On the night of December 20th, 1984, police officers with flashlights walked the edges of a house in Gley, Colorado.
There was fresh snow on the ground.
Beneath one of the windows, they found footprints as if someone had stood outside in the dark and looked in.
And beside those footprints, they found something that made no sense.
Someone had tried to wipe the footprints away with a garden rake.
As the homeowner would later put it, the rake came right out of my garage.
Inside that house, a 12-year-old girl had been home alone for about an hour.
Her shoes were still on the floor.
Her stockings were draped over the couch.
The heater beside the chair where she liked to sit was still running.
And she was gone.
Investigators made a quiet decision about that rake.
They kept it to themselves.
It stayed out of the press releases.
It stayed out of the newspapers.
The girl’s name was Janelle Matthews.
Her face would be printed on milk cartons across the country.
The president of the United States would say her name out loud and for 34 years.
Nobody would find her.
But the rake was not finished.
Decades later, a man living in Idaho would talk about it.
He said he had never met the Matthews [music] family.
And in the years after that night, he ran for governor of Idaho, not once, but twice.
From the night she vanished to the day he was arrested, 35 years, 9 months, and 22 days went by.
Gley’s police chief would call the arrest 36 years in the making.
This is the story of a girl taken from her home 5 days before Christmas and of the man who spent the next three and a half decades unable to stop talking about her.
And it starts with a choir.
Welcome to Cold Case Reckoning, where we follow forgotten cases all the way to the end.
If stories like this matter to you, subscribe [music] now because the man in Idaho is coming and he is going to tell on himself.
Now, let’s go back to the beginning.
Janelle Renee Matthews [music] was born on February 9th, 1972 at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California.
Her birthother was 13 years old.
6 weeks later, the baby was adopted by Jim and Gloria Matthews, a couple who already had a daughter of their own, Jennifer.
Several years later, the family left California for Gley, Colorado, a farming city about 50 mi north of Denver.
They settled in a quiet neighborhood called Pheasant Run.
Jim built a career in education and would go on to become principal of Plat Valley Elementary School in the small town of Kersie.
The family joined Sunny View Church of the Nazarene, and Janelle became active there.
To understand what happened to Janelle, it helps to understand what Gley was in 1984.
The city was roughly half the size it is today.
Kids rode their bikes down dirt roads past farm fields.
They explored the ravines.
They sold Girl Scout cookies doortodoor.
They walked to school in the morning and walked home in the afternoon.
And nobody thought twice about it.
People in town commonly left their doors unlocked.
By the third week of December, presents were already tucked under the trees and holiday lights blinked from the rooftops and reflected off the snow.
A 12-year-old girl at home by herself for an hour on a weekn night was not neglect.
It was ordinary.
That ordinariness is part of this story.
Mike Peters, the Gley Trabune’s police reporter, lived in Janelle’s neighborhood.
He would later say that after that December, parents stopped letting their kids walk to school.
They drove them there and picked them up because nobody knew why she had disappeared.
By the winter of 1984, Janelle was in the seventh grade at Franklin Middle School.
She had short, thick, dark hair.
She sang in the Franklin Middle School Honor Choir.
Her sister, Jennifer, four [snorts] grades ahead of her, would remember her decades later as a strong, independent, opinionated 12-year-old.
Jennifer has described her as athletic and as a girl with a flare for the dramatic.
If Janelle had ever run away, Jennifer said, she would have left a note making sure everyone knew exactly how upset she was.
In one family photo, Janelle stands in the living room with a hand on her hip playing to the camera.
They were sisters and they fought like sisters.
Jennifer has said there was real sibling rivalry between them in 1984.
It was the kind of rivalry that usually softens with time, the kind two sisters usually grow out of together.
[music] Jennifer would later say that what happened that winter took away any chance for the two of them to grow closer.
Thursday, December 20th, 1984 [music] was a busy night for the Matthews family.
Gloria had left earlier that day for another state to care for a sick relative.
Jennifer, a junior, was playing in a varsity basketball game, and Jim went to watch her.
Janelle had somewhere to be, too.
That evening, the Franklin Middle School Honor Choir performed a Christmas concert at a bank in downtown Gley.
