The story you're about to hear is true. It's part of an active and ongoing federal investigation. If you have information that could help, contact your local FBI office or go to tips dot FBI dot gov dot. This show contains material which may be unsuitable for younger audiences.

It was pouring rain, big lightning storm. I decided I was going to look for a house with a couple in it. So I started walking through neighborhoods back behind the hotel. And, yeah, once I found out that it was the right house, and I knew that they were home because I walked around the house and I could hear some fans running in the bedroom, so I knew what bedroom they were sleeping in. Once I got into the garage and I unlocked the deadbolt on that and kind of staked up, checked out the neighborhood. I was checking out all the other houses around there, made sure that there wasn't anybody up. So I just kept waiting. I just kept hanging out around their house, and I went back into the garage. By then, I think it was probably one or two. And, yep, that's when it. That's when it happened.

That's the voice of Israel Keys. He was a killer. His methods were unprecedented. His planning was meticulous.

He buried kill kids in random locations across the country, hiding them sometimes years in advance, making his victims anyone, anywhere, and making him virtually undetectable. That is, until 2012, when he finally made a mistake.

Once in the hands of police, he starts talking, giving up some of his crimes, but never giving up all of his crimes.

Keys was an unreliable narrator, and he held the truth hostage until his demands were met.

He always made the truth part guessing game and part scavenger hunt. A trail of crumbs based on the things he did say.

Before he could go to trial or prison or make a full confession, he killed himself, leaving one big central mystery. Just how far did Israel Keys actually go? And how many people did he actually kill?

We're all wired differently. Some of us are wired for good. Some of us are wired for bad. But a select few step outside all of society's boundaries from cold, open media. This is deviant.

Welcome to Deviant. It's a new show from me, Dan Sematovich, and me, Andrew Aydin. You may remember us from down the hill, the Delphi murders. Well, this is our new show, and we're really glad you're with us.

And what we're going to do here is we're going to chase down stories. And really, our guiding principle here is we're into the stories that are going to make you say, wait, what?

Yeah, and we're going to take our time telling those stories, chasing down the answers to the biggest mysteries of these deviants.

We're going to do that with a number of other true crime stories, too. We're going to bring you along. And basically, if we say wow, we figure that you're going to say wow to.

So let's jump into the very first story of many were off to chase the truth about Israel keys.

Let's make this clear from the jump. Israel Keys was a serial killer. Those words, serial killer. The news media jumps on them. Detectives, police, they're often loath to say it. And when they do, the public loses it. They lock their doors, call the kids in before streetlights come on, fire up Facebook pages, and we all know the imagery. There's a sketch, detectives speaking to the killer in front of a bank of microphones. Then there's the Hollywood version. Hannibal Lecter, John Doe, and the killer lurking a block or two away, smoking a cigarette. And there's a string of victims on the news. Names, photos, all while the killer moves around in darkness.

Israel Keys didn't fit any of that. What he did is something police had never seen and Hollywood couldn't have scripted.

I think for me when I realized that he really was not like other serial offenders. Most serial killers, serial offenders have a type. They like women between 18 and 25 who are blonde, something like that. And it became very evident in our conversations with keys that that didn't matter. It really didn't matter who the person was, their age.

No victimology whatsoever.

None at all. It was really all about opportunity. It was about the situation, about him creating a situation. And then whoever it happened to be that crossed his path was going to be a victim. My name is Jolene Godin, and I'm an agent with the FBI in Anchorage, Alaska. I was one of the case agents that investigated the Israel Keys case, and I remain in Anchorage and I continue to investigate the Israel Keys case.

There's a specific way I wanted things done, very specific way I want things to happen. And I have the whole thing planned out. I have everything I need to do it. When somebody messes up that plan, it kind of even surprised even me that I lost control that way.

And for me, that was. It really hit home to me that he was really unlike other serial offenders that certainly I had knowledge of.

He was a new kind of killer. Truly unique. The murderer, we know we have him, but the full list of his victims, we don't. The FBI says they believe he killed.

Eleven and they know who four of those are.

We're pretty confident with eleven. However, he would make kind of the comments also, Canadians don't count or things like that. That would suggest that it could be more. I think we're pretty confident that there were eleven victims in the United States.

