Man Jailed For Life After Slowly Poisoning Wife With Antifreeze

It was a terrible way to die and it was a terrible plot that made it happen. A former radio talk show host has been convicted of slowly poisoning his wife with antifreeze.

A jury in Woburn, Massachusetts believed the allegations against James Keown were true and returned a verdict of first degree murder against him on Wednesday. But that terse statement doesn’t even begin to reflect the enormity of his crime.

Keown was in desperate need of money after falling deeply in debt. His solution: get a payoff from his wife’s $250,000 life insurance policy. But to do that, he had to figure out a way to kill her.

His solution was as chilling as it was sneaky. He slowly began mixing anti-freeze into her Gatorade, gradually increasing the amount of the poison until the fatal blow: a lethal overdose of the chemical ethylene glycol contained in the liquid.

That’s the same substance believed to have accidentally  poisoned two dogs in Toronto’s High Park last month.

Julie Keown had been in and out of hospital for weeks as she unknowingly sipped the fatal brew. She finally slipped into a coma after ingesting one last cup on Sept. 4, 2004. The 31-year-old died four days later. Toxicology tests showed the presence of the chemical and sparked a huge investigation about how it got there.

That set off two theories of the crime presented to the jury.

Keown’s lawyers suggested the woman had committed suicide or somehow accidentally ingested the substance. Police didn’t find any trace of the sweet-tasting antifreeze in the couple’s home. Why would she kill herself? The defence suggested Keown’s wife became depressed after doctors diagnosed her with kidney disease.

But prosecutors had a different take. They believed that ‘kidney disease’ was caused directly by the antifreeze and that when her husband’s endless lies began to catch up to him, he became desperate.

Keown was transferred to Boston in 2004, after going to work for a Kansas City company. But he was fired when the firm discovered he lied about attending the prestigious Harvard Business School and had stolen a website design the company had asked him to create.

And computer experts discovered Keown had Googled the words “ethylene glycol death human,” just two days before his wife’s first of three hospital visits, as the effects of the poison began to take their toll.

Keown left the state and wound up as a radio reporter and talk show host in Missouri for a full year before cops put their case together and had enough evidence to charge him.

He was finally convicted Wednesday as his late wife’s parents eyed him coldly from the courtroom. “In my mind, James is no longer a person,” Julie Keown’s mom Nancy Oldag told the court in a victim impact statement. “He’s just a mass of flesh and bone. A real person never would have done so evil a thing.”

Keown was sentenced to life in prison. Under the penalty, he’ll never be eligible for parole.

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