AMERICAN PREDATOR-Maureen Callahan

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web address ZipRecruiter dot com, slash murder. That's ZipRecruiter dot com, slash m u r d er, ZipRecruiter dot com, slash murder, ZipRecruiter, The Smartest Way to Hire Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. The names of a notorious serial killers are usually well known. They echo in the news and in public consciousness, but most people have never heard of Israel Keys, one of the most ambitious and terrifying serial killers in

modern history. The FBI considered his behavior unprecedented. Described by a prose prosecutor as a force of pure evil, Keys was a predator who struck all over the United States. He buried kill kits, cash weapons, and body disposal tools in remote locations across the country. Over the course of fourteen years. Keys would fly to a city, rent a car, and drive thousands of miles in order to use his kits.

He would break into a stranger's house, abduct his victims in broad daylight, and kill and dispose of them in mere hours, and then he would return home to Alaska, resuming life as a quiet, reliable construction worker devoted to

his only daughter. When journalist Moumene Callahan first heard about Israel Keys twenty twelve, she was captivated by how a killer of this magnitude could go undetected by law enforcement for over a decade, and so began a project that consumed her for the next several years, uncovering the true story behind how the FBI ultimately caught Israel Keys, and trying to understand what it means for a killer like Keys to exist, a killer who left the path of monstrous,

randomly committed crimes in his wake, many of which remain unsolved to this day. American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Key's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer and to the limitations of

traditional law enforcement. The book they were featuring this evening is American Predator, The Hunt for the most meticulous serial killer of the twenty first century, With my special guest, journalist and author Maureen Callahan. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for greening this interview. Maureen Callahan, Hi, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining us on this program. This is going to be an incredible interview about a truly incredible book

about a truly incredible serial killer. We just mention it in the opening. Tell us how you came to learn about this case and why it was important for you to write this book. Tell us about that decision.

if not longer. The mo was as you described in your introduction, and I'm certainly happy to delve deeper into that. But the other thing that made it clear that this was a story that needed to be dug into and really explored was the admission that the FBI had kept this individual existence secret from the American public for the nine months that they had had him in custody, and given that his killing spree extended all over the United States,

that seemed not in the public interest. And so that was going to be at at least one mystery to explore. But it was clear that there would be multiple mysteries to explore. And as I researched and reported year after year, I just I could never have expected the things that I discovered.

The other thing to know is that the culture and anchorage is such that these teenage girls are often working these kiosks alone. Samantha disappears that night. The next morning, she's reported missing. The next morning when the next young woman comes in to open the kiosk, which has been locked, but she sees that all of the cash and the register is missing. It's a little bit messy in there. Samantha is a meat freak. She is known to clean

up meticulously. The evening before, however, her boyfriend had received text messages from Samantha's phone in which she indicated that she was very upset with him. She knew exactly what he had been up to, and she was taking off for a few days with some of her friends. So initially, law enforcement is looking at this as a potential runaway scenario. It's compounded by Samantha's history. She had an unstable upbringing. She had had her own issues with substances. They didn't

law enforcement didn't look at well. They made several mistakes, one of which is they never taped off that scene. They didn't treat it as a crime scene. They sort of made their assumptions, and so that kiosk and its surrounding areas were contaminated. They did not get a look at the surveillance video from inside the kiosk until later that evening, so it's almost twenty four hours. And once they do, they see a figure outside ordering a coffee,

a man who looks to be tall. A few minutes go by, and suddenly he leaps in through the kiosk's window. And when I say leap, and you can see the surveillance video online, he barks his body like a cheetah and he pounces in there. What confound investigators is that they spend another eleven minutes in that kiosk before leaving.

So one of them, in particular, a very very seasoned investigator, is thinking to himself, these two are in there for seventeen minutes, what on earth could they possibly be talking about.

The next theory becomes the accomplished theory that Samantha is in on her disappearance with an unknown own individual for money later, as weeks go by, and a ransom note is discovered which contained the photo of Samantha made up, hair, braided eyes wide open, facing the camera, a newspaper a proof of life photo a newspaper dated weeks after her disappearance. The investigators are again confounded. All but one of them

thinks that Samantha is alive. The FBI at this point is involved, and they bring in an expert in snuff films. That expert cannot tell and it's not until Samantha's ATM card begins pinging in the lower forty eight. The FBI now has a tracker on it that a man named Israel Keys is arrested on the side of the road in Texas, and in his car they find Samantha's ATM card and her cell phones. Israel Keys previously unknown to law enforcement in any capacity, and he's arrested and he's not talking.

