Dateline NBC - Footprints in the Snow

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

The missing persons case of 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews in Colorado remains a mystery for more than 3 decades until detectives narrow in on a suspect whose bizarre behavior after her disappearance hints at something much more sinister. Dennis Murphy reports.

Tonight, on Dateline. We dropped Janelle off. And you and your dad went home. We went home. Imagine her being taken from her home. Taken. She must have been terrified. I get a call. We have a missing child. She had come home, taken off her coat,

just like she was just going to settle down and watch TV. It was truly baffling. No sign of a struggle, nothing missing from the house. There were shoe prints found around the outside of the house. Doors were getting locked. Parents were warning children. It really rocked this community. Every single person who lived in the neighborhood needed to be tracked down.

I know who you did. Who overdid the analysis? Absolutely positively not. They did not have physical evidence. All leads were going dead. I've got information that you want, and you can't have it. This really might be something. Pretty dramatic stuff.

Very dramatic stuff. Unforgivable. How can you forgive evil? A child kidnapped, a town haunted, a killer taunting detectives. See how they caught him at last. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with Footprints in the Snow. 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. It's endless. Getting rid of a body out here is extremely easy. And there, for passing decades of winter snow and summer heat, she lay, abandoned, alone, but not forgotten. 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. And the nearby town was paralyzed in oh-my-God fear from that very first moment when word passed Janelle Matthews had gone missing. He says, Glo, I don't know how to tell this to you, but we can't find Janelle. I knew the longer it goes on, the less chance that we would find her alive.

And no one ever quite forgot the night really lost its innocence. It'll never be over. Janelle's always there. Janelle's always going to be a story that you have to tell. It was just before Christmas, December 20, 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. Greeley was 50,000 approximately at that time. Now it's about 125, 130. But to me, it was kind of an ideal Midwest town, small Midwest town, good place to raise kids, good schools. Jim Matthews moved here from California with his wife, Gloria, and two daughters, Janelle and Jennifer. You know, I was interested in talking to your parents. I had this kind of picture of Greeley, Colorado, like the old TV shows from the 50s 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. 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. 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. 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.

What did Janelle in particular think about Christmas coming around? She loved Christmas. She liked to make presents for her friends. She liked to get presents. And she liked to get presents. Yeah, who doesn't? She was excited for the gifts and just everything about Christmas and the songs. 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. It was the last big event before school ended for the holidays. That's Janelle, right there in the middle. Did Janelle enjoy it? She loved it, yes. That was really her sweet spot, right? Absolutely, yeah.

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. He wasn't going to make it back in time to take Janelle home. Is Janelle stuck without a ride? Did she have to figure out how she's going to get home? No, I don't believe so. I think she had a ride figured out, but I think she came with us at the last minute. Janelle hopped into 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.

Janelle ran into the house through the garage and gave her secret signal. 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. That was the okay signal, huh? Yeah, it was the okay signal. Deanna and her dad drove away.

Jim arrived home from Jennifer's basketball game at 9.30, about an hour after Janelle. Thirty minutes later, Jennifer arrived home. I came home around 10 o'clock and my dad had asked, do you know where Janelle is? And I said no. She usually came home and would watch TV and never had any problems about not being where she was supposed to be. What was the back of your neck telling you, anything? Just that this was not right, something was wrong. So Jim called the last person he thought had seen Janelle, Russ Ross.

I called Russ and I said, Russ, do you know anything about Janelle? He said, yeah. He said, I brought her home and I watched her walk in. 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. Jim knew immediately something was awry. The garage door should not have been open. It was not open when we left. 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. Deanna Ross remembers vividly being startled awake by her father

in the dead of night that December 20th, 1984. I remember feeling kind of like, what's going on, what's happening, and not really registering with me what was happening. 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. Deanna's dad had driven them home. You didn't have anything to tell them unless you'd seen Janelle, was her going into the house?

Yes. Back at the Matthewss house, late as it was, her father Jim continued to call around to see if anyone knew where Janelle was. No one did. So now I'm starting to really be concerned. Finally, he called the police. Officers from the Greeley Police Department responded quickly. They came right away when my dad had called and waking me up in the middle of the night to fingerprint my room. How awful for you. But something that you wanted to have done so that they could find Janelle. Police scoured every inch of the house as Jim and Jennifer stood by in silence. And their home was rarely silent, especially when the ebullient and sometimes cheeky Janelle was around. Bossy? Correct.

Sassy? Yes. Just opinionated. 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. I'll tell you a story about Janelle. It was a Sunday night and she wanted something and I said no Janelle. She stomps out the room. She comes back a few minutes later and she asked me the

same question. By that time I was getting angry. I said, no, Janelle. And she stomps up the room and she says, suffer the little children and forbid them not. 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? Oh, definitely. One that sticks out is Menudo. She loved Menudo. But now, in that house crawling with police, there was no music. Just worry. The clues were meager at best. 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. 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. Perhaps a sign, police speculated, that Janelle didn't leave the house willingly. 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. 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.

