Remember Michelle Martinko: Iowa Time Machine December 19, 1979

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On December 19, 1979, an 18-year-old girl named Michelle Martinko vanished from the living world. Her body was discovered around 4:00 a.m. on December 20 in her family's tan 1972 Buick Electra, parked in the northeast section of the Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids. The murder would haunt Cedar Rapids for nearly four decades, becoming a ghost story that hung over the community until technology gave the dead a voice they'd been waiting 39 years to use.

Michelle Marie Martinko was born on October 6, 1961. She attended Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School, where she was an above-average student and talented performer who joined the twirling squad as a sophomore and performed in choirs and theater productions. Friends described her as stylish and kind, someone who wore her blonde hair in the popular Farrah Fawcett style and had dreams of studying interior design at Iowa State University. On the evening of December 19, 1979, she attended her school's choir banquet before driving to Westdale Mall to complete her Christmas shopping by picking up a winter coat her mother had placed on layaway. The mall, newly built just two months earlier, had quickly become a gathering place for young people. Michelle asked a friend to accompany her, but the friend declined, citing homework.

Michelle was last seen alive around 9:00 p.m. in the mall, and when she failed to return home, her parents reported her missing to police at approximately 2:00 a.m. The discovery of her body transformed a family's worry into a community's nightmare. Investigators found the crime scene rich with evidence. Blood scrapings from the gearshift of Michelle's Buick showed male DNA was present, and a spot of blood on her black dress contained a complete male DNA profile. The killer had worn gloves to conceal fingerprints, but had left behind something far more telling in the blood evidence. For years, that DNA sat in files, a genetic signature without a name attached.

The case found new life when science caught up with justice. In 2006, a cold case investigator discovered unidentified blood while reviewing files, and a DNA profile entered into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) yielded no matches. The breakthrough came in 2018 when investigators partnered with Parabon NanoLabs, a company specializing in genetic genealogy. By uploading the DNA profile to GEDmatch, a public genealogy website, investigators identified a distant relative and traced the family tree to three brothers in Iowa. Jerry Lynn Burns, a 64-year-old powder coating business owner from Manchester, matched perfectly. On December 19, 2018, exactly 39 years after Michelle's murder, Burns was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. When questioned, he repeatedly told investigators to test the DNA. When they did, it matched. After three hours of deliberation on February 24, 2020, a jury found Burns guilty of first-degree murder, and he received a mandatory life sentence without parole. #Iowa #OTD #History #ColdCare #Remberance