The Innocent and The Damned
In 1992, Fran and Dan Keller were sent to prison for sexually abusing a child in the suburban Austin day care center. But parents have convinced themselves that the couple is guilty of much worse. They believe the Kellers belong to a cult that tortured and brainwashed their kids and turned them into Satan’s slaves.
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Dan and Fran Keller didn’t look like monsters, though it is true that there are no demographic profiles of pedophiles, much less Satanists. The Kellers had no history of drugs, mental illness, or sexual abnormalities, but neither would pedophiles necessarily. Pedophiles are narcissistic and exhibit what therapists call cognitive distortions, or the inability to recognize that even the vilest act is anything eccept normal behavior. That description didn’t fit the Kellers. Nor did they appear to be victims of low self-esteem, as many child molesters are said to be. Indeed, those who knew Fran suspected that she suffered from high self-esteem. The word normally used to describe her, even by friends, was “bitch.” She was a woman of strong opinions and clearly the dominant partner in her marriage to Danny. Danny had retired from his job with a Travis County road crew to help Fran run the day care, which opened for business in September 1989, two years before charges were filed and the day care was ordered to shut down.
Fran was 42 and had three grown children from a previous marriage. Dan was 50. Fran was his fourth wife, and he had four children. Together they had seven grandchildren. Neither of them had ever been accused of molesting a child or of any other crime for that matter. A ninth-grade dropout, Danny Keller had worked most of his life with bulldozers and heavy equipment. Before marrying Fran in 1987, he supervised the Precinct 3 road crew. In his off-duty hours, he enjoyed riding patrol with the Travis County Sheriff’s office deputies who worked the three-to-eleven shift. “After our shift, we all gathered to drink beer and cool out, what we called choir practice,” recalled Janise White, one of the deputies and later a constable at the precinct, “Danny was like part of the family.” After Danny married Fran, he no longer hung out at choir practice, but Janise White remained his friend and Fran’s too, a relationship that eventually cost all three of them dearly.
Aside from the location of Fran’s Day Care, what made it attractive to many parents was Fran herself. She was at once stern and good-hearted. She took it on herself to buy large stocks of children’s clothes from Goodwill so that when kids soiled their own clothes during the course of the day, she could send them home wearing fresh and dry things. Fran had worked with children all of her adult life. Children sensed that she could not be intimidated or manipulated, that she was the clear and undisputed boss. Unlike most day care centers, Fran’s Day Care accepted children with emotional and behavioral problems, including those who had been abused. This was a small operation, with about fifteen kids in attendance each day.
One of the children she cared for in the summer of 1991, when the ritual abuses supposedly took place, was the daughter of Suzanne Chaviers. Suzanne was going through a bitter divorce and had accused her husband in court of physically and emotionally abusing their child, which he denies. The Chaviers girl, who was not quite four years old, had exhibited behavioral problems since the couple separated two months earlier. Fran accepted her anyway. But, according to testimony, after two weeks at the day care, the child had become almost unmanageable at home: biting, screaming, kicking, pulling her mother’s hair, destroying things, trying to stab the dog with a barbecue fork. Fran quickly observed that the little girl was a liar and manipulator who attacked other children and accused them of attacking her. Suzanne Chaviers made hardly any effort to discipline the child, having been advised by a previous therapist against “setting limits.” Suzanne was an interior designer who worked out of her home: Until the child started going to Fran’s Day Care, she had always stayed at her mother’s side. The Chaviers girl clearly did not like this new arrangement.
Danny Keller was the antithesis of his wife, soft and easygoing patient, almost comically professorial with his gray hair and beard. Danny was handy, good at fixing and creating things. He enjoyed making toys for the children—bows and arrows, Indian drums, capes on which he painted the likenesses of Ninja Turtles. Sometimes Danny would hitch a trailer to his riding lawn mower and give the kids rides around the property, with the pony, Dancer, prancing behind. Almost all of the kids enjoyed riding Dancer, except the Chaviers girl, who complained after her first day that the horse frightened her. Suzanne Chaviers told the Kellers to keep the child away from the horse, which they did. Though the Chaviers girl attended the day care from May 8 until August 15, 1991, she was considered a drop-in, not a regular. In all, she attended Fran’s Day Care only thirteen times.
