http://p8ntballer-forums.com/threads/ke ... ox.144267/I'm not so sure anyone knew Keith Idema well, least of all himself; he was an extremely complex and elusive personality.
He was most certainly a psychopath and trying to get inside his head was like chasing shadows.
I’m sure at times, Keith even struggled to disentangle truth from his own accounts of events past.
It is true to say though, he was trained in the Special Forces at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina and went on to indulge himself in some notorious events around the world.
He used to come over to the UK in the early to mid nineties and while here, he met my team at the time, NWC and in his words, 'liked the look of us' and decided he was gonna sponsor our team, the only team he did sponsor in the UK at the time..... this was quite worrying looking back because at that time, our team was made up of some mates from my old boxing club and about 3 doorman but as we found out later, he liked to surround himself in what he believed were people who were like himself but the reality was, none of us on my team at the time were anything like him and never wanted to be ...
He was a guy who had killed many times, and many, means many.
The problem with Keith was, you never knew what he told you was the truth; a lot of it was cr@p but a lot of it was true ... and there was no real way to discern the truth by just talking to him.
He threatened anyone who either got in his way or disrespected him [in his mind].
I'll give you a taste of what he was like; in the early nineties, there were 3 UK magazines. Paintball Adventures was run by a real nice guy called Stewart Wall, an inoffensive guy who just wanted to earn a living.
In one of his magazines, he covered an event where Keith was present with his dog, Sarge; Lord knows how he managed to bypass quarantine rules but I know he had access to international military flights and so this was the probable means of entry for his dog.
Stewart Wall's photographer took a pic of many things at the event but the fateful pic was one of Keith's dog having a crap, and he ran this photograph in a subsequent edition of Paintball Adventures.
Some time later, Stewart Wall was sitting at home getting his next issue of the magazine ready for publication [he worked from home] and there was a knock at the door.
Two guys pushed into Stewart's house and basically said the following, 'We've come from Keith Idema and he's really pis$ed off about that pic you ran; You have to write an apology in this next issue and if you ever pull a stroke like that again, you will be killed' ...
The word ‘killed’ may well be viewed by some as exaggerated but unfortunately for Stewart, the two guys made that point quite clear and Stewart wasn’t the sort of man to wanna take that chance .. he was just a regular nice person.
Most threats that includes the word 'kill' are baseless or just a meaningless threat, problem for Stewart was, these guys showed their IDs as members of some 22nd squad of our country's special forces [SAS] ... this is not BS here, this actually did happen in the way I described.
Keith had called these guys up from the US and asked them to go round to Stewart's house and 'have a word' .... Keith was able to do this because he had previously come over from the US to train this particular SAS unit.
He used to show off a small display case that was given to him from that SAS unit thanking him for the training he had given them all, it was a glass-fronted case with ribbons and medals and an inscription; he coulda faked it I suppose but when those guys went through Stewart's front door, that was no fake as Stewart will undoubtedly testify.
Stewart Wall stopped publishing the magazine after that and got out of paintball.
I can't blame him .... it was sooo insane and just over a pic he placed in his magazine .....it beggared belief but was typical Keith I’m afraid.
Some years ago, me and a few guys from that old NWC team went to Heathrow to pick Keith up and take him over to Earl's Court where he was co-promoting a new book called 'Hunt for Bin Laden' that he had contributed to .. it was actually written by a guy called Robin Moore who had previously written the Green Berets, that book was made into a film that John Wayne starred in I think.
We were with Keith for a couple of days and while at Earls Court, he told us of many things, I doubt you guys would believe some of the things he claimed but the problem was, some of it was actually true and so it was really difficult to know where to draw the line of credulity.
One of the accounts he gave was of one of his friends called Mr Plum [ for the sake of anonymity] who was one of Keith’s friends.
We all knew Mr Plum quite well because we had all hung out when we [NWC] went to the Nashville Open in 1990, Mr Plum was a real cool guy and also special Forces like Keith out of Fort Bragg.
Unfortunately for Mr Plum had gotten involved with two brothers [also Special Forces guys] who had set up a company that directly conflicted with Keith's.
Long story short, Mr Plum and his pals, dog-napped Keith's dog, Sarge in retaliation for Keith’s continued threats toward them.
I got no idea how the following happened but the dog was shot in the hind quarters and handed back to Keith somehow as a message.
