Welcome back to The Pathwent Chili. I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm
Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's case. June twenty third, nineteen
ninety seven, San Francisco, California. After completing her shift at a coffee
shop at the Crocker Galleria, eighteen year old Christian Motifery vanishes without a trace,
even though coworkers report seeing Christian with a blonde woman, she's never identified,
and bloodhounds track Christians sent to the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Land's
End, over six miles away. Weeks later, a man named John o'numa
phones in a fake tip in which he falsely accuses two women of murdering Kristin.
But even though Numa does a number of suspicious things and multiple women accuse
him of abuse, no conclusive evidence ties him to Christian's disappearance. After that,
the Path Went Chile. So today we're going to be covering an unsolved
case involving a missing university student, the nineteen ninety seven disappearance of Kristin Modafery.
At the time of her disappearance, Kristin Modaferi was a student at North
Carolina State University, but decided to relocate to the San Francisco Bay area for
the summer in order to take some classes at the University of California, Berkeley.
She got herself a job at a mall coffee shop, but went missing
after leaving at the end of her ship one afternoon, though some of Kristen's
co workers would report seeing her in the company of an unidentified blonde woman.
The case would take an una expected turn weeks later, when a man named
John O'numa phoned in an anonymous tip, falsely implicating two women in Kristen's disappearance.
While he attempted to write off the whole thing as a stupid prank,
suspicion mounted that Onuma might have been personally involved in what happened to Kristin,
particularly since there were numerous women who accused Onuma of abuse, and he would
reportedly use other women in order to lure his victims to him. But no
conclusive evidence has ever implicated Onuma, and this is one of those frustrating cold
cases in which there are a lot of different pieces of the puzzle, but
they just don't quite fit together. Some of the information you'll hear today was
sourced from the website find Kristin dot com, which is run by a man
named Dennis Mann, who lived in Kristin's hometown of Charlotte at the time she
went missing before he volunteered to assist with the search effort, and he remains
a major advocate for twenty seven years later. Mann also released his own multi
episode podcasts about this taste titled Fine Kristen, and has made every effort to
piece together what happened to her, but we still don't have any definitive answers.
This is what's so horrifying about this case. It's a young eighteen year
old who's enrolled in college and she's so ambitious over in North Carolina. She
wants to go to Berkeley for the summer and take some more courses, and
in order to accomplish that, she gets this job at the mall. So
she's seen with a woman at her coffee shop before she leaves for the night,
and then all of a sudden, there's this phone call by a man
who kind of shifts the investigation. As you're describing it, I thought,
well, wait a minute, her coworkers described her being with this woman.
Then you have John who's calling in this tip that ends up causing a big
stir in the investigation. But then, Robin, you just said he actually
used other women to help lure abuse victims to him, And my heart just
sank because even if this blonde woman she was sided with was someone involved,
John could still be the main perpetrator in the case. Or it's very possible
the woman could be unrelated to the case, or the woman acted alone.
So it opens up a whole host of possible answers of was this woman even
involved and was she actually working for John? Yeah, there are so many
possibilities here because, as we're going to talk about, John Ouma did have
a girlfriend at that time who may know more than she's letting on. But
this woman was not a blonde, but of course that doesn't preclude the possibility
of her being in disguise or possibly wearing a blonde wig. So opinions aren't
divided. Some people think that John Onuma is guilty and cause Kristen's disappearance,
but at the other hand, he may just be like a prick who decided
to phone in a false tip and completely complicated the investigation so that the focus
has never left him. So there is just no real evidence pointing to any
one conclusion. All we know for certain is that Kristen is gone and is
not and found for twenty seven years. It speaks volumes for her character that
she has someone back home who says, you know, twenty some odd years
later, I'm still fighting for justice for her, that she was that important,
that she was that loved, and that it was so important to that
community to say, we have to have answers for someone who's one of ours.
Even though she was in California at the time, what happened to her,
one of our children went missing. Our story begins in California in nineteen
ninety seven, and our central figure is eighteen year old Kristin Motiferi. Originally
born in Danbury, Connecticut, to parents Bob and Debbie Modiferi. Kristin was
the second of their four daughters, and the family would relocate to Charlotte,
North Carolina. After receiving a four year scholarship to North Carolina State University and
completing her freshman year as an industrial design major, Kristin decided to make a
temporary move to the San Francisco Bay Area in order to take a summer photography
course at the University of California, Berkeley, which would count towards her credits
at NC State. She is the Internet to find a rented room at a
Victorian house located on Jane Avenue in Oakland, which she would share with four
male roommates, and Kristin officially arrived and moved in on June first, which
happened to be her eighteenth birthday. In order to support herself, Kristin found
a job working the morning shift at Spinelli's coffee shop in the Crocker Galleria mall,
located in San Francisco's Financial District, and she was also planning to work
part time on weekends in a coffee shop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. At around three p m. On the afternoon of June twenty third,
the day before her photography course was scheduled to start, Kristin completed her
shift at Spinelle's and asked her co workers for recommendations of places to visit,
even though she said she'd already been there. Kristin briefly mentioned the possibility of
traveling to Ocean Beach, located in lands End Park next to the Pacific Ocean
but after leaving Spinelle's, Kristin never returned to her residence in Oakland that night
and was not heard from again. She did not attend her first photography class
at Berkeley the following morning, and never returned to Spinelle's, even though she
left behind an unclaimed four hundred dollars paycheck. Based on her character, it's
pretty clear that this was not a voluntary exit because she had just planned too
much. She had worked too hard to try to get out to California.
She had these jobs arranged, and she's about to start courses, which seems
to be her priority right now in life, to get that industrial design degree,
to make sure she's financing her whole dream out in California. In my
heart, I want to know, I'm assuming the roommates were all ruled out.
