Chronicling 34-year search for missing 12-year-old

Five days before Christmas 1984, Jim and Gloria Matthews and their two daughters were all going in different directions.

Gloria flew out of state to spend time with her father. Jennifer, then 16, played basketball in the Greeley Central High School gym. Jim took 12-year-old Jonelle to Franklin Middle School, where she got on a bus and rode to a nursing home to sing Christmas carols. After Jonelle’s outing, a friend watched her enter the front door of her home.

It was the last time anyone ever reported seeing Jonelle until Tuesday, when her bones were discovered buried by a work crew excavating in a rural part of Weld County near County Road 49 and County Road 34K, Greeley police said. The coroner’s office has confirmed the remains were those of Jonelle. Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams said his deputies are treating Jonelle’s death as a homicide.

The following is an account featured in The Denver Post’s Colorado Cold Cases blog in November 2012 chronicling developments in the search for Jonelle Matthews based on dozens of news stories over a span of 28 years:

On the night Jonelle returned home with Deanna Ross and her father Russell Ross, Jonelle was wearing a dark gray skirt, a red blouse, a gray sweater and a light blue ski jacket. The Rosses noticed that the garage door was open when she entered her home.

Jonelle’s home was in a safe neighborhood in the Pheasant Run subdivision. After she arrived home, Jonelle took off her shoes and turned on the television set. She put a space heater in the middle of the room and turned it on. She was apparently wearing her mother’s bedroom slippers.

The room had a Christmas tree up, and there was a Christmas stocking with Jonelle’s name on it hanging from the wall. A teacher from Jim Matthews’ school called. The woman asked the girl to tell her father, principal of Platte Valley Elementary School in Kersey, that she couldn’t make it to school the next day. Jonelle wrote a note on the message board near their phone, according to an article in the Greeley Tribune.

Jim Matthews, who had gone to watch Jennifer’s game, arrived home at 9:30 p.m. The house lights and the TV were on as he entered the living room. Jonelle’s stockings were on a sofa. Everything was as it was expected to be except for one thing. Jonelle was gone.

Ordinarily the seventhgrader would have written a note if she left the house to go with a friend. It didn’t seem right. Jonelle’s father called Greeley police.

“There were no signs of a struggle, but there are indications of possible foul play, which I can’t disclose,” Lt. Paul Branham told a Denver Post reporter in 1984. “We are regarding this as a possible kidnapping.”

(Contacted on Friday after the discovery of Jonelle’s remains, Branham said he would not comment about the case and said no one should speak about it while there is an ongoing investigation.)

Footprints were discovered in the snow around the Matthews home the night she disappeared. The next day, a search was organized. The FBI and a dozen Greeley police were on the case. Police formed lines and walked through fields near the Matthews home. They questioned neighbors and spoke with Jonelle’s teachers. Her friends told police that Jonelle had given Christmas presents to friends on Dec. 19, the day before she disappeared.

“Everybody we have talked to says that Jonelle wouldn’t just walk away and disappear — that it would be out of character for her,” Branham said at the time. Jim Matthews echoed that belief.

“There were too many neat things happening to her,” Jim Matthews had told a Denver Post reporter, his voice trailing off.

Detectives learned that Jonelle was adopted from a Los Angeles agency when she was 1 month old. Police in Los Angeles watched the birth mother’s house for six weeks, but later cleared her without contacting the woman who was only 13 years old when she gave birth to Jonelle.

A $5,000 reward for information leading to Jonelle’s kidnapper was offered.

On Friday, Feb. 8, which would have been Jonelle’s birthday, more than 600 volunteers searched for Jonelle, scouring 4,000 square miles of Weld County. They looked under bridges and in culverts.

Jonelle’s parents went on a national media tour to generate publicity that might lead to her discovery. Detectives followed thousands of leads, some of which came from psychics. A girl in Lakeland, Fla., claimed to be Jonelle. An investigation proved she was not. Jonelle’s picture was put on flyers and sent to 4,000 stores across the country. On March 7, 1985, President Ronald Reagan mentioned Jonelle’s missing person’s case during a speech about missing kids.

The following May, a farmer found a partial scalp on his farm in southwest Weld County. It was a piece of skin and hair. Gloria Matthews knew it wasn’t Jonelle’s remains because the hair was the wrong color.

But the family was losing hope that they would ever find Jonelle alive.

The Matthewses went to Washington, D.C., in September 1985 and appeared with executives from Dole Foods when they announced a multimilliondollar promotion to reach 43 million Americans and funnel $250,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

After a year of searching, the family gave away the presents they had bought for her, and Gloria Matthews told a reporter that Jonelle might be dead. But even worse, she feared her daughter might be some place she didn’t want to be, forced to do things she didn’t want to do.

Five years after Jonelle disappeared, tips kept streaming into police from all over the country.

Classmates planted a chokecherry tree in memory of their friend.

On the 10th anniversary of Jonelle’s disappearance, her family had Jonelle declared legally dead. Then in 1997, the Matthewses received another shock.

“My name is Terri Vierra-Martinez,” said a letter they received in the mail. “On February 9th, 1972, I gave birth to a baby girl at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, Calif. A search consultant recently helped me locate the baby I gave up for adoption. After extensive efforts, it was found that her name is Jonelle Matthews. … I hope that your hearts will be open for a possible reunion sometime in the future.”

The letter stunned Gloria Matthews. She started crying in the post office. Vierra-Martinez and her husband would later visit the Matthews family.

“I was thrilled that Jonelle’s mother wanted to contact her, because Jonelle had always wanted that,” Gloria Matthews had told a reporter. “But then I had to tell Terri that the little girl that she entrusted to us is gone. … I had to ask myself, ‘Could I have taken better care of her?’ ”