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.

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

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.”

We look to medicine and technology for explanations, even though the science isn’t there yet. No brain scan can definitively detect a tendency toward psychopathology.

Keyes, for one, proved this thesis wrong. As he told investigators from the outset: “There is no one who knows me, or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me, really. . . . I am two different people.”