And Then There Were Three

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Speaker 13 I'm Lester Holt. Tonight on Dateline, she was 18 and loved to sing.
The night she was murdered was ice cold.

Speaker 14 After four decades, so was her case.

Speaker 15 This was the Christmas choir banquet. She was dressed up to the nines.

Speaker 16 This young girl catches his eye.

Speaker 17 She caught everyone's eye.

Speaker 18 She didn't come home that night.

Speaker 19 There was blood everywhere. There was blood spatter all over the inside of the car.

Speaker 18 It was a very frenzied attack.

Speaker 15 The theories were just awful. Drug rings, prostitute rings.

Speaker 20 The entire town was going crazy.

Speaker 17 I thought eventually if we swapped enough people, we're going to come across our suspect.

Speaker 15 It was fascinating how they went about the investigation.

Speaker 21 We got a call. We've got three brothers.
We think one of them is the killer.

Speaker 15 But they didn't know which one.

Speaker 17 So you got a live one here. We got a live one here.

Speaker 22 What do you think at that moment?

Speaker 3 We're ecstatic.

Speaker 20 We're ready to go.

Speaker 17 He was sitting at a booth right by the window there.

Speaker 23 You're in the next booth over. Yeah.

Speaker 17 It's hard to enjoy your food when you think you're staring at the killer.

Speaker 24 Here's Dennis Murphy with, and then there were three.

Speaker 26 It was an act of unspeakable violence.

Speaker 19 It was a really horrific crime. Everybody was scared.

Speaker 14 A murder that shattered a family.

Speaker 15 My parents were devastated. My mother eventually did not go out of the house.

Speaker 28 A whodunit that grabbed hold of a city and wouldn't let go.

Speaker 18 It's been kind of a dark cloud hanging over the community for 40 years.

Speaker 31 A case that touched generations of investigators who refused to quit until the killer was found.

Speaker 15 They cared about this family. They cared about solving this murder.
They weren't going to give up, and they didn't.

Speaker 28 Kurt Thomas says he was a lucky kid.

Speaker 25 He got to grow up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Speaker 20 It was a magical bubble. We didn't know anything but fun.

Speaker 2 A lot of that fun happened at the mall.

Speaker 31 For teenagers, it was the place to shop, eat, and hang out.

Speaker 14 That's where the kids hung, huh?

Speaker 20 It was a place you could go at any time, and it was a big deal.

Speaker 2 High school senior Michelle Martinko was no mall rat, but she did shop and work at one near her home.

Speaker 2 Michelle was a top student, a gifted bouton twirler, and sang in the school choir, along with her friend, Jane Hansen.

Speaker 16 Why do you think you guys hit it off as well as you did?

Speaker 15 Gosh, we had a lot of things in our life that were very parallel.

Speaker 33 Was she what they used to call girly girl, or was she a little bit of a tomboy?

Speaker 39 How do you remember her?

Speaker 21 Oh, no, she's a girly girl.

Speaker 34 December 19th, 1979, was a big night for Michelle.

Speaker 40 It was her school choir's Christmas banquet at the Sheridan.

Speaker 25 With her hair done up to perfection and decked out in her favorite black dress and rabbit fur coat, she looked like an angel, a Charlie's angel.

Speaker 21 Her nickname was Farah.

Speaker 43 John Stonebreaker is Michelle's brother-in-law.

Speaker 21 It was Farah Fawcett Major's time. Farah Fawcett

Speaker 21 with the hair, you know, so she was Farah.

Speaker 2 Though it was a school night, after the banquet, Michelle asked Jane to go with her to the mall. But Jane had homework to do.

Speaker 37 So when Michelle said, let's go to the mall tonight, Jane, that wasn't wasn't going to work for you, huh?

Speaker 15 Correct. I turned her down.

Speaker 43 So going solo, Michelle got in her parents' 1972 Buick Electra and headed off to the brand new Westdale Mall on the southwest side of town.

Speaker 2 She had $180 cash on her to pay for a coat her mother had picked out.

Speaker 38 Kurt was also at the mall that night, working a shift at the Chess King men's store.

Speaker 20 Saw this beautiful girl in a rabbit fur coat, black dress, high-heeled shoes, blonde hair. Then I was like, that's Michelle.

Speaker 26 Kurt and Michelle were friends from school.

Speaker 25 She joined him for his break and they went for a stroll.

Speaker 2 At one point, passing by a shop girl Kurt had a crush on. Teenage drama at the mall.

Speaker 20 And it pops in my head, well, I'm never going to get a

Speaker 20 dance with that girl because

Speaker 43 I just walked by with a woman. I've got Miss America here on my arm.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 26 Kurt says he and Michelle spent his entire break catching up until he had to get back to work.

Speaker 2 He walked her to an exit.

Speaker 20 And that's when we're saying our goodbye. And she said, well, don't be a stranger.

Speaker 23 Did you think you'd see her again?

Speaker 20 Yes, of course I did.

Speaker 28 Since there was school the next day, it wasn't a night to stay out late.

