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

by Maureen Callahan

Like many of his fellow investigators, Bell thought these profilers were a notch above psychics. Their predictions of violent offenders were almost always the same: Your suspect will be a young man, probably white, with a low-level job, difficulties maintaining relationships, and lots of anger issues, especially toward women. Hardly the most surprising conclusion to reach.

As 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Land of the free, land of the lie, land of the scheme Americanize!” he wrote, a refrain that appeared twice. “Consume what you don’t need, stars you idolize, pursue what you admit is a dream, then it’s American die.”