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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When Suzanne Chaviers picked up her daughter at Fran’s Day Care that final time on August 15, 1991, she had a lot of things on her mind. And one of them was sexual abuse. The 39-year-old University of Houston graduate was in therapy, trying to come to grips with her own memories of being sexually abused by a drunken father, who died when she was 18. The therapy had induced new, heretofore unknown recollections of that traumatic time nearly thirty years ago. On top of that, she was struggling through her second divorce. As in the first one, she claimed in legal proceedings that her estranged husband, Rick Chaviers, had intense and uncontrollable outbursts of rage, that he had physically and emotionally abused their daughter. Rick Chaviers denied this. But in the five months since the couple’s separation there had been talk of “bad daddy,” which reinforced the image of an abusive father who pulled down the child’s panties and beat her with a belt. On the advice of her therapist, Suzanne had taken the child to a pediatrician for a vaginal examination on May 7, one day before she started at Fran’s Day Care. No signs of sexual abuse were detected, but Suzanne was still not convinced that her daughter hadn’t been molested.
A psychologist who did a court-ordered psychological evaluation of the Chaviers in June 1991 wrote in his report, “This is a pathological family system. . .[the daughter] stood as the battleground and lightning rod for tension. . .between the parents. The mother seems to have a great deal of anger, of which she is only marginally aware. . .” The psychologist speculated that Suzanne Chaviers “unconsciously encourages others to act out her anger for her.”
If Suzanne was subliminally attempting to transfer her repressed hostility to her daughter, the little girl appeared to be receiving the message loud and clear, More recently, the child’s out-of-control behavior included her insistence that she was a dog—walking on all fours, barking, eating out of the dog bowl, defecating or urinating like a dog, licking herself like a dog. Sometimes she defecated or urinated on the floor in front of guests. On one occasion, when Suzanne’s sister and her boyfriend came for dinner, the little girl took off her clothes, climbed onto the boyfriend’s lap, and began kissing him, then relieved herself on the floor. The child had started using profanity too, some of it extremely rough and vulgar. As for the no-limits program recommended by a previous therapist, obviously it wasn’t working. Therapist Donna David, who had been seeing the Chaviers girl since May 21, had suggested setting some limits, noting that while the child appeared to have the ability to control her behavior, she “seems to be struggling for control and testing mother’s limits continually.”
On the day that the Chaviers girl made her allegations, mother and daughter were on their way to see Donna David to discuss the child’s latest outrage—the ice-cream truck game. The previous Sunday at Kids Exchange—a court-supervised facility where parents involved in custody cases go for visits with their children—Rick Chaviers and the supervisor on duty were shocked by the child’s behavior. Spreading her legs far apart, the little girl pretended to run a toy truck into her vagina, saying, “Here comes the ice-cream truck.” Donna David testified that she had observed similar behavior in earlier sessions, when the girl would stuff beans into the various orifices of anatomically correct dolls. Suzanne Chaviers had reported that several times she had caught the child hiding behind the couch, sticking marbles and crayons into her vagina. In a therapy session a week before the incident at Kids Exchange, Rick Chaviers told Donna David that his daughter had exhibited “loving behavior” for him even before the separation, pulling down her pants, playing with her vagina, looking for things to insert.
On the way to the therapist on that fateful day, the Chaviers girl told her mother that she did not want to go back to the day care. Why not? Because Danny had hurt her, she said. How” He had pulled down her panties and spanked her. Suzanne was shaking all over by the time they reached Donna David’s office. In her notes from that session, David wrote that the child had told her mother, “[Danny Keller] spanked her like her daddy used to and it hurt. . ..’He hit me with a belt.’ When asked where, in front or back, she said, ‘Front.’. . .She continued saying that Danny pulled down her pants down and played with her and that ‘he pooped and peed on my head,’ and when asked if someone washed her hair, she said, ‘Fran did,’ and when asked further details, she said that it did not happen.” The therapist produced an anatomically correct doll and asked the child to demonstrate what Danny Keller had done. The Chaviers girl stuck a ballpoint pen in the doll’s vagina. David informed the mother that she would have to contact Child Protective Services, and from there the case began a long, tortuous journey through the criminal justice system.
