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Post by Graveyardbride on Dec 13, 2013 12:18:22 GMT -5
Dan and Fran Keller Texas Pair Released after Serving 21 Years for ‘Satanic Abuse’
Dan Keller has left an Austin jail, a week after his wife was released – and 21 years after the pair were given a 48-year sentence for sexual assault during America’s “Satanic panic” era. Fran Keller, 63, was released on bond last week after the Travis County district attorney agreed the trial jury was probably swayed by the faulty testimony of an expert witness.
To supporters of Dan and Fran Keller, their 1992 trial was a modern-day Texas witch-hunt that recalled the hysterical delusions of 17th-century Salem. The fuse was lit in August 1991, when a three-year-old girl on the way to a behavioral therapy session told her mother that Dan Keller had spanked her at the preschool he ran with his wife in Austin. The girl told the therapist that Keller had sexually assaulted her using a pen and “pooped and peed on my head.” In subsequent months, two other children made similar claims about the Kellers. By the time the couple went on trial in November 1992, the allegations were significantly more lurid and involved allegations of ritual abuse, murder, dismemberment and animal sacrifice. The Kellers were found guilty of aggravated sexual assault of a child, even though the three-year-old girl at the center of the case recanted her claims in court.
A modern-day Texas witch-hunt. The only physical evidence against the Kellers was the testimony of Dr. Michael Mouw, who examined the girl in the emergency room of a local hospital after the therapy session and said he found tears in her hymen that potentially indicated that she was molested. Mouw signed an affidavit last January in which he affirms that he now realizes his inexperience led him to a conclusion that “is not scientifically or medically valid, and that I was mistaken.”
In an appeal filed on behalf of Fran Keller earlier this year, her lawyer, Keith Hampton, also argued that the state presented misleading evidence about the cemetery, relied on a false witness confession and the testimony of a “quack” satanic abuse “expert,” and that suggestive interview techniques had encouraged the children to make “fantastical false statements.”
According to police reports and trial records, the children said Dan Keller killed his dog and made children cut it up and eat it, “baptized” kids with blood and disemboweled pets, forcing children to drink the blood. The Kellers were also said to have decapitated and chopped up a baby, put the remains in a swimming pool and made the children jump in. In one account, the Kellers were said to have stolen a baby gorilla from a park and Frances cut off one of its fingers.
The pair, who apparently liked to wear robes, were said to have dug graves in a cemetery to hide dead animals and a passerby who was shot and carved up with a chain saw. The children were supposedly taken to military bases and on secret airplane trips, including to Mexico, where they were abused and returned to the center in time for their parents to pick them up as normal. They said they were coerced into videotaped sex acts and drugged so they would forget what they had seen.
In court, the jury heard about the extensive attempts by Austin police to substantiate the stories – and Hampton believes that lent them credibility. Police conducted inquiries at nearby airfields, took the children to a cemetery and examined graves from a helicopter using an infrared camera that they said could detect “hot-spots” on decomposing corpses.
In a letter of support for the Kellers dated March 17 this year, James Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, wrote: “There is now general agreement among reputable scholars that the Daycare Abuse Panic was a 20th-century manifestation of ‘witchcraft fever’ of the same kind that swept Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and Western Europe in the centuries before that.”
A nation panicked over “rampant” Satanism. A nationwide alarm over apparent widespread child sexual abuse at daycare centers was ignited by the McMartin Preschool case in the 1980s, which attracted vast media attention. An initial allegation that the owner of the preschool near Los Angeles had molested a boy snowballed into a seven-year investigation that unearthed tales of ritualistic animal mutilation in secret underground passageways. More than 200 charges relating to the sexual abuse of dozens of children were leveled at seven people, but no one was convicted. In 1988, Geraldo Rivera interviewed the heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne as part of a primetime two-hour NBC special called Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground. “The very young and the impressionable should definitely not be watching this program tonight. This is not a Halloween fable, this is a real-life horror story,” Rivera said at the start in front of a studio audience of “devil worshipers and law enforcers, experts and victims.” The show claimed Satanism was rampant across the US.
