A Grand Traverse County jury convicted Steven Gary Koon, 64, of the killing of Linda Meteer, who went missing on April 20, 1989, from a bar near Chum's Corner.
Key to securing the conviction, the prosecutor said, was mitochondrial DNA evidence demonstrating Meteer had been in Koon's vehicle.
That science was not available to authorities in 1989, who suspected Koon but couldn't make an arrest because of a lack of evidence.
Journalist Mardi Link covered the verdict for the Traverse City Record-Eagle, and talked to IPR about the way the prosecutor's case came together.
Producer: Austin Rowlader
Editing: Steve Junker
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
Interview transcript
Lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Ed Ronco, Interlochen Public Radio: Mardi, can you take us back to 1989? Who was Linda Mateer, and what happened?
Mardi Link, journalist: Linda was a 41 year old Traverse City woman, mother of five, and with a demeanor one of her best friends described to me as kind, outgoing, and happy-go-lucky.
So back on April 20, 1989, Linda and a friend went to a bar near Chum’s Corners called Spikes Peak. Some of your listeners might know that bar as Northern Lights – that’s what I remember that place as. Linda disappeared after that, and her body was found about a week later by a mushroom hunter in Hoosier Valley.
Just to place that geographically, that's a rural area in Grand Traverse County's Blair Township.
IPR: Not terribly far away. Police had looked at Steven Kuhn as a suspect, the man convicted yesterday, but they couldn't arrest him at the time because they didn't have enough evidence. What was it that led them back to him all these years later?
Link: So, at the time, witnesses had put Linda Mateer and Steven Koon at the bar on the same night, and at the same time.
Officers took photos of the scene in Hoosier Valley, they took photos and forensic evidence from Koon’s car, which was a brown Cadillac. They interviewed her friends and family, and they interviewed Koon several times, at least seven, which was brought out in testimony during the trial. They also had Michigan State Police and analysts work up a profile, and that was not allowed into evidence.
The judge ruled that it wouldn't be helpful to the jury, but that profile also pointed to Koon. But they didn't make an arrest, and the case went cold.
IPR: That was that was in the early 1990s when that happened, and there's been some advancements in the decades since then, in especially scientific evidence, and I gather that it was that, especially DNA, that finally brought back this case in front of authorities who made an arrest just last year?
Link: Yes, right. And it was mitochondrial DNA, which is a little different than the nuclear DNA that we usually hear about. The jury had a lot of scientific evidence to go through.
Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the maternal line, so mothers pass it to their sons and daughters, but daughters are the only ones that then pass it on. There was a hair found among the forensic evidence in that Cadillac that to a high degree of certainty, 99.7%, eliminated that percentage of the population of Northern America, but did not eliminate Linda Mateer.
So, the prosecutor said that was a near certainty that she had been in his car, and that was key, she said later in the conviction.
IPR: So they've got this scientific evidence in front of the jury. What did Steven Koon’s defense attorneys say during the trial? What was their counterargument here?
Link: At the time of her death, Linda was engaged to be married to a man named Charles Manville, and the defense said that law enforcement didn't look carefully enough at him as a suspect. They posited that he could have been responsible for her death and they brought out with their own forensic evidence that Charles Manville's DNA was not tested.
They also made the point that shortly after the murder, Manville moved away, while Steven Koon stayed in the area and had lived here still. Unfortunately, for the defense, Manville has medical and memory issues, so he wasn't able to be called as a witness.
IPR: It has been interesting to see more widely how DNA evidence has affected court cases. Here, it's led to a conviction. I've covered stories where it's also led to exonerations. We hear about it in modern day trials. How often is it used for this purpose: to go way back into the past and solve something in either direction?
Link: I talked with both Capt. Chris Clark, who's head of the Grand Traverse County Detectives, and Prosecutor Noelle Moeggenberg after the verdict. Neither one of them had worked, had solved the case, or gotten a conviction in a case older than this one. By Grand Traverse County standards, this one is ancient.
Obviously nationwide, and even worldwide, it's used now in criminal convictions, nuclear (DNA) more than mitochondrial DNA. But you may remember the headlines from 2018 when the Golden State Killer out in California, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., was arrested? He was arrested using genetic genealogy, so tracing a family tree using DNA, and I think we already have seen that much more, and I think we will continue to do so.
This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
