48 Hours - Murder at the Mall: The Michelle Martinko Case

Episode Date: November 8, 2020

Michelle Martinko fought for her life in a parking lot. Her attacker was left bleeding — creating the evidence that solved the case. CBS News correspondent Jamie Yuccas reports for "48 Hours."See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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ConstantContact.ca On December 19, 1979, Michelle Martinko was an 18-year-old high school senior. She was impossible to miss. She had the big blonde hair. She was that striking. She was striking. Just a smart, kind, nice person. She was a member of the concert choir.

They had a banquet, which she attended. Afterwards, Michelle ended up going to the mall. So did a bunch of her friends from the choir. The mall had just opened. It was two months old. It was the place to be in Cedar Rapids at the time. So she would have been parked right in this area? Yeah, she would have been parked facing this direction. She left the mall shortly before it closed. It closed at 10 p.m. that night. You're talking December in Iowa. It's very dark. It's very dark.

Michelle walks out and gets in her car. This person snuck up on Michelle, opened the door, and climbed in. She was stabbed and cut a total of 29 times. This was a real fight. It looks personal. It's a lot of stab wounds. It's overkill. It looks personal. It's a lot of stab wounds. It's overkill. It's always the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the husband,

someone really, really close to the person. Did either of you know Andy Seidel? I knew Andy through Michelle. That was her boyfriend. I took an instant dislike to Andy. He was very possessive of Michelle. I believed Andy did it. I did not see anything from the men in her life that would give any of them motive to do something like this.

I definitely didn't see that from Andy Seidel. The entire police force dedicated time and energy to try to find answers to what happened to Michelle. After a couple of years, the leads were starting to dry up. The case then goes cold. Yeah. We really had given up hope. We truly had. These guys never gave up.

The investigation never really stopped. I've been through every piece of paper in here. Probably close to 8,000 pages of reports here. The biggest break came in 2005. The DNA was the key. We collected DNA from 161 people. We were looking for a needle in a haystack. We just need to get lucky.

It took us 13 years until we had a suspect. We immediately call up the lab. Is this our guy? What was the answer? Yes. What are you doing in that moment? I don't know what I was doing. I was speechless.

So do you think he just all these years thought he got away with it? Well, yeah, because he did. Thank you. This tragic case, it's been haunting this community for years. Just before Christmas in December 1979, every single police officer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was called to work on the horrific murder in the parking lot of Westdale Mall. I never seen anybody stabbed that many times. Including now retired detective Harvey Denlinger. Something like that was unheard of around here. Michelle Martinko, an 18-year-old high school senior, had been found

violently stabbed in the front seat of her car. Her killer unknown, confounding generations of investigators. We couldn't come up with anything and we just kept plugging away. How old were you? I was five years old. Do you remember the case? No, not from when I was little. Harvey's son, Matt. But every single year on December 19th. Michelle Martinko was a bright-eyed blonde.

The local news would have a Michelle Martinko segment. 27 years ago, her life was cut short. So it was really hard to miss the severity of it. Decades later, Matt, now a detective himself, joined the investigation into Michelle Martinko's murder. I love how old this map is. 36 years after his father had begun working the same case. Wouldn't it be something if I could find our suspect and my dad is still alive? And as he dug into the thick files, the son went to his father to help him make sense of it all. I wanted someone to talk to about it and I wanted someone that really understood it. The crime had stunned the small city of 110,000.

It scared the hell out of us. Tracy Price went to high school and sang in the choir with Michelle. It just hit me like a brick. It was just shocking. Mike Wyrick had dated Michelle in high school and says her murder shattered the city's all-American image. If that could happen and the person wasn't caught, anything could happen. This one, I think, is one of our favorite pictures. She's sleeping with her dog. So cute. Here we're into the hair

stage. Lots of hair pictures. Yep. Janelle Stonebreaker is Michelle's big sister, 12 years older. Michelle was the flower girl at her wedding. She and her husband, John, say nothing could have prepared them for the horrible news they got the morning after Michelle was killed. We just hugged, and we couldn't believe she was gone. My dad was very stoic about it, but he was angry. And my mother was just brokenhearted. It was a devastating blow to parents who had been through so much with Michelle already. Janet Martinko had suffered five miscarriages and was 44 years old when Michelle was born.

