← The Megyn Kelly Show
The Megyn Kelly Show
How Deranged Serial Killer Israel Keyes Finally Got Caught - Crime Week Continues with Maureen Callahan | Ep. 1219
01:15:12
Megyn Kelly is joined for Crime Week by Maureen Callahan, host of "The Nerve" and author of the book "American Predator," to talk about her reporting on the serial killer Israel Keyes, why the FBI originally cooperated with her book on Keyes but then suddenly stopped, the shocking story behind the "final victim" of Keyes Samantha in Alaska, how Keyes was finally caught after more than a decade, the shocking police interrogation that happened next, what cops found in Keyes' car, the twist in Keyes' confession, what police would learn about various victims of Keyes, what we know about psychopathy and true evil, the strange moment in the interrogation of serial killer Israel Keyes when he stops cooperating, other potential victims of Keyes from around the country, how women can and should protect themselves, and more. Subscribe to Maureen's show The Nerve: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nerve-with-maureen-callahan/id1808684702 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/...
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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
Megyn Kelly
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show. Today we are examining a serial killer that some in law enforcement have called unlike any other in modern American history. A predator who was meticulous, methodical, unpredictable and for years completely undetected. His name, Israel Keys. Keys had no victim type, no geographic pattern and an M.O. the FBI described to be as quote, unique as a fingerprint. Our very own Maureen Callahan, host of the Nerve, spent years uncovering how Keys operated. Her investigation led her to write the bestselling book on American predator, the Hunt for the most meticulous serial killer of the 21st century. Maureen also appears in the ABC true crime documentary Wild Crime. Eleven Skulls on Hulu, which traces the disappearance of Samantha Koenig, the crime that finally exposed Keyes's double life Watch.
- [02:23]
Narrator/Voice Actor
He was taking trips.
- [02:24]
Commercial Announcer
He was killing people.
- [02:26]
Maureen Callahan
He buried victims all over the continental United States.
- [02:29]
Narrator/Voice Actor
Underneath his bed there was 11 skulls.
- [02:33]
Megyn Kelly
Drawn using a finger in blood.
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Narrator/Voice Actor
All of these victims souls belong to him. They're mine. This guy is evil genius. I'm more sane than most Americans.
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Maureen Callahan
He's the best serial killer that ever existed.
- [02:48]
Megyn Kelly
Wow. Maureen is one of the foremost experts on keys and she joins me now. Every once in a while, something comes along that reminds us of the power of storytelling. Something bold, meaningful and grounded in faith. The Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin is a new seven part series from The Daily Wire, based on the novels by Stephen R. Loughead. In the series, as pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's faith lights the spark of a civilization reborn. It's a story about courage, order and moral clarity. It's the kind of story Hollywood does not make anymore. Through blood, faith and sacrifice, Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire on January 22, 2026. Watch the new trailer now at pendragonseries.com hi.
- [03:47]
Maureen Callahan
Hi.
- [03:49]
Megyn Kelly
I've always known that you've written this book, but I had never read it. And I'd never known who Israel Keys was. Why is his name so, like, not on the list of all the big serial killers?
- [04:00]
Maureen Callahan
It's really wild, isn't it? Isn't it?
- [04:02]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah.
- [04:03]
Maureen Callahan
I mean, my theory about it is that, you know, not long after Keys was apprehended, I'm gonna say about nine months in. I don't wanna spoil how this sort of ends for anybody. The FBI announced that they had this guy in custody. Nobody had ever heard of him. Nobody knew. He'd been operating all over the United States for at least 14 years, probably more. And they asked the public for help in identifying other victims, in locating and identifying other victims. And then they just as quickly pulled this case back from public view. And I could never understand why. So I began the book with the full cooperation of the FBI. And, in fact, one of the agents on the case said to me that he was really surprised because he'd never seen the Bureau in his, like, 26 years there give a journalist such unfettered access to them. And then about halfway through, I got back from one trip to Alaska. He was based up in Alaska, Keys. And the FBI just shut down.
- [05:08]
Megyn Kelly
What year was this?
- [05:10]
Maureen Callahan
When they shut down?
- [05:11]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, with me.
- [05:12]
Maureen Callahan
Well, the book came out in 2019. So I'm gonna say, like, 2017. 17.
- [05:16]
Megyn Kelly
Wow.
- [05:17]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [05:18]
Megyn Kelly
All right, so let's start. It's not exactly the beginning, but let's start with the murder of Samantha. Because this. This would be the tripping wire for him.
- [05:28]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [05:29]
Megyn Kelly
She was in what state?
- [05:31]
Maureen Callahan
Alaska.
- [05:32]
Megyn Kelly
She was in Alaska. And she was in one of those little kiosk type things where you buy coffee from.
- [05:36]
Maureen Callahan
Right.
- [05:36]
Megyn Kelly
Like, coffees, some light food.
- [05:38]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [05:39]
Megyn Kelly
And she was working late at night, which, honestly, like, no woman should ever do. She shouldn't work alone in a little box that anyone can come up to with a gun and get into because that's exactly what happened to her? And we actually had that moment where Samantha was working in this little coffee hut. This is from the ABC documentary Wild 11 Skulls. And he jumps in first. He pulls a gun on her. You can see her back away. And then all the lights go out, and he jumps in. Watch. In the video, you can see Samantha.
- [06:14]
Maureen Callahan
Is closing up for the night in.
- [06:16]
Megyn Kelly
The coffee stand, cleaning and wiping things down.
- [06:20]
Maureen Callahan
It's late at night, so there aren't many coffee drinkers that are driving up to the stand.
- [06:26]
Megyn Kelly
And then you can see somebody walking up. You don't see a lot of people just walk up or driving a vehicle. Samantha goes to the window. So she starts making coffee. And she appears to be engaging with the person.
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Narrator/Voice Actor
At one point, she turns towards the window and she reacts.
- [06:56]
Megyn Kelly
I vividly remember Samantha doing this and putting her hands up.
- [07:02]
Narrator/Voice Actor
She then walks across the coffee stand and turns the lights off. Samantha took the money from the cash register. Then Samantha puts her coat on.
- [07:22]
Megyn Kelly
And then this individual just jumped straight.
- [07:25]
Maureen Callahan
Into the coffee hut.
- [07:30]
Megyn Kelly
That moment, Maureen, she saw the face of evil, and she knew it.
- [07:34]
Maureen Callahan
I'll tell you, when I was working on the book, I think I watched that tape, the abduction tape. I mean, I watched it many, many, many times, but I would go through it frame by frame, partly because the initial working theory, Samantha was 18 at the time. So she had just turned 18. She was legally an adult. Right. But they decided to treat it like a missing child. Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up. He was 10 minutes late. He would have been there. I don't know that it would have mattered, because Keys like, taking people in pairs. And that also distinguished him from many, many other serial killers. Their original theory was that Samantha was in on it, that that was a.
- [08:18]
Megyn Kelly
Staged abduction so she could get the.
- [08:21]
Maureen Callahan
Money, so she could get, like, the $200 that were in the till. And part of this also goes to the ways in which so many assumptions are made about victims of violent crimes. Samantha's father was like Hell's Angel. Hell's angel adjacent had his own brushes with the law. She was from the wrong side of the tracks. She had overcome her own drug issues. And so the theory was she's out partying and that's her accomplice. But when you go frame by frame through that, and you stopped right there when Keys jumps in. And he is a big guy. He's like at least six, four, very rangy. He jumps like a predator. There's something that's almost like a panther, the way he. Because those kiosks are up off the ground. They're on the side of the road. In Alaska, until Samantha's abduction, always stuffed by. Staffed rather by attractive young girls, often alone. In the summer, they used to make them wear bikinis.
- [09:19]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my God. That's crazy.
- [09:21]
Maureen Callahan
I know.
- [09:22]
Megyn Kelly
Girls do not do this.
- [09:23]
Maureen Callahan
And those were very coveted jobs in Alaska. It was something of a veneration, it was something of a validation. If you got a job that meant you were an attractive young woman who could lure customers in.
- [09:34]
Megyn Kelly
I used to worry even my own brother, who, you know, he was. He's five years older than I am, but he used to work in one of those gas station kiosks for his high school job after hours, you know, up until like 11 o' clock at night or whenever they closed. And he was alone. And I used to worry about him just being in there alone. You just never know who's gonna come through. It's literally everybody comes through a gas station and a female, a young female in Alaska, which, like, a lot of bad stuff happens in Alaska. It's so isolated. Like bad people go there to get lost 100%.
