Police Hunt Down Killer Grandpa 51 Years Later

0:00Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exema. So I get how it can steal your time. But why let Exema take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce? Epglyce, lubricism ab LBKZ, a 250-mg per 2-mg leador injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe Exema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Epglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglyce. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyce. Before starting Epglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lili Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyce and visit Epglyce.com or call 1-800-LiliRx or 1-800-545-5979. Earn your farm D in as little as 33 months with West Coast University's

1:03hybrid program no bachelor's degree required. Eligible transfer credits may be accepted. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exema. So I get how it can still your time. But why let Exema take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce? Epglyce, lubricism app LBKZ, a 250-milligram per 2-milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms, with moderate to severe Exema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Epglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglyce. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyce. Before starting Epglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

2:03Paid partnership with Lili. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyce and visit Epglyce.com, or call 1-800-LiliRX, or 1-800-545-5979. So usually when we talk about burying something, like a time capsule, for instance, there's this baked in expectation of absolute control. Right, definitely. You control the whole process. Exactly. You pick the spot, you dig the hole, you place the object in the dirt, and then you just cover it up and walk away. Right, you're the one controlling the narrative. Yeah, you decide when or even if that secret ever sees the light of day again. Well, and it's a very binary way of looking at the past. Yeah. You know, like it's either buried or it's unburied. And historically, let's be real, that model held true. Right. If you kept your mouth shut. Exactly. If you buried something deep enough and just didn't talk, the earth kept your secret. The physical world was just static. But then you step into the modern world of forensic science and genetic genealogy,

3:03and suddenly that buried time capsule starts emitting a signal. It's wild. It's like the earth starts shifting all on its own. It really is. We're looking at this investigative landscape today that is actively rewriting history, dragging things out of the mud, whether the person who buried them once or not. Oh, absolutely. They have no say in it anymore. So I want you, the listener, to picture this. Picture sitting down at a crowded carnival. Maybe you're holding your kids hand, buying a funnel cake, or maybe you're sitting at a local diner having a casual cup of coffee on a random Tuesday morning. Just completely normal everyday stuff. Yeah. Totally mundane. Imagine living that perfectly normal life for 18,528 days. Wow. When you put the number on it like that, over 18,000 days absolutely convinced that you were the smartest guy in the room. Because decades ago, you committed a horrific violent act and you just walked away completely clean. You see, in the mind of someone hiding a crime of that magnitude,

4:05time acts like this massive insulator. It's like a buffer, right? Exactly. Every single day that passes reinforces their delusion of safety. Each year adds another layer of psychological distance between the man he is today and the man he was in the past. So time just feels like his best friend. He thinks time is his greatest ally without a doubt. Okay, let's unpack this because right there, that is the fatal flaw in his logic. He thought time was his ally, but I look at this like a biological ticking clock. Oh, I like that analogy. Yeah, because for 50 years, this killer thought he was walking further and further away from the crime scene, right? But thanks to his own DNA, every step he took every year he lived was actually just counting down his capture. It's so true. Time wasn't protecting him at all. No, it was just waiting for science to catch up to his biology. Because the evidence was always there, just waiting in the dark. The biology itself was fundamentally unchanged. Right. The police had it the whole time. They collected it, they preserved it,

5:06but they just couldn't read the language who was written in yet. Time basically just served as the bridge between collecting the evidence and finally being able to translate it, which plunges us directly into the freezing reality of February 15th 1974. Yeah, this is where it all starts. Right. And today we're doing a deep dive into the 50 year old cold case of Mary Kathleen Schlaz. And we're using source material from some incredible excerpts, specifically from an interrogation transcript featured on the YouTube channel, Red Thread Interrogations. It's a fascinating source because you get the exact moment the detectives confront him. Exactly. Our mission today is to unpack the intersection of historical police work, cutting edge forensic science, and the chilling psychology of a man who hit his crime for half a century. And the scene that baffled police for 50 years is just it's a brutal setting. It really is. We are on a rural dirt road in Dunn County, Wisconsin, dead of winter. A driver is making his way down this completely desolate stretch, just navigating the winter landscape. Pitch black freezing cold. Yeah. And he stops his car near

6:11an intersection climbs out into the snow. And the source material tells us he was desperately hoping his eyes were just playing tricks on him. You can only imagine that sinking feeling. But they weren't there just discarded in a snow bank was the body of 25 year old Mary Kathleen Schlaz. It is devastating visual, just a frozen, lonely dirt road. And left out there like garbage. Right. But the tragedy multiplies exponentially when we delve into who Mary actually was. Let's talk about her because she was incredible. She really was because when we examine cold cases, there's this unfortunate, almost subconscious tendency to reduce the victim to the circumstances of their death. Yeah, to just view them as a body in a snow bank. Exactly. But Mary was this vibrant, culturally rich creator. She was actively participating in the world in a way that was highly advanced for 1974. She was actually hitchhiking from Minneapolis where she lived down to an art show in Chicago. She was going there in a network to show off her skills basically to build her career.

7:13And we should note that in 1974, hitchhiking was a far more common mode of transit. Right. It wasn't seen as this crazy risk like it is today. No, it was a symbol of independence and mobility for that young generation. And her potential was just off the charts. What's fascinating here is the sheer breadth of her intellect and her drive. She was a talented artist working across multiple mediums. She traveled the world, right? She did. She spoke fluent German, fluent Danish. Wait, didn't she? Wasn't she also learning Japanese? Yes. She was actively in the process of studying Japanese. I mean, that requires a level of cognitive flexibility and cultural curiosity that's just extraordinary. And her work wasn't just aesthetic either. It had deep structural purpose. Her art was focused heavily on women's rights, which was so pivotal at that time. Totally. Her pieces were actually on display at the women's institute for social change. I mean, to be a 25-year-old woman in 1974, dedicating your artistic output to female empowerment, she was on the absolute cutting edge of the cultural zeitgeist.

8:15Which is exactly why the concept of interrupted potential is so profound here. Yeah, it's not just a life lost. Right. She was advocating for marginalized voices through her art, communicating across cultural boundaries through her languages. This loss wasn't just the termination of a biological life. It was the theft of decades of future contributions. The killer didn't just take her future. He stole her art, her advocacy, and her voice from the rest of society. The contrast is just sickening to me. You have this brilliant young woman with a worldly, expansive future left in a freezing Wisconsin snowbank by some man driving a 1972 Gremlin. It's a horrific juxtaposition. So the police launched an investigation immediately, obviously. And looking at the file, they actually had what appeared to be an incredibly solid foundation. They had three distinct actionable clues. And by 1974 standards, having those three things was an absolute gold mine of evidence. Okay, so walk us through what they had.

9:15First, they had eyewitnesses who had spotted a man and a woman arguing on the side of the road shortly before Mary's body was discovered. Okay, so they have a rough timeline and a witness. Yes. Second, they had a really solid physical description of the vehicle involved. That's 72 Gremlin. Which is a pretty specific car, you know. Exactly. And third, and this is the big one, they had a physical item left behind at the scene by the killer. A hat. A witness, a car, and the killer's actual hat. And yet the case went completely cold. It's frustrating to look back on for sure. Yeah, and if her people casually mentioned the historical police just like failed or dropped the ball on these old cases. But looking at the mechanics of 1974 policing, it's not that simple. It's not simple at all. They did everything right with what they had. Exactly. It's like having a physical hat is like having the key to a safe, but the safe itself hasn't even been invented yet. Oh, that's a perfect way to look at it. The hat was the key. It held the killer's biological identity. But they literally had to wait 50 years for genetic science to build the lock

10:19that the key could actually fit into. If we connect this to the bigger picture of forensic history, the paradox of evidence collection in the 70s becomes glaringly apparent. Because you can have the evidence, but it doesn't mean you can use it. Right. You can possess a murder weapon, a vehicle description, and a piece of the killer's clothing. But without a centralized genetic database, or even the technological capability to extract microscopic cellular data from fabric, that hat is virtually useless as an identification tool. It basically just tells you the killer had a head and wore a hat. That's literally it. The detectives in 1974 performed their duties impeccably. They secured the scene. They cataloged the hat and they preserved it in a sterile environment. They did their job. They did. They just couldn't know that the technological apparatus required to read that evidence wouldn't be invented for several more decades. So that hat just sits in an evidence locker. The 70s become the 80s. The 80s give way to the 90s. The turn of the millennium comes and goes. 50 years.

