Today we’re going to dive into one of Alaska’s most creepiest serial killers Israel Keyes. He’s not a nice man and did a lot of unpleasant things. It’s believed that he killed up to a dozen people before he was finally caught. There’s a lot to get into.
Israel Keyes made Alaska his hunting ground
On February 1, 2012, 18-year-old Samantha Koenig was working the late shift at the Common Grounds espresso coffee stand in Anchorage. She had been working there about a month and was a popular work, and she was well-liked by the regulars.
At this stage in his career, Israel Keyes was stalking four locations not for people but for places to murder easily. He eventually settled on the Common Grounds espresso stand. It was open later than other coffee stands, making it an easier target.
Keyes chose that night, in particular as he had tickets to take a cruise to Mexico from Louisiana the very next day at his home, also in Anchorage. In his shed, he placed two heaters to keep it warm and spread a tarp on the floor to deal with any blood. Shortly before eight p.m., after listening to his traffic scanner, he heard something big was happening on the other side of Anchorage, which would draw the police away.
Keyes kidnapped Samantha Koenig at coffee stand
Israel Keyes pulled over his face a ski mask and approached the Common Grounds coffee stand. He planned on robbing the place, but he didn’t even know how many people worked there. Unfortunately, it was just Samantha. He walked up and calmly ordered an Americano. Samantha prepared the drink, but when she turned around to hand it to him, Keyes pointed a handgun at her.
He hold her turn off the lights. And then he climbed through the window and inside the coffee stand. He told her to get on her knees as he bound her. She said her father was going to be there at any moment to pick her up. He hesitated but eventually pushed her to his car. He put her in the passenger seat and told her he was going to hold her for ransom.
Israel Keyes was born in 1978 in Richmond, Utah, to parents who are Mormon and was homeschooled when the family moved to the state of Washington.
They began to attend the ARC, a Christian identity church with pretty racist and anti-Semitic views. He later admitted to sexually assaulting a young girl in Oregon sometime between 1996 and 1998. He would have been 18 to 20 years old. At 20, he joined the Army. He served at Fort Lewis, Fort Hood and in Egypt, he was known for his heavy drinking and his love of the Insane Clown Posse. In 2000, he was honorably discharged from the Army. And it was during this time he proclaimed he was an atheist. He said his first murder victim was in two thousand and one while he lived in nearby Washington, though it is unknown who his first victim was on that fateful day.
Israel Keyes committed murders all over the country
He’s also claimed to have murdered a couple while he was living in Washington and alluded to them being buried in a location near a valley, Keyes further claimed he had committed four murders in total while living in Washington state from 2001 to 2007, but gave investigators very little to go on, alluding to two separate murders in either 2005 or 2006.
In 2007, Israel Keyes moved to Anchorage, Alaska. Here, he established Keyes construction and began working as a contractor. He seemed like a very normal person, regular Joe, dedicated to his business and a family man to his daughter and girlfriend, a quiet guy who generally kept to himself but keep to himself he did not. By that time, Israel Keyes was already a serial killer, bank robber and everything in between. His hero was Ted Bundy, and they did share a number of similarities.
He would travel to locations in the United States, always wanting to keep the attention away from him, committing murders and other unspeakable acts. Israel Keyes planned murders well in advance and took extraordinary action to avoid detection. He placed murder bags around the country filled with shovels, guns and ammunition. Keyes would later admit to kidnapping a woman on the East Coast in April 2009, who he said was taken across state lines and buried in upstate New York. Authorities suspect the victim may have been, forty-nine year old Deborah Feldman also around the time Keyes robbed a bank in New York in June 2011.
Keyes flew from Alaska and eventually ended up in Vermont to kill a couple
Israel Keyes flew from Alaska to Chicago and then rented a car and drove more than 900 miles to the small town of Essex, Vermont. On the night of June 8th, Keyes broke into the home of Bill and Lorraine Currier subdued, then took them to another location where he shot Bill and sexually assaulted Lorraine before strangling her. Their disappearance remained a mystery until Israel’s confession.
Israel Keyes never gave law enforcement an exact number of his victims. It’s believed to be around 12, but it would be his last victim, Samantha Koenig, that would prove to be his undoing.
Samantha was tied up in Keyes shed
After taking her keys, drove Samantha to the house he shared with his girlfriend and young daughter and tied her up in a shed next to the house, he managed to do this unnoticed somehow by his girlfriend. He told Samantha that he would kill her if she screamed. And then he turned on the radio in the shed to cover up any noise she made. Keyes then left and after getting information from Samantha, he broke into Samantha’s boyfriend’s truck and stole her debit card.
He then returned to his house, poured himself a glass of wine and went back to the shed. He then sexually assaulted her while choking her till he killed her. After he was finished with her, he wrapped her body in a tarp and stuffed her in a cabinet in the freezing shed. By then it was morning and he woke his daughter for school and called a cab to get to the airport, where he flew to New Orleans on a cruise he had booked months earlier after his cruise was over.
Israel Keyes traveled to Texas, where he robbed and burned a house. He then robbed a branch of the National Bank of Texas. After that, he drove to Houston and flew back to Anchorage. On February 19th, he’s returned to his home, removed Samantha’s body from the cabinet and had sex with her frozen corpse. A few days later, he applied makeup to Samantha’s face to make her appear alive, so her eyes open with fishing line and photographed her with a recent newspaper.
Samantha was dead when Israel Keyes sent the ransom note
He then included the photo with a ransom note to Samantha’s family, telling them to deposit 30000 dollars into Samantha’s bank account if they wished to see her alive again. He then texted Samantha’s boyfriend from her phone, giving him directions to a dog park where he left a photo on the demands. A few days later, Israel took Samantha’s body and dumped it in Matanuska Lake near Anchorage.
Keyes flew to Las Vegas, rented a car, and drove to Arizona, where he used Samantha’s debit card to withdraw four hundred dollars. Keyes wore a disguise when he made the transactions, but an ATM security camera recorded an image of the white Ford Focus rental car he was driving. The image did not capture the license plate, but it was clear enough to determine the make and model of the car.
Two days later, on March nine, Keys withdrew money from an ATM in Texas, and the FBI alerted Texas law enforcement officials to be on the lookout for a white Ford Focus. On March 13th, a Texas highway patrolman spotted a white Ford Focus parked at a motel when Keyes left the motel. The officer followed him and noticed the car was traveling three miles over the speed limit. Using this as an excuse, the police officer pulled him over and asked Israel for his driver’s license when Israel gave him his Alaskan driver’s license. The officer then called for backup.
Texas police arrested Keyes
Police found the mask Keyes wore while withdrawing the money from the ATMs, a gun and Samantha’s debit card.
They arrested Israel Keyes. A few days later, they flew him back to Anchorage. At first, Israel Keyes refused to talk to investigators, but on March 31st, he admitted to abducting Samantha Koenig from the coffee stand. He said he would give authorities more details eventually on the murder of Samantha and his many other crimes. But he would only talk if they could promise to keep the details from the press. He didn’t want his daughter to read about everything he had done to Samantha.
He did agree to tell the investigators the details of the abduction and murder of Samantha Koenig, as well as where to find her body. In a few days later, police recovered her remains from a new school.
On May 23, Keyes appeared before a United States district judge in a federal court for a hearing to set a trial date. Partway through the hearing, Keyes broke free from his steel leg shackles and jumped over the railing into the first row of seats in the gallery area. Deputies tackled keys and used a Taser to subdue him.
Investigators who questioned Keys said he was arrogant and sometimes seemed bored while relating to details of his crimes. But when talking about an abduction or murder, he’d get excited and sit on the edge of his seat.
Israel Keyes committed suicide leaving many questions unanswered
In late November, he’s met again with investigators. But by the end of the interview, he seemed distracted and told them he might be willing to talk to them. The following week, two days later, at 5:57 a.m., a prison guard performing a security check noticed a strange red colored streak on the floor of cell three.
Israel Keyes was found lying face down in a cell covered in blood. He was pronounced dead at six, 13 a.m. He had slit open his left wrist along the vein and a razor blade attached to a pencil, it was found under his body. Wanting to make sure he got an A plus in killing himself, he’s laid on his stomach and tied a bedsheet noose around his neck. Then with his left leg bent back, he tied the other end of the sheet around his left ankle. This ensured that when he lost consciousness due to blood loss, the force of his leg lowering back down to the bed would tighten the noose around his neck and strangle him.
Police officials still have not determined how Keyes obtained a razor blade while locked in his cell. Israel Keyes died doing what he loved killing, but now the investigators would never know about his many, many more victims that he never told them about or the locations of the bodies that were hidden across the United States. Keys left a four page suicide note on a yellow legal pad so saturated with his blood it was unreadable until the FBI restored most of it, though it didn’t hold much in the way of information regarding his crimes or anything the police could use.
Keyes is forever etched into the criminal history of Alaska
And so ends the long, tragic and horrific story of Israel Keyes psychopath, murderer, someone who held the key information on a long list of cold cases that will now likely never be solved.
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