Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Teen barista girl Samantha Koenig falls victim to sick serial killer

Episode Date: February 28, 2019

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, who later admitted to killing 11 people across the country had developed an elaborate plan to demand a ransom for the 18-year-old's return. Former FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon, who led a dive team that recovered Koenig's dismembered body from a frozen lake two months later, joins Nancy Grace in an exploration of the case. The expert panel also includes Cold Case Research Institute Director Sheryl McCollum, Atlanta juvenile judge and lawyer Ashley Willcott, Los Angeles psycho analyst Dr. Bethany Marshall, 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. Do you know another parent or expecting parent? Are you wondering what can I give them as a gift? Don't give them another onesie. Don't give them a plastic toy or God forbid a toy gun that's just going to end up in the garage. Give them something that matters and what matters the most is protecting their child.

What do you love most in the world? Your children. What will you do to protect them? Anything. I sat down with the smartest people I know in the world on matters of child safety, finding missing children, fighting back against predators, and what I learned is so important, powerful, and information so critical. I want you to have it. I want them to have it. Go to crimestopshere.com for a five-part series

with action information that you can use to change your life and protect your child. Give that as a gift, not another onesie. Find out how to protect your child when you're out at the mall or the store or the grocery, in the parking lot, at home. Find out about protection regarding babysitters and daycare, even online. I'd rather have that any day of the week than a plastic toy or, God forbid, a toy gun. Join Justice Nation. Go to crimestopshere.com. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I want to ask for her captors, if they would please send my daughter home. I will give you anything in this world.

Call me anonymously. You don't have to go through the police. I will meet you. I will give you whatever you want. Just please bring my daughter back. If you guys have any questions for me, I'll take them. I don't have any new information. The police hasn't been able to give me with

the ongoing investigation. I just need her home every day she's gone where the odds are against us. And I need the whole community to come together and find my daughter, go door to door every neighborhood. And anything suspicious, no matter how small you think it is, call the police. Call me. I will investigate it. Just please help find my daughter.

How are you holding up, Travis? Not good. I don't think any of us are holding up in this. I don't know if my daughter's being fed, taken care of, if she's still alive, if she's getting any sleep. I don't think any of us are. A father's desperate plea to help find his missing daughter. What happened to Samantha Sammy Koenig?

She vanishes on a Wednesday night from her coffee stand there in Anchorage, but then closed-circuit TV footage turns up showing an armed man forcing her to leave the coffee shop. Joining me right now, special guest, retired FBI special agent Bobby Chacon. You can find him at BobbyChacon.com. Director of the Cold Case Research Institute, Cheryl McCollum.

Judge, lawyer, anchor, Ashley Wilcott. You can find her at AshleyWilcott.com. And joining me now, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter robin walensky author of beautiful life the csi behind the casey anthony trial robin i want to take it at the beginning what do we know about her disappearance first tell me about the coffee stand where she worked well nancy this is a that's a bright blue you see see it. It's very small. You can see it from the road. And it's called the Common Grounds Espresso Coffee Stand. You can pull up in your car and order whatever you need. And the people who work there inside see you through a window, almost like the old-fashioned ice cream stands where you would take your children and the window slides open and then you order that way. There's no actual door where someone walks in. Your transaction is done through a window. And she was working there part-time. And on this particular night that she goes missing,

this was a shift where she was closing this little coffee stand. Joining me now, special guest, retired FBI agent who worked on the case, Bobby Chacon. Describe the area for me, Bobby. I mean, it's often been said, if you want to get lost, move to Alaska. You know, Anchorage is considered a big city, but by some of our standards, myself included, who lived in New York and now lives in LA, Anchorage is kind of a small town. And the area, particularly where the Common Grounds coffee shop, I would consider it, I would describe it as somewhat suburban. It had stores.

It had places. The parking lot where the Common Grounds was located was in the parking lot of a health club. So you did have people coming and going. However, of course, in February in Alaska, there was about 15 feet of snow that was bulldozed from the parking lot and piled up around that parking lot. So anyone driving by on that road, the main road that runs by the coffee shop or the kiosk, the coffee kiosk where Samantha was working, would not have actually seen that because of the high piles of snow in February in Anchorage. To Cheryl McCollum, director of the Cold Case Research Institute, you're like me. Well, I'll speak for myself. Grew up in the middle of nothing, okay?

As I have described it many, many times, as far as you can see, you see nothing but trees and soybeans. And so, you know, the fact that a crime would occur in a place like that is even more unusual. You've got a low population. But Bobby Chacon's right. Anchorage is a big city compared to many others. But still, there are miles, thousands of miles of pristine territory surrounding Anchorage, Cheryl McCollum.

