Kristal Reisinger Part III: An Angel Disappears

Kristal escapes Catfish’s but has red marks on ankles and wrists. She found “disgusting” photos while there. A few weeks later she disappears.

Be Scofield is a prominent cult reporter whose work is cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, People, Daily Beast, The Guardian and has led to coverage on Netflix, Dr. Phil, VICE, CNN, and elsewhere.

November 15th, 2021

On June 28th, 2016, Kristal Reisinger pretended to fall asleep at Catfish’s house and then waited for him to fall asleep. It was 10 a.m. and he had apparently been up all night. Kristal had been drugged and held captive there for the last three days. She quietly picked up the pieces of her phone and put them back together as Catfish had disassembled and tampered with it. Kristal slowly crept outside and called her boyfriend “Ethan” who rushed over and picked her up.

This is what Kristal told Ethan and her friend “Mark” the day she escaped. “Kristal had visible red marks on her wrists and ankles. She was really scared,” Mark told me during an interview. He saw her that night at the apartment. Ethan told me he remembers seeing bruises and marks all over Kristal’s legs. “I’ve never seen her that scared. She told me he held her there, he wouldn’t let her leave, he took apart her phone,” Ethan said. She also told him she thought she had been raped.

As reported in Part II, Beth the house cleaner for Catfish, told me she walked in to the house one time right after Catfish had been zip tied by his knees, ankles and wrists for the weekend by Brendan Pulver.

Kristal had “visible red marks on her wrists and ankles,” according to Mark. “Catfish had red marks all over his wrists, ankles and knees,” after Brendan tied him up according to Beth. Brendan told the podcast he was at Catfish’s during the time that Kristal said she had been drugged and raped but he said he merely helped Kristal take out the trash. But Brendan acknowledges being there at the time and place in question. Two events Brendan was at the location of, two people left with visible red marks on their wrists and ankles.

“Kristal had visible red marks on her wrists and ankles.”

Kristal’s landlord Ara Macdonald saw her around July 1st, just a few days after she escaped from Catfish’s. “Kristal told me she was raped at a party,” Ara told me. “She was a complete basket case, she never said she was going to press charges, she was going to try and get a rape kit but never did because she was scared.” She said Kristal told her, “you think people are your friends and then something like this happens.”

Ethan told me Catfish made Kristal put a pistol to her head and pull the trigger while she was drugged and held captive. There were no bullets in the gun, however. “She was standing in front of a mirror and Catfish was fucking with her, telling her she was dead,” Ethan said.

Kristal told her boyfriend she had discovered “incriminating and disgusting photos” at Catfish’s but wouldn’t tell him of what. Catfish had been trying to get Kristal to move into one of his rooms, and she was going through his stuff in the closet. “She stole a plastic binder page that was filled with dozens of pills, each in their own tiny pocket,” Ethan said. He thought they were Klonopin or something similar. Kristal also showed Ethan a pink or blue laptop she says Catfish had given to her, but Ethan suspected she may have stolen it from him.

Kristal told her boyfriend she had discovered “incriminating and disgusting photos” at Catfish’s.

Kristal didn’t have a car, so she had asked a friend for a ride to Catfish’s. In the podcast, the friend described what happened. “There’s a bag of drugs just sitting on the ground of the restroom floor,” he said. He got freaked out about being at Catfish’s and told Kristal he was going to leave. When he saw Kristal several days later, she told him Catfish held her captive. “That night you brought me there, this guy drugged me and hid my phone from me and wouldn’t let me leave and it was this whole crazy ordeal,” he says Kristal told her.

Catfish John Keenan told the police he and Kristal had merely “drank wine and smoked marijuana.” However, a friend of his told the podcast that they were doing meth together. “[Catfish] told me himself that [Kristal] had been over there. He said he’d done a bunch of meth with her the night before…he sent her a video of all the meth he had bought, because she was a user of that, and lured her over.”

How Kristal was drugged is unknown, but she thought three people were involved in her rape.

For the next two weeks, Ethan took care of Kristal until she disappeared. Around July 10th or 11th, they got into an argument because Kristal hadn’t slept in four days. He told me he pleaded with her to sleep but she was in a manic state, often “laughing hysterically.” Another friend of Kristal’s who saw her in those last few days also described her as being “very manic.” Ethan suspected she was on meth and knew she had been taking pills and drinking. Kristal asked him to leave so he did. The deputy who spoke to Ethan when she disappeared wrote, “[Ethan] stated Kristal stated she was going to walk to the mountains and die.”

“Catfish said he’d done a bunch of meth with her the night before.”

Ethan said Kristal was Bipolar. Another close friend of hers also confirmed this. Kristal’s neighbor in the apartments told the deputy that she was “very up and down in terms of personality,” and that the last time