Tell us a little bit about this dynamic and introduce Steve Pain and this investigation and the team involved in that investory.

small town. So law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, they all know each other. And Payne at his FBI field office gets a call from a friend of his telling him about this missing girl and he immediately wants to get involved and the word back is no, thank you, We think we know what this is. Later that afternoon, was there around five six Payne gets a call from Mickey Dong and she tells him some things have changed,

can you come over? So he gets in his car and he races over to APD and it's the surveillance video. Kanan is looking at it, Doll is looking at it, and just well, he's the investigator who had the seventeen minute theory. He's an amazingly multi faceted, multi talented investigator. He's the US Marshals, he's swat he's got FBI clearance, he's worked drugs, he's seen and done it all and is relatively young by the way, I mean, this is how talented this guy is. And he's got eyes on

the video too now. And so they are all beginning to work together, and yet there is there is a clashing of I don't know if I would call it egos, but it's definitely a power struggle. Jean's got all the resources of the FBI at his disposal to help with this case. Nicky dolls on it for less than twenty four hours. She's a woman, she feels this is her case and she does not want the FBI bigfooting her. Jeff Bell is kind of caught in the middle he's

sort of a peacemaker and always looking to mediate. He can always see both sides. What's interesting is the team really comes together once that atm card begins pinging in the Southwest. It's important to realize that at this point, Samantha has been missing for five weeks, six weeks, So the more time that goes by, the more that they're thinking, you know, Samantha is not going to have a good

outcome here. And what they now need to rely on all the way up in Anchorage is a coordinated multi jurisdictional effort among law enforcements, people that they do not know and who may not feel the urgency of this case because who they're being asked to chase. Their subject is in a white male, Paul athletics, middle aged. He is driving the most commonly rented car in the United States of America. They can't pinpoint his location, he's moving

too far, too fast. Find him somehow, and it's the Texas Rangers, and in particular a ranger named Steve Rayburn and a corporal named Brian Henry, who take this vague information and they consolidate it and the hand Rayburn is handwalking it to everyone. He can look for this vehicle. Let's canvas. Particularly hotel, the area in which the ATM card is being used seems to be, you know, more and more concentrated. One of the analysts on this case

called it nesting. The subject was nesting. And they put eyes on a rental vehicle that's parked in a complex that has three hotels, so he's talking hundreds and hundreds of rooms, and they look at where this cars parked.

One of the investigators looks up and they see a white male two stories above on a balcony looking directly down at that car, and they put eyes on him, and they follow this car, and Henry is two cars behind this guy as he's heading toward Route fifty nine like he's about to get away, and he's he can't, he can't pull him over. He has no reason, and he's getting he's getting orders from Rayburn over the radio. Find a reason, find a reason to pull him over.

And he pulls out his radar gun and this vehicle goes two miles over the speed limit. He puts on his lights and to his amazement, this rental car pulls over to the side of the road, and when he approaches the car and he says, where are you from? And the man says Alaska. The way Henry described it, his heart stops because his twenty years in law enforcement, he had never pulled over anyone from the state of Alaska. And right then they knew, what.

worried about fruit as a poison tree. Right if they after a search that's unwarranted, no matter what they find in his possession, can get thrown out and keys can walk. Danaway says to him, listen, I want you to understand you should know something. In Texas we have an exemption and if we think that there is probable cause to search someone's vehicle. We can do it. And Pain really thinks about this hard for a moment, and then he says, I don't want you to cut this guy loose without

searching that car. And it doesn't matter to me how you do it. It's highly unusual for him. He's ad buy the book guy. So they searched Keys's car and side they find immediately like just eyeballing the car down and way suspicious because she sees folded up maps in the front seat. She sees rolled up hash with that die packs has exploded. This guy clearly has been robbing banks. He's got little girls paraphernalia in the back seat. They

open up the trunk. The trunk is this weird treasure trove of like booze and pornography, and there's sea masks and there's headlamps, and then they find Samantha's cell phone and it's broken apart and the batteries out.

or anything. Within minutes of his arrest, up an Anchorage, Jeff Bell and Mickey Dahl are getting on a plane to fly to Texas. And they get down there, and it takes a long time to fly out of Anchorage to anywhere in the lower forty eight. There's no such thing as a direct plight. You have to stop in Seattle and you have to lay over. So they get there and they're exhausted, and they're hungry and they're tired, and they are in the most high pressure interrogation they've

ever been in. And Belle gets into the room and the way he described it to me, he said, the hair's on my back stood up, like on the back of my neck. They stood up. He was like, it was a feeling of pure evil. And I knew that he had Samantha, and I knew that she was dead, and I knew that he had done this before and so now their priority to get keys onto a story, any story doesn't matter. That get him to admit some connections. So Mickey Dahal takes the lead and she says, I

don't think that you're a monster. I think you had a reason for what happened, and I want to hear it from you. And he comes in Hawes, but when he's really confronted with the ATM card and the cell phone, he says, oh, now I know how I'm involved in this, and that's when the investigators starts revving up. They're like, okay,

here comes a story. And Key says that he's a contractor, which they must know by now, and he had a client who owed him money couldn't pay, and he found the ATM card and the cell phone in a baggie on his driver's seat that must have been slipped in through a cracked window because they must know. Also he smokes cigars. They searched his car, and that was the long and the short of it. And he otherwise does not know Samantha Koenig and has not heard that she's disappeared,

and can't help them. He will not say anything else, and Pine is back in Alaska, drawing up the strongest federal indictment he can, which is only fraud with access device. That's all they've got him on that ATM card. He needs to get Keys back to at they can get a full confession, and they get him back to Alaska.

