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Mahanay and Bradley faced two major obstacles in building a case. They lacked a crime scene; there was no evidence of a struggle, no clothes or clues left behind to work with. And in part because Kristen had been in the Bay Area such a short time, they had few additional leads to pursue.Through further interviews with Kristen's roommates, Bradley learned one telling thing. Kristen, who had never had a steady boyfriend, had a very trusting nature -- perhaps too trusting. She apparently took "casual carpool" rides with strangers over the Bay Bridge. Once, after missing the last train to Oakland following a concert she'd attended, she considered spending the night on a train station bench. When a young man she'd met at the concert told her that was dangerous, she accepted his invitation to sleep on the sofa at his brother's house. Bradley and Mahanay eliminated the man as a suspect, but wondered how many others like him Kristen had run into -- and if one of them had turned out to be lethal.
It came as no surprise to the Modafferis that their daughter gave people the benefit of the doubt, perhaps naively so. In many ways, she'd lived a protected, idyllic life before heading to California.
Robert and Deborah were high school sweethearts from New Jersey who had married 30 years earlier and moved to Charlotte in 1988 for Robert's job. They settled into a five-bedroom colonial-style house on a street lined with crape myrtles and dogwoods, in a neighborhood full of families. Robert coached softball, and Deborah shuttled the kids from soccer to piano. All four girls were as beautiful as they were smart -- Allison, now 26, then Kristen, Lauren, now 21, and the mid-life surprise, Meghan, now 13. Their lives revolved around one another.
The Modafferis stayed in the Bay Area an exhausting 14 days. They were grateful for the increased diligence of the detectives, but couldn't understand why Kristen's disappearance was not attracting more attention. They thought about the milk cartons with missing children on them, the billboards, the television announcements. If their daughter's name and photo were widely broadcast, surely someone would come forward who knew something. Had other area law enforcement agencies been alerted? What if Kristen had been abducted and taken across state lines? Would anyone be watching for her?
They contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the one agency they'd heard could help. But because Kristen had celebrated her 18th birthday three weeks before her disappearance, they were turned away; the NCMEC's charter limits services to victims under the legal age. Kristen's legal emancipation meant the investigation into her disappearance was ineligible for a variety of resources available for solving missing children's cases in the United States.
When a child turns up missing, for instance, police are required to immediately register all information about the case, including details about possible suspects, with the National Crime Information Center, a sophisticated database managed by the FBI. The NCIC can be quickly accessed by law enforcement agencies across the country. It's this kind of coordination that set the stage for Amber Alert.
In the United States, at least 600,000 children under the age of 18 are reported missing each year. (As many as one-quarter of these cases are classified as family abductions.) Thanks in part to the NCIC database and coordinated recovery efforts, 94 percent of those cases are resolved quickly, the majority with the children found and returned safely home. Missing adults are not as fortunate.
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