DNA breakthrough leads to shock arrest in 30-year-old cold case killing

A university custodian was 'visibly shaking' as police arrived to conduct a DNA test that finally linked him to the decades-old rape and murder of a teenage art student, it was revealed this week.

Dozens of people were interviewed after the naked body of 19-year-old Carmen Van Huss was found with 61 stab wounds by her father at her Indianapolis apartment in March 1993.

But it took more than three decades for police to get the breakthrough they needed when Carmen’s former neighbor, Dana Shepherd, was identified through the DNA of a distant cousin.

The 51-year-old University of Missouri worker was arrested last week and is awaiting extradition back to Indiana to face charges of murder, felony murder and rape.

'There's a lot of people that missed Carmen all these years,' her brother, Jimmy Van Huss Jr., said during a press conference on Tuesday. 'For my dad to have to find his daughter after what was brutally done to her makes this day bittersweet. 

'I wish he was here to see it.’

Police had hundreds of leads to follow in the immediate aftermath of the murder that shocked the city in the early 1990s.

Her father went looking for his daughter in her Harcourt Road apartment after a colleague of hers at Pizza Hut told him she had not turned up for work.

‘There were obvious signs of a struggle, including a knocked over table, clothing thrown on the floor, a large pooling of blood near the victim’s head, and blood spatter around the victim’s body,’ a probable cause affidavit noted.

A resident in the apartment directly below Van Huss told police he heard screams, cries, banging and the ‘noises and voices of a male arguing that lasted approximately 30 minutes,’ in the early hours of that morning.

DNA was recovered from the scene but did not match any held on CODIS, the nationwide law enforcement DNA database.

But the technology was slowly evolving and in 2018 police submitted a sample to Parabon NanoLabs who were developing DNA phenotyping and forensic genetic genealogy.

They eventually spotted a partial match with a distant relative of Shepherd’s who had at some point voluntarily submitted their DNA to a genetic database.

A check of the relative’s family members revealed that Shepherd had been a neighbor of Carmen’s at the time of the murder and that their apartments shared a communal area.

In February of this year police knocked on the door of Shepherd’s apartment in Columbia and saw the suspect start trembling as they handed him a warrant to obtain and test his DNA against that found at the scene of the murder.

A positive match came back in June and police returned to Shepherd’s home with an arrest warrant on Friday.

Deputy Chief Kendale Adams of the Indianapolis Metropolitan PD said he hoped the arrest would help bring ‘some measure of peace’, to Carmen’s family.

‘For 31 years, the family of Carmen Van Huss has been searching for answers.

‘We remain dedicated to bringing justice to all victims and will continue to pursue every lead, no matter how much time has passed.’

But Carmen’s brother said he fears the families of other victims are waiting too long for justice.

‘We want all of them to get this treatment,’ he said. ‘And by that, I mean the DNA, genealogy treatment.

‘We would love a bill, a law, a procedure — something in Carmen's memory to get the attention other cases deserve.’

Shepherd appeared via video call on Wednesday in a Boone County courtroom where a judge denied his application for bail and set September 26 as the date for an extradition hearing.

‘My sister was a beautiful, 19-year-old art student at IUPUI,’ Van Huss told FOX59. ‘She was always happy and everyone loved her.

‘We hope after all this time people understand just how violent my sister's murder was.

‘She was raped and stabbed over 60 times and my dad had to see her like that, blood everywhere, blood on walls, his daughter was naked, laying there, he had to see that. That changed him forever.

‘She had a lot of family, a lot of friends. She had cousins that loved her like sisters.

‘She was taken from me when I was a freshman in high school. And I'm thankful that, finally, the man that did it is where he needs to be.’