The 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.

Born in Connecticut in 1979, Kristen was 10 when her family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. A gifted student, Kristen skipped a grade in elementary school and would go on to win a distinguished four-year scholarship at North Carolina State University.

“She was just very, very bright, and she was a year ahead in school,” Kristen’s mother, Debbie Modafferi, told SFGATE. “She always did well, sometimes too well, and would correct the teacher.”

Kristen’s sisters, Allison and Lauren, remember singing a cappella songs with her. Meghan, Kristen’s youngest sister, remembers making playdough and reading “The Phantom Tollbooth” with her big sister. “She would help me understand the jokes,” Meghan says. “I remember that really fondly.”

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 Mahaney. Though Mahaney 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,” Mahaney 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,” Mahaney said. “Then, I heard the PI’s involvement, so we put it in the priority pile.”

Meanwhile, Bob and Debbie Modafferi, and their three daughters, desperately tracked Kristen’s last known whereabouts in San Francisco. They canvassed the streets, handing out flyers with Kristen’s face on them and affixing them to posts.

Mahaney 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.

Mahaney 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,” Mahaney 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 Mahaney 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.

In the months following Kristen’s disappearance, billboards showing Kristen smiling at her high school graduation alongside the text “Forever in our hearts” went up around the Bay Area. Mahaney says up to 17 search warrants were carried out on undisclosed locations, but an arrest was never made.

A spokesperson from the FBI’s San Francisco office told SFGATE they had no reason to believe foul play had befallen Kristen at all.

“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, Mahaney can’t shake the detailed description of Modafferi’s last moments described on that prank call.

“I made the analogy once,” Mahaney said. “When you take the cellophane off a pack of gum, you try to throw it away, and it sticks to your hand. We’ve been trying to throw it away for 25 years.”

What’s believed to be the last known photograph of Kristen was sent to Dennis Mahon a few months after he spoke with the Spinelli’s staff in the summer of 1997. A coworker of Kristen’s told Mahon that she took the photo in a makeshift art gallery in SoMa. “She just took a picture of art on the wall,” Mahon said. “But she noticed she had snapped Kristen in the photo, over on the right-hand side.”

Wearing a green blouse, with a brown purse on her hip, Kristen can be seen taking in a piece of artwork. Mahon said that he immediately sent the photo to Kristen’s mother, Debbie, who told him she “cried for days” after seeing it.

As years turned into decades, life has gone on for the Modafferi family. The girls, now grown, have careers and friends and families of their own. They’ve had benchmarks Kristen never got to see. They wonder what kind of adult she would have become. (“Maybe she would have ended up working in a museum. One of her best friends from high school is a curator for museums in Chicago,” Allison suggested. “She definitely would have been a ‘Harry Potter’ fan,” Lauren added.)

It’s been seven years since Mahaney left the Oakland Police Department. Even after retiring from the force, he has accompanied detectives who are following up on leads.

In 2015, a cadaver dog reportedly alerted to the scent of human decomposition at Kristen’s former Oakland residence on Jayne Avenue. But after Oakland police dug up the area, the lead was ruled inconsequential. Mahaney says that the scent may have come from a broken sewer pipe or even an ancient Native American burial ground. He strongly believes Kristen never made it back to Oakland that day.

Mahaney said anonymous tips still come in every so often. When asked where he believes Kristen is, he didn’t hesitate. “I’d say she was dumped off a bridge in Marin County,” he said, referring to the location mentioned in the prank KGO call.

He worked at one point with a deputy in the Marin County Sheriff’s Department to identify and search every wooden bridge in the area. They didn’t find her, but even if Mahaney’s hunch were right, it was a needle in a haystack: Floods, animals and heavy brush could all wipe out any trace of a body.

For families who have waited years to learn what happened to missing or slain loved ones, hope has been renewed by recent advancements in DNA extraction and forensic genealogy. Nearly every week, police departments around the nation announce arrests in long-cold cases: a trace of decades-old blood or a scraping from under a fingernail can now lead to justice. But with Kristen, there is no crime scene. There is no body. All investigators have to work with are fading memories and best guesses.

“I’m thinking Kristen’s up there somewhere going, ‘Come on, come on. Look a little deeper. Turn over one more rock,’” Mahaney said.

But for the Modafferis, there is a part of them that fears knowing what happened.

“Closure. Everybody talks about closure,” Meghan said. “It would be something to know what happened, but it’s also really terrifying to get confirmation that perhaps these horrifying things happened. So it’s not like closure would feel good exactly. The world is a dark, dark place when you look too closely.”

If Kristen did not fall victim to foul play, there is another possibility. Perhaps she did take the bus down to Lands End. She might have watched the sun sparkling on the Pacific Ocean and lifted her camera to her eyes to snap a few shots to bring to the first day of her photography class. In doing so, she might have lost her balance and fallen into the unforgiving sea.

“We talked to someone from the Oceanic Administration,” Mahaney said. “And they said yeah, if she fell in that night, she could be down in Monterey in three days. Under the waves there, there’s a bunch of caves. We tried to send divers in, but it’s just too dangerous. There will be skeletons in there from a hundred years ago. A thousand years ago.

“Hopefully that’s what it was. That would be the easiest way to go, you know.”

In 2014, Debbie and Bob Modafferi moved to Florida to enjoy their retirement. They had spent six sunny years there when Bob was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. In the spring of 2022, the last of his treatment options failed.

“When Bob passed away and I was saying goodbye to him, I told him to please give hugs from all of us to Kristen,” Debbie said. “Please give Kristen hugs from all of us. I’m praying they’re together.”

“I think every time we hear about a very old case, a very cold case, we find some more hope,” she went on. “… But as the years pass, and now with my husband recently passed away, I don’t know. I’m still trying to hold up hope, but, you know, I’m 73 now. I was 47 when we lost Kristen.

“I was young, and now I’m not.”