California 1975 Double Teen Homicide Cold Case SOLVED – Arrest Shocks Community

On a June afternoon in 1975, two best friends sat on a bench in Hollywood, Florida, holding report cards that said they had just finished the eighth grade. Barbara Schreiber and Darlene Zetterauer were 14 years old. Summer had just started. High school was 3 months away,    and neither of them would live to see the first day of it.

 A white van pulled up to the curb. Two men sat inside. In a South Florida that summer,    sun-bleached and used to strangers offering rides, that was not yet the alarming thing it would become. Barbara and Darlene climbed in, the same way they had climbed into cars and trucks a dozen times before, expecting nothing more than a lift home.

Nobody who loved them ever saw them alive again. The next morning, a family out fishing near Interstate 75, in a stretch of Everglades scrub called Andytown, found two girls lying together on a dirt road, fully clothed, shot. They had been sexually assaulted. Whatever happened between that bench and that dirt road, no one could say.

 There was no name for the van.    There was no name for the men inside it. There was only an evidence sample, sealed and logged, that would sit in a Broward County lab for 49 years before anyone could finally read what it had been saying the entire time. If you’re new to this channel, this is what we do here.

 We tell the stories of women and children the world let slip through its fingers, and we follow those stories all the way to wherever the truth eventually landed. Even when it takes decades to get there.    Subscribe now, because this one took nearly 50 years, and the way it finally cracked open is unlike almost anything we’ve covered.

 Stay until the end, and you’ll learn exactly why the men responsible were never once made to sit across a table from a detective, look a jury in the eye, or answer a single question about what they did to two 14-year-old girls. Now, back to Barbara and Darlene.  Warning, this is a true crime story. The following program contains real events that include violence and sensitive topics.

 Some viewers may find certain details disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.  She grew up in Hollywood, Florida,    in a full and busy household with an older brother and a much younger sister named Kimberly, who was only about 5 years old that summer. Kimberly was too small to understand why her big sister stopped coming home, and old enough, just barely, to remember pieces of her for the rest of her life.

Barbara was the kind of 14 that still keeps one foot in childhood, old enough to want independence, young enough that a report card still mattered enough to bring home and show somebody. Belinda Darlene Zetterauer had known Barbara for years by then.    In a town the size of Hollywood in the mid-1970s, that meant the same streets, the same schools, the same long, humid, nothing in particular afternoons that 14-year-old best friends fill without even noticing the days go by.

 Darlene was Barbara’s shadow, and Barbara was hers. Neighbors who knew one girl generally knew to expect the other standing right next to her. On June 18th, 1975, both girls walked home from school with report cards in hand, marking the official end of eighth grade. It should have been the most forgettable kind of afternoon there is, the kind that blurs into every other summer day of being 14    with nowhere urgent to be.

At some point that day, the two of them ended up sitting on a bench near Sterling Road in Hollywood. Hitchhiking was ordinary that year. Ordinary enough that it barely registered as a risk worth a second thought. Barbara and Darlene had done it before, the way plenty of teenagers in Broward County did in 1975.

Sticking out a thumb rather than walking the whole way home under a Florida sun that didn’t let up until well past 6 in the evening. A white van slowed near the bench. Two men sat inside. According to what investigators would eventually reconstruct, the girls climbed in willingly.    There was no scream that a neighbor remembered.

 No scene that pulled anyone to a window. No sign at all that this ride was any different from the ones that came before it. It was the last decision either of them would ever get to make. 1975 in South Florida looked, from the outside, like a postcard. The radio that summer was full of disco and soft rock.

 Families packed drive-ins and roller rinks. Kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on, and nobody thought twice about it. Underneath that postcard though, something else was moving through Broward and Miami-Dade counties.    Something nobody in Hollywood had put a name to yet. Barbara and Darlene had no way of knowing that the same summer that felt so ordinary to them was already  quietly one of the most dangerous seasons South Florida had seen in years.

