Sunday, December 15, 1991
Home Edition
Section: Los Angeles Times Magazine
Page: 52
Faith, Hope & Fraud;
Desperate Cancer Victims Say
Jimmy Keller Is a Miracle Worker.
The Government Says He's a Con Man.
By: Paul Ciotti
Paul Ciotti is a Los Angeles Times Magazine staff writer
The first time patients saw St. Jude's International Cancer Clinic
in Tijuana, it was a wonder they didn't turn around and leave. The clinic
was in a decrepit two-story building in a desolate hillside neighborhood.
The finish stucco had fallen off the facade in places, and some of the
windows were covered with plastic and tape. To reach the clinic offices,
you went down a long, dark-paneled hallway opening into a small,
four-room suite. And nearly anytime between 9 a.m. and dusk, that's where
you'd find the director, Jimmy Keller, a small, slightly-stooped man with
longish gray hair, a salt-and-pepper beard and thick glasses that always
hung at a precarious angle across his face.
That was a result of his cancer. Twenty-three years ago, he lost his
left ear, part of his neck and his major facial nerves to radical cancer
surgery. The left side of his face sagged. His eyeglasses had nothing to
hook onto--the spot where his ear used to be was a round, gray traumatic
scar, the size of a saucer, with a little black hole in the middle for
his ear canal.
But none of this mattered to the people who drove up the steep,
potholed streets to St. Jude's, lining the curb with their cars and vans
and U.S. license plates. Once their oncologists had pronounced the death
sentence--"I'm sorry. There's nothing more I can do"--they went to
Keller. And Keller was unique. He had a presence. His easy southern drawl
inspired trust. "You feel intensely cared about," said one Redondo Beach
family therapist treated by Keller for cancer of the stomach, cervix and
breast.
Return To The Article
People would walk in the front door and see a long hall lined with
people sitting in chairs under amino-acid IV drips, laughing, talking and
welcoming the newcomers. "You have cancer?" they'd burble. "Oh, really?
What kind?"
It was Keller who set the tone. He was always touching people, putting
his arms around them, telling them he loved them.
"Is this part of the treatment?" a woman asked him once.
"Yes," Keller said.
He gave everyone hugs and kisses. Men, too. People would come to his
clinic and wonder what they were getting into--his clinic was full of
cancer patients singing songs.
Then on March 18, 1991, the singing stopped.
[Just two days earlier, on March 16, 1991, was when my wife went
to see Jimmy with her step-father, dying of cancer. He never got any treatments from
Jimmy, and, indeed, did die of cancer. Karl Loren]
At 9 in the morning, while Keller was examining patients, men with
guns burst into the clinic. "Who are they?" asked Keller, looking up in
surprise. That's when they pulled him out the door to a waiting van.
"Jimmy has just been kidnaped by four thugs," a patient screamed into
the telephone. "My God! What are we going to do?"
There was nothing they could do. The men were from Mexican
immigration. After taking Keller back to their office, they disappeared,
and six other men in dungarees and blue work shirts, who declined to
identify themselves, entered the room, seized him and walked him across
the border to San Ysidro.
There he was arrested by the FBI and arraigned on 12 counts of
conspiracy to commit wire fraud (specifically that he or someone working
for him made telephone calls across interstate lines to attract people to
his Mexican clinic). Keller was flown to Brownsville, Tex., where bail
was set at $5 million cash. Then, in August, the judge moved the
proceedings 50 miles up the Rio Grande to McAllen, Tex.
Keller's trial had begun.
Although his friends were shocked and appalled at this dramatic turn
of events, Keller himself was not totally surprised. People had been
trying to put him in jail for the past 15 years. As he saw it, there was
too much money at stake for the "cancer industry" to sit idly by while
"alternative practitioners" increasingly took their clients away. "I had
the most successful clinic that's ever been run," he maintained. "They
didn't punish me for being unsuccessful but for being too successful."
Ridiculous, responded William Jarvis, head of the Loma Linda-based
National Council Against Health Fraud. What people like Keller do, Jarvis
says, is exploit desperate, alienated and guilt-ridden cancer victims,
infusing them with their own paranoia until these people start to believe
that "the FDA is the enemy and that the National Cancer Institute is
involved in this giant conspiracy to withhold these wonderful cures."
