Once more, modern technology allows law enforcement to solve a crime in a way they simply couldn't half a century ago:
The cold case killing of a Wisconsin hitchhiker has been solved 50 years later thanks to a DNA breakthrough from evidence pulled from a hat that the accused killer left behind at the scene.
Jon Keith Miller, 84, was arrested Thursday after he ‘confirmed his involvement' in the vicious stabbing of Mary Schlais, whose body was found at a Spring Brook intersection in February 1974.
Schlais had been hitchhiking to Chicago at the time of her murder; the only evidence obtained from the scene was "a stocking cap found near her body, from which a few hairs were pulled."
Recently, however, the Dunn County Sheriff's Office "teamed up with the genetic genealogy department at Ramapo College in New Jersey" to try and obtain information from the evidence.
Genetic genealogy - which uses genetic material to establish family trees from which both victims and perpetrators can be identified - has been used in solving numerous long-dormant criminal mysteries in recent years:
In this latest case, genetic testing led police to Jon Keith Miller's daughter (don't surrender your DNA to any of those ancestry services if your relatives are murderers 😅), and eventually to Miller himself:
When police interviewed Miller, who now lives in Minnesota, on Thursday, he initially denied knowing anything about the murder - but once presented with the DNA evidence he fessed up.
The suspect said he picked Schlais up and propositioned her; after she refused he stabbed her to death. He tried to bury her body in a snowbank, but he was spooked by a passing car and left his hat behind.
Police said the old man was likely ready to confess:
‘I believe it's got to even be a relief for him after 50 years of living with this. It's had to have been on his mind almost every day,' Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Bygd told reporters Friday, according to CNN.
‘You would think anybody with a conscience, it would. So, I think he was done fighting it, personally.'
The sheriff called the arrest "a huge victory for our agency."
Those online DNA databases are both impressive and frightening at the same time!
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