Speaker 2 So when Michelle hadn't returned home, even well after the mall had closed, her sister says their mother Janet started to worry.

Speaker 15 My parents started calling around to see with her other friends what the situation was.

Speaker 22 And why is she not back here home?

Speaker 21 And Janet did call the police as well. The police say, well, you know, we can't look after every teenager who's missing for a couple of hours.
And Janet resisted that. She said, no, no, no.

Speaker 21 She's very dependable. She should be home.
She has a test tomorrow. She has to study.

Speaker 2 Michelle's mom kept making calls late into the night.

Speaker 43 At 2.30 a.m., she dialed Michelle's friend, Jane.

Speaker 15 I was sound asleep, and

Speaker 15 My dad came and woke me up and,

Speaker 15 you know, said it's Mrs. Martenko on the phone.

Speaker 2 Those are not good calls.

Speaker 15 She wanted to know if I knew where Michelle was.

Speaker 44 But Jane didn't know.

Speaker 43 Nobody did.

Speaker 28 So in the middle of the night, in a panic, Michelle's mom called the police again.

Speaker 38 This time they dispatched an officer.

Speaker 32 Jim Kinkade got the call at 4 a.m.

Speaker 20 They sent me out to the mall to see if I could locate this car.

Speaker 2 Just hours earlier, the mall was bustling with Christmas shoppers.

Speaker 38 Now it was dark, deserted.

Speaker 23 In the distance, Officer Kincaid spotted a car in the far reaches of the parking lot, a long walk from the entrance to the JCPenney.

Speaker 45 It seemed to match the description of the one I was sent to find.

Speaker 51 Looking from your vehicle, could you see what had happened there?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 45 Couldn't see in the windows. Couldn't see in the windows they were frosted over.
I opened the back door. I could see that there was a woman slouched down.

Speaker 45 At first, I thought just an intoxicated person. So I walked around the car and looked in the passenger side front window, And obviously,

Speaker 45 there wasn't an old woman drunk.

Speaker 51 Could you tell she was gone?

Speaker 45 Yes, there were no signs of life.

Speaker 46 She was obviously deceased.

Speaker 26 Beautiful, vivacious high school senior Michelle Martinko was dead.

Speaker 14 She was just 18 years old.

Speaker 30 For her family and close friends, the Christmas season and life as they knew it ended that night.

Speaker 53 And the brand new Westdale Mall had become a crime scene.

Speaker 13 What had happened to Michelle when we come back?

Speaker 18 Very frenzied attack.

Speaker 19 There was blood everywhere.

Speaker 17 Michelle had really deep defensive wounds on her hands.

Speaker 24 She put up a fight against a killer who knew what he wanted.

Speaker 17 The officers found glove prints on the outside of the car.

Speaker 51 So the killer came to do business. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 49 On a dark, ice-cold morning, Cedar Rapids detectives were called to the mall parking lot to begin a murder investigation.

Speaker 25 The body of Michelle Martinko in her black dress and fur coat was slumped halfway off the passenger seat of the family's Buick Electra.

Speaker 18 She had multiple stab wounds.

Speaker 2 Doug Larison was a college freshman when Michelle was killed.

Speaker 34 Matt Denlinger only in kindergarten.

Speaker 33 But years later, as Cedar Rapids police investigators, they'd come to know know every detail of this case.

Speaker 18 Very frenzied attack.

Speaker 19 There was blood everywhere.

Speaker 18 There was blood spatter all over the inside of the car.

Speaker 33 Did the killer leave a blood trail away from the scene?

Speaker 16 Did you get lucky in that way?

Speaker 21 No.

Speaker 17 No, there's no blood trail away from the scene, but the killer did leave some signatures. The ID officers found glove prints on the outside of the car, in the dirt, on the door handle.

Speaker 17 They looked like dishwashing gloves from the late 70s, early 80s that everyone would have in their house.

Speaker 51 So the killer came to do business.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 17 The killer came to do business. Michelle had really deep defensive wounds on her hands.

Speaker 17 She put up a fight.

Speaker 32 The blood told them the struggle took place mostly on the passenger side.

Speaker 27 But...

Speaker 17 The gear shifts got blood on it, the steering wheels got blood on it. And we know Michelle's not driving the car.

Speaker 51 So what does that suggest to you?

Speaker 16 What's the Connect the Dots thought there?

Speaker 17 Well, the Connect the Dots thought that Doug and I both had is that the killer's touching these things after he's murdered Michelle.

Speaker 43 They thought the killer might have cut himself during the attack, leaving his own blood behind.

Speaker 28 But linking that blood to a suspect in 1979, almost impossible.

Speaker 18 Back then, they didn't have the DNA analysis to go by. They used blood typing, you know, like type A blood or type B blood, which doesn't really narrow it down very much.

Speaker 41 Still, police collected the blood for analysis.

Speaker 54 There wasn't much else at the scene to point to a who or why behind the killing.

Speaker 17 There's no obvious signs of a sexual assault. We really didn't have a good foundation for deciding what the motive was at that time.

Speaker 38 That left investigators back in the day hanging.

