More than three decades after Carmen Van Huss was found dead in her Indianapolis apartment, a homicide victim at 19, the police said on Tuesday that they had arrested a suspect, a break in a cold case that had long consumed the Van Huss family.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and the Boone County Sheriff’s Office in Missouri arrested Dana Shepherd, 52, in Columbia, Mo., on Friday in connection with Ms. Van Huss’s death. The authorities charged Mr. Shepherd with murder, felony murder and rape, according to Ryan Mears, the Marion County prosecutor.
“Thirty-one years ago she was tragically killed, and today we finally have some answers,” Kendale Adams, the deputy chief of the Indianapolis police criminal investigations division, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Jimmy Van Huss Jr., Ms. Van Huss’s younger brother, thanked law enforcement officials for their efforts to bring the case to a close.
“There’s a lot of people that missed Carmen all these years,” Mr. Van Huss said. “She had a lot of family, a lot of friends.”
Mr. Van Huss said he was a freshman in high school when his sister was killed. “We were becoming a lot closer as she was taken from us,” he said. “She wasn’t able to experience her college graduation or have a wedding or any life events that she missed out on.”
On the night of March 22, 1993, Ms. Van Huss had reportedly visited her sick grandmother in the hospital along with her father and her younger brother, before dropping them off at her father’s house. At about 10 p.m., Ms. Van Huss left for her studio apartment, telling her father she had to do laundry, according to an F.B.I. alert seeking information about Ms. Van Huss’s death.
Around 11:30 that same night, neighbors said they “heard the victim and an unidentified male talking and laughing as they entered Van Huss’s apartment,” according to the F.B.I. alert. Then, around 1:30 a.m., neighbors reported hearing the sounds of a loud fight coming from Ms. Van Huss’s apartment just before they heard the sounds of footsteps leaving her place.
The next day, Ms. Van Huss did not show up for her shift at Pizza Hut.
The day after, Ms. Van Huss’s father went over to her apartment and found the body of his daughter, who had been stabbed many times.
“For my dad to have to find his daughter, after what was brutally done to her, makes this day bittersweet,” Ms. Van Huss’s brother said this week. “I wish he was here to see it.” Ms. Van Huss’s father died in a car crash in 2002.
Ms. Van Huss was “found brutally murdered (multiple stab wounds) and it is suspected she knew her assailant,” the F.B.I. alert says, adding that the weapons used in her killing might have been a pocketknife and a screwdriver.
The police said that detectives had over the years interviewed dozens of people and had followed up on hundreds of leads but that the case had eventually gone cold.
But then, almost 10 years ago, Bill Carter, a captain with the Indianapolis police, started looking into the case in his spare time, raising money through GoFundMe for special DNA testing and starting a Facebook group and a website called Justice for Carmen Van Huss.
In 2018, an Indianapolis detective submitted DNA for testing that included genetic genealogy, the police said, which led to their identifying a suspect.
In June of this year, Mr. Shepherd’s DNA was tested and matched samples found at the scene and on Ms. Van Huss’s body, the police said.
But many details of the case remain unknown, such as whether Ms. Van Huss had planned to meet with her killer in her apartment or had met him spontaneously.
When Indianapolis detectives arrested Mr. Shepherd in Boone County, Mo., late last month, he invoked his right to a lawyer without speaking with the detectives, the police said.
The police said they planned to extradite Mr. Shepherd to Indianapolis.
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