Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - SERIAL KILLER CAUGHT ON TAPE: MORE BODIES?

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

Samantha Koenig was kidnapped at gunpoint from the Anchorage, Alaska, coffee stand where she worked as a barista in February 2013 by a man who may be one of the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Israel Keyes developed an elaborate plan to demand a ransom for the 18-year-old's return.  After his arrest, Keyes  admits to killing 11 people across the country, but are there more?  JOINING NANCY GRACE TODAY:  Andrew Iden  - Co-Host, "Deviant" Podcast, Insta & TikTok: @deviant.podcast    Dr. Bethany Marshall -Psychoanalyst, Author "Deal Breaker: When to Work on a Relationship and When to Walk Away” https://www.drbethanymarshall.com, Instagram & TikTok: drbethanymarshall, Twitter:@DrBethanyLive Bobby Chacon - Former Special Agent FBI, Screenwriter for “Criminal Minds;” Co-star Facebook TV "Curse of Akakor" Instagram/Twitter: @BobbyChaconFBI, BobbyChacon.com   Darryl Cohen - Former Assistant District Attorney, Former Assistant State Attorney, Defense Attorney, Cohen, Cooper, Estep, & Allen, LLC, CCEAlaw.com, Facebook: "Darryl B Cohen", Twitter: @DarrylBCohen Dr. Kendall Crowns -  Chief Medical Examiner Tarrant County, Lecturer: Burnett School of Medicine at TCU (Texas Christian University)   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. How many serial killers are walking amongst us? How many serial killers yet to be caught? Has a prolific serial killer been caught on tape? And are there more bodies? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us.

The search for Samantha Koenig leads to a local park as the kidnapper leaves a photo for police. What happened to Samantha? Little did Samantha's father know that photo that was left along with a ransom note and had Samantha pictured with braids. And her dad immediately knew Samantha never wore her hair like that. Little did her dad know at the time he got the ransom note and he saw the Polaroid that Samantha was dead. In the photo, her eyes stitched open and makeup artfully applied. How many serial killers are lurking amongst us? This guy, Israel Keyes, one of the most prolific serial killers to ever stalk our country. Very

rarely is a serial killer caught on tape, but listen to this. She was out on the river, and it's like a river you can float down. People do it on inner tubes and stuff. And I was just hanging out at this more remote spot. She was like the last one in her group. I just grabbed her and pulled her into the shore. He speaks of abducting one of his first victims so casually. You are hearing the voice of a prolific serial killer that's taught our country for so long,

and the bodies weren't even connected. Authorities didn't realize one guy is responsible for a murder wave. Joining me in our panel, before I let you hear more of the prolific serial killer Israel Keyes, I want to introduce a longtime friend and colleague. As you may know, I was on HLN for many, many years. And one of our star producers was Andrew Iden, aka Drew Iden, who joins us tonight. He is now co-host of The Deviant Podcast. Andrew, thank you for being with us. Thanks for having me, Nancy. Israel Keys.

Do you hear how casually he's describing? He says she was out on the river, a river you can float down with inner tubes, and she was near the end. It's just like the slowest gazelle, Drew. The slowest gazelle is the one the hyena grabs. And that's exactly what he does. I mean, if a hyena could talk, it would be him. And he so casually grabs, like describes grabbing her as the rest of the group goes away. It's like, you know, yeah, I drove through McDonald's. I got a diet Coke. Yeah. Are you surprised at how, how casual he is? It's a, it's really shocking. Honestly, when you listen to, when you listen to the hours of his conversations with authorities, um, the thing that is so mind boggling is the, is the callous, cold, detached demeanor with which

he outlines all of his crimes and even some of the crimes that he doesn't really confess to. Right. He what we learned listening to him talk to police is that he loves to walk right up to the edge of a confession and then stop right short of giving them the information they need. OK, hold on. Yeah. A.K.A. Andrew Iden. Hold on just a moment. We talked about this over and over on the NG show at HLN. Let me go to Daryl Cohen. Daryl Cohen, courtroom superstar, former felony prosecutor, now a defense attorney. You can find him at Cohen, Cooper, Estep, and Allen. Daryl, how many times did we have, I mean, a full-fledged criminal, just a bad guy. And he, and it's typically a he, people say, why do you hate men? I don't hate men. I just hate men that commit violent crimes. He would go all the way up to the moment and say something like, yeah, we were driving along and I looked out the window and I heard a gunshot. And at that moment, that one critical moment, as Andrew is describing, leads you all the way up to the moment of the murder and then backs off? Nancy, so often because most or at least many of those who have

