Nearly every college student dreams of being far from home. Living in unfamiliar surroundings gives one a sense of independence while transitioning to adulthood. Being out of one’s comfort zone can give a young person a chance to grow. Such adventures can be exciting but also dangerous.
Kristen Modafferi had just completed her freshman year at North Carolina State University, majoring in Design. She loved her home city of Charlotte and her adopted hometown of Raleigh, but she longed to travel beyond tobacco road. When presented the opportunity to spend the summer studying on the other side of the country, Kristen jumped at the chance. Of the many trips she had taken with her parents and three sisters, she had had the biggest blast in the Golden Gate City. Her chosen summer locale was San Francisco.
An eager Kristen arrived in San Francisco on June 1, 1997, her eighteenth birthday. On June 23 she disappeared. Twenty-seven years later her fate is unknown.
San Francisco is often called the most gorgeous city in America, but it may also have been where Kristen Modafferi’s life came to a grisly end.
Kristen planned to spend the summer taking photography classes at the University of California at Berkeley, thirteen miles to the northeast. Using Craig’s List, she found an apartment in Oakland and two part-time jobs, one at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (some sources state this job was full-time) and the other at Spinelli’s Coffee Shop at the Crocker Galleria Mall in San Francisco’s Financial District.
On June 23, Kristen finished her shift at the coffee shop at 3:00 p.m. A co-worker saw her and an unknown blond-haired woman walking together on the second floor of the mall forty-five minutes later. Other shoppers who recalled seeing Kristen with the woman said it appeared they knew each other as they were walking close together and appeared to be having a fairly intimate conversation.
Mall videos showed Kristen using a Wells Fargo ATM machine to withdraw money from her bank account. An outside camera then shows her exiting the mall. In both instances, she no longer appeared to be in the company of the blond-haired woman.
Kristen did not arrive home that evening or for work the following day. Her classes at Berkeley also began the following morning, for which she was also a no-show.
Kristen lived with five roommates, none of whom she knew well. She was not reported missing until June 26, three days later, when a roommate returned a voicemail left by her father, Bob. After the roommate told him no one had seen Kristen for three days, Bob reported his daughter missing to the San Francisco Police Department.
Police initially believed Kristen may have run away but later concluded her disappearance was not voluntarily. She had been looking forward to her classes at UC Berkeley and had already paid the full $925 tuition. In addition, she had not picked up her $400 check from the coffee shop.
On the day of her disappearance, Kristen had asked a co-worker for directions to Baker Beach, a public beach on the San Francisco peninsula, where she had had heard a party may be held. Bloodhounds tracked her scent from the mall to a nearby Muni 38 Geary bus stop. The bus route would have taken her to Sutro Park Beach, then to Land’s End Beach, near Baker Beach.
Kristen’s scent was further traced to Land End’s Beach but was lost near a cliff along a treacherous shoreline from which several people had accidentally fallen to their deaths. Investigators feared Kristen, unaware of how precarious the coastline was, may have plunged to her demise.
A search of the area, however, failed to find Kristen’s body or any of her clothing or belongings. In addition, at that time of day, the beaches were filled with tourists and, investigators believe, someone likely would have noticed if she had been in trouble.
On July 10, two-and-a-half weeks after Kristen’s disappearance, San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO-TV received an anonymous phone call from a man saying Kristen had been murdered after having been involved in a lesbian love triangle gone awry. The man provided the names of two women who he said had kidnapped and murdered her and dumped her body under a bridge in the Point Reyes area of Marin County, approximately sixty miles northwest of where bloodhounds had last tracked Kristen’s scent.
After speaking to the women, police determined they were not lesbians, did not know Kristen Modafferi, and had nothing to do with her disappearance. The women, however, were still of great help as they believed they knew who had called KGO-TV.
The women fingered thirty-six-year-old Jon Onuma, saying he had probably made the phone call because he was angry with them for recently firing his girlfriend, Jill Lampo, from her job at the local YMCA. The two women claim Onuma harassed them after Jill’s dismissal.
When police questioned Onuma, who lived in an apartment near the Galleria where Kristen worked, he eventually admitted making the phone call to KGO-TV and confirmed he did so because of his ire toward the women. He said he conceived the idea when he saw coverage of Kristen’s case on television, but he insisted he never met her and knew nothing about her disappearance other than what was reported in the press.
Police believed Onuma was not being completely forthright, and their suspicions were intensified after learning of his disturbing past with members of the opposite sex. Onuma was described as a “newspaper” and/or “internet troll” who met numerous women through personal ads. Many of these women accused him of physically abusing them if they refused to have sex with him.
In Kristen’s apartment bedroom, her parents found a Bay Guardians newspaper. In the June 11 personal section, one ad read “FRIENDS: Female seeking friends to share activities, who enjoy music, photography, working out, walks, coffee, or simply the beach, exploring the Bay area! Interested, call me.”
