0117 | Suzy

[MUSIC PLAYING] With NoviBet, it's time to take a spin with the future of online casinos. Unluck a world of entertainment with the best value and highest or Tp in the industry on all your favorite slots and table games. And for Blockbuster value, you can't be guaranteed rewards in our free-to-play game gift wheel, where you'll get a daily bonus just for playing. Nice one. So download NoviBet today and play your way. NoviBet, more parody. This universe is fun. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is a studio, both, and production. If you'd like to support this show and get ad-free episodes for as little as $2 a month, go to patreon.com/studio, both, and. So what was it like to take that cross that up line to actually following through the plan to kill somebody? It went a lot better in the second time. [LAUGHS] For this. The second time you killed someone? What was the first time? No, I'm just saying, from that incident that happened on the river to when I actually did it the second. I-- yeah, the second time I had someone actually tied up and stuff there. Was it a restroom like the first time or something? No. Cam sight. Woods. I had already had the area picked out. And-- but as far as I had a lot of areas picked out, I just had it set in my mind how it was going to happen. And I was determined that's the way it was going to happen that time. And I'd say, it didn't really matter where. I, like I said, had several areas. It was kind of one of those things where first time the opportunity came up. You were driving around, but you can't tell. Well, I guess you'd say I was going to several different areas, kind of thing. Did-- Do you want to play on that? Yeah. And the first time you were going to strangle the girl, is that what you did the second time? Did you strangle her? Yeah. Were there any-- did you have a knife or a gun? Yeah. Did you use the knife or the gun? No. And it seems like you talked about tying the woman out because that did you tie this woman up? Yeah, there you are. Was it one person? No, I'm just pointing out I never said it was a woman. The person was tied up. Yeah. Are you-- is that mean it was a man or are you just-- No, I'm just trying to-- I'm willing to come in one way or the other. We're not going to catch you in that easy, right? Well, I'm already caught here and told you we'll talk about it. This is Drew Grime bullshit. I'm your host, Josh Hallmark. And this is a serialized story of Israel Keys. Every press release in the Keys case has stated that its believed Keys committed his first murder in 2001, something we even detailed in this very podcast in episode 6. But that's not a universally held belief amongst those who have investigated and studied Keys. I'm going to be opinion that. There was victim or victims before. And I don't think that for your period, he was dormant. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] And I'm inclined to agree with both Bobby and Catherine. I have a hard time believing that after amping himself up to commit his first murder in 1997, and then losing his nerve on the Dishoots River and regretting it so deeply, that he'd be able to then wait four years before attempting it again. And he's made several statements that corroborate this theory. And so going back to like time between things. I mean, I guess my perspective on would be criminal activity not necessarily, you know. How long could you go? Or how long had you gone? How would you just look at those? Like, how long could you go between victims? Well, I was a long time. I was a long time. I was three. Three. Three, four, you know. I'm two different people, basically. How long have you been two different people? One time, 14 years. Now, that last sound bite is probably the most played and ubiquitous key sound bite. And I think because of that, over time, it's lost its depth. But if you really think about it, there's a lot that stands out in those few seconds. 14 years is oddly specific. It's not 15, not more than 10, not less than 12. It's 14 years. This is from an April 2012 interview. So what is he considering the moment where he became two different people? If it's the 1997 DeShoot's River Abduction Enraped, where he let the girl go, well, that's 15 years. If it's 2001, as we've seen in press releases, that's 11 years. So where was he and what happened in the spring of 1998? Well, we know he was living in Constable, New York. They talk a lot about how most likely his first murder victim was after he got out of the army in 2001. And yet, he contradicts it twice in his interviews. And even just looking at that grand scheme of things, he works himself up to this 97 Oregon Sexual Assault, where he doesn't have the nerve to kill her. And then four years later, he kills someone. It just doesn't add up, especially when they did ask what was your longest dormant period. And he said less than three years. And so that added with the fact that this is a guy who admittedly would stake out parking lots. There's a missing person who disappeared in Albany shortly before he went into the army. And I wonder if you think it's possible there was a victim prior to 2001. And if they looked into Suzanne Lyle. Yeah, I can't say whether they looked into it or not. But I certainly do think I'm going to be opinion that there was a victim or victims before. And I don't think that's where