Iowa 1979 Cold Case Solved — She Went to the Mall to Pay for Her Christmas Coat
On December 19, 1979, eighteen-year-old Michelle Martino attended a school choir banquet, spent time with her friends, and made plans to stop at the mall before heading home.
There was nothing unusual about any of it.
Christmas was just six days away, and Michelle had a future she was excited about.
But sometime that evening, an ordinary night took a turn no one could have anticipated.
Hours later, her parents were desperately searching for her, and when police finally located the family’s car, they discovered something that would leave an entire city asking the same question for nearly forty years.
What happened to Michelle after she left that mall?
In 1979, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the kind of American city where families put down roots, neighbors knew one another, and children often grew up surrounded by people they had known their entire lives.
Situated along the Cedar River in eastern Iowa, it was home to roughly 110,000 people, a hard-working community built around manufacturing, agriculture, and businesses that had supported generations of local families.
It was not a particularly glamorous place, but to the people who called it home, that was part of its charm.
Life moved at a familiar pace.
Families gathered for church on Sundays, teenagers attended football games and school dances and choir performances, and on weekends shopping centers became gathering places where young people could spend hours with their friends.
For many families, there was little reason to worry when their teenage children went out for the evening.
Michelle’s friend Jane Hansen would later recall how ordinary it was for young women to leave work late at night and walk to their cars alone.
It was simply something they did without giving much thought to the possibility of danger.
And in October of that year, Cedar Rapids had welcomed something new.
Westdale Mall, the large enclosed shopping center on the city’s southwest side, had opened just over two months before Christmas.
With its department stores, smaller shops, and expansive parking lot, it quickly became the place to be.
As December arrived, families came looking for Christmas presents, teenagers met up with friends, and shoppers moved between stores preparing for the holidays.
To most people it was simply another place to shop, and there was no reason for anyone to imagine that before Christmas arrived, this new shopping center would become associated with one of the most haunting crimes in Cedar Rapids history.
Among the families living in this community were Albert and Janet Martino, whose youngest daughter had a particularly special place in their lives.
Michelle Marie Martino was born on October 6, 1961, to Albert and Janet Martino, but her arrival was something her family had waited many years for.
Before Michelle was born, Janet had suffered five miscarriages.
By the time she finally welcomed her youngest daughter into the world, she was forty-four years old.
The family already had an older daughter, Janelle, who was twelve years older than Michelle, and despite the age difference, Janelle was delighted to have a little sister.
She would later remember the excitement surrounding Michelle’s birth, describing her as the family’s miracle baby, a name that reflected just how much her arrival meant to everyone.
As Michelle grew, she developed a close relationship with her older sister.
When Janelle married John Stonereaker, Michelle was the flower girl at their wedding.
But growing up was not always easy for her.
At twelve years old, Michelle was diagnosed with scoliosis, a condition that causes the spine to curve sideways.
To help manage it, she had to wear a brace that extended from her neck down to her hips.
For a young girl entering her teenage years, it was a difficult adjustment.
While other children her age could move around freely, Michelle lived with the physical restrictions of the brace.
She became painfully self-conscious and felt different from the children around her, and her sister Janelle would later recall just how difficult those years had been.
But when Michelle turned fourteen, something changed.
She was finally able to stop wearing the brace, and according to Janelle, that was when her little sister began to blossom.
It was the 1970s, and Farrah Fawcett’s famous feathered hairstyle had become popular across America.
Michelle, who had long blonde hair, began experimenting with the same look.
She was discovering her own style, growing more confident, and enjoying the freedom that had once seemed so far away.
Her brother-in-law John would later remember that Michelle seemed almost unaware of the attention she was beginning to attract.
The shy young girl who had spent years feeling different was growing into a confident young woman, and by the time she reached high school, Michelle had discovered talents and ambitions that would begin shaping the future she wanted for herself.
By the fall of 1979, Michelle Martino was eighteen years old and in her final year at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids.
She had grown into a bright, confident young woman with a busy social life and plenty of plans for the future.
Michelle was a talented performer.
She had earned a place on the school’s baton twirling squad as a sophomore, an achievement that was unusual for someone so young.
