In Alaska, a Killer Ends Half-Told Tale of His Crimes With Suicide ANCHORAGE - In a conversation with homicide investigators before his suicide in jail this week, Israel Keyes said he had lived much of his life thinking that people only pretended to be nice. But then, Mr. Keyes told one of the interrogators, he realized that perhaps it was only him. Israel Keyes killed himself this week in jail in Alaska. Erin Hooley for The New York Times The kiosk in Anchorage, Alaska, from which Samantha Koenig, 18, was abducted in February. For Mr. Keyes, the superficial facade of an ordinary life as a construction contractor and family man concealed the dark and cold interior life no one ever saw of a roving serial killer, rapist, arsonist and bank robber. "He said a lot of haunting things," said Frank V. Russo, the deputy criminal chief at the United States Attorney's Office in Anchorage, who recounted Mr. Keyes's epiphany. And I thought I'd heard just about everything. By the time of Mr. Keyes's jail-cell death here at age 34, the trail of his crimes - some definite, others still being investigated, with at least eight murder victims in four states, including one disposed of in New York - was matched only by the swirling mystery of loose ends and half-told horror stories he had offered before cutting the conversation short with his death. Sometime either late last Saturday or very early Sunday, he strangled himself with bedding materials and slashed a wrist with a disassembled shaving razor, the Alaska State Troopers said Wednesday in a statement. It is not clear which method finished the job, they said. Law enforcement investigators are now trying desperately to illuminate the dark shadows Mr. Keyes left. They appealed this week to the public across the country for help in solving his crimes. They produced detailed timelines of Mr. Keyes's extensive road trips - driving thousands of miles, by his own account, over the last decade - and are trying to match missing persons reports with his travels. They are looking for the four bodies in Washington State that Mr. Keyes spoke about but would not elaborate on, and the buried caches of weapons and body disposal tools he said he had left in New York, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming and perhaps elsewhere. What makes the task even more chilling and urgent, the authorities said, is that every crime he spoke about in detail after his arrest was substantiated. He may have conducted one of the worst one-man crime waves in recent United States history, but in keeping with his life of concealment, he took the final dimensions of it with him to the grave. And investigators said he was no fabulist seeking dark glory with exaggerated accounts of his exploits. Starting in 2001, after his discharge from the Army, where he was based in Washington State and had no obvious red flags on his record, he seems simply to have embarked on a path of unrelenting mayhem, committing his first homicide that year. He moved to Alaska from Washington in 2007. "Everything that he told us about, we were able to corroborate," said Jolene Goeden, a special agent with the F.B.I. But he also adeptly covered his tracks. Indeed, before his arrest in March after a traffic stop in East Texas, the authorities did not even know they were hunting for someone who had committed a string of monstrous crimes. An 18-year-old woman named Samantha Koenig had been abducted in Anchorage the month before, and a ransom note had been sent; there were hopes for finding her alive. It was not by any means a simple case even then, investigators said - they had the note, and text messages sent from Ms. Koenig's phone, and store surveillance videos showing a figure walking from a white Chevy pickup truck to the coffee kiosk where Ms. Koenig worked. But nothing at the time suggested the depth of horrors and geographic breadth that would ultimately be revealed. Ms. Koenig's ATM card and a rented white Ford Focus turned out to be Mr. Keyes's undoing. An ATM video camera in Willcox, Ariz., captured the image of the car as money was withdrawn from Ms. Koenig's account by a figure in a face mask. A highway patrolman in Lufkin, Tex., spotted a Focus that matched the description of Ms. Koenig's, and Mr. Keyes had the ATM card, as well as Ms. Koenig's phone.