FLORIDA 1975 Cold Case Solved After 50 Years — Two Girls, One Van, Never Came Home

FLORIDA 1975 Cold Case Solved After 50 Years — Two Girls, One Van, Never Came Home

On June 18th, 1975, two 14-year-old girls named Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber left Barbara’s house in Hollywood, Florida, planning to spend the night at a friend’s place. They never made it there. They were last seen sitting on a bench, laughing, holding report cards from their last day of eighth grade.

Detectives searched for weeks. They chased down false leads. They tested the girls’ clothing for evidence three separate times over the decades. They had a description of a van. They had a whole community desperate for answers. They just didn’t have a name.

When the answer finally came, it didn’t come from a witness changing their mind or a killer confessing on his deathbed. It came from a piece of technology that did not exist when these girls were alive.

This is the story of two best friends, one white van, and the 50 years it took to say their names out loud again. If you’re new here, this channel tells the stories of cold cases that finally got solved. Hit like and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

Before we get to that van, you need to know who Darlene and Barbara actually were.

Who Were Darlene and Barbara?

Darlene Zetterauer was born on January 24th, 1961. Barbara Schreiber—everyone called her Barbie—was born two months later on March 21st. They grew up just a few streets apart in Hollywood, Florida, a mid-size beach town in Broward County, sandwiched between Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

By the time they were teenagers, the two girls were inseparable. Not close friends—inseparable. The kind of friendship where you show up at someone’s house so often their mom stops asking why you’re there.

Hollywood in the mid-1970s was a place still figuring out what it wanted to be. Growth was everywhere. New neighborhoods were going up, but it still had that small-town feel where everybody’s kids knew everybody’s kids, and parents let their teenagers roam a little more freely than they probably should have.

Hitchhiking, for example, wasn’t unusual. Kids did it to get to the beach, to get to a friend’s house, or to save themselves a long walk in the Florida heat. Darlene and Barbara did it, too—more than their parents were comfortable with. It was one of those small habits nobody thought twice about, right up until the day it mattered more than anything else.

Both girls had just finished eighth grade at Attucks Middle School. They’d gotten their report cards that very day, June 18th, 1975, and they were excited. Not nervous excited, happy excited. High school was a few months away, and they were going in together, the way they did everything together.

A childhood friend named Gail Kovaco remembered Darlene as fun-loving, full of character, the kind of girl who made ordinary afternoons feel like something worth remembering. That’s who she was to the people who knew her—not a headline, but a girl who made people laugh.

Barbara had a little sister named Kimberly, only 5 years old at the time, who idolized her. Kimberly would later say she remembered her big sister vaguely but warmly. Good times, fun times—the kind of memories a 5-year-old holds on to forever because there’s nothing bad mixed in with them yet.

The Schreiber family was just an ordinary Hollywood family, living the kind of quiet, unremarkable life nobody expects to end up at the center of a 50-year mystery.

That evening, Darlene and Barbara left the Schreiber home with a plan. They were going to spend the night at another friend’s house—the kind of casual summer sleepover plan that thousands of teenagers make every single week without a second thought. Barbara’s mother had no reason to worry. Her daughter had made this exact kind of plan a hundred times before.

They never got there.

Here’s something worth thinking about before we go further: If you’d grown up in a neighborhood like theirs, in a decade when hitchhiking barely raised an eyebrow, do you think you would have made the same choice they did? And if Darlene and Barbara’s story is one you think more people should hear, a like on this video goes a long way toward making that happen.

The Night They Disappeared

June 18th, 1975: A warm Wednesday evening in Hollywood, Florida. The last ordinary day Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber would ever have.

Earlier that afternoon, the girls had been at Attucks Middle School picking up their final report cards of eighth grade. Summer had officially started. High school was still a few months off, but it was close enough to talk about, close enough to plan for.

Around town, kids were doing what kids in Hollywood, Florida did in the summer of 1975: riding bikes, hanging out near the beach, killing time on benches along the busier streets, watching cars go by.

That’s exactly where witnesses placed Darlene and Barbara that evening, sitting together on a bench near Sterling Road, one of the busier stretches running through their part of town. They’d left the Schreiber house earlier with a plan already in place: they were headed to spend the night at another friend’s house. An ordinary summer sleepover, the kind of plan that required no permission slip and raised no red flags.

Somewhere along that walk, a white van pulled up to the curb. Inside were two men. Nobody knows exactly what was said. What witnesses did know, and what the girls’ own families later confirmed, was that hitchhiking was something Darlene and Barbara did from time to time—more than their parents were entirely comfortable with. It wasn’t unusual for the era. It also wasn’t safe, and on this particular evening, it would turn out to be fatal.

