Dateline NBC - Deadly Deception

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

In this Dateline classic, Julie Keown succumbs to a mysterious illness after growing more debilitated and depressed by the day. Doctors later find antifreeze in her system. Was it murder, an accident or, in her despair, did she take her own life? Dennis Murphy reports. Originally aired on NBC on January 9, 2009.

From the heart of central Missouri's KLIK, here's your host, James Cowan. Well, good morning, friends. He'd circled back to where he'd come from, the morning man on News Talk Radio in Jefferson City, Missouri. After a taste of the big time, studies at no less an institution than Harvard, James Cowan, the 30-year-old call-in host, had found a place to regain his footing and heal his wounds after what many thought was his great loss. It had been a while since he'd been behind the mic, years. Radio was James's first love, though,

and now he was working again with the man who'd given him his big break when he was just a teenager, all ambition and no experience. He had just an uncanny confidence about him. It's mostly clear in 79 in the capital city. Warren Kretsch remembers he was doing his show as a live remote when this 15-year-old kid stuck out his hand and told the veteran broadcaster he could do him some good if he'd hire him. James Cowan even then was nothing if not glib and confident. Long story short, put him on the air as a disc jockey. He had the goods.

An amazing kid. I have hired umpteen part-timers in my day, and he was the standout in that whole crowd. So in 2004, when a very grown-up James Cowan showed up back in Jeff City, the state capital, looking for work. Warren Kretsch urged his bosses at the radio station to hire his former protege. Frankly, he would have been way overqualified to go back to work in Jefferson City, Missouri, after all of the things he had done. Even his on-air talent? Yes. Yes.

James Cowan, son of a statehouse lobbyist, grew up with an ear tuned to the Capitol's gossip. Two decades later, that's what his popular morning show was all about, dishing out the latest political buzz around town. It is a jam-packed show. He'd gab about the politicos he'd seen at dinner the night before, rubbing prominent elbows at the Capitol's watering holes. We're squeezing as much as we can into this Monday. What he kept out of the banter, for the most part,

was maybe the important biographical detail of his life. That his wife of nearly eight years, Julie Cowan, had died recently. And the man behind the mic was trying to open a new, happier chapter in his life. We definitely shared grief over the loss of his wife. To this friend from high school days, James Cowan confided a secret, the real reason for his wife's death. She had been chronically ill, he said, before falling into a severe depression. Julie had actually committed suicide because she had been depressed. And in the rare times he shared his story, his friends and family understood that his desperate wife had loved him right up to her final hours. They'd been an opposites attract couple from the start.

Him, the teenage disc jockey, the child of a state bigwig, and she, a farmer's daughter from the rolling soybean fields of western Missouri. I thought a perfect child. She never gave us any problems at all. Before James came along, she was known as Julie Oldag. Her parents, Nancy and Jack, remember a sharp-witted, outgoing kid with a small appetite for mischief. I think the only thing she really did that was wrong was during high school,

she had a music teacher that she really liked and her and her friends went out and stuck plastic forks in his yard one night and she drove the getaway car a criminal yeah a criminal harmless pranks aside her parents say julie was always sensible a rooted person At college, friends set Julie up with a guy they knew from the campus radio station. Mike and Stephanie Webb, now a married couple, thought that Julie might blossom in the company of James Cowan, the salt of the earth girl and the full of himself boy always swinging for the fences. Well, her being very down to earth, very grounded, and him being very ambitious and sort of, like we said, larger than life, there was a balance there.

That blind date freshman year was a success as Mike and Stephanie watched their friends James and Julie find an easy pace for their growing relationship. When his balloon threatened to sail away, Julie would tug James back to earth. And she would just say, that's not true. That's BS, James. Oh, James, knock it off. Yeah. When Julie graduated with a degree in nursing,

James hadn't finished college, it seemed only natural to one and all that the two were getting married. Watching the two of them together had inspired us as a couple because of the way they loved one another. The newlyweds settled just outside Kansas City, where James still worked in the radio biz, mostly behind the scenes. No one doubted James, the big dreamer with his nonstop chat, would make it in radio or anything else he set his mind on.

