Israel Keyes was a serial killer who was meticulous, methodical, and for years completely undetected. Keyes had no victim type, no geographic pattern, and an M-O the FBI described to be as, quote, unique as a fingerprint . Our very own Maureen Callahan spent years uncovering how Keyes operated. Her investigation led her to write the best-selling book, American Predator, the hunt for the most meticulous serial killer of the 21st century. She also appears in the ABC true crime documentary, Wild Crime, 11 Skulls, which traces the disappearance of Samantha Koenig.
00:01:35.220Keyes had no victim type, no geographic pattern, and an M.O. the FBI described to be as, quote, unique as a fingerprint.
00:01:45.000Our very own Maureen Callahan, host of The Nerve, spent years uncovering how Keyes operated.
00:01:54.300Her investigation led her to write the best-selling book, American Predator, the hunt for the most meticulous serial killer of the 21st century.
00:02:04.820Maureen also appears in the ABC true crime documentary, Wild Crime, 11 Skulls on Hulu, which traces the disappearance of Samantha Koenig, the crime that finally exposed Keyes' double life.
00:04:02.660I mean, my theory about it is that, you know, not long after Keyes was apprehended, I'm going to say about nine months in, I don't want to spoil how this sort of ends for anybody, the FBI announced that they had this guy in custody.
00:04:43.960So I began the book with the full cooperation of the FBI.
00:04:48.320And in fact, one of the agents on the case said to me that he was really surprised because he'd never seen the Bureau in his, like, 26 years there give a journalist such unfettered access to them.
00:04:58.960And then about halfway through, I got back from one trip to Alaska.
00:07:21.720And then this individual just jumped straight into the coffee hut.
00:07:29.940That moment, Maureen, she saw the face of evil, and she knew it.
00:07:33.780I'll tell you, when I was working on the book, I think I watched that tape, the abduction tape.
00:07:38.960I mean, I watched it many, many, many times, but I would go through it frame by frame, partly because the initial working theory, Samantha was 18 at the time.
00:08:03.060I don't know that it would have mattered, because Keyes liked taking people in pairs, and that also distinguished him from many, many other serial killers.
00:08:12.500Their original theory was that Samantha was in on it, that that was a staged abduction.
00:08:44.840And so the theory was she's out partying, and that's her accomplice.
00:08:51.080But when you go frame by frame through that, and you stopped right there, when Keyes jumps in, and he is a big guy, he's, like, at least 6'4", very rangy, he jumps like a predator.
00:09:03.540There's something that's almost like a panther, the way he—because those kiosks are up off the ground.
00:09:09.400They're on the side of the road in Alaska until Samantha's abduction, always staffed, rather, by attractive young girls, often alone.
00:09:17.380In the summer, they used to make them wear bikinis.
00:09:28.700It was something of a validation if you got a job.
00:09:30.740That meant you were an attractive young woman who could lure customers in.
00:09:33.700I used to worry, even my own brother, who, you know, he's five years older than I am, but he used to work in one of those gas station kiosks for his high school job after hours, you know, up until, like, 11 o'clock at night or whenever they closed.
00:09:48.180And he was alone, and I used to worry about him just being in there alone.
00:09:51.940You just never know who's going to come through.
00:09:53.620It's literally everybody comes through a gas station, and a female, a young female in Alaska, which, like, a lot of bad stuff happens in Alaska.
00:10:08.640You know, the thing, too, about that is it doesn't even matter.
00:10:11.760I think the time was, like, close to 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock.
00:10:14.600You know, I was sure to go to Alaska in two distinct times, once in the dead of summer and once in the dead of winter, because I wanted to experience what those extremes really do to your mind and your body.
00:11:54.920He, most serial killers, like, if you think of the Gilgo Beach killer, you know, they tend to operate in one location, the Zodiac killer.
00:12:04.180He was interstate also, but his last major, major spree, Bundy's, was in Florida.
00:12:11.180And I know we'll probably get to it later, but there is a very famous unsolved cold case involving multiple victims in Florida that I firmly believe is the work of Israel Keyes.
00:12:23.320So, although unlike Ted Bundy, Israel Keyes was not an attractive man.
00:12:41.920No, he's—all of his power—he did have power.
00:12:45.940He was the most powerful person in that room.
00:12:48.220They were never going to solve another case without him, to a point.
00:12:51.120Once the interrogation gets to five months, six months, Jeff Bell, who was one of the leads, began putting some stuff together, which was remarkable.
00:13:00.660Um, but, you know, the Samantha case, when they caught him, and that was an interstate chase, that was an interstate—like, he made the mistake of—
00:13:12.820So, Samantha gets kidnapped from this coffee kiosk thing late at night, and they're not treating it quite with the urgency they would if, you know, some rich woman in California, you know, had this happen to her.