To have an eighteen year old little girl from North Carolina fly cross country
and live in a home with four guys that she didn't really know. How
were they ruled out pretty quickly? Yeah, we're going to talk more about
the roommates as we go along, but they have never been considered to be
suspects, And it might seem unusual that like an eighteen year old girl who
was away from home for the first time, would move in with four other
guys that she didn't even know, but by the sounds of it, because
Christian was so active and was would go get up early to go to work
and spent a lot of time sight seeing in San Francisco, these roommates really
didn't see her all that often because she would come home late at night and
then wake up next morning to do it all over again. So they didn't
really cross pass all that much. But there has never been any red flags
to indicate that they were involved in Kristen's disappearance. Good it doesn't seem like
she even got home that night, because from the sounds of it, she
had plans to, like you said, be sight seeing and to go out
and about. She seems like one of those kids that once she started school,
she'd be at the library anyway, hanging out, you know, doing
her schoolwork and making sure the investment she made to make that trip to California
actually paid off. So just make sure they were all ruled out in case
there had been a problem at home. Silly question, what exactly is industrial
design? Let me look, Yeah, I'm not even sure either, Okay,
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was thinking an interior design,
but me too. And then I'm like, what does she design the
interiors of industrial buildings? Because an architect would. Let's see it says,
an industrial designer actually develops concepts for manufactured goods such as cars, home appliances,
and toys. So they combine art, business, and engineering to make
everyday products for everyday use. Very cool, Very cool. I got a
toy designer. How fun would that be? So none of Kristen's roommates became
concerned enough to reporter missing, as they figured she was probably staying with someone,
but her father, Bob, left a voicemail at the residence. When
one of the roommates returned Bob's call and informed him that no one had seen
or heard from Kristen in three days, Bob and his wife, Debbie,
hopped on the first available flight to San Francisco, and Christian's roommates finally reported
her missing to the Oakland Police Department. By the time police launched an investigation,
one week had passed since Kristen's disappearance, but the Mada Fairies remained in
the Bay Area performing their own search for their daughter, handing out missing persons
flyers, and hiring the services of a private investigator. An intriguing lead was
provided by two of Kristen's co workers, who reported seeing her with a young
blond woman on the second floor of the Crocker Galleria about forty five minutes after
her final shift at Spinelli's ended. According to those who worked with her,
it was uncharacteristic for Kristin to hang around the mall for a long period of
time following her shifts, as she had spent the previous three weeks leaving as
quickly as possible in order to explore the city. Even though a public plea
was sent out for this blond woman to come forward, she never did and
she could not be identified. I can tell kind of the dynamic just from
the description you gave of the roommates with the parents. How incredible that these
are guys that live with her. She's only been there a couple of weeks,
and when the parents are calling to check on her, one of the
roommates has the decency responsibility to call mom and dad back and instantly can tell
how serious this is because they're thinking, eighteen year old girl, we don't
see her a lot. She's eighteen out at college, like she's probably hanging
out with people and doing her own thing. But as soon as her parents
voiced something's wrong and that they're boarding a flight to get out to San Francisco
to check on her, they go into action as well to help mom and
dad. So it sounds like they report her missing while mom and dad are
on their way, and it's the police who drag their feet a couple of
days. I'm assuming that's because she's eighteen, right, and there's no sign
quote end quote that something wrong had happened to her. Oh yeah, we're
going to talk about this. But this was caused a lot of red tape
because Kristin legally became an adult only weeks before she went missing. That's when
she turned eighteen, So of course there's still feelings that she's an adult.
She could take off if she wanted to, so she didn't get the same
urgency as if she was a kid or a teenager who had gone missing.
But yeah, some people have been suspicious of the roommates for not reporting her
missing immediately, but they operated on different schedules, like they would go in
and out of the house, they would barely see Kristin. So as far
as they know, there's nothing suspicious about the fact that they hadn't seen her
because they're not aware that she isn't showing up for her shifts at work or
her classes at college. And like you said, once they found out from
once they heard from her father and found out that they hadn't heard from Kristin,
that's when they realized, okay, something is wrong and they finally took
action. I think it'd be very different had you said their arrangement was like,
hey, Wednesday night's game nights with roommates or Thursday night we all cooked
together and she just didn't bother to show up, but we didn't pay any
attention to it. Or she always called and checked in on her way back
to tell us you'll leave the door online, and she didn't call. They
didn't have that dynamic. This was a living situation that was convenient for all
of them. And so after hearing what you said, I think they acted
absolutely appropriately. There's nothing to worry about until mom and dad say, guys,
this is out of her behavior, and they say, tell us what
to do, And it sounds like they went straight into action to help the
parent. It's so it's such a perilous situation when you have a missing person
and you aren't necessarily close with roommates in the sense that, like you said,
you're seeing them every day, or you have these routines that you're sticking
to. You're like ships passing in the night. So we've seen cases where
people were deceased murdered in their apartment, like in their room, and their
roommates were just going about their business and they didn't discover them for a great
amount of time later, or that they were missing, and it took days
to actually figure that out, for everyone to come together and be like,
oh, because it's not just Kristin likely in the situation who's passing. These
four other guys are likely working, going to school, doing all of the
things, and so it's going to take all of them coming together to go
like, dude, when did you last see Kristen And then they all figure
out that this is a problem. So it's fortunate that they actually got together
and were able to provide her parents with that information because Debbie and Bob I
feel for them. They probably were really scared having Kristin leave home live with
all of these guys, and they're worried about the things that could happen to
her. And then before she can even start this photography course, she goes
missing. It's just so heartbreaking. Investigators decided to use a police bloodhound who
picked up Christen sent from a pillowcase at her residence and later wound up tracking
the scent from Spinelli's to the number thirty eight bus stop on Geary Street,
located just a few blocks away from the Galleria. Now, this particular bus
route t west and ended at Sutro Heights Park, located at Land's End,
over six miles away, and when Kristin had mentioned the possibility of traveling to
Land's End and revisiting Ocean Beach following her shift, her coworkers told her that
the quickest way to get there was taking the number thirty eight bus on Geary
Street. This prompted police to drive the bloodhound a Land's End and it picked
up Christian scent beneath the Cliff House, a historic restaurant located near Ocean Beach,
and tracked it to a tunnel which was part of the Sutro Bath ruins.
After that, the dog lost the scent and since the location was near
a rocky, windswept cliff next to the shoreline. There was speculation the Christian
could have fallen into the Pacific Ocean and drowned before her body was swept away.
However, Christian's family was skeptical of this explanation because the Sutro Baths had
a lot of tourist activity and no one reported seeing or hearing anything unusual on
the day she vanished. In addition, Kristin had told her roommates that she
went to a summer Solstice party at Ocean Beach on the evening of June twenty
first, two days before she went missing. Kristin also apparently said she went
to a party with two women, but they were never identified. While the
authorities were unable to find anyone else who attended this party or could confirm that
the party even took place, they could not discount the possibility that the bloodhound
only picked up Kristen sent near Ocean Beach because she went to that location on
the twenty first but never actually went there on the twenty third. Fun side
fact, when I went to San Francisco for a criminology conference, I ate
a the cliff house and visited the Sutra Bass. It was amazing good,
it was really amazing. So I know exactly where she was that night where
they found her scent. It is a very busy area. It's a beach
area. But I think if she was at that tourist location, there would
have been somebody who would be paying attention or would have noticed something out of
sorts. It's very very possible that, yes, she had been there,
but the date is incorrect of when she was there. That's the problem with
things like a bloodhound or saying like well, you know there's DNA here.
Yes, But if her scent or if some piece of evidence is found there
and she had ever been there, then it makes sense that these bloodhounds would
smell her scent, and she had confirmed that with some of her roommates.
So oh, it's very confusing. Likely she was on this adventure during the
day as well, because remember she gets off her shift, she does the
morning shift at the coffee shop, and so I don't see her going out
to the beach and drowning during the day, unless people assumed she was out
there till midnight or one am, when you wouldn't have the same kind of
tourist level and population out there. But yeah, I tend to believe that
if she said she was out there on the twenty first, it's very possible
those bloodhounds were saying she's been here, but it doesn't prove she was there
the twenty third. So from your recollection of going there, would you say
that it was crowded a lot of the time and that it would be very
unlikely for someone to fall off without anyone seeing anything. So okay, So
the cliff house is up high obviously on the cliff, and the Sutra baths
are down further. So if she was going to the Sutra bath area,
I don't feel like there would have been as many places to fall, but
I mean there there could have been. If she was there during the day,
it would have been too much traffic. Had she been there towards dusk
and at the in the evening, yes, of course there's a chance something
could have happened without a bunch of people being around. But had she been
there during daylight, I think that there would have been too many people to
not recognize something odd going on. Kristen's parents, Bob and Debbie, decided
to search through her personal possessions inside her rented room in Oakland and came across
a cop be of the weekly alternative newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
This particular issue was for the week of June the eleventh to the seventeenth,
and it featured a personal ad which had been circled and read quote 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 end quote. Unfortunately, the backlog of The Bay Guardian's computer records for
personal ads had already been deleted by this point, so it could not be
determined if Kristen had answered this personal ad or placed it herself, or if
it even had any relevance at all to her disappearance. However, since the
person who wrote the ad had similar hobbies to Kristin, her parents believed she
might have written it. That's what I thought. As soon as you read
the ad, I went, is this her? She? It seems like
it is. It's a very similar to just to remember, she's there for
photography. She goes out to the beach and likes to explore, and she
w at a coffee shop. Now these are not unlikely hobbies when you live
in San Francisco, but it is something that makes you think would an eighteen
year old posts this when she lives with four guys, she hasn't started classes,
and the only people she's really interacting with are her co workers. It
seems likely that she could have said, I'm going to turn to the San
Francisco Bay Guardian and see if there's any other young people who want to hang
out and other girls that want to get together and hang out. And it
seems like Kristen actually was finding some people to socialize with. These two women
who invited her to this summer Solstice party if it occurred, the woman who
she ran into at the mall. So it makes you wonder how did she
meet them, Who were these people, what were their backgrounds? But no
one knows. Back in the prehistoric days before the Internet, when you would
actually have to put a physical ad in a physical newspaper in order to meet
people, it must sound so wild to anyone who's like gen Z right,
the idea of somebody actually putting a personal ad in a physical paper to meet
somebody, rather than like using some kind of app to either find her own
magic partner or a friend. It's wild. Yeah, you used to actually
have to talk to people and seek people and reach out. But yeah,
this is a printed ad that she would have had to put out if it's
her saying help, I need a friend. And what's scary is if she
had placed that ad and if her personal information had ever been shared, it
does open her up to a lot of people who or seeking ulterior motives or
said, let's trick her by meeting her under the guise of being a friend,
but then we can take advantage of her dangerous like Craigslist could be dangerous.
Oh my gosh, yes, I remember Craigslist being the hot thing.
