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Chapter 1: What happened to Kelsie Schelling in February 2013?
Every mystery has an answer, but some have way more than one possibility. I'm Yvette Gentile.
And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecoraro. Every week on our podcast, So Supernatural, we invite you to explore the unknown and to consider the many theories behind each unsolved mystery.
We'll guide you as you question the world you think you know, through investigations into spine-chilling hauntings, unexplainable encounters, strange disappearances, and so much more.
So, if you're ready to be haunted by stories of the unsolved and of the unknown, listen, if you dare, to So Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Our card this week is Kelsey Schelling, the 10 of spades from Colorado. In February 2013, Kelsey was 21 years old and figuring out what her future would look like. She had close friends and family and surprising news to be excited about. Then one night after work, Kelsey got in her car and drove south from Denver to the city of Pueblo. And she was never seen again.
My hope was that her location would be revealed. And it wasn't.
Years after her disappearance, a jury would convict someone of Kelsey's murder. But her card remains in Colorado's cold case deck because the search for Kelsey isn't over.
I think it was described to us that it's 80 stories deep and 20 football fields long is what the area that we'd be looking at in searching was.
How did investigators build a murder case without a body? And why are they still asking the same question they started with? Where is Kelsey Schelling? I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Before anyone knew Kelsey Schelling as a missing person, Laura Saxton knew her simply as her sweet, vibrant daughter.
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Chapter 2: How did Kelsie's pregnancy impact her relationships?
She was hum-hawing around that she had something to tell me and she kind of just blurted it out. You know, she's like, I know you're going to be mad, but, you know, I'm pregnant. And I don't really even remember what I said. I mean, I'm sure initially my reaction was like not thrilled. But then, you know, it's like, OK, I want to support her now.
And so, you know, I just let her know that we'd talk later and everything would be fine. And I think she was just really relieved to have the conversation over with and to know that she supported. Because I think it was probably stressing her out pretty bad.
Our reporter asked Laura if her daughter was looking forward to being a mother, despite the unexpected timing.
Oh, yeah, definitely. That I had no doubt about. I mean, she's always loved kids anyway. So I knew that she would be a good mom.
On Monday, February 4th, Kelsey had her first prenatal appointment and learned her due date was September 13th, 2013, making her about eight weeks pregnant. She texted both her mother and Dante a picture of the sonogram. And they had two very different reactions. While Laura was excited for her daughter, probably remembering the feelings she had when she was pregnant with Kelsey, Dante was upset.
I mean, he'd been mad about the pregnancy ever since Kelsey first told him. And it seemed like seeing the sonogram picture was no different because it set off a series of arguments over text about the pregnancy and their relationship, which ended in Dante asking Kelsey if she would come down to Pueblo so they could try to make things work in person.
Now, Kelsey was working that day, so she had to wait until her shift ended. But around 9 p.m., she got behind the wheel of her 2011 black Chevy Cruze and drove to Pueblo. But she didn't tell her mother.
I would not have been okay with that. It's night, and she's driving on the interstate, and she's worked all day, and she's pregnant, and she's tired.
Over the next few days, Laura didn't hear much from her daughter, which was odd. I mean, they were close, and they spoke frequently.
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Chapter 3: What led to Kelsie driving to Pueblo the night she disappeared?
But they told Denver police all about their relationship and the pregnancy at the center of it. Denver police spoke with Dante twice on the phone over the following 24 hours. He told them that Kelsey had come to Pueblo and they met near his grandmother's house. He said that they'd argued in the car before he left and went back inside. Now, first, he said that she left and returned in the morning.
But then he said that she stayed in her car outside the house before coming back in for a few hours. In both stories, though, he told police that they had gone to the hospital the next morning for a pregnancy test before Kelsey drove back to Denver.
Now, to fast forward just a little bit, the fact that this case spanned multiple jurisdictions is a big reason why the Colorado Bureau of Investigation eventually took lead on this one. Here's Agent Kevin Torres of the CBI.
Dante claims he didn't believe Kelsey was pregnant and he wanted to see the test for himself. And so he felt the best way to do that was go to the hospital. And he says they drive to Parkview Hospital, which is on the completely opposite side of town, which would be weird. But anyway, he waits in the car. Kelsey goes in.
He says she's in there for maybe two hours and then comes back out and says she's not pregnant. And he's okay with that. He claims they drive to the Walmart, that she goes into the store, buys, I think he said, a soda and some chips. And they come back out and have a little argument. And then he gets out, walks away, and then Kelsey leaves. Apparently drives back to Denver.
But now his timeline has changed again. So now he's saying this is later in the morning. Now it's become obvious that they don't believe Kelsey has left the city or county of Pueblo.
After speaking with Dante, detectives in Denver rushed to preserve Kelsey and Dante's cell phone records. And time was of the essence. Remember, this was back in 2013. Some cell phone data could be overwritten within days. And almost a week had already gone by. Detectives could have been close to losing key pieces of information, like text messages and location data.
