Israel, the second oldest, was somewhere between ages three and five when Jeff and Heidi rented a one-room cabin in Washington. Here, the growing family would live without heat, plumbing, or electricity for the next seven years, while Jeff eked out a living as an appliance repairman, traveling three miles up and down the mountain each day to his shop. He would fix things for other families, but barely provided for his own. Yes, he was building them a house, but he was doing it alone, even chopping down trees by himself, a task that would take years.
Every day before work, Jeff would go into the woods for a long time and pray. He was a private man, even with Heidi. She often didn’t know what he was thinking or feeling. Though deeply religious herself, she found his religiosity extreme.
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. Forget about trips to Disneyland—they never watched cartoons over sugary bowls of cereal, or heard pop music, or went to a movie theater, a bowling alley, an arcade, a playground, a McDonald’s. It’s one thing to grow up in poverty. It’s another to have all the small pleasures of childhood denied.
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. The children farmed and cleaned slop buckets and chopped firewood and babysat each other, and Israel especially emerged as a leader. In Jeff’s absence, he became the man of the house. He learned how to cook and to sew, how to braid his sisters’ hair, and he would take his time with all of them, even though he longed to be outside. His siblings adored him.
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.
Every two years another baby came along. The cabin got so crowded that from April to November, Israel and his sisters would live outside in a tent. In winter, Heidi took them to California, where Jeff’s mother let them stay in her trailer in Palm Springs. By the time Heidi was about to give birth to her fifth child, she begged Jeff. I can’t have another baby in a tent, she said. She needed to be in a real house.
Jeff had his ever-ready reply: It was in God’s hands.
They grew their own vegetables and shot game. The children never saw a doctor or a dentist or the inside of an emergency room. No matter the ailment, bronchitis to broken bones, Heidi treated them with herbs and oils. She didn’t even keep Tylenol in the house. Peppermint tea and a hot bath, she said, could cure most anything.
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.
Heidi would elide this part of her family’s history, as would Israel. That, to investigators, was a clue to its significance. These were formative years for Israel, the family venturing from their hermitage and exposing their children to a sliver of the outside world. It was around this time he befriended two brothers who lived half a mile away off Aladdin Road.
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.
This excited Israel. He had been obsessed with guns since he was six years old. He began learning all he could about the make and model of most guns, the different operating mechanisms, which ones were banned and how to get them. He got his hands on publications like Guns & Ammo. His grandfather gave him at least one gun and had taught him how to shoot. His parents, he said, were concerned, but there was little they could do.
“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.
Aside from the Kehoes, there was one other person he could be himself with, his younger sister Charity. Israel would take her into the woods where they would shoot BB guns at houses, and if no one came outside, break into them. Sometimes they’d take stuff; sometimes they’d just move things around, then hide outside and wait for the owners to come home and freak out.
They would start fires and scare animals. “But she talked too much about it,” Keyes said. “People found out about some of the stuff I did—like my parents, and parents of other kids who would hang out with me. So I quit doing things with her.”
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.”
Keyes didn’t understand that reaction at all, and not long after, he verbalized his first real threat. “There was a cat of ours that was always getting into the trash,” Keyes said. “It was my sister’s. I told her, ‘If that cat gets into the trash again, I’m going to kill it.’”
One day, Keyes grabbed the cat and set out into the woods, his sister and two of their friends trailing behind. “I took a piece of parachute cord and tied it to a tree,” Keyes said. The cord was ten feet long, and he wrapped the other end around the cat’s neck. Keyes was carrying a .22 revolver. “And I shot the cat in the stomach and it ran around and around the tree, and then crashed into the tree and started vomiting. And for me, I didn’t really react. I actually kind of laughed a little because of the way it was running around the tree, but I looked at the kid who was my age and he was throwing up. Kind of traumatized, I think. And he told his dad about it, and of course, his dad talked to my parents about it, and that was pretty much the last time anyone went into the woods with me.”
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. Even as an adult, Keyes claimed not to understand the cruelty of these acts. When asked during the psychiatric evaluation if he had ever hurt anyone badly when he was a child, he minimized.
“A few minor scuffles,” he said, completely serious. “I am pretty much nonconfrontational.”
Despite Keyes’s claims to the contrary, Heidi insisted she had no recollection of this incident with the cat. She maintained that no other parent ever told her or Jeff about it. It seemed that one part of her needed to believe it never happened, while another part of her conceded it was possible. This may have been the only way she could live with herself—believing that Israel’s childhood had no part in making him a monster, even as, deep down, she might have suspected that wasn’t wholly true. “His upbringing really didn’t surface negatively until the last few years of his life,” Heidi said.
When he was fifteen, Keyes began building a cabin about one mile away from his parents. He had learned by watching, then helping, his father, and
had taken a construction job with people from the Ark. He was sixteen when he finished the build and moved in alone. Heidi didn’t approve, but she didn’t try to stop him. “I thought he was too young,” she said. “I believed his family was a much healthier environment.”
By now, Jeff had finished building the new home, and the rest of the family moved in. There was a generator, a range for cooking, and propane lights. The family boiled water in the fireplace.
But none of this mattered to Keyes. He was focused on one thing, and he needed to be alone to do it.
“I would hunt anything with a heartbeat,” he said. He learned that hunting was as much about patience as marksmanship and trained himself to go still for hours, to heighten his senses for the scent of an animal, hear its smallest movements, how to camouflage himself expertly. He mainly shot deer, he said, and knew how to dress and butcher the meat, which he would give to his family. But hunting for survival was no longer the point. Hunting animals was no longer the point.
“Stalking through the woods, you see somebody in the woods and they don’t see you. . . .” Keyes said he would sit, hidden, and watch people for hours. He would think about how easily he could take someone out there and make them disappear. “I can remember doing that from the time I was thirteen, fourteen years old,” he said.
In 1994, when Israel was sixteen, he was arrested down the mountain for shoplifting. He got off with community service, but Jeff and Heidi had enough. After searching his cabin and finding a bunch of stolen guns, they forced him to move back home, return the weapons, and chop firewood to further pay his victims back. Keyes thought there was something hypocritical about Heidi and Jeff’s attitude. Hunting those animals wasn’t legal, and they knew it, but they encouraged him to do it anyway. It was to their benefit. Why was shoplifting any worse?
Heidi recalled a real shift in Israel after that. In hindsight, she felt he might have been trying to let her know who he really was. She already sensed that he was pulling away from religion and worried he was pulling away from her. They were driving down the mountain one day, Heidi in the passenger seat of his truck, when Israel asked her a question.
“Mom, has it ever crossed your mind that all of your children might not choose to live the way you and Dad live?”
“Israel,” Heidi said, “you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Well,” he said, “we’re all not going to necessarily want to do—the way you and Dad have lived.”
This was devastating. Heidi felt it was a rejection of her and Jeff entirely, not just by Israel but her other children. How many of them felt this way? How many would reject God? How many would leave? Would Israel leave? That was unthinkable. Surely, Heidi thought to herself, they’ll come to their senses.
Not long after, Israel told his parents that he no longer believed in organized religion. His father had already pulled away from the Ark after the 1993 siege at Waco, and Israel thought he would understand. Yet Jeff disowned him. 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.
“Mom saw past that,” Keyes told the doctor. “She cared about me.”
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.
In fall or winter of 1996, Heidi and Jeff decided it was time to move again. Israel wasn’t the only child causing them trouble.
* * *
—
As she later wrote in a testimonial posted to the Church of Wells website, Autumnrose Keyes, along with two of her sisters, had also rebelled. This testimonial would provide great insight into the psychodynamics of the Keyes home.
She began by quoting Psalm 51:5. “In sin did my mother conceive me,” she wrote, before listing her wrongdoings. “I . . . was a grief to my mother, which she told me. . . . I let my conscience become seared. I would watch what I considered ‘good’ movies. I started struggling with impure thoughts and sins. I started listening to contemporary ‘Christian’ music. I would confess these sins and sometimes seek to stop, but things got worse and what I watched got worse. I was in this state when, praise the Lord, I became utterly condemned.”
The Keyes children seemed to believe moral ruin was the way to salvation.
Autumnrose began to doubt the Bible, she wrote, and Christianity itself. Her six-page account was strewn with words of damnation: She called herself wicked, a leper, a burden, forsaken. She described herself as fearful, distraught, lost, questioning, plagued, and unquestionably going to hell. “Rid me of this dark unrest,” she wrote. Her torment was palpable, as was her belief that she was saved only by those random street preachers who parked their RV in Heidi’s driveway back in Indiana in November 2009 and never really went away. “I could see that God was with them and that they were not like me,” she wrote, “in that serving the Lord was their delight.”
* * *
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This spiritual crisis, Autumnrose wrote, spurred her parents to take the children and leave Colville for Oregon. Not mentioned in her testimony was the exclusion of her beloved older brother Israel, who stayed behind for at least one month. Why is unclear, but there would again be rumblings of an excommunication, that Israel’s behavior was alarming enough to separate him from his siblings. Heidi would later deny this.
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. One example: Before the family relocated to Oregon, he badly needed to replace the tires on his truck, a yellow pickup with an attached rack he’d built himself. But Heidi told him the family needed that money. It was the perfect metaphor for their relationship, Israel’s girlfriend thought, Heidi intent on keeping him from ever moving on, or away. Heidi needed Israel to do what Jeff would not: parent the eight younger children and be a support to her. A surrogate partner.
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.
In 1997 the Keyes family, for reasons unknown, moved again, this time clear across the country. Jeff bought property in upstate Malone, New York, and, perhaps as an apology, signed the deed over to Israel. One year later the family moved again, to Smyrna, Maine, where they decided to make honey and live among the Amish.
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 wrote about guilt over leaving his family, but ultimately concluded he had tried. He was tired of making life harder than it needed to be. The world was on the cusp of a new millennium and his
family insisted on pioneer living and paranoia. Enough.
He stayed back at the house in New York, another barely habitable dwelling, this one a tiny farmhouse on ten acres of land, right near the Canadian border. 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.
Keyes needed that diploma to realize his next goal: joining the military. He never said as much, but his most recent ex, Tammie, and his first fiancée both later had the same impression, that Keyes enlisted as another rebellion against his parents. And somehow, in 1998, even without a birth certificate or a Social Security number, he talked his way in to the US Army.
“I didn’t exist on paper, really,” Keyes said.
He was twenty years old and already a very dangerous man.
* * *
—
Keyes didn’t much want to talk about the army. He said he could give investigators names, later, of guys he had served with, but none of them would know anything. Well, maybe one. Keyes recognized something of himself in that friend, and it was possible he had maybe shared too much with him. That was a regret.
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.
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