On the first of February, 2012, Samatha Koenig was finishing her shift at the coffee place where she worked. It had been a day like any other for the eighteen-year-old barist, and since things were quiet, the long, uneventful day winding down, she had already begun tidying up the Common Grounds stand in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. That was when a man approached her, a figure wearing a ski mask… who was set on turning this average day into one unlike any other, ending it in an unspeakable tragedy.
The man placed an order for a coffee. Despite it almost being the end of her working day, Samantha obliged and started making his order, expecting it would be the last one of the day – and, in a sense, it would be. While it might seem somewhat unnerving and even possibly a cause for concern to be approached at your place of employment by a stranger wearing a ski mask, most employees at retail outlets or financial services like banks might be expecting that someone with a mask on is trying to conceal their identity, possibly so that they can rob the establishment.
But with the freezing cold temperatures in Alaska, it would hardly be an unwarranted assumption that this figure was just trying to keep his face warm. . .
But in actuality, the mask was to keep his face hidden from what was about to happen next. Samantha Koenig finished making the man’s coffee and went to hand him the order. Then, without warning, he pulled out a gun.
The barista was terrified for her life as the masked figure began threatening her, demanding she hand over money from the coffee stand’s register. Trying to comply with his demands as quickly as possible, Samantha hurriedly went to empty out the cash draw and give the money to the assailant… only to find that the register was empty. She was perhaps hoping that he’d run off, having failed his attempted hold-up, leaving her still frightened but ultimately still alive.
Sadly, that wasn’t what happened. Despite doing as he had instructed, Samantha was then made to put her hands up and kneel down on the ground. She was horrified to see the armed man suddenly dove over the kiosk, forcing his way inside the coffee stand, before grabbing her and using zip ties to bind her hands together.
Once he had Samantha tied, her attacker pulled her to her feet and guided her outside towards a white Ford Focus that was parked nearby. He took her towards the vehicle and tried to push Samantha inside, which was when she made an attempt to get away from the man. It didn’t work, and in retaliation, he pressed the barrel of the gun he was holding right against her head and warned that if she tried to escape again, he’d shoot her.
Forcing her into the car, the assailant got behind the wheel and drove off with Samantha in tow, her hands still bound and unable to flee for fear of being killed. The masked figure explained, while driving through town, that he didn’t intend to cause Samantha any harm and that he only kidnapped her to demand a ransom. He told her that, as long as she cooperated, she would eventually be returned to her family alive and unharmed.
Bringing Samantha to his home, it was here that the kidnapper would hold her captive for several days. He kept her tied up in a shed on his property and turned a radio up to full volume in order to drown out the sound of his captive screaming, preventing any neighbors or passers-by from hearing her cries for help and intervening. Immediately after imprisoning her, the man later drove back to the coffee kiosk he’d taken Samantha from to retrieve her phone.
Her boyfriend, Duane Tortolani, was due to be picking her up from work after her shift. The kidnapper had initially intended to capture Duane, too, but had changed his mind and decided only to take Samantha instead. But he still had to cover his tracks and delay his victim’s loved ones from discovering that she was missing.
So, he retrieved Samantha’s phone and sent a fake text message to Duane, telling him: “I’m spending a couple of days with friends, let my dad know. ” The day after the kidnapping, the kidnapper demanded that Samantha give him her address so he could break in and steal her ATM card. She told him where she lived and even that the card was in her boyfriend’s truck.
So, the man made his way over to Samantha’s home and broke into Duane’s truck. Sure enough, there was a debit card right there for the taking, linked to an account that Samantha and her boyfriend shared. The kidnapper pocketed the card and was about to make his exit… When somebody spotted him.
Duane Tortolani had already been on edge since receiving a vague text message from his girlfriend the night before, with no idea that Samantha hadn’t been the one to send it. When Duane and Samantha’s dad, James Koenig, witnessed someone who appeared to be a burglar attempting to steal his truck, he confronted the man, running inside the house to get James’ help. But by the time they had returned, the thief had fled from the scene.
Neither Duane nor James realized they’d just seen the man responsible for Samantha’s disappearance. Once the kidnapper had successfully tested Samantha and Duane’s debit card, making sure it still worked, he returned to his home and his captive victim. There, he poured himself a tall glass of wine, then headed out to his shed, where he violently forced himself on Samantha.
