by Linda Wolfe
I didn’t think Douglas was involved. The police had found no evidence, when they searched his house, of his ever having loved another girl besides Robin, no frilly mementos of some other female, no lonesome, longing letters to anyone but her. Douglas, I felt certain, and said to Connolly, had been in love just that one time, and he had killed Robin only because she had exploited, then rejected, his love.
That night on the plane back to New York, I reread some of Douglas’s letters to Robin. “Dear,” went one, “Since I have known you, I have always tried to be by your side in time of need. Now I desperately need some help from you!” It was the letter he had written to her just after he’d been let go by Tufts, one of the many she hadn’t answered: “I am so alone. I need to be able to reach you or talk with you,” the letter continued. “Please don’t turn yourself away from me now.… I need you, dear.” It certainly sounded like love, I thought. Gave the appearance of love. But suddenly I began to ask myself, was it really love? Is not love the feeling that someone else’s well-being is as important to the self as one’s own? And does not that feeling require that one understand that one’s partner is someone else, and just who he or she is?
It was clear to me then, concentrating on the words and at last considering all I knew about Douglas and Robin, that Douglas had never really understood who Robin was, not even in the first days of their “affair.” He had formed an attachment, not to an actual girl, but to a figment of his imagination. No wonder he’d felt he could erase her, wipe her away. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing him wrapped with Robin in their final embrace, arms and legs tangled together on the king-size bed, the hammer over their heads, and I thought Douglas had killed, not someone he loved, but someone he had loved having invented.
FROM A NICE FAMILY
Dallas, Texas
1981
I HADN’T SPENT much time in Texas when I accepted an assignment to go to Dallas to investigate the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who had shot his mother and father to death. Oh, I’d been to Texas. I’d flown in and out of both Houston and Dallas on book tours, but I’d never stayed long enough to make friends. I didn’t know anything except what I’d read and heard from Texas friends who’d come east about the extraordinary hospitality with which their countrymen treat visitors—and the extraordinary casualness with which they treat guns.
One of my transplanted Texas friends said as I was leaving New York, “You’ll love Texas. But make sure you don’t jaywalk. You’ll notice that no one ever jaywalks in Dallas.”
“Why not?” I asked, ever the straight man.
“Because if they do, they’re liable to get shot. Either by the police or by some law-abiding citizen who doesn’t like to see the rules get broken.”
Another Texas friend living in New York said, “What, another kid killing his mama and papa? Well, it’ll turn out like the classic story of the guy who kills his folks, then begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan. Only, since this is Texas, they’ll see his point.”
I chided both my friends for painting their homeland so stereotypically. And I set off for ten days in Dallas, where, to my astonishment and delight, I was, as Henry James might say, taken up. I was invited to dinners in sophisticated restaurants, to catered backyard barbecues, to art openings, concerts, a poetry reading. I fell in love with Texas because all the Texans I met were so friendly, so warm and personable. But an astonishing number of my new acquaintances admitted to me that they had guns. “You need ’em out here,” was the usual explanation. No matter that “out here” was, increasingly, tracts of suburban homes, mile after mile of sprinkler-showered lawn. Texans don’t seem to recognize that the state is no longer a wilderness, or at least that the wilderness that grows in the hearts of men might never burgeon and blossom and become untamable if guns weren’t a household item, as expected as mesquite chips and pickup trucks.
The story I’d come to report on was that of David Keeler, whose mother, Anita, had been a superb homemaker and whose father, Bill, had been president of Arco Oil and Gas. David had shot them one Sunday morning in the summer of 1981 as they returned home from church.
I got the details of the crime by going, first, to see Jim Gholston, a detective on the Dallas police force. Gholston told me, “These cases where a kid goes crazy and knocks off his parents are terrible. We’ve had a few of them lately. This one was particularly gruesome. The boy confronted his folks outside their bedroom and shot them each several times. The father died right away, but the mother, well, she was riddled with bullet holes but she lasted several hours. Long enough to say who did it.”
