I asked myself to question this week, what's the smallest detail that could unravel even the most clever serial killer? I mem William Phelps, an investigative journalist and author of forty plus true crime books. I've dedicated the past twenty years of my life to helping families of the missing and murder join me. We're crossing the line. You know, a lot of true crime podcasts, investigative shows, and even crime writers like myself have weighed in on this week's subject. Israel Keys, a serial killer who chose his victims randomly. But I have my own take on this guy. I covered the case on my former investigation discovery series Dark Minds in a special two part episode that first aired in two thousand thirteen called The Secrets of Israel Keys. I was investigating Keys as the story was breaking, filming and speaking to several people involved on the front lines. For reasons i'll soon explain, I can say that working this story weighed heavily on myself and my crew, and that's because Keys was a special kind of monster. To better understand Keys, I want to discuss his last known victim. On February one, two thousand twelve, eighteen year old Samantha Konig is working the night shift in one of those drive through coffee stands found everywhere around Anchorage, Alaska. As I was working the case at the time, I visited this particular location, it was called common Grounds Espresso. Now you have to picture this. It's a small kiosk parked in a desolate corner of a Jim's parking lot. The street it's on, two to Road is heavily trafficked. So on that night ten years ago, it's just before eight pm and the stand is about to close. Israel Keys gets out of his truck, which is parked across the street, and walks up to the kios open window. He orders a coffee. It's a cold night, low thirties, so it's likely Samantha didn't find it strange that this customer who just came up to her window is wearing a ski mask. She makes the drinking, hands it to him. Keys pulls out a gun and demands money. She gets the cash together and hands it over. Then Keys forces himself into the stand. He zip ties her hands together, and then he asked her where her car is parked. Well, Samantha had been dropped off so she doesn't have a car. He then wrestles her out of the kiosk and begins walking her toward his truck, kind of you know, holding her to his side tightly. Right. Surveyor on his footage shows that Samantha fights, She struggles to get away and actually runs. He's chases and tackles her. He presses a gun into her body. It's a twenty two caliber pistol, he says, has a silencer on it, and he threatens to kill her if she tries escaping again. Okay, so you mentioned that Keys picked his victims randomly, but it sounds like there's some money involved too. That is the beautiful voice of my executive producer, Katherine Law, who you're gonna hear from time to time, and she brings up a really good point here. Key's committed robberies to kind of finance his travel for murders. He wasn't a local murderer. Guy didn't drive around in a white van, you know, with zip ties, a shovel and some chloroform. This guy traveled thousands of miles to commit murders, which we'll get to, but with this particular location. He chose it because it was openly he knew only one person would be working at that war and usually it's a young woman, since most of the Kiosk employees were teenage students, and Keys spent days leading up to this particular night doing drive buys, kind of casing to joint. I don't know. I would call that stocking myself, but you know. So now Keys forces Samantha to walk across Tudor Road with him to the parking lot between an eye hoop and a dairy queen where his white truck is parked. This detail will tell you a lot about the kind of guy we're dealing with here. With Keys, he had removed the license plates and the mounted toolbox from the bed of his truck. So why do you think he removed the toolbox. I think he removed the toolbox because not every truck has a toolbox. You know, it's only a small percentage. So in order to just blend in with the rest of the trucks around, he takes the toolbox out so someone doesn't describe a white truck with a toolbox. And I'll say this, not many serial killers display the level organization that Keys did. I'll give you a better example Keys was a handyman. In fact, I was told he was one of the best in Anchorage. People loved his work. I even met a couple and they showed me some of the bookshelves he built inside their home. And creepy as it was, you know, looking at this stuff, I have to admit the guy was a really good carpenter. He was meticulous. He paid close attention to detail. But in my professional way, that fits into the psychopathy of being extremely organized and methodical. And what he did in this case, though, Samantha Konik and Anchorage, a craving for power and control took over and Key's got sloppy. And when I'm talking about sloppy for Keys, we're talking about the tiniest mistake. First, I want to talk about Samantha Konick. The photos of or I have you can see she has this engaging smile, very magnetic. You could tell she was friendly and kind, and I got this from talking to people about her. In my view, she was a child, her entire life ahead of her. Also, in my opinion, allowing the teenager to work at a coffee kiosk at night alone, that's dangerous. This detail kind of bothers me a little bit, but it is a fact the police did very little at first to look into her disappearance. And here's why. She had been working at the coffee stand for a few weeks, and she had a troubled history to some extent. Law enforcement initially believed she robbed the place and took off with the money to go party. It would be nearly two weeks before police seriously began looking into her case, and by that time, she's already dead. This is my problem with this, and you've heard this before on this show. Police assumed something. You can never assume anything when you're looking for missing people. If you assume, if you make a judgment, oh, she's just out party and she stole the money, she bought drugs with it, it could be a number of reasons. You lose very precious time, and time is your biggest enemy in a missing person case. Now Keys has a police