There's tons of places to hide. There's tons of places to hide. There's tons of places to hide a body. There's absolutely no question. For those of us that have been to Alaska, I can tell you, yeah, Anchorage is a big city, but you can also stay very lost if you want to. You can go and not interact with other people or really see other people for that matter. I'm taking a look at the area and what Robin Walensky is reporting is absolutely correct. They're huge, huge walls of snow and ice all surrounding the coffee shop where someone had bulldozed the parking lot so people could actually get in. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of barista Samantha Koenig only deepened. And all of the coffee stand's cash disappeared

along with, and she is gorgeous, Samantha Koenig. The father is desperate and finally leverages everything he's got to increase the reward. Listen. As day breaks over Anchorage, Samantha's dad calls the local police to report his only daughter missing. One of our officers contacted the owner of Common Grounds Coffee Shop and she was able to show them video. A man came to the little kiosk window at 8 o'clock. Samantha made a coffee drink for him, turned back around, and then you can tell she's shocked. You see her body language change.

She goes from someone who's just serving someone a coffee to being very nervous and very concerned. Samantha turns out the lights, and you can see the individual jumping in through the window. You can tell she's sort of going along with him because he thinks that he's going to rob the place. It just didn't come across to her that she was in danger until he starts, you know, locking her out.

Samantha and the individual leave the coffee stand and then disappear from line of sight from the camera. The next day, her dad was raising hell about this, trying to figure out where his daughter went. Use this area as a meeting place to figure out where his daughter went. Use this area as a meeting place, because this is where my daughter was taken from. People were just literally like,

whose basement is she in? Whose door do we have to go knock down to find her? There wasn't any narrative for people to understand what happened. Very upsetting. We knew she had to be here somewhere. We had people who were donating money, thousands of dollars. We had T who were donating money, thousands of dollars.

We had T-shirts made, pens made. We had people who were putting flyers throughout the state of Alaska. These people need to get my daughter back so we can get back with our lives. I will do anything. Take me. To Ashley Wilcott, judge, lawyer, anchor, ashleywilcott.com. What do you think, Ashley? Yeah, so this is one that, you know, just doesn't make sense. As a parent, you're like, Ashley Wilcott dot com. What do you think, Ashley? Yeah. So this is one that, you know, it just doesn't make sense as a parent.

You're like, what the heck happened? Yeah, there are all these areas that anybody could, you know, it is desolate. That's just the best word for Alaska and these surroundings. But somebody had to know something. What happened? Who was she with? But then a stunning twist to the disappearance of samantha koenig good evening everyone the massive search for missing barista samantha koenig is over but it's not the news family and friends were hoping for average police announced today they found a body

they believed to be samantha koenig's in matanuska lake out in the valley channel two's jason lamb was there as investigators dove into the frigid waters this evening and he now joins us live from the Common Grounds coffee stand where Samantha was abducted more than two months ago. Jason. Maria, the place that became so well known as the headquarters in the search for Samantha Koenig has tonight become a makeshift memorial. You can see all the flowers that people have left behind in memory of Samantha as news of her death spreads across town tonight. At Matanuska Lake Monday afternoon, a worst-case scenario showed up just outside Kevin Sturgeon's house. I just thought people were ice fishing. That's all I thought. I had no idea, intentions on what was going on. Rumors of a horrible development in the Samantha Koenig abduction became a lot more suspicious out in the Matanuska Valley.

Kevin says snow machines started showing up. Just riding back and forth and hearing chainsaws. Like, just that's all I've been hearing until I came out and I just seen a bunch of people. And all it took was the Anchorage Police Department Monday to make it official. Police say Koenig likely died within hours of her abduction back in February. Divers remained at Matanuska Lake into Monday night after scrambling several APD, FBI, and state trooper units earlier in the day when information was hard to come by. We have information that's led us out here and we're actively following them up. Straight out to retired FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon.

You can find him at BobbyChacon.com. Bobby, you helped pull Samantha Koenig out of that icy water. And here's the thing I don't get, Bobby. She couldn't have fallen in the water. She couldn't have been really thrown into the water because it's covered with feet of ice. In fact, vehicles, I'm looking at the video right now, drive out on it, full-on vehicles, drive out into the middle of the river and start cutting into the ice to pull her body up. So you can't just throw her overboard or she can't just fall into the water.