- [10:09]
Maureen Callahan
You know, the thing too about that is it doesn't even matter. I think the time was like close to 8 o' clock or 9 o'. Clock, you know, in. I was. I was sure to go to Alaska in two distinct times. Once in the dead of summer and once in the dead of winter, because I wanted to experience what those extremes really do to your mind and your body. And we're such animals, you know, like you go in the winter, I mean, you get like two hours of sunlight, if you're lucky, two hours of real sunlight. And it has a depressive feeling, but it also. There's a lot of. It's a lot of darkness. It's a lot of spiritual darkness. It's a lot of psychological darkness. Most people don't know this, but Alaska. More people come from the lower 48 than our natives up there. And they're all people who are running away from something.
- [10:51]
Megyn Kelly
Yes, sorry, Alaska, but it's. I mean, you're the most beautiful state in the Union, but you got a lot of misfits there. Every other Dateline is about something in Alaska. All these crime series like Alaska Wild Alaska, you know, all the. Anyway, so it's no accident Israel Keys found Alaska, but he was from Washington State. Right. Or he had been living there.
- [11:10]
Maureen Callahan
That's where he was raised. Yeah.
- [11:12]
Megyn Kelly
And it's. You're the one who turned me on to the Bundy book.
- [11:16]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, the Stranger Beside Me.
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Megyn Kelly
There's a lot of parallels there.
- [11:19]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, yeah.
- [11:20]
Megyn Kelly
Also from Washington state. And preyed on women. Ey. In Washington state. Like, the juxtaposition both in Alaska and Washington state, for that matter, of, like, immense beauty and Zen and calmness and nature and almost like godlike territory and evil roaming among it all.
- [11:40]
Maureen Callahan
And you know, the thing about Bundy, which, when Keyes was apprehended, he did say that was one of the serial killers that he had studied. He did sort of quote, unquote, admire Bundy also was interstate. Most serial killers, like, if you think of the Gilgo beach killer, you know, they tend to operate in one location. The Zodiac Killer, he was interstate also. But his last major, major spree, Bundy's, was in Florida. And I know we'll probably get to it later, but there is a very famous unsolved cold case involving multiple victims in Florida that I firmly believe is the work of Israel Keys.
- [12:24]
Megyn Kelly
So, although, unlike Ted Bundy, Israel Keys was not an attractive man.
- [12:28]
Maureen Callahan
Depends on how you look like. Honestly, There were some images where I was like, this guy is kind of attractive. Really? I can see it. Yeah.
- [12:37]
Megyn Kelly
In the interrogation video.
- [12:39]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, he looks like nothing in the interrogation.
- [12:41]
Megyn Kelly
You recoil.
- [12:41]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, yeah. No, he's. He's. All of his power. He did have power. He was the most powerful person in that room. They were never gonna solve another case without him. To a point. Once the interrogation gets to five months, six months, Jeff Bell, who's one of the leads, began putting some stuff together, which was remarkable, remarkable detective work. But, you know, the Samantha case, when they caught him, and that was an interstate chase. That was an interstate. Like, he made the mistake of.
- [13:11]
Megyn Kelly
Wait, let's.
- [13:11]
Maureen Callahan
Before we get there.
- [13:12]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so Samantha gets kidnapped from this coffee kiosk thing late at night. And they're not treating it quite with the urgency they would if, you know, some rich woman in California, you know, had this happen to her. And days go by, and then a ransom note appears on, like, a. A park bulletin board.
- [13:35]
Maureen Callahan
Yep.
- [13:36]
Megyn Kelly
And it shows a picture of her holding a newspaper that is dated post the date of her abduction. So they actually. This is legit. This is from a person who really has her. And then what happens?
- [13:50]
Maureen Callahan
And then they go to Samantha's father. The kidnapper is demanding, like, $50,000, $60,000. He's already started what would be considered now, like a GoFundMe. The community is donating money. James is not a man of means. And James is frantic. But they say, okay, now is the time to wire the money into this into this account. And James says, I don't want to. And then the FBI gets a tip from someone who knows James and says he's acting strangely. He yelled. He yelled at my daughter. Friend of my daughter's because she made some T shirts. Find Samantha, and she's selling them. And James is very upset that we're making money off of that. So now the FBI is. And Anchorage police are really confused because when they door knocked James, he wouldn't let them in the house after Samantha went missing.
- [14:48]
Megyn Kelly
So now he's looking suspicious.
- [14:49]
Maureen Callahan
So now they're looking at him, and they're looking at the boyfriend who has been living with Samantha and James. And they don't know which end is up, but they've never encountered a parent who is resistant to giving the reward money to the kidnapper who's promising a return.
- [15:07]
Megyn Kelly
Right.
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Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [15:09]
Megyn Kelly
Well, then they do get money deposited into her account, and the kidnapper starts making withdrawals with her ATM card, which is, by the way, how he gets caught. But who made the deposit into her account?
- [15:23]
Maureen Callahan
James eventually relented, and they said, he's gonna ask. He's asking for this much. We only deposit this much because now we have him. We're in contact, and now it's a negotiation. So that's conversation. He doesn't seem to realize that using this ATM car, they're, like, five minutes behind him. Every time he withdraws. Every time he withdraws, they're, like five minutes behind him. And he knows what he's doing because he knows where all the surveillance cameras are in any given place. He's going. He's covered up. You cannot see. It looks like it's a man. You can't really see. Then it stops working in Anchorage. The card stops pinging there, and then it starts pinging in New Mexico in these very tiny towns in New Mexico and up in Alaska. It's like a movie. It's like these FBI agents get word that her card's pinging down there, and they jump out of bed, and they rush to their war room at the FBI field office, and they're calling bank managers in Lordsburg, New Mexico, saying, can you get there? Can you get there? And the first one they called was like, sorry, I'm sleeping. I'm not getting out of bed for this.
- [16:28]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my. No. It's a serial killer. Well, I guess that was just a suspicion at the time.
- [16:33]
Maureen Callahan
They knew they had someone who abducted this young woman. They still didn't know whether she was in on it or not. It was very suspicious. A guy that sophisticated, if this is a true stranger abduction, they're very rare. So it's easy to see why the theorizing was such that it's the boyfriend, it's the father, she's in on it, whatever. They couldn't figure out why he would be using it. It's such an easy mode of detection.
- [17:03]
Megyn Kelly
It's so bold because it's so easy. Right. To see. Oh, my God, her ATM just pinged again. Where? And it is sort of how he got caught, because he made the mistake of letting his car get caught on camera at one of the locations. Right. And so they saw what kind of make, model, et cetera, of car, and maybe even a license plate, I'm trying to remember. But they. They tracked that car, and that's how they found him.
- [17:30]
Maureen Callahan
This was also incredible police work. And this is where the Texas Rangers come in. And these guys are such badasses. They are just like. Like Jeff Bell, who is one of the main guys in Alaska. He's a. He's. I think he's from the northeast maybe originally, I don't know. But he was like. When he went down to Texas and met the Texas Ranger who led that manhunt that caught Keys, which was a very cinematic event. Cause Keys was driving the most commonly rented vehicle in the United States of America. So it really was needle in a haystack. He was like, oh, my God, this is a Texas Ranger. Just like in the movies. Like a real badass, you know?
- [18:07]
Megyn Kelly
Right.
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Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [18:08]
Megyn Kelly
So they track him down, they arrested him, and they found incriminating materials in his car. Like it was kind of Bob's your uncle. Once they found him, he was not banking on cops pulling him over.
- [18:20]
Maureen Callahan
No.
- [18:21]
Megyn Kelly
And so then they bring him in for this interrogation. Now, who does the interrogation? Like, is it the feds? Is it the Jeff Bell of the Washington.
- [18:31]
Maureen Callahan
Well, first it's Steve Ranger, Steve Rayburn since retired. And an FBI agent named Deb Gannaway, who was looped in very quickly as all of this was unfolding in a very kinetic moment by moment fashion. And Steve Rayburn told me that they were so caught off guard that they didn't even have like a two way radio, like a two way audio system set up in their interrogation room. So they had to go to Target and buy a baby monitor.
- [19:01]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, no. So people could listen to it outside of the room.
- [19:03]
Maureen Callahan
Yes.
- [19:04]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my gosh.
- [19:04]
Maureen Callahan
Like, this is how MacGyverish. And like they. And they had no idea who they were dealing with. They really didn't. They Knew he was dangerous. They knew he had this woman. The lead agent on the case, Steve Payne, even in that moment, he's up in Alaska sitting at a car at one of these coffee kiosks, and he's the one agent on this case who has been holding out hope that Samantha is alive. Jeff Bell. Jeff Bell took one look at that ransom note with the proof of life photo of Samantha. She's looking at the camera dead center with the print paper, and he took one look at that and said, she's dead.
