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

by Maureen Callahan

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. —Sherlock Holmes

The rarest form of murder is serial. Despite what we see on CSI or Mindhunter or the films and procedurals that dominate popular culture, people who kill randomly and for no reason are extremely uncommon. It’s why they loom so large in our collective mindscape.

He thrived on order and logic. He had gotten his degree in math and that didn’t help him on cases like this, where 1 percent of what the FBI does is black and white and the rest is shades of gray.

It was a small town, less than three square miles. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of less than five thousand.

Impossible

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.

He had strength that had elegance.

Payne thought of a documentary he’d seen the other night about ambush predators: animals that kill with lightning speed and vanish just as fast.

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.

“The sexual offender is never fully inactive,” Hazelwood wrote. “He may not be acting out against a specific victim, but he will be making plans, selecting new targets, acting out against other victims, or gathering materials. He is never dormant.”

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.”

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.”

He spent his free time with his family, or learning how to fix anything that was broken, or alone with an ever-present book.

Sometimes when he was drunk, he would tell her things that didn’t make sense to her. “I’m a bad person,” he would say. “I have a black heart.” She refused to believe it.