Footprints in the Snow

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Speaker 4 We dropped Janelle off.

Speaker 3 And you and your dad went home.

Speaker 4 We went home.

Speaker 3 Imagine her being taken from her home.

Speaker 5 Taken.

Speaker 6 She must have been terrified.

Speaker 7 I get a a call. We have a missing child.

Speaker 8 She had come home, taken off her coat, just like she was just going to settle down and watch TV.

Speaker 9 It was truly baffling. No sign of a struggle, nothing missing from the house.

Speaker 7 There were shoe prints found around the outside of the house.

Speaker 10 Doors are getting locked.

Speaker 11 Parents were warning children.

Speaker 12 It really rocked this community.

Speaker 7 Every single person who lived in the neighborhood needed to be tracked down.

Speaker 13 I know who you did.

Speaker 14 Who overdid you now that night?

Speaker 15 Absolutely, positively not.

Speaker 9 They did not have physical evidence. All leads were going dead.

Speaker 16 I've got information that you want, and you can't have it.

Speaker 1 This really might be something.

Speaker 3 Pretty dramatic stuff.

Speaker 1 Very dramatic stuff.

Speaker 5 Unforgivable.

Speaker 5 How can you forgive evil?

Speaker 3 A child kidnapped. A town haunted.

Speaker 17 A killer taunting detectives.

Speaker 3 See how they caught him. At last.
I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 3 Here's Dennis Murphy with footprints in the snow.

Speaker 3 This is the place where he left her, this windswept scruff of land. I almost feel like we're on sacred ground or something.
I mean, with all of this prairie out here, way off the paved road, nowhere.

Speaker 11 It's endless.

Speaker 17 Getting rid of a body out here is extremely easy.

Speaker 3 And there, for passing decades of winter snow and summer heat, she lay, abandoned, alone, but not forgotten.

Speaker 9 Part of this story touches so deeply on that fear that we all have as parents that there'll be a moment where we won't be able to protect our child.

Speaker 3 And the nearby town was paralyzed in, oh my God, fear from that very first moment when word passed, Janelle Matthews had gone missing.

Speaker 5 He says, Glo, I don't know how to tell this to you, but we can't find Janelle.

Speaker 8 I knew the longer it goes on, the less chance that we would find her alive.

Speaker 3 And no one ever quite forgot the night Greeley lost its innocence.

Speaker 4 It'll never be over. Janelle's always there.
Janelle's always going to be a story that you have to tell.

Speaker 3 It was just before Christmas, December 20th, 1984, in small town Greeley, Colorado. Back then, Greeley was a cow town on Colorado's eastern prairie, a quiet place to set down roots and raise a family.

Speaker 18 Greeley was 50,000, approximately, at that time. Now it's about 125,000, 130, but to me, it was kind of an ideal Midwest town, small Midwest town, good place to raise kids, good schools.

Speaker 3 Jim Matthews moved here from California with his wife Gloria and two daughters, Janelle and Jennifer. You know, I was interested talking to your parents.

Speaker 3 They had this kind of picture of Greeley, Colorado, like the old TV shows from the 50s

Speaker 8 growing up, Jennifer. Exactly right.
I didn't have to worry about being outside and playing with my friends and coming home by dark and just enjoying life.

Speaker 3 That December 1984, Gloria decided to take a trip back to the West Coast to visit her extended family. That meant she would miss Christmas Day in Greeley.

Speaker 18 You know, Janelle said, what are we going to do about Christmas? And Gloria told her, you know, we'll just wait another day and mom will be back on the 26th and we'll celebrate Christmas.

Speaker 3 But even with Gloria away in the days leading up to Christmas, Jim was determined to make the most of the season for his daughters. Jennifer was 16 then, Janelle 12.

Speaker 3 What did Janelle in particular think about Christmas coming around?

Speaker 18 She loved Christmas. She liked to make presents for her friends.

Speaker 5 She liked to get presents.

Speaker 18 And she liked to get presents. You know, who doesn't?

Speaker 4 She was excited for the gifts and just everything about Christmas and the songs.

Speaker 3 Deanna Ross was Janelle's childhood best friend, and they sang together in the school's honor choir. They'd both been rehearsing hard for the Christmas concert that night of December 20th.

Speaker 3 It was the last big event before school ended for the holidays. That's Janelle right there in the middle.
Did Janelle enjoy it?

Speaker 4 She loved it, yes.

Speaker 3 That was really her sweet spot, right?

Speaker 4 Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 3 Jim Matthews was juggling the schedules of both daughters that evening. First, he dropped Janelle off and then went to watch Jennifer's basketball game.

Speaker 3 He wasn't going to make it back in time to take Janelle home. Is Janelle stuck without a ride? Does she have to figure out how she's going to get home?

Speaker 9 No, I don't believe so.

Speaker 4 I think she had a ride figured out, but I think she came with us at the last minute.

Speaker 3 Janelle hopped in a pickup with Deanna and her dad, Russ Ross. When they pulled up to the Matthews home at about 8.30 p.m., nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Speaker 3 Janelle ran into the house through the garage and gave her a secret signal.

Speaker 4 She went inside and flicked the light on and off to let us know that she's inside. And then me and my dad left.

Speaker 3 That was the okay signal, huh?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it was the okay signal.

Speaker 3 Deanna and her her dad drove away. Jim arrived home from Jennifer's basketball game at 9.30, about an hour after Janelle.
30 minutes later, Jennifer arrived home.

Speaker 8 I came home around 10 o'clock and my dad had asked, do you know where Janelle is? And I said no.

Speaker 8 She usually came home and would watch TV and never had any problems about not being where she was supposed to be.

Speaker 3 What was the back of your neck telling you? Anything?

Speaker 8 Just that this was not right, something was wrong.

Speaker 3 So Jim called the last person he thought had seen Janelle, Russ Ross.

Speaker 18 I called Russ and I said, Russ, do you know anything about Janelle? And he says, yeah, he said, I brought her home and I watched her walk in.

Speaker 18 The garage door was open. And he said she walked into the garage area and used that door to enter the house.
And then she flicked the lights on and off, just saying that everything was fine.

Speaker 3 Jim knew immediately something was awry. The garage door should not have been open.

Speaker 18 It was not open when we left.

Speaker 3 One thing was terrifyingly clear: 12-year-old Janelle Matthews was nowhere to be found. But in that garage, clues about what had happened to her were about to emerge.

Speaker 3 Deanna Ross remembers vividly being startled awake by her father in the dead of night that December 20th, 1984.

Speaker 4 I remember feeling kind of like, what's going on? What's happening? And not really

Speaker 4 registering with me what was happening.

Speaker 3 What her father was saying didn't make sense. Her best friend, Janelle Matthews, missing? But the two girls had just performed in their school's Christmas concert hours before.

Speaker 3 Deanna's dad had driven them home. You didn't have anything to tell them.
The last you'd seen Janelle was her going into the house.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 3 Back at the Matthews house, late as it was, her father Jim continued to call around to see if anyone knew where Janelle was. No one did.

Speaker 18 So now I'm starting to really be concerned.

Speaker 3 Finally, he called the police. Officers from the Greeley Police Department responded quickly.

Speaker 8 They came right away when my dad had called and waking me up in the middle of the night to fingerprint my room.

Speaker 3 Oh, how How awful for you.

Speaker 8 But something that you wanted to have done so that they could find Janelle.

Speaker 3 Police scoured every inch of the house as Jim and Jennifer stood by in silence. And their home was rarely silent, especially when the above and sometimes cheeky Janelle was around.
Bossing?

Speaker 18 Correct.

Speaker 3 Sassy? Yes.

Speaker 8 Just opinionated.

Speaker 8 She was sweet and had a tender heart, but I didn't see that because I was just rolling my eyes to the other more dramatic actions that she would do.

Speaker 5 I'll tell you a story about Janelle. It was a Sunday night and she wanted something and I said, no, Janelle.

Speaker 5 She stomps out the room. She comes back a few minutes later and she asked me the same question.

Speaker 8 By that time I was getting angry.

Speaker 5 I said, no, Janelle.

Speaker 5 And she stomps up the room and she says, suffer the little children and forbid them not.

Speaker 3 Deanna says Janelle just loved music and brought any situation to life. What did she like? What little girl things did she have? She had boy band posters on her wall.

Speaker 4 Oh, definitely. One that sticks out is Menudo.
She loved Menudo.

Speaker 3 But now, in that house crawling with police, there was no music, just worry. The clues were meager at best.

Speaker 3 Janelle had left her stockings on the couch, and she'd written a note for her dad to return a call to one of his employees.

Speaker 3 Police found no signs of struggle, but the shoes Janelle had worn to the concert that evening were inside the house and none of her other shoes were missing.

Speaker 3 Perhaps a sign police speculated that Janelle didn't leave the house willingly.

Speaker 3 As dawn broke with still no trace of Janelle, the Greeley Police Department dispatched more officers to the scene. I was called out, I don't know, four or five in the morning.

Speaker 3 John Gates was a Greeley Police Department detective back in 1984. Now he's the mayor of Greeley.
There's a girl that's been missing now since last night that, you know, there's several options.

Speaker 3 Of course, you're hoping it's a girl that's run away,

Speaker 3 maybe with a friend that didn't communicate that to her parents.

