Israel Keyes

Israel Keyes (January 7, 1978 – December 2, 2012) was an American serial killer, bank robber, burglar, arsonist, kidnapper, and sex offender. He murdered at least three people, is suspected of murdering between 11 and 20 people, and committed dozens of felonies including armed robbery, arson, rape, and burglary across the United States from July 2001 to February 2012.

While awaiting trial, Keyes killed himself by slashing his wrists and hanging himself. Evidence left behind in his jail cell led the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to suspect Keyes murdered at least eleven victims in total. Evidence found in his cell included a suicide note, drawings of eleven skulls, a drawing of Baphomet, and an inscription of "Corozal" on the cell's wall (all written or otherwise stained with Keyes' blood). He admitted to having committed violent crimes as early as 1996, with the aggravated sexual assault of a teenage girl in Oregon, in a series of meticulous crimes across multiple states that lasted until his capture in 2012.

Childhood
Israel Keyes was born in Richmond, Utah, on January 7, 1978, the second of ten children of Heidi Keyes née Hakansson and John Jeffrey "Jeff" Keyes (October 4, 1952 – November 13, 2002). His parents were members of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from Torrance, California.

Keyes and his siblings were homeschooled until 1983. After leaving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Keyes's father moved the family to a remote plot of land north of Colville, Washington in Stevens County when Israel was 5. Isolated from society, the Keyes family lived in a one-room cabin without electricity or running water on Rocky Creek Road.

In Colville, the family attended services at a church called the Ark, which subscribed to white supremacist Christian Identity ideology. Keyes later described the Ark as an Amish-like environment. During this period of attending the Ark, the Keyes family befriended the neighboring family of Chevie Kehoe, who was later convicted for a 1996 triple murder.

Adolescence
The family attended another church in Colville called the Christian Israel Covenant Church that taught British Israelism as doctrine, that miscegenation was abominable and deviant, that Anglo-Saxons were to rule over the perceived inferior races, and that Keyes later alleged to have been militia-like. For years, some of the Keyes children had been forced to sleep in a tent due to their cabin's small size. To survive, the Keyes children were made to hunt their food, chop firewood, and work on local farms to support the family; as a hobby, Keyes hunted "anything with a heartbeat" and freely admitted to skinning a deer alive to his peers at the church. As a result, Keyes was ostracized and actively avoided by other children who attended the Christian Israel Covenant Church, with one girl recounting that Keyes's presence "made my skin crawl."

As a youth, Keyes admitted to shooting at neighbors' houses with his BB gun, starting fires in the woods, and breaking into houses for fun. He also occasionally broke into houses with another youth, who subsequently avoided him after witnessing Keyes shoot an animal. On one occasion, Keyes stole several guns from his neighbor's residence and was forced to apologize by his parents after their discovery of the cache. On occasion, Keyes—who stood 6ft 2in tall by age 14—would also sell stolen guns to local adults.

Around this time, Keyes's parents provided shelter to personal friends; in the presence of their son and daughter and Keyes's sister, Keyes tied a cat to a tree with a parachute cord and gored it with a .22 revolver. The cat then began circling the tree before crashing into it and vomiting; Keyes allegedly chuckled before noting that the boy—who later informed his father—had vomited in response to the incident. Keyes had an epiphany in which he felt that he was different from his peers, who ran away from him. Upon this realization, he kept his increasingly antisocial behavior to himself, withdrawing socially due to being ostracized. In addition, Keyes's mother began to notice "some troubling signs" in Keyes during this period, when he began tuning into various "radio stations and different things."

By his teenage years, Keyes had become a skilled and proficient carpenter, building his first wooden cabin for his family at age 16. He also began working for a Colville contractor from 1995 to 1997. Around this time, Keyes kept a journal from early childhood littered with Bible scriptures, documenting daily sins for which he felt shame such as lusting after his girlfriend. Soon thereafter, the family relocated to Smyrna, Maine, where they collected sap for maple syrup production in a mostly Amish community. Due to their mother's religious zealousness, the Keyes children were forced to secretly flee their parents to watch movies with friends and were forbidden to learn musical instruments as they were "against God." Sometime during this period, Keyes renounced his former Christian faith.

On one occasion, Keyes declared his atheism to his parents—both of whom he had previously made tireless and constant efforts to please—after an intense argument. This led his parents to evict their eldest son from their residence, shunning him for apparent blasphemy; they then instructed his younger siblings, who looked up to Keyes, to never have contact with him again. Keyes then developed an inordinate interest in Satanism, with plans of committing a ritualistic murder.

