← The Deck
The Deck
Kelsie Schelling (10 Of Spades, Colorado)
00:42:23
In February 2013, 21-year-old Kelsie Schelling had just learned she was eight weeks pregnant. Hours after her first prenatal appointment, she drove from Denver to Pueblo - and was never seen again. Kelsie’s body has never been found. But years later, someone was convicted of her murder. How do investigators build a case without a body? And after more than a decade, is there still a chance of finding Kelsie?
Loading summary
Transcript97 lines
- [00:01]
A
Every mystery has an answer, but some have way more than one possibility. I'm Yvette Gentile.
- [00:09]
B
And I'm her sister, Racha Pecorero. Every week on our podcast, so Supernatural,
- [00:14]
A
we invite you to explore the unknown
- [00:17]
B
and to consider the many theories behind each unsolved mystery.
- [00:22]
A
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.
- [00:35]
B
So if you're ready to be haunted
- [00:38]
A
by stories of the unsolved and of the unknown, listen if you dare to
- [00:43]
B
so Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts,
- [00:53]
A
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.
- [01:19]
B
My hope was that her location would be revealed and it wasn't.
- [01:25]
A
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.
- [01:37]
C
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.
- [01:47]
A
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 Kelsey.
- [02:45]
B
I mean just from the time she was a very little girl was just always like full of life, full of energy, just very active and very loving but spirited. She could give you a run for your money too. She wasn't afraid to stand up for herself, but really soft hearted, I would say very caring, very non judgmental with people. She was just really a bubbly type personality. Just very like sparkling eyes and a very beautiful smile. She could just capture you with her smile.
- [03:22]
A
Kelsey spent the spring and summer of 2012 attending college in Costa Mesa, California. But by the fall, financial pressures brought her back home to Colorado where she'd grown up. She settled in Denver, got her own place in a full time job and she reconnected with her on again, off again boyfriend of the last two years, Daunte Lucas. Now, they'd met when they attended Northeastern Junior college in Sterling, Colorado. This was before Kelsey ever went out to California. She'd been at Northeastern studying psychology and Dante was a popular 6 foot 7 basketball star at the school with dreams of playing in the NBA. One day when they were together, friends and family say that Kelce was devoted and committed to Dante in a way that they didn't always see returned. In fact, when they were together, Dante never even met Kelsey's mother, Laura. She'd only watched him play basketball a couple of times. But what she did know about the relationship worried her.
- [04:19]
B
It was more she was into him than he was into her. But I think that he didn't necessarily want her, but he didn't want anybody else to have her either. And so she would just tell me things like, you know, oh, he's flirting with this girl or that girl or whatever. And then when she would be just about ready to just give up like she'd had enough of it, then he would really like pour on the charm and like treat her really well to suck her back in. And so it was just, it was not a healthy thing going on at all for her.
- [04:51]
A
It's hard to say why certain relationships get such a chokehold on people and pull them back in. It's not like Dante had a lot to offer Kelsey. By the time she moved back and they got together again, Dante had left college and was living back in his hometown of Pueblo, a city about two hours south of Denver. His basketball career hadn't worked out and he was bouncing between staying at his mom's house and his grandma's house. Still, Laura said that Kelce hoped that one day he would come around and realize she was the one. Her family and friends, on the other hand, hoped that it would be just another short lived chapter in their on again, off again relationship. But this time would be different. Three months after they'd gotten back together, something happened that all but guaranteed that they would be in each other's lives for a very long time.
- [05:44]
B
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, okay, I want to support her. 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.
- [06:25]
A
Our reporter asked Laura if her daughter was looking forward to being a mother, despite the unexpected timing.
- [06:31]
B
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.
- [06:43]
A
On Monday, February 4th, Kelsey had her first prenatal appointment and learned her due date was September 13, 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 Kelce 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 9pm she got behind the wheel of her 2011 black Chevy Cruze and drove to Pueblo. But she didn't tell her mother.
- [07:40]
B
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.
- [07:48]
A
And 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.
- [07:56]
B
I knew that she was being really quiet, but she had said, you know, that she was really tired. And so I kind of let that, like, take over my mind. It's like, oh, she's probably resting or whatever. That's why she's not, you know, communicating as much or whatever. So I didn't give it, like, a whole lot of thought, although I was. The more time was going by, I was, you know, getting a little funny feeling in my stomach about it. But then I think it was on that Friday, it was like all of a sudden, everybody just started contacting me, like, her friends, just asking, you know, have you talked to Kelsey? You know, like, I've been trying to get a hold of her and can't get a hold of her. And when that started happening, then it was like the worst, like, panic feeling, you know, just hit me. And then that's when I contacted her brother and her dad to see if either one of them had heard from her.
- [08:59]
A
Her dad Doug and her brother Colby hadn't. Neither had any of Kelsey's friends once Laura had begun reaching out to them, too.
- [09:07]
B
And this is a girl that's attached to her phone, you know, so, I mean, I knew that something was wrong.
- [09:16]
A
As panic started to set in, Kelsey's family decided to meet at her apartment in Denver, which her father owned and had access to.
- [09:25]
B
Nothing seemed amiss. I mean, like, everything seemed normal. You know, she's tidy, and everything was, you know, tidy there. You know, wasn't anything that, like, raised any suspicion of anything. So then it's just like, okay, you know, where is she?
- [09:44]
A
Kelsey's family called the Denver Police Department and filed the missing persons report that day, February 9, 2013. In the initial report, they told police all about all of the people that they'd already reached out to and the one person that they hadn't been able to reach out to, Dante. I mean, remember, they'd never officially met him, 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.
- [10:54]
C
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 that they drive to Parkview Hospital, which is on the completely opposite side of town, which would be weird, but anyway, he. He waits in the car. Kelsey goes in. He says she's in there for maybe. 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.
- [11:48]
A
After speaking with Dante, detectives in Denver rush to preserve Kelsey and Dante's cell 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 10pm Kelsey texted Dante saying that she was almost there and asked where they should meet.
- [12:30]
C
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.
- [12:47]
A
50 minutes later, Kelsey was still waiting for Dante to show up.
- [12:52]
C
Finally, he tells her, hey, we just go to where we usually go, which is a corner right down the street from his grandma's house. So Kelsey apparently goes to this location, and her cell data indicates that her location changes to roughly that area. We don't have an exact ping on it, but it seems to match up with that area.
- [13:13]
A
Kelsey texted Dante once she got to the meeting spot at 11:18pm she texted again at 11:24pm saying, where are you? I've been here for over an hour just waiting. Now, Dante responded to that message saying that he was walking over and he should be there soon. Then at 12:30am on the morning of February 5th. Now, Kelsey sent one more text message from. From this location, telling Dante that she was upset that he still wasn't there.
- [13:44]
C
There's no more communication on either of their phones until 2:42am There is a phone call that goes from Kelsey's phone to an ex girlfriend of Dante's. During the investigation, we could not uncover anything that Kelsey would have known about this ex girlfriend. 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 3:56am 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 the Dante's grandma's house.
- [15:01]
A
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.
- [16:00]
C
We find a transaction that occurs on the morning of February 5th at 11:39am from a local bank in Pueblo, Colorado, about a two or three minute drive from the Walmart.
- [16:12]
A
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 5 foot 4 inch, 120 pound brunette female inside the car. I don't know if Investigators back in 2013 were surprised to see who was driving Kelsey's car as it pulled up to the ATM on February 5th shortly before noon. But you won't be.
- [16:46]
C
Dante is driving Kelsey's car and the one that is withdrawing the money from the ATM. It was about $400 and we would later learn that he used that to pay a cell phone bill. So now our timeline has changed again because now we have Dante in kelsey's car at 11:39am hours after he said that he last saw her and that she left and went back to Denver.
- [17:07]
A
And hours after he told police that he'd taken Kelsey to Parkview Hospital for her Proof of pregnancy test. Now, investigators were unable to find any record from the hospital or Kelsey's insurance company that she had been admitted or even seen by a doctor that day. Now, after the trip to the bank, it appears that Dante, or someone who looks an awful lot like him, drove Kelsey's car to Walmart. This time, it was captured on camera. Pulling into the lot at noon, you
- [17:39]
C
can't make out details of a person. It appears the person that parks the car and then gets out is African American. But it's not clear enough to see features and details, 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.
- [18:10]
A
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.
- [18:20]
C
Continue 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 7:17am a person matching Dante's description returns to the vehicle. The person gets in, backs out, and leaves the Walmart parking lot.
- [18:43]
A
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 was 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.
- [19:12]
B
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, you know, a lot of hills, a lot of curves, you know, 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.
- [19:39]
A
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.
