Cemetery Plot

The teen-age girl in the casket didn't look herself. The mortician had crafted a new nose and a new mouth, but her true features had been unique: an upturned nose with a slight crease in its center, Cupid's-bow lips and a heart-shaped face. In life, she had looked sweet but contrary. In death, she looked like a doll.

As two small lamps cast a glow over her body, a mournful Cure song she'd loved played softly inside the funeral chapel: She whispers, "Please remember me when I am gone from here"/She whispers, "Please remember me but not with tears."

The girl's divorced parents and another of their daughters approached the casket, and each placed a white rose inside. Three younger girls stayed back, unable to look at their dead sister.

Gloomy songs were the funeral's sole concession to the teen-ager's tastes. As the tape ran out and an elderly woman stolidly played hymns at the organ, most of the girl's friends huddled sullenly in the vestibule or outside on the chapel steps.

The girl's best friend watched the other mourners. A slim, pale young man dressed in black walked to the casket, leaned over and stared at the body for a long moment. He had been one of the last people to see her alive on the night of her murder. Her friend began to sob quietly.

"I can't believe he's standing over her body," she whispered to a woman standing next to her. "I just can't believe it."

It was a clear Wednesday afternoon in late October 1997 when Anastasia WitbolsFeugen's stepmother and sister walked into the family's Independence home and found Anastasia waiting by the door with her coat on. She was eager to get a ride to nearby Mount Washington Cemetery, where her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Justin Bruton, had agreed to meet her for yet another talk about their mercurial relationship.

A passionate eighteen-year-old, Anastasia had single-mindedly pursued Justin ever since he'd begun trying to back out of their relationship. The more ambivalent he became, the harder she fought to keep him. Some mutual friends thought she was obsessed; she'd call them five or ten times a day whenever the couple broke up and would repeatedly page her boyfriend's best friend to ask Justin's whereabouts.

They had started dating while she was a senior at the Kansas City, Missouri, school district's elite Lincoln College Preparatory Academy. She was a brainy girl who told her family that if she were the queen of a small nation, Latin would be its official language. She wrote poetry and articles for her school's underground newspaper and listened to joyless music. On weekends, she sometimes dressed in the "goth" clique's uniform -- dark clothes, dark eyeliner, dark lipstick -- and frequented a favorite haunt of disaffected youth, the Broadway Café.

There she met Justin, a University of Missouri-Kansas City journalism major with a laconic sense of humor and a violent imagination. Justin's year of high school in Germany had instilled him with wanderlust, and he and his best friend, Byron Case -- whose mother was born in Germany -- sometimes spoke to each other in German. They would dream up twisted schemes to get money to travel the world.

One plan was to drive to Oklahoma to rob Justin's wealthy parents at gunpoint. Justin, Anastasia and Byron actually did set out for Oklahoma once but quickly turned the car around and went to get doughnuts instead, Byron told a friend. Another idea was to place plastic explosives in the spire over what is now the Community of Christ headquarters in Independence and demand a ransom in exchange for letting the Mormon landmark stand.

Anastasia and Justin seemed to be crazy about each other. Shortly after her high-school graduation, Anastasia moved into Justin's family-financed condominium on the Plaza, and the happy couple adopted a black cat they named Pagan. Anastasia told friends and family that she was in love and had made a "serious commitment" to Justin.

Around that time, in the late spring of 1997, nineteen-year-old Byron met Kelly Moffet, a charmingly rebellious fourteen-year-old suburbanite. In a laboriously quaint letter he posted to his Web site, Byron described her as "a strikingly beautiful young lady ... a bit younger than myself with ebony hair and heavenly eyes." He wrote that the two "took an instant shine to each other."The two began dating soon after Justin introduced them, and Byron picked Kelly up from her last day of junior-high school. Kelly had been a straight-A student who played softball on a team coached by her dad. She lived with both her parents in the family's comfortable Lenexa home. Her mother, a pharmacy technician, usually got off work in time to pick up Kelly and her younger sister from school by 3 p.m.

Kelly's life was too normal to impress her older, jaded friends from broken homes, so she embellished. Her father, she once lied to Byron, was a mean drunk who flew into rages and beat her. When he later found out her story wasn't true, he assumed it was a ploy to get sympathy and attention.