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She was a romantic-you could see it in her room: handmade muslin drapes looped through dogwood boughs, low tables bearing plants, vases, goblets. A shawl-draped dresser displaying a tin Barbie box, pictures of herself as a child in Wisconsin and of her sister Kathy's adorable 2-year-old son, named Marshall, after Thurgood Marshall. The books on her shelves (Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement, The Philosophy of Right and Wrong, Development and Dependency) advertised a feisty, cerebral idealism. And on the floor near a stack of CDs (Jamiroquai, Liz Phair, Jeff Buckley, the Fugees) were more books, including a dog-eared copy of Two of Us Make a World: The Single Mother's Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth and the First Year. She was five months pregnant; and though the baby was unplanned and she was adamantly pro-choice (after vegetarianism, reproductive freedom was the cause she fought for most fiercely), she never considered abortion. She was thrilled about having this child, and while her friends had no doubt she could handle single-motherhood ("Kristine is the most competent person I know," says Denise Lilien, her girlhood friend from Madison, Wisconsin), they had worried about her involvement with the baby's father. She had detailed to at least eight confidants every twist and turn in her strange, sporadic five-month relationship with her former Baruch College science instructor and had shared key parts of the story with several others. And so when, shortly after noon on Saturday, October 24, Kristine Kupka, 28, left her room with little more than the clothes on her back and didn't return, her disappearance led those who knew her to fear the worst.
Kristine was a passionate, opinionated person with a strong circle of friends and clear, close-at-hand goals. A college philosophy major two months from graduation, with a 3.97 average, she planned to go to law school and specialize in women's issues. She had a job waitressing at the Caribbean restaurant Negril, near Chelsea Piers, that she would not have abandoned. And she was happy; to those who knew her well, suicide was unthinkable.
Indeed, her life seemed as disciplined and spirited as her room in the wide-porched house near Coney Island Avenue, in a hidden pocket of Brooklyn called Kensington. Deeming Park Slope too expensive, Kristine, who had also lived in the East Village, and TriBeCa, rented two floors of this house for $2,200 a month from a Turkish family. Then she shrewdly sublet the extra bedrooms, creating a kind of MTVs Real World of frugal young urbanites: an extravagantly tatooed club bouncer, a New York Times cyber-journalist, a hotel trainee, and two college students.
Within a week, there were news reports of her disappearance
(PREGNANT HONOR STUDENT IS MISSING; SIS FEARS PREGNANT BARUCH COED WHO VANISHED
IS DEAD), and on November 10, her friends held a vigil. Outside Baruchs
main building at Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street, they embraced, cupped votive
candles, help up signs expressing their fear and outrage (KRISTINE KUPKA:
MISSING 17 DAYS; 17 DAYS TOO LONG) Kristines sister, Kathy, heartbroken,
and hoarse, was given a bouquet, and a plate was passed to collect reward
money.
Then weeks went by without a breakthrough. As
the November wind loosened the flyers (please help me find my 5-months pregnant
sister) from the maple trees, the candle-clutching group that assembled in
front of Kristineís house for a second vigil was smaller, and the TV
crews failed to materialize. A mere $5,000 had been raised to induce anyone
with information to come forward. (It has since been doubled, with a donation
from Baurchs alumni association.) Kathy Kupka had taken on the drained
aspect of Dorothea Langes dust-bowl mother. Desperate to believe Kristine
might still be alive, she had spent a recent day and night in New Jersey,
futilely following a telephone tipster who promised to lead her to her sister.
That outing had underscored her hellish limbo: Should she hope, or grieve?
Use common sense, or take leaps of faith? Speak in the present or past tense?
Frustration
of a different sort plagues authorities in missing-persons cases. Without
a body, it is extremely hard to prove that a crime has even been committed.