Of course, you're hoping it's a girl that's run away, maybe with a friend that didn't communicate that to her parents. 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. 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 the neighborhood.

Does it look to your eyes more or less the same? You know, what's ironic is it looks almost exactly the same. We have the same type of weather. The snow is covering the lawns. 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. 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. So there's the sign maybe of foul play, but you don't know. And also, that same shoe print is found walking through the grease of the two-car garage,

walking towards a rake. 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. Investigators decided to keep that information close to the vest so as not to tip off the possible perpetrator. 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.

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. He asked the obvious questions. Has she been troubled? Has there been any indicators? Did you get any red flags about Janelle? None whatsoever. She had no friends she was going to run off with her. 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. 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. You would say they had a character for her. Correct. When Janelle's mom, Gloria, called to check in from California, Jim gave her the horrible news.

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

Is that why Jim Matthews became a suspect? Absolutely. 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. 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. What do you say to one another?

We just embrace and, you know, we're trying to think positively that she's going to, you know, turn up. But I don't know. What do you do when you don't know when one of your children are? 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 mobilized to do. We still have hope that she'll be found and that she'll be found safely. And 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. We had a countywide search that the police and a couple of our board members in our church

organized and coordinated. Six or seven hundred people for this search. 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. Family friend Eileen Huff was one of those who rushed to the family side. What could you read in their faces and what they're saying to you? You know, Gloria and Jim, through all of this, have been the most gracious, kind,

loving people, and that's who they are. and they would share honestly how they felt and we wanted so much to alleviate that pain to do something to bring her home as the investigation was taking shape police focused on the man who had brought Chanel home that night Deanna's dad Russ Ross detectives treated him first as a witness but about a month after Janelle home that night, Deanna's dad, Russ Ross. 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. It bothered him, but when you have nothing to hide, you know, that's how he felt, and he was fully cooperative. He understood why they had to question him the way we did. He was the last

adult known to have seen her. Absolutely. 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? Start with a family, because statistically that often turns out to be who has the answers to this thing. 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. Especially investigators thought with Janelle's father, Jim. He told investigators he didn't notice right away that Janelle was missing.

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. 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. So this disappearance of Janelle is not really on police radar until sometime around 11, after 11? Absolutely. We had no idea until he made the initial call. Then the next morning,

with police swarming his house, Jim did something else that seemed odd. He went driving around for four hours of unaccounted time. This is after his daughter has gone missing? Yes. But what really piqued Detective Olson's interest was Jim's stoic behavior.

He didn't show a lot of emotions. Does that matter, affect, demeanor? It shouldn't, but it does. And he wasn't showing you what you'd expect to see? Right. 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. 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. But that didn't rule him out as a person of interest. He knows where the rake is. He knows exactly where the rake is in the garage? He knows exactly where the rake is. 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 it to its original position. Not just throw it down on the side of the house. Right. So there are all these questions and just confusion. 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. The relevant questions were, do you know what happened to your daughter?

Or do you know the whereabouts of Janelle Matthews? So the FBI's were assuming they're some of the best polygraphers in the nation. They say he's deceptive. Of course, polygraphs are really just used for guidance. You can't admit them in court, I don't think. Correct. But when a guy flunks on the critical questions, what does it tell you as the investigator? That's a lead that needs to be followed up on.

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. 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. 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.

There were parents that were coordinating who's watching which child. 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. 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. They could no longer walk to school alone. And it was traumatizing for everyone. I think based on all the information that we have available, the child has been kidnapped.

Reminders of the mystery that haunted Greeley were everywhere, even at the breakfast table. 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. I can't imagine what is going on with you in this period. For both of us, that's where our faith took over. As Jim 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. As Christians, we expect God to answer prayer. 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. And we thought there were so many babies to be adopted. It's a very generous thing to do. About six months later, the adoption service called,

and there she was, another daughter, Janelle. 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 three weeks. Twelve years later, that present from heaven was gone. Gloria, 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? Did you stay on the police? No, I didn't do anything. I just... We did, yeah, we just let the police do their thing. I mean, they're the professionals. 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. I think in most cases, you have to assume that someone close to the victim might have been involved. So it was pro forma that he became a suspect.

Jim says he expected the police scrutiny, even welcomed it. After all, he had nothing to hide. 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 and looking to his spiritual mentor for advice on what to do next. I decided to call my pastor, who 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. 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. The FBI agent was trying to get me to confess. Oh. And I can't read a polygraph. I don't know anything about polygraphs. And he would tell me that I was lying. 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. Police had compared his boots to the footprints in the snow. They went through his car with a fine-tooth comb and found nothing. So Jim was annoyed when two months after the FBI polygraph, Greeley PD asked him to take another lie detector test. They were kind of giving me kind of the same thing that the FBI gave me, kind of getting me to try to confess. 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. Are you telling me you didn't abduct your daughter? Absolutely. Are you sure? And I'm telling you I don't know where my daughter is. I'm telling you, who would have had it with, who would have been it? If I knew, do you think I'd be sitting here, I don't know where my daughter is. I'm telling you, who did it? Who did it then? If I knew, do you think I'd be sitting here? I don't know.

