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

Nearly four decades after a young girl disappeared, a jury has convicted her killer. The jury found Steve Pankey guilty of kidnapping and murdering 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews in Greeley. She disappeared back in 1980.  On the night of December 20th, 1984, a 12-year-old girl was dropped off at her home in Greeley, Colorado after singing in her middle school Christmas concert.

 Her parents were out, her father across town at her sister’s basketball game. Jonelle Matthews went into the empty house, turned on the lights, and set her shoes by the heater to warm her feet. She was alone, 4 days before Christmas, and the doors were unlocked. When her father came home an hour later, Jonelle’s shoes were still sitting by the heater.

 Jonelle was not there. There was no sign of a struggle and no note. Outside in the fresh snow were footprints  that someone had dragged a garden rake across, trying to wipe them away. It would take almost 35 years to find her, and the man a jury would decide had taken her spent those years unable to stop talking about the case.

 This is how they found the monster. Jonelle Renee Matthews was 12 years old, a seventh grader in Greeley, a city on the plains of northern Colorado about 50 miles from Denver. She had been adopted as a baby by Jim and Gloria Matthews, who raised her with an older sister, Jennifer. Her father was an educator, a man who would go on to become an elementary school principal.

By every account, they were a close, church-going family, the kind that knew their neighbors and sat in the same pew every Sunday. Jonelle was a bright, musical kid. She sang, she had friends. She was the sort of 12-year-old who kicked off her shoes by the heater on a winter night.

 On December 20th, 1984, 5 days before Christmas, she performed with the Franklin Middle School Choir at a Christmas concert in Greeley. A family friend gave her a ride home afterward and dropped her at the house. That was the last time anyone outside her family is known to have seen her. She went into an empty house on a snowy December night.

 Somewhere in the hour that followed, someone came and she was gone. Jim Matthews had taken the family to watch his older daughter, Jennifer, play in a basketball game that evening. Jonelle had come home early from the concert with the family friend. When Jim returned around 8:30, he found the house lit and warm and empty.

 His daughter’s shoes were by the heater. Her coat was there. Nothing was missing. Nothing was disturbed and there was no sign that Jonelle had left on her own. He called the police and Greeley launched one of the largest searches in the city’s history. Officers, volunteers, and tracking dogs worked the neighborhood through the freezing night and into the following days.

 They knocked on doors, searched fields and ditches, and pushed Jonelle’s photograph out to every news outlet that would carry it. For a small Colorado city 5 days before Christmas, the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl from inside her own home was a nightmare with no precedent. The one physical trace they found was outside.

 In the snow near the house were shoe impressions and someone had taken a garden rake and dragged it back and forth over them trying to erase the tracks. The rake, investigators later learned, had come from the Matthews family’s own garage. Jim Matthews would later say it had come right out of his garage.

 Whoever used it had been comfortable enough on that property to find a tool in the dark and use it. Police kept the detail of the raked footprints out of the public eye. It was the kind of specific withheld fact that could one day separate a real witness from the many people who come forward with stories in a case like this. They filed it away and said  nothing.

In the first days, investigators did what they always do and looked closely at the family. Jim Matthews was the obvious starting point. The last person expected home, the father of a girl who had vanished from inside the house. But Jim had been at the basketball game in front of a gymnasium full of witnesses and he was cleared.

 The family was not involved. From there, the case widened into one of the most public missing child searches of its era. Jonelle had disappeared at the exact moment America was waking up to the idea of the stranger who takes a child, and her face became one of the symbols of that awakening. Her photograph was printed on milk cartons and mailed into kitchens across the country as part of a national campaign by the child safety movement.

For a generation of Americans, those faces at the breakfast table were the first images of a danger their parents had never had to think about. Jonelle was one of them. In 1985, she was among the missing children named by President Ronald Reagan as his administration pushed a national effort to find them. It went that high.