Things certainly seemed to be going well for James a few years later when he went home to Jefferson City and took his old boss and mentor Warren Crutch out to lunch. James announced that he'd landed a cushy new gig in Chicago with ESPN Radio, the sports broadcasters. From what his old boss could tell, Cowan was earning a good living. There was a little twinge of jealousy when this kid that I trained in when he was 15 years old picks me up for lunch in a BMW, you know. Betsy Dudenhafer, a high school classmate, says Cowan's old pals wore a similar shade of Envy Green when he pulled up to their 10-year high school reunion in a rolling success

story, a slightly different set of wheels. He shows up in a brand new, top-of-the-line, fully loaded Mercedes Benz. Gorgeous, easily $60,000, $70,000 car. He tells us he's the voice of ESPN, he's living in Chicago, he's living the high life. But by his late 20s, the old friends had lost touch with James's brilliant career. Word reached home that he'd left Chicago, gone back to Kansas City, and after some setbacks, had gotten out of radio and into marketing and web consulting. His new boss, Tammy Blossom, liked her hire. Boy, he's got an impressive resume, and this is a guy that's smart and going places. And where he was going next came as something of a surprise. Good news, certainly,

but not expected. James announced that he'd been accepted into the prestigious Harvard Business School. He and Julie would be uprooting themselves from Missouri and heading for Boston. A new beginning for the Cowans, which would turn out to be the end. Boston, Mass, home to the bean and the cod, and as of January 2004, also home to Julie and James Cowan from Missouri. After nearly eight years of marriage, it was almost as though they were starting over. James would be throwing himself into studies at the elite of elites, Harvard Business School, while still telecommuting via laptop to his old job back in Kansas City. His employer thought it was a win-win situation. Things were clipping along and moving along,

and we thought things were just fine. The Cowans rented half of a two-family house in the Boston suburbs. Like James, Julie had a job that let her work out of the home by computer. Friends and family in Missouri, meanwhile, were hearing only good things about the couple's excellent adventure back east. So he's telling you about attending lectures, going to courses, hitting the books, meeting lots of people. Right. Everything is going up, up, up.

It's great. Everything's great. But a few months later, by June of 2004, it wasn't so great. Julie was feeling unwell, chronically draggy. More disturbing, it wasn't clear just what her problem was. When James' mother, Betty Cowan, came out for a visit that July, Julie had taken to bed. She was not feeling well. As a matter of fact, when we were there, she was upstairs a lot, laying down. She rallied a bit after that, enough at least for James and Julie to take a vacation

in North Carolina with their dear friends from college days, Mike and Stephanie Webb. It was August, and Julie had talked about her recent illness. And her electrolyte count was off. James had been pushing Gatorade to get her electrolytes back in balance. Keep her rehydrated. Julie, what you need is Gatorade. Rehydrate. But the Webbs noticed that the glass half full in all the months of a puzzling illness was that James and Julie seemed closer than ever. In fact, we commented that he was very loving.

He got her drinks, cuddled with her. He was much more attentive to her needs minute by minute than I'd ever seen him. But all of James' TLC wasn't making his wife well. A few weeks later, after the couple had returned to Boston, the nurturing husband placed another call back home to Missouri, a disturbing one to his in-laws. Julie's dad, Jack Oldag, picked up the phone. I got a call, I think it was a Friday night,

and Julie went to the hospital and her speech was slurred and her motor skills were out of whack. Days later, the doctors still weren't sure why Julie had become so ill so suddenly. But this time doctors did diagnose something wrong with her. Tests revealed one of Julie's kidneys was smaller than the other and scarred. She had lost almost half of her normal kidney function. That's shocking news for a young woman. Yeah, she was very upset.

