Over years spent boating on Lake Shelbyville, Tracy Seabaugh developed a habit of picking up trash left behind by visitors to the heavily trafficked central Illinois reservoir. That habit ended on a Sunday afternoon in September 1996.

Seabaugh, then 36, and his wife Sheri were walking along the shore that afternoon when he spotted a gray garbage bag in shallow water. Angered at the brazen act of littering, he planned to take the bag with them to deposit in the nearest trash can.

All these years later, he can remember everything about the moment. The bag tied with a knot, heavy, sagging as he lifted it. He felt the thin plastic, grasping for some clue to its mysterious contents.

His stomach climbed to his throat.

Oh my God, he thought. What is this?

Seabaugh’s discovery would spark a multi-agency investigation into one of the region’s most horrific crimes, the murder of 23-year-old Decatur mother Karyn Hearn Slover. Four years and thousands of tips later, authorities homed in on her suspected killers: ex-husband Michael Slover Jr., and his parents, Michael Slover Sr. and Jeannette Slover.

Macon County prosecutors built a case entirely on circumstantial evidence, some of it considered at the time to be cutting-edge forensics — dog hair DNA analysis and comparisons of concrete and cinder samples. In the end, they convinced a jury that the elder Slovers murdered their former daughter-in-law, with their son’s tacit approval, to stop her from taking her 3-year-old son and moving out of state.

In the two decades since the Slovers were sent to prison, the salacious details of their case have become fodder for the burgeoning true-crime entertainment industry. All the while, the Slovers have insisted they’re innocent and fought in court to clear their names.

For Michael Slover Sr., that fight ended with his death in prison in 2022. But his wife and son have continued to push for a new trial, aided by the Illinois Innocence Project, a nonprofit based at the University of Illinois at Springfield that works to overturn convictions in a state infamous for sending innocent people to prison.

Earlier this year, IIP attorneys launched what could be the best, and last, attempt at exonerating the Slovers. In a sweeping, nearly 2,000-page amended petition for post-conviction relief filed in February in Macon County court, attorneys say DNA testing previously unavailable during the initial trial “conclusively demonstrates the Slovers’ innocence.”

“Disturbingly,” attorneys wrote, authorities have not run the new DNA evidence through a federal database that could identify Karyn’s real killers, which, they added, could be three men whose names first surfaced as possible suspects days after Karyn disappeared.

The petition also mounts a detailed attack on the state’s evidence in the case, calling it a “junk science house of cards” that “completely collapses when subjected to scientific review and modern understandings of forensic science.” It goes on to accuse prosecutors of using false and misleading witness testimony to win a conviction.

Macon County State’s Attorney Scott Rueter did not respond to multiple messages seeking an interview for this story. Karyn’s family declined to be interviewed.

The question of whether the Slovers should receive a new trial now falls with 6th Judicial Circuit Associate Judge Rodney Forbes. The next status hearing is scheduled for July 11.

“The murder of Karyn Hearn Slover was a terrible tragedy,” IIP attorneys wrote in the petition. “This tragedy was further compounded by convicting three innocent people for a crime they did not commit.”

Part 1: The aspiring model goes missing

Friday, Sept. 27, 1996.

Two days before the Seabaughs’ lake trip.

Melany Jackson sat in the lunchroom inside the Decatur Herald & Review newspaper office, where she worked part time as a layout clerk. In two years, she had come to make friends with several co-workers, including an energetic and outgoing ad rep named Karyn.

At work, or while playing racquetball, the two shared stories from their lives. Jackson heard Karyn talk about her 3-year-old son Kolten, about her struggles with her ex-husband and former in-laws, and about her goal of becoming a model.

Karyn had professional headshots taken (photos that were widely circulated after her disappearance and murder), and had done some local jobs. But she wanted more.

A month or two earlier, Karyn applied to a company called Paris World International, based in Savannah, Georgia. For a yearly fee, the company offered opportunities as film extras or models in runway shows or catalogs.

