The last time anyone can remember seeing Karen Schepers, the 23-year-old Elgin woman was leaving a Carpentersville bar where she’d been attending a celebration with co-workers in 1983.
Her car was never seen again. Her bank account money remained untouched, credit cards unused and possessions abandoned.
Is she still alive, having deliberately abandoned her old life for a new one, as some people do? Did she accidentally drive into a pond on her way home, or maybe she met some more sinister fate.
More than four decades later, Elgin police still don’t know. They’re hoping a new look at an old case via their 13-part podcast “Somebody Knows Something” might trigger a forgotten detail or lost memory that could help close the books on the mystery.
“One of the things we looked at was there is really no definitive (answer) of what happened to her,” detective Matt Vartanian said. “We don’t know if it’s a homicide. We don’t know if she did something to herself. … There are so many layers of possibilities.
“We want to be able to get it out there because we don’t know,” he said. “Somebody does know something.”
Vartanian and detective Andrew Houghton make up the Elgin Police Department’s Cold Case Unit, which was created in May 2024. They co-host the podcast, which launches Monday and will be available on streaming services like Spotify and through the app for local radio station WRMN-AM (1400 AM), which helped produce the series.
The two investigators spent six months poring over thousands of documents in case files for crimes that were never solved. They isolated 41 murders dating back to 1971, 26 sexual assault cases dating to 1996 and six missing persons cases dating to 1982.
“Unfortunately, some of these cases will never be solved,” Houghton said. “That’s the reality. But the hope is some of these cases we can solve with someone’s help.”
Police Chief Ana Lalley came up with the podcast idea and she’s part of the first episode, which details how the department’s Cold Case Unit was created. The rest take a deep dive into the Schepers investigation.
Schepers worked at the First Chicago Bank in Elgin and joined 17 co-workers when they decided to go to a Carpentersville bar on the night of April 15, 1983. She called her boyfriend to invite him to join her but he opted not to because he had to work the next day, Houghton said.
The last time her colleagues remembered noticing her, she was competing in a hula hoop contest. She’s believed to have left about 1 a.m. April 16.
When no one heard from her after a few days, her boyfriend filed a missing person report. She lived alone, with her family residing in Sycamore at the time.
Investigators explored a few theories. Maybe she was upset or angry that her boyfriend didn’t join her at the bar, Houghton said. Maybe she drove into some body of water, he said.
Police did some aerial searches of spots where Schepers’ distinctive yellow 1980 Toyota Celica hatchback with red stripes could have gone off the road but found nothing.
Her boyfriend cooperated with police, passed a polygraph test and was cleared as a suspect, the investigators said.
So, the case went cold. It was reopened in 1989 and again in 2009, when police received a tip about possible connection between Schepers and a man named Thomas Urlacher.
Urlacher was a suspect in the 1976 disappearance of a 14-year-old girl from a concert in Huntley and while never charged, he was found liable in a civil trial for the teen’s death in 1981 and ordered to pay her family $5.15 million, according to a wire service report at the time.
Schepers rented an apartment in which Urlacher had been the previous tenant, Houghton said. Investigators looked into the link only to learn Urlacher had been murdered a 2005 drug deal and to find no evidence tying him to Schepers.
Their goal now is to put the case details out to a larger audience via the podcast in the hope it might help dislodge a clue or missing bit of evidence, Vartanian said.
“Maybe it will trigger someone to remember something,” he said.
“Somebody Knows Something” is different from other true crime podcasts, Vartanian said, in that it doesn’t explore how a crime was solved but relays the details of an active investigation that’s an unsolved mystery.
“It’s almost taking a real-time approach,” he said. New details they receive will be revealed and updates provided on tips they receive, he said.
Schepers’ family and friends agreed to be interviewed for the series. Houghton and Vartanian said they were struck by how vivid their memories of her remain and how strong their grief is after all these years.
“They think about what happened to her every day,” Varanian said. “Her family deserves answers.”
They plan to do more podcasts in the future in the hope that one or more cold cases might be resolved, if only to help the victims’ families, Houghton said.
“We have not had a single family who hasn’t been happy to hear from us,” he said.
“There is a sense of hope for people,” Vartanian said.
Anyone with information on any Elgin cold case is asked to call 847-289-COLD or email coldcasetips@elginil.gov.
Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