Speaker 3 By the early morning, police had fanned out across Greeley to see if anyone had seen Janelle or knew where she might be. Gates and his partner moved methodically on foot through the snow.

Speaker 3 We knocked on all the doors that we could. You're a canvasser.
Correct. Patrol officer Keith Olson was called to the scene too.
This is a neighborhood. Does it look to your eyes more or less the same?

Speaker 7 You know what's ironic is it looks almost exactly the same. We have the same type of weather.

Speaker 7 The snow is covering the lawns.

Speaker 3 Olson was told to check out a new and possibly important clue. Unidentified shoe prints in the snow leading to one of the windows at the Matthews house.

Speaker 7 We don't have a lot of facts, but there were shoe prints found around the outside of the house as if someone was looking into the windows.

Speaker 3 So there's the sign maybe a foul print, but you don't know.

Speaker 7 And also that same shoe print is found walking through the grease of the two-car garage, walking towards a rake.

Speaker 3 And Olson and others noticed an odd detail about that rake. It had been used to rake over the shoe prints as though someone had tried to cover them up.

Speaker 3 Investigators decided to keep that information close to the vest so as not to tip off the possible perpetrator.

Speaker 7 The information about the shoe prints, the raked-out shoe prints, the fact her shoes were found in the house was information not released to the press.

Speaker 3 Later that morning, Detective Gates headed down the street to Janelle's middle school to see if he could learn anything new from Janelle's friends and classmates. We asked the obvious questions.

Speaker 3 Has she been troubled?

Speaker 3 Were there been any indicators? Did you get any red flags about Janelle?

Speaker 3 None whatsoever. She had no friend she was going to run off with?

Speaker 8 Not to my knowledge. If my sister were to have run away, she would have left a note, been dramatic about it, and not done it five days before Christmas.
That was a big holiday for Janelle.

Speaker 8 She had presents to give to her friends the next day for the holidays. Running away at Christmas time probably would not have been on her radar.

Speaker 3 You would say they had a character for her. Correct.

Speaker 3 When Janelle's mom, Gloria, called to check in from California, Jim gave her the horrible news.

Speaker 5 He says, Glo, I don't know how to tell this to you,

Speaker 5 but we can't find Janelle.

Speaker 5 I mean, right away, I felt sick to my stomach.

Speaker 3 Gloria made plans to travel home right away. Meanwhile, as investigators rang doorbells in Greeley, finding nothing, Their gaze began to turn back to where the investigation started.

Speaker 7 In this situation, it's not uncommon for a parent to be involved.

Speaker 3 Is that why Jim Matthews became a suspect? Absolutely.

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Speaker 3 As Christmas Day dawned in Greeley, The Matthews home was uncharacteristically quiet. There were no joyful outbursts as 12-year-old Janelle unwrapped her presents.

Speaker 3 They sat unopened beneath the Christmas tree. And her contagious enthusiasm had been replaced by a dark, unspoken fear.
Had Janelle been kidnapped? Or worse? This has to be just unreal for you.

Speaker 3 What do you say to one another?

Speaker 18 We just embrace and, you know,

Speaker 18 trying to think positively that she's going to, you know, turn up.

Speaker 18 But

Speaker 18 I don't know. What do you do when you don't know when one of your children are?

Speaker 3 You search for them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that's what the family, the police, and the people of Greeley mobilize to do.

Speaker 23 We still have hope that she'll be found and that she'll be found safely.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 23 we're just going to start gearing up our efforts in two or three major channels to get the word out so that people can spot her.

Speaker 18 We had a countywide search that the police and a couple of our board members in our church organized and coordinated.

Speaker 5 Six or seven hundred people for this search.

Speaker 8 The people of Greeley are like salt of the earth and they put their needs aside to take care of the needs of people in their community. And it's humbling to be on the receiving end of this.

Speaker 3 Family friend Eileen Huff was one of those who rushed to the family side.

Speaker 3 What could you read in their faces and what they're saying to you?

Speaker 24 You know, Gloria and Jim, through all of this, have been the most gracious, kind,

Speaker 24 loving people, and that's who they are. And

Speaker 24 they would share honestly how they felt, and we wanted so much to alleviate that pain, to do something to bring her home.

Speaker 3 As the investigation was taking shape, police focused on the man who had brought Janelle home that night, Deanna's dad, Russ Ross.

Speaker 3 Detectives treated him first as a witness, but about a month after Janelle disappeared, they brought him in for some tough questioning. Deanna remembers how it started to take a toll on him.

Speaker 4 It bothered him, but when you have nothing to hide, you know, that's how he felt, and he was fully cooperative.

Speaker 4 He understand

Speaker 4 why.

Speaker 4 Why they had to question him the way he had to do that.

Speaker 3 He was the last adult known to have seen her.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, the Greeley Police Department had found little physical evidence, so they sharpened their focus on those closest to Janelle. Is this a statistical template we're talking about?

Speaker 3 Start with the family, because statistically, that often turns out to be who has the answers to this thing.

Speaker 7 That's always in the back of your mind, but in this case, it wasn't some template. It was, there was these outward signs.

Speaker 3 Especially investigators thought with Janelle's father, Jim. He told investigators he didn't notice right away that Janelle was missing.

Speaker 3 He shouted hello when he got home, but didn't make much of it when Janelle didn't answer, and proceeded to wrap a present before checking on her.

Speaker 3 Curiously, once he called Janelle's friends and realized no one knew where his daughter was, Jim did not immediately call the police. First, he called his pastor.

Speaker 3 So this disappearance of Janelle is not really on police radar until sometime around 11, after 11?

Speaker 20 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 We had no idea until he made the initial call.

Speaker 3 Then the next morning, with police swarming his house, Jim did something else that seemed odd.

Speaker 7 He went driving around for four hours of unaccounted time.

Speaker 3 This is after his daughter has gone missing? Yes.

Speaker 3 But what really piqued Detective Olson's interest was Jim's stoic behavior.

Speaker 7 He didn't show a lot of emotions.

Speaker 3 Does that matter? Affect demeanor.

Speaker 7 It shouldn't, but it does.

Speaker 3 And he wasn't showing you what you'd expect to see? Right.

Speaker 7 I mean, he's not showing how I would react if my daughter's missing. I'd be hammering on the table.
I want these efforts done. And we have a person who is disconnected from the case.

Speaker 3 Police had not found physical evidence that indicated Jim had something to do with Janelle's disappearance. And none of his boots matched those raked footprints in the snow.

Speaker 3 But that didn't rule him out as a person of interest. He knows where the rake is.

Speaker 7 He knows exactly where the rake is.

Speaker 7 You have to believe that the individual who did this, for some reason, chose to go get the rake out of the garage and then return return it to its original position.

Speaker 3 Not just throw it down to the side of the house.

Speaker 7 Right. So there are all these questions and just confusion.

Speaker 3 Three days after Janelle's disappearance, the FBI joined the investigation. They thought a lie detector test might provide some clarity and asked Jim Matthews to take one.
So he did and failed it.

Speaker 7 The relevant questions were, do you know what happened to your daughter? Or do you know the whereabouts of Janelle Matthews?

Speaker 7 So the FBIs were assuming they're some of the best polygraphers in the nation. They say he's deceptive.

Speaker 3 Of course, polygraphs are really just used for guidance. You can't admit them in court, I don't think.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 3 But when a guy flunks on the critical questions, what does it tell you as the investigator?

Speaker 7 That's a lead that needs to be followed up on.

Speaker 3 Investigators were going to do more than follow up. They were about to put the heat on Jim Matthews.
Your daughter's missing, and the authorities think you had something to do with it.

Speaker 3 Time for those coming of age in Greeley during the early 1980s was measured differently. There was Greeley before Janelle's disappearance and Greeley after.

Speaker 9 This missing kid hysteria was gripping the rest of the country, but it hadn't really hit Greeley until this. And everyone was keeping their curtains shut.
They were locking their doors.

Speaker 9 There were parents that were coordinating who's watching which child.

Speaker 3 Journalist Ashley Fonts, who has a well-known podcast on the case, felt it was a watershed moment in the life of this small city.

Speaker 9 The kids that I talked to who are, of course, adults now, said that it completely changed their childhoods. They wouldn't be allowed to go to playgrounds by themselves.

Speaker 9 They could no longer walk to school alone. And it was traumatizing for everyone.

Speaker 23 Well, I think based on all the information that we have available,

Speaker 23 the child has been kidnapped.

Speaker 3 Reminders of the mystery that haunted Greeley were everywhere, even at the breakfast table.

Speaker 3 Milk cartons with the faces of missing children first appeared in December 1984, the month Janelle went missing. A few months later, she became one of those faces herself.

Speaker 3 I can't imagine what is going on with you in this period.

Speaker 18 For both of us, that's where our faith took over.

Speaker 3 As Jim and and Gloria's expectations to reunite with their daughter slowly dwindled, they immersed themselves in prayer. It's the only way they knew how to keep hope alive.

Speaker 5 As Christians, we expect God to answer prayer.

Speaker 3 Janelle had certainly been just that, an answer to a prayer. After Gloria had given birth to their older daughter, Jennifer, she wanted another child, but found out she couldn't get pregnant again.