scanner in order to know where law enforcement is, and he also walks around Anchorage with Samantha for five hours, reportedly being seen by over a dozen people. There's video of this abduction which is chilling, and it feels like literally something out of a horror film. Key's is six ft two, a foot caller. Then Samantha, She's no match for him, he says later he was going to wait until her ride came and abduct both. It's like this unquenchable thirst at this stage of his murder run. At this point he can't control himself anymore. As he abducts Samantha. It's been eight months since Keys has killed anyone that we know of. In the end, the act of controlling and killing, the fantasy aspect of it for Keys, he cannot stop obsessing over now. It outweighs everything else. And when you look at this case, that's really his undoing and be right back. I just want to break down for a minute, Israel Keys psychopathy. He's a killer who seems at first glance to be quote different, like a superkiller, if you will, when in reality he falls in line with most serial killers. So let me break that down. Anti social personality disorder. He robbed banks. He was an arsonist. You have no regard for other people's feelings, You have no regard for other people's lives. He was good to family members and community members described him as an average dude when reality check, so was John Wayne gacy. Keys was about power and control. Hedonistic killer, meaning he derives pleasure from the act of killing, you know, like a thrill killer, which does make him slightly unique in that respect as a serial killer. And Key's had O c D, another common trade amongst serial killers. I might add, He's like to partake an obsessive, ritualistic behavior that was intensified by the fantasies in his head and his need for gratification. And we're going to get to some of that later on. The one thing that is different is that he chose victims without preference for race, age, gender, social status, whereas lots of serial killers have a preference for specific type of victim sex workers, children, blonde, brunettes, white, black, et cetera. The guy knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. Make no mistake, Israel Keys was a monster, a powder keg of violence flying around the planet, basically choosing people at random. So what creates a monster like this? Keys was born in Utah and n into a Mormon family. They moved to Stevens County, Washington. He was homeschooled. He had nine siblings. The family attended the ark a white supremacist church connected to what's called the Christian Identity Movement. Simply put, we're talking about a hate group here. Keys was also honorably discharged from the army, where he spent two years. From all accounts, he out a horrific childhood that fell in line with the common abuses we know some serial killers experience during their childhood's. I don't want to draw one ounce of sympathy about this guy. That's not my job. You want to know about his abusive childhood, read Marine Callahan's book American Predator. You can get all the detail you want. Going back to Samantha Cone Egg, what happened when Keys forced her into his car. He zip ties Samantha to the seatbelt and tells her he is holding her for a ransom that her family will have to pay. He wants Samantha's phone. She left it in the kiosk, so Keys drives back, cleans the kiosk, and finds her phone. He then sends the text from her phone to her boyfriend and her boss, and he basically says, I've had a rough week and I'm leaving town for a few days. And then he takes the battery and the chip out of her phone. Keys takes Samantha to his house and anchorage and he ties her up in the shed out back. He has a girlfriend and a daughter who lived with him in the house, but they've gone on vacation. The FBI, meanwhile, with the anchorage p D are now on this case and looking directly where they should at family and friends. Three weeks into her disappearance, Samantha's boyfriend receives another text. This is all it says, Connor park sign under pick of Albert. Ain't she purty now? Samantha Konigs debit card was inside her boyfriend's truck. She had given Keys the address to where her boyfriend's truck was parked, so after he tied her up, he headed out to that truck to grab her card. As I looked at this, I don't know if I believe that or not. I think he probably killed her first. The point is he got her debit card, and he got her number so he could get cash out of her account, which is an important fact in this case to fund for his next killing. Exactly, not only his killing, but all the tools he needs to set up his kills, the money he needs to pay his bills because he would, you know, go out into the woods for a week to look for somebody. So you know, there's all kinds of funding going on here for him, but it all pertains to his serial murder. So now going back to that message she sends to the boyfriend the text Connor Park sign under pick of Albert. Ain't she purty? Law enforcement of course is called to the park that location and there's a plastic bag with a photo inside. The photo is of Samantha and there's a note talking about putting thirty thou dollars into Samantha's account. That photo was of Samantha holding a newspaper dated February, almost two weeks after her abduction. So what he's saying is she's still alive. Over the course of the next week and even longer, Keys wearing a covering over his face, a hoodie, dark shades. Remember now, the FBI has not identified him yet, but he has photographed making withdrawals from Samantha's account. Can't tell who he is, but something is a bit strange. The withdrawals are made in Arizona, New Mexico, Humble and Shepherd, Texas. I mean, you can't get much further from Alaska than Texas. Yeah, trust me, I flew that route that keyths took, and it took forever. So this is significant. I mean, the guy's making withdrawals all over like the Southwest. Now, in one of the A t M photos, Keys, who'd been flawless and undetectable for what amounts to about twelve years, he makes a costly mistake. He allows the vehicle he'd been driving to be photographed by the A t M CCTV. It seems like such a simple and sloppy mistake to make. Well, he's running on adrenaline