IOWA 1979 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community 

39 years ago an 18-year-old girl in Cedar Rapids, Iowa left her house to go to the mall to buy a jacket and never returned leaving her family and the entire city with a question that had no answer for four decades. Authorities questioned more than 80 suspects, cleared more than 60 people, developed a DNA profile from the killer’s blood left at the scene, but that profile didn’t match anyone in the national database and the investigation eventually reached a dead end.

 However, through all those years the victim’s sister never stopped waiting and the blood the victim managed to get from her attacker in the final moments of her struggle still remained in storage waiting. Then genetic genealogy from GEDmatch built a family tree from that DNA profile and narrowed it down to one name, a name that shocked everyone involved in a way no one in those 39 years could have imagined because it was a man with no criminal record respected in the community.

Before diving deep into this story, let us know where you’re watching from and if you like this content, don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next cases. In 1979, America was going through one of the worst economic winters since the Great Depression. Inflation skyrocketing at 13%, long lines of cars waiting to buy gas.

 President Carter had just delivered a nationally televised speech about the crisis of confidence among Americans. A year when people in the Midwest felt the tightening of their wallets most acutely, but still tried to have a normal Christmas season. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city of a 110,000 people nestled among the corn and soybean fields of America’s most fertile farmland where neighbors knew each other’s names and serious violent crime was rare.

December 1979 was the month of Christmas trees, holiday music, and crowded shopping malls. Michelle Martinko, 18, was a senior at Kennedy High School, a blonde girl with Farrah Fawcett style hair, the most iconic look of the late 1970s, who sang in the school choir, participated in theater productions, and planned to study interior design at college after graduating in the spring of 1980.

Her family, including her sister Janelle, remembered her as kind, funny, beautiful, and smart. Her mother, Janet, had miscarried five times before Michelle was born, a detail that spoke to what Michelle meant to the family. On the evening of December 19th, 1979, Michelle had just finished her school choir banquet, the end-of-year party for the choir.

 After the party, instead of heading straight home, she drove the family’s 1972 Buick to Westdale Mall to pick up a new jacket she had bought, a typical errand for an 18-year-old girl on a festive evening, nothing out of the ordinary. Tracy Price and her group of friends happened to run into her at the mall around 7:00 p.m. They were heading to see the movie The Jerk and had stopped by the mall first, and Michelle told them she was there to pick up the jacket she had purchased.

They said goodbye and went their separate ways. That was the last time anyone who knew her saw her alive, and the Martinko family’s 1972 Buick remained in the Westdale Mall parking lot. Around 4:00 a.m. on December 20, 1979, a Westdale Mall security guard conducted his final patrol of the parking lot, a routine part of the night shift, checking to see if any cars were still there after closing time, with no reason to think tonight would be different.

 The Martinko family’s 1972 Buick was still parked alone in the darkness many hours after the mall had closed and the parking lot should have been completely empty. The guard approached the car. Inside was the body of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko lying in the passenger side footwell, not on the seat as if she were sitting and waiting or sleeping, but in the footwell, the position of someone who had been pushed down or fallen during an attack.

 A 911 call was made and shortly after the entire Cedar Rapids police force was mobilized. Not just a few patrol cars responding to the scene, but all of them. Every officer on the night shift called in to work this case. The response of a force that recognized from the very first information that this was not the type of crime Cedar Rapids usually faced.

Detective Harvey Denlinger was one of the first investigators at the scene and what he saw inside that Buick never left him for the rest of his career. I had never seen anyone stabbed that many times. Something like this was unheard of here. There was no blood outside the car, no blood on the parking lot pavement, on the outside door handle, on any surface around the Buick.

Investigators concluded from that evidence that the attacker had approached the car while Michelle was sitting inside. Perhaps she had started the engine to warm it up before driving home. Perhaps she was just sitting there and then opened the car door, pushed her aside, and attacked her right there in the confined space of the Buick.

 The autopsy confirmed Michelle had been stabbed 29 times, mostly to the face and neck with enough repetition and force to puncture her lungs and aorta. She lost about 1/3 of her blood volume. The cause of death was stab wounds leading to blood loss. She had not been robbed. $186 in cash, a significant enough amount to be a clear motive in 1979, was still in her wallet.

 She had not been sexually assaulted. There was no clear motive the investigators could build a theory around. Only 29 stab wounds inside a car in a dark parking lot on the night before December 20, 1979. On her hands were defensive wounds, forensic evidence that in those seconds she had tried to fight back and scratched her attacker enough to make him bleed and leave his blood on her skirt and on the gearshift of the car.