Speaker 5 And we thought there were so many babies to be adopted.

Speaker 3 It's a very generous thing to do. About six months later, the adoption service called and there she was, another daughter, Janelle.

Speaker 18 And I remember when I first saw Janelle, I put my finger down close to her and she grabbed it with her hand and I was surprised about how strong she was for

Speaker 2 three weeks.

Speaker 3 12 years later, that present from heaven was gone. Gloria, I'm I'm thinking you have to be hungry for information from the authorities.
What do you have? What can you tell us? Do you have any leads?

Speaker 3 Did you stay on the police?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 I didn't do anything. I just...

Speaker 18 Yeah, we just let the police do their thing. I mean, they're the professionals.

Speaker 3 But Jim knew that might blow back on him. Police hadn't stopped wondering about his behavior and demeanor the day after Janelle went missing.

Speaker 9 I think in most cases, you have to assume that someone close to the victim might have been involved, so it was pro pharma that he became a suspect.

Speaker 3 Jim says he expected the police scrutiny, even welcomed it. After all, he had nothing to hide.

Speaker 3 That call to his pastor, investigators wondered about, the one he made before he called police to report Janelle missing. Well, it was simply a father overcome with anxiety.

Speaker 3 and looking to his spiritual mentor for advice on what to do next.

Speaker 18 I decided to call my pastor who

Speaker 18 I was very close to and really respected and told him what happened. He said, Jim, I wouldn't mess around with this.
Maybe you should call the police.

Speaker 3 When the FBI got involved in the investigation, Jim says he cooperated fully. But he wasn't prepared for his voluntary polygraph to turn into a full-on, you did it, kind of grilling.

Speaker 18 The FBI agent was trying to get me to confess.

Speaker 18 And I can't read a polygraph. I don't know anything about polygraphs.
And he would tell me that I was lying.

Speaker 18 And he would say, look at the polygraph and say, you're lying here, you're lying here, you're lying here. Well, I knew I wasn't lying.

Speaker 3 Police had compared his boots to the footprints in the snow. They went through his car with a fine-tooth comb and found nothing.

Speaker 3 So Jim was annoyed when two months after the FBI polygraph, Greeley PD asked him to take another lie detector test.

Speaker 18 They were kind of giving me kind of the same thing that the FBI gave me that kind of getting me try to confess.

Speaker 3 That repeat tactic was apparently too much for Jim. He lost his patience with investigators and lost the low-key demeanor that had so bothered them.

Speaker 13 You telling me you didn't know about your daughter? Absolutely. Are you sure? And I'm telling you I don't know where my daughter is.
I'm telling you who will have it with who will have in it.

Speaker 13 If I knew, you think I'd be sitting here? I don't know. Tell me.

Speaker 14 I do not know where she is or who took her. That's it.

Speaker 13 Are you sure? Absolutely. Absolutely sure.
Now, I don't want to raise my voice and get emotional, but that's not my style, but I will.

Speaker 3 Once again, he was told he had flunked the lie detector. That's when Jim says he'd had enough.

Speaker 18 And I just got tired of being the main suspect. And I just said, listen, I have done, I got mad.
I have done everything I can to be cooperative with you. I've told you the truth every single time.

Speaker 18 I'm fed up with this.

Speaker 3 But no matter what Jim told investigators, he could not shake their suspicion.

Speaker 3 And soon it seemed everyone in Greeley knew he was a suspect, including close family friend Eileen Huff.

Speaker 24 I heard via people who worked in the police department, oh,

Speaker 24 he was the guilty party.

Speaker 24 And I just thought, if you only knew Jim Matthews, he'd be the last person you'd think.

Speaker 3 Eileen thought that the only way to put all the suspicions to rest was to find Janelle, hopefully alive. And so she came up with an audacious plan.
And this is the White House switchboard. Hello.
Yes.

Speaker 3 How can I direct your call?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 24 And I thought, I have broken through to the inner sanctum.

Speaker 3 And straight through to the big guy at the top, President Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 3 By February 1985, several months had passed without any significant leads in the Janelle Matthews case. But Eileen Huff was determined not to let the case turn cold.

Speaker 3 So she and several other friends of Jim and Gloria's formed a group called Rescue Janelle. What do you got there, Eileen?

Speaker 24 These were posters from back in 1984 and 85

Speaker 24 showing Janelle at the choir concert.

Speaker 3 They didn't just put up flyers around town or even limit them to Colorado. They sent them to police departments across the country and to American embassies all over the world.

Speaker 3 So you're thinking, Eileen, was what? Let's keep her picture in front of people. Let's see the name, and maybe something good will come of it.

Speaker 24 Well, my feeling was someone somewhere is going to see her picture, know the story of what happened to Janelle, and we're going to find her and we're going to find her alive.

Speaker 3 They also knew flyers weren't enough. To reach as many people as they could, they planned to get Janelle's face on TV.
So they started working the phones,

Speaker 3 first to regional, then national news and talk shows, all the way to the White House.

Speaker 24 I don't know what it is, but I just kept going after it.

Speaker 3 Somehow, Eileen got one of President Reagan's advisors on the line and persuaded them to make sure the president mentioned Janelle when he talked about the issue of missing children in an upcoming TV address.

Speaker 3 American children disappear from their homes or neighborhoods every year, causing, as we can all understand, heartbreaking anguish.

Speaker 3 For example, I learned about Joanelle Matthews of Greeley, Colorado, who would have celebrated a happy 13th birthday with her family just last month.

Speaker 3 But five days before Christmas, Joanelle disappeared from her home.

Speaker 3 Eileen's persistence and determination had achieved something remarkable. And now the phones at the Greeley Police Department wouldn't stop ringing.

Speaker 3 Their tip line was flooded with more than a thousand leads.

Speaker 9 It was an enormous amount of tips, and so the police were just trying their best to handle all of them.

Speaker 9 This is a really tiny police department back in the early 80s, and they were chasing things down. But of course, you know, they all turned out to be dead.

Speaker 3 The Matthews family, the whole city of Greeley, waited desperately for a break in the case. They waited a month, a year, then two.

Speaker 8 There is a somber, maybe dark cloud over Christmas, especially for my family. And I just remember asking my mom, is it always going to be this way? And she, at the time, was like, yes.

Speaker 3 The case languished.

Speaker 3 Then in 1989, almost five years since Janelle disappeared into thin air, Keith Olson, now a detective, was assigned to take another look.

Speaker 3 One report he had never seen before raised the detective's eyebrows, and it wasn't about Jim Matthews.

Speaker 7 One of our officers during the neighborhood canvas had knocked on the door of the neighbors directly across the street from the Matthews.

Speaker 7 Frances Drake was living there and Frances Drake told the officer that her son had been visiting that night and that he may have saw something.

Speaker 3 And his name is what?

Speaker 12 Norris Drake.

Speaker 3 A possible witness? To Olson's astonishment, no one had bothered to contact Drake or follow up with his mother. So over your shoulder here, that the green exterior, that was Janelle Matthews' house.

Speaker 7 That's right.

Speaker 3 Detective Olson showed us just how close Drake's house was to Janelle's. Boy, it is directly across.

Speaker 3 If you wanted to keep eyes on the comings and goings at the Matthews house, that's a pretty good vantage point.

Speaker 7 And his mother said that when he left that evening, around

Speaker 7 9:15 or so, he sits in his vehicle for a while as if he's watching something.

Speaker 3 That was exactly the timeframe in which investigators estimated that Janelle had disappeared and before Jim Matthews returned home at about 9.30.

Speaker 3 So just who was Norris Drake? What the detective found made him wonder why the initial investigators never contacted him or took a closer look at him.

Speaker 3 At the time of Janelle's disappearance, Drake was unemployed, struggling with drug and alcohol addictions and staying at the home of his best friend, a man named Dave.

Speaker 3 When the detective interviewed Drake's ex-girlfriend, she told him that Drake had a propensity for violence.

Speaker 7 He had beaten her up. He had broke into her house after they split up.
He was currently on probation for burglary and assault on her.

Speaker 3 They put some right in the theoretical frame of what you're looking at. Yes.

Speaker 7 He had told her that if I kill you, no one will ever find your body.

Speaker 7 He had told her how he would conceal his footprints and even showed her how to conceal footprints in the mountains by using a tree branch to wipe out the shoe prints.

Speaker 7 So, all these things are going wow.

Speaker 3 But that wasn't all. His ex-girlfriend told Detective Olson that Drake had a fetish for preteens, especially for young girls who looked a little bit older, like Janelle.

Speaker 7 He tells his girlfriend at the time that he's obsessed with

Speaker 7 young women

Speaker 7 children that are just developing into women.

Speaker 3 Olson couldn't find anything on the books about Drake's alleged adolescent obsession, but he says another woman who'd hung out with Drake as a young teenager told him a similar story.

Speaker 3 And no one knew where Norris Drake had been for several critical hours on the night Janelle disappeared. His mother told police canvassers that he left a bit after 9 p.m.

Speaker 3 But Drake didn't return to his friend's house where he was staying until more than five hours later. His friend's sister was sleeping on the couch and saw him walk in a bit after 2 a.m.

