Murder case “The Girl on the Milk Carton” finally solved and shown in new Oxygen special

If you were around in the 1980s, you probably remember the milk cartons that then-President Ronald Reagan introduced with pictures of missing children. One of the first girls to appear on the cartons was 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews, who disappeared without a trace from her home in Greeley, Colorado, on the night before Christmas in 1984.

Courtesy of Oxygen True Crime

In the upcoming Oxygen documentary series The girl on the milk cartondetails the entire story and the decades-long investigation that followed, beginning with the night of the disappearance, when Jonelle was home alone for just one very inopportune hour while her father 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 father (who, authorities would much later discover, was the main link between Jonelle and the man who murdered her).

Because the man who kidnapped Jonelle was so far away from her life and left no evidence behind, the case remained unsolved for decades. Then, 35 years after her disappearance, her remains were found 20 miles from her home by construction workers laying a new pipeline. The case was taken up by a former classmate of Jonelle's surviving sister who had become a detective, and with some luck and hard work, Greeley police were finally able to find the perpetrator of this gruesome crime (with the help of an unexpected ally: the killer's ex-wife).

Courtesy of Oxygen True Crime

The shocking and disturbing two-picture documentary takes you behind the scenes of the disappearance and the subsequent investigation that went on for years and came to nothing. But the story has a somewhat encouraging ending: the killer was eventually found and Jonelle's parents were finally able to get justice and perhaps peace.

Tune in to Oxygen on Sunday, August 25th at 7:00 p.m. EST to catch the full story!