Earlier that Friday, Karyn and her boyfriend, fellow newspaper employee David Swann, went to the post office and overnight-mailed a contract to the company, which, she excitedly told Jackson, had lined up a modeling job for her in Atlanta.

It wasn’t a permanent move, but, Jackson remembered, “it felt like a door was opening.”

Karyn left work around 5 p.m., driving Swann’s 1992 Pontiac Bonneville, which, he would later tell authorities, he let her borrow because her car needed an oil change and new brakes.

She had to pick up Kolten from her former in-laws and stop at the mall to buy a dress for a wedding she and Swann were attending the next day (there is debate as to which task she intended to do first). Eventually, she planned to swing by his place to pick up laundry she left there and then head home to make dinner for her son.

Swann, who had been at the wedding rehearsal that night, got home a little before 10 p.m. He spotted Karyn’s laundry bag in the same place she left it.

“It didn’t click right away,” he would later tell investigators.

Around the time Swann came home, a Piatt County sheriff’s deputy pulled over to investigate an abandoned Bonneville on the westbound shoulder along Interstate 72, about 40 miles northeast of Decatur.

The car was still running, its driver’s side door open, keys still in the ignition, dome light and tail lights and headlights still on.

There were no immediate signs of foul play.

The deputy ran the car’s unique license plate, CADS 7, and a dispatcher contacted its owner, Swann, who, upon learning there was no sign of Karyn or Kolten, called Karyn’s parents before hurrying to the stretch of interstate.

Karyn’s father, Larry Hearn, called the Slovers’ house in Mt. Zion to ask where Karyn and Michael Jr. were.

Junior’s at work, Jeannette Slover replied, and Karyn hadn’t come to pick up Kolten.

Hearing that Kolten was still with the Slovers, Larry Hearn broke down in tears.

Melany Jackson’s phone rang around 7 the next morning. A co-worker at the newspaper told her Karyn was missing, her car found near Champaign. Jackson hurried to the office, where several dozen colleagues made posters with Karyn’s picture and a photo of a similar Pontiac Bonneville. They split into search parties and fanned out in different directions.

The search continued through Saturday and into Sunday. By Monday, Jackson was at Richland Community College in Decatur, about to teach an English writing class. A student approached her in the bathroom. She knew Jackson worked at the newspaper and heard from a relative in law enforcement that authorities were soon to hold a news conference about a discovery made the previous day at Lake Shelbyville, about 30 miles south of Decatur and 50 miles south of where the Pontiac was found.

“No! It’s not her!” Jackson reflexively yelled. “Whatever they found is not her!”

Shocked at what they might have stumbled upon on that Sunday afternoon, Tracy and Sheri Seabaugh took their boat to the nearest marina. There, they convinced an employee to let them use the phone to call the Moultrie County sheriff.

Deputy Jeff Thomas was dispatched to the call. He followed the Seabaughs’ boat to the shoreline where they found the garbage bag. The couple was visibly shaken, Thomas remembered.

“It’s probably just a deer carcass dumped by a poacher,” he told them, and himself.

Not wanting to disturb any evidence, Thomas donned gloves and cut into the side of the bag with a knife. There looked to be a second gray garbage bag inside the first, this one sealed with duct tape. He cut it open too.

The color drained from Thomas’ face, and the 23-year veteran deputy nearly collapsed at the sight of blond hair draped over a human ear.

Part 2: The Slover task force

Authorities quickly descended on the lake. They pulled five other similar garbage bags from the water that week, containing hands and feet, an arm, a thigh and parts of a torso. Some body parts would never be found.

Dental records confirmed it was Karyn. An autopsy concluded she’d been shot seven times in the head with a .22-caliber handgun before being dismembered, likely with a power saw. Neither the gun nor the saw was ever located.

With a sprawling potential crime scene spanning multiple jurisdictions, authorities created a task force of local, state and federal investigators to catch Karyn’s killer or killers.

At the lake, they found cinders, grasses, weeds and broken concrete with her remains. A blood stain, later confirmed to be Karyn’s, and at least one fingerprint — both on the bridge spanning the lake near Findlay Marina — suggested that was the spot where the bags were dumped into the water.