First, let's start with you getting her body out, Bobby Chacombe. When did you first find out you were heading out to a body of water to drill down in the ice to look for a dead body? I found out on Friday, March 30th of 2012, when I got a call from my boss from the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, that we had a mission that we needed to carry out. And my team was based in Los Angeles, and we needed to fly up to Anchorage immediately to participate in a body recovery.

They sent me some information on the lake, told me that it was frozen with about three to four feet of solid ice on top. And so we knew right away that we would have to prepare for such a job in such conditions and so the very next day Saturday the 31st of March I was assembled my team at our warehouse in Los Angeles we packed our gear and shipped it up we flew up there on the 1st of April on Sunday we were briefed by the FBI in Alaska and the Alaska the Anchorage PD on the case and morning, April 2nd, we drove up to the lake, which is about 40 miles north of Anchorage, and we conducted the search.

The lake is a very popular fishing lake. People do ice fishing. So they go out on this lake. They kind of set up one of these small tents. I think some of them have small fires to keep warm inside these tents. They drill a circular hole about 8 to 10 inches in diameter, and then they drop a fishing line in and they do ice fishing. I'm actually entranced with what you're saying. If you've noticed, I haven't interrupted once, which is amazing. Okay, go ahead. So we went out to a

particular part of the lake where we were told to search. We cut our own hole in the ice and put down some sonar equipment to look around for what we might be looking for, which was a body. Now, we were told that the body may have been disposed of in a particular way, and our sonar did indicate that that was consistent with what we were being told. Okay, wait, right there, right there. Sonar to Cheryl McCollum, director of the Cold Case Research Institute, is basically like a sonogram. I started to say x-ray, but it's like a sonogram for water. Divers use it.

You used to use side-scan sonar where you go along the side of a river or body of water and look out into the middle. But in this case, Cheryl, I guess they had to do something very different with the ice covering it. But what's your experience with sonar in bodies of water, Cheryl? Well, with the underwater sonar, what you're going to look for is the pattern where the image comes back and shows you, are you looking at a body? Are you possibly looking at a car tire? Are you possibly looking at other, you know, junk or debris so that you know where to search? Like, you don't want to spend your time looking, you know, at trees and logs that might be under the water when you're looking for something so specific. And what, you know, Agent Chacon is talking about is such an unbelievable recovery mission because of the ice. And again, it tells you an awful lot about this perpetrator. What the perp would have to go through to get her body into that body of water through three or four

feet of ice, so thick and so resistant that you can drive big cars out onto it. And Ashley Wilcott, can you imagine her dad, who has just leveraged everything he's got to offer over $40,000 reward, when he finds out they're heading out to dig down under the ice for his daughter? No, I can't imagine at all. Especially those of us who have kids, you just can't imagine that anything that horrific would happen. And you have to have hope, right? When something happens, you can't locate your child. You have to hope and pray everything's fine. So to get the kind of news, I can't even imagine what that would do to you. No, no, I can't either. I mean, Ashley, you know me, when I go to the school to spy on the children at playground, if I don't

see him out there, I just assume they've been kidnapped, right? So I can't even imagine what this dad, he sees the video surveillance of his daughter being taken out of the coffee stand by a guy with a gun. Then we start searching. We start searching. We find out she had taken out a TRO, a protective order, against an ex. Robin Walensky, what was that about, the protective order? Well, Nancy, someone was obviously stalking her or upsetting her or following her, and she went and filed all the paperwork, which, as you know, is very lengthy. And you go before a judge and you say, so and such, John Smith is following me and harassing me, possibly text messages or phone calls or showing up at your place of business and so here she is out in the middle as the lower 48

would call it of nowhere in anchorage alaska on the you know outskirts of town in the middle of a parking lot at 10 o'clock at night in a coffee stand that's a drive-through. So Bobby Chacon, before I get you back on drilling down into the ice, it could be anybody. It could be the ex-boyfriend or perp that had been allegedly following her that she had to go get a protective order about. It could be a boss. It could be a current boyfriend. It could be some creepy perv that drives through her coffee stand every day to like try to touch her hand when she gives him change or try to make conversation with her. It could be literally anybody that has fled the lower 48 and landed in Anchorage. So, Bobby, you've got a wide range of potential perps let me get you back on that day

you're in LA you get a call from your boss in Quantico you got to go to Anchorage on a recovery mission you take off when you see that body of water that lake what do you think well the first thing you think of is how remote it is. I mean, there's maybe a sprinkling of houses in the area, but there's certainly no town and there's no infrastructure. You can, you know, we drove about an hour north of Anchorage. Well, wait a minute. You're just telling me what a big, big city Anchorage is. Yeah, this was about 40 miles outside of Anchorage. I mean, you, you, anyone that would go there to do this on purpose was looking for a place that was a little bit outside of town, a little remote. You know,

