Israel Keyes: Studying a Psychopath

1489 Words3 Pages

Israel Keyes was born as the second oldest of nine on January 7, 1978 in Richmond, Utah. Keyes grew up in a Mormon household eventually moving to Washington and then ending in Maine only to reject his family’s religion resulting in him being kicked out. As a child, Keyes always carried a gun around with him, some of which were given to him by family members, specifically his grandfather ("Acting At Random"). Around the age of 19, Keyes enlists in the Army as a Specialist and works his way up only to leave on an honorable discharge after receiving a DUI and also after his first crime of abduction and rape of a young teenage girl between 1996 and 1998 (Noe). This is the beginning of Keyes’s journey of criminal behavior.

Keyes was never caught for the raping of the teenage girl and therefore he was able to continue committing other crimes. According to a blog called “Acting At Random,” his first murder was in 2001 of an unidentifiable couple. He also started dating a woman whom he had a child with later on and in 2006 committed his second murder claiming two more victims. In 2009 he needed to support his criminal activities, thus he began robbery, but still continued to murder by taking the lives of Bill and Lorraine Curriers. On February 1, 2012 Keyes abducted and murdered Samantha Koenig which caught the media’s attention that eventually lands him in prison due to surrounding cameras that caught his car on tape.

Israel Keyes was a very organized conventional criminal that was always thinking ahead of how he could benefit himself for future crimes. According to many posts in discussion week 6, students seemed to agree that conventional criminals are much more hands on and appear more threatening. Keyes fits this description ve...

... middle of paper ...

...ny requirements for a psychopath, even though a formal test like the PCL-R cannot be completed because he took away his own life before investigation was final. However, he is similar to a few psychopaths that this course studied over the past nine weeks making it possible to compare him. Some aspects are still questionable of Keyes’s, like his childhood, but otherwise he does represent much of what has been learned of the psychopath in this class.

Works Cited

"Acting At Random." 19 May 2013. Web.

Fersch, Ellsworth Lapham. Thinking About Psychopaths and Psychopathy. Lincoln: iUniverse, 2006. Print.

Noe, Denise. "The Cold-Blooded Crimes of Serial Murderer Israel Keyes." 10 April 2013. CrimeLibrary: Criminal Minds and Methods. Web.

Associated Press. The mysterious secrets ‘Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde’ Alaska serial killer took to the grave. 26 January 2013. Web.

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