[music] Janelle stood on a staircase decorated with garland and sang Jingle Bells with her classmates.
Somebody filmed it.
In the footage, she is smiling slightly, perhaps a little shy.
That video would sit in a police file for 34 years before investigators released it to the public.
After the concert, Janelle needed a ride home.
Her friend, Deanna Ross, who had sung beside her in the choir that night, and Deanna’s father, Russ, a family friend, drove her.
It was a short trip through a quiet neighborhood a few days before Christmas with presents already waiting under the tree.
If Janelle feels like a kid you [music] grew up with, a girl from your own school choir, hit the like button.
It helps her story reach people who have never heard her name.
[music] Now, let’s go back to the driveway.
Russ Ross pulled up to the Matthews house shortly after 8:00.
The garage door was partway open.
That did not worry him.
He had seen it that way before and assumed the family was not far away.
Janelle went inside and Russ and Deanna drove off.
They were the last people known to have seen her alive other than the person who [music] took her.
Shortly after 8:30, the phone rang.
A teacher was calling in sick and needed a substitute for the next day.
Janelle took the message and wrote it out for her father, the principal.
It is the last thing anyone knows she wrote.
That phone call is the last time anyone is known to have spoken with her other than her abductor.
The prosecution would later place the abduction between 8:30 [music] and 9:30 that night.
At 9:30, Jim Matthews came home from the basketball game.
The house was empty.
The television was on.
Janelle’s stockings were lying on the couch.
The space heater next to her chair, where she liked to sit, was still running.
Her shoes were there.
Her slippers were gone.
Jurors would later hear that she appeared to have been in the middle of making crossstitch embroidery as Christmas [music] gifts.
The phone message for her father was waiting for him.
Jim has said that after he had been home for [music] about half an hour, he had a strange feeling.
His girls were good about leaving a note or calling if their plans changed.
Janelle had done neither.
At 10:00, Jennifer came home from her game.
She had not seen her sister.
Jim called their pastor, Jim Christy, then Janelle’s friends.
Nobody knew where she was.
[music] He called the police and officers arrived at 10:15.
It was a dark, freezing night with snow on the ground.
Jim thought it unlikely his daughter would have gone far without her shoes, but her slippers were missing.
The officers found no sign of forced entry and no sign of a struggle.
Then they took their flashlights outside and they found the footprints near the window and they found the rake marks.
The footprints said someone had stood outside that window.
[music] The rake said someone had tried to make sure nobody would know it.
The open garage said someone had walked in without breaking a thing.
John Gates, a grely detective who would one day become the city’s mayor, was the third detective to arrive that night.
He has said that the moment he walked into the house, he believed this [music] was probably not a runaway.
Officers walked the neighborhood in the dark.
Nobody had [music] seen anything.
No witnesses came forward.
No usable fingerprints led anywhere.
Genetic testing was not yet part of police work in Gley.
And so the investigators did what investigators do with a detail that only the guilty should know.
They held it back.
The rake marks stayed out of the newspapers.
That decision is going to matter.
Police had footprints in the snow and a rake from the family’s own garage.
What they did not have was anyone to compare them to.
If this case is getting under your skin, subscribe to the channel because the next part is the hardest to sit through.
Police were about to search everywhere for Janelle while the answer walked right through their front door.
Now, let’s turn to the morning after.
Mike Peters drove past the Matthews house early on December 21st on his way to work.
There were police cars all around it.
When he got to the station, an officer told him plainly that they had a missing girl.
School let out for the holidays and the town mobilized.
Neighbors formed a group called the Rescue Jonel Committee.
They walk [music] the fields.
They taped flyers to lamp posts.
Churches held prayer vigils.
Donations poured in for the family.
Reward offers went out.
None of it produced a real lead.
Mike Peters later said people stopped him everywhere to ask what was new and that the answer was always the same.
Nothing was new.
Diane Duval, then the young mother of a one-year-old boy, later said the whole town was terrified and that it made people paranoid.
John Gates put it more bluntly.
Detectives were working hard and getting nowhere.
Christmas came and Jonelle did not.
Her presents stayed under the tree.
