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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In March 1992 the investigation was taken away from the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, which in seven months had discovered almost nothing in the way of evidence, and turned over to two detectives from the Austin Police Department, Sergeant Larry Oliver and Detective Rodney Bryant. Later, two Texas Rangers and an investigator from the district attorney’s office were added to the task force. The parents of forty additional children who had attended Fran’s Day Care over the past two years were questioned, but no other complaints of abuse were reported. Since the Nash boy was shaping up as the key witness, Larry Oliver asked Sandra Nash to come to his office and make a statement. “I knew that her statement would be very important,” he told me. “Under Texas law, the first person a child reveals something to can testify in court. It’s an exception to the hearsay rule.” Oliver had heard some horrible, almost unbelievable tales in his years on the child abuse beat but nothing even remotely like the stories that Sandra Nash related. Danny Keller had urinated and ejaculated on the boy’s head and made him brush his teeth with feces, Sandra reported. Her son had been forced to kiss his baby sister between the legs with his tongue out while Danny took movies and Fran held a gun to the boy’s head. Danny had pretended to cut off the boy’s penis. All the children had been baptized with blood and taken to cemeteries where, with the help of two “bad sheriffs,” they dug up bodies. After Oliver’s first of several long interviews with Sandra Nash in April 1992, h told her, “First, I believe you. And second, this scares the hell out of me.”
As the parents continued their research into satanic ritual abuse, they bombarded Oliver and Bryant with amazing reports. The Staelin boy talked about killing people, cutting them up with chain saws, skinning them, and putting the skins in the children’s socks. The kids told stories of people in multi-colored robes, carrying candles, sacrificing cats and dogs and sometimes babies. The Chaviers girl had been talking about killing babies all along, but now she was going into detail. An elderly neighbor woman had brought a newborn baby to Fran’s for sacrifice, the girl told her mother. The baby’s name was Rachel. Suzanne Chaviers remembered the matter-of-fact tone in the child’s voice as she related the grisly details, almost as though she were watching in ton television: “And then, Mommy they cut baby Rachel up the middle so I could see her insides, and she started crying. Then they cut her throat, and she quit crying. They put her little heart in my hand, and it was bloody and it went thump, thump, thump. Then they cut her up, and Fran held me, and Danny made me drink the blood.”
According to the parents, Fran’s Day Care was a working brothel. When customers appeared, the Kellers lined up the children like cuts of meat on a display shelf. Customers paid cash up front to Danny, then took the child of children of choice to the playroom. One customer wanted all the children and agreed to Danny’s price of $2,000. Before the children were taken to the playroom, Fran drugged them with needles to the anus or toes. Lookouts carrying two-way radios warned the Satanists when someone was approaching the day care, at which time Fran Keller and Janise White turned the satanic pictures to the wall, revealing the Christian paintings on the other side.
Frequently the children were driven to other homes or businesses in and around Austin, where they were abused by people dressed as monsters and werewolves. At the sheriff substation and Precinct 3 road maintenance complex—where both Danny Keller and Janise White had worked—the children were supposedly abused by men and women in black uniforms. The orgies were often filmed. The Nash boy reported an incident in which Danny Keller delivered ninety gift-wrapped packages (apparently of pornography tapes) and collected $10,000, which he spread out in piles on the floor of the day care for all the kids to play with. An investigator suggested to the parents that the Kellers were part of an international porno and prostitution ring. This explained why, at the advanced age of fifty, Danny Keller found Satanism attractive. He was in it for the money.
The children also told of being flown on jets to Mexico and taken to military bases like Camp Mabry, home of the Texas National Guard, These reports squared with the satanic checklists and other satanic ritual abuse information the parents were gathering. Carol had discovered the airplane scenario in a book titled The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, recommended to her by Pam Noblitt, the wife of Dallas clinical psychologist Randy Noblitt, the president of the Society for the Investigation, Treatment and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse. (Randy was guru and adviser to a number of Austin therapists.) The book makes wild and unsubstantiated claims that some of Omaha’s top business, academic, and political leaders conspired in a network of pornography and ritual murder. Girls and boys were flown to a number of cities, including Austin, where they were subjected to unspeakable sexual abuses by devil-worshiping old men in satanic hoods and then murdered during the sex act while a cameraman filmed and Hunter S. Thompson directed.
