Death by deception

For months after his arrest, James Keown’s family and friends wondered why the State of Massachusetts would make such an outrageous claim against such a decent guy. Still, even his own mother had to swallow hard and ask her son the tough question.

Betty Keown, James Keown's mother: I say, “James, did you do this to Julie?” And he said, “Mom, no.” He says, “You know, I didn’t.” I said, “I know.” But, I said, “I had to ask you.”

For awhile, some here even wondered if Massachusetts might release James Keown. Two and half years after his arrest, his case still hadn’t gone to trial. And then in June of 2008 the former radio star was back in the news: The state was finally ready to try James Keown for his wife’s murder.

“Murder by deception,” claimed the prosecution. The prosecutor told the couple’s story: Julie Keown had been living and sleeping with a stranger for most of her marriage. James Keown, he said, was a shameless liar, going all the way back to his early days in radio.

Those stories he told friends like Betsy Dudenhoeffer about being the voice of ESPN radio in Chicago — bogus. James had really been more of a behind-the-scenes guy.

And that fancy car he paraded in front of Betsy, the one he said he had paid thousands for?Friends later found out the nice wheels had been a rental.

But the biggest whopper James Keown had told—the granddaddy of them all—was about getting into Harvard.

Video   'We thought he was a good guy' WEB ONLY VIDEO: Julie Keown's parents, Jack and Nancy Oldag, talk about their daughter's marriage to James Keown. Dateline NBC

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: And he’s telling friends and family, and they’re all buying it, he’s going to one of the most elite, prestigious institutions in the country, Harvard?

Nat Yaeger, prosecution: He fakes a letter saying basically that he got into Harvard Business and ‘I’ll see you at Harvard in the yard in the fall.”

In court, the prosecutor asked a former admissions director for Harvard if she’d ever written that acceptance letter to Keown: it wasn’t.

In fact, Keown’s only connection to Harvard was a computer course he took from the university’s extension school. He flunked it.

But James Keown, claimed the prosecutor, was more than a liar. He was also an embezzler. He had bilked his Kansas City employer out of $60,000, billing them with phony invoices for work he’d never done.

Nat Yaeger: It’s fraud.

He committed extortion, there’s no doubt about it.

On the stand, his Kansas City boss testified how her starry-eyed view of Keown quickly darkened when she realized his scam. In July 2004, Tammy Blossom phoned Keown—known as JP to his coworkers—and confronted him. She ended up firing him as a result.

Still, according to the prosecutor, Julie Keown was in the dark about everything: about the firing, the fraud, the Harvard that wasn’t. She didn’t even know they were dead broke and unable to pay their rent. The prosecutor said Keown concealed it all from her.

Murphy: Not to speak ill of the dead, but how could she be so naïve?

Yaeger: Well, that was something I was very worried about. And I think the answer is, is she was in love with him. She trusted him. And she was in love with him.

Murphy: So, he was running a con on her?

Yaeger: No question about it. I believe James Keown ran a con on everyone he ever spoke to.

By July 2004, with his world imploding, the prosecutor said Keown saw only two choices before him. One: He could tell his wife everything. In essence to gamble his marriage...

Yaeger: Or he could kill her.

And Plan B came with an added benefit—a payout of $250,000 from his wife’s life insurance policy. Enough to get James Keown out of debt and onto a new life.

The prosecutor said the poignant story told by Julie’s laptop underscored how clueless she was: he argued that all the while her husband was slowly killing her a dose at time with antifreeze, she was making online searches on how to deal with a failing kidney, the consequences for pregnancy. Just days before her death, the prosecutor said, she even sent an email to a new friend.

Yaeger: “I’m very fortunate to have a husband like James, who’s working fulltime, going to Harvard fulltime. I worry about messing that up for him.”

Meanwhile his laptop told a different story altogether. The prosecutor said James Keown was Googling different ways to poison someone, with searches for “arsenic” and “ricin” before finally settling on antifreeze, lethal, cheap and available. The prosecution wouldn’t bring it up at trial but Keown’s sometime handle online was “Kaiser So-say,” the character from a cult movie favorite “The Usual Suspects.” Kevin Spacey won an Oscar for his portrayal of an amoral conman and killer who fools police with a yarn about an imaginary, murderous villain named “Kaiser So-say.”

Why had the glib radio man identified with such an oily and lethal character?

Keown friend Mike Webb said his hairs stood on end when he learned about the Kaiser So-say business.

Mike Webb, friend: Chilling that it could have been, from end to end, something that he dreamt, that he built. It’s not something I can reconcile. I can’t make it fit with what I knew of him before.

But the prosecutor said it was all just that: an elaborate plot hatched by a cold, hard man whose tissues of lies were shredding around him. There were no forensics to put the antifreeze in the defendant’s hands. But make no mistake, argued the prosecutor, James Keown was a killer.

Still, maybe there was more than one way to read the evidence so painstakingly laid out by the prosecutor: those damning computer files, the emails, Julie’s long illness. The jury was about to take a look at all those things through another lens—one that trained its focus squarely on the victim herself in the agonizing days before her death.

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