The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Ernie W. Webb III’s “Goodbye, Butterfly: Murder, faith and forgiveness in a small Kansas town.” The chapter introduces readers to Brenda Keller and her family.
To know the Kellers is to know their faith. The son of a pastor, Bob is well-versed in God’s word, and church is the center of the Kellers’ being. Brenda embraced God from an early age, but her devotion grew drastically in the summer of 1990 while she was doing something else she loved.
“I always thought I was a Christian when I was little, but I think I really became one last year,” Brenda wrote on a Bible camp questionnaire in 1990. “I had been going to a lot of youth group things, and they started making me feel guilty. So, one time when I was on a long bike ride, I asked Jesus into my heart, and ever since then have been growing more and more in Him every day.”
Brenda finished the survey with the following answer to “What can we pray for you this year?”: “That I will learn to be a good witness and have a perfect heart for God.”
The change in Brenda afterward was profound. She started reading the Bible daily, became more tender hearted, and displayed more willingness to learn. Brenda regularly wore shirts praising Jesus and featuring biblical messages, but her faith was not something she pressed on others.
“She was about God,” Jill Wilson said. “But she never judged anybody. She did her own thing. She was kind to everybody.”
Brenda sang all the time, just like her mother, who often treated large congregations at the Federated Church to hymns with her beautiful soprano voice. If Tracy and Brenda weren’t talking, they were humming or singing. Crystal Sievers loved her voice so much that she begged Brenda to sing tunes from the “The Little Mermaid,” Brenda’s favorite movie.
“There’s a scene in the movie, and it was like she had perfect pitch and it was so spot on, we wanted her to sing that over and over again,” she said.