Israel Keyes was a 34-year-old contractor in Anchorage, Alaska, when police in Lufkin, Texas, stopped his rented car on March 13, 2012. In the car was the cell phone of Samantha Koenig, an 18-year-old barista who had been taken from an Anchorage coffee stand six weeks earlier, and in his wallet was a debit card that had been used to collect a ransom paid for her return. A federal grand jury in Anchorage indicted him the next month for kidnapping resulting in death. Over the following months he confessed to federal prosecutors, FBI agents and Anchorage detectives that he had killed Samantha Koenig and, in June 2011, Bill and Lorraine Currier, a couple from Essex, Vermont, whom he had never met.
He also described other killings, across about a decade and in several states, but refused to name the victims or say where they were. On December 2, 2012, three months before his trial was to begin, he was found dead in his cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex. He had never been convicted of any killing. The FBI later said that, based mainly on his own statements, it believed he was responsible for 11 homicides between 2001 and 2012, and it described him in its public appeals as a serial killer. Only three of those victims have ever been named by investigators. The Curriers' remains have never been found.
Keyes was born in Utah in 1978 to a Mormon family, one of ten children, Time reported after his death. The Associated Press described him as the second-eldest of the children. The family later moved to rural Stevens County in northeastern Washington, near Colville and not far from the Canadian border, where the children were homeschooled in a cabin without electricity, according to the AP.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in December 2012 that the family's land lay off Aladdin Road north of Colville, and that the children sometimes attended The Ark, a church up the road whose pastor preached the Christian Identity doctrine that white people are a chosen race. The pastor told the Center that he did not remember Keyes but that he "could have been" there. The Center also reported that the Keyes children were neighbors of two brothers from a racist family who were later imprisoned for murder and attempted murder, and that Keyes reportedly built his first log cabin in the county at 16. In one of his interviews with investigators in 2012, Keyes referred to his own "white supremacist roots," the Anchorage Daily News reported.
In the 1990s the family moved to Smyrna, Maine, where they worked in the maple syrup business, the AP reported. In the same interviews, Keyes told investigators that he knew by the age of 14 that he was different from other people, and he recalled shooting and harming a cat as a teenager.
Keyes enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1998. Time and the Southern Poverty Law Center, citing records, said he served until 2000 and was honorably discharged; the Center gave the discharge date as June 2000. The FBI's later timeline of his life, and CBS News reporting on the FBI's interview materials, put his discharge in July 2001. He was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, at Fort Hood, Texas, and in Egypt. A barracks mate, Sean McGuire, later told the AP that Keyes had a dark side that came out when he felt offended.
The earliest crime the FBI attributes to him dates from these years. According to the Bureau's timeline, in the summer of 1997 or 1998 he abducted a young woman who was tubing on the Deschutes River near Maupin, Oregon, sexually assaulted her and released her. FBI Special Agent Jolene Goeden told the Anchorage Daily News that Keyes described her as his first victim and said he had meant to kill her but let her go. She has never been publicly identified.
After the Army, Keyes moved to Neah Bay, on the Makah Reservation at the northwestern tip of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and lived there from 2001 to 2007, according to the FBI. His company website later said he worked for the Makah Tribal Council during those years; the Makah police chief, Charles Irving, told the Peninsula Daily News that he was a maintenance worker and "had no run-ins with the police." Makah tribal members told the paper that he had been a model citizen who worked for the tribe and did landscaping around town, planting flowers and shrubs. He hiked and took out overnight backcountry permits in Olympic National Park.
His only recorded brushes with the law in Washington were minor. The Anchorage Daily News reported in 2012 that his only prior record was a 2001 drunk-driving charge in Washington, and the Peninsula Daily News found a January 2002 citation in Thurston County for driving with a suspended license and no apparent felony record. The outcomes of those cases were not reported.
The FBI's timeline places his first killing in Neah Bay between July and October 2001, soon after he left the Army. The victim's identity and the location are unknown. The timeline also records that between 2001 and 2005 he said he killed a couple in Washington and buried them, and that in 2005 or 2006 he committed two separate killings and used a boat to dispose of the bodies, at least one of them weighted and sunk in more than 100 feet of water in Lake Crescent, west of Port Angeles. None of these deaths has been confirmed, and none of the victims has been identified.
In March 2007 Keyes drove from Neah Bay through Canada to Anchorage, the FBI said. He started a one-man business, Keyes Construction, and worked as a carpenter and handyman with a reputation for competent and honest work, the AP reported. He lived in the Turnagain neighborhood of West Anchorage with a partner and their young daughter. People who knew him there were stunned when his other life came to light. He told investigators he had been "two different people" for 14 years.