During football season she performed at halftime alongside her teammates.
She was also a member of the women’s choir and concert choir and took part in school theater productions.
But her interests extended beyond the stage.
She had developed a love for fashion and design, and after graduation she planned to attend Iowa State University to study interior design.
It was a future she was already looking forward to.
One of her closest friends was Jane Hansen, a fellow baton twirler.
The two shared the ordinary experiences of teenage life, from school activities to time spent together outside the classroom.
Michelle was also remembered fondly by several boys she had known.
Mike Hayrick, who had dated her, would later describe her as intelligent, kind, and strikingly beautiful.
Another classmate, Blair Gaunt, remembered a small moment from a choir bus ride when he sat in the row ahead of Michelle and quietly reached back to hold her hand.
It was an awkward, innocent moment between two teenagers, but one that stayed with him for decades.
Michelle had also experienced her first serious romance.
A few years earlier, she and her friend Gail Dawson had met a boy named Andy Sidell at a roller skating rink.
Andy, who was sixteen at the time, was about a year older than Michelle, and Gail remembered him as a flashy young man with a sports car.
The two began dating, and their relationship lasted approximately two years.
They even attended prom together in 1978, but as Michelle grew older, her feelings changed.
According to friends, she was not interested in settling into a serious commitment.
She wanted the freedom to enjoy her youth and make her own decisions, and eventually the relationship ended.
For Michelle, there was still so much of life ahead.
College was approaching, she had a career she wanted to pursue, friendships she valued, and an independence she was only beginning to enjoy.
At eighteen she was old enough to imagine the life she wanted, but still young enough to believe she had plenty of time to figure everything out.
On Wednesday, December 19, she attended a school choir banquet in downtown Cedar Rapids.
Afterward she decided to make one last stop before heading home.
It was a simple errand, and she had no reason to believe that anything about that evening would be different from the countless others she had spent with her friends.
The banquet for Kennedy High School’s concert choir was held at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Cedar Rapids.
Michelle was dressed for the occasion in a black dress with a rabbit fur coat to keep her warm against the December cold.
After the banquet she had one more thing she wanted to do.
Her mother, Janet, had placed a winter coat on layaway at Westdale Mall as a Christmas gift, and Michelle planned to stop by and pay off the remaining balance.
She had approximately $186 with her.
Before leaving, she asked her best friend, Jane Hansen, if she wanted to come along.
Jane declined because she had homework to catch up on.
It was a perfectly ordinary decision, one that neither girl had any reason to think would matter, but years later Jane would remember that conversation with deep regret.
Michelle did not insist.
She got into the family’s 1972 Buick and drove to Westdale Mall alone.
The mall was still relatively new, and Michelle knew it well.
She worked there, had friends who worked there, and was comfortable spending time in its stores.
A number of her friends from the choir had ended up at the mall that night as well.
Michelle browsed the shops and stopped to speak with people she recognized.
At some point she ran into Tracy Price, a boy she knew from choir.
Tracy noticed something that concerned him.
Michelle was carrying a considerable amount of cash, and she was not being particularly discreet about it.
He warned her to put the money away rather than display it where everyone could see.
It was a friendly warning, nothing more, and Tracy had no reason to believe Michelle was in immediate danger.
Michelle eventually decided against buying the coat her mother had selected.
She kept the money and continued with her evening.
But there was something about that night that Tracy would not learn until later.
According to what he was told, Michelle had said she was nervous about going to the mall alone and that she felt like someone might be following her.
Whether anyone actually was has never been established.
Tracy himself would say that when he saw her, he never noticed anyone watching her or behaving suspiciously.
Still, it was a troubling detail.
Had Michelle genuinely noticed something unusual, or was it simply an uneasy feeling that had nothing to do with what happened afterward?
There was no way to know.
As the evening progressed, the mall began approaching its ten o’clock closing time.
Michelle was still inside at approximately nine-thirty, according to court records.
Sometime between nine and ten, she left the building alone and headed toward the parking lot.
Her Buick was parked in the southwest section, some distance from the mall entrance.
It was a cold, dark December night, and she had only a short distance to walk before she could get in the car and drive home.
What happened after she walked out of the mall remains one of the most troubling parts of this case.
