UPDATE: On July 11, 2025, the Monroe Police Department submitted an arrest warrant for manslaughter to the State’s Attorney’s office. Since the suspect was under 14 when Renee was killed, a murder charge was not an option under state laws in effect in 1977. On September 18, 2025, the office declined the warrant citing the statute of limitations, which is only five years for manslaughter. “Given the current status of the investigation and the conclusive opinion of the State’s Attorney, this case has regretfully been marked as closed,” the police department said in a statement following the decision.
June 22, 1977. The day before the last day of school.
Elementary school kids in Monroe, Connecticut, buzzed with excitement about their summer plans. Tawny Syrotiak and her best friend, 8-year-old Renee Freer, spent that day at school together as they usually did.
“I still hear her laughing,” Tawny told Dateline. “She had the most infectious laugh ever.”
Tawny was in second grade — a grade behind Renee. “We still played together, you know, rode the school bus together, sat together — did everything together,” she said. “I mean, on the playground, running around, chasing the boys together.”
She remembers meeting Renee years earlier, in kindergarten. “Renee and I met on the school bus,” Tawny said. “She was probably the most hysterical, funniest girl you have ever met.”
Tawny is not alone in her memories of Renee as a contagiously positive little girl with an affinity for making friends. “She was a sweet little girl,” Lisa Victoria, Renee’s mother’s cousin, told Dateline. “She would talk to anybody and she was friends with anybody. I mean, that’s just the way her personality was. She was bubbly.”
Lisa and Renee, who were less than four years apart in age, often spent time together at family reunions. The last time Lisa saw Renee was at the one in 1976. “That was actually the last one we ever had,” she said.
On June 22, 1977, something happened that changed everything — for Renee’s family, her community, and her friends.
Friend Tawny remembers that day well. She and Renee took the bus home together from school. They were excited for the last day of school the next day. “We were talking about getting together, you know, playdates when school let out,” she recalled. “I get off the bus first and you turn, you wave to your friends on the bus, and you run up to the door. And that’s it.”
It was a careless goodbye at the time. Now, 48 years later, it’s a memory that Tawny revisits often.
Renee was murdered later that evening. Her killer has not been found.
“Her life was stolen,” Tawny said. “Somebody has to be her voice now.”
Dateline spoke with Lieutenant Kevin McKellick of the Monroe Police Department, who says that after the school bus dropped Renee off, she spent a few hours at home with her mother, her brother, and her grandparents, all of whom lived in the family home in Monroe.
After dinner — around 6:30 — Renee went out to play in the neighborhood. Her mother, Felicia Wasik Freer, had plans to go to the store to buy ingredients for cookies that night. “She was baking cookies because the next day was the last day of school,” her cousin Lisa said.
Before she left, Felicia stepped outside and called for Renee, according to Lt. McKellick. Renee, who had been gone for around 30 minutes at that point, did not respond.
Assuming her daughter was somewhere in the neighborhood playing, Felicia left for the store around 7 p.m. Renee’s grandparents stayed at home. McKellick says Felicia returned home “a little while later” and began preparing the cookies.
Tawny Syrotiak says it wasn’t unusual for kids in Monroe to be out playing till dark. “We grew up where you ran out, you went out into the woods, and your parents weren’t afraid. You know, we were safe,” she said. “Your parents opened the door in the morning, you went out in the woods, you came home for lunch and you went back out till dark. That’s what it was like.”
So it wasn’t until around 8 p.m. that Felicia began to worry that Renee hadn’t come home. “After a little while, she became uneasy,” Lt. McKellick said. “And so she stopped with the cookies, went back out again a second time, and began looking for her.”
About an hour later, around 9:15, Felicia contacted the Monroe Police Department to report her daughter missing. Officers searched the area as neighbors and family called for the missing girl.
“I heard her mother calling for her,” Tawny said. She still remembers sitting by her window watching the commotion over her friend unfold that night. “I saw the helicopters. I saw the police cars.”
For 57 minutes, Renee’s neighborhood held its breath. “We were all just sitting in the kitchen, just waiting for the phone to ring,” cousin Lisa remembered. “And then, finally, the phone rang.”
Renee had been found.
“She was actually found, um, relatively quickly,” Lt. McKellick told Dateline. “At, um, 10:12 at night, she was found in the woods behind, uh — behind her house.”
