Note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter Two, “Moving to Dover,” in “Goodbye, Butterfly: Murder, faith and forgiveness in a small Kansas town.” Oct. 19 is the 35th anniversary of Brenda Keller’s shocking death. This chapter provides background on the Keller family moving to Dover and on Brenda.
Brenda Keller inherited the best of her parents. She was a gifted writer and artist and loved reading and history. She loved to work out and be outdoors. She had a sneaky quick sense of humor, laid-back personality, wonderful voice, and devotion to God. Brenda had a special bond with her mother and father.
“Have you ever loved somebody, and it was like seeing through their eyes? That’s the kind of relationship Brenda and I had,” Tracy, her mother, said. “It was like she was a blend of Rob and I together.”
Brenda also adored animals, just as Tracy did. The Kellers had a small zoo at their house, including lizards, ferrets, spiders, bugs, and a pet rat. Brenda loved God and her family above all, but animals were a close second. A neighbor, Janet Baldwin, remembered Brenda owning a pet chameleon, which she almost lost when she brought the lizard over to show it off.
“We had bushes in front of the porch, and that chameleon jumped into those bushes. She was just squealing,” Baldwin said. “She would just shriek and squeal if she got upset or excited about something. She was in a panic. Tracy and Brenda both loved animals so much.”
Brenda had such a soft spot for animals that it broke her heart to see any creature suffer. Her grandmother, Jean Keller, recalled a moment in her kitchen in which Brenda pleaded with her not to swat any bothersome flies, and Bob remembered tears running down her cheeks when he smashed a spider crawling across a book she was carrying. One of Sievers’ memories of Brenda is her despair when Brenda’s rat bit the head off of her minuscule pet turtle.
“She was just so distraught,” Sievers said. “I was just laughing because it was kind of funny, but she was so upset.”
It was one of the many times Brenda suffered a broken heart over an animal. In another instance, she and friend Amy Best found an abandoned mouse in a nest near the Kellers’ house. Brenda wanted to warm it up, so the girls put it in the microwave.
“Obviously, a poor choice,” Best said. “We found another small rodent of some kind and tried a heating pad. That didn’t work either. She was hysterical and in tears. I was kind of shocked, but she was just devastated.”
Among the kingdom of animals and wildlife Brenda kept, cared for, or tried to nurture to health, Charlemange is the one almost all of her friends and family remember. An aging white rat, Charlemange lived in a piano in the Kellers’ home. When it wasn’t hiding behind the hammers and strings inside the instrument, it was often with Brenda, either crawling on her or resting on her shoulder as she played with her friends.
“She had birds and rodents, and she’d let them crawl all over her,” Jana Blodgett said. “And that freaked me out!”
Brenda treated Charlemange like she would any of her best friends and had the rat for several years before it died of old age. Seeing her care for a pet that would make most people queasy impacted her friends.
“I remember the day it died … it was so sad,” said Amber McGhee, who moved to Dover as a second-grader in 1988 and had numerous sleepovers with Brenda. “She had the coolest animals. Because of Brenda, I actually own two rats as an adult.”