American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  Threats, Keyes said, wouldn’t work either. “This is the day where you say, ‘Give us more information or else,’ right?” He laughed.

  The contempt was infuriating. Now was the time to rattle him.

  “Debra Feldman,” Goeden said. She smacked Feldman’s photo on the table. Agents were fairly sure she was the body in New York. A drug addict and a prostitute, Feldman had gone missing from New Jersey on April 8, 2008, while Keyes had been traveling through the state on that very day.

  “We had talked about her before,” Goeden said. In fact, they had shown Keyes her photo before, and his reaction—subdued, surprised—led agents to believe he had killed her.

  “New Jersey is looking into her more,” Goeden said. “FBI is looking into her more.”

  Keyes began rubbing himself. “All right,” he said, voice low.

  “I thought that might be a place where we could start,” Bell said.

  “No,” Keyes said.

  BZZZZZZZZZ.

  “Her name was on your computer,” Feldis said.

  The rubbing got harder. “I’m not going to talk about what’s on the computer,” Keyes said. Get him a deal and that would change.

  “There’s something more to the story with Debra that you don’t want to tell us now,” Feldis said.

  “Yeah,” Keyes said. “I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  * * *

  —

  On October 30, Halla and Sanders came up from their field office in Poulsbo, Washington, just to interview Keyes. This surely fed his ego. In Texas, he had been disappointed to be sitting across from a Texas Ranger and an FBI agent from a local field office. Even Bell and Doll flying in from Anchorage hadn’t been good enough. If he had to be questioned, Keyes wanted the FBI’s top agents, and two of them flying in from his home state was gratifying. For months he’d been curious about who they were and what they had been learning.

  At this point, Halla and Sanders had distinct advantages over the Alaska team. Neah Bay had long been part of their beat. They had handled Tammie, who now had custody of her daughter and who spoke to Keyes by phone weekly, with great sensitivity. They had been interviewing the people he knew and who were a connection to his past life. And the pure novelty of Halla and Sanders’s presence could potentially dislodge new information.

  Halla was similar to Bell in his folksiness. He sounded so casual, even though inside he was afraid. He hadn’t expected to be. He and Sanders had listened to all the Keyes interviews and thought they knew what they were getting into.

  “Did you have any questions for us about any of the stuff we’ve done?” he asked Keyes. Halla told him they also had spoken to Tammie’s mom and his friend Dave, who had been his boss.

  Sanders felt pretty confident sitting across from Keyes. This surprised her, too—she’d expected to feel fear. She began by asking Keyes what his early days in Neah Bay had been like.

  “What were you doing to get by?”

  “I was on unemployment,” Keyes said. It took a few months for the tribe to hire him. “It was interesting to have the shoe on the other foot,” he said, “to be working on one of the buildings there and have people drive by and yell, ‘Go home, white boy!’” But after a year or so, when everyone saw his work, the way he tried to beautify the reservation, they came to accept him.

  Halla shifted the conversation to Colville. “Were you there in ’96?”

  “Yeah,” Keyes said. “I was there in ’96. That would have been the last year I was in the Colville area.”

  “When you were living in Colville,” Halla said, “do you remember the case where Julie Harris, she was a double amputee, went missing?”

  “Ninety-six?” Keyes asked. The rubbing began.

  “She lived, I think, pretty close to you,” Halla said.

  “I do remember hearing about that. I remember the name. I don’t remember the details of the story.”

  Those details had been grisly. Keyes would have relished them.

  “I remember that it seems like it was a pretty big deal,” Keyes said. “It was in local news and stuff. I was working construction at the time so I would hear stuff. But I never took a personal interest in it. It was one of those passing . . . passing kind of interest things.”

  Goeden said she thought a big story like that would have had an impact on Keyes.

  Not really, he said.

  No one believed him, but they let it go. Halla shifted to Washington’s national parks and forests. Was it true Keyes had never killed in any of them?