Whether that number actually stops at eleven, that's what we're here to figure out.

Yeah. And this guy lived the life of a nomad. He was a carpenter and a skilled outdoorsman. And as you'll hear, he loved to talk. The stories he tells detectives become a test of what's true and what may not be true in this sort of trail of babies.

In interrogation sessions, keys held all the cards and he knew it. He hadn't gone to trial and he never had plans to. As we mentioned at the top of the show, he killed himself. He was always planning to die one way or another.

His death in 2012 at the age of 34 left the final chapters of his story unwritten. It's up to all of us to figure out the rest.

The case is still active, and it will remain active, I think, for quite some time.

The goal of this series is to explore the full scope of Israel Key's life of murder, motion of operating in plain view. To do that, we had many conversations and interviews with those who knew him, those who interrogated him, those who studied him. All of this in an effort to get us closer to some kind of clarity.

You'll also hear the words of Israel Keys himself in hours of interrogation we obtained from the FBI and the us attorney's office. Just how far did Israel Keys go? How many people did he actually kill?

We first learned about him in March of 2012 when he was arrested in Texas. That was literally the first time. He wasn't even anywhere on the radar.

Prior to that, Agent Godin starts this story in the same place we are. We have no file, no knowledge. This is just a guy floating around in the world.

There really wasn't a lot. He was. He was kind of an unknown. He was a contractor. He worked construction in Alaska. So that was a piece of it. Is trying to figure out what his day to day activities were like and things like that, and then just piecing it backwards where he was prior to Alaska. But we really. We only knew about Samantha at that point. So our focus really was Alaska.

When special agent Godin says Samantha, she's referring to Samantha Koenig. In February of 2012, Israel Keys kidnapped and murdered her in Anchorage, Alaska. This is the crime that eventually got.

Him caught while he's in Texas for a family wedding. He's pulled over, arrested, and sent back to Alaska where he confesses to the crime. And I promise that's a crime we'll get into in a later episode.

But to start this story, we have to go to that interrogation room in Anchorage.

I think the first time that I really had an inclination that we were dealing with somebody that had done a lot of harm, Samantha's homicide was bad enough. And then to really start to realize that, wow, there's a lot more that is here. That was during one of those first couple interviews with him when he started to talk about how he had kind of been two personalities for 14 years and things like that. I think all of us were like, oh, my gosh, like, this is. There's a lot more to this guy and there's many, many more victims here.

Authorities from multiple agencies now try to extract a body of work from keys. How many robberies, how many arsons, how many murders.

Keys keeps dropping hints that the things he's done are more than investigators can imagine. And then after a few weeks of back and forth negotiations, finally he starts to share.

All right, I'll give you two bodies and a name and the rest of the story. Like, you know, everything that happened.

As investigators spend time with him, they begin to learn his tells. When you really perk up and pay attention to what he's saying.

If he was going to give us something in his mind that was significant, he had requests. He wanted his Starbucks Americano. He wanted a Snickers bar. He wanted his cigar, which are so trivial. But those were like the things that he initially wanted.

This is one of those times.

If I get a cigar, he gets.

The cigar and begins telling his story.

North, north and then east, east, east, east. Keep going. Alright, now follow that.

Israel Keys is now in custody in Anchorage, Alaska, on the heels of his arrest for Samantha Koenig's murder. His dialog with law enforcement isn't just negotiation. It's also sometimes monolog and once in a while a revelation.

What you're about to hear is one of those. It's a revelation of more victims, a revelation of a completely new kind of mo. And also a look at what's happening inside his mind.

Just an abandoned farmhouse. If that's it, they'll be in the basement. And who are we looking for? Last name. Currier. Currier. First name? I don't remember their first names. They're in big black trash bags, probably skeletal by now.

Their first names were Bill and Lorraine, the couriers of Essex, Vermont, a few.

Miles east of Burlington Bill was 49 years old. He was a big man with a big frame. He had brown hair and wore glasses. He was a vet tech and an animal lover. Lorraine was 55, with a smaller frame and reddish brown hair. She worked in the healthcare industry. The couriers had been married for 25 years, and while they had no kids, their neighbors told local reporters that they always loved decorating their modest white house for the holidays.