your period was dormant. With Novi Bed, it's time to take a spin with the future of online casinos. Unluck a world of entertainment with the best value and highest or T.B. in the industry on all your favorite slots and table games. Nice one. So download Novi Bed today and play your way. Novi Bed, more parody. This is your name versus God. Suzanne Lyle, who went by Susie, was a 19-year-old student at SUNY Albany when she disappeared on the night of March 2nd, 1998. There are several suspicious components to her disappearance, but no real biometric evidence or prime suspects. There are, however, a handful of suspicious people who can be connected to her disappearance. Most notably, her boyfriend Rich Condon. The last confirmed sighting of Susie was at around 9 p.m. on the night of her disappearance. When she left her job at software retailer Babbage's and the crossgates mall, just two miles away from her dorm at the SUNY campus. Susie left Babbage's and exited through a back hallway from the mall to a parking lot where she would take the number 12 bus back to campus. And while her last confirmed sighting was at Babbage's, the regular route driver on that 12 bus line stated that he saw Susie boarded the bus that night at Crossgate's mall, and a SUNY student very familiar with Susie stated that as she was boarding the bus at the SUNY campus, Susie was exiting it. At around 9.45 pm, both of these statements are considered highly credible, which makes it incredibly likely that Susie did make it back to campus from her job on the night of her disappearance. But there's no evidence that she ever made it back into her dormitory, which is a mere 100 yards from the 12 bus line stop at the SUNY Albany parking lot at Colin's Circle. Susie was reported missing to the SUNY campus police on the morning of March 3rd. After Susie's boyfriend called her parents to say that she was missing. Unfortunately, the SUNY campus police didn't report her disappearance to state police for another three to four days, which became problematic. Most notably because in those three to four days before a proper ground search could be conducted, a snowstorm hit the Albany area, covering the parking lot she went missing from in several feet of snow. Susie's disappearance and the investigation into it is well documented in the serialized podcast Upstate Unsolved, which was researched and developed by reporter Phoebe LaFave and the College of St. Rose Cold Case Analysis Center. For more thorough look at Susie's case, I highly recommend subscribing and listening. The first major lead in Susie's disappearance came shortly after she was reported missing. When her ATM card was used at around 4 p.m. at a Stewart's convenience store on Central Avenue, approximately three miles from the SUNY campus. Central Avenue is one of the major arteries within Albany. It runs from downtown, connecting to both Interstate 90 and Highway 87 before becoming Route 5 and leading into the greater Albany area. It's an avenue we'll visit multiple times throughout this episode. Whoever used Susie's ATM card had the correct pin and successfully withdrew $20. Unfortunately, this ATM located inside the convenience store was not on the store's surveillance, which only recorded the register area. Police pulled all records from transactions that occurred in the 30 minutes proceeding and following the withdrawal. And were immediately able to identify and locate all but one of those customers. A man who would eventually be labeled "Nike Man" because of the Nike hat he can be seen wearing in the surveillance video. Nike Man immediately became a person of interest in the investigation and a police sketch was created and distributed. And while investigators went about trying to find him, police met with those closest to Susie, including her boyfriend Rich. Despite being Alibide, Rich was at his parents' house playing online video games with a friend. Suspicious statements and behaviors from both him and his parents kept the Condon family on the police's radar throughout the investigation. The Condon family paid to put up billboards with Susie's information and a sketch of Nike Man throughout the Albany area, which actually led to Nike Man himself contacting the police. Nike Man, whose name has never been publicly released, worked at the SUNY campus and had a criminal history of assault and rape. But he had a solid alibi. And police determined that Susie's disappearance didn't match his MO at all. And after seven interviews and extensive background checks, he was eventually ruled out as a suspect in Susie's disappearance. In May of 1998, two months after an extensive ground search of the 300 acres surrounding the SUNY parking lot where Susie is believed to have been abducted from, her Babbage's ID card was found in the adjacent Visitors parking lot, about 400 feet from the bus stop. It was recovered along the edge of the parking lot amid a pile of sand and dirt. The metal clip on it had become rusty and the text had started to fade. But several investigators and reporters were a bit dubious of its sudden appearance following such an extensive search of the area. There are several theories about how the ID badge came to be there. One line of thought is that it was placed there sometime after the search. Another theory is that when the parking lot was plowed following the snow storm, the badge was pushed to the edge of the parking lot and concealed beneath snow and debris. But regardless of either theory, what makes its location most suspicious is that it's the opposite direction of where Susie would have been traveling from the bus stop to her dorm. So Susie either would have been somehow diverted to that parking lot or abducted from her dorm parking lot and taken there, which is probably as good as any segue into keys. Admittedly, we don't know a lot about keys actual abductions. Since we only have details for the couriers and Samantha Conegs, which are wildly different abduction styles, but what we do know, based on his interviews and the little evidence we do have, is he had a thing for staking out parking lots. Here he is discussing staking out two different parking lots in Alaska, one in Anchorage and one in Eagle River, where he would eventually admit to stalking a couple and two police officers one night. This was a, was this place open? Like the gates were open continuously, there's no snow. When you put this in Eagle River? Yeah. At the parking lot there? Yeah. Because it's May sometime is there early May? It was open, yeah. Was there snow on the ground? No. No. Okay. But there wasn't a lot of traffic there. I staked it out for a couple nights, but I think there was only one or two cars that came by. Okay. And when you staked it out, your vehicle there or perfect somewhere else. Now I parked the vehicle down the road by the nature center, and then I rode my bike back down. That's why all that stuff was stashed there ahead of time. Because I didn't want to have my car. How many days or nights or whatever did you? Well, yeah, it goes up there for two or three nights. I didn't stay all night just till after dark. And just there wasn't much traffic there, so never an opportunity never arose. Yeah, there was only one, there was only one time that I almost did it, but there was, it was two people and it would have been a lot of work. And then during this time frame, this is also the time frame you talked about point warns off or on that area, right? Yeah, right after you built the signless. Yeah, that was, I think I went up to you go river after that incident because, uh, was a lot of police driving around me for just the birds, no. And then the time out at point warns off, how late was that when that? I mean, how was it started? It's about 11 o'clock, because it was about 11 o'clock. Yeah, okay. And you think that was mid-help far before you left for, you left on June 3rd to go to remind me, on the days or weeks was that before that? Uh, it would have been in May sometime, probably mid May. Okay. And do you know for sure if it was an APD officer or was it airs or PD? It was two of them. Do you remember what kind of car was there other than the police car or what you were watching? It was a Subaru station wagon, I think, what color? Navy blue or darker maybe? And you may recall that prior to abducting the couriers, he's staked out a parking lot at a nearby apartment complex. And, um, went across the road from the hotel and had a apartment complex there staked out. And I was waiting for someone to come in alone. So that's what I was, I was, uh, had this apartment staked out. I was actually looking for a guy. And there was, uh, it was pouring rain, big lightning storm, and, um, there was a guy who came in, he's in a yellow V-dubb bug, newer one, and, um, and he's almost, he almost got it that night. If he hadn't got out of the car, he'd been about five seconds slower getting out of his car and going into the apartment. He would have, he would have been the one that night. But, um, like I said, it was raining. So I walked out of this little wooded area and I was walking up behind his car and he kind of, or walking along the line of cars towards his car, and he kind of jumped out and had like a newspaper over his head and he ran into the apartment. And even in the case of Samantha Konig, who was abducted from a coffee stand in a parking lot, keys was watching that coffee stand in that parking lot from another parking lot across the street. He essentially abducted Samantha from one parking lot and took her to an adjacent parking lot. Sound familiar? And if you believe one witness report, keys was staking out at least one parking lot in the Albany area in 1998. There are hundreds of witness statements and tips that have come in over the years on the keys investigation. I've read them all. Most of them lack credibility. Either keys can be placed somewhere else. The details don't match his timeline, the description doesn't fit and so on and so on. In fact, only a few of these tips really stood out to me. Usually because keys can either be placed in the area at that time, or their details are incredibly specific and reflective of keys in his MO. One such tip came through the tip line in 2013, and investigators followed up on it. Twice. On October 1st of 2013, a woman reported that sometime in 1998, she was shopping at a Marshall's clothing store in Albany, New York. She said that the store was closing and she was one of the last people to leave. Her car was located in a dark area of the parking lot, and while she was placing her items into it, she was approached by a younger man who looked to be in his late teens or early 20s. She said that at first the man just stared at her and watched her