A sapphire ring she wore every day and a 1977 graduation tassel from Sycamore High School were among the items recovered from Karen Schepers’ car this week and returned to her family, more proof that the Elgin woman missing nearly 42 years had finally been found.
Elgin police Detectives Andrew Houghton and Matt Vartanian said they wanted to make sure the personal belongings found in the car were returned to Schepers’ mother, now 90.
“It’s a privilege and an honor for the Elgin Police Department to be able to do this for a family,” Elgin police Chief Ana Lalley said. “It was very important to give the family a sense of peace.”
Speaking Friday on Lalley’s radio show, “Fridays with the Finest,” on WRMN-AM 1410, the three discussed the stunning week of revelations that began with the discovery of Schepers’ missing car in the Fox River and ended with identification of Schepers’ remains.
The detectives described the rapid series of events as astonishing despite knowing there was a strong possibility Schepers could have accidentally gone into the river given the weather conditions and other factors at play in the early morning hours of April 16, 1983.
“I think this week is still a bit of a shock (in) how everything went down how it did,” Vartanian said.
Schepers’ case was the first one Houghton and Vartanian decided to pursue after being assigned to the department’s newly created cold case unit in May 2024. They decided to do a podcast, “Somebody Knows Something,” in hopes it could bring forth new witnesses and details and would be intriguing to listen to as they did their work in real time.
The first step was to recount and review what they knew about the case. Schepers, a 23-year-old computer programmer, and a group of co-workers from First Chicago Bank Card in Elgin decided to meet April 15, 1983, a Friday night, for drinks at a bar in Carpentersville to celebrate the completion of a work project. Schepers had called her boyfriend, described as her former fiance, to see if he wanted to join her, and they quarreled when he turned her down.
Despite that, she was seen participating in a hula hoop contest and reported to be the last in the group to leave about 1 a.m. After that, the trail went cold. She was never seen again. Her car never found. Her bank accounts, credit cards and possessions left untouched.
Had she followed the common route home, she would have driven in close proximity to the Fox River’s edge. The crescent moon offering limited light, below-freezing temperatures causing slick roadways and the possibility that Schepers’ response time was hindered by alcohol consumption were all factors to be considered.
Had a river search ever been conducted? The detectives weren’t sure. That’s how they came to contact Chaos Divers, a nonprofit that specializes in locating people in bodies of water.
Early Monday,the pair joined Chaos Divers owner Jacob Grubbs, manager Lindsay Bussick and diver Mike McFerron on their boat for a search. Armed with specialized sonar equipment, they started at the Kimball Street dam and combed 5 miles of the river heading north toward the Interstate 90 bridge, Vartanian said.
Several cars were found at the bottom of the river in the area northwest of the Slade Avenue boat launch but they were ruled out as being Schepers’ 1980 Toyota Celica, the detectives said. After eight hours of unsuccessful searching, they decided to circle back to the Slade Avenue area.
When McFerron went into the water there a second time, he came upon a vehicle on its roof covered in debris, Houghton said. When he resurfaced, he had a license plate number: XP8919.
“We knew the plate. We had it memorized,” Vartanian said.
“I can’t describe the amount of shock you are in (when you realize you have a match),” Houghton said.
The two immediately started making a plan for what to do next. The Celica was pulled out of the water Tuesday afternoon. Inside, human remains were recovered and given to the Kane County coroner’s office for identification. Thanks to dental records, a positive ID for Schepers was made Thursday.
“When we started the podcast, we never wanted it to take away from what the goal was,” Vartanian said. “The goal was to find answers and get information about where Karen is and what happened to her.”
“We wanted to be very factual,” he said, “but still wanted to be engaging for people to listen to without being exploitative of the family or Karen.”
Through the podcast, they learned details that weren’t in the original police reports. Such as, there was a carnival in Carpentersville that night. And there had been an incident at the Carpentersville bar in which an employee reported that a co-worker was stalking her.
Had they not gotten the break they needed by finding the car, the investigation would have continued, authorities said.
The detectives will appear again next week on “Fridays with the Finest” to answer questions about the case, Lalley said. While the cold case unit has other cases to work on, she’s giving Houghton and Vartanian some time to decompress after an intense week, she said.
“The priority here is the Schepers family,” she said. “We need to give them an opportunity to process this privately. This is an extraordinary thing that happened over this past week that they probably never thought would happen.”
Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
