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Jean Terese Keating, now 54, fled Oregon 15 years ago while awaiting trial in connection with a fatal traffic accident, was tracked down in Canada in April. She was back in court in Oregon Friday afternoon to face charges that she killed Jewel Oline Anderson in the April 1997 wreck.

(RCMP)

The Milwaukie woman who fled Oregon 15 years ago while awaiting trial in a fatal crash along Interstate 5 had built a new life for herself and her children in a small Canadian community.

For the past decade and a half, Jean Terese Keating had been living in

, a rural town of about 2,500, said Corporal Miles Hiebert with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Manitoba is the province north of North Dakota and Minnesota. Minnedosa is about 280 road miles northwest of Grand Forks, N.D.

On Friday, Keating appeared in Linn County Circuit Court for arraignment on charges of first-degree manslaughter, driving under the influence of intoxicants, reckless driving and reckless endangerment.

Jewel Anderson

The charges stem from the April 1997 crash near Albany that killed Jewel Oline Anderson, 65, of Dexter.

That car, driven by Anderson, then careened across the center median and into a Lincoln Continental driven by Noel Kuzma.

Kuzma and his passengers survived the crash but Anderson died. Keating was arrested and charged.

On Friday, a judge set bail of $5 million and a pre-trial meeting on Sept. 16, said district attorney Ryan Lucke. Keating is being held at Linn County Jail.

While on bail and awaiting trial in 1998, Keating stopped contacting her attorney and apparently crossed the border to Canada with her 3-year-old daughter, Morgan Jean, and 1-year-old son, Alexander Marcus. At some point, she took the name "Jean McPherson" and started a new life in Minnedosa.

A Facebook profile shows that Morgan Jean graduated from high school in 2012 and is part of a Minnedosa trading group. There was no information available about Alexander Marcus, Hiebert said.

A woman who answered the phone at the Minnedosa Inn, which also serves as a community bar, said Friday that McPherson was "just your average person" and well known in the small town. The woman would not give her name, however, and didn't want to elaborate.

Others reached by phone in Minnedosa declined to talk at all.

It was at a bar that Keating's new life appears to have begun to unravel.

She apparently was in a bar when she boasted about getting away with a suspected drunken-driving fatal crash, according to Oregon State Police, and in early 2013, someone tipped a Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable stationed in the town.

He followed up on the rumor that a local woman named Jean McPherson was actually an American citizen who was in Canada illegally, and that she might be a fugitive.

He sent an email to an investigator with Red River Integrated Border Enforcement Team, which confirmed there was no record indicating "Jean McPherson" to be a Canadian citizen.

Investigators learned the woman had been arrested several times in Canada, including on impaired-driving charges. They compared the fingerprints with those on record for Keating in Oregon and found a match.

Investigators alerted immigration authorities. Officials don't know how she entered Canada, said Lisa White, a spokesperson for Canada Border Services Agency, but in the late 1990s, it was not usually necessary for U.S. citizens to show a passport when crossing into Canada.

Immigration authorities arrested Keating at her Minnedosa home on April 4 and issued a deportation order two weeks later. She was detained in Winnipeg because of flight risk until June 12, when she was deported. Keating has been barred from ever entering Canada again, White said.

Keating was brought into the United States through the Pembina border crossing in North Dakota, where she was taken into custody by U.S. Marshals, said chief deputy marshal Dan Orr. The marshals booked her into the Grand Forks jail, where she was picked up by Oregon authorities and brought back to the state this week.

Keating's arrest brought to an end years of searching by

, the 51-year-old daughter-in-law of Jewel Anderson.

Periodically over the past 15 years, Anderson had logged on to resume a methodical online hunt for the woman accused of killing the Anderson family's matriarch as she drove to church.

Linda Anderson had turned to Ancestry.com and other "be your own detective" websites in hopes of finding Keating.

"I'd type her name in, type her children's names in to search. There would be other Jean Terese Keatings, but they wouldn't line up," said Anderson.

But on Father's Day weekend, Oregon State Police investigators called to say Keating had been arrested in Canada. She was astonished.

"It was just too much," Anderson recalled.

Anderson attended Friday's court appearance and said she asked prosecutors and the judge to hold Keating accountable for the life she took and her years on the run.

She said Keating "looked like she had been through the wringer" and that she had a "smirky grin" on her face."

Anderson said she got to read a statement on behalf of the Anderson clan.

"I'd say we as the family feel the justice system has failed us already," she said. This time, she said, she doesn't want to hear that Keating is out on bail at any point.

"I'm asking that Jean remain in jail until her sentencing."

– Simina Mistreanu and Kimberly A.C. Wilson