Knowing how Keith reacted to Stewart Wall’s photograph of Sarge, perhaps it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to hear he went on the warpath against these three individuals.
Mr Plum later allegedly committed suicide and so prior to meeting Keith at Heathrow, we all knew of Mr Plum’s untimely end and so when Keith came over, we naturally asked him what the fuhk happened with Mr Plum, 'he drank too much anti-freeze' was his response .... it was true, Mr Plum did actually die of acute poisoning due to the anti-freeze.
But when asked Keith the natural question as to why Mr Plum would choose that way to do it, Keith's reply was chilling, not so much what he said but how he said it, he told us sneeringly, 'he had no choice in the matter', a subsequent conversation one of us had with him afterward revealed that 'someone' had put a gun to Mr Plum's head and threatened to splatter his brains should he not drink the anti-freeze.
BS?
I dunno for sure either way, I do know Mr Plum died by drinking anti-freeze and I do know he really pissed Keith off and so connecting the two together isn’t such an outrageous thing to do.
The two brothers also died some time later when their car blew up …. This all sounds like a frikkin movie but that was what Keith was like, he wrote the script and starred in it but we never quite knew what to believe ..
Some time later, Keith went to fight over in Afghanistan as a renegade soldier which basically means, he hadn’t been sent officially and went over just because he wanted to get involved leastwise that’s what the military said afterwards.
What I do know for sure is, he called me up some years ago from Afghanistan asking me to get out there with him because in his words. 'Pete, ya gotta come out here, it's just like paintball' .... I declined his most generous of offers preferring to maintain a bullet-free physique coz in the real world of Afghanistan, there’s no wiping them shots off.
Was he serious with his offer?
I suppose that had I had said, ‘ok meet me at Kandahar airport’, I’ve no doubt he woulda picked me up and I coulda joined his merry bunch of psychopaths … luckily for me, I didn’t mind getting into the occasional punch-up back then but I did draw the line at killing people or more importantly, putting my ass on the line .. I can quite easily declare I’m an abject coward when it comes to blood spillage due to muliple gunshot woundd eespecially when that spillage just happens to be mine.
During Keith’s stay in Afghanistan he ended up in prison out there because when his house was raided out there by the Afghani police, a number of Afghani individuals were found hanging upside down in his front room exhibiting numerous marks of torture.
Now all of this may sound preposterous but if you need any confirmation, I’ll put a link at the bottom of this article where you can go and check it all out.
I think he got 10 years for that but typical Keith, this wasn’t the last I heard from him.
Some years later he calls me up from his Afghani prison cell and asks me for a favour, my stomach turned somersaults coz I knew what was coming was gonna be bad, real bad .. and my ass was gonna be on the line somehow.
He informed me that one of the guys who was in prison with him [Another American ex Special forces guy] had been released and was stranded at Gatwick airport and could I go and pick him up and put him up for a few days.
I thought to myself, I’d have to drive down to Gatwick, pick up a confirmed psychopathic killer [he was one of the guys with Keith who did the torturing] and let him sleep in my house.
Now far be it from to judge anyone but seeing as the guy had been banged up for 5 years and hadn’t seen a woman without a black tent swirling around them, I was somewhat hesitant to allow him into my house with my wife and daughter around.
I respectfully told Keith I was going on holiday the next day and so couldn’t help him out.
Now, Keith had threatened many, many people in the paintball industry, and when I say threaten, I am talking about threats to kill.
I ain’t gonna name names here for obvious reasons but some of those threatened got together with a view to erasing that problem, I kid you not.
But don’t get me wrong here, these guys weren’t the violent type by any means, they were good ole boys all of them and were highly respected within our industry but they didn’t wanna take the chance Keith was serious, and with Keith, you really didn’t know what he’d do.
He told me he gave up the special forces after he went on a mission to I think Guatemala where he was party to bombing a coach that had kids aboard instead of the expected terrorists.
I tend to think this was BS but as I say, you couldn’t tell because a high proportion of the stuff he told you was true; he just embellished and imagined things and threaded then in as he went along.
He was always cool with me and I never had any problems from him but I think that was because I wasn’t around him for any extended period; I have little doubt that if I had been, I woulda been on his hit list for some ridiculously trivial reason.
Keith wasn't all bad though, he did have some good sides; NWC, my team, went over to Nashville to play the Open in 1990, after the event had finished, a lot of the team went to stay with Keith in Fayetteville.
