When he arrived at the campsite, Chase immediately noticed that the Chevy pickup was now adorned with Louisiana license plates with current registration stickers. He asked, “Now where did those come from?”
“I bought them at a wrecking yard—well, sort of. I paid for them at least.
Let me explain. The same day I got into the state, I went and found myself two cardboard boxes about eighteen inches square, back behind a restaurant. I cut one of the boxes up. I made a panel of cardboard the same size as the bottom of the box and laid it inside—basically a false bottom. Then I selected a few tools from my tool kit and threw them in the box. I found a wrecking yard on the interstate. I walked into their office carrying the box, and told them that I was looking for an exterior mirror for a ’79 Chevy pickup, and a few odds and ends. It was one of those ‘pick and pull’ places. I paid my five-dollar fee to get into the yard, and went to work. I found a new mirror all right, from about the same year Chevy. I also got replacements for the missing radio knob and door lock button. And… a set of license plates off a recent wreck that still had a few months to go on the registration sticker. I put the plates under the false bottom. They deducted the five-dollar yard fee off the price of the stuff, so everything only cost a total of nine-fifty.”
They spent that night in the back of the camper. They were surprised at how warm the weather was, compared to the Carolinas, even in February.
The Keanes got busy building their “legends” the next day. Their first stops were graveyards. They spent hours walking row after row of headstones, looking for males of about the same birth year, who had died before the age of three. Matt picked “Jason Lomax.” Jason was born a year later than Matt was and had died at the age of six months. Chase picked out a “Travis Hardy” who would have been a year older than him, had he lived. That afternoon, they rented drop boxes using their new names from two different UPS Store franchises in Baton Rogue. Both franchises told them that they could use “Apt.
number” in place of “Box number” if they wished. A quick phone call yielded the address of the parish recorder’s office, and the fee required to obtain a duplicate notarized birth certificate. “Jason” bought his money order at the post office. “Travis” got his at a Circle-K.
Matt’s letter explained that he needed a spare notarized birth certificate because he was getting married. His envelope went in the mail to the recorder late that afternoon. Chase’s letter explained that he had lost his original birth certificate. His letter and money order went in the mail the following day. Both of their birth certificates arrived at their respective drop boxes two days later.
Not wanting to linger too long and attract suspicion, they moved their camp to St. Pierre State Park, on the other side of Baton Rogue. They also each bought fishing licenses in their assumed names. They bought spin cast fishing outfits, a Coleman camp stove, a cast iron frypan, and a small inexpensive barbecue. They spent a lot of time bank fishing at the park, and caught a surprising number of fish.
Soon after their birth certificates arrived, they got library cards at two different library branches. Then they sent in SS-5 forms to apply for Social Security numbers. Their cards took an agonizing two weeks to arrive. During the interval, the Keanes started looking for work. Chase got a job with the local power company, working on a pole replacing crew. Since Chase was young, the fact that he didn’t have a Social Security number didn’t arouse any suspicion. He explained that he had been in junior college and hadn’t previously worked jobs that required a SSN. His Social Security card, he explained, was “on the way.” The card in fact arrived just two days before his first payday.
They carried their fishing licenses, library cards, and folded birth certificates inside their shoes, to quickly give them a “used” look.
Chase was assured steady work in the pole yard, due to the ongoing infesta-tion of Formosan termites in New Orleans. Not only were they destroying many historic buildings and eating the cores out of living trees, the termites also had an appetite for power poles. Most termites wouldn’t eat treated wood, but the Formosan termites were ravenous. In three years’ time, his crew had to replace more than half of the power poles in the Venetian Isles area, one of the most extensively infested regions in the parish. The work accelerated following the 2005 hurricanes, which left thousands of poles downed or waterlogged.
After another week, they moved their camp back to De La Croix State Park. Chase used the pickup to commute to work, while Matt fished and casually guarded their tent. Immediately after their Social Security cards arrived, Matt and Chase got drivers’ licenses in Baton Rogue suburbs, using their drop box “apartment numbers” as mailing addresses. Chase’s birth certificate and SS card was considered sufficient identification. Only Matt was asked to show additional ID. He flashed his fishing license and library card.
