April 1994
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.
Most of the people in the small meeting room at Cicada Recovery Services in South Austin were therapists, and all of them had patients who had been diagnosed as victims of satanic ritual abuse—including some of the children allegedly savaged at an Austin day care center two years earlier. In the fall of 1993, the therapists met monthly at Cicada to discuss satanic ritual abuse (SRA), which they regarded as the most menacing evil of our age. Most victims are children, though in some cases they are women, who, in the course of therapy, have recovered memories of abuse twenty or thirty years earlier. The stories that the victims relate to their therapists—stories now being discussed and analyzed at the meeting—are strikingly similar and seem to have boiled up from a Stephen King nightmare.
The tales of satanic ritual abuse usually started with touching or fondling, then progressed to oral, genital, and anal penetrations; forced injections of mind-altering drugs; monsters or witches enacting bizarre rituals that included defecating and urinating on their victims’ heads and forcing them to eat feces and drink blood and urine; and finally torture, mutilation, and murder. The rituals were almost always filmed. The victims were forced to participate in the murders and often made to eat the flesh and drink the blood of those who had been sacrificed. These were not merely the sadistic acts of pedophiles but the sophisticated techniques by which devil-worshiping perpetrators programmed and controlled victims, ultimately turning them into Manchurian Candidate-style robots. The perpetrators were often the parents or grandparents of the victims. The cults went back many generations and were as powerful as they were secretive, including among their ranks doctors, lawyers, the clergy, police officers, and prominent business and political leaders.
“They have infiltrated the legal, medical, and law enforcement professions with their agents,” reported Karen Hutchins, one of the therapists at Cicada. “The male agents tend to end up in the criminal justice system and the females in state hospitals.” Hutchins is the secretary-treasurer of this watch-dog group, which calls itself the Travis County Society for Investigation, Treatment, and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse. It is part of a statewide organization headed by Dallas psychologist Randy Noblitt. Hutchins and the others believe that satanic cults are widespread throughout Texas and the United States. They believe that cults induce multiple personality disorders in their victms to control them. These cult-created alternate personalities, or alters, behave like mental robots, programmed to follow orders. Robots have been strategically placed to sabotage our institutions and to recapture and return to the cult those who have somehow escaped—in other words, those whom the therapists are attempting to deprogram. This is nothing less than a battle to the death for the soul of America.
Psychologist Pam Monday had brought to the meeting copies of secret CIA documents supplied by Cory Hammond, a Utah psychologist and leading theorist on the satanic menace. The documents, which Hammond had gotten through the Freedom of Information Act, were lists of names of people connected to a satanic-influenced mind-control experiment that the CIA conducted following World War II called Project Monarch. “This will give you some sense of how big the cover-up is,” Monday said, passing the lists around. “Some of these names will blow your mind.” They included Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, and Mao Tse-tung.
Hammond frequently lectured at seminars and had convinced many therapists—including those at this meeting—that satanic ritual abuse was an international conspiracy involving the CIA, former Nazi scientists, and a mysterious Dr. Greenbaum. According to Hammond, Greenbaum was a young turncoat from the Nazi death camps who saved his own life by giving the Nazis the secrets to the cabala. After World War II, the CIA brought Greenbaum and the Nazi scientists (who were Satanists) to this country and hid them at military bases. In the years that followed, the scientists continued to perfect the mind-control techniques they had started in the death camps. Greenbaum was educated in psychiatry and positioned at the centerpiece of the satanic order. What was the purpose of all this activity? “My best guess,” Hammond told audiences, “is that they want an army of Manchurian candidates—tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, engage in child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, snuff films. All sorts of lucrative things. Robots who will do their bidding. And eventually the megalomaniacs at the top believe they will create a satanic order that will rule the world.” Hammond thought that the Satanists had already penetrated high levels of government. Part of his evidence was the frequency with which the name “Greenbaum” was spontaneously and independently mentioned by patients being treated for multiple personality disorder in therapy sessions across the United States.
Karen Hutchins had several patients who had spoken of Dr. Greenbaum and who recalled being subjected to mind-control experiments on military bases. Patients suffering from multiple personality disorder sometimes appeared quite normal, but their alters were capable of amazing and often supernatural feats. A client of Hutchins’, whacked-out on drugs almost to the point of being comatose, was driven to the Cicada Recovery Center one night by one of her alters, who turned out to be completely drug-free. It was common for an alter to have different-colored eyes from its host’s. Scars that appeared on one personality could not be detected on another. During therapy, rope urns might suddenly appear like stigmata on wrists or necks. Therapists referred to these apparitions as body memories—an evolving theory asserting that memories could be stored not only in the brain but in cells of the body. In Michelle Remembers, the 1980 book that introduced satanic ritual abuse, a photograph of an asymmetrical rash on Michelle’s neck was labeled a body memory of the “devil’s tail.” The book was written by a former Catholic priest who is now a psychiatrist and his wife and former patient, Michelle. Under hypnosis, Michelle recovered bits and pieces of memories in which the former priest discerned satanic motifs. Though there was no evidence that anything Michelle remembered was true, the book became a nonfiction best-seller. Within a few years, the FBI was getting reports from women all over the country who claimed that they had escaped from devil-worshipping cults.
Ritual abuse cases usually involved day care centers, which seemed only logical in the opinion of the members of the Travis County Society for Investigation, Treatment, and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse. “You start with preschool-age kids,” said Hutchins. Everyone in the room was familiar with the November 1992 prosecution of Fran and Dan Keller, the middle-aged couple who operated Fran’s Day Care Center in the rural Oak Hll area south of Austin: Hutchins was now treating two of the three children allegedly abused in that case. Fran and Dan were each serving sentences of 48 years, and two Travis County law enforcement officers had also been indicted and were awaiting trial. Dozens of additional conspirators were still at large, the therapist believed.
Although the allegations of torture, mutilation, and murder in the case of Fran’s Day Care Center seemed unbelievable—and indeed there was hardly a trace of physical evidence—they fit precisely with a pattern of charges that had emerged in earlier highly publicized day care cases in California, North Carolina and Florida. Dozens of people had gone to prison. Families had been wrecked. Children too young to understand what was happening had been permanently scarred with memories of unspeakable assaults. The damage in human terms was incalculable. SRA had spawned a cottage industry among therapists, child-protection workers, cops, writers, lecturers, radio talk-show hosts, and others who bought into the SRA story line. This country hadn’t seen anything like it since the Salem witch trials.
Most of the parents who took their children to Fran’s Day Care Center were baby boomers, dedicated to their careers and their children and drawn irresistibly to the day care’s rural isolation and rustic, idyllic setting. The one-story fieldstone house, which was also the Kellers’ home, was nestled among cedar trees and rolling hills, as tidy and pastoral as a cottage in a fairy tale. Behind the house was a playground, a shallow swimming pool, cages of rabbits and doves, and a corral with a resident pony named Dancer. This part of Oak Hill was sparsely populated, with small homes, trailers, and century-old family cemeteries. The Kellers’ neighbors were working people, fiercely independent and likely to drive pickup trucks. Lawn décor usually featured iron kettles, rusted farm equipment, fieldstone walkways. Strings of deer skulls hung from the limbs of live oaks, armadillo and raccoons roamed freely, and hawks and turkey buzzards rode the invisible currents of the placid blue sky.
Dan and Fran Keller didn’t look like monsters, though it is true that there are no demographic profiles of pedophiles, much less Satanists. The Kellers had no history of drugs, mental illness, or sexual abnormalities, but neither would pedophiles necessarily. Pedophiles are narcissistic and exhibit what therapists call cognitive distortions, or the inability to recognize that even the vilest act is anything eccept normal behavior. That description didn’t fit the Kellers. Nor did they appear to be victims of low self-esteem, as many child molesters are said to be. Indeed, those who knew Fran suspected that she suffered from high self-esteem. The word normally used to describe her, even by friends, was “bitch.” She was a woman of strong opinions and clearly the dominant partner in her marriage to Danny. Danny had retired from his job with a Travis County road crew to help Fran run the day care, which opened for business in September 1989, two years before charges were filed and the day care was ordered to shut down.