Tell me. I do not know where she is or who took her. That's it. Are you sure? Absolutely. Absolutely sure. I don't want to raise my voice and get emotional, because that's not my style, but I will. Once again, he was told he had flunked the lie detector.

That's when Jim says he'd had enough. 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. I'm fed up with this. But no matter what Jim told investigators, he could not shake their suspicion. And soon it seemed everyone in Greeley knew he was a suspect,

including close family friend Eileen Huff. I heard via people who worked in the police department, oh, he was the guilty party. And I just thought, if you only knew Jim Matthews, he'd be the last person you'd think. 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. How can I direct your call? Yes. And I thought, I have broken through to the inner sanctum. And straight through to the big guy at the top, President Ronald Reagan. 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. So she and several other friends of Jim and Gloria's formed a group called Rescue Janelle. What do you got there, Eileen?

These were posters from back in 1984 and 85, showing Janelle at the choir concert. 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. 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. 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. 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. first to regional, then national news and talk shows, all the way to the White House. I don't know what it is, but I just kept going after it. 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.

American children disappear from their homes or neighborhoods every year, causing, as we can all understand, heartbreaking anguish. For example, I learned about Janelle Matthews of Greeley, Colorado, who would have celebrated a happy 13th birthday with her family just last month. But five days before Christmas, Jonel disappeared from her home. Eileen's persistence and determination had achieved something remarkable. And now the phones at the Greeley Police Department wouldn't stop ringing. Their tip line was flooded with more than a thousand leads.

It was an enormous amount of tips, and so the police were just trying their best to handle all of them. 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. The Matthews family, the whole city of Greeley, waited desperately for a break in the case. They waited a month, a year, then two. 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. The case languished. Then in 1989, almost five years since Janelle disappeared into thin air, Keith Olson, now a detective, was assigned to take another look.

One report he had never seen before raised the detective's eyebrows, and it wasn't about Jim Matthews. One of our officers during the neighborhood canvas had knocked on the door of the neighbors directly across the street from the Matthews. Francis Drake was living there, and Francis Drake told the officer that her son had been visiting that night and that he may have saw something. And his name is what? Norris Drake.

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, the green exterior, that was Janelle Matthews' house. That's right. Detective Olson showed us just how close Drake's house was to Janelle's. Boy, it is directly across. If you wanted to keep eyes on the comings and goings at the Matthews' house, that's a pretty good vantage point.

And his mother said that when he left that evening, around 9, 9.15 or so, he sits in his vehicle for a while as if he's watching something. That was exactly the time frame in which investigators estimated that Janelle had disappeared and before Jim Matthews returned home at about 9.30. 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.

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

That puts him right in the theoretical frame of what you're looking at. Yes. He had told her that if I kill you, no one will ever find your body. 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 so all these things are going wow but that wasn't all his ex-girlfriend told detective olsen that drake had a fetish for pre-teens especially for young girls who looked a little bit older like janelle he tells his girlfriend at the time that he's obsessed with young women, children that are just developing into women.

Olsen 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. 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., 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. 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. 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. That statement never made its way into Janelle's case file, so the Greeley police never knew it existed. 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 firsthand account of the crime. Play by play. Right. So Norris Drake is a guy you want to talk to. Right. And maybe look at the shoes in his closet. Right.

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. This was one of the most upsetting moments in my reporting of the story. From the moment we started talking, she actually started crying, a deep, guttural cry. And so after I got off the phone with her, I thought, you know, it's possible. Maybe Norris Drake did it. It was time to bring in Norris Drake. I know you did.

You overdid Janelle's at night. No, sir. You were responsible for her disappearance. 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. Detective Olsen was told that he had an affinity for adolescent girls and a violent streak, and investigators had placed him across the street from Janelle

when she was home alone at the time of her disappearance. Detective Keith Olson was relishing the moment when he would finally come face-to-face with Drake. So you're in an interview room at the police station. Sure, and we believe there's a chance we can get this guy to confess. I've got the Janelle Matthews case. Okay. I'm sure you've figured out we need to talk to you.

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. After that, though, Detective Olson sensed the truth stopped. I just noticed I looked across the street and Janelle's garage door was up and the lights were on. In the garage? Uh-huh. And I don't remember seeing any vehicles. And after you left your mom's, do you know where you went? Probably straight back to Dave's. Okay. Do you know for certain if he did? I'm sure I did because Dave really didn't like me tooling around in his pickup, so I'm sure I would have went straight back over there. That, Olson thought, was a lie.

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. 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. What information did you hear about the case? Well, I remember real well that they thought a gang of kids had come across the back field, had jumped the fence, and had somehow nabbed her.