it's not heavily populated. I'm glad you're telling me that, Bobby. And I'll tell you why. Because when people refer to my home, the Southland, as the middle of nothing, you know, I get where they're coming from. I do. But it's a little hurtful when you refer to somebody's home as nothing, the middle of nothing. And I don't mean it that way. What I'm talking about is it's remote as far as it relates to a crime scene, less witnesses. It lowers the possibility of who the perp is. Guys, with me is Special Agent Bobby Chacon, who was sent on a mission to find the body of Samantha Koenig. I'm more worried every day it drags on. I don't know what the people that have her want, and whatever they want, they have it.

Just bring her home. The money is sitting in a bank account. I am not running around town spending it on lavish gifts. I am having to resort to some of the funds to keep my home running so Samantha has a home to come to. By no means am I using that money for personal gain. It is in a bank account, and it's specifically for paying a reward or ransom or however it comes about. The bank account has to be in my name.

I can't put it in her name because she can't sign on it. It is totally separate from my personal account. It is set up to hold her funds. If I need the funds, I can get to them. But again, the majority of the money is there. The majority of the money in there came from my family and has been specified use as you need as well as from the community. I mean, a large sum of the money came from the community as well.

It has been told to me to use it as I need, you know, to keep the home and whatever running as well. So I am not working right now. I cannot go back to work until I get Samantha home. And even after that, it's going to be some time so we can get her fixed up and get her head right again. I'm really getting tired of the money being the focus. People are losing focus as why we're looking for Samantha. It's not about the money. I could care less about the money. And obviously 37, 38 days down the road, it must not be about the money. But I really wish people would stay focused on my goal and the community's goal that's backing us up and helping us.

Hi, Nancy Grace here. Have you ever go... Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. To Samantha's father, James Koenig. Mr. Koenig, what are the cops telling you tonight? So far, they are saying they have made significant progress. They're starting to get better leads. Other than that, that's about all they're giving me to lieutenant dave parker from the anchorage police department lieutenant parker thank you for being with us what is your theory as to what

happened to samantha right now we know that samantha was abducted from that little coffee shack and we know that her abductor came into the coffee shack and that he took her out against her will. We're operating on that theory and getting a lot of leads in and things like that that are helping us investigate the case. Well, obviously it is someone that either knows her personally or frequents the coffee shop. To Lieutenant Parker, what time of the day or night did the abduction take place the abduction took place about 8 p.m on last wednesday night was it dark first big pardon was it dark at the time uh it was dark but uh it's a lighted parking lot is to matt zarell matt is their surveillance video and isn't it true that the guy was wearing a hood?

Yes, Nancy, there is surveillance video. The guy was wearing a hood. They believe he was armed. He had something in his hand. They're trying to determine if it was a gun or a knife, what type of weapon it was. There you hear me on HLN helping in the search to find Samantha Koenig. Joining me right now, the man who found Samantha, Bobby Chacon, retired FBI special agent. Bobby, so you're out there at this body of water. You get out in the middle of the ice, and what happens?

So we have an area where we're going to search. We drill the first hole in the ice and drop a sonar down at the bottom that sits on the bottom on a tripod, and we take some sonar imaging. That imaging happens to match what we're told about what we're looking for, namely a body. And so, as you mentioned, sonar imaging is not photographic. It's more like a sonogram. It's not very detailed. So, the next hole we drill is a small underwater robot with a video camera on it, and we fly that underwater to one of the objects that we're looking at on the sonar to get a video image of it so that we're able to better prepare the divers before they go in the water.

You want to save as much time as you can for the divers because it's a very perilous place to be under that ice. And so you use as much equipment as you can before the divers get in the water. That plus, I was under a lot of pressure to verify whether or not we had human remains at the bottom of the lake, because there was a lot of people back in Anchorage waiting to hear if it was confirmed there was going to be a press conference by the bosses. And so the detectives and the agents running the case were over my shoulder watching all this imaging coming back from the bottom of the lake. And I wanted to be sure as much as I could before I confirmed that we, in fact, had a body at the bottom of that lake. Bob, I'm just trying to imagine you over this hole you've cut in the ice.

