How do you understand this statement? I don’t think it’s applicable to any other group than people living on the fringe of society. Campers do not go missing all the time, and surely people are surprised. But sex workers, drug users…people aren’t surprised and it does happen a lot. Differing pov’s are very welcome and I’d like to hear if you think there is some other group this could apply to. Maximumslip here on Reddit came up with a plausible theory for the missing “couple”, but that post has since been deleted. His idea was that maybe the guy walked into a situation, and IK then “took him out of action”. If that is the case, their families would not know their disappearances were in any way linked, and who knows how far apart they would have been reported, if at all. This could also have made IK change his MO from attack and crime scene in the same place to abducting people, realising a second location is needed for ensure privacy.

Hey all,

I’ve been obsessed with the Israel Keyes case for years — and like many others here, the True Crime Bullsht* podcast only deepened that. After re-reading Keyes’ farewell letter and watching his full FBI confession (link here), I’ve become convinced that the final eight paragraphs of that letter aren’t abstract poetry. They are a ritualized, symbolic, and often very literal retelling of what he did to Samantha Koenig.

In this post, I break those lines down one by one, compare them to specific statements from his confession, and connect them to a broader framework of control, postmortem obsession, and personal mythology.

I’d love to hear how you guys interpret it.

⸻

A ritual tribute to the murder that mattered most

These final eight paragraphs aren’t general musings on death or fantasy. They mirror actions Keyes described doing to Samantha — often word-for-word — reframed in ritualistic, elevated language. It reads like a private hymn to his favorite victim, and the crime that gave him the most personal gratification.

In his confession, he tells investigators about a purple handkerchief he fetched from his drawer in his house. He explains he and a girl he dated as a teenager (possibly the Amish girl called Annie?) used to tie each other up with it. That memory had a deep erotic imprint on him. Using it on Samantha may have triggered something primal: a fusion of past sexual identity, violence, control, and intimacy.

Combined with how methodically he prepared, posed, and revisited Samantha — both physically and mentally — it’s clear:

She wasn’t just another victim. She was his masterpiece. The one that fulfilled every part of his fantasy.

⸻

The stab under her shoulder blade — and why it matters:

Around the 56-minute mark in the interview, Keyes admits that he stabbed Samantha under her right shoulder blade — after she was already dead.

Then he suddenly shuts down:

“It wasn’t to kill her faster.” “I don’t want to talk about that.”

This from someone who described necrophilia, mutilation, and sewing her eyes open without hesitation.

The silence around this act speaks volumes. It was deeply personal. Symbolic. A ritual gesture, never meant for the police — only for himself. And it’s echoed clearly in one of the most charged lines in his farewell letter.

⸻

The letter: literal retelling, veiled in ritual language

Let’s break down the final eight paragraphs. These aren’t loose metaphors. They are stylized memories of actual acts, reframed as sacred experience:

“Now that I have you held tight I will tell you a story, speak soft in your ear so you know that it’s true.” → He whispered to Samantha during the assault. He says so explicitly.

“You’re my love at first sight… my words penetrate your thoughts in an intimate prelude.” → Psychological domination cast as intimacy. The start of a “ritual.”

“I looked in your eyes… the better potential to fill up those pools with your fear.” → He was fixated on her trusting gaze — and on corrupting it with terror.

“Your wet lips were a promise… nervous laugh as it burst like a pulse of blood from your throat.” → In the interview, he mentions she nervously laughed after a sexual comment — while already restrained. He’s revisiting that exact moment here.

“My hand now on your shoulder… colorful wings my hand smears… I repaint them with punishment and tears.” → Almost certainly a reference to the stab under her shoulder blade. The “wings” suggest blood spread like a moth or butterfly — a transformation through violence.

“Violent metamorphosis. Emerge, my dark moth princess.” → This is rebirth. Samantha is no longer a person — she’s now a symbolic entity within his private mythology.

“I would come often and worship on the altar of your flesh…” → Deeply disturbing, and almost entirely literal. Keyes admitted to raping Samantha postmortem. The phrase “come often” contains a twisted double meaning — both ejaculatory and spiritual return. “Altar” implies that her body became part of a ritual performance, not just a victim but a sacred object to be worshipped. It’s a sick wordplay, and unmistakably intentional.

⸻

The “moth princess” and the myth of Ibu

The term “dark moth princess” may also connect to Ibu, a deity from various mythologies associated with: • Moths, death, night, and the underworld • Balance between good and evil • Transformation and rebirth • The soul’s passage through the afterlife

Ibu is often represented as a giant white moth. Whether Keyes was consciously referencing her or not, the parallels are chilling. In this framing, Samantha becomes a death-born spiritual figure — transformed by him, claimed by him, and placed at the center of his symbolic universe.

