Woman serving life for 1999 Harvard killing says someone else did it

An inmate serving life in prison after killing a Harvard woman in 1999 and leaving her battered remains in a Wisconsin field argued in a Racine County, Wisconsin, courtroom this week that she had poor legal representation in her trial.

Dressed in orange prison clothing and shackled, Linda Sue La Roche, 68, who formerly lived in McHenry County and was known as Linda Sue Johnson, sat stoic Thursday while her attorney Laura Walker questioned La Roche’s trial attorneys.

Among several critiques, Walker probed defense attorneys about why they did not present a defense pointing to alternate killers in a similar murder months after 23-year-old Peggy Lynn Johnson-Schroeder’s tortured body was discovered.

About six months after a man walking his dog found Johnson-Schroeder’s remains near a cornfield in Raymond, Wisconsin, the body of Mary Kate Sunderlin was found near a field in Lake County, Illinois.

[The defense theory] was that Linda La Roche did not kill [Johnson-Schroeder]. At best, the state had a circumstantial case with no physical evidence linking Linda La Roche to [Johnson-Schroeder’s] death.”

—  Jillian Scheidegger, former defense attorney for Linda La Roche

Authorities described both Johnson-Schroeder and Sunderlin as being cognitively impaired.

Johnson-Schroeder was a live-in nanny at La Roche’s home in McHenry for about five years before her death. The two met at a clinic where La Roche worked shortly after Johnson-Schroeder’s mother died in 1994.

Johnson-Schroeder’s body was found July 21, 1999, with burns, bruises and broken bones – some older and healing, as well as newer injuries. She remained a Jane Doe for 20 years before La Roche was charged.

Sunderlin’s body was found in a similar condition, Walker said.

Walker showed Jillian Scheidegger and her partner Carl Johnson autopsy and crime scene pictures of both women’s remains and noted similarities in their wounds and in the locations they were found.

She asked the defense attorneys why they did not file what is called a Denny motion that would give way for them to introduce details surrounding Sunderlin’s murder as a defense.

It initially was thought that Sunderlin was the victim of an “unnamed duo” committing fraud against disabled people, and she had been sex trafficked, according to a court motion filed on Johnson-Schroeder’s behalf. An arrest and conviction were made in the case but later overturned on appeal.

Sunderlin’s case remains unsolved, according to Walker and news reports.

Both attorneys said they did not feel that would have been a good trial strategy in La Roche’s case because they didn’t think they could prove someone else did it.

“[That type of defense] has a very high burden and [requires] more than just similarities in crime scene and autopsy photos,” Scheidegger said. “It was not consistent with our theory of defense.”

Walker asked Scheidegger, “What was your theory?”

“It was that Linda La Roche did not kill [Johnson-Schroeder],” Scheidegger said. “At best, the state had a circumstantial case with no physical evidence linking Linda La Roche to [Johnson-Schroeder’s] death.”

Walker also asked the attorneys why they did not present evidence to the jury that Johnson-Schroeder had pollen on her clothing that only exists on the East Coast.

They both testified that the woman was known to wear clothing from consignment or secondhand stores, presumably suggesting there is no good way to know where the clothing came from or a way to explain the presence of pollen.

Walker questioned why the defense attorneys did not test DNA found underneath the victim’s nails. They said it because there was not enough to be tested.

In an unusual courtroom scene, Assistant District Attorney Diane Donohoo, who prosecuted La Roche, cross-examined the defense attorneys, seemingly trying to show that they presented a sound defense.

Donohoo asked Scheidegger about her theory in devising a defense.

“As an attorney, you are not going to present every single piece of evidence,” Donohoo said.

To which Scheidegger said she wouldn’t want to.

“I don’t subscribe to the throw-everything-at-the-wall theory of defense in a jury trial and see what sticks,” Scheidegger said.

She said she thinks it is “important to be strategical” when selecting what to present as evidence.

Donohoo also questioned how the defense attorneys asked questions of witnesses, including La Roche’s grown children and her husband at the time that Johnson-Schroeder lived with them.

Both attorneys said La Roche’s children were not supportive of their mother and spoke of a chaotic and abusive household.

During the trial, her now grown sons and ex-husband said La Roche began to physically abuse Johnson-Schroeder, slapped her often, once stabbed her with a pitchfork and made her sleep in a crawl space – until one day she disappeared.

Donohoo also questioned Johnson about the words he chose when presenting closing arguments.

Donohoo asked about the doubts the defense attorneys cast over an alleged confession that La Roche made to a woman she met while held in a jail cell in Florida, where she lived in 2019 when she was charged with the murder.

The community in Racine County buried Johnson-Schroeder as Jane Doe and cared for her burial site for two decades. Not until a call was made by an anonymous tipster was her true identity discovered, and so was her killer’s, authorities have said.

Johnson-Schroeder has since been reburied in Belvidere next to her mother with a headstone bearing her name.

After the hearing, La Roche’s brother Timothy S. Meyer of Clinton, Wisconsin, said he does not believe his sister killed Johnson-Schroeder.

“She is not that kind of person,” he said, adding that La Roche – who had worked as a nurse – was the “matriarch of our family” who often “took in” and cared for other family members.

The hearing will continue Feb. 26.