One of them was a Cabbage Patch doll that Gloria had stood in line for hours to buy.
There were Christmas presents to Jonelle under the tree, Jennifer would later say, and that’s where they stayed.
Gloria could not bring herself to give them away until years later.
Meanwhile, the investigation reached as far as California.
For weeks after the disappearance, law enforcement kept Jonel’s birthother under surveillance.
Nobody told her the child she had given up was missing.
She would not learn it until 1997 when she finally tracked down the adoptive family and wrote to Gloria asking to visit.
The Matthews family told her what had happened.
In time, the two families became friends.
The case went national at a moment when the country was just beginning to pay attention to missing children.
3 years earlier, the abduction of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in Florida had set off a nationwide campaign.
Jonell became one of the first missing children whose photograph was printed on milk cartons.
On March 7th, 1985, from room 450 of the old executive office building, President Ronald Reagan spoke about missing children and named [music] her.
He said Jonel would have celebrated a happy 13th birthday with her family just last month.
Her name was entered into the Congressional Record that April.
The administration helped open a national center for missing children with a toll-free hotline.
None of it brought her home.
Investigators did look hard at one man in the neighborhood, a man who had spent that evening at his mother’s house across the street and got home after midnight.
Detectives eventually eliminated him based on witness statements that accounted for his time.
He died in 2007 and was never charged with anything [music] connected to Janelle.
The years went by.
Every time human remains turned up somewhere, the family braced for a phone call.
Mike Peters kept writing anniversary stories for the Tribune.
At 5 years, at 25, at 30.
In 1994, a decade after she disappeared, Janelle was declared legally dead and the family held a funeral service in Gley without her.
A choke cherry tree was planted in front of Franklin Middle School in her memory.
Within a few years, the tree died.
The plaque with her name on it disappeared.
The family moved on as much as a family can.
Jim and Gloria became missionaries in the Philippines and later retired to Costa Rica.
Jennifer married and moved out of Colorado and the case file stayed in Gley.
The retired detectives who had worked it would still bring it up at a weekly coffee table they jokingly called the grumpy old men drinking coffee.
They talked about it.
They did not expect to live long enough to see it solved.
Jerry Garner, who ran the Gley Police Department from 2006 to 2018, would call it a case that had haunted him.
Now, [music] pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything that happened after.
In January of 1985, a few weeks after Janelle disappeared, a man walked into the Gley Police Department.
He said he was a Baptist minister.
He said a member of his congregation had confided some involvement in Janelle’s disappearance and he asked a detective for information about the investigation so that he could compare it with what his parishioner had told him.
At the time it seemed like nothing.
Police in a case like this hear from strangers every day.
He was not a minister.
His name was Steven Dana Panky.
He was 33 years old.
He [music] sold used cars and he lived about 2 mi from the Matthews home.
A few years earlier in 1980, he had lived out on Weld County Road 47 [music] and A2.
According to the indictment, that address sits roughly 10 mi due north of the spot where Janelle’s [music] body would one day be found.
The indictment also says he used to watch school children walking home from Franklin Middle School, which was Janelle’s school.
He knew the Matthews family’s church well.
Panky had been part of Sunny View Church of the Nazarene through the late 1970s.
He has claimed he served as a youth pastor [music] there.
A church official disputed that and prosecutors said he worked as the church janitor.
In 1977, a conflict with another member of the congregation led to criminal charges and the church cut him loose.
That charge was later dropped.
He remained around the congregation until the summer of 1978.
That was around the same time the Matthews family joined.
They came in as he was going out and by his own account, he [music] left angry.
Years later on the witness stand he would say I made a lot of stuff up out of bitterness naming Sunny View and a former employer.
That former employer was the SevenUp bottling plant in Gley where Panky had worked as a delivery driver.
Russ Ross, the father who drove Janelle home on her last night, had been a sales manager there.
Ross testified that he was not Pankiy’s supervisor and had no relationship with him outside work.
His wife at the time, Angela Hicks, would later describe what happened in their house that December.
The family had been invited to a Christmas gathering with Panky’s relatives in California, and he had made it clear they were not going.
Then, the day after Janelle disappeared, he announced they were going after all.
