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

by Maureen Callahan

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. —Sherlock Holmes

Chacon had been with the FBI’s Dive Team for nearly twenty years. Almost nobody knows what they do or that they exist, even within the Bureau. Yet Dive Team members see more death and mutilation than the average FBI agent, who might deal with one homicide in an entire career. At forty-eight years old, Chacon was the team’s elder statesman. There was no one better prepared or more experienced to lead a dive of this physical difficulty and sensitivity.

Chacon needed to choose carefully. Who on his team could handle this job best, mentally and emotionally? He knew all too well: the youngest victims never leave you.

Kaczynski had been a domestic terrorist, but he was also a genius. If even half of Keyes’s confession was true—and agents on the case believed most of it—that could make Keyes as organized and lethal as Kaczynski, himself a master at leaving false clues and no forensic evidence. Kaczynski was an off-the-gridder, a loner, a paranoid man with a profound distrust of the US government. Would Keyes share some of these traits? It was a possibility.

it was, Kat Nelson was having a hard time finding Israel Keyes in any public filings. No property records. No documentation of parents or siblings. No address history, no gun licenses, no academic transcripts. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. He had left nearly no digital footprint, no paper trail—and this was a guy with an unusual name. If he hadn’t been in custody, Nelson would have a hard time believing Israel Keyes actually existed.

It was a foot. A human foot. Even Chacon was taken aback. He’d been told the remains weren’t wrapped, but somehow he hadn’t visualized it. Yet there it was, in the bottom right-hand side of his monitor, naked and swollen, preserved in the cold freshwater. It was 4:42 P.M., nearly five hours after the team began setting up. Chacon turned to Oberlander. He both loved and hated this part. His team’s success was a family’s tragedy.

“I can now confirm to you that I have human remains,” Chacon said. He watched everyone get on their cell phones. The energy on the lake was electric, and Chacon was worried. There was pressure now, an urgency to get Samantha up immediately so the police and FBI could get their credit. This was against everything Chacon’s Dive Team stood for.

Before beginning Samantha’s recovery, Chacon had his team gather in one of the tents, where they were invisible to cameras and agents on the ice. They observed a moment of silence, and as they exited, they saw an enormous bald eagle circling overhead. Chacon took it as a sign that Samantha was watching over them. The divers looked at each other, nodded, and silently went to work.

Allen handed off the remote and went to suit up. SWAT was dispatched to cut yet another hole: this one a triangle, ten feet long on each side, for the divers to shimmy themselves down while hanging on a 45-degree angle, getting leverage going in and out.

Allen and Bart had a team of ten prepping them; divers work so hard underwater they do nothing for themselves on land. Suiting up in one hundred pounds of gear takes two hours, which gives divers plenty of time to think. Allen pushed away images of what he would find and focused on logistics: what they might need, how long they might be down there, the order of the recovery. Anything other than the girl below and what had been done to her.

Bart did the same. Look at these conditions, he thought. They’re perfect. The ice was so thick you could drive a tank across it. The water below was clear as glass. A small village of people were on the ice, and more had gathered in the distance...

It took him fifteen minutes to make the descent, forty-one feet from the surface of the lake to the bottom. He had to wait another fifteen minutes for Allen to come down. As each man softly landed, silt rose up, blacking out their entire field of vision. For minutes they stood perfectly still, the hiss of their oxygen tanks a...

Bart landed where he’d hoped, right near the torso. He knelt down and unhooked a body bag from his chest, then spread it over his legs. Allen made his way over, and the two men struggled to keep the bag still while securing the torso. It kept slipping out of their hands, so they decided to roll the torso into the body bag, which proved only slightly le...

was early in the recovery, but Bart and Allen were both surprised by how hard this was. Weightless in water—that’s a myth. The torso alone, coupled with the ...

Allen left Bart with the bag to retrieve Samantha’s arms, which were wired together nearby. While walking them back to Bart, one of Allen’s gloves snagged on the wire and exposed part of his hand to the freezing water. They still had to recover Samantha’s legs and head. Ch...

A few minutes later, all of Samantha’s remains, found in close proximity, were in their possession. Allen and Bart dragged the body bag directly under the hole they’d dived through, where it lay in a shaft of nighttime sunlight. They waited while a white pop-up shelter was pitched above the hole, blocking the media’s view. Once they got the signal, Bart and Allen attached three small nylon lift bags to the body bag and watched it rise. At th...

Chacon retired in July 2014, and at his going-away party said the one thing he’d never miss was pulling another dead child out of the water. He meant it as a joke, but it left his colleagues stunned. To this day, he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He will probably have it the rest of his life. He sometimes thinks that the reason he and his wife were never able to have children despite years of trying, specialist after specialist offering no solution, was so he’d never have to know a parent’s grief.

That laptop, investigators thought, must have been the most valuable. They had low hopes for Kimberly’s computer. Keyes was too careful; chances were there was nothing on it. But when Nelson started looking at what was hidden inside, she was stunned. One by one they popped up. Faces. And there were hundreds of them. Children, women, men. Middle-aged and old. White, black, mixed race. Slim and overweight. Some looked polished and well off. Others looked like drug addicts or sex workers. These photos, in many cases, were attached to news articles reporting each disappearance. Some were attached to “Missing Person” flyers. Others were pulled off Facebook or other websites.

Among them were photos of Samantha Koenig. So many, Nelson thought, it looked as though Keyes had stalked her. No way, she thought. No fucking way.

Payne got in touch with Armin Showalter, one of the Bureau’s top criminal profilers. Serial killers were Showalter’s area of expertise, and Payne needed his help. All these images on one computer. What did it mean? What could the FBI do here? Showalter told Payne he didn’t know what to say. He’d never heard of a kidnapping and murder like this before. None of the BAU specialists on this case had. He suggested that Payne send those images to FBI headquarters. Digital experts there would run each one through facial recognition.

Payne’s stomach dropped. That would be only so much help. There was no national database for missing persons. There was no law that required missing adults be reported to police. And there was no way to tell so far whether Keyes just liked reading about missing persons or was cataloging his victims.

Payne thought Keyes was still most concerned about media coverage. Keyes swatted that away. “I know it’s inevitable,” he said. “I’m not in this for the glory. I’m not trying to be on TV.” When Bell heard the tape of this interview, the word “glory” struck him. It was another tell. Who calls the rape and murder of an eighteen-year-old a thing to be glorified for? Payne and his team had come to believe they were dealing with a serial killer. And Keyes had just told Doll and Payne: You’re right. And you’ll never find another body without me. —

They needed a second confession.

“Don’t tell me,” Feldis said. It was against the law for the prosecutor on this case to have any information about constitutionally protected conversations between Keyes and his attorney; Feldis should have removed himself from the room right then. But he would not. He would never. Keyes kept going.

As Keyes approached this part of the story, he became physically excited, bobbing his knees, jangling his shackles, rubbing against his armchair so hard he scraped a layer of wood clean off. This would become another tell, his signature expression of sexual excitement. A substitute, essentially, for masturbation. It would be the way investigators knew there was much truth to his story. Stories.

Another thing: In searching Kimberly’s house, police recovered a piece of paper with random numbers listed: 5, 79, 105, 633, 1.5, 5, 5. Bell Googled them. Up came “Police frequency, Stephenville, Texas.” He pulled up a map of Stephenville—5 was the highway coming into it; 105 was the highway out. Then Bell Googled “1.5-5-5, Stephenville TX.” Up came the scanner frequency.

Meanwhile, the FBI had gone through the hundreds of images on Kimberly’s computer and were able to identify forty-four people using facial recognition software against all the images on NamUS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons website. Eleven of those were teenagers. Ten were small children. The two youngest were each one year old. One thing I won’t do is mess with kids. Now investigators had even more reason to doubt this credo.

For one, it was ridiculously self-serving: Look at me, a serial killer with a conscience! Investigators were parsing every single utterance.

Even if Keyes was telling the truth, and his daughter’s birth catalyzed a fundamental shift in him, that alone would imply that before ...

And while investigators didn’t necessarily think Keyes was responsible for all of the missing kids on his computer, their inclusion was disturbing. Who reads ...

Difficult as it was, investigators needed to try to cross-reference every single person reported missing in the United States with Keyes’s known travels. Anyone who disappeared during t...

The Bureau’s top criminal profilers were at a loss. The only thing they could tell the team was that Keyes was one of the most terrifying subjects they had ever encountered. There was no precedent for a serial killer with this MO: no victim type; no fixed location for hunting, killing, and burying; putting thousands of miles between himself and his victims; caches buried all over the United States. He avoided detection through travel. Travel!

doing the paperwork involved in renting a car and then relying only on paper maps, no Garmin satellite or Google; checking into a hotel or setting up a campsite; filing for hunting and fishing licenses—to say nothing of successfully finding a victim, or victims, while trying to retrieve some cache buried months or years ago, the locations only in his head; then expertly disposing of his victims’ remains and leaving no evidence behind. The sheer efficiency and time management Keyes displayed was staggering.