Whilst there, the guys got taken out to the firing ranges in the woods at Fort Bragg by Keith, and whilst travelling there in Jeeps, one of the Jeeps overturned and one of our players, Rob, was ejected from the vehicle and had broken his neck.
Keith somehow radioed in to the powers at Fort Bragg and a helicopter was soon on site and whisked Rob off to an army hospital hospital, Rob had to be resuscitated back to life a couple of times and so Keith had effectively saved his life.
But this is where the story turns a little sour, Rob had a brother called Chris who was also on our team over there in the US and he stayed in Fayetteville for several months after the others came home while his brother recovered in hospital, a full recovery thank heaven.
Now, Chris stayed with Keith at his house for months on end and was looked after by Keith, feeding him and putting a roof over his head as well as giving him money.
So far so good, about 6 months later, we had the big Mayhem tournament over here in the UK attracting several Yank teams; Keith also made the trip over to set up his company’s vendor stand for ICS.
During the event and while we were playing and getting ready for our next game, Keith came up to me and told me he was gonna bash the crap outa Chris for stealing some paintball guns while he had stayed with him.
I couldn’t believe Chris would ever, could ever do such a thing to a man who had saved his brother’s life and had put him up for all those months and so I told Keith, ‘Chris just wouldn’t do it’ but Keith persisted and told me ‘it makes no difference what you think Pete, he did it and I’m gonna do him’.
At that point, I wasn’t really prepared to let him just whack the cr@p out of one of my players and stand idly by watching it and so I had to front him out by saying, ‘Keith, if you do that, then there’s three guys over there in my team that will turn on you and I’ll have to join in as well.
These guys were doormen and so could handle themselves well enough.
Lord knows why I took the chance in saying that and it had nothing to do with being brave or me bullshitting about the way it all unfolded in this account; It just happened that way.
Keith looked around and thankfully said ‘fair enough, I’ll get him afterwards'.
I was just pleased it didn't kick off there and then.
Keith never got round to meeting him afterwards but that was more because Chris had been lucky in avoiding him. This Chris guy used to work for me when I had the paintball store and then one day, I got in early and went into the office to find a fax from some guy in the US asking Chris if he had sold the guns he’d ‘got’ from Keith’s house …… Chris had stolen the markers and in the process, stuck my ass right in the middle of a psychopath's malicious intent. I wasn’t pleased to say the least and when he finally walked through the door he slipped and had an accident sustaining significant damage not only to himself but his car was also myteriously battered.
His car looked as though a club hammer had had an epileptic fit on the bodywork but he managed to crawl into it and drive home with no job and I never saw him again, but what I did do, was call Keith.
I apologised to Keith for doubting his word during Mayhem and when he asked me what had happened when Chris came into work, he listened intently and I suppose was satisfied in some way because he told me, ‘I owe you one’ …. This is exactly how it happened, no BS, no lies … it’s not something I am proud of but I don’t like thieves at the best of times let alone one who had stolen from a man who’d saved his brother’s life.
Keith coulda frikkin killed me after saying what I did at the Mayhem Cup and so that made me even more angry with Chris for compromising me in that way.
There are several people over here in the UK Keith did threaten to kill and I think he’d grown so used to voicing these threats as a vehicle to get what he wanted, he lost touch with the reality of it all and he paid the price dying in an obscure Mexican town with no real friends or family around him.
He died a lone man, ‘somewhat deservedly’ a lot of people might suggest.
He was most certainly a diagnosed psychopath and I lost count of the number of people he told me he had killed.
It’s not a nice thing to say but you got used to it when around him and so I didn’t really take much notice but whilst I am pretty sure he hadn’t killed as many as he said, I am however damned sure he had killed a lot of people.
I think the world is undoubtedly a better place now but I can’t help but feel a tiny amount of sorrow that he could never find it within himself to repent what he had done in his life and he died a lonely man with nobody around him … It was inevitable he would go that way but it wasn't Keith's style to compromise.
If there is a hell, that’s where he’s undoubtedly going but knowing Keith, he’ll probably enjoy it down there and I have zero doubt he’ll inevitably threaten to kill the Devil …..
Here's the link that fills in some more gaps and is quite enlightening if you care to read it ..leaswtise it's a more official version than my own.
http://m.fayobserver.com/articles/2012/ ... ?sac=LocalKeith Idema R.I.P [Rest in Psychopathsville]