11:20Half a century. And Mary's killer is just out there walking around, raising children, going to local school events, working his jobs. For 50 years, this guy operates as a ghost in broad daylight. And we know his name now. His name was John Keith Miller. Right. And for decades, John lived a remarkably unremarkable life. He lived just two hours away from Mary's home. Two hours. That is just chilling. He spent a significant portion of his life working transient jobs at carnivals, primarily in Iowa. Oh, carnivals. Talk about a transient lifestyle. Exactly. And he married a woman named Ruth, who were consistently as a cook at the copper tree restaurant. He effectively blended right into the mundane and visible background of the American Midwest. So if the science is finally catching up and the biological key is sitting right there in the evidence locker, how do they finally bridge that 50-year gap? That's the real marvel of this case. Because I mean, how do you take a dusty hat from 1974 and turn it into a name on a computer screen in the 2000s?

12:21It requires a painstaking, highly specialized scientific process. It's not just running it through a quick machine. No, not at all. The breakthrough came via geneticists based out of Ramo Polk College in Moa, New Jersey. They specialize in investigative genetic genealogy or IgG. Okay, IgG. But before you can even think about building a family tree, you have to acquire the DNA. And extracting genetic material from a 50-year-old piece of fabric is incredibly arduous. Right, because I imagine it's not like the television shows where they swab the hat, put it in a tube, and a machine beeps 30 seconds later with a photo of the killer. I wish it were that easy, but it's far from it. Right. We were talking about touch DNA. Meaning just skin cells left behind. Exactly. Microscopic skin cells shed by the wearer, deeply embedded into the interwoven threads of the hat. And after 50 years. Over 50 years DNA degrades significantly. The sugar phosphate backbone of the DNA molecule actually breaks down due to environmental factors, temperature fluctuations, and just time itself.

13:23So it's basically shattered into tiny pieces? Yes. So the geneticists have to utilize advanced chemical washes just to isolate these fragmented cells. And then they employ a technique called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. PCR, right? We heard a lot about that during the pandemic. Exactly the same concept. They use PCR to amplify those tiny degraded fragments into a readable genetic profile. It is a grueling month long endeavor of molecular reconstruction. Just to get a profile that you can even look at. And once they finally have that reconstructive profile, they run it through the consumer databases, like the genealogy databases where people send their spit tubes to find out where their ancestors came from. Precisely. They use a unit of measurement called centimorgans. Centimorgans. Yeah, it chronifies the length of DNA segments you share with someone else. The more centimorgans you share, the closer to the familial relationship. Oh, okay. So it's like a mathematical map of family ties. Exactly. By mapping these shared segments, genetic geneologists triangulate a suspect's

14:24position within a family tree. And in John's case, they successfully ran the DNA and traced it to two biological siblings of the suspect. Wait, I'm confused. If they have a mathematical genetic match to his actual brother and his sister, how is he not in handcuffs the very next morning? What broke the chain of identification? Earn your farm, Deanna's littlest 33 months. With West Coast University's hybrid program, no bachelor's degree required. Eligible transfer credits may be accepted. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Imagine your friend tells you she's taking an innocent family trip to Greenville, South Carolina. We'll call her Emma. The trip sounds great to you. Hiking at John's Gap, dinner at Topsoil, a room at the best hotel in town. Harmless, right? Here's the thing. Emma and her family never return from Greenville. They disappear. You search for answers, but nothing adds up. Emma had a great life back home. You guys were best friends.

15:25What happened? Well, the truth is, once Emma realized she could have access to Michelin recognized restaurants, nature, local shops, and performing arts, all in one place, everywhere else started to seem a little. Emma's vacation is a cautionary tale. If you're coming this way, don't forget to tell your friends and neighbors goodbye. Visit Greenville, South Carolina, but you may never want to leave. Learn more at visitgreenvillesc.com. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. The complex, legal, and social reality of adoption. No, wow. Okay. This is where investigative genetic genealogy encounters a massive, sometimes almost insurmountable roadblock. John was adopted as an infant.

16:26So his name wasn't originally John Miller? Right. His biological father was a man named John Pearson, and John's given birth name was Donald Keith Johnson. Donald Keith Johnson. But his adoptive parents, Merr and Grace Miller, legally changed his name to John Miller, keeping only his middle name, Keith. It's like trying to find a specific book in a massive sprawling library. The genealogy gives the detectives the exact aisle and the exact shelf. But when they walk up to that shelf and pull the book down, it has a completely blank cover because the state erased the title when he was an infant. That analogy perfectly captures the friction between biology and bureaucracy here. Because he was adopted as an infant, he was never raised with those biological siblings. They didn't even know him. They had no idea he existed, or at least no idea what his new name was or where he went. The geneticists connected the DNA from the hat to the biological siblings. But when investigators look to the public records for that specific family, Donald Keith Johnson had effectively vanished. Just swallowed up by the sealed records of the mid-20th century adoption system.