It was great. I mean, it was just so exciting when my sister was born. And she was the miracle baby. When she was 12, Michelle was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. She had to wear a brace that went from her neck to her hips. She felt very different, very self-conscious. So that was a tough period. But at age 14, she was able to shed the brace. And then, Janelle says, everything changed for Michelle. Farrah Fawcett was in with the hair, and my sister always had the long blonde hair. So she thought, okay, I can do the hair. So she thought, okay, I can do the hair. Michelle was blissfully unaware of all this attention that she was getting from men. She caught the eye of Andy Seidel, who at 16 was a

year older than Michelle. We met him roller skating. Michelle's friend Gail Dawson remembers him. There is this flashy sports car guy, you know. Michelle and Andy were together for two years and then broke up. Friends say she didn't want to be in a committed relationship and Andy apparently didn't take it too well. After they broke up, he wanted to know her every move, who she was dating, why she was dating that particular person. He would talk to her friends. He just wouldn't go away. Police learned Andy had run into Michelle at the mall that fateful night. They brought him in for questioning. Did he have an alibi? Andy did have an alibi. Andy was at home shortly after the mall closed and his mom provided an alibi. The problem with Andy's alibi, though, is that moms would say a lot to protect their children.

Every male that knew her was a suspect that they had to clear. You must have been a suspect. I was. Mike Wyrick was questioned as well. And even though he was more than 100 miles away at college when Michelle was murdered, police knew he had also dated her. All of it was a little intimidating. It was hard. It was scary.

Mike says the police were tough on him. At one point, they thought that I wasn't telling them everything, and they laid the crime scene photos out in front of me, and it was hurtful. Mike was never considered a serious suspect because he was not in Cedar Rapids at the time of the murder. But Andy was. And Andy's behavior at Michelle's funeral only reinforced many people's suspicions about him.

He was almost in the casket. He was so emotional. He has arms around her and he was just sobbing and he said to me, I have to know who she loved when she died. Did she love me or did she love Mike? Who did she love when she died? But police had no hard evidence pointing to Andy Seidel. He left Cedar Rapids soon after high school and joined the Navy. There's a large amount of us that were convinced that he did kill her. I thought it was just a matter of time before he was arrested and charged. There was no one else.

There really wasn't another suspect. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military, and when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty.

Her specialty? Representing some of the city's most infamous gangland criminals. However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own. She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld, and she's informing on them all. I'm Marsha Clark, host of the new podcast, Informants Lawyer X. In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I've seen some crazy cases, and this one belongs right at the top of the list. She was addicted to the game she had created. She just didn't know how to stop. Now, through dramatic interviews and access, I'll reveal the truth behind one of the world's most shocking legal scandals. Listen to Informant's Lawyer X exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify,

and listen to more Exhibit C true crime shows early and ad-free right now. As police investigated those closest to Michelle Martinko looking for potential suspects, they were also looking at the possibility that Michelle may have been killed outside the mall by a stranger. She was out there and she was looking for a coat that her mom had put on layaway for her for Christmas, and she was going to pay it off. Michelle had $186 with her to pay for the coat, but ultimately decided she didn't want it. Tracy Price had run into her at the mall that night and gave her a protective warning when he saw her holding the cash. Put that away, you know. Don't be flashing money out here in the middle of everybody.

