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July 2 - July 12, 2022
Before beginning Samantha’s recovery, Chacon had his team gather in one of the tents, where they were invisible to cameras and agents on the ice. They observed a moment of silence, and as they exited, they saw an enormous bald eagle circling overhead. Chacon took it as a sign that Samantha was watching over them. The divers looked at each other, nodded, and silently went to work.
Bell finally drove home around 9:00 P.M. Now, each time he drove by Samantha’s kiosk, there would be no more questions. He knew exactly what happened to her, in such minute detail that part of him wished he’d never heard it. He knew exactly the route Keyes took that night. He knew every opportunity Samantha had to escape. Bell was a father, too, and now he had more sorrowful sites in his personal constellation of landmarks: an arrest, a shooting, a body. He called his wife and told her he’d be home soon, weeping on the way.
It was a little after 10:00 P.M. Showered and shaved now, they all looked the same: buzz cuts, khaki pants, black jackets. Chacon joked that it was as close as they could get to wearing “FBI” across their chests.
When the team flew out the next night, Anchorage felt different. Chacon always felt it, this palpable shift from communal hope to grief. Driving in, he’d seen that sign at the kiosk, the city praying for Samantha. Driving out less than thirty-six hours later, he saw the sign had changed.
He sometimes thinks that the reason he and his wife were never able to have children despite years of trying, specialist after specialist offering no solution, was so he’d never have to know a parent’s grief.
James so badly wanted to say good-bye to his daughter, to see her one last time. It had been left to Bell and Goeden to tell James that he really didn’t want to see his daughter that way.
That statement left Payne and his team with three big questions. What were those stories? How many were there? And just who was Israel Keyes?
The core four were still in place: Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson. This was the team Payne thoughtfully built from the outset, and now he felt vindicated. He knew how rare it was to work with a group of investigators who got along and how valuable that was to solving a case.
This, Payne thought, was the laborious stuff that CSI turns into a cybertrick: punch in a code and get your coordinates in seconds, cell phone records in a flash. If only. This stuff would take weeks to sift through and sort out.
She didn’t know much about him, only that he had mentioned growing up in a kind of commune and saying something like, “Religion poisons people.” He also said his daughter’s mother had serious substance abuse issues and he had taken full custody. He worked alone and never seemed to need help.
The next noteworthy tip came from an anonymous caller who said Keyes had a sister in Smyrna, Maine, who belonged to the Amish community. This caller also said that when Keyes was a young man, his sister and parents lived in Idaho with a Christian identity group that preached white supremacy. Two other tips had to do with Heidi’s church. The first caller was from Wells, Texas, who said the town had recently been taken over by a cult. Israel Keyes, the tipster said, was a member.
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 crept around the house, found the phone line and cut it: no alarm system. His work in construction, he said, helped him predict floor plans pretty easily. He found only one window-installed air-conditioning unit and figured that was the master bedroom.
When Keyes took people, he was acutely attuned to their animal response: the acid flush of adrenaline flooding the veins, color draining from faces, pupils dilating in fear. He could smell it in their sweat. He liked to extend that response as long as possible.
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. That’s what this guy is, Payne realized. A true ambush predator.
Keyes would say no more about his childhood, and his refusal to discuss it convinced the team, Goeden and Nelson especially, that this was fertile ground. For these two investigators, the mystery of how Israel Keyes got this way was as compelling as discovering other victims.
Nelson Googled “Glen Rose TX river trails.” Up came the top two hits: the Paluxy River and the Dinosaur Valley State Park. Knowing how much Keyes loved state and national parks, there was a good chance it was the latter.
Texas was proving harder than Keyes thought. People here were openly suspicious of outsiders. At least one person actually came right up to him while he smoked a cigar, right across from the bank he was about to rob, and asked who he was and what he was doing there. How he replied, Keyes didn’t say. It wasn’t enough to stop him, but Texans were living up to their image as straight-talking shitkickers. Also, too many people had guns! He said this in all seriousness: Almost no one took their personal safety for granted. “I was surprised that security is actually pretty tight,” Keyes said. “Most
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While Keyes was proud of his crimes and his MO, he had made it clear from the outset: He was only going to give them information that they would inevitably discover themselves. If they somehow found a body without him, that would be their win, and he would confess. Otherwise his victims were his alone. It was strange for him to be talking about any of this. He never had and thought he never would.
Someone goes missing? Police are looking at the victim’s friends and family. Maybe the person he kills isn’t even from, say, Texas. Maybe they’re on vacation from another state or another country. Who’s going to link him to that? Keyes knew that stranger abductions are rare. He knew his way of doing things was even more so.
Breaking apart his cell phone and removing the battery was something the team hadn’t seen before either. For Kat Nelson, those dark spots in his history, the hours that his phone gave off no signal, would be a tell. That’s when Keyes was doing something.
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.
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.
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. He made this prediction in 2001.
Not all psychopaths are serial killers, but all serial killers are psychopaths.
Yet Hazelwood offered some comfort: Sexually motivated serial killers are truly rare. And Keyes was the 1 percent of the 1 percent.