Information that eventually confirmed Kelsey did drive from Denver to Pueblo the night of February 4th to meet Dante. And this was information that helped paint a picture of what happened. So at about 10 p.m., Kelsey texted Dante saying that she was almost there and asked where they should meet.
And so he instructs her to go to a Walmart near his grandmother's house on the south side of Pueblo. So Kelsey drives to that location and she sends a text message to Dante. Hey, I'm in the Walmart. Where are you? And he's like, just hang on. I'll be there.
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Chapter 4: How did investigators begin to piece together Kelsey's case?
It was not stored in her phone, was not part of her contacts, which is a bizarre, a bizarre turn. So there's no more activity until 3.56 a.m. when a text message goes from Kelsey's phone to Dante's phone, and it does not make sense. It is very incoherent. It says something to the effect of, I'm having a baby. I'm not having a baby. I trapped him. He doesn't want to be involved.
But it's really broken. It just doesn't make sense. completely uncharacteristic of the way that she would text message with her friends and Dante for that fact, too. The weird thing about this text message is there's some geolocation data with this off some cell phone towers. And that location data places that text message in the prairie west of Dante's grandma's house.
Kelsey's phone remained on after the 5th for two more days. During that time, the messages sent from it were usually just short responses to loved ones who were worried because they hadn't heard from her. And as Agent Torres mentioned, the replies felt off. The wording, the spelling, the tone, it just didn't sound like Kelsey.
And for the entire time, the geolocation data revealed that her cell phone had never left Pueblo. And that didn't match up to Dante's story that Kelsey had driven back to Denver. So Denver police turned the case over to Pueblo since it fell under their jurisdiction. Next, investigators went to the Walmart near Dante's grandmother's house.
And in the back of the store, they found security camera footage from February 4th. That's the day that Kelsey drove into town. But they didn't see any signs of Kelsey or her car. Although one section of the lot wasn't covered by cameras. Her car does show up on camera somewhere else, though.
We find a transaction that occurs on the morning of February 5th at 11.39 a.m. from a local bank in Pueblo, Colorado. About a two or three minute drive from the Walmart.
Detectives learned that transaction had taken place at one of the drive-thru ATMs. And when they looked at the footage, there was no sign of a five-foot, four-inch, 120-pound brunette female inside the car.
Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra. And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.
From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Chapter 5: What evidence was found in Kelsey's car and how did it connect to her disappearance?
And it's at an angle to where you can't really tell height of the person, but it does look like a taller individual. And I think that becomes important because Dante is a taller person. As he walks away from the car, you see the lights flash, indicating that it's remotely locked. And he walks around to the back of Walmart.
Once he gets there, the driver is picked up by a group in a silver car. Investigators would learn later that that vehicle belonged to Dante's mother and grandmother.
Continuing with the surveillance video, we watched that for the entire time the car's parked. It's there the entire day of February 5th into the morning hours of February 6th. At about 7, 17 a.m., a person matching Dante's description returns to the vehicle. The person gets in, backs out, and leaves the Walmart parking lot.
It's unknown what path the car took from there, but I can tell you where the car ended up. Police ended up locating Kelsey's Chevy Cruze on Valentine's Day, 2013. It was left abandoned, none of her personal belongings inside, at St. Mary Corwin Medical Center, which is about 10 minutes from Dante's grandmother's house.
And by the way, not even the hospital that Dante said that they went to in his story to police.
Up until that point, I didn't think she had run away. I didn't think she would do that to me. But I think I was scared that maybe she had an accident, like on the interstate between Denver and Pueblo. There's a lot of hills, a lot of curves, a lot of places that you could run off the road and end up in a pretty big ravine. But once her car was found, that was it for me.
I just knew that something had happened to her.
While Pueblo PD's crime scene unit went through Kelsey's car, piece by piece, looking for forensic evidence, police served a search warrant at Dante's grandmother's house.
We looked through the entire house. I remember we walked in the backyard. There was no dirt to stir of it. You know, nothing out of the ordinary. It just seemed like a normal, lived-in house. At that time, the grandma kept the house pretty clean. Dante's room was normal.
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Chapter 6: What role did Dante Lucas play in Kelsie's case?
So we wanted to search on our own. So we hired a private investigator from Pueblo basically to just teach us how to do a search, you know, how to get the people together and like how to operate it and things like that. And so he worked with us for a while. But then I was also contacted by an investigator from Arkansas who had learned of Kelsey's case and reached out.
And I ended up retaining his services.
Our reporter asked if Laura's PI found any new evidence or leads that were missed by investigators.
No, because everything kept coming back to Dante. But he did, you know, go and talk to Dante's family and things like that.