It takes a couple of weeks. In that time. By the way that extradition process, there is an unexplored ye stop which I only obtained through citing with the federal government and at one point suing the federal prosecutor in the case for a lot of things that they were hiding regarding this case. They have an unexplained stop in Oklahoma City, which I can circle back to later if

you like. But they get Keys into this room finally in Alaska, and Steve Pain and Jeff Bell are war gaming out how they are going to get a full confession out of Keys when they have a serious dearth of evidence. Because if Keys sticks to this story, as atlandish as it is and as clear of a lie as it is, he's gonna walk. They don't have anything else, and they need to figure out a way leverage this

dearth of evidence into a full confession. And Pain explained his approach to me, which was there are a fair amount of investigators who like to take in a bunch of props still come into a.

For some reason, Cane and bell politically felt they had to fall in line and they had to teach this guy really fast as best they could how to sit across from a hardened criminal who has clearly done this before a predator who can no doubt mel fear have a sixth sense for it, and teach him how to go in that room with almost nothing and get this guy to tell everything. And that confession is another thing

that the government has kept hidden all these years. I was able to obtain it through asource to which is to remain anonymous. And you know, those parties involved would probably say, Hey, the reason that that confession has been kept secret all these years is because the details of what was done to Samantha are too gruesome for public consumption, to which I say, those details are easily redacted. Those are actually really not the salient parts of the concession.

The salient parts of the concession are how this concession was elicited. It is a masterclass because not only does Steve Payne rest control artfully away from Kevin Pelvis, the prosecutor, who is bundling it less and right. I mean, at one point he admits practically the Israel Keys that the team recovering evidence from his residence took the wrong shed

in which he had had Samantha for four weeks. But the person who really comes in and saves it, and at Israel Keys's request, is none other than Mickey Dahl. He says, you want to know everything. I want to talk to Mickey Dahl, and she comes in the next day and she really delivers a masterclass in how you interrogate a suspect and get him to tell you everything you need to know in order to put him away.

But what also comes out of that interrogation is an astonishing admission where Keith says to them, I have a lot more stories to tell, and someone in that room says, to him, you know it's after he also says he wants to take control back in some way, as so many of these guys do, and he says to them, there is nobody who knows me or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me. Really, I am two different people, basically, And someone in that room says,

how long have you been to different people? And Keith chuckled and he said a long time, fourteen years yea. And so now they know Dave've got to get another confession, and they've got to get another confession fast because they

need to know exactly who they're dealing with. And the FBI special agents in this case go directly to Quantico and they go to the top criminal profilers and they say, please listen in, tell us what you think, give us some guideline, some chips so we can leverage more information out of him. And they're pretty quickly told, we don't know what to tell you. We have never seen one like this before.

he realized accelerated human decompositions. He would then go on the hunts, and he would hunt for anyone. Unlike most serial killers who have a definite victim profile, and I point as an example to his hero Ted Bundy, who went after young white women with long, straight hair parted down the middle. Keys would go after anyone young, old, black, white male female fit overweight, alone in a couple, traveling in a pair. He was a craven opportunist when it

came to his hunts and his kills. He came described him as a true ambush predator. He would jump out of nowhere, lightning fast, and take someone and move them to another location, or two people to another location, rake, torture and kill them, move the remains to yet another location, presperably across the state line, dispose of those remain so expertly that he left no trace of DNA behind and immediately put hundreds, if not thousands of miles between himself

and that crime scene. And by the way, from the moment he boarded that first plane out of anchored Alaska, he has now turned off his cell phone, ripped out the battery, and is only using cash he has, as he calls it gone dark, making it really impossible to link him to any missing person or cold case in the country. So the FBI, aside from that monumental task, is identifying and locating other victims over a fourteen year span. It's not longer because you are dealing with the ultimate

unreliable narrator. Wants to see how Keith has sort of cooked this up, so they execute a search of the house he's shared with his girlfriend, who is a travel nurse, and he's' ten year old daughter, to whom he is, by all accounts, extremely devoted. They find fiction such as Dean Kutz's Intensity, a novel that is told from the dueling perspective of a serial killer and his latest victim.