The other person traveled. The FBI's reconstruction of his movements, built from rental car contracts, hotel stays, flights and bank transactions, shows him crossing the country and leaving it repeatedly: to British Columbia, Belize, Mexico and El Salvador; to Salt Lake City, Boston, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Fort Wayne, Indiana; to Mobile, Alabama, and Louisiana; to Minnesota, North Dakota and Maine. He told investigators he had made several trips to Montreal to look for prostitutes. Investigators have not determined whether he killed anyone outside the United States.
What he described to investigators, and what the FBI later made public, was a deliberate method. He chose victims he did not know, in places far from home, and he tried to leave nothing that could connect him to them. He paid in cash where he could. He said he looked for victims in remote places such as parks, campgrounds, trailheads, cemeteries and boating areas. He said he robbed banks to pay for his travel; he admitted several robberies, and investigators corroborated two. He admitted burglarizing 20 to 30 homes and talked about using arson to cover up homicides.
He also buried caches, years ahead of time, so that he would not have to carry weapons on planes or use traceable cards. He told investigators these held weapons, money and supplies for disposing of bodies. The FBI recovered two. One, beside the Blake Falls Reservoir in Parishville, New York, held a .22-caliber Ruger pistol without a stock, empty magazines, ammunition and a silencer, all sealed in a watertight bucket. The other, off Eagle River Road outside Anchorage, held materials that would speed the decomposition of a body. He said he had buried others near Green River, Wyoming, and near Port Angeles, Washington. CBS19 in Tyler, Texas, reported in an undated story that the FBI believes several more caches are still buried.
"Back when I was smart, I would let them come to me," Keyes said in one interview, Time and the AP reported. He told agents that there were no witnesses in the remote places he chose.
In April 2009 Keyes flew to Manchester, New Hampshire, and stayed in the region for a week, according to the FBI's timeline. He later admitted that on April 9, 2009, he abducted a woman from a state on the East Coast, took her across state lines into New York, killed her and buried her near Tupper Lake, in the Adirondacks. The next day, April 10, he robbed the Community Bank branch in Tupper Lake; that robbery is one of the two the FBI corroborated. The same day he had a reservation at a Hampton Inn in Colchester, Vermont, near Burlington.
He owned about ten acres of land on Poplar Street in Constable, New York, near the Canadian border. Investigators searched it over two days in October 2012 and reportedly found nothing, the Watertown Daily Times group's Telegram reported, and the FBI's Newark office said in November 2013 that investigators did not believe the New York victim was buried there.
In that November 2013 statement the FBI named, for the first time, a woman it believed might be that victim: Debra Feldman of Hackensack, New Jersey, who disappeared in 2009 and whom investigators believe was the victim of a homicide on April 9, 2009. Her body has never been recovered. An FBI spokeswoman, Barbara Woodruff, told ABC7 that April 9 "was the day that Debra Feldman disappeared," and that when Keyes was shown her photograph among pictures of possible victims, he said he did not want to talk about that right now. He never did. The FBI asked anyone who knew her and her movements at the time to contact the Hackensack Police Department.
Bill and Lorraine Currier lived in Essex, outside Burlington, Vermont. Bill, 50 according to the Vermont State Police (an Associated Press report at the time of the disappearance gave his age as 49), worked as an animal care technician at the University of Vermont. Lorraine, 55, worked at Fletcher Allen Health Care. Authorities described them as homebodies who rarely went far from home. In a statement read at a news conference in July 2012, their family said, "Our family circle has a huge gap with the loss of Bill and Lorraine." They had no connection to Keyes.
Keyes had been to the area before. In interviews in 2012 he said he had buried weapons in the Burlington area on his 2009 trip, the trip on which he robbed the bank in Tupper Lake, and dug them up when he returned in June 2011.
On June 2, 2011, Keyes flew from Anchorage to Chicago, the AP reported, and the FBI's records show a rental car from the Chicago area and transactions on the Indiana Toll Road heading east. Prosecutors said he had left Alaska meaning to kidnap and kill someone. He spent three days in Vermont beforehand, bought a three-day fishing license and went fishing, prosecutors told reporters, according to an ABC News Radio report. He was looking for a particular kind of house: an attached garage, no car in the driveway, no children, no dog, and no security system.
