Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Killers Amongst Us: Teen barista Samantha Koenig kidnapped at gunpoint (Part 5)

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Samantha Koenig is kidnapped at gunpoint from the Anchorage, Alaska, coffee stand where she worked, February 2013. Today we hear from the serial killer, Israel Keyes, who killed the barista. 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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Welcome back to Killers Amongst Us, a production of iHeartMedia and Crime Online. The disappearance of a beautiful young barista, Samantha Koenig. She vanishes into thin air and into sub-zero temperatures this week. Who is Israel Keyes? What, if anything, does he have to do with Samantha? 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.

Joining us to analyze the clues left behind, Cheryl McCollum, Director of the Cold Case Research Institute, and Dr. Bethany Marshall, renowned L.A. psychoanalyst. Today, you hear directly from Israel Keyes to understand who he is in his own words. Back when I was smart, I would let them come to me. Just a remote area. Kind of go to a remote area that's not anywhere near where you live that other people go to as well. Nancy Grace, killers amongst us. How did he do it? How could he be a serial killer traveling the country, crossing the country from New Mexico

to Anchorage, to Texas, to California, killing randomly, seemingly randomly? He lived two separate lives. Listen. He said to the detectives that he found a house and he had staked it out prior to their disappearance and murder. He said to meet certain criteria for him to get in easily, to get out easily, to have a car. There's no dog. There's no kids. Keys would avoid homes that he thought either had kids or had dogs simply because they're a complicating factor. I think I even had it pegged down just from looking at the outside because of the way they had their backyard set up.

It just looked like an older couple that didn't have kids kind of house. That is when Israel Keys is setting at the murder of the Currier family, a man and woman. He would stalk in hiking areas. He would stalk in areas like where Samantha was, leaving no connections. As a matter of fact, Bobby Chacon, FBI special agent who was there recovering Samantha Koenig's dismembered body out of a Sub-Zero lake covered in ice. Tell me about Israel Key's kill kits. He would take what were large five-gallon compound buckets that we often see in home improvement stores that are orange and things like that. So he would take something like that and put into it the things that he thought

he would need for an abduction and a kill. Sometimes they had weapons, knives, guns. They had rope. They had tape. They had gloves. Sometimes they had ski masks. So each one might have been a little different, but they all contained the things to subdue and abduct someone and then to ultimately kill that person. And so when I went up to upstate New York on the Currier case, they had located one of those in that area, and then we went to look at a kill kit. They located it. So when I went upstate New York on the Currier case

and took my dive team up there, they had already located his kill kit up there. And the thought is that he may have used it and actually put it back. So they started analyzing that. I'm not sure if anything ever came of that. But I certainly went to the lake in upstate New York where Keyes said he had disposed of Mr. Currier's weapon. And in less than an hour, my divers located that weapon and recovered it exactly where Keyes told us it would be. To John Limley, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter, were the Curriers his first kill? Who are the Curriers in this scenario?

Because I'm relating them back to barista Samantha Koenig. Who were the Curriers? Let me just start with that. Sure. They were a middle-aged couple living in Essex Junction, Vermont. And over the past 24 to 48 hours before they were reported missing, family members and people they worked with thought it was very bizarre that they hadn't heard anything from this couple. So police conduct a welfare check. At first, everything looks normal as if they've left town, like their car is gone.

But then they notice a window is broken. They find a mix of things that shouldn't be there and things that should be there that are missing, such as some very important medication that if they were going to travel, they'd certainly have it with them, like Lorraine's cardiac nor her wallet was there. Also missing, Lorraine's gun, a Ruger Snub Nose.38 caliber handgun that she kept for protection. And while searching the area outside of the courier's home, this is when they first realized that there may have been an abduction. They found that the couple's phone line had been severed. And these were not the type of people that would just leave out of the blue, not tell family, not tell co-workers where they were going. And unfortunately, no other activity was ever reported in the case. And then it went unsolved for the better part of a year. Take a listen to our friend at WPTZ NBC5. This

is Charlie Gora. Hardest investigation, the longest investigation I've ever been involved with in 28 years. About a half mile down a path at the Woodside Natural Area is where Detective George Murdy says Israel Keyes hid what was used to murder Bill and Lorraine Currier. Yes, this general area and a lot of what guided us was the sharp bend in the Winooski River right here. The serial killer told authorities he buried a cache of items including a handgun in a box, calling it a murder kit. Federal investigators say Keyes initially stashed it in April 2009. He retrieved it over two years later before killing the Curriers. He then hid most of the items in Parrishville, New York, where they remained until he started confessing to his crimes.

