On the morning of Friday, February 15th, 1974, Mary Schlais set out from Minneapolis with a plan she had followed many times before. She would walk to the highway, hold up a sign, catch a ride east toward Madison, Wisconsin, and keep going until she reached Chicago. There was an art show there she wanted to see. She was a graduate student, an artist, and a world traveler who often got where she was going by hitchhiking.

She had done it before. She had always come back. This time, she made it about seventy-five miles. That afternoon, on a quiet back road in Dunn County, Wisconsin, a local man was driving along a rural route.

He passed a small compact car parked on the shoulder. Then he glanced into his rearview mirror. Behind him, a man was pulling something out of that car and throwing it into the ditch. It was Mary.

She had been stabbed more than a dozen times. The wounds on her hands showed she had fought back. By the time she was found, the car was gone. The driver was gone.

The only things left behind were tire tracks in the snow and a single object that did not belong to her: an orange and black stocking cap. No license plate. No name. A description of a man.

And a description of a car that would turn out to be the wrong color. Here is the part that would haunt this case for decades. By his own account, the killer read about it in the newspaper the very next day. He saw the witness describe his car, and he saw that they had gotten it wrong.

Years later, he would say exactly what he thought in that moment. He figured he had gotten away with it. For fifty years, it looked like he had. To understand what was taken on that road, you have to start with Mary herself.

Born in 1948, she was an honor student at the University of Minnesota working toward her master’s degree. Years later, her niece would describe her in four words: an artist, an equestrian, a world traveler, and a scholar. Mary was not someone who waited for life to come to her. She went out and found it.

And very often, she found it by hitchhiking. Today, that sounds reckless. In the early 1970s, it was ordinary. Students did it.

Young travelers did it. There were no cell phones to call for help and no apps to book a ride. For a young person with more curiosity than money, a thumb and a cardboard sign could open up an entire country. Investigators would later say it was common at the time and that Mary was known to do it often.

So when an art show in Chicago caught her attention that February, the plan was simple. Head to Interstate 94, hold up a sign for Madison, and from there find another ride south. It was the middle of a Minnesota winter. According to her killer’s later confession, it was in Uptown Minneapolis that Mary got into his car.

What happened next inside that car was a mystery for fifty years. Everything known about it today comes from one person, the man behind the wheel. His account, given to detectives in 2024, is recorded in the criminal complaint against him. It is his version, and it should be heard that way.

He said he picked Mary up as she was hitchhiking. They drove east on I-94 and crossed the state line into Wisconsin. Somewhere along the way, he said, he asked her for sexual contact. Mary said no.

According to the complaint, when she leaned forward, he reached for a knife he kept stowed above the passenger-side sun visor. He stabbed her in the back. The autopsy would later show that Mary had been stabbed more than a dozen times. Her hands carried defensive wounds.

She had fought him. She died from blood loss. The driver left the interstate and turned onto the quiet rural roads of the town of Spring Brook in Dunn County. He was looking for a place to hide her.

He pulled over and began trying to push her body into a snowbank. Then another car came down the road. The local man behind the wheel passed the small compact car parked on the shoulder. Then, in his rearview mirror, he saw the man throw what looked like a body into the ditch.

The killer panicked and fled. Mary was found near the intersection of 408th Avenue and 990th Street. It had been roughly three hours since she was last seen in Minneapolis. Her death was ruled a homicide.

Investigators worked the scene in the snow. There were tire tracks. There was biological material that did not belong to Mary. And lying nearby was the orange and black stocking cap.

Everything in this case eventually comes back to that hat. The witnesses gave police what they could: a description of the driver, a description of the car, a compact, possibly a Chevy Vega, orange or gold. For decades, that gold car became one of the central details of the case. It appeared in reports.

It was repeated in news coverage. It shaped what investigators looked for. But the killer would later tell detectives his car had been blue. In a jail interview after his arrest, he described seeing the newspaper the day after the murder.

