Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Killers Amongst Us: Teen barista Samantha Koenig kidnapped at gunpoint (Part 4)

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Samantha Koenig is kidnapped at gunpoint from the Anchorage, Alaska, coffee stand where she worked, February 2013. Today our investigation moves from a recuse to a recovery. Former FBI Special Agent��Bobby Chacon, who worked on the Koenig investigation, joins Nancy Grace in an exploration of the case. The expert panel also includes Cold Case Research Institute Director Sheryl McCollum, Atlanta judge and lawyer Ashley Willcott, Los Angeles psycho analyst Dr. Bethany Marshall, Casey Grove with Alaska Public Media and Crime Stories Reporter Robyn Walensky.Summary Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Welcome back to Killers Amongst Us, a production of iHeartMedia and Crime Online. A major break occurs in the hunt for Samantha Koenig and her kidnapper. Investigators tracking Samantha's debit card across the country. The man we now know as Israel Keyes in custody. Joining us to help crack the case, investigative reporter Casey Grove from Alaska and FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon, who's actually in on the FBI investigation, to analyze the clues left behind Cheryl McCollum,

director of the Cold Case Research Institute, and Dr. Bethany Marshall, renowned L.A. psychoanalyst. The FBI now are on the mission not to save Samantha, but to recover her body. We were told by the interrogators that the victim was dismembered in five distinct parts. Nancy Grace, killers amongst us. He let the agents know in the interrogation that he had taken her to a lake about 40 miles north of Anchorage. Remember, this is still the winter, and he went out onto this frozen lake that's used, ice fishermen use it all the time. So you see these tents that are put up by these ice fishermen so they can sit around a fishing hole in the cold and fish. So he got himself one of these tents.

He put it up. He drilled a hole through the ice, and he put Samantha's body through that hole to rest on the bottom of that lake. Bobby Chacon, FBI special agent, all the time you are out there on the ice, and you're digging a hole in it, you're pulling her up like she's a fish and in parts, you've got to be thinking about what Keyes tells you he does with Samantha's body. Listen. The morning after the kidnapping, Israel Key Keys rolled her body up and stuck it in a box in his shed, and then woke his girlfriend up and his child up, went to New Orleans, boarded a cruise ship, and then came back about two, two and a half weeks later.

Because of the cold temperatures, she had frozen. And then he thawed her out and had to apply makeup to her in order to make her look more lifelike. And also he told detectives he braided her hair as he had braided his daughter's hair and taken her photograph to be used in the ransom note, not knowing that she never wore her hair that way. So you know going into it, Bobby Chacon, that she's cut up into pieces. That's correct.

But we were told not to let anyone know that and keep that a very well-guarded secret because one of the conditions that Keyes put on the interrogators was that he didn't want that particular detail released because he was fearful of what his daughter might think about the dismemberment. You're kidding me. No. I just got to drink that in for a moment. You know, Cheryl McCollum, director of the Cold Case Research Institute,

every time I think I've heard it all, then I hear something like that. Israel Keyes. think I've heard it all. Then I hear something like that. Israel Keys. He did not go from zero to 160 just like that with Samantha Koenig. Okay. This ain't his first time at the rodeo. I can guarantee you that. But he's worried. He takes the girl at gunpoint with ski mask, leaving behind his Americano coffee on the counter. He forces her into his car. He puts her in a shed. He rapes her over and over in a basically dungeon atmosphere he's created in the shed, turning the music up high so nobody can hear him. He kills her. Then he stitches her eyelids open, puts makeup on her to take a ransom photo, freezes her,

but he doesn't want anybody to know about the dismemberment because he thinks that might make him look bad. Really? Nancy, this man is more twisted and more evil than most you're ever going to come across. And again, his methods, his way of thinking are just as twisted so again he knows you know killing somebody whatever but that dismemberment is going to make people see me differently

and he's extremely concerned about that even though as you said not only has he done all these horrible things he lived his life this way. Yeah, I mean, really, Cheryl, he stitches the dead girl's eyes open to her brow and puts makeup on a dead body a la Ted Bundy. But he's worried about what his daughter might think about the dismemberment aspect. Dr. Bethany Marshall, you know, I'm just a trial lawyer. You're the shrink. Help me out here. How can he be worried about that detail getting out? Remember that sociopaths have a thin veneer of sociability. Thin. It cracks at the smallest disagreement with them. So what

belongs to that? Okay, stop right there, Bethanyany what do you mean by a thin veneer of sociability i see that's the kind of thing i'd have to dissect and write notes on just to figure it out have you ever met somebody who's incredibly syrupy sweet they're solicitous they ask you everything about yourself they i'm in the tv business are you kidding everything's fake okay so let's use fake instead of Bethany, Bethany, Bethany, Bethany, Bethany. If you read and I can't remember which book it was, I think it was death on the D list. Okay, there's a character in there, which is patterned after a real person, which I will not name. They changed the name of the network from Global News and Entertainment,

