“Are you confident that this case will be solved?”
“No.”
“Why can’t they figure this out? How did he get away with this?”
“Police officer survived to find that she had been stabbed well over 20 times.”
“It was local lore. We all knew who Michelle Martinko was.”
“Tonight, stunning news. Decades after her murder, new information from DNA evidence.”
“Our jaws were on the floor because that was the first time in 40 years that we had ever received an answer like we had received. And they have found the killer’s DNA.”
“Our suspect was likely one of three brothers, all living in Iowa. Which one is it?”
On December 19th, 1979, the world was Michelle Martinko’s for the taking. Instead, she was taken from the world.
“Okay, your wife is in a bar and said she’s under [scientists]. This is what he’s going to tell you about how to get out of that situation.”
“And I grabbed the gun. Trying to find the first place to put a body.”
“No, sir.”
“The only thing they could do was kill him.”
“You want to say anything?”
“We, the jury, need to find the defendant…”
It was 1979. What would be a tumultuous, soul-searching year for America.
“All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”
“Iran, 1979. The United States suffered its most serious commercial nuclear power plant accident.”
“The long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline.”
“It is a crisis of confidence.”
A year that saw the crime rate climbing, especially in the country’s smaller cities, including Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“Especially around here, folks thought they could just kind of go about their lives as they always had for decades here and not have to worry about the violence that happens in those bigger cities.”
All that changed in Cedar Rapids one week before Christmas in 1979 at the brand new Westdale Mall. A high school student brutally murdered.
“Her body discovered in her car in the parking lot.”
“Our uniform division people went out there to check and check various places. They checked there and did in fact discover the body of one Michelle Martinko.”
“Any motive at all? Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to kill her?”
“No.”
“From what our understanding is, a very nice young lady. It’s a sad situation. We have no idea at this point. No idea.”
And it would stay that way for almost 40 years until Michelle Martinko’s killer was finally tracked down by a detective, Matt Deniger, who was just a child at the time of the murder.
“I was probably at home in bed in 1979. I would have been five years old.”
“The prosecutor who would handle the case, Nick Bays, was even younger—four years old.”
“We were all aware of it. Growing up in Cedar Rapids, it was local lore. We all knew who Michelle Martinko was.”
She had gone to the mall for some Christmas shopping with $180 in her purse. And this being a brand new mall with a 100-plus stores, in the weeks that lead up to Christmas, a lot of people are there for the first time. Michelle Martinko had come from a school choir holiday banquet and was all dressed up.
“She has been described by her friends as being kind of a girly girl, someone who enjoyed wearing evening clothes and things like that. She was bright, she was friendly, she stood out in the crowd.”
“Of course she was also beautiful.”
“As a matter of fact, the night that my sister went to the mall, that was the first time she had ever been there and had the $180 cash on her for that evening, and she still had the money with her after she was killed.”
The last person to talk to her that night was Kurt Thomas, who had been in a school play with Michelle and was working at a men’s clothing store in the mall.
“We were walking and looking at each other, and animated and just friendly.”
Thomas walked her to the mall exit.
“She was saying her goodbyes. She was bundling up. She was calling it a night. And going out in that parking lot, she smiled at me. I call it the ‘Michelle smile.’”
The next time that she was seen was when police officers arrived on the scene at about 4:00 a.m. the next morning.
“To find that she had been stabbed well over 20 times throughout her chest, her neck, and her arms. And that she had been brutally murdered.”
“She was in a battle for her life as she was being stabbed to death.”
“She was a good-looking gal. Real good-looking, I understand.”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Any possibility of sexual assault here?”
“I would at this point, and I certainly can stand to be corrected, I would say possibly not. I don’t think robbery is a motive. We don’t know at this time.”
Michelle’s family, including her sister and brother-in-law, were convinced it was an ex-boyfriend, Andy Seidel, who had killed her.
“Well, we really didn’t have any other suspects. And they had broken up in a rather unsatisfactory way, and he wouldn’t let go. And just seemed like the classic behavioral trait of, you know, ‘If I can’t have her, no one can.’”
But detectives were also suspicious of the friend she had talked to at the mall that night, Kurt Thomas.
“It turned into a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.”
Thomas was taken to the police station even before he knew Michelle had been killed.
“The one thing I do remember was the good cop, bad cop. He just flat turned around, leaned over the chair, and asked me why I killed her.”
But there were no surveillance cameras in the mall parking lot, no eyewitnesses, and at the time, no DNA testing was available. No way to rule in or rule out Kurt Thomas or any of Michelle’s friends. The case went cold.