They recovered Bill and Lorraine Currier's gun and pieces of what turned out to be the murder weapon. Detective Murdy said he wasn't surprised Keyes chose a location like this because a wooded isolated area would have been in Keyes' comfort zone. He was very comfortable out in the woods and in wilderness areas. Murdy can't say if Keyes would have returned to Vermont but doesn't think the murderer would have changed his ways. I think there's a substantial likelihood that he would have killed again if he had remained free. And it seems to me that these kill kits have been made very meticulously. Listen to detectives speaking. Israel Keyes was one of the most meticulous serial killers that I've ever come across or even heard of. And one of the reasons is these kill kits or these caches of gear that he had stashed away

all around the country. These kill kits indicate to the FBI just how frighteningly calculating a killer Keyes is. They're also his signature, setting him apart from other serial killers. Even though he didn't have an identified victim, the planning really started when he would leave that kit, when he buried that kit in that location.

I haven't seen anything like it. It contains things like duct tape, shovels, guns, rope, things that you would use to both capture somebody, to hold them, and then to kill them, and dispose of the body afterwards. Drano and lye and these sorts of caustic chemical agents were present as well. Drano was an idea I had in case they were found right away.

I didn't want there to be any DNA on the outside of the bodies. The other thought I had that it would start the decomposition and they would break them down a little bit faster. He mentioned having up to 12 caches stashed in places around the country. He kind of joked about them and said, everybody loves a buried treasure. As a kid, I always used to dream that I'd find buried treasure, and if I were willing, I might as well create it. You hear him again laughing. You hear him laughing as he describes the kill kits, but the amount of planning, the intricate planning

to create kill kits, including murder weapons and even Drano, and then bury them in multiple states all across this country. FBI believes there are still kill kits buried to this day. But back to the couriers. Listen to Israel Keys in his own words, speaking about two of his many victims. And at that point, he was still like trying to talk me out of it. He was like, he's like, just let us go. I know you're in too deep, but we haven't really seen you. You can still walk away. And I just kind of laughed at him. I was like, you know, I don't know if I actually said anything, but in my head I was like, you don't even know how much planning everybody does. You can just walk away.

About two of his many victims and at that point he was still like trying to talk me out of it he was like he's like just let us go i know you're in too deep but we haven't really seen you you can still walk away and i was kind of laughed at him i like, you know, I don't know if I actually said anything, but in my head I was like, you don't even know how much planning everybody does and just walk away. The laughter, the laughter. I mean, the feeling of superiority he's feeling over his victims as the couriers, as man and woman, are trying to talk him out of killing them. Cheryl McCollum, it literally makes me sick to my stomach. And I'm just wondering how the feds are feeling sitting there listening to him laughing about the victims

trying to talk him out of murdering them. Nancy, they're feeling confident because the more he talks and the more he laughs, the more they gain and the closer they get to a full confession. So again, yes, he is ridiculous in what he's saying. I mean, it's almost unbelievable. You think he's making this up, except we know that he's not. And these, you know, caches that he's hidden everywhere. I can guarantee you there's some in places still that we'll never find. But he not only picked what went in that bucket, he picked where he was going to bury it and what went in it.

I think they were all different for a reason. He didn't need a mask everywhere. He didn't need a gun everywhere. He picked it deliberately. And when you hear him speak, of course he's laughing about it. He was hiding in plain sight. He was superior. Nancy, he was playing God. He decided who died and who didn't and when. Local cops had wondered how did the killer get into the courier home. Well, here's Israel Keyes bragging about how he got in. I cut the phone lines because usually if there's an alarm system, it'll trigger the alarm. So after I cut that, I was outside for probably an hour or two waiting for everybody in the neighborhood to go to sleep.

