Murder at the Mall: The Michelle Martinko Case
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[music] On December 19, 1979, Michelle Martenko was a 18-year-old high school senior. She was impossible to miss. She had the big blonde hair. She was that striking. She was striking. Just a smart, kind, nice person. [music] She was a member of the concert choir. They had a banquet, which she attended. Afterwards, Michelle ended up going to the mall so I did a bunch of her friends from the choir. The mall had just opened. It was two months old. It was the place to be in Cedar Rapids at the time. So she would have been parked right in this area? Yeah, she would have been parked facing this direction. She left the mall shortly before it closed to close to 10 p.m. that night. You're talking December and Iowa? It's very dark. It's very dark. Michelle walks out and gets in her car. This person snuck up on Michelle, opened the door and climbed in. She was stabbed and cut in a total of 29 times. This was a real fight. It looks personal. It's a lot of stab wounds. It's overkill. It's always the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the husband. Someone really, really close to the person. Did either of you know Andy Seidel? I knew Andy through Michelle. That was her boyfriend. I took an instant dislike to Andy. He was very possessive of Michelle. I believed Andy did it. I did not see anything from the men in her life that would give any of them motive to do something like this. I definitely didn't see that from Andy Seidel. The entire police force dedicated time and energy to try to find answers to what happened to Michelle. After a couple of years, the leads were starting to dry up. The case then goes cold. Yeah. We really had given up hope. We truly had. These guys never gave up. The investigation never really stopped. I've been through every piece of paper in here. Probably close to 8,000 pages of reports here. The biggest break came in 2005. The DNA was the key. We collected DNA from 161 people. We were looking for a needle and a haystack. We just need to get lucky. It took us 13 years until we had a suspect. We immediately call up the lab. Is this our guy? What was the answer? Yes.
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Michelle Martinko fought for her life in a parking lot. Her attacker was left bleeding — creating the evidence that solved the case. CBS News correspondent Jamie Yuccas reports for "48 Hours."