Maureen Callahan joins Megyn Kelly to dissect Israel Keyes' 14-year killing spree, detailing his abduction of Samantha Koenig in Alaska and the brutal murders of the Couriers in Vermont. The discussion highlights Keyes' escape attempt using cellophane for shackles, his refusal of the death penalty by public defender Rich Kirtner, and allegations linking him to a dozen more victims including a Paralympian. Keyes' suicide note featuring 11 skulls and "Belize" raises questions about reclassifying his crimes as domestic terrorism, exposing potential FBI secrecy regarding his white supremacist ties and the evolving nature of serial murder investigations. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
Today we are examining a serial killer that some in law enforcement have called, unlike any other in modern American history, a predator who was meticulous, methodical, unpredictable, and for years completely undetected.
His name, Israel Keyes.
Keyes had no victim type, no geographic pattern, and an MO the FBI described to be as quote unique as a fingerprint.
Our very own Maureen Callahan, host of The Nerve, spent years uncovering how Keys operated.
Her investigation led her to write the best-selling book, American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century.
Maureen also appears in the ABC true crime documentary Wild Crime: 11 Skulls on Hulu, which traces the disappearance of Samantha Koenig, the crime that finally exposed Keyes' double life.
Watch he was taking trips, he was killing people.
He buried victims all over the continental United States underneath his bed.
There were 11 skulls drawn using a finger in blood.
All of these victims sold belong to him.
They're mine.
This guy is an evil genius.
I'm more sane than most Americans.
He's the best serial killer that ever existed.
Wow.
Maureen is one of the foremost experts on keys, and she joins me now.
Every once in a while, something comes along that reminds us of the power of storytelling.
Something bold, meaningful, and grounded in faith.
The Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin, is a new seven-part series from The Daily Wire based on the novels by Stephen R. Lawhead.
In the series, as pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's faith lights the spark of a civilization reborn.
It's a story about courage, order, and moral clarity.
It's the kind of story Hollywood does not make anymore.
Through blood, faith, and sacrifice, Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings.
The Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin, premieres exclusively on Daily Wire Plus on January 22nd, 2026.
Watch the new trailer now at pen dragonseries.com.
Hi.
Hi.
I've always known that you've written this book, but I had never read it and I'd never known who Israel Keys was.
Why is his name so like not on the list of all the big serial killers?
It's really wild, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Why Israel Keyes Was Missed00:08:34
Yeah.
I mean, my theory about it is that, you know, not long after Keyes was apprehended, I'm going to say about nine months in, I don't want to spoil how this sort of ends for anybody, the FBI announced that they had this guy in custody.
Nobody had ever heard of him.
Nobody knew he'd been operating all over the United States for at least 14 years, probably more.
And they asked the public for help in identifying other victims, in locating and identifying other victims.
And then they just as quickly pulled this case back from public view.
And I could never understand why.
So I began the book with the full cooperation of the FBI.
And in fact, one of the agents on the case said to me that he was really surprised because he'd never seen the bureau in his like 26 years there give a journalist such unfettered access to them.
And then about halfway through, I got back from one trip to Alaska.
He was based up in Alaska Keys and the FBI just shut down.
What year was this?
When they shut down with me?
Well, the book came out in 2019.
So I'm going to say like 2017.
Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's start.
It's not exactly the beginning, but let's start with the murder of Samantha because this would be the tripping wire for him.
Yeah.
She was in what state?
Alaska.
She was in Alaska and she was in one of those little kiosk type things where you buy coffee from, right?
Like coffee, some light food.
Yeah.
And she was working late at night, which honestly, like no woman should ever do.
She shouldn't work alone in a little box that anyone can come up to with a gun and get into because that's exactly what happened to her.
And we actually had that moment where Samantha was working in this little coffee hut.
This is from the ABC documentary, Wild Crime 11 Skulls.
And he jumps in.
First, he pulls a gun on her.
You can see her back away.
And then all the lights go out and he jumps in.
Watch.
In the video, you can see Samantha is closing up for the night in the coffee stand, cleaning and wiping things down.
It's late at night, so there aren't many coffee drinkers that are driving up to the stand.
And then you can see somebody walking up.
You don't see a lot of people just walk up or driving a vehicle.
Samantha goes to the window.
So she starts making coffee.
And she appears to be engaging with the person.
At one point, she turns towards the window and she reacts.
I vividly remember Samantha doing this and putting her hands up.
She then walks across the coffee stand and turns the lights off.
Samantha took the money from the cash register.
Then Samantha looks for coat on.
And then this individual just jumped straight into the coffee hut.
That moment, Maureen, she saw the face of evil and she knew it.
I'll tell you, when I was working on the book, I think I watched that tape, the abduction tape.
I mean, I watched it many, many, many times, but I would go through it frame by frame, partly because the initial working theory, Samantha was 18 at the time.
So she had just turned 18.
She was legally an adult, right?
they they decided to treat it like a missing child.
Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up.
He was 10 minutes late.
He would have been there.
I don't know that it would have mattered because Keys liked taking people in pairs.
And that also distinguished him from many, many other serial killers.
Their original theory was that Samantha was in on it, that that was a staged abduction.
So she could get the money.
So she could get like the $200 that were in the till.
And part of this also goes to the ways in which so many assumptions are made about victims of violent crimes.
Samantha's father was like hell's angel, hell's angel adjacent, had his own brushes with the law.
She was from the wrong side of the tracks.
She had overcome her own drug issues.
And so the theory was she's out partying and that's her accomplice.
But when you go frame by frame through that and you stopped right there, when Keyes jumps in and he is a big guy, he's like at least six four, very rangy, he jumps like a predator.
There's something that's almost like a panther the way he, because those kiosks are up off the ground.
They're on the side of the road in Alaska until Samantha's abduction.
Always stuffed by staff rather by attractive young girls, often alone.
In the summer, they used to make them wear bikinis.
Oh my God, that's crazy.
I know.
Girls do not do this.
And those were very coveted jobs in Alaska.
It was something of a veneration.
It was something of a validation.
If you got a job, that meant you were an attractive young woman who could lure customers in.
I used to worry, even my own brother, who, you know, he was, he's five years older than I am, but he used to work in one of those gas station kiosks for his high school job after hours, you know, up until like 11 o'clock at night or whenever they closed.
And he was alone.
And I used to worry about him just being in there alone.
You just never know who's going to come through.
It's literally everybody comes through a gas station and a female, a young female in Alaska, which I like a lot of bad stuff happens in Alaska.
It's so isolated.
Like bad people go there to get lost.
100%.
You know, the thing too about that is it doesn't even matter.
I think the time was like close to eight o'clock or nine o'clock.
You know, in, I was, I was sure to go to Alaska in two distinct times, once in the dead of summer and once in the dead of winter, because I wanted to experience what those extremes really do to your mind and your body.
And we're such animals, you know, like you go in the winter, I mean, you get like two hours of sunlight if you're lucky.
Two hours of real sunlight.
And it has a depressive feeling, but it also, there's a lot of, it's a lot of darkness.
It's a lot of spiritual darkness.
It's a lot of psychological darkness.
Most people don't know this, but Alaska, more people come from the lower 48 than are natives up there.
