By Brad Lendon
(CNN) — They are some of the last thoughts of a serial killer, found on blood-soaked, handwritten and often poetic notes in his Alaska jail cell after he took his own life.
“Speak soft in your ear so you know that it’s true. You may have been free, you loved living your lie, fate had its own scheme, crushed like a bug you still die,” Israel Keyes wrote.
Keyes killed himself in December. He was in custody in the killing of barista Samantha Koenig, 18, whom he abducted from a coffee stand in Anchorage, Alaska, last February. Koenig was one of at least eight people Keyes admitted to killing, but he may have taken other lives, police have said.
Keyes’ notes were released by the FBI on Wednesday after they were cleaned up at the bureau’s lab in Quantico, Virginia. They were found under his body, written in a combination of pencil and ink on a yellow legal pad, the FBI said in a statement.
The bureau said the notes don’t confirm any of his killings, add any new victims to his grisly toll, or offer any other clues that might help their investigation. It said an analysis showed no hidden messages or code in the four pages.
But a read of them does give a glimpse into Keyes’ mind, apparently describing how it felt to take a life and the disdain in which he held much of American society.
“I looked in your eyes, they were so dark, warm and trusting as though you had not a worry or care. The more guiless (sp) the gaze the better potential to fill up those pools with your fear,” Keyes wrote at one point.
“Your wet lips were a promise of a secret unspoke. Nervous laugh it burst like a pulse of blood from your throat. There will be no more laughter here,” he wrote later.
“Forget the lady called luck. She does not abide near me for her powers don’t extend to those who are deceased,” Keyes also wrote.
Shortly after the killer’s suicide in December, Anchorage police Detective Monique Doll described Keyes as a murder addict, saying police interviews with him showed he got “an immense amount of enjoyment” from killing.
“Israel Keyes never expressed in any way, shape or form that he was ashamed of or regretted his actions,” Doll said in December. “He knew what he was and he was fine with it.”
While he held no remorse, his writing indicates that he didn’t think people in general cared for each other at all.
“Soon now, you’ll join those ranks of dead, or you’re ashes the wind will soon blow. Family and friends will shed a few tears, pretend it’s off to heaven you go. But the reality is you were just bones and meat, and with your brain died also your soul,” Keyes wrote.
Keyes criticizes U.S. society elsewhere in the four pages.
“Consume what you don’t need, stars you idolize, pursue what you admit is a dream, then it’s American die,” he wrote.
And he appears to rip the American worker.
“Punch in the clock and sit on your ass, playing stupid ass games on your phone. Paper on your wall says you got smarts, but you still crawl like the vermin you are once your precious power grids blown,” Keyes wrote.
On the last page of the note, Keyes may be referring to his impending suicide or to another of his victims, but his words are disturbing.
“Okay, all is over, words are flaccid and weak. Back it with action or it all comes off as cheap. Watch close while I work now, feel the electric of my touch, open my trembling flower, or your petals I’ll crush.”
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