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The Boys in Blue — The Cases of Charlie Keever and Jonathan Sellers
Under the brush, a killer lurked in wait
Setting off on their bikes, Jonathan Sellers, 9, and Charlie Keever, 13, went for a ride along the Otay River in California. The pair were lured to a “igloo-style fort” of tumbleweeds and castor bean plants, then murdered in what detectives described as one of the worst crime scenes they had ever seen.
Eight years after that day in 1993, a DNA database found the man responsible.
Keever loved taking long walks accompanied by his basset hounds, and he was friends with Alton Williams, Sellers’ older brother. Sellers enjoyed playing basketball, with hopes of either being a professional player or becoming an architect. His birthday was around the corner, and his mother, Milena (Sellers) Phillips (sometimes referred to as Sellers-Phillips), gave Sellers a bike as an early present — a gift she said she later regretted.
But Williams was not there when Keever arrived at the house on March 27, so instead, Sellers went with him. Sellers’ twin sister, Jennifer Palmer, wanted to go along with them, but Jonathan “begged” their mother for her not to go. They left without Palmer.
Sellers and Keever were then seen by witnesses at an arcade, a pet adoption center and a hamburger stand before they headed towards the riverbed trail.
A man on a run happened upon their bodies two days later, one of which was hanging from a branch in the makeshift camp. The boys were brutally tortured, molested, and strangled. Still, no one could figure out who was behind their gruesome deaths. The case went cold.
“Charlie was my whole life,” said Maria Keever, Charlie’s mother, to the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “Sometimes it hurts so much to wake up, I just want to stay asleep.”
At one point, Maria Keever even took a gun to the crime scene she visited every day, her grief almost bringing her to the point of killing herself where her son was murdered.
To hopefully find a resolution, anti-crime group CrimeStoppers Inc. worked with the police and their local Fox News…
