Indianapolis Police are responding to a controversy surrounding a decades-old cold case.
Nineteen-year-old Carmen Hope Van Huss was raped and murdered in her Indianapolis apartment in 1993.
Det. Sgt. William Carter, who is not a cold case detective, had recently been working on the case in his spare time. Carter even started a GoFundMe account to raise money to test DNA samples.
Within hours, the site had raised more than enough money for the test.
However, Van Huss' brother, Jimmy Van Huss, told Eyewitness News that Carter had been pulled from the case. Huss said that if Carter was not working on the case, there was no hope that it would be solved.
"He's found a lot of errors that were made back in the beginning, he's narrowed the suspect list down quite a bit, and he seems to be the only one that really cared about it, took it to heart," Jimmy Van Huss said Thursday.
On Friday, IMPD Police Chief Rick Hite explained the misunderstanding. Hite said that Carter was never assigned to or removed from the case, but may have been told to temporarily pause while police sorted out the confusion.
Hite added that Carter would be permitted to work on the case moving forward.
"I want to be clear that the buck stops here, with me, and I would have a hard time understanding why any detective who has information would not be allowed to be shared," Hite said. "We're not going to deny any of our people, and certainly not Sgt. Carter and his tenacity to find justice, the opportunity to assist in this case."
Police say the more than $1,200 collected in the GoFundMe account would be returned to the donors. They are reevaluating whether the new DNA test is necessary.
