The Professor and the Prostitute (15 page)

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.

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.”