Either Steve Pankey’s paranoia and self-esteem issues led him to try to insert himself into the investigation of Jonelle Matthews’ 1984 disappearance, a case he didn’t actually have any knowledge of, or he kidnapped and killed her and has denied her family and community closure for 37 years.

Prosecutors on Tuesday tried to convince a Weld County jury to convict Pankey for Matthews’ kidnapping and death, while Pankey’s defense argued that he should be acquitted. In closing arguments, each side asked the jury to see evidence they way they’ve presented it.

The jury began deliberating late Tuesday morning.

“Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different,” said Pankey’s defense attorney Anthony Viorst, quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing about Sherlock Holmes.

Matthews, 12, went missing Dec. 20, 1984, from her family’s home in Greeley after she returned from performing in a choir concert, in the hourlong window she was home alone before her father returned. Her body was found in a field by oil and gas workers on July 23, 2019. She had died of a gunshot to her head.

Pankey, 70, faces four charges in connection with Matthews’ disappearance and death:

• First-degree murder after deliberation
• Felony murder
• Second-degree kidnapping
• Giving false information to authorities, a charge the jury was told Monday they can consider

He also faces two sentence enhancers for using a weapon while committing a violent crime.

Prosecutors spent much of the trial working to show how pieces of circumstantial evidence point to Pankey’s guilt: He had knowledge of raked-over shoe prints in Matthews’ yard, a piece of evidence prosecutors say investigators kept close to the vest for years.

He made other statements over the years that implied direct knowledge of Matthews’ disappearance, prosecutors said, such as claiming at certain points she would have been dead “before she crossed 10th Street” and that she didn’t make it out of her house alive. Prosecutors say that’s damning because Pankey shouldn’t have had reason to know Matthews’ body had been found in a location that would have required crossing 10th Street, and he also lived in that general direction.

He behaved strangely during an abrupt trip to visit family in California for Christmas a few days after Matthews disappeared, Pankey’s ex-wife testified, and when they returned home he seemed obsessed with finding news about her case.

“You don’t check your common sense at the door. You use it to decide what happens here. And common sense tells you that he murdered Jonelle Matthews” in 1984, said assistant district attorney Robb Miller.

But Viorst spent much of his closing arguments working to show the circumstantial evidence prosecutors had presented didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Pankey’s shoe size in 1984 didn’t match the prints in Matthews’ yard, and that piece of evidence wasn’t as tightly controlled as prosecutors made it seem, Viorst said. And Pankey’s statement about Matthews being killed in her home didn’t make sense, Viorst claimed, because there were no signs of a struggle in the house.

And he said it’s strange Angela Hicks, Pankey’s ex-wife, suddenly seemed to have clear memories about his strange behavior during their 1984 Christmas trip 15 years later, when Pankey made an apparently abrupt statement about Matthews’ disappearance.

““I think we all agreed that the Matthews should not have closure at the expense of an innocent man,” Viorst said.

Throughout the trial, the two sides worked to account for Pankey’s contacts with law enforcement over years about Matthews’ disappearance, even long before they considered him a suspect. A few weeks after she went missing, he called a Greeley police detective pretending to be a pastor who claimed he had received information from a parishioner about Matthews and asked for information about the investigation. Decades later in 2019, when he spoke with another detective who was starting to pay attention to Pankey as a possible tie to the case, Pankey said he needed immunity in order to keep talking to them.

Miller singled out an instance in 2013 when Pankey sent an “alibi” letter to Greeley police, which included a request for a deal that would include a stipulation that his statements about Matthews’ disappearance were true. Miller said he was trying to anticipate what Hicks might remember about the days right after Matthews went missing.

“’Which is more important, Jonelle Matthews or the Matthews case?’” Miller said Pankey wrote to police. He said Pankey implied in his demand for immunity from prosecution that investigators should make a choice between learning where Matthews’ body was and being able to charge Pankey with her disappearance and death.

“That is an outrageous taunt from a murderer.”

But according to Viorst, Pankey is a true-crime junkie who also claimed to be responsible for the 1977 murder of Mary Pierce, though DNA evidence led investigators to another culprit. Viorst added Pankey is “kind of a jerk” who sometimes has shown a propensity for meanness to others, and acknowledged his client has a paranoid view of the world that has led him to see conspiracies against him, such as collusion by police, his ex-wife and others to convict him of Matthews’ killing.

But “a jerk is not the same as a murderer,” Viorst said.

“Mr. Pankey lives in a world of conspiracy, paranoia and low self-esteem. And we may not live there, but we’re asking you to consider his state of mind when you think about this case.”