17:30Exactly. The DNA said, look at this family. But the paper trail said, this family has no record of this man. Well, here's where it gets really interesting, though. Because while his infant adoption provided this accidental bureaucratic shield, his own biological legacy is what ultimately tore it down. Yeah, they didn't just give up. Investigators refused to let the trail go cold again. They kept digging, they kept mapping, and they eventually secured a direct 100% DNA match from John's own daughter Tina. The profound irony of that outcome cannot be overstated. It's wild. John's adoption shielded him from the initial familial match, right? It provided a temporary witness protection program of sorts. But his autonomous decision later in life, to build his own family, to pass on his genetic code to a child, is what ultimately anchored him permanently to the crime scene. It was his own biology coming back from him. Yes. When police confronted his daughter Tina, and requested a direct DNA sample to compare against the crime scene profile,

18:33she provided it. And it was a definitive, undeniable match to the daughter of Mary's killer. Imagine the psychological weight of that reality for Tina. Just think about it. Imagine your own DNA, the very fabric of your biological existence, acting as a homing beacon for a horrific crime that occurred before you were even a factor in the world. It's a heavy burden to bear. You submit your DNA, maybe to learn about your heritage, or simply to cooperate with law enforcement, and you inadvertently solve a 50-year-old murder. Your existence is the key that finally locks your father away. This raises an important point about the modern inevitability of consequence. It was actually perfectly articulated by one of the detectives later in the interrogation. He tells John, DNA is non-escapable. You can't escape it. It is what it is. Non-escapable. I mean, it has become an omnipresent, inescapable force. It really is. Non-escapable. It is the ultimate reckoning. But even armed with that 100% DNA match, law enforcement doesn't just, you know,

19:34kick the door off the hinges with a SWAT team. No, they have to be smart about it. Right. They are dealing with an 84-year-old man living in an assisted living facility. They have to carefully navigate this interaction, because they need a confession. They need to understand the why and the how. Which brings us to the methodology of the confrontation. This happened in November of 2024. Detectives Dan and Jason visit John at his assisted living facility. And this is where the Red Thread and Terrogation source material gets so good. Yes. Because what unfolds in the transcript is a complete masterclass in the psychology of interrogation. I want to pause on their specific approach right at the start, because it is fascinating. They don't walk in projecting authority or hostility. They don't want to spook him. Exactly. They use this conversational camouflage. Detective Dan is incredibly polite, almost folksy. He walks in and says, nothing like getting bothered on a nice day, huh? It's very disarming. He frames the entire visit around Ancestry DNA,

20:35claiming they are just trying to build family charts and clear up some old records. This is a classic iteration of the soft approach. It's heavily reminiscent of the Colombo method, if you're familiar with it. Oh, like the old TV detective who acts confused. Exactly. By feigning a mere genealogical inquiry, they are strategically manipulating John's Thread Assessment mechanisms. They aren't treating him like a violent murder suspect. They're treating like a grandfather helping out with the school project. Right. They're treating him like a respected elder statesman, who just happens to hold the key to some historical family trivia. They lull him into a false sense of security, which completely prevents his psychological defenses from deploying. See, I wonder about that. Why does that soft approach actually yield a better result with someone capable of covering up a murder for 50 years? Because if I'm a detective, my raw instant would be to walk in, slam the DNA file on the table, and establish absolute dominance right from the jump. Which is exactly what you shouldn't do.