They find films they find, to their great surprise, books written by FBI profilers, And they asked him about this, and he says, the first time I realized I was not the only person liked this was when I was fourteen years old and I read Mind Hunter by John Douglas. John Douglas, who is, I'm sure you know, one of the top one of the most legendary criminal profilers in the bureau. He also told them he read Dark Dreams by Roy Hazelwood, an equally legendary profiler who passed away

not too long ago. But who I was lucky enough to talk to while I was writing this book about Keys, and Hazelwood's book was a revelation. I mean, Keys would rattle off these titled and you know, Jeff Bell had never heard of dark dreams. Someone else on the team had never heard his dark dreams. I mean they would run out and get these books. They would watch the movies the Keys watched. They would if they had assembled

these little libraries. They had their own personal philibigoing. And what was revelatory about Hazelwood's book was that he was really the first to put to paper a taxonomy of the lust driven serial murder and the traits that they had in common, one of which, to everyone's surprise, was compulsive driving. Definitely a trade key shirt. I mean this guy drove. You know, the mileage he put on rental

cars was unbelievable. And at one point in the investigation, you know, Jeff Bell is trying to game out how many states Keys could have traveled to on like a four day trip to Texas based on the mileage he put on his rental car alone. And he's I described the scene in the book, He's using string and a compass and a map of the United States and some tacks. And after he's packed everything together and put his circles together, he steps back and he looks at the map and

he says to himself, this is unbelievable. He is realized that he's drawn circles around thirteen states.

a tire, waiting for that car to flow to its inevitable call and stop, and then coming up behind and taking that driver. And he said that that was a fantasy he had just yet to get to. So they are learning, to their horror that a monster like he's is in part being built by them.

He knows the Quantico is listening in. He knows the Department of Justice is listening in. He's very very savvy, despite by the way, having zero formal education and being raised up in the woods by off the Greger parents, who hates the federal government. He knows how everything works. He said, So if you do this for me, if you wrap this case up within a year and get me that death penalty agreement, I'll give you the names and locations of all my victims. He also tells them

he does not want them talking to his family. He wants them leaving his girlfriend alone. He wants his daughter completely insulated from all of it, and he wants his mother and his siblings don't go near them. He says, well, if my mother wants to talk, actually talk to her. But the siblings, nine of them, he's got all over the country. And the FBI accedes to this demand, and it's kind of incredible because you know, they're not pushing

very hard with the siblings at all. And then the third demand is, I want you to keep my name out of the press. I don't want anybody knowing about me. His stated reason was he wanted to his daughter, but the real reason was probably he just didn't want the attention wrong with the lots. There are things that they do that they for all their depravity and the extreme psychopathy they know are are shameful. And he wanted to continue operating in the shadows, and he wanted to exert control.

And you know, the FBI tried to accede to all of this. And at one point there's a reporter in Vermont who somehow links Israel Keys to the disappearance in twenty eleven of a middle aged suburban couple from their home in the middle of the night, and that case was cold from the get go. Nobody had any clue what happened to these people. It wasn't until Israel Keys confessed to taking them and killing them. And by the way, that the account he gave the FBI was so extraordinary

they didn't even believe it at first. And his name broke in Vermont, and he found out about it because other demands he had where he wanted access to the New York Times, he wanted access to the Internet, he wanted access to cigars he liked. I mean, he was the most high value suspect that Alaska had ever had in custody, and they had to figure out a way to take him outside so he could smoke his cigars. Once his name breaks, he's pissed. He says, I'm not

talking to you anymore. And the case stalls for three months because he just won't talk to them and he's basically showing them whose boss, and it's it's it's it's quite humbling and at that point they really have nothing else to do but but and and wait and hope that they can get him talking again.

wants to know about right there. One of the most important things that investigators were able to get was a court ordered psychological evaluation, because he's one of the death penalties so badly he needed to be ruled sane as fast as possible, and so that psycho val happens really fast. And that, by the way, was another thing that I had to do the Federal Prosecutor's office for they kept that hidden since twenty twelve, along with thirteen hours of

interrogations with keys that they had never logged anywhere. Their existence was unknown, and I was able to figure out that they existed because I had been talking to these agents for so long. So I obtained those things only last May, and I felt reading the psychoval the way that Joline Goden must have felt, which was that it was a mother load the greatest self report that we had of Israel Keys's upbringing to date. So he was born in Utah to Heidi and Jeff Keyes. He's raised

as one of ten. He is the second oldest and the oldest boy. When Israel and his older sister America are either four and two or about six and four, Heidi and Jeff uproot the family from Utah to a remote corner of Washington State called Calville. And they do that because the neighbors are getting very suspicious about the welfare of the toddler children, who they never see outside. Heidi goes on to have seven more children. They're all

home births. The children never get a birth certificate, they never get a Social Security number, they never see a doctor. They are raised outdoors for seven years while Jeff builds a cabin by hand. They live in tents. The food they eat they either grow it or they hunt it. By the time Israel is ten, you knows how to shoot to kill at a dress game out of cook it. They are servants off the gritters. They load and distress.

The federal government of the United States they're always sure from this point on to pretty much live near a border where they can get to Canada quickly. They join a church, a white supremacist church called the Arc, where Israel befriends two brothers named Chevy and Shane Kehoe, who will later go on in the nineties to become among

the FBI's ten most Wanted. One of the key Oh brothers later implicates the other as a co conspirator with Timothy mcveay in the Oklahoma City bombing, and in fact, when Keith is demanding the death penalty and the agents and prosecutors are trying to tell him that that is impossible to get that fast, he says, that's a lie. Timothy mcveay demanded the same thing, and he got it really fast. And a lot of people I grew up with, by the way, regard Timothy McVay as a hero. By

the time he's is fourteen, he is starting fires. He's breaking and entering into neighbors' houses, sometimes simply just rearranging the furniture so that he can walk watch them return home from a little bit away and experienced their fear that someone's been in their home. He is not just stealing guns and buying guns. At fourteen, by the way, he looks like a grown man. He's really tall, actually as early as twelve now that I think about it,

but he's learning how to build guns. At sixteen, he tells his mother he wants to live by himself, and he handbuilds the cabin in less than a year. That took seven less than a year. He hand built the cabins. He has also begun to manifest the text book signs of not just psychopathy, but the extreme psychopathy that indicates

a future serial killer. He has taken his sister's catt into the woods with some friends and described tying that cat to a tree and shooting it in the stomach and watching that cat run around frantically and vomit and suffer and die a horrible death. And he's watching it and he's laughing, and he looks over at another one of the kids there, and that kid has turned around and it's puking his guts out in terror and fear. And he says, that's pretty much the last time anyone

went out into the woods with me. And he said he told the in the Psychological Evaluator as a psychologist that he was pretty sure his parents knew about that, that one of the kids had told his parents, and the parents had gone to Jeff and Heidi. Now I interviewed Heidi I like for this book, and to my knowledge, she never spoken to a reporter, since she certainly had never spoken to one before. She told me she had

no recall of that incident. The only incident she had recall of was her and Jeff discovering a cash of guns in Israel's cabin and thinking that at that point he really needed to move back home with them, But it was far too late by then, because Keith had told investigators that by age fourteen, and again I'm going to say it's earlier than that, he has figured out that he was really good at sitting in the woods, deep in the woods alone still four hours and watching

people and having the epiphany that not only would it be easy enough for him to take someone and no one would ever know so, that he absolutely could do this and get away with it.

in the United States Army. Yeah. I asked the Army if this was remotely possible, and they said absolutely not. So that's a mystery.

a super soldier. One describes him as having carried one hundred and fifty pounds on his back four miles without swinching. One described him handmaking what's known as the Jill suit. And these are the suits worn by snipers. They sort of look like Bigfoot when they're done because they are extensively designed to camouflage you in any environment. But snipers in the Army are issued their Jial suits, and they're made by experts. And somehow Keys not only knew how

to build one himself, but had permission to. It's never on record that he was trained as a sniper. He also, and this was a surprise to me, not just underwent, but easily past Army ranger training. That is a grueling, grueling, excruciating method that the Army really uses to flush out. Most people can't hack it. So he's now we know,

has had Special Forces training of some kind. I also uncovered in these previously filed documents that he had gone down to Panama at one point for training that remains unknown. He told the FBI at a later point in this investigation that as a fourteen year old he knew how to build explosives. He was building bombs. He has had told someone he served with that at property he owned in upstate New York, even back then we're talking ninety eight ninety nine, he had buried nine thousand rounds of

Black Talent ammunition on that property. Black Talents are the outlawed so called cop killer boards. At that point in this case, the FBI, again this has never been reported and they've never explained why redesignate. They reclassify the Israel Keys case. It is now no longer serial murder, it's terrorism. And they deployed bomb squads on either side of the country, one to his house and anchorage and one to the property in Upstate New York, and they have never said

what they recovered. They have never said what they know Israel Keys had ever done or what he was planning to do.

Felldus with State Pain biting his nails. He gets lucky in this gets very very fortunate, as you right, because things could have went a lot differently given the strategy that he employed versus this strategy that the FBI and Steve Pain and others would have employed. Tell us a little bit about that.

or as the sense attorney. These are really they're so enlightening because Soelvis is approached is almost one that's informed by what you would see in a movie or a television procedural, you know, where it's the interrogator comes in full of like kissing vinegar and like Dave's got all the control, and you're just like gumbbags that they're going to nail to the wall. So you may as well

just tell me. And Paine goes in with far more humility, and the way he described his approach to me was he says, I like in that very first interrogation with a suspect as telling an author his own story. And you know, of course it's only the author who knows how this story ends. So Paine and Belle are kind of being guardian angels as Felovis is sort of stuggling along, and they're trying to also figure out in what way Key's is going to be most common stable telling this narrative.

And it becomes apparent that Keys is much more comfortable working backward, working with timelines and logistics and where he was when, rather than getting right into how he took Samantha, what he might have done with her and at one point Keys is walking himself up to giving the details

of that night and what he did to Samantha. And they needed these details crucially because they had so little physical evidence linking Keys to Samantha, and if at any point Keys recanted his concession or wanted to throw in like an unnamed accomplice to the mix, they would be screwed. So they needed details that they could then very quickly corroborate. And at that point he says, I'll give you these details, but there are too many people in this room. There

needs to be fewer people in this room. And immediately Steve Kane is thinking, okay, fine, like who would I leave in this room? And he goes and in his mind he's going, Jeff. Jeff is the best interrogator on this team. Jane has an ego that is strong enough to admit his strengths and weaknesses. So it would be Bell and it would be uh, he's's defense attorney Rich Kurtner, and that would be it with him. That would be fine.