Speaker 18 It's almost like this is the heartland of the country and no place is safe anymore.

Speaker 15 We got the call about 6 o'clock in the morning, maybe 5 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 14 Janelle Stonebreaker, Michelle's sister, says her parents broke the awful news to her through sobs and pleas to hurry home.

Speaker 15 They were just devastated.

Speaker 50 Even then, she sensed her parents might never recover, given how hard they had willed Michelle, their second and last child, into this world.

Speaker 15 This is my mother and father's miracle baby. You know, she's the child that they had tried to have for all those years.

Speaker 29 A child who grew up in 1960s and 70s Midwest America, hanging out at the roller rink, going to the lake.

Speaker 26 In middle school, a back brace for scoliosis turned her into a shy preteen. But by high school, she'd done a 180.

Speaker 55 When she got her brace off that's when she just kind of blossomed.

Speaker 2 Gail McCammon Dawson and Mike Weirick roamed these same halls with Michelle, three close high school friends.

Speaker 55 All the time that she spent not wanting to be noticed then she spent to be noticed you know and that's when the hair changed and she got into her fashion and her style.

Speaker 49 The Farah hairdo worked for Michelle and she in turn worked it. She was a head turner, right?

Speaker 57 She was a head turner.

Speaker 55 There's no way you can not notice her.

Speaker 47 Because she had gone through that more difficult period in junior high school, I think she knew what it was like to be on the other side of that, and she would go out of her way to be kind to everybody.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 46 That mix of beauty and sweetness made Mike, a year ahead of her in school, fall for Michelle.

Speaker 23 How serious were you with her?

Speaker 47 Well, I was really serious. It was my first girlfriend.
You know, it was the most serious relationship I'd ever had.

Speaker 29 But it ended when he went to college.

Speaker 2 Michelle had plenty of admirers, though.

Speaker 34 She dated and broken up with a guy named Andy.

Speaker 2 Her friends thought this Andy had a hard time letting go, which may have prompted this exchange.

Speaker 55 She was a little bit weepy in class that one day and when I asked her what was happening, what's going on, her response was that she just is tired of belonging to somebody.

Speaker 43 By her senior year, Michelle was focused on college.

Speaker 20 She definitely conveyed to me she was ready to put high school and Cedar Rapids behind her.

Speaker 49 Kurt Thomas, the boy she hung out with the night she was murdered, is certain Michelle was preparing to leave the building when they said their goodbyes.

Speaker 20 You don't think that person's going to walk out the door and you're never going to see him again.

Speaker 42 Kurt says he still feels guilty about how he handled that goodbye.

Speaker 28 I could have walked her to the car.

Speaker 20 I could have done something.

Speaker 17 We're standing where her vehicle was found.

Speaker 26 Now, more than 40 years later, the account of Michelle's final steps to her car is mostly guesswork.

Speaker 17 And just around the other side of J.C. Penney's would have been the public entrance that she exited from.

Speaker 16 I'm thinking she's got a long walk in the cold to get to her vehicle.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's a long walk.

Speaker 25 It's a good hundred yards or so, huh?

Speaker 17 It's mid-December. It's dark.
The lot's probably not real well lit. 1979.

Speaker 20 Yeah, she's got a long walk.

Speaker 25 A long walk through a dark lot.

Speaker 49 Now, police were eager to speak to one of the last friends known to have seen Michelle Martinko alive.

Speaker 54 Coming up, a possible suspect.

Speaker 20 It was just like they do it on TV. This guy leaned over and said, why did you kill her? Talk about deer in the headlight looking kid.

Speaker 35 And an ugly rumor.

Speaker 15 The theories were just awful. I mean, it went everything from drug rings to prostitute rings.

Speaker 24 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 34 Even now, decades later, Kurt Thomas remembers the moment.

Speaker 2 That morning at school, a principal showing up in his classroom and looking straight at him.

Speaker 20 Trouble. The principal turned and said, Mr.
Thomas, I need to talk to you.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 20 And I get up and when I walk there, he said, I need you to go out in the hallway and talk to these gentlemen.

Speaker 28 These gentlemen were the two detectives first assigned to the case.

Speaker 2 Kurt says he didn't know why they wanted to talk to him because he hadn't heard about the murder yet.

Speaker 14 Soon he was inside an interrogation room answering questions about the previous day.

Speaker 20 Go Go through the night, Kurt.

Speaker 20 What time did you get off school? Did you drive from school? You know, they're intent on starting very factual.

Speaker 2 They won a time one. Very factual.

Speaker 53 He says, after hours of back and forth, the detectives finally told him Michelle had been murdered.

Speaker 51 The unhappy fact was that you were the last person in her circle of associates known to have seen her alive.

Speaker 20 That realization hit me like a brick.

Speaker 56 That's not a good place to be in.

Speaker 34 Oh, no.

Speaker 20 At that point, I was somewhere in shock.

Speaker 2 Then he says they hit him with it.

Speaker 20 It was just like they do it on TV. This guy wheeled around and put his hands on the desk and leaned over and said, why did you kill her?

Speaker 51 Now's the time to give it up and do yourself some good.

