Solved cold cases in Iowa
5 documented cases.
Barbara Lealyn Lenz
Barbara Lealyn Lenz, a 31-year-old woman, vanished from her apartment in Woodbine, Iowa, on May 6, 1989. Her boyfriend, Robert Davis, said he had dropped her off at home that day, and she was supposed to drive to Omaha to see her 3-year-old daughter, but she never arrived. Relatives who checked her home found her purse, keys, a half-full coffee pot still switched on and a pile of half-folded laundry, leading investigators to conclude she had been taken against her will. Her body was never found and the case went cold for more than three decades. After Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird launched a statewide Cold Case Unit in July 2024, investigators reopened the case and built it without DNA or a recovered body, relying instead on a documented history of Davis abusing and strangling Lenz and on witnesses who said he had threatened to kill her if she left him. Davis was arrested in March 2025, and on March 31, 2026 a Pottawattamie County jury convicted him of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Cora Ann Okonski
Cora Ann Okonski, 23, a waitress and mother of a two-year-old, vanished from her home in Tama, Iowa on Palm Sunday, April 16, 2000. Her fiancé, Tait Purk, told Tama police she had walked out to buy cigarettes and never came back. Her body has never been found. A 2003 search of a farm and salvage yard turned up only animal bones, and the case stalled for more than a decade while Purk served a federal drug and weapons sentence. In March 2015 the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation reopened it, interviewed witnesses around the country, and in November 2016 declared it a homicide. A grand jury indicted Purk for first-degree murder on December 9, 2016. At trial in May 2017, a fellow inmate testified that Purk had described killing Cora and burying her in a state park, and a jury convicted Purk of first-degree murder. A judge threw out that verdict in August 2017 for lack of evidence. At a retrial before a judge alone, Purk was found guilty of second-degree murder on December 8, 2017, and on February 1, 2018 he was sentenced to the mandatory 50 years. He denies the killing.
Corey Wieneke
Corey Wieneke, 22, a bartender at Wink's Tap in West Liberty, Iowa, was found dead on the bedroom floor of his home on the evening of October 13, 1992. He had been beaten with a baseball bat, and an aluminum bat with blood matching his blood type was found beside a gravel road near the house. His fiancée discovered him when she came home from work. Investigators looked at several theories, and at Annette Cahill, a woman who worked at the bar and was one of at least three women he was involved with. The Iowa Supreme Court later wrote that her potential motive was clear, but that with no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence the case went cold. In December 2017, a nurse in an Iowa City hospital struck up a conversation with a state cold-case agent and told him that as a nine-year-old on a sleepover in fall 1992 she had overheard Cahill, sobbing among black candles, say she had never meant to kill Corey. Cahill was arrested in Tipton on May 31, 2018. A first trial ended in a hung jury in March 2019. A second jury convicted her of second-degree murder on September 19, 2019, and she was sentenced to 50 years. Iowa's appeals courts upheld the conviction in 2021 and 2022.
Michelle Martinko
Michelle Marie Martinko, an 18-year-old high-school senior, was found stabbed to death in the front seat of her family car in the parking lot of the newly opened Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early hours of December 20, 1979, after attending a school choir banquet the night before. She had been stabbed 29 times. The killer left his own blood on her dress and on the car gearshift, but the case went cold for decades. In 2018, investigative genetic genealogy through Parabon NanoLabs traced that crime-scene DNA to Jerry Lynn Burns of Manchester, Iowa. Police covertly recovered his DNA from a drinking straw he discarded at a Pizza Ranch restaurant, confirmed the match, and arrested him almost exactly 39 years to the day after the murder. A jury convicted Burns of first-degree murder in February 2020, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Robert Huntbach
Robert Huntbach, 85, a retired meatpacking worker and First World War veteran, and his wife Goldie, 77, were found bound, gagged and shot in their home at 311 West Tenth Street in Waterloo, Iowa, on the morning of January 12, 1981. The house had been ransacked and there was evidence they had been tortured with a cattle prod. Police interviewed dozens of people, including a truck driver who had been seeing a relative of the couple, but nobody was charged and the case went cold. On May 8, 2012, that man, Jack Wendell Pursel, then 66, walked unannounced into the Waterloo police station and confessed, giving details that had never been made public. He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder on June 7, 2012, and was sentenced to life without parole.