Israel Keyes was born in Cove, Utah on January 7, 1978, and raised in rural Washington state in a strict religious household that home-schooled its ten children. He served in the Army from 1998 to 2001, then settled in Anchorage, Alaska, where he ran a one-man construction business, had good reviews, and raised a daughter.
His method was built to defeat the specific things that catch serial killers. He chose victims at random, with no connection to himself and none to each other, which removes the link investigators look for first. He flew to a distant city, hired a car and drove hundreds of miles further, which puts the killing outside any jurisdiction that knows him.
And years in advance he buried caches across the country holding firearms, cash, ammunition, zip ties and Drano, so that he never travelled with anything incriminating. Two have been recovered, in New York and in Texas. He researched his method on ordinary crime shows and paid for everything in cash.
Two murders are confirmed besides the last. In June 2011 he flew to Chicago, drove to Essex, Vermont, and killed Bill and Lorraine Currier, a middle-aged couple chosen because their house had no garage and no alarm.
In February 2012 he abducted Samantha Koenig, eighteen, from the coffee stand where she worked in Anchorage, killed her, and then went on a two-week cruise before returning to photograph her body with a newspaper and send a ransom demand to her family.
The ransom demand is what caught him. He was arrested on March 13, 2012 in Lufkin, Texas, in a hire car, having used Koenig's debit card at cash machines across the south-west. The one part of the operation that required him to come back and be traceable.
In forty hours of interviews he described eleven murders in an unhurried way, gave the details of the Curriers before anyone had connected them, spoke about the caches, and refused to name places or people. He said he wanted to control what came out and when.
He cut his wrist and strangled himself in his cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex on December 2, 2012.
Three of the eleven are known. The other eight exist as an account given by the only person who could identify them, who withheld the identifications deliberately and then made sure no one could ask again. The FBI has published the caches, his travel records and a timeline, in the hope that someone recognises a date.