21:36Really? Yeah. Because establishing sudden aggressive dominance triggers the fight or flight response. When a suspect feels immediately cornered, their cognitive walls go up instantly. They just shut down. They shut down. They invoke their right to silence. They ask for a lawyer. And the flow of information completely ceases. Oh, okay. By playing the role of a somewhat confused genealogist, the detective strokes the suspect's ego. The suspect believes he is smarter than the detective, which makes him talkative. So he thinks he's controlling the room? Exactly. He begins offering up verifiable details, locking himself into a ton line, without even realizing he is weaving his own net. Wow. And they use this incredibly disarming setup to get him to verify every crucial detail of his life. They get him talking about working the transient carnival circuit, primarily in Iowa. They're building the foundation. They casually ask about his wife, Ruth, confirming she worked at the Coppertree restaurant. They are meticulously getting him to place himself exactly where he needs to be,

22:37geographically and temporally. And they're also actively testing his cognitive function. This is crucial to make sure he's mentally sharp. Yes. They're testing his willingness to admit to lesser past transgressions. They casually bring up a firearm he acquired from his father in Lauddonny, which John actually used in a robbery when he was a young man residing in California. The source transcript highlights that prior robbery conviction and detective Dan just slides it into the conversation so smoothly. It's masterful. He says, obviously nothing you know you're not in trouble for that particular thing, but I was wondering if that helped you remember anything. And John just casually admits to the armed robbery like they're discussing a parking ticket. If we connect this to the broader context of his life, it reveals a deeply troubling pattern. Because it wasn't just a one-off mistake. Right. The fact that he possessed the capacity for armed robbery, combined with a lifestyle of traveling all over the country, working under the table jobs at carnivals in California, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota,

23:39it raises a chilling extrapolation. Carnivals are the perfect cover. Carnivals are transient by nature. They operate heavily in cash, leaving minimal paper trails, and they offer the perfect camouflage for someone harboring dark, violent impulses. And if he committed this brutal murder in Wisconsin and went totally undetected for half a century, you have to wonder. It forces us to wonder if Mary was truly his only victim. It's terrifying. So picture this scene in your head listener. You have an 84-year-old man likely sitting in a recliner in a quiet assisted living room, having this calm nostalgic chat about carnival cooking and family trees. Very cozy. And sitting across from him are two detectives who are secretly holding the absolute trump card for a 1974 homicide. The dissonance is surreal. And the detectives are highly strategic with the specific linguistic traps they set during this cozy chat. What kind of traps? Well, they start throwing out specific names from his biological family tree. They ask about the name Sutherland, and they ask, do you recognize the name Bar-at-all?

24:42B-A-H-R. They are testing the structural integrity of his memory. Exactly. They are establishing on a recorded medium that his mind is remarkably sharp. They confirm that he knows his original birth name was Donald Keith Johnson. Even though he hasn't used a dissonance, he was a baby. Right. And that he is aware his biological father was John Pearson. By getting him to accurately recall these obscure familial details from decades past, they are preemptively destroying any future legal defense. Oh, like a defense claiming dementia or Alzheimer's? Yes. They're heading off any claims of age-related confusion. He cannot later go to court and claim he doesn't remember 1974 when he just flawlessly detailed his family tree and a prior robbery to these detectives. It is brilliant. They are building a cognitive fence around him using his own words, and he is cheerfully hammering in the nails himself. He has no idea it's happening. But eventually, the polite banter has to terminate. The fence is complete. The detectives have to pivot from the ancestry ruse to the brutal reality of the crime scene.

25:46The transition in the interrogation is swift, it's calculated, and it's completely devoid of emotion. The tone shifts completely. Detective Dan shifts his posture and says, so to get to that point, John, the case that we're looking at, there's DNA, and obviously it's from many years ago. He explains investigative genetic genealogy and simple undeniable terms, and then he just drops the hammer. He says, what led us here is a homicide. Yes. And John's immediate reaction is wild. The detective tells him directly, your DNA was found at the scene of the crime. And John plays incredibly, almost comically dumb. He really tries to deflect it. He says, I have no idea what you mean. He actually tries to brush it off by claiming this must be one of them things that I watch on TV, called case. Called case. He attempts to frame the entire confrontation as some sort of television production misunderstanding. Like, he's on a prank show or something. Well, this is actually a highly documented psychiatric phenomenon in criminal interrogations. Really? Pretending it's a TV show. Pretending it's not real, yes.

