u/MedicalAd9419

What if the 11 skulls Keyes drew weren’t victims?
Just throwing this one out there because I can’t get past one particular choice of words by Keyes: “less than a dozen.” when LE asked him how many caches he had.

The usual interpretation of the drawings is pretty straightforward: the 11 skulls represent 11 victims, while the Baphomet/pentagram-like drawing represents Keyes himself. “WE ARE ONE.”
And maybe that’s exactly what they mean.

But what if we flip that interpretation for a second?
When Keyes was asked how many caches he had, he answered “less than a dozen.”

Obviously, “less than a dozen” does not mean 11. It could mean any number below 12.
But 11 is the maximum number it can mean.
And then, shortly before his death, he draws exactly 11 skulls.

That coincidence just really stands out to me.
What if those aren’t victims at all?
What if the skulls represent his caches?
Most of them could represent the methodical caches we already associate with Keyes: kill kits containing weapons, restraints, tools, disposal material, etc. Hence the skulls.

But then there’s that one drawing that is completely different from the others: the Baphomet/pentagram-like symbol.

What if that represents a different kind of cache?
For example, the trophy cache I’ve been wondering about — something containing souvenirs, belongings, hair, remains or whatever else he may have kept from victims.
That would also give “WE ARE ONE” a slightly different meaning.

Not “Keyes and his 11 victims are one,” but multiple separate caches forming one interconnected system.
And that’s the part I’m particularly curious about, because Keyes literally talked about his caches as all “being connected”. If that’s indeed what he meant, “WE ARE ONE” suddenly becomes a pretty interesting phrase to put alongside a series of separate but related symbols.

Again, I’mnot claiming this is what the drawings mean. I just think “less than a dozen” is such an oddly specific phrase in hindsight.

Less than a dozen -Eleven skulls - “We are one.”

Curious whether anyone has ever considered the 11 in relation to his caches rather than his victim count, because I haven’t been able to shake that connection.

Something I keep wondering about: why was Keyes so cagey about Debra Feldman?

Assuming Feldman was the Tupper Lake victim, why was Keyes so reluctant to really talk about what happened to her — and, especially, to help investigators recover her body?

What makes this so strange to me is what we know he was willing to talk about elsewhere.
He gave investigators an incredibly graphic account of what he did to Bill and Lorraine Currier. With Samantha Koenig, he admitted to things that were arguably even more disturbing. He discussed having sex with her body, and at one point even seemed almost amused talking about how close his daughter came to discovering what he was doing.

So what was different about Feldman?
What could possibly have happened in that case that made Keyes, of all people, decide: no, I’m not going into that?
The obvious answer would be that whatever he did to her was somehow even worse. But I’m starting to wonder whether that’s the wrong way of looking at it.

Maybe the problem wasn’t what Keyes would have to confess. Maybe the problem was what investigators might discover if they actually dug her up. Afew possibilities have crossed my mind.
One is that someone else was involved.
I don’t necessarily mean Keyes suddenly had a murder partner. It could be anything from someone being directly involved to someone unknowingly helping him, providing something, being present for part of it, or owning a property or vehicle that would immediately raise questions.

If talking investigators through Feldman’s murder meant implicating another person, that would at least provide a reason for this case to be different from the Curriers or Koenig.

There’s no evidence I know of for a second offender, though, so that’s obviously highly speculative.
Another possibility: what if Feldman wasn’t alone at the burial site?

Keyes could tell investigators he’d murdered a woman and buried her somewhere around Tupper Lake without giving them the exact location. But directing them to the actual site is different.
What if he’d used that location before?
Or afterwards?

It doesn’t necessarily have to mean two bodies in the same grave. Maybe another victim was buried somewhere nearby. Maybe there was another cache. Maybe something else at that location connected him to a crime he had no intention of discussing.

In that scenario, withholding the precise location isn’t really about protecting the Feldman secret. It’s about protecting whatever sits behind it.
And then there’s a much darker possibility I’ve been thinking about.

What if something was missing from Feldman’s body?

I’m going to take that idea to its most extreme conclusion: what if Keyes had removed and kept her head?

Again, I have zero evidence that this happened. I’m throwing it out precisely because I’m trying to understand what could make recovering this particular body so threatening to him.
Because imagine what happens if investigators find Feldman and discover she’s been decapitated.
The obvious next question is: where is her head?
And suddenly Keyes has a very different problem:

What if the answer leads to a separate trophy cache? What if there are other remains there? Hair? Personal belongings? Souvenirs from victims the FBI doesn’t even know exist?
One recovered body could potentially start unraveling several other cases.