00:13:26.120And, um, days go by, and then a ransom note appears on, like, a park bulletin board.
00:14:16.860And then the FBI gets a tip from someone who knows James and says, uh, he, he's acting strangely.
00:14:23.460He yelled, he yelled at, uh, my daughter, a friend of my daughter's, because she was, she made some t-shirts.
00:14:29.740Find Samantha, and she's selling them.
00:14:31.740And James is very upset that we're making money off of that.
00:14:34.380So, now the FBI is, and, and Anchorage police are really confused because when they door-knocked James, he wouldn't let them in the house after Samantha went missing.
00:14:49.460So, now they're, they're looking at him, and they're looking at the boyfriend who has been living with Samantha and James, and they don't know which end is up.
00:14:58.940But they've never encountered a parent who is resistant to giving the reward money to the kidnapper who's promising a return.
00:15:08.360Well, then they do get money deposited into her account, and the kidnapper starts making withdrawals with her ATM card, which is, by the way, how he gets caught.
00:15:20.660But who made the deposit into her account?
00:15:22.940James eventually relented, and they said, you, we, he's going to ask, he's asking for this much, we only deposit this much, because now we have him, we're in contact, and now it's a negotiation, so that's conversation.
00:15:36.840He doesn't seem to realize that using this ATM card, they're, like, five minutes behind him every time he withdraws.
00:15:43.140Every time he withdraws, they're, like, five minutes behind him, and he knows what he's doing because he knows where all the surveillance cameras are in any given place he's going.
00:15:56.860Then it's, it stops working in Anchorage, the card stops pinging there, and then it starts pinging in New Mexico, in these very tiny towns in New Mexico.
00:16:10.520It's like these FBI agents get word that her card's pinging down there, and they jump out of bed, and they rush to their war room at the FBI field office, and they're calling bank managers.
00:16:20.420They're in Lordsburg, New Mexico, saying, can you get there?
00:17:43.320But he was like, when he went down to Texas and met the Texas Ranger who led that manhunt that caught Keyes, which was a very cinematic event, because Keyes was driving the most commonly rented vehicle in the United States of America, so it really was needle in a haystack.
00:18:01.280He was like, oh, my God, this is a Texas Ranger, just like in the movies, like a real badass, you know?
00:18:28.060Is it the Jeff Bell of the Washington?
00:18:30.500Well, first, it's Steve, Ranger Steve Rayburn, since retired, and an FBI agent named Deb Ganaway, who was looped in very quickly as all of this was unfolding in a very kinetic, moment-by-moment fashion.
00:18:45.920And Steve Rayburn told me that they were so caught off guard that they didn't even have, like, a two-way radio, like, a two-way audio system set up in their interrogation room, so they had to go to Target and buy a baby monitor.
00:19:11.300And the lead agent on the case, Steve Payne, even in that moment, he's up in Alaska sitting at a car at one of these coffee kiosks, and he's the one agent on this case who has been holding out hope that Samantha is alive.
00:19:41.300I don't know if he was just more dialed in to the realities of what he factually was seeing or if there was something unnatural that he picked up on.
00:19:55.420You know, Steve, by his own admission, did not want to believe it.
00:20:00.220And even the search of his car was like a, it was a multi-state mess because he's up there worried that if they go into that car without the proper, I mean, what's the word for, like, thank you, or they have probable costs, then everything they find, even if Samantha's body is in there, is thrown out.
00:20:22.980Like, it can't, like, it can't, can't get in.
00:20:39.580This is from the ABC doc, Wild Crime, and it's dash cam footage from the moment that investigators decided to do a warrantless search on Keyes' car.
00:22:41.460And Jeff Bell and his partner, his then partner on this case, Mickey Dahl, who was this sort of very glamorous, young, beautiful detective who had just joined Homicide.
00:22:51.660She had spent like 10 years doing drugs.
00:23:02.080But so they jump on a plane and they go down there and they're so wired and they're so like dying to talk to this guy and they get in there.
00:23:10.460And Keyes kind of lights up a bit because now he's got the attentions of this beautiful young detective.
00:23:15.800And it becomes this sort of almost like a – I talk about it in the book.
00:23:20.620It's like a Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter kind of dynamic, you know.
00:23:27.400And so they have to extradite him up to Alaska.
00:23:30.180And this is all – like the TikTok is really – it's so pressing because at a place like Lufkin, as would prove true even in Anchorage, they did not have the wherewithal to really contain this guy.
00:23:45.440Like this guy was such a predator and so dangerous, such a genius, completely self-taught.
00:23:51.000This guy did not have formal schooling at all, at all.
00:23:54.360And he taught himself how to hunt and kill.
00:23:56.900And so they get him back up to Alaska.