The girls climbed into that van. Whatever conversation happened between them and the two men inside it, whatever reason they had for saying yes, none of it survived the night. What we know is simple and devastating: they got in willingly, and then they were gone.

That van is the detail to hold on to. Nobody got a plate number. Nobody could describe the men’s faces in any real detail. All investigators had, in the earliest hours of this case, was the color of a vehicle and the fact that it was heading away from town. It would sit in the case file for decades as almost nothing. Later, it would turn out to be almost everything.

Nobody at the friend’s house thought much of it when Darlene and Barbara didn’t show up. Sleepover plans fell through sometimes. It’s the kind of small, forgivable delay that happens in every teenager’s summer, right up until it doesn’t.

But the night stretched on, and neither girl came home, and neither girl called. Slowly, quietly, in two separate houses a few streets apart, the same feeling started to settle in: something wasn’t right.

By morning, the worry that had been sitting in the back of two families’ minds turned into something else entirely. Darlene and Barbara were gone, and nobody knew where.

The Discovery

The next morning, a family in Broward County set out on an ordinary fishing trip, driving out toward the edge of the Everglades near US 27 to a remote, swampy stretch of land locals called Andytown. It was the kind of desolate, wide-open area where the city stopped and the wilderness took over—all sawgrass, dirt roads, and canal water stretching to the horizon.

Instead of a good fishing spot, they found two bodies lying on a dirt road at the edge of that wilderness. It was Darlene and Barbara.

Word spread through Hollywood fast. Families who had known these girls their whole lives, teachers from Attucks Middle School, neighbors who’d watched them grow up riding bicycles up and down the block—all absorbed the same gut-punch fact at roughly the same time: two 14-year-old girls, gone for less than a day, were already dead.

Investigators determined both girls had been brutalized and then shot to death. The nature of what was done to them was violent and depraved—the kind of detail investigators kept out of public reports to protect the dignity of the victims and the integrity of the case.

The bodies had been left out in that remote area, far from any road most people would ever have a reason to drive down, in a spot chosen specifically because nobody was likely to find it quickly. Only the fishing trip changed that.

The scene told investigators a few basic facts, but not nearly enough. This was a spot far from where the girls had last been seen, which meant somebody had driven them a significant distance out past the edge of town into the kind of nowhere that only someone who wanted privacy for something terrible would choose. Whoever did this knew or guessed correctly that Andytown was quiet enough and remote enough to buy them time.

There wasn’t much physical evidence left behind in that swampy dirt. No fingerprints that held up. No murder weapon recovered at the scene. What investigators did have was a location, a cause of death, and the same maddening blank space where a suspect’s name should have been.

And there was still that van. Two girls last seen getting into a white van near Sterling Road were now found dead nearly 30 miles away in a place most Hollywood residents had never even driven through. The distance alone told a story. This wasn’t a crime of a few desperate minutes. It was a drive. It took time. It took a destination already in mind.

For the families of Darlene and Barbara, the discovery answered the most unbearable question—where their daughters were—while opening an even harder one that would take 50 years to close: Who did this to them, and why?

The Investigation and Why It Went Cold

In 1975, the Broward Sheriff’s Office threw real resources at this case. Detectives interviewed neighbors up and down the girls’ street. They talked to classmates at Attucks Middle School. They combed the area around Andytown for anything that could point them toward the men in that van. This wasn’t a case anyone treated casually. Two young girls murdered together was the kind of crime that shook an entire community, and investigators felt that pressure.

But 1975 was a different world for detective work, and the limitation that mattered most wasn’t a lack of effort—it was a lack of science. There was no such thing as a DNA database in 1975. DNA testing for criminal cases didn’t exist yet at all, not in any form investigators could have used.

If a suspect left behind biological evidence—and in this case, they had—there was no method on Earth in 1975 that could turn that evidence into a name. Investigators could collect it, preserve it, and file it away. That’s exactly what happened. The girls’ clothing was kept, tested when technology allowed for it, and tested again. But for decades, every single test came back the same way: inconclusive. Not enough to work with.

On top of that, there was no shared national system connecting arrests and evidence across state lines the way there is today. A man with a criminal record in California and Arizona could drift into Florida, and unless a very specific coincidence connected the dots, nobody investigating a murder in Hollywood would ever know he existed. That gap wasn’t a failure of any one detective; it was a hole built into the entire system.

Investigators did chase leads. They looked hard at the possibility that Darlene and Barbara’s murders were connected to a string of other killings happening around South Florida at roughly the same time—a series that would later become known informally as the “flat tire murders” because the killer in those cases deflated his victims’ tires to strand them.

