She looked like she had been beat up and tortured. And later on, we had found out from the sheriff’s department that they believe she was tortured for weeks, if not months, before she finally passed away. And then they just dumped her. Everything’s so different now from then that maybe something will get out there through technology or through science to get more answers to find out who she is.

The way she was treated in life and in death was just heartbreaking. and I would love to see some justice come to her.  The utter barbaric brutality inflicted on this young woman is something that none of us will ever forget.  On the morning of July 21st, 1999, a man was walking his dog on 92nd Street in Raymond, Wisconsin, with his teenage daughter beside him.

 He noticed a drag mark in the dirt at the edge of a cornfield. The mark ran from the roadside into the rose. He followed it. A young woman was lying between the first and second rows of corn. Burns covered a quarter of her body. There were branding marks on her. Her nose was broken.  Several of her ribs were broken.

 Some of them long before she died and already knitting back together. And some of them after she was already dead. There was blunt force trauma to her head. She was underweight. Then the medical examiner noted something that did not fit. Most of the injuries were healing. Some were weeks old. Some were older than that.

 What had been done to her had not been done that night or the night before. It had been done over and over for a long time and she had kept living in between  that she was burnt and beaten and in the last few days of her life it escalated substantially.  The Rine County Sheriff’s Office started looking for a name. She had no identification on her.

 They checked missing person’s records in Wisconsin, then Illinois, then every state that would send them a file. They worked the tip line. They sent her sketch to police departments, hospitals, homeless shelters, and clinics across the region. Nothing matched. Nobody called. A young woman had been hurt for years by someone who had her.

 And in all that time, not one person had filed a report that looked anything like her. Whoever she was, nobody had noticed she was gone. That October, she was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Calonia. The stone they put over her did not have a name on it. It would be 20 years before anyone knew what to carve there. Her name was Peggy Lynn Johnson Schroeder.

 She was 23 years old.  She was born in Harvard, Illinois on the 4th of March, 1976. And the last time anyone in her hometown could remember seeing her, she was at a homecoming dance. The answer, when it finally came, did not come from the evidence.  It came from a phone call from a stranger in Florida. Before we go any further, if you’re new here, this channel covers cold cases that took decades to solve.

  Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you stay until the end of this one, you’ll find out why the science that was supposed to tell investigators where she came from pointed 2,000 mi in the wrong direction. Now, back to  the case. Peggy Lynn Johnson Schroeder grew up in Harvard, Illinois, a small farm town in Mckenry County near the Wisconsin line.

 She had a cognitive impairment. She could live on her own and handle herself dayto-day, but she had trouble reading people and she had trouble seeing when a situation had turned bad until it already had. Her family got smaller as she got older. Her father died, her brother died in 1994. Her mother, Diane, died, too. Peggy was 18.

 There was nobody left to move in with. She had no money and no place to go. That fall, she was at a homecoming dance in Harvard.  People remembered it later because it was the last time anyone in that town could put her in a room. Sometime after that, she walked into a medical clinic in the Mckenry area and asked for help.

 She was not sick. She needed food and somewhere to sleep.  A nurse who worked at the clinic sat down with her. She found out that Peggy’s mother had died, that Peggy had nowhere to live, and that there was no family left to call.  Then she made Peggy an offer. She had five children and a house. Peggy could move in, keep the house, and watch the  kids.

 In exchange, she would have a bedroom and meals. For an 18-year-old with no money, no relatives, and nowhere to sleep that night, it was not a hard decision. It was the only offer she had. Peggy said yes. She moved into the house before the end of the year. She had no phone of her own. She had no address that anyone back in Harvard wrote down.

 The people who had known her stopped seeing her around. And because she had always been quiet, and because she had just had a terrible year, nobody thought much about it.  Nobody in Harvard ever saw her again. What happened inside that house came out 23 years later in a rine county courtroom from the people who had lived in it.

  The nurse’s own children took the stand as adults and described what they had watched as kids. At the start, the arrangement worked the way it had been described. Peggy cleaned.  She watched the children. She had a place to sleep and food to eat. It did not stay that way. It began with yelling.

  Court records described it as yelling at her the way a person yells at an animal. Then it was slapping. Then it was punching her in the head in the face. The children testified that their mother beat Peggy. One of them described watching her stab Peggy in the head with a pitchfork.  And she was really part of the family. I mean, she was included in everything that we did.

 Relationship at times it was it was heated.  How a lot of yelling  about what  you name it. I mean, it just it I couldn’t put a finger on it, but just a lot a lot of constant yelling.  Peggy stopped sleeping in a bedroom. She was put in the crawl space, the low unfinished gap underneath the floor of the house.