In this paranoid context, Hampton said, the allegations against the Kellers “did not seem outlandish. People were believing this stuff because it was on national TV. The local news had a [recurring] segment called ‘Cult Crimes.’ The Exorcist III was a blockbuster; Satan was everywhere.”
The Kellers’ freedom comes only a couple weeks after the release on bail of a group of friends known as the San Antonio Four. They spent more than a decade in prison after being convicted of child sexual assaults that were said to have taken place in Texas in 1994. Their case also featured claims of wild, ritualistic molestation and expert medical testimony that was later exposed as incorrect. In Arkansas in 2011, a trio dubbed the “West Memphis Three” was set free after high-profile campaigns backed by Hollywood celebrities. The men, then teenagers, had been convicted of murdering three boys in 1993 after prosecutors claimed the defendants were members of a Satanic cult. Devil’s Knot, a film based on the events and starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon, is scheduled for release in the US next year. And in Florida, a Cuban immigrant named Frank Fuster is serving a 165-year sentence handed down in 1985 for child molestation, but doubts have been raised as to the validity of the evidence against him.
The Keller investigation was one of the last examples of the daycare panic but “very typical of previous cases,” according to Mary deYoung, a sociology professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who has published extensively on moral panics and sexual abuse. Cultural shifts in the 1980s combined to foster a climate of fear, she said. The American family was changing, with an increasing number of women going out into the workforce. There was more reliance on daycare and increased anxiety about the welfare of children,” she says. “There was a huge rise in Christian fundamentalism that made the devil very real and insinuated the devil into a number of social problems ... and a rising interest in the country in the whole issue of trauma.” According to DeYoung, suggestive and insistent interviewing strategies prompted children to make up stories and began to believe what they were telling the adults, and the belief was that children would not lie about such serious crimes. Media and parental pressure obliged the police to give credence even to risible allegations. “There has been a kind of grudging acknowledgment [from the authorities] that things got out of hand,” she continues. “I’m not sure that we’ve learned anything that could prevent a similar moral panic springing up ... for example over cyber threats.”
The Kellers, who are no longer married, but remain close, plan to lead a quiet life in the Austin region, Hampton said. Though they are free, they have not been formally declared innocent and in theory, the state could still pursue a retrial. As with the San Antonio Four, the case will head to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. There is no timeline for the court to examine it. Hampton says he will push for an exoneration that would allow the Kellers to pursue a claim for compensation. He adds he is “absolutely convinced” that others have been imprisoned in similar cases based on questionable evidence. “It’s the problem with basing convictions purely on the testimony of children,” he said. “These cases will not stop. The problem is, how do you prove innocence?”
Source: Tom Dart, The Guardian, December 5, 2013. |
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Post by natalie on Dec 1, 2014 13:26:31 GMT -5
Wrongfully Convicted 'Satanists' Request ExonerationAssociated Press
December 21, 2014AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Former day care owners who spent 21 years in prison before being freed amid questions over their convictions for child abuse involving satanic rituals are struggling to convince prosecutors that they should be fully exonerated. Dan and Fran Keller, who divorced in prison, were freed on bond last year when the only physical evidence against them was found to be a mistake. They had been convicted in 1992 after therapists testified that they helped three children recover memories of satanic rituals and sexual abuse at an Austin preschool the Kellers operated. The Kellers, who always denied the charges, want the courts to throw out their convictions. But a year after they were freed from prison, Travis County prosecutors remain unwilling to proclaim them innocent, the Austin American-Statesman reported Sunday. Prosecutors say to overcome a jury finding of guilt, the courts require new evidence that unquestionably establishes innocence — something like an ironclad alibi or DNA proof. "Our responsibility is to make sure the law is properly applied, and, under the applicable standards, we are not satisfied that they have established actual innocence under the law," Travis County Assistant District Attorney Scott Taliaferro said. This standard seems unfair to Fran Keller, who said there is no way to conclusively prove a negative. "It's so hard to prove you're innocent when there was never a crime," she said. The Kellers had been sentenced to 48 years in prison. During their trial, the only physical evidence came from an emergency room doctor who testified that internal lacerations on one child were evidence of abuse. But in court documents filed in 2013, Dr. Michael Mouw says what he thought were lacerations were actually normal physiology. This prompted prosecutors in Travis County, which includes Austin, to agree that the case's evidence was faulty and release the two on bond. The Kellers' claim of innocence will be decided by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, where a core of conservative judges typically takes a skeptical view toward overturning jury verdicts. The court will be guided by the recommendations of Senior District Judge Wilford Flowers, who presided over the Kellers' 1992 trial and their recent appeals — and who has already twice ruled that they had failed to prove their innocence. Attachments:
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Post by Graveyardbride on May 26, 2015 6:00:56 GMT -5
Texas Court Tosses Convictions in Satanic Panic Case
AUSTIN, Tex. – The state’s highest criminal court threw out the 1992 sexual assault convictions against Dan and Fran Keller, but declined to find the former Austin day care owners innocent of crimes linked to a now-discredited belief that secret Satanic cults were abusing day care children nationwide. The Kellers spent more than 22 years in prison after three young children accused them of dismembering babies, torturing pets, desecrating corpses, videotaping orgies and serving blood-laced Kool-Aid in Satanic rituals at their home-based day care. No evidence of such activities was ever found.