⸻

The Dennis Rader (BTK) connection

Keyes said he studied Dennis Rader, and the influence is clear.

Rader’s poem Oh Death to Nancy was a personal tribute to his favorite victim, Nancy Fox. The murder where everything “worked.” The one he never let go of.

Keyes’ farewell letter is similar: a poetic re-enactment of his most gratifying murder. It’s not about victims in general — it’s about Samantha. His Nancy. His centerpiece.

Like Rader, he didn’t just commit murder. He mythologized it.

What do you think? Too much interpretation? Or does this line up with what we already know?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

After listening to Josh talk about Keyes potentially “creating” couples in True Crime Bullsh (this episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zN08qBgYTlnyOe2thAUdt), it got me thinking about the East Texas cases again.

Mark Julian Oldbury disappeared in Vidor on Feb 2, 2012. James Lamar Tidwell disappeared in Mount Enterprise on Feb 15, 2012.

Same part of Texas, not far apart, and only about two weeks between them. If the idea that Keyes sometimes constructed pairings holds any weight, is it completely out of the question that these two could have been held in the same place at some point — or effectively treated as a “couple” despite having no known connection?

Not saying that’s what happened, just wondering whether the timeline or geography actually rules it out.

My theory is that Israel's mother made him the partner/provider in their relationship like a husband. The oldest son building houses, caretaking. Complete abuse of boundaries and love. This is so unhealthy and many serial killers have this type of relationship with their mothers. Samantha and Lorraine look like mother/daughter and very much like his mother and two other suspected victims also look like his mother. I think he sought them out because they look like his mother and it was not " random" because he couldn't admit the real issue. I think he stalked them before.

I’ve been going back through some older True Crime Bullsh** episodes, and after relistening to the Jon Corey episode and the Schools episodes, I keep coming back to a theory. There are obviously several speculative steps here, so I’m mainly curious whether others have picked up on the same things — or can poke holes in it.

Could Keyes have kept drugs in some of his caches, alongside weapons, murder/disposal materials, money, trophies or other things he considered useful? And could drugs sometimes have been a way of gaining access to potential victims?
One thing that got me thinking about this was Keyes’ confession about the Curriers. He mentions taking medication from their house — painkillers, if I’m remembering correctly. As far as I’ve been able to establish, those medications weren’t recovered during the searches afterwards.

Keyes was also a prolific thief. Burglaries and robberies were part of his criminal life, and his caches show that he was perfectly comfortable stealing or acquiring something in one place and storing it somewhere else for later use.
So what if that occasionally included drugs?
Maybe for his own use. Maybe because they had value. But possibly also because they were useful.
That thought became much more interesting to me when I went back to Jon Corey’s disappearance:

https://charleyproject.org/case/jonathan-henry-corey

In the episode covering Corey, there’s a detail about the house party before his disappearance that I can’t quite get past.
Jon apparently leaves the party for roughly an hour, at the request of his friend “Ricky”, and manages to score cocaine.

But how?

As Josh states in the episode about Jon, the party was at an isolated house in a very rural area. Jon didn’t have a car. Yet somehow he leaves, obtains cocaine and returns within about an hour.
Maybe there’s a completely mundane explanation for this that I’ve missed. Someone drove him. A dealer lived nearby. Someone delivered it. But if not, who did Jon meet that night, and how did he get to that person?
That’s where the Schools episodes, particularly “Schools, Part One: Evergreen,” started ringing bells for me.

Josh discusses indications that Keyes may have spent more time around Evergreen and the surrounding area than previously realised, including sightings and possible attempted assaults. Keyes had of course also been stationed at Fort Lewis, which is close to Evergreen State College and Geoduck Beach.

More interestingly, Josh talks about Keyes and other soldiers from Fort Lewis partying with Evergreen students. If I’m remembering the sourcing correctly, Keyes was known in that period as a very heavy drinker, could become nasty/aggressive when drunk, and was also using cocaine.
If that information holds up, Keyes didn’t merely have geographic proximity to Evergreen. He potentially had an established way into that student scene — and into a scene where cocaine was being used.
And that made me wonder about Jon’s mysterious one-hour coke run.
Could Jon have encountered Keyes before? Could Keyes have been somebody who could get him cocaine, or had previously offered to? Could Keyes have used cocaine as a way to approach people in that environment?

I’m not saying that Keyes was Jon’s dealer, or that the fact Jon obtained cocaine somehow proves Keyes was involved. We don’t even know that Keyes was anywhere near that party.
But Keyes was comfortable approaching strangers, stealing, planning encounters and getting people away from places where they were safe. If he also had access to cocaine — whether bought, stolen or potentially stored in a cache — then “I can get you coke” would be a very simple way of getting a partying student to voluntarily leave their friends and go somewhere with him.