And they're all people who are running away from something.
Yes.
Sorry, Alaska, but it's, I mean, you're the most beautiful state in the union, but you got a lot of misfits there.
Every other dateline is about something in Alaska.
All these crime series like Alaska, wild Alaska, you know, all the anyway.
So it's no accident Israel Keyes found Alaska, but he was from Washington State, right?
Or he was, he had been living in the state.
That's where he was raised.
Yeah.
And it's, you're the one who turned me on to the Bundy book.
Oh, the stranger beside me.
There's a lot of parallels there.
Oh, yeah.
He was also from Washington State and preyed on women, EY, in Washington State.
Like the juxtaposition, both in Alaska and Washington State for that matter, of like immense beauty and zen and calmness and nature and almost like godlike territory and evil roaming among it all.
And, you know, the thing about Bundy, which when Keyes was apprehended, he did say that was one of the serial killers that he had studied.
He did it.
He did sort of quote unquote admire.
Bundy also was interstate.
Most serial killers, like if you think of the Gilgo beach killer, you know, they tend to operate in one location, the Zodiac killer.
He was interstate also, but his last major, major spree, Bundy's, was in Florida.
And I know we'll probably get to it later, but there, there is a very famous unsolved cold case involving multiple victims in Florida that I firmly believe is the work of Israel Keyes.
So although unlike Ted Bundy, Israel Keyes was not an attractive man.
Depends on how you look.
Like, honestly, there were some images where I was like, this guy is kind of attractive.
Let me see it.
Yeah.
Florida's Unsolved Cold Case00:15:29
In the interrogation video.
Oh, he looks like nothing in the interrogation.
You recoil.
Oh, yeah.
No, he's, he's all of his power.
He did have power.
He was the most powerful person in that room.
They were never going to solve another case without him to a point.
Once the interrogation gets to five months, six months, Jeff Bell, who was one of the leads, began putting some stuff together, which was remarkable, remarkable detective work.
But, you know, the Samantha case, when they caught him, and that was an interstate chase, that was an interstate, like he, he made the mistake of before we get there.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Samantha gets kidnapped from this coffee kiosk thing late at night.
And they're not treating it quite with the urgency they would if, you know, some rich woman in California, you know, had this happen to her.
And days go by and then a ransom note appears on like a park bulletin board.
Yep.
And it shows a picture of her holding a newspaper that is dated post the date of her abduction.
So they know actually this is legit.
So this is from a person who really has her.
And then what happens?
And then they go to Samantha's father.
The kidnapper is demanding like $50,000, $60,000.
He's already started what would be considered now like a GoFundMe.
The community is donating money.
James is not a man of means.
And James is frantic.
But they say, okay, now is the time to wire the money into this account.
And James says, I don't want to.
And then the FBI gets a tip from someone who knows James and says, he's acting strangely.
He yelled.
He yelled at my daughter, a friend of my daughter's because she made some t-shirts.
Find Samantha and she's selling them.
And James is very upset that we're making money off of that.
So now the FBI is and Anchorage police are really confused because when they door knocked James, he wouldn't let them in the house after Samantha went missing.
So now he's looking suspicious.
So now they're looking at him and they're looking at the boyfriend who has been living with Samantha and James.
And they don't know which end is up, but they've never encountered a parent who is resistant to giving the reward money to the kidnapper who's promising a return.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, then they do get money deposited into her account and the kidnapper starts making withdrawals with her ATM card, which is, by the way, how he gets caught.
But who made the deposit into her account?
James eventually relented.
And they said, he's going to ask, he's asking for this much.
We only deposit this much because now we have him, we're in contact.
And now it's a negotiation.
So that's conversation.
He doesn't seem to realize that using this ATM card, they're like five minutes behind him every time he withdraws, every time he withdraws.
They're like five minutes behind him and he knows what he's doing because he knows where all the surveillance cameras are in any given place he's going.
He's covered up.
You cannot see.
It looks like it's a man.
You can't really see.
Then it stops working in Anchorage.
The card stops pinging there and then it starts pinging in New Mexico in these very tiny towns in New Mexico.
And up in Alaska, it's like a movie.
It's like these FBI agents get word that her card's pinging down there and they jump out of bed and they rush to their war room at the FBI field office and they're calling bank managers in Lordsburg, New Mexico saying, can you get there?
Can you get there?
And the first one they called was like, sorry, I'm sleeping.
I'm not getting out of bed for this.
Oh my.
No, it's a serial killer.
Well, I guess that was just a suspicion at the time.
They knew they had someone who abducted this young woman.
They still didn't know whether she was in on it or not.
It was very suspicious.
A guy that sophisticated, if this is a true stranger abduction, they're very rare.
So it's easy to see why the theorizing was such that it's the boyfriend, it's the father, she's in on it, whatever.
They couldn't figure out why he would be using it.
It's such an easy mode of detection.
It's so bold because it's so easy, right?
To see, oh my God, her ATM just pinged again.
Yeah.
Where?
And it is sort of how he got caught because he made the mistake of letting his car get caught on camera at one of the locations.
Right.
And so they saw what kind of make model, et cetera, of car, maybe even a license plate.
I'm trying to remember.
But they tracked that car and that's how they found him.
This was also incredible police work.
And this is where the Texas Rangers come in.
And these guys are such badasses.
They are just like Jeff Bell, who is one of the main guys in Alaska.
He's a, he's, I think he's from the Northeast maybe originally.
I don't know.
But he was like, when he went down to Texas and met the Texas Ranger who led that manhunt that caught Keys, which was a very cinematic event because Keyes was driving the most commonly rented vehicle in the United States of America.
So it really was needle in a haystack.
He was like, oh my God, this is a Texas Ranger, just like in the movies, like a real badass, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
So they track him down.
They arrested him and they found incriminating materials in his car.
Like it was kind of Bob's your uncle once they found him.
He was not banking on cops pulling him over.
No.
And so then they bring him in for this interrogation.
Now, who does the interrogation?
Like, is it the feds?
Is it the Jeff Bell of the Washington?
Well, first, it's Steve, Ranger Steve Rayburn, since retired, and an FBI agent named Deb Ganaway, who was looped in very quickly as all of this was unfolding in a very kinetic, moment-by-moment fashion.
And Steve Rayburn told me that they were so caught off guard that they didn't even have like a two-way radio, like a two-way audio system set up in their interrogation room.
So they had to go to Target and buy a baby monitor.
Oh, no.
So people could listen to it outside of the room.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
Like, this is how MacGyverish.
And they had no idea who they were dealing with.
They really didn't.
They knew he was dangerous.
They knew he had this woman.
The lead agent on the case, Steve Payne, even in that moment, he's up in Alaska sitting at a car at one of these coffee kiosks.
And he's the one agent on this case who has been holding out hope that Samantha is alive.
Jeff Bell, Jeff Bell took one look at that ransom note with the proof of life photo of Samantha.
She's looking at the camera dead center with the with the print paper.
And he took one look at that and said, she's dead.
How?
How did he know that?
I don't know if he was just more dialed into the realities of what he factually was seeing or if there was something unnatural that he picked up on.
You know, Steve, by his own admission, did not want to believe it.
He knew he was in denial about it.
