CA KRISTEN DEBORAH MODAFFERI: Missing from San Francisco, CA - 22 June 1997 - Age 27

[Romulus]

The Doe Network:
Case File 1864DFCA

Bottom Right: Progressed to age 31 (circa 2010)

Kristen Deborah Modafferi
Missing since June 23, 1997 from San Francisco, California
Classification: Endangered Missing

Vital Statistics

Date Of Birth: June 1, 1979
Age at Time of Disappearance: 18 years old
Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 5'8" (173 cm); 145 lbs (66 kg).
Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Brown hair below the shoulders; brown eyes. She has dark eyebrows and distinct facial dimples.
Clothing: Kristen was last seen wearing a black t-shirt with Spinelli's Coffee Shop on it, tan slacks and a dark blue plaid flannel shirt. She was also carrying a dark green Jansport backpack with 2 library books in it.
Dentals: Available
Fingerprints: Available
Circumstances of Disappearance
Modafferi was last seen at the Crocker Galleria Mall in the downtown financial district of San Francisco, California on June 23, 1997. She had just finished her shift at Spinelli's Coffee Shop.

Kristen had clocked out at 15.00, but was seen 45 minutes later on the second floor of the Galleria walking with a blonde woman carrying a backpack. That was the last time Kristen Modafferi was seen.

Earlier, Kristen had asked a coworker for directions to Baker Beach, which is next to Land's End Beach. With the help of a bloodhound, police went to Land's End Beach where Kristen's scent was picked up and lost at the water's edge. They also traced her scent in the Crocker Galleria and lost it at the bus stop.

Kristen was a design student at North Carolina State University at the time of her disappearance. She had arrived in San Francisco where she planned to spend the summer. Within three days of arriving in San Francisco, Kristen took a job at Spinelli's Coffee Shop (now known as Tulley's). Within three weeks, she went missing.
She disappeared the day before she was to attend a photography course at the University of California at Berkeley.

Investigators
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:

Oakland Police Department
510-238-3641
510-238-3775
510-238-3352
OR
FBI-San Francisco Field Office
415-553-7400
E-Mail

Agency Case Number: 97-60524

NCMEC #: NCMA991788

NCIC Number: M-038421722
Please refer to this number when contacting any agency with information regarding this case.

Source Information:
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
California Department of Justice
National Center for Missing Adults
NamUs
Oakland Police Department
Unsolved Mysteries
The Kristen Foundation
MISSING: Kristen Modafferi
Help Find Kristen Modafferi
Texas Missing Persons Clearinghouse
FBI

The Doe Network: Case File 1864DFCA

edited by staff to add media link

KRISTEN DEBORAH MODAFFERI: Missing from San Francisco, CA since 22 Jun 1997 - Age 27

Kristen had clocked out at 15.00, but was seen 45 minutes later on the second floor of the Galleria walking with a blonde woman carrying a backpack. That was the last time Kristen Modafferi was seen.

www.crimewatchers.net

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[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

43 unsolved missing cases the FBI needs fresh leads on

While the search for Gabby Petito is over, thousands more cases need the same attention. Here's an FBI list of 43 unsolved missing persons cases.

www.usatoday.com

43 unsolved missing cases the FBI needs fresh leads on
Amid the disappearance of Gabby Petito that has captured the nation's attention, FBI officials say hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year. In May, the FBI conducted an internal audit and compiled a list of 43 unsolved cases of people under the age of 21 that the agency says need fresh leads. Some date back decades. Here's the list.

Kristen Modafferi was 18 when she went missing from San Francisco, California, on June 23, 1997. More information and age-progressed photos here.
PROVIDED BY THE FBI

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-missing-person-kristen-modafferi-18415384.php

'Turn over one more rock': The San Francisco disappearance of Kristen Modafferi​

Meghan Modafferi has a memory from when she was 7 years old. She was walking the streets of San Francisco, handing out flyers to strangers, trying to find her big sister. She remembers her family went to Kinko’s to make more copies of missing posters with her sister’s face on them. While they waited, she wandered over to a big blue mailbox.

