Who Is The Flat Tire Killer?

Flat-Tire murders

The Flat-Tire murders were a series of unsolved murders in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, Florida, occurring between February 1975 and January 1976. The name originated from the investigators’ belief that, when the offender committed his first two known murders, he had deflated the tires of the victims’ cars. The list of suspected victims ultimately included 12 girls and women found drowned in the Intracoastal Waterway within a short distance of each other. Some forensic experts have questioned whether a single offender was responsible for all the murders, while others have proclaimed that the murderer might’ve killed more than 30 women in multiple states.

Victims and Investigation

#1. Ronnie Gorlin, 27: In the early afternoon of July 22, 27-year-old respiratory therapist Ronnie Sue Gorlin stopped at the Asthmatic Children’s Foundation in North Miami Beach to catch up with some of her old coworkers. A lifelong resident of South Florida, Ronnie had been living with her fiancé in Pennsylvania for about a year and returned to Hallandale to visit her parents for a few weeks while she planned her upcoming wedding. After gleefully telling her coworkers about her wedding plans, she said she was going to pass by the 163rd Street Shopping Center before heading to Parkway General Hospital at 2:00 PM to see her mother, who was being treated for a stomach bug. Ronnie never showed up at the hospital. That night, a mall security guard called North Miami Beach police to have her rental car towed after he found it abandoned with a flat tire, blocking traffic in the parking lot of Burdines. The next morning, a surveying crew stumbled across her nude body floating in the Graham Canal in northwest Miami-Dade County. An autopsy performed by Dr. Ronald Wright, then the county’s deputy chief medical examiner, revealed that she was raped and sexually mutilated before drowning in the canal.

#2. Elyse Rapp, 21: On the evening of July 30, Elyse Rapp, a 21-year-old New York native who moved to the Miami area for work in June 1975, headed out to do some shopping at the now-defunct Hollywood Mall. The next morning, a man grading a dirt road spotted Elyse’s body floating in the Graham Canal, just ten blocks from where Ronnie was found the week before. She was wearing only a gold chain necklace bearing the Hebrew symbol for “life”. She had been sexually assaulted before she was struck over the head and drowned in the canal, and Dr. Wright noted that she was sexually mutilated in a very similar — but reportedly more vicious — way to Ronnie Gorlin. Later that night, her car was found abandoned in the parking lot of Sears at Hollywood Mall. One of the tires was flat.

In both of these cases, the killer had chosen young women who traveled in cars by themselves. In their absence, he had deflated their vehicles’ tires, after which he waited for them to return and then offered to fix their tires, presenting himself as a good samaritan.

After the discovery of Gorlin and Rapp’s bodies, the police first suggested that there was a serial killer active in two counties. According to them, a total of 12 young women killed in South Florida might’ve been victims of the same offender.

#3. Judith Ann Oesterling, 20: The first of them was 20-year-old Judith Ann Oesterling, from Indiana, who went missing on February 1, 1975, from Miami-Dade County after returning home from her job at a massage parlor. Two days later, her body was found in the canal bordering Broward and Miami-Dade.

#4. Arietta Tinker, 17: 17-year-old Arietta Marie “Renie” Tinker was dropped off by her husband at the Hippopotamus lounge on Hollywood Beach at around 1:00 PM on April 9, 1975. He asked her if she wanted a ride home, but she declined, saying she would find her way back. She was reportedly last seen at the Lum’s restaurant near Young Circle, a little over half a mile from her home. She was never seen alive again. Three days later, her body was found floating in the Snake Creek Canal about half a mile east of Highway 27 in Miramar, just north of the Dade-Broward line (in approximately the same area where Judith was found less than three months earlier). Reports differ as to whether she was discovered by an off-duty police officer riding his bike or four Miami teens who were out on a fishing trip. Arietta was believed to have drowned and, although there were no obvious signs of foul play, detectives suspected she was murdered because they could not explain how else she would wind up dead so far away without her car.

#5. Barbara Davis Stephens, 21: She left her parents’ home in southwest Miami at around 7:00PM7:00 February 12, 1975, telling her father she was going to visit a friend in Coral Gables. On the way there, she stopped by a Gold Triangle store across from Dadeland Mall, bought a couple of rock ’n roll records, and disappeared. The next afternoon, a concerned coworker found her Camaro abandoned in the parking lot of the Gold Triangle with the doors unlocked, keys in the ignition, and traces of blood on the steering wheel. On February 20, Barbara’s body was discovered in a patch of woods behind a grocery store at the corner of Southwest 87th Avenue and Sunset Drive. She was still wearing the same clothes she disappeared in, but her slacks were pulled down and one of her shoes was lying a short distance from her body. She had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen. Blood, dust, and grass found in and on her Camaro led detectives to believe that her killer used the car to transport her body to the dumpsite before returning it to the Gold Triangle.

