Wild Crime: Mask of Sanity | S4 Ep. 4

Speaker 1 911. What is the address to your emergency?

Speaker 2 This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland, Ohio, into a crime scene.

Speaker 3 We've got something big going on here.

Speaker 4 The first thing you hit my mind is a monster.

Speaker 2 A new series from ABC Audio in 2020: The Hand in the Window.

Speaker 2 Out now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 6 this is Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020. It's time for the final episode of Wild Crime 11 Skulls.
It's called Mask of Sanity.

Speaker 8 So it's May 23rd, 2012. I was assigned to cover one of the court hearings of Israel Keys in federal court.
That means no video cameras. I was expecting it to be super quick.

Speaker 9 Literally one or two word answers of, do you say you're innocent or guilty?

Speaker 8 But it turned into something else

Speaker 10 he jumps from his seat and jumps over the barrier that's separating him from the rest of the gallery

Speaker 13 he jumped up and started sprinting essentially right towards me

Speaker 15 The courtroom broke into hysterics.

Speaker 16 People screaming, people running out of the courtroom.

Speaker 14 The marshal grabbed him as he was going over the wall.

Speaker 12 Within a few steps that Keys took, Jeff was right on him.

Speaker 3 We took him to the ground and tasered him.

Speaker 14 It made me very uncomfortable.

Speaker 3 He was highly unpredictable and capable of doing almost anything without much notice.

Speaker 21 Secrets in the wilderness.

Speaker 23 Beautiful yet treacherous landscapes.

Speaker 23 These are the stories of investigators who solve murders in wild places.

Speaker 25 Without making a sound, Keyes jumped the railing where family and friends of Samantha Koenig were seated together.

Speaker 25 It was unclear whether Keyes was attempting to escape or if he was lunging for a particular person.

Speaker 26 I was very shooken up.

Speaker 26 I just remember getting out of that courtroom and the news crew just being right in your face.

Speaker 25 James Koenig, Samantha's father, declined to comment outside the courtroom.

Speaker 24 The marshals are investigating how Israel Keys managed to decouple the irons before leaping over the railing.

Speaker 25 How he got out of them remains a mystery.

Speaker 3 So Israel had several hours sitting in the basement of the courthouse waiting to go to court and the leg shackles, just like handcuffs, are connected with a chain.

Speaker 30 He was able to determine one of the chains was was really loose, and he just sat there for hours and wiggled that piece of metal until it broke free from the leg iron.

Speaker 20 Then he took a piece of cellophane that he had his sandwich wrapped in and made a string out of it.

Speaker 29 That cellophane would break so that his legs would go three feet apart instead of 16 inches.

Speaker 30 The next day, I interviewed Israel.

Speaker 32 What's changed since yesterday?

Speaker 32 More beam cooks.

Speaker 13 I said seriously do you really think you were gonna escape?

Speaker 14 And he said if I had a one percent chance of escaping what did I have to lose?

Speaker 34 I had muscles sore this morning.

Speaker 16 I didn't even know I had it. Really?

Speaker 14 I guess he had an escape plan or vision in his mind of how he was going to leap across the top of each chair.

Speaker 5 towards the door and escape.

Speaker 12 I didn't afraid I'd actually get away.

Speaker 14 You always had to be on your toes because he was very dangerous.

Speaker 19 There's probably going to be a lot of

Speaker 36 vigilantes guarding the door up.

Speaker 38 He had confessed to killing Samantha Koenig.

Speaker 38 We got the courier confession, but unlike Samantha, we had not recovered their bodies for their family.

Speaker 38 It's fairly obvious that this was not, you know, two isolated events.

Speaker 15 During our interviews with Israel Keys,

Speaker 30 he had indicated to us there were more victims,

Speaker 15 and he specifically said less than 12.

Speaker 7 We still had a lot of work to do to solve all the claims he had that.

Speaker 41 When we seized the computers from Keys' house, we had them forensically examined to see what he was searching for. What were the key search terms that he was looking for?

Speaker 15 On his computer, he had searched the name Deborah Feldman. She went missing from Hackensack, New Jersey, April 8th, 2009.

Speaker 12 She had

Speaker 12 lived a little bit of a rough life, I would say.

