Killer Realizes the Only Way to Die Is to Say What He Did

Israel Keyes · FBI interview recordings · 26 July 2012 — Federal Tapes. By the summer of 2012, Israel Keyes had told the FBI he had killed eleven people. He had given them three names and one location. On the morning of 26 July, a federal prosecutor sat down across from him in an interview room in Anchorage and spent three and a half hours trying to work out the price of the one thing Keyes was asking for. He was asking to be executed. A federal death sentence is decided at a public sentencing hearing, and the more a jury hears about what a man did, the more likely it is to impose one. So the death he wanted could only be bought with the exposure he had spent nine months avoiding. He could have one of them, not both. Every minute of this recording is him trying to get both. The camera stamped the real time into the corner of every frame. It starts at 09:01 and runs to 12:27. At 10:31 he asks for his attorney — and the tape jumps to 11:57. Eighty-six minutes are not in the file the Bureau released. When the picture comes back there is a new man at the table. This is the FBI's own recording, published in full. Nothing has been reconstructed, re-voiced or performed; the date and time in the corner were burned in by the Bureau's own recorder. Where the audio is genuinely unclear, no subtitle is shown rather than a guess. Supporting material comes from released case file 306-AN-15642. Four of the people he killed have names. Seven do not. The FBI still asks the public for information. Recording: FBI, Israel Keyes interview, 26 July 2012 — public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). Documents: FBI case file 306-AN-15642 — public domain.