Found Deceased CO - Jonelle Matthews, 12, Greeley, 20 Dec 1984 *arrest 2020*

[SAMS]

Apparently, the caller was a woman, and Jonelle took the message when she was home.

Greeley child snatched from living room after Christmas concert

Ty.

 

[Gardener1850]

The guy with a blue pullover that has beige stripes across it? He does wear glasses, like SP.

Yes, that's the one that I was looking at. It may not be him but that guy gives me a weird vibe every time I see that short clip of the volunteers. MOO.

 

[SAMS]

Apparently, the caller was a woman, and Jonelle took the message when she was home.

Greeley child snatched from living room after Christmas concert

Interesting. I hadn’t seen this article before.

“Detectives learned that Jonelle had been adopted from a Los Angeles agency when she was one month old. She had talked to her friends about finding her natural parents”.

I’m not adopted so I don’t want to sound like I’m speaking from experience but isn’t it somewhat odd that she spoke to her friends about finding her natural parents at 12? How was her home life? Just making some observations. MOO

 

[ZoriahNZ]

According to a video upstream, they may have attended the same church. If this is true, then how would he have not heard of her gone missing? In the video above he claims to not have known or heard of the family. I would imagine everyone in the church and community would’ve known.

Keeping a close eye here.

Well, I think he's claiming he was on vacation camping for a whole week in CA, left at 5am on the 21st and didn't arrive back until the 26th. His quote was a claim that he hadn't heard about her until the 26th and that he'd never met her or the family prior to that. I agree that it seems odd considering they allegedly went to the same church and he was a youth minister there at around the same time.

ETA: Oops, saw someone already had it covered. Sorry.

 

[dblsj]

Interesting. I hadn’t seen this article before.

“Detectives learned that Jonelle had been adopted from a Los Angeles agency when she was one month old. She had talked to her friends about finding her natural parents”.

I’m not adopted so I don’t want to sound like I’m speaking from experience but isn’t it somewhat odd that she spoke to her friends about finding her natural parents at 12? How was her home life? Just making some observations. MOO

If I recall correctly, I think Jonelle had just found out she was adopted. She was curious about her mother and wanted to meet her. Again, that is speaking strictly from memory.

I was not a member of Jonelle's church, but I drove past it every day. From the outside, I would guess the congregation was a few hundred people. It wasn't a mega church that you see in larger cities.

 

[crhedBngr]

I have found the address dates to be slightly inaccurate on that site. I looked myself up and it’s kinda close, but not perfect by any means.

What muddies the water for me is SP seems to go by several aliases. If you go back to 100% Free People Search - TruePeopleSearch.com and plug in his name, you'll see this.

I belong to a website that lets you search yearbooks. I'll keep looking through that, and see what I can find.

 

[dblsj]

...However, I've exhausted my free-article limit to the Greeley Tribune, so I may not be able to link it.

ETA: Bringing forward this post by @FragileSugar : Found Deceased - CO - Jonelle Matthews, 12, Greeley, 20 Dec 1984

If you want to access an article on the Tribune, let it load and then turn your phone to airplane mode before the popup about subscriptions appears. You'll be able to access the entire article.

 

[crhedBngr]

If you want to access an article on the Tribune, let it load and then turn your phone to airplane mode before the popup about subscriptions appears. You'll be able to access the entire article.

Thanks. I'm actually on my laptop as I type this. I may be able to go incognito.

 

[dblsj]

I had the thought you might not be on a phone... You just need to somehow stop the internet connection.

 

[crhedBngr]

I had the thought you might not be on a phone... You just need to somehow stop the internet connection.

Incognito mode works for now, thanks.

 

[Iamlysaloo]

Has anyone found any photos of SP from 1984? I wonder if he volunteered to assist with the search for Jonelle? In the video below they show historic footage of volunteers traipsing across a snow covered field (about 1:05). Although the video is blurry, there's a man that seems to smile when he sees the cameras filming him. Could that be SP? I wonder if he had to admit to finding out about Jonelle on Dec 26th because he signed in at a search and police kept tabs on those names? There is also historic video of the Matthews family in church and a wide view of the congregation is shown. Could SP be among those shown in the church?

MOO

Is this allowed. I apologize if it’s not.

 

[gregjrichards]

Wow that looks like him and if it is and he committed this horrific crime it is chilling.

 

[neesaki]

I’ve never seen this particular article but could have missed it here, as usual I’m running behind. But do we know who sent the pictures from the site to the Tribune?
Was it LE or someone else?

Pictures from the site sent to the Tribune showed a human skull next to a hole about the size of a basketball rim while tattered clothing sat on the other side of the hole. A close-up of the lower jaw showed two completely intact rows of teeth that had braces on them.

Jonelle Matthews, Girl Missing Since 1984, Found Dead

 

[gregjrichards]

I’ve never seen this particular article but could have missed it here, as usual I’m running behind. But do we know who sent the pictures from the site to the Tribune?
Was it LE or someone else?