Was she talking about having a family or planning a family? They told us that they had been trying to have children. We weren't aware of it before. During that late August visit to Boston, Nancy was relieved to see the color coming back into her daughter's cheeks. And she was pleased to note her son-in-law, James, giving Julie so much tender attention. James took his in-law sightseeing a tour of Harvard Square. And on a road trip to Maine, Julie recalled while they were driving how the doctors at the hospital had asked

her just the most absurd question. Was her husband poisoning her? And the docs were serious. Then she tapped James on the shoulder and said, isn't that right, James? And he said, yeah. And he says, I was really getting annoyed at them because they kept bringing that up. By the time they left at the end of August, the Old Daggs were feeling better about Julie. She was already searching the internet for information on how to get pregnant while battling kidney disease. And she was emailing friends with nothing but praise for James for taking such good care of her while working and going to school full-time. And then a few days later, Saturday morning, September 4th, Julie Cowan's mysterious

malady came roaring back. A kidney doctor would later testify that James Cowan had called her explaining Julie's latest symptoms. Garbled speech, confusion, difficulty walking. The doctor advised Cowan to get his wife into an emergency room right away. Roughly 10 hours later, he walked with Julie into an ER. Two hours after that, she had lapsed into a coma. Her parents in Missouri got the news, flew back to Boston, and headed straight for the hospital.

This time, the doctors examining Julie came up with an even sharper diagnosis. Yes, they said, Julie did have a chronic kidney disease, but it wasn't the reason the young woman was deathly ill. She'd been poisoned with ethylene glycol, what you and I call antifreeze. How did this happen?

Doctors telling you she's been poisoned. Yes. Whether she did it herself or by someone else, you don't know, but she's been poisoned. That's why she's in desperate straits in the hospital. They suspected that she'd been getting this all along. For over a long period of time. The doctors explained that Julie's kidneys were shutting down, being blocked by tiny crystals manufactured from the antifreeze.

The diagnosis explained her months of illness, nausea, slurred speech. Doctors administered the antidote, but it was too late to flush out her kidneys. She was going into irreversible decline, kept alive only by machines. James's mother, Betty Cowan, watched her daughter-in-law fading. I just thought she'd be okay, and then she would have, her body would jerk. And I thought, she's coming around. She's going to be okay. And that wasn't to be. It was too late.

The poison had taken her. As their 31-year-old daughter lay dying, the old dags walked out of the hospital and hailed a cab to the local police station. They wanted detectives there to help them answer two questions. How could a car additive like antifreeze wind up in their daughter's system? And who on earth could have put it there? On September 8, 2004, four days after first being admitted to the emergency room, the machine keeping 31-year-old Julie Cowan alive was turned off. Doctors said she had died because she'd ingested a massive amount of ethylene glycol, antifreeze.

There seemed to be only two plausible theories. She'd either taken her own life or someone had killed her. Police investigators began taking down information from the attending doctors and from her husband, James. Nat Yeager was an assistant district attorney just outside Boston at the time. Gives a very unusually detailed medical history. Of his wife? Of his wife. Not being evasive here? Not at all. The husband, James Cowan, 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'd 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. 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, nurse that she was, had found a cheap and widely available poison to take her own life? Antifreeze. Its key ingredient, ethylene glycol, can be lethal. It's also sweet-tasting and blends easily with sugary liquids like sweet tea and 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 Stephanie Webb, started to make the idea of suicide sound implausible to detectives. I thought she must have committed suicide. She must have. But then I looked back and I thought, but she was hopeful. 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. 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 Cowan, 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. Neighbors didn't see him siphoning it out of the car. You didn't get lucky on anything like that? 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 Cowan 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, Missouri. 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. He didn't make a whole lot of money at it, but at least he was going to get back on his feet and try to get his life together.

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. 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 a 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 Cowan needed. As he signed on with his first show, he briefly mentioned his recent loss. My wife, Julie, we've been married for eight years at that point.

Passed away in September. Was the show finding some success, the talk show? The show was very successful, yeah. He had a very good listenership, had a lot of call-ins, had a lot of interesting guests on the show from state government, city government. The county prosecutor at that time was a regular guest on his program. He used to talk about the hot crimes. Sure.

