American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars | 7,500 ratings

Price: 15.75

Last update: 06-16-2024


Top reviews from the United States

TLG
5.0 out of 5 stars This book confirmed all my suspicions about why LE at large tried to bury the Keyes case ....
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2019
Maureen Callahan has done the public a service with this book. It reads like an expose of all the things we should be taking different LE and legal agencies to task for.

***This review starts with a semi-rant about how this case was screwed up. My analysis of Maureen’s writing and the book overall is titled separately below if you want to skip the complaining. ;-) ***

The Rant:
If you’ve never heard of Keyes, he’s likely the most terrifying serial killer we’ve ever had, and one of the least known. Least known because authorities deliberately hid the info they had on him. If you DO know the Keyes case, and you haven’t been pissed about how it was handled, you should be, and will be, after reading this book.

(Side-note: For years I’ve been complaining to anyone who’d listen, online and everywhere possible about the FBI withholding info on this case. I’ve been screaming, “Cover up!” like a conspiracy theorist. BECAUSE IT WAS. You bastards! I knew it!! Lol).

Bravo, Maureen! Seriously. This book demonstrated clearly how ego and bravado screwed up a massive case, and the subsequent cover up. There were a few good agents, great periphery LE with their hearts in the right places ... and idiot “big shots” who bungled everything and made rookie mistakes with Keyes, subsequently losing valuable info.

Now, this case is one I followed extensively, and was completely infuriated by the investigation. I watched all the FBI interviews (that were released anyways), multiple hours of them — and wondered what the hell a US Attorney’s office prosecutor was doing playing interrogator ... how did he think that would turn out for a trial ...?

I followed Maureen Callahan’s multi-year long battle in court to get the FBI and US Attorneys office to release all the info they had on Keyes. And boy, did they fight it. And I wondered ... why? What are you hiding? Keyes is dead, there’s no investigation to protect, you won’t be prosecuting him. So why protect his info now that he’s gone? Why keep a no-publicity promise to a serial killer when there’s still friggin victims unidentified out there! (As Keyes himself said, most will just be straight missing persons cases. No real press, no muss or fuss. Just another person ghosted in a sea of missing people.) Or were they protecting themselves? Yep. ALL the agencies involved buried their mistakes. As Callahan points out, the interview where Keyes correctly predicts an underwhelming response to Samantha’s kidnapping from the outset by APD was buried for years. Until she dug it up.

The public should be outraged over this case. Yet barely a blip, certainly the LE involved we’re not held accountable following Keyes death. I hope they realized how incredibly bad they effed up and have since made changes, but ...

This entire case is a study in missed opportunities. Now we have a victim count we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of, and little to no info or follow up post-Keyes suicide. To be honest, I think Keyes only gave them a count of bodies he thought might eventually be found and/or possibly connected to him. There’s more out there. And we don’t know who they are. IMO, the US Attorneys office & APD, (and possibly the FBI for allowing all the bungling), wanted this case to vanish as much as Keyes did. Obnoxiously, it did.

I was excited for Maureen’s book, but thought there wasn’t much new info I would get out of it. In fact, there was quite a bit. This peeled back the investigation, a glimpse into the mindset of the investigators. Quick nod here to Texas, you guys are THE SH*T. Keyes himself was amazed at how on guard ordinary people in Texas were, how observant and well armed. Plus your LE? As I believed before, the LE people who did best in this whole mess of a case, who were most on top of it all ... were the Texas Rangers and State Police. These guys knocked it out of the park. They took vague info and turned it into an arrest. If only they could’ve run the rest of it! No, not exactly fair. Had the FBI agents who’d been tracking Keyes taken the lead on questioning and the rest ... maybe we’d have a different outcome.

My analysis of Maureen’s writing and style:
I saw reviewers point out they didn’t feel Maureen could extrapolate feeling and tone from transcripts. That’s true, EXCEPT, there’s video to go along with those transcripts — the tone is VERY easy to sense. Along with the power struggles and silent battles. Her interpretation of the power dynamics and missed opportunities in questioning were exactly what I got out of those tapes. So everyone else, please understand, she’s not making things up here.

There were a few times I thought, “Ok, you can’t know what he was thinking here so writing this investigators innermost thoughts is a ballsy writing move.” Yet, those few occasions were logical thoughts anyone would’ve had. She used them as teaching moments, i.e. times where quotes from interrogation transcripts showed clear questioning errors on the prosecutor’s part, and another investigator would think, “That’s a mistake.” Stuff like that. Not a stretch. But I still think some leeway should be given here; Maureen mentions extensive interviews with individuals involved at the beginning of the book. So we have to give some latitude for that. I didn’t see anything in this book I thought ventured towards the fictional.

Now, in the interest of fairness, Maureen had to fight the US Attorney/DOJ for years in court to get the info for this book. So it’s possible she had a resentment bias while writing in regards to Feldis screwing up this case. BUT, I thought her treatment of him was fair — bc he WAS the main screw up point in this case. Everything she wrote I agreed with.

This book is extremely well written. It’s VERY in-depth, piecing together so much info on Keyes, it felt like a goldmine to someone like me who’s been frustrated by the info blackout. I read the only other book on Keyes and found it lacking. This is a result of years of fighting the government for their records, and meticulous research. Yet it’s not dry or boring. This was a fully engaging page turner. It keeps you totally immersed in the investigation and Keyes in general. Very well done, I was impressed.