“I had a favorite stuffed animal,” Meghan said, “and I put it in a mailbox, and I closed it, and it disappeared. I was so upset.”

In the 26 years since then — 26 long years without her sister Kristen — Meghan’s childhood memory has become tinged with an adult awareness.

“Was I testing what makes something disappear and what allows it to come back?” she wondered. “I don’t know. I thought it would come back.”

The disappearance of Kristen Modafferi remains unsolved over two decades after she vanished from downtown San Francisco on a summer day in 1997.

The brilliant, spirited teenager flew to California from their family home in North Carolina on her 18th birthday. She planned on taking a photography class at UC Berkeley while working coffee shop jobs and seeing the West Coast before returning home. After 23 days in California, Kristen disappeared into thin air.

SFGATE recently spoke with Kristen’s three sisters, her mother and the retired detective who says he hopes the case will soon be solved to revisit one of the most mysterious and frustrating missing person cases in San Francisco history.


After completing her first year at NC State, a year younger than most of her peers, Kristen wanted to spend her summer in San Francisco, a city the family had previously visited together in 1994.

“I didn’t want her to go,” Debbie remembers. “I was a little leery about the whole thing.” But Kristen’s dad, Bob, thought it would be a good experience and convinced Debbie to allow it.

Kristen soon set about planning the summer of her life. She enrolled in a photography class at Berkeley and found roommates in Oakland through an early internet message board.

“The internet was still pretty new,” Allison says. “It doesn’t sound that much of a big deal now, but it was a totally different world. She created a summer program for herself and did all the research and signed up for classes and found a job out there.”

Modafferi moved to Oakland on June 1, 1997. It was her 18th birthday, a twist of fate that would become tragically important three weeks later. Within a few days, she had lined up summer jobs at Spinelli’s, a coffee shop inside the Crocker Galleria, and the SFMOMA cafe. Early each morning, she caught BART from 19th Street for her 7 a.m. shift at Spinelli’s. After clocking out at 3 p.m. every day, Kristen went exploring, often with her camera in hand.

Although she was bright and precocious, Kristen also still possessed a teenager’s naivete. That worried her mother.

“I remember saying, ‘I don’t know, Kristen. I’m not so sure about this.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Mom. You’re not gonna stop me from going, are you? I really want to do this,’” Debbie Modafferi said. “I relented. I thought maybe she could have used a couple more years of maturing.”

One night shortly after arriving, Kristen went to a concert at Shoreline — a Live 105 music festival featuring Blur and Fiona Apple. Once the show was over, she realized she’d missed the last train home. Trusting Kristen split a cab with a young man she’d just met and stayed overnight at his apartment. In the morning, she went straight to her job at Spinelli’s. (The man was later tracked down and cleared by police as a suspect in her disappearance.)

Monday, June 23, 1997, was like any other. Kristen woke up early and left her Oakland apartment to catch the train into the city. At Spinelli’s, coworkers recalled Kristen asked for directions to Lands End beach, which would later strike detectives as odd; she’d just been there a day or two before for a summer solstice party. Although many news stories at the time reported that Kristen almost certainly headed to Lands End that day, an amateur investigator named Dennis Mahon, who later interviewed Kristen’s coworkers at Spinelli’s, told SFGATE that while Kristen had floated the idea of heading to Lands End after her shift, they said she was “noncommittal.”

Kristen wrapped up around 3 p.m. and headed out the door in her Spinelli’s T-shirt and green backpack.

What happened over the next 96 hours is a mystery.

About 30 minutes after Kristen left Spinelli’s, a coworker thought they saw her walking on the second floor of the Crocker Galleria in conversation with a blonde woman. The coworker didn’t recognize the woman, although they did think it was unusual. Kristen typically left work as soon as she clocked out. The next day, Kristen failed to show up for the first day of her UC Berkeley photography class. This was extremely uncharacteristic of her — but unfortunately, her new roommates and coworkers didn’t know her well enough to be immediately alarmed by her absence.