at this point. You know he's killed for a long time. There's a lot of different parts to this particular crime, this particular murder, and he makes this small mistake that ultimately sends law enforcement on the lookout for the vehicle, and they find it. A Texas trooper pulls over Keys, searches the car, finds a gun, Samantha's I D and that A t M card, her cell phone, and the disguise matching the one from the A t M CCTV. Israel. Keys is caught. He's thirty four at the time. He has no criminal record, He's a construction handyman, business owner, and Anchorage and people like him. He lives in a suburban neighborhood with his girlfriend and his ten year old daughter from a previous relationship. He was a trusted member of his community. In fact, someone from the U. S. Attorney's Office and Anchorage had actually hired him once even get this, even gave him the key to his house so Keys could work inside his house when he wasn't home. All right, So I just want to save this up front. Here. A lot of the detail I'm going to talk about next, some of which is very graphic, came from the FBI, and this is important to me, who spoke to Samantha's family before releasing it publicly. And some of this is from my own reporting I did while in Texas and Alaska. Key starts talking to the FBI. And here's the thing about this interrogation. Every time he sits down with them, he has a detailed request a Snickers bar Americano from Starbucks and a specific brand of cigar. They give it to him, of course, but it's a display really of his absolute narcissism and his deep need to control every situation. Keys had placed photos of Samantha purportedly being alive in that ransom note bag. But as they start talking to Keys, any hope that Samantha Konig is alive dissolves. He had chained Samantha up in his shed. He sexually assaulted her, then he strangled her to death. Now, I was told by high up law enforcement that keeps soda eyes open, put makeup on her face and posed her to take those photographs to make people think she was alive. And the photos are just horrific once you realize what they are. That is straight out of a horror film, like sona eyes open. Well, the photo he kind of blurred it. It's kind of blurry a little bit, and it's black and white, I think. So, remember you're looking at it wanting to believe she's alive. Right away, your mind is saying, I want to believe she's alive. You look at it. Her eyes are open, she's holding the paper. She looks scared, but she is dead and she's probably been dead for at least ten twelve days maybe so. Not only does he do that to Samantha Conick, he dismembers her and he places her body parts in a lake while he's fishing one afternoon. Well, he points the FBI to where ten hours of diving and the FBI recovers Samantha's body parts. Like a lot of his victim choices, Keys was more focused on location and surroundings than the victim. The victim became secondary to his choosing the right location to not draw attention to himself, though in this case you really wouldn't think so. When I pulled out my file on Keys, I'm going through the pages and a lot of them are smudged, you know, And it brought back a memory of when we were going up to staircase in the Olympia National Park where I believe Keys stalked and killed the hiker, which he was never charged with or never connected to him. In the end, we're talking about a rainforest. I have never seen rain like that in my life. So my point is this Keys was up there. For sure. We know the idea that Keys chose a victim in this rainforest, on the top of this mountain, in the middle of literally in the middle of absolutely nowhere tells you about his absolute focus and the kind of killer he was, and the fact that the victim was secondary. Going back to the beginning of this, Keys had bought himself some time by sending that text to Samantha's family, telling them she'd be gone for a few days, and that's what threw the Anchorage police off the trail for a time. But in choosing Samantha, he broke a golden rule that he had really been living by for all those years, and one that he went to great lengths to follow, disguising his location. After ten years that we know of of not being caught, the urge to kill became overwhelming for him. So Keys could not control the need to kill anymore. And this is why he grabs this girl in his backyard. Because he lives in Anchorage. This was something he would have never, ever, ever, ever done, is abduct somebody in his hometown. This is a guy who traveled three thousand miles to abduct someone and kill him. It's kind of like, you don't commit a crime in your own neighborhood. People are gonna know who did it. Picture these FBI agents sitting in the room with him. Actually you can picture them because you can see him on video. It's all over the place. But it's like an uh moment, you know what I mean? Washington State, California, Wyoming, Texas, and Vermont to be exact. But before Keys will talk about it all, he again pulls the I'm in charge cards psychopaths love to use, and he says this. He says, I'll tell you about everything and give you every gory detail you want, but I want an execution date. I want to promise that I'll get the death penalty. I mean, it's all about the control. You can see it right there in that word. He chooses gory, right. He thinks he's given him a bone by saying, I'll give you all the gory detail. I'll give you all the salacious stuff you want. So I think i'd like to play a quote by Keys from his FBI interviews. Listen to this. They're gonna tell you something that does not line up with anything I tell you, because I'm two different people, basically, and the only person who knows about what I'm telling you the kind of things I'm telling you is me. How long have you been to different people? Long time years. If you watch the interrogation videos of Keys, you'll see the amount of control he wields. The laughing. The laughing is just it'll make you sick the power he tries to rain in. You know, it's that smugness. One of the most obvious things is he has zero emotion for any of this stuff. It's it's just all a game to him. He's laughing, he's joking, he's drinking his coffee, eating his candy bar. It's like he gets this self satisfact