committed these heinous crimes cannot admit it to themselves. They believe that what they were doing was a story. They were in a fairy tale. They were wonderful people. And oh my gosh, I don't know how that happened. The gun went off. I didn't have the gun. Did I really? Maybe. Sure. Maybe. Perhaps. These people. Yeah. Was that me that pulled the trigger? And you know, another thing, and I want to know if you've noticed this, Bobby Chacon is joining us, special agent, FBI, former special agent, now screenwriter for Criminal

Minds. And I want to clue you into a new documentary you can find. It's called After the Fall. Little did Bobby and I know, we were both in New York the day of September 11. And this is his painstakingly put together documentary about that day. Bobby Chacon also helped fish the body, as I recall, dismembered in black plastic trash bags out of an icy lake. It was you. There you go. On top of that ice, trying to pull up the body parts of that Alaskan barista, Samantha Koenig. That was you, Bobby Chacon. What do you make of what Drew is telling us about how Israel Keys, the serial killer, will go all the way up to the point of the murder and then back off? And you know what I've noticed also, Bobby, as you and I have discussed, they very often won't admit that they sexually assaulted a victim, rape, sodomy, the whole thing.

They leave that part out. It's like they're more worried about that than they are about the murder. Yeah, it's really interesting where they draw the lines, right, because they're so irrational when you try to figure out the lines they want to draw. In this particular case, when we were going up there to recover Samantha, we were told that she had been dismembered and she was in five separate pieces weighted down. But we were also told that Keyes made a demand that he did not want that part of it leaked. He didn't want the part that she had been dismembered leaked to the press. So we had to be very careful. Normally we recover a victim like this.

We would bring each body part up in a separate body bag for the medical examiner. They don't like those commingled when they do their analysis. But in this case, we put Samantha all in one bag and brought her to the surface because the media was at the shorelines with cameras and stuff. And we didn't want to clue them in because Keyes made that demand

that he didn't mind getting out there that he sexually assaulted and murdered her, but he didn't want his 11-year-old daughter to know that he had dismembered her. It's a really strange line that these guys draw sometimes. Security cam at the coffee shop where she worked, there was a little pop-up in the middle of a parking lot, really. There is a shopping center around it, a strip center, but the snow was so high at that time. No one within the center saw Keyes approach the pop-up.

These are the last known images of Samantha Koenig, who was thrilled about the possibility of becoming a veterinarian, making money there at the coffee shop. I guess he didn't want his daughter or anyone else to know that he dismembered her. As to the sex attack, that he blared loud music so no one inside the home could hear him out in a hut outdoors raping her. No one could hear Samantha screaming. And I guess did he not want Dr. Bethany Marshall joining us? We're now on Psychoanalyst, author of Deal Breaker and star of Paris in Love. Dr. Bethany, interesting that he didn't want anyone to know he had dismembered Samantha. And Samantha is one of many. That's how I found out about Israel Keys is through Samantha Koenig investigation and through Bobby Chacon and now through Andrew Iden. But it's interesting, Dr. Bethany, the choices serial killers make about what they want publicized and what they want to keep secret? You know, it makes sense to me, Nancy, the questions you've been asking,

because first of all, he starts to tell the story to the investigators and then he backs off. I think he's doing that because he's trying to create some excitement in the room and trying to kind of tease them like cat and mouse. Look, the excitement he had before was raping and killing. This is like small potatoes. It's all he can get, but he's going to get it as much as he can in the interview. The fact that he is leaving out the sex assaults is because he's trying to minimize the heinous nature of what he did. And he doesn't want the public to know that he dismembered Samantha Koenig because psychopaths are grandiose. You know, he may feel that he's saying that he doesn't want his daughter to find out. But I think there's an inherent narcissism in psychopaths as a part of the disorder. And on some level, they sort of feel proud of their acts. They feel they have fantasies that they may be celebrated, may go down in history. But this dismember part