Speaker 7 My mom struggled with addiction throughout her entire life.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 the addictions just, it got worse over the years.

Speaker 7 So it's 2009. She was supposed to go meet somebody and she never came back.

Speaker 41 There was very little information in the news, if any, about Deborah's disappearance.

Speaker 41 So to have keys all the way across the country trying to get information about her missing person case, That was a huge indicator to us that he maybe had something to do or was responsible for Deborah's disappearance.

Speaker 15 So we put the picture of Deborah Feldman in front of him.

Speaker 14 We all left the room and then we went to the observation room and then we watched him look at the photo

Speaker 45 and he had a clear reaction to it.

Speaker 41 It was a pretty significant change in demeanor and his response was essentially,

Speaker 9 I don't want to talk about this one yet.

Speaker 7 He had this shocked expression. I think about that regularly still.
Even if she was under the influence of a drug, she would have fallen back and left a lasting impression on her killer.

Speaker 46 And he wasn't prepared for her to fight back with him.

Speaker 47 Do you know where this person is?

Speaker 47 No.

Speaker 48 Her name was on your computer. There's a lot of names on that computer.

Speaker 9 Here we searched her name.

Speaker 50 Just explain so we're not sitting here wondering.

Speaker 49 No, I'm not gonna talk about what's on the computer.

Speaker 7 I still have no idea if she's dead.

Speaker 9 Or was she really murdered by a serial killer?

Speaker 7 That one's a hard pill to swallow. Even still today, that's hard to swallow.

Speaker 48 I already said I'm not talking about any more specific cases until we get some kind of deal hammered out.

Speaker 11 Everything is a power struggle and Keys' top priority is getting the death penalty and getting it fast.

Speaker 34 I need confirmation

Speaker 34 before I decide to take the next step or steps, whatever it takes.

Speaker 41 When Keyes learned that we weren't as in control of when he could get the death penalty as he initially thought, I think that's where he really started to kind of flex a little bit more.

Speaker 45 And you think that, and I'm not, and you think we're on this side stalling that.

Speaker 34 I don't know who's stalling it. Somebody's stalling it.

Speaker 41 He tried to take control over more of the interviews and really controlled when he would give us information and how much information he would give us.

Speaker 34 Just like little bargaining chips, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 15 The prosecution was hoping to use a death penalty to their advantage in getting additional information from him.

Speaker 38 The investigative team has been working diligently to try and solve any other murders and crimes committed by Keyes.

Speaker 38 Can we keep him talking? And find out the breadth of what he's done?

Speaker 41 While Keyes was incarcerated at the Anchorage Correctional Complex, the correctional officers did a search of his cell and underneath his bed they found 12 paintings.

Speaker 3 There was 11 skulls, a pentagram with a goat on it, and then one of the drawings said, we are one.

Speaker 10 They had been drawn using a finger in blood.

Speaker 13 These are the drawings that were discovered in Israel Keyes' jail cell by the Department of Corrections. He had to cause some injury, whether he punched himself in the nose, something to

Speaker 45 create this much blood.

Speaker 41 This was significant for us because we were never able to get keys to say definitively how many people he had killed.

Speaker 45 So

Speaker 3 this one here is, I think, is significant because it's the one that has

Speaker 28 We Are One written on it,

Speaker 13 which again, I believe, signifies that he believes that all of these victims and all these people, the stories and their soul belong to him.

Speaker 34 They know that there's potentially up to 10 or 11 victims. So there's seven or eight that we don't know where they're at.

Speaker 41 When we referenced the 11 homicides, he never corrected us.

Speaker 34 I'm getting a little bit ticked off at what's happening with the information that I've already given you.

Speaker 14 He was very upset that they were found.

Speaker 34 I see no reason at this point to keep giving you more information because I don't know what's going to happen with that.

Speaker 28 This gave us at least a goal to look for these 11 trips.

Speaker 55 Can we put him in a certain location for a period of time and try to figure out the missing people in that area where he was traveling at that time?

Speaker 14 Anywhere from Alaska to the East Coast.

Speaker 41 New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, it's pretty much the whole East Coast.

Speaker 33 West, we're going all the way out to L.A.

Speaker 10 He talked about in his interviews how he would purposefully turn his cell phone off and take the battery out of his cell phone so that he wouldn't be tracked during that time.

