Missing: Kristal Anne Reisinger
Kristal Anne Reisinger, 29, disappeared from a little town in Colorado called Crestone on July 13, 2016. She left her four-year-old daughter Akasha in Denver with Akasha’s father, Kristal’s ex-boyfriend Elijah Guana.
Then she moved about 200 miles south by southwest to Crestone looking for sobriety and spiritual enlightenment; instead, the self-described clairvoyant vanished without a trace.
Her early life was reportedly troubled and difficult, which led to her becoming a ward of the state, which sent her to Denver to live with her aunt.
After she later had a falling out with her aunt, the parents of a friend of hers took Kristal in. Rodney and Debbie Ervin essentially adopted Kristal, putting her through college and even acting as surrogate grandparents to Kasha.
Kristal attended Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, then studied psychology and sociology at Western Colorado University, where she reportedly also taught a class.
According to Investigation Discovery, she met Elijah Guana in 2011. They fell in love and moved to Denver together, where she gave birth to their daughter Kasha in 2013.
Guana said Reisinger found Denver “toxic” and in 2015 she decided to leave Kasha with him, moving to Crestone, a small town with a population of less than 150 people that rests at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
According to various sources, Reisinger was searching for religious enlightenment and sobriety in Crestone, which had become known as some kind of mecca for New Age religions. While in Crestone, she worked at the Crestone Brewing Company.
Investigators have been trying to solve Reisinger’s disappearance for almost a decade. The investigation led authorities down dozens of mine shafts, across miles of wilderness, through drum circles, into drug dealers, and the investigation has mostly yielded a lot of contradictory and unclear information.
Sheriff Dan Warwick of the Saguache County Sheriff’s Office said that Reisinger’s landlord, Ara McDonald, filed the initial missing persons report, and the Sheriff’s Office was first notified of Reisinger's disappearance on July 30, 2016.
At first, Sheriff Warwick said, they didn’t treat Reisinger as a missing person, but a search of Reisinger’s apartment put that theory to rest. Sheriff Warwick recalled that deputies found Reisinger's clothing, medication, cellphone, computers, and other personal belongings she was unlikely to leave behind still inside of her apartment, but that deputies found nothing out of place and no indication of a strugghle.
Guana added, “She had just bought groceries the day before…. She would have to have gone out with absolutely nothing — not even her phone, not even her shoes. It really just doesn’t make any sense.”
The Saguache County Sheriff's Office and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation decided that foul play was likely involved in Reisinger's disappearance.
In 2017, Saguache County Sheriff Dan Warwick told Fox 31, "For her to be gone this long is unusual, so that heightens the chances of foul play being involved. She didn't just take off and not come back. She left everything she owns behind."
According to Investigation Discovery's The Missing, numerous witnesses believe that they saw her at the Full Moon Drum Circle gathering the night of July 18, 2016 (the full moon was on July 19 in 2016).
Investigators, including canine units, reportedly searched the area where this gathering took place but turned up no clues as to where she might be.
According to Guana, her plan was for he and Kasha to join her in Crestone after Reisinger found an apartment, and that he and Reisinger spoke together on the phone every day until she disappeared. And his last phone conversation with Reisinger was extremely disturbing. He said, “She told me people had drugged and raped her.”
Multiple sources claim the last person to have seen Reisinger alive was a man named “Catfish,” who reportedly had a history of drugging and assaulting victims. According to Up and Vanished host Payne Lindsey, “Catfish” was John Keenan, also known as "Catfish John.”
A number of women have posted on reddit claiming to be victims of Catfish, as did a man who claims that Keenan drugged his son, causing brain damage.
Reisinger met Catfish when she moved to Crestone. Her boyfriend at the time, “Dready” Brian Otten, introduced her to Catfish as well as Nathan Peloquin, who she dated after breaking up with Otten, all of which seems to conflict with what Guana claimed were plans for them to reunite in Crestone when she got an apartment.
In the weeks leading up to her disappearance, both Peloquin and Catfish reported seeing Reisinger and just before she went missing, Reisinger told multiple people, including both Guana and Peloquin, that she had been drugged and raped. She told Guana she knew two of the men who assaulted her, but she did not recognize the other men who were present at the time of her assault. She told Peloquin that the assault happened at Catfish’s house.
Catfish told investigators that Reisinger was at his house, and that they smoked marijuana and drank wine, but he denied any type of assault took place at his home, telling Up and Vanished, “Why would I hurt the girl? I barely knew her.”
Peloquin told Up and Vanished that he remembered picking Reisinger up after the alleged attack, and said Reisinger told him on June 28, 2016 that she was sexually assaulted by two men.
