The Model & the Millionaire

There's the Florida Gold Coast, and then there's nothing quite like it Palm Beach, where the houses are bigger, the boats sleeker, and the bank accounts unmatched.

And both guys are pointing at each other, saying, That guy shot me.

Before the gunplay, there was just a beautiful young German girl full of promise.

She was very bright, she had a lot of aspirations. I mean, there's so many things, so many talents that she had.

Rose and her sister, Angie Bovey, grew up in a family of six children in Frankfurt, a place that Rose wanted to escape. As her kid sister remembers it, Rose was fleeing their father.

He was physically and emotionally abusive to all of us, but I think he had it out for my sister Rose, mostly.

Rose was ambitious and left school at 15.

She designed clothes actually for the boutique that my mother and her had in Wiesbaden, Germany.

The lovely Rose had no shortage of young boyfriends, but she had no interest in them either.

She was always attracted to older men, and I think she was also probably looking for a father figure, because that's what she never had.

As one relationship after another sputtered out. Someone in the family saw an ad in a Frankfurt paper and immediately thought of Rose. Essentially, it read Florida Millionaire looking for love, Rose had nothing to lose, and so she answered the ad. Just who was this rich, lonely heart?

Fred was a smart, obviously, a very smart person.

John Herring was one of the many business associates with whom Fred Keller wheeled and dealed in the booming South Florida real estate market.

When you met Fred, you liked him, he was a charming person to get you into what you needed.

Fred Keller actually had a little bit of rose in him. He'd come from humble roots, too, and like the young German girl, he'd want it out.

This was the one thing, above all others, that motivated him in his life was to escape the working class and make a lot of money.

Palm Beach journalist Larry Keller No relation found in his research that Fred had been born in Brooklyn, New York, to strict German parents by the name of Bolander.

He wrote in his memoir that his father was a member of the SS. And when he was about three, he moved back to Germany. And he was there for part of World War II.

The Bolanders returned to the U.

He made his money not building beautiful hotels like Donald Trump and resorts and golf courses, but commercial real estate, strip centers, warehouses, that sort of thing. Nothing glamorous at all about it, but very profitable.

Palm Beach may like old money better than new money, but no one could sniff at Fred Keller's wealth at that time. We're talking tens of millions. Still, he wasn't one for the exclusive clubs or charity balls that can define the Palm Beach pecking order. For those keeping score writer Lawrence Leamer, Fred was too cheap to join one of the clubs to play tennis.

They started writing to each other, they started talking on the phone, and then eventually, he asked if she wanted to come visit to meet. And I think she was supposed to be here for two weeks and she never came back to Germany.

Was it love or let's make a deal? I think when there's 25 or 30 years of difference, I think if you're going to call it love, you have to have quote marks around love. Do you think there was affection there? No.

Your lifestyle?

Still, on those audio tapes, you can hear Keller saying it was champagne and fireworks. From the moment he saw Rose step off the plane, she smiled, and it was just like instant fond. Same desires, the same outlooks, and Rose's sister agrees. Strange as it may appear, she says, it was the real thing.

She loved him, she wanted to be happily married and have a, you know, happy and secure family life.

Her dream came true. The older Palm Beach Money Bags and the German ingenue were married, which is when the trouble began.

There were holes in the ceiling.

And no gleaming Mercedes in the driveway either.

She drove a 10 year old minivan, you know, and he always drove his. Um, I don't know how old that car was, but it was a Cadillac, it was old.

And as for the glittering party life, while the social x-rays rattled their jewelry at fancy balls, the kellers kept to themselves. And that's the way Fred liked it. He wasn't one for the society pages. Was it because some people are?

I think he lived here because he felt it was a value in the property, he didn't live here for the social life.

At first, Rose went along with Fred's austerity program.

She went into that house the first time, she didn't realize how poorly decorated it was. She didn't realize the places she was going with him were not the premier places in Palm Beach.

And she'd quickly learned that in Fred's world, it was his way or the highway.

If he said dinner at six, it didn't mean five minutes, or even two minutes, or three minutes before six or after six, and meant six o'clock. And, uh, you know, it was like walking on eggshells sometimes.

He may have been a grumpy old man and tight as a tick, but Rose Keller never considered herself put upon. Fred seemed to be devoted to her, even tutoring his wife in the intricacies of his real estate empire.

