Welcome back to the Path Wind, Chile for part two of our series about
the disappearance of Christian Mota Feri. Robin, do you want to catch everyone
up on what we talked about in our previous episode. Well, Kristin Montiferi
lived with her family in North Carolina, got a full scholarship to North Carolina
State University, but decided to spend the summer of nineteen ninety seven living in
San Francisco so that she could take a photography course at the University of California,
Berkeley. Kristin arrived right around her eighteenth birthday. She got a job
at a Look coffee shop and was there for about three weeks, where she
would work the morning shift, then at three pm every day she would go
out and see the sights of San Francisco, and she finally worked a shift
which was scheduled the day before she was going to start her photography class,
but then she just mysteriously vanished without a trace. A couple of her coworkers
would recall seeing her at the mall with an unidentified blonde woman, and a
couple weeks later, a man named John Ouma phoned in a tip to the
news accusing two women that he knew of murdering Kristen, which turned out to
be completely false because Onuma decided to get revenge on them because they had had
some friction with his girlfriend and he thought that the best way to deal with
it would be too falsely accuse them of murders. It turned out that they
had nothing to do with Kristen's case, and even though Onuma said that it
was just a stupid prank and that he had read about Kristen's case in the
newspapers, people became more suspicious towards him because he turned out that he had
a history of troubling behavior. As the years would come on, a bunch
of women would come forward and say that they had been abused and tortured and
scammed out of money by Numa, and apparently he said to one of them
that she was going to wind up dead, just like Kristin Modiferi. But
they also turned out that Kristin had possibly filed a personal ad in a local
newspaper seeking companionship, and because Onuma was known for using other women in order
to lure his victims to him, there has been speculation that the blonde woman
seen at the mall with Kristin might have been involved somehow and could have been
Onuma's girlfriend at the time, Jill Lampo, wearing a blonde wig. But
in the end they never found any conclusive evidence to link Onuma to Kristen's disappearance.
I know that a cadaver dog has detected kristen scent near the Sutro Bass,
a tourist attraction located near the Pacific Ocean, but they've never been able
to conclusively establish she was there, And in recent years, cadaver dogs have
also detected kristen scent at the house in Oakland where she had been staying with
four other male roommates, but they were never considered to be suspects and there's
no evidence that foul play took place there. So after twenty seven years,
this case is still unsolved and we have no idea what happened to Kristin or
if she was the victim of foul play. So before we start discussing the
known facts of the case, we want to talk about another odd lead which
wasn't shared in Part one. Believe it or not, one person who's been
looked at as a potential suspect in Kristen's disappearance is notorious convicted murderer Robert Durst.
I'm sure most of you already know who Durst is, as he was
a subject of a multi episode documentary series The Jinx The Life and Death of
Robert Durst, which aired on HBO in twenty fifteen. Durst has always been
the prime suspect in the nineteen eighty two disappearance of his a strange wife,
Kathleen McCormick Durst, and during the filming of The Jink new evidence was uncovered
to implicate Durst in the murder of a friend of his named Susan Berman,
who was shot to death inside her home in Los Angeles on December twenty third,
two thousand. Durst was charge of Bourbon's murder the day before the final
episode of The Jinks aired, and in September twenty twenty one, Durst was
finally convicted of the crime at trial and received a sentence of life imprisonment.
Shortly thereafter, Durst was finally charged with second degree murder in his former wife's
death, even though her remains have never been found, and these events were
recently chronicled in The Jinks Part two, which dropped on HBO a few months
ago. You're probably also aware that Durst once went on trial for the two
thousand and one murder of a man named Morris Black, though he wound up
being acquitted on the grounds of self defense. So officially, Durst has been
implicated in the murders of three people, but attempts have been made to link
him to some unsolved cold cases, many of them involving young missing women,
and in an odd coincidence, when Robin recorded his original Trail Went Cold episode
on the Christian Modi Faery case back in January of twenty twenty two, Durst
died in prison a few days later. Okay, Robin, can you tell
us more about the girls that he or these unsolved cold cases that Durst might
have been tied to, Because I was obsessed with the jings, both parts
of it thought it was fascinating and he's such a disturbed individual, but I
had never heard that there were other unsolved cases that he might be tied to,
especially Kristen's. Well, I'm going to talk about them right now,
and you might recall that we did a bonus minisode on The Path Went Chiley
about the first one I'm going to talk about, which is the nineteen seventy
one disappearance of eighteen year old Lynn Cholsey, who vanished while attending Middlebury College
in Middlebury, Vermont. The main reason durst has been looked at as a
potential suspect in that case was because he owned a health food store in Middlebury
at the time, and Lynn Scholsey was supposed seen frequenting the store a short
time before she went missing. On November twenty fifth, nineteen ninety seven,
five months after Kristin Mota Feri disappeared, sixteen year old Karen Mitchell vanished after
visiting her aunt at a shoe store she owned at Bayshore Mall in Eureka,
California, and an eyewitness reported seeing Karen climb into a light blue sedan being
driven by an unidentified white male believed to be in his sixties or seventies.
At the time, Dursta was living in the nearby town of Trinidad and had
reportedly been seen frequenting the shoe store belonging to Karen's aunt, as well as
a soup kitchen where Karen often volunteered, and he also does have a bit
of a resemblance to the composite sketch of the older man seen driving the sedan.
As for a Kristin Motaferi, there really isn't much to link Durst to
her case at all, other than the fact that he owned a house in
San Francisco during that time period. Though shortly after Durst was arrested in twenty
fifteen, one of Kristin's sisters made a public plea for Durst to come clean
and reveal what happened to Kristen if he was responsible for her disappearance. Wow,
so even Christen's sister said it's possible that there is a link. It's
disturbing because Darst is so He's incredibly smart and manipulative and somehow charismatic to people.
