by Linda Wolfe
The Keelers may have been particularly uneasy about David because they felt disappointed in his brother John. John had run away from home right after high school and joined the army. When he’d come home, instead of going to college as the Keelers wanted, he’d fathered a child and gotten married. The Reverend Cook told me one afternoon, as we were sitting in his book-lined, tranquil study, “Anita Keeler brooded about this all the time, and was always trying to blame someone or something for what had become of John. She’d say things like, ‘If the church retreat had been properly chaperoned, all of this would never have happened.’ By ‘this,’ she meant John’s having a child when he was so young. I’d tell her that it was wrong to try to explain the direction of anyone’s life by seeking the reason for that direction in this specific thing or that, and that it was wrong to brood over the past all the time. But it didn’t do any good.”
By July of 1981, Anita Keeler was unable to stop brooding. Bill Keeler was unable to get control of his youngest child. And David was unable to stop resenting his parents for what he considered their overbearing treatment of him.
At home, he retreated sullenly to his room. At church, which he still attended regularly, he became withdrawn.
“After services, I’m in the habit of standing in front of the church and saying goodbye to my parishioners, shaking hands and exchanging a few words,” the Reverend Cook told me. “David wouldn’t offer his hand. I’d always have to be the one to reach out. To try to touch him.”
The restraint that had characterized both David and Bill Keeler began to crumble on Saturday night, July 11. That night David and three of his friends went to Six Flags Over Texas, a popular amusement park a few miles from the Keeler home. Waiting to ride on the Log Flume, the boys got rowdy and began cutting ahead through the line. Park security officers interceded and took the teenagers to the security office. There they discovered that the boys had in their possession a number of novelty items that they had shoplifted from amusement park vendors. The security police called the boys’ families. Bill Keeler drove out to the park to take his son, and two of the other boys, home.
It must have been a frosty ride. It couldn’t have been easy for a prominent corporate executive to fetch home a son accused of stealing. But Bill Keeler didn’t reveal his anger in the car. Nor, in fact, did he reveal it once they reached home, for here, too, there were outsiders, Don Avant and his seventeen-year-old sister, Debra, come for a sleepover date because their parents were out of town. All that night, the Keelers kept up a front of calm and hospitality. Nothing was said about the Six Flags incident, and in the morning Anita Keeler insisted that the Avant children stay for breakfast; she made one of her elaborate spreads, stacks of pancakes and a sauté pan full of sausages. Perhaps she thought her son and her husband had put their anger aside. Or perhaps she was merely hoping to forestall an explosion between them. Whatever the reason, she prolonged the breakfast, serving up seconds to the dawdling children. When Lynda Avant called to find out what her children were doing, Anita said cheerfully that everything was fine and they’d all be going swimming later in the day. Then Don and Debra ran home to change their clothes and get ready for church.
It was only then, in those few short minutes after the Avant children departed and before the Keelers and the Avants reconvened at the nearby church, that an argument erupted in the Keeler household. But when it did, it was savage. According to a sworn statement David was to give to the police, no sooner were his friends out the door than “my dad started yelling at me about the shoplifting. Mom was yelling with him. And he started to push me around a little, and grabbed me by the neck.” Then, David went on, his father pushed him down the hall to his room, threw him on the bed, sat on him, and threatened to punch him.
Somehow, after that, Bill managed to get his anger under control, for he stood up and told David to hurry and get dressed for church. Even so, the Six Flags incident was not over. “As I was getting ready, they kept coming in and yelling at me about many things they said I had done,” reported David, adding, “Most of which I hadn’t.”
Perhaps it was at this moment that the idea of killing his mother and father crept into the boy’s mind. Or perhaps it was a few minutes later, as he sat in a pew in the church alongside them. Mr. Cook was giving a sermon about Jesus’ parables, talking about the importance of stories in the lives of children. He spoke about how parents tell fairy tales to their kids, and how kids love to hear them, and how Jesus, like a fond parent, had tried to convey his teachings not with harshness but through the gentle medium of stories. David sat through the entire service. But when it was over, he bypassed the minister at the entrance to the church, slipping behind his back without a farewell. He headed home.