Prime examples are the recent indictment of grifters Kenneth and Sante Kimes
for the murder of heiress Irene Silverman, and the indictment, in November
1997, of prominent Delaware attorney Thomas Capano for the June 1996 murder
of governors assistant Anne Marie Fahey. In both cases, police had early
circumstantial evidence that pointed to the suspects. But the absence of a
body made securing indictments extremely arduous. In the Kupka case, the police
still arent certain that a homicide has been committed.
By early December, the number of detectives working on the
case had shrunk to four; by mid-December, to just two. Today, ten and a half
weeks after Kristines disappearance, the identity of the Baruch College
teacher who left with her that morning is still being kept secret by the nervous
college and the proprietary Police Department. Kristine Kupka's family and
friends, convinced her fate lies in his hands, believe it is time to change
that.
The man who accompanied Kristine on her October 24 outing is
Darshanand Persaud; most people call him Rudy. Persaud is a respectable young
Indo-Guyanese-American. A 1995 graduate of Baruch, a Manhattan-based branch
of CUNY, he was a quality-control chemist testing glue products at Basic Adhesives,
in Brooklyn, and an adjunct lab instructor at his alma mater. He currently
attends the New Jersey Dental School in Newark, making a cumbersome commute
(subway to path train to school bus) to get there each morning. He is now
married to an accountant in the Dreyfus Corporations Park Avenue office;
the couple lives with his parents in a neat house in a rundown section of
Brooklyn. Hes the familys only son; the oldest of his three
sisters is a physician.
Miguel Santos, the lecturing professor for Introduction to
Environmental Sciences, whose lab sections Persaud taught found him "a
very pleasant, cordial, nice person, knowledgeable in science and a good teacher."
Students characterized him as handsome, sometimes polite, sometimes angry
and moody. He was decorous; he had refrained from dating Kristine, his student,
until he had filed her course grade. It was Kristinewith her long, black
clothes, bright-red hair, extra-strength opinionswho had flirted with
him.
When Kristineís classmate Anthon Grant, a 26-year-old
Trinidadian who had
befriended Persaud on the basis of their mutual interest in computers, and
shared Caribbean background, told him last May that he thought Kristine had
a crush on him, "Rudy said, come ahhhhn.... "
Kristine found Persaud's shyness charming. "She thought of him as this
gentle-lamb sort of guy, honest and naive," says Michael Legatt, a member
with Kristines of Baruchs Philosophy Club. Indeed, Persauds
clean-cut looks and slight awkwardness led her to compare him, to several
friends, to a "newborn baby."
Where Kristine saw guilelessness, Anthon Grant saw calculation.
"Rudy was very GQ-ish. He never had a bad-hair day. He seemed like someone
who had his own agendalike his main goal was getting ahead in life,
like he didnt want to be where he was, thats for sure. He would
walk into class late, in a trench coat, like hed just come from someplace
important." He was "Mr. Persaud" to his students who were mainly
his age, and when the class first overheard Dr. Santos address him informally,
"we looked at each other, like,Rudy!" Grant says, laughing.
It seemed too goofy a name for Persaud.
Though few at Baruch knew, Persaud was that rare thing in India, rarer in
Guyana, and rarer still in New York: a true Brahmin. And a Brahmin with a
pandit (a priest) for a father. Kristine Kupka was a kind of reverse Rudy
Persaud. They represented two different versions of the romance of migrating
to New York Citycolliding examples of the postmodern melting pot. He
moved here as part of an esteemed ethnic family, part of an ambitious community
of immigrants who had a literal caste system. She moved to New York in a quasi-bohemian
fashion: a white, blue-eyed Midwesterner drawn to milieus in which she was
the racial minority. Baruch has a predominantly non-white student body; and
Negril, where she worked, has a largely Caribbean clientele. Many of the men
she had dated were black. Anthon Grant says, "I dont think Kristine
saw color."
Where Persaud maintained the formality and reserve of the Anglo-Indian
culture, Kristine, a graduate of the Forum, a modified reincarnation of Werner
Erhards EST seminars, "revealed herself," Denise Lilien says.
"She didnt hold back; she really developed intimacies. She was
willing to put so much on the table so quickly. She was This is who
I am; this is what I can give. Thats how she was with men, too.
It was often too much. It could be overwhelming."
On October 24, a little past 11 a.m., Persaud pushed the buzzer at Kristines
house. He had called the night before, she told her roommate Ozlem, a 22-year-old
Near Eastern college student (who asked New York to withhold her last name),
to tell her he had found an apartment in Queens and wanted her to see it.
But Kristine had overslept; she called out to Ozlem to let Rudy in. Ozlem
says she sensed that Rudy did not want to come upstairs. When he did, "he
was pacing around. He had his hands in his pockets like he was distressed."
Kristine came out of her bedroom in her pajamas and sat with Rudy, eating
her health-food breakfast. Ozlem then when to her room; another housemate
glimpsed Kristine, in a long black skirt and black sweater, leaving with Rudy.
That was the last time any of Kristines friends or family saw her. Her
last communication was a message left on Kathys answering machine, apparently
just before she walked out the door: "Im going to look at Rudys
new apartment in Queens. Ill call you later this afternoon. See ya."
When Kathy didnt hear from hers sister that afternoon
or that night, she began to worry. When Ozlem called the next morning to say
Kristine had still not returned, Kathys worry turned to alarm and dread.
She and her husband, Kevin (hes a parole officer, she a teacher), bundled
up their toddler, Marshall, and rushed to the 70th Precinct.
At the 70th, Kathy and Kevin were given a stock response: Because Kristine
was over 16 and under 65 years old and of sound mind and body, a missing-person
report could not yet be filed. Maybe she took a trip home to Wisconsin or
a vacation to Bermuda, it was suggested. Kristine wouldnt do that! Kathy
protested, to no avail. It would be two days before the police called her
to take an "informational account" of Kristines disappearance.
The couple raced back to their Brooklyn apartment, with its pictures of Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Frida Kahlo, and Huey Newton, to plot their next move.
Both former caseworkers and political activists, Kathy is cool and wry, and
Kevin, who is African-American, has the efficient manner of a young executive.
They immediately started making calls and designing a flyer. Kathy left a
message for her and Kristines mother. Ellie Bodell, 64, is as much as
freethinker as her daughters: At age 56, she became a long-distance truck
driver. She was on the road and didnt get Kathys frantic message
until October 31. When she heard it, she says, "I just sat here in total
shock." Then she flew to New York.
Monday morning, October 26: Still no Kristine. Kathy and Kevin
went to Baruch. Joining them was Nick Papanikolu, a darkly handsome, quite
graduate student who had lived with Kristine for three years; since breaking
up two and a half years ago, they had been the closest of friends. Kristines
disappearance has since taken over Nicks life; he dropped out of school
to search for her, and virtually lives at Kevin and Kathys. They tried
to get Persauds home address from Baruch, but a clerk in the personnel
office told them theyd need a subpoena. Through a chain of acquaintances,
they came up with an approximate address in Bushwick.
Nick and Kevin drove out to a row of attached redbricks with aluminum awnings,
gated windows and doors, shrubs, and chain-link fences. In front of one: Indian
and Guyanese flags. Its sidewalk bore a childs worn wet-cement legend:
rudy.
Nick and Kevin waited in the car. When an older man approached the house,
they approached him. Rudys uncle. He had seen Rudy Saturday morning
and then not again until Sunday evening. At 5:30, a woman appeared. Rudys
mother. "We started hitting her with all these facts,"Kevin recalls,
"and told her we needed to question Rudy and to have him here at seven."
Nick and Kevin waited in the car. At seven, a
police van pulled up. Two officers got out, guns drawn. (the NYPD refused
to grant New York an interview with the two officers.) They ordered Nick and
Kevin out of the car and lightly frisked them. Then a young man climbed out
of the back of the police van. "He was dressed very preppy," Kevin
recalls. "Cardigan sweater, white shirt, dark dress pants, Jansport backpack."