Two more fingerprints were discovered inside the front passenger window of the Pontiac. None of those prints ended up identifying a suspect. Curiously, authorities never tested unknown material under Karyn’s fingernails on her left hand.

Task force members initially looked at the men in Karyn’s life.

Though Swann, then 31, had been friends with Karyn for months, the two only recently started dating before her murder. He also had a past arrest that raised red flags among investigators.

Five years earlier, Swann was arrested in nearby Coles County and charged with breaking into his estranged wife’s apartment, armed with a .22-caliber handgun. Inside, he hit his wife while threatening to kill her. Swann eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated battery, court records show, and was sentenced to probation.

Authorities questioned Swann about the incident and about his whereabouts the night Karyn disappeared.

He told investigators he had been at a Decatur restaurant until about 7:30 that night. Next, he stopped at a hardware store to copy keys for a joke he planned on his friend, the groom in the wedding he and Karyn were to attend that weekend. Then, he went to the church for the wedding rehearsal.

There was a roughly half-hour gap in his alibi that he couldn’t initially account for. He eventually told police he stopped at an ATM during that time. Bank records and footage from the ATM camera verified his story. To police, he was no longer a suspect.

Swann declined to be interviewed for this story.

Investigators also focused on Michael Slover Jr. He and Karyn attended the same community college and met through mutual friends. They married in 1993 and welcomed their son Kolten that same year. Karyn’s friends later testified to seeing him physically abuse his wife, though, defense attorneys argued, they only told authorities about the alleged abuse after the case was in the media.

By May 1996, the marriage had ended. Their divorce agreement named Karyn as Kolten’s primary custodian and gave Michael alternate weekends with his son. And, in a stipulation that would come to be a focus for police and prosecutors, it read that the boy’s grandmother Jeannette would continue to be his babysitter until he started kindergarten, or until the parties agreed otherwise.

Michael gave investigators a three-page handwritten account of his actions that Friday, from 12:30 p.m. when he started his first job as security at a grocery store, until 2 a.m. the next morning, when he finished his third job as a bar bouncer.

His alibi was airtight and detailed — almost too detailed, Thomas remembered.

“I believe he could tell us exactly the denomination of bills and change he got to buy a milkshake,” remembered Thomas, who eventually became Moultrie County sheriff before retiring in 2014. “Most people wouldn’t recall all those fine details. It was overkill.”

Two of Karyn’s ex-boyfriends were also questioned. Both had alibis that excluded them as suspects.

Amid unrelenting press coverage and a torrent of tips about possible suspects, pressure to solve Karyn’s murder mounted. Decatur’s roughly 82,000 residents, meanwhile, reeled from another grisly crime.

Two years before Karyn’s murder, 30-year-old realtor Sherry L. Lewis was found fatally beaten and strangled in a Decatur home she had an appointment to show. Her case remains unsolved.

Then, in September 1995, 3-year-old Sara Lynn Kramer vanished from her family’s Decatur home. Her body was found by a fisherman in the Sangamon River four days later. It would be another five years before police identified her uncle as her killer.

Detectives on the Slover task force looked closer at Karyn’s life and uncovered financial troubles they felt could provide clues. She struggled to pay rent and utilities. She’d been hit with hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees and returned check penalties. Her car was almost repossessed. She contemplated bankruptcy.

The month she was killed, Karyn pawned a diamond ring for $120 despite the pawnbroker telling her it was worth more. Still, the investigation was never able to tie her money problems to a suspect, and as the months went by, the case grew cold.

That’s when authorities looked closer at Karyn’s former in-laws.

Part 3: The unlikely suspects

Michael and Jeannette Slover were childhood sweethearts in suburban St. Louis, married just after high school in 1966. They eventually moved to Mt. Zion, a tiny village just south of Decatur. Jeannette stayed home to raise their two children, Michael Jr. and Mary, while Senior worked in a trade union. He sold used cars from home, at first, and eventually opened Miracle Motors used car lot on Illinois Route 121, a few minutes from home, which he ran on nights and weekends.

