A Killer Ends Half-Told Tale of His Crimes With Suicide (Published 2012) (2024)

ANCHORAGE — In a conversation with homicide investigators before his suicide in jail this week, Israel Keyes said he had lived much of his life thinking that people only pretended to be nice. But then, Mr. Keyes told one of the interrogators, he realized that perhaps it was only him.

For Mr. Keyes, the superficial facade of an ordinary life as a construction contractor and family man concealed the dark and cold interior life no one ever saw of a roving serial killer, rapist, arsonist and bank robber.

“He said a lot of haunting things,” said Frank V. Russo, the deputy criminal chief at the United States Attorney’s Office in Anchorage, who recounted Mr. Keyes’s epiphany. “And I thought I’d heard just about everything.”

By the time of Mr. Keyes’s jail-cell death here at age 34, the trail of his crimes — some definite, others still being investigated, with at least eight murder victims in four states, including one disposed of in New York — was matched only by the swirling mystery of loose ends and half-told horror stories he had offered before cutting the conversation short with his death. Sometime either late last Saturday or very early Sunday, he strangled himself with bedding materials and slashed a wrist with a disassembled shaving razor, the Alaska State Troopers said Wednesday in a statement. It is not clear which method finished the job, they said.

Law enforcement investigators are now trying desperately to illuminate the dark shadows Mr. Keyes left.

They appealed this week to the public across the country for help in solving his crimes. They produced detailed timelines of Mr. Keyes’s extensive road trips — driving thousands of miles, by his own account, over the last decade — and are trying to match missing persons reports with his travels. They are looking for the four bodies in Washington State that Mr. Keyes spoke about but would not elaborate on, and the buried caches of weapons and body disposal tools he said he had left in New York, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming and perhaps elsewhere.

What makes the task even more chilling and urgent, the authorities said, is that every crime he spoke about in detail after his arrest was substantiated. He may have conducted one of the worst one-man crime waves in recent United States history, but in keeping with his life of concealment, he took the final dimensions of it with him to the grave.

And investigators said he was no fabulist seeking dark glory with exaggerated accounts of his exploits. Starting in 2001, after his discharge from the Army, where he was based in Washington State and had no obvious red flags on his record, he seems simply to have embarked on a path of unrelenting mayhem, committing his first homicide that year. He moved to Alaska from Washington in 2007.

“Everything that he told us about, we were able to corroborate,” said Jolene Goeden, a special agent with the F.B.I.

But he also adeptly covered his tracks. Indeed, before his arrest in March after a traffic stop in East Texas, the authorities did not even know they were hunting for someone who had committed a string of monstrous crimes.

An 18-year-old woman named Samantha Koenig had been abducted in Anchorage the month before, and a ransom note had been sent; there were hopes for finding her alive.

It was not by any means a simple case even then, investigators said — they had the note, and text messages sent from Ms. Koenig’s phone, and store surveillance videos showing a figure walking from a white Chevy pickup truck to the coffee kiosk where Ms. Koenig worked.

Ms. Koenig’s ATM card and a rented white Ford Focus turned out to be Mr. Keyes’s undoing. An ATM video camera in Willcox, Ariz., captured the image of the car as money was withdrawn from Ms. Koenig’s account by a figure in a face mask. A highway patrolman in Lufkin, Tex., spotted a Focus that matched the description of Ms. Koenig’s, and Mr. Keyes had the ATM card, as well as Ms. Koenig’s phone.

Confronted with the details, he admitted that he had sexually assaulted and strangled Ms. Koenig shortly after her abduction and later dumped her dismembered body through a hole cut in a frozen Alaskan lake.

Mr. Keyes’s house, in West Anchorage, where he lived with his girlfriend and a 10- or 11-year-old daughter, was subsequently searched, including the shed in front, where he said he put Ms. Koenig before the murder.

“He knew all along he was going to kill her,” said Monique Doll, a homicide detective with the Anchorage Police Department, describing Mr. Keyes’s account.

Only after confessing to the Koenig murder did the rest of Mr. Keyes’s story — the larger, grimmer portrait that the authorities had never imagined — start to spill out.

It came slowly, in teased-out bites, law enforcement officials said, with Mr. Keyes apparently enjoying the sense of control over his information. Investigators laughed at his jokes, which were often disturbing and not funny at all, they said, just to keep him talking.

He confessed to killing Bill and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vt., in June 2011. The couple, in their 50s, were apparently singled out at random, but Mr. Keyes’s planning for a murder in the Essex area was extensive, the authorities said, with a cache of killing and disposal supplies placed as much as two years before. Their bodies were never found.

His extensive travels were also financed by property crime, including at least two armed bank robberies that law enforcement authorities have confirmed.

He said he had hoped never to be taken alive and imagined a shootout with the police at the end. He said he had disposed of a body in New York in 2009, and would not provide more details.

But like the mixture of diligence and luck that led to his capture — a might-be-the-car-they’re-looking-for decision by a Texas patrolman — the what-ifs of the Keyes story linger on.

Surveillance video released this week by the Anchorage Police Department, for example, shot in February inside the coffee kiosk, shows Ms. Koenig responding to a figure approaching the service window just before the 8 p.m. closing. Ms. Koenig steps over to turn off the kiosk lights, as Mr. Keyes, brandishing a gun, has ordered her to do. A panic button had been installed near the light switch.

“Her fingers were inches from the panic button,” said Ms. Doll, the Anchorage police detective. “She may have been too afraid.”

The video also shows, after Mr. Keyes had bound Ms. Koenig’s hands and marched her out toward his truck, her phone flashing in the dark, empty shop as messages came in from a friend who was coming to pick her up. The friend, arriving only four minutes after the kidnapper and victim had left, peers through the window, his own phone pressed to his ear, then drives away.

Mr. Keyes later returned to retrieve the phone and tidy up. He had cinched Ms. Koenig’s hands behind her with zip ties in the shop, and snipped off the ends. He carefully picked up the snipped pieces and left.