Speaker 10 We're trying to gather as many records as we can about Keys as far as whether it was visiting family or he might be traveling with his girlfriend where he had kind of that cover.

Speaker 56 We do know he traveled extensively and he didn't always stay where he landed. He would land in one airport, ride a car, and drive hundreds of miles.

Speaker 11 In early 2012, Keyes takes two separate trips to Texas. The first is hours after killing Samantha, taking his family on a cruise out of New Orleans.

Speaker 57 When they returned from the cruise, Israel's girlfriend flew back to Anchorage and Israel and his daughter drove to the Dallas-Fort Worth area to visit his mother, Heidi.

Speaker 11 The second Texas trip is after he's traveled through the southwest and then Keyes is arrested on his second trip to Texas.

Speaker 57 It was very possible things had happened in Texas.

Speaker 57 In the search of the Ford Focus, we found three rolls of money in the driver's door of the car.

Speaker 57 They were musty and appeared to have dye on them.

Speaker 1 Did not offer an explanation for that money. I don't know how much there is.
A big roll of ones and a roll of fives with rubber bands consistent with narcotics currying.

Speaker 57 The Ranger suspected it was to do with narcotics trafficking. A bell went off in my head that this could have something to do with the bank robbery.

Speaker 57 So I put out another special bulletin about unsolved bank robberies during the time period that Israel was in Texas. I got a call from a task force officer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Speaker 57 And he said there was a robbery in Azel, Texas on February the 16th.

Speaker 57 The bank robbery suspect was wearing a white hard hat.

Speaker 58 He had long, darkish-colored hair coming out from the bottom of the hard hat.

Speaker 57 I immediately knew that that was Israel Keys. Just the stature of him, the gun that he was holding appeared identical to a gun that we seized from his vehicle, the jacket he was wearing.

Speaker 15 His description of his trip to Texas was worrisome in that he was describing the escalation crimes

Speaker 14 to much higher degree.

Speaker 48 And I just got kind of amped up and decided I wanted to go out and do something, like preferably take someone.

Speaker 57 Heidi had told us that Israel had disappeared for two or three days and his daughter stayed at his mother's house and they were unable to reach him by text message or by telephone.

Speaker 57 From February 14th to February 16th, he was off the grid.

Speaker 14 Remember, he did say that he was out of control, too,

Speaker 52 during this trip, especially.

Speaker 30 He put 2,847 miles on his vehicle.

Speaker 57 We had to determine if anyone had gone missing in Texas during that period of time.

Speaker 57 And there was one person in Texas that disappeared.

Speaker 57 And his name was Jimmy Tidwell from Mount Enterprise, Texas.

Speaker 42 We're in East Texas.

Speaker 42 I call this God's country. It's wild,

Speaker 42 it's vast,

Speaker 31 it's adventurous, but it comes with its challenges.

Speaker 45 My name is Lieutenant Roy Cavassas, and I investigated the missing persons case of Jimmy Tidwell.

Speaker 59 We're a rural county, 55,000 people, and we have a vast amount of wilderness. We cover a thousand square miles with two to three deputies and backups 30, 40 minutes away.

Speaker 9 Sometimes you're the Lone Ranger.

Speaker 59 On February the 28th of 2012, Flanders Electric had contacted the Sheriff's Department to report that one of their employees, Jimmy Tidwell, had not shown up for work in the last 11 days.

Speaker 60 And that was very out of of character for him.

Speaker 60 The last time we know he was seen alive was leaving Flanders Electric on February the 15th.

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Speaker 11 I got a phone call one night and it was Russ County Sheriff's Department

Speaker 61 saying

Speaker 40 We're out on Jimmy's property. We think he's a missing person.

Speaker 55 It's kind of crazy because he's never left East Texas.

Speaker 19 He never wanted to.

Speaker 55 He had no desire to travel.

Speaker 19 That just wasn't him.

Speaker 59 Jimmy Tidwell appears to have been a private man.

Speaker 59 He lived isolated out in the woods.

Speaker 59 There was a search done of the property,

Speaker 59 and there was no trace of him found.

Speaker 46 It wasn't really foreign of me to think: like, is he really missing or has he gone somewhere?

