34 years later, and it is still unclear what happened to Jonelle Matthews. Police say no body has ever been found, no suspect ever arrested, but they’re not giving up and tell us modern tools, among other things, might help them solve this case.
“On the night of December 20th, 1984, a 12-year-old girl walked into her home, kicked off her shoes, and sat down by the warmth of a space heater next to the family Christmas tree. She had just performed in her school’s holiday concert. She was happy. She was safe. She was home. 60 minutes later, she was gone, and she would stay gone for 35 years. No signs of a struggle, no forced entry, no screams heard by the neighbors, just a pair of small shoes sitting perfectly in front of an empty couch, and footprints in the snow outside her living room window.”
Footprints that someone tried to erase with a garden rake. Her name was Jonelle Matthews, and the man who took her life that night would spend the next 37 years hiding in plain sight, running for governor, giving interviews to journalists, inserting himself into the very investigation meant to catch him. But here’s what makes this case truly disturbing. He couldn’t stop talking, and every single word he said slowly built the noose around his own neck. To understand what happened to Jonelle Matthews, you first have to understand who she was. Because this wasn’t just some name in a case file. This was a real kid, a loud, funny, dramatic, larger-than-life kid who made every single room she walked into feel a little brighter.
Jonelle was born on February 9th, 1972, in Santa Barbara, California. But her story starts with heartbreak before it even begins. Her biological mother, Terri Vera Martinez, was just 13 years old when she gave birth. 13, a child herself, and after about a month of trying to make it work, Terri made the hardest decision a mother can make. She gave Jonelle up for adoption. Not because she didn’t love her, but because she loved her enough to want something better for her. And Jonelle got that something better. A couple from Colorado named Jim and Gloria Matthews adopted her within weeks. They already had a daughter, Jennifer, and now the family was complete.
They moved to Greeley, a small, quiet, tight-knit town about 60 miles north of Denver, the kind of place where kids rode their bikes until the streetlights came on, where families left their front doors unlocked, where everybody knew everybody, the kind of place where you’d never imagine a child could simply vanish from inside her own home. Jim Matthews worked as the principal of Platte Valley Elementary School. Gloria worked at a local restaurant. They were active in their church, the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene, and Jonelle, she was the spark of that family. Her friends described her as theatrical, dramatic, hilarious. She loved performing in church skits, singing in her school choir, having sleepovers, fawning over the boy band Menudo.
She was the kind of kid who made everything a big deal, because to her, everything was a big deal. Christmas was coming, and Jonelle Matthews was absolutely buzzing with excitement. Now, December 20th, 1984, 5 days before Christmas. This is the day everything changes. Jonelle had actually been sick with a cold in the days leading up to this. Most kids her age would have jumped at the chance to stay home from school, not Jonelle. She practically begged her parents to let her go. She had Christmas gifts to hand out to friends she wouldn’t see for weeks, and more importantly, she’d been selected to perform with the Franklin Middle School Honor Choir at their annual holiday concert.
There was absolutely no way she was missing that. Jim and Gloria agreed, but they had one condition: come straight home after the concert and rest. Jonelle promised, and off she went. That evening, the concert was held at the IntraWest Bank of Denver’s local branch. It was even televised on a local cable network. Jonelle performed with her classmates, singing Christmas carols. Her friend Diana Ross was there, too. The two girls sang together, laughed together, and afterward, Diana’s father, Russell, offered to drive Jonelle home. That car ride was the last normal moment of Jonelle Matthews’ life. At approximately 8:15 p.m., Russell Ross pulled up to the Matthews family home at 320 43rd Avenue Court.
Jonelle got out, said goodbye to Diana, wished her a Merry Christmas, and walked up the driveway. Russell and Diana sat in the car and watched. They waited until Jonelle made it inside, and then the light in the foyer flickered on. That was the signal, the unspoken agreement between kids and parents in a small town. The light comes on, it means I’m in, I’m safe, everything’s fine. Russell drove away. He had no idea he was the last person, other than her killer, to ever see Jonelle Matthews alive. Now, here’s what we know happened next. At around 8:30 p.m., Jonelle answered a phone call at the house. It was a teacher from her father’s school calling to let Jim know he wouldn’t be in the next morning.
