The Megyn Kelly Show - How Deranged Serial Killer Israel Keyes Finally Got Caught - Crime Week Continues with Maureen Callahan ｜ Ep. 1219

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00:01:00.760 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:02.680 Live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:01:12.460 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:01:14.320 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:15.480 Today we are examining a serial killer that some in law enforcement have called unlike any other in modern American history.

00:01:24.580 A predator who was meticulous, methodical, unpredictable, and for years completely undetected.

00:01:32.540 His name, Israel Keyes.

00:01:35.220 Keyes had no victim type, no geographic pattern, and an M.O. the FBI described to be as, quote, unique as a fingerprint.

00:01:45.000 Our very own Maureen Callahan, host of The Nerve, spent years uncovering how Keyes operated.

00:01:54.300 Her investigation led her to write the best-selling book, American Predator, the hunt for the most meticulous serial killer of the 21st century.

00:02:04.820 Maureen 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.

00:02:21.000 Watch.

00:02:22.640 He was taking trips.

00:02:24.580 He was killing people.

00:02:25.840 He buried victims all over the continental United States.

00:02:29.460 Underneath his bed.

00:02:31.380 There was 11 skulls.

00:02:33.180 Drawn using a finger in blood.

00:02:35.800 All of these victims' souls belong to him.

00:02:38.620 They're mine.

00:02:40.320 This guy is an evil genius. 0.91

00:02:43.080 I'm more sane than most Americans. 0.99

00:02:45.300 He's the best serial killer that ever existed.

00:02:48.120 Wow.

00:02:49.120 Maureen is one of the foremost experts on Keyes, and she joins me now.

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00:03:46.560 Hi.

00:03:47.320 Hi.

00:03:48.180 I've always known that you've written this book, but I had never read it, and I'd never known who Israel Keyes was.

00:03:55.680 Why is his name so, like, not on the list of all the big serial killers?

00:03:59.720 It's really wild, isn't it?

00:04:01.760 Isn't it?

00:04:02.340 Yeah.

00:04:02.660 I 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.

00:04:19.360 Nobody had ever heard of him.

00:04:21.040 Nobody knew he'd been operating all over the United States for at least 14 years, probably more.

00:04:27.220 And they asked the public for help in identifying other victims, in locating and identifying other victims.

00:04:35.700 And then they just as quickly pulled this case back from public view.

00:04:39.260 And I could never understand why.

00:04:43.960 So I began the book with the full cooperation of the FBI.

00:04:48.320 And 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.

00:04:58.960 And then about halfway through, I got back from one trip to Alaska.

00:05:04.100 He was based up in Alaska, Keyes.

00:05:06.480 And the FBI just shut down.

00:05:08.440 What year was this?

00:05:09.740 When they shut down with me?

00:05:11.680 Well, the book came out in 2019.

00:05:13.560 So I'm going to say, like, 2017.

00:05:16.120 Wow.

00:05:16.660 Yeah.

00:05:16.880 All right, so let's start.

00:05:19.120 It's not exactly the beginning, but let's start with the murder of Samantha because this would be the tripping wire for him.

00:05:27.660 Yeah.

00:05:29.140 She was in what state?

00:05:31.520 Alaska.

00:05:32.160 She was in Alaska.

00:05:32.860 And she was in one of those little kiosk type things where you buy coffee from, right?

00:05:36.160 Like, coffee is some light food.

00:05:38.180 Yeah.

00:05:38.400 And she was working late at night, which honestly, like, no woman should ever do. 1.00

00:05:42.360 She shouldn't work alone in a little box that anyone can come up to with a gun and get into because that's exactly what happened to her. 0.98

00:05:51.360 And we actually had that moment where Samantha was working in this little coffee hut.

00:05:56.260 This is from the ABC documentary, Wild Crime, 11 Skulls.

00:05:59.640 And he jumps in.

00:06:02.400 First, he pulls a gun on her.

00:06:03.760 You can see her back away.

00:06:05.740 And then all the lights go out, and he jumps in.

00:06:08.640 Watch.

00:06:10.560 In the video, you can see Samantha is closing up for the night in the coffee stand, cleaning and wiping things down. 0.94

00:06:20.060 It's late at night, so there aren't many coffee drinkers that are driving up to the stand.

00:06:25.660 And then you can see somebody walking up.

00:06:28.720 You don't see a lot of people just walk up or driving a vehicle.

00:06:35.860 Samantha goes to the window.

00:06:38.360 So she starts making coffee.

00:06:42.560 And she appears to be engaging with the person.

00:06:47.240 At one point, she turns towards the window, and she reacts.

00:06:51.260 I vividly remember Samantha doing this and putting her hands up.

00:07:02.140 She then walks across the coffee stand and turns the lights off.

00:07:12.980 Samantha took the money from the cash register.

00:07:15.680 Then Samantha puts her coat on.

00:07:21.720 And then this individual just jumped straight into the coffee hut.

00:07:29.940 That moment, Maureen, she saw the face of evil, and she knew it.

00:07:33.780 I'll tell you, when I was working on the book, I think I watched that tape, the abduction tape.

00:07:38.960 I 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.

00:07:50.020 So she had just turned 18.

00:07:51.900 She was legally an adult, right?

00:07:54.120 But they decided to treat it like a missing child.

00:07:59.020 Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up.

00:08:01.160 He was 10 minutes late.

00:08:02.440 He would have been there.

00:08:03.060 I 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.

00:08:12.500 Their original theory was that Samantha was in on it, that that was a staged abduction.

00:08:19.620 So she could get the money.

00:08:21.040 So she could get, like, the $200 that were in the till. 0.84

00:08:24.200 And part of this also goes to the ways in which so many assumptions are made about victims of violent crimes.

00:08:30.500 Samantha's father was, like, hell's angel, hell's angel adjacent, had his own brushes with the law.

00:08:39.600 She was from the wrong side of the tracks.

00:08:41.980 She had overcome her own drug issues.

00:08:44.840 And so the theory was she's out partying, and that's her accomplice.

00:08:51.080 But 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.

00:09:03.540 There's something that's almost like a panther, the way he—because those kiosks are up off the ground.

00:09:09.400 They're on the side of the road in Alaska until Samantha's abduction, always staffed, rather, by attractive young girls, often alone.

00:09:17.380 In the summer, they used to make them wear bikinis.

00:09:19.120 Oh, my God, that's crazy.

00:09:21.320 I know.

00:09:21.920 Girls, do not do this. 1.00

00:09:23.400 And those were very coveted jobs in Alaska.

00:09:26.240 It was something of a veneration.

00:09:28.700 It was something of a validation if you got a job.

00:09:30.740 That meant you were an attractive young woman who could lure customers in. 0.99

00:09:33.700 I 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.

00:09:48.180 And he was alone, and I used to worry about him just being in there alone.

00:09:51.380 Sure.

00:09:51.940 You just never know who's going to come through.

00:09:53.620 It'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. 0.74

00:10:02.380 It's so isolated.

00:10:04.720 Like, bad people go there to get lost.

00:10:06.900 Just 100%.

00:10:08.640 You know, the thing, too, about that is it doesn't even matter.

00:10:11.760 I think the time was, like, close to 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock.

00:10:14.600 You 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.

00:10:25.540 And we're such animals, you know?

00:10:27.780 Like, you go in the winter, I mean, you get, like, two hours of sunlight if you're lucky, two hours of real sunlight.

00:10:33.540 And it has a depressive feeling, but it also, there's a lot of, it's a lot of darkness.

00:10:40.080 It's a lot of spiritual darkness.

00:10:41.480 It's a lot of psychological darkness.

00:10:43.340 Most people don't know this, but Alaska, more people come from the lower 48 than are natives up there.

00:10:48.360 And they're all people who are running away from something.

00:10:50.680 Yes.

00:10:51.000 Sorry, Alaska, but it's, I mean, you're the most beautiful state in the union, but you got a lot of misfits there. 1.00

00:10:56.560 Every other dateline is about something in Alaska.

00:10:59.240 All these crime series, like Alaska, wild Alaska, you know, all the, anyway.

00:11:03.640 So, it's no accident Israel Keyes found Alaska, but he was from Washington State, right?

00:11:09.080 Or he was, he had been living there at least.

00:11:10.280 That's where he was raised, yeah.

00:11:11.740 And it's, you're the one who turned me on to the Bundy book.

00:11:15.880 Oh, the stranger beside me.

00:11:17.480 There's a lot of parallels there.

00:11:19.340 Oh, yeah.

00:11:19.740 He was also from Washington State.

00:11:21.740 Yeah.

00:11:22.160 And preyed on women, EY, in Washington State.

00:11:26.480 Like, the juxtaposition, both in Alaska and Washington State, for that matter, of like,

00:11:30.860 immense beauty and zen and calmness and nature and almost like godlike territory and evil roaming among it all.

00:11:39.420 And, you know, the thing about Bundy, which when Keyes was apprehended, he did say that was one of the serial killers that he had studied.

00:11:48.420 He did sort of, quote unquote, admire.

00:11:52.020 Bundy also was interstate.

00:11:54.920 He, most serial killers, like, if you think of the Gilgo Beach killer, you know, they tend to operate in one location, the Zodiac killer.

00:12:04.180 He was interstate also, but his last major, major spree, Bundy's, was in Florida.

00:12:11.180 And 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.

00:12:23.320 So, although unlike Ted Bundy, Israel Keyes was not an attractive man.

00:12:27.820 Depends on how you look.

00:12:29.320 Like, honestly, there were some images where I was like, this guy is kind of attractive.

