On February 1, 2012, Israel Keyes, 34, decided that the Common Grounds, espresso coffee stand in Anchorage, Alaska would be his target. He had already purchased tickets to board a cruise ship from New Orleans to Mexico the very next morning. Keyes waited in his car fairly close to the coffee stand, listening to a police scanner for any potential distractions.
At around 8 pm a major incident was broadcast over the scanner quite far across town. This was the moment Israel Keyes decided to strike. Keyes covered his face with a ski mask and walked up towards the coffee stand.
Keyes threatened Samantha repeatedly, telling her that if she were to make any noise, he would kill her. Keyes was then able to move Samantha from his vehicle to the shed next to his house which he had already prepared for the attack without anybody noticing. He cranked up the volume on a radio that he had in the shed. He forced Samantha to tell him where her debit card was. She told him it was currently in her boyfriend’s truck. At that point Keyes was planning to hold onto Samantha for ransom. He left Samantha tied up and locked up inside the shed for a short period of time, while he went off to break into her boyfriend’s truck and fetch the debit card. When he came home from fetching the debit card, he walked inside his house and quietly poured himself a glass of wine. He then went back out to the shed. Israel Keyes brutally raped and murdered 18-year-old, Samantha Koenig, via strangulation. He wrapped her body in the plastic tarp that he had laid along the floor in a shed. Keyes then placed her body into a shed cabinet and turned off the heaters and the radio. He then went back inside his house where his daughter and his girlfriend lay asleep.
Israel Keyes packed up for his cruise, woke up his daughter for school and then headed towards the airport. The cruise he was taking ported out of New Orleans. So Keyes flew to New Orleans and then boarded the ship. When his cruise was over, Keyes went on a crime spree throughout Texas, where he had robbed a home and then set it on fire.
He flew home to Anchorage, Alaska on February 19, 2012. After being home for a few days, Keyes decided that he needed to dispose of Samantha’s body. As he removed her from the cabinet in the shed, he felt the urge to have sex with her once again, and Keyes then had intercourse with Samantha’s body again.
Keyes completely dismembered Samantha and dumped her remains into the Matanuska Lake just outside of Anchorage, Alaska.
Sometime during the first week of March 2012, Keyes decided to go on a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada. He hopped on a plane and flew there. He rented a white Ford Focus and drove himself to Arizona. While in Arizona, he put on a different outfit and a mask and withdrew $400 from Samantha’s bank account. That activity immediately alerted the FBI and they began to check ATM cameras, and monitor Samantha’s bank account activity. On the ATM camera footage, they were not able to make out Keyes’s identity, but they were able to pinpoint the white Ford Focus he was driving. Unfortunately, they were not able to work out what the license plate was.
Just two days later, on March 9, 2012, Israel Keyes pulled on another disguise and visited an ATM in Texas, where he withdrew money from Samantha’s bank account. Again the FBI immediately informed Texas authorities to keep a keen eye out for the white Ford Focus.
Four days later, on March 13, 2012, a Texas police officer monitoring the highway witnessed a white Ford Focus parked outside of a Texas motel. The officer waited inside his vehicle and monitored the white Ford Focus and when Keyes entered the Ford Focus, the officer followed him due to suspicion that this may, in fact, be the vehicle that they were looking for. The officer kept his eye on Keyes’s speed limit and when Keyes went just four miles per hour over the posted speed limit, the officer pulled Keyes over. Keyes handed his Alaskan driver’s license over to the police officer, and that immediately set off alarms due to the bank account belonging to a kidnap victim, whom also lived in Alaska. The officer called for backup. As the officers proceeded to search the white Ford Focus, they found a face mask that matched the one captured by the ATM camera. They also found rolls of cash that were covered in a die, which is used to signify that the money had been stolen from a bank. As well as a gun and Samantha’s debit card.
For the initial couple weeks, following his arrest, Keyes was constantly confronted with overwhelming evidence against him. He denied everything and refused to talk. However, on March 31, 2012, Keyes admitted some involvement regarding the abduction of Samantha Koenig. He decided to strike a deal with the investigators to protect his daughter from hearing any details. He told them that if they keep the details of the crimes away from the media and the public, that he would then tell them everything about what he did and how he did it. He said he would tell them the entire story, but then Israel Keyes also said that he had a lot more stories to tell. Israel Keyes: “I’m not in this for the glory. I’m not trying to be on TV. I want my kid to have a chance to grow up. She’s in a safe place now. She’s not going to see any of this. I want her to have a chance to grow up and not have all this hanging over her head.”
A few days later, Israel Keyes went on to provide the details of the abduction and murder of Samantha Koenig to the police, leading them to the location at Matanuska Lake where he disposed of her remains. A federal grand jury returned an indictment on Israel Keyes to face charges for the kidnapping and murder of Samantha Koenig. Israel Keyes mentioned that he had also been involved in the disappearances of many other people throughout the USA, between the years of 1997 and 2012. However, he refused to go into any further details.
On May 23, 2012, Israel Keyes had its first appearance in court in order to set a date for the trial. Somehow during this court appearance, Israel Keyes managed to break out of leg restraints and dive over the handrail behind him into the gallery members, sitting in the front row. Fortunately, the officers in the courtroom were able to quickly regain control of the situation. The prosecutors involved in the case were seeking that a trial take place sometime around 10 months after his initial court appearance. During the months between Israel Keyes’s first court appearance and his projected trial date of January 2013, Israel Keyes took part in several different interviews with police. All interviews are on YouTube. During these interviews Keyes displayed a disturbingly casual demeanor and a complete lack of empathy for his victims. Investigators would even go on to state that he appeared bored at times. Keyes let officers know that for about 14 years of his life, starting in 1997, he believed that he was basically two different people. The version of himself that all of his family and friends would know him as was a normal man, that would go on to live a regular crime free life, working as a handyman, contractor and construction worker. However, behind the scenes, there was a completely different version of him. This version was a serial killer, serial rapist, serial arsonist, bank robber and abductor who would travel the country, searching for his next victim. He would hide something he referred to as “kill kits” in remote locations, throughout the states. In these kits, he would leave what he believed was the necessary equipment needed to complete an abduction murder or armed robbery. One of them consisted of a five-gallon-home-depot bucket which he filled with zip ties, ammunition, guns, silencers, duct tape and drano to accelerate human decomposition.