The witness had described his car, he said, but it wasn’t his car. His conclusion was blunt: I figured, well, I got away with it. Even the color investigators believed in did not stay fixed. Years later, they would say it was possible the car had been light green instead.

One detail, uncertain from the very first day, kept shifting under everyone who tried to build on it. The description of the man was apparently close. The car was not. And in 1974, with no surveillance cameras and no computerized records, a wrong color was enough to send a search in the wrong direction.

Over the following years, multiple agencies chased tips and conducted interviews. Nothing connected. No arrest came. The case went cold.

Mary’s family had to keep living around an empty space. There was no trial to attend, no name to hate, no answer to the simple question every family in that position asks: who? The years went by, then the decades. The evidence from the scene was examined, set aside, and examined again as forensic technology improved.

When DNA testing arrived, Dunn County investigators turned back to the stocking cap. Hairs collected from it produced a partial male DNA profile. They ran it through CODIS, the national law enforcement DNA database. No match.

Whoever wore that hat had never been entered into the system. In 2009, Mary’s body was exhumed for further DNA testing. Two years later, a new name surfaced, one that made headlines: Randall Woodfield, a former Green Bay Packers draft pick, later known as the I-5 Killer, suspected by authorities in dozens of killings along Interstate 5, though imprisoned in connection with one murder. Investigators determined that he had been traveling from Portland to Green Bay around the time of Mary’s murder and that he fit the witnesses’ description of the driver.

It looked like a breakthrough. It wasn’t. Woodfield was never charged with Mary’s murder, and no further evidence connected him to it. The theory faded.

The case went quiet again. Meanwhile, the real killer was living an unremarkable life in southern Minnesota. His name was John Keith Miller. According to records later reviewed by Forum News Service, he had a 1965 robbery conviction in Arizona, and he had been out of San Quentin Prison in California for less than two years when he picked Mary up.

In the decades that followed, he lived in Austin, Minnesota. In 2024, just months before his arrest, he moved into an assisted living facility in Owatonna. He was never publicly named as a suspect. He had no reason to think he ever would be.

The witnesses who saw that car on the road in Spring Brook grew old. According to local reporting, both have since died. Several members of Mary’s family died too, without ever learning who killed her. Fifty years passed.

The hat sat in evidence the whole time. What finally broke this case wasn’t a confession or a tip. It was a family tree and a strange detail hidden inside it. In late 2022, Dunn County was approached by the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey.

By 2023, the center was working on Mary’s case. Investigative genetic genealogy works differently from a standard DNA search. CODIS can only find a person who is already in it. Genetic genealogy looks for relatives instead.

Millions of people have voluntarily uploaded their DNA to genealogy databases to learn about their ancestry. If a killer’s DNA partially matches some of those people, genealogists can treat them as distant cousins. They build those families backward generation by generation until they find a shared ancestor. Then they work forward again through every descendant, narrowing the list until only a few people could be the source.

The technique became famous in 2018 when it led investigators in California to Joseph James DeAngelo, the man known as the Golden State Killer. Suddenly, cases that had been frozen for decades had a new path forward. Agencies across the country began sending old evidence back to the lab. It is slow, painstaking work.

A single case can mean thousands of hours of records, obituaries, birth certificates, and marriage licenses. And in this case, it went wrong in a way that turned out to matter. Around the fall of 2023, the team identified a possible family line. In January 2024, investigators began looking at one man who might be related to the source of the DNA.

In May, they interviewed him at his home in Wyoming. It wasn’t him. But he pointed them to a cousin in Michigan. Investigators interviewed that man too.

Wasn’t him, either. According to authorities, that exhausted every known male relative in that family line. The DNA said the killer belonged to this family. The family tree said there was no one left.

So investigators asked a different question. What if the man they were looking for was born into this family but never raised in it? What if he had been adopted, and his biological relatives did not even know he existed? It would explain the dead end.