The account that follows is the one Keyes gave investigators in Alaska, as Chittenden County State's Attorney T.J. Donovan and U.S. Attorney Tristram Coffin set it out at a press conference in Burlington on December 3, 2012. Keyes cut the Curriers' phone line from outside after checking that the house had no security system. He broke in wearing a headlamp, armed with a gun and a silencer, found the couple in bed and bound them with zip ties, in what Donovan called a "blitz attack" while they slept. He took Bill Currier's gun from the house, and Lorraine's purse and wallet. He drove them in their own car to an abandoned farmhouse he had scouted earlier.
There, prosecutors said, he tied Bill to a stool in the basement. Lorraine got free and ran toward the road; Keyes caught her and tied her up on the second floor. In the basement, Bill's stool broke and he partly freed himself. Keyes attacked him and, when he kept struggling, shot him. Keyes then killed Lorraine. He left both bodies in the farmhouse. "They fought to the end," Donovan said.
The FBI's timeline dates the kidnapping and killings to June 8, 2011, the evening the Curriers were last seen; the AP, summarizing the case in January 2013, said he entered their home in the early hours of June 9. The FBI's records show him staying at a Handy Suites hotel in Essex on June 9.
Afterward, prosecutors said, he set out in the Curriers' car intending to rob a bank, then abandoned it when it gave him trouble. It was found a few days later at an apartment complex about three-quarters of a mile from their home. He drove his rental car to Maine and, prosecutors said, burned the Curriers' belongings in a national forest. He then came back through Vermont, revisited the scenes, and threw the two guns and the silencer into a reservoir in Parishville, New York. FBI divers later recovered a handgun stolen from the Curriers' house and the gun used to kill Bill Currier, exactly where he said they would be. He flew home by way of San Francisco on June 15 and 16.
The Curriers did not arrive at work on June 9, 2011, and Bill's sister reported them missing. When police went to the house they found a broken window and other signs that something was wrong; the phone line had been cut and a window in the door between the garage and the house was broken. Police later said there were signs of a struggle. On the morning they were reported missing, someone from the University of Vermont had called Bill's cell phone at 7:30 a.m., and police used that call to try to locate the phone; in October 2011 they searched part of the Winooski River by boat and an area of Essex known as "68 acres." Nothing was found. Lieutenant George Murtie of the Essex police led the local inquiry.
The break came from Alaska. Investigators there contacted Vermont in April 2012, after Keyes began talking. On April 12 and 13, 2012, agents searched a site on Route 15 in Essex, where a house had been demolished. Keyes later told investigators that he had been surprised the bodies were not found sooner and that the farmhouse where he left them had been torn down. On May 7, 2012, the FBI, the Vermont State Police and Essex police began searching a targeted section of the Casella landfill in Coventry, in the state's Northeast Kingdom. The search lasted about 11 weeks. Daniel Rachek, the FBI's supervisory senior resident agent in Vermont, called it the largest search in Vermont history, with 178 FBI agents and specialists rotating through it. It ended without finding the Curriers' remains.
On July 20, 2012, Coffin, Donovan and Rachek announced that the Curriers had been abducted from their home and killed shortly afterward, and that the person believed responsible was in custody in another state. They did not name him. "There was nothing the Curriers did in their personal lives that contributed to their deaths," Donovan said. The following day the Burlington television station WCAX, citing unnamed sources, reported that the suspect was Israel Keyes of Alaska. Most Vermont outlets did not repeat the name until it could be confirmed, Seven Days reported, and the officials declined to comment. Certificates of presumed death for the couple were issued that summer, and a memorial service was held in late summer, the AP reported.
By his own account, Keyes had also been planning to kill close to home. In interviews in 2012 he said he had scouted abduction sites in Anchorage since the spring of 2011. The FBI's timeline records that in April and May 2011 he planned shootings in Anchorage and staked out the North Fork trailhead in Eagle River. He described practicing with a homemade silencer in the Chugach Mountains, shooting at tires, a method he planned to use to stop a vehicle. He told investigators he had come close to killing a couple parked at Point Woronzof, an Anchorage park, and had considered shooting the police officer who came by, but abandoned the plan when a backup officer arrived. Anchorage homicide detective Monique Doll said his crimes had escalated from single victims to pairs and that he was "losing control."
Samantha Koenig was 18 and worked at Common Grounds Espresso, a drive-up coffee stand in the parking lot of a fitness club on East Tudor Road in midtown Anchorage. She lived with her father, James Koenig, and her boyfriend. Hundreds of people came to her memorial at West High School in April 2012, where photographs of her lined the hall outside the auditorium and friends and family celebrated her life with remembrances, a video and music. She had never met Keyes.
