Dana Shepherd, 53, was sentenced to 45 years in prison on Friday after signing a plea deal admitting to the rape and fatal stabbing of 19-year-old Carmen Van Huss — a crime committed more than three decades ago in an Indianapolis apartment complex where both lived.
Van Huss, a freshman art student, was stabbed 61 times in 1993. Her father discovered her naked body in a pool of blood. Shepherd was 20 at the time. He was never scrutinized as a suspect.
According to Breitbart, for 33 years, Shepherd walked free. He moved to Missouri. He worked at the University of Missouri. He lived the kind of ordinary life that he had permanently destroyed for an entire family. Then forensic genetic genealogy caught up with him.
The Van Huss family released a statement after the sentencing that carried the weight of 33 years of grief compressed into a few sentences:
"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."
"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."
That phrase — "live a normal life after taking that right away" — lands like a verdict of its own. Carmen Van Huss never got to finish college, never got to build a career with her art, never got to do any of it. Shepherd got all of those years—every single one was stolen.
Jimmy Van Huss, Carmen's brother, offered an unflinching account of what this crime did to his family in a 2024 statement:
"We hope after all this time people understand how violent my sister's murder was. 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."
That image — a father walking into that scene — never leaves. It didn't leave the Van Huss family for three decades, and it shouldn't leave the public conversation about what justice actually requires.
The investigative timeline tells a story of persistence and advancing technology working in tandem. In 2013, DNA recovered from the crime scene was uploaded into CODIS, the nationwide law enforcement DNA database. No match.
Five years later, in 2018, police submitted the sample to Parabon NanoLabs for forensic genetic genealogy analysis — a technique that cross-references DNA against genealogical databases to identify suspects through family connections rather than direct database hits.
By 2023, that analysis, combined with other investigative methods, pointed to Shepherd. A tipster also informed detectives that Shepherd had lived in the same apartment complex as Van Huss. Police obtained a warrant for his DNA.
When shown the warrant, Shepherd was visibly shaking.
He knew what it meant. In 2024, the DNA match was confirmed. Shepherd was arrested in Columbia, Missouri, extradited to Indiana, and charged with rape and murder. Last month, he signed the plea deal. Friday, he received 45 years.
Shepherd was not a man with a clean history. Before the 1993 killing, he had already faced charges in Indiana for:
After the murder, he accumulated charges in Missouri for:
None of it, apparently, triggered a closer look at the young man who had lived steps from where a college freshman was brutalized to death. The dispositions of those charges remain unclear, but the pattern is unmistakable — a man who kept brushing against the system without the system ever connecting him to the worst thing he'd done.
Cases like this are the clearest possible argument for law enforcement's use of forensic genetic genealogy. The technology did what CODIS alone could not. Traditional DNA databases depend on a suspect already being in the system. Genealogical analysis builds a net from the outside in — tracing familial connections until investigators can narrow the field to a single individual.
Civil liberties debates surrounding the technique are genuine, and they warrant serious consideration. But so does this: a man who raped and stabbed a teenager 61 times lived free for three decades because older tools couldn't find him. Newer ones did. The Van Huss family has some measure of accountability today because investigators didn't stop pushing the science forward.
Every cold case solved through genealogical DNA reinforces the same lesson. The evidence was always there, preserved in biology, waiting for the technology to catch up to the crime. When critics raise privacy concerns about these databases, they should be forced to reckon with the Carmen Van Husses of the world — the victims whose cases go cold not because evidence doesn't exist, but because the tools to read it haven't arrived yet.
The Van Huss family acknowledged the plea deal was "not our first choice." That's a restrained way of saying what most people would feel: 45 years for a crime this savage, after 33 years of freedom, doesn't balance the scales. It can't. No sentence could.
Shepherd was 20 when he killed Carmen Van Huss. He is 53 now. A 45-year sentence, even without early release, would carry him to 98. As a practical matter, he will almost certainly die in prison. But the principle still gnaws. A plea deal means the state chose certainty over the possibility — however remote — of a trial going sideways after three decades. From a prosecutorial standpoint, it's defensible. From a family's standpoint, it will never feel like enough.
That tension is baked into the plea system, and it becomes most visible in cases where the crime is this violent and the delay this long. A family waits 33 years and then is asked to accept a negotiated outcome rather than a full public reckoning. The system calls it justice. The family calls it the best they could get.
Carmen Van Huss was 19. She was an art student. She had a family that loved her and a father who found her in a way no parent should ever have to. Dana Shepherd took 33 years of freedom that didn't belong to him.
Now those years are over.