On July tenth, two and a half weeks after Kristen went missing, the
case would take a disturbing turn when an anonymous male caller phoned the newsroom assignment
manager at San Francisco's a b C affiliate k g O t V. The
caller claimed that two women from the local y MCA had abducted and murdered Christen
over a lesbian love triangle gone wrong, and hid her remains beneath the bridge
in the Point Reya's area of Marin County. While investigators looked into this lead,
but were unable to find eddy remains or evidence at this location, and
when they tracked down these two women at the y m c A, they
both denied any knowledge or involvement in Christian's disappearance and were ruled out as suspects.
However, when the women were asked if they knew any one who held
a grudge against them and might have been compelled to falsely implicate them in a
murder, they both named a thirty six year old man named John or Numa,
who worked about a mile away from the Crocker Galleria. The two women
had both worked alongside on Numa's girlfriend, Jill Lampo, but did not get
along with her, and since Sonuma believed they were conspiring to get her fired,
he responded by threatening and harassing them for it. When investigators questioned Onuma,
he initially denied being the anonymous caller, but eventually admitted he did phone
in the tip because he was intentionally trying to cause problems for the two women.
As revenge, He decided to falsely accuse them of murder after hearing about
Christian Modiferi's disappearance in the media, but maintained that he had no prior knowledge
of the case. In spite of the numa's suspicious actions, there was no
evidence to implicate him, and he eventually left San Francisco. Here's what's so
ridiculous is that these two women so easily could look at each other and say,
who would have done something like this? Oh, John would have done
something like this. He's actually threatened to take us down and destroy our lives
because of Jill, and so it's really bizarre to think of how twisted this
individual is that in order to protect his girlfriend, he's going around threatening these
other women to a point that when they're questioned by police, they say,
I know who did this, John, And when they go to John,
eventually he says that yes, he made this call, but it was only
to destroy these women's lives. He's really doing a lot of things here.
He's destroying at the time, their character for murder and for their sexual orientation.
This is San Francisco, so way more accepting, but twenty seven years
ago, these are two women who are being accused of being lesbians and may
not be accepted by everybody, especially law enforcement. So it's possible that he
was trying to tear down their character in multiple ways, right, that they
would not only abuse this woman, that there's these two lesbians in this love
triangle, and then they kill her and dispose of her. What a dramatic
turn because they didn't like your girlfriend and might have been trying to get her
fired from work. It seems ridiculously escalated. And the other part of me,
though, thinks, if this guy has nothing to do with Kristen's disappearance,
and it truly is all about Jill, how messed up that his call
would focus all these resources and attention towards an investigation down this path. And
then what if it's nothing. What if John has nothing to do with it?
What if these two women had nothing to do with it, And there's
a totally different lead that the police could have missed because they were spending so
much time on this guy's ridiculous phone call to law enforcement. Oh yeah,
Like, regardless of whether or not John Onnuma was actually complicit in that Kristen's
disappearance, it's indisputable that he is a major douchebag for even doing this in
the first place, and he is a very troubling individual. And we'll talk
more about this later. But when he gave his story to the news affiliate,
he didn't just flat out say, oh, these two women I know
murdered Kristan Mataferi, Like, he gave a detailed layout of how they did
it and what they did. And it just seems so weird to me that
he would give such details about a case that he supposedly had no knowledge of,
just as some sort of weird prank. So that's why, even though
like this happened something like twenty seven years ago, people are still suspicious of
John o'neuma to this day and think that he didn't just do this as some
sort of prank. He knows something about the case and maybe projecting because he
was the one who murdered Kristen. And do we even know if these women
were out as gay, because it's just just an extra layer of like bottom
tier human behavior to put a tip out there with their names, and this
suggests as a lesbian love triangle. If these women aren't out of the closet
like that could be a real problem for them, both in their employment and
in their personal lives given the time period. Well, thank you, the
police were very protective of the women, like their names and nothing about their
personal lives was released publicly. All they really said is that they were ruled
out as suspects. So I really don't know if they were actually gay or
lesbian. And this could have been just a sort of detail that no Numa
decided to add to the story. But yes, you're right, if it
was that way and they were being outed by them, then that just adds
a whole other element of sleaziness to this whole situation. And what's wild is
this man thirty six years old. This is not a twenty four year old
trying to get revenge on someone at thirty six. If your girlfriend is not
getting along with people at work, it's one of those things. You help
her personally, You give her some tips of how to professionally deal with it,
you help her get a different job, You let it go like you
act professionally, and you say, this is the best we can do here,
Maybe we need to get you out of the situation, and you leave
at thirty six. I feel like this whole ruse and call to police it
really shows some kind of like immaturity at the best, but mental health issues
of someone who would go this far to get back at somebody because of your
girlfriend's work situation. There's a slight misogynistic bent too, when you have men
getting involved in women's business and you see it like the most clearly. I
don't know if either of you watch like reality TV or housewives when you see
a situation where you got the men jumping in trying to, like, you
know, defend their wives, but they look very anti women when they start
going out a woman rather than letting the women handle it themselves. Is just
never a good look. Here, he is at forty six, like you
said, intervening when he should just be supporting her and be a shoulder for
her to cry on if she's having issues, maybe give her suggestions of how
she could move forward in a positive way. But like, what is he
doing involving himself at some thing like a sixteen year old kid would do?
Oh exactly. And I know that Jill Lampo was in her twenties at that
point. She was considerably younger than Onuma, So he definitely comes across as
a major predator. However, in May of nineteen ninety nine, Kristen's case
was featured on America's Most Wanted and it was announced that authorities wanted to locate
John Onuma for further questioning. During the preceding two years, a number of
women had come forward to accuse Ouma of abusing them or stealing their money,
and three of them agreed to be interviewed on The America's Most Wanted episode.