Three days after she was last seen, Kristen’s parents in North Carolina received a call from one of her Oakland roommates: They hadn’t seen Kristen since Monday. The Modafferis caught the first flight out to the Bay Area.

The missing person report landed on the desk of Oakland Police Department missing persons detective Patrick Mahanay. Though Mahanay is now retired from the force and working in private security, the case has never left him.

“At the time, we had over 800 open missing persons cases,” Mahanay said at a recent meeting at an East Bay cafe. “Those included runaways, which were probably 90% of the caseload. Another 5% were people who just wanted to duck away for a while. There were very few cases like Kristen’s.”

Because 18-year-old Kristen was no longer technically a child, her disappearance was grouped in with other missing adults.

“Something that was frustrating early on is that, because she was 18, the first questions that people had to ask were like, ‘Do you think she meant to disappear? Do you think that she doesn’t want to be found?’” Meghan Modafferi recalled.

There was no question in the family’s minds, though: Nothing seemed right or logical about the situation. It all happened so suddenly that Allison and Kristen left a story half-told on the phone a few days prior.

“I was like, ‘I’ll finish later. We’ll finish this conversation later,’” Allison recalled. “She didn’t run away. She didn’t have any reason to run away. … She was doing what she wanted to. She was having this dream summer, and someone or something interrupted it.”

When the Modafferis arrived in the Bay Area, they immediately hired a private investigator. The PI hit the ground running, interviewing roommates and coworkers before Oakland police did. “It was one of 25 reports I got that morning,” Mahanay said. “Then, I heard the PI’s involvement, so we put it in the priority pile.”



Mahanay connected with the PI, and the pair shared notes. Kristen’s acquaintances told consistent stories; no one in her new circle of friends raised red flags. The roommates were cleared, and the blonde woman at the Crocker Galleria was never identified or found. It was a dead end. On a search of her room, a copy of the San Francisco Bay Guardian was discovered. In it, a personal ad was circled: “Friends. Female seeking friend(s) to share activities, who enjoy music, photography, working out, walks, coffee or simply the beach, exploring the Bay Area! Interested, call me.”

By the time investigators found the magazine, the Bay Guardian’s ad department had wiped its files. It was impossible to figure out if Kristen had placed the ad or if she was circling one she intended to respond to. Another dead end.

Mahanay also called in a bloodhound. Items belonging to Kristen were used as scent identifiers, and the dog was taken to the Crocker Galleria. The dog went out the door and headed west on Geary Street into the Tenderloin. It was consistent with their theory that Kristen may have taken the 38 Geary Muni to Lands End.

“She probably caught a bus and headed on down there,” Mahanay recalled thinking at the time. “So we ended up pulling the dog off after around 20 minutes.”


On July 10, a little over a month after Kristen went missing, an assignment editor at KGO-TV picked up the phone. The man on the other end of the line told the editor that he knew what had happened to Kristen: Two jealous “lesbians” had killed Kristen in a car near the old Tower Records store on Market Street in the Castro, before driving over the Golden Gate Bridge and dumping her body “by a wooden bridge on the way to Point Reyes.” The KGO employee reached out to police, who followed up on the tip.

The caller named two employees of a San Francisco YMCA as the killers. When Mahanay met with the women, he found them unlikely suspects, to say the least. They were soon cleared.

The call was highlighted in a 1999 episode of “America’s Most Wanted,” renewing interest in the case. The person who made that call did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and SFGATE is not identifying him because he has never officially been named a person of interest or a suspect in this case.

“The FBI diligently investigated the matter along with our colleagues at OPD,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “After investigating all logical leads, FBI special agents did not uncover any evidence of foul play. The FBI closed its case in 2010.”

Nonetheless, it’s clear that after all these years, Mahanay can’t shake the detailed description of Modafferi’s last moments described on that prank call.

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