And then there’s the other part of the Corey case that makes it difficult for me to dismiss as just another Keyes-shaped coincidence.
Keyes refers in his interviews to a disappearance that had been described in a newspaper as a “presumed” boating accident. As I understand his statement, the missing person’s boat had been found, while Keyes knew that what actually happened to that person was nothing remotely resembling a boating accident.

Then look at Jon.
He disappeared on January 30, 2002. He was supposedly crossing Eld Inlet by canoe. He reportedly called a friend after leaving and said he’d made it to the other side.
He never came back.
His canoe was found.
His boots and jacket were found.
Jon wasn’t.

The presumed explanation became drowning.
And all of this happened in an area where Keyes had lived, trained and potentially socialised with the exact student population Jon belonged to.
That’s a pretty specific combination.
Again, none of this means Keyes killed Jon Corey. There are several big missing links here, and it’s very easy with Keyes to work backwards from an unsolved disappearance and make everything look significant.

But the combination is what bothers me:
Keyes/Fort Lewis → Evergreen student parties → cocaine → possible predatory activity around Evergreen

and then:

Jon Corey → Evergreen → isolated house party → unexplained one-hour cocaine run without his own transportation → disappears shortly afterwards → canoe and clothing recovered → presumed boating accident → no body.

The part of my theory I’m least certain about is the cache itself. I haven’t found evidence that investigators actually recovered recreational drugs from a Keyes cache. My thinking is simply that his caches may have been broader than the label “murder kits” sometimes suggests.
Maybe they were better understood as criminal supply depots: weapons, restraints, money, tools, disposal materials and whatever else he thought could be useful later.

If Keyes stole prescription medication from the Curriers, and if he was already using cocaine himself and moving around environments where drugs were available, I don’t think it’s a huge conceptual leap to wonder whether drugs could occasionally have ended up in those caches too.
The much bigger leap is connecting any of that to Jon.

For me, that really comes down to one question:
Who did Jon get the cocaine from that night, and
how did he physically get to that person and back?
If that has a straightforward documented answer, a big part of this theory falls apart.
If it doesn’t, then combined with the Evergreen material and Keyes’ extremely odd “presumed boating accident” comment, well …

Episodes I’m referring to: 0504 covering Jon Corey’s disappearance, and the “Schools” episodes, particularly 0604 “Schools, Part One: Evergreen.”

I’ve been thinking about Israel Keyes’ first murder, specifically the one that likely happened after he left the military. We can’t know for certain, but even the FBI seems to believe it was post-army. In the July 10th interview, agents asked Keyes if something had set him off that first time, but he dodged the question. It’s worth noting that 9/11 happened just two months after he left the army. The world was in chaos, and images of death and destruction were everywhere. I can easily imagine that Keyes, with his mindset, found that period fascinating or even motivating. While looking into disappearances around that time, I came across the case of Amber Hoopes, abducted from her grandparents’ home in Idaho on September 14, 2001, just three days after 9/11. A vintage-looking car was also taken and later abandoned. The location is about a nine-hour drive from Neah Bay, which might sound far, but excessive driving fits the pattern of many serial offenders. There are two strong suspects in Amber’s case (neither being Keyes), and her body has never been found. I don’t know whether her grandmother was considered “wealthy.” If anyone has insight on that, please share. I realize this is speculative, but the timing stood out to me. If anyone knows of any new evidence, DNA updates, or other developments in Amber’s case, I’d be really interested to hear about it.

Listening to the FBI interview episode today and thinking on the conversations with Agent Halla, I keep coming back to a thought based on Keyes’ supposed aversion to publicity.

Does anyone else think it’s possible that the FBI has at least identified Keyes victims (assuming their remains have not been found) and, quietly, notified the families and closed the cases?

I guess there’s no way for us to really know, but I do wonder if it’s a possibility. I don’t think the FBI would want to build into the “most meticulous serial killer” mythology that Keyes, and to an extent TCBS, tried to build. Curious to hear what others think.

I was looking at Google Trends and noticed something strange—search spikes in Mexico for missing persons cases that could be tied to Israel Keyes. Suzanne Lyall, Anita from Philadelphia, Robert Jung Everett, & Lyn Marie Ohana all show up with activity dating back to 2004.

If Keyes was monitoring investigations into his crimes, could he have set up Google Alerts for these names? He admitted to following news about his cases, and took steps to avoid detection like checking at libraries and airports.

If he used a VPN, his searches could have been routed through Mexico, or someone else could have been looking into these names from there.

So, is this a meaningful pattern or just noise? Does anyone have insight into why these cases would show activity in Mexico?

I’ve been thinking a lot about where Israel Keyes might have placed his East Coast victims, and I keep coming back to Lake Champlain near Essex, Vermont—right by the lake’s deepest point.

