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July 2 - July 12, 2022
Across town, FBI Special Agent Steve Payne was tying up a drug case when a friend at the police department called. This is common practice in Anchorage, a big city that runs like a small town. Cops, FBI agents, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges—everyone knows everyone. 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.
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.
Payne made the twelve-minute drive from the FBI’s Anchorage field office over to APD. He was six years older than Doll and had been with the Bureau for sixteen years, born and raised in Anchorage, a rarity. Most folks who live here, like Doll, are expats from the Lower 48. Payne understood the psyche of the city. He understood the bias police could have when it comes to Anchorage’s poor and troubled, the lost causes. He didn’t want to see Samantha dismissed.
James Koenig was standing outside the Common Grounds kiosk on Friday afternoon, his daughter now missing almost forty-eight hours. This was the kind of shock known only to a parent, the sheer inability to believe that your child is somehow, suddenly, nowhere to be found. How is such a thing possible?
He’d heard people talk about how boundless a parent’s love is, but now he knew. Sam was his only child, his favorite person, his world. She would never have gone missing if he’d brought her dinner that night, like she asked. Why didn’t he do that? Why?
So much of Alaska’s lure is its ability to humble. This is a place first inhabited by our ancestors more than eleven thousand years ago and hardly more developed when Russia sold it to America in 1867 for two cents an acre. 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
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Darkness and depravity compete with a collective hunger for light and life. Never does this place feel so literally on the edge of the earth, seesawing between the temporal world and some black chasm of unknown phenomena, as the six months it sinks into near-total darkness. The isolation alone means anything goes. It is a rough place to be a woman.
“We can now bring the full force of the FBI to bear,” Payne said. “We don’t have to justify anything to anyone.”
Goeden would say she had heard the worst of the worst, yet her spiritual beliefs gave her both strength and sympathy: So many of the offenders she worked with had been abused as children too. Goeden was a master at separating the person from the crime, but never shied away from brutal truths. She was perfect for this investigation.
One detail they agreed not to make public: was the author’s promise to return Samantha in six months. No member of the team had ever heard something like that before. None of them believed it.
It had taken until February 20, three weeks after Samantha’s disappearance, for it to occur to APD to request surveillance video from the Home Depot across from Samantha’s kiosk.
Oh, no, Payne thought. You have your chance. Yell “Help!” Or “Fire!” Don’t let this man take you somewhere else.
Now, with so much time lost, they had to find a white Chevy pickup truck. No problem, Payne thought. Only the most popular truck in Alaska.
Rayburn had been a Texas Ranger for three years. Before that, he’d been a Lufkin police officer for eight, a state trooper for ten. He knew US Highway 59, the over six-hundred-mile main artery linking Lufkin and Houston, extremely well. This roadway, he thought, would probably come into play.
To be a Texas Ranger had always been a point of pride for Rayburn; they’re about as outlaw as a law-enforcement agency gets. Their motto is “One Riot, One Ranger.” They took down John Wesley Hardin and Bonnie and Clyde. The Lone Ranger is a Texas Ranger gone rogue. Journalist John Salmon Ford, who served as Ranger captain in the 1850s, described the Rangers this way: “A large portion . . . were unmarried. A few of them drank intoxicating liquors. Still, it was a company of sober and brave men. They knew their duty and they did it. While in a town they made no braggadocio demonstration. They
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The white Ford Focus, it turned out, was the most commonly rented vehicle in the United States. First the white Chevy pickup truck, now this. Their suspect certainly knew how to blend in.
In these moments, Rayburn thought of investigative work like fishing or hunting. You had to look at where your target was most likely going.
Technology is a double-edged sword in cases like these; so much information comes through in-car computers and over the radio that even the best officers and troopers suffer information overload. An old-school approach like this, Rayburn always found, made a much more lasting impression: I’m walking this over to you, I’m talking to you, which means this is important.
