Body found in Broward field in 1975 now ID’d as New York man. BSO seeks tips

A body dumped in a field in Broward County and discovered by ATV riders 51 years ago has now been identified as a young man from Long Island.

Detectives with the Broward Sheriff’s Office are asking the public for tips to track down his family and hopefully find out who took the life of Robert Russell Freese, who would have been about 18 at the time of his death.

“I’m sure that once we find family members, cousins, brothers, whoever, they’ll be able to give us enough information where we really can start determining who killed him,” Cold Case Homicide Det. John Curcio said.

The summer of 1975, two people riding through an open field found a partially clothed body off a dirt road four miles west of the 4400 block of University Drive in Lauderhill, according to BSO.

“He had not been murdered at that location, but he had been brought there and dumped at that location after he had been killed,” Curcio said.

There was little physical evidence at the scene, and investigators said despite looking into missing person reports and pursuing any leads they could, the case went cold.

That is, until Curcio began looking into the case several months ago, working with BSO’s Crime Lab Latent Fingerprint Unit to see if any records could point them to the victim’s identity. The unit got a match with a man who had been arrested on two misdemeanors in Pompano Beach four months before the killing.

Fingerprints confirmed the victim was Freese of Long Island, New York, born in 1957. He had blonde hair and blue eyes, stood 6 feet tall and weighed about 170 pounds. He was living near the 700 block of NW Sixth Street in Pompano Beach at the time of his arrest.

“Somebody’s been looking for their loved one for 51 years,” Curcio said. “And every holiday, they’ve been looking for him, and we now know who he is.”

Curcio submitted a subpoena for Freese’s birth certificate in Nassau County, but there wasn’t enough information to find a birth certificate.

He’s now asking anyone who knew Freese or his family to call him at 954-321-4212, or to contact Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-8477.

“Anytime I work an old case, almost every time, the family says I didn’t think anybody still cared about my loved one,” Curcio said. “For me, the success is letting them know where their loved one is.”