Just before closing time on the night of February 1, 2012, a man in a hooded sweatshirt and a face covering walked up to the Common Grounds Espresso stand on Tudor Road in Anchorage and ordered a coffee. Samantha Koenig, eighteen, was working alone. A security camera recorded what followed: the man climbed in through the service window, bound her with zip ties and took her away. By the next day she was dead. It took investigators six weeks to find the man, and eight more months to begin to understand him. Israel Keyes, a thirty-four-year-old Army veteran with his own construction business, a long-time girlfriend and a young daughter, told them he had killed Koenig and a Vermont couple, and that there were more. He put the total at less than a dozen, and he died before he named any of the rest.
Keyes was born on January 7, 1978, in Richmond, Utah, the second of ten children of Heidi and Jeff Keyes; some accounts place the birth in nearby Cove. The children were homeschooled, and in 1983 the family moved to a plot north of Colville, Washington, and a one-room cabin on Rocky Creek Road with no electricity or running water, where some of the children slept in a tent and all of them hunted, cut wood and worked on neighboring farms. The family worshipped at The Ark, a Christian Identity church with white supremacist teachings, then at another church of the same outlook, and later moved to Smyrna, Maine, to tap maple sap among Amish neighbors. Investigators and his former commanding officer said after his arrest that they suspected his father had abused him. In those years he gave up his faith.
He enlisted in the Army in Albany, New York, in April 1998 and served until July 2001 as a specialist in the 25th Infantry Division, on a mortar team at Fort Lewis, at Fort Hood, and in the Sinai, where he told a fellow soldier he would like to kill him. He later admitted trying to rape a sex worker while on leave in Egypt and a college student while on leave in Israel. After an honorable discharge he moved to Neah Bay, on the Makah Reservation at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula, to live with Tammie Hawkins, whom he had met online; they had a daughter and separated in 2004. In 2007 he moved to Anchorage and started Keyes Construction, with himself as the only employee, and at the time of his arrest he was seeing a nurse named Kimberly Anderson and raising his daughter. He told investigators he had been living as two different people.
The other person traveled. Keyes chose his victims at random, strangers with no link to him or to each other, and he went a long way from home to find them. He flew to a distant city, rented a car, and drove hundreds or thousands of miles more. He paid in cash where he could. Years ahead of time he buried caches of weapons, money and tools in places he expected to return to, so that he did not have to travel with anything that could connect him to a crime. Two have been recovered. One, in a watertight bucket under rocks at Blake Falls Reservoir in New York, held a .22-caliber Ruger with no stock, empty magazines, ammunition and a silencer. Another, off Eagle River Road near Anchorage, held materials that would speed the decomposition of a body.
The FBI's reconstruction of his movements shows how the Currier killings worked. On June 2, 2011, he flew from Anchorage to Chicago and rented a car in Des Plaines. The next day he paid tolls on the Indiana Toll Road heading east. "He intended on that trip to commit a homicide," FBI Special Agent Jolene Goeden said later. He told investigators he dug up weapons he had buried near Burlington, Vermont, years before. On the night of June 8 he abducted Bill and Lorraine Currier, a couple he had picked at random, from their home in Essex and took them to an abandoned farmhouse, where he killed them. He said he sexually assaulted and strangled Lorraine. The next night he checked into a hotel in Essex. On June 15 he flew home by way of San Francisco. The Curriers' families had no idea what had happened to them. Neighbors described a man who may have been seen driving the couple's dark green Saturn, and police released a sketch, and then the case went cold. Their bodies have never been found.
Samantha Koenig was killed in a shed behind Keyes's house in Anchorage. The next day he flew to Houston and then took a planned vacation, a cruise from New Orleans with his daughter, leaving her body in the shed. He came back to Alaska on February 17 or 18; prosecutors gave the earlier date. He sexually assaulted the body, put makeup on her face and sewed her eyes shut with fishing line so that she would seem to be alive with her eyes squeezed closed, and took a Polaroid of her bound, beside a copy of the Anchorage Daily News dated February 13. On the back of a photocopy of the picture he typed a ransom demand for $30,000, and on February 24 he used her phone to text her boyfriend directions to where he had left it, at Connors Bog Park. Her family, as the message directed, deposited donated reward money into the account linked to her debit card. Her family and friends were searching the city and raising reward money. He dismembered her body and put the remains through a hole he had cut with a chainsaw in the ice of Matanuska Lake, north of Anchorage.
