On an evening in June 1975, two fourteen-year-old best friends, Barbara Schriber and Darlene Zetterower, sat on a bench along a busy street in Hollywood, Florida. The summer stretched ahead of them, filled with the ordinary rituals of youth: riding bikes after dinner, listening to music, and counting down the days until they would start high school together in the fall. Like many teenagers of that era, they were not afraid to accept a ride from someone they did not know. That night, someone stopped.
Neither girl would live to see her fifteenth birthday. The next morning, a family on a fishing trip discovered their bodies in a remote area near the Everglades, on the bank of a canal a few miles north of a small highway outpost called Andytown. Both girls had been sexually assaulted and shot. Two fourteen-year-olds, last seen climbing into a stranger’s van, were dead, and the killer was already gone.
What followed was one of the coldest cases in Broward County history—a case that outlasted nearly everyone who tried to solve it. Barbara Susan Schriber, known to friends as Barbie, was born on March 21, 1961. Her best friend, Belinda Darlene Zetterower, had been born a few months earlier, on January 24 of the same year. That summer, they had just completed the eighth grade together at Attucks Middle School in Hollywood.
Those who knew them described the two as inseparable. Barbara had a younger sister, Kimberly, who was only five that summer. Her memories of Barbara are few but warm: she remembered her older sister and Darlene turning up the music and dancing through the living room, playing with the younger Schriber children in the easy way older girls sometimes do. Barbara and Darlene were buried separately, at two cemeteries a few miles apart in the county where they had grown up together.
Their families carried the weight of the loss for decades. Barbara’s mother, Joyce Tate, told the Miami Herald in 1979 that the death of her daughter had changed her profoundly. Kimberly later said that Barbara’s murder contributed to the breakup of their parents’ marriage. By the time the case was finally solved in 2025, Barbara’s parents and her brother had all died without ever knowing who was responsible.
Darlene’s parents, Robert and Joyce Zetterower, had roots in Savannah, Georgia, before moving to South Florida. Robert died in 2005, Joyce in 2001. Neither lived to hear a name. One of Darlene’s friends, Gail Cavaco, saw the girls sitting on that bench shortly before the van arrived.
She remembered something else as well: Darlene had invited her to come along. Cavaco’s father said no. It was an ordinary decision made for ordinary reasons, with no premonition attached. Decades later, Cavaco described the fear she felt when she realized how close she had come to being in that van with them.
The detail leads nowhere; it simply remains, a reminder of how narrow the margin was between two victims and three. In the summer of 1975, Hollywood, Florida, was a booming coastal suburb with more than 120,000 residents, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and calling itself the Diamond of the Gold Coast. It was an era before DNA testing, when teenagers moving through town freely and hitching rides was not unusual enough for parents to intervene, though the girls’ mothers did worry. West of Hollywood, the landscape changed quickly.
Within a few 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. It was not the kind of place anyone from Hollywood would have had a reason to go. That contrast between the busy suburb and the empty highway formed the geography of the entire case.
Somewhere in the miles between those two points, the lives of two fourteen-year-olds ended. The accounts vary on where the girls intended to go that evening. Some reports say they told Barbara’s mother they were staying overnight at a friend’s house, possibly a girl named Valerie. Other reports describe them as expected at a gathering in Fort Lauderdale.
What is clear is that they never arrived. They were seen sitting on the bench near Sterling Road, and then a white van, described by some as a work truck, stopped with two men inside. Authorities believe the girls got in voluntarily, accepting a ride the way they had apparently accepted others that summer. Then they were gone.
On the morning of June 19, the fishing family found the bodies near the canal. The investigation began under the limitations of its time. DNA testing did not exist as a forensic tool. Investigators had a description of a van and two unknown men, but no identified suspect and no scientific way to connect biological evidence to a name.
What they did have—though its value would not become clear for nearly five decades—was the girls’ clothing, carefully preserved and stored in an evidence archive. Over the decades, the case passed through the hands of countless detectives and forensic lab workers at the Broward Sheriff’s Office. They picked up the file, did what they could, and set it down again. In 2019, the Broward Sheriff’s Office established a full-time cold case unit, and the file of Barbara and Darlene was among 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, detective Roberto Caceres of the 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 while simultaneously sucking it back, to collect biological material that can remain in fabric long after a standard swab would yield nothing. The analysis 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 Keebler had died in 2019, four years before his DNA could mean anything to the investigators looking at this file. As they reconstructed his life, they found a criminal record described as a list of armed robberies, assault, and aggravated battery—a documented pattern of serious violence that predated any link to this specific case.
Investigators also learned that Keebler had driven a white van when he came to South Florida from California, and that he had been arrested in a white van only seven days after the girls disappeared, following a traffic altercation. A van and a violent past are not proof that a specific man committed a specific murder. But it gave the investigators something they had not had in 1975: a name that could actually be investigated. Detective Andrew Giannino was not convinced Keebler had acted alone.
There was still that second, partial DNA profile that could not be assigned to anyone in 2023. Giannino made a public appeal for information that could link Keebler to a possible second man, or to the girls themselves. During the reopened investigation, detectives found a witness who had never before been heard in connection with the case. This person remembered the girls getting into a white van or work vehicle.
The witness could describe how the girls disappeared, but could not tell the investigators who the second man was. That answer took nearly two more years. In May 2025, the second partial DNA profile was identified as belonging to Lawrence Stein. Like Keebler, Stein was already dead; he had died in 2005, twenty years before his name was linked to the case.
Officials stated that the two men had extensive criminal records and had been suspected or accused of other sexual and violent offenses in Florida, California, and Arizona, with a pattern reportedly dating back to around 1972. Some secondary reporting described the two men as acquaintances, but that detail is not fully documented in public sources. Sheriff Gregory Tony stood before the press on May 22, 2025, 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 eighth grade, received their report cards, and were looking forward to high school together. Countless dreams, he said, were lost to senseless violence. The Broward State Attorney’s Office reviewed the case alongside the detectives and agreed with their conclusion. If Keebler and Stein had still been alive, the evidence would have supported criminal prosecution.
They were not alive, so there would be no arrest, no trial, no moment in a courtroom. The case was formally closed as exceptionally cleared—the police term for cases where investigators know who committed the crime and could prove it, even though no one will ever answer for it in court. Kimberly Schriber, the little girl who had once danced through the living room with her older sister, was in the room when Sheriff Tony made that announcement. She was no longer a child but a woman who had spent virtually her entire adult life without answers, and without her parents or her brother alive to hear the news beside her.
At the podium, she thanked the detectives for not giving up and for not forgetting the case. She also received something smaller that mattered in its own way: among the evidence the Broward Sheriff’s Office had kept for almost 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 members of Darlene’s family were informed of the findings, though her parents did not live to see the day.
It would be easy to close this case as a straightforward story of an opportunistic crime: two teens, a passing van, a crime without planning. That is a tempting shape for such a story, but it is more certainty than the evidence actually supports. There is no established proof that Keebler or Stein had any prior relationship with Barbara or Darlene, nor have investigators established that the encounter was planned rather than formed in the moment. What is clear is that the girls’ summer routine—hitchhiking and spending unsupervised time in their neighborhood—created a situation in which two men with documented violent histories could get close to them, regardless of what those men intended when they stopped that night.
The opportunity is clear. The full intention behind it is not. And this case is not evidence that Barbara and Darlene did anything wrong by hitchhiking, being out that evening, or trusting two strangers in a van—things many teenagers of that time did without incident. Their routine explains how the opportunity arose.
It says nothing about who bears responsibility for what was done with it.