There were no confirmed eyewitnesses.
Between ten-thirty and eleven that night, an assistant manager at a nearby Pier 1 Imports noticed Michelle’s Buick sitting in the parking lot.
The car seemed unusually isolated, particularly for that time of night, but the employee had no reason to know that anything was wrong.
And so the evening continued.
Stores closed, employees went home, the parking lot grew quiet, but Michelle never returned to her family.
Back at the Martino home, Albert and Janet were becoming increasingly worried.
Michelle was eighteen, she had her independence, and it was not unusual for her to spend an evening with friends, but she was usually responsible about letting her family know where she was.
Now it was well past midnight, and there was still no sign of her.
By approximately two in the morning, her parents were frightened enough to contact the Cedar Rapids Police Department.
Her father also went out looking for her.
Eventually police learned that Michelle had gone to Westdale Mall, and officers were sent to search the area.
Shortly after four on Thursday morning, December 20, they located the family’s Buick in the mall parking lot.
And when officers looked inside, they discovered something no parent should ever have to face.
Michelle was lying across the front passenger area.
She was dead.
The eighteen-year-old high school senior had been attacked inside her family’s car just hours after leaving a school choir banquet.
What had begun as an ordinary Christmas shopping trip was now a murder investigation.
Every officer on the Cedar Rapids Police Force was called in, including Detective Harvey Denlinger, who would later remember the crime scene as unlike anything he had encountered.
It was the kind of violence that, in his words, was unheard of in Cedar Rapids at the time.
Michelle had suffered numerous injuries from a sharp weapon.
Years later, testimony in court would establish that she had sustained twenty-nine wounds.
But there was another detail that told investigators something important about her final moments.
Michelle had fought back.
The medical examiner found defensive wounds on her hands and body, indicating that she had struggled against whoever attacked her.
Investigators believe the attacker might even have been injured during that struggle.
Yet there was no immediately apparent reason why anyone would have wanted Michelle dead.
The money she had brought to the mall was still there.
The item she had purchased had not been stolen, and the autopsy found no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.
If robbery was not the motive, then what was?
Had someone followed Michelle out of the mall?
Was she confronted by a person she knew, or had she simply encountered a stranger who saw an opportunity?
The police had no answers.
Investigators have theorized that Michelle may have started the car to warm it and clear the frost from the windows, and that someone approached, opened the door, and climbed in, forcing her across the seat.
But no one saw it happen, and no one could say for certain.
The Buick itself presented another mystery.
Crime scene investigators discovered impressions consistent with rubber gloves on the outside of the vehicle, in the dirt, and inside it in blood.
Whoever entered the car had taken precautions to avoid leaving fingerprints, and the marks were not confined to one area.
They were found on the steering wheel, gear shift, door handles, and other controls.
That raised a disturbing possibility.
Someone other than Michelle appeared to have driven the Buick after the attack.
Michelle had originally parked in the southwest section of the lot, yet the vehicle was discovered in a different area.
Why had the person been trying to conceal what happened?
Were they attempting to move Michelle somewhere else, or had something interrupted whatever they originally intended to do?
Investigators could only speculate.
The murder weapon was never recovered.
They had no fingerprints and no witnesses, and although they collected physical evidence, including blood from inside the car, the technology available in 1979 could not provide the answers modern DNA testing would eventually make possible.
Michelle had been killed in a public parking lot outside a busy shopping center during the Christmas season.
She had been seen speaking with friends only hours earlier, yet not a single confirmed witness could tell police who had approached her car.
By the time the sun rose over Cedar Rapids on Thursday, the Martino family was facing a reality they could barely comprehend.
Just hours earlier, Albert and Janet had been waiting for Michelle to come home.
Now they were being told that the daughter they loved so dearly had been murdered.
Michelle’s older sister, Janelle, and her husband, John, were equally stunned.
Years later, Janelle would remember how the two of them simply held each other, struggling to accept what had happened.
Her father was largely stoic, although beneath his silence was a deep anger.
Her mother was heartbroken.
Janet had endured five miscarriages before Michelle was born.
She had watched her youngest daughter overcome the back brace, grow into a confident young woman, and begin planning for college.
