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PLANO, Texas (KTVT) — At the age of 8, Ashley Keith thought nothing of strolling half a block with her friend to their Plano neighborhood pool.
On August 15, 1991, that all changed.
“How people parented their children, what children we were allowed to do after that. It changed because it was so shocking. Because it was never expected,” Keith said.
Keith sat down with CBS News Texas for her first-ever interview about her kidnapping, a decades-long mystery that has left her and investigators convinced she wasn’t the only victim.
Ashley Keith’s disappearance
“We were just going to go down to the pool. I had a new swimsuit that I loved. And I remember a man approaching us,” Keith said.
Though Keith cannot remember exactly what he said, a police report based on an account her friend gave at the time said the man asked the girls if they had seen his white dog.
“And then, the next thing I remembered is he grabbed me, and I kicked and I screamed just like I was told to do, and he put me in his car and drove away,” Keith said.
She was held for five hours, sexually assaulted and then dropped off after dark in Garland, 20 miles away.
“What happened while he had me in the vehicle was awful, but I remember feeling so scared when he let me go,” Keith said. “I had no idea where I was or what was going to happen next.”
In that moment, Keith said she thought of advice she had received on Halloween: “Go to the house with the light on. Right? That’ll tell you if someone’s home. And so, I walked to the closest house that I felt like had a bright light, and I knocked on the door,” she said.
Too small to be visible to the man peering through his peephole, she had to knock several times before he finally opened the door to find her standing there, still in her swimsuit.
“I said, ‘My name is Ashley. I’ve been kidnapped. I need to call my mom.'”
Struggle followed the kidnapping
The months that followed were hard.
“I started losing weight. I wasn’t eating very good. I couldn’t sleep. My body was just shutting down because I was just terrified,” Keith said.
With help from Keith’s friend who witnessed her abduction, Plano police created a sketch of the man they were looking for.
They had also recovered male DNA from her swimsuit.
What they didn’t have was their suspect. For Keith, that was terrifying.
“He, at one point, had told me that if I told anybody that he would come and hurt my family, that he would hurt my brother or my mom and dad. And so I remember being afraid, like if he was going to show up again,” she said.
A second girl attacked in Dallas
Eight years later, Keith’s attacker showed up again, this time in southeast Dallas.
On March 25, 1999, a man in a red Chevy pickup pulled over near where a 9-year-old girl and her friend were walking home from school, Dallas Police Det. Elizabeth DeAngelis said.
According to reports at the time, he asked the girls if they had seen a bunch of kittens in a nearby field. When the girls stepped forward to look, the man grabbed the 9-year-old and sped off.
“Both the 1991 and 1999 cases were very similar,” DeAngelis told the I-Team. “The similarities are striking.”
That girl, too, was sexually assaulted, held for hours and released.
According to law enforcement, the girl was dropped off along Interstate 45 in rural Navarro County, 60 miles outside Dallas, after she said her abductor heard an Amber Alert for her on the radio while they were driving.
Police once again had a sketch and DNA.
Re-opening the cold case
It would take years to make the connection, but in 2004, CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, revealed that the DNA in both cases belonged to the same man.
“What’s called a case-to-case hit,” explained Plano Police Det. Aaron Benzick. “So, we now know we have a profile. We know the profile of the offender, and we know it’s connected to multiple offenses, but we don’t know who they are. They don’t exist in any government databases yet.”
In 2023, Benzick, who investigates cold cases, called Keith when he started to look into her assault.
“That’s a hard phone call to make,” he said.
He wasn’t the first detective to reach out.
“Multiple times throughout my life there has been a detective or someone that would call and say, ‘We’re reopening a cold case,'” Keith said.
She was always open to assisting, and at one point she even allowed a Texas Ranger to hypnotize her in an effort to tap into any additional memories or details she might have about her attacker.
Keith admits she never expected the man responsible would be caught. But this time, things felt different.
“Detective Benzick called me and said, ‘Hi, I’ve been taking a look at your case, and I want to tell you a little about what we do,'” she recalled. “‘I think we can really get this guy, but first let me explain all this to you.'”
Benzick had an idea, and the support of both the Dallas Police Department and the Texas Rangers.
Working together, they were about to break the case wide open.
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