Solved cold cases in Iowa
3 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.
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, an 85-year-old man, and his 77-year-old wife, Goldie Huntbach, were bound, gagged, tortured and shot to death in their home in Waterloo, Iowa, late on the night of January 12, 1981. The elderly couple's house was ransacked and the robbery netted about $6,000, according to prosecutors. Although Waterloo police interviewed many people in the original investigation, including a former local resident named Jack Wendell Pursel who was believed to have once dated a Huntbach relative, no arrests were made and the case went cold for more than three decades. The case was not broken by DNA, fingerprints or any forensic advance. On May 8, 2012, Pursel, then 66 and living in South Gate, California, walked unprompted into the Waterloo Police Department and confessed to the killings, saying he had become a born-again Christian and was seeking forgiveness. Days earlier he had telephoned an estranged brother to tell him what he had done, and he later disclosed that he had also confided the crime years before to a prison acquaintance who had once been associated with Charles Manson's followers. Prosecutors said Pursel supplied details about the murders that were never made public and that only the killer would have known. He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder on June 7, 2012, and Black Hawk County District Judge Bradley Harris sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole.