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

by Maureen Callahan

“I think you should take the lead,” Gannaway said. “We don’t know his temperament.” By this she meant: We don’t know how he’ll react to a female in charge. “Let’s see how he responds to a Texas Ranger,” she said.

“The FBI has pictures of your truck at the crime scene,” Rayburn said. “If they had that,” Keyes said, “they already would have talked to me.” Keyes was right, and it pissed Gannaway off. His whole demeanor was smug and superior. It just oozed off him: Who were they to interrupt his day?

Rayburn had gotten nowhere yesterday. Maybe Keyes would respond to a pretty blond detective who’d flown all the way from Alaska just to talk to him.

Bell stepped into the interrogation room first. He looked at Keyes and felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He did it, Bell thought to himself.

“I’m begging you. There’s a girl out there whose father is frantic. She’s been missing for over a month.” “Well,” Heidi said, “if God wants that girl to be found, she’ll be found.” Then she turned and walked away.

was silently conceding that yes, it was possible that her own son was responsible for the kidnapping of a teenage girl,

he had a thin, reedy voice—in contrast to Payne’s whiskey-and-nicotine-soaked twang, or Bell’s open-throated midwestern warmth—was a distinct weakness,

Feminity equals weakness, as usual

The investigators nodded, silently encouraging Keyes to continue. He did, his tone getting deeper, quieter. His speech slowed down and his voice began to quake. It was the eeriest thing: Keyes sounded both ashamed and enraptured.

Feldis, limited by his position as prosecutor, actually did see this video, it was yet another strike if this case went to trial. That video was evidence. Compounding this mess, it was clear that neither the Bureau nor APD had thought to pull all the surveillance footage from every business near the kiosk. They’d had no idea about the witnesses at IHOP.

Yikes

This was yet another crushing blow. If someone at APD or the FBI had watched the surveillance video all the way through, they would have known, without a doubt, that Samantha Koenig had been kidnapped that night.

They... didn’t watch the whole video? What the hell

She would, correctly, play humble. She would apologize for interrupting and show a detached respect. She might hear the worst atrocities one human being can visit upon another and respond only with “Gotcha.” If her subject laughed, she would laugh along, no matter how repulsed she might be.

Being a woman trained her to do that

The team was absorbing the likelihood that Keyes could be a serial killer. If so, he would clearly see himself in the pantheon, worthy of an interrogator who had movie-star quality. Doll certainly had that.

“You’ve got your monster,” he said. It was almost like he was proud of her. Feldis, he wanted to dominate. Humiliate.

Keyes was right. He had predicted their response, or, really, lack thereof. To commit a crime of this magnitude, to drive around with a missing teenage girl for three hours with plenty of witnesses, and not worry about getting caught “because it’s Anchorage”—that was a damning indictment of the police department. It was true.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

I wonder if this is true 100% of the time

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.

Wwhaaat?!

The truth was Jeff hated doctors and didn’t believe in modern medicine. He had never been immunized and didn’t want his children to be either.

Remember, raising kids antivax makes the serial killers 👍🏼

Not long after leaving Utah, Heidi and Jeff quit Mormonism. Neither ever explained why, but in Colville they began attending a militia-based white supremacist anti-Semitic church called the Ark. Israel, now around twelve years old, took great interest.

This was one fight Tammie had not backed down from: she insisted on a hospital birth, and Keyes went along even though, he said, he had birthed enough lambs growing up to deliver a baby.

I was never—everybody’s nice to each other and everything’s all sunshine and roses and uh—so that’s why it was disturbing to me. Because it seemed like for a long time I was—I thought everybody else was faking it and everybody was like me and they just didn’t act like it. Or I figured that I was a demon child or whatever. I don’t know.”

According to what little was released, this report determined that Keyes had slashed and strangled himself between 10:12 and 10:24 P.M., bleeding out all over the floor. It was only when a day-shift correctional officer arrived at 6:00 A.M. that Keyes’s body was found.

The Anchorage Correctional Complex, the Alaska Department of Corrections, and state attorneys are so corrupt that in 2016 these attorneys advised prisons not to keep records and not to document causes or circumstances of inmate deaths.

Keyes also indicted the United States, for which he harbored a near-lifelong hatred. “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.”