I think I called it, to G-N-E. And Haley, the star, is going, and they keep going, it's not Global News and Entertainment. Don't say that. And she goes, well, then what does G-N-E stand for? And they go, it stands for nothing. It's just G-N-E. That's all.

Just go with it. That is actually a true life scenario that happened to me when they changed headline news to H-L-N. I'm like, but why can't I say headline news anymore? And they went, just don't say it. I'm like, well, why? What does H-L-N stand for? They go, it stands for nothing.

I'd like to say that I made that up. But sadly, you know, it stands for nothing. You know, it's that I made that up, but sadly, you know, it stands for nothing. You know, I remember that moment, but it's yes, of course I've met somebody like that. Really? Are you kidding me? Okay, so when Israel Keyes is concerned about whether or not his daughter is going to know about the dismemberment and the fact that he put makeup on the victim after she was frozen and the fact that he stitched her eyes shut when he does not want his daughter to know those details,

it is as meaningless as when the network changed its name from one to the other and there was no underlying meaning to it. It is superficial. He just wants to look good in front of his daughter. There's no deeper meanings. We can search for meanings, but he, as Cheryl McCollum said, is a twisted sicko. And in some, I'm going to use the word. You know, wait a minute, Bethany, I expect Cheryl and myself to talk like that twisted sicko,

pearl freak, but you're supposed to sugarcoat it with fancy psychological names. Like, I don't know, give me one. Okay, well, when Cheryl talks, it just sounds so important. So I had to repeat her words, but I will use clinical terms. Israel Keyes, I read the reports, the psychologist who evaluated him said that he had antisocial tendencies. I would say sociopaths, but that's what the psychologist said. This was five and a half hours of testing when he was incarcerated. And so I would say that someone with antisocial, there's failure to pay back debts to society, there's impulsivity, there are perversions, that the person has very strange sexual interests, but they are also very concerned about what people think about them. They're very grandiose and it's, they, they're concerned about what other people think

about them in the most superficial of ways. Like they just want to look good, but they don't care if there's anything to back up the perception. Like I have a husband of a patient in my practice who goes around telling everybody that he graduated from Harvard. He didn't. He graduated from a local city college. In fact, he actually didn't graduate. He just dropped out. He just wants to look good.

But he doesn't care that everybody can go on the Internet and figure out whether or not he really graduated from Harvard. It's superficial. It's just in the moment he wants to look good. He's not caring at all if people are going to like research and see if, in the moment he wants to look good, he's not caring at all if people are going to like research and see if in fact he went to Harvard. And that's kind of how Israel Keyes is. He's not, he doesn't think that his daughter is going to like read all the reports and know everything that he did to this victim. He just thinks that, oh, you know, dad's a good guy. You know, this woman died, but you know, he took care of the body. And that's how Israel

Keyes thinks. It's very superficial. There's no big picture thinking. It's not thought out in any systematic way. Well, I'm sure right now that Harvard University is so proud that somehow you've dragged them into the mind of a serial killer. But Bobby Chacon with me, FBI special agent, as much as he wanted to keep it a secret that he had actually dismembered this young girl, it was very clear. But I'll go to you on that. Casey Grove from Alaska Public Media. I mean, how could you stand on the edge, that it was not just one body that came out. It was smaller pieces than just one whole body. And I think that was reported that day or the next day, that that was one of the things that they noticed

when watching the FBI dive team go under this ice and start pulling things out. But there was, you know, there was some covering. They, you know, the FBI was trying to be as discreet as they could about it. But, yeah, I think it was kind of clear. You know, Bobby Chacon with me there on the scene on that ice recovering the body of Samantha Koenig, the Alaskan barista. Bobby Chacon, I want to know what you were thinking, what was going through your mind as you're standing out there on the ice. I mean, it's got to be bittersweet because you've wanted to find Samantha, but not like this. What were you thinking out there? Well, you know, my team is trained to do this and we do this all too often, unfortunately.

