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 first and still best known SRA investigation began in 1983, when a mentally ill mother told Los Angeles County authorities that her child had been abused at the McMartin Pre-School. As it happened, this allegation coincided with a hotly contested reelection campaign for the office of district attorney, in which the primary issue was child abuse. Following the first accusation, the police department mailed out two hundred letters to parents of McMartin preschoolers, listing specific questions to ask their children to determine whether or not they had been molested. All the children denied having been abused. But at the suggestion of prosecutors, frightened parents sent their children to Children’s Institute International, a clinic that specializes in sexual abuse therapy. The CII staff suggested ritual abuse scenarios to the kids and warned them that if they didn’t tell the “yucky secrets,” people would think they were stupid. This technique is almost identical to the Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, a catch-22 theory authored by Roland Summit, M.D., which says, in effect, if there is evidence of sex abuse and a child denies it, this is only further proof that it happened. In which case, a therapist should use any means necessary to help the child talk. Of the 400 McMartin children interviewed, the CII staff suspected that 369 had been molested. The McMartin trial went on for nearly three years, without a conviction. But it led to a rash of satanic ritual abuse reports around the country, of which the case against Fran’s Day Care is among the most recent.
Sensationalized by the media and by far-fetched theories put forward by psychologists such as Cory Hammond, many people now accept that our nation and world is under siege by a multigenerational international megacult. So-called cult survivors have appeared on television talks shows like Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo. And after each television appearance, fresh allegations surface. Accounts of satanic ritual abuse have also appeared in countless articles, books, and made-for-television movies such as Do You Know the Muffin Man? Though the Muffin Man was total fiction, its ending was straight out of the true believer’s handbook: Parents discover day care teachers worshiping the devil amid piles of kiddie porn. Thousands of women—most of them in their twenties, thirties, and forties—have come forward in the past ten years with accusations that they were sexually abused as children. One of the most popular self-help books on sexual abuse, The Courage to Heal (which Carol Staelin read during therapy in 1989), advises, “If you are unable to remember any specific instances [of childhood sex abuse]. . .but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did. . . . If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.”
Almost all “recovered memories” begin with vague recollections that something happened. Carol Staelin’s first clue, for example, came in group therapy, as another woman was describing her own recovered memory of childhood abuse. “Suddenly, my body started shaking all over, and I started crying,” Carol told me. “I went into an altered state. My body was remembering something.” Later, in a one-on-one session, her therapist suggested that her many physical and emotional problems were caused by repressed memories of childhood abuse.
“It was the therapist who planted the idea in my mind,” she admitted. “I had no idea.” Gradually, with the help of her therapist, Carol began recovering the memory. It came in bits and pieces—flashbacks of a room, a shadow, a feeling. In these flashbacks, she looked down on the scene of her abuse as though she were a camera mounted on the ceiling. But the theory of recovered memory contradicts the way memories actually work. Our brains are not cameras, indiscriminately recording everything in view. We selectively record and distort to suit our needs. And memories are not film—not true, unchanging renditions of reality. Over time, these already distorted renditions are reworked and integrated with other memories, each of which is also distorted and changed over time. “Memory is basically a reconstructive process. . . [a way] to ‘make sense’ of the present,” says Robyn Dawes, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. “The fit between our memories and stories enhances our belief in them. Often, however, it is the story that creates the memory, rather than vice versa.”
Some professionals claim that the similarity of satanic ritual abuse cases around the country is proof that they are true. More likely, the similarity results from the questions posed by professionals, who are familiar with the well-publicized cases. Most of the police officers whom I talked to either bought the story line without reservation or rejected it entirely. “The danger of all these wild allegations is that they could hurt legitimate child abuse cases,” one Austin-area detective told me. “Ritual abuse is such an emotional area, it defied credibility. There’s a core group of law enforcement officers who feel that they are on a mission from God, that ritual abuse is the ultimate battle of good versus evil.” The FCI has been consulted in hundreds of cases involving allegations of ritual abuse and concluded that there is far less there than meets the eye. Kenneth Lanning of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit has been widely quoted debunking reports of satanic ritual abuse. “We now have hundreds of victims alleging that thousands of offenders are abusing and even murdering tens of thousands of people as part of organized satanic cults,” Lanning wrote. “And there is little or no corroborative evidence.” Not a single body or body part has been produced. If the cults are real, Lanning observed, they constitute the greatest crime conspiracy in the history of the world.
