Disappearance of Kristen Modafferi

Kristen Deborah Modafferi was born June 1, 1979, in Danbury, Connecticut, and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1997, after completing her freshman year at North Carolina State University on a Park Scholarship, she traveled alone to the San Francisco Bay Area to study photography at the University of California, Berkeley for the summer. She found housing on Jayne Avenue in Oakland with four male roommates, and worked part-time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and full-time at Spinelli's coffee shop in the Crocker Galleria Mall in San Francisco's Financial District.

On the afternoon of June 23, 1997, three weeks after her eighteenth birthday, Modafferi finished her shift at Spinelli's around 3:00 p.m. She had mentioned to coworkers that she might visit Baker Beach that afternoon. About 45 minutes after her shift ended, coworkers saw her with an unidentified blonde woman on the second floor of the Galleria; this woman has never been identified. Surveillance video last captured Modafferi withdrawing cash from a Wells Fargo ATM.

Modafferi did not attend her first photography class at UC Berkeley the next day, despite having paid tuition, and left an unclaimed paycheck at Spinelli's. Her roommates did not report her missing when she failed to return home. Her parents flew to San Francisco on June 27 and reported her missing to the Oakland Police Department, though investigators did not begin actively investigating until June 30, initially treating her as a runaway. A $50,000 reward was offered, and the family hired a private investigator. Police bloodhounds traced her scent to a Muni bus route ending near Sutro Heights Park, where the trail was lost. A personal ad found circled in a newspaper in her room could not be traced to its author.

On July 10, 1997, a man later identified as Jon Onuma called a local television station claiming Modafferi had been murdered and her body disposed of near Point Reyes. Onuma later told police he had fabricated the claim to implicate two women he believed were conspiring against his girlfriend. Blood found in his apartment was determined through DNA testing to be from a cat. Onuma relocated to Hawaii in 1999. He has not been charged in connection with Modafferi's disappearance.

In 2015 and 2017, independent searches of the Jayne Avenue house used cadaver dogs and specialized forensic equipment that indicated possible signs of human decomposition and blood near the property. Oakland police stated that the necessary information from the researchers had not been formally submitted to the department, which the researchers disputed. As of 2025, the case remains unsolved. In 2000, "Kristen's Law" was enacted to fund missing-persons assistance programs, though its federal funding lapsed in 2005.