Jury Hears Tape of Deceased Witness in ’82 Strangulation

A dead woman’s videotaped testimony linking a Minnesota man to the 1982 slaying of a Cal State Northridge administrator was played to a Van Nuys jury Thursday after a judge rejected defense efforts to bar it.

The accusations by elementary school teacher Rain Slook, who died in January, are the core of the prosecution’s case against Jonathan Karl Lundh, who contends police pressured her to identify him in order to solve a highly publicized murder.

Lundh, who authorities describe as a suave con man with many aliases who lived off women while visiting California from the Midwest a decade ago, is charged with strangling Patty Lynne Cohen, 40, assistant dean of CSUN’s School of Arts.

As jurors strained Thursday to hear the barely audible videotape of Slook’s testimony, which was made six months before she died in January, Lundh, who is representing himself in the case, chatted and joked with his court-appointed investigator.

Lundh unsuccessfully argued that allowing jurors to see the videotape denied him his right to cross-examine his accuser, but Judge John Fisher ruled that use of the tape was unavoidable because of Slook’s death from cancer.

Cohen was last seen leaving an evening self-improvement seminar at the Burbank Holiday Inn on April 27, 1982, according to testimony in the Van Nuys Superior Court trial.

Her nude body was found five days later in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip H. Rabichow contends that Lundh, who claims he is 40 but who police say is 44, was stalking women at the hotel and speculates that he kidnaped Cohen and killed her elsewhere.

Three days after Cohen’s body was found, Lundh was arrested on a charge of car theft after police found him sleeping in a stolen Corvette.

Police testified that they immediately noted a strong resemblance between Lundh and a police artist’s sketch of a mustachioed man that two women reported seeing at the hotel parking lot the night of Cohen’s disappearance.

At a news conference, then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates announced that Lundh was to be charged with Cohen’s murder.

But the district attorney’s office refused to file the charge after Slook said she could not positively identify Lundh as the man she saw driving Cohen’s Ford Mustang on Sherman Way in Van Nuys the morning after the killing.

Slook, who said she did not know Cohen, told police that she focused on the car in morning rush-hour traffic because both the car and its license plate resembled those of a longtime family friend. Slook said she did not connect the sighting to the Cohen case until four days later when she read news reports of the discovery of Cohen’s body.

Although not charged with Cohen’s killing, Lundh was convicted of attempting to abduct another woman--one of two who provided information for the police sketch artist--as she was leaving the same hotel the night of the slaying.

The Cohen case languished until 1990, when police, during what they termed a routine reinvestigation, once again interviewed Slook, who told them she was now prepared to positively identify Lundh as the driver of Cohen’s car.

Lundh was charged with the slaying and extradited from Minnesota, where he had returned after serving a four-year prison term in California for the attempted abduction.

On the videotape played Thursday, which was made during a preliminary hearing in July, 1991, Slook, then dying of cancer, told Lundh from the witness stand: “I do not expect to be around very much longer. I had to face you and you had to face me.”

Lundh repeatedly demanded that the schoolteacher explain how she could positively identify him now but could not do so in 1982.

Slook said 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.

At one point, Slook shot back at him: “I made a mistake that day. I should have said yes” when asked if she was positive Lundh was the driver.

On a witness card filled out at the lineup in 1982, Slook wrote she had “strong feelings” Lundh was the man she saw driving Cohen’s car but added, “I am not positive.”