One of these women referred to Onuma as a quote unquote human vampire who sucks
the life out of you, and the victims accused him of such horrific acts
as holding them against their will as a sex slave, and beating and torturing
them with such methods as burning their hands with cigarettes. These women said that
they did not report these incidents at the time because they feared retaliation from Onuma,
and one of them claimed that she was abused by him shortly after Kristen
went missing and heard him say quote, you know, I'm going to have
to kill you. I can't let you go now. You know what happened
to kristin Modaferi end quote. Only a few days after The America's Most Wanted
episode aired, it was announced that a viewer tip had helped authorities locate Onnuma
in his native Hawaii, and he agreed to fly to California to meet up
with the investigators on Kristen's case and take a light detector test. It's unclear
if this ever took place, but no. Numa has never been charged in
connection to any of these allegations of abuse against him. Anuma's victims claimed that
he originally met them through personal ads and newspapers, and would sometimes use other
women, including his girlfriend Jill Lampo, to Lua's victims to him. This
detail is particularly interesting when you consider the personal ad found in Kristin's room and
the sighting of her with the unidentified blonde woman before she went missing. But
it must be clarified that Jill Lampo is a brunette, so the only way
she could be the woman seen with Kristen is if she had dyed her hair
or wore a blonde wig that day. So do you know, Robin,
how many of these women that come forward were there were the police taking their
claims seriously? Did they believe that these women truly were abused and tortured the
way that they described by John, Because that really does put him in a
different category. Like I said, at the best, he was showing signs
of being immature, but at the worst. There really seems to be a
big flaw in the kind of human he is just from the claims, but
now to think that there's women backing up that he was physically and sexually abusive
emotionally abusive. If the police are validating those claims, it does put him
in a different light towards Christen's disappearance. I think the police did take them
seriously because these women were interviewed on America's Most Wanted and I don't think the
police would have let them do that unless they believe their claim re credible.
But I think at this time they pretty much figured this is nothing more than
he said, she said, So we don't actually have any evidence to prosecute
him other than their word, because as far as I can tell, he
has never faced any criminal charges for any of this. But it does sound
like law enforcement does believe that these women's accounts are true. I mean,
that's a lot of smoke, having that many women come forward for there to
be no fire one thousand percent, And it is scary to think there was
a public ad where she's asking people to come meet her. It intensifies the
situation when you think Kristen could have placed a physical ad asking people to contact
her to hang out. Because if you are a predator or you're someone who
likes to manipulate and abuse people, that's a perfect opportunity to go through the
newspaper and say, here's a woman seeking companionship and friendship in a new city.
She's letting people know that she isn't familiar right, she's exploring, and
it opens her up to someone who's a predator saying I want to hurt this
individual. It's a very vulnerable, perfect candidate, someone begging, someone begging
for social companionship and attention. So oh, it really does put John in
a different perspective hearing that those women came forward against him. When investigators performed
a search of the apartment that Lampo and Numa had been sharing and found Lampo's
day planner, they noticed that some pages from June nineteen ninety seven were missing.
This would have corresponded with the time period when Christian disappeared, and Lampo
claimed that a Numa tore the pages out because he believed there was material in
there that could come back to hurt him. In June of two thousand and
one, Christian's case would be featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and
while Onuma agreed to participate, the show only referred to him by his first
name, and his interview was filmed in silhouette in order to conceal his face,
and his voice was digitally altered. Ouma any involvement in Christian's disappearance and
acknowledged that he made a big mistake by phoning in a fake tip before apologizing
to the Modifery family. He also claimed that he passed a polygraph test given
by a reputable expert. At some point, Numa wound up being evicted from
the house where he was living in Hawaii, and shortly thereafter, a briefcase
containing a number of articles about Christian's case was found inside the attic. Okay,
so clearly he's obsessed with the case in general, whether or not he's
the one who actually kidnapped or harmed Kristen. He has a briefcase that has
a number of articles about her disappearance in it. That's odd. I can't
remember a single case that someone who's not an investigator or someone associated with the
case. I can't think of why you'd sit there and collect newspaper articles about
a given disappeared young lady. He also intertwined himself so deeply. Not only
is he collecting the newspaper ads or articles, but he's also making this phone
call saying he knows what happened to her and getting himself in her twined that
way, and he talks about passing a polygraph test. Is this done by
law enforcement? And did he? I haven't seen any corroboration about this.
We only have Ouma's word from his interview where he said I passed a polygraph
test, and he just said given by a reputable expert. But law enforcement
never confirmed or denied that. Yeah, I don't see that happening. I
think law enforcement would have come forward and said, listen, he passed a
light detector test, we need to kind of widen our scope and look somewhere
else. But he's saying he just passed it by some reputable expert. And
who the heck knows who that is? According to him, I mean the
way he talks and has this fantasy life that he leads it could be his
girlfriend, who knows. But the briefcase with the number of articles and him
tearing out those pages because there's something that quote could come back and harm him.
What else, what did you write in your date planner? And why
are you collecting those articles if you had nothing to do with the case.
What would have implicated you in your day planner? Yep, just seems like
too much of a coincidence that it happens to correspond with the time period when
Kristen went missing, and there's multiple layers to it. It's all of those
things added up. It's in him saying, oh, I thought I'd actually
get caught, I'd be implicated with those two pages of my day planner or
whatever. Like John, You're he's a mess. And think who compiles a
whole briefcase of articles about a case when you had nothing to do with it.