place items into her vehicle, and she found it incredibly odd that he was standing near her in the middle of an empty parking lot and looking very tense. After a few minutes of watching her, the man approached and asked, "How old are you?" She replied, "How old do you think I am?" At the time she was in her 40s and had replied in an agitated voice because she felt the question was a rude one. She said after her curt response, the man seemed to relax and silently walk away. She immediately got into her car and fled the scene. The woman said that the man who approached her was identical to Israel keys, but with shorter hair. She said that after watching the videos on the FBI.gov website, she recognized his voice and a certain that the younger man was in fact keys. On April 22nd of 2014, the FBI conducted a follow-up interview and asked her to recount her story. She recalled that the incident occurred in the Marshalls parking lot in 1998. Possibly 97 or 99, she said at this time. She said there was no snow on the ground, and that her car was parked further away from the store and closer to the road. She confirmed that it was about 9 or 10 pm, and that she was placing a purchase into her car at the time of the encounter. She described the man as tall and thin with short, wavy hair. That he looked like he was in his 20s and this always makes me chuckle because it's both hilarious and hilariously accurate, that he resembled the character Beaker from the Muppets. In the second interview, she said that after seeing a video of keys, she became incredibly upset because he was so familiar to her. She googled his name and immediately recalled the incident. Saying keys looked and sounded exactly like the man in the parking lot. Apart from her visceral reaction and description of keys, there's a few other elements to this report that make it seem credible to me. For one, staking out a parking lot matches keys known M.O. Secondly, he was living just 200 miles away at the time. The third is that the witness is an attorney who works for the State Department, and not that being an attorney or a government employee immediately disqualifies someone for being wrong or a liar, they do make her a detailed oriented witness, trained in ethics, with a lot on the line. An attorney can be disbarred for lying or providing false statements to the FBI. And most notably, keys would eventually join the Army through the Albany Recruitment Office, which is across the street from a Marshalls. Now, there are two Marshalls in Albany, which was disappointing to find out. But after my initial disappointment, I made some calls. And it turns out only one of those Marshalls was actually open in 1998. The one across the street from the Recruitment Office, the other one didn't open until 2007. And the Marshalls in the Recruitment Office? Well, they're both located on Central Avenue, just two miles from the Stewart's convenience store where Suzy's ATM card was used, and perhaps more relevantly, less than two miles from the SUNY campus. In fact, if you take Highway 87 from Constable to Albany to get to the Recruitment Office, the Marshalls, or SUNY, you take the exact same highway exit. You can drive from that Marshalls parking lot to the parking lot where Suzy was abducted in under 10 minutes. I know because I did it last week. And the area where this woman most likely had the interaction, that part of the parking lot, but to a small forested area that can't be seen from the road. And the pathway from the bus stop to Suzy's dorm, while incredibly short, is also a fairly heavily forested area. And according to school personnel, there was no direct lighting on that pathway in 1998. Now let's speculate that Keys attempts to abduct this woman from the Marshalls parking lot at 9 pm, when the store closed. Then for whatever reason decides not to. Maybe he's intimidated by her age or her snarkiness, or perhaps he noticed someone pull into the parking lot. In any event, he can still be at the SUNY campus, staking out that bus stop by 9.10 pm. It's believed that Suzy disappeared from the parking lot at around 9.45. Now, obviously, placing Keys two miles from the SUNY campus sometime in 1998, isn't exactly proof that Keys was involved in Suzy's disappearance. And while it was confirmed that within the two weeks prior to her disappearance, there was no snow anywhere on the ground in Albany, it's still not proof that that's when this attempted abduction took place. But there is more than just that linking Keys to this case. About 18 hours after Suzy disappeared, her ATM card was used to withdraw $20 from a nearby ATM. Now, we all know that Keys would eventually use Samantha Koneg's ATM card to withdraw several thousand dollars from her account, while in Alaska and the Southwest. But he also withdrew $20 from her account on the night he abducted her. Presumably, to test the pin she gave him. We know Keys is very aware of surveillance. It's something he talks about in almost all of his FBI interviews. So maybe he picks this particular ATM because he knows there's no camera on it. But if this is Keys, where does he abduct her too? And what does he do with her remains? Well, that's another interesting thing about this case. Keys was adamant that early in his career, he would always try to abduct victims from one state, kill them in another, and dispose of them in a