50 Shades of Evil: Alaska - Israel Keyes

0:16 I walk a straight line, shackled chain. Oh, gruesome Gertie is calling my name. There is no mercy in this penitentiary. Just ask the hill string gang, a wrangle of three. I'm here. For life. We'll be right back. Hey everyone, welcome back to Bloody Angola and let's go to Anchorage, Alaska on February 1st of 2012. Now on that day, the sun had been down for hours. That's what it looks like during the day in Anchorage, Alaska, and it was snowing.

1:50 As a matter of fact, The snow was coming down hard enough to soften the edges of the parking lot. And at the edge of that lot sat a drive-thru coffee stand called Common Grounds Espresso. Now inside was an 18-year-old. Her name was Samantha Koenig. And she was working toward the end of her shift. Now people who knew her would later say she was the kind of kid who remembered regulars. She wanted to be a hairstylist. and still had a bright future that all 18-year-olds are supposed to have. The stand was scheduled to close at 8 that evening. And across the street, a man is waiting. He was 34 years old, and he's not what you would expect.

2:36 He's not frantic. He's not scary looking. Not some figure out of a murder movie. He's a contractor. A father. an Army veteran. And he lived in a two-story house on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood where people had barbecues and walked their dogs. Just a regular guy. But tonight, he's wearing a hoodie and a mask, and he's already decided how this night His name is Israel Keys, and today I'm going to take you into the details of what led to this seemingly ordinary guy becoming a bank robber, a burglar, an arsonist, a rapist, and a killer of multiple people. So let's get into it with this week's 50 Shades of Evil. Now, this story doesn't start off in Alaska in 2012. It starts in 1978 in northern Utah with a second child in a large family of 10 people. Now, his parents, Jeff and Heidi, they were a little different, you might say. They struggled with trust.

3:45 And when it came to their kids, they really struggled with trust. They didn't trust public schools. They didn't trust the government. They didn't trust doctors. And they were the members at that point in time of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And you may have thought initially, wow, 10 kids. But there were plenty of LDS families in Utah in 1978 raising 10 kids. And it's common in the Mormon religion to have just very large families. And Utah specifically... having the largest population of those who are Mormon. So when Israel was five, the family left, they went north and west to a remote property outside of Colville, Washington, which all Colville is in the northeastern corner of the state of Washington. It's a small timber mining community and farm town. And the property they chose was in the sticks of of even a smaller town like that. Just picture a cabin, periods without heat, periods without electricity, children sleeping in a tent, homeschooling and getting money from cutting firewood and working other people's farms. That was the Keys family.

5:07 That's how they rolled. It was the life they wanted and they enjoyed the isolation. Now, Israel's parents, Jeff and Heidi, would eventually leave the LDS church, and they would become what is known as fundamentalist Christians, which is a very strict religion. It doesn't recognize government at all. And for a time, the family was tied to a congregation in their town known as the Ark. It was a church that investigators and later reporting described as a white supremacist anti-Semitic church. Now, the Keys children were not the only young people exposed to at a young age to this area in these types of beliefs. As a matter of fact, their neighbors included the Keough family. Chevy and Cheyenne Keough would later become notorious in their own right. So you can look them up. That is a whole nother podcast, not for today. Now, the signs that Israel was a bit off were showing early in his childhood years into his formative years. He would shoot at houses with BB guns.

6:18 He would break into houses. He started fires in the woods. He even slipped into neighbors' cabins and stole firearms at a young age and hid them in a box at home. And Israel had other problems that you see with a lot of people who would later turn out to be serial killers. He tortured animals. He would admit this way later on to police that he killed neighborhood pets. He said he would even hurt some when he found them in the woods. And then he would torture the animals to death. So by his mid-teens, he renounced Christianity completely. He actually took an interest in Satanism. He would later say that by his late teens, he had decided he could rape or kill and get away with it. And in his head, he was so twisted by this point, he would start having desires of satanic ritual killings. involving a young woman. So in 1998, the family moved again, this time to Maupin, Oregon. And Israel and his brothers, they would help their father build a home. And if you didn't know any better, this just seemed like a normal large family with a lot of kids. and they all seemed to chip in around the house. Nothing seemed off at this point in his life. Then in the summer of 1998, when Keyes turned 18, he spotted a group of young people tubing on a river near his home. Now,