#6. Nancy Lee Fox, 19: According to Captain Elihu Phares, Nancy moved to Fort Lauderdale in early 1975, hoping to get away from an unhappy love triangle involving her sister and a young man named William Moore Jr. She was last seen alive on the night of June 13; various newspaper articles say that she was hitchhiking, walking to a local laundromat, or had just left work because she felt ill and was walking back to her apartment when she disappeared. Two days later, her body was found floating in the canal parallel to Highway 27 in Broward County; she had been struck over the back of the head with a blunt object and choked before her body was thrown into the water.

There were at least two suspects in Nancy’s murder. The first was Walter Wirth, a convicted rapist who abducted 18-year-old Cheryl Ives from a laundromat just over a mile from Nancy’s apartment (and only 24 hours after her body was found). He slit Cheryl’s throat with a razor blade when she tried to escape, but she survived and helped provide officers with information that led to his arrest shortly after the attack. In January 1976, the Miami Herald reported that there was a prime suspect in Nancy’s case: A man who was involved in a love triangle with her. Although that article doesn’t include his name, it is almost certainly a reference to William Moore Jr. It is unknown if either man is still considered a suspect in her case, which remains unsolved.

#7. Barbara Susan Schreiber, 14, and Belinda Darlene Zetterower, 14: Girls left the Schreiber home in Hollywood on the evening of June 18, telling Barbara’s mother that they were going to spend the night at their friend Valerie’s house. The next morning, a family out on a fishing trip found their bodies lying side by side along the canal parallel to Highway 27, approximately four miles north of Andytown (an outpost for truckers and fishermen that no longer exists). Both had been shot once with a large-caliber bullet, likely a .45. Due to a large amount of blood at the scene, investigators believe both of them were killed on the spot. They were found fully clothed and there are conflicting reports as to whether they were sexually assaulted; some say they were, others say they weren’t, and one article states there was no conclusive evidence but that one girl was found wearing her underwear backward.

When detectives called Valerie, they learned that the girls never made plans to sleepover and that they often used this excuse when they wanted to go somewhere without their parents knowing. There are conflicting reports about the girls’ exact movements that night, but newspaper accounts most commonly state that they visited another friend’s house and were last seen near the intersection of Route 441 and Hollywood Boulevard, allegedly (according to Broward County investigators) trying to catch a ride north so they could buy drugs.

#8. Robin Leslie Losch, 14the, February: Those fears heightened on July 10, when a family vacationing from Fort Myers spotted an arm sticking out of the Highway 27 canal about ten miles south of where Barbara, Darlene, and Nancy were found. The body was quickly identified as Robin Leslie Losch, a 14-year-old girl who was reported missing by her parents just two days earlier when she failed to return home from summer classes at Stranahan High School. An autopsy revealed that Robin had likely drowned, but investigators sharply disagreed over whether she was the victim of a murder or an unfortunate accident.

The suspected perpetrator was described as a white male, aged 20–25, well-dressed, physically athletic and attractive, possibly married, likely very intelligent with an above-average IQ and a sexual sadist. Using his charm, he won the trust of potential victims which he would lure to his car. A reward of $1,000 was announced for any information that would lead to his capture.

According to Sgt. Edwin Carlstedt of Sonoma County, California, the Flat-Tire Murderer, was possibly responsible for upwards of thirty murders across several states since the early 1970s, starting in California. After these killings abruptly ceased in December 1973, nine similar murders were recorded in Washington the following year but stopped in September. And after that, another spate of killings, in which the perpetrator demonstrated a similar modus operandi to the killer in California and Washington, occurred in Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. In most cases, the victims, who physically resembled each other, were beaten and raped before death, with the killer stripping the bodies and throwing them in canals, streams, or leaving them near embankments. A total of 35 such murders were recorded, which, according to this theory, were committed by the same man, but this has not been proven.

#9. Mary Coppolla, 15, and Marlene Annabelli, 27: who had arrived in Fort Lauderdale from Pennsylvania on October 17, 1975, renting a room for a one-week stay at the Lauderdale Beach Club. Her body, strangled with a rope, was found by a motorcyclist nine days later in a dump outside the city.

#10. Michelle Winters, 17: The 12th and the final supposed victim was 17-year-old Michelle Winters, whose body was found floating in the Snapper Creek in Pembroke Pines on January 11, 1976. She was last seen in early January in Fort Lauderdale, with friends of the deceased claiming that she had been depressed and planned to enlist in the Navy. Winters’ mother told police that her daughter had likely voluntarily entered her killer’s car, as she often preferred to hitchhike.

It has been suggested that notorious serial killer Ted Bundy could have been the culprit, but so far, no evidence has been recorded of him being present in Florida during this period. To this day, all the murders remain unsolved.

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