What is known of her abduction comes from the indictment and from the detailed narrative that the U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI and the Anchorage Police Department released on December 4, 2012, after speaking with her family. They said they released it to show the courage she had shown, and to help the investigation of his other crimes.
Keyes chose Common Grounds because of where it was and because it stayed open later than other stands. Shortly before closing, at about 8 p.m. on February 1, 2012, he came to the window in a ski mask and ordered coffee. When Samantha handed it to him, he pulled a gun and demanded money, and she gave it to him. He climbed inside, bound her hands with zip ties and asked where her car was. She said she had none. Doll later said that he had expected someone to come and pick her up and intended to take that person as well.
He walked her out toward Tudor Road. She broke away and ran; he tackled her, held her with one arm and pointed the gun at her with the other, telling her the gun used very quiet ammunition. They crossed Tudor Road to a parking lot where his white pickup was waiting, its toolboxes and license plates removed in advance. He told her she was being held for ransom, and when she said her family had little money, he said they would raise it through public appeals and that she would be returned unharmed if she cooperated. Investigators said he never intended to let her go. "He knew all along he was going to kill her," Doll said.
He needed her phone, which she did not have with her, so he drove back to the stand, left her bound in the truck, took the phone and drove away. Video showed her boyfriend arriving at the stand four minutes later, looking for her. From another part of town Keyes sent two text messages from her phone, one to her boyfriend and one to the stand's owner, making it look as though she was leaving town for the weekend, then took out the battery so that the phone could not be traced. She told him that the debit card for the account she shared with her boyfriend was in their truck, and gave him her address and the PIN.
He took her to a shed at his house, bound her there and turned up a radio so no one would hear. He told her he had a police scanner. Then he drove to her home to get the card. Her boyfriend found a masked man by the truck at about 3 a.m., shouted at him and ran inside for help; by the time he came back the man was gone, and so was the card. Keyes tested the PIN at an ATM, scratched it into the card, the indictment says, and returned to the shed.
There, according to the narrative released in December 2012, he killed her. The indictment says she was killed early on February 2. The released account says he suffocated her; the FBI's statements reported by CBS News and NBC News said he strangled her. He left her body in the shed, packed, and left early that day for a cruise from New Orleans that he had planned in advance, flying first to Houston.
While he was gone, Anchorage searched for her. Her father camped in a motor home next to the coffee stand, and he told Alaska Public Media that stands like it were not safe for a young woman closing up alone. Her photograph went up on billboards, bulletin boards and the internet, friends and volunteers handed out more than 45,000 fliers door to door, and a candlelight vigil was held in Town Square. Her family and others raised a reward fund. Police classified the case as an abduction from the start, based on what the stand's security video showed of her manner and the man's.
Keyes returned to Anchorage on February 17, according to the indictment and prosecutors. He then staged a photograph meant to make her family believe she was alive, and typed a demand for $30,000 on the back of a copy of it on a manual typewriter he had bought. He left the note in Connors Bog Park, under a memorial flyer for a dog named Albert, and on February 24 used her phone to text her boyfriend that it was "under Albert." Anchorage police recovered it.
In the following days, according to the released account, he disposed of her remains in Matanuska Lake, north of Anchorage near Palmer.
James Koenig deposited reward money donated by the community into the account linked to the card, so that investigators could follow the withdrawals.
Keyes began withdrawing money from that account at ATMs, his face covered. The AP, drawing on court records, listed the withdrawals: $500 in Anchorage on February 29, another $500 the next day, $400 in Willcox, Arizona, $80 in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and $480 each in Humble and Shepherd, Texas. The FBI dates the Shepherd withdrawal to March 8 and the Humble withdrawal to March 10. The indictment as summarized by the Anchorage Daily News put the total at nearly $2,500 and included Nevada among the states.
Investigators determined that the person making the withdrawals was driving a white Ford Focus, and the FBI and the Texas Rangers tracked the withdrawals as they happened. Two Anchorage detectives had been in Texas for several days.
On March 13, 2012, Texas Highway Patrol Corporal Bryan Henry stopped a white Ford Focus matching the description in Lufkin, in East Texas, about 3,200 miles from Anchorage; the AP reported that the car was stopped for going 3 miles an hour over the speed limit. Keyes was driving. Henry and Texas Ranger Steve Rayburn learned enough during the stop to search the car, and they found Samantha Koenig's phone in the car and the debit card in his wallet. Time and the AP reported that the car also held cash, a highlighted map and a cut-up T-shirt used as a mask. He also had three phone numbers that investigators later traced to prostitutes in the Houston area, the FBI said.
