November 26, 1986 started like most nights on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It was quiet and humid though for late November.
That Saturday, inside a condo at the Woodlake Villas complex, 16-year-old Kristina Porco stood in the kitchen making herself a turkey sandwich from the holiday’s leftovers. Her mother, Merrill, was in the next room, and the two began an argument over Kristina’s curfew.
It wasn’t the first fight they had on the issue that fall. They had just moved to Hilton Head from Johnsburg in upstate New York near Lake George the previous year, and Kristina made it clear to her parents she resented the move.
She also began spending time with a crowd her mother didn’t like and had blown past her set curfew more than once. The argument that night escalated quickly and Kristina stormed out through the sliding glass door to the patio.
She walked out, wearing jeans, an orange sweatshirt, red sweater and white sneakers. But didn’t carry a purse, wallet or any identification.
Within ten minutes, she reached a nearby convenience store phone booth and called a female classmate, who lived within walking distance. Kristina asked to spend the night at her house, but the classmate’s mother refused loud enough that Kristina heard it over the line.
During the call, Kristina mentioned seeing a taxi that kept driving past her slowly, multiple times. The teen then decided she would sleep on a lounge chair by the Woodlake Villas complex pool instead.
Feeling uneasy about Kristina’s state and knowing she had no money on her, the classmate and her brother made Kristina a sandwich. They left their home and walked to the pool to bring it over to her.
They got there minutes later, but Kristina was gone. All they found was her red sweater draped over a lawn chair. Assuming Kristina had grown too cold waiting in the night air, the friend and her brother left the pool area, then returned to their house.
Inside the Porco home, Kristina’s parents, Merrill and Joe, decided to give Kristina about 10 minutes to cool off after her dramatic exit. Worried about the late hour and wet weather, they stepped outside and searched the immediate area.
At midnight, they were convinced that she must have gone to a friend’s house to sleep out of spite, so they returned to their apartment. However, Joe decided to get into his vehicle and scour the Hilton Head Island area.
Joe also drove around the local roads searching for his daughter. However, detectives later emphasised that his exact whereabouts and timeline could never be independently verified.
The next morning, the family realised Kristina never came home. They found her purse, wallet, and ID untouched on her nightstand.
It was at that point that Merrill called the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.
A family Plagued by Tragedy and Anxiety
Kristina wasn’t an only child. Just as her life was beginning in 1970, her family experienced significant tragedy when her four-year-old brother was struck and killed by a neighbour’s car in their own driveway.
Growing up in the aftermath of that event carried a heavy weight considering her parents’ intense grief and protective anxiety that affected the home’s dynamics.
She spent her early childhood growing up in New York, where she had a core friend group, routine, and a sense of identity. However, Joe and Merrill decided to uproot and relocate the family to Hilton Head Island.
This was primarily because they sought a fresh start after years of intense grief. As a student at Hilton Head High School, Kristina tried to adapt by finding a new social circle, but this only sparked more conflict at home.
Her mother heavily disapproved of the group she was hanging out with, and to assert her dominance, Kristina repeatedly ignored her curfew, resulting in explosive arguments with her mother.
While the couple had been able to mourn their four-year-old son, Kristina’s disappearance was an open wound that simply refused to heal. Under the crushing weight of mutual grief and pressure from police suspicion, their marriage collapsed, and they got a divorce soon after.
In the years after, Kristina sometimes went out for Thanksgiving, but not before posting a handwritten note on the front door of their house. The Post Crescent recorded, “We left a note for Krissi. We thought she might come home.”
The anniversary of Kristina’s disappearance often heightened Merrill’s anxiety. “It brings back that this is all so unbelievable. This is the worst time of year. It’s downhill from here to Christmas.”
Investigations Ensue
On November 30, Deputies from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department arrived at Woodlake Villas apartments to interview Merrill and Joe Porco. Merrill explained that Kristina had left behind her purse, makeup, identification, and a bank account containing her savings.
She also reiterated that Kristina was highly anticipating an upcoming Christmas trip back to New York to see her old friends, which made a long-term runaway attempt a bit unlikely.