And that they had even found evidence where they had taken a rake out there and raked over their tracks. 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. He's got too much information? 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. 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. 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. First, he confronted him about the rake. Well, I'm crying out loud. I wouldn't even repeat something like that if I was a guilty one. Here's something that's just, you know, that points to your involvement is the use of that truck and then the unaccounted four to six hours after you leave your mother's place. You can't do that to me, though. We also have witnesses that will testify that you were talking about the case

before it even could have been on the media. No, there's no way. Detective Olson thought he had Drake where he wanted him, so he went for the jugular. I think you took Janelle, and I already told you that. Mm-hmm. I don't know what you did with her. It did happen.

Well, it did happen, and the evidence indicates that whatever it was, whatever the cause of her disappearance, you were involved. Olson pushed and pushed, but Drake didn't budge. I have to say that the reason you went into Matthew's everyone, I did not ever go in that house. I never crossed the street. It didn't have anything to do with it. Absolutely, positively, I had nothing to do with it. How many people did I bring in here?

Do you think, swear to God, that they didn't do it? Do you know what I'm saying? But, Keith, this is one of these classic cases where you really got the wrong guy. I really am innocent. So where did he stand at the end of that? Was he still on your, you thought he was going to be good for this? Oh, absolutely. I mean, everything just seemed like this has to be the guy.

Olson would not get another stab at Drake, who left police headquarters and promptly lawyered up. It had been five years since Janelle disappeared, which made it unlikely for investigators to find physical evidence that would implicate Drake. 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. There was just nothing there to indicate that any crime had occurred inside the pickup truck. Certainly no bullet hole and no blood stains or blood patterns or anything. 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. Here's the problem. We have no proof that Janelle Matthews is dead. I mean, and we have no crime scene, and we have no body. The investigation into the disappearance of Janelle Matthews had once again reached a dead end, and a frustrated Detective Olson reluctantly walked away. It sounds like you still have question marks

about Norris Drake in the back of your mind. Well, that's because, 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. 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. Someone who had apparently been saying repeatedly, I know something. At the Sunnyview Church of the Nazarene,

friends of Jim and Gloria Matthews come together to say goodbye to Janelle. In 1994, ten years after Janelle mysteriously disappeared, her family and friends gathered to remember. This was turning her over to God and saying, God, she's obviously in your hands and we trust you. Is that you accepting she's gone? Yes. I think that's part of it. I could never say that she was dead. I could never accept the fact that she was not alive. Janelle's case had turned cold, but the Greeley police never forgot about it.

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. In 2013, it landed on the desk of Detective Robert Cash. It was my time to take it and see what I could do with it. Here you go. Yes. It was an absolute puzzle. Cash decided he needed a partner and enlisted Mike Prill to help him solve the mystery. Prill is a detective with a knack for making sense of complex cases. So when he gives me this case, I go about the process of organizing it. Bringing it kicking and dragging into the modern era. Kicking and dragging.

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. Jim Matthews, Russ Ross, and Norris Drake, who had died in 2007 of an overdose but was still a suspect. 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. He was someone that came up in my review of the original investigation, and his name would pop up in two paragraphs, in two reports, and never again. Who was Steve Pankey? Turned out he had some curious connections to people involved in the case. 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 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. Ross had been Pankey's boss at a 7-Up distributorship in the 1970s, and there seemed to be bad blood between them. He alleged that Russ had beat him up at one point as a supervisor at 7-Up. So although that happened in 1978-79, Steve to this day still despises Mr. Ross. But even more intriguing to Cash and Pro was that Panky had reached out to police soon after Janelle disappeared. He made a phone call and said, I have information on Janelle. And I have pretty good evidence that she was dead, or she is dead. But I don't want to share any more of my information until you tell me what you know

in this investigation. So that's really weird. Very. It turned out Pankey 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. He was continually dismissed by one investigator after the other. It was somebody who had been tapping the shoulder of law enforcement for decades. And he's always talking about the Janelle case. Correct. And he went into the discard bin. Yes. In April of 2019, 34 years after Pankey first called Greeley Police, Cash got him on the phone. Hello? Hi, looking for Steve Pankey, please. This is Steve Pankey.

But suddenly, Pankey feigned total ignorance about Janelle's disappearance. It seems to be that you're focused on people in the months, weeks, days, the night that she disappeared. And if that's your focus, I can't help you. And unprompted, Pankey made a point of denying any personal involvement in Janelle's disappearance. I was never at Janelle Matthews' house. My first knowledge that Janelle Matthews existed and disappeared was six days after the fact. But during a rambling 45-minute conversation, Pankey hinted he knew things about the case,

things about Russ Ross, but he wouldn't share anything unless he could get some guarantees. I'm not going to say anything until I have a firm deal that can't be broken. Pankey's response to Robert was, is, I want my attorney. I need to work a deal. I need some protections. Who needs a deal unless they've got a problem? And what is his problem? You know, it was that confounding.

Cash and Prill started asking around about Pankey. A portrait of a quirky, belligerent character quickly emerged. But it was a call with Pankey's ex-wife, Angela Hicks, that suddenly turned the decades-old cold case red hot. She said, oh gosh, you know, I've been waiting so long for you to call. Angela described a chilling incident from 1999. She and Pankey, still married then, had moved to Idaho. 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. She was taken aback and remembered the case from Greeley and kind of inquisitively

said Janelle Matthews. To that, she said Steve Pankey looked at her and said, well, you don't think I would hurt her, do you? Would she look just like you? How creepy was that? Well, she said that it made her blood run cold. 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. It was the Friday before Christmas 1984. 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. And she finds that a little bit curious. The trip ended just as abruptly after Panky got into a fight with his father. The Pankys drove back to Greeley on Christmas Day. 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. They get home, and more bizarre things happen.

He goes inside, comes back out in coveralls, and then starts digging in the front yard of the residence. This wasn't just quirky behavior. It sounded downright incriminating. And it contradicted what Pankey had told them about not being aware of Janelle's disappearance until almost a week later. I enlisted an organization called NecroSearch to do some ground penetrating radar to see if there was anything there buried in the front yard or some sort of disturbance or just something. 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, 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. We're essentially right there. It was interest in the Janelle Matthews case. Then, on July 15th, out of the blue, Detective Cash got a call. A construction crew digging an oil pipeline in a remote part of the county had made an important discovery. They'd found unidentified remains that had been lifted up with earth-moving equipment. Cash hurried to the scene about 20 miles from Greeley. Detective Prill met him there.

It was kind of dusk. I remember it was, you know, very, very hot. They'd already flown a drone around the area to kind of get an idea of kind of the whole area. The chance discovery in a vast open field was human skeletal remains. Cash went in for a close look and took his breath away. I go and look, see the skull, see the braces. Braces on the teeth? Janelle wore braces back in 1984. Then immediately I see clothing

that is in and around and attached to the skeletal remains. We're essentially right there. It was right in this location that we're standing. I keep coming back to the revelation that there's her braces. It's still on, right? Mm-hmm.

No question who your discovery is at that point. And the clothing. Yeah. She's dressed exactly as she was at the choir recital, except that she had a coat on. But she had that distinctive shirt and blouse and everything else. There was no doubt when you looked at her, it was her. They had found Janelle.

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. It looked as though Janelle had been shot through the head. No bullets or shell casings were found. I almost feel like we're on sacred ground or something. I mean, with all of this prairie out here.

Oh, yeah. This is where this poor kid was for decades. For 35 years. And think of the world that's changed while she was here. Winters and summers, and here she is. Who calls Janelle's parents? I call Janelle's parents. You know, she really just kind of came out with it

that we have found something, and we believe that it's Janelle. Jim and Gloria had moved away years earlier, but say they still think of Greeley as home, and that's where they decided to hold a memorial service and burial for their daughter, 35 years removed from her 12th birthday. We had a huge turnout again, 400 people. Feeling the love of the people around us, that was tremendous satisfaction to be able to do that, I guess is the best way I can say it, to be able to put our daughter to rest.

With their case now a homicide investigation, the detectives set aside their previous suspects to focus on Stephen Pankey, who was living in Idaho. After Janelle's funeral, they decided to take a road trip. We have to go to Idaho. I want to see this guy. 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. Prill couldn't help but think what a strange life Panky had led. He left Greeley somewhat under the cover of darkness, packed up his family and announced and split. In the years after Janelle disappeared, the Panky family moved

to several different states before settling in Idaho in the 1990s. During that time, Steve is taking a job as a mortician in any of the cities that they live in. What do you make of that? It's weird. He had this proclivity to be around dead people. Of course, lots of people work as morticians. Nothing weird about that. But the detectives were now looking at everything about Pankey with a suspicious eye. Like the fact that he would never last at any job

for very long. Pearl called it dabbling. And when he wasn't dabbling, he was filing frivolous lawsuits. And running for office. And running for office. I'm your next governor. Right.

Pankey had actually run for several offices, including two extremely long-shot campaigns for office. And running for office. I'm your next governor. Right. Pankey 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. No. No. Hello everyone, this is your best friend Steve Pankey. Steve Pankey is running as the Republican candidate for Idaho governor. He has traditional core values with a biblical and constitutional perspective. Together we can make a safe, prosperous, and moral Idaho. Intermixed with all of this is his half-truths, claiming he had a degree in criminology. He didn't. That he's an ordained pastor. He was never.

The more Prill read, the more bewildering things got. I mean, there were moments there where I'm reading some of the things that Pankey has written, and there's a lot of WTFs going on. Very strange comments that he is writing 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. 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. The charges would later be dropped, but Pankey 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 Ms. Matthews' body. What did that have to do with the incident in the bank? Absolutely nothing. What on earth was Steve Pankey up to? When Cash and Pearl finally arrived at Pankey's Idaho home for that surprise visit,

they were determined to find out. Detectives Cash and Pearl had done their homework on Steve Pankey, but still didn't know what to expect when they rang the intercom at his house. Cash recorded the conversation. Steve, hey, it's Robert Cash with the Greeley Police. How are you? Are you at my door? I am. And what did you want?

What is it like talking, engaging Steve Pecky in conversation? Very strange. He began talking about things unrelated to anything that we were expecting, you know, personal aspects of his history, of his sexual orientation, things that just were so far away from where we wanted to go. I have almost a bisexual history, a long bisexual history. You can go on the Internet and it's there. 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. So the presiding question is, why are you so interested in about Janelle Matthews. They tried steering the conversation in that direction.

So the presiding question is, why are you so interested in the Janelle Matthews case? Yeah, why won't you tell us? I mean, help us. Anything come out? No. Once again, Panky said he would not talk without his attorney or an agreement in place to protect him.

And that was that. But the long drive to Idaho wasn't a waste of the detective's time. While they were there, Panky's ex-wife, Angela, agreed to sit down for a recorded interview. 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. 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, like how he once jumped out of his seat in church when their pastor said he was certain Janelle would be found alive.

And then he's up and down the aisle and at the back and kind of pacing back there saying false prophet. So they take him to the foyer. And I mean, every time that foyer opened, he was just yelling out there. Detective, is that evidence or is it just kind of a curiosity? Taken by itself, it's a curiosity. And that's what this entire investigation was, was any one thing 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. 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? Yeah, I think by the time that car was put into drive, I knew Pankey was a suspect in this case. They were done trying to talk to Pankey, but returned to his house to execute a search warrant, seizing his electronic devices. His browser history was filled with searches about Janelle. After refusing to talk to detectives about the case, Pankey, now the prime suspect, decided to start talking to practically anyone else who would listen. On December 20th, 1984...

In an interview with NBC station KTVB, Pankey finally revealed the mysterious details of what he'd been claiming he knew about Janelle back in 1984. Panky said it was just something his father-in-law, a caretaker at a cemetery, had told him. A cop had come to him 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. That's the total of my knowledge about the disappearance of Janelle Matthews, okay?

That's it. There ain't nothing more. In other interviews, Pagke offered up provocative conspiracy theories about the case. 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. I get a call from a journalist in Idaho who said, Hey, Mayor Gates, are you aware that Steve Pankey has named you as a suspect in the disappearance of Jan Almatthews? That you're part of a plot.

Right. And, you know, I don't find myself speechless very often. I think I was probably speechless that day. Cash and Prill call this latest gambit the Pankey publicity tour. In full Stephen Pankey fashion, he went on a crusade. I'm going to now tell the world about Stephen Panky. Yes. My name is Steve Panky.

Panky also found time to run for office again. This go-round for sheriff in Idaho. I humbly ask for your vote. I'm Steve Panky, and I approve this ad. One of his campaign slogans was, no hanky with Pankey. Back in Colorado, Cash and Prill were paying close attention to everything Pankey was saying, as they quietly built their case with prosecutors Robert Miller, Lacey Wells, and the elected DA of Weld County, Michael Rourke. They believed Pankey had talked himself into a murder charge,

and they presented their evidence to a grand jury. We presented our information to the grand jury through Detective Cash, through Detective Prill. The detectives laid out a detailed timeline of the suspicious behavior and statements made by Pankey over the decades. Detective Prill had even developed a theory of how Janelle was killed, 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?

Well, it became fairly clear to me that this coat had been pulled over Janelle's head. To control her? 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, and it's at that point that she was likely shot. Prosecutors told the grand jurors it all added up to a strong circumstantial case.

They very quickly turned around and said, here's your indictment, go get him. On October 12, 2020, that's exactly what Detectives Cash and Prill did. They arrested Steve Pankey at his home in Idaho. He was charged with first-degree murder. Pankey would soon be telling his story again. When you shot Janelle Matthews in the forehead, was she begging for her life? This time, he'd be talking to his most important audience yet, a jury of his peers. Stephen 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. It doesn't have all that stuff that juries absolutely crave. Correct. Obvious motive, there's no weapon, there's no DNA, there's no eyewitness. Yes, it was unusual, to say the least. 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. The trial started in October of 2021.

Reporter Ashley Fonce was in the courtroom. Paint me a picture as the trial of Stephen Pankey begins. 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. Prosecutors planned to prove their case with a mountain of words spoken and written by Pankey himself. Wells County DA Michael Rourke thought that was a winning hand. For 37 years, justice for Janelle has been denied.

That change is beginning today. 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. Statements of the defendant. Statements and behaviors that will lead you to but one conclusion. That he is the individual we have been looking for for 37 years. Prosecutors presented an avalanche of documents. 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. 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. For D.A. Rourke, one thing in Exhibit 209 stood out above all others, a letter Pankey had written to prosecutors. Rourke calls it Pankey's alibi letter. It's an incredibly detailed alibi, not in a believable sense. 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. 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. Who remembers that 35 years later? Prosecutors, I see so many red flags in that story, I can't count them. Do you also? Yes. Prosecutors told the jury there was only one way to interpret all those statements put together by Detective Prill. They were the product of a killer's guilty conscience.

And it turned out that Prill became your Panky whisperer. He put the entire case together for the jury, for their understanding through this document. After three days of presenting Stephen Panky in his own words, the prosecution turned to its star witness, Panky's ex-wife, Angela. 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. One day I was in the kitchen. I had my stereo on and he came in. The next thing you know, I hear crashing, smashing, you know, no more music, no TV, no radio, no newspapers. This is going to be a godly home.

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. 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. That's all he wanted to listen to on the radio. He kept having me flip to find more news reports about it. Prosecutors were confident Angela's detailed testimony would compare very favorably to the sometimes contradictory, strange things Pankey had written about the same events.

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. 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. One of the things notated in his handwriting on this piece of legal paper

was snow outside the Matthews house was raked. Police say they never revealed the fact that the shoe prints in the snow at the Matthews house had been raked over. Prosecutors believed Angela's testimony about the note 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 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.

Take her out of the case, what do you have? Nothing. She's that important? Yes. We don't make this case without Angela Hicks. Now it was time for the defense, and the unpredictable Stephen Pankey would make an unusual case for himself.

From the witness stand. The Bible says, make sure your sins will find you out. So I began a it's ironic. Stephen Pankey's defense attorney, Anthony Viorst, believed in his client's innocence. After the state rested, it was his turn to tell the jury why. Mr. Pankey is innocent, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no physical evidence, really no evidence whatsoever, connecting him to this crime. No fingerprints, no DNA, there are no witnesses. So it's all circumstantial evidence, number one, and circumstantial evidence can be misleading. One of the defense's biggest problems was the powerful testimony of the state

star witness, Pankey's ex-wife, Angela. Viewers 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. 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. She had reason to be upset with him. And she had reason to divorce him. But she doesn't have a reason to accuse him of committing a murder. When Viorce got his chance to question Angela,

he tried to demonstrate why she had good reasons to resent Panky. He did not treat you particularly well during the marriage, did he? No, he did not. Okay. He didn't provide well for you marriage, did he? No, he did not. Okay. He didn't provide well for you financially, did he? No. 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.

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. So that's kind of an old-fashioned view of marriage, isn't it? I thought so. Yeah. And Steve had an old-fashioned view of marriage as well. Yes.

After dealing with Angela's testimony, the defense shifted its focus to an alternate suspect. Viorst thought he had a good one in Norris Drake. We presented evidence that he did have an interest in young girls, you know, who were about Janelle's age. We presented evidence that he was there at that exact location right around the time that she was dropped off. You thought he was a viable suspect? Absolutely. I mean, I really think he's the one who did it. Giving the jury an alternate suspect to think about and challenging Angela's credibility were centerpieces of the defense strategy.

But what about Stephen Pankey's credibility? Viewers knew putting him on the stand would be risky. This is a guy who's gotten in trouble by talking too much. Right. And yet here you're going to go to the totally vulnerable situation of sworn testimony. Right? You don't always know what Steve's going to say. Pankey made the final decision.

He would testify. And after swearing to tell the truth, he did a remarkable thing. He told the jury he's a liar. The Bible says, make sure your sins will find you out. So I began a series of lies. I had told so many lies over the years. I didn't know how you can, it's just, it has to, it has to make sense and it all does him and panky's reason for lying about janelle he said it was to exact revenge on people he didn't like relatives co-workers law enforcement and because i hated the police it was all in one to say, 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. Jim and Gloria Matthews were there and could not believe what they were hearing. 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. How do we know that he's not lying when he was just that he was lying? Yeah, it was bizarre. Panky didn't hold back when it came to Angela. He said her story about him simply wasn't true. I had never imagined that Angie would be as big a liar as I am. Angela had testified about her unhappy marriage. On the stand, Pankey said he never had romantic

feelings for his wife. He recalled talking to Angela one night when he decided to sleep on the couch. I turned and told her making love to her was an act of mercy, not passion. I didn't mean to be overly gross, but I think you can surmise from that kind of like what the relationship was like. Here was Panky himself, offering an anecdote about how poorly he treated Angela, a story that was as mean as it was gratuitous. I mean, he volunteered that. Believe me, I didn't ask him that question. A lot of Pankey'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. I believe that we are living in the last days, and after this lifetime, there'll be a thousand years, millennium. Vior steered Pankey 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 Pankey a chance to explain that. Again, what was the purpose of those letters? They thought that I was crazy. So the purpose of my letters was to prove their point.

Pankey 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. Still, there was one final question D.A DA Michael Rourke wanted the jury to hear. When you shot Janelle Matthews in the forehead, was she begging for her life? Never happened. Did you look in her eyes? Never happened.

