ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A confessed serial killer from Alaska
who hid in plain sight and whose crimes went undetected for more than a
decade, was ultimately caught after he gave in to his compulsions and
struck close to home.
Israel Keyes, in jail since March for the kidnapping and murder of 18-year-old coffee stand server Samantha Koenig in Anchorage, Alaska,
confessed to that and other violent crimes. Then guards found him dead
on December 2 after he committed suicide by cutting his wrists and
choking himself with a bed sheet. He was 34.
Keyes, a U.S. Army veteran, lived a quiet life in one of Anchorage's
best neighborhoods, doing well-regarded handyman work for unsuspecting
customers. He had been due to go on trial in March for Koenig's death,
and investigators believe he killed eight to 11 people, if not more.
A picture of Keyes'
double-life emerged from his own words -- authorities released excerpts
from 40 hours of interviews with investigators to reporters -- and from
interviews and news conferences given by investigators, who said they
believed his confessions were sincere.
"Everything that he
told them has been borne out," Lieutenant Dave Parker of the Anchorage
Police Department said on Sunday.
Keyes admitted that
he committed numerous killings, bank robberies and other crimes across
the country. He admitted to plans for more killings. He admitted to
several unreported crimes and acts of cruelty committed before he
started killing people, including the rape of a teenager in Oregon in
the late 1990s and torture of animals when he was a child.
His suicide ended
the revelations and made him a rarity -- a confessed serial killer who
was never convicted of murder.
"It gives us no pleasure to dismiss the charges against Mr. Keyes, but that's what the law requires," said Kevin Feldis, the assistant U.S. attorney leading the prosecution.
The criminal investigation will continue indefinitely,
even if there is no prosecution, "because there will inevitably be many,
many unknowns," Feldis said.
Keyes was caught in
Texas in March with a debit card stolen from Koenig, whom he abducted
from her coffee stand in February. Keyes admitted to kidnapping, raping
and killing her, then dismembering her body and dumping her remains in
an icy lake before traveling out of Alaska.
Once in custody, he also confessed to the 2011 killings
of Bill and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont, and the disposal of
four bodies in Washington state and one in New York state.
Only three homicides have been definitively pinned to
him -- those of Koenig and the Curriers -- in large part because Keyes
could not identify victims by name.
His motivation was
enjoyment, said Monique Doll, an Anchorage homicide detective who worked
on the investigation. Throughout his months of jail interviews, Keyes
was utterly unapologetic and remorseless, she said.
"Israel Keyes
didn't kidnap and kill people because he was crazy. He didn't kidnap and
kill people because his deity told him to or because he had a bad
childhood. Israel Keyes did this because he got an immense amount of
enjoyment out of it, much like an addict gets an immense amount of
enjoyment out of drugs," Doll told a news conference.
He also enjoyed staying under the radar, officials
said. He targeted total strangers, avoiding anyone with any possible
connection, traveling hundreds of miles to target random victims at
secluded parks, trail heads and other remote locations.
He broke some of
his own rules when he killed Koenig, abducting her at her workplace on a
busy Anchorage street, where security cameras caught some of his
actions, and killing her at his own house, officials said. Keyes
admitted he considered merely robbing Koenig -- whom he did not know --
and instead gave in to his compulsions, Doll said.
"In prior cases, he had enough self-control to walk away from it," Doll said. "But with Samantha, he didn't."
Koenig's case dominated local news, and supporters
raised a reward fund, held candlelight vigils and gave self-defense
lessons to coffee stand servers.
Keyes got a thrill
from following the news coverage, so long as his name was not linked to
the case, investigators said. When he was identified by a Vermont
television station in the s u mmer as the suspect in the murder of the
Curriers, he became so angry he stopped speaking to investigators for
two months.
WHITE SUPREMACIST BACKGROUND
Keyes grew up in Washington state in a fundamentalist
Christian family that, in the past, attended a white-supremacist,
anti-Semitic church but later moved out of the region and became
affiliated with other congregations, according to the Southern Poverty
Law Center civil rights group.
Keyes served in the
U.S. Army for three years, including a brief stint in Egypt, and was
discharged from Fort Lewis Army Base in Washington state in 2001. In his
interviews, he said he was anxious for his military service to end so
that he could start murdering people, Feldis said.
He moved to Alaska in 2007 and lived with his daughter and a girlfriend in Anchorage's
Turnagain neighborhood, near many of the city's most prominent
citizens, top attorneys and law-enforcement officials, operating a
one-man contracting business.
"He was well-known
in Anchorage as a really good handyman," said state Senator Hollis
French, who lived around the corner from Keyes.
All the while, Keyes said in his interviews, he was "two different people."
"There's no one who
knows me or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me,
really," Keyes said in one of the interviews.
Keyes told authorities he almost killed a young couple
and an Anchorage police officer at a beach overlook, about a month
before killing the Curriers in Vermont.
Keyes said he was
hiding in the park with a gun and a silencer and ready to ambush his
victims; he wanted to test the silencer that he would later bring to the
East Coast on his trip to kill the Curriers. He stopped when a second
police officer arrived on the scene.
"It could have got ugly, but fortunately for the cop
guy, his backup showed up," a chuckling Keyes said one interview. "I
almost got myself into a lot of trouble on that one."
The silencer wound up in a stockpile of murder supplies
that Keyes stashed in upstate New York, near a home he owned there.
Keyes admitted to placing several such caches around the country,
investigators said.
Officials have found two so far -- the New York
stockpile and one in the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River that contained a
shovel and bottles of liquid clog remover, material for concealing a
body and speeding decomposition.
Until he was arrested, Keyes' plan was to leave Alaska
this year and work as an itinerant contractor making repairs in
hurricane-struck areas of the United States, Feldis said.
"That would allow him to move from place to place and commit murders," Feldis said.
Post a Comment