 A 12-year-old from Greeley, Colorado, who had sung in a Christmas concert and left her shoes by a family room heater, had become a name spoken from the White House. Jonelle Matthews became, in the language of the time, the girl on the milk carton. But the attention did not bring her home. Tips came in by the thousands and led nowhere.

 Investigators chased suspects across states and years and never built a case against any of them. The searches ended. The milk cartons were thrown away, and Jonelle Matthews stayed missing. For 35 years, the Matthews family lived without an answer. Jim and Gloria did not know if their daughter was dead or alive, held somewhere or long gone.

 They marked Christmases and birthdays around a hole where a child should have been. Jim later said that not knowing was its own kind of torture, a grief with no bottom    because it never resolved into anything final. The case passed through generations of Greeley detectives. Every few years it would surface again in a newspaper anniversary piece or a television segment about the missing children of the 1980s.

 New eyes looked at the old file. The raked footprints stayed in it, unpublished, waiting. But no one could turn the file into a name that would hold. Jonelle became one of those cases that a community never quite lets go of. Her name still spoken in Greeley decades later. Her photograph still the face of a wound that had never closed.

Subscribe so you don’t miss how a construction crew and 35 years finally cracked it open. One man kept circling back to the case on his own. He did not live in Greeley anymore. He had moved his family away just a few years after Jonelle vanished, drifting through several states before landing in Idaho. There he reinvented himself as a perennial political candidate and ran more than once for governor.

 And no matter where he went, he kept finding his way back to the disappearance of a girl he said he barely knew. In 2008, his own son died. At the funeral, according to his former wife, Pankey said something that stopped her cold. He said he hoped God had not allowed this to happen because of Jonelle Matthews. It was, she thought, a strange and terrible thing for a father to say over the body of his own child, unless the guilt of another child’s death was already living somewhere inside him.

 She would carry that sentence and repeat  it years later in a courtroom. On a July day in 2019, a construction crew was installing a pipeline in a rural field in Weld County, southeast of Greeley. It was about 15 miles from the Matthews home. In the dirt, they found human bones. The remains were clothed and they had been in the ground a very long time.

 Forensic testing identified them through DNA, matching the remains to Jonelle. After nearly 35 years, she had been found in a field she had no connection to, miles from the warm house where she had left her shoes by the heater. She had been shot once in the head. That was the cause of death and it answered, in the cruelest way possible, the question her parents had carried for three and a half decades. Jonelle had not run away.

 She had not been taken to be raised by someone else. She had been killed that first winter and buried in a field and left there while the world printed her face on milk cartons and searched for a girl who was already gone. Her parents had spent decades imagining every possibility and the ground gave them the one they had feared most.

 The discovery turned a missing person’s case into a homicide with a body, a cause of death and a location. And it turned the full attention of investigators back onto a man who by then had spent decades making sure they could not forget his name. The man was Steven Pankey and the reason investigators knew him was that for years he would not stop talking about Jonelle Matthews.

 In 1984, Pankey had lived about two miles from the Matthews family. He had been a  youth pastor at a church the family was connected to before he was pushed out of that role. His time in the ministry had ended under a cloud. In 1977, he had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman from the congregation. He always maintained the encounter was consensual, said the two of them had been dating and the charge was dropped after he passed a polygraph, but he lost his position.

And the church that would later take in the Matthews family was one he had been forced out of. To the people who knew him, he was difficult, rigid, and combustible. A man who collected grievances and feuds. His ex-wife would later testify that he was intensely controlling. For much of their marriage, she said, he did not allow her to drive or to listen to the radio or television on her own.

 It was a marriage run entirely on his terms, which was part of what made the exception so striking when they came. The day before Jonelle disappeared, by his own later account, he had been arrested after a confrontation at a bank. What drew investigators was not proximity alone. It was that over the decades, Pankey repeatedly inserted himself into the case.

 He contacted law enforcement again and again, across state lines, across the years, long after he had any obvious reason to. He claimed to have information about what had happened to Jonelle. Prosecutors would later say his statements grew more detailed and more incriminating over time, and that he offered to share what he knew only if he was granted immunity from prosecution.