But something else happened that evening that virtually nailed the case shut. The Chaviers girl called to her mother from the bathroom and said that it hurt to urinate. When questioned, the mother would report later, the child told her, “Danny put his pee-pee in me and got glue in me, and it was warm and yucky, and Fran washed it out.” Nearly overcome with anxiety, Suzanne took her daughter to the emergency room at Brackenridge hospital. The physician on duty that night discovered two small tears in the hymen, which he judged to be less than 24 hours old. This medical discovery became the single piece of physical evidence against the Kellers.
In a second session with the therapist a few days later, the Chaviers girl gave more-graphic descriptions of what happened at the day care, this time involving Fran in the story. In her notes the therapist wrote, “When asked if Fran did anything to her. . .she said that Fran [kissed the child’s vagina] and ‘ate me all up,’ making smacking lip sounds and using her mouth to imitate the movement of Fran’s mouth on her vagina.”
By coincidence, Carol Staelin happened to telephone Suzanne Chaviers the night of the Chaviers girl’s allegations. Carol had called to invite Suzanne to a meeting of her twelve-step recovery group. Carol was a recovering alcoholic and believed the group could help Suzanne deal with her own post-traumatic stress of growing up with an abusive and alcoholic father. In getting acquainted, the two women sometimes talked about their children and about their common problems and experiences. Both had gone through troubled marriages: Carol and her husband, Earl Staelin, were still trying to work things out. Suzanne had previously suffered from severe allergies, and Carol suffered from a similar ailment diagnosed as environmental illness. Carol frequently followed Suzanne’s lead. Suzanne was the reason that Carol had chosen Fran’s Day Care and the reason that she now planned to send her son to therapist Donna David. The child had been in therapy two years earlier, suffering from a trauma induced by the sudden resignation of his nanny. Lately, he was showing new signs of emotional and physical distress.
When Suzanne Chaviers told Carol what her daughter said had happened at Fran’s Day Care, Carol went into what she described as “automatic denial.” Later she would explain, “At first I was sure that the abuse was limited to Suzanne’s daughter, that my son wasn’t involved. Though my intelligence was telling me otherwise, I was just saying, ‘Thank God it wasn’t my son!” But two weeks later, after a session with Donna David, Carol was firmly convinced that the boy had also been sexually violated. It was an area in which she was painfully familiar, Like Suzanne, Carol also had memories of being sexually abused as a child. The memories had been “recovered” in therapy, nearly thirty years after the abuse supposedly happened.
Earl and Carol Staelin both had law degrees and had moved to Austin in 1981 looking for alternative lifestyles. For twelve years Earl Staelin had worked as a staff attorney for the public defender society in Toledo, Ohio. One thing that attracted them to Austin was the city’s perceived New Age persona, particulary its commitment to nutritional, homeopathic, and holistic approaches to life’s problems. A second reason was that the Staelins wanted to adopt a baby, and Texas offered more opportunities than Ohio, where they would have had to wait eight years just to qualify for a home background check. The Staelins were already older than the preferred adoptive parent: he was 41 and she was 33 when they moved to Texas. Earl Staelin was a great admirer of Gandhi’s, and both were fascinated with Indian culture, so when they heard that it was possible to adopt a baby from an international agency in India, they jumped at the opportunity. Their son was four months old when he arrived at their home.
After moving to Austin, Earl quit his law practice to become a nutritional counselor, but the career change didn’t work out, and in 1982 he returned to law. Carol had already decided to give up her own law practice. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her career, and this bothered her. Austin hadn’t worked out the way she had planned. Since the move, their lives had been in constant crisis. Carol had problems with alcohol, problems with overeating, problems with her liver, problems with her career, problems with her marriage. And problems with her son. Constant problems. And now the experience at Fran’s Day Care. It was almost as if life had conspired against her.
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