Now, at just eighteen, Michelle’s life had been cut short.
And the timing made the loss even more painful.
Christmas was only five days away.
Instead of preparing to celebrate, the Martinos were making arrangements to bury their daughter.
The winter coat Michelle had gone to the mall to pay for would never be worn by her.
At approximately four-thirty that morning, Janet called Michelle’s best friend, Jane Hansen, to tell her what had happened.
Jane was only seventeen.
She had grown up so sheltered from violence that a crime like this was almost impossible to comprehend.
And alongside the shock came a painful thought that would stay with her for years.
Michelle had asked her to come to the mall.
What if she had gone?
Would Michelle still have been alive, or would they both have been in danger?
There were no answers to those questions.
Michelle’s other friends were equally shaken.
Tracy Price, who had spoken with her at the mall that evening, remembered how deeply the news affected him.
Mike Hayrick would later say that all of them were victims in a way, that their innocence had been stolen, and that her murder shattered the image of Cedar Rapids as a safe, ordinary American city.
Gail Dawson remembered the fear that followed.
“You were scared,” she said. “You were afraid to go places.”
For years, teenagers had walked to their cars after work without thinking much about it.
Now security escorts became part of the routine for young employees leaving at night.
There was a new awareness that someone could be watching, even in places that had always felt familiar.
If Michelle could be attacked while doing something so ordinary, what did that mean for the rest of them?
Whoever had killed her was still unidentified, and nobody knew whether that person was a stranger passing through Cedar Rapids or someone who lived among them.
As the city mourned, investigators faced enormous pressure to find answers.
And before long, one young man’s name began attracting particular attention.
He had once been very close to Michelle.
In the days following Michelle’s murder, investigators began looking closely at the people who had known her.
As in many cases like this, they started with those closest to the victim.
In fact, every man who knew Michelle had to be cleared.
They interviewed friends, classmates, and young men she had dated, hoping someone might know of a disagreement, a threat, or a reason anyone would want to harm her.
The nature of the attack was particularly troubling.
Michelle had been assaulted repeatedly, yet her money and belongings had been left untouched.
To investigators, the violence raised the possibility that her killer had been motivated by something personal, perhaps jealousy, anger, or resentment, but those were only theories.
Among the people questioned was Mike Hayrick, who had previously dated Michelle.
Mike was away at college, more than a hundred miles from Cedar Rapids, on the night of the murder.
Even so, detectives wanted to speak with him.
Years later he remembered how intimidating the experience had been.
During one interview, investigators reportedly placed photographs of Michelle’s crime scene in front of him, and he found it deeply upsetting, particularly because he had cared about her.
Ultimately police found no reason to consider him a serious suspect.
But another young man attracted considerably more attention.
Andy Sidell was Michelle’s former boyfriend.
They had dated for approximately two years and attended prom together in what many people around them regarded as a serious teenage relationship.
But according to Michelle’s friends, she had wanted more independence.
Andy, however, reportedly struggled with the breakup.
Michelle’s brother-in-law, John Stonereaker, recalled that Andy seemed unwilling to let the relationship go.
He allegedly kept asking Michelle’s friends about her activities, particularly whom she was seeing and why.
Some of those friends described him as possessive.
Others said he just would not go away.
When detectives began reconstructing Michelle’s final evening, they discovered that Andy had been at Westdale Mall on December 19 and that he had run into her there.
That immediately made him someone they wanted to question.
Andy told police he had gone home shortly after the mall closed, and his mother supported his account.
But investigators were not entirely satisfied.
They knew a parent’s word, while important, did not necessarily settle every question about someone’s whereabouts.
Still, there was a significant problem with the suspicion surrounding Andy.
Police had no physical evidence connecting him to the murder.
There were no fingerprints, no recovered weapon, and no witness who could place him inside the Buick.
Whatever concerns Michelle’s friends had about his behavior, those concerns were not proof of a crime.
Then came Michelle’s funeral.
Gail Dawson recalled seeing Andy overcome with emotion, crying beside Michelle’s casket.
She remembered him desperately asking whether Michelle had loved him or her other former boyfriend, Mike, when she died.
To some people his reaction seemed unusually intense.
