Last Updated on 05/09/2024 by Arun jain
More than three decades after Carmen Van Huss, a 19-year-old homicide victim, was found dead in her Indianapolis apartment, police said Tuesday they have arrested a suspect, a break in the cold case that has long consumed the Van Huss family.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and the Boone County Sheriff’s Office in Missouri arrested Dana Shepherd, 52, of Columbia, Mo., on Friday in connection with Ms. Van Huss’ death. Authorities charged Mr. Shepherd with murder, aggravated murder and rape, according to Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears.
“Thirty-one years ago she was tragically murdered, and today we finally have some answers,” Indianapolis Police Criminal Investigations Division Deputy Chief Kendall Adams said at a news conference Tuesday.
Jimmy Van Huss Jr., Ms. Van Huss’ younger brother, thanked law enforcement officials for their efforts in closing the case.
“There are a lot of people who have missed Carmen over the years,” Mr. Van Huss said. “She had a lot of family, a lot of friends.”
Mr. Van Huss said he was a freshman in high school when his sister was killed. “Since she was taken from us we have become very close,” he said. “She didn’t get to experience her college graduation or the wedding or any of the life events she missed.”
On the night of March 22, 1993, Mrs. Van Hus accompanied her father and younger brother to visit her sick grandmother at the hospital before dropping them off at her father’s house. At about 10 p.m., Ms. Van Huss left for her studio apartment, telling her father she had to do laundry, m. According to an FBI alert seeking information on Van Huss’ death.
Around 11:30 that same night, neighbors said they “heard the victim and an unknown male talking and laughing when they entered Van Huss’ apartment,” according to the FBI alert. Then, around 1:30 p.m., neighbors reported hearing loud fighting sounds coming from Ms. Van Huss’s apartment before they heard footsteps leaving her place.
The next day, Mrs. Van Huss did not show up for her shift at Pizza Hut.
The next day, Ms. Van Hus’s father went to her apartment and found his daughter’s body, which had been stabbed multiple times.
“My father needs to find his daughter, the brutality that was done to her, makes this day bittersweet,” Ms van Huss’ brother said this week. “I wish he was here to see.” Ms. Van Hus’s father died in a car accident in 2002.
Ms. Van Hus was “brutally murdered (multiple stab wounds) and it is suspected that she knew her assailant,” the FBI alert says, adding that the weapons used in her killing may have been a pocketknife and a screwdriver.
Police said detectives interviewed dozens of people over the years and followed up on hundreds of leads but the case eventually went cold.
But then, about 10 years ago, Bill Carter, an Indianapolis police captain, began investigating the case in his spare time, raising money through GoFundMe for special DNA testing and starting a Facebook group and website called Justice for Carmen Van Huss. .
In 2018, an Indianapolis detective submitted DNA for testing that included genetic genealogy, police said, which led them to identify the suspect.
In June of this year, Mr. Shepherd’s DNA was tested and matched samples found at the scene and on Ms. Van Hus’s body, police said.
But many details of the case remain unknown, such as whether Ms. Van Huss planned to meet her killer at her apartment or met him spontaneously.
When Indianapolis detectives arrested Mr. Shepherd in Boone County, Md., late last month, he invoked his right to counsel without speaking to detectives, the police said.
The police said they planned to extradite Mr. Shepherd to Indianapolis.
Post Police arrest in 1993 slaying of 19-year-old Indianapolis woman appeared first New York Times.