Detective Waits for the Straw He Leaves Behind

On the night of December 19, 1979, Michelle Martinko — an 18-year-old senior at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — left a choir banquet and drove the family's 1972 Buick to the newly opened Westdale Mall to pick up a winter coat her mother had put on layaway. Her parents reported her missing at 2 a.m. Shortly after 4 a.m. on December 20, police found her stabbed to death inside the car in the northeast corner of the parking lot. She had not been robbed. She had fought her attacker. Investigators found rubber-glove prints on the controls of the car, and blood on the steering wheel and gearshift, but no fingerprints, no weapon and no suspect. More than 200 tips, a hypnosis-based composite sketch in 1980 and a $10,000 reward led nowhere, and the case went cold by 1986. In 2005 the Iowa DCI lab developed a partial male DNA profile from a bloodstain on the back of Michelle's dress — consistent with the blood on the gearshift — and uploaded it to CODIS in 2006. No match. More than 100 people gave cheek swabs and were cleared. In 2017 the department paid for DNA phenotyping, which predicted a blond, blue-eyed man — the opposite of the 1980 sketch. In 2018, after the Golden State Killer arrest, investigator Matt Denlinger turned to genetic genealogy: a single distant relative on GEDmatch, months of building family trees, a cousin's voluntary swab, and finally three brothers from Manchester, an hour from Cedar Rapids. Two brothers were excluded through discarded items. On October 29, 2018, investigators sat in the booth next to the third at a Pizza Ranch and collected the straw he left behind. It matched. On December 19, 2018 — 39 years to the day — Jerry Lynn Burns, 64, was interviewed at his business, told police to "test the DNA," and was arrested. A Scott County jury convicted him of first-degree murder on February 24, 2020, after about three hours of deliberation. He was sentenced on August 7, 2020, to life without parole. The Iowa Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on March 31, 2023, holding that DNA on an abandoned straw can be collected without a warrant. CHAPTERS 00:00 The coat on layaway 05:31 The car in the far corner of the lot 10:57 The sketch that was wrong 16:29 The blood nobody had read 22:00 A face predicted from DNA 27:47 Three brothers and a straw 33:35 The thirty-ninth anniversary 39:19 Michelle helped solve her own murder Every case on this channel is reconstructed from court records, police statements, and verified reporting. Sources for this case: the Iowa Supreme Court opinion in State v. Burns (No. 20-1150, March 31, 2023), statements by the Cedar Rapids Police Department at the 2006, 2017 and 2018 news conferences, contemporaneous reporting by The Gazette (Cedar Rapids), KCRG-TV, the Associated Press, CBS News and NBC News on the investigation, arrest, trial, sentencing and appeals, and the CBS News 48 Hours report on the case. The Evidence Room investigates real cold cases that stayed unsolved for decades — and the forensic breakthroughs that finally closed them. These were real people. We tell their stories with respect for the victims and for the families who waited. Subscribe for a new case file every week. #coldcase #truecrime #forensics #dnaevidence #geneticgenealogy #unsolved #documentary