Deschutes River assault
In the summer of 1997 or 1998, Keyes committed a sexual assault on a teenage girl who had been tubing with her friends down the Deschutes River in Maupin, Oregon. Although this was not his first sexual assault, Keyes admitted that he stalked her from a tree line before "very violently sexually assaulting" the girl—whom he estimated to be between 14 and 18—at knifepoint. Originally planning to murder her as part of a Satanic ritual, Keyes let her go in the river tube he had abducted her from. "I was too timid. I wasn't violent enough," he told investigators. "I made up my mind I was never going to let that happen again."

Military service
On July 9, 1998, Keyes relocated and enlisted in the United States Army in the state of New York, where he served as a Specialist in Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment. He passed a rigorous month-long preliminary course for United States Army Rangers training. He was stationed at Fort Lewis and Fort Hood, also spending some time abroad. While stationed in Sinai, Egypt, Keyes befriended several soldiers, informing one of them that he would "like to kill" him.

While at Fort Lewis, Keyes served on a mortar team in the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division. Former Army friends of Keyes have noted his quiet demeanor and habit of keeping to himself. On weekends, he was reported to drink heavily, consuming entire bottles of his favorite drink, Wild Turkey bourbon. Keyes was also a fan of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse and displayed posters of the musical act in the barracks.

In February 2001, Keyes was arrested for driving under the influence in Thurston County. Pursuant to a plea agreement, he was fined $350. Keyes was awarded an Army Achievement Medal for his meritorious service as a gunner and assistant gunner from December 1998 to July 2001. Keyes was then honorably discharged, and he relocated to Neah Bay, Washington, where he lived in the Makah Reservation community of Neah Bay, on the Olympic Peninsula with his Native American girlfriend, who he'd met online and subsequently had a daughter with. In 2007, Keyes started a construction business in Alaska, called Keyes Construction, while working as a handyman, contractor, and construction worker. When asked if his murders started after his discharge from the Army, Keyes cryptically replied, "Yeah, Neah Bay's a boring town."

Criminal history
Keyes targeted random people all across the United States to avoid detection with months of planning before he committed a particular crime. He specifically frequented campgrounds and isolated locations. He claimed to only use guns when he had to and preferred strangulation; this was due to the pleasure he derived from witnessing victims lose consciousness in the struggle. He claimed to not kill children or parents of children, primarily because of his daughter, whom he feared finding out about him and his crimes. However, police and FBI investigators were skeptical of this claim and suspected Keyes of killing several teenagers and children.

Keyes did not admit to any murders during his three years in the United States Army, but he did admit to twice attempting rapes of women, once with a sex worker while on leave in Egypt, and another time with a college student he met in Israel. He is believed to have resumed his killing spree in 2001 following his discharge. Keyes had ties to New York; he owned 10 acre and a dilapidated cabin in the town of Constable. He also confessed to committing bank robberies in New York and Texas. The FBI later confirmed that Keyes robbed the Community Bank branch in Tupper Lake, New York, in April 2009. He also told authorities that he burglarized a Texas home and set it on fire.

An FBI report stated that Keyes burglarized twenty to thirty homes across the United States and robbed several banks between 2001 and 2012. He is believed to have been responsible for as many as eleven deaths in the United States and potentially even more victims outside the country. Keyes planned murders long ahead of time and took extraordinary action to avoid detection. Unlike most serial killers, he did not have a victim profile, stating that he chose victims randomly. On his murder trips, he kept his mobile phone turned off and paid for items with cash. He had no connections to any of his known victims. For the Currier murders, Keyes flew to Chicago, where he rented a car to drive 1,000 mi to Vermont. He then used the "murder kit" he had hidden two years earlier to execute the murders.

Confessed victims
During interviews with FBI agents and officials in Alaska, Keyes directly admitted to three murders whose identities were confirmed:
 * Keyes confessed to murdering 49-year-old William "Bill" Scott Currier and 55-year-old Lorraine Simonne Currier of Essex, Vermont. Keyes broke into the Currier home on the night of June 8, 2011, and tied them up before driving them to an abandoned farmhouse where he shot Bill before sexually assaulting and strangling Lorraine. Their bodies have never been found. Two years prior, Keyes hid a "murder kit" near the Currier home, which he later recovered and used during the crime. After the murders, he moved most of the kit's contents to a new hiding place in Parishville, New York, where they remained until after his arrest.
 * Keyes' last confirmed victim was 18-year-old Samantha Tessla Koenig, a coffee booth employee in Anchorage, Alaska. Keyes kidnapped Koenig from her workplace on February 1, 2012, took her debit card and other property, sexually assaulted her, then killed her the following day. He left her body in a shed in his backyard and went to New Orleans, where he departed on a pre-booked two-week cruise with his family in the Gulf of Mexico. When he returned to Alaska, he removed Koenig's body from the shed, applied makeup to the corpse's face, sewed her eyes open with fishing line. He snapped a picture of a four-day-old issue of the Anchorage Daily News alongside her body, posed to appear that she was still alive. After demanding $30,000 in ransom, some of which was paid into Koenig's bank account, Keyes dismembered Koenig's body and disposed of it in Matanuska Lake, north of Anchorage. Her remains were recovered by the FBI's Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team (USERT).