They'd last been seen the evening of June 8, 2011. But the plan for killing them began in a remote wooded area near the Winoskee river, less than 2 miles from their home.

Israel Keys had buried a cache of weapons and tools, guns, duct tape, rope, all the way back in 2009, more than two years earlier. This is something he did in seemingly random locations all over the place.

A lot of that stuff was buried with the guns. I usually have road flares in them, too. It's a handy way to start a fire. Why did you bury them there? And why had you left them for years in that location? Well, it just. It was a good spot, and I knew I would be back to that area. So it's just that a lot of people don't do that. Don't think of burying stuff. Ha. Right. I mean, come on. Everybody loves buried treasure. Yeah.

Not long after the burial of that cache, Israel keys returns home to Alaska. But he won't stay there long. Over the next two years, he is everywhere. Seattle, Sacramento, Denver, Chicago, Boston, Vegas. Even a cruise to St. Kitts and St. Croix. Fast forward two years to June 2 of 2011, and he boards an Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Chicago, driving back to Vermont, revisiting the Winuski river and the cash he'd buried two years ago.

Yeah, I mean, I had a plan. Fly to Chicago, drive to Indiana, see my family in Indiana, and then drive up through New York, stop at my place in New York, drive through Vermont. I've actually been looking for a while. Like, when I was in Vermont, I was looking for a church to burn. That's what I really wanted to do. Oh, just. It's like a personal thing. I had it in my mind that I was going to start using churches. I knew I was going to Vermont. I wasn't set on Vermont. Could have been Maine, could have been New York, could have been Maine, could have been New Hampshire. So I was doing a lot of driving around, and I was looking for churches, houses, and I was also in that area because I wanted to dig up those guns that I had buried there. They had been there for few years, and I wanted to check on them, make sure they weren't full of water. I think the way it worked is I went fishing for a day. Then I went down and found the guns, brought them back up to the motel room and worked on them for a while, getting everything working again.

Then I found that house and it was exactly what I was looking for. Was kind of thinking, if I'm going to do something here, I'm going to go all out and do a bunch of stuff. I was in the hotel that evening, the evening before they were reported missing or whatever. I had all the guns ready to go and I had on. Actually, I think it was that same jacket that you found me with, that rain jacket. And I started walking around town at about eight or 09:00 after it had got dark. I was looking for someone to carjack. So I had my backpack with me. It had a bunch of stuff in it like cable ties and duct tape and went across the road from the hotel and had an apartment complex there staked out. And I was waiting for someone to come in alone. And I was also looking for someone who was coming in in a decent car. That was fairly generic because my thought was the next day, after I got done with whoever I took, I was going to take their car. And I had three banks staked out in different towns.

My plan was to take whoever's car I took up to the furthest north one and hit that and then drive back down Route 15 and hit the other two banks on my way back to Burlington and then dump the car. Just move everything into my car and check out of the hotel and leave that day. So that's what I was. Had this apartment staked out. I was actually looking for a guy and there was pouring rain, big lightning storm. There was a guy who came in, he was in a yellow v dub bug. And he's almost. He almost got it that night. He'd been about 5 seconds, seconds slower getting out of his car, going into the apartment. He would have been the one that night. But like I said, it was raining. So I walked out of this little wooded area and I was walking up behind his car and he kind of jumped out. He had like a newspaper over his head and he ran into the apartment to keep from getting wet. But that would have been my first choice, I guess. So when that didn't work out, I wasn't that worried about it.

I just waited until later when the carjacking thing didn't work out, I decided I was going to look for a house with a couple in it.

Why Keys is changing his plan at this point, we don't know. This also kind of points to what we talked about earlier. Israel Keys can be an unreliable narrator, and it can be tough to know when that's happening.

Was the guy in the volkswagen really his intended victim? Did he even exist? That remains a mystery. Either way, committing murder is clearly top of mind.

So I was started walking through neighborhoods back behind the hotel. I was looking for a house that didn't look like it had a dog. I was looking for a single car garage with no cars parked outside. And I was looking for a fairly easy way to get into the garage. And theirs was the first house I found that had all those things. Once I got into the garage, the car was unlocked. And I looked in the. Checked out the registration. I think I found out that it was registered to a woman. And I think there was something else in the car that had her birth date on it. So I knew about the age of the couple that was there. Did that matter? I didn't want to go into a house where there were kids. So I was checking for those things in the garage, like anything related to kids. And I checked the back seat of their car to make sure there wasn't dog hair and stuff in it. Once I found out that it was the right house, I had walked around the house, and they had a. I could hear some fans running in the bedroom, so I knew what bedroom they were sleeping in.