He was arrested for access device fraud and held at a federal facility in Beaumont, Texas. The federal arrest warrant was sealed. Anchorage police named him only as a "person of interest" in the abduction. Detective Slawomir Markiewicz said Keyes was the only person charged and the only person of interest. Police said they were still hopeful she was alive.
Investigators later learned more about how he had spent the weeks before his arrest. The FBI said that on February 12, 2012, he rented a blue 2011 Kia Soul in Houston and kept it until February 18, logging 2,847 miles. He admitted traveling through Azle, Aledo and Cleburne, near Fort Worth; investigators suspected that the car got stuck in mud in a rural area, possibly near Cleburne, and that he visited Post Oak Cemetery near Glen Rose. The FBI's timeline records that on February 16, 2012, he set fire to a house in Aledo and then robbed the National Bank of Texas in Azle, the second of the two robberies investigators corroborated.
U.S. marshals returned Keyes to Alaska, where he was held in state custody at the Anchorage Correctional Complex, because Alaska has no federal prisons. On March 27, 2012, he pleaded not guilty in federal court in Anchorage to access device fraud.
On April 2, 2012, FBI and Anchorage police told him that divers were searching a lake in the Wasilla area for her body. "Happy to help but it's on my terms," he said, according to the recordings later released. That day a forensic dive team recovered remains from Matanuska Lake that police believed were hers. Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew said investigators believed she had died within hours of the abduction, that the person responsible had acted alone, and that "we are confident that we have that person in custody." Mary Rook, the FBI special agent in charge in Alaska, said investigators had found no direct association between the abductor and Samantha or her family; the apparent randomness of the crime was "largely" what had puzzled them at first.
On April 18, 2012, a federal grand jury in Anchorage indicted Keyes on three counts: kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money, and access device fraud. U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler announced the indictment, which noted that "an indictment is only a charge and is not evidence of guilt." The kidnapping count carried a maximum sentence of life in prison or death. Alaska has no death penalty, but the federal charge carried that possibility. Keyes was not charged with murder; the Anchorage Daily News corrected an earlier report that he had been. He pleaded not guilty through his lawyer the next day.
Keyes talked to investigators for months. CBS19 in Tyler, Texas, citing the FBI, put the total at more than 40 hours. The sessions, held mostly at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Anchorage, involved federal prosecutors Kevin Feldis and Frank Russo, FBI Special Agents Jolene Goeden, Jay Sherman and Steve Payne, ATF Special Agent Thom King, and Anchorage police investigators Jeff Bell and Monique Doll. Many of them were negotiations, the Anchorage Daily News reported after recordings were unsealed in 2013. Keyes wanted two things: a quick execution, and secrecy, especially to shield his young daughter from what he had done.
On April 5, 2012, he said he wanted to fire his lawyer and talk first to federal prosecutors. On April 6, in a 90-minute interview, he admitted killing the Curriers and offered to talk in exchange for an execution date within a year, saying he wanted "my kid to have a chance to grow up." On April 12 he walked investigators through the Currier killings and showed them on Google Maps where he had thrown the gun used to shoot Bill Currier. On April 17 he told them he was "more sane than most Americans." On April 30 he talked about his homemade silencer and his plans in Anchorage.
On May 16, 2012, Feldis and Russo proposed a trade: information about victims in exchange for keeping the case in federal court and his name out of the public record. Keyes admitted that a body was in New York and that he had robbed the bank in Tupper Lake and buried the Currier weapons in Vermont on the same trip, but withheld the details. On May 25 he disavowed an agreement signed on March 30, 2012, with his defense lawyer, Rich Curtner, and U.S. Attorney Loeffler, under which the government would not seek the death penalty if he pleaded guilty in the Koenig case. On June 7 investigators came close to getting the New York victim's name, and Keyes mused about waiting until just before his execution, saying, "They can't prosecute a dead man."
In July 2012, five days after the Vermont media linked him to the Curriers, he told Russo, Goeden and Bell that he wanted any future confessions kept private, especially about sexual assaults and what had been done to the bodies. When Russo warned him that he could be portrayed as a villain, Keyes replied, "I'm already the villain." The same month, with Curtner present, prosecutors discussed the death penalty after Loeffler sent a recommendation to the Attorney General. Keyes again pressed to limit what would be made public and hinted that he might take matters into his own hands.