Barbara and Darlene did not come home that night. In a summer of loose schedules and looser supervision, it may have taken hours before either household understood something had actually gone wrong. A mother checking a bedroom that should have had a daughter asleep in it. A phone call to the other family asking if anyone had seen the girls since that afternoon.

By morning, there was no version of events left that made any sense.  Two 14-year-olds simply did not disappear for a full night without a single friend, a single relative, a single soul in Hollywood knowing where they’d gone. The answer came from strangers. Early the next morning, a family on a fishing trip near Interstate 75, out past the edge of town in the stretch known as Andytown, found what nobody should ever have to find.

Two girls lying together on a dirt road at the border of the Everglades, fully clothed, each shot. Broward County investigators who responded to that call were staring at a scene with almost nothing to build from. No eyewitness to an abduction. No license plate for a van that could have belonged to any one of thousands of vehicles moving through South Florida that summer.

 And a body dump site chosen. It seemed obvious even then, specifically because nobody would be watching. Biological evidence recovered from the girls’ clothing would, decades later, turn out to hold the entire answer. In 1975, all that evidence could confirm was what detectives already suspected from the scene itself. That Barbara and Darlene had been sexually assaulted before they were killed.

  It could not put a name to anyone. DNA profiling as a forensic tool did not exist yet. Fingerprint records were paper index cards filed by hand, not a searchable national network. Whoever had done this walked away from that dirt road carrying nothing that connected him to it.    At least nothing anyone alive in 1975 had the tools to find.

 Two families in Hollywood were told, within hours of each other, that their daughters were gone. There is no gentle way to deliver that kind of news. And in 1975, there was no protocol built around softening it, either. A detective showed up at a door. A A understood, before a single word was finished that the rest of her life had just been divided into before  and after.

 For Barbara’s family, that moment came with her little sister Kimberly, still small enough to be shielded from most of it, and old enough to sense that something in the house had broken permanently. For Darlene’s family, it came without a single answer attached, only a location, a cause of death, and an open case number that would  outlive both of the girls’ parents.

Hollywood, and all of Broward and Miami-Dade counties with it, had good reason to be afraid that year. Between February of 1975 and January of the following year, at least a dozen girls and young women disappeared or turned up dead across South Florida. Most of them found in or near canals in a string of killings that local papers first called the canal murders, and that would later become known informally as the flat tire murders after investigators’ theory that the perpetrator deflated a victim’s tires  

 to strand her before an attack. 19-year-old Judith Austerling, Barbara Stevens, Nancy Lee Fox, 14-year-old Robin Laush, Mary Coppola, only 15, and her older companion Marlene Annabelly, 17-year-old Michelle Winters, names that, taken together, painted a summer and a fall during which an entire region of Florida quietly stopped trusting the road.

   Barbara and Darlene’s deaths fell squarely inside that same window, in the same corner of the state,    and for decades afterward, both working detectives and true crime researchers wondered aloud whether one man or one small group of men was responsible for all of it.

 South Florida in the mid-70s was, unbeknownst to most of the people living in it, a hunting ground for more than one predator. And researchers who studied the era have even noted that the general method attributed to the canal murders, stranding a victim before an attack, echoed tactics used elsewhere around the same years by the serial killer Ted Bundy.

   Whether Barbara and Darlenes deaths belonged to that same pattern or to something else entirely was a question nobody could answer in 1975. It would take 50 years in modern DNA analysis to answer that particular question. And the answer, when it finally came, was no. Barbara and Darlenes killers had a method of their own, distinct  from the pattern investigators saw in the canal cases.

 But in 1975, nobody had a way to draw that line. All Broward County knew was that girls kept turning up dead and that no arrest ever seemed to follow any of it. Parents in Hollywood and the surrounding towns started saying things out loud that summer that they had never needed to say before. Don’t hitchhike.    Don’t get in a car with someone you don’t know, even if he seems friendly, even if it’s hot and the walk is long.

