A college janitor was “visibly shaking” when police arrived to conduct a DNA test that ultimately linked him to the decades-old rape and murder of a teenage art student, it emerged this week.
Dozens of people were interviewed after the nude body of 19-year-old Carmen Van Huss was found stabbed 61 times by her father in her Indianapolis apartment in March 1993.
It took police more than three decades 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 to Indiana to face charges of murder, manslaughter and rape.
“There are a lot of people who have missed Carmen all these years,” her brother, Jimmy Van Huss Jr., said during a news conference Tuesday. “For my father, having to find his daughter after what was brutally done to her makes this day bittersweet.”
“I wish I was here to see it.”
Art student Carmen Van Huss was just 19 years old when she was raped and murdered in March 1993.
His former neighbor Dana Shepherd, 51, was arrested Friday at his home in Missouri after DNA evidence linked him to the crime.
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 to collect his daughter from her Harcourt Road flat on March 23 after a colleague at Pizza Hut told him she had not turned up for work.
“There were obvious signs of a struggle, including a table knocked over, clothing on the floor, a large pool of blood near the victim’s head and blood spatter around the victim’s body,” a probable cause affidavit stated.
A resident of the apartment directly below Van Huss told police he heard screaming, crying, banging and “noises and voices of a man arguing that lasted approximately 30 minutes” in the early hours of that morning.
DNA was recovered from the scene, but it did not match any of the data when it was uploaded to CODIS, the nationwide law enforcement DNA database, in 2013.
In 2018, police sent a sample to Parabon NanoLabs, which was developing DNA phenotyping and forensic genetic genealogy.
A partial match was eventually found to a distant relative of Shepherd’s who had at some point voluntarily submitted DNA to a genetic database.
A check with family members revealed that Shepherd had been Carmen’s neighbor at the time of the murder and that their apartments shared a common area.
In February of this year, police knocked on Shepherd’s apartment door in Columbia, Missouri, and saw the suspect begin to shake as they served them with a warrant to obtain and test his DNA against that found at the murder scene.
A positive result was found in June and police returned to Shepherd’s home with an arrest warrant last week.
Carmen’s brother, Jimmy Van Huss Jr., said “the man who did this is where he belongs.”
Jimmy Van Huss Jr., pictured with Carmen as children, said he fears other victims’ families are waiting too long for justice.
Carmen was stabbed 61 times while being raped and murdered in her Indianapolis apartment
Deputy Chief Kendale Adams of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said he hoped the arrest would help bring “some measure of peace” to Carmen’s family.
‘For 31 years, Carmen Van Huss’s family has been searching for answers.
“We remain committed to providing justice for all victims and will continue to follow every lead, no matter how much time has passed.”
Carmen’s brother said he fears other victims’ families are waiting too long for justice.
“We want all of them to receive this treatment,” he said. “And by this I mean DNA genealogy treatment.”
“We would love a bill, a law, a procedure, something in memory of Carmen so that other cases receive the attention they deserve.”
Shepherd appeared via video call Wednesday in a Boone County courtroom, where a judge denied his request for bail and set Sept. 26 as a 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 that after all this time people understand how violent my sister’s murder was.” His brother told FOX59.
“She was raped and stabbed over 60 times and my father had to see her like that, with blood everywhere, blood on the walls, his daughter was naked, lying there, he had to see that. It changed him forever.
‘She had a lot of family, a lot of friends. She had cousins who loved her like sisters.
“She was taken from me when I was a freshman in high school. And I’m grateful that, finally, the man who did it is where he belongs.”