Still missing: Karen Schepers discovery a reminder of these enduring mysteries

The Elgin Police Department’s Cold Case Unit, which we profiled back in January, scored its first big victory this week with the discovery of a car belonging to Karen Schepers seven feet deep in the Fox River.

Formal identification Thursday of the skeletal remains found inside the car may bring some long-sought closure for family and friends of the Elgin woman who vanished without a trace nearly 42 years ago.

It’s also a reminder that many other suburban families have been waiting years or even decades for answers to what caused their loved ones to disappear. Here’s a look at some of those unsolved mysteries:

Barbara Glueckert

Barbara, 14, of Mount Prospect, went missing after she and a friend attended a concert at a farm near Huntley on Aug. 21, 1976.

The two friends split up at the concert and never reconnected.

Police determined that Thomas Urlacher of Algonquin, who had a history of sexually assaulting girls, was with Barbara that day and called him a suspect in her disappearance.

Urlacher left Illinois, but later wrote a 33-page letter stating, “I put that girl in the ground. … Now I am going to go to jail for murder.”

The letter was turned over to police and Urlacher was arrested on a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The case was dropped, however, and Urlacher never was charged in Barbara's disappearance.

Urlacher, coincidentally, was for a time a suspect in the disappearance of Karen Scheppers. The connection? He was the previous tenant of her Elgin apartment before she moved in.

He was killed in 2004 during a drug deal gone bad in Colorado.

Laura Johnson

Laura Johnson walked out of a downtown Arlington Heights bar in the early morning hours of May 5, 1990, and hasn’t been seen since.

The then-24-year-old mother of two young daughters had spent the previous day with her husband at Arlington Park racetrack. She later was dropped off at the Billy Club tavern by her husband, who went home to relieve their children’s sitter.

Bar workers who knew Laura said she left with a group of people they didn’t recognize, and police later heard from two witnesses who said they saw her later that morning at the Hob Nob bar in Palatine. She left with a man who claimed to be a truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, according to the witnesses, but police never were able to confirm those reports.

Anthony “Tony” Klama

Tony Klama disappeared in the late-night hours of Nov. 5, 1998, after leaving Splinter’s Sports Bar in Palatine and heading to his home at the nearby Foxfire Apartments.

There were reports that the 36-year-old was seen with another man in the apartment complex’s parking lot — perhaps the same man he was seen playing darts with at the bar earlier that night.

But police found no evidence of foul play, nor any indication that Klama had been planning to leave the area or take a trip.

Timmothy Pitzen

Timmothy was 6 on May 12, 2011, when his mother pulled him out of his kindergarten class at Greenman Elementary School in Aurora. She took him to Brookfield Zoo, a water park in Gurnee and another in the Wisconsin Dells, which is where he was last confirmed seen.

Two days later, she checked in to a hotel in Rockford. A maid found her body the next day, accompanied by a note that Timmothy was safe and with people that loved him.

Authorities thought they had found him in April 2019, when a young man found wandering the streets in a town outside Cincinnati claimed to be Timmothy. A DNA test, however, would prove the man an impostor, and he later confessed that he made up his story after seeing news coverage of Timmothy's disappearance.

Michael Mansfield

Mansfield, then a 19-year-old college student, left his Rolling Meadows home to hang out with a friend in Arlington Heights on New Year's Eve 1975. He was never heard from again.

At the time he vanished, Mansfield was preparing to testify against his former college roommate, a man named Russell Smrekar facing accusations he stole from another student's dorm room.

Smrekar was convicted of killing another man and his pregnant wife a year later in downstate Lincoln, where he and Mansfield attended college. The man was scheduled to testify against Smrekar in a separate theft case.

In 2011, authorities say, Smrekar gave a deathbed confession to killing Mansfield. And while investigators and Mansfield's family believed him, the teen's final resting place remains a mystery. In 2017, police searched a property near Joliet — Smrekar's hometown — for his remains, but came up empty.

Kianna Galvin

The 17-year-old went missing from her home in South Elgin in May 2016.

Kianna told her sister she was going to a park on the day she vanished, but instead arranged to meet a neighbor to buy marijuana, according to police.

Blood matching hers was found on a neighbor's trash can, but police have made no arrests and Kianna's whereabouts remain unknown.

Deborah McCall

The 16-year-old Downers Grove girl vanished in November 1979 after leaving Downers Grove North High School.

Authorities believe she may have fallen prey to suspected serial killer Bruce Lindahl, who’s been linked to at least three other killings. He died in 1981 when he accidentally stabbed himself while killing another man in Naperville.

Police searching his apartment found photos of several women and girls, including Deborah. However, her body has never been found and police have not conclusively connected her with Lindahl.

Catherine Runte

Catherine walked out of her Palatine home in the early morning hours of May 22, 1979, after a fight with her husband and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

The 28-year-old took only her purse containing a small amount of cash and credit cards which never were used after that date.

Her disappearance came eight months after a man and woman armed with handguns broke into the home, handcuffed her to a beam in the basement and stole more than $5,000 in jewelry and other items, but police could not prove a link between the robbery and her disappearance.

Lee Cutler

Cutler, an 18-year-old senior at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, spent the night of Oct. 19, 2007, at a friend's house, got up the next morning and drove another friend home then disappeared.

Two days later, police in Sauk County, Wisconsin, found the Buffalo Grove teen's car parked along Highway 33, a few hundred yards from the Baraboo River. Several personal items, including a favorite yarmulke, a book, a backpack and letters to his family, were found in the river or on its banks.

Divers, an airplane crew, police dogs and investigators using heat-sensing detectors searched the area, but found no trace of Lee. His disappearance also has been featured on TV shows and police have entered his DNA into a national database, but so far his whereabouts remain a mystery.

A profile remains active on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, where Cutler's likeness has been modified to show what he might look like as he's aged. Anyone with information is asked to call the national center at (800) 843-5678 or the Buffalo Grove Police Department at (847) 459-2560.

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