Identification of Murder Suspect Is Challenged

A defense expert sought to cast doubt Friday on the testimony of five women who have linked a Minnesota man to the 1982 slaying of a Cal State Northridge administrator.

Testifying in the trial of Jonathan Karl Lundh, Dr. Alfred Coodley found fault with the testimony of all five prosecution witnesses, saying that evidence suggests that police prodded or manipulated them into identifying the defendant.

Lundh, 44, is charged with murder in the April 27, 1982, slaying of 40-year-old Patty Lynn Cohen of Tarzana, assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, in a case that drew widespread attention at the time.

She 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.

Four days later, then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates announced Lundh’s arrest for the Cohen slaying, saying police focused on Lundh, a transient visiting California from the Midwest, after arresting him for car theft.

Police said they determined that Lundh resembled a widely circulated police artist’s sketch of the knife-wielding man seen stalking women at the hotel the night Cohen disappeared.

But prosecutors refused to charge Lundh with Cohen’s murder after concluding that witnesses’ identifications were inadequate, according to testimony.

However, Lundh was convicted of attempting to abduct another woman at knifepoint at the same hotel that night, and sentenced to four years in state prison.

The Cohen case was dormant until 1990, when police re-interviewed witnesses and the district attorney’s office agreed to prosecute.

In his testimony in Van Nuys Superior Court, Coodley, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and frequent defense expert, described as “totally inadequate” the identification of Lundh made by elementary school teacher Rain Slook.

Slook, who died from cancer in January but whose videotaped testimony from a preliminary hearing 15 months ago was played to the jury, said she saw Lundh driving Cohen’s Ford Mustang on Sherman Way in Van Nuys the morning after she disappeared.

Slook said she pulled alongside the car in rush-hour traffic and looked at the driver for up to five seconds because both the car and its license plate resembled those belonging to a man she identified as Rip, a longtime family friend.

Later, when photos of Cohen’s car were published, she connected the incident to the killing and called police, Slook said.

Coodley said Slook “was just trying to eliminate Rip” as the driver of the car, and that in such a situation, people normally do not focus on the features of someone who is not the person they expected to see.

At a lineup shortly after Lundh’s arrest, Slook wrote on a police witness form that she had “strong feelings” that Lundh was the driver of Cohen’s car, but added: “I am not positive.”

However, in her videotaped testimony, Slook said she was positive--a change of position that Coodley attributed to “feelings of guilt” about letting police down in 1982.

Referring to Slook’s testimony that she told a colleague she had had a vision of Cohen’s body in the car trunk, Coodley termed her someone “prone to have fantasies.”

Coodley said he also doubted the identification of the defendant that was made by the woman whom Lundh was convicted of attempting to kidnap from the hotel parking lot.

Evidence suggests “she was convinced in advance” by police that Lundh was the man, Coodley said.

Another woman who attended the lineup identified Lundh as the disheveled man who walked rapidly past her car in the hotel lot as the seminar was breaking up.

Coodley dismissed her testimony as “so marginal as to be insignificant” because she only saw the man for a few seconds and at the lineup said it was one of two men, including Lundh.

Two other women identified Lundh from photos police supplied them several weeks after the slaying.

Coodley said those identifications were tainted by widespread display of Lundh’s photo on television and in newspapers.