Keyes: I cut the phone lines as soon as I picked the house.
Once I was actually in the house,
I was probably in the bedroom within five or six seconds.
It was 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.
I think they were just kind of in awe that it was happening.
Like, they couldn't believe it.
And they kept wanting an explanation
as to why it was happening.
♪♪
Welcome to "Very Scary People." I'm Donnie Wahlberg.
Israel Keyes is in Texas.
He said he traveled there from Alaska for his sister's wedding.
But it looks like he's running from something.
He has used kidnap victim
Samantha Koenig's ATM card several times.
Now the Texas rangers want to know how he got Samantha's card
and if he knows where she is.
This is part two of "The Cross-Country Killer."
On the night of February 1, 2012,
Samantha Koenig was working at the Common Grounds coffee stand.
He said they were random. It had to do with the place.
Hunter: Shortly before it closed,
a man walked up and ordered a coffee.
When she turned back around, he had a gun pointing at her.
You always hope that it's just a robbery.
But she's led away from there and kidnapped.
He wasn't looking for a particular age.
He tells her that he is wanting to get money from her family.
He wasn't looking for a particular type of person.
His victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He took her ATM card and made a ransom demand.
A ransom note demanding $30,000.
A few hours later, somebody made a withdrawal.
He is in full disguise, wearing gloves, not to be detected.
We had a trace on the card.
The next time he used it was in Arizona.
He then ended up in Humble, Texas, again, withdrawing money.
An ATM surveillance camera grabbed footage of the car
he was in, a white sedan.
FBI got in touch with the Texas rangers,
and put together a bolo, be on the lookout,
for the vehicle.
On March 13th, police were able to identify the vehicle.
They followed him and they eventually pulled him over.
And they identified him through his Alaska I.D.
as Israel Keyes.
He was standing in front of the car,
and he was, like, staring off into...
...he was just staring off into nowhere.
And he didn't really
make eye contact with us.
They search the car and uncover Samantha's I.D.,
her cellphone, a debit card,
and the disguise that match the one from the ATM footage.
When the ATM card was found,
the decision to put him in a vehicle, secure him,
and take him to jail was instantaneously made.
You know, this ballgame is over.
We had too much circumstantial evidence on the front end,
and then we started to find things
that this is not just circumstantial.
This is absolute evidence
that this is the guy that we're looking for.
It was over.
It was time to take him to jail.
At that point, what my job was to do in Alaska
was, we now had a name and a suspect,
and I immediately went to Israel's house
with a team of SWAT guys,
because we didn't know if Samantha was still alive,
if she was at that house.
When they searched the house,
they didn't find any sign of Samantha.
After Keyes was arrested, he was extradited back to Alaska
and he was held there in an Alaska correctional facility.
While he was being held there,
he started talking to federal investigators about his crimes,
and he told the investigators
that he would be willing to cooperate to some extent
and tell them about some of the things he had done,
but he wanted it done under his own terms.
Investigators were willing to go along with Keyes
and his request to keep the details of the information
he shared out of the media
because they wanted to keep Keyes talking to them.
We were sitting with Israel.
That's when he confessed to us
of what had happened with Samantha.
Several hours after abducting Samantha Koenig
and after he had taken possession of her purse
and her bank debit card,
Israel Keyes returned back to the shed
that he had next to his house,
and in the early morning of February 2nd,
he raped Samantha.
He was telling us details, a very matter of fact,
and not shy about anything that he had done.
Authorities also learn that this is not the first time
he had targeted a teenage girl.
When Keyes was about 20 years old,
he had been planning to make his first kill.
In the late '90s, Israel Keyes' family moved to Maupin, Oregon.
It was there that he and his brothers
helped the father build a house.
There were some girls floating the river.
He set up in around the bend of a corner
where people would stop their tubes,
get out, and use the restroom.
And one of the tubers
who had kind of separated herself from the rest,
who was kind of behind all the others,
was a teenage girl.
Then he dragged her over to a remote
bathroom facility there.
And inside there, he subdued her.
He tied her up and raped her.
[ Woman gasps ]
And his plan was to kill her and to dump her body
in the waste tank there for the toilet.
Bell: He told us she said things to him like,
"You don't have to do this.
"You look like somebody that I would date.
You don't have to rape me."