“She called me on June 28… and I took care of her for like the next two weeks because I never seen her that scared. And I told her like to go to the police,” Peloquin said. “She told me that he held her there. He wouldn’t let her leave. It was a couple weeks before she went missing.”
Reisinger never reported the alleged rape to law enforcement. She vanished two weeks later. Catfish denied any involvement in either Reisinger's disappearance or the alleged assault, and moved away from Crestone not long afterward.
“According to the police, Catfish had gutted his house out and cleaned everything, bleached everything, got rid of all of his computers, and got rid of all kinds of stuff,” Guana said.
During an interview with Up and Vanished, Catfish claimed “Dready” Brian sent him a message on Facebook admitting that he had killed Reisinger. Catfish said that he took a screenshot of the conversation, but refused to share it with Up and Vanished.
He denied that he was protecting “Dready” from legal prosecution, adding that he hoped “[Reisinger] is “alive and well.” Catfish went on to say that she had neither been drugged nor killed in his home. When asked why he thought that Reisinger had told Peloquin she had been raped there, he responded, “First of all, I don’t know this and because she was probably cheating on him as her boyfriend. And that’s my guess is she was probably scared of him ‘cause he’s a creepy ass kid.”
Guana also said he thinks he knows what happened, stating, “The guys who were directly involved in what happened to Kristal have strong ties in a drug market that goes back and forth directly from Crestone to Denver. Kristal had made a decision to do something about it. She wanted them to be accountable for their actions and that’s when she went missing. I strongly believe she was murdered by those guys.”
With no evidence, law enforcement has been unable to make any arrests. Rumors spread that someone may have disposed of Reisinger’s body by throwing her down a mine shaft, and authorities have reportedly searched more than 60 mines in the search for Reisinger. Sheriff Warwick said, “There are a lot of mines up there. That’s been a thing that’s been said in this county for a number of years — ‘Anyone comes up missing, check the mines.’”
In addition to claiming that “Dready” Brian killed Kristal, Catfish also called it “sick” that her daughter might want justice.
Catfish: No. And this thing I keep hearing about, "We just want her child to have justice," and stuff… Listen, if her child at, what? Four or five years old or so, is already vindictive enough to need to know who did it and punish them, then that scares me on a Chucky had children and they're real kind of thing.
Lindsey: I don't know. When I met her, she was crying and she gave me a hug and she was like, "I'm so glad someone's looking for my mommy." I don't know, it was kind of heartfelt.
On May 16th, 2020, “Dready” Brian Otten was found unconscious on the roof deck of the Starlit Hostel about 15 minutes outside of Crestone. According to the autopsy report, Brian died because of “heroin and mitragynine intoxication.”
On March 29th, 2022, “Catfish” John Patrick Keenan was arrested in Raleigh, NC for possession, and three months later in June he was arrested for possession again, specifically, possession of heroin and meth. He was found dead on September 22nd, 2022.
“His friend Tyler was on scene,” Lt. Morrison told reporter Be Scofield during an interview. “There was a lot of drug paraphernalia in the apartment…”
According to Scofield, Reisinger was pushed off a balcony at Catfish’s home by “Dready” Brian Otten, after which she lay twitching on the ground. Scofield believes that she was then killed.
Scofield also uncovered that one of the deputies involved in the investigation, Deputy Wayne Clark, was fired for “criminal extortion” and “fabricating an investigation.”
On June 30th 2020, Deputy Wayne Clark of the Saguache Sheriff’s department was fired for what was then reported as “official misconduct.” The Center Post Dispatch reported that he was a “no show” at his arraignment on July 29th. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and a source close to law enforcement speculated he may have left the state. His whereabouts are unknown at this time.
Clark had previously denied allegations made by Crestone resident Sarah Grimes, a former professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, about his handling of investigations including the disappearance of Reisinger (and also the death of another Crestone resident, Brandy Atkins, whose death was officially ruled a suicide).
“The case has now been turned over to CBI (The Colorado Bureau of Investigation),” Sherriff Warwick announced after the allegations made by Grimes.
Reisinger is described standing five foot six and weighing 155 pounds. She has blue eyes. She was last seen with her hair in platinum blonde dreadlocks, with gauged earrings, other facial piercings, and numerous tattoos all over her body.
A $20,000 reward has been issued for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for her disappearance, and anyone with information regarding the disappearance of Kristal Reisinger is asked to contact either the Saguache County Sheriff’s Office at (719) 655-2544 or the CBI at (303) 239-4211.
If you’d like to help the family, a GoFundMe created by the Up and Vanished team has raised over $19,000 towards a trust for Kasha and her future.
This one is near me and it’s always been speculated “Catfish” had something to do with it. Unrelated but Suzanne Morphew’s remains were found just outside of Crestone in a shallow grave. It doesn’t take an old mine to dispose someone.