Henry was skeptical. So he took the flyer and drove over to the local Ford dealership. Turned out Chris Iber, who identified the Focus using windshield analysis, was right.
Progress seemed minimal. They had a man, his age, race, and weight unknown, covered head to toe, traveling on major highways in a nondescript vehicle, picking small banks in small towns at odd hours, knowing the risk of getting caught was almost zero. He seemed to have a hyperawareness of video cameras, often parking his vehicle out of frame. What were the chances they’d ever catch him?
With little to discuss—Rayburn knew as much as Gannaway—they talked procedure. Gannaway marveled at the Bureau’s ability to identify the most commonplace vehicles in the country through subtle design quirks; Rayburn boasted of Henry taking photos over to the Ford dealership and holding them up, side by side, to an actual Ford Focus. For a Texas Ranger, no job was too small.
Rayburn, who followed the Rangers’ strict dress code, removed his cowboy hat and necktie. As best he could, he didn’t want to look like a Ranger, but he still wore his long-sleeved dress shirt, immaculate blue jeans, and cowboy boots.
These were a lot of unsolicited details. Henry’s training told him: This man was lying.
Keyes began stretching his limbs, another giveaway: This guy wasn’t telling the truth. He might be ready to run.
He sat waiting to order his usual, a twenty-ounce skinny peppermint mocha with whipped cream. Payne got teased about it all the time, his penchant for what he called his “froufrou” coffee, and compensated by drinking a pot and a half of cheap office swill the rest of the day.
Payne knew most of these baristas by name, and so did his girlfriend, a nurse. Some were saving for college; others were working on medical degrees. Payne’s girlfriend always made a point of telling them to stick with it. They were good girls, Payne thought, the girls who make my skinny mocha every morning. Any one of them could have met Samantha’s fate, whatever that was.
“You should know that in Texas, we have a probable cause exemption. If you have enough reason to believe a vehicle has been used in the commission of a crime, you can search it.”
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.
The very blandness of the FBI’s offices—beige walls, beige carpet, beige furniture—helped give family members a sense of orderliness and competence, underscoring that these were investigators of the highest degree.
“Well,” Heidi said, “if God wants that girl to be found, she’ll be found.” Then she turned and walked away.
The next entry in the biography put Keyes in the US Army from 1998 to 2000, stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington, Fort Hood in Texas, and Sinai, Egypt. He had passed, with distinction, the army’s pre-Ranger course, a merciless sixty-one days of training that typically flushes out half its hopefuls in the first week.
Israel Keyes’s own mother, in such a raw moment, was silently conceding that yes, it was possible that her own son was responsible for the kidnapping of a teenage girl, maybe worse. What led Heidi to accept this? What had Israel been like growing up? The team in Anchorage hadn’t found a criminal record for him, but that didn’t mean no criminal history. It only meant he hadn’t been caught.
How long had Heidi been living in Texas? Was Israel a frequent visitor? I recently moved here with four of my daughters, Heidi said. They had all been living in Indianapolis, Indiana, where they met two young men Heidi called “street preachers,” charismatic evangelicals who somehow convinced the Keyes women to move nearly nine hundred miles south and join their congregation. First they had moved to Dallas, then Wells. One of Heidi’s daughters had just wed a fellow church member in an arranged marriage. That’s why Israel had been in Texas.
Was Israel a member of their church? Gannaway asked. No, Heidi said. Israel doesn’t believe in God. His atheism was a great tragedy of her life. Had anything unusual happened? Gannaway asked. Actually, a few things, Heidi said. She had heard that at least one of Israel’s sisters had begged him to accept the Lord, and Israel, normally so contemptuous of such talk, instead became very emotional. He wept, Heidi said. He told his sister, “You don’t know the things that I have done.”