“I’ve known since I was 14 that there were things that I thought were normal and [okay] that no one else seemed to think were normal and okay. So that’s when I just started being a loner. […] People found out about some of the stuff I did. Like my parents, and parents of other kids who would hang out with me. They would find out about some of the stuff I did. And that’s when I just started doing stuff by myself exclusively.”
Keyes during an interview with the FBI.
During this same conversation, Keyes admitted to the murder of a couple that lived in Vermont. While he spoke about the murder, investigators listening in from the next room, googled missing Vermont couple and found a picture of Bill and Lorraine Currier. The picture was brought to Keyes. Keyes explained how it happened, stating that he dressed in black from head to toe and broke into Bill and Lorraine’s house while they were asleep. He walked into their bedroom, holding a gun, and when they woke up, they were in a slight daze. It took them a few moments to realize what was happening. Keyes then ordered the couple to roll onto their stomachs, while he zip-tied their hands and feet. He asked them where all of their valuables were as he raided through their belongings. After about 15 minutes, he told them that they were all leaving the house. He dragged them both into the garage and forced them into a vehicle. He drove them to an empty house that was currently for sale. He forced the couple inside and after murdering Bill, he raped Lorraine twice and murdered her as well. He stuffed their bodies into large 55-gallon trash bags, and hid them underneath garbage and wood in the corner of the basement. He then left the house. Keyes stated it took him six hours, start to finish. After telling the police all of the details, Keyes expected that the investigators would hold up their side of the agreement, by keeping his case out of the news as much as possible. Soon after he told them, Keyes caught wind that he was all over the news in Vermont. That made Keyes more difficult to extract information from, because he felt the investigators were not living up to their end of the deal that they made. He then went on to tell the investigators that the only way he would provide further information was if he was promised that he would be sentenced to death. He didn’t request an attorney. He made a choice to represent himself. It has been said that this is likely due to Israel Keyes’s strange obsession with another serial killer – Ted Bundy.
Israel Keyes’s final interview took place on November 29, 2012, and just three days later, on December 2, 2012, at exactly 5:57 am, a prison guard noticed a red streak on Keyes’s cell floor, and when they approached his cell, they found Israel Keyes lying face down, covered in blood and deceased from what appeared to be a plethora of very elaborately planned self-inflicted wounds.
After years of investigating the case of serial killer, Israel Keyes, law enforcement now believe that Israel Keyes is responsible for 11 murders throughout the USA.
Israel Keyes was born in Richmond, Utah, on January 7, 1978, the second of ten children. His parents were members of the LDS Church from Torrance. Keyes and his siblings were homeschooled until 1983. After leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Keyes’s father moved the family to a remote plot in Washington in Stevens County when Keyes was 5. Isolated from society, the family lived in a one-room cabin without electricity or running water on Rocky Creek Road. The family attended services at a church called the Ark, which subscribed to white supremacist Christian Identity ideology. Keyes later described the Ark as an Amish-like environment. During this period of attending the Ark, the Keyes family befriended the neighboring family of Chevie Kehoe, who was later convicted for a 1996 triple murder. The family attended another church in Colville called the Christian Israel Covenant Church. Keyes later alleged it to have been militia-like. For years, some of the Keyes children were forced to sleep in a tent due to their cabin’s small size and made to hunt their food, chop firewood, and work on local farms to support the family. As a hobby, Keyes hunted “anything with a heartbeat”; he freely admitted to skinning a deer alive to his peers at the church. As a result, Keyes was ostracized by other children who attended the Christian Israel Covenant Church, with one girl recounting that Keyes’s presence “made my skin crawl.” As a youth, Keyes—who stood 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) tall by age 14—admitted to shooting at neighbors’ houses with his BB gun and starting fires in the woods. He also broke into houses with another youth, who subsequently avoided Keyes after witnessing him shoot an animal. Keyes’s parents provided shelter to personal friends. Keyes tied a cat to a tree with a parachute cord and gored it with a .22 revolver. The cat then began circling the tree before crashing into it and vomiting; Keyes allegedly chuckled before noting that the boy—who later informed his father—had vomited in response to the incident. Keyes then became interested in Satanism, and planned to commit a ritualistic murder.
In the summer of 1997 or 1998, Keyes sexually assaulted a teenage girl who had been tubing with her friends down the Deschutes River in Maupin, Oregon. Originally planning to murder her as part of a Satanic ritual, Keyes let her go in the river tube he had abducted her from. “I was too timid. I wasn’t violent enough,” he told investigators. “I made up my mind I was never going to let that happen again.”
In 1998, Keyes relocated and enlisted in the United States Army in the state of New York, where he served as a Specialist in Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division. He passed a month-long preliminary course for United States Army Rangers training. Keyes was awarded an Army Achievement Medal for his service as a gunner and assistant gunner from December 1998 to July 2001. He was then honorably discharged and relocated to Neah Bay, Washington. He lived in the Makah Reservation community of Neah Bay, on the Olympic Peninsula with his Native American girlfriend, who he had met online and subsequently had a daughter with. In 2007, Keyes started a construction business in Alaska.
1:35 Israel Keyes: “There’s no one who knows me or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me really.”
