Mary Kathleen Schlice was 25 years old in 1974, an honors graduate of the University of Minnesota working toward her master's degree and living in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis. She stood 5'10" tall, weighed roughly 135 pounds, and had hazel eyes and long light brown hair.
Her niece remembers her as a gifted artist, an equestrian, a world traveler, and a scholar. Her brother Don once put it simply: her life was pretty much about horses and art.
Years after her death, when a reporter asked how he felt, Don said the loss still made him extremely sad and that he missed his sister a lot.
Early reports describe hitchhiking as her usual way of getting around, and that was the plan on February 15, 1974, when she left her apartment for an art show in Chicago. She told friends she would hold up a sign for Madison first, then switch to Chicago from there.
The trip was meant to be a series of short rides toward a weekend among other artists. Mary never reached Chicago.
Her body turned up that same day in a snowbank near the intersection of 48th Avenue and 990th Street in Spring Brook Township, Dunn County, Wisconsin. The sheriff's office ruled her death a homicide.
A driver passing through the area had seen a man in his vehicle at the spot, and that eyewitness account started the investigation. Decades later, Mary Dodge, who lives with her husband near the wooded spot where Mary was found, told reporters that their neighbor, Denny Anderson, was driving by as the man left the body in the snow, and that Denny had never forgotten the way the man stared at him.
What deputies found was brutal. Mary had been stabbed more than a dozen times, she had defensive wounds on her hands, and the official cause of death was blood loss. Her purse and her coat were never found.
On the road near her body lay an orange and black stocking cap that did not belong to her, and investigators collected human hairs from it that were not hers either. DNA analysis did not exist in 1974, which meant the cap could only be placed into evidence to wait for science to catch up.
Science took its time. Multiple law enforcement agencies followed tips, chased leads, and conducted interviews over the following decades, and they examined and re-examined the evidence every time DNA technology took a step forward. Yet no viable suspect ever emerged.
The witness had described the car as a compact, possibly a Chevy Vega, orange or gold in color. Investigators later admitted it might have been light green, and that uncertainty about something as basic as the color of the vehicle shows how thin the trail was.
Investigators came and went, and as they retired, the case landed back at the Dunn County Sheriff's Office, where the people working it kept the file alive. Sergeant Jason Stalker described the feeling inside the agency by saying that anyone who worked there for any length of time knew about Mary Schlice and her case.
Her family waited through all of it. In 2011, her brother Don told a reporter he had no anger left after so many years and that all he wanted was to look the killer in the eye and ask him what he was thinking.
In 2009, with her family's consent, investigators exhumed Mary's body and tested it for more DNA. The testing turned up two DNA profiles that did not belong to her.
In 2018, the sheriff's office publicly named the first person those results had not ruled out: a man named Randall Woodfield. Woodfield was a standout college football player from Portland, drafted by the Green Bay Packers in the early 1970s and cut before he played a game. He later became known as the I-5 killer, with as many as 44 murders linked to him along the interstate from Washington to California.
On paper, he fit. Investigators determined he had been traveling from Portland to Green Bay around the time Mary was killed. Photos of him from that period matched the witness's description, and his victims were petite white women in their 20s, just like Mary.
Even then, the department was careful about how far it would go. A detective said plainly that a lot more had to happen before anything could be proven. And one thing nobody knew was what kind of car Woodfield had been driving in February 1974.
Woodfield never confessed to anything, which is why Dunn County had not been able to question him about her case, and he was never charged in it. Mary's brother Don told reporters he thought about his sister all the time, and a neighbor near the crime scene called it terribly tragic that the family still had no closure.
Sheriff Kevin Bygd later said DNA analysis eliminated Woodfield, and that meant the case was right back where it started.
Back at the start, all that investigators had was the hair on the stocking cap. The DNA from those hairs had no match in CODIS, the national database police use. So the killer's profile sat there without a name attached to it.
Here is where a college in New Jersey enters the story. Ramapo College's investigative genetic genealogy center had only opened in December 2022. According to a report from KARE 11, its staff cold called the Dunn County Sheriff's Office after finding Mary's case online and offered to help.
