The Only Case That Ever Scared Me: Israel Keyes and the Victims No One Has Named

For more than ten years, a contractor and father from Anchorage crossed the country killing strangers, and no agency linked him to a single crime. He was caught because he broke his own rules. He died before trial, and he took most of the names with him.

Content note: this piece concerns abduction, murder, and a death by suicide in jail custody. Details of the crimes are kept to what the record requires. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States.

The Public Version of Israel Keyes

On paper, Keyes was unremarkable in the way that matters most in this case. He served in the Army from 1998 to 2001, with postings at Fort Lewis, Fort Hood, and in Egypt. After his discharge he lived on the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, Washington, with his daughter’s mother, and worked for the tribe’s parks and recreation department. In March 2007 he drove the Alaska Highway to Anchorage and started Keyes Construction.

In Anchorage he lived with a nurse practitioner and his school-aged daughter in the Turnagain neighborhood, where, the Anchorage Daily News reported, his neighbors included a Superior Court judge. He fished, hiked, kayaked, and built a ramp so the family’s pugs could get into the backyard. A psychological evaluation ordered in his federal case found him sane and at the high end of average intelligence.

He told that evaluator that there were two sides to him and that people knew only one. The record of the next decade is the record of the other side, and almost all of it comes from him.

Eleven Years Without a Link

The FBI’s August 2013 timeline, built from his interviews and travel records, places his first homicide in Neah Bay between July and October 2001, weeks after he left the Army. It lists an unidentified couple killed in Washington between 2001 and 2005, and two more killings in Washington in 2005 or 2006, at least one body sunk in Crescent Lake. It describes an East Coast woman abducted on April 9, 2009 and buried in upstate New York, and a bank robbery in Tupper Lake, New York the next day. None of these victims has been named.

The Bureau also recorded how he worked. He flew into airports far from home, rented cars, and drove hundreds of miles looking for people in parks, campgrounds, trailheads, cemeteries, and boat launches. He told investigators he did not know his victims. He buried caches of weapons and disposal supplies around the country to use later, and paid for travel in part with bank robberies. He told agents that before the Curriers, the disappearances he caused got little if any media attention.

Let me tell you what I notice when I lay that out. Every one of those methods is designed to defeat the way crimes get connected.

The FBI says he described one killing in which he moved or staged the body so the death would look accidental, and that authorities ruled it an accident. He described staking out a park at Point Woronzof in Anchorage in 2011 intending to shoot a couple in a car, abandoning the plan when a police officer pulled into the lot, and nearly shooting the officer. The officer drove away from that encounter not knowing it had happened.

The Rule He Broke

Keyes told investigators that until Samantha Koenig, he followed a rule never to kill close to home. On the evening of February 1, 2012, he abducted the 18-year-old from the Common Grounds coffee stand in Anchorage where she worked. The next day he left on a cruise out of New Orleans.

Weeks later he used her phone to send a ransom demand and began pulling money from an account tied to a debit card he had taken from a vehicle she shared. The withdrawals moved with him: Anchorage, then Willcox, Arizona, then Humble and Shepherd, Texas. On March 13, 2012, a Texas trooper stopped him for speeding in Lufkin. The card and Koenig’s phone were in the car, according to the Associated Press. FBI divers recovered her body from Matanuska Lake on April 2.

The tool that caught him was ordinary financial tracing in a single case, worked by the Anchorage Police Department and the FBI. It worked because, for the first time, he left a victim in his own city and then went back to her money.

The Interrogation: Talking on His Terms

Interviews began on April 2, 2012, the day divers recovered Koenig’s body. FBI agents, Anchorage police detectives, and federal prosecutors Kevin Feldis and Frank Russo questioned him across more than a dozen sessions through the spring and summer, and into the fall. He set conditions early. In an April 6 session, according to the Associated Press, he said he wanted everything resolved within a year, and he wanted a death sentence, not decades in prison.

The Anchorage Daily News, reviewing the recordings later unsealed in court, described the arrangement plainly: Keyes would talk about past crimes in exchange for details being kept out of the public. Investigators brought espresso, cigars, and candy bars. He gave them the Curriers in detail. He led them to the cache at Eagle River. He hinted at fewer than a dozen victims, and he declined, again and again, to say who or where.

Then the arrangement cracked. In July 2012, details tying him to the Vermont case reached the press. Recordings from July 26 show him irritated that his name was public, and his defense lawyer told prosecutors Keyes’s family saw the news before he did. By October, agents were telling Keyes their supervisors believed he was playing them. Anchorage police officer Jeff Bell, who interviewed him, said after his death that Keyes knew his other victims’ names and never gave them up.

The public did not hear most of those sessions for years. Some were unsealed in April 2013 at the request of the Alaska Dispatch. The rest, along with his psychological evaluation, stayed sealed until 2018, when author Maureen Callahan hired a lawyer and won a federal court order releasing them.

The Custody Death

On May 23, 2012, during a routine hearing in federal court in Anchorage, Keyes broke free of his leg restraints and vaulted the railing toward the gallery before deputy marshals subdued him with a Taser. He was classified as a dangerous detainee and held alone in segregation at the Anchorage Correctional Complex, a state facility, because Alaska has no federal prison.

Corrections officials later said he had been placed on suicide watch at one point during his detention, after something caught a corrections officer’s attention, and taken off it a few months before he died. The state’s director of institutions told reporters Keyes had apparently convinced psychiatric staff he was no longer suicidal. He was not on watch on December 1, 2012.

That night he died by suicide in his cell, using a razor blade, according to Alaska State Troopers. He was found the next morning. In February 2013, the Department of Corrections released a statement that a razor had been issued to him by mistake.

The department would not say how the mistake happened, citing security. It denied an Associated Press records request on the subject, citing the confidentiality of people in its custody and anticipated litigation. It fired a correctional officer, Loren Jacobsen, for inattention during the shift. In 2014 an arbitrator found he had been on a mandatory break during the critical window and had been made a scapegoat for broader lax practices, and reversed the firing. His union argued that Keyes died because someone moved him out of a suicide cell and someone else handed him a razor. No full public investigative report on the death has been located.

The People Still Without Names

In May 2020, FBI agents Jolene Goeden and Katherine Nelson showed 48 Hours a set of drawings found under his bed after his death: 11 skulls, drawn in his own blood.

Nelson said the drawings meant at least seven victims had not been identified. Some may never have been reported missing. Some may sit in other states’ files as runaways, drownings, or accidents. The FBI has named one woman publicly as a possible victim: Debra Feldman, 48, of Hackensack, New Jersey, who disappeared in April 2009, the month Keyes said he abducted a woman on the East Coast. She remains a suspected victim, not a confirmed one. A teenage girl he said he assaulted on the Deschutes River in Oregon in 1997 or 1998 has never been identified either. By his account, he let her go.

The library linked below exists so that anyone who thinks they recognize a date, a place, or a rental car can check it against the record.

Why It Matters Beyond This Case

The lesson usually drawn from Keyes is that he was uniquely careful. He was careful. But careful only works against systems that let it work. Separate agencies, separate files, and disappearances that never make the news are not features of one killer. They are the ordinary conditions a mobile offender relies on, and they still exist.

The same is true in the jail. A pretrial detainee with a suicide history, a stated wish to die, and information no one else possesses is exactly the person custody systems are built to protect. When that protection fails, the cost is not only one death. It is every answer that dies with it.

That is why this case scares me. Not because of what he was. Because the gaps he used are still open.