Keller wasn't a healer, Jarvis contended--he was a transparent fraud who
dispensed worthless secret serums and misdiagnosed cancer victims with
pseudo-scientific machines. "Those are so fraudulent on their face it's
hard not to judge Keller as a pathological liar."
McAllen, Tex., a flat, languid farm town of 90,000 people (16%
unemployed), is not an ideal place to spend the summer. Cloudbursts hit
without warning in the middle of the afternoon, and at night warm winds
rattle the palm fronds, bang screen doors and otherwise fray the nerves.
The federal marshals in U.S. District Court Judge Filemon Vela's
courtroom were on edge in August for reasons that went beyond the
weather. Seventy-five friends, relatives and former patients had shown up
in McAllen for Keller's trial, and the marshals at first thought they
were dealing with some health-fanatic religious cult.
The prosecutors, too, were confounded by the intensity of support for
Keller. Because they started with the assumption that Keller was the
worst and most obvious kind of fraud, they couldn't explain the fierce
loyalty of Keller's patients except by postulating that he had a
charismatic hold on them--which to Keller's patients was absurd. Far from
being some kind of cult leader, Keller was actually rather shy. He was
deferential, easily moved to tears and, as one man put it, so "profoundly
self-effacing" that he found it difficult to ask patients to pay their
bills. It wasn't Keller's alleged charisma that made him so beloved by
his former patients, said Redondo Beach family therapist Ruth Kerhart; it
was his care. "We are dying when we come to him. We have given up. We are
headed for death, and all of a sudden we're going in the other
direction."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mervyn Mosbacker didn't see it that way. A
graduate of the University of Texas Law School, he was 37 years old, with
a pale, smooth face, a dogged manner and, most important, perhaps, a
righteous conviction that Keller belonged behind bars.
As Mosbacker painted Keller, he was a quack, a con man who'd treated
people with an expensive and allegedly potent wonder drug, Tumorex, which
he'd claimed was a "live-cell polypeptide" smuggled out of West Germany.
In fact, it was mainly water and L-Arginine--a common, everyday amino
acid that, Mosbacker said, had no efficacy whatsoever in the treatment of
cancer. Although Keller claimed he'd had an 80% to 90% success rate with
people whose immune systems had not been compromised by surgery,
radiation or chemotherapy, his alleged cures, Mosbacker said, were
nothing but delusion, fantasy and outright fraud. The FBI did a study of
the 135 or so patients Keller had treated during the nine months covered
by the indictment (from March though December, 1983). Of the 103 the FBI
was able to locate, 91 were dead, nine were alive but still had cancer,
and three were cancer-free.
Return To The Article
The case, as the prosecutor hammered it home to the jury, was really
very simple: Keller claimed he could cure cancer and had the chutzpah to
charge cancer patients $3,000 for three weeks' treatment with a
watered-down amino acid, and, in the end, his patients all died anyway.
As Jimmy Keller sat in the courtroom day after day,the story of his
life that the prosecutor told seemed so alien and twisted that when old
friends drove out to see him at the Hildago County Jail, he'd seize their
hands and burst into tears. There was far more to his story than the
judge or prosecution ever dreamed, he said. "If they knew what I knew
(about how to stop cancer), they'd dismiss the case."
I am, on this warm Saturday night in late summer, talking to Keller in
one of the jail's small administrative offices at the end of a long
corridor next to an unlocked outside door. If Keller had wanted to, he
could have taken three steps, turned left and fled unnoticed into the
humid, bug-filled night. Instead, he leaned back and began his story in
his low-key, casual way, the same way he always tells it, starting with
that fateful summer of 1968 when he developed a black mole, as big as a
golf ball, in his left ear, pressing on his earlobe. "My doctor said if I
had immediate radical surgery, I had a 50-50 chance of living. This
mutilation was the price I had to pay to get rid of my tumor."
Although the operation was successful, it left Keller bitter and
depressed. He owned a thriving water-softener business in Baton Rouge,
but with his left ear gone and left-side facial nerves severed, he felt
"hideous," "a monster." "I was scaring people," he recalls.
On top of
everything else, within two months, cancer nodules grew back in his neck,
arms and groin. This time, his doctors recommended the same kind of
radiation treatment they had previously told him wouldn't work.