Do you guys think he could have been compiling those articles to get information
when he made those false claims, or do you think it was too soon
and he was collecting those articles after the anonymous tip was called in. I
don't think Kristen's case got that much coverage when he made his tip, Like
she'd only been missing for a few weeks at this point. So I have
to think that if he has an entire briefcase, that he had been collecting
them over the course of the next several years. If he got a polygraph
test from a reputable expert, wouldn't you list who that reputable expert was so
that law enforcement or the public could be able to discern, Like you said,
as it could have been like his girlfriend, It could have been anybody
who were like, oh, yes, reputable expert over here, she administered
a polygraph, when really it's like, not actually a polygraph, So why
don't we know who this person is or what agency they were from, or
what organization. And you would think if he passed it, you'd think if
he passed it with that expert, wouldn't the law enforcement give him the same
polygraph or give him an exam as well and say, yeah he did,
he passed that private one and he passed hours that didn't happen. One would
think, I got doctor Nick Riviera to give me this polygraph, don't you
believe him? So during the early stages of the investigation, Kristen's parents had
attempted to contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but we're told
they cannot provide any assistance since uk Kristen was legally an adult when she disappeared
even though she had only turned eighteen three weeks earlier. So the case eventually
inspired Sue Meyrick, the US representative for North Carolina's ninth Congressional District, to
introduce a new bill titled Kristen's Act, which would provide assistance to law enforcement
and families of missing adults over the age of seventeen. Kristen's Act would allow
for the annual sequestering of one million dollars in support of missing persons organizations,
including the National Center for Missing Adults, and it was officially signed into law
by President Bill Clinton in October of two thousand. Around this same time period,
one of the Madafery family's neighbors in Charlotte, Jones Scanlon Petruski, decided
to establish the Christen Foundation, a nonprofit organization which offers financial and informational assistance
to the families of missing or endangered adults over the age of eighteen, and
the Foundation has provided assistance to hundreds of missing persons case like I mentioned in
the intro. A few months after Kristen went missing, another Charlotte resident named
Dennis Mann offered to assist the Mauda Fairies by traveling to California and performing his
own independent investigation, but will be discussing some of the things he uncovered later
on. In June of twenty fifteen, there would be a new development in
the case when Paul Dosty, a retired police officer turned private investigator hired by
the Mauda Faery family, decided to perform a new search of the house where
Kristin had been living in on Jane Avenue in Oakland at the time she disappeared.
Dosti would be assisted by cadaver dog named Buster, who had once used
his sense of smell to locate the remains of World War Two soldiers who went
missing in action. Buster proceeded to pick up a scent that has been described
as a quote unquote chemical plume and is associated with human decomposition. The dog
barked when it picked something up on a drainage pipe and proceeded to follow it
to the basement door at the back of the house. This prompted Paul Dosty
to recommend that the Oakland PD excavate a concrete slab in the basement, take
soil samples, and reinterview Kristen's former roommates. The police responded by bringing in
specialists with ground penetrating radar to perform a search of the basement. But we're
not able to turn up anything, and since the basement soil was dense,
hard packed clay, it would have been very difficult for anyone to dig it
up and bury a body there. Well, that puts a unique element to
this case, right, you do have the family friend who comes out and
helps. There's got to be this kind of enraged helplessness that the parents feel
when for several days the police are saying, you know, she's a grown
woman, she's eighteen, she could do what she wants. She'll probably show
up soon. And Kristen's parents are very well aware this is not typical behavior
by Kristin. She was a very driven young lady and she was really pursuing
a dream. Something's wrong. No one helps for several days, which is
a problem because the more time that passes, the less evidence we're going to
get. The friend comes out and does his own investigation, and then they
also hire this man who comes out with cadaver dogs. It gives a lot
of promise to Kristen's family, who's saying, look, there's a hit.
It's like she might have been hurt in that home. I think that would
cast a huge darkness over those four roommates. And yet when the police go
out, they're looking at saying, you know, this is a really difficult
scenario in location because I don't think a body could have been buried here.
So if we're going to dig up the ground, the composition of the ground
just doesn't really work for body disposal. Is it possible she could have been
hurt there and left somewhere. I think it's possible. But remember the roommates
are on board and helping day three of her missing. So to what extent
would she be decomposing at that point when the parents are literally flying in to
help day three of her missing. Yeah, that's the confusing aspect of this
case because we know Kristin was last seen at the Galleria in downtown San Francisco,
and she would have needed to travel quite a distance to make it back
to her home in Oakland, and there's no evidence that she ever made it
there that day, because there are no eyewit sightings of her in Oakland after
she left the galleria. And of course that kind of takes suspicious away from
John o'numa because he lived in downtown San Francisco. So if he harmed Kristin,
why is the scent of her decomposition being found at her house in Oakland?
So that's what causes all this confusion with the case. I don't know
what to make of these readings and know if the cadaver dogs snipping out kristin
scent is reliable. I have to believe that Buster is a very good kidaverdog
because he was obviously used to look for the remains of people from World War
Two, but they're all So is no standardized protocol with regards to training dogs
to be cadaver dogs across the US. It differs from state to state,
and so some can be trained on pseudo sense, some are actually trained on
decomposition, others can be trained on animal decomposition. It really varies, so
it's really tough to know. Maybe a family had lived in this home before,
and maybe they had a deceased pet, and if Buster was just taught
on decomposition in general and not just specifically human decomposition, maybe he smelled this.
He or she smelled the smell of what was a decomposing animal that maybe
was in the basement for a period of time before it was buried elsewhere.