There were many reasons Feldis had no business being in that room, let alone co-opting the investigation. For one, the US Attorney’s Office wasn’t wired for audio and video recording of the interrogation. Nor did the building have proper security. Keyes wouldn’t be as intimidated, psychologically or physically, as he’d be at the FBI’s offices. These were all very real concerns. Feldis didn’t care. How about this liability? Police officers and FBI agents can, by law, lie to elicit a confession; prosecutors cannot.
He also easily followed direction. This was not someone who suffered from mental illness or cognitive defects. Keyes was clearly sane.
Anchorage, for all its violent crime, doesn’t have a federal penitentiary.
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.
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.
How about the witnesses? For example, other than the surveliiance camera footage, did any witnesses observe Samantha's momentary escape (on foot) from Keyes and his tackle of her? If so, why didn't they call the police? Who knows? It could be easy to be caught up in the moment and have thought these two are friends in a spat, it isn't my business. However, reading this passage and others in this book makes me hope that I would be aware and do what I could to ascertain the situation and/or call for help.
Chacon was scrambling. His team had six or seven divers, but for a job like this he would need two more: it takes ten people to put two in the water. He called Quantico for help, then the FBI in Anchorage to make sure this information was solid.
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.
Chacon also told Oberlander that he needed four or five pop-up shelters, two so his team could get dressed on the ice, two to cover his monitors from direct sunlight, and one to shield Samantha’s remains from the press.
Chacon hated arriving in cities and towns where such a high-profile case has gripped the community, because the minute he and his team pulled out their government IDs, word always spread quickly: Strange federal agents are here now. That can’t be good.
April 2, 2012, was a perfect Alaska day: crisp and clean, no snow, no wind, no rain, fifteen hours of sunlight. Matanuska Lake was as white as the moon.
Kaczynski had been a domestic terrorist, but he was also a genius. If even half of Keyes’s confession was true—and agents on the case believed most of it—that could make Keyes as organized and lethal as Kaczynski, himself a master at leaving false clues and no forensic evidence. Kaczynski was an off-the-gridder, a loner, a paranoid man with a profound distrust of the US government. Would Keyes share some of these traits? It was a possibility.
I read some Goodreads readers' reviews of this book that accused law enforcement of shoddy work regarding investigations into homicide or missing persons cases that Keyes admitted to or he was a suspect. Well, these type criminals and predators tend to be very intelligent or cunning. They plan and map things out, and they know how to reduce their literal and figurative footprints, whether physical or digital. I read in this book or elsewhere that Kaczynski was geniuses. Apparently Keyes was very intelligent. A genius can be good or evil, just like anyone else. If these type criminals weren't cunning, they would be caught sooner.
If he hadn’t been in custody, Nelson would have a hard time believing Israel Keyes actually existed.
Again, Keyes was very clever. His parents would move the family ever few months and live out of tents. My assumption is that he was a survivalist at ab early age. Keyes was also in the U.S. Army and was apparently candidate for the Rangers. I have a relative who had similar training. Keyes knew what it took to hide his tracks and keep investigators guessing.
By now, the FBI had brought in a specialist who worked with victims’ families. They had to prepare James for this terrible likelihood: His daughter was gone. They wouldn’t know for sure until the FBI searched the bottom of the lake. His thinnest thread of hope, translucent and breakable as spider’s silk, was that this confession could possibly be a hoax. It sounds real to us, they told him. We have reason to believe it. Brace yourself as best you can.
Bart, Chacon’s choice to lead the dive, was an eight-year army veteran. He now oversaw all four of the FBI’s Dive Teams from Quantico; for this mission, he partnered with his friend and former Quantico roommate Joe Allen. Both men were protective of their teammates, some of whom had only recovered weapons, never a dead body, let alone a dismembered young woman. Bart didn’t want that to be a diver’s first experience. Allen had two unique qualifications. He was the only certified ice diver on the team who was also an advanced care paramedic. He was an obvious choice, because, as he often said,
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It was 4:42 P.M., nearly five hours after the team began setting up. Chacon turned to Oberlander. He both loved and hated this part. His team’s success was a family’s tragedy.
