Before two Elgin police detectives used a podcast to help solve a mystery that endured for more than 40 years, they first had to figure out what podcasting was, exactly, and how it worked. It’s not the sort of thing they teach at the police academy.

Andrew Houghton and Matt Vartanian knew some things about the medium, at least. As two 40-somethings who’d worked their way up in their profession, they’ve listened to their share of true crime podcasts.

But to put one together, themselves, and host it? To investigate the most difficult cases, often ones that have gone unsolved for decades, and take an audience along for the ride for the improbable victories and inevitable failures? To share with the world their search for Karen Schepers, a young Elgin woman missing for more than 40 years?

The detectives wondered if they could do it and, at first, wondered if it could even help. That was their first reaction about a regular show dedicated to cold cases: Doubt. Apprehension.

Their boss pushed them to do it, anyway.

Less than a year ago, Houghton, 41, and Vartanian, 42, were both working major investigations at the Elgin Police Department, about 35 miles northwest of Chicago in Illinois’ sixth-largest city. Their cases often involved the worst of the worst. Vartanian came up in the department’s gang unit, where shootings and firearms offenses occupied a lot of his time.

Houghton, meanwhile, spent about a decade investigating sex crimes against children. He’d come to tell people “they’re bad cases, but good cases” — the good being that they were often black and white, with little gray area.

Last year their police chief, Ana Lalley, received some good news: She finally had the budget for a two-person cold case unit, one she had long aspired to start.

For Houghton and Vartanian, the possibilities seemed intriguing. They’d both worked their way up from low-level police work — patrol and traffic cops, then to evidence technicians — before joining major investigations. Here came a chance to work on some of the most difficult and high-profile cases, ones surrounded by little hope and even fewer leads.

“I was like, ‘Yeah — I want to do that,’” Houghton told the Tribune recently.

And so the detectives, who’d worked closely together only sparingly, expressed their interest. Lalley, who admired their experience as much as their temperament and intellect, made it official soon enough. Elgin’s first cold case unit launched last May, and a short time later Lalley presented its first — and, so far, only — members with an unconventional idea.

Her pitch: What if, in the spirit of generating interest and leads, Houghton and Vartanian regularly shared their work with the public? What if they even … hosted a podcast?

To Lalley, it made a lot of sense. She appears weekly on local radio to talk about policing in Elgin — in good times and bad — and “that’s something that I completely believe in,” she said. “Openness and transparency.”

When she raised the idea of starting a cold case podcast, though, she was met with blank stares.

“They’re just looking at me,” she said. “I’m, like, you’ll be fine. You know, you guys will be fine.”

Between Houghton and Vartanian, they had their favorite true crime podcasts: “S-Town,” A&E’s “Cold Case Files,” “The Consult,” hosted by two retired FBI profilers. And, yes, “Serial,” perhaps the mother of all those that followed in its genre. Still, there wasn’t exactly a blueprint, at least not for a podcast involving actual detectives inviting an audience to follow an investigation in real time.

Their initial apprehension, Vartanian said, reflected the reality that “we had no experience, whatsoever” in broadcasting or storytelling — not in the form popularized by true crime podcasts, anyway. They had all kinds of questions: Would anyone listen? How would they sound? And what about the technical parts of it all?

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Houghton recalled thinking.

Recording. Editing. Turning a box of old files into a cohesive story. Uploading it all to Apple and Amazon and “wherever you get your podcasts,” as the saying goes. Who knew how to do all that?

“I’d never heard of an RSS feed,” Houghton told the Tribune, referencing the software used to distribute podcasts.

Almost a year later, their doubts long soothed, new questions have replaced the old. Houghton and Vartanian recently made their regular appearance on a local AM radio station to answer some of them. Everyone wanted to know, after all, how they’d done it. How, after almost exactly 42 years, they’d found Karen Schepers, who was 23 when she vanished in 1983.

