The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals.
“When a young girl is kidnapped in front of her own family, who takes a 10-year-old child in broad daylight? What kind of sick bastard does that?”
A former victim holds the key to the abductor’s identity.
“That’s what I said. ‘Oh my god, that’s him. That’s him.'”
The bureau mobilizes.
“You have one mission, and that’s to find her alive.”
3:30 a.m.
20-year-old medical student Michanne Matson leaves a friend’s house and begins the short drive to her apartment. It’s a rare break from her hectic life studying to be an orthopedic surgeon and working part-time.
“All I ever wanted to be was a doctor. That was my entire life. That was my entire purpose, was to be a doctor.”
As Michanne approaches her neighborhood, she notices a white truck idling at a stop sign.
“It had plenty of time to turn, and the fact that it was still sitting there and it hadn’t proceeded through the intersection, I found very odd, and it just kind of raised the hairs on the back of my neck.”
Michanne continues a few blocks before turning into her apartment complex parking lot. The truck follows just behind. Michanne sees the truck stop. A man starts to walk towards her.
“I just glance and look at him, and he’s just kind of early 20s guy. I’ll smile at him, be nice, you know. ‘Hey, excuse me, do you know, uh, Jeff?'”
When he gets close to Michanne, he asks her if she knows the son of the security guard who works there.
“I say, ‘No,’ I turned my back and started walking faster up to the door. I got about 15, 20 feet from the outer door, and then I hear running footsteps behind me, and then that’s when it finally hits me. Something’s not right.”
The man grabs her and presses an 8-inch knife to her throat.
“I was told, ‘Bitch, if you say anything, I’m going to kill you.'”
“And then he started marching me back towards the parking lot. We got a few feet and he pulled out a pair of handcuffs, and he told me to put the handcuffs on. I don’t know where the stuff comes from, but what went through my head is ‘act stupid.’ Really, I mean, how hard is it to put on a pair of handcuffs? But I acted like I didn’t know how to put on a pair of handcuffs.”
The attacker gets one cuff around Michanne’s wrist then drags her towards his truck. Something clicks with Michanne.
“My purse kept falling off my shoulder, and he just kept pushing it back on my shoulder. That little gesture made me know that he wasn’t there to rob me. His intention was not to rob me. His intention was to kill me.”
“It was very strange. It was as if everything had slowed down at this point. I had a thought that went through my head, and it was this girl who’d been kidnapped in her just decaying body tied to a post in the middle of a field in a clearing, and that went through my head, and I didn’t want to be that. For some reason, it focused me. It made me think that if I was going to die, then I was going to do it there because I wanted at least for my family to be able to find me and to know where I was.”
Michanne struggles furiously but can’t break loose.
“He put his hand over my mouth, and I started screaming. I started biting his hand—he had gloves on.”
She has only a split second to decide what to do.
“I was looking at my surroundings and thinking, ‘Some of these cars are newer. Newer cars mean car alarms. How do you set off car alarms?’ Well, sometimes if you kick them hard enough, maybe you’ll set off a car alarm. So I started kicking every car we came by, pushing off of every car, and at that point, that’s when I decided, ‘Okay, well, I lose a few fingers, I don’t care.’ I reached up and I grabbed the knife and I pulled down, pushed off of him, and just fought with everything that I have.”
Bleeding and terrified, Michanne tries one last desperate move.
“I just dropped, and I dropped dead weight. Still had the one handcuff on, so he dragged me by the other one across the parking lot. At that point, I was creating as much noise as possible.”
“And he just gave up. Give me that—”
“He grabbed my purse, and he looked at me and he said, ‘Bitch, you better run back to the building, and if you look back at me, I’ll kill you.'”
The man runs back to his truck and tears out of the parking lot. Michanne frantically bolts to a neighbor’s apartment, where she calls 911. Kansas City, Missouri, police officer Jason Cranble is the first responder on the scene.
“Miss Madson had one handcuff on her hand when we arrived, and you could tell visibly her arm was swollen from where he tried to drag her through the parking lot.”
In shock and still terrified, Michanne gives the police as much information as she can.
“She described the pickup truck as an older white-style pickup truck, but she didn’t know if it was a Ford or Chevy or a Dodge. But it gave us enough information to have the other cars that were in the area looking for that vehicle.”
Officers put out an APB on the truck and knock on neighbors’ doors to see if they heard or saw anything, but they come up empty-handed and the apartment complex doesn’t have security cameras that might have captured more details. The forensic team removes Michanne’s handcuffs and bags them. It’s the only evidence they have.
“It was black, it was furry, and at one point in time she mentioned that he was wearing gloves.”
