On the morning of February 15th, 1974, Mary Schlice left her apartment in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis, walked out into a cold that sat well below freezing, and stuck out her thumb at the edge of the road. She was twenty-five years old, carrying a cardboard sign that said Madison, and wearing a long tan coat. She was on her way to an art show in Chicago. Hitchhiking was simply how she got places.
She had done it across Europe and across the American Midwest, a hundred times before this particular Friday morning. She had always arrived. She never arrived. Her body was found ninety miles east of Minneapolis in a snowbank off a remote road in Dunn County, Wisconsin, three hours after she left.
An orange and black stocking cap lay on the roadway nearby. It did not belong to Mary. Nobody knew whose it was. For fifty years, through hundreds of interviews, multiple suspects, an exhumed body, and the slow march of forensic technology from the era of typewritten reports to the era of DNA databases, nobody could say.
Then a team of college students in New Jersey looked at the hairs inside that cap and traced them step by step through a genealogy database to a man who was eighty-four years old and living in an assisted living facility in Owatonna, Minnesota. He had been walking free for half a century. When investigators showed him the evidence, he confessed. Mary Kathleen Schlice had grown up in Champlin, Minnesota, north of the city, the daughter of a family that produced three children who all by some instinct became people who paid close attention to the world.
She had graduated from high school and gone on to the University of Minnesota, where she earned an art degree with honors and collected enough scholarships to quiet the practical concerns about what a life in art would actually look like. She had studied abroad. She was fluent in German and Danish and was in the middle of learning Japanese because she had decided she wanted to understand more of the world. What she loved beyond the art were horses, which she had ridden since she was a girl.
As her brother Don said when reporters asked about her, her life was pretty much about her love of horses and art. Two things that asked everything of you and gave everything back. She had ambitious plans. A master’s degree was the next step, teaching after that, a lasting body of work.
The art show she was heading to in Chicago that Friday was both a professional trip and a personal one. Her roommate Judith saw her leave the apartment at 10:30 in the morning, cardboard sign in hand, tan coat on her back, moving with the particular purposefulness of a woman who knew where she was going. At around 1:00 that afternoon, a man driving a rural road in Spring Brook Township, Dunn County, roughly ninety miles east of the apartment Mary had left that morning, made a detour because his dog wanted a longer ride. He turned down a dead-end road and came upon a scene that stopped him cold.
He saw two people, a struggle. He drove on, not certain what he had witnessed. When he turned around and came back a few minutes later, only one person remained. Mary Schlice was found in a ditch beside a snowbank at the intersection of 990th Street and 408th Avenue in a remote stretch of Dunn County farmland.
She had been stabbed more than fifteen times. Her hands bore defensive wounds. Her long tan coat and her purse were gone, and they have never been found. On the roadway nearby lay the orange and black stocking cap.
The cap was collected. The hairs inside it were collected. The witness, Dennis Anderson, was interviewed at length and helped investigators assemble a description of the suspect and the vehicle. A composite sketch was drawn.
Tips came in. Leads were pursued. The hairs in the cap did not match Mary. They belonged to someone else, the only person who knew exactly what had happened.
In February of 1974, those hairs had no way of telling investigators who he was. Detective Gerald Koser of the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office worked the Mary Schlice case for decades. He kept in touch with the family, revisited the evidence as technology evolved, and pursued new leads when they arrived. In 2009, thirty-five years after the murder, he coordinated the exhumation of Mary’s remains.
The goal was additional biological material that might yield new information under the DNA testing capabilities that had developed since 1974. The process produced some results and raised new questions. Among those questions was a name that had begun to appear in connection with unsolved crimes along the West Coast: Randall Woodfield, a former Green Bay Packers draft pick who had become one of the most prolific killers in Pacific Northwest history. The Woodfield theory was examined seriously.
He had operated in the right era and targeted women, and the possibility that he had been traveling through the upper Midwest in February 1974 was not impossible. Investigators followed the thread as far as it would go. It went nowhere. Woodfield was ruled out.
The case file grew thicker. The stocking cap stayed in evidence. Don Schlice gave interviews when reporters called for anniversary pieces and cold case retrospectives. He spoke about his sister in the present tense and the past tense almost interchangeably.
He missed her. He wanted to look the person responsible in the eye and ask one question: What were you thinking? He had been asking that question for forty years. He was not done asking it.
