The Professor and the Prostitute (14 page)

Howe came back to Dedham recommending that no further search be undertaken, for it would surely prove futile. It had turned out that Douglas's choice of a method for getting rid of a body had, indeed, been a choice worthy of a professor.

A year later I was still doing research, still tying up loose ends, and I went back to New England for a few days. I stayed in a dreary hotel where Robin used to pick up traveling businessmen, did some last-minute interviews, visited the Combat Zone again, and one afternoon went to Dedham to talk with the police and lawyers at the district attorney's office there about what they thought, finally, about the case and the sort of man Douglas really was.

I met that day with Lieutenant Sharkey, Trooper Howe, District Attorney Delahunt, Assistant District Attorney Kivlan, and another assistant district attorney whom I'd never seen before, Matt Connolly. Sharkey said he'd believed Douglas about the hammer's having been brought into his house by Robin and that he still believed it. Kivlan said he hadn't believed it at the time of the confession and still didn't.

Sharkey said, “You want to know what kind of a guy Douglas was? He's the wimp everyone went to school with, the little fat kid who couldn't tie his own shoes, the one who, if you threw him a basketball, he dropped it, the one with his arms sewed on backward.” Connolly said, “No, he was smarter than that. Wilier. He wanted us to think he was just a wimp, but I think he planned her killing, and that he planned it cleverly.” Someone murmured, “Except for the credit cards. That wasn't smart.”

What about the two unsolved murders that they'd been worried about when Douglas was on the loose? I asked them.

“You read his confession,” Sharkey said. “We probed him about those deaths, but he denied knowing anything about them.” Connolly spoke up: “I don't believe him. I think he could have been connected to them.” He was working on the Sharon case, but so far he'd failed to find anything to link the professor to it.

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.”