So this is certainly not the first body recovery and certainly not the first child we've recovered. So it really breaks down into two phases for us. Once we're looking for what we're looking for, the person we're looking for, it's really a target of a search for us. So we divorce ourselves from the emotions that this is a human being because we need to maintain that emotional distance to maintain our focus on the search because I'm about to put some of my people, my divers, into an environment that's hostile to human life. That means they could die down there. And so I need them focused on what they're doing to stay alive, to retrieve the things that we're looking for. And in this case, that was five items, five objects, five distinct parts.

And so once we locate the victim. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, Bobby. What do you mean by five distinct parts? Now, there's no separating emotion or reality here. I want to know what you mean when you say five distinct parts. Well, we were told by the interrogators that the victim was dismembered in five distinct parts and deposited into the lakes in five distinct parts. We were told that the parts were weighted down with some kind of wire and some kind of weight. And so when we saw on our sonar, we did see five very distinct parts on a very otherwise clean and sandy bottom of that lake.

And so when we turned the sonar on, we saw those five pieces. And so then we sent our robot down with the video. And then when the divers went down, they did the recovery of those five pieces. Now, the difference we did here, because we wanted to try to keep the dismemberment detail as secret as possible, instead of using five different bags, we put one body bag and we put all five pieces in one bag so that when we brought Samantha back to the surface, we lifted only one bag out of the water. We immediately brought that bag into a covered pop-up shelter. And the medical examiner's investigators and myself opened the bag for the first time once it was in that covered shelter.

So you're out there on the ice. And as you know, I'm an amateur diver. You may be the greatest diver in the world, but anything can go wrong, especially in those conditions, Bobby Chacon. So you're standing there sending your people down in cold water dive suits. What happens? I want to hear the mechanics of how you retrieve five bags containing the remains of Samantha Koenig off the bottom of a freezing cold lake. How do you do it? Our divers are on a surface-supplied air system with communications and full dive helmets, so they're protected from what we call an overhead environment, which means that you can't

go directly to the surface. There's something blocking you, in this case ice. So they are tethered to the surface with that big umbilical that supplies them with the air to breathe and which provides us with the communication and video from their helmets. So they go down in a diver pair. I put both of the divers in the water at the surface. We check all their systems. This is all equipment that's rated to work underwater. So the first few minutes are testing your equipment at the surface.

So they now descend a foot or two. They stay there to make sure that none of the equipment will freeze up that they'll be able to basically survive while they do this work and so once we're confident that everything's working properly um that nothing is going to freeze up on us um then i communicate with them and they descend to the bottom the the one saving grace about frozen water or water that cold is it's very clear because a lot of the sediment has settled to the bottom. Most of the, even the microscopic life is dormant in that kind of temperature. So it's very clear. So from the surface or from a few feet below the surface, as they look down, we can see on our video camera, and they obviously certainly can see the five distinct parts that lay below them about 40, 45 feet.

So we then slowly have them descend, and they descend because they're heavy. We have a tender holding each of their umbilical cords, allowing them to descend to the bottom. So they slowly go to the bottom. And we know that because it's all frozen and the bottom is going to be very silty, so as soon as they impact the bottom, there'll be clouds of silt that puff up. So we try to get them as close to at least the first of the five as possible. And they do, and they descend. One of them has a tool bag attached to him with different tools that they might need. The other has a large underwater body bag specifically designed to work underwater. And so they go about the business of retrieving the items and the pieces that we're looking for,

and I communicate with them, and I'm watching on their helmet video camera the entire time. They get to the first piece, and they open the bag, and they start the recovery, and they place the first piece in the bag. Up until the point where we're in contact with the victim, there's a distance to the emote. Did you just say they open the bag under the water? Yes, it's folded up because dragging a bag, an open bag through the water is almost impossible. It's just got too much drag in the water and it's too inefficient. So the bag is folded up very tightly.