 A man who says he knows nothing does not ask for immunity. A man with nothing to hide does not spend 30 years circling back to the same dead child. Subscribe so you don’t miss the one detail he knew that he never should have. According to his ex-wife, in the days after Jonelle vanished, he abruptly announced an unplanned trip to California.

Then he followed the news coverage with an intensity she found disturbing, having her read him the newspaper stories and search the radio for updates. She described other things, too, things that stayed with her for decades. She said that around that time he got rid of the family’s two Great Danes, telling her he had dumped them, and the dogs were never seen again.

She said, “He began digging in the yard.” And she said a car that had been parked on their property caught fire around then and was hauled off to a salvage yard. None of those things on their own proved anything. People get rid of pets and dig in yards and lose cars to fire. But taken together, in the mouth of a woman who had lived with him and grown afraid of him, they formed a portrait that investigators could not unsee.

 She also described finding a note in his handwriting years later that referred to the raked snow at the scene. And there was the church. A few months after the disappearance, according to his former wife, a minister told a congregation that Jonelle would be found alive. Pankey, she said, reacted with anger, accusing the man of being a false prophet, as though he already knew the girl was dead.

 The single most damaging thing was the rake. The detail investigators had guarded for decades. The raked over footprints in the snow was something the public was never told. It was known only to the family, to the police, and prosecutors argued, to whoever had stood in that yard on the night Jonelle was taken.

 And then Steven Pankey talked about it. Somewhere in his years of contacting investigators, he described how someone had dragged a garden tool across the footprints at the scene to erase them. To prosecutors, that was close to a confession. There was no innocent way, they argued, for a man 2 miles away to know a fact that had been deliberately kept from every newspaper and broadcast for over 30 years.

 “He knew it,” prosecutors said, “because he had been there.” Pankey’s defense had an answer, and it is a fair one to weigh. His attorney argued that the police themselves had let the rake detail slip to Pankey during their many conversations over the years, and that this was the only reason he knew it. On this account, he was not a killer who knew a secret.

 He was an obsessive who had been fed a secret by careless investigators, and then repeated it back. Investigators disputed that they had ever told him about it, but the dispute is the heart of the case, and it says something that the case’s weight sat where it did. The strongest evidence against Steven Pankey was not a fingerprint or a weapon or a strand of hair.

 It was what came out of his own mouth, and the fight over how that knowledge had gotten there. Because this case was built on behavior and words rather than physical proof, the defense had room to argue, and it  did. Steven Pankey’s lawyer told the jury that his client was strange, obsessive, and impossible, but not a murderer.

 The defense said Pankey had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and that it drove him to insert himself into true crime cases to feel important, to be at the center of something. His fixation on Jonelle Matthews, they argued, was a symptom of the way his mind worked, not evidence that he had killed her.

 Jerk, his attorney conceded to the jury, guilty  as charged. Murderer, not guilty. The defense also offered another name. They pointed to a man named Norris Drake, whose mother and sister lived directly across the street from the Matthews home. Drake had been at his mother’s house the night Jonelle vanished and was reportedly unaccounted for during part of the evening.

 Police had questioned him at the time and not pursued him further, satisfied with an alibi his family provided. The defense argued he had an interest in girls Jonelle’s age,    that he was physically close to the house that night, and that he was another person who could have known the details prosecutors said only the killer knew.

He, not Panky, was the killer, the defense told the jury. Norris Drake had died in 2007, more than a decade before the trial, and could not answer the accusation for himself. None of it could be proven.  The reporters covering the trial had never heard Drake’s name before the defense raised it, and no evidence tied him to the crime any more firmly than it tied Panky.

But it gave the jury a second man to think about in a case that had only ever had circumstance. For decades, he had been a voice on the phone, a name in the margins of the file, a man who kept calling to talk about a dead girl. His name was Steven Dana Panky. By the time the case came together, Panky was in his late 60s, living in Twin Falls, Idaho.