7:50 He would tell this story much later on, but he said one of the group was a girl and Keyes put her age between 14 and 18 years old. He said he was able to separate her from her friends somehow. He drags her to a nearby bathroom and he sexually assaulted her, but he stopped short of killing her. Now, that is the first violent crime Israel Keyes ever committed according to his later interviews. The girl had never been identified and the assault apparently was never reported. No one has ever come forward. So after Oregon, the Keys household, they move again. This time they went east all the way to Maine and they settled near an Amish community. Now, at this point, Israel seemingly was tired of living this secluded life And he starts looking into something else for himself.

8:52 And he thought, why not join the U.S. Army? I can travel around the world and I won't have to pay for it. And I can learn survival skills that I don't already have because he did grow up kind of in the wilderness. And on April 22nd of 1998, he does sign up in Albany, New York with the U.S. Army. Now, The army will give him structure, it will allow him to travel, but it will also, by his own later account, give his fantasies more shape. He would later say that he liked the survival training and that he felt more confident about killing strangers afterwards. when he was in uniform.

9:37 So it was on July 9th of 1998 that Israel Keyes reports for basic training. Now at this point, he's 20 years old, he has his GED, and the army sees a kid who he's pretty good at being a soldier, right? He's really good with working with his hands, and that can be an asset in the army. He serves as as a specialist in alpha company first battalion fifth infantry regiment in the 25th infantry division he's on a mortar team first as an assistant gunner before becoming a gunner and his work's pretty clean on paper So clean, in fact, he receives an Army Achievement Medal, and he completes a month-long preliminary process tied to Ranger training, but he never goes to U.S. Army Ranger school. He's also placed on a temporary duty assignment in Egypt. That's from January 15th to June 1st of 2000. I want to cover with you quickly the soldier that other soldiers saw, because later in A lot of them did interviews after you find out what I'm going to tell you about as we go along. But they said what they thought about Israel Keyes.

10:54 They said he was quiet. He kept to himself more often than not. And on weekends at Fort Lewis, he would drink alcohol. And they said his drink of choice was wild turkey, of all things. Men who served with him described a guy who could be a friend in the field of training. And then without much warning at all, he would change into this completely different person. A guy by the name of Sean McGuire, he said that he shared a barracks with Israel Keys and went through some of the Egypt training beside him. And he said they were friendly. but that if Keyes took offense to joking around with him, he said that would offend him very easily, that he would nearly come to blows just to have a very short fuse. In interviews with other soldiers from that company, they all pretty much said the same thing.

11:51 The other guys in the platoon were trained to kill just like Israel Keyes was, but they said Keyes was on a different level. Many describing him as just terrifying. And he wasn't a little guy either. He was six foot two and he was he wasn't built like a bodybuilder, but he had some muscle to him. Now, another friend named Matthew Perkins, he remembered the outdoors side of Keyes. He said he was a great hunter, a great fisherman, a great backpacker, and he said he loved Washington State and would disappear in any forest near Fort Lewis. And even another soldier came out and said he was more of a follower than a leader. He was easy to goat, if you will, and he was bad at picking up women easily. As a matter of fact, he wrote letters home to a girl he had been interested in back in Washington, and she later told the FBI that one letter from Egypt read like he was very depressed and the letter was very, very dark and it kind of freaked her out. And she totally lost interest in him after that. An army specialist that was talked to later on by the FBI said he would cut wood with keys often. And the keys the whole time would talk about crimes like bank robberies and killings and just was really interested in this stuff. And he said, it totally freaked me out, man. Like he would actually want to

13:22 be these people. In February of 2001, while still in service, still at Fort Lewis, he did get in some trouble and he gets a DUI to which he negotiates a plea agreement and a fine in the neighborhood of $ 350. And it's really the only official mark on him that he had while he was in the Army. And in July of 2001, he walks out with an honorable discharge. Now, I'm going to tell you about something that was learned after his arrest way later on. He didn't confess to any kind of murders during the three years he was in the army, but he did tell investigators that he and other soldiers would take trips to Egypt and Tel Aviv.

