The body of an unidentified woman was discovered in the town of Raymond in Racine County, Wisconsin, twenty-five miles south of Milwaukee, on July 21, 1999. Believed to have been dumped there either that day or the day before, the dead woman was thought to have been between eighteen and thirty-five-years-old.
Authorities dubbed the unidentified woman “Crystal Rae.” The coroner ruled her death as a homicide by blunt force trauma and sepsis (blood poisoning caused by infections of the body’s organs and tissues.) The autopsy revealed awful findings.
Crystal Rae, AKA “The Racine County Jane Doe,” appeared to have been neglected and even tortured for much of her life. Her death had been caused from multiple injuries, including burns and beatings, and she had endured weeks of neglect and abuse, which had increased in the days before her death. She had visible bruises and cuts across her body, a fractured nose, and a “cauliflower ear” deformity, likely the result of years of abuse. Furthermore, several of her teeth were missing, most that remained were decayed, and her front incisors also protruded. She had also been malnourished and sexually abused.
A check with area doctors and dentists failed to produce Crystal Rae’s identity. She remained a Jane Doe for over twenty years, until November 2019, when DNA and forensic testing finally provided her name.
Racine County Jane Doe
AKA “Crystal Rae”
Although she was younger than the projected age, fourteen-year-old Aundria Bowman was believed by many to be Crystal Rae. She was initially thought to have run away from her adoptive parents’ home in Hamilton, Michigan, on March 11, 1989, after accusing her adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, of abusing her.
DNA profiling via Aundria’s birth mother, however, determined she was not the Racine County Jane Doe.
Aundria Bowman
In November 2019, Dennis Bowman was arrested for the September 1980 rape and murder of Kathleen Doyle in Norfolk, Virginia. The twenty-five-year-old was the daughter of a Naval Officer and recently married to Lieutenant Stephen Doyle a navy pilot deployed on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower at the time.
Bowman pled guilty to the charges in June 2020 and was sentenced to life imprisonment
Kathleen Doyle
While incarcerated, he confessed to Aundria’s murder, and her remains were subsequently recovered from the family’s property, concealed beneath a layer of concrete.
Aundria’s Remains Are Found
In December 2021, Bowman was convicted of the second-degree murder of his adoptive daughter. For that crime, he was sentenced to thirty-five to fifty years in prison in February, 2022.
Dennis Bowman
Twenty-three-year-old Karen Wells disappeared from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in April 1994, and thirty-four-year-old Tina D’Ambrosio vanished from Phoenix, Arizona, in June 1996.Both women were deemed possibilities of being Crystal Rae, but DNA profiling ruled them out as well. Each is still missing.
Karen Wells Tina D’Ambrosio
For many years, some investigators believed the murder of Crystal Rae was related to that of thirty-four-year-old Mary Kate Chamizo, who disappeared from Forest Preserve, part of Cook County, Illinois, on September 4, 1999, seven weeks after Crystal Rae’s body was discovered. In October 2000, although her remains had not been identified, a man named Jeremy Strong confessed to her murder, and two other men also confessed involvement and were convicted of concealing a homicide. All, however, later recanted their confessions, claiming they were coerced.
In 2002, Mary Kate’s husband, Gonzalo, also confessed to her murder, saying he buried her at their home. A search of the residence, however, found no trace of his wife and the confession was later discounted because of his history of mental illness.
Mary Kate’s Chamizo’s remains were found on December 9, in Carpentersville, approximately thirty miles away, but they were not positively identified until 2006.
In April 2015, Jeremy Strong and his two convicted cohorts were released from prison after testing showed Mary Kate had died earlier than previously believed. The men were confirmed not to have been in Illinois at the time of her murder.
The murder of Mary Kate Chamizo was reopened and remains unsolved.
Mary Kate Chamizo
Crystal Rae’s remains were exhumed in 2013 for further study.
In 2016 it was announced that chemical isotope testing on samples of her hair and bone suggest she may have originally been from or had spent several years of her early life in southern Canada, Alaska, or the northwestern United States. The findings fueled speculation that she may be Nyleen Marshall, who disappeared from Montana in 1983 when she was four-years-old.
Additional Facial Reconstructions
Here is the link to a write-up I did on Nyleen Marshall’s disappearance. It includes the possible connections to the Racine County Jane Doe.
rystal Rae, AKA the Racine County Jane Doe, was given a funeral at the Holy Family Catholic Cemetery in Raymond, Wisconsin. Over fifty people paid their respects to the troubled young woman they never knew. Residents hoped a name would one day be placed on her tombstone.
Over twenty years after her discovery, the day finally came.
Identity Unknown
In November 2019, DNA tests identified Crystal Rae, AKA the Racine County Jane Doe, as twenty-three-year-old Peggy Johnson of McHenry, Illinois, a northwest Chicago suburb approximately forty miles south of where her body was found.
Peggy Johnson
Peggy became the ward of a nursing caretaker after becoming cognitively disabled at age eighteen. She was last seen at a homecoming dance in Harvard, Illinois, in 1994, five years before the discovery of Crystal Rae. She was never reported missing.
Cognitively Disabled
The nurse and caretaker who assumed custody of Peggy Johnson was sixty-three-year-old Linda LaRoche. She was ultimately found to have inflicted the physical abuse on Peggy and allegedly confessed to several friends to having killed her.
At the time of her arrest, LaRoche was facing charges of causing a vehicular accident while intoxicated in Florida, where she had lived since 2013.
Linda La Roche
In March 2022, Linda LaRoche was convicted of the first-degree intentional homicide of Peggy Johnson and concealment of a corpse. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Convicted
After over twenty years, a name was finally engraved on the Racine County Jane Doe’s tombstone.
No Longer Unknown
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/204545858/peggy-lynn-johnson-schroeder
SOURCES:
- The Charley Project
- Channel 3000
- The Doe Network
- Fox News
- KBZK TV Channel 7 (Bozeman, Montana)
- Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel
- The Missoulian
- The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
- NewsLibrary
- Operation Lookout
- Racine Journal Times
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