It was Rudy. Apparently alerted by his mother that two men were harassing
the family, he had gone to the precinct and obtained a police escort.
"Wheres Kristine?" Kevin demanded.
"How should I know?" came Rudys flippant answer, according
to both men.
"You killed Kristine!" Nick insisted. "Where is she?"
"He said, I donít know what youre talking about,
and Why dont you go file a missing-persons report."
Recalls Kevin.
Kevin asked Rudy what he and Kristine had done on Saturday,
since "you were the last one seen with her." He said that he had
dropped Kristine off two blocks from her house between 3 and 4 p.m., because
she wanted to go to the health-food store, and that that was the last time
he had seen her.
Kevin asked Rudy where he'd gone with Kristine. Rudy said they went shopping.
Kevin asked where. Rudy answered, "Some mall." Kevin and Nick kept
the questions up: Which mall? Which stores? Rudy said he had stayed in the
car while she shopped.
Five days later, when the news media were told of Kristines disappearance,
reporters canvassed Kristines neighborhood, as had the police and Nick,
Kathy, and Kevinall asking whether anyone had seen her on Saturday.
A Laundromat owner said hed seen her through his window, and a health-food-store
worker thought she may have seen Kristine in the store"after dark,"
at about 7 p.m.
The health-food-store worker is now "pretty sure" the woman she
way after dark on Saturday, October 24, was not Kristineamong other
things, that woman was wearing peach-colored pants, which Kristine did not
ownbut rather another customer "who looks a lot like her."
And the Laundromat owner, who says he told his original story "to try
to help," now says he does not know whether he saw Kristine on Saturday,
the 24th, or Friday, the 23rd. On November 2, Rudy Persaud sat down for police
questioning with his attorney. A police source says, of Rudys November
2 interview: "Did he cooperate? Yes. Did he had an airtight alibi? No."
"Theres an old movie where a guy is walking down
the street under a street-light looking at the ground. Another guy says, what
are you looking for? The first guy says, I lost my glasses.
The second guy says, Where did you lose em? He says, I
lost em over there . . . but the lights better over here."
Lieutenant Phillip Mahony, comading officer of NYPDs Missing Persons
Bureau, likes telling this story. His small office is dominated by metal file
cabinets. Several drawers are marked patz and contain files relating to the
maddeningly unsolved 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in SoHo. The
lost-glasses story, says Mahony, illustrates the problem with having too obvious
a suspect: He might not be the killer.
"I can tell you this, none of the four detectives on this case think
its open-shut," he says. "This Rudy may be the guy. You certainly
had a guy with a motive. He was the last one seen with heryou cant
ignore that. But it still doesnt add up. Its no crime to be the
last person seen with somebody. Its no crime for a married guy to get
his girlfriend pregnant. Its a shame but not a crime. You can even say,
I have plenty of reason to want her gone, but youre still
not gonna get an arrest on it. (Repeated efforts were made by New York
to contact Rudy Persaud for an interview.) Mahony says: "Our biggest
fear is, shes lying in a ditch somewherethe result of an accident
or random mayhem"and were walking by her every day because
were focused on Rudy."
To this end, detectives combed the tracks of the D train, which
she took to Baruch. They choppered low over Brooklyn and Queens and took pictures.
Kristines family and friends have also gone searching. With the help
of ex-NYPD detective Gil Albaa specialist in solving kidnappings by
Colombian and Dominican drug dealersand using maps of abandoned industrial
sites, parks, wetlands, and isolated land near bridges (all places where bodies
tend to be buried) they have gone out in small parties several times a week,
talking to park personnel, harbor partolmen, dog walkers, joggers, and vagrants.
But these searches for Kristine have been futile.
Denise Lilien, now a business consultant, first met Kristine back in Madison.