Jonelle Matthews, Girl Missing Since 1984, Found Dead

I don’t think that is publicly known but I found it a pretty sick and low life thing to do when I read that article at the time. I did wonder if one of the workers might have done it in the hope of making some cash. In my opinion it is unlikely someone from LE would do that.

 

[Renzolla]

[

I look for him to attempt suicide - he's a narcissist, wants to control the narrative, wants the attention, wants to play the victim. He knows once he's in prison, he will fall off the radar and nobody will give a hoot about him. That is the ultimate rejection in his mind.
If he was truly innocent, he would have already hired an attorney and publicist, to paint a pretty picture of himself.

This reminds me of the way Mindhunter portrayed Wayne Williams. I'm not familiar enough with that case to know how much they've fictionalized, but I wonder how much of it was inspired by actual profiling.

 

[Iamlysaloo]

Is he holding a shovel? Might be an optical illusion. But if he is, I went through the video, he's the only person carrying one.

 

[crhedBngr]

Is he holding a shovel? Might be an optical illusion. But if he is, I went through the video, he's the only person carrying one.

Looks like it could be some kind of digging implement. Not a full-sized shovel.

JMVHO.

 

[PommyMommy]

SEP 18, 2019
For 34 years, Colorado asked 'Where is Jonelle Matthews?' Now, it's 'Who killed her?'
[...]

In the winter of 1984, Jonelle’s disappearance shook Greeley — a conservative, close-knit city set 60 miles north of Denver on Colorado's High Plains.

[...]

In March 1985 — a few months after Jonelle vanished from her family’s west Greeley home on Dec. 20 — President Ronald Reagan mentioned her in a speech to a group of Washington, D.C., newspaper editors as fear over high-profile child abductions gripped the nation.

[...]

Decades would pass without any notable progress in the search for Jonelle. As time beat on, her case grew colder, becoming the oldest unsolved missing person case in Weld County, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

“We were consigned to the fact that we were never going to find out what happened to her,” Jonelle’s father, Jim Matthews, told the Coloradoan in a recent interview.

[...]

But 34½ years later, just north of Weld County Road 34½, oil site crews digging for a pipeline on July 24 uncovered a set of human bones, including a skull with intact, braces-lined teeth — just like Jonelle’s.

[...]

In 1984, the home Gilliland has lived in since 2001 was one of only three in the immediate area, he said. Surrounded by flat farmland for decades, it would have been "essentially a no-man's land" when Jonelle went missing, he added.

[...]

Within a nine-months span of 2013, Gilliland's wife discovered two discarded dogs — an icy Akita-Labrador mix and bright white great Pyrenees mix — while driving near the site where Jonelle would ultimately be found. The family adopted both.

[...]

With the July discovery breathing new life into a decades-old mystery, the Matthews family — and Greeley — are now holding out hope for justice.

For 34½ years, they asked, "Where is Jonelle?"

Now they have a different question: "Who killed her?"

'A thousand million times'
Gloria laughed when I asked what Jonelle was like.

[...]

Gloria recalls detailed requests from Jonelle before each of her birthdays. "I want a strawberry cake," she remembers Jonelle saying. "I want it pink."

[...]

Deanna, now 47 and living in New Jersey, met Jonelle when she moved to Greeley with her dad, Russell, and brother, Brent, in 1980. The girls went to the same elementary school and soon realized their families belonged to the same church — Greeley's Sunny View Church of The Nazarene.

"She was very friendly and just very loud," Deanna recalled. "I always say that I was very shy and she was very outgoing so I think we complimented each other well. She was really theatrical and dramatic and just the center of the room."

[...]

Because Jim was at Jennifer's high school basketball game that night and Gloria was on a plane to Los Angeles to surprise her ailing father for Christmas, Jonelle got a ride home with Deanna and her father, Russell Ross.

[...]

One month later, an advanced reporting class at Colorado State University was watching it wide-eyed.

[...]

They spent weeks traveling to and from Greeley, talking to investigators and characters in Jonelle's story. Like the police, they were giving Jonelle's disappearance a fresh look.

[...]

Within a day, the news was out, and Kim Spencer, the instructor of CSU's advanced reporting class, was texting a link to her students.

[...]

"Holy s---."

The kids
[...]

They were hopeful — so much so that Gloria set a place for Jonelle at the table during the family's Christmas Eve dinner in case she walked through the door.

[...]

Her disappearance came just six months after the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC — a first-of-its-kind national resource center dedicated to finding missing kids — was established by Congress.

[...]

 

[PommyMommy]

Published on Sep 18, 2019
Full KTVB interview with former Idaho governor candidate Steve Pankey

 

[PayrollNerd]

Looks like it could be some kind of digging implement. Not a full-sized shovel.

JMVHO.

If that is him, is that the digging implement he used to bury her? That may explain the smirk on his face. She was found in a small hole right?