Where they go towards him, they're drawn towards him. I think a
lot of that had to do with money and a desire to have wealth to
your name by being associated with him, or experiences being associated with him.
But you know, for young women who were looking for someone with culture and
knowledge and access to experiences and things like that, I could see where Durst
became an attractive individual despite all of his bizarre quirks. But without there being
much to go on. I'm assuming Durst is not really a main lead in
her case. Is that right? Pretty much? Yeah? I mean,
the the only reason people have looked at her at him as a potential suspect
in the Christen Moda Fairy case is because Karen Mitchell just happened to go missing
a few months later, And even though there's pretty much a tentative connection there,
at least in that one, you have a suspect to kind of resembles
Durst, and I think they were just looking at these similar cases of young
women going missing in California so close apart will Durst happened to be living in
the area that they kind of put two and two together. But I don't
think this would have happened unless Durst had been a suspect in those other crimes
we talked about, like the disappearance of his former wife and the murder of
Susan Berman. If you've seen The Jinx, you'll know that Dursts sometimes like
to dress and drag in order to disguise his appearance. So one of the
more outrageous theories in this case is that he could have been the mysterious blonde
woman seen with Kristin at the galleria. However, the Oakland pd IS announced
that they never found any evidence to connect Rst to Kristen's disappearance, and it
sounds like he's pretty much all but been ruled out as a suspect. In
fact, if it wasn't for Durst's relatively tenuous connection to Karen Mitchell's disappearance,
which took place five months later, I'm not sure anyone would have ever attempted
to link him to Christian's case at all. Well, Durst is undeniably a
murderer. It sounds like he only killed people whom he considered to be an
obstacle or threat to him, So I'm not sure that being a predator who
targets random young victims like Lynn Cholsey, Christian MOTIFERI, and Karen Mitchell was
part of his modus operandi. The Durst connection was definitely worth mentioning here,
but I ultimately believe he has nothing to do with this case. Yes,
I definitely think when you look at some of the other case, especially Karen's,
he was present often times, like going to the soup kitchen she volunteered.
Dad. He has no reason to beat the soup kitchen, and there's
those kind of bizarre ways that he would show up in scenarios where he didn't
belong that would definitely make Karen's case seem like, hey, we need to
look at this guy with kristin just saying it's another young girl who disappeared.
Yes, there was the blonde lane in the mall, but no one reported
that she was distinguished looking or odd looking, or looked like she had a
wig on or anything like that. So I would tend to think it's just
a kind of loose link of saying it's possible. But I would be much
more inclined to think it's her going out and exploring and getting caught up with
the wrong person and or John having something to do with it. And it's
kind of funny how when I mentioned Robert Durst on my original Trail in Cold
episode, he died a few days later, And earlier this year I did
another Trail and Cold episode where I made reference to OJ Simpson and then he
died a few days later. So it seems like if we mentioned notorious murderers,
they'll drop dead. Maybe it's good. Should we talk about Should we
talk about John o'numa. Now, there are alternate theories which do not involve
Kristin being the victim of foul play, as it's possible that she could have
traveled to land End on the day she disappeared and accidentally fallen into the Pacific
Ocean near Sutra Bass before her body washed away. In fact, if she
was feeling suicidal, she theoretically could have jumped into the ocean to take her
own life. But this is one case where I'm pretty confident that there's absolutely
nothing to back up a suicide theory unless she did a very effective job at
hiding her depression from everyone. I suppose we can't completely discount the possibility that
Kristin fell into the ocean accidentally. But the problem is that we can't even
conclusively establish that she was at this location on June the twenty third, even
though a bloodhound detector is sent there. Kristin had mentioned attending a summer Solstice
party at Ocean Beach two days earlier, on June the twenty first. Yes,
it was also never established that Kristin attended this party, but this could
provide an alternate explanation for her scent being picked up on that area, as
bloodhous are not going to be able to pinpoint the exact date as scent was
left there. It's possible this entire lead is nothing more than a red herring.
But regardless of whether Christen traveled with that location on the twenty first or
twenty third, I do believe she went missing because she cross passed with the
wrong person after her final shift at Spinelli's. That's exactly what I think would
have happened. I think that she crossed paths with somebody. It's possible it's
this blonde lady who kind of intercepted her at the mall. And you,
if you've ever been in one of those situations where you start talking to a
stranger and you can't really get away, It's possible something like that happened where
she kind of felt obligated to continue this conversation with her. It's possible this
lady presented as knowing a lot about the city and could show her places.
And is it the woman who heard her, or is it that she did
get away from that woman and then ran into somebody else on her adventure who
took advantage of her. I think both are possible avenues, which, like
we said before is what makes this so complicated. Blonde lady could be nothing
but a red who's just distracting us from the actual perpetrator. The blonde lady
could have been working with John to target her and get a vulnerable person in
his care. Or she could have left that blonde woman and gone on a
totally different route and not had anything to do with John or this per Now,
for me, I don't think that that beach scent is very powerful whatsoever.
