Who Murdered Mary Schlais? The 1974 Wisconsin Cold Case Breakthrough 

Who Murdered Mary Schlais? The 1974 Wisconsin Cold Case Breakthrough 

 

 

On the afternoon of February 15th, 1974, a man in rural Dunn County, Wisconsin, was driving to the grocery store when he saw another man throw a woman out of a car on a dead-end road near a snowbank. The driver left her there and drove away. The witness called the police. By the time investigators arrived, the woman’s body was face down in the snow.

She was still warm. Near the body, they found a stocking cap that didn’t belong to her. It had the killer’s DNA on it, but in 1974, there was no way to read it. The case stayed open for 50 years. Her name was Mary Kathleen Schlais. She was 25 years old, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she’d earned her degree with honors and was working toward her master’s.

 She was an accomplished artist whose work would still be exhibited at the university decades after her death. She spoke fluent German and was learning Japanese. She rode horses, traveled the world, and paid her way through college on scholarships. A 1974 story in the Leader-Telegram described her as someone who had packed more into 25 years than most people manage in a lifetime.

 Her brother Don would say her life was pretty much about her love of horses and art. Mary lived alone in an apartment in Minneapolis. On the morning of February 15th, 1974, she left for Chicago, where there was an art show she wanted to attend. So, she planned to hitchhike the roughly 400 miles, heading east along Interstate 94 through Wisconsin.

She told friends she’d hold up a sign for Madison first, then switch to one for Chicago from there. Hitchhiking was how she got around. It wasn’t unusual for her or for a lot of people in 1974. She was 5 ft 10 in with hazel eyes and long light brown hair. She weighed about 135 lb. Her roommate saw her leave that morning.

 She never made it to Chicago. Her body was found roughly 90 miles east on a rural road in Spring Brook Township at the intersection of 408th Avenue and 999th Street, about 8 miles west of Eau Claire. It was around 1:30 in the afternoon. She’d been dead for less than an hour. The man who saw the car gave a description of the driver.

 White male, about 6 ft tall, auburn hair, thick dark mustache. Two other witnesses had seen the same suspect and vehicle in the area around the same time. With their help, investigators produced a composite sketch and distributed it across the region. It ran in newspapers and was circulated to law enforcement agencies across Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Mary had been stabbed more than 15 times in her back, neck, and stomach. She had defensive wounds on her hands. Her nose was broken. She was fully clothed, wearing a maroon turtleneck and jeans. Her purse and tan furry jacket were gone and would never be recovered. The then sheriff, Daryl Spagnuleti, told the Leader-Telegram it was a brutal attack and that it appeared she had put up a big fight before being killed.

 And the stocking cap recovered near her body was collected as evidence along with everything else from the scene. In 1974, DNA technology didn’t exist. The hat could only be used for human hair comparisons. Hairs were recovered and examined, but they produced no leads. The cap went into evidence storage. The case was worked by multiple agencies over the following months and years, including the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office and the State Division of Criminal Investigation.

 Tips came in from across the region. Detectives talked to everyone they could find.    They checked the composite sketch against criminal records and ran down every name that came through the tip line. They followed up on reports of similar vehicles and men matching the description. None of the leads produced a viable suspect.

 For decades, Dunn County investigators kept the case active. Sheriff Kevin Begged, who spent more than 35 years at the department, said investigators worked on it throughout his entire tenure. The case never sat idle. Multiple detectives inherited the file, each one picking up where the last one left off. They chased leads across Wisconsin and Minnesota.

They interviewed strangers and acquaintances. They ran new names through the system every time a tip came in. Begged said witness reports aren’t always 100% accurate, but the description and the composite sketch from 1974 were still in the file and still generating leads decades later. Every trail ended the same way.

 The cap was tested and retested as forensic technology improved. By the time DNA profiling became available in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the hat yielded a partial male profile, but it didn’t match anyone in CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA from convicted offenders. CODIS only works if the person’s DNA is already in the system, and it wasn’t.

 If the killer had committed his crimes before states started requiring DNA from convicted offenders, he wouldn’t be in any database. The profile sat there with no name attached. Every few years, as the database expanded with new entries from convicted offenders across the country, investigators ran the profile again. It never hit.

In 2009, with the consent of Mary’s family, her body was exhumed from her grave in Minneapolis. The technology had changed since 1974. What had once been limited to hair comparison could now produce genetic profiles from old, degraded evidence. So, investigators recovered additional DNA and produced two profiles from the remains and the crime scene evidence.