A family tree records who was raised where, not just who was born to whom. A child placed with another family can vanish from one branch entirely, still carrying that family’s DNA under someone else’s last name. Investigators would later say that Miller’s adoption was part of what made him so hard to find. That possibility changed the search.

In the fall of 2024, another relative agreed to share their genetic profile. That profile pointed to a man who had grown up with a different family. John Keith Miller, eighty-four years old. On November 4th, 2024, Miller’s DNA was confirmed as a match to the evidence from the scene.

November 4th would have been Mary Schlais’s seventy-sixth birthday. Three days later, on November 7th, 2024, Dunn County investigators arrived in Owatonna, Minnesota. They were not going to a hideout or a remote cabin. They were going to an assisted living facility to see a man in his eighties who had lived there only a few months.

According to the sheriff’s office, Miller later told them something revealing. The moment he opened the door, he said, he knew why they were there. At first, he denied it. In a recorded interview later shown in court, Miller said he didn’t know anything about Mary’s killing and didn’t know how his DNA could have been at the scene.

Then investigators told him about the DNA evidence, and Miller admitted it. He described picking Mary up. He described the knife above the visor. He described trying to hide her in the snow and running when a car came.

Investigators showed him a photograph of the orange and black stocking cap. According to the criminal complaint, Miller said it was his. He must have lost it, he told them. Fifty years after it fell into the snow, the hat finally had an owner.

Miller was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, then brought back to Wisconsin to face the charge. On March 27th, 2025, he appeared in Dunn County Circuit Court. He pleaded no contest to first-degree murder. A no contest plea is not a formal admission of guilt, but it accepts a conviction.

Judge James Peterson found him guilty. Photos and videos of Mary were shown in court. So was the interview where Miller first denied knowing anything, then admitted what he had done. The prosecutor, Andrea Nodolf, spoke about the brutality of the crime and about Miller’s lack of remorse.

She noted that several of Mary’s relatives had died without ever getting the answers they waited for. And she said what many in that room were likely thinking: “Life in prison, frankly, doesn’t seem enough. ”

When the judge asked if Miller wanted to say anything, he declined. Judge Peterson sentenced him to life in prison, the mandatory sentence for the charge.

He was also ordered to pay $2,200 in restitution to Mary’s family. The man who believed he had gotten away with murder in 1974 was eighty-four years old when he was finally held to account for it. After the hearing, Mary’s niece, Nina Mary Schlais, spoke for the family. She was born after Mary died.

She had never had the chance to know her aunt. She asked people to remember Mary as more than a victim: the artist, the writer, the traveler, the scholar. She thanked the genealogist whose work had led to the arrest, and she offered a message to other families still waiting on cold cases. This case is a reminder that justice has no time limit.

For the family, the arrest changed how they could think about Mary. For half a century, her name had been tied to what was done to her on that road. Now, the family said, they could start to celebrate the twenty-five years she was here. Not every question has closed.

Local reporting has pointed to another case: the unsolved killing of Jolene Trulson, a young woman murdered two years before Mary. Witnesses in that case described a driver resembling the one seen in Spring Brook, and a gold car. Miller has not been charged in that case or officially connected to it. Whether there is any link remains unknown.

The witnesses who saw the car on that road did not live to see the arrest. Neither did several of Mary’s relatives. The case closed fifty years late, and the people who waited longest for it were not all there to see it end. On February 15th, 1974, Mary Schlais walked toward Interstate 94 with a sign that said Madison.

She was twenty-five. She was going to see some art. She never made it out of Dunn County. For fifty years, the man who killed her lived quietly a few hours from where he left her.

He read the newspaper the next day and decided the danger had passed. He was wrong. The proof had been sitting in an evidence room the entire time, waiting for science to learn how to read it. A winter hat, a partial profile with no match, a family tree that came up empty, one adoption no one knew to look for, and a DNA match confirmed on what would have been Mary’s seventy-sixth birthday.

Mary Kathleen Schlais, artist, equestrian, traveler, scholar. Her case is no longer cold.