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

by Maureen Callahan

Bell stepped into the interrogation room first. He looked at Keyes and felt the hair on the back of

his neck stand up. He did it, Bell thought to himself.

Oh come on! What BS.

Bell and Doll knew that Keyes could, if he was smart, avoid ever being charged for kidnapping Samantha.

According to his self-report, Keyes had lived in Colville, Washington, from 1995 to 1997, working as a contractor for a man named Kelly Harris.

Situated on the uppermost western tip of Washington, Neah Bay was a designated

reservation for the Makah tribe. Only 865 people lived there. Like Colville, it was less than three square miles.

Though they were never married, Keyes called Tammie his ex-wife.

Gannaway’s first impression was of a serious woman who, unlike Kimberly, was sad but not in shock.

Israel Keyes’s own mother, in such a raw moment, was silently conceding that yes, it was possible that her own son was responsible for the

kidnapping of a teenage girl, maybe worse. What led Hei...

Heidi said. Israel doesn’t believe in God. His atheism was a great tragedy of her life. Had anything unusual happened? Gannaway asked.

a few things, Heidi said. She had heard that at least one of Israel’s sisters had begged

him to accept the Lord, and Israel, normally so contemptuous of such talk, instead became very emotional. He wept, Heidi said. He told his sister, “Yo...

When the cruise was over, Israel rented another car and drove with his daughter to Dallas, where Heidi was still living. Kimberly had gone off on a road trip with a friend. This visit, Heidi said, had been the weirdest.

something was very wrong with Israel,

because once at Heidi’s he snuck out of the house sometime early in the morning, like a teenager. It was February 13, one day before he and his daughter were due on a flight b...

When did he come back? That was the thing, Heidi said. He didn’t come back. She showed Gannaway exchanges from a family group text beginning that morning, two hours after they found Israel’s note.

8:05 A.M.: “Izy, we can take your guns to [redacted] if you want, no problem.”

Later that night, Israel texted back. He was stuck in the mud, he said, in the middle of nowhere.

34 P.M.: “We wanna get you if you have any idea where you are.” No response. 8:52 P.M.: “We have 4 w drive if you give us an idea where you are we’ll come get you.”

The next day, February 14, Israel texted to say he was parked near a big shopping center in Cleburne, an hour away. The family drove to pick him up, but when they arrived, no sign of Israel.

they spent the night sleeping in the parking lo...

Gannaway did not ask the obvious: Why not just go home, take a shower, get some sleep? Or, if they were that worried, why not call the police? But she ...

On the morning of the fifteenth, finally, a call. Israel said he was on the other side of the mall. And there they found him, disheveled and incoherent. His rental car, a little blue Kia Soul, was...

His credit cards had been frozen. He had no cash. He hadn’t eaten or slept in two days. This was unlike the Israel Heidi and his siblings knew. That Israel was calm, neat, and r...

He was like a superhero. The notion that Israel couldn’t find his way around suburban Texas ...

no one asked him where he had been or what he had been doing. Instead, on February ...

plane tickets to Anchorage. And again, Israel left the house for much of the day and the next, finally returning with nine hundred dollars in...

In relaying all this to Gannaway, Heidi had to admit: Something had been very wrong. There was the extreme emotionality. And Israel seemed to be drinking a lot.

Heidi was worried enough to call upon her church

elders, who came by to off...

Israel’s willingness to talk to them was another sign something was amiss. He must have been truly distraught to sit ...

what seemed to be his mental unraveling immediately after Samantha’s disappearance, and one crucial takeaway.

Israel’s behavior disturbed even them, and no one felt they could say a thing.

For their first true interrogation, Payne and

his team had only a few hours to prepare, and what happened in that room would set the tone for everything to come. Keyes needed to believe the FBI knew more than they actually did. He needed to feel boxed in by evidence that the FBI didn’t yet have,

The flip side: If Keyes kept his mouth shut, they’d only be able to charge him with fraudulent ATM card use, nothing more.

would be held, per protocol, at the FBI’s offices. No other facility in Anchorage was equipped to deal with such a potentially dangerous suspect: They had

the necessary security,

The interrogation rooms were wired for audio and video. Goeden and Nelson, along with federal prosecutors, would be able to watch

and listen from another room, at their computers, verifying or debunking any statements Keyes made in real time.

That morning, an anxious Payne called his contact at BAU and was given one main piece of advice: Let your suspect

keep talking. The smarter ones usually like to talk.

They all agreed they should stay away from the biggest hole in their knowledge: Keyes’s connection to Samantha.

Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson all thought it was a winning strategy. Then they got a phone call. To their horror, the

top federal prosecutor in Alaska had another idea.

Kevin Feldis had worked for the US Attorney’s Office since 1999 and had been in Alaska since 1997.

He was a graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago Law School who had never been involved with street crime, let alone homicide. He worked strictly white-collar crime, yet here he was, telling Payne that this was his show now.

This was not just a supremely bad idea—it was prosecutorial misconduct.

No one ever fought back