This is an our Americana podcast network production sponsored by Podbean.

My concern, the problem is nowadays the more stuff my name is attached to the more likely it is that somebody's gonna try to do some kind of stupid frickin' TV special or you know how it is nowadays like with all this true crime bullshit that people are obsessed with.

This is True Crime Bullshit. I'm your host Josh Hallmark and this is a serialized story of Israel Keys.

It started when I was a kid. You see I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s.

On the heels of the zodiac, the massacre at Jonestown, the murders of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng,

back when unsolved mysteries in America's most wanted were becoming prime time staples. I guess you could say True Crime has always been a cultural touch point for my generation.

Of course up until recently it was mostly only talked about with hush tones in the backs of bars with your weird friends.

And then podcasts and investigation discovery created a community who killed Hayman Lee and what happened to Morra Murray became water cooler debates.

And over time we all became more and more comfortable casually talking about murder.

That's actually where I first heard about Israel Keys. At the office coffee maker, I just started a new job in Seattle and quickly went about identifying my own weird murder friend.

I don't exactly remember how we came out to each other but we soon found ourselves deconstructing episodes of disappeared each Tuesday morning over our cubicle walls.

We were both fascinated by disappearances.

How someone could just vanish. We're trained to crave answers and tidy conclusions.

And I think that's why these cases can so easily become obsessions. We need to know what happened.

And that's how she knew I'd be just as terrified of Israel as she was.

He'd just been arrested and while his identity had been concealed from most of the world, his roots in Seattle led to enough local chatter that a story made his way to our desks.

And in an attempt to get information about his other crimes, the FBI made a deal with Israel that they wouldn't release his name to the media as long as he continued to work with them.

We'll get into this deal more in future episodes but if you hadn't heard of him before now, well this is probably why.

Very little is actually known about Israel's crimes. As we'll explore, he was incredibly meticulous in concealing his activities and avoiding being caught.

Essentially, we knew he was a serial killer with victims all across the country. Who killed it random? He had no victim profile. Israel contradicted a lot of what we know about serial killers. Mostly because he had studied them.

So I guess I identify most or my favorite if you have to put it that way it would be the ones that I identify most with.

That's a fair way to say it.

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