Colorado 1984 Cold Case SOLVED by a Detail Only the Killer Knew

The Girl on the Milk Carton: How a Withheld Detail Solved a 35-Year-Old Cold Case

A Cold December Night

On the evening of December 20, 1984—just five days before Christmas—12-year-old Jonelle Matthews was dropped off at her home in Greeley, Colorado. A seventh-grader and a bright, musical kid, Jonelle had just finished performing with the Franklin Middle School Choir at a holiday concert. A family friend gave her a ride home, making them the last person outside her family to see her alive.

Jonelle’s parents were out; her father, Jim Matthews, was across town attending her older sister Jennifer’s basketball game. Jonelle walked into the empty house, turned on the lights, and took off her shoes, setting them by the heater to warm her feet. She was entirely alone, and the doors were unlocked.

When Jim returned around 8:30 p.m., he found the house lit, warm, and empty. Jonelle’s coat was there, and her shoes were still sitting by the heater. Nothing was missing, nothing was disturbed, and there was no sign of a struggle. But Jonelle was gone.

The Secret in the Snow

Jim Matthews immediately called the police, sparking one of the largest searches in Greeley’s history. Officers, volunteers, and tracking dogs scoured the freezing neighborhood, but the only physical trace left behind was found outside the house.

In the fresh snow, investigators discovered shoe impressions. Someone had taken a garden rake—pulled directly from the Matthews’ own garage—and dragged it back and forth over the tracks in an attempt to erase them. Whoever took Jonelle had been comfortable enough on the property to navigate it in the dark and locate a tool.

Police made a strategic decision: they kept the detail of the raked footprints strictly out of the public eye. It was the kind of withheld fact that could one day separate a genuine suspect from false confessors. For decades, they filed it away in silence.

A Nation on Alert

After clearing Jim Matthews—who had a rock-solid alibi at a gymnasium full of witnesses—the investigation widened. Jonelle vanished at a time when America was just waking up to the terrifying reality of stranger abductions.

Her face became a symbol of the child safety movement. Her photograph was printed on milk cartons and mailed into kitchens across the country, introducing a generation of Americans to a new kind of suburban fear. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan even mentioned Jonelle by name during a national address on missing children. But despite the thousands of tips and national attention, the trail went cold. For 35 years, her family lived with the agonizing uncertainty of not knowing her fate.

Unearthing the Truth

In July 2019, a construction crew installing a pipeline in a rural Weld County field—about 15 miles from the Matthews home—unearthed human remains. Forensic DNA testing confirmed the devastating truth: it was Jonelle.

She had been shot once in the head. The discovery answered the cruelest question her parents had carried for three and a half decades. She had not run away, nor had she been taken to be raised by someone else. She was murdered during that first winter and left in a field while the world searched for her. With a body, a location, and a cause of death, the missing person’s case officially became a homicide investigation.

The Man Who Couldn’t Look Away

With the case reopened, investigators turned their full attention to a man who had spent decades making sure police knew his name: Steven Dana Pankey.

In 1984, Pankey lived just two miles from the Matthews family. He was a former youth pastor who had been forced out of his ministry in 1977 following a sexual assault accusation. Though charges were dropped after he passed a polygraph, he lost his position. The church that ousted him was the very same one the Matthews family later attended.

Described by those who knew him as rigid, combustible, and controlling, Pankey became a perennial political candidate later in life, moving to Idaho and running unsuccessfully for governor and sheriff. But no matter where he went, he continuously inserted himself into Jonelle’s case. He contacted law enforcement repeatedly across state lines, demanding immunity in exchange for information he claimed to possess.

His ex-wife, Angela Hicks, provided a chilling portrait of his behavior in the days following Jonelle’s disappearance:

Sudden Flight: He abruptly announced an unplanned trip to California.

Destroying Evidence: He dug in their yard, discarded the family’s two Great Danes (who were never seen again), and had a car on their property catch fire before hauling it to a salvage yard.

Obsessive Monitoring: He forced Hicks to read him newspaper stories and scour the radio for updates on the case.

A Disturbing Confession: At the 2008 funeral of his own son, Pankey chillingly stated he hoped God hadn’t allowed his son’s death as punishment for Jonelle Matthews.

The Detail Only the Killer Knew

The most damning piece of evidence against Pankey was his own mouth. During his years of contacting investigators, Pankey explicitly described how a garden tool had been dragged across the snow to erase footprints at the crime scene.

To prosecutors, this was a confession. There was no innocent way for a man living two miles away to know a specific detail deliberately hidden from the public and the press for over 30 years.

The Trials and the Verdict

Bringing Pankey to justice was not easy, as the state had no DNA, no murder weapon, and no eyewitnesses. The case relied entirely on circumstantial evidence, his ex-wife’s testimony, and his knowledge of the rake.

During his first trial in the fall of 2021, Pankey took the stand. He admitted to lying to investigators to make himself feel important but flatly denied killing Jonelle. His defense attorney argued that Pankey suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, which caused his true-crime fixation, and claimed careless police officers had accidentally leaked the rake detail to him during interviews. The defense also pointed to an alternate suspect, Norris Drake, a man with a suspicious alibi whose family lived across the street from the Matthews home. The first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial on the murder charges.

Prosecutors tried again in October 2022. This time, a second Weld County jury weighed the decades of strange behavior against the withheld crime scene detail and reached a verdict. Steven Pankey was found guilty of felony murder and second-degree kidnapping with a deadly weapon.

On October 31, 2022, the 71-year-old Pankey was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. Maintaining his innocence, he stated the verdict was “not justice for Jonelle.”

Epilogue: The Shoes by the Heater

The conviction finally brought earthly justice to a grieving family. It was a case solved not by modern forensics, but by the accumulated weight of a guilty conscience and a single, closely guarded secret. At the center of it all remains the haunting image of a 12-year-old girl who kicked off her shoes by the heater on a snowy winter night, expecting an ordinary evening in a warm home—shoes she would never return to wear.