And even the search of his car was like a, it was a multi-state mess because he's up there worried that if they go into that car without the proper, I mean, what's the word for warrant?
Thank you.
Or they have probable costs.
Then everything they find, even if Samantha's body is in there is thrown out.
Like it can't get in.
But Deb says to Steve, down here in Texas, we have a much looser interpretation of this.
And if we've got a bad guy and we think he's got bad shit going on in his car, we can go into his car.
Here we have some of this.
This is from the ABC Doc Wild Crime and it's dash cam footage from the moment that investigators decided to do a warrantless search on Keys' car.
Here it is.
And we opened a trunk and the Ranger started going through things in the trunk of the car.
There you go.
Hey.
Gray hoodie.
We glad it's in a pocket.
Hang on and a mask.
We found a gray hoodie that appeared to be the same hoodie that the perpetrator had been wearing in the ATM videos.
And in the pocket of that was this gray piece of cloth that looked like a mask.
We also found the amber shooting glasses.
We got her gun.
Sorry, you're under a lamb.
After he was put under arrest, he was transported to the Lufkin Police Department.
The Ranger and I do a thorough search of Israel's wallet and we found Samantha's ATM card.
Samantha's cell phone was in the car.
I mean, that's just devastating from a criminal standpoint.
That's everything you need.
You've got the victim's cell phone.
You've got her license and you've got his disguise that he was wearing all the times when he was making the withdrawals with her ATM card.
Really strong.
Very strong, but they don't have a body.
And they don't know whether she's dead.
And they don't even know whether she's dead or alive.
So they need a confession from him.
He is taken to Lufkin PD down in Texas again, small town, these small towns he's operating in.
And they try to talk to him and he says, I'm sorry, I can't help you.
So then they call up to Alaska and Jeff Bell and his partner, his then partner on this case, Mickey Dahl, who is this sort of very glamorous, young, beautiful detective who had just joined homicide.
She spent like 10 years doing drugs as a police officer.
Oh, sorry.
Praise that.
Yeah.
Undercover on narcotics.
But so they jump on a plane and they go down there and they're so wired and they're so like dying to talk to this guy and they get in there and Keys kind of lights up a bit because now he's got the attentions of this beautiful young detective.
And it's it becomes this sort of almost like a, I talk about it in the book as like a Clarice Starling Hannibal Lecter kind of dynamic, you know.
But he won't talk to them either.
And so they have to extradite him up to Alaska.
And this is all like the TikTok is really, it's so pressing because at a place like Lufkin, as would prove true even in Anchorage, they did not have the wherewithal to really contain this guy.
Like this guy was such a predator and so dangerous, such a genius, completely self-taught.
This guy did not have formal schooling at all, at all.
And he taught himself how to hunt and kill.
And so they get him back up to Alaska.
And that's when it really starts clicking in because they know Samantha's dead.
They've gone to the house he shares with his living girlfriend, a travel nurse, and his 10-year-old daughter.
By all accounts, he is an incredible father.
It's crazy.
And they toss the house and they're looking, they're looking for Samantha.
They can't find her.
There's a shed on the property.
This is before or after he's confessed.
He hasn't confessed to anything.
He hasn't.
Okay.
So they're just doing a search of his property because he's under arrest.
And there are two sheds on his property and they physically remove a shed from the property and they bring it to the FBI field office where they leave it.
And then so the fight begins now as to who's going to lead this interrogation because they all know this is a big, big case.
And this is a career maker.
This is a star maker.
If you have your eyes on becoming like a legal analyst on CNN or like, you know, they're going to make a movie out of this case, who's going to play you?
The egos start coming into play.
And Steve and Jeff are Steve Payne and Jeff Beller are the most experienced.
And they're gaming out how they're going to talk to this guy.
They have zero.
They really don't have much evidence.
They don't have that footage of him, he's unrecognizable in that surveillance clip of him abducting Samantha.
Sure, a couple of items are in his car, but he says she gave them to me.
I was her dealer.
She owed me money.
Prove it.
Prove I took her.
You don't have anything.
He was an expert at leaving no physical evidence behind.
So you have to have very experienced detectives go in there or agents go in there who can say, like Steve's favorite tactic was to like, he would say, some people like to go in with like boxes full of paper.
It's all blank paper.
Oh, we have all this shit on you.
We've got all these photos and you may as well just give it to us now before we like really, you know, throw you away forever.
And Steve, his whole thing was like, less is more.
Like one photo.
That's, that's just the tip of what we've got on you.
You know, it's a whole mind game.
And the federal prosecutor on this case comes in and he sees what this case could be.
And he says to them, I'm leading this investigation now.
I'm questioning this suspect.
What?
That's so rude.
I'm in charge.
He's white collar, Megan.
He's never dealt with.
Nor do they usually have the investigator be the prosecutor.
You can't, right?
Because if this goes to trial, now the prosecutor is also a witness.
And now he's going to testify.
Yeah.
Can't happen.
But this is, this is how wild it is up there.
It's so funny.
The twin poles of this case are Alaska and Texas, like two states with this psyche, which is like, don't tell me what to do.
Do it my way.
You know, fine to a point.
Not when you've got like what will become the most high value like suspect in federal custody.
Like only Jeffrey Epstein exceeds this guy in terms of like the threat he posed even behind bars.
Oh.
So he does confess.
We have video of it's what we've only titled it FBI interview.
So I don't know which interrogators these are, but you'll tell us after we watch SOT 53 in which he does admit to killing Samantha Koenig.
Here it is.
He directed us north out of Anchorage towards the Mattanuska Valley.
Like how many yards off the shoreline or feet off the strike there.
And he pointed to a spot on the lake.
And what should they look for specifically?
Ice fishing spot.
Was it a hole that you cut or was the hole there?
No, it was a hole I cut.
You'll see it.
You'll see where the hole was from.
I don't imagine.
There's not very much salt there.
And Israel Keys said that is where we would find Samantha Cohen.
She's not wrapped up or anything, but there'll still be some point on the ice.
Confession on the Lake00:14:33
Are they going to find anything else out there?
Oh, you'll find your DNA.
You'll probably, you'll find her, my DNA because she hasn't been there alone.
So thank you.
The one thing I do need to know is how you killed her.
Why?
I mean, it doesn't really matter how it happened.
I'm saying that, yes, I was responsible.
And yes, I told you where she is.
So you killed her.
Yes.
Okay, several things about that clip.
We are looking at Jeff Bell, who was one of the lead guys, and then that voice in there that says, I need you to tell me why you killed her.
That's Kevin Feldis.
That's the prosecutor who bigfooted this case.
That's not a question you ever ask a suspect like that.
It doesn't matter what you need.
I need to know.
No, And I think these little things were tells.
Now that's Keys telling them where he put her remains.
He had her in his shed after he murdered her.
Steps away from the home in which his daughter was living.
Yes.
And girlfriend was packing for their trip the next day.
They were going on vacation for two weeks.
So she's out in the shed for two weeks.
He left her there.
God.
And when they asked him about it, they said, weren't you worried?
And he said, was I worried?
Like, it's like 10 degrees in Alaska.
No, the body's going to freeze.
It'll be fine.
But they took the wrong shed when they arrested him.