He told investigators that the calm he felt after a crime no longer satisfied him, and that he had sought bolder crimes. He called it a "mind game" and said he got an adrenaline rush from living two lives without anyone suspecting. Prosecutors in Vermont said he told police he traveled to kill strangers because he "liked to do it." Coffin said Keyes described his acts as choices, not something he was compelled to do. "Why someone likes to act like that, nobody knows," Coffin said. FBI Special Agent Eric Hernandez told Time that Keyes "derived pleasure from it" and that investigators would not describe him as remorseful. Goeden said Keyes enjoyed what he did and "had no remorse at all."
Investigators said he gave them information about eight victims and mentioned fewer than 12 killings in all; asked for a total, he said "less than 12." He would not give the names of the others, or in some cases even their sex. When Doll pressed him to think of the families who did not know what had happened to their relatives, he answered that he would rather think his loved one was on a beach somewhere. He spoke of one death that he called accidental and would not explain. Feldis later said investigators had verified "almost everything" he told them, and Doll said that with Samantha Koenig he "broke his own rule" by staying in his own city, when he had usually traveled to find victims at random.
On May 23, 2012, during a hearing in federal court in Anchorage, Keyes broke his leg restraints and ran. Supervisory Deputy Marshal Dave Long said his handcuffs had been removed; either he tried to leap over the bar separating the public from the defense table or his momentum carried him over it. Marshals tackled him and used a Taser. The next day he refused to talk until his demands about his lawyer and a fast trial and execution were resolved.
After the escape attempt he was held in the jail's segregation unit under tighter rules: full restraints and a two-officer escort whenever he left his cell, restrictions on razors and pencils, and daily strip and cell searches. Officers were told to use extreme caution. In July 2012 he was found with a makeshift noose and put in a suicide cell; the Department of Corrections later returned him to his unit, saying he was no longer a suicide threat. In September he was found with an object that could open his handcuffs, made from a paper clip and dental floss, and he was given 15 days of punitive segregation beginning November 28.
His federal trial was set for March 2013.
Keyes was last seen alive in his cell on the night of December 1, 2012. The Alaska State Troopers said he had been alone in the cell from 9:30 p.m.; the Department of Corrections later said he was last seen at 10:13 p.m., just before lights out; and an arbitrator's report, drawing on surveillance video, put it at 10:12 p.m., when he was seen arranging items and getting into bed. Just before 6 a.m. on December 2, when the lights came on, an officer saw blood on his bed and the floor. The troopers gave the time he was found as 5:57 a.m.
The troopers said his injuries were self-inflicted and that he had used a blade from a disposable razor. The state medical examiner took custody of the body; in the first days the medical examiner had not determined which injury, alone or in combination, was the main cause of death. The troopers, who investigate deaths in Alaska's prisons, found no sign that anyone else was criminally involved. The FBI's Houston office later stated simply that Keyes "committed suicide on December 2, 2012 while in custody in Anchorage, Alaska."
In the cell were several pages from a yellow legal pad, with illegible writing. The troopers turned them over to the FBI, whose laboratory in Virginia processed them. The FBI later said that the writings held "no hidden code or message" and offered no clues to other victims.
In February 2013 the Department of Corrections said that the razor had been issued to him by mistake and "appears" not to have been retrieved. A spokeswoman said, "It was a mistake, and that's all I can say." The officer on duty that night, who was responsible for 15 prisoners and had made 16 checks without entering any cell, was fired for "negligent inattention" on December 28, 2012; an arbitrator later ruled that his performance had been poor but not a firing offense by the department's usual standards, and found an unacceptable gap between corrections officers' practice and the department's policy on checks and counts, the Anchorage Daily News reported in 2014.
"I certainly wish we could've prevented this so that he could stand trial," said Bryan Brandenburg, a senior Department of Corrections official. "He should have stood trial in front of everybody," said James Koenig. Because Keyes died before trial, no jury ever heard the evidence in the Koenig case, and he was never charged in Vermont or anywhere else.
His family held a small funeral service for him in Deer Park, Washington, north of Spokane, on December 9, 2012, the AP reported.
On December 3, 2012, the day after his death, officials in Anchorage and in Burlington made public what he had told them. In Anchorage, Feldis said Keyes had confessed to kidnapping and killing Samantha Koenig and to killing the Curriers and at least five others, and that he had disposed of one body in New York. "He was the single best source of information about what he had done," Feldis said, and some facts might never be learned. Mew said Keyes's death allowed investigators to release information they had held back.
