Fort Bragg parents use technology to look for missing daughter
Kristi Krebs
Published: Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:18 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:18 p.m.
In the months after their 22-year-old daughter disappeared in 1993, Fort Bragg residents Bob and Susan Krebs distributed thousands of fliers with her photo around the state in the hope someone had seen her.
Now, after 18 years, technology offers new ways of getting out word that they're still looking.
A photo showing what Kristi Krebs might look like today was developed recently by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Her parents hope it will reach someone who has crossed her path or who knows what became of her.
Police are hopeful, too.
“I'm optimistic that either she's out there somewhere, or somebody knows something about it,” said Fort Bragg Police Officer Jeanine Gregory, who requested the forensic age-progression photo on behalf of the department.
“We think she's out there,” Bob Krebs said. “We don't have any reason to think that she's not.”
Kristi Krebs, who would be 41 now, was a young woman with psychological problems when she vanished the night of Aug. 9, 1993.
Though recovering in the months before she disappeared, she'd had a psychotic break a few years earlier and may have drifted back into her own world at the time she vanished.
After leaving work at Round Table Pizza that night, she drove into the Woodlands Campground outside Fort Bragg where her Toyota Tercel became stuck in a creek bed, authorities said.
There were signs she'd struggled to get the car out, and perhaps gone into a rage. The headlights were broken, some photographs and her identification were torn up in the car, and there was a small amount of blood. The radio was ripped out, as well.
The incident was similar to an earlier occasion in which Kristi got a car stuck in the mud in the woods, and it burst into flames.
When the charred remnants were found, Kristi was gone. When she was spotted the next morning some distance away on the Skunk Train tracks, she was in a daze that signaled her break-down and months of amnesia.
Three years later, police found wet clothes in the Tercel — traded, her parents believe, for some pink shorts and a shirt she would have had in the car for the gym workouts. They're convinced a hitchhiker in pink shorts seen in town a day or two later was their daughter.
Eight months later, a Utah woman contacted them after seeing a flier about Kristi. The woman described a hitchhiker in pink shorts in Salt Lake City the previous August, providing the kind of detail the Krebs say distinguished her report as more credible than the hundreds of others that never panned out.
The woman had Kristi's walk down, the smile that revealed her upper gums, and other mannerisms like the way she licked her lips and called herself “the happiest girl in the world.”
She also described the hitchhiker's euphoria and belief she was on her way to get married, as well as her conviction that people were after her and that returning home would put her parents at risk.
Police have never ruled out foul play but have not made public any specific evidence indicating Krebs was a victim, either. Gregory noted that the coastal woods were searched several times with trained dogs and no trace of her was found.
In the meantime, replays of segments about her case on TV programs like “Unsolved Mysteries” have continued to generate tips from folks around the country — especially the Midwest and the East Coast — who think they've seen or known her, Fort Bragg Police Sgt. Brandon Lee said.
As recently as December, a woman contacted authorities saying she believes she'd worked with Kristi in South Carolina, even remembering a deformed right thumb, one of Kristi's distinguishing features, Lee said.
Many in the Fort Bragg police department grew up in the area and knew Kristi, so they take the unsolved case personally, he said.
Reviewing cold cases in recent months, Gregory thought it made sense to see what more could be done to move the case forward, and she sought help developing a new image.
Police and the Krebses believe there's a possibility that Kristi lost her memory as she did when she first exhibited psychological problems or that perhaps she's been having contact with mental health personnel.
If so, those mental health professionals might be prevented from contacting her parents on their own because of patient confidentiality.
“We would just like them to communicate with her that we love her and we would like to hear from her, and then we could go from there,” Bob Krebs said.
The Krebs have other children — three grown sons and five grandkids — and “have gone on with our lives,” he said.
The retired elementary school teacher and his wife have stayed in Fort Bragg, hoping some day Kristi might find them.
“You never know what little thing could trigger it,” he said said.
Krebs was about 5-foot-2 and weighed 135 to 140 pounds when she disappeared. She had blue eyes, light brown hair and a fair complexion. She also had a deformed right thumb. Anyone who believes they have seen her should contact a local law enforcement agency or Fort Bragg Police at 961-2800.
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