Speaker 7 And then she tells me, even more interesting, is he wakes up that morning and tells me that a 12-year-old girl had been kidnapped from her house across from his mother's house last night and that he had talked to the police about it and was on scene when the police were doing the investigation.

Speaker 3 After Janelle's case went public, his friend's sister became so suspicious of Norris Drake that she sent a detailed account of what he told her that morning to a police officer friend in Denver.

Speaker 3 That statement never made its way into Janelle's case file, so the Greeley police never knew it existed.

Speaker 7 And then when I interview her, she reads me this statement that she had written so many years ago. It was as if I was getting a first-hand account of the crime.

Speaker 3 Play-by-play. Right.
So Norris Drake is a guy you want to talk to. Right.

Speaker 3 And maybe look at the shoes in his closet. Right.

Speaker 3 Drake got divorced several years before Janelle went missing. His ex-wife told journalist Ashley Fonce that he had abused her and even pointed a gun to her head.

Speaker 9 This was one of the most upsetting moments in my reporting of the story. From the moment we started talking, she actually started crying in a deep guttural cry.

Speaker 9 And so after I got off the phone with her, I thought, you know,

Speaker 9 it's possible. Maybe Norris Drake did it.

Speaker 3 It was time to bring in Norris Drake.

Speaker 15 I know who you did.

Speaker 15 Go over to Janelle's that night.

Speaker 14 Now they're responsible for her disappearance.

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrison.

Speaker 3 It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name and we're back for another season.

Speaker 3 I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it.

Speaker 3 Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrison sometimes. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 21 Think you know the truth about the world around you?

Speaker 3 Think again.

Speaker 21 Every strange sound, unexplainable sighting, and bone-chilling legend has endless possibilities hiding in the shadows. I'm Yvette Gentile.
And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecaro.

Speaker 21 Every Friday on our podcast, So Supernatural, we dive deeper into the mysteries that defy logic.

Speaker 21 From haunted spaces to cryptid creatures, we unravel every loose thread and uncover all the possibilities of the unknown.

Speaker 21 If you're determined to find the truth behind the world's most bizarre occurrences, listen to So Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 Five years after Janelle Matthews disappeared, police thought they finally had their first big break in the case. The suspect, a man named Norris Drake.

Speaker 3 Detective Olson was told that he had an affinity for adolescent girls and a violent strake, and investigators had placed him across the street from Janelle when she was home alone at the time of her disappearance.

Speaker 3 Detective Keith Olson was relishing the moment when he would finally come face to face with Drake.

Speaker 3 So you're in an interview room at the police station.

Speaker 7 Sure, and we believe there's a chance we can get this guy to confess.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 18 I'm sure you've

Speaker 15 figured out we needed to talk to you. And so I was living at Garden Hall.

Speaker 3 Drake seemed honest enough about how his friend Dave lent him his pickup truck to visit his mom that night. and about the time he left her house to go back home.

Speaker 3 After that though, Detective Olson sensed the truth stopped.

Speaker 15 I just noticed I looked across the street and Janelle's garage door was up and the lights were on.

Speaker 14 In the garage? Uh-huh. Okay.

Speaker 15 And I don't remember seeing any vehicles. And after you left your mom's, do you know where you went?

Speaker 15 Probably went straight back to Dave's. Okay.
Do you know for certain after Dave?

Speaker 15 I'm sure I did because Dave really didn't like me toodling around in his pickup, so I'm sure I would have went straight back over

Speaker 3 That Olson thought was a lie.

Speaker 3 Dave's sister, who had been sleeping on the couch that night, told Olson that Drake didn't return to the apartment until after 2 a.m., more than five hours after Drake said he left his mom's.

Speaker 3 But what Drake said next was the kind of wait a minute moment that made the detective believe Drake knew what had happened to Janelle.

Speaker 15 What information did he hear about the case?

Speaker 15 Well, I remember real well that they thought a gang of kids had come across the back

Speaker 15 field, had jumped the fence, and had somehow nabbed her, and that they had even found evidence where they'd taken a rake out there and raked over their tracks.

Speaker 3 The raked footprints in the snow. That information was known only to the police and the Matthews family, who had promised to keep it secret.
If Drake was the perpetrator, that was a huge slip.

Speaker 3 He's got too much information?

Speaker 7 Norris Drake says that he was provided the information possibly by his mother from a phone call early in the morning. And she told him all this stuff.

Speaker 3 But how could Drake's mom know anything about case details police had kept a lid on? By now, Detective Olson was convinced that Drake was hiding something.

Speaker 3 Drake agreed to accompany police for a search of his mother's house where he was currently residing. When he returned to the interrogation room, Olson amped up the pressure, hoping Drake would crack.

Speaker 3 First, he confronted him about the rake.

Speaker 15 do that to me though.

Speaker 15 We also have witnesses that will testify that you're talking about the case before it even could have been on the media.

Speaker 15 Now there's no way.

Speaker 3 Detective Olson thought he had Drake where he wanted him, so he went for the jugular.

Speaker 12 I think he took Janelle, and I already told you that.

Speaker 12 I don't know what you did with her. It didn't happen.

Speaker 15 Well, it did happen,

Speaker 15 and

Speaker 15 the evidence indicates that

Speaker 15 whatever it was, whatever the cause of her disappearance,

Speaker 14 you were involved.

Speaker 3 Olson pushed and pushed, but Drake didn't budge.

Speaker 15 I have to say that the reason you went into the Matthews residence was purely for some

Speaker 14 enjoyment with a young girl.

Speaker 15 Keith, I swear to you and Jesus Christ and everyone, I did not ever go in that house. I never crossed the street.
I didn't have anything to do with it.

Speaker 15 Absolutely, positively, I had nothing to do with it. How many people that I bring in here, do you think, swear to God that they didn't do it?

Speaker 14 Well,

Speaker 15 but Keith, this is one of these classic cases where you really got the wrong guy. I really am innocent.

Speaker 12 So where did he stand at the end of that?

Speaker 3 Was he still on your... You thought he was going to be good for this.

Speaker 18 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 7 I mean, everything just seemed like this has to be the guy.

Speaker 3 Olson would not get another stab at Drake, who left police headquarters and promptly lawyered up.

Speaker 3 It had been five years since Janelle disappeared, which made it unlikely for investigators to find physical evidence that would implicate Drake.

Speaker 3 Sure enough, they hadn't found anything in his mother's house. Olson even tracked down the pickup truck that Drake drove that night, but again, Zilch.

Speaker 7 There was just nothing there to indicate that any

Speaker 7 crime had occurred inside the pickup truck. Certainly no bullet hole and no blood stains or blood patterns or anything.

Speaker 3 Olson thought he had a strong circumstantial case against Drake, but he knew that if he wanted the district attorney to charge him, he would need physical evidence or a confession, and he had neither.

Speaker 18 Here's the problem.

Speaker 7 We have no proof that Janelle Matthews is dead. I mean, and we have no crime scene.
And we have no body.

Speaker 3 The investigation into the disappearance of Janelle Matthews had had once again reached a dead end, and a frustrated Detective Olson reluctantly walked away.

Speaker 3 Sounds like you still have question marks about Norris Drink in the back of your mind.

Speaker 11 Oh, that's because,

Speaker 7 you know, he was indelibly burned into my mind over all these years, and so it's a scar that's always going to be there.

Speaker 3 And there the case sat for more than two decades. until two new detectives inherited it.
Maybe it was fresh eyes or blind luck, but in the almost 30,000 pages of evidence, they found a name.

Speaker 3 Someone who had apparently been saying repeatedly, I know something.

Speaker 3 At the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene, friends of Jim and Gloria Matthews come together to say goodbye to Janelle.

Speaker 3 In 1994, 10 years after Janelle mysteriously disappeared, her family and friends gathered to remember.

Speaker 18 This was turning her over to God and saying, God, she's obviously in your hands and we trust you.

Speaker 3 Is that you accepting she's gone?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 18 I think that's part of it.

Speaker 5 I could never say that she was dead. I could never accept the fact that she was not alive.

Speaker 3 Janelle's case had turned cold, but the Greeley police never forgot about it.

Speaker 3 As decades passed, it continued to change hands from one investigator to another in the hope that a pair of fresh eyes would see something others had not.

Speaker 3 In 2013, it landed on the desk of Detective Robert Cash.

Speaker 1 It was my time to take it and see what I could do with it.

Speaker 3 Here you go. Yes.

Speaker 1 It was an absolute puzzle.

Speaker 3 Cash decided he needed a partner and enlisted Mike Prill to help him solve the mystery. Prill was a detective with a knack for making sense of complex cases.

Speaker 12 So when he gives me this case, I go about the process of organizing it.

Speaker 3 Bringing it kicking and dragging into the modern era.

Speaker 11 Kicking and dragging.

Speaker 3 It took Detective Prill 15 months to create a coherent, all-encompassing case file. And when it was all done, the same old persons of interest emerged from the pages.

Speaker 3 Jim Matthews, Russ Ross, and Norris Drake, who had died in 2007 of an overdose but was still a suspect.

Speaker 3 But Prill also noticed someone new, a very odd character who had been dancing around at the fringes of the case, a guy named Steve Pankey.

Speaker 11 He was someone that came up in my review of the original investigation.

Speaker 11 And his name would pop up in two paragraphs, in two reports, and never again.

Speaker 3 Who was Steve Pankey? Turned out he had some curious connections to people involved in the case.

Speaker 3 For instance, the Matthews family belonged to the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene, and Steve Pankey once worked there as a custodian. He'd worked for them, gotten fired, and been excommunicated

Speaker 3 from the congregation. Yes.
Pankey reportedly held a grudge against the entire congregation after that. He also knew Russ Ross, still a suspect in the case.

Speaker 3 Ross had been Panky's boss at a 7-Up distributorship in the 1970s, and there seemed to be bad blood between them.

Speaker 11 He alleged that Russ had beat him up at one point as a supervisor at 7-Up. So although that happened in 1978-79,

Speaker 11 Steve to this day still despises Mr.

Speaker 3 Ross.

Speaker 3 But even more intriguing to Cash and Pro was that Panky had reached out to police soon after Janelle disappeared.

Speaker 11 He made a phone call and said, I have information on Janelle,

Speaker 11 and I have pretty good evidence that she was dead, or she is dead.

Speaker 11 But I don't want to share any more of my information until you tell me what you know in this investigation.

Speaker 3 That's really weird.

Speaker 11 Very.

Speaker 3 It turned out Panky hadn't just contacted law enforcement that one time. He'd reached out repeatedly through the years.
For some reason, no one ever got back to him.

Speaker 3 He was continually dismissed by one investigator after the other.

Speaker 1 It was somebody who had been tapping the shoulder of law enforcement for decades, and he's always talking about the Janelle case.

Speaker 3 Correct. And he went into the discard bin.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 In April of 2019, 34 years after Panky first called Greeley police, Cash got him on the phone. Hello.

Speaker 1 Hi, looking for Steve Panky, please.

Speaker 30 This is Steve Panky.

Speaker 3 But suddenly, Panky feigned total ignorance about Janelle's disappearance.

Speaker 7 It seems to be that you're focused on people in the months, weeks, days, the night

Speaker 25 that she disappeared. And if that's your focus,

Speaker 25 I can't help you.

Speaker 3 And unprompted, Panky made a point of denying any personal involvement in Janelle's disappearance.

Speaker 25 I was never at Janelle Matthews' house. My first knowledge that Janelle Matthews existed and disappeared was six days after

Speaker 25 the fact.

Speaker 3 But during a rambling 45-minute conversation, Panky hinted he knew things about the case, things about Russ Ross, but he wouldn't share anything unless he could get some guarantees.

Speaker 25 I'm not going to say anything until I have

Speaker 25 a firm deal that can't be broken.

Speaker 12 Panky's response to Robert was, is, I want my attorney.

Speaker 11 I need to work a deal.

Speaker 11 I need some protections.

Speaker 3 Who needs a deal unless they've got a problem? And what is his problem?

Speaker 11 You know, it was that confounding.

Speaker 3 Cash and Prill started asking around about Panky. A portrait of a quirky, belligerent character quickly emerged.

Speaker 3 But it was a call with Panky's ex-wife, Angela Hicks, that suddenly turned the decades-old cold case red hot.

Speaker 1 She said, oh, gosh, you know, I've been waiting so long for you to call.

Speaker 3 Angela described a chilling incident from 1999. She and Panky, still married then, had moved to Idaho.

Speaker 3 He came home one day and said he had tried to talk to the police there about the Janelle Matthews case, but they wouldn't listen to him.

Speaker 1 She was taken aback and remembered the case from Greeley and kind of inquisitively said, Janelle Matthews.

Speaker 1 To that, she said, Steve Panky looked at her and said, well, you don't think I would hurt her, do you?

Speaker 1 Would she look just like you?

Speaker 3 How creepy was that?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 she said that it made her blood run cold.

Speaker 3 That incident triggered a flood of memories about Janelle Matthews' disappearance and Panky's peculiar behavior, which Angela told police started the day after Janelle disappeared.

Speaker 3 It was the Friday before Christmas 1984.

Speaker 9 Steve tells her, hey, we're going to go to California for Christmas. And this was a trip that they weren't supposed to be going on, and suddenly he wants to get out of town.

Speaker 9 And she finds that a little bit curious.

Speaker 3 The trip ended just as abruptly after Panky got into a fight with his father. The Pankies drove back to Greeley on Christmas Day.

Speaker 9 On the way back to Greeley from California, he seems to be obsessed with listening to any story that she can find on the radio about this missing girl in Greeley, Janelle Matthews.

Speaker 9 They get home and more bizarre things happen.

Speaker 1 He goes inside, comes back out in coveralls, and then starts digging in the front yard of the residence.

Speaker 3 This wasn't just quirky behavior. It sounded downright incriminating.
And it contradicted what Panky had told them about not being aware of Janelle's disappearance until almost a week later.

Speaker 1 I enlisted an organization called NecroSearch to do some ground-penetrating radar to see if... if there was anything there buried in the front yard or some sort of disturbance or just something.

Speaker 3 They found nothing. But after everything detectives Cash and Prill read and heard from Steve Pankey and from his ex-wife, he was now in their crosshairs as a new and very plausible suspect.

Speaker 3 Especially after a shocking discovery that put the Janelle Matthews story back on the front pages for the first time in more than 30 years.

Speaker 20 We're essentially right there.

Speaker 12 It was right in this location where we're standing.

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrison.

Speaker 3 It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name and we're back for another season.

Speaker 3 I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it.

Speaker 3 Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrison sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 21 Think you know the truth about the world around you?

Speaker 3 Think again.

Speaker 21 Every strange sound, unexplainable sighting, and bone-chilling legend has endless possibilities hiding in the shadows. I'm Yvette Gentile, and I'm her sister, Rasha Pecarrero.

Speaker 21 Every Friday on our podcast, So Supernatural, we dive deeper into the mysteries that defy logic.

Speaker 21 From haunted spaces to cryptid creatures, we unravel every loose thread and uncover all the possibilities of the unknown.

Speaker 21 If you're determined to find the truth behind the world's most bizarre occurrences, listen to So Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 In the summer of 2019, Steve Pankey had emerged as a new person of interest in the Janelle Matthews case. Then, on July 15th, out of the blue, Detective Cash got a call.

Speaker 3 A construction crew digging an oil pipeline in a remote part of the county had made an important discovery.

Speaker 1 They'd found unidentified remains that had been lifted up with earth-moving equipment.

Speaker 3 Cash hurried to the scene about 20 miles from Greeley. Detective Prill met him there.
It was kind of dusk.

Speaker 1 I remember it was,

Speaker 1 you know, very hot. They'd already flown a drone around the area to kind of get an idea of kind of the whole area.

Speaker 3 The chance discovery in a vast open field was human skeletal remains. Cash went in for a close look.
It took his breath away.

Speaker 1 I go and look,

Speaker 1 see the skull, see the braces.

Speaker 3 Braces on the teeth?

Speaker 3 Janelle wore braces back in 1984.

Speaker 1 Then immediately I see clothing that is in and around and attached to the skeletal remains.

Speaker 20 We're essentially right there.

Speaker 12 It was right in this location that we're standing.

Speaker 3 I keep coming back to the revelation that there's her braces. It's still on, right?

Speaker 3 No question who your discovery is at that point.

Speaker 2 And the clothing. Yeah.

Speaker 11 She's dressed exactly as she was

Speaker 20 at the choir recital.

Speaker 11 except that she had a coat on. She had that distinctive shirt and blouse and everything else.
There was no doubt when you looked at her, it was her.

Speaker 3 They had found Janelle.

Speaker 3 A DNA sample confirmed the identity. It was a match to Janelle's biological parents.
But there was no DNA from anyone else. The cause of death seemed clear, too.

Speaker 3 It looked as though Janelle had been shot through the head. No bullets or shell casings were found.

Speaker 3 I almost feel like we're on sacred ground or something. I mean, with all of this prairie out here,

Speaker 3 this is where this poor kid was for decades, decades, huh?

Speaker 27 35 years.

Speaker 12 And think of the world that's changed.

Speaker 3 Was she summers and here she is.

Speaker 3 Who calls Janelle's parents?

Speaker 1 I call Janelle's parents. You know, it really just kind of came out with it that

Speaker 1 we have found something and we believe that it's Janelle.

Speaker 3 Jim and Gloria had moved away years earlier, but say they still think of Greeley as home.

Speaker 3 And that's where they decided to hold a memorial service and burial for their daughter, 35 years removed from her 12th birthday.

Speaker 18 We had a huge turnout again, 400 people.

Speaker 18 Feeling the

Speaker 3 love of the people around us,

Speaker 18 that was

Speaker 18 tremendous satisfaction to be able to do that, I guess is the best way I can say it.

Speaker 3 To be able to put our daughter to rest.

Speaker 3 With their case now a homicide investigation, The detectives set aside their previous suspects to focus on Stephen Panky, who was living in Idaho.

Speaker 3 After Janelle's funeral, they decided to take a road trip.

Speaker 11 We have to go to Idaho. I want to see this guy.

Speaker 3 The meticulous detective Prill spent a lot of the nine-hour drive reading about Panky, trying to learn even more about him and what made him tick.

Speaker 3 Prill couldn't help but think what a strange life Panky had led.