I read this book in one day, it was a page turner.
Kim M.
4.0 out of 5 stars The mind of a killer!
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2024
Very insightful engrossing and very scary! Well worth the time spent due to the detail and great storytelling. Read this book.
Michelle P.
5.0 out of 5 stars Such a good book!
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2024
I really enjoyed reading this book! Such an interesting story that keeps you engaged.
Michelle Olsen
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good read
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2024
The author did amazing work building a timeline of events while adding narrative. If you are in to true crime or want to know more about Isreal Keyes, this is a great place to start.
California Dreaming
3.0 out of 5 stars A Minor American Disappointment
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2019
While reading "American Predator: the Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century" (AP) I did something that I rarely do with true crime: I tried to put myself in the mind of the serial killer by imagining that I was committing the crime myself. While reading about the Currier's abduction and murder I thought about scoping out their house, turning on my headlamp, breaking the window between the garage and the house, unlocking the door, and then blitz attacking the couple with a gun in my hand. I actually really tried to think about how it would feel to be the killer in this scenario, and not the victim.

Suffice it to say that I didn't much like the feeling of it. At all. In any way.

While I have read many books on serial killers, I surely am not an expert when it comes to understanding what it's actually like to commit any of these types of crimes. That's probably a good thing. But I realized something right away while performing my "thought experiment," or "Gedanken Experiment," as Albert Einstein liked to call them: So many things could go wrong during this type of attack. Maybe the homeowner has a gun? Maybe the homeowner will be more difficult to control than expected? Maybe the homeowner will simply say, "I'm not going with you!" and then what do you do? Israel Keyes probably worked out these possibilities himself beforehand. After all, Mr. Keyes was one of the most organized serial killers ever and so to him, the Devil must've been in the details. He wouldn't have become such a "successful" serial killer otherwise.

But it's more than this really. Just thinking about it should make you feel more than uncomfortable. After all, if you are an empathetic human -- Mr. Keyes had little time for such trivialities as empathy himself -- you would have a very difficult time doing the things to the Curriers that he did. It should actually make you nauseous, if you're a caring human being. And then if you felt that way you'd just let them go before killing them and then promise yourself you'd never do that again. Luckily I'll never know myself.

Well, good luck with that with Mr. Keyes. If he were still alive, I suppose.

What's really disappointing to me about AP: this book could've been really good, maybe it could've been even great. It sure starts out that way and that's what led me to have my ill-advised thought experiment as the story unfolds during the early chapters. But then AP concentrates too much on the interviews with Mr. Keyes, and in reality, you can just go to one of your favorite streaming web sites and watch most of those interviews yourself. What I would have preferred: concentrating more on Mr. Keyes' crimes. Why he committed them and how he committed them. And how he became the eventual monster he was. Sure, it would've taken some speculation, but I've read many serial killer books where the authors made many guesses, but if you think logically, even if you weren't there, you might be able to piece quite a bit of it together anyways. In particular, Mr. Keyes describes how he took with him a portable burner and pan to boil water in the abandoned farmhouse where he eventually assaulted and killed the Curriers. Why boil water? Maybe I want to know. Maybe I don't. But this is never really explored by the author and it should be. I think it must be.

There are many ways to tell a story like this. Tell it from the viewpoint of the police and how they caught the UNSUB. Tell it from the viewpoint of the victims, although that can make the reader very uncomfortable, without using Kid Gloves. Or tell it from the viewpoint of the UNSUB and describe exactly what he was thinking, which yes, often requires speculation. This final approach is what Jack Olsen uses in the book "I: the Creation of a Serial Killer" and it is more than a chilling read because of it.

And I think that the Israel Keyes' story might work best using this Jack-Olsen like approach.

I guess that Maureen Callahan, the author of AP, is an investigative journalist. She obviously is a very good writer. But I don't know much about her other than that. But my gut tells me she wouldn't be the correct person to write this story if it were approached from a serial killer's first-person perspective. She's probably too nice. Her approach was to tell pretty much the facts, and I would argue she does a very good job with those fact. I've read another book on Mr. Keyes -- "Devil in the Darkness" -- which I thought was a more electrifying read. And I've seen quite a few documentaries on him as well. But after reading AP I just don't think I learned much more about him, other than some possible abductions and murders that he might've committed across the country. From memory there was a string of abductions -- I believe extended car jackings -- in Florida that Ms. Callahan seems to believe may have been committed by Mr. Keyes. I just don't think so. They just don't feel right to me. He often liked to take victims in pairs -- at least one of the car jackings involved a mother and very young daughter, so it kind of fits -- but he also seemed to prefer taking his victims in isolated locations, free from witnesses if possible. From within a victim's house. Deep in the woods. At a lake where no one else is around. If you could put Mr. Keyes at the location where ALL of theses car jackings occurred I might change my mind, but right now I just don't think so.

I'll go with a mild recommendation on "American Predator" if you want to learn more about the interview techniques used with Mr. Keyes, maybe some of the politics involved just doing those interviews. But maybe just watching the actual videos of his interrogations might be more interesting. But I won't give a recommendation to doing a little Gedanken Experiment by trying to get into the mind of a sadistic serial killer. It might make you feel more than uncomfortable. Or at least it should. Leave it up to the profilers at Quantico to dare venture into the Black Hole that was Israel Keyes, because there may be no coming back.
Ben Haddad
4.0 out of 5 stars Great research; terrible pronoun use
Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2024
The author was exceptional at crafting the narrative and demonstrating research. I was annoyed by shaky pronoun agreement where the author would start a new chapter with “he” or “she” and you’d need to forward or back in the book to figure out who it was in reference too. Otherwise, a really well-investigated book
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Sick, sick, sick
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2024
Interesting story of a demented serial killer. Fascinating to witness the apprehension and interrogation details. Not for the faint hearted.
Sandra
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is an adventure!
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2023
This book is quite different from all the other true crime books I have read. At first I wasn't sure if I was going to like it...I LOVED IT!! The main character was definitely a strange man who was brilliant as well as very very evil. His story will keep you reading far beyond bedtime, always wanting to read just one more part of this strange story. A must read for all true crime buffs!

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