Afterward, he strangled her to death. The man who kidnapped and killed Samantha Koenig was named Israel Keyes. To those on the outside looking in on the man’s life, he was unassuming, just a father to a daughter and a reliable handyman, contractor, and construction worker with his own business, Keyes Construction.
But since the details of his heinous actions were brought to life, he’s been called, by some, the most meticulous serial killer of the twenty-first century. Make no mistake, Israel Keyes was a monster wearing the mask of a man and one responsible for a whole laundry list of serious crimes, from burglary and bank robbery, arson to kidnappings, with his serial killings claiming the lives of between eleven and twenty victims, as well as his numerous aggravated sexual assaults added to the already degenerate pile. His crime spree toured the breadth of the United States as early as 1996, only ending after 2012 when the FBI learned about what he’d done to Samantha Koenig, and what they uncovered made them utterly terrified of Israel Keyes.
Once he had murdered Samantha, Keyes would leave her body stashed in a cupboard inside the shed where he had been keeping her prisoner. After all, he had places to be and a flight to catch. The next morning, he woke up his daughter – who was only eleven at the time and then left for the airport.
He traveled down from Alaska to New Orleans, Louisiana, to board a ship that took him on a pre-planned cruise around the Gulf of Mexico, which lasted for around two weeks. At the culmination of the New Orleans cruise, Keyes was starting to get increasingly worried. In the short time that he’d been away, his abduction of Samantha had garnered a lot of publicity, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Rather than returning home directly to Anchorage, Keyes figured that perhaps the best way he could draw attention away from the crime he’d committed back in Alaska was to… commit more crimes somewhere else. He began exploring parts of Dallas, Texas, intent on launching a full-blown crime spree. Soon enough, in Aledo, he came across a single-story house.
It was a three-and-a-half thousand-square-foot property, complete with red bricks and a barn nearby. Once he had successfully robbed the house, Keyes set fire to the barn, burning it to the ground. After arson around Aledo, Keyes drove to another nearby Texas city, this time making a pit stop in Azle.
Was he there to take in the local sights? Maybe visit the Ain’t that Something antique store? No, he was there to knock over the National Bank of Texas.
Putting on sunglasses, a breathing mask, a hard hat, and a pair of gloves, Keyes marched into the bank with the same handgun he’d used to threaten Samantha Koenig. He brandished the weapon at the teller, robbing the place within approximately two minutes and racing off before the police had time to arrive on the scene. Later on, Keyes would bury the money he’d stolen in a hole he’d dug in the Post Oak Cemetery, located in Glen Rose, Texas.
Still on his return journey back to Alaska and still on a mid-crime spree, Keyes even came close to carrying out yet another kidnapping. While he was in an area of Texas just south of Cleburne, he spotted a woman who was out walking her dog. For a moment, Keyes considered abducting her too, and even almost did, but ultimately quickly gave up on that plan and instead focused on making his way back to Anchorage.
On the seventeenth of February, 2012, Keyes arrived back home in Alaska. Now, while it might seem that his original plan to kidnap and hold Samantha for ransom was just a lie Keyes told the teenager while he abducted her, that was still very much his intention. And the fact that he’d already murdered Samantha wasn’t about to stop him trying to get his hands on ransom money.
At the time, after all, despite all the publicity her disappearance had drummed up, the police and the Koenig family had no clue that Samantha was already dead. So, Keyes enacted arguably one of the most horrific parts of his twisted plan. He took Samnatha’s lifeless body out of the cupboard he’d left her in, then applied makeup to her frozen face.
Unsettlingly, he sewed her eyes with a fishing line so that they would stay open, giving the impression that his victim was still alive. He then wrote a ransom note, demanding that thirty thousand dollars be deposited into the shared account belonging to Samantha and her boyfriend. Keyes still had the ATM card for the account in his possession, which would allow him to withdraw money should the family accept his demands.
Then, he snapped a Polaroid of Samantha’s body, giving her the appearance of still being alive, and holding up a four-day-old issue of the Anchorage Daily News newspaper. Having it visible in the frame proved the photo had been taken recently and would, according to Keyes' plan, make it seem like the deceased woman was still alive. Both the photo of her body and the note containing his ransom demand were then left at an Anchorage park underneath a memorial flyer for a dog named Albert.
