Death by deception

On September 8th, 2004, four days after first being admitted to the emergency room, the machine keeping 31-year old Julie Keown alive was turned off. Doctors said she had died because she’d ingested a massive amount of ethelyne glycol: antifreeze.

There seemed to be only two plausible theories: she’d either committed suicide or someone had killed her.

Police investigators began taking down information from the attending doctors and from her husband James. Nat Yaeger is an assistant district attorney just outside Boston.

Nat Yaeger, Assistant D.A.: [James] gives a very unusually detailed medical history—

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Of his wife?

Yaeger: --Of his wife.

Murphy: Not being evasive, here?

Yaeger: Not at all.

The husband James Keown also had a theory about what may have happened. He told a friend that in the hours before she’d become violently ill, he’d seen Julie looking disoriented, sitting on a curb in the neighborhood, drinking from a bottle of Gatorade. Maybe, he said, she had picked it out of a neighbor’s trash bin and maybe it had contained discarded antifreeze—a terrible accident.

The police went to the couple’s home in Waltham, a Boston suburb, to look for any trace of antifreeze.

Yaeger: They searched the house for obvious signs of ethylene glycol. Antifreeze, basically—and they don’t find anything.

But police eventually did take two computers from the home which were mainly used by Julie. That’s when they found her Web searches for ways to live with chronic kidney problems. Or, perhaps, was there another way to look at her Googling? Had she been so distressed by what she found there that she slumped into despair and, the nurse that she was, had found a cheap and widely available poison to take her own life?

Antifreeze’s key ingredient, ethylene glycol, can be lethal. It’s also sweet-tasting and blends easily with sugary liquids—like sweet tea or Gatorade. A person drinking a mix like that might never detect the danger. Victims of ethylene glycol poisoning can recover from small doses but in large amounts the antidote has to be administered immediately. To wait is almost certainly to die.

But the suicide theory was problematic. Death-by-antifreeze is a slow, painful way to go. How many people would actually choose to kill themselves with it?

That and the victim’s state of mind, as related by friends like Mike and Stephany Webb, started to make the idea of suicide sound implausible to detectives.

Stephany Webb:  I thought she must have committed suicide. She must have. But then I looked back and I thought, “But she was hopeful. She had talked about seeing a specialist. She wouldn’t have done that.” And I couldn’t explain it.

And yet, there was something about the Gatorade story that sat uneasily with the detectives. The Webbs recounted what Julie had said during their last vacation together—how James wanted her to drink Gatorade, keep her from dehydrating. Even Julie’s mom remembered seeing the beverage in the couple’s home during that August visit.

Nancy Oldag, Julie's mother: I noticed there was a partial bottle of gatorade in the refrigerator. I didn’t think anything of it.

One obvious conclusion was almost too hard to contemplate: Could the loving husband, James Keown, have slowly poisoned his wife to death by lacing her Gatorade with ethylene glycol over a period of weeks or even months?

If so, police were coming up empty-handed on any forensic link between the husband and antifreeze.

Murphy: Neighbors didn’t see him siphoning it out of the car?

Yaeger: No.

Murphy: You didn’t get lucky of anything like that?

Yaeger: Nothing like that, no. And we looked. We looked for receipts for ethylene glycol, credit card records for ethylene glycol. Antifreeze, that kind of thing. We couldn’t find it.

Instead, they’d have to learn more about who James Keown was. The investigation would take more than a year.

In the meantime, James pulled up stakes in Boston and returned to his native Jefferson City, Mo. He found a job back on the radio, in a hometown that years before had seen him as a rising star. His mom Betty was happy to have him back.

Betty Keown: He wasn’t making a whole lot of money at it, but at least he was gonna get back on his feet and try to get his life together.

At one point, his in-laws casually asked how he planned to make a living. That’s when he mentioned Julie’s life insurance policy of $250,000.

Nancy Oldag: And he says, “I went and filled out the paperwork for that after the funeral was over.”

According to some friends, he talked about using the money to buy a new home and BMW. Whatever was left, he reportedly said, he’d use to set up a foundation in Julie’s memory.

Until the life insurance paid off, though, he’d have to work. Besides, his new radio gig seemed to be just what James Keown needed. As he signed on with his first show, he briefly mentioned his recent loss.

But when it came to explaining how his wife had passed away, he told old friends different things.

Betsy Dudenhoeffer: He told me she died of stomach cancer.

Warren Kretch, mentor: Congenital kidney problem.

And to another friend, he offered yet another cause of death. It was a secret, he said. And a bombshell.

Julie Webber: Julie had actually committed suicide.

Suicide. Maybe the social stigma of it explained why he so rarely mentioned Julie. Instead he blogged and dated and got on with life.

He’d just kicked off his daily radio show at 9am that first Monday in November 2005 when he stepped outside the little studio during a commercial break. Warren Kretch had just gotten off the air and watched dumfounded as a group of men in State of Massachusetts windbreakers walked in and confronted the talk radio host.

Kretch: These guys weren’t messing around. They walked right in the door. They saw him in the hallway. And they arrested him on the spot.

The Massachusetts State Police informed Keown he would be arraigned in court for the murder of his wife Julie.

James Keown—who always knew how to fill dead air—barely said a word as he was led away to a holding cell

He’d always wanted to be the talk of the town and now he was.

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