WISCONSIN 1974 Cold Case Solved After 50 Years — Her Killer Was Finally Caught at 84

On February 15th, 1974, Mary Schlais left her apartment in Minneapolis carrying a small cardboard sign. It just said, “Madison.” She was 25 years old hitchhiking to an art show in Chicago. 3 hours later, she was dead in a snowbank 90 miles away. Police found a stocking cap near her body    with hairs on it.

They had a sketch of the killer’s face. They had the color of  his car. They had everything except his name. For 50 years, that’s where the case stayed. When the break finally came, it didn’t come from a tip. It came from a DNA database that didn’t exist when Mary was alive, built from a genealogy test her own relative never meant to send.

Some cases don’t just go cold, they go quiet so long that everyone who worked them retires or dies  still wondering. This is the story of the one that didn’t stay that way. If you want more stories about people who never stopped looking, hit subscribe. But before we get to the man who did this, you need to know who Mary Schlais actually was.

Who was Mary Schlais? Mary Kathleen Schlais was born on November 11th, 1949    and raised in Champlin, Minnesota, a small town just northwest of Minneapolis. She had two siblings and by every account from people who knew her, she was the kind of person who made a room feel bigger just by being in it.

 She graduated [ __ ] laude from the University of Minnesota paying her way through school on scholarships. That alone would have made her family proud. But Mary didn’t stop there. She was working toward her master’s degree studying art and she had a mind that seemed to soak up everything around it. She spoke fluent German.

 She spoke Danish and at the time she died, she was teaching herself Japanese just because she wanted to. This was the early 1970s, a time when young people, especially young women, were pushing back against the idea that the world was too dangerous to explore on your own. Mary embraced that completely. She had traveled through Europe, often getting from city to city the same way she got around the Midwest, by sticking out her thumb.

 She’d done it dozens of times. Nothing had ever gone wrong. To Mary and a lot of people her age in 1974, hitchhiking wasn’t reckless. It was just how you got where you were going when you didn’t have much money and a lot of curiosity. Her brother Don would later describe her life simply. “Her life was pretty much about her love of horses and art,” he said.

 “She was an equestrian, spending as much time as she could around horses.    She was an artist who worked with real skill, not just as a hobby, and she was, by every measure, someone with a future that was just getting started.” What made Mary specific, not just another bright young woman from Minnesota, was how she carried all of that talent.

 She wasn’t showing off her scholarships or her languages. She was the kind of person who’d hitchhike across an entire country because she wanted to see an art show, then come home and tell you about it like it was the most natural thing in the world. On the morning of February 15th, 1974, she was doing exactly that.

She said goodbye to her roommate Judith, grabbed her cardboard sign, and walked out the door of her Uptown Minneapolis apartment. She’d made a plan. Hitchhike to Madison, Wisconsin, then hitchhike again from Madison down to Chicago for an art show she didn’t want to miss. She had made this kind of trip before.

Rides had come and gone without incident dozens of times. There was no reason, based on everything she’d experienced up to that point, to think this one would be any different. Would you have done the same thing in her position,    trusting a system that had never let you down before? Let us know what you think down below.

If Mary’s story is one you think more people should know, hitting like on this video helps make sure it reaches them. The day it happened. February 15th, 1974. A Friday. The temperature in Minnesota was cold enough that Mary wore a tan, fur-lined winter coat over a maroon turtleneck and jeans. At around 10:30 in the morning, Mary left her Kenwood apartment in Uptown, Minneapolis.

   Her roommate, Judith Daniel, watched her go. Mary was carrying her purse and holding her cardboard sign, the one with Madison written on it in plain letters. She walked toward Interstate 94, the highway that would carry her east out of the city. Hitchhiking on Interstate 94 was something Mary had done often enough that nobody thought twice about it.

She’d get picked up by a stranger, ride for a while, and get dropped off somewhere closer to where she needed to be. It was a system built entirely on trust, and in the early 1970s, that trust was the norm, not the exception. Truckers, students, and families driving cross-country all understood the unspoken rule.

You stopped for the person on the shoulder with a sign, and you got them a little closer to home. That morning, somewhere along that stretch of highway, a man in a gold-colored compact car pulled over and offered her a ride. Nobody knows exactly what was said in that car. What we do know is what happened next.

