officer. jim kincade got the call out for in. they sent me out to the mall to see if i could look at this car. just hours earlier, the mall was bustling with christmas shoppers. now, it was dark. deserted. in the distance, officer kincade spotted a car in the far reaches of the parking lot. a long walk from the entrance to the jcpenney. it seemed to match the description. looking from your vehicle, could you see what had happened there? no. couldn t see into the windows? could it see into the windows. they were s frosted over. i opened the back door. i could see that there was a woman, slouched down. at first, i thought just an intoxicated person. so, i walked around the car and looked into the passenger side from the window. and obviously, it wasn t an old woman, drunk. could you tell she was gone? yes. there were no signs of life. she was obviously deceased. beautiful, by vicious, high school senior michelle martinko
Nearly 40 years after a high school senior is found stabbed to death in her car after visiting the mall days before Christmas, investigators identify the.
generations of investigators, who refused to quit until the killer was found. we ve cared about this family, they cared about solving this murder. they weren t going to give up. and they didn t. kurt thomas says he was a lucky kid. he got to grow up in cedar rapids, iowa. it was a magical level. we didn t know anything but fun. a lot of that fun happened at the mall,. four teenagers, it was the place to shop, eat and hang out. that s where the kids hung, her? it was a place you could go at anytime. and it was feebly deal. high school senior michelle martinko was normal right. but she did shop and work at one near her home. michelle was a top student, i gifted baton taller, and some in the school choir, along with her friend jane hanson. why do you think you guys hit it off as well as you did? gus, we had a lot of things in our life that we re was she december 19 and they went for a stroll. at one point, passing by a shopgirl court had a crush on. teenage drama at the
all we had to do with submit the profile to codis codis? 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.
three hours? yeah. not even three. i couldn t believe they came back with a verdict they did. outside the courthouse, john and janel were emotional. to finally have the closure on this and to actually no i wish my parents could be here to see this. we left cedar rapids but cedar rapids never left us. 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 martinko family. jerry burns was sentenced to life without parole. he is appealing his conviction. as we were looking through pictures, we realized that she wasn t part of that christmas. she wasn t part of that birth. she was part of that party. we kept going deeper and deeper into the box, trying to find where was michelle? she had missed everything. the family album goes on,