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Transcript of Wild Crime: Mask of Sanity | S4 Ep. 4

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Transcription of Wild Crime: Mask of Sanity | S4 Ep. 4 from 20/20 Podcast
00:00:03

This is Deborah Roberts, CO anchor of 2020. It's time for the final episode of Wild 11 Skulls. It's called Mask of San.

00:00:42

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. Literally one or two word answers of do you say you're innocent or guilty?

00:01:01

Turned into something else.

00:01:08

He jumps from his seat and jumps over the barrier that's separating him from the rest of the gallery. He jumped up and started sprinting essentially right towards me.

00:01:24

The courtroom broke into hysterics. People screaming, people running out of the courtroom. The marshal grabbed him as he was going over the wall. Within a few steps that Keys took, Jeff was right on him. We took him to the ground and tasered him.

00:01:47

It made me very uncomfortable. He was highly unpredictable and capable of doing almost anything without much notice.

00:01:57

Secrets in the wilderness. Beautiful yet treacherous landscape. These are the stories of investigators who solve murders in wild places.

00:02:43

Without making a sound, Keys jumped the railing where family and friends of Samantha Koenig were seated together. It was unclear whether Keyes was attempting to escape or if he was lunging for a particular person. I was very shook up. I just remember getting out of that courtroom and the news crew just being right in your face. James Koenig, Samantha's father.

00:03:06

Father declined to comment. Outside the courtroom, the marshals are investigating how Israel Keys managed to decouple the irons before leaping over the railing. How he got out of them remains a mystery. So Israel, he 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.

00:03:28

He was able to determine one of the chains was really loose. And he just sat there for hours and wiggle that piece of metal until it broke free from the leg iron. Then he took a piece of cellophane that he had his sandwich wrapped in and made a string out of it that cellophane would break so that his legs would go 3ft apart instead of 16 inches.

00:03:54

The next day, I interviewed Israel. What's changed since yesterday?

00:04:03

More game tips. I said, seriously, do you really think you were gonna escape? And he said, if I had a 1% chance of escaping, what did I have to lose? I had muscle sore this morning. I didn't even know I had really.

00:04:17

I guess he had an escape plan. A vision in his mind of how he was going to leap across the top of each chair towards the door and escape I didn't figure I'd actually get away. You always had to be on your toes. Cause he was very dangerous. Probably gonna be a lot of vigilantes guarding the door on that one.

00:04:46

He had confessed to killing Samantha Koenig.

00:04:52

We got the career confession, but unlike Samantha, we had not recovered their bodies for their family. It's fairly obvious that this was not, you know, two isolated events. During our interviews with Israel Keys, he had indicated to us there were more victims, and he specifically said less than 12. We still had a lot of work to do to solve all the crimes he had done. When we seized the computers from Keyes house, we had them forensically examined to see what he was searching for.

00:05:33

What were the key search terms that he was looking for on his computer? He had searched the name Debra Feldman. She went missing from hackensack, New Jersey, April 8, 2009. She had lived a little bit of a rough life, I would say. My mom struggled with addiction throughout her entire life.

00:05:58

And the addictions just. It got worse over the years. So it's 2009. She was supposed to go meet somebody and she never came back. There was very little information in the news, if any, about Deborah's disappearance.

00:06:18

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. So we put the picture of Deborah Feldman in front of him. We all left the room, and then we went to the observation room. And then we watched him look at the photo. And he had a clear reaction to was a pretty significant change in demeanor.

00:06:52

And his response was essentially, I don't want to talk about this one yet. He had this shocked expression. I think about that regularly still. Even if she was under the influence of a drug, she would have fought back and left a lasting impression on her killer. And he wasn't prepared for her to fight back.

00:07:16

Do you know where this person is? No. Her name was on your computer. There's a lot of names on that computer here. We searched her name.

00:07:29

Just explain. So we're not sitting here wondering. No, I'm not gonna talk about what's on the computer.

00:07:38

I still have no idea if she's dead or was she really murdered by a serial killer. That one's a hard pill to swallow. Even still today, that's hard to swallow.

00:07:52

I already said I'm not talking about any more specific cases until we get some kind of deal hammered out. Everything is a power struggle. And Keys, top priority is getting the death penalty and getting it fast. I need confirmation before I decide to take the next step, or steps, whatever it takes. When Keys 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.

00:08:29

And you think that I'm not. And you think we're stalling? That I don't know who's stalling. Somebody's stalling. That.