They were content to live a quiet life at home. They listened to NPR on weekends, took evening walks and shared ice cream cones at Dairy Queen.

Investigators questioned the couple multiple times. They said they last saw Karyn around 5:45 p.m. the day before she disappeared, when they met at a McDonald’s to pick up Kolten.

Senior said he went to work at a Clinton power plant the next day while Jeannette stayed home to watch Kolten and a friend’s 2-year-old. The friend came to collect her child around 3:30 p.m. and Senior returned home about an hour later. He said he had lunch and watched television while his wife took their grandson to Kmart to look for a toy.

Jeannette and Kolten returned sometime after 6 p.m., she said. By then, her husband had left for Miracle Motors.

Karyn typically picked up her son from the Slovers between 5 and 6 p.m. But, Jeannette told authorities, it was not uncommon for her former daughter-in-law to be late.

In her grand jury testimony, she said she once told Karyn: “Don’t worry if you’re late. If you get a chance to call, OK. If not, just don’t worry about it.”

Jeannette said she called Karyn’s apartment and got no answer, so she took Kolten to the car lot around 8 p.m. She and her husband planned to take their grandson to the McDonald’s playland but he fell asleep on the drive over, she said, so they went home instead.

There had been no one at the car lot that evening and no one who saw the couple and could corroborate their story. In essence, they were each other’s alibis.

Eighteen months after Karyn’s murder, a search warrant in hand, police descended on the Slovers’ used car lot. By then, the family’s names had been in the news as possible suspects. They planned to sell the business, Michael Sr. told police, because no one would buy a car from him.

The lot was blanketed in snow, so investigators brought in a machine normally used by road crews to melt asphalt. Once the snow was gone, they divided the lot into a grid and began excavating the ground, aided by a forensic geologist and former Canadian police constable, Richard Munroe.

After three days of searching, police left Miracle Motors with 60, five-gallon buckets of excavated ground. They took the buckets, uncovered, to a warehouse where teams spent weeks sifting through them like prospectors, searching for clues.

Authorities returned to the car lot, now under new ownership, in September 1999. This time, they brought a University of Illinois professor who they asked to search the property for specific plants — foxtail, nimble will and switchgrass — found with Karyn’s remains.

On Jan. 27, 2000, more than 1,200 days after the Seabaughs’ horrific discovery at the lake, a Macon County grand jury indicted Michael Slover Sr., his wife and their son on first-degree murder charges and, for the male Slovers, concealment of a homicide.

Part 4: The case against the Slovers

The closely watched trial began in April 2002, but not before a flurry of activity.

Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty (still an option at the time), which gave the Slovers access to a state fund designed to help pay for investigators and expert witnesses in capital cases.

Those extra resources were cut off when the state’s attorney took the death penalty off the table.

The two public defenders appointed to represent Michael Sr. and his son — Jeannette had the lone private defense attorney the family could afford — tried to have the case continued, saying the loss of investigators and their existing caseloads left them unable to adequately prepare for the trial.

The request was denied, as was a request by the defense to move the case out of Macon County, citing a jury pool they argued had been biased by extensive media coverage and public comments made by the state’s attorney.

The state built its case around the theory that Karyn’s plan to take Kolten and move out of state to pursue modeling had enraged the Slovers — especially Jeannette, whose attachment to her grandson, they argued, bordered on fixation.

And so, prosecutors said, Michael Jr. crafted an airtight alibi while his parents killed and dismembered Karyn when she came to pick up Kolten that Friday in September. They used concrete from the car lot to weigh down the bags, the state said, hoping her remains would sink to the bottom of Lake Shelbyville, never to be found.

The Slovers “staged” Karyn’s car along the interstate, one prosecutor said during the trial, to draw attention away from the crime scene at Miracle Motors, giving the family time to dispose of any evidence — witnesses testified to seeing Michael Jr. burning things and weed-whacking on the property shortly after Karyn disappeared.