That's what I was wondering. I was wondering what other elements could lead to
similar smells, because, like you said, Jeles, depending on how they're
trained, there's other organisms that break down, or even bodily fluids that break
down, that start to have sense that are similar to the ones they're designed
to pick out. I mean, they're picking out things like hydrogen sulfide,
disulfied, all kinds of things that they're really smelling for, which is part
of human decomposition. But in my head, I'm trying to rack my brain
for things that also could have been in that location and not necessarily been a
dead body, but perhaps an incident of bodily fluids or something else. Like
you said, an animal, and that dog is hitting on accurate chemical decomposition,
but maybe not a human being. So it does depend on how this
baby was trained, and it depends on his handler and how his response to
the dog is performed. It's a very subjective science. It's a magical science
because there is an accuracy to it, but it's not perfect. It's human
lead and animal driven. So and what if somebody who lived in the home
prior had an accident in the basement, because these things can happen, right
depending on what type of tools you have down there. Say you cut your
hand and a bunch of blood blood somewhere, and then later that is going
to have the smell of decomposition. Perhaps, I'm not quite sure if the
dog would be able to differentiate from blood and possible tissue that could have come
from an injury and the smell of an entire body. Like I'm just not
sure what dogs can and cannot smell, and how sophisticated their training is.
So there's just a lot of questions here. And like you said, one
of the problems is then it takes the heat off of John and really does
put it. If it was at her home, you would think it's got
to be one of those four roommates. Because there's four guys living in this
old Victorian home. It would be odd that this strange person made their way
in there at some point in the night and no one you know, here's
him or anything like that. To their knowledge. She didn't even make it
home, much less someone else being in the house at the time. In
February twenty seventeen, doctor R. Pod Voss, a research scientist and forensic
anthropologist who specializes in human decomposition, decided to perform his own search of the
residence. He used a proprietary device which detects human decomposition chemicals, and it
reportedly picked up signals in an area located between Christian's former house and the residence
next door. More specifically, it picked up a chemical signature denoting the presence
of human blood near a concrete slab at the base of some porch steps at
the other residence. Back in nineteen ninety seven, the residents had actually been
a halfway house for convicted juvenile offenders who had violated their probation, but neither
Christened, her family, or anyone in law enforcement was aware of this at
the time, and it was Dennis Mann who originally learned this information while canvassing
the neighborhood. When Christian's parents agreed to provide samples of their DNA to doctor
Voss for testing, the results were cowartedly matched the DNA that was found within
these human decomposition chemicals. Felicia Aysthorpe, the public information officer for the Oakland
PD, would later confirm that since doctor Voss was using relatively new technology,
the results of his findings would have to be delivered directly to the police for
scientific and independent verification. She stated, quote at this time, the information
we need from doctor Voss to collect the samples for human decomposition testing has not
been forwarded to the department. Additionally, no information regarding the more recent blood
testing conducted on the porch has been disclosed to the department end quote. Both
doctor Voss and Paul Dosty have denied this and the claim that Oakland PD had
enough has enough data about the findings to perform their own search of the site,
and they also believed that Christian's body may have been there at some point
before it was transported away. Around the twentieth anniversary of Christen's disappearance, KGO
TV decided to produce a new segment about the case and managed to track down
Jill Lampou, who had long since broken up with John and Numa. They
convinced her to do an interview, though she kept her face off camera,
and Lampeau continued to deny any involvement, claiming that she had an alibi placing
her at a library on the date that Kristin went missing. John and Numa
also agreed to provide comment for the segment and continued to deny his own involvement
as well, though investigators still consider Oduma to be a person of interest.
Sadly, Bob Mordiferi passed away of leukemia during the spring of twenty twenty two
without receiving any answers of what would happen to his daughter. So after twenty
seven years, there are still no conclusive answers about what actually happened to Christian
Modiferi. So I guess you could say the path went chilly. Here's what's
so difficult about all these different experts and parties being involved in an investigation from
a private perspective. Private experts and people that are hired as private investigators and
these kinds of things, they don't have to operate under the same rules as
law enforcement or the same standards that our criminal justice system sets for evidence being
allowed into the court system. And so I would be just like Kristen's parents,
I'd beg any human being with a breath in their lungs that's willing to
help me, come help me, and any technology or resource I can pay
to have in this investigation. I will pay for it because I need to
have answers in her case. But it definitely complicates the case. I think
for families, it puts a lot of emotional weight on the investigation for them
because they're getting this help from outside experts, and those outside experts don't have
to follow the same protocol and don't always watch what they share with the family.
So when they're sharing this kind of promising information and saying, I know
that her body was here, We've smelled, you know, the dogs smelled
her decomposing here, there's DNA that matches, and then the police are saying
we can't go off any of this, we don't have enough information to go
off of this. There becomes this resentment and emotional distress of saying, why
aren't you doing anything for us? But it's such a different ballgame the private
individuals working and being hired by the family and working on behalf of the family
and an investigator who's trying to make sure they have a flawless case if they
have one, And so it's actually heartbreaking because the family gets this information that
looks like you have to be able to prove the next steps for us because
this expert told us X, Y and Z, and the police often have
their hands tied in those situations. So as much as I would be just
like her parents and say give me everything that we know and tell me everything,
you do have individuals that aren't always as experts as they claim to be,
aren't as well versed as they say they are, use technology that may
not be reliable, and then other times you get blessed and you have these
miracle workers who solve the case for the police. So it's kind of a
crapshoot of like, what are you getting when these experts come in and investigate.
I know for a fact you're getting a lot of emotional distress because of
promises made or information that seems so promising and it goes nowhere. Well,
I didn't know this at the time I recorded my original Trail Cold episode,
but I've since learned a bit more about Arvid Boss, the one who's finding
all this new stuff at the home, and apparently he had once put forward
a proposal to search out human remains with the use of a fly with a
tracking chips. So I don't know if he's the most scientifically reliable person.