What?
They took another shed that he just used as a shed.
He was a contractor.
They didn't take it.
Take a look inside.
There were a lot of mistakes on this case.
A lot, a lot of big ones.
The confession, which is in American Predator, the text of the entire confession, the FBI has never made that public.
I had to get that through someone very, very close to the case.
But it's in none of the records that have been made public.
The audio of it doesn't exist.
They've tried to bury it.
It's a confession in two parts.
And it's broken up because one, it went on so long, but two, Feldis was in real danger of tipping their hand that they had nothing, that they had no evidence.
And once you lose that power, you can't get it back.
Third, Keyes originally spoke to them on the promise that he would not get the death penalty.
They broke midday, came back to finish the confession, and he said he would only finish the confession if they promised to give him the death penalty.
Right.
That's so strange.
We don't know what explained the flip, the switch.
I think his mother spoke to me for the book.
She's never spoken before or since.
She said when she saw the footage of Keys getting arrested in Texas, she knew that he knew his life was over.
That that was it.
Yep.
She knew he was a killer, by the way.
What?
Oh, she knew he was a killer.
How?
From the cat and the animals?
Well, the cat, the animals.
She and her husband kicked him out of the home.
He was about 14.
He was breaking and entering.
He was gun running.
He had this habit of he would break into people's homes and move their furniture around.
Oh, and then he would go outside and like peep and wait for them to come home and look through the windows and watch how freaked out they were.
You know, he was, he was a budding, budding, budding serial killer.
And she told me, she said, oh, the FBI thinks Israel first killed in this date.
And I know his first kill was much earlier.
Whoa.
Okay.
Okay.
Great.
Could you be more specific?
Why don't you call the FBI with that information?
Well, and he said something like, it became apparent to me at a young age that the things I thought were okay, no one else thought was okay.
And like, I was different from the others.
And it really does go to like, is a serial killer born?
Is it, you know, nature, nurture?
Right.
Do you arrive here in the crib as a little psychopath?
And no matter what happens, that's what you're going to be?
Or do you have to subject, be subjected to some amount of torture and neglect and so on as an infant in order to get there?
Do we know the answer to that in his case?
It's, it's a tantalizing philosophical, neurological, behavioral question that hangs over the book.
And I spoke to a guy named Roy Hazelwood, who has since died.
He was like the godfather of criminal profiling in the FBI, godfather.
And I asked him that and he laughed and he said, I was waiting for how long it was going to take for you to ask me.
Everyone wants to know.
And he said, we don't know.
He said, the youngest incidence of psychopathy I've ever encountered was in a two-year-old.
Oh, gosh.
Who was self-harming in a sort of psychosexual way?
But he said, we don't know.
You know, Keese was one of 10 siblings.
They all suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of the parents, all of them.
Oh, boy.
Only one turned out like this.
So I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know either.
I wish we did.
Okay, so let's keep going.
So he gives that confession about, do we know how many days he had Samantha before he killed her?
Oh, he only had her for hours.
How did he get the paper that was post the abduction in the photo?
I think he had saved it.
He had saved it and how he made her look alive.
So she was dead in the photo and he made that look alive.
Jeff was right.
She was dead in that photo.
Oh my gosh.
So he took, he was an avid outdoorsman, also an ultra marathoner who was hunting in national parks and the like.
But he took fishing wire and sewed her eyes open.
Oh my gosh.
And then put makeup on her.
He took his girlfriend's makeup.
This is a very makeup on her.
This is a very sick person.
And that was the proof of life photo.
Okay.
So at what point did the cops start to glean there's more than one?
Oh, once he starts talking about Samantha, they know.
The detail, the affect, the flat, matter-of-fact way of communicating this.
We're negotiating now.
We're demanding the death penalty.
We're demanding it's off the table, on the table.
This is someone who's very interested in power and control, and it's not the first time he's done it.
And in fact, Jeff told me that when he and Mickey Dahl first worked, walked into that police station in Lufkin into that interrogation room.
He said the hairs on the back of his neck stood up before they even said a word to him.
They knew.
They knew.
I think that's right.
I do think when you're in the presence of true evil, you know it's different energy.
It's just a vibe shift, as the kids say, but it's real.
I mean, you'd like to believe that.
You know, you'd like to know that when you're around somebody who's truly evil, you'd have that response, but the hair, you know?
Well, now that totally tracked to me because he's in custody.
They know he took Samantha.
Jeff knows she's dead in his bones.
He knows it.
But he was very, very, very good at wearing a mask in real life.
I mean, the irony is that where he and his girlfriend lived, it was, it's in a suburb called Turn Again in Anchorage.
And it is a neighborhood heavily populated with judges, federal prosecutors, lawyers.
And he was the contractor on all of their homes.
And so many of the people they interviewed after they apprehended him were like, he had the keys to my house.
And when we go away, we'd be like, go in and do all the renovations.
We trusted him.
Oh my gosh.
Can you imagine finding out that a serial killer had been in your house regularly working on your kitchen?
So the next murders that he confessed to, right, are really the only other murders that he owned, correct?
That the husband and wife.
He fully owned, yeah.
Across the country.
In Vermont.
So tell us about that couple.
This is so wild.
And it's also interesting how they got this confession because they know he's a serial now.
They know it.
So they're like, okay, you want the death penalty?
You got to give us something else.
We can't go to the feds and say, you're getting it for one.
You have to have, give us more.
And he says, okay.
He says, I'll give you two bodies and a name.
And he says, I need you to get a map and I need you to pull it up for me.
So now we're in Vermont.
And he begins with where he dug up his kill kit.
So he's got these kill kits buried all over the country.
And they're still out there.
They're five gallon Home Depot buckets that he filled with cash.
He was a bank robber, only used cash when he was committing crimes.
Zip ties, guns, ammo, and Drano to accelerate human decomposition.
Oh, my.
So then what he would do is he would start walking around and looking for people to take.
That's what he called it, taking people.
And he was out this night in Vermont.
He was, he was on a family trip.
Was this after?
No, it must have been before.
It's had to be before.
She was his last.
She's his last known victim, which is very important.
Definitely not his last one.
So he, it's a rainy night.
This is his own self-report.
He's staying in like a holiday inn or something.
He goes out and he's looking for someone to take and he comes upon this apartment complex and this car is pulling in this little like VW bug.
And he likes this.
And this guy gets out and puts it.
It's raining and he puts his newspaper over his head and he's trying to rush into his apartment complex and Keys is right behind him, unbeknownst to the guy.
And the way Keys described it, his arm went like this behind the guy, like that.
Like he just missed him.
He was just about to take him.
Like reaching forward and missing.
And he said that guy has no idea because if he had been like one second slower, he would have gotten it that night.
He would have been the one.
I mean, he had no victim profile.
He would take anybody.
And when I say take, he would abduct, rape, torture, and murder.
And so he was bisexual.
He was always like, like they call it practicing the parlances like on sex workers, you know?
Anyway, so he goes, he goes back to his hotel, waits for the rain to stop.
Then it's like midnight.
He goes back out.
His own self-report, he comes upon this house.
It's a suburban.
It's like a flat single story.
He sees in the yard, there is no indication of dogs or kids.