She was his partner, really. When they first met. He was ready to sell everything and be done with it. And she was actually the one that said, No. Let's just keep buying properties and build on this and make this a family business.

Some people thought they'd already read this. Play Pygmalion, with Rose as Eliza Doolittle.

I actually watched Rose grow in to being the protege of of Fred Keller.

Savvy.

Pretty savvy, Fred's way was her way.

But Keller never apparently regarded Rose as his successor, the captain of his empire. In his fifties, he'd been diagnosed with leukemia, and he had other ideas about an heir apparent.

He initially brought her two brothers, Wolfgang and Klaus, over, and he was very generous. He put them up on a house in Palm Beach. He paid for college education for the two of them, and he he wanted to mentor them and have them become a part of his business.

According to some brother-in-law, Wolfgang was being groomed to head the company, but others weren't so sure. Keller was really serious about that. Fred Keller was turning out to be no one's idea of Prince Charming. But while some still saw Rose and Fred's match as a marriage of convenience, her family wasn't quite so cynical. Rose, they say, loved him. Warts and all.

She responded to his behavior As you know, a loving wife. Hey, you know what? I I love him, I want to be with him with all his quirks.

And they both wanted a child. Rose gave birth to a son, Fred Schint, in 1995. But just as Fred controlled dinner time, Rose's sister says, he began to micromanage his son and the boy's mother.

He tried to tell her when to breastfeed, when not to breastfeed. She wasn't allowed to go in the baby's room at night when he was crying, because he would say, just, you know, let him cry.

He only had German nannies, only could eat certain food. Very, very regimented. Rose came to resent her husband ordering her about. It was one thing to tell her how to live, and quite another to boss around their son.

As soon as you bring another human being into a relationship like this and that person treats your child like that, then you realize what's going on, for sure.

It seemed to some observers that when Rose started defying Keller over Fred Schint's upbringing, things began to spin out of control. Keller maintains the rift came about not because he was a Martinet, but because his unsophisticated bride was turning into a social climber. She became more social conscious of what a palm beacher should be.

She said Why don't we belong to a country club? And she was going that direction, and I was going in the direction of how false this whole stuff was.

Finally, by 1999, seven years into the marriage, Rose had had enough, she would file for divorce. And it would turn out to be the fight of her life. One that ended with three bloody bodies on an office floor.

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I only lost one lawsuit in my life and I don't know why I ever let it happen. But it will never happen again, and if anybody does win, they will never collect.

But Rose did want to collect. There had been years of her quietly suffering his iron-fisted control and steely rage when crossed. She'd even said she'd feared for her life sometimes.

He'd been involved with many other, much younger women. He had her sign a prenup before they got married.

When I read the Prenup for the first time, I thought something was wrong.

It was 16 pages, where was the section where it's what she gets?

But she was to get nothing. So the prenup may have been quite clear about being valued at Goose Egg, but Rose had a stronger card to play. In the divorce proceeding, she claimed that she was more than just a wife in the marriage, she was a business partner as well.

The assets have quadrupled pretty much since they met.

That's how we lived now. There were some, like Keller's sometimes partner John Herring, who never really regarded Rose as much more than a trophy wife playing at work. When it came to actually rolling up her sleeves in the business, I think she was more in the position to just be with him, to maintain the business.

Versus going out and finding a deal.

But Rose's divorce lawyer thought this case had the potential for enormous ka-ching ka-ching, it seems. Before things turned sour, Rose had begun, insisting that she deserved an equal share in her husband's business empire. She said That's how they would have done it back in their mutual old country.

Her team was in Germany. The wife owned half of everything. I was not comfortable with doing it.

But Rose would not be denied in this negotiation. She wanted half.

He finally signed some documents that he knew were not legally binding really, in an attempt to defraud his own wife and keep her with just a 10 percent interest.

Defraud his own wife? Would Fred Keller do such a thing? Why? Yes, my purpose was not to convey it to her, but to placate her.

And hopefully that things would be OK at the home front. Did I mislead her? absolutely.

Martin Haynes was Rose's divorce lawyer.

She gave everything she had to that man, and ultimately, Fred recognized her contributions.

Which came back to bite him.

Which came back to bite him.