14:06 And Keyes told the FBI that he once met a girl there. He said she was pretty young. He said he thought she was a Norwegian exchange student. And he said they had been hanging out. He told her where her room was. And the FBI kind of pressed him and said, did you rape this girl? And he said, I wouldn't say it was like an outright rape. because we were hanging out and she allowed herself to be there. He said it happened in her room and he said he lost control a little bit as things progressed and he almost went further than he went, meaning he almost killed her. So that's some signs, early signs when he's in the army that this guy is going to be a problem when he's released and there's no one that has any control over him at that point, right? So let's go to July 8th of 2001. Israel Keyes, he gets out of the army, honorably discharged, and he's 23 years old. And if you look over his discharge records, you're going to think this is a regular veteran heading into civilian life. But you would be wrong. Because this is the same young man who had already told us years later, sitting in a jail in Alaska, that he raped a teenage girl in Oregon. So he gets out and he does not go back to Oregon. He goes about as far as you can drive on the west coast of the country before you run into the Pacific Ocean.

15:39 And that is Neah Bay, Washington. This is on the Makah Reservation in the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula. And this is a small, wet, isolated place. And the reason he's there is a woman... named Tammy Hawkins. So he met Tammy online in late 2000 while he was still stationed at Fort Lewis. Now, by the time he gets out of the army, she's already pregnant with their daughter, and that baby is born right around the time that Israel Keyes gets discharged. Now, July of 2001 to October of 2001, Keyes is living in the Neah Bay area, And he tells investigators that this is when he kills for the first time. Now, he does not give them a name. He doesn't even walk them out to a spot in the woods and say, dig here, right? He just says that's when it started. Some people who have gone deep into this case, they think he may have started killing earlier than that. The FBI, at least on the timeline they put out to the public, They kept that first homicide in that first three-month window after he gets out of the Army. He later tells them he murdered a couple in Washington sometime between 2001 and 2005 and buried them in a valley. And let me tell you, that's about as specific as he got. And he puts

17:12 two more killings in that 2005-2006 time frame stretch. So if you're counting the way prosecutors were counting later on in life here, you're looking at four people in Washington state before this man ever set foot anywhere else. And we'll talk about a little bit about that toward the end of this podcast. But in the Washington years, 2001 to 2007, they're easy to skip past if you're in a hurry. But I don't want to skip completely past them. He does work. As a matter of fact, he works in contracting. That's that same kid, right, who helped build that home for his dad. He's good with his hands, and he's now getting paid to hang doors and remodel houses.

17:58 People hire him. He hunts. He fishes. Now, he's also becoming a father in these years. And on the outset, y'all, from the outside looking in, I mean, it looks like He's working hard. He's got a steady job. He's got a young child and a girlfriend. You would never suspect anything crazy was going on. So March of 2007, he does leave Washington and he goes to Alaska. Now, Anchorage is not the same cabin in the woods. You would go disappear where he lived prior to that in Washington, almost, you know, in the Pacific Ocean area. This is a major thoroughfare, if you will, a major city inside of Alaska.

18:46 I mean, they've got an international airport. You can be in Chicago by afternoon from Anchorage. And there's a lot of work there for a man who can remodel houses. And Israel Keyes, he starts a construction business there. He's general contracting. And he starts out more like handyman jobs, but those turn into real jobs. It's just like anybody else. You go hire someone to paint your house. And while they're there painting your house, you're like, well, can you fix light switches? And can you do this? Same thing for him. And it was a growing business. The people who hired him actually said he was really good at what he did, that he showed up on time. He wasn't drunk. And he was good at fixing things. He just didn't even look like a problem. And I want you to sit for that for a second, because these people, they're not stupid people. He was really good at hiding who he was. And at that time, he also lived for a stretch in a white two-story house. in a cul-de-sac in one of the nicer parts of Anchorage. He had his girlfriend there, his daughter, just nothing that would throw up a huge red flag at this point in his life that this guy was going to be a problem.

