Barista Strangled and Dismembered by Serial Killer, Israel Keyes

He put makeup on her corpse and sewed her eyelids open, then took a photo for her family.

Rivy Lyon
8 min readMay 26, 2021
Newspaper photo of Samantha Koenig (Source: Dark Minds/Investigation Discovery)

Samantha Koenig was only 18 when she was kidnapped from the Common Grounds drive-thru coffee stand on Tudor Road in Anchorage, Alaska. After viscously murdering her in a secluded shed on his property, Israel Keyes, 34, used Samantha’s debit card in the state of Texas and was apprehended by police in 2012.

He admitted to investigators that Samantha wasn’t his only victim.

Background of a Killer

(Source: Nypost.com/Credit: FBI)

Israel Keyes was a father, contractor, and killer. He led a double life in Anchorage, murdering at least three people and possibly many more.

He is believed to have killed a minimum of 11 people.

To FBI investigators, Keyes confessed that as a teenager he had already made the decision to rape and murder. Interested in Satanism, he schemed a ritual killing of an innocent woman. He stated that he was standing along the Deschutes River one day and waited for a young woman at the back of a group…

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Rivy Lyon
Rivy Lyon

Written by Rivy Lyon

Investigative Journalist | Criminology, Psychology & Sociology B.A. | I’ve loved true crime since Forensic Files was Medical Detectives!