Jurors in Slaying Case Tour Burbank Hotel Site : Courts: The Holiday Inn is where CSUN administrator Patty Lynn Cohen was last seen alive in 1982. It is the second murder trial of the Minnesota man.

As the second trial of a Minnesota man charged with murder began Wednesday, jurors visited the Burbank hotel where the Cal State Northridge administrator he is accused of killing was last seen alive 11 years ago.

Under the direction of Van Nuys Superior Court Judge John S. Fisher, jurors toured the Burbank Holiday Inn and its parking garage, where Patty Lynn Cohen, 40, was seen leaving a self-improvement seminar April 27, 1982.

In a case that drew widespread media attention, her nude body was found five days later in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley.

Cohen, assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, had been strangled and stabbed several times with a knife, according to experts.

Jonathan K. Lundh, 44, who is accused of abducting and killing Cohen and who is representing himself in the case, was brought Wednesday to the hotel by sheriff’s deputies who formed a ring around him to prevent escape.

Fisher ordered that the defendant, who was dressed in a jogging suit, should not be handcuffed so jurors would not know he is in custody.

In November, an earlier jury deadlocked 7 to 2 for conviction in the case, with three undecided.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip A. Rabichow said he asked for the unusual hotel tour because some jurors in the first trial reported there was confusion among panelists about the facility’s layout.

Lundh, who police say was a con man living off various women while visiting California from Minnesota at the time of the slaying, became a suspect the day after Cohen’s body was found.

Arrested on car theft charges in North Hollywood, police concluded he bore a striking resemblance to a widely circulated sketch of a mustachioed, knife-wielding man seen loitering at the hotel that night.

But prosecutors refused to charge Lundh with Cohen’s killing, saying that witnesses’ identifications were inadequate.

However, they charged him with attempting to abduct another woman at knifepoint outside the hotel minutes before Cohen was last seen walking to her car in the hotel garage.

Lundh was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in that case and sentenced to four years in prison, returning to Minnesota after serving his time.

Four years ago, police reopened the Cohen case, re-interviewing more than 30 witnesses.

This time, the district attorney’s office agreed to prosecute the murder and Lundh was extradited to California from Minnesota.

Although no physical evidence links Lundh to the murder, four women have identified Lundh, dressed as a maintenance worker, as the man seen stalking women at the hotel that night.

Another woman testified that she saw Lundh driving Cohen’s Ford Mustang on Sherman Way in Van Nuys the morning after the victim disappeared.

At the first trial, Lundh hammered at the brief periods of time that witnesses were able to see the man loitering at the hotel.

Lundh also has suggested repeatedly that police, under pressure to solve the case, concluded that he was the man in the sketch and then leaned on the women to identify him.

He also called several witnesses who, with varying degrees of certainty, say they saw Lundh at two bars and a gas station on the Westside at the time of Cohen’s disappearance.