Among the testimony presented during trial, jurors heard that the excavation at Miracle Motors uncovered jean rivets and a metal button. A state police forensic scientist testified that both appeared to match the type of buttons and rivets on the jeans Karyn was wearing when she died. The same forensic scientist said a burned cloth button from the lot was also similar to the cloth buttons on Karyn’s shirt.

Munroe, the Canadian geologist, testified that concrete and cinders at the lot were similar to those found with Karyn’s remains. The university professor who searched Miracle Motors for specific plants identified with Karyn’s body testified he located two of the three varieties at the car lot.

And, a little over a decade after human DNA analysis was first used in a criminal investigation, the state presented testimony from Dr. Joy Halverson, who said she analyzed DNA from a strand of dog hair stuck to the duct tape that sealed one of the bags containing Karyn’s remains and concluded it could have come from one of the Slovers’ dogs.

The defense team tried to poke holes in the state’s case, arguing, among other points, that the Slovers regularly burned discarded clothing or other belongings left in the cars they purchased at auction for resale, and that the city had issued a notice three days after Karyn’s disappearance to cut tall weeds.

Even if the hair belonged to the Slovers’ dog, defense attorneys argued, it could have been transferred from Kolten or Karyn at any time. And, during cross-examination, the university professor who testified about plants at the car lot also acknowledged that all three types found with Karyn’s remains also grew in his backyard.

The nearly five-week trial ended May 17, 2002, when the jury returned a unanimous verdict against the Slovers. All three received 60-year prison sentences for the murder; father and son were given an extra five years for concealing the crime.

Before sentencing, the family had a chance to make a statement. All three said they were innocent.

“I just hope that someday the truth comes out,” Michael Sr. said in his statement, “and that somehow everyone knows that we had nothing to do with this.”

Melany Jackson did not attend the trial. She didn’t need to. In her mind, she knew who killed Karyn the minute she learned her friend and co-worker was dead.

All these years later, she can’t remember where she was when the verdict came down, or how she found out the Slovers had been convicted. She just remembers her first thought when she heard the news.

Finally.

Part 5: The IL Innocence Project

In the spring of 2002, as the Slover trial was about to begin, a student at the University of Illinois at Springfield pitched a project idea for her legal studies class.

Her husband, a Champaign defense attorney, heard about the case, she told the professor. And it appeared to them to be little, if any, hard evidence of the family’s guilt.

Her professor was Larry Golden. About a year earlier, inspired by a conference organized by the attorneys behind the Innocence Project, Golden and two others started a similar effort, then called the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project.

One of the founders, Springfield private investigator Bill Clutter, was familiar with the Slover case, having briefly worked for the defense team when it had access to capital defense funds.

The student eventually presented her report to Golden’s class at the end of the semester, after the trial had ended. Her assessment was that the family was innocent, Golden, 80, recalled, “or at a minimum should never have been found guilty.”

“In our minds, we knew this case wasn’t right,” said Golden, who remains the project’s founding director on its leadership team.

At the start, students in Golden’s class worked with the family’s appellate attorney on a motion for post-conviction relief. And as the project grew and added staff, its attorneys eventually took on the Slovers’ case.

Along the way, the family’s efforts met resistance in the courts.

In 2009, for example, the Slovers asked for new testing on the fingerprint found near Karyn’s blood on the bridge guardrail at Lake Shelbyville, and on a print left on a fast-food bag in her car. The state opposed the testing; an appeals court agreed.

The state also fought the Slovers’ request for DNA testing.

“Generally,” Golden said, “prosecutors and judges at the local level tend to be extremely resistant to admission of error, reopening cases and, in some cases like the Slovers, any belief that there was a wrong committed and that the people could be innocent.”

Part 6: The Slovers’ defense

By 2014, a Macon County judge cleared the way for the family’s attorneys to pursue DNA testing.

A partial DNA profile found on a piece of duct tape that sealed one of the bags containing Karyn’s remains excludes all three Slovers, IIP attorneys said in the court filing. Instead, the profile points to at least two unknown people, one of whom is male.