00:23:58.740And that's when it really starts clicking in because they know Samantha's dead.
00:24:03.020They've gone to the house he shares with his living girlfriend, a travel nurse, and his 10-year-old daughter.
00:24:08.120By all accounts, he is an incredible father.
00:24:21.660So they're just doing a search of his property because he's under arrest.
00:24:25.180And there are two sheds on his property and they physically remove a shed from the property and they bring it to the FBI field office where they leave it.
00:24:35.000And then so the fight begins now as to who's going to lead this interrogation because they all know this is a big, big case.
00:24:46.320If you have your eyes on becoming like a legal analyst on CNN or like, you know, they're going to make a movie out of this case, who's going to play you?
00:25:24.720He was an expert at leaving no physical evidence behind.
00:25:27.220So you have to have very experienced detectives go in there or agents go in there who can say, like, Steve's favorite tactic was to – like, he would say some people like to go in with, like, boxes full of paper.
00:25:59.280And the federal prosecutor on this case comes in, and he sees what this case could be, and he says to them, I'm leading this investigation now.
00:26:37.320Not when you've got, like, what will become the most high-value, like, suspect in federal custody, like, only Jeffrey Epstein exceeds this guy in terms of, like, the threat he posed even behind bars.
00:26:58.640We have video of, so we've only titled it FBI interview, so I don't know which interrogators these are, but you'll tell us after we watch shot 53, in which he does admit to killing Samantha Koenig.
00:44:57.220And he said he took Lorraine downstairs and Bill's obviously deceased on the floor.
00:45:03.060He describes killing her and then using contractor bags to put their bodies in in the basement of that house.
00:45:12.380The bodies were completely covered and they were underneath a lot of debris, like piled on top of them, like wood and trash.
00:45:24.660I mean, just like the callousness is shocking.
00:45:27.540Not that you expect a killer to like respectfully dispose of the remains, but in garbage bags underneath a bunch of garbage left for the animals.
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00:49:37.700I now have my very own channel on SiriusXM.
00:49:40.880It's called the Megan Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth, unfiltered, with no agenda, and no apologies.
00:49:46.400Along with the Megan Kelly Show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Drashinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.
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00:50:07.820So, Keyes admits to this double murder of Bill and Lorraine.
00:50:14.420But then a weird thing happens in the interrogation, where they want him to say more, but he's suddenly coy, and now he doesn't want to, like, give it up.
00:50:26.620And there's a moment in the investigation, this is from July of 2012, where he kind of objects to giving them any more, and it's sort of odd.
00:50:40.860I just think, at this point, I kind of feel like I'm in a position where I've given you a certain amount of information.
00:50:54.940None of it has, or I shouldn't say none of it.
00:50:58.180But about half of what I thought we had an understanding on, you know, from the very beginning, hasn't worked out in my favor.
00:51:11.160Granted, you know, some things haven't worked out in your favor, but I just think at this point, I just don't see what incentive I have to tell you anything else.
00:51:24.580What does he mean, it hasn't worked out in my favor?
00:51:28.920He wanted the death penalty, and he wanted it really fast.
00:51:32.140Well, how long was this series of interviews?
00:51:36.040So they started March, April, and they went till about—he really began shutting down, I'm going to say, right around there.
00:55:04.100But he would not—the minute Keyes said, I want the death penalty, Rich was like, well, I'm not arguing for that, because I'm anti-death penalty, and I won't do it.
00:55:14.400And so, now he's got a court-appointed lawyer that he can't get out from under, who won't advocate for what he wants, and the FBI is trying to get him what he wants, but it's not moving that quickly, and they can't get any traction anywhere.
00:57:42.900There is a very famous case I'm obsessed with in Florida called the Boca Murders.
00:57:49.980There was a man in Boca Raton who was targeting women at the mall, upscale luxury mall, broad daylight.
00:58:01.660First victim, she is going to her vehicle with her toddler son, and she's loading up the back of the car.
00:58:09.520Honestly, Megan, after writing this book, I don't move through the world the same way at all.
00:58:14.320Like, I will never—my head is on a swivel in, like, a garage.
00:58:17.940He comes up to her, and he's got a gun, and he's like, get in the back of the car, get your kid in the back of the car, takes the car, starts driving them all over.
00:58:25.440Never do it, by the way, to the listening audience.
00:58:28.000Never let them take you to a second location.
00:58:29.560And that would qualify as a second location, like, from the parking lot into your car to go someplace.
00:58:40.520The difficult victims, they just kind of let him go.
00:58:42.620But I'd rather somebody take a shot at me while I'm serpentining away than have me in the car.
00:58:47.820You know, though, what the thing is, and he understood the psychology of this, if you are—like, the home invasion with the couriers, you know when you're awoken, startled in the middle of the night?
