http://kxan.com/2014/02/07/muegge-murder-cold-case-fredericksburg-texas/Cold Case: Muegge murderPublished February 7, 2014, Updated February 10, 2014
AUSTIN (KXAN) - Linda Muegge was 55 years old when she was stabbed to death. Whoever did it set her Fredericksburg house on fire in an attempt to cover up her murder. That was in 2007. Her killer has still not been captured
AUSTIN (KXAN) - Linda Muegge was 55 years old when she was stabbed to death. Whoever did it set her Fredericksburg house on fire in an attempt to cover up her murder. That was in 2007. Her killer has still not been captured.
Shannon Ramsey says she will never forget that phone call saying her sister, Linda, was dead. Shannon says most everyone who met Linda loved her.
She raised horses and goats, loved to dance, had her own catering business, and taught at a Montessori school for a while.
Some of Linda’s jewelry survived the fire, and Shannon was wearing Linda’s earrings during her interview. The sisters were so close that Shannon rebuilt Linda’s house on the same spot. She lives there now with her husband.
“She was just a unique individual with a finely tuned sense of right and wrong,” says Shannon.
Their mother is 90 years old, and Shannon says every single day, her mother calls and asks if there is any break in Linda’s case.
From the start, detectives believed Linda’s killer was someone she knew.
“I think the person that did it, that was their mission. That was his mission that night… was to go over there and murder her,” said lead detective Terry Weed with Fredericksburg Police.
Several bizarre things happened in Linda’s life after the end of her 30-year marriage. The couple divorced two years before Linda’s murder. A couple years before her murder Linda filed a complaint with police claiming a man named Frank had scared her by following her home, but police say they were not able to identify that man and Linda never filed another complaint about it.
She filed another report a year before her murder, claiming someone shot and killed two of her sheep. They never solved that case either.
The night she died, some said they saw a teenager on a bike near the fire, but nothing panned out. Police collaborated with family members, state agencies and even the FBI, and they say evidence kept pointing to one suspect, Linda’s ex-husband, Fred Muegge.
Linda’s sister says she’s on the fence with that theory, ”Some days I think he might have, and other days I know in my heart he didn’t.”
Fred told police he was at yoga class in Austin on the night of the fire, and police confirmed his credit card was used there that night, but they were never able to confirm whether Fred swiped the card himself or whether someone else swiped it for him.
“He was not 100% cleared,” said Weed.
Investigators also say Fred failed two polygraph tests, and they say his DNA was found at the scene.
But Fred died in December slowing down the case even more.
“I’ve never lost hope. I know we’re gonna get closure,” says Shannon. ”I don’t know how close we are. Only God knows that.”