00:12:35.480 Really?

00:12:35.680 You can see it, yeah.

00:12:37.140 In the interrogation video, he is—

00:12:39.080 Oh, he looks like nothing in the interrogation video.

00:12:40.520 You recoil.

00:12:41.420 Oh, yeah.

00:12:41.920 No, he's—all of his power—he did have power.

00:12:45.940 He was the most powerful person in that room.

00:12:48.220 They were never going to solve another case without him, to a point.

00:12:51.120 Once the interrogation gets to five months, six months, Jeff Bell, who was one of the leads, began putting some stuff together, which was remarkable.

00:12:59.600 Remarkable detective work.

00:13:00.660 Um, 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—

00:13:10.920 Wait, let's wait before we get there.

00:13:12.080 Oh, yeah.

00:13:12.360 Okay.

00:13:12.820 So, 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.

00:13:26.120 And, um, days go by, and then a ransom note appears on, like, a park bulletin board.

00:13:35.260 Yep.

00:13:36.060 And it shows a picture of her holding a newspaper that is dated post the date of her abduction, so they know, actually, this is legit.

00:13:44.140 Mm-hmm.

00:13:44.400 So, this is from a person who really has her.

00:13:46.320 Mm-hmm.

00:13:46.920 And then what happens?

00:13:47.740 And then they go to Samantha's father.

00:13:53.360 The kidnapper is demanding, like, $50,000, $60,000.

00:13:57.360 He's already started what would be considered now like a GoFundMe.

00:14:01.180 The community is donating money.

00:14:03.500 James is not a man of means.

00:14:06.320 And James is frantic.

00:14:07.880 Um, but they say, okay, now is the time to wire the money into this, into this account.

00:14:13.300 And James says, I don't want to.

00:14:16.860 And then the FBI gets a tip from someone who knows James and says, uh, he, he's acting strangely.

00:14:23.460 He yelled, he yelled at, uh, my daughter, a friend of my daughter's, because she was, she made some t-shirts.

00:14:29.740 Find Samantha, and she's selling them. 0.65

00:14:31.740 And James is very upset that we're making money off of that.

00:14:34.380 So, 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.

00:14:47.880 So, now he's looking suspicious.

00:14:49.460 So, 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.

00:14:58.940 But they've never encountered a parent who is resistant to giving the reward money to the kidnapper who's promising a return.

00:15:07.360 Right.

00:15:07.940 Yeah.

00:15:08.360 Well, 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.

00:15:20.660 But who made the deposit into her account?

00:15:22.940 James 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.

00:15:36.520 Mm-hmm.

00:15:36.840 He doesn't seem to realize that using this ATM card, they're, like, five minutes behind him every time he withdraws.

00:15:43.140 Every 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.

00:15:52.020 He's covered up.

00:15:53.460 You cannot see.

00:15:54.400 It looks like it's a man.

00:15:56.000 You can't really see.

00:15:56.860 Then 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.

00:16:07.820 And up in Alaska, it's like a movie.

00:16:10.520 It'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.

00:16:20.420 They're in Lordsburg, New Mexico, saying, can you get there?

00:16:23.220 Can you get there?

00:16:24.160 And the first one they called was, like, sorry, I'm sleeping.

00:16:26.900 I'm not getting out of bed for this.

00:16:28.180 Oh, my.

00:16:29.080 No.

00:16:29.740 It's a serial killer.

00:16:30.860 Well, I guess that was just a suspicion at the time.

00:16:33.360 They knew they had someone who abducted this young woman.

00:16:37.800 They still didn't know whether she was in on it or not.

00:16:42.260 It was very suspicious.

00:16:44.160 A guy that sophisticated, if this is a true stranger abduction, they're very rare.

00:16:48.980 So it's easy to see why the theorizing was such that it's the boyfriend, it's the father, she's in on it, whatever.

00:16:56.640 They couldn't figure out why he would be using it.

00:17:01.360 It's such an easy mode of detection.

00:17:03.080 It's so bold because it's so easy, right, to see, oh, my God, her ATM just pinged again.

00:17:08.060 Yeah.

00:17:08.380 Where?

00:17:08.640 And it is sort of how he got caught because he made the mistake of letting his car get caught on camera at one of the locations, right?

00:17:20.340 And so they saw what kind of make, model, et cetera, of car, and maybe even the license plate, I'm trying to remember.

00:17:26.040 But they tracked that car, and that's how they found him.

00:17:28.880 And this was also incredible police work, and this is where the Texas Rangers come in, and these guys are such badasses.

00:17:36.520 They are just like Jeff Bell, who is one of the main guys in Alaska.

00:17:40.100 I think he's from the Northeast maybe originally.

00:17:42.860 I don't know.

00:17:43.320 But 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.

00:18:01.280 He was like, oh, my God, this is a Texas Ranger, just like in the movies, like a real badass, you know?

00:18:06.460 Right.

00:18:07.080 Yeah.

00:18:07.380 So they track him down, they arrested him, and they found incriminating materials in his car.

00:18:14.820 Like, it was kind of Bob's your uncle once they found him.

00:18:17.420 He was not banking on cops pulling him over.

00:18:20.240 No.

00:18:21.120 And so then they bring him in for this interrogation.

00:18:24.760 Now, who does the interrogation? 0.91

00:18:27.060 Like, is it the feds?

00:18:28.060 Is it the Jeff Bell of the Washington?

00:18:30.500 Well, 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.

00:18:45.920 And 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.

00:19:01.120 Oh, no.

00:19:01.660 So people could listen to it outside of the room?

00:19:03.240 Yes.

00:19:03.700 Oh, my gosh.

00:19:04.260 Like, this is how MacGyver-ish, and, like, they had no idea who they were dealing with.

00:19:08.640 They really didn't.

00:19:09.400 They knew he was dangerous.

00:19:10.400 They knew he had this woman.

00:19:11.300 And 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.

00:19:26.500 Jeff Bell.

00:19:27.580 Jeff Bell took one look at that ransom note with the proof-of-life photo of Samantha.

00:19:32.280 She's looking at the camera dead center with the print paper, and he took one look at that and said she's dead.

00:19:39.860 How?

00:19:40.380 How did he know that?

00:19:41.300 I 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.

00:19:55.420 You know, Steve, by his own admission, did not want to believe it.

00:19:58.520 He knew he was in denial about it.

00:20:00.220 And 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.

00:20:22.980 Like, it can't, like, it can't, can't get in.

00:20:24.580 Yep.

00:20:25.020 But Deb says to Steve, down here in Texas, we have a much looser interpretation of this.

00:20:32.560 And if we've got a bad guy.

00:20:33.920 Good old Texas. 1.00

00:20:34.680 And we think he's got bad shit going on in his car, we can go into his car. 0.99

00:20:38.360 Here we have some of this. 0.99

00:20:39.580 This 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.

00:20:47.880 Here it is.

00:20:52.080 When we opened the trunk and the ranger started going through things in the trunk of the car.

00:20:59.700 There you go.

00:21:00.320 Hey.

00:21:02.740 Gray hoodie.

00:21:04.500 With glasses in the pocket.

00:21:06.580 Hand on.

00:21:07.280 And a mask.

00:21:08.060 We found a gray hoodie that appeared to be the same hoodie that the perpetrator had been wearing in the ATM videos.

00:21:19.240 And in the pocket of that was this gray piece of cloth that looked like a mask.

00:21:26.000 We also found the amber shooting glasses.

00:21:31.800 We got a gun.

00:21:34.140 Sir, you're under arrest.

00:21:35.400 After he was put under arrest, he was transported to the Lufkin Police Department.

00:21:47.940 The ranger and I do a thorough search of Israel's wallet.

00:21:53.020 And we found Samantha's ATM card.

00:21:58.100 Samantha's cell phone was in the car.

00:22:00.900 I mean, that's just devastating from a criminal standpoint.

00:22:05.640 That's everything you need.

00:22:06.620 You've got the victim's cell phone.

00:22:08.040 You've got her license.

00:22:09.300 And you've got his disguise that he was wearing all the times when he was making the withdrawals with her ATM card.

00:22:15.220 Really strong.

00:22:16.700 Very strong, but they don't have a body.

00:22:19.400 And they don't know whether she's dead.

00:22:21.100 And they don't even know whether she's dead or alive.

00:22:22.920 So they need a confession from him.

00:22:27.940 He is taken to Lufkin PD down in Texas.

00:22:31.240 Again, small town.

00:22:32.200 These small towns he's operating in.

00:22:34.580 And they try to talk to him.

00:22:36.600 And he says, I'm sorry, I can't help you.

00:22:37.900 So then they call up to Alaska.

00:22:41.460 And 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.

00:22:51.660 She had spent like 10 years doing drugs. 0.85

00:22:55.100 As a police officer.

00:22:56.420 Oh, sorry.

00:22:57.000 I phrased that.

00:22:57.680 Yeah.

00:22:59.100 Undercover on narcotics.

00:23:02.080 But 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.

00:23:10.460 And Keyes kind of lights up a bit because now he's got the attentions of this beautiful young detective.

00:23:15.800 And it becomes this sort of almost like a – I talk about it in the book.

00:23:20.620 It's like a Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter kind of dynamic, you know.

00:23:25.560 But he won't talk to them either.

00:23:27.400 And so they have to extradite him up to Alaska.

00:23:30.180 And 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.

00:23:45.440 Like this guy was such a predator and so dangerous, such a genius, completely self-taught.

