The Ongoing Legacy of a Satanic Panic
Today's guest post is from Joseph Laycock, who holds a PhD from Boston University and is a wandering adjunct at present. He is currently busy with numerous publications on American religious history, foremost of which is a manuscript on the Catholic seer Veronica Lueken.
Joseph
Laycock
Fran and Dan Keller have been
imprisoned for twenty-three years for a crime that almost certainly never
occurred. In 1989 the Kellers opened a
daycare center in Oak Hill, a neighborhood just southwest of Austin,
Texas. Their business prospered until
1991 when Suzanne Guinn, along with social worker Donna David-Campbell, became
convinced that the Kellers were sexually assaulting Guinn’s three-year-old
daughter. As investigators moved to
gather evidence against the Kellers, the Guinn girl, along with two other
children from the day-care, began to tell incredible stories about atrocities
committed by their caretakers. They had
seen numerous animals tortured and abused––including a gorilla that the Kellers
had taken from Austin’s non-existent zoo in Zilker Park. They had been taken to graveyards and buried
in open graves in Satanic rituals. They
had been transported to other places in airplanes. One child describing seeing a baby’s heart removed
and watching it continue to beat as the Kellers held in their hand. Another child said that the Kellers cut open
his arm, removed one his bones, and replaced it with “Satan’s arm bone.” All of this had allegedly taken place without
anyone noticing, at a daycare with regular visitors. The Guinn girl had only attended the daycare
on thirteen occasions.
All of these stories were coaxed
from the children by well-intentioned social workers, some of who believed in a
secret network of Satanic cults that was slowly taking over America by
brainwashing children through Satanic ritual abuse (SRA). The seemingly pointless abusive rituals, it
was claimed, were intended to induce a split personality or “alter” in the
children that would then perpetuate the work of the cult. Unfortunately, when a grand jury indicted the
Kellers for sexually assaulting the Guinn girl, they attempted to flee
Austin––a move they claimed was a misinterpretation of their attorney’s advice. The prosecution took this as an admission of
guilt.
At the trial, the Guinne girl was
called to the witness stand where she was described as “more
silly than frightened.” She recanted her
original story and claimed that she the Kellers had never abused her. When asked if she had described abuse to
Donna David-Campbell she replied, “No way, Jose.” But the prosecution had other evidence. Dr.
Randy Noblitt served as an expert witness and explained his theory of
Satanic ritual abuse to the jury. (Noblitt
also claimed that the Kellers were controlling the Guinne girl’s testimony by
making furtive Satanic hand signs that served as hypnotic commands.) Dr. Michael Mouw had examined the Guinne
girl’s genitals and discovered what he then identified as irregularities on her
hymen. Mouw explained that the
irregularities “could be consistent” with sexual abuse.
The
strongest evidence was the testimony of Dan Keller’s long-time friend Doug
Perry. Perry had been questioned by
Texas rangers for four hours. Although
no tapes of the interrogation were produced, Perry eventually signed a confession
that he had attended a “beer and sex party” where he and the Kellers had taken
turns abusing the Guinne girl and another child. Weeks later Perry recanted this confession in
an affidavit where he stated, “I was
scared because the officers were not believing me so I started making up a
story. I basically started telling them what I thought they wanted to
hear." The prosecution called Perry
to the witness stand and implied that his recantation was false. Perry’s “eye-witness testimony” persuaded the
final hold out on the jury to vote guilty.
Dan and Kelly were sentenced to 48 years in prison for sexually
assaulting the Guinne girl. According to
the Austin
Chronicle,
when the verdict was read, the hold-out juror fled to the bathroom and wept.
In
2009 The Innocence Project of Texas began working with Kellers toward an appeal. This January, Austin attorney Keith Hampton
petitioned for a writ of habeus corpus on the Keller’s behalf, although the
Kellers have not yet received a hearing.
Hampton obtained an affidavit from Dr. Mouw, stating that he erred in
suggesting the Guinne girl’s hymen might be evidence of abuse. Mouw explained that he was an emergency room
physician with minimal training in pediatric sexual abuse and that he had
mistaken ordinary variation in the appearance of the hymen for lacerations. In the 1992 trial, Mouw’s findings had been
the only form of physical evidence. Hampton was quoted, “A
21st century court ought to be able to recognize a 20th century witch-hunt and
render justice accordingly.” I hope he
is right.