Unwilling to undergo radiation or further surgery, Keller fell into
despair. He began to drink. By December, 1968, he was "in real bad
condition. I had lumps all over me. I was in pain. I had no appetite. My
parents were making novenas to St. Jude."
Then one day his parents got an unsigned letter about an alternative
cancer clinic in Dallas. "And so to please my mom and dad, I went to
Dallas and started on (an herbal anti-cancer) treatment."
To Keller's amazement, after three months his tumors softened and
disappeared, his weight returned to normal and he became an
alternative-treatment zealot. "I was on fire to tell people about other
treatments. I was going into the hospitals to tell other people but no
one was listening."
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It was just as well. The government closed the clinic in 1969, leaving
Keller and the others with no place to go for treatment, so Keller's
modest house in Baton Rouge became by default the center of an informal
self-help society where patients gave each other Laetrile shots and
chelation therapy. For the next seven years, Keller openly practiced
medicine without a license, giving injections and megavitamin IV drips,
hanging the bottles on clothes hooks, treating as many as 20 people a day
from all over the country.
In the process, Keller also became an outspoken advocate for
alternative health care, giving talks and TV interviews, running
letter-writing campaigns and, as state chairman of the Committee for
Freedom of Choice in Cancer, lobbying the Louisiana Legislature for three
straight weeks in the mid-'70s to legalize Laetrile (an anti-cancer drug
derived from apricot pits). The bill passed 91 to 1 in the House, 34 to 0
in the Senate, and got the governor's fast-track signature in only three
days.
When the Georgia Legislature decided to hold hearings on a similar
bill, Keller showed up to announce that he was "going to commit suicide
before the Georgia House of Representatives." This was in response to
early medical testimony that eating six apricot kernels and half-a-dozen
500-milligram Laetrile tablets could cause a person to die from cyanide
poisoning. When it was Keller's turn to speak, he first ate half-a-dozen
apricot kernels and Laetrile tablets. "It took me five minutes to chew
them up. I was chewing and chewing." There was total silence in the
packed galleries.
When it became clear that Keller wasn't going to drop dead,
pandemonium broke out. Members of the audience started shouting: "They've
been lying to us!" "The enemy is the FDA! That's the real enemy!" Keller
said that before he left, every member of the committee approached him to
thank him for exposing the federal government's bias.
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Such tactics didn't endear him to the Louisiana State Board of Medical
Examiners, which had been trying without success to shut him down for the
previous three years. In those days, Keller used to walk around with a
.357 magnum on his hip and let it be known that "if anyone tried to stop
us I would take that as a threat on my life." More significant, there
were by then lots of important people among Keller's clients, including
the executive secretary to the governor of Louisiana (who used to show up
at Keller's clinic in an official state car) as well as several friends
of the district attorney of East Baton Rouge parish. "The D.A. wouldn't
prosecute me," Keller said. "I was appearing on TV. I was just as
arrogant as ever."
Then in March, 1983, the State Board of Medical Examiners, having
failed to get anywhere with a criminal case, finally reversed field and
filed a civil suit against him for practicing medicine without a license.
A judge issued an injunction and shut Keller down. It was the end of the
line in Louisiana, and, organizing a caravan of cancer patients, Keller
moved his operation down to Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from
Brownsville, Tex.
For people used to traditional medical care, Keller's operation came as
quite a shock. Because he believed that poor eating habits weakened the
immune system's ability to fight cancer, he put all his patients on a
strict diet of foods such as whole grains, fresh vegetables, fish,
fertile eggs and chicken breasts. He urged patients to avoid aluminum
pots, red meat, canned goods, alcohol, coffee, white flour and salt. Not
only was he suspicious of the radiation used in cancer treatment, but he
also avoided computer screens, microwave ovens and even battery-powered
watches, which, he said, upset the body's natural energy flow.
Keller deliberately tried to keep his clinic looking as little like a
hospital as possible. "I always wore just plain old clothes," he said. He
didn't merely give injections; he would hold people's hands and pray with
them. A firm believer in the power of positive imagery, he put a plaque
above the mantel: "I do not have cancer. Therefore I am going to live."
At the end of the day, he'd call everyone in to say the words together.
Not surprisingly, some people were put off by Keller. They'd come to
Mexico to be cured of cancer by cutting-edge medical science unavailable
in overcautious U.S. clinics and instead found themselves being treated
by a one-eared shaman with a southern drawl who was dressed in casual old
clothes, praying, hugging his patients and telling them he loved them.
