Best friends Darlene Zetterower and Barbara Schreiber had just received their eighth-grade report cards when they disappeared into a white van on a June evening in 1975.
The next day, the bodies of the two 14-year-olds were found on the edge of the Everglades. They had been sexually assaulted and shot dead, and their murders would remain a mystery for close to 50 years.
At a news conference Thursday, Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony and Cold Case Homicide Unit Detective Andrew Gianino announced that the two girls’ murders had finally been solved, thanks to new DNA testing capabilities, a recently discovered witness and detective work.
Two men, Robert Clark Keebler and Lawrence Stein, are believed to have murdered the girls that day amid a spree of violent crimes and sexual assaults all the way from California to Arizona and Florida.
Both men are now dead. But the resolution of the case brings some solace to Schreiber’s younger sister, Kimberly, who attended Thursday’s news conference and participated in a recorded interview with the Sheriff’s Office.
“I do imagine how my siblings would feel if they were here,” she said through tears, “to know this team has done everything to find the people that did this tremendous, horrible thing to our family.”
The two girls were inseparable, recalled Kimberly Schreiber, who was 5 at the time of her older sister’s death. They would play with Schreiber and her siblings, putting Schreiber and her little brother on top of the car, putting on music and dancing.
“It was innocent,” she said in the BSO interview. “It was them having fun.”
But on June 18, 1975, the two teens were walking near Stirling Road, possibly hitchhiking, when they got into a white van with Keebler and Stein inside. The next day, their bodies were found on the edge of the Everglades, near U.S. 27.
The murder didn’t only take Kimberly Schreiber’s sister away; it destroyed her family and her parents’ marriage, she said in the recorded video, leading them to blame one another for her sister’s death.
The girls had just finished eighth grade and received their report cards earlier in the day. They “were looking forward to going to high school together,” Gianino said. “Countless dreams have been lost to senseless violence.”
Years passed. Schreiber’s parents and brother died. Then, in 2019, the Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit reopened the case. And in 2023, Gianino and BSO’s Crime Lab used DNA taken from the girl’s clothing to identify Keebler as one of the suspects. At that point, detectives still needed more evidence to link Keebler to the girls and to uncover the identity of the other suspect.
Through further investigation, Gianino discovered that Keebler had driven a white van around the same time period, and that the two men were involved in similar crimes together, including the abduction of two girls from Plantation. They are also suspected or charged in a series of sexual assaults in other states, dating back to 1972, Gianino said.
“There’s been nothing but tragedy and violence in their lives,” he said.
But what “really opened this case up” outside of the DNA testing was a new witness: Detectives managed to locate someone who had never been interviewed, but saw the two girls getting into a white work truck on the evening of June 18, Gianino said. Keebler was in the same van when he was arrested seven days later in a road-rage incident.
Earlier this year, with the closure of the case, Gianino was able to return some of Schreiber’s jewelry to her sister: a cross necklace and a ring.
Zetterower’s parents died in the early 2000s, according to an online obituary. Surviving family members are not local and were not able to attend the news conference, but were also informed of the resolution of the case and happy to have closure, Gianino said.
The girls’ deaths also happened about the same time as a series of unsolved murders of teen girls in South Florida known as the “Flat Tire Murders,” though Gianino said he does not think the modus operandi used by Keebler and Stein matches those cases.
However, detectives are looking into whether the two men are responsible for other homicides. A “multitude” of bodies have been discovered in the same location as the girls’ murders, Gianino said, though they have not connected Keebler and Stein to them.
Stein died in 2005, and Keebler died in 2019 in Miami, Gianino said, right as the case was getting reopened. Both had been in and out of jail throughout their lives, though neither was in custody at the time of their deaths.
Detectives filed the case with the Broward State Attorney’s Office as if the two men were alive. The prosecutor agreed that, had they been alive, they would have faced charges.
“It’s not a matter whether or not they were alive today or dead,” Tony said. “Our obligation is to find justice for this community.”
