Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the night of December 19, 1979, six days before Christmas, 18-year-old Michelle Martinko walked out of Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and headed across the parking lot to her family’s car.
She never came home.
A choir banquet and a winter coat
Michelle was a senior at Kennedy High School. She sang in the school’s concert choir, and she planned to study interior design at Iowa State University.
That evening the choir had held its holiday banquet at the Sheraton in Cedar Rapids. Michelle wore a black dress. Afterwards she didn’t go straight home. She drove the family’s big 1972 Buick Electra, a car her classmates knew well, to Westdale Mall, which had opened only a few years earlier. She wanted to look at a winter coat.
At the mall she chatted with friends. Sometime between 9 and 10 p.m., she left alone and walked out to the Buick.
Around 10:30 or 11, the assistant manager of a Pier 1 Imports store noticed the big car sitting in the lot. It was “just kind of out there by itself,” she would later say. At that hour, it looked out of place.
When Michelle still wasn’t home in the early hours of the morning, her father called the police.
The Buick
Shortly after 4 a.m. on December 20, officers found the Buick in the mall parking lot. Michelle was inside.
She had been stabbed 29 times. She had defensive wounds on her hands. The medical examiner said there had been a struggle, and that her attacker might well have cut himself in it.
She had not been robbed. Whoever killed her had not come for her purse.
The killer had been careful. There were no fingerprints anywhere in the car. Instead, investigators found the patterned prints of rubber gloves on the steering wheel, the gearshift, the door handles, the keys and the light switch. After the attack, it seemed, the killer had driven the Buick himself.
Police collected Michelle’s black dress, and they scraped blood from the gearshift and the steering wheel. In 1979, there was nothing more anyone could do with it.
Forty years of suspects
The tips poured in. In the first week alone, police received more than 200 responses to their appeals. Suspects came and went. A sketch based on witnesses was released. Michelle’s parents both died in the 1990s without an answer.
Then DNA science began to catch up with the case. From the late 1990s onward, the evidence was tested again and again. In 2005, the state crime lab found a bloodstain on Michelle’s black dress that held a man’s DNA. The same man could also have left the blood on the gearshift.
Whoever he was, he wasn’t in any criminal database. Police swabbed more than 100 men over the years and compared their DNA to the dress. None of them matched.
A face from the DNA
In 2015, Cedar Rapids Police Investigator Matt Denlinger took over the case. He reached out to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia company that predicts what a person looks like from their DNA.
Parabon’s “Snapshot” showed a man with fair skin, light hair and blue eyes. It looked nothing like the old witness sketch.
In 2018, Parabon tried something newer. It ran the DNA through GEDmatch, a public genealogy database where people upload their own DNA to find relatives. There were hits, but only distant ones. Denlinger spent months building family trees out of them.
The trees led to a woman in Linn County who agreed to give a DNA sample. With her DNA, Parabon could say it with confidence: the man who left his blood on Michelle’s dress was probably her first cousin.
She had three first cousins. They were brothers, Donald, Kenneth and Jerry Burns, and all three had grown up in Manchester, Iowa, about an hour from Cedar Rapids. All three were still living in Iowa.
The booth next to his
Police couldn’t simply ask the brothers for a swab. If one of them was the killer, that would warn him.
So they watched. When Kenneth Burns threw away a drinking straw at a golf course clubhouse, police picked it up. When Donald put out his trash, they took a toothbrush from it. The lab tested both. Neither brother could have left the DNA on the dress.
That left Jerry.
Jerry Lynn Burns was 64. He had worked for John Deere and now ran a powder coating business in Manchester. He was a father. Nothing in his life had ever put him on the police radar in the Martinko case.
In late October 2018, investigators followed Burns and his son into a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Manchester. They sat down in the booth right next to theirs.
They watched Burns drink several sodas through a clear plastic straw. When he and his son finished eating, they got up and walked out.
The investigators reached over, picked up his cup, and bagged the straw.
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