Others understood it as the grief of a young man who had lost someone he once loved.
But in a community desperate for answers, even grief could become a reason for suspicion.
Gradually a belief took hold among some of Michelle’s friends and relatives.
They thought Andy was responsible.
John Stonereaker later admitted he had expected Andy to be arrested eventually.
Janelle remembered how difficult it was to imagine anyone else as the killer.
But not everyone shared that belief.
Mike Hayrick, who also knew Andy, said he had never seen anything in his behavior that made him believe Andy was capable of murdering Michelle.
The police continued investigating, but the evidence needed to charge Andy never materialized.
After high school he left Cedar Rapids and joined the Navy.
His departure did not end the speculation.
For years, people who remembered the case continued to associate his name with it, and yet, despite all the suspicions, Andy Sidell was never charged.
That left investigators with a troubling possibility.
What if the person they were searching for had never been part of Michelle’s life at all?
Police still had no way of knowing, but as they followed other leads, they would eventually release a drawing of a possible suspect, a face they hoped someone in Cedar Rapids would recognize.
As the weeks passed, detectives interviewed friends, classmates, former boyfriends, and people who had been at Westdale Mall that December evening.
They followed tips, questioned potential suspects, and searched for anyone who might have noticed something unusual in the parking lot, but they were no closer to identifying Michelle’s killer.
There was no confirmed eyewitness to the attack, no murder weapon, and no physical evidence that had yet provided a name.
By the spring of 1980, police were running out of conventional leads, and they began exploring other ways of recovering information from people who might have seen something.
One of those methods was hypnosis.
At the time, some investigators believed it could help witnesses recall details they might otherwise struggle to remember.
Today the reliability of memories recovered that way is widely questioned, but in 1980 investigators hoped it might provide the breakthrough they desperately needed.
Approximately thirty people were questioned using the technique, and from the recollections of two witnesses, police developed a composite sketch.
On June 19, 1980, exactly six months after Michelle’s murder, the drawing was released to the public.
It showed a white man believed to be in his late teens or early twenties, approximately six feet tall with dark curly hair.
For the first time, the public had a face to associate with the investigation.
The response was immediate.
Tips began arriving, but nobody could establish whether the man in the sketch had actually been involved.
The witnesses had not seen the attack itself, and none of the tips produced the evidence detectives needed.
A reward of $10,000 was also offered, a substantial amount at the time.
Investigators hoped it might encourage someone who had remained silent to finally come forward.
It did not.
Months turned into years.
Every promising direction eventually seemed to reach another dead end.
By 1986, nearly seven years after Michelle’s death, the case had effectively gone cold.
Detective Matt Denlinger, who would become involved decades later, described how little investigators had left to work with by that point.
There simply seemed to be nothing more they could do.
Michelle’s family felt the same frustration.
It seemed that everyone had been looked at, and the investigation appeared to be going nowhere.
For Michelle’s parents, accepting that there might never be an answer was another matter entirely.
And as the criminal investigation stalled, her father, Albert, decided to pursue a different kind of accountability.
If police could not yet identify the person who had murdered his daughter, he wanted to know whether the tragedy could have been prevented in the first place.
His attention turned to the owners and operators of Westdale Mall.
By the mid-1980s, with the police investigation producing few new leads, Albert Martino took legal action.
As the administrator of Michelle’s estate, he filed a lawsuit against the owners and operators of Westdale Mall.
His argument was that the shopping center had failed to provide reasonable security in its parking lot, particularly during the busy Christmas season.
But proving that responsibility would be far more complicated.
The mall’s operators argued that Michelle’s murder was not something they could reasonably have anticipated.
Westdale had only opened two months before the attack, and there was no documented history of violent crime at the shopping center or in its immediate surroundings.
Albert’s legal team presented evidence of 126 crimes reported over four years at twenty-six other malls in which the defendants had ownership interest, arguing that they showed the potential dangers of large shopping centers.
But the court was not persuaded that crimes at other malls established a foreseeable danger at Westdale.
Albert also questioned the mall’s security arrangements.
Although security personnel patrolled the parking lot after the stores closed, he argued that those patrols showed the operators understood there were risks.
