Israel Keyes Israel Keyes is an American serial killer who was active from approximately 2001 to his capture in 2012. He is known for his extreme attention to detail, his patience and discipline in selecting targets that lived far away from him, and the meticulous disposal of his victim’s bodies. Keyes killed several victims across the United States and was finally caught in 2012 after he uncharacteristically deviated from his modus operandi and hatched a plan to collect a ransom from his last victim’s family. Keyes was known to go to extreme lengths to hide his involvement in these murders, including driving across the country in rental cars, while using nothing but cash and removing the batteries from his cell phones in order to evade …show more content…
He was the second child to John Jeffrey Keyes and Heidi Hokansson. John, a maintenance man, and Heidi, a stay-at-home mom, raised their son in a Mormon environment and homeschooled both Israel and his eight siblings. Soon after his birth, Israel’s parents moved the family to Aladdin Road, a small area north of Colville, Washington. While his family officially followed the Mormon faith, they were known to attend a local Christian Identity church, an organization known to follow a white supremacist version of Christianity. The family also quickly became friends with the neighbors, the Kehoe family. Chevie Kehoe, the eldest of eight sons, would later become an infamous white supremacist and convicted murderer, after killing William Frederick Mueller, along with his wife and daughter, during a robbery to secure guns, ammunition, and money. During his time in Aladdin Road, Israel became a very introverted child with little interaction with the other children in town. He is known to have burglarized several houses during his time here and to have killed family pets for entertainment. Following his family’s relocation to Smyrna, Maine to become involved in the maple syrup business in the late 1990s, Keyes was kicked out of his family home for rejecting his parents’ faith and declaring his