He gains access to the house by taking a fan out of a window in the garage. He used a crowbar that he found in the garage to break that glass. Once I was actually in the house, I was probably in the bedroom within five or six seconds. It really was a blitz attack on Bill and Lorraine, who were sleeping in bed.

Were they cooperative adversities? Yeah. Pretty shell-hooked. I'm sure. People never expect stuff to happen to them. That's from our friends at Oxygen. But listen to Keys. And I'm going to come back to the experts, Dr. Bethany Marshall, Cheryl McCollum, and Bobby Chacon,

talking about his demeanor, how he's bragging about killing these two defenseless people. You just make sure they know right away who's in charge and immediately tie him up. I jumped up over on the bed and grabbed her by the neck and shoved her head down into the pillow. He went in fast. He went in armed. He took them captive, put them in their own car. He had found an abandoned farmhouse that was very run down, and that's where he ended up taking Bill in the rain.

They were convinced that i had the wrong people but it was a case of mistaken identity or something first thing that he did is he took bill downstairs cable tied his hands so he couldn't stand up must have taken me longer than i thought because she got out of the car the best crushing part was hearing about her very near escape. That's when Keyes tells investigators that he sexually assaults Lorraine. That's from our friends at Oxygen to Dr. Bethany Marshall, California psychoanalyst. Dr. Bethany, I mean, there you see him raping her. But is that his motive?

I think his motive is actually just to kill. I think it's both. Rape is just another aspect of that. With serial killers, sexual perversion, power, and the homicidal instinct are all intertwined. You can't really say one is more important than the other. So these kill kits, the reason they're important to him is that when he methodically puts them together, he probably has sexual arousal as he's doing that because that is like the foreplay before the crime. It's interesting about the

couriers that he didn't care who he sexually assaulted. It could be an adolescent girl. It could be a middle-aged man. And he didn't even care if his victims were alive or dead. Okay. So that's how severe the perversion was, is it just had to be a body alive or dead. Now with serial killers, we know that aggression is processed through the same neural net as sexuality and somewhere in their neurobiology, sex, sadism, and killing all get, I don't know, intertwined, fused, stuck together. So when he took the crowbar out of the garage, when he took the screen off the window, when he went into the bedroom, I wouldn't be surprised if this felt like a sexual ritual. And then when he took them to kill them, the idea would be the, hey,

am I going to sexually assault them while they're alive, while they're struggling, I'm going to slash his throat and then sexually assault him while he lies there dying. That all of it happens at once in his brain. And that's what's so tragic about the couriers is that not only were they killed, but they suffered extraordinarily. And he seems to enjoy the suffering. I'm trying to figure out a motive. Again, remember, the state never has to prove a motive. State prosecutors are not expected to, under the law, crawl into the mind of a devil, as Cheryl McCollum put it, like Israel Keys and figure out what's happening. But

there are clues that maybe part of the motive is sexual. We know that he put Samantha Koenig in a sex torture chamber that he created, and a shed even had a radio out in the shed to turn the music up super high so his girlfriend and daughter could not hear her screaming. And it goes all the way back to his very first victim that we know of. Listen to Keys in his own words. His first plan to sexually assault and kill somebody happened in Maupin, Oregon in 1997. He went through everything he did to stake things out and identify where the best place was to take a victim. That's an area where people raft and tube down the Deschutes River, and he claimed that

a girl had been separated from her party. He was able to pick off the wounded deer in the herd. And much like a wolf or a pack of wolves would do, found her to be the easiest target. And in fact, that was his MO early on. They took her into the outhouse structure, and that's where he sexually assaulted her. What was the name of the girl that you raped? Oh, she told me her first name was Leah, or Lena. Lena?

Something else, yeah. Was that the first time you had sex with somebody? Depends what your definition is. Was that the first time you had sex with somebody against their will? No, but that was the first time I had someone tied up, you know, like was ready to actually do that. Yeah. She wasn't the first person that you had sex with

that wasn't a willing participant. What made this one, because you tied her up? Oh, because I was going to kill her. Uh-huh. And she knew I was going to kill her. He kind of joked that she got inside his head. She was asking him some personal questions and kind of interacted with him on a personal level. She was talking to me and telling me, you know, saying, oh you're a good-looking guy, why are you, you know, you don't have to do this. I probably would have even gone out with you and all this stuff.

