In investigation of serial killer Israel Keyes, FBI gets new tips

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Investigators are following up on tips about an Alaska serial killer that were prompted by new information released to the public, an FBI official said.

The agency in August posted more than six hours of videotaped interviews with Israel Keyes conducted by agents, federal prosecutors and Anchorage police in the months before his suicide last December in an Anchorage jail.

The FBI also released an updated timeline of travels and crimes by Keyes in the hope that someone might be able to match his movements in the past 12 years to people missing before his arrest in Lufkin, Texas, in March 2012. Keyes was believed to have killed 11 people across the country, but investigators had exhausted all their leads and decided to seek the public’s help with the release of the interviews and the timeline.

Investigators received a few leads from outside Alaska after the new information was released, according to FBI spokesman Eric Gonzalez. He declined to elaborate on the nature of the information.

“At this point, there’s nothing that we’re discussing publicly,” Gonzales said Monday.

Keyes said in interviews with authorities that he buried three victims in the state of Washington and submerged two others in a lake there. But as with most of his other victims, Keyes refused to provide many more details about their whereabouts.

When he killed himself in jail, the 34-year-old Keyes was awaiting a federal trial in the rape and strangulation murder of his last known victim, 18-year-old Samantha Koenig.