Madness Under the Royal Palms (26 page)

T
he networks and local and regional newspapers wanted to talk to Fred, but he turned everyone down. I spent a lot of time thinking of how I could approach him. In the end, I wrote him a letter to the county jail. “My book will likely be the main historical record of your life,” I wrote. “It’s something that one day your son will read to learn about his father, and it represents an opportunity for you to have a major say in how your life is presented.”

Within a couple of days, Fred’s civil lawyer Bennett Cohn called to tell me that Fred was considering talking to me. I knew that Keller was a controlling, litigious man, and when he asked me to sign a seemingly benign agreement, I turned him down. He backed off and agreed to talk without any conditions, except for my promise that one day I would give Fredchen copies of my interviews with his father.

Fred called from jail, but sometimes I went to see him in person. He was living in a pod with fifteen other older prisoners, his belongings relegated to a shoebox. The Palm Beach County Detention Center is a sparse, concrete shell, and has a reputation as a county jail harsher than many state prisons. Fred’s defense attorney Roth has had some of the toughest criminals as his clients, and he says that in all his years of practice, he has never seen anyone handle life at the county jail as well as Fred did. The jail is as cold as a morgue, and I talked with him through thick glass scratched with evocations of eternal love (“Darlie & Dave”). He wore the standard blue prison issue garb. If we had been dressed alike, he would have seemed the confident, composed journalist, and I the nervous, uncertain convicted murderer trying to make my case.

After Fred got over his initial despair, his quiet rage only intensified, and in the next few weeks, he had something more important on his mind than talking to me. He had what he knew might be his one last great public forum. That was the sentencing hearing. There he could righteously condemn what he called “the criminal conviction system” led by arrogant men like Judge Garrison, who had not permitted Fred’s lawyers to present a case that might have won. And there too he could condemn the Keils and the legal leeches feeding off what he considered Fredchen’s money.

In April 2007 for his sentencing, the sheriff deputies brought Fred into the courtroom in shackles, wearing the prison garb that would be his uniform the rest of his life. For the first time in the trial, Fred had a relative in the courtroom, Brian Bohlander, his estranged adopted son. Brian had flown down from Washington to take rich satisfaction in seeing his stepfather sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.

The Keils spoke first as the victims publicly witnessing Fred’s crime. Fred’s hearing was bad and he hardly listened to their savaging of him. He did not care what they said. He had no intention of making the apologies or tepid avowals of innocence that were standard fare. He was about to be sentenced to an automatic two life terms. He could have gotten on the floor and begged, and nothing would have changed.

Unlike the soft-spoken persona he affected for his testimony during the trial, Fred spoke this morning with intensity, passion, and anger. “You talk about your love for Fred, all of you,” Fred said, looking out at the Keils in the courtroom. “Yet what you want is twenty-five million dollars to have all of this go away. That is Fred’s money. You think you have earned that? You are a hypocrite, Wolfgang. You grasp your chest like you did at the trial. I could have half a dozen witnesses testify how false it is. You know what happened. Terrible. Wolfgang, you will carry this burden accidentally shooting your sister and killing her, and you will further suffer for lying to your siblings and to your mom and to the court as to what happened that tragic morning.”

Fred tried to move into an equally impassioned attack on the legal system, but Garrison cut him off before he had hardly begun. “Mr. Keller, I don’t need to hear your opinions about the criminal justice system,” the judge said, and Fred resumed his attack on the Keils.

“What happened that Monday morning was a spontaneous act that has caused our twelve-year-old son to be a virtual orphan, ostracized—and Angie, you and Wolfgang are responsible for this—ostracized from his dad, friends, and relatives, in total control. If you love him, stop this litigation for money. I gave him everything I have, let him have that, not you.”

Garrison had had enough of Fred Keller, and when the judge sentenced him, he did not have him rise and stand with his lawyers, as was the common practice. Instead, he sentenced him to two life sentences, and a further fifteen years as Fred sat at the defendant’s table. This happened so quickly and in such a desultory way that Wolfgang feared something had gone wrong and Fred had not been sentenced at all.

J
ANET
M
ALCOLM HAS FAMOUSLY
written that a journalist “is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Although Malcolm’s thesis has widely been accepted as the truth, I do not think that studied empathy is a code word for calculated deception. And sometimes it is the subject who is the confidence man preying on the vanity, ignorance, and gullibility of the reporter while “gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

From the moment I first talked to Fred, I hoped I would gain enough of his trust so that he would confess to me, while he hoped he could convince me of his innocence. As he saw it, I would then write a book vindicating him that his son would read one day. I did not believe in Fred’s innocence and never led him to believe that I did, but because of young Fred, I considered that I was taking on a responsibility that transcended my role as a journalist.

Fred had nothing but time now to think about why things had gone so wrong, but our discussions were hardly in a setting conducive to philosophical dialogue. He called me several times a week. We generally spoke for an hour, sometimes with the sounds of bantering prisoners in the background. Each fifteen minutes the phone went dead and he had to call collect again.

Fred cursed the Keils for their brainwashing of his son. It never occurred to Fred that maybe young Fredchen had a mind of his own. He did not see that his obsession with money and a life of wealth had distorted him. He was a private person, but he had worn a badge saying “Palm Beach millionaire,” and that had created his world, the women who approached him, and the men he called friends. He had hurt so many people in his life, but he did not grasp that either. He did not see that in the last years of his life he had an opportunity to make amends and the means to do so.

For three months I was Fred’s analyst, priest, and friend. Keller was talking about things he had never talked about to anyone, and he told me that our sessions were therapeutic.

Except for his civil attorney Cohn and one tennis-playing acquaintance, there may have been no one who believed Fred was innocent. When I realized he was never going to admit his guilt, I attempted to get him to take some responsibly, if not for the crimes, then in his purported innocence, at least for his complicity in the tragedy.

“I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, Fred, and if I pulled out my gun and Rose died and Wolfgang was wounded, I would feel that I had done something wrong,” I said insistently one morning. “I was the one with the gun. I was the one who made the mistake.”

“I can understand you saying that, but you have to be part of what happened,” Fred replied as if lecturing a child. “Rose losing an increasing sense of reality. You have to experience what’s going on where everyone was on heightened alert. You have to experience that to have a mind-set where this stuff was terrible.”

“I’m still surprised that you don’t say, ‘I screwed up, I had a right to be paranoid, but I screwed up. I had a right to be paranoid, but they didn’t do it.’”

“That’s the prosecutor’s line! ‘Mr. Keller, why didn’t you run out the door? Mr. Keller, why didn’t you holler?’ I was scared. I reacted instinctively. I didn’t think.”

“I still would say, ‘I messed up,’” I insisted, holding the phone mouthpiece back from my mouth. “‘I’m guilty of something. I did something wrong.’”

“I did what I thought I had to do to protect my life,” Fred replied as if I were incapable of understanding. “It’s as simple as that. We all sit here and Monday-morning quarterback. It played out the way it did, right or wrong. I had no choice.”

“Do you think young Fred will see it this way?” I asked.

“I know you’re going to address all the issues and the court transcript is there. I’ve tried to give the explanation in court and hopefully I’m doing it with you. It’s terrible. The worst thing any child can experience is the death of their parent. You feel all alone. It’s sad. It’s terrible.”

“And then what about when you’re taken physically to a prison farther away from young Fred?” That was a question that had long been on my mind.

“I hope I’m still here when the judge rules on my seeing Fred,” he said. Then he stopped for a moment, choking up. “I wake up frequently at night thinking about things and making notes. And the thought occurred to me that I wrote down that really describes what I have here. ‘As hope fades, despair takes its place.’”

“And Fred is the one piece of hope you have?” I queried.

“He’s the one that keeps me going. Without him, what’s left for me but to be warehoused in prison until I die?”

F
RED PLANNED AN APPEAL,
but in the immediate future, he focused on the one positive thing in his life, his son Fredchen. He and his attorney Cohn planned a vigorous legal attack that Fred believed would give him access to the boy so that Fred could tell him
his
story of his mother’s death.

I suggested to Fred that it was not the best thing to tell an impressionable, vulnerable youth that his beloved uncle had accidentally murdered his mother, and that the family with whom he lived were liars and greedy interlopers trying to steal his money. I said that the noble thing might be to write a letter to his son to be given to him as an adult, saying that his father had loved him so much that he had gone to his grave not even trying to tell him his side of what happened.

“That’s crazy,” Fred said. “Young Fred’s been ostracized and fed the company line and believes it. The harm psychologically would come later on if he’s never had an opportunity to sit down with his dad and find out from his dad what happened. I want him to understand that the underlying reason for this is money.”

Fredchen was the vehicle of his father’s wrath. If Fred was motivated in part by love of his son, he was motivated even more by hatred of the Keils. He did not care about the cost to the vulnerable psyche of a twelve-year-old boy. Nor was he willing to minimize that by promising the court he would not tell the boy his story of his mother’s death.

Circuit Court Judge Karen L. Martin asked Dr. Alexander, the psychologist who had interviewed Fred, Rose, and Fredchen during the divorce, to interview Fredchen again. That way she could have independent medical input into her decision as to whether Fred should see his son. In his new session with Fredchen, Dr. Alexander saw that young Fred’s opinion of his father had not changed since the day of his mother’s death. It was only deeper and more articulately and resolutely pronounced. He did not want to see his father. “He’s still my dad, but there’s no excuse for what he did.” He did not want to read his letters. “He can write fifty billion, I just don’t want to see them.” He did not want to hear his name. “I don’t want to communicate with him.” He knew Fred had been convicted, and he wanted him away, gone, finished, out of his life forever.

Fredchen is an intelligent child whose opinions are deeply felt and well stated, and in his letter of opinion, Dr. Alexander did little but to agree with what young Fred had said and desired. And the judge in her decision did little but put legal substance to Dr. Alexander’s opinions that Fred should be freed of the shadowy image of his father. There should never be any contact between Fredchen and the father, not even by letter. They were the words of a judge, but it was young Fred speaking out of the depths of his pain.

F
RED HAD BEEN KEPT
alive by his hope of seeing Fredchen, and now that he would never see the boy again, something died within him. I felt that once he was shipped to the prison that would be his final home, seventy-three-year-old Fred would not live more than a year. And I thought that now was the time to find something positive to come up out of the darkness of Fred’s life. I wanted to see if I could somehow bring this man to some kind of moral closure, to help him end his life with a series of good acts that would live beyond him.

Fred was always complaining about what he called the criminal injustice system, and all the innocent men and women incarcerated in America’s prisons. I suggested that he take ten million dollars of his money and start a foundation to help the falsely convicted, but he swatted that idea away with a curt dismissal.

Then I turned to his family. I had talked to his sons’ widows and to his stepson, and knew what a modest amount of Fred’s money would mean to them and to his grandchildren’s educations. Fred bragged how he had sent a letter to his grandson Austin Keller, offering to pay for his college education. Fred was alienated from Austin’s mother, and Fred said that the ungrateful wretch had not even replied. I had talked to family members about this and saw the letter in which Fred wrote about “relocating to Florida, going to college here and working for our company.” The young man did not want to work for Keller’s company. I suggested that Fred send the teenager tuition money for whatever school he chose to attend. Fred was not interested. Everything for Fred was a matter of exchanges, even his grandson’s education.

“Who else do you plan to give it to but young Fred?” I asked him.

“Well, I don’t know what other family I have left.”