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I understood some of you preferred it this way. So, this episode is for you. We stay in the United States of America, but we are no longer in the stylish late 1940s. This episode takes a closer look at a very recent serial killer case, one ending in 2012, only seven years ago.
So, turn your nose northwards with me, the A-Lissuna, as we travel to the great state of Alaska and its largest city, Anchorage. Here, a rapist and serial killer hid very much like a wolf among sheep. He is believed to have killed perhaps as many as eleven, but at least three human beings. His name was Israel Keys and this is his saga.
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So, again, visit the serialkillerpodcast.com.com. donate now if you wish to contribute. The couriers who vanished in 2011 lived in Essex, Vermont. They were a middle-aged couple living a peaceful life.
Bill was tall, somewhat portly, with brown hair and eyes. He wore glasses. Lorraine was shorter than Bill, had red hair, an easy smile and looked happy in photographs. They didn't know Israel Keys.
He didn't know them. On 2 June 2011, Keys flew from Alaska to Chicago. He later told investigators his purpose was to kidnap and murder someone. Anyone.
In Chicago, he ran to the car and headed east. Five days later, Israel Keys checked into the handy suites on Susie Wilson Road in Essex, Junction, Vermont. The handy suites is still in operation. It's a fairly low-cost place with a rather imposing entrance area.
The building is green-gray with a red brick foundation. In his simple but adequate room, he planned his attack meticulously. The next night, he began scouting for a victim. He told police he zeroed in on the couriers because their house had an attached garage.
There were no cars in the drive and no sign of children in the home. They didn't have a dog. Keys, a seasoned construction worker and carpenter, also felt he could accurately guess the home's floor plan and predict the location of the bedroom. He was right.
By his own account, Keys was on the couriers within 10 seconds of breaking in. They awakened to a stranger, wearing a headlamp, carrying a gun and bearing zip ties. He took them to an abandoned farmhouse nearby. Keys took Bill's career into the basement of the house and tied him to a stool.
Upon returning to the car, Keys saw that Lorraine had broken free from the zip ties that had previously bound her hands and feet. Keys then saw Lorraine running towards Main Street. He tackled her, brought her to the second floor of the farmhouse and rebound her hands and feet. Upon returning to the basement, Keys found that Bill had broken the stool on which he was bound and repeatedly shouted, Where's my wife?
In an attempt to subdue Bill, Keys hit him with a shovel. But when Keys realized that Bill was not going to cooperate, he retrieved the gun and silencer and shot Bill carrier to death. Just having heard the fatal struggle ending with her husband's murder, Lorraine was then forcefully raped by his third keys. When he had finished, he was already laying on top of her.
He put his gun away and wrapped his hands around her throat, slowly squeezing her life out of her. As I've mentioned in earlier episodes, strangulation is a terrible way to die. It's slow, very painful, has tissue of a tear inside the esophagus and causes extreme trauma to the victim as they watch their killers straight in the face as he is killing them. Keys said he hid Bill and Lorraine Carrier's corpses under the abandoned farmhouse.
However, police have yet to recover their bodies. But before we continue, let us take a closer look at who Israel Keys really was. He was born in Richmond, Utah in 1978. He's one of the few serial killers I have covered that actually did not have a middle name.
For some reason, most serial killers have at least three names. Theodore Robert Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Leonard, Thomas Lake, Dennis Lynn Rader, the list goes on. But it's not applicable to Israel Keys. He was raised in a Mormon family and was homeschooled.
His family moved to the Aladdin Road area north of Colville, Washington, where they became neighbors and friends with a family of Chivy Kehoe. And occasionally they attended a Christian Identity Church. As you might know, Chevy O'Brien Kehoe is an American self-proclaimed white supremacist and convicted murderer. So it is not unreasonable to say that he was not a very wholesome influence on young Israel.
However, when Israel Keys was 20 years old, he enrolled in the US Army from 1998 through 2001 at Fort Lewis, Fort Hood and in Egypt. While at Fort Lewis, he served on a mortar team in the first battalion, 5th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division. According to his military records, Keys entered the Army in Albany, New York on the 9th of July, 1998, and was discharged from Fort Lewis on the 8th of July, 2001, at the rank of a specialist. Records indicate Keys was awarded the following decorations and awards.
Army Achievement Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Marksman Badge with Rifle Bar, Expert Infantry Man Badge and Air Assault Badge. Former Army friends of Keys have noted his quiet demeanor, that he typically kept to himself. On weekends, however, he was reported to have drunk heavily, consuming entire bottles of his favorite drink while Turkey Bourbon. He was also heavily into the music group Insane Clown Posse and had several large posters hanging in his barracks room.
In other words, he was perhaps what is known as a juggalo, the only verified serial killer juggalo I know of, actually. Keys apparently fell away from his strong Christian upbringing and according to his now-defunct Myspace page, he described himself as an atheist. He looked like a regular guy. He was on the tall side about 6 foot 2 and in good shape.
He was a white guy with brown hair and dark eyes. Up until his arrest, he lived at a stable address with a woman and her child. In 2006, he placed 129th in a marathon in Olympia, Washington, very decent results considering several hundred participants. When he was arrested, he had his own construction business in Anchorage, Alaska, called Keys Construction.
Here he did jobs as a handyman, contractor and construction worker. He charged and, here I quote, as low as $35 an hour, depending on when the job was done. Israel Keys' first victims were in Washington State in the late 1990s. Keys admitted to investigators that he killed four people in Washington State, claims which are the subject of an active investigation by the FBI as well as police in that stage.
The problem with these murders is that Keys, as is typical of serial killers who enjoy controlling what information they feed their captors with, never gave any details about these four murders. He simply said that he killed them. He did not mention the victim's gender, age or how he went about murdering them. He also confessed to killing one person in New York, but again, he only said he killed a person and did not give any details about his victim.
What is known is that he lived in many places in the US before finally settling down in Anchorage. Since we know he murdered a couple in Vermont, one person in New York, and at least four people in Washington State. The entire US could have been Israel Keys' hunting ground. Samantha Koenig was a pretty, blonde, 18-year-old woman who lived in Anchorage.
There, she worked as a buddy stud, Common Ground's Coffee Stand. It is a small shack, kind in color. It looks really cozy. Prior to the 1st of February in 2012, Keys had selected the Common Ground's Coffee Stand located on Tudor Road for the site of the abduction.
He did this after considering other coffee stans, but chose Common Ground's because of its location, and because it was open later than other coffee stans. Keys had never met or seen Samantha Koenig before. He approached the coffee stand just prior to closing time. He was wearing a ski mask and ordered the coffee.
Samantha made the coffee and handed it to Keys. He then pulled out a gun and demanded money. Samantha complied, and then Keys forced himself inside. Inside the coffee stand, he tied up Samantha's hands with zip ties.
He asked her, where is your car? And she told him that she did not have a vehicle. Keys then forcibly walked her out of the coffee stand toward Tudor Road. Samantha broke away from Keys and tried to run away.
Keys chased her and tackled her to the ground. He put one arm around her and pointed a gun at her body, with the other hand, telling her that she needed to co-operate. That the gun had very quite ammo and that she should not do anything to make him kill her. They walked across Tudor Road into the parking lot, between the I-Hop restaurant and Dairy Queen, where Keys' white truck was parked.
Keys had previously prepared a truck for the abduction by taking the mounted toolboxes off the bed of the truck, as well as removing the license plates. Keys then bound Samantha in the truck and drove away. Keys drove around town, explaining to Samantha that this was a kidnapping for ransom. Samantha told Keys that her family did not have much money, and that Keys was not likely to get much in ransom.
Keys explained that they will raise money for the ransom by simply seeking the public's help. Keys convinced Samantha that if she cooperated, she would be returned to her family unharmed. She believed Keys and tried to talk to him in an effort to convince him to release her. At some point on the drive, Keys realized that Samantha did not have her cell phone, which was necessary for his plan to demand ransom money by sending a text message from her phone.
He drove back to common grounds and re-entered the coffee stand, leaving Samantha bound in his truck. He retrieved the cell phone and got back into the truck and drove away. He drove to another part of town, where he sent two text messages from Samantha's phone. The first message was to Samantha's boyfriend, and the second to the owner of common grounds.
The text messages made it appear that Samantha had just had a bad day and was leaving town for the weekend. Keys then took the battery out of Samantha's phone. He asked Samantha for her debit card. She told him that she shared the bank account with her boyfriend and that his ATM card was in the truck that they shared.
Samantha told Keys where her house was and gave him the pin number to the ATM card. Keys put Samantha in the shed in front of his house, bound her and turned the radio up in the shed so no one would hear, if she screamed. He also told her that he had a police scanner and would know if she attempted to alert neighbors. He then drove to Samantha's house and retrieved the ATM card from her truck.
While he was at Samantha's, he was confronted by her boyfriend, who yelled at him and then went back in the house to get help. Keys ran back to his truck and left the area before he could be found. He drove to an ATM machine to test the pin number provided by Samantha. It worked.
He then returned to his shed. Samantha was on the floor. The door was ripped open and there was Keys. He closed it behind him and went to her.
He ripped off Samantha's pants and proceeded to rape her. Again, after he had finished, he proceeded to slowly strangle her, looking into her eyes as she died. He left her in that shed and then went back inside his house where he packed for a pre-planned cruise that he was taking from New Orleans. He left early that morning, the second of February, for that cruise.