Koontz described his serial killer thusly: “He does not believe in reincarnation or in any of the standard practices of an afterlife that are sold by the world’s great religions. . . . But if he is to undergo an apotheosis, it will be brought about by his own bold actions, not by divine grace; if he, in fact, becomes a god, the transformation will occur because he has already chosen to live like a god—without fear, without remorse, without limits, with all his senses fiercely sharpened.”
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.
The behaviorists at the FBI think so. In 2008, the Behavioral Science Unit founded the Evil Minds Research Museum, dedicated to the study of serial killers and their development since infancy. Analysts use artwork, journals, and other personal possessions in an attempt to map each killer’s mind, hoping to create a kind of master profile. The core belief is that each monster would, from time to time, let the mask of sanity slip. 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
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One upshot of Keyes’s legal wrangling for the death penalty was a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. All of the investigators knew Keyes was sane. The long-range planning, the lengths to which he concealed not just his crimes but his true self—this was someone who understood right from wrong and the consequences of getting caught.
And none of their children would have birth certificates or Social Security numbers or attend school. No one else, certainly not the government, would have a say in how their children were raised.
Heidi and Jeff loved their children but also regarded them as what they sometimes called assets, sources of free labor. The Keyes children had few friends, just a small menagerie of dogs and cats. There was no TV, no radio, no computer or telephone, no contact with the outside world. Without knowing what they were missing, they sensed, as children do, that they were deprived.
As the Keyes children learned to read they were forced to memorize Scripture. They wore hand-me-down clothes and too-small shoes; in Israel’s case, his toes would be disfigured, a permanent reminder of how much his parents withheld.
Heidi believed her children loved this way of life. She convinced herself of it. And it made her feel superior, her lack of need for material things, her individualism, her nonconformity. Here she was, raising all these children on her own in the forest, without science or capitalism or the government or any outside institution to help.
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.
Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe were close in age to Israel. They had six siblings and all were homeschooled, lived off the grid, and belonged to the Ark. Their father was planning for a race war. The Kehoe brothers knew all about guns: shooting them, hiding them, stealing them, moving them on the black market.
“I learned all the details about guns even if I had never seen them,” Keyes said. “It got worse when I got guns. I found out how easy it was to steal them.” He was already breaking into homes, sometimes with a friend, and though he didn’t name either Kehoe, it seems likely one was an accomplice. Sometimes Keyes off-loaded his stolen guns at local sales or swaps. It was so easy back then. Even though he was still a child, no one ever asked him for ID or why he had all these weapons.
His behaviors escalated, and he began to realize how different he was from most of his peers. At fourteen, Keyes and a friend—the one he broke into houses with—were out in the woods, and Keyes wanted to try something new. “I shot something,” he said. “A dog or a cat. He couldn’t handle it. And that was the last time I did stuff with him.”
What Keyes was describing was the textbook progression, from childhood, of a sadist and a psychopath. Torturing and killing small animals, pets especially, is experimentation in controlling and killing another living thing for pure pleasure. It is practice, the last step before graduating to humans.
“His upbringing really didn’t surface negatively until the last few years of his life,” Heidi said.
Once the favored son, he was now emotionally cast out, except by Heidi. She would not go along with her husband here. Heidi loved her son, even if he no longer loved or believed in God.
Still, he felt oppressed by Heidi and her beliefs, especially when it came to his burgeoning romantic life. He was eighteen years old, working construction, and had begun seeing his boss’s daughter. He was ashamed of his sexuality. “I had sinful thoughts today about my girlfriend,” he wrote in his journal. Those pages were otherwise covered in Bible verses. When Heidi and Jeff learned of this relationship, they forbade Keyes from seeing the girl. He could write letters to her only, which he did.
The Keyes children seemed to believe moral ruin was the way to salvation.
Israel expressed resentment. He told his girlfriend that his family relied on him too much and that his mother sought to control him. This manifested in ways big and small.
Keyes did move to Oregon one month later, joining his family in the tiny town of Maupin. He was there to help his father build a new house, one they planned to sell, while the family once again lived in tents. Whether any of the Keyes children verbalized or even recognized this as punitive at best, sadistic at worst, is unclear. What’s not in dispute is that as their father built large homes—homes they would live in briefly, or never at all—the children watched through tent flaps, hungry bellies against hard ground, wondering why they were, in effect, kept homeless.
Except for Israel. He was done. He had had it with itinerant living and what he saw as cult shopping. The Amish, he thought, were silly. His parents had dragged them through Mormonism to Christian fundamentalism to what he later called “crazy white people with guns.”
His journal entries from late 1997 indicate regret over not living his own life. He missed the girl he’d left back in Colville. He couldn’t stop thinking about her and worried that he would never get over this heartbreak, his first. “I thought to myself in Maupin, What’s wrong with you, can’t you give her up? No, I guess I couldn’t.”
He was happiest here, alone in the woods. He took a few courses to get his high school equivalency diploma and struggled only with math. He was a big reader growing up, an autodidact who could teach himself most anything.