And Feldis immediately goes, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa? Wait wait wait wait wait, let's let's let's let's hit the poup button on that you know, I mean, only you know the details you're gonna tell us is real, So why don't why don't you just start telling us? And Gave is really adamant. He's like, there are too many people in here, and and Pain is like dying as like Feladus is like gripping his table with like white fingertips, like he's not leaving that room. He wants to be

in that room. They're beginning to realize this is a case that could be a starmaker, you know, and Pain is thinking to himself, you know, I don't care what this guy's motivations are. I don't care if he needs some form of cosmetic privacy. I don't care what it is, or if he really feels this ashamed of what he's done that he needs like for people in the room. I need those details. We need those details. And Peladouce

won't relent. And this is when like Keith pushes his leverage back and he says, I'll give you all the details you want, but I want to talk to the lady. Detective what's her name? What's her name again? And they say Mickey, Mickey Dall and he says, yeah, I want to talk to her, and Pelvis is like, well, why you know, and he says, that's the way I want it. And in those moments, Paine and Bell are realizing that Keys is putting this together. He's already put it together,

that Peldus has no idea what he's doing. Why go holds all the cards in that room right now? It's real Keys, you know. And Pelvis had sort of misunderstood this dynamics from the outset. You know, he thought, as the federal prosecutor who had decided to run lead run point on this interrogation, that he was the most powerful person in the room. But no, Israel Keys was the most powerful person in that room.

for a guy. This evening. His fantasy this evening involves a guy, and he sees a yellow VW bug full into the parking lot. It's an apartment complex, and he watches as this guy gets out of the car and puts a newspaper over his head and keys starts following him, and he's getting closer and closer and closer, and his

keys describes it. He's arcing out his arm to grab the guy by the back, and the guy breaks into a sprint to get out of the rain, and he runs and he says, that guy almost got it that night. If that guy had been five seconds flower, he would have been the one. And so now he's got to look for something else and someone else, and he shifts his fantasy to a couple, and he lets a few hours go by in his hotel room, and he goes back out, and now it's about midnight and he's walking

around town. And a few minutes later he finds himself dinnering at a house on a suburban street. And this is a middle class neighborhood. This is a single story ranch house. He's a contractor. He looks at it and he figures out the layout. He knows exactly what it looks like inside. He starts prowling around the backyard. He sees an above ground pool, he sees a grill. He

sees no evidence of pets or small children. He has previously told the investigators one thing I won't do is mess with kids, which is a remarkably self serving from first speial killer. To make it's another one too, another indicator that he's borrowing from his predecessors, both real and fictional, because that's a reference to the fictional serial killer Dexter, you know, the serial killer with a code with a moral code.

got air conditioners that are in unit. You know, you shove them in the window. He can get he can gain access, So he does that through their garage, gets in their car, finds a woman's driver's license, and he sees that there are a lot of tools in that garage. Okay, this is the wants a man and a woman breaks them through the kitchen door, tells them it takes him six seconds flat to get from the kitchen to their bedroom, wake them up, tie them up, restrain them, and that's it.

He's taking them that night, tacks some luggage, roots around for some jewelry, some prescription drugs, puts them in their car, and drives them to a remote abandoned house that he says he had found the day before, and he tells them he gives them another clue. He says, whenever I'm on a road trip, whenever I'm driving around, I always look for abandoned houses, especially ones with a four sale sign. I always stop at ones with a four sale sign.

And he had gone in his house, and he had seen had it been lived in for years, if not decades, and it was abandoned, and there was a hole in the floor of one bedroom that dropped down right to the living room. There was a basement. It was off of a small road. It was it was perfect, and it's to him it looked like a house of horrors.

And he's driving them up to this house and they are begging him to let them go, that they're old, they're sick, and they have no money, and if they would just let him go, they will give him everything they've got and they will never tell a soul. And he tells them what he told Samantha Konig the night he took her, that he was just a kidnapping for ransom and they were going to be fine, and he was bringing them to a drop house where someone else

would take this over. And he takes them into that house, and he visits upon them unspeakable horrors, and when he is done, he leaves their bodies in trash bags in the corner of the basement and tells the FBI that he has been planning to more thoroughly dispose of their remains, but he was running out of time because the sun was coming up and there was a small amount of

traffic on the road of people going to work. And he figured that it would be fine ultimately, because whoever bought the house, he thought, would either tear it down or burn it, and they were doing it for the property, and then they would just rebuild. And that anyone who even thought about going into the basement would think that they were smelling the stench of a dead wild animal