- [19:40]
Megyn Kelly
How. How'd he know that?
- [19:43]
Maureen Callahan
I don't know if he was just more dialed into the realities of what he factually was seeing or if there was something unnatural that he picked up on. You know, Steve, by his own admission, did not want to believe it. He knew he was in denial about it. And even the search of his car was like a. It was a multi state mess because he's up there worried that if they go into that car without the proper. I mean, what's the word for warrant? Thank you. Or they have probable cause, then everything they find, even if Samantha's body is in there, is thrown out like it can't get in. But Deb says to Steve, down here in Texas, we have a much looser interpretation of this. And if we've got a bad guy.
- [20:34]
Megyn Kelly
Good old Texas, and we think he's.
- [20:35]
Maureen Callahan
Got bad shit going on in his car, we can go into his car.
- [20:38]
Megyn Kelly
Here we have some of this. This is from the ABC doc Wild Crime. And it's dash cam footage from the moment that investigators decided to do a warrantless search on Keys's car. Here it is. We opened the trunk and the Ranger started going through things in the trunk of the car.
- [21:00]
Maureen Callahan
There you go. Hey.
- [21:03]
Narrator/Voice Actor
Gray hoodie with glasses in the pocket, handgun and a mask.
- [21:10]
Megyn Kelly
We found a gray hoodie that appeared to be the same hoodie that the perpetrator had been wearing in the ATM videos. And in the pocket of that was this gray piece of cloth that looked like a mask. We also found the amber shooting glasses. We got our gun.
- [21:34]
Narrator/Voice Actor
Sir, you're underway.
- [21:40]
Megyn Kelly
After he was put under arrest, he was transported to the Lufkin Police Department. The Ranger and I do a thorough search of Israel's wallet, and we found Samantha's ATM card. Samantha's cell phone was in the car. I mean, that's just devastating from a criminal standpoint. That's everything you need. You've got the victim's cell phone, you've got her license, and you've got his disguise that he was wearing all the times and he was making the withdrawals with her ATM card. Really strong, very strong.
- [22:17]
Maureen Callahan
But they don't have a body and.
- [22:20]
Megyn Kelly
They don't know whether she's dead and.
- [22:21]
Maureen Callahan
They don't even know whether she's dead or alive. So they need a confession from him. He is taken to Lufkin PD down in Texas. Again, small town. These small towns he's operating in and they try to talk to him and he says, I'm sorry, I can't help you. So then they call up to Alaska and, and Jeff Bell and his partner, his then partner on this case, Mickey Dahl, who was this sort of very glamorous young, beautiful detective who had just joined homicide. She had spent like 10 years doing.
- [22:53]
Megyn Kelly
Drugs as a police officer.
- [22:56]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, sorry, I phrased that. Yeah, undercover on narcotics. But. So they jump on a plane and they go down there and they're so wired and they're so like dying to talk to this guy. And they get in there and keys kind of lights up a bit because now he's got the attentions of this beautiful young detective and it becomes this sort of almost like a. I talk about it in the book. It's like a Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter kind of dynamic, you know, but he won't talk to them either. And so they have to extradite him up to Alaska. And this is all like the TikTok is really, it's so pressing because at a place like Lufkin, as would prove true even in Anchorage, they did not have the wherewithal to really contain this guy. Like this guy was such a predator and so dangerous, such a genius, completely self taught. This guy did not have formal schooling at all, at all. And he taught himself how to hunt and kill. And so they get him back up to Alaska and that's when it really starts clicking in because they know Samantha's dead. They've gone to the house he shares with his living girlfriend, a travel nurse and his 10 year old daughter. By all accounts, he is an incredible father.
- [24:11]
Megyn Kelly
That's crazy.
- [24:12]
Maureen Callahan
And they toss the house and they're looking for Samantha. They can't find her. There's a shed on the property.
- [24:18]
Megyn Kelly
This is before or after he's confessed?
- [24:20]
Maureen Callahan
He hasn't confessed to anything.
- [24:21]
Megyn Kelly
He hasn't. Okay. So they're just doing a search of his property because he's under arrest and.
- [24:26]
Maureen Callahan
There are two sheds on his property. And they've physically remove a shed from the property and they bring it to the FBI field office where they, they Leave it. And then so the. The fight begins now as to who's going to lead this interrogation. Because they all know this is a big, big case. And this, this is a career maker. This is a star maker. If you have your eyes on becoming, like, a legal analyst on CNN or like, you know, they're gonna make a movie out of this case. Who's gonna play you? The egos start coming into play, and Steve and Jeff are. Steve Payne and Jeff Bello are the most experienced, and they're gaming out how they're gonna talk to this guy. They have zero. They really don't have much evidence. They don't have that footage of him. He's unrecognizable in that surveillance clip of him abducting Samantha. Sure, a couple of items are in his car. But he says, she gave them to me. I was her dealer. She owed me money. Prove it. Prove I took her. You don't have anything. He was an expert at leaving no physical evidence behind. So you have to have very experienced detectives go in there or agents go in there. Who can say? Like, Steve's favorite tactic was to, like. He would say, some people like to go in with, like, boxes full of paper. It's all blank paper. Oh, we have all this shit on you. We've got all these photos. And you may as well just give it to us now before we, like, really, you know, throw you away forever. And Steve, his whole thing was like, less is more, like one photo. That's just the tip of what we've got on you. You know, it's a whole mind game. And the federal prosecutor on this case comes in and he sees what this case could be, and he says to them, I'm leading this investigation now. I'm questioning this suspect.
- [26:09]
Megyn Kelly
What? That's so rare.
- [26:10]
Maureen Callahan
I'm in charge. He's white collar, Megan. He's never dealt with my life.
- [26:15]
Megyn Kelly
Nor do they usually have the investigator be the prosecutor.
- [26:19]
Maureen Callahan
You can't. Right, because if this goes to trial, now the prosecutor's also a witness, and.
- [26:23]
Megyn Kelly
Now he's gonna testify.
- [26:24]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah, can happen. But this is. This is how wild it is up there. It's so funny. The twin poles of this case are Alaska and Texas, like, two states with this psyche which is like, don't tell me what to do. Do it my way. You know? Fine, to a point. Not when you've got, like, what will become the most high value, like, suspect in federal custody. Like, only Jeffrey Epstein exceeds the sky in terms of, like, the threat he posed, even behind bars.
- [26:55]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, so he does confess. We have video of. We've only titled it FBI interview. So I don't know which interrogators these are. But you'll tell us after we watch that 53 in which he does admit to killing Samantha Koenig. Here it is.
- [27:15]
Narrator/Voice Actor
He directed us north out of Anchorage towards the Matanuska Valley. How many yards off the shoreline or feet off the straight there. And he pointed to a spot on the lake. And what should they look for specifically? Ice fishing spot. Was it a hole that you cut or was the hole there? No, it was a hole I cut.
- [27:48]
Maureen Callahan
You'll. You'll see it.
- [27:49]
Narrator/Voice Actor
You'll see where the hole was?
- [27:50]
Megyn Kelly
Probably.
- [27:52]
Narrator/Voice Actor
I don't imagine there's not very much snow up there. And Israel Keys said that is where we would find Samantha Conan. She's not wrapped up or anything, but there will still be some blood on the ice. They can't find anything else out there. Oh, you'll find your DNA.
- [28:12]
Maureen Callahan
Okay.
- [28:15]
Commercial Announcer
You'll probably.
- [28:16]
Narrator/Voice Actor
You'll find her. My DNA on her. She has been everywhere, so.
- [28:20]
Megyn Kelly
Okay.
- [28:25]
Narrator/Voice Actor
The one thing I do need to know. How you killed her.
- [28:29]
Megyn Kelly
Why?
- [28:32]
Narrator/Voice Actor
I. I mean, it doesn't really matter how it happened. I'm saying that, yes, I was responsible, and, yes, I told you where she is. So you killed her.
- [28:43]
Megyn Kelly
Yes.
- [28:47]
Maureen Callahan
Okay. Several things about that clip. We are looking at Jeff Bell, who was one of the lead guys, and then that voice in there that says, I need you to tell me why you killed her. That's Kevin Feldis. That's the prosecutor who bigfooted this case. That's not a question you ever ask a suspect like that. It doesn't matter. What you need. I need to know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I think these little things were tells. Now, that's Keys telling them where he put her remains. He had her in his shed after he murdered her.
- [29:19]
Megyn Kelly
Like, steps away from the home in which his daughter was living.
