Peggy Lynn Johnson (Racine County Jane Doe)

Case background and investigation

On July 21, 1999, a father and daughter walking their dogs discovered the body of a young woman lying in a cornfield along 92nd Street in the town of Raymond, in Racine County, Wisconsin. She appeared to have died only about a day earlier and had been dumped and dragged roughly 25 feet from the roadside. She wore a gray man's shirt and black sweatpants and had collar-length, reddish-brown curly hair with blonde highlights. The condition of her body immediately signaled that she had suffered severe and prolonged abuse rather than a single sudden attack.

The autopsy revealed a horrifying pattern of injuries accumulated over weeks: a broken nose, fractured ribs, a bent and infected right elbow, road rash, malnutrition, and chemical burns covering roughly a quarter of her body. She had also been sexually assaulted. Her cause of death was tied to the cumulative trauma and resulting sepsis. With no identification and no matches to missing-persons reports, the 23-year-old woman was buried as "Racine County Jane Doe," and the sheriff's office kept the case open for the next two decades.

In 2019 forensic genetic genealogy finally gave the victim her name. Through DNA comparison, investigators announced on November 8, 2019, that she was Peggy Lynn Johnson, born March 4, 1976, of McHenry, Illinois. The identification quickly reframed the case. Johnson had become homeless as a teenager after her mother's death and, in 1994, had agreed to work as a live-in housekeeper for a nurse named Linda Sue La Roche in exchange for room and board. Over the following years, according to investigators, she was subjected to escalating neglect and physical abuse in the La Roche household.

La Roche, then 63, was arrested on November 5, 2019, in Cape Coral, Florida, and charged in Johnson's death. During questioning she made incriminating statements about how Johnson had been treated. In March 2022, nearly 23 years after the body was found, a Racine County jury deliberated for roughly 90 minutes before unanimously convicting Linda La Roche of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse. She was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Community members ensured Johnson was reburied in her family's plot in northern Illinois with a donated headstone, closing a case that had begun as an anonymous Jane Doe and ended in both an identification and a conviction.

The reopening of the case after the 2019 identification quickly focused on the household where Johnson had lived and worked. Investigators determined that Linda La Roche had left Illinois and relocated to Florida in the years after Johnson's death, and it was there, in Cape Coral, that detectives confronted and arrested her. At trial, prosecutors described injuries that the sheriff called "barbaric," inflicted over an extended period of captivity and abuse, and jurors heard that Johnson had died of sepsis stemming from her untreated wounds. La Roche was formally sentenced in May 2022 to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. For Johnson, buried as a Jane Doe more than two decades earlier, the verdict delivered a measure of justice that had once seemed impossible.