Things never got really violent like they could have if she had been fighting me or something. She was pretty smart. She was, I mean, because it worked. I didn't, the main thing is I just lost my nerve right at the end. That victim eventually talked him into letting her go. He said, if you tell anybody about this, I'm going to come back and kill you. For like two years after that, I kept telling myself I should have killed her.

And I really beat myself up about that. Wow. You know what? I beat myself up about not giving the children enough vegetables. I'm just thinking and hearing him laugh about the victims, and he really beats himself up about the fact that he didn't kill her. I'm seeing a lot of similarities to FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon. You can find him at BobbyChacon.com. Bobby, I see picking this similar looking victim, Leah, that he's describing, restraining her, raping her, planning to kill her, committing the deed in an outhouse, as he describes it, compared to the shed in which he sex assaulted and murdered Samantha Koenig. I mean, he thinks he's so smart, but he's committing the same M.O., modus operandi method of operation,

over and over and over. Yes, but the important thing here, Nancy, is to look at these two cases and look at the evolution of a killer. So here he brought her back to an outhouse, which is in the public for everybody to use. As he matures as a killer, as he gets better at his craft, he now has a shed under his control that he's already pre-outfitted with restraining devices. So the change in this first attempted murder and rape to the current situation that we have with Samantha Koenig is you can see the difference.

You can see how much he has honed his skills, how much he has learned from prior incidents. And he says, I should have killed her. He learned from that initial incident and he changed his methods and he got better. And this is what we often find with killers like this. They get better as they learn from their mistakes,

if they don't get caught from those mistakes. So these two incidents, they show us a stark difference and, you know, the maturation and the expertise that he was developing in his craft, which is to hunt and kill people. Well, what's so amazing to me, and I'm going to let you explain this in your way, Cheryl McCollum, but with all of this happening, the raping, the murder, he still doesn't want his daughter to find out about dismembering Samantha Koenig. Listen to Keyes in his own words, if you can stand it. I do want to continue to cooperate. I'm having some issues as far as somewhat of an unrealistic expectation on my part, but I was thinking there might be a way give you all the answers on these cases. And, you know, families get closure and you find as many of them as possible. And in return for that, you know,

I don't plan on being around a whole lot longer, but a really big concern to me is, you know, my kid's going to be around. I don't want her to, like, type my name in the computer and have it pop up. You know, I already know stuff's going to come up. I know that. I just

try to minimize that at this point, I guess. It's what I was hoping to do and apparently it's going to be really difficult to get that assurance. I'm trying to figure out a way that you can still do that so cheryl mccollum again he's worried about his daughter finding out about the

dismemberment of samantha coney real easy nancy he's living two lives and for him the dismemberment was a level very different than just strangling someone or shooting someone from a distance that is grotesque by anybody's definition and he knew it would be for his daughter so he wanted to keep that from her so we've got this life as her dad he's got this life as a killer he wanted those two things separated as much as possible. How did he do it? How could he be a serial killer traveling the country, crossing the country from New Mexico to Anchorage to Texas to California, killing randomly, seemingly randomly. He lived two separate lives. Listen. It wasn't until we got into the really detailed conversations

about his crimes where you had to kind of step back. And that's why nobody suspected him. He did such a good job of having these two different lives. Despite his stable career and newfound commitment to fatherhood, Keyes tells investigators that he can't suppress his uncontrollable urge to kill. He recounts the convincing lies he made up to keep his family in the dark. A lot of the stuff that I did was in conjunction with something else that was going on. Pretty tight timeline, if you can say, so that it ever came up.

It's not like I would be in a situation where I had to explain where I was for days on end or something. He would make up these stories for why he had to leave on jobs and then take off for blocks of time. He would tell family and friends, co-workers, that he was heading over to eastern Washington

to visit family. I may have gone to eastern Washington, but it doesn't mean I went to see old friends. I don't have any old friends in eastern Washington. Right. Interestingly, his partner had absolutely no clue about what he was up to. She never suspected or knew anything.