00:23:51.000 This guy did not have formal schooling at all, at all. 0.91

00:23:54.360 And he taught himself how to hunt and kill.

00:23:56.900 And so they get him back up to Alaska.

00:23:58.740 And that's when it really starts clicking in because they know Samantha's dead.

00:24:03.020 They've gone to the house he shares with his living girlfriend, a travel nurse, and his 10-year-old daughter.

00:24:08.120 By all accounts, he is an incredible father.

00:24:10.920 It's crazy.

00:24:12.000 And they toss the house and they're looking for Samantha.

00:24:14.980 They can't find her.

00:24:16.860 There's a shed on the property.

00:24:18.080 This is before or after he's confessed.

00:24:20.080 He hasn't confessed to anything.

00:24:21.180 He hasn't.

00:24:21.520 Okay.

00:24:21.660 So they're just doing a search of his property because he's under arrest.

00:24:25.180 And 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.

00:24:35.000 And 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.

00:24:42.620 And this is a career maker.

00:24:44.920 This is a star maker.

00:24:46.320 If 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?

00:24:53.440 The egos start coming into play.

00:24:55.980 And Steve and Jeff are – Steve Payne and Jeff Beller are the most experienced.

00:25:00.560 And they're gaming out how they're going to talk to this guy.

00:25:03.000 They have zero – they really don't have much evidence.

00:25:05.140 They don't have – that footage of him, he's unrecognizable in that surveillance clip of him abducting Samantha.

00:25:15.700 Sure, a couple of items are in his car, but he says she gave them to me.

00:25:18.920 I was her dealer.

00:25:19.820 She owed me money.

00:25:21.120 Prove it.

00:25:22.040 Prove I took her.

00:25:23.220 You don't have anything.

00:25:24.720 He was an expert at leaving no physical evidence behind.

00:25:27.220 So 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.

00:25:41.400 It's all blank paper. 0.98

00:25:42.960 Oh, we have all this shit on you. 0.99

00:25:44.700 We've got all these photos. 1.00

00:25:45.760 And you may as well just give it to us now before we, like, really, you know, throw you away forever.

00:25:49.920 And Steve, his whole thing was like, less is more.

00:25:52.840 Like, one photo.

00:25:53.880 So that's just the tip of what we've got on you.

00:25:57.100 You know, it's a whole mind game.

00:25:59.280 And 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.

00:26:07.800 I'm questioning this suspect.

00:26:09.680 That's so real.

00:26:10.520 I'm in charge.

00:26:11.580 He's white-collar, Megan.

00:26:13.280 He's never dealt with violent crime in his life.

00:26:14.860 Nor do they usually have the investigator be the prosecutor.

00:26:18.980 You can't, right?

00:26:19.940 Because if this goes to trial, now the prosecutor's also a witness because he was in that room.

00:26:22.860 And now he's got to testify.

00:26:23.880 Yeah, can't happen.

00:26:25.540 But this is how wild it is up there.

00:26:28.020 It's so funny.

00:26:28.840 The twin poles of this case are Alaska and Texas, like two states, with this psyche, which is like, don't tell me what to do.

00:26:34.520 I'm going to do it my way.

00:26:35.800 You know?

00:26:36.320 Fine, to a point.

00:26:37.320 Not 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.

00:26:54.880 Wow.

00:26:55.300 So, so he does confess.

00:26:58.640 We 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.

00:27:12.620 Look, here it is.

00:27:13.140 He directed us north out of Anchorage, towards the Matanuska Valley.

00:27:20.680 How many yards off the short line or feet off?

00:27:24.320 It's right there.

00:27:24.880 And he pointed to a spot on the lake.

00:27:32.220 And what should they look for specifically?

00:27:35.760 Ice fishing spot.

00:27:39.420 Was it a hole that you cut, or was the hole there?

00:27:44.340 No, it was a hole I cut.

00:27:48.240 You'll, you'll see it.

00:27:49.480 You'll see where the hole was, probably.

00:27:51.460 I don't imagine.

00:27:52.600 There's not very much snow up there.

00:27:55.880 And Israel Keyes said, that is where we would find Samantha Koenig.

00:28:01.160 She's not wrapped up or anything, but there will still be some blood on ice.

00:28:07.320 They're going to find anything else out there?

00:28:10.140 Oh, you'll find her DNA.

00:28:12.240 Okay.

00:28:14.840 You'll probably, you'll find her, my DNA, on her ship and everything along, so.

00:28:20.520 Okay.

00:28:24.880 The one thing I do need to know is how you killed her.

00:28:28.640 Why?

00:28:31.400 I mean, it doesn't really matter how it happened.

00:28:34.560 I'm saying that, yes, I was responsible.

00:28:37.600 And yes, I told you where she is. 0.93

00:28:39.480 So you killed her. 0.97

00:28:42.560 Yes.

00:28:45.440 Okay, several things about that clip.

00:28:49.800 We are looking at Jeff Bell, who was one of the lead guys.

00:28:52.940 And then that voice in there that says, I need, I need you to tell me why you killed her.

00:28:59.500 That's Kevin Feldes.

00:29:00.520 That's the prosecutor who bigfooted this case. 0.97

00:29:02.820 That's not a question you ever ask a suspect like that.

00:29:05.380 It doesn't matter what you need.

00:29:07.040 I need to know.

00:29:07.900 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:29:08.820 And I think these little things were tells.

00:29:11.660 Now, that's, he's telling them where he put her remains.

00:29:15.400 He had her in his shed after he murdered her.

00:29:19.500 Steps away from the home in which his daughter was living?

00:29:21.960 Yes.

00:29:22.540 And girlfriend was packing for their trip the next day.

00:29:27.120 They were going on vacation for two weeks.

00:29:29.260 So she's out in the shed for two weeks.

00:29:31.560 He left her there.

00:29:32.320 Oh, my God.

00:29:32.760 And when they asked him about it, they said, weren't you worried?

00:29:38.140 And he said, was I worried?

00:29:39.740 Like, it's like 10 degrees in Alaska.

00:29:41.600 No, the body's going to freeze.

00:29:42.740 It'll be fine.

00:29:45.200 But they took the wrong shed when they arrested him.

00:29:48.700 What?

00:29:49.380 They took another shed that he just used as a shed.

00:29:52.200 He was a contractor.

00:29:53.260 They didn't take the right shed.

00:29:54.540 They didn't look inside.

00:29:55.100 There were a lot of mistakes on this case.

00:29:57.080 A lot.

00:29:57.680 A lot of big ones.

00:29:59.180 The confession, which is in American Predator,

00:30:01.780 the text of the entire confession,

00:30:04.380 the FBI has never made that public.

00:30:06.420 I had to get that through someone very, very close to the case.

00:30:10.360 But it's in none of the records that have been made public.

00:30:13.840 The audio of it doesn't exist.

00:30:15.220 They've tried to bury it.

00:30:16.800 It's a confession in two parts.

00:30:18.900 And it's broken up because, one, it went on so long.

00:30:21.600 But, two, Feldus was in real danger of tipping their hand

00:30:28.120 that they had nothing, that they had no evidence.

00:30:30.640 And once you lose that power, you can't get it back.

00:30:35.300 Third, Keyes originally spoke to them on the promise that he would not get the death penalty.

00:30:42.560 They broke midday, came back to finish the confession,

00:30:45.760 and he said he would only finish the confession if they promised to give him the death penalty.

00:30:50.960 Right, right.

00:30:51.420 That's so strange.

00:30:52.460 We don't know what explained the flip, the switch?

00:30:55.180 I think his mother spoke to me for the book.

00:30:59.420 She's never spoken before or since.

00:31:01.980 She said when she saw the footage of Keyes getting arrested in Texas,

00:31:06.760 she knew that he knew his life was over, that that was it.

00:31:10.220 Yep. 0.96

00:31:10.600 She knew he was a killer, by the way.

00:31:12.240 What? 0.97

00:31:12.780 Oh, she knew he was a killer.

00:31:13.840 How?

00:31:14.300 From the cat and the animals?

00:31:16.280 Well, the cat, the animals, she and her husband kicked him out of the home. 0.99

00:31:21.100 He was about 14.

00:31:22.080 He was breaking and entering.

00:31:23.240 He was gun running.

00:31:25.260 He had this habit of he would break into people's homes and move their furniture around.

00:31:31.020 Oh.

00:31:31.780 And then he would go outside and, like, peep and wait for them to come home

00:31:36.260 and look through the windows and watch how freaked out they were.

00:31:39.140 You know, he was a budding, budding, budding serial killer.

00:31:42.780 And she told me, she said, oh, the FBI thinks Israel first killed in this date,

00:31:48.240 and I know his first kill was much earlier.

00:31:50.140 Whoa.

00:31:50.560 Okay.

00:31:51.220 Okay.

00:31:51.860 Great.

00:31:52.540 Could you be more specific?

00:31:53.660 Why don't you call the FBI with that information?

00:31:55.600 Well, and he said something like, it became apparent to me at a young age that the things

00:32:02.980 I thought were okay, no one else thought was okay, and, like, I was different from the others.

00:32:08.040 And it really does go to, like, is a serial killer born?

00:32:11.780 Is it, you know, nature and nurture?

00:32:13.120 Right. 0.75

00:32:13.500 Do you arrive here in the crib as a little psychopath, and no matter what happens, 0.96

00:32:18.760 that's what you're going to be?

00:32:19.760 Or do you have to be subjected to some amount of torture and neglect and so on as an infant

00:32:25.580 in order to get there?

00:32:26.920 Do we know the answer to that in his case?

00:32:29.360 It's a tantalizing, philosophical, neurological, behavioral question that hangs over the book.

00:32:37.240 And I spoke to a guy named Roy Hazelwood, who has since died.

00:32:41.060 He was, like, the godfather of criminal profiling in the FBI.

00:32:46.480 Godfather.

00:32:47.020 And I asked him that, and he laughed, and he said, I was waiting for how long it was

00:32:50.760 going to take for you to ask me.

00:32:52.520 Everyone wants to know.

00:32:54.300 And he said, we don't know.

00:32:55.260 He said, the youngest incidence of psychopathy I've ever encountered was in a two-year-old.

00:32:59.960 Oh, gosh.

00:33:01.700 Who was self-harming in a sort of psychosexual way.

00:33:06.540 But he said, we don't know.

00:33:07.780 You know, Keese was one of 10 siblings.

00:33:10.220 They all suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of the parents.

00:33:13.140 All of them.

00:33:13.960 Oh, boy.

00:33:14.460 Only one turned out like this.

00:33:16.140 So I don't know.

00:33:17.120 Yeah, I don't know either.

00:33:18.280 I wish we did.

00:33:20.060 OK, so let's keep going.

00:33:21.540 So he gives that confession about, do we know how many days he had Samantha before he killed

00:33:26.000 her?

00:33:26.820 Oh, he only had her for hours.

00:33:29.000 How did he get the paper that was post the abduction in the photo?

00:33:33.080 I think he had saved it.

00:33:34.460 He had saved it and how he made her look alive.

00:33:37.920 So she was dead in the photo, and he made her look alive.

00:33:40.380 She's dead.

00:33:40.420 Jeff was right.

00:33:41.040 She was dead in that photo.

00:33:42.680 Oh, my gosh.

00:33:44.460 So he took, he was an avid outdoorsman, also an ultra marathoner who was hunting in national

00:33:52.780 parks and the like.

00:33:53.760 But he took fishing wire and sewed her eyes open.

00:33:58.880 Oh, my gosh.

00:34:00.280 And then put makeup on her.

00:34:02.140 He took his girlfriend's makeup. 1.00

00:34:03.320 This is a very sick, sick person. 1.00

00:34:05.500 And that was the proof of life photo. 0.99

00:34:07.540 OK, so at what point did the cops start to glean there's more than one?

00:34:14.660 Oh, once he starts talking about Samantha, they know the the detail, the the affect, the

00:34:22.360 flat matter of fact way of communicating this.

00:34:26.500 We're negotiating now. 0.98

00:34:28.940 We're demanding the death penalty.

00:34:30.780 We're demanding it's off the table on the table.

00:34:32.640 Well, this is someone who's very interested in power and control, and it's not the first

00:34:37.280 time he's done it.

00:34:37.980 And in fact, Jeff told me that when he and Mickey Dahl first worked, walked into that

00:34:42.920 police station in Lufkin, into that interrogation room, he said the hairs on the back of his

00:34:48.220 neck stood up before they even said a word to him.

00:34:50.160 They knew.

00:34:51.080 They knew.

00:34:51.700 I think that's right.

00:34:52.600 I do think when you're in the presence of true evil, you know, it's a different energy.

00:34:57.920 It's just a, you know, vibe shift, as the kids say.

00:34:59.940 But it's real.

00:35:00.480 I mean, you'd like to believe that, you know, you'd like to know that when you're around

00:35:03.860 somebody who's truly evil, you'd have that response with the hair, you know?

00:35:08.680 Well, now they that that totally tracked to me because he's in custody.

00:35:12.840 They know he took Samantha.

00:35:14.720 Jeff knows she's dead in his bones.

00:35:16.880 He knows it.

00:35:18.220 But he was very, very, very good at wearing a mask in real life.

00:35:23.500 I mean, the irony is that where he and his girlfriend lived, it was it's in a suburb

00:35:28.740 called Turnagain in Anchorage.

00:35:30.860 And it is a neighborhood heavily populated with judges, federal prosecutors, lawyers.

00:35:39.420 And he was the contractor on all of their homes.

00:35:42.040 And so many of the people they interviewed after they apprehended him were like, he had

00:35:46.620 the keys to my house.

00:35:47.500 And when we were away, we'd be like going and do all the renovations.

00:35:50.760 We trusted him.

00:35:51.560 Oh, my gosh.

00:35:52.780 Can you imagine finding out that a serial killer had been in your house regularly working

00:35:56.880 on your kitchen?

00:35:58.220 So the next murders that he confessed to, right, are really the only other murders that

00:36:06.600 he owned, correct?

00:36:08.540 That the husband and wife.

00:36:09.520 Fully.

00:36:09.580 That he fully owned, yeah.

00:36:10.500 Across the country.

00:36:11.820 In Vermont.

00:36:12.960 So tell us about that couple.

00:36:15.420 This is so wild.

00:36:16.560 And it's also interesting how they got this confession, because they know he's a serial

00:36:20.760 now.

00:36:21.120 They know it.

00:36:21.960 So they're like, okay, you want the death penalty?

00:36:24.340 You got to give us something else.

00:36:25.860 We can't go to the feds and say, you're getting it for one.

00:36:28.660 You have to give us more.

00:36:30.180 And he says, okay.

00:36:31.320 He says, I'll give you two bodies and a name.

00:36:36.140 And he says, I need you to get a map.

00:36:37.780 And I need you to pull it up for me.

00:36:40.600 So now we're in Vermont.

00:36:42.040 And he begins with where he dug up his kill kit.

00:36:47.160 So he's got these kill kits buried all over the country.

00:36:50.580 And they're still out there.

00:36:52.340 They're five-gallon Home Depot buckets that he filled with cash.

00:36:56.900 He was a bank robber.

00:36:58.320 Only used cash when he was committing crimes.

00:37:01.420 Zip ties, guns, ammo, and Drano to accelerate human decomposition.

00:37:08.180 Oh, my.

00:37:09.480 So then what he would do is he would start walking around and looking for people to take.

00:37:16.120 That's what he called it, taking people.

00:37:18.300 And he was out this night in Vermont.

00:37:21.000 He was on a family trip.

00:37:22.760 Was this after?

00:37:23.660 No, it must have been before.

00:37:24.800 This is before Samantha.

00:37:25.500 It had to be before because she was his last.

00:37:26.680 She's his last known victim, which is very important.

00:37:30.000 Definitely not his last one.

00:37:31.140 So he – it's a rainy night.

00:37:38.040 This is his own self-report.

00:37:39.360 He's staying in like a Holiday Inn or something.

00:37:41.580 He goes out, and he's looking for someone to take.

00:37:44.240 And he comes upon this apartment complex, and this car is pulling in this little like VW bug.

00:37:49.320 And he likes this.

00:37:51.840 And this guy gets out, and it's raining, and he puts his newspaper over his head, and he's trying to rush into his apartment complex.

00:38:00.860 And Keyes is right behind him, unbeknownst to the guy.

00:38:03.900 And the way Keyes described it, his arm went like this behind the guy, like that.

00:38:09.080 Like he just missed him.

00:38:10.920 He was just about to take him.

00:38:12.280 Like reaching forward and missing.

00:38:14.320 And he said that guy has no idea because if he had been like one second slower, he would have gotten it that night.

00:38:20.700 He would have been the one.

00:38:22.440 I mean, he had no victim profile.

00:38:23.980 He would take anybody. 0.98

00:38:25.220 And when I say take, he would abduct, rape, torture, and murder. 1.00

00:38:29.180 And so he was bisexual. 0.99

00:38:30.920 He was always like – they call it practicing the parlances, like on sex workers, you know?

00:38:37.620 Anyway, so he goes back to his hotel, waits for the rain to stop.

00:38:43.040 Then it's like midnight.

00:38:43.800 He goes back out.

00:38:44.980 His own self-report, he comes upon this house.

00:38:47.880 It's a suburban.

00:38:48.960 It's like a flat single story.

00:38:51.940 He sees in the yard there is no indication of dogs or kids.

00:38:58.320 He says, I won't go near kids since having my daughter.

00:39:02.000 Now you sort of see where he's beginning to realize he's going to be in the pantheon.

00:39:06.740 You know, he says he doesn't want anybody to know he exists, but he does.

00:39:10.200 This is the kind of thing the fictional character Dexter would say.

00:39:13.800 Like, I'm a serial killer with a code, you know?

00:39:16.400 Yep.

00:39:16.840 I don't touch kids.

00:39:17.680 Give me a gold star.

00:39:18.660 He did touch kids.

00:39:20.660 So he decides he's going to cut the phone line to see if an alarm goes off, which it does not.

00:39:27.740 He smashes his way in.

00:39:29.320 As a contractor, he's pretty confident.

00:39:31.100 He knows the layout.

00:39:31.840 There's an older couple living there named Bill and Lorraine Currier.

00:39:37.740 They are older.

00:39:38.700 They are overweight. 0.99

00:39:39.580 They are sickly. 0.86

00:39:40.260 They have medication.

00:39:41.720 They have a bird in the house.

00:39:43.420 And this was one of the more chilling details that law enforcement told me.

00:39:47.620 When he goes in, they have this huge bird.

00:39:50.520 I forget whether it was a powder or something.

00:39:51.880 But the bird cage, which was like six feet, had the cover over it so it could sleep at night.

00:39:58.440 So it's almost like a shroud of death is already there.

00:40:01.420 And he said he, from breaking the window pane on the back door to gain access to the house

00:40:07.920 and tying the two of them up, like hog tied on the bed, six seconds.

