The Man Who Scares Even the FBI

On the first of February, 2012, Samatha  Koenig was finishing her shift at the coffee place where she worked. It had been a day  like any other for the eighteen-year-old barist, and since things were quiet, the  long, uneventful day winding down, she had already begun tidying up the Common  Grounds stand in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. That was when a man approached her, a figure  wearing a ski mask… who was set on turning this average day into one unlike any other, ending it  in an unspeakable tragedy.

The man placed an order for a coffee. Despite it almost being the end  of her working day, Samantha obliged and started making his order, expecting it would be the last  one of the day – and, in a sense, it would be. While it might seem somewhat unnerving and even  possibly a cause for concern to be approached at your place of employment by a stranger wearing  a ski mask, most employees at retail outlets or financial services like banks might be expecting  that someone with a mask on is trying to conceal their identity, possibly so that they can rob  the establishment.

But with the freezing cold temperatures in Alaska, it would hardly be  an unwarranted assumption that this figure was just trying to keep his face warm. . .

But in actuality, the mask was to keep his face hidden from what was about to happen next.  Samantha Koenig finished making the man’s coffee and went to hand him the order. Then, without  warning, he pulled out a gun.

The barista was terrified for her life as the masked figure  began threatening her, demanding she hand over money from the coffee stand’s register. Trying to  comply with his demands as quickly as possible, Samantha hurriedly went to empty out the cash  draw and give the money to the assailant… only to find that the register was empty.  She was perhaps hoping that he’d run off, having failed his attempted hold-up, leaving  her still frightened but ultimately still alive.

Sadly, that wasn’t what happened. Despite doing as he had instructed, Samantha was then made to put her hands up and kneel down  on the ground. She was horrified to see the armed man suddenly dove over the kiosk, forcing his way  inside the coffee stand, before grabbing her and using zip ties to bind her hands together.

Once  he had Samantha tied, her attacker pulled her to her feet and guided her outside towards a white  Ford Focus that was parked nearby. He took her towards the vehicle and tried to push Samantha  inside, which was when she made an attempt to get away from the man. It didn’t work, and in  retaliation, he pressed the barrel of the gun he was holding right against her head and warned  that if she tried to escape again, he’d shoot her.

Forcing her into the car, the assailant got behind  the wheel and drove off with Samantha in tow, her hands still bound and unable to flee for fear of  being killed. The masked figure explained, while driving through town, that he didn’t intend to  cause Samantha any harm and that he only kidnapped her to demand a ransom. He told her that, as  long as she cooperated, she would eventually be returned to her family alive and unharmed.

Bringing Samantha to his home, it was here that the kidnapper would hold her captive for  several days. He kept her tied up in a shed on his property and turned a radio up to full  volume in order to drown out the sound of his captive screaming, preventing any neighbors or  passers-by from hearing her cries for help and intervening. Immediately after imprisoning her,  the man later drove back to the coffee kiosk he’d taken Samantha from to retrieve her phone. 

Her boyfriend, Duane Tortolani, was due to be picking her up from work after her shift. The  kidnapper had initially intended to capture Duane, too, but had changed his mind and decided only  to take Samantha instead. But he still had to cover his tracks and delay his victim’s loved  ones from discovering that she was missing.

So, he retrieved Samantha’s phone and sent a  fake text message to Duane, telling him: “I’m spending a couple of days  with friends, let my dad know. ” The day after the kidnapping, the kidnapper  demanded that Samantha give him her address so he could break in and steal her ATM card. She  told him where she lived and even that the card was in her boyfriend’s truck.

So, the man made his  way over to Samantha’s home and broke into Duane’s truck. Sure enough, there was a debit card right  there for the taking, linked to an account that Samantha and her boyfriend shared. The kidnapper  pocketed the card and was about to make his exit… When somebody spotted him.

Duane Tortolani had already been on edge since receiving a vague text message from his girlfriend  the night before, with no idea that Samantha hadn’t been the one to send it. When Duane and  Samantha’s dad, James Koenig, witnessed someone who appeared to be a burglar attempting to steal  his truck, he confronted the man, running inside the house to get James’ help. But by the time they  had returned, the thief had fled from the scene.

Neither Duane nor James realized they’d just seen  the man responsible for Samantha’s disappearance. Once the kidnapper had successfully  tested Samantha and Duane’s debit card, making sure it still worked, he returned to his  home and his captive victim. There, he poured himself a tall glass of wine, then headed out to  his shed, where he violently forced himself on Samantha.

