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Kelsie Schelling’s last day alive began with such promise.
The 21-year-old got her first glimpse of her daughter-to-be on a sonogram, confirming she was pregnant.
The pregnancy had been unexpected, but Kelsie’s parents, Doug Schelling and Laura Saxton, were ready to rally around and support their daughter, according to “The Night Kelsie Disappeared” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
“I talked to her and told her I would support her anyway I could, you know, the whole family would support her and it was gonna be ok,” Saxton recalled of her final conversation with her daughter that day.
When Kelsie mysteriously disappeared just hours later, after finishing her shift at a Floor & Decor store just outside Denver, Colorado, her anguished family was left wondering what could have happened.
Who was Kelsie Schelling?
By all accounts, Kelsie was a vibrant and bubbly person who others naturally gravitated toward.
“There was nothing quiet about Kelsie, whatsoever,” her friend and coworker Aly Cox remembered. “She was fun. She was great with people, you know, really personable.”
But Kelsie had also struggled in the past with her mental health. After her parents divorced when she was a teenager, Kelsie found herself in the depths of despair and tried to take her own life. Two years before her death, she tried again.
“She called me and she said, ‘I just — I need help. I need you to come home and I need help,’” said Cox, who rushed her friend to the hospital after she admitted to taking too many pills.
The night Kelsie Schelling vanished
After Kelsie disappeared the night of February 4, 2013, just after clocking out of work at 9:54 p.m., investigators had to consider the possibility that she may have tried to take her own life. But they quickly dismissed that thought after her family noted her “strong” love for her unborn baby.
“That’s a hard avenue to explore and just like millions of other Americans, I think she had some mental health issues and she battled them and was winning that battle,” said Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Kevin Torres.
Kelsie’s family and investigators believed she had likely met with foul play, especially after a visit to her apartment revealed nothing out of the ordinary.
Saxton reached out to Kelsie’s on-again/off-again boyfriend and the unborn baby’s father, Donthe Lucas.
Lucas, a former college basketball star, admitted to seeing Kelsie that night at around 2 or 3 a.m., but told Saxton that she seemed fine when they parted ways. He promised to reach out to the family if Kelsie tried to contact him and also mentioned that she may have gone to California.
Kelsie had moved out to California the year before and loved the sunny beaches and friends she made there, but she was forced to return to Colorado just six months later when she was unable to keep up with the high cost of living in the Golden State.
Investigators looked into the possibility that Kelsie had jetted over to California for a visit, but didn’t find any evidence to suggest that’s where she’d gone.
Investigators uncover clues
Detectives were also troubled by an account that Cox, Kelsie’s coworker, had shared with them. About six months before she disappeared, Kelsie failed to show up for one of her shifts at the flooring store. When her colleagues finally got in touch with her, she told them she couldn’t come in because she had bruises on her neck and claimed, “My dad strangled me.”
Kelsie’s father, Doug, denied ever harming his daughter and detectives were ultimately able to confirm that he had been hours away at the time of the alleged incident. But that left them wondering who had actually caused the bruising.
About a week after Kelsie vanished, authorities got their first break in the case. Kelsie’s car was spotted on surveillance video at around noon the day after she disappeared, driving into a Walmart parking lot in Pueblo, Colorado, a town about two hours south of Denver. It was the same town where Lucas was living with his grandmother.
An unidentified male was seen getting out of the car and walking around the building, where he was picked up by another vehicle. The next morning, the same man was seen getting back into Kelsie’s car and driving away.
Eight days after Kelsie’s car drove out of the Walmart parking lot, it was later found sitting abandoned in a hospital parking lot. There was no evidence that Kelsie ever went inside the hospital. Again, surveillance footage showed an unidentified man driving the car into the lot.
Kelsie Schelling’s mom “knew” her daughter was dead
“The day that her car was found, that was the day I knew that she was deceased, cause I knew there was no way, she was very attached to her things and I — I just knew that there was no way that she would abandon her car,” Saxton said.
Investigators also learned that the day after she disappeared, someone had used an ATM in Pueblo to withdraw $400 from Kelsie’s bank account. When they looked at the surveillance footage captured at the ATM, they recognized a familiar face. Lucas was the one who withdrew the money.
Donthe Lucas is arrested
Lucas had also been driving Kelsie’s car at the time. Police in Pueblo arrested him for identity theft and brought him in for questioning.
His story about what happened the night Kelsie disappeared kept changing. While sometimes he told police he had met up with her at around 2 a.m., other times he placed it closer to midnight. He also told them that they stayed at the Walmart, went to his grandma’s house, and in one account, that they went to a hospital and she lost the baby there.
The conflicting stories weren’t enough, however, to arrest Lucas for Kelsie’s disappearance. And after investigators found evidence that Kelsie had often lent Lucas her bank card and vehicle in the past, they weren’t able to hold him on the identity theft charges either and he was released.
Without any concrete evidence, years went by without any arrests in Kelsie’s disappearance.
“I think we were all lost, almost like your heart falls into the pit of your stomach and you feel just so helpless,” Kelsie’s brother Colby Schelling said of the family’s anguish.
Years later, Kelsie Schelling’s case gets another look
Four years after Kelsie disappeared, the CBI decided to take a fresh look at the case. They considered different possibilities, but continued to come back to Lucas.
“She loved Donthe with all her heart, unconditionally, but Kelsie would often confide in her friends that Donthe didn’t feel the same way about her and he was very degrading to her,” Torres said.
One friend had reported that Kelsie confided that Lucas had gotten violent in the past, pushing her when he got upset.
According to Torres, the relationship “met all the markers” of “a very tumultuous relationship with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.”
Lucas’ ex-girlfriend also told investigators that he got anxious every time Kelsie’s case came on the news and admitted being the man captured on the surveillance footage dropping her car off.
But investigators finally got the break they needed in the case after Torres was finally able to secure a warrant for Lucas’ cell phone at the time, which revealed the final text messages between him and Kelsie.
According to the text messages, Kelsie had driven to Pueblo the night she disappeared, arriving at the Walmart parking lot at 11:20 p.m. Although Lucas told her he would be “over there shortly,” she waited for more than an hour for him to arrive.
She eventually pulled onto a street near Lucas’ grandmother’s home and then sent one final text message at 12:32 p.m.
“Where are you? I’ve been here over an hour just waiting,” she wrote.
There are no other text messages after that point. Torres believes Lucas finally arrived and ushered Kelsie into his grandmother’s house. When a fight broke out about the baby, Lucas killed her, Torres believes.
“He’s a monster,” Saxton said of Lucas. “I mean, it’s — it’s bad enough that he wanted to — to get rid of Kelsie rather than just walking away from her, but that he wanted to kill his child.”
Donthe Lucas charged with Kelsie Schelling’s murder
Authorities finally had enough evidence to arrest Lucas in the case, and he was charged with first-degree murder in 2017.
Lucas went on trial four years later, and was found guilty in March of 2021.
Where is Donthe Lucas now?
Lucas was sentenced to life without parole and is currently serving out his sentence at the Limon Correctional Facility in Lincoln County, Colorado, according to Colorado Department of Corrections records. He appealed his murder conviction, but it was upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals in 2024, according to The Pueblo Chieftain.
Kelsie’s body has never been found.
