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Ransom for a Ghost: How Keyes Extended the Hunt After the Kill
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Israel Keyes strangled Samantha Koenig, then boarded a cruise ship while her family searched — and later staged a proof-of-life photo of her corpse to collect ransom. This is the chapter where the Alaskan serial killer's methodical control finally cracked.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
He walked into a situation that should have ended his life. He didn't know that.
Samantha Koenig was eighteen years old. She worked the closing shift at the Common Grounds coffee stand on Tudor Road in Anchorage, Alaska.
But there was a gap. A small one.
While Samantha's family and Anchorage investigators began searching, Keyes was at sea. When he returned, he went back to the shed.
Then Keyes made an error. The only one that mattered.
On March thirteenth, two thousand twelve, Corporal Bryan Henry of the Texas Department of Public Safety pulled over a white Ford Focus near Lufkin, in east Texas. Routine stop.
To understand Keyes, you have to understand the infrastructure he'd built before he was ever identified as a suspect. He didn't carry weapons onto planes.
Vermont, June two thousand eleven. Eight months before the Koenig abduction.
After his arrest, Keyes agreed to talk. Between April and October of two thousand twelve, he underwent more than forty hours of FBI interviews in an Anchorage jail.
He didn't give investigators long to work with what he'd offered. On December second, two thousand twelve, Israel Keyes was found dead in his cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
Come back to Duane Tortolani for a moment. The boyfriend who walked into that situation and didn't die.
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