The DNA That Didn’t Forget: Indiana 1997 Cold Case Finally Solved
This is her class ring here. It’s from 1991. >> Stefan, now 34, has spent the last three decades wondering who killed his mom. He’s held on to that class ring, these pictures, and her death certificate. Even though it’s a painful reminder of how she died. >> In the final weeks of 1997, Fort Wayne, Indiana was wrapped in the energy of the holiday season. Snow lined the streets.
Malls were packed with lastminute shoppers and families across the region were preparing for Christmas. For most people, it was a time of warmth and predictability. But for one household, that festive atmosphere was about to be shattered by a tragedy that would remain frozen in time for nearly three decades.
At the center of this story was Angela Sako, a 25-year-old mother whose entire world revolved around her 5-year-old son. Originally from Van Wart, Ohio, just across the state line, Angela had moved to Fort Wayne to build a stable life. Friends and family remembered her as fiercely independent and cheerful, balancing early motherhood with the irregular hours of her job.
She was known to be meticulously punctual, especially when it came to returning home to her boy. On the night of December 20th, 1997, Angela left her apartment to work a late night shift in downtown Fort Wayne. The weather was bitter, typical of a Midwestern winter. In the early morning hours of December 21st, she clocked out, stepped through the exit doors, and vanished into the darkness.
When she failed to return home, panic rippled through her inner circle. Angela would never intentionally leave her son, especially with Christmas just days away. Later that afternoon, a park ranger patrolling the isolated grounds of the Huntington County Reservoir made a grim discovery near an embankment.
The property, situated north of County Road 100 South, was a vast, desolate expanse largely deserted in winter. The scene he encountered instantly transformed a quiet Sunday afternoon into a criminal investigation. Angela Sako had been found. Her life had been violently taken and her body left in the snow. The news hit Fort Wayne and Van Wart like a physical blow.
The Huntington County Sheriff’s Department alongside the Indiana State Police immediately mobilized. Detectives combed through Angela’s background, interviewed friends and co-workers, and checked every route between Fort Wayne and the reservoir. They spoke to anyone awake in the pre-dawn hours of December 21st.
In total, investigators formally interviewed dozens of individuals and mapped every conceivable lead. Yet, every path led to a dead end. No suspicious vehicles had been spotted near the reservoir. No motive could be established. The investigation ran into a wall of silence. The culprit was living completely undetected in a small neighboring town, going about his daily life as an ordinary community member, eventually taking his secret to the grave.
To understand why this case remained unsolved for 28 years, we have to examine the technological limitations facing law enforcement in the late 1990s. Today, investigators have digital surveillance, traffic cameras, cellular triangulation, and instant data sharing. In 1997, none of these tools existed for rural or regional police departments.
Processing the crime scene, investigators worked with a severely limited forensic toolkit. An autopsy confirmed that Angela’s cause of death was severe trauma inflicted by a sharp blade consistent with a close quarters violent encounter. The reservoir’s geography compounded the difficulty, accessible only by unlit county roads and deserted in winter.
The location suggested the perpetrator either knew the landscape intimately or had chosen it entirely at random. The task force documented 98 separate interviews over the first 12 months. They cataloged everyone present at Angela’s workplace, scrutinized local delivery drivers, and cross-referenced regional criminal registries.
But one fundamental barrier blocked every advance, the state of forensic science. In 1997, DNA profiling was in its infancy. The primary method, polymerase chain reaction testing, required large, pristine biological samples to produce a usable result. For DNA evidence to be useful, detectives already needed a suspect’s name.
They had to physically obtain a comparative sample from a specific person of interest and run a direct onetoone laboratory comparison. If the perpetrator’s name was never generated through an interview, tipline, or physical clue, their DNA profile was a useless string of data with nothing to anchor it to. Because the encounter between Angela and her attacker appeared entirely random, no tip ever pointed toward the actual culprit, there were no eyewitnesses to the abduction or the confrontation at the reservoir.
Eventually, the task force was reassigned to newer cases. The physical evidence, including biological material recovered from Angela’s clothing, was carefully packaged, sealed, and moved into the climate controlled vaults of the Indiana State Police Evidence Storage Facility. For nearly three decades, those boxes remained untouched while the world moved on.
In 2024, the Indiana State Police formed a dedicated cold case unit with one mandate. systematically review decades old files and apply modern technology to preserved evidence. When detectives pulled the Angela Sacko file, the case was immediately identified as a prime candidate for forensic genetic genealogy.
The responding officers from 1997 had inadvertently saved the future investigation. Their meticulous handling, drying and sealing the biological evidence without contamination had preserved the DNA perfectly inside its sealed packaging for 28 years. The cold case unit engaged Identifers International, a forensic genealogy firm based in California that specializes in cold case homicides.