Keys returned to Anchorage on the 17th of February 2012. He then began preparing a ransom note that demanded money be placed in the account connected with the ATM card. He went into the shed and retrieved Samantha's body. He took steps to make it appear that she was still alive and took a Polaroid picture of her tied up.
The photo also showed Keys's arm holding the Anchorage daily news from the 13th of February 2012. He photocopied the photo and, using a manual typewriter he had purchased, typed a ransom demand for $30,000 on the back of the photo. After preparing the note and the photo, he placed it in Conner's Bog Park and there are memorial flyers of a dog named Albert. Then, using Samantha's cell phone, he texted her boyfriend.
That message, in short, said that the ransom note was under Albert in Conner's Bog Park. The note was recovered by the Anchorage Police Department. In the days that followed, Keys dismembered Samantha's body and drove out to Mata Nusker Lake. There he cut a hole in the ice and put her body into the dark waters of that lake.
Meanwhile, Samantha's father, James Koenig, deposited reward money, which had been generously donated by members of the community, into the account connected with Samantha's ATM card. The plan was to attempt to catch the perpetrator by tracking any withdrawals. ATM withdrawals were made in Anchorage, then in Arizona, New Mexico, and finally, Texas. Authorities were able to determine that the perpetrator of these withdrawals was driving a white-fought focus, the FBI, and the Texas Rangers tracked the ATM withdrawals as they occurred.
Ultimately, Corporal Brian Henry of the Texas Highway Patrol pulled over a white-fought focus matching the e-description. Keys was driving. Henry, along with Texas Rangers Steve Rayburn, obtained enough information during the traffic stop to search the fourth focus. Samantha's cellular telephone was found in the car, and the ATM card was found in Keys' wallet.
He was promptly arrested, and Israel Keys subsequently extradited to Alaska, very confessed to Koenig's murder. There are several unsolved murder and missing persons cases where Israel Keys remain a suspect, a few that really stand out out of the following. Mora Murray. Mora vanished from a snowy rural New Hampshire road in February 2004, and remains missing to this day.
Israel Keys likely knew the back roads of upstate New York, and his attack on the couriers in Vermont may indicate he was familiar with parts of New England as well. There's a chance that Mora had an unlucky encounter with him on that mysterious winter's day. However, author James Renner, who runs a blog about Mora's case, doesn't think she fell prey to Keys writing an I quote, it is extremely unlikely that Keys happened to be driving by the scene of Mora's incident. In rural New Hampshire in the seven minutes she was alone and decided to abduct her in clear view of three homes.
It would be too much of a coincidence in timing. Also Keys had no control of that scene. End quote. Stephen Hagen, Jeanette Baumann, and Hagen's dog is Caesar.
Hagen Baumann and Caesar were found shot to death in the Willamette Forest near Oakridge, Oregon, on the 1st of July 2005. Their killer took license plates and perhaps some fishing gear from the scene. The remote location, as well as the practical step of stealing the plates, may suggest Keys as the culprit. Lindsay Cachol and Jason Allen.
The unsolved murders of Cachol and Allen on a remote northern California beach in August 2004 drive both amateur and professional sluts to destruction. The Christian camp counselors didn't have an enemy in the world, and were in a nominally safe area just camping for the night. At some point someone shot them as they slept. Aside from the isolated location and proximity to some of Keys's likely kill zones, an odd bit of evidence mentioned in some reports about the crime stands out.
A bottle of Carmobear was found near the scene. Carmo has chiefly been sold in Texas, Illinois, Utah, California, and Vermont. Susanna Stodden and Mary Cooper. Stodden and her mother, Mary Cooper, were slain while hiking near Pinnacle Lake in Washington in 2006.
They may be the most likely Keys victims among this selection of unsolved cases. They were in his favorite sort of remote location, and Keys's home state of Washington, and a thin timeline of Keys's movements has him in the west, and Alaska for most of 2006. Keys, organized as he was, could also seize opportunities, even saying in a recorded interview that he let his victims come to him. It's easy to imagine Stodden and Cooper encountering the outwardly quiet and normal seeming Keys on the trail, not realizing what he was about to do to them, until it was too late.
Israel Keys was facing a March 2013 trial on Federal murder charges in the kidnapping and death of 18-year-olds and at the comic. He was locked up in Anchorage Correctional Facility. He readily confessed to several of his crimes, and when asked for a motive, he famously said, and I quote, why not? After making several confessions, instead of facing the justice that awaited him, he used a makeshift shank, or a piece of metal to open up his own artery on his wrist.
As the blood was pumping out of his artery, he put a noose he had made off his bed sheets around his neck, and with the other end of the bedding secure that a steel bed frame is sat down heavily, causing him to strangulate as well as bleed to death. And so ends the story of the somewhat unknown serial killer known as Israel Keys. Next week, I will bring to you a more known name among serial killer aficionados. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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