He says, I won't go near kids since having my daughter.
Now, now you sort of see where he's beginning to realize he's going to be in the pantheon.
He says he doesn't want anybody to know he exists, but he does.
This is the kind of thing the fictional character Dexter would say.
Like, I'm a serial killer with a code.
You know?
Yep.
I don't touch kids.
Give me a gold star.
He did touch kids.
So he decides he's going to cut the phone line to see if an alarm goes off, which it does not.
He smashes his way in as a contractor.
He's pretty confident he knows the layout.
There's an older couple living there named Bill and Lorraine Courier.
They are older.
They are overweight.
They are sickly.
They have medication.
They have a bird in the house.
And this was one of the more chilling details that law enforcement told me when he goes in.
They had this huge bird.
I forget whether it was a powder or something, but the bird cage, which was like six feet, had the cover over it so it could sleep at night.
So it's almost like a shroud of death is already there.
And he said he from breaking the window pane on the back door to gain access to the house and tying the two of them up like hogtide on the bed, six seconds.
And the FBI did it.
And they figured out he did it in six seconds.
He did.
He took them from the house.
Took them from the house.
It's so strange.
Sassy, because I saw how they look.
And yes, it tracks exactly with what you said.
And they look to me helpless.
Yeah.
Like even, you know, in their nice, you know, picture predating this terrible event, they looked completely helpless, completely harmless.
So he still got a Jones from that.
Like he got a Jones from capturing and killing people who posed absolutely no threat or conquest to him.
I think in his mind, it was a, it was a conquest because it was a strange house.
He didn't know how many people would be in.
He could guess it would be two, probably a married couple.
But he's, he's breaking into their house in the middle of the night as a stranger.
And he's not just going to kill them in their home.
He's going to abduct them and he's going to move them to a second location that he had staked out like a day prior.
And nobody saw any of it?
Nobody saw a thing.
Did they?
Dead of night.
We don't know if they were screaming.
I mean, he probably had them.
He had them gagged.
Okay.
So he gets them in the car.
He moves them to some dilapidated looking like dismal.
Dismurded farmhouse falling apart.
And then he kills them both.
The husband tried to fight for his wife.
He did.
He separated them both.
He put the husband in the basement, tied up.
And then he brought the wife to the second floor and he raped her up there.
Older woman.
Older woman.
He had an issue.
He had a lot of rage at his mother, a lot of rage.
And this goes into his taking of people in pairs and mothers and children.
And then he brought Lorraine.
No, no, no.
Then he hears from upstairs, Bill Courier in the basement is making a lot of noise.
He's a big guy.
He's a former Army veteran.
He's an Army veteran.
And he's trying to break free and he's like shouting for his wife and leave my wife alone and blah, Keys goes down there and he shoots him dead, shoots him dead.
And this angers him because that was not in the plan.
He wanted to strangle Bill.
He wanted it to be personal.
He wanted it to be that violent.
And it takes a long time to strangle somebody to death.
It's not like in the movies.
The Violent Strangulation Plan00:05:01
It takes a long time.
It takes a lot of force.
So then he's infuriated, but Lorraine has begun to run.
She's gotten out of the house and she's running towards the highway.
Again, it's like three or four in the morning.
It's desolate out there.
And he catches her.
He catches her and he brings her down to the basement where he shows her her husband and then he strangles her to death.
Oh, that is sick.
And then he leaves them in the basement.
He leaves the bodies in the basement.
He's running out of time.
The sun is coming up.
Normally, what he would do would be to move the bodies across state lines to yet.
So you make it multi-state.
You make it very difficult to track.
But he's got to go.
And he figures this house is a teardown.
So anybody who buys this property, it's going to be a developer.
They're going to tear down the house and the animals will get to the bodies before any of this even happens.
He was right.
He was right.
Well, I don't know about the animals, but they show that the house gets torn down.
It gets dumped in a landfill.
No one's walked through and seen two corpses or skeletons.
Nope.
They went to the landfill, the police, and searched it trying to find any remnants.
Didn't.
So their remains have never been found.
They're not even classified as murdered.
They're classified as missing.
Even after a confession.
Speaking of which, let's play some of it.
Here is Keys admitting to killing Bill and Lorraine Courier, SOT 54.
There was a shovel in the basement, and I hit him with that a couple times, and I was all hanged up and grabbed me 10-22.
He saw the gun and he started to say something and it just pissed me off and I started pulling the triggers.
I pulled as fast as I could until the magazine was empty.
After he killed Bill, he tells us that he rapes Lorraine Courier.
He rapes her multiple times.
And he said he took Lorraine downstairs and Bill's obviously deceased on the floor.
He describes killing her and then using contractor bags to put their bodies in in the basement of that house.
The bodies were completely covered and they were underneath a lot of debris.
They were like piled on top of them, like wood and trash.
I mean, just like the callousness is shocking.
Not that you expect a killer to like respectfully dispose of the remains, but in garbage bags underneath a bunch of garbage left for the animals.
Just like zero humanity in him.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And, you know, with recovering Samantha's remains, you know, he dismembered her and he just put the limbs and the head in the water.
And I spoke to the lead on the dive team who led that recovery.
Oh, God.
And the two divers who recovered Samantha's remains.
And the lead diver, the lead, Bobby Shakan, you know, he's retired now.
He is PTSD and he has a therapy dog.
And he talks about this case because it's instructive for members of law enforcement.
They should know about it.
But that recovery, he said, was among the most brutal.
And they see a lot of things no one should ever see.
And in fact, what they do, these tough, tough, tough guys, Bobby sent me these drawings they did.
And especially after recovering children, the divers will often, their beautiful drawings will draw images of themselves and they have all their dive gear on and their helmets on, but they have angel wings on and they're always holding the victim intact, bringing them up.
But while they're always bringing them out of water, it's also sort of an ascension into a heavenly place of rest.
And that's how they manage.
Special, special people who do this work.
You think about them, right?
It's like when you're doing your job and you have a bad day and I think, oh, this is tough.
Oh my gosh.
And you remember how tough actual hardworking people with really difficult jobs have to spend their days.
And I think about it all the time with child sexual abuse material.
Like there are, and that really just changed people.
It changes them.
Men in particular, who have to spend their days chasing the most vile among us, having to look, and they have to look at the images because they've got to go after it.
They got to make a case against these people.
And I've heard so many on different podcasts and so on, just talking about what it does to you.
Tough Work for Investigators00:14:59
Like it deadens your soul.
Most don't last that long.
This is just how can you spend your day doing that?
No, I know.
Oh.
To expose that level of darkness and things that most people would never even think of.
Yeah.
I've been talking a lot about Riverbend Ranch because I love their steaks.
Well, this holiday season, express your love with a very special gift of premium steaks from Riverbend Ranch.
They have spectacular beef bundles that are wonderful gifts to friends and family.
Their prime rib roast and holiday bundles are only available while supplies last and they're going fast.
For the last 35 years, Riverbend Ranch has been creating an elite Angus herd by using ultrasound technology to identify genetically superior cattle with a focus on flavor and tenderness.
All Riverbend Ranch cattle are born and raised in the USA.
