The 37-year-old cold case murder of a beloved firefighter in Miramar has been cleared after detectives identified one of the people who they believe was involved in the killing.
Miramar Police held a news conference Tuesday to announce the new development in the murder of William "Billy" Halpern, whose body was discovered on October 21, 1986.
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Police believe a man named Harry Collier was involved in the murder, but said Collier himself was murdered seven months after Halpern.
Halpern, 28, was found tied up, beaten and with his throat slashed inside his Miramar townhome after detectives believe a group of people knocked on his door and he let them inside.
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Halpern had been a former firefighter and bodybuilder who worked out at the Apollo gym in Hollywood, and his killing has been tied to a string of other murders back in the '80s that have been linked with the gym.
The gym's owner, Hubert "Bert" Christie, and a former Miami-Dade Police Officer, Gilbert Fernandez, were arrested and later convicted in the murders of three other people.
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Fernandez, now 70, is still serving his life sentence. Christie died in custody in 2000 at the age of 66.
Officials said Tuesday that Fernandez, who had been a suspect in Halpern's killing since the beginning, was excluded through DNA.
Police said they were able to link Collier to the scene of the crime after finding his fingerprints at the scene of a double murder of a couple in Tamarac just seven months later.
Miramar Police Det. Danny Smith said the Tamarac murder scene and Halpern scene were almost identical.
"In both of those scenes we had no forced entry, we had a use of sharp-edged weapon, we had, the method of binding all three victims was very similar and it was unique in the sense that the way that their hands were bound together and the fact that black electrical tape was used to bind them really painted a picture as to modus operandi, so the way that the murder scene in Tamarac was laid out, very similar if not exact to the Halpern murder scene," Smith said.
Eight days after Tamarac murder, Collier and another man were found murdered in Pembroke Pines, Smith said.
"The similiarities between that murder scene and the Billy Halpern scene coupled with the dozens of interviews that we were able to obtain, we feel confident that if Harry Collier were alive today we would be charging him with murder and he would stand trial," Smith said.
Smith said Halpern wasn't involved in the drug rings, home invasions or other crimes the people at the gym were linked to, but said he likely had information on other crimes and murders.
"Definitely at the gym he heard certain things about certain crimes and the idea is that he just wouldn't play ball, he was not going to keep quiet about it, he was really a loose end for those that could potentially be held responsible for their crimes as a result of what Billy may say," Smith said. "He knew something that he just shouldn't have known and he heard something he shouldn't have heard."
The Halpern case has been cleared but it's not yet closed.
"We're still looking and that's kind of the reason that we wanted to speak to you guys and the public we wanted people to look at Harry Collier's picture, we wanted people to hear the name Harry Collier and hopefully get some kind of an idea, maybe jog their memory and come forward with information that may assist us in finding the additional perpetrators in Billy Halpern’s murder," Smith said.