  “No,” Keyes said. That, agents believed, was a lie. Back in July he had told Bell and Feldis that one of his victims had actually been found, but that the death had been presumed accidental. Bell suspected that victim would have been a hiker found at the bottom of a cliff or a body discovered in water.

  “It was a mistake,” Keyes had said. “It was kind of the same situation as the Curriers. I just wasn’t in a position to get rid of it right away so I decided to try and make it look—I mean, it was already going to be assumed that it was an accident of some sort . . . Anyway, I’m sure we’ll talk about it at length eventually.”

  * * *

  —

  Halla tentatively approached the victim in Lake Crescent.

  Why, Halla asked, had Keyes purchased that Bayliner? Was that premeditated, part of a plan to dispose of bodies? Or had that been an afterthought?

  “Well, I’ve always been interested in boats,” Keyes said. “I’ve been building them since I was like fifteen. The boat was just an opportunity that popped up. It was fun while it lasted.”

  Agents hadn’t known that Keyes built boats. Keyes proudly elaborated, telling Bell he mainly built canoes and rowboats, a kayak here or there—on top of the guns, moving targets, rope bridges, houses, and God knows what else.

  Keyes said he wanted a motorboat, like the Bayliner, big enough to carry camping gear.

  Goeden and Sanders said they found other titles for boats in Keyes’s records. He only had one other, he said, an oceangoing boat. It needed so much work that he abandoned it.

  “Our understanding is that there were likely victims that were disposed of by the boat,” Halla said. They suspected the other victims might be at the bottom of Lake Ozette, which Keyes frequently visited. They knew those victims had been left in Washington, but were they from Washington?

  “Yeah, I don’t want to . . . I don’t want to give details on that yet,” Keyes said.

  * * *

  —

  How about the statement Keyes made about family and coworkers unwittingly helping him out? Halla and Sanders knew that he wasn’t always honest on his time sheets, often putting in for “funeral leave.” That somehow never raised suspicion—one young man with so many people dying all around him.

  Keyes admitted that he lied to everyone.

  “The reasons I would ask people to do things, or the reasons I would give for why I was doing them, were seldom realistic with what was actually going on,” he said. “I’d take trips to eastern Washington and say I was going to see old friends or go to see the old place and, you know—”

  “Went to Oregon,” Bell said.

  “No, not necessarily,” Keyes said. “I may have gone to eastern Washington but not to see old friends. I don’t have any old friends in eastern Washington.” He laughed and began rubbing himself again.

  Halla tried to catch Keyes off guard. “Would you pass your cell phone off to other people to hang on to?” Keyes wouldn’t bite, but did admit to always keeping his timeline tight so his involvement in any murder would seem impossible—just as he had with Samantha.

  Halla and Sanders wondered about his state of mind long before he took Samantha. Was overworking himself a way to stave off his cravings? What about when he met Kimberly? Was the excitement of a new relationship enough?

&n
bsp; Not really, Keyes said. “There were lots of distractions along the way. It’s like one hobby after another with me. But when the sun goes down, it’s all . . .” He chuckled. “It doesn’t matter how many hobbies you have. It all comes back to the same thing eventually.”

  This was perhaps the only thing BAU had been sure of, and it had come from listening to all those earlier interviews: Keyes wasn’t motivated by money or psychosis or anything other than pleasure. He did it because he wanted to do it. Even the things he tried to distract himself with were always related to his ultimate desire. As Roy Hazelwood wrote: Some people just rape and kill because they enjoy it. And Hazelwood was right, because Keyes had said it too: Once he got going, there was no other rush like it. And once he built a tolerance for that rush, he had no choice but to escalate.

  “Like, guns were always a big hobby for me,” Keyes said. “Explosives and stuff.”

  It took a moment for Bell to absorb this.

  “Explosives? You make bombs?”

  “Nothing too exciting, but yeah, I would tinker around. Mostly just designing stuff. I never . . .”

