September 22, 2025 • 44 mins
As we prepare for Season 7 of True Crime Bullsh**, we're sharing episodes from the past 6 seasons that will be foundational for the upcoming season.
SPONSORS:
BetterHelp: Go to www.betterhelp.com/TCB for 10% off your first month.
Quince: Go to www.quince.com/TCBS to get free shipping and 365-day returns on your next order.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-bullsh--3588169/support.
SPONSORS:
BetterHelp: Go to www.betterhelp.com/TCB for 10% off your first month.
Quince: Go to www.quince.com/TCBS to get free shipping and 365-day returns on your next order.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-bullsh--3588169/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is a studio both and production. Many of the
bravest never are known and get no praise, but that
does not lessen their beauty. Louisa may Alcott. Perhaps the
(00:38):
most compelling and significant aspect of the Israel Keys case
for me is that of the many victims who at
this point are missing persons or both missing persons and
John or Jane. Does the idea that someone you love
could be lost in the world that you're left to
constantly wonder what happened to them? Are they hurt? Are
(01:02):
they alive? Did they disappear of their own volition? Did
they meet with foul play? Was there something I didn't know?
Was there something I did or something I could have done.
It's a mystery, yes, but a mystery of the most
heartbreaking kind. There are so many stories of people spending
(01:25):
their entire lives desperately trying to find their loved ones,
desperately trying to find answers, with no peace, with little reconciliation.
It's perhaps the slowest and cruelest torture Keys ever inflicted,
a torture that for some never ends. In Nemus alone,
(01:52):
there are seventy eight still unidentified bodies that have been
recovered since June of two thousand, when Keys return from
as Army deployment in Egypt. And that's in Washington State alone.
Seventy eight stories with no resolve, seventy eight families with
no resolve, seventy eight lives whose deaths can't even be
(02:17):
dignified with a name, And as we well know, NamUs
is by no means a complete catalog of loss. It's
merely an unfinished chapter in a book full of unfinished
chapters that never seems to end. I've reviewed almost every
(02:39):
single one of those seventy eight dos, but it was
two researchers for the podcast who were able to narrow
down those seventy eight dos and using maps and data,
tell some pretty eerie and familiar stories. Stories will share
over the next two episodes. This is my friend Kaz,
(03:00):
who's a prosecutor and board member for the nonprofit organization
founded by Bruce Maitland, Private Investigations for the Missing. Caz
really got the ball rolling in terms of taking a
look at does in Washington State and later in the Northeast.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
So where I started was, you know, everybody kind of
had like a niche that they fell into and we
were all. I felt like we were also like working
on this assumption that none of the people had been
found already, which made me think of NamUs and the
Unidentified Persons function on Neamus. So I thought, if we
go through NamUs for a chunk of time that would
(03:43):
cover the keys timeline that everybody else has been working on,
maybe we can see if any of those John or
Jane does would match up to the to the to
the people that we were the victims potential victims that
we were looking at, and find out if they had
already been compared and ruled out or if they hadn't
been compared at all, and you know, judging by you know, time, location,
(04:05):
the keys kind of like you know, touchdones, like things
that we've been that we've been seeing come up over
and over again, like boat, boat launches, boat ramps, outhouses,
coffee shops, you know, wooded areas, et cetera, cemeteries. You see,
if any of those things were in the areas of
these unidentified persons that haven't even found. So I started
(04:25):
with Washington because we know that he spent a lot
of time in Washington and a lot of the murders.
We think took place in Washington. So I went in.
I punched in as my search criteria John and Jane
does between January of nineteen ninety seven to the present,
(04:45):
and it returned ninety three unidentified people.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And that's all of Washington State.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
All of Washington State.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
As I'm looking at this list, it was obvious to
me that there was going to be some that were
not going to fit at all. For instance, more urban
areas like say, parts of Seattle, it's not going to
fit with you know, what we know about keys. You know,
also the type of individual it was in Washington, it
was in some other states too that I looked at.
(05:14):
There were you know, deceased, like very young infants, and
that's not going to fit with what we're looking for.
So what I ended up looking for in terms of
criteria was, you know, it was basically, you know, my opinions,
first impressions and thoughts, looking at what name is the
information that name has provided us, and then I would
(05:37):
kind of plug those dates, times, places, and criteria into
Google to see if I can come up with any
news stories or anything that could give me some extra
information about these particular unidentified persons. And for a lot
of them. There wasn't a lot of information at all.
Sometimes I would get just a WEBSITEES page or you know,
(05:57):
something something like that. For some I got a lot
of information. There was some news reports, especially remains that
were found closer in time to us. Now, a couple
of things that I kept in mind. You know, just
because remains were found in a certain year doesn't mean
that they were put there in that year. I looked at,
you know, do we have skeleton remains versus do we
(06:20):
have a full intact body or was there some level
of decomposition or putrification that would lean towards or lend
towards a body having been placed there closer in time then,
you know, as opposed to skeleton remains, which could be
in an environment in Washington anywhere. And I'm just ballparking
this because I'm not a scientist anywhere from you know,
(06:42):
a year to decades, you know. And I also looked at,
you know, the state of the body. Do we have
a skull, do we have a femur, or do we
have a full and fully intact skeleton. And then also
you know, just the locations ruling out you know, again,
bodies that were found or remains that were found in
more urban or suburban areas in the ocean, in bodies
(07:05):
of water or near bodies of water that might not
lend itself to keys being there. Like, we kind of
have a good idea, I think at this point of
what his type of place is. And it was easy
then as I was going through the name is chart
to be able to you know, say like, okay, this
(07:27):
is a very suburban area. This is not going to
be a place where he's going to where he would
have put somebody. So we're going to rule that one out.
The other thing too that I found, you know, not
just going through Washington State, but through the other states,
looking at you know, where there were some things where
you know, places change after a while. Sometimes there could
be excavation, there could be construction, and a lot of
(07:50):
these a lot of these remains are found when people
were doing some kind of work or like tearing down
an old abandoned house or excavating for a swimming pool
or something like that, and that's when these remains were
being found. So, you know, I started to think too.
That went into my mind as you know, something I
(08:10):
was computing, you know, what was this area like then
what could it have been like before? So that's where
French and the and the Google Maps and the Google
Earth came in, because you know, he was able to
take you know, this data and you know, see if
you can find you know the history of these of
these places, like the photohistory of these places, to see like, Okay,
(08:32):
so there's something built here, but what was it like
in twenty twelve, or what was it like in two
thousand and nine, or what was it like in nineteen
ninety nine?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And when Kaz finished combing through those dough files, she
sent them along to French, who created some pretty compelling
maps using archival data, property records, and urban development history.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
When Caz coached me, I was super skeptical, and I
think there's a lot of keys mythology, you know, we
because we don't have a lot of bodies, you know,
to look at, we tend to think that he was
an expert at getting rid of them, even though he
admitted one was found and it was kind of accidental.
So I wanted to come in with like an open mind.
