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Robert Modafferi picked up the phone in his Charlotte, N.C., office that late June morning and heard the news every parent dreads. "I don't know how to tell you this," said a flustered voice. "Your daughter's missing."The caller was Griffin Cherry, a 24-year-old website designer. For the previous three weeks, he had shared a house in Oakland, Calif., with Modafferi's 18-year-old daughter, Kristen, and three other men. Cherry, stammering, said that none of them had seen Kristen for three days -- not since she left first thing in the morning for her job at Spinelli's, a downtown coffee shop.
He hadn't called earlier, Cherry explained, because he figured Kristen had just met up with friends. But when the second night went by, still with no word, he'd notified police and then placed the call to Modafferi.
Robert, a 48-year-old electrical engineer, took a deep breath. How would he tell his wife, Deborah? What should they do? It was too soon for him to realize that their life, as they knew it, was over.
On June 23, 1997, Kristen Modafferi, a tall, vivacious brunette, ended her workday and vanished into thin air. An investigation into her disappearance has yet to produce a trace.
For now, Kristen has become a statistic. Each year, there are as many as 200,000 adults who are listed as missing in the United States. The majority turn up quickly -- some having disappeared by choice, some found dead, by accident or foul play. Yet others -- roughly 11,000 last year alone -- remain missing, 3,400 of them deemed by law enforcement to be endangered or abducted against their will. In many of these cases, investigators have little more to go on than the strong belief that the victims were not the kind of people who would have walked away from their lives. Police say Kristen, now gone for more than six years, falls into that category.
She was just a kid, yet in some ways she was mature beyond her years. She had skipped a grade and had traveled as far as Russia to sing with the high school chorus. She was smart. She scored 1570 on her SATs and won a full four-year academic scholarship at North Carolina State University -- tuition, room and board included. Kristen was extremely curious, open to new experience. A student of industrial design, she was a photography buff, read Ayn Rand and sang in an a cappella group. The world, as they say, was her oyster.
Initially, Deborah Modafferi didn't want to let her second oldest daughter move to San Francisco, the city Kristen chose to live and work in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years as part of her scholarship program. But Robert thought it was a good idea, and Kristen twisted her mother's arm. "She was so excited about the whole thing, we couldn't say no," Deborah says. "She was really ready to grow up."
So on June 1, her 18th birthday, Kristen spread her wings. She arrived in the Bay Area, enrolled in a photography class at the University of California at Berkeley, and rented a $500-a-month room in an Oakland house occupied by four young male professionals. Robert would have preferred she stay in the dorms -- but agreed, for this summer, to defer to his daughter's stubborn determination.
It was a concession that plagued him now. As he sped from his office to meet Deborah at home, he was tormented by guilt. Why, he asked himself, had he let his little girl go?
Robert and Deborah took the first plane out to San Francisco. They went straight from the airport to police headquarters in Oakland, where the desk officer told them that the investigators assigned to their daughter's case had gone for the weekend. It was Friday afternoon, just after 4 p.m.
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