Michelle Martinko

Case background and investigation

On the night of December 19, 1979, 18-year-old Michelle Martinko, a senior at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, drove her family's Buick to Westdale Mall to shop for a winter coat after attending a school band banquet. When she did not return home, her worried parents alerted police, and early the next morning her body was found in the car in the mall parking lot. She had been stabbed 29 times in the face, neck and chest, with the fatal wound penetrating her sternum and aorta. There were no witnesses, and the brutal killing of a popular teenager shocked the community.

Investigators recovered blood at the scene that did not belong to Martinko, presumably from her attacker, but in 1979 the technology to exploit it did not yet exist. For years detectives pursued leads and interviewed possible suspects without success, and the murder settled into one of Cedar Rapids's most infamous cold cases. In 2006 a cold-case investigator reviewing the file had DNA developed from the unidentified blood found on Martinko's dress and on the car's gearshift, and the profile was entered into the national CODIS database, but it returned no matches.

The case was finally cracked through forensic genetic genealogy. In 2018 the crime-scene DNA profile was uploaded to public genealogy databases such as GEDmatch, where investigators found distant familial matches that pointed to a family of brothers living in Iowa. Detectives focused on one of them, Jerry Lynn Burns, who had been 25 years old at the time of the murder. In October 2018 they covertly collected a straw Burns had discarded at a Pizza Ranch restaurant, and the DNA on it matched the blood recovered from Martinko's car. Burns was arrested on December 19, 2018, exactly 39 years after the killing.

Burns went on trial in early 2020, with venue moved to Scott County. Prosecutors relied heavily on the DNA evidence, while the defense argued the genetic material could have been transferred innocently. On February 24, 2020, a jury deliberated only a few hours before finding Jerry Burns guilty of first-degree murder. On August 7, 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and sent to the Anamosa State Penitentiary. Burns appealed his conviction, but the Iowa Supreme Court upheld it in 2023. The case is regarded as one of the earliest major murders solved through investigative genetic genealogy, closing a mystery that had endured for nearly four decades.

Michelle had driven to Westdale Mall that December evening to look for a new winter coat after attending a school band banquet, an ordinary errand that ended in one of Iowa's most enduring mysteries. The trial drew intense statewide attention as a test of whether investigative genetic-genealogy leads could withstand courtroom scrutiny, and the guilty verdict was widely seen as a validation of the technique. For the Martinko family, and particularly Michelle's sister Janelle, the conviction delivered long-sought answers after forty years of waiting. Burns's subsequent appeals were rejected, and the case is now frequently cited in discussions of how DNA and genealogy have reopened and resolved some of the country's coldest homicides.