Clutching his handheld camera as he walked through the remote Cascade foothills in Washington, Peter Keller looked up at the lens and said: ‘I used to sit here and think, you know, this whole thing is crazy,’
Wearing a casual grey sweatshirt, the 41-year-old might have looked like a vlogger in the wild to any passer-bys.
‘The more I thought about it, the more I understand it,’ Peter continued. ‘I don’t really feel bad about it. It is just the way it is. I won’t have to worry about Lynnettee or Kaylene. Everything will just be taken care of.
‘It will just be me.’
But Keller wasn’t your average vlogger. He may have been documenting his day-to-day activities like any another social media star with a camera would but, instead of filming shopping hauls or quirky Q&As, he was revealing something far more sinister.
In his video diaries, Keller detailed his plans to kill his 41-year-old wife, Lynnettee, and his 18-year-old daughter, Kaylene.
He also filmed the construction of a secret bunker in a remote woodland 25 miles from his home in Seattle. It was there the dad-of-one planned to escape to, after his loving family was ‘taken care of.’ Keller, who refurbished computers for a living, had stocked his bunker with 13 guns, boxes of ammunition, countless tins of beans, vodka and gasoline. Keller reckoned he could live there for years unnoticed.
How Peter Keller planned to ‘survive’
‘His connection to reality had snapped,’ crime expert Ava Glass explains. The writer, who has worked as a police reporter in America and with MI5 spies in the UK, revisits the Keller case on the latest season of Killers Caught On Camera.
‘If you watch the videos, Keller is very cheerful while he’s building his bunker and stock-piling it,’ Ava tells Metro.
‘He talks about how he’s going to reinforce the roof so he can hide, and says over and over again “I might get caught, I imagine I’ll be caught. But if not, I could easily live here for six months then I’ll get away that way.” Keller prepared that escape route. He’s so practical and proud, almost like “yes, this is my plan, it’s going to be great.” And that plan, to murder his wife and daughter who loved him, was just horrific.’
In some clips, Keller explains how he will rob banks or chemists to get money to survive after killing his wife and daughter. He doesn’t give a specific reason for wanting to commit murder. Instead, he repeats that it is an act he ‘has to do’ which would mark ‘the end.’
On April 23, 2012, the 41-year-old put his gruesome plan into action. Keller shot and killed Lynnettee and Kaylene as they slept and also fatally shot the family’s dog Dino. He tried, unsuccessfully, to set the house on fire then fled to his secret bunker in the woods.
Meanwhile, police set to work on trying to trace the missing dad.
The hunt for a killer
Detectives analysed and enhanced several photos found at the Keller family home which eventually led them to an area called North Bend near Rattlesnake Ridge Trail in the Cascade foothills. They had also found hand-drawn sketches of bunkers at Keller’s house, so knew what kind of hide-out to look out for.
Once in the woods, police saw smoke in the distance. The plumes were coming from Keller’s wooden stove in his bunker as he cooked food. Armed police were dispatched to the scene with megaphones on April 27. They tried to speak to Keller and urge him to give himself up.
After a 22-hour stand-off, a SWAT team set off small explosions near the bunker and deployed tear gas into the entrance to try flush out the cowardly murderer. A ‘pop’ was heard from inside the hideout shortly after this.
Inside the bunker, police discovered Keller’s dead body with a handgun and a radio by his side.
The killer had foretold his own death in a video filmed two weeks before he took the lives of his family. While laughing, Keller had told the camera: ‘I do have my escape and that’s death. I can always shoot myself. I’m OK with that.’
More than a decade on since the murders of Lynnettee and Kaylene, true crime fans are still confused by the lack of motive, with countless Reddit threads discussing the killings.
A motiveless crime?
On paper, the Keller family were happy and had no money or domestic issues at play. Lynnettee was a keen crafter and extremely generous, her loved ones would recall. The mum-of-one would gift presents to under-privileged members of the community and loved to cook traditional Mexican food for her friends and family.
Meanwhile Kaylene was ‘beautiful and vibrant’, studied at Bellevue College and had a loving boyfriend. Videos of Kaylene’s graduation were found at their home, as well as happy clips from family holidays. Her obituary stated she was ‘a strong student who cared passionately about nature and the environment, baked cookies that could tempt anyone off a diet and loved to spend time in the outdoors with her friends and her beloved dog.’
Sgt. Cindi West of the King County Sheriff’s Office, would later tell the press that there didn’t seem to be a clear motive behind the slayings of the two women Speaking after Keller’s body was found in his bunker, she said: ‘We gathered he had a doomsday attitude … family and friends have indicated he thought the world was going to end at some point. We know he in the past has had a number of rifles, scopes and handguns. He purchased some kind of bulletproof vest.’
As well as weapons and ammunition, detectives discovered thousands of dollars hidden in Keller’s bunker. The cash was put towards a scholarship fund set up in Kaylene’s memory to support female students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Kaylene had dreamed of going there and studying video game design, her devastated family said.
Gene Rocha, Lynnettee’s twin, later said that his sister’s killer was ‘a very quiet individual.’ He said he could not bring himself to watch the video diaries filmed in the lead-up to the murders. ‘It won’t give me any answers,’ Gene added.
Caught on camera
For Ava, revisiting the Peter Keller case for Killers Caught On Camera was an unsettling experience. When she was a crime reporter in the 80s and 90s, there were no viral clips on social media clips or much of a digital footprint to follow. Insight into killers’ motives would often come via the memories of witnesses or through details unveiled in court proceedings.
‘Having these videos [from the Keller case] is very interesting. It’s something I never had to work with when I was a crime reporter,’ she explains.
‘You see Keller in these clips admit to the crime, which is insane, but at the same time it still doesn’t really explain anything. The murder makes no sense. He was a crazy man in the forest with a plan to kill his family, and he was upbeat about it.
‘It feels like a movie, or a Stephen King novel. When I was a reporter I felt I could understand the motive of a murder 9 times out of 10. Maybe it was related to anger, drugs, or poverty. But today, we’re seeing so many cases get attention that are wilder and unexplainable.’
Killers: Caught on Camera S2 premiers on TRUE CRIME on Thursday, September 5 at 10pm, with episodes airing weekly and available on WATCH FREE UK after broadcast.
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