Two sources of blood at the scene, Michelle Martinko’s blood and the blood of the person who did this to her. The initial investigation focused on people who knew Michelle. Andy, Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, drew suspicion due to his behavior at the funeral. He nearly climbed into the coffin, hugged Michelle’s body in the coffin, and said to her friend, “I have to know who she loved when she died.

 Did she love me or did she love Mike?” That behavior was unusual enough for police to put him on the suspect list and question him. Many in the Cedar Rapids community, including Michelle’s friends and family, expected that Andy would be the one charged. But his mother provided an alibi, telling police that he had already returned home from the mall before Michelle was killed.

 In June 1980, police released a composite sketch of the suspect based on witness descriptions. A white male, late teens or early 20s, weighing 165 to 175 lb, about 6 ft tall, and asked the public for help in finding anyone with injuries on their hands around the time of the murder. More than 80 potential suspects were listed and pursued in the years that followed.

 More than 60 of them were blood tested or otherwise investigated and cleared. The killer’s blood was tested using the forensic methods available in the early 1980s, determining blood type and some basic serum characteristics. But there was no forensic DNA technology to create an individual profile from that blood sample, no national database to compare it to, and no technical path from that blood sample to the specific name of the person who left it.

 Andy left Cedar Rapids and joined the Navy. No one was charged. By the mid-1980s, the case had lost investigative momentum. There was no official decision to close the file. No one signed a piece of paper declaring it abandoned. It simply faded quietly as every lead dried up and no new leads emerged to replace them with 1980s technology.

 Janelle Stonebreaker, Michelle’s sister, knew that her mother had miscarried five times before Michelle was born and understood what that meant to everyone in the family. “When her little sister died in a parking lot in December 1979, Janelle didn’t just lose her sister, she lost December. The Decembers of the present and December 1979 overlapped and could not be separated.

I think more about the season than the specific day. But it’s always with us,” she told the Gazette. A statement from someone who had learned to live with what could not be changed without letting it completely paralyze her, but also never fully setting it aside. Year after year, every time December arrived and Christmas trees were put up and holiday music started playing on the radio and in the malls, Janelle lived simultaneously in two Decembers.

 One in the present with its routines and parties and one in 1979 with the Buick and the dark parking lot and the question that still had no answer 39 years later. She followed every update related to the case through the decades. The suspect sketches, police press conferences, announcements of investigative progress, not because she hoped this time there would surely be an answer, but because it was the only way she knew to continue being Michelle Martinko’s sister.

 Not a single year did she stop waiting for the name of the person who did this to her little sister. By the mid-1980s, the Martinko investigation had no clear new path to pursue. The killer’s blood had been collected from Michelle’s skirt and from the gearshift of the Buick on the night of December 20th, 1979 and had been preserved in storage, but preservation and the ability to analyze it were two entirely different things.

In 1985, forensic blood analysis could determine [ __ ] blood type and certain serum characteristics, enough to exclude some people, but not enough to identify one specific person among millions who shared the same blood type. Creating an individual DNA profile from a blood sample, a profile that could uniquely identify a specific person with extremely high statistical probability, was a technology that the United States did not yet have in practical crime lab forensic settings in 1985.

Forensic DNA as a practical criminal investigative tool began to appear in the US in the late 1980s with the first case using DNA to convict occurring in 1988, and it continued to develop through the early 1990s. But applying the new technology to old evidence from 1979 stored under conditions not optimized for DNA analysis was a different technical challenge than applying it to fresh samples collected at a new crime scene.

 The Martinko case needed that technology to advance further, and in 1985 or 1988 or 1992, the technology had not yet reached the point where it could produce a sufficiently complete and reliable DNA profile from 1979 blood samples to have real legal value. In 1998, CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, the national DNA database operated by the FBI, became fully operational nationwide, connecting state and local DNA databases into a unified system that could compare crime scene DNA profiles with those of convicted individuals who had provided DNA

samples. In theory, this was a tool that could solve the Martinko case if a full quality DNA profile of the killer was created and entered into the system. And if he had ever been convicted of a felony in any state, and therefore had DNA in CODIS, a match would appear automatically. But there were two insurmountable problems with this traditional method.

 First, a full DNA profile meeting CODIS standards. Second, and this was the problem that no technical advances of the 1990s or 2000s could solve. Michelle Martinko’s killer had never been convicted of a felony in his entire life, not in Iowa, not in any other state. His DNA was not in CODIS. In 2006, a Cedar Rapids police cold case detective, while systematically reviewing the case file, discovered that the blood scraped from the gearshift of the Buick had never been fully and thoroughly analyzed with the most advanced DNA technology available at

that time. In October 2006, detectives Doug Larison and Georgia Abboud of the Cedar Rapids police held a press conference announcing that the Martinko case had new evidence and asked the public for help, specifically looking for anyone who remembered a man with injuries on his hands around the time of the December 1979 murder, because the blood at the scene showed the attacker had been injured during the assault.