(09:20):
So I went through and I looked back through all
of the interviews and kind of thought about what we
know about keys and body disposal. You know, we've got
Deborah Feldman the Story of two thousand and nine, where
you know, there's just remains we don't know any more
than that somewhere near a river, maybe buried, maybe submerged,
I don't know much. And then you know, we got
(09:43):
the couriers left in the basement of an abandoned building
to decompose and he was going to return later. And
then we've got Samantha Konig, who was obviously dismembered after
the fact after a while and then put into a lake.
And then we have his note where he's talking about,
you know, putting people in legs, the couple that he buried,
(10:04):
that kind of thing. But I think the thing that
stood out the most of me was him talking about
Eagle River. That little cliff I think it's seven twelve
is super interesting because he talks about his plan and
how he developed a plan to kill somebody and use
a pre dug ditch near that berm to bury them
(10:26):
and then cover them with sheet metal that was found nearby,
which kind of doesn't fit with a lot of the
things that we think about keys, because you know, he's
not taking them to a second location he's killing them there,
or you know, up the road near the nature center
where there's an outhouse. But the fact that he was
just gonna, you know, I think, bury them, probably a
(10:46):
shallow grave considering where he was near the road, and
then cover them with metal and then go on his way.
That made me believe that perhaps, you know, what would
have happened to that body had he actually succeeded and
killed someone carried that plan out, how easy would it
have been for wildlife to get to it? And then
looking through Kaz's list, so many of these, you know,
(11:08):
are fragments out in the woods that wildlife was disturbed,
and that starts to make me think that it's very
possible that some of these bodies have been dug up
through a natural process, and that maybe some of the
remains have been discovered. So I went in with an
open mind in that way, and I just went through
(11:29):
and I started looking, you know, I looked at her
list and she had a great color coordination. And I
went through and I started reading all the news articles
I could about them and trying to find the exact location.
Because one of the things I noticed with name this
is that they'll give you a coordinates, but I'm guessing
depending on who enters it into the database, the coordinates
are not always accurate. Once I found that location, I
(11:52):
would plot it into this Google map, which has everything
else that we know about Keys put into it and
just kind of look and see, like how it relates
to everything else, because you know, I'm such a visual person.
The spreadsheet tells a lot of good information, but it
doesn't tell the story the same way that I think
looking at you know, being able to see his movements
(12:13):
and like, oh, he stayed at a hotel over here,
Well when did he stay there? And how could that
possibly relate to a body being found in this area?
Is that support it at all? And once I found that,
once I determined that all out, I would also say like, okay, well,
if we know Keys was active during this timeframe, what
(12:34):
do the maps look like now compared to when this
body might have been placed there? I think the Lake
Taps is one of the best examples of that.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
The Lake Taps dough is one of two dough cases
that sparked our deep dive into unidentified remains, and it's
a case that using archival map data, French was able
to pin point a fairly clear timeline for Lake Taps
is a small forested town just ten miles east of Tacoma, Washington,
(13:11):
which was built around yes Lake Taps, and this female
Dough came up in our research into the Giovanna Tyler
case as a reminder, Giovanna Tyler disappeared from her home
in Tacoma on March twenty eighth of two thousand and four,
and shortly before her disappearance, she and Israel Keys ended
(13:33):
up in the Nia Bay Police station on the same night.
But it's not so much the proximity of Tyler's home
to Lake Taps that led us to investigate this Dough,
but it's many, many haunting similarities to what we know
about Israel Keys and what Israel Keys told the FBI
about his crimes. The Lake Taps Jane Doe was discovered
(14:03):
on August twenty eighth of twenty nineteen during the cleanup
and prep for sale of an abandoned property two blocks
from the lake. The skeletal remains, later determined to be
a woman between the ages of eighteen and fifty, approximately
sixty one to sixty seven inches tall, were found in
a recycling bin which had been almost completely swallowed by overgrowth.
(14:28):
A construction crew was on site to demolish and clear
out a rundown and long ignored trailer home on the property.
Speaker 5 (14:38):
I went through and I was like, okay, so they
found a you know, they're talking there was a construction
crew that was getting rid of a trailer. They found
a recycling bin and it was too heavy to move,
and so they dumped it out and bones came out,
and that's how the body was discovered. So you go
up and you're looking around where they kind of describe it,
(14:58):
and you're clearly you know, there's a trailer right here
that's overgrown and overrun. There's a sale for sale sign,
there's an abandoned trailer, and there's a blue recycling bin,
which is super creepy to actually see on the map.
So I want to be able to go through and
see this was like, I don't know when this photo
was taken necessarily because this version of Google Maps doesn't
(15:20):
show that. But this version does Google earth Pro. So
looking at Google earth Pro here I can go back
in time and see overhead. When I want to know
when this trailer was actually abandoned, you know, because that
would if it was only abandoned within the last couple
of years. That would put a different you know, that
would rule keys out. So if we go back as
(15:40):
far as we can, there's not a whole lot. But
we keep going forward and we see it looks pretty
well occupied June two thousand and two, but by March
two thousand and five, it's starting to look less occupied
and less occupied. You can see this is the trailer.
You can see those the bushes are growing pretty well
(16:03):
next to the trailer where the recycling bin was found.
And then certainly by two thousand and nine this is
an abandoned property. So taking that into consideration, we go
just to regular old Google Earth here or Google Maps
on your browser. If we can look at the street view,
we can go back in time at certain points if
(16:26):
you're lucky, and we were lucky enough that we can
go back to two thousand and eight and see, yeah,
this was not occupied in two thousand and eight. There's
clearly a for sale sign and that section where the
recycling bin was found is overgrown. So my guess whoever
put that body there stuffed it in the recycling bin
and just tucked it into these It looks like BlackBerry brambles,
(16:48):
and it wasn't touched for you know, close to over
a decade, I would say. And if we go up
to twenty twelve, you can see those brambles are thick.
You know, you lived in the Northwest, You're not going
to go through those brambles very easily at all, very
thorny and difficult to get into. By twenty fifteen, it's
(17:10):
almost completely overtaken the trailer and then luckily enough, about
a month before they actually discovered the body. That's why
the recycling binness exposed is because they were clearing this
to get ready to demolish the property. And so this
is July twenty nineteen, and this body was discovered in
(17:31):
August twenty nineteen. August twenty eight, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
After looking into property records, deed transfers, and property tax history,
we were able to determine that the body was most
likely placed on the property between two thousand and four
and two thousand and eight. The property went on the
market in late two thousand and three, where it sat
abandoned and for sale for three years. In March of
(18:01):
two thousand six, it was purchased, but remained abandoned and
transferred hands through quick claim sales multiple times until the
twenty nineteen demolition, and when analyzing both the growth of
those brambles and the presence of for sale signs, the
likely timeline of the Jane Doe can be narrowed down
(18:22):
to late two thousand three to early two thousand six,
and Keys fits into this picture in many notable ways.
Let's start with the time line and geography. This is
an area that Keys was incredibly familiar with. Lake Taps
is less than thirty miles from where he was stationed
(18:45):
at Fort Lewis and Tacoma from September of ninety nine
until January of two thousand, and then again following his
return from Egypt in June of two thousand until his
eventual discharge and moved to Nea Bay in July of
two thousand one. The time frame for when the body
(19:05):
was most likely placed on the property is during a
period where Keys was admittedly very active in Washington State,
and specifically during a time where he was traveling to
or through the Seattle Tacoma metro area almost daily. Between
January of two thousand four and June of two thousand six.
(19:27):
We have receipts placing keys crossing Puget Sound by Ferry
thirty five different times, and financial records and cell phone
pings place him in the area well beyond that, and
from interviews with friends and family, we also know for
much of this time he was dating Denise, who lived
in the Tacoma area, So, like I said, he knew
(19:51):
the area quite well. And then there's cell phone pings
that place keys driving past Lake Taps on our October
twenty first of two thousand and four. Also of note
is the property itself.
Speaker 6 (20:09):
I did check out this house for a while to
know it was empty, right, Well, no, I don't.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
I think I found it that day, maybe early in
the morning that day. I had left Dallas early that morning.
Speaker 6 (20:24):
I don't remember what time, but I was driving around
to a lot of small towns that day.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Or just with a plan of finding a bank run. Yeah, yeah,
I had them all. It seems like maybe you were
killing time before the bank's opened with that house or
was that what you were doing? Yeah, yeah, no, I was.
Speaker 6 (20:47):
I mean I always look, I always stop at empty houses,
especially if they have for sale signs, and looking for yeah,
just to kill time and check out an area.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
And and I don't know.
Speaker 7 (21:04):
In Texas, I was surprised, Like, the security is actually
pretty tight. There's a lot most people have gates and
locked gates. So it took me a while to to
find that place.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
But yeah, I was just killing time whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
The Lake trailer sits on half an acre of land,
obscured almost entirely from the road by trees and overgrowth.
Archival street view photos show that only the roof of
the trailer could be seen from the road from two
thousand and four through twenty eighteen. Even the majority of
(21:49):
the driveway and surrounding property are not visible from the road,
and directly across the street from the property is a
tree lined back fence. And it should be noted that
trailer homes come up multiple times in interviews with Keys.
(22:10):
He discusses setting one on fire, he discusses breaking into
multiple trailers, and he talks about staying for a short
while in a trailer. In fact, real estate images show
that at some point between two thousand three and twenty eighteen,
the Lake Taps trailer was broken into. But what's most
(22:33):
interesting about this apparent break in is the method. The
majority of the windows are missing on the trailer, making
it incredibly easy to slip in and out without making
a noise or any visible disturbances, Yet the rear sliding
glass door has been shattered. It also appears that someone
(22:55):
tried to remove the slider completely but couldn't due to
an abstruct so it's fair to say that whoever broke
in was trying to move something very large into the trailer,
rather than simply just trying to gain access to the
already very accessible interior. The other standout is the property's
(23:18):
transactional history, specifically that it was consistently on the market
from late two thousand and three until spring of two
thousand and six. Keyes told investigators that he found the
Essex Junction farmhouse where he killed the couriers and abandoned
their bodies by looking for abandoned properties in real estate
(23:38):
magazines and websites. This property was abandoned and listed during
the three years the body was most likely to have
been placed there.
Speaker 5 (23:50):
And then that's the kickers. Once I determined the exact location,
like this is clearly where that body was found, and
look up that location, you know, I found the listing
and it showed all of the interior photos of this
property and something that I can't tell when those were posted,
but clearly, you know that's something he's admitted to doing.
(24:10):
He would look online at all of these for sale
properties and you could very clearly tell that this was
an abandoned property and it, you know, I think it
would have been just a really great place for Keys
to do his thing.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Unfortunately, and then I guess going back to the reason
we stumbled upon this or started really looking into this,
was when we were looking into the case of Giovanna
Tyler because she disappeared. It's been a while since I've
done the map, but I think five miles from this
trailer I think.
Speaker 5 (24:45):
I think it's about thirteen miles driving like the most
direct route, and Giovanna, you know, went missing two thousand
and four, which kind of lines up. I think it
would have been a freshly abandoned property at that time.
It definitely it makes it seem like this is somebody
that they should be comparing the DNA too, and I'm
almost positive, Caz, it's determined that they haven't.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Yeah, which is crazy.
Speaker 5 (25:09):
I think that's one of the big takeaways. One of
the big tragedies of this whole learning experience is that
you know, DNA is not being compared at the rate
it should to these bodies.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
Yeah, I think what was really disappointing for me and
what cast sent over is seeing there's bodies they're finding
in Washington that they're comparing to people who are missing
in California, but not to people who are missing in
Washington State.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Absolutely, just to clarify, I just looked it up on
names and the lake the Lake taps Jane Doe. There's
been no comparisons that have been put into this, and
you know, part of that is is because this is
something that I've been looking into a little bit recently,
is that you know, depending on the bones and depending
(25:53):
on what we what we have two to actually get
DNA out of those remains. I I imagine that it's
probably costly. I imagine that it's not something that is
necessarily on everybody's radar. Is something to do in terms
of you know, law enforcement, and you know, it doesn't
it doesn't really say even on the case file. I
(26:14):
mean it says it's a near complete or complete skeleton.
You know, even just take DNA out of the out
of the running for a second, if you if at
least if they had you know, dental records or or
something or some kind of medical records that they can compare.
You know, why aren't we doing that?
Speaker 1 (26:32):
And that's the hardest part about looking into these many,
many unidentified bodies, These bodies who are people with lives
and stories and loved ones. Local law enforcement and even
the FBI don't seem to have the resources, time, or
bandwidth to do simple comparison testing, even in some cases
(26:55):
where it seems pretty clear cut who these people could be.
After French and Kaz shared their findings with me, I
started running these doughs against missing persons cases in Namis
and on the Charlie Project. And in all of these
(27:16):
highly curated doughcases, there were matches familiar to this podcast
and my investigation, names and faces I've come to know
quite well. When running the known and estimated data on
the Lake taps Jane Doe through missing persons cases out
of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California, there are twenty one
(27:39):
possible matches and these matches include names you're familiar with,
Giovanna Tyler, Kimberly, Anne Forbes, Cynthia Jane Marril, Lynn o'honna,
and Tina May Costin, among many others. But there's something
else that stands out about the geography of Lake Taps
(28:03):
its proximity to a population dense metro area. Lake Taps
itself is fairly ex Surban, but it abuts to Washington
State's largest metropolitan area, which is actually not. Unlike the
locations of the Couriers and Samantha, Konix remains. Essex Junction
(28:24):
is a fifteen minute drive from downtown Burlington. Mattanuska Lake
is a forty minute drive from downtown Anchorage. What this
location tells me is if it's Keys, it's likely someone
who is abducted from nearby. As in the cases again
of the Couriers and Samantha, and as I went through
(28:47):
the twenty one missing persons matches, the majority were from
rural and remote areas some distance away. Why would Keys,
or anyone for that matter, drive a kidnapping victim or
even a body over one hundred miles through remote forest,
farmland or high desert into a population dense neighborhood. It
(29:13):
makes no sense, and its high risk with even higher effort.
And if there's two things we've learned about Keys, it's
that he avoided high risk situations, and yet was somehow
still an incredibly lazy criminal. It seems more likely that
the Lake taps janeed O was abducted from nearby and
(29:36):
taken to this area, which would be the closest low
population forested area to the I five corridor, And when
the search is narrowed using that assumption, there's only six
possible matches Danica Child's, Cynthia de Vrise, Valerie Renee Delaney,
(29:56):
Pamela fay Cuic, Catherine Rose, and Giovanna Katie Tyler. Three
of those disappearances occurred shortly after the two thousand and
six sail of the trailer in Land. Cynthia Devrze, who
disappeared from Lynnwood, Washington on May thirtieth of two thousand six,
(30:19):
Catherine Rose, who disappeared from Piollup, Washington on June twenty
sixth of two thousand and six, and Danica Diane Childs
who disappeared from Federal Way, Washington on December twenty one
of two thousand seven. Of the three remaining missing persons,
only one, Giovanna Tyler, lines up with Keyes's known m
(30:45):
Valerie Delaney, disappeared from the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle,
which is a high density, high traffic area. Other than that,
there's not a lot of information available on her disappearance.
Pamela Cwick was very likely killed by her estranged and
abusive husband, who is currently serving time for a different murder.
(31:07):
And of all twenty one missing persons cases that match this,
Jane Doe Giovanna Tyler's disappearance occurred the closest to where
the remains were recovered. Lake Taps is just thirteen miles
from Giovanna's house and an almost straight line from door
to door. The second dough that inspired our deep dive
(31:31):
was one I came across while looking into the case
of Stephen Michael Mason.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I would love to discuss because it's the one that
drives me the craziest. The el Law Reservo, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
On May tenth of twenty twelve, a dog dug up
an adult human leg bone from a thin layer of
silt on the lower Elwaw Column Reservation, just eight miles
southwest from downtown Bangelus. And let's start with the general frustration,
which is very little has been made public or is
(32:07):
known about who this leg belonged to according to available records,
the sex is uncertain, the height and weight of the
person cannot be estimated. The estimated age range is eighteen
to ninety nine, and the year of death cannot be
estimated either. Although it has been determined that the bone
(32:30):
is not that of any ancient tribal remains, the bone
was initially thought to belong to Karen Tucker, a woman
who disappeared from the area in nineteen ninety one. However,
DNA analysis done in October of twenty twelve ruled Tucker out. Unfortunately,
(32:52):
as of this recording, that is the only information about
the DNA analysis that has ever been made publicly available.
But there are multiple reasons beyond just proximity to consider
keys when looking at these human remains.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Okay, so this Elwah one stands out for lots of reasons.
For one, they drained a reservoir and found it. For two,
this is right at the intersection where he was harassing
Molly while she was driving. Elwah comes up a lot,
and I remember just last week we were talking about
it came up in a weird place that.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
In the witness report from the barista in Squim, she
said that Keys specifically mentioned that he did work on
the Elwah reservation.
Speaker 8 (33:43):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
This leg was found not just along the shore of
the Elwah River, but in an area that had previously
been the deepest section of Lake Aldwell, a reservoir that
was drained as part of an ecosystem restoration project in
the spring of twenty twelve. Additionally, Keyes did work on
(34:09):
the lower Elwah Column reservation in at least two thousand
four and two thousand and five, and possibly later into
two thousand and six. And this is the exact location
where Keys tried to run a woman named Molly off
the road late one night in winter spring of two
thousand and one two thousand two. And while we don't
(34:36):
know a lot about this bone based on where it
was recovered in the history of Lake Aldwell, which was
created by the nineteen thirteen damning of the Iwah River,
it seems most likely that the bone arrived by boat.
(35:00):
And while the lake taps and Lake Caldwell does are
the remains that ignited our deep dive, they are by
no means the cases that most line up with Keys.
In addition to these two doughs, we investigated seven other
Washington does that could possibly be Key's victims, four who
(35:21):
were found in national or state parks and forests, one
who was found following the demolition of another abandoned house,
one who was found adjacent to Fort Lewis, where Keys
was stationed in the army, and one who was found
near a boat ramp and the very town where Keys
(35:43):
bought his bay Liner boat. And when looking for missing
persons who could match these doughs, we encountered many disappearances
that looked similar to Keys cases, including more than a
handful of names familiar to us, like Wendy de Hoop,
Robert Perry, Bissell, Cynthia Jane, Marl Koi, Dang Vu, Kimberly,
(36:09):
Anne Forbes, Juvana Tyler, and del Mar Wayne. Sample. When
(36:29):
you experience loss, people say you'll move through the five
stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What they
don't tell you is that you'll cycle through them all
every day. Ranata Suzuki. It's sometimes easy to buy into
(36:57):
the Keys mythology and get lost in an orchestrated hopelessness
that we might never find the remains of his victims.
But there are bodies out there, recovered remains that just
haven't been identified yet, And the strange dichotomy of how
(37:20):
we talk about those bodies isn't lost on me. That
body tends to refer to the entirety of something, its completeness,
a body of work. But in the case of the
human body, in the instances of finding bodies, the body
(37:40):
is missing the thing that made it complete, its humanity,
its person. When a person becomes just a body, they
are no longer a complete body of work. And when
someone is minimized down to just the nameless body that remains,
(38:04):
it becomes easier and easier to overlook them, to overlook
that body, to not prioritize the closure, to not find
its home. It's easy to talk about how DNA testing
costs too much or takes too much time when that
(38:26):
person is just a body who currently belongs to no one.
And that's the other conflict in these bodies. How in
the recovery of a missing loved one, there is the
simultaneous pain of there being no more hope in the
(38:46):
long awaited emancipation from wondering and worrying and searching. Hope
often dies with closure. It's a tortuous liberation, but in
many cases, short of a miracle, it's the most we
can hope for.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
A picture you in the sun, wandering.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
What were.
Speaker 9 (39:16):
And falling down.
Speaker 10 (39:17):
On your knees, asking for sympathy, and being caught in
between all you wish for and all you see, and
trying to find anything you can't feel that you can bevn.
Speaker 8 (39:45):
Make God's love be with you. Of make God's love
be read here.
Speaker 11 (40:00):
No I would apologize if I could see your eyes,
cause when you show me myself, you know I became
someone else, but I was caught in between.
Speaker 9 (40:20):
All you wish for and all you me.
Speaker 11 (40:25):
I'll picture your pries to sleep.
Speaker 12 (40:29):
When night back comes.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
You can't kid.
Speaker 13 (40:37):
Make cause of be with you, Oh, make gods of
with make gods of me with you, my gout of
(41:04):
the way.
Speaker 11 (41:09):
Five if I find a way as my twin bad impasta.
Speaker 9 (41:20):
If I fie ma way, have my will fad im
fast If by five mile way twitter bad.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
I don't know more what it's fun.
Speaker 11 (42:06):
I'm not even sure if there is anyone who's in
this sun.
Speaker 13 (42:14):
Will you have me to understand?
Speaker 12 (42:18):
Because I've been caught in between all I wish for
and all of me. Maybe I'm not even show what
it's for and even love.