What did you send a diver, a cold water diver down? How did that work? Well, that was the final step. So the underwater robot flew right to a object that the sonar was showing us. And when we turned the video camera on, we saw what we knew was confirmed to be a part of a human body. And so at that point... What exactly did you see? We saw a human foot and the part of a leg that was clearly severed from the rest of the body. And that was on the video. And when you saw that, Bobby, when you saw that, did you know immediately it was a foot? I mean, how could you tell it was a foot? You can tell the video was clear. The body was not that degraded yet. It was very cold, the water, it's fresh water. The water, the more cold it is,

and fresh water tends to have more of a, less of a degradation effect, more of an effect that keeps it pristine. And so when we looked at the video, we knew what we had was probably a human foot and leg severed somewhere around the knee area. Did the foot, was it wearing a shoe? Were the clothes attached? No. And in fact, we could see at that point other body parts in the immediate area within a couple of feet of that. And no clothing was found or seen on any of the body parts. At that point, I readied the divers to get in the water.

Were they just floating? Hold on. Were they just floating together? Were they at the bottom? Were they tied together? They were weighted down with weights, some kind of weights, and all within about a 15-foot area. And they were in five pieces. I'm just trying to take in what you're saying, Bobby Chacon. So someone killed her, dismembered her body, weighted down the body parts, and dumped them. They were all in about a 15-foot radius area, which means to me that someone drilled a hole in the ice and dropped the body parts into the hole. It's not as if there was a boat speeding along the water, throwing the

parts off as it went. They're all right there together. Bobby Chacon, special agent with the FBI, sent there from LA, arrives to the spot that they have deduced may reveal Samantha Koenig's body, drills through the eyes, sends down an underwater robot, and it spots the body parts. Then what happens, Bobby? Well, then we drill an even bigger hole, big enough to fit my divers, and I readied two divers to go down and retrieve those five objects now that we know are basically five parts of a human body. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm just trying to just take this whole thing in because I'm looking right now at video of all of you amassed out on the ice. I've done a lot of cold water diving, but not in temperatures like that,

and certainly not to go through a hole in the ice to bring up the remains of a young girl. So what do you say to a diver before you send them down into that icy water? Well, you know, we're very focused and we try to compartmentalize the emotional aspects of this until the mission is over. So to ready the divers, they are very focused on their equipment because I'm sending them into an area that is hostile to human life. And so they have to remain alive to do their job. And that's the ultimate priority. So they're checking their gear.

They have help doing that. The attenders are checking their gear. We're doing double and triple checks. The last thing I do is I bring them over an image that we print off from the video camera and from the sonar and show them the approximate distance that the items are from each other and where they are so that they're prepared to go down and retrieve these items. They have the necessary equipment. It's functioning properly, and they're going to get in the water.

They're going to descend. It was about 40 feet deep, 45 feet deep, and they're going to execute the recovery. And so they have to be focused on that apart from the emotional aspects of this mission. I heard you say Bobby Jacone, retired FBI special agent, that you have to compartmentalize. And I think you're still doing it because you refer to this girl, Samantha's severed legs and feet as items. Is that how you deal with it? Well, yeah, I think you're right. I think that's exactly what we do. You know, we never refer to the victim by name when we're on site.

We never refer to the person until afterwards. And sometimes you just get into the habit of doing that. And that's for many different reasons. Remember, we go to Anchorage and we aid FBI agents check into a local hotel. You know, when Samantha's missing, people start to talk. And so we have out-of-town reporters and we have out-of-town family members that may be staying at the same hotel, things like that. So we have to develop our own kind of code language so that we don't say something that someone else overhears that's either insensitive, that's either perceived as insensitive, or just information about the investigation that we don't want out yet, or the investigators in charge don't want out yet. So

you do tend to compartmentalize it both for operational security reasons and for emotional reasons. You know, this was not the first body that we recovered. We do a lot of child recoveries of even younger children. So there are ways that we have to deal with it, and we do that. And so compartmentalizing it and looking at it as we call it the target, we talk about what we're looking for in recovery. But it's best, in my experience, it's best to divorce yourself from that emotion at the time being because we're diving in such dangerous

conditions that you have to really focus on staying alive and doing the job. And emotions can cause you to make mistakes that, you know, could be detrimental to that mission. Police and volunteers are braiding sub-3s and temperatures in an all-out search for 18-year-old Samantha Koenig. 18-year-old Samantha Koenig was closing up the coffee stand where she worked when cops say surveillance video. New surveillance video. Shows an armed man abducting her and taking her away. One terrifying clue. She was last seen on her surveillance camera being marched away from work by an armed man. Welcome back. This is Crime Stories. I'm Nancy Grace. You are hearing me searching for Samantha on HLN. With me, Robin Walensky, Ashley Wilcott, Cheryl McCollum, and retired FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon

sent to bring Samantha's body up from underneath frozen waters. Bobby, how did you send divers down, they come up, but do they hand up her body parts through the ice hole? Well, what we do is we take a body bag, an underwater body bag. We have special body bags that you'd see at any crime scene, but these are special for underwater. They're made of a material that is special for underwater. And so normally what we would do is we would take down a bag for each body part and they would be bagged separately. However, in this case, the special nature of this case was that we

were told for investigative reasons that the dismemberment and the fact that it was in five different pieces was going to be kept a secret. Now, we had some media attention. We had cameras on the lake at the edge pointed at us, so they did not want us to bring up the parts separately. And so my divers put all five pieces into one body bag, and they brought the body bag up to the surface, and then myself and others helped lift the body bag out of the water. And the medical examiner, we had them there.