The defendants maintained that the patrols were primarily intended to protect property against theft and vandalism.
The case reached the Iowa Supreme Court, and on September 17, 1986, the court ruled against Albert.
The majority concluded there was insufficient evidence that the mall’s operators knew or should reasonably have known that such an attack was likely.
Three justices disagreed.
They believed the evidence raised questions that deserved to be examined at trial.
For Albert it was another disappointment.
The man who had lost his daughter had now lost his attempt to hold the shopping center legally responsible, and Michelle’s killer remained unidentified.
Albert died on July 24, 1995, at seventy-nine years old.
His wife Janet lived almost three more years before passing away on March 30, 1998.
Neither parent lived to see an arrest.
According to their surviving daughter, Janelle, they likely went to their graves believing Michelle’s former boyfriend had been responsible.
They never learned whether that suspicion was correct.
But there was something Albert and Janet could not have known.
While the investigation had gone quiet, important evidence from Michelle’s murder had been preserved, evidence that investigators in 1979 had no way of fully understanding.
And years after both parents had passed away, a detective reviewing the old case files would uncover something that had been overlooked.
For more than twenty-five years, Michelle’s murder had remained unsolved.
But investigators in 1979 had done one thing that would prove invaluable.
They had preserved the evidence, and as the years passed, forensic science began developing ways to examine it that had not existed when Michelle was murdered.
By 2005, Detective Doug Larrison was working the case.
For Larrison this was not just another unsolved murder.
He had attended Kennedy High School with Michelle.
Although the two had not been close, her death had stayed with him.
He remembered the shock that swept through their school, and he felt a responsibility to his classmates to finally get the crime solved.
Larrison began carefully reviewing the old files, and buried in the paperwork, he discovered something important.
Years earlier, another investigator had submitted blood scrapings from the gear shift of Michelle’s Buick for laboratory testing.
The results had been placed in the file, but according to Larrison, nobody had properly followed up on what they revealed.
It had simply sat there until someone read the whole file and realized what it meant.
The sample contained DNA from more than one person, and testing had identified a male contributor.
Investigators had long suspected that Michelle’s killer might have injured himself during the struggle, and Larrison believed this could explain it.
The attacker may have been cut and left traces of his own blood mixed with hers, but the sample was a mixture, making it difficult to isolate a complete profile.
Larrison wanted to know whether the same male DNA might be found somewhere else.
His attention turned to another piece of evidence preserved since 1979.
Michelle’s black dress.
It was the dress she had worn to her choir banquet on the night she was murdered.
For more than two decades it had been carefully stored, and now advances in forensic testing offered a chance to examine the blood stains on the fabric with far greater precision.
The dress was sent for analysis, and what technicians discovered changed the direction of the investigation.
One of the blood stains contained a full male DNA profile, and that profile was consistent with the male DNA previously detected on the Buick’s gear shift.
For Larrison the significance was difficult to overstate.
If the male blood came from Michelle’s attacker, then the person responsible had unknowingly left behind something that could eventually identify him.
And there was a heartbreaking detail.
Michelle had fought desperately to survive.
Investigators believe that during the struggle she injured the person attacking her.
If that theory was correct, her resistance had preserved the very evidence that could one day solve her murder.
Even though she had been gone for more than twenty-five years, the evidence from her final moments was still speaking for her.
The next step seemed straightforward.
Investigators submitted the male profile to CODIS, but the result was disappointing.
There was no match.
That did not necessarily mean the man had never been arrested.
It meant that no matching profile was in the database at the time.
In October of 2006, police publicly announced the new findings and asked whether anyone remembered a man who had suffered an unexplained injury to his hand around the time of Michelle’s murder.
The appeal brought additional attention to the case, but it did not produce the name they needed.
After more than a quarter of a century, investigators had finally found a way to distinguish the suspected killer from other men.
Somewhere there was a person whose DNA could answer the question that had haunted Cedar Rapids since 1979.
But finding him would require investigators to revisit the very people they had questioned decades earlier, and this time they had something far more powerful than memories, suspicions, or alibis.
They had DNA.
With a male DNA profile finally available, Detective Larrison began revisiting the people investigators had questioned during the original investigation.