They were both teenagers at an alternative high school. Malcolm Shabazznamed
after Malcolm Xwhich Kristine transferred to when her regular public
school proved too confining. Kristine, the youngest of six Kupka children,
had moved to Madison with her mother (then a factory worker) and several siblings
after the death of their father, a firefighter whom Ellie had divorced. After
rural Mount Carroll, Illinois, the avant-garde atmosphere of Madison, with
its history of academic and political activism, suited Kristineas did
the ultraprogressive Shabazz school, where students reclined on couches and
did "free writing" exercises. Kristine went on to the University
of Wisconsin, then dropped out.
In her twenties, Kristine made her way to Atlanta. She got a waitress job
and roomed with Kelly Richardson, now a film-production assistant. But Atlanta
was too makeup-and-big-hair; and on a trip to New York, when she visited her
sister Kathy, who was living with Kevin in a tenement on East 3rd Street,
she vowed to move there. When Kathy and Kevin moved out, Kristine moved in.
Her clothes changed from flowing neo-hippie to sleek black-on-black.
She got a job at MacDougals Cafe., a tourist magnet across from Cafe
Le Figaro in the Village. Nick Papanikoluóa young Greek-American raised
in Brooklyn, Greece, and the Boston suburbsalso waited tables there
while putting himself through college. He was solemn; she was vivacious. They
went to MOMA on their first date. "She kept touching the paintings,"
Nick recalls. " I said, Kristine, theyll kick us out!"
She moved into his apartment on Hudson Street, near the mouth of the Holland
Tunnel. After three years, they broke upher decisionbut remained
best friends. She entered Baruch and, maintaining high grades, won a full
Provost scholarship. She founded the schools Philosophy Club, setting
up debates on whether organized religion is oppressive, on whether focus on
the Holocaust obscures the evil of slavery, and on the medias roll in
the death of Princess Diana. She typed papers for blind students.
Kathy and Kristine, working-class sisters, shopped at thrift
stores, cooked at home, got $12 haircuts, and took the subway everywherealways
competing over who could save more money. Kristineís weakness for Joan
& David shoes almost cost her the honor until she found the house in Kensington
and began filling it with roommates to defray the rent. Ozlem has been there
the longest, and she became the little sister Kristine never had. "I
would knock on her door five times a day," says Ozlem, usually with a
question about a romance. "Kristine would say, --Stop being a drama queen.
Just look at the facts!"
With men, Kristine could give as good as she got. She often chewed them out
for not calling when they said they would. "She didnít want to
dominate, but she was powerful. It was challenging for the man and for her,"
says Ozlem. Kristine put it more bluntly to her friend Suzana Riordan: "Youre
like me. We have ballswe scare em off." She was involved
with a law student, then, for months, a security guard. Lilien says, "I
felt she picked men who werent her equal. Shes a really strong
person. She needed somebody who could match her." Her mother, who had
thought the security guard was "an overgrown brat," was pleased
when Kristine stopped seeing him sometime around last winter. At the time,
her mother recalls, "Kristine said, No more men! No more relationships!
Im going to settle down now and just finish school!"
But in the spring, Kristine started telling people she had a crush on her
science teacher. She told her mother she was attracted to his intellect. Ozlem
recalls her saying that "his skin was so clean and he didnt drink,
didnt smoke, never ate meat. She also liked him because he had all these
tacky neckties and not-matching clothes." Valerie Santos, a social worker
who was Negrils night hostess, says that at first Kristine "didnt
know how to read him; she was trying to figure out if he had a girlfriend."
Then Kristine told Valerie that Rudy "was singlehe had recently
broken up with someone. He basically gave her the impression he was available."
They exchanged numbersher phone, his beeper. During conversations they
had after class, he told Kristine about a business trip he would soon be taking
to Turkey. An envious Kristine quipped to Kathy, "I wish he could take
an assistant."
Once he filed the class grades, Rudy Persaud drove to Kristines house
for a date. He was leaning on a walking stick, Ozlem recalls, the result of
a foot injury. "He made it sound like he wanted a relationship,"
Kathy recalls Kristine later telling her about the day, which had included
lovemaking. But Ozlem had picked up a different vibe. "Hes adorable,"
she said, "but hes hiding something."
