Decades old murder mystery ends in Owatonna arrest

Three days after Mary Kathleen Schlais would have turned 76 years old, investigators arrested an Owatonna man they believe killed the young artist back in 1974.

Jon Keith Miller, now 84, was arrested at his home on 195 24^th Place NW on a warrant for first-degree murder.

Sergeant Jason Slacker and Detective Dan Westlund had made the two-hour drive from Dunn County, Wis., to make the arrest about 2:30 p.m. Nov. 7.

Miller appeared the next morning in Steele County District Court, where he waived extradition back to Wisconsin to face charges there.

DNA extracted from hairs found in a stocking cap left at the scene of the homicide eventually led to Miller, court documents say.

He initially denied knowledge of the crime, said Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Bygd, but when confronted with the evidence, Miller allegedly admitted that he picked up the victim while she was hitchhiking and eventually stabbed her to death.

“With the assistance of the Minnesota BCA and the Owatonna Police Department, these two (investigators) were finally able to arrest Jon K. Miller for the homicide of Mary K. Schlais after 50 years,” Bygd said at a press conference Nov. 8.

The murder

The day after Valentine’s Day in 1974, Schlais left her Minneapolis apartment and began hitchhiking to an art show in Chicago.

She was 25, tall and slim, with long hair and hazel eyes. An artist herself, she had attended the University of Minnesota on scholarships – then graduated with honors. Schlais loved to travel.

“In 1974, it wasn’t that unusual for somebody to hitchhike,” Bygd said, “but stories like this are the reason we don’t let our kids do it anymore. This was a very bright lady who had a very bright future ahead of her, and her life was taken away from her, way too young.”

Just a few hours after leaving home, Schlais’s body was discovered 90 miles away in a snowbank in Spring Brook Township in Dunn County after a witness reported seeing a man dump a body out of a car before driving away.

Schlais had been stabbed several times in her upper torso, including in her back. An autopsy report released at the time indicated she had defensive cuts to her hands; injuries to her face suggested she had been hit or punched several times.

She was fully clothed, though her purse and coat were missing – and were never found. What was found, however, was the clue that would lead to her killer: an orange and black stocking cap.

The suspects

The caller who had notified police said that after the man threw Schlais’s body into the ditch, he got out of his car and tried to cover her with snow.

The stocking cap was found on the road near her body. It contained human hairs that did not match the victim.

A news story at the time of the murder described the suspect as a white male between the ages of 25 and 35, about 6 feet tall and about 180 pounds. He had medium-length auburn hair and a thick mustache.

The suspect was driving a late-model, orange-gold compact car.

Though the witness was interviewed and cleared as a suspect, several other leads came in the first days after the murder. None panned out.

“Over the course of the next several decades there were many tips, leads and interviews conducted related to this homicide,” Bygd said at the press conference.

It involved multiple law enforcement agencies, he said, and “there were also several items of evidence examined and re-examined over the years as technological advances in DNA were developed. Still, no viable suspects were identified.”

In 2009, Schlais’s family consented to the exhumation of her body, which provided multiple different types of DNA.

As recently as 2018, the DCSO named former Green Bay Packer Randall Woodfield as a person of interest.

Woodfield was cut from the team in 1974 before ever appearing in a game, after a series of arrests for indecent exposure. He drove a gold Volkswagen Beetle and had a thick dark mustache.

Woodfield was arrested in 1981 and is serving life in prison in Oregon for the murders of two 19-year-old women, but is suspected of committing more than 40 murders near interstate exits across the country.

The answer

After following tips and dead-end leads for decades, the DCSO investigators recently began working with Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., and its team of genetic genealogists.

The team used DNA samples from the hair recovered from the stocking cap to identify potential suspects – relatives of known people who had voluntarily uploaded their DNA to a genetic database.

Ramapo College, Bygd said, has “been an incredible partner. Agencies can spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars sending DNA samples to private labs across the country to get results. We had a college very willing to step up and help us with this process.”

The investigators traveled to Wyoming, where a potential suspect was ruled out after he provided his own DNA; it did not match the sample from the cap.

Bygd said the Ramapo College team kept working and “pretty much got a 100 percent match” with Miller – despite a curveball: Jon Miller had been adopted as a child.

Names and family trees may change, but DNA does not.

At his apartment in Owatonna, Miller admitted to detectives that he picked up Schlais as she hitchhiked and asked her for sex, the criminal complaint says. She told him no, and at one point leaned forward in the seat.

That’s when Miller allegedly said he grabbed a knife stowed above the passenger seat visor and stabbed her in the back; he believed she was dead.

According to court documents, Miller, then 33 years old, pulled off the highway and tried to hide Schlais’s body in the snow, but a car drove by. It scared him, he said, so he quickly left – leaving his stocking cap behind.

He saw a photo of the cap and reportedly admitted it was his.

Neither his car nor the murder weapon were ever recovered.

The relief

Bygd declined to answer questions about why Miller was in the area, or if he had ever been on the radar as a suspect, saying he “cannot get into too much detail, to ensure Mr. Miller has a fair trial here in Dunn County,” and that the investigation continues.

He spoke with Schlais’s family the night of the arrest and said “they were very relieved, and very thankful for our agency and the investigation.”

Bygd, too, was relieved by the arrest. A 35-year veteran of the DCSO, he has seen the ups and downs of the case firsthand.

“I was actually sitting in a deer stand when I got the text from the detective,” he said at the press conference. “I had a difficult time controlling my excitement.”

Miller, who was alone in his apartment when investigators arrived, was calm.

“I believe it’s got to be a relief for him, after 50 years of living with this,” Bygd said. “It had to have been on his mind almost every day. You’d think anybody with a conscience, it would. I think he was done fighting it, personally.”

A reporter asked about prison, given Miller’s age.

“There’s closure now,” he said, “but 50 years have gone by, and now he’s an old man. Does it still feel like justice is served here?”

“My preference would be that he’d have spent the last 50 years in prison,” Bygd answered. “Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. I’m pretty comfortable saying he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison – he’s 84 years old.”

The case has gone through five sheriffs and countless investigators, both local and state.

“I always kept hope – but there’s always that question,” he said. “To have somebody in custody for it is unbelievably satisfying.”