And the head idea isn’t completely random in terms of the serial killers Keyes himself was interested in.
Ted Bundy famously decapitated some victims and kept heads as trophies. Keyes clearly knew a lot about Bundy and was aware of the similarities people could draw between them. Both were mobile offenders, and Keyes himself acknowledged similarities between his crimes and those of other serial killers.

There’s also an eerie geographical overlap at Evergreen State College. Donna Gail Manson disappeared from Evergreen in 1974 and was murdered by Bundy. Decades later, Evergreen and the surrounding area become interesting again when looking at possible Keyes activity, as discussed in the Schools episodes.

I’m absolutely not suggesting that this means Keyes copied Bundy, let alone that it proves he kept Feldman’s head. That’s several layers of speculation stacked on top of each other.

But if Keyes had an interest in Bundy and knew the details of his crimes, I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to at least include trophy-taking of that kind among the possibilities.
Especially because it raises something about Keyes that I find more interesting than the gruesomeness itself: control.

A confession is still Keyes controlling the story.
He decides what happened. He decides which details investigators get. He decides which victim gets discussed and which one doesn’t.
A recovered body doesn’t work that way.
The body can tell investigators things Keyes didn’t want to tell them.
And a recovered trophy cache would be even worse from his perspective.

If he’d privately kept body parts, hair or possessions from victims, those things were his. They allowed him to revisit those crimes privately while nobody else even knew the victims belonged to him.
Once investigators find that collection, he loses control over all of it.

Forensics could identify victims he never intended to name. Objects could connect cases investigators hadn’t connected. And whatever deeply private behavior he’d hidden behind the image he maintained with his family could suddenly become evidence photographs, court exhibits and eventually public knowledge.

That last part seems especially relevant considering how concerned Keyes was about what his daughter would eventually learn about him.
And there are other possibilities too.
Maybe Feldman would have revealed something important about his actual victimology.

In my previous post (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrimeBullshit/s/5bKHA6WSJf) I discussed the possible drug angle, and Feldman was a known drug addict. What if his encounter with her wasn’t the kind of random victim selection Keyes wanted investigators to think was typical? What if explaining how he found Feldman would reveal something about how he actually approached certain victims?
Drugs. Sex work. A dealer. A bar. Someone he knew. Some other social connection.

Once investigators understand a method of victim acquisition, they can potentially start looking backwards for other missing people who fit it.
Or maybe telling the complete Feldman story inevitably leads to another crime, another victim, another cache, another location, another person.
And of course there’s the simplest explanation of all: maybe this was just Keyes being Keyes.

He controlled information throughout the interviews. Withholding information gave him leverage. Perhaps there wasn’t some extraordinary secret buried with Feldman at all.
But even then, I keep coming back to the same question:

Why Feldman?
Why be so guarded about this particular victim when you’re willing to describe the Curriers in extraordinary detail and admit what you did to Samantha Koenig’s body?

That’s why I’m increasingly wondering whether the question shouldn’t be:

“What did Keyes do to Debra Feldman that he couldn’t bring himself to admit?”

but rather:

“What would investigators have discovered if Keyes had actually allowed them to find Debra Feldman?”

Someone else involved?
Another body nearby?
A cache?

Evidence of a different victim-selection method?
A missing body part that would immediately raise the question of where he’d kept it?
Or something completely different?

I genuinely don’t have a preferred answer yet. The trophy/cache possibility fascinates me, but there’s basically no evidence for it at this point.
I’m mostly curious whether anyone here has picked up on anything in the interviews, FOIA material or Josh’s research that could explain why Feldman/Tupper Lake seems to have been such a line in the sand for Keyes.

Because considering everything else he was willing to admit, his reluctance here feels like a question worth asking.

I’ve been going back through some older True Crime Bullsh** episodes, and after relistening to the Jon Corey episode and the Schools episodes, I keep coming back to a theory. There are obviously several speculative steps here, so I’m mainly curious whether others have picked up on the same things — or can poke holes in it.

Could Keyes have kept drugs in some of his caches, alongside weapons, murder/disposal materials, money, trophies or other things he considered useful? And could drugs sometimes have been a way of gaining access to potential victims?
One thing that got me thinking about this was Keyes’ confession about the Curriers. He mentions taking medication from their house — painkillers, if I’m remembering correctly. As far as I’ve been able to establish, those medications weren’t recovered during the searches afterwards.

