Man Charged in 1982 Death Alleges Police Vendetta

Jonathan Karl Lundh says he feels like a character in a suspense novel--an innocent man accused of a heinous crime and left to use his own wits to clear himself.

“It’s like a cheap dime-store novel--I can’t believe what they are doing to me,” Lundh said from behind the bars of Los Angeles County Jail.

The 39-year-old Minnesota man pleaded not guilty last week to a charge he strangled a Cal State Northridge staff member nine years ago. Charges of robbery and rape in the case were dismissed because the statute of limitations for those crimes had expired.

Lundh appears bright and educated and can seemingly quote case law like an attorney. In fact, he has chosen to defend himself against the charges, although he said he quit Harvard Law School before getting a degree. He is soft-spoken and reserved. He has a young wife and friends who share his astonishment and outrage at the murder charge against him.

But authorities say it is the picture of Lundh as an innocent victim of the justice system that is fiction. They contend that he is a skilled con artist and killer who fabricates much of what he says about his life and hides the rest.

“There is no doubt that he is very bright,” Los Angeles Police Detective Larry Bird said. “But I don’t know whether I would believe anything he said. . . . He is a con man.”

Police and prosecutors said that beneath Lundh’s calm, articulate demeanor is a dangerous man who stalked women. It is a characterization that Lundh, who is being held without bail, said he finds as aggravating as his loss of freedom.

“I am not some mad dog cruising the streets, looking to prey on women,” he said during a recent interview. “Anybody who would do that to a woman should be put away.

“But it’s not me. I am innocent!”

Lundh is accused of murdering Patty Lynne Cohen on April 27, 1982, in a case that received wide attention in Los Angeles.

Cohen, 40, an assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, was abducted from the garage of a Holiday Inn in Burbank, where she had attended a self-improvement seminar. Her nude body was found in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley five days later.

Lundh, who according to court records has nine aliases and records of arrests for nonviolent crimes in at least five states, became a suspect less than two weeks after the slaying. He was later convicted of assaulting another woman outside the hotel just minutes before Cohen disappeared.

But he was never charged with the Cohen murder until last year--after police reopened the dormant investigation and said they found new evidence linking him to the case.

By then, Lundh had moved back to his native St. Paul. He was extradited to Los Angeles last month from a Minnesota prison where he was serving a sentence for grand theft in a case in which he used several thousand dollars of an unsuspecting woman’s money to buy a car, authorities said.

In interviews and court records, Lundh has given different accounts of his background.

In 1983, according to records, he told a probation officer that he had attended Harvard Law School for a year before dropping out for financial reasons. He said he also attended six other universities, including Princeton.

Lundh told the probation officer that he made his living providing cars for film sets but also was an agent for several top entertainers. The officer concluded: “This defendant is viewed as a very sophisticated manipulator and con artist who uses his intelligence to defraud the public.”

In a recent interview, Lundh added a year to his law school experience but said he left Harvard after two years because he was recruited to play defensive end with the Los Angeles Express, a defunct professional football team.

“I wanted to attend law school but once I got there, my interests changed,” he said.

Lundh said he was recruited by Express coaches because he had played defensive end for UCLA, from which he said he graduated in 1974. In addition to UCLA, Lundh said, “I did some time at the University of Hawaii.”

But efforts to verify Lundh’s claims were unsuccessful.

“We have no record of that person ever registering or attending the law school,” Harvard spokeswoman Mary Ann Spartichino said.

Officials at UCLA and Hawaii also said they could not find any records indicating that Lundh attended those schools.

A media guide listing former UCLA football players did not include Lundh’s name. And the Express lasted only a few seasons after beginning in 1982, a period during which Lundh spent most of his time in jails and prison.

When told that any discrepancies in the biography he furnished might be published, Lundh said his background was not important. “If you want to look for inconsistencies, look at the evidence in my case,” he said.

Lundh said he is the victim of a police vendetta, that he was wrongly convicted of the 1982 assault at the Burbank hotel and is now a scapegoat for an unsuccessful investigation into Cohen’s slaying.

“Why they singled me out, I don’t know,” Lundh said. “I was not in Burbank that evening and they know that. If there was a shred of evidence against me, they would have charged me in 1982, but they had the wrong man. It’s not that they had insufficient evidence; they had no evidence.

