Serial Killer

Israel Keyes seemed a little too familiar with killing. After arresting the 34-year-old Anchorage, Alaska, construction contractor in Texas in March, investigators confronted him with evidence they believed implicated him in the kidnapping and slaying of an 18-year-old Anchorage barista in February. Investigators say there was video of him leading Samantha Koenig away, and they have text records from her stolen phone, and had monitored withdrawals of ransom made with her debit card in areas where he was known to have traveled.

Serial killer Israel Keyes had already slain Anchorage barista Samantha Koenig and left town to go on a cruise more than two weeks before he began demanding ransom for her release, authorities said. Officials said the 34-year-old self-employed construction worker kidnapped Koenig at gunpoint Feb. 1 from a Common Grounds coffee shop in Anchorage because it stayed open later than others. He sexually assaulted and asphyxiated her, leaving her body in a shed. When he returned Feb. 17, Keyes posed Koenig's corpse with a newspaper in a ruse to show she was alive, then dismembered the body and dumped it in a nearby lake, according to a statement released Tuesday by the FBI. Keyes was arrested in Texas in March, and authorities had withheld the details of the kidnapping attack for months while they extracted partial confessions regarding as many as eight killings he may have committed since 2001.

With a single gun linked to the fatal shootings of three Brooklyn shopkeepers since July - each of Middle Eastern descent - New York police have asked for help from FBI experts who profile serial killers. The latest killing took place Friday night, when Rahmatollah Vahidipour, 78, was gunned down inside his boutique in the Flatbush neighborhood. "In the past three nights, police officers and detectives were here questioning, trying to get a clue, trying to investigate," Abraham Shokirian, a son-in-law of Vahidipour, said in a phone interview Tuesday.

One by one, the young women vanished from the dusty farm towns of the Central Valley. They were often addicts or prostitutes, and their disappearances over a 15-year period in the 1980s and '90s didn't seem to draw much official concern. Two childhood friends and locally renowned troublemakers, Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog, were eventually arrested in 1999 for a series of murders known as the "Speed Freak" killings, and many of the missing were presumed to have fallen victim to the methamphetamine-addled duo. Shermantine and Herzog never disclosed where they dumped the mutilated corpses of their victims, leaving bereaved families with only grim speculation.

Colorado cold-case investigators have linked a convicted murderer who died in prison in 1996 to four more slayings -- and say he may have been responsible for a score of others as well. Vincent Groves, 57, known for playing on a championship Colorado basketball team in the 1970s, strangled most of his victims, Denver Dist. Atty. Mitch Morrissey told The Times. “In my 30 years experience, he is the worst home-grown serial murderer,” Morrissey said, noting that Ted Bundy , believed to be responsible for several Colorado slayings, was more prolific overall.

The slayings of a Goleta couple 30 years ago have been linked through DNA evidence to an unidentified man thought to be responsible for a string of rapes and killings in Sacramento, Ventura and Orange counties, Santa Barbara County authorities said Thursday. The DNA finding confirms a long-held theory that the July 1981 slayings of Cheri Domingo, 35, and Gregory Sanchez, 27, were the work of a serial killer whose last known crime occurred in Orange County in 1986. “With recent advancements in DNA profiling methods, it was important for us to push forward and reevaluate evidence in this case before it deteriorated and became useless,” said Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown.

Investigators searched for a Mexican drifter alleged to be a serial killer with a taste for riding the rails. Police in the United States and Mexico were looking for Rafael Resendez Ramirez, who has been linked to six deaths in Texas and one in Kentucky, all brutal beatings that took place near railroad tracks. "Right now he is the most wanted man in Texas," said Texas Department of Public Safety Director Dudley Thomas.

Anaheim's police chief said Saturday that he is "extremely confident" a suspect arrested Friday is responsible for the deaths of four homeless men and that authorities plan to present the homicide cases to Orange County prosecutors next week. Itzcoatl Ocampo, 23, of Yorba Linda was booked at the Anaheim jail early Saturday morning. He will be transferred to the Orange County Jail early next week. Authorities did not specify a motive for the killings or provide any details about the suspect or the victim killed Friday evening.

When Israel Keyes was arrested in Texas in March, detectives flew in from Alaska to question the man suspected of kidnapping an 18-year-old barista in Anchorage. Anchorage Det. Monique Doll had the ransom note that was sent to Samantha Koenig's family. “I put the ransom note in front of him and told him that the first couple of times I had read the note, that whoever had written it was a monster," Doll told the Los Angeles Times. "And the more I read it, the more I realized that monsters aren't born, they are created, and this monster had a story to tell.” He would tell his story eventually.

SEATTLE - As they talked with him in a conference room at the federal courthouse in Anchorage, agents already were confident they had Samantha Koenig's abductor. They had surveillance footage of Israel Keyes' truck parked outside of the lonely coffee stand where Koenig was working when she was kidnapped one frozen night in Anchorage. They had the ATM withdrawals the 34-year-old construction worker had made with her bank card. They had a ski mask found in the trunk of his vehicle.