Israel Keyes (January 7, 1978 – December 2, 2012) was an American serial killer, bank robber, burglar, arsonist, kidnapper and sex offender who murdered at least three victims and committed dozens of felonies including armed robbery, arson, rape and burglary across the United States from July 2001 to February 2012.
While awaiting trial, Keyes killed himself by slashing his wrists and hanging himself. Evidence left behind in his jail cell—including a suicide note, drawings of eleven skulls, a drawing of the Baphomet, and an inscription of "Corozal" on the cell's wall (all written or otherwise stained with Keyes' blood)—led the FBI to suspect Keyes murdered at least eleven victims in total. He admitted to having committed violent crimes as early as 1996, with the aggravated sexual assault of a teenage girl in Oregon, in a series of meticulous crimes across multiple states that lasted until his capture in 2012.
Early life
Childhood
Israel Keyes was born in Richmond, Utah, on January 7, 1978, to Heidi Keyes née Hakansson and John Jeffrey "Jeff" Keyes (October 4, 1952–November 13, 2002). He was the second of ten children born to a large family, whose parents were members of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from Torrance, California.
There, Keyes and his siblings were homeschooled and taught Christian beliefs until 1983. After leaving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints faith, Keyes's father moved the family to a remote plot of land north of Colville, Washington in Stevens County when Israel was 5 years old. Isolated from society, the Keyes family lived in a one-room cabin without electricity or running water located on Rocky Creek Road. In Colville, the family attended services at a church called the Ark, which practiced white supremacist Christian Identity ideology. Keyes later described the Ark as an Amish-like church environment. During this period of attending the Ark, the Keyes family befriended the neighboring family of Chevie Kehoe, who was later convicted for a 1996 triple murder.
Adolescence
The family attended another church in Colville called the Christian Israel Covenant Church that taught British Israelism as doctrine, that miscegenation was abominable and deviant, that Anglo-Saxons were to rule over the perceived inferior races, and that Keyes later alleged to have been militia-like. For years, some of the Keyes children had been forced to sleep in a tent due to their cabin's small size. To survive, the Keyes children were made to hunt their food, chop firewood, and work on local farms to support the family; as a hobby, Keyes hunted "anything with a heartbeat" and freely admitted to skinning a deer alive to his peers at the church. As a result, Keyes was ostracized and actively avoided by various youths who attended the Christian Israel Covenant Church, with one girl recounting that Keyes's presence "made my skin crawl."
As a youth, Keyes admitted to shooting at neighbors' houses with his BB gun, starting fires in the woods, and breaking into houses for fun. He also occasionally broke into houses with another youth, who subsequently avoided him after witnessing Keyes shoot an animal. On one occasion, Keyes stole several guns from his neighbor's residence, and was forced to apologize by his parents after their discovery of the cache. On occasion, Keyes–who stood tall by age 14–would also sell stolen guns to local adults.
Around this time, Keyes's parents provided shelter to personal friends; in the presence of their son and daughter and Keyes's sister, Keyes tied a cat to a tree with a parachute cord and gored it with a .22 revolver. The cat then began circling the tree before crashing into it and vomiting; Keyes allegedly chuckled before noting that the boy–who later informed his father–had vomited in response to the incident. Keyes had an epiphany in which he felt that he was different from his peers, who ran away from him. Upon this realization, he kept his increasingly antisocial behavior to himself, withdrawing socially due to being ostracized. In addition, Keyes's mother began to notice "some troubling signs" in Keyes during this period, when he began tuning into various "radio stations and different things."