26:49Imagine your friend tells you she's taking an innocent family trip to Greenville, South Carolina. We'll call her Emma. The trip sounds great to you. Hiking at John's Gap, dinner at Topsoil, a room at the best hotel in town. Harmless, right? Here's the thing. Emma and her family never returned from Greenville. They disappear. You search for answers, but nothing adds up. Emma had a great life back home. You guys were best friends. What happened? Well, the truth is, once Emma realized she could have access to Michelin recognized restaurants, nature, local shops, and performing arts all in one place, everywhere else started to seem a little. Emma's vacation is a cautionary tale. If you're coming this way, don't forget to tell your friends and neighbors goodbye. Visit Greenville, South Carolina, but you may never want to leave. Learn more at visit GreenvilleSC.com. It's fall in Jeep country, and during the driving to fall sales event,

27:50get a great deal on four by fours that refuse to be contained, like Jeep Wrangler. Confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied, with the open air freedom in Jeep Gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep Driving to Fall Sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, even the Jeep Grill or Registered Trademarks of FCA US LLC. When confronted with overwhelming, inescapable reality, the human brain will often attempt a desperate narrative salvage. Faining complete ignorance and minimizing the reality by comparing it to fiction is a defense mechanism. So he's trying to mentally escape the room. He is trying to distance his current self from the visceral, bloody reality of the murder by framing the detective's presence as a television plot. It's an attempt to de-realize the situation. But detective Dan does not let him squirm out of the reality. He pushes back immediately. He states firmly,

28:50your DNA was on the scene of a murder next to the dead woman. It's time for you to talk about what happened. And this is where the 50-year facade completely crumbles. From the moment he is confronted with the DNA evidence, it takes exactly three minutes and 47 seconds for John Miller to crack. Three minutes and 47 seconds to surrender a secret he guarded for over 18,000 days. That is just wow. He just suddenly deflates and says, all right, I did. I put him in a snow bank. Is that enough? It was an accident. The sheer detachment in his voice is staggering. He even uses the wrong pronoun. He says, him. I don't know if that is a slip of the tongue or a further attempt at distancing, but it's bizarre. It's likely distancing. And what's fascinating here is the clinical psychology of a minimizing confession. Right. Because he admits it, but barely. Exactly. John admits to the physical act. He admits he is the killer, but he drastically dilutes his culpability and the violence of the act. He creates the sterile, sanitized narrative that protects his own ego.

29:51Let's look at the specific script he tries to sell the detectives. John claims he was driving his 72 Gremlin, saw Mary Hitch hiking and picked it up. Okay, so far plausible. He claims he propositioned her for a sexual favor. When she refused, he says she just bent forward in the passenger seat at which point he reached up to the visor, grabbed a skinny fishing knife, and hid her exactly once in the back. Once. And then he claims he was utterly shocked that she died, stating, I can't believe it, she died. Like it was a complete surprise to him. It is essential to analyze the psychiatric phenomenon of why a killer's brain allows them to verbalize such an obvious, easily disprovable lie. Because it's so easily disprovable. Right. Even when confronted with undeniable scientific proof of their presence, suspects often cannot bear to cognitively process the full monstrosity of their actions. It's too much for their own brain to handle. By claiming it was a single strike, by claiming he was surprised she died from it, he is desperately trying to paint himself not as a brutal, frenzied murderer,

30:53but as a normal guy who made a quick, unfortunate mistake. Like oops, my hand slipped with a knife. Exactly. It is an ego preservation tactic to maintain some semblance of humanity in his own eyes and to mitigate the judgment of the detectives in the room. But the forensic reality completely obliterates his narrative salvage. Completely. The physical evidence from 1974 is devastating. He claims he struck her a single time in the back. The autopsy report reviews that Mary was stabbed between 13 and 15 times. 13 to 15, that is not a single poke. And the wounds were located on both the front and the back of her body, which points to a prolonged, dynamic, and incredibly violent struggle. Exactly. The physical geometry of his story makes absolutely zero sense. He claims she is sitting next to him in a small car, refuses a sexual advance, and then just passively leans forward, crying, while he slowly retrieves a knife from a visor and pokes her in the back. It's absurd. The evidence shows she fought ferociously for her life.

