He had burned the Curriers’ possessions in New Hampshire and confessed to burying the gun he used in Blake Falls Reservoir in upstate New York. That, too, turned out to be true. Investigators had thrown up yet another Google Map, and Keyes directed them to two large rocks near the reservoir, one leaning against the other to form a triangle, smaller rocks piled up in the formation’s shade.
“Underneath that slab is an orange Home Depot bucket, and it’s well hidden,” Keyes said. He got excited talking about even this, clearing his throat and jangling his chains. “It’s got, um, a bunch of brush and other rocks and moss and stuff piled and packed in around it.” Inside was an additional gun plus a silencer. He used desiccant to protect them from moisture and sealed the bucket tight, then threw the gun he’d taken from Lorraine Currier in the reservoir.
If Keyes went to all that trouble to hide and dispose of weaponry, why wouldn’t he do the same with a victim? It would explain his outsize confidence, his threats. When it came to the victims he might give up, he said, “That’s just the United States.”
Meanwhile, the FBI had gone through the hundreds of images on Kimberly’s computer and were able to identify forty-four people using facial recognition software against all the images on NamUS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons website. Eleven of those were teenagers. Ten were small children. The two youngest were each one year old.
One thing I won’t do is mess with kids.
Now investigators had even more reason to doubt this credo. For one, it was ridiculously self-serving: Look at me, a serial killer with a conscience! Investigators were parsing every single utterance. Even if Keyes was telling the truth, and his daughter’s birth catalyzed a fundamental shift in him, that alone would imply that before she was born he had targeted children. And while investigators didn’t necessarily think Keyes was responsible for all of the missing kids on his computer, their inclusion was disturbing. Who reads about missing children and babies for kicks?
Difficult as it was, investigators needed to try to cross-reference every single person reported missing in the United States with Keyes’s known travels. Anyone who disappeared during the timeline had to be considered a possible victim.
* * *
—
To keep rapport, investigators agreed, to their great frustration, to give Keyes other, smaller things he wanted. Cigar breaks during interrogations were a painstaking process that involved shackling Keyes’s handcuffs and leg irons to his belly chain, taking him down a secure and empty elevator to the below-ground parking garage, letting him smoke while making small talk, then hauling him back up without anyone seeing. Keyes had other requests, also met: The New York Times delivered to his cell every day, access to the internet, Americanos, candy bars.
Then there were the bigger things. By now investigators had learned Keyes had nine siblings scattered all over the country, but they listened when he said, Leave my brothers and sisters alone. Heidi was another story. If she still wanted to talk, Keyes said, let her talk. If she decided to stop, leave her alone.
Keyes had all the power here. His only other true care was for his daughter, but using her as a pawn, even a false one, was never up for discussion.
* * *
—
Liz Oberlander and her team had spent two days dismantling the shed Samantha had spent her last moments in, searching for evidence of blood, hair, fingerprints, fibers. Despite the near-month her corpse had been left inside, then later made up, hair French braided, underarms shaved, photographed for ransom, subject to necrophilia before being dismembered, still they found nothing.
Same with his pickup truck. The magnitude was sobering. The few interviews Keyes gave seemed, at first, hubristic. Most of the case agents thought Israel Keyes had to be, to some degree, exaggerating.
No more.
The Bureau’s top criminal profilers were at a loss. The only thing they could tell the team was that Keyes was one of the most terrifying subjects they had ever encountered. There was no precedent for a serial killer with this MO: no victim type; no fixed location for hunting, killing, and burying; putting thousands of miles between himself and his victims; caches buried all over the United States. He avoided detection through travel. Travel! They thought about how onerous travel itself could be: booking flights; clearing post-9/11 security and searches; hoping a flight isn’t delayed or canceled; doing the paperwork involved in renting a car and then relying only on paper maps, no Garmin satellite or Google; checking into a hotel or setting up a campsite; filing for hunting and fishing licenses—to say nothing of successfully finding a victim, or victims, while trying to retrieve some cache buried months or years ago, the locations only in his head; then expertly disposing of his victims’ remains and leaving no evidence behind. The sheer efficiency and time management Keyes displayed was staggering.
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.