Their investigators had set up a pop-up shelter near the hole in the ice, and we brought the bag into that shelter away from the public's attention, and we were able to open the bag and put it on the table, open the bag, and then the medical examiner and myself could go through the contents of the bag. When you opened the bag, what did you see? I saw two human legs, a human torso, a human head, and two human arms that were tied together. So those were the five pieces. Each leg was separate.

The torso was separate. The two arms were actually tied together, and the head was separate. You know, I'm pausing right now because I'm just trying to take in what you're saying, and you're in a pop-up. I'm looking at it, a white tent out on frozen water there outside of Anchorage, Alaska, and you open the bag, and that is when you see the severed body parts. Did you know immediately it was Samantha Koenig? Yes. How? Well, first of all, when I held her head in my hands, I could tell it was her. When I turned the head over and

looked at her face, I made a facial recognition. And also, we had been told that her eyelids had been sewn open. And so I could still see that her eyelids, in fact, had been sewn open. I'm sorry, what? Did you just say I did not know this? What? So previously, we were told that a ransom demand had been made for this individual, and the individual had taken a picture of the person, and the person was already deceased. And to make the person look alive in the photographs, the person had sewn the person's eyelids open and then took the photograph, put makeup on and then took the photograph and then sent the photograph with a ransom demand. The person had already been deceased, obviously, when the photograph was taken,

but they were trying to hide the fact that the person was deceased. Robin Walensky, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. Is that true? Unfortunately, it is true that she was already dead. And whoever did this to her, you know, really takes your breath away. Yes, in fact, sewed her eyelids open so she would look alive and actually took makeup like you would use on your face before you do a tv program that powder kind of makeup with a sponge and put it on her face to give her color you know ashley wilcott i've covered a lot of murder cases i've investigated a lot of murder cases and the only times that i have heard of this type of staging is from serial killers. Ted Bundy would take his victims and redress them and bathe them

and dress them and fix their hair and put on makeup on them. BTK would redress his victims and take photos of them. I'm just trying to take in what kind of a mind would do this to Samantha Koenig. Well, I think that that's something a rational person just can never understand. It's a sociopath, an antisocial behavior person who does this. And he described himself as having, I don't know if you want to say that, strike that, I'm so sorry. Anyways, the antisocial sociopath personality does this. It is not normal brain functioning.

A rational person cannot understand how anyone can possibly do this to a human body. Then a tip. New surveillance footage captured by a neighboring business from the night of Samantha's abduction. We're able to determine that Samantha walked to a white pickup truck and then the truck drives away. They could estimate about the year that it was built. It was like a 99 through 2007 Chevrolet pickup truck white. So at that point, it's a matter of trying to track down how many of those vehicles are in the Anchorage Bowl. And there were several thousand of them. Due to the growing scope of the case,

local authorities contact the FBI field office. We bring manpower. We bring expertise, profilers. You know, these are things that sometimes a local police department might not have. The FBI assigns Jolene Godin as the lead investigator. Jolene's pretty well known as someone who's a top agent. And one thing Jolene excels at is she can delve

into somebody's history with the best of them. We're reviewing social media, we're reviewing phone records, we're really looking at anything we possibly can to determine is this a personal thing with Samantha, is the person that took her somebody that knew her? Or is this truly a stranger abduction? Then, two and a half weeks after Samantha's abduction, there's a chilling turn in the case.