“The theories that were floating around in town, in that small town—those were very hurtful because it was everything from drug rings to prostitution. I mean, you name it.”
And for years, her family was in despair, especially her mother, Janet, subjected to ugly crank calls after the murder.
“And they’d say, ‘What mother? Mother? It’s Michelle,’ do things like that, and some of them would be laughing on the phone. It was absolutely awful.”
“My sister and my mother were soulmates, and so my mother just lost a part of herself.”
“Are you confident that this case will be solved?”
“No. No, I’m not.”
The case would remain unsolved for almost four decades before a scientific breakthrough.
“And they have found the killer’s DNA.”
Now, police would know if the alibis of Michelle’s friends would hold up.
For decades, it became a sad Christmas-time ritual in Cedar Rapids: friends and teachers gathering at the grave site of Michelle Martinko.
“And there’s a lot of people in my life I can’t remember their voice, but I can always remember Michelle’s laugh.”
The community was still struggling to understand her brutal murder just a few days before Christmas in 1979.
“We still have a really small-town-like atmosphere here. So when something happens to one of our own, we’re all impacted by it.”
The years went by with no solution. Michelle’s mother and father, Albert and Janet Martinko, died not knowing who had killed their daughter.
“I would say it destroyed a lot of their lives.”
“There’s just no other decision than he is guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action.”
“Whenever you’re ready, I am, judge.”
“All right, thank you very much, judge.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s get one thing straight. Who wanted Claudine Blanchard dead?”
“Who? Gypsy.”
“Gypsy wanted Claudine Blanchard dead. She is fully capable of deception, cuz that’s how she lived her life. She was trained that way by her own mother.”
“Gypsy manipulated Nick, a low-functioning person with autism.”
“And then Gypsy pressures Nick into committing a homicide against her mother when he was only trying to help the woman he loved.”
All along, it was clear that Gypsy’s lawyer, Dewayne Perry, had given up on pushing for a not-guilty verdict but instead wanted the jury to find his client guilty of the lesser charge of second-degree murder.
“I believe after all the evidence that you consider, there is reasonable doubt as to his capacity to deliberate first-degree murder, and I believe the appropriate verdict in this case is one of the lesser homicides. Thank you very much for your time.”
The facts of the murder of DD Blanchard were never in dispute: the 17 stab wounds, the knife Gypsy stole for him to use, and Nicholas Godejohn admitting to it on video.
“Because… And then the truth is, okay, I’ll admit it. I did actually stab her. I will admit it.”
So the jury was not expected to be out for long. The main decision that they had to make was if he had the capacity—if Mr. Godejohn had the capacity—to deliberate. Then he was guilty of first-degree murder. If he did not, then he was guilty of second-degree murder. And the difference would mean how long Nicholas Godejohn would go to prison.
“A first-degree murder is life without parole. A second-degree murder has a minimum of 10 and also can go up to life, but it’s not an automatic sentence.”
It was all hanging on that decision. Godejohn had not testified during the trial, but in a sign of optimism just before the verdict was read, Godejohn told the judge he would abide by the jury’s decision on sentencing if he was found guilty of second-degree murder.
“And if they find you a lesser on count one, you are still asking for jury sentencing. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have there been any threats made to you to get you to waive that right?”
“No, sir.”
“Have there been any promises?”
“No, sir.”
And with that, Nicholas Godejohn was ready to hear the jury’s verdict.
“Would you pass down the file folders, please?”
Which narrative had the jury come to believe? Who was the mastermind?
“Gypsy manipulated Nick, a low-functioning person with autism.”
“Whose idea was it to kill your mother?”
“Mine.”
“His mild autism, that changes nothing.”
“As to count one, we the jury find the defendant Nicholas Godejohn guilty of murder in the first degree. We assess and declare the punishment for murder in the first degree at imprisonment for life without the possibility of probation or parole.”
The autism defense did not work. While Gypsy will be eligible for parole in the next few years, Nicholas will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“The bottom line is he still stabbed an individual, regardless of who it was, 17 times. And he, by the evidence in the trial, enjoyed doing that. And I believe that justice was very much served in keeping him out of the community for as long as we possibly could.”
“I don’t think there is justice in this case. I think that everyone is broken, and there is not a way to really put the pieces back together.”
A grim ending to what started as an abused child’s longing for a Cinderella fairy tale. It just proves that happy endings are not just in fairy tales. They’re real—not on this day, not in this courtroom.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