This time he was not relying on memories or trying to decide whether someone’s story sounded convincing.
He could compare their DNA directly against the evidence from Michelle’s dress.
But most of the people he needed to speak with had moved on.
Some had left Cedar Rapids entirely.
Others had not thought about the investigation in years.
Larrison had to locate them, explain why police were still investigating a murder from decades earlier, and ask them to voluntarily provide a sample.
It was slow, time-consuming work.
Among those tested were Mike Hayrick and Tracy Price.
Neither was a match.
But there was one person Larrison was particularly interested in testing.
Andy Sidell.
For more than twenty-five years, Andy had lived with the suspicion surrounding Michelle’s murder.
When Larrison approached him, he explained that a DNA comparison could finally settle whether Andy was the man whose blood was on Michelle’s clothing.
Andy agreed to provide a sample, and the results established something that decades of questioning never could.
Andy Sidell was not the source of the male DNA.
He was eliminated as a suspect.
For Andy the result ended a suspicion that had followed him through much of his adult life, but there was a heartbreaking side to it.
Michelle’s parents were gone, and they never lived to learn that the evidence pointed away from the young man they had likely blamed.
Janelle would later express regret over what Andy had endured.
His elimination forced investigators to confront a possibility they had struggled with from the beginning.
Perhaps the person who murdered Michelle had never been part of her life at all.
Larrison kept collecting DNA from others connected to the case.
In all, investigators collected samples from 161 people.
Not a single one matched.
Every negative result answered one question while leaving the biggest one unresolved.
Who was the unknown man?
By 2015, Larrison had spent approximately ten years on the investigation.
He had reviewed the evidence, followed new leads, and eliminated people who had remained under suspicion for decades, but he still did not have a suspect.
Burned out, he asked his supervisors to replace him as lead detective.
The man who took over had a remarkable connection to the case.
His name was Matt Denlinger.
Thirty-six years earlier, Matt’s father, Harvey, had been one of the officers called to Westdale Mall after Michelle’s body was discovered.
Harvey had watched detectives struggle to identify a killer, and he had watched the case go cold.
When Michelle was murdered, Matt was only five years old.
He was too young to remember, but growing up in Cedar Rapids, he could not escape the story.
Every December 19, local news stations revisited Michelle’s murder.
The same photographs appeared, the same questions were asked, and year after year there was still no answer.
Matt eventually followed his father into law enforcement.
Now, in 2015, he inherited the very case Harvey had worked.
Harvey was still alive, and Matt found himself thinking how much it would mean to identify Michelle’s killer while his father could still see it.
He could even turn to Harvey when he needed help understanding something in the old files, and he went through them all, close to 8,000 pages of reports by his own estimate.
But Matt also understood that repeating the same methods would probably produce the same results.
Police already had a DNA profile.
They had compared it against the national database.
They had tested more than 160 people, and they still did not have a name.
So Matt began asking a different question.
If DNA could not tell investigators who the man was, could it at least tell them what he might look like?
By 2017, technology had advanced enough to offer a possibility.
Matt contacted Parabon NanoLabs, a company in Virginia that used genetic information to predict physical characteristics through a service called Snapshot DNA phenotyping.
Instead of comparing DNA against a list of known individuals, the technology analyzed genetic markers associated with ancestry, eye color, hair color, and skin pigmentation and used them to create an approximation of a person’s appearance.
Matt thought it sounded almost like science fiction, but after decades of dead ends, he was willing to try.
The analysis suggested that the unknown man was likely of northern or western European ancestry, with fair skin, blonde hair, and blue or blue-green eyes.
Because the DNA could not reveal his age or how he wore his hair, Parabon produced several images showing how he might have looked at different ages.
They were not photographs, and investigators understood that the technology could not establish an exact face, but there was an important difference.
The composite sketch released in 1980 had shown a younger man with dark curly hair.
The DNA-based predictions suggested someone with much lighter features.
On May 16, 2017, Cedar Rapids police unveiled the new images at a press conference for Michelle’s surviving family and friends.
It was another emotional moment.
After so many years, they were looking at an approximation of the face that might belong to the person who had taken her life.
The public responded.
