All anyone knows is that Kenzie called soon after she disappeared from a blocked number, saying she was all right. Then in early February from a Verizon store in Kansas City, Missouri, she called her aunt Lisa. When Lisa pleaded for her to come home, to finish school, Kenzie told her to fuck off and hung up. Next she called her grandmother, asking for money. Finally she called her dad, demanding that he remove Crawford's national warrant poster from Facebook.
An anonymous tip recently placed the two of them at Grapevine Mills Mall, and he's said to have been in contact with his parents in Grand Prairie. But a search by Grapevine police didn't turn anything up. And damned if Crawford's parents were going to turn in their boy.
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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"I'm gonna be up front with you," his stepdad promised when I showed up on his doorstep. "It'll be a cold day in hell before I tell anybody where Kris is at." His mom said that "maybe she'll go home when she's 17," the age of consent in Texas.
By early April, no one had heard from Kenzie in over a month. That's when her family blasted Dallas media asking for help. They eventually sent hundreds of pages of documents chronicling Crawford's pursuit of the girl, some which included his cell phone number. I called. He picked up and agreed to meet for coffee. And wouldn't you know it: There he is.
"I'm not hiding," he says. But he's not turning himself in. And he doesn't have the little girl. He tells me it'd been months since he's heard from her.
I explain that everyone thinks Kenzie ran to him. People were suggesting that he was whoring her, that he killed her, that she killed herself. She didn't even have her inhaler.
But in an hour, he says almost nothing about her or their relationship. All Crawford wants to talk about is coffee.
"I used to spend 500 bucks a month," he says. "I'd bring people from work here. Before work, during work, after work. I drink Peppermint Mocha but they didn't used to have that," he tilts his head, lost in another time. "I used to drink Caramel Macchiatos." He looks back up then, and smiles.
"Hello?" the girl on the line says.
The day after I met Crawford at Starbucks, I mentioned the meeting to the father of Kenzie's best friend, Foss. She and her dad had coincidentally moved to Flower Mound in 2011, before Kenzie disappeared, so the dad, a sweet man named Shelby, was trying to help track her down.
After I mentioned the meeting, police who for weeks had expressed no interest in the case called me right up. And the next day I receive a call from a blocked number. A girl's on the line.
"It's Mackenzie," she says.
Kenzie tells me that the night she left, she stayed with people she met on the street in St. Paul. The next morning, she took a bus to Missouri. She met a girl in St. Louis named Jules. Walked right up to her on the street, Kenzie says. Luckily, Jules has two loving parents and a pit bull/German shepherd puppy, and they all took Kenzie in as their own.
She pauses for long stretches before answering some of my questions, like she's getting distracted, or instruction.
"What's the weather like?" I ask her. "In Missouri?"
"I don't go outside," she responds. "I dislike the cold."
A cell phone rings in the background. I ask whose phone it is.
"You can hear the ring?" She dismisses it. "It's another call."
"I'm not hiding," she continues. "When I turn 18 I'm going to go home and get my stuff." But not before then.
She's not in Texas, she says. She's cut off all communication with Crawford. "I've talked to him maybe once. And that was the beginning of December. A while ago."
She admits that she thinks about him sometimes, but she doesn't tell Jules about him. Kenzie doesn't tell Jules anything about where she comes from, and Jules' family never questions why Kenzie can't work, can't even go to school.
"How do you deal with having asthma?" I ask her, remembering she left without her inhaler.
"I sit outside."
"You said you sit outside?"
"Mhm."
She just told me it was too cold. There's a pause, tense, longer than before.
"Um, I have to go eat," Kenzie says. "I'll try to call you back."
She's gone.
I race to my computer. The day before in St. Louis, it was partly cloudy and 88 degrees.
After his late-night text announcing Kenzie's whereabouts, and after inviting me over to meet the missing girl, Shelby invites me to accompany the family to the police station, where Kenzie will turn herself in. I clamber through the back and scrunch into the back seat, and on the drive through Flower Mound, I ask Kenzie how she managed, in months as a runaway, to acquire both a cat and a dog.
"I was lonely," she says. "I found the cat on the side of the highway, and I said 'I don't know if you have a home, but I'm going to take you.' She's litter-box trained."
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