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

by Maureen Callahan

Otherwise, he said, he liked the army. To his own surprise, he was a good soldier. He was infantry, stationed at Fort Hood in Texas and later Fort Lewis in Washington, with about six months in Egypt. He never saw combat. Keyes thrived under the structure he never had growing up, but struggled to make friends. He really didn’t know how to relate to the other guys. He had never had a drink or tried drugs. He had no knowledge of popular culture. He didn’t know what football was, or who Brad Pitt or Nirvana were. When the other guys reacted with open mouths and blank stares, Keyes would give them a shorthand explanation. I’m Amish, he would say. I mean, was.

There was something else Keyes kept from her: He was bisexual. He spoke of this in his psychiatric evaluation as something he always knew and accepted about himself. Only Kimberly ever found out, he said, and that was because he got sloppy after drinking too much one night and cruising online. She found those chats on his computer and confronted him, but that was all he would say about that.

They hit it off. Lunch turned into a drive and then dinner and a movie. They bonded over their traumatic childhoods. Tammie had grown up in Neah Bay without plumbing or electricity and knew the deprivation and humiliation, what it was to never feel clean enough, worried that others were snickering over poor personal hygiene that you, a child, had little control over. She knew what it was to be raised in squalid conditions yet surrounded by a breathtaking landscape, emerald trees and water of the clearest blue. She knew how this could comfort and could hurt.

Keyes never shared with her his white supremacist past. Nothing in his demeanor, nothing he said, ever caused her suspicion.

They had other things in common. They both loved heavy metal and hard-core slasher films, but were most bound by lust and alcohol. Despite Tammie’s time in recovery, she drank with Keyes, a lot. The sex was amazing. The best lover, hands down, I have ever had, Tammie said. At the end of eight weeks she was pregnant.

He made sure Keaton, her son from a previous relationship, felt included—not threatened by a new baby, or this new man living with his mom. Keyes was sensitive to this small boy’s anxieties, and over time Keaton would come to accept and love Keyes as a father figure.

One year later, Chevie was convicted in the 1996 triple homicide of a young family, including an eight-year-old girl, and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. I know them, Keyes said. I grew up with them. Tammie was stunned. The Kehoes were terrifying. She wanted to know: Were you friends? Were they part of your church? Were they violent? Did you believe the same things? Did you ever do anything bad with them? Keyes would only give Tammie vague answers and shoulder shrugs. He made it very clear: I don’t want to talk about this. And not wanting to get into a fight, Tammie let it go.

The Keyes family was removed from the train, but it’s unclear whether Jeff ever saw an emergency room. It’s doubtful. No record of his death exists—no obituary, no death certificate the FBI could find, no gravesite. All Tammie recalls is Keyes flying to Maine for the funeral. Whether there was ever a funeral in Maine is unknown.

Payne and Goeden, too, would also wonder. That Keyes never spoke of Jeff implied, paradoxically, that Jeff had a profound impact on Keyes, likely a bad one. They would always wonder if Keyes had been abused by him. Payne, on nothing more than his gut, would always wonder if Keyes had anything to do with his father’s untimely death. That there was no record of Keyes near his father in the months and weeks prior to his demise, Payne knew, meant nothing.

Tammie couldn’t see it then, but she was outside the family now. Keyes had effectively taken on the role of a single father.

It was the first time Tammie saw this side of Keyes—cold-blooded. He outmaneuvered her. There was really no fighting him. He was going to do whatever he wanted.

One involved staking out a backwoods road, late at night, a place where people “don’t really expect any[thing] to happen to them,” he said. There would be very little traffic, one car every five or ten minutes, and Keyes pictured himself set back on the side, watching drivers through binoculars. “You know, like shopping,” he said. “You shoot out someone’s tire, she’s by herself, and she doesn’t have much choice but to stop. . . . Probably within half a mile of where you shoot it out.”

Keyes heard another vehicle snaking down the narrow road and into the lot. It was a patrol car, but this wasn’t an obstacle. It was exciting. “I was thinking about shooting the cop,” Keyes said. “Ever since I was a kid, it’s like . . . [my] white supremacist roots or something, that I was going to ambush a cop. And for some reason that night I had been sitting there long enough, and I was just bored enough and just amped up enough that I almost did it.”

Keyes wasn’t naive about the law. Ever self-motivated, he had been clocking time in the prison’s law library and knew the right questions to ask. He wanted to see if Feldis had done his homework, or was incompetent, or was maybe just stalling.

“To a point,” Keyes said. “But there’s a lot of people, people that I grew up with, who looked at him as a patriot. As a hero.” Whether Keyes felt the same, he did not say. Bell circled back to McVeigh’s execution, which had been fast-tracked at McVeigh’s request.

That said: DNA cannot be altered, but science can minimize how much of it someone might leave behind. Fingerprints can be surgically modified. Body hair can be lasered off. Perspiration can be short-circuited with Botox.