31:55She had severe defensive wounds on both of her hands. She was grabbing the blade. And John's own biological material was found underneath her fingernails. She fought him. She scratched him. She fought a man wielding a blade. The contrast between his chillingly sterile description of a single poke and the absolute terror and adrenaline of a 15 stab wound fight for survival is immense. It's horrifying. The blood evidence, the defensive wounds, the sheer volume of strikes, it speaks to a chaotic, rage-fueled attack. The physical evidence completely destroys his script, but he clings to it with everything he has. There is this incredibly tense, quiet, strange word, the detective flat out looks at him and says, John, I don't believe you. And John's response. John, with absolute ice in his veins, just replies, I don't care if you believe me or not. That response is incredibly telling. I don't care if you believe me or not. He's just totally unbothered. In that moment, John realizes he has lost the larger war. He knows he is going to prison the DNA ensures that,

32:58but he is stubbornly refusing to lose the battle over the narrative. He won't give him the satisfaction. He is clinging to his final shred of control, which is his sanitized version of the story. So with the physical act confessed to, the detectives begin to drill down into the aftermath. They want to understand the logistics of his evasion. They need to know what happened next. How did he hide it? What was his alibi? And what was the psychological toll of carrying the secret? Well, let's examine his alibi, because it perfectly illustrates the concept of the banality of evil. Anality of evil, yeah. After brutally murdering Mary and leaving her in the snowbank, John realizes he is covered in her blood. Specifically, his Levi's are soaked in it. He claims he ripped the side of the pants during the struggle. So what is his grand cover story to his family? A skiing accident. A skiing accident. He tells people he went skiing, hit the fence that separated the two slopes and ripped his pants. He says he calmly went to the store, bought a brand new pair of Levi's,

33:59drove home, and casually threw the murder weapon out the window into a swamp. Think about the staggering level of psychological compartmentalization required to execute that sequence of events. I can't even fathom it. You have just ended a human life in a horrific, bloody, frenzied manner. You are literally wearing the victim's blood, and your brain allows you to calmly invent a story about a fence on a ski slope. Go retail shopping for trousers, and return to your domestic life as if you merely had a flat tire. I really question the family dynamic and the environment he lived in. Think about his wife Ruth. Right. He supposedly keeps the skinny, fishing filet knife in the visor of the car they share. He comes home with brand new pants, claiming a skiing accident. The source notes that John's family later indicated to investigators that leaving a fishing filet knife under the visor of the vehicle was absolutely not usual behavior for him. Which means it stood out. Did Ruth suspect something? We are culturally conditioned to think that monsters hide in the shadows,

34:59or in dark alleys, or in abandoned buildings, but they don't. No, they really don't. They hide in the mundane details of everyday life. They hide behind new livis, ski slope anecdotes, and carnival jobs. It forces us to confront how little we truly know about the internal lives of the people around us. But moving to the motive, or the context of why he was even in Minneapolis that day, this is where we see a deeply unsettling glimpse into his state of mind at the time of the murder. Oh, this part is just bizarre. When Detective Dan asks why he traveled into the city, John doesn't cite an innocent errand or a work requirement. He vaguely blames a popular 1972 X-rated movie. Yeah, his exact quote from the transcript is, well, one that, you know, that movie, like myself, and many, many others, everybody headed to the theater to watch that movie. This detail is bizarre, but it is forensically crucial. The source points out that this specific X-rated film was released two years prior in 1972, but was heavily playing in regional theaters in Minnesota

36:01and Wisconsin in the winter of 1974. Okay, so it was actively screening. And the film centered entirely on the exact sexual act that John claims he demanded from Mary in the vehicle. So his brain, half a century later, still explicitly links his trip to Minneapolis with the pursuit of this specific illicit gratification depicted in that film. Yes. He ties his motive directly to his own selfish predatory desires. He wasn't just a guy who made a bad decision in the heat of the moment. He traveled into the city in a predatory headspace, seeking a specific outcome. It also implies that his memory of that day is far more vivid and detailed than he is willing to admit to the detective. Oh, good point. His memory isn't fading due to age. It is highly selective. He perfectly remembers the movie. He remembers the brand of pants. He remembers the snowbank. But he conveniently experiences Amnesia regarding the 15 stab wounds and the violent struggle for her life. And the sheer arrogance of his perspective on time is breathtaking. John admits to the detectives that in the days following the murder,

37:04he actively followed the news coverage. He was checking up on his own crime. He read the newspaper the next day. He noticed that the reporters or the police got the color of his gremlin entirely wrong. And his takeaway from reading about the woman he butchered, he figured he got lucky. Unbelievable. He tells the detectives, if I figured I got away with it, I got lucky, but luck runs out. We have to analyze the concept of cognitive dissonance over a 50-year span here. He claims he never looked the case up again, that he just tried to shut it out of his mind completely. Just put it in a box and ignored it. Yet he also tells Detective Dan that the guilt weighed on him immensely in his own words. About 100 pounds worth. 100 pounds of guilt. How does a human being carry 100 pounds of guilt, acknowledging the immense moral weight of taking a life yet coldly stonewall the police 50 years later when confronted with the truth? He stonewalls them completely. The climax of this interrogation is infuriating to watch. It really is.