Freed from prison in late 2013 as the case against them crumbled, the Kellers asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to declare them innocent, arguing they were the victims of inept therapists, shoddy police work and the “Satanic panic” that swept the nation in the early 1990s.
A unanimous Court of Criminal Appeals instead overturned their convictions based on false testimony by an emergency room doctor whose hospital examination had provided the only physical evidence of sexual assault during the Kellers’ joint trial. Dr. Michael Mouw later admitted that inexperience led him to misidentify normally occurring conditions as evidence of sexual abuse in a 3-year-old girl.
The nine judges did not provide an explanation as to why they rejected the Kellers’ innocence claim except to say their decision was based on the findings of the trial judge “and this court’s independent review of the record.”
However, in a concurring opinion, Judge Cheryl Johnson said she would have found both Kellers innocent. “This was a witch hunt from the beginning,” Johnson wrote, finding fault with investigators who too easily accepted fantastic claims of abuse, including plane trips to Mexico during which children were abused and returned to Austin in time for afternoon pickup by their parents. “It was not just Dr. Mouw who was too quick to believe,” Johnson said. “If he is to be blamed for the failure to provide applicant with a fair trial, the missteps of other persons and entities need to be examined also. We do not learn from our mistakes unless and until we are required to acknowledge those mistakes.”
Keith Hampton, the Kellers’ lawyer, said he was extremely disappointed that the court did not closely examine, and discuss, the evidence of innocence. “I’m not happy,” said Hampton, whose work on the case, at no charge, led to the Kellers being freed from prison. Hampton said he is not ready to stop trying to prove the Kellers’ innocence, adding that he may file a “suggestion” that the Court of Criminal Appeals reexamine the evidence of innocence. “I don’t know how in good conscience you can ignore the overriding claim in this case, which is not Dr. Mouw. The issue is they’re innocent,” he said. Hampton said he also may turn to the federal courts to try to establish the Kellers’ innocence.
Travis County Assistant District Attorney Scott Taliaferro said his office will review Wednesday’s ruling and await additional filings by Hampton, before deciding how to proceed.
Prosecutors could dismiss the charges against the Kellers or press for a new trial. However, without Mouw’s testimony showing evidence of abuse and with allegations almost 25 years old, a retrial would be a difficult proposition.
Source: Chuck Lindell, The American-Statesman, May 20, 2015.
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Post by aprillynn93 on May 26, 2015 12:24:20 GMT -5
These poor people.
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Post by natalie on May 26, 2015 14:55:41 GMT -5
If they threw out the convictions of sexual abuse, doesn't that pretty much say they are innocent? I am having trouble understanding why they cannot also be found innocent. The whole story sounds preposterous. Considering they spent over 22 years in prison for something they didn't do, haven't they been through enough?
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Post by Joanna on Jun 27, 2017 14:53:43 GMT -5
Couple Convicted of 'Satanic' Ritual Abuse ExoneratedAUSTIN, Tex. – On June 20th, a couple who served 21 years in prison for the Satanic ritual abuse of children was formally exonerated by the district attorney, who said there is “no credible evidence” against them. The decision brings an end to one of the more prominent cases brought during the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and early 90s, during which fears of devil-worshipers’ ritual abuse of American children spread rapidly. Hundreds of childcare providers were accused of unspeakable crimes and many would spend years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.
Fran and Dan Keller (above) were convicted in 1992 of sexually abusing a three-year-old girl at their home daycare facility on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Following the girl’s initial reports of abuse – she said Dan spanked her, but under further questioning, alleged rape, – the local community panicked. The charges leveled against the Kellers soon included Satanic rituals such as sacrificing babies, the amputation of a zoo gorilla’s arm, secret graveyard ceremonies and transportation of children to Mexico to be assaulted by members of the military. Following trial, the two were each sentenced to 48 years in prison.
Mr. and Mrs. Keller were finally released in 2013 after multiple appeals, when the doctor who had provided the only physical evidence of the alleged assault recanted his testimony. This week, Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore exonerated the couple, bringing an end to the pair’s 25-year-long struggle to clear their names.
Though the Satanic Panic that ensnared the Kellers certainly has historical precedents (most notably the Salem Witch Trials), the panic’s more immediate roots can be traced to the tumultuous decade that preceded it. “In the 1970s, there was a lot of anxiety being put onto the idea that Satanists were controlling things and had their hands in things,” explained Debbie Nathan, a longtime investigative journalist who co-authored a book Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (2001) with Michael Snedeker.
At the time, a number of gossipy urban myths were about Satanic influences on corporations were making the rounds. Procter & Gamble even had to hold a press conference in 1985 to deny allegations that its logo was the sign of the devil. According to Nathan, such myths had staying power because they reflected people’s anxieties about “corporate consumerism and corporate culture,” about women entering the work force, and especially about children being left in daycare facilities in increasing numbers. In the early 1980s, “Daycare was really demonized in ways that were way beyond the facts. There was just a lot of anxiety about public childcare, which I think was tacked onto a generalized anxiety about women going into the workforce.”
In the early 80s, these concerns unexpectedly tracked with those of feminists, who were seeking to confront violence (particularly sexual violence) against women and children. “Those two things came together and caused a really powerful panic,” Nathan added. “It was really remarkable to see all of these institutions buy into the idea that there was an international conspiracy of Satanists set out to recruit tiny kids, and somehow brainwash them so that later on when they became adults, you could sort of snap your fingers and they would go into this Satanic trance.”
The panic gathered steam with the McMartin preschool case, when allegations of Satanic ritual abuse at a southern California preschool led to a lengthy and expensive prosecution featuring hundreds of children. The $15 million case ended in 1990 with zero convictions, but by that time, the country was in a full-blown hysteria, aided in no small part by the efforts of televangelists and TV talk show hosts. “They did a lot to spread this,” Nathan said of hosts like Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael. In a 1988 special report for NBC called Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, Rivera warned viewers that a “secret network” of more than one million Satanists was using secret messages in heavy metal music and other nefarious methods to spread their agenda. Even Oprah Winfrey entered the fray on her show in 1989, interviewing Michelle Smith (subject of the controversial 1980 book Michelle Remembers) and others who had recovered repressed memories of ritualized Satanic abuse through psychotherapy.
In addition to hundreds of accusations of abuse against daycare providers and other caregivers, people identified all sorts of evil influences in modern American society during the panic. People saw Satanic messages in rock music, cartoons, role-playing video games like Dungeons & Dragons, the theme song from Mr. Ed and even the diapers they put on their children.
By the early ‘90s, evidence was mounting against the existence of a widespread Satanic conspiracy among childcare providers. A report in 1992 by the Department of Justice found the reports of widespread Satanic ritual abuse were not credible. In 1994, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect released another report debunking the claims.
Thanks to increased skepticism, the Satanic Panic had died down by the mid-1990s, and now many of the cases against childcare providers have been overturned because of mishandled prosecutions. In perhaps the most notorious panic-fueled case, three Arkansas men – known as the West Memphis Three – were freed in 2011 after serving more than 18 years in prison; they had been convicted as teenagers in 1994 of the sexual assault and murder of three young boys, however, DNA evidence showed they had no connection to the crime.
