Jury convicts Leelanau County man in 1989 Grand Traverse murder case

A Grand Traverse County jury ended a 37-year wait for justice Monday, convicting Steven Gary Koon, 64, of Leelanau County, in the 1989 killing of Linda Marie Meteer. Jurors reached the second-degree murder verdict after nearly two days of deliberations in 13th Circuit Court before Judge Kevin Elsenheimer.

Meteer was 41 years old and the mother of five when she vanished after leaving a bar in Chum’s Corner on April 20, 1989. Her body was found a week later, on April 27, 1989, in Hoosier Valley near Traverse City. For decades, the case sat among northern Michigan’s most painful unsolved crimes, a murder that investigators never fully let go of and family members carried in public silence and private grief.

The breakthrough came only after the case was reopened in 2023 and investigators began applying tools that did not exist when Meteer was killed. Prosecutors and law enforcement said the investigation was strengthened by DNA work, including mitochondrial DNA, and by fiber analysis. Testimony at trial also focused on fibers recovered from Koon’s car that shared characteristics with fibers found near the scene where Meteer’s body was discovered.

Western Michigan University’s Cold Case Program also played a key role. Students digitized the case file and built searchable timelines and documents, helping turn paper records and old leads into a form investigators could compare against modern forensic results. Grand Traverse County Sheriff Michael Shea announced the arrest in February 2025, and Koon was later charged with open murder after investigators pieced the case back together.

The jury’s decision closed a case that had first identified Koon as a person of interest in 1989, but never produced a conviction at the time. Prosecuting Attorney Noelle Moeggenberg and Detective Captain Chris Clark said they stayed in contact with Meteer’s family as the case moved forward, a reminder that the evidence reached far beyond the courtroom and into a family that spent decades waiting for an answer.

Meteer’s daughter, Lisa Haney, said after the arrest that she was 17 when her mother was killed and had lived with unanswered questions ever since. The verdict gave Grand Traverse County a rare cold-case conviction and showed that even a file that sat unresolved for nearly four decades can still be rebuilt, tested and proven in court.