shin of holding onto information. And I mean, that's what these guys do. The quote I played it is the furthest thing from the truth about him Israel Keys is not two different people. The FBI is really shaken to their core when Keys admits to killing a married couple, Bill in Lorraine Courier, four thousand miles from his Anchorage home. Now, I remember being at Essex Junction, Vermont and talking to the detective who took the call from the FBI that day. The detective took me out into the woods where Key's buried. One of what he called this kill cash is an Orange home depot five gallon bucket, which he utilized in the abduction and murders of Bill and Lorraine Courier. In it, we have a silencer, a plastic stock for twenty two, a drum, magazine and and look just a bunch of other weird serial killer ship that you can go online and you can see the actual pictures of what's in there. The Courier's house just happened to fit what Keys was looking for at the time, and easily accessible garage. He wanted to kill a couple. That was his goal. He didn't know who until he found the Couriers. Something else too that sparks a memory for me of being in Vermont is that he also wanted to choose a house that didn't have a dog. I think that's very important. So they have a garage, they don't have a dog. What does that mean. He can go in the back and can get into garage, you can get in the house. No one will see him. What he did to these people, it was barbaric. He took them to an abandoned farmhouse he had scoped out previously, restrained them in separate parts of the building. He sexually assaulted Lorraine and he killed her while her husband was forced to watch. And then he sexually assaulted and killed Bill, Lorraine's husband, and I was told he also sexually assaulted Bill's corpse later. Again, this is all about power power and control. There are far too many layers of this case to focus on in the time we have, but there is, as I said earlier, a well done book about Keys, American Predator, by Marine Callaghan that details it all. She did a fantastic job on this book, a lot of exclusive reporting, which I can appreciate. She noted that Keys had fitted himself with a gastric band and he had visited a plastic surgery clinic in Mexico, kind of theorizing that Keys was meticulously planning to become an even more stealthy killer, like the lap band surgery so he wouldn't get hungry as often, you know what I mean. And the plastic surgery was to change his fingerprints, and he even removed all his body hair to lessen the chances of leaving evidence behind. But we need to take a quick break, so I'll be right back for me and this show. I want to end this episode by talking a little bit about the effect a case like this can have on law enforcement and people who go down the rabbit hole of it all. Writers like myself, producers and TV people, etcetera. You have to understand that you don't really realize truly how a case like this can seep into your psyche. I mean, while I was investigating this case, to hear the details from those who knew them intimately, some of which were far too graphic to put into my two hour TV special, it became all consuming. He began to question humanity a little bit, and Keys was not a serial killer who needed recognition and notoriety, which made him even more dangerous. It's believed that he began killing in two thousand one. He buried bodies, He put bodies in water so deep there's no chance of ever finding them. He owned property, as I said earlier, in Upstate New York. He abducted random females and killed them and transported their bodies to other states to dismember and discard. Barry before he even started killing in the nineties, he raped. He drove around the country, and he raped people. So do we know how many victims there were at the end. We will never know. I mean, eleven murders, the FBI says, at least, but there's no way we'll ever understand the extent of what he did to people while they were alive or dead. A majority's bodies were never discovered, so really, the Keys could have said anything he wanted. But look a guy like that says this, you believe him. Keys once said, you don't know the depths of darkness that I've gone to. You don't know what I've done. I believe him when he says this. This is not an exaggeration. In December two thousand twelve, thirty four year old Israel Keys committed suicide in his Alaska jail cell by embedding a disposable razor blade into a pencil and slitting his wrist and using a sheet to strangle himself. In two thousand sixteen, a CEO of Corrections officer who was watching and Keys was fired for a quote negligent and attention over what happened to me. That's bullshit, bureaucracy, the state passing the buck. Here's the truth. Nobody was going to stop Keys from killing himself. Key's left behind a blood soaked note, not really a suicide note, but more so the ramblings of a psychopath. He committed suicide because he knew the death penalty was not going to happen, at least anytime soon. He didn't want a trial because, in his grandiose way of thinking, he is trying to spare his family, especially his daughter, the details of his true self and his gruesomeness. And here's something I've thought about for many years. I believe he killed himself because he knew he would eventually, after years of being in prison, begin talking about his crimes. He wouldn't be able to help himself. He'd become that nickname serial killer he never wanted to be. Sources for today's episode come from an FBI press release stated August an article on FBI dot gov titled seeking Public's Assistants, New information released in serial killer case, Various articles from the Anchorage Daily News, American Predator, The Hunt for the Most Meticulous serial Killer of the one century by Maureen Callahan. Crossing the Line is production of I Heeart Radio. It's executive produced by me Am William Phelps and iHeart Executive producer Katherine Law. Special thanks to producer Rose Bacci and EP Christina Everett. Audio engineering, original music and sound designed by Matt Russell. Additional thanks to Will Pearson at I Heeart Radio. The series theme number four four four is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