Other pieces of evidence tested at the family’s request revealed DNA profiles that exclude Jeannette and her son, the petition reads. One of those profiles appears to belong to at least three unknown males.

Analysts were unable to extract a suitable profile from a piece of hair submitted by Michael Sr. for comparison to the additional DNA samples. Still, attorneys argued in court filings that the DNA results are enough to exonerate the Slovers.

And yet, the family’s petition goes further, attempting to pick apart, at length, key pieces of evidence used against the family: dog hair DNA analysis, comparisons of cinders and concrete, grasses, buttons and rivets.

“In the early 2000s, this so-called evidence was presented as new and novel scientific evidence,” IIP attorneys wrote in court filings. “Now, more than two decades later, this ‘evidence’ could only be considered new or novel because it was not, in fact, based on any real or existing science.”

IIP attorneys asked an Elgin-based laboratory to review Munroe’s work on the case, which the lab’s scientists concluded was flawed at “every level of the scientific process.”

“Peaks in X-ray diffraction” used by the Canadian geologists to match concrete samples from the Slovers car lot to concrete found with Karyn’s remains were, the lab’s scientists wrote in a report, “just peaks of some of the most common minerals used in concrete in Illinois.”

A research geneticist commissioned by the IIP examined case files from Halverson’s DNA testing of dog hair found with Karyn’s remains and concluded that her analysis linking that hair to hair from one of the Slovers’ dogs “appears to be plagued by several problems.”

“Even two decades ago,” the geneticist wrote, “several major issues with (Halverson’s) analysis should have prevented the admission of her canine DNA evidence.”

Halverson’s work in three other criminal cases faced similar criticism, IIP attorneys noted.

Munroe could not be reached for comment. Halverson, 69 and retired, said her lab used the best available resources for what was then the nascent field of animal DNA testing.

To criticize her work all these years later, she said, is akin to criticizing NASA for once sending astronauts to space without modern computers.

“Do I stand by my results? Absolutely,” she said. “But if they want to impugn them because of the lack of bells and whistles, so be it.”

The IIP petition also accused Macon County prosecutors of using false testimony and inflammatory closing arguments to convict the family; similar allegations led to new trials in two other Macon County criminal cases a year earlier.

During the Slover trial, the defense team tried to poke holes in the state’s theory that Karyn was killed at the Slovers’ car lot. To do so, they called more than one person who testified to seeing the Pontiac and its unique CADS 7 plate between 5:25 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. the Friday she disappeared, in locations miles east of Miracle Motors.

But those witnesses said the car they saw had lightly tinted windows. And the state put Swann on the stand to testify, more than once, that his car’s windows were clear.

Two IIP volunteers later tracked down the car’s current owner and records from General Motors, both of which confirmed that the Pontiac did have lightly tinted windows, just as witnesses testified.

Another piece of Swann’s trial testimony drew the ire of IIP attorneys. He told the court he first learned that Karyn’s purse was found in his Pontiac when he got to the stretch of interstate where it had been abandoned that Friday night and, he added, he was unable to share that information with Karyn’s parents.

And yet, after Michael Jr. spoke by phone to his mom that same night, he told a bar co-worker that Karyn was missing and her purse was left in the abandoned car.

How could the younger Slover have known about the purse, the state asked, unless his parents killed her?

But, a phone transcript included with the family’s petition shows that Swann was told about the purse when a Piatt County dispatcher first called him to say his car was found.

Additional phone records filed with the petition reveal that he and Karyn’s parents exchanged two separate phone calls less than 30 minutes after Swann spoke to the dispatcher, followed quickly by a third call from the bar where Michael Jr. worked to Karyn’s parents.

“This evidence is critical in explaining how Michael Slover Jr. would know that Karyn’s purse had been found with the car,” IIP attorneys wrote.

