TRAVERSE CITY — Steven Gary Koon was sentenced Monday to prison, where he will likely spend the rest of his life, for the 1989 killing of Linda Meteer.
Grand Traverse County Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer sentenced the 64-year-old Koon to serve 30 to 60 years for the murder of Meteer, with credit for 552 days already served.
Koon, who continues to maintain his innocence, was found guilty of second-degree murder on June 9 after a five-day jury trial.
Elsenheimer said Koon has lived in “relative peace” for the past 36 years and acknowledged that, given Koon’s age, this would most likely be a life sentence — “as it should be.”
“It is an important day because we are finally bringing someone to justice who clearly was responsible for this murder,” the judge said before handing down the sentence. “And we’re finally, after all these years, bringing peace to a family that desperately needed peace.”
The day of Meteer’s death was “a dark day,” Elsenheimer said, adding that the case was known to everyone who grew up in Traverse City at that time.
“But even darker were the 30-plus years where this case was unresolved due to lack of evidence,” he said.
Meteer, 41, was last seen April 20, 1989, at a bar near Chum’s Corner. Seven days later, a mushroom hunter discovered her body partially concealed under tree branches in a rural area of Blair Township known as Hoosier Valley.
The official death certificate put the day of death as approximately April 20, 1989; the cause was a lacerated liver caused by a severe beating. The autopsy noted that her jaw was broken on both sides, with bruising around the left ribs, indicating broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and bruising on the right side from the lacerated liver.
Grand Traverse County Prosecutor Noelle Moeggenberg asked Elsenheimer to consider the “brutality” of the crime in handing down the sentence. She said Koon stripped and hid the body “as if she was completely expendable.”
Koon was initially a suspect in the murder, but the conclusive connection wasn’t made until the analysis of hair and fibers found in his car provided the evidence that connected him to Meteer with a high degree of certainty. He was arrested on Feb. 18, 2025, in Leelanau County.
Meteer had five children at the time of her death and her son, Shawn Meteer, spoke at the sentencing.
He was 10 years old when his mother was murdered; she was missing on his birthday that year, he recalled.
“A day that should have been filled with happiness became the day my childhood ended,” Meteer said.
Koon didn’t just commit a crime, Meteer added, he destroyed their family.
“He (Koon) took every future memory I was supposed to have with her. He took the chance to hear her voice when I needed comfort. He took the chance to see her smile. And when I reached my milestones in life, he took the chance of her telling me she was proud of me,” Meteer said. “He took the moments I didn’t even know I would miss until they were gone.
“I still think about the life I should have had. I think about the advice my mom would have given me today. I think about what she would say if she could see me standing here today. And the hardest part is knowing I will never get to see those answers.”
Meteer said that, when someone loses a parent, they don’t just lose that person, “a child loses a part of who they are supposed to become.”
The impact the loss has had on his life included mental health struggles and substance abuse issues. “I was angry because I felt like my mom had been forgotten. But she wasn’t forgotten,” he said.
The case went cold in the 1990s and was revived in 2024 when Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Chris Clark reopened the case.
Meteer said the guilty verdict mattered, “not because it gave back my mother, it didn’t. Not because it erased the pain, it didn’t. But because it finally acknowledged what my family didn’t know all along: He (Koon) did this. He took her from us and he changed our lives forever.”
Mattias Johnson, Koon’s attorney, said he advised his client to limit his statement in court “in light of a very likely appeal.” Koon has a “very short criminal background,” he pointed out, continuing to maintain his client’s innocence.
Elsenheimer encouraged Koon to explain what had happened before he handed down the sentence.
Koon said it was a “tragic and sad thing that happened to the family, to Linda Meteer, but I had nothing to do with it.”
The judge pointed out that Meteer was a “friend to many” and “loved by her family.”
Her death was a loss that has, and will, impact many people for multiple generations, Elsenheimer said, wondering how her children’s lives would have been different if she hadn’t been killed, if she had come home from the bar that night.
“But that, because she came into contact with you, that simply wasn’t going to happen,” the judge said. “Sir, you took a life; you took a life and you are responsible therefore for paying the price.”