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 decided 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.