American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

by Maureen Callahan

As he well knew, the first rule of any investigation was to keep an open mind. You didn’t try to fit a personal theory to a possible crime.

If an Israel Keyes existed, someone even more diabolical would follow. They needed to understand the forces that built Israel Keyes, the first sui generis serial killer of the twenty-first century.

Keyes had told investigators that there were two texts that he studied closely, both written by pioneering behavioral profilers in the FBI: Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind by Roy Hazelwood, and Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas, in turn the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

Compulsive driving—this stood out to Bell. It had seemed so specific to Keyes, yet Hazelwood explained that this was a shared tendency among psychopaths, feeding an overarching need for control, freedom, and constant visual stimulation to counter the boredom they so often feel.

He believed that technology, the mainstreaming of violent pornography, advances in ever-faster travel, and an overall culture of misogyny, from politics to entertainment, would only continue to breed more aberrant and dangerous criminals. He made this prediction in 2001.

Psychopathic sadists such as Keyes have pushed their emotions down so deep only extreme acts evoke any feeling whatsoever. It’s why their crimes, horrific even in the beginning, must escalate, typically from the torture of small animals to rapes and murders increasingly elaborate in planning and realization. Palpable gratification comes only through multiple victims and greater suffering.

Not all psychopaths are serial killers, but all serial killers are psychopaths.

All of forensic criminal psychology is haunted by one question: Are psychopaths born or made? The debate is as old as Socrates, who believed that human beings were incapable of deliberate evil. Wrongdoing was born of ignorance or delusion. “There is only one good, knowledge,” he said, “and one evil, ignorance.”

The youngest subject Hazelwood knew to exhibit psychopathic behavior was a three-year-old caught by his mother in the act of autoerotic asphyxiation. That toddler grew up to become a serial killer.

What Keyes was describing was the textbook progression, from childhood, of a sadist and a psychopath. Torturing and killing small animals, pets especially, is experimentation in controlling and killing another living thing for pure pleasure. It is practice, the last step before graduating to humans.

What Keyes ultimately planned, or what larger crime he may have gotten away with, we may never know.