In the district. Yes, he would. But when it came to explaining how his wife had passed away, he told old friends different things. He told me she died of stomach cancer, congenital kidney problem. And to another friend, he offered yet another cause of death. It was a secret, he said. And a bombshell. 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 his life. He was dating several girls within the radio station, pursuing girls. And I will tell you that at one time, several times, I would ask myself, man,

is that how, you know, it's very quickly after her death, do people really move on that quickly? He just kicked off his daily radio show at 9 a.m. that first Monday in November 2005 when he stepped outside the little studio during a commercial break. Warren Kretsch had just gotten off the air and watched dumbfounded as a group of men in state of Massachusetts windbreakers walked in and confronted the talk radio host. 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 state police troopers informed Cowan he would be arraigned in court for the murder of his wife, Julie. James Cowan, 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. The FBI arrested Cowan. He might have lived a double life. Cowan is being held in the Cole County jail until he's moved. And now he was. For months after his arrest, James Cowan'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. I says, James, did you do this to Julie?

And he said, Mom, no. He says, you know I didn't. I said, I know. I said, I had to ask him. For a while, some here even wondered if the authorities would release James Cowan. Two and a 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. A former Wolf Amman goes on trial today, charged with killing his wife by poisoning her with antifreeze. The state was finally ready to try James Cowan for his wife's murder.

Murder by deception. That is what the evidence in this case will prove. The prosecutor told the couple's story. Julie Cowan had been living and sleeping with a stranger for most of her marriage. James Cowan, he said, was a shameless liar, going all the way back to his early days in radio. Those stories he told friends like Betsy Dudenhafer about being the voice of ESPN Radio in Chicago, bogus. James had really been more of a behind-the-scenes guy. James was brought in to help with the formatting of the radio station, writing liners, and scheduling, so on and so forth. And that fancy car he paraded in front of Betsy, the one he said he paid thousands for, friends later found out the nice wheels had been a rental.

But the biggest whopper James Cowan had told the granddaddy of them all was about getting into Harvard. 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. Fakes a letter from them saying basically that he got into Harvard Business School, and I think the quote was, I'll see you 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 Cowan. Is that your signature? That is not my signature. In fact, Cowan's only connection to Harvard was a computer course he took from the university's extension school. He flunked it. But James Cowan claimed the prosecutor was more than a liar.

He was also an embezzler. He had allegedly bilked his Kansas City employer out of $60,000, billing them with phony invoices for work he'd never done. It's fraud. He committed extortion. There's no doubt about it. On the stand, the Kansas City boss testified how her opinion of Cowan darkened when she realized his scam. In July 2004, she phoned Cowan,

known as JP, to his co-workers and confronted him. What was the result of that phone call? As a result of the phone call, I fired JP. Still, according to the prosecutor, Julie Cowan 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, unable to pay their rent. The prosecutor said Cowan concealed it all from her. Not to speak ill of the dead, but how could she be so naive? Well, that was something I was very worried about, and I think the answer is that she was in love with him. She trusted him, and she was in love with him.

So he was running a con on her, no question about it. All the while. I believe James Cowan ran a con on everyone he ever spoke to. By July 2004, with his world imploding, the prosecutor said Cowan saw only two choices before him. One, he could tell his wife everything, in essence, to gamble his marriage. 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 Cowan 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 a 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.

I'm very fortunate to have a husband like James who's working full-time, going to Harvard full-time. I worry about messing that up for him. Meanwhile, his laptop told a different story altogether. The prosecutor said James Cowan 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 Cowan's sometime handle online was Kaiser Sose, 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 Sose. Why had the glib radio man identified with such an oily and lethal character?

Cowan's friend, Mike Webb, said his hair stood on end when he learned about the Kaiser Sose business. 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 Cowan was a killer. Access, motive, and the defendant's conduct tell you that James Cowan murdered his wife. 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 of those things

through another lens. One that trained its focus squarely on the victim herself in the agonizing days before her death. There is a poison called ethylene glycol. One key issue wasn't in dispute. Julie Cowan had died a terrible death by ingesting antifreeze. No doubt about that from either side in the courtroom. Defense attorney Matthew Feinberg said the big question, however, was how the poison got in her system. This case is about how this happened and by what means. And the fact is, and it will remain,