And they had. Their house was locked up really tight. There was no way into the house. Even the garage door. The door between the house and the garage had a dead bolt. So I knew I was going to have to break the window to get into the house. But I wasn't really worried about that. There was one window on the side of the house that had a fan in it. I grabbed one of their chairs in the backyard and took the fan out of the window and just crawled through the window. I broke into the garage, but I knew I wasn't going to break into the house until I was sure that the neighbors were asleep. And then I found the phone box on the side of the house, and I cut the wire, the main wire of the phone box. Figured if they had any kind of alarm or something, the police would do a drive by or something. So after I cut that, I was outside for probably an hour or two, just waiting for everybody in the neighborhood to go to sleep and also watching for. Watching the street for cops or cars driving by.

But there was never anything. I went back into the garage, and by then I think it was probably one or two. And that's when it. That's when it happened. Immediately. Through the door, from the garage into the kitchen. I knew it would be pretty much a straight shot down the hallway to the bedroom. I already knew what bedroom they were in.

So were they still asleep when you got to there, or do you think they heard that?

They heard it, but they were just barely. I mean, they were just wondering what it was.

Were they cooperative? At first, at least?

Well, then, yeah. Pretty shocked. People never expect this stuff to happen, you know, it's like a blitz attack. You just make sure they know right away who's in charge, and immediately tie them up. Tell them what the rules are, that there's no talking unless I talk to them. They don't move unless I tell them to move.

He grabs a suitcase, filling it with their financial documents, jewelry, and some of Lorraine's lingerie. He continues pressing the couriers. Where are your phones, your ATM cards? Do you have any guns? And then things started taking a turn that keys didn't like.

They weren't taking the situation seriously enough, I guess. And that was a problem throughout the night? Yeah, they were. I think they were just kinda in awe that was happening. Like they couldn't believe it. And they kept wanting an explanation as to why it was happening. I could tell they were trying to make a plan and figure out what to do. And I jumped over on the bed and grabbed her by the neck and shoved her head down into the pillow. And even when they didn't think I was watching, I might be watching. And no matter what they tried to do or what they said, it wasn't gonna. It was only gonna piss me off. It wasn't gonna change anything for them. So after that, they stayed quiet for quite a while. Didn't do anything. And then the next time I started having trouble with them was when I got them in the car. That was the first time they got a look at me. And because the dome light came on, I guess. And they were, you know, they were both checking me out, trying to figure out why. I think they were incredulous of the whole situation.

That was part of the problem, is they didn't realize how serious the situation was. I think they thought that they could talk their way out of it or negotiate their way out of it. After I had him in the car, I drove to the hotel where my car was parked.

At this point, Keys is both acting out his plan and improvising. He knows he's going to kill them, but he hasn't yet worked out how to dispose of their bodies. So he takes everything he might need from his car. Diesel fuel, draino large trash bags. He wants to be prepared.

I already had my backpack with me, had a bunch of stuff in it. I had like a propane burner, camp stove thing and a pan for boiling water and had a coil, like a 50 foot coil of nylon rope, duct tape, latex gloves, I guess you'd call it a rape kit.

He drives them to the house he'd scouted earlier, and now it's time to do what he came here to do. He moves Bill currier to the basement and ties him to his stool. While they're down there, Lorraine runs for it.

I mean, it must have taken me longer than I thought because I came out of the basement and she was standing right there by the door. She had got out of the car and she had somehow broke the cable ties on her hands and on her feet and got out of the car. She was almost to the road when I came out of the basement and she saw me come out and she started running and I tackled her on the lawn and roughed her up a little bit and tied her back up and took her upstairs.

The next few minutes of this can be difficult to hear, but there are details that are important in order to understand how Israel Keys operated. It's a clear example of what he did and how he did it.

