In June 1975, two fourteen-year-old girls sat on a bench along a busy street in Hollywood, Florida. Barbara Schriber and Darlene Zetterower were inseparable, spending a carefree summer together after finishing eighth grade at Attucks Middle School. Like many teenagers that summer, they were not afraid to accept rides from strangers. That evening, a white van with two men inside pulled over.
Neither girl would live to see her fifteenth birthday. The next morning, a family on a fishing trip discovered their bodies along a canal in a remote area near the Everglades, at a highway junction known as Andytown. For nearly fifty years, the case defeated every detective, agent, forensic examiner, and laboratory technician who touched it. It grew colder than almost any other in Broward County history.
Barbara Susan Schriber, called Barbie by those who knew her, was born on March 21, 1961. Belinda Darlene Zetterower was born a few months earlier, on January 24 of the same year. The two had been best friends throughout their childhood. Darlene was remembered as lively and full of personality, someone who filled a room with her presence.
Barbara had a younger sister, Kimberly, who was only five years old that summer. Kimberly’s memories of her older sister were warm: Barbara and Darlene turning up music and dancing through the house, playing with the younger children. It was one of the few remaining windows into who Barbara was before the tragedy. The loss rippled through both families.
Barbara’s mother, Joyce Tate, spoke to the Miami Herald in 1979, four years after the murders, describing how profoundly her daughter’s death had changed her. Kimberly later said the murder contributed to the breakup of her parents’ marriage. By the time the case was finally solved in 2025, both of Barbara’s parents and her brother had died without ever learning who was responsible. Darlene’s parents, Robert and Joyce Zetterower, had roots in Savannah, Georgia, before the family settled in South Florida.
Robert died in 2005, Joyce in 2001. Neither lived long enough to hear the killers named. A friend of Darlene’s, Gail Cavaco, had seen the girls sitting on the bench that day, shortly before the van arrived. Cavaco remembered something else as well: Darlene had invited her to come along.
Cavaco’s father said no. No premonition, no warning, just a father in an ordinary house who refused his daughter’s request for reasons unrelated to what lay ahead. Decades later, Cavaco described the fear she felt realizing how close she had come to being a third victim. It remained a haunting detail, a reminder that the case nearly involved three girls instead of two.
Hollywood, Florida, in 1975 was a rapidly growing suburb between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, with more than 120,000 residents. It called itself the Diamond of the Gold Coast. Children rode bikes after dinner and sat on benches without worrying about who might drive by. Hitchhiking was common enough that Barbara and Darlene regularly accepted rides that summer, enough to worry their parents but not enough for anyone to stop them.
West of Hollywood, the landscape changed within miles. Suburban streets gave way to canals, sawgrass, and long desolate stretches of US Highway 27 along the edge of the Everglades. Andytown was little more than a gas station and a few buildings where truckers and fishermen could stop. It was not a place anyone from Hollywood would have reason to go.
Between those two worlds, along that desolate stretch, the girls’ lives ended. The evening of June 18, 1975, began like any other. Barbara and Darlene had just received their eighth-grade report cards and looked forward to starting high school together that fall. Reports differ on where they intended to go that night.
Some accounts say they left Barbara’s home telling her mother they would sleep over at a friend’s house. Other reporting describes them as expected at a gathering in Fort Lauderdale. Wherever they intended to go, they never arrived. They were last seen sitting on the bench at Sterling Road.
A white van, described by some as a work truck, stopped with two men inside. Authorities believed the girls voluntarily got in, accepting a ride as they had done many times that summer. Then they were gone. The next morning, June 19, 1975, a family on a fishing trip found the bodies in the wilderness a few miles north of Andytown, near a canal.
The girls had been shot. The modern investigation by the Broward Sheriff’s Office concluded that they had also been sexually assaulted. Older accounts from around 1975 described the physical evidence as unclear, and certainty about that detail shifted over the decades. But from the first morning, one fact was beyond dispute: two fourteen-year-old girls last seen climbing into a stranger’s van were dead in the Everglades, and the killer had vanished.
DNA testing as an investigative method did not exist in 1975. Investigators had a description of a van and two unknown men, but no identified suspect and no way to find one. What they did have, whose value would only become clear forty-eight years later, was the girls’ clothing, carefully preserved and stored in the evidence archive. Over the decades, the case passed through the hands of countless detectives and forensic laboratory staff at the Broward Sheriff’s Office, who repeatedly picked up the file, did what they could, and set it aside again.
In 2019, the office established a full-time cold case unit, and the file on Barbara and Darlene was one of those pulled from the shelf. It would take four more years and equipment no one in 1975 could have imagined before the clothing finally gave up its secret. In 2023, forty-eight years after the murders, Detective Roberto Caceres of the Broward Sheriff’s Office crime scene unit used a device called the M-Vac on Darlene’s preserved clothing. The M-Vac uses a controlled wet vacuum process, spraying a sterile liquid onto a surface and simultaneously sucking it back up to collect biological material that can remain in fabric long after a standard swab would yield nothing.
