It is an indisputable fact that on the night of her death on October 22, 1997, Anastasia WitbolsFeugen met up with her on-and-off boyfriend, Justin Bruton, at a Dairy Queen in Independence, Missouri, near Mt. Washington Cemetery.¹ It is also an indisputable fact that Byron Case and his girlfriend Kelly Moffett were riding along with Justin when he picked Anastasia up,² and that the three of them were the last people known to have been seen with Anastasia before her murder.

However, the reason that Case and Moffett came along with Justin to pick up Anastasia, only two hours before Kelly's curfew and knowing full well that there was a long argument brewing, remains in dispute.

Case testified at his trial in 2002 that he and Moffett tagged along because they did not want to be stranded indefinitely at Bruton's apartment while he went to pick up Anastasia.³ However, in 1998, just more than four months after the murder, Case provided a different version of that story in an email to Anastasia's family, claiming that he would have had to walk the 12 blocks back to his mother's apartment in order to get his car and drive Kelly home, and that it would have been too much trouble.⁴ Case would later go to great lengths to deny that his car was available at all that night.⁵

Case mentioned a number of times that he was concerned about getting Kelly home by curfew, but his excuses seem counterintuitive toward that end, and Kelly's mother, Debbie Moffett, testified that they got back to her home after curfew.⁶

Case's excuses for accompanying Justin out to Independence and later to Mt. Washington Cemetery do not make any logical sense. The best and most rational hypothesis to explain his motives match Kelly Moffet's testimony,⁷ that Byron Case tagged along with Justin Bruton that night with no purpose other than to murder Anastasia.