All we had to do with submit the profile to codis codis? it s an fbi computerized systems that come teens millions of profiles that have been collected from crime scenes, from jails, people who have been arrested. and anything come back? nothing. no hit. to larsson, that meant michelle s killer was likely someone about any prior arrest or run-ins with a lot. that meant compute people police police had talked back in the day had to be reconsidered. my thinking is, let s start going through this case. let s start finding potential suspects. and the school get their dna and start eliminating them from that partial profile. so, now are we back to andy and all those other boyfriends? correct. nearly 30 years after michelle the s death, everything old was new again. boys with alibis back in 1979, we re now middle aged men with something more valuable than a story to offer. they had there dna.
session. welcome back to dateline . i m craig melvin. michelle martinko s unsold murder marked a loss of innocence for her friends and family. but not a loss of hope. cold case detectives were determined to catch the killer using a modern arsenal of tools. the same technology used to crack a legendary case in california, was about to reveal a tantalizing clue. back to dennis murphy with and then there were three . the decades old investigation into michelle martinko s 1979 murder had emergency. detective doug larsson had a dna profile of the killer and the traditional list of suspects. one by one, he started asking for dna samples, looking for a match. doug started with the really obvious suspects. all the ex-boyfriends.
Michelle kind of stripped away, not just our innocence that the innocence of the whole town. it settled over the city. the thought that michelle s killer might never be caught. the seventies became the eighties, and then the nineties. the dawn of dna testing finally gave police new hope. in 1997, they sent scrapings from that gearshift of michelle s car off to a state lab. the lab was able to sort out all of those dna points and left a partial meal the any profile. at the time, it was an enough to match to a suspect. but in 2005, doug larsson took over the case. he wondered if anything else from the car might yield a more complete dna profile. he sent michelle s blood stained dress back to the state crime lab. got the phone call from the lab analysts that they had found a full dna profile on the dress, which was very exciting. that s a pretty exciting phone call? that s great.
And her black dress and for cool with slumped halfway off the passenger seat at the families buick electra. she had multiple stab wounds. doug larsson was a college freshman when michel was killed. matt denlinger only in kindergarten. but years later, as cedar rapids investigators, they d come to know every detail of this case. very frenzied to attack. there was blood everywhere. there was blood spatter all over the inside of the car. did the color leave a blood trail away from the scene? did you get lucky in that? we know. there s no luxurious away from the scene. for that killer did leave some signatures. the officers found love prince on the outside of the car, in the dirt, on the door handle. they love looked like dishwashing gloves from the late seventies, early eighties, that everyone would have in their house. so, the killer came to do business? oh, yeah. the color came to do business. michel had warily deep defense of wounds on her hands. she put up a fight.