Foss eventually got bored with blogTV, but Kenzie and Crawford corresponded throughout her ninth-grade year, Foss says, on Facebook, video chat, text. They had a lot in common. Kenzie told him she watched the same ThunderCats and He-Man cartoons that Crawford had grown up on more than a decade earlier, and they both liked rap music.
Soon Kenzie was adding 's' to the end of her words, like Crawford. They adopted pet names for each other, like Kenzieface Rosebear. She called Crawford Bear, or Choon after his Facebook handle Choontak Bloodsack.
Jason Ryan
Before Mackenzie Foss moved from Minnesota to Flower Mound, she and the missing girl were best friends. Their friendship continued in Texas until Foss' dad, Shelby, unearthed the truth.
Mark Kartarik
Kenzie was staying with her aunt Lisa (above) when she disappeared for the last time.
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"You're going to marry me," Crawford told her on Facebook, according to records provided by the family. "Even if you're drunk and bawlin' snot bubbles."
"I do, Bear," Kenzie answered. "<3."</p>
"I do, lovebear," he vowed, sealing the promise.
It was June of last year, a year after they met, that the two first met in person. Kenzie had been crying. It was the week before the eight-year anniversary of her mother's suicide; Amy suffered from bipolar disorder, her family says, and she died of a drug overdose. Still, Kenzie worshiped her. She had an array of keepsakes from her mother, including jewelry and a box her mom had painted for her, and she held tightly to the memory of her smell. The anniversary was always when Kenzie was at her weakest, when pent-up grief flooded out in tears and soft sobs.
"What are you doing this weekend?" Crawford asked her.
She didn't have plans.
"I'll come there and go to the graveyard with you," he said.
She didn't believe him. But on June 26, he left his house around 5 a.m. and drove straight through to Marshall.
"I hope you know how much this means to me, Bear <3," Kenzie Facebook messaged him as he drove. She'd even handmade him a card.</p>
"Eheh, we'll see about that when you meet me :D," he answered.
That night he arrived in Marshall. He slept in his car, Foss says, at a park by the narrow, sluggish Redwood River. Kenzie sneaked out to take him coffee or spend the night in the car with him.
In the mornings, Foss says, Kenzie would tell her dad that she was going over to Foss' house. Instead she'd joyride with Crawford, touring him around Marshall and showing him off to her maternal grandparents, to Foss and to other friends. Crawford even let her drive.
Then, four days after Crawford arrived, on the evening of June 30, Kenzie's dad pulled up to Foss' house in a Jeep. There was a gun in the backseat, Foss remembers. He looked angry and frightened.
"Kenzie ran away with that guy Kris," he said. Kenzie had bragged about Crawford to a younger cousin, and word had gotten back to her father. "We have no idea where they are."
An old man cracks his front door and sneers into the fading Texas sunlight. He steps out, shutting the door behind him. A pit bull barks on the other side.
"Can I see some identification?" he howls.
Although this is Kristopher Crawford's last-known address, he isn't likely to be holed up in his mom and stepdad's modest Grand Prairie rancher. Still, it's a good place to start. Crawford has lost both of his jobs, at Home Depot and a temp job at a financial services company. He's broke. Everyone believes he's in Texas, if only because he's so close to his mother.
The man calls to his wife. "Leslie! Come here!"
He is suspicious, for good reason. The cops have knocked on his door multiple times in recent months. They even searched the house. But Crawford was never there. Neither was Kenzie.
Leslie steps out, looking around her husband's shoulder. She wears an oversized, fraying gray tee over her pudgy body, and her gray hair is knotted messily behind her. Her handshake is the firmer of the two, although her husband is working himself into a frenzy.
"If someone jacks with Kris, I'm going after them," he says. "I'll blow them away."
"No you won't," Leslie says softly, trying to calm him down.
"Yes I will! I'm serious." He's done calmly stepping aside as police walk through his house without a warrant, he says, searching the rooms, pressing on the walls.
The second of two boys, Kristopher Crawford was born in 1983 into a shaky household. Leslie and his father fought, then separated. For a while, Leslie was a single mother, working nights at the post office.
For years, Crawford was shuttled between his mother and father. As soon as he adjusted, Leslie says, he would have to move back. He never finished high school and got his GED instead. His most serious attempt at a career was when he went to bartending school.
"But the bars want you to have experience to work for them," she says. "And to have experience, you have to work at the bar."
Crawford never had many friends, his mom says. Most of the ones he made he met through Internet chat rooms and video games, including a teenager named Malcolm Robbins. They met three years ago in a chat room, when Robbins was 17. Crawford was 25.
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