Jonelle took a message for her dad, polite, responsible, normal. Everything about this phone call was completely ordinary. That phone call is the last confirmed contact with Jonelle Matthews. After that, silence. Something happened inside that house between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. And whatever it was, it happened fast. Jim Matthews had been at his older daughter Jennifer’s basketball game that evening. Gloria was out of state caring for her own sick mother. So, when Jim pulled into the driveway at around 9:30 p.m., he expected to find Jonelle relaxing at home, maybe watching TV, maybe already asleep on her favorite spot on the couch. He walked inside.
The house was warm, the heater was on, the television was still playing, and there on the couch, Jonelle’s favorite doll was draped across the back as if she just taken it off. Her shoes were sitting perfectly on the floor in front of her usual spot, right next to the Christmas tree. Everything looked like Jonelle had been there moments ago, but Jonelle wasn’t there. The heater was running, the shoes were still warm, but the girl who wore them was gone. Jim didn’t panic right away. Maybe she went to a friend’s house. He started making calls. No one had seen her. Then at 10:00 p.m., Jennifer came home from the game. She walked in and immediately called out,
“Hi Jonelle, Jonelle, are you there?”
No answer. That’s when the fear hit. Jim called the Greeley police. They arrived within 15 minutes. And what they found outside the house sent a chill through every officer on scene. Footprints in the fresh snow, right outside the living room windows. Someone had been standing there, watching, peering inside. And these weren’t the footprints of a child. They were too big, too deliberate. And here’s the part that really gets under your skin. Somebody had tried to rake over those footprints. Using a garden rake pulled right out of the Matthews’ own garage. No forced entry, no signs of struggle inside the house, no broken windows, no screams reported by any neighbor.
Whoever took Jonelle Matthews that night did it quietly, efficiently, and deliberately. And they knew enough about the house to use the family’s own rake to cover their tracks. This wasn’t random. This was someone who had been watching, planning, waiting for the exact right moment when a 12-year-old girl was completely alone. The police initially explored the possibility that Jonelle had run away. Jim Matthews couldn’t believe it. He told the officers there were too many good things happening in her life. She had a sleepover planned for the next day. She was going to perform in a Christmas presentation at church. And presents, it was Christmas. What 12-year-old runs away 5 days before Christmas?
They searched her locker. They went through her bedroom. Nothing. No plan to leave, no note, no indication of family trouble. And as the days turned into weeks with no sign of Jonelle, the runaway theory completely collapsed. Investigators then turned their attention to Jim Matthews himself, the father. In cases like these, law enforcement always looks at the family first. And Jim understood that. He cooperated fully. He took a lie detector test administered by the FBI’s top interrogator west of the Mississippi River. The agent told him he failed. Jim took another one with local police. Imagine that. Your daughter is missing. You’re terrified. And the people who are supposed to be finding her are accusing you of making her disappear.
But Jim kept telling them the truth again and again. Eventually, he was cleared, which left investigators with nothing. No suspect, no body, no leads. They even placed Jonelle’s birth mother, Terri Viera Martinez, under surveillance for weeks. Terri didn’t even know Jonelle was missing. She hadn’t made contact with the family in over a decade. Another dead end. Meanwhile, the community refused to let Jonelle be forgotten. A 24-hour prayer vigil was held at local churches. Thousands of reward posters were printed and distributed across the country. And then came something that burned Jonelle’s face into the memory of an entire nation.
Jonelle Matthews became one of the very first missing children in American history to have her photo printed on a milk carton. Think about that. In the mid-1980s, there was no Amber Alert system, no social media, no instant notifications. The way you found missing kids was by printing their faces on something every family in America saw at the breakfast table every single morning. Jonelle’s face was on milk cartons from coast to coast. Her story even reached the president of the United States. In March 1985, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech about the crisis of missing children in America, and he mentioned Jonelle by name.
A 12-year-old girl from a small town in Colorado, spoken about by the most powerful man in the world, and still nothing. No leads, no tips that went anywhere. The case went cold, stone cold. Five years passed, then 10. In 1994, a full decade after Jonelle vanished, her parents made the gut-wrenching decision to have her declared legally dead. Gloria Matthews said at the time, they’d spent 10 years without a reason, 10 years without a motive, 10 years with no answers. She asked publicly,
“Doesn’t anyone know anything? Can’t someone just tell us where her body is so we can bury our daughter?”
Nobody answered. In May of 1985, there had been a brief flicker of hope. A portion of a human scalp was found on a farmer’s land in Weld County. Gloria was asked to look at it. Imagine being a mother and being asked to examine a piece of a human scalp to see if it belongs to your child. She did it because that’s what mothers do, but it wasn’t Jonelle. And the relief of that moment was swallowed immediately by the agony of still not knowing. Staying in Greeley became unbearable. The memories, the empty bedroom, the questions from neighbors that had no answers. Jim and Gloria eventually left.
They moved first to the Philippines as missionaries, then retired to Costa Rica. Jennifer, Jonelle’s older sister, married and moved to Washington state. But Gloria never stopped looking. Everywhere she went, her eyes scanned crowds, searched faces. She told people that in her dreams, Jonelle always came home. Every single dream, her daughter came back through the front door smiling. In reality, that door stayed closed for 35 years. July 23rd, 2019, a construction crew is working on a new oil and gas pipeline in a remote, desolate stretch of farmland in rural Weld County, about 15 miles southeast of Greeley. Just another day. Just another dig until the bulldozer operator hit something in the dirt.
Bones, human bones, and something else, a skull with orthodontic braces still attached, and fragments of fabric, pieces of a plaid skirt, a blouse, and a sweater vest. The same clothes Jonelle Matthews was wearing the night she walked into her house and never walked out. Two days later, the Weld County Coroner’s Office confirmed what everyone feared. The remains were Jonelle’s. Identified through dental records and DNA. And the autopsy revealed something that turned a missing person’s case into a murder investigation. A single gunshot wound to the head. Jonelle hadn’t wandered off. She hadn’t run away.
She hadn’t been taken by a stranger passing through town. Someone had walked her out of that house, driven her to a field 15 miles away, put a gun to her head, and pulled the trigger. Then buried her in the dirt like she was nothing. The remains were found wrapped in a white bedsheet. Her coat was partially zipped, turned inside out with the cuffs tucked into the armpits. When investigators pulled the cuffs open, small hand bones fell out, meaning Jonelle’s hands were tucked underneath her armpits when she died. She was cold, a 12-year-old girl standing in a field in December trying to keep herself warm in her final moments. Let that sink in for a moment. Because that image is going to stay with you.
For Jim and Gloria Matthews, the discovery was a devastating kind of relief. Gloria had always held onto the tiniest thread of hope that maybe, somehow, her daughter was alive out there somewhere. That thread was now severed forever, but there was a new question now, one that Greeley had been waiting 35 years to ask. Who killed Jonelle Matthews? Just weeks after the remains were discovered, the Greeley Police Department made an announcement that shocked the community. They had a person of interest, and this wasn’t some drifter or unknown criminal. This was a man who had run for governor, twice.
A man who had spent decades giving interviews, writing letters, filing legal documents, all while carefully weaving references to Jonelle Matthews into almost everything he did. His name was Steven Dana Pankey, and the story of how he got caught is one of the most bizarre things you will ever hear in any true crime case, anywhere, ever. In 1984, when Jonelle disappeared, Pankey was a 33-year-old married father living in Greeley. His house was just 2 miles from the Matthews home. He attended the same church, the Sunny View Church of the Nazarene, and on the day before Jonelle vanished, December 19th, Pankey had been arrested at a local bank for harassment and criminal trespass.
His used car business had collapsed, and he was spiraling financially. Now, in the days immediately after Jonelle’s disappearance, something very strange happened. According to his ex-wife Angela Hicks, Pankey came home and announced they were leaving town. Immediately before daylight the next morning, they were going to Big Bear Lake, California to visit his parents for Christmas. Angela said this trip was not planned. It was sudden, unexpected, and rushed. But the really disturbing part came on the drive back. See, Pankey had banned all media from their household. No television, no radio, no newspapers, no music. He declared it a godly home.
