Gone With the Boyfriend and the Cash: The Disappearance of Jozlynn Martinez

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

June 22, 2026

Jozlynn Mari Martinez was two years old, a small girl her family called Jozzie, when she disappeared from her home on the 900 block of Nagold Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sometime during the overnight hours of February 22 to 23, 2010. Her mother, Consuela Martinez, had heard her in her bedroom between 11:00 and 11:30 that night, an ordinary, unremarkable sound of a toddler settling in for sleep. By morning, Jozlynn was gone. So was her mother's live-in boyfriend, Jeffrey Lynn Malmberg. So was $2,800 in cash that had been sitting in Consuela's purse.

A Toddler in a Troubled Household

Jozlynn lived with her mother, her seven-month-old baby brother, and Malmberg, her mother's boyfriend at the time. Consuela Martinez was only 21 years old herself, raising two young children while managing a relationship that had already shown clear warning signs of danger. Malmberg had a documented history of substance abuse and prior criminal charges, and the relationship between him and Consuela had already grown troubled enough that a protection order had been issued against him in 2009 following threats he had made toward her. Consuela herself had noticed bruises on Jozlynn in the period before her disappearance and had already begun to suspect the little girl was being abused, a suspicion that, in hindsight, pointed directly at the danger already living inside her own home. Despite that suspicion and the existing protection order, Malmberg remained in the household and continued to have unsupervised access to Jozlynn.

The Night She Vanished

When Consuela discovered on the morning of February 23 that Jozlynn was missing, she also found that Malmberg and a significant amount of her own cash had disappeared along with her daughter. Jozlynn's infant brother, only seven months old, remained safely in the home, untouched. The timeline left a narrow window, roughly the overnight hours after Consuela had last heard her daughter in her room, during which whatever happened to Jozlynn had taken place.

An Arrest in Lansing

Police located and arrested Jeffrey Malmberg in Lansing, Michigan, on February 24, just a day after Jozlynn's disappearance was discovered. Under questioning, he told investigators that Jozlynn had died in the home sometime during the night of February 22 into the early morning of February 23, and admitted that he had disposed of her body by placing it in a dumpster. During his preliminary examination that March, prosecutors played a recorded confession for the court in which Malmberg stated flatly, "I just killed my daughter," even though he was not Jozlynn's biological father. He was charged with second-degree murder along with tampering with evidence and larceny, connected to the missing $2,800, and the prosecutor's office declined to offer any plea deal, pushing the case toward a full trial.

A Landfill Search That Found Nothing

Once Malmberg directed investigators toward the dumpster where he claimed to have left Jozlynn's body, police launched an extensive search of the Kent County landfill where that dumpster's contents would have ultimately been trucked and processed. The search continued for roughly two weeks before authorities called it off on March 10, 2010, having failed to locate any trace of Jozlynn among the tons of waste already processed at the facility. Investigators concluded that her remains had most likely been incinerated along with other garbage before the search had even begun, leaving nothing physical behind to recover no matter how thoroughly the landfill was combed.

A Confession That Kept Changing

Malmberg's account of exactly how Jozlynn had died shifted substantially over the course of the investigation. At various points he claimed she had fallen down a set of stairs, and at other points he described suffocating her by kneeling on her chest. He also, briefly, attempted to shift blame toward Consuela herself before investigators were able to establish a clearer picture of what had actually happened. The inconsistency in his own retellings became one of the more damning elements of the case against him, since a genuinely accidental death typically produces a single, consistent account rather than a shifting series of explanations that each conveniently minimized his own culpability.

Trial and Conviction

Malmberg's case went to trial in October 2010. At trial, he maintained that Jozlynn's death had been accidental rather than intentional. Prosecutors countered that argument with expert testimony establishing that the kind of suffocation Malmberg himself had described, kneeling on a small child's chest, would have required somewhere between two and five continuous minutes of sustained compression to actually cause death, a duration that undercut any claim that what happened had been a single unfortunate accident rather than a sustained, deliberate act. The jury agreed with the prosecution, convicting Malmberg of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to a term of thirty to ninety years in prison and pursued an appeal of that conviction in the years that followed.

A Family Pushing for Answers and Reform

While the investigation and search continued, Jozlynn's extended family worked to keep her case visible, distributing missing posters and printing t-shirts bearing her name and photograph to raise awareness while there was still hope she might be found alive. Her grandmother and her biological father, John Rittenhouse, publicly pushed for an Amber Alert to be issued or reinstated in connection with her disappearance. Rittenhouse later offered his own theory about what might have driven Malmberg to kill a two-year-old child who was not his own, suggesting it may have stemmed from something like jealousy, speculating that Malmberg might have seen harming Jozlynn as a way to get even with Consuela over tensions in their relationship.

Court records connected to the case also revealed that Jozlynn's seven-month-old brother, Bryan, was placed into protective custody following her death, and that Consuela herself, who had noticed bruising on Jozlynn beforehand yet continued to allow Malmberg unsupervised time with her, subsequently participated in a court-ordered treatment plan aimed at eventually being reunified with her surviving son.

Never Found

Jozlynn Mari Martinez's remains have never been recovered. Because Malmberg disposed of her body in a dumpster whose contents were collected and incinerated before any search could be conducted, investigators and prosecutors have treated her remains as effectively unrecoverable, a genuinely rare and painful circumstance in which the person responsible for a child's death has been identified, tried, and convicted, while the most basic act of recovering that child's body and laying her to rest has been rendered permanently impossible by the very method used to dispose of her.

Jozlynn's case stands as a stark illustration of how thoroughly a protective order and a mother's own growing suspicion of abuse can fail to prevent a tragedy when the danger is already living inside the home. Consuela had already sought legal protection from Malmberg the year before her daughter's death, and had already begun noticing signs suggesting Jozlynn was being harmed. None of it was enough to remove the threat before it turned fatal. What remains today is a conviction without a body, a two-year-old girl whose case will likely never see the one thing her family has always wanted most, a place to finally bring her home.

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