About 90 miles from her apartment in rural Dunn County, Wisconsin, a local man named Dennis Anderson was driving home from a store with his dog in the car. His dog wanted a longer ride, so instead of heading straight home, Anderson turned down a dead-end road near an intersection close to Elk Creek Lake. That’s when he saw it.

Two people  struggling, fighting. He didn’t stop right away. He kept driving past, the way you do when your brain hasn’t quite caught up to what your eyes just saw. But something about it stuck with him, and a few minutes later,    he turned his car around and went back. By the time he returned, the gold compact car was gone.

 In its place was a young woman lying in the snow beside the road. Back in Minneapolis, nobody had any idea yet. Judith wouldn’t have expected Mary home that night. She was supposed to be on the road, working her way towards Chicago, one ride at a time. It would take hours before anyone who loved Mary understood that she was never going to make it there.

If a story like this makes you want to know how it finally got solved, sharing it with someone else is one of the best ways to help it reach them. The discovery. It was around 1:00 in the afternoon when Dennis Anderson pulled his car back around and got a full look at what he’d driven past. A young woman was lying in the snow near the intersection of 408th Avenue and 990th Street in the Township of Spring Brook, roughly 10 miles northwest of Menomonie.

She was dead. The Dunn County Sheriff’s Office was called immediately, and Sheriff Daryl Sagen’s investigators arrived to find a scene that told a brutal specific story. The medical examiner would later determine that the young woman had been stabbed somewhere between 13 and 15 times  in the chest, the neck, and the abdomen.

It was fast and it was vicious.  Tire tracks in the snow matched a compact car investigators believe to be the same gold vehicle Anderson had noticed. Whoever did this hadn’t planned to leave a body in a snowbank in broad daylight in a spot where anyone driving by might see. He’d made a decision in a moment of panic and it showed.

 She was wearing a maroon turtleneck and blue dyed socks. Her long tan coat, the one she’d left her apartment in that morning, was gone. So was her purse. Neither would ever be recovered. Based on Dennis Anderson’s description, investigators put together a sketch and a rough  profile. A white male somewhere between 25 and 35 years old, about 5 ft 8 in tall, slim build with light brown hair.

 It was specific enough to feel promising and vague enough to match thousands of men across two states. Investigators found a phone number on her tied to a Minneapolis restaurant. That single detail let police work backward and identify her within a day. Her brother Don would formally identify her body. Her name was Mary Kathleen Schlais.

But there was one more piece of physical evidence at the scene. One that would end up mattering more than anyone in 1974 could have possibly known. A stocking cap, a simple winter hat left behind near her body. At the time, it was just an object, a clue that didn’t have a name attached to it yet.

 Investigators bagged it, logged it, and kept it. There was no way in 1974 to pull DNA from a hair. That technology didn’t exist. So, the cap went into evidence storage where it would sit for decades waiting for science to catch up to what it already knew. The investigation and why it went cold. In the days  after Mary’s body was found, the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office did real work.

They interviewed Dennis Anderson  extensively and used his description to build a sketch of the man he’d seen. They canvassed the area around Spring Brook Township. They tracked down the phone number found on Mary’s body and used it to identify her fast. They knew the make and general color of the car.

They had a cause of death, a location, and a timeline. What they didn’t have was DNA testing and they didn’t have it for a simple reason. It didn’t exist yet. Genetic fingerprinting as a forensic tool wouldn’t be developed until the mid-1980s and even then it took years to become something small departments like Dunn County’s could actually use.

 In 1974, evidence like the stocking cap could be preserved, but it couldn’t be read. Investigators worked leads for years. Tips came in from across Minnesota and Wisconsin. Detectives interviewed men who vaguely matched the sketch, checked alibis,  and chased down every lead that seemed even remotely promising.

None of them led anywhere solid. Case files piled up, got reviewed by new detectives inheriting the file from retiring ones, and got set back down again. Then in 2009, the case took an unusual turn. Mary’s body was exhumed and new  DNA testing was run on evidence connected to the crime. Two years later in 2011, investigators had a name they thought might finally close the case, Randall Woodfield.

Woodfield had been a standout college football player, drafted by the Green Bay Packers before being cut without ever playing a game. He would later become infamous as the I-5 Killer, linked to as many as 44 murders and dozens of rapes along Interstate 5 in Oregon, Washington, and California between 1980 and 1981.