Speaker 20 Oh, talk about deer in the headlight-looking kid.

Speaker 2 But then his store manager from the mall was on the line.

Speaker 23 She told detectives Kurt had gone on break, returned to the store at around 9.30, and helped her close up shop about 10.

Speaker 39 Police believe Michelle left the mall sometime in that half hour.

Speaker 20 This detective said, Mr. Thomas, you can go.

Speaker 20 I didn't know what that meant. As stupid as that is to say, can I really go?

Speaker 25 For the moment, at least, Kurt was in the clear.

Speaker 34 In fact, Michelle's brother-in-law, John, already had someone else in mind for her murder, her old boyfriend, Andy.

Speaker 21 he was very possessive after they broke up he'd park down the street to see if she was going out with someone else he'd drive fast around the block so i was pretty sure it was andy you know if i can't have her nobody can have her type of thing sure enough andy was brought in for questioning matt denlinger and doug larison understood why the first detectives had taken a hard look at andy andy was at the mall that night what was his story why did he say he was there well he was there to buy her a christmas present her the girlfriend his ex-girlfriend yeah

Speaker 16 The night she's killed, he is at the mall to buy her a present even though they're no longer a boyfriend, girlfriend.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 17 Yep.

Speaker 16 I mean, that sounds curious even now, just saying it.

Speaker 17 It does. A lot of the detectives thought that might be too much of a coincidence.

Speaker 51 Andy recounted his movements for detectives.

Speaker 2 He and a buddy bumped into Michelle at the mall around 8.30.

Speaker 56 He said he had no idea Michelle was missing until her mother called his house about 3.30 a.m.

Speaker 2 He told detectives he and his mom jumped in the car to go searching, but couldn't find her.

Speaker 16 So it was the early thinking, we're going to get with this young guy, Andy, and we're going to have a solved case here. I think so.
We're going to sweat him a little bit and the story will come out.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 43 But Andy's story never changed, and police had no physical evidence to connect him to the murder.

Speaker 49 And without a quick arrest, the Cedar Rapids gossip mill started churning.

Speaker 14 As time slipped by, people became suspicious of Michelle herself.

Speaker 15 The theories were just awful. I mean, it went everything from drug rings to prostitute rings.

Speaker 37 That somehow this young girl brought it on herself, right?

Speaker 15 Absolutely. Because surely she had to be at fault in this.

Speaker 50 Painful for your parents?

Speaker 27 Horrible.

Speaker 15 My mother eventually did not go out of the house. She just stayed at home.

Speaker 2 Michelle's death and the failure to find her killer also had a profound effect on the city where she'd lived.

Speaker 15 People were really upset and traumatized by it.

Speaker 56 Trish Mahaffey is the court's reporter for the Cedar Rapids paper, The Gazette.

Speaker 15 Back in 1979, Cedar Rapids, it was smaller than it is even now. It was a close-knit community.

Speaker 47 Cedar Rapids in those days was very Mayberry-like. And honestly, what happened to Michelle kind of stripped away not just our innocence, but the innocence of the whole town.

Speaker 14 It settled over the city, the thought that Michelle's killer might never be caught.

Speaker 42 The 70s became the 80s and then the 90s.

Speaker 29 The dawn of DNA testing finally gave police new hope.

Speaker 44 In 1997, they sent scrapings from the gear shift of Michelle's car off to a state lab.

Speaker 18 The lab was able to sort out all those DNA points and it left a partial male DNA profile.

Speaker 28 At the time, it wasn't enough to match to a suspect.

Speaker 44 But in 2005, Doug Larison took over the case.

Speaker 34 He wondered if anything else from the car might yield a more complete DNA profile.

Speaker 25 He sent Michelle's bloodstained dress back to the state crime lab.

Speaker 18 Got the phone call from the lab analysts that they had found a full DNA profile on the dress, which was very exciting.

Speaker 16 Well, that's an are you sitting down phone call, huh?

Speaker 18 That's correct. All we had to do was submit this profile to CODIS, probably get it.

Speaker 18 It's a FBI computerized system that contains millions and millions of DNA profiles that have been collected from crime scenes, from jails, people who have been arrested.

Speaker 2 Anything come back?

Speaker 18 Nothing, no hit.

Speaker 14 To Larison, that meant Michelle's killer was likely someone without any prior arrests or run-ins with the law.

Speaker 48 That meant the people police had talked to back in the day had to be reconsidered.

Speaker 18 So my thinking is, let's start going through this case, let's start finding potential suspects, and let's go get their DNA and start eliminating them from that partial profile.

Speaker 16 So now are we back to Andy and all those other boyfriends?

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 2 Nearly 30 years after Michelle's death, everything old was new again.

Speaker 2 Boys with alibis back in 79 were now middle-aged men with something more valuable than a story to offer.

Speaker 21 They had their DNA.

Speaker 24 Coming up.

Speaker 16 You're going to take a molecule of human genetic material and turn it into an image of somebody?

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 13 Using DNA to paint a a portrait of a killer and trace his family tree.

