Donthe Lucas Case: Trial, 2024 Appeal, and Where It Stands

The Donthe Lucas case ended in a first-degree murder conviction on March 8, 2021, for the 2013 killing of his pregnant girlfriend, Kelsie Schelling, whose body has never been found. A Pueblo County jury deliberated less than three hours before returning its verdict, and Lucas received the mandatory sentence under Colorado law: life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on February 23, 2024. Lucas is currently incarcerated at the Limon Correctional Facility in Lincoln County, Colorado.¹

The Disappearance of Kelsie Schelling

Kelsie Jean Schelling was 21 years old and living in Denver in early 2013. On February 4 of that year, the same day a sonogram confirmed she was eight weeks pregnant, she drove to Pueblo to meet Lucas, her on-and-off boyfriend and the father of her unborn child. Text messages later recovered by investigators showed that Lucas had drawn her to Pueblo by promising a “surprise.”²

She clocked out of her job at a Highlands Ranch Floor & Decor at 9:54 p.m. and arrived at a Pueblo Walmart parking lot at 11:20 p.m. She waited more than an hour. Her final text, sent at 12:32 a.m. on February 5, read: “Where are you? I’ve been here over an hour just waiting.”³ She was never seen again. Her family reported her missing on February 9, 2013.¹

Friends testified at trial that the relationship was “tumultuous,” that Lucas had been “degrading” toward Schelling, and that he had been violent in the past. Prosecutors alleged that Lucas had a pattern of using Schelling for her money, car, and apartment. Schelling had told her mother, Laura Saxton, that Lucas was unhappy about the pregnancy.³

Building a Case Without a Body

Investigators had no crime scene, no body, no weapon, and no forensic evidence tying Lucas to a specific act of violence. What they did have was a chain of circumstantial evidence that steadily grew.

Walmart surveillance footage from the afternoon of February 5 showed a tall person in a red hoodie stepping out of Schelling’s black 2011 Chevrolet Cruze, walking around the building, and being picked up by another car. The next morning, a figure returned and drove her Cruze away. That person in the red hoodie was the only individual to exit the car during the nearly 18 hours it sat in the lot, contradicting Lucas’s later claim that Schelling had gotten out to buy chips.⁴

Also on February 5, $400 was withdrawn from Schelling’s bank account at a Pueblo ATM. Surveillance footage identified Lucas as the person making the withdrawal, driving her car.³ The car itself turned up abandoned and dirty in the parking lot of St. Mary-Corwin Hospital in Pueblo, driven there by an unidentified person captured on hospital surveillance.⁵

In the days after Schelling vanished, someone used her phone to send messages her mother described as “curt and short,” unlike her usual voice. One text falsely claimed she was sick with an ectopic pregnancy, contradicting testimony from her OB-GYN that she had a healthy, viable pregnancy.⁶ Cell phone tower data showed that Lucas’s phone and Schelling’s phone pinged in the same locations for two days after her disappearance, including on the night of February 5-6, when Lucas’s phone tracked west of Pueblo toward the Southside Landfill and the town of Beulah.⁴

Schelling’s family was dissatisfied with the pace of the Pueblo Police Department investigation, hired a private investigator, and pushed for further action. In 2016, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took over as lead agency.¹ CBI agent Kevin Torres found dark-reddish stains on a laundry room door at Lucas’s grandmother’s home on Manor Ridge Drive, where Lucas was living. The stains tested “presumptive positive” for blood.⁷

In April 2017, law enforcement excavated the backyard over two days. A decomposition-detection dog named Radar, handled by Frank Hurst, alerted to the scent of human decomposition near a tree in the backyard and on floor mats and a trunk liner from Schelling’s car. Investigators recovered a hair twisted around a small piece of blue plastic, but the defense said the hair was too degraded to test, and the excavation produced nothing further.⁸

Investigators also looked at the Pueblo Southside Landfill, where cell tower data placed Lucas’s phone on the night of February 5-6. The landfill’s gate lock had been tampered with overnight, and a landfill camera captured a vehicle idling nearby, though the footage was too poor to identify. A landfill search expert, Lee Reed, testified that without a specific section of the landfill to target, finding evidentiary material would have been “unlikely even early on.” The CBI’s lead investigator theorized that Lucas strangled Schelling after luring her to Pueblo and may have disposed of her remains at or near the landfill.⁷

Arrest After Nearly Five Years

Nearly five years passed between Schelling’s disappearance and Lucas’s arrest on murder charges. In late 2017, a Pueblo resident reported that Lucas and family members had attacked him and stolen $1,000, triggering an aggravated robbery investigation. That November, authorities learned Lucas was heading to Denver International Airport to fly to Tucson, Arizona, which investigators believed was a step toward fleeing to Mexico. Police obtained an arrest warrant on the robbery and intercepted him at the airport 20 minutes before his flight.⁹

On December 1, 2017, while Lucas was already in custody at the Pueblo County Detention Center, he was served with a warrant for first-degree murder after deliberation. A judge ruled on May 31, 2018, that probable cause existed to proceed to trial despite the absence of a body.¹⁰ Lucas pleaded not guilty in August 2018.¹¹

