Murder Of Peggy Johnson

Nurse Charged with Decades-Old Cold Case Murder of Mentally Handicapped Woman

On July 21, 1999, a man and his daughter were walking their dog in Raymond, Wisconsin when they saw something surprising; drag dots were leading from an embankment down into a cornfield. When they followed the doubtful paths, they slipped across the decomposing corpse of a young woman wearing black sweatpants and an embroidered shirt with red and black flowers. She was desperately slim and her skin was drenched from the previous night's rain. Because there was no missing person news that matched her description, a lack of leads caused her recognition to remain a mystery for nearly two decades until a mysterious tipster reached out to Racine County sheriff’s department alleging that their co-worker Linda Laroche was telling people that she murdered a woman when she used to live in Illinois. This inquiry led to authorities recognizing Jane Doe as Peggy Lee Johnson, a mentally handicapped woman that vanished from a care facility.  

Sheriff Schmaling, the detective that worked on the case said that 18-year-old Penny was cognitively injured and homeless after her father and mother died. She was unable to complete high school and she sought out the help of a medical clinic where Linda Laroche worked as a nurse. Linda asked to house Peggy at her home and help her finish high school if she was willing to work as a live-in nanny and maiden for her children. Yet, once she was inside of the home the abuse started. Her children recall seeing Linda punching and abusing Peggy and in one severe episode, she impaled her with a pitchfork in her head and threatened her to sleep in a crawl space underneath the home. When questioned why he didn’t stop the abuse, he confessed his wife was a force to be reckoned with. 

On the night of Peggy’s death, Linda’s husband found her lying lifeless on the ground. When he questioned his wife, she claimed that Peggy took a huge number of pills and overdosed. She required he take the kids for ice cream, and when they returned Peggy was gone and never seen again. 

A postmortem indicated that Peggy suffered from blunt force trauma to the head, a broken nose, and many wrecked ribs with burn marks covering 25% of her body. None of these wounds was singularly responsible for her death, though. The coroner ordered that her official cause of death was from infected wounds and sepsis pneumonia. Many of these wounds were in all stages of healing, showing that she suffered at the hands of the woman who was thought to help her for far too long. 

For one last time, Peggy’s body is going to be dug up from her burial plot listed a ‘Jane Doe’ and buried next to her mother. 

Source: Cold Case Blogger