The garage door stood open and the house was silent. Jim Matthews stepped inside shortly after 9:30 on the night of December 20, 1984, and knew something was wrong. The television was still playing. The lights were on.

The heater was running, filling the family room with warmth. But there was no sound of his twelve-year-old daughter. He called out for Jonelle. Nothing came back.

Her shoes and shawl sat where she always left them, near the heater in the family room, the spot where she liked to sit and relax. She had put on a pair of her mother’s slippers. The house was decorated for Christmas, warm and bright, with a tree and stockings hung up. But Jonelle herself was nowhere.

At first, Jim convinced himself she might have run over to a friend’s house. He busied himself wrapping a Christmas gift for a coworker, trying to shake the unease. It would not fade. He walked from room to room, checking every space, and found nothing.

At 10:00 p. m. , Jennifer arrived home from her basketball game. Jim asked her immediately if she had seen her sister.

Jennifer had no idea where Jonelle could be. This was strange, because whenever Jonelle left the house to visit someone, she always left behind a note. That night there was no note anywhere. Truly worried now, Jim began calling around.

He reached the Ross family, the ones who had given Jonelle a ride home earlier that evening, but they had no information. He phoned his pastor and close friend, James Christy, for advice. The pastor told him plainly to call the police right away. Jim did exactly that.

When officers arrived about forty-five minutes later, around 10:15 p. m. , they combed through the house and the surrounding property. They found no signs of a struggle.

No forced entry. Nothing broken or disturbed. But just outside, in the freshly fallen snow beneath the windows, they found footprints. Someone had been standing there, looking directly into the Matthews home.

Jonelle Matthews was born in February of 1972 in Santa Barbara, California. Her birth mother, Terry Vieira, was only thirteen years old at the time and could not care for her. Six weeks after she was born, a couple named Jim and Gloria Matthews adopted her. They already had one daughter, Jennifer, and had always wanted a second child.

The adoption agency tried to match children with families who looked alike, and since Gloria had dark hair, baby Jonelle, who also had dark hair, was placed with them. The family later moved from California and settled in the small town of Greeley, Colorado. Jim became the principal of Platte Valley Elementary School in the nearby town of Kersey. Gloria worked at a local restaurant.

The family attended a local church called Sunny View Church of the Nazarene, and life was quiet and ordinary. By 1984, Jonelle was twelve years old and in the seventh grade. She was a happy, lively girl who loved singing and was part of her school choir. She had a habit of making handmade gifts by cross-stitching and loved giving them to her friends.

She had short dark hair, braces on her teeth, and a few small scars on her chin. Greeley was the kind of small town where nobody thought twice about safety. Kids played outside for hours, and doors were often left unlocked. Jonelle’s older sister, Jennifer, was a few years older and in high school.

There was some normal sibling rivalry between them, but the sisters got along in the way that most siblings do. That evening, December 20, five days before Christmas, Jonelle was set to sing with her school choir at a Christmas concert held at a bank building in Denver. Her family could not be there to watch. Her father was at Jennifer’s basketball game, happening at the same time.

Her mother had flown out to California to care for a sick relative. After the concert ended, Jonelle did not travel home alone. Her best friend, Deanna Ross, and Deanna’s father, Russell Ross, gave her a ride back to the house. They pulled up to the Matthews home at around 8:15 in the evening.

Jonelle went inside. As was her habit, whenever she got home safely she flicked the porch light on and off so her friends would know she had made it in okay. Everything seemed completely normal. At around 8:30 that night, the house phone rang.

Jonelle picked it up. It was a teacher calling for her father, to let him know she would be out sick the next day. Jonelle wrote the message down. It was the last time anyone would ever hear from Jonelle Matthews again.

The very next day, the investigation kicked into high gear. FBI agents joined a dozen Greeley police officers, combing the fields surrounding the Matthews house. They walked shoulder to shoulder in search lines across the property and nearby land. Other officers went door to door in the neighborhood, questioning everybody they could find, including Jonelle’s own teachers.

Detectives quickly learned that Jonelle had no reason to run away. She had plans lined up for the coming days. A sleepover was scheduled for December 21. She had a Christmas presentation to give at her church.

She was looking forward to her mother’s return so the family could finally celebrate the holiday together. In fact, Jonelle had been feeling sick in the days leading up to her disappearance, and her parents had wanted her to stay home from school. But she had insisted on going in because she wanted to hand out the cross-stitched gifts she had made for her friends before the holiday break. As with most disappearances involving a child, police did not rule out someone close to Jonelle.

For roughly six months, her own father remained the leading person of interest. Jim understood why they were looking at him so closely. He fully cooperated, submitting to more than one polygraph examination, both with the FBI and separately with local police. Eventually, after being called back for repeated testing, he grew frustrated that so much of the investigation’s energy was being spent scrutinizing him instead of searching for his daughter.

He confronted the police directly about it, and after that they stopped bringing him in for further lie detector tests. Detectives also turned their attention toward Jonelle’s birth mother, Terry Vieira. Investigators wondered whether she might somehow be connected to the disappearance. Without ever telling her that her biological daughter had vanished, police placed her under quiet surveillance for about six weeks.

In the end she was cleared as a suspect. But astonishingly, nobody from law enforcement ever informed her that Jonelle had gone missing in the first place. As the investigation dragged on, authorities offered a $5,000 reward for any information leading to Jonelle. At the time, it was the largest reward ever offered in the history of Greeley.

On what would have been Jonelle’s thirteenth birthday, in February of 1985, more than six hundred volunteers showed up to join the search. They fanned out across an area covering roughly four thousand square miles of the surrounding county, checking bridges, ditches, culverts, and anywhere else a young girl might be found. The case exploded into national attention. Jonelle became one of the very first missing children to have her photograph printed on milk cartons across the country, part of a brand-new nationwide program aimed at finding missing kids.

Flyers bearing her name and photo were mailed to four thousand stores nationwide. Her story reached all the way to the White House. President Ronald Reagan personally mentioned Jonelle Matthews by name during a speech in March of 1985, and her case was entered into the official congressional record the following month. Yet for every headline there seemed to be a dead end.

Police received word of a girl in Florida claiming to be Jonelle Matthews; detectives investigated thoroughly, only to determine that the girl was not Jonelle at all. In May of 1985, a farmer discovered a partial scalp on his property. Gloria Matthews examined it herself, but she knew instantly it did not belong to her daughter, since the hair color did not match. Jonelle’s old middle school planted a small tree outside the building in her memory, along with a plaque bearing her name.

Within a few years the tree died, and at some point the plaque itself vanished without explanation. Years passed. Leads kept coming in, and every one of them led nowhere. Finally, in 1994, exactly ten years after she vanished, the Matthews family made the heartbreaking decision to have Jonelle legally declared dead.

They had never stopped hoping, but after a full decade with no trace, they had to accept that she was likely never coming home. Three years later, in 1997, something unexpected happened. Gloria Matthews received a letter in the mail from Terry Vieira, Jonelle’s birth mother. Using a private search consultant, Terry had managed to track down the family who had adopted her daughter decades earlier, and she was hoping to arrange a reunion.

Gloria had the painful task of writing back to explain that the daughter Terry hoped to reconnect with had been missing for over a decade and was now presumed dead. Rather than driving the two families apart, this devastating shared loss brought them together. Terry and her husband eventually met with Jim and Gloria in person, and the two couples became genuine friends, bonded by their grief over Jonelle. As the years continued to pass, Jim and Gloria eventually moved overseas to the Philippines to work as missionaries.

After they retired, they relocated again, this time settling in Costa Rica. Jennifer grew up, got married, and moved out of Colorado entirely. Jonelle’s case sat cold for decades. In December of 2018, on the thirty-fourth anniversary of her disappearance, the Greeley Police Department publicly announced they were reopening the case with fresh eyes, applying newer forensic technology that had not existed back in 1984.

They released old video footage of Jonelle performing at that final Christmas concert, hoping it might jog someone’s memory. Had she lived, Jonelle would have turned forty-seven that year. Nobody could have predicted what would happen just a few months later. On July 23, 2019, a crew of excavators was hard at work laying down a new oil pipeline.

The location was roughly fifteen miles from the Matthews family’s old home, out near the intersection of two rural county roads. As they dug, the workers uncovered human remains. The Weld County Coroner’s Office took over. Investigators found that the remains were still dressed in clothing that closely matched what Jonelle had worn on the night of her disappearance, including a red blouse and a gray skirt.

There was not enough usable DNA left on the bones or clothing after so many years buried in the ground. But the coroner’s office was able to use Jonelle’s old dental records to make a positive identification. After thirty-five years of not knowing, the Matthews family finally had an answer. The remains belonged to Jonelle.

The forensic examination revealed something else, something devastating. Jonelle had died from a gunshot wound to the head. Whoever took her that night in 1984 had not simply kidnapped her. They had murdered her.

And for over three decades, her body had been left out in an empty field. With the discovery of her remains, the case was reignited. Detectives went back through every scrap of evidence, every old file, and every witness statement collected since 1984. It did not take them long to zero back in on a name that had come up again and again over the decades, a name that had always managed to insert itself into the investigation without ever becoming an official suspect.

Steven Dana Pankey. In September of 2019, just two months after Jonelle’s remains were found, the Greeley Police Department publicly announced that Pankey was officially a person of interest. At the time of Jonelle’s disappearance, Pankey had lived only a few miles away from the Matthews family, with his wife Angela Hicks and their young son. He claimed at various points to have once served as a youth pastor at the very same church the Matthews family attended, though the church itself later denied he had ever held that position.

What was confirmed was that Pankey had once been a member of that congregation and had left it years earlier following an accusation of sexual assault against a woman from the church. The list of red flags, once detectives started laying them all out together, was long. Each one on its own might have seemed minor, but stacked together they painted a deeply troubling picture. The first and most damning clue was something Pankey said to police early on.

He mentioned, almost in passing, that whoever had left those footprints outside the Matthews window on the night Jonelle vanished had used a rake to try and cover their tracks in the snow. This detail about a rake had never been released to the public. Investigators had kept it a closely guarded secret specifically to weed out false confessions. Yet somehow Pankey knew about it.

Then there was his alibi, which fell apart the moment his own wife was questioned separately. Pankey told police that on the night Jonelle disappeared, he and Angela had been home preparing for a family road trip to visit relatives in California, a trip they said had been planned before December 20. But when detectives spoke with Angela Hicks, her account told a very different story. She said the trip had not been planned at all.

It came together suddenly, and they did not actually leave Greeley until December 22, two full days after Jonelle went missing. She also revealed a disturbing detail from just before they left. The family owned two large dogs. Right before the trip, Angela asked her husband what they should do about them.

Pankey told her not to worry, saying the dogs were already gone. He said he had dumped them. Angela never saw either dog again, and to this day does not know what happened to them. Angela also described how Pankey behaved on the drive back home from California once the trip was over, arriving back on December 26.

According to her testimony, Pankey suddenly wanted the car radio turned on, something he almost never allowed, and he specifically wanted to hear any news updates about the missing Matthews girl. The moment they arrived back in Greeley, instead of heading straight home, he insisted they stop at a grocery store first. He spent what little money he had left buying up multiple local newspapers so he could read every article written about Jonelle’s disappearance. He then made Angela read each article out loud to him more than once.

Not long after returning home, according to the later criminal indictment, Pankey was seen digging a hole in his own backyard for no explained reason. Around this same time, a car that the family had stored on their property mysteriously caught fire. The burned-out vehicle was hauled off to a salvage yard, where workers who inspected it believed the fire had started from inside the car, suggesting it had been set deliberately rather than being some kind of accident. A few months after Jonelle disappeared, Pankey and Angela attended a church service where the visiting minister told the congregation that Jonelle would be found alive and returned safely to her family.

According to Angela, her husband began muttering angrily under his breath, calling the minister a false prophet, growing so agitated that he had to be physically escorted out of the church. Perhaps the most chilling detail came years later, in 2008, when Pankey’s own son, Carl, was tragically shot and killed by his girlfriend. At Carl’s funeral, as Pankey stood grieving over his son’s ashes, Angela heard him say something no one grieving a child should ever connect to an unrelated case. He said he hoped God had not allowed his son’s death to happen because of Jonelle Matthews.

On top of all this, Pankey had a documented habit of watching school children walk home from the very same middle school Jonelle had once attended. Witnesses, including a relative of his, recalled seeing him parked nearby on multiple occasions, simply observing the kids as they walked past. Investigators also discovered that over the years, Pankey had filed various legal documents containing oddly specific and unsettling references to Jonelle’s case. In one filing from the late 1990s, he suggested that revealing where Jonelle’s body was located could get him the death penalty.

In another filing from the early 2000s, he wrote that the family should be told Jonelle died before crossing a particular street and that they should not be given false hope. He also wrote at one point that without some kind of deal being made with him, the case would never be solved. On multiple occasions, Pankey directly asked investigators for immunity from prosecution in exchange for information he claimed to have about what happened to Jonelle. When detectives eventually searched his devices, they found that Pankey had been searching for information about the Jonelle Matthews case online almost every single day for years, right up until his search history was seized, at which point records showed he had attempted to delete all of it.

Investigators also learned that back in 1993, years before he became a suspect, Pankey had written and self-published a fictional novel. In the story, a pastor from a church bearing the same real name as the one the Matthews family attended led a secret society of clergy members who committed rape and murder. The book’s main character was widely understood to represent Pankey himself, a man who gets pulled toward this dark secret society before ultimately exposing it. After leaving Colorado and eventually settling in Idaho, Pankey developed a strong hunger for public office.

Over the following years he ran for local sheriff more than once and lost each time. In 2010 he sought the Republican nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho but did not win. Then in 2014 he ran for the governorship of Idaho itself, this time under the banner of the Constitution Party. He lost that race too, and the party later distanced itself from him entirely.

By this point Pankey had already divorced Angela and had come out as gay, though he insisted on describing himself as a celibate Christian. Four years later, in 2018, Pankey tried for the governor’s seat a second time, this time running in the Republican primary. He only managed to capture just over one percent of the vote. Remarkably, even after he became a named suspect in Jonelle’s murder, Pankey still tried his hand at politics one more time, running for sheriff in Twin Falls County in the summer of 2020, only months before his arrest.

Had he not finally been taken into custody, there is little doubt he would have kept running again and again. Despite mounting suspicion, when Pankey spoke publicly during a 2019 interview he firmly denied ever knowing Jonelle or her family. He claimed he had not even learned she had gone missing until his family returned from their trip on December 26. He also suggested to reporters that he believed police were unfairly targeting him because he identified as a celibate gay man.

By September of 2019, investigators felt they had enough. Police in Idaho executed a search warrant on his home, seizing electronics, documents, and other potential evidence. On October 13, 2020, a grand jury formally indicted Steven Pankey on charges of first-degree murder and kidnapping in connection with Jonelle’s death. He was sixty-nine years old.

He was held without bail in Idaho before being extradited back to Colorado to face trial. Jonelle’s family reacted to the arrest with a complicated mixture of relief and lingering grief. Her sister Jennifer described it as another gift to their family, saying it brought them a measure of closure after so many decades of not knowing. Their father Jim was reportedly thrilled to finally see some form of justice moving forward.

Pankey’s first trial began in October 2021. He appeared in court wearing a mask due to pandemic restrictions. During the trial, prosecutors laid out the mountain of circumstantial evidence built up over decades, arguing that Pankey’s own words and behavior painted a clear picture of guilt. Angela Hicks took the stand and testified in detail about her ex-husband’s controlling and erratic behavior throughout their marriage.

Pankey also took the stand in his own defense. He attempted to walk back many of his previous incriminating statements, claiming he had simply been lying out of bitterness in the past, and that his current testimony, denying any involvement, was the truth. His defense attorney argued that Pankey’s obsessive fixation on the case over the decades could be explained by an underlying condition rather than actual guilt. After roughly two weeks of testimony, the jury began deliberating.

In the end, they could not reach a unanimous decision on the murder and kidnapping charges. They did unanimously convict him on a single lesser charge: making false statements to the police, a misdemeanor. On November 4, 2021, the judge declared a mistrial on the major charges due to the hung jury. It would take nearly another full year before Pankey stood trial again.

Prosecutors used the time to build an even stronger case. This time around they had new evidence to present, including testimony that Pankey had confessed information about the case to a fellow inmate while behind bars, and reportedly had even been overheard praying to God for forgiveness for what he did to Jonelle. Once again Angela Hicks took the stand, and her testimony would once again prove absolutely critical to the case against her former husband. On October 31, 2022, the second jury reached a very different conclusion.

They found Steven Dana Pankey guilty of felony murder and second-degree kidnapping in the death of Jonelle Matthews. He was sentenced to serve twenty years to life in prison. His earliest possible chance at parole will not come until the year 2042, at which point he will be ninety-one years old. Even after his conviction, Pankey continued to insist he was innocent, and his legal team suggested they were considering an appeal.

For Jonelle’s family, the conviction closed a chapter that had haunted them for thirty-eight long years. Gloria Matthews spoke to reporters afterward, saying she simply wanted to cry and that she could not find it in herself to forgive Pankey for what he did to her daughter. Jonelle’s sister Jennifer later reflected that while she did not fully understand what drove Pankey to commit such a crime, she recognized him as someone consumed by anger and resentment toward authority. She made a point of saying she refused to let him take up any more space in her life than he already had, stating firmly that she would not give him the satisfaction of another victim.

Steven Pankey is currently serving out his sentence at a correctional facility in Ordway, Colorado. For thirty-five years, a family waited, and a killer hid in plain sight, quietly inserting himself into the very investigation meant to catch him, all while running for public office not once but multiple times. In the end, it was not brilliant detective work alone that cracked the case, but a combination of a chance discovery by pipeline workers and decades of small, damning details that a determined ex-wife never stopped remembering.