The cold case of the rape and murder of a 19-year-old Indianapolis woman more than three decades ago was closed Friday as a 53-year-old man was sentenced to 45 years in prison for the crime.
Dana Shepherd was sentenced after signing a plea deal last month admitting to the vicious, knife-wielding homicide of freshman art student Carmen Van Huss, local news outlets reported, capping a case solved by forensic technology that mines and matches the DNA of an unknown suspect’s relatives.
Van Huss was only 19 in 1993 when she was raped and stabbed 61 times by the then-unknown perpetrator, who broke into her apartment.
According to Fox59, her father discovered her naked body lying in a large pool of blood. Police said there were signs of a struggle, with a table knocked over and objects scattered around the crime scene.
“We hope after all this time people understand how violent my sister’s murder was,” her brother, Jimmy Van Huss, said in 2024. “She was raped and stabbed over 60 times. My dad had to see that, blood everywhere, his daughter naked, lying there. He had to see that. That changed him forever.”
Shepherd was 20 years old at the time of the killing but apparently was not scrutinized as a suspect back then. It was not until 2023 that detectives discovered from a tipster that he actually lived in the same apartment complex as his victim.
In 2013, an “unknown suspect’s” DNA from the Van Huss rape and murder was uploaded into to CODIS, the nationwide law enforcement DNA database, but did not find a match, according to a probable cause affidavit.
According to ABC News:
Then, in 2018, police said they submitted a DNA sample from the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs to try to solve the case with forensic genetic genealogy — a new investigative tool that takes unknown DNA and identifies it by comparing it to family members who voluntarily submitted their DNA samples to a database.
In 2023, police said “various investigative methods and lead information from the genetic genealogy analysis” led to a suspect’s name: Dana Shepherd.
Police then obtained a warrant to take a DNA sample from Shepherd. When police showed it to him, he “was visibly shaking,” according to the document.
That testing tied Shepherd to the crime and he was arrested in 2024 in Columbia, where he was working for the University of Missouri. He was extradited to Indiana and charged with rape and murder.
Shepherd had a rap sheet in Indiana prior to the murder, including charges for battery and public intoxication, Fox59 reported. In the years after the murder, he had also been charged in Missouri with stealing, disturbing the peace, and driving without a license, according to the outlet.
The Van Huss family released a statement reacting to the sentencing.
“While this plea deal was not our first choice, we are grateful that after 33 years the man responsible for Carmen’s brutal rape and murder is finally being held accountable,” the family stated.
They continued, “For decades, the perpetrator was able to live a normal life after taking that right away from Carmen and from our family. Nothing can undo that loss or erase the injustice of him living freely for so long, but we are thankful that the truth has finally come to light and that he has not escaped justice.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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