For a while, it seemed like it might all be the same monster. It wasn’t. The pattern didn’t match, and investigators eventually ruled the connection out. Which meant this case wasn’t part of some larger, already active manhunt. It was its own unsolved mystery, standing alone.

There was no wrongly accused neighbor dragged through years of suspicion here. No innocent life ruined by a bad hunch. But there was frustration—the kind that comes from investigators knowing the answer was probably sitting in their own evidence room without the tool yet to unlock it.

Years passed. Detectives who worked the case in 1975 retired, and some passed away. The physical evidence went into storage. Darlene and Barbara’s names stopped appearing in the newspaper. The case went quiet. Not dead—dormant. Waiting for a piece of technology that hadn’t been invented yet.

The Perpetrators

The men responsible for the murders of Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber were Robert Clark Keebler and Lawrence Stein. Both were in their early 20s in June of 1975. Neither one was a stranger to violence.

Keebler had come to South Florida from California earlier that year driving a white van. By the time detectives eventually pieced together his history, it stretched back to at least 1972 and crossed multiple states: California, Arizona, and Florida. His record included armed robbery, violent assault, and aggravated assault.

Lawrence Stein’s history ran along a similar track: violent, scattered across state lines, the kind of record that should have made him impossible to ignore. Investigators would later say plainly that these weren’t men who slipped through the cracks by accident. Their crimes stretched from coast to coast because the systems meant to catch them weren’t built to talk to each other. An arrest in California didn’t flag a name in Florida.

Keebler and Stein moved through that gap for years, committing violent crimes in one place, then reappearing somewhere else with a clean slate as far as local police were concerned.

Here’s the detail that should stop you in your tracks: 7 days after Darlene and Barbara were murdered, Robert Keebler was arrested in Pompano Beach, Florida following a road rage incident. He was driving that same white van. Officers found a handgun inside it.

At the time, nobody had any reason to connect a traffic dispute to a double homicide happening in a different part of the county. The arrest was logged, processed, and filed away like any other minor incident. Keebler walked out, and the connection sat buried in a filing cabinet for the next 48 years.

Both men went on living. Keebler drifted between arrests and stretches of freedom for decades, in and out of custody in different states, never once connected to what happened in Andytown. Stein did the same, building a long and violent record of his own, never facing so much as a single question about two 14-year-old girls in Florida.

They worked jobs. They had lives. They existed in the world as ordinary, forgettable men to anyone who didn’t know their history, right up until the day science finally caught up with them decades after they were already gone.

Robert Clark Keebler died in 2019 in Miami of causes unrelated to any of this. Lawrence Stein died back in 2005. Neither man was ever arrested for what happened to Darlene and Barbara. Neither man spent a single night in jail for it. For close to 50 years, they simply got away with it, living out full lives while two families waited for a name that never came.

If you’re finding this case as unsettling as we did putting it together, subscribing means you’ll be here for the next one, too.

The Breakthrough

In 2019, the Broward Sheriff’s Office created something the department hadn’t had before: a full-time cold case homicide unit dedicated entirely to reopening decades-old murders that everyone else had stopped working on. Darlene and Barbara’s file was one of the cases sitting in that unit’s stack.

Detective Andrew Giannino picked it up. He was set to retire, but he later said he couldn’t walk away knowing this case was still sitting there unsolved. It became personal to him in a way that some cases just do. He said the innocence of these kids was part of what made the case live on and resonate with investigators decade after decade.

The girls’ clothing had already been tested for DNA multiple times over the years, and every single time the results came back inconclusive. Most people at that point would have accepted that the evidence simply wasn’t going to give up an answer. Giannino didn’t. He ordered another round of testing using the newest forensic techniques available, and he made it clear he wasn’t willing to accept another dead end.

Here’s how modern DNA testing actually works in plain terms: every person leaves behind a genetic fingerprint in their skin cells, blood, even trace sweat. For decades, crime labs didn’t have machines sensitive enough to pull a usable profile from tiny, degraded samples sitting in evidence storage for 50 years. New techniques changed that, allowing labs to amplify and read genetic material older methods couldn’t detect.

Once you have a usable profile, you run it through CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, searching for a match against millions of profiles collected from criminal cases nationwide.

In February of 2023, Detective Roberto Casseras ran that newest test on evidence from Darlene’s clothing. This time, it worked. It produced a full DNA profile, and it hit a match in CODIS. The name attached to it was Robert Clark Keebler.

Investigators also found a partial profile of a second man on the same evidence, one they couldn’t identify yet. And that’s when the van came back into the story.