 The killer’s DNA profile, created from the blood on the gearshift and on Martinko’s skirt using more advanced DNA analysis technology than what was available when the early 1980s or 1990s was entered into CODIS and began the process of periodic automatic comparisons with the entire national DNA database. That process ran month after month, year after year.

 Each time the database was updated with new DNA profiles from newly convicted felons across America. The Martinko killer’s profile was compared again to all of them and not once in all those years did it return a match. In 2017, Cedar Rapids investigators hired Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company specializing in DNA phenotyping, a relatively new forensic field that uses DNA profiles to predict the physical appearance of the person who left DNA at a crime scene, not from witness descriptions, but from the DNA itself. Genetic variants related to skin

pigmentation were read to estimate skin color, variants related to melanin to estimate hair color, variants related to facial structure to create an estimated facial model. Parabon created three composite images from the DNA profile, three estimates of what the person who stepped into the Buick in December 1979 looked like.

 Those images were released publicly, but did not directly lead to any specific name. But the more important step Parabon took alongside phenotyping was confirming that the DNA profile was of sufficient quality for the next step, genetic genealogy forensics, the method that by 2018 had proven it could do what CODIS could not, find people with no felony record by finding their relatives who had voluntarily uploaded DNA to public genealogy databases.

In 2018, investigators uploaded the killer’s DNA profile to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database where millions of people worldwide had voluntarily shared their DNA profiles to search for ancestors, identify distant relatives they had never known, or simply explore their ethnic origins. None of whom ever thought their decision to upload DNA could one day become a link in a murder investigation.

 GEDmatch compared the killer’s DNA profile with millions of profiles in the database and found distant matches, people who shared enough DNA segments with the killer to be distant relatives, determined to be second cousins once removed to the person being sought. That was the starting point. From those distant matches, investigators began building the family tree in reverse, searching public birth and marriage records, census data, local newspaper archives, state public databases, and gradually narrowing it down from those distant

relatives through generations, through family branches, excluding those who didn’t match in age, gender, or geography until three names stood out more clearly than all the others in the family tree. Kenneth Burns, Donald Burns, and Jerry Burns, three brothers from Manchester, Delaware County, Iowa, about 60 miles from Cedar Rapids.

 Three brothers, one of whom was the person who stepped into the Buick in the dark parking lot of Westdale Mall on the night of December 19th, 1979. Jerry Lynn Burns, 25 years old on the night of December 19th, 1979, was from Manchester, Delaware County, Iowa, a small town about 60 miles northeast of Cedar Rapids.

 He was not Andy with the strange behavior at Michelle’s funeral that made the entire Cedar Rapids community suspicious. He was not one of the more than 80 suspects that investigators had listed and pursued in the early years after the crime. His name did not appear in any investigation documents, was not mentioned in any witness interviews, and was not connected to the Martinko case in any way.

 After the night of December 19th, 1979, Burns continued to live the life of a man in Manchester, Iowa, building his business in the town where he grew up, becoming a business owner known in that small community, getting married, having children, and living the kind of normal life, the type of person neighbors greeted in the morning when driving past his house, the type of person whose friends knew his name, his family, and his life story.

 After GED match in the family tree narrowed it down to the three Burns brothers, police began the process of eliminating them one by one by collecting DNA samples, a process that required patience and care so as not to reveal the investigation before there was enough evidence to act. Kenneth Burns and Donald Burns were cleared.

 Their DNA did not match the profile from the 1979 crime scene. The investigation focused on the remaining brother, Jerry Lynn Burns. Police surveilled him and waited for an opportunity to collect DNA without needing to ask for his cooperation or revealing that he was under investigation. That opportunity came at the Pizza Ranch restaurant in Manchester when Burns finished eating and left the table, leaving behind a used drinking straw.

 Investigators approached and collected that straw. This was one of more than 125 DNA samples collected throughout the Martinko investigation over the decades from dozens of suspects and related individuals, and it was the only sample among those 125 that fully matched the DNA from Michelle Martinko’s skirt and from the gearshift of the 1979 Buick.

 The confirming evidence left no doubt. An arrest warrant was prepared. On December 19th, 2018, exactly 39 years after the night Michelle Martinko drove the family’s Buick to Westdale Mall to pick up a jacket and never returned, police arrested Jerry Lynn Burns at his workplace in Manchester and charged him with first-degree murder.

 It was a deliberate decision by the Cedar Rapids police, their way of saying that December 19th would no longer be only the day of the question, but also the day of the answer. That 39 years was long enough, and no additional day was needed. Jerry Lynn Burns’ trial began on February 10th, 2020 at the Linn County Courthouse, more than a year after his arrest, in a trial that lasted many days with DNA evidence at the center of every argument from both sides.

 The prosecution emphasized that the statistical probability of the DNA from the straw not belonging to the same person who left DNA at the 1979 crime scene was extremely low. Harvey Dentlinger, the detective who had been at the scene on the night of December 20, 1979, stood before the jury and recounted what he saw that night.

 The defense argued that the DNA evidence had been mishandled during collection and preservation over the decades and was therefore not reliable enough to convict a person of first-degree murder. An argument that attorney Leon Spies used to try to create reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind about the integrity of the chain of evidence.

On February 24th, 2020, after 3 hours of deliberation, the jury found Jerry Lynn Burns guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Michelle Martinko on December 19th, 1979. On August 7th, 2020, the judge imposed the sentence required by Iowa law for first-degree murder, life in prison without the possibility of parole.

 John Stonebreaker, Janelle’s husband and Michelle’s brother-in-law, made a statement after the verdict and what he said captured the meaning of the entire 40 years. Michelle played a major role in identifying her own killer. The defensive wounds on her hands show that. It was the line from the person who had lived 40 years with Decembers that were never entirely holiday seasons.

Burns hired attorney Kathleen Zellner, who is famous for representing Steven Avery in the case documented in the Netflix series Making a Murderer, to appeal the conviction arguing that police had violated his constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment by collecting DNA from the straw he discarded at Pizza Ranch without a court search warrant.

 In March 2023, the Iowa Supreme Court reviewed the appeal and rejected Zellner’s argument ruling that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in items discarded in a public place and therefore collecting DNA from a discarded straw does not require a search warrant. The life sentence was upheld. When Burns’ name was finally released in December 2018 after GED match in the family tree led to him, the reaction of people who had known him in Manchester for decades was shock.

 Not abstract shock at hearing about a stranger, but the shock of people who knew his face, his name, and his family. Mike McElliot, who had known Burns for 40 years, told local media, “You’d have a hard time convincing me that Jerry did this. I just I can’t believe it.” Burns, when questioned, insisted he had never met Michelle Martinko, simply a straightforward denial that he knew the woman or had been in her family’s Buick on the night of December 19th, 1979.

The question of why, why a man with no known connection to Michelle Martinko, with no clear reason to approach her in the dark parking lot of Westdale Mall, stepped into her car and stabbed her 29 times and left while the $186 in cash remained untouched, was a question that the 2020 trial did not clarify in any satisfying way.

 Burns offered no explanation. A motive was never clearly established in court. The Michelle Martinko case was one of the first and most widely cited in the wave of cold cases solved by forensic genetic genealogy, paving the way for dozens of subsequent cases across America and raising important legal questions about the collection of DNA from discarded items in public places that the Iowa Supreme Court had to answer in 2023.

For Janelle Stonebreaker, December 2020 was the first December in 40 years that had an answer. Not a perfect answer because the question of why still had no solution and probably never would. The Michelle Martinko case leaves behind specific lessons that anyone living in America can apply today. First, if you have voluntarily uploaded your DNA to databases like Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, or GEDmatch to search for ancestors, know that your decision can be the link that helps identify the perpetrator in a cold case that some

family has been waiting decades for an answer to. And that is a good thing, not something to worry about. Forensic genetic genealogy works not because law enforcement has the suspect’s DNA in a database, but because distant relatives of the suspect voluntarily shared their DNA, and the participation of ordinary citizens in genealogy databases is the foundation of this method.

Second, if you have a loved one who is the victim of a cold case and the family has not yet received an answer, contact the investigating agency and specifically ask whether biological evidence from the scene has been analyzed using forensic genetic genealogy methods, not just CODIS, but genetic genealogy through GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA, because these are two different methods with different capabilities.

 The Martinko case proves that CODIS could not find a perpetrator with no criminal record, but genetic genealogy could. Third, John Stonebreaker’s statement, “Michelle was her own best witness,” reminds us that in attacks, the forensic evidence a victim leaves behind in the act of self-defense is sometimes the only thing that leads to justice after many decades, and investigators properly collecting and preserving that evidence from the very first night is what determines everything.

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