Lauren Suhr, a single mother from the Colorado Springs area, had never met Kelsie Schelling or her family. She said the case moved her as a mom, so in 2016 she contacted Donthe Lucas on Facebook and spent close to a year in a relationship with him to draw out information. He proposed, and she wore the ring.
Kelsie Jean Schelling was 21 and about 8 weeks pregnant when she drove from Denver to Pueblo, Colorado, on February 4, 2013, to meet her boyfriend Donthe Lucas after an ultrasound. He had asked her to come. She was never seen again and was reported missing on February 9.
Her black 2011 Chevy Cruze turned up on surveillance footage, left overnight in a Walmart lot and later moved to a St. Mary-Corwin Hospital parking lot, where it was found on February 7. Lucas lied to police about where he had been.
During their relationship, he admitted to Suhr that he was the man caught on camera moving Kelsie’s abandoned car. He never confessed to killing her.
Suhr later testified she was playing a role, while acknowledging that real feelings developed along the way. She passed what she learned to a friend who relayed it to Kelsie’s mother, Laura Saxton, cooperated with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and ended contact around April 2017.
Lucas was charged with first-degree murder in December 2017 and convicted by a jury on March 8, 2021, in a case prosecutors won with no body, no weapon, and no eyewitness. He has always maintained his innocence.
The sentence was mandatory life without parole, and the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in February 2024. Suhr testified at the trial and appeared in ABC’s 20/20 special on the case.
The prosecution was built on surveillance, cell data, deceptive texts sent from Kelsie’s phone after she disappeared, cadaver-dog alerts, and Lucas’s own lies.
Kelsie and her unborn child have still never been found. Searches continue and a reward still stands, 13 years after she drove to Pueblo to meet the father of her baby.
