Crime Immemorial

On July 21st, 1999, two individuals happened upon the remains in a field not far from the town of Raymond in Racine County, Wisconsin. The victim would thus be christened Racine County Jane Doe, or more informally as Crystal Rae.

The victim in this case appeared to have suffered from neglect, malnourishment, and abuse for quite a long time before her death, which was estimated to have occurred only about a day before her body was found. She was a white woman, believed to be between eighteen and thirty-five years old, standing around five-foot-eight and weighing around one-hundred-twenty pounds. She had curly, reddish-brown hair that was collar-length and had blonde highlights throughout.

Her teeth were found to be in poor shape; several of them were decayed, and a few were missing. She also had a cauliflower ear, perhaps indicative of intense physical abuse perpetrated against her while she was alive. Her body was also found to have many old cuts and bruises, as well as a broken nose, strengthening the assertions that she had been regularly beaten and sexually assaulted. There was also some speculation that she might have been mentally disabled.

When found, she was clad in a men’s gray button-up shirt with floral embroidery on the front, and a pair of black sweat pants, though no shoes were ever found.

In 2013, the victim’s remains were exhumed, and a later isotopic analysis was able to establish that Racine County Jane Doe probably hailed from somewhere in Montana, Alaska, or southern Canada. Authorities held a press conference and announced that further evidence had been found, and years later, in 2019, confirmed that not only had the victim been identified as twenty-three-year-old Peggy Lynn Johnson, but that the murderer had also been arrested.

It turned out that Peggy Johnson had last been seen in 1994, when she was only seventeen years old, at a homecoming dance at her high school in Harvard, Illinois. Shortly after turning eighteen, Peggy’s mother passed away, and as her father and brother were already dead by that point, Peggy herself subsequently became homeless. Evidently, she took a job soon afterward as a housekeeper for a nurse in her sixties named Linda La Roche, who she met at a medical clinic where La Roche worked. Johnson moved into La Roche’s home, agreeing to provide cleaning and cooking services in exchange for room and board.

According to La Roche’s children and then-husband, though, the quiet, easygoing Peggy was subjected to terrible emotional and physical abuse at the hands of Linda La Roche for years prior to her death, accounting for the malnourishment and evidence of repeated assault discovered at the autopsy of her body. La Roche’s former husband told authorities that Linda repeatedly claimed Peggy was stealing from her, and that she would invite men over to the house without permission, leading to the need for her to be “punished.”

Apparently, in July of 1999, Linda’s husband returned home and found Peggy unresponsive; Linda reported that the young woman had overdosed, but notably did not call an ambulance or make any effort to aid the victim, even though Linda was a practicing nurse. After Peggy died, Linda told her husband to take the children away for a while so that she could dispose of the remains. The autopsy of Peggy’s body, incidentally, showed no evidence of an overdose, and established the cause of death to be blunt force trauma and sepsis.

Linda La Roche was arrested in November of 2019. It was established that she had owned her own nurse’s practice since 1997, which provided care to a handful of correctional facilities in Illinois, but there did not seem to be any record of complaints against her in that regard. However, at the time of her arrest for Peggy’s murder, she was embroiled in legal proceedings concerning a car accident she had caused while driving drunk.

In March of 2022, Linda La Roche was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and concealing a corpse, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Shortly after, authorities announced that they would be exhuming Peggy Johnson’s body one final time, in order to re-inter her next to her mother in Belvidere, Illinois.