His parents, he knew, would be delayed because it was their turn to count the collection money. He went into the house and loaded his father’s semiautomatic shotgun. When the Keelers entered the house fifteen minutes later, he was waiting for them in the foyer. He fired seven shots.
Barbara Keeler, who lived in her own apartment, arrived to go swimming in her parents’ pool about a half hour later. She knocked on the door and, when no one answered, let herself in. She saw her mother lying in the hallway, groaning. Then, lifting her eyes, she stared down the hallway and saw her father. He, too, was lying on the floor, but no sound was coming from his lips.
She raced to him first, bending over him to see if he was still breathing, but she could find no pulse or breath. She turned back to her mother, who was bleeding profusely. “David,” moaned her mother. “David did it.”
At that very moment David, dressed in a sweatshirt, shorts, and Adidas sneakers, was some four miles from the house, pedaling hard on his green Schwinn Varsity ten-speed. After the shooting, he had decided to run away; packing a bag, he tossed it into his bike basket and headed out of town. But suddenly a change came over him. Seeing a police car with two officers inside, he began to ride, almost automatically, toward it. As he drew close, one of the officers rolled down his window and looked at the boy casually, expecting to be asked directions.
“I just shot and killed my parents,” David said.
He was taken to a Dallas police station, and there he talked about what he’d done and why. He’d killed his parents, he explained, because they’d been so strict, because they’d accused him of being a disgrace, and because his father had roughed him up and his mother had sided with his father.
“He talked quite freely,” said Jim Shivers. “And he knew that what he’d done was wrong. But he was kind of emotionless. He had the same demeanor as if he’d been caught shoplifting.”
Stuart Mut went over to the Keeler house that afternoon because he needed to discuss a business matter with Bill. He saw police cars surrounding the place and learned that the Keelers had been killed. He was stunned and, assuming his friends had been the victims of some vicious stranger, drove away. “We didn’t learn until much later that day that it had been little David,” he told me.
Lynda Avant went into the house once the bodies were removed. “The thing I remember best, the thing that gets me,” she said, “was that on top of the washing machine I saw these new blue jeans Anita had just bought for David to take on his backpacking trip. She’d told me she was going to wash them for him before he wore them, to get the stiffness out. And alongside them on the top of the machine were those jingle bells that you wear on your ankles because of bears. She’d bought them and set them out so she could sew them on for him as soon as the jeans were washed.”
The Reverend Cook also went over to the hourse, then hurried down to the Dallas youth detention center to talk with David. “He was casual,” he told me. “It was as if he was no different that night than he’d been when I’d seen him at church in the morning. He talked. But he said things like, ‘I’m feeling okay’ and ‘It’s been kind of a rough kind of day.’” Telling me about it, the minister had sighed and said, “Maybe he was in shock.”
A few days after the shooting,
the surviving members of the Keeler family hired for David a well-known, highly respected criminal lawyer named Doug Mulder. Under Texas law, youthful offenders—those under fifteen—could not at the time be charged and sentenced as adults. David’s crime of patricide and matricide was considered a civil offense—delinquency—rather than a criminal one. But he could, if a judge so willed, be jailed for that delinquency in a juvenile detention center until he reached the age of eighteen. The family felt David would be better served by getting psychiatric treatment and consequently engaged the silver-tongued Mulder.
In August, at a hearing to determine what to do with David, Mulder produced a team of mental health experts who testified that intense criticism by his parents ever since he was a child had caused David to repress his emotions, and that this repression—rather like a fire in a coal mine that inevitably must seek the airshaft—had finally erupted into the violent rage that made the boy shoot to kill. He needed to be taught how to express his feelings, the experts felt, and how to do so constructively. The hearing was televised, and the judge sent David to a private psychiatric hospital, Timberlawn.