38:04The detectives literally pull out the physical crime scene photos. They place photos of Mary's hands covered in severe defensive runes on the table in front of him. Undeniable proof. They point to them and ask, look at her hands. How do you think that happened? And John, staring at the visual proof of his brutality, it just refuses to yield an inch. You won't break. He says, I don't know that, but that must have happened. I remember just what I did. I killed her, put her in the snowbank and left. That's it. He is retreating deep into his psychological fortress. He has surrendered the outer wall. He admits he caused her death, but he is fiercely defending the inner keep. Which is his absolute denial of the violence, the cruelty, and the suffering he inflicted. He just won't acknowledge her pain. He desperately wants this historical record to view him as a man who made a single fatal mistake. Not a monster who butchered a woman while she fought for her life. But the reality is the modern justice system doesn't care about his inner fortress or his sanitized narrative.

39:05The biology speaks louder than his lies. The science wins in the end. The detectives take a formal sample of his DNA to lock in the match. They put him in handcuffs. And the source video shows this incredibly poignant, pathetic image. The shuffle of shame. It's a powerful visual. This 84-year-old man who thought he had outsmarted the entire world slowly, weekly, shuffling out to the back of a police cruiser. He is arrested. He later pleads no contest to first-degree murder. And he receives a life sentence, ensuring he will die in a concrete cell rather than an assisted living facility. It is a stark, undeniable reminder that while it took 18,528 days, justice in the modern era can be absolute. The biology does not forget, even when the human mind tries to erase the tape. So let's synthesize this journey. We started with a tragic horrifying discovery on a freezing dirt road in Wisconsin in 1974. A case that seemed impossible to solve. We navigated the incredibly frustrating bureaucratic

40:07dead ends of sealed adoption records and name changes. We walked through the microscopic grueling science of touch DNA extraction. And we ended up sitting in an assisted living facility, watching an interrogation yield a confession from a man who thought he was untouchable. The overarching theme of this analysis is the inescapable retroactive nature of DNA. It reaches back in time. The advancement of genetic science is actively rewriting the history of cold cases. It is taking the unsolved, the forgotten, and the buried, and shining a glaring undeniable light on the truth. The biological key was always resting in that evidence locker. We just finally learned how to build the lock. Why does this matter to you? Because we are living in a revolutionary era of justice. The very fabric of who we are, our biology or genetic code, is now making it impossible for the worst among us to simply get lucky and fade away into the suburbs. The shadows that criminals relied on for centuries are rapidly disappearing. This raises an important question and leaves us with a somewhat provocative thought

41:08to consider regarding the future. We are witnessing a massive generational shift in the concept of accountability. How so? Well, John Miller's generation committed crimes under the assumption that the only witnesses that mattered were human eyes or human ears. If no one saw you, and you didn't leave a fingerprint, you were safe. But today, millions of people willingly surrender their genetic blueprints to consumer databases. We do it for fun. Right. We swab our cheeks and mail them off to corporate labs just to find out if we have a distant cousin in Ireland or what percentage knee underthought we are. Man, in doing so, what happens to our traditional concepts of privacy and family loyalty? That's a scary thought. When our own bloodlines are children, our distant cousins we've never even met become the ultimate surveillance network against our own relatives. We are voluntarily building a genetic penopticon. That brings us right back to where we started. The idea of the time capsule. You bury your secret deep in the ground. You think you control the narrative.

42:09You think it's just you and the dirt. But the rules have changed. Now, your own family tree is the map that leads the detectives right to where you're standing. Your own biology is digging up the capsule. The earth is shifting on its own and the secrets. Well, they just can't stay buried anymore. It's fall in Jeep country, and during the drive-in-to-fall sales event, get a great deal on four-by-fours that refuse to be contained, like Jeep Wrangler. Confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever. Jeep Grand Cherokee. And freedom that can't be denied. With the open-air freedom in Jeep Gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep drive-in-to-fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand. Jeep and the Jeep Grille Registered Trademarks of FCA-US LLC.