On June 9, 2012, an FBI evidence-response team in Parishville, New York, after almost three days of careful excavation, lifted a buried five-gallon bucket out of a shallow hole next to the Blake Falls Reservoir. Inside the bucket, wrapped in heavy plastic against the upstate New York winters, were a .22 caliber handgun, a silencer, several lengths of rope, three sets of zip-tie restraints, a homemade flashlight modified to be quieter, $1,800 in twenty-dollar bills, a roll of trash bags, and a small notebook listing items needed for a future trip.

The bucket had been put there in 2009 by a man who had then flown back to his home in Alaska, gone to work the next morning as a carpenter, paid his taxes, raised his ten-year-old daughter, and not touched the bucket again for more than two years. The man’s name was Israel Keyes. He had buried at least four other identical buckets in remote locations across the United States. The FBI has, fourteen years later, recovered three of them. They are still looking for at least one more.

What Israel Keyes had been doing, between roughly 2001 and 2012, was something the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had spent decades quietly hoping never to encounter at scale: a serial killer who had read enough about how serial killers got caught to make a system, and was disciplined enough to follow it.

A barista in Anchorage

The case that broke him open began on a cold Wednesday night in Anchorage on February 1, 2012. Samantha Koenig, eighteen years old, was working alone in a small drive-through coffee shop called Common Grounds in midtown Anchorage. She was a few minutes from closing at 8:00 p.m. when a man approached the window from the parking lot, told her he wanted a $4 Americano, and — once the espresso machine was running — pulled out a pistol and a roll of zip-ties.

The kidnapping was caught on the coffee shop’s security cameras. The footage shows Samantha calmly handing over the day’s cash, then being walked out of the shop by a tall, broad-shouldered man whose face is largely hidden by a dark hat. The man left her cell phone in the shop. By the time her boyfriend, who had been waiting to pick her up from the end of her shift, realized she was missing and called the Anchorage Police, the attacker had taken her to his home in a Anchorage suburb called Turnagain.

She was raped, killed, and her body dismembered in the man’s small backyard shed, sometime within the first twenty-four hours of the kidnapping. The man, who had a previously scheduled two-week cruise to New Orleans the next day, left Samantha’s body wrapped in plastic in the shed, packed his suitcase, and boarded the cruise as planned. His name was Israel Keyes. He was thirty-four, white, an Army veteran, a self-employed contractor in Anchorage, and the father of a ten-year-old girl who was at her grandmother’s house for the week.

The ransom photographs

After his cruise, Keyes returned to Anchorage in early March. He took Samantha’s body out of the shed, applied makeup to her face, propped open her eyelids with fishing line, and photographed the body holding a copy of an Anchorage newspaper dated February 13. He emailed the photographs to her family along with a ransom demand: $30,000 deposited into Samantha’s own bank account. He then drove her body out to a frozen lake north of Anchorage, cut a hole in the ice, and dropped the body in.

The Koenig family, working with the Anchorage Police and the FBI, deposited the money as instructed. Over the next two weeks, Keyes used Samantha’s debit card to make small ATM withdrawals across the western and southern United States — in Arizona, in New Mexico, in Texas. The FBI tracked the withdrawals in close to real time. On March 13, 2012, an Anchorage FBI agent and a Texas Ranger arrested Israel Keyes at the entrance of a bank in Lufkin, Texas, while he was about to use the card again.

In his rental car, agents found Samantha Koenig’s cell phone, the cash from the ATM withdrawals, a pistol, the ransom note draft, and a small, dog-eared notebook with handwritten lists of supplies and target cities. The notebook was the first piece of physical evidence agents had of what Keyes had been doing in the eleven years before the night he walked into the coffee shop in Anchorage.

A method that broke the profile

Over the next nine months, between his arrest in March 2012 and his suicide on December 2, 2012, Israel Keyes sat in the Anchorage jail and gave the FBI roughly forty hours of confessional interviews. The interviews were conducted by Special Agent Jolene Goeden and U.S. Attorney Frank Russo on the condition that the FBI would not seek the federal death penalty if he cooperated fully. Keyes had been clear from the beginning that he had no interest in either martyrdom or the slow grind of state-by-state capital trials. He wanted, he said, to choose his own ending.

What he described to Goeden over those nine months would, in the years since, become an FBI training case study used at the agency’s academy in Quantico. Keyes had developed, over the course of his twenties, a personal method designed specifically to defeat the things investigators looked for when they tried to identify a serial killer.

He chose victims at random. He did not have a type. He did not stalk individuals over time. He looked, instead, for what he called “opportunity” — a person alone in a remote location, where the geographical odds of a chance witness were low. The coffee shop, the rural house, the late-night gas station, the campground.

He traveled to commit his crimes. He almost never killed in Alaska. He flew to a distant region of the United States — New York, Vermont, Washington State, Oregon — rented a car, drove for hours away from the airport, and committed the crime in a small town where he had no personal connection and no history. He paid for everything in cash. He did not carry a cell phone on the trip. He had no online communications related to the trip. By the time investigators in the small town began their canvass of recently-arrived strangers, Keyes was three thousand miles away.

And then there were the kits. Sometime in the early 2000s, Keyes began burying caches of weapons and supplies in remote locations he intended to use for future crimes. The kits were placed years in advance. By the time he was ready to use one, he could fly into a region clean — no gun on the plane, no rope, no zip-ties, no risk of pre-crime contact with anything that would later become forensic evidence — and recover his tools from a hole in the ground that no one knew about but him.

The Currier killings

The most fully reconstructed of Keyes’s pre-Anchorage murders is the Currier kidnapping in Essex, Vermont, in June 2011. Bill Currier, forty-nine, and his wife Lorraine, fifty-five, lived in a modest two-story house at the end of a quiet street in Essex. Bill was a hospital worker. Lorraine was a nurse. They had no children. They lived a small, settled life.

