This Serial Killer ‘Resurrected’ His Victim From Death
It doesn’t get crueler than this
Downtown Anchorage, Alaska, February 4, 2012, 8: 30 PM: As Duane drove through the chilly evening of Anchorage, all he could think about was his girlfriend-Samantha Koenig. Things had taken a drastic turn in their relationship, but Samantha always retained her special place in his heart.
So, when she asked if Duane could pick her up from the Common Grounds coffee stand in Anchorage, he jumped in without a second thought. The 18-year-old Samantha worked as a Barista in the coffee stand for a while now.
But as Duane pulled towards the parking lot, he realized that Samanta was gone before he had arrived.
“Perhaps her dad picked her up,” he thought.
Duane wanted to double-check on that. So he drove straight to Samantha’s father’s house and, much to his shock, found that she was not there. The father and the boyfriend teamed up to find the truth behind her disappearance and started trying Samantha’s cell phone.
After several calls that elicited no response, Duane now had a text message from Samantha. The message said Samantha was taking a break for a while and that she would be with her friends.
Although the text sufficiently explained her absence, her father knew that such a message was uncharacteristic of her. If Samantha had taken a weekend break, her father would have been intimated. And not by a text, but at least by a call.
The duo started smelling something fishy. They knew something bad had happened to Samantha.
A few minutes earlier
Samantha was waiting for Duane.
Although Samanta had only been working as a Barista for quite a few weeks, she had already earned a name for keeping the shop meticulously clean. She was wiping the counter table, putting things on shelves, while a montage of several moments she had with Duane flashed in her mind.
Samantha’s train of thoughts was suddenly interrupted by the sounds of approaching footsteps.
“A customer,” she thought.
A man on a ski mask walked into the coffee shop.
“A cup of americano, please,” he asked.
Everything about his attire and attitude screamed danger for Samantha, but she handed over the coffee confidently.
The stranger kept the coffee on the table and took a gun out of his pocket.
“Now get me the money in the register,” the man ordered.
Samantha was terrified. She looked out through the window hoping for Duane’s intervention but knew he wouldn’t be here for another few minutes.
“If this was a robbery attempt, I should at least save myself.” she thought. Samantha obliged by handing him the money.
But he wasn’t going to leave.
The ski-masked man tied Samantha’s hands with zip ties and made her walk into his truck.
“You get into the car with this man, and it’s all over. You have to find a way to escape before that,” she told herself.
The walk to the car
The abductor had a .22 pistol pressed into the ribs of Samantha. She knew what it meant. This gun was a silent, handy weapon that you could put to use even in the middle of a crowd; nobody would notice.
Samantha’s first window of opportunity or half-opportunity presented itself in the form of a Canon DSLR lying on the floor. The abductor found this abandoned digital device worth taking home. He stooped over to pick it up while Samantha, sensing a chance, tried to wriggle away and rush.
However, the man was strong and alert enough to pull her back into his captivity, and this time, the gun pressed deeper into her ribs as if making a statement — “I am not afraid to use this.”
Her hopes for freedom had taken a hit, and she felt a bit of her courage being drained by this setback. So, as the abductor walked along with Samantha to his truck, she couldn’t alert anybody around. He held her close, asked her to lean on him like she loved him.
Inside her mind, she was hoping someone would notice the gun and raise an alarm.
Nobody did.
Eventually, the kidnapper drove away with Samantha. He had a police scanner in his ears, and he constantly monitored if the force was picking up a message of a missing teenage girl; there was none.
The family man
Israel Keyes was a serial killer hiding in plain sight. He had a girlfriend, a daughter, and a good house he co-owned with his girlfriend. He possessed a sense of self-restraint and caution not to barge into circumstances that raised suspicion.
But he was also a violent murderer who couldn’t predict when the urge to kill would come to him, so he had weapons stashed in several parts of the country.
When the mood struck him, he would retrieve the hidden weapons and go about choosing random targets. And he did them so professionally, without leaving any traces of evidence.