If she had been down to the beach in the last couple of days,
the dogs would have hit on her scent, And so is it possible
she was there that night or that day. Sure, but she definitely was
there two days beforehand. That we believe she was there two days beforehand,
So it doesn't really give us much information. I do not think she was
suicidal. This girl is chasing a major dream and putting all the puzzle pieces
into place to make it come true, like working, getting her living situation,
getting ready to start her dream class at Berkeley. She was a go
getter and she was pumped about this dream. She was on really being a
tourist, getting to explore a new place. No part of me thinks that
she took her own life. I'm curious, but what is both of your
gut feelings about the blonde woman. Do you think that she's somehow is complicit
in this crime or as part of this or do you think that she's a
red herring. I'm even considering the possibility that her coworkers may have been mistaken
that maybe they saw someone else who wasn't Kristin with a blonde woman, or
maybe saw her on a different day if that wasn't her final shift, and
just got the dates mixed up. But that's the thing is that if John
o'numa was responsible, then I would think that Jill Lampo would be the prime
suspect to be the blonde woman. But she was a brunette at the time,
and I don't know if she's the type of person who would go to
the trouble of putting on a blonde wig in order to lure Kristin to her
boyfriend. I think that she could have just been somebody who was there talking
to Kristin, and she's one of these kiddos who's just kind of on this
journey to it explore the city and to kind of meet new people and have
new cultural experiences. So if she meets someone interesting and she's just talking to
them, I could see her spending forty five minutes talking to somebody new and
then walking away. I don't see it being someone who abducted her. I
mean, could you have taken her somewhere that was dangerous, yes, But
I also think it could have just been her being social and getting caught up
in a conversation with someone who was interesting to her at the time. Yeah,
I've got nothing to back it up, but it feels to me like
gut feeling that it's a red herring. I mean, she could have come
across so many different people while working at Spinelli's, because it appears that she
worked a great deal. If she had a paycheck of four hundred dollars,
that seems like she would have had to have worked a lot of hours back
then to have that type of a paycheck. So she's opening herself up to
a variety of people there, and like as she brought up in Part one,
having this if it was her personal ad that she'd placed looking for friends,
she's also opening herself up there. So there's just so many different possibilities
that the idea that this woman has to be tied to her disappearance is like
tenuous at best. So on our last episode, we mentioned a guy named
Dennis Mann who approached the Modifery family back in nineteen ninety seven to volunteer to
assist them with the investigation. He traveled to California and essentially lived in a
van while he tracked down leads and interviewed people connected to the case. It
sounds like he expected Kristen to be found within a couple of months and never
dreamed this case would still be unsolved twenty seven years later. But regardless,
Mann is not given up, which is why he continues to run his website
find Christian dot com and released a multi episode podcast with the same title in
twenty twenty. Throughout his investigation, Mann was able to dig up some interesting
new information about John and Numa and Joe Lampo, and while there's still no
direct evidence that they had any involvement in Christian's disappearance, there is a good
reason to believe that at the very least, they might know more than they're
letting on now. Regardless of whether or not he's guilty of harming kristin it,
seems indisputable that John o'numa is a pretty terrible human because he's seriously hampered
the investigation by phoning in a false tip to implicate two innocent women, And
if even a fraction of the allegations about him abusing other women and conning them
out of their money are true, then he's damn lucky that he's not in
prison for something. The women who have accused a Numa of abuse claimed that
he would use other women in order to lure them to him, and with
the evidence that we have, it's easy to imagine a similar scenario happening to
Kristin. A newspaper containing a circled personal ad was found in Christian's room in
which the writer was seeking a female companion for a number of the same hobbies
at Christen Light. So it's possible that a new placed the ad and she
answered it. But since Kristen was living inside a house with only male roommates,
perhaps she was looking for female friends and place the ad herself. In
fact, she did tell her roommates that she went to the Summer Solstice party
at Ocean Beach with two women on June twenty first, but they were never
identified. Whatever the case, it's reasonable to assume that Christian might have met
the unidentified blonde woman seen with her at the galleria through the personal ad.
It sounds like it was very at a character for Kristin to still be hanging
around the mall, to still be hanging around the mall forty five minutes after
her shift ended, But part of me wonders if Christian's coworkers saw her from
a distance, it might have mistaken her for someone else, or maybe just
misremember the date and actually saw Kristin and the blonde on a previous occasion.
The coworkers described them as walking shoulder to shoulder, which seems to indicate that
they were together and it was not just a coincidental sighting where Kristin was just
passing some random strangers that she did not know. But if deciding was accurate,
then it's possible the blonde had some sort of involvement in Christian's disappearance,
particularly since she's never come forward. It is odd that she hasn't come forward,
but it's also very possible she never saw call to come forward. It's
possible she didn't know Kristen that well, and so it wasn't paying attention to
the news. And remember back then you didn't have things like the Internet,
and you just didn't have the same access to media and news stories and things
like that. So it's very possible this is someone else who's traveling. It's
very possible that this is another student who comes and goes from campus. So
all kinds of reasons why you might not have had that blonde come forward,
More so than just being someone who's guilty, right, there could have been
a very innocent reason why they never came forward. Also, if their young
fear of being implicated in something they didn't have anything to do with might prevent
them from coming forward as well. Now, if Onuba was behind the whole
thing, then the most promising candidate to be the blonde is Jill Lampo.
But, like we mentioned earlier, Lampo is a brunette. So unless Lampo
dyed her hair or was wearing a blonde wig, could it be possible that
Ouma was using other women to lure his victims to him during this time period.
Well, here's what odd piece of evidence which suggests that Lampo may have
some complicity. In June of twenty twelve, Lambeau had a lengthy and very
emotional phone call with her uncle, which prompted him to start taking notes and
writing down what she was saying. At one point, Lampo supposedly shared a
story about having once dated a controlling man in San Francisco who convinced her to
quote unquote assist in an unspeakable kidnap and murder. Well, these notes eventually
made their way into the hands of Dennis Mann, and you can see a
photograph of them at the Fine Christian website. These notes were turned over to
the Oakland PD, but it doesn't sound like this lead has gone anywhere,
as Lampo did not provide any specific details about this quote unquote kidnap and murder,
and even though it was reasonable to assume that this quote unquote controlling man
in San Francisco was John Onuma, she never actually referred to him by name.