00:40:13.020 And the FBI did it.

00:40:15.360 And they figured out he did it in six seconds.

00:40:17.780 He did it.

00:40:18.460 He took them from the house.

00:40:20.620 Took them from the house in their car.

00:40:21.520 So strange.

00:40:22.240 Let me just ask you because I saw how they look.

00:40:25.680 And yes, it tracks exactly with what you said.

00:40:28.020 And they look to me helpless.

00:40:29.540 Yeah.

00:40:30.020 Like even, you know, in their nice picture predating this terrible event,

00:40:33.840 they looked completely helpless, completely harmless.

00:40:36.700 So he still got a Jones from that.

00:40:39.040 Like he got a Jones from capturing and killing people who posed absolutely no threat or conquest to him. 0.66

00:40:46.400 I think in his mind, it was a conquest because it was a strange house.

00:40:51.940 He didn't know how many people would be in.

00:40:53.940 He could guess it would be two, probably a married couple.

00:40:58.920 But he's breaking into their house in the middle of the night as a stranger. 0.99

00:41:03.200 And he's not just going to kill them in their home. 0.77

00:41:05.520 He's going to abduct them. 0.98

00:41:06.540 And he's going to move them to a second location that he had staked out like a day prior.

00:41:10.720 And nobody saw any of it?

00:41:12.220 Nobody saw a thing.

00:41:13.580 Dead of night.

00:41:14.460 We don't know if they were screaming.

00:41:15.780 I mean, he probably had them gagged.

00:41:17.140 Okay.

00:41:17.720 So he gets them in the car.

00:41:19.080 He moves them to some dilapidated looking like farmhouse or something.

00:41:23.520 Desserted farmhouse.

00:41:23.760 Yeah.

00:41:24.140 Falling apart. 1.00

00:41:25.340 And then he kills them both. 0.97

00:41:27.100 The husband tried to fight for his wife. 1.00

00:41:29.460 He did.

00:41:30.260 He separated them both.

00:41:31.520 He put the husband in the basement, tied up.

00:41:36.580 And then he brought the wife to the second floor. 0.98

00:41:41.800 And he raped her up there. 1.00

00:41:45.100 This older woman. 1.00

00:41:46.320 Older woman. 0.95

00:41:48.760 He had an issue.

00:41:51.600 He had a lot of rage at his mother.

00:41:53.740 A lot of rage.

00:41:54.400 And this goes into his taking of people in pairs and mothers and children.

00:42:03.320 And then he brought Lorraine.

00:42:07.700 No, no, no.

00:42:08.460 Then he hears from upstairs, Bill Currier in the basement is making a lot of noise.

00:42:14.300 He's a big guy.

00:42:15.000 He's a former Army veteran.

00:42:17.920 He's an Army veteran.

00:42:18.660 And he's trying to break free.

00:42:21.460 And he's shouting for his wife and leave my wife alone and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:42:25.820 Keys goes down there and he shoots him dead. 1.00

00:42:28.140 Shoots him dead. 0.99

00:42:29.020 And this angers him because that was not in the plan. 1.00

00:42:32.220 He wanted to strangle Bill.

00:42:34.260 He wanted it to be personal. 0.76

00:42:35.820 He wanted it to be that violent.

00:42:37.520 And it takes a long time to strangle somebody to death.

00:42:39.860 It's not like in the movies.

00:42:40.860 It takes a long time.

00:42:42.260 It takes a lot of force.

00:42:43.300 So then he's infuriated, but Lorraine has begun to run.

00:42:48.900 She's gotten out of the house and she's running towards the highway against like three or four in the morning.

00:42:53.460 It's desolate out there.

00:42:54.960 And he catches her.

00:42:56.260 He catches her and he brings her down to the basement where he shows her, her husband, and then he strangles her to death. 0.93

00:43:03.740 Oh, that is sick.

00:43:04.680 And then he leaves them in the basement.

00:43:07.120 He leaves the bodies in the basement.

00:43:08.440 He's running out of time.

00:43:09.420 The sun is coming up.

00:43:10.220 Normally what he would do would be to move the bodies across state lines.

00:43:15.680 So you make it multi-state.

00:43:17.220 You make it very difficult to track.

00:43:20.540 But he's got to go.

00:43:22.100 And he figures this house is a teardown.

00:43:26.200 So anybody who buys this property, it's going to be a developer.

00:43:30.560 They're going to tear down the house and the animals will get to the bodies before any of this even happens.

00:43:35.820 He was right.

00:43:37.200 He was right.

00:43:37.820 Well, I don't know about the animals, but they show that the house gets torn down.

00:43:44.360 It gets dumped in a landfill.

00:43:46.600 No one's walked through and seen two corpses or skeletons.

00:43:51.040 Nope.

00:43:51.780 They went to the landfill.

00:43:53.020 The police and searched it, trying to find any remnants.

00:43:57.040 Didn't.

00:43:58.180 So their remains have never been found.

00:44:00.700 They're not even classified as murdered.

00:44:03.680 They're classified as missing.

00:44:04.940 Even after a confession?

00:44:07.340 Speaking of which, let's play some of it.

00:44:09.980 Here is Keys admitting to killing Bill and Lorraine Currier.

00:44:14.220 Sot 54.

00:44:14.720 There was a shovel in the basement and I hit him with that a couple of times.

00:44:23.520 But then it was all hanged up and grabbed a 10-22.

00:44:27.740 He saw the gun and he started to say something.

00:44:31.180 And it just pissed me off and I just started telling the trigger.

00:44:33.640 I pulled as fast as I could until the magazine was empty.

00:44:45.240 After he killed Bill, he tells us that he rapes Lorraine Currier. 0.99

00:44:51.580 He rapes her multiple times. 0.92

00:44:57.220 And he said he took Lorraine downstairs and Bill's obviously deceased on the floor. 0.96

00:45:03.060 He describes killing her and then using contractor bags to put their bodies in in the basement of that house.

00:45:12.380 The bodies were completely covered and they were underneath a lot of debris, like piled on top of them, like wood and trash.

00:45:24.660 I mean, just like the callousness is shocking.

00:45:27.540 Not 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.

00:45:35.780 Just like zero humanity in him.

00:45:38.700 Nothing.

00:45:39.140 Nothing.

00:45:40.780 Nothing.

00:45:41.380 And, you know, with recovering Samantha's remains, you know, he dismembered her and he just put the limbs and the head in the water.

00:45:51.600 And I spoke to the lead on the dive team who led that recovery.

00:45:57.740 Oh, God.

00:45:58.320 And the two divers who recovered Samantha's remains.

00:46:01.340 And the lead diver, the lead, Bobby Chacon, you know, he's retired now.

00:46:09.420 He has PTSD and he has a therapy dog.

00:46:12.860 And he talks about this case because it's instructive for members of law enforcement.

00:46:18.200 They should know about it.

00:46:19.920 But that recovery, he said, was among the most brutal.

00:46:23.840 And they see a lot of things no one should ever see.

00:46:26.320 And in fact, what they do, these, these tough, tough, tough guys, Bobby sent me these drawings they did.

00:46:33.360 And especially after recovering children, the dive, the divers will often, their beautiful drawings will draw images of themselves.

00:46:41.860 And they have all their dive gear on and their helmets on, but they have angel wings on.

00:46:48.120 And they're always holding the victim intact, bringing them up.

00:46:53.340 But while they're always bringing them out of water, it's also sort of an ascension into a heavenly place of rest, you know.

00:47:01.280 And that's how special, special people who do this work.

00:47:05.480 Like, you think about them, right?

00:47:08.880 It's like when you're doing your job and you have a bad day and you think, oh, this is tough.

00:47:12.340 Oh, my gosh.

00:47:13.180 And you remember how tough, actual, hardworking people with really difficult jobs have to spend their days.

00:47:21.220 And I think about it all the time with child sexual abuse material.

00:47:24.240 Like, there are, and that really does change people.

00:47:26.720 It changes them.

00:47:28.000 Men in particular who have to spend their days chasing the most vile among us.

00:47:31.960 It's having to look, and they have to look at the images because they've got to go after it.

00:47:35.780 They've got to make a case against these people.

00:47:37.720 And I've heard so many on different podcasts and so on, just talking about what it does to you.

00:47:42.860 Like, it deadens your soul.

00:47:43.920 Most don't last that long.

00:47:45.480 This is just, how can you spend your day doing that?

00:47:47.600 No, I know.

00:47:48.680 Oh.

00:47:49.120 To expose that level of darkness and things that most people would never even think up.

00:47:56.880 Yeah.

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00:50:07.820 So, Keyes admits to this double murder of Bill and Lorraine.

00:50:12.760 They know he killed Samantha.

00:50:14.420 But 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.

00:50:26.620 And 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.

00:50:38.700 Please explain this to me.

00:50:39.780 It's SAT 60.

00:50:40.860 I 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.

00:50:54.940 None of it has, or I shouldn't say none of it.

00:50:58.180 But about half of what I thought we had an understanding on, you know, from the very beginning, hasn't worked out in my favor.

00:51:11.160 Granted, 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.

00:51:24.580 What does he mean, it hasn't worked out in my favor?

00:51:28.920 He wanted the death penalty, and he wanted it really fast.

00:51:32.140 Well, how long was this series of interviews?

00:51:36.040 So they started March, April, and they went till about—he really began shutting down, I'm going to say, right around there.

00:51:47.860 July.

00:51:48.200 July, August, he tried to kill himself in prison, and it wasn't successful.