Conversations between the two sides began in 2022, and the following year investigators were working closely with the genealogologists with help from the Wisconsin State Crime Lab. By November 2024, the center had aided more than 16 cases, including the rare exoneration of two wrongfully convicted brothers.
The method works backward from a stranger's DNA. When relatives of an unknown suspect voluntarily upload their own DNA to genealogy databases, researchers can build family trees until one branch points to the person they are looking for. The center's director compared the result to a tip called in to police.
The team ran the cap's DNA through FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch PRO, and they developed a family line from a hair scraped off the hat. The first trails led to relatives in Wyoming and then in Michigan, and both cooperated and gave their own DNA, but neither one matched the hair.
What nobody expected was that these cousins had never even heard of the man the trail was actually leading toward. John Keith Miller had been adopted, and that was the problem, because an adopted man does not appear on the family tree his relatives know.
Investigators began to suspect an adoption, and earlier in 2024 they went back to the genealogologists with that idea. The center's assistant director, Karen Binder, said the cooperation of Miller's DNA cousins is what allowed the team to figure out who the unknown relative was.
The path ended at Miller, who was 84 years old and living in Owatonna, Minnesota, and who had spent his whole life one state over from Wisconsin without ever appearing on detectives' radar.
Before anyone knocked on his door, detectives went to his daughter and collected her genetic profile. Her DNA showed that the hair on the stocking cap came from her biological father. The final match was confirmed on November 4, 2024, which would have been Mary Schlice's 76th birthday.
Three days later, on November 7, Sergeant Stalker and investigator Dan Westland arrived at Miller's apartment in Owatonna. According to the criminal complaint, he knew why they were there, and he still denied any knowledge of the killing at first.
None of that mattered once they showed him the DNA evidence. Miller admitted that he had picked Mary up while she was hitchhiking and asked her for what he called sexual contact. When she said no, he grabbed a knife he had stowed in the car and stabbed her in the back.
He then pulled off the highway and tried to bury her body in the snowbank. The result was exactly what the witness had seen, because another vehicle drove past and Miller panicked and left the scene. Shown a photo of the stocking cap, he told investigators it was his and that he must have lost it during the attack.
Months later, in jailhouse interviews with KARE 11, he explained that he had not realized he left the cap behind until he saw the photos from investigators. He also explained why he had felt safe all those years, saying he never thought anything would be traced back to him. Fifty years earlier, that had been a reasonable bet, since the science needed to trace it did not yet exist.
He was arrested that day and charged with first-degree murder, and he was held in Stearns County, Minnesota, waiting to be sent to Wisconsin.
At a news conference the next day, Sheriff Bygd called the outcome a huge victory for his agency, and it was the first time his office had used genetic genealogy to solve a case. The sheriff also said that being able to give closure to Mary's family and to the investigators who had worked the case before retiring felt pretty unreal.
Investigator Westland added that although the case was very old, it had never collected dust at the agency, and Sergeant Stalker thanked everyone involved for not giving up on it.
By February 2025, Miller was telling reporters he planned to plead guilty, and he described it as a way to spare Mary's family a trial. In March, he entered a no contest plea to first-degree murder, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison and ordered him to pay $2,200 in restitution to the family.
Mary's niece, Nina Schlice, spoke at the sentencing. She said the case was a reminder that justice has no time limit, and she urged families still searching for answers to let Mary's story stand as proof that persistence, science, and dedication can bring closure.
The case also marked a first for the New Jersey team, because it was the first time a suspect identified by Ramapo's genealogy center led to an arrest. Investigators call it one of the oldest cold cases in the country ever solved while the killer was still alive.
Mary Schlice left her Minneapolis apartment on February 15, 1974, with a sign in her hand and an art show waiting in Chicago. The man who ended her trip left behind one thing he never noticed.
A cap carrying his hair sat in an evidence room for 50 years while investigators chased a football player turned serial killer who was never the answer. The truth had been on that road the whole time.
It took relatives who had never heard of John Keith Miller, a college in New Jersey, and a daughter's DNA to bring it out. By the time it did, the man who thought nothing would ever be traced back to him was 84 years old and sitting in his own apartment in Owatonna.