In the autumn of 1975, in sunny south Florida, a father and son would be gunned down in their own home in what appeared to be a revenge-motivated attack.
Early on the morning of October 10th, police entered the house located at 10720 SW 43rd Lane in Miami and found the bodies of the two residents in the dining room: fifty-four-year-old Clarence Gehrke, and his twenty-four-year-old son Brian. Both men had been shot multiple times.
Upon interviewing neighbors, investigators determined that the victims had likely been murdered at some point between eight-thirty and ten-thirty p.m. on the previous evening, when witnesses reported hearing something that sounded like gunshots.
As authorities dug deeper into the double homicide, a definite person of interest caught their attention. This individual was a man named Stephen Holland, who worked as a general contractor in the area. Victim Clarence Gehrke was an inspector for the City of Miami Public Works Department, and had failed a construction project that Holland was attempting to get off the ground.
In fact, Holland had been so incensed by this incident that he had assaulted Clarence Gehrke, and was subsequently arrested and sued. During the course of the lawsuit, Clarence received numerous mystery phone calls, which consisted of nothing but a few seconds of silence before the caller would hang up. The calls were so frequent that Clarence’s son Brian had moved back into the house, as he had feared for his father’s life. Tragically, his fears turned out to be completely justified.
Stephen Holland was brought in for questioning, and although the results of a polygraph test indicated that he was being deceptive when asked if he knew anything about the murders, no other evidence could be found that linked him to the crime, and no charges were ever filed. While Holland remains the most likely suspect, it remains unknown whether he killed the Gehrkes himself, whether he hired a third party to carry out the slayings, or whether the shooting was simply a random crime, unrelated to the earlier assault.
Crime Immemorial 