December 20th, 1984.

Greeley, Colorado. After singing and acquiring at a Christmas performance,

12-year-old Joannelle Matthews is dropped off at her family's house by a friend.

When Joannelle's father returns home later that evening,

he is horrified to discover that Joannelle is missing, and the evidence suggests she was abducted

by an intruder. In spite of an extensive search, Joannelle has never found, and investigators

fail to uncover any potential suspects in her disappearance. After that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest mini-sode of the trail went cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder, and today I will be covering a case which was requested by a

listener named Steve W, who is a poster at the Unsolved Mysteries message board at the sitcom's

online forum, and has been a supporter of this podcast from day one. He's actually been

requesting that I cover this case since the very beginning, and even suggested I cover it back

in December. It is the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl named Joannelle Matthews, which took place

only a few days before Christmas in 1984. Well, the holiday season has since passed, but I still

think this mystery deserves inclusion on this podcast. It's one of those very frustrating cold cases

in which it's easy to construct a scenario about what happened, but the only thing we don't know

is the identity of the person responsible. About a year ago, an online sleuth suggested Joannelle

as a potential match to an unidentified Jane Doe, and since that case is a pretty compelling

Unsolved mystery in its own right, I'm going to discuss both of them on this mini-sode.

But before we get started, just a quick reminder that the trail went cold as a weekly podcast,

which alternates between our regular full-length episodes, and 15-20-minute mini-sodes like this one.

We deliver either a new full-length episode or a new mini-sode every Wednesday. We're currently

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