Afterward, he strangled her to death. The man who kidnapped and killed Samantha Koenig was named Israel Keyes. To those on the outside  looking in on the man’s life, he was unassuming, just a father to a daughter and  a reliable handyman, contractor, and construction worker with his own business,  Keyes Construction.

But since the details of his heinous actions were brought to life, he’s  been called, by some, the most meticulous serial killer of the twenty-first century. Make no mistake, Israel Keyes was a monster wearing the mask of a man and one responsible  for a whole laundry list of serious crimes, from burglary and bank robbery, arson to kidnappings,  with his serial killings claiming the lives of between eleven and twenty victims, as well as his  numerous aggravated sexual assaults added to the already degenerate pile. His crime spree toured  the breadth of the United States as early as 1996, only ending after 2012 when the FBI learned  about what he’d done to Samantha Koenig, and what they uncovered made them  utterly terrified of Israel Keyes.

Once he had murdered Samantha, Keyes would leave  her body stashed in a cupboard inside the shed where he had been keeping her prisoner. After  all, he had places to be and a flight to catch. The next morning, he woke up his daughter – who  was only eleven at the time and then left for the airport.

He traveled down from Alaska to  New Orleans, Louisiana, to board a ship that took him on a pre-planned cruise around the Gulf  of Mexico, which lasted for around two weeks. At the culmination of the New Orleans cruise,  Keyes was starting to get increasingly worried. In the short time that he’d been away, his abduction  of Samantha had garnered a lot of publicity, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. 

Rather than returning home directly to Anchorage, Keyes figured that perhaps the best way he  could draw attention away from the crime he’d committed back in Alaska was to… commit  more crimes somewhere else. He began exploring parts of Dallas, Texas, intent on launching a  full-blown crime spree. Soon enough, in Aledo, he came across a single-story house.

It was a  three-and-a-half thousand-square-foot property, complete with red bricks and a barn nearby. Once he had successfully robbed the house, Keyes set fire to the barn, burning it to the ground. After arson around Aledo, Keyes drove to another nearby Texas city, this time making a pit  stop in Azle.

Was he there to take in the local sights? Maybe visit the Ain’t that  Something antique store? No, he was there to knock over the National Bank of Texas.

Putting  on sunglasses, a breathing mask, a hard hat, and a pair of gloves, Keyes marched into the  bank with the same handgun he’d used to threaten Samantha Koenig. He brandished the weapon at the  teller, robbing the place within approximately two minutes and racing off before the police had time  to arrive on the scene. Later on, Keyes would bury the money he’d stolen in a hole he’d dug in the  Post Oak Cemetery, located in Glen Rose, Texas.

Still on his return journey back to Alaska and  still on a mid-crime spree, Keyes even came close to carrying out yet another kidnapping. While he  was in an area of Texas just south of Cleburne, he spotted a woman who was out walking her dog.  For a moment, Keyes considered abducting her too, and even almost did, but ultimately quickly  gave up on that plan and instead focused on making his way back to Anchorage.

On the seventeenth of February, 2012, Keyes arrived back home in Alaska. Now, while  it might seem that his original plan to kidnap and hold Samantha for ransom was just a lie Keyes  told the teenager while he abducted her, that was still very much his intention. And the fact that  he’d already murdered Samantha wasn’t about to stop him trying to get his hands on ransom money. 

At the time, after all, despite all the publicity her disappearance had drummed up, the police  and the Koenig family had no clue that Samantha was already dead. So, Keyes enacted arguably one  of the most horrific parts of his twisted plan. He took Samnatha’s lifeless body out of the  cupboard he’d left her in, then applied makeup to her frozen face.

Unsettlingly, he sewed her eyes  with a fishing line so that they would stay open, giving the impression that his victim was  still alive. He then wrote a ransom note, demanding that thirty thousand dollars  be deposited into the shared account belonging to Samantha and her boyfriend. Keyes still had the ATM card for the account in his possession, which would allow him to withdraw  money should the family accept his demands.

Then, he snapped a Polaroid of Samantha’s body, giving  her the appearance of still being alive, and holding up a four-day-old issue of the Anchorage  Daily News newspaper. Having it visible in the frame proved the photo had been taken recently  and would, according to Keyes' plan, make it seem like the deceased woman was still alive. Both the photo of her body and the note containing his ransom demand were then  left at an Anchorage park underneath a memorial flyer for a dog named Albert.