"He doesn't look like a doctor," one woman told her son the
first time
she saw Keller.
"Mom, he isn't a doctor," her son said. "He's a healer.
That's why
we're here."
But even healers have their failures, and in 1981, Keller's biggest
failure was with himself. A tumor on his neck had began to grow and get
hard again. But this time, his regular remedies seemed powerless to
control it. Then at the annual meeting of the National Health Federation
in Dallas, he bought a supply of Tumorex. When he injected the amino acid
solution intravenously, he was astonished. "I felt a tingling in my tumor
areas. They got softer. It was phenomenal."
Keller became a believer. The instant he gave an injection, people
would start feeling heat in their tumors (a thermometer placed on the
tumor, Keller said, showed a temperature rise of one to two degrees).
There was a pulling, tingling, grabbing sensation. One patient said it
felt like a thousand little fingers pulling at her tumors. People with
brain tumors heard popping and cracking sounds as if fireworks were going
off in their heads. Tumorex didn't always work with everyone, but when it
did, Keller said, the results could be spectacular. Within hours,
patients reported, tumors began to soften and shrink, and within days
they began to disappear. "On open tumors," Keller said, "you could
actually see bubbles."
Visitors to the Keller clinic were astounded. They'd come back and
tell stories about having seen people who would come to the clinic near
death, and who, after a few days or few weeks of treatment, would be back
on their feet again, walking, shopping and ready to resume their normal
lives. Dr. George Eisberg, an Albuquerque family physician who testified
at Keller's trial, told of escorting a dying friend to Keller's clinic.
"I wheeled him in in a wheelchair. He couldn't swallow." But as
soon as
Keller put him on the IV drip, the patient's chest pain subsided so much
that for dinner that night he went out and ordered a lobster and a pina
colada.
Dr. David Steenblock, an El Toro osteopath, testified that he saw
dozens of patients with metastasized cancer make the trip to Keller's
clinic--and when they came back, no cancer was visible on the bone scan.
"He has a lot more success with cancer patients than I have," Steenblock
said.
Joel Wallach, a comparative pathologist from San Ysidro, testified
that Keller worked wonders with people's immune systems. "They come home,
gain weight, their T-cell level comes back up to normal and they go back
to work."
But the best advertisements of all for Keller were his former
patients, people like Bonnie Cayer of Huntington Beach, Olga Quijano of
Torrance, Eleanor Dominquez of Culver City, Libby Hodges of Newport
Beach, Rosaline Raz of Tustin, Maxine Bachich from Malibu and Ruth
Kerhart of Redondo Beach--all of whom testified that when they first went
to see Keller they were suffering variously from cancer of the breast,
brain, stomach, cervix or uterus. Keller, they claimed, had stopped their
pain, shrunk their tumors and kept them alive and well for as long as
eight years. "I have talked to people who spent $150,000 on doctors and
been told to go home and die," Hodges said. "I spent $5,000, and he saved
my life."
Although much of what Keller did (administering injections, ordering
transfusions and prescribing vitamins and diets) fell well within the
realm of conventional medical practice, his use of the Digitron D
Spectrometer to diagnose and treat cancer dwelt in another realm
entirely. This was a kind of automated biofeedback machine (common in
Europe) that, according to Keller, operated on the body's "energy field."
As he explained it, "Every disease has its particular
frequency." By
having the patient hold an electric coil and dialing in the right
numbers, he could, he asserted, diagnose cancer without the need for
biopsies, blood tests, CAT scans or X-rays.
Not that it was any simple matter. Operating the Digitron was a
calling that required a kind of intuitive skill, a sixth sense, even a
kind of grace. "Truly, he is a born healer," said Quijano, a Torrance
grandmother. "There are times I have felt such healing energy."
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And that was another thing Keller's patients liked about him. He
didn't simply dispense serums and vitamins on some predetermined
schedule; he used the Digitron to test every person every day to
determine what kind of therapy or serums were needed at that moment and
in what amounts. He would make the diagnosis even if the patient wasn't
physically present. A mere Polaroid photo would suffice. Nor was the
Digitron limited only to the treatment of cancer. Keller also used it to
test Tumorex and even five-gallon jugs of bottled drinking water. If he
got a bad reading, he'd send them right back.
Keller wished he could do as much with the FBI, which, on Dec. 7,
1983, sent agent Claude Hildreth and Texas attorney general investigator
Nora Dominguez to Keller's Matamoros clinic with a hidden tape recorder.
The two claimed claiming to be the parents of a sick boy. But Keller got
suspicious when they specifically asked him how he "cured" leukemia, and
he refused to be drawn into a discussion.
The FBI wasn't the only institution with an interest in Keller's
alleged ability to successfully treat cancer. On Dec. 14, 1983, the
Brownsville Herald ran a major investigative piece on Keller's clinic,
prompting the Matamoros Health Department to temporarily seal the front
door (flexible, as always, Mexican authorities left the back door open).
Frantic, Keller called his U.S. patient representative and contact
person, Maxine Lowder.
"Have you seen anything in the newspapers about us up there?"
"No, why?"
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"It's in the newspapers and on TV that we have a quack clinic and
we're robbing people."
That wasn't the half of it. The Brownsville Herald story (based in
part on confidential investigative reports provided by state authorities)
concluded that Keller's clinic was an out-and-out fraud that robbed
terminal patients of both their money and their dignity. It described
Keller's sales pitch as "so ridiculous" as to be "funny" and reported
that the Baton Rouge district attorney who protected Keller all those
years was under investigation by a federal grand jury for taking bribes.
As soon as Maxine Lowder got off the telephone with Keller, she called
a CIA agent who had been treated at the clinic.
The agent, who lived in Florida, urged that Keller be sent to him
immediately. "I'll get him out of the country," he said.
Keller left that day for Florida, slumped down in the back seat of
car. But by the time he got to Baton Rouge, Keller had a change of heart.
You couldn't just start patients on Tumorex and suddenly leave them high
and dry.
"Jimmy, you got to get out of there," Lowder told him.
"I can't. I can't."
"Jimmy, you can't help them if you are in jail."
It was no use. Keller flew back to Texas, where he finished his
patients' treatment in a Brownsville motel.
"It was a mistake to go to Matamoros," Keller said after closing
the
clinic. "People weren't used to us. We were sitting ducks."
By early 1984, Keller was back in operation again,this time on the
water at Rosarito Beach. According to Keller, the U.S. attorney in
Brownsville wanted to extradite him, but it was impossible under Mexican
law--nothing Keller was doing was illegal in Mexico (officially, Keller
was simply the director of a clinic that employed Mexican doctors).
Then, over the Easter weekend, 1984, two FBI agents, Scott Weigmann
and Walter Lamar, in the company of Mexican police officials, showed up
at his clinic in flowered shirts, straw hats and sunglasses. While the
FBI raided his clinic, Keller hid in a cottage nearby. Knowing that it
was just a matter of time until someone found him there, Keller and his
nurse casually walked out the door, past the clinic and up the beach,
laughing and cutting up, as if they were lovers. Keller later heard that
the FBI had been hunting for him all over Baja.
Although Keller decided to stay in Mexico, the rest of 1984 turned out
to be a disaster. He was forced to abandon his clinic. Maxine Lowder was
convicted of failure to report a felony (she subsequently spent 19 months
in the federal prison at Pleasanton, Calif.), and without his contact in
the United States, Keller lost track of all his patients.
In late 1984, Keller set up his clinic again. This time he located it
in a poor hillside neighborhood in Tijuana. Although temporarily beyond
the reach of the FBI (one senior Mexican police official had, according
to Keller, warned the FBI that if he caught agents harassing Keller in
Mexico again, he'd throw them into jail), Keller was hardly home free.
Because of the now well-advertised indictment against him, and the fact
that his clinic generated large amounts of cash, he had become a walking
target of opportunity.
In the fall of 1985, two Mexican policemen picked up Keller and his
nurse, Junie Douglas, and literally tried to push them across the border
(Keller gave them $2,500 to let them go). Two years later, he was
attacked by men carrying a machete and a nightstick. There was so much
blood on the walls that a rumor went around that he had been beheaded.
And in 1989, Keller was kidnaped and robbed by two Mexican police
officers, one of whom carried a pistol and the other a sawed-off shotgun.
Finally, on March 18, 1991, Keller was dragged out of his office by
Mexican immigration and turned over to the FBI to stand trial on the wire
fraud charges.
To head his defense team, Keller hired Gerald Goldstein, a highly
esteemed, curly-haired San Antonio attorney who, only days before the
start of the trial, had been named Lawyer of the Year by the National
Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers. A virtuoso when it came to
illegal-search cases, he had recently persuaded a Colorado judge to
dismiss five felony counts of sexual assault and drug and weapons
possession against gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson. Afterward, a
grateful Thompson described him in Rolling Stone as a "maestro of
motions."
Return To The Article
The easiest part of Keller's defense was disproving the government's
contention that the L-Arginine serum used by Keller was "ineffective as a
cancer treatment." To refute that assertion, one of Keller's attorneys
(he had five) put several health researchers on the stand. They testified
that computer searches of the standard medical databases showed some 20
to 25 articles, several of which were done at the National Cancer
Institute itself, demonstrating that L-Arginine either prevented
cancerous tumors in the first place or, in the case of existing tumors,
made them significantly shrink or disappear entirely. The papers ranged
from a 1943 study showing that in 83% of the animals tested, rat tumors
disappeared within two to three weeks when injected with L-Arginine, to a
1991 Lancet study showing that when human volunteers were injected with
large doses of L-Arginine over a three-day period, their "natural
killer-cell activity rose a mean of 91%."
If L-Arginine is so good for treating cancer, asked the judge, why
don't more doctors use it?
It was a good question, and one answer, suggested Bryan Smith Finkle,
a pharmacologist-toxicologist from the University of Utah Medical Center
who led the successful development of human growth hormone, was one of
economics. FDA approval of a new cancer drug traditionally took seven to
10 years and cost the manufacturer $80 million to $120 million.
This is why the drug companies don't want to have anything to do with
L-Arginine, Keller later said. "They have to make a profit for their
stockholders. So they go after the things that are profitable." No drug
company is going to jump the hurdles of FDA approval for a common amino
acid you couldn't even get a patent on.
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Before the trial started, Keller supporters had been alarmed by Judge
Vela, a heavy-set, round-faced man with thinning, slicked-back hair and
large Lyndon Johnson ears that gave him the look of an unreconstructed
south-Texas cracker. In fact, he was a genial, grandfatherly Latino with
an open, fair attitude and unabashed curiosity. As the trial progressed,
he became so interested in alternative-health-care issues that at times
he would interrupt the attorneys and question the witnesses himself.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mosbacker was fuming. The defense put on a
Stanford professor of engineering to testify that the Digitron machine
was a "radionics" device that worked like "instrumented prayer" in
"another dimension" using "subtle energy" at the "level of the
mind." And
yet when Mosbacker objected to letting what he regarded as drivel into
the trial record, the judge hushed him with a wave and leaned over his
bench to chat with the professor in a friendly, informal way, the two of
them talking like a couple of old codgers sipping root beer on a wooden
bench outside the general store.
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Bill Moore, an longtime Savannah lawyer who handled the examination of
the witnesses regarding L-Arginine and radionics, was elated. "This judge
lets in triple hearsay. We've got a golden window of opportunity."
Other people were not so sure. The prosecution was careful to keep the
focus of the trial narrow and limited to specific charges of fraud:
Keller promised people a cancer cure, took their money and then failed to
deliver ("All his patients died").
And the defense had to admit that the great majority of Keller's
patients from those early Matamoros days had, in fact, died by the summer
of 1991. Not that anyone (except, maybe, Mosbacker) really blamed Keller.
By Keller's reckoning, perhaps as many as 95% of the patients were
terminal by the time they first walked in the door. That's the reason
they had gone to Mexico in the first place. Their own doctors had given
up on them. They'd had so much radiation and toxic chemotherapy that
their immune systems were shot, their inner organs destroyed. Of course,
Keller couldn't save such people; no one could. What he could do was
reduce their tumors, relieve their pain and, as in the case of Brenda
Laughlin, make their remaining days more rewarding.
Laughlin had originally come to see Keller expecting to live just
another few weeks. In fact, she lived 2 1/2 years, and had a baby in the
interim. When she did die, it was from pneumonia, not cancer. Most people
would have gladly paid thousands of dollars for a chance to bear a child
and live an extra 2 1/2 years. "I never charged her anything," said
Keller. Although Mosbacker portrayed him as a money-grubbing fraud,
perhaps as many as one-third of his patients never paid anything at all,
Keller said, and many more paid less than the standard charge of $3,000
for three weeks. Keller gave food to some patients and even allowed
people to stay in his apartment so they wouldn't have to rent a motel
room. Once, when he accidentally overcharged a woman, he mailed her a
refund. "Let's face it," Goldstein told the jury. "Do con artists send
money back? When was the last time you got a refund from a doctor?"