Lampo did agree to be interviewed during a KGOTV segment that aired five years
later, where she claimed that she was at the library on the day Christen
disappeared and even held up her library card for the camera. Though I'm not
entirely sure how this card is supposed to prove that she was there on June
the twenty third, nineteen ninety seven. However, when asked about the false
tip that Onuma phone did during that time period, Lampo did not hesitate to
express her suspicions about him, stating, quote to me, that would imply
guilt. If you're going to call and draw attention to yourself, that implies
you want attention for some reason. End quote. It's almost like she's putting
little breadcrumbs out there to say, yes, something's wrong with him, or
look at him, but I don't want to be associated with it. There's
a very little reason the uncle would share this kind of information about the emotional
phone call with her unless a he wants attention or two he's actually highly concerned
about Lampo and or John and wanting to provide that kind of information to the
police. But for me, when you do look at what she says,
she said, this would imply guilt. If you're going to call and draw
attention to yourself, it implies you want attention for some reason. And we
talked about that earlier. John is an attention seeker. He's a problem starter.
And for someone who made a mistake and did this horrible call to police,
misleading the investigation, and said, oh, crap, I went too
far. Shouldn't have done that. You should naturally fade away. John seems
to continue to one up and continue to put his hand out to say,
please look at me, include me in the coverage of this case years and
years later. So I tend to believe what Lampo's saying when she says,
hey, if you're going to call and draw attention to yourself, it implies
you want attention for some reason aka guilt. She probably knows a lot more
than what she's saying. And it is crazy to think, like we were
talking about how ridiculous it was that when this first happened, when Onuma phoned
in that false tip, he was thirty six years old at the time.
He wasn't just some stupid teenager or some stupid kid, And now he would
be in his early sixties, and he still is not shying away from the
atension of this case. Whenever they try to interview him about it, he
is willing to go on the record and speak to the cameras. So he's
still not trying to distance himself from it, even though he's becoming a senior
citizen. But before we talk anymore about Jill Lampo or John and Numa,
we have to discuss another possible angle, and that's the possibility that Christian was
harmed by one or more of the four male roommates that she was living with
in Oakland. Their living situation was a bit unusual, as the house was
going through foreclosure and the landlord had stopped paying the mortgage. However, since
the foreclosure process usually took several months, Kristin and the other roommates could still
keep living in the house as the actual eviction was not actually scheduled to take
place until the end of the summer, by which time Kristin would return to
North Carolina for her sophomore year at NC State. I know that one of
these roommates had recently broken up with a girlfriend who'd moved out of the house
to travel to France, which is why a spare room became available for Kristin
to rent. Now, while the idea of an eighteen year old like Kristin
living alone in a strange city at a house with four other guys she didn't
even know might sound like a major red flag, it must be stated that
Dennis Men personally interviewed most of these roommates and thought they were nice, cordial
guys who didn't give off any suspicious vibes, so he's inclined to believe that
none of them had anything to do with Kristen's disappearance. Guess it might seem
odd that they waited three days with without reporting Kristin missing and did not take
the initiative to call the police until after they spoke with her father, But
the fact of the matter is that she'd only been there for three weeks,
and it's not like any of them had a close relationship with her. The
roommates were going in and out of the house all the time, and Kristen's
routine was pretty much waking up early to work the morning shift at Spinelli's,
exploring San Francisco after a shift ended, and then returning home late at night.
These guys never saw Kristin all that much to begin with, so this
probably explains why they didn't become alarmed when she didn't return home on the evening
of June twenty third. Absolutely, I don't see this as suspicious at all.
These guys had their own lives, Kristen's eighteen. She wasn't really close
to these people. She had just been there a couple of weeks, so
it is kind of this place to line my head. But she's not getting
her socialization and bonding from the people inside her house. So the fact that
they don't report her missing, the assumption would be she's living her own life.
The girl comes and goes when she wants. We don't keep tabs on
each other, so why would we report her missing? Now? What speaks
volumes is at the moment they get a voicemail on the home answering machine and
they hear her parents saying, has anyone seen Kristen? We're concerned something's not
right. One of them calls right back, and all of them start to
go into action to help the parents. While they're on their way over to
San Francisco, they're making reports to the police that she's missing. So I
just don't see them being helpful to the parents and being concerned when the parents
express concern. I don't see that being any kind of red flags other than
just these other kids living their life until adults say help, something's wrong,
and they say, okay, tell me what to do. Under normal circumstances,
there really wouldn't be much reason to suspect these roommates of any involvement,
But we can't ignore the findings of Buster, the cadaver dog who detected the
scent of human decomposition at the house two decades later, and the fact that
a chemical signature denoting the presence of human blood was found near the location.
Now, I must admit that I'm pretty confused about the whole DNA testing process,
as DNA samples provided by Christen's parents supposedly matched the DNA within some decomposition
chemicals found at the scene. This seemed to indicate that Christen's blood had been
there twenty years earlier. But the issue is that the proprietary device doctor R.
Pod Vas used to make these findings was so new that it was still
under patent review at that time, so he couldn't provide much of an explanation
of how this device actually worked. The details are pretty murky, but I
get the impression that the Oakland PD may not believe these findings are credible enough
to prove that foul play took place there, which is why they've never attempted
to perform any additional searches. If nothing else. The findings would require a
lot of independent scientific verification before they could be used as evidence to make an
arrest or bring someone to trial. I'm not a fan of any of this
evidence that came about when we're looking at doctor r pad Vas's information. To
me, again, I think that the idea that you have these private experts
who can kind of work within any realm they want to. There aren't the
same restrictions, there are not the same protocols, there's not the same standards,
and there's not the same communication with family. I have trouble when you
mix a lot of those kinds of individuals into an investigation who are providing this
incredibly promising information to the family and claiming that they've told the police, and
the police don't react. If you told me you had a DNA hit and
you shared it with law enforcement, why would they not want to work towards
finding out what happened to this eighteen year old girl. I think there's something
a little bit more fishy going on, especially when you look at these kind
of new technologies and these tests that are performed years later. It's suspicious to
me. It rings more of someone trying to exploit the family, and or
not being as well versed in their craft as they claim to be, and
just trying to present as a bigger influence in the case than they're able to
do. I started rolling my eyes, and I'm thinking, Yeah, this
DNA testing where the DNA from Christen's parents supposedly matched the DNA within some decomposition
chemicals, is making me think that this is nothing more than junk science.