Two days after getting his driver’s license, Matt bought another pickup with a shell in his new name, again from a private party. This one was a 1990 Ford, rust free, and had four-wheel drive. It cost $2,200. This wiped out the last of their cash. Chase sold one of his gold Maple Leafs at a pawnshop to provide them enough cash to live on until they started bringing home paychecks.
Chase was disgusted that the pawnshop owner paid him twenty-five dollars under the spot price of gold for the coin. He considered that highway robbery. At least the man at the pawnshop didn’t ask for any ID.
Wearing gloves, Matt vigorously rubbed both sides of the title to the Chevy pickup with a gum eraser, to remove fingerprints, and then put it in the truck’s glove box. The following day, he drove the pickup to Beaumont, Texas. He spent hours laboriously wiping it clean of fingerprints with a bottle of Break Free CLP lubricant and two rolls of paper towels. Then, wearing gloves, he drove it to the worst looking neighborhood he could find. He parked it in front of a liquor and check-cashing store that had bars on the windows. As with the stolen Cutlass, he left it unlocked, with the keys in it. The signed title was still in the glove box. He took a Greyhound bus back to New Orleans, arriving late at night.
Matt rented a single-wide trailer in New Orleans East for $275 a month. There was a shopping center with a Laundromat and a grocery store within walking distance, and a city bus stop just two hundred yards from the trailer park. It was an ideal location. The New Orleans East neighborhood was appealing because it had an independent streak and was decidedly blue collar.
Nobody asked a lot of questions. Matt read a newspaper editorial that derided the residents of New Orleans East for shooting rabbits with .22s even though the district was within city limits.
The Keanes rented drop boxes at separate firms in downtown New Orleans. Now that they had driver’s licenses, it was a breeze. Then they each opened checking accounts at different nearby banks. It took a month of looking, but Matt found a job as a warehouseman with an oil distributor outside of New Orleans. It paid nine-twenty-five an hour. He ran a forklift, wrote up orders, and kept inventory. Compared to previous jobs he had held digging postholes and stringing barbed wire, he considered it easy.
A month after Matt started his job, he picked up a crumpled March first issue of a national news magazine that was on a desk in the company office. He was shocked to see an article titled “Radical Right Gone Wrong” and subtitled “Carolina Shootouts Part of Growing Militia Resistance to Traffic Stops.” He brought the magazine home for Chase to see that evening. There was a large but blurry photograph of the shootout. The photo was digitally captured from a “much aired” video that was shot through the front windshield of the trooper’s car.
The article explained that the trooper’s cruiser was one of a group of North Carolina patrol cars that was equipped with dash-mounted automated video cameras to film traffic stops. The intended goal was to get footage of motorists who were pulled over for suspected driving-while-intoxicated, to gather court evidence. It was coincidentally one of those camera-equipped cars that ended up behind the Keanes’ van. Matt studied the photo carefully, and decid
ed that their faces were not recognizable.
Matt turned the page to see a muddy picture of Chase and a disturbingly clear photo of himself. By the background and the way he was dressed in the photo, he immediately recognized it as one taken the previous June, when he was a groomsman at a friend’s wedding in Coeur d’Alene. Below these shots was a color photo of Chase’s Dodge executive motor home, captioned “Abandoned getaway vehicle.” The article had a rough chronology of the two shooting incidents, and a surprising number of biographical details about Matt and his brother.
Matt was disgusted by the blatant statist bias of the magazine article. In describing the first incident, it incorrectly stated that Chase had fired first, and that the trooper and deputy had “fired back in self-defense.” The article went on to describe the later “rapid fire sniper attack” at the strip mall. It described the officer “bravely radioing in reports…while at the same time Keane allegedly concentrated his deadly fusillade of full metal jacket armor piercing bullets on the officer, trying for a head shot.”