It proved particularly useful for recovering traces of male DNA from clothing of female victims and for working with evidence untouched for decades. The examination of Darlene’s clothing produced a full DNA profile of one man and a partial profile of a second, unidentified man. The full profile was matched to Robert Clark Keebler. It was the first real breakthrough in the case.
But it was not the end. Keebler had died in 2019, four years before his DNA could mean anything to the investigators looking at this file. Detectives began reconstructing who he had been. Authorities described his criminal record as a list of armed robberies, sexual assault, and aggravated battery, a documented pattern of serious violence predating any link to this case.
Investigators also learned that Keebler had been driving a white van when he came from California to South Florida, and that he had been arrested in a white van after a traffic dispute just seven days after the girls disappeared. A van and a violent past did not prove that a specific man committed a specific murder, but it gave investigators something they had not had in 1975: a name that could actually be investigated, and a vehicle detail matching what the DNA already suggested. Detective Andrew Giannino, who took up the case, was not convinced Keebler had acted alone. There was still that second, partial DNA profile that could not be assigned to anyone as of 2023.
Giannino made a public appeal for information connecting Keebler to a possible second man, or to the girls themselves. During the reopened investigation, detectives found a witness who had never been heard from in connection with the case. That person remembered seeing the girls get into a white van or work vehicle. This witness was a different person from Gail Cavaco, the friend who had declined the invitation.
The witness’s account gave investigators a direct confirmation of how that evening actually began. She could describe how the girls disappeared, but she could not tell them who the second man was. That answer took nearly two more years. In May 2025, investigators finally identified the second partial DNA profile from the girls’ clothing as Lawrence Stein.
Like Keebler, Stein was already dead, having died in 2005, twenty years before his name was linked to the case. Investigators stated that the two men had extensive criminal records and had been suspected or accused at various times of other sex crimes and violent offenses in Florida, California, and Arizona, with a pattern reportedly reaching back to about 1972. Some secondary reporting described the two men as acquaintances, but that detail was not fully documented in public sources. What the Broward Sheriff’s Office confirmed was the conclusion that mattered most: two men, both dead, both linked by DNA evidence to the deaths of two fourteen-year-old girls in 1975.
On May 22, 2025, Sheriff Gregory Tony of Broward stood before the press and announced that the murders of Barbara Schriber and Darlene Zetterower had finally been solved. Justice, he said, has no expiration date. Detective Giannino described the girls in simple terms: they had just finished the eighth grade, received their report cards, and looked forward to going to high school together. Countless dreams, he said, were lost to senseless violence.
The Broward State Attorney’s Office studied the case alongside the investigators and agreed with their conclusion. Had Keebler and Stein still been alive, the evidence gathered would have supported criminal prosecution. They were not alive, so there would be no arrest, no trial, no courtroom moment. The case was formally closed under the designation exceptionally cleared, the police term for knowing who committed a crime and being able to prove it, even though no one will ever answer for it before a judge.
For one family in the room, the announcement meant something far more personal than a legal designation. Kimberly Schriber, the five-year-old who had once danced through the living room with her big sister, was present when Sheriff Tony made the announcement. She was no longer a child. She was a woman who had spent essentially her entire adult life without answers, and without any of her parents or her brother alive beside her to hear the news.
At the podium, she thanked the detectives personally for not giving up and not forgetting the case. She also received something smaller that mattered in its own way. Among the evidence Broward police had preserved for nearly five decades were two pieces of Barbara’s jewelry: a cross necklace and a ring. After forty-nine years in an evidence room, they were finally returned to Kimberly.
Surviving relatives of Darlene’s family were informed of what the investigators had found. It would be easy to close this case as a straightforward story of an opportunistic crime, two teenagers, a passing van, a crime without planning. It is a tempting shape for such stories. But it is more certainty than the evidence actually supports.
There is no established proof that Robert Clark Keebler or Lawrence Stein had a prior relationship with Barbara or Darlene. Investigators have also not established the opposite, or whether the encounter was somehow planned or arose in the moment. What is clear is that the girls’ routine that summer, hitchhiking and hanging around their neighborhood unsupervised, created a situation in which two men with documented histories of violence could get close to them, regardless of the men’s intentions when they stopped that evening. The opportunity is clear.
The full intent behind it is not. The case is also not evidence that Barbara and Darlene did anything wrong by hitchhiking, being out that evening, or trusting two strangers in a van, as many teenagers of that era did without incident. Their routine explains how the opportunity arose. It says nothing about who bears responsibility for what was done with it.
The girls lie buried today in separate cemeteries, Barbara at Fred Hunter’s Hollywood Memorial Gardens West, Darlene at Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens South in Fort Lauderdale, a few miles apart in the same county where they grew up inseparable. Their parents never learned the names of the men who killed them. But their names, and the story of two best friends on an ordinary summer evening, are no longer forgotten.