The state’s closing arguments, alone, merit a new trial, IIP attorneys said. At one point, prosecutor Richard Current compared the dog hair DNA analysis with the DNA testing done eight months earlier to identify 9/11 terrorist attack victims. He also suggested that Karyn could not have been killed by a stranger because there was no evidence of a sexual assault and she was “a very attractive lady.”

Part 7: The alternative suspects

There is also a question in the minds of IIP attorneys about what the jury did not hear during the trial.

Around 4:30 a.m. on the day Karyn’s remains were found in Lake Shelbyville, a police officer in the tiny village of Grant Park, about 20 miles northeast of Kankakee, pulled over a Ford Mustang with three people inside, records included in the family’s petition show.

The officer stood near the driver’s side door and spoke with the driver. Meanwhile, a Suzuki that had been traveling with the Ford continued down the street for a block, then turned back toward the officer, sped across the lane divider and struck the officer before smashing into his squad car.

Both the officer and the Suzuki’s driver were taken to the hospital. Authorities learned the Ford had been reported stolen three days earlier in Effingham, about 60 miles south of Decatur.

There had been a second man in the Suzuki who, authorities were later told, grabbed his gun from under the passenger seat and bailed before the car hit the officer.

Three days after the Grant Park crash, the names of the Suzuki’s two occupants would surface in a tip about Karyn’s murder.

A police officer in Charleston, 55 miles southeast of Decatur, met with a source who had been told that the Suzuki’s two occupants and a third man stole a car from the Charleston area and drove to Decatur because one of them knew Karyn and wanted to see her. The man who knew Karyn raped her while the other two held her down and then shot her in the head, the source told the officer. The three dismembered her body, put her remains in garbage bags and dumped them in a lake because they noted how long it took authorities to find an Eastern Illinois University student who had recently drowned.

Records in the IIP court filing show that investigators received at least two similar tips identifying the Suzuki’s two occupants as being two of the three men responsible for Karyn’s murder.

Investigators searched both cars involved in the Grant Park incident, collecting hairs and fibers from the Ford. They also searched a Champaign motel room that the men reportedly rented for two nights, Sept. 26 and 27 — the last two days Karyn was seen alive. They found no evidence connecting them to her murder, and the fingerprint found on the Lake Shelbyville bridge was not left by either man.

Four years after the Slovers were found guilty, the man tipsters said fired the shots that killed Karyn was convicted in Tennessee on three counts of statutory rape of a 14-year-old.

That means his DNA could be in the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS for short), an FBI-maintained database that contains more than 20 million DNA profiles.

But, IIP attorneys said, authorities have not entered the new DNA evidence from the Slover case into that database for any matches.

Part 8: ‘Who would do this?’

Michael Slover Jr. walked out of Robinson Correctional Center on March 15 of this year, paroled after 24 years behind bars. His mother’s projected parole date is in three more years.

About three weeks after Michael Jr.’s release, IIP attorneys filed into a Macon County courtroom for the first of what will likely be many hearings in their effort to overturn the family’s conviction. Before the next court date in July, they expect to have more DNA testing results they said would further prove the Slovers’ innocence.

“This would be almost the culmination of my career work with the project, with a belief that this injustice had been done,” Golden said. “I actually hope that I will be around to see some remedy to this.”

As for Kolten, the 3-year-old who became the crux of the prosecution’s case against his father and grandparents would eventually find himself at the center of another bitter court battle, this one a custody dispute between his aunt, Mary Slover, who legally adopted her nephew months before her family’s arrests, and Karyn’s parents, Larry and Donna Hearn.

In the end, the Hearns were awarded custody of Kolten, who is now approaching his 31st birthday.

Melany Jackson, Karyn’s friend and colleague, remains certain of the Slovers’ guilt. Now living in Colorado Springs, she said she did not intend to read the family’s latest court filing.

“Whatever evidence they’re going to put forth, I already know in my heart what happened,” she said. “I’m not interested in any efforts for them to be exonerated.”

Thomas, the former sheriff who took part in the initial investigation, said the evidence against the Slovers remains “overwhelming.”

“If not the Slovers,” he asked, “then who would do this?”