- [19:49]
C
We looked through the entire house. I remember we walked in the backyard. There was no Dirt disturbed, you know, nothing out of the ordinary. Just seem like a normal lived in house at that time. The grandma kept the house pretty clean. Dante's room was normal. But we do find a dark colored hoodie with a white emblem that later is going to be very similar to the clothing that we see in the Walmart video.
- [20:12]
A
That night, Pueblo police asked Dante to come in for another interview.
- [20:18]
C
And now the detectives have a lot more information to confront him with and ask him about, like, now they're aware of the bank transaction, they're aware of the car being dropped off, and so they're going to start asking him more direct questions. And when they start talking about the bank transaction, Dante becomes pretty uncomfortable and asks for a lawyer and stops the interview at that point.
- [20:38]
A
The next day, they put cuffs on Dante anyway. Not for the reason you think, though. They were arresting him for felony ID theft because he used Kelsey's debit card at the ATM after she went missing. But the case was eventually dropped after detectives learned that Kelsey often let him use it to withdraw money. And this is where Kelsey's case hit a frustrating plateau. Evidence from her car was tested, but it didn't really produce anything that helped. And despite the cell phone data and video camera footage placing Dante with Kelsey at the time, her phone activity presumably stopped. None of it proved what happened after or where on earth Kelsey was. And this is one of those frustrating situations where all the small signs were pointing in the same direction, but the family was being told there was nothing they could do about it. The sad reality was what they needed was a body or enough time to pass that a jury would reasonably believe that Kelsey was. Was dead without a body. But it's not like they were really doing a whole lot to look for one. So Laura Saxton took matters into her own hands.
- [21:53]
B
We wanted to have more searches done, and the police department really wasn't. You know, they did some initial ones, but then they kind of weren't actively continuing to search. 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.
- [22:35]
A
Our reporter asked if Laura's PI found any new evidence or leads that were missed by investigators.
- [22:42]
B
No, because everything kept coming back to Dante, but he. He did you know, go and talk to Dante's family and things like that.
- [22:53]
A
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. 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.
- [23:36]
C
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 there 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.
- [24:27]
A
Agent Torres went to Dante's grandmother's house with a warrant for a DNA sample. Dante wasn't home, so Torres gave his sister a business card and left.
- [24:37]
C
We're not even out of the front yard yet, and on the sidewalk, and my cell phone starts ringing from an unknown number, and it was Dante's mom. So, like, word travels fast. And she is reading me the riot act on the phone, telling me, like, you want Dante, you go through me.
- [24:54]
A
Dante went to the police station with his mother and gave them a DNA sample. And guess what? It did match DNA from a hair sample found in Kelsey's car. But that alone wasn't proof of foul play. Maybe that was why Pueblo police hadn't done that before. I mean, Dante admitted to being in the car with her. We know that he was driving it in the ATM footage. It's not exactly new info. Now, Torres says Dante's mom, Sarah Lucas, became a constant presence in the investigation, controlling access to her son and running interference for him. But that didn't stop several other women from getting close to Dante. Something that became kind of an odd component of this story.
- [25:36]
B
It was crazy that the number of girls who, like, came forward and, like, said, oh, well, I'll, you know, get in a relationship with him and try and get information out of him.
- [25:47]
A
One of these women who came forward and tried to date Dante was Lauren Shore, a single mother who was living in Colorado Springs in 2016 and had been following the case in the news. She decided to try and cozy up to Dante, gain his trust, and get information about Kelsey's case.
- [26:06]
C
And Lauren Shure becomes this key figure, and not by our planting. This was something she did completely independent. Her and another friend. They just reach out to Dante while the friend kind of, I guess, if you will, does surveillance while the friend meets with Dante at a park and they just get to know each other, and the next thing you know, they're dating.
- [26:26]
A
They even became engaged. Agent Torres says that Lauren still had the ring when investigators found out about the relationship and interviewed her in 2017. Now, the two were broken up by then, but while they were together, Dante told her things that investigators believed tied him more closely to Kelce's disappearance, things that he hadn't shared with police before.
- [26:49]
C
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.
- [27:06]
A
We tried to contact Lauren Schor 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, Jessyca became interested in the case after seeing media coverage about it, and she, too, wanted to befriend Dante for information.
- [27:31]
C
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, so. And despite everything we told her this, this female went ahead and. And did it, and the same result happened. Dante gets her, they fall in love, they start dating.
- [28:04]
A
Women around Dante were trying to draw out answers in their own way, but the CBI was taking a more traditional route by re examining the evidence from Kelsey's car.