Her boyfriend just goes sheet white. He's got his phone, and there's a text from her phone. Basically, it says, Connors Park, underneath Albert Pick, ain't she pretty? Authorities race to Connors Lake Park, just five miles southwest of downtown Anchorage, not knowing what's waiting for them. When you enter that park, there's a bulletin board and tacked was a Ziploc bag that had what ultimately was a photograph of Samantha and a ransom note. The fact that there was a ransom note really ratchets up the tension because, okay, she's alive. And what are we going to do to get her back? You're hearing our friends at

Oxygen and joining me, an FBI agent, a special agent that worked the case, Bobby Chacon. Bobby, when you told me her eyes were sewn open when you recovered her body, it was almost more than I could take in. And you're telling me that in this photo that was texted to her boyfriend, her eyes were open and she appeared to be alive? Yeah, I mean, I think that was the intent. I think part of the investigation was sending that photograph then to our forensic photography unit at the FBI laboratory in Quantico

where they were, you know, they took a closer look at it. And I don't know the determination of that, but normally they would be able to tell whether or not the person was alive. I think he may have even staged a newspaper from that particular day in the photograph to even more verify that she was alive on a certain date. So I don't know how long it took to get that photograph to our forensic photography unit to look at closely and do what they could. I think

it was a Polaroid. That makes it harder to look at. But yeah, they were probably really trying to determine whether or not the photograph was legitimate and, in fact, whether the person depicted in the photograph was actually alive when the photograph was taken. Two and a half weeks after the abduction of 18 year old samantha konig authorities still have no clues or any evidence connecting israel keys to her disappearance until a text message sent from samantha's phone directs investigators to their biggest clue yet a ransom note with a picture of the missing girl in the photograph sam Samantha was bound tape on her mouth, but it was obviously intentionally made fuzzier.

So they took the photograph to her father for him to identify it. He, after looking at it for a long time, said, yes, that's Samantha. But her hair was in a braid, and Samantha never wore her hair that way. In the ransom note, Samantha's kidnapper demands $30,000 be placed in her bank account.

This is really our biggest break, because we know that we can still potentially have contact with the person responsible for taking Samantha. Authorities work with her dad to deposit a portion of the ransom. And then they wait. I told them he's going to use her debit card.

If he was going to do something stupid, that was going to be the one thing he did that was stupid, because we could find him. They had worked out a deal with the bank so that Anchorage Police Department and the FBI would be notified immediately when her debit card was used for anything. So a few days go by, and at this point,

we have our first ATM withdrawal from Samantha's account. There were three withdrawals in the city of Anchorage of $500, the daily limit. In all of the ATM situations where he was using the debit card, as soon as the alerts came, we dispatched law enforcement there as quickly as we could. But we were literally minutes behind him. Then the account went silent.

And on March 7, detectives were kind of shocked because there was a withdrawal from an ATM in Wilcox, Arizona. Then there was another withdrawal in Lordsburg, New Mexico. The next withdrawal was March 10th in Humble, Texas. And then shortly after, there was a withdrawal in Shepherd, Texas. Each time this money was withdrawn, it was withdrawn by a person wearing a mask. Joining me right now, FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon. Bobby, it was something as

simple as an ATM withdrawal or a credit card all the way across the country in Texas. What that card was, Samantha Koenigs? Yes. And in fact, now we have a trail. So now we have basically our first big break in the case. We see it used in Anchorage, and then there's a break in time. And then we see it now used again in the southwestern part of the United States. So now we have a trail, a suspect that may be traveling. So we have to get on that and assume that this person is moving on the move, and we need to track him, So we have to get on that and assume that this person is moving on the move and we need to track him and we need to catch up with him. What happens next? There are more ATM withdrawals in the case. And each time, as Jolene said, the authorities are

minutes behind in responding to the ATMs. However, on one of the ATMs, just one, because the person using that card was very careful not to be seen, as we know that the ATMs film whenever you put your card in, but each time the person is wearing a hood and you can't see the facial features and they're in the picture for a very short period of time and then you see nothing when they exit. You don't see a vehicle go by or anything, except one very conscientious person, analyst, that was reviewing the videos of one particular ATM transaction waits, and just before the camera cuts off, a vehicle goes through the film, the video. Now, on a hunch, they say this could be the vehicle based on the time of day of the transaction and the location of the transaction. And so they start looking at that

particular vehicle on the video. And ultimately, an all-points bulletin goes out on that vehicle in that area and is told to all local law enforcement in that area, by this time in Texas, and they're on the lookout for this certain kind of vehicle. And that's where we are in the case. So you find the vehicle, and it turns out to be none other than Israel Keys. Who is Israel Keys, Robin Walensky. Well, he is a guy who was working in Alaska and they're able to track down what Bobby just said, the Ford Focus, a white Ford Focus that he was driving. And the Texas police officers pull him over and they say, license and registration, sir. And there he is with his face with the Alaska driver's license. And they already realize that they have their man. And then they open the trunk, Nancy, of that Ford Focus. And in the back is Samantha's debit card and some clothes and a gun.