It is important when investigating allegations like those against the Kellers to distinguish between sexual abuse and the far more bizarre satanic ritual. The incredibility of the latter should not reflect on the possibility of the former. Assistant District Attorney Bryan Case conceded that Fran and Dan may have faked the ritual part to conceal and confuse their true intentions, but he believes that the children were abused. His belief is supported in part by the children’s bizarre “acting out” behavior in the summer and fall of 1991. Although the Chaviers girl and the Staelin boy had previously demonstrated behavioral problems, the problems appeared to have greatly intensified after the children started at Fran’s Day Care. But are these problems indicators of sexual abuse or indicators that the parents lacked the will to discipline their children? It is necessary too to factor in the influence of the therapists, whose education and training are in social work, not medicine, and who have a substantial financial interest in identifying and sustaining a malady for which there is no quick cure. The Nash boy exhibited few behavioral problems until after he had been in therapy—and asked to reveal secrets—for four or five months. There is certainly evidence that the Chaviers girl was sexually abused—the medial report, Doug Perry’s statement, the child’s own allegations, which were unusually lurid and detailed for such a case. What started as a simple accusation—“Danny hurt me”—became an avalanche of charges that overwhelm the senses. District Attorney Ronnie Earle told me, “We’ve learned from long experience that these stories often get embellished. There is usually a kernel of truth at the core, but over time it gets covered with layer after layer of things we’re not sure really happened.” But what if the kernel at the core is not the truth? What if it’s a lie? What if a distraught mother, obsessed with fears of sexual abuse, and an emotionally disturbed and manipulative child somehow conjure up a tale that never happened? And what if a therapist too ready to believe in satanic ritual abuse picks it up from there, and it just snowballs until nobody can really say what happened?
In every satanic ritual abuse case that I’ve read about, there is evidence of overprotective parents’ pressuring children to reveal “secrets” and planting ideas in their minds. A mother in the highly publicized Little Rascals Day Care case in North Carolina refused her child dessert until he told her what she wanted to know. Carol Staelin admits asking her son leading questions. She simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. When the Chaviers girl was being videotaped by a therapist at the sheriff’s office, her mother interrpted the process at one point with promises of a “special treat” if she would cooperate. When that didn’t work, she tried another approach, telling the child, “They need to know what happened because you’re the only big girl that can protect the other children because what Fran and Danny did was very, very, very mean.”
For at least nine months before the Kellers’ trial, the parents and investigators relied on material from groups such as Believe the Children (which was started by the parents in the McMartin case in California) to answer the unanswerable questions. For example, how did such an apparently unsophisticated couple as the Kellers learn the rituals or master the mind-control techniques credited to them? Was all that covered in the satanic bible? “I learned that the cults send people around the country to teach [these rituals] to child-care workers,” Sargeant Larry Oliver told me. He learned this from Dee Brown, a special education teacher, television reporter, and self-proclaimed satanic ritual abuse expert from California. Also, with the repeated rapes, electrical shocks, and screwdrivers up the anus and urethra, how was it that the children showed no cuts or bruises? According to the gospel of Cory Hammond, that wasn’t the Chaviers girl, the Staelin boy, and the Nash boy who underwent such assaults, it was their alternate personalities, or alters.
Much of what the children said—or, more accurately, what the parents said they said—is either demonstrably false or inherently unbelievable. In the beginning, the children talked about Fran Keller’s little dog, Sissy, who had mysteriously disappeared. As the story evolved, it became more demonic. The Staelin boy related how Danny Keller had clamped the dog’s lips together, poked its eyes with pins, shot it full of drugs, then strangled it. The Nash boy put his own spin on the story, relating how the Kellers axed Sissy to a pulp. By talking to neighbors, private investigator Drew McAngus discovered that Sissy had been hit by a car: Danny buried her but had spared his wife’s feelings by letting her believe that the dog had run away. In another tale, the Kellers kidnapped a baby gorilla from Zilker Park, after which Fran cut a finger off the gorilla and drained the blood in a water bucket. But there has never been a zoo at Zilker Park, much less a gorilla.
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