In Burlington, Coffin named Keyes as the only suspect in the Curriers' deaths. He said Keyes had given "substantial, non-public information," including the layout of their house and what was in their garage, and that although the searches had not found the remains, investigators had "enough details to confirm that Keyes did murder the Curriers." He described the couple as good people who had encountered "a force of pure evil acting at random," and said the Vermont case was closed. Asked whether it was frustrating that Keyes would never face trial, he said, "the biggest concern I have is all the families that are out there." Essex Police Chief Brad LaRose read a statement from the Currier family thanking friends, co-workers and strangers for "praying for us, hugging us, listening to us."
Bill Currier's mother, Marilyn Chates, told the AP that police had told her they believed the killings were random, and that by sparing the family a long legal process, "perhaps this was the best thing that could have happened."
The next day, December 4, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI and Anchorage police released the detailed account of Samantha Koenig's last hours.
In April 2013, after the Alaska Dispatch asked a court to unseal them, the government released audio recordings of interviews with Keyes. On August 13, 2013, the FBI went further. Deirdre Fike, the special agent in charge in Alaska, released a timeline of his movements from 1997 to 2012, an interactive map, photographs of the two recovered caches, and more than six hours of video from his interviews, and asked the public for help. The FBI's Houston office issued its own release on his time in Texas, and the Seattle office began reviewing unsolved homicides and missing persons cases with local and tribal police in Washington.
"We have his DNA," Goeden said, and anything that might jog someone's memory could help. She added that his death made the work harder. The FBI said investigators believed he was responsible for 11 homicides in fewer than 10 states, that his victims were men and women ranging from their late teens to the elderly, and that he did not know any of them before he abducted them.
The released interviews added to what he had said about Washington. CBS News reported that Keyes told agents he had buried three victims in the state and sunk two in a lake, asking at one point, "You guys know about Lake Crescent in Washington, right?" Prosecutors concluded that the Washington couple had been buried, not put in the lake. He told agents that all his victims had been strangled except Bill Currier, who was shot, and one Washington victim, who was struck on the head during a struggle. The interview in which he discussed the lake took place on November 29, 2012, three days before he died.
The FBI also asked for information about a trip he made in late 2008, when he rented a car in Seattle on October 31, flew to Boston on November 2, and returned to Anchorage on November 5.
The appeal brought tips but no names. By January 2014 the FBI had received about 100 calls, and Goeden said none linked Keyes to a missing person in Clallam or Jefferson counties on the Olympic Peninsula. "They are cases we're not able to rule him out of, but we can't rule him into, either," she said. Local officials said none of his victims appeared to have lived in those counties.
Several specific cases were looked at and largely ruled out. In August 2013 an FBI spokeswoman, Ayn Dietrich, said it was "highly unlikely" that Keyes was connected to the deaths of Mary Cooper, 56, and her daughter Susanna Stodden, 27, who were shot on the Pinnacle Lake Trail in Snohomish County, Washington, on July 11, 2006; their killer has not been identified. In April 2014 the FBI said it was highly unlikely that he was connected to the 2005 disappearance of Delmar Sample, a pharmacist from Onalaska, Washington, whose pickup was found near Lake Quinault, and it ruled out a link to Gilbert Gilman of Olympia, who disappeared in 2006. In December 2012 the Stevens County undersheriff said Keyes was not a person of interest in three killings in the Colville area from the years he lived there, the deaths of a mother and two 12-year-olds, KXLY reported.
Keyes has been dead since December 2, 2012. He was never convicted of any crime of violence. The only killings investigators have tied to named victims are those of Samantha Koenig and Bill and Lorraine Currier. Samantha Koenig's remains were recovered; the Curriers' were not, and the Vermont State Police still list the couple among the state's unsolved missing persons cases, with their remains not located and NamUs case numbers 11677 (Lorraine) and 11678 (William). Debra Feldman's disappearance remained open in the FBI's 2013 statements, and no later announcement about her was reported. As of October 21, 2026, no identification of any other person the FBI believes he killed had been reported.
Established in court: nothing. The indictment in the Koenig case was a charge, not a finding, and he died before trial.
Confessed and attributed by prosecutors and the FBI: the kidnapping and death of Samantha Koenig, for which there was also physical evidence (her phone and the debit card in his possession, her remains found where he directed, and the ransom trail); and the kidnapping and deaths of Bill and Lorraine Currier, which Vermont and federal prosecutors said they confirmed through details he gave that had not been made public and through the recovery of the guns from the Parishville reservoir.
Described by Keyes, unconfirmed: a killing in Neah Bay in 2001; a couple in Washington between 2001 and 2005; two killings in 2005 or 2006, at least one victim placed in Lake Crescent; the April 2009 abduction and killing of a woman buried near Tupper Lake, whom the FBI believes may be Debra Feldman; and a death he called accidental. The FBI's total of 11 rests mainly on his own statements and his remark that the number was less than 12.
