Crime Beat

assigned to the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip H. Rabichow, have refused to disclose what additional evidence against Lundh was found.
    But Lundh, who has access to legal documents on his case because he has acted as his own attorney, said an extradition warrant he studied stated that investigators had a witness who positively identified Lundh as a man seen driving Cohen’s Mustang the night of her death.
    Lundh scoffs at such evidence, saying it will be unbelievable to a jury hearing the witness nine years after the slaying.
    “There is no possibility that someone is going to believe that somebody can remember something like that nine years later,” he said.
    According to police and court records, this is what happened April 27, 1982:
    Cohen had gone to the Holiday Inn to attend a self-help seminar with about 100 others. When the meeting ended about 10:30 p.m., Ruth Kilday, another woman who had attended, saw a man standing in the hallway outside the seminar room. She said the man followed her to the parking lot, where he approached her with a knife as she was opening her car door.
    Kilday was able to jump in the car and begin honking its horn to signal that she needed help. The man ran and she started her car and attempted to follow. But the man ran into the hotel’s underground parking garage and Kilday gave up the pursuit.
    Authorities said Cohen had parked in the garage and they believe that when she returned to her car, she encountered the man who ran from Kilday.
    “I think he stalked her like he stalked the other victim,” Rabichow said.
    Cohen was reported missing the next day. Her car, with her body in the trunk, was not found until a North Hollywood resident saw it in an alley and recognized it from media reports about the woman’s disappearance. Meanwhile, police had issued a drawing of the suspect made with the help of Kilday.
    A week later, Lundh was arrested in North Hollywood when a police officer saw him in a stolen Corvette. Lundh gave the name John Robert Baker, and he immediately became a suspect in the Cohen and Kilday cases because of his likeness to the drawing of the suspect.
    Although Police Chief Daryl F. Gates labeled Baker/ Lundh “a very likely suspect” at the time, prosecutors charged Lundh only with the auto theft and the assault on Kilday because there was insufficient evidence linking him to Cohen.
    After his arrest, Lundh claimed that he was at a West Los Angeles gas station at 11 p.m. the night of the attack on Kilday, making it impossible for him to have been in Burbank. But during a 1983 trial, he was identified by Kilday as her attacker and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and auto theft. He was sentenced to four years in prison and released in 1986.
    The Cohen murder case languished until a chance occurrence in 1990. A detective working on another murder case ran a routine check on the department’s HITMAN—for Homicide Information Tracking Management Automation Network—computer looking for similar slayings.
    Bird said the computer, which contains information on all Los Angeles homicides in the last decade, printed out the Cohen case in reply. Prosecutors then discussed the Cohen case with Bird but decided that it was not related to the case the other detective was investigating.
    However, after reviewing the Cohen case, the prosecutors told Bird that there was nearly enough evidence to file charges against Lundh and urged that the case be reopened and the investigative ground covered again.
    Bird said he located Lundh in St. Paul, where he had recently been paroled from prison for grand theft. Bird said he interviewed Lundh there, then returned to Los Angeles and began gathering new evidence.
    In early 1990, Lundh was arrested in Colorado for violating his parole by leaving Minnesota and was returned to prison. Lundh said he left the state to get married and go on a honeymoon. Police believe that he left because he knew that the Cohen case had been reopened.
    He was charged May 31, 1990, with Cohen’s murder and returned to Los Angeles in January. The trip back took a week because detectives had to drive him after he cited a fear of flying and refused to go on a plane.
    He now awaits arraignment but that may be delayed because Lundh said he has not had enough time to prepare for the hearing.
    Lundh’s wife, Gale, who has moved to Los Angeles, is convinced her husband of 1 1/2 years is not a con man or a killer.
    “They have the wrong man,” she