00:08:34

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. Like little bargaining chips, whatever you want to call it. The prosecution was hoping to use a death penalty to their advantage in getting additional information from him. The investigative team has been working diligently to try and solve any other murders and crimes committed by Keyes. Can we keep him talking and find out the breadth of what he's done?

00:09:10

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. There was 11 skulls, a pentagram with a goat on it. And then one of the drawings said, we are one. They had been drawn using a finger in blood.

00:09:43

These are the drawings that were discovered in Israel Key's jail cell by the Department of Corrections. He had to cause some injury, whether he punched himself in the nose, something, to create this much blood. This was significant for us because we were never able to get Keys to say definitively how many people he had killed. So this. This one here is, I think, is significant because it's the one that has we are One written on it, 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.

00:10:23

They know that there's a potentially up to 10 or 11 victims, so there's seven or eight that we don't know where they're at. When we reference the 11 homicides, he never corrected us. I'm getting a little bit ticked off at what's happening with the information that I've already given you. He was very upset that they were found. 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.

00:10:50

Once this gave us at least a goal to look for these 11 trips, 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, anywhere From Alaska to the East Coast, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, it's pretty much the whole east coast west. We're going all the way out to la. 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. 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. We do know he traveled extensively and he didn't always stay where he landed.

00:11:42

He would land in one airport, rent a car, and drive hundreds of miles. 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. 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. The second Texas trip is after he's traveled through the Southwest.

00:12:15

And then Keys is arrested on his second trip to Texas.

00:12:23

It was very possible things had happened in Texas. In the search of the Ford Focus, we found three rolls of money in the driver's door of the car. They were must and appeared to have dye on them. He's not offering 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 carrying.

00:12:49

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. Brian, I saw you y'all come in, 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, and he said there was a robbery in azle, Texas, on February 16th. The bank robbery suspect was wearing a white hard hat.

00:13:30

He had long darkish colored hair coming out from the bottom of the hard hat. I immediately knew that that was Israel Keyes. 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.

00:13:52

His description of his trip to Texas was worrisome in that he was describing the escalation crimes to a much higher degree. And I just got kind of amped up and decided I wanted to go out and do something like preferably take someone. 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.

00:14:27

From February 14 to February 16, he was off the grid. Remember, he did say that he was out of control too. During this, during this trip especially, he put 2,847miles on his vehicle. We had to determine if anyone had gone missing in Texas during that period of time. And there was one person in Texas that disappeared, and his name was Jimmy Tidwell from Mount Enterprise, Texas.

00:15:08

We're in East Texas. I call this God's country. It's wild, it's vast, it's adventurous. But it comes with its challenges. My name is Lt.

00:15:22

Roy Cavazos and I investigated the missing persons case of Jimmie Tidwell. We're a rural county, 55,000 people, and we have a vast amount of wilderness. We cover 1,000 square miles with two to three deputies and backups 30, 40 minutes away. Sometimes you're the Lone Ranger.

00:15:48

On February 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. That was very out of character for him.

00:16:04

The last time we know he was seen alive was leaving Flanders electricity on February 15th.

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00:16:30

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00:16:41

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00:16:49

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00:17:04

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00:17:18

I got a phone call one night and it was R County Sheriff's department saying we're out on Jimmy's property. We think he's a missing person.

00:17:31

Kind of crazy because he's never left East Texas. He never wanted to. He had no desire to travel. That just wasn't him.

00:17:45

Jimmy Tidwell appears to have been a private man. He lived isolated out in the woods.

00:17:54

There was a search done of the property, and there was no trace of him found. It wasn't really foreign of me to think, like, is he really missing or has he gone somewhere?

00:18:11

But that's when things really started kind of being weird out the fuck. The day after Jimmy was reported missing, his truck was discovered on the side of the road. That area of FM95 is a lot of farmland, a lot of wooded area. I was beyond panic at that point to realize there's really something wrong. Did Jimmy leave the truck there, or did someone that did something and Jimmy just abandoned it there?

00:18:51

Finding the truck created questions more so than answers. There was nothing leading us from that truck that said a human being left this truck and went a certain direction. I find it hard to believe in this day and age, all the technology that we have, that somebody could disappear. And it was like they were never here. You can't imagine the feeling and the frustration and the anger and the what ifs.

00:19:26

You're just at your weakest point trying to figure out what happened. How did we miss the clues? Why would somebody hurt him?

