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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After her son’s first visit with Donna David on August 29, Carol recalls that the therapist gave her instructions to question her son until he told the truth, because “these people” customarily threaten and warn their victims against telling secrets. “Tell him that we don’t know what happened at the day care,” the therapist said, “He needs to tell us. He needs to protect the other children.” (David denies that she said these things to Carol.) Later Carol attempted to get the boy to tell by admitting her own terrible childhood experiences. “When I was little like you,” she said, “I was hurt in my private parts. I didn’t like it—but now I can talk about it.” The boy didn’t respond, either that day or in any of his next several visits to the therapist.
The more the boy resisted, the more determined Carol was to get to the bottom of things. She tried to impress on him that others had been hurt too, that by not speaking out he was putting the lives of other children in danger. That didn’t work either. He wasn’t talking. Moreover, he was exhibiting some of the same symptoms as the Chaviers girl’s—out-of-control behavior, clinging to his mother, and talking baby talk. He was destructive, using profanity, wetting the bed, having bowel movements in the bathtub, experiencing nightmares, and making improper sexual gestures—trying to touch his father’s penis, for example, and looking up his mother’s skirt. Once when he looked up his mother’s dress, Carol asked him, “Did someone teach you to do that? Did Fran teach you that?” The boy nodded yes.
By late September, a month after the Travis County Sheriff’s office began its investigation, the Staelin child still hadn’t said anything specific. But little by little, Carol Staelin was forcing the issue. One day, as she was washing the boy’s hair in the bathtub, he suddenly threatened to cut her head off. “I thought this was very odd,” she explained, so I led him. I asked, ‘Did Danny tell you he would cut your head off if you told secrets?’” The boy nodded. Four days later, again as she was washing his hair, the boy said, out of the blue, “Pee-pee in your hair.” This sounded suspiciously like what the Chaviers girl had told her mother. Carol asked her son if anyone had ever peed in his hair. He smiled and hesitated. “Was it Danny?” she prompted. The boy nodded. “And how did you feel?” she asked. “Bad,” he said. Then he changed the subject.
An incident on October 6 convinced Carol that the devil had possessed her son. For no apparent reason, her son hit his pet cat with his fist. “Did anyone teach you to do that?” she asked, he voice trembling. He nodded. “Who was it?” she demanded. He wouldn’t say. “Was it Dan and Fran?” he told her that it was, then put his finger up the cat’s anus and began to strangle the animal. At that moment, it crossed Carol’s mind that the Kellers were Satanists. The next day she telephoned a friend who said she herself had experienced satanic abuse; and a short time later Carol received in the mail a ritual abuse checklist compiled by a child protective group in California called Believe the Children. Carol gave the group’s address to Suzanne who later ordered her own checklist. In due time, every one of the 28 indicators on the checklist was matched by an allegation against Dan and Fran Keller.
Carol had also spoken with Sandra Nash, the third mother who would level charges against the Kellers. The two Nash children, a five-year-old boy and his infant sister, attended Fran’s Day Care from March 25 to August 22, when Sandra learned from Fran Keller that charges of sexual abuse had been made against Dan. Like Suzanne Chaviers and the Staelins, Sean and Sandra Nash were college educated and middle class. Both parents were busy with their careers. Sandra Nash was a landscape architect who had been recruited to Austin from Colorado eight years ago by the engineering consulting firm of Espey Huston. She had been laid off during the bust in 1987 and more recently on maternity leave, but by the summer of 1991, she was working up to seventy hours a week. Sean owned a small, struggling moving company, largely subsidized by his wife’s income, but he expected business to improve.
The allegations against Fran’s Day Care hit the Nashes even harder than they had hit the other families. When Sandy came home that day and told me what happened,” Sean Nash told me later, “I was sitting down and I still nearly fainted.” They immediately placed their son in therapy with a psychologist, who noted the “suspicion of abuse” and observed that the boy showed “anger at the Danny doll.” Afterward, the Nash boy admitted to his mother that he knew a “secret” about Dan and Fran, but he couldn’t tell.
