by scintilla

Created on: May 08, 2008   Last Updated: July 11, 2010

In the fall of 1997, Anastasia WitbolsFeugen, eighteen years old, was shot and killed in Lincoln Cemetery, located in an unincorporated area between Kansas City and Independence, Missouri. Her body was found by a Sheriff's Deputy in the early morning hours of October twenty-third, with a large gunshot wound to the face. She had last been seen in the company of Justin Bruton, her on-and, off-again boyfriend, and her friends Byron Case and Kelly Moffett, who were also a couple. The four of them had met at a Dairy Queen nearby, and were on their way to Justin's condominium, about twenty minutes away, in his hunter-green Honda Civic, when Anastasia, upset by the argument she was having with Justin, angrily exited the car at a stop light and began walking quickly away. With little apparent thought, her home being a mere five-minute drive away, Justin simply drove off. The cemetery in which her body was found eight hours later was less than a half-mile from the intersection where she last saw her friends. No time of death was ever determined. No bullets (save a fragment recovered from Anastasia WitbolsFeugen's hair) or shell casings were ever found at the scene, and her body is presumed to have fallen where she was shot. The Jackson County Sheriff's Department, which headed up the investigation, never named a suspect, not even when Justin's body was found the following afternoon, more than seventy miles away, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot blast to the head. The case was considered unsolved for almost four years.

When Kelly Moffett and Byron Case broke up, it was a messy affair. Kelly's admitted drug use and infidelity had become more flagrant, and Byron, having lost his father less than two months after his best friends' deaths, was too stricken by grief to handle the loss of his longtime girlfriend. The couple would split, but Kelly would often call him or show up at his home at odd hours, claiming to be lonely, in need of money, or outright homeless, and Byron would do what he could to help, almost invariably finding himself back in the relationship. In the autumn of 2000, he determined that he'd had enough and rented an apartment in Saint Louis, hoping to get away from her, once and for all. The week before moving the last of his belongings, Kelly paid an unannounced visit, saying she was living in a crack house without running water and needed to use his shower. Immediately noticing the lack of furniture and the piles of boxes, she became upset once

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