“This has continued to disrupt my life for nine years,” he added. “I’ve had my fill of justice.”

But Bird, an investigator on the case since its start, said the evidence against Lundh has always been substantial. He said it was only with the reopening of the case and the gathering of additional evidence that prosecutors decided to file charges.

“It was a strong case,” he said. “It’s much stronger now.”

Bird and the Los Angeles County prosecutor assigned to the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip H. Rabichow, have refused to disclose what additional evidence against Lundh was found.

But Lundh, who has access to legal documents on his case because he has acted as his own attorney, said an extradition warrant he studied stated that investigators had a witness who positively identified Lundh as a man seen driving Cohen’s Mustang the night of her death.

Lundh scoffs at such evidence, saying it will be unbelievable to a jury hearing the witness nine years after the slaying.

“There is no possibility that someone is going to believe that somebody can remember something like that nine years later,” he said.

According to police and court records, this is what happened April 27, 1982:

Cohen had gone to the Holiday Inn to attend an est seminar with about 100 others. When the meeting ended about 10:30 p.m., Ruth Kilday, another woman who had attended, saw a man standing in the hallway outside the seminar room. She said the man followed her to the parking lot, where he approached her with a knife as she was opening her car door.

Kilday was able to jump in the car and begin honking its horn to signal that she needed help. The man ran and she started her car and attempted to follow. But the man ran into the hotel’s underground parking garage and Kilday gave up the pursuit.

Authorities said Cohen had parked in the garage and they believe that when she returned to her car, she encountered the man who ran from Kilday.

“I think he stalked her like he stalked the other victim,” Rabichow said.

Cohen was reported missing the next day. Her car, with her body in the trunk, was not found until a North Hollywood resident saw it in an alley and recognized it from media reports about the woman’s disappearance. Meanwhile, police had issued a drawing of the suspect made with the help of Kilday.

A week later, Lundh was arrested in North Hollywood when a police officer saw him in a stolen Corvette. Lundh gave the name John Robert Baker, and he immediately became a suspect in the Cohen and Kilday cases because of his likeness to the drawing of the suspect.

Although Police Chief Daryl F. Gates labeled Baker/Lundh “a very likely suspect” at the time, prosecutors charged Lundh only with the auto theft and the assault on Kilday because there was insufficient evidence linking him to Cohen.

After his arrest, Lundh claimed that he was at a West Los Angeles gas station at 11 p.m. the night of the attack on Kilday, making it impossible for him to have been in Burbank. But during a 1983 trial, he was identified by Kilday as her attacker and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and auto theft. He was sentenced to four years in prison and released in 1985.

The Cohen murder case languished until a chance occurrence in 1989. A detective working on another murder case ran a routine check on the department’s HITMAN--for Homicide Information Tracking Management Automation Network--computer looking for similar slayings.

Bird said the computer, which contains information on all Los Angeles homicides in the last decade, printed out the Cohen case in reply. Prosecutors then discussed the Cohen case with Bird but decided that it was not related to the case the other detective was investigating.

However, after reviewing the Cohen case, the prosecutors told Bird that there was nearly enough evidence to file charges against Lundh and urged that the case be reopened and the investigative ground covered again.

Bird said he located Lundh in St. Paul, where he had recently been paroled from prison for grand theft. Bird said he interviewed Lundh there, then returned to Los Angeles and began gathering new evidence.

In early 1990, Lundh was arrested in Colorado for violating his parole by leaving Minnesota and was returned to prison. Lundh said he left the state to get married and go on a honeymoon. Police believe that he left because he knew that the Cohen case had been reopened.

He was charged May 31, 1990, with Cohen’s murder and returned to Los Angeles in January. The trip back took a week because detectives had to drive him after he cited a fear of flying and refused to go on a plane.

He now awaits arraignment but that may be delayed because Lundh said he has not had enough time to prepare for the hearing.

Lundh’s wife, Gale, who has moved to Los Angeles, is convinced her husband of 1 1/2 years is not a con man or a killer.

“They have the wrong man,” she said. “But in this system, it’s not really innocent until proven guilty. It’s guilty until proven innocent. The sad part is that the person who really did this is still out there.”