Investigators determined that in February of 1974, Woodfield had been traveling from Portland toward Green Bay on a route that would have taken him directly past Dunn County, Wisconsin. He matched the general description Dennis Anderson had given decades earlier. His victims tended to be young, white women in their 20s, physically similar to Mary.

For a while, it looked like the case might finally have an answer, but there was a problem. The 2018 DNA results that pointed toward Woodfield weren’t a match. They were simply a failure to rule him out. Woodfield was already serving a 90-year sentence for a different murder, and he had never confessed to any of his other suspected crimes.

Investigators never got the chance to formally interview him about Mary. The lead went nowhere. It was a wrongly suspected direction the case had spent years chasing, not because investigators were careless, but because it was the best evidence available at the time. The case went quiet, not dead, dormant. Sheriffs retired.

 Detectives who had worked the file their whole careers moved on or passed away,    never knowing the name of the man who did it. The person who did it. The man in that gold compact car was named John C. Miller. He was born on May 2nd, 1940, and by the time he picked Mary Schlais up on the side of Interstate 94,    he was 33 years old.

 Miller’s life up to that point had followed a pattern, one that any honest look back makes hard to miss.    In 1959 and 1960, he was convicted twice for forgery and served time at Minnesota’s State Reformatory in St. Cloud. He was paroled in January of 1963, and less than a year later, he married his first wife. That marriage revealed something darker.

According to that first wife, Miller was violent. In one incident, she said, he broke her jaw and dragged her body down a street. He would also disappear for stretches of time without explanation. During one of those disappearances, in September of 1965, he was arrested in Flagstaff, Arizona, for breaking into an auto supply store.

   Police there also connected him to a burglary back in Austin, Minnesota, where a service  station had been robbed of cash, a shotgun, and cigarettes. Miller was convicted and  sentenced to two to three years in prison. He served just 13 months before being released.

 While he was locked up, his wife filed for divorce, citing what the court records called cruel and inhuman treatment. By 1967, Miller had made his way to California. There, his pattern continued. A petty theft conviction, a burglary arrest that was later dismissed,    and then, in 1969, an armed robbery, where Miller used a loaded gun to threaten a convenience store clerk.

That conviction sent him to San Quentin State Prison. Here is the detail that matters most. Miller was released from San Quentin on May 5th, 1972. Less than 2 years later, on February 15th, 1974, he picked up a 25-year-old art student hitchhiking on Interstate 94 and stabbed her to death when she refused his advances.

The system had every reason to see this coming. A man with convictions for forgery, armed robbery, and documented domestic violence released from one of the country’s most notorious prisons was walking free in the Twin Cities less than 2 years before he committed murder. There was no national system in place to flag that history to anyone who crossed his path.

 No database connecting a Minnesota parole to a Wisconsin roadside. He was simply a man with a record driving a car, picking up a hitchhiker on a highway. What happened after is almost harder to process than what came before. Miller went on to live an ordinary life. He married again in 1973, settling in a Minneapolis suburb. In the decades after Mary’s murder, his only recorded run-ins with police were minor.

A drunk driving arrest in 1994 and a public intoxication charge in Iowa in 2014. He eventually moved into an apartment in Austin, Minnesota located directly across the street from the police department. Officers there had no documented contact with him in the decade he lived there. He later moved into an assisted living facility in Owatonna.

He was to everyone around him simply an old man. A man with his record released from San Quentin less than 2 years before he killed Mary walked past a police department every single day for a decade and was never once stopped. Do you think a criminal history like his should have kept him on someone’s radar long before a DNA test ever did? The breakthrough, the tool that finally broke this case open didn’t exist in any form investigators could have imagined in 1974.

It’s called investigative genetic genealogy and it works by taking DNA from a crime scene and comparing it not to a single suspect but to public genealogy databases full of ordinary people who submitted their own DNA just to learn about their ancestry. Here’s how it works in plain terms. If your distant cousin uploads their DNA to a genealogy website to build a family tree and your DNA happens to share enough small matching segments with theirs, genealogists can use that connection to work backward.

They build out a family tree from the matches they find branch by branch, generation by generation until they narrow it down to the handful of people who could have contributed the original sample. It’s less like finding a fingerprint and more like reconstructing an entire family reunion just from a handful of guests who happened to show up.