The phone number was not found on the ad and law enforcement were unable to determine who had placed the ad, as the newspaper had already purged their backlog.
Because all the activities mentioned in the ad were things which interested Kristen, her parents believed she could have placed it because she had not yet made many friends in the area.
Responding to such personals was a common method of operation of Jon Onuma. Many of his former girlfriends told investigators he also often used them to lure other women to him and abused them if they refused to do so. Several believe the blonde woman seen with Kristen at the mall could have been such a plant.
One former girlfriend said Onuma threatened her and referenced Kristen’s disappearance, saying the same thing could happen to her. Onuma denies making such a threat and claims the former girlfriend was angry at him because he was moving from San Francisco and no longer wanted to date her.
DNA testing in Onuma’s apartment detected sizable amounts of blood, but additional testing determined it was that of a cat.
The woman most often claimed to be used by Onuma to lure other women was his onetime girlfriend Jill Lampo. In searching Onuma’s apartment, which he had previously shared with Jill, police found her diary was missing several pages covering the time period Kristen had been in San Francisco. Jill, who by this time had broken up with Onuma, told police he had torn the pages out because the diary’s contents could have incriminated him in Kristen’s disappearance.
Jill is a natural brunette and police do not believe she was involved in Kristen’s disappearance. Though she could have worn a wig or dyed her hair, she does not fit the physical description of the blond woman seen walking with Kristen at the mall.
Onuma apologized for making the bogus phone call and remains adamant that he never met Kristen and has no knowledge of her whereabouts. He returned to his native Hawaii in 1999 where he still lives today.
Nothing concretely links Jon Onuma to Kristen Modafferi’s disappearance, but police still consider him a person of interest.
Real estate heir Robert Durst is also a person of interest in Kristen’s disappearance. The eldest son of New York City real estate magnate Seymour Durst is believed to be responsible for the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen McCormick, the 2000 murder of journalist Susan Berman, and the 2001 murder of his neighbor, Morris Black. Durst was acquitted of Black’s murder in 2003, but he was convicted of Berman’s murder in September 2021, and sentenced to life in prison. In October, he was charged in connection with McCormack’s disappearance, but he died in January 2022, before the trial began.
Durst is also considered a person of interest in the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Karen Mitchell, who vanished while vacationing in Eureka, California, two-hundred-seventy miles north of San Francisco, over the 1997 Thanksgiving holiday, five months after Kristen disappeared.
Durst was believed to be in the Bay Area at the time Kristen vanished, but nothing connects him to her.
For many years, it was believed Kristen disappeared in San Francisco and many have criticized the initial police investigation for not focusing more on the Oakland angle. The house Kristin rented on the east side of the bay was next door to a halfway house for parole violators. In 2015, eighteen years after her disappearance, both houses were searched by police.
Using a new technique pioneered by a California-Berkeley anthropologist, cadaver dogs indicated human decomposition chemicals in the home’s basem*nt as well as at the base of the former halfway house. A dig in the basem*nt using ground-penetrating radar, however, revealed nothing. Investigators say the soil and dense clay would have made it difficult to dig a hole deep enough to bury a person.
In 2017, however, authorities announced blood had been found in the basem*nt, and DNA testing indicated it could be Kristen’s because it had characteristics consistent with her parents’ DNA. The finding suggested she made it back to Oakland and was murdered in the basem*nt of the house she rented but that her remains were buried elsewhere. Investigators have not said if they have any clues suggesting where her body was disposed.
Kristen’s living next door to a halfway house provides an array of suspects in her disappearance.
Police are now also looking closer at the four males and one female who shared the house with Kristen at the time of her disappearance, and the Oakland Police Department is now assisting their counterparts across the bay in the investigation.
Kirsten Deborah Modafferi has been missing since June 23, 1997. At the time of her disappearance, she was five-feet-eight inches tall and weighed one-hundred-forty pounds. Her hair and eyes were brown and she had pronounced dimples.
Kristen Modafferi would today be forty-five-years-old. If you have any information relating to her disappearance, please contact the Oakland, California, Missing Persons Unit at 510-238-3352, the San Francisco, California, Missing Persons Unit at 415-558-5508 of the San Francisco FBI office at 415-553-7400.
Kristen Modafferi disappeared three weeks after her eighteenth birthday, meaning she legally was an adult. Reported missing on June 26, police initially believed she may have left of her own volition, which, as an adult, she was free to do. Consequently, they did not begin investigating her disappearance as that of an endangered missing person until June 30. If she had gone missing three weeks earlier, while still seventeen, she would have been a minor and the response time would have been quicker.
After her disappearance, “Kristen’s Law” was passed. From 2001-2004, the act provided “assistance to law enforcement and families in missing persons cases of those over the age of 17” and authorized $1 million per year to support organizations including the National Center for Missing Adults.
Kristen’s Law expired in 2005 when the center’s federal funding ran out. The center continues with volunteer efforts.
Kristen’s father, Bob, died in April 2022, at age seventy-three.
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