A measure of his success was traveling to a place that he has no connection to to commit a murder and then leave right away. Traveling was his way of getting away both physically and probably psychologically from the stability of the home he had created. It's amazing to me. How does he do it, Bethany? And it's not the first time we've seen it. For instance, BTK buying torture killed Dennis Rader was a dog catcher involved in his church, extremely sanctimonious with a wife and a family. You've got Ted Bundy, who was a law student, who many people, not me, thought was charming, thought was

charismatic. You've got Scott Peterson, who had it all. The wife, the baby on the way, the home, the job, the college degree, the golf, the this, the that. They're killers, but they put on a semblance of normalcy. You know, Nancy, when we covered the BTK killer a number of years ago, I looked at all the research on serial killers. Like what kind of lives do they lead? And one of the things the research showed is that they are often family men in menial jobs. They usually have like 2.5 children, like the national average, and they often drive a family van or a family vehicle of some sort. And in this case with Israel Keys, and we saw with BTK and all the other serial killers you mentioned, they do live double lives, but not because they love their

families. It's as we talked about earlier, they want to put on the mask of sanity. They know something's wrong with them. They know that they are not like the rest, but they assemble a superficial life, like putting on a costume. But you know, when we go to a costume party, that costume is just good for that night. You know, we throw it in the closet at the end of the night. We don't think about it. It doesn't mean anything. And that's like their families are like a costume to them. They have superficial interest. But this whole thing about his daughter, I think in just some cheap kind of way, he wants his daughter to look up to him. It's like just simple pride. And it's nothing more than that. He doesn't want her to think of him badly, but she's going to,

right? She's going to grow up and read all the news reports. So this is how shallow his thinking is. Well, it's quite the dichotomy that he wants to have a family and a family life. Cheryl McCollum, I mean, we've dealt with serial killers so many, many times, and I'm always amazed they have a normal life. But they see that part of it. They grow up knowing that's what they're supposed to do. I mean, they watch TV, they see movies, they see neighbors. They want that on some level.

They just know they can't have it. So, again, they want the facade, and that also, in a really bizarre way, like with BTK, helps them continue their crime. How does he do it, Chacon? How does he have a normal life when he's traveling across the country, raping and killing? He adds bank robberies to his repertoire. How does he do it? And then he comes home to a wife and a daughter. Yeah, and I think I agree with Cheryl. I think it's all a facade for him. I think it's a disguise that he uses. The normalcy is a disguise. He doesn't really want that. He knows he needs it in society because he was raised to think that this is what people do. So this is what he has to do to be able to maintain this facade so that he

can then go and pursue his life's passion and his life's work, which is to hunt and kill people. That's what he's made to do. If society didn't have these rules, he probably wouldn't need that facade. So the facade only serves the function of keeping him hidden, keeping him out in the public so that he's not caged like an animal. So he knows that. So, you know, he doesn't want to have that family life. He doesn't want any of that. It's a useful tool. It's just like a ski mask that he might pull over to hide his identity. That's what all that trappings are. And he has learned that through his upbringing that he needs to maintain that so that he can go off and do

these other things that he's really basically and primarily driven to do. You know, Bobby, I've actually, as many times as I've dealt with serial killers, I've never thought about it like that. I didn't think about it that way. That these families, or being the deacon in the church, or the dog catcher, or the law student, or the fertilizer salesman. That's all just props. That's like putting on stage makeup and, you know, a costume.

That's what those people are to you. That's all they are to you. They make it possible for you to be literally a wolf in this world. Listen. Investigators suspect he's killed a total of eight people after they learn of five potential victims in Washington state. But it was after taking those five lives that Keyes comes to a crossroads in his personal life. He decides that his girlfriend, struggling with alcoholism,

is an unfit mother, so he seeks a better life for his daughter in Anchorage. He's been a handyman for much of his life, so he opened his own contracting business. He really fooled everybody. I mean, there was no indication for anybody in Anchorage that he was up to anything other than carpentry. He was capable of living what seemed to be a responsible life. But it was more like islands that were punctuated by channels that were turbulent and dangerous. He could be on firm ground for a little while, but it wouldn't last. Keys tells Special Agent Jolene Godin and her team