00:51:56.520 And so there's so much secrecy surrounding this case, and I have theories as to why.

00:52:00.880 It's not just about a federal prosecutor who was too big for his britches.

00:52:04.140 It's not that.

00:52:05.840 But Jeff Bell—Jeff Bell went—he would go over every day to the prison, the jail, rather, to see.

00:52:10.900 They didn't have anything remotely secure enough for a guy like this.

00:52:15.000 He never should have been up there.

00:52:16.120 He never—he should have been in a Supermax.

00:52:18.180 Yeah.

00:52:19.480 He went over there every day to see if Israel wanted to talk every day.

00:52:23.520 And he went—so Israel almost escaped from court, very Ted Bundy-like.

00:52:29.140 Remember when Ted Bundy—

00:52:30.240 Yes.

00:52:30.820 Okay.

00:52:31.680 This footage has been scrubbed from the internet.

00:52:35.000 Fox had the footage from inside the courtroom.

00:52:38.440 Keys, shackled, ankles, wrists.

00:52:42.880 Samantha's father is in the courtroom.

00:52:44.340 Everyone's in the courtroom.

00:52:46.900 Keys, suddenly, in the middle of the hearing, leaps up out of his chair.

00:52:52.960 He's out of his shackles, and he's jumping—like, what do you call those rows?

00:52:58.060 I think of them as pews from church.

00:52:59.820 But in a courthouse, the rows—he's jumping from, like, benches, top to top to top to top,

00:53:04.460 before, like, he's tased.

00:53:06.120 He's jumped, and he's tased.

00:53:07.600 He almost got away.

00:53:09.240 He was tased.

00:53:10.100 He seemed to very much enjoy the tasing.

00:53:13.120 But how did he do it?

00:53:14.700 How did he do it?

00:53:15.440 Well, he took—he would get a little baggy lunch every day before going over to court,

00:53:20.600 and he took the cellophane that wrapped the sandwich, and he fashioned little keys out of that thing,

00:53:26.920 and he used it to—

00:53:28.240 Come on.

00:53:28.880 Yes, yes.

00:53:30.960 And so Jeff would go over there, and he would be like, stop giving this guy anything.

00:53:35.580 Take away his shoelaces.

00:53:37.160 Why does he have subscriptions to magazines like Outside Adventurer?

00:53:41.740 What's going on in here?

00:53:43.480 They could never get an answer.

00:53:45.640 They could never get an answer.

00:53:47.380 He was just so clever.

00:53:48.680 He fooled everybody.

00:53:49.680 That's an advantage, right, when you're a killer who's very smart, and you're smarter than your jailers.

00:53:53.720 Yeah.

00:53:53.940 Maybe than the cops, some of them.

00:53:55.780 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:56.020 So, notwithstanding his lamentation that he wasn't getting put to death fast enough,

00:54:02.300 he hadn't had a trial or anything.

00:54:03.620 It was—I don't know how he thought the system worked.

00:54:06.380 They were figuring out that he was responsible for more than just those three murders.

00:54:11.700 Absolutely.

00:54:12.900 Absolutely.

00:54:13.480 Go ahead.

00:54:13.760 The other thing that I'm remembering now that was stalling him up—this is like the lawyer in you will appreciate.

00:54:20.200 So, his defender, his public defender, is this guy named Rich Kirtner, who is a great lawyer.

00:54:28.080 Great lawyer.

00:54:29.320 He's also very anti-death penalty.

00:54:32.500 So, there's a man who enters this story named Rich Kirtner.

00:54:36.600 What's his story?

00:54:37.340 So, he's assigned to Keyes the moment Keyes is arrested.

00:54:40.340 He is Keyes' public defender.

00:54:42.840 Okay?

00:54:43.100 Keyes can't afford a lawyer.

00:54:44.680 So, he says—because all of his cash is tied up in kill kits all over the United States, you know?

00:54:49.280 So, anyway, Rich takes this case, and Rich is way into this case.

00:54:53.400 And I talked to Rich at his office in Anchorage, and he was like, I really liked Israel.

00:54:58.340 Oh, my gosh.

00:54:59.660 I know.

00:55:00.680 Rich, you got to get out more.

00:55:02.840 Seriously.

00:55:03.460 He's like, I liked him.

00:55:04.100 But 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.

00:55:14.400 And 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.

00:55:30.120 Okay.

00:55:30.840 But they do figure out it's more than these three.

00:55:33.920 Oh, yeah.

00:55:34.200 So, how did they do that?

00:55:36.100 They asked him.

00:55:36.940 They said, how many people did you kill?

00:55:38.740 They just asked him.

00:55:40.020 And he said, well, less than 12.

00:55:44.140 And Steve Payne always thought that was a weird number.

00:55:47.120 Yeah.

00:55:47.420 Because most people go by fives and tens, right?

00:55:50.060 Like, you round up to a five or a ten.

00:55:51.940 What does that even mean?

00:55:53.280 Like, less than 12.

00:55:55.440 That's a great point, right?

00:55:56.740 Like, what does that mean?

00:55:58.560 But Steve took it to mean 12.

00:56:01.580 Like, 11 or 12.

00:56:03.480 But I talk to people on the case who think it was way more than that, and I definitely think it was way more than that.

00:56:12.420 And do we know who they are?

00:56:13.980 Like, you mentioned something in Florida.

00:56:15.540 We know some of them.

00:56:16.480 We know some of them.

00:56:18.480 There are some cold cases I lay out in the book that I definitely believe are the work of Keith.

00:56:22.800 Yes, absolutely.

00:56:25.560 A 12-year-old Paralympian in Colville, Washington, where Keith lived.

00:56:29.600 Very, very small town went missing when Keith was a very young man.

00:56:35.120 He was like 14 and this girl was 12?

00:56:38.540 Okay.

00:56:38.860 Maybe 19.

00:56:39.100 Her body was later found with her feet.

00:56:45.200 Her prosthetic feet were far away from her remains.

00:56:48.340 But she was seen.

00:56:50.800 She knew him.

00:56:51.460 She knew him.

00:56:52.360 She knew him.

00:56:53.660 So it's not true that he didn't kill children, to your point.

00:56:56.420 Absolutely.

00:56:57.180 Yeah.

00:56:57.460 And there was another 12-year-old girl who was murdered with her mother.

00:57:02.900 And I think that was Keith as well, in Colville as well.

00:57:07.220 There's a man named Jimmy Tidwell who went missing in Texas after Samantha was taken, while Keith was still on the loose.

00:57:14.740 And I go into all of the evidence as to Jeff Bell knows it's Jimmy, too.

00:57:20.980 He won't say it publicly, but we talked about it.

00:57:24.180 After the book came out, after American Predator came out, I got an email from a woman who said,

00:57:29.280 your book came to me through a circuitous route.

00:57:33.600 I am Jimmy Tidwell's niece.

00:57:35.740 We have never been able to get an answer from either local law enforcement or the FBI, but now we know what happened to him, so thank you.

00:57:42.600 Wow.

00:57:42.900 There is a very famous case I'm obsessed with in Florida called the Boca Murders.

00:57:49.980 There was a man in Boca Raton who was targeting women at the mall, upscale luxury mall, broad daylight.

00:58:01.660 First victim, she is going to her vehicle with her toddler son, and she's loading up the back of the car.

00:58:09.520 Honestly, Megan, after writing this book, I don't move through the world the same way at all.

00:58:14.320 Like, I will never—my head is on a swivel in, like, a garage.

00:58:17.940 He 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.

00:58:25.440 Never do it, by the way, to the listening audience.

00:58:28.000 Never let them take you to a second location.

00:58:29.560 And that would qualify as a second location, like, from the parking lot into your car to go someplace.

00:58:34.440 Run, run, run, run.

00:58:36.220 You have much better chance of surviving.

00:58:38.100 He's probably not going to shoot you.

00:58:39.460 He's probably not.

00:58:39.920 Run and scream. 0.79

00:58:40.520 The difficult victims, they just kind of let him go.

00:58:42.620 But I'd rather somebody take a shot at me while I'm serpentining away than have me in the car.

00:58:47.820 You 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?

00:58:58.220 And it's like, it takes you a minute to be like, am I awake?

00:59:00.280 Yes.

00:59:00.780 You know?

00:59:01.300 Yeah.

00:59:01.660 He's capitalizing on those five seconds of, like, orienting yourself.

00:59:05.300 Yeah.

00:59:05.720 And so then who's going to believe a stranger's in your house on top, you know?

00:59:08.980 I know.

00:59:09.880 So he's—this woman with her little child—

00:59:12.640 Don't comply.

00:59:13.560 He's got his gun in her back, and he's like, get in the car.

00:59:15.700 It's like, she probably couldn't even take that minute to go, you know?

00:59:19.520 Oh, I don't judge her.

00:59:20.240 Oh, I know you're not.

00:59:21.000 I know that.

00:59:21.200 But for the people listening, don't comply.

00:59:23.540 You're absolutely right.

00:59:24.560 You're absolutely right.

00:59:25.220 And you do it, especially if you have a child with you.

00:59:27.580 You're like, I'll do anything to protect my child.

00:59:29.460 That thing is to run away.

00:59:30.820 That's what that thing is.

00:59:31.840 Yeah.

00:59:32.480 Yeah.

00:59:33.220 So they get in the car, and he starts driving out and all around Boca Raton, and she is terrified, and her child begins to cry.

00:59:42.860 And she's worried that the crying is going to just infuriate him further, and she just keeps talking to him.

00:59:49.960 She just keeps talking—Samantha tried this, too.