Her acting that way sort of calmed his killing urge.
And he kind of chickened out.
He regretted that he made that mistake,
letting her go where she could have told on him
and gotten him in trouble.
♪♪
When you look at the interrogation,
you really get a sense of the manipulation
that's going on here and the back and forth,
the cat and mouse game going on
between Israel Keyes and law enforcement.
Members of law enforcement
even brought in treats to Israel Keyes,
hoping that he would divulge more.
Snickers, an americano coffee,
bagels, cigars, even.
Chacon: I mean, they did what they had to do.
And your job is to keep him talking
and keep him providing information to you,
whatever it takes to do that.
The first thing we want to know,
and what everybody wants to know is where is Samantha?
And he acknowledged that she was deceased.
The worst interview to listen to
was what he had done with Samantha.
It was hard to listen to.
Israel Keyes, he raped Samantha inside the shed
and then strangled her.
Bell: He wrapped Samantha up in some plastic
and he put her in some cabinetry that was inside that shed.
And he shut the heat off in that shed.
Remember, it is February in Alaska -- extremely cold.
That will preserve Samantha's body.
After raping and killing Samantha Koenig,
Israel Keyes caught a flight out of Anchorage
and went on a cruise.
When Israel Keyes arrived back from that cruise
two weeks later, he goes to the shed.
He thawed out Samantha's body with some heaters he had.
And after he did that, he put into plan an idea
that he had come up with to get a ransom paid.
And what he did is he pretended that Samantha was still alive.
He puts makeup on Samantha,
sews her eyes open with fishing line.
Doing her hair,
trying to make it look like Samantha was still alive.
He said it took him hours and hours to do this.
And he took a Polaroid of her,
and he had a recent newspaper next to her,
kind of a proof of life type photograph.
It was my opinion at the time that she was either deceased
or was unconscious in the photograph.
And once we talked to Israel, as you may know now,
Samantha was already deceased by the time APD was notified
she was missing.
It was a game. It was a game to him.
And he asked for a computer, which we got him,
and he proceeded to show us
where Samantha's remains were using Google maps.
And he took us to Matanuska Lake,
put the cursor on a location in the lake,
and he said that she's right there.
Chacon: It's about 40 minutes north of Anchorage.
It just struck me as very beautiful.
The sky was just wide open and blue
and the lake just looked beautiful.
I went out to that lake with those coordinates
and I kind of got down on my knee
and I was just looking at the ice,
because there was two feet of snow,
and obviously, I wasn't able to see anything.
But I knew that's where Samantha was.
Chacon: Keyes gave us a general idea of
where he had entered the lake.
And he wanted to make himself look like an ice fishermen.
So, we knew where he had parked and where he had gone in
and accessed, you know, the frozen lake.
We have a plan already of how we're going to
approach this search.
We know we're going to deploy a sonar first,
which sits on a tripod on the bottom
and does a circulating picture for us.
As soon as the sonar got on the bottom,
the bottom was clean and flat,
and we could see the shape of objects on the sonar.
There was a hushed tone in that pop-up shelter
as we threw the lights
and the camera on and people were looking like at that image.
So, we put two divers in the water,
and they start recovering Samantha.
Earlier today, a forensic dive team
discovered in Matanuska Lake,
what investigators believe to be the body of Samantha Koenig.
When we found her remains,
that was also another very, very low point.
We stopped him, we found her, we brought her home.
But she was deceased.
So that was a very difficult time for me, personally,
in the investigation.
Tasker Bell: Later that afternoon, I got word.
James was just sitting there,
just sitting there,
but he was still strong for her friends,
he was still strong for Duane.
But that was a very somber,
quiet day.
None of us really said much other
than just held onto each other
and moved on to the next steps,
which was planning her service.
♪♪
Hunter: Israel Keyes was born in 1978 in Utah.
He was one of 10 children.
He was the second child born to the family.
He was the oldest son of the family.
His parents were Christian fundamentalists.
They were very, very religious.
They were often very harsh with administering
their religious views to Israel and the other kids.
When he was just a toddler,
the family moved to Colville, Washington, where at one point,
they lived in a one-bedroom cabin with no electricity
and no access to the outside world.
The family did not believe in modern medicine,
government interference, and public schools.
When Israel Keyes' family was living in Colville, Washington,
his parents joined a religious organization out there,
a church called the Ark.