Speaker 11 He left Greeley

Speaker 11 somewhat under the cover of darkness, packed up his family unannounced and split.

Speaker 3 In the years after Janelle disappeared, the Panky family moved to several different states before settling in Idaho in the 1990s.

Speaker 11 During that time, Steve is taking a job as a mortician in any of the cities that they live in.

Speaker 3 What do you make of that?

Speaker 2 It's weird.

Speaker 3 He had this proclivity to be around dead people. Of course, lots of people work as morticians.
Nothing weird about that.

Speaker 3 But the detectives were now looking at everything about Panky with a suspicious eye. Like the fact that he would never last at any job for very long, Pearl called it dabbling.

Speaker 11 And when he wasn't dabbling, he was filing frivolous lawsuits.

Speaker 33 And running for office.

Speaker 29 And running for office.

Speaker 3 I'm your next governor. Right.
Panky had actually run for several offices, including two extremely long-shot campaigns for governor in Idaho. Didn't have a chance at any of those things.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 16 Hello, everyone. This is your best friend, Steve Pankey.

Speaker 17 Steve Pankey is running as the Republican candidate for Idaho governor. He has traditional core values with a biblical and constitutional perspective.

Speaker 26 Together, we can make a safe, prosperous, and moral Idaho.

Speaker 20 Intermixed with all of this is his half-truths, claiming he had a degree in criminology.

Speaker 11 He didn't. That he's an ordained pastor.
He was never.

Speaker 3 The more Prill read, the more bewildering things got.

Speaker 11 I mean, there were moments there where I'm reading some of the things that Panky has written, and there's a lot of WTFs going on.

Speaker 11 Very strange comments that he is writing

Speaker 11 in motions that he filed in court. What I came away with is that he's endlessly, endlessly asserting that he has some information on Janelle's disappearance.

Speaker 3 Remarkably, in legal filings unrelated to Janelle Matthews, Panky would write something about her disappearance. One example, Panky was arrested for disturbing the peace in a bank.

Speaker 3 The charges would later be dropped.

Speaker 3 But Panky filed a court petition saying the arrest was an attempt to force him to become an informant in Janelle's case, adding that he feared he would get the death penalty for revealing the location of Miss Matthews' body.

Speaker 3 What did that have to do with the incident in the bank? Absolutely nothing. What on earth was Steve Panky up to?

Speaker 3 When Cash and Pearl finally arrived at Panky's Idaho home for that surprise visit, they were determined to find out.

Speaker 3 Detectives Cash and Prill had done their homework on Steve Panky, but still didn't know what to expect when they rang the intercom at his house. Cash recorded the conversation.

Speaker 3 Steve, hey, it's Robert Cash with the Greeley Police. How are you? Are you at my door? I am.

Speaker 3 And what did you want?

Speaker 3 What is it like talking, engaging? Steve Penke in conversation.

Speaker 12 Very strange.

Speaker 1 He began talking about things

Speaker 1 unrelated to anything that we were expecting.

Speaker 1 Personal aspects of his history, of

Speaker 1 his sexual orientation, things

Speaker 1 that just were so far away from where we wanted to go.

Speaker 25 I have almost a bisexual history, a long bisexual history. You can go on the internet and it's there.

Speaker 3 That was a puzzling thing to share. The detectives, of course, were there to talk about Janelle Matthews.
They tried steering the conversation in that direction.

Speaker 3 So the presiding question is, why are you so interested in the Janelle Matthews case?

Speaker 11 Yeah, and why won't you tell us?

Speaker 27 I mean, help us.

Speaker 3 Anything come out? No.

Speaker 3 Once again, Panky said he would not talk without his attorney or an agreement in place to protect him. And that was that.

Speaker 3 But the long drive to Idaho wasn't a waste of the detective's time.

Speaker 3 While they were there, Panky's ex-wife, Angela, agreed to sit down for a recorded interview.

Speaker 3 This is not my usual way to say things, so

Speaker 3 you can relax.

Speaker 3 Over several hours, Angela talked about her life with Steve Panky. recounting his suspicious behavior when they returned from that unplanned road trip after Janelle disappeared.

Speaker 3 So we get home, and then we're barely, barely home and he goes in the yard and starts digging. Angela also had lots of other stories about her ex-husband's strange obsession with the case.

Speaker 3 Like how he once jumped out of his seat in church when their pastor said he was certain Janelle would be found alive.

Speaker 13 And then he's up and down the aisle and at the back and kind of pacing back there saying,

Speaker 13 false prophet.

Speaker 19 So they take him to the foyer and I mean every time that foyer opened he was just yelling out there.

Speaker 3 Detective, is that evidence or is it just kind of a curiosity?

Speaker 11 Taken by itself, it's a curiosity. And that's what this entire investigation was, was any one thing

Speaker 11 meant nothing. Two things, curious, three things, blah, blah, blah.
When you start finding yourself with hundreds and you're putting it all together, it's damning evidence.

Speaker 3 By the end of their conversation with Angela, Cash and Prill had no doubts about Steve Pankey. So as you guys went back in the car, what did you think? That was kind of an interesting experience, huh?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I think by the time that car was put into drive, I knew Pankey was a suspect in this case.

Speaker 3 They were done trying to talk to Panky, but returned to his house to execute a search warrant, seizing his electronic devices. His browser history was filled with searches about Janelle.

Speaker 3 After refusing to talk to detectives about the case, Panky, now the prime suspect, decided to start talking to practically anyone else who would listen.

Speaker 34 On December 20th, 1984.

Speaker 3 In an interview with NBC station KTVB, Panky finally revealed the mysterious details of what he'd been claiming he knew about Janelle back in 1984.

Speaker 3 Panky said it was just something his father-in-law, a caretaker at a cemetery, had told him.

Speaker 34 A cop had come to him

Speaker 34 and said that he had a body that needed to be buried in a casket. They never mentioned the name Janelle Matthews.
They never mentioned any name.

Speaker 34 That's the total of my knowledge about the disappearance of Janelle Matthews, okay? That's it. There ain't nothing more.

Speaker 3 In other interviews, Panky offered up provocative conspiracy theories about the case.

Speaker 3 One of them was about Greeley Mayor John Gates, who was a detective in 1984 and responded to the Matthews house the night Janelle was reported missing.

Speaker 17 I get a call from a journalist in Idaho.

Speaker 3 who said,

Speaker 3 hey, Mayor Gates, are you aware that Steve Panky has named you as a suspect in the disappearance of Joan L. Matthews? That you're, yeah, you're part of a plot, right?

Speaker 3 And I, you know, I don't find myself speechless very often. I think I was probably speechless that day.

Speaker 3 Cash and Pearl called this latest gambit the Panky Publicity Tour.

Speaker 1 In full Steven Panky fashion, he went on a crusade.

Speaker 3 I'm going to now tell the world about Steven Panky.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 30 My name is Steve Panky.

Speaker 3 Panky also found time to run for office again. This go-round for sheriff in Idaho.

Speaker 30 I humbly ask for your vote. I'm Steve Panky, and I approve this ad.

Speaker 9 One of his campaign slogans was, no hanky with Panky.

Speaker 3 Back in Colorado, Cash and Prill were paying close attention to everything Panky was saying as they quietly built their case with prosecutors Robert Miller, Lacey Wells, and the elected DA of Weld County, Michael Rourke.

Speaker 3 They believe Panky had talked himself into a murder charge, and they presented their evidence to a grand jury.

Speaker 17 We presented our information to the grand jury through Detective Cash, through Detective Prill.

Speaker 3 The detectives laid out a detailed timeline of the suspicious behavior and statements made by Panky over the decades. Detective Prill had even developed a theory of how Janelle was killed.

Speaker 3 based on the fact that her coat had been turned inside out when they found her remains. So what did that tell you? What's the picture that came together?

Speaker 11 Well, it became fairly clear to me that this coat had been pulled over Janelle's head.

Speaker 3 To control her?

Speaker 11 Perhaps. Or she was trying to get away, and he reached over her head and grabbed the coat, and then she pulled away to the point where the cuffs and her hands are in the armpits of the coat.

Speaker 11 And it's at that point that she was likely shot.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors told the grand jurors it all added up to a strong circumstantial case.

Speaker 17 They very quickly turned around and said, here's your indictment.

Speaker 3 Go get him.

Speaker 3 On October 12, 2020, that's exactly what detectives Cash and Prill did. They arrested Steve Panky at his home in Idaho.
He was charged with first-degree murder.

Speaker 3 Panky would soon be telling his story again.

Speaker 35 When you shot Janelle Matthews in the forehead, was she begging for her life?

Speaker 3 This time he'd be talking to his most important audience yet, a jury of his peers.

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Speaker 3 Steven Pankey had been charged with first-degree murder for kidnapping and killing Janelle Matthews. Detectives knew the case against him wasn't a slam dunk.

Speaker 3 It doesn't have all that stuff that juries absolutely crave.

Speaker 17 Correct.

Speaker 3 Obvious motive, there's no weapon, there's no DNA, there's no eyewitness.

Speaker 1 Yes, it was unusual, to say the least.

Speaker 3 There was also no evidence to show how Janelle was taken from her house or when and where she was shot, but prosecutors were still confident.

