Why can’t they figure this out? Why can’t they prove it? The question haunted Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the better part of four decades. The brutal murder of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko, stabbed over twenty times in her car in the Westdale Mall parking lot on the night of December 19, 1979, had become a dark fixture of local life.
It was a story everyone knew. It was local lore. I was probably at home in bed in 1979. I would have been five years old.
The prosecutor who would eventually handle the case was even younger, just four. But growing up in Cedar Rapids, we all knew who Michelle Martinko was. She had gone to the mall for some Christmas shopping with $180 in her purse. She had come from a school choir holiday banquet and was all dressed up.
She was bright, friendly, and stood out in the crowd. She was also beautiful. The last person to talk to her that night was a young man named Kurt Thomas, who had been in a school play with her and worked at a men’s clothing store in the mall. He walked her to the exit.
She was saying her goodbyes, bundling up, and calling it a night. She smiled at me. I call it the Michelle smile. He never saw her again.
The next time she was seen was when police officers arrived at about 4:00 a. m. the next morning to find her brutally murdered in her car. Michelle’s family, including her sister and brother-in-law, were convinced it was an ex-boyfriend, Andy Seidel.
They had broken up in a rather unsatisfactory way, and he wouldn’t let go. It seemed like the classic behavioral trait of, if I can’t have her, no one can. But detectives were also suspicious of the friend she had talked to at the mall, Kurt Thomas. It turned into a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.
He was taken to the police station even before he knew Michelle had been killed, where he faced a good cop, bad cop routine. He just flat turned around, leaned over the chair, and asked me why I killed her. But there were no surveillance cameras in the mall parking lot, no eyewitnesses, and no DNA testing was available. There was no way to rule in or out Kurt Thomas or any of Michelle’s friends.
The case went cold. The theories floating around town were hurtful. It was everything from drug rings to prostitution. For years, her family was in despair, especially her mother, Janet, who was subjected to ugly crank calls.
They’d say, “Mother, mother, this is Michelle. ” And some of them would be laughing. It was absolutely awful. My mother just lost a part of herself.
The years went by with no solution. Michelle’s parents died not knowing who had killed their daughter. I saw the actual notes her mother had made. She thought it was Andy.
She was keeping a diary, and it was very troubling to see her write my name, circle it, and put question marks. But the answer had been sitting on a shelf at the Cedar Rapids Police Station all those years. In 2006, at a CSI-like moment, some of the items of evidence that had been kept were re-examined by a lab analyst, and they found the killer’s DNA. Anyone who had been suspected or had any contact with Michelle was asked to submit a DNA sample.
One of the first people detectives looked at was the boyfriend, Andy. They took a swab from him. Not a match. But eyebrows were immediately raised when one man refused to give a DNA sample: Kurt Thomas, now married to a judge in Oklahoma.
My wife just was completely silent and then she said, “Are you crazy? Are you nuts? The police don’t call and ask for DNA just willy-nilly out of the blue. ” Thomas’s lawyer gave him a statement to read to the police detective who had contacted him, turning down the request.
He read his little statement and set the phone down. I could hear the phone going down on the desk, and he just announced it to wherever he was. “We got our effing killer. We’re going to get a warrant for your DNA.
We’re going to get a warrant for your arrest. ” After a prolonged negotiation, Thomas relented and gave his DNA. I remember they called and just said, “He’s not a match. ” And they hung up.
No one else was a match either, of the hundreds of men tested. Unless it was a total stranger. And then how do you find that person? In 2015, a detective named Matt Denlinger took on the cold case, determined to find that total stranger.
He sorted through more than 7,000 pages of reports. It was his wife who gave him the answer after she had received a Christmas gift of an ancestry. com report on her family tree that used DNA. She mentioned, “Wouldn’t that be neat if you could do that with your Martinko case?