 The kind of space a family uses to store things they do not need. That is where she slept. The burns came from chemicals. By the end, they covered a quarter of her body. They were not in one place and they were not from one incident. They were spread across her in layers. Some healed, some healing, some fresh. She was fed less and less.

 She got thinner  and she stayed. There is a question people ask about cases like this and it deserves a straight answer. Peggy had a cognitive impairment. She did not have money. She did not have a phone. She did not have a relative to call because there were none left. The only address she had in the world was the house she was being heard in.

 She had been homeless once already, and she knew exactly what waiting for her outside that door looked like. Leaving was not a door she could not find. It was a door with nothing behind it.  The children knew. They saw it happen and they lived in that house, too. And they were kids. Their mother is the one who fed them and drove them and put them to bed.

 There was nothing a child in that house could do about what was happening in it.  5 years went by that way. Her body kept a record of all of it. Ribs broke and knit back together crooked. Her nose broke. There was trauma to her head. Wounds opened and were not cleaned  and were not closed.

 And the infection worked inward and settled in her lungs. She was never taken to a doctor. The woman who had her was a nurse. In July of 1999, the nurse’s husband came home and found Peggy lying on the floor, not moving. He asked what had happened. His wife told him she would take care of it. She told him she would get rid of the body so the family would not be dragged into it.

 He did not call an ambulance. He did not call the police.  He put the children in the car and took them out for ice cream. Johnson.  I had come home and uh Peggy was laying in the yard and I yelled out, “Call an ambulance.” And Linda said, “No, please just take the kids. I know what to do for Peggy.”  He says he took the kids for ice cream, came home, saw Peggy Johnson sitting upright, but apparently unconscious in Lar Ro’s car.

 They left, and he never saw her again.  On that day, you thought 911 should have been called.  Yes.  But you didn’t. No, I didn’t.  His wife was gone a little over 2 hours. She drove north out of Illinois and across the state line into Wisconsin about 40 m to a stretch of Farm Road in Rine County. She pulled onto the shoulder of 92nd Street.

 She dragged Peggy out of the vehicle and into the corn far enough from the road that a person driving past would not see anything, and she left her between the first and second rows. Then she drove home to her five children. The medical examiner would put a cause of death on the certificate that was not a stab wound, not a gunshot, not a blow to the head.

 Peggy Lynn Johnson Schroeder died of sepsis pneumonia. Her body had been broken and burned and starved for years, and an infection got into it, and she died of that infection over some unknown stretch of hours or days while she was still inside that house. She was 23 years old. When Rine County deputies stood in that cornfield on the morning of July 21st, they had none of this.

 They had a young woman with old injuries and new ones. No identification, no witnesses, and no idea what state she had come from. They had a body that told them she had been tortured for years. And they had nobody in the entire country reporting anyone like her missing. In a normal homicide, investigators start with the victim and work outward.

 They talk to her family, her co-workers, her landlord, her  boyfriend. Somewhere inside that circle of people is usually the person who did it.  The circle is the case. Here, there was no circle. No name meant no family to interview, no job  to check, no apartment to search, no phone records to pull, no last known address, no list of people who had ever been angry with her.

 There was nothing to work outward from because there was no center.  What Rine County had was a body and what the body could tell them. A woman somewhere between 18 and 35. Brown hair to her shoulders with blonde run through it. Pierced ears. Bad teeth that  came forward at the front. A shirt with flowers on it.

 Biological material under her fingernails that matched nobody.  Four detectives caught the case at the start. Over the years, it narrowed to two. Jim Dany and Eileen Riley, who kept working a file that refused to open. In October of 1999, 3 months after she was found, Rine County buried her. Nobody at that grave had known her.

 Nobody could say where she was born or what she liked or who she had loved. They came anyway because she had been left in a cornfield  and somebody ought to stand there.  She had no family. No one knew who she was. So we felt like, you know, I’ll be our family for now.  Deputies carried her casket.  She went into the ground in a county she had never lived in, in a state she had likely never set foot in until the night she was driven across the line in the back of a car.

 Most cold cases have somebody waiting. A mother who calls the sheriff’s office every year on the anniversary. A sister at every press conference.  A father who puts up a billboard and keeps it there for 30 years. The case stays warm because one person refuses to let it cool. Peggy had nobody,  and that is exactly why she was chosen.

 Everything that had been done to her had been possible because she was a young woman with no parents, no siblings, no address, and no one who would pick up a phone if she stopped appearing. So, the sheriff’s office became the family. They kept the file open. They took the anniversary calls. They drove  out to the cemetery. A cold case investigator named Tracy Hints took the case on and would not put it down.

 Asked once whether it had become her life’s work, she did not soften it.  She said she would keep going until she identified her and until the people responsible answered for it. The years went anyway. Detectives retired, new ones came in, read the file from page one, and hit the same wall. Databases grew and searches got faster, and every search came back the same.