With the exoneration of the Kellers, and improved techniques used by law enforcement officers, social workers and other professionals to interview children in cases where abuse is suspected, it is tempting to believe something like the Satanic Panic could not happen today. Nathan warned against such complacency, however, saying the Internet has sparked all kinds of new anxieties about what children are doing online and the dangers to which the could be exposed. In fact, the earlier panic may hold a lesson for us in today’s news climate, with its prevalence of conspiracy theories and unsupported rumors. “We saw this 30 years ago,” Nathan asserted. “It’s sort of an object lesson, what happened then, and I think it’s unfortunate that not very many people remember it.” Source: Sarah Pruitt, History, June 21, 2017.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jun 28, 2017 11:39:11 GMT -5
Yay!
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Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 1, 2017 9:32:08 GMT -5
Imprisoned Victims of ‘Satanic Panic’ Awarded $3.4 MillionAn Austin pair will get $3.4 million for their wrongful conviction and imprisonment on allegations they sexually abused children at their day care center during “Satanic rituals.” Dan (above right) and Fran (above left) Keller were convicted in 1992 after therapists testified they helped three children recover memories of Satanic rituals and sexual abuse at the Kellers’ South Austin facility. The convictions were later overturned.
Fran Keller, 67, told the Austin American Statesman that with the money they won’t have to live on the brink of destitution. They have been unable to find jobs because of their felony convictions advanced ages. “This means we don’t have to worry about pinching pennies on Social Security and late bills. It means we will actually be free,” Fran Keller said. “We can start living – and no more nightmares.” The Kellers plan to buy a house, vehicle, health insurance and a better hearing aid for Dan Keller, who is 75. The state’s wrongful conviction compensation fund pays $80,000 for each year in prison.
Their couple’s attorney, Keith Hampton, told the Statesman his clients were victims of a “satanic panic,” a belief in the early 1990s that a network of secretive cults was preying on children in day care centers. The Kellers, who maintained their innocence, were convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 48 years each in prison.
The case began in 1991 after a 3-year-old girl told her mother that Dan Keller hurt her. The girl’s therapist drew out details from the girl including that Dan Keller defecated on her head and sexually assaulted her, the Statesman reported. Two other children made similar accusations. By the time the trial rolled around, the children had accused the Kellers of serving blood-laced Kool-Aid, forced them to have sex with adults and other children, and made them watch or participate in the death and dismemberment of animals and a baby. The accusers also said that on one occasion, the children were taken to Mexico, sexually abused by soldiers and returned to Austin in time to be picked up from day care.
The Kellers were released on bond in 2013 when the only physical evidence in the case was found to be mistaken. In court documents filed the year of their release, the emergency room doctor who had testified that internal lacerations on one child were evidence of abuse said the lacerations were actually normal.
Following their release. the Kellers, who divorced while in prison, struggled to convince Travis County prosecutors they should be fully exonerated. In 2015, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out the sexual assault convictions, but did not exonerate the pair. But in June, Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore filed court documents declaring the Kellers “actually innocent” under the law and dropping the charges against them, the Statesman reported. Sources: Claire Z. Cardona, The Dallas News, August 23, 2017, and The Associated Press.
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Post by jason on Sept 1, 2017 11:47:55 GMT -5
At least they got something for the 21 years they spent behind bars. Too bad the prosecutors, therapists and others who didn't have any better sense than to believe all that Satanic nonsense are getting away scot-free. People that stupid should have to pay for the harm they do others. |
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Post by madeline on Sept 1, 2017 16:30:29 GMT -5
At least they got something for the 21 years they spent behind bars. Too bad the prosecutors, therapists and others who didn't have any better sense than to believe all that Satanic nonsense are getting away scot-free. People that stupid should have to pay for the harm they do others.
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Post by kitty on Sept 1, 2017 19:05:41 GMT -5
The Nash couple who filed the civil lawsuit against the Kellers also got away with it. How dumb do people have to be to believe the crazy stories those kids told? But it's even worse when therapists, police officers and lawyers believe that kind of rot.
So what exactly was the Kellers charged with doing?
Looking at the photo from back then, Fran Keller has really aged, but Dan Keller looks just about the same.
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