Lawyers haggled now over whether Fred's gift to Rose was legally binding. It turned out it was, and no 10 percent deal, either. If the divorce judge followed the logic of that finding, Keller would have to turn over to Rose. Up to half of his estate, nearly $50 million money he'd never intended to put in anyone's pocket but his own.

It was really killing her, I always told her.

But how strange is this? All through Rose's knife fight of a divorce, she kept on dating Keller.

Sometimes it happens, but in this instance, I was somewhat surprised that it happened.

Ultimately, the $100 million question, the divvying up of the money pie, was put before the judge to decide. Fred Keller was convinced, as always, that he couldn't lose his former colleagues saw him just days before the final decree was handed down.

And I said, So what's going on with the divorce? I said, I'm surprised to hear you're not winning. And he goes, Oh, she's not going to get anything, she's not going to get anything.

On October 30, 2003, the judgment was delivered. The judge bought Rose's understanding of what these agreements were, that she was indeed the 50 percent partner of a $100 million business.

Correctly so.

It was an astonishing and sweet victory by proxy for all those who had danced with Keller and been stopped. Big round numbers. If it's $100 million, she's going to get $50 million in this thing. Fred Keller's young bride had bested her cagey older husband. It meant that for a second time, Rose Keller was going to start a new life.

We're going to work together and build an empire.

But dividing up the real estate empire of a self-made man who answered to no one wasn't going to be an easy matter. A meeting was called for a Monday morning, 10 days after the divorce became final. Fred, Rose and her brother, Wolfgang Keil, would sit down in the conference room at Fred's office and try to figure out where to go in this court-ordered 50-50 relationship. Then, within minutes, 911 had received a frantic call.

Wolfgang Keil initially stated that Fred had shot him and that he Wolfgang Keil stated, I shot Fred and I've got the gun.

There would be conflicting accounts of what had happened behind the closed doors of Keller Trust, but it had been very sudden and very violent.

Now Mr. Keller shot you, right? Yeah, he shot my sister too, he shot who too. I got the weapon from him.

Bill Fraser is an investigator with the prosecutor's office. It was a difficult crime scene to figure out.

Wolfgang Keil had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the back, and he had a gun. Fred, who had also been shot. He sustained a superficial gunshot wound to the face.

Wolfgang and Rose's sister, Angie, rushed to the hospital. Her brother was in critical condition. Rose was beyond that. Angie begged a detective for details.

And all she said was there was a female that didn't make it.

And then I just freaked out.

1030 hours and I am entering the scene of the homicide.

Wolfgang sits down and as he sits down, his cell phone kind of hits him in the gut a little bit. You know, like that'll happen sometimes, and he takes the cell phone and places it on the table.

Fred Keller, in his account, told police that's when the trouble started, mistaking Wolfgang's cell phone for something else.

Now, according to Fred, Fred sees this and says, Wolfgang just pulled a gun.

He just drew on me.

Just drew on me.

Fred Keller then turned and walked over to his briefcase.

Wolfgang's sitting in the chair and he sees Fred point a gun at him, and he shoots him right in the chest. Now he sees Fred Keller in what is commonly referred to as a combat stance, holding the firearm in his hands, and he's pointing the firearm right at Rose Marie Keller.

Like something out of the movie.

He's saying, I shot this guy because he just shot me.

I took the gun.

Yeah, readily admits that he shot Fred Keller.

Fred has shot Wolfgang.

Wolfgang sees Rose laying there and she's spurting blood, and he realizes right away there's nothing he can do to help her She's dead.

One gun among three people, and it belonged to Fred Keller. The fact of the wounded brother and the dead ex-wife made it look like a cold-blooded execution. Keller would claim immediately that it was all a terrible misunderstanding, just a matter of self-defense. In fact, he said, the only reason he was carrying a gun in the first place was to protect himself from a threat. Not from Wolfgang, but from Rose, a telephone threat, he said he'd reported to the police the week before.

She said that they don't respect me and she just said, I'm going to shoot everyone in the office. That very next morning, I thought about it all night and I said, Is she serious?

Keller had even faxed a letter to nearby Riviera Beach police telling them of the supposed threat, but this police investigator wasn't buying Keller's story.

I think that it's a setup.

Setting up his play.

He's establishing the threat and on November 10, 2003, the play is going to go into play.

