Where’s Karen? New Elgin Cold Case Unit takes on baffling 1983 disappearance

Karen Schepers had reason to celebrate April 15, 1983. With a recent job promotion, a $1,200 tax return in the bank and the final payment made on her bright yellow Toyota Celica, the 23-year-old Elgin woman headed to a bar in Carpentersville for a night out with coworkers.

The gathering lasted until early the next morning. Karen left the bar sometime after 1 a.m. and vanished without a trace.

There have been no credible sightings since. No phone calls. No letters. No sign of her car. No one’s ever used her Social Security number. No one’s touched her bank accounts.

More than four decades later, the mystery surrounding Schepers’ disappearance endures. Numerous search efforts, years of police investigation, public pleas from family members, billboards, media campaigns and online sleuthing have all failed to answer the question: Where’s Karen?

So last year when the Elgin Police Department created a Cold Case Unit — unique among suburban police departments — Schepers’ disappearance quickly rose to the top of the list. The investigators who lead the unit — Det. Andrew Houghton and Det. Matt Vartanian — are taking their work public, with the launch of a podcast this month titled “Somebody Knows Something.”

“A lot of people still remember this case well,” Houghton told us. “Almost everyone we’ve spoken to still gets emotional talking about it, even 41 years later.”

Into the night

On the night she vanished, Karen met up with about 20 coworkers at P.M. Bentley’s, a now-closed bar in Carpentersville. At one point she called her fiance, Terry Schultz, and asked him to drop by. He declined, telling her he had a busy work day ahead of him; a brief argument ensued.

Schultz was looked at as a suspect at the time, but Houghton and Vartanian said he cooperated with investigators until his death in 2015 and media reports from the time say he passed a lie-detector test.

The investigators believe Karen left the bar between 1 to 1:30 a.m. after her coworkers already had gone.

What happened next? The detectives say there are six working theories:

· She made the choice to vanish.

· Something occurred at or just outside the bar.

· Something occurred on her drive home.

· Something occurred when she arrived home.

· She went somewhere other than home and something there caused her disappearance.

· Her car plunged into the waters of the Fox River or some other body of water along the route home.

“With a lot of cases, you have a body that’s been recovered or a vehicle. In this case, there’s neither,” Vartanian said. “We don’t have a body, we don’t have a car, we don’t have a crime scene.”

‘Last deep dive’

What they do have is new technology and new ways to reach witnesses.

That includes access to sonar technology to search underwater locations that were checked only from the air and surface 40 years ago.

And then there’s the podcast and police department’s Transparency Hub, where the public can find information about Karen’s and dozens of other cold cases.

Recorded at Elgin-based WRMN radio, “Somebody Knows Something” will cover all aspects of the case over 12 to 13 episodes, each about 30 minutes long, and should be available on most podcast platforms later this month.

The detectives hope it triggers some long-forgotten memories or encourages a reluctant witness to come forward.

“There’s not a tip that’s too small,” Vartanian said.

Before going to work on the podcast, the detectives said they reached out to Karen’s family for their support.

“We didn’t want to open old wounds. We just want to make sure they get the closure they deserve,” Houghton said.

“This may be the last deep dive this case gets.”

More than a coincidence?

One angle the detectives are working is the connection between Karen’s disappearance and another notorious suburban case.

On Aug. 21, 1976, 14-year-old Barbara Glueckert left her Mount Prospect residence to attend a rock concert in then-rural Huntley. Like Karen, she never came home. And like Karen, she’s never been found.

But unlike Karen’s disappearance, authorities believe they know what happened to Barbara — they say she met and was murdered by Thomas Urlacher, an Algonquin man with a record of assaulting young women.

Despite a letter that police considered a confession, Urlacher never was prosecuted in Barbara’s death. He was killed 20 years ago in a drug deal gone bad in Colorado.

The person who rented Karen’s Elgin apartment immediately before her? Thomas Urlacher.

Other cold cases

While the Schepers case is in the spotlight, it’s not the only unsolved mystery getting a fresh look from Houghton and Vartanian. The unit’s log of cold cases goes back to 1971 and includes 41 murders, 26 sex assaults and six missing persons.

For details on each case, visit the department’s transparency hub at epdopendata-cityofelgin.hub.arcgis.com.

“The more people that we can get to go there and review these cases and possibly give information, the better,” Houghton.

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