Worth a read..
Possessed by Love
The Ghostly Shadow
Kathryn Keats awoke in a panic, convinced she'd heard the curtains in front of her bedroom's French doors swaying. In the dim glow from a bathroom night-light, she made out a ghostly shadow on the wall and froze, terrified. The suburban wife and mother had spent much of her adult life eluding a man bent on killing her, and now she was certain he had finally found her. I am going to die, she thought.
The figure lunged toward her. But instead of the assault of a murderous stalker, Keats, 43, felt her seven-year-old son wrapping his arms around her. Frightened by a bad dream, he'd come to his parents' room for comfort. "All I could think was, If I'd had a gun, I would have shot him," Keats says today. "No one could understand how scared I was."
Photographed by Tim Tadder
Kidnapped and tortured by her schizophrenic boyfriend, Munger found a way to survive.
No one could understand because not even her closest friends knew that Keats's true name was Ellen Christian Munger, and that for 21 years, she'd been in hiding from a man who had worked with her, loved her and ultimately become bent on destroying her.
Munger grew up in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest of three and "the star" of the family. By her late teens, she was an accomplished singer and musician who had performed at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1978, at age 18, she moved to New York to pursue a career in theater and was soon called to audition for the successful off-Broadway show Let My People Come.
At the audition, she watched a man play the piano with impressive virtuosity. He was Ken Ford, the show's 32-year-old musical director, a compelling presence with long black hair and piercing green eyes. "I thought he was not only beautiful," Munger recalls, "but also the most mysterious and talented person I had ever met." That day, the two began a musical collaboration that would continue for years.
Munger joined the show's Philadelphia company, and soon she and Ford were living together. Raised in Philadelphia, Ford had served in Vietnam and, upon his return in the early 1970s, had immersed himself in the world of musical theater, composing and writing shows that gained little notice until a producer brought him in to direct Let My People Come. When Ford and Munger weren't working on the production, which played to packed houses in both New York and Philadelphia, they successfully teamed up on other musical compositions and performed at cabarets.
But in the couple's second year together, Munger noticed a troubling shift in Ford's personality. He was distracted and moody and increasingly seemed to mutter to himself. Back in their apartment one rainy night after the show, Ford hurled Munger against a wall, shouting that he didn't like the way other male cast members were looking at her. He then grabbed her by the shoulders and repeatedly slammed her head against the wall. Breaking free, Munger tried to calm him, but he cornered her and threw her to the floor. She felt him rip off her jeans, and the man who had been her partner, confidant and lover brutally raped her.
When it was over, Munger retreated to the bedroom, where she spent the night huddled in a corner trying to make sense of what had happened, while Ford paced in the living room. When morning finally arrived, Ford went to her and begged forgiveness. "You're the only one I love, the only one who can help me," he said. "This will never happen again."
"I was young and in love," she says, "and I believed him."
The pair continued to tour with the show and enjoyed weeks of tenderness and creativity together. But Ford eventually admitted to Munger that he was hearing voices whispering stories about her and other men, and outlining elaborate conspiracies being set to trap him. When the voices came, episodes of beatings and sexual abuse followed.
"I didn't know anything about mental illness," says Munger. "I did know that you're supposed to take care of people you love, so when the voices came, I tried to calm Ken by taking him on long walks and talking. Sometimes it worked. We'd start working on a song. As long as we had the sanity of our work, I could stay."
Munger covered her bruises with makeup and long sleeves and told no one about her plight. In 1981, Ford finally saw a psychiatrist, who prescribed medication for schizophrenia, and for a while, the pills seemed to work. Then Ford stopped taking them.
Held Captive
One day that April, Munger returned to the apartment after auditioning for a New York talent agency interested in signing her as a solo client. Oddly silent, her boyfriend grabbed her and twisted her arm; he threatened to break it in retribution for Munger's "sabotaging" his career. When she tried to flee, he held up a bottle he'd broken in the sink. He used the glass to cut himself, then spread blood on Munger's arm. "See what I can do to you?" he shouted.