The article went on to gleefully describe the items that the Keanes had left behind in the van. It described the six “paramilitary” guns—“two of which were described by a sheriff’s deputy as easily convertible to full automatic fire,” four thousand rounds of ammunition “most of which could easily pierce bulletproof vests,” a stretcher, body bags, FBI logo hats, FBI raid jackets, U.S. Marshall’s badges, latex gloves, and a roll of duct tape. The lists were set in the context of describing the gear as an “arms cache” and “crime tools.”Whoever wrote the article failed to mention the fact that the guns, ammunition cans, and law enforcement items all had price tags on them, because they were part of the Keanes’ gun show inventory. The stretcher and body bags were also both gun show merchandise, and were similarly marked with price labels. Nor did the writer mention that the duct tape was inside the van’s tool kit, and that the latex gloves were inside Chase’s medic’s bag, along with various first aid supplies, bandages, and minor surgery instruments.
The lengthy article was full of innuendoes and references to the Keane brothers as “gun nuts” (somewhat true), “survivalists” (true), “militia cell members” (a lie), “white separatists” (a lie), “with ties to the KKK” (a lie), “unlicensed gun dealers” (a half-truth), “organizers of a jural society” (true), “adherents of racist ‘Identity’ Christianity” (a lie), “reputed members of the Aryan Nations neo-Nazi group” (a lie), and “having extensive contacts with the Elohim City neo-Nazi compound” (a lie).
The most blatant piece of innuendo was a reference to the roll of duct tape. It was described by an ATF spokesman as “the same type of tape that is often used to bind the hands and feet of victims in home invasion robberies.” These comments infuriated Chase. He quipped, “You know, they ought to rename it the BATFE&DT: ‘The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, & Duct Tape.’” Putting on a mocking falsetto, he added, “If they just put all the sickos in this country who own any of that evil ‘assault duct tape’ in prison, we’d live in a much safer society. There is no legitimate purpose for private citizens to own duct tape. Mere possession should be viewed as criminal intent.”
Matt added, “Yes, and only properly trained law enforcement officers should be allowed to own duct tape, or high capacity duct tape dispensers.”
In the following weeks, Matt often joked about the magazine article and others like it that they saw later. “I sure am glad to live in a country with a fair and unbiased media!”
In early June, Matt bought a copy of The Gun List at a New Orleans news-stand. He was still hoping to find some additional high capacity magazines for their guns. There were none advertised. Leafing through the magazine, he was stunned when he saw a prominent half-page reward ad, placed by the BATFE.
The agency was offering a fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and North Carolina authorities offered another ten thousand. The ad had blurred second-generation photos of Matt and Chase.
It read:
WANTED BY THE FBI; ATF; NORTH CAROLINA STATE HIGHWAY PATROL, RANDOLPH COUNTY OHIO SHERIFF’S OFFICE, ASHEBORO, NORTH CAROLINA POLICE DEPARTMENT; FOR THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF THREE LAW
ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS…
$60,000 REWARD
CAUTION: SUBJECTS ARE CONSIDERED TO BE ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. ANYONE WITH INFORMATION, CONTACT THE ATF 24 HOUR ENFORCEMENT OPERATIONS CENTER AT 1-888 ATF-GUNS OR YOUR LOCAL FBI OFFICE.
After seeing the article and reward advertisement, the Keanes were glad that they’d gone completely underground, changed their identities, and made no attempt to contact their family or friends. They were on the BATFE’s “10 Most Wanted” List. After seeing the pictures of himself with and without a beard, Matt decided to grow a mustache. He wore his dark Ray-Ban shooting glasses almost constantly. Chase began growing a full beard. He let it grow for the four years that they were in hiding. It eventually extended three inches below his chin.