This was where Keyes instructed Duane Tortalani to look for further instructions using Samantha's phone. The message ominously read: “Conner Park sign, under pic of Albert. Ain’t she purty.
” A few days after leaving the photo and ransom note for Duane to find, Keyes disposed of Samantha’s body. He drove her out to Matanuska Lake, a lake just north of Anchorage that was covered with a sheet of ice during that time of year. Taking Samantha’s body out of his truck, Keyes then meticulously dismembered her corpse using a chainsaw before cutting a hole in the ice and dumping her severed remains in the freezing lake.
Around this time, Duane found the ransom note left in Conner Park and shared it with Samantha’s father, James, as well as the rest of her family. Believing Samantha was still alive, deceived by Keyes’s sickening photo of her body, James deposited the requested sum of thirty thousand dollars into the account that Keyes now had access to. Members of the local community had generously donated as much as they could to help, sparing the Koenigs from paying the entire ransom out of pocket.
But, of course, this was all done under the false assumption that Samantha would be returned to them if they coughed over the cash to Keyes. The killer and kidnapper started accessing Samantha’s and Duane’s shared accounts and gradually withdrew the ransom money from the sixth of March onwards. This alerted Alaskan police, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Given the severe nature of the crime committed, the FBI had also begun its own investigation into the case, and, as a result, they were monitoring any activity on the account where the ransom money had been deposited. Shortly after Keyes started collecting his ill-gotten gains, he started making his way through the southwestern states; in Alaska, he was not only too close to where he’d left Samantha’s body, but staying in one place would make it easier for the police to catch up with him. This did little to deter the authorities from tracking where in the southwestern USA he was making the numerous withdrawals of ransom money.
Authorities in Alaska had made the controversial decision not to release the surveillance footage of Samantha’s abduction to the public, which is often done to encourage citizens to come forward with any relevant information if they recognize familiar figures or details from footage of a crime under investigation. However, without the assistance of the public, police were able to determine that the man responsible for both the kidnapping of Samantha Koenig and the robbery at the National Bank of Texas had been driving a white 2012 Ford Focus. Officers in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas were alerted to keep an eye on a vehicle that matched that description.
The car that Keyes had been using was a rental vehicle. Somewhat ironically, he tried to obtain a replacement to better cover his tracks, only to receive another Ford Focus, the same model and even the same color. This would eventually lead the authorities to arrest him after a Texas Highway Patrol officer spotted Keyes and the vehicle on the thirteenth of March.
The officer alerted Texas police and began following the white car onto Highway 59, having noticed that the driver was traveling above the speed limit. The Highway Patrol officer made his presence known Keyes, getting the kidnapper to pull over to the side of the road. The moment he stopped, a fleet of unmarked vehicles raced to the scene, federal agents and Texas Rangers pouring out of their cars and surrounding him.
Israel Keyes had nowhere left to run. A quick search of the murderer’s car later, authorities had found Samantha Koenig’s debit card, along with her cell phone, which Keyes had removed the battery from to prevent it from being traced. Also in the car were a ski mask, Keyes’ gun, and cash that he’d taken from the National Bank of Texas, distinguishable by the anti-theft dye that stained the bills.
Keyes also had maps of California, Arizona, and New Mexico with certain areas highlighted. Israel Keyes was subsequently arrested at the scene and indicted in a federal holding facility located in Beaumont, Texas. On the twenty-sixth of March, he was returned to Anchorage and confessed to murdering Samantha Koenig.
During subsequent interviews with police, Keyes conducted himself with an unsettling level of calm and patience, even offering up terms to the authorities in exchange for confessions of his various other crimes. It turned out that, unbeknownst to law enforcement, Samantha Koenig wasn’t Keyes's first victim. He offered to divulge the information regarding the crimes he had committed and even agreed that he would plead guilty to any and all charges that were brought against him.
But Keyes laid out that he’d only agree to do so as long as his trial lasted less than a year and that he was sentenced to execution at the end of it. Naturally, police don’t – or certainly shouldn’t – be able to influence the outcome of the judicial process, so promising a specific outcome in Keyes’ trial was a little far out of the police’s jurisdiction. Still, federal investigators eventually struck a deal with Israel Keyes to learn about where the bodies of his potential prior victims were hidden.