Accounts differ on several points: his Army service (1998 to 2000 with discharge in June 2000, per Time and the Southern Poverty Law Center, against discharge in July 2001, per the FBI and CBS News); the year of the Oregon assault (1997, or 1997 or 1998, in different FBI releases); Bill Currier's age (49 in AP's 2011 report, 50 in later reports and the Vermont State Police listing); whether the Curriers were attacked on the night of June 8 (FBI) or in the early hours of June 9 (AP, 2013); whether Samantha Koenig was suffocated (December 2012 joint release) or strangled (FBI statements as reported by CBS and NBC); and the time he was last seen alive (9:30, 10:12 or 10:13 p.m.). The date of his arrest is given as March 13, 2012, by the FBI and most reports; an Anchorage Daily News report gave March 15 and an FBI Newark release March 18. Several reports describe him as having been "charged with murder" in the Koenig case; the charge was kidnapping resulting in death.
1978: born in Utah; the family later moves to Stevens County, Washington, near Colville.
1990s: the family moves to Smyrna, Maine.
1997 or 1998: by the FBI's account, abducts and sexually assaults a young woman tubing on the Deschutes River near Maupin, Oregon, and releases her.
1998: enlists in the Army; serves at Fort Lewis, Fort Hood and in Egypt.
2000 or July 2001: discharged (accounts differ).
2001 to 2007: lives in Neah Bay, Washington; works for the Makah tribe.
July to October 2001: first killing he described, in Neah Bay (unconfirmed; victim unknown).
2001 to 2005: a couple in Washington, by his account, killed and buried (unconfirmed).
2005 or 2006: two more killings in Washington, by his account; at least one victim placed in Lake Crescent (unconfirmed).
March 1 to 9, 2007: drives from Neah Bay to Anchorage; starts Keyes Construction.
October 31 to November 5, 2008: Seattle and Boston trip the FBI later asks the public about.
April 9, 2009: by his account, abducts a woman on the East Coast and buries her near Tupper Lake, New York; the FBI believes she may be Debra Feldman of Hackensack, New Jersey.
April 10, 2009: robs the Community Bank in Tupper Lake.
Spring 2011: scouts abduction sites in Anchorage and Eagle River.
June 2, 2011: flies from Anchorage to Chicago and drives east.
June 8 to 9, 2011: Bill and Lorraine Currier are abducted from their home in Essex, Vermont, and killed at an abandoned farmhouse.
June 9, 2011: the Curriers are reported missing.
June 15 to 16, 2011: flies home to Anchorage by way of San Francisco.
February 1, 2012: Samantha Koenig, 18, is abducted from the Common Grounds coffee stand on Tudor Road, Anchorage.
February 2, 2012: she is killed, according to the indictment; Keyes leaves for Houston and a cruise.
February 12 to 18, 2012: drives a rented Kia Soul around Texas; on February 16 sets fire to a house in Aledo and robs a bank in Azle.
February 17, 2012: returns to Anchorage.
February 24, 2012: sends the ransom text; the note is found in Connors Bog Park.
February 29 to March 10, 2012: ATM withdrawals in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
March 13, 2012: arrested in Lufkin, Texas, for access device fraud.
March 27, 2012: pleads not guilty to access device fraud in Anchorage.
April 2, 2012: Samantha Koenig's remains are recovered from Matanuska Lake.
April 6, 2012: admits killing the Curriers.
April 12 to 13, 2012: search on Route 15 in Essex.
April 18, 2012: indicted on three federal counts; pleads not guilty the next day.
May 7 to July 2012: 11-week FBI search of the Coventry landfill in Vermont; no remains found.
May 23, 2012: escape attempt in federal court.
July 20, 2012: Vermont officials announce that the Curriers were killed and a suspect is held in another state.
October 2012: his land in Constable, New York, is searched.
December 2, 2012: found dead in his cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
December 3 to 4, 2012: officials in Anchorage and Burlington release his confessions and the account of Samantha Koenig's death.
December 9, 2012: funeral in Deer Park, Washington.
February 2013: the Department of Corrections says the razor was issued by mistake.
April 2013: audio of his interviews is released.
August 13, 2013: the FBI releases its timeline, photographs and video and appeals for information; it attributes 11 homicides to him.
November 13, 2013: the FBI names Debra Feldman as a possible victim.
April 2014: the FBI rules out a link to the disappearance of Delmar Sample.
October 21, 2026: the Curriers' remains have still not been found; no other victim has been publicly identified.