Speaker 41 But that's when things really started kind of being weird.

Speaker 59 The day after Jimmy was reported missing, his truck was discovered on the side of the road.

Speaker 59 That area of FM 95 is a lot of farmland, a a lot of wooded area.

Speaker 40 I was beyond panic at that point

Speaker 33 to realize

Speaker 9 there's really something wrong.

Speaker 59 Did Jimmy leave the truck there?

Speaker 59 Or did someone that did something to Jimmy just abandon it there?

Speaker 46 Finding the truck created questions

Speaker 46 more so than answers.

Speaker 59 There was nothing leading us from that truck that said a human being left this truck and went a certain direction.

Speaker 55 I find it hard to believe in this day and age, all the technology that we have, that somebody could disappear and

Speaker 55 it was like they were never here.

Speaker 61 You can't imagine the feeling and the frustration and the anger and the what ifs.

Speaker 40 You're just at your weakest point

Speaker 11 trying to figure out what happened.

Speaker 40 How did we miss the clues?

Speaker 40 Why would somebody hurt it?

Speaker 59 During the investigation, the FBI contacted us and they brought up the name Israel Keys.

Speaker 59 We were told that at the time of Jimmy's disappearance, that Keys was in East Texas area.

Speaker 48 I was driving around to a lot of small towns that day. I was kind of out of control a little bit since the stuff happened in Alaska.

Speaker 57 During the weeks after Israel had abducted Samantha, he was like excited on a high.

Speaker 57 Maybe that was because he thought he'd gotten away with it already. And when he came to Texas, he wanted to do it again.

Speaker 48 Well, you already know about, or you already have a lot of information about the bank robbery in Texas.

Speaker 13 Israel was very quick to confess to the bank robbery in Texas.

Speaker 15 But he denied that he took anybody.

Speaker 48 Do you have any doubts about your competency or ability to

Speaker 48 understand what I'm saying? No, I'm more sane than most Americans.

Speaker 52 I'm truthful with everything I talk to you about.

Speaker 48 I can give you arson in Texas. I burned a house down, but I want a cigar for it.

Speaker 41 With Keys, it was not just about committing homicides, committing murders, committing sexual assaults. He was involved in a number of different crimes.

Speaker 41 How did you pick that house?

Speaker 48 It was a ways out of town.

Speaker 27 Okay, but nobody was home.

Speaker 17 No, not when I was there.

Speaker 36 Every room was packed, and so I was digging through everything. I mean, I was mostly looking for guns.

Speaker 41 He ransacked the house and then very meticulously put different things that would catch fire differently and open certain windows in order to make sure that the house was consumed by fire.

Speaker 10 The purpose of him setting this fire was to take all the law enforcement in the area to this house fire, take all their retention so that he could then go to Azel, Texas and commit a bank robbery.

Speaker 17 Next thing I knew, there were emergency vehicles coming from all over the place.

Speaker 54 The fire, the bank robbery, and all the activity leading up to that would indicate that he was very out of control and that the probability of him taking somebody and killing somebody were even higher.

Speaker 19 My mom called, upset.

Speaker 55 She asked me if I'd ever heard of somebody named Israel Keys.

Speaker 55 He was some kind of serial killer that possibly had something to do with my uncle Jimmy's disappearance.

Speaker 57 The bank robbery that Israel committed was in Azel, Texas. The fire was in Alito, Texas.
Jimmy Tidwell lived in Mount Enterprise, Texas, and was last seen early morning hours of February 15th.

Speaker 5 No one knows where Israel was on February 15th.

Speaker 57 The disguise that Israel Keyes was wearing included a white hard hat and there was long hair hanging out from the hard hat.

Speaker 36 Whereas in Texas I had short hair.

Speaker 47 I taped hair on the inside of the helmet so people thought I had long hair.

Speaker 9 Like costume hair or real hair?

Speaker 47 No, it was actually real hair.

Speaker 19 I see that little curl of hair right there.

Speaker 55 And I would not be surprised if all if that was my Uncle Jimmy's.

Speaker 55 I hope it's not his hard hat and hair, but can't imagine what he might have went through if it is.

Speaker 57 What we didn't find was the white hard hat or the hair that he said he taped under it.

Speaker 48 The bag, the helmet, the dust mask, glasses, the gloves, all that stuff went in dumpsters along the way to Houston.

Speaker 57 The DNA from that potentially could have linked us to Jimmy Tidwell.

Speaker 33 I spent a lot of time out here for a long time pacing this highway. This truck was found here.

Speaker 33 You know, I should have found something.

Speaker 46 I remember at the point that I said, like, do you realize he's not coming back? Like, I needed her to say,

Speaker 9 I know that.

Speaker 9 Because

Speaker 19 otherwise it's just,

Speaker 9 it's hard to watch your mom grieve.

Speaker 46 I knew Uncle Jimmy was her person.

Speaker 9 I just wish I could reach out and touch him.

Speaker 33 I just want him to be here.

Speaker 46 In all this craziness we live in.

Speaker 33 I'd love to see that truck going down this road.

Speaker 33 But right now this is what we're working with.

Speaker 20 I don't think these are detailed enough to signify an individual.

Speaker 15 I don't think that we could go through this and say this one is Samantha Cohen and these are the couriers. However, I do think that he was very intentional about how many he did.

Speaker 54 I believe this signifies Satan

Speaker 20 and Israel keys and the upside-down crucifixes on his 11 victims indicate that these are his and these stories and souls belong to him.

Speaker 30 And we'd like to put a name to each one of these.

Speaker 52 I think the main purpose of the Levin's skulls was to give the impression of being a dark, powerful, and thought of as an evil genius, the best serial killer that ever existed.

Speaker 17 I probably know every single serial killer that's ever been written about. It's kind of a hobby of mine.

Speaker 14 Israel told us that he did some investigating and studying on other serial killers.

Speaker 54 That's how he got his ideas about where to take somebody and what to do to not get caught killing people.

Speaker 14 When I asked Israel which serial killer he most related to or emulated, he compared himself mostly to Ted Bundy.

Speaker 43 He was very sexually motivated in the stuff that he did.

Speaker 17 He was able to separate his two different aspects or whatever you want to call his personality.

Speaker 41 Many other serial killers have a particular type. With Keys, that was absolutely not the case.
Like there was men, women, old, young, which in my mind makes him even more dangerous because

Speaker 41 it really is not about the person. It's about finding the perfect situation to take somebody.

Speaker 36 It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to make sense to me.

Speaker 52 This guy, Israel Keyes, is an excellent description of what a psychopathic personality is. One of the things that they do

Speaker 52 is they cloak their true selves with this conglomeration of traits that they've observed in other people that seem to get positive responses and they sew them together to create this mask of sanity.

Speaker 60 Washington was a lot easier in a lot of ways because

Speaker 60 I was so isolated out there.

Speaker 36 It's like you're in a new world anyway.

Speaker 26 When Keyes is talking to investigators in Alaska, He makes it clear that there are at least four victims in Washington state.

Speaker 7 Israel Keyes had lived down on the Olympic Peninsula from 2001 to 2007.

Speaker 11 When Keyes was in the Army, he meets this woman online. She gets pregnant fairly quickly and he moves with her to a Native American community in Nea Bay, Washington.

Speaker 7 My understanding from Israel is he moved to Nea Niebe because of his relationship and his daughter that was going to be born.

Speaker 7 That's where his girlfriend was from and where she wanted to live, and so he followed her there.

Speaker 63 When Israel moved here, it was here to try to support his family. And I was actually on an interviewing panel that hired him in the public works.

Speaker 63 And he had a three-ring binder.

Speaker 63 of all of his carpentry stuff that he had done. And it was really, really impressive.
And we thought, you know, we need to get this guy on board right away.

Speaker 63 This is one of the projects that Israel had built, the village market. It's used for a lot of things.
They have vendors come and sell stuff here. Kids like to hang out in here too.

Speaker 63 There was a lot of things that he had built around town, but this is one of the main structures that is still standing

Speaker 63 there was a lot of beautification that was done on the waterfront you know over the years with the salt water and everything that has eroded and gone away but this is the main one is still here that you know always reminds you of him

Speaker 64 Nia Bay, it's located on the most northwestern tip of the United States. We're a fishing community and also

Speaker 64 have a rich history of whaling, sealing.

