Weeks shy of the 42nd anniversary of Karen Schepers’ disappearance in Elgin, a major break in the cold case occurred. Her canary yellow Toyota Celica was found in the Fox River last week.
Days later the Kane County Coroner would confirm through dental records that human skeletal remains found inside the car, matched Karen’s.
“You put six months of energy into this case and all of a sudden you have something tangible you’re looking at,” Det. Matt Vartanian of Elgin’s Cold Case unit told NBC 5.
Vartanian, along with Det. Andrew Houghton started a podcast called “Somebody Knows Something” through the Department’s new Cold Case unit which was formed last year.
The goal of the podcast, which will eventually feature other cold cases in Elgin, is to take listeners along with detectives as they leave no stone unturned.
Karen went out with coworkers to a bar in Carpentersville in April 1983 but was never seen again.
“For us I think the big thing is trying to get the community involved with us and saying hey listen if you send us a tip even if it sounds like something that is totally crazy, we’re going to spend hours going through that and running it down,” Det. Houghton said.
Most importantly the podcast seeks to give families like the Schepers, closure.
“Obviously we wanted buy-in from them. Them allowing us to do this was kind of the first step,” Det. Houghton said. They worked closely with Karen’s mother and siblings to make sure they were along for every step of the process.
Both detectives have backgrounds as evidence techs, which played a crucial role in how they approached this decades-long case, which came with hundreds of pages of case files and yielded dozens of new tips through the podcast.
Before joining law enforcement, Vartanian worked in retail. Houghton was a second grade teacher. Now in addition to being full time cold case detectives, they’re also storytellers of sorts.
They interviewed dozens of family, friends, and old acquaintances of Karen’s. They also spoke with former police to re-examine possible theories about what may have happened to Karen.
Through the 8-episode podcast, with new episodes dropping in mid-April, they examine six possible scenarios. Ranging from Karen leaving a Carpentersville bar with a biker, leaving town on her own intentionally, that she was possibly the victim of a serial killer, or that she and her car somehow ended up in a body of water. There were several along Karen’s route home to Elgin, namely the Fox River, which the detectives believe was only searched aerially in the 1980s.
“Any cold case you get to, it went cold for some reason. Whether it’s technology just didn’t catch up to where you were or things were missed because that was how the investigation was handled then,” Houghton said.
They worked with a group of chaos divers trained specifically for cases like this, to ensure whatever is recovered is kept intact.
“They said the best way to do this was to bite off the biggest chunk we could first, so we did the river first. But we had probably two dozen other bodies of water we had planned to search over the course of the entire week,” Det. Houghton told NBC 5.
After six months to digging through files and re-examining evidence, both Vartanian and Houghton had memorized Karen’s license plate. When the divers found an upside car in the river, they were guarded but hopeful
“You just see this striking image of the vehicle underwater that’s upside down. And he’s like.. We got a car,” Vartanian said “We could see there as an X there was a P there as some 8s on there,” Vartanian said.
“Matt holding that plate is just something I don’t think either of us will ever forget,” Houghton told NBC 5.
The podcast helped bring in plenty of new tips and also kept Karen’s case in the spotlight. Working with evidence and memories that are decades old though, has its challenges.
“No cell phones, there’s no cameras, no traffic cameras, no social media,” Vartanian said.
It’s been front row exhibit to how policing has changed also.
A major break in the case, but it’s still not solved.
“Just because we found her and we found the vehicle doesn’t mean that we stop. We still want to be able to try and get as many answers for the family as we can,” Vartanian said.
The next episode of “Somebody Knows Something” will feature the chaos divers who found Karen’s car. That’s set to be released April 14th.
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