No further questions. 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. The jury would have its hands full trying to figure out Steven Pankey. Defense attorney Vior says his client's unusual ways and obsession with Janelle Matthews do not make him a killer. What is going on with Steve Pankey? And the answer is he's a mentally ill person craving attention. That's the answer that I offer to the jury, and that's the answer that I firmly believe is true. The prosecution cautioned the jury not to fall for that argument.

He's not someone that has a mental health disorder. He's a master manipulator. Don't let this self-proclaimed master manipulator manipulate you. After three weeks of testimony, both sides were feeling confident. The Matthews family, who had been in court every day, weren't sure what to think. But as with so much of Janelle's story, it was out of their hands. Now, it was up to the jury. The Stephen Pankey trial was now in the hands of the jurors. They deliberated for a day, then another, and another, with no verdict.

I think that we finally reached a tipping point in day two where we're thinking to ourselves, what is this jury doing? And we're starting to get nervous at that point. 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? Oh, it was huge. We're standing there thinking, and I know I'm standing there thinking, we're going to do this again. There's no way we're not going to try this case again. The decision was made without any hesitation. Stephen Pankey would face a second trial. While preparing for it, prosecutors received an

intriguing letter from an inmate at the Wells County Jail, someone named Patrick Callis. It was the same jail where Pankey was being held. Prosecutor Lacey Wells. 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. 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. Panky came to this inmate and sought forgiveness for what he did to Janelle. And that whatever it was he did to that little girl was between Steve and God. So he'd booked himself a day on the witness stand? He did. Oh, yeah. 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? This is someone who had an incident with Panky before Janelle, right?

She was in a relationship with him back in 1977. They were members of the church together. She had come to the realization that she wanted to break up with him. He took her out onto county roads and assaulted her. Debbie Moon told police that Panky had raped her, but said when she was told it was a case of he said, she said, she decided not to press charges. 45 years later, she still stood by her allegation, and the judge decided to let her testify, overruling a defense objection. We had a big ask of her. She had left the state of Colorado because of Mr. Pankey and had never returned. She came back for the second trial to bring justice for Janelle.

Stephen Pankey's second murder trial began in October 2022. The prosecution had those two new witnesses, but the heart of the case remained the same. The state would rely on Pankey's own statements to prove his guilt. D.A. Rourke's opening argument had a familiar ring to it. The defendant is the person that police were looking for for 37 years. Pankey had two new lawyers this time. Public defender Peter Harris used pretty much the same playbook from the first trial. Not only is there no DNA,

there's no fingerprints, there's no murder weapon. There is no witness. 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. There is evidence tying him to this crime. There is evidence about opportunity for him to have committed the crime. The state's star witness was still Panky's ex-wife, Angela. But even though Debbie Moon's story was about an incident that happened years before Janelle was killed, prosecutors thought her testimony was pivotal. Did Debbie Moon give the jury a different view of the accused? And

that he's not just the goofball down on Main Street, but he could be a violent character. She, I think, completed the incomplete picture that the jury had previously had of the defendant. There was that one additional piece that really gave the jury some insight into who this guy really is. There was a moment during a break in Debbie's testimony

that Prosecutor Well says she'll never forget. She stares at Mr. Pankey, and she stares at him until he looks away first. Deb Moon does. Deb Moon does. And I think that that was her saying, I'm here giving Janelle a voice, and he turned away in shame. Pankey 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. I had told so many lies over the years. When the jailhouse informant Patrick Callis testified, he said he asked Pankey

if he killed the little girl he was talking about. He said Pankey nodded yes and then prayed for forgiveness. The DA thought that testimony was so compelling, he used the informant's words to conclude his closing argument. Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant did confess to this crime through Patrick Callis. Pat, I need forgiveness. For what? For that little girl. Did you kill her?

That's between me and God. He lowered his head and he nodded. Defense attorney Jessica Brazil made the closing arguments for Pankey. Mr. Pankey seeks attention, is paranoid about law enforcement, everyone has someone like that in their life, where they're just a little off. That doesn't make them a murderer by any means.

This jury deliberated for less than two days and this time reached a decision. The judge read the verdict. We, the jury, find the defendants, Steve and Dana Pankey, guilty of murder in the first degree, felony murder. Guilty of first degree murder. What a moment. 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. Detective Perreault was sitting at the prosecution table

when the verdict was announced. 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. That wasn't supposed to happen. Just amazing to get to that final third part. 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. 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. This crime has haunted our family all these years. I told him, you know, he claims to be a Christian,

and I said, but your life doesn't show that. Gloria Matthews tenderly remembered her younger daughter. As a mom, I remember much. Yes, she's feisty. Yes, she's opinionated. But she's also tender-hearted, sensitive, and loving. 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. Jim and Gloria were grateful, but still think Stephen Packie has a lot to answer for. Gloria, you're a Christian. Can you forgive him?

No. We can forgive him, but we can't forgive what he did. There's a difference in my mind. I can't forgive him. He shot our daughter. Other Christians say that I need to forgive him. But how can you forgive evil? That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 central.

And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.