Family still searching for answers to daughter's disappearance

Liz Paulson, mother of Karen Schepers, holds a photograph of her daughter in her Sycamore home Friday morning. Schepers has been missing for 25 years. Now, with the help of new technology and the public, Schepers’ family and police hope to learn more information about this cold case. “With the modern technology we have now ... we’re hoping that something can surface here,” Paulson said. KATE WEBER | kweber@daily-chronicle.com

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Karen Schepers had a good job and friends and was close to her family. The 23-year-old played the piano, sewed her own clothes and was good with kids. Just before she went missing, she deposited a tax-return check into her bank account, but never withdrew any of the money. That was 25 years ago. The Sycamore High School graduate, who had recently moved to Elgin, went out with friends on April 16, 1983, in Carpentersville. She never made it back home, and no trace of her or her yellow 1980 Toyota Celica has ever been found. Now, Schepers' family and police are hoping new technology and the public will help shed light on this cold case and find out what happened to the woman. “With the modern technology we have now ... we're hoping that something can surface here,” said Schepers' mother, Liz Paulson. Schepers' brother and Paulson have both submitted DNA to a national database, which will be compared to that of unidentified remains found throughout the country, said Detective Brian Gorcowski of the Elgin Police Department. “It's a long process,” he said. “It takes quite a while, especially with the backlog.” At the request of Schepers' family, Gorcowski was assigned last fall to work on the case, which hadn't been touched by authorities since 1999, when the Illinois State Police last looked at it. Paulson contacted police after finding one of her daughter's brushes in a box. The brush still had Karen's hair on it, and Paulson thought investigators might be able to use it, with the help of new forensic technology, to help her find closure. “If there are answers out there, we really want them,” she said. So does Gorcowski. The detective is going back through the case, starting at the beginning. “We're going to try to gain leads, get new evidence, re-interview everyone,” he said. But there aren't a lot of leads to follow, and one person of interest in the case is dead. Today, Gorcowski said, people are easier to find. Facebook, MySpace, I-Pass, cellular telephones, GPS and e-mail all leave a trail and make the world seem much smaller. But they weren't available in 1983. The detective hopes that someone may still have information. “Somebody may have told somebody else or slipped up and told somebody something over the years,” he said. Paulson thinks her daughter met with foul play, but doesn't like to dwell on the details. “You don't like to think about the what-ifs,” she said. “On one side, you're hopeful; on the other, you want to know. “It would just be nice to be able to say ... that she is resting here.”