The 1980 Toyota Celica driven by Karen Schepers, the 23-year-old Elgin woman missing since 1983, was found Monday night at the bottom of the Fox River and removed from the water Tuesday afternoon.

It bears the “XP8919” license plate matching Schepers’ car but there has been no confirmation from police that human remains have been located inside.

That will be up to the Kane County Coroner’s Office to determine once they have a chance to examine once its recovery from a spot northwest of the Slade Avenue boat launch, near the Fox River Trail, is complete, Elgin Police Chief Ana Lalley said during a morning media briefing.

“This is the beginning of what is still an open and active investigation with many questions still to be answered,” Lalley said. “As we continue to investigate this case, we will remain steadfast in our resolve to provide answers and closure for Karen’s family.”

The car was discovered about 4:40 p.m. after a full day of searching done by Chaos Divers, a nonprofit organization that specializes in finding missing people in bodies of water.

Working in conjunction with two Elgin police detectives, the team systematically looked at locations where the car could have gone into the water in the early morning hours of April 16, 1983, when Schepers was last seen leaving a bar in Carpentersville and was believed to be returning to her Elgin apartment.

The boat launch area is now considered a crime scene, with yellow police tape cordoning it off to anyone other than divers, police, firefighters and other officials. People gathered nearby to watch the recovery scene unfold.

Lalley did not answer questions at the briefing so things like how deep the water is where the car was found or why they chose to look in that location remain unanswered.

Schepers’s disappearance nearly 42 years and was the subject of a podcast, “Somebody Knows Something,” put together by Elgin Cold Case Unit detectives Andrew Houghton and Matt Vartanian, who looked at different theories about the unsolved mystery and were on the scene for the search.

Chaos Divers manager Lindsay Bussick, joined in the search by company owner Jacob Grubbs and diver Mike McFerron, said they were looking at several locations where an accident could have occurred. Their initial search focused on parts of the river that run alongside Duncan Avenue, one of two routes Schepers likely would have followed from Carpentersville to Elgin.“There are so many spots where it is so close to the river,” she said.

The crew uses three types of sonars, including one with a scope that provides a live feed that’s almost like an ultrasound, Bussick said. “There are times we can get such a clear image where we can almost tell what make and model the vehicle is,” she said.

“With this case and with her being missing for so long, we are kind of looking at it differently,” she said. “We are looking for shadows because we have to take into account deterioration and that kind of thing just being in the water and the flow of the water over that vehicle.”

Police have long believed that one possibility was that Schepers had accidentally driven into a body of water because her canary yellow Toyota Celica was never found, her credit cards and bank account left untouched, and nothing from her apartment taken.

According to the podcast, Schepers was born in San Francisco, the second of nine children. The family moved to Sycamore in 1965, where she graduated from Sycamore High School in 1977.

She later moved to Elgin, where she worked as a computer programmer for First Chicago Bank Card. She had been dating a man named Terry Wayne Schultz, but they’d broken up several weeks earlier after being unofficially engaged, police said.

On the night of Friday, April 15, Scheppers joined about 20 coworkers at P.M. Bentley’s, a now-closed Carpentersville bar, to celebrate completing a project at work. She talked to Schultz that night, but he opted not to meet her at the bar, police said.

Schepers was last by her friends and witnesses participating in a hula hoop contest. She left the bar in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 16.

When Schultz failed to hear from her and she didn’t show up for work on Monday, he notified police that Schepers was missing.

Her 90-year-old mother, Liz Paulson, was among the family members interviewed for the podcast.

The family feels like they can’t go forward until “you fix this,” she said.

Paulson still lives in the family’s Sycamore home, which looks the same as it did in 1983 and has never been painted a different color so Karen would recognize it if she ever returned, her brother, Gary, said. He held out a sliver of hope he would see her again, he said.

“In my mind, I almost never say the word was about her. It’s always like she’s somewhere,” he said.

“Mom and I are still in the house. We are waiting for her to show up one day,” Gary said. “I would be surprised, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened.”

In the podcast, Houghton and Vartanian outlined the reasons why they’re looking at the river and other bodies of water. Chief among them were the road and weather conditions in the early morning hours when she left the bar as well as the river’s high water level at the time, they said.

There were two routes Schepers could’ve taken to return to her apartment in the 300 block of Lovell Street on Elgin’s east side, the detectives said. Duncan Avenue would have been the more common route, they said, although she could have also taken Route 25.

Houghton and Vartanian researched the phases of the moon to determine how dark the road would have been, and learned there was a crescent moon that night in which only 10% was illuminated.

“It would’ve been pretty dark,” Houghton said in the podcast.

There also would have been less light pollution because Elgin’s population was only about 60,000 and the town not as built up as it is now, he said.

Temperatures were below freezing and there were gusting winds, data shows.

Additionally, the Fox River was at a record high level that week, much higher than the normal eight feet it would have been along that stretch of road, the detectives said.

Water or ice on the roadway could’ve caused Scheper’s car to slip or crash and, if it did, her response time might have been affected by any alcoholic drinks she’d had at the bar, they said. If she was incapacitated by a crash, her car could’ve veered into the river.

Houghton and Vartanian said they also planned to explore other theories, such as Schepers decided to leave Elgin, may have intentionally hurt herself or encountered someone who did her harm.

A fight Scheper had with her boyfriend before she went to the bar over his not wanting to meet her there could have been a factor, they said, but he cooperated with police and passed a lie detector test.

“Everybody has their theory. This is one of the many theories of what happened to her,” Lalley said. “It’s important we exhaust all investigative methods, including this, because there are always going to be questions. The purpose of the Cold Case Unit is to find answers and, more importantly, bring some peace and closure to the family, if we can.”

Bussick said being part of a mission to locate a family’s missing loved one can be “incredibly rewarding.”

“It’s heartbreaking at times because when we do locate someone, you are taking that hope away from them that their loved one may pull back into the driveway,” she said. “At the same time, you can watch this weight be lifted off them.”

To listen to the podcast, go to www.spreaker.com/podcast/somebody-knows-something–6488643?fbclid=IwY2xjawJObEtleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHeKlroZ7h4xXkGeVcFPIj8afouDUBdCQ7-WwSPHdZXTc4myKWwBr9NVu1Q_aem_q3BeoMYI38AzqPqAtWalJQ.

Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.