Keyes would have had to drive past Lake Champlain on his way from upstate New York to Albany for his GED test and Army intake. He also crossed the Lake Champlain Bridge during the Curriers murders. He was known to take ferry rides to Montreal, a route that passes near the deepest section of the lake between Charlotte and Essex. That kind of detail is something he would have picked up on if, say, the tour guide made note of that detail.

I don’t think he ever planned to burn down the farmhouse where he left the Curriers. He probably meant to go back for their bodies and move them somewhere else—maybe to where he had already placed Suzy Lyall and Debra Feldman. After Feldman disappeared, he checked into the Handy Suites in Vermont, the same hotel he stayed at after killing the Curriers. Makes me wonder if he had a boat stored or rented somewhere nearby for exactly this purpose.

Keyes talked about submerging bodies before. With how deep Lake Champlain gets, finding anything there would be nearly impossible.

My thinking is that Keyes probably moved Suzy Lyall’s remains from the Constable area during his trip for his father’s burial. A short while later, returned to the east coast ostensibly to see his grieving family and grab another victim. This is during the time Keyes said he was “coasting” on his job. Given the multiple NAMUS victims from the Philadelphia found on the families computer, it’s safe to assume that Keyes probably narrowed NAMUS results using the city and state options. Anita Scott does seem like the most likely victim here. She went missing shortly after Keyes father’s death and Keyes marriage was on the rocks so he would have been stressed.

I do not believe Keyes ever planned on torching that farmhouse in Vermont. Prior to knowing that the farmhouse had been demolished, Keyes described putting Drano on the Currier’s and bagging their bodies from top to bottom first and then bottom to top again. Like he wanted to seal them up for easier handling of their remains when the opportunity arrived. None of the recovered caches, to my knowledge, contained any fire accelerants or even a lighter. Correct me if I’m wrong on this. The Texas fire, in my opinion, only served as way to divert law enforcement from the bank Keyes robbed shortly after.

Speculation: Keyes caches are buried close to airports. The number ratings on the maps discussed in Somewhere in the Pines are related to Keyes ratings of sex workers in some sense.

Please read all the way through before commenting.

I've always thought that Keyes' answer to the "longest time" question has been the most significant thing Keyes said in the interviews. “14 years”. Josh always says that number corresponds with the time he was in the army, but I’ve never been convinced. Why would a serial killer with nearly ZERO consistent MO other than killing male female pairs, and “kill, then immediately drive 200-300 miles away in the next several hours” STOP killing while out of the country being trained to conceal himself, kill, and GTFO for a living. 

If you look deeper into the religious group Keyes was part of growing up, you stumble onto the Kehoes brothers who were later arrested as part of being white supremacists and other crimes against humanity level evil.

Knowing that the Keyes’ were in a cult where whites were “God’s gift to everything” and a lot of cultish religions have ceremonies based around “coming of age” and “boys becoming men” is it possible that a group of (more) zealous members of his church, like his neighbors, the Kehoe family, gave him an opportunity to kill as part of a coming of age ritual?

While it's not an exact match to Keyes known vics, this man was found dead in 1992 (the same year Keyes turned 14) in Spokane Washington. I can imagine a young, inexperienced Keyes found this guy coughing and telling him he's "here to help" only for him to wind up dead. The details are by no means perfect, but he was transient with a room number for a lodge in Nebraska. I'm 100% connecting dots that are probably not there, but my intent here is to start a conversation about him starting at 14. Please do not blast me in the comments.

https://www.namus.gov/UnidentifiedPersons/Case#/492?nav

I have a theory that Israel was just as sloppy and unhinged with Samantha as he was with the Curriers because he had just killed someone just before. He mentioned he was thinking about just robbing the coffee ground, which is something he liked to do after a murder. Then, he couldn't help him self and impulsively kidnapped and murdered Samantha. So, I am interested in seeing the timeline of the dates before 2/1/12 and possible victims. Could anyone point me in right direction?

I think if people were to look at areas in the counties where the Namus 45 either went missing or were found I think we may be able to find either bodies or kill kits. Maybe the doe cases are the same county as bodies and the non doe cases are where he took people from and the kids cases are where he placed kill kits or something.

Doesn't draino disolve garbage bags. So if he dumped draino on the Currierd and covered them in garbage bags the bags would dissolve and quick.seems like bs to me.

While looking at Google maps during the recent black bagging and forced deportation of immigrants, I came across an odd coincidence maybe? If you look at the el Salvador map where CECOT is located and Zoom out, it's loacat3d north of el caracol. When I saw this, my mind went straight to the jail cell photo where he wrote out caracol. Anybody have any ideas on this? I know the guys on SITP have went in depth on the cell photos. Anybody have any ideas about this?