Speaker 3 The trial started in October of 2021. It's winter.
Reporter Ashley Fonce was in the courtroom. Paint me a picture as the trial of Stephen Pankey begins.

Speaker 9 The trial felt tense to me. This was such a storied case in Greeley, you know, in the 80s.
And it was almost like you had, you know, ghosts of the past sitting there.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors planned to prove their case with a mountain of words spoken and written by Panky himself. Wells County DA Michael Rourke thought that was a winning hand.

Speaker 26 For 37 years,

Speaker 26 justice for Janelle has been denied.

Speaker 26 That change is beginning today.

Speaker 17 Basically what I'm telling them is, ladies and gentlemen, you're not going to hear DNA evidence. I'm going to ask you to rely upon evidence which is as old as time.
Statements.

Speaker 17 Statements of the defendant.

Speaker 26 Statements and behaviors that will lead you to but one conclusion.

Speaker 26 That he is the individual we have been looking for for 37 years.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors presented an avalanche of documents.

Speaker 3 The centerpiece was Exhibit 209, a 75-page timeline prepared by Detective Prill listing virtually everything Stephen Pankey had said about Janelle over three decades.

Speaker 17 Exhibit 209 was the compilation of 37 years worth of law enforcement effort. It detailed his life, all of the statements that he's made about Janelle Matthews over the course of time.

Speaker 3 For D.A. Rourke, one thing in Exhibit 209 stood out above all others.
A letter Panky had written to prosecutors. Rourke calls it Panky's alibi letter.

Speaker 17 It's an incredibly detailed alibi, not in a believable sense.

Speaker 17 He remembers standing at the window watching the snow conditions and thinking whether he's going to be able to leave the next morning on a trip to California.

Speaker 17 But we pull the weather reports and we know there's hardly any snow on the ground. He talks about remembering that he had gone to the gas station and bought a six-pack of Pepsi.

Speaker 17 Who remembers that 35 years later?

Speaker 3 Prosecutors, I see so many red flags in that story, I can't count them.

Speaker 3 Do you also? Yes.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors told the jury there was only one way to interpret all those statements put together by Detective Prill.

Speaker 3 They were the product of a killer's guilty conscience. And it turned out that Prill became your penky whisperer.

Speaker 17 He put put the entire case together for the jury, for their understanding through this document.

Speaker 3 After three days of presenting Stephen Panky in his own words, the prosecution turned to its star witness, Panky's ex-wife, Angela.

Speaker 3 She offered an intimate portrait of her ex, a man with a short fuse, who insisted on very strict rules for his family. It was a household with a lot of thou shalt nots.

Speaker 37 One day I was in the kitchen. I had my stereo on,

Speaker 3 and he came in.

Speaker 37 The next thing you know, I hear crashing, smashing, you know, no more music, no TV,

Speaker 37 no radio, no newspapers. This is going to be a godly home.

Speaker 3 Angela remembered how Panky suddenly abandoned those rules during that unplanned Christmas 1984 road trip. obsessively ordering her to find reports about Janelle on the car radio.

Speaker 3 The message to the jury was clear. This was Janelle's killer making sure there was nothing in the news connecting him to the crime.

Speaker 38 That's all he wanted to listen to on the radio.

Speaker 37 He kept having me flip to

Speaker 37 find more news reports about it.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors were confident Angela's detailed testimony would compare very favorably to the sometimes contradictory, strange things Packy had written about the same events.

Speaker 17 You start to have this real contradiction between the Angela Hicks and her incredible memory and these writings of a guy who, by all accounts, shouldn't have anything to do with this.

Speaker 3 Then Angela described a disturbing note in her husband's handwriting. She'd found it in the trash years after Janelle disappeared.
It had been torn into little pieces.

Speaker 37 One of the things notated in his handwriting on this piece of legal paper was

Speaker 37 snow outside the Matthews house was raked.

Speaker 3 Police say they never revealed the fact that the shoe prints in the snow at the Matthews house had been raked over.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors believed Angela's testimony about the notes she found was powerful evidence that Panky knew all about the prints because he was the one who made them. Prosecutor Rob Miller.
She was

Speaker 38 one of the most compelling witnesses I've ever had on the stand. And we took a break for the day and I was like, wow, that was an amazing witness.

Speaker 3 Take her out of the case. What do you have? Nothing.
She's that important.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 17 We don't make this case without Angela Hicks.

Speaker 3 Now it was time for the defense. And the unpredictable Steven Pankey would make an unusual case for himself from the witness stand.

Speaker 16 The Bible says make sure your sins will find you out.

Speaker 16 So I

Speaker 16 began

Speaker 16 a series of

Speaker 16 lies.

Speaker 13 I mean, it's ironic.

Speaker 3 Steven Pankey's defense attorney, Anthony Bjorst, believed in his client's innocence. After the state rested, it was his turn to tell the jury why.

Speaker 10 Mr. Pankey is innocent, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no physical evidence, really no evidence whatsoever, connecting him to this crime.

Speaker 27 No fingerprints, no DNA, there are no witnesses. So it's all circumstantial evidence, number one, and circumstantial evidence can be misleading.

Speaker 3 One of the defense's biggest problems was the powerful testimony of the state star witness, Panky's ex-wife, Angela.

Speaker 3 Viorst pointed out that Angela had waited 15 years before reaching out to police about the case. And he tried to give the jury a reason to question her motive for speaking out now.

Speaker 27 He was a sort of a domineering type of husband, and she may have been sort of getting her revenge by testifying against him at this trial.

Speaker 16 She had reason to be upset with him.

Speaker 19 And she had reason to divorce him.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 she doesn't have a reason to accuse him of committing a murder. Specifically.
When Vjorz got his chance to question Angela, he tried to demonstrate why she had good reasons to resent Panky.

Speaker 10 He did not treat you particularly well during the marriage, did he?

Speaker 3 No, he did not. Okay.

Speaker 10 He didn't provide well for you financially, did he?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 Angela said Panky inherited an ultra-conservative view on marital roles from his father. who once described a wife's place to her in a crude, offensive manner.

Speaker 37 What he had said is, you should obey your husband as unto the Lord. Okay.
And if your husband asks you to stand up on a table in the middle of a restaurant and dance naked, you should do it.

Speaker 10 So that's kind of an old-fashioned view of marriage, isn't it?

Speaker 3 I thought so. Yeah.

Speaker 10 And Steve had an old-fashioned view of marriage as well.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 After dealing with Angela's testimony, the defense shifted its focus to an alternate suspect. Viewers thought he had a good one, and Norris Drake.

Speaker 27 We presented evidence that he did have an interest in young girls who are about Janelle's age.

Speaker 27 We presented evidence that he was there at that exact location right around the time that she was dropped off.

Speaker 3 You thought he was a viable suspect.

Speaker 27 Absolutely. I mean, I really think he's the one who did it.

Speaker 3 Giving the jury an alternate suspect to think about and challenging Angela's credibility were centerpieces of the defense strategy. But what about Steven Panky's credibility?

Speaker 3 Vjorst knew putting him on the stand would be risky. This is a guy who's gotten in trouble by talking too much.
And yet, here you're going to go to the totally vulnerable situation of sworn testimony.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 27 You don't always know what Steve's going to say.

Speaker 3 Panky made the final decision. He would testify.
You previously. And after swearing to tell the truth, he did a remarkable thing.
He told the jury he's a liar.

Speaker 16 The Bible says, make sure your sins will find you out.

Speaker 3 So I

Speaker 16 began

Speaker 16 a series of

Speaker 16 lies.

Speaker 16 I had told so many lies over the years, I didn't know how

Speaker 16 you can,

Speaker 16 it's just

Speaker 16 it has to make sense and it all doesn't.

Speaker 3 And Panky's reason for lying about Janelle?

Speaker 3 He said it was to exact revenge on people he didn't like. Relatives, coworkers, law enforcement.

Speaker 16 And because I hated the police, it was all in one to say,

Speaker 16 I've got information that you want and you can't have it. It was a polite way of flipping them the bird.
It was pure hatred on my part.

Speaker 3 Jim and Gloria Matthews were there and could not believe what they were hearing.

Speaker 18 Here he's trying to defend himself in a way, but he's telling us that all he's done is throughout the years is he's lied.

Speaker 5 How do we know that he's not lying when he was testifying that he was lying?

Speaker 12 Yeah, it was bizarre.

Speaker 3 Panky didn't hold back when it came to Angela. He said her story about him simply wasn't true.

Speaker 34 I had never imagined

Speaker 16 that

Speaker 16 Angie would be as big as liar as I am.

Speaker 3 Angela had testified about her unhappy marriage.

Speaker 3 On the stand, Panky said he never had romantic feelings for his wife.

Speaker 3 He recalled talking to Angela one night when he decided to sleep on the couch.

Speaker 16 I turned and told her

Speaker 16 making love to her was an act of mercy, not passion. I didn't mean to be overly gross, but I think you can

Speaker 16 surmise from that kind of like what the relationship was like.

Speaker 3 Here was Panky himself offering an anecdote about how poorly he treated Angela.

Speaker 3 A story that was as mean as it was gratuitous.

Speaker 27 I mean, he volunteered that. Believe Believe me, I didn't ask him that question.

Speaker 16 Been five years.