Most telling was the gastric surgery. Keyes was nothing if not a time-management master. If investigators thought about it, Keyes could easily go at least twelve hours without eating, as he seemed to have done on the nights he took Samantha and the Curriers. Here was something else—far less pressing but no less sinister—to consider: 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.”

“Keyes was close to his younger sisters and was trying to save money to get them out of the lifestyle,” the CO said. “It was never spoken, but [my] impression was that Keyes or his sisters were abused by their father.”

This was something Keyes would share with agents. His brandings, at first, represented his rejection of God and his interest in Satanism. Initially, Keyes thought, there had to be a higher reason he was like this—why it was he liked hurting animals and people and never felt guilt or even shame. Ultimately that logic didn’t hold, because Keyes realized he couldn’t believe in the devil without believing in God. Evil was something else entirely.

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.” At some point in his twenties, Keyes said, he had come to accept himself. He had also come to accept that he, too, might never know a why.

Was Keyes trained as a sniper? That remains unclear. The Department of the Army released only a few pages of his military record. Missing was any mention of the monthlong special training he underwent in Panama in 1999, training a fellow soldier recounted to the FBI, or his time on the Egypt-Israel border from 2001–2002, or his visit to Saudi Arabia, or how close he came to joining the Army Rangers.

The other guys, this soldier claimed, were in shock. They kept asking: What did you do to freak her out so much? Nothing, Keyes said. “I threw her around a little bit,” he later told Jeff Bell. “I wasn’t going to let her run the show.”

“I’m surprised he . . . got caught,” Perkins said. “He was smarter than that.”

It was 2:30 in the afternoon, four and a half hours since their hike began, when the couple encountered the mother and daughter again. They looked like they were squatting, or hunched over. Their bodies had been posed right along the trail.

Mary Cooper had been fifty-six years old. Her daughter, Susanna Stodden, was twenty-seven. First responders—park staff—couldn’t tell how Susanna and Mary had been killed. There were no visible wounds. Homicides in Washington State parks were extremely rare. Or so went the thinking.

Between the hours of 1:48 and 4:41 P.M. the day Mary and Susanna were murdered, Nelson found that signature tell: Keyes’s cell phone had gone dark.

There’s nothing I can do. No sentiment captured this stage of the investigation more. Bell couldn’t get Chandler to do his job. Payne couldn’t get Feldis out of the room. Keyes couldn’t fire his attorney or get an execution date. There was no one in charge, not one person or panel or institution that could fix it.

And Keyes exploited their desperation, soon trading his hated paper slippers for sneakers and shoelaces and getting his newspapers. He even had a wilderness survival guide in his cell. Shock didn’t begin to cover Bell’s reaction when he found out. Didn’t Chandler know that Ted Bundy had escaped from prison twice? Keyes idolized Bundy.

The moment Keyes let her go he regretted it. He checked the local papers constantly, waiting for the day her story appeared, for the cops to arrest him. When months passed with his name never coming up, no phone call or door knock, no investigation that he knew of, he didn’t feel smart. He felt lucky.

The Boca Raton task force was dissolved a year later, but not before Jane Doe gave the police sketch artist a detailed description. The physical resemblance to Keyes, the mouth especially, is startling.

Jane Doe told police she followed every instruction the abductor gave and kept talking to him, just like everything was otherwise normal. She thinks that’s why she and her son survived.

As Roy Hazelwood wrote: Some people just rape and kill because they enjoy it. And Hazelwood was right, because Keyes had said it too: Once he got going, there was no other rush like it. And once he built a tolerance for that rush, he had no choice but to escalate.

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.

Approximately forty-five thousand pages of case files remain unreleased by the Department of Justice, under claims of national security. The official timeline of Keyes’s travels, issued by the FBI shortly after his death, remains heavily edited. Knowledge of any terrorist activities or potential plots remains secret.

The great FBI profiler and author Roy Hazelwood spoke to me for this book in March 2016. For someone who spent the majority of his life confronting the worst of humanity, he was one of the kindest, most joyful people I have ever encountered.

First Amendment lawyer nonpareil Kate Bolger and her team embarked on a lengthy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) battle with the Department of Justice on my behalf almost pro bono, simply because they believed it was the right thing to do.

Thanks to J.T. Hunter, author of Devil in the Darkness: The True Story of Serial Killer Israel Keyes, for his research assistance. Interviews he conducted with Tammie in particular helped flesh out an essential part of the narrative.

Thirteen hours of hidden interviews with Keyes were made public after my lawyer requested a hearing in Alaska federal court in 2018. These had never been officially logged or docketed with the court, which meant that there was no way to know of their existence. (Previously released interviews, plus documents unsealed through the Freedom of Information Act, allowed me to piece together references to those missing interrogations. I have since learned that such obfuscations are more common than we know.) After the interviews were released, my lawyer asked the prosecutor’s office several times if any others remain hidden. We have not received a response.

So far, the FBI is comfortable naming only Debra Feldman, whose body was recovered in New York, as another victim of Israel Keyes.