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

by Maureen Callahan

Keyes was clearly sane.

was so he’d never have to know a parent’s grief.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

“Because they’re going to have to pay for this for a lot of years to come.”

Had Keyes begun biohacking his own body in his quest to become the perfect serial killer?

“I’m surprised he . . . got caught,” Perkins said. “He was smarter than that.”