Nearly 60 years later, Perkasie police still seek killer

PERKASIE, PA. » For children preparing to venture out after dark in Perkasie in the early 1960s, their trip often would be preceded by a stark reminder.

“‘Be careful,’ my mother would say,” recalled Judy Pezzanite. “Remember what happened to Mrs. Kretshmar.”

Those words, Pezzanite said, cut through the idyllic image of Perkasie, an Upper Bucks hamlet with a population back then of just a few thousand people.

“It kind of put the fear of God into us,” she said.

The 1959 death of Mabel Kretshmar — or Mrs. Kretshmar, as Pezzanite’s mother called her — and the painstaking, but ultimately fruitless, investigation that followed served as a grisly flashpoint in the borough’s history. Residents began locking their doors. Children, like Pezzanite, were warned to avoid a similar fate.

While Pezzanite was only 9 years old at the time, the specter of Mrs. Kretshmar, she said, lingered well into her teenage years.

“I just remember it was a horrendous thing,” said Pezzanite, now 67. “It was just horrible what happened to her.” Friday the 13th Kretshmar, 58, was a small woman, according to newspaper reports, but unafraid to walk alone, having spent her adult life in Philadelphia.

She moved back to the area after her husband, Edward, a World War I veteran, died in 1947.

It was a chilly February night — Friday, the 13th — when Kretshmar bundled up in a green overcoat and matching hat to embark on the mile-long walk from her apartment to St. Andrew’s United Church of Christ on the south side of town to attend a prayer service.

Shortly before 7:30 p.m., just as she finished crossing the Walnut Street Bridge, which traverses the east branch of the Perkiomen Creek, she was attacked.

Her assailant dragged her 300 feet to a muddy area along the bank of the creek, police said.

She struggled the entire time — leaving behind her left shoe, followed a few more feet by her hat, then her other shoe. A broken pair of eyeglasses was found where she was left in the muck. Her purse, which contained $30, was missing.

The woman, dazed and covered in mud, staggered to a nearby gas station.

By the time police arrived, a small crowd already had gathered. She showed officers the area where she was mugged and beaten.

Aside from a scrape on her right wrist and a small bruise on her hand, there was little sign of injury.

But Kretshmar described a pain in her chest and later was rushed to Grand View Hospital.

She was pronounced dead at 2:20 a.m. Feb. 14. “Country boy” suspect The cause of Kretshmar’s death was listed in a coroner’s report as laceration of the liver and abdominal hemorrhaging. All of the ribs on her left side were broken.

In the hours before her death, Kretshmar could provide little detail about her attacker to police. All she could say for certain was that he grabbed her from behind, dragged her away from the bridge and stomped on her chest with his knees.

No one seemed to have witnessed the actual attack, but by Monday two people had come forward to describe a young man seen in the area around the time of the incident. One said he saw him trailing Kretshmar. Both told authorities the man wore a ski cap and a red and black plaid jacket. He walked with a long, “country boy” stride, they added. That detail, police would say, was verified by footprints found at the scene that seemed to show the suspect’s left foot pointed outward. That would have meant he tended to swing it away from his body when walking.

A composite sketch was constructed based on those statements, along with input from a 16-year-old Sellersville girl who was attacked in Perkasie three weeks earlier, which police thought could be connected. The drawing circulated in newspapers and nearly 1,000 copies were posted throughout the county.

Police brought at least one witness to two youth basketball games to hopefully spot the suspect in the crowd, but to no avail.

At the height of the investigation, more than 50 local, county and state law enforcement officers took part, often working 12- to 15-hour shifts. They used Perkasie Borough Hall as their headquarters. Two high school students were brought in to take dictation.

By Feb. 26, police had questioned about 120 possible suspects. The number swelled to 140 by March.

A diving unit from Telford was brought in to search the creek for Kretshmar’s missing purse or any other bits of evidence.

Officers canvassed every home in the area of the attack in the hope that someone might have seen something that could break the case. They stopped drivers near the bridge and questioned them.

The Forrest Lodge VFW Post 245 in Sellersville offered a $100 reward. Leads turn cold In 1959, 22-year-old Vernon Gantz was between marriages. He had recently moved back in with his mother across the street from the former location of the Perkasie police department.

From there he could see “probably everyone around town” who even remotely fit the description of the suspect entering the station to be questioned by investigators.

“Guys were coming and going all the time,” recalled Gantz, now 80. The interviews, he said, went on for weeks.