Speaker 14 (42:34):
Maybe make God's love be with you, Oh, make God's
love be with you.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Make gods.
Speaker 9 (43:04):
I can't be wait kiss your pa I bas bay
and twas I bast waiting, tweas impast by waiting. Twell,
(43:35):
maybe it's fast. I wait, but you if she gave,
(44:14):
she
This is a studio both and production. Many of the
bravest never are known and get no praise, but that
does not lessen their beauty. Louisa may Alcott. Perhaps the
(00:38):
most compelling and significant aspect of the Israel Keys case
for me is that of the many victims who at
this point are missing persons or both missing persons and
John or Jane. Does the idea that someone you love
could be lost in the world that you're left to
constantly wonder what happened to them? Are they hurt? Are
(01:02):
they alive? Did they disappear of their own volition? Did
they meet with foul play? Was there something I didn't know?
Was there something I did or something I could have done.
It's a mystery, yes, but a mystery of the most
heartbreaking kind. There are so many stories of people spending
(01:25):
their entire lives desperately trying to find their loved ones,
desperately trying to find answers, with no peace, with little reconciliation.
It's perhaps the slowest and cruelest torture Keys ever inflicted,
a torture that for some never ends. In Nemus alone,
(01:52):
there are seventy eight still unidentified bodies that have been
recovered since June of two thousand, when Keys return from
as Army deployment in Egypt. And that's in Washington State alone.
Seventy eight stories with no resolve, seventy eight families with
no resolve, seventy eight lives whose deaths can't even be
(02:17):
dignified with a name, And as we well know, NamUs
is by no means a complete catalog of loss. It's
merely an unfinished chapter in a book full of unfinished
chapters that never seems to end. I've reviewed almost every
(02:39):
single one of those seventy eight dos, but it was
two researchers for the podcast who were able to narrow
down those seventy eight dos and using maps and data,
tell some pretty eerie and familiar stories. Stories will share
over the next two episodes. This is my friend Kaz,
(03:00):
who's a prosecutor and board member for the nonprofit organization
founded by Bruce Maitland, Private Investigations for the Missing. Caz
really got the ball rolling in terms of taking a
look at does in Washington State and later in the Northeast.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
So where I started was, you know, everybody kind of
had like a niche that they fell into and we
were all. I felt like we were also like working
on this assumption that none of the people had been
found already, which made me think of NamUs and the
Unidentified Persons function on Neamus. So I thought, if we
go through NamUs for a chunk of time that would
(03:43):
cover the keys timeline that everybody else has been working on,
maybe we can see if any of those John or
Jane does would match up to the to the to
the people that we were the victims potential victims that
we were looking at, and find out if they had
already been compared and ruled out or if they hadn't
been compared at all, and you know, judging by you know, time, location,
(04:05):
the keys kind of like you know, touchdones, like things
that we've been that we've been seeing come up over
and over again, like boat, boat launches, boat ramps, outhouses,
coffee shops, you know, wooded areas, et cetera, cemeteries. You see,
if any of those things were in the areas of
these unidentified persons that haven't even found. So I started
(04:25):
with Washington because we know that he spent a lot
of time in Washington and a lot of the murders.
We think took place in Washington. So I went in.
I punched in as my search criteria John and Jane
does between January of nineteen ninety seven to the present,
(04:45):
and it returned ninety three unidentified people.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And that's all of Washington State.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
All of Washington State.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
As I'm looking at this list, it was obvious to
me that there was going to be some that were
not going to fit at all. For instance, more urban
areas like say, parts of Seattle, it's not going to
fit with you know, what we know about keys. You know,
also the type of individual it was in Washington, it
was in some other states too that I looked at.
(05:14):
There were you know, deceased, like very young infants, and
that's not going to fit with what we're looking for.
So what I ended up looking for in terms of
criteria was, you know, it was basically, you know, my opinions,
first impressions and thoughts, looking at what name is the
information that name has provided us, and then I would
(05:37):
kind of plug those dates, times, places, and criteria into
Google to see if I can come up with any
news stories or anything that could give me some extra
information about these particular unidentified persons. And for a lot
of them. There wasn't a lot of information at all.
Sometimes I would get just a WEBSITEES page or you know,
(05:57):
something something like that. For some I got a lot
of information. There was some news reports, especially remains that
were found closer in time to us. Now, a couple
of things that I kept in mind. You know, just
because remains were found in a certain year doesn't mean
that they were put there in that year. I looked at,
you know, do we have skeleton remains versus do we
(06:20):
have a full intact body or was there some level
of decomposition or putrification that would lean towards or lend
towards a body having been placed there closer in time then,
you know, as opposed to skeleton remains, which could be
in an environment in Washington anywhere. And I'm just ballparking
this because I'm not a scientist anywhere from you know,
(06:42):
a year to decades, you know. And I also looked at,
you know, the state of the body. Do we have
a skull, do we have a femur, or do we
have a full and fully intact skeleton. And then also
you know, just the locations ruling out you know, again,
bodies that were found or remains that were found in
more urban or suburban areas in the ocean, in bodies
(07:05):
of water or near bodies of water that might not
lend itself to keys being there. Like, we kind of
have a good idea, I think at this point of
what his type of place is. And it was easy
then as I was going through the name is chart
to be able to you know, say like, okay, this
(07:27):
is a very suburban area. This is not going to
be a place where he's going to where he would
have put somebody. So we're going to rule that one out.
The other thing too that I found, you know, not
just going through Washington State, but through the other states,
looking at you know, where there were some things where
you know, places change after a while. Sometimes there could
be excavation, there could be construction, and a lot of
(07:50):
these a lot of these remains are found when people
were doing some kind of work or like tearing down
an old abandoned house or excavating for a swimming pool
or something like that, and that's when these remains were
being found. So, you know, I started to think too.
That went into my mind as you know, something I
(08:10):
was computing, you know, what was this area like then
what could it have been like before? So that's where
French and the and the Google Maps and the Google
Earth came in, because you know, he was able to
take you know, this data and you know, see if
you can find you know the history of these of
these places, like the photohistory of these places, to see like, Okay,
(08:32):
so there's something built here, but what was it like
in twenty twelve, or what was it like in two
thousand and nine, or what was it like in nineteen
ninety nine?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And when Kaz finished combing through those dough files, she
sent them along to French, who created some pretty compelling
maps using archival data, property records, and urban development history.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
When Caz coached me, I was super skeptical, and I
think there's a lot of keys mythology, you know, we
because we don't have a lot of bodies, you know,
to look at, we tend to think that he was
an expert at getting rid of them, even though he
admitted one was found and it was kind of accidental.
So I wanted to come in with like an open mind.
(09:20):
So I went through and I looked back through all
of the interviews and kind of thought about what we
know about keys and body disposal. You know, we've got
Deborah Feldman the Story of two thousand and nine, where
you know, there's just remains we don't know any more
than that somewhere near a river, maybe buried, maybe submerged,
I don't know much. And then you know, we got
(09:43):
the couriers left in the basement of an abandoned building
to decompose and he was going to return later. And
then we've got Samantha Konig, who was obviously dismembered after
the fact after a while and then put into a lake.