Into the river

The detectives arrived before 9 a.m. on a rainy April morning and took their seats behind a pair of microphones at WRMN-AM, right off Douglas Street in downtown Elgin. They looked sharp — dress pants and shirts, their silver badges hanging over their ties.

Anyone walking by could’ve looked through the large glass window and peered into the studio. There was Houghton, his dark head of hair cut short, casually ruffled, and Vartanian, head shaved, a large iced coffee from Dunkin’ in his grasp. Two detectives neatly put together recounting the break of their lives, the break many like them long sought but never got.

By this point they were comfortable behind the mics. Their podcast, “Somebody Knows Something,” had been running since Jan. 20, with a new episode every two weeks. They’d developed a routine: Organize the story. Record it at WRMN, where Ben Boquist, the production director, handled the technical work. Then come in during the week for a live airing and discussion.

This was not a routine appearance, though. The eighth and most recent episode, “The Dive,” had been out for two days. It represented the climax of Season 1 and the end of a mystery nearly 42 years old. Karen Schepers had been found, her remains inside her 1980 Toyota Celica at the bottom of the Fox River, about six miles from where she was last seen on April 16, 1983.

On air, Boquist told listeners he’d been “just crying all weekend” putting the episode together. Houghton, sitting across the studio to Boquist’s left, with Vartanian in between, couldn’t quite articulate his feelings.

“I don’t know that I can really describe how much of a shock it is,” he said.

They began to relive the events of the previous week. Everything that led to their association with a two-person organization known as the Chaos Divers, a grassroots search-and-recovery team based in southern Illinois. The dive into the west side of the Fox River on March 24. The discovery of Karen’s car. The sight of a license plate that a diver brought to the surface, the characters outlined in caked-in mud.

Houghton and Vartanian knew Karen’s plate by memory.

XP 8919.

And there those letters and numbers were, covered in 42 years of muck.

On the boat, Houghton and Vartanian studied the plate and then looked at each other. Almost speechless.

They found the car on a Monday. They removed it on a Tuesday.

“There was a buoy attached to the car that we could watch as it came across the water,” Houghton said. “It’s slowly going across the water. And that, probably, was the most nerve-wracking part of the whole thing, because Matt and I are standing on the boat watching it slowly loop across the water and you’re thinking: ‘I hope it stays intact. I hope it stays intact.’”

It stayed intact. Its once-bright yellow paint was still visible in the remnants of the mire. So were the red accent stripes. The tires still looked inflated. Some of the windows remained. For more than 40 years the car had been submerged and now the water that filled it gushed out of it.

“A time capsule,” Vartanian said.

And what is detective work if not unearthing metaphorical and literal time capsules and unlocking what’s inside?

On the other side of the studio window, the downtown reflected a place that in some ways had remained unchanged. A riverboat casino opened in 1994, and Elgin has grown into a city of more than 110,000, but it retains a certain kind of small-town, working-class charm. Storefronts advertise small mom-and-pops. A gelato and crepes place. A knitting store. A tea shop. Bakeries and cafes.

It’s a city that owes its existence to its place alongside the Fox River, which winds for a little more than 200 miles from just northwest of Milwaukee down past La Salle and into Ottawa, where it connects to the Illinois River. And since 1983, the Fox, it turned out, held the answer to one of the city’s greatest mysteries, one that hung over the community: that of what happened to Karen Schepers.

A resident of Elgin, Karen was last seen alive in nearby Carpentersville at a long-gone bar called P.M. Bentley’s. She’d been there with a group of more than a dozen coworkers from her job at an Elgin bank. They danced. Reveled. Karen participated in a hula hoop contest. She was the last one of her group to remain, with witnesses last seeing her around 12:30 or 1 a.m. on April 16, 1983.

She was 5-foot-7. Brown eyes and brown hair. Slender and pretty, with a boyfriend, a good job and a promising future. And then one night she and her car were gone without trace. Less than three months after her disappearance, an officer with the Elgin Police Department told a local newspaper that “we don’t know what happened to Karen Schepers. We may really never know.”