 A small reward was posted for information leading to an arrest. A few thousand dollars pooled together by a community that had run out of other ideas. It didn’t matter. Whoever was responsible for the canal deaths and whoever had driven that white van up to a bench near Sterling Road kept walking around free, doing ordinary things, blending into a South Florida that had no way yet of picking him out of a crowd.

 The investigation into Barbara and Darlenes deaths didn’t so much  close as it ran out of road. Detectives worked it through the back half of the 1970s and every lead ended the same way, nowhere. There was no national DNA database to search, no viral social media post to put two young faces in front of millions of strangers overnight, no forensic genealogy, no cell tower records,    none of it.

 There was only shoe leather, handwritten notebooks, and the slow, grinding realization that a case can simply stall completely and sit  there unsolved for far longer than either girl had been alive to begin with. For Kimberly Schreiber, growing up without her older sister meant growing up around a silence nobody could explain to a five-year-old, and then, years later, one that still couldn’t be explained to a grown woman, either.

Barbara and Darlenes parents lived out the rest of their lives with a case file that never closed. Somewhere in that stretch of decades, Kimberly’s parents passed away. So did her brother. None of them ever got to hear a name attached to what happened to Barbara. Hollywood changed around all of it. Sterling Road, once a quiet stretch where two teenagers might sit on a bench with nowhere urgent to be, turned into a busier corridor lined with new development and traffic that had nothing to do with either girl. Andytown,

 the patch of Everglades edge where the bodies were found, has all but vanished from modern maps, absorbed into the growth of Broward’s western suburbs. An entire generation grew up in Hollywood, Florida, with no memory of Barbara Schreiber or Darlene Zetterower at all, only a case number on a shelf and,    eventually, an occasional true crime podcast episode revisiting a summer most of the state had chosen to forget.

 The evidence, at least, never moved. Somewhere in a Broward County evidence room, the biological material recovered from the girls clothing sat sealed and cataloged, waiting the way it does in departments across the entire country for a piece of technology nobody in 1975 could have imagined existing. Dozens of detectives touched this file over the decades that followed.

 One generation of investigators handing it to the next,  along with everything else in Broward County’s backlog of unsolved homicides. Every so often, someone would pull the folder back out, run down whatever lead was left, and put it back exactly where it had been. None of it was for lack of effort.

 It was simply the sealing of what 1975 era police work could accomplish against a crime with no witness, no confession, and no way to search a stranger’s DNA against anyone else’s on Earth. In 2018, a case out of California blew the doors open for cold case investigators everywhere. A man responsible for a string of murders and rapes committed across the 1970s and ’80s, chased for decades under a name like the Golden State Killer,    went from completely unidentified to arrested almost overnight.

Not because of a new witness, and not because of a confession, but because of a technique nobody in law enforcement had seriously tried before. Investigators uploaded the killer’s crime scene DNA to public genealogy websites,    the same kind ordinary people used to trace their family history.

 The database didn’t hand them the killer directly. It handed them his distant relatives, third and fourth cousins who had never heard his name, and from those fragments, genealogists built out family trees, branch by branch, until exactly one name fit every piece of the puzzle. He’d been living quietly for decades in a Sacramento suburb, a former police officer nobody had ever thought twice about.

 Cold case units across the country took notice, and Broward County was one of them. In 2019,    the Broward Sheriff’s Office stood up a full-time cold case homicide unit specifically to revisit files like Barbara and Darlenes. Cases where the only thing standing between a grieving family and an answer was better technology and someone patient enough to spend years chasing it down.

 The science behind it is worth understanding because it explains why this case could never have been solved a single day earlier than it was. For decades, the only way to identify a suspect through DNA was a direct hit. A sample from a crime scene run against a database of people who had already been arrested or convicted of something else.

 If a man had never been caught for anything serious enough to end up in that system, his DNA could sit there forever and never match a single name. Genetic genealogy changed the math entirely. It didn’t need the killer’s own DNA on file anywhere. It only needed a distant relative somewhere down the line who had ever taken an ancestry test out of curiosity.

