man came with a kit. That was what he called it—“my kit.” Inside were the zip ties, the cuffs, the duct tape, the sunglasses and goggles, the knife, the gun. He seemed to know exactly where ATM surveillance cameras were and avoided them. She sensed that he had done this before.
Police were later able to trace the zip ties and duct tape used in the Bochicchio double murder to a big-box store in Miami, purchased shortly before Nancy and her little girl were murdered. No physical evidence or DNA was recovered. Circumstantially, the Doe and Bochicchio cases were identical. Otherwise the cops had nothing.
The Boca Raton task force was dissolved a year later, but not before Jane Doe gave the police sketch artist a detailed description. The physical resemblance to Keyes, the mouth especially, is startling.
Equally startling is every known detail of this case. Keyes hunted in daylight, taking people within seconds. He almost always took victims in their own cars. There was the botched ATM withdrawal, as if the abductor did not know daily limits, and the skilled avoidance of surveillance cameras. The kit Jane Doe described. Gorenberg’s cell phone, later found on a homeless person, was also consistent with a favorite tactic of Keyes—he told investigators he would sometimes dump a victim’s phone in areas where the homeless congregated. The targeting of pairs, mothers and children—could this be rage at his own mother? His confession that every time he traveled he’d be “looking for places to do stuff.” That his only victim preference was “lightweight.” That knives were his favorite weapon. Tying up women by the neck. The directive to tell the cops he was black. None of the agents believed his so-called code about children.
The zip ties, which the FBI, in the Bochicchio case, called as unique as a fingerprint. They had been purchased the same day at a local big-box store, as Keyes described having done before abducting the Curriers.
Jane Doe said her abductor wore his wavy brown hair in a ponytail down the back of his neck. Why, in hot summer? Why not up, under the hat? Was that to conceal a branding? Keyes had that pentagram on the back of his neck.
Keyes’s whereabouts during these abductions and murders are unknown, but the FBI does know that during each of these crimes, he was traveling.
Jane Doe told police she followed every instruction the abductor gave and kept talking to him, just like everything was otherwise normal. She thinks that’s why she and her son survived.
State and local authorities later learned of another near miss, a few days after the Jane Doe abduction. This attempted kidnapping took place in the parking lot of another well-to-do shopping center. The intended victim, a woman, had been walking toward her car when an armed man confronted her, ordering her to drive him to an ATM. She flung her handbag far afield and started screaming, “Leave! Leave!”
That quick thinking saved her life. She later looked at the police sketch Jane Doe helped work up and the man, she said, looked exactly the same.
There has never been another attack. The Bochicchio case remains open.
THIRTY-THREE
Shortly before and during the three months Keyes stopped talking, investigators were able to make progress. They had recovered the Eagle River cache buried sometime in May 2011. In Neah Bay, Ted Halla and Colleen Sanders had searched the Bayliner boat Keyes had left behind but recovered no real evidence. Agents now had a total of eight victims, three identified, and the rest, despite all their hunches, unknown.
Except, maybe, for one. The team may have be
en pretty confident about Jimmy Tidwell in Texas, but Bell felt even more confident that they had identified the body in New York.
* * *
—
By late October, Keyes was back at the table and the FBI had a new strategy. Apply some pressure, lightly. Blame the bosses. Make a threat. Keyes had run every other interrogation as one long taunt, dangling possible victims as investigators begged for just one more, all while Keyes drank his Americanos and smoked his cigars and basically flipped the finger to the federal government.
Gently suggest that his name might leak, they were told. Stress that his name had only surfaced in Vermont, nowhere else, and that was down to the case agents in this room. Now was the time to tell Keyes that these same agents were losing patience and so was the Bureau. Now they would tell him that Quantico had a new timeline.
“Frankly, the ground is freezing, Israel,” Feldis said. He was speaking literally and metaphorically. “So we don’t have a lot of time to play with, and without any movement, there wouldn’t be anything we could do anymore.”
“Be that as it may,” Keyes said, “nothing else that I’m involved with is weather dependent.” As he’d said before, all those other bodies would keep.
“Your patience is probably getting better with your situation you’re in,” Bell said, “but everybody else’s patience is growing thin—our bosses, at least, have been pressuring us for progress.”
Keyes told them that leaking his name wasn’t much of a threat anymore, because he had been considering what he called “maximum publicity.” He could easily go to any national news outlet and expose the federal government’s refusal to give him the death penalty in exchange for more victims. He was feeling spiteful. “If I wanted to make a point using my case as an example, the media would potentially give me a pretty big soapbox,” he said. “There’s not much more you can offer me.”
American Predator Page 24