third. Well, if you're living in upstate New York, Albany would be an ideal place to do just that. Albany is almost exactly 30 miles du-west from the New York Vermont Massachusetts border. You can drive a loop through all three of these states, using rural one lane highways, and under two hours. And while the Albany metropolitan area is a fairly densely populated region, as soon as you cross the Hudson River out of downtown Albany, you're in heavily forested mountains and farmland. It would be incredibly easy for Keys to abduct Susie from Albany, transport her to an abandoned house in western Massachusetts, and then hide her remains in rural Vermont. Without ever being seen or her body ever being recovered, and it's an area Keys New Well. It's also an area I know well. I'm currently living there, and I've driven every possible route he could have taken, and each our remote, passing many rivers and lakes, and only on occasion going through sleepy towns full of abandoned houses. This is a pretty depressed region of the United States. In fact, in the town I'm living in, about half of the houses are abandoned. This is also a region of the United States that includes the Bennington triangle, an area infamous for a string of strange disappearances that occurred in the 1940s and 50s. So yeah, a good place to make someone disappear. With Novy Bed, it's time to take a spin with the future of online casinos. Unluck a world of entertainment with the best value and highest or Tp in the industry, on all your favorite slots and table games. Nice one. So, download Novy Bed today and play your way. Novy Bed, more parody. Now, I'm not the only person to link keys to Susie. Upstate Unsolved devoted an entire episode to the possibility of keys being involved in her disappearance. And I'll say it's one of the most accurate standalone episodes on keys I've heard. In the episode Dr. Chris Conkel, an advisor for the St. Rose Cold Case Analysis Center, states, "This was planned, or it was executed by a highly skilled opportunist. For someone close to her, this would need to be planned. This involves a more planful, more deviant offender than someone close to her. That may sound familiar because of the show open, keys talked about how his first successful murder was, highly planned. And that he let the victim come to him. Conkel then goes on to suggest that keys might be a possible suspect. The host of Upstate Unsolved, Phoebe, does an excellent job of staying objective and avoiding tunnel vision on any particular suspect or theory, of which there are many. Most notably, as I mentioned at the start of the show, is Susie's boyfriend Rich Condon and his family. They did and said a lot of suspicious and sometimes shady things in the wake of Susie's disappearance. It actually reminds me a lot of James Coneg following Samantha's disappearance, which brings me back to Dr. Conkel's quote, "This was a well planned abduction executed." by a highly skilled opportunist. And to me, the condoms are by no means criminal masterminds. There's a long list of things they said and did that would be epically stupid if they were involved, but here's just a few highlights. When it was discovered that Suzie's pin was correctly entered into the Stuart's ATM, Rich blurted out that only he and Suzie knew the pin. Rich's family was known to occasionally pick Suzie up from the Suni Visitor Center's parking lot, which means they either would have abducted her from the place they were known to pick her up, or they planted evidence at the place they were known to pick her up. Rich reported Suzie missing to her parents within 12 hours of her disappearance. Those weren't the only things that stood out to me from this episode. While listening, I realized that they were missing a lot of incredibly relevant information. And that made me question whether the FBI and the New York State police had ever exchanged info. So, I called Phoebe. Phoebe and Dr. Conkel laid out a pretty rational and detailed explanation of how keys could have been involved, but they weren't aware that at the time of her disappearance, keys was actually living in New York. They just knew he was familiar with the area. They also didn't know that he was prone to staking out parking lots, nor about the Marshalls tip. But most importantly, they didn't know that Suzie's name was found on Keyes' computer. Remember that list of over 40 names of missing people who came up in Keyes' internet history? Suzie Lyle was one of those 40 people. I asked Bobbi Shacon about this, and I know that the FBI found at least 40 missing people on his computer and either searches or in photos. And obviously, that's more than the FBI believe are his victims. And a lot of those victims have been connected to other killers. So, what's your opinion of his collection and research of all these missing people? Do you think it was about aiding his future crimes? Or do you think it was a fetishization of missing people? I think it's both. I think it's and there's a third element. I think that one, some of that were his victims. Number two, because he was so meticulous in not getting caught, he studied others and how the mistakes they made when they got caught. And number three, like you said, the fetishist nature of rereading, you know, it wasn't his own kill, but he could still find some psychosexual treasure in reading about other