doesn't make him look so good. So he's trying to prop up his image a little bit there. Going down in history, he's going nowhere but straight to hell. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Back to you, Daryl Cohen. Talking about this guy trying to build suspense as he tells his story. Normally, I would tell somebody that said that, well, you're crazy because most criminals are really dumb. They're not building suspense. They're just idiots. This guy eluded police for decades. He had kill kits hidden all over the country. He was never caught. He had multiple MOs, Motorcycling Method of Operation. He would stalk campgrounds. He would stalk RV camps. He would hang out at rivers like the victim we were

just hearing about. But then you've got a case like Samantha Koenig. I mean, this guy probably is, did lead authorities on as he was telling his story. Well, Nancy, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was both bright, he was cunning, he was intelligent, he was vicious, and a sociopath, a psychopath. He was all the paths other than a good one. He knew how to elude the police. He also knew how to elude all the other law enforcement agencies because he didn't do it every day, every week, every month. There was no pattern to his pattern, if that makes any sense.

So he was able to leave. Well, I can tell you this much. I guarantee you there are more bodies. What can we learn? What can we glean from hearing? You'll have to hold your nose to do it. But listen to Israel Keys. Was that the first time you sexually assaulted somebody?

Yeah. I don't know. 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 took it to that level

and had someone tied up, you know, like was ready to actually do that. Did you hear what he just said? And by the way, he's laughing and snickering during the whole thing. Was this the first time you sex assaulted somebody? No. But it's the first time I took it to that level, like, to kill them. Yeah, to do that. And he's laughing.

He's snickering as he is saying that. But let's take it back. How long had this guy been committing murders? Like I say, I got out of the Army, and any time I'd get to where I had downtime or, you know, if I would leave Neah Bay, get out of Neah Bay. All that stuff was still there, you know. Like every time I'd drive and make a drive somewhere, I'd be looking for places, good places to do stuff. I guarantee you, to Andrew Iden, now co-host of Deviant Podcast.

I guarantee you there are more dead bodies out there we haven't found yet. But the fact that he was in the army, has he been traced back to wherever he was stationed? And has there been a search for missing women? Because it's always occasionally there be a murdered man who was with a woman. Right. But he typically preyed on those that were weaker, less powerful, less cunning than he. Right. Andrew, have we heard of any searches in the various places where he was stationed?

So what I can tell you is that, you know, the FBI and all of the agencies that have been involved in this case from the jump, they've gone to extreme lengths to track down and talk to people that knew keys in the army. So they have infiltrated his entire unit. They've talked to his friends. They've talked to his fellow soldiers. So they've gone into that corner of his life to see if they can flip over some rocks and see if there's anything to find. The other thing that I can tell you is that when you talk to the FBI, you know, that video of Israel Keyes in that interrogation room, that's dated 2012. However, this case is still considered active and open.

When you talk to the FBI about it, they are very clear. We need information. Is this a guy that's ever come across your radar? There's so much still that we don't know. So this is not a case that is just in the rear view. This is still very much an active investigation. Samantha Koenig, a beautiful young barista at an Alaskan coffee stand, suddenly goes missing. That evening, her father realizes it's way too late for her to have been gone all day and not spoken to him. And he raises the alarm. Samantha Conan, just one of so, so many

victims. I want you to hear him speaking about how he finds his victims. I was out looking for trouble. I had that place up there staked out one, actually two or three nights. And then I had a park, a couple of parks here in town that I could ride my bike to. I had those staked out. Yeah, but there's still a couple gallons of Drano and a shovel stashed up there. He's describing one of his many, many kill kits that he had stashed all around the country. Andrew Iden, host of Deviant Podcast, explains. This is a guy that would bury Home Depot buckets full of Drano, guns, ropes, chains. He buried them in Vermont.

He buried them in Wisconsin. He buried them in Wyoming. And he would do that years in advance. And so, you know, he buried these, go back to Alaska, live his life for days, weeks, months, years, and then go back to Vermont, dig up that bucket, take it to Essex, Vermont. And ultimately, when he killed the couriers, Bill and Lorraine, you know, that was with a kill kit that he had buried years ahead of time. So that's really the crux of this meticulous nature that we talk about. And, you know, Bobby Chacon joining us, former special agent with the FBI, screenwriter, his new documentary After the Fall, which is an amazing work regarding 9-1-1.