En route to an appointment with her therapist on what turned out to be her final day at Fran’s, the Chaviers girl told her mother that the Kellers had molested her. She was the first of three children to make accusations against the Kellers. Within a matter of days, Earl and Carol Staelin and Sean and Sandra Nash also charged that the Kellers had sexually abused their children. By the first week in September, authorities had closed the day care. In December, a few days after the grand jury indicted the Kellers, they fled. They were arrested a few weeks later in Law Vegas, where Fran Keller’s eldest daughter lived, They have been in jail or prison ever since. In the months after the day care was closed, the parents began to suspect that the Kellers were Satanists, and the allegations of simple child abuse escalated to monstrous proportions. In light of their new set of beliefs, everything looked different to the parents who had leveled the charges. The pastoral, commonplace backdrop that had made Fran’s Day Care so attractive in the beginning now appeared sinister. The seemingly innocuous middle-aged couple now looked evil and malevolent. Sandra Nash, who had a five-year-old son and an infant daughter at the day care, had originally regarded Fan Keller as “a warm, loving woman.” Later, as she looked back on events of the summer of 1991, Sandra remembered that Fran’s personality had changed, that she suddenly became “very coldhearted. . .a very different and aggressive woman.” Many parents remembered occasions when their children would be wearing different clothes in the afternoon from those they wore when they were dropped off that morning. At the time, these incidents didn’t seem important, but now they suggested unspeakable acts—at least to the parents who celieved their children had been molested. Sandra Nash recalled the day she dropped in unexpectedly at the day care and found her son’s hair wet. She was told that Fran had had to shampoo the boy’s hair because when Dan and the boy had been goofing around, Dan had put styling gel in the boy’s hair. But the Nashes came to believe it wasn’t gel in the boy’s hair but semen.
The Ninja Turtle capes and other toys that the children brought home from Fran’s became—in the parents’ minds—diabolical “triggers,” planted to call the children back to the cult. Many months later, Sandra Nash told investigators, “They gave my son drums so he could call Satan at home.” Carol Staelin, whose four-year-old son had suffered emotional and physical problems most of his life, including frequent asthma attacks, believed that the boy’s severe asthma attacks two weeks after starting at Fran’s Day Care was because the Kellers had put horse manure in the boy’s nebulizer. “Every aspect of these kids’ lives, they twisted and perverted,” she said. “They tortured a bunny in front of the kids and told them I was the Easter Bunny. They kept a flock of doves—doves, the symbol of Christianity. They would break a dove’s wing, then bury the wounded dove and the children in a castle in the cemetery. Danny supposedly buried the children, then Fran dug them up seconds before they ran out of air and told them, “Satan has spared you.” Even Dancer was seen as part of the satanic plot. As Carol Staelin reconstructed events, the Kellers initiated the children on their first day—taking them on horseback to the woods, abusing them sexually, torturing them by applying electric shocks to their genitalia, and threatening to kill their parents and burn down their homes if they told.
Most of the ritual abuse allegations came months after the initial claims of molestation. Understandably, the prosecution tried to avoid the satanic aspects of the case. It was far easier to sell the abuse than the ritual, and the jury heard only bits and pieces of lurid details. The Kellers denied each and every allegation, but the jury did not believe them, partly because they had fled and partly because Fran keller came across as such a cold, hostile witness. Several members of the jury told investigators and prosecutors later that Fran’s demeanor in court was the main reason they convicted the Kellers.
“They painted us as monsters and ogres,” Fran Keller told me about a year after her trial, during an interview at the Hobby unit of the Texas Department of Criminal justice, near Marlin. “On the witness stand, I told them that the little girl [the Chaviers child] was a liar and a manipulator, and the prosecutor jumped me and said, ‘Don’t you think it’s an uneven match, a forty-year-old woman taking on an emotionally disturbed child?’ let me tell you something. I was as scared as that child. It was my life and my husband’s life they were ruining. We have lost everything we ever owned or cared about because of that little girl.”
At the Clements Unit, in Amarillo, Dan Keller spends much of his time writing poetry and trying to figure out what happened to the life he once knew. “I know God has a reason to have me in here for something I did not do,” he wrote. “Is it to test my love for Him? As I write this, I notice only one set of foot prints outside my cell door, and I remember that He said: ‘When you notice only one set of foot prints, that is when I carried you.’” The Kellers are not eligible for parole until 2004.
The following is based on trial testimony, the official police investigation, and interviews with parents and therapists.
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