Mary Ann Coppola, a 15-year-old White/Caucasian female, disappeared from the Homestead area of South Florida in September 1975. Although some later online summaries have associated her name with an October 26, 1975 Fort Lauderdale homicide, more detailed accounts separate Coppola from that case. The October discovery involved Marlene Joy Annabelli, while Coppola remained missing until her remains were discovered months later near Homestead.
On the morning of September 2, 1975, Coppola's mother took her to Genesis Outreach, a counseling program for troubled youths. It was never firmly established whether Mary actually attended her scheduled counseling session that day. Her disappearance came after a difficult period in her life. Accounts from friends and counselors described her as generally sweet and well liked but struggling privately with problems involving friends, family pressures and drugs. She had reportedly run away once during the previous month and was found by her mother at a nearby Burger King, after which her parents sought counseling assistance for her.
Investigators also learned of a troubling relationship in Mary's life. Friends said she had been seeing an unnamed man in his late twenties who was considerably older than she was. He was reportedly known for selling drugs around her school, and one friend alleged that the man was attempting to draw Mary into drug use. Accounts indicated that he sometimes picked her up near her school bus stop and drove her to school. Despite the obvious investigative significance of this relationship, publicly available records do not identify the man by name or establish that police ever formally classified him as Mary's killer or charged him with any offense connected to her disappearance.
For nearly four months Mary's family had no answer about where she had gone. On New Year's Day, January 1, 1976, snake hunters searching a remote area near Homestead and the Everglades discovered scattered human remains approximately 20 feet from a canal. The location was in far southern Dade County, near the Monroe County line. The remains were subsequently identified as Coppola's. Investigators believed she had probably been dead for much of the time she was missing, but exposure and decomposition had destroyed much of the evidence that might have explained exactly what happened to her. No obvious skeletal trauma established a cause of death, and authorities could not perform meaningful toxicology testing to determine whether drugs or an overdose had played a role. Her cause of death therefore remained undetermined.
Mary's disappearance and death occurred during the same period in which numerous girls and young women were being found dead in canals, wooded areas and other isolated locations throughout Dade and Broward counties. Those cases eventually became associated in public discussion with the so-called Flat-Tire or Canal Murders. Investigators believed at least some of those killings were connected, particularly cases in which a victim's automobile tire appeared to have been deliberately disabled so that an offender could approach under the pretense of offering assistance. Mary has consequently appeared on some lists of possible victims, but the evidence tying her death to the same offender has never been conclusive. The Florida Sheriffs Association continues to describe her among the group of women associated with the broader series while noting that investigators have long suspected more than one offender may have been responsible.
Modern DNA work has identified Robert Clark Keebler and Lawrence Stein as the men responsible for the June 1975 murders of Barbara Schreiber and Darlene Zetterower, two other teenagers whose deaths had historically been discussed in connection with the same South Florida murder series. Both men died before they could be prosecuted. Broward cold-case Detective Andrew Gianino has specifically said, however, that he does not believe Keebler and Stein were responsible for the other killings traditionally grouped under the Flat-Tire Murders because their method did not fit the remaining cases. There is presently no publicly reported evidence connecting either man to Coppola's death.
No arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction has been publicly reported in connection with Mary Ann Coppola's death. The older man reportedly associated with her before she disappeared has never been publicly identified as a charged suspect, and investigators were unable to determine whether Mary died through homicide, an accidental or drug-related death, or some other circumstance. Her case therefore remains one of the unresolved deaths surrounding South Florida's disturbing sequence of disappearances and killings in the mid-1970s.
