Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
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.
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.
9 Medical Myths Busted
Video: How to Eat Healthy While Traveling
10 Great Gift Book Ideas
How to Cope With a Depressed Spouse
Joke: I was leading a tour through Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico…
Advertisement 
