March 27, 2009 - The Austin Chronicle

NEWSBELIEVING THE CHILDREN CONTINUED FROM P.23Traumatic OriginFran and Danny Keller had been marriedabout a year when they moved into a ranchstylebrick home on Thomas Springs Road,northwest of the Y in Oak Hill. They’d beenliving in an apartment, but Fran, a country girlat heart, was eager to find something out oftown. “I like gardens, and I like animals,” shesaid recently. “I just wanted someplace in thecountry.” The couple found the three-bedroomhome owned by Julia Dietz, who hasremained friends with the Kellers. “They werenice people,” she says.The couple leased the home on July 1,1988, and immediately began work on theproperty. Danny, a manager of the county’sPrecinct 3 road crew, put in a stone walkwayto the front door and began clearing cedar inthe back yard, where the couple pastured theirhorse, Fancy Dancer; Fran planted a garden.The couple had been in the home just morethan a year when Fran decided she was tiredof working at the H-E-B. When her formerboss gave birth to a son, Fran began to care forhim while his mother was at work. It wasn’tlong before Fran was taking in other kids,referred to her by friends and neighbors.Eventually, she put a sign up in the front yardadvertising her services. “It was wonderful. Itaught the kids how to garden,” she says, “andwe had a big back yard, and we bought a poolfor the kids. And we had sand all over theyard. … We built one of those big woodengyms. … We had a horse, and [the kids]would take rides on the horse.”By 1991, Danny had retired; he tended theproperty and helped with the kids, takingthem out for rides on the horse or pullingthem in a large wagon behind his riding lawnmower. Teresa Chambers, a former paramedic,says the environment the Kellers had createdwas the main reason she put her two childrenin day care with Fran. “I took a tour of thehouse; it was clean. There was one particularroom that was the kids’ room. There was fishingnet on the wall holding up stuffed animals,”Chambers recalled. She was alsoimpressed by the animals (in addition to thehorse, the Kellers had six doves, a pair ofparakeets, a dog, and a cat) and the garden. “Ithought … this is so cool for kids!” By thesummer of 1991, the Kellers were regularlytaking in between eight and 10 kids each day– including Christina Chaviers and VijayStaelin, both 3, and Brendan Nash, then 5.By all accounts, before she ever spent amoment at the Kellers, Christina was a troubledchild. In the summer of 1991, her parents,Rick and Suzanne, were embroiled in abitter divorce, marked in part, recalls Rick, byaccusations that he had been abusive towardhis wife and toddler daughter. “We were bothevaluated, and [Suzanne] came out as passiveaggressive,and I was a dumbshitwith an average IQ,” he says. ButSuzanne “got to court first andsaid I was abusive and all thatstuff.” (Suzanne Guinne, nowStratton, did not respond to phonecalls or e-mail requesting an interviewfor this story; ChristinaChaviers did not respond to similarrequests.) Guinne, an interiordesigner, told the court that thereason she sought day care forChristina was so she’d have aplace to take her daughter whileshe ran errands related to the divorce – tocourt, to see her lawyer, to attend counseling.Christina attended Fran’s Day Care no morethan 13 times; prior to that year, she hadrarely been away from her mother’s side. Atthe same time she began dropping Christinaoff for day care at the Kellers, in May 1991,Guinne began taking her daughter to seeDavid-Campbell.According to the therapist’s testimony atthe Kellers’ trial, Christina’s behaviors wereamong the worst she’d ever seen. Christinahad been “acting out” for months, she said,long before the child began going to Fran’sDay Care. She was violent toward her motherand often bit her; she once tried to jump outJulia Dietzof a moving car; she was behaving like a dog,eating and drinking from a bowl and defecatingin the back yard; she once tried to stab thefamily’s dog with a fork. She was inserting toysinto her vagina – mostly marbles and crayons– and she was already using rough language,including the phrase “butt fuck.” WhetherDavid-Campbell was able to identify the causeof Christina’s behavioral issues or whether herbehavior improved with therapy isn’t clear.(David-Campbell told the court that, by theend of 1992, she’d seen Christina roughly 150times and that Christina’s behaviors wouldwax and wane.) But as the summer of 1991wore on, she said, Christina’s behaviors weredefinitely getting worse.In mid-August, Guinne and David-Campbellsaid later, they believed they hadfound the answer to why Christinawas so ill-behaved. It didn’t explainwhy Christina had been acting outfor so long and in so many differentways, but neither her mother nor hertherapist acknowledged that in court.Instead, they moved quickly to asingle explanation: Christina hadbeen abused at Fran’s Day Care.On Aug. 15, 1991, Guinne pickedChristina up from the Kellers’ atabout 1:30pm, to take her to a 2pmsession with David-Campbell.According to Guinne, she was driving onMoPac toward the therapist’s office whenChristina volunteered that she didn’t likeDanny. “I asked her why,” Guinne testified inNovember 1992. “She said that he hurt her –he had hurt her and pulled her panties downand spanked her and he pooed and peed on herhead.” Guinne said she decided not to ask toomany questions, “because I didn’t know how tohandle that exactly and figured that we weregoing to counseling and that was the best placeto handle all of whatever she had to say.”At the office, David-Campbell brought out apair of anatomically correct dolls for Christina– so she could show the therapist and motherwhat it was that Danny had done. After Dannydefecated on her head, she said, Fran washed itout “with blue shampoo.” Then, she said,Danny “had taken a writing pen and put it upher,” Guinne told the court. Christina thenstarted pointing to the hole on the female dollthat represents a vagina and “started showingus” where the pen had gone. “[W]e asked her,‘One time?’ And she said no,” Guinne said. “Shestarted counting on her fingers, lots of times,started going, ‘One, two, three, four, five.’”That evening at home, Guinne said sheheard Christina crying in the bathroom. Shetold her mother that it “hurts inside” whenshe urinated. Christina kept pointing to hervagina and contorting her labia to make hergenitalia look like “a face.” She said thatDanny had taught her that. Then Christinasaid that there was also “glue” stuck inside her– she said, “Danny took his pee-pee and put itin her hole and got glue all stuck inside and allover her, and it was yucky.” Guinne called thedoctor and rushed Christina to Brackenridge.Dr. Michael Mouw was on duty in the Brackenridge emergency room when Guinne arrivedwith her daughter just after 11pm. In five yearsof medical practice, Mouw had evaluated approximately30 children who were suspected victimsof sexual abuse, but he did not have specializedtraining in that area, he told jurors. Guinne toldMouw that in the previous weeks her daughterhad been “crawling behind furniture and tryingto insert toys into her vagina,” Mouw recalled incourt. Guinne also told him that Christina hadpreviously been abused. Mouw tested for semenbut found nothing. He did, however, find thatChristina’s genitalia were red and noted “whatappeared to be lacerations to the hymen at threeand nine o’clock,” he testified.Could the injuries be “of a traumatic origin?”Assistant District Attorney Bryan Case asked.“Yes,” he said, and could be “consistent”with an allegation of sexual abuse.Under defense questioning, Mouw testifiedthat the injuries could also have been theresult of Christina’s own actions.The SatanicAbuse ScareThe sensational charges against Franand Danny Keller and their home daycare were not unique. By 1992, the yearthe Kellers were tried, about 100 childcareworkers across the country hadbeen charged with ritual sex abuse ofchildren, and 20 day care workers hadbeen convicted in similar cases. Themost notorious concerned the McMartinPreschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif. There, more than 300 childrenwould eventually make statements accusing their teachersnot only of sexually violating them but also of subjecting them tobizarre, ritualistic abuse. Many of the allegations made by childrenin the McMartin case were curiously similar to those that would bemade against the Kellers. In 1990, after a decade in the courtsfor what became the longest and most expensive criminal case inAmerican history, the McMartin defendants were acquitted.But the public hysteria surrounding alleged day care abuse,exemplified and fed by the McMartin prosecution, was still verymuch in the cultural atmosphere. So was a widespread notionthat a vast network of Satanists was intent on corrupting andsexually abusing children and that many of its practitioners couldbe found working in child care. (The cults avoided discovery andprosecution, some claimed, because law enforcement memberswere themselves part of the satanic network. In the Kellers’case, one parent told Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright shesuspected longtime District Attorney Ronnie Earle – in partbecause he lived near a goat farm.)Partly for this reason, the allegations made by the childrenagainst the Kellers were hardly tested at all. Apparently, theprosecutors and some of the police investigators believed atleast some of the wildest allegations – specifically, that therewas cult abuse at work.Satanic ritual abuse is a fictional pop-culture archetype – mostlyin horror movies – but it was widely introduced to the public as areal, hidden conspiracy with the 1980 publication of the bookMichelle Remem bers. The co-authors, Canadian psychiatristLawrence Pazder and a longtime patient of his, Michelle Smith(whom Pazder later married), recount the therapy that led to herpurportedly “remembering” that she had been abused in the 1950sby her mother and other members of a “satanic cult” in BritishColumbia. The book has since been exposed as a hoax by severalresearchers, but at the time, its revelations – including the notionthat there was a widespread cult of Satanists torturing and sexuallyabusing children – caught public attention and fed the fears of parentswho, with many women now in the workplace, were increasinglyleaving their children in the care of others during the day. Thenotion of a powerful, underground cult of Satanists convinced manyparents, therapists, and credulous prosecutors, leading to a seriesof satanic ritual abuse-related child-care cases, beginning with thenotorious McMartin case. By the time of the allegations against theKellers, the satanic ritual abuse script for child abuse was alreadywell established and had not yet met much meaningful challenge.An excellent history of the satanic ritual abuse panic is Satan’sSilence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American WitchHunt, by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (Basic Books, 336pp., 1995). For more information on people wrongly accused orconvicted of crimes against children, visit the website of theNational Center for Reason and Justice, www.ncrj.org. – J.S.24 T H E A U S T I N C H R O N I C L E MARCH 27, 2009 a u s t i n c h r o n i c l e . c o m