He and I both in New York the day of September 11. His story is amazing after the fall. Bobby, talking about what Andrew Iden is describing, it's hard to catch a guy like this. There's no connection to the victims, which that makes it a needle in a haystack to start with. He is killing people all across the country. There's no region that has been immune to Israel keys. And he hunts his prey like a wolf. And then he has these kill kits already created and hidden, buried all around the country. Sure. And from an investigator standpoint, think of it, because we've seen cases where when you see when we find a victim that's bound with, you know, rope or chain or something like that, and we can tell, oh, this might have been bought at a nearby, say, Home Depot or

hardware store. We go out and we ask them to look at that video from the last three months, six months, whatever. Think about that. He's actually avoiding that investigative step because these things were purchased probably years in advance and hidden so he knew not to buy these things locally and not to buy them recently because that's what investigators do because often we see oh they they trace the receipt or they trace something that was bought at a home depot and there's the killer on the video in the home depot buying the things that they use so he knew to avoid that when i went to homicide school i was working so many mafia cases in New York that they

sent me to the NYPD homicide school. You draw a Venn diagram, one circle contains the life of the victim and all the people involved in that life. And the other one, the other circle is the geographic location where the victim is found or murdered and where those two overlap. That's where your pool of suspects might come in now key's new to stay random to his victim and random to the geographic location that puts him outside of most in 95 of the investigative avenues that you're going to follow he's going to be

outside of those because he's not related to the victim he doesn't have what what most serial killers have he doesn't have that victimology and he doesn't have the geographic kill zone. So those two things he knew to avoid and to stay random. And that was a big part of his success. Yes, because in many, many cases where we have serial killers, their M.O. never deviates. They are in the same region. There is a way to connect them to their victims. You know, he's been stalking them. He's

a grocery store boy. He, you know, delivery guy, the yard man. There is a way, even though tangential, that you can connect the killer to multiple victims. Not in this case. Speaking of Israel Keyes, listen from the horse's mouth. But that was not in anything. It's just ropes or something holding it. Is that the milk jugs? Well, that's what the weights were. Milk jugs. How many milk jugs?

Are they going to move around? No. How many milk jugs are you talking about? At least four or five, I would think. Just for one body. Yeah. Well, Scott Peterson, you didn't have to go to all that trouble making those cement blocks to weight down the body of your wife, Lacey Peterson, and her unborn son, Connor.

You know, take a page out of Israel Key's book. He just used milk jugs. You know, when you think of the callous nature of the planning, the pre-planning before your victim has even been murdered, you're already planning to weight down their body in water to hide the body or destroy evidence? What could be more cold, more calculating? Just think about it. As he is spotting these victims, he's already made weights to hold their bodies down underwater. Joining me now, a very special guest, a renowned medical examiner, the chief medical examiner at Tarrant County, that's Fort Worth, never a lack of business for him. Also, a prestigious lecturer at the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU, Dr. Kendall Crowns.

Dr. Kendall Crowns, thank you for being with us. When a body is weighted down in this manner, as you hear Israel Keyes say, so deep the fish don't even go down that far. He has this very well planned. With the body down at the bottom of a body of water, what will that do to the evidence over a period of time? So in the depths of a lake, the body will continue to decompose. If it's cold, it'll decompose at a slower rate, but you'll also get fish and other aquatic creatures that will eat at the body. So eventually the body will skeletonize. The problem with weighting the body down, you have to have enough weight to compensate for when the body decomposes and the gas formation begins. The body will bloat or swell up like a balloon and then will float back up to the top of the surface.

I've seen people weighted down with paint cans that still float up, cinder blocks that still float up. Even a gentleman that was wrapped in a carpet and shoved in a trash can that was duct taped shut, he still bobbed up once he decomposed enough. So you have to have enough weight to compensate for the decomposition or they'll still float up. But if they're underneath the water for a long enough period of time, they will decompose, skeletonize, and all the evidence will disappear. James Koenig tries to be patient, but by 1230 p.m., he's on the phone with the Anchorage Police Department reporting his 18-year-old daughter, Samantha, missing. He tells police his daughter never came home the night before from her job at Common

Grounds Espresso. Patrol officers begin asking questions in the area. No signs of a break-in, no struggle, no blood. Getting a look at surveillance video, police see a masked man jumping through the window of Common Grounds and leading Samantha away. Samantha Koenig's case brought a great deal of notoriety to the killer. Little did authorities realize at the time of her disappearance, they were dealing with a very cunning serial killer. Listen. Just before 8 p.m. closing time at Common Grounds Coffee in Anchorage, Alaska, Israel Keys walks up to the parking lot kiosk and orders an Americano coffee.

