One of Florida’s most infamous and gruesome unsolved murders, known as the Flat-Tire Murders occurred 50 years ago in Broward and Dade counties. Between February 1975 and January 1976, several women fell victim to a man described as very intelligent and a sexual sadist. He lured these women to his car to assault and beat them to death before dumping them in nearby bodies of water.

Horrific Flat-Tire Murders

The despicable human being who took the lives of many coined the name the Flat-Tire murderer. Investigators gave the case the name after theorizing the offender purposefully chose his victims by deflating the tires in their cars. The suspect was described as a white male, aged between 20 and 25 at the time of the crimes. He was said to be well-dressed, physically athletic, and conventionally attractive. 

Law enforcement believes the man committed murders across several states, starting in California in the early 1970s. They theorized he would charm his potential victims and win their trust to lure them to his car.

Once he had them, and this is a trigger warning, he would beat and rape them before they died. He stripped their bodies before throwing them in bodies of water, such as canals, streams, or he went as far as just leaving them near embankments. About 35 women were recorded as murdered, according to authorities. 

Identifying The Suspects

Law enforcement issued a reward of $1,000 for any information that would lead to his capture and put an end to the Flat-Tire Murders. At the time, that was a very incentivizing reward, but it was not until decades later, in August 2023, when the Broward County Sheriff’s Office identified a suspect. Using DNA evidence collected from the clothing of two of the victims, they identified a known felon, Robert Clark Keebler, who died in 2019. 

Authorities still believed there were two offenders involved, and two years later, in May 2025, the Sheriff’s Office identified a second suspect as Lawrence Stein, another known felon who died in 2005. So, neither of the suspects has faced or will face the consequences of their alleged crimes. Officials may have placed names and faces to the perpetrators from the Flat-Tire Murders, but it will never be confirmed if they have the right ones. 

Victims of The Flat-Tire Murderers

Several of the Flat-Tire Murder victims were identified, and their ages ranged from 14 to 27 years old. Authorities say they were possibly targeted for their looks as they all resembled one another. 19-year-olds Judith Ann Oesterling and Nancy Lee Fox went missing in 1975 while doing everyday things.

Oesterling was returning home from work, and Fox was walking to the local laundromat. Their bodies were found two days later in canals. Fox was found with blunt force trauma to the back of the head and appeared to have been choked before landing in the water.

Barbara Susan “Barbie” Schreiber and Belinda Darlene Zetterower were 14 when they were last seen on June 18, 1975. They were leaving Schreiber’s home to go to another friend’s house, but they never made it. The next morning, a family was fishing near Highway 27 when they saw the girls’ bodies lying alongside the canal.

Not so coincidentally, less than a month later, on July 10, another family vacationing saw an arm sticking out of the Highway 27 canal. Authorities later identified the body as 14-year-old Robin Leslie Losch and determined her cause of death was drowning. 

Schreiber and Zetterower’s murders went cold for a long time, but they were the ones for which authorities found DNA evidence linking them to the suspects. Robert Clark Keebler and Lawrence Stein had a lengthy history of sexual assault and aggravated assault stretching from Florida to California, dating back to 1972. DNA was taken from the girl’s clothing and tested several times using a new technique, revealing a complete match to one man and a partial match to the other.

Unfortunately, there are many other victims from the Flat-Tire Murders, all of whom deserve to be remembered for the lives they led, and not how they died. It is a disservice that authorities never confirmed the murderer(s) in all of the cases. And even the suspects they lined up decades later will never face the consequences of their inhumane actions.