Day Care Owners Convicted In Satanic Sex-Cult Hysteria Ask Texas Court to Clear Their Names

Daniel and Frances Keller were in the wrong
profession at the wrong time: day care owners during the 1980s, at
the height of American moral panic over just who was watching the
children. As more American mothers entered the workforce, Satan-worshipping sex cultists couldn’t resist
the babysitting opportunities, or so the story went. And so
powerful was the pull of this narrative that Texas proscutors had
little trouble believing—based largely on children’s “recovered ”
(and later recanted) memories—that the Kellers served kids
blood-spiked Kool-Aid while dressing as pumpkins, raiding
graveyards, and taking children on day-trips to Mexico to be raped
by soldiers. In 1992, a jury found the now-divorced pair guilty of
child sexual assault and they were sentenced to 48 years in prison
apiece.

After serving 21 years, the Kellers
were finally freed in 2013, when the only physical evidence of
sexual assault was found to have been a mistake on the part of an
examining physician. Travis County prosecutors agreed to release
the Kellers from prison and asked the courts to vacate their
convictions.

“But for the Kellers, freedom isn’t enough,” the Austin-American Statesman reported
this weekend. “They want the courts to declare them innocent”
of the heinous crimes of which they were accused: 

Innocence, however, is one concession prosecutors are unwilling
to make, and exoneration will not come easy. Defense lawyer Keith
Hampton spent three years carefully amassing volumes of information
attacking every aspect of the convictions, filing court documents
arguing that the Kellers were convicted by the combined efforts of
inept therapists, gullible police, a “charlatan” posing as an
expert in satanic ritual abuse and an investigation that spiraled
out of control — eventually producing a suspect list of 26 ritual
abusers, including an Austin police captain and many of the
Kellers’ neighbors.

(…) He had mental health professionals examine the Kellers for
sex-offender tendencies; none were found. He had them take two
polygraphs each; all were passed. Leading psychology and
criminology professors explained how improper interview techniques
and subtle encouragement by therapists likely produced believable
but false memories in the children who accused the Kellers of
abuse.

The totality of new evidence, Hampton argues, completely
undermines the case against the Kellers and leads to one
inescapable conclusion: “Dan and Fran Keller are innocent,” he
said. “None of these allegations are true.”

But in order to receive an official exoneration, the Kellers
must provide an “ironclad alibi”, DNA evidence, or something
similar, say prosecutors. In other words, they must somehow provide
concrete evidence de-linking them from non-existent crimes. Fran
told the Statesman:

“It’s so hard to prove you’re innocent when there was never a
crime.” 

More on
the Kellers’ plight here. Their exoneration plea was heard by
the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last week. Senior District
Judge Wilford Flowers, who presided over the Kellers’ 1992 trial
and their subsequent appeals, will present his initial findings
today. The Kellers’ lawyer and Travis County prosecutors then have
nine days to prepare rebuttals, after which the Court of Criminal
Appeals will issue a final decision.