18-year-old Samantha Koenig is finishing up her shift, and it looks like Keys might be her last customer. Turning to hand the man his coffee, Samantha Koenig sees the gun in his hand. Keys tells her it's a robbery to turn off the lights. Keys reaches in and quickly zip ties Koenig's hands behind her back and climbs through the window into the kiosk. And what is so amazing here to Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst joining us out of L.A., is this is brazen. There, as you can see, are parking lights illuminating the area. It's right on a very busy thoroughfare street. There's a huge snowbank about six to 12 feet tall surrounding the coffee shop. So

many people didn't see what was going on, but that takes a lot of chutzpah to go in where people can see you and attack the barista and lead her out. Nancy, Israel Keyes was becoming increasingly emboldened to act out his sexual fantasies, his killing fantasies with these victims. So he starts out in the army, you know, just kind of trolling around looking for possible sites. But this becomes a compulsion that's so deeply baked into his DNA, that he's thinking about it all the time. And it becomes very ritualized, the search extends to all over the United States. And it's almost as satisfying to search for victims, to bury the kill kits as it is to actually act out the crime. But by the time he gets to Samantha Koenig, he's graduated. It's where people could see him. He stitches her eyes open. He makes

braids with her hair. He does it in a shed right outside his family home. So at this point, it's like he's getting not only more and more emboldened, but it's like a sex addict that starts out going to strip clubs. And then they kind of rape somebody. And then pretty much they start graduating to children and kiddie porn because they need more and more and more in order to excite them. And Nancy, these interviews that we're seeing, I think he's talking sort of calmly and matter of fact, because he imagines he's now the expert on killing. He's the world's leading expert. It's kind of like a car collector who maybe has 200 cars and he's walking someone around and said, you know, this one is made in

1968 and this is special stitching and look at the paint job. And that person knows their stuff. Israel Keyes feels like he knows his stuff. So he's going to take time with this interview so he can kind of educate the world, be the celebrity, be at the center of things. Like I said earlier, go down in history. This is a part of the ritual is talking about it. You know, let's just cut the chase here to Bobby Chacon, former special agent, FBI, and then to Drew Iden, co-host of Deviant. Bobby Chacon, you know that as he is telling his story to authorities, he's getting turned on.

As he's sitting there underneath that table, I don't want to know what's under that table. I guarantee you, as he's telling his story, he's reliving the rapes and the murders. Oh, sure. And you know that by his posture and by his attitude, his language. And I think he's enjoying the fact that several of the investigators in the in the room are women. And I think he's he's getting off on that as well. I think this is his as Dr. Bethany mentioned earlier, this is kind of his last gasp. He knows he's not getting out. And what little joy he can get, his psychosexual joy he can get, is going to come in this room. Bobby, get real for a moment, please, as if you hadn't already been real.

How many times have you sat across from a defendant like Keyes? Actually, I don't know that there is another defendant like Keyes, but a defendant similar to Keyes. And you know, as you're talking to him and he's giving his story, he's getting turned on. I don't guess you need your mind to go to that extent about exactly what's happening under that table. But you know it's true. It's, ugh, reliving a murder? Yeah, I'm sure. Because you and I know what a murder scene is really like.

It's not like in the movies. It's horrible. But he likes it. Yeah, and at that point, I mean, you can see a candy bar that they brought to him, you know, on the table there. I mean, look, what they're doing is they are hyper-focused. You know this, Nancy. There's a prosecutor in there that they're hyper-focused at getting him on the record to say things that are going, they're going to be able to use against him in a court and proceeding. So, so all of that other stuff is kind of,

you have to deal with it, but you kind of put it aside because you need to get the admissions. You need to get the confessions. You need to get the statements he's going to say out of his mouth. You can't kind of extrapolate it. You have to get him to say those things. So you ask him the question eight different times, get him to say the words, I killed them, you know, and that kind of thing. So they're hyper-focused on that. And the rest of that stuff, you just have to deal with kind of on the side, in the background and to get them to make those admissions. Okay, you know what? Maybe you can set it aside, Bobby Chacon, but Andrew Iden, the co-host of a Deviant podcast, every time you play these caught-on-tape videos and audio, you know that as he is describing the rapes and the murders,