Speaker 64 When people come in, they say, oh, you guys are at the end of the world. But we like to say we're at the beginning of the world

Speaker 64 and have been here since the beginning of time.

Speaker 11 It was extremely odd that Keyes was so readily accepted into Nia Bay, which is populated by Native Americans. It is a reservation.

Speaker 11 His acceptance into that community was indicative of his ability to sort of wear that mask of sanity.

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Speaker 63 Well this here is where Israel Keys' shop was.

Speaker 63 This is where he did all his planning and you know construction and fabricating and everything for for the projects he had, come driving up and as we're coming up you could hear the heavy music that he listened to.

Speaker 63 It was pretty intense.

Speaker 19 Night you're outside

Speaker 7 and loud.

Speaker 19 Night outside.

Speaker 63 That was the only thing I think that was a little bit different about Israel.

Speaker 64 I don't remember all of our real conversations. I mean it was mostly all joking and laughing and

Speaker 64 this and that.

Speaker 64 I just have this one picture in my head, and that what triggers it is watching the FBI interviews when he laughs.

Speaker 64 I get this picture of me sitting on a log, and I'm looking up at him in the fire and him holding the beer.

Speaker 9 But that same laugh just

Speaker 64 kicking his head back, and that laugh.

Speaker 64 Every time I hear it, that's the trigger moment that I get with that.

Speaker 64 And then it just makes me go,

Speaker 9 how, why?

Speaker 64 The laugh went from being something that was pleasurable, you know, happy, to,

Speaker 64 I got you.

Speaker 37 That's where I got my kicks was being able to live two different lives and have no one have a clue.

Speaker 37 When I was in Nia Bay and got my kicks, just being able to look at people while they were talking to me and thinking that for all the years they've known me, they actually don't know me at all, really.

Speaker 7 Everyone praised him. He was the best co-worker, best worker, best friend.

Speaker 60 I think everybody was just...

Speaker 9 How could I be fooled like that?

Speaker 64 That was his thing, his deception.

Speaker 29 I can tell you right now, there is no one who knows me, or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me, really.

Speaker 32 I'm two different people, basically.

Speaker 9 And the only person who knows about the kind of things I'm telling you is me.

Speaker 7 I kind of always imagined that

Speaker 7 a possible scenario for him would be to

Speaker 7 just go deep into woods or forest, going miles in, and then setting up and then just waiting. He told us that he often would just have to display a knife.

Speaker 7 He would convince the victims that this was some sort of robbery and he would just need to bind them up.

Speaker 36 I used a knife mostly as a threat. I had a gun, I just never felt the need.

Speaker 17 I would have used it, I guess, if things had got out of control.

Speaker 7 And once he was able to get them bound up, then he was totally in control.

Speaker 7 The Olympic Peninsula is very rural. The Olympic Mountain Range runs through it, and the vast majority of the land is either national park or national forests.
I think it's a million acres.

Speaker 7 The park itself is a huge area, very rugged mountains, deep, dense forests.

Speaker 11 I'm sure that Olympic National Park was part of his hunting grounds.

Speaker 11 It's about a two-hour drive from Nia Bay.

Speaker 7 With Samantha and with the couriers, he used what he would call blitz attacks, where he went after them.

Speaker 7 But what we understood for Washington State is that he would go out into these remote areas and wait for victims to come by.

Speaker 43 You go to a remote area that's not anywhere near where you live, but that other people go to as well. And then when they disappear, a lot of times nobody's really surprised.

Speaker 62 That happens all the time.

Speaker 38 We're dealing with somebody who's killed lots of people. There are multiple families suffering, and we don't know who they are.

Speaker 38 There were little things that were dribbling out,

Speaker 38 but he wasn't filling in the details verbally.

Speaker 7 Our most specific information came from a writing he had done in his jail cell where he wrote about some of his crimes without identifying

Speaker 7 who these people were.

Speaker 7 And there's a couple that he writes about from Washington State.

Speaker 35 And that writing was fairly detailed about what he did to these individuals.

Speaker 7 He assaulted the female first and the male was still alive in there present while he's assaulting the female.

Speaker 7 It appears that he struck him with a shovel and then we know that both of them eventually get buried after they're killed.

Speaker 7 What he does tell us about the Washington State victims is that they got little to no media when they disappeared.

