The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

In the 1980s came the satanic panic. This started as an accusation of ritual abuse in the McMartin preschool in Southern California. Despite the long investigation and trial that followed, no convictions were made. Dan and Fran Keller were not so lucky. They were convicted in 1991 of sexual assault based on the testimony of children who attended their daycare center. The accusation started when a three-year-old claimed that Dan Keller “pooped and peed on my head” and suggested sexual assault with a pen. Of course, all suspicions of child abuse need to be investigated, but just because the idea of such crimes is horrific doesn’t mean we can suspend the rules of evidence. In this and other cases, children were interviewed using dubious leading techniques. When their testimony started to get more and more bizarre—including animal sacrifice, murder, and satanic rituals—that should have called the testimony and the methods into question. Instead the prosecutors assumed that the daycare was the center of ongoing satanic rituals. The utter lack of physical evidence (it’s hard to sacrifice animals and murder people without leaving anything behind) should have also given them pause. Instead the Kellers were convicted and sentenced to forty-eight years in prison. They were released in 2013 after twenty-one years when a judge ruled that their conviction resulted from faulty testimony by an expert witness.