American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  * * *

  —

  He drove home. Kevin was now inside for the night and Kimberly was out with friends. Keyes debated removing Samantha’s body from the shed.

  He had to calculate his risks. Was it safer to wait until Kevin went home? Kimberly wouldn’t go near the shed; ever since she discovered he’d been growing weed in it, her anger and resentment was palpable. He couldn’t blame her. For all her independence, Kimberly was now very lonely. Keyes was never home. He was drinking way more than usual. His credit cards were maxed out. Kimberly went to work and took care of their two dogs and kept the house in order and Keyes was increasingly distracted.

  Keyes knew it was over. He had been depressed about it. But Kimberly had never wanted children and never really warmed to his daughter. It was time to go. He was going to take his kid and relocate somewhere in the Lower 48, where he would initiate the second part of his “grand plan.”

  But that was in the future. Right now he had to get Samantha out of the shed.

  KEYES: You know, she was starting to smell a little bit so I, um—I wanted to keep her. I didn’t want to do it right then. . . . I was thinking I could put her out in the backyard and bury her in the snowbank and, uh, finish it up later. But then I just decided it was better just to do it—get it done and figure out some excuse as to what I was doing for three days. So I rolled her off the table and took the table apart, cut up the plywood that it was made out of, and burned that, and had a big, rolling tote—it wasn’t very deep, about five or six inches deep. And that’s what I cut her up in.

  Keyes made three trips, over three separate days, out to Matanuska Lake, always removing the battery and SIM card from his own cell phone. He chose daytime because it was less suspicious, driving an hour each way.

  On day one, Keyes walked out toward the center of the lake, about two hundred yards. He was dragging a chainsaw, lead weights, a snow shovel, a 16 x 30-inch piece of plywood, and some parts of the ice hut, which he’d pitch the next day, on a sled.

  None of this would look unusual on a winter afternoon in Alaska. Still, Keyes wasn’t taking chances.

  “I think I had my fishing stuff with me that day too,” Keyes said. “Just for appearances.”

  He thought cutting the hole would be easy. He was wrong.

  “It took me forever,” he said. “The chainsaw would not—it kept dying on me.” The ice was 20 inches thick, and Keyes was trying to cut a 13 x 20-inch hole.

  There was a witness this day, Keyes said, another man out on the lake ice fishing, looking at Keyes quizzically.

  “Why do you think?” Doll asked.

  “Well,” Keyes said, “he had an ice drill right there.” It was odd that Keyes didn’t ask to use it.

  After cutting the hole, Keyes tied twine through two of the lead weights and dropped them down to check the water’s depth. He’d asked Kevin, who worked for Fish and Game, for the best lakes for ice fishing. Kevin said Matanuska, eighty feet at its deepest.

  “I think it ended up being only about forty feet,” Keyes said. “But I figured that was deep enough.”

  After that, he packed everything back up, covered the hole with plywood, covered the plywood with snow, and left.

  On day two, Keyes said, he packed some of Samantha’s remains into tote bags, triple-bagging them to contain any blood. He made the drive that morning during the work commute, not concerned at all that he could be pulled over or involved in an accident.

  At the lake, under cover of his ice shack, Keyes removed Samantha’s remains from his tote and weighted them. Then he dropped them down the hole.

  “The first day, like I say—dumping the body took me about five or ten minutes once the ice shack was set up.” Then he left to go to a parent-teacher conference for his daughter.

  “How did you stay calm enough to do that?” Feldis asked.

  “I didn’t really think about it,” Keyes said. It was a quick meeting, just him and the teacher, talking about the gifted and talented program his child was enrolling in.

  * * *

  —

  It took two more days, Keyes said, purely due to logistics. He couldn’t have moved Samantha’s remains all at once, and he didn’t want to create suspicion at the lake. He said he never saw anyone else out there again, just a car parked near his truck on day two or three. He couldn’t be sure, only that it was a day he was submerging the remains, and it caused no alarm.

  “I could tell by the tracks that they’d just gone, like, cross-country skiing,” Keyes said. “Yeah, they never even came down by the lake. They probably didn’t even see me on the lake.”

  Very disciplined, Payne thought. Very methodical.

  After the last of Samantha’s remains sank, Keyes sat at the edge of the hole and went fishing.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, Payne and his team had their blow-by-blow account of what had happened to Samantha. They knew where she was. They could bring her home. This case was closed, but Payne knew there was more to come. For one thing, they would have to corroborate, as best they could, what Keyes had told them. A confession without a body—without any physical evidence at all—was hardly ideal. What if Keyes recanted? Said he’d lied about some of it? All of it? Claimed an unnamed accomplice?

  Fourteen years.

  The Bureau couldn’t risk any more mistakes. They had to find out if Samantha was where Keyes said she was—immediately.

  This, too, would be harder than it seemed.

  FIFTEEN

  After Keyes’s initial confession on Friday, Steve Payne and Jeff Bell drove out to Matanuska Lake. The two men wanted to see for themselves if this wild story, Keyes spending three days disposing of Samantha’s body at a popular ice fishing spot, could possibly be true.

  Bell mapped the coordinates with his iPhone’s compass, and the two walked out about fifty feet toward a fresh pack of snow. Bell kicked aside the pile and there it was: a cut in the ice, like a fresh scar from any other wound. They knew this was the place.

  Back at the Anchorage field office, Special Agent Liz Oberlander was reaching out to the FBI Dive Team. Oberlander worked Evidence Response and had been on the periphery of the Koenig investigation until the confession. Now it was on her to call the Dive Team and ask to break protocol, which otherwise gave months of prep time for dangerous recoveries all over the world.

  She knew what the response would be: Your victim is dead, it’s cold, what’s the rush?

  Oberlander hoped the enormity of the case—Samantha’s age, what was done to her, her father’s anguish, the city’s fear—would convince them otherwise.

  * * *

  —

  Bobby Chacon got the call early that Friday evening while idling in traffic in LA. On the line was agent Charles Bartenfeld, who everyone called Bart. “There’s a kid up in Anchorage who’s been dismembered,” Bart told Chacon. “They need you right away.”

  Chacon got off at the first exit and sped back toward the Dive Team’s warehouse. He didn’t need to hear anything else: Children were always a special circumstance. Once on-site, he rolled up the gate, ducked inside, switched on his computer, and sent his team an email blast: Report immediately.

  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.

  “We have a confession,” they told him. “She’s in the lake.”

  * * *

  —

  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.

  At forty-eight years old, Chacon was t
he team’s elder statesman. There was no one better prepared or more experienced to lead a dive of this physical difficulty and sensitivity. Before his guys filed in, Chacon began doing prep work, relying, like his colleagues to the north, not on some super-secret database but Google. He plugged in the names Samantha Koenig and Israel Keyes, then called Oberlander in Anchorage.

  She told Chacon they had a state trooper sitting on the location. She gave him the lake’s coordinates, its depth, and the average temperature this time of year.

  “Do you have a forklift?” he asked.

  Home Depot had loaned Oberlander one for the shed recovery; she told Chacon his team could use that. Most importantly, she needed him to know the conditions of Samantha’s remains. They were weighted down but not wrapped in anything. She was naked and dismembered. This would make her remains even harder to recover. There would not be much to grab on to.

  Chacon needed to choose carefully. Who on his team could handle this job best, mentally and emotionally? He knew all too well: the youngest victims never leave you.

  Once Chacon’s guys arrived they began loading up two U-Haul trucks with gear: an ice auger, anchors, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), sonar, monitors, and chainsaws greased with vegetable oil to cut the ice cleanly. 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 landed in Anchorage early Sunday afternoon. He was struck by how often he saw Samantha’s face on signs posted in shop windows, on telephone poles, in restaurants and coffee shops, at his car rental place. He drove by her coffee kiosk and saw a sign that read

  WE’RE PRAYING FOR YOU, SAMANTHA

  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.

  The day before, Sunday, Chacon went to the FBI’s Anchorage field office to meet Oberlander. She took him to their vehicle processing unit, where they were storing Keyes’s shed.

  The shed was small yet large enough to inhabit. Tools, clothes, plastic bags, and spare parts were everywhere, stacked in multiple shelving units, slung on hooks, falling in piles on the floor. This was an organized chaos that evoked malevolence. It reminded Chacon of the Unabomber’s cabin, where Ted Kaczynski had lived alone for decades, no heat or hot water, no plumbing or electricity, building and mailing bombs all over the United States from his Montana hovel until his arrest in 1996.

  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.

