Pair now give conflicting tales of last time missing girl was seen
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
"Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said."
-- Mark Twain
Seven years ago today, Kirsten Kryszak and the van she supposedly stole disappeared from the planet.
Josh Anders and Brent Wolverton, who once played in a local band called Interstate, are by their own admission two of the last people to see 18-year-old Kirsten Joy Kryszak and that 1988 blue Ford Aerostar van.
"I could see her taking off, to like, California," says Wolverton, who at the time was Kirsten's latest quasi-boyfriend and is now 31, married and living in a Southaven apartment complex.
"She probably sold the van. I'd say for drugs," says Anders, 28, who shares a small Byhalia, Miss., house
with his wife. "If she was smart,
she'd head out of the city. Because if you steal somebody's vehicle. ..."
You vanish forever?
Wherever she is, she hasn't used her Social Security number in seven years, hasn't called her family, hasn't followed her pattern when she still lived in Indiana and would run away.
"She always came back," says Jeffery Brown, 24, a friend who lives in the same Chesterton, Ind., subdivision as Kirsten's mother.
In fact, just days before she disappeared after the New Year's Eve party, Kirsten had gone back to Indiana to visit family. Part of that time, Brown says, she was "frantic looking for coke."
But part of that time, she was a little girl again. Her mother, Karen St. Mary, and sister, Ashley Kryszak, recall the three of them spending Christmas morning snuggling and giggling, finding a precious moment when all was still right with the world.
The previous year, even amid the drama in her own life, Kirsten called Ashley on her 15th birthday and sang on the answering machine.
"She loved her sister," says Wolverton. "She showed me a picture a couple of times, said her sister looked up to her."
Is this somebody who chooses to disappear?
"I don't see Kirsten killing herself or just taking off," says Brown, her Indiana friend.
But suppose she was ready to run. Would she leave behind all her other clothes and belongings?
Would she drive away on a snowy winter's day in a miniskirt and a light jacket -- the clothes Anders and Wolverton recall her wearing?
Seven years ago, Josh Anders and Brent Wolverton more or less told matching stories concerning Kirsten Kryszak's disappearance:
She was at the same Midtown New Year's Eve party they were, near Wolverton's apartment on Clark Place. Bradford S. Toland -- "Tolly," the owner of the blue Ford Aerostar van -- also was there. A band was playing up in the attic at the party and Wolverton was working the lights. Kirsten was "high."
As Wolverton recalls events, Kirsten kept playing with the lights and he told her: "You're (expletive) up the show."
Wolverton took Kirsten outside the party. But Anders says Wolverton became irritated for other reasons.
"I remember Brent saying, 'Don't act like this is a strip club,' " says Anders.
Fast forward to mid-morning New Year's Day 2001. Kirsten asks Anders for a ride home and he borrows Tolly's van.
Anders, according to what he and Wolverton told police then, drove Kirsten around for several hours and she couldn't find the house she was looking for. So they came back and parked near Wolverton's pad on Clark Place.
When Anders walked up to Wolverton's front door, she slid behind the wheel and took off.
But seven years later, Anders and Wolverton tell conflicting stories in vivid detail.
The New Year's Eve party went late. Wolverton says after he escorted Kirsten from the party, he next saw her at 3:30 a.m. standing outside where people were milling about.
"I didn't go anywhere else," he says. "I probably sat around my apartment and (shot the bull) with a few folks."
Anders says Kirsten awakened him about 10 a.m. on New Year's Day. He had slept on the couch at the Midtown apartment of Tolly's brother, Bobby.
Taking Wolverton's and Anders' stories together, that leaves an unexplained gap from 3:30 a.m. to 10 a.m.
"There's this whole lapse of time when no one seems to know where she was or what she did," says her mother, Karen St. Mary.
Karen and Kirsten's stepfather, Pete St. Mary, came to Memphis several weeks later in 2001. They talked to Wolverton and Toland without satisfaction.
Wolverton, recalling her family's visit, puts forth another theory: "My personal thought was that she overdosed because of the path she was on."
The MPD's Missing Persons Bureau and a private detective firm conducted short-lived investigations and posted flyers with Kirsten's picture throughout the Cooper-Young area in Midtown.
"Unfortunately, we couldn't find evidence of a crime," says Memphis police Sgt. Barbara Olive, who has had the case for several years -- but has never spoken to Anders, Wolverton or Toland, the last three people to see Kirsten.
"She's wanting a ride home," Anders says now of New Year's Day. "I've got a hangover. My car won't start."
This, he explains, is how he came to borrow Toland's van. Anders says he and Kirsten went to CK's Coffee Shop for breakfast, and then came back to his apartment for him to shower and change clothes.
"She stayed in the van, with the heater running, so she could stay warm," he says.
Was this not the perfect opportunity for her to steal the van?
Yet, she didn't. Anders says he drove her "all over God's country," an odyssey that took them to West Memphis, "into the 'hood," and finally Mississippi.
"By the time we got back, I'd put gas in that damn van twice."
As he tells it, she first directed him to West Memphis and a big house set back off the road. She told him it was either her mom's or grandparents' place, but then said, "Nobody will be home."
And so it went, he says. He drove to one place after another, but never the right place.
The roads were snowy and slick, yet he kept driving. Her behavior was bizarre -- "she's happy one minute, sad the next, laughing, then crying" -- and yet he let her keep telling him where to go.