Their methodology differs fundamentally from standard police DNA matching and it represents one of the most significant advancements in the history of modern criminology. >> In a conventional investigation, DNA is run through which only contains profiles from individuals convicted of specific felonies or arrested for qualifying offenses.
If a perpetrator commits a violent act but is never arrested again, they remain permanently invisible to the system. What investigators call the offender blind spot. To bypass it, identifers used single nucleotide polymorphism testing or SNP analysis. Where traditional police DNA testing examines just 20 locations on a DNA strand to find a direct identity match, SNP testing analyzes over 800,000 distinct genetic markers.
This volume of data allows geneticists to build a comprehensive map of a person’s entire ancestral heritage. The resulting profile was uploaded to public genealogy databases, Jed Match and Family Tree DNA, the same platforms millions of ordinary people used to discover their ethnic backgrounds and trace their family trees.
Within hours, the algorithm identified several distant relatives of the unknown attacker, second and third cousins who shared common ancestors but were not themselves suspects. From there, the painstaking human work began. Genealogologists at Identifinders spent months constructing sprawling family trees, working backward through Indiana and Ohio public records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, obituaries, and census data.
They traced lineages from the 1800s forward, tracking how families migrated and settled across northern Indiana counties. The objective was to find the exact point where those distant branches converged on a single male relative who was alive and present in the Indiana area in December of 1997. In early 2026, after hundreds of hours of research, the family tree converged on one man, Steven L. Schlater.
With a name finally in hand, detectives immediately began a deep examination of Schlater’s background. What they found explained precisely why he had evaded the original investigation entirely. In the mid 1990s, Schlater had been convicted of a nonviolent federal extortion offense and sentenced to incarceration in an outofstate federal facility, completely removed from the local law enforcement networks of northern Indiana.
In the spring of 1997, he completed his sentence and returned to the region to reestablish his life. He had been a free man for exactly 5 months when his path crossed with Angela Sako on the morning of December 21st, 1997. At the time of the crime, Schlater was 50 years old, more than double Angela’s age.
Having re-entered the community from an out-of-state federal facility, his name appeared in no local sheriff registries. He had no personal relationship with Angela, no shared workplace acquaintances, and no connection to her social circle. It was a completely random encounter born from proximity and opportunity, executed by a man who had successfully stayed off the radar of all 98 interviews conducted during the original investigation.
To legally cement the identification beyond genealogy, detectives obtained biological samples from Schlater’s immediate lineage and ran a traditional short tandem repeat comparison against the 1997 reservoir evidence. The laboratory result was unambiguous. The probability that the DNA belonged to anyone other than Steven L.
Schlater was virtually non-existent. But the breakthrough arrived with a deeply bitter reality. Schlater would never face a courtroom. He would never sit in an interrogation room, never be forced to explain why he took Angela’s life, and never hear a judge read a guilty verdict. Following the events of December 1997, Schlater settled in Marl, Indiana, a quiet community just a short drive from the very reservoir where Angela’s body had been found.
He lived out the remainder of his life completely unbothered, working ordinary jobs, known to neighbors as a quiet older resident, aging into his senior years without ever raising a hint of suspicion. Steven L. Schlater died peacefully in 2021 at the age of 74, carrying his secret to a local cemetery.
Huntington County Prosecutor Jeremy Nicks held a formal press conference to announce the resolution. Nicks stated plainly that had Schlater been alive at the time of the DNA match, his office would have filed immediate murder charges. The case was officially closed, solved not by confession, but by the relentless march of science.
The resolution of Angela Sako’s case stands as a monument to scientific persistence and the quiet, multi-deal dedication of law enforcement. The frustration that the perpetrator died before formal justice could be served is real and valid. >> But for Angela’s family, particularly the 5-year-old boy who had to grow into a man carrying a permanent void, the breakthrough delivered something irreplaceable.
He says he’s grateful for the hard work of 28 years. Her son lived with corrosive unanswerable question. Was his mother targeted by someone she knew? Was there a hidden secret in her past? Was her killer still walking the streets of Fort Wayne? >> The definitive identification of Steven dismantled those questions permanently, proving that Angela was an entirely innocent victim of a random encounter and placing responsibility on a single specific name.
The case is also a textbook example of why evidence preservation is the most critical duty of first responders. Had the deputies at the Huntington County Reservoir been careless in 1997, contaminating the clothing, failing to dry the biological samples, or allowing moisture to degrade the materials in storage, the genetic profile would have been lost to history.
The procedural discipline of those anonymous officers created the exact biological bridge that allowed scientists in 2026 to look backward through time. Angela Sako’s name is no longer attached to an open file. Her story has been completed by the intersection of human persistence and molecular science.
Proof that while a killer can hide, age, and escape into the grave, the truth has a way of surviving the decades, waiting patiently beneath a plastic seal until it is finally ready to speak.