 Because the problem was never technological.  You cannot match a body to a missing person report that was never filed. In 2011, a lead came out of a shelter in FondeLac that looked like it might finally be her. Investigators worked it all the way down. It was not her. In 2012, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children built a new image of her face using methods that had not existed in 1999.

 It went out to the media and to police agencies across the country. A fresh wave of tips came in. None of them were hers. Then in 2013, 14 years after they buried her, the sheriff’s office did something most agencies never do. They dug her up. They took her out of the ground in Calonia and sent her for testing that had not been possible when she was found.

 The science was isotope analysis. Minerals from the water a person drinks and the food a person eats get laid down permanently in bone and in hair and different regions of the continent leave different signatures. In theory, her own body could say where she had lived. It was the best idea anyone had in 14 years.

 2 years later, with the analysis still running, they put her back in the ground.  The rebarial was July 21st, 2015, 16 years to the day from the morning the man walking his dog saw the drag mark in the dirt. Sheriff Christopher Schmalling stood in front of the cameras that day and did not dress it up. He said he hoped to replace that stone one day with one that had her name on it.

 He said he was embarrassed that they still had to call her Jane Doe.  In 2016, the analysis came back from the Smithsonian Institution. The signature in her bones pointed to Alaska or Montana or southern Canada. Investigators turned north and west. They contacted agencies in those regions and pushed her face out into places 2,000 mi from Rine County.

 Peggy Lynn Johnson Schroeder had lived her whole life in northern Illinois. She was born in Harvard, 40some miles from the cornfield she was found in. She had never been to Alaska. Whatever her bones were recording, it was not a childhood in the north. And the one piece of science that was supposed to finally point at her pointed the investigation away from the only place it needed to look.

 That is how close this came to never being solved at all. 40 mi south across the Illinois line, the woman who put her in that cornfield was living an ordinary life. She raised her five children. She worked as a nurse. She had never been arrested, never been questioned, never had her name typed onto any page of any file in Rine County.

 In 2013, the same year they exumed Peggy, she moved to Florida. For 20 years, this case was not missing a piece of evidence. It was missing a sentence. Somebody had to say out loud what had happened. At the end of September 2019, a woman in Cape Coral, Florida, picked up the phone, and called the Rine County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin.

 She said there was a woman in her life who had been talking about something she did back in Illinois  in 1999. The woman said she had killed someone. She had not said it once. She had said it more than once to more than one person.  Her name was Linda Su Lar Ro. She had never been arrested. She had never been charged with anything.

  In 20 years of investigation across multiple states, her name had never appeared anywhere in the Rine County file. Not in a tip, not on a list, not in a single line of a single report. There was no version of that investigation that was ever going to reach her. She was not caught. She was reported by 2019.

 She was living in Cape Coral, Florida. A registered nurse who had worked in medicine for decades, raised five children, and moved south. And somewhere in those years, she started talking about it, not once. In a moment, she regretted  more than once, to more than one person. She told people in her life that she had killed a woman in Illinois in 1999.

 Nobody has ever explained why. She had gotten away with it completely.  There was no investigation anywhere near her, no evidence pointing at her, and nobody had ever reported Peggy missing. She said it out loud anyway, and one of the people she said it to picked up a phone. Investigators went to her children first.

  They were adults now with homes of their own, no longer children, living under their mother’s roof. Nobody had ever asked them anything.  In 20 years, no officer had ever knocked on a door looking for Peggy because no officer anywhere had a reason to. They had grown up carrying what they saw in that house, and not one person with a badge had ever put a question to them about it.

 When someone finally did, they  answered. So did her ex-husband. Then detectives flew to Florida and sat down with Lar Ro herself.  She talked. She did not confess, but she said enough that investigators later described her statements as incriminating.  With that, for the first time since 1999, they had somewhere to look for Peggy’s identity.

They were not searching a database anymore.  They were following people. The children knew who had lived in that house. From there, investigators located Peggy’s remaining relatives, and DNA comparison did what 20 years of sketches and searches had not. On November 5th, 2019, Linda Sue Lar Ro was arrested in Cape Coral, Florida, and charged with firstdegree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse.

 She waved extradition to Wisconsin. 3 days later, on November 8th, Sheriff Christopher Schmalling stood in front of the cameras again. This time, he was not there to say he was embarrassed. He said her name, Peggy Lynn Johnson Schroeder of Harvard, Illinois, 23 years old when she died. The people who had stood at a stranger’s grave in October of 1999 finally knew whose grave it was.

 The trial took nearly three more years to arrive. It did not move and then it kept not moving. Lar Ro appeared in court without an attorney. Hearings were set and pushed. Then the pandemic closed the courts and a case that had already waited two decades went to the back of a line with no end date on it.