The Reverend Cook, when I spoke with him, several months after David had been sent to Timberlawn, said he was happy for the boy, although, like many people, he wasn’t sure that psychiatric treatment could remake a personality. He also said that the members of the congregation had learned the wrong lesson from what had happened to the Keelers. “There is a mindset here that we’re dealing with the will of God, that God caused all this to happen because in some way He was dissatisfied with us,” the minister told me. “People here say, ‘In the good old days, when everyone believed, you didn’t have things like this.’ Well, you did. What you didn’t have then were guns, all those loaded guns. Those loaded guns in our homes are killing more of us than bad guys ever could. But people around here don’t care.”
David was treated at Timberlawn and then kept in a halfway house until late in 1984. By then I’d forgotten all about his case, but as I said, I’d made friends in Texas, and Texans are good about staying in touch. That Christmas I got letters and cards from several of my Dallas friends, and one of them sent me a news clipping. David, the clipping said, would be released from psychiatric supervision on December 29—his eighteenth birthday. His juvenile record would be sealed. And he would receive his share of his parents’ $1.2 million estate.
There was also a final twist, or at least what seemed to me to be a final nod to the anxieties that people living in a gun-toting society can never fully vanquish. The financial settlement had been negotiated among the Keeler siblings, who were apparently willing enough to give David his share of the family fortune. Interestingly, however, they stipulated that he not go to college either at the University of Texas in Austin or Southern Methodist University in Dallas, because of the two schools’ proximity to them.
THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE TWIN GYNECOLOGISTS
New York, New York
1975
IN THE SUMMER of 1975, a pair of forty-five-year-old twins, their bodies gaunt and already partially decomposed, were found dead at a fashionable Manhattan address in an apartment littered with decaying chicken parts, rotten fruit, and empty pill bottles. The bodies were those of Cyril and Stewart Marcus, doctors who had apparently died, more or less simultaneously, as the result of a suicide pact.
Like many people, I was shocked by the information. Two things contributed to my astonishment. One was the men’s twinship, the doubleness that had given them a mutual birth date and now a mutual death date as well. Another was the men’s prominence; they had been among New York City’s most well-known obstetrician-gynecologists.
But if I was shocked, I was at the same time not surprised to hear of the death of the Marcus brothers, for I had known them, had once been a patient of Stewart Marcus. It was back in 1966, a year during which I paid several visits to his office but then abruptly decided not to continue seeing him. Though he was garrulous and even oddly confiding on one of my first two visits, on my third, he got angry about something—I no longer recall exactly what it was—and began to shout and scream at me. My husband was with me at the time, and I remember how, controlling an urge to respond in kind, he turned to me and said, “Let’s go. This man is obviously crazy.” Dr. Marcus seemed not to hear my husband’s derogatory remark, though it was made sharply and loudly. He just went on ranting and raving, and we felt that although the doctor was standing just across his desk from us, it was as if, in effect, he were somewhere else, somewhere very distant. We stood up and left.
No doubt it was because of that experience—when I had so clearly perceived the gynecologist’s distance from life, from reality—that I wasn’t altogether surprised to hear of his and his brother’s peculiar death. Indeed, a part of me wondered how anyone that disturbed and provocative had managed to function, cope, survive as long as he had. Nevertheless, I was immensely curious about how he had died, especially since there were a number of mysteries about what had occurred.
