GREELEY, Colo. — The trial of a former longshot Idaho gubernatorial candidate charged in the killing of a 12-year-old neighbor girl ended Thursday with jurors unable to reach verdicts on the most serious charges against him.
After three weeks of testimony, jurors found Steve Pankey, 70, guilty of false reporting but could not reach agreement on the charges that he kidnapped and killed Jonelle Matthews in 1984.
The Colorado girl was a high-profile missing person, appearing on milk cartons nationwide. In 2019, pipeline workers near Greeley found her remains, and it was determined that she died of a gunshot wound to the head.
Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke pressed for District Judge Timothy Kerns to offer an instruction encouraging jurors to reach a verdict, but Kerns said further deliberation would not change anyone’s vote.
Gloria Matthews, Jonelle’s mother, was in tears in the courtroom as the judge declared a mistrial.
Pankey, described by his lawyer as a paranoid true-crime junkie, testified in his own defense, delivering sometimes rambling testimony. He said he pretended to know information about the case out of bitterness for police and because he wanted his former church and former employer investigated. He denied being involved in Jonelle’s disappearance and death.
It was because of his testimony at the trial that the charge of false reporting was added.
Pankey was a neighbor of the Matthews family when Jonelle vanished. She was last seen on Dec. 20, 1984, by a family friend who dropped her off at her empty home after she had performed at a Christmas concert. When her father returned several minutes later from his older daughter’s basketball game, Jonelle was gone.
Pankey emerged as person of interest in the case three decades later — shortly before Jonelle’s body was found in 2019 — after claiming to have information about what happened to her and asking for immunity from prosecution.
A hearing is scheduled Monday to sentence Pankey for the false reporting conviction and to discuss whether prosecutors will try again to put him on trial a second time for murder and kidnapping.
Lacking physical evidence, the prosecution relied heavily on testimony from Pankey’s ex-wife, who said that Pankey unexpectedly announced the night that Jonelle disappeared that they were leaving to visit family in California early the next day. It also pointed to Pankey’s unwarranted visits and statements to law enforcement about the case, including sharing information it said had not been made public.
The ex-wife, Angela Hicks, recalled Pankey’s obsession with the search for Jonelle and his odd behavior around the time of her disappearance but said she did not suspect him of a crime until 1999. It was then, she said, that she confronted her husband after he got in trouble with police for not giving them information about the case.
She stated an awful feeling surfaced when he said to her, “Do you really think I would hurt her when she looked so much like you?”
“It made my blood run cold,” Hicks said, on the verge of tears.
She recalled that she had taken issue with their sudden departure from town at Christmas 1984, saying she needed to find someone to take care of their two dogs.
“Don’t worry about the dogs, they’re gone,” he reportedly told her — and she never saw them again.
Pankey’s lawyer, Anthony Viorst, told jurors that Pankey, diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, was a “jerk” to his ex-wife and others but was not a murderer. He also tried to generate reasonable doubt about his client’s involvement by raising the possibility of an alternative suspect.
Prosecutors said Pankey kept up to date on the case throughout the years even as he moved his family to several states before settling in Idaho, where he ran unsuccessfully as a Constitution Party candidate for Idaho governor in 2014 and in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2018, the year that authorities said he was named as a person of interest in the girl’s death.
Viorst told reporters afterward that he wasn’t surprised by the outcome, but “perhaps a bit frustrated.”
“I think we’re all a bit frustrated,” Viorst said. “But it was a very hotly contested trial, and there was certainly quite a bit of evidence of Mr. Pankey’s innocence, so I could see why they wouldn’t be able to reach a verdict.”The Greeley Tribune contributed to this report.
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