Angela wasn’t even allowed to drive. And yet, on the ride back to Greeley after cutting the trip short, Pankey suddenly ordered Angela to turn on the car radio. He wanted news. Specifically, he wanted news about a missing girl, a girl he would later claim he’d never heard of. Angela testified that she flipped through the stations for hours while Pankey listened obsessively for any mention of Jonelle Matthews. When they got back to Greeley, he drove straight past their house to a store and bought every local newspaper. Then, he made Angela read every single article about Jonelle’s disappearance out loud to him three times each.
But, that wasn’t all. Within days of returning home, Pankey changed into coveralls and galoshes and started digging in the front yard. He told Angela it was a septic tank issue. But, their septic tank had just been replaced earlier that year. Angela hadn’t noticed any problems with it. Then, that same week, a car stored on their property mysteriously caught fire. Angela went outside to check and found Pankey standing next to the burning vehicle holding a shovel. A sudden trip out of state, an obsession with the news about Jonelle, unexplained digging in the yard, a car set on fire. All of this within one single week of a 12-year-old girl’s disappearance.
And then, Pankey did something that no guilty person in their right mind should ever do. He picked up the phone and called the FBI. One month after Jonelle vanished, Steven Pankey walked into the Greeley Police Department claiming to be an ordained Baptist minister who had received information about the disappearance through a pastoral confession. He said he had knowledge that could help solve the case. But, there was a catch. He wanted immunity first. The police didn’t give it to him, but they noted his name and they started watching.
Now, let’s get back to Steven Pankey because what he did over the next three decades is genuinely unlike anything I’ve ever covered. After that initial contact with law enforcement, Pankey and his family left Greeley. They bounced around several states before settling in Twin Falls, Idaho, in the late 1980s. But Greeley and Jonelle never left his mind. While in Idaho, Pankey discovered a new passion, politics. He ran for sheriff three times, city council, lieutenant governor, governor twice. He lost every single race, badly. In 2018, he pulled 1.4% of the vote in the Republican primary.
But politics wasn’t the real story. Underneath the campaigns and the speeches, Pankey was doing something far more troubling. He was writing. Constantly, obsessively, letters to attorneys, court filings, petitions to the Idaho Supreme Court. And scattered throughout all of these documents, in cases that had absolutely nothing to do with a missing girl from Colorado, were random, unprompted references to Jonelle Matthews. When police eventually searched his home, they found over 1,000 documents that mentioned Jonelle Matthews. 1,000. In a 1999 court filing, Pankey told the Idaho Supreme Court that a previous conviction was part of an attempt to force him to become an informant in Jonelle’s disappearance.
And then he wrote something that made every investigator’s blood run cold. He said he feared he might get the death penalty for revealing the location of her body. Think about that. Why would an innocent man be afraid of getting the death penalty for telling police where a murdered girl’s body was buried, unless he knew exactly where that body was. He also wrote a book. It was found during the search of his home. The title, “Graveyards.” Inside, it was filled with hatred directed at the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene, the same church the Matthews family attended, the same church Pankey had been kicked out of before the Matthews even joined.
He told a police officer in the late 1990s that he had buried bodies in Colorado. He described himself in legal filings as the subject of a capital murder investigation. He called himself a material witness in the Jonelle Matthews case. And in almost every letter, the same demand appeared:
“Give me immunity. Give me a deal, and then I’ll tell you where the body is.”
Nobody gave him a deal, but everybody was listening. And every single word Steven Pankey said was being filed away, building a case that would take decades to bring to trial, because Steven Pankey knew something that only Jonelle’s killer could have known, and he said it out loud.
Remember those footprints in the snow? The ones that someone tried to rake over? That detail was never released to the public. The police deliberately held it back as what’s called hold-back evidence, information that only the killer and investigators would know. And yet Pankey mentioned it multiple times in conversations with police, in notes his ex-wife found in the trash, written in his own handwriting on a piece of legal paper:
“Snow outside the Matthews house was raked.”
His own defense attorney would later admit that is arguably the one piece of evidence that ties Steven Pankey to this crime, because there is no innocent explanation for how he knew about that rake. And there was something else, something his own cousin accused him of that Pankey desperately wanted buried. During recorded jail phone calls, Pankey learned his cousin had died. His first reaction, he asked his sister if the cousin’s accusations that he had been cruising schools would now go away. His sister said she thought so, since the cousin was the only one who had made those claims.
Prosecutors later pointed out that this cousin lived just three blocks from Franklin Middle School, the exact school where Jonelle Matthews was a student. A few months after Jonelle disappeared, a minister at Pankey’s church stood up and told the congregation he’d received a message from God that Jonelle would be found alive and brought home safely. The congregation was hopeful. They prayed, they believed, but Steven Pankey, he stood up and screamed “false prophet” at the minister. He had to be physically removed from the church. Why would an innocent man be so certain? So absolutely furious at the idea that Jonelle Matthews might still be alive unless he already knew she wasn’t.
On October 12th, 2020, a Weld County Grand Jury handed down an eight-page indictment against Steven Dana Pankey. The charges: first-degree murder and second-degree kidnapping of Jonelle Matthews. After 36 years, someone was finally going to answer for what happened to that little girl. Pankey was arrested in Idaho and held without bail. He was 69 years old. The man who had spent decades demanding deals, writing letters, running for office, and inserting himself into every corner of this investigation was now sitting in a jail cell waiting to be shipped back to Colorado.
And the Matthews family, Jim and Gloria, flew back to Greeley. They sat in that courtroom. They looked Steven Pankey in the face for the first time, and they waited for something they’d been chasing since 1984, answers. The first trial began in October 2021, and the prosecution had a problem. There was no DNA, none. After 35 years buried in a Colorado field, Jonelle’s remains and clothing yielded nothing usable. No fingerprints, no murder weapon recovered. This entire case would have to be built on one thing, Steven Pankey’s own words and behavior, and honestly, that turned out to be more than enough.
The prosecution called roughly 60 witnesses over the course of the trial. They walked the jury through nearly four decades of Pankey’s bizarre, obsessive, self-incriminating conduct. The letters, the court filings, the thousand-plus documents found in his home, the holdback evidence about the rake that he somehow knew, the recorded jail calls where he spoke about his guns in code after learning Jonelle died from a gunshot wound. But the star witness was someone who knew Pankey better than almost anyone, his ex-wife, Angela Hicks. Angela took the stand and laid it all out. The rush trip to California, the obsessive radio listening, the newspaper articles read aloud three times each, the digging in the yard, the burning car.
And then she told the jury about something that happened in 2008, 24 years after Jonelle disappeared. Pankey’s own son had been murdered that year. At the funeral, as Pankey stood over his son’s urn, Angela watched him lean down, kiss the urn and whisper,
“I hope God didn’t allow this to happen because of Jonelle Matthews.”
His son’s funeral. And the name on his lips was Jonelle’s. Angela also described finding a handwritten note in the trash. On it, in Pankey’s handwriting, “Snow outside the Matthews house was raked.” Evidence that was never made public. Written down by a man who swore he knew nothing. She testified that Pankey was extremely controlling. He banned television, radio, newspapers, and music from their home. He didn’t let her drive. And yet after Jonelle vanished, all those rules suddenly broke. Because Steven Pankey needed to know what the world was saying about what he’d done.
But it was Pankey himself who delivered the most damaging testimony. Because Steven Pankey, against every piece of legal advice he’d ever been given, took the witness stand. And what followed was two days of rambling, contradictory, head-scratching testimony that left even his own attorney speechless. Pankey admitted he’d lied for years about everything. The story about his father-in-law and the cop with the body, a lie. The pastoral confession, made up. The claims about having information, fabricated out of bitterness.
He told the jury, “I made a lot of stuff up out of bitterness for things that happened to me at Sunny View and for things that happened to me at the police department.”
It was a polite way of flipping them the bird. “It was pure hatred on my part.”
So, his defense was essentially this, “Yes, I’m a liar. I’ve been lying for 37 years, but I’m not lying now.”
The prosecutor, District Attorney Michael Rourke, wasn’t buying it. He looked Pankey in the eye and asked him directly, “Was Jonelle begging for her life when you shot her in the forehead?”
Pankey didn’t answer. His own defense attorney later told the jury, “Steve Pankey’s kind of a jerk. It’s a fact. We can’t hide from it, but a jerk is not the same as a murderer.”
The jury deliberated, and they deadlocked. They convicted Pankey on a single misdemeanor count of making false statements to police, but they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on murder or kidnapping. The judge declared a mistrial. The Matthews family was devastated, but the prosecution wasn’t done. A second trial was scheduled for October 2022, and this time the prosecution had a new weapon, a witness who hadn’t testified before, a man named Patrick Callas. Callas was an inmate at the Weld County Jail.
He’d been housed in the same protective custody pod as Pankey between January and April of 2021. The two men had formed a spiritual bond. They prayed together. They did Bible studies. Pankey rarely talked about his case, but one day Pankey approached Callas’ cell and said he needed forgiveness. He asked if they could pray together. Callas agreed, and then Pankey said,
“I did some bad things.”
Callas asked if he was talking about Jonelle. Pankey nodded. They prayed. Callas asked if he killed her. Pankey’s answer,
“That’s between me and God.”
But that wasn’t the last time. Callas testified that one day another inmate pounded on the wall and told him to come listen. Callas moved to the front of his cell, and through the glass he heard Steven Pankey say four words that no innocent man would ever say:
“She was dead before I crossed the railroad tracks.”
Callas wrote a letter to the district attorney after the first trial ended in a mistrial. He said he’d stayed quiet because of the spiritual relationship he’d formed with Pankey. He felt like he was betraying him, but after watching the first trial failed to deliver a verdict, his conscience wouldn’t let him stay silent anymore. On October 31st, 2022, Halloween, the jury came back with their verdict. Guilty: felony murder, second-degree kidnapping with a deadly weapon, and false reporting to authorities.
Steven Pankey was found not guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, but the felony murder conviction meant the same thing in terms of punishment: life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. His earliest possible release date, 2042. He’ll be 91 years old. Before the judge handed down the sentence, the Matthews family spoke. Jennifer Mogensen, Jonelle’s older sister, stood up and told the court that 12,634 days had passed since her sister disappeared. She said her husband never met his sister-in-law. Her son never met his aunt.
The sibling rivalry she and Jonelle had as kids in 1984 never got the chance to become a real grown-up friendship. Pankey stole that from her. Jim Matthews stood up next and what he said to Steven Pankey silenced every single person in that courtroom. He looked directly at the man who murdered his daughter and said,
“You have been obsessed with your actions and your consciousness could not let you forget. You have been a prisoner of your own mind.”
Then Jim said something no one expected. He said, “You’ve claimed to be a Christian on many occasions. There’s still hope for you. It is not too late to confess your sins. The gates of heaven can still be open for you. It’s not too late, Steve Pankey. God is waiting.”
A father who lost everything offering grace to the man who took it. Gloria Matthews was not as forgiving. In the press conference after sentencing, she said,
“I cannot forgive him for how he killed Jonelle. God’s the only one that can forgive evil and I feel that this is evil.”
And Pankey, given his chance to speak, he looked at the courtroom and said, “I am a Christian. I will be in heaven. I am innocent and this is not justice for Jonelle.”
As of today, Steven Pankey is serving his sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado. He has indicated plans to appeal. He maintains his innocence, but 12,634 days of silence are over. Jonelle Matthews is no longer a question mark. She’s no longer a face on a milk carton. She is a girl who was loved, who was taken, and who was finally brought home. It took 35 years to find her body, 37 years to convict her killer, but the Matthews family never stopped fighting.
And Greeley, Colorado never forgot the girl who disappeared 5 days before Christmas. Jonelle Matthews was 12 years old. She loved singing. She loved Christmas, and she loved her family. And she deserved so much more time than she got. Now, I want to hear from you. After everything you’ve just heard, do you think the jury got it right convicting Pankey without any DNA evidence? Do you believe his jailhouse confession was genuine, or was Patrick Callas just looking for a deal? And here’s the question that haunts me the most: If Pankey had simply kept his mouth shut for 37 years, would he have ever been caught?
