Maureen Callahan Quotes

Adventurers and loners, romantics and desperadoes, eccentrics and slow suicides—the luxuriousness of the place, its seduction and savagery, calls to the wildest among us. Alaska, the land of black moons and midnight suns.

As the final decade of the millennium dawned, there would be no greater expression of the cultural, economic, and social revolutions to come than fashion. What rock 'n' roll was to the '50s, drugs to the '60s, film to the '70s, and modern art to the '80s, fashion was to the '90s: the fuse, then the filter.

I've got lots more stories to tell.

What Keyes was describing was the textbook progression, from childhood, of a sadist and a psychopath. Torturing and killing small animals, pets especially, is experimentation in controlling and killing another living thing for pure pleasure. It is practice, the last step before graduating to humans. Even as an adult,

I’m walking this over to you, I’m talking to you, which means this is important.

Studies of twins have shown that psychopathy may be a trait more heritable than environmental, yet good children can thrive despite bad parents, and vice versa.

What Kate wore, whether on the street or the red carpet was much cooler to them than what she modelled. Her paparazzi photos were becoming indistinguishable from her editorials.

And while investigators didn’t necessarily think Keyes was responsible for all of the missing kids on his computer, their inclusion was disturbing. Who reads about missing children and babies for kicks?

Yet Alaska remains the “Great Land,” as James Michener called it: the closest we have to a time before man, unsullied terrain, nature so titanically overwhelming it’s impossible not to be awed and a little afraid.

She was having nightmares, vivid and unceasing. Most days she couldn’t get out of bed. She was as inconsolable as ever, reminiscent of the months after Jack’s death when little Caroline told her schoolteacher, “My mommy cries all the time.

Breaking apart his cell phone and removing the battery was something the team hadn’t seen before either. For Kat Nelson, those dark spots in his history, the hours that his phone gave off no signal, would be a tell. That’s when Keyes was doing something.

Ari Onassis was a Greek shipping magnate, a billionaire, an antisemite, a vulgarian, and a bisexual with a string of bought-and-paid-for young men that he savagely beat after sex. On October 17, 1968, he and Jackie Kennedy, thirty-nine years old to his sixty-two, announced they would marry in three days’ time.

Anna Wintour hadn't been to any of McQueen's shows, and McQueen didn't like it. McQueen said American Vogue could borrow the dress only if they flew it to New York and back, in its own seat, with an escort. It was a fuck-you and they took it, and the dress was shot by Richard Avedon. "Fashion people haven't got any brains," McQueen said.

If the FBI hadn’t been informed of this interview, it was highly unlikely the Department of Justice had—and DOJ was the final word, the lone authorizing agency on federal death-penalty cases. Investigators and prosecutors had to do everything—everything—by the book. And Kevin Feldis was pissing all over it. Nor was this an isolated example.

She told Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that she couldn’t find slumber at night despite all the sleeping pills she took, that her medications did nothing to stop her mind from obsessively replaying the assassination. She told Roosevelt that Bobby Kennedy was the only person keeping her from killing herself. For Bobby, the same was true of Jackie.

Keyes had told investigators that there were two texts that he studied closely, both written by pioneering behavioral profilers in the FBI: Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind by Roy Hazelwood, and Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas, in turn the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

New York City, near death and calling for her desperately. His cries had broken her heart. In his anguish she heard the little boy who’d been left in one too many hospital beds by his mother and father. But back then Jackie did what the doctors said and stayed in the hallway, trusting they knew best. She had sworn that she would never leave Jack alone like that again.

Then there was the driving, the ability to stay awake without the aid of drugs, just his Americano coffees and soaring adrenaline, moving through five states in as many days. Until Samantha, Keyes had left no digital trail, no cell phone or credit card activity. Until Samantha, he swore he’d never killed in his own backyard. Decades of mayhem, geographical boundaries unknown.

Before beginning Samantha’s recovery, Chacon had his team gather in one of the tents, where they were invisible to cameras and agents on the ice. They observed a moment of silence, and as they exited, they saw an enormous bald eagle circling overhead. Chacon took it as a sign that Samantha was watching over them. The divers looked at each other, nodded, and silently went to work.

Before his death in 2016, Hazelwood spoke about Keyes. Hazelwood’s decades of service had left him with a cynical view of the FBI’s truthfulness in general, and he believed stranger abductions are far more common than the Bureau insists. He was convinced that the proliferation of hard-core pornography, so easily and anonymously accessible online, has contributed to increasingly sadistic crimes and murders.

Another passage nailed Keyes: “The sexual offender is never fully inactive,” Hazelwood wrote. “He may not be acting out against a specific victim, but he will be making plans, selecting new targets, acting out against other victims, or gathering materials. He is never dormant.” Keyes was a cluster bomb. Investigators were learning that some of his tactics were borrowed from different predecessors, reconstituted for the modern age.

I decided to go back to my old stomping grounds,” he said. “Back east.” Another clue. Had Keyes killed more on the East Coast than the West? They could tell he was getting off on telling investigators things they’d never heard nor had ever known to fear. It could be difficult to tell how much he was exaggerating, but so much of what he had told them bore out. They were inclined to believe him. “I have hundreds of plans,” Keyes said, “and a grand plan.

Chacon retired in July 2014, and at his going-away party said the one thing he’d never miss was pulling another dead child out of the water. He meant it as a joke, but it left his colleagues stunned. To this day, he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He will probably have it the rest of his life. He sometimes thinks that the reason he and his wife were never able to have children despite years of trying, specialist after specialist offering no solution, was so he’d never have to know a parent’s grief.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black… “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

I wrote this story because I needed to, when, so many years after losing my sister, I found myself daily, hourly sometimes, being touched by life in some way that brought up her "missing-ness." Like an invisible shard in my heart, it doesn't show when you look at me, but there it sits, in the center of my chest, a shard now turned to crystal that casts its light and color over my life. Inside that crystal, Kathy is still with me. I know I am not alone in this experience.

This kind of prayer was about staying present, keeping her company in this place of helplessness and uncertainty. We cried and we chuckled. We told each other stories and drank tea from china cups. All that was prayer, too. And that was how we navigated this dangerous, terrifying path.

Jack opened the window a crack to hear Sheila complain to Maureen, “Oh, there is nothing to do! Nothing at all!” And Maureen, now about to be married, crouched down next to the young girl and said, “There are books enough to find a thousand worlds. You can play in the woodlands or write home or mend your socks. It is only for lack of imagination that you are bored.

removed the cast the day before, and even though John needed a cane to walk and would need months of physical therapy, he swore the doctor had cleared him to fly. Not likely. But John was so confident. Overconfident, as usual. Carolyn couldn’t fully blame him. No one said no to John F. Kennedy Jr., heir to Camelot, the only living son of the beloved slain president, with movie star looks and charm to match. “America’s Prince,” the media called him, and whenever John wanted to do something—to become a lawyer, start a magazine—hell, run for president of the United States, everyone knew that was coming—the answer was always yes. Sure, yes, of course Mr. Kennedy, and you know what?

That was another secret between her and Jack, their confidential appointments with Max Jacobson, the German physician they called Dr. Feelgood. He shot them up with all kinds of drugs: speed, steroids, painkillers, animal hormones, bone marrow, human placenta. Neither Jack nor Jackie knew what, exactly, was in Feelgood’s injections. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Jack once said. “It works.

They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Bobby had been more than a brother-in-law to Jackie; before his assassination, in the wake of Jack’s death, the two of them destroyed and disconsolate, they became romantically involved.

Chacon retired in 2014, and at his going-away party said the one thing he'd never miss was pulling another dead child out of the water. He meant it as a joke, but it left his colleagues stunned. To this day, he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He will probably have it the rest of his life. He sometimes thinks that the reason he and his wife were never able to have children despite years of trying, specialist after specialist offering no solution, was so he'd never have to know a parent's grief.

Dean Koontz’s Intensity.

Cumberland Island was like no place Carolyn had ever seen. Remote, untouched by industry or technology, maybe forty people total lived on this strip of land situated between Florida and Georgia. Its pristine beaches were the domain of wild horses and enormous sea turtles and resembled a land before time, before humans existed. The only place to stay was a mansion-turned-inn, run by descendants of Andrew Carnegie. On the other end of the island was a tiny white chapel built in 1893. John wanted them to be

It didn’t take long for Steve Payne to find out about Feldis’s secret interrogation, and when he did, there was, finally, a confrontation. A friend of Goeden’s had first heard about the interview down at the courthouse, and when Goeden was told she didn’t believe it at first. This stuff just didn’t happen, especially with such a high-value suspect. Goeden had to make several phone calls to find out: Yes, it’s true. The prosecutor on your case is totally out of control. The potential damage could be incalculable.

Finally, complaints about the federal prosecutor were made through the proper channels, and these went all the way through chain of command to Washington, DC. Word came back to Feldis: Your behavior is unacceptable. And yet, incredibly, Kevin Feldis remained in the interrogation room, often leading the charge. To this day, no one will say why that was allowed to happen.

The Anchorage Correctional Complex, the Alaska Department of Corrections, and state attorneys are so corrupt that in 2016 these attorneys advised prisons not to keep records and not to document causes or circumstances of inmate deaths. In January 2018, the Anchorage Daily News reported that ACC had secretly wired visitation rooms Keyes used, and that these rooms remained wired ever since, illegally recording attorney-client conversations.

Meanwhile, the FBI had gone through the hundreds of images on Kimberly’s computer and were able to identify forty-four people using facial recognition software against all the images on NamUS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons website. Eleven of those were teenagers. Ten were small children. The two youngest were each one year old. One thing I won’t do is mess with kids. Now investigators had even more reason to doubt this credo.

If an Israel Keyes existed, someone even more diabolical would follow. They needed to understand the forces that built Israel Keyes, the first sui generis serial killer of the twenty-first century.

Some agents, like Steve Payne, stuck to traditional investigative methods: the interviews Gannaway was conducting with Heidi; searches through financial records, computers, datebooks, and journals; interrogations with Keyes himself. For other agents—Jeff Bell, Jolene Goeden, and now Ted Halla and Colleen Sanders, two FBI special agents who were starting to research Keyes down in Washington State—the few serial killers Keyes referenced were a source of fascination and, they hoped, insight. These agents began reading and watching every book, film, or TV show Keyes had consumed, building little libraries in their respective field offices and comparing notes.

Ted Bundy, who Keyes called his great hero, killed all over the country. James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben, the basis for Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, kept at least one kill kit. John Robert Williams was a long-haul trucker who killed in one state and left bodies in another. Dennis Rader, the BTK (“bind, torture, kill”) Strangler, posed at least one of his victims in the basement of his church, tied up in sexually degrading positions.

Another thing: In searching Kimberly’s house, police recovered a piece of paper with random numbers listed: 5, 79, 105, 633, 1.5, 5, 5. Bell Googled them. Up came “Police frequency, Stephenville, Texas.” He pulled up a map of Stephenville—5 was the highway coming into it; 105 was the highway out. Then Bell Googled “1.5-5-5, Stephenville TX.” Up came the scanner frequency.

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twenty-eight years old, getting elective surgery

It did make sense. Books were among Jackie’s great loves; she was a voracious consumer and reader of them, and aside from her children, books were her solace, her emotional sustenance. And editing would fit with her baseline personality: Jackie was social and loved meeting new and fascinating people, but she was also, at her core, a loner. Becoming an editor would mean lunches and book launches and office work, but it would also allow her hours away on her own, reading and thinking and refueling.

Jackie had encouraged her friend Barbara Chase-Riboud to write her groundbreaking book about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and the mother of at least six of Jefferson’s children—a disturbing part of American history that, at the time, remained little known.

It took three years,” Chase-Riboud wrote, “from the time a concerned Jacqueline Onassis had turned to me and said, ‘You must write this story,’ to the time it was published at Viking Press with her as my acquiring editor… I realized that sitting beside me in a black one-piece swimsuit was one of the few women in the world who could explain political power and ambition, American sex and American autocracy, the back stairs at the White House and the intolerable glare and flame of living history. Who else?” Who else, indeed?

Now fifty years old, Jackie was in her prime. She was building her dream house on Martha’s Vineyard, had raised two children in uniquely difficult circumstances, had earned the respect of her peers in publishing, and had fallen in love with Maurice Tempelsman, a man she had known since her years with Jack. She had no desire to marry again, ever, and that was just fine with him; he remained married to his first wife and had no desire to divorce. Jackie had always had a penchant for married men and the emotional distance baked into those arrangements, but Maurice was different; he was devoted to her. Jackie Onassis, in short, had found her bliss. She was now the architect of her own life.

Chacon had been with the FBI’s Dive Team for nearly twenty years. Almost nobody knows what they do or that they exist, even within the Bureau. Yet Dive Team members see more death and mutilation than the average FBI agent, who might deal with one homicide in an entire career. At forty-eight years old, Chacon was the team’s elder statesman. There was no one better prepared or more experienced to lead a dive of this physical difficulty and sensitivity.

it was, Kat Nelson was having a hard time finding Israel Keyes in any public filings. No property records. No documentation of parents or siblings. No address history, no gun licenses, no academic transcripts. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. He had left nearly no digital footprint, no paper trail—and this was a guy with an unusual name. If he hadn’t been in custody, Nelson would have a hard time believing Israel Keyes actually existed.

A few minutes later, all of Samantha’s remains, found in close proximity, were in their possession. Allen and Bart dragged the body bag directly under the hole they’d dived through, where it lay in a shaft of nighttime sunlight. They waited while a white pop-up shelter was pitched above the hole, blocking the media’s view. Once they got the signal, Bart and Allen attached three small nylon lift bags to the body bag and watched it rise. At the surface, Chacon knelt down and looked inside. The first thing he saw was Samantha’s face. Her eyes were wide open.

Payne thought Keyes was still most concerned about media coverage. Keyes swatted that away. “I know it’s inevitable,” he said. “I’m not in this for the glory. I’m not trying to be on TV.” When Bell heard the tape of this interview, the word “glory” struck him. It was another tell. Who calls the rape and murder of an eighteen-year-old a thing to be glorified for? Payne and his team had come to believe they were dealing with a serial killer. And Keyes had just told Doll and Payne: You’re right. And you’ll never find another body without me. —

Carolyn really, really did not want to get on that plane.

the

Joe Kennedy had been the one driving in the wrong lane, smoking pot and speeding which led to the crash that left Pamela Kelley unable to ever walk again. And not once did he apologise.

Joseph Kennedy Sr. ordered for his daughter, Rosemary, to forcibly be lobotomised leaving her with the mental capacity of a two year old. She was stashed away in another state to never be visited by her family. Simply erased.

He didn’t even know how to spell her last name.

The media kept propping him up as the next hair of Camelot even as they knew better. Everyone on the hill knew about the drug box Ted kept in his desk in the Senate. They’d all heard the story about the fourteen year old girl he tried to rape and whose parents he’d paid off.

Rose’s husband wasn’t just promiscuous. He wasn’t just an adulterer. He was also…a rapist.

That was the moment Joan gave up. Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo’s funeral, the phone call to Mrs Kopechne, the inquest — all of it had contributed to her miscarriage. Ted made her lose her baby.

Jack put her in Valleyhead where in one week she underwent three rounds of electroshock therapy. He never called her and he never came to see her.

Had he left these diaries somewhere she was bound to find them? In the back pages of each book, under the headline “cash accounts,” were lists of women, delineated by month, that Bobby had been with. He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager.

Mary Jo’s parents were told no details by Ted. Not that he had been drinking, or had an expired license. They didn’t know he had emerged from the water and walked a mile past several houses, a fire station and pay phones and never once tried to find help.

She probably lived for at least an hour after the crash, and if Ted had gotten help, Mary Jo could have been saved.

Joe had promised her, whatever Pam needed, whenever she needed it, it was hers. Always.

When Jackie gave birth to a stillborn alone, Bobby called Jack who was still at sea. “What’s done is done…the baby is lost.” Jack saw no point cutting his vacation short.

Bobby said the ugliest things to her — that she’d be “better off dead” and that things would be “so much easier” if she committed suicide.

Before his death in 2016, Hazelwood spoke about Keyes. Hazelwood's decades of service had left him with a cynical view of the FBI's truthfulness in general, and he believed stranger abductions are far more common then the Bureau insists. He was convinced that the proliferation of hard-core pornography, so easily and anonymously accessible online, has contributed to increasingly sadistic crimes and murders. He believed that technology, the mainstreaming of violent pornography, advances in ever-faster travel, and an overall culture of misogyny, from politics to entertainment, would only contribute to breed more aberrant and dangerous criminals. He made this prediction in 2001. [!!]

...how did a self-employed construction worker with below-average income purchase so many one-way plane tickets and never get flagged by Homeland Security? Was Keyes a beneficiary of racial profiling? He sometimes traveled with guns, breaking them apart and stashing them in carry-ons, yet was never once questioned by the TSA.

Showered and shaved now, they all looked the same: buzz cuts, khaki pants, black jackets. Chacon joked that it was as close as they could get to wearing "FBI" across their chests.

As in the White House