In 2023, the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey. The center had only opened its doors the year before and Mary’s case would become its very first investigation to end in an arrest. Their staff and volunteers took the DNA profile developed decades earlier from the hair on that stocking cap and began building out a genetic family tree from public database matches.

 It wasn’t simple. John Miller had been adopted as a child which meant the biological family members showing up in the genetic matches had no idea he even existed. It took the team more than a year of painstaking work tracing branch after branch of a family tree that didn’t know it included him before they finally arrived at a name, John Keith Miller.

Investigators went to Miller’s biological daughter first. They asked her for a DNA sample, and she agreed. When the results came back, the hair from the stocking cap found beside Mary’s body wasn’t just similar to her DNA. It was a match to her biological father. On November 7th, 2024, investigators went to Miller’s apartment at the assisted living facility in Owatonna.

When they told him what they’d found, Miller initially denied any knowledge of Mary Schlais or her murder. For a moment, it looked like 50 years of silence might hold for just a little longer. Then investigators laid out the evidence piece by piece, the DNA profile, the match to his own daughter, the stocking cap that had sat in evidence storage since before some of the officers in that room had been born.

Something in him gave way. He confirmed that the stocking cap was his. Building the case. Once Miller confirmed the cap belonged to him, the confession followed, calm and almost business-like, the way people sometimes describe things they’ve replayed in their heads for decades. He told investigators that on February 15th, 1974, he had picked up Mary Schlais while she was hitchhiking near Uptown Minneapolis.

As they drove toward Wisconsin, he said, he made a sexual advance. Mary refused him. According to Miller, that refusal was what triggered the violence. He said he reached for a knife he kept stashed in the car near the sun visor and stabbed her in the back. He kept stabbing until she stopped fighting  back.

Then he pulled off the road and tried to hide her body in the snowbank. Investigators had waited 50 years for this moment, and Miller gave it to them almost matter-of-factly. “I picked this girl up. I asked for sex, and she said no, and I stabbed her and put her in a snowbank.” Miller later said, describing the killing in an interview from jail.

“Maybe I have no feelings. I have no idea.” He was arrested on November 7th, 2024, at  84 years old and taken into custody at the Steele County Detention Center in Minnesota, while extradition to Wisconsin was arranged. Everything he told investigators that day lined up with the physical evidence collected from the scene 50 years earlier.

 The stab wounds to her back,    the roadside location, the snowbank, the missing coat and purse. There was nothing left to argue about. Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Begg learned the case had finally broken while he was out in a deer stand. “I had a difficult time controlling my excitement.” Begg said. He thought about the investigators who had worked the file over five decades, many of whom had since retired, and some who had died without ever learning Mary’s killer’s name.

“I’ve been through with every investigator that’s picked this up and ran with it and got to a dead end.” Begg said. Miller also told investigators something about how he’d evaded suspicion all those years ago. He described a moment right after the murder when another car had pulled up behind him. “I thought I was caught.” he said.

 But the description that appeared in the next day’s newspaper described a different car than his own. “I figured, well, I got away with it.” he said. For 50 years, he had been right. Sentencing. There was no trial. Prosecutor Andrea Amadon Nodolf and defense attorneys Travis Satorius and Shelley Tomchick had already reviewed the evidence in the weeks before, and Miller’s side made it clear he wouldn’t be contesting the charge.

On March 27th, 2025, in a Dunn County courtroom, John Keith Miller entered a plea of no contest to one count of first-degree intentional homicide. Under Wisconsin law, that charge carries a mandatory life sentence. By pleading no contest instead of forcing a trial, Miller spared Mary’s surviving from having to sit through a courtroom retelling of exactly how she died.

Judge James Peterson accepted the plea. “Mr. Miller, I do hereby sentence you to life imprisonment in the Wisconsin prison system,” Peterson said. Miller was also ordered to pay $2,200 in restitution to Mary’s family, along with roughly $480 to cover the cost of extraditing him from Minnesota. When given the  chance to speak, Miller declined.

 He offered nothing to the family. No apology, no explanation beyond what he’d already confessed. Mary’s niece, Nina Mary Schlais, who had been born after her aunt’s murder and had spent her life carrying a story she never got to live, stood and spoke for the family instead. “Today marks the end of a 50-year journey,” she said.