Despite Merrill’s insistence, the responding deputies officially classified Kristina as a runaway juvenile. Because she had stormed out following a curfew dispute, a standard police protocol dictated they wait for the girl to cool down and return home voluntarily.
Due to the runaway status, no forensic team was dispatched to the scene to secure it. The phone booth that Kristina had called from was also not swept for fingerprints.
Nor was the pool area where her red sweater was found treated as a potential crime scene. Over the following days, deputies eventually began to interview Kristina’s friends.
The classmate came forward, detailing the last phone call and explaining that Kristina said a taxi was driving past her slowly, and they later found her sweater abandoned by the pool.
Frustrated by what she felt was a lack of urgency from the police, Merrill took matters into her own hands. She spent the next weeks distributing missing person flyers across Hilton Head Island and interviewing local business owners.
As the weeks stretched into months with no sightings, phone calls, or activity on her daughter’s bank account, the Beaufort County sheriff’s office recognised that a teen would not survive long-term without money.
They officially upgraded the case file to an endangered missing person case involving foul play. When investigators finally tried to chase down the ‘slow-moving taxi’ lead, they had a setback.
Multiple independent cab companies and drivers operated across Hilton Head Island on Thanksgiving weekend, so they could never definitely identify the specific vehicle.
According to the Oshkosh Northwestern, Detective Richard Roper of the Beaufort Sheriff’s Department was baffled by the case: “This thing is really mind-boggling. Somebody knows what happened to this girl.”
However, when speaking about the area, Roper said, “It is not an area prone to either crime or violence, and that makes the circumstances even more mysterious.”
Toward the late 80s, investigators began to shift the investigation to a homicide, and detectives scrutinised the household. They considered Kristina’s father, Joe, because he had admitted to driving around Hilton Head Island for several hours looking for the night she disappeared.
Because he was alone in his vehicle between 11.30 pm and 2 am, his exact movements could not be verified. Police interviewed neighbours who also testified to a deeply toxic environment within the home.
Polygraphs were administered to the parents and close friends to narrow down suspects. While the results of the tests have never officially been released, investigators claim the family was never cleared of suspicion.
Merrill also had an active role in the investigation. She spent the days chasing every tip that came in, no matter how thin. She did appreciate every sighting that was called in, telling the Post-Crescent, “Short of finding Krissi, it is all I could have hoped for. That’s the goal-to get people to look.”
Whenever a call came, she dropped everything and went, even if nothing came of it. One call, though, in 1990, consumed her.
In September that year, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington received a call from someone claiming Kristina was living in a safehouse in Appleton, Wisconsin. She was allegedly being held by a motorcycle gang and using the alias ‘Mary Joanne Morris’.
Roper described the anonymous call to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children as a hot lead. He told The Island Packet, “We’ve had a lot of calls from people, (but), this call came from an anonymous female around 18 to 20 years old. There was another female in the background telling her what to say. There is reason to believe Krissi is the one in the background or on the phone. That’s why it’s such a hot lead.”
Merrill borrowed $1,200 from her employer and rode the bus for two days to get there. She also recruited two local newspaper reporters and a police officer who was willing to assist.
For a week, they worked through runaway shelters, halfway houses, and social services offices. Frustrated, she was packing to go back home when a new lead surfaced, sending her to a group home.
There she located the woman who was supposed to be her daughter. This woman resembled Kristina but appeared to have been living with a long-term drug addiction.
The Cult Letter
During the early 90s, the case took a strange turn following the delivery of a letter purporting to be from a satanic group calling itself “Finders of the Magic Circle” that arrived at an Orlando television station, threatening violence across Florida if certain demands were not met.
Among these demands were the release of men who were jailed for a string of Gainesville student murders. Buried in the threat was a claim about Kristina.
It indicated the group had her, saying she was still alive and that Kristina sold her soul to Satan, so she was up next to be sacrificed. Multiple letters containing these threats were mailed to an Orlando, Florida television news station and to a local Crime Stoppers program in Kissimmee, Florida.
In another piece by The Post-Crescent, Merrill said, “I don’t know, I just don’t know. Everybody seems to agree that if we don’t find her by today, we’ll never see her again. That’s the worst part-if we don’t find her today, you can’t prove or disprove that she was murdered.”