Breaking apart his cell phone and removing the battery was something the team hadn’t seen before either. For Kat Nelson, those dark spots in his history, the hours that his phone gave off no signal, would be a tell. That’s when Keyes was doing something.

Then there was the driving, the ability to stay awake without the aid of drugs, just his Americano coffees and soaring adrenaline, moving through five states in as many days. Until Samantha, Keyes had left no digital trail, no cell phone or credit card activity. Until Samantha, he swore he’d never ...

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...

Some agents, like Steve Payne, stuck to traditional investigative methods: the interviews Gannaway was conducting with Heidi; searches through financial records, computers, datebooks, and journals; interrogations with Keyes himself. For other agents—Jeff Bell, Jolene Goeden, and now Ted Halla and Colleen Sanders, two FBI special agents who were starting to research Keyes down in Washington State—the few serial killers Keyes referenced were a source of fascination and, they hoped, insight. These agents began reading and watching every book, film, or TV show Keyes had consumed, building little libraries in their respective field offices and comparing notes.

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.

Bell hadn’t read Dark Dreams before, and it was a revelation. Hazelwood wrote of the specific deviations of sexually sadistic criminals, and Keyes had nearly all of them: No criminal record prior to arrest. A seemingly happy domestic life. 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 overar...

Another passage nailed Keyes: “The sexual offender is never fully inactive,” Hazelwood wrote. “He may not be acting out against a specific victim, but he will be making plans, selecting new targets, acting out against other victims, or gathering materials. He is never dormant.” Keyes was a cluster bomb. Investigators were learning that some o...

Ted Bundy, who Keyes called his great hero, killed all over the country. James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben, the basis for Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, kept at least one kill kit. John Robert Williams was a long-haul trucker who killed in one state and left bodies in another. Dennis Rader, the BTK (“bind, torture, kill”) Strangler, posed at le...

Before his death in 2016, Hazelwood spoke about Keyes. Hazelwood’s decades of service had left him with a cynical view of the FBI’s truthfulness in general, and he believed stranger abductions are far more common than the Bureau insists. He was convinced that the proliferation of hard-core pornography, so easily and anonym...

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. Keyes, Hazelwood agreed, was among the top criminally organized minds he had ever encountered. But Keyes should not be mistaken as lacking emotion. Far from it, Hazelwood said. 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 ...

Not all psychopaths are serial killers, but all serial killers are psychopaths. The latter, lust-driven serial murderers, will share a common denominator: how they think. For example, Keyes had once considered becoming a police officer, and when asked why, Keyes said, What better way to hunt for victims? A police officer pulls you over on the side of the road, late at night . . . Mike DeBardeleben, while pretending to be a police officer, victimized and murdered untold young women this way. Ye...

As they read further, the agents got a sharper look into not just Keyes, but how out of their depth they were. Upon first reading John Douglas’s Mindhunter, Keyes told them, he felt like he was reading about himself. “Put yourself in the position of the hunter,” Douglas wrote. “That’s what I have to do.” Douglas drew a parallel to Payne’s metaphor, Keyes as ambush predator. “If you could get a galvanic skin response reading on one of them as he focuses on his potential victim,” Douglas wrote, “I think you’d get the same reaction as from [a] lion in the wilderness.”

Keyes never knew that before—that his psyche and physiological reactions weren’t unique. He’d had the same epiphany, Keyes told them, with Dark Dreams and, though it was fiction, 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.

Koontz described his serial killer thusly: “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 l...

“I decided to go back to my old stomping grounds,” he said. “Back east.” Another clue. Had Keyes killed more on the East Coast than the West? They could tell he was getting off on telling investigators things they’d never heard nor had ever known to fear. It could be difficult to tell how much he was exaggerating, but so much of what he had told them bore out. They were inclined to believe him. “I have hundreds of plans,” Keyes said, “and a grand plan.”

It didn’t take long for Steve Payne to find out about Feldis’s secret interrogation, and when he did, there was, finally, a confrontation. A friend of Goeden’s had first heard about the interview down at the courthouse, and when Goeden was told she didn’t believe it at first. This stuff just didn’t happen, especially with such a high-value suspect. Goeden had to make several phone calls to find out: Yes, it’s true. The prosecutor on your case is totally out of control. The potential damage could be incalculable.

If the FBI hadn’t been informed of this interview, it was highly unlikely the Department of Justice had—and DOJ was the final word, the lone authorizing agency on federal death-penalty cases. Investigators and prosecutors had to do everything—everything—by the book. And Kevin Feldis was pissing all over it. Nor was this an isolated example.