Rudy Persauds family is one of the more than 200,000 Hindu families
who have flocked to America from Guyana (overwhelmingly to Queens, especially
Richmond Hill) since the sixties, during and after the unfriendly regime of
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. They left a Caribbean country where they and
their forebears had lived since coming there as indentured laborers from India
between 1838 and 1917. Queens now has about twenty Hindu temples. Pandits
like Rudys father, having witnessed a full generation of Hindu youth
raised on rap music make pleas for traditional morality and spiritual regeneration.
In mid-June, Kristine told Valerie Santos she felt certain she was pregnant;
Valerie brought her a pregnancy test from the health clinic she worked in.
When it came out positive, despite the certainty shed expressed to Valerie,
"she was shocked," Kathy says. "It took a day for it to settle
inshe hadnt planned it. But then she said, Im graduating
in January, I have a great house, Im already 28--I can do it."
Even though she only had sex with him once, Kristine told friends there was
no question that Persaud was the babys father. Still, she was afraid
to tell him, Kathy says, but she did not put the task off. She beeped him,
and when he called her back, she said she had something important to discuss;
could she see him in person? When he said he was busy, she broke the news
on the phone. According to the accounts of several of Kristines friends,
he heatedly denied paternity, claiming heíd had a vasectomy (a "partial
vasectomy" was the term Kristine told Kathy and Nick he had used). Then
in a subsequent conversation (again, according to what Kristine told friends),
he backed away from the vasectomy assertion. He stopped denying paternity.
"He started cryingliterally crying," Kathy says Kristine told
her. "He started begging her to have an abortion." He told her that
he had gotten married. (Apparently, the Turkish "business trip"
had been his honeymoon, and his new wife was a young Brahmin woman.) "He
said, Youre going to ruin my life! My parents are going to disown
me!" He said his wife and his parents were going to pay his tuition
to dental school. "You cant do this to me! This cant
happen!"
Kathy reports, "He talked to her a few more times. Each time, he begged
her again to have an abortionthe baby would ruin his life.
She was trying to work it through with him. I said, Would you stop already?
Its his problem! You dont have to make it right for him.
But she wanted it to be right for him."
She had reasons for this. She wanted his name on the birth certificate so
her child wouldnt be embarrassed enrolling for school with a document
that did not list a father. The acknowledgment of paternity would also allow
her to sue him for child support, something Kathy pressed her to consider.
"But Kristine is definitely not about money. Never once did she say,
Oh hes gonna be a dentist one day!" Kristine would
only consider suing for child support "later," Kathy says, "if
down the road she needed money to safeguard the baby."
During these weeks, in July, of talking with Rudy about the pregnancy, "it
got bad, real badvery negativebetween them," says a Negril
waiter named Sean, who had joined Kristines band of confidants. Shed
become so afraid of Rudys feelings on the matter, she told Sean and
others, "she only wanted to meet him in a public place. I thought she
was being paranoid; she was very assertive and very together, so I was surprised
when she said that." She confided to Nick several times her fear that
Rudy might "hit her in the stomach" or find some other way to end
the pregnancy. She told Valerie (who was arranging her prenatal care) "words
to the effect of If anything happens to me, he will have probably have
done it. It was her gut [feeling] from the beginning. She never told
me he threatened her verbally, but she was anxious and scaredand I dont
think even she could explain why."
Still, Kristine pressed on. She "wanted Rudy to have some kind of relationship
with the baby," Kathy says Kristine told her. He said," How am I
going to do that? I have a wife! My mom and dad would find out!" She
said, You could do it on a weekend. People have problems when they dont
have a fatherthey think theyre worthless. They feel abandoned."He
stopped calling. She started beeping. Kelly Richardson pleaded, "Kristine,
is there any way you can have this baby and just . . . completely not involve
him? Put him out of the picture?"
