MURDERED: Carmen Van Huss

At about 1 a.m. on March 23, 1993, neighbours in the Turtle Creek Apartments on the northwest side of Indianapolis heard a woman in apartment 302A screaming 'get off me' through walls thin enough to carry the words. For thirty minutes nobody knocked, nobody called 911, and one tenant across the hall told reporter Nicole Kagan he rolled over and went back to sleep. Someone did phone the management office to complain about the noise. Carmen's father James found the handwritten warning note still tacked to her door the next day when he arrived to check on her after her friend Missy reported she had been a no-call, no-show at Pizza Hut. Through the unlocked door he could see his 19-year-old daughter dead on the floor beside her bed. She had roughly 60 stab wounds, some deep enough to penetrate her skull; the weapon, something small and pointed, has never been found.

Because there was no forced entry, because neighbours had heard Carmen come up the hall around 11 p.m. laughing with a man, and because fast-food cups and beer bottles sat out in the studio, Sergeant David Wilkes's investigators concluded she knew her killer and worked through her friends and boyfriends. Missy was hauled in over a cigarette pack with 'death' written on it, a note she had written to shame herself into quitting. Boyfriend Rob was in Arizona with call logs to prove it. One ex was chased over Beastie Boys tickets Carmen had taken from a gift bag meant for another girl, then cleared by a Social Security office in San Francisco. Nobody thought to check the communal laundry room, even though Carmen had gone home specifically to wash her uniform. The case went cold, and Pam Schott Francis and her father Bob called for updates once a year to hear the file was still on someone's desk.

In 2013 Bill Carter, an IMPD sergeant with no homicide training whose career had run through state revenue, domestic violence and nuisance abatement, picked the file up in his spare time after solving Amy Weidner's case the same way. Testing produced a full DNA profile from blood on a white paper bag in Carmen's kitchen trash matching a partial profile from her body, and Carter eliminated more than forty men. Then the city sent the wrong sample to a lab, which reported the killer was a European female, and refused to pay for a retest. Carter raised over $1,200 on GoFundMe in seven hours for a $996 test, citing the department's own fundraiser for a police horse's cancer surgery; IMPD made him refund every dollar, suspended him ten days and pulled him off the case, telling the Indianapolis Star that people should 'stay in their lanes.' A family petition got him reinstated in name.

Genetic genealogy finished it. Parabon NanoLabs determined in 2019 the profile belonged to a Black man; a Season of Justice grant in 2020 funded fifteen hours of genealogical research and a database upload; in June 2023 a great-niece once removed turned up on 23andMe. Analyst Meera Patel traced the line to two Shepard brothers who had lived in Carmen's own complex, thirty seconds' walk away through the common area containing the laundry room. Dana Shepard, by then a University of Missouri custodian, was swabbed on campus in February 2024 and arrested that August. He pleaded guilty to one count of murder on January 23, 2026 and was sentenced to 45 years; the rape charge was dropped, so he never testified. Pam's bill, Carmen's Law, passed the Indiana Senate unanimously and was signed in March 2026.