00:59:51.900 It was really smart.

00:59:53.180 Humanize yourself.

00:59:54.600 You don't want to be doing this, right?

00:59:55.920 Like, we can end this.

00:59:57.020 Like, you know, he does let them go.

00:59:59.160 He lets them go.

01:00:00.780 He drives them back, and he lets them go.

01:00:02.400 So the other victims weren't so lucky.

01:00:05.760 Another mother and daughter were found in that mall, tied up in their car, zip ties.

01:00:12.660 There was a woman who was also—witnesses saw this happen.

01:00:17.540 This is how she was discovered.

01:00:19.980 She was driving a Jeep. 0.74

01:00:21.500 Well, a very well-to-do woman, married, middle-aged.

01:00:24.860 And the Jeep just starts going just erratically.

01:00:29.900 It's like slowing down, but it's going erratically.

01:00:31.860 And then the driver's side door opens, and she falls out. 0.75

01:00:37.100 So that means there's someone in the passenger side who pushed her out of the car.

01:00:42.200 So 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.

01:00:58.380 Now, Jane Doe, the woman who survived with her toddler, spoke to Dateline.

01:01:02.660 She has never given her real identity.

01:01:05.400 We have a little bit of that in Sup 55.

01:01:07.220 Let's watch.

01:01:08.760 I put my son in first.

01:01:10.180 I strapped him in his car seat.

01:01:11.400 He's in back.

01:01:12.400 Yeah, in the back.

01:01:13.820 Then I go to the back of the truck, and I put the stroller in, shut the gate, and start walking to the front.

01:01:22.100 Mama, mama. 0.61

01:01:23.440 And I could tell, look, he's worried or scared.

01:01:26.280 That's when I look in to see if he's okay, and there's a guy sitting there.

01:01:30.280 A guy in a floppy hat, wrapped around shades, sitting in her SUV right next to her two-year-old.

01:01:36.540 That moment, how terrifying is that?

01:01:38.660 I was in shock at that moment.

01:01:40.300 And I just stood there, and the guy said, get in the car, and I was frozen.

01:01:47.360 And when he said, get in the car for the second time, that's when I noticed the gun.

01:01:51.180 The gun is pointed at her son.

01:01:53.440 I see him pull out a pair of handcuffs.

01:01:55.480 He 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.

01:02:07.040 And he takes out a pair of darkened sunglasses with duct tape, I'm guessing, and puts them on my eyes.

01:02:16.100 So now I'm blindfolded.

01:02:18.040 Speak to me of terror.

01:02:19.500 I 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.

01:02:33.120 Zip tied her neck to the headrest? 0.97

01:02:36.140 That is disconcerting.

01:02:38.800 I mean, I can't imagine being able to function with anything like your full brain power when you're in that position.

01:02:44.740 No, and actually, I had that detail wrong.

01:02:46.940 He was in the car.

01:02:47.820 He got in the car before she knew, and her kid was crying and going, mommy, mommy.

01:02:53.360 But that was Keyes' MO.

01:02:56.860 And 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.

01:03:05.000 It's a dead ringer for Israel Keyes.

01:03:07.040 It's amazing he let her go.

01:03:08.660 Like, why would he show empathy in that case and none other?

01:03:12.420 It's such a great question.

01:03:14.180 I don't know.

01:03:15.480 I don't know what it was.

01:03:17.020 I don't know if it was the crying child.

01:03:18.980 I don't know if it somehow sparked something in him about his own daughter.

01:03:24.780 But it makes no sense because a couple of months later, another woman with her eight-year-old daughter, he murders.

01:03:33.300 So it doesn't make any sense.

01:03:34.820 This is after he has his own daughter or no?

01:03:36.660 Yeah.

01:03:37.820 Is she around his biological daughter?

01:03:41.580 She is.

01:03:42.060 What's her story?

01:03:43.200 She was raised by her mother on a reservation way up in Neah Bay in Washington State.

01:03:51.780 It's a very, very remote place.

01:03:55.560 And Keyes lived there for quite some time.

01:03:58.200 It's real poverty up there.

01:03:59.940 It's real, real poverty.

01:04:02.180 People know who she is, and she just lives her own life. 0.71

01:04:07.280 You know, she's never sought publicity or anything.

01:04:11.280 I remember I reached out to her mom right before the book came out, and I said, you should know that it's coming out.

01:04:17.220 Like, you might want to remove photos you've got of her on your social media.

01:04:21.340 You know, it'll be easy for people to find her.

01:04:23.060 So she's probably mid-20s now. 0.57

01:04:25.680 Yeah.

01:04:26.060 Oh, my gosh.

01:04:27.440 He had a stepson, by the way, who killed himself.

01:04:29.600 That's been omitted completely from the FBI narrative.

01:04:32.600 Killed himself after Keyes was caught.

01:04:34.000 So what happens?

01:04:37.580 Because now they're starting to get what they think is a toll, you know, a number.

01:04:43.520 And then it all comes to an end one day.

01:04:46.820 It all comes to an end one day.

01:04:48.940 Jeff Bell is getting ready to barge into a house and make some arrests, and he gets a phone call.

01:04:57.140 Well, it's very early in the morning that Israel Keyes has successfully committed suicide in his cell.

01:05:04.300 And he has left in blood drawings of 11 skulls with the words, we are one.

01:05:13.860 What the FBI did not make public was that he also wrote on the wall of his cell.

01:05:19.360 And I went there.

01:05:20.260 I went to the jail, and I went to the cell, and I saw exactly where it was, and this was a plexiglass cell.

01:05:24.440 So if you want to tell anybody that he did it in secret and nobody would ever have known, it's impossible.

01:05:30.280 So they knew he was killing himself.

01:05:32.060 Yes.

01:05:32.760 There was video of blood pooling out from under his door for hours.

01:05:39.100 He used a disposable.

01:05:41.120 Razor blade.

01:05:41.840 Yeah, the razor blade from his razor.

01:05:44.280 Well, you know, the warden of the jail told me that he put a sign on Keyes' door that said,

01:05:49.900 do not give this prisoner a razor blade.

01:05:53.280 Wow.

01:05:53.760 And they didn't follow that?

01:05:55.500 It's Keystone Cops.

01:05:56.620 How did they ever get past that?

01:05:58.180 How did they ever get past that?

01:05:59.420 Dictat.

01:05:59.940 I don't know.

01:06:00.500 But I got—

01:06:02.120 Wow.

01:06:03.640 After the book came out, I spoke to somebody who was impacted me.

01:06:05.960 Wait, wait.

01:06:06.280 You were going to say something that was on the wall.

01:06:07.880 Oh, on the wall.

01:06:08.700 In his own blood, he wrote Belize, the nation.

01:06:12.660 Why?

01:06:12.920 Well, I asked his mom about that, and she said he went to Belize on vacation, and he was really struck by the poverty in Belize.

01:06:21.780 And it really—it made him hate America even more and hate the federal government even more.

01:06:29.020 And, you know, he had planned to—he had in his planning, you know, at one point this case, in the middle of it, it was reclassified.

01:06:38.040 It went from serial murder to domestic terrorism, and the FBI has never said why.

01:06:43.800 Wow.

01:06:44.420 Mm-hmm.

01:06:45.340 Well, does that reclass do anything for the FBI's ability to hide the case?

01:06:50.640 I think they're doing exactly what they want to do.

01:06:53.320 You know, there's like 50,000 pages.

01:06:55.340 Why would they get to the point where they don't want to disclose it?

01:06:57.600 Just because they look bad?

01:06:58.820 Well—

01:06:59.040 Because if the numbers climb too high, they look like they're do-or-know-nothings?

01:07:04.060 I 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.

01:07:12.240 You know, you could say, we could close this out with a fair degree of certainty, right?

01:07:15.580 Give surviving family members some peace of mind.

01:07:18.900 Yeah.

01:07:19.820 He was allowed to join as a volunteer—a volunteer recruit at the United States Army, despite not existing on paper.

01:07:27.020 However, 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.

01:07:50.260 Keyes mentions McVeigh in his interrogations with the FBI, and he says, a lot of people I know regard that guy as a hero.

01:07:57.020 Wow.

01:07:57.880 He was a super soldier in the Army.

01:07:59.900 He has special forces training.

01:08:01.620 I asked for his Army records.

01:08:03.140 I got, like, three pages.

01:08:05.240 And one of those—two of those pages, the interesting things, one is his father died.

01:08:10.380 They have no idea how or what happened to the body.

01:08:13.880 Oh, boy.

01:08:14.560 And they were interrogating the discovery of a skull, a human skull, on the base where Keyes had trained for quite some time.

01:08:25.340 Well, it's no accident he drew skulls with his own blood as his final thing here on Earth.

01:08:31.640 And he drew 11, which is less than 12.

01:08:35.080 Mm-hmm.

01:08:35.500 And now we only know officially of three.

01:08:38.660 So, yeah, that's the big mystery.

01:08:40.000 Who are the other nine? 0.76

01:08:41.220 We just don't know yet.

01:08:42.140 I 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.

01:08:48.320 What did his mom say after the fact, after all this was done?

01:08:51.980 So, his mother is a member of a cult called the Church of Wells, last I heard, in Texas.

01:09:00.480 And she said to me, these interviews were really difficult because there was a lot of proselytizing to get to the point.

01:09:08.920 Oh, boy.

01:09:09.860 You must have loved that.

01:09:10.960 It was hard.

01:09:12.120 But she said, one day they were driving somewhere in his Jeep, and she knew something was wrong with him.

