The Sasquatch Journal

Sometimes I reminesce about the halcyon days of crime reporting. Bustin' the cop beat, yo. For the 14 months I covered the crime in Jefferson City in 2005 to early '06, there were 9 murders, which was astounding for a sleepy city of 40,000 in Central Missouri. It got to the point where people joked that I was some sort of city curse because the murders started about a week after I started there.

Recently, this misty-eyed nostalgia led me to check the website for the newspaper that I used to write for, the News-Tribune, for updates on cases that I once covered. It was opportune because earlier this month the James Keown trial finally wrapped up.

Of all the cases I did, the James Keown story was the one that became a national story because it seemed like something from a crime TV show. Here was this radio talk show host who actually hosted a show with the county's prosecuting attorney who is one day arrested on air for the murder of his wife. Talk about drama and an extremely cinematic moment.

But of course, it also wasn't your run of the mill in-the-heat-of-passion gunshot or stabbing, he slowly poisoned her by continually putting small amounts of antifreeze in her Gatorade which he kept demanding she drink. It took several months for it her to go to sick, hospitalized, lapse into a coma and die.

The end was particularly a horrible act because Keown had called an ER after his wife was having some sort of bad kidney reaction. The doctors told him to bring her right away but he waited 10 whole hours to take her to the hospital. That's when she fell into the coma.

And the reason? James Keown was charasmatic and ambitious but also apparently a pathological liar. They moved to Boston afterKeown told his Kansas City employer - an educational consulting company - he had been accepted at the Harvard Business School and asked if he could work remotely from the Boston area. Six months later, Keown was fired when his boss discovered he had lied about being accepted to Harvard and had stolen a Web site design he was asked to develop for the company.

Keown didn't reveal to his wife - or anyone - that he got fired and didn't actually get into the Harvard school. His debts mounted into the tens of thousands and it got to the point where he was going to have his utilities shut off. So he attempted to kill his wife to collect on her $250,000 life insurance policy.

Keown's computer showed he did a Google search using the words "ethylene glycol death human"and "Can you buy arsenic?"

Here's one of the first stories I wrote about it after it happened:
http://www.newstribune.com/articles/2005/11/08/news_local/0110805001.txt

Anyway, after three years, Keown was finally found guilty of murder by a jury a couple weeks ago . He was sentenced to life in prison.
Here's the most recent story about it:
http://www.newstribune.com/articles/2008/07/03/news_local/181local25keown.txt

It's pretty surreal to me still three years later. I knew James Keown on a professional level because we covered the same beat sometimes and we were friendly (we had drinks once after an election). He struck me as a bit of an egoist and pompous, but so do most broadscast journalists/radio and TV personalities. But besides being a fast talking big fish in a little pond type, there wasn't anything extraordinary about him...but obviously he was capable of something that is almost unthinkable.

The judge who ruled on the case called Keown "a monster" which I suppose is not uncommon in these kinds of cases, but I think if we label or write off people who commit certain atrocities as "evil" or "monsters" it just serves to rationalize certain behavior as "inhuman" and doesn't really explain anything.

In centuries past, a lot of irrational acts committed by people were blamed on superstitious causes - ghosts and spirits, angering Gods, demon possession, etc., but can we really say we're that far away from that? It's interesting to me how often people who know rapists and murderers comment in shock about how "normal" that person seemed, as if they would expect the same person that killed someone to talk to themselves loudly, drink blood for breakfast and wear tight leather bondage gear out to the mall on the weekends.

Maybe this is some sort of coping mechanism for humanity, to see bad things as something that intrudes from another realm, rather than what it is, a horrible, selfish, but very human act.