 It finally began in March of 2022 and ran 7 days. Lar Roa’s account of Peggy’s  last day had never held still. Over the years, she had said she left Peggy at a restaurant to meet her grandmother.  She had said she took Peggy to a restaurant to meet someone whose name she did not know. In the end, she admitted she had driven Peggy across the state line and dropped her at the side of a rural road in Wisconsin, alive and uninjured, and driven home.

 The problem with that version was the body. A woman dropped off unharmed at a roadside does not die of sepsis pneumonia from infected wounds she has been carrying for months.  Peggy’s injuries were in stages of healing going back years, and no version of events beginning on a Wisconsin roadside  could account for a single one of them. Her ex-husband took the stand.

A woman who had been held in jail alongside her testified as well. And her own children went into a witness box one after another and told a jury what their mother had done. The people who grew up in that house were the people who put her away.  It’s still  hard for me to grasp that she even did this knowing her now.

We had no inkling of this ever being her.  Friends are still trying to grasp the story.  I was hysterical crying. None of us believed it until they put her picture up behind it, you know. And I said, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” And she said, “Yeah.” But at the end of the text, she said to me, “Bye-bye.

” And I thought that was weird.  You hear these stories all the time about people that you know and you meet. You would never know another side to them. Well, this is one. We didn’t know this side.  In closing,  Assistant District Attorney Diane Donahoo laid out the motive.

 Lar Ro was jealous of Peggy because Peggy was loved by Lar Ro’s children.  The word the state used was scorned. The jury deliberated for less than two hours. On March 16th, 2022,  they convicted her on both counts. Lar Ro sat stonefaced while the verdict was read. On May 23rd, Judge Timothy Bole sentenced her to life in prison  without the possibility of parole, plus five consecutive years for hiding the body.  She was 66 years old.

Afterward, Sheriff Schmalling said what the previous 23 years had been about. His office would never forget or stop working a cold case homicide. She did not accept it. From prison, Lar Ro filed to overturn the conviction, and her argument was that somebody else had killed Peggy.  We hope you suffer in the ways Peggy’s poor soul did.

 This is injustice. I’m [snorts] sorry. I didn’t do anything like that. I’m innocent. I’m going to fight this to the end.  She lies. She thinks she’s a good liar and she is not.  She pointed to another case. In September of 1999, a 34year-old woman named Mary Kate Sunderland disappeared from Carpentersville, Illinois.

 That December, her body was found in a forest preserve. She had been tortured over a period of time. She was malnourished.  Her injuries, like Peggy’s, were in different stages of healing. Lar Roa’s filings also raised the unidentified biological material that had been recovered from under Peggy’s fingernails and had never matched anyone.

 Two women, both tortured over a long period, both left outdoors, found 5 months apart. Her lawyers argued a jury should have been allowed to consider that one person did both. The courts did not agree. To put a third party in front of a jury, the defense has to do more than raise a resemblance.  it has to name someone and show that person had a motive and an opportunity.

 Lar Ro never named anyone. The circuit court denied the motion in April of 2024. And on  August 13th, 2025, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed her conviction, holding that possible suspicion is not the same thing as a connection. There was also this. Three men had already been convicted in connection with Mary Kate Sunderland’s death.

 Peggy was not in Wisconsin to hear any of it. On March 4th,  2020, before the trial ever started, she was taken out of the ground in Calonia for the last time and driven back across the state line into Illinois. She was buried at Highland Garden of Memories in Belvadier next to her mother, Diane, and her grandparents.  It’s been a roller coaster for sure.

 Megan Rios was the one who found her body. She said for the past 23 years, Peggy was a huge piece of her life. My dad and I went to her funeral and it was just disheartening that she was a Jane Doe and nobody knew who she was. So we did kind of consider her like definitely part of my life.  A Rine County funeral home later to rest twice.

 Once as Jane Doe and again when she was identified so her body could be with her family’s graves in Belvadier, Illinois.  I think she was a part of everybody in Reine’s family cuz everybody came together to make sure she had a final resting place. March 4th was her birthday.  She would have been 44. Her family came and people who had worked the case came and they gave her a headstone with her name on it.

 The money for all of it, moving her, burying her, the stone, came from donations from people around the country who read about a woman nobody had reported missing and sent what they could. There was enough left over to buy new headstones for her mother and her grandmother, too. In 1994,  an 18-year-old girl in Harvard, Illinois, buried her mother, and there was no one left to take her in, and she walked into a clinic and asked a stranger for help.

For 5 years after that, no one came looking. For 20 years after that, no one knew her name. She is buried beside her mother now, under a stone that says who she is. It was paid for  by strangers. If this case stayed with you, let me know your thoughts in the comments and tell me where you’re watching from.