After over three decades, there are formal charges in the 1984 disappearance and death of 12-year-old Colorado girl Jonelle Matthews. A grand jury indicted defendant Steven Dana Pankey, 69, as her kidnapper and killer.
After more than three decades, there are formal charges in the 1984 disappearance and death of 12-year-old Colorado girl Jonelle Matthews. A grand jury indicted defendant Steven Dana Pankey,69, as her kidnapper and killer. The child’s whereabouts were a mystery for years. She was last seen entering her home on December 20,1984 when friends had dropped her off after a choir concert, police said. Nothing immediately turned up, and would not for decades. The Greeley Police Department reopened their investigation in 2018, however, and Matthews’s body was found by a crew excavating in Weld County in July of 2019. “It’s still kind of surreal,” Matthews’s sister Jennifer Mogensen told 9News after her sister’s body was identified. “It’s closure for me and my family but it also raises new questions now, and it’s sad too. We’re sad, my parents and I.” The alleged answers to at least one of those questions would soon surface. It turned out that Pankey was under investigation for Matthews’s death. He said he lived in Colorado at the time of the child’s disappearance, and left the state in 1987. Incidentally, he would go on to be a gubernatorial candidate in Idaho: for the Constitution Party in 2014, and as a Republican in 2018 (not that he got anywhere near the seat, receiving 1.