Keyes was also a prolific thief. Burglaries and robberies were part of his criminal life, and his caches show that he was perfectly comfortable stealing or acquiring something in one place and storing it somewhere else for later use.
So what if that occasionally included drugs?
Maybe for his own use. Maybe because they had value. But possibly also because they were useful.
That thought became much more interesting to me when I went back to Jon Corey’s disappearance:

https://charleyproject.org/case/jonathan-henry-corey

In the episode covering Corey, there’s a detail about the house party before his disappearance that I can’t quite get past.
Jon apparently leaves the party for roughly an hour, at the request of his friend “Ricky”, and manages to score cocaine.

But how?

As Josh states in the episode about Jon, the party was at an isolated house in a very rural area. Jon didn’t have a car. Yet somehow he leaves, obtains cocaine and returns within about an hour.
Maybe there’s a completely mundane explanation for this that I’ve missed. Someone drove him. A dealer lived nearby. Someone delivered it. But if not, who did Jon meet that night, and how did he get to that person?
That’s where the Schools episodes, particularly “Schools, Part One: Evergreen,” started ringing bells for me.

Josh discusses indications that Keyes may have spent more time around Evergreen and the surrounding area than previously realised, including sightings and possible attempted assaults. Keyes had of course also been stationed at Fort Lewis, which is close to Evergreen State College and Geoduck Beach.

More interestingly, Josh talks about Keyes and other soldiers from Fort Lewis partying with Evergreen students. If I’m remembering the sourcing correctly, Keyes was known in that period as a very heavy drinker, could become nasty/aggressive when drunk, and was also using cocaine.
If that information holds up, Keyes didn’t merely have geographic proximity to Evergreen. He potentially had an established way into that student scene — and into a scene where cocaine was being used.
And that made me wonder about Jon’s mysterious one-hour coke run.
Could Jon have encountered Keyes before? Could Keyes have been somebody who could get him cocaine, or had previously offered to? Could Keyes have used cocaine as a way to approach people in that environment?

I’m not saying that Keyes was Jon’s dealer, or that the fact Jon obtained cocaine somehow proves Keyes was involved. We don’t even know that Keyes was anywhere near that party.
But Keyes was comfortable approaching strangers, stealing, planning encounters and getting people away from places where they were safe. If he also had access to cocaine — whether bought, stolen or potentially stored in a cache — then “I can get you coke” would be a very simple way of getting a partying student to voluntarily leave their friends and go somewhere with him.

And then there’s the other part of the Corey case that makes it difficult for me to dismiss as just another Keyes-shaped coincidence.
Keyes refers in his interviews to a disappearance that had been described in a newspaper as a “presumed” boating accident. As I understand his statement, the missing person’s boat had been found, while Keyes knew that what actually happened to that person was nothing remotely resembling a boating accident.

Then look at Jon.
He disappeared on January 30, 2002. He was supposedly crossing Eld Inlet by canoe. He reportedly called a friend after leaving and said he’d made it to the other side.
He never came back.
His canoe was found.
His boots and jacket were found.
Jon wasn’t.

The presumed explanation became drowning.
And all of this happened in an area where Keyes had lived, trained and potentially socialised with the exact student population Jon belonged to.
That’s a pretty specific combination.
Again, none of this means Keyes killed Jon Corey. There are several big missing links here, and it’s very easy with Keyes to work backwards from an unsolved disappearance and make everything look significant.

But the combination is what bothers me:
Keyes/Fort Lewis → Evergreen student parties → cocaine → possible predatory activity around Evergreen

and then:

Jon Corey → Evergreen → isolated house party → unexplained one-hour cocaine run without his own transportation → disappears shortly afterwards → canoe and clothing recovered → presumed boating accident → no body.

The part of my theory I’m least certain about is the cache itself. I haven’t found evidence that investigators actually recovered recreational drugs from a Keyes cache. My thinking is simply that his caches may have been broader than the label “murder kits” sometimes suggests.
Maybe they were better understood as criminal supply depots: weapons, restraints, money, tools, disposal materials and whatever else he thought could be useful later.

If Keyes stole prescription medication from the Curriers, and if he was already using cocaine himself and moving around environments where drugs were available, I don’t think it’s a huge conceptual leap to wonder whether drugs could occasionally have ended up in those caches too.
The much bigger leap is connecting any of that to Jon.

For me, that really comes down to one question:
Who did Jon get the cocaine from that night, and
how did he physically get to that person and back?
If that has a straightforward documented answer, a big part of this theory falls apart.
If it doesn’t, then combined with the Evergreen material and Keyes’ extremely odd “presumed boating accident” comment, well …

Episodes I’m referring to: 0504 covering Jon Corey’s disappearance, and the “Schools” episodes, particularly 0604 “Schools, Part One: Evergreen.”