  As it was, Kat Nelson was having a hard time finding Israel Keyes in any public filings. No property records. No documentation of parents or siblings. No address history, no gun licenses, no academic transcripts. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. He had left nearly no digital footprint, no paper trail—and this was a guy with an unusual name.

  If he hadn’t been in custody, Nelson would have a hard time believing Israel Keyes actually existed.

  * * *

  —

  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.

  * * *

  —

  James went on Facebook.

  PLEASE EVERYONE SAY A QUICK PRAYER. THANK YOU.

  The Dive Team began setting up at noon. Payne, Bell, and Nelson were all on hand. Goeden was out sick and Doll was on assignment, but Payne wished both of them were here. It was important, he thought, to be part of the resolution, no matter how tragic. It was humbling. He felt awe at the sheer force and precision of the Dive Team, which he had never seen in action, and sadness over what was about to happen. Recovering Samantha’s remains would make her death real.

  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, “I’ve seen the worst of everything.”

  * * *

  —

  Though Keyes had said the ice had been less than two feet thick, Chacon found it closer to three. He quickly handed off cracking it to Alaska’s investigators, some of whom brought their own tools. White pop-up shelters went up; a sonar head went down, giving Chacon and his team an aural sense of the lake’s bottom. It took nearly two hours to set up, but once on the lake’s floor, sonar pinged five distinct targets, just as Keyes described.

  “There she is,” Chacon said. Someone over his shoulder kept asking Chacon if he could call it in, almost giddy with excitement.

  “No,” Chacon said. He wouldn’t allow it until he saw the remains with his own eyes. Those targets could be anything. It was something he’d tried to convey to Liz Oberlander—dives are a process. Everyone needs to be patient.

  Chacon turned his attention to the SWAT team.

  “Go over and cut a hole,” he said. Next to go down would be the four-propeller ROV, which would transmit visual images. Again, once on the lake’s floor, the ROV almost immediately hit something.

  It was a foot. A human foot. Even Chacon was taken aback. He’d been told the remains weren’t wrapped, but somehow he hadn’t visualized it. Yet there it was, in the bottom right-hand side of his monitor, naked and swollen, preserved in the cold freshwater.

  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.

  “I can now confirm to you that I have human remains,” Chacon said. He watched everyone get on their cell phones.

  The energy on the lake was electric, and Chacon was worried. There was pressure now, an urgency to get Samantha up immediately so the police and FBI could get their credit.

  This was against everything Chacon’s Dive Team stood for. His first recovery had been the search for 230 passengers and crew lost in the 1996 TWA crash off Long Island, and though it had taken four months, every day, the team found the DNA of each victim. The first Chacon recovered was a twelve-year-old girl. Baptism by fire, Chacon said. He regarded his work a calling.

  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.

  * * *

  —

  Allen handed off the remote and went to suit up. SWAT was dispatched to cut yet another hole: this one a triangle, ten feet long on each side, for the divers to shimmy themselves down while hanging on a 45-degree angle, getting leverage going in and out.

  Allen and Bart had a team of ten prepping them; divers work so hard underwater they do nothing for themselves on land. Suiting up in one hundred pounds of gear takes two hours, which gives divers plenty of time to think. Allen pushed away images of what he would find and focused on logistics: what they might need, how long they might be down there, the order of the recovery. Anything other than the girl below and what had been done to her.

  Bart did the same. Look at these conditions, he thought. They’re perfect. The ice was so thick you could drive a tank across it. The water below was clear as glass.

  A small village of people were on the ice, and more had gathered in the distance. The press had arrived.

  Bart went in first. It was now 7:00 P.M.

  It took him fifteen minutes to make the descent, forty-one feet from the surface of the lake to the bottom. He had to wait another fifteen minutes for Allen to come down. As each man softly landed, silt rose up, blacking out their entire field of vision. For minutes they stood perfectly still, the hiss of their oxygen tanks a familiar comfort, watching as these tiny dark particles lowered like a heavy curtain.

  Bart landed where he’d hoped, right near the torso.

  He knelt down and unhooked a body bag from his chest, then spread it over his legs. Allen made his way over, and the two men struggled to keep the bag still while securing the torso. It kept slipping out of their hands, so they decided to roll the torso into the body bag, which proved only slightly less arduous. Keyes had wired weights to Samantha’s remains, evidence that couldn’t be removed.