That night, Munger stayed with friends. But she went back to Ford the next day -- as she would, again and again. "I know how crazy it sounds," she says, "but like most victims of abuse, I thought I could be the one to save him."
Courtesy Kathryn Keats
Keats, then Ellen Munger, and Ken Ford (circa 1980), before he began hearing voices.
In the spring of 1983, Munger and Ford left the tour and moved to Oakland, California, where Munger's sister, Ann Carlin, had settled with her family. Munger hoped that, without the pressures of the show, Ford would stabilize. Instead, his delusions worsened. One day as Munger headed out for groceries, Ford blocked the door, saying Zen gods inside him were refusing to release her. Munger realized that her boyfriend had finally had a total break with reality.
For the next 54 days, Ford held her captive in their apartment. He told Munger she had the spirit of a woman from the 1800s living inside her and that he needed to exorcise her. He bound her hands and feet with leather belts, and when she struggled, beat her. Eventually Munger stopped fighting back. "I was numb," she says.
Ford, who disconnected the phone lines, allowed her to eat only tomato soup, which he would crush cigarette butts into. "He'd blindfold me and throw a glass at the side of my head to see if I trusted him," Munger recalls. "If I flinched, he would do it again." He repeatedly raped and beat her. "In my mind," says Munger today, "I was a dead person."
Finally, one afternoon in the spring of 1984, Ann Carlin, who had assumed that her sister was on an extended tour out of town, drove to Munger's apartment and rang the bell. When Ford opened the door a crack, Carlin caught a glimpse of her sister, covered in blood. She ran to a nearby pay phone and called the police. When the officers arrived, it took five of them to haul Ford off in a straitjacket.
but also the most mysterious and talented person I had ever met.
Munger was taken to a safe house run by the Alameda Victim/Witness Assistance program, and Ford was committed to Oakland's Highland Hospital for 72 hours. Afterward he was flown back to Philadelphia, where his parents were waiting. Soon Munger moved to her sister's home to recuperate.
But her nightmare was not over. One afternoon just two weeks after Ford flew East, the phone in Carlin's kitchen rang. It was Ford, who told Carlin that Zen gods had instructed him to return to Oakland, dismember and kill Munger, hang her entrails from a tree and then kill himself.
Munger contacted police, who took up watch outside Carlin's home. Two weeks later, the officers apprehended Ford as he approached the house; he was dressed all in white, wearing a white wig. Charged with being a danger to himself and others, Ford was found guilty and committed to Napa State Hospital for six months.
Falling Silent
To Munger, all that meant was Ford would be free in just 180 days to make good, once again, on his promise to kill her. In desperation, she met with Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Leo Dorado, who suggested a plan. Ellen Munger, he told her, would have to disappear for her own safety. The singer who'd dreamed of seeing her name in lights would have to become someone else -- someone who didn't have a career that would put her in the public eye. Worse than giving up her name, Ellen Munger would have to abandon her music. "It meant losing the one thing on earth I had lived for," she says today. "I was devastated."
But she also realized there was no other way and that she didn't have much time. Her father moved to Oakland to be nearby and hired a bodyguard for her. With the help of the Victim/Witness Assistance program, she legally changed her name to Kathryn Keats. She started training as a paralegal, and by the time Ford was released, Ellen Munger was gone.
All that remained was the fear. As long as Ken Ford walked free, Keats believed her life was in danger.
Photographed by Tim Tadder
Keats, husband Richard Conti and sons Lorenzo (left) and Andrew enjoy an outing with their family pooch, Scarlet.
Months turned into years, and Kathryn Keats began to emerge from her cocoon. She spoke to no one from her past aside from family members and a few trusted childhood friends. She got a job in film financing and slowly made new friends, always keeping her background vague. In 1988, she met a man who interested her -- Richard Conti, a printing executive.
"She was so dynamic and yet very stable," says Conti. But there was something unsettled about her. "She'd wake up scared to death, shaking, and couldn't tell me why," he says. "All I could do was just be there for her." After a year, Keats told him the truth about her past. She and Conti married in 1993 and had two sons, Andrew, now 11, and Lorenzo, 9.