Ozlem picked up the ringing phone one evening in late July. A young womans
voice demanded, "Do you know someone named Rudy Persaud? You just called
his beeper." Ozlem said no and hung up the phone. The same thing happened
the next morning, at seven. Ozlem woke Kristine and said, "She called
again; I dont want to get caught in between." The next time, Kristine
answered the phone. And that is how Kristine entered into an astonishing communication,
over the course of a number of phone calls, with Rudys wife, Rochelle.
First Kristine told Rochelle she was merely one of Rudys students. The
second or third time Rochelle called, Kristine admitted theyd been involved
but that they no longer were and said there was a reason she was remaining
in touch with him. According to several of Kristines friends, every
time Rochelle asked what the reason was, Kristine said, "Youll
have to ask Rudy." Finally Rochelle asked,"Are you pregnant?"
Kristine admitted she was. As Ozlem listened, Kristine carefully explained
that Rudy had told her he wasnt married (which was apparently true at
the time of their single sexual encounter). According to Kristines reports
to several friends, Rochelle expressed explosive anger toward her husband,
even telling Kristine she didnt want Rudywhy didnt Kristine
take him? Kristine said she didnt want him.
Over the course of these phone calls, "at first, Kristine couldnt
figure the wife out," Valerie Santos says, "and then she felt more
empathy for the woman." Kristine told Suzana Riordan that she tried to
assure Rochelle (in Suzanas words): "The pregnancy wont affect
your life together or any children you have; I dont want to hurt your
relationship; I just need a few things from him." According to what Kristine
told friends, Rochelle seemed to pour her heart out to Kristine: describing
the wedding (it may have been through Rochelle that Kristine determined the
approximate date), musing about an old boyfriend. (Rochelle Persaud was called
at her office for a response. Told New York was doing an article about Kristine
Kupkas disappearance, she abruptly said, "I dont know
anything about it!" When asked whether she had placed calls to Kristine,
she angrily said, "I cannot talk to you right now! You called my job;
dont you ever call back!" and hung up.)
By summers end, to the relief of Kristines friends, Rudy and his
wife had slipped out of her life, which seemed to return to normal. But at
the beginning of October, Rudy was back. His parents were out of town, he
said, and his wife had kicked him out. He was staying with a cousin, Kristine
told friends. One day, he met Kristine on her porchhe was "disheveled,"
she saidand told her he was hungry, that he was waiting for Dunkin
Donuts to throw out its leftovers. Did she believe him? Her mother says: "She
doubted that he was actually kicked out, but it made her feel bad." Nevertheless,
others say she wanted to help him. "She said they would spend days together
and kind of walk around," Valerie Santos says."That they were affectionate
but not sexual. She encouraged Rudy to get back with his wife."
He was cool toward the pregnancy, Kristine reported to her confidants. It
bothered her that he would pat her head but never touch her stomach. Yet he
also seemed to embrace paternal involvement. According to what Kristine told
friends, he offered to be the birthing coach. And he said he wanted to give
the baby a Hindu name. Still, "she was very confused." Valerie Santos
says, "because Rudy had gone from one extreme to another in a really
short amount of time. She was not listening to her gut anymore, because his
nice behavior had swayed her." Yet she never entirely surrendered her
skepticism.
During the last two weeks before she disappeared, in "every conversation
we had," Nick says, her wariness of Rudy "always came up. She was
afraid of him; she was afraid he was going to get somebody to punch her in
the stomach." Ozlem and Kathy say Kristine discussed such fears with
them too. But she usually concluded that he wouldnt hurt her because
if something happened to her, it would be too obvious; all fingers would point
to him. The third week in October, Kristine was feeling upbeat. She had $7,000
in her savings account, and she had chosen a birthing center on West 14th
Street. Just before she disappeared, she stopped by to visit with Anthon Grant
at school. They sat together in the student-government office and talked about
her future. "She looked so good pregnant," he remembers ruefully,
"and she seemed so happy."