This was where Keyes instructed Duane Tortalani to look for further instructions using  Samantha's phone. The message ominously read: “Conner Park sign, under pic  of Albert. Ain’t she purty.

” A few days after leaving the photo and ransom note  for Duane to find, Keyes disposed of Samantha’s body. He drove her out to Matanuska Lake, a  lake just north of Anchorage that was covered with a sheet of ice during that time of year.  Taking Samantha’s body out of his truck, Keyes then meticulously dismembered her corpse using  a chainsaw before cutting a hole in the ice and dumping her severed remains in the freezing lake.

Around this time, Duane found the ransom note left in Conner Park and shared it with Samantha’s  father, James, as well as the rest of her family. Believing Samantha was still alive,  deceived by Keyes’s sickening photo of her body, James deposited the requested sum of thirty  thousand dollars into the account that Keyes now had access to. Members of the local community had  generously donated as much as they could to help, sparing the Koenigs from paying the  entire ransom out of pocket.

But, of course, this was all done under the false  assumption that Samantha would be returned to them if they coughed over the cash to Keyes. The killer and kidnapper started accessing Samantha’s and Duane’s shared accounts  and gradually withdrew the ransom money from the sixth of March onwards. This alerted  Alaskan police, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Given the severe nature of  the crime committed, the FBI had also begun its own investigation into the case, and, as a  result, they were monitoring any activity on the account where the ransom money had been deposited. Shortly after Keyes started collecting his ill-gotten gains, he started making his way  through the southwestern states; in Alaska, he was not only too close to where he’d left  Samantha’s body, but staying in one place would make it easier for the police to catch up with  him. This did little to deter the authorities from tracking where in the southwestern USA he was  making the numerous withdrawals of ransom money.

Authorities in Alaska had made the controversial  decision not to release the surveillance footage of Samantha’s abduction to the public, which is  often done to encourage citizens to come forward with any relevant information if they recognize  familiar figures or details from footage of a crime under investigation. However, without the  assistance of the public, police were able to determine that the man responsible for both the  kidnapping of Samantha Koenig and the robbery at the National Bank of Texas had been driving  a white 2012 Ford Focus. Officers in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas were alerted to keep an  eye on a vehicle that matched that description.

The car that Keyes had been using was  a rental vehicle. Somewhat ironically, he tried to obtain a replacement to better cover  his tracks, only to receive another Ford Focus, the same model and even the same color. This would  eventually lead the authorities to arrest him after a Texas Highway Patrol officer spotted Keyes  and the vehicle on the thirteenth of March.

The officer alerted Texas police and began following  the white car onto Highway 59, having noticed that the driver was traveling above the speed limit. The Highway Patrol officer made his presence known Keyes, getting the kidnapper to pull over  to the side of the road. The moment he stopped, a fleet of unmarked vehicles raced to the  scene, federal agents and Texas Rangers pouring out of their cars and surrounding him.

Israel Keyes had nowhere left to run. A quick search of the murderer’s car later,  authorities had found Samantha Koenig’s debit card, along with her cell phone, which Keyes  had removed the battery from to prevent it from being traced. Also in the car were a ski mask,  Keyes’ gun, and cash that he’d taken from the National Bank of Texas, distinguishable by the  anti-theft dye that stained the bills.

Keyes also had maps of California, Arizona, and  New Mexico with certain areas highlighted. Israel Keyes was subsequently arrested  at the scene and indicted in a federal holding facility located in Beaumont, Texas.  On the twenty-sixth of March, he was returned to Anchorage and confessed to murdering Samantha  Koenig.

During subsequent interviews with police, Keyes conducted himself with an unsettling level  of calm and patience, even offering up terms to the authorities in exchange for confessions of  his various other crimes. It turned out that, unbeknownst to law enforcement, Samantha  Koenig wasn’t Keyes's first victim. He offered to divulge the information regarding  the crimes he had committed and even agreed that he would plead guilty to any and all charges that  were brought against him.

But Keyes laid out that he’d only agree to do so as long as his trial  lasted less than a year and that he was sentenced to execution at the end of it. Naturally, police  don’t – or certainly shouldn’t – be able to influence the outcome of the judicial process, so  promising a specific outcome in Keyes’ trial was a little far out of the police’s jurisdiction. Still, federal investigators eventually struck a deal with Israel Keyes to learn about where the  bodies of his potential prior victims were hidden.

