On the night of December 20, 1984, 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews walked into her home in Greeley, Colorado, kicked off her shoes, and sat by 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.
Sixty minutes later, she was gone. She would stay gone for 35 years.
There were no signs of a struggle, no forced entry, no screams heard by neighbors. Just a pair of small shoes sitting perfectly in front of an empty couch, and footprints in the snow outside the living room window. Footprints someone had tried to erase with a garden rake.
The man who took her life that night would spend the next 37 years hiding in plain sight, running for governor, giving interviews, and inserting himself into the very investigation meant to catch him.
Jonelle was born on February 9, 1972, in Santa Barbara, California. Her biological mother, Terri Vera Martinez, was just 13 years old when she gave birth. After about a month, Terri made the hardest decision a mother can make and gave Jonelle up for adoption.
A couple from Colorado, Jim and Gloria Matthews, adopted her within weeks. They already had a daughter, Jennifer, and the family moved to Greeley, a small, quiet town about 60 miles north of Denver. It was the kind of place where families left their front doors unlocked and everybody knew everybody.
Jim Matthews worked as the principal of Platte Valley Elementary School. Gloria worked at a local restaurant. They were active in the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene.
Jonelle was the spark of the family. Her friends described her as theatrical, dramatic, and hilarious. She loved performing in church skits, singing in the school choir, having sleepovers, and fawning over the boy band Menudo.
Christmas was coming, and Jonelle was buzzing with excitement.
On December 20, 1984, five days before Christmas, Jonelle had been sick with a cold. Most kids would have jumped at the chance to stay home from school, but not Jonelle. She had gifts to hand out to friends and, more importantly, she had been selected to perform with the Franklin Middle School Honor Choir at their annual holiday concert.
There was no way she was missing that.
Her parents agreed, but with one condition: come straight home after the concert and rest.
That evening, the concert was held at a local bank branch and was even televised on a local cable network. Jonelle sang with her classmates. Afterward, her friend Diana Ross’s father, Russell, offered to drive Jonelle home.
At approximately 8:15 p. m. , Russell pulled up to the Matthews family home at 320 43rd Avenue Court.
Jonelle got out, said goodbye, wished Diana a Merry Christmas, and walked up the driveway. Russell and Diana waited until the foyer light flickered on, the unspoken signal that she was inside and safe. Russell drove away.
He had no idea he was the last person, other than her killer, to ever see Jonelle alive.
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. That phone call was the last confirmed contact with Jonelle Matthews.
Jim had been at his older daughter Jennifer’s basketball game that evening. Gloria was out of state caring for her own sick mother. When Jim pulled into the driveway at around 9:30 p.
m. , he expected to find Jonelle relaxing at home. Instead, the house was warm, the television was still playing, and Jonelle’s favorite doll was draped across the back of the couch.
Her shoes were sitting perfectly on the floor next to the Christmas tree.
Everything looked like Jonelle had been there moments ago. But Jonelle wasn’t there.
Jim didn’t panic right away. He started making calls. No one had seen her.
When Jennifer came home at 10:00 p. m. , she called out for her sister.
No answer. That’s when the fear hit.
Jim called the Greeley police. They arrived within 15 minutes. 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. The footprints were too big to be a child’s.
And somebody had tried to rake over them, using a garden rake pulled from the Matthews’ own garage.
No forced entry. No signs of struggle. Whoever took Jonelle did it quietly, efficiently, and deliberately.
This wasn’t random. This was someone who had been watching, planning, waiting for the exact moment when a 12-year-old girl was completely alone.
Police initially explored the possibility that Jonelle had run away. Jim couldn’t believe it. She had a sleepover planned for the next day.
She was going to perform in a Christmas presentation at church. What 12-year-old runs away five days before Christmas?
Investigators turned their attention to Jim himself. In cases like these, law enforcement always looks at the family first. Jim cooperated fully.
He took lie detector tests administered by the FBI. He was eventually cleared, leaving investigators with no suspect, no body, and no leads.
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 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.
In March 1985, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech about the crisis of missing children in America and mentioned Jonelle by name. Still, nothing. No leads, no tips that went anywhere.
The case went cold.
In 1994, a full decade after Jonelle vanished, her parents made the gut-wrenching decision to have her declared legally dead. Gloria Matthews 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.
Staying in Greeley became unbearable. Jim and Gloria eventually left. They moved first to the Philippines as missionaries, then retired to Costa Rica.
Jennifer married and moved to Washington state. But Gloria never stopped looking. She told people that in her dreams, Jonelle always came home.
On July 23, 2019, a construction crew was working on a new oil and gas pipeline in a remote stretch of farmland in rural Weld County, about 15 miles southeast of Greeley. A bulldozer operator hit something in the dirt. Bones.
Human bones. A skull with orthodontic braces still attached. 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 the remains were Jonelle’s, identified through dental records and DNA. The autopsy revealed a single gunshot wound to the head. Jonelle hadn’t wandered off.
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.
The remains were found wrapped in a white bedsheet. Her coat was partially zipped, turned inside out with the cuffs tucked into the armpits. Small hand bones fell out when investigators pulled the cuffs open.
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.
Just weeks after the remains were discovered, the Greeley Police Department made an announcement that shocked the community. They had a person of interest. 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 and writing letters while carefully weaving references to Jonelle Matthews into almost everything he did.
His name was Steven Dana Pankey.
In 1984, Pankey was a 33-year-old married father living in Greeley, just 2 miles from the Matthews home. He attended the same church. On the day before Jonelle vanished, December 19, Pankey had been arrested at a local bank for harassment and criminal trespass.
His used car business had collapsed, and he was spiraling financially.
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 before daylight the next morning, heading to Big Bear Lake, California to visit his parents for Christmas. Angela said the trip was not planned.
It was sudden and rushed.
On the drive back, Pankey, who had banned all media from their household, suddenly ordered Angela to turn on the car radio. He wanted news about a missing girl. Angela testified that she flipped through 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.
Within days of returning home, Pankey changed into coveralls 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. That same week, a car stored on their property mysteriously caught fire.
Angela found Pankey standing next to the burning vehicle holding a shovel.
Then Pankey did something no guilty person in their right mind should ever do. He picked up the phone and called the FBI. One month after Jonelle vanished, 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 started watching.
After that initial contact, Pankey and his family left Greeley. They settled in Twin Falls, Idaho, in the late 1980s. Pankey discovered a new passion: politics.
He ran for sheriff three times, city council, lieutenant governor, and governor twice. He lost every single race, badly.
But underneath the campaigns, Pankey was doing something far more troubling. He was writing constantly, obsessively. Letters to attorneys, court filings, petitions to the Idaho Supreme Court.
Scattered throughout all of these documents, in cases that had 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 her name.
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. 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.
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 titled Graveyards, filled with hatred directed at the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene, the same church the Matthews family attended. He told a police officer in the late 1990s that he had buried bodies in Colorado. 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.
Remember those footprints in the snow that someone tried to rake over? That detail was never released to the public. Police deliberately held it back as hold-back evidence, information only the killer and investigators would know.
Yet Pankey mentioned it multiple times in conversations with police, and 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. There is no innocent explanation for how he knew about that rake.
There was something else. During recorded jail phone calls, Pankey learned his cousin had died. His first reaction was to ask his sister if the cousin’s accusations that he had been cruising schools would now go away.
Prosecutors later pointed out that this cousin lived just three blocks from Franklin Middle School, the exact school where Jonelle 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. The congregation prayed and believed. Steven Pankey 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 might still be alive, unless he already knew she wasn’t?
On October 12, 2020, a Weld County Grand Jury handed down an 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 first trial began in October 2021. The prosecution had a problem. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no murder weapon recovered.
This entire case would have to be built on one thing: Steven Pankey’s own words and behavior.
The prosecution called roughly 60 witnesses. They walked the jury through nearly four decades of Pankey’s bizarre, obsessive, self-incriminating conduct. The letters, the court filings, the hold-back evidence about the rake, the recorded jail calls.
The star witness was his ex-wife, Angela Hicks. She 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.
She also described finding the handwritten note in the trash: “Snow outside the Matthews house was raked.”
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.”
But it was Pankey himself who delivered the most damaging testimony. Against every piece of legal advice, he took the witness stand. What followed was two days of rambling, contradictory testimony.
Pankey admitted he’d lied for years about everything. The story about the pastoral confession, made up. The claims about having information, fabricated out of bitterness.
The prosecutor 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.
The jury deliberated and 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.
A second trial was scheduled for October 2022. This time, the prosecution had a new witness. A man named Patrick Callas, an inmate at the Weld County Jail who had been housed in the same protective custody pod as Pankey.
The two men had formed a spiritual bond. They prayed together and did Bible studies.
One day, Pankey approached Callas’ cell and said he needed forgiveness. Callas asked if he was talking about Jonelle. Pankey nodded.
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 he heard Steven Pankey say four words that no innocent man would ever say: “She was dead before I crossed the railroad tracks.”
On October 31, 2022, the jury came back with their verdict. Guilty of felony murder and second-degree kidnapping with a deadly weapon. 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 is 2042. He’ll be 91 years old.
Before the judge handed down the sentence, the Matthews family spoke. Jennifer, Jonelle’s older sister, told the court that 12,634 days had passed since her sister disappeared. Her husband never met his sister-in-law.
Her son never met his aunt. Pankey stole that from her.
Jim Matthews stood up next. 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. “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.”
Pankey, given his chance to speak, looked at the courtroom and said, “I am a Christian. I will be in heaven. I am innocent.”
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 is 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 and 37 years to convict her killer. But the Matthews family never stopped fighting, and Greeley, Colorado never forgot the girl who disappeared five days before Christmas.
Jonelle Matthews was 12 years old. She loved singing. She loved Christmas.
And she deserved so much more time than she got.