- [28:16]
C
We set up an open air canine sniff, if you will, and the K9 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 it. 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.
- [28:43]
A
But if Kelsey was in the trunk at walmart, why risk moving the car for whatever reason?
- [28:50]
C
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.
- [29:05]
A
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. New owners lived there by that point, but they gave investigators permission to search the property. After one dog hit on a scent in the backyard, Investigators got a search warrant and dug up the area around it, using ground penetrating radar to search for evidence. It was a long shot that ultimately didn't pan out, but the activity did stir things up a bit. Dante's mom, Sarah, started calling agent Torres again, asking questions. And investigators saw an opportunity in this. In November 2017, they had a wiretap on Sarah's phone and staged a visible search around pueblo, issuing press releases and placing surveillance near the Lucas family home.
- [30:09]
C
We wanted those guys to not be, like, obvious, but we wanted them to know, well, the police are watching, like, what's going on here? We wanted to generate chatter on the phones that we were listening in on. And it did work. Sarah was very active on the phone.
- [30:28]
A
In early November, Agent Torres was in the wire room listening to phone calls, conversations when he heard Dante's mother talking about an upcoming trip.
- [30:38]
C
Sarah had bought him a one way ticket to go meet with a girlfriend in Arizona, and he wasn't planning on coming back.
- [30:47]
A
Dante was traveling to see Jessica Martin, one of the women who had ended up dating him, while trying to get information about the case. Now the two were still together, even though she had moved from Colorado to Arizona at this point point.
- [31:00]
C
So he's headed south. We're a little nervous that he's maybe heading for the border and just trying to get away from everything. So it's kind of an emergency situation with the investigative team. We're trying to figure out, okay, what do we do.
- [31:13]
A
So on November 13th, Dante was at the Denver airport and 20 minutes away from boarding an American Airlines flight for Tucson. And that's when he was stopped by police.
- [31:26]
C
They tell him, you know, Dante, we have a warrant for your arrest. We have to take you into custody.
- [31:30]
A
But once again, this arrest is not for the reason you think. Investigators had been working on building a murder case against Dante, but they needed more time. So not wanting him to flee when they were so close, they arrested him in relation to another crime. You see, a few months earlier, a man in Pueblo had accused Dante and other family members of beating him up and stealing $1,000 from him while he sat in a car outside of their old house. Police had been investigating that case and felt like they had enough there to move on it. I mean, literally moments before he hopped
- [32:15]
C
on his flight, I believe he thought he was getting arrested for Kelsey's murder. When he gets to the jail, he's told that the warrant was for robbery, and he had this massive sigh of relief that, thank God, you know, I think he was thinking he was probably going down for the murder.
- [32:32]
A
At that point, Pueblo detectives interviewed Dante first about the robbery. Then they returned a few hours later and began questioning him about Kelsey. And he made a confession, not about her death, but the same one that he made to Lauren Shore, one of the women who dated him for information in 2016.
- [32:53]
C
He now admits that he is the one that dropped the vehicle off at Walmart and that he lied. He also is going to confirm that he was the person that dropped the car off at St. Mary Corwin Hospital and then walked away.
- [33:06]
A
This was the final piece of the puzzle that investigators need, the piece that pulled together the narrative that they'd been weaving. So on December 1, 2017, they went to the jail where Dante was being held for the assault and robbery, and they arrested him again, but this time, finally, for the murder of Kelsey Schelling. It would take more than three years to bring this case to trial. But opening Statements started on February 3, 2021, and prosecutors had the uphill task of proving murder, even though they still didn't have Kelsey's body or really any forensic evidence showing exactly how she died. But agent Torres says that all the pieces of circumstantial evidence that investigators found added up to something much stronger.
- [33:56]
C
You take a group of sticks, one by itself breaks in half. You know, you grab two together, you could probably still break them in half. You grab three, you could still break them in half. But when you have a whole bunch of sticks or Cohesive together, you can't break them. And even if one or two breaks, the whole remains intact. And each one of those sticks represents a piece of circumstantial evidence that we had in Kelsey's case. And so together, every one of those pieces creates this overwhelming, strong case that Dante murdered Kelsey.
- [34:30]
A
And instead of a body, they presented reasons that suggested why her body hadn't been found. Even though there was no blood in Kelsey's car, there were soil particles inside that could be traced to an area near the former home of Dante's grandmother. A geologist testified during the trial that the soil was unlikely to have come from Denver. And some pointed to areas west or southwest of Pueblo, including Beulah, this mountain town about 27 miles away. As part of the background work on Dante, investigators learned that he was known to just drive around when he had access to a car, and that Beulah was one of the places that he liked to cruise through. Prosecutors also called an employee from a local landfill to testify about a mysterious car spotted on the morning that Kelsey went missing. Now, remember, when investigators first pulled Kelsey's text message, they had ID'd one strange, out of character text from Kelsey's phone to Dante's.
- [35:28]
C
And we Talk about that 3:56am Text message from Kelsey's phone and Dante. That location roughly puts him in that prairie between the landfill and Dante's grandma's house.
- [35:41]
A
At around 4:30 that same morning, a security camera at the landfill captured headlights near the front gate. Someone appeared to walk up and tamper with the lock. Now, the lock was later found damaged but not breached. The video was dark, and investigators couldn't identify the person or the vehicle. And unfortunately, before police could get a usable copy of this footage, it was overwritten. But even without it, the landfill and the soil theories were two more sticks that strengthen Agent Torres stack of circumstantial evidence. And on March 8, 2021, after less than three hours of deliberation, a jury found Dante Lucas guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, which is the mandatory sentence for first degree murder convictions in Colorado. Nine months after that, he was sentenced to an additional three years for charges related to that robbery and assault case, the one that he was arrested for at the Denver airport shortly before being charged with Kelsey's murder. 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 for many of them. For Kelsey's mother, Laura Saxton, justice in court didn't mean closure.
- [37:20]
B
I always feel bad when I, you know, 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 probably never going to know where she's at.
- [37:58]
A
Dante has never revealed this information, even when presented with a potential deal with that could have reduced his jail time. So investigators appeared 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.
- [38:24]
C
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% were still missing. And again, I hope that one day we can give the family that last piece.
- [38:40]
A
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.
- [39:11]
C
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.
- [39:25]
A
Their estimate came to be 366 miles. So let's just do a little math. 473, 366. That's 107 unaccounted for miles that were put on kelsey's car between February 3rd and February 14th. And that number matters because if investigators are right that she was killed after she arrived In Pueblo, those 107 miles could represent the distance someone drove her car while trying to figure out where to dispose of her body. So investigators drove that loop through Beulah themselves, the one that Dante was known to drive, and they found that it came close to matching the unexplained miles on Kelsey's car. All of that leaves one painful that during those 107 unexplained miles, Kelsey may have been taken to the landfill area. But if she was, Agent Torres says trying to find her now would be incredibly difficult.
- [40:28]
C
The landfill is one of the few that doesn't grid their trash. 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, which feels virtually impossible. I think the estimation was that it would take 70 some years. And with 20 personnel searching seven days a week for, I think, 10 to 12 hours a day, completely unrealistic.
- [40:55]
A
The scale of that search is hard to comprehend. But for Kelsey's mother, the reason to keep asking is simple. Until her daughter is found, there is still an absence that no verdict can fill.
- [41:09]
B
I'm not going to say I'll ever be okay again, but to have a place to go, visit her, take her flowers, make it pretty for her, those types of things that would mean the world to me. Like, it hurts me a lot to not have that. Like, it means a lot to me. People say things like, oh, but her body's just her shell and her spirit's in heaven, and blah, blah, blah. I don't care. I, you know, I carried that little body for nine months inside of mine, and, you know, I want it back. I don't want it discarded like trash. You know, that's not. She didn't deserve that.
- [41:55]
A
Kelsey was eight weeks pregnant when she disappeared, and her case is part of a larger, devastating reality. A national study using CDC data from 202005 to 2022 found that homicide and suicide were the leading causes of death among pregnant people and those within 42 days of postpartum. Because Kelsey's body hasn't been found, it is still a deck case. The 10 of spades from Colorado. And someone may know where she and her baby are. So if you have any information that can help, you can call the Colorado Bureau of Investigations Corporate Caseline at 303-239-4244, or you can call Pueblo Crime Stoppers at 719-542-7867. The deck is an audio Chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com I think Chuck would approve. Hi, I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast unlike any other. Why? Because every case I cover comes from the heart of my home, New England. From the rocky Maine coast to the historic streets of Boston to the quiet corners of Vermont and beyond, I investigate stories filled with untold twists, enduring questions, and voices that deserve to be heard. So if you're ready to explore the darker side of New England, join me every week for Dark Down East. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.