he's reliving it in his mind. And as Dr. Bethany calls it, his arousal is full on. So just keep that in mind when you're watching him, because that's where he's coming from. That's the way his mind works, to rape and murder somebody and murder the husband and murder the boyfriend or whoever else is around. That's his idea of dinner in a movie. Yeah. And in fact, you know, when you look at him having these conversations with law enforcement in the interrogation room, you can see that. And one of the things we learned in talking to Jeff Bell, who was a detective in that room with the Anchorage PD, he told us in the process of doing this series is that the chair that Key sat in, there was a day that they were sitting in a wooden chair. And he said, Key scratched the wood off of the arms of

the chair while he was retelling the story. And he said, you could see the hair on his arms standing up. And so it was apparent to Jeff Bell, who's right in that video, that he was seeing this all unfold while he was telling the story. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Andrew, I'm totally going to listen to every single episode of Deviant. Because when you were just describing Israel Keyes scratching the wood on the chair as he's telling the story, Jackie, you know Jackie, our producer, actually had to get rid of the shivers on her arms. Well, I was going to say, I think oftentimes when we talk about these stories, oftentimes there's a lot of hyperbole involved in describing these things. But everything that Israel Keys is, is a real life horror film from start to finish.

I mean, look at Nancy, if you look at that video there, you see on the left, Jolene, I believe that's Jolene, the FBI case agent. But you can look at if you nancy if you look at the that video there you you see on the left jolene i believe that's jolene the fbi case agent but you can look at her posture look at how she's you can almost see how how um how repulsed she is by this her hands are by her sides by her sides her hands are in her lap i mean you you as a normal person you know being in the presence of such evil you you are affected by that. You are repulsed by it. Of course, somebody like Israel Keys has to have the perfect, let me just say, perfectly outfitted vehicle. Listen. The truck Israel Keys is driving has been temporarily modified. Before he left the house, he removed the permanent toolbox from the back and took off both license plates.

Keyes demands Samantha Koenig give him her ATM card, but she tells him it's in the truck she shares with her boyfriend at their house. Keyes drives to his house, ties up Koenig in the shed, turns up the radio loud so nobody can hear her scream, then leaves to retrieve her ATM card from her truck. As Keyes is retrieving the ATM card, Samantha Koenig's boyfriend sees him and shouts. Ducking into the house to get some help, he tries to confront the man messing with his truck. But when he comes out of the house, Keyes is gone. A narrow escape, but yes, he does escape. But what about Samantha? Listen. Samantha Koenig is tied up in a shed in back of the home Israel Keyes shares with his girlfriend and her daughter. When Keyes arrives back at the shed, he sexually assaults Samantha Koenig twice. Then, first thing in the morning, he strangles her to death and puts her body in a freezer, then leaves with his girlfriend

for a pre-booked family cruise vacation leaving out of New Orleans. Okay, that's like putting the leftovers from dinner into the freezer, then heading out on vacation. He did that to Samantha's body, but he wasn't done yet. Listen. Returning from his two-week family vacation, Israel Keys removes the now-frozen corpse of Samantha Koenig. Using a hairdryer to thaw her out, he uses makeup and braids her hair to take a proof-of-life photo he's going to use for the ransom. Taking a picture of Samantha, Israel Key's arm is seen holding a copy of the Anchorage Daily News from February 12th. He places a black and white copy of the photo in a Ziploc baggie with a ransom demand of $30,000 deposited into the account of Samantha Koenig and tapes it to a missing dog poster in Connors Bog Park.

And then Samantha's father is led to that park where he sees the ransom photo and the money demand. Okay, let me understand this. Andrew Iden joining us, co-host of Deviant Podcast. He uses a hair dryer to thaw out her body. Yeah, the details of what he did after he got back from that Houston, that cruise are horrific. And disposing of her body in the lake after he had, you know, pulled her remains out of that shed. That period after the cruise for about two weeks is truly some of the most horrific things that I've ever read and ever heard in covering crime for 20 years. What aspect are you describing? Are you to which you are referring, Andrew? Well, it's the process of him dumping her body in the lake piece by piece and basically making sure that all of the things that he did are covered up. And it's just it's it's horrific.

I mean, it's like it's a horror film, like I mentioned before. Dr. Bethany, jump in. If we think of raping and killing as a part of a sexual act for him, that the whole ritual is arousing. I think what happened is that he had to do it right before the cruise because he knew that he knew that on the cruise he wouldn't be able to act out his killing homicidal instinct. It's a little bit like with alcoholics. We see sometimes the night before they go into detox or rehab, they binge. This was like his binge before a period of sobriety. And he was probably thinking about it all throughout the cruise and planning his return.

