Police Couldn’t Crack This Cold Case For 50 Years Because Of One Wrong Detail 

Police Couldn’t Crack This Cold Case For 50 Years Because Of One Wrong Detail 

Did the murder happen in the car or outside the car? I think it happened in in the car. And what was the weapon that you used? In 1974, Mary Kathleen Schlais disappeared. She was found days later, stabbed and left buried in a snowbank on the side of a rural road. There was a witness. There was a description of the killer.

There was even a description of his car. For 50 years, none of it mattered. Every lead built from that description went nowhere because the description itself was wrong. It took 50 years for investigators to find out exactly how wrong. And when they did, it led them straight to the man responsible. Did you know when you walked in the door today, I knew right away what it was going to be about? On February 15th, 1974, 25-year-old Mary Schlais left her apartment in Minneapolis.

She was headed to an art show in Chicago, and she planned to get there the way she got most places, hitchhiking, holding up a sign with a city’s name on it and waiting for someone to stop. She never made it. That afternoon in [clears throat] rural Dunn County, Wisconsin, a driver passing along a quiet stretch of road saw a car pulled over.

He saw a man get out and pull something from the passenger side, then push it into a snowbank at the edge of the road. The car sped off. The driver called the police. When officers arrived, they found Mary’s body half buried in the snow. She’d been stabbed more than a dozen times. There were wounds on her hands, too, from trying to fight him off.

The sheriff at the time called it a brutal attack. He said it looked like she’d fought hard before she died. Investigators had a body. They had a cause of death. Beyond that, in the first hours of this case, they had almost nothing. No name for the man in the car. No way to know if he’d ever be found. Two things were left behind at the scene.

The first was a stocking cap dropped somewhere near where Mary’s body was found. Investigators didn’t know it yet, but that cap held hair. And inside that hair was DNA. In 1974, that meant almost nothing. The science to read it that way was decades [snorts] away. The second thing they had was the witness’s account.

He described the man he’d seen. White, around 6 ft tall, with auburn hair and a thick mustache. Somewhere in his late 20s or 30s. He also described the car. A newer model, gold in color, shaped like a Chevy Vega. Investigators built a sketch from that description and started working it. For a few days, it looked promising.

On February 19th, 4 days after Mary was found, a car matching that exact description showed up at a local mechanic’s shop. Police searched it. They waited for the owner. And when he arrived, they questioned him and let him go. He wasn’t the man they were looking for. It was the strongest lead they had, and it went nowhere.

They still had the sketch. They still had a description everyone trusted. What they didn’t know, and wouldn’t for another 50 years, was that the description itself was wrong. Years passed. Interviews led to more interviews. Tips led nowhere. The file got thicker without getting any closer to an answer. Different officers took over the case across the decades.

Some of them weren’t even born when Mary died. For her family, there was nothing to hold on to. No name, no arrest, no explanation. Just the same open file year after year. In 2009, with the family’s permission, investigators exhumed Mary’s body. DNA testing had changed enormously since 1974, and they wanted another look at what it could tell them now.

They recovered two distinct DNA profiles. They ran them against the national criminal database, the one built from the DNA of people who’d been arrested or convicted. Nothing matched. That meant one of two things. Either he’d never been caught for anything else in his life, or he’d simply never been arrested for anything that would have put his DNA in a system in the first place.

They had genetic evidence, finally, 35 years after the murder. What they didn’t have was a name to put to it. And there was no way yet to know how to find one. While that DNA sat unmatched, investigators were also looking somewhere else entirely. Around 2018, Dunn County detectives began seriously considering a different man for Mary’s murder.

His name was Randall Woodfield. Woodfield wasn’t a stranger to law enforcement. Years earlier, he’d been drafted by the Green Bay Packers and cut before he ever played a game for them. By the early 1980s, he was in custody in Oregon. Convicted of murdering 19-year-old Sherry Hull and attempting to murder 19-year-old Lisa Garcia.

Investigators across the country came to suspect him in dozens of other killings. Most of them near highway exits along the West Coast. People started calling him the I-5 Killer. Here’s why Dunn County looked at him. Around the time Mary was murdered, Woodfield was believed to be driving from Green Bay toward Oregon.

A route that would have taken him directly through Wisconsin. Photographs of him from that era showed a man with the same build, the same hair, and a mustache like the one the witness described. For a case that had gone nowhere for over 40 years, this was the first name that actually fit. But Woodfield was already serving a life sentence in another state for other murders, convicted years earlier.

Connecting him to Mary’s case wasn’t as simple as a hunch and a resemblance. Investigators needed something firmer than a photograph and a travel route. By the time this theory became public, it had real weight behind it. A convicted killer, a plausible timeline, a physical match to the only description anyone had.

No charges were ever filed against him for Mary’s murder. He was never cleared, either. Not fully. Not on the record. For investigators, that left the case exactly where it had been for decades. A name that might be the right one and no way to prove it either way. While that question sat open, a different search was starting.

 One that had nothing to do with photographs or travel routes. In 2022, Dunn County’s Sheriff’s Office began working with a genetic genealogy center at Ramapo College in New Jersey using the DNA from that stocking cap to build out a family tree instead of searching for a direct match. It led them to a man in Wyoming, a possible cousin.

They found him, spoke with him, and tested his DNA. He wasn’t connected the way they’d hoped. It led them to another relative in Michigan. Same result, another dead end. Each time the family tree pointed toward a branch that didn’t connect to anyone they could find. There was a gap where a name should have been.

Eventually, investigators considered a new possibility. What if the man they were looking for had been adopted as a child? His legal name and every official record would belong to a family he had no biological connection to at all, which would explain why decades of ordinary detective work never turned up his name.

It was a theory, but it fit everything that had gone wrong for 50 years. They still didn’t have a name. In October of 2024, that changed. Genealogists working the case identified a name for the first time in the investigation’s history. An 84-year-old man named John Keith Miller living quietly in an assisted living facility in Owatonna, Minnesota, less than 2 hours from where Mary had once lived.

Investigators needed to confirm it before they moved any further. They located Miller’s adult daughter and asked if she’d be willing to provide a DNA sample. She agreed. The results came back on November 4th, 2024. The DNA was consistent with a parent and child. John Keith Miller was almost certainly the source of the DNA recovered from that stocking cap 50 years earlier.

November 4th would have been Mary Schlais’s 76th birthday. Investigators now had what they’d been missing since 1974. A name. An address. A man they believed had killed Mary and walked free for half a century. What they didn’t know yet was whether he’d admit to any of it. On November 7th, 2024, two investigators from the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office drove to Miller’s apartment.

He was 84 years old by then and in poor health. He let them in and sat down with them. At first, he denied knowing anything about a murder from 50 years earlier. Investigators told him about the DNA, that it had been found at the scene right next to Mary’s body. They gave him a chance to explain it. Within a few minutes, he stopped denying it.

>> And what was the weapon that you used? I guess I had a dirty knife. He told them he’d picked up a young woman who was hitchhiking and that he asked her for sex. She said no. He said he had a knife stowed above the passenger side visor. And when she leaned forward in her seat, he reached for it and stabbed her.

He said he drove until he found a side road, pulled off, and tried to hide her body in a snow bank. While he was doing that, another car passed close behind him. He panicked thinking he’d been seen and left before he’d finished. Then he told investigators something that had stayed with him for 50 years. The day after the murder, he read a newspaper article about the case.

It described the suspect’s car completely wrong, different color, a different model than the car he’d actually been driving. From that moment on, he believed he’d gotten away with it. He also confirmed that the stocking cap recovered from the scene was his. He said he must have lost it that day without realizing it.

Investigators arrested him. 50 years earlier, he decided a stranger’s mistake meant he’d gotten away with it. He was wrong. He was now in custody charged with first-degree murder. What came next for an 84-year-old man accused of a 50-year-old crime wasn’t yet decided. On March 27th, 2025, John Keith Miller stood in a Dunn County courtroom and entered a plea of no contest to first-degree murder.

Judge James Peterson sentenced him to life in prison. The prosecutor, addressing the court, put a number on what it had taken to get there. 18,000 528 days. That’s how long it had been since Mary Schlais was killed. Mary’s niece, who was born after her aunt’s death and never knew her, spoke afterward. She said the family planned to visit the University of Minnesota, where Mary’s art still hangs.

And that for the first time, she felt like she could think about who Mary actually was, rather than only how she died. Part of the restitution ordered in the case is going to the genetic genealogy center that helped identify him. He’s now serving his sentence at a Wisconsin correctional facility. For 50 years, this case stayed unsolved because everyone trusted a detail that turned out to be wrong.

In the end, it wasn’t a memory that broke it open. It was something Mary’s killer never even knew he’d left behind.