Indiana police identify killer in 1997 Angela Saco murder

Angela Saco’s 1997 murder sat cold for nearly three decades, hidden in a file that had outlasted witnesses, leads and memory itself. Now Indiana police say the 25-year-old Fort Wayne mother was killed by Stephen Shlater, a man who had already died by the time advanced DNA work finally named him.

Saco’s body was found on December 21, 1997, on Huntington County Reservoir property off County Road 100 East, north of County Road 100 South. An autopsy confirmed she died from stab wounds. Witnesses last saw her at her workplace in Fort Wayne during the early morning hours of the day she disappeared. She was the mother of a 2-year-old son.

The original investigation drew a major response from the Huntington County Coroner’s Office, the Huntington County Sheriff’s Department, Indiana Conservation Officers and Indiana State Police. Detectives interviewed nearly 100 people, but they never developed enough probable cause to charge anyone. That dead end held for years, until preserved evidence from the scene was submitted in 2024 for advanced testing.

Indiana State Police formed a Cold Case Unit in 2024, and that unit leaned on forensic investigative genetic genealogy to revive the case. The evidence went to Identifinders International, a California-based forensic genealogy company founded by Colleen Fitzpatrick. Investigators said the work produced a DNA profile using SNP testing, then genealogists built out family-tree leads that pointed to Shlater. In February 2026, forensic genetic genealogists identified him as a candidate suspect. STR testing later confirmed that Shlater was the contributor of DNA recovered from the crime scene.

Police said Stephen Shlater had been released from federal prison in spring 1997, about five months before Saco was killed. His last known residence was in Markle, Indiana. He died in 2021, and an obituary listed Stephen L. Shlater Sr. as 73 when he died on July 5, 2021, at his residence in Markle. Prosecutor Jeremy Nix said Shlater would have been charged if he were alive.

The solve gives Saco’s family an answer the case never could in 1997. It also shows what modern genealogy-driven DNA work can do now that the original investigation, despite nearly 100 interviews and a massive response, could not do then: turn preserved evidence into a name, and a name into accountability, long after the trail had gone cold.