20:06 So let's go to February 1st of 2012, and we're going to talk about Samantha Koenig. Now, Samantha Koenig was 18 years old, and she worked at a drive-thru coffee stand, and it was called Common Grounds Espresso. It was on East Tudor Road in Anchorage, Alaska. It was just a cute little coffee stand, a little teal kiosk in a parking lot with a Home Depot and an IHOP. The kind of place you'd roll up to in the dark and you would never think twice about going in there. She had a boyfriend and they were in love. She shared a truck with him. She shared a bank account with him. And people who knew her said she was a regular kid with a regular future. Now, Israel Keyes, he had never met this girl. He had never even seen her before that night. To him and his sick mind, this wasn't personal. It was business. And he had already been looking specifically for coffee stands. And he picked Common Grounds because of where it sat and because it stayed open later than the other coffee stands that he was staking out. Closing time at this particular coffee stand. was eight o'clock in the evening. So the interesting thing here is he had a cruise booked the next morning out of New Orleans. It was pre-planned, family trip. The tickets were already bought and paid for. And he was just

21:38 leaving in a few hours from what I'm about to tell you that went down. And he broke the one rule he said that he lived by for years. Do not kill close to home. And Common Grounds was only about four miles from his house. So two days before all of this would go down, he prepped his shed in his driveway. He had heaters set up. He had a radio. And he later told police that he had set the shed up because he intended to bring a victim back there. Initially, he would claim all of this that I'm about to tell you about was a robbery going wrong. It was not. He had pre-planned all this stuff.

22:22 So on February 1st, shortly after seven o'clock in the evening, he pulls his white Chevrolet pickup out of his driveway and he drives over to that Home Depot lot on Tudor and he parks and he takes a coffee mug, plastic zip ties, a headlamp, and a. 22 revolver, puts that in his pocket. He puts on a ski mask and a hoodie and he exits that vehicle. Now, you might be thinking someone obviously is going to know he's about to rob somebody with this get up on the ski mask, the hoodie, the whole deal. Remember this. He's in Alaska, y'all. It is February. Everybody dresses like this in February in Alaska. So he walks up to that window near closing time and he orders a coffee. And Samantha makes it. She hands it to him. The gun comes out and he tells her that he wants money.

23:22 She empties the register. She complies, coins and all. And she gives it all to him. And he tells her to get on the floor. She does. And he climbs up and through the window into that little stand. He gets down next to her and he zip ties her hands together. behind her back. He even then trims off the extra plastic after he zip ties her hands. And then they wait two minutes, three minutes down low, making sure no last minute customer rolls up and sees him in there. He even takes a wooden stick and he puts it in the window and So the stand looks closed. Now, surveillance video from inside that kiosk would later show all of this. The zip ties, the hands behind her back, him leading her out. Another camera would catch the white pickup across the way with a man getting out and that same man coming back with somebody that he is gripping very tightly. tightly. He asked her where her car was and she told him, I don't have a vehicle.

24:31 Me and my boyfriend, we share a vehicle and he's at work right now and he drove the vehicle to work. And at that point, Keyes then forcibly walks her out of that coffee stand toward Tudor Road. Now, apparently once the realization that Keyes was kidnapping her, Samantha Koenig This all clicks and she says, screw that, I'm running. And she actually breaks away from Keys and tries to run away. But Keys does chase her and tackle her to the ground. He puts one arm around her, points the gun at her body with the other hand, and he tells her, hey, you need to cooperate. that the gun had very quiet ammo and that she should not do anything that would make him kill her. They walk across Tudor Road into a parking lot between the IHOP and a Dairy Queen and Key's white truck was parked there. Now, Key's had previously prepared that truck. He removed the license plate and he also removed some mounted toolboxes off of the bed of the truck. So it was ready to go. He took Koenig, threw her in the truck and drove away.

25:48 So he starts driving around town in Alaska and he's explaining to Koenig that this was a kidnapping for ransom. And Koenig's like, my family doesn't have any money. What's he going to ask for ransom for? And she explains that to him. And he says, hey, no worries. I've already thought farther ahead than you have. And when the public finds out that you've been kidnapped, they're going to chip in to help with your ransom money. And so it doesn't matter if your parents have money or not. The public is like a GoFundMe. for ransom, right? And Keyes also convinces her that if she cooperates, he's going to return her to her family unharmed. And Koenig seemed to believe Keyes. And she tries to talk him out of it and tries to convince him to release her.

