About two years after an anonymous letter changed the course of a stagnant murder investigation, Fred C. Kretzmer on Monday was ordered held without bail on charges he robbed and strangled a 55-year-old widow before setting fire to her home west of Boca Raton.
“It’s pretty rare to get a letter like that,” Palm Beach County sheriff’s Detective Eric Keith said. “That was just enough to get the ball rolling.”
Kretzmer was a young man from New Jersey with a drug problem who Linda Fishman had befriended years before she was killed, Keith said. He was not a suspect until investigators received a typewritten letter that said he had some of Fishman’s belongings, sheriff’s Sgt. William Springer said.
Detectives said they tracked down the author of the letter, whom they would not name, and slowly unraveled a case that had stymied them after Fishman’s body was found Feb. 7, 2003, in her house on quiet Flower Drive in the Boca Winds neighborhood.
Small fires were intentionally set in her home to destroy evidence, investigators said at the time. Her Lincoln Town Car was gone.
But financial transactions place Kretzmer near Fishman’s home before the slaying, Keith said. A former roommate gave investigators some of Fishman’s items — including paintings — that Kretzmer asked the roommate to store, and pawnshop transactions in New Jersey tie Kretzmer to the killing, Keith said.
Building a case that investigators thought was strong enough for a conviction in some ways became a race against time.
Kretzmer, 31, was scheduled to be released last week from a state prison in Bushnell after serving just more than two years for robbery and felony battery after shoplifting a pair of sunglasses and severely beating a store clerk in St. Lucie County, Keith said.
A Palm Beach County grand jury last month indicted Kretzmer on first-degree murder, arson and robbery charges in Fishman’s death, and he was detained to face those charges the day before he was to be released, Keith said.
It was the second time prosecutors had brought the case before a grand jury, said Fishman’s nephew, Michael Jamrock.
The initial prosecutor was uncomfortable with the evidence and withdrew the case before the first grand jury decided whether to charge him, Jamrock said.
“After that first grand jury, no one was really confident that we were going to get this guy,” Jamrock said. “There’s no DNA, there’s no fingerprints, there’s nothing like that. It’s all circumstantial, and it’s going to be a very difficult case when it comes to trial.”
Investigators expressed confidence in the evidence but sketched only a basic outline of their case, saying they wanted to reserve details that only the killer would know and protect witnesses who feared retaliation.
Keith described Kretzmer as “unpredictable and violent.” A woman who answered the phone at a former New Jersey address for Kretzmer declined to comment.
Kretzmer came to Palm Beach County from New Jersey about 1996 after having “drug problems” and was living in Riviera Beach, Keith said.
Fishman met Kretzmer in 1998 at a social event, Keith said. Jamrock described it as a convention for acclaimed artist Edna Hibel.
Fishman had a reputation for generosity. A former court administrator in Connecticut who was widowed from a superior court judge, she was active in charity fund-raising.
Fishman befriended Kretzmer, buying him a computer and other items while he enrolled in classes at Palm Beach Community College, Springer said. Kretzmer left Florida in 2001, enlisting in the Navy and was stationed in California, Keith said.
After legal troubles in California, prosecutors contend he returned to Florida and killed Fishman.
“We really don’t know what happened,” Jamrock said. “He may have asked for money and she denied him.”
John CotM-i can be reached at or 561-832-6550.