Keyes willingly agreed to reveal all, but there  was one other important caveat to his doing so: he didn’t want the public or the media to  know any of the details about his crimes. . .

because Keyes didn’t want his daughter to  learn about what he had done to Samantha. On the second of April, 2012, two months and  a day after she had been kidnapped at work, Samantha Koenig’s remains were recovered from  Matanuska Lake. What Keyes had done to her ultimately led to him being discovered  and resulted in his eventual downfall, with some federal agents even being convinced that  had Keyes not kidnapped and murdered Samantha, he might never have been caught at all.

As the information he later revealed to authorities would confirm, Israel Keyes’  criminal exploits had been going on much longer than anyone realized. His vile actions were  more akin to the villain of a horror movie than an actual human being; the FBI realized they weren’t  dealing with an opportunistic murder but a cold, calculating, highly methodical, and  downright terrifying serial killer. So, who exactly was Israel Keyes?

How had a man  guilty of so much violence and murder been able to avoid being found? Where does a monster like that  even come from? Well, this specific monster was born in Richmond, Utah, in 1978.

The Keyes family  home, the second child of nine siblings, certainly got crowded after his parents, John Jeffery Keyes  and Heidi Hakansson, had him. Keyes was raised Mormon, although would often attend a Christian  church that espoused white supremacist beliefs. As if being exposed to hateful ideology at such  a young age wasn’t enough to turn Keyes into a monster, he seemed to adopt a fixation  with weapons in his early adolescence.

From the age of fourteen, he would walk around  everywhere with a thirty-eight caliber revolver that his grandfather gave him. As a child, Keyes  outfitted the weapon with his very own homemade silencer and began killing pet animals in true  ‘child destined to be a serial killer’ fashion. His propensity for burglary would also begin  around this time when he and a friend would break into local houses and steal valuables.

By 1995, by the age of around seventeen, Keyes started working with a construction crew,  up until the late nineties when his family moved to Maine. It was there that he’d announce to  his parents that he was an atheist, leading to him being kicked out of the home of his highly  religious family. But it was also around this time in his life, some point between 1996 and 1998,  that Keyes would commit his first serious crime, and it was a grim warning of the type of heinous  act he’d spend much of his life carrying out.

A hiking group had been making their way along  the Deschutes River near Maupin, Oregon when they noticed that one of their number, a girl, had  gone missing. The group started to search the surrounding area, attempting to track the missing  hiker down. But, as it turned out, Israel Keyes had found her first.

Keyes abducted the girl  from the other hikers and then forced himself on her. Later, he released her, although he had  intended to murder her, until she convinced him to let her leave. It seems he wasn’t yet adding  kidnapping and killing to his already deplorable modus operandi, although he would later be quoted  as saying: “I wasn’t violent enough… I made up my mind I was never going to let that happen again.

” In 1998, Keyes enlisted in the US Army after relocating to New Jersey and would serve as a  Specialist within Alpha Company’s First Battalion, Fifth Infantry. He trained in Egypt, spending  much of his service in Fort Hood, Texas, and near Tacoma, Washington, over in Fort  Lewis. He even earned an Army Achievement Medal for meritorious service while he had been  assigned as a gunner, manning a sixty-millimeter mortar between December 1998 and July 2001.

In May 2001, Keyes encountered legal trouble when he was charged with driving under the influence  in Thurston County, Washington. Compounding the issue, authorities discovered that his driving  license had already been suspended, resulting in an additional charge for driving with a suspended  license. Though less severe than his other offenses, these infractions led to his honorable  discharge from the US Army later that year.

While discharge from the armed forces would be  devastating to some, for Keyes, it offered him a chance to pursue his true passion; his new lease  on life was largely focused on ending other people’s lives. Upon his arrest, he confessed to  the FBI that shortly after his military discharge, he took the lives of his first murder victims, a  couple whose identity still remains unverified. In 2000, Keyes became involved with a woman  living on the Washington Makah Reservation, and their daughter was born a year later.

By the  following year, 2002, Keyes had separated from the still unnamed woman and took his daughter  away to live with him. Then, as of 2006, he began taking a number of travels away, visiting  parts of California, Washington, and New England, never specifying a reason as to why. When he made his confession to law enforcement in 2012, Keyes was confirmed  to have committed a number of burglaries, taking place in between twenty to thirty different  homes, as well as conducting robberies in several other banks.