And the Ark was a very extremist Christian faith.
So, Israel, at a young age, was exposed to a lot
of these very extreme religious viewpoints.
Israel was homeschooled, as were his siblings.
So, their socialization was limited
to each other to some extent.
They did have friends,
although the parents were very controlling
as to what they could do with their friends,
whether they could go to the friends' houses or not.
When he was 14 years old,
he would do things that he thought were normal
and others didn't think they were.
Keyes tells us a story
about going into the woods as a teenager,
and he brings one of his friends into the woods,
and he's, like, going to have, like, fun.
And fun to Keyes is capturing this cat
and tying a rope around it until it's dead.
His friend is so horrified by this that the friend winds up
vomiting right there in the woods,
and Keyes cannot understand that.
He looks at his friend
and says he can't understand why he's doing that.
"This is fun."
Hunter: As he got older, he did come to question
the harsh religious environment that his mother in particular
was raising the family in,
and he completely rebelled against it.
Bell: Back when Israel was 17,
he built his own cabin on their property
and lived in it by himself.
By then, he had realized that he was different than most people.
He enjoyed torturing animals and killing animals.
He had by then already burglarized places, taken guns.
And so, he knew that he was different,
and he knew that he didn't have that sense of empathy
and sorrow for things.
There probably were things about his childhood experiences
to which he reacted totally inappropriately
by railing against religiosity,
railing against just the very idea of trying to do good,
and basically deciding
that he was going to be the angel of death.
♪♪
Welcome back to "Very Scary People."
Israel Keyes is in custody for the abduction
and murder of Samantha Koenig.
Authorities suspect he has more victims
after finding searches on Keyes's computer
about missing Vermont couple Bill and Lorraine Currier.
Keyes is playing a game of cat and mouse,
and knows that he has the upper hand.
Israel Keyes flies to Chicago.
His plans were to visit some family members in Indiana,
go fishing, and check out property he owned,
then drives to Vermont.
On June 7, 2011, Israel Keyes
checked into the Handy Suites hotel in Essex, Vermont.
The next night, he went out looking for his victim.
He found a parking lot near a hotel where he was staying,
and he saw what he thought was a secluded bush area.
He hid in that area and he was going to wait
for somebody to come up in their vehicle,
and then he would take that person.
Keyes was hidden in the dark,
watching the car park.
He told us that a person drove in,
parked where he had hoped somebody would park.
It was a male.
But that person managed to quickly get out of the car
and run into the apartment complex before Keyes
could react.
And so, that person, they got away
without knowing how close they had been
to becoming one of Keyes's victims.
Bell: Israel was very restless
because he was feeling a need to take somebody.
So he went out for a walk in the neighborhood,
near the hotel,
and that's when he saw the house that the Curriers lived in.
Hunter: He knew he wanted a house
that had an attached garage
that would make it easier to enter unseen.
He knew he wanted to find a house
that it didn't look like there were children living there.
He was looking very carefully
for the lack of any pets,
especially a yappy dog.
And the Curriers did not have a dog.
It was more about the house than it was about the Curriers.
And so, he watched, and waited at night.
He cuts their phone lines.
And then he entered the house through the garage.
Grabs a crowbar from the garage
and gets into the house and fast,
busting the glass window.
Hunter: He had a headlamp on so he could see.
And he came in, in a blitz-style attack,
he called it.
He rushed in with a gun and surprised the Curriers,
who were sleeping in their bed.
He said the Curriers were just waking up,
kind of didn't know what was going on quite yet.
And that's how he was able to overwhelm them.
And he had them turn over on their stomachs
and he bound them with zip ties immediately.
They didn't have a chance to fight or run.
Israel Keyes interrogates the couple,
finding items in their home.
I think that part of what he got off on was dragging it out.
To get into the bedroom and announce his presence
and terrify them
and do whatever he planned to do.
Keyes forced them into their own car
and then drove off with them,
and took them to an abandoned farmhouse
located a few miles away.
He took Bill Currier into the house first.
He took him down into the basement
and tied him up down in the basement
of this abandoned farmhouse.
Then he went back to the car in the driveway to get Lorraine,
and as he walked back,
he saw Lorraine running away towards the road.
