Enraged Driver Cuts Woman In Half With Car After Victim ‘Wouldn’t Go’ At Intersection

SPRINGFIELD, MO — A woman allegedly in a hurry to make a car payment at the bank intentionally got into a fender bender and then ran over and killed the other driver after luring her from her vehicle.

According to a probable cause statement, at about 5:15 P.M. on November 20, Elizabeth McKeown grew frustrated with traffic while racing to make it to the bank before it closed. On her way, she got stuck at an intersection behind Barbara Foster.

McKeown, 46, later explained to police that Foster “wouldn’t go” — so she came up with a disturbing solution. She at first began nudging the 57-year-old woman’s car with her Ford Mustang’s bumper, but then "decided to hit it full-out.”

Foster, who was driving to do volunteer work to help those who couldn’t afford glasses, was on the phone with one of her Eyeglass World colleagues when the situation began to unfold.

“We knew that she had been rear-ended because, actually, we spoke to her just before,” Foster’s coworker, Logan Rader, told KSPR. “She said, ‘Hey, I just got ... rear-ended. I got to let you go.”

“She's a fighter; she'll be fine,” Preston Abbott, another Eyeglass World employee, recalled thinking at the time. “That's nothing to her. She might be a little mad, but who isn't when they get rear-ended?”

Court documents show the out-of-control driver said she “tricked” Foster into thinking she was going to be amiable after the initial accident in order to lure her from her vehicle.

McKeown "must have backed up a little bit or turned because the woman who had gotten out of her car was trying to get back into her car, and the Mustang came around the driver's side and went right over her,” said eyewitness Austyn Adams.

According to the court papers, McKeown "slammed into [Foster] and cut her in half.”

"At that point, we realized, it is like, well, she is not going to stop. I saw her coming up behind me, she is flashing her flashers and honking her horn and everything,” said Adams, who boxed McKeown’s car in with the help of another driver.

When Adams confronted McKeown, she “was just sitting there staring, holding the steering wheel,” he said. "She just looked at me, like no emotion, no anything, just staring. I told her …’You just ran a person over! You’re going to jail.'"

Police charged McKeown with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. She is currently being held at the Greene County Jail and faces life in prison without parole if convicted.

"I never expected something like this to happen. It doesn't feel real. It's just heartbreaking,” said Abbott, Foster’s coworker. “You end someone's life and you ruin countless others.”

"She definitely touched a lot of lives. She definitely made her mark on the world,” noted Rader of the “really caring” colleague she viewed almost as a sister. “She will never be forgotten. Ever.”

Read more: Springfield News-Leader, KSPR, KY3