Hello everyone, what is up? Welcome back to another episode of Killer Instinct. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you're new here, hi, my name is Savannah and I am your host of Killer Instinct.

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Now for today's episode we are discussing a cold case that was recently solved after 38 years. Truthfully you guys this is a wild wild case and I'm really interested to see what you guys have to say about it because I was on the edge of my seat researching and it's a tragic tragic case.

However, the family luckily did get justice fairly recently. So we're going to walk through all of it today. So as you can tell we're talking about the case of Janelle Matthews. Let's jump right on into it.

Janelle Matthews was born on February 9th 1972 in Santa Barbara, California. Now Janelle's birth mother was only 13 years old when she gave birth to Janelle. So shortly after Janelle was born she was placed for adoption.

And one month after she was born in March of 1972 Janelle ended up getting adopted by a couple named Gloria and Jim Matthews.

Jim and Gloria already had one biological daughter. However, they were looking to expand their family and were thrilled when they were matched with Janelle.

The family lived in Greeley, Colorado and at the time that this case took place, which is in the 1980s, Greeley was a very quiet and quaint Midwest town.

It was the type of town where parents weren't worried if their kids were staying out playing late at night in the front yard. It was a not worrying about locking your doors type of town. It was very, very safe.

And Janelle Matthews was a firecracker. She was a very sassy and opinionated 12 year old girl. She was full of life. She loved music. She actually had boy band posters all over her bedroom.

And her favorite band was called Manudo, which was a Puerto Rican band. And it's actually where Ricky Martin got his start in the industry. So that's something that I learned into this case.

So this case begins in December of 1984. At the time, Janelle was 12 years old and we're looking at the days leading up to Christmas.

Now both Gloria and Jim were actually from California. And in the days leading up to Christmas of 1984, Gloria got some news from her family back in California that her grandfather had gotten pretty ill.

And so Gloria decided to take the days leading up to Christmas and Christmas itself to go back to California to spend that quality time with her grandfather.

Now Janelle was someone who absolutely loved Christmas. It was her favorite holiday. She was always making little gifts to give to her friends. And of course she loved getting gifts as well.

It was a time that she truly, truly cherished. And so her family told her and her sister Jennifer that because Gloria was going to be gone on the actual day of Christmas.

And she was returning home on the 26th of December. The family was going to celebrate Christmas on the 26th instead. But they still did everything they could to keep the Christmas magic alive for their daughters.

So this now brings us to the night of December 20th, 1984.

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