Tracy only learned later that Michelle was a little anxious that night. She was nervous about going out to the mall by herself. And that she had told someone that she felt like she was being followed. You didn't notice anybody watching her, paying close attention to her? I never got that feeling. Michelle headed to her car in the dark. So she was parked pretty far away. Yeah, she was parked a ways out here. I think she gets in. I think she probably turned that car on herself and was warming it up for a minute to get the frost off the windows. And I think that in that

moment before she puts it in drive and leaves, I think he's at the door, pops it open, pushes her over and climbs in. Sounds like a robbery? On the surface, it would sound like a robbery, but she did have cash on her. It wasn't taken. She did have a bag with some items she had purchased in the backseat. Those weren't taken. So is it a sexual assault? It very well could have been the plan. Although the autopsy showed she was not sexually assaulted, Michelle had defensive slice wounds on her hands and body. You have to assume that pretty much any motive that you can logically think of was a possibility,

and that Michelle decided she wasn't going to allow that to happen. She fought. Whatever the motive, the assailant had come prepared. They found rubber glove indentations on the outside of the car in dirt. They found them inside the car in blood. It was clear that that person was trying to conceal their identity. Investigators had no fingerprints, no witnesses, and few leads. Although they had a blood-soaked crime scene, DNA technology was still years away. It's frustrating.

By 1986, this case is sitting on ice. It's that cold. No one can think of anything more to do at that point. Michelle's family was even more frustrated. It seemed that everybody had been looked at. We thought the investigation was pretty much dead in the water. It would take almost two decades, but the case would come alive again. In 2005, Detective Doug Larrison was in charge.

Coincidentally, he had gone to high school with Michelle. Although they were not close her murder had deeply affected him so that had been on your mind since you were 18 years old how do you get this solved right i felt the responsibility towards my classmates actually to get this crime solved in the years since michelle's murder dna had emerged as a forensic tool. Technology changes, science changes, so I wanted to proceed and move the case forward. And Larrison did just that. He was reading Michelle's file when he discovered that sometime earlier, another detective had sent blood scrapings found on the gear shift of the car out for testing, but nobody had followed up on the results.

And it just stays in the file until somebody finds it? And it can get lost in the file. And until somebody actually sits down and reads the file, do they go, oh, wow, we have DNA? Those different investigators don't necessarily network with one another. But Larrison found that lab report, and it showed that not only did the gear shift have DNA, it was male DNA. He had probably cut himself, and that's how his DNA and his blood got mixed with her blood on the gear shift selector.

Larrison then sent Michelle's dress, which had been safely tucked away in an evidence locker, to the lab for further testing. What did they find? A spot of blood on her dress with a full male DNA profile. And it was consistent with the male DNA profile on the gear shift selector. Larrison had identified a crucial piece of evidence. I think it's just common sense that that's probably your killer right there. Detectives had the evidence. Now all they needed was the suspect. We know we just need one person. We just need to get lucky, you know, have the sunshine on us just one day

when we find one person that matches that. But it would take many days, more than a decade. And it wasn't luck. It was cops who wouldn't quit until they finally narrowed in on one very surprising suspect. Oh boy, this is it. We have finally gotten down to the wire on this. Here in America's heartland, for friends like Tracy Price, who saw Michelle Martinko the last night of her life. Every anniversary, it goes through your head. You know, here's another year. Still don't know.

For ex-boyfriend Mike Weirich. We all were victims in a way. Well, your innocence was stolen. Yeah, exactly. Then the fear set in. And for close friend Gail Dawson, Michelle's murderer left a mark on all their lives. You're scared. You're afraid to go places.

The killer had vanished. But by 2005, investigators were on to something new. Science. And that male DNA profile on Michelle's dress and the DNA from the blood on her car's gear shift. Would it be fair to say you found a needle in a haystack? I think there was a lot of needles in a lot of haystacks in this case. For lead investigator Doug Larrison, old evidence suddenly had fresh potential.