And then we have his note where he's talking about,
you know, putting people in legs, the couple that he buried,
(10:04):
that kind of thing. But I think the thing that
stood out the most of me was him talking about
Eagle River. That little cliff I think it's seven twelve
is super interesting because he talks about his plan and
how he developed a plan to kill somebody and use
a pre dug ditch near that berm to bury them
(10:26):
and then cover them with sheet metal that was found nearby,
which kind of doesn't fit with a lot of the
things that we think about keys, because you know, he's
not taking them to a second location he's killing them there,
or you know, up the road near the nature center
where there's an outhouse. But the fact that he was
just gonna, you know, I think, bury them, probably a
(10:46):
shallow grave considering where he was near the road, and
then cover them with metal and then go on his way.
That made me believe that perhaps, you know, what would
have happened to that body had he actually succeeded and
killed someone carried that plan out, how easy would it
have been for wildlife to get to it? And then
looking through Kaz's list, so many of these, you know,
(11:08):
are fragments out in the woods that wildlife was disturbed,
and that starts to make me think that it's very
possible that some of these bodies have been dug up
through a natural process, and that maybe some of the
remains have been discovered. So I went in with an
open mind in that way, and I just went through
(11:29):
and I started looking, you know, I looked at her
list and she had a great color coordination. And I
went through and I started reading all the news articles
I could about them and trying to find the exact location.
Because one of the things I noticed with name this
is that they'll give you a coordinates, but I'm guessing
depending on who enters it into the database, the coordinates
are not always accurate. Once I found that location, I
(11:52):
would plot it into this Google map, which has everything
else that we know about Keys put into it and
just kind of look and see, like how it relates
to everything else, because you know, I'm such a visual person.
The spreadsheet tells a lot of good information, but it
doesn't tell the story the same way that I think
looking at you know, being able to see his movements
(12:13):
and like, oh, he stayed at a hotel over here,
Well when did he stay there? And how could that
possibly relate to a body being found in this area?
Is that support it at all? And once I found that,
once I determined that all out, I would also say like, okay, well,
if we know Keys was active during this timeframe, what
(12:34):
do the maps look like now compared to when this
body might have been placed there? I think the Lake
Taps is one of the best examples of that.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
The Lake Taps dough is one of two dough cases
that sparked our deep dive into unidentified remains, and it's
a case that using archival map data, French was able
to pin point a fairly clear timeline for Lake Taps
is a small forested town just ten miles east of Tacoma, Washington,
(13:11):
which was built around yes Lake Taps, and this female
Dough came up in our research into the Giovanna Tyler
case as a reminder, Giovanna Tyler disappeared from her home
in Tacoma on March twenty eighth of two thousand and four,
and shortly before her disappearance, she and Israel Keys ended
(13:33):
up in the Nia Bay Police station on the same night.
But it's not so much the proximity of Tyler's home
to Lake Taps that led us to investigate this Dough,
but it's many, many haunting similarities to what we know
about Israel Keys and what Israel Keys told the FBI
about his crimes. The Lake Taps Jane Doe was discovered
(14:03):
on August twenty eighth of twenty nineteen during the cleanup
and prep for sale of an abandoned property two blocks
from the lake. The skeletal remains, later determined to be
a woman between the ages of eighteen and fifty, approximately
sixty one to sixty seven inches tall, were found in
a recycling bin which had been almost completely swallowed by overgrowth.
(14:28):
A construction crew was on site to demolish and clear
out a rundown and long ignored trailer home on the property.
Speaker 5 (14:38):
I went through and I was like, okay, so they
found a you know, they're talking there was a construction
crew that was getting rid of a trailer. They found
a recycling bin and it was too heavy to move,
and so they dumped it out and bones came out,
and that's how the body was discovered. So you go
up and you're looking around where they kind of describe it,
(14:58):
and you're clearly you know, there's a trailer right here
that's overgrown and overrun. There's a sale for sale sign,
there's an abandoned trailer, and there's a blue recycling bin,
which is super creepy to actually see on the map.
So I want to be able to go through and
see this was like, I don't know when this photo
was taken necessarily because this version of Google Maps doesn't
(15:20):
show that. But this version does Google earth Pro. So
looking at Google earth Pro here I can go back
in time and see overhead. When I want to know
when this trailer was actually abandoned, you know, because that
would if it was only abandoned within the last couple
of years. That would put a different you know, that
would rule keys out. So if we go back as
(15:40):
far as we can, there's not a whole lot. But
we keep going forward and we see it looks pretty
well occupied June two thousand and two, but by March
two thousand and five, it's starting to look less occupied
and less occupied. You can see this is the trailer.
You can see those the bushes are growing pretty well
(16:03):
next to the trailer where the recycling bin was found.
And then certainly by two thousand and nine this is
an abandoned property. So taking that into consideration, we go
just to regular old Google Earth here or Google Maps
on your browser. If we can look at the street view,
we can go back in time at certain points if
(16:26):
you're lucky, and we were lucky enough that we can
go back to two thousand and eight and see, yeah,
this was not occupied in two thousand and eight. There's
clearly a for sale sign and that section where the
recycling bin was found is overgrown. So my guess whoever
put that body there stuffed it in the recycling bin
and just tucked it into these It looks like BlackBerry brambles,
(16:48):
and it wasn't touched for you know, close to over
a decade, I would say. And if we go up
to twenty twelve, you can see those brambles are thick.
You know, you lived in the Northwest, You're not going
to go through those brambles very easily at all, very
thorny and difficult to get into. By twenty fifteen, it's
(17:10):
almost completely overtaken the trailer and then luckily enough, about
a month before they actually discovered the body. That's why
the recycling binness exposed is because they were clearing this
to get ready to demolish the property. And so this
is July twenty nineteen, and this body was discovered in
(17:31):
August twenty nineteen. August twenty eight, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
After looking into property records, deed transfers, and property tax history,
we were able to determine that the body was most
likely placed on the property between two thousand and four
and two thousand and eight. The property went on the
market in late two thousand and three, where it sat
abandoned and for sale for three years. In March of
(18:01):
two thousand six, it was purchased, but remained abandoned and
transferred hands through quick claim sales multiple times until the
twenty nineteen demolition, and when analyzing both the growth of
those brambles and the presence of for sale signs, the
likely timeline of the Jane Doe can be narrowed down
(18:22):
to late two thousand three to early two thousand six,
and Keys fits into this picture in many notable ways.
Let's start with the time line and geography. This is
an area that Keys was incredibly familiar with. Lake Taps
is less than thirty miles from where he was stationed
(18:45):
at Fort Lewis and Tacoma from September of ninety nine
until January of two thousand, and then again following his
return from Egypt in June of two thousand until his
eventual discharge and moved to Nea Bay in July of
two thousand one. The time frame for when the body
(19:05):
was most likely placed on the property is during a
period where Keys was admittedly very active in Washington State,
and specifically during a time where he was traveling to
or through the Seattle Tacoma metro area almost daily. Between
January of two thousand four and June of two thousand six.