Then there was the driving, the ability to stay awake without the aid of drugs, just his Americano coffees and soaring adrenaline, moving through five states in as many days. Until Samantha, Keyes had left no digital trail, no cell phone or credit card activity. Until Samantha, he swore he’d never killed in his own backyard. Decades of mayhem, geographical boundaries unknown.
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.
* * *
—
Some agents, like Steve Payne, stuck to traditional investigative methods: the interviews Gannaway was conducting with Heidi; searches through financial records, computers, datebooks, and journals; interrogations with Keyes himself. For other agents—Jeff Bell, Jolene Goeden, and now Ted Halla and Colleen Sanders, two FBI special agents who were starting to research Keyes down in Washington State—the few serial killers Keyes referenced were a source of fascination and, they hoped, insight. These agents began reading and watching every book, film, or TV show Keyes had consumed, building little libraries in their respective field offices and comparing notes.
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.
Bell hadn’t read Dark Dreams before, and it was a revelation. Hazelwood wrote of the specific deviations of sexually sadistic criminals, and Keyes had nearly all of them: No criminal record prior to arrest. A seemingly happy domestic life. 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.
Another passage nailed Keyes:
“The sexual offender is never fully inactive,” Hazelwood wrote. “He may not be acting out against a specific victim, but he will be making plans, selecting new targets, acting out against other victims, or gathering materials. He is never dormant.”
Keyes was a cluster bomb. Investigators were learning that some of his tactics were borrowed from different predecessors, reconstituted for the modern age.
Ted Bundy, who Keyes called his great hero, killed all over the country. James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben, the basis for Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, kept at least one kill kit. John Robert Williams was a long-haul trucker who killed in one state and left bodies in another. Dennis Rader, the BTK (“bind, torture, kill”) Strangler, posed at least one of his victims in
the basement of his church, tied up in sexually degrading positions.
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 was convinced that the proliferation of hard-core pornography, so easily and anonymously accessible online, has contributed to increasingly sadistic crimes and murders. 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.
Keyes, Hazelwood agreed, was among the top criminally organized minds he had ever encountered. But Keyes should not be mistaken as lacking emotion. Far from it, Hazelwood said. Psychopathic sadists such as Keyes have pushed their emotions down so deep only extreme acts evoke any feeling whatsoever. It’s why their crimes, horrific even in the beginning, must escalate, typically from the torture of small animals to rapes and murders increasingly elaborate in planning and realization. Palpable gratification comes only through multiple victims and greater suffering.
Not all psychopaths are serial killers, but all serial killers are psychopaths. The latter, lust-driven serial murderers, will share a common denominator: how they think. For example, Keyes had once considered becoming a police officer, and when asked why, Keyes said, What better way to hunt for victims? A police officer pulls you over on the side of the road, late at night . . .
Mike DeBardeleben, while pretending to be a police officer, victimized and murdered untold young women this way.
Yet Hazelwood offered some comfort: Sexually motivated serial killers are truly rare. And Keyes was the 1 percent of the 1 percent.
* * *
—
As they read further, the agents got a sharper look into not just Keyes, but how out of their depth they were. Upon first reading John Douglas’s Mindhunter, Keyes told them, he felt like he was reading about himself. “Put yourself in the position of the hunter,” Douglas wrote. “That’s what I have to do.”
Douglas drew a parallel to Payne’s metaphor, Keyes as ambush predator. “If you could get a galvanic skin response reading on one of them as he focuses on his potential victim,” Douglas wrote, “I think you’d get the same reaction as from [a] lion in the wilderness.”
Keyes never knew that before—that his psyche and physiological reactions weren’t unique. He’d had the same epiphany, Keyes told them, with Dark Dreams and, though it was fiction, Dean Koontz’s Intensity. Told from the alternating viewpoints of a serial killer and his abducted victim, Koontz’s novel crystallized Keyes’s thoughts and urges: the love of pain, self-inflicted and imposed; the ultimate pointlessness of human existence; the disbelief in God or any other higher being; the power and transcendence that only taking, torturing, and killing could provide. This made him feel, ironically, like the God he didn’t even believe in.
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.”
* * *
—
All of forensic criminal psychology is haunted by one question: Are psychopaths born or made? The debate is as old as Socrates, who believed that human beings were incapable of deliberate evil. Wrongdoing was born of ignorance or delusion. “There is only one good, knowledge,” he said, “and one evil, ignorance.”