They never use growth hormones or antibiotics and the beef is processed right at the ranch in their award-winning USDA inspected processing facility.
Avoid the costly middlemen because the beef is sent directly from Riverbend Ranch to your home.
This is not your average black Angus beef.
Order from RiverbendRanch.com.
Use the promo code Megan for 20 bucks off your first order and let me know what you think.
That's riverbendranch.com.
Promo code MEGAN.
Along with the Megan Kelly show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Lake Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Drushinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.
It's bold no BS news only on the Megan Kelly channel, SiriusXM 111 and on SiriusXM Apple.
So Keyes admits to this double murder of Bill and Lorraine.
They know he killed Samantha.
But then a weird thing happens in the interrogation where they want him to say more, but he's suddenly coy and now he doesn't want to like give it up.
And there's a moment in the investigation, this is from July of 2012, where he kind of objects to giving them any more.
And it's sort of odd.
Please explain this to me.
It's SAT 60.
I just think at this point, I kind of feel like I'm in a position where I've given you a certain amount of information.
None of it has or I shouldn't say none of it.
About half of what I thought we had an understanding on, you know, from the very beginning hasn't worked out in my favor.
Granted, you know, some things haven't worked out in your favor, but I just think at this point, I just don't see what incentive I have to tell you anything else.
What does he mean it hasn't worked out in my favor?
He wanted the death penalty and he wanted it really fast.
How long was this series of interviews?
So they started March, April, and they went till about, he really began shutting down, I'm going to say, right around there, July.
July, August.
He tried to kill himself in prison and it wasn't successful.
And so there's so much secrecy surrounding this case.
And I have theories as to why it's not just about a federal prosecutor who was too big for his britches.
It's not that.
But Jeff Bell, Jeff Bell went, he would go over every day to the prison, the jail rather, to see they didn't have anything remotely secure enough for a guy like this.
He never should have been up there.
He never, he should have been in a super max.
Yeah.
He went over there every day to see if Israel wanted to talk every day.
And he went, so Israel almost escaped from court.
Very Ted Bundy-like.
Remember when Ted Bundy?
Yes.
Okay.
This footage has been scrubbed from the internet.
Fox had the footage from inside the courtroom.
Keys shackled, ankles, wrists.
Samantha's father is in the courtroom.
Everyone's in the courtroom.
Keyes suddenly in the middle of the hearing leaps up out of his chair.
He's out of his shackles and he's jumping.
Like, what do you call those rows?
I think of them as pews from church, but in a courthouse, he's jumping from like benches, top to top to top to top before like he's tased.
He's jumped and he's tased.
He almost got away.
He was tased.
He seemed to very much enjoy the tasing.
But how, how did he do it?
How did he do it?
Well, he took, he would get a little baggy lunch every day before going over to court and he took the cellophane that wrapped the sandwich and he fashioned little keys out of that thing and he used it to yes.
Yes.
And so Jeff would go over there and he would be like, stop giving this guy anything.
Take away his shoelaces.
Why does he have subscriptions to magazines like Outside Adventurer?
What's going on in here?
They could never get an answer.
They could never get an answer.
He was just so clever.
He fooled everybody.
That's that's an advantage, right?
When you're a killer who's very smart and you're smarter than your jailers, maybe than the cops, some of them.
Yeah.
So notwithstanding his lamentation that he wasn't getting put to death fast enough, he hadn't had a trial or anything.
It was, I don't know how he thought the system worked.
They were figuring out that he was responsible for more than just those three murders.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Go ahead.
The other thing that I'm remembering now that was stalling him up, this is like the lawyer in you will appreciate.
So his defender, his public defender is this guy named Rich Kirtner, who is a great lawyer, great lawyer.
He's also very anti-death penalty.
So there's a man who enters this story named Rich Kirtner.
What's his story?
So he's assigned to Keys the moment Keys is arrested.
He is Keys' public defender.
Okay.
Keys can't afford a lawyer.
So he says, because all of his cash is tied up in kill kits all over the United States, you know?
So anyway, Rich takes his case and Rich is way into this case.
And I talked to Rich at his office in Anchorage and he was like, I really liked Israel.
Oh my gosh.
I know.
Rich.
I said, you got to get out more.
Seriously.
He's like, I liked him.
But he would not, the minute Keys said, I want the death penalty, Rich was like, well, I'm not arguing for that because I'm anti-death penalty and I won't do it.
And so now he's got a court-appointed lawyer that he can't get out from under who won't advocate for what he wants.
And the FBI is trying to get, get, get him what he wants, but it's not moving that quickly.
And they can't get any traction anywhere.
Okay.
But they do figure out it's more than these three.
Oh, yeah.
So how did they do that?
They asked him, they said, how many people did you kill?
They just asked him.
And he said, well, less than 12.
And Steve Payne always thought that was a weird number.
Yeah.
Because most people go by fives and tens, right?
Like you round up to a five or a 10.
What does that even mean?
Like less than 12.
12.
That's a great point, right?
Like, what does that mean?
But Steve took it to mean 12, like 11 or 12.
And, but I talked to people on the case who think it was way more than that.
And I definitely think it was way more than that.
And do we know who they are?
Like you mentioned something in Florida.
We know some of them.
We know some of them.
There are some cold cases I lay out in the book that I definitely believe are the work of Keyes.
Absolutely.
A 12-year-old Paralympian in Colville, Washington, where Keyes lived, very, very small town went missing when Keyes was a very young man.
He was like 14 and this girl was 2019.
Her body was later found with her feet.
Her prosthetic feet were far away from her remains, but she was seen.
She knew him.
So it's not true that he didn't kill children, to your point.
Absolutely.
And there was another 12-year-old girl who was murdered with her mother.
And I think that was Keyes as well in Colville as well.
There's a man named Jimmy Tidwell who went missing in Texas after Samantha was taken while Keyes was still on the loose.
I go into all of the evidence as to Jeff Bell knows it's Jimmy too.
He won't say it publicly, but we talked about it.
After the book came out, after American Predator came out, I got an email from a woman who said, your book came to me through a circuitous route.
I am Jimmy Tidwell's niece.
We have never been able to get an answer from either local law enforcement or the FBI, but now we know what happened to him.
So thank you.
Wow.
There is a very famous case I'm obsessed with in Florida called the Boca Murders.
There was a man in Boca Raton who was targeting women at the mall, upscale luxury mall, broad daylight.
First victim, she is going to her vehicle with her toddler son, and she's loading up the back of the car.
Honestly, Megan, after writing this book, I don't move through the world the same way at all.
Like I will never, my head is on a swivel in like a garage.
He comes up to her and he's got a gun and he's like, get in the back of the car, get your kid in the back of the car, takes the car, starts driving them all.
Never, never do it, by the way, to the listening audience.
Never let them take you to a second location.
And that would qualify as a second location, like from the parking lot into your car to go someplace.
Run, run, run, run.
You have much better chance of surviving.
He's probably not going to shoot you.
He's probably not going to the difficult victims.
They just kind of let him go.
But I'd rather somebody take a shot at me while I'm serpentining away than have me in the car.
You know, though, what the thing is, and he, he understood the psychology of this.
If you are like the home invasion with the couriers, you know, when you're awoken, startled in the middle of the night, it's like, it takes you a minute to be like, am I awake?