He had stolen that card from the car she shared with her boyfriend, made her tell him the PIN, and scratched the number into the plastic, and now he began to use it. He withdrew money in Anchorage on March 1, then flew south again and worked his way across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas making ATM withdrawals, his face covered on the cameras. Investigators were watching the card. After a withdrawal in Shepherd, Texas, officers were told to look for a white Ford Focus rental. On March 13, 2012, police in Lufkin, Texas, pulled him over for speeding. The officers noticed maps with highlighted routes and cash bundled in rubber bands, and a search of the car turned up Koenig's phone and her card. He was flown back to Anchorage, and after he confessed to her murder, FBI divers recovered her remains from the lake on April 2. On April 18 a federal grand jury indicted him on three counts: kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money, and access device fraud. The kidnapping count carried a possible death sentence under federal law, although Alaska has none, and he pleaded not guilty.
Over the following months Keyes sat through more than forty hours of interviews with the FBI, Anchorage police and federal prosecutors. He was calm, articulate and constantly negotiating. He gave the Curriers because he knew he was already tied to them. About the rest he offered fragments: victims who were men and women, in fewer than ten states; two separate killings in 2005 and 2006, with at least one body put into Lake Crescent near Port Angeles, Washington; three victims buried in Washington and two others sunk in a lake there. He said he had abducted a woman from a state on the East Coast on April 9, 2009, driven her across state lines and buried her in New York near Tupper Lake, the town where, the FBI later confirmed, he robbed the Community Bank branch that April. Investigators believe she was Debra Feldman, forty-eight, who vanished from her apartment in Hackensack, New Jersey, on April 8, 2009. His computer had been used to look up an article by a different woman named Deborah Feldman, and when he was shown Debra Feldman's photograph he paused and said he did not want to talk about her yet. He described burning a house in Aledo, Texas, and robbing a bank in Azle, Texas, in the weeks before his arrest. He refused to give names or places. He said he wanted to keep the details from reaching the internet, where his daughter might find them, or his mother, who he feared would have a heart attack. Investigators said he often failed to deliver what he had promised.
Because there are no federal prisons in Alaska, Keyes was held in state custody at the Anchorage Correctional Complex while he awaited trial in federal court for Koenig's kidnapping and murder, set for March 2013. He was kept apart from other inmates and under heightened security after guards found him with a makeshift handcuff key. A Department of Corrections review later found he had been mistakenly issued a razor that was never retrieved. He was last seen alive at 10:13 on the night of December 1, 2012. At 5:57 the next morning an officer saw blood on his bunk and floor. He had cut his left wrist with a razor blade set into a pencil and strangled himself with a bedsheet tied around his neck and attached to his ankle. He was declared dead at 6:13 a.m.
Under his body was a four-page note on a yellow legal pad, soaked in blood and illegible. The FBI laboratory in Virginia recovered the text: rambling, sometimes rhyming, full of violent imagery, and, the Bureau concluded, holding no hidden code and no clue to the identity of anyone else he had killed.
His death ended the prosecution and left the other victims without names. In August 2013 the FBI said that, based on his statements, it believed he had killed eleven people between 2001 and 2012. It released a timeline of his travels, photographs of the caches, and hours of his interviews, and asked the public for help. He had traveled often to Canada, to Mexico in 2007 and 2008 and to Belize in 2005, and the prosecutor who led the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Feldis, said there could be victims outside the country. "Right now, the best hope for solving these cases is going to come from information from the public," Feldis said. Other cases have been examined and set aside. His first arson, he said, was a trailer in Colville, and he was for a time a suspect in the 1997 deaths of Marlene Emerson and her daughter Cassie, twelve, whose burned-out trailer stood there; in December 2024 another man, Charles Tatom, was arrested for those murders. Independent researchers published a timeline of his movements in 2025 with more than a thousand entries. Samantha Koenig and Bill and Lorraine Currier remain the only victims he named, and Debra Feldman the only other the FBI has publicly linked to him.