American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

Content Warning: This section of the guide references extremely distressing themes, including drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse, abduction, gun violence, rape, murder, and desecration of corpses. Additionally, bigoted, racist, and misogynistic beliefs are expressed by the serial killer and members of his family.

Payne’s team started to find information about Keyes online, and gradually sketched out a profile for him. There was unusually little information, and most of their findings came from a self-reported biography on Keyes’s construction website. Born in 1978, Keyes had worked as a contractor in the small town of Colman in Washington State when he was younger before joining the US Army in 1998. He was honorably discharged after two years, and began to work in Neah Bay, another “poor, rural, isolated” area of the Pacific Northwest (66). He then moved to Anchorage and began his construction business. The investigators noted the discrepancy between his apparent intellectual potential and adventurousness, and the small, dead-end jobs and neighborhoods to which he had gravitated.

Meanwhile, local Texas officers finally persuaded his mother Heidi to speak to them. Heidi explained that she and her four adult daughters had moved across the country to join a small Christian congregation in a rural area of Texas.