- [29:22]
Maureen Callahan
Yes. And girlfriend was packing for their trip the next day. They were going on vacation for two weeks. So she's out in the shed for two weeks. He left her there. And when they asked him about it, they said, weren't you worried? And he said, was I worried? Like, it's like 10 degrees in Alaska. No, the body's gonna freeze. It'll be fine. But they took the wrong shed. When they arrested him, they took another shed that he just used as a shed. He was a contractor. They didn't look inside. There were a lot of mistakes on this case. A lot. A lot of big ones. The confession, which is in American Predator, the text of the entire confession, the FBI has never made that public. I had to get that through someone very, very close to the case. But it's in none of the records that have been made public. The audio of it doesn't exist. They've tried to bury it. It's a confession in two parts, and it's broken up because, one, it went on so long. But, two, Feldus was in real danger of tipping their hand that they had nothing, that they had no evidence. And once you lose that power, you can't get it back. Third, Keys originally spoke to them on the promise that he would not get the death penalty. They broke midday, came back to finish the confession, and he said he would only finish the confession if they promised to give him the death penalty.
- [30:51]
Megyn Kelly
Right. That's so strange. We don't know what explained the flip, the switch.
- [30:57]
Maureen Callahan
I think his mother spoke to me for the book. She's never spoken before or since. She said when she saw the footage of Keys getting arrested in Texas, she knew that he knew his life was over, that that was it.
- [31:10]
Megyn Kelly
Yep.
- [31:11]
Maureen Callahan
She knew he was a killer, by the way.
- [31:12]
Megyn Kelly
What?
- [31:13]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, she knew he was a killer.
- [31:14]
Megyn Kelly
How? From the cat, the cat and the animals.
- [31:16]
Maureen Callahan
Well, the cat, the animals. She and her husband kicked him out of the home. He was about 14. He was breaking and entering. He was gun running. He had this habit of. He would break into people's homes and move their furniture around, and then he would go outside and, like, peep and wait for them to come home and look through the windows and watch how freaked out they were. You know, he was a budding, budding, budding serial killer. And she told me, she said, oh, the FBI thinks Israel first killed in this date. And I know his first kill was much earlier.
- [31:50]
Megyn Kelly
Whoa.
- [31:51]
Maureen Callahan
Okay.
- [31:51]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, great. Could you be more specific?
- [31:53]
Maureen Callahan
Why don't you call the FBI with that information?
- [31:56]
Megyn Kelly
Well, and he. He said something like. It became apparent to me at a young age that the things I thought were okay, no one else thought was okay, and, like, I was different from the others. And it really does go to, like, is a serial killer born? Is it, you know, nature, nurture?
- [32:13]
Maureen Callahan
Right?
- [32:14]
Megyn Kelly
Do you arrive here in the crib as a little psychopath, and no matter what happens, that's what you're gonna be? Or do you have to be subjected to some amount of torture and neglect and so on as an infant in order to get there? Do we know the answer to that?
- [32:28]
Maureen Callahan
In his case, it's a tantalizing philosophical, neurological, behavioral question that hangs over the book. And I spoke to a guy named Roy Hazelwood who has since died. He was like the godfather of criminal profiling in the FBI. Godfather. And I asked him that, and he laughed. And he said, I was waiting for how long it was going to take for you to ask me. Everyone wants to know. And he said, we don't know. He said, the youngest incidence of psychopathy I've ever encountered was in a two year old.
- [33:00]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, gosh.
- [33:02]
Maureen Callahan
Who was self harming in a sort of psychosexual way. But he said, we don't know. You know, Keese was one of 10 siblings. They all suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of the parents. All of them. Oh, boy. Only one turned out like this, so I don't know.
- [33:17]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I don't know either. I wish we did. Okay, so let's keep going. So he gives that confession about. Do we know how many days he had Samantha before he killed her?
- [33:27]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, he only had her for hours.
- [33:29]
Megyn Kelly
How did he get the paper that was post the abduction in the photo?
- [33:33]
Maureen Callahan
I think he had saved it. He had saved it. And how he made her look alive.
- [33:38]
Megyn Kelly
So she was dead in the photo, and he made her look alive.
- [33:40]
Maureen Callahan
Jeff was right. She was dead in that photo.
- [33:43]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my gosh.
- [33:44]
Maureen Callahan
So he took. He was an avid outdoorsman, also an ultra marathoner who was hunting in national parks and the like. But he took fishing wire and sewed her eyes open.
- [33:59]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my gosh.
- [34:00]
Maureen Callahan
And then put makeup on her. He took his girlfriend's makeup.
- [34:03]
Megyn Kelly
This is a very sick, sick person.
- [34:05]
Maureen Callahan
And that was the proof of life photo.
- [34:08]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, so at what point did the cops start to glean there's more than one?
- [34:15]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, once he starts talking about Samantha, they know the detail, the affect, the flat, matter of fact way of communicating this. We're negotiating now. We're demanding the death penalty. We're demanding. It's off the table. On the table. This is someone who's very interested in power and control, and it's not the first time he's done it. And in fact, Jeff told me that when he and Mickey Dahl first walked into that police station in Lufkin, into that interrogation room, he said the hairs on the back of his neck stood up before they even said a word to him. They knew. They knew.
- [34:52]
Megyn Kelly
I think that's right. I do think when you're in the presence of true evil, you know, it's a different energy. It's just a, you know, vibe shift, as the kids say. But it's Real. I mean, you'd like to believe that, you know, you'd like to know that when you're around somebody who's truly evil, you'd have that response with the hair, you know?
- [35:09]
Maureen Callahan
Well, now they. That. That totally tracked to me because he's in custody. They know he took Samantha. Jeff knows she's dead in his bones. He knows it. But he was very, very, very good at wearing a mask in real life. I mean, the irony is that where he and his girlfriend lived, it's in a suburb called Turnagain in Anchorage. And it is a neighborhood heavily populated with judges, federal prosecutors.
- [35:37]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my goodness, lawyers.
- [35:39]
Maureen Callahan
And he was the contractor on all of their homes. And so many of the people they interviewed after they apprehended him were like, he had the keys to my house. And when we were away, we'd be like, go in and do all the renovations. We trusted him.
- [35:52]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine finding out that a serial killer had been in your house regularly working on your kitchen? So the next murders that he confessed to, Right, are really the only other murders that he owned, correct? That the husband and wife he fully owned?
- [36:10]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [36:11]
Megyn Kelly
Across the country in Vermont. So tell us about that couple.
- [36:15]
Maureen Callahan
This is so wild. And it's also interesting how they got this confession, because they know he's a serial now. They know it. So they're like, okay, you want the death penalty, you gotta give us something else. We can't go to the feds and say, you're getting it for one. You have to give us more. And he says, okay. He says, I'll give you two bodies and a name. And he says, I need you to get a map and I need you to pull it up for me. So now we're in Vermont, and he begins with where he dug up his kill kit. So he's got these kill kits buried all over the country, and they're still out there. They're five gallon Home Depot buckets that he filled with cash. He was a bank robber. Only used cash when he was committing crimes. Zip ties, guns, ammo, and Drano to accelerate human decomposition.
- [37:08]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my.
- [37:10]
Maureen Callahan
So then what he would do is he would start walking around and looking for people to take. That's what he called it, taking people. And he was out this night in Vermont. He was. He was on a family trip.
- [37:23]
Megyn Kelly
Was this after? No, it must have been before. It had to be before because she was his last.
- [37:27]
Maureen Callahan
She's his last known victim, which is very important. Not his. Definitely not his last one.
- [37:33]
Narrator/Voice Actor
So.
- [37:35]
Maureen Callahan
He. It's A rainy night. This is his own self report. He's staying in like a Holiday Inn or something. He goes out and he's looking for someone to take. And he comes upon this apartment complex. And this car is pulling in, this little like VW bug. And he likes this. And this guy gets out and puts. It's raining. And he puts his newspaper over his head and he's trying to rush into his apartment complex. And Keys is right behind him. Unbeknownst to the guy, and the way Keys described it, his arm went like this behind the guy like that, like he just missed him. He was just about to take him.
- [38:12]
Megyn Kelly
Like reaching forward and missing.
