On February 15, 1974, 25-year-old Mary Schlais left her Minneapolis apartment with a small cardboard sign reading “Madison. ” She planned to hitchhike to Madison, Wisconsin, then continue to Chicago for an art show. About three hours later, she was found dead in a snowbank roughly 90 miles away in rural Dunn County, Wisconsin. A local man named Dennis Anderson was driving home when his dog wanted a longer ride, so he turned down a dead-end road near Elk Creek Lake.
He saw two people struggling, drove past, then turned around and came back. By then, a gold compact car was gone and a young woman lay dead in the snow. Investigators determined Mary had been stabbed between 13 and 15 times in the chest, neck, and abdomen. Her long tan coat and purse were missing and never recovered.
Near her body, they found a stocking cap with hairs attached. In 1974, DNA testing did not exist, so the cap was bagged and stored in evidence, where it sat for decades. Mary was identified within a day through a phone number on her body linked to a Minneapolis restaurant. Her brother Don formally identified her.
She had graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota, was studying for her master’s degree in art, spoke fluent German and Danish, and was teaching herself Japanese. She had traveled through Europe hitchhiking dozens of times without incident. Investigators built a sketch from Anderson’s description of a white male, about 5 feet 8 inches, slim build with light brown hair. They canvassed the area, chased tips across Minnesota and Wisconsin, and interviewed countless men who vaguely matched.
None of the leads went anywhere. In 2009, Mary’s body was exhumed for new DNA testing. Two years later, investigators focused on Randall Woodfield, a former Green Bay Packers draft pick later known as the I-5 Killer, linked to dozens of murders along Interstate 5. Woodfield had been traveling from Portland toward Green Bay in February 1974 on a route that passed near Dunn County, and he matched the general description.
But the DNA results did not confirm Woodfield. They only failed to rule him out. Woodfield was already serving a 90-year sentence for another murder and had never confessed to his other suspected crimes. The lead went nowhere, and the case went quiet again.
The man responsible was John C. Miller, born May 2, 1940. His criminal history stretched back decades. In 1959 and 1960, he was convicted twice for forgery.
After parole in 1963, he married his first wife, who later said he broke her jaw and dragged her down a street. In 1965, he was arrested in Flagstaff, Arizona, for burglary and connected to a robbery in Austin, Minnesota. He served 13 months of a two-to-three-year sentence. By 1969, Miller was in California, where he committed armed robbery, threatening a convenience store clerk with a loaded gun.
That conviction sent him to San Quentin State Prison. He was released on May 5, 1972. Less than two years later, he picked up Mary Schlais on Interstate 94. Miller went on to live an ordinary life.
He married again in 1973 and settled in a Minneapolis suburb. His only later run-ins with police were minor: a drunk driving arrest in 1994 and a public intoxication charge in 2014. He eventually moved into an apartment in Austin, Minnesota, directly across the street from the police department, where officers had no documented contact with him for a decade. He later moved to an assisted living facility in Owatonna.
The breakthrough came through investigative genetic genealogy, a tool that did not exist in 1974. It works by comparing crime scene DNA to public genealogy databases, building a family tree backward from distant matches. In 2023, the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey. Mary’s case became the center’s first investigation to end in an arrest.
Miller had been adopted as a child, meaning biological family members in the genetic matches had no idea he existed. It took more than a year of tracing branch after branch of the family tree before they arrived at John Keith Miller. Investigators asked Miller’s biological daughter for a DNA sample, and she agreed. The hair from the stocking cap was a match to her biological father.
On November 7, 2024, investigators went to Miller’s apartment at the assisted living facility. He initially denied any knowledge of Mary Schlais or her murder. When they laid out the DNA evidence and the match to his own daughter, he confirmed the stocking cap was his. Miller then confessed in calm, almost businesslike terms.
He said he picked Mary up while she was hitchhiking near Uptown Minneapolis. As they drove toward Wisconsin, he made a sexual advance and she refused. He reached for a knife kept in the car near the sun visor and stabbed her in the back, continuing until she stopped fighting. Then he pulled off the road and tried to hide her body in the snowbank.
“I picked this girl up. I asked for sex, and she said no, and I stabbed her and put her in a snowbank,” Miller said in a later jail interview. “Maybe I have no feelings. I have no idea.
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Miller also explained how he avoided suspicion. Right after the murder, another car pulled up behind him. “I thought I was caught,” he said. But the description in the next day’s newspaper described a different car than his own.
“I figured, well, I got away with it. ”
Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Begg learned the case had broken while he was in a deer stand. “I had a difficult time controlling my excitement,” he said. He thought about the investigators who worked the file over five decades, many retired and some dead without ever learning the killer’s name.
There was no trial. On March 27, 2025, in a Dunn County courtroom, Miller, then 84, entered a plea of no contest to one count of first-degree intentional homicide. Under Wisconsin law, the charge carries a mandatory life sentence. By pleading no contest, he spared Mary’s family from sitting through a courtroom retelling of her death.
Judge James Peterson accepted the plea and sentenced Miller to life imprisonment. He was also ordered to pay $2,200 in restitution to Mary’s family plus roughly $480 to cover extradition costs. Given the chance to speak, Miller declined. He offered no apology.
Mary’s niece, Nina Mary Schlais, who was born after her aunt’s murder, spoke for the family. “Today marks the end of a 50-year journey,” she said. “One that is filled with loss, perseverance, and finally justice. ”
“Mary Schlais was more than a victim.
She was a brilliant, independent woman, a gifted artist, an equestrian, a world traveler, and a scholar,” Nina continued. After the hearing, she reflected on what the sentencing meant. “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 announced plans to donate part of the restitution money to the Ramapo College IGG Center, funding the kind of work that finally gave them their answer.
Miller is now serving his life sentence at the Dodge Correctional Facility in Wisconsin. He is 84 years old and, barring a successful appeal, will die in prison. Randall Woodfield, the man once wrongly suspected, remains in prison for an unrelated murder conviction. He was never charged in Mary’s case, and the DNA testing had only failed to rule him out, years before the real killer was found.
Sheriff Begg said the resolution was a relief for everyone connected to the case, including, strangely, Miller himself. “I believe it’s got to even be a relief for him after 50 years of living with this,” he said. “It’s had to have been on his mind almost every day. You would think anybody with a conscience it would.
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Mary Schlais was not a stocking cap in an evidence locker or a case number in a filing cabinet. She was a 25-year-old woman who spoke three languages and was teaching herself a fourth. She was a scholar, an artist, and an equestrian who believed the world was safer to move through than it turned out to be that Friday afternoon in Dunn County. Her art is still shown.
Her family still speaks of her love of horses, language, and travel, not just the last three hours of her life. Fifty years late, justice gave back what it could: her name is the one people remember.