The frozen ground crunched under the tires as Dennis turned his car down the long, dead-end road. He wasn’t sure why he drove down there at all—his dog was in the passenger seat, and he thought she wanted a longer ride. That was his story. As he passed a parked car, he saw a man and a woman standing beside it, locked in what looked like an argument.
Maybe a fight. He didn’t stop. A few minutes later, he reached the end of the road, turned around, and drove back. The car was gone.
But something dark was sprawled in the snow at the roadside. He didn’t get out. He drove home, told his wife, and only then asked his neighbor to come back with him to check the spot. Together, they saw it was a young woman, blood soaking her clothes.
Only then did someone call the police. Officers confirmed she was dead. She had been stabbed around fifteen times and died from blood loss. But there wasn’t much blood in the snow.
She had defensive wounds on her arms, signs she had fought back. There were no signs of sexual assault, which ruled out the easiest motive. Not far from her body, police found a man’s hat. The snow was too soft to make casts of the tire tracks.
There were almost no clues to work with. The victim was Mary Kathleen Schlais, a 25-year-old artist from Minneapolis. She had left her apartment that morning around 10:30, carrying a sign that said “Madison,” planning to hitchhike to an art show in Chicago. She shared a small apartment with a roommate, lived simply, saved what she could, and, like many people in the 1970s, relied on hitchhiking to get around.
Public transport was unreliable, and owning a car wasn’t an option for her. She had studied fine arts at the University of Minnesota, earned several scholarships, graduated with honors, and had even studied abroad, picking up fluent German and Danish before beginning to learn Japanese. Her teachers saw a bright future in her. She just never got the chance to reach it.
The drive from Mary’s home to where her body was found would have taken about an hour and a half. That meant the person who picked her up in Minneapolis was almost certainly the one who killed her. Dennis, the man who found her, described seeing a white, slim-built man between 25 and 35, about 5 feet 8 inches tall with light brown hair. The car was a small, gold-colored sedan.
No model. No license plate. Police put together a composite sketch and shared it with the local papers. Tips came in, but none went anywhere.
Then, detectives turned their attention to Dennis. He had been on that remote road for no clear reason. He claimed he had stopped at a store and kept driving afterward because his dog wanted a longer ride. He didn’t call police until his neighbor saw the body.
That looked like a man trying to build an alibi. But there was no evidence he had been in Minneapolis that morning, and tire tracks at the scene didn’t match his car. They couldn’t rule him out entirely, but they couldn’t put him at the crime, either. They even brought in a hypnotist twice, hoping to unlock hidden memories, but it didn’t work.
An anonymous letter urged police to dig deeper into Dennis, but it contained no new evidence. Just suspicion. The case stalled. Then investigators found a similar unsolved case from 1972.
A young woman named Jolly had been hitchhiking home in Minneapolis. Fifteen hours later, her body was found near a river. Her friends had seen her get into a gold-colored car driven by a young man, and just like Mary, Jolly showed no signs of sexual assault. Detectives looked hard for a link between the two murders.
They found none. Leads dried up. The case went cold. Over the following decades, the case was reopened several times, but every time it hit the same dead end.
In the early 1980s, police suspected serial killer Randall Woodfield, who had confessed to killing forty-four people, most of them picked up while hitchhiking. Despite the similarities, nothing concrete linked him to Mary’s murder. As the years passed, the case became local legend in the county where Mary died. People started reporting sightings of a young woman trying to hitch a ride by the roadside, vanishing the moment anyone looked away.
Two fishermen claimed they saw a glowing woman watching them silently near a lake. Another woman said a murdered woman named Mary visited her and spoke to her. The ghost stories became more famous than the crime itself. Many who told them didn’t know a real tragedy sat behind the legend.
In the early 2000s, DNA analysis became standard in criminal investigations. Detectives took another look at the evidence. Under Mary’s fingernails, they had found traces of blood and skin, likely from her attacker. But after all these years, experts couldn’t extract a usable DNA profile from it.
They had one more lead: the hat found near the body. Inside were a few short strands of male hair. Forensic experts managed to pull a partial DNA profile from them. But there was no match in the FBI’s database.
The partial profile did, however, rule out suspects, including the serial killer they’d once suspected. The case stayed cold until late 2022, when detectives learned about genetic genealogy. They reached out to a specialized lab in New Jersey, and the lab agreed to help. Experts went to work with that partial DNA profile taken from the hat.
It wasn’t a full profile, which made things much harder. After a long process of searching public genealogy databases and building possible family trees, they landed on a potential suspect, a man who matched every criterion. Detectives tracked him down and asked for a DNA sample. He agreed.
The DNA didn’t match. Then the analyst suggested another possibility: the killer might be the man’s first cousin. Detectives collected a second sample. No match.
Both men were clearly close biological relatives of the killer. That much was certain. But no one else in the family seemed to fit. That’s when experts offered a new theory—what if the killer had been adopted?
The team began digging through old records. On November 4th, 2024, they found what they had been searching for. Based on everything uncovered, there was a strong chance that the biological relative they’d been looking for was an 84-year-old man named John Miller. Detectives looked into Miller’s background and learned he had a daughter.
They reached out to her, and she agreed to provide a DNA sample. The results came back a match. The hair found in the hat at the crime scene belonged to her father. Fifty years after Mary Schlais was murdered, investigators finally knew who killed her.
They went straight to Miller’s home. Almost immediately after they told him about the DNA evidence, he calmly confessed. He said that on the day of the murder, he picked up Mary on the side of the road and promised her a ride. Once they got out of the city, he started pressuring her for sex.
When she refused, he pulled out a knife and stabbed her multiple times. Then he drove down that remote dead-end road, planning to bury her body in the snow. While dragging her out of the car, a man drove by. Panicked, Miller jumped back into his vehicle and sped off, leaving the body by the roadside.
The next day, he saw a newspaper article about the murder and felt relieved—the witness had gotten the color of his car wrong. Miller said he had been driving a light blue car that day, not a gold one. He told detectives he had thrown the murder weapon into a swamp near his home. He couldn’t remember what he did with Mary’s purse.
When asked if he had killed anyone else, Miller said no. He said he didn’t understand why he had killed her in the first place. After his confession, Miller was charged with murder and taken into custody. He made it clear he didn’t intend to fight the charges.
He said he would plead guilty because he didn’t want to go through a long court process. He was ready to spend the rest of his life in prison. Five decades after Mary Kathleen Schlais vanished, her case was finally closed. As for Jolly’s murder, Miller’s involvement now seems unlikely, given he drove a completely different colored car back then.
Still, investigators are looking into whether he might be connected to any other unsolved cases. So far, they haven’t found anything to tie him to any additional murders.