00:19:38

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

00:19:47

We were told that at the time of Jimmy's disappearance that Keys was in East Texas area. I was driving around to a lot of small towns that day. I was kind of out of control a little bit. Since stuff happened in Alaska during the weeks after Israel had abducted Samantha, he was, like, excited, on high. Maybe that was because he thought he'd gotten away with it already.

00:20:16

And when he came to Texas, he wanted to do it again.

00:20:23

Well, you already know about or you already have a lot of information about the bank robbery in Texas. Israel was very quick to confess to the bank robbery in Texas, but he denied that he took anybody. Do you have any doubts about your competency or ability to. No. To understand what I'm saying?

00:20:44

No. I'm more sane than most Americans.

00:20:49

I'm truthful with everything I talk to you about. I can give you arson in Texas. I burned a house down, but I want a cigar for it. With Keys, it was not just about committing homicides, committing murders, committing sexual assaults. He was involved in a number of different crimes.

00:21:08

How did you pick that house? It was a ways out of town. Okay. But nobody was home? No, not when I was out.

00:21:16

Every room was packed. And so I was digging through everything. I mean, I was Mostly looking for guns. 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.

00:21:43

The purpose of him setting this fire was to take all the law enforcement in the area to this house fire, take all their attention, so that he could then go up to Azol, Texas, and commit a bank robbery. Next thing I knew, there were emergency vehicles coming from all over the place. The fire, the bank robbery, all the activities 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.

00:22:21

My mom called, upset, and she asked me if I'd ever heard of somebody named Israel Keys. He was some kind of serial killer that possibly had something to do with my Uncle Jimmy's disappearance. 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.

00:22:53

No one knows where Israel was on February 15th. The disguise that Israel Keys was wearing included a white hard hat. And there was long hair hanging out from. From the hard hat. Whereas in Texas, I had short hair.

00:23:11

I taped hair on the inside of the helmet so people thought I had long hair, like costume hair or real hair. No, it was actually real hair. I see that little curl of hair right there.

00:23:27

And I would not be surprised at a fall if that was my Uncle Jimmy's.

00:23:33

I hope it's not his hard hat and hair, but can't imagine what he might have went through if it is. What we didn't find was the white hard hat or the hair that he said he taped under it. The bag, the helmet, the dust mask, glasses, the gloves, all that stuff went in dumpsters along the way to Houston. The DNA from that potentially could have linked us to Jimmy Tidwell.

00:24:05

I spent a lot of time out here, for a long time pacing this highway. This truck was found here, you know, I should have found something. I remember at the point that I said, like, do you realize he's not coming back? Like, I needed her to say. I know that because otherwise, it's just.

00:24:31

It's hard to watch your mom grieve. I knew Uncle Jimmy was her person.

00:24:40

I just wish I could reach out and touch him.

00:24:45

I just want him to be here.

00:24:51

In all this craziness we live in.

00:24:56

I'd love to see that truck going down this road. But right now, this is what we're working with.

00:25:14

I Don't think these are detailed enough to signify an individual. I don't think that we could go through this and say this one is Samantha Coning and these are the couriers. However, I do think that he was very intentional about how many he did.

00:25:32

I believe this signifies Satan and Israel Keys. And the upside down crucifix is on his. Eleven victims indicate that these are his and these stories and souls belong to him. And we'd like to put a name to each one of these. I think the main purpose of the Levin skulls was to give the impression of being a dark, powerful and thought of as an evil genius.

00:26:00

The best serial killer that ever existed.

00:26:08

I probably know every single serial killer that's ever been written about. It's kind of a hobby of mine. Israel told us that he did some investigating and studying on other serial killers. That's how he got his ideas about where to take somebody and what to do to not get caught killing people. When I asked Israel which serial killer he most related to or emulated, he compared himself mostly to Ted Bundy.

00:26:35

He was very sexually motivated in the stuff that he did. He was able to separate his two different aspects, or whatever you want to call his personality. Many other serial killers have a particular type. With Keys, that was absolutely not the case. Like, there was men, women, old, young.

00:26:55

Which in my mind, makes him even more dangerous because it's. It really is not about the person. It's about finding the perfect situation to take somebody. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to make sense to me.

