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 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.

“It is the paradox of being Alaskan: this state is home to rugged individualists who nonetheless know there will come a time, amid the cold, unpitying winters, when they will need help.”

This passage showcases the regionally specific challenges of investigating crime in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as the rapid response of the community. Callahan depicts Anchorage as a home to people who valued their privacy and self-sufficiency but also recognized the urgency of protecting one of their own from a potential predator.

“Payne had never seen a case like this: zero physical evidence, nothing to indicate Samantha had been abducted. Yet here was an eighteen-year-old girl, her face all over the news, a city of three hundred thousand people looking for her, with no money—and even if she had stolen from the register, that was maybe two hundred dollars at best—no proof she had even left town. If Samantha hadn’t been abducted but also hadn’t left town, what was the answer?”

This passage highlights the relative rarity of stranger abductions in Anchorage that led the investigators to initially dismiss that theory out of hand, introducing the ways in which Keyes’s crimes deviated from traditional patterns of serial murder. Keyes selected Samantha precisely because they were not tied to each other in any way, and so law enforcement would never consider him as a suspect, a technique that he utilized in earlier crimes as well.

“Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson were all working twenty-hour days, frayed to the point of exhaustion. No one shut off, ever. They’d all go home and log on to their computers, looking for leads, and despite their access to top-secret databases, they all relied most heavily on Google.”

Callahan explores the psychological toll of the investigation, highlighting the challenges posed by Keyes’s non-traditional methods. The mystifying nature of the case meant that the most seasoned investigators in the FBI could follow every lead they had and still get nowhere.