2456 Spurr Ln, Anchorage, AK 99517
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Author: Jewls Krueger
Israel Keyes was a serial killer, rapist, bank robber, and arsonist who operated across the United States from 2001 to 2012 from his home base in Anchorage, Alaska. While the FBI ultimately believes he killed as many as 11 people, he is officially linked to the murders of Samantha Koenig in Anchorage in 2012 and Bill and Lorraine Currier in Essex, Vermont in 2011. He is widely considered one of the most meticulous and elusive serial killers in modern American history.
The home where he lived at the time of his arrest, and where his only known murder in Alaska took place, still stands in the Turnagain neighborhood of West Anchorage.
Isreal Keyes' Mugshot -Public Domain
Israel Keyes was born on January 7, 1978 in Richmond, Utah, the second of ten children of John Jeffrey and Heidi Keyes. The family lived an off the grid lifestyle and moved frequently throughout Israel's childhood, eventually settling in a small cabin without electricity or running water near Colville, Washington. While there, the family attended a white supremacist Christian Identity church and were neighbors of Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe, two future white supremacist criminals. Israel was homeschooled and as a teenager became fascinated with guns, fires, and Satanism.
Keyes enlisted in the U.S. Army on July 9, 1998 and served at Fort Lewis in Washington, Fort Hood in Texas, and in Egypt before being honorably discharged on July 8, 2001 at the rank of E-4. After leaving the Army, he settled in the Makah Reservation community of Neah Bay, Washington with a girlfriend, Tammie Hawkins, with whom he had a daughter in 2000.
In 2007, Keyes moved to Anchorage, Alaska to live with a new girlfriend, a nurse practitioner named Kimberly Anderson. He brought his daughter with him. That same year he started his own business, Keyes Construction, working as a handyman and general contractor. The family eventually settled into a modest, light blue, three bedroom home at 2456 Spurr Lane in the Turnagain neighborhood of West Anchorage.
On the evening of February 1, 2012, 18 year old Samantha Koenig was working at the Common Grounds coffee stand on Tudor Road in midtown Anchorage when Keyes approached her in a face mask and gloves shortly after 8 p.m. He ordered an Americano and then forced her at gunpoint to walk away with him to his white pickup truck parked across the street.
Keyes drove Samantha back to his home on Spurr Lane and locked her inside a shed in his front yard. He bound her, turned the radio up so she could not be heard, and told her he had a police scanner that would alert him if she tried to signal a neighbor. He then drove to Samantha's home to retrieve her ATM card from a vehicle she shared with her boyfriend. When her boyfriend came outside, Keyes fled the area and returned to the shed, where he sexually assaulted Samantha and then strangled her.
The next day, Keyes left for a long planned two week family cruise out of New Orleans, leaving Samantha's body in the freezing shed in his front yard. When he returned to Anchorage on February 17, he applied makeup to her face, sewed her eyelids open with fishing line, and took a Polaroid photograph of her propped up with a recent issue of the Anchorage Daily News. He used the photo to support a ransom demand of $30,000, which was deposited into Samantha's bank account.
In the weeks that followed, Keyes flew to Las Vegas and rented a 2011 Kia Soul, then made a series of ATM withdrawals using Samantha's card across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He had also dismembered Samantha's body and dumped her remains in Matanuska Lake, off the Glenn Highway between Palmer and Wasilla.
Further Reading
Long before the Koenig case, Keyes had become a methodical traveling killer. Beginning in 2001, he had been driving and flying across the country to murder strangers in locations far from Anchorage, often using "kill kits" of weapons and supplies he had buried at remote sites years in advance.
On June 8, 2011, Keyes flew from Alaska to Chicago, rented a car, and drove more than 1,000 miles to Essex, Vermont. After digging up a kill kit he had buried in the area in 2009, he broke into the home of 49 year old Bill Currier and 55 year old Lorraine Currier, a couple he had selected at random because their ranch home had an attached garage, no cars in the driveway, and no signs of children or a dog. He took the Curriers to an abandoned farmhouse, where he shot Bill, then raped and strangled Lorraine. He bagged their bodies, hid them in the basement, and then set them on fire. The Curriers' remains have never been recovered. The farmhouse was later demolished and the debris taken to a landfill.
During interviews after his arrest, Keyes confessed to having killed four people in Washington state between 2001 and 2005, and another woman believed to be Debra J. Feldman, who was abducted from Hackensack, New Jersey in April 2009 and likely buried near Tupper Lake in New York. He claimed at least 11 total victims, but the FBI was never able to identify the rest.
FBI agents search Matanuska Lake for Samantha Koenig -Public Domain
Israel Keyes was arrested on March 13, 2012 after a Texas Highway Patrol corporal pulled him over for speeding outside Lufkin, Texas. Inside the rental car, the trooper found Samantha Koenig's debit card and cell phone, along with a sweatshirt and ski masks. Federal investigators were already closing in on Keyes when he was stopped. He was transported back to Anchorage and charged with Samantha's murder.
Over the next eight months, FBI agents and Anchorage prosecutors conducted more than 40 hours of recorded interviews with Keyes. He admitted to the Currier murders and provided extensive but partial details about other killings. He also asked that his name not be publicly linked to the Vermont case in order to protect his family.
In the early morning hours of December 1, 2012, Keyes was found dead in his cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex. He had used a razor blade he had somehow concealed in the cell to slit his left wrist and had also strangled himself with bedding. Beneath his body was a four page handwritten suicide note that gave no clues to other victims, along with 11 skull drawings and a pentagram he had painted on the back of his interview transcripts using his own blood. On one of the drawings, he had written the words "We are one." Investigators believe each skull represents one of his victims.
The home at 2456 Spurr Lane sits on a quiet dead end street in the Turnagain neighborhood of West Anchorage, near the Cook Inlet and Knik Arm. It is a modest single story, three bedroom home of approximately 1,970 square feet, originally built in 1971. The front yard shed where Samantha Koenig was held was seized by federal investigators on March 30, 2012, transported to FBI Anchorage headquarters, and never returned to the property.
The house has changed hands at least once since Keyes lived there and was most recently sold in March 2021 for $425,000. It remains a private residence.
Spurr Lane is a short cul de sac with very few homes, so all visitors are easily seen and noted. Please be respectful of the current owners and the surrounding neighborhood, stay on public roads at all times, and do not attempt to enter the property or interact with the neighbors.
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