THE VOLLEYBALL TOURNAMENT
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In the summer of 1991, 12-year-old Brenda Michelle Keller decided she was going to be a better athlete. At 5-foot-5 and 112 pounds, she had powerful legs from riding her bike miles across the hilly, winding country roads in the southwest corner of Shawnee County, 15 minutes from Topeka, Kansas.
The owner of an 18-speed Schwinn with shiny green paint and tires fit for rough gravel roads, Brenda pedaled for hours on the outskirts of Dover, the small town where she lived, reveling in the beauty of land marked by aging trees and an abundance of wildlife.
“Brenda just loved nature, loved animals,” her father, Bob, said. “That bike was her prized possession. She’d ride that thing 10, 20 miles a day.”
Logging thousands of miles on her bike gave Brenda an advantage in sports against some of her schoolmates. What she might have lacked in skill, she made up for in fitness, especially speed and endurance. She also knew natural ability wasn’t enough and leaned on her older brother, John, a football and basketball player at Mission Valley High School, for help. Almost daily, the siblings shot on a goal behind the family’s home.
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“When Brenda decided she wanted to do something, she worked at it,” her mother, Tracy, said.
Volleyball bridged the gap between Brenda’s summer of hoop dreams and her first season of basketball at Dover Junior High. A seventh grader, she didn’t play much on the varsity volleyball team in September and October of 1991. But, like many young girls, being a part of the team meant spending time with her friends. And sports, like in many small towns, were vital in Dover.
Toward the end of the volleyball season, the Tigers had a tournament on Saturday, Oct. 19, at Mission Valley, where kids from Dover and several other small towns in the area traveled for the ninth through 12th grade. On a cool, crisp autumn morning, Brenda, her teammates, coaches, and Terri Anderson, the principal of the junior high and grade school, climbed onto a bus and headed southwest to the tournament.
Three hours and several matches later, the Tigers were on their way back to Dover. Brenda’s teammates and others on the bus remember little about the tournament, but they do recall the 10-minute trip home. During that time, Brenda asked her friends to hang out that afternoon.
“She asked me if I wanted to go on a bike ride, and I said, ‘I’m tired,’” said Jill Wilson, Brenda’s best friend. “We’d been playing all day, and I said, ‘No.’”
Brenda didn’t stop with Wilson. She asked several other teammates, including Misty Lange, a close friend who lived across the street from the Kellers and often went with Brenda on her long bike rides. She also asked Crystal Sievers, Brooklynd Thomas, and Jana Blodgett. Exhausted from a long morning of volleyball, each passed.
The trip home had a profound impact on several of the people on the bus. As sunlight shined through the back and side windows, Allen Zordel, a teacher and coach, and Kristi Osburn, a teammate and eighth grader, saw a light tracing Brenda’s body. Anderson can still see Brenda sitting on the bus.
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“I remember her turning around, looking at me,” Anderson said. “Our eyes locked, and she smiled. That was the last time I saw her.”
Arriving at the junior high school early in the afternoon on a sunny, uncharacteristically warm day for mid-October, members of the team went separate ways. Brenda came home at about 2 p.m., grabbed a snack, and watched TV for an hour before changing for her bike ride. In the few hours before leaving, she asked her mother, John, and younger brother, Pat, if they wanted to tag along. Each said no, and she climbed on her bike at 4 p.m.
“I remember looking out the window and seeing her get on her bike and getting ready to head out,” Lange said. “She went out of town, to the east, and off she went.”
Brenda had several routes. Sometimes, she rode west from her house along 57th Street, the main road running east and west through the heart of Dover, turned right on K-4 Highway, which zigged and zagged northeast to Auburn Road, just outside of Topeka, before heading back to the south along the gravel of Davis Road. On another route, she headed west for miles on 57th, picked one of many dirt roads, and rode between farmland dotted with greenery.
On this day, Brenda picked her favorite route, heading east on 57th Street up the steep hill leading out of Dover. About a mile from her house, she turned right onto Davis Road, a sparsely populated dirt road just outside of the community. On any other day, Brenda might be gone for three or four hours taking in the beauty of nature, admiring butterflies, squirrels, and other critters. On this day, she had a little more than an hour to travel six miles. At 5:30 p.m., the Kellers planned to drive to the junior high for the annual Ladies Aid banquet, a charity event held by a women’s group at the Dover Federated Church.
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Brenda rode south on Davis, which had only a handful of houses surrounded by large open pastures and hills. Though few people lived on this section of the ride, longtime Dover resident Roger Lambotte, whose house was a mile south of 57th Street, spotted Brenda before 5 p.m. Brenda pedaled on to the south, turning right on 79th Street and heading west toward Douglas Road. About a mile later, she turned north onto Douglas to finish the final two miles of her trip. At some point between 79th Street and 69th Street, Brenda had to stop riding her bike due to a mechanical issue – either the chain came off or the rear tire went flat – and that left her pushing it along the east side of Douglas a little after 5 p.m.
Before Brenda turned north onto Douglas, friend Aimee Grubb drove toward the junior high with her father, Don. A 13-year-old, Aimee Grubb was on a driving lesson as they delivered pies for the Ladies Aid dinner. Moments before pulling into the parking lot, the Grubbs met a red Camaro with the license plate “TAMSTOY,” which pulled into the driveway of the house on Douglas Road owned by Gene and Tammy Blake. The Grubbs dropped off the pies at the grade school and traveled back on Douglas toward their home in Harveyville, a small town 15 miles south of Dover. Less than a half mile from school, the Grubbs drove past Brenda as she pushed her bike directly south of the Blake home.
“She was right by the Rileys’ driveway because we could have pulled in there,” Aimee Grubb said. “I wondered why she was pushing her bike, and I thought maybe we should ask her if she wants a ride.”
Don Grubb, who grew up in Dover, said, “She rode her bike lots of times around that square. I’d never given (stopping to pick her up) a thought. I just thought maybe she’s tired. You get tired and you get off and push sometimes. I never paid any attention if she had a flat tire. It goes through my mind quite often. I lay awake at night at times wondering why in the hell I didn’t stop and ask her if she needed any assistance.”
As the Grubbs drove back to Harveyville, they crossed paths with Penny and Francy Lister, who lived a little more than a mile south of Dover. The Listers, including husband and father Larry, are lifelong residents. Their daughter Francy was one year ahead of Brenda in school and knew her well from the Dover Federated Church and its popular youth group.
“Brenda and Francy were really good friends,” Penny Lister said. “They were close. Her and Crystal and Jill … those kids were just close.”
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Like the Grubbs, the Listers were dropping off pies that evening for the banquet and left their home a few minutes before 5:30 p.m. Penny hosted a family gathering that evening, so she and Francy were gone no more than 15 minutes before returning home. Less than five minutes into their drive, they passed the Blakes’ house, a two-story, blue home on the west side of the road. Resting on several acres of property covered in thick timber, the Blake house has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a cellar.
In 1991, the property had several buildings, including multiple red barns, an open field directly north of the barns, a large pond with a makeshift diving board, and a creek running through the woods. A dilapidated small building, which the family and others referred to as a boatshed, rested on the west side of the pond atop a small hill. As the Listers approached the driveway leading to the house, Penny Lister spotted three men sitting at a picnic table in the front yard.
Moments later, the Listers passed Brenda as she pushed her bike north on the east side of the paved road. When the Listers drove by her, Brenda was 50 yards north of the Blake home and crossing a small bridge at the section of the Blake property that opened to a pasture.
“I was like, ‘That’s not too good.’ She was pushing her bike past their house and they were just sitting there,” Penny Lister said.
She considered stopping and asking if Brenda wanted a ride, but decided not to because they were hosting a family birthday party that night. The Listers arrived at the grade school at about 5:30 p.m., and Francy Lister dropped off the pies, which took no more than 5 minutes. They were back on Douglas Road by 5:35 p.m., heading south toward their house.
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“We came directly back, and Brenda wasn’t anywhere,” Penny Lister said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of strange.’ But Brenda was notorious for, if a squirrel would have gone across the street, she would have been checking out where it went, so I really thought that she could have got through the fence line and taken a little jaunt back. I really was not that concerned.”
As the Listers drove by the Blake house, Penny also noticed something else: The three men sitting at the picnic table minutes earlier were not there and out of sight. That memory haunts Penny more than 30 years later. She and her daughter were the last people to see Brenda alive, other than her killer.