Early in her new life, Keats contacted Barbara Crawford, a Philadelphia psychologist who had befriended Ford years earlier. While she didn't provide her new name or location, Keats learned from Crawford that Ford was living on the streets of Philadelphia. Crawford told her she had once invited Ford into her residence and that he set fire to her piano. She also said Ford had told her that he remained obsessed with killing his former lover.
To outsiders, Keats appeared to be thriving at work, raising her family and getting involved in her community. "But inside," she says, "I was still a hostage." One afternoon, she glanced out her front window and saw someone sitting in a parked car with tinted windows. Minutes turned into hours, and the driver remained, waiting and watching. "I broke out in a cold sweat," Keats says. "I thought, Why would anyone sit outside my house for so long? I was sure Ken had found us." She frantically called police, but before they arrived, the car door opened and a woman emerged. It was a neighbor's baby-sitter, doing some homework before going to work.
"She always thought he could find her," says Conti, "yet she remained devoted to me and our children as a wife and mother. I don't know how she did it -- feeling it would never end."
But end it finally did. In May 2005, after returning from a shopping trip with her sons, Keats had an overwhelming urge to reach out for news of Ford. Alone at home the following morning, she called one of the producers of Let My People Come and learned that Ford, who'd still been living on the streets of Philadelphia, had died more than a year earlier of lung cancer.
She sat down at her piano, put her hands on the keys and, for the first time in years, composed a song. She sang it out loud to the empty living room, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I cried because I knew I would finally sing and write again," Keats says. "And I cried out of relief, because I was finally free. My hell was finally over."
Since learning of Ford's death, Keats, now 47, has written a host of songs and performed them in cabarets in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. She has completed a CD, After the Silence, which will also tour as a show with a nine-piece band.
But her favorite audience of all is her husband and two sons, who often join her at the piano. Though she hasn't shared all the details with them, her boys now know that their mother had to change her identity for her safety. And they know that, after so long, Ellen Munger and Kathryn Keats have finally become one.
From Reader's Digest - March 2007
The Ghostly Shadow
Kathryn Keats awoke in a panic, convinced she'd heard the curtains in front of her bedroom's French doors swaying. In the dim glow from a bathroom night-light, she made out a ghostly shadow on the wall and froze, terrified. The suburban wife and mother had spent much of her adult life eluding a man bent on killing her, and now she was certain he had finally found her. I am going to die, she thought.
The figure lunged toward her. But instead of the assault of a murderous stalker, Keats, 43, felt her seven-year-old son wrapping his arms around her. Frightened by a bad dream, he'd come to his parents' room for comfort. "All I could think was, If I'd had a gun, I would have shot him," Keats says today. "No one could understand how scared I was."
Photographed by Tim Tadder
Kidnapped and tortured by her schizophrenic boyfriend, Munger found a way to survive.
No one could understand because not even her closest friends knew that Keats's true name was Ellen Christian Munger, and that for 21 years, she'd been in hiding from a man who had worked with her, loved her and ultimately become bent on destroying her.
Munger grew up in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest of three and "the star" of the family. By her late teens, she was an accomplished singer and musician who had performed at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1978, at age 18, she moved to New York to pursue a career in theater and was soon called to audition for the successful off-Broadway show Let My People Come.
At the audition, she watched a man play the piano with impressive virtuosity. He was Ken Ford, the show's 32-year-old musical director, a compelling presence with long black hair and piercing green eyes. "I thought he was not only beautiful," Munger recalls, "but also the most mysterious and talented person I had ever met." That day, the two began a musical collaboration that would continue for years.
Munger joined the show's Philadelphia company, and soon she and Ford were living together. Raised in Philadelphia, Ford had served in Vietnam and, upon his return in the early 1970s, had immersed himself in the world of musical theater, composing and writing shows that gained little notice until a producer brought him in to direct Let My People Come. When Ford and Munger weren't working on the production, which played to packed houses in both New York and Philadelphia, they successfully teamed up on other musical compositions and performed at cabarets.
