Murder of Jonelle Matthews

Jonelle Matthews, a 12-year-old girl living in Greeley, Colorado, disappeared on the evening of December 20, 1984, after being driven home from a school Christmas concert by a friend and the friend's father. Her father was at her sister's basketball game and her mother was out of state; shortly after 8:30 p.m., Matthews answered a phone call and took a message for her father, the last time anyone but her abductor is known to have spoken with her. Her father returned home at 9:30 p.m. to find the garage door open and no one inside; Matthews's shoes and shawl were left near a heater where she often sat. Police found footprints in the snow suggesting someone had looked through the windows, but no signs of forced entry or a struggle.

Matthews was born in Santa Barbara, California, in February 1972 and adopted six weeks later; her family moved to Greeley, where her father became an elementary school principal. Her disappearance drew national attention, including her photograph on milk cartons and mentions by President Ronald Reagan and in the Congressional Record in 1985. For several weeks, investigators placed her birth mother under surveillance without telling her Matthews was missing; the two families reconnected in 1997. Matthews was declared legally dead in 1994, a decade after her disappearance.

In July 2019, pipeline construction workers discovered human remains in rural Weld County, Colorado, roughly 15 miles from the Matthews family's former home. The Weld County Coroner's Office positively identified the remains as Matthews's through DNA evidence and determined her cause of death to be a gunshot wound to the head.

In September 2019, Greeley police publicly identified Steven Pankey, a former Greeley resident and one-time youth pastor at the church the Matthews family attended, as a person of interest in the abduction and killing; he and his then-wife had lived about three miles from the Matthews home at the time. Investigators had searched his Idaho condominium that month under a warrant citing probable cause of abduction and murder. Pankey told a newspaper he did not know the Matthews family and that he and his wife were home the night she disappeared, preparing to leave the next day for a trip to California; he later gave investigators travel documents that police said contained false statements and superfluous details.

The criminal indictment said Pankey repeatedly inserted himself into the investigation over the years, claiming knowledge of the crime — including that a rake had covered tracks in the snow — and asking for immunity in exchange for information; investigators said his account grew more inconsistent and incriminating over time. His then-wife said the couple's California trip actually began two days after the disappearance and that Pankey afterward took an unusual interest in news coverage of the case. Pankey has said he believed he was being framed because of his sexuality.

Pankey was indicted on charges of first-degree murder and kidnapping on October 13, 2020, and made his first Colorado court appearance on October 30, 2020, after extradition from Idaho. His first trial, in October 2021, ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked on the murder and kidnapping charges, though they convicted him of a single misdemeanor count of making a false statement to police; his defense attributed his fixation on the case to Asperger syndrome. On retrial, a Weld County jury convicted Pankey of Matthews's kidnapping and murder on October 31, 2022, and he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He has maintained his innocence and, as of 2025, was serving his sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado.