Witness Backs Up Tape Linking Man to ’82 Slaying

A retired schoolteacher on Wednesday corroborated a dead colleague’s videotaped statements linking a Minnesota man to the 1982 slaying of a Cal State Northridge administrator.

During the trial of Jonathan Karl Lundh, former elementary school teacher Fanny Krivit’s testimony contradicted the defense’s contention that police had pressured her dead colleague, whose taped testimony is the core of the prosecution case.

Lundh, 40, is accused of murdering Patty Lynne Cohen, 40, on April 27, 1982, in a case that drew widespread attention at the time.

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

Authorities believe Lundh, a transient, kidnaped Cohen while stalking women leaving the seminar. Her nude body was found five days later in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley. She had been strangled.

A key issue in the trial is the credibility of Rain Slook, who died of cancer in January but who testified six months earlier that she saw Lundh driving a car resembling Cohen’s Ford Mustang the morning after the woman disappeared.

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

The judge at the preliminary hearing ordered her testimony taped in the event that she did not live to testify at the trial.

In that videotaped testimony, which is expected to be played to the jury today, Slook testified that she was afraid to identify Lundh at a 1982 lineup because “no one was going to believe me.”

At the time, she wrote on a police witness form that she had “strong feelings” it was Lundh but added, “I am not positive.”

Slook, in her videotaped testimony, said that she focused on the car while driving to school along Sherman Way because its make and license plate were similar to that belonging to a longtime friend.

Slook, who said she did not know Cohen, testified that only later did she connect the car and the man she saw driving it to news reports about the murder.

On Wednesday, Krivit said that shortly after Cohen’s disappearance--and several days before Lundh’s arrest--Slook had told her of seeing a man driving a Ford Mustang on Sherman Way.

“I actually saw the car,” she quoted Slook as telling her. “I saw the license and that made me look at it.”

She also quoted Slook as saying the driver was not her friend. Slook told her “I’ll never forget his face” because she got an “uneasy feeling” looking at the driver, Krivit said.

Lundh initially was questioned about the killing when detectives determined that he resembled a police artist’s sketch of the mustachioed man two other women said they had seen in the Holiday Inn parking lot.

In 1983, Lundh was convicted of attempted assault with a deadly weapon on another woman leaving the hotel the night of Cohen’s 1982 murder.

But prosecutors declined to file charges in Cohen’s murder after Slook said she could not positively identify him as the driver of the victim’s car.

According to testimony, charges were filed in 1990 when detectives, routinely reinvestigating the case, re-interviewed Slook, who told them she was now prepared to identify Lundh as the driver of Cohen’s car.

Lundh was extradited from Minnesota, were he was in prison for grand theft.