"I have not seen this day happen": DNA is responsible for the arrest of exactly 39 years after his teenager was stabbed to death, police say

On December 19, 1979, Michelle Martinko, age 18, left a school banquet and drove her family's car to the Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in order to get a ride. buy a winter coat, said police Cedar Rapids. The next day, she was found stabbed to death in the parking lot of the mall.

This "tragic case" has been haunting this community for 39 years, "said Wayne Jerman, chief of police at Cedar Rapids on Wednesday, and investigators have struggled over the years to link DNA collected on the scene and a suspect.

"I cried a lot and I looked out the windows at all hours of the night," Martinko's mother, Janet Martinko, told CBS's Cedar Rapids station in 1987. " I talked to myself and did not know what to do, and then you have to pray. "

Thirty-nine years after the day of his assassination, a suspect was charged with his DNA and genetic genealogy.

Jerry Lynn Burns, 64, was arrested on Wednesday after police claimed he was tied to DNA blood found on Michelle Martinko's clothes and elsewhere in the car on the scene of crime.

Linn County Sheriff

Dave Franzman, a long-time reporter at KCRG, a subsidiary of ABC Cedar Rapids, even covered the case at the time of l. assassination of Michelle Martinko.

"I have not seen this day come," Franzman said during a television show this week.

Cedar Rapids Police

The first progress of the case occurred in 2006 when a sample of the suspect's DNA from the car Michelle Martinko was submitted to a laboratory for treatment, police said.

The DNA was loaded into the law enforcement database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, but investigators never have found of correspondence, said the police.

In 2017, Cedar Rapids Police announced they had contacted Parabon NanoLabs in order to help them create a suspicious DNA-based crime scene profile.

Parabon made predictions regarding "ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckles and facial shape," said police, who said then released the composite images to the public in May 2017.

But it's another Parabon technique – genealogical genealogy – that led the investigators to Burns, said CeCe Moore, Parabon's genealogical genealogist, at ABC News.

With genealogical genealogy, the DNA of an unknown murderer of a crime scene can be identified by members of his family, who voluntarily submit their DNA to a genealogy database . This allows the police to create a much larger family tree than databases such as CODIs.

"In a database on genealogical genealogy, we can proceed to the reverse engineering of the tree [suspect’s family] from their distant" parents having submitted DNA, a said Moore. "So, no matter that they have not tested their DNA during an arrest or a crime scene, we do not need their DNA." need that a member of their family has made a test to resolve these cases. "

The new technique, launched this year with the "State Killer", has identified more than two dozen suspects.

After tracing the suspect's family tree, the investigators focused on Burns, secretly collected his DNA, and sent him to a lab for analysis, according to Moore and Jerman.

The lab determined that the DNA collected from Burns matched the blood found on Michelle Martinko's clothes and matched the DNA profile developed from blood found elsewhere in the car, Jerman said.

On Wednesday, after weeks of "planning and strategizing," investigators interrogated and arrested Burns for first-degree murder, Jerman said.

When Burns, of Manchester, in Iowa, was questioned, he "denied committing the offense, but could not give any plausible explanation as to why his DNA would have been found at the scene of the crime, "the police said.

Burns appeared for the first time in court by video Thursday morning and announced that he would fill out a request for appointment of an attorney office clerk. The judge ordered a bail of $ 5 million and Burns is expected to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on December 28.

KCRG

"The family has never given up hope that this case would be resolved, "said Jerman in a statement Wednesday.

"I am delighted for his sister, Janelle, and hope her parents were in to see him, "Elizabeth Laymon, a friend of Michelle Martinko in high school, told The Des Moines Register. "I'm glad Michelle finally gets justice."

Matt Foster and Ahmad Hemingway of ABC News contributed to this report.