 “One that is filled with loss, perseverance, and finally justice.” She continued, refusing to let the courtroom remember her aunt only as a case file. “Mary Schlais was more than a victim. She was a brilliant, independent woman, a gifted artist, an equestrian, a world traveler, and a scholar.” She added that Mary had graduated with honors and had ambitious plans to continue her studies, to teach, and to make a lasting impact through her art.

Plans that ended on a Wisconsin roadside when she was 25 years old. “For decades, our family lived with unanswered questions,” Nina said. “But thanks to the tireless efforts of dedicated individuals, we now have those answers. It was a moment 50 years in the making, a family finally saying the truth out loud to the one man who had spent five decades making sure they never could.

” Aftermath. John Keith Miller is currently serving his life sentence at the Dodge Correctional Facility in Wisconsin. He is 84 years old, and barring a successful appeal, he will die in prison. For Mary’s family, the sentencing didn’t erase 50 years of not knowing, but it changed what those years meant. Speaking after the hearing, Nina Mary Schley reflected on what came next for the family.

 “Is there closure? I think closure is a process,” she said. “But yes, I think we have continued to feel relief. Sadly, whenever we thought about Mary over the years, we always think of what happened to her. And I think  now we can think about who she was as a person.” The family made a point of thanking the people responsible for the breakthrough, the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office, which never fully closed the file even during its quietest decades, and the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College, which took on Mary’s

case as one of its very first investigations and delivered results where 50 years of traditional police work could not. In gratitude, the family announced plans to donate part of the court-ordered restitution money to the Ramapo College IGG Center, funding the very kind of work that finally gave them their answer.

Sheriff Begged, reflecting on what the case meant to the people who came before him in the department, said it was in some way a relief for everyone connected to it, including, strangely, for Miller himself. “I believe it’s got to even be a relief for him after 50 years of living with this,” Bigged said.

 “It’s had to have been on his mind almost every day. You would think  anybody with a conscience it would. So, I think he was done fighting it, personally.” Randall Woodfield, the man once wrongly suspected in this case,    remains in prison for an unrelated murder conviction, having never been formally connected to or cleared in Mary’s case beyond the DNA testing that failed to rule him out years before the real killer was found.

 He was never charged, and investigators never got the chance to interview him directly about Mary’s death. His name is part of this story only because investigators, working with what little science allowed them at the time, followed every thread they had, even one that pointed toward one of the most notorious killers in the country’s history.

 That’s what a real investigation looks like from the inside. Most of the threads lead nowhere. Only one of them eventually leads to the truth. Who she was. Mary Schlais was not a stocking cap in an evidence locker. She was not a DNA profile or a 50-year-old case number sitting in a Dunn County filing cabinet. She was a 25-year-old woman who spoke three languages and was teaching herself a fourth.

   She was a scholar who paid her own way through college and kept going for more. She was an artist with real, recognized talent  and an equestrian who loved horses the way some people love a person. She was someone who believed, reasonably, based on her own experience and the experience of countless people her age in 1974, that the world was safer to move through than it turned out to be that particular Friday afternoon in Dunn County, Wisconsin.

What does it say about a person that their absence could still be felt this sharply 50 years later by a niece who was born after they were already gone? Nina Marie Schlies never met her aunt. And yet she stood in a courtroom and spoke about her with more clarity and love than most people manage for someone they’ve known their whole lives.

The Dunn County Sheriff’s Office never closed this file, not really, not even during the decades when there was nothing left to chase. Detectives who worked it their entire careers passed it  down and some passed away before they got their answer. Sheriff Kevin Big made sure the ones still living got to hear the news themselves one by one because he understood that this case belonged to more people than just Mary’s family.

Some cases close and the people who fought for them are still alive to see it. This one came full circle for a family, for a department, and for a piece of forensic science that didn’t exist when Mary Schlies died, but was built eventually by people who refused to accept that a stocking cap in an evidence box would be the last word on who she was.

There are cases like Mary’s sitting in evidence rooms all over the country right now waiting on the same kind of breakthrough. What case do you think deserves this same kind of attention? 50 years late or not. She had her whole life ahead of her when she wrote Madison on a piece of cardboard and walked out the door that morning in Minneapolis thinking about nothing more than an art show in Chicago.

50 years later, her name is the one people remember. Not his. Her art is still shown. Her family still speaks of her love of horses and language and travel, not just the last 3 hours of her life. That in the end is what justice managed to give back to her, even 50 years late. If this story stayed with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and subscribe so you never miss the next case that finally gets its answer.