In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption - Hardcover

1.
Fathers & Sons
 
IT’S THE JUDGMENT OF THE COURT IT’S THE JUDGMENT OF THE COURT that the defendant be committed to the custody of the attorney general of the United Sates or her authorized representative for the minimum guideline term of one hundred twenty months.
When Jimmy Keene first heard the judge pronounce his sentence in July of 1997, he says, “The life went right out of me.” It was exactly the term that prosecutor Larry Beaumont had recommended, and when Keene went before the bench to make a presentencing statement, he told the judge, “I know I did something wrong, but not to ruin my whole life. Ten years will ruin my life.”
But only moments later, with sickening finality, he would hear those words—“one hundred twenty months”—from the judge’s own lips. Jimmy was hollow and numb. It was, he thought, like hearing a doctor’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. He felt helpless and hopeless in a way that he’d never felt before.
The worst was yet to come. His mother sobbed hysterically somewhere behind him, but when the marshals grabbed his arms to lead him out of the court, he first scanned the spectators to find his father—his idol and his best friend. A tall, brawny man with a mustache and full head of dark hair, Big Jim looked a decade younger than his sixty years. But now, upon hearing the sentence, he, too, was stunned, his face pale and eyes unfocused. “Like he was lost,” Jimmy says.
As soon as Big Jim could, he went to see his son at Ford County jail. They looked at each other through the thick bulletproof glass of the visiting room, and Jimmy says, “We cried like babies.”
 
It was not the first time that they had been in jail together. As a thirteen-year-old in 1976, Jimmy tagged along with his father, then a police officer, when he was called to the Kankakee station house to deal with an unruly prisoner in the holding cells. “As soon as we walked in the station, we heard screaming and yelling. It sounded like a riot. When we went into the cellblock, we could see this huge, crazy black guy whipping everyone into a frenzy. All the guards seemed scared to death, but my father knew him and called him by name. He walked right up to his cell and very calmly said, ‘Choo Choo, you’ve got this whole cellblock out of hand. If I have to unlock that cell door and get in there with you, it won’t be a pretty thing.’ And Choo Choo said, ‘I don’t want no problems with you, man,’ and then completely settled down. It was like watching Superman. When we left the station, the desk sergeant said to me, ‘That’s what we love about your dad.’ ”
Big Jim’s bravery did not stop with the police. He also joined the fire department and, for five years, was a ranking officer in both forces. Jimmy has a favorite newspaper clipping that shows Big Jim rushing a frail little girl into the back of an ambulance. He had passed her burning house on his way home, heard the cries of her mother on the sidewalk, and rushed inside without a helmet or any other gear. Another time, when Jimmy was a teenager, he and some friends had stopped their car by a burning building when they saw his father on the roof. “Just then we heard kaboosh, and we watched the whole building collapse. Everyone on the roof dropped down inside and they were trapped there for hours. A few of them even died. But somehow, my dad got out alive.”
Big Jim was larger-than-life. He had the macho magnetism that drew both men and attractive women. At the age of twenty-six, he married one of those women, a raven-haired beauty named Lynn Brower. Jimmy arrived the next year, with a face that had both his father’s Irish square jaw and his mother’s blue eyes. Although Big Jim never rose above the rank of lieutenant in either the police or fire department, he still hung out with some of the most important people in town: Kankakee’s longtime mayor, Tom Ryan, who was his best friend, and Tom’s older brother, George, who would go on to become governor and—like two of his predecessors—would also end up in prison. But such was the Kankakee pedigree of power and corruption, dating back to the days of Al Capone. Scarface made the riverside town—an hour south of downtown Chicago—his summer getaway and kept most of the local politicians firmly in his pocket.
In many ways, when Jimmy was born in 1963, he embodied his hometown’s moral ambiguity: Big Jim may have been in law enforcement, but Jimmy’s maternal grandfather was a driver for Capone. Keene grew up listening to his Italian grandmother’s tales of the fancy supper clubs and the fast guys who ran them. “She was a high-fashion mink-stole lady,” Jimmy says, “with some serious Mafia connections.”
His father had no reservations about meeting with his in-laws’ friends. One Mafia princess even became Jimmy’s godmother. It all added to Big Jim’s aura as a man who worked both sides of the street. But his political friends were no different and were shameless in exploiting their clout. When Jimmy tagged along to his father’s bull sessions with the local big shots, he heard them dole out government contracts like chips in a poker game. To cash in on these connections, Big Jim started a construction business on the side. Meanwhile Lynn saved the money to finally open her own bar and grill. In addition to Jimmy, they also had another son and a daughter, living just outside of town where they could afford a large house on a big lot. From all appearances, the attractive couple led a storybook lifestyle.
But behind closed doors, a completely different plot played out for Jimmy. Like the song “Jumping Jack Flash,” he says, “I was born in a cross-fire hurricane.” His parents argued constantly—mostly about money. Despite Big Jim’s side businesses, he could not give Lynn all the trappings of wealth to keep up with their fancy friends. Then there was Lynn’s nighthawk lifestyle. “My dad had an old-world mentality,” Jimmy remembers. “He wanted his wife in the kitchen with dinner on the table. She never went along with that.” Sometimes she was still not home when Big Jim was ready to start his morning shift. He would jump back in the squad car and tear over to the restaurant, where the two would empty the bar with their screaming. But nothing bothered him more than her flirting. “She was always a glamour queen,” their son says. “Guys would flock to her, and as far as my father was concerned, she was too nice to them.”
Big Jim’s worst suspicions ultimately panned out when he caught Lynn outside a motel in a car with one of his business partners. His parents divorced when Jimmy was eleven, in 1974, and his childhood came to an abrupt end. Not only did he lose the father he idolized, but a few months after the separation he was forced to live in the same house with the man who had torn his family apart and married his mother.
Sports became Jimmy’s escape from this domestic turmoil. He had grown into a compact version of his father with both strength and blazing speed. Against his mother’s advice, he enrolled in Kankakee’s Eastridge public high school just so he could stick with the football players he had grown up with. Their team ultimately went all the way to a state championship game with Keene as the star running back. He would also letter in wrestling and track. His father never missed a game or a meet.
Although Jimmy was one of the few white students in a tough inner-city school, Big Jim never worried about his safety. He had sent his son, from the age of five, to martial arts schools, where he would...