Remains in car pulled from river may belong to woman missing since 1983, IL cops say
Distinct features of a car found at the bottom of an Illinois river helped investigators link the vehicle to a cold case of a woman missing since 1983, Illinois authorities said.
The yellow vehicle was found 42 years after Karen Schepers vanished after she left a Carpentersville bar on April 16, 1983, Elgin officials said in a March 25 news release.
During the search of Fox River, divers identified the 23-year-old woman’s vehicle using sonar technology and pulled it to shore, authorities said.
The car, a Toyota Celica, matched the description of Schepers’ vehicle, authorities said. The license plate was also found in the dive, police said.
Inside the vehicle were human skeletal remains believed to be Schepers, Elgin police said in a March 25 Facebook post. The identification cannot be confirmed until officials compare the remains to Schepers’ collected DNA or her dental records, police said.
The cold case unit reopened the case and featured the investigation on the police department’s podcast “Somebody Knows Something,” authorities said.
“The goal of this podcast was very simple: to generate leads and garner information into Karen’s case so that we could eventually provide answers to Karen’s family and friends,” Elgin police chief Ana Lalley said in the news release. She said people provided information about her cold case as a result of the podcast.
Finding the car and remains is a “tremendous break in this investigation,” Lalley said, but the case of Schepers’ disappearance is still unsolved.
Carpentersville is about a 7-mile drive north from Elgin, and Elgin is about a 40-mile drive northeast from downtown Chicago.
This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 1:23 PM with the headline "Remains in car pulled from river may belong to woman missing since 1983, IL cops say."
