My ex-husband killed the missing girl on the milk carton - here's how I caught him

It was five days before Christmas 1984 when , 12, vanished in a mystery that baffled America for nearly four decades.

Police in small town Greeley, Colorado, struggled to find a lead but feared she had been abducted. A few months after she went missing, the case attracted the attention of the White House and prompted President Ronald Reagan to make Jonelle one of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons in his campaign to stop lost children being forgotten. Jonelle’s mum, Gloria Matthews, wasn’t comforted. “To be honest, I felt that was the least they could do,” she said.

For 35 years, police struggled to join the dots but Angela Hicks, the wife of a local man named Steven Pankey, was starting to fear her abusive and controlling husband was in fact a killer. Decades later, Angela teamed up with Detective Robert Cash – who had been a classmate of Jonelle’s older sister Jennifer – before they managed to amass enough evidence for Pankey to be charged.

READ MORE:

READ MORE:

Oh the night of Jonelle’s kidnap, Gloria had flown out of Colorado to care for a sick relative. She recalled the last moment she saw her daughter. “I said, ‘Goodbye Jonelle, kissed her, kissed Jennifer. There are so many things that I wished I would have done but I didn’t,” she said.

Meanwhile, Angela Hicks, then a stranger to the Matthews family, was becoming increasingly frightened by her husband’s behaviour. One day after Jonelle disappeared, Pankey uprooted his family and drove to Big Bear in California. In a new Crime documentary called The Girl On The Milk Carton, Angela recalled, “My husband Steve was never into , but for Christmas this year Steve’s dad said, ‘Hey, it would just be wonderful if you guys could come.’ Steve said we weren’t going to go. The afternoon of 21 December, all of a sudden Steve came home and said, ‘Get us packed, we’re leaving tomorrow morning.’ I felt so bad because we had two Great Dane and Steve said. ‘Don’t worry about the dogs – I’ve dumped the dogs. Get us ready to go.’ We weren’t going and all of a sudden he’s dumped the dogs?”

Pankey’s family were not expecting them and there was a falling out on Christmas morning that saw the family suddenly return to Greeley. On the journey home, Pankey became obsessed with listening to radio reports of Jonelle’s disappearance and shouted at Angela to keep flicking through the stations to find more updates. “He was so focused on these news reports,” Angela said in the documentary. “He was absolutely acting strange. I just didn’t quite understand.”

Things got even stranger a few days later when Pankey torched their car. Then, in January 1985, police received a phone call from someone called Pankey claiming to be a pastor, saying someone had come to him and confessed to the crime. But Pankey claimed he was prevented from telling who it was because of ‘pastoral privilege’. Policeman Mark Blaskiewicz said, “At the time, the officers thought it was a prank. They were not realising what they had missed.”

Pankey was physically and emotionally abusive to Angela and controlled every aspect of her life. She recalled, “His control grew and grew and I became more silent and less sure of anything I should say or do. Everything was a potential trigger. He told me, ‘If you’re thinking of leaving me, you’re going to watch me shoot both boys, then I’m going to shoot you, then I’m going to kill myself. Is that what you want?’ How was I ever going to find my way out of that?”

Meanwhile, Jonelle’s heartbroken father, Jim Matthews, was the chief suspect and cops subjected him to a polygraph test, which he failed. He said, “I got upset.”

Over the years, Pankey would reference Jonelle and then in the late 1990s Angela found torn up notes about Jonelle written in Pankey’s handwriting at home. She reconstructed them and smuggled them out of the house to her local police station, fearing Pankey would punish her if she was caught. The police listened to her and advised her to leave her marriage. However, she later found out the evidence was never passed to the right department. “What the hell happened to that file after everything that I went through?” she said. “No one had done anything.”

Eventually, Angela divorced Pankey and took out a civil protection order against him. Then when Detective Robert Cash met Angela, he realised she was the key to the case. “Angela Hicks had so much information to give,” said Detective Cash. “I had several conversations with her over the next few months. She would bring copies of the things that she had found in the house – notes, legal briefs, important writings. Angela would talk about the statements to her that made her blood run cold. The trip to California, dumping dogs, how she suffered abuse at the hands of Steve Pankey, physical and emotional.”

The moment he began to believe Pankey was the killer was when he saw the handwritten notes Angela had saved, mentioning that the around the Matthews’ family home had been raked to eliminate footprints. It proved to him
that Pankey had been there that night as, crucially, that information had never been released to the public.

“My rose,” said Detective Cash. “Steve knew the holdback information. The general public had no
idea about the raking.”

Then in July 2019, Jonelle Matthews’ skeleton was found with a bullet wound in her skull. Her family was informed. “It was absolutely earthshaking,” said her dad Jim. Gloria added, “There isn’t a day of my life that I don’t think about how she was shot in the head and how afraid she was.”

Thanks to Angela’s testimony in court, Pankey was found guilty and jailed for life. “I could just feel my heart pounding,” said Angela. “They said kidnapping in the first degree, guilty, then , guilty.”

Jonelle’s sister Jennifer Mogensen felt “instant relief” as Pankey was sentenced to life imprisonment in October 2022. “It was the best feeling ever,” she said. “Almost an instant relief of the last 38 years – all the blood, sweat and tears that had gone into this.”

For Angela, she’s now no longer afraid of the man who terrorised her during her marriage. “For the first time in a long time I feel safe,” she said.

The Girl On The Milk Carton is available to watch via Sky Crime and Now. Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on , , , , , and .