Keys brings Lorraine to a room with mattresses that he'd prepared ahead of time. He uses ropes, handcuffs and duct tape to secure her for what he has planned. As he describes all this, you can tell that he's really reliving this moment, enjoying it. He really spends his time telling it and goes into the minute details, details we've decided not to share here. It's at this point, though, that his plan begins to fail.

I heard some movement downstairs because at that point she was, she finally shut up a little bit of, and I heard something downstairs. And that's when I started having problems with the guy. I went down there and he had the stool. He was kind of a big guy, like overweight. And the stool had just collapsed. And I guess when it collapsed, the cable ties that I had on his wrist behind his back, they had broke and the stool came apart. I don't know, just messed my whole plan up. So I was kind of pissed off about that. I was like yelling at him, like, why are you trying to get away? You're just making it worse. And at that point, he was still trying to talk me out of it. He's like, just let us go. I know you're in too deep, but we haven't really seen you. You can still walk away. And I just kind of laughed at him. I was like, I don't know if I actually said anything, but in my head I was like, you don't even know what. How much planning I put into this and just walk away.

And then I got started getting pissed. And I just told him. I was like, I have a gun upstairs. If you want to do this the hard way or do it the easy way, it's up to you. I just came to the realization that, you know, he wasn't going to stop fighting. But by then I already had her all set up upstairs. And it was annoying me that I was having to deal with him. That was part of the whole plan for taking a couple. You know, I had this idea in my head of what was gonna happen and she was screwing it up, I guess. So once I realized he wasn't gonna let me tie him back up again, I just kind of. Kind of gave up on that part of the plan.

We now get a glimpse of keys overall plan for Bill and Lorraine. He talks about how he planned to involve Bill and what he was about to do to Lorraine. But Bill isn't cooperating. So Keyes changes the plan again.

I, like, ran back upstairs and by then I was all amped up and grabbed the 1022 out of the backpack and came back downstairs. And he started to say something. And it just pissed me off. And I just started pulling the trigger. I just kept pulling the trigger. I pulled as fast as I could until the magazine was empty.

Now Keyes talks about how he repeatedly sexually assaults Lorraine. He gets very detailed. Were leaving most of it out.

I had all the ropes and had a bunch of stuff with me. Like stuff that I had been thinking about for a while that I was going to do. And I did it. And the ropes were a big part of it. I guess the fantasy that developed over the years. It seems like I got more into the tying up part. I'm not sure why. Really? Yeah. That was. That was a big. That was a good one. I had everything on that one.

At one point, he pauses, goes outside, gets some air. And then he goes back inside, goes back upstairs and sexually assaults Lorraine again. What he does to her is beyond horrific. He makes her suffer. Finally, he decides to put an end to this.

She wasn't fighting anymore. I think she knew. I think she knew what was gonna happen. And I put all her you know, everything that had been on her, I put in that bag and then grabbed the bag, walked her downstairs all the way to the basement, and she was sitting on a bench down there. And by the time I walked her downstairs, she was a little bit out of it. I don't know if she really knew what was going on at that point. Had my leather gloves on, and I think I took a piece of the rope and stood behind her while she was sitting on that bench and used it like a garret and strangled her. And I knew that she was. I knew that she was gone. I had the garbage bags with me, but the plan was that night to burn the house that night. But by the time I was done, it was arguing light. It was like six or 07:00 a.m. so I didn't want to start a big fire. Plus, there was a lot to get rid of, so it was raining really hard, and I didn't think the house would burn that well anyway.

So I just figured I'd put them in the basement, buried them under a bunch of stuff, and figured if they were found, there wasn't enough evidence there to tie me to it. And if they weren't, the plan washing to go back there this year, once there wasn't as much left and burn them. So I decided just to bury them with all the wood that was down there. Let nature take its course, as it were. When I was driving back through Vermont, I planned my route back through Vermont so that I could come back on that road into Burlington. And I drove by the house, wanted to see, I guess, kind of see it in the daylight. And I was tempted to stop and check on the bodies and stuff, but it seems like it was quite a bit of traffic. So I just decided not to stop and just kept driving.

We've heard these confessions quite a few times now, and for us, it never gets less difficult. It's easy to imagine what FBI Special Agent Jolene Godin must have felt sitting across from him, hearing him talk, feeling that energy. She told us it was a real turning point for her.