Keyes willingly agreed to reveal all, but there was one other important caveat to his doing so: he didn’t want the public or the media to know any of the details about his crimes. . .
because Keyes didn’t want his daughter to learn about what he had done to Samantha. On the second of April, 2012, two months and a day after she had been kidnapped at work, Samantha Koenig’s remains were recovered from Matanuska Lake. What Keyes had done to her ultimately led to him being discovered and resulted in his eventual downfall, with some federal agents even being convinced that had Keyes not kidnapped and murdered Samantha, he might never have been caught at all.
As the information he later revealed to authorities would confirm, Israel Keyes’ criminal exploits had been going on much longer than anyone realized. His vile actions were more akin to the villain of a horror movie than an actual human being; the FBI realized they weren’t dealing with an opportunistic murder but a cold, calculating, highly methodical, and downright terrifying serial killer. So, who exactly was Israel Keyes?
How had a man guilty of so much violence and murder been able to avoid being found? Where does a monster like that even come from? Well, this specific monster was born in Richmond, Utah, in 1978.
The Keyes family home, the second child of nine siblings, certainly got crowded after his parents, John Jeffery Keyes and Heidi Hakansson, had him. Keyes was raised Mormon, although would often attend a Christian church that espoused white supremacist beliefs. As if being exposed to hateful ideology at such a young age wasn’t enough to turn Keyes into a monster, he seemed to adopt a fixation with weapons in his early adolescence.
From the age of fourteen, he would walk around everywhere with a thirty-eight caliber revolver that his grandfather gave him. As a child, Keyes outfitted the weapon with his very own homemade silencer and began killing pet animals in true ‘child destined to be a serial killer’ fashion. His propensity for burglary would also begin around this time when he and a friend would break into local houses and steal valuables.
By 1995, by the age of around seventeen, Keyes started working with a construction crew, up until the late nineties when his family moved to Maine. It was there that he’d announce to his parents that he was an atheist, leading to him being kicked out of the home of his highly religious family. But it was also around this time in his life, some point between 1996 and 1998, that Keyes would commit his first serious crime, and it was a grim warning of the type of heinous act he’d spend much of his life carrying out.
A hiking group had been making their way along the Deschutes River near Maupin, Oregon when they noticed that one of their number, a girl, had gone missing. The group started to search the surrounding area, attempting to track the missing hiker down. But, as it turned out, Israel Keyes had found her first.
Keyes abducted the girl from the other hikers and then forced himself on her. Later, he released her, although he had intended to murder her, until she convinced him to let her leave. It seems he wasn’t yet adding kidnapping and killing to his already deplorable modus operandi, although he would later be quoted as saying: “I wasn’t violent enough… I made up my mind I was never going to let that happen again.
” In 1998, Keyes enlisted in the US Army after relocating to New Jersey and would serve as a Specialist within Alpha Company’s First Battalion, Fifth Infantry. He trained in Egypt, spending much of his service in Fort Hood, Texas, and near Tacoma, Washington, over in Fort Lewis. He even earned an Army Achievement Medal for meritorious service while he had been assigned as a gunner, manning a sixty-millimeter mortar between December 1998 and July 2001.
In May 2001, Keyes encountered legal trouble when he was charged with driving under the influence in Thurston County, Washington. Compounding the issue, authorities discovered that his driving license had already been suspended, resulting in an additional charge for driving with a suspended license. Though less severe than his other offenses, these infractions led to his honorable discharge from the US Army later that year.
While discharge from the armed forces would be devastating to some, for Keyes, it offered him a chance to pursue his true passion; his new lease on life was largely focused on ending other people’s lives. Upon his arrest, he confessed to the FBI that shortly after his military discharge, he took the lives of his first murder victims, a couple whose identity still remains unverified. In 2000, Keyes became involved with a woman living on the Washington Makah Reservation, and their daughter was born a year later.
By the following year, 2002, Keyes had separated from the still unnamed woman and took his daughter away to live with him. Then, as of 2006, he began taking a number of travels away, visiting parts of California, Washington, and New England, never specifying a reason as to why. When he made his confession to law enforcement in 2012, Keyes was confirmed to have committed a number of burglaries, taking place in between twenty to thirty different homes, as well as conducting robberies in several other banks.