and never take a look. And so, first of all, again the agents don't believe what they're hearing, because what he's describing and what he's done to this couple who were you know, they were infirm, and they were slightly overweight, and the husband, Bill especially, was a big guy, and it really would have been hard to take one of them alone, aside from two of them. But the timeline he's giving them, you know, this is like five hours

start to finish. So they send sealed agents to that house and lo and behold keys is right, it's already been torn down. It's been less than a year. He committed this crime in June of twenty eleven, and he's telling them about it in March of twenty twelve, and the house is gone, and so as he is very interested in learning the progress of what's going on in Vermont, and he wants One of the things he's saying is listen, I gave you all these details. I want to see

the pictures of the remains. And this, again, is it an unfortunate tell on Felds's part because he asks why. He asks why, and he says, I want to see them. I just want to see them. That's the way I am. And Feldis realizes that he just wants to get off on seeing the decomposed remains and it's it's now clear to Keys that felt it terrified of him, but he keeps asking over and over and he asks feldis you know week has gone by, now have they found the

bodies yet? And Felda says they haven't found the bodies, And Jesus like, are you sure they have the right house? And Felda says yeah, And he says, well, that is extremely weird because those bodies should be very easy to find. It wasn't that big of a house. And Feladas is offering all these lame excuses left and right, but Keys is beginning to piece it together like they might not ever find these bodies, and in fact, they they have to tell him because he's got access to the internet.

Oh guess what Israel. It looks like whoever bought this land this house? They hired a crew to excavate the basement, and so the bodies are in the landfill and the FBI is searching the landfill and this becomes the largest such hunt in FBI history. And it goesult for weeks and they can't find the bodies and they have to tell Keys they can't find the bodies. And now Keys knows really that he holds all the cards, he said.

I guess I spoke too soon on that one. He only gave them the couriers because they had his laptop, they had his computer, and they were going to find photos and news stories about the courier's disappearance, and he figured they would put that on him, and he may as well give them an easy one. And now he knows there's no such thing as an easy one.

The way I sort of describe it in the book, I say that he wanted them to know that in the history of Moms, because he was a great and I do think he just wanted to avoid it on his terms and to have that recognition also on his terms. He said that it was really about protecting his daughter. To some degree, that was true, but he was certainly for all of his rural background without really any formal education, he was an extremely bright guy who certainly understood the

basic principles of Google. So he knew that that was an inevitability. But you know, again, he wanted it on his terms. And he went so far as to, you know, sort of happily tell them his future plans, one of which was inspired by the infamous serial killer HH Holmes, who is the subject of the great book Devil in

the White City. And I'm sure all of your listeners are familiar with Holmes, but for anyone who's not, he built a dungeon in his mansion in Chicago during the the World Fair there, and he advertised it at the hotel, and really it was just an elaborate lore to to have victims come to him. As Keys described his favorite way to take someone, he said, back when I was smart,

I would just let them come to me. And his dungeon he used as a as a place to hold his victims for a long time and torture them and rape them before killing them. And Keith said that that was his plan. He really wanted it was what he called his retirement plan, built a big house with a

dungeon where he could keep victims for much longer. And another more immediate plan that he had was to leave Anchorage and begin traveling the country as an itinerant construction worker, because he told them that there was no greater cover for moving around offering his services as all of the

increasing extreme weather events. And that was a plan that was diabolical and ingenious, quite frankly, and that coupled with really the unforced error he made when later he begins talking to them again and says, I know how to build bombs, you know. Was that an unforced error or was that like another chancelizing clue he's using to tap them withs like you don't know what I'm truly capable of, Try and figure it out. Maybe I'll help you, maybe

I won't. And I think that he truly was laying the groundwork for what he hoped his narrative would be. I want to say that said, I really went to great pains in this book to call Keys what he is, a monster, a predator, a complete aberration. I explore, with the help of Roy Hazelwood, psychopathy into your earlier question about how Keys's upbringing may have formed or malformed this individual.

Are they born or are they made? But the larger point being I in no way would ever want anyone to take away from this book that any of these acts are things to be glorified for. In fact, at one point he tells the investigators visa V relaying the details of his crimes. You know, hey, I'm not in this for the glory. You know, he really wizes that the culture has this sick fascination and tends to glorify

serial killers. I really hope that if anything, it's it's it's the victims who are are the sole focus of sympathy here and recognition, and that Keys is is what the FBI and Quantiga regard him to be, which is a thing to be studied and to learn from.