Keller denied intending to hurt anyone. In fact, his lawyer, Doug Duncan, says Keller's briefcase containing the gun wasn't even within reach at the start of the meeting.

He had a gun on him, suggesting that someone has a plan. But when he sees the black object, which he testified, he honestly believed was a gun. He went to get his gun and he fired one shot at Mr. Kyle. Mr. Kyle got control of the gun and in the process of Mr.

Keller, by this account, was also insisting that in the horrible mishap, it was Wolfgang who'd accidentally killed his own sister. Keller said he would never have harmed Rose.

I think the most important piece of evidence was the 911 call. I shot him.

You shot him, Yeah, I got the weapon away from him.

And you listen to Wolfgang's voice and you have to ask yourself, is this a guy who's responsible for this event? The way he's talking? I mean, would he call up if he was the guy that's responsible for this killing?

Some common sense things of the narrative didn't add up either. A There aren't many cell phones that look like a gun. And I've got to go now turn my back to this group, go retrieve my gun out of my bag, and I'm now going to turn around and shoot you. It just doesn't make sense, the scenario.

Well, the cell phone, all he sees is the black barrel. He keeps his back to them because if they're shooting me, I want everyone to know they shot me in my back.

And in his defense, why would a man who spent his life calculating all the angles deliberately commit a murder which would almost surely be blamed on him?

Don't call me stupid for me to kill someone, for me to kill Rose, lose my money, would gain nothing from her death, lose my freedom, lose my son. That is stupid.

Though there were no outside witnesses to the wife's death and the brother's wound, within a matter of hours, it was Fred Keller who was arrested. The canny tycoon would face a prosecutor who was convinced that Keller had actually thought everything out and had plenty of motive. Motive enough to get him convicted of first-degree murder.

This case is about a man who was consumed with his desire to keep his accumulated wealth. Even if it meant that he was going to get arrested, and even if it meant that he was going to go to jail.

How did a master cyber-criminal and a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin hack into America's financial system, scamming millions? CNBC presents the crimes of Putin's traitor. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Palm Beach was fascinated by this, but just like any other murder in Palm Beach, when this happens, the Palm Beachers say, Well, gee, that's not a real Palm Beacher, that's not us.

The timing of the incident was certainly suspicious. The slaying occurred just days after a judge had awarded Rose half of Keller's $100 million fortune in a divorce settlement. Keller was a man who didn't like to lose. Prosecutor Andy Slater called that the motive for murder.

He became enraged and was bound and determined that Rose Keller and her family members were not going to benefit one red cent.

But the defense would argue that Keller still had plenty of money left. He said as much in those taped interviews.

Fred Keller never made a decision without thinking about it planning, and this was a very poor plan, because what was the exit strategy? Rose is dead, Wolfgang is shot dead, and there's one gun. Fred Keller wasn't about to hinge his life on, you know, that week of a self-defense claim.

So the trial began, and the jury was riveted as they heard Wolfgang recall in graphic detail how Fred Keller had calmly shot him point blank. I heard a loud bang and I felt the pain right away in my chest. He was standing like this and moved forward, something like this, and then, he said, Keller methodically turned his sights on Rose.

Number one, he doesn't tell any of his employees that Rose has threatened them. He doesn't put extra security on the business, he doesn't change the locks of the business. He does none of the things that a person who's legitimately been threatened would normally do.

You're arguing a premeditated murder here.

Absolutely a premeditated murder.

Then it was Keller's turn. He took the stand and told the jury that he only carried the gun in self-defense. The purpose of bringing that gun was to protect yourself and your employees. From Rose, Correct and Wolfgang. The ensuing melee, Keller said, was a horrible mistake.

My son wanted the best for his son. Fred Keller knew that he had a terminal illness. Fred Keller would never have intentionally orphaned his child by killing his mom.

The defense reminded jurors the last thing Keller would do was destroy a future with his beloved young son over money.

Fred Keller did not have this fancy lifestyle where he needed a lot of money, that he had more money than he could possibly spend. That his lifestyle was spending time with his son.

Turning it this way and that a homicide or a misbegotten self-defense? This juror said it was a hopeless deliberation.

We did realize, you know, again, agonizing and agonizing over it, taking the weekend and trying to regroup, that. We were not going to be able to do that as a group, we could not reach a consensus.

And, in fact, they did not.

It was a hung jury and a mistrial.

We were all devastated.

I thought it was very clear that he was guilty.

We were thinking, did the jury not hear? you know, did the jury not hear what we heard?

There was absolutely no question at all that this was going to be a retrial.

The state was determined to convict Fred Keller of murder, but would Keller be allowed to walk free on bond? While he waited for a second trial? Rose's family was still afraid of him.

It was too scary to think about, to be honest with you.

With more than enough cash for bail, there seemed nothing to keep Keller in jail until one man walked out of the shadows of a tortured past to tell a courtroom an astonishing and terrible story about Fred Keller. And it involves this allegation of abducting, kidnapping his own children.

That's true.

Palm Beach millionaire Fred Keller had been charged with killing his ex-wife, Rose, but there had been a mistrial. And now his ex-wife's family was afraid he'd get out on bond as he waited for the retrial.

We needed to do a bond hearing to keep him in custody.

Most bond hearings are routine affairs, but this one would be a shocker. The prosecution called to the stand Brian Bolander, a son of Keller's first wife, whom Keller had adopted during the marriage. He'd tell the court how far Fred Keller would go to have his way when the legal system didn't work for him.

His wife filed for and received a divorce from him, and it was the early 1960s. At this point, the wife got custody of the children and apparently, Mr.

What happened next would change Brian Bolander's life forever.

Those boys get in the car.

I'm going to talk to your mother alone.

We got in the car.

Did the 50-yard dash.

Jumped in the car.

That was the last I saw. Keller, still known as Fred Bolander, drove the three young boys to Canada.

All of this time, the young sons were asking of their father, Where's mom? and Fred Keller told his sons Your mom is dead. She died in an automobile accident.

Ultimately, Keller brought the boys back to Virginia, where an observant social worker happened to hear Young Brian's story. She did a little research on covering the twisted truth, and after nearly a decade, the boys were reunited with their mother. While two of the sons maintained a relationship with Keller, Brian Bolander never saw him again.

I think it's important that he was never prosecuted for any kidnapping or any child abuse charges.

Keller had never answered for the incident, but now the judge viewed Keller as a definite flight risk and denied bail. Rose's family, the Kyles, would wait two years for the second trial. Her sister, Angie, was raising the boy. FreD Chin If Fred Keller was found not guilty in the makeover trial, they were certain he'd want to get his son back under his roof.

He certainly would have had enough money to fight everybody to get him back, and that was just unthinkable.

In January of 2007, Fred Keller once again stood trial for his ex-wife's murder. Prosecutors felt they'd learned something by talking to the previous jury. What was the wobbly part of the case for that poor person in trial one?

They were having some trouble understanding some of the aspects of the physical evidence. And so, whereas we relied upon diagrams in the first trial, we had a scale model of the office of the scene actually built.

And then you moved like this. Now, a new set of jurors heard accounts of that horrible morning Wolfgang's story. I was thinking, I'm going to die, I'm dying today.

A person who's afraid does not do what defendant Fred Keller did on the morning of November 10, 2003.

The defense?

Fred Keller would not, and did not, as the evidence shows, shoot Rose Keller, leaving his son without a mother.

And so a second jury retired to deliberate. Rose's family didn't know what to expect.

It could be another mistrial, it could be a guilty verdict, I mean, it could be anything, and it's really scary.

After a scant five hours, the jury was coming back with a verdict.

He proceeded to just lighten to Rose's family. He called them greedy opportunists. He looked right at Wolfgang and said, You're responsible for your sister's death and you've been lying about it. It was quite amazing.

Keller was sentenced to life in prison, and most expected a control freak like Keller to have trouble doing time.

But my understanding was he pretty much controlled the prison.

People were saying, Sir to him. In those audio tapes made from behind bars, Keller put an oddly positive spin on his incarceration.

It has not been completely negative here. I have a lot of respect here. I'm the only person here that they call Mr. Keller.

Once upon a time in Germany, a pretty young girl answered a lonely hearts ad, and now the unhappy little fairy tale was over. Promise turned to ruin. Fred Keller said all along that Rose would never get a dime of his money, and ultimately she didn't.

But you peel it away, and you find greed and money.

In the end, though, it would turn out nothing was found, only a great deal lost.