Gholston shook his head. A big man and a soft-spoken one, he was dressed that afternoon in a white-on-white cowboy shirt with silvery snaps up the cuffs and a large, ornate brass belt buckle. He was also wearing a studded brass holster and a gun with an ornate pearl handle. I’d interviewed dozens of police detectives in New York, but I’d never seen a policeman display his gun in front of a reporter and I’m afraid I stared a bit, but he seemed not to mind. Getting out a file, he read me a description of David: “Blond. Blue-eyed. Five feet, eight inches. One hundred and thirty-seven pounds.”
Gholston seemed to have sympathy for both the parents and the child, saying, “They’re dead, but in a way, his life is lost now, too.”
What made him do it? I wanted to know.
“It’s hard to say. There didn’t seem to be any major problems, nothing other than the usual raising-a-teenager problems. In fact, what we seem to have here is a pretty well model child and a pretty well model family. It makes funny things go through your mind.”
Like what? I asked him.
His forehead wrinkled. “I can’t tell you the percentage of homes in Texas that have guns in them. That’s what goes through your mind. That, and your own home.”
Why? Did he keep guns around?
“Well, not out in the open,” he said. “I’m careful where I keep them. But of course, with me being a police officer, there are weapons around the house.”
When I was leaving, he told me he had a fifteen-year-old son.
I had a similar conversation later that day with Jim Shivers, a police officer with Dallas’s Youth Services, who’d interviewed David Keeler a few hours after the shooting. The boy had been cooperative and polite, Shivers told me. Then he too looked uneasy as he said, “I have a kid the same age. You couldn’t ask for my kid to be more polite. It’s yes-sir and no-sir all the time.” He shuddered. “I guess it was the gun.”
How come the Keelers had a gun? I asked.
He looked at me blankly, as if I’d asked an incomprehensible question. Then, “They were outdoors people,” he said.
Gholston and Shivers weren’t the only Dallas parents to find in what had happened to the Keelers cause for a kind of personal anxiety. The Reverend Charles W. Cook, minister of the Schreiber United Methodist Church, where the Keelers and many of their neighbors worshiped, told me that his congregation was obsessed with the Keeler killing. He said, “The parents keep saying, ‘Such a nice family. Such a good boy. Could my child ever turn on me?’ And the children keep asking, ‘Could I ever do such a thing to my parents?’ A lot of the families have guns, but they haven’t thrown them away.”
Of course, it wasn’t just because of the gun that David Keeler had killed his parents. I was to learn that there’d been a long-standing feud in the Keeler family, a war between the parents and the child that began once David became an adolescent and wanted to do things his way. Still, until that time and even after they grew embittered and embattled, the Keelers had seemed like an average enough family, a happy enough family. It was this aspect of the crime that frightened the congregation of the Schreiber United Methodist Church and many of the people who knew, or came to know, members of the family.
I heard a good deal about how happy they’d all seemed from a colleague of Bill Keeler’s named Stuart Mut, a senior vice president at Arco’s parent company, the Atlantic Richfield Corporation. Mut had known
the Keeler family for some thirty years and David for his entire life. “They were a well-balanced bunch,” he said. “The parents were sincerely interested in the kids. The boy wasn’t temperamental or anything.”
We were sitting in Mut’s icy, air-conditioned office high above the streets of Dallas, and he went on to tell me about Bill and Anita. Bill had started out quite modestly. He’d been born in Brownwood, Texas, a small, arid town in the western part of the state, and studied engineering at Texas A&M. After a stint in the navy, he’d joined Atlantic Richfield in 1949 as a junior engineer and worked there the rest of his life, slowly shouldering his way through the corporate ranks to hold down ever more complex and responsible positions. In 1973, he’d made it to vice president in charge of research and engineering. And in the spring of 1981, shortly before his son killed him, he’d been named president of Arco, Atlantic Richfield’s largest subsidiary. “He was a strong but quiet man,” Mut said. “He had all the standard engineer’s characteristics. He was logical and analytical in his approach. But he also had a good feel for the other factors involved in an enterprise, for the human factors.” Then, although I hadn’t asked, he added, “Not the kind of man who would ever bully anybody.”