The time he robbed the National  Bank of Texas certainly wasn’t a one-and-done. One of the most notable of these took place  in 2009 when Keyes decided that, in order to finance his crimes, the quickest way to secure  funds was to rob a bank. As one does, naturally.

He had allegedly abducted and killed a man in New  York not long before; then, on April 10, 2009, Keyes made his way toward the Community Bank. He  was said to have been wearing a jacket and jeans, grey shoes, two-tone gloves, sunglasses, and a  fake mustache and goatee to complete the look. Oh, and a couple of accessories: a forty caliber  semi-automatic Smith & Wesson handgun and a twenty-two caliber Ruger Charger pistol as a  spare.

Heading inside with his weapons at the ready, he successfully made off with the cash  he needed. However, rather than get spending, Keyes had a different approach. Stashing the stolen money in a toolbox, he then buried it in the Woodside Natural Area  of Essex, Vermont.

Along with the cash, he buried both his Smith & Wesson and Ruger Charger, along  with homemade silencers, ligatures, ammunition for both guns, and some garbage bags. Four days later,  he flew back home and then made several repeat travels across America over the next two years. In 2011, he flew to Indiana, then drove to New York, and later back to Vermont. 

Recovering his hidden toolbox, he prepared to target and murder another victim  as a prelude to another bank robbing spree, with maybe some arson thrown in as an added treat.  Prowling around suburban neighborhoods late on the eighth of July, 2011, Keyes eventually  set his sights on Bill and Lorraine Currier. Having observed which room of the  house the couple were asleep in, Keyes cut their phone line and broke inside.

He  then enacted what he would later call a “blitz attack” on the Curriers, ambushing them as they  slept, tying them up, and then driving them out to an abandoned farmhouse that he’d previously  found in the area. After shooting Bill Currier with the twenty-two caliber Ruger, Keyes then  forced himself on Lorraine before strangling her. Neither of their bodies were ever found.

Where Keyes was different from many other serial killers was how exactly he went about conducting  his crimes. Rather than attacking victims spontaneously, he instead meticulously planned  out each of his murders, spending ample time and taking extreme caution to avoid detection. And  it seemed to work for almost his entire killer career since the police and FBI didn’t make any  headway in even discovering his crimes until he kidnapped and killed Amantha Koenig in 2012.

What also made him far more difficult to track down than other serial killers was that there  was little linking Keyes’ various victims, even the ones that authorities had actually  found. Statistically, murders are typically carried out by somebody that the victim is  considerably familiar with or a person who is at least known to the deceased. But when  it came to Keyes, he had no prior connection whatsoever with any of his victims.

The  idea of a total stranger just deciding, apropos of nothing, that they’re going to end your  life because you just happened to cross their path is genuinely the stuff of paranoid nightmares. Keyes would lie in wait and search for victims in parks, cemeteries, campgrounds, or other  similarly isolated areas away from the prying eyes of potential witnesses or surveillance cameras  that are far more common in populated urban areas. When describing his reasoning to the police, he  explained that there weren’t as many people to choose from in areas like these.

He confessed  to law enforcement that the lack of anyone else around to see what he was doing was what  drew him to the places and people he targeted: “There’s also no witnesses, really.  There’s no one else around. ” He never went after victims that fit a specific  profile, targeting men and women, although, when interviewed by police in 2012, he  claimed that he considered children and their parents to be off-limits.

How altruistic  of him. Despite these claims, the FBI still suspected that Keyes had been involved in the  killing of several teenagers and children. In addition, the fact that Keyes moved around  a lot, constantly traveling away to enact his brutal acts, made it initially hard to link  his crimes to each other.

If a death occurs in Vermont and another takes place in Washington,  it might be considered by police to be a bit of a leap to assume the same person did them, let  alone entertain the idea that they were the work of a notorious serial killer. State to state,  unless making requests for relevant information, police departments might not even be aware of  crimes committed elsewhere in the country. Keyes would always enact his killings far away from  wherever he currently called home and would never murder someone in the same area twice, making it  even harder to connect what must have looked like several separate deaths, especially when he killed  with no apparent motive or discernible pattern.

Months of preparation and planning went into his  attacks. During his various trips to different states, he would only pay in – normally stolen  – cash and kept his cell phone switched off at all times. Once Keyes had selected a victim at  random, he would bury a “murder kit” somewhere in the area where his target was, just like he  did before killing the Curriers.