Two thousand years later, we know little more than this: Evildoers have forever been among us. But why? What makes them so?
As the great writer Ron Rosenbaum once put it, “the discourse of evil” is endless and no longer the province of psychology, psychiatry, or philosophy. We look to medicine and technology for explanations, even though the science isn’t there yet. No brain scan can definitively detect a tendency toward psychopathology. Social psychiatry is just as useless. Studies of twins have shown that psychopathy may be a trait more heritable than environmental, yet good children can thrive despite bad parents, and vice versa.
We are not far from where we were thousands of years ago, theorizing that some people are simply born this way. Heidi Keyes, after all, raised ten children. Only one was an aberration.
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. Children as young as nine, who live in stable homes with normally developing siblings, have been documented exhibiting such extreme psychopathic behaviors that their parents fear their own child might kill them. The mythology of the bad seed has knotty, primal roots, and the best people to ask the questions “How?” and “Why?” may be serial killers themselves.
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 me, really. . . . I am two different people.”
* * *
—
Every investigator lucky enough to catch this case—and among Payne’s team, Keyes was regarded as “once in a lifetime”—wanted to crack his origin story. It was irresistible, the notion that if they could understand everything specific to him and his upbringing, they could possibly locate a reason. A why.
Keyes wasn’t willing to give investigators any of that. When asked why, he’d say, “Why not?” Investigators suspected he may have been abused as a child, a hallmark in the development of such criminals, but Keyes denied it. Besides, he didn’t believe in childhood trauma as the cause of anything. He thought it was Freudian bullshit. Over and over he insisted that none of this was his family’s fault. They were good people, he said, who loved him.
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.
But the psychiatric evaluation—Goeden and Nelson especially wanted that. It would give the most detail yet into his background. It would surely explain something.
Right?
TWENTY-ONE
On Friday, April 27, Keyes sat across from Dr. Ronald Roesch, a forensic psychologist from Washington State and Canada, at the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility in Anchorage. They would speak for six and a half hours.
Roesch’s report, along with interviews agents had been conducting in Alaska, Texas, and Washington plus the journals seized from Keyes’s home allowed investigators, finally, to build a history. This was like uncovering a pentimento, an original portrait finally visible underneath a newer image, the altered composition designed to face the world.
* * *
—
Israel Keyes was born in the tiny town of Cove, Utah, on January 7, 1978. His parents had met as teenagers in their native Los Angeles, drawn together as misfits. Heidi Hakansson had been adopted by a late-in-life couple who were married seventeen years before beginning their family.
Heidi
was something of a loner. She didn’t dwell, at least outwardly, on her biological parents or why they gave her up. She was mature for her age. She didn’t care about football games or hanging out at the beach; she preferred the company of adults. John Jeffrey Keyes, who went by Jeff, was much the same. He spent his free time with his family, or learning how to fix anything that was broken, or alone with an ever-present book. Both were Mormons.
Heidi was twenty-one and Jeff twenty-two when they wed. The most formative experience in Heidi’s life thus far had been her eleven years as a Girl Scout. For Jeff, it had been his missionary service in Germany. They were both good, wholesome, God-fearing people who wanted nothing more than to raise their children in nature. The first time Heidi ever walked into the woods, she thought, Why would anyone live in a city? What man-made metropolis could compare to God’s creation?
So they moved to Utah. Their first child, a girl named America, was born in 1976. It was a home birth, as would be the births of the nine children to follow, all delivered by Jeff. Hospitals had too many rules—at least that’s what they told people. The truth was Jeff hated doctors and didn’t believe in modern medicine. He had never been immunized and didn’t want his children to be either. Heidi agreed; she had never been sick herself. 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.
But Heidi and Jeff had neighbors, and they were concerned enough to call authorities about this strange little family with two toddlers who were rarely seen outside. That’s when Heidi and Jeff decided to pack up and move hundreds of miles away to Washington, where property was cheap and there were no neighbors to pry. With money saved from Jeff’s repair work and Heidi’s babysitting, they purchased 160 acres on top of a mountain in Colville, near a national forest. They would live off the land, obscured by soaring trees and mountains five thousand feet high. Nature would be their fortress. For most of the children, it would be something of a prison.
American Predator Page 17