” And I immediately recognized the potential in that. They found a company called Parabon NanoLabs out of Virginia. They were able to create an image of what our suspect would look like from that DNA, including skin color, hair color, eye color, and facial structure. It was pretty amazing and was not something that had ever been tried in Iowa.
They put out the picture and had a big press release. We hoped to get 100 people call in and say, “Hey, it all looks like person A. ” But we got 200 people call in and say it looks like 100 different people. Another dead end.
In the spring of 2018, the detective saw the news that they had cracked the Golden State Killer case using a genealogy database. A partial match with a woman living in Washington state. She was our ground zero for building a family tree and working our way back to our suspect. And so, we were honing in pretty quick.
Our suspect was likely one of three brothers, all living in Iowa. They all grew up in the Manchester, Iowa area, about 45 minutes from Cedar Rapids. Jerry Burns, Kenneth Burns, and Donald Burns. None of them had any connection to Michelle or to Westdale Mall that we could identify.
It was really tricky to tell which one we thought was most likely our suspect. No criminal records. They were all entrepreneurs. Well, it was hard to sleep at night.
Which one is it? In great secrecy, police descended on Manchester. They began with the brother they thought was the most likely suspect, Kenneth Burns. They followed him around for the better part of a day until he went and had lunch at a golf course clubhouse, and they were able to collect a drinking straw out of his glass.
The lab compared the new sample with the DNA collected off Michelle’s dress four decades earlier. Kenneth was not a match. Now to Davenport, where Donald Burns lived. They were able to covertly collect a glass and a toothbrush out of his garbage.
That’s not a match, either. Finally, back to Manchester and the brother detectives had thought was the least likely of the three to be the killer. They observed Jerry Burns having lunch at a Pizza Ranch buffet restaurant. We decided that the straw he was drinking out of was going to be the best item to take.
When we got that phone call, our jaws were on the floor. It was a match. The date chosen for the confrontation was December 19th, the anniversary of Michelle’s murder. It was no coincidence.
At age 64, Jerry Burns listened as the detective laid out the purpose of the visit, all recorded on an undercover camera. They showed him a picture of Michelle. He claimed he didn’t know her. Then the detective closed in.
“I’m telling you, Jerry, I already know that your DNA is going to match the DNA that we have on file. ” Burns was in full denial mode. “I was not there that night. ” They played the video for him in the police car.
“Do you know what today is? Did you murder someone that night, Jerry? Test the DNA. Why did this happen, Jerry?
” He never confessed. They arrested him for first-degree murder. The case went to a jury trial. The prosecution put Michelle’s former boyfriend and friend on the stand, who described the guilt they had carried for decades.
The defense argued the DNA on the dress could have been transferred innocently. The judge allowed the expert to testify to the possibility. The defense pointed out there was no motive, successfully keeping out evidence of disturbing internet searches found on Burns’s computer about assault, rape, and murder. But the jury also saw the secretly recorded video of the interrogation, where Burns never once said, “You got the wrong guy.
” After about three hours of deliberations, the jury found Jerry Lynn Burns guilty of murder in the first degree. He got the maximum possible sentence: life without parole. Michelle’s family said they were just glad they caught him. She’s forever 18.
She’s forever just a beautiful person. Years later, in a remote western Iowa farmhouse, a different family was about to be torn apart. A son called 911 to report a horrible scene. “My mom.
My mom was laying here on the floor. Blood everywhere. She’s dead. And I don’t know what happened.
” The woman was Shirley Carter, 67 years old, and the son who found her, Jason Carter, came under suspicion almost immediately. The lead detective listened to the 911 call and something did not sound right. “Right away that set bells off to me in my mind of the words he used, how he described the scene, and his emotions. How would Jason know she had been there for 2 hours?
” Adding to the questions was a secret Jason had kept from police and his wife: a torrid extramarital affair. Within three days, both Jason and his wife Shelly were brought in for questioning. The investigators tried to get Shelly to turn on her husband. “I could have been a scorned wife because that’s what they wanted me to be.