Yes.
You know, like he's capitalizing on those five seconds of like orienting yourself.
Yeah.
And so then who's going to believe a stranger's in your house on top, you know?
I know.
So he's this woman with her little child.
Don't comply.
He's got his gun in her back and he's like, get in the car.
It's like she probably couldn't even take that minute.
Totally.
You know?
Oh, I don't judge her.
Oh, I know you're not.
But for the people listening.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Don't comply.
You're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
And you do it, especially if you have a child with you.
You're like, I'll do anything to protect my child.
That thing is to run away.
That's what that thing is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so they get in the car and he starts driving out and all around Boca Ratan and she is terrified and her child begins to cry and she's worried that the crying is going to just infuriate him further.
And she just keeps talking to him.
She just keeps talking.
Samantha tried this too.
It was really smart.
Humanize yourself.
You don't want to be doing this, right?
Like we can end this.
Like, you know, he does let them go.
He lets them go.
He drives them back and he lets them go.
The other victims weren't so lucky.
Another mother and daughter were found in that mall, tied up in their car, zip ties.
There was a woman who was also the witnesses saw this happen.
This is how she was discovered.
She was driving a Jeep.
Well, a very well-to-do woman, married, middle-aged.
And the Jeep just starts going just erratically.
It's like slowing down, but it's going erratically.
And then the driver's side door opens and she falls out.
So that means there's someone in the passenger side who pushed her out of the car.
So when the police and FBI arrived at the scene at the mall with the woman and her eight-year-old daughter who were tied up and murdered, they were like, this is as unique as a fingerprint, this MO.
And it matches Keys.
Now, Jane Doe, the woman who survived with her toddler, spoke to Dateline.
She has never given her real identity.
We have a little bit of that in SUP 55.
Let's watch.
I put my son in first.
I strap him in his car seat.
He's in back.
Yeah, in the back.
Then I go to the back of the truck and I put the stroller in, shut the gate, and start walking to the front.
Mama, mama.
And I could tell, like, he's worried or scared.
That's when I look in to see if he's okay.
And there's a guy sitting there.
A guy in a floppy hat, wrap around shades, sitting in her SUV right next to her two-year-old.
That moment.
How terrifying is that?
I was in shock at that moment.
And I just stood there.
And the guy said, get in the car.
And I was frozen.
And when he said, get in the car for the second time, that's when I noticed the gun.
The gun is pointed at her son.
I see him pull out a pair of handcuffs.
He handcuffs my wrists behind my back and he pulls out a bag of zip ties and he zip ties my ankles together and then zip ties my neck to the headrest.
And he takes out a pair of darkened sunglasses with duct tape, I'm guessing, and puts them on my eyes.
So now I'm blindfolded.
Speak to me of terror.
I started losing it and I started choking, choking myself because the zip tie was so tight, couldn't breathe and gagging and crying.
And I was just hysterical.
Zip tied her neck to the headrest?
That is disconcerting.
I mean, I can't imagine being able to function with any like anything like your full brain power when you're in that position.
No, and actually, I had that detail wrong.
He was in the car.
He got in the car before she knew.
And her kid was crying and going, mommy, mommy.
But that, that was, that was Keys' MO.
And the sketch that she worked up, they showed a little bit of the police sketch that she worked up of her abductor, her and her child's abductor.
Genetic Genealogy Breaks the Case00:13:34
It's a dead ringer for Israel Keys.
It's amazing he let her go.
Like, why would he show empathy in that case and none other?
It's such a great question.
I don't know.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know if it was the crying child.
I don't know if it somehow sparked something in him about his own daughter.
But it makes no sense because a couple of months later, another woman with her eight-year-old daughter, he murders.
So it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
This is after he has his own daughter or no?
Yeah.
Is she around his biological daughter?
She is.
What's her story?
She, she was raised by her mother on a reservation way up in Nia Bay in Washington State.
It's a very, very remote place.
And Keys lived there for quite some time.
It's real poverty up there.
It's real, real poverty.
People know who she is and she just lives her own life.
You know, she's never sought publicity or anything.
I remember I reached out to her mom right before the book came out and I said, you should know this, it's coming out.
And like you might want to remove photos you've got of her on your social media.
You know, it'll be easy for people to find her.
So she's probably mid-20s now.
Yeah.
My gosh.
He had a stepson, by the way, who killed himself.
That's been omitted completely from the FBI narrative.
Killed himself after Keyes was caught.
So what happens?
Because now they're starting to get what they think is a toll, you know, a number.
And then it all comes to an end one day.
It all comes to an end one day.
Jeff Bell is getting ready to barge into a house and make some arrests and he gets a phone call.
It's very early in the morning that Israel Keyes has successfully committed suicide in his cell.
And he has left in blood drawings of 11 skulls with the words, we are one.
What the FBI did not make public was that he also wrote on the wall of his cell.
And I went there.
I went to the jail and I went to the cell and I saw exactly where it was.
And this was a plexiglass cell.
So if you want to tell anybody that he did it in secret and nobody would ever have known, it's impossible.
So they knew he was killing himself.
Yes.
There was video of blood pulling out from under his door for hours.
He used just razor blade.
Yeah, the razor blade from his razor.
Well, you know, the warden of the jail told me that he put a sign on Keyes' door that said, do not give this prisoner a razor blade.
Wow.
And they didn't follow that?
It's Keystone Cops.
How did they ever get past that?
How did they ever get past that dick tat?
I don't know.
But I got after the book came out, I spoke to somebody who was impacted by the people.
Wait, wait, you were going to say something that was on the wall.
Oh, on the wall.
In his own blood, he wrote Belize, the nation.
Why?
Well, I asked his mom about that and she said he went to Belize on vacation and he was really struck by the poverty in Belize.
And it really, it made him hate America even more and hate the federal government even more.
And, you know, he had planned to, he had in his planning, you know, at one point, this case in the middle of it, it was reclassified.
It went from serial murder to domestic terrorism.
And the FBI has never said why.
Wow.
Well, does that reclass do anything for the FBI's ability to hide the case?
I think they're doing exactly what they want to do.
You know, there's like 50,000 pages.
Why would they get to the point where they don't want to disclose it?
Just because they look bad?
Because if the numbers climb too high, they look like they're do or know-nothings?
I don't know because I think they're, as discussed, like with just a few of those, there are others in the book.
There are plenty of cases I believe could easily be ascribed to him.
You know, you could say we could close this out with a fair degree of certainty, right?
Give survivor, surviving family members some peace of mind.
He was allowed to join as a volunteer.
He a volunteer recruit the United States Army, despite not existing on paper.
He was raised off the grid by these cultists who belonged to a church, a white supremacist church, where they were friends with.
Keyes was very good friends with Chevy and Shane Kehoe, who grew up to be on the FBI's 10 most wanted list of domestic terrorists, potential ties to Timothy McVay, Oklahoma City bombing.
Keyes mentions McVeigh in his interrogations with the FBI, and he says a lot of people I know regard that guy as a hero.
Wow.
He was a super soldier in the Army.
His special forces training.
I asked for his army records.
I got like three pages.
And one of those, two of those pages, interesting things.