One mystery concerned the specific cause of death. A large number of empty barbiturate bottles were found in the apartment, and at first the medical examiner had assumed that the brothers had killed themselves by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. But autopsy tests revealed no trace of barbiturates in either body. The medical examiner’s office next concluded that the twins had died from an attempted withdrawal from barbiturates. Such withdrawal can, in the case of chronic barbiturate addicts—and by this time it had been established that both twins had been taking mammoth doses of Nembutal for years—be as fatal as the addiction itself by producing life-threatening seizures and convulsions. After the M.E.’s report, however, some experts questioned the finding, since the bodies showed none of the typical signs that accompany death by convulsion, such as bruises, tongue bites, and brain hemorrhaging. New tests were performed, and this time it was discovered that in Stewart’s body, at least, there were barbiturate traces, but not in Cyril’s. How Cyril had died remained a puzzle.
Another mystery was that Cyril had outlived his brother by several days. Police investigators learned that he had even left the apartment once Stewart was dead, only to return and die alongside him. Why had he left? And why, for that matter, had he come back?
I began my investigation by talking, first, with police at the 19th Precinct, a few blocks from my home. Detectives from that precinct had been called to the apartment in which the twins had died—it was Cyril’s apartment on York Avenue in the East Sixties—after a building repairman discovered the bodies. A lieutenant described to me the scene the detectives had encountered. “There wasn’t an inch of floor that wasn’t littered,” he said. “The place was a pigsty.” He went on to explain that one of the twins had been found lying face down across the head of a twin bed, the other, face up on the floor next to a matching twin bed in a different room. The features of the one on the bed—Stewart, dead longer than his brother—had already begun to decompose.
“Not a pretty sight,” the lieutenant said. I nodded. “You want to see the pictures?” I said yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to look at the bodies. I concentrated instead on the rooms themselves, vast seas of garbage, of unfinished TV dinners and half-drunk bottles of soda, of greasy sandwich wrappers and crumpled plastic garment covers. “See the chair.” The lieutenant pointed at an armchair I’d hardly noticed, a-swim in the debris. “See what’s in the middle of it?” I peered but couldn’t tell. “That’s because you’ve probably never seen an armchair full of feces before.” The lieutenant guffawed. Then, serious and indignant, he said, “They used the chair for their toilet! Would you believe it!”
What I remember best about that encounter is that when I got up to leave, I noticed tacked to the back of the door a large print of the picture with the armchair. “A couple of the guys had it blown up,” the lieutenant, seeing me stare at it, explained. The pile of excrement in the center of the chair had been circled with a wax pencil, and scrawled across the circle were the words “East
Side doctors!”
I understood the indignation the police felt about the Marcus brothers. Many people were to share it, particularly when it was revealed that until some two weeks before their death, the addicted twins had still been on the staff of one of New York’s most prestigious medical institutions, the New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center, and had still been treating patients there. But it turned out that throughout their lives, the twins had inspired indignation. In part it was because they had always seemed to believe that, by virtue of their twinship, they were not merely different from the rest of the world but superior to it. One patient of theirs, a woman named Arlene Gross who eventually gave birth to twin sons, told me that when she was pregnant she grew very heavy, and although tests did not indicate she was carrying twins, she thought she might be, particularly since there was a history of twins in her family. Stewart, who was her obstetrician, refused to consider that she might be carrying two fetuses. “You pregnant women are all alike,” he said to her. “Just because you overeat and get fat, you think you’re going to have twins.” Arlene Gross continued, “And from that time on, he spoke to me with such contempt that it was as if I’d said I was going to have the Messiah, as if giving birth to twins was something too special for the likes of me.”
They had been born in 1930 in Binghamton, New York, Stewart a few minutes before Cyril, and from that moment forth they led lives as intertwined as the one they had shared in their mother’s womb. They were not identical, but they looked remarkably alike, and when they were toddlers spoke to one another in the secret, private language that many affect. Always together, by the time they entered school, they thought of themselves not as separate entities but, somehow, one person, albeit a person with two heads, two trunks and torsos, eight limbs, and no physical connection like that of Siamese twins. For them, the connection, the bond, was never palpable, but it existed just the same. In the first grade, the teacher asked the class members who were only children to raise their hands. Stewart and Cyril Marcus both shot up a waving, eager arm.