As for the notion that all Keller's patients died, the evidence
presented by Mosbacker appeared to the defense as, at the very least,
highly selective. Among the 20 people whose death certificates were
introduced into evidence were people who died from a gunshot wound, a
stroke and chickenpox. Besides, these were people Keller had treated
eight years ago, some of them elderly people who might have been expected
to die even without cancer. "In conventional medicine," Goldstein said,
"if you have a patient live five years, they call it a cure. Yet his
patients are expected to live forever."
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The toughest defense issue, however, was whether Keller had promised a
cure. The prosecution had put on a dozen witnesses who said Keller had
told them (or their now-deceased relatives) they were "cured" or "cancer
free" or that "the poison has left your body."
In response, the defense put on nearly two dozen other vigorous,
healthy former patients, mostly from Keller's Tijuana years, all of whom
stoutly denied that Keller ever used the word cure, as well as Keller
himself who said: "I bless (the prosecution witnesses), and I hope God
blesses them. I sure tried to help them. I didn't say cure. I said the
(Digitron) machine had 'zeroed out.' "
Well, what about all the witnesses who said you had promised them a
cure? Mosbacker asked. "All these people are lying?"
"No," said Keller, "they are good people." It was just
that when
people are desperate, they tend to hear what they want to hear.
As prosecutor, Mosbacker got the final word at the trial. And on this
occasion he made the most of it. He readily conceded that many patients
felt better for a brief period after they went to Keller, but that had
nothing to do with Keller's ability to do anything about their cancer.
Keller, Mosbacker said, was simply giving them blood transfusions to
invigorate them, medicine to mask their pain and diuretics to shrink
their tumors.
"If Keller has treated thousands of persons, why can't he bring you
in
one person he has cured?" Mosbacker asked. Then he answered his own
question: "There aren't any."
Forget all the extraneous stuff about Digitron mind machines, subtle
waves and the alleged ability of L-Arginine to shrink tumors in rats,
Mosbacker told the jurors, and instead take a last, hard look at Keller's
numbers. "Out of 103 patients, 91 are dead, three claim to be cured, and
the rest have cancer. (The defense) didn't even bring in a single person
who was cured."
Return To The Article
Sitting at the defense table, Keller was practically apoplectic. How
could the prosecutor get away saying that he couldn't produce anyone who
was ever cured when the witness room was full of them? The prosecutor had
contended that they didn't count, that they hadn't had biopsies to prove
they were better. But no doctor did biopsies on obviously healthy
patients, Keller said. And besides, Keller's son, Jimmy Jr., would later
say, in many cases the tumors had disappeared. "What are you going to
biopsy? The place the tumor used to be before it went down?"
The case went to the jury at noon Sept. 2. The judge's instructions to
the jurors, mostly young Latinas, were stunningly favorable to the
defense ("awesome," actually, Goldstein would later say). Among other
things, the judge told them, it didn't matter if Keller's treatment
didn't actually help anyone. If he merely believed he was helping people,
he wasn't guilty of fraud.
Even so, it was hard to predict what the jury would do. Frequent peals
of laughter spilled from the jury deliberation room as Keller's friends
and family waited anxiously in the courtroom nearby. No one knew what the
laughter meant; there was no way to interpret it.
Return To The Article
After three hours, to everyone's astonishment, the jury announced that
it had reached a verdict. Goldstein was hopeful as the individual jurors
filed into the courtroom. Many were smiling, and some even looked him in
the eye. Then the clerk started to read the verdicts--"Count number
one--guilty! Count number two--guilty! Count number . . . ."
"Oh no!" gasped one of Keller's former patients. Jimmy Jr. and
his
wife, Suzanne, fell weeping into each other arms, and Guy Keller, Jimmy's
frail and elderly father, stumbled out of the courtroom in a daze:
"Something is radically wrong."