Possible victims
Keyes hinted at other murders, and/or was a suspect in other murders that coincided with his whereabouts or matched his modus operadi. However, the identities of the victims are uncertain and/or he was not definitively linked to the crimes:
 * Julie Marie Harris, a 13-year-old Special Olympics medalist in skiing, disappeared on March 2, 1996, while waiting for a ride to a local church in Colville, Washington; her remains were found on April 26, 1997, in a wooded area a few miles away. A cause of death was not determined. Harris was a double amputee whose prosthetic feet were found by the Colville River a month after her disappearance. Keyes, then 18 years old, lived in the area at the time and was questioned about her case after he was arrested in 2012, but he neither confirmed nor denied killing her.
 * Cassandra "Cassie" Emerson, 12, another young girl from the Colville, Washington area, was reported missing after the remains of her mother, Marlene Kay Emerson, 29, were discovered in their burned-out trailer home on June 27, 1997; Cassie's remains were found in 1998 about thirteen miles from her home. Keyes did admit his first act of arson was with a trailer in Colville.
 * Keyes admitted to investigators he had killed five people in Washington State, and was the subject of an active investigation by the state police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Keyes claimed to have either buried or submerged a victim in a lake in Neah Bay, Washington sometime between July and October 2001. A body was found, but this death was ruled accidental. He also confessed to the double homicide of a young couple which occurred between 2001 and 2005. According to Keyes, the male was beaten to death and the female was fatally strangled; both victims were buried. Between 2005 and 2006, Keyes said he had killed two further victims who were both killed separately; one was apparently dumped in Lake Crescent, Washington. Keyes did not have a felony criminal record in Washington although he had been stopped on two occasions for minor driving-related offenses. Authorities reviewed unsolved murder and missing persons cases to determine which, if any, may have been the work of Keyes. In 2012, authorities identified a possible victim known only as Lewis County Jane Doe, who was a woman found in the Peterman Hill area in Morton, Washington on April 7, 2011, by a passing motorist. In 2022, the victim was formally identified but her identity was not publicly revealed. Keyes also confessed to at least one murder in New York State. In late 2012, authorities had not determined the identity, age, or sex of the victim, or when and where the murder may have occurred but regarded the confession as credible.
 * Keyes is a suspect in a series of 2007 crimes by the "Boca Killer", near Boca Raton, Florida. The first case in the murder series was that of Randi Ann Malitz Gorenberg, 52, who on March 23, 2007, was abducted from the Boca Town Center Mall parking lot. Within an hour her body with two fatal bullet wounds, was dumped at a different location. The second crime was the kidnapping of an unidentified woman who claimed she and her toddler son were abducted from the same shopping mall parking lot on August 7, 2007. Though the kidnapper wore a mask and sunglasses, the victim caught glimpses of his face and described him as a tall, athletically built man with long hair, which generally matched Keyes's description.  This woman was released unharmed after the assailant forced her to withdraw cash from an automated teller machine. The third Boca case was the murder of Nancy Bochicchio, 47 years old, and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey Bochicchio-Hauser, who were found fatally shot in their vehicle at the Boca Town Center Mall parking lot on December 12, 2007.
 * Authorities believe Keyes may have murdered 48-year-old Debra Feldman, a prostitute with alleged substance abuse issues after discovering that he had frequently searched for her missing persons case on his computer shortly before his arrest. Feldman was last seen at her apartment in Hackensack, New Jersey on April 8, 2009. Her body has never been recovered. Federal agents showed Feldman's image to Keyes upon which he “hesitated, he waited,” and then said only, “I don’t want to talk about her yet.” It is suspected that Keyes buried her near Tupper Lake, New York.
 * Keyes is a suspect in the murder of 58-year-old James "Jimmy" Lamar Tidwell Jr., an electrician who disappeared in Mount Enterprise, Texas on February 15, 2012. He was last seen at 5:30 a.m. that day, after he had finished working the night shift. During a bank robbery in Azle, Texas on February 16, 2012, the culprit – believed to be Keyes – wore a white hard hat similar to Tidwell's. Tidwell's hair also resembled a dark-haired wig worn by Keyes during the robbery. While interrogated, Keyes stated that his "wig" was, in fact, human hair. When asked where he had obtained the human hair, Keyes refused to elaborate but said, "You don't have to buy real hair to get real hair."