He shipped the blood samples to CODIS, the nationwide database of DNA collected from arrested offenders. If Michelle's murderer had a previous record... CODIS will give us a hit and tell us who matches the profile. So you send it to CODIS and what happens? We never got a hit. Dead end. The DNA from Michelle's dress and car did not match up with anyone in the huge

government file. So now we had a job to do. Starting with locating all the people Cedar Rapids cops had originally interviewed. We collected DNA samples from over 100 different people. Cops had to convince them to take a DNA test. It was time consuming. Mike Wyrick and Tracy Price were tested. Both came up negative.

At the top of Larrison's list was Michelle's old boyfriend, Andy Seidel. I think he was probably the main suspect from the very beginning of this case. Andy Seidel had lived for 27 years, with many in his hometown believing he was a killer. I said, listen, Andy, if you give us your DNA and it doesn't match, then you're eliminated. You're cleared. So he voluntarily gave his DNA and he was eliminated. But whoever ended Michelle's life left a different but lasting mark on Andy. Michelle's parents both died before that DNA test exonerated him. They likely went to their graves believing Andy was their daughter's killer.

I feel very bad about that. Andy was a victim himself because many, many fingers were pointing at Andy. because many, many fingers were pointing at Andy. Larrison moved on. Classmates, friends, family, searching for a match with that male DNA. So you do 100 different people. What comes back?

Everybody's eliminated. No matches. It had been 10 frustrating years for Detective Doug Larrison. I was kind of burned out, so I went to my supervisors and I said, hey, I think you need to get somebody to replace me on this case. One of these had the FBI profile in it. And that's when Matt came in. Matt Denlinger, Harvey's son, that second generation, searching for Michelle's killer. In 2015, he took over as lead detective. They would tell you our computer records only go back to 1990.

Facts hadn't changed, but DNA technology had once again advanced further, offering tantalizing possibilities. We've got this DNA profile. How can we get more information from it? Can we find out eye color, hair color, race? Denlinger reached across the country to Virginia's Parabon Nano Labs. And they said, yeah, we know what you're trying to do. And guess what? We can make a picture of a potential suspect from that DNA sample. Did you think that that could be possible? No. No, I had no good concept that that was possible. It sounded a little bit sci-fi,

but I was ready to try. We had to do something. I had no good concept that that was possible. It sounded a little bit sci-fi, but I was ready to try. We had to do something. The portrait was striking. Parabon called the technique snapshot. It put a face on a phantom. What we learned from that is our suspect was probably a white male, blonde hair, blue eyes. And so we had a press conference. Investigators had narrowed down the suspect's genetics, but they did not know his age or have a clue as to how he wore his hair. So different sketches were created, each with a different look. A town hungry for justice searched its memory for a match.

Do you get a lot of tip calls? We got hundreds. Any of them pan out? No. It's every blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy that ever walked the face of the earth and stepped foot in Iowa. Are you just confused? I was really confused, and I did not know where to go next. blue-eyed guy that ever walked the face of the earth and stepped foot in Iowa. Are you just confused? I was really confused, and I did not know where to go next.

That answer came from an infamous but totally unrelated case, California's so-called Golden State Killer. Joseph DeAngelo was arrested in 2018, charged with a decades-long spree of serial murder and rape. That was big news. That was big national news then. I read the article, and it talked about genetic genealogy. And you went bingo? I went bingo. Genetic genealogy, the charting of DNA from one family member to another. A DNA family tree. Parabon was ready to test that same DNA one more time. They said we'll use the sample you already gave us for the snapshot images. I said let's do it. Parabon searched a public national database called GEDmatch of people who

submitted their own DNA voluntarily to trace their own personal family tree. And in July of 2018, we got a report back from them. They said, good news, we found a relative of your killer. Brandi Jennings is our gal in Vancouver, Washington. She's the second cousin. Right. Once removed. Exactly.