Hundreds of tips came in, but the flood created another problem.
Countless men shared those characteristics, and the images alone could not tell investigators which, if any, had been at Westdale Mall on December 19, 1979.
Matt and his colleagues investigated the tips, but no one could be connected to the crime through a definitive DNA comparison.
Then in April of 2018, a major arrest in California attracted national attention.
Investigators announced they had identified the man suspected of being the notorious Golden State Killer after decades of searching.
What caught Matt’s attention was not just the arrest.
It was how they had found him.
They had used a technique known as investigative genetic genealogy, which could potentially identify an unknown person through relatives who had never committed a crime.
Matt realized that the answer to Michelle’s murder might not depend on finding her killer’s DNA in a criminal database.
It might depend on finding someone who shared a small part of it, someone who had submitted their DNA for an entirely different reason.
For nearly four decades, investigators had been searching for a man whose identity remained a mystery.
Now, in 2018, Matt Denlinger was about to try something that would have seemed impossible when Michelle was killed.
Instead of searching for the man himself, he would search for his relatives.
The basic idea was surprisingly simple.
When people submit their DNA to genealogy services, they can discover relatives they never knew existed.
Some matches are close family.
Others are distant cousins connected through ancestors who lived more than a century earlier.
Even if two people have never met, their shared DNA can reveal that they belong to the same extended family.
Matt returned to Parabon, which this time used the genetic evidence to search GEDmatch, a public genealogy database containing DNA that people had uploaded while researching their ancestry.
Unlike the criminal database, GEDmatch could potentially reveal relatives of the unknown man, even if he had never submitted his own DNA.
In July of 2018, Parabon had a match, not to the man they were looking for, but to someone related to him.
Her name was Brandy Jennings, an office manager in Vancouver, Washington, more than a thousand miles from Cedar Rapids.
She had no known connection to Michelle Martino or Westdale Mall, but she was likely a second cousin once removed of the man whose DNA was found on Michelle’s dress.
It was a distant relationship, but for the first time, investigators had a family connection to the unidentified man.
Now they needed to work out where he belonged within that family.
Matt spent months reconstructing Brandy’s ancestry back to her great-great-grandparents.
He searched birth certificates, marriage records, obituaries, family histories, and cemetery records.
A marriage connected two families.
A birth certificate identified another generation.
An obituary sometimes revealed relatives who had moved away.
Some records were incomplete, and branches stretched into different states.
He had to trace the relationships backward, then follow the descendants forward again, looking for someone whose age and family connections might fit.
And as he worked, the investigation moved closer to Iowa.
Parabon’s analysis pointed toward the descendants of four sets of great-great-grandparents.
Additional DNA comparisons could eliminate entire branches.
Among the relatives detectives reached out to was a woman named Janice Burns, who lived in Linn County, Iowa, the same county as Cedar Rapids.
She had no known connection to Michelle or to the crime, but she belonged to one of those branches of the family tree, and she agreed to provide a DNA sample.
Parabon compared it against the profile from Michelle’s dress, and the results were far more specific.
The unknown man was likely one of Janice’s first cousins.
Janice had three first cousins who fit the genetic relationship.
They were brothers: Donald Burns, Kenneth Burns, and Jerry Burns.
All three had grown up in Manchester, Iowa, about an hour from Cedar Rapids.
All three had been old enough in 1979, and all three were still living in Iowa.
After nearly thirty-nine years, investigators had narrowed their search to three men from the same family.
But genetic genealogy could only tell Matt that one of the brothers was a promising lead.
It could not tell him which one had left blood on Michelle’s dress, and being related to the unknown contributor was not by itself evidence of murder.
Investigators needed to compare each man’s DNA directly.
They also needed to proceed carefully.
Iowa is not a big state, and Matt worried that if the brothers learned they were being investigated, word could spread before police had gathered the evidence they needed.
So he was careful about who he told.
Rather than approaching the brothers, detectives began watching them, planning to recover objects the men discarded during ordinary daily life, items that might contain saliva.
The first opportunity came when Kenneth Burns left a drinking straw behind at a golf course clubhouse.
The result was negative.
Detectives then obtained a toothbrush from the garbage associated with Donald Burns.
Again
