“I understand how these things work, you go on a need-to-know basis and I didn’t need to know,” said Keller, recalling his conversation with local FBI agents after Turner’s informant status was revealed. “But at the same time, his handlers could have made one phone call and told him to knock it off and we would have been spared a lot of grief.”
Betrayed
But it was a high-profile incident of an entirely different kind which would come to dominate Keller’s final months on the job — one that rocked the department and provided a dispiriting coda to his tenure. In January, Detective Lt. Tim Matthews, a veteran cop and to a large degree the public face of the KPD, was placed on administrative leave amid allegations, uncovered during a routine audit of the Kingston City School District, that he had committed payroll fraud by billing the department for overtime at the same time he was working a second job as chief of security at Kingston High School. There was worse to come. First $9,000 missing from a police safe containing investigative funds for the detective division, then a stunning 13-count indictment charging Matthews with carrying on a decade-long scheme to skim more than $200,000 in money seized as evidence of slated for undercover drug buys. Matthews’ arrest was followed by an onslaught of investigators from at least seven local state and federal agencies demanding documents covering every aspect of the department’s financial workings.
“It was just horrific,” said Keller. “To have someone you’ve worked with for so long and was such a key player and a confidant, and then to have these kind of allegations is really just awful.”
Despite the shaken trust, Keller said that the department has weathered the storm and emerged with a better handle on what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
As the KPD prepares for the post-Keller era, the chief can find a lot to be grateful for. A chance to serve the community, raise family and get an education. But as he learned a long time ago, some things don’t change or if they do, they don’t change in the course of 40 years. People, Keller notes, still like to get high and a four-decades-long “war on drugs” hasn’t had much impact on the supply, or the demand. Dysfunction and poverty linger over generations. Keller’s son Robert is now a KPD detective, patrolling the same streets his father did, and arresting the children and grandchildren of the same people his father locked up as a patrolman.
“They’re so idealistic, they have no idea what they’re in for,” said Keller says with a chuckle of the freshly minted rookie cops he sees on the street these days. “You start out thinking you’re going to change the world. Eventually you learn that, despite your best efforts, the world continues to go on.”