The time he robbed the National Bank of Texas certainly wasn’t a one-and-done. One of the most notable of these took place in 2009 when Keyes decided that, in order to finance his crimes, the quickest way to secure funds was to rob a bank. As one does, naturally.
He had allegedly abducted and killed a man in New York not long before; then, on April 10, 2009, Keyes made his way toward the Community Bank. He was said to have been wearing a jacket and jeans, grey shoes, two-tone gloves, sunglasses, and a fake mustache and goatee to complete the look. Oh, and a couple of accessories: a forty caliber semi-automatic Smith & Wesson handgun and a twenty-two caliber Ruger Charger pistol as a spare.
Heading inside with his weapons at the ready, he successfully made off with the cash he needed. However, rather than get spending, Keyes had a different approach. Stashing the stolen money in a toolbox, he then buried it in the Woodside Natural Area of Essex, Vermont.
Along with the cash, he buried both his Smith & Wesson and Ruger Charger, along with homemade silencers, ligatures, ammunition for both guns, and some garbage bags. Four days later, he flew back home and then made several repeat travels across America over the next two years. In 2011, he flew to Indiana, then drove to New York, and later back to Vermont.
Recovering his hidden toolbox, he prepared to target and murder another victim as a prelude to another bank robbing spree, with maybe some arson thrown in as an added treat. Prowling around suburban neighborhoods late on the eighth of July, 2011, Keyes eventually set his sights on Bill and Lorraine Currier. Having observed which room of the house the couple were asleep in, Keyes cut their phone line and broke inside.
He then enacted what he would later call a “blitz attack” on the Curriers, ambushing them as they slept, tying them up, and then driving them out to an abandoned farmhouse that he’d previously found in the area. After shooting Bill Currier with the twenty-two caliber Ruger, Keyes then forced himself on Lorraine before strangling her. Neither of their bodies were ever found.
Where Keyes was different from many other serial killers was how exactly he went about conducting his crimes. Rather than attacking victims spontaneously, he instead meticulously planned out each of his murders, spending ample time and taking extreme caution to avoid detection. And it seemed to work for almost his entire killer career since the police and FBI didn’t make any headway in even discovering his crimes until he kidnapped and killed Amantha Koenig in 2012.
What also made him far more difficult to track down than other serial killers was that there was little linking Keyes’ various victims, even the ones that authorities had actually found. Statistically, murders are typically carried out by somebody that the victim is considerably familiar with or a person who is at least known to the deceased. But when it came to Keyes, he had no prior connection whatsoever with any of his victims.
The idea of a total stranger just deciding, apropos of nothing, that they’re going to end your life because you just happened to cross their path is genuinely the stuff of paranoid nightmares. Keyes would lie in wait and search for victims in parks, cemeteries, campgrounds, or other similarly isolated areas away from the prying eyes of potential witnesses or surveillance cameras that are far more common in populated urban areas. When describing his reasoning to the police, he explained that there weren’t as many people to choose from in areas like these.
He confessed to law enforcement that the lack of anyone else around to see what he was doing was what drew him to the places and people he targeted: “There’s also no witnesses, really. There’s no one else around. ” He never went after victims that fit a specific profile, targeting men and women, although, when interviewed by police in 2012, he claimed that he considered children and their parents to be off-limits.
How altruistic of him. Despite these claims, the FBI still suspected that Keyes had been involved in the killing of several teenagers and children. In addition, the fact that Keyes moved around a lot, constantly traveling away to enact his brutal acts, made it initially hard to link his crimes to each other.
If a death occurs in Vermont and another takes place in Washington, it might be considered by police to be a bit of a leap to assume the same person did them, let alone entertain the idea that they were the work of a notorious serial killer. State to state, unless making requests for relevant information, police departments might not even be aware of crimes committed elsewhere in the country. Keyes would always enact his killings far away from wherever he currently called home and would never murder someone in the same area twice, making it even harder to connect what must have looked like several separate deaths, especially when he killed with no apparent motive or discernible pattern.
Months of preparation and planning went into his attacks. During his various trips to different states, he would only pay in – normally stolen – cash and kept his cell phone switched off at all times. Once Keyes had selected a victim at random, he would bury a “murder kit” somewhere in the area where his target was, just like he did before killing the Curriers.