On this night, his prey was the unfortunate Samantha, sitting next to him in his truck. He had already made her send a text to Duane’s phone to block any interested searching parties.
As we saw, neither Duane nor Samantha’s father took that bait.
Keyes felt confident that his police scanner could alert him if the force had a sniff.
“This is going to be another successful job,” he thought as he pulled his truck into the driveway of his house. It was close to midnight by then.
Time is of the essence.
Mr Keyes knew his 10-year-old daughter was sleeping inside his house, but not his girlfriend, Kimberly. The latter was a night owl. He had to wait at least past 2 AM to ensure that his girlfriend would not walk on his act. Keyes checked his watch. He was on a tight schedule; A trip to the airport was due at 5 AM. The father and the daughter were going to leave for a weekend picnic in New Orleans. Time was of the essence.
Did Keyes choose the wrong date to kidnap Samantha?
By 2 AM, Samantha was pulled out of the truck and dragged into a shed beside his house. Fatigue and fear had almost paralyzed her, and she wasn’t calculating the escape routes with the same efficiency as before.
Even if she could, this man was too prepared to block it.
Keyes tied Samantha to a wall. Next, he wanted her home address, ATM card, and it’s pin. He convinced her that this was an abduction for ransom.
Was it?
The 18-year-old was hoping it would be so that her life would be spared. She readily gave away the address and ATM secret pin. She knew that her dad would find a way to raise the money and save her.
Israel Keyes went to his home, checked on his daughter. She was sleeping so gracefully, oblivious of the gut-wrenching acts her father was pulling off. Before sleeping, all she could think of was the weekend cruise in New Orleans.
Her father promised, and she knew he would keep his promises.
Mr. Keyes soon returned to the shed where Samantha was held captive. He had a glass of wine in his hands. His eyes now had a cruel resolve with a hint of lust.
He walked up to Samantha.
The proof of life
Elsewhere, Samantha’s father, James, had approached the Police. The investigative team checked the CCTV footage and saw a man with a ski mask taking Samantha with him, but that was pretty much all the progress they made.
Even the FBI was roped in to be a part of this search, but Israel Keyes had hardly left a clue.
James couldn’t just stay put and watch a fruitless investigation carry on forever. So he came out requesting the support of the residents of Anchorage to find his missing daughter. His efforts attracted national attention, and Samantha’s kidnap was all over the news.
People were moved by the battle James was waging, and they offered money to fund a reward to anyone who could come up with useful information about the whereabouts of Samantha.
However, none came forward. Nobody had seen anything.
Three weeks after the abduction, on February 24, Dwayne had a text message from Samantha’s phone. It said:
“Conner park sign under pic of albert ain’t she purty”
The message was directing them to a particular place in a park.
James and Dwayne rushed to the scene, and in the spot the kidnapper mentioned, they found a ziplock bag. Inside the bag was a ransom note and a photo taken from a polaroid camera.
The photo was that of Samantha, who had a plain expression on her face, staring a little away from the lens. Next to Samantha, her abductor held a newspaper dated February 13.
This was the proof of life photo Israel Keyes had sent.
Nine more days had elapsed since February 13. The proof of life, if anything, was a little obsolete. But they had to believe.
Samantha Koenig was kidnapped on February 4.
The proof of life photo was dated February 13.
The world saw the photo on February 24.
Was she still alive?
The ransom note
The ransom note found along with the photo demanded that James put 30000 USD into the bank account of Samantha. If he obliged, Samantha was promised to be released six months later.
The investigative officers asked James to abide by the demand, as they knew that this modus operandi of the abductor opened a definite chance to arrest him.
If the kidnapper tried to withdraw money from this account, the officers could track the ATM, rush there and catch him red-handed. They made arrangements to gain speedy notifications of any withdrawal from Samantha’s account and waited for the abductor to make a mistake.
The ploy was intelligent but not something Israel Keyes had not foreseen. He made three withdrawals from three different ATMs in Anchorage but vanished before the force showed up.
