Teen was stabbed to death in 1979. DNA clues just led to an arrest, Iowa cops say
Iowa police arrested a suspect Wednesday in the brutal murder of a teenage girl, precisely 39 years after the girl vanished and her body was discovered near a Cedar Rapids mall.
Police said 64-year-old Jerry Burns’ DNA matched genetic material in blood found at the 1979 crime scene. Burns was arrested at his workplace in Manchester, the town where he lives, after police questioned him, Cedar Rapids police wrote in a Facebook post announcing the arrest.
During questioning, Burns denied murdering 18-year-old Michelle Martinko nearly four decades ago, according to police, but he “could offer no plausible explanation why his DNA would be found at the crime scene.”
Burns is charged with first-degree murder, police said. He is being held at a Linn County jail and is set to appear in court on Thursday, KCRG reports.
Martinko was discovered with fatal stab wounds in a Westdale Mall parking lot around 4 a.m. on Dec. 20, 1979, police said. She had taken her family’s Buick to the mall just a day earlier to buy a winter coat after a school banquet ended around 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 19.
Martinko never returned home from the mall, and her parents reported her disappearance around 2 a.m. on Dec. 20, police said. That’s when police headed to the mall’s parking lot and discovered her body.
For decades, investigation into the case continued, according to Cedar Rapids police. Back in 2006, authorities announced they had recovered DNA evidence from the Buick and entered it into a crime scene database.
But there was no match for the DNA evidence at the time, police said.
Last year, Cedar Rapids police had Parabon NanoLabs run the DNA through a phenotyping process to show which physical traits the suspect might have. The process helped police create new composites of the suspect. Since then, more than 100 new tips in the case have poured in, CBS2 reports.
Cedar Rapids Police Chief Wayne Jerman said police covertly collected DNA from Burns and sent it to a lab before making the arrest on Wednesday.
That DNA from Burns matched “the DNA from the blood that was found on Michelle’s clothing — and consistent with the DNA profile developed from blood also found elsewhere in the vehicle,” Jerman said at a press conference Wednesday announcing the arrest.
For weeks, police and prosecutors have been planning for the arrest, Jerman said.
“The family never gave up hope that this case would be solved,” Jerman said in a statement. “Today’s announcement makes it clear that this Police Department and our investigators never gave up on this case either.”
Police said the department and Linn County prosecutors are still treating the investigation as active and ongoing.
Shortly after the murder, police put out a composite sketch of a suspect based on witnesses’ descriptions, the Des Moines Register reports. More than 80 suspects were identified and then more than 60 were ruled out, but a killer was never caught. A medical examiner’s office found that Martinko hadn’t been “sexually molested” and was “fully clothed,” but there were signs on her hands that she tried to fend off the killer, the Register reports.
High school friends of Martinko said they have clear recollections of the day she was found dead.
“We went to school that day and it wasn’t announced,” classmate Elizabeth Laymon said, according to KCRG. “We all kind of found out through classes we were in. I’d sit through classes where people were crying and I didn’t know why, until someone finally told me. The media showed up and then it was real.”