Renee had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. “There was a rock found right next to her body that was believed to be the murder weapon,” McKellick said. Renee’s shirt was torn, but she had not been sexually assaulted.
The Monroe Police Department theorizes Renee was murdered sometime between 6:30 and 7 p.m. “We believe it was a pretty small window from the time she left the house to the time that her mother, uh, left for the store,” McKellick said. “Felicia was calling for her before she left, and Renee didn’t answer.”
Under normal circumstances, a forensic autopsy would have been performed on Renee by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. However, as McKellick explained, there had been two other murders in Connecticut that day on which the medical examiner’s office was working. Renee’s autopsy was done at a hospital instead.
“It’s tough to say exactly what would have gone different had it been a forensic autopsy,” McKellick told Dateline. “I don’t know specifically what could have been done differently at the time. There’s only speculation that it could have been possibly been better.”
The morning after Renee’s murder, the town of Monroe grieved for the 8-year-old. “I found out at 7:30 in the morning when my father sat me down in the living room — crying — and told me,” Tawny recalled. “I just remember the last day of school crying. That’s all we did, was cry.”
“It was devastating. I mean, to hear somebody in your family got murdered like that,” Lisa said. “There’s certain things that people remember that just stick in their brain. And it’s, like, I’ll remember sitting at the table hearing that she got killed — that her face was smashed in. It scares you. And being a kid myself [made] it even scarier.”
After Renee’s murder, things changed in Monroe. “You didn’t go outside alone. You were afraid of everything,” Tawny told Dateline. “Our parents were afraid there was somebody still out there murdering kids.”
The Monroe Police Department interviewed “lots and lots” of people as part of the investigation over the years, according to Lt. McKellick. But as the years passed with no news about Renee’s killer, her loved ones began to lose hope that the case would be solved. “Years went on and on,” Lisa told Dateline. “We kinda didn’t see much light at the end of the tunnel.”
Over the years, Renee’s case continued to receive attention in the media and online. In April 2024, a Facebook group called “Who Killed Renee Freer?” was created to discuss the case. Months later, in December 2024, an author named E.C. Hanson published Dead End Road, a book delving into Renee’s case. In January 2025, NBC Connecticut also covered the case.
No one has ever been charged or arrested in connection with Renee’s murder. However, Lt. McKellick believes “it is possible to make an arrest,” and told Dateline the department continues to investigate. “We do have a suspect,” he said. “We believe the suspect is a lone juvenile male known to Renee.”
According to Lt. McKellick, the Monroe Police Department is currently in the process of testing DNA evidence related to the case. “We have been actively working with the crime lab here in Connecticut over the years, but I can’t go into specifics of what we’re doing,” he said.
The department believes there are people with crucial information in the case who, 48 years after Renee’s murder, have yet to come forward. “Some people back then were hesitant to speak to the police for one reason or another. We want to assure them that they’re free to come forward and we’ll listen to what they have to say,” McKellick explained. “And if they were to come forward and tell us the information, they might have the thing that we need to bring this case to a conclusion.”
Renee’s family believes the same and refuses to give up fighting for answers. “I want everybody to know that they did this. I want to know why,” Lisa Victoria told Dateline. “It’s not fair, when Renee had eight years. It destroyed [her brother’s] life, it destroyed Felicia’s life, destroyed my aunt’s and uncle’s life. I mean, what gives them the right to live?”
Best friend Tawny Syrotiak feels the same way. “This is just vile and wrong. So there’s no way you’re going to explain to me why you did it. If it was an accident, you could have come forward,” she said. “You got to live your life, so –. She didn’t. So it’s time to pay. I guess you could say I’m angry, yeah. Sorry. Party’s over for me.”
Felicia Wasik Freer died in 2020 not knowing what happened to her daughter. As the years pass, the family continues to hope Renee’s killer will be brought to justice. “Before I die, I want it solved,” Lisa said. “You’re running out of family members.”
The state of Connecticut is offering a $50,000 reward “for any information leading to the arrest and conviction” of the “person who murdered Renee,” according to Lt. McKellick.
Anyone with information about the murder of Renee Freer is asked to contact the lead detective in the case, Det. Jeff Marcel of the Monroe Police Department, at 203-452-2831, ext. 1332.
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