But I knew that he didn’t have anything to do with his mom’s death. ” Jason was interrogated for almost eleven hours and agreed to take a lie detector test. He was told he was deceptive. He protested his innocence the entire time.
“I NEVER TOUCHED MY MOM. I NEVER HURT HER. THE KILLER IS STILL OUT THERE. ” He walked out of the sheriff’s office with no charges filed.
But his own father, Bill Carter, became convinced of his guilt. He hired his own private detective to investigate. “He and his wife both lied constantly. I knew he did it or hired it done, one or the other.
” Bill Carter filed a civil lawsuit against his son, blaming him for Shirley’s wrongful death. The civil jury took only two hours to find Jason Carter liable and ordered him to pay $10 million. The prosecution then decided it had enough evidence to charge him with murder. At the criminal trial, the defense presented a crucial piece of evidence: surveillance video showing Jason at a grain elevator, over an hour’s drive away, at the time the medical examiner believed Shirley was killed.
The defense rested without putting Jason on the stand. The jury found him not guilty. His father, Bill, was devastated. He knew it was over with.
Jason and his wife then sued his father, the state, and the lead agent. And then, in another small Iowa town, there was the case of Todd Mullis. On a cold November day, he called 911 saying his wife Amy had fallen on a corn rake. “I had to pull the damn fork out.
” She died on the lap of their teenage son, Tristan, as they raced to the hospital. But an autopsy revealed six puncture wounds in Amy’s back. A corn rake only has four tines. It didn’t look like an accident.
Investigators learned Amy was planning to leave Todd. She had a lover. Todd had a cruel streak. He checked her phone.
But their teenage son said his father was never out of his sight that morning. Investigators seized Todd’s iPad and found Google searches for “16 facts about cheating women” and “killing unfaithful women. ” At the trial, the son changed his story, admitting there was a window of time he wasn’t with his dad. The prosecution played a 911 call where some listeners heard Todd whisper, “cheating whore” and “go to hell, cheating whore.
” The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life without parole. His supporters insisted he was innocent. The children lost both parents: one dead, one in prison. In Springfield, Missouri, a community had opened its heart to Dee Dee Blanchard and her daughter Gypsy.
The mother seemed so brave, raising a child with leukemia, asthma, seizures, and paralysis, confined to a wheelchair. They got a house from Habitat for Humanity. But one warm summer night, Dee Dee was found brutally murdered, stabbed seventeen times, her head nearly severed. Her daughter Gypsy was missing.
Police found the wheelchair still in the house. A Facebook post from Gypsy and Dee Dee’s shared page said, “That bitch is dead. ” Police tracked the post to a home nearly 500 miles away in Wisconsin, where they found Gypsy with her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn. The big shock was that Gypsy was up and walking around.
She was not paralyzed at all. It was all a scam. The mother had been pulling it off for years to trick sympathetic people and charities out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Gypsy had been a prisoner her whole life.
She truly believed she was sick. She feared her mother more than anyone. She had met Nicholas on a Christian dating site. She invited him to see the premiere of “Cinderella” with her.
And after that, they planned to kill her mother. Gypsy admitted she stole the knife from Walmart and handed it to him. She admitted she was there that night, locked in the bathroom, hearing her mother scream her name. She admitted she cleaned up the crime scene.
She said Nicholas raped her, but he said it was consensual. “Guess who’s the mastermind? ” They were both charged with first-degree murder. Given her history of abuse, Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a ten-year sentence.
Nicholas Godejohn went to trial. His defense was that he had autism and was manipulated by Gypsy. “Whose idea was it to kill your mother? ” Gypsy testified for the defense.
“Mine. ”
But the prosecutor showed text messages where Nicholas was planning the murder, excited about it. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life without parole. While Gypsy would be eligible for parole in a few years, Nicholas would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
A grim ending to what started as an abused child’s longing for a fairy tale.