She wouldn't talk most of the time, he says, but she tried to put the moves on him by "dancing in her seat" and asking him to pull over.
"I shot her down," he says.
So Anders covers three states, rejects Kirsten's advances and says they return to Clark Place after dark -- "the street lights were on, I remember that" -- and that's when she steals the van at the moment he walks up to Wolverton's door.
"I get out of the van, stupid me, and the van's still running, the heater's still going, and she takes off," he says.
Not forever, though, because he says she came around the block and was "laughing and pointing at me" as he chased her, adding, "she damn near hit me."
As Anders tells his tale one morning, he sits in his living room before going to work at a granite shop. He is tall and lean, a little pale, with a thin goatee. He holds a coffee cup -- "my wife's cup," he says with a smile -- that depicts Winnie the Pooh tumbling, finally landing on his head.
"The way the road conditions were, I'm surprised she didn't get in a wreck right off the bat," he offers, filling the silence.
Was Wolverton home when he went to the door and she took the van?
"It doesn't seem like he was, no sir."
Has he seen Wolverton lately?
"I remember seeing him at my wedding reception -- three years ago," says Anders. "I really don't think I remember seeing him after that."
Brent Wolverton recalls New Year's Day 2001 this way: He woke up to a winter wonderland. He walked outside his apartment to have a smoke. A girl across the way, whose third-floor apartment window faced Wolverton's apartment, waved at him.
"She invited me over for hot chocolate," he says, his smile showing the gap between his two front teeth. "Pretty girl. I'd been waiting for that hot chocolate invitation."
He accepted it, he says, and was standing by her window looking at his apartment, around noon, when the blue 1988 Ford Aerostar pulled up.
"Here comes Kirsten, Shaun and another guy we used to play music with." Wolverton pauses. "... Josh. I don't remember his last name off the top of my head. I really don't."
Wolverton says Kirsten walked up to his apartment door and knocked, then returned to the van. Then all of them went to the door and knocked.
"After that, they left," he says. "That was the last time I saw her.
"I got a call around 2 p.m. from Shaun (Toland) or Josh, I don't remember which one, saying Kirsten had stolen Shaun's minivan. I think they said something like they were getting out at a gas station and she had taken the car."
If what Wolverton says now is true, that Kirsten was with Anders and Toland New Year's Day and stole the van when they were at a gas station around 2 p.m., then Anders' story can't be true.
If Anders' version is true, that he alone drove Kirsten around for several hours and she stole the van after dark on Wolverton's street, then Wolverton's story can't be true.
"I feel the same way that I've always felt," says Karen St. Mary, Kirsten's mother. "Somebody knows something."
Seven years later, Kirsten Joy Kryszak is missing. Nothing less, nothing more.
For a long time, Josh Anders, Bradford S. Toland and Brent Wolverton were not totally unlike Kirsten: They had disappeared -- at least to police.
Now Toland seems unhappy to be found, via a call to his mother requesting a way to contact him.
"What if I wanted to go find your mother's phone number?" he huffs into the phone and hangs up.
Wolverton takes the opposite approach. Hours after meeting with a reporter, after saying he knew Kirsten "six months to a year, tops," he calls back.
"Hey, man, my wife and I were just sitting here talking and I was curious: What was her last name?"
Kryszak -- K-r-y-s-z-a-k.
The name that Josh Anders said sounded "familiar" when a reporter approached him on his driveway asking about the past.
Now, after talking about Kirsten for an hour, after inviting the stranger in for coffee and politely answering every question, Anders again stands in his driveway, his wife by his side.
The stranger mentions one last thing: These past seven years? They've been hard on Kirsten's family.
Anders nods a little, lights himself a Marlboro, inhales ... exhales, blowing smoke.
"I do feel for the family, I really do," he says. "Maybe they'll get lucky and she'll be all right.
"Maybe not."
-- Don Wade: 529-2358
What happens in a cold case?
In the seven years that Kirsten Kryszak has been missing, several detectives from the Memphis Police Department's Missing Persons Bureau have worked the case.
"Kidnappings will go to the felony assault squad," says Sgt. Terry Wiechert of the Missing Persons Bureau. Homicide detectives, she says, won't get involved "unless there's a body. I'm not trying to be trivial, but typically that's the only thing they handle nowadays."
Wiechert is not assigned to the Kirsten Kryszak case. Sgt. Barbara Olive is. She says, "Unfortunately, I don't think there's going to be a happy outcome to this one."
Karen St. Mary believes her daughter is dead, too. She also believes police could have, should have, done more over the years to find her. She says her calls to Memphis police always end the same way.
"I'm always politely told I'm screwed," she says.
Kristin Helm, a spokeswoman for the TBI, says one of two conditions must exist in a case for the TBI to become involved.
"To enter a case, we either have to be requested by a local law enforcement agency, such as the Memphis Police Department," Helm says, "or it has to be at the request of district attorneys -- 'I want you to open an investigation on such-and-such a case.'"
"Unfortunately, we couldn't find evidence of a crime."
Memphis police Sgt. Barbara Olive, an investigator on the case
"I don't see Kirsten killing herself or just taking off."
Jeffery Brown
friend from Indiana
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/jan/01/missing-today-different-stories-arise-missing/Be sure to read the comments at the link.