Anita Keeler was a homebody, although she too had excellent organizational skills. She raised four children: Barbara, who was in her late twenties, worked for the Environmental Protection Agency; John, who was twenty-five, was married and had a son of his own; Robert, nineteen, was a student at the University of Texas in Austin; and then there was David, “the baby.” Anita was an expert cook and housekeeper. And, like Bill, who was fond of duck hunting, she was a good shot. Just that year, she’d bagged a deer and a turkey.
“The Keelers did a lot of hunting and fishing and camping,” Mut said. “Summers, at least when the kids were little, the entire family would go camping at Lake Ouachita in Arkansas. I used to take my wife and kids there, too, so I had plenty of occasion to watch the interaction of this family. And what I saw was that they always seemed to be having fun, and taking the greatest joy from their trips and being together.”
The memory puzzled him. “You know,” he went on, “some people have asked whether perhaps the Keelers were too strict with their children. Well, if there’s one time or place when you’d expect to see parents bossing children around, it’s on a camping trip, where there are so many chores to be done and when, especially if you’ve got a big brood, the kids have to be kept in line. But I never saw anyone in that family bossing anyone else around.”
Still, the Keelers had stern ideas. For example, they were great believers not just in the fun of outdoor life but in the way such a life could temper children, condition them. “At some point in her development,” Mut reminisced, “the Keelers’ daughter, Barbara, apparently had some difficulties, as so many adolescents do. Attacks of shyness, I think it was. The Keelers enrolled her in one of those Outward Bound programs.” Mut thought it was a good idea. “I hear it helped. She became more self-confident.”
I heard more about the Keelers from their neighbors on their quiet, lawn-lined street in North Dallas, a street of expensive but not opulent homes, with large yards and swimming pools behind. Lynda Avant, a neighbor who’d known the family for some ten years, told me that Anita Keeler involved herself tirelessly in community work: the PTA, Meals on Wheels, the United Methodist Women. If an after-school sports group needed equipment, Anita Keeler was the person who could be counted on to get merchants to contribute supplies. If a shut-in needed groceries, Anita Keeler was the person who could be counted on to make sure the food arrived promptly. If a handicapped student couldn’t get to school on his own, Anita Keeler was the person who could be counted on to see that he got there, sometimes organizing friends to do the driving, sometimes taking on the onerous daily back-and-forth effort herself. The summer she was shot, she’d been ferrying a boy confined to a wheelchair to his classes at a community college in nearby Brookhaven. But Anita’s interests in charitable work outside the home never kept her from being involved in her children’s lives and activities, Avant told me. When Barbara was little, Anita served as a Campfire Girl leader. When the boys were growing up, she learned to be a sports fan. And she went to so many of David’s games over at St. Mark’s that the school newspaper remarked on her loyalty in an article and dubbed her “Superfan.”
Bill Keeler was just as devoted. Despite the heavy demands of his career, he managed to see his boys play ball whenever he could. Sometimes, on his way home from a business trip, briefcase still in hand, he’d go directly from the Dallas airport to a school ball game. Other times, when one of the boys was playing a game out of town, he would fly out to watch him, even if the game was hundreds of miles away, in Houston or in Oklahoma.
Lynda Avant had a son the same age as David, and the two boys were the best of friends. They’d gone to the same schools, played on the same teams, done their Halloween trick-or-treating together every fall. “David was so cute and shy when he was little,” she recalled. “I’ll never forget the first time he came to dinner at our house. We were having English peas, and he didn’t like them. So instead of eating them, he hid them under his plate. He didn’t want to have to say he didn’t like them. He was so sweet-looking then, with a little squared-off haircut. But he never went through the unkempt stage. He was the kind of little boy who never needed you to come along and tuck in his shirt for him.”
David had been a conscientious and unusually well behaved child. And to some extent he remained this way, even when he reached adolescence and the war between him and his parents erupted. At the exclusive St. Mark’s School of Texas, where he studied until he killed his parents, he’d maintained a B average, been on the Honor Roll, and become a member of the student council. A good athlete, he’d played on the football team. A good musician, he’d joined the school band, his instrument a second-hand top-of-the-line Bach trombone, which he paid for himself out of pocket money earned by mowing neighbors’ lawns.
“He was one of our best and brightest,” George Edwards, headmaster of St. Mark’s high school, which David would have been entering in the fall, told me. “I always found him to be a very responsible person in both academic and social areas,” said Bob Kohler, headmaster of the middle school, from which he had just graduated.
He was considered bright and responsible by his neighbors as well. “I used him as a baby-sitter,” said one neighbor, who had a toddler. “Now, would I have done that if there was anything wrong with him? Would any mother?”
But although few people who knew David were aware of it, he had begun to resent his parents bitterly. And in the spring of 1981, the resentment became dangerously intense. That spring two things happened: Bill Keeler was named president of Arco, and David graduated from the eighth grade. The two events were landmarks in the lives of both father and son. They were celebrated with parties and congratulations. They produced for each one a new sense of mastery and triumph. But they also spawned in each one a new sense of rights and privileges. And the rights and privileges to which father and son felt entitled were in direct conflict.
David, viewing himself now as mature, wanted to be allowed to do what the other kids he knew did—to listen to rock ’n’ roll, have girlfriends, stay out later at night. Bill, feeling himself increasingly in the public eye, disapproved of these activities and wanted his son to behave not just well but better than the other kids. David began defying his father.
There were nights that spring that he didn’t come home until the early hours of the morning. There were days when he slept late and did nothing all afternoon but lounge around listening to his stereo.
There is no indication that at this point in his life he was a particularly bad kid, a backtalking, pot-smoking hooligan. But his parents, devout and conservative, with their stern, character-building ideas, considered his behavior unseemly and intolerable. They gave David an early curfew, and they sent him to work at the church’s Vacation Bible School. They also threatened to
revoke his stereo privileges if he didn’t shape up. And they began to nag him, criticizing his hair—a full but not overly long rendition of the hair style popularized by the young John Kennedy—and his slothfulness, the fact that he was untidy and didn’t make his bed in the mornings.
Their criticism simply strengthened his yearning to be free of supervision. He began slipping out of the house whenever he could.
But if David was defying his parents, he was not totally disobedient. That July he worked not only at the church school but as a counselor at St. Mark’s day camp. He mowed lawns and baby-sat in order to earn pocket money for a backpacking trip to Alaska on which his parents had promised to send him. He attended to the household chores they assigned him—the care and cleaning of the backyard swimming pool and the care and feeding of the family schnauzer and his own pet, an orange-and-white-striped cat named Flash. And he never let on, at least not in the presence of any adults, that he was furious with his parents.
His ability to keep things to himself—ironically, it was a trait he’d learned from his father, who saw self-control as a sign of masculinity—may have been his undoing. According to his brother John, he was bottled up, choking on his anger. “He never talked back or argued,” he said. “If he was reprimanded, he would just turn and go away.”
But increasingly that summer he was reprimanded, and one day he did complain about it to a friend, a girlfriend. “My parents won’t let me go where I want to go or do what I want to do,” he told her.
Anita Keeler also complained. “David’s turning out badly,” she said to the Reverend Cook, beseeching him for advice.
Bill Keeler never complained—at least not outside his home. Every Saturday he played golf at the Brookhaven Country Club, and he never mentioned to any of his good friends there his struggle with his youngest son. Nor did he breathe a word about it to his friends at church, where every fourth Sunday he and Anita counted the collection money. But more and more Bill Keeler began to feel that his youngest son was a shame and a disgrace to him, and more and more he began to tell David this, shouting at him whenever they were in the privacy of their own home.