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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The following day, after obtaining a lawyer, Perry retracted his statement. But the damage was done: He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years’ probation. Perry claimed that the Rangers had intimidated and pressured him, insisting that they could prove that he was part of the conspiracy and warning him what happened to child molesters in prison. “I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.” A polygraph expert testified that Perry was lying when he said he didn’t know what went on at Fran’s Day Care. In fact, Perry was lying, about that at least. While he was still married to “the bad sheriff,” Janise White, he had read a copy of the offense report against the Kellers.
Perry’s statement described in graphic detail a textbook example of pedophilia: how he and the Kellers and Raul Quintero did terrible things to a boy and a girl (later identified as the Nash boy and the Chaviers girl), while Janise White took pictures. There was nothing ritualistic or ceremonial in his description, no robes or candles or satanic bible: It read like a page out of The Story of O. But the statement was made-to-order for the case the prosecution was planning.
By the time the trial of Fran and Dan Keller started in November 1992, prosecutors Judy Shipway and Bryan Case thought they had an excellent case, much neater than most of the child abuse cases they had tried. The plan was to sidestep the sensational allegations of satanic ritual abuse and restrict the case to a single child-victim, the Chaviers girl, who had made the initial accusation and for whom there was medical evidence of abuse. It didn’t matter that after hours of interrogation the little girl had told authorities almost nothing. They needed her only for show: this pristine child pitted against the evil Kellers. The hearsay exception in child abuse cases cleared the path for her mother to testify in lurid detail. The judge also agreed to allow the therapist, Donna David, to give hearsay testimony. The Chaviers girl’s testimony was an exercise in futility. The child appeared more silly than frightened, waving her lollipop at Shipway and popping the microphone with her hand. She denied that she even knew anyone named Dan and Fran or that she ever went to a place called Fran’s Day Care. She denied that she ever told anyone that someone touched her in a way she didn’t like. When Shipway asked, “Did you ever tell Donna that Danny did something to you?” the girl replied, “No way, Jose”—one of her mother’s favorite expressions.
Carol Staelin even speculated that it may not have been the Chaviers girl on the witness stand, but one of her programmed alters. Randy Noblitt, the Dallas clinical psychologist who was being paid $120 an hour to research satanic abuse for the state and another $140 to testify, had warned that this might happen. Satanists often use hand signals to control their victims, he said. What most people in the courtroom took to be the defendant’s running a hand down the side of his face, Noblitt interpreted as a signal that meant “You saw nothing, you heard nothing, you will say nothing.” An Austin television station later ran a special report that showed Keller flashing a hand signal as he was led away from the courtroom. It looked like he was forming the letter c with his thumb and forefinger, and Noblitt told the TV reporter that this was a satanic message, In fact, Keller was saying hello to the boys in C Block, where he had been confined for the previous nine months.
The Nash boy was called as a witness to rebut Fran Keller’s claim that all of her troubles could be attributed to one lying little girl. He was not required to sit in the witness box as the Chaviers girl had been but was allowed to testify in a separate room, on closed-circuit television. He appeared primed and thoroughly prepared. When Case began questioning the boy about Fran’s Day Care Center, the boy interrupted and said, “You mean Hate Care Center.” “Why would you say that?” Case asked. “Because they hate kids,” the boy replied, After that, every time the prosecutor mentioned “day care,” the boy corrected him and said, “you mean ‘hate care,’” The Nash boy was a far better witness than the Chaviers girl ahd been. In a clear voice he told the jury that he had watched as “Danny pee-peed glue on [the Chaviers girl’s] head. . .and Gran washed it off.”
The defense, not the prosecution, introduced satanism into the trial. The court had appointed two attorneys to defend the Kellers—Dan Whitworth for Dan Keller, Lewis Jones for Fran Keller—but had given them little money to hire investigators or bring in expert witnesses. Whitworth and Jones didn’t know about the satanic allegations until after the trial started. They found them almost by accident when the judge allowed them to subpoena Donna David’s worksheets. They took a calculated risk that the jury would find the satanic allegations so incredible that it would doubt the validity of the simpler sexual abuse charges. The gamble didn’t work.
The prosecution made the most of Fran Keller’s defiant personality and implied that the mere fact that the Kellers had fled was proof of guilt. One of the Las Vegas cops who had pushed their way into the Kellers’ motel room the previous January told the jury that Fran had refused to cooperate, that she had an “attitude.” Fran claimed that he had forced her to stand naked while being questioned. Fran told the jury that she and Dan had left town because, “We were scared and humiliated.” Also, at the time of their indictment, their lawyer hinted that the court would set a bail they could not afford. Above all, their long-term outlook appeared bleak. Fran had read about the prosecution of other child-care workers around the country and feared that they couldn’t get a fair trial. It was a fear with some foundation: Conviction rates in day care cases are about 85 perfect. The jury in Austin bought into the mainstream view, just as juries had in other cities and states.
A year later, charges against the two “bad sheriffs,” White and Quintero, were dropped. The reason cited by the district attorney was that the children had stopped talking. To this day the parents continue to believe that dozens, maybe even hundreds, of co-conspirators walk free to continue Satan’s work. Sean and Sandra Nash have filed a civil suit against the Kellers, White, Quintero, Doug Perry, and others.
The fear of cults is part of a recurring pattern in our society, surfacing time and again during periods of widespread social upheaval. Satanic ritual abuse is to the 1990’s what McCarthyism was to the 1950’s and what the Salem witch trials were to the 1690’s—a mythic expression of deep-seated expression of deep-seated anxiety over complex changes in family and values. Child abuse is the demon of our generation. Without question it is widespread. But are we to believe, as statistics indicate, that it is nineteen times more likely to occur today than it was thirty years ago? Or is something else happening? Essayist and retired psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer argues that the helping professions—child-protection workers, therapists, child-abuse police—have convinced themselves that the abuse is epidemic and “have encouraged a massive search to find cases, and where they cannot be found, to invent them.”
Child-protection workers and therapists are caught in the middle of this controversy. They are not expected to be impartial investigators but advocates for children. They commonly act on a presumption that children have been victimized, that their real job is to gather evidence to support prosecution. An independent therapist hired by defense attorneys to review the videotapes made of the three victims in the Keller case counted 89 leading questions. The problem with this, aside from the inherent injustice, is that well-intended child advocates may inadvertently trap a child in a contradiction. If a child denies being abused, the denial is taken as evidence that the child is repressing memories of terrifying experiences. If a child expresses anxiety—as one would expect after repeated interrogation—the anxiety is regarded as evidence of repressed memories. Dr. George K. Ganaway of Emory University writes, “a substantial portion, if not all, of the newly acquired SRA trauma memories and cult-related alternate ‘personalities’ eventually will prove to be products of a mutually shared deception between patient and therapist, serving the narcissistic needs of both. . .”
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