- [38:14]
Maureen Callahan
And he said, that guy has no idea. Because if he had been like one second slower, he would have gotten it that night. He would have been the one. I mean, he had no victim profile. He would take anybody. And when I say take, he would abduct rape, torture, and murder. And so he was by bisexual. He was always like, they call it practicing the parlances, like on sex workers, you know. Anyway, so he goes back to his hotel, waits for the rain to stop. Then it's like midnight. He goes back out his own self report. He comes upon this house. It's a suburban. It's like a flat, single story. He sees in the yard. There is no indication of dogs or kids. He says, I won't go near kids since having my daughter. Now you sort of see where he's beginning to realize he's going to be in the pantheon, you know, he says he doesn't want anybody to know he exists, but he does. This is the kind of thing the fictional character Dexter would say, like, I'm a serial killer with a code, you know? Yep, I don't touch kids. Give me a gold star. He did touch kids. So he decides he's gonna cut the phone line, see if an alarm goes off, which it does not. He smashes his way in. As a contractor, he's pretty confident he knows the layout. There's an older couple living there named Bill and Lorraine Currier. They are older, they are overweight, they are sickly, they have medication. They have a bird in the house. And this was one of the more chilling details that law enforcement told me. When he goes in, they have this huge bird. I forget whether it was a parrot or something. But the bird cage, which was like 6ft, had the COVID over it so it could sleep at night. So it's almost like a shroud of death is already there. And he said he from breaking the windowpane on the back door to gain access to the house and tying the two of them up, like, hogtied on the bed. Six seconds. And the FBI did it. And they figured out he did it in six seconds. He did it. You took them from the house. Took them from the house in their car.
- [40:22]
Megyn Kelly
So I just ask you because I saw how they look and. Yes, tracks exactly with what you said. And they look to me helpless. Like, even, you know, in their nice, you know, picture predating this terrible event, they looked completely helpless, completely harmless. So he still got a jones from that. Like, he got a Jones from capturing and killing people who posed absolutely no threat or conquest.
- [40:47]
Maureen Callahan
I think in his mind it was a conquest because it was a strange house. He didn't know how many people would be in. He could guess it would be two, probably a married couple. But he's breaking into their house in the middle of the night as a stranger. And he's not just gonna kill them in their home. He's gonna abduct them and he's gonna move them to a second location that he had staked out, like, a day prior.
- [41:11]
Megyn Kelly
And nobody saw any of it.
- [41:12]
Maureen Callahan
Nobody saw a thing, did they? Dead of night.
- [41:14]
Megyn Kelly
We don't know if they were screaming. I mean, he probably.
- [41:16]
Maureen Callahan
He had them gagged.
- [41:17]
Megyn Kelly
Okay. So he gets them in the car, he moves them to some dilapidated looking, like, deserted farmhouse.
- [41:24]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah. Falling apart.
- [41:25]
Megyn Kelly
And then he kills them both. He, the husband tried to fight for his wife.
- [41:29]
Maureen Callahan
He did. He separated them both. He put the husband in the basement tied up, and then he brought the wife to the second floor and he raped her up there.
- [41:45]
Megyn Kelly
Older woman.
- [41:46]
Maureen Callahan
Older woman. He had an issue. He had a lot of rage at his mother. A lot of rage. And this goes into his taking of people in pairs and mothers and children. And then he brought Lorraine. No, no, no. Then he hears from upstairs, Bill Currier in the basement is making a lot of noise. He's a big guy. He's a former army veteran. He's an army veteran, and he's trying to break free. And he's, like, shouting for his wife and leave my wife alone. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Keys Goes down there and he shoots him dead. Shoots him dead. And this angers him because that was not in the plan. He wanted to strangle Bill. He wanted it to be personal. He wanted it to be that violent. And it takes a long time to strangle somebody to death. It's not like in the movies. It takes a long time. It takes a lot of force. So then he's Infuriated. But Lorraine has begun to run. She's gotten out of the house and she's running towards the highway again. It's like three or four in the morning. It's desolate out there. And he catches her. He catches her and he brings her down to the basement where he shows her her husband and then he strangles her to death.
- [43:04]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, that is sick.
- [43:05]
Maureen Callahan
And then he leaves them in the basement. He leaves the bodies in the basement. He's running out of time. The sun is coming up. Normally what he would do would be to move the bodies across state lines. So you make it multi state, you make it very difficult to track. But he's gotta go. And he figures this house is a tear down. So anybody who buys this property, it's gonna be a developer, they're gonna tear down the house and the animals will get to the bodies before any of this even happens.
- [43:36]
Megyn Kelly
He was right.
- [43:37]
Maureen Callahan
He was right.
- [43:38]
Megyn Kelly
Well, I don't know about the animals, but they show that the house gets torn down, it gets dumped in a landfill. No one's walked through and seen to corpses or skeletons.
- [43:51]
Maureen Callahan
Nope.
- [43:52]
Megyn Kelly
They went to the landfill, the police, and searched it trying to find any remnants, didn't. So their remains have never been found.
- [44:01]
Maureen Callahan
They're not even classified as murdered, they're classified as missing, even after a confession.
- [44:08]
Megyn Kelly
Speaking of which, let's play some of it. Here is keys admitting to killing Bill and Lorraine Currier. SOT 54.
- [44:16]
Narrator/Voice Actor
There was a shovel in the basement and I hit him with that a.
- [44:19]
Maureen Callahan
Couple times.
- [44:24]
Narrator/Voice Actor
But then I was all handed up and grabbed the 10:22. He saw the gun and he started to say something and it just pissed me off and I just started pulling the trigger. I pulled as fast as I could until the magazine was empty. After he killed Bill, he tells us that he rapes Lorraine Carrier. He rapes her multiple times. And he said he took Lorraine downstairs and Bill's obviously deceased on the floor. He describes killing her and then using contractor bags to put their bodies in. In the basement of that house.
- [45:15]
Megyn Kelly
The.
- [45:15]
Narrator/Voice Actor
Bodies were completely covered and they were underneath a lot of debris that I piled on top of them like wood and trash.
- [45:25]
Megyn Kelly
I mean, just like the callousness is shocking. Not that you expect a killer to like respectfully dispose of the remains, but in garbage bags underneath a bunch of garbage left for the animals. Just like zero humanity in him. Nothing.
- [45:41]
Maureen Callahan
Nothing. And you know, with recovering Samantha's remains, you know, he dismembered her and he just put the limbs and the head in the water and I spoke to the lead on the dive team who led that recovery.
- [45:58]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, God.
- [45:58]
Maureen Callahan
And the two divers who recovered Samantha's remains. And the lead diver, the lead, Bobby Chukan, he's retired now. He has PTSD and he has a therapy dog. And he talks about this case because it's instructive for members of law enforcement. They should know about it. But that recovery, he said, was among the most brutal. And they see a lot of things no one should ever see. And in fact, what they do, these, these tough, tough, tough guys. Bobby sent me these drawings. They did. And especially after recovering children, the divers will often their beautiful drawings will draw images of themselves. And they have all their dive gear on and their helmets on, but they have angel wings on. And they're always holding the victim intact, bringing them up. But while they're always bringing them out of water, it's also sort of an ascension into a heavenly place of rest, you know, and that's how they manage special, special people who do this work.
- [47:07]
Megyn Kelly
Like, you think about them, right? It's like when you're doing your job and you have a bad day and think, oh, this is tough. Oh, my gosh. And you remember how tough, actual hard working people with really difficult jobs have to spend their days. I think about it all the time with child sexual abuse material like there are. And that really does change people. It changes them, men in particular, who have to spend their days chasing the most vile among us, having to look. And they have to look at the images because they've got to go after. They got to make a case against these people. And I've heard so many on different podcasts and so on, just talking about what it does to you, like, it deadens your soul. Most don't last that long. This is just. How can you spend your day doing that?
- [47:48]
Maureen Callahan
No, I know. To expose that level of darkness and things that most people would never even think up.
- [47:57]
Megyn Kelly
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- [49:00]
Narrator/Voice Actor
The McDonald's snack wrap is back.
- [49:02]
Commercial Announcer
You brought it back.
- [49:03]
Maureen Callahan
Ranch snack wrap, Spicy snack wrap. You broke the Internet for a snack Snack wrap is back.
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Commercial Announcer
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- [49:46]
Megyn Kelly
Hey, everyone, it's me, Megyn Kelly. I've got some exciting news. I now have my very own channel on SiriusXM. It's called the Megyn Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered, with no agenda and no apologies. Along with the Megyn Kelly show, you're gonna hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily jasinsky, Jesse Kelly, RealClear Politics, and many more. It's bold. No BS news. Only on the Megyn Kelly Channel, SiriusXM 111, and on the Sirius XM app. So Keys admits to this double murder of Bill and Lorraine. They know he killed Samantha, but then a weird thing happens in the interrogation where they want him to say more, but he's suddenly coy and now he doesn't want to, like, give it up. And there's a moment in the investigation, this is from July of 2012, where he kind of objects to giving them any more and it's sort of odd. Please explain this to me. It's sat 60.
- [50:55]
Narrator/Voice Actor
I just think at this point.
- [51:00]
Maureen Callahan
I.
- [51:01]
Narrator/Voice Actor
I kind of feel like I'm in a position where I've given you a certain amount of information. None of it has, or I shouldn't.
- [51:10]
Maureen Callahan
Say none of it.
- [51:12]
Narrator/Voice Actor
About half of what I thought you had an understanding on, you know, from the very beginning, hasn't worked out in my favor. Granted, you know, some things haven't worked out in your Favor. But I just think at this point, I just don't see what incentive I have to tell you anything else.
- [51:38]
Megyn Kelly
What does he mean, it hasn't worked out in my favor?
- [51:41]
Maureen Callahan
He wanted the death penalty, and he wanted it really fast.
- [51:45]
Megyn Kelly
How long was this series of interviews?
- [51:49]
Maureen Callahan
So they started March, April, and they went till about. He really began shutting down. I'm gonna say right around there, July, July, August. He tried to kill himself in prison, and it wasn't successful. And so there's so much secrecy surrounding this case, and I have theories as to why it's not just about a federal prosecutor who is too big for his britches. It's not that. But Jeff Bell. Jeff Bell went. He would go over every day to the prison, the jail, rather, to see they didn't have anything remotely secure enough for a guy like this. He never should have been up there. He should have been in a supermax. Yeah, he went over there every day to see if Israel wanted to talk. Every day. And he went. So Israel almost escaped from court. Very Ted Bundy. Like, remember when Ted Bundy.
- [52:43]
Megyn Kelly
Yes.
- [52:43]
Maureen Callahan
Okay. This footage has been scrubbed from the Internet. Fox had the footage from inside the courtroom. Keys. Shackled ankles, wrists. Samantha's father is in the courtroom. Everyone's in the courtroom. Keys. Suddenly, in the middle of the hearing, leaps up out of his chair. He's out of his shackles, and he's jumping. Like. What do you call those rows? I think of them as pews from church. But in a courthouse, the rows he's jumping from, like, benches, top to top to top to top. Before, like, he's tased. He's jumped and he's tased. He almost got away. He was tased. He seemed to very much enjoy the tasing. But how did he do it? How did he do it? Well, he took. He would get a little baggy lunch every day before going over to court, and he took the cellophane that wrapped the sandwich and he fashioned little keys out of that thing and he used it. Come on. Yes, yes. And so Jeff would go over there and he would be like, stop giving this guy anything. Take away his shoelaces. Why does he have subscriptions to magazines like Outside Adventurer? What's going on in here? They could never get an answer. They could never get an answer.
- [54:00]
Megyn Kelly
He was just so clever. He fooled everybody. That's an advantage, right? When you're a killer who's very smart and you're smarter than your jailers. Yeah, maybe then the cops. Some of them.
- [54:08]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [54:09]
Megyn Kelly
So notwithstanding his lamentation, that he wasn't getting put to death fast enough. He hadn't had a trial or anything. It was, I don't know how he thought the system worked. They were figuring out that he was responsible for more than just those three murders.
- [54:24]
Maureen Callahan
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [54:26]
Megyn Kelly
Go ahead.
- [54:26]
Maureen Callahan
The other thing that I'm remembering now, that was stalling him up. This is like the lawyer in you will appreciate. So his defender, his public defender is this guy named Rich Kirtner, who is a great lawyer, great lawyer. He's also very anti death penalty.
- [54:45]
Megyn Kelly
So there's a man who enters this story named Richard Kirtner. What's his story?
- [54:50]
Maureen Callahan
So he's assigned to Keys. The moment Keyes is arrested. He is Keyes public defender. Okay. Keys can't afford a lawyer, so he says because all of his cash is tied up in kill kits all over the United States, you know, so anyway, Rich takes this case, and Rich is way into this case. And I, I talked to Rich at his office in Anchorage and he was like, I really liked Israel.
- [55:11]
Megyn Kelly
Oh my gosh, I know Rich. I said, you got to get out more.
- [55:15]
Maureen Callahan
Seriously. He's like, I liked him, but he, he, he would not. The minute he said I want the death penalty, Rich was like, well, I'm not arguing for that because I'm anti death penalty and I won't do it. And so now he's got a court appointed lawyer that he can't get out from under who won't advocate for what he wants. And the FBI is trying to get, get, get him what he wants, but it's not moving that quickly and they can't get any traction anywhere.
- [55:42]
Megyn Kelly
Okay. But they do figure out it's more than these three.
- [55:46]
Maureen Callahan
Oh yeah.
- [55:47]
Megyn Kelly
So how did they do that?
- [55:49]
Maureen Callahan
They asked him. They said, how many people did you kill? They just asked him and he said, well, less than 12. And Steve Payne always thought that was a weird number because most people go by fives and tens, right? Like you round up to a five or a ten.
- [56:04]
Megyn Kelly
What does that even mean? Like less than 12.
- [56:07]
Maureen Callahan
Less than 12. That's a great point. Right? Like what does that mean? But Steve took it to mean 12, like 11 or 12. But I talk to people on the case who think it was way more than that. And I definitely think it was way more than that.
- [56:25]
Megyn Kelly
And do we know who they are? Like you mentioned something in Florida.
- [56:28]
Maureen Callahan
We know some of them. We know some of them. There are some cold cases I lay out in the book that I definitely believe are the work of keyes. Absolutely. A 12 year old Paralympian in Colville, Washington, where Keyes lived, very, very small town. Went missing when Keyes was a very young man.
- [56:48]
Megyn Kelly
He was like 14.
- [56:49]
Maureen Callahan
And this girl is maybe 19, maybe 19. Her body was later found with her feet. Her prosthetic feet were far away from her remains. But she was seen. She knew him. She knew him. She knew him.
- [57:06]
Megyn Kelly
So it's not true that he didn't kill children to your point?
- [57:09]
Maureen Callahan
Absolutely. And there was another 12 year old girl who was murdered with her mother. And I think that was Keys as well. In Colville as well. There's a man named Jimmy Tidwell who went missing in Texas after Samantha was taken while Keys was still on the loose. I go into all of the evidence as to Jeff Bell knows it's Jimmy too. He won't say it publicly, but we talked about it after the book came out. After American Predator came out, I got an email from a woman who said, you book came to me through a circuitous route. I am Jimmy Tidwell's niece. We have never been able to get an answer from either local law enforcement or the FBI. But now we know what happened to him. So thank you.
- [57:55]
Megyn Kelly
Wow.
- [57:56]
Maureen Callahan
There is a very famous case I'm obsessed with in Florida called the Boca Murders. There was a man in Boca Raton who was targeting women at the mall. Upscale luxury mall, broad daylight. First victim, she is going to her vehicle with her toddler son and she's loading up the back of the car. Honestly, Megan, after writing this book, I don't move through the world the same way at all. Like I will never. My head is on a swivel in like a garage. He comes up to her and he's got a gun and he's like, get in the back of the car. Get your kid in the back of the car. Takes the car, starts driving them all over.
- [58:38]
Megyn Kelly
Never do it, by the way, to listening audience.
- [58:40]
Maureen Callahan
Never let them take you to a second location.
- [58:42]
Megyn Kelly
And that would qualify as a second location, like from the parking lot into your car to go someplace run, run, run, run. You have much better chance of surviving. He's probably not going to shoot you. He's probably not scream. The difficult victims, they just kind of let him go. But I'd rather somebody take a shot at me while I'm serpentining away than have me in the car.
- [59:00]
Maureen Callahan
You know though what the thing is, and, and he, he understood the psychology of this. If you are like the home invasion with the couriers, you know, when you're awoken, startled in the middle of the Night. And it's like, it takes you a minute to be like, am I awake?
- [59:13]
Megyn Kelly
Yes.
- [59:13]
Maureen Callahan
You know, like he's capitalizing on those five seconds of like orienting yourself.
- [59:18]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah.
- [59:18]
Maureen Callahan
And so then who's gonna believe a stranger's in your house on top, you know?
- [59:21]
Megyn Kelly
I know.
- [59:22]
Maureen Callahan
So he's this woman with her little child.
- [59:25]
Megyn Kelly
Don't comply.
- [59:26]
Maureen Callahan
He's got his gun in her back and he's like, get in the car. It's like she probably couldn't even take that minute totally, you know.
- [59:32]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, I don't judge her.
- [59:33]
Maureen Callahan
Oh, I know you're not.
- [59:33]
Megyn Kelly
But for the people listening.
- [59:34]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah, no, absolutely.
- [59:35]
Megyn Kelly
Don't comply.
- [59:36]
Maureen Callahan
You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.
- [59:38]
Megyn Kelly
And you do it. Especially if you have a child with you. You're like, I'll do anything to protect my child. That thing is to run away. That's what that thing is.
- [59:44]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah, yeah. So. So they get in the car and he starts driving out and all around Boca Raton and she is terrified and her child begins to cry. And she's worried that the crying is going to just infuriate him further. And she just keeps talking to him. She just keeps talking. Samantha tried this too. It was really smart. Humanize yourself. You don't want to be doing this. Right. Like, we can end this. Like, you know, he does let them go. He lets them go. He drives them back and he lets them go. The other victims weren't so lucky. Another mother and daughter were found in that mall tied up in their car. Zip ties. There was a woman who was also. The witnesses saw this happen. This is how she was discovered. She was driving a Jeep. Very well to do. Woman, married, middle aged. And the Jeep just starts going, just erratically. It's like slowing down, but it's going erratically. And then the driver's side door opens and she falls out. So that means there's someone in the passenger side who pushed her out of the car. And so when the police and FBI arrived at the scene at the mall with the woman and her 8 year old daughter who were tied up and murdered, they were like. This is as unique as a fingerprint, this mo and it matches keys. Now, Jane Doe, the woman who survived with her toddler, spoke to Dateline. She has never given her real identity.
- [61:18]
Megyn Kelly
We have a little bit of that in set 55. Let's watch.
- [61:21]
Survivor
I put my son in first. I strapped him in his car seat.
- [61:24]
Narrator/Voice Actor
He's in back?
- [61:25]
Survivor
Yeah, in the back. Then I go to the back of the truck and I put the Stroller in, shut the gate and start walking to the front.
- [61:34]
Megyn Kelly
Mama.
- [61:35]
Survivor
Mama. And I could tell if he's worried or scared. That's when I look in to see if he's okay. And there's a guy sitting there.
- [61:43]
Commercial Announcer
A guy in a floppy hat, wrap.
- [61:45]
Narrator/Voice Actor
Around shades sitting in a her SUV right next to her 2 year old. That moment, how terrifying is that?
- [61:51]
Survivor
I was in shock at that moment and I just stood there and the guy said, get in the car. And I was frozen. And when he said get in the car for the second time, that's when I noticed the gun.
- [62:04]
Maureen Callahan
The gun is pointed at her son.
- [62:06]
Survivor
I see him pull out a pair of handcuffs. He handcuffs my wrists behind my back and he pulls out a bag of zip ties and he zip ties my ankles together and then zip ties my neck to the headrest and he takes out a pair of darkened sunglasses with duct tape, I'm guessing, and puts them on my eyes. So now I'm blindfolded.
- [62:31]
Narrator/Voice Actor
Speak to me of terror.
- [62:32]
Survivor
I started losing it and I started choking, choking myself because the zip tie was so tight. Couldn't breathe and gagging and crying and I was just hysterical.
- [62:46]
Megyn Kelly
Zip tied her neck to the headrest. That is disconcerting. I mean, I can't imagine being able to function with any like, anything like your full brain power when you're in that position.
- [62:57]
Maureen Callahan
No. And actually I had that detail wrong. He was in the car, he got in the car before she knew and her kid was crying and going, mommy, Mommy. But that was Keys Mo. And the sketch that she worked up, they showed a little bit of the police sketch that she worked up of her abductor. Her and her child's abductor. It's a dead ringer for Israel Keys.
- [63:19]
Megyn Kelly
It's amazing he let her go. Like why would he show empathy in that case and none other.
- [63:25]
Maureen Callahan
It's such a great question. I don't know. I don't know what it was. I don't know if it was the crying child. I don't know if it's somehow sparked something in him about his own daughter, but it makes no sense because a couple of months later, another woman with her 8 year old daughter, he murders. So it doesn't make any sense.
- [63:47]
Megyn Kelly
This is after he has his own daughter or no.
- [63:49]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [63:51]
Megyn Kelly
Is she around, his biological daughter?
- [63:54]
Maureen Callahan
She is.
- [63:54]
Megyn Kelly
What's her story?
- [63:56]
Maureen Callahan
She was raised by her mother on a reservation way up in Neah Bay in Washington State. It's a very, very remote place and Kee's lived there for quite some Time. It's real poverty up there. It's real, real poverty. People know who she is, and she just lives her own life. You know, she's never sought publicity or anything. I remember I reached out to her mom right before the book came out, and I said, you should know it's coming out. And, like, you might want to remove photos you've got of her on your social media. You know, it'll be easy for people to find her.
- [64:36]
Megyn Kelly
So she's probably mid-20s now.
- [64:38]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah.
- [64:38]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my gosh.
- [64:40]
Maureen Callahan
He had a stepson, by the way, who killed himself. That's been omitted completely from the FBI narrative. Killed himself after Keys was caught.
- [64:47]
Megyn Kelly
So what. What happens? Because now they're starting to get what they think is a. Is a toll, you know, a number. And then it all comes to an end one day.
- [64:59]
Maureen Callahan
It all comes to an end one day. Jeff Bell is getting ready to barge into a house and make some arrests, and he gets a phone call. It's very early in the morning, that Israel Keys has successfully committed suicide in his cell. And he has left in blood drawings of 11 skulls with the words, we are one. What the FBI did not make public was that he also wrote on the wall of his cell. And I went there, I went to the jail, and I went to the cell, and I saw exactly where it was. And this was a plexiglass cell. So if you want to tell anybody that he did it in secret, nobody would ever have known. It's impossible.
- [65:43]
Megyn Kelly
So they knew he was killing himself?
- [65:45]
Maureen Callahan
Yes. There was video of blood pooling out from under his door for hours.
- [65:52]
Megyn Kelly
He used razor blade? Yeah, the razor blade from his razor.
- [65:57]
Maureen Callahan
Well, you know, the warden of the jail told me that he put a sign on Keys's door that said, do not give this prisoner a razor blade.
- [66:06]
Megyn Kelly
Wow. And they didn't follow that.
- [66:08]
Maureen Callahan
It's Keystone Cops.
- [66:09]
Megyn Kelly
How did they ever get past that?
- [66:11]
Maureen Callahan
How did they ever get past that Dick Tat? I don't know, but I got.
- [66:15]
Megyn Kelly
Wow.
- [66:15]
Maureen Callahan
I. After the book came out, I spoke to somebody who was impacted.
- [66:18]
Megyn Kelly
Wait, wait, you were going to say something that was on the wall. On the wall.
- [66:21]
Maureen Callahan
He's in his own blood. He wrote Belize, the Nation.
- [66:25]
Megyn Kelly
Why?
- [66:26]
Maureen Callahan
Well, I asked his mom about that, and she said he went to Belize on vacation, and he was really struck by the poverty in Belize, and it really. It made him hate America even more and hate the federal government even more. And, you know, he had planned to. He had in his planning, you know, at one point, this case, in the middle of it, it Was reclassified, it went from serial murder to domestic terrorism. And the FBI has never said why.
- [66:56]
Megyn Kelly
Wow. Well, does that reclass do anything for the FBI's ability to hide the case?
- [67:03]
Maureen Callahan
I think they're doing exactly what they want to do. You know, there's like 50,000 pages.
- [67:08]
Megyn Kelly
Why would they get to the point where they don't want to disclose it? Just because they look bad? Because if the numbers climb too high, they look like they're doomed or know nothings?
- [67:16]
Maureen Callahan
I don't know, because I think they're as discussed, like, with just a few of those. There are others in the book. There are plenty of cases I believe could easily be ascribed to him. You know, you could say we could close this out with a fair degree of certainty. Right. Give surviving family members some peace of mind. He was allowed to join as a volunteer. He a volunteer recruit the United States Army. Despite not existing on paper, he was raised off the grid by these cultists who belonged to a church, a white supremacist church where they were friends with Keys was very good friends with Chevy and Shane Kehoe, who grew up to be on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list of domestic terrorists. Potential ties to Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bombing. Keys mentions McVeigh in his interrogations with the FBI. And he says, a lot of people I know regard that guy as a hero.
- [68:09]
Megyn Kelly
Wow.
- [68:10]
Maureen Callahan
He was a super soldier in the army. His special forces training. I asked for his army records. I got like three pages. And one of those, two of those pages, the interesting things. One is his father died. They have no idea how or what happened to the body.
- [68:27]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, boy.
- [68:28]
Maureen Callahan
And they were interrogating the discovery of a skull, a human skull, on the base where Keys had trained for quite some time.