00:27:14

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

00:27:38

Washington was a lot easier in a lot of ways because I was so isolated out there. It's like you're in a new world. Anyways, when Keith. When Keyes is talking to investigators in Alaska, he makes it clear that there are at least four victims in Washington state. Israel Keyes had lived down on the Olympic Peninsula from 2001 to 2007 when Keyes was in the Army.

00:28:11

He meets this woman online. She gets pregnant fairly quickly, and he moves with her to Native American community in Neah Bay, Washington.

00:28:29

My understanding from Israel is he moved to Neah Bay because of his relationship and his daughter that was going to be born. That's where his girlfriend was. From and where she wanted to live. And so he followed her there.

00:28:47

When Israel moved here, he was here to try to support his family. And I was actually on the interviewing panel that hired him in the public works and he had a three ring binder 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.

00:29:12

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 and kids like to hang out in here too. And there was a lot of things that he had built around town. But this is one of the main structures that is still standing.

00:29:33

There was a lot of beautification that was done on the water front, you know, over the years with the salt water and everything that has eroded and gone away. But this is the main one still here that, you know, always reminds you of him.

00:29:51

Neah Bay is located on the most northwestern tip of the United States. We're a fishing community, also have a rich history of whaling, sailing. 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 and we've been here since the beginning of time.

00:30:18

It was extremely odd that Keys was so readily accepted into Neah Bay, which is populated by Native Americans. It is a reservation.

00:30:32

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

00:30:51

Well, this here is where Israel Keys a shop was just where he did all his planning and, you know, construction and fabricating and everything for the projects. He had come driving up and as we're coming up, you could hear the heavy music that he listened to. It was pretty intense and loud.

00:31:17

That was the only thing, I think that was a little bit different about Israel. I don't remember all of our real conversations. I mean, it was mostly all joking and laughing and this and that.

00:31:37

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

00:31:48

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, but that same laugh just kicking his head back. And that laugh, every time I hear it, that's the trigger moment that I get with that. And then it just makes me go, how? Why?

00:32:15

The laugh went from being something that was pleasurable, you know, happy to I gotcha. That's where I got my kicks. Was being able to live two different lives and have no one have a clue. When I was in Neah Bay and got my kicks, like just being able to look at people while they were talking to me and thinking that for all these they've known me, they actually don't know me at all, really. Everyone praised him.

00:32:46

He was the best co worker, best worker, best friend. I think everybody was just how could I be fooled like that? That was his. His thing was deception.

00:33:02

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. I'm two different people basically.

00:33:16

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

00:33:33

I kind of always imagined that, you know, a possible scenario for him would be to, you know, 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. He would convince the victims that this was some sort of robbery and he would just need to bind them up. I used a knife mostly as a threat. I had a gun.

00:34:03

I just never felt the need. I would have used it, I guess, if things had got out of control and once he was able to get them bound up, then he was totally in control. 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 forest.

00:34:25

I think it's a million acres. The park itself, it's a huge area. Very rugged mountains, deep, dense forests. I'm sure that Olympic national park was part of his hunting grounds. It's about a two hour drive from Neah Bay.

00:34:46

With Samantha, I'm with, with the couriers. He used what he would call blitz attacks where he went after them. But what we understood for Washington state is that he would go out into these remote areas and wait for victims to come by. They 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.

00:35:13

It happens all the time.

00:35:21

We're dealing with somebody who's killed lots of people. There are multiple families suffering and we don't know who they are. There were little things that were dribbling out, but he wasn't filling in the details verbally. 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, you know, who these people were. And there's a couple that he writes about from Washington State.

00:35:53

And that writing was fairly detailed about what he did to these individuals. He assaulted the female first, and the male was still alive in there present while he assaulting the female. It appears that he struck him with a shovel. And then we know that both of them eventually get buried after they're killed. What he does tell us about the Washington State victims is that they got little to no media when they disappeared.

00:36:22

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

00:36:36

His girlfriend is having some issues. Keys 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. I was planning on continuing to raise her. It's easier with the child.

00:36:56

They have to follow the rules. Whereas with, you know, with your partner, certain aspects of your life that they're going to cry into and find out things that are going to get harder and harder to explain as the years go by.

00:37:14

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. People leave one another alone. So even though Anchorage is the biggest city in Alaska, it's a small city in the middle of a vast wilderness, and it really remains more primitive, more wild.

00:37:52

I employed Israel Keys in 2008 and 2009.