01:09:19.640 And she said, he turned to her and said, you know, Mom, not everyone wants to live the way you do.

01:09:26.600 Not all of us want to live the way you do.

01:09:29.140 And then she said she knew her son was guilty of these things.

01:09:33.020 Like, 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.

01:09:43.320 And Jeff Bell saw Heidi at the courthouse, and he said she looked like someone out of Little House on the Prairie.

01:09:47.780 Like, the long dress, and like the handmade thing, and like the long braid.

01:09:52.560 And he went up to her, and he said, please, can you help us?

01:09:55.260 Your son won't talk.

01:09:56.420 There's a missing girl.

01:09:57.420 They didn't know if she was dead yet.

01:09:58.960 I mean, they knew.

01:09:59.940 And she said to Jeff, if the Lord wants that girl to be found, that girl will be found, and turned her back and walked away. 0.71

01:10:05.960 Okay.

01:10:06.600 This is what we're dealing with.

01:10:07.680 This is what we're dealing with.

01:10:08.660 So 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?

01:10:22.020 Well, you know, the FBI said they'd never seen one like him before.

01:10:25.560 And I think that's why his case remains so little known.

01:10:31.320 They know more than they're telling, but not nearly as much as I think we think they do.

01:10:36.660 They have something called the Evil Minds Research Museum, the FBI does.

01:10:41.260 What?

01:10:42.280 Yeah, I tried to get in there.

01:10:43.340 They really wouldn't let me in.

01:10:45.740 They let David Fincher in for Mindhunter, but they wouldn't let me in.

01:10:48.820 Who is this pest who keeps subpoenaing us?

01:10:51.400 Knock, knock, knock. 0.85

01:10:51.880 It's foyering.

01:10:52.700 But there they have the brains of serial killers. 0.93

01:10:56.820 They have artifacts.

01:10:59.260 They have a lot of Keyes' stuff, like his journals, his own self-reports.

01:11:04.300 They have also, when they were going to let me in, they were like, don't publicize this, but screw them.

01:11:10.120 They have like a big, stuffed Hannibal Lecter in like a prison cell, like, you know, in the middle of the movie.

01:11:16.560 Like for fun?

01:11:17.260 When the senator comes in.

01:11:18.100 Yeah, that's their idea of kicks.

01:11:19.820 Oh, my gosh.

01:11:20.460 Yeah.

01:11:20.680 This is like at, where?

01:11:23.440 Quantico adjacent.

01:11:24.360 Oh, wow.

01:11:25.120 So it's official.

01:11:25.360 Yeah, it's like off the side of a highway.

01:11:26.780 Like it's an unmarked building, but it's a real thing.

01:11:28.740 So like agents are supposed to go there to learn?

01:11:30.580 Or like the academics, I guess, at Quantico are in there trying to figure out the origins of psychopathy to this degree.

01:11:37.360 Well, I'm glad they're studying it.

01:11:38.640 I mean, it sounds like to me they'd be better off reading your book, but.

01:11:41.480 Yeah, they should give it a shot.

01:11:42.320 Yeah, that's helpful.

01:11:44.020 Well, I can't believe I didn't know.

01:11:45.400 I mean, I am obsessed with true crime.

01:11:47.040 I feel like I listened to all of them and I've never heard his name before.

01:11:50.920 And my dear friend wrote the book on him.

01:11:52.820 So it's like, I mean, I'm, I was going to say thrilled to know, but that's not the right word.

01:11:59.380 I'm fascinated because they're all so different.

01:12:01.860 And this guy's so bizarre where there's not an MO.

01:12:04.380 There's not like a typical victim.

01:12:06.020 There's not a geographic tie.

01:12:08.220 Just so bizarre.

01:12:09.640 I don't, it doesn't make me, it's somewhat unsettling, right?

01:12:12.160 Because you want to believe there'll always be that and that'll make them easier to catch.

01:12:16.120 But 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?

01:12:22.860 They thought they would get something, right?

01:12:24.640 And he said, it's the one who hasn't been caught.

01:12:27.980 Because he knew that there was someone better at being undetected right behind him.

01:12:33.040 And 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.

01:12:45.940 It definitely could be.

01:12:47.100 I mean, he was a criminologist.

01:12:48.240 He was a criminologist.

01:12:49.500 He was, it was like, he had Washington state connections, but he crossed state lines to do it.

01:12:55.960 A lot of them do.

01:12:56.300 Washington state is another one.

01:12:57.820 It is.

01:12:58.580 So is Iowa.

01:13:00.080 So is Long Island.

01:13:01.400 Yes.

01:13:01.800 It'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.

01:13:13.580 They're much more dispersed than that.

01:13:15.740 Yeah.

01:13:15.840 The serial killer thing.

01:13:16.580 Although I will say just a note of comfort for the audience since it's the holidays.

01:13:22.600 Cece Moore, the great genetic genealogist woman who like catches everybody.

01:13:27.640 Speaking of Brian Kohlberger, um, she told me, she doesn't believe you can have a serial killer in 2025 America.

01:13:34.240 She's like, we've gotten too good.

01:13:37.020 Really?

01:13:37.520 The touch DNA that they like, it's no longer, they don't need a fingerprint.

01:13:42.160 They don't need blood or semen or bodily fluids.

01:13:46.140 It's like touch DNA.

01:13:47.800 Look how Kohlberger kind of got caught.

01:13:49.840 Right.

01:13:50.140 Touch DNA on the knife sheath, which yes, then he left behind.

01:13:54.860 But like that touch DNA 10, 15, 20 years ago would have been meaningless.

01:13:59.380 They wouldn't have been able to find that.

01:14:00.560 Right.

01:14:00.840 That would have been nothing.

01:14:01.360 If it wasn't like a bodily fluid that you could see in like bag, forget it.

01:14:04.680 Now they know to look for it and that touch DNA, they didn't have a hit.

01:14:09.920 They had to be the genetic genealogy.

01:14:11.720 They went, they got like some hit to somebody, some distant relative of Kohlberger, which they

01:14:16.060 then traced back to the dad of Kohlberger.

01:14:18.480 And then they start using her skills to figure out who's around this dad who could be potentially

01:14:23.320 in Idaho on this night.

01:14:25.320 And then they quickly got to Brian.

01:14:27.200 But anyway, she doesn't think that you can have a serial killer in 2025 America, which makes 0.97

01:14:32.400 me feel better.

01:14:32.900 The only, I would say my caveat to that would be if you look at the Gilgo Beach killer, who

01:14:37.500 was active for many, many, many, many years, it's the victim.

01:14:41.160 It's just as important, right?

01:14:42.560 He was, he was targeting sex workers and they don't stay on sex worker cases for very long.

01:14:47.540 It's terrible.

01:14:48.020 You know?

01:14:48.580 So I guess if you're, if you're, if you're a predator and you know your prey, that's,

01:14:54.680 that would be my one thing where I'd maybe push back on that.

01:14:57.320 Yeah.

01:14:57.420 You're going to like the victims no one cares about.

01:15:00.460 Exactly.

01:15:00.900 Absolutely.

01:15:01.380 That society regards as kind of disposable.

01:15:03.560 Well, I was trying to leave it on an up note, but I don't think we're going to be able to

01:15:07.140 now.

01:15:07.700 I'm sorry.

01:15:08.120 Well, the book is fun to read and it's, um, there's, oh, and they're great.

01:15:12.100 Uh, I didn't see the 11 skulls, but I hear it's, it's great.

01:15:15.540 The Keith case is fascinating.

01:15:17.240 I was amazed you found the Dateline footage because I was trying to find it while doing the book

01:15:21.240 and I couldn't find the footage.

01:15:22.320 Yeah.

01:15:22.820 I don't, my, my crack team found that, but it was, I mean, the whole, the whole case

01:15:27.800 is dark, but fascinating.

01:15:29.240 You know, it's like sometimes the serial killer stuff is too much for me.

01:15:32.540 Like I don't, I can't take any torture stories, but we think we did a good job today of skimming

01:15:38.360 over some of the more disturbing parts of this guy.

01:15:40.820 Cause you can go deep and you can go way darker on him even than we did.

01:15:45.020 Well, and that's our, that's our silver lining.

01:15:47.920 I like it.

01:15:48.680 You could have gone worse.

01:15:49.620 It could have been worse.

01:15:50.980 We say nothing says Christmas like true crime.

01:15:53.660 Um, so look, the, I think the reason so many people are drawn to true crime is because it

01:16:00.500 takes your mind off of your own problems.

01:16:02.000 You cannot be thinking about whatever thing is stressing you when you are thinking about

01:16:05.160 something like this.

01:16:06.160 There's something soothing about solving it, you know, like justice.

01:16:09.760 I think there's a good contingent of us who that really feels validated when justice

01:16:13.640 comes to bad guys.

01:16:15.080 It makes you believe again in the world, you know, like people aren't all going to get away

01:16:19.580 with it.

01:16:20.100 Mother effers.

01:16:21.520 And that will conclude the things of positive things.

01:16:24.140 I have to say the list.

01:16:26.980 Love you.

01:16:27.920 I love you.

01:16:28.620 Oh, happy holidays.

01:16:29.720 Merry Christmas.

01:16:30.300 Happy new year.

01:16:31.200 Happy new year.

01:16:31.820 All of it, lady.

01:16:32.820 Great to see you.

01:16:35.080 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:16:37.020 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - December 30, 2025

How Deranged Serial Killer Israel Keyes Finally Got Caught - Crime Week Continues with Maureen Callahan ｜ Ep. 1219

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