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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Doug Perry’s confession is hard to refute but nevertheless puzzling. Even if Perry wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, it is hard to imagine anyone admitting such brutal behavior. On the other hand, none of the children identified Perry as one of their abusers, nor did they describe a scene like the one in his statement. The Austin-area detective who complained that many fellow officers believe they are on a mission from God also speculated that Perry’s confession may have been tailored to fit their pre-conceived notion of how these scenarios were supposed to be played out.
The physical evidence that the Kellers committed a crime—or indeed that a crime was even committed—seems suspect. Asked at the trial if the tears in the Chaviers girl’s hymen could have been caused by her having inserted marbles, pinto beans, toys, and crayons into her vagina, the physician who examined her replied, “Could have.” Another physician testified that it would have been “highly unusual” for the child to injure herself in such a manner, but then many things about the Chaviers girl were highly unusual. Lost in the general atmosphere of hysteria was this question: While even a small tear to the hymen would have caused a stinging pain each time the child urinated, how was it that she didn’t report the pain until almost eight hours after she left Fran’s Day Care? Did she wait that long to void her bladder? Or was it something else? In the report of his initial investigation at Brackenridge Hospital shortly after the girl was examined, Travis County Sheriff’s Office detective Roget Wade wrote: “The complainant [Suzanne Chaviers] said she caught the victim [her daughter] taking her panties off behind the couch.” This statement did not appear in any subsequent reports, nor was it mentioned at the trial. But it appears that shortly before the onset of pain, the child was playing an old familiar game.
A conventional wisdom has emerged that children are innocent beings who do not lie. Children under the age of six probably do not recognize the difference between the truth and a lie, but they are extremely suggestible. A review of a scientific study of children’s suggestibility published in Psychological Bulletin concludes that police officers, child-care workers, and therapists who specialize in ritual abuse have a preconceived notion of what happened. “In the course of questioning [they] suggest it to the child, who then reports it as though it were true,” says the author of the article, Maggie Bruck, a psychologist at McGill University, and Stephen Ceci, a psychologist at Cornell University. “The more often you ask young children to think about something, the easier it becomes for them to make something up that they think is a memory.”
Austin therapist Vivian Lewis Heine, who has testified an estimated five hundred times in child abuse cases (almost always for the prosecution), told me that young children hardly ever give false accusations without the influence of an adult. “The majority of the time when a child falsely accuses someone,” Lewis Heine said, “there’s a co-conspirator. It’s usually a parent involved in a divorce case or an adult who had post-traumatic stress disorder, someone who was either abused as a child or believes she was abused.” She cited an article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry that listed four warning signs of false accusation: (1) the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder in the adult, (2) the presence of serious psychiatric disorder in a parent and evidence of a disturbed mother-child relationship, (3) an ongoing custody dispute, and (4) a professional committed prematurely to the truth of the allegation. Three of the four warning signs were clearly evident in the Keller case.
Only a small percentage of therapists (or police officers) buy the satanic ritual abuse and multiple personality disorder material put out by theorists like Hammond and Noblitt. In a nationwide survey of mental health professionals in 1991, 70 percent of those who responded had never treated a case of ritual abuse or multiple personality disorder. Two percent of the sample who did report such cases were responsible for a majority of the cases, each reporting more than one hundred victims. One individual reported two thousand cases. Austin therapist Karen Hutchins, who for the past seven months has been treating the Chaviers girl and the Staelin boy, estimates that about half of her fifty patients have been ritually abused and suffer multiple personality disorder. She can usually spot a victim after one visit. “I can feel an energy change,” she told me. To date, Hutchins has identified in the Staelin boy fifteen to seventeen personalities, including Jacob, an assassin alter, and Poopsie, a 56-year-old man who can have bowel movements on command. Carol Staelin regards Poopsie as final proof that the child was ritually abused. “Having a bowel movement at nine p.m. when your pattern is every other morning, you can’t fake that,” she said.