He told them he had been doing this for fourteen years. I think he started way earlier, and it's a it's a conclusion I reached after, you know, five years of a deep research and reporting on this case. I believe there are some rule. There are several cold cases that I explore in the book that I hope are reopened cold cases and the miss unsolved missing persons cases, two completely different things that law enforcement has reason to believe

Israel Keys is likely responsible for. And I say that based on information the agents gave me directly about their own suspicions. I say that based on hundreds of pages I got from the Department of Justice case files that involves both calls to the FBI tip line and emails from both civilians and law enforcements all over the United States saying please look at Israel Keys for this. His mo fits the circumstances of the disappearance of my friend,

my loved one, my husband, my son. I cross referenced those with another classified piece of information I was able to obtain, which was the FBI's secret internal timeline of Israel Keys's known travels. This is far more detailed than the timeline that the FBI threw up online in about twenty thirteen asking for the public's help in locating and

identifying other victims of Israel Keys. And when I got the secret timeline, which I only attained last summer, so about a year ago or maybe last all this was a revelation because this timeline included information that came directly from journals and calendars that Keys kept, so they were able to put him at places where previously they might

not have been able to. So in cross referencing all these materials, there are about four or five cases revisited in the book that make a strong argument for another look. And I would close that out by saying, the Keys told them he just gave them this. He said, I buried one, but possibly two victims in Lake Crescent in Washington, and I went to Lake Crescent because I visited with the FBI agents in Washington State who works it, and it is one of the largest lakes in the United

States of America. Until you see it, you can't comprehend how vast it is. At its deepest point, it's probably seven hundred feet. They've never been to the bottom of it, so Key said, there's at least one down there, and the FBI checked with their experts. It's fresh water, there's very little marine life. The chances of preservation are remarkably good.

And the agents in Washington State told me they went to the Bureau and they said, we want to do a recovery operation, and the Bureau told them no because they did not want to spend the money.

run from court and he was tasered. You also talk about some of the behavior that Ted Bundy exhibited as well in terms of what they find out.

if not success. So the Keys is in federal courts and he's sitting at the table with his defense attorneys. He's surrounded by the US marshalls, the courthouse is packed, the press is there, and Jeff Bell is there, as is Chief King and but Belle, particularly the way he sort of described this to me, He's watching Keys look back over his shoulder at an attractive young woman and she's a reporter, Bell thinks, and he keeps doing this and he can't tell if he is flirting with her

or trying to intimidate or what. Bell starts moving himself over to break Keys's eye lines so that he can no longer make eye contact with this girl, and Keys shoots him a look that's like daggers, and the court begins its proceeding and suddenly Israel Keys jumps up. His leg chains are unlocked somehow, and he has, I mean, think about what this would look like. He's jumped up over his chair. His hands are still handcuffed in front

of him, and he is leaping over benches. He's going bench by bench by bench by bench, like think about the athleticism and the balance and just the sheer defiance. And the courthouse erupts and Jeff Belle leaps up to go after him, and the US Marshals grab him and they gave him and Keys is on his back and Belle is looking at Keys's expression and he sees it's one of ecstasy. And it's again it's another moment where even someone as seasoned as Belle is just completely floored

by the monster he is dealing with. And he later learned that he was able to make that attempt by taking the cell phane that had been used to wrap his sandwich which he had been given in the courthouse. He was given the standard issue sandwich and apple and milk carton with a straw and in a paper bag. And so he took that piece of cellophane and he worked it up in his mouth, and he somehow unlocked his leg irons and he used a slimsy piece of cellophane to keep them together until ready to make a

run for it. And if, by the way, if you try to find footage of that escape attempt, which made national news and there's video of it, it's all been taken down. And why I have no idea. But this became yet another battle for Jeff Bell, who was the investigator who day after day would go to the courthouse. He had the best rapport with keys. He would go and say, do you want to talk? Do you want to come out, like, we'll take you out. You can go to the FBI's offices. We'll have some launch you

can read the paper. But he was he was the most diligent about eyeing keys and what he was capable of. There was a day at the FBI where he noticed Keys was working his jaw subtlely, and Bell forced him to open his mouth and in there were little shards of pencils that Keys was fashioning into weapons. They were never in a room with him unarmed, without guards there. You know, Jeff Bell would watch as with the other agent as Keys would just sort of eyeball the room,

like he would be looking at electrical sockets. He would be looking at what can I make thing out of? What can I make into a weapon? To get out of here. He was found with a razor blade. Jeff Bell had to go to the head of the correctional facility and say, you guys, can't give this guy anything. Because there was a day where Jeff Bell was strip searching Keys before leaving, which was standard procedure, and there

was always an armed guard outside that room. And after Keyes finished his after Bell finished his strip search of Keys,

the armed guard had just wandered off. And so now Bell is alone in his room with this guy who he yes, he has rapport with on a professional level, but he is not fooled, like he knows that Keys would kill him just going to talk to him, and Jeff Bell is terrified, like he was very honest about it, and he had to knock on the door from the inside without evincing any fear to get a guard to come back and unlock that door. And so you know, he's basically saying, how laxed? Can you guys be like,

don't you understand who this is? And don't you understand that he can make things out of anything? And so this was an ongoing, ongoing battle that was waighed. But it was just yet another example of Keys's extreme lethality. I mean, they found Bell found in his bell one day, like he was getting survivalist magazines in jail.