Justice has been delivered too late for a murdered Wisconsin hitchhiker. 50 years after the brutal act, a DNA test led to the trail of the now 84-year-old killer of Mary Schlais, who was stabbed to death at the age of 25.
Schlais wanted to hitchhike to an art exhibition in Chicago in 1974, but she never got there. The driver who gave her a ride sexually assaulted her. When she fended off his attacks, he stabbed her in the back with a knife. The attacker then tried to hide her body in a snowdrift. When a car drove up, he panicked and ran away, leaving behind a hat that would condemn him half a century later.
The cold case was reopened and the hair on the headgear was examined. The resulting genetic profile was used to identify relatives of the killer. Police found his daughter and questioned Jon Keith Miller 50 years after the brutal crime.
84-year-old seemed “pretty calm”
He initially denied knowing anything about the case. Confronted with the results of the DNA test, he eventually confessed. Police said Miller was “quite calm about the incident” when he confessed. “I think it should actually be a relief for him, after having to live with it for fifty years. He must have thought about it almost every day,” Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Bygd told CNN.
Source: Krone
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