Speaker 16 So you got a live one here at the bottom of this tree.

Speaker 17 So you got a live one here, only 20 minutes away.

Speaker 28 The decades-old investigation into Michelle Martinko's 1979 murder had a new urgency.

Speaker 52 Detective Doug Larison had a DNA profile of the killer and the original list of suspects.

Speaker 49 One by one, he started asking for DNA samples, looking for a match.

Speaker 17 Doug started with the really obvious suspects, all the ex-boyfriends, the Kurt Thomases of the world, all the high school buddies that had been at the mall.

Speaker 14 At the top of that list was ex-boyfriend Andy.

Speaker 21 I thought it was just a matter of time before Andy was found to be the killer.

Speaker 28 But Andy's DNA was not a match.

Speaker 44 More than 25 years after he was first considered a suspect, he was cleared.

Speaker 49 Justice for Andy.

Speaker 15 He had nothing to do with it. And he had to live with that cloud over him because so many people did think

Speaker 15 he was involved.

Speaker 31 Kurt Thomas, the last person in her circle known to have seen Michelle at the mall, was also tested.

Speaker 44 Police called his lawyer with a result.

Speaker 20 They got him on the phone and said, the DNA is not a match, and they hung up.

Speaker 28 But the headline was, the DNA says it's not you, it's not a match.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 14 Another possible suspect cleared.

Speaker 25 Another setback for the Cedar Rapids PD.

Speaker 25 But when Matt Denlinger took over as lead investigator in 2015, he still thought DNA would solve the crime.

Speaker 37 So he did another deep dive into a case file that had been built by so many before him.

Speaker 17 Now we're just trying to find men who are listed in these reports. that could have possibly had a connection to her or men that would have had a connection to them all.

Speaker 17 I thought eventually if we swabbed enough people, we're gonna come across our suspect.

Speaker 38 But after more than 125 tests, no one matched the killer's DNA.

Speaker 25 They were out of leads.

Speaker 2 And then Parabon comes into this. What is that?

Speaker 17 So Parabon is a private lab. What Parabon was offering is to take the genetic profile that we had and to create an image.

Speaker 2 Create an image? Yeah, an actual.

Speaker 50 Like a up-in-the-post office photo of be on the lookout for this guy?

Speaker 17 Exactly. A computer-generated police sketch.

Speaker 28 Excuse me if I sound a little skeptical.

Speaker 16 That sounds like voodoo science fiction.

Speaker 50 Well, you're going to take a molecule of human genetic material and turn it into an image of somebody?

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 39 Three sketches were created from the DNA profile.

Speaker 2 The suspected killer imagined at age 25, another at age 50, and one with a typical 1979 haircut.

Speaker 49 Police released the pictures to the public.

Speaker 17 We were hoping that 100 people would call in and say that looks like person A.

Speaker 17 The problem is we got 250 people call in and say it looks like 100 people.

Speaker 2 Oh man.

Speaker 16 More needles, more haystacks, huh?

Speaker 17 Yeah, a lot of rabbit holes we went down. I tracked down, you know, another 50 people and swabbed them.

Speaker 17 Each time hoping that this is, we finally got our guy.

Speaker 49 But with each DNA test result, that hope was dashed.

Speaker 2 Then in 2018, Parabon helped solve the Golden State killer case using a new technology called genetic genealogy.

Speaker 17 I get an email from Parabon saying, hey, check out what we just did.

Speaker 28 Parabon offered a similar genealogy search for the Martenko case.

Speaker 41 Using the DNA from the crime scene, they would try to identify relatives of the killer by searching through genetic profiles on an online database.

Speaker 42 Denlinger gave them the green light.

Speaker 17 We sent that in the spring of 2018, and by the summer, they had sent us a report, and they said that they had found a relative of our killer.

Speaker 25 A relative of your killer? Yeah.

Speaker 17 They hypothesized that she was a second cousin once removed from our killer.

Speaker 16 Wow, there's a headline for you guys.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 25 The person related to the killer was a woman living in Vancouver, Washington. Now the trick was to build a family tree to see if police could link a family member to Cedar Rapids in 1979.

Speaker 46 Denlinger reached out to the woman. She agreed to answer all his questions.

Speaker 17 We have to start building her family tree.

Speaker 34 Denlinger traced the woman's family tree back to the early 1800s.

Speaker 23 So you're looking through old historical records and census data and

Speaker 40 tombstones?

Speaker 17 Tombstones, anything we could find.

Speaker 52 Denlinger created four branches of the family going back to great-great-grandparents.

Speaker 14 The first branch led to someone living in Ohio.

Speaker 39 Denlinger got a DNA sample.

Speaker 17 We sent their DNA back to Parabon and they recalibrated and told us that we can eliminate

Speaker 17 that branch of the family tree.

Speaker 16 Don't waste your time on that, Drew.

Speaker 17 Don't waste your time on that. That person shares no DNA with your killer.
This one here, we wound up in Nebraska and sent that one in, same thing.

Speaker 17 Boom, get rid of that one. We don't need to worry about that branch of the family tree.