After I heard what happened to Bill and Lorraine Courier, that was a really. That was a really difficult interview. I think that's when I. For me, I really realized that there was something just incredibly, incredibly. I don't even know what the word is. Demonic is what comes to mind, but that's not the word. I mean, he's bad. I mean, that there's really, like. He's done some just horrific, horrific things.

Also in the room for many of these sessions, Detective Jeff Bell from the Anchorage police department. You heard him occasionally as Keyes confessed to the courier murders. He's retired now, but told us that during those interrogations he felt it, too.

Yeah.

What a monster. And not only that, the physical reaction that he was having in telling us those details was visible. We could see him, you know, goosebumps. And he kept rubbing his arms and the hair standing up on his arms. He was maybe reliving it. I don't know what was happening to him, but it was very disturbing to watch, I can tell you that. It was one of those times where I got a vibe from him that was very, very powerful and scary and that kind of like the makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Eyes kind of just go right through you. Looking at him, he seemed like a big man. You know, he doesn't, he isn't really that big, but he seemed like a powerful person.

Detective Bell is a key player in this story, and we'll be hearing a lot more from him in later episodes.

And so as we move forward in this series and continue to try and figure out how far Israel keys actually went, we're going to run into some natural challenges. For one, as we learn from the courier murders, he was incredibly skilled and meticulous, moving like a shark, invisible under the water.

He was very good at what he did. And so really, the only way that we are going to definitively tie keys to a victim is going to be, you know, DNA or something significant like that. Likely what we're going to be able to do is tie keys to an area, a time, a location when somebody went missing. And that's what we'll have. And we can make assumptions that keys was responsible. And so we have not been able to really tie him to any other missing persons yet.

And because he was so unique, the usual police playbook had to change for.

Everybody that was involved. I would say it was the first and only case like that. Everybody was kind of just learning. And we did have difference of opinions and internal fights between law enforcement and prosecutions and law enforcement and law enforcement.

Government, politics, bureaucracy, all that comes along with that was playing a role, too, sometimes leading to mistakes and missed opportunities.

When some, something big like this happens in a smaller town, even though it's the biggest town in Alaska, it gets very political very fast. And, you know, I think everybody was trying to do the right thing.

In the end, you'll learn that Israel Keys was incredibly smart, crafty and manipulative. He put those skills to work in jail, too, always playing his game his way.

I think we did a total of 25 ish interviews with keys. And I would say his demeanor from that very first one to the very last one, it never really changed. He was very calm, very relaxed. The first few interviews. This was obviously all new to him interacting with law enforcement. And I think law enforcement had the upper hand initially with him, and then as time went on, he really had the upper hand. He had all the cards and he knew that. And so it really became kind of a chess match at that point.

Israel told us in an interview that if we found out information, he would admit to it. If we were right and we had the victim, he would tell us about it. But he wasn't going to just give us a list of names and locations where these occurred. But if we could find them, he would admit to it.

And as we go, we'll also explore the psychology behind Israel Keys and killers like him.

Whenever I got a serial sexual case to work, I never wanted to only focus on those victims that became part of the series. I also wanted to look for the practice murders. And practice murders are the ones that come before the person becomes a legitimate serial killer. In other words, they're good at what they do. They know the weapon, they know how to plan, they know how to follow, they know how to fight with someone that fights back with him. That's when they become really an expert at what they do. I want to look at the practice crimes, which would include practice murders.

Did Israel Keyes commit practice murders? If so, are they part of the eleven victims attributed to him by the FBI based on keys own clues, we'll explore that question, too. There's a lot here to pick through.

So many leads to chase down documents and statements, to parse movements, to map. Israel's story will take us across the United States and back again through Canada, to the Middle east and even Central America. And next time we'll continue our search for who Israel Keys really was and.

How far Israel Keys really went.

There is no one who knows me or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me, really. They're going to tell you something that does not line up with anything I tell you, because I'm two different people, basically. And the only person who knows about what I'm telling you, the kind of things I'm telling you, is me.

Until next time, thanks for listening. Deviant is written, produced and executive produced by Clark Goldband, Andrew Iden and me, Dan Sematovich. Original scoring by Shuvo sir with editorial and production consultation from Jenny Ammons marketing, sales and distribution support comes from our friends at Gemini 13.