26:44 But it's fallen on deaf ears, right? This guy has made up his mind. So at some point during that drive, Keith says, I need your phone because I'm going to start texting people to get this whole ransom thing going on. And she says, we got a problem. I don't have my phone. And he said, I'm assuming, said, what do you mean you don't have your phone? And she said, well, you freaking kidnapped me. And my phone is back at the stand. I never grabbed it. So I can only imagine what went through his head at this point. But he says, I got to have that phone. They turn around and they actually go back to the coffee stand to retrieve her cell phone. He had to have that to pull off his plan. Huge risk. And you can actually see him on surveillance video re-enter that coffee stand while she's in the car and retrieve her cell phone, get back in the truck and drive away. Keys then drives to another part of town and he sends two text messages from her phone. The first was to her boyfriend and the second was to the owner of that coffee grounds stand. And the text messages made it appear as if Koenig just had a really bad day and was leaving town for the weekend. And Keyes sends those and then he takes the battery out of Samantha Koenig's phone.

28:11 He then asked her for her debit card. And Samantha's got another surprise for him when she says she doesn't have her debit card. Her and her boyfriend actually share a debit card and that he had the debit card. They didn't keep two of those. So Keyes is like, oh, for two here. I'm sure he's really freaking out. And he says, okay, where do you live and where's the debit card? And she says, well, the debit card is typically kept in my boyfriend's truck. And she gives Keys the address to where they live. So get this. Keys, he locks her up in the shed in the front of his house. And he turns the radio up. And he says, look, if you scream, no one's going to hear you anyway. But he said he also had a police scanner on him. So if you do manage to get away and the police are alerted, I'm going to hear it. And I know where you live. I'm on the way to your house right now. And at that point, this crazy sucker dies. jumps in his car and drives to Koenig's house. He retrieves the ATM card from her boyfriend's truck. And here's where it gets really crazy. While he's at her house, going into her boyfriend's truck to get this ATM card out of there, her boyfriend sees him, comes outside, confronts him. They're kind of yelling back and forth.

29:40 The boyfriend goes inside to get help, assumingly, or a gun, one of the two. Keyes at that point runs back to his truck and leaves the area before anything else happens. He then drives to an ATM machine and he withdraws like the minimum amount just to make sure that the PIN number that Samantha had given him was correct, which it was. She was honest with this guy. But the question is, is Keyes gonna be honest with her? Hell no, he's not. He drives back to his house, goes into his shed where he had her locked up. He sexually assaults her and then he kills her by choking her to death. Keyes then leaves her in the shed, goes back inside his house where he packed for this pre-planned cruise that he was taking from New Orleans. And he leaves early that morning, February 2nd for that cruise. Unbelievable.

30:44 Keyes then returned to Anchorage on February 17th of 2012, and he starts preparing a ransom note that demanded money be placed in the account connected to that ATM card. Yeah, not a fucking genius, right? He's already shown it right there. He goes into the shed, he retrieves Koenig's body, and he takes steps to make it appear, this is how sick he is, He wanted to make it look like she was still alive. So he dresses her up and he takes Polaroid pictures of her tied up trying to make her appear to look like she's still alive. And as these pictures are taken, he also holds up an Anchorage Daily newspaper dated from February 13th of 2012. He photocopies the photo and using a manual typewriter he purchased, he types a ransom demand for $ 30, 000 on the back of that photo. Now, after doing all of that, He takes the note and he puts it in a dog park under a memorial flyer for a dog named Albert.