Speaker 2 On the next branch, Denlinger found a relative living in Iowa.

Speaker 56 So you got a live one here at the bottom of this tree.

Speaker 17 We got a live one here. This was a gal in Lisbon, Iowa.
She's only 20 minutes away.

Speaker 2 She's not your killer, of course.

Speaker 17 Definitely not your killer. We always knew the killer was a man.
We took her DNA. We sent it to Parabon.

Speaker 27 Boom.

Speaker 17 She shares enough DNA with the killer to be a first cousin.

Speaker 52 It turns out the woman shared DNA with three first cousins, three brothers.

Speaker 41 After four decades and so many disappointments, the suspect list had narrowed to three.

Speaker 17 All three of them are still alive, still living in Iowa.

Speaker 22 What do you think at that moment?

Speaker 20 We're ecstatic.

Speaker 17 You can taste it at that point.

Speaker 20 We're ready to go.

Speaker 24 Coming up. Not a confession, but not a denial either.

Speaker 17 What happened that night? Did you murder someone that night, Jerry?

Speaker 27 Test the DNA.

Speaker 24 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 61 Hey, everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrelson.

Speaker 61 It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name and We're Back for Another Season.

Speaker 61 I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it.

Speaker 61 Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrelson sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 41 And then there were three.

Speaker 14 After chasing down hundreds of leads over four decades, the suspect list in Michelle Martinko's murder had narrowed down to three brothers living in Iowa.

Speaker 16 When you run the computer check on them, criminal records, anything come up?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 16 So they're leading respectable middle-class lives, as far as you can see.

Speaker 17 Yeah, very much.

Speaker 38 The family name was Burns, and all three brothers were adults in 1979, but did not seem to have any connection to Michelle Martinko.

Speaker 30 Investigator Matt Denlinger and two colleagues decided to secretly collect DNA from all three.

Speaker 16 So this is when you become a 00 agent.

Speaker 51 It's really shifting gears here.

Speaker 20 It is shifting gears.

Speaker 2 They tracked the brothers one at a time, starting with middle brother Kenneth.

Speaker 26 A married father of three, he sold farm equipment in Manchester, Iowa, about a 50-minute drive from Cedar Rapids.

Speaker 17 We collected his DNA from a straw, and it immediately goes to the state lab. They told us, hey, he is not your suspect.
The next brother was Donald.

Speaker 2 Oldest brother Donald was a father of three and had five grandchildren. He lived in Davenport, Iowa, and was the manager of a lumberyard before retiring.

Speaker 28 Denlinger went to his house and staked it out surreptitiously.

Speaker 17 The first item we collected was out of a trash bag he had set by the curb. We found a toothbrush in there and collected some DNA off of that.

Speaker 16 And what did the lab think about his genetic material?

Speaker 17 They said the same thing.

Speaker 16 He's not your guy.

Speaker 17 He's not your guy.

Speaker 49 It came down to the youngest brother, Jerry Burns, who like brother Ken, lived and worked in Manchester.

Speaker 46 Denlinger did some intel on him.

Speaker 17 In 1979, he had two young kids. He lived in Manchester.
He sold farm implements, was in a bowling league.

Speaker 37 So he's married with children, nine to five guy, huh?

Speaker 17 Nine to five guy. Yeah.

Speaker 14 On an October morning in 2018, Denlinger and his team set out for Manchester in three unmarked cars.

Speaker 62 So Jerry's place is right down here in the Iron?

Speaker 27 Yeah, we're going to pass it here in within seconds. It's going to come up on us in no time.

Speaker 14 Police followed him throughout the morning.

Speaker 42 Finally, at lunchtime, an opportunity.

Speaker 29 Burns and his son had pulled into the Pizza Ranch restaurant.

Speaker 17 He parked in the parking lot there and he went in and was sitting at a booth right by the window there.

Speaker 28 Denlinger and his partners went in and sat in a booth.

Speaker 32 You're in the next booth over.

Speaker 17 I'm as close to him as you and I are right now.

Speaker 37 You got to be thinking, is this my killer, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 It's hard to enjoy your food when you think you're staring at the killer.

Speaker 31 Burns was drinking a soda from a straw.

Speaker 28 Denlinger didn't take his eyes off of it, making sure nobody else touched it.

Speaker 17 Then he and his son leave, they drive away from the pizza ranch, and we grab the cup off his table.

Speaker 17 And my partner puts some gloves on, grabs the straw out of the glass, package it up, and we disappear.

Speaker 49 The sample was sent for testing.

Speaker 26 It was the moment of truth.

Speaker 41 Jerry was not only the last Burns' brother, he was the last possible suspect.

Speaker 52 Denlinger will never forget the moment he spoke to his contact at the crime lab.

Speaker 17 He says, that's your guy.

Speaker 22 He's the killer.

Speaker 17 He's the killer.

Speaker 52 The lab reported that the scientific probability was 100 billion to one.

Speaker 34 That meant the DNA from the crime scene belonged to Jerry Burns and not anyone else on earth.

Speaker 34 Finally, it was the culmination of a relentless, decades-long investigation.