Some of these kits have been recovered in parts of Alaska and New York, but Keyes also confessed that he had stashed others across Washington, Wyoming, Texas, and Arizona. Also, according to his confessions, he rarely used firearms, relying on them to carry out a killing only when he had to. Keyes admitted to deriving a lot of pleasure from watching his victims lose consciousness in a struggle, preferring instead to strangle them to death.
When the police questioned him as he confessed to his crimes, Keyes revealed one of the core details that made the FBI so afraid of him: he’d studied the crimes of other serial killers. According to Keyes, in his youth, he had read Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit – a book that features profiles of various serial killers from a former FBI agent – and since then had developed an affinity for his fellow killers. In one interview, investigators mentioned Robert Hansen, another serial killer who happened to also have been active in Anchorage, Alaska, between 1972 and 1983, otherwise known as the Butcher Baker.
Hearing mention of Hansen, Keyes enthusiastically told authorities: Yeah, I know all about him… I probably know every single serial killer that’s ever been written about. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. ” In particular, it was said that he deeply admired Ted Bundy, even claiming that he saw himself in him and shared many similarities with the notorious murderer.
While it was true that Keyes and Bundy were both methodical and operated in multiple US states, they clearly differed in how they chose their victims and how they operated. Even though part of the reason that Keyes didn’t want his name given to the media was to avoid being labeled as a copycat of his serial killer role model, he would even go as far as to try and imitate Bundy’s escape from court later in 2012 but was immediately seized by guards. Keyes didn’t hold all his fellow serial killers in such high regard, though.
He said of Dennis Rader, also known as BTK, that he was a “wimp” for showing remorse for his killings. Keyes expressed the most admiration for other serial killers who hadn’t been caught like he very nearly was. One homicide detective from Anchorage, Detective Monique Doll, said that Keyes “didn’t kidnap and kill people because he was crazy.
He didn’t kidnap and kill people because his deity told him to or because he had a bad childhood…. He did this because he got an immense amount of enjoyment out of it, much like an addict gets an immense amount of enjoyment out of drugs. In a way, he was an addict, and he was addicted to the feeling that he got when he was doing this.
” When investigators asked Keyes why he had committed his crimes, he simply replied by asking them: “Why not? ” It wouldn’t be until August of 2013, over a year after he had killed Samantha Koenig, that federal authorities released information about Israel Keyes to the public. They announced that he was suspected to have a grand total of eleven slain victims, each having been killed between 2001 and 2012.
There was also speculation that he’d claimed the lives of even more people, possibly up in Canada, where Keyes had often targeted prostitutes, as well as potential killings he’d committed in other countries. However, these were either too far out of federal jurisdiction or happened too long ago for the FBI to be able to fully substantiate them. Israel Keyes was said to have a body count of at least eleven innocent people, although he confessed to as many as twenty.
Still, only three of his victims have ever been confirmed and formally identified: those being the Curriers, Bill and Lorraine, and Samantha Koenig. There exists an entire list of speculated Keys’ additional victims, too, including multiple teenaged girls from Colville found dead in 1997, the Lewis County Jane Doe found in 2011 in Morton, and a body that was ruled as an accidental drowning in a lake in Neah Bay – and those are just the possible victims from Washington. When information about him was released to the public, Keyes became uncooperative with investigators and threatened to stop speaking with the FBI entirely.
During a routine court hearing in June 2012, he even became violent, which was when he was able to escape confinement and attempted to attack spectators in the courtroom. Following this, security measures were increased. Keyes had an escort of two officers every time he left his cell, full restraints, and daily strip searches since there were no restrictions on what items he could have in his possession, such as pencils and, crucially, razors.
Yet, despite these measures, he was still able to sneak a razor blade on his person, which was believed to have been issued to him by mistake since he was only authorized to shave with an electric razor. On December 2, 2012, Keyes wrote a two-page note before using a combination of the razor and hanging to end his own life. While he was never formally sentenced for his numerous crimes, Israel Keyes at least faced some kind of justice, no longer able to harm anybody else.
For more terrifying stories involving the FBI, check out “The Insane Story Of How The FBI Caught The “Eyeball Killer”. ” Or watch “MOST WANTED FBI Criminals 2024 Edition.
