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

by Maureen Callahan

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.

Dean Koontz’s Intensity. Told from the alternating viewpoints of a serial killer and his abducted victim, Koontz’s novel crystallized Keyes’s thoughts and urges: the love of pain, self-inflicted and imposed; the ultimate pointlessness of human existence; the disbelief in God or any other higher being; the power and transcendence that only taking, torturing, and killing could provide. This made him feel, ironically, like the God he didn’t even believe in.

“He does not believe in reincarnation or in any of the standard practices of an afterlife that are sold by the world’s great religions. . . . But if he is to undergo an apotheosis, it will be brought about by his own bold actions, not by divine grace; if he, in fact, becomes a god, the transformation will occur because he has already chosen to live like a god—without fear, without remorse, without limits, with all his senses fiercely sharpened.”

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.”

Studies of twins have shown that psychopathy may be a trait more heritable than environmental, yet good children can thrive despite bad parents, and vice versa.

The behaviorists at the FBI think so. In 2008, the Behavioral Science Unit founded the Evil Minds Research Museum, dedicated to the study of serial killers and their development since infancy. Analysts use artwork, journals, and other personal possessions in an attempt to map each killer’s mind, hoping to create a kind of master profile. The core belief is that each monster would, from time to time, let the mask of sanity slip.