Michelle Martinko Was Stabbed 29 Times — Then Her Case Went Cold. Here's How Police Caught Her Killer 40 Years Later By Emily Blackwood

Dateline is highlighting a murder that went unsolved for 40 years.

Michelle Martinko was found stabbed to death in her car outside a local mall in December 1979. After ruling out those who knew her, the Cedar Rapids Police Department started to suspect that the 18-year-old Iowa teen had been stabbed 29 times by a stranger. She was not robbed, despite having $186 on her, and was not sexually assaulted.

“She was nervous about going out to the mall by herself,” her friend, Tracy Price, told CBS’s 48 Hours in December 2023. “She had told someone that she felt like she was being followed.”

It wasn’t until 2006 that investigators finally got a break, when a detective found what he believed to be the killer’s blood, NBC News and The Gazette reported. That blood eventually led police to Jerry Burns, whose DNA matched that found at the crime scene.

He was arrested in 2018, on the 39th anniversary of Martinko’s death, and was convicted of her murder in 2020.

Here’s everything to know about Michelle Martinko’s murder, including why it went unsolved for so long and where her killer is now.

Martinko was stabbed to death in 1979

On Dec. 19, 1979, Martinko stopped by the Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to pick up a new coat. She never returned home.

Around 4 a.m. the following day, police found her bloodied body in the passenger well of her family’s car, which was parked in the mall’s surrounding lot. The teen had suffered multiple stab wounds to the face and neck, as well as some defensive slice wounds on her hands, 48 Hours reported.

Police also found evidence that the assailant had worn rubber gloves. Nothing, including the cash she had on her, was taken, and her autopsy showed that she had not been sexually assaulted.

Her case went cold for decades

Initially, friends and family suspected that an ex-boyfriend of Martinko’s had killed her. Police brought him in for questioning, but he had an alibi for the time of the murder, and no evidence ever linked him to the crime.

“By 1986, this case is sitting on ice,” Cedar Rapids police investigator Matt Denlinger told 48 Hours.

Nearly three decades after Martinko was murdered, cold case detective Doug Larison discovered that blood scrapings taken from her car’s gear shift had been sent for testing. But no one ever followed up on the results, 48 Hours reported.

Further testing found that blood on the gear shift and the teen’s dress contained male DNA.

Police identified three potential suspects through familial DNA 

It took another decade, but investigators were finally able to narrow their suspect pool using genetic genealogy, a technique that identifies potential suspects by comparing crime scene DNA to profiles voluntarily uploaded to public ancestry databases. According to 48 Hours, a distant relative of the killer had submitted their DNA, leading police to three brothers living in Iowa.

After collecting samples from each man, one of them — Burns — was identified as an exact match to the male DNA recovered from the crime scene.

Police arrested Burns in 2018, on the 39th anniversary of Martinko’s murder.

Burns was convicted of Martinko’s murder in 2020

The Iowa business owner pleaded not guilty to a charge of first-degree murder and claimed to police that he never met Martinko. Friends of Burns described him as reserved and approachable; they didn’t believe he would be capable of murder.

“You’d have a hard time convincing me that Jerry did this,” Mike McElliott, who had known Burns for 40 years, told KCRG at the time of his arrest. “I just, I just could not believe that.”

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In February 2020, Burns was found guilty of Martinko’s murder. He was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, KCCI reported.

”Michelle played a critical role in identifying her own killer,” John Stonebraker, Martinko’s brother-in-law, stated in a video. “The defensive wounds on her hand show it. She fought so hard that she was able to deflect the killer’s knife so that he stabbed himself, leaving the blood that caught him.”

He concluded, “In a very real way, Michelle became her own best witness.”

His attempt at appeal was later denied

Burns later hired attorney Kathleen Zellner — best known for representing Steven Avery, one of the subjects of Netflix’s Making a Murderer — to appeal his February 2020 conviction, per KCRG. He argued that investigators had violated his constitutional rights by collecting his DNA from a straw he discarded at a pizza restaurant.

The Iowa Supreme Court denied the appeal in March 2023. Burns has resided at the Anamosa State Penitentiary since his conviction in 2020.