Dying Woman Links Man to 1982 Murder : Killing: Cancer victim says she made a mistake nine years ago in not identifying the suspect. He is charged in death of a college staff member.

An elementary school teacher who says she is dying of cancer provided dramatic testimony Monday linking a Minnesota man to a murder in Burbank nine years ago.

Saying she had to give her testimony before her death, a trembling Rain Slook identified Jonathan Karl Lundh as the man she saw driving the victim’s car shortly after the murder.

“I do not expect to be around very much longer,” Slook told Lundh from the witness stand during a preliminary hearing in Van Nuys Municipal Court. “I had to face you, and you had to face me.”

Lundh, 39, is accused of murdering Patty Lynne Cohen, 40, a Cal State Northridge staff member, on April 27, 1982.

Cohen, assistant to the dean of the college’s School of Arts, was last seen leaving an evening self-improvement seminar at the Burbank Holiday Inn.

Her nude body was found five days later in the trunk of her car in an alley in North Hollywood. She had been strangled.

Lundh was questioned about the killing. Prosecutors declined to charge him after Slook said she could not positively identify him as the driver of Cohen’s Mustang.

He was convicted in an attempt to abduct another woman from the hotel parking garage shortly before Cohen disappeared. He served four years for assault with a deadly weapon in that case.

After the case was reopened, Lundh was charged last year with the murder. He was extradited from Minnesota, where he was in prison for grand theft.

Lundh, who is representing himself at his preliminary hearing, repeatedly demanded during cross-examination Monday that Slook, the prosecution’s key witness, explain how she can identify him now but could not do so in 1982.

Slook replied that she was intimidated by officials at the 1982 lineup and “felt that no one was going to believe me . . . because I only had a peripheral view” of the man driving the dead woman’s car.

She acknowledged writing on a police witness form at the time that she had “strong feelings” that Lundh was the man she saw driving the victim’s car but adding, “I am not positive.”

On the stand Monday, Slook said: “I made a mistake that day. I should have said yes.”

Slook said she told investigators in 1990 that she was now willing to identify him “because I only have three to six months to live, and I have to finish up this business.”

At the request of Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip H. Rabichow, Judge Michael S. Luros ordered that Slook’s testimony be videotaped.

The prosecutor said that if Luros orders a trial, Slook’s testimony can be played for a jury if she is not alive or not strong enough to testify.

The Cohen murder case languished for more than seven years until investigators, studying it because of its similarity to another murder, decided to interview Lundh and major witnesses, including Slook, again.

Detectives said they located Lundh in his native St. Paul, where he was convicted of grand theft after being paroled in California.