The
imprisonment of the Kellers is one of the last tragic remnants of the Satanic
Panic that swept America in the 1980s and early 1990s. Rumors of Satanic cults began in the 1960s
fueled by the Manson murders and tropes borrowed from horror films such as Rosemary’s Baby. By the 1970s, elaborate conspiracy theories
had begun to form about Satanic cults who committed murders undetected and were
supported by powerful figures in world government and finance. Then in 1980 the best-selling paperback Michelle Remembers introduced a new
element to the Satanic conspiracy theory––the ritual abuse of children. Michelle
Remembers described the “recovered” memories produced by Michelle Smith
while placed under hypnosis by psychologist Lawrence Padzer. Like the conversations between social workers
and allegedly-abused children, Smith and Padzer worked together to produce a
truly bizarre and horrible tale in which Smith remembered being tortured by her
own mother, having horns grafted to her head, and witnessing a portal to hell.
The
fear that children were undergoing the type of abuse described in Michelle Remembers fomented a strange
alliance of evangelical Christians, law enforcement, feminists, and social
workers. These diverse forces––all of
whom wanted to see victims believed and abusers punished––supported each
other. They created a mutually affirming
web of expertise that caused claims of SRA to seem plausible. Also fueling the panic were talk show hosts
such as Geraldo Rivera, who warned America about SRA in his famous 1988 special
“Satan’s Underground.”
The
hunt for abusers resulted in the McMartin Pre-School Trial, which lasted from
1984 to 1990. Like the Kellers, the case
revolved around a family-owned daycare center, the proprietors of which were
accused of abusing children as part of a Satanic cult. The trial may have been the most
expensive in American history,
costing $15 dollars. In the end, all
defendants were acquitted. However, the
parents of some of the alleged victims formed an advocacy group called “Believe
the Children.” Accusers in the Keller
case became convinced that their children were being abused after receiving a
mailing from Believe the Children that featured a “checklist” of signs that your child is the
victim of SRA.
David
Bromley has
suggested that daycare providers were often targeted because economic forces in
the 1980s had caused families to reluctantly cede the task of raising of their
children to others. In families with two
incomes, parents were forced to share influence over their children with
teachers, afterschool counselors, bus drivers, and others. In this sense, Bromley argued that claims of
SRA were “metaphorically true even if empirically false.” Many parents really did feel that there was
an invisible force in America working to turn their own children against
them. Claims of Satanic cults helped to
make these frustrations apprehensible.
With
the recent release of the West Memphis Three, the Kellers remain one of the last victims of
Satanic Panic. However, it would be a
mistake––as historians and as citizens in a democracy––to assume that Satanic
Panic is a relic of the 1980s. Karen
Hutchins is an Austin therapist whose services include hypnosis and shamanic
drumming. She assessed several children
in the Keller case and explained to Texas
Monthly that
Satanists had infiltrated the legal, medical, and law enforcement
professions. In an interview
last month, she
insisted that the Kellers are guilty and that the stories solicited from
children were true. The organization Stop Mind
Control and Ritual Abuse Today (S.M.A.R.T.) continues to hold conferences were alleged
survivors discuss their abuse at the hands of Satanists and covert CIA programs.
Since September 11, 2001, the culture of
conspiracy has grown exponentially and it seems inevitable that dangerous claims
about Satanic cults will continue to influence our culture. The victims of these claims will continue to
be individuals who lack the education as well as the legal, and financial
resources to defend themselves.
David
Frankfurter has framed
claims of evil rituals––which occur throughout many times and cultures––are a
discourse through which cultures render a complex and trouble-filled word
sensible. This theory suggests that
human beings may, in some sense, be hard wired to believe accusations like
those made against the Kellers. This is why
the work of historians matters. If we
forget the Satanic Panic of the 1980s or dismiss it as a strange fluke that can
be hermetically sealed from the larger narratives of American culture, we
ensure that someday people like the Kellers will face similar accusations.
Note: images from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/innocence/roundtable/
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