Detectives tracked down a relative of Keebler’s and confirmed he had, in fact, driven a white van when he arrived in Florida from California in early 1975. Then they pulled his old arrest record and found it: a road rage incident in Pompano Beach, just 7 days after the murders, with Keebler behind the wheel of that same white van and a handgun sitting inside it. A detail that had meant absolutely nothing for 48 years suddenly meant everything.

Would you have believed a 50-year-old traffic stop could crack open a double murder? Because that’s essentially what happened here.

Investigators also located a witness who had never been interviewed before—someone who confirmed seeing the two girls climb into that van. Piece by piece, the case that had gone quiet in 1975 was coming back together, decades later than anyone could have hoped.

Building the Case

Identifying Robert Keebler was a massive step, but it wasn’t the finish line. Detective Giannino and his team still needed to confirm the second man, and they needed enough to make the case hold up even against defendants who could no longer speak for themselves.

Giannino went public in August of 2023, releasing Keebler’s name and asking the community for help. He specifically asked if anyone remembered Darlene and Barbara—anyone who might remember associations, friendships, anything at all connected to June of 1975. He said it plainly: it might mean nothing to them, but it could mean everything to the investigation.

That public appeal, combined with the witness who came forward and continued lab work on the second partial DNA profile, slowly filled in the rest of the picture. Investigators corroborated Keebler’s white van independently through his own arrest record. They confirmed his violent history across three states, and eventually, refined testing connected the second profile to Lawrence Stein—the man who had died back in 2005—closing the final gap in who was actually in that van on June 18th, 1975.

There was no arrest to make. Both men were already dead. But Broward investigators didn’t treat that as a reason to stop. Giannino filed the case with the Broward State Attorney’s Office for prosecution exactly as though Keebler and Stein were still alive, presenting the DNA evidence, the witness account, and the corroborating arrest record as a complete case file.

The State Attorney’s Office reviewed it and agreed: had these two men been alive, they would have been prosecuted for the murders of Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber.

That legal designation has a name: exceptionally cleared. It means the evidence is there, the case is solved in every sense that matters to the people who investigated it, but there’s no living defendant left to stand trial. It’s not the ending anyone hoped for back in 1975. It is, after almost 50 years, the truth finally written down in black and white.

Detectives also checked whether Keebler and Stein were tied to the flat tire murders, a separate string of killings in South Florida from that same period. Giannino was direct about it: the methods didn’t match closely enough, and he didn’t believe these two men were responsible for those other cases. It would have been easy to stretch the evidence to close more files at once. Investigators chose not to.

The Announcement

On May 22nd, 2025, nearly 50 years to the point where this case had gone cold, Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony stood in front of cameras and reporters to announce what his department had found.

There was no judge in the room, no jury, no defense attorney standing beside a client. Instead, there was a sheriff, a detective, and a case file built from DNA science that didn’t exist when the crime happened, laid out for a community that had waited half a century for this exact moment.

Tony didn’t soften the outcome. He told the room plainly that Keebler and Stein were both dead and would never face trial for what they did. But he framed it as something that still mattered: “Justice doesn’t have an expiration date,” he said, “not in this organization, not in this community.”

Detective Giannino walked through the evidence the same way a prosecutor might lay out a case for a jury: the DNA profile matching Keebler; the corroborating arrest record from Pompano Beach 7 days after the murders (same van, same man behind the wheel); the newly discovered witness who saw the girls get into that vehicle; the refined lab work that finally connected the second partial profile to Lawrence Stein.

He was honest about what this outcome actually was and what it wasn’t. “I don’t know if it’s justice,” he said, “but at least it gives the family some answers.”

That single sentence captured something no courtroom verdict could have. There was no satisfaction of watching two men led away in handcuffs. No moment of a jury standing to deliver a guilty verdict while family members wept in the gallery. What there was instead was certainty.

After decades of not knowing, the families of Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber finally had two names, two full histories of violence, and a case file the state attorney’s office had agreed would have led to prosecution had these men lived long enough to face it.

Giannino also spoke about the men themselves plainly, without embellishment: “They lived full lives,” he said. “Very violent lives.” It wasn’t sympathy; it was simply a fact, delivered the way a detective delivers facts, because after everything these two men had done across three states and five decades, sympathy wasn’t really on the table.

Kimberly Schreiber, Barbara’s younger sister, sat through that news conference as an adult woman who had spent nearly her entire life without an answer. She had been 5 years old when her sister was murdered. Now, decades later, she finally had one.