(19:27):
We have receipts placing keys crossing Puget Sound by Ferry
thirty five different times, and financial records and cell phone
pings place him in the area well beyond that, and
from interviews with friends and family, we also know for
much of this time he was dating Denise, who lived
in the Tacoma area, So, like I said, he knew
(19:51):
the area quite well. And then there's cell phone pings
that place keys driving past Lake Taps on our October
twenty first of two thousand and four. Also of note
is the property itself.
Speaker 6 (20:09):
I did check out this house for a while to
know it was empty, right, Well, no, I don't.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
I think I found it that day, maybe early in
the morning that day. I had left Dallas early that morning.
Speaker 6 (20:24):
I don't remember what time, but I was driving around
to a lot of small towns that day.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Or just with a plan of finding a bank run. Yeah, yeah,
I had them all. It seems like maybe you were
killing time before the bank's opened with that house or
was that what you were doing? Yeah, yeah, no, I was.
Speaker 6 (20:47):
I mean I always look, I always stop at empty houses,
especially if they have for sale signs, and looking for yeah,
just to kill time and check out an area.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
And and I don't know.
Speaker 7 (21:04):
In Texas, I was surprised, Like, the security is actually
pretty tight. There's a lot most people have gates and
locked gates. So it took me a while to to
find that place.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
But yeah, I was just killing time whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
The Lake trailer sits on half an acre of land,
obscured almost entirely from the road by trees and overgrowth.
Archival street view photos show that only the roof of
the trailer could be seen from the road from two
thousand and four through twenty eighteen. Even the majority of
(21:49):
the driveway and surrounding property are not visible from the road,
and directly across the street from the property is a
tree lined back fence. And it should be noted that
trailer homes come up multiple times in interviews with Keys.
(22:10):
He discusses setting one on fire, he discusses breaking into
multiple trailers, and he talks about staying for a short
while in a trailer. In fact, real estate images show
that at some point between two thousand three and twenty eighteen,
the Lake Taps trailer was broken into. But what's most
(22:33):
interesting about this apparent break in is the method. The
majority of the windows are missing on the trailer, making
it incredibly easy to slip in and out without making
a noise or any visible disturbances, Yet the rear sliding
glass door has been shattered. It also appears that someone
(22:55):
tried to remove the slider completely but couldn't due to
an abstruct so it's fair to say that whoever broke
in was trying to move something very large into the trailer,
rather than simply just trying to gain access to the
already very accessible interior. The other standout is the property's
(23:18):
transactional history, specifically that it was consistently on the market
from late two thousand and three until spring of two
thousand and six. Keyes told investigators that he found the
Essex Junction farmhouse where he killed the couriers and abandoned
their bodies by looking for abandoned properties in real estate
(23:38):
magazines and websites. This property was abandoned and listed during
the three years the body was most likely to have
been placed there.
Speaker 5 (23:50):
And then that's the kickers. Once I determined the exact location,
like this is clearly where that body was found, and
look up that location, you know, I found the listing
and it showed all of the interior photos of this
property and something that I can't tell when those were posted,
but clearly, you know that's something he's admitted to doing.
(24:10):
He would look online at all of these for sale
properties and you could very clearly tell that this was
an abandoned property and it, you know, I think it
would have been just a really great place for Keys
to do his thing.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Unfortunately, and then I guess going back to the reason
we stumbled upon this or started really looking into this,
was when we were looking into the case of Giovanna
Tyler because she disappeared. It's been a while since I've
done the map, but I think five miles from this
trailer I think.
Speaker 5 (24:45):
I think it's about thirteen miles driving like the most
direct route, and Giovanna, you know, went missing two thousand
and four, which kind of lines up. I think it
would have been a freshly abandoned property at that time.
It definitely it makes it seem like this is somebody
that they should be comparing the DNA too, and I'm
almost positive, Caz, it's determined that they haven't.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Yeah, which is crazy.
Speaker 5 (25:09):
I think that's one of the big takeaways. One of
the big tragedies of this whole learning experience is that
you know, DNA is not being compared at the rate
it should to these bodies.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
Yeah, I think what was really disappointing for me and
what cast sent over is seeing there's bodies they're finding
in Washington that they're comparing to people who are missing
in California, but not to people who are missing in
Washington State.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Absolutely, just to clarify, I just looked it up on
names and the lake the Lake taps Jane Doe. There's
been no comparisons that have been put into this, and
you know, part of that is is because this is
something that I've been looking into a little bit recently,
is that you know, depending on the bones and depending
(25:53):
on what we what we have two to actually get
DNA out of those remains. I I imagine that it's
probably costly. I imagine that it's not something that is
necessarily on everybody's radar. Is something to do in terms
of you know, law enforcement, and you know, it doesn't
it doesn't really say even on the case file. I
(26:14):
mean it says it's a near complete or complete skeleton.
You know, even just take DNA out of the out
of the running for a second, if you if at
least if they had you know, dental records or or
something or some kind of medical records that they can compare.
You know, why aren't we doing that?
Speaker 1 (26:32):
And that's the hardest part about looking into these many,
many unidentified bodies, These bodies who are people with lives
and stories and loved ones. Local law enforcement and even
the FBI don't seem to have the resources, time, or
bandwidth to do simple comparison testing, even in some cases
(26:55):
where it seems pretty clear cut who these people could be.
After French and Kaz shared their findings with me, I
started running these doughs against missing persons cases in Namis
and on the Charlie Project. And in all of these
(27:16):
highly curated doughcases, there were matches familiar to this podcast
and my investigation, names and faces I've come to know
quite well. When running the known and estimated data on
the Lake taps Jane Doe through missing persons cases out
of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California, there are twenty one
(27:39):
possible matches and these matches include names you're familiar with,
Giovanna Tyler, Kimberly, Anne Forbes, Cynthia Jane Marril, Lynn o'honna,
and Tina May Costin, among many others. But there's something
else that stands out about the geography of Lake Taps
(28:03):
its proximity to a population dense metro area. Lake Taps
itself is fairly ex Surban, but it abuts to Washington
State's largest metropolitan area, which is actually not. Unlike the
locations of the Couriers and Samantha, Konix remains. Essex Junction
(28:24):
is a fifteen minute drive from downtown Burlington. Mattanuska Lake
is a forty minute drive from downtown Anchorage. What this
location tells me is if it's Keys, it's likely someone
who is abducted from nearby. As in the cases again
of the Couriers and Samantha, and as I went through
(28:47):
the twenty one missing persons matches, the majority were from
rural and remote areas some distance away. Why would Keys,
or anyone for that matter, drive a kidnapping victim or
even a body over one hundred miles through remote forest,
farmland or high desert into a population dense neighborhood. It
(29:13):
makes no sense, and its high risk with even higher effort.
And if there's two things we've learned about Keys, it's
that he avoided high risk situations, and yet was somehow
still an incredibly lazy criminal. It seems more likely that
the Lake taps janeed O was abducted from nearby and
(29:36):
taken to this area, which would be the closest low
population forested area to the I five corridor, And when
the search is narrowed using that assumption, there's only six
possible matches Danica Child's, Cynthia de Vrise, Valerie Renee Delaney,
(29:56):
Pamela fay Cuic, Catherine Rose, and Giovanna Katie Tyler. Three
of those disappearances occurred shortly after the two thousand and
six sail of the trailer in Land. Cynthia Devrze, who
disappeared from Lynnwood, Washington on May thirtieth of two thousand six,
(30:19):
Catherine Rose, who disappeared from Piollup, Washington on June twenty
sixth of two thousand and six, and Danica Diane Childs
who disappeared from Federal Way, Washington on December twenty one
of two thousand seven. Of the three remaining missing persons,
only one, Giovanna Tyler, lines up with Keyes's known m
(30:45):
Valerie Delaney, disappeared from the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle,
which is a high density, high traffic area. Other than that,
there's not a lot of information available on her disappearance.
Pamela Cwick was very likely killed by her estranged and
abusive husband, who is currently serving time for a different murder.
(31:07):
And of all twenty one missing persons cases that match this,
Jane Doe Giovanna Tyler's disappearance occurred the closest to where
the remains were recovered. Lake Taps is just thirteen miles
from Giovanna's house and an almost straight line from door
to door. The second dough that inspired our deep dive
(31:31):
was one I came across while looking into the case
of Stephen Michael Mason.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I would love to discuss because it's the one that
drives me the craziest. The el Law Reservo, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
On May tenth of twenty twelve, a dog dug up
an adult human leg bone from a thin layer of
silt on the lower Elwaw Column Reservation, just eight miles
southwest from downtown Bangelus. And let's start with the general frustration,
which is very little has been made public or is
(32:07):
known about who this leg belonged to according to available records,
the sex is uncertain, the height and weight of the
person cannot be estimated. The estimated age range is eighteen
to ninety nine, and the year of death cannot be
estimated either. Although it has been determined that the bone
(32:30):
is not that of any ancient tribal remains, the bone
was initially thought to belong to Karen Tucker, a woman
who disappeared from the area in nineteen ninety one. However,
DNA analysis done in October of twenty twelve ruled Tucker out. Unfortunately,
(32:52):
as of this recording, that is the only information about
the DNA analysis that has ever been made publicly available.
But there are multiple reasons beyond just proximity to consider
keys when looking at these human remains.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Okay, so this Elwah one stands out for lots of reasons.
For one, they drained a reservoir and found it. For two,
this is right at the intersection where he was harassing
Molly while she was driving. Elwah comes up a lot,
and I remember just last week we were talking about
it came up in a weird place that.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
In the witness report from the barista in Squim, she
said that Keys specifically mentioned that he did work on
the Elwah reservation.
Speaker 8 (33:43):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
This leg was found not just along the shore of
the Elwah River, but in an area that had previously
been the deepest section of Lake Aldwell, a reservoir that
was drained as part of an ecosystem restoration project in
the spring of twenty twelve. Additionally, Keyes did work on
(34:09):
the lower Elwah Column reservation in at least two thousand
four and two thousand and five, and possibly later into
two thousand and six. And this is the exact location
where Keys tried to run a woman named Molly off
the road late one night in winter spring of two
thousand and one two thousand two. And while we don't
(34:36):
know a lot about this bone based on where it
was recovered in the history of Lake Aldwell, which was
created by the nineteen thirteen damning of the Iwah River,
it seems most likely that the bone arrived by boat.
(35:00):
And while the lake taps and Lake Caldwell does are
the remains that ignited our deep dive, they are by
no means the cases that most line up with Keys.
In addition to these two doughs, we investigated seven other
Washington does that could possibly be Key's victims, four who
(35:21):
were found in national or state parks and forests, one
who was found following the demolition of another abandoned house,
one who was found adjacent to Fort Lewis, where Keys
was stationed in the army, and one who was found
near a boat ramp and the very town where Keys
(35:43):
bought his bay Liner boat. And when looking for missing
persons who could match these doughs, we encountered many disappearances
that looked similar to Keys cases, including more than a
handful of names familiar to us, like Wendy de Hoop,
Robert Perry, Bissell, Cynthia Jane, Marl Koi, Dang Vu, Kimberly,
(36:09):
Anne Forbes, Juvana Tyler, and del Mar Wayne. Sample. When
(36:29):
you experience loss, people say you'll move through the five
stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What they
don't tell you is that you'll cycle through them all
every day. Ranata Suzuki. It's sometimes easy to buy into
(36:57):
the Keys mythology and get lost in an orchestrated hopelessness
that we might never find the remains of his victims.
But there are bodies out there, recovered remains that just
haven't been identified yet, And the strange dichotomy of how
(37:20):
we talk about those bodies isn't lost on me. That
body tends to refer to the entirety of something, its completeness,
a body of work. But in the case of the
human body, in the instances of finding bodies, the body
(37:40):
is missing the thing that made it complete, its humanity,
its person. When a person becomes just a body, they
are no longer a complete body of work. And when
someone is minimized down to just the nameless body that remains,
(38:04):
it becomes easier and easier to overlook them, to overlook
that body, to not prioritize the closure, to not find
its home. It's easy to talk about how DNA testing
costs too much or takes too much time when that
(38:26):
person is just a body who currently belongs to no one.
And that's the other conflict in these bodies. How in
the recovery of a missing loved one, there is the
simultaneous pain of there being no more hope in the
(38:46):
long awaited emancipation from wondering and worrying and searching. Hope
often dies with closure. It's a tortuous liberation, but in
many cases, short of a miracle, it's the most we
can hope for.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
A picture you in the sun, wandering.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
What were.
Speaker 9 (39:16):
And falling down.
Speaker 10 (39:17):
On your knees, asking for sympathy, and being caught in
between all you wish for and all you see, and
trying to find anything you can't feel that you can bevn.
Speaker 8 (39:45):
Make God's love be with you. Of make God's love
be read here.
Speaker 11 (40:00):
No I would apologize if I could see your eyes,
cause when you show me myself, you know I became
someone else, but I was caught in between.
Speaker 9 (40:20):
All you wish for and all you me.
Speaker 11 (40:25):
I'll picture your pries to sleep.
Speaker 12 (40:29):
When night back comes.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
You can't kid.
Speaker 13 (40:37):
Make cause of be with you, Oh, make gods of
with make gods of me with you, my gout of
(41:04):
the way.
Speaker 11 (41:09):
Five if I find a way as my twin bad impasta.
Speaker 9 (41:20):
If I fie ma way, have my will fad im
fast If by five mile way twitter bad.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
I don't know more what it's fun.
Speaker 11 (42:06):
I'm not even sure if there is anyone who's in
this sun.
Speaker 13 (42:14):
Will you have me to understand?
Speaker 12 (42:18):
Because I've been caught in between all I wish for
and all of me. Maybe I'm not even show what
it's for and even love.
Speaker 14 (42:34):
Maybe make God's love be with you, Oh, make God's
love be with you.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Make gods.
Speaker 9 (43:04):
I can't be wait kiss your pa I bas bay
and twas I bast waiting, tweas impast by waiting. Twell,
(43:35):
maybe it's fast. I wait, but you if she gave,
(44:14):
she
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.