00:37:58

He built essentially a 2,000 square foot building, you know, raising the walls, putting on the roof, the rafters, everything, all by himself, which I thought was, you know, a pretty impressive thing to do. He was super reliable. He. He did what he would say that he would do. He would speak to us, you know, just very, very openly about taking a trip.

00:38:21

He'd say, hey, I have some travel plan. I'm going to be gone from this date to this date. It was always out front and open. 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, and he was hiding it perfectly and absolutely and it. And it's impossible to really reconcile.

00:38:51

So you're underway. Who was this guy? What was going on inside him? It's. It's impossible to understand.

00:39:13

How are you doing today? All right, November 29th of 2012 seems like a routine meeting with Israel. And if there's anything you want, you'll give me like an hour on the Internet maybe. 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. You guys know about Lake Crescent?

00:39:38

Washington droughts down Lake and be.

00:39:44

Lake Crescent is almost 12 miles long. It goes over 600ft deep. I was near the edge, but, you know, 30ft out from the bank on that lake, it drops down to 50, 60ft already. He talks about disposing of somebody using milk jugs full of concrete as weights. How many milk jugs?

00:40:06

At least four or five I would take just for one body. Yeah, 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. Just a vast amount of water unpractical to, you know, try to conduct any search without more specific information from them. I'll have to think about which ones I'm going to part with.

00:40:41

On December 2, 2012, I was on a SWAT operation, 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.

00:41:01

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.

00:41:12

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

00:41:23

I drove to the jail, I met Jolene, and we went to Israel's cell. Saw him facing away from us, laying on the mattress. There was a river of blood from his.

00:41:40

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

00:42:04

Keys was able to. 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. And that's what was handed back to the correctional officers. I was extremely upset, wondering how something like that had happened.

00:42:26

And I was upset with the Department of Corrections first and then obviously, Israel.

00:42:38

I hate the fact that Keys had his final word in his suicide. That was under his control, not ours.

00:42:50

Federal inmate Israel Keys was found dead in his jail cell of an apparent suicide. We don't have a federal prison here, so we pay the state Department of Corrections to house them. First of all, you know, they're under custody. Federal prisoners should not be able to harm anybody. Else or themselves.

00:43:09

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. And it's just, you know, it's a very abrupt, you know, guys, we're done. Initially, I thought there were ways that I could manipulate the situation in this case, knowing what happened after this date Now, I was listening to it with an ear of did he say things that would have told us that he was going to kill himself and that there wasn't going to be another interview? 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.

00:43:54

He said, yeah, sure, and he gave his 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. It just felt like a punch in the gut.

00:44:11

Israel Keys family stepped out of their van and filed into the funeral home before the service today. His mother, four sisters and their husbands attended Keyes. Six other siblings and former Colville neighbors never made it. I would say a lot of people were glad he was dead. They think that's what he deserved.

00:44:32

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

00:44:48

We'll start with Anchorage first and then go from there and see what we can do. Okay. So you have the bill, so I don't know if you want to skip. I think it's page 28. That's the latest one.

00:45:02

We came up with this idea for this bill to help those at work late at night with better lighting, better security, alarm system, possibly everywhere. Always, always silent alarms, training and then not working alone. We call it the Samantha Koenig Safety Act. It comes down to we want to protect night shift workers and we want to make sure that what happened to Samantha can never, ever happen again to anybody. I miss her being this little, because when you're younger, it's like your innocence.

00:45:49

You don't know how messed up the world is yet.

00:46:09

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

00:46:26

I definitely don't want to lose sight of the victims like that. That's where the true story is, is that these were normal, everyday people. And it literally was a split second of crossing paths with Keys. And unfortunately, it led to their death.

00:46:46

We're still reviewing evidence. We still receive leads pretty frequently. Unfortunately, we haven't solved any other cases since his suicide.

00:46:59

I believe we can locate and identify other victims. It just needs enough eyeballs and daylight and pressure and it can happen.

00:47:24

This is Deborah Roberts. Wild Crime was produced by Lone Wolf Media for ABC News Studios. 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 source. Don't forget you can find seasons one through four of Wild Crime streaming on Hulu along with more episodes of 2020.

00:47:52

Thanks for listening.

00:48:01

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Episode description

Israel Keyes says he killed and demands being promised the death penalty before saying who. The guards find eleven skulls drawn in blood. Who are they? Before he answers, Keyes suddenly shocks everyone with a dramatic and unexpected twist.
Originally Aired: 12/05/24
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