A Trip to Pueblo for a Surprise That Never Existed: The Murder of Kelsie Schelling

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

June 11, 2026

Kelsie Jean Schelling was twenty one years old in the winter of 2012, having met Donthe Isiah Lucas back in 2010 while both were students at Northeastern Junior College. The two dated on and off for roughly two years before finally splitting up, one of those relationships that friends would later describe as tumultuous, marked by a steady cycle of arguments followed by reconciliation. That cycle brought them back together at least once more, because during the 2012 holiday season, Kelsie surprised her family with news that she was pregnant, and that Donthe was the father. Her mother, Laura Saxton, responded the way a lot of mothers would, telling her daughter directly that she would support her whether Donthe stayed in the picture or not. Neither of them could have known, at that point, just how much that support would eventually be needed.

A Text Message Promising a Gift

On February 3, 2013, Lucas began texting Kelsie with what he described as a surprise, urging her to make the roughly two hour drive from her home in Denver down to Pueblo to see him. He gave her specific instructions about where to go once she arrived, including directions to visit a local Walmart, the kind of oddly precise itinerary that reads, in hindsight, like a set of directions from someone trying to control exactly where a person would and would not be seen. Kelsie's last message to him that night came at 11:18 p.m., and it carried the tone of someone growing frustrated rather than someone anticipating a happy surprise: where are you, she wrote, I've been here over an hour just waiting. After that message, the trail of Kelsie Schelling as anyone had known her essentially stops.

She missed work on February 5. A coworker received a text message from her phone that same day, one that struck people as immediately strange once it was read back: it claimed she was no longer pregnant, because, in the wording of the message, it was growing in the wrong place. Her parents received similarly odd, unsettling messages over the following days, the kind of communication that felt engineered to explain away a pregnancy and a daughter's absence at the same time, without actually confirming that either the sender or the situation described was real. By February 7, calls to her phone stopped connecting entirely and went straight to voicemail.

A Car With No Driver

More than a week after she vanished, Kelsie's car turned up abandoned, with no trace of Kelsie herself anywhere near it. Surveillance footage from the Walmart Lucas had directed her toward told a story that flatly contradicted what he'd told investigators. The footage showed Lucas himself getting out of Kelsie's vehicle alone, with no sign of her inside it. Roughly eighteen hours later, an entirely different, unidentified man was captured on camera getting into that same car and driving it away, eventually leaving it at St. Mary Corwin Hospital, where police would ultimately locate and recover it. Lucas's own explanation to police, when he was first questioned, was that he had taken Kelsie to Parkview Medical Center after she suffered a miscarriage. When investigators checked, the hospital had no record of any such visit ever taking place.

A Scam Built on a Missing Woman's Name

The investigation dragged on for years without an arrest, and in October 2015, more than two years after Kelsie disappeared, her mother Laura Saxton received a message through Facebook from someone claiming Kelsie was actually alive, being held as a victim of sex trafficking, and that fifty thousand dollars was needed to secure her rescue at a McDonald's location in Vancouver. It read, on its surface, like the cruelest possible hoax a grieving mother could be subjected to, and it turned out to be exactly that: investigators later discovered that the family of a separate missing woman, Megan Lancaster of Ohio, had received nearly identical messages around the same time, part of what turned out to be a coordinated extortion scheme. FBI analysis eventually traced the messages back to a Russian IP address, confirming that whoever was behind them had never had any real connection to Kelsie or her case at all, and had simply been running the same cruel script against multiple grieving families simultaneously.

The Woman Who Cracked the Case From the Outside

The break that eventually moved the investigation forward didn't come from law enforcement at all. It came from Lauren Suhr, a single mother with no personal connection to Kelsie or her family, who had followed the case in the news and felt compelled enough by what she'd read to take matters into her own hands. Suhr began building an online relationship with Donthe Lucas under false pretenses, maintaining that connection patiently for roughly a year while quietly gathering whatever information she could. Over that time, according to what later emerged in court, Lucas admitted to her that he had, in fact, moved Kelsie's car himself and dropped it off at the hospital, a direct contradiction of the account he'd originally given police. It was an extraordinary, almost unbelievable piece of amateur investigative work, a private citizen succeeding, through patience and a willingness to spend a year building trust with a murder suspect, where years of official investigation had stalled.

An Arrest at the Airport

By late 2017, with new evidence accumulating against him, Lucas apparently sensed the walls closing in and attempted to flee the state, booking a flight to Arizona. Police arrested him at Denver International Airport on unrelated robbery charges just twenty minutes before that flight was scheduled to depart, closing off what might otherwise have been his last opportunity to avoid facing the case directly.

A Trial Built Without a Body

When Lucas finally went to trial in February 2021, eight years after Kelsie disappeared, prosecutors laid out a case built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence: the text messages showing Lucas luring Kelsie to Pueblo under the pretense of a gift, the surveillance footage placing him alone with her car, and cell phone data tracking his movements in the hours after she vanished. A jailhouse informant named Ryan Rivera testified that Lucas had confessed directly to him while incarcerated, telling him investigators would never find Kelsie's body. Laura Saxton took the stand as well, testifying emotionally about her daughter's genuine excitement at the prospect of becoming a mother, testimony that stood in stark, painful contrast to the messages sent from Kelsie's phone in the days after her disappearance claiming the pregnancy had somehow resolved itself.

The jury needed less than three hours to reach a unanimous guilty verdict, reportedly agreeing on Lucas's guilt on their very first vote. He was convicted of first degree murder and received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

A Landfill and a Search Deemed Impractical

Even with a conviction secured, Kelsie's remains have never been recovered. Investigators developed a theory, based on cell phone location data and evidence that a landfill gate had apparently been tampered with around the time of her disappearance, that her body may have ended up at a Pueblo area landfill. A systematic search of that facility was ultimately judged impractical given the scale of material that would need to be sorted through, leaving Laura Saxton without the one thing she has said she needs most to find any real peace. I'm never going to recover without getting her back, she has said. I have nothing. Donthe took that away from me. Kelsie Schelling would have turned thirty in 2023, a milestone her family marked without her, in a case that ended in a conviction but never in the return of the daughter, and the unborn grandchild, that conviction was ultimately about.

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