  “Where do you go to blow that up?” Bell asked. “You don’t do that in the backyard.”

  “There are lots of places in Neah Bay,” Halla said. There was nervous laughter all around.

  “No,” Keyes said. “I gave most of my bomb-making stuff away before I came up here.” He said he mostly worked with black-powder-based explosives and would use them sometimes while committing another crime, sometimes not.

  “Were you breaching with explosives?” Halla asked. He meant blowing doors open—something only trained military or law enforcement does in extreme circumstances.

  Yes, Keyes said. He had started doing that at age fourteen. “The first time, I blew a lock with a pipe bomb.”

  “Like to a shed or a garage or something?” Bell asked. He was still in enough shock not to realize: Think bigger.

  “No,” Keyes said. “It was a forest service gate, I think.” Government grounds. That admission transformed this case.

  * * *

  —

  Within minutes, bomb squads on both sides of the country were deployed: one to the Anchorage house, one to the New York property.

  How had the FBI missed this? Interviews with Keyes’s army buddies, the very few he had, pointed in this direction. Keyes had told at least one of them that on the upstate New York grounds he had buried nine thousand rounds of Black Talon ammo, so-called cop-killer bullets that are also often used in mass shootings. At the Anchorage house, agents recovered a number of doors, hinges removed, one spray painted with the words Church of Arlington and YouMustBeBornAgain.org. Both were former names for the Church of Wells.

  What had Keyes plotted? He spoke to agents of his many plans, and then his grand plan. He had been looking to burn down churches; it wasn’t hard to believe he might blow them up instead. He told agents he fantasized about killing police and admitted to nearly killing the APD officers at that lovers’ lane. He talked to his army friend Perkins about kidnapping people on a mass scale. He had denied being a white supremacist yet referenced his white supremacist roots. He had been friends with Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe, one of whom implicated the other in the Oklahoma City bombing. Keyes had been raised to hate the federal government. He himself told agents that people he grew up with regarded Timothy McVeigh as a hero. He did not disavow himself of this.

  What was recovered in New York that day, the Bureau will not say. But they added a new classification to the Keyes case: terrorism.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  What Keyes ultimately planned, or what larger crime he may have gotten away with, we may never know. Sometime after ten o’clock on the night of December 1, 2012, Israel Keyes committed suicide in his prison cell with a razor blade and a noose. He left twelve skulls on the wall, drawn with his own blood, the words WE ARE ONE written underneath.

  He also left the team one final clue, also scrawled in blood:

  BELIZE

  * * *

  —

  Bell and Payne maintain that Keyes murdered eleven people and that the twelfth skull was likely his. They believed Keyes when he said his final number was “less than a dozen.” To Payne, ever the math guy, a dozen was always a weird number; most people count by fives or tens. Less than a dozen, to him, meant eleven. Other agents who worked this case, Gannaway and Chacon among them, believe Keyes killed far more people than that.

  EPILOGUE

  Any one of us could have been a victim of Israel Keyes.

  After the FBI went public with the case, sightings and encounters involving Keyes were reported everywhere from the Appalachian Trail to California to Montague, Massachusetts, to San Padre Island, Texas, to New York City’s Union Square.

  It’s worth asking: In a post-9/11 world, how did a self-employed construction worker with below-average income purchase so many one-way plane tickets and never get flagged by Homeland Security? Was Keyes a beneficiary of racial profiling? He sometimes traveled with guns, breaking them apart and stashing them in carry-ons, yet was never once questioned by the TSA.

  Multiple people told the FBI they believed Keyes had approached them on beaches, in national parks, on trailheads, and in campgrounds—even at their homes, walking right up to their doors or porches or driveways. He would try to make conversation or offer help. If he knocked on your door he was an insurance salesman. Several people reported the same scene, having witnessed Keyes, sometimes with another man, in various parts of the country, emerging from woods or cemeteries carrying a shovel.

  A woman in Texas believes she was followed by Keyes while driving. Another believes she was followed and nearly kidnapped by him on a dark, deserted stretch of Highway 112 in Port Angeles in 2001 or 2002. In a lengthy email to the FBI, she recounted what happened after filling up her tank at a Shell station and noticing a man watching, in a midsize truck.

  “For the next forty miles,” she wrote, “he would pass me when he could and then slow down in front of me . . . Very slow. To about five miles an hour and look in his rearview mirror at me. He stopped several times in our lane, and I was forced to pass him. The final time he pulled in front of me, he got out of the truck and stood beside his driver’s-side door and looked at me. . . . It was very dark, and raining, and cold. He raised his hand as if to wave me to stop and I drove past him, though he stepped toward my car.”

  She had no cell service but held up her illuminated cell anyway. The man turned around and drove away.

  She believes this man was Israel Keyes. The FBI can’t rule him out.

  * * *

  —

  Other victims may yet be recovered and identified, and that work may come together sooner than later. If Keyes was telling the truth about the body in Lake Crescent, Washington, and investigators believe he was, it’s still there. An expert at the Bureau told Goeden that the conditions of that lake, pristine freshwater with very little marine life, would preserve the remains considerably. That they were weighted down would make them easier to find.

  Halla and Sanders requested a search, but the Bureau told them they didn’t want to spend the money.

  * * *

  —

  As for Keyes telling investigators that he had been two different people for fourteen years, Payne believes it. He theorizes that Keyes did not kill until he was discharged, and Heidi Keyes believes the same. She stopped short of saying she had direct knowledge, but feels quite sure he murdered his first victim shortly after leaving Fort Hood, probably that summer. Keyes has still not been ruled out in the murders of Julie Harris in 1996 or Cassie Emerson and her mother, Marlene, in his hometown of Colville in 1997.

  On January 9, 2013, little more than one month after the suicide, Tammie told the FBI she had a nagging suspicion. Back in December 2000 or early 2001 her neighbor’s husband had gone missing while on a hike. She had not see
n Keyes that day or night, which now struck her as weird. Sometime later the body was found, and the death was ruled accidental.

  * * *

  —

  After Keyes’s suicide, a closed-door hearing regarding procedural failings at the Anchorage Correctional Complex was convened.

  According to what little was released, this report determined that Keyes had slashed and strangled himself between 10:12 and 10:24 P.M., bleeding out all over the floor. It was only when a day-shift correctional officer arrived at 6:00 A.M. that Keyes’s body was found.

  Or so this story goes. Much of it is hard to believe. Arbitrators blamed the death on two factors. “One or more people”—who, we do not know—“moved him out of a suicide cell and . . . gave him a razor.” The Anchorage Correctional Complex, the Alaska Department of Corrections, and state attorneys are so corrupt that in 2016 these attorneys advised prisons not to keep records and not to document causes or circumstances of inmate deaths. In January 2018, the Anchorage Daily News reported that ACC had secretly wired visitation rooms Keyes used, and that these rooms remained wired ever since, illegally recording attorney-client conversations.

  The prison, despite multiple requests by the press, has kept everything regarding Keyes’s suicide secret. The video and audio recording of that night and the medical examiner’s report have never been released. But the Department of Corrections Special Incident Report, obtained through a FOIA request, provides some details.

  At seven P.M., Keyes was escorted to the prison’s law library for the third night in a row. Two hours later, he was escorted back to his cell. The corrections officer on guard in the Bravo Module, where Keyes was housed, said that he performed his duties that night, conducting security checks and updating paperwork, and was relieved twice for half-hour breaks. He said he did his last security check at 5:30 A.M. and went off duty ten minutes later. “At no time did I see anything out of the normal in Keyes, Israel, cell number three,” he said. “Keyes was rolled up in his blankets as he was every night I had been on shift with no parts of his body showing.”