In the same story in the Cardunal Free Press, J.W. Smith, a police captain, said, “We exhausted every possible lead, did everything we could do, and then did a lot of it over again.” Karen’s dad, an airline pilot, flew over the area in search of his daughter’s bright yellow car. A psychic’s tip led her family, along with her boyfriend, Terry Schultz, to chase hope in Utah.

According to a newspaper account, the psychic then changed the story: Karen had been abducted “and was in the Elgin area,” she insisted. “Strangely, beneath or around a manhole cover.”

Schultz “found a manhole near the Fox River but could not lift it,” a reporter wrote. Another search of another manhole near Chicago Rawhide, on the west side of the river, turned up nothing.

More than four decades later, about 2,000 feet east and on the other side of the water, a team of workers used heavy machinery to lift a small car out of the river. It was yellow and in good shape, all things considered. Houghton and Vartanian knew make and model by heart. They’d come to know pretty much everything about the case by heart.

‘Feels personal’

Houghton lives north of Elgin and his drive home from work takes him along the west side of the Fox River. For months, the sight of it fueled obsessions. He has a natural tendency to overthink things, anyway. He was like that even before he came to focus on one case for months at a time.

The work on the newly formed cold case unit came to be “pretty all-consuming,” Vartanian said. For months, he and Houghton traded texts at all hours about Karen, going over theories and questions, trying to construct a puzzle without even knowing how many pieces there were, what they looked like or how they fit.

Driving past the river, Houghton often found himself asking the same questions:

“What else are we missing here? What else could we be thinking about?”

Early on, they met with a retired local detective about the case and they described it to him as looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not that easy, the detective told them, because in this case — and in a lot of cold cases — “you don’t know where the haystack is.”

Neither Houghton nor Vartanian moved into the cold case unit with much experience in these kinds of investigations. Both followed unconventional paths into police work in the first place — Houghton turning down law school to pursue a career in policing that he wound up loving more than he anticipated, and Vartanian selling computers at Best Buy while attending Northern Illinois University and beginning a police internship that changed the direction of his life.

“I think working in retail helped me to prepare to be a cop,” he said. “Because, you know, everything you do is sales, right?”

Their most important sales pitch came early, not long after they’d agreed with their chief on the idea of the podcast and after they’d decided on the most compelling topic for the first season. Houghton had browsed through the Elgin police’s files concerning Karen Schepers. Vartanian, meanwhile, had at least some familiarity with it.

They agreed it was a good candidate for the podcast for several reasons. For one, there was plenty for a multi-part series. There were several theories, even if there’d been hardly any leads. It was a case that in the early to mid-1980s captured attention throughout the region, and one that resurfaced occasionally over the years whenever an enterprising detective picked it back up again.

But was it solvable? And more important, would Karen’s family approve of it?

She came from a big family, with eight siblings. Her mom, Elizabeth Paulson, is still living. At 90 years old, would she be willing to experience her daughter’s disappearance all over again? Could she bear to relive the trauma of not only her loss, but also the endless letdowns of investigations that went nowhere? In 2008, which had been the last time anyone had tried to advance the case, Paulson and one of Karen’s brothers, Dale Schepers, expressed their frustration with police.

“From the beginning, they figured she was 23 years old and had a spat with the boyfriend and left town,” Paulson said in a story published in the Tribune that April, upon the posting of eight billboards around Chicago publicizing Karen’s disappearance. “They just figured she was an adult and left on her own.”

Said her brother Dale, in the same story: “That’s probably the most disappointing thing in her disappearance. They didn’t bother to learn enough about [Karen] and without knowing that you don’t know where to look.”