For the first time in 35 years, they had something concrete to work with. The profiles led them in the wrong direction. In 2011, investigators identified a possible suspect, Randall Woodfield, a former Green Bay Packers  draft pick who had been cut from the team in the early 1970s before playing a game.

Woodfield later became known as the I-5 Killer, linked to as many as 44 murders along Interstate 5 from Washington to California in the 1980s. He was serving a 90-year sentence in Oregon for the murder of a 19-year-old woman named Sherry Hull and the attempted murder of another woman. And investigators determined he’d been traveling from Portland to Green Bay at the time of Mary’s murder and that his route would have taken him directly through rural western Wisconsin, through the area where her body was found.

He matched the witness description. All of his known victims were white women in their 20s, the same profile as Mary. Photos of Woodfield from the early 1970s matched the composite sketch. The circumstantial case was strong enough that Dunn County took it seriously for years. By 2018, Dunn County publicly named Woodfield as a person of interest.

The case made headlines again for the first time in years. Mary’s family allowed themselves to hope that after more than four decades, they might finally know who killed her. But there was no physical  evidence tying Woodfield to the crime. He had never confessed to any of the dozens of killings attributed to him.

 He was in prison in Oregon and had never admitted to a single one of his crimes. He was never further connected to Mary’s murder. Dunn County had yet to even interview him about it. After 7 years  of pursuing the wrong man, the lead stalled and the case went cold again. Mary’s brother Don, reached by phone years later, said he thought about her all the time.

 A woman named Mary Dodge, who lived near where the body was found in Spring Brook Township, remembered the day the news of the murder arrived in 1974. She said the man who told them looked white, like the color had drained from his face. She said it was frightening. Don and his wife and their daughter Nina had kept Mary’s memory alive for half a century.

 Nina had been named after her aunt, uh the aunt she’d never met. In 2023, Dunn County partnered with the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey. It was a college lab, not a private forensic company. Many law enforcement agencies spend thousands of dollars sending DNA to private labs for this kind of work, and not every county can afford that.

 Ramapo was willing to step up and help, and Dunn County was willing to try something new. It was the first time the county had used genetic  genealogy in a case. The center went back to the stocking cap. The partial male DNA profile from the hat was uploaded to ancestry databases, including Family Tree DNA and GEDmatch Pro.

 People use these sites to learn about their family history by sharing their DNA results.    The idea behind genetic genealogy is straightforward. Even if the killer never submitted his own DNA, uh a distant relative might have, and from that relative’s results, you can trace the family tree until you reach the person who matches the crime scene profile.

 The databases returned hits on distant relatives. From there, the genealogists began building the tree outward. The family tree research took over a year. The trail led from Wyoming to Michigan to Minnesota. Gurney and Karin Binder at Ramapo connected with Dunn County investigators and began the slow process of working through the family lineage, interviewing and collecting DNA from potential relatives, clearing them one by one.

 They contacted distant relatives across multiple states, asking each one to voluntarily submit a DNA sample, but they hit a wall. Every known family member was eliminated. The man they were looking for didn’t appear in the tree the way he should have. He’d been adopted. His biological family wasn’t in the records they were searching.

 That was the complication Biggs described as a curveball. The genealogists had to work around the adoption, tracing connections through biological relatives who didn’t know they were related to the suspect. It meant building the tree from the DNA outward rather than from public records downward.

 Normal genealogy follows a paper trail. This was different. The genealogists had to follow the DNA itself, connecting people who had no idea they shared a biological relative with a murder suspect. Karin Binder, the lead genealogist, said the family tree research in this case was very complicated and that it had taken over a year before they got anywhere.

 The tree pointed to one man living in Minnesota. He had a criminal record that went back to the late 1950s. Two forgery convictions in Minnesota in 1959 and 1960 when he was still a teenager. He was sent to the Minnesota State Reformatory for men in St. Cloud, a facility for young male offenders that had been operating since the 1880s.

 He was paroled in January 1963 and discharged from parole in January 1965. He would have been in his early 20s when he got out. After his release, he married his first wife and left Minnesota. He ended up in California where at some point he was convicted of another crime and sent to San Quentin, one of the most notorious prisons in the country. His first marriage didn’t last.

He kept moving. And public records and an interview with his first ex-wife told the same story. He went from Minnesota to California to prison and back again, never settling anywhere for long.  He was released from San Quentin less than two years before Mary Schlais was killed.

 By February 1974, he was back in  Minnesota, back in the Minneapolis area where he’d started. He was in his early 30s. On the morning of February 15th, 1974, he was driving through Uptown Minneapolis when he saw a young woman standing on the side of the road hitchhiking. He pulled over. She got in.