But in the couple's second year together, Munger noticed a troubling shift in Ford's personality. He was distracted and moody and increasingly seemed to mutter to himself. Back in their apartment one rainy night after the show, Ford hurled Munger against a wall, shouting that he didn't like the way other male cast members were looking at her. He then grabbed her by the shoulders and repeatedly slammed her head against the wall. Breaking free, Munger tried to calm him, but he cornered her and threw her to the floor. She felt him rip off her jeans, and the man who had been her partner, confidant and lover brutally raped her.
When it was over, Munger retreated to the bedroom, where she spent the night huddled in a corner trying to make sense of what had happened, while Ford paced in the living room. When morning finally arrived, Ford went to her and begged forgiveness. "You're the only one I love, the only one who can help me," he said. "This will never happen again."
"I was young and in love," she says, "and I believed him."
The pair continued to tour with the show and enjoyed weeks of tenderness and creativity together. But Ford eventually admitted to Munger that he was hearing voices whispering stories about her and other men, and outlining elaborate conspiracies being set to trap him. When the voices came, episodes of beatings and sexual abuse followed.
"I didn't know anything about mental illness," says Munger. "I did know that you're supposed to take care of people you love, so when the voices came, I tried to calm Ken by taking him on long walks and talking. Sometimes it worked. We'd start working on a song. As long as we had the sanity of our work, I could stay."
Munger covered her bruises with makeup and long sleeves and told no one about her plight. In 1981, Ford finally saw a psychiatrist, who prescribed medication for schizophrenia, and for a while, the pills seemed to work. Then Ford stopped taking them.
Held Captive
One day that April, Munger returned to the apartment after auditioning for a New York talent agency interested in signing her as a solo client. Oddly silent, her boyfriend grabbed her and twisted her arm; he threatened to break it in retribution for Munger's "sabotaging" his career. When she tried to flee, he held up a bottle he'd broken in the sink. He used the glass to cut himself, then spread blood on Munger's arm. "See what I can do to you?" he shouted.
That night, Munger stayed with friends. But she went back to Ford the next day -- as she would, again and again. "I know how crazy it sounds," she says, "but like most victims of abuse, I thought I could be the one to save him."
Courtesy Kathryn Keats
Keats, then Ellen Munger, and Ken Ford (circa 1980), before he began hearing voices.
In the spring of 1983, Munger and Ford left the tour and moved to Oakland, California, where Munger's sister, Ann Carlin, had settled with her family. Munger hoped that, without the pressures of the show, Ford would stabilize. Instead, his delusions worsened. One day as Munger headed out for groceries, Ford blocked the door, saying Zen gods inside him were refusing to release her. Munger realized that her boyfriend had finally had a total break with reality.
For the next 54 days, Ford held her captive in their apartment. He told Munger she had the spirit of a woman from the 1800s living inside her and that he needed to exorcise her. He bound her hands and feet with leather belts, and when she struggled, beat her. Eventually Munger stopped fighting back. "I was numb," she says.
Ford, who disconnected the phone lines, allowed her to eat only tomato soup, which he would crush cigarette butts into. "He'd blindfold me and throw a glass at the side of my head to see if I trusted him," Munger recalls. "If I flinched, he would do it again." He repeatedly raped and beat her. "In my mind," says Munger today, "I was a dead person."
Finally, one afternoon in the spring of 1984, Ann Carlin, who had assumed that her sister was on an extended tour out of town, drove to Munger's apartment and rang the bell. When Ford opened the door a crack, Carlin caught a glimpse of her sister, covered in blood. She ran to a nearby pay phone and called the police. When the officers arrived, it took five of them to haul Ford off in a straitjacket.
but also the most mysterious and talented person I had ever met.
Munger was taken to a safe house run by the Alameda Victim/Witness Assistance program, and Ford was committed to Oakland's Highland Hospital for 72 hours. Afterward he was flown back to Philadelphia, where his parents were waiting. Soon Munger moved to her sister's home to recuperate.