that in the spring of 2009, he traveled to the East Coast under the guise of visiting family. During this trip, Keys had committed a homicide. He had acknowledged that to us. Our computer forensic team had gotten hold of his computer to see what kind of news article he was searching, and they found Deborah Feldman's name on the computer. Deborah Feldman was a woman the FBI had identified as going missing, and around this time, she was someone who was estranged from her family,

and I think that they assumed that she had just run off. She was someone who, you know, lived a very high-risk lifestyle. She had addiction issues, may have lived on the street for a while, and these are the type of people that unfortunately fall prey to people like Keyes. Her case had very little media attention. It was not one that he would have had any reason to know about, so to find her name on there was really significant. We pulled photographs of several missing people. And when we got to Deborah's photograph, his demeanor changed a bit.

Do you know this person? No. That's nothing. I didn't. Do you know where this person is? No. For the first time, the investigators see a crack in Keyes' cruel persona. Keyes didn't want to talk about Deborah Feldman because it was a turn on the way he was controlling the interrogation process.

All of a sudden, we're confronting him with a picture and say, do you know this person? So he pushes back and says, I don't want to talk about that. He's exercising that control again. This was part of that cat-and-mouse game and he was at a point where he, I don't think, felt that he had to give us anything, but he didn't deny it either. Her name was on your computer. Yeah, I don't... I don't understand. You don't understand why the name was on my computer? Well, put it this way.

There's a lot of names on that computer. Well, just explain so we're not sitting here wondering. No, I'm not. I'm not. No, I'm not going to talk about what's on my computer. You're hearing serial killer Israel Keyes in his own words and our friends at Oxygen. Bobby Chacon, the Deborah they're talking about is victim number nine that we know of. How is her murder and Leah's murder similar to that of Samantha Koenig? And how do you think he picked Samantha out? Well, the Deborah Feldman murder is similar because they tied the time of her disappearance

to a known trip that Keyes took to the area where she disappeared. He also robbed a bank in that area. He drove and robbed a bank. And then he was in the area where Deborah Feldman disappeared at the time of her disappearance. And then, because they found her name and a news article on his computer. And when they confronted him with that, you saw the stark change in his demeanor. He did not like the fact that for a change where he was giving the interrogators the situations where he killed people, now they're saying, we found another one that you did without your help. That frightened him. That's a loss of control because now the interrogators now are saying,

we did some work and we know what you did here. So that's a complete change to that point. And that change, you can see how that change caused his change in demeanor. And he immediately said, no, I'm not going to talk about any names on my computer because now he's lost a measure of that control. And that was a very big turning point. So my question is, how did he single out Samantha? What do you think, Bobby? Well, we think he singled out the coffee shop itself. So he knew that that particular coffee shop stayed open, I think, one hour later than some of the surrounding coffee kiosks that populate that area. So he staked them out. He

knew that that one stayed open one hour later. It was surrounded by a mountain of snow, basically, so it was hidden from the street. So I think he picked the actual coffee shop, and whoever was closing on that particular night was going to be his victim. I wonder how many times, how many times, Cheryl McCollum, he drove by Samantha Koenig and looked into her coffee stand and decided she was the one. I guarantee you at least four. He picked the coffee shop out, had nothing to do with her. Once he realized, hey, after about 45 minutes to close, they stopped having a lot of people. There's not a lot of people around. He saw that location. He knew where to park. He knew how to enter. He knew how to get out. He knew how to do

it unseen. He was meticulous in every aspect, Nancy. He knew that general area better than I would say most people that live there. I mean, if you listen to him talk about how he staked out the home of the couriers, the couple, about taking the fan out of the window, about sneaking in, cutting the phone cords. He had watched them for a long time. He had buried a kill kit long before in their vicinity. Same thing here. And just imagine Samantha Koenig night after night after night in that isolated coffee stand, you know, surrounded by the 12-foot-tall snow banks where the snow's been pushed out of the parking area, the parking lot, and there she sits like a little canary in a golden cage, just sitting there, waiting unbeknownst to her. No idea at all. But then you also have the aspect of the robbery. It's not

just about sexual torture. It's not just about the thrill of dominion over his victims later laughing about how they begged to live. You know, he's making a living at this. There's a robbery aspect. And it goes all the way back to that we know of, victim number nine. That's Deborah. At that point, that is when he started robbing banks. Listen. The reason he was such a successful killing machine was because he knew how to avoid getting caught. The only victim that we recovered is Samantha. And that's because he told us exactly where she was.