In 2023, the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the genetic genealogy program at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey. The program, run by trained forensic genealogists and undergraduate students working under faculty supervision, had already applied investigative genetic genealogy to cold cases across the country with significant results. The technique was the same one that had cracked the Golden State Killer case in 2018. Crime scene DNA was uploaded to a public ancestry database, family trees were built outward from distant matches, and a process of systematic elimination worked backward through generations until a candidate emerged.
The hairs from the orange and black stocking cap had been used to build a DNA profile of the unknown suspect years earlier. That profile had been run against CODIS, the combined DNA index system maintained by the FBI, and had produced no match. As far as the system was concerned, the suspect had never existed. The Ramapo team changed that.
Working from the DNA profile, they identified distant relatives in the public ancestry database, built family trees, traced lines of descent, and narrowed the field. The work took months and required hundreds of individual genealogical decisions. The trail led to a complication: evidence pointed toward someone who had been adopted, which disrupts family trees because the database records biology, not documentary connections. The team worked through it.
They identified a biological daughter of the likely suspect, a woman who, when approached by Dunn County investigator Dan Westland and Sergeant Jason Stalker, agreed to have her own genetic profile uploaded for comparison. The analysis confirmed it. The hairs in the stocking cap belonged to her biological father. His name was John Keith Miller.
He was eighty-four years old. He lived in an assisted living facility in Owatonna, Minnesota, across the street from a police station, and he had been living there quietly without incident in the final years of a long ordinary life. Westland and Stalker drove to Owatonna and knocked on the door. Miller knew why they were there.
When investigators first told him why they had come, he denied it. He said he didn’t know anything about any murder. He said the name Mary Schlice meant nothing to him. Then they put the DNA evidence in front of him.
They showed him the stocking cap. He looked at it. He recognized it. He had lost it there, he said during the homicide.
He must have lost it there. According to the criminal complaint filed on November 11th, 2024, Miller said he had been driving on February 15th, 1974 and had seen a young woman hitchhiking. He stopped and offered her a ride. As they drove, he made a sexual advance.
She refused him. At the moment she leaned forward in her seat, he reached to the sun visor above the passenger side where he kept a knife, and he used it. He drove to a remote road in Dunn County, pulled her from the car, and tried to cover her body with snow. A car appeared on the road nearby and he panicked.
He left her there. He drove away. The arrest took place on November 7th, 2024. John Miller was taken into custody at his assisted living facility and transported to the Steele County Jail to await extradition to Wisconsin.
The date the genealogy team confirmed that the stocking cap belonged to the biological father of Miller’s daughter was November 4th, 2024. November 4th would have been Mary Schlice’s seventy-sixth birthday. On March 27th, 2025, in Dunn County Circuit Court, John Keith Miller entered a plea of no contest to first-degree intentional homicide. Judge James Peterson accepted the plea and sentenced Miller to life in prison.
Miller declined to address the court. He sat in silence as the sentence was delivered. Mary’s niece, Nina Mary Schlice, read a statement. While no verdict can undo the pain of losing Mary, she said, we take comfort in knowing the man responsible for her murder has been held accountable.
She described her aunt as 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. She said she hoped Mary’s story would be a testament to families still searching for the truth, that persistence, science, and dedication could bring long-awaited answers. What remains of Mary Schlice is not the way she died.
It is the way she lived: the honors degree she earned, the languages she taught herself, the horses she rode, the sculptures she made, and the gallery that bore her name on the campus of the university where she studied. The Mary Kay Schlice Memorial Gallery was established in her memory by her fellow students within months of her death. The Dunn County Sheriff’s Office never stopped working the case. In the years before the Ramapo partnership, investigator Dan Westland’s response to questions about the Schlice file was always the same: this case has never collected dust.
Sergeant Jason Stalker said afterward that he was grateful to everyone who had worked the case before them, to the genealogy team at Ramapo, and to the biological daughter who had agreed to have her DNA tested without knowing where it would lead. Every link in that chain had to hold. Every one of them did. The orange and black stocking cap is back in an evidence room now.
Its work complete. It did what the person who dropped it believed it could never do. It told the truth. It told it on Mary Schlice’s birthday, to the people who had been waiting to hear it, in the language of a science that did not exist in 1974.
John Miller had spent fifty years counting on it staying that way. He was wrong.