And so they believe that he is the man now that abducted her from the coffee shop all those miles away from Anchorage, Alaska. Bob, once you start questioning Israel Keyes, what do you learn? Well, the investigative team is questioning him in Anchorage. And they learn that they learn a number of things over the course of the first two days to three days of their interrogation. And one, they learned that he does admit that he is the person responsible for abducting Samantha. Take a listen to Israel Keyes caught on video. 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 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 from they're mine and um 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. My only regret is that I tried to have as much self-control as I did. I'm happy about the life I've lived and, you know, as long as I got away with it. But that being said, it was, you know, considering that's all I have now, it's, it'd be better to have more memories. So do you think that's like a part of the memories part?

It is now. Well, it is now. It's never, never was a consideration before. I was more interested in the next plan. Take a listen to our friends at Oxygen as we hear a description of how the FBI got Keyes to talk. After presenting Keyes with the overwhelming evidence, Prosecutor Frank Russo and special agent Jolene Godin get him to agree to a full confession. But first, he makes a few demands. The mood significantly changed once we first got to hear from Israel Keys. It was clear just how cold and calculating he was. I can give you the rest of the story, like, you know, everything that happened. If I get a cigar.

He wanted an Americano, and he wanted a peanut butter Snickers bar, and he wanted an opportunity to smoke a cigar, which at the time we thought were pretty silly. But if that's what it was going to take for him to talk with us, we were willing to do that. That was when he began relating details of the kidnapping of Samantha Koenig. He had a shed in his driveway.

And ultimately, he put Samantha in the shed. And she's bound in the shed. There he was drinking alcohol and smoking cigars and then turned up the music so that any sounds that were irregular wouldn't be heard by his girlfriend and daughter who were in the house or the neighbors. And he sexually assaulted her through the night. Considering the horrific ordeal

Keyes claims to have enacted right outside his home, the FBI is shocked to find out that Keyes has a live-in girlfriend and a 10-year-old daughter. His girlfriend and their child had absolutely no clue about what he was up to. He indicates to Samantha that his goal is to get money, and if he gets money, that he intends to let her go. There was no truth to that. He had no intention of letting her go.

And while she's in the shed is when he goes back to the coffee stand both to get her phone get her debit card and actually goes to an atm to see how much money is in her account and then returns to the shed in the morning he killed her by strangulation and also he stabbed her cheryl mccollum what about that bobby chacon and his fellow fbi agents did a remarkable job One of the most brilliant things they did when questioning this guy was allowing him to have a cigar. What that did was not only relax him, but gave him automatic recall about the murder of Bill and Lorraine Currier. That was genius. But does he ever describe what happened to Samantha? Although Special Agent Godin's team fears Keyes is telling the truth, they need to know they can take him at his word.

They test the waters, asking Keyes to direct them to Samantha's body in exchange for another Americano and Snickers bar. He obliges, continuing his confession, with the moments immediately following the murder. The morning after the kidnapping, Israel Keyes 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.

After sending the ransom note, he dismembered Samantha's body, and he tried to find a deep lake near the Anchorage area. And he had found Matanuska Lake, and he actually went to where on the map he felt one of the deepest areas was in the lake. A lot of ice fishermen out there, so he used that as a ruse to cut a hole in the ice

and ultimately disposed of her body there. So I asked him, kind of, I guess apropos of nothing, I just, well, did you catch any fish? And he said, yeah, I caught him, kind of, I guess apropos of nothing, I just, well, did you catch any fish? And he said, yeah, I caught fish. I go, what'd you do with them? He goes, I took them home and ate them. So that really kind of turned my stomach as well,

that this guy would, you know, kind of, he's disposing of a body, catching fish, and going home and serving them to his family. Special Agent Bobby Chacon with us now. Bobby, as you look back on the disappearance and the murder, the recovery of Samantha Koenig, what are your thoughts? You know, the feeling that I have, you know, obviously is one of, you know, sadness, overall sadness. This is a young woman who had struggles in her life at times and really,

by all accounts, had straightened her life out, was working again and was really on a right path in her life when, by the most random of events that the place where she was working was selected because of its location. This had nothing to do with her. The crime did not target her. This was a crime of opportunity by someone who saw the location where she was as an opportunity to do what he was going to do to abduct and murder her because he could do it and not get caught. And so when I look back at this young person's life, that's ended by, you know, in such a brutal way and, and, and by such a monster,

you know, it's one of those things that you, it fills you with such, with such sadness for her, for her family. And, you know, and knowing that monsters are out there like that,

walking among us in everyday life. In everyday life. Nancy Grace, Crime Stories, signing off. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.