UPDATED::Fran Keller's Satanic Conviction Overturned | Houston Press

UPDATE::  Dan, Fran Keller to get $3.4 million in ‘satanic day care’ case

Dan and Fran Keller, who spent more than 21 years in prison after they were accused of sexually abusing children during supposed satanic rituals at their South Austin day care facility, will receive $3.4 million from a state fund for those wrongly convicted of crimes.

Shortly after receiving the news Tuesday, an ecstatic Fran Keller said they will no longer have to live on the brink of destitution, unable to find jobs at their ages and with their convictions, even if overturned by the state’s highest criminal court.

“This means we don’t have to worry about pinching pennies on Social Security, and late bills. It means we will actually be free. We can start living — and no more nightmares,” said Fran Keller, 67.

UPDATE::  A declaration of innocence in Austin ‘satanic day care’ case 

Nearly two years after the state’s highest criminal court overturned the child sexual abuse convictions for day care owners Dan and Fran Keller, Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore will file court documents Tuesday declaring them “actually innocent” under the law and dropping pending charges against them.

 

The decision will resolve all outstanding criminal issues for the Kellers, who were convicted in 1992 and served more than 21 years in prison in a case that generated national headlines amid allegations that they performed satanic rituals on the children. The couple, now elderly and described by their lawyer as destitute, has been free on bond since 2013 and will each be able to apply for $80,000 for every year mistakenly spent in prison.

“I believe under the law that I am charged with this responsibility — and it is my personal decision,” Moore told the American-Statesman and KVUE-TV.

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I can't believe that after 20+ years this case is still being written about.  By the sounds of it, we will still be writing about if for years to come:

Unfortunately for the Kellers, an overturned conviction is not exoneration, which prosecutors oppose, though no evidence supports the case against the Kellers. There’s a fine legal distinction at play here, and possibly compensation for the more than 20 years the Kellers spent in prison. In short, the Kellers are no longer guilty of anything, but the charges against them remain in place. For the time being, they are in the position of having to prove their innocence. In other words, they are stuck having to prove, as Fran Keller has said, a negative.

Beginning in 1991, Fran and Dan Keller, who ran a day care out of their Austin home, committed unspeakable acts against their charges — they put one in a swimming pool with a baby-eating shark; they forced the kids to watch as they dismembered an infant;  they flew the children to Mexico, where they were raped by soldiers, before flying them back to the day care in time to be picked up by their parents.

Except, possibly, just maybe, perhaps, none of that ever happened. Incredibly, even though the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday overturned the charges against Fran Keller because of "false evidence," the court denied her claims of actual innocence.

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The Kellers were convicted just as the "Satanic panic" — a tide of accusations of ritualized sexual abuse often coinciding with "recovered memories" — was winding down. The Kellers' trial took place two years after the debacle of California's McMartin Preschool trial, the touchstone flagship Satanic panic case that should have put the nail in the coffin of this most unfortunate and embarrassing period of American jurisprudence. But, unfortunately for the Kellers, word hadn't reached Travis County prosecutors in time.

The Kellers appealed, and Fran was released on bond in 2013, at age 63. By that time, Michael Mouw, the physician who testified to the evidence of sexual abuse, had recanted, saying he was mistaken. And it's because of that that the Texas CCA finally tossed Fran's conviction. Not because of the complete lack of evidence of baby-eating sharks.

Judge Cheryl Johnson was apparently baffled by her colleagues' reasoning — she wrote in a concurring opinion that the court should go ahead and find Keller innocent. (We'd like to see Johnson's rough draft, which almost certainly had to include the phrase "Are y'all fuckin' nuts?")

Fran Keller's Satanic Conviction Overturned | Houston Press

See also:

Fran Keller Released From Prison: After more than 20 years, Keller is home for the holidays - News - The Austin Chronicle

This second article deals with another SRA case that never should have gone to trial,,,

Nearly 21 years to the day that she was sent to prison for a crime that few still believe ever actually happened, Frances Keller on Tuesday evening walked out of the Travis County Jail, freed on a personal bond, and was greeted by a grown daughter eager to hug her mother after more than two decades of separation.

Keller and her husband Dan were each convicted and sentenced on Nov. 30, 1992, to 48 years in prison for the alleged sexual abuse of 3-year-old Christy Chaviers, who in the summer of 1991 was an infrequent drop-in at the couple's home-based daycare near Oak Hill. After a day in care at the home that summer Christy told her mother, Suzanne Stratton, that Dan had spanked her. With a bit of pressing, first by her mother and then by therapist Donna David Campbell, that initial allegation soon morphed, first into an allegation of sexual abuse and then, by the fall, into far more fantastic allegations – including that the Kellers took Christy and other children on plane rides to Mexico where they were abused by various individuals, that Fran cut off the arm of a gorilla at Zilker Park, that the Kellers performed a satanic bone-replacing ritual on one child, and that the Kellers forced the children to watch them sacrifice babies and small animals. Ultimately, Campbell concluded that Christy was a victim of "ritual abuse."

The Kellers were among hundreds of child-care workers across the nation who, in the Eighties and Nineties, were accused of being part of a network of satan worshippers who abused children taken to daycare. In 2008, the Chronicle began a reinvestigation of the case against Fran and Dan Keller, discovering that Austin Police and prosecutors were embarrassingly credulous in their belief that the children had been abused in all manner of impractical – if not simply impossible – ways and despite the fact that there was scant evidence to suggest any crime ever happened at all.

Fran Keller Released From Prison: After more than 20 years, Keller is home for the holidays - News - The Austin Chronicle

(See also, the original cover story by the Chronicle: Believing the Children)