Every time the officers checked the security footage inside the ATM, they saw a man wearing a ski mask and sunglasses pull the money out of the machine.
After a week’s silence, more withdrawals were made in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The officers rushed to the spot, but only after Mr. Keyes had disappeared.
However, his Texas withdrawal wasn’t as clean as the other ones.
One of the security camera footage in the ATM at Texas picked up the car in which the ski-masked man was leaving:
A white color Ford Focus.
Samantha …
February 5, 2012: Israel Keyes had just walked into the shed with a wine glass. He knew his girlfriend and daughter were asleep. He had also figured out what he wanted to do with Samantha, but he fancied one last cruel joke with her.
So, Keyes cut her zip lock, untied the ropes, gave Samantha a cigarette, and assured her that this was just a kidnap for ransom. He even said that her father was contacted, but that contact only happened three weeks later.
Samantha, for the first time in the past several hours, breathed easy. She hoped she would be allowed to leave once her kidnapper had the money. But little did she know that this was just the calm before her final storm.
After offering Samantha a few minutes of relief, Keyes grabbed and tied her even more tightly. The 18-year-old was taken aback by this sudden transformation. The glimmer of hope in her eyes had given way to a frantic scare.
Israel Keyes went back to his home one more time to check on his daughter and girlfriend. They were asleep. He returned to the shed to find a struggling Samantha lying in her sweat and urine.
What followed was a brutal assault. There was no mercy.
By the time Keyes was done, the script had become obvious to Samantha. There was a stoic resignation on her face. She did not fight anymore.
“Are you going to kill me,” she asked.
Israel Keyes said yes.
He took a knife and pressed it deep into the chest of Samantha. She was killed only hours after her kidnap.
Israel Keyes arrested
Once the abductor’s car was revealed, it did not take much time for the force to zero in on Israel Keyes. The ski mask, Samantha’s ATM card, and a gun was recovered from his car. He was arrested.
Inside the interrogation room, Israel Keyes started narrating the horrible ordeal Samantha had to go through and much more, but not before his demands were met.
And those demands included everything from a promise that his daughter will never read about him in a newspaper, his house will not be torn apart to a coffee from Starbucks, a Snickers chocolate bar, and a cigarette.
The officers learned that apart from Samantha Koenig, Keyes was responsible for several other murders, seven at least.
Israel Keyes chose his targets randomly, but once he did, he was very careful with the proceedings. He killed people far from his place, never killed twice in the same area, paid everything in cash and never used a phone while on a mission.
It is such precautions that made him extremely elusive. And he had been doing it for fourteen years!
The Samantha resurrection
If Samantha was dead on the day(February 5)Israel Keyes left for the Caribbean island, how come the ‘proof of life’ photo had a newspaper dated February 13?
Before Mr. Keyes and his daughter left for the airport, he had already kept Samantha’s body in a freezer. Two weeks later, when he returned, he retrieved the body and put some make-up on it to make it seem alive.
Then he sewed Samanta’s eyes open, sat her up on a chair, and took a polaroid shot with a copy of the newspaper dated February 13.
Thus Israel Keyes had ‘woken’ Samantha up from the dead so that he could extract money out of her parents. He then disposed her body in Matanuska lake, north of Anchorage.
In retrospect, we can call this eye-sewing a folly on his part because it is what eventually led to his downfall. Had he not spearheaded the ransom plan, Keyes could have been still amongst us, choosing random targets.
Where is Israel Keyes now?
According to the investigative officers, Israel Keyes killed people for pure fun. It was an addiction for him. He executed his targets without a hint of remorse, and his psychological evaluation showed that Keyes was a mentally fit and extremely functional person.
December 2, 2012: Before Keyes’ trial could begin, he took his own life in the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
Under his body was a letter in which he described his victims as ‘pretty captive butterflies.’
During his funeral, which was attended by his mother and four sisters, the pastor who opened the service said:
“He is not in a better place, he is in a place of eternal torment.”
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