Once you get on scene, you unclip it from your belt and you unroll it and then you can start using it, unzip it and things like that. So up until that point, we've maintained that emotional distance that's needed to focus on staying alive in that environment. But once we're in contact with the victim, the recovery takes a distinct, at least for us, emotional shift. And now it becomes much more solemn for us and much more. Right. I got a question for you, Bobby. When you, as you're pulling up, they come up with the black plastic bags. You know what's in them. When you get them in your hands, what do you do with them? At the surface, they come up with the bag and we have, you we have three or four people around the hole reaching down in and grabbing a hold of it, and slowly and now, because in effect we're pallbearers at this point,

and we slowly move the bag onto a sled that's at the edge of the hole in the ice, and we move that sled into a covered pop-up shelter, because we knew there were high-powered cameras focused on us from the shoreline of the lake. You mean from the media? Yes. Bobby, when did you actually look in a bag, and how did you determine it was Samantha? Well, as soon as we got the sled into the pop-up shelter,

the medical examiner investigator and I started unzipping the bag. And that's when we saw the body parts in there. And then we looked at Samantha's head. We turned the head over. And then, of course, we could do a visual identification of her face. Listen. You know, the things I've done, and I didn't do them because I don't feel bad about them, and I didn't do them because I felt I had no other choice. I did them for myself, so it's just as good.

It's better, actually, for me to keep them to myself because they're mine. And so unless I'm going to get something in return, aside from just an ego boost by talking about them, then I'm not going to talk about them. I don't have any interest in it. I don't know. I just, the main thing is I just lost my nerve right at the end. Because, I mean, that wasn't...

I mean, that never stopped me after that. People would always talk to me. You are hearing the voice of Israel Keyes, the man we now know murdered the Alaskan barista Samantha Koenig. But that is the tip of the iceberg. To John Limley, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter, how many people do authorities believe Keyes murdered? Well, as they were interviewing him, those hours and hours of interrogation, Keyes finally indicated that in addition to Samantha Koenig, there were others. In fact, several others. And this is when he started sort of bribing the investigators. Well, if you'll give me a cigar or if you'll

give me a candy bar, I'll tell you this story or that story. He was very vague about a number of stories, but one that he really honed in on and gave them a good bit of information was a couple in Vermont that had been missing for months. To Dr. Bethany Marshall, California psychoanalyst, you know, serial killers don't just happen. You can tell very early on that there's something very, very disturbing about a serial killer, even back to childhood sometimes. Well, that's one of the criteria for evaluating whether or not someone's a serial killer or a sociopath or a psychopath is cruelty to animals or to children or people during childhood. And I read a little bit about Israel Key's history, and apparently he had a love for guns. And he said in one of

the interviews that he loved to hunt in the woods. Again, this is as a child. And he wanted to kill anything that, quote, had a heartbeat, end quote. So that's a very unusual way for an adult to describe their childhood. And what that tells me is that even at that young age, the factors that create sociopathy were already in him, whether it was genetic or psychological, biological, environmental, he had those factors. And I would say the distinguishing factor of the serial killer is cruelty. You know, we have a lot of sociopaths that become, let's say, the president of Enron, or they rise to the top of corporations, and they put all their cruelty into having power over other people in the realm of finances, in the realm of industry. But you have what we call

a disorganized sociopath, a low-level sociopath like Serial Keys, and his power and cruelty goes into the destruction of life. A little bit like a lion on the savannah may just be waiting for a deer, an antelope, a springbok to come by, tears its throat out, and just says, yummy, I have lunch. It doesn't mean much more than that, except in the case of the serial killer, there's the enjoyment in tearing the throat out. Right. Cheryl McCollum, Director, Cold Case Research Institute. What do all serial killers have in common? Nancy Mosley, they set fires, They kill an animal. And we often see that they wet the bed up until, you know, of late age, like into their, you know, 11, 12-year-old ages. So that's usually the triangle people look for. Things he has already said, they're not uncommon.

We saw it with Jeffrey Dahmer where he killed, you know, the dead squirrel and kept it for months and watched it, you know, disintegrate basically in a shoebox. They do these things. So there are flags. There are, you know, things that people know to be true. And what he's saying goes right in Serial Killer 101. Well, Keyes manifested tendencies of a serial killer early in life. Listen. Keyes describes his childhood home as free from abuse and neglect. But he also remembers having violent urges.

He talked about having these urges and these dark urges at a very young age. I had the thought that everybody else was faking it, and everybody was like, I mean, they just didn't act like it. Or I figured that I was a demon child or whatever. I don't think it's an emotional attachment that he's talking about when he says, you know, I was battling these demons. It's a conflict between his parents and all of society

telling him, this is how we behave. But as you mature, you can shed that confusion. But I mean, all that went away. I don't feel bad about it anymore. That was Keys' journey. And that's the maturation of a psychopath. I've known since I was 14 that there was things that I thought were normal and that were OK that nobody else seems

to think are normal and okay. There was some friends staying with us and there was a cat of ours that was always getting into the trash and we all went up into the woods and I took a piece of cord and tied it to this tree and I shot it in the stomach. It ran around and around the tree and then crashed into the tree. I mean I actually kind of laughed a little but then I looked over and the kid who was about my age was throwing up

like he was really traumatized I guess you would say. That was pretty much the last time anybody went in the woods with me. I learned my lesson. What he recognized from that is not that he had to change what he was doing, just that he had to hide it from other people. That's when I just started doing stuff by myself, pretty much exclusively. You're hearing the serial killer, Israel Keyes, in his own words. And, you know, Cheryl McCollum, you and I have been there so many times.