Now more than 15 years had gone by and not much had changed. And here were two young detectives, new to cold cases and new to Karen’s disappearance, calling Dale in North Carolina, where he lives, and saying, as Houghton recently remembered it, “Hey, this is what we’re doing; this is what we’re thinking …”

Word spread among Karen’s siblings. The consensus was if their mom was OK with it, so were they. It wasn’t long before Dale relayed the message, that their mom said, “Yes, I absolutely want to do this.” The interviews soon began — marathon sessions lasting hours, with Karen’s friends and family bringing her back to life, humanizing her and reliving her loss in hopes of rediscovery.

Traditional detective work can often be an exhaustive slog. The search for leads can be lonely.

In turning the Karen Schepers case into a true crime, True Detective-esque odyssey, though, Houghton and Vartanian created a sense of community. With an audience that grew, yes, but also with members of Karen’s circle, friends and family who became something like characters, themselves, in the drama.

Listeners responded. With more than 100 reviews on Apple Podcasts over the past 2½ months, “Somebody Knows Something” has a perfect five-star rating. The titles of some of the recent reviews include several raves: “Professional & Provocative.” “Incredible.” “Feels personal.” “These are Detectives, not entertainers looking to sensationalize,” one person wrote.

For Houghton and Vartanian, it all came with a heightened sense of responsibility.

They were not only investigators on a case but caretakers of a story. And whether they solved the mystery or not, they felt a burden to get everything right, to do justice to who Karen was and who her loved ones knew her to be. And if they did all of that — if they really got to know her, as her brother wished investigators had done from the start — maybe they’d know where to look.

From the beginning, Houghton and Vartanian had to accept the possibility of failure. That an audience might not respond. That the case could remain unsolved. More than 40 years had passed without much of any progress. They could live with those failures a little easier, though, if they left nothing unturned or unsearched.

And so work began on six distinct theories. And their obsession grew.

“We didn’t want to let this family down,” Houghton said.

‘Miracles do happen’

Not long into their research for “Somebody Knows Something,” Houghton and Vartanian came to appreciate an unforeseen benefit of putting together a podcast. Constructing a narrative story, it turned out, proved beneficial in sifting through thousands of pages of a case file and more than 40 years of dead-end leads.

“I was kind of surprised,” Houghton said, “at how thinking out how you want to structure a season of the podcast really did help us structure the investigation a little bit. Because you could look at it and say, ‘OK, these are the six theories we want to talk about. Let’s spend a couple weeks working on this first theory. Let’s spend a couple weeks looking at this second theory.’”

The six theories they settled upon were these: That Karen made a choice to leave town or end her life; that something nefarious happened at P.M. Bentley’s; that something nefarious happened during her drive home; that she made it home, and something happened there; that her boyfriend was involved in her disappearance; that she somehow drove into a body of water.

Only the first of those theories — that she left town or died by suicide — did the detectives dismiss. Nobody in Karen’s orbit supported that idea or believed she’d leave; certainly nobody believed she’d remain gone, for years, by choice or without checking in.

In pursuing the other possibilities, Houghton and Vartanian considered serial killers who were active in the area at the time; they considered a previous tenant of Karen’s apartment with a criminal history and a carnival worker behaving oddly at the bar.

They wondered whether she could’ve stopped on the way home and tried to help a stranded motorist. Or if she’d offered someone a ride. Or if she’d gone to another bar.

Every time Houghton drove past the river on the way home, though, he wondered if Karen might be there.

The water theory came to make sense. The detectives learned heavy rain raised the level of the Fox River in April

1983. They drove the routes Karen most likely took home, always after midnight and under a waxing crescent moon — same as it was the night she disappeared.

One of the ways she could’ve gone, along an unlit, two-lane road, would’ve passed by the river. Could she have lost control? Hit standing water and spun out?

Maybe. But if so, why had her car been so impossible to find?

Newspaper accounts in 1983 reference helicopter searches over local bodies of water, flying low, looking for signs of a yellow car. But, nothing. Same thing when Karen’s dad flew over the area. But that she ended up in the Fox remained a stubborn possibility, so much so that Mike Gough, a retired Elgin police officer, connected Houghton and Vartanian with a two-person organization known as the Chaos Divers.