32:00 Then he uses Koenig's cell phone, text her boyfriend. And in substance, he said a ransom note was under Albert in Connor's dog park. And that note gets recovered by the Anchorage Police Department. And in the days that followed, Keyes dismembers Koenig's body. drives her out to a lake, cuts a hole in the ice, and puts her body inside of that lake. Now, meanwhile, Koenig's father, James Koenig, he deposits ransom money, which had been generously donated by members of the community into an account connected with Samantha Koenig's ATM card. Now, the plan was to attempt to catch the perpetrator by tracking those withdrawals. March 1st, he uses it at an ATM in Anchorage. March 6th, he flies from Anchorage to Las Vegas. March 7th, from there to Wilcox, Arizona. An ATM camera catches a masked man in a rental car. March 8th, he goes to Lordsburg, New Mexico and uses a car. At this point, he is leaving a major paper trail. And then on March 13th, a traffic stop occurs in Lufkin, Texas. So let's go to the Quality Inn in Suites, which is great. where

33:34 the last debit card withdrawal took place. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning. Texas Highway Patrol Corporal Brian Henry, he calls in a white Ford Focus sedan sitting in that hotel lot that matches a bulletin about the make and model of a car that last used that ATM card belonging to Samantha Koenig. So, What this asshole didn't realize was this had become a national emergency and every police station in the country was looking for that Ford Focus by this point in time. Because they knew it was the ATM withdrawals that a murderer was making on this poor girl's account. And these police, shout out to them, they knew it. When they saw this car, something wasn't right.

34:27 As a matter of fact, Texas Ranger Steven Rayburn, he's already with an FBI agent. Her name was Deborah Ganaway, and they roll up into the Quality Inn. And Ganaway kind of does a walk by that vehicle. She sees a rental barcode sticker on the back passenger window. That tells her, okay, whoever owns this vehicle rented the vehicle. She sees trash and clothes piled up inside and what looked like a pink piece of women's clothing in plain view that she could see. Ranger Rayburn, he runs the plate and it's registered to a car rental company. And Lieutenant Mickey Hadnot from the Department of Public Safety, he keeps a clear eye on the car. They're really watching everything. Now, hotel records later show a room Number 215 rented for those days leading up to the 13th. So whoever was there had been there a couple of days at least.

35:29 And police, they want to talk to the driver, but they know they need a lawful reason to kind of light this guy up. And they want to do everything by the book because they got a feeling this is going to be a bigger case than they're used to. So they kind of stake it out. They just watch. They see, eventually, Israel Keys walk out to the vehicle, get in it, and drive down the road, and they pull up behind him. As a matter of fact, Corporal Henry is right behind him. He waits for Israel Keys to go just a couple of miles over the speed limit, and he pulls him over. Henry walks up to Israel Keys, and he says, I need to see your ID. Israel Keys hands him an Alaska driver's license. And they run that license and it comes back clear. No warrants that pop up in a routine search. Just a tall man from Alaska in a rental Ford Focus in East Texas.

36:27 And Henry asked the usual questions. Where are you from? Anchorage. What are you doing down here? I came down here for a wedding. Whose wedding? My sister's wedding. How did you get here? Flew from Anchorage to Las Vegas and then rented a car at the airport and been driving ever since. And that kind of raised an eyebrow because why didn't you just fly into Texas? Why would you fly into Las Vegas and then come here? And he kind of struggled to answer those questions. And police are like, something is off with this dude. They asked to see his wallet and he gets pissed. He's not going to show it. As a matter of fact, they said keys became increasingly confrontational during the traffic stop. especially when asked for details about his activities. He wouldn't let them look in his car. He wouldn't let them look in his wallet.

37:20 And through the window, police could see a pair of large white tennis shoes shoved under the driver's seat. And one thing they knew was those shoes appeared to be a match to the ATM debit videos that they had reviewed. within the past couple of days on this guy. They also noticed there was rolls of cash on the floorboard and they were rubber banded. They also noticed there was maps with routes highlighting north to south through California and just everything you would notice that looked bad if you're looking for somebody that's on the run. So at this point, they feel like they've got enough probable cause to conduct a search, whether he wants them to or not. The car matched the bulletin that they had received about an ATM withdrawal. And that's really all they needed. And they start searching it. They pop the trunk. And the first thing they see is a gray hooded sweatshirt. And that was the same sweatshirt that he had worn when Samantha Koenig was kidnapped. And these police knew it. They had already seen that video. This was everywhere by that point.

38:37 in the realms of the police community. What else did they find in there? How about Samantha Koenig's cell phone? And when they finally get his wallet, with all of these police standing around, guess what they pull out of it? A Visa debit card with the account matched to Samantha Koenig and her boyfriend. And also, incidentally, some of the cash that was in that car, they noticed it's stained. It's a very bright ink. Guess what that is? Die pack money, which they were able to track back to a New York bank robbery. At this point, they put Israel Keys in handcuffs and they charge him with what's known as access device fraud. Now, that's just the first fraud.