- [68:38]
Megyn Kelly
Well, it's no accident he drew skulls with his own blood as his final thing here on earth. And he drew 11, which is less than 12. And now we only know officially of three. So, yeah, that's the big mystery. Who are the other nine? We just don't know yet. I mean, we have suspicions, but we don't know. And we're probably never gonna know, given that you're saying the FBI's kind of clammed up on it. What did his mom say After. After the fact, after all this was done.
- [69:05]
Maureen Callahan
So his mother is a member of a cult called the Church of Wells, last I heard in Texas. And she said to me, these interviews were really difficult because there was a lot of proselytizing to get to the point.
- [69:21]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, boy. Must have loved that.
- [69:23]
Maureen Callahan
It was Hard. But she said one day they were driving somewhere in his Jeep, and she knew something was wrong with him. And she said he turned to her and said, you know, mom, not everyone wants to live the way you do. Not all of us want to live the way you do. And then she said she knew her son was guilty of these things. Like when the FBI showed up at her door, and they were like, we have your son arrested in connection with the disappearance of this young girl. She was like, yeah, that sounds about right. And Jeff Bell saw Heidi at the courthouse, and he said she looked like someone out of Little House on the Prairie. Like the long dress and, like, the handmade thing and, like, the long braid. And he went up to her and he said, please, can you help us? Your son won't talk. There's a missing girl. They didn't know if she was dead yet. I mean, they knew, but. And she said to Jeff, if the Lord wants that girl to be found, that girl will be found, and turned her back and walked away.
- [70:18]
Megyn Kelly
Okay, this is what we're dealing with.
- [70:20]
Maureen Callahan
This is what we're dealing with.
- [70:22]
Megyn Kelly
So as you look back on the case now, it's been a couple years since you wrote the book. Like, where does he fall in the pantheon of American serial killers?
- [70:35]
Maureen Callahan
Well, you know, the FBI said they'd never seen one like him before, and I think that's why his case remains so little known. They know more than they're telling, but not nearly as much as I think we think they do. They have something called the Evil Minds Research Museum. The FBI does what? Yeah, I tried to get in there. They really wouldn't let me in. They let David Fincher in for Mind Hunter, but they wouldn't let me in.
- [71:01]
Megyn Kelly
Who is this pest who keeps subpoenasing Knock, knock, knock foiaing?
- [71:05]
Maureen Callahan
But there, they have the brains of serial killers, they have artifacts, they have a lot of keys, stuff like his journals, his own self reports. They have. Also, when they were gonna let me in, they were like, don't publicize this, but screw them. They have, like, a big stuffed Hannibal Lecter in, like, a prison cell. Like, you know, in the middle of the movie, Senator comes in. Yeah, that's like. That's their idea of kicks.
- [71:32]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, this is, like, at. Where.
- [71:36]
Maureen Callahan
Quantico adjacent.
- [71:37]
Megyn Kelly
Oh, wow.
- [71:37]
Maureen Callahan
Yeah, it's, like, off the official highway. Like, it's an unmarked building, but it's a real thing.
- [71:41]
Megyn Kelly
So, like, agents are supposed to go there to learn, or, like, the.
- [71:44]
Maureen Callahan
The. The academics, I guess, at Quantico or they are in there trying to figure out the. The origins of psychopathy to this degree.
- [71:50]
Megyn Kelly
Well, I'm glad they're studying it. I mean, it sounds like, to me, they'd be better off reading your book.
- [71:53]
Maureen Callahan
But, yeah, they should give it a shot.
- [71:55]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, that's. That's helpful. Well, I can't believe I didn't know. I mean, I am obsessed with true crime. I feel like I listen to all of them, and I've never heard his name before. And my dear friend wrote the book on him, so it's like I. I mean, I'm. I was gonna say thrilled to know, but that's not the right word. I'm fascinated because they're all so different, and this guy's so bizarre. Where there's not an M.O. there's not, like, a typical victim, there's not a geographic tie. Just so bizarre. I don't. It doesn't make me. It's somewhat unsettling, right? Because you want to believe there'll always be that, and that'll make them easier to catch.
- [72:29]
Maureen Callahan
But the thing is, is, like, the more we learn from this one, you know, Keys said he was asked, who is your favorite serial killer? They thought they would get something right. And he said, it's the one who hasn't been caught because he knew that there was someone better at being undetected right behind him. And I'll tell you this, Megan. When the Idaho college murder story broke and before we knew who did it, I was convinced that whoever did it had studied the case of Israel Keys.
- [72:59]
Megyn Kelly
Definitely could be. I mean, he was a criminologist.
- [73:01]
Maureen Callahan
He was a criminologist. He was. It was like he had Washington state connections, but he crossed state lines.
- [73:08]
Megyn Kelly
A lot of them do. Washington state is another one. So is Iowa.
- [73:12]
Maureen Callahan
So is Long Island.
- [73:14]
Megyn Kelly
Yes, just.
- [73:15]
Maureen Callahan
I know.
- [73:16]
Megyn Kelly
As much as you think, it would be like, New York or Chicago or Baltimore, they have different kinds of murders, but it's not really serial killer central. They're much more dispersed than that. Yeah, the serial killer thing. Although I will say just a note of comfort for the audience, since it's the holidays. Cece Moore, the great genetic genealogist woman who, like, catches everybody. Speaking of Brian Kohlberger, she told me she doesn't believe you can have a serial killer in 2025America. She's like, we've gotten too good.
- [73:50]
Maureen Callahan
Really.
- [73:50]
Megyn Kelly
The touch DNA that they, like, it's no longer. They don't need a fingerprint. They don't need blood or semen or bodily fluids. It's like touch DNA. Look how Kohlberger kind of got caught. Touch DNA on the knife sheath, which, yes, then he left behind. But like, that touched DNA 10, 15, 20 years ago would have been meaningless. They wouldn't have been able to find that. That would have been nothing if it wasn't like a bodily fluid that you could see in, like, bag. Forget it. Now they know to look for it. And that touch DNA, they didn't have a hit. They had to be the genetic genealogy. They went. They got like, some hit to somebody, some distant relative of Kohlberger, which they then traced back to the dad of Kohlber. And then they start using her skills to figure out who's around this dad who could be potentially in Idaho on this night. And then they quickly got to Brian. But anyway, she doesn't think that you can have a serial killer in 2025America, which makes me feel better.
- [74:46]
Maureen Callahan
The only I would say my caveat to that would be if you look at the Gilgo beach killer, who was active for many, many, many, many years, it's the victim. It's just as important. Right. He was targeting sex workers, and they. And they don't stay on sex worker cases for very long. You know, So I. I guess if you're. If you're. If you're a predator and, you know, your prey, that's. That would be my one thing where I'd maybe push back on that.
- [75:10]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah. You're going to like the victims no one cares about.
- [75:13]
Maureen Callahan
Exactly. That society regards as kind of disposable.
- [75:16]
Megyn Kelly
Well, I was trying to leave it on an up note, but I'm sorry, I don't think we're gonna be able to now.
- [75:21]
Maureen Callahan
Well, the book is fun to read, and it's. There's. Oh, and there are great. I didn't see the 11 skulls, but I hear it's. It's great. The Keys case is fascinating. I was amazed you found the date line footage, because I was trying to find it while doing the book, and I couldn't find the footage.
- [75:35]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I don't. My crack team found that, but so good it was. I mean, the whole. The whole case is dark but fascinating. You know, it's like sometimes the serial killer stuff is too much for me. Like, I can't take any torture stories. But we think we did a good job today of skimming over some of the more disturbing parts of this guy, because you can go deep and you can go way darker on him even than we did. Well, and that's our. That's Our silver lining.
- [76:00]
Maureen Callahan
I like it.
- [76:01]
Megyn Kelly
You could have gone. It could have been worse. We say nothing says Christmas like true crime. So look, I think the reason so many people are drawn to true crime is because it takes your mind off of your own problems. You cannot be thinking about whatever thing is stressing you when you are thinking about something like this. There's something soothing about solving it, you know, like justice. I think there's a good contingent of us who that really feels validated when justice comes to bad guys it makes you believe again in the world. You know, like people aren't all gonna get away with it. Mother effers and that will conclude the things of positive things. I have to say the list. Love you.
- [76:40]
Maureen Callahan
I love you.
- [76:41]
Megyn Kelly
Oh. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.
- [76:43]
Maureen Callahan
Happy New Year.
- [76:44]
Megyn Kelly
All of it lady. Great to see you. Thanks for listening to the Megyn Kelly show. No bs, no agenda and no fear.
- [76:58]
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