Man Convicted in 1982 Slaying of CSUN Official

More than a decade after a Cal State Northridge administrator was stabbed and strangled, a jury convicted a Minnesota man Friday of first-degree murder, concluding his second trial for the slaying.

Jonathan K. Lundh, 45, is expected to receive a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole at a May 5 hearing because the jury also determined that he killed 40-year-old Patty Lynne Cohen during both a kidnaping and robbery.

“I feel a person who is clearly a danger to the community will no longer be able to prey upon any community,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip H. Rabichow said.

Lundh, who acted as his own attorney during this trial and at a previous trial that ended with a hung jury, objected to the verdicts, telling Superior Court Judge John Fisher that the trial was improper.

Without citing specifics, Lundh characterized the prosecution as: “If you can’t beat him, cheat him.”

The jury deliberated for about 3 1/2 weeks after hearing testimony for two months.

Cohen, a Tarzana resident who was the assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, was last seen alive April 27, 1982, at the Burbank Holiday Inn where she was attending a self-improvement seminar. Police found her nude body five days later, stuffed into the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley.

Several days after the body was recovered, Lundh was taken into custody on unrelated auto theft charges. Police immediately noticed that he resembled a composite drawing of a mustachioed, knife-wielding man that another woman, Ruth Kilday, said had attacked her at the Burbank Holiday Inn on the night that Cohen disappeared.

Although Lundh was charged and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for attacking Kilday, authorities at the time said there was not enough evidence, and witness identifications were too tenuous, to charge him with killing Cohen. Lundh was sentenced to four years in state prison for the Kilday attack.

The case was reopened in 1989, and after re-interviewing major witnesses, prosecutors decided to charge Lundh with the Cohen slaying.

Lundh was extradited from Minnesota at the end of 1990. His first trial ended in November when a jury deadlocked 7 to 2 in favor of conviction, with three jurors undecided.

In the second trial, four witnesses placed Lundh at the Holiday Inn, another said she saw him driving Cohen’s car, and two others said Lundh frequented a restaurant less than one block from where Cohen’s body was found, according to Rabichow.