While Israel was upstairs assaulting Mrs. Currier,
Bill Currier was downstairs.
Yelling and screaming, "Where's my wife?
Where's my wife?"
So, he had to go leave Lorraine again
and go down back into the basement where Bill was.
Mr. Currier had gotten off the stool
and a struggle ensued.
Bell: He told us that Mr. Currier
wasn't cooperating with his plan.
He didn't tell us what his plan was,
but he did say he had plans for both of them.
Bill had become so belligerent at this point
and was fighting back.
Keyes had to resort to using his gun,
which he had not planned on doing, he didn't want to do.
Israel then shot him multiple times.
After Bill was dead, Keyes went back upstairs
and raped Lorraine
and strangled her to death.
Jennifer: Israel Keyes knew what he was doing.
Killed them in that house, raped Lorraine in that house,
kidnapped my brother and handcuffed him in that house.
That man deserved to rot in prison.
♪♪
To get rid of the bodies, Keyes pours Drano on them,
put them each in a garbage bag,
and shoves the bodies into a corner of the basement
of that abandoned farmhouse.
When he told us that he was going to give us
the two more bodies and a name, he gave us the name Curriers.
And he asked for a computer, and he went to Google maps
and he put the cursor on the house where he said
that the bodies could be found in a corner of the basement,
and so law enforcement was sent out to that location.
It was an abandoned farmhouse kind of out in the country.
Unfortunately, that house had been destroyed
and been taken down.
And the remnants of the house had been hauled to a dump site
that was the size of several football fields,
up to 12 feet deep.
Vermont authorities tried desperately
to find their bodies, searching for 11 weeks.
We told you yesterday
an announcement would come today,
and now it's official.
The dig at the Coventry landfill is over.
The bodies of Bill and Lorraine Currier were not recovered.
To this day, Bill and Lorraine Currier
are listed as missing persons
even though we know that they are dead.
I will never feel like there's closure
until their bodies are found,
and I don't think you'll ever find them, ever.
Hunter: Keyes was very crafty in the way
he committed his crimes.
He was very elusive.
Oftentimes, he would fly into an airport in one state,
he would rent a car there,
he would then drive out of that state to another state,
sometimes driving through multiple states
before he would get to an area
where he would actually commit a crime.
He would bury these caches or kill kits in areas,
and then travel back to those locations
to commit the next crime.
And what these kill kits were is he would take
a five-gallon plastic bucket and he would put in it tools
that he would need for future crimes.
He'd have rope, he'd have gloves,
he'd have tape, he'd have zip ties,
some of them, he would have a gun in there.
They had all the tools that someone would need to abduct,
restrain, and murder someone.
He would do this years in advance,
and he'd have them stashed all over the country.
I called up the Essex police and I said,
"Did he bury one of those things here in Vermont?"
And the officer that I was speaking to said,
"Yes, he did. We have evidence that he did."
Bell: In 2009, he had been on the east coast
and he had buried a kill kit in Essex, Vermont, area.
And so he went back to that location
to retrieve that kill cache, which had guns in it,
and then killed the Curriers.
He was very random about his victims.
He wasn't looking for a particular age,
he wasn't looking for a particular type of person.
His victims were more of being in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
He purposely made it very difficult to track him down.
In my 27-year career in the FBI,
I never saw anybody so meticulous
in planning their crimes
and getting away with it for so long.
Keyes made it very clear that in exchange for the information
he was willing to give them,
he wanted to make sure that to the extent possible,
his daughter could be protected from what he had done.
He didn't want the details released to the public.
And so, there's a cat and mouse game
that sometimes you have to play.
It's only wrong if it shuts down the person and he stops talking.
But in this particular case, he was still providing useful
information and accurate information.
Authorities believe Israel Keyes'
first murder victim
happened not long after he moved to Neah Bay,
Washington, in 2001.
And more victims soon follow.
Bell: We know that he disposed of bodies
in Lake Crescent, in Washington.
The lake is, in some parts, 600 feet deep.
And so we weren't able to find any victims.
Thompson: He talked about Lake Crescent.
He talked about various other places in Washington
where he could just make people disappear,
and those were some of the same places that we drove
by when I was working with him.
So it was really, really jarring
to find out about that,
and that I had been alone
with him for hours on end
in some places he said he could hide a body
where nobody would ever find it.