Speaker 25 But Denlinger wasn't ready to make an arrest.

Speaker 30 There were just too many questions that needed answers.

Speaker 17 It's time to go talk to him. He's not going to be ready.

Speaker 17 And which is the best time to try to interview someone.

Speaker 28 So on December 19th, 2018, Denlinger headed back to Manchester.

Speaker 40 He pulled up to Burns' place of business a little before noon.

Speaker 27 The door was open. Denlinger walked in.

Speaker 28 A hidden camera recorded everything.

Speaker 2 Oh. Do you have backup?

Speaker 17 He had a lot of backup. We had no good expectation on what to expect from him, what to expect from his behavior.

Speaker 37 What's in his desk drawer?

Speaker 2 Yeah, correct.

Speaker 59 Denlinger's camera was hidden in a travel mug.

Speaker 28 He introduced himself and set the mug down on Burns's desk.

Speaker 17 He sits there and he's petting his shop cat, who's climbing all over the desk during the interview. We got a cat here, huh? Kip.

Speaker 27 What's the kitty's name? Bella. Bella.

Speaker 26 Denlinger handed Burns a business card and got down to business.

Speaker 17 We're following up on an old case. It's a homicide that happened at Westdale Mall.

Speaker 26 Then he described the computer sketch released to the public that was developed from DNA found at the crime scene.

Speaker 28 He said someone called in with a tip and that's how Burns's name came up.

Speaker 43 That wasn't true, but Denlinger wanted to see how he would react.

Speaker 17 That's the picture we had created.

Speaker 27 Boy, it looks a lot different till I I look in the mirror, but do I look like that?

Speaker 17 Well, I kind of think you do a little bit.

Speaker 17 Enough that we bothered to come up here and talk.

Speaker 28 Burns remained calm and polite. He denied knowing Michelle, but didn't say much more.

Speaker 16 You're holding the major ace card here.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 16 Here's what science says.

Speaker 34 Do you confront him with that?

Speaker 17 Well, we did. We directly confronted him with that.
We have your DNA at the crime scene.

Speaker 17 And so we know you were there that night. This happened.
How would we get your DNA at the crime scene there, Jerry?

Speaker 27 I don't know. Test it, see if it is.

Speaker 28 No, no, no, no, we did.

Speaker 17 How would it be there, Jerry?

Speaker 17 What happened that night? Did you murder someone that night, Jerry?

Speaker 27 Test the DNA.

Speaker 17 Jerry.

Speaker 27 Test the DNA.

Speaker 38 It wasn't the confession Denlinger was hoping for, but he didn't think it was a denial either.

Speaker 40 So 39 years to the day after Michelle Martenko's murder, Jerry Burns was cuffed and placed under arrest. You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can we use against you in a court of law?

Speaker 49 The charge was first-degree murder.

Speaker 48 For Jerry Burns' daughter, Jennifer, and his brother Donald, the news was a gut punch, impossible to comprehend.

Speaker 58 It almost seemed like a dream that it wasn't really,

Speaker 58 really happening, wasn't really true.

Speaker 25 Could you believe it?

Speaker 57 No.

Speaker 63 My brother had...

Speaker 63 said dad's been arrested for murder and just like who i was

Speaker 63 so in disbelief.

Speaker 2 The arrest just didn't square with the image of the devoted father, the good kid brother that they'd always known. They felt certain there was something wrong with that DNA evidence.

Speaker 63 There's lots of other stories out there where there's a mistake of DNA found at crime scenes and there's an explanation for why it's there.

Speaker 63 Doesn't mean that whose eNA it was is the person that committed the crime.

Speaker 58 There's nothing to substantiate when it came there, how it got there.

Speaker 16 Today, now you say this just cannot be right.

Speaker 58 No, it can't be right.

Speaker 40 Jerry Burns' family was convinced he was innocent.

Speaker 31 Could prosecutors convince a jury he was guilty?

Speaker 13 Coming up, a damning discovery.

Speaker 64 There were files found on Mr. Burns' computer.
I think it was described publicly as deviant pornography.

Speaker 24 And the risk of relying on DNA evidence.

Speaker 15 I taught fifth grade. I know how hard it is to teach somebody something.
You have to repeat it over and over and over again. I'm concerned about that.

Speaker 38 40 years after Michelle Martinko's murder, Cedar Rapids investigators were confident that a DNA match proved Jerry Burns was her killer.

Speaker 38 First assistant prosecutor for Lynn County, Nick Maybanks, certainly had motive too.

Speaker 64 There were files found on Mr. Burns' computer.

Speaker 16 Extreme pornography, fair to say?

Speaker 64 I think it was described publicly as deviant pornography, violent pornography.

Speaker 26 Featuring prominently young blonde women.

Speaker 64 Blonde women was a search term that was used.

Speaker 26 Defense attorney Leon Speece filed a motion to bar the computer evidence from the trial.

Speaker 60 It wasn't germane to the case.

Speaker 62 This is material that was found on Mr.

Speaker 60 Burns' computer 39 years after the crime.

