Primarily in the 1980s, it was a common sight to see a picture of a child all across milk cartons in school cafeterias and anywhere else that milk was sold. These haunting images mark a grim memory in many people who were kids at the time because the images were of missing children.
The first appearance of missing children on a milk carton was in Des Moine, Iowa by Anderson Erickson Dairy who put the picture of 2 missing paperboys on the cartons. By December of 1884 this concept was pushed nationwide by the National Child Safety Council. This was done with the goals of further publicising disappearances and to make sure that the children who may have seen that child after their disappearance know to tell someone that they have seen them. 
On December 20, 1884; 12-year-old Jonelle Reenee Matthews had a Christmas Choir concert and was dropped off by her friend’s father at her home. She arrived at her Greely, Colorado home at 8:15 pm and received a call from her father at 8:30 pm. At 9:30 pm, Matthews’ father arrived home to an open garage door. He went inside to find no one with even Jonelle’s shoes and shawl still inside. This made it unlikely that she went outside because there was snow on the ground and it was cold. At 10:00 pm, Jonelle’s older sister arrived at the house to the scene.
After the discovery of this sudden disappearance, Jonelle’s birth mother, who had put her up for adoption, was taken into police custody without them telling her that she had gone missing. The case still remained inconclusive for several more decades. Years after the disappearance, Jonelle’s parents moved to the Philippines as missionaries and later retired to Costa Rica. Her older sister married and moved away from Colorado. It had been so much time and any hope of finding the likely deceased Jonelle was pretty much gone.
Jonelle was one of the first milk carton kids and was seen by tens of millions of children around the country. Her case was very well known for many years following the disappearance. She was not only on milk cartons but also newspapers and magazines. She was even mentioned in a speech by former president Ronald Reagan. Being one of the first milk carton kids and heavily publicized disappearance, it makes sense that people often discussed her cold case. On a slightly unrelated but interesting note, a chokecherry tree was planted at her middle school that died only a few years later, with the plaque with her name also going missing. 
35 years passed with no knowledge on what could have happened in that Greely home until July 2019 when human remains were found 15 miles from the home with a single gunshot wound in the head. DNA analysis confirmed that this was Jonelle Matthews and helped guide the police into an investigation. By September of the same year, the case had come out conclusive with the former youth pastor, Steven Dana Panky was found guilty of the murder.
If you look back to earlier in the story when the interest in the case was discussed, you will see a social media post by Panky from his running for governor of Idaho at the time posting about the case. He had been intertwined with the case for quite a while before it was discovered that he was guilty. When the main pastor of the church claimed that Jonelle would soon be found and brought home it is reported that Panky called him a false prophet. There were several occasions when Panky went to the police department and tried to ask the detectives questions on the case. In 2008, Panky’s son was killed in an unrelated case and his wife claims that Panky had kneeled at his son’s grave and said that he hoped that this hadn’t been allowed because of Jonelle Matthews.
With the case finally solved. The Matthews family finally got closure on something that had messed with them for 3 and a half decades and the community could rest that the person behind the crime was behind bars.
