The Disappearance of Kristen Modafferi: Suspects, Tips, and Searches

Kristen Modafferi, an 18-year-old North Carolina State University student spending the summer in the Bay Area, disappeared on June 23, 1997, after finishing a shift at Spinelli’s Coffee in San Francisco’s Crocker Galleria. More than a quarter-century later, the disappearance of Kristen Modafferi remains unsolved: investigators pursued an unidentified woman last seen speaking with her, a man who called in a false tip, real estate heir Robert Durst, and the Oakland house where she rented a room, but no one has ever been charged and her body has never been found.¹

The Last Known Day

Modafferi had arrived in the Bay Area only weeks earlier on a scholarship, renting a room on Jayne Avenue in Oakland and signing up for a summer photography class at UC Berkeley that was set to begin the day after she vanished.²

She clocked out of Spinelli’s around 3 p.m. on June 23, 1997, wearing her work T-shirt and carrying a green Jansport backpack. During her shift, she had asked coworkers for directions to Lands End beach, which struck them as odd because she had already been in that area for a summer solstice party a day or two before.³ A bank security camera caught the last known footage of her shortly after.⁴

Bloodhounds later tracked her scent from a bus stop outside the Crocker Galleria onto the Muni 38 Geary line and picked it up again near the Sutro Baths, close to Lands End and Ocean Beach, before losing it in a tunnel and on the sand. Investigators cautioned that the scent could have been left on her earlier solstice visit rather than that afternoon.³

Because Modafferi was living in Oakland, jurisdiction fell to the Oakland Police Department rather than San Francisco police. The FBI also opened a case.⁴ Up to seventeen search warrants were served over the course of the investigation, and no arrest followed.¹

The Unidentified Woman at the Crocker Galleria

About thirty minutes after Modafferi clocked out, a coworker saw her on the second floor of the Crocker Galleria talking with an unidentified blonde woman. The coworker found it strange because Modafferi normally left the mall as soon as her shift ended.¹ Despite repeated public appeals by Modafferi’s family, the woman has never been identified and has never come forward.⁵ She remains the last person known to have spoken to Modafferi.

Jon Onuma and the False Tip

Seventeen days after Modafferi vanished, a man called the assignment desk at KGO-TV and claimed she had been murdered in a “lesbian love affair that went wrong,” naming two specific women. Detectives quickly cleared the women. The caller turned out to be Jon Onuma, who used the aliases “Ryan” and “Jade Yoshino”; he admitted the call and said the women he named were his then-girlfriend Jill Lampo’s employers and he had been trying to retaliate against them.⁵ Onuma later told reporters, “I put the attention on me when I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up. I took the focus off the investigation.”⁶

The call drew investigators’ attention to Onuma himself. Pages had been torn from Lampo’s diary covering the days around Modafferi’s disappearance, and Lampo told police Onuma had removed them because the content “could come back to hurt” him. A personal ad investigators believed Modafferi may have placed was found in her apartment, and Onuma was known to meet women through personal ads.⁵ Other women accused Onuma of physical violence; on an episode of America’s Most Wanted, one woman shown in silhouette said that after attacking her, Onuma told her, “Now you know what happened to Kristen Modafferi.”⁶

Onuma has never been charged in connection with the disappearance or the assault allegations. He says he passed a polygraph and never met Modafferi.⁵⁶⁴ A family friend, Dennis Mahon, who has investigated independently for years, also tried to interview Matthew Luque, a former boyfriend of Lampo, and reported Luque became “very hostile” at the mention of Modafferi’s name.³

The Robert Durst Inquiry

After real estate heir Robert Durst was arrested in 2015 for the murder of his friend Susan Berman, the Oakland Police Department disclosed that it had looked at Durst years earlier in the Modafferi case. The inquiry started in 2003, when investigators learned Durst may have been living in Northern California in 1997.⁷ Working with the FBI, Oakland police kept the inquiry “open and active for several years” before concluding there was no evidence tying Durst to the disappearance.⁸

Forensic Searches at the Jayne Avenue House

In 2015, private forensic investigator Paul Dostie, a former Mammoth Lakes police sergeant, brought his cadaver dog Buster to 274 Jayne Avenue, where Modafferi had rented her room. The dog alerted to what Dostie described as a “chemical plume” in the basement and near a drainage pipe and vents, which he said indicated human decomposition.⁹ Oakland police went to the property, brought in Chico State University specialists to run ground-penetrating radar, and dug in the basement. Nothing was recovered, and the assigned officer noted the dense clay soil made burial unlikely. The lead was later called “inconsequential.”¹

Dostie returned in February 2017 with forensic anthropologist Dr. Arpad Vass, who used a proprietary device designed to detect volatile organic compounds associated with decomposition. The device flagged an area at the base of porch steps between 274 and 278 Jayne Avenue. According to Dostie and Vass, material near a concrete slab there tested positive for human blood, and DNA extracted from the decomposing material matched the DNA of Modafferi’s parents, who had provided reference samples.¹⁰

Oakland police did not run their own confirmatory testing. As of May 2018, the department said it had not received enough information from Vass about his testing protocols and blood-testing results to proceed; Dostie and Vass said they had provided enough for independent verification.¹⁰ Because the technology was proprietary and under patent review, police said they would need independently reproducible results before the findings could be used in any criminal case.⁴

Where the Case Stands Now

The FBI closed its investigation in 2010, saying agents “did not uncover any evidence of foul play,” but still features Modafferi on its website and takes tips through its online portal.¹¹¹ The Oakland Police Department’s missing persons file remains open.⁴ The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has released an age-progressed image showing what Modafferi might look like at thirty-six; she would now be in her mid-forties.¹² No one has ever been charged.

1
SFGate. Kristen Modafferi Cold Case
2
NBC Bay Area. New Evidence Emerges in 1997 Oakland Cold Case of Kristen Modafferi
3
SFGate. Kristen Modafferi: Dennis Mahon, Onuma, Missing, Lampo
4
ABC7 News. Kristen Modafferi Mystery: Private Investigators Shed Light on Cold Case
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Unsolved.com. Kristen Modafferi
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ABC7 News. Kristen Modafferi Mystery: Private Investigators Shed Light on Cold Case (Part 2)
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People. Police Eye Links Between Robert Durst and Missing Women
8
NBC Bay Area. Oakland Police: No Evidence to Indicate Robert Durst Was Involved in Kristen Modafferi’s Disappearance
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WSOCTV. Official: Possible Human Remains Found Where Missing Charlotte Teen Lived
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SFGate. Kristen Modafferi Cold Case: Oakland Jayne Avenue DNA
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FBI. Kristen Modafferi – Kidnappings and Missing Persons
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National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Kristen Deborah Modafferi