Dr. Kendall-Crowns, can't you look at a body and determine whether it has been frozen? You can look at a body and when someone dies of hypothermia, you can tell that there are changes about the body. They kind of turn a reddish pink color. If a body's been frozen, the lividity or the post-mortem coloration change will be kind of a bright red coloration, but beyond that, there's not really any changes that you can see with a frozen body that are specific to that. After getting a confession from Israel Keys, the FBI dive team is tasked with attempting to recover Samantha Koenig's body from frozen Matanuska Lake. Before a search can begin, a four-foot-by-four-foot hole is cut in the ice

with chainsaws. The FBI dive team resorts to using sonar to guide them in low visibility, and it takes the team of experts about 10 hours to recover the body of Samantha Kona. Enter former FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon, now screenwriter for Criminal Minds and creator of a new documentary, After the Fall. Bobby, describe what it was like out there, what you went through trying to retrieve Samantha Koenig's body. Well, Nancy, first of all, it was the brightest, clearest, most beautiful day. And that was the dichotomy of the situation was that we were in this immensely beautiful location with the mountains and the snow. And we were doing this horrific mission to recover this poor young woman. You know, and it was tough. The conditions were tough. But we've we've done this before.

We certainly dived in tougher conditions, but it wasn't that deep. It was about 45 feet deep the entire dive took about 45 minutes it wasn't a it was long to set up you see whenever you're working around ice and holes everybody has to be tethered in somewhere to a hard point so if you fall in so there's this safety considerations but the dive itself was not that difficult everything matched exactly what keys told us it was in the location we saw the five different parts that he told us about. It was a torso. There was two legs. There was two arms that were bound together as one.

And that was her head. And so those were the five pieces that showed up on the sonar. We sent a small mini ROV down with a camera to make sure it was human remains. And then once we did those two methods, then I splashed the divers and that dive took about 45 minutes. Again, like I said, it would have taken longer, but we were able to put Samantha oil into one body bag because of the fact that Keys had made that demand on us not to tip off the press that she had been dismembered. But certainly when I handled Samantha's remains, I could tell that some of the water had washed off and I saw the stitching on her eyelids as I was transferring her to the possession of the medical examiners, investigators who were there taking possession of her remains. And then we find out in a completely different MO method of operation, the murders of Bill and Lorraine Currier. Listen. During a vacation to Vermont, Israel Keyes buries a

five-gallon orange bucket filled with zip ties, ammunition, guns, silencers, Drano, duct tape, and a flashlight in a remote corner of the Woodside Natural Area off Vermont 15. Over the years, Keyes has buried several kill kits in places he's been traveling. Years later, Keyes digs up the kit in Vermont and stakes out the home of Bill and Lorraine Currier. There are no children in the home, and it's within walking distance of his hotel. Andrew Iden, co-host of Deviant Podcast. I've got too many of Keyes' victims, and there's still so many other victims that we don't know about. We haven't found their bodies yet. But here we see a stark dichotomy in the way he murdered and dismembered Samantha Koenig

and the way he murdered and left the couriers. Explain about the couriers. Yeah. So Bill and Lorraine lived in Essex, Vermont, and Israel Keyes talked at length about waiting outside their home, cutting the phone line to disable the security system, kidnapping them essentially and taking them a few miles away to an abandoned farmhouse. And that's where he sexually assaulted Lorraine, strangled her and actually shot Bill in the midst of a kind of a struggle they were having in the house.

And he left their remains there. So you're right. Bill and Lorraine and that crime is everything that Samantha Koenig was not right. It was two. It was instead of one. They were older. Samantha was younger. You know, they? It was two, it was instead of one. They were older, Samantha was younger. You know, they were in Vermont, Samantha was in Alaska. So there's really kind of a dichotomy between these two crimes. As you mentioned with the MO,

they're two very different crimes in a lot of different ways. We know of the 11 to which he has admitted, and we believe there is somewhere, there will be discovered at some point, somewhere between 20 and 30 bodies. Israel Keyes, serial killer. Thank you so much to the guests joining us today, but especially to you. Nancy Grace signing off. Good night, friend.