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

by Maureen Callahan

It is the paradox of being Alaskan: This state is home to rugged individualists who nonetheless know there will come a time, amid the cold, unpitying winters, when they will need help.

If the kiosk was in fact a crime scene, it had already been contaminated.

Crucially, investigators themselves are at their most curious and engaged, confronting a brand-new mystery with brand-new players. This sets the tone for everything to come.

Yet Alaska remains the “Great Land,” as James Michener called it: the closest we have to a time before man, unsullied terrain, nature so titanically overwhelming it’s impossible not to be awed and a little afraid. Adventurers and loners, romantics and desperadoes, eccentrics and slow suicides—the luxuriousness of the place, its seduction and savagery, calls to the wildest among us. Alaska, the land of black moons and midnight suns.

Duane couldn’t explain. But he said he saw a man with a mask, about six feet away, going through his and Samantha’s pickup truck. They each stood there for a moment, staring at each other, and then the man closed the door and walked away.

Duane had a simple answer: He didn’t think police would do anything until Samantha had been missing for twenty-four hours. Interesting. That was the same thing James Koenig had told Doll in his interview immediately before.

These were the actions of a frantic father and boyfriend? You insist your daughter’s been kidnapped but you won’t let the police in your house? Jeff Bell was tasked with surveilling James Koenig round the clock.

Payne had never seen a case like this: zero physical evidence, nothing to indicate Samantha had been abducted. Yet here was an eighteen-year-old girl, her face all over the news, a city of three hundred thousand people looking for her, with no money—and even if she had stolen from the register, that was maybe two hundred dollars at best—no proof she had even left town. If Samantha wasn’t abducted but also hadn’t run away, what was the answer? What were they missing?

The only logical explanation was that Samantha staged the abduction, and the man in the video was her accomplice.

Police arrested about fifty people, confidential informants mainly, and asked what they’d heard about Samantha Koenig. A lot, it turned out.

The note implied Samantha was no longer in Alaska and had been moved through an arid state in the Lower 48. “She did almost get away twice. Once on tudor [road] and once in the desert. Must be losing my touch.”

Then there was the call to APD from a Koenig family friend. She said she’d spent a lot of time with James in the days after Samantha’s disappearance, and he was obsessed with money. The reward money in particular. Sometimes he’d go online multiple times a day just to track his donation jar. “Please check on this,” she said. “Because something just isn’t right.”

It was a reminder, in a case that got darker by the hour, that there were still good people out there.

It wasn’t lost on Payne that this bank, the Western, was too small to have a centralized database for pulling video and financials. It would take a day for the surveillance video to be overnighted to Payne in Anchorage, and then another day to send to the lab at Quantico. Samantha’s kidnapper probably knew this. He was smarter than they’d thought.

Twenty minutes went by. Were they coming up empty? His cell rang. It was Gannaway. “We got him,” she said. “This is the guy.” Payne couldn’t believe it. “What do you have?” he asked. “Enough,” Gannaway said. Payne thanked her, over and over. They were going to bring Samantha home.

There were two sheds off to the right and a trailer. In front sat a white pickup truck, a Chevrolet. Bell’s heart sank. This truck, at this very address, had been checked out by APD right after Samantha disappeared. They had ruled it out.

How about this liability? Police officers and FBI agents can, by law, lie to elicit a confession; prosecutors cannot.

This case was made for Dateline or 48 Hours or any number of true-crime documentaries. It could be a career maker.

“A normal person.” Keyes had just given them another clue: There was something wrong with him. He had probably done this before. There was no way Feldis picked up on this. Jeff Bell would no longer cede the floor.

In fact, if you watch the surveillance video APD eventually made public frame by frame, you can see, in the final moments as Keyes and Samantha leave, that Samantha’s face is fully visible, eyes glistening with tears, her hand over her mouth in terror.

I’m two different people, basically. And the only person who knows about what I’m telling you, the kinds of things I’m telling you, is me.

The search of Kimberly and Keyes’s house two weeks back had yielded scores of books, fiction and nonfiction, about serial killers.

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. James Koenig knew it.

KEYES: Um, well, it—put it this way: I mean, it’s obvious why I did it. I did it—the bottom line was to get money out of it. But at the same time, it’s not like I didn’t want to do it.

Chacon had been with the FBI’s Dive Team for nearly twenty years. Almost nobody knows what they do or that they exist, even within the Bureau. Yet Dive Team members see more death and mutilation than the average FBI agent, who might deal with one homicide in an entire career.

The manager came over and bought them their first round of drinks. “We know you can’t tell us who you are,” he said, “but we know what you did. Thank you.”

I love this. Just people being good.

Several years back, Keyes said, he had taken a five-gallon Home Depot bucket and filled it with zip ties, ammunition, guns and silencers, duct tape, plus Drano to accelerate human decomposition—things like that—and buried it there. He had more buried all over the country. He’d get to that detail later. Maybe.

Keyes knew that stranger abductions are rare. He knew his way of doing things was even more so.

“Hair is free. Everything’s free if you take it,” he said. “Well, famous last words. You’ve got to pay for it eventually.”

And yet, incredibly, Kevin Feldis remained in the interrogation room, often leading the charge. To this day, no one will say why that was allowed to happen.

Goddamn it. Fuck this guy

Had Keyes begun biohacking his own body in his quest to become the perfect serial killer? As Jeff Bell would come to say: “Anything’s possible with him.”

They had been right to cast their net across the United States. Now they had to alert Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Panama for missing persons that fit his timeline.

Chandler had purchased an electric razor, which Keyes was only to use under direct supervision, but guards were ignoring that. Bell asked Chandler, in essence: What the fuck? Did his guards want Keyes to kill himself? Or were they just that dumb? Chandler sighed. He could only write the note and post it on the door. “And if these idiots don’t read it,” Chandler said, “there’s nothing I can do.”

sometimes not. “Were you breaching with explosives?” Halla asked. He meant blowing doors open—something only trained military or law enforcement does in extreme circumstances. Yes, Keyes said. He had started doing that at age fourteen. “The first time, I blew a lock with a pipe bomb.”

“No,” Keyes said. “It was a forest service gate, I think.” Government grounds. That admission transformed this case.

Within minutes, bomb squads on both sides of the country were deployed: one to the Anchorage house, one to the New York property.

What was recovered in New York that day, the Bureau will not say. But they added a new classification to the Keyes case: terrorism.

What Keyes ultimately planned, or what larger crime he may have gotten away with, we may never know. Sometime after ten o’clock on the night of December 1, 2012, Israel Keyes committed suicide in his prison cell with a razor blade and a noose. He left twelve skulls on the wall, drawn with his own blood, the words WE ARE ONE written underneath.

An expert at the Bureau told Goeden that the conditions of that lake, pristine freshwater with very little marine life, would preserve the remains considerably. That they were weighted down would make them easier to find. Halla and Sanders requested a search, but the Bureau told them they didn’t want to spend the money.

Lame. Why not just do it?

When paramedics arrived at 6:10 A.M., they found a curious scene. Blood was not just all over the bunk but contained in two cups, size unknown, and two milk cartons. By 8:25 Alaska State Troopers, US Marshals, and FBI agents were on the scene, Jeff Bell among them.

This case provoked the FBI to beg for the public’s help—but just as quickly, they decided to obscure much of the case and Israel Keyes from public view. Approximately forty-five thousand pages of case files remain unreleased by the Department of Justice, under claims of national security.

He made sure of it, dropping clue upon clue before committing suicide, certain of one outcome: His case will never be closed.