“But there’s a catch. Unfortunately, the handcuff that we recovered from her arm was unprocessable.”
Detectives forward the report to the Kansas City, Missouri, Sex Crimes Unit, but the little information they have doesn’t match a known perpetrator. That means an attacker is still on the prowl in Kansas City with a knife and all of Michanne’s information.
“I didn’t know where he was, I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t know his intentions. All my IDs, everything was—was in my purse. It was all gone. I didn’t know if he was going to come back.”
She has good reason to be afraid. Michanne’s attacker will come back, and the skilled agents of the FBI will be racing to stop him.
“We felt a bit of desperation to find this guy and apprehend him and get him off the street before someone else fell victim to his craziness.”
October 12th, 1999. It’s been 10 days since a violent predator attacked Kansas City, Missouri, medical student Michanne Matson. Police know a dangerous man is on the loose, but he’s covered his tracks well.
“I was terrified. I couldn’t return to my apartment building. I moved in with a friend of mine. I couldn’t sleep; I could barely go to class.”
She was lucky to be alive. She fought him off. What’s next? What’s most available? What’s easier? Well, a child.
Six miles away from Michanne’s apartment in Kansas City’s Armdale neighborhood, 11-year-old Penny and 10-year-old Pamela Butler are playing in their front yard. Their 16-year-old sister, Cassie, is keeping an eye on them.
“I got to go feed the baby; I’ll be right back, okay, guys?”
“Got it.”
“I was right there in the living room, right next to the front door, with the front door open. It’s like a hair mount in the front yard.”
The girls’ mother, Sher West, is at work but believes her daughters are in good hands.
“I grew up in that neighborhood my whole life. I was born and raised there, so I knew everybody.”
“River where Nelson was caught.”
The exhaustive search lasts late into the night, but they turn up nothing. They go over every piece of evidence they have and decide to revisit one more place they might be able to find Pamela. They go back to the lot behind the Grain Valley Church where Nelson’s truck had been spotted. This time, they cover every square inch of land. More than a hundred law enforcement agents line up side by side to walk deep into the woods.
“There’s a lot of tree limbs and branches and high weeds and fences, and it’s just not an easy area to walk through.”
One of the FBI agents saw a piece of clothing and as he got closer, he realized it was panties from, um, a—a child. About 12:30 p.m., 3 days after Pamela was abducted, a searcher notices a pile of sticks under a tree in a field north of the church. Underneath, the nude body of a little girl; it is Pamela Butler.
The coroner determines Pamela has been raped and strangled to death with a wire. She had likely been killed within an hour or two of her abduction.
“Something more that sticks with me after all these years working these cases is how horrible do you think it was for Pamela? What a nightmare that was to be rollerblading, to see your house only a few feet away is your sister, and somebody comes out of nowhere and just grabs you and throws you in a truck, pushing your head down, yelling and screaming.”
“Can you imagine yelling for your mother or your father to help you out? That’s her last thing that she saw on the face of this earth was this human being doing that to her. How horrible is that?”
Investigators share the grim news with Pamela’s family.
“I seen, um, Colon Scott standing on my porch, the FBI agent, and when he come and see me the first time, he told me that if they find Pamela, he would be back to tell me. So when I seen him standing there, I just had this gut-wrenching feeling that something was wrong.”
“I looked at him and I said, ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ And he had me sit down and he told me that they had found her body, and I lost it after that. I mean, I just couldn’t do nothing but cry.”
“I’m still numb of the thought that she’s gone. She’s laying in this casket and she’s really not coming back.”
Keith Nelson is charged with two federal counts: aggravated kidnapping resulting in death and interstate travel to commit aggravated sexual abuse of a child resulting in death. He pleads guilty but shows no shame.
“The words he used in the courtroom were outrageous, um. He showed no remorse, um. I’ll never forget his one comment about, um, ‘Everyone thinks it’s so hard to kill a child. It’s not that hard.'”
Keith Nelson is sentenced to death. He awaits his execution date in the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Those whose lives were changed by Nelson are left to carry on.
“I write every now and then inside of a journal when I feel down. I’m missing her; I love her and I miss her. Emotions are still there. I can still pull him up 12 years later. It doesn’t leave you. It doesn’t ever go away. It’s on a constant reel inside your head.”
Michanne Matson was so torn by her experience that she dropped out of medical school. She is now a police 911 dispatcher.
“When I didn’t have anybody and when I was alone, there were these police officers that cared, and they cared about Pamela and her family, and they poured their heart and soul into that case and looking for that poor girl and finding her and finding Keith, and they did everything. And it broke their hearts—hurts so. I became a dispatcher, and I spend every day now paying them back, and I do what I do every day to thank them, so now I have their backs.”