But let's just say that these findings are credible even if Buster the cadaver dog
was accurate and some sort of human decomposition did take place at that location.
Let's not forget the Buster ones detected the remains of buried soldiers who were killed
during World War Two. Human decomposition chemicals can remain in the soil for centuries,
so for all we know, Buster could have detected a scent from a
body which had once decomposed on that spot hundreds of years ago, and his
reaction may not have had anything to do with Kristen's case. And the chemical
signature denoting the presence of blood was not found inside Christian's former house, but
rather at the base of the porch steps for the residence next door, which
had been a halfway house for juvenile offenders who violated their probation back in nineteen
ninety seven. This might imply that Christian could have crossed paths with one of
the offenders from the residents and they did something to her near the porch steps
before moving her body. But from what I can tell, this place mostly
housed juvenile drug offenders rather than violent, hardcore criminals. Yeah, I absolutely
think that when you look at the presence of blood, that when you say
that there was a presence of this blood, or that you know there were
decomposition chemicals and things like that, there could have been so many elements that
fed into that reading and that fed into that conclusion. And so even those
kids, those juvelenal Lincolns, what if they had gotten in a fight and
someone had broken their nose, or there had been tissue that they sneezed out
or coughed out or something like that. There's so many reasons you could have
those things occur. I just don't think that Kristen was at the residence when
she was hurt. I think she was exploring and got caught up with someone
who was promising her an adventure, someone who wanted to be her quote friend
and take her somewhere, and she trusted the wrong person. I just don't
see the four guys at the house being the people who did that when she
just wasn't a part of their kind of daily interaction. I almost think had
they been super close, the roommates and Kristin, I'd be a little bit
more suspicious, like maybe one of them had come on to her and she
denied them, or maybe they had gotten in a fight or something like that.
But I really feel like this was a state of convenience and that all
of them kind of lived these separate lives. I just don't see the home
being a big place of interest for the investigation. And I feel like we
could almost write off the juvenile offenders because the sophistication that it would take to
be able to dispose of a body. They just don't have the tools and
implements at the ready for them, such as a vehicle and all the other
things that would be required to do that. They are accountable to the people
at the halfway house, and although most of them might be leaving to work
and to reintegrate into society, it doesn't mean that they have all the time
in the world, and that they would be able to manage something like concealing
a body and disposing of it in a way that would never be found.
I would pray there'd be more supervision and things like that for juvenile offenders who
are needing to be in a home. There'd be more where people were watching,
and wouldn't they wouldn't have time to do any of that. Yeah,
The problem with these findings is that we have no eyewitnesses or any evidence that
could confirm Kristin return to this location at any point after she left Spinelle's on
June the twenty third. Remember, this house was in Oakland, and Kristin
went missing in San Francisco, as she always used the Bay Area Rapid Transit
system to commute back and forth across San Francisco Bay. John Onomah only lived
a mile away from the Crocker Galleria, so if he was responsible for harming
Kristin, it doesn't make any sense for him to transport her body back to
Oakland, unless perhaps Numa followed Kristin back to her house or she invited him
there. But if something happened to Kristin at that location, what are the
odds that none of her four roommates would have seen anything. When I first
heard about these new discoveries at the house years ago, I thought they might
edge this case ever so closer to being solved. But they've only complicated things
and made the circumstances of Kristen's disappearance a lot more confusing. Yeah, I
think they've been distracting. I think that there are things that gave false hope
and false promises, and yet when you look at her last whereabouts, it
doesn't really make sense. No one saw her being on any kind of transportation
to get home, no one saw her arrive at home, no one saw
her over in Oaka. So to me, you've got to focus more on
the mall where we know she was last seen, possibly that blonde lady,
but especially the mall area that's the location you started, and focus on the
house. I don't think she made it home after her shift, so I
don't see that being a place that needs any further investigation unless new information came
forward. What we have now seems like a distraction now. Dennis Mann has
presented a very interesting theory about how the police bloodhound, which track Kristen sent
to the Sutro baths, may have led the investigation in the wrong direction.
As you recall, they followed Kristen Sent from the Crocker Galleria to the number
thirty eight bus stop on Geary Street, and that bus route traveled west to
Suture Heights Park at Land's End, And since Kristin attended to her coworkers that
she was planning to go there, the police operated under the assumption that Kristin
had hopped on the bus, a theory which seemed to be corroborated when the
the dog detected her scent at that location. But like we've reiterated numerous times,
it's possible that the only reason Kristen sent showed up there was because she
may have attended a party at Ocean Beach two days earlier. Dennis Matt had
speculated that if the police had not mistakenly assumed that Kristin climbed on the number
thirty eight bus, the bloodhout might have wound up tracking her scent to John
Oonuma's apartment, located about seven blocks west on o'faral Street, which is only
a block south of the Geary Street bus stop. So, theoretically, if
the blonde woman seen at the galleria was connected to Numa, and she was
attempting to lure Christen to him. Perhaps they walked together to his place.
