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

by Maureen Callahan

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.

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 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.

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

Sexually motivated serial killers are truly rare. And Keyes was the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

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.” Two thousand years later, we know little more than this: Evildoers have forever been among us. But why? What makes them so?

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.