To protect their investigation,
authorities are keeping Israel Keyes's name
and crimes under wraps.
That is until a Vermont TV station makes an announcement.
A channel 3 news investigation over the last several months
has led us to the identity of the man
accused of killing the Curriers.
Israel Keyes finds out his name is made public,
and stops talking.
I think he thought that he would take responsibility for it
and that would be it and the details wouldn't come out.
And so, once he found out that every single detail
he told was going to eventually come out,
he became much more reluctant to give us details.
♪♪
Keyes was closely monitored
and was even on suicide watch for a period of time,
but at some point,
Keyes was able to get ahold of a razor blade.
He was a coward for doing what he did.
You had no problems killing that couple,
you had no problems killing Samantha.
You should have no problems standing up
and answering for it.
Hunter: Early in the morning of December 2nd,
Keyes' body was found in his cell.
He had killed himself late the night before.
The FBI says a suspected serial killer
has committed suicide while in custody.
In March, Israel Keyes was charged with the murder of
18-year-old Alaskan barista Samantha Koenig.
Before killing himself on Sunday,
police say that Keyes confessed to other murders.
I got a phone call from either from somebody in Anchorage
or somebody in Quantico that said, "Hey, have you heard?
Israel Keyes -- he's dead."
He had used a razor blade that he had managed to obtain somehow
and used that to slit his own wrists.
And then to make sure that he was successful,
he had actually planned ahead to have a backup.
At that point, Israel Keyes hung himself.
How did he get the goddamn ability to kill himself?
Like, seriously? What's wrong with our system?
Russell: I think it was pretty clear
how this was going to end for him.
Then I think he decided,
"Well, my way to go out and sort of win now"
is to take himself out as he did, commit suicide
and leave the cops
still with all these questions and quandaries.
The reality is he got the last word.
Hopefully, we will take it back
and make it for Samantha and the other victims.
A note was discovered after Keyes' suicide,
and even though the FBI analyzed the note,
there wasn't anything in there that allowed them to solve
any other cases or link any other victims to Keyes.
Also discovered in Keyes' cell
was that he had scrawled in his own blood,
he had drawn pictures of 11 skulls.
Bell: Skulls with upside down crosses on their foreheads.
There weren't any names.
There was one that said, "We are one," on them.
And I believe that is him signifying
that once he killed these people,
that they all became part of him.
Investigators surmise that the skulls
represented Keyes' victims.
We believe that those drawings kind of confirmed
what he was telling us, was that there was 11 victims.
He told us once he gave up Samantha
and once he gave up the Curriers
and once he gave up that information,
he felt like they left him,
and they no longer belong to him and their stories.
And so, I think that the main reason he didn't tell us
was he didn't want to give those victims up.
He took those people to the grave with him
because he did not want to share what he believed was his.
Keyes was careful to maintain the trappings of a normal life
of a regular guy.
On the one hand, this doting father figure,
this business owner, this supportive husband,
and then on the other hand, this very dark-hearted character
who enjoyed inflicting pain on others,
enjoying seeing suffering in others, enjoyed killing.
This isn't the case of a regular guy going bad.
This is a case of a bad guy
maintaining a facade of a regular guy.
He knew if he had his druthers,
he probably would have acted out openly as a killer all the time.
I think we can't always prevent bad things from happening,
but certainly, a national missing persons' database
for adults could help solve some of these unsolved cases
where families don't know what happened to their loved ones.
The people Israel Keyes killed, Samantha Koenig,
Bill and Lorraine Currier,
they were victims of happenstance.
They happened to come across this evil of Israel Keyes,
and there really was nothing that they could have done
to prevent these crimes from happening.
Jennifer: I want them to be remembered as real people.
Bill and Lorraine Currier are real people.
They were alive and well at one time,
and in my head, they are always going to be there.
Tasker Bell: Samantha will be remembered as a strong,
courageous woman.
She did everything right,
and all she did was tried to go do a job,
go home with her boyfriend, her dad, and have a life.
Authorities believe Israel Keyes killed as many as 11 people.
Those who knew him -- even loved him --
apparently knew nothing about his dark side.
And that's possibly the scariest part of
Israel Keyes's life -- his true self, his evil self.
I'm Donnie Wahlberg. Thanks for watching.
Good night.
♪♪