Israel Keyes

The Victims: A Barista in Anchorage and a Couple in Vermont

Samantha Koenig was 18 years old and worked the late shift at a small coffee stand on Tudor Road in Anchorage, Alaska. Federal prosecutors and the FBI gave her age as 18; at least one early national report described her as 17, but the official figure is used here. She had never met the man who took her. Far across the continent, Bill and Lorraine Currier were a long-married, middle-aged couple living in Essex, Vermont, who vanished in June 2011. Their bodies have never been found. Both cases would eventually lead investigators to the same person: Israel Keyes, a 34-year-old Army veteran and construction contractor who lived in Anchorage with his partner and young daughter.

The Abduction of Samantha Koenig

According to the federal indictment, Keyes took Koenig from the coffee stand on February 1, 2012, and led her to a pickup truck parked across the street. Prosecutors said she was killed early the following morning. Keyes then used her phone to send messages meant to make her family believe she was safe, and he took a debit card from a vehicle she shared and got its PIN from her. Investigators later said he left her body in a shed at his home while he travelled out of state on a cruise that began in New Orleans.

On February 24, 2012, a ransom demand appeared, asking for money to be deposited into the account linked to the stolen card. Koenig's family, using reward money raised by the community, made the deposit. That decision gave investigators a trail to follow.

Following the Money to Texas

Between March 1 and 10, 2012, the card was used at ATMs in Alaska, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Law enforcement tracked the withdrawals, and Keyes was arrested in Lufkin, Texas, in mid-March 2012. The FBI and CBS News give the date as March 13, while an ABC News report from 2024 says March 12. The Anchorage Police Department, the FBI, the Texas Rangers, Lufkin police and prosecutors in Alaska all worked on the case. Koenig's remains were recovered from a frozen lake north of Anchorage about three weeks after his arrest.

After agents searched his home, Keyes confessed to killing Koenig. In later interviews he went much further. He admitted to killing the Curriers, whom the FBI says he chose at random on June 8, 2011, after flying from Alaska to Chicago, renting a car and driving roughly 1,000 miles to Vermont. He also described burying caches, sometimes called "kill kits," in various places around the country. The FBI says these caches held weapons and cash, the money coming partly from bank robberies, including one in Tupper Lake, New York, in April 2009 and another in Azle, Texas, in February 2012. The caches allowed him to travel without carrying weapons on planes or leaving a credit card trail.

Charges and a Case That Never Reached Trial

In April 2012 a federal grand jury in Alaska indicted Keyes on three counts: kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money, and access device fraud. The kidnapping count carried a maximum penalty of life in prison or death. Investigators said Keyes wanted a quick death sentence and hoped to avoid several trials in different jurisdictions. A federal trial was slated for the following March, but on December 2, 2012, Keyes was found dead in his cell at the Anchorage jail in an apparent suicide. Because he died before trial, he was never convicted of any of these killings; his responsibility rests on his own confessions and the evidence investigators gathered.

How Many Victims?

Keyes never gave a full list. The FBI has said investigators believe he killed 11 people, largely because he described the total as "less than 12." Beyond Koenig and the Curriers, he spoke of seven or eight other victims, including people he said he killed in Washington state, where he had lived after leaving the Army in 2001 and before moving to Anchorage in 2007. In August 2013 the FBI posted hours of his recorded interviews online, along with a detailed timeline of his travels, and asked the public for help. An FBI spokesman said at the time that investigators had exhausted their leads. Those additional victims remain unidentified, and the FBI continues to invite tips through 1-800-CALL-FBI and its online portal.

Renewed Attention and Why the Case Matters

Interest in the case has not faded. In December 2024 ABC News Studios released a Hulu series, Wild Crime: Eleven Skulls, which revisited the investigation, including drawings of skulls found in his cell that some investigators believe may represent his victims. That reading remains unconfirmed, and no newly identified victims have been publicly announced since.

The case is often cited for what it revealed about a mobile offender who targeted strangers in places he had no connection to, crossing state lines and planning months ahead. That pattern made the crimes extremely hard to link through ordinary local policing. It also shows why the abduction became a federal matter: kidnapping charges brought in U.S. court opened the possibility of a federal death sentence. In Vermont, the Currier case is still incomplete in one painful sense: the couple's remains were never recovered.