Israel Keyes and the Kill Kits Still Buried Across America

0:00 In the last episode we talked about how Israel keys managed to live two lives. One as a quiet contractor and family man, the other as a man who spent years flying across the country, killing strangers and leaving almost nothing behind. But the part that stayed hidden wasn't just what he did, it was how far it reached, because once he was caught he started talking and every time he opened his mouth, investigators had more to untangle. This is the part where the mask comes off, where the stories don't feel random anymore. This is part two of Israel keys. Let's get into it. .

1:04 After Israel keys was flown back to Anchorage, the silence didn't last long. He asked to speak with investigators, not with a lawyer, no negotiation, he just started talking. He admitted to killing Samantha Canek, said it was an even planned. Said he went out that night looking for someone and she was the first someone he saw. He walked up to her coffee stand, waited until she was alone, pulled a gun, forced her to turn off the lights and unlock the door. Then he climbed inside and took her. He brought her to his house, tied her up in a shed behind the garage, while his girlfriend and daughter slept inside keys assaulted her.

1:45 Then he killed her. Then the next day he flew to New Orleans, boarded a cruise with his family, smiled for pictures, and drank beer on the deck. No one knew that he had just left someone dead in his backyard. Two weeks later he returned to Alaska. He told her eyelids open to make it look like she was still alive, posed her with a newspaper, took a photo and sent it with a ransom demand. He gave investigators the exact location where he left her body. Manta Nuska Lake. He cut a hole in the ice and dropped her in. He told them the tools he used, the fishing line, the weight, everything. Police went to the lake and pulled her out.

2:27 Police told that story calmly, without hesitation and without emotion. When they asked if he had killed anyone else, he said yes. That answer changed everything about the case, because the next name he gave them wasn't from Alaska. It was a couple from Vermont and they had been missing for nearly a year. Bill and Lorraine Courier lived in Essex, Vermont. They didn't have kids, no dogs, nothing flashy about their life. They worked regular jobs, kept to themselves and stuck to a quiet routine. On the night of June 8, 2011, they vanished. No signs of a struggle. Their car disappeared too.

3:09 Friends called the police when neither of them showed up for work. Flyers went up, tips came in, but no one had any idea what happened to them. A year later, sitting in an interrogation room in Alaska, Israel Keys gave investigators their names. He said he had flown from Alaska to Chicago, then rented a car and drove over a thousand miles to Vermont. Not for a vacation, not for business, he had buried a kill kit there two years earlier and he was ready to use it. He picked a town at random and drove around at night, looking for a house. He wanted one with a garage and no dog. The courier's home matched everything he was looking for.

3:51 He cut the phone line, broke through the garage and forced them out of bed at gunpoint. He tied them up and drove them in their own car to an abandoned farmhouse a few miles away. He brought Bill to the basement and Lorraine upstairs. While he was attacking Lorraine, he heard noise from below. Bill had almost gotten free. Keys went downstairs and shot him. Then he returned to Lorraine and strangled her. He left both bodies in the house, wiped everything down and drove off before the sun came up. Weeks later, that same house was demolished and hauled off to a landfill. Most of the evidence went with it. But one thing survived.

4:32 Inside the debris, investigators found a shell casing with Keys fingerprint on it. When they showed it to him in the interview, he smiled, not surprised, just slightly impressed that they found it. Little Keys didn't rely on impulse. He spent years preparing for the murders he hadn't committed yet. He buried those kill kits across the country, each one sealed in a plastic bucket, hidden near hiking trails, parks and abandoned lots. Inside were guns with the serial numbers filed off. Ammo, zip ties, tape, masks, gloves, cash and chemicals to destroy evidence. He buried some of them years before he returned to dig them up.

5:16 Sometimes he changed plans mid-trip and saved the kill kit for later. Each one marked a place he had studied. The FBI found some of those kits, others, are still missing to this day. He kept his routine simple. Without a digital trail, without credit cards, he flew to one state, rented a car and then drove hundreds of miles to each place he had in mind. He robbed banks along the way to pay for it. He'd pick a victim, someone with no connection to him, no reason for investigators to look his way. He later said he preferred victims who didn't get much news coverage. People without a strong paper trail. People he could make disappear without much noise.

5:58 His goal was to keep killing as long as he could without drawing attention. And for years, it worked. Keys knew exactly what investigators looked for. Victim lines, victim types, geography, behavior that repeats. So he built a system that gave him none of that. He didn't have a type. He targeted couples, single women, strangers on the street, people asleep in their homes. Sometimes he drove across three states just to throw off the timeline. He avoided anything familiar. He never killed where he lived. He didn't stalk victims or keep souvenirs. Thinking about his process was built to vanish.

6:39 When agents asked how many people he had killed, he said, less than a dozen. He talked about a victim in New York, a woman he kidnapped and murdered near Tupper Lake in 2009. He never gave her name, but investigators believe it was Deborah Feldman, a woman who went missing from New Jersey that same week he was in the area. He mentioned four people in Washington. Two were a couple. The others were separate victims. No names and no body locations. He hinted at a murder in Texas, one in Wyoming, maybe one in Canada. When asked if he'd ever killed anyone outside the US, he smirked and said, Canadians don't count. That's all he gave them.

7:21 And that was enough to keep the FBI digging. Israel keys controlled every part of his life. Right down to the way he talked to the investigators, he agreed to interviews but only under his rules. He wanted coffee, he wanted Snickers bars, he wanted small talk. Not because he needed comfort, but because he liked being in charge. He said he would tell them everything, but only if they guaranteed him the death penalty. He didn't want a trial, he didn't want to be the headline, he wanted a date with death. Agents played along, they gave him time, they kept the tone casually, laughed at his jokes, gave him what he asked for, hoping he'd give them more in return.

8:07 It worked, to a point, he confessed to the couriers. He walked him through what happened to Samantha, he dropped hints about other victims, but he never gave full answers, just fragments, enough to keep their attention, never enough to close a case. And when he felt like they weren't holding up their end, he stopped cooperating. He went back to silence. Still he decided to end the story himself. On the morning of December 2, 2012, guards at the Anchorage Correctional Complex found Israel keys dead in his cell. He had taken a razor blade from a disposable shaving razor, hit it inside a pencil, and used it to cut his wrists.

8:52 At the same time he strangled himself using bed sheets. He left behind a four-page suicide note, written in his own blood. He didn't confess or name any victims, it read more like a rant. Dark lines, eerie language, phrase his like, "crush like a bug, you still die." Under his bed, investigators found something else. Eleven drawings of skulls painted in blood. Below them, one phrase, "We are one." He had already told investigators he'd killed fewer than 12 people. The FBI believes the skulls were a final message. Eleven victims, three confirmed, eight still unknown.

9:35 After his death, agents released his travel records, timelines, and interrogation footage to the public. They tracked his movements across dozens of cities trying to connect the gaps. The case remains open. These didn't leave behind a full story. He left pieces, locations without names, murders without bodies, states without answers. Unless those missing victims are found, the rest of his story stays buried. [Music]