the Commonwealth doesn't know how it happened and neither do we. The defense found the state's charge that Cowan had murdered his wife to be pure conjecture. There was no real evidence, it argued, nothing to tie the defendant to the so-called murder. In fact, the defense countered that it probably wasn't a murder when you took a closer look at the victim's deteriorating health and mental state in the last weeks of her life. Just to help you, go ahead. closer look at the victim's deteriorating health and mental state in the last weeks of her life. The defense's sole witness, a medical expert, testified that Julie Cowan was a young woman whose kidneys had grown weaker over the course of many years. The kidney, when it's injured and chronically injured, becomes small and shrunken. So it is my opinion that this is evidence that the kidney, in fact, had evidence of significant chronic disease.

And Julie Cowan, the doctor said, was taking a drug called prednisone to treat the condition, a steroid that can produce dramatic side effects, severe mood swings. Depression. Depression can be aggravated. In higher doses, prednisone could even make the patient lose touch with the reality the doctor testified. Remember, days before Julie's death, James Cowan had reportedly seen his wife wandering the streets looking dazed and drinking from a Gatorade bottle, a devastating illness, mind-altering drugs. Even Julie Cowan's own mother conceded on cross-examination that suicide was not out of the question.

There was a possibility in your mind that that was what happened? Yes, there was that possibility in my mind. But in her heart of hearts, Nancy never really believed that her daughter could have taken her own life. I just remember thinking, now how does someone get ethylene glycol in their system? And that's when that thought crossed my mind. Not that I thought she committed suicide. I thought that it was one of the possibilities. Because you never know.

Right. You never know. And that's basically what you said in court. Right. But it's something to explain it. You didn't really consider it seriously. No. As for those damning computer searches for poisons and ways to die found on James Cowan's home computer, the defense grilled the prosecution's computer expert. After all, he said, the couple shared a home office, perhaps even each other's computers.

Anybody could simply turn on these computers and use it under any account name at all, right? Theoretically, yes. Well, not theoretically. I mean, as a matter of fact, isn't that right? If they had access to it, yes. The suggestion was clear. Maybe Julie Cowan, in a fog of drugs and depression, had been trolling her husband's computer, looking for a way out of her misery. Suicide. To the defendant's mother, the evidence suddenly looked less incriminating.

They didn't know who did those. They did not. It did not. Anybody could have done those. Not only that, said the defense, but the prosecution's theory that James Cowan's tumbling house of cards had driven him to murder didn't make sense either. It noted that Julie was well aware of what was happening, that her husband wasn't exactly enrolled at Harvard, that he'd just lost his job,

that money was tight. And Julie's frequent bank transfers claimed the defense proved she understood their financial dilemma. What's more, she was still drawing a paycheck. Each had retirement accounts and ready access to cash. What's the balance that's in the account? The balance is $3,784.56. In other words, there was no reason for a loving husband to kill his wife. Not for a life insurance policy that paid only $250,000. It did not fly. No. No. Sorry.

$250,000. I mean, if they had a set insurance policy of a million dollars or something like that, that would make more sense. And defense proved that they were not deep in debt. Instead, the defense argued James Cowan loved his wife deeply and with devotion. Witness after witness, witnesses for the prosecution had admitted as much to the defense. Did it appear to you that they had a good relationship together? Yes. So in the end, at least to James Cowan's mother, sitting patiently by her son in the courtroom day after day. The prosecution's case didn't amount to much. No sound motive, no solid proof, no figurative murder weapon in the hands of her son. I didn't see any antifreeze. I didn't see any Gatorade bottles. I did not see one Gatorade bottle. And this is what they've been saying all along.

The jury had heard all there was to hear, the evidence or lack thereof. But they would not hear from the defendant himself. James Cowan would not take the stand. He had no legal obligation to do that. And it didn't matter anyway, said defense attorney Matthew Feinberg. There was no murder here, just a sad death of a sick woman.

