Falsely accused of satanic horrors, a couple spent 21 years in prison

"This country hasn't seen anything like it since the Salem witch trials," Texas Monthly wrote in 1994, in a profile of Austin day-care operators Dan and Fran Keller, who had been thrown in prison two years earlier. The Kellers had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992. Children from their day-care center accused them - variously - of serving blood-laced Kool Aid; wearing white robes; cutting the heart out of a baby; flying children to Mexico to be raped by soldiers; using Satan's arm as a paintbrush; burying children alive with animals; throwing them in a swimming pool with sharks; shooting them; and resurrecting them after they had been shot.

They were hardly the only people to be accused by children during the panic. Many were exonerated long ago - like the 20 people wrongly convicted in the infamous Kern County sex abuse cases. Some now blame the phenomenon on "a quack cadre of psychotherapists who were convinced that they could dig up buried memories through hypnosis," as Radley Balko wrote in a column for The Washington Post.

But the Kellers suffered for decades. They served nearly 22 years in prison before a court released them in 2013, after years of work by journalists and lawyers to expose what proved to be a baseless case against them. And only now - when Fran Keller is 67 and Dan is 75 - has the couple been fully exonerated. Their 1992 case was finally dismissed in June after a district attorney declared them innocent. This week, the Austin American-Statesman reported, they were awarded $3.4 million from a state fund - a belated attempt to refund a quarter-century that they lost to the delusions of other people.

source: Article 'Falsely accused of satanic horrors, a couple spent 21 years in prison. Now they're owed millions.' by Avi Selk; www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/24/accused-of-satanism-they-spent-21-years-in-prison-they-were-just-declared-innocent-and-were-paid-millions/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories-2_satanism-730pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory; The Washington Post; 25 August 2017