Chacon, you have been too, where you're in the room listening to a confession. And I've watched other agents and other law enforcement kind of laugh along with the perp as he says something he thinks is funny. I could never do it. I just sit there and stare at them with dead eyes. And I hear Israel Keyes just actually start laughing, snickering at his own words. Did I get that right, Cheryl? Did he say he shot a cat and hung it and watched it twirl around till it died? Absolutely. These agents in that room did a remarkable job from beginning to end. And this was almost like this symphony.

And they just were orchestrating it, and they were in charge, but they let him believe that he was running the show. It was perfection as far as interview and interrogation goes. And they were able to extract so much information from him, that we can learn from. So the next time we have to combat someone like this, we have more in our arsenal to do so. It was sheer brilliance. Well, I have to agree with you on that. And this is why nobody can connect Israel Keys, a serial killer, to Samantha Koenig. He had absolutely no connection. Bobby Chacon, FBI special agent, when you have a homicide, you start there at that point with that body, okay? Processing the crime

scene, everything around it, primary, secondary, tertiary crime scenes. Then you start moving out. Then you go to the husband, the boyfriend, the coffee shop freak that comes by every morning to get coffee, the friend she used to work with, the boys you went to high school that had a crush, the neighbor with the TRO, and then on and out and out and out and out. And nothing connected her in any way to Israel Keys, which made it literally like looking for a needle in a haystack for the cops. There's no connection. But this guy has committed murders all over the country. How has he done it, Bobby, and gotten away with it? Well, the two things that, you know, he was dead on in his thinking that when he told us the two things he knew he should be random to, and when I investigated homicides, one of the things I learned in what we call homicide school was you draw two circles.

You draw one circle around the victim, and you put one circle around the geographic location where the body was found or where the homicide took place. And 95% of the time, your suspect is going to come out of one of those circles. So you look at who's associated with this particular victim. And like you said, ex-boyfriends, people with TROs, all of those people are in that circle. In the other circle are all the people surrounding maybe that coffee shop, regulars to the coffee shop, people that have been hanging around the coffee shop, people, you know, the crazy guy that's always in there on a certain morning. So that's the second circle of people.

Now, he's new. He kept random to his victim and random to the location that that would keep him out of the suspect pool on almost all his homicides. He was very methodical about that. And those are the two things that aid investigators. Take a listen to First Assistant U.S. Attorney in Alaska, Kevin Feldes. Well, we firmly believe that he killed at least 11 people. And frankly, I think it could be more.

At one point when he was in jail, we found that he had drawn in his own blood 11 skulls on a piece of paper. We also asked him about the number of people. So there's more victims out there. And it is really going to be through something somebody may have seen somewhere that at the time they didn't think was important. But if they can look at that timeline and they may have any information, please report it because that's going to be what leads us to the next step and hopefully give closure to more families. That's from my friends at HLN. Okay, I was trying to soak that in.

You know, Cheryl, most guys are like, let's see, what are they doing? They're watching football or they're not to stereotype. Don't get mad, Bobby, Chacon, John Limley, Casey Grove. They're watching football. They're watching the Masters. They're obsessed with their car or their job. They're not drawing skulls in their own blood, Cheryl. Help me. This is the devil on earth. I mean, that's what he is. I mean, I can't imagine the things that this man has done, the ease in which he talks about them, the time that he took to prepare, the time that he took to carry all this stuff out. And here's the real kick, Nancy, the time that he took to make sure everything was in place before he did it. Most men are pretty, you know, it's kind of seat of their pants.

Like, hey, that's a good enough victim. It's pretty random. I'll just grab her right now. And they get caught because there's no planning. This man took so much time to plan and then took time in between that not only was there no connection with his victims, there was no connection with him in the cities and states he was in. This guy traveled all across the country. Now you see him. Now you don't.

Who is Israel Keyes? Nancy Grace, signing off. Goodbye, friends. Nancy Grace signing off goodbye friends