Carmen Van Huss was 19 years old, an art student who loved animals and always picked up stray cats. On March 22, 1993, she was raped and murdered inside her Indianapolis apartment. It took 33 years for her killer to be identified.
Carmen spent the evening of March 22, 1993, visiting her ailing grandmother in the hospital with her family. She drove her father and young brother home, arriving around 9:30 p.m., then left again to do laundry for her job at Pizza Hut. She was found dead in her apartment with more than 60 stab wounds. There were signs of a struggle. Investigators questioned several people, including former boyfriends, but the case went cold.
In 2018, investigators used blood evidence from the scene to build a genetic profile of the suspect using forensic genealogy. In 2023, that profile produced a match: Dana Shepherd, who had lived in the same apartment building as Carmen at the time of her murder and had never previously come up as one of more than 40 suspects reviewed over the decades. He was arrested in 2024 and later pleaded guilty to murder. In February 2026, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Carmen's sister, Pamela Francis, has said the family was told for over a decade that there wasn't funding available for the kind of advanced DNA testing that eventually solved the case, and that they weren't permitted to pay for it themselves — it had to come through a nonprofit. An Indianapolis woman started a nonprofit specifically to fund Carmen's testing, which Pamela has said is a rare exception most families never get. That experience led Pamela to work with Indiana state Representative Carey Hamilton on "Carmen's Law," which creates a legal framework for nonprofits to fund cold case DNA testing at the request of victims' families, coroners, or law enforcement. The bill passed both chambers of the Indiana legislature without opposition and was signed into law, taking effect July 1, 2026.
Carmen's Law gives other families a path her own family didn't have for over 30 years — a way to escalate DNA testing on a cold case without waiting on limited public funding. Pamela continues to work with advocates and other families to expand access to the tools that finally brought her sister's case to a close.