39:25 That's just to get his ass in jail so they can question him. They were definitely going after him. for other things. So he goes to the station and initially he says nothing that helps. Anchorage detectives Monique Dahl and Jeff Bell, they're called and they actually fly into Texas. And he tells them he doesn't know who Samantha Koenig is. He tells them the phone and bank card, get this, must have come through the window. He said he leaves the window cracked to air out cigar smoke. And as he's going down the road, someone throws a freaking ATM card through the window in a cell phone as it's cracked.

40:05 That's the story. Yes, it's a stupid story. And he is supposedly a smart offender, but that's what happens when you panic. So he's in jail in Texas, and then eventually he's extradited to Anchorage, Alaska. So at this point, police do a lot of interviews with Israel Keyes. I mean, probably 25, 30 hours interviews. And throughout these interviews, he starts off not admitting to shit. And I'm going to cut to the chase here. Eventually, he does admit to not only the murder of Samantha Koenig, but also the murders of several other people. So on April 18th of 2012, he is indicted for the murder of Samantha Koenig first.

40:56 He also admits to a string of bank robberies and home robberies, which is how he was able to travel throughout all these years, how he had the money to do that because he would travel a lot. So there are initial hearings. And during one of these hearings, he actually tries to get away, like tries to escape the courtroom. The problem is he had leg irons on. So he tries to get out of these leg irons. and attempts to run out of the courtroom but he doesn't even make it to the door they put him back down in the chair and look y'all he absolutely hated being held captive 23 hours a day in a cell was just more than this piece of shit could take. So let's go to December 1st and into December 2nd of 2012.

41:47 He's alone in a cell. He's got a camera on him. All his movements are supposedly watched. And there's movement until about 1024 that night. Then it all goes still. A correctional officer had given him access to a razor he was not supposed to have. Now, restrictions called for a supervised electric razor. So it would have to be an electric razor and they'd watch you shave. Somehow he got his hands on a razor. Accounts differ on exactly how the blade got in his hand. One version is a mistake on the shift. Another describes a sliver of metal hidden with a pencil. But what's not in dispute is the result. He slashes his left wrist, then he twists the bedding into a noose, and he strangles himself. A day shift officer finds him around 6 in the morning on December 2nd, and he had been dead for hours by that point, 34 years old. never convicted of murder, never walked into a trial where a jury said his name and Samantha's name in the same sentence. And under the body, they find a note. It's like four pages long on a yellow pad, soaked in his blood. And the FBI lab at Quantico cleans it up and they look to see if there's a coded message, maybe a map, a list, something on these other people that he killed.

43:15 And I'm not even going to read it because I think he's had enough attention by this point. But inside of his cell, authorities found 11 skulls drawn onto paper. And the FBI believes Israel Keyes indeed did kill 11 people. But of those 11, only four have ever been identified. Those being Samantha Koenig, Also, Bill Currier and LaWayne Currier, who were a married couple from Vermont, who Keyes confessed to abducting and killing in June of 2011. Now, I didn't cover those killings because this episode was focused only on Samantha, and I didn't want to deviate from that.

43:57 Maybe in the future, at some point, I'll cover those. Also, Deborah Feldman, a 49-year-old woman from Hackensack, New Jersey, who vanished in in 2009, the FBI said that Keyes provided details matching her disappearance and things he knew that nobody else would have known unless it was the killer in the case. And that makes her a very strongly suspected fourth victim. So there you have it. And what makes this one especially disturbing for me is that none of these victims' families would have been given the opportunity to to provide victim impact statements and really tell this piece of shit what they thought about him. Those impact statements, y'all, they're very important. They're very important to getting that off your chest. And you never get closure in something like that, but they're very important in your mental health as a victim.

45:01 And that was stolen from them because this coward Hung himself, essentially. So there you have it. Another Fifty Shades of Evil episode. And we'll be back next week with another one. Until then, I'm Jim Chapman with Bloody Angola. Much love.