The jurors left the courtroom immediately after delivering the
verdict, ran to their cars and--tires squealing--shot out of the parking
lot. The one juror I was able to catch said she'd based her decision on
the "uniformity" of the testimony. One after another, the prosecution
witnesses all said Keller had promised to cure them, she said. "Where
would they all get that," she asked, "if he hadn't told them?"
Later, back at their hotel, Keller's family and friends stood around
in small stunned knots wondering why not even a single juror found any
merit to Jimmy's side of the story. "The jury doesn't know what they've
done," said one patient. "They've condemned hundreds of people to death."
For his part, Keller assigned most of the blame to his attorney,
Gerald Goldstein: He didn't attack the prosecution witnesses; he
delivered a far less impressive summation than his reputation might have
warranted; he wasn't familiar enough with the facts to effectively
counter the prosecution's case. "If I had defended myself, I would have
done a lot better," Keller said. "I couldn't have done worse."
Return To The Article
Goldstein would later take strong exception to the notion that he
hadn't done his homework or otherwise earned his fee (The total bills for
all five defense lawyers, plus expenses, ran to $500,000--Keller's life
savings plus a defense fund). The real problem, Goldstein said, was that
the jury "never got on board. They were watching a different movie." Then
there was the near insurmountable problem of having to explain the
Digitron machine. "Two weeks is not enough time to convince a south Texas
jury that you can cure cancer at a distance with a Polaroid photograph."
Keller's sentencing was scheduled for last Thursday, Dec. 12. He was
looking at 55 years--five years apiece on each of 11 counts--a fact that
appalled former patients such as Olga Quijano. The people who went to St.
Jude's weren't duped, she said. They'd had conventional therapy and it
hadn't worked. They went to Keller of their own free will. "We have
freedom of choice in abortion," said Quijano, whose own therapy had been
cut off by Keller's arrest. "Why can't we have freedom of choice in
cancer therapy, too?"
Return To The Article
"Choice is only half the story," answered quackbuster William
Jarvis a
few weeks after the trial. "What about accountability? Practicing
medicine is not a right. It's a privilege. To allow incompetent or
untrustworthy people to practice medicine would be irresponsible. We
don't do it with plumbers or auto mechanics or anybody else. Why should
we do it with health care?"
It was a reasonable question, and perhaps the most eloquent response
came from another of Keller's former patients, Selma Meyers, one morning
at a breakfast table in the deserted lobby of McAllen's Compri Hotel.
Meyers is a regal-looking woman of 68 with smooth, pink skin, a sharp
aquiline nose and a slow, dignified way of moving her head that is
reminiscent either of a great stage actress or someone who is in very
deep pain.
"Five years ago," she said, "I came down with inoperable
breast
cancer." Her doctor had scheduled her for a double mastectomy at Kaiser,
Woodland Hills only to change her mind at the last minute. She'd taken
Meyers' case to two different cancer review panels, and they both agreed:
The cancer had metastasized; surgery wouldn't help. Let the woman die in
peace.
Having nothing to lose, Meyers went St. Jude's in Tijuana. After three
weeks' treatment, the tumor disappeared completely and stayed in
remission for four years. Then, two years ago, the cancer came back on
the other side: a purple, bleeding tumor, seeping pus. It was more
difficult this time, but Keller slowly shrunk that one till it
disappeared as well. But last February, for the third time, a tumor came
back. Meyers called his clinic to make arrangements for additional
treatment, but it was too late. Four thugs, Olga Quijano told her, had
just dragged Keller out the door.
Return To The Article
All the time Meyers and I were talking, she had been holding herself
perfectly still. Suddenly she stiffened--head erect, eyes closed. It was
then that I noticed a small, red stain spreading on her blouse above her
left breast.
Meyers' husband, Sam, was sitting with us. "This is too important to
be modest about," he told her.
Slowly, Selma unbuttoned the top of her blouse and carefully pulled
the corner back. There on the chest wall above her left breast was a big
red and yellow, cracked and pus-encrusted mass. The technical name was
infiltrating intraductal carcinoma--but it looked as though someone had
just taken a pound of raw hamburger, made a crude ball and pressed it
against her chest. Even as I stared, a trickle of blood began seeping
from a fissure in the top and running down the side.
As the tears welled up in her eyes, Selma Meyers gingerly covered the
tumor with a napkin and rebuttoned her blouse. There was nothing the
doctors could do, she said. "We've been told we are dying. Jimmy is our
only hope." |
