Dateline: Unforgettable - How did the police find Jerry Lynn Burns after almost 40 years?

Jerry Lynn Burns was finally arrested in October 2018 for the murder of Michelle Martinko, that took place 39 years prior. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and is currently being held at the Anamosa State Penitentiary.

The victim, Martinko, was an 18-year-old high school student from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who was visiting a mall to buy a winter coat. Later that day, her body was discovered in her family's car. She was stabbed multiple times in the face, neck, and chest.

In 2018, familial DNA identified a suspect named Jerry Lynn Burns, and the case was finally laid to rest with the accused getting sentenced to life in prison without parole.

At the time of the murder, Burns was 25 and lived in Manchester, Iowa. He was born in 1953 and graduated from West Delaware High School in 1972.

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How was Jerry Lynn Burns caught?

At the time of arrest, Burns had his own power-coating company called Advanced Coating Concepts. He previously co-owned a truck shop and worked for John Deere. Burns also built himself a new home on his parents' land and opened a gas station and convenience store nearby.

People around him considered him to be a professional but everything fizzled out shortly after. In 2006, a new cold case investigator working for the Cedar Rapids Police Department was tipped with an update. The detective looked through the case files and found what he thought to be the murderer's blood. The police used the information to create a partial DNA profile.

Thus began the quest to finally nab Martinko's killers. After several trials and errors, the suspects were narrowed down to three brothers who had grown up in Manchester, Iowa.

The police then began procuring evidence secretly. Jerry Lynn Burns' DNA sample was collected from a plastic straw he drank soda with. On December 19, 2018, exactly 39 years after Martinko's murder, the police confronted Burns and arrested him after his DNA matched the one found on Martinko's clothes.

During the trial, he initially denied knowing Martinko but his statements were found to contradict when his defense argued that evidence had been mishandled back in 1979 and that different articles of clothing from the crime scene should not have been stored together in one evidence bag.

The final nail in the coffin was when a witness gave his statement to the court. On February 24, 2020, after three hours of deliberation, the jury found Jerry Lynn Burns guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life on August 7 without the possibility of parole.

Now in his late 60s, Burns is currently behind bars and will stay there till he dies. His ex-wife, Patricia, committed suicide in 2008, and his cousin Brian Burns astonishingly disappeared. While these occurrences sounded suspicious, the police didn't believe Burns had anything to do with them.

Janelle Stonebraker, Michelle's older sister, thinks that by fighting so vehemently that the suspect wounded himself and left his DNA behind, Michelle contributed to the investigation into her own murder.

She even said:

"We don't exactly know the whys and some of the details, but we definitely know who did it, and that was terribly important to us. I wish my parents could be here to see this."

Martinko's father Albert and mother Janet died in 1995 and 1998 respectively.

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To learn the entire story of Michelle Martinko's murder, watch Dateline: Unforgettable at 10 pm on Oxygen 79.