Murdered: Linda Muegge

In May of 2007, Linda Muegge's neighbors called the fire department because her house was on fire. The fire department arrived shortly, only to discover that it was in fact a homicide. Who killed Linda Muegge?

Photo by Thomas Ehling / Unsplash

55 year old Linda Muegge lived in Fredericksburg, Texas, about an hour and a half west of the capital city of Austin. She owned a catering business, called The Peasant Kitchen, and was a very well liked person. She was a photographer, and a dancer as well.

On May 14th, 2007, at around 5:30pm, Linda returned home from a local yoga class. 8:00pm comes around, and neighbors start alerting the fire department that Linda's house was on fire. A short time later, the fire department arrived and started to put out the flames. The firefighters quickly called the police to the scene when Linda's body was discovered inside the house. Even though she was partially burned, they could see that she had been assaulted.

An autopsy confirmed that Linda had been murdered; they found the cause of death to be stab wounds and blunt force trauma to her head and neck. All of which was determined to have happened before the fire was started.

The first suspect they turned to was her ex-husband, Fred Muegge. But according to Fred, he was in Austin that night, and couldn't have been the one who murdered Linda. While the police did find Fred's DNA inside Linda's house and he failed two different polygraph tests, he did have credit card receipts that placed him in a yoga studio in Austin. Fred was a dead end.

Another lead the police followed was because of a report that Linda herself filed nearly four years before the murder. In September of 2003, Linda called the police because friend of a friend, identified only as "Frank", had followed her home and she felt unsafe. Another time, on February 12th, 2006, Linda reported to police that someone had shot and killed two of her sheep. It was determined that the sheep were killed by a .22 caliber rifle, but again, no more information is documented from that incident.

Over 17 years later, Linda's case is still unsolved.

If you have any information about Linda's murder in 2007, please contact Lt. Terry Weed of the Fredericksburg Police Department at (830) 997-7585 or the FBI Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) Unit working the case at (800) 634-4097.

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