The Chaviers girl has eight personalities, Hutchins claims, including a violent alter named Crystal. At the appropriate age, Hutchins has determined, the child is programmed to be called back to the cult as a breeder, meaning that she will bear a child that will be sacrificed to Satan. The Chaviers girl was supposedly programmed to kill herself on her sixth birthday, in November 1993, but she did not. According to his therapist, the Nash boy said he is supposed to kill himself on his eighth birthday.
The Nash boy is seeing a psychiatrist rather than a therapist, and at this point, multiple personality disorder has not been diagnosed. The boy continues to show great anger and confusion. He has achieved a blue belt in karate so that, he says, “When they come and get us, I’ll be ready.” Full recovery for the boy (and for all the children) may take years. They may be in therapy for the remainder of their lives. Except for their continuing obsession with getting to the bottom of this tragedy, life has virtually stopped for Sean and Sandra Nash. Sean’s moving company is operating only part-time. Sandra has been on disability leave since the time of the trial. Their savings are long gone. “Our children’s emotional needs are such that we have no choice,” Sandra told me. “We just take it one day at a time.”
What happened at Fran’s Day Care Center was a tragedy. If the Kellers did even a fraction of what is alleged, they got what they deserved. If they didn’t, then the tragedy is compounded beyond measure, because the children believe that the stories of humiliation and torture that they were encouraged to tell are real and also because innocent people are in prison, their lives and the lives of their families wrecked. Stories of unimaginable horrors have been told and repeated and refined so many times by parents, therapists, and law enforcement authorities—told with such passion and conviction—that they are permanently planted in these children’s minds. In that respect, some form of ritual abuse obviously took place.
AUTHOR’S NOTE (March 2009): Back in 1994, as I was working on this story, I became convinced not only that Dan and Fran Keller were innocent, but that the crime they were accused of had never happened. That conviction has only deepened with time. Since this article was published, I’ve kept up a correspondence with the Kellers; I’ve written letters in support of their parole and visited them both in prison. They sit there silently, day after day, year after year, like a pair of ghosts, watching helplessly as parents die, grandchildren and great-grandchildren get born, and paroles are refused again and again. They won’t come up for parole again until 2010, and it’s unlikely that the result will be any different. I hope I’m wrong, but the board seems determined to see them serve every minute of their forty-year sentences.
The last time I visited them was in 2007. In her early sixties, Fran is still feisty, defiant and hopeful—and still a sucker for bad advice. In 1993, a jailhouse lawyer convinced her that if she divorced Dan and married him, he’d help get her out of jail. She agreed to the divorce but help never arrived, nor did the proposed marriage. She changed her religion from Baptist to Native America, which allowed her to move to a less brutal prison unit but hasn’t helped with parole. Two years ago she married a Colorado man she met on the Internet. He helped hire a Houston lawyer who persuaded her to write a letter to the parole board, confessing the guilt she had always denied. “I cried myself to sleep that night,” she told me, tears in her eyes. I told her this was the worst legal advice I’d ever heard. While it is true that parole boards are interested only in expressions of remorse and have zero tolerance for protestations of innocence, the letter is now part of her permanent record and, inadvertently, part of Dan’s record, too.
Dan is 67 now, his hair turned silver, his blue eyes placid as always. He still wears his wedding band and vows his love for Fran. “Tell her I have no hard feelings,” he said. How does he maintain hope, knowing his life has been destroyed by lies? “I try to help others,” Dan told me. “And walk with the Lord.” He told me that he is haunted by the question of what the children, now grown, believe about their pasts. “What’s going through their brains?” he asked me, rubbing his eyes. “Believing all those horrible things really happened. How do they live with it?”
When I wrote this story, I clung to some hope that it would help resolve what I was certain was a grave injustice. I wish I could say that it had. Instead, the Kellers are now mostly forgotten, a man and a woman locked away out of sight and out of mind, victims of one of those social hysterias that break loose from time to time. In their case, it was Satanic ritual abuse. But we saw it in the 1690’s in the Salem witch trials and again in the 1950’s in the red scare and the McCarthy outrages. Like its malevolent predecessors, SRA ran unchecked for a while and then died of its own craziness. It did, however, claim a number of victims, including Dan and Fran Keller. GARY CARTWRIGHT
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