She spoke to reporters afterward, and her words carried the weight of everything her family had been through: “It devastated us,” she said. “It destroyed us. It didn’t break us, but our hearts will ever be broken.” She also said the loss had fractured her parents’ marriage in the years after, the two of them left to quietly blame each other for a tragedy that was never their fault.

Kimberly thanked the detectives directly, grateful, in her words, to “people who never forget people like us.” It was a small sentence that summed up exactly what this announcement meant: not a trial, not a conviction, just the overdue confirmation that somebody had kept looking the entire time.

Aftermath

There was no sentence handed down in this case. No judge read out a number of years. No jury decided a punishment. Robert Clark Keebler and Lawrence Stein had already died—Stein in 2005, Keebler in 2019—both of them free men at the time, both of them never once questioned about what happened to Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber in June of 1975.

In a strange, uncomfortable way, that absence of punishment is its own kind of ending, and it’s worth sitting with honestly instead of pretending it’s tidier than it actually was. These two men committed one of the most devastating crimes a community can experience, and they simply lived out the rest of their lives without ever answering for it. Neither man showed any documented remorse, because neither man was ever confronted with what he’d done in a way that required one.

What happened instead wasn’t sentencing—it was accounting. Investigators laid out in full exactly who these two men were, the violence that followed them from California to Arizona to Florida, and the decades they spent moving through a justice system that never connected the dots until it was far too late for punishment to mean anything in the traditional sense.

For Darlene’s family, closure arrived without the presence of a killer in a courtroom to receive it. Her parents, Robert and Joyce Zetterauer, did not live to see this day. Barbara’s parents didn’t either, and neither did her brother. An entire generation of the family that raised these two girls went to their graves not knowing the names Keebler and Stein—not knowing that 7 days after their daughters were killed, one of the men responsible had already been sitting in a police station over a road rage argument, driving the very van their girls had climbed into.

That detail is hard to sit with. The answer existed in a filing cabinet for 48 years while an entire generation of parents died waiting for it.

What’s left now is the next generation: Kimberly Schreiber, 5 years old when her sister was murdered, grown now, finally able to say her sister’s killer’s name out loud; Gail Kovaco, the childhood friend who remembered Darlene as full of life, finally able to see an old unresolved memory get an ending; Detective Andrew Giannino, who postponed his own retirement because he refused to let this case die with him still holding the file.

None of them got a courtroom moment. All of them got the truth, which turned out to be the only form of justice this particular case had left to offer.

Who They Were

Darlene Zetterauer and Barbara Schreiber were not a DNA profile. They were not case numbers sitting in a Broward County evidence room for 50 years. They were two 14-year-old best friends who spent the last afternoon of their lives holding report cards from their last day of eighth grade, sitting on a bench, probably talking about high school, probably talking about absolutely nothing important at all—the way 14-year-olds do on a warm June evening with their whole lives still in front of them.

The public record will never fully capture what these girls meant to the people who loved them. It won’t capture what Darlene’s laugh sounded like, or what Barbara and her little sister used to do together before Kimberly was old enough to really remember it clearly. It won’t capture ordinary dinners at the Schreiber house, or the specific sound of two best friends walking down a street together—the kind of small, unremarkable moment nobody thinks to hold on to until it’s the last one.

Some cases close on their own timeline. This one took the length of an entire lifetime: 48 years from crime to confirmed suspect, nearly 50 from crime to public announcement. But it came full circle in the end. A piece of technology that didn’t exist in 1975 finally gave two families the one thing that mattered more than punishment ever could: the truth.

What the public record does preserve is this: two girls who trusted the wrong van on an otherwise ordinary summer evening; two families who never stopped hoping for an answer, even after the parents who raised these girls didn’t live long enough to hear it; a detective who wouldn’t let a retirement date end an investigation that still had a name left to find; and in the end, two names—Robert Clark Keebler and Lawrence Stein—spoken publicly for the first time in nearly 50 years. Not in a courtroom, but close enough to justice that a grieving sister could finally exhale.

Darlene Zetterauer. Barbara Schreiber. 14 years old. Best friends. Remembered here, and remembered by name at last.

For nearly 50 years, the families were simply asked to wait without a name, without an arrest, without even a suspect to be angry at. Nobody chose that outcome out of laziness; the technology to do better hadn’t caught up yet. But when it finally did, a detective who could have walked away chose not to. And that choice is the reason this story has an ending at all.

Now we want to hear from you. Knowing what you know now about that van, about the road rage arrest sitting quietly in a filing cabinet for 48 years, is there another detail from this case you think investigators should dig deeper into? Let us know down below. If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and subscribe so the next forgotten case we uncover doesn’t stay forgotten either.