On the morning of June 9, 2011, the Curriers did not appear at work. Their cars were still in the driveway. Their cell phones were on the kitchen counter. Their wallets and IDs were untouched. There was no sign of forced entry. There was no sign of struggle. They were simply gone.

Burlington Police treated it, for months, as one of the most baffling missing-persons cases the department had ever seen. There was no narrative, no suspect, no witness, no body. The Curriers had vanished off a Vermont street between 8:00 p.m. on June 8 and 6:00 a.m. on June 9, and nobody had heard anything.

In his Anchorage confessions a year later, Keyes described in detail what had happened. He had flown from Alaska to Chicago, then driven a rental car east to Vermont. He had driven through Essex looking for a target. He had selected the Curriers’s house essentially at random — it was the right kind of street, the right kind of darkness, the right distance from neighbors. He had broken in through the basement, woken them in bed, told them they were being robbed, and walked them out to his rental car at gunpoint. He had taken them to an abandoned farmhouse a few miles away and killed them both within a few hours. He had then drived north, recovered the kit he had buried two years earlier in the Adirondacks of New York at the Blake Falls Reservoir, used materials from it to clean and dispose of evidence, and reburied the empty bucket. The kit had functioned exactly as he had designed it to function.

The Curriers’s bodies, by Keyes’s own account, were burned in a sealed bag inside the abandoned farmhouse he had used. The farmhouse was, after his confession, demolished and the rubble carefully sifted by the Essex Police, but no remains were ever recovered. As of 2026, Bill and Lorraine Currier are still officially missing. Their families have held two private memorial services without the comfort of a burial.

The other killings, and the ones we don’t know

Keyes admitted to a total of at least eleven murders in his confessions. He confirmed three: Bill Currier, Lorraine Currier, and Samantha Koenig. He described in less detail at least eight other killings, in states he refused to name and at times he refused to specify. He was, even in confession, strategic about what he revealed. The FBI’s working theory is that he was protecting the identifiable details of the other crimes to give him leverage in any potential plea negotiations — leverage he never wanted to actually use, but liked having.

The FBI’s geographic reconstruction of Keyes’s known travel between roughly 2001 and 2012 has identified about a dozen trips that match the profile of an undisclosed killing — a few days in a remote region, paid in cash, no clear business reason. Investigators have specifically asked the public for any information about unsolved disappearances during the years 2005 through 2011 in Washington state, Oregon, the upstate New York area, the rural Pacific Northwest, and the Texas-Louisiana border region. As of 2026, at least four of Keyes’s eight unidentified victims remain unidentified.

The FBI has also continued, periodically, to excavate sites that match Keyes’s pattern of cache-burial. Three of his five known kits have been recovered. A fourth was described by Keyes but its location was given imprecisely enough that searches in 2013 and 2018 have not yet found it. A fifth, in Keyes’s own telling, may exist somewhere in the mountain west.

A cell, a blade, a sheet

On the morning of December 2, 2012, a guard at the Anchorage Correctional Complex found Israel Keyes dead in his cell. He had cut his left wrist with a small blade he had concealed for weeks, and had hanged himself with a torn bedsheet. On the wall above his bunk, written in his own blood, was a four-stanza poem and a row of eleven hand-drawn skulls.

The number of skulls has been the most-debated single artifact of the case. The FBI’s reading is that the eleven skulls correspond to eleven specific victims Keyes was confirming as his — the three he had named completely (the Curriers, Samantha Koenig) plus eight more he had partially described. Some investigators believe the count is a deliberate over-count for theatrical effect. Some believe it is, if anything, an under-count.

His suicide ended the FBI’s interview access permanently and saved him the years of additional state prosecutions that the unsolved-but-confessed killings would have generated. It also, in the assessment of every senior FBI investigator who worked the case, prevented the recovery of information that would have brought closure to several families who, fourteen years later, still do not know whether their missing relative was killed by Israel Keyes.

What he taught the bureau

The Israel Keyes case is now used inside the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit as the prototype of what the bureau calls a “counter-investigative” predator — an offender whose methodology is specifically designed to defeat the standard tools of serial-homicide investigation. The traditional investigative model, refined since the 1970s through cases like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, assumes that a serial killer will reveal himself through patterns: victim type, geographic locus, escalating frequency, signature behaviors at the crime scene. Keyes deliberately had no patterns. He took the playbook the FBI had developed by studying the previous generation of killers and built his career around its blank spots.

The reason he was caught, in the end, was that he broke his own rules. He killed Samantha Koenig in his home state. He used her debit card for cash. He chose convenience over discipline. He was, in his own telling to Goeden, exhausted in 2012 — tired of the elaborate methodology, increasingly willing to risk shortcuts. The lesson the FBI took from the case is not encouraging. If Keyes had kept following his own rules in February 2012, he would almost certainly never have been caught.

Somewhere in the woods of the American West — a state Keyes never named, a hole he never marked on any map he ever showed an FBI agent — there is at least one more bucket. There may be more than one. The FBI is still, fourteen years later, occasionally getting tips. Excavations have not yet produced results. Whoever Keyes killed in the years before he met Samantha Koenig at a coffee window in Anchorage — their families do not yet have an answer. The next answer, if it ever comes, is going to be dug out of the ground.

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Sources: FBI Anchorage Field Office case file; U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska, Israel Keyes interview transcripts (December 2012, selected releases); Maureen Callahan, American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century (Viking, 2019); Anchorage Daily News and Vermont Public Radio archival reporting, 2011–2024; FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit case study on counter-investigative offender methodology (training materials).