Brandi Jennings, an office manager and single mom, was a distant relative to the male whose DNA was found on Michelle's bloody dress and in her car. So you start with her. We start with her. Denlinger spent months building Brandy's family tree, all the way back to her great-great-grandparents. We used genealogical records, birth records, marriage records, gravestone records, anything we could find to fill in a bunch of these unknowns. As more blood relatives of Brandi Jennings provided their DNA, a genetic puzzle filled in, and the detective reached out to Parabon once again. And they recalibrated things and said, listen, we think your best odds are these three brothers who live in Iowa.

Three brothers, all from Iowa. All likely sharing some DNA with the blood found in Michelle Martinko's car. A 38-year trail was heading straight back home. 20 minutes away. I was pretty excited about this one. Should police use genetic genealogy to help solve crimes? For more on the investigation, go to 48hours.com. By October of 2018, Detective Matt Denlinger's painstaking ancestry searches had narrowed the suspects down to three brothers in Iowa, and all of them were still alive.

We immediately started doing research on these three brothers. There were Donald Burns, Kenneth Burns, and Jerry Burns. Denlinger and his team set up a plan. They would collect DNA samples from the brothers to see if any were a match. And they would do it without them knowing. You think one of them's a suspect, you can't tell any of the three. Not only can I not tell any of the three, but I was careful who I told in general. Iowa is not the biggest state in the union, and you never know who knows who. They followed one brother to lunch and grabbed

his straw. For the second, a toothbrush was collected from his garbage. And then the third brother, Jerry. We drove up to Manchester. We had already established kind of a pattern or some locations to try to find him. After a couple of hours, he spotted Jerry Burns at this pizza restaurant. He drank at least two sodas out of a glass with a straw. All three brothers' samples were sent to the lab. Don and Kenneth were not a match. But the results showed Jerry Burns' DNA was an exact match. For Denlinger, the message was clear. I was definitely speechless. I'm almost speechless today thinking about it.

It turns out that Parabon's sketch of the suspect was very similar to a young Jerry Burns. But Burns wasn't an obvious suspect. We are not finding any connection at all. No connection to Michelle. No connection to that car. Even more baffling, Jerry Burns' resume was the opposite of a cold-blooded killer. He had no criminal record and was even a respected businessman with a wife and three kids. Denlinger picked a particular day to interview Burns at his business. Hello. December 19, 2018. Hey, how are you today?

Jerry, my name's Matt. I'm with the Cedar Rapids Police Department. Exactly 39 years to the day after Michelle was murdered. I wanted to rattle him. I wanted to bring that up during the interview and see if that would do anything to him. Using a hidden camera inside a coffee mug, Denlinger tried to get a confession. The reality is we have your DNA at the crime scene,

and so we know you were there that night this happened. How would we get your DNA at the crime scene there, Jerry? I don't know. But Jerry acknowledged he had been to the mall with his family in the past. Did you go to Westdale Mall? Oh yeah, we've gone to Westdale Mall. Although Jerry couldn't remember when he was at the mall, Denglinger continued to press him. Jerry, what happened that night? I don't know. Despite Burns' denials, the DNA was enough to arrest him for the murder of Michelle Martinko. Anything you say, Ken, we'll be used to get you in a court of law.

On the ride back to Cedar Rapids, a camera was rolling again, this time in the police car. And Denlinger believes Jerry offered something revealing. He said a few things about blocking stuff out, traumatic events. I think it's possible it's happening. I'm not sure. I'm sure something like that would be possible to block things out of your memories. You're a homicide detective. Your gut tells you something. What does your gut say?

