Witness Again Testifies She Fought Off Lundh : Courts: The environmentalist says the man stalked a Burbank hotel. He is being retried in ’82 killing.

For the seventh time in 11 years, a prominent environmentalist Friday identified in court a Minnesota man as the stalker she fought off outside a Burbank hotel minutes before another woman was abducted there and killed.

Ruth Kilday, executive director of the Mountains Conservancy Foundation, testified that Jonathan K. Lundh, 44, followed her around the lobby and hallways of the Burbank Holiday Inn on the night of April 27, 1982.

He then brandished a knife and tried to force his way into her car parked on Angeleno Street in front of the hotel, said Kilday, who heads a group that buys and preserves land for parks in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Kilday, who said she sounded her car horn and used the driver’s side door to push the assailant back, clashed repeatedly in Van Nuys Superior Court on Friday with Lundh, who is acting as his own attorney in the case.

In a case that began with intense media and police attention, then languished for years, Lundh is charged with the murder of Patty Lynn Cohen, 40, assistant to the dean of the Cal State Northridge School of Arts.

According to prosecution witnesses, Cohen was last seen walking toward her car in the hotel garage at about the time Kilday fought off the attacker she has testified repeatedly was Lundh.

Cohen’s nude body was found five days later in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley. She had been strangled and had knife cuts on her hand.

Prosecutors theorize that after failing to overpower Kilday, Lundh ran into the adjacent parking garage and abducted Cohen while stealing her car to make his escape.

Kilday and Cohen were part of a large group leaving a self-improvement seminar at the hotel when the incidents occurred, according to testimony.

In addition to Kilday, three other women attending the session identified Lundh, in testimony at the previous trials, as the mustachioed man they saw loitering at the hotel. Another woman has testified in the past that she saw Lundh driving Cohen’s Ford Mustang on Sherman Way in Van Nuys the morning after Cohen disappeared.

Lundh, whom police describe as a suave con man who lived off women while visiting California at the time of the slaying, became a suspect the day after Cohen’s body was found. After arresting him on car theft charges in North Hollywood, police said they noticed Lundh resembled a widely circulated police sketch of the mustachioed man described by Kilday.

But prosecutors refused to charge Lundh with Cohen’s killing, saying that witnesses’ identifications were inadequate because only Kilday had seen him for more than a few seconds.

However, they charged him with attempting to abduct Kilday.

He was convicted in 1983 of assault with a deadly weapon and car theft and sentenced to four years in prison, returning to Minnesota after serving his time.

In 1989, police reopened the Cohen case and re-interviewed major witnesses.

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

In November, after a six-week trial, a jury deadlocked 7 to 2 in favor of convicting Lundh of the murder, with three undecided, and the district attorney’s office brought Lundh to trial again.

Kilday, under questioning by Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip A. Rabichow, said that in addition to the 1983 and 1992 trials, she has identified Lundh as her assailant at four other court hearings related to the case over the past 11 years.

She said her irritation under cross-examination was the result of Lundh’s repetitive questions and “having to answer questions from and speak directly to Mr. Lundh.”

Lundh contends that Kilday and the other women who have identified him were coerced by detectives eager to solve a high-visibility case.

At both the 1983 and 1992 trials, he also called witnesses who, with varying degrees of certainty, said they saw Lundh at two Westside bars and an Inglewood gas station at about the time Kilday was attacked and Cohen disappeared.