At the time the bloodhouse was used, Numa had not yet inserted himself into
the investigation, and the police had no idea who he was, so you
can understand why they wouldn't have considered this angle. Oh that's a very good
point. You have women who have said that Numa would use women to lure
in other victims or to get somebody who is vulnerable to him. And so
if this blond lady's talking, she could have easily said, Hey, I
want to go out and show you this part of San Francisco. Let's go
over to Alcatraz. Let's go here or there wherever. She's going to take
her, and she says, but first, I got to run in my
apartment real quick. It's just a block over right, it's just a mile
this way wherever, and they start to go towards this location that could have
been John's. I think that's a big possibility. It's definitely possible, knowing
that other women have said this is an mo of his. But again,
because of the timing and the way the bloodhounds were used, and we didn't
have that lead yet, It's kind of impossible to go back and try to
retrace that even right when John calls in the tips, it would have been
too many factors going on to say, hey, that's probably what happened at
the time. Oh yeah, like they could have. They had no idea
who John Onuma was, so of course they're not going to try to trace
his route to his apartment on O'Farrell Street. So they probably get to the
bus stop and say, this is far enough. She probably got on here,
but who knows. If they had kept going, maybe the bloodhound would
have taken her sent elsewhere. It's possible that no one would have ever connected
Onuma to this case had he not decided to call the newsroom and falsely accuse
his girlfriend's two co workers of being responsible for Kristen's murder, which he always
maintained was nothing more than a bad joke. On one hand, this would
have been an incredibly stupid thing for Numa to do if he was guilty.
But on the other hand, he sounds like such a narcissistic and vindictive person
that I can actually picture him being brazen enough to falsely implicate a pair of
innocent people for a crime he committed. Sadly, when cases like Kristen's get
a lot of coverage in the media, it's not uncommon for people to anonymously
send in false tips for no logical reason whatsoever. But what's interesting is the
amount of details Onuma provided during his call to the newsroom. He did just
give some vague statement about how these two women murdered Christin. He specifically said
that they killed her in the backseat of a car on Market Street near Castro
Street, before they drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge to the point Rey's
Forest area and hit her body beneath the wooden bridge. Of course, no
remains were found at this location, but you have to wonder if there might
be some element of truth within the details of Anuma's story. If this had
all ended with one false tip, I suppose I could write off Anuma's involvement
as him being nothing more than some jerk hampering the investigation. But one of
the women he abused claimed that Onuma threatened her and said she would wind up
like Kristin Motaferi. We also have some missing pages from Jill Lampo's day planner
from the time period Christo went missing, which she said he tore out because
it contained information which could incriminate him. And we have a briefcase filled with
articles about this case, which was found in the attic of Onuma's residence in
Hawaii years after the fact. However, none of this conclusively proves that Numa
ever met Kristen, as he very well could have only learned the details of
her disappearance after hearing about it in the media. The one thing that stands
out to me is his unwillingness to disappear from this case right, needing to
be involved, needing to share information, making very bizarre statements, and like
you said, when you find all this information, not just the facts he
brings forward, not just the false allegations against the two girls, but that
briefcase and the ripped out pages of his planner, that quote could implicate him
or make him look bad. All of that added together just you can't take
your eyes off of him, like, is there proof? No, is
there a flaming pile of smoke that says, look at this guy. Absolutely,
And when you add the women's statements that he was an abuser, that
he is a narcissistic kind of person, that he threatened and said, you
know what happened to that girl, Kristen now is going to happen to you.
Those kinds of elements make it where this man, at the very least
is a dangerous human being and at the most could have been the person who
was responsible for Kristen's disappearance. During the course of the investigation, Dennis Man
did manage to dig up one link between Kristin and Onuma, and while it's
a very tenuous one, it did lead to a very odd situation. A
few months after Kristen went missing, Spinelli's Coffee Shop hired a new employee named
Matthew Luke, who was friends with another employee there named Kelly Strafman. What's
interesting is that Matthew Luk had previously dated Jill Lampeau before she broke up with
him and began a relationship with John Ouma. Now, since Luk didn't start
working at Spinelli's until after Kristin vanished, this connection might not mean much.
But here's where it gets odd. So in May nineteen ninety eight, Dennis
Man got permission to reinter view all of Christian's coworkers from Spinelli's, but by
this point Kelly Strathman had quit his job there and they did not have any
contact information for him. Man managed to get in touch with Strathman years later
and communicated with him via email, and it sounds like he was nothing but
cooperative. But before this occurred, the other employees had suggested that Man also
get in touch with Matthew Lukay since they were friends and he might have Strathman's
phone number. Well. According to Mann, he called Luk up and the
moment he mentioned that he was working with Christian Motifery's family, the moment he
mentioned that he was working with Kristin Modifery's family, lu K became hostile and
completely snapped at him and stated that he didn't have anything to do with that
and told Man never to call him again before abruptly hanging up. This struck
Man is very odd because he didn't even phone Luke to question him about Kristin,
as he only wanted to ask if he had Kelly Strathman's contact information.
Furthermore, Man that he didn't even finish saying Christian Modifery's entire name before Lukay
snapped at him, but it was very clear that Luk just did not want
to talk about the case, even though he had no apparent connection to it.