Speaker 41 In 2007, Key's relationship with a woman in Nia Bay had ended and he decided to relocate to Anchorage because there's still still very much a kind of remote feeling to it.

Speaker 11 His girlfriend is having some issues. He says he's leaving, he's moving to Alaska, he wants to take the daughter, and he winds up with essentially full custody of the girl.

Speaker 55 I was planning on continuing to raise her.

Speaker 52 It's easier with a child.

Speaker 55 They have to follow the rules, whereas with

Speaker 36 your partner, certain aspects of your life that they're going to pry into and find out things that are going to get harder and harder to explain as the years go by.

Speaker 42 I think Anchorage in Alaska was a good place for someone like Israel Keys where he could come and not have people checking on him or wondering what he's up to.

Speaker 50 People leave one another alone.

Speaker 50 So even though Anchorage is the biggest city in Alaska, it's a small city in the middle of a vast wilderness.

Speaker 19 And it really remains more primitive, more wild.

Speaker 50 I employed Israel Keys in 2008 and 2009.

Speaker 18 And he built essentially a 2,000 square foot building, you know, raising the walls, putting on the roof, the rafters, everything

Speaker 35 all by himself, which I thought was, you know, a pretty impressive thing to do.

Speaker 50 He was super reliable.

Speaker 18 He did what he would say that he would do.

Speaker 35 He would speak to us, you know, just very, very openly about taking a trip. He'd say, hey, I have some travel plan.

Speaker 50 I'm going to be gone from this date to this date.

Speaker 18 It was always out front and open.

Speaker 35 And so you start to think that at the very same time that he was at our house working for us, he was taking trips, he was killing people.

Speaker 42 And he was hiding it perfectly and absolutely.

Speaker 5 And it's impossible to really reconcile.

Speaker 31 Who was this guy? What was going on inside him?

Speaker 35 It's impossible to understand.

Speaker 36 How are you doing today, Adrian?

Speaker 63 All right.

Speaker 7 November 29th of 2012 seems like a routine meeting with Israel.

Speaker 34 And if there's anything you want, like it'll give you like an hour on the internet, maybe.

Speaker 7 But toward the end of that interview, he does reveal that one of the bodies he has submerged in Washington State here is Lake Crescent.

Speaker 7 You guys know about Lake Crescent, Washington.

Speaker 62 It drops down like a beep.

Speaker 7 Lake Crescent is almost 12 miles long. It goes over 600 feet deep.

Speaker 62 I was near the edge, but you know, 30 feet out from the bank on that lake, it drops down to 50, 60 feet already.

Speaker 9 He talks about disposing of somebody using milk jugs full of of concrete as weights.

Speaker 9 How many milk jugs?

Speaker 9 At least

Speaker 19 four or five, I would think.

Speaker 9 Just for one bottle. Yeah.

Speaker 7 He gave us some, you know, kind of a vague description of where the body was sunk, but nothing that we could follow up with.

Speaker 7 Just a vast amount of water. Unpractical to try to conduct any search without more specific information from them.

Speaker 62 I'll have to think about which ones I'm going to move hard with.

Speaker 30 On December 2nd, 2012, I was on a SWAT operation,

Speaker 31 and we had just entered a home on a barricaded subject, and we were taking that individual into custody when I was tapped on the shoulder by a team member, told to go talk with the commander.

Speaker 10 I got a phone call from Jolene and I knew from the time of day she was calling me it was not going to be positive news.

Speaker 3 And that's when he told me that Israel Keys was dead.

Speaker 3 Give it up for Chicago.

Speaker 66 Sebastian Menuscalco's new stand-up special, It Ain't Right, is coming to Hulu on November 21st.

Speaker 49 30 years ago, Jeff Bezos, complete nerd. Bezos now ripped to shreds on his super yacht and the boxes keep coming.

Speaker 66 Sebastian Maniscalco, It Ain't Right, premieres November 21st, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

Speaker 15 I drove to the jail.

Speaker 27 I met Jolene and we went to Israel's cell.

Speaker 15 I saw Saw him facing away from us, laying on the mattress.

Speaker 27 There was a river of blood from his bed.

Speaker 41 He had attempted to commit suicide in multiple ways. He had cut his wrists very deeply with a razor.
He had also fashioned a noose or like something around his neck with his pillowcase.