Angelo’s first thought was the family dogs.
She testified that he told her, “Don’t worry about the dogs.
I dumped the dogs.”
She never saw them again.
They left on December 22nd.
On Christmas Day, after an argument with his father, Panky abruptly turned the family around.
On the drive home, she said he had her search the radio dial for news about a missing girl in Gley.
Back in town, he drove straight to a grocery store for copies of the Gley Tribune and the Denver Post and had her read the stories about Jonel aloud again and again.
Within days, according to the indictment, he was digging in their yard and a car parked on their property burst into flames.
He took it to a salvage yard.
A few months later, a minister at a church service said Jonell would be found safe.
Panky began muttering, “False prophet,” and other churchgoers had to remove him.
Panky’s own version of that winter was different, and he would tell it for decades.
He said he and his wife were home together that night with the car already packed for California.
He said he only learned Jonell’s name on December 26th from the radio.
He said that the next day his aranged father-in-law, a gravedigger, made a strange remark about a body that needed burying and that he reported it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the following week.
His father-in-law has since died.
Then Panky moved away.
Within a few years, he had left Gley for Idaho.
In Gley, the file sat on a shelf.
In Idaho, Steven Panky kept writing.
On September 2nd, 1999, in an unrelated case before the Idaho Supreme Court, Panky filed a pleading.
In it, he argued that if the court ruled a certain way, he could reasonably believe he would get the death penalty for revealing the location of Janelle Matthews body.
Think about that for a second.
In 1999, Janelle Matthews was a missing child.
Her remains would not be found for another 20 years.
Nobody knew where she was.
And here was her name and her body in a state supreme court filing two states away.
In his writings, he added that without a deal, the case would never be solved.
Back in Gley, nobody saw it.
Panky would later say he wrote to the Weld County District Attorney’s Office about the case over the years and that some of [music] his letters came back unopened.
He also said Idaho authorities contacted him in 1996 after six-year-old John Bené Ramsay was killed in Boulder, another Colorado girl who died at Christmas time.
Neither claim has been publicly confirmed by police.
In 2010, Panky ran in the Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho.
In 2013, he sent law enforcement an alibi letter about his family’s Christmas trip describing a departure on December 21st, 1984.
Investigators would later call it full of false statements and needless detail.
In another letter that year, he claimed a blanket had also disappeared from the Matthews House.
In 2014, he won the Constitution Party’s nomination for governor of Idaho with 21 votes.
And no, that’s not a typo.
On August 13th, 2014, the party’s delegates voted to withdraw their backing, but he stayed on the ballot and received 5,219 votes in November.
In 2018, he ran again, this time in the Republican primary and finished with less than 2%.
Brad Little won the nomination and the governorship.
And according to authorities, 2018 was also the year Steven Panky was named a person of interest in the death of Jonel Matthews.
His name was on statewide ballots.
His words were in court files.
And one person in Idaho had already tried to tell [music] the police.
Angela Hicks married Steven Panky in 1978.
By December of 1984, they had a 5-year-old son named Carl.
She would describe the marriage under oath.
He made her stop seeing her father.
He would not let her drive.
He forbade radio and television in the house for most of their marriage.
That detail matters when it is set beside the drive home from California.
In a house where she was not allowed to listen to the radio, he spent hours having her flip the dial for news of Janelle [music] Matthews.
For years, the subject never came up.
Then in 1999 in Idaho, she found out he had not paid the rent.
In the middle of that argument, he brought up Janelle [music] Matthews.
Angela was stunned.
The girl had not been mentioned in years.
That year, she started collecting.
She gathered newspapers.
She gathered his legal filings.
She recorded her account on a cassette tape.
She did not tell him.
As far as she knew, he had no idea she had gone to the police.
And she went to law enforcement in Idaho.
Robert Cash, the Gley detective, who would eventually lead the case, later said the Idaho authorities remembered her and that they had sent her materials on to Gley.
And then nothing happened.
Nothing happened that year and nothing happened 10 years later.
Her account went into the system in the late 1990s and the system did not call back for roughly two decades.
She carried other weight too.
She has said she worried their son would not understand what she was doing.