Each workday, in what became a relentless grind, Chase took the bus to the pole yard, and Matt drove the pickup to the warehouse. They didn’t use any of their accrued vacation, and consciously avoided developing more than a “wave and say hi” relationship with anyone at the trailer park or at work. Because of their reclusive habits, some of their neighbors at the trailer park concluded that they were gay. They rarely ate out, and saved as much money as possible. For relaxation, they mainly went fishing on weekends. They developed tastes for Cajun music and Creole cooking. With a conscious effort, they soon slipped into a slower pattern of speech and a soft southern accent.
They realized that since they knew so many people from their gun show days that it would be a risk being recognized at a gun show. So they avoided going to any gun shows. They began attending a nearby Baptist church. There, too, they kept a low profile. It was frustrating, but they avoided all contact with their family or any of their old friends. It was the only way to make a clean break. They knew that the vast majority of wanted criminals were captured because they returned to their old haunts and renewed contacts with their former associates. The Keanes weren’t stupid, and they wouldn’t make those mistakes.
In June, Matt emptied out their storage space in Baton Rogue, and rented another one near New Orleans, as Jason Lomax. In August, Chase found a large box trailer for sale. It was a sturdy homemade trailer, made out of a pickup bed. He bought a used camper shell that fit it the following weekend. After getting the trailer registered to Jason Lomax, rewiring the trailer lights, and fitting overload springs, they left it in their new ten-by-twelve-feet storage space. They stored it with all their tactical gear packed inside it, ready to go at a moment’s notice. The humid Louisiana climate could quickly destroy guns that weren’t kept clean and well oiled, so four times a year, they brought the trailer home from the storage space to oil their guns and rotate the packets of silica gel dessicant. The day before each of their gun maintenance trips, Chase would put a batch of silica gel packets in the oven on low heat to drive out any moisture that they had gathered. Chase had a ready supply of free silica gel from a New Orleans piano shop. The shop had large packets of silica gel that came in each of their pianos received from overseas shipment. Until Chase started asking for them “for his tools,” the shop had thrown most of the packets away.
The following January, using his company discount, Matt bought four twenty-gallon drums of gasoline and a pint can of gas stabilizer. He waited until January to buy the gas. From his experience at work, he knew that gasoline made in the winter months had more butane added to it to provide better cold weather starting. This also greatly increased its shelf life. The drums of gasoline soon went into storage with the trailer. Starting the following January, and in the subsequent winters, Matt replaced the drums with fresh ones. Since he had just a short commute, burning up the old fuel took several months.
Not content with just one false ID apiece, the Keanes gradually developed two more false IDs each during the next eighteen months. They had gone through the
experience of living in campgrounds while waiting for their documentation to arrive, and they feared being so vulnerable again. With their later false IDs, they decided to “go all out.” They even got passports.
In May, unexpected transmission and differential repairs on the pickup used up most of their savings. They slowly began to build up their savings again, becoming even more frugal.
Once their budget had restabilized, Matt and Chase worked on increasing their food storage program, and made themselves ghillie camouflage suits. Ghillie suits were first developed in the nineteenth century by British game wardens.
The wardens used them to camouflage themselves as they lay in wait for poachers. A ghillie suit is covered with strips of random length rag material, in earth tones. It is designed to thoroughly break up the outline of its wearer. When still and sitting or prone, someone in a ghillie suit looks like a clump of brush.
To make his ghillie, Matt started with a large piece of shrimp netting that he found at a surplus store. It was from a nearly new brown nylon shrimp net that had been caught on a snag and ruined. The undamaged portion was perfect for Matt’s purposes. He cut the netting material to the shape of a rectangular poncho that reached his knees. He reinforced the hole for his head by stitching it with a four-inch-wide ring of forest green denim material. This kept the netting from tearing at the point where it would take the most stress.
After he had bought the net, Matt mail ordered ten rolls of two-inch-wide military surplus camouflage material from The Gun Parts Company in West Hurley, NewYork. The company advertised them as “Cama Rolls.” Half of the rolls were forest green, and the others were brown. The burlap made perfect ghillie suit making material. The Keanes supplemented the green and brown strips with a few strips of tan burlap that they cut from potato sacks. Sewing the random length strips of burlap to the net poncho took countless hours.
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