Woman is childhood friends with a notorious serial killer — these incidents proved something was ‘a little off’

TikTok creator Kelsey May Vandy has shared unsettling memories from her childhood. In hindsight, they were early signs of something deeply wrong with a boy who would one day become one of the most methodical serial killers in American history: Israel Keyes.

Keyes, who died by suicide in 2012 while awaiting trial, confessed to abductions, sexual assaults, and murders across multiple states, telling investigators he traveled specifically to kill and used hidden “kill kits” — buckets of weapons, restraints, and cash buried across the country — to carry out attacks far from home.

The FBI ultimately linked him to at least three confirmed murders, including the kidnapping and killing of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig in Alaska. But investigators believe he may have had 10 or more victims.

A close family relationship

As Vandy explains, her family once had a close, almost familial connection with the Keyes household. “My parents became really good friends with Heidi and Jeff,” Israel’s parents, she recalls. The families were neighbors in Cove, Utah, where their mothers homeschooled together in a co-op called Rainbow Academy. Her mother learned canning, gardening, and goat-milking from Keyes’ mother, and even babysat Israel as a baby. But even then, Keyes seemed different.

Her mother remembered him as “really shy,” developmentally delayed, and slow to meet early milestones. “He didn’t get potty trained till later, a lot later on,” Vandy says. His father, she adds, was known to be extremely strict and believed in corporal punishment. When the kids were jumping on a trampoline, Vandy recalled, Israel would deliberately try to “bang my two sisters’ heads together really hard.”

The cat incident

The most disturbing memory surfaced years later, when Vandy’s father brought her older siblings to Washington State to stay with the Keyes family for a month. “My brother said he saw a lot of odd behaviors,” she explains. “He was very fascinated with harming animals. He liked watching them die.”

According to Vandy, Israel “took his sister’s cat and nailed it to a board and did horrible things to it.” And this aligns directly with Israel’s own confession. In taped FBI interviews released publicly, Keyes admitted to torturing and shooting a cat as a teenager, describing the pleasure it gave him and calling it a formative early act of cruelty.

After that visit, Vandy says, the families gradually pulled away. Her mother eventually had a falling out with Keyes’ mother, and contact with the family faded.

A final eerie encounter — after the killings began

Years later, long after Keyes had committed his first known murder, he and his father passed through town and stayed the night at Vandy’s family home. She was nine or ten at the time. She remembers only a normal visit — nothing that hinted at the violent secret life he was already leading. Only years later did she learn the truth.

Vandy emphasizes she isn’t trying to sensationalize the story. “These are just simply memories and stories that I have personally and that my family has with the Keyes family,” she says. But with hindsight — the shy, delayed child; the head-banging incident; the fascination with animal death; the cat torture confirmed in his confession — the signs seem impossible to ignore.