Since her son had talked about cemeteries, Sandra Nash obtained a geological survey map of the area with all the cemeteries marked and took the boy to three of them. The Nash boy described and reenacted a memory of Danny pushing a man into a grave and riddling him with bullets. In time, each of the children pointed to graves where they had seen people buried or dug up. Sergeant Oliver noted in his report that the surfaces of several of the older graves appeared “disturbed,” that the dirt was suspiciously soft rather than hard-packed as one would expect. Twice during the summer of 1992, the task force conducted land air searches of a cemetery, using a Department of Public Safety helicopter equipped with an infrared camera. Nothing was detected the first time, but during the second search, the camera picked up “hot spots,” which might indicate recent burials. However, only one of the hot spots was a place the children had pointed out. Oliver wanted to get a court order to dig up the grave, but he was overruled. “I still think a crime was committed there,” Oliver told me eighteen months later. “There should have been more of an investigation, but that was a decision I had to live with.” In fact, there was more of an investigation. Drew McAngus, a former Travis County deputy sheriff who was hired as a private investigator by lawyers for the Kellers, talked to the families of people buried at the cemetery. None of the graves had been disturbed. “A lot of those graves were old and were sinking with age and erosion,” McAngus told me. “The families would go there periodically and add fresh dirt. Nothing really mysterious about it.”
Sean Nash was conducting his own investigation, jotting down license numbers of vehicles at homes or businesses where the kids told of being abused and taking pictures of suspected Satanists during pretrial hearings. Exploring the woods behind the day care center, Nash discovered what he considered evidence of satanic activity—fire circles, a doll with the arms and legs ripped off, and some bones of small animals, which he had analyzed at the Balcones Research Center. Carol Staelin suspected that district attorney Ronnie Earle was involved in satanism. Unable to get Earle’s home address from the DA’s office, she looked it up in the county clerk’s records. She discovered that he lived on Hamilton Pool Road, not far from Fran’s Day Care. On her way to check out Earle’s home, she passed a large goat farm—“Goats are used in satanic ceremonial rituals,” she observed—then came to the walled compound of county buildings that included a sheriff substation and the Precinct 3 road maintenance headquarters, places where her son said the kids had been taken. “Imagine my shock when I saw that cozy little arrangement,” she told me later. “But that was nothing compared to what happened next. I backed out of the driveway and continued down the road, and to my shock, the first driveway I came to was his—Mr. District Attorney himself. I literally started shaking all over.”
The big break in the prosecution’s case came in July 1992, almost by accident. Sally Whitley, who was the DA’s representative on the task force, knew the two “bad sheriffs,” Janise White and Raul Quintero. Before joining the DA’s staff the previous spring, Whitley had worked with the two suspects in the Precinct 3 warrant division. Whitley also knew Doug Perry, a road crew truck driver who had married Janise White about a year earlier but was no divorced from her and apparently bitter about the experience. At the moment, the investigation was stuck—there was not sufficient evidence to indict White or Quintero—but Whitley had a hunch that Doug Perry was the key to dislodging it.
Debbie Dorrance, a deputy constable at Precinct 3, recalls that on July 8, Sally Whitley told her of a plan. “She told me they were gong out to see Doug, Janise’s ex-husband,” Dorrance says. “She said if we tell Doug that Janise and Raul have already given statements and ‘ratted’ on you, he’d probably sign a statement on them. Sally said that she thought Doug was dumb enough to fall for it.” (Whitley admits that the plan was hers but denies saying Doug was dumb.) The plan worked better than anyone at the DA’s office had dared hope. After submitting to two polygraph tests and undergoing several hours of intense interrogation by Texas Rangers, Perry implicated not only Dan and Fran Keller, Janise White, and Raul Quintero in the sexual abuse of children but also himself. This was the final brick that the prosecution needed to build its case—an adult eyewitness.
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