Some of these kits have been recovered in parts of Alaska and  New York, but Keyes also confessed that he had stashed others across Washington, Wyoming, Texas,  and Arizona. Also, according to his confessions, he rarely used firearms, relying on them to carry  out a killing only when he had to. Keyes admitted to deriving a lot of pleasure from watching  his victims lose consciousness in a struggle, preferring instead to strangle them to death.

When the police questioned him as he confessed to his crimes, Keyes revealed one of the core details  that made the FBI so afraid of him: he’d studied the crimes of other serial killers. According  to Keyes, in his youth, he had read Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit – a  book that features profiles of various serial killers from a former FBI agent – and since then  had developed an affinity for his fellow killers. In one interview, investigators mentioned Robert  Hansen, another serial killer who happened to also have been active in Anchorage, Alaska,  between 1972 and 1983, otherwise known as the Butcher Baker.

Hearing mention of Hansen,  Keyes enthusiastically told authorities: Yeah, I know all about him… I probably know  every single serial killer that’s ever been written about. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. ” In particular, it was said that he deeply admired Ted Bundy, even claiming that he saw himself  in him and shared many similarities with the notorious murderer.

While it was true that Keyes  and Bundy were both methodical and operated in multiple US states, they clearly differed in how  they chose their victims and how they operated. Even though part of the reason that Keyes  didn’t want his name given to the media was to avoid being labeled as a copycat of his serial  killer role model, he would even go as far as to try and imitate Bundy’s escape from court later  in 2012 but was immediately seized by guards. Keyes didn’t hold all his fellow serial killers in  such high regard, though.

He said of Dennis Rader, also known as BTK, that he was a “wimp” for  showing remorse for his killings. Keyes expressed the most admiration for other serial killers  who hadn’t been caught like he very nearly was. One homicide detective from Anchorage, Detective  Monique Doll, said that Keyes “didn’t kidnap and kill people because he was crazy.

He didn’t kidnap  and kill people because his deity told him to or because he had a bad childhood…. He did this  because he got an immense amount of enjoyment out of it, much like an addict gets an immense  amount of enjoyment out of drugs. In a way, he was an addict, and he was addicted to the  feeling that he got when he was doing this.

” When investigators asked Keyes why he had  committed his crimes, he simply replied by asking them: “Why not? ” It wouldn’t be until August of 2013, over  a year after he had killed Samantha Koenig, that federal authorities released information  about Israel Keyes to the public. They announced that he was suspected to have a grand total of  eleven slain victims, each having been killed between 2001 and 2012.

There was also speculation  that he’d claimed the lives of even more people, possibly up in Canada, where Keyes had often  targeted prostitutes, as well as potential killings he’d committed in other countries.  However, these were either too far out of federal jurisdiction or happened too long ago for  the FBI to be able to fully substantiate them. Israel Keyes was said to have a body  count of at least eleven innocent people, although he confessed to as many as twenty. 

Still, only three of his victims have ever been confirmed and formally identified: those being  the Curriers, Bill and Lorraine, and Samantha Koenig. There exists an entire list of speculated  Keys’ additional victims, too, including multiple teenaged girls from Colville found dead in 1997,  the Lewis County Jane Doe found in 2011 in Morton, and a body that was ruled as an accidental  drowning in a lake in Neah Bay – and those are just the possible victims from Washington. When information about him was released to the public, Keyes became uncooperative with  investigators and threatened to stop speaking with the FBI entirely.

During a routine court hearing  in June 2012, he even became violent, which was when he was able to escape confinement and  attempted to attack spectators in the courtroom. Following this, security measures were increased.  Keyes had an escort of two officers every time he left his cell, full restraints, and daily strip  searches since there were no restrictions on what items he could have in his possession,  such as pencils and, crucially, razors.

Yet, despite these measures, he was still able to sneak  a razor blade on his person, which was believed to have been issued to him by mistake since he was  only authorized to shave with an electric razor. On December 2, 2012, Keyes wrote a two-page  note before using a combination of the razor and hanging to end his own life. While he was  never formally sentenced for his numerous crimes, Israel Keyes at least faced some kind of  justice, no longer able to harm anybody else.

For more terrifying stories involving the  FBI, check out “The Insane Story Of How The FBI Caught The “Eyeball Killer”. ” Or watch  “MOST WANTED FBI Criminals 2024 Edition.