Iowa 1979 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

This J.C. Penney behind  me is one of the only remaining stores from 1979 when Michelle  Martinko was found dead in the mall’s parking lot. Now, with the news of the suspected killer’s arrest, people in the community say they’re remembering how their lives forever changed 39 years ago today.    I think that made a difference on how we raised our children.

 It can really kind of shatter our whole assumptions or beliefs about the world and our belief about being safe and our  faith in humanity.  It was 5 days before Christmas. Janet Martinko had been putting money aside for weeks. The coat was at Westdale Mall, brown and white rabbit fur, the kind a teenage girl would wear to every event worth dressing for.

Janet had it on layaway. She was almost done paying it off. Michelle found out about it. She didn’t say anything to  her mother. She just counted out $186 in cash, folded it, and put it in her purse. She was going to go to the mall and pay it off herself,  surprise her mother, bring it home.

 That is the whole reason she was there. That is the reason she was alone. That is the reason she had cash, and it’s what December 19th, 1979  was supposed to be, a teenage girl surprising her mother with a paid-off coat 5 days before Christmas in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That is not what it became. Welcome back to Tierra True Crime.

Today, we are talking about Michelle Martinko, an 18-year-old killed in a mall parking lot in 1979. In this case, you will learn how Michelle left behind the only thing that could ever identify her killer, and how it took 40 years and two generations of detectives to  understand what she had left them.

If you’re new here, subscribe and hit the like button. Drop a comment and let us know where you’re watching from. We read every single one. Now, let’s get into it. Michelle Marie Martinko was born October 6th, 1961.    The second child, the younger daughter, the miracle baby. Her mother Janet had suffered five miscarriages before Michelle  arrived.

 She was 44 years old the day she finally held her.    There are no words for what that child meant to that woman. There is only the fact of five losses, and then this one girl, finally alive, breathing,    hers. Michelle had one sibling, her sister Janelle, 12 years older. By the time Michelle was old enough to remember anything, Janelle was already a teenager, already someone Michelle looked up to instead of grew up alongside.

  But the gap never made them strangers. When Janelle got married, Michelle was her flower girl. That is one of the first things  anyone who knew them tells you. She was the flower girl. That is the kind of sisters they were. Michelle was tall, striking, the kind of blonde hair that people noticed before  she even spoke.

 Friends called her Farah because of Farrah Fawcett and the hair  and the way she moved through a room. She was in the choir. She acted in school  productions. She twirled baton. She was everything at once, easily, the way some people are before they’ve had to work  for anything.

 But she had already worked for it. When she was 12, Michelle was diagnosed with scoliosis. The brace went from her neck to her hips. She wore it for 2 years. She was self-conscious and quiet and different in the way that only a 12-year-old in a back brace can be different. And then at 14, she shed it and she grew and everything changed.

 The blonde hair and the choir and the confidence, none of it was effortless. She had earned it. She was a senior at Kennedy High School. She was planning to study interior design at Iowa State. She had an entire  future laid out in front of her, the way futures look at 18, like they will last forever, like there is nothing that can stop them.

 On the evening of December 19th, she attended a banquet for the Kennedy Concert Choir at the Sheraton Inn. She wore a black dress and heels. She had the rabbit fur coat, her coat, the one she’d been wearing all season. After the banquet, she asked a friend if she wanted to come to the mall with her. The friend had homework, so Michelle went alone.

 She had never been to Westdale Mall before. It had only been open for 2 months. She parked in the northeast corner of the lot near the JCPenney entrance. She went inside.  She ran into people she knew, friends from school, people from the banquet. One of them, a friend named Tracy,  saw her counting her cash and told her to put it away.

 “Don’t flash money in the middle of everybody.” She put it away. She ran into Curtis  Thomas, a classmate who worked at a store in the mall. They sat together  and talked for about 45 minutes. She was easy to talk to. She was  always easy to talk to. Around 9:30, she said goodbye.

 Curtis walked her to the JCPenney exit. That was the last time  anyone who loved her saw her alive. At 2:00 in the  morning, her parents called the police. At 4:00 in the morning, Officer James Kincaide found the family’s green Buick Electra in the northeast  corner of the mall parking lot. The December air had frosted the windows over.

 He wiped a clear spot and looked inside. He thought he was looking at a woman who had too much to drink. He opened the door. It was Michelle. She was on the passenger side floor. The interior of that car told him everything he needed to know and nothing he wanted to. 29 stab wounds,    11 to her face, her neck, her chest. The fatal wound reached her heart.

 The cause of death was that she bled out alone in a locked car in a mall parking lot on a December night 5 days before Christmas. No fingerprints, no murder weapon, no robbery.  The $186 was still in her purse. No sexual assault, no security cameras. The mall had been open for 2  months.

 Nobody had thought to install them yet. What investigators did have was this. Michelle had fought. Deep defensive cuts on her hands and arms. The kind that happened when you reach for the blade. The kind that means she did not go without making him feel it. She fought long enough and hard enough that at some point during that struggle, the knife turned and  he was cut too. His blood went into that car.

 It went onto her dress. It went onto the gearshift. She marked him. In the dark, in December, in the last minutes of her  life, Michelle Martinko marked the man who killed her. Nobody knew it yet. The first suspect was Andy Seidel. He had dated Michelle for 2 years. She broke up with him.

 He didn’t take it well. He kept calling her friends. He wanted to know who she was seeing. He had been at the mall that night. At her funeral, he was almost inconsolable. He leaned over her casket. He asked someone whether she had loved him or her other ex-boyfriend when she died. Who did she love? Those were the words he chose standing over her.

 His mother provided his alibi.    He was home before the mall closed, she said. Police weren’t sure. Michelle’s family wasn’t sure. The community wasn’t sure. Andy Seidel would spend the next  26 years living under the weight of a suspicion nobody said out loud, but everybody held. He didn’t do it. But nobody could prove that yet.

 And in the absence of proof, suspicion fills every available space. Detectives ran through everyone. 200 tips in the first  week, then more. By 1980, a reward of $10,000. By the mid-80s, all leads gone cold. By the late 80s, the file sat in a box. In 1995, Michelle’s father Albert died. He had spent 16 years silently weeping at his watchmaker’s bench and never getting an answer.

 A co-worker said Albert would sometimes just sit at the bench and weep  without making a sound. Before Michelle died, if you asked him how he was doing, he always said the same thing. Mighty fine. Mighty fine. Nobody asked him after.    In 1998, Janet died. She had identified Michelle’s body in the parking lot the morning after.

 She had carried that for 19 years.    She went to her grave having never heard a name. Michelle had been the miracle they waited for their  entire adult lives. They died without knowing who took her. In 2005, Detective Doug Larison sat down with Michelle’s file. He had gone to  high school with her.

 Not close, but close enough that her murder had never left him. He felt the weight of it, the way you feel the weight of something that happened to your generation that changed what your city thought it was. He was reading through the file when he found something another detective had sent to a lab years earlier and never followed up on.

 Blood scrapings from the gearshift. The results were sitting in the file, unread,  waiting for someone to pick them up. Male DNA. He went further. He sent Michelle’s black dress, preserved in an evidence locker since 1979, to the lab for testing.    They found a spot of blood on the back. Full male DNA profile, consistent with the blood on the gearshift.

 26 years after the murder, they had the killer’s DNA. They entered it into CODIS, the national database of convicted offenders. Nothing came  back. He wasn’t in it. He had never been convicted of anything that required his DNA to be on file. So, they started testing everyone. 161 men. Friends, family, suspects, neighbors, anyone who had ever had a finger pointed at them.

   The knife at the mall, the violent conviction in another county, Andy Seidel finally tested, finally cleared. 26 years of suspicion dissolved into a negative result. Michelle’s parents had died believing Andy killed their daughter. They were wrong. Nobody could tell them. Larsson kept going until there was nobody left to test. He burned out.

 He handed the file to someone new. In 2015, Matt Denlinger took over the case. His father, Harvey, had been one of the original detectives on scene in 1979. Matt had grown up hearing about it. Every year on December 19th, the local news ran a segment. He had never known a Cedar Rapids winter that didn’t include Michelle Martinko’s  name. Now, he was the one with the file.

He reached out to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia. They had something new. DNA phenotyping. They could take a genetic profile and build a face. Hair color, eye color,  approximate bone structure, a picture from a blood sample. The result came back.  Blond hair, blue eyes, white male. It was released publicly.

   Tips flooded in. Every blond-haired, blue-eyed man in Iowa who had ever  set foot near Cedar Rapids became somebody’s phone call. None of them led anywhere. Genetic genealogy, a public ancestry database,    family trees built backward from distant relatives until one name emerged.

   The same technique Parabon had used on Michelle’s DNA was now proven to work on the other end. Not just to build a face, but to build a family.    Parabon reached back out to Matt Denlinger. Let us try again. In July of 2018, Parabon uploaded the killer’s DNA  profile to GEDmatch, the public ancestry database, where ordinary people submit their own genetic information to find relatives.

And they found one. Brandy Jennings, an office manager and single mom in Vancouver, Washington.  She had uploaded her DNA after her father died in 2009, trying to learn more about his side of the family. She had no idea what she was connected to. Denlinger spent months building her family tree backward.

  Birth records, marriage records, gravestones, public documents going back generations.  As more relatives provided their own DNA, the picture sharpened. Parabon recalibrated. The tree narrowed, and it pointed  to a family in Iowa. Three brothers. Donald Burns, Kenneth  Burns, Jerry Burns.

 All still alive. All still in Iowa. Denlinger couldn’t tell any of them. Iowa is not  a large state. He didn’t know who any of them knew. He watched. Donald was first. He staked out Donald’s home in Davenport and found a toothbrush in the trash. No match.  Kenneth was next. He watched him eating at a golf clubhouse and recovered a straw. No match. That left one.

On October 29th, 2018,  Denlinger followed Jerry Burns to a Pizza Ranch in Manchester, Iowa. Jerry ordered soda. He drank from a clear plastic straw. He finished. He got up and left. Denlinger bagged the straw. He sent it to the lab, and then  he waited. Jerry Lynn Burns was born in Manchester, Iowa in 1953.

 He spent almost his entire life  in that small town of 5,000 people. He was a blue-collar worker.    He ran a powder coating business. He had a wife, three kids, a house. He was, by every account of anyone who knew him, an ordinary man. In 1979, he was 25 years old, married, two young children at home.

 He drove 20 minutes to Cedar Rapids, to a mall he had been to before, on a December night that was already dark and cold. He selected Michelle. He followed her to her car. He climbed in. He came with a knife and rubber gloves.  He had come prepared. What he had not prepared for was how hard she would fight.

 The straw came back a match, one in 100 billion. Denlinger set the interview for December 19th, 2018, exactly 39 years to the day. He wanted to see what the date would do to Jerry  Burns, whether something in him would surface. He walked into Jerry’s office with a camera hidden inside a coffee mug. Jerry was calm. He said the case rang a bell from the news a long time ago.

 When Denlinger showed him the phenotype images, the reconstructed face of a young man built from crime scene DNA, Jerry kept looking at them. “Those are strange,” he said. “That looks a little like me, but I don’t think I ever looked like that.” He did not deny being at the mall. He could not explain  why his DNA was there. When Denlinger told him directly, “We already have your DNA from before you came in today, and it matches  the crime scene.

” Jerry Burns said four words, “I don’t know.” He did not say he wasn’t there. He did not say it was impossible. He did not say what any  innocent person in that room would have said in the first 5 seconds. He said he didn’t know. In the police vehicle  on the way back to Cedar Rapids, a camera was still rolling.

 Jerry Burns said something to no one in particular about traumatic events, about blocking things  out, about how that was possible, about how memory worked. His gut, Denlinger said later, told him everything the moment Jerry refused to deny it. Jerry Burns was charged with first-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty. The trial began  in February 2020 in Davenport, a venue change granted because Cedar Rapids had spent 40 years living with this case and everyone agreed the jury pool was soaked in it.

The prosecution had one piece of evidence, the DNA on Michelle’s dress and the gearshift, one in 100 billion. That was their entire case and they knew it and they believed it was enough. The defense said DNA doesn’t tell the full story. It said the evidence had been mishandled. It said Jerry Burns’s DNA could have transferred to Michelle’s clothing innocently, at the mall, at a food court, passed from  surface to surface without anyone knowing.

 It said the straw was obtained without a warrant. The judge overruled that. Discarded property has no reasonable  expectation of privacy. Burns left the straw on a table for anyone to pick up. The most damaging  testimony came from a cellmate. Michael Allison had been housed with Jerry Burns in jail.

 He said Burns told him that no matter what happened at trial, he had already won because he had spent those 40 years out there with his family. And he said something  else. He told Allison that if Allison kept beating him at pinochle, he was going to have to take him to the mall. The jury deliberated for less than 3 hours, guilty, first-degree murder.

 On August 7th, 2020, Jerry Lynn Burns was sentenced to life in prison  without the possibility of parole. He will die there. Janelle Stonebraker was preparing for the trial when someone asked her for photographs of Michelle. She and her husband John started going through bins and boxes and old albums.

 They realized they had almost none. We started realizing how much time we had missed with her, she said. Part of our lives without her. 40 years of a sister’s life    is a lot of photographs that never got taken. A lot of Christmases where the presents under the tree stayed wrapped because nobody could bring themselves to open them.

 A lot of moments where someone picked up a camera    and then put it down again because the person they most wanted to photograph wasn’t there. Janelle had spent 40 years watching her mother become bitter and withdrawn. Watching her father go quiet in a way he had never been before. The man who used to answer every  how are you with mighty fine, mighty fine.

 She stopped asking because she knew what she would get. After Michelle died, she never asked him again. Janelle was not there when the verdict came in at the Scott  County Courthouse in 2020. She heard it happen. She had waited 40 years. She was in her 70s by then. Both parents gone. The flower girl grown old.

 She said, “In a way, Michelle was there  in that trial. She was there because she fought so hard and she struggled and she fought to the degree that she caused the killer to cut himself. And with that cut,  he left his blood. And with that blood, he left his DNA. That is the truth of this case.

  There was no tip, no witness who came forward, no confession. No moment where the system  worked the way it was supposed to work. What there was was an 18-year-old girl  who refused to let it happen without a fight. Who reached for the blade and bore the cuts on her own hands and left the only evidence that would ever matter inside the car he left her in. She solved it.

She is the reason anyone knows his name. John Stonebreaker stood  in a courtroom and said that Jerry Burns would be excised from all of them like an oozing wound, that they would be cleansed  by his absence, that he would never again smell the fresh turned earth of Delaware County. Michelle Marie Martinko was 18 years old.

 She sang in the choir, she twirled baton, she wore her hair the way only she could wear it. She saved $186 in cash and drove alone to a mall she had never been to before because she wanted to surprise her mother with a paid-off coat 5 days before  Christmas. She never made it inside, but the coat was not what she left behind.

 What she left behind was the truth locked inside a blood stain on a black dress that sat in an evidence locker  for 26 years before anyone read what was written on it. She had been the miracle baby. After five miscarriages and a lifetime of hoping, she had arrived and her mother was 44 and the whole family exhaled.

18 years later she was gone. But the miracle wasn’t over. The miracle was that she fought. Drop a comment below. Do you think Jerry Burns will ever explain why? And the question  that keeps coming back, was Michelle his only victim? We read every single one. If you’re new here, subscribe.

 There are more stories where this one came from. I’ll see you in the next one.