Speaker 3 A lot of Panky's testimony wasn't about responding to questions. It was a stream of consciousness that often didn't seem to have anything to do with the case against him or make any sense.

Speaker 16 I believe that

Speaker 16 we are living in the last days, and after this lifetime, there'll be a thousand years millennium.

Speaker 3 Vior steered Panky back to all of the statements he'd made about Janelle, including the letters to law enforcement at the heart of the prosecution's case. He gave Panky a chance to explain that.

Speaker 3 Or again, what was the purpose of those letters?

Speaker 16 They thought that I was crazy.

Speaker 16 So the purpose of my letters was to prove their point.

Speaker 3 Panky was an unusual witness, to say the least. But under cross-examination, he continued to insist he had nothing to do with Janelle's murder.

Speaker 3 Still, there was one final question DA Michael Rourke wanted the jury to hear.

Speaker 35 When you shot Janelle Matthews in the forehead, was she begging for her life?

Speaker 3 Never happened.

Speaker 35 Did you look in her eyes?

Speaker 3 Never happened. No further questions.

Speaker 17 I didn't care what his answer was. I wanted the jury to have that image in their mind of that gun being pointed at that little girl's head.

Speaker 3 The jury would have its hands full trying to figure out Steven Panky. Defense attorney Vior says his client's unusual ways and obsession with Janelle Matthews do not make him a killer.

Speaker 3 What is going on with Steve Pankey?

Speaker 27 And the answer is he's a mentally ill person craving attention. That's the answer that I offered to the jury and that's the answer that I firmly believe is true.

Speaker 3 The prosecution cautioned the jury not to fall for that argument.

Speaker 38 He's not someone that has a mental health disorder. He is a master manipulator.
Don't let this self-proclaimed master manipulator manipulate you.

Speaker 3 After three weeks of testimony, both sides were feeling confident. The Matthews family, who'd been in court every every day, weren't sure what to think.

Speaker 3 But as with so much of Janelle's story, it was out of their hands.

Speaker 3 Now it was up to the jury.

Speaker 3 The Steven Pankey trial was now in the hands of the jurors. They deliberated for a day, then another,

Speaker 3 and another, with no verdict.

Speaker 17 I think that we finally reached a tipping point in day two where we were thinking to ourselves, what is this jury doing? And we're starting to get nervous at that point.

Speaker 3 The jurors finally came back, but not with a verdict. They were deadlocked.
The judge declared a mistrial. Michael, how much of a depth bomb is that?

Speaker 17 Oh, it was huge. We're standing there thinking, and I know I'm standing there thinking,

Speaker 17 we're going to do this again. There's no way we're not going to try this case again.

Speaker 3 The decision was made without any hesitation. Stephen Pankey would face a second trial.

Speaker 3 While preparing for it, prosecutors received an intriguing letter from an inmate at the Weld County Jail, someone named Patrick Callas.

Speaker 3 It was the same jail where Pankey was being held, prosecutor Lacey Wells.

Speaker 19 He talked about this relationship he had developed with Mr. Pankey over their shared beliefs, and it was kind of a religious-based relationship.
They would praise God together.

Speaker 3 He also suggested he had some information. So Detective Prill went to the county jail to meet the inmate who described a conversation he had with Panky.

Speaker 11 Panky came to this inmate and sought forgiveness for what he did to Janelle.

Speaker 11 And that whatever it was he did to that little girl was between Steve and God.

Speaker 3 So he'd booked himself a day on the witness stand. He did.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 The jury would hear from inmate Callis, and there was another important addition to the prosecution's witness list for the second trial. A woman named Debbie Moon.
What happened to Debbie Moon?

Speaker 3 This is someone who had an incident with Panky before Janelle, right?

Speaker 17 She was in a relationship with him back in 1977. They were members of the church together.

Speaker 17 She had come to the realization that she wanted to break up with him.

Speaker 17 He took her out onto county roads and assaulted her.

Speaker 3 Debbie Moon told police that Panky had raped her, but said when she was told told it was a case of he said she said, she decided not to press charges.

Speaker 3 45 years later, she still stood by her allegation, and the judge decided to let her testify, overruling a defense objection.

Speaker 19 We had a big ask of her. She had left the state of Colorado because of Mr.
Panky and had never returned.

Speaker 19 She came back for the second trial to bring justice for Janelle. Thank you, kid.

Speaker 3 Stephen Panky's second murder trial began in October 2022. The prosecution had those two new witnesses, but the heart of the case remained the same.

Speaker 3 The state would rely on Panky's own statements to prove his guilt. D.A.
Rourke's opening argument had a familiar ring to it.

Speaker 35 The defendant is the person that police were looking for for 37 years.

Speaker 3 Pankey had two new lawyers this time. Public defender Peter Harris used pretty much the same playbook from the first trial.

Speaker 33 Not only is there no DNA,

Speaker 33 there's no fingerprints, there's no murder weapon,

Speaker 33 There is no witness.

Speaker 3 Harris told the jury there was strong evidence in the case, but not against his client. It implicated Norris Drake.
Harris called Drake the elephant in the room.

Speaker 33 There is

Speaker 33 evidence tying him to this crime. There is evidence about opportunity for him to have committed the crime.

Speaker 3 The state star witness was still Panky's ex-wife, Angela.

Speaker 3 But even though Debbie Moon's story was about an incident that happened years before Janelle was killed, prosecutors thought her testimony was pivotal.

Speaker 3 Did Debbie Moon give the jury a different view of the accused? In that he's not just the goofball down on Main Street, but he could be a violent character.

Speaker 17 She, I think, completed the incomplete picture that the jury had previously had of the defendant.

Speaker 17 There was that one additional piece that really gave the jury some insight into who this guy really is.

Speaker 3 There was a moment during a break in Debbie's testimony that Prosecutor Will says she'll never forget.

Speaker 19 She stares at Mr. Panky and she stares at him until he looks away first.

Speaker 3 Deb Moon does.

Speaker 19 Deb Moon does. And I think that that was her saying, I'm here, giving Janelle a voice, and he turned away in shame.

Speaker 3 Panky decided not to take the stand, but he became a surprise witness for the state anyway. when the judge allowed prosecutors to play his testimony from the first trial for the jury.

Speaker 16 I had told so many lies over the years.

Speaker 3 When the jailhouse informant Patrick Callis testified, he said he asked Panky if he killed the little girl he was talking about. He said Panky nodded yes and then prayed for forgiveness.

Speaker 3 The DA thought that testimony was so compelling, he used the informant's words to conclude his closing argument.

Speaker 35 Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant did

Speaker 17 confess to this crime through Patrick Callis.

Speaker 17 Pat, I need forgiveness.

Speaker 3 For what?

Speaker 3 For that little girl

Speaker 17 did you kill her

Speaker 3 that's between me and god he lowered his head and he nodded defense attorney jessica brazil made the closing arguments for panky mr panky

Speaker 8 seeks attention

Speaker 37 is paranoid about law enforcement

Speaker 37 Everyone has someone like that in their life where they're just a little off.

Speaker 9 That doesn't make them a murderer by any means.

Speaker 3 This jury deliberated for less than two days and this time reached a decision. The judge read the verdict.

Speaker 11 We, the jury, find the defendant Stephen Dana Penke guilty of murder in the first degree, felony murder.

Speaker 3 Guilty of first-degree murder.

Speaker 17 What a moment.

Speaker 38 I mean, just knowing we got the Matthews some closure in this lifelong saga they've been through and gotten some justice for the city of Greeley and our community.

Speaker 3 Detective Perrow was sitting at the prosecution table when the verdict was announced.

Speaker 11 You got to keep a straight face, not react to the tears as they start erupting behind us. We found Janelle.
We weren't supposed to. We identified a suspect and arrested him.

Speaker 11 That wasn't supposed to happen. Just

Speaker 11 amazing to get

Speaker 12 to that final third part.

Speaker 8 I mean, it still doesn't bring Janelle back and it's still something horrific happened to our family, but having earthly justice and closure is priceless and it feels really good.

Speaker 3 There really is value to that. Amazing.
Before sentencing, with Janelle's convicted killer just feet away, the Matthews family was given a chance to speak.

Speaker 18 This crime has haunted our family all these years.

Speaker 18 I told him, you know, he claims to be a Christian. And I said, but your life doesn't show that.

Speaker 3 Gloria Matthews tenderly remembered her younger daughter.

Speaker 5 As mom, I remember much.

Speaker 5 Yes, she's feisty.

Speaker 5 Yes, she's opinionated.

Speaker 5 But she's also tender-hearted, sensitive, and loving.

Speaker 3 The judge handed down a life sentence with a chance for parole after 20 years. The justice system's final answer to the cruel and senseless murder of Janelle Matthews.

Speaker 3 Jim and Gloria were grateful, but still think Steven Packy has a lot to answer for. Gloria, you're a Christian.
Can you forgive him? No.

Speaker 17 We can forgive him, but we can't forgive what he did.

Speaker 18 There's a difference

Speaker 18 in my mind.

Speaker 5 I can't forgive him.

Speaker 5 He shot

Speaker 5 our daughter.

Speaker 5 Other Christians say that I need to forgive him.

Speaker 5 But how can you forgive evil?

Speaker 3 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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