He was very good at not leaving evidence. Deborah is the ninth victim that the FBI is able to connect to Keys. And although her body has never been recovered, Keys' location at the time of her disappearance supports the theory that she is one of his victims with deborah new jersey fbi is asking questions basically because it fits it fits the date fits the place fits a number of things fit and the fact that she's on your

computer um i i just i don't want to talk about it and the fact that she's on your computer. Um. I just, I don't want to talk about it. We suspect that Deborah went missing on April 9th. And it was on April 11th that the bank in Tupper Lake, New York, was robbed. We learned that Keyes was into bank robberies, and he admitted that was a bank that he had robbed. We learned that Keyes was into bank robberies and he admitted that was a bank that he had robbed. I walked through the door and there were a lot of people so I pulled the gun out but then I already had the note and I was like this doesn't make sense I've already got the gun out. There's literally a picture where you've got a note in one hand and a gun in the other.

Money caches were some of the types of caches that he had. So from that statement, I suspect that he's probably robbed several banks. The idea was, if we could find the bank that he robbed, maybe we can find the person he murdered, because that seemed to be in similar places. But he was very careful with doling out information, and he understood exactly where we were going.

Believe it or not, most of the things I've done haven't really been for money. Mm-hmm. Right. It's hard to make that defense, because I did get quite a bit of money from banks, but that's not really more of the adrenaline. Bank robberies are fairly common in our business, but takeover bank robberies,

where the suspect takes over the bank, exceedingly rare. It seemed to be one of the things he enjoyed doing after killing someone because it excited him. Mr. Keyes said it was similar to the type of rush he would get when he would kidnap the victim, but not on the same scale. That's our friends at Oxygen and the words from hours of Israel Keyes' statements. John Limley, were the bodies of the couriers ever found? I mean, we've got so many victims. I made a flow chart. No, they were not.

Keyes were forced into a vacant farmhouse not far from their home. Now, this is a location that Keyes had identified earlier as the place where he'd take a couple. He hadn't identified at the time which one, but take a couple and then kill them. Keyes placed the courier's bodies in separate garbage bags in one corner of that abandoned farmhouse basement. He poured Drano on them to speed decomposition, then covered them with debris. Now, not knowing as the months passed that the old burned out house was actually a crime scene, someone at some point had bulldozed the charred remains and hauled them all to a landfill. By the time investigators realized the full story of what had happened to the Curriers, the debris and presumably the couple's remains had been there for some time.

A long search of the landfill was conducted, but the Curriers' bodies were never recovered. And at this point, authorities really don't expect to ever find them. Isn't it true, John Lindley, one of his hunting grounds was cemeteries? Yes, indeed. He seemed to have a fascination with cemeteries as a part of his travel. One thing that investigators began to see is that a picture of Key's life was he liked to be a tourist. He liked to travel. He liked the freedom of moving around the country, exploring new places. So very much like many of us, he'd scope out where he wanted to go, where he'd like to stay. He'd make airline and rental car reservations. Unlike many of us, though, instead of, say, visiting an historic landmark or maybe catching up with family or

friends, he said he had none. His vacation activities centered around murdering a random person or maybe two. If you're trying to compare him to me taking the twins to historic sites or Disney, you can stop right there. You know, the way he talks, he talked for how many hours, Bobby Chacon? Oh, dozens of hours. I don't know the exact number, but he spoke for dozens of hours. There were many, many trips. All in control. I can just imagine him kicked back, smoking his cigar, laughing about all of his victims. It's a miracle in my mind, Bobby, that the body of Samantha was ever found because we never got Deborah's body. We never found the courier's body. There are so many others out there, I think, we don't know about and

we never found. And what's so eerie that I can't shake this, is that he walked among us, undetected, for decades, killing, planning the killings, enjoying the killings, savoring the killings. I mean, when I pull up at a red light and I look around, this guy, Keyes, makes me automatically lock my doors because killers walk among us. In case you're wondering, Israel Keyes committed suicide behind bars. Nancy Grace, signing off. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.