Michelle Marie Martinko Find-A-Grave: Michelle Marie Martinko Iowa Cold Cases: Michelle Marie Martinko Michelle Martinko stories 40 years later: What we know about Michelle Martinko and the arrest that re-opened the cold case Jury seated in Jerry Burns murder trial Michelle Martinko murder case evidence photos Iowa Teen Was Fatally Stabbed in Mall Parking Lot 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. Martinko then asked another acquaintance to go to the mall with her; that friend said yes at first but later changed her mind. I've been reading up on this case and was wondering if they profiled this guy? He was around 25 when he killed Martinko in 1979. "Burnsie was laying siege to New Orleans," said Lynn. Burns originally refuted every charge of involvement in this crime during interrogation by claiming he was unable to provide the authorities with a "plausible explanation" for why his DNA was found at the crime site. wife was deter mined to be a distant cousi n to many of the Subject's more . This is what eventually helped authorities identify the culprit - Jerry Lynn Burns. "Do I look like that?" Oral Argument Schedule. UPDATE: Trial set for Iowa man accused in 1979 killing of Michelle Martinko . [31] The defense argued that DNA evidence had been mishandled,[31] and that different articles of clothing from the scene should not have been stored together in one evidence bag. Thanks to advances in technology and DNA evidence, a jury in an Iowa courthouse . Over 40 years ago, teenager Michelle Martinko was stabbed to death outside a mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Some thought that Martinko had received harassing phone calls before her death, but police stated that they did not think so. Her friend declined. She had looked into the parking lot as she drove by to check for her daughter's car because her daughter worked at the mall and had had car trouble before. The hearing will continue in Linn County District Court, though a date has not been set. While that tip did not yield any new leads, it did cause Det. [22][12] From that, police were able to build a partial DNA profile. Want a job? He was arrested Wednesday on the exact day Martinko was last seen alive. A witness testified he signed this image from a newspaper article about the case. Unfortunately, this led the police nowhere at the time and the case gradually got cold. Jerry retired from the Army National Guard and retired as a Master Plumber. Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria, a group of 39 people. According to the investigator, "Burns showed almost no emotion during the interview, even when he was eventually told he was being arrested. (Rebecca F. Miller/The Gazette). Burns was read his Miranda rights and taken to the police department. After the arrest this week of Jerry Burns in the 1979 killing of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko, an Iowa city is left shocked, saddened, and skeptical. [18], For some time, a prime suspect in Martinko's murder was a man who had, the month before, broken into a Cedar Rapids home, raped a woman at knifepoint, and threatened to kill her children. Jerry Burns Wife: Who Is He Married To? [9] Martinko was found inside collapsed over the passenger seat and stabbed to death. Hi! Exactly 39 years after Michelle Martinko's body was found, DNA evidence led to the arrest of a Manchester man who was charged with her 1979 murder. Prosecutors played a covertly recorded interview that investigators conducted with Jerry Lynn Burns in December of 2018. But he never asked for an attorney, Denlinger said. Comments: (319) 398-8318; trish.mehaffey@thegazette.com, Trish Mehaffey Crime and Courts Sep. 12, 2021 10:48 am535d ago, Gage Miskimen Health Care and Medicine Jul. 20-1150 APPEAL FROM THE IOWA DISTRICT COURT FOR LINN COUNTY HONORABLE FAE E. HOOVER . [1][5][6], Michelle Marie Martinko (October 6, 1961 December 19, 1979) was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. [29] The judge determined the search history was not usable in the trial due to the decades of time separating the murder and the searches. Her father died in 1995 and her mother died in 1998. And he said he couldn't talk about it," Michael Allison said, who shared a cell with Burns starting in September 2019. He had followed them and secretly recovered their DNA. Linn. It showed that she was a distant relative of the person whose DNA was found at the crime scene a second cousin once removed. The wait ended Monday, when a jury convicted Jerry Lynn Burns of first-degree murder in the 1979 stabbing death of 18-year-old Martinko. After tracing the suspect's family tree, investigators zeroed in on Burns, covertly collected his DNA and sent it to a lab for analysis, according to Moore and Jerman. The sample was put into a national computer database and was used to clear more than 70 of Martinkos acquaintances, according to NBC News. The police never received the information, and the woman did not contact police until months later, when they reissued a call for any information connected to the murder. A Felony. Dave Franzman, a longtime reporter at ABC Cedar Rapids affiliate KCRG, even covered the case at the time of Michelle Martinko's killing. Jerry Lynn Burns, 64, of Manchester, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on Wednesday, nearly 40 years after the brutal murder of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko in the parking lot of . But her sister Janelle and Janelles husband John Stonebaker were present at Burns sentencing. He was born on December 09, 1952 to Harold Eugene and Virginia Burns in Osceola, Arkansas. An obituary for Burns' wife, Patricia, says that she died in June 2008 at the age of 55 . Jerry Lynn Burns, 64, of Manchester, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on Wednesday, nearly 40 years after the brutal murder of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko in the parking lot of Westdale Mall on December 19, 1979. Jerry Burns. "We are reviewing the case and at this time have not uncovered any additional information that would implicate Jerry Burns in that disappearance," Sheriff John LeClere told TV9. Things that make it difficult. Allison, who's being held on drug charges in Linn County, says the two played the card game pinochle often. [34], On February 24, 2020, after three hours of deliberation, the jury found Jerry Lynn Burns guilty of first degree murder of Michelle Martinko. Please logout and login again. "I talked to myself and didn't know what to do Then you have to pray.". But by 2 a.m., her father called the police because she had not returned home. On December 19, 2018, he was arrested in Manchester, Iowa, on the 39th anniversary of Michelle's death. And he had the daunting task of trying to figure out who that could be, armed only with an unidentified sample of blood DNA. Hi all - I discuss the case of Michelle Martinko, who was murdered in 1979 in Iowa, this week on DNA: ID podcast. The defense requested the case be declared a mistrial as a result, but the judge denied the request and asked the prosecutor to rephrase the question. The case got nationwide media attention but has remained an unsolved mystery for more than 25 years. There is no known DNA evidence tying Burns to the Huisentruit case and no evidence that he knew Jodi Huisentruit. An investigator with the Cedar Rapids police department contacted DNA-tested members of two of the branches of the family tree, and eliminated those branches as containing the killer. But detectives had been stymied. The Realm, a group of 34 people. Sonny arrives at his restaurant and gives Dex, who is there, the night off. [9] After the event, she asked her friend and twirling squad teammate if she wanted to join her on a shopping trip to the Westdale Mall, which had recently opened, and where Martinko worked. Accountability doled out to suspects. His first wife, Patricia, died by suicide in 2008. Vikings PR. In a press conference during which the new image was shared, a former classmate of Martinko exclaimed that the face looked like another one of their classmates, but that classmate had been investigated and was cleared based on a DNA swab several years before. Anthony Rex officiating. [24], In 2018, the DNA phenotyping company took the data they had collected the year before and entered it into GEDmatch, a public genealogy website that has been used by law enforcement to solve other cold cases, most famously that of the Golden State Killer. or. Jerry Lynn Burns was convicted of first-degree murder for the 1979 murder 18-year-old Michelle Martinko thanks to DNA he left on a straw after drinking a soda. [7] Eventually, more than 125 people would have their DNA swabbed and compared against samples taken from the scene. Denlinger interviewed Burns at his business. When the police executed a search warrant for Burns home and office, they found a computer search history that included blonde females, assault, rape, strangulation, murder, abuse and rape of a deceased individual, and cannibalism.. On the eve of December 19, 1979, an 18-year-old high school student named Michelle Martinko was discovered dead in her family's car outside a mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. [2], In 2006, 27 years after Martinko's killing, a new cold case investigator working for the Cedar Rapids Police Department received a tip connected to the case. But Denlinger did get consent from Janice Burns, Burns' first cousin, and collected her DNA for testing, he said. In October 2018, an investigator was able to snag a straw used by one of the three brothers, Jerry Lynn Burns, and tested it against the sample, getting a match. As reported by CBS News, Burns was not arrested until 2018, when DNA evidence confirmed he was responsible for Martinko's death. Burns was arrested on Dec. 19, 2018. The prosecution emphasized the unlikelihood of the DNA evidence matching someone other than the person who left it at the scene. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. Her killer will go undetected for almost 40yrs! Further the Iowa Department of Corrections assumes no legal liability or . December . Burns, charged with first-degree murder in the cold case stabbing of Martinko, is asking the court to toss out DNA and other evidence because they were obtained without a warrant and represented violations of privacy and other rights. Detectives considered charging the Commissioner with failure to pass along the information to police, but no charges were pursued. DNA: ID. She claimed to have seen two cars in the lot, one of which was Martinko's, and a man standing next to the open driver's side door of Martinko's car. His cousin, Brian Burns, went missing on the 19th of December 2013. Viewers also wondered if there was a connection to the disappearance of Burns' cousin, Brian Burns. He said he thought Burns might have a 'conscience.. [25] He refused to voluntarily provide a sample of DNA, but was compelled to do so with a search warrant. She thinks this new crime . Jerry Burns. He is survived by his wife, Lydia Lynn; his oldest son, Scott Lynn; and his ch After weeks pursuing a wide range of possible blood relatives, Parabon helped him narrow the search down to three middle-aged brothers in Iowa who would have been young men back in 1979: Ken, Don and Jerry Burns. In 2006, a cold case investigator discovered unidentified blood, presumably belonging to the killer, while he was reviewing case files. The woman communicated her information to the daughter of the secretary of the Public Safety Commissioner and believed that it would be passed on to police if it was important. / CBS News. Denlinger recorded him using a camera that was hidden inside a coffee mug. He entered a plea of not guilty. Despite being known as a professional, Burns arrest got people talking about his family. Investigators struggled over the years to connect DNA collected at the scene to a suspect. We would also like to extend our sympathy to the Martinko family.. The case was appealed and was eventually decided by the Iowa Supreme Court in favor of the mall owners. Martinko, an 18-year-old high school student, was found stabbed to death in her family's car in the parking lot of a local mall, where she had gone to buy a new coat. "Hmm, strange," Burns responded when Cedar Rapids Police Investigator Matthew Denlinger told him he was a suspect for Martinko's death. She was a beautiful singer, and I miss all this. Janelle Stonebraker, Michelle's older sister, thinks that by fighting so vehemently that the suspect wounded himself and left his DNA behind, Michelle contributed to the investigation into her own murder. Burns' attorney, Leon Spies, also argued in his suppression motion that the computer evidence is irrelevant because it's from 2018 - 38 years after Martinko's death. 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