Lingering questions: Why wasn’t river searched years ago for missing Elgin woman’s car?
When Elgin police discovered Karen Schepers’ car in the Fox River on Monday, one question immediately popped into the public’s mind: Why wasn’t it found long ago?
And did authorities even look in the river or nearby ponds nearly 42 years ago?
Two Elgin cold case unit detectives have said as part of their March 17 “Someone Knows Something” podcast episode that they have not been able to find any proof to corroborate anecdotal reports that police searched the river as part of the effort to locate Schepers, who went missing on April 16, 1983, or her car — a canary yellow Toyota Celica.
On Tuesday, police said skeletal remains were found inside the car after authorities recovered it from the river. It will take weeks to determine if the human remains match DNA samples or dental records from Karen Schepers, authorities say.
Gary Schepers, Karen’s older brother, said Wednesday that his father did an aerial search a few days after Karen disappeared. Loren Schepers was a commercial airline pilot, and he rented a small plane to see if his daughter’s 1980 Toyota could be spotted from the air.
Schepers said one of his brothers suggested Wednesday that police in 1983 might not have looked in the Fox River because they knew the river was fairly shallow and might have thought a car could not be hidden in it.
But, Gary Schepers said, “When everything in this town is having ‘Fox Valley’ in its name, you (would think police) might have looked at it.”
Elgin police did not respond to questions Wednesday about why the river was not searched years ago.
On their podcast, the Elgin detectives said they determined the Fox River was running high at the time because of recent rains. In addition, the stretch of the river in Elgin from the Kimball Street Dam to Lincoln Avenue is about 7 to 8 feet deep, drops to 4 to 5 feet, then gets deeper, they said.
They speculated the Toyota could have sunk a foot into the sediment. And that if the car was upside down, the gray underbody might not be visible in the dark river water. Also, brush, branches or other debris could have helped hide the car.
On Tuesday, police said divers had about 6 inches of visibility in the water. The car also was found upside down.
The detectives said they looked at maps of the area from 1983. They learned that locals often took two-lane Elgin Avenue, which turns into Duncan Avenue in Elgin, as a bypass instead of using Route 25. Duncan/Elgin “dumps you out in her neighborhood,” detective Andrew Houghton says in the podcast. The river comes up pretty close to the road; Houghton says there is a spot where the river is about 100 feet from the road.
On a dark road, with possibly wet or ice-covered pavement, on a nearly moonless night, it’s possible she lost control, the detectives theorize in the podcast.
Karen disappeared after celebrating with coworkers that night at a bar in Carpentersville.
Gary Schepers said on Wednesday that Karen’s family and friends were frustrated in the 1980s with how police handled the case and even conducted a letter-writing campaign to the governor. That resulted in a state police report that “was not at all complimentary to Elgin police,” Schepers recalled.
“Their (police) line was, ‘She had a fight with her boyfriend and she took off. What do you want us to do about it?’” Schepers said.
According to a 1990 Elgin Courier-News article, the family had Karen declared legally dead.
“There never was a good outcome for this,” Gary Schepers said.