‘The Girl on the Milk Carton’ Murder Finally Solved & Featured in New Oxygen Special
If you were around in the 1980s, then you probably remember former president Ronald Reagan‘s rollout of milk cartons with pictures of missing children on them. One of the very first girls to appear on the cartons was 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews, who disappeared from her Greeley, Colorado home in 1984 without a trace the night before Christmas.
Courtesy of Oxygen True Crime
In the upcoming Oxygen docuseries, The Girl on the Milk Carton, the entire story and its ensuing decades-long investigation will be featured in detail, beginning with the night of the disappearance, when Jonelle was home alone just one very unlucky hour, while her dad was at a basketball game with her older sister, and her mother was out of town caring for a sick family member; she had been dropped off at home by a friend’s dad (who, as authorities would find out much later, was the main connection between Jonelle and the man who murdered her).
Because the man who took Jonelle was so far removed from their lives and had left no evidence behind, the case went cold for decades. Then 35 years after her disappearance, in 2019, her remains were found 20 miles away from her home by construction workers putting in a new pipeline. The case was picked up by a former classmate of Jonelle’s surviving sister, who was now a detective, and with some luck and some hard work, the Greeley police department was able to finally find the culprit of this horrific crime (with the help of an unlikely ally: the murderer’s ex-wife).
Courtesy of Oxygen True Crime
As shocking as it is disturbing, the two-art documentary takes you behind the scenes into both the disappearance and the details of the ensuing investigation, which, for years, went absolutely nowhere. But the story has a somewhat uplifting ending: eventually the killer was found, and Jonelle’s parents were finally able to get some justice, and perhaps some peace as well.
Tune in to Oxygen on Sunday, Aug. 25, at 7pm EST to see the whole story unfold!