But her nightmare was not over. One afternoon just two weeks after Ford flew East, the phone in Carlin's kitchen rang. It was Ford, who told Carlin that Zen gods had instructed him to return to Oakland, dismember and kill Munger, hang her entrails from a tree and then kill himself.
Munger contacted police, who took up watch outside Carlin's home. Two weeks later, the officers apprehended Ford as he approached the house; he was dressed all in white, wearing a white wig. Charged with being a danger to himself and others, Ford was found guilty and committed to Napa State Hospital for six months.
Falling Silent
To Munger, all that meant was Ford would be free in just 180 days to make good, once again, on his promise to kill her. In desperation, she met with Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Leo Dorado, who suggested a plan. Ellen Munger, he told her, would have to disappear for her own safety. The singer who'd dreamed of seeing her name in lights would have to become someone else -- someone who didn't have a career that would put her in the public eye. Worse than giving up her name, Ellen Munger would have to abandon her music. "It meant losing the one thing on earth I had lived for," she says today. "I was devastated."
But she also realized there was no other way and that she didn't have much time. Her father moved to Oakland to be nearby and hired a bodyguard for her. With the help of the Victim/Witness Assistance program, she legally changed her name to Kathryn Keats. She started training as a paralegal, and by the time Ford was released, Ellen Munger was gone.
All that remained was the fear. As long as Ken Ford walked free, Keats believed her life was in danger.
Photographed by Tim Tadder
Keats, husband Richard Conti and sons Lorenzo (left) and Andrew enjoy an outing with their family pooch, Scarlet.
Months turned into years, and Kathryn Keats began to emerge from her cocoon. She spoke to no one from her past aside from family members and a few trusted childhood friends. She got a job in film financing and slowly made new friends, always keeping her background vague. In 1988, she met a man who interested her -- Richard Conti, a printing executive.
"She was so dynamic and yet very stable," says Conti. But there was something unsettled about her. "She'd wake up scared to death, shaking, and couldn't tell me why," he says. "All I could do was just be there for her." After a year, Keats told him the truth about her past. She and Conti married in 1993 and had two sons, Andrew, now 11, and Lorenzo, 9.
Early in her new life, Keats contacted Barbara Crawford, a Philadelphia psychologist who had befriended Ford years earlier. While she didn't provide her new name or location, Keats learned from Crawford that Ford was living on the streets of Philadelphia. Crawford told her she had once invited Ford into her residence and that he set fire to her piano. She also said Ford had told her that he remained obsessed with killing his former lover.
To outsiders, Keats appeared to be thriving at work, raising her family and getting involved in her community. "But inside," she says, "I was still a hostage." One afternoon, she glanced out her front window and saw someone sitting in a parked car with tinted windows. Minutes turned into hours, and the driver remained, waiting and watching. "I broke out in a cold sweat," Keats says. "I thought, Why would anyone sit outside my house for so long? I was sure Ken had found us." She frantically called police, but before they arrived, the car door opened and a woman emerged. It was a neighbor's baby-sitter, doing some homework before going to work.
"She always thought he could find her," says Conti, "yet she remained devoted to me and our children as a wife and mother. I don't know how she did it -- feeling it would never end."
But end it finally did. In May 2005, after returning from a shopping trip with her sons, Keats had an overwhelming urge to reach out for news of Ford. Alone at home the following morning, she called one of the producers of Let My People Come and learned that Ford, who'd still been living on the streets of Philadelphia, had died more than a year earlier of lung cancer.
She sat down at her piano, put her hands on the keys and, for the first time in years, composed a song. She sang it out loud to the empty living room, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I cried because I knew I would finally sing and write again," Keats says. "And I cried out of relief, because I was finally free. My hell was finally over."
Since learning of Ford's death, Keats, now 47, has written a host of songs and performed them in cabarets in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. She has completed a CD, After the Silence, which will also tour as a show with a nine-piece band.
But her favorite audience of all is her husband and two sons, who often join her at the piano. Though she hasn't shared all the details with them, her boys now know that their mother had to change her identity for her safety. And they know that, after so long, Ellen Munger and Kathryn Keats have finally become one.
From Reader's Digest - March 2007
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