   From there, genealogists could work backward generation by generation narrowing an entire family tree down to the handful of men who fit the age, the location, and the timeline of the crime. Detective Andrew Giannino and the Broward Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab pulled the 1975 file  and sent the decades-old biological evidence out for renewed testing.

 It had been processed more than once over the years already, but forensic science kept moving and this attempt came back with something none of the earlier ones had, a complete DNA profile belonging to one of the men involved and a partial profile belonging to a second. Investigators would later describe the method behind the breakthrough as forensic genetic genealogy, the same broad category of science that had cracked the Golden State Killer case in California    and dozens of cold cases since.

 In August of 2023, that complete profile led detectives to a name, Robert Clark Keebler. Keebler had built a criminal record across three states, Florida, California, and Arizona, stretching back to 1972, three years before Barbara and Darlie were killed. Armed robbery, sexual assault, aggravated assault.

 By every measure investigators could piece together, he had spent his adult life hurting people and moving on before any of it fully caught up with him.    It never fully caught up with him. Robert Clark Keebler died in 2019, the same year Broward’s cold case unit was created to eventually find his name. He lived 44 years past that afternoon on Sterling Road without ever being connected to  it.

 He was never arrested for it, never questioned about it, never made to sit across a table from a detective and explain why his DNA was on the clothing of a 14-year-old girl. Keebler had come to South Florida from California and he drove a white van when he did it.    That single fact would end up doing more work in this case than almost anything else investigators found because it meant the vehicle two witnesses would eventually describe wasn’t a guess or a coincidence.

 It was Keebler’s van sitting parked in Broward County in the same summer two girls climbed into one exactly like it and never came home. Investigators didn’t stop at one profile. They kept working the partial match the new testing had returned, refusing to close a file with only half an answer sitting inside it. Nearly 2 years later in May of 2025, that persistence produced a second name,  Lawrence Stein.

 Like Keebler, Stein carried a long criminal history of his own, and detectives said the two men were suspected or charged in sexual assaults  stretching from Florida to California to Arizona dating back to that same year, 1972. Stein had died in 2005, 20 years before his name would ever be spoken in connection to Barbara and Darlene.

   Very little about Lawrence Stein made it into public record before 2025. He wasn’t the man with the complete profile, the one whose DNA sat waiting for a perfect match. He was the partial signature, the second man in the van, the one investigators only fully placed at the scene once they’d finished running down every other possibility his profile could have belonged to.

 It took nearly two additional years of comparison work, cross-checking, and patience to turn a partial match into a name detectives were willing to put in front of cameras and say out loud. Alongside the renewed DNA work, something else surfaced that had been sitting untouched in the file for decades.

 A witness who had never once been interviewed. That witness told investigators all these years later that they had in fact seen two teenage girls climb into a white van in Hollywood on June 18th, 1975, confirming at last the one detail that had haunted this case since the very beginning. And there was one more thread buried inside an old and completely unrelated police report.

 When Keebler had first come to South Florida from California, he’d been driving a white van. Seven days after Barbara and Darlene were murdered, that same van turned up again. This time in a road rage arrest that had nothing to do with two missing girls at the moment it happened, and everything to do with them once someone, decades later, finally laid the two files side by side.

 There would be no trial, no cross-examination, no jury, no moment where either man stood up and answered for what the evidence said about him. Robert Clark Keebler and Loren Stein were already dead by the time their names surfaced. One 6 years gone, the other 20. Broward State Attorney’s Office filed the case exactly as it would have if both men were still alive to be charged.

   An official act meant to close the file properly, on the record, even with no one left standing to sentence. Detective Giannino put it plainly when the case was finally announced. Both men, he said, had lived full lives, very violent lives. Whether any of that adds up to justice isn’t a question with a clean answer.