Speaker 54 Put the loop around his foot and push down on his leg to create the force around his neck to strangle himself.

Speaker 41 Keyes was able to get a razor to shave. He had a small silver piece of like tin foil that he was able to put back in the razor to make it look like the blade was there.

Speaker 41 And that's what was handed back to the correctional officers.

Speaker 20 I was extremely upset wondering how something like that had happened and I was upset with the Department of Corrections at first and then obviously Israel.

Speaker 10 I hate the fact that Keyes had his final word in his suicide.

Speaker 10 That was under his control, not ours.

Speaker 38 Federal inmate Israel Keyes was found dead in his jail cell.

Speaker 33 of an apparent suicide.

Speaker 38 We don't have a federal prison here, so we pay the State Department of Corrections to house them.

Speaker 38 First of all, you know, they're under custody. Federal prisoner should not be able to harm anybody else or themselves.

Speaker 38 It puts an end to both justice for the families we already knew about and justice for people that we knew had been murdered by this guy.

Speaker 40 And it's just,

Speaker 38 you know, it's a very abrupt,

Speaker 10 you know, guys, we're done.

Speaker 10 Initially, I thought

Speaker 10 there were ways that I could manipulate this situation, this case.

Speaker 9 Knowing what happened after this state now, I was listening to it with an ear of, did he say things that would have

Speaker 15 told us that he was going to kill himself and that there wasn't going to be another interview.

Speaker 28 In hindsight, I felt after transporting him back to the jail after this and talking about what we were going to talk about on the next interview, he gave that weird, he said, yeah, sure, and then he gave his

Speaker 15 weird chuckle, which now makes me think maybe he had a plan, knowing he knew he wasn't going to be at the next interview.

Speaker 10 It just felt like a punch in the gut.

Speaker 60 Israel Keyes' family stepped out of their van and filed into the funeral home before the service today. His mother, four sisters, and their husbands attended.

Speaker 60 Keyes' six other siblings and former Colville neighbors never made it.

Speaker 12 I would say

Speaker 12 a lot of people were glad he was dead.

Speaker 10 They think that's what he deserved, but

Speaker 10 there is some recognition that there's a lot of information he took with him.

Speaker 26 We'll start with Anchorage first and then go from there and see what we can do. Okay, so you have the bill.

Speaker 44 So I don't know if you want to skip.

Speaker 33 I think it's page 28.

Speaker 26 That's the latest one.

Speaker 26 We came up with this idea for this bill to help those that work late at night

Speaker 26 with better lighting, better security, alarm system possibly everywhere. Always, always.

Speaker 33 Silent alarms, training,

Speaker 29 and then not working alone.

Speaker 44 We would call it the Samantha Koenig Safety Act. It comes down to we want to protect night shift workers

Speaker 44 and we want to make sure that what happened to Samantha can never ever happen again to anybody.

Speaker 26 I miss her being this little because when you're younger, it's like you're innocent. You don't know how messed up the world is yet.

Speaker 10 It's a lot on any family member to go through.

Speaker 26 And then there's family members that don't even know where their loved one is. And the fact that he still has victims out there and no one knows anything.

Speaker 40 I definitely don't want to lose sight of the victims.

Speaker 41 That's where the true story is: is that these were normal, everyday people.

Speaker 41 And it literally was a split second of crossing paths with keys.

Speaker 31 And unfortunately, it led to their death.

Speaker 10 We're still reviewing evidence. We still receive leads pretty frequently.

Speaker 10 Unfortunately, we haven't solved any other cases since his suicide.

Speaker 11 I believe

Speaker 11 we can locate and identify other victims.

Speaker 11 It just needs enough eyeballs and daylight and pressure.

Speaker 11 And it can happen.

Speaker 6 This is Deborah Roberts. Wild Crime was produced by Lone Wolf Media for ABC News Studios.

Speaker 6 Next week, we'll be back with a new series from 2020 called Bad Romance: Tales of Heartbreak, Betrayal, and the Unexpected Twist That Can Happen When Love Turns Sour.

Speaker 6 Don't forget, you can find seasons one through four of Wild Crime streaming on Hulu, along with more episodes of 2020. Thanks for listening.