In Vino Veritas

The war-time expression warning people to take care of what they spoke is never so true as when a secret is held for a specific purpose. Loose lips not only sink ships as an allegorical stab at reality they also sunder plans to escape justice when someone under the influence of alcohol carelessly throws out identity clues that will be of immense interest to criminal justice authorities.

And a woman, who fled from justice in Oregon to Manitoba to live in anonymity herself succumbed to the incaution that alcohol consumption leads to.

Drinking alcohol and making the decision to drive regardless turned out to be fatal to the woman whose car Jean Teresa Keating struck back in 1997 on a stretch of Interstate 5 in Oregon. Ms. Keating's vehicle side-swiped one driven by 65-year-old Jewel Anderson which caused Jewel Anderson to lose control of her car resulting in a collision with an oncoming car, and it was that collision that ended Ms. Anderson's life, then and there.

A grand jury indicted Jean Keating on first-degree manslaughter, drunk-driving and reckless-driving charges. With the trial pending, Ms. Keating chose to vacate the scene entirely. She took herself and her two children aged one and three along for a trip to rural Manitoba where they all thereafter lived on a farm he rented outside of Minnedosa, Manitoba where her soon-to-be common-law husband, Leonard McPherson had been born and brought up.

They had met a few months earlier in Clackamas County, Oregon, when Mr. McPherson was working a three-year stint as an electrician in heavy industry. In 1998 his work contract ended, and they decided to travel together to Manitoba while her trial was pending. "A mother with two kids needs a chance to raise them", said Mr. McPherson, in retrospect. "She was a damn good mother and a damn good wife", he added.

So they lived quietly together on that rented farm, where Mr. McPherson worked outside the farm and Ms. Keating tended to the farm while raising her children. Residents of Minnedosa and a nearby village became familiar with the pleasant "happy-go-lucky" woman they knew as Jean McPherson, seen occasionally shopping. She did wrack up one driving penalty in Canada that was notable; a conviction for impaired driving.

And then, one day, fifteen years after the accident that resulted from driving while under the influence, causing the death of Jewel Anderson, Manitoba Royal Canadian Mounted Police received a tip. A woman at a bar had boasted about a fatal crash she was involved in years ago and for which she had never paid the criminal penalty. Jean McPherson was identified through fingerprint scrutiny as Jean Keating.

Canada Border Services Agency inland enforcement officers visited the family farm in early April to arrest Jean Keating/McPherson. And she was returned to Oregon in June,  and is now now awaiting trial and temporarily averted justice. She is being held in custody, her bail set at $5-million; an obvious flight risk.

For his part, Mr. McPherson believes his common-law wife to be innocent of the charges laid against her. He loves her and is without doubt prepared to await her return, whenever that will be.

The moral of the story revolves around alcohol and avoidance thereof, of evading justice and how every so often the law finds the subject of a search. That old Demon Rum.
 

Jean Terese Keating is pictured in a 1997 booking photo. Keating fled to Canada 15 years ago after being charged with manslaughter in connection with a fatal crash. Authorities captured her earlier this year in rural Manitoba and deported her back to the U.S.   Photograph by: Linn County Sheriff's Office , Postmedia News