Because the letters crossed state lines and involved extortion, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an active case. While investigators initially feared there could be some truth to these claims, the FBI quickly traced the mail and determined it was an elaborate hoax.
The FBI soon identified and arrested the 22-year-old Florida man who fabricated the letters. When questioned, the man confessed he had no ties to Kristina, her family, or the said cult.
He had just pulled Kristina’s name from a newspaper clipping about missing children and wrote extortion letters because he thought it would be fun.
The Christopher Below Connection
The case stalled after then for the next year before a significant development in 1992 when police in Ohio searched the home of a convicted killer named Christopher Below. Inside his belongings, investigators found a copy of Kristina’s missing person poster.
At the time, it did not mean much, but by 2004, it meant a great deal. Below had grown up in Kentucky after a difficult childhood. He spent part of his teen years on a relative’s farm in Dawson Springs.
Below enlisted in the Army after graduating high school in 1985, but was discharged within a few months. He later fabricated stories of heroism in the military to attract women and ran up significant debts.
In 1991, while living in Medina, Ohio, Below began a secret affair with Kathern Fetzer, a 26-year-old married woman whom he had met working a temp job. That November, Fetzer disappeared, leaving her husband a note.
Her vehicle turned up the next day, 20 miles from their house. It took investigators more than a decade to level an effective case against Below.
In 2003, when he was already in custody due to an unrelated charge, Below admitted to shooting Fetzer in his apartment, and he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in 2004.
That disproved the theory he was just an eccentric individual who collected missing person flyers. There was a significant likelihood he had something to do with Kristina’s disappearance.
Lieutenant Bob Bromade of the Beaufort County sheriff’s office, who inherited the cold case in 1999, got the call from a detective in Ohio in 2003. The presence of Kristina’s flier among the others warranted more investigation.
According to 14news, he said, “Kathern Fetzer, her body has not been found, so there are similarities. And Kristina Porco, if she’s alive, there’s been no contact with her, so we have to investigate it as a homicide at this point, although there has been no body found or anything like that.”
Below has also been named as a person of interest in the disappearance of Heather Teague, who was taken at gunpoint from a Kentucky beach in 1995. However, no formal charges have ever been issued in connection with the case due to a lack of physical evidence and conflicting eyewitness testimony.
Investigators have confirmed that he was living in South Carolina during the years that Kristina went missing and spent years trying to pin down his whereabouts on November 29, 1986.
In November 2004, a detective from South Carolina travelled to the Ohio prison holding Below to question him concerning the case. The interrogation yielded nothing conclusive.
Below remains uncharged in Kristina’s case, and investigators were careful to stress the connection was circumstantial. Below completed the 18-year sentence and was officially released from the Ohio Department of Corrections on November 13, 2021.
Following his release, Below retreated from public life.
The Case as it Stands
Crushed by decades of intense grief and the bitter breakdown of her marriage, Kristina’s mother, Merrill, passed away in November 2009 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She had spent the rest of her life believing her daughter’s remains were somewhere in the North Forest Beach area of Hilton Head.
In 2010, realising that the traditional interrogation methods had failed to yield answers, the sheriff’s office pivoted to using genetic forensics.
Kristina’s DNA profile was formally extracted from the surviving family samples and securely uploaded into the FBI’s National Missing Persons DNA Database and NamUs. The Beaufort County sheriff’s office cold case unit also launched a public media campaign on the 31st anniversary of her disappearance.
They released updated and age-progressed images issued by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children to show what she would look like as an adult.
The sheriff’s office also published a permanent dedicated digital portal detailing Kristina’s timeline, emphasising that while her father’s multi-hour search window remains an unverified missing puzzle piece, the case is still considered an endangered missing person file involving suspected foul play.
In December 2021, weeks after Below was released from prison, Kristina’s 90-year-old father, Joseph Porco, passed away in New York. With both parents deceased, the investigation currently functions as a passive matching file.
The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office has put up a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to an arrest. Kristina would be 56 years old in 2026.
Anyone who has information regarding the disappearance of Kristina Porco is asked to contact the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office cold case resolution unit at 1-843-255-3300.
For more stories on unsolved disappearances, explore our articles on Rico Harris and Leigh Occhi.
