Crime Beat

said. . . . He is a con man.”
    Police and prosecutors said that beneath Lundh’s calm, articulate demeanor is a dangerous man who stalked women. It is a characterization that Lundh, who is being held without bail, said he finds as aggravating as his loss of freedom.
    “I am not some mad dog cruising the streets, looking to prey on women,” he said during a recent interview. “Anybody who would do that to a woman should be put away.
    “But it’s not me. I am innocent!”
    Lundh is accused of murdering Patty Lynne Cohen on April 27, 1982, in a case that received wide attention in Los Angeles.
    Cohen, 40, an assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, was abducted from the garage of a Holiday Inn in Burbank, where she had attended a self-improvement seminar. Her nude body was found in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley five days later.
    Lundh, who according to court records has nine aliases and records of arrests for nonviolent crimes in at least five states, became a suspect less than two weeks after the slaying. He was later convicted of assaulting another woman outside the hotel just minutes before Cohen disappeared.
    But he was never charged with the Cohen murder until last year—after police reopened the dormant investigation and said they found new evidence linking him to the case.
    By then, Lundh had moved back to his native St. Paul. He was extradited to Los Angeles last month from a Minnesota prison where he was serving a sentence for grand theft in a case in which he used several thousand dollars of an unsuspecting woman’s money to buy a car, authorities said.
    In interviews and court records, Lundh has given different accounts of his background.
    In 1983, according to records, he told a probation officer that he had attended Harvard Law School for a year before dropping out for financial reasons. He said he also attended six other universities, including Princeton.
    Lundh told the probation officer that he made his living providing cars for film sets but also was an agent for several top entertainers. The officer concluded: “This defendant is viewed as a very sophisticated manipulator and con artist who uses his intelligence to defraud the public.”
    In a recent interview, Lundh added a year to his law school experience but said he left Harvard after two years because he was recruited to play defensive end with the Los Angeles Express, a now defunct professional football team.
    “I wanted to attend law school but once I got there, my interests changed,” he said.
    Lundh said he was recruited by Express coaches because he had played defensive end for UCLA, from which he said he graduated in 1974. In addition to UCLA, Lundh said, “I did some time at the University of Hawaii.”
    But efforts to verify Lundh’s claims were unsuccessful.
    “We have no record of that person ever registering or attending the law school,” Harvard spokeswoman Mary Ann Spartichino said.
    Officials at UCLA and Hawaii also said they could not find any records indicating that Lundh attended those schools.
    A media guide listing former UCLA football players did not include Lundh’s name. And the Express lasted only a few seasons after beginning in 1982, a period during which Lundh spent most of his time in jails and prison.
    When told that any discrepancies in the biography he furnished might be published, Lundh said his background was not important. “If you want to look for inconsistencies, look at the evidence in my case,” he said.
    Lundh said he is the victim of a police vendetta, that he was wrongly convicted of the 1982 assault at the Burbank hotel and is now a scapegoat for an unsuccessful investigation into Cohen’s slaying.
    “Why they singled me out, I don’t know,” Lundh said. “I was not in Burbank that evening and they know that. If there was a shred of evidence against me, they would have charged me in 1982, but they had the wrong man. It’s not that they had insufficient evidence; they had no evidence.
    “This has continued to disrupt my life for nine years,” he added. “I’ve had my fill of justice.”
    But Bird, an investigator on the case since its start, said the evidence against Lundh has always been substantial. He said it was only with the reopening of the case and the gathering of additional evidence that prosecutors decided to file charges.
    “It was a strong case,” he said. “It’s much stronger now.”
    Bird and the Los Angeles County prosecutor