I asked myself to question this week, what's the smallest detail that could unravel even the most clever serial killer? I mem William Phelps, an investigative journalist and author of forty plus true crime books. I've dedicated the past twenty years of my life to helping families of the missing and murder join me. We're crossing the line. You know, a lot of true crime podcasts, investigative shows, and even crime writers like myself have weighed in on this week's subject. Israel Keys, a serial killer who chose his victims randomly. But I have my own take on this guy. I covered the case on my former investigation discovery series Dark Minds in a special two part episode that first aired in two thousand thirteen called The Secrets of Israel Keys. I was investigating Keys as the story was breaking, filming and speaking to several people involved on the front lines. For reasons i'll soon explain, I can say that working this story weighed heavily on myself and my crew, and that's because Keys was a special kind of monster. To better understand Keys, I want to discuss his last known victim. On February one, two thousand twelve, eighteen year old Samantha Konig is working the night shift in one of those drive through coffee stands found everywhere around Anchorage, Alaska. As I was working the case at the time, I visited this particular location, it was called common Grounds Espresso. Now you have to picture this. It's a small kiosk parked in a desolate corner of a Jim's parking lot. The street it's on, two to Road is heavily trafficked. So on that night ten years ago, it's just before eight pm and the stand is about to close. Israel Keys gets out of his truck, which is parked across the street, and walks up to the kios open window. He orders a coffee. It's a cold night, low thirties, so it's likely Samantha didn't find it strange that this customer who just came up to her window is wearing a ski mask. She makes the drinking, hands it to him. Keys pulls out a gun and demands money. She gets the cash together and hands it over. Then Keys forces himself into the stand. He zip ties her hands together, and then he asked her where her car is parked. Well, Samantha had been dropped off so she doesn't have a car. He then wrestles her out of the kiosk and begins walking her toward his truck, kind of you know, holding her to his side tightly. Right. Surveyor on his footage shows that Samantha fights, She struggles to get away and actually runs. He's chases and tackles her. He presses a gun into her body. It's a twenty two caliber pistol, he says, has a silencer on it, and he threatens to kill her if she tries escaping again. Okay, so you mentioned that Keys picked his victims randomly, but it sounds like there's some money involved too. That is the beautiful voice of my executive producer, Katherine Law, who you're gonna hear from time to time, and she brings up a really good point here. Key's committed robberies to kind of finance his travel for murders. He wasn't a local murderer. Guy didn't drive around in a white van, you know, with zip ties, a shovel and some chloroform. This guy traveled thousands of miles to commit murders, which we'll get to, but with this particular location. He chose it because it was openly he knew only one person would be working at that war and usually it's a young woman, since most of the Kiosk employees were teenage students, and Keys spent days leading up to this particular night doing drive buys, kind of casing to joint. I don't know. I would call that stocking myself, but you know. So now Keys forces Samantha to walk across Tudor Road with him to the parking lot between an eye hoop and a dairy queen where his white truck is parked. This detail will tell you a lot about the kind of guy we're dealing with here. With Keys, he had removed the license plates and the mounted toolbox from the bed of his truck. So why do you think he removed the toolbox. I think he removed the toolbox because not every truck has a toolbox. You know, it's only a small percentage. So in order to just blend in with the rest of the trucks around, he takes the toolbox out so someone doesn't describe a white truck with a toolbox. And I'll say this, not many serial killers display the level organization that Keys did. I'll give you a better example Keys was a handyman. In fact, I was told he was one of the best in Anchorage. People loved his work. I even met a couple and they showed me some of the bookshelves he built inside their home. And creepy as it was, you know, looking at this stuff, I have to admit the guy was a really good carpenter. He was meticulous. He paid close attention to detail. But in my professional way, that fits into the psychopathy of being extremely organized and methodical. And what he did in this case, though, Samantha Konik and Anchorage, a craving for power and control took over and Key's got sloppy. And when I'm talking about sloppy for Keys, we're talking about the tiniest mistake. First, I want to talk about Samantha Konick. The photos of or I have you can see she has this engaging smile, very magnetic. You could tell she was friendly and kind, and I got this from talking to people about her. In my view, she was a child, her entire life ahead of her. Also, in my opinion, allowing the teenager to work at a coffee kiosk at night alone, that's dangerous. This detail kind of bothers me a little bit, but it is a fact the police did very little at first to look into her disappearance. And here's why. She had been working at the coffee stand for a few weeks, and she had a troubled history to some extent. Law enforcement initially believed she robbed the place and took off with the money to go party. It would be nearly two weeks before police seriously began looking into her case, and by that time, she's already dead. This is my problem with this, and you've heard this before on this show. Police assumed something. You can never assume anything when you're looking for missing people. If you assume, if you make a judgment, oh, she's just out party and she stole the money, she bought drugs with it, it could be a number of reasons. You lose very precious time, and time is your biggest enemy in a missing person case. Now Keys has a police