Were it not for Lukay's extreme overreaction, I would have no reason to
believe that he had any knowledge or involvement in Christen's disappearance. But what could
have prompted him to act this way? I mean, for all we know,
Luke could have just been having a bad day, was in a lousy
mood, and when Man phoned him up, I can understand him not wanting
to talk about Jill Lampo or John o'numa since Lampo technically dumped him for Onuma,
but Man didn't even get the opportunity to mention their names before Luk went
off on his angry rant. This whole situation is kind of a six degrees
of separation thing because we know that Christian knew Kelly Strathman, who was one
of Luka's closest friends. But even though Luka technically took Christen's job after she
disappeared, there's no evidence that Christian ever met Luka, who is one degree
of separation away from Lampo and Onuma. So I hope you can understand what
I mean when I say there are a lot of pieces in this jigsaw puzzle,
but they just don't quite fit together. I guess it's possible that maybe
Lampo still had some kind of social connection to him, And what if she
had told him, like, yes, it's my ex boyfriend. But what
if at some point she tells him information that terrifies him. He feels threatened
by John, or he gets really worried that he's gonna somehow get caught up
in this investigation he has nothing to do with, and so he has this
kind of paranoia surrounding it, and when he's asked about it, it triggers
this kind of like trauma stress that I didn't have hing to do with it.
I broke up with her, We have nothing to do with each other.
I don't know why she would tell me that information, and now I'm
at risk of being caught in an investigation and or being hurt. I wonder
if that could have prompted anger instead of a kind of uneasiness, a reaction
that's abnormal. That would make sense to me, because he should have no
reason to act that way just from hearing Kristin Monifery's name. I mean,
I know that her name has been in the media for a while, and
that his friend Kelly Strathman took over her job at the coffee shop. But
it's like, why would he get so hostile? So I think your assessment
might be correct that at some point maybe Jill Lampa was still in touch with
him and mentioned something about Kristin's case which terrified him and got him so fearful
that he decided, I don't want anything to do with it, and I'm
not going to talk to anyone who brings up her name. So even though
everyone had nothing but glowing things to say about Kristin, one of her roommates
from the house in Oakland made this interesting comment when he was interviewed on Unsolved
Mysteries. Quote, she wanted to come to the big city and find some
excitement, but it seemed to be coupled with a naivete not a real understanding
of how the big city worked end quote. Interestingly enough, during the early
stages of the investigation, the police were looking to speak with a young blonde
man known only as Tristan, as Kristin had told people that she met himle
attending a concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View on June the thirteenth and
spent the night at Tristan's brother's house. Investigators were able to eventually track down
Tristan and rule him out as a suspect, but it sounds like the only
reason Kristin went to his brother's place was because she missed the last train to
Oakland and was planning to spend the night at the train station, but Tristan
convinced her that wasn't safe and offered her a place to crash before driving her
to work the following morning. Thankfully, Tristan turned out to be a genuinely
decent and helpful guy, because you can see how the situation might have turned
out badly if someone like John Ouma had offered her assistance. I think that
when you look at the roommate's statement, it's probably very true. You have
an eighteen year old kiddo who is, yes, a legal adult, but
that's a kid, and she's always been very academically focused. She's an overachiever.
She has these big of school. But I will tell you, as
someone who's very geared towards school and who might have that book smart driven smarts,
it often comes at a cost of saying like well as kind of cultured
and worldly as I am, my common sense can sometimes not be where it
needs to be, right, And she has this little adventure or spirit,
but she doesn't have a whole lot of life experiences. So when she comes
from North Carolina to San Francisco, that's in Oakland. Also, that's a
very different world. Every time you travel to these newer locations, a new
university, it's just a different space. And for her to have that dream
or attitude of I just want to see everything. I want to get to
know people. I want to engage in things I don't normally get to do.
Yes, I think being naive comes with that when you're that young.
I think when you're thirty five, in traveling the world or you're going cross
country, you just have a different worldly experience of knowing. Yeah, don't
ask that to these people. Maybe wait to find a police officer or someone
who's older or elderly, right, Like, there's just different experiences that would
shape intelligent choices when you're in a new space, and bold, brave choices
you might make that aren't as intelligent, right, that aren't as smart or
wise. And so I don't see any kind of harm in what the roommate
said, I believe he's probably right. There's this bushy tailed, bright eyed
kid that came to Oakland and San Francisco without an idea of how these big
cities work, and it takes one person who can smell that this person's vulnerable,
this person wants help. I can help you. I can give you
a ride, I can give you quote directions, I can walk you where
you want to be, And you just happen to ask the wrong person who's
a predator and takes your life. So I tend to agree with the roommate.
I bet she was a young kid who just didn't have the world knowledge
to navigate some of these new experiences. And for most people, they scape
by without getting harmed in those situations because most people are good people. But
it takes one that isn't for something disastrous to happen. And Tristan's sounded like
a good guy, so it's kind of a shame they didn't become a couple,
Kristin and Tristan. That would have been so adorable. By all accounts.
John and Numa is a very manipulative con artist, which is how he
managed to lure a number of women into situations where he can not only sexually
and physically abuse them, but scam them out of their money as well.
All that being said, while Onuma has been accused of doing terrible things to
many different women, it does not sound like he's ever been looked at as
a potential suspect in any other unsolved murders or missing person's cases. So if
Onuma did something to Kristin, why did she wind up dead while the other
victims he abused were allowed to live. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely
a whole here to make me suspicious of Onuma, but this case is just
lacking that one slam dunk piece of evidence which conclusively implicates him. There is
nothing that conclusively places Kristin Modaferi and John and Numa together at the same location,
and there are a few pieces of evidence which might lead away from Onuma,
such as the evidentiary findings at the house in Oakland and the unidentified blonde
woman seen with Kristin before she disappeared. I mean, for all we know,
maybe that blonde killed Kristin and was acting completely on her own and Onuma
had nothing to do with it, Or perhaps Christian cross paths with another predator
who has never popped up on the radar as a suspect. The good news
is that there are people like Dennis Man who have ensured that Kristin Modaferi is
not forgotten. And if there are people out there who know more about her
disappearance than they're saying, then all it might take to break this investigation wide
open is for the right person to come forward. So if you happen to
have any information on the unsolved disappearance of Kristin Modafari, please contact the Oakland
Police Department at five one zero two three eight three six four one. That's
five one zero two three eight three six four one, Jules Ashley, any
final thoughts in this case. This is one of those where you look at
Kristen and all the potential, all of the plans that she had, and
your heart breaks. She is driven, she's excited, she's a go getter.
She's an adventurer and a dreamer, and because of that adventure in dreams,
her life was cut short. Right, There's somebody who saw this young
girl just full of life and just wanting so badly to make friends, connections,
cultural experiences, memories, and they saw her as someone that they could
pray on. It's heartbreaking. It's so sad that her father passed away without
knowing what happened to her. And it is magical to think of people like
Dennis Man who said, look this girl North Carolina. I refuse to let
her story die. I refuse to let people look away from this case because
she mattered and she was important to those of us who knew her. I
think it speaks volumes to her character and to her legacy, and it makes
me really proud of her community and of Dentist for saying, I'm going to
keep it going. I'm going to keep covering this case. My heart also
breaks for some of the I think pseudoscience that plays into this case, where
the parents and family are so desperate for answers that it's possible they too open
themselves up to vulnerability and manipulation. And it really does speak to these cases.
When you have someone who's eighteen and they're a legal adult, do you
react in a way that errs on something's wrong from the get go? In
Christian's case, yes, she was eighteen, but when people say something's wrong,
we need to listen and if you get proven that they're okay and safe.
What a blessing. But I can only imagine Christian's family's heartbreak where they're
begging police to start day three helping them with this missing person's case. And
it's not until I think we said day seven that they actually opened a case.
So there's a lot of different criminal justice factors here too, but the
main fact is that an amazingly talented young lady lost her life and the ability
to chase those dreams and we just don't know what happened. It's devastating.
This case is so sad because we've got Christian who's on the precipice of all
of these new experiences. She's getting to indulge her creative side, taking this
photography class at Berkeley and then going back to NC State. She had the
world at her fingertips, and to think she gets to Oakland, she has
all of these new experiences, she's working at Spinelli's, meeting all of these
people, and I'm sure that her parents, Bob and Debbie were sitting at
home and going, Okay, we know our girl has a good head on
her shoulders. I'm sure it was intimidating a little bit scary for them because
she's living with four guys, it's a whole new city, but they trusted
her. And to think that some predator plucked her off the street or out
of a coffee shop or followed her home and did something to her, it's
just so sick. My gut tells me that there's a strong probability that that
predator was John o'numa, just all of the red flags with him. Robin
brought up the specificity by which he pointed his fingers at those two women,
that he said it was a lesbian love triangle gone wrong, and then he
detailed exactly how she was murdered and like where she was. They didn't find
a body there, but Robin had said that it seemed like there could have
been a possibility that part of that was true, and I happened to agree
with him. I think that he's doing part of that from memory and maybe
embellishing other parts, saying where he concealed the body or disposed of the body.
But I just think the fact even that Jill Lampo was saying, well,
you know, based on all this, it seems like there's a possibility
could be guilty. Most signs point to him. Our pod Boss and all
of that technology I think is one of those things we were looking at it
and going, O, well, this could be good, but it's really
not proven science. And Buster the cadaver dog, although very talented, there's
a lot of strange things here. Where she was at that summer Solstice party
on the twenty first, so there could have been her scent remaining there on
the twenty third. She never confirmed for sure after she got off work at
Spinelli's that she was going to be going back there. She just had mentioned
the possibility, so I think that it's unlikely that she returned there that day
and somehow went over the cliff. It's just such a sad case because I
just feel in my bones that John o'numa is just the one to lean on
here. Yeah, I tend to. I mean, there's no direct evidence
implicating Onuma, but his behavior is just so creepy, and the fact that
he took the initiative to falsely accused to innocent people in a missing person's case
at the time, which he supposedly had nothing to do with is pretty troubling.
I Mean, when I first watched this on Unsolved Mysteries, a lot
of the abuse allegations hadn't come out against him yet, so I was giving
him the benefit of the doubt that it was just a stupid prank. But
then I just saw there was such a dark side to this guy, and
also the fact that he did weird things like keep a briefcase full of news
clippings of Christen's case. So yeah, I definitely do believe that Kristen was
the victim of foul play and this was a major tragedy because I'm sure the
decision haunted her parents because it is unusual to let someone who just turned eighteen
go off and live in a strange city on her own for a couple months.
But she was such a bright young girl who was such a vibrant personality
that I think they trusted her judgment and felt she was do the right thing.
And even though there might be red flags about her staying at a house
with four other male roommates she didn't know, ironically enough, they turned out
to be the good guys, and unfortunately, I think Kristin wound up crossing
paths with a bad guy and wound up becoming the victim of foul play.
I mean, I don't know if the sighting of the blonde woman is a
red hairing or as connection to the case. But I do think that if
John Unuma was involved, that Jill Lampo might have some knowledge about what actually
happened. This case often gets overshadowed a little bit by the Christian Smart case
because it also happened to take place in California one year earlier and involved another
bright, young, vibrant university student who went missing. And in that case
there was a prime suspect from day one named Paul Flores. But even though
Kristen Smart's remains have still never been found, Paul Flores was eventually charged with
her murder and found guilty at trial and sent to prison. So who knows,
maybe the same thing will happen here these days, that maybe even if
they don't find Christian's remains, they will amass enough evidence to potentially charge John
o'numa or even another suspect and maybe bring them to trial. So it is
sad that Kriston's father died without getting any answers, but I do hope that
we find out the truth about what happened someday. Robin, do you want
to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon. Yes,
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy