Missing: Nicole Engle
Episode 2 of our documentary miniseries Israel Keyes Life in Full Detail, THE VICTIMS, identified Nicole Engle as the suspected first victim of Keyes.
Keyes possible connection to Nicole’s case was first made by the co-creator of Last Known Contact, researcher Nina Waldmann. Due to structural constraints in making a documentary, we were unable to go into as much detail about Nicole as we would have liked in Episode 2, and we wanted to remember her and share her story with you in more detail.
Nicole was just 19-years-old at the time of her disappearance, a Caucasian female with dirty blonde to brown hair and blue eyes who stood at 5'6” and weighed about 135 pounds. She is described as having facial acne and pierced ears, with a tattoo of her son's name, Tristan, on her right ankle.
She went by the nickname “Nikki” and wore contact lenses. Nicole has been missing since October 2, 2001 from Portland, Oregon; she spoke to her mother for the last time on October 2, 2001.
While there is no smoking gun that proves Nicole was taken by Keyes definitively, there is a great deal of compelling circumstantial evidence.
We know he was already planning on doing this at this time; although it has been speculated that Keyes first killed before joining the military, he relayed to the FBI that he committed his first homicide between the time he left the military in July of 2001 and October 2001.
This lines up with what we know of his early life, as discussed in Episode 1 of our documentary, EARLY YEARS.
Keyes’ fiancé Tammie was about eight months pregnant around the time of Nicole’s disappearance; stressful personal events are known to act as motivating stressors on psychopathic serial killers like Keyes, increasing pathological compulsions, pushing him to take a victim.
The FBI states that one of Keyes victims was a pale female with an old car and a wealthy grandmother; Nicole had fair skin and drove an old car.
Keyes often travelled immediately after he committed his crimes; he travelled to Belize the day after the disappearance of Nicole Engle.
[EDITORS NOTE: This was based on an FBI list of international travel dates:
After cross referencing this with a PDF timeline on Keyes from the FBI, which you can find below:
This appears to be an FBI typo as the FBI has him in two places at once, with travel listed on the specific date in question on one list but not on the other.]
The FBI also believes Keyes’ first victim may have been in Oregon. Nicole was living in Vancouver, Washington at the time of her disappearance, going to school and working as a dancer at a club in Northwest Portland, Oregon. Neah Bay is only about 300 miles from Portland, Oregon.
It is believed that Nicole was last seen in the parking lot of the club where she worked. One witness claimed that they saw her at a McDonalds sometime after October 2nd but neither this sighting nor the date have ever been corroborated.
In an interview from October 30th, 2012, the FBI asked Keyes about the circumstances surrounding his first victim. They asked, “How did you identity the target for the first person, that you’d been kinda working up to. How did you identify who that was gonna be? Was it one of these where you go out and wait for somebody?”
Keyes responds, “Yeah well, yeah… not really wait, but you know, if you know an area you can pretty much plan who you’re going to run in to, what type of people and stuff.”
Could he be referring to the “type of people” that might be outside of a strip-club in Portland, ensuring that he wouldn’t have to wait?
The issue of a wealthy grandmother suggests that Keyes may have presented to his victim as if his intention was to hold them for ransom, in the same way that he did with Samantha Koenig and nearly did in the case of Bill and Lorraine Currier.
A victim might say anything in an effort to survive; a “wealthy grandmother” may not mean that the victim’s family are multi-millionaires, but that the victim believes that their grandmother could afford some kind of ransom. Keyes would later demand $30,000 from the family of Samantha Koenig.
Keyes may have never even gone through with the ransom plans, instead just killing his victim as he intended all along, as he did in the Currier case. Keyes said that following the murder of Bill and Lorraine Currier, when he received phone calls from the Currier’s workplace, he thought about answering and going through with a ransom demand.
He had even considered staying in Vermont an extra day, keeping Lorraine alive to make her call into work. He decided against going through with the ransom plan in the Currier murders because the phone he had stolen from them did not allow texting. He also could not get a photo of the Currier’s because he had covered their bodies with Drano.
This on-the-fly decision making breaks the myth that Keyes was incredibly meticulous; he was really quite impulsive, even capricious, as all psychopaths tend to be. Was an abandoned ransom plan why he recalled his first victim having a wealthy grandmother?
We spoke with a childhood friend who grew up with Nicole. She told us that she played with Nicole and her brothers when they were kids. She prefers to remain anonymous as she still lives in the area and did not want to risk creating animosity with people like Katie Ryan, “Nicole’s best friend and roommate.”
The friend says that Katie was “shacking up with Nicole’s fiancé (who was the father of her son), while she was missing, and neither one of them reported her missing.”
The anonymous friend saw Nicole a couple weeks before she disappeared; they ran into each other at the local Winco grocery store. Nicole was there with her young son, Tristan.
Her friend said that while there are a lot of things Nicole did that might be questionable, “She would never leave her son.”
Nicole grew up in Northern Idaho where she was one of three siblings, the middle child in between her two brothers, Elijah and Cody. The friend described Nicole’s mom, Terry, as a “tough broad” who fought a lot with Nicole’s father, Russ.
She told me that Russ beat them and she believes that Nicole was sexually abused as well. Nicole attended Priest River Junior High School where she consistently made Honor Roll before she graduated and became a dancer at a strip club in Northwest Portland, Oregon.
She also said that Selena Braaten, Nicole’s true best friend, was likely the only trustworthy person in Nicole’s entire circle at the time of her disappearance.
“She cared about her. She wants to know what happened to her. She talked [about her] like she was a human being not - you know, talks about her like she was a human being not a piece of trash like some of these people talk about her.”
Paid subscribers will find our full 63-minute interview with the childhood friend of Nicole Engle below; we cover a lot of ground. We have also contacted Nicole’s brother and another friend who reportedly saw her last but so far we have not heard back from either of them.
If and when we do hear back from them, we will follow up on this article and share those interviews with you separately. We respectfully ask subscribers not to bother or harass anyone discussed in this article or in the interview below.
Nicole’s friend asked to remain anonymous; we have redacted all information we believe could be personally identifying.