And in 2008, Carl was murdered in Phoenix in a case that had nothing to do with Janelle.
At Carl’s memorial, Angela watched her former husband walk up to their son’s ern.
She testified that he bent down, kissed it, and said, “I hope God didn’t allow this to happen because of Janelle Matthews.”
When he saw her face, according to the indictment, he asked her whether she thought he could have hurt the girl.
Angela kept the tape, the clippings, and the files.
For 20 years, one of the most detailed accounts of what happened inside the Panky House in December of 1984 was not sitting in a police evidence room.
It was sitting with her.
When Robert Cash finally met her, he said he was taken aback by how much she knew about the case and by the intensity of her suspicion.
Her former husband has called her a vindictive ex-wife, a woman scorned.
She has said plainly that neither is true.
And then in Gley, someone finally decided to look again.
If Angela’s persistence means something to you, give this video a like.
20 years of silence, and she kept that tape anyway.
Now, here [snorts] is what happened when someone finally listened.
On December 20th, 2018, the 34th anniversary of Janelle’s disappearance, the Gley Police Department announced it [music] was putting new energy into the case and hoped to use modern technology to solve it.
Detectives released the video of Janelle singing with the Honor Choir.
The lead detective was Robert Cash.
Then, in 2019, Cash had a phone conversation with Steven Panky.
According to testimony, Panky told him he had knowledge about the case and wanted to compare information.
Then he demanded a deal.
Then he demanded immunity.
[music] Years later, Cash would describe Panky as a man who tapped on the shoulder of law enforcement again and again [music] for decades.
To understand why that phone call mattered, it helps to understand a basic tool of homicide investigation called holdback evidence.
When a case becomes public, investigators deliberately keep a few specific details out of the news.
The reason is simple.
High-profile cases attract false confessions, rumors, and people who want attention.
A holdback is a test.
If someone describes a detail that was never published, there are only a few ways they could know it.
They were told by an investigator, they heard it through a leak, or they were there.
When it is the third, investigators call it guilty knowledge.
On its own, it is not [music] proof.
The first thing any defense lawyer will ask is whether the secret really stayed secret, but it changes how every other word a person has said looks.
The grand jury’s indictment would later state that Panky knew of and discussed a crucial piece of evidence withheld from the public.
Specifically, it stated that a rake was used to obliterate shoe impressions in the snow.
District Attorney Michael Ror would later say Panky had intimate knowledge of the crime that the public never had.
Then on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019, [music] at 4:50 in the afternoon, a crew digging an oil and gas pipeline in rural Weld County made a discovery near the intersection of County Roads 34 1/2 and 49, about 15 mi southeast of the Matthews home.
They had uncovered human [music] remains in a shallow grave.
With the bones were scraps of fabric from a red blouse, a dark blue sweater vest, and a skirt.
It was what was left of a Christmas concert outfit.
Identifying her raised a problem that is easy to miss.
Jim and Gloria Matthews shared no genetic material with the daughter they had raised.
But investigators also had a genetic sample from her birthother file, the same woman they had quietly watched for weeks in 1984.
The Weld County Coroner’s Office confirmed it.
Janelle Matthews had been found.
She had died of a single gunshot wound to the head.
Jim Matthews later said that by then he had assumed whoever did this was probably dead.
That August, about 500 people filled the building that had once been home to Sunny View Church of the Nazarene for a celebration of Janelle’s life.
Gley police officers watched from the corners of the room.
He told a Gley detective in 1985 that he had information.
He told the Idaho Supreme Court in 1999 that revealing where her body was could cost him his life.
He told Robert Cash in 2019 that he would talk if they gave him immunity.
On August 15th, 2019, two Gley detectives traveled to his home in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Now that they wanted to talk, Panky refused to answer their questions.
On September 4th, officers from Colorado and Idaho searched his condo.
By his own account, they took his two cars, which were later returned, and a disc from his son’s funeral.
They found more than 1,000 documents mentioning the Matthews case.
Prosecutors would later say he had written at least 2,000 pages about it.
After detectives first contacted him, according to the indictment, he tried to delete the record of his internet searches about Janelle.