So I'm more understanding now about why the police were reluctant to accept his findings
and why they would want to find more evidence before they launched a dig at
that house. Can you imagine being the mom and dad who are getting that
information though, Like someone who says, oh, I'm a private investigator,
Oh I'm a you know, a human remains expert, I'm this and that,
and then they tell you something so promising, it's got to be just
absolutely devastating for them. So it's to me it's a very fine line of
you work these cases as literally, like I said, a hero and someone
who says, I don't have to walk the same lines as police and I
can help solve this case. And then I think you do have people just
like you have in psychic realms and all these other things. There's I think,
legitimate people with gifts and passions, and then there's people who see it
as a way to kind of get attention to notoriety or take advantage of people
financially. And so that actually makes me very angry. When I think about
the fact that you're talking about flies with microchips, I'm I don't know,
very very frustrating, and I just read one more thing about bass he claims
to have invented as applying for patents for a DNA frequency scanner device that can
find missing persons from the air using a sample of a family member's DNA.
Oh boy, very sketchy. Yeah, I mean, these poor people are
probably paying him or hanging their hat on every word he says. I think
it's cruel and abusive if that, if that really is the case. So
Kristin Motaferi's disappearance is a particularly frustrating one because there are a number of intriguing
leads, but there are times when they almost seem to contradict one another.
For instance, even though we have police bloodhounds tracking kristen scent to the shoreline
of the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco, we have a cadaver dog who has
detected the scent of human decomposition at the house she was staying at in Oakland,
which is several miles in the opposite direction. We have a promising potential
suspect named John Numa, who lived only a mile away from Kristen's workplace and
has done a number of suspicious and terrible things, yet no direct evidence has
ever been found. To prove that he ever met Kristin, let alone cause
her disappearance. We also have Onuma's former girlfriend, Jill Lampo, who allegedly
helped lure other women to Onuma for him to abuse. Yet the last reported
sighting of Kristin places her with an unidentified blonde woman who does not seem to
match Lampo's description. So how do you fit all the pieces of the puzzle
together? Who is this blonde woman and how does she fit into things?
Did Kristin actually travel to the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean If something happened to
Kristin there, why is there evidence of a possible crime scene at the house
in Oakland? If John o'numa harm Kristin, why would he take her body
to that house, especially since he lived in downtown San Francisco. No matter
which way you look at it, some of these leads have to be false.
But what actually did happen to Kristin? Could her disappearance have been caused
by an angle which hasn't even been explored yet. When it comes to Kristen
Modeferi as a person, it doesn't sound like anyone had a bad thing to
say about her as She was an incredibly bright young woman who excelled in school,
which is why she graduated a year earlier than normal and got a four
year scholarship at North Carolina State University. She also had no history of ever
causing any trouble for her parents, which would probably explain why they allowed her
to spend the summer alone in the San Francisco Bay Area even though she was
barely eighteen. In other words, it seemed like she had done an awful
lot to earn that trust. I also think it says something about Kristen's personality
that when she applied for position at Spinelli's coffee shop, the manager found her
to be so likable and enthusiastic that he immediately offered her a job, even
though they were not even hiring at that time. Krista was technically only in
the Bay Area for three weeks before she vanished, but it sounds like her
daily routine was working the seven am to three pm shift at Spinelle's and spending
the rest of the day explos or in San Francisco before returning to the house
in Oakland. The day Kristen went missing was pretty much her last day of
freedom before her classes at Berkeley started, so it sounds like she wanted one
last adventure after her shift ended, but something happened. When I think about
what happened in those last hours, I honestly think in my gut that the
hit at the beach was from the twenty first, not the twenty third,
That yes, she had been down there, which she had already confirmed with
her roommates, and that when she know when they hit down at the beach
for her scent, it's because she had in fact been there, just not
the night that she went missing. And so for me, I don't really
think the hit at the house or the hit at the beach necessarily tie anything
to her disappearance. I think the house hit is more or less going to
be smoking mirrors and false promises to the family, and I think that the
beach hit would be to that earlier party that she went to. So there
is a very big possibility that, like you said, John lived in downtown,
that she never went to the beach, and she was never at her
house the evening that she died. So yes, there's a lot of conflicting
information, but when you think about the sources, I tend to discount a
lot of the things that were said to have occurred at the house, and
with John it's one of those just questions where you say, do you look
at all the red flags and lump them together and say it's like a forest
fire of facts, or do you have to just look at him as a
very disturbed, sick individual that was obsessed with his case. It's very hard
to distinguish those but I will tell you those women coming forward that he was
an abusive, sexual, sadist type. That's very scary, especially when you
couple it with the briefcase full of articles about the case and then ripping the
stuff out of the day planner saying that it could get him into trouble.
These things are just like huge, huge red flags. I mean, I
agree with you, there's just something about all this stuff at the house that
just doesn't ring as true to me as John O Numa does. And think
about this, he is always willing to have his name in the spotlight.
He's always willing to make a statement if you Okay, let's say I was
an idiot at thirty six, way too old to be making big like life
disasters like this. But if I made this anonymous tip at thirty six and
try to destroy these people's lives and sent police on a wild goose chase and
I wasn't arrested for something. I might slowly fade away from this case,
but John can't. He's constantly Yes, I'll be on Inzlove Mysteries. Yes,
I'll interview with the newspaper. Yes, I'll go on this show for
the anniversary. All these things that he's saying, like, look at me,
look at me. I got a private person hired for a lie detector
test. It's it's like he needs the attention and he won't let it go,
which a smart person would distance themselves. He has to be part of
it. That's very concerning. So I think this would be a good time
to bring it into part one. But join us next week as we present
part two of our series about the disappearance of Kristen Modaferry. Robin, do
you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and
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until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and chili pass
call for warm clothing. Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy