The Kane County Coroner’s Office announced Thursday night that the skeletal remains found inside a car removed this week from the Fox River belong to Karen Schepers, the 23-year-old Elgin woman who went missing in April 1983.
Dental records provided by the family led to the positive confirmation by a forensic odontologist, according to Coroner Dr. Monica Silva, who released a media release on the findings shortly after 8 p.m.
Elgin police have said it was likely Schepers had been found but there would be no official confirmation until after the coroner’s review using either dental records or DNA. Had the latter been necessary, the process could have taken several weeks.
The mystery of what happened to Karen Schepers made it one of the oldest cold cases in the Elgin Police Department’s files. It prompted two detectives to produce a podcast, “Somebody Knows Something,” and to launch a search of the river, which is not believed to have been done at the time of her disappearance.
And, in fact, the case could have been solved three years ago had an Elgin Fire Department diver not mistaken her car, found in the murky, brush-filled water, for an ATV when to investigate. The search was done after a resident told the fire department that he’d seen something that looked like a car northwest of the Slade Avenue Park boat launch.
The error was announced Thursday morning by the Elgin police and fire departments, with Elgin Fire Chief Robb Cagann acknowledging that a better inspection of the vehicle — which had landed on its roof — should have been done. The department’s protocol and policies in regards to such searches have been improved since then, he said.
Schepers was last seen on April 16, 1983, when she left a Carpentersville bar where she’d been having drinks with coworkers. She was believed to be headed home to her Elgin apartment when she and her 1980 yellow Toyota Celica vanished.
The podcast looked at several possible scenarios, including that she could have accidentally driven into a body of water because it was dark, the temperatures below freezings and the roadways slick. Had she followed the common route home, she would been following a path that was very close to the river, which was abnormally high at the time due to recent storms.
Schepers’ family was notified Tuesday of the car’s recovery and the discovery of human remains found inside. Her brother, Gary, expressed relief that they might finally have the closure they’ve sought for more than four decades. Schepers’ father, a pilot, tried to do his own search using a chartered plane but ultimately died without know what had happened to his daughter.
The two cold case detective and Chaos Divers, a nonprofit organization that searches bodies of water for missing people, searched several areas long the river using specialized sonar equipment. Police have not offered any thoughts as to how the car ended up where it did and if they believe it could have been moved by the current in the last 41 years.