The Trial

The trial began on January 25, 2021, in Pueblo County District Court, with 10th Judicial District Attorney Jeff Chostner leading the prosecution and Karl Tameler representing Lucas.¹²

Prosecutors argued that Schelling’s pregnancy was “the gasoline to the fire” and the central motive. Their theory: Lucas lured her to Pueblo, strangled her, and then used her phone and car to cover his tracks. The evidence they presented included:

Surveillance footage of Lucas withdrawing $400 from Schelling’s account, driving her car to the Walmart and the hospital, and moving through Pueblo in the days afterward, with Schelling not visible in any frame.⁶
Cell tower data placing Schelling’s and Lucas’s phones together in the hours and days after she vanished.⁴
Testimony from Ryan Rivera, a former inmate who served time with Lucas, who said Lucas admitted killing Schelling and told him investigators would never find her body and would never convict him.²
A two-hour 2017 police interrogation played for the jury, during which Lucas said: “I lied from the jump. I moved the car.”⁹
The Southside Landfill circumstances, the decomposition-dog alerts, and evidence that Lucas gave contradictory accounts to police across multiple interviews, including naming a hospital that had no record of treating Schelling.⁴

Prosecutors also introduced “other acts” evidence, including sexual text messages Lucas sent to other women during the days surrounding the disappearance. They argued this showed his state of mind and that he already knew Schelling was dead.¹

The defense called no witnesses. Tameler called the prosecution’s case “the biggest stretch in Colorado history” and a “radical experiment,” emphasizing that there was no body, no crime scene, no forensic evidence, no cause of death, and no murder weapon. He argued that Lucas’s DNA in Schelling’s car was unremarkable because he often borrowed it, and that the investigation had been driven by “pressure” from Schelling’s family.¹³

On March 8, 2021, after a 13-day trial, the jury deliberated for under three hours and returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Lucas received the mandatory life sentence.¹⁴

The 2024 Appeal

Lucas appealed to the Colorado Court of Appeals on three main grounds. He argued that the trial court improperly admitted “other acts” evidence, including his sexual text messages to other women and a missed court hearing in Arapahoe County. He challenged the reliability of the decomposition-dog evidence, pointing to the four-to-six-year gap between Schelling’s disappearance and the canine search. And he alleged prosecutorial misconduct during closing arguments, citing the prosecutor’s “Jedi mind” metaphors used to disparage the defense and emotional references to Schelling as a “21-year-old kid.”¹

On February 23, 2024, in a 24-page opinion authored by Judge Jerry Jones, the appellate court affirmed the conviction. Even if the admission of certain evidence had been erroneous, the court held, any errors were “harmless” and did not deprive Lucas of a fair trial. The decomposition-dog evidence was “marginally relevant” but unlikely to have substantially influenced the verdict. The prosecutor’s remarks did not rise to “plain error,” the court found, noting that prosecutors are permitted some degree of “oratorical embellishment.”¹

Chostner said after the ruling that the case “may still be subject to appeal with the Colorado State Supreme Court.” No further filings at that level have been publicly documented.¹

Where the Case Stands Now

Lucas is serving his life sentence at the Limon Correctional Facility in Lincoln County, Colorado. Schelling’s remains have never been recovered, and the case remains classified as an open missing persons investigation with respect to locating her body.¹

Laura Saxton, Schelling’s mother, said after the guilty verdict that she was “very thankful” but devastated that she “didn’t get Kelsie back.” “I’m going to forever say she’s never been found,” she said. Doug Schelling, Kelsie’s father, said: “It’s really sad that we can’t take Kelsie home with us.”¹⁴ Saxton went on to help pass Colorado legislation designating February 4, the anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance, as Colorado Missing Persons Day, and she serves on the CBI’s Cold Case Task Force.¹⁵

1
Pueblo Chieftain. Donthe Lucas Loses Appeal in Kelsie Schelling Colorado Murder Case
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KRDO. Former Jail Inmate Says Donthe Lucas Admitted to Killing Kelsie Schelling
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Oxygen. Donthe Lucas Kills Kelsie Schelling, Mom of His Unborn Baby
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Fox 21 News. Donthe Lucas Murder Trial Resumes After Delay Due to COVID-19
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Colorado Cold Case Database. Kelsie Jean Schelling Case Detail
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Pueblo Chieftain. Kelsie Schelling Murder Case: Jury Deliberates, Donthe Lucas Defense Rests
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KOAA. Southside Landfill Discussed in Donthe Lucas Murder Trial
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KRDO. Donthe Lucas Trial: Focus on Damaged Lock at Landfill
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ABC7. Kelsie Schelling Story
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KKTV. Kelsie Schelling Murder Suspect in Court
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Denver7. Donthe Lucas Pleads Not Guilty in Kelsie Schelling’s Death
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Court TV. Donthe Lucas Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder, Sentenced to Life in Prison
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KOAA. Donthe Lucas Murder Trial Resumes Wednesday
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Denver7. Jury Finds Donthe Lucas Guilty of First-Degree Murder in Death of Kelsie Schelling
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Westword. Colorado Missing Persons Day: Grief, Pain on Tenth Ceremony