Speaker 2 In a pre-trial hearing, the judge agreed, dealing a blow to the state's case, which boiled down to a single piece of evidence against Jerry Burns, that DNA match.

Speaker 15 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, to the jury.

Speaker 2 The trial began in February 2020.

Speaker 46 Michelle Martenko's sister, Janelle, and her husband, John, traveled from their Florida home to attend, determined to see it through to the end.

Speaker 21 Every day, if the jury has to be there, we'll be there.

Speaker 62 You examine the dress.

Speaker 41 The prosecution put Detective Doug Larison on the stand to tell jurors the police followed sound practices when they handled Michelle's clothing.

Speaker 18 We wore rubber gloves, for one thing. We tried not to disturb the clothing items, just to get a quick look at them and then reinsert them back in their original packaging.

Speaker 2 To extract DNA.

Speaker 25 DNA analyst Linda Sauer testified that the DNA collected from that evidence could only belong to one person.

Speaker 15 The probability of finding two unrelated individuals is so small that it can be discounted.

Speaker 54 But Defense Attorney Spies wasn't rolling over for the state's DNA case.

Speaker 65 Jerry Lynn Burns is not guilty

Speaker 37 of the killing of Michelle Martinko.

Speaker 54 Do you recognize the...

Speaker 25 The defense attorney went after the cops for the way they handled the evidence over four decades.

Speaker 25 Spies argued key items like Michelle's dress were jumbled up with her other clothing, tainting them forever.

Speaker 62 When you opened up the original packaging of the dress, the panties, and the panty hose, were the items all bundled together.

Speaker 19 As far as I recollect, they were, yes.

Speaker 41 And there was another reason to question the prosecution, the defense attorney said.

Speaker 59 Something called DNA transfer.

Speaker 26 Trace DNA.

Speaker 2 He quizzed his own expert witness.

Speaker 36 Is it, Dr.

Speaker 65 Spence, a plausible explanation that the DNA of Jerry Burns found on the dress or on the gear shift could have come about by a transfer?

Speaker 21 Yes, that's a distinct possibility.

Speaker 2 The defense's DNA expert told the court Burns might have left his DNA at the mall innocently, on a door or a bench.

Speaker 25 After all, he told investigators that he had visited the mall.

Speaker 65 Jerry Burns' DNA.

Speaker 40 Jerry Burns, the defense argued, was a victim of coincidence and sloppy police work.

Speaker 15 Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence has been submitted to you.

Speaker 29 After eight days of testimony, the jury got the case.

Speaker 51 When it goes out to the jury, what are you thinking?

Speaker 15 I mean, we're hoping for

Speaker 63 the best. If he wasn't guilty, great, we have my dad home.
If he was guilty, it just meant more work, more fighting for him.

Speaker 2 Janelle was worried for a different reason.

Speaker 33 She knew the prosecution's case, the DNA testing, the genetic genealogy was complicated, dense with data.

Speaker 15 I taught fifth grade. I know how hard it is to teach somebody something.
You have to repeat it over and over and over again. I'm concerned about that.
Thank you.

Speaker 33 As it turned out, the jury reached a quick verdict.

Speaker 40 Judge Hoover read the decision aloud.

Speaker 15 We, the jury, find the defendant, Jerry Lynn Burns, guilty of the charge of murder in the first degree.

Speaker 28 How did he he take it, the verdict?

Speaker 63 I think he was shocked too. He was very much expecting to come home.

Speaker 16 Don, you're in court, the verdict, huh?

Speaker 58 I was surprised at the verdict.

Speaker 58 I

Speaker 58 had a hard time believing that the jury sat down and

Speaker 58 even reviewed the case.

Speaker 22 Three hours.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Not even three.

Speaker 58 I couldn't believe they came back with the verdict they did.

Speaker 56 Outside the courthouse, John and Janelle were emotional.

Speaker 15 To finally have a closure on this and to actually know,

Speaker 15 I wish my parents could be here to see this.

Speaker 21 We left Cedar Rapids,

Speaker 21 but Cedar Rapids never left us.

Speaker 17 I could feel the pressure of 40 years and countless police officers that have worked on this case. I felt like we as a team had finally done justice for the Martenko family.

Speaker 41 Jerry Burns was sentenced to life without parole.

Speaker 15 As we were looking through pictures, we realized that she wasn't part of that Christmas. She wasn't part of that birth.
She wasn't part of that party.

Speaker 15 We kept going deeper and deeper into the box, trying to find

Speaker 15 where was Michelle. She had missed everything.

Speaker 16 The family album goes on, but she's not in it.

Speaker 57 She's not in it.

Speaker 42 No, she's only in the old photos.

Speaker 34 A girl smiling out into a world of possibilities.

Speaker 2 Stolen on a cold December night.

Speaker 13 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 62 Thanks for joining us.

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Speaker 6 But with Zin nicotine pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

Speaker 7 Zen is America's number one nicotine pouch brand.

Speaker 8 Plus, Zen offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 10 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 7 Check out Zen.com/slash find to find Zen at a store near you.

Speaker 12 Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Speaker 9 Nicotine is an addictive chemical.