Study of serial killers
A search of Keyes's residence found dozens of books about murders, both fiction and non-fiction. He closely studied Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by FBI profiler John E. Douglas in his youth. Keyes also undertook a meticulous study of other serial killers. Keyes idolized Ted Bundy and felt that he shared many similarities with him. Both Keyes and Bundy were methodical and felt as though they possessed their victims despite their difference in victim choice and modus operandi.

Keyes even went as far as to imitate Bundy's court escape and was immediately seized by guards. He also admired and studied other serial killers, yet actively shunned media attention for his crimes as he was fearful for his family and being labelled a "copycat" for his admiration of Bundy and other murderers. Keyes called Dennis Rader a "wimp" for apologizing in court and showing remorse for his crimes but expressed admiration for serial killers "that haven't been caught."

When asked in an interview about Alaska-based murderer Robert Hansen, Keyes replied enthusiastically, stating, "Yeah, I know all about him." He continued: "I probably know every single serial killer that's ever been written about. It's kind of a hobby of mine." When FBI agents informed him of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting he inquired as to the status of the shooter and had expressed mild interest in the mass murder's perpetrator, James Holmes. Keyes also re-read Intensity, a 1995 thriller novel by Dean Koontz, and closely identified with the serial killer antagonist.

Investigation, arrest, and imprisonment
After Koenig's murder, Keyes demanded ransom money, and police were able to track withdrawals from her account as he moved throughout the southwestern U.S. During that time, the police controversially refused to release surveillance video of Koenig's abduction. Keyes was arrested by Texas Highway Patrol Corporal Bryan Henry and Texas Ranger Steven Rayburn in the parking lot of the Cotton Patch Café in Lufkin, Texas, on the morning of March 13, 2012. Investigators had circulated a lookout bulletin for the suspect's car, which had been used at ATMs to withdraw money from Koenig's account. Keyes's car matched this description. Keyes was stopped after he drove slightly over the speed limit. His vehicle was searched after officers spotted cash stained with bright ink, indicating a dye pack from a bank robbery. Koenig's ATM card and cell phone were also discovered in Keyes's car.

Keyes was subsequently extradited to Alaska, where he confessed to the Koenig murder. He was represented by the Rich Curtner, Federal Public Defender for Alaska. Keyes was indicted in the case, and his trial was scheduled to begin in March 2013. While incarcerated, Keyes spoke to investigators several times over a period of months. He cooperated at first to an extent, confessing to some of his crimes, and stated a wish to be executed within a year. Keyes said he wanted to avoid publicity due to the negative attention his young daughter might face but largely stopped cooperating after his identity was discussed in the media. On Wednesday, May 23, 2012, Keyes attempted to escape during a routine hearing. He used wood shavings from a pencil to pick his cuffs. US Marshals used a taser to subdue him.

Suicide
While being held in jail at the Anchorage Correctional Complex on suspicion of murder, Keyes managed to conceal a razor blade in his cell. It is uncertain how Keyes obtained the blade, as he was under security restrictions of using an electric razor under supervision. He died by suicide on December 2, 2012, via cutting his wrists and attempted strangulation. A suicide note, found under his body, consisted of an "ode to murder" but offered no clues about other possible victims. In 2020, the FBI released the drawings of eleven skulls and one pentagram, which had been drawn in blood and found underneath Keyes' jail-cell bed after his suicide. One of the drawings included the phrase "WE ARE ONE" written at the bottom. The FBI believes the number of skulls correlates with what are believed to be the total number of his victims.

In media
Keyes has been the subject of multiple books. Multiple true crime podcasts have discussed him, including True Crime Bullsh**, which focuses exclusively on Keyes and his victims. The name for the podcast comes from a quote from Keyes in one of his interviews with the FBI, "My concern — the problem is nowadays, uh, the more stuff my name is attached to the more likely it is that somebody’s gonna try to do some kinda stupid freaking TV special or, you know — you know how it is. Nowadays like with all this true crime bullshit that people are obsessed with." Keyes is also the subject of the documentary Method of a Serial Killer released in 2018 by the Oxygen channel. Most of the FBI interrogations were released publicly by Anchorage Daily News to SoundCloud that same year. They were removed from SoundCloud in 2019 but have since become available on YouTube.