 According to what he would later tell investigators, he asked her for sex. She said no. He grabbed a knife he’d stowed in the car and stabbed her in the back. She fought him. He stabbed her more than a dozen times. When he was done, and he pulled off the highway into rural Dunn County and tried to push her body into a snowbank on the side of a dead-end road.

 A car drove by and he panicked and left the area. His stocking cap fell off near the body and he didn’t go  back for it. After the murder, his record went quiet. In the 50 years between the killing and his arrest, he was picked up only twice, a DUI in 1994 and a conviction for drug paraphernalia and public intoxication in Iowa in 2014.

 Nothing violent, nothing that would have required a DNA sample or put his profile in any law enforcement database. He lived in small towns across the Midwest and drew no attention. His name never came up in connection with the Schlais case or any other unsolved crime. For a decade before his arrest, he lived in an apartment building in Austin, Minnesota.

 Yet, the building was directly across the street from the Austin Police Department. A representative from the department told reporters they had no documented contact with him during his entire decade of residence. He moved to an assisted living facility in Owatonna just months before investigators came looking for him. His name was John Keith Miller.

 The DNA match came back on November 4th, 2024. That date would have been Mary Schlais’s 76th birthday. The Ramapo Center confirmed that the partial male profile from the stocking cap matched the man the family tree had pointed to. After more than a year of genealogy work and more than 50 years of investigation, they had a name.

 Miller was 84 years old. On November 7th, 3 days after the match was confirmed, Dunn County investigators Dan Westland and Jason Stalker traveled from Wisconsin to the assisted living facility in Owatonna and knocked on his door. When Miller opened it, he told them that as soon as he saw them, he knew why they were there. He initially denied knowing anything about Mary Schlais or her killing.

Investigators sat with him and laid out what they had.  They told him about the stocking cap found at the scene in 1974 and the DNA recovered from it, the genealogy that traced his family tree across three states, and the confirmed match. When they told him his DNA was on that hat, he stopped denying it.

 He confessed on video. He described picking Mary up, the request, the refusal, the knife,  and the snowbank. He confirmed the stocking cap was his. He answered their questions in short, flat sentences and did not express remorse. Sergeant Stalker said he thought he spoke for everyone involved when he thanked the people who had never given up on the case, who had never let it become lost to time.

 Miller was arrested and extradited to Dunn County. On March 27th, 2025, Miller appeared in Dunn County Circuit Court before Judge James Peterson. He was brought in from the Dunn County Jail where he’d been held since his extradition from Minnesota. He pleaded no contest to first-degree murder. The prosecution played the confession video for the court.

 Prosecutor Andrea Amadon Nodolf stood up and started with a number, 18,528. That was how many days had passed between Mary Schlais’s murder and the sentencing, 50 years, 1 month, and 12 days. She walked the court through the full investigation, the decades of dead ends, the wrong suspect, the stocking cap that had been tested and retested for half a century, and the genealogy that finally identified the killer.

Miller’s defense attorney told the court her client had expressed some regret when confronted with the evidence. Yet, no one from Mary’s family spoke at the hearing. Miller didn’t speak. Judge Peterson sentenced him to life in prison. Miller was 84 years old. He was transferred to the Dodge Correctional Facility in Wisconsin.

 He was ordered to pay more than $2,000 in restitution to the Schlais family. The family said it planned to donate the money to Ramapo College’s IGG Center. Mary’s niece Nina, who was named after her aunt and born after her death,    spoke to reporters afterward. She called Mary a brilliant, independent woman, a gifted artist, an equestrian, a world traveler, and a scholar.

 She said the case was a reminder that justice  has no time limit and that to families still searching for the truth, Mary’s story should be a testament that persistence, science, and dedication can bring closure. Well, the family had plans to visit the University of Minnesota where Mary’s art is still exhibited.

 Now they could celebrate the 25 years Mary was alive instead of just  thinking about the moment she was taken from them. When they thought about Mary over the years, Nina said, they always thought about what happened to her. Now they could think about who she was as a person. Mary Schlais was 25 years old.

 She graduated with honors, paid her way on scholarships, and was working toward her master’s degree. She spoke two languages and was learning a third. Her art is still on display at the University of Minnesota. On the last morning of her life, she left her apartment in Minneapolis with a sign for Madison and a plan to see an art show in Chicago.

 And the hat the man who killed her left in the snow beside her body sat in an evidence room for half a century.