When a young teenage girl vanished into thin air on a snowy winter’s evening after a Christmas concert, it sparked a huge police search, but for years, what happened remained a mystery
It was just a few days before Christmas when 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews vanished from her Colorado home after being dropped back after a school concert.
Jonelle had been performing in a Christmas concert while her dad was at a basketball game and her mum was away from home caring for a family member.
After getting a lift home with a friend she spoke to her father on the phone, but when he returned to the family home shortly after, he found the garage door open and an empty house.
For over 30 years, Jonelle Matthews’ disappearance on December 20, 1984, remained a mystery. It wasn’t until some 35 years later that her remains were discovered during a pipe installation in 2019.
A year later in 2020, Steven Pankey — a local man with ties to her church who later ran twice for the governor of Idaho — was arrested. After two trials, he was convicted of felony murder and kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison.
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“During those decades, generations of Greeley police officers have never forgotten Jonelle, many living in torment over the possibilities of what may have occurred that grim evening in 1984, and what could be done to solve this mystery,” the Greeley Police Department said in a statement following Pankey’s arrest.
Pankey had continuously involved himself in the investigation and displayed odd behaviour regarding Jonelle’s disappearance. Even his ex-wife, Angela Hicks, said in Oxygen’s 2024 docuseries The Girl on the Milk Carton that she started collecting evidence against him years before his arrest. So what happened to Jonelle Matthews?
Jonelle was a 12-year-old student living in Greeley with her parents who loved to sing and cross-stitch gifts for her friends. According to The Denver Post, she had been adopted from Los Angeles when she was one month old because her birth mother was only 13 when she gave birth.
“You could tell Jonelle had been there,” her dad, Jim Matthews, said in a November 2024 episode of 48 Hours. “I yelled out ‘Hi Jonelle,’ ‘Jonelle, are you there?’ No answer.”
After her dad called the police, investigators found footprints in the snow near the family’s home. Her dad told 48 Hours that it looked like someone had tried to mess the prints up with a garden rake.
Jonelle’s case caught national attention after she became one of the first kids featured in the Missing Children Milk Carton Program and president Ronald Reagan discussed her disappearance during a 1985 meeting with the National Newspaper Association.
But on the tenth anniversary of her disappearance in 1994, her family had Jonelle declared legally dead, The Denver Post reported. Her case went cold until July 2019, when a group of oil and gas workers discovered her remains while digging a pipeline less than 20 miles from the Matthews’ home in Greeley.
It was only then that Jonelle’s death was ruled as murder and her autopsy report revealed she had been shot in the head. Pankey was a fellow Greeley resident, living just two miles away from the Matthews’ home who served as a former youth minister at the same church.
After Jonelle went missing, his former wife said her ex-husband began acting ‘suspiciously’ spending hours digging a hole in their yard, becoming fixated on news coverage around her case and making them leave town. She started collecting evidence against Pankey in 1999.
Pankey also involved himself in the police’s search for Jonelle and repeatedly hinted to investigators that he knew what happened. When his son was shot and killed by his girlfriend in 2008, Hicks claimed that she heard him say, “I hope God didn’t allow this to happen because of Jonelle Matthews.”
Pankey was indicted by a grand jury in October 2020 on charges of murder, kidnapping and crimes of violence. According to 48 Hours, he allegedly took Jonelle from her family home and shot her some time “during the course of the kidnapping.” The document also claimed that Pankey was aware of the rake used to blur the footprints.
He was first tried in October 2021, but it ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a verdict on the murder and kidnapping charges. However, he was found guilty of false reporting.
Two years later, he was tried again and found guilty of felony murder and second-degree kidnapping. Pankey was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, reports the Greeley Tribune.
Episode 3: Missing At Christmas: Jonelle Matthews is currently streaming on NOW.