The prednisone, the long-term consequences of our underlying chronic kidney failure are all suggestive that there is more going on here than meets the eye. They certainly don't prove accident or suicide, but they are highly suggestive of it. James Cowan, the man who captured loyal radio listeners in his hometown, had just made his best case for freedom to 12 strangers. Well, good morning, friends. Would they be his toughest audience or easy listeners? More than three years after the death of Julie Cowan, one of two things was about to happen. Her parents would win what they saw as justice for their daughter, or her husband would walk free.

The case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus James P. Callen was in the hands of the jury. So this is really a chilling case to sit in on. It is. She had a painful way to go. She did. Death by antifreeze. The parade of witnesses had convinced the jurors, including Danielle Savato and Charmaine Cook, that poison had indeed killed Julie Callen. Now they only

had to figure out by whose hand. It could have been an accident. It could have been a suicide. It could have been a murder. The first scenario, an accident, was an easy one for jurors to throw out. The story about Julie drinking from a tainted Gatorade bottle sounded too convoluted. What's more, those computer searches for ways to poison showed someone was planning something weeks before Julie died. Somebody did a search for poison. Whether it was him or her, somebody did it. So obviously it wasn't an accident. Was it possibly Julie who'd done the web searching looking for an exit from her misery? Was it suicide? Danielle and Charmaine said this was the most time-consuming

question they posed. After all, Julie Cowan had plenty of reasons to be depressed. We were thinking maybe she was depressed because of her kidney disease and maybe not being able to have children. Her husband had lied and they had financial downfalls, and maybe she just thought that she, you know, couldn't face everybody for everything that he had done. And yet those damning computer searches were, after all, done on James's computer, not on Julie's. Still, Danielle believes Julie Cowan may have been the one at the keyboard. So she could have made those searches on his computer. Correct. If it was my husband and he said it was a work computer,

would I have used the computer if it was right there? I might have, you know. Julie Cowan killing herself. It was a plausible scenario to everyone deliberating. Even Julie's own mother conceded as much on the stand. Yes, there was that possibility in my mind. Okay. But the suicide theory came with a thorny problem for the jurors.

If Julie had been hunting for ways to kill herself on her husband's computer, why in the world would she also be hunting for ways to keep herself alive on another? Her own laptop yielded search after search on anything and everything related to surviving kidney disease, the illness she thought had doomed her. She had way too much hope. She looked like just wanted to figure it out, just fight it through, figure it out, just solve it and just get it over with and done. Like she documented so much of how she was feeling and her medicines and the effects they were having on her. And she just had so much hope. For jurors, it boiled down to a tale of two computers, one used to hunt out death, the other life. Two entirely different pursuits, two entirely different users, only one person left to blame.

Mr. Foreman, has your jury agreed upon its verdict? Yes. May I have them, please? We had to go on all of his lies, his deceit. We just had to go on the picture that was presented to us. Is the defendant guilty or not guilty? Guilty. Guilty of first-degree murder.

The jurors had concluded that James Cowan had planned his wife's death, had executed it, and then slowly watched her fade away over the course of several weeks. I think it was his lies falling in on him. I think it was having to face her. And, you know, it's easier to be a widower. Oh, poor you, poor you, instead of be a big liar. For Julie's parents, a chance finally to exhale. Just a big sense of relief. It's just, you know, he didn't get away with it. But it doesn't bring Julie back. No. No. Good afternoon.

The Oldags, though, got a chance to tell their former son-in-law just what they thought of him after the verdict in open court. He is just a mass of flesh and bone taking up space on this earth. Even the judge lashed out at James Cowan. I am truly in the presence of an evil person. Please rise. She sentenced him to life in prison, no possibility of parole. For James Cowan's mother, virtually the only one to stand by him, the verdict may have upended her world, but not her deep faith in her son. James is a wonderful man

and James will be back home. I just hope I live to see it, but he will be. The Oldags, of course, are of a very different opinion about their former son-in-law. To them, he's a stranger of terrible talent and skill. So glib, he was able to fool them all, fool their daughter even up to the very minute she drew her last breath. The most important thing in his life and the only person he loved was himself. And all the rest of it was just a facade. Everybody else on earth, everybody else he knew was there for his use. His listeners have moved on. The James Cowan Show is off the air.