Gough was one more investigator, among several, who never had been able to let it go. The case had outlived several of them.

Other key people died, too, like witnesses in the bar and Terry Schultz, Karen’s boyfriend, who died in 2015 from complications of multiple sclerosis, whose last conversation with Karen ended in a minor squabble when he wouldn’t meet her at Bentley’s. And if he had come out that night?

“I feel like I have to get my life back together again,” he told a reporter in 1983, months after the disappearance. “It’s driving me crazy.”

Schultz left behind two sons, according to his obituary, “and enjoyed life to the fullest. He loved cars and his motorcycles.”

But even if he had peace, eventually, he never had answers. Nobody would have if Houghton and Vartanian hadn’t followed Gough’s recommendation to contact the Chaos Divers, the team from Harrisburg, Illinois, not far from the Kentucky and Indiana lines.

Jacob Grubbs, a former coal miner, founded Chaos Divers in 2019. Lindsay Bussick joined in 2021. Since then they’ve found the remains of 20 people who’d gone missing in cars submerged in bodies of water, from Texas to the East Coast. Along the way they’ve documented their search and recovery work on YouTube, where the revenue from their videos — along with donations from viewers and businesses — have allowed them to fund their work.

Houghton and Vartanian scheduled the divers to come to Elgin in late March, when they figured the Fox River would be finally thawed. Grubbs and Bussick drove up in an RV, hauling a 26-foot boat — donated by SeaArk, a sponsor — equipped with sonar. In the Fox, they made several passes over an area near the west bank, close to a ramp near Slade Avenue. On the sonar it looked like a small car.

A diver named Mike McFerron, a member of a sheriff’s diving team in Missouri, went into the chilly water alone. Eventually he surfaced with the muddy license plate. It’d been on a bright yellow Toyota Celica, underwater and out of sight for 42 years.

On the boat there was jubilation. Bussick caught a glimpse of the detectives, emotional. In disbelief.

“Watching Andrew and Matt,” she said, “you almost felt like it was their loved one missing.”

In the rush of everything, Grubbs kept his eye on the sonar and “I didn’t even get to read the plate,” he said. But “once I seen that it was hers, I did almost tear up for the guys, for the detectives. Because you can just see in their hearts that all their hard work just came down to this moment.”

The detectives called the family.

Three days after the discovery of the car, Houghton and Vartanian met with Karen’s mom and sister Susan Trainer and returned some of Karen’s belongings that had been discovered in mud that spilled out of her car: A sapphire birthstone ring Karen always wore. The metal part of a 1977 high school graduation tassel. Her mom turned them over in her hands, a box of tissues in front of her.

In a statement the family released, Karen’s loved ones said there was “an audible gasp” among family members when they realized her car had been found.

They thanked Houghton and Vartanian and the divers and those who listened to the podcast.

“Miracles do happen,” the family said.

Could it have happened without the podcast? Without the internet-funded Chaos Divers?

It’s impossible to know for sure. But two months after the launch of a podcast into one of Elgin’s most confounding cold cases, there was resolution.

“We should never be afraid to try some new tool and see how it works,” Houghton said. “If 100 agencies do this, and five agencies get some sort of resolution from doing it, that’s five families that got to bring a loved one home, or know what happened to a loved one, or close a case.”

On the other end of a conference table on the third floor of the Elgin Police Department sat the Karen Schepers case file, some of the folders dog-eared and darkened with age.

Among the thousands of pages were some old missing persons posters with Karen’s picture, a young woman frozen in time at 23, her entire life ahead of her. Not too far away, along the riverbank, someone had placed a small bouquet of yellow and purple flowers near the place where she’d been pulled out.

Her car had been in about seven feet of water, and was discovered upside down. It could’ve drifted as much a mile downstream over the past four decades from where it entered the river.

For almost 42 years it’d served as an unmarked, improper grave for the young woman trapped inside. But now Karen Schepers had been found. She was free.