scanner in order to know where law enforcement is, and he also walks around Anchorage with Samantha for five hours, reportedly being seen by over a dozen people. There's video of this abduction which is chilling, and it feels like literally something out of a horror film. Key's is six ft two, a foot caller. Then Samantha, She's no match for him, he says later he was going to wait until her ride came and abduct both. It's like this unquenchable thirst at this stage of his murder run. At this point he can't control himself anymore. As he abducts Samantha. It's been eight months since Keys has killed anyone that we know of. In the end, the act of controlling and killing, the fantasy aspect of it for Keys, he cannot stop obsessing over now. It outweighs everything else. And when you look at this case, that's really his undoing and be right back. I just want to break down for a minute, Israel Keys psychopathy. He's a killer who seems at first glance to be quote different, like a superkiller, if you will, when in reality he falls in line with most serial killers. So let me break that down. Anti social personality disorder. He robbed banks. He was an arsonist. You have no regard for other people's feelings, You have no regard for other people's lives. He was good to family members and community members described him as an average dude when reality check, so was John Wayne gacy. Keys was about power and control. Hedonistic killer, meaning he derives pleasure from the act of killing, you know, like a thrill killer, which does make him slightly unique in that respect as a serial killer. And Key's had O c D, another common trade amongst serial killers. I might add, He's like to partake an obsessive, ritualistic behavior that was intensified by the fantasies in his head and his need for gratification. And we're going to get to some of that later on. The one thing that is different is that he chose victims without preference for race, age, gender, social status, whereas lots of serial killers have a preference for specific type of victim sex workers, children, blonde, brunettes, white, black, et cetera. The guy knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. Make no mistake, Israel Keys was a monster, a powder keg of violence flying around the planet, basically choosing people at random. So what creates a monster like this? Keys was born in Utah and n into a Mormon family. They moved to Stevens County, Washington. He was homeschooled. He had nine siblings. The family attended the ark a white supremacist church connected to what's called the Christian Identity Movement. Simply put, we're talking about a hate group here. Keys was also honorably discharged from the army, where he spent two years. From all accounts, he out a horrific childhood that fell in line with the common abuses we know some serial killers experience during their childhood's. I don't want to draw one ounce of sympathy about this guy. That's not my job. You want to know about his abusive childhood, read Marine Callahan's book American Predator. You can get all the detail you want. Going back to Samantha Cone Egg, what happened when Keys forced her into his car. He zip ties Samantha to the seatbelt and tells her he is holding her for a ransom that her family will have to pay. He wants Samantha's phone. She left it in the kiosk, so Keys drives back, cleans the kiosk, and finds her phone. He then sends the text from her phone to her boyfriend and her boss, and he basically says, I've had a rough week and I'm leaving town for a few days. And then he takes the battery and the chip out of her phone. Keys takes Samantha to his house and anchorage and he ties her up in the shed out back. He has a girlfriend and a daughter who lived with him in the house, but they've gone on vacation. The FBI, meanwhile, with the anchorage p D are now on this case and looking directly where they should at family and friends. Three weeks into her disappearance, Samantha's boyfriend receives another text. This is all it says, Connor park sign under pick of Albert. Ain't she purty now? Samantha Konigs debit card was inside her boyfriend's truck. She had given Keys the address to where her boyfriend's truck was parked, so after he tied her up, he headed out to that truck to grab her card. As I looked at this, I don't know if I believe that or not. I think he probably killed her first. The point is he got her debit card, and he got her number so he could get cash out of her account, which is an important fact in this case to fund for his next killing. Exactly, not only his killing, but all the tools he needs to set up his kills, the money he needs to pay his bills because he would, you know, go out into the woods for a week to look for somebody. So you know, there's all kinds of funding going on here for him, but it all pertains to his serial murder. So now going back to that message she sends to the boyfriend the text Connor Park sign under pick of Albert. Ain't she purty? Law enforcement of course is called to the park that location and there's a plastic bag with a photo inside. The photo is of Samantha and there's a note talking about putting thirty thou dollars into Samantha's account. That photo was of Samantha holding a newspaper dated February, almost two weeks after her abduction. So what he's saying is she's still alive. Over the course of the next week and even longer, Keys wearing a covering over his face, a hoodie, dark shades. Remember now, the FBI has not identified him yet, but he has photographed making withdrawals from Samantha's account. Can't tell who he is, but something is a bit strange. The withdrawals are made in Arizona, New Mexico, Humble and Shepherd, Texas. I mean, you can't get much further from Alaska than Texas. Yeah, trust me, I flew that route that keyths took, and it took forever. So this is significant. I mean, the guy's making withdrawals all over like the Southwest. Now, in one of the A t M photos, Keys, who'd been flawless and undetectable for what amounts to about twelve years, he makes a costly mistake. He allows the vehicle he'd been driving to be photographed by the A t M CCTV. It seems like such a simple and sloppy mistake to make. Well, he's running on adrenaline