00:58:58.220And it's like, it takes you a minute to be like, am I awake?
01:00:21.500Well, a very well-to-do woman, married, middle-aged.
01:00:24.860And the Jeep just starts going just erratically.
01:00:29.900It's like slowing down, but it's going erratically.
01:00:31.860And then the driver's side door opens, and she falls out.
01:00:37.100So that means there's someone in the passenger side who pushed her out of the car.
01:00:42.200So when the police and FBI arrived at the scene at the mall with the woman and her eight-year-old daughter, who were tied up and murdered, they were like, this is as unique as a fingerprint, this M.O., and it matches keys.
01:00:58.380Now, Jane Doe, the woman who survived with her toddler, spoke to Dateline.
01:01:02.660She has never given her real identity.
01:01:05.400We have a little bit of that in Sup 55.
01:01:53.440I see him pull out a pair of handcuffs.
01:01:55.480He handcuffs my wrists behind my back, and he pulls out a bag of zip ties, and he zip ties my ankles together, and then zip ties my neck to the headrest.
01:02:07.040And he takes out a pair of darkened sunglasses with duct tape, I'm guessing, and puts them on my eyes.
01:02:19.500I started losing it, and I started choking, choking myself because the zip tie was so tight, couldn't breathe, and gagging, and crying, and I was just hysterical.
01:02:56.860And the sketch that she worked up, they showed a little bit of the police sketch that she worked up of her abductor, her and her child's abductor.
01:06:59.040Because if the numbers climb too high, they look like they're do-or-know-nothings?
01:07:04.060I don't know, because I think they're—as discussed, like, with just a few of those, there are others in the book, there are plenty of cases I believe could easily be ascribed to him.
01:07:12.240You know, you could say, we could close this out with a fair degree of certainty, right?
01:07:15.580Give surviving family members some peace of mind.
01:07:19.820He was allowed to join as a volunteer—a volunteer recruit at the United States Army, despite not existing on paper.
01:07:27.020However, he was raised off the grid by these cultists who belonged to a church, a white supremacist church, where they were friends with—Keyes was very good friends with—Chevy and Shane Kehoe, who grew up to be on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list of domestic terrorists, potential ties to Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bombing.
01:07:50.260Keyes mentions McVeigh in his interrogations with the FBI, and he says, a lot of people I know regard that guy as a hero.
01:08:42.140I mean, we have suspicions, but we don't know, and we're probably never going to know, given that you're saying the FBI has kind of clammed up on it.
01:08:48.320What did his mom say after the fact, after all this was done?
01:08:51.980So, his mother is a member of a cult called the Church of Wells, last I heard, in Texas.
01:09:00.480And she said to me, these interviews were really difficult because there was a lot of proselytizing to get to the point.
01:09:12.120But she said, one day they were driving somewhere in his Jeep, and she knew something was wrong with him.
01:09:19.640And she said, he turned to her and said, you know, Mom, not everyone wants to live the way you do.
01:09:26.600Not all of us want to live the way you do.
01:09:29.140And then she said she knew her son was guilty of these things.
01:09:33.020Like, when the FBI showed up at her door, and they were like, we have your son arrested in connection with the disappearance of this young girl, she was like, yeah, that sounds about right.
01:09:43.320And Jeff Bell saw Heidi at the courthouse, and he said she looked like someone out of Little House on the Prairie.
01:09:47.780Like, the long dress, and like the handmade thing, and like the long braid.
01:09:52.560And he went up to her, and he said, please, can you help us?
01:10:08.660So as you look back on the case now, it's been a couple years since you wrote the book, like, where does he fall in the pantheon of American serial killers?
01:10:22.020Well, you know, the FBI said they'd never seen one like him before.
01:10:25.560And I think that's why his case remains so little known.
01:10:31.320They know more than they're telling, but not nearly as much as I think we think they do.
01:10:36.660They have something called the Evil Minds Research Museum, the FBI does.
01:12:09.640I don't, it doesn't make me, it's somewhat unsettling, right?
01:12:12.160Because you want to believe there'll always be that and that'll make them easier to catch.
01:12:16.120But the thing is, is like the more we learn from this one, you know, Keyes said, he was asked, who is your favorite serial killer?
01:12:22.860They thought they would get something, right?
01:12:24.640And he said, it's the one who hasn't been caught.
01:12:27.980Because he knew that there was someone better at being undetected right behind him.
01:12:33.040And I'll tell you this, Megan, when, um, the Idaho college murder story broke and before we knew who did it, I was convinced that whoever did it had studied the case of Israel Keyes.
01:13:01.800It's just, I know as much as you think it would be like New York or Chicago or Baltimore, they have different kinds of murders, but they, it's not really serial killer central.
01:13:13.580They're much more dispersed than that.