According to Agent Torres, Laura's PI shared information from those conversations with investigators because Dante was no longer speaking to investigators when they tried re-interviewing him. He was keeping a low profile during this time. Whenever news stories aired asking for tips, Torres told us that Dante and his family would disappear and go into covert mode until the heat died down.
But the heat never really died all the way down. In fact, come 2016, it got much hotter. That's when the CBI and Agent Torres came in to review Kelsey's case. This time, not as a missing person, but as a homicide.
Just the amount of time that had gone by with no communication, her car being left behind, her cell phone, this age of technology, it's almost virtually impossible to disappear without some sort of trace, especially for somebody of Kelsey's age and vibrance that we'll find out that she possessed. It's not in her character to just disappear off the face of the earth.
And she's got a lot to look forward to in life. I mean, she just had the world ahead of her. When reviewing the case file, the captain and I and the detectives realized that nobody had ever obtained a DNA sample from Dante Lucas.
And if we were to do any other further forensic analysis on anything from Kelsey's vehicle or we start to recover evidence, we needed to have this standard to compare any DNA to Kelsey's.
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Chapter 7: What were the key developments leading to Dante's arrest?
He actually admitted to Lauren that he was indeed the person that dropped the car off at Walmart. He had initially denied that being him. And he'll also tell her that he is the one that ultimately did, in fact, drop Kelsey's car at St. Mary Corwin Hospital.
We tried to contact Lauren Shore through phone and email, wanting to hear more about her experience, but we didn't get a response. And we tried unsuccessfully to reach another young woman with a similar story named Jessica Martin. Just like Lauren, Jessica became interested in the case after seeing media coverage about it. And she, too, wanted to befriend Dante for information.
That kind of became a controversial issue because she first came to the police wanting to propose this idea and she was explicitly told that is a really bad idea. The police don't do those kinds of things with, you know, just some random person that's into these types of cases and It's not safe for you, you know. And despite everything we told her, this female went ahead and did it.
And the same result happened. Dante gets her. They fall in love. They start dating.
Women around Dante were trying to draw out answers in their own way. But the CBI was taking a more traditional route by reexamining the evidence from Kelsey's car.
We set up an open-air canine sniff, if you will, and the canine alerts to the floor mats that were in the trunk of Kelsey's vehicle. So that's kind of another piece of the puzzle that we're able to kind of hypothesize that Kelsey had likely was deceased in the trunk of her own vehicle. Probably, I believe, in theory, during the time the car's parked at Walmart.
But if Kelsey was in the trunk at Walmart, why risk moving the car?
For whatever reason, there's maybe some belief that, well, I can't just let her be found in her car in the trunk at Walmart. So that he walked back, picked the car up and then was able to dispose of her body and then eventually go dump her car at the hospital.
Agent Torres says that it's likely Kelsey was strangled to death since no blood evidence was ever found in her car or at Dante's grandmother's house, which investigators searched twice, once in 2013 and again in 2017. The search in 2017 came after Agent Torres realized that cadaver dogs had never been used earlier.
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Chapter 8: What was the outcome of the trial and what remains unresolved about Kelsie's case?
Dante eventually appealed his murder conviction, arguing that certain evidence should not have been allowed at trial. But the appeals court rejected it in 2024 and upheld the conviction. Dante is serving both sentences concurrently in a state correctional facility.
We reached out to him, as well as to his mother and several other family members to see if they would want to speak to us about Kelsey's case. But as of this recording, we have not received a reply from any of them. For Kelsey's mother, Laura Saxton, justice in court didn't mean closure.
I always feel bad when it's like the conviction wasn't good enough. Well, the conviction was excellent. I mean, I know there's a lot of families that don't get that, and that's really unfortunate. So I'm very thankful for all the hard work that CBI did and the attorneys did. In the end, my hope was that Kelsey, her location would be revealed, and it wasn't.
And so, you know, the jubilation of the conviction pretty much, you know, sputtered out pretty fast, knowing that I was probably never going to know where she's at.
Dante has never revealed this information, even when presented with a potential deal that could have reduced his jail time. So investigators appear to have solved one part of the mystery, the who of who was responsible for Kelsey's disappearance, but the other part still remains unanswered. Where is she? It's a question that still haunts agent Kevin Torres a decade later.
The goal was to find Kelsey, and we never did. We still haven't found her. And I just feel we got 50% of it, but the other 50% are still missing. And again, I hope that one day we can give the family that last piece.
That missing piece has kept investigators focused on that broad stretch of the map, west and southwest of Pueblo, the general area of Beulah and the landfill. Kelsey's father, Doug, had changed the oil in her Chevy Cruze the weekend before she disappeared. And he wrote down the mileage. When the car was found on Valentine's Day, it had 473 more miles on it.
Agent Torres says that investigators could account for some of that.
We were actually able to trace the amount of miles she would have driven from his house in Holyoke back to Denver and then from Denver to the doctor's appointment and from the doctor's appointment to work and then from work down to Pueblo.
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