people, similar to him, carrying out their crimes. And so, I think that in part, because people like him lived their whole lives feeling that the only person on earth who is like them, when they start to realize when they come to a mature age, you know, when they're 18s or 20s, and they start realizing, oh, there are other people out there like me, because I can find them in the news. It interests them. It interests them to see what these other people that are like me doing. And how they're doing it. And so, I think some of those 40 or more people they found on his computer were his own victims. And I think some of them were research on how other people may have gotten caught. And then the third aspect is I want to know what my brethren are like or what they're doing. I mean, I think that ultimately, you know, he would have loved to meet someone like him. But, you know, they know all they often know that that's another way of getting caught. So, I think that that is a three possibly four elements to those names and those people on his computer. And like he said, we do know for certain that some of those names were in fact his victims, because the careers were on that list. And several other people on that list went missing at times when keys can be placed nearby. We also know that list, with at least two hits on Susie, is only a fraction of who and what he was searching for online. Computers, you mentioned when computers first cannot start doing searches and look just want to see what was up with the military guys. You talked before with us about there were a couple times that you would go on your computer and do a search just to see if a body had been found or, arson or bank robbery or whatever it is. When you were doing it, how would you, how would you do that? I mean, did you know names of everybody or would you do just Google search a town or how would you do it? I was with the exception of the computer that you guys got. I generally wouldn't do it on the home computers. I had another computer that I did use for a while, but for the most part, it was a computer that I was planning on having around for a while. I would never do research as long as I did do. I usually, for the generic, I would type in an area or a newspaper of an area and type in a keyword. I would never type in a specific name. I know. The name of the newspaper from the area? Like if it, I would do it as a Burlington press. Right. Yeah. I would do a search of news from an area, I guess, and then pull up either a newspaper, news channel, online news, type in a keyword of something and just scroll down the different stories so I found the one I was looking for. If I was doing it from an anonymous computer, like an airport or a library or something, I would do. I would just type in what I wanted right away. Bring it up. Did you know the names? Did you remember the names of most of the people? Yeah. Well, yeah. On the major things. Okay. Phoebe and I found ourselves a bit dumbfounded. Our stories had collided in the strangest way, and it seemed clear that we were two of very few people who had the entirety of information on how keys could be linked to Susie. So, she reached out to her contacts in law enforcement, and I foiled local law enforcement to try to get access to the Stuart Surveillance video and any fingerprints possibly pulled from the ATM. And now, we wait. The most infuriating thing about investigating Israel keys is without a body or a biometric evidence. It's nearly impossible to truly confirm he's responsible for any missing person. There are cases where I'm so certain he's involved, and there's so much circumstantial evidence pointing at him that I want to throw my computer out the window because I'll likely never get proof. More than likely, that will be the case with Susie. Unless keys fucked up. Which, he rarely ever did, but maybe. Just maybe, for a fleeting second or two, he'll pop up on that video. Or a new witness will come forward. Until then, I find myself obsessively driving the back roads of Berkshire County and upstate New York, looking for something. I'm not entirely sure what, just some sign of keys, some clues, some earth's shattering realization. And in the meantime, we have one confirmed sighting and one probable sighting of keys within two miles of where Susie disappeared. We have our disappearing from a place he was known to abduct people from, and we have our name on his computer. And unfortunately, that's just not enough. This episode was produced, written, and researched by me, your host, Josh Hallmark. I'd like to thank True Crime Bullshit's newest Patreon supporters, Anastasia M, Jo N, Sarah H, Chase F, Shivan B, Julie W, Shiloh H, Gabby, Laurie, and Chris R. Thank you to Bobby Shacon and Dr. Catherine Ramslin for providing insight in this episode. A special thanks to Phoebe LaFavre and the team of Upstate Unsolved for working with me on this investigation in episode. This episode featured music by William Hellfire, Radical Face, Wife, Sergei Cheromissanov, Kirk Pearson and BIT, and Russ Huddleston and Robert Smith Jr. [Music] [Music] (upbeat music) Don't forget the silly way we miss. Don't forget the tender touch except why are burning in tune. But I'm forgetting you. They proceed and it seems you are over so dear when I lose this dream to disappear. I'm forgetting you. Why forget you? I'm forgetting you.