By the early fall of 1991, all three of the children had been interviewed by therapists—hired by the Travis County Sheriff’s Office—who videotaped the sessions. Despite a barrage of leading questions—Did Danny ever put his penis in your mouth? Has Fran ever asked you to touch her pee-pee or poo-poo?—the children revealed very little. The Staelin boy did acknowledge that Danny put his penis in the boy’s mouth, but when the interviewer asked him to show what happened using the dolls, the boy said, “You tell me.” On the first of three attempts to interview the Chaviers girl, the therapist couldn’t even certify that the little girl knew the difference between a lie and the truth. The child identified the doll’s penis as a nose and the vagina as a foot. The Nash boy admitted that “we heard” that the Chaviers girl and the Staelin boy had been harmed. He had obviously heard this from his parents, who had heard it from Suzanne and Carol.
By November, the third month of the investigation, the parents were becoming impatient and occasionally angry, pressing the investigators to move more quickly. They were on the telephone weekly, demanding to know why the Kellers hadn’t been arrested and held without bail: The parents believed (correctly as it turned out) that the Kellers were about to flee. Someone from the district attorney’s office told them they couldn’t make an arrest until the grand jury indicted. Nobody knew when that would be. The parents began to suspect a cover-up or worse.
The Staelin boy’s emotional state continued to worsen and so did his mother’s. On November 20, Carol wrote in her journal, “For the past several days I’ve tried to find a therapist for myself, without success. Today my son has pneumonia again, an ear infection and asthma. I’m very upset about the grand jury situation. Today my son was acting out worse than ever. I had to call two (separate) hot lines for help at one point to make it through the day. At 7 p.m. I lost it and nearly hurt my son. Instead I shoved a wooden chair across the floor and shouted: ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ I cried hysterically and then shook for half an hour, and panted heavily in a dog pant. Then I told Earl, ‘I want my doll.’” The next day the Staelin boy was placed in a hospital, where he stayed for three weeks, followed by two more weeks of day-program care at the hospital. Since the Staelins couldn’t afford to have two family members hospitalized, Carol settled for outpatient treatment. Around the same time, Carol’s dark suspicions were confirmed. Both a nurse at a psychiatric hospital and a policeman who had worked on a cult task force assured her that Austin was a hotbed of satanic ritual abuse. Indeed, all of Texas had been invaded by Satanists, Carol’s informants told her.
On January 28, 1992, the Nash boy watched television footage of the fugitives Dan and Fran Keller being returned to Austin in handcuffs and chains, and afterward he began to talk about Satan. He told his parents that Dan and Fran were on Satan’s team, and that Dan read out of Satan’s bible and put spells on people. He told how Dan shot people, pushed their bodies into holes, then waved his staff in the air and called to Satan. A short time later, Carol Staelin reported that her son was also talking about Satan’s bible. The Nash boy said that he couldn’t see the cover of the bible because it was always concealed behind a magazine. But Carol Staelin’s son described it as a large blue book, about the size of a telephone directory, with illustrations of clothed adults abusing naked children. In his scenario, Fran would ask Dan, “What do I do [to the Staelin boy] next?” and Dan would look it up in the book and read her the instructions.
Once the children started talking about Satan, the parents began seriously researching the massive amounts of literature available on the subject of ritual abuse, pressing the children to reveal more and more secrets. The Nash boy started talking about “bad sheriffs” being part of the satanic team. He described a blond woman named Pam who wore a brown uniform and a man named Lee who wore a similar uniform. Both “bad sheriffs” had tattoos. Deputy constable Janise White, who had known Dan Keller from their Precinct 3 days and who occasionally socialized with the Kellers—Fran Keller was the matron of honor at Janise’s wedding—immediately became the suspected female conspirator, though she in no way matched the Nash boy’s description and hadn’t worn a uniform for nearly eighteen months. Investigators showed the Nash boy four photographs of female officers, two of which were of Janise. The boy most likely had seen Janise on at least one occasion, when she visited Fran’s Day Care with some coloring books and deputy sheriff stick-on badges for the kids. He also must have seen her wedding photograph, which sat on a table in the living room of the Kellers’ home. Not surprisingly, he picked Janise from the photo lineup. From a much larger group of eighty photographs of male officers, the boy picked out a captain in the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, who was later polygraphed and cleared. Eventually, the investigators decided that the male suspect had to be deputy constable Raul Quintero, Janise White’s partner. Their reasoning: Quintero resembled the three cops that the Nash boy had misidentified in the photo lineups.
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