He was a two-time candidate for governor who had never come close to winning. He had built a small, strange public life out there. He ran for one office after another, for governor, for lieutenant governor, for sheriff. He filed lawsuits and gave interviews, and in some of those interviews and filings, he brought up Jonelle Matthews himself, unprompted, returning to her case again and again, like a man worrying at a wound.

 In the weeks after Jonelle’s remains were found in the summer of 2019, investigators searched his Idaho home and carried out his laptops and phones. That September, Greeley police publicly named him a person of interest in her murder. A year later, in October of 2020, a Weld County grand jury indicted him for kidnapping  and killing Jonelle Matthews.

 It had been 36 years since she disappeared from her home. The man who had spent decades forcing his way into this story was finally going to stand inside it in a way he had never wanted. But putting him in front of a jury and making a conviction hold turned out to be far harder than anyone expected.

 It took two trials to reach a verdict. The first began in the fall of 2021. Prosecutors laid out Panky’s decades  of strange behavior, his knowledge of the withheld rake detail, and the testimony of his ex-wife, Angela Hicks. She was one of the prosecution’s most important witnesses, the person who had lived inside the marriage and watched him in the days and years after Jonelle vanished.

 Everything she had carried for three decades, she now said under oath in front of a jury. The prosecution had no forensic evidence to offer, and it did not pretend to. What it had was a woman who had shared a home with the accused and a pattern of behavior she said had frightened her for a lifetime.

 The defense offered the Asperger’s explanation and the alternate suspect. And then Panky himself took the stand, which defendants in murder cases rarely do. Under oath, he admitted that he had lied to investigators over the years about knowing things he did not know. He said he had made a lot of it up out of bitterness, that it had been him trying to be a big man, to be part of the case.

 He denied killing Jonelle. The jury deadlocked on the murder and kidnapping charges. It convicted him only of a misdemeanor, making a false report to police, and the judge declared a mistrial on the rest. Prosecutors tried again the next year. In October of 2022, a second Weld County jury heard the same story, weighed the same behavior, and the same contested rake, and reached a different conclusion.

They found Steven Pankey guilty of felony murder and of second-degree kidnapping with a deadly weapon.  They did not find him guilty of premeditated first-degree murder. The distinction mattered. The verdict said the jury believed Jonelle had died in the course of a kidnapping Pankey committed, not that they could see into the moment and call it planned.

 On the strength of his own decades of talking and one detail he should not have known, he was convicted of taking and killing a child. On October 31st, 2022, a judge sentenced Steven Pankey to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. He was 71 years old. Under the terms, his earliest possible release would come in 2042, when he would be 91.

In practice, it was a sentence likely to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Pankey did not accept the verdict. “I am innocent,” he told the court, “and this is not justice for Jonelle.” He maintained, as he had throughout, that he had not killed her. And he and his lawyers signaled that they would appeal.

 What his conviction rested on and what it did  not is worth stating plainly. It rested on no DNA, no weapon, and no eyewitness. No forensic thread of any kind tying Steven Pankey to Jonelle Matthews. It rested instead on the accumulated weight of 38 years of his own conduct and on his ex-wife’s account of the man she had lived with.

 It rested on a jury’s judgment that a person does not follow a case for a lifetime and know what only the killer knew by coincidence. Jonelle’s  sister, Jennifer, spoke in court. She told him the verdict was the end of the family’s search for earthly justice. A second reckoning, the one that mattered more to her, was still to come, and only he and God would be present for it.

 A 12-year-old girl came home from a Christmas concert on a snowy night, went into an empty house, and set her shoes by the heater to warm her feet. Within the hour, she was gone, and the only trace left behind was a set of footprints someone had raked away in the yard. Her face went on to milk cartons and into a president’s speech.

 Her body stayed buried in a field for almost 35 years. And a man 2 miles away spent the rest of his life unable to stop talking about her, until the one thing he said that he could not have known sent him to prison. Those shoes are the detail her family could never shake. She had taken them off the way she did every single night, expecting an ordinary evening in a warm house.

 She never came back for them. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.