at this point. You know he's killed for a long time. There's a lot of different parts to this particular crime, this particular murder, and he makes this small mistake that ultimately sends law enforcement on the lookout for the vehicle, and they find it. A Texas trooper pulls over Keys, searches the car, finds a gun, Samantha's I D and that A t M card, her cell phone, and the disguise matching the one from the A t M CCTV. Israel. Keys is caught. He's thirty four at the time. He has no criminal record, He's a construction handyman, business owner, and Anchorage and people like him. He lives in a suburban neighborhood with his girlfriend and his ten year old daughter from a previous relationship. He was a trusted member of his community. In fact, someone from the U. S. Attorney's Office and Anchorage had actually hired him once even get this, even gave him the key to his house so Keys could work inside his house when he wasn't home. All right, So I just want to save this up front. Here. A lot of the detail I'm going to talk about next, some of which is very graphic, came from the FBI, and this is important to me, who spoke to Samantha's family before releasing it publicly. And some of this is from my own reporting I did while in Texas and Alaska. Key starts talking to the FBI. And here's the thing about this interrogation. Every time he sits down with them, he has a detailed request a Snickers bar Americano from Starbucks and a specific brand of cigar. They give it to him, of course, but it's a display really of his absolute narcissism and his deep need to control every situation. Keys had placed photos of Samantha purportedly being alive in that ransom note bag. But as they start talking to Keys, any hope that Samantha Konig is alive dissolves. He had chained Samantha up in his shed. He sexually assaulted her, then he strangled her to death. Now, I was told by high up law enforcement that keeps soda eyes open, put makeup on her face and posed her to take those photographs to make people think she was alive. And the photos are just horrific once you realize what they are. That is straight out of a horror film, like sona eyes open. Well, the photo he kind of blurred it. It's kind of blurry a little bit, and it's black and white, I think. So, remember you're looking at it wanting to believe she's alive. Right away, your mind is saying, I want to believe she's alive. You look at it. Her eyes are open, she's holding the paper. She looks scared, but she is dead and she's probably been dead for at least ten twelve days maybe so. Not only does he do that to Samantha Conick, he dismembers her and he places her body parts in a lake while he's fishing one afternoon. Well, he points the FBI to where ten hours of diving and the FBI recovers Samantha's body parts. Like a lot of his victim choices, Keys was more focused on location and surroundings than the victim. The victim became secondary to his choosing the right location to not draw attention to himself, though in this case you really wouldn't think so. When I pulled out my file on Keys, I'm going through the pages and a lot of them are smudged, you know, And it brought back a memory of when we were going up to staircase in the Olympia National Park where I believe Keys stalked and killed the hiker, which he was never charged with or never connected to him. In the end, we're talking about a rainforest. I have never seen rain like that in my life. So my point is this Keys was up there. For sure. We know the idea that Keys chose a victim in this rainforest, on the top of this mountain, in the middle of literally in the middle of absolutely nowhere tells you about his absolute focus and the kind of killer he was, and the fact that the victim was secondary. Going back to the beginning of this, Keys had bought himself some time by sending that text to Samantha's family, telling them she'd be gone for a few days, and that's what threw the Anchorage police off the trail for a time. But in choosing Samantha, he broke a golden rule that he had really been living by for all those years, and one that he went to great lengths to follow, disguising his location. After ten years that we know of of not being caught, the urge to kill became overwhelming for him. So Keys could not control the need to kill anymore. And this is why he grabs this girl in his backyard. Because he lives in Anchorage. This was something he would have never, ever, ever, ever done, is abduct somebody in his hometown. This is a guy who traveled three thousand miles to abduct someone and kill him. It's kind of like, you don't commit a crime in your own neighborhood. People are gonna know who did it. Picture these FBI agents sitting in the room with him. Actually you can picture them because you can see him on video. It's all over the place. But it's like an uh moment, you know what I mean? Washington State, California, Wyoming, Texas, and Vermont to be exact. But before Keys will talk about it all, he again pulls the I'm in charge cards psychopaths love to use, and he says this. He says, I'll tell you about everything and give you every gory detail you want, but I want an execution date. I want to promise that I'll get the death penalty. I mean, it's all about the control. You can see it right there in that word. He chooses gory, right. He thinks he's given him a bone by saying, I'll give you all the gory detail. I'll give you all the salacious stuff you want. So I think i'd like to play a quote by Keys from his FBI interviews. Listen to this. They're gonna tell you something that does not line up with anything I tell you, because I'm two different people, basically, and the only person who knows about what I'm telling you the kind of things I'm telling you is me. How long have you been to different people? Long time years. If you watch the interrogation videos of Keys, you'll see the amount of control he wields. The laughing. The laughing is just it'll make you sick the power he tries to rain in. You know, it's that smugness. One of the most obvious things is he has zero emotion for any of this stuff. It's it's just all a game to him. He's laughing, he's joking, he's drinking his coffee, eating his candy bar. It's like he gets this self satisfact shin of holding onto information. And I mean, that's what these guys do. The quote I played it is the furthest thing from the truth about him Israel Keys is not two different people. The FBI is really shaken to their core when Keys admits to killing a married couple, Bill in Lorraine Courier, four thousand miles from his Anchorage home. Now, I remember being at Essex Junction, Vermont and talking to the detective who took the call from the FBI that day. The detective took me out into the woods where Key's buried. One of what he called this kill cash is an Orange home depot five gallon bucket, which he utilized in the abduction and murders of Bill and Lorraine Courier. In it, we have a silencer, a plastic stock for twenty two, a drum, magazine and and look just a bunch of other weird serial killer ship that you can go online and you can see the actual pictures of what's in there. The Courier's house just happened to fit what Keys was looking for at the time, and easily accessible garage. He wanted to kill a couple. That was his goal. He didn't know who until he found the Couriers. Something else too that sparks a memory for me of being in Vermont is that he also wanted to choose a house that didn't have a dog. I think that's very important. So they have a garage, they don't have a dog. What does that mean. He can go in the back and can get into garage, you can get in the house. No one will see him. What he did to these people, it was barbaric. He took them to an abandoned farmhouse he had scoped out previously, restrained them in separate parts of the building. He sexually assaulted Lorraine and he killed her while her husband was forced to watch. And then he sexually assaulted and killed Bill, Lorraine's husband, and I was told he also sexually assaulted Bill's corpse later. Again, this is all about power power and control. There are far too many layers of this case to focus on in the time we have, but there is, as I said earlier, a well done book about Keys, American Predator, by Marine Callaghan that details it all. She did a fantastic job on this book, a lot of exclusive reporting, which I can appreciate. She noted that Keys had fitted himself with a gastric band and he had visited a plastic surgery clinic in Mexico, kind of theorizing that Keys was meticulously planning to become an even more stealthy killer, like the lap band surgery so he wouldn't get hungry as often, you know what I mean. And the plastic surgery was to change his fingerprints, and he even removed all his body hair to lessen the chances of leaving evidence behind. But we need to take a quick break, so I'll be right back for me and this show. I want to end this episode by talking a little bit about the effect a case like this can have on law enforcement and people who go down the rabbit hole of it all. Writers like myself, producers and TV people, etcetera. You have to understand that you don't really realize truly how a case like this can seep into your psyche. I mean, while I was investigating this case, to hear the details from those who knew them intimately, some of which were far too graphic to put into my two hour TV special, it became all consuming. He began to question humanity a little bit, and Keys was not a serial killer who needed recognition and notoriety, which made him even more dangerous. It's believed that he began killing in two thousand one. He buried bodies, He put bodies in water so deep there's no chance of ever finding them. He owned property, as I said earlier, in Upstate New York. He abducted random females and killed them and transported their bodies to other states to dismember and discard. Barry before he even started killing in the nineties, he raped. He drove around the country, and he raped people. So do we know how many victims there were at the end. We will never know. I mean, eleven murders, the FBI says, at least, but there's no way we'll ever understand the extent of what he did to people while they were alive or dead. A majority's bodies were never discovered, so really, the Keys could have said anything he wanted. But look a guy like that says this, you believe him. Keys once said, you don't know the depths of darkness that I've gone to. You don't know what I've done. I believe him when he says this. This is not an exaggeration. In December two thousand twelve, thirty four year old Israel Keys committed suicide in his Alaska jail cell by embedding a disposable razor blade into a pencil and slitting his wrist and using a sheet to strangle himself. In two thousand sixteen, a CEO of Corrections officer who was watching and Keys was fired for a quote negligent and attention over what happened to me. That's bullshit, bureaucracy, the state passing the buck. Here's the truth. Nobody was going to stop Keys from killing himself. Key's left behind a blood soaked note, not really a suicide note, but more so the ramblings of a psychopath. He committed suicide because he knew the death penalty was not going to happen, at least anytime soon. He didn't want a trial because, in his grandiose way of thinking, he is trying to spare his family, especially his daughter, the details of his true self and his gruesomeness. And here's something I've thought about for many years. I believe he killed himself because he knew he would eventually, after years of being in prison, begin talking about his crimes. He wouldn't be able to help himself. He'd become that nickname serial killer he never wanted to be. Sources for today's episode come from an FBI press release stated August an article on FBI dot gov titled seeking Public's Assistants, New information released in serial killer case, Various articles from the Anchorage Daily News, American Predator, The Hunt for the Most Meticulous serial Killer of the one century by Maureen Callahan. Crossing the Line is production of I Heeart Radio. It's executive produced by me Am William Phelps and iHeart Executive producer Katherine Law. Special thanks to producer Rose Bacci and EP Christina Everett. Audio engineering, original music and sound designed by Matt Russell. Additional thanks to Will Pearson at I Heeart Radio. The series theme number four four four is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H