One is his father died.
They have no idea how or what happened to the body.
Oh, boy.
And they were interrogating the discovery of a skull, a human skull, on the base where Keys had trained for quite some time.
Well, it's no accident.
He drew skulls with his own blood as his final, his final thing here on Earth.
And he drew 11, which is less than 12.
And now we only know officially of three.
So yeah, that's the big mystery.
Who are the other nine?
We just don't know yet.
I mean, we have suspicions, but we don't know.
And we're probably never going to know, given that you're saying the FBI is kind of clammed up on it.
What did his mom say after the fact, after all this is done?
So his mother is a member of a cult called the Church of Wells.
Last I heard in Texas.
And she said to me, these interviews were really difficult because there was a lot of proselytizing to get to the point.
Oh, boy.
You must have loved that.
It was hard.
But she said, one day they were driving somewhere in his Jeep and she knew something was wrong with him.
And she said, he turned to her and said, you know, mom, not everyone wants to live the way you do.
Not all of us want to live the way you do.
And then she said she knew her son was guilty of these things.
Like when the FBI showed up at her door and they were like, we have your son arrested in connection with the disappearance of this young girl, she was like, yeah, that sounds about right.
And Jeff Bell saw Heidi at the courthouse and he said she looked like someone out of Little House on the Prairie.
Like the long dress and like the handmade thing and like the long braid.
And he went up to her and he said, please, can you help us?
Your son won't talk.
There's a missing girl.
They didn't know if she was dead yet.
I mean, they knew, but, and she said to Jeff, if the Lord wants that girl to be found, that girl will be found and turned her back and walked away.
Okay.
This is what we're dealing with.
This is what we're dealing with.
So as you look back in the case now, it's been a couple of years since you wrote the book.
Like where does he fall in the pantheon of American serial killers?
Well, you know, the FBI said they'd never seen one like him before.
And I think that's why his case remains so little known.
They know more than they're telling, but not nearly as much as I think we think they do.
They have something called the Evil Minds Research Museum.
The FBI does.
What?
Yeah, I tried to get in there.
They really wouldn't let me in.
They let David Fincher in for mind hunter, but they wouldn't let me in.
Who is this pest who keeps subpoenaing?
Knock, knock, knock.
But there they have the brains of serial killers.
They have artifacts.
They have a lot of Keys' stuff, like his journals, his own self-reports.
They have also, when they were going to let me in, they were like, don't publicize this, but screw them.
They have like a big stuffed Hannibal lecter in like a prison cell, like, you know, in the middle of the moon.
Like for fun senator comes in.
Yeah, that's like, that's their idea of kicks.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
This is like at where?
Quantico adjacent.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it's like official highway.
Like it's an unmarked building, but it's a real thing.
So like agents are supposed to go there to learn.
Or like the academics, I guess, at Quantico are in there trying to figure out the origins of psychopathy to this degree.
Well, I'm glad they're studying it.
I mean, it sounds like to me they'd be better off reading your book, but yeah, they should give it a shot.
Yeah, that's helpful.
Well, I can't believe I didn't know.
I mean, I am obsessed with true crime.
I feel like I listened to all of them and I've never heard his name before.
And my dear friend wrote the book on him.
So it's like, I mean, I'm, I was going to say thrilled to know, but that's not the right word.
I'm fascinated because they're all so different.
And this guy's so bizarre where there's not an MO, there's not like a typical victim, there's not a geographic tie, just so bizarre.
I don't, it doesn't make me, it's not somewhat unsettling, right?
Because you want to believe there'll always be that and that'll make them easier to catch.
But the thing is, is like the more we learn from this one, you know, Keys said he was asked, who is your favorite serial killer?
They thought they would get something, right?
And he said, it's the one who hasn't been caught because he knew that there was someone better at being undetected right behind him.
And I'll tell you this, Megan, when the Idaho college murder story broke and before we knew who did it, I was convinced that whoever did it had studied the case of Israel Keys.
It definitely could be.
I mean, he was a criminologist.
He was a criminologist.
He was, it was like he had Washington state connections, but he crossed state lines.
A lot of them do.
Washington State is another one.
He is.
So is Iowa.
So is Long Island.
Yes.
Just, I know.
As much as you'd think it would be like New York or Chicago or Baltimore, they have different kinds of murders, but it's not really serial killer central.
They're much more dispersed than that.
Yeah, the serial killer thing.
Although I will say just a note of comfort for the audience, since it's the holidays.
Cece Moore, the great genetic genealogist woman who like catches everybody, speaking of Brian Kohlberger.
She told me she doesn't believe you can have a serial killer in 2025 America.
She's like, we've gotten too good.
Really?
The touch DNA that they like, it's no longer, they don't need a fingerprint.
They don't need blood or semen or bodily fluids.
It's like touch DNA.
Look how Kohlberger kind of got caught.
Right.
Touch DNA on the knife sheath, which yes, then he left behind.
But like that touch DNA 10, 15, 20 years ago would have been meaningless.
They wouldn't have been able to find that.
Right.
That would have been nothing if it wasn't like a bodily fluid that you could see and like bag, forget it.
Now they know to look for it.
And at touch DNA, they didn't have a hit.
It had to be the genetic genealogy.
They went, they got like some hit to somebody, some distant relative of Kohlberger, which they then traced back to the dad of Kohlberger.
And then they start using her skills to figure out who's around this dad who could be potentially in Idaho on this night.
And then they quickly got to Brian.
But anyway, she doesn't think that you can have a serial killer in 2025 America, which makes me feel better.
The only, I would say my caveat to that would be if you look at the Gilgo Beach killer, who was active for many, many, many, many years, it's the victim.
It's just as important, right?
He was, he was targeting sex workers and they don't stay on sex worker cases for very long.
So I guess if you're, if you're, if you're a predator and you know you're prey, that's, that would be my one thing where I'd maybe push back on that.
Yeah, you're going to like the victims no one cares about.
Exactly.
That society regards as kind of disposable.
Well, I was trying to on an upnote, but then I don't think we're going to be able to now.
Well, the book is fun to read.
And it's, um, there's, oh, and there are great.
Uh, I didn't see the 11 skulls, but I hear it's, it's great.
The Keys case is fascinating.
I was amazed you found the date line footage because I was trying to find it while doing the book and I couldn't find the footage.
Yeah, I don't, my, my crack team found that.
So good.
It was, I mean, the whole, the whole case is dark, but fascinating.
You know, it's like sometimes the serial killer stuff is too much for me.
Like, I don't, I can't take any torture stories.
But we think we did a good job today of skimming over some of the more disturbing parts of this guy because you can go deep and you can go way darker on him, even than we did.
Well, and that's our, that's our silver lining.
I like it.
You could have gone worse.
It could have been worse.
We say nothing says Christmas like true crime.
So look, I think the reason so many people are drawn to true crime is because it takes your mind off of your own problems.
You cannot be thinking about whatever thing is stressing you when you are thinking about something like this.
There's something soothing about solving it, you know, like justice.
I think there's a good contingent of us who that really feels validated when justice comes to bad guys.
It makes you believe again in the world, you know, like people aren't all going to get away with it, mother effers.
And that will conclude the things of positive things I have to say.