My gut told me the second he refused to deny it or give me a plausible explanation that we had the right guy. For Michelle's sister Janelle, news of the DNA match and the arrest signaled hope. And a day she and her husband John thought would never come. We were just hooping and hollering and we were just talking and talking. We were just so excited. But for the Burns family, it all came as a complete shock. Jerry's daughter Jennifer and his brother Don could not believe the man they know and love could ever be capable of such a gruesome act. We did not believe it. This could not be our dad. He couldn't have done

it. There was just no way. I mean, he was always there for his family. Circumstances that just made it highly improbable from our perspective. First of all, there was no connection between Jerry and Michelle Martinko, none. Leon Spies is Jerry Byrne's attorney. He believes his client's demeanor during the police interview wasn't out of the ordinary. I challenge anybody to predict how any person is going to react, let alone react being caught out of the blue with an investigator trying to attribute them to a horrible, horrible crime. He did not commit this murder. In February of 2020, Michelle Martinko's accused killer went on

trial more than four decades after her murder. Due to the buzz surrounding the case in Cedar Rapids, the judge granted a venue change to Davenport, Iowa, an hour away. The evidence will show that Michelle Martinko was murdered that night by the defendant, Jerry Burns. Prosecutor Nick Maybanks felt the weight of his hometown on his shoulders. A lot of eyes on this case. There are generations that grew up with this story. And the generation who lived through the horror and suspicion. Always seemed to be happy. Several of Michelle's friends were

called to testify, including Michelle's ex-boyfriend and once prime suspect Andy Seidel, who says he and Michelle were on good terms the last time they saw each other. There was no reason for us to part ways in a bad way. We just kind of grew apart as we evolved growing into adulthood. Mike Weirich was also called and had to relive Michelle's murder all over again. This trial was hard on me for a lot of us, brought it all back into focus in a way that it hadn't been in focus since those early, early days. This was a random act of violence committed by a stranger. From the start, the prosecution faced a number of hurdles.

The case and the evidence were decades old. Tried to take 40 years of investigation and condense it into a story. And a lot of things about this suspect didn't make sense. What's that like for you? You have a suspect who has no criminal background that we're aware of. And this heinous crime that looks extremely personal. Right. Yeah. You have no story.

I don't. Yeah. And after he was interviewed, we didn't have much of a story either. A story the Burns family believes was problematic from the start. They wanted an explanation of how his DNA got there. Well, how is he supposed to know from 40 years ago? You know, I can't even remember what I did last week every day. So would you say it's impossible that Jerry murdered Michelle? I'd say it is.

There's absolutely no way it could have happened. I don't think there's any way that my dad could have done this. The prosecution's case hinged on that one critical piece of evidence. Jerry Burns' DNA. We got the science. We got the guy. There's a one in 100 billion chance that it could be somebody else's. There's only 8 billion people or so in the guy. There's a one in 100 billion chance that it could be somebody else's. There's only 8 billion people or so in the world. But Leon Spies argues the DNA evidence isn't foolproof.

There are lots of misconceptions about DNA. It's not the silver bullet that law enforcement often portrays it to be. Do you think Jerry Burns' comment in the patrol car was telling? Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder. I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was.

Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, early and ad-free, with a 48-hour plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of them. virgin. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn.

When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. As the state's case wound down, prosecutor Nick Maybanks had one last card to play. He called a new witness, Michael Allison, a drug offender who had become friendly with Jerry Burns in jail. Yes, I do. I asked him directly, I asked him, Jerry, did you do the crime?

And he said, I can't talk about this. But Burns did say something curious. He feels like no matter what happens in this case, that he wins because he had the opportunity to be out there with his family all these years. Allison said Jerry later made another comment while they were playing cards that disturbed him so much he volunteered to testify. He had told me if I keep beating him in Pinochle he was going to have to take me to the mall. It disgusted me. In his defense case, Leon Spies calls only one witness, Dr. Michael Spence, a molecular biologist. He says

while there is no doubt the DNA in Michelle's car belonged to Jerry Burns, how it got there was another matter. Is it, Dr. Spence, a plausible explanation that the DNA of Jerry Burns could have come about by a transfer. Yes, that's a distinct possibility. Every time you come into contact with something, you're shedding DNA. You're leaving a biological trail of yourself. She was in a shopping mall before she was killed, a shopping mall that the Burns family had used. She sat down with a friend at a food court,

a food court that Jerry Burns and his family may have sat at. But how did Jerry's DNA end up on the Buick's gear shift? Jerry's brother Don Burns believes there could be an innocent explanation. He worked in a dealership that sold Buick cars, so there is a possibility that if records show that that car went through that dealership, his DNA could be in that car. But Detective Matt Denlinger isn't buying it. My question for them would be, did the dress go to the dealership too? This is this fantasy world. Common sense says that that's not the case. Impossible. Impossible. Common sense says that that's not the case.

Impossible. Impossible. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, good morning. In his final arguments, Prosecutor Maybanks tells the jury there was only one way Jerry Burns' DNA got into that car. There was no chance of outside contamination on this dress. We know how it happened, and we know who did it. In his closing argument, Spies attacks the integrity of the investigation. You can consider not only the evidence but also the lack or the failure of evidence produced by the prosecution. And he tells jurors to consider how unlikely it is that a man like Jerry

could commit a crime like this. The state scenario here is that Jerry Burns, a married man with two young children at home, leaves, drives to Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the night, leaving his wife and children behind, armed with a knife, armed with rubber gloves, goes to a Westdale mall on the chance that he's going to encounter Michelle Martenko, designs to kill her,

and then leaves and drives back home. Splattered with blood, presumably with a knife wound in his hand. That's the scenario the government wants you to believe. The jury begins deliberations on a Monday afternoon. Remember, you are the judges of the facts. Nerves are on edge. I was not thinking slam dunk.

All it takes is one juror to have a hung jury. But just three hours later. I said, we have a verdict. So we rush into the courtroom, sit down, and we wait. Thank you. We, the jury, find the defendant, Jerry Lynn Burns, guilty of the charge of murder in the first degree. Guilty. The courtroom was silent.

We almost couldn't breathe. It was just amazing. It was fabulous. We were aware of how quiet it was on Jerry's side and that there was no reaction. Unfair? I'd say I was stunned. The verdict came back so fast, I don't know if the jury really took time to look at the facts. What do you feel in that moment? Extreme relief. The weight of the in that moment? Extreme relief.

The weight of the world was off my shoulders now. Harvey Denlinger, the investigator who was there at the beginning of the case, 40 years earlier, saw his son help end it. I'm proud as heck of him. I really am proud to get an answer, you know, while he can still appreciate it. He said today how proud he is of you. Well, all right. We're going to take a break. Finally, there was an answer to the question that had haunted Cedar Rapids for so long.

But there is a lingering question. Was Michelle Martinko Jerry's only victim? I've just seen something about Jody Husentruth recently. In his interview with Denlinger, Burns randomly mentioned the name of Jody Husentruth. You aren't watching News Channel 3 Daybreak? She was a blonde news anchor kidnapped near her car in a parking lot in 1995 and never found. She worked in Mason City, Iowa, two hours from where Burns lived, though there is no evidence he knew her. Do you suspect that Jerry Burns was involved in other crimes?

I don't know the answer to that. My gut tells me there's probably something else out there. know the answer to that. My gut tells me there's probably something else out there. Mason City Police will not disclose whether they are investigating Burns in the Who's in Truth disappearance, and his DNA is not connected to any other cases. But in Michelle Martinko's case, she played a unique role in revealing her killer. She fought so hard that she caused the murderer to cut himself. He left his DNA, and so Michelle helped solve her own murder. Four decades after Michelle's death, her friends, family, and generations of investigators gather to celebrate her memory.

This case isn't just about her death, it's about her life. Nick Maybanks worded it the best. I mean, he said, it's not about how she died, it's about how she lived. You can't help but wonder where life would have led her. Her name will be forever etched in local history as part of Cedar Rapids' most haunting crime. You've been a prosecutor for 20 years. Is this the biggest case you've ever had? Yeah. Every case, you want justice. But a case like this touched so many people over so many years, there'll never be another one like it. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge?

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