 It gives a family something concrete after 50 years of having nothing at all. It does not give them a courtroom, a verdict, or a face they finally get to watch held accountable in front of them. Investigators used a specific term for what this case became,    exceptionally cleared. It’s a designation used when detectives can say with confidence exactly who committed a crime, and can build a case strong enough to have gone to trial, but a trial itself is no longer possible, usually because the suspect has died.

 It is not the same as a conviction. There is no jury verdict attached to it, no sentence, no moment of public reckoning. But it is the closest thing a case like this one can ever reach once its only two suspects are already in the ground. And for Broward County, closing the file that way, on the record, with both names attached, was still worth doing.

 Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony stood at a podium in 2025 and told the families and the cameras that justice doesn’t have an expiration date in his department. Even though neither man would ever face a jury, he said    the community deserved to know. Broward had never actually stopped looking. It was as close to resolution as a 50-year-old case with two dead  suspects was ever going to get.

 And for the people who had waited that whole time, it still mattered. Kimberly Schreiber was about 5 years old the summer her older sister disappeared. She stood in front of reporters and cameras nearly 50 years later, an adult now, having spent almost her entire life as the surviving sibling of an unsolved murder.

 She said she remembered Barbara only vaguely.    Good times, fun times, a big sister she was too young to really know,    and old enough to spend a lifetime missing anyway. She said the case had devastated her family, destroyed something in them that never fully grew back.    And in her words, “It didn’t break us, but our hearts will ever be broken.

” Her parents never lived to hear Robert Clark Keebler’s name, neither did her brother. For decades, this family did what so many families in cases exactly like it have had to do. They aged around a wound that never got the chance to close properly, because closing generally requires an answer.    And for a very long time, there wasn’t one.

 By the time Broward investigators finally had one, most of the people who needed to hear it most were already gone. Kimberly stood there anyway, in front of the cameras, thanking a detective who wasn’t even born when her sister disappeared, for refusing to let the file gather any more dust. That is,  in its own way, the quieter half of this story.

 It isn’t only about the two men who did this. It’s about a detective who inherited a 50-year-old box of evidence    and treated it like it still mattered. And a sister who waited her entire adult life to hear a name, any name, attached to the worst day her family ever lived through.

 Barbara Schreiber and Darlene Zetterower were 14 years old. They weren’t adults making adult calculations about strangers in vans. They were children in a decade when hitchhiking barely registered as something worth warning a daughter about twice. That gap between what a community quietly accepts as normal and what it eventually discovers,  far too late, was never safe at all, is exactly the kind of gap this channel exists to talk about.

 Two men with documented violent histories across three separate states moved through the world for decades afterward, one of them for 44 years, without a single system anywhere ever connecting their names to a crime scene in Hollywood, Florida.    It’s worth sitting with that for a second. Two teenage girls, best friends, walking home with report cards on the last ordinary afternoon of their lives, and two men who, as far as any record shows, never once had to explain themselves to anyone.

Broward County alone has carried hundreds of unsolved homicide files like this one. Cases where the only thing keeping a family from an answer is time, funding, and whether anyone is still willing to look. Barbara and Darlene’s file happened to be one of the ones that got a second look decades later from a unit built specifically to give cold cases exactly that chance.

Plenty of other families are still waiting on that same phone call for a case that may or may not ever get the same attention this one finally did. Somewhere in Hollywood, Florida, there used to be a bench near Sterling Road. Two best friends sat on it. On an ordinary June afternoon in 1975, freshly out of eighth grade, with their whole lives supposedly still ahead of them, a white van slowed down.

 They climbed in and nobody who loved them ever saw either girl again. Not that night, not that year, not for the 49 years it took to learn two names that, by the time anyone finally said them out loud, belonged to men who had already been dead for years. If this case stayed with you the way it stayed with us while we put it together, tell us in the comments and let us know where in the world you’re watching from.

 This channel exists to tell the stories of the women and children the system didn’t protect  in time and to ask, every single time, how it could have gone differently. If you want to be here for the next one, hit subscribe. We’ll see you there.