On September 13th, Gley police publicly named him a person of interest.
Ror would later say that finding Janelle’s remains had been significant in leading investigators back to a suspect.
Jennifer Matthews, now Jennifer Mogensson, learned his name when [music] a reporter called her and asked what she thought of Steve Panky.
Until then, she had never heard of him.
Even then, he did not go quiet.
He gave long interviews to newspapers in Idaho and Colorado, denying everything.
One interview with the Colorado Sun ran an hour and 47 minutes.
He told reporters he had given police a genetic sample.
The Gley Police Department said it had never asked for it and that it was Panky who kept trying to talk to detectives.
Jennifer called it a power play and said she did not want to be part of his game.
In May of 2020, while under investigation for Janelle’s murder, he ran for sheriff of Twin Falls County.
He lost.
In October of 2020, a Weld County grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder and seconddegree kidnapping.
The indictment laid out its case in 26 numbered points.
On October 12th, 2020, Panky was arrested at his home in Idaho.
When he appeared before a Weld County judge weeks later, he wore an orange jail jumpsuit, handcuffs, and a white face mask.
Prosecutors called him a flight risk and asked for $10 million.
Judge Timothy Kern set his bond at $5 million cash only.
The trial would answer the question that had been hanging over Gley since 1984, and it would take two tries.
The first trial opened in Weld County District Court in October of 2021.
There was no genetic evidence linking Panky to Janelle.
There was no fingerprint, no weapon, no witness who saw him at the house.
The case rested on his own words, his behavior, and his former wife.
Defense attorney Anthony Vior argued that Panky was obsessed with the case, but was not a killer, and called an expert witness who testified that he had diagnosed Panky with Asperger syndrome, which he said helped explain his fixation.
Panky took the stand himself.
Under cross-examination, Ror pressed him on why a man with nothing to hide would ever need immunity.
Panky compared it to invoking the fifth amendment, which he said does not make anyone guilty.
In closing, Vorce told jurors that the Matthews family should not have closure at the expense of an innocent man.
The jury deliberated from noon on Tuesday, November 2nd, until late Thursday morning.
It convicted him of false reporting, a misdemeanor, and deadlocked on murder and kidnapping.
A mistrial was declared.
Prosecutors decided to try him again.
The second trial opened on October 7th, 2022 in Gley before Judge Timothy Karns.
Weld County District Attorney Michael Ror and Assistant District Attorney Rob Miller prosecuted.
Peter Harris and Jessica Brazil defended.
Angela Hicks testified again.
She told jurors about the dogs, the radio, the newspapers, the digging, and the ern.
The defense had a fair question for her, too.
In the first trial, it had pointed out that she had not voiced suspicion of Panky until 1999, nearly 15 years after Jonelle disappeared and suggested her memories had sharpened with time.
Russ Ross testified about the garage door that was partway open.
On cross-examination, the defense pressed him on the rake.
Had he gone home and told his wife, his friends, and his co-workers about the footprints and the rake marks in the snow?
It was the defense’s best point in the entire case.
If the holdback had leaked, then Pankkey’s knowledge of it proved nothing.
Then there was Patrick Callas, who had been held in the Weld County Jail with Panky in 2021.
Callus testified that Panky told him, “She was dead before I crossed the railroad [music] tracks.”
Jessica Brazil attacked his credibility.
Ror said Callus was never offered a deal to testify.
The defense’s argument was not frivolous, and it deserves to be stated fairly.
There was no physical evidence.
Panky did not know the family.
The defense pointed to the neighbor across the street as an alternate suspect, calling that possibility the elephant in the room.
In the first trial, Vior had also told jurors that Panky was a true crime obsessive who had once claimed responsibility for a different 1977 killing, one that genetic testing tied to someone else.
By the end, the defense asked jurors to convict him of a lie, the false claim about a missing blanket and nothing more.
The prosecution’s answer in closing arguments at the first trial had been decades of his own words.
In one letter, Panky had asked police which mattered more, Jonel Matthews herself or the Matthews case.
Assistant District Attorney Rob Miller argued that Pankiy’s demands for immunity amounted to an offer.
Investigators could learn where her body was, or they could charge the man who knew.
What the defense could not explain was the 1999 filing or why an innocent man would demand immunity or how he knew about the rake.
The jury began deliberating on the afternoon of Friday, October 28th.
On Monday, October 31st, 2022, [music] it returned a unanimous verdict.
The jury found him not guilty of first-degree premeditated murder, but guilty of felony murder, secondderee kidnapping with a deadly weapon, and false reporting.
It was Halloween.
Outside, children were trick-or-treating in Gley.
Sentencing came that afternoon.
Because the crime was committed in 1984, Judge Karns had to apply the law as it stood [music] in 1984.
The sentence was life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Under current Colorado law, first-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life without parole.
In [music] 1984, it did not.
Panky addressed the court.
I am a Christian, he said.
I will be in heaven.
I am innocent and this is not justice for Janelle.
Ror told the court the life sentence was right for someone who’s walked this earth 38 years knowing what he’d done.
Jim Matthews urged Panky to repent.
Jennifer said she and her parents had been thrown into a reality of moving forward while trying to find Janelle.
And afterward, Gloria Matthews, who had kept her daughter’s Christmas presents under the tree for years, said it simply, “I cannot forgive him for how he killed Janelle.”
Steven Panky was 71 when the verdict came down.
He is serving his sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado.
According to state corrections records, he will become eligible for parole around 2040, when he will [music] be close to 90 years old.
At his sentencing, he and his lawyers signaled that he would appeal.
He has never stopped saying he is innocent.
That should be stated plainly along with the rest of it.
This is a conviction without genetic evidence and without a single piece of physical evidence.
One jury could not agree on murder at all.
The jury that did convict him rejected premeditation.
Part of the case came from a jailhouse witness and part of it rested on whether a 35-year-old secret had truly stayed secret.
Here is what the verdict means.
12 people agreed unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt that Steven Panky kidnapped Janelle Matthews and that she died in the course of that kidnapping.
Here is what it does not mean.
It does not mean they found he planned to kill her in advance.
And here is what survives every one of those caveats.
A 1999 court filing, in his own words, about the location of her body, decades of demands for immunity, and a rake that only a handful of people were supposed to know about.
The case has since been told on 48 hours, on Dine, and in a 2024 oxygen series called The Girl on the Milk Carton, in which Angela Hicks and Robert Cash told their sides of it.
Robert Cash has since retired.
Jennifer has said that even knowing how her sister died, there was some comfort in finally having answers.
Angela Hicks eventually met the Matthews family.
After the verdict, she spoke with Jennifer on the phone, and Jennifer told her something she has never forgotten.
Angela, you are Jonelle’s story.
For 35 years, the rake looked like the one careful thing the killer did that night.
He took a tool from the family’s own garage and tried to erase the proof that he had ever been there.
It did not erase anything.
The snow melted.
The footprints were long gone.
But the rake stayed in the file, a detail only a handful of people were supposed to know.
And in the end, the man who tried to sweep away his tracks spent the rest of his life leaving new ones in letters, in court filings, and in phone calls to the police.
The rake was supposed to make him disappear.
Instead, it was the one thing he could not stop bringing back.
But this was never really a story about him.
Jonelle was 12.
She was in the seventh grade.
She had short, thick, dark hair.
She sang in the honor choir.
She was strong and independent and opinionated, and she would have left a note.
She had an older sister she argued with and would have grown close to.
On her last night, she wore a red blouse, a dark blue sweater vest, and a skirt.
She sang jingle bells on a staircase wrapped in garland.
She wrote down a message for her dad.
She was working on Christmas presents for other people.
There was a doll waiting for her under the tree.
At that celebration of her life in August of 2019, Jim and Gloria stood up and sang a gospel hymn.
There’s something about that name.
It was Jonelle’s favorite bedtime song.
She is buried at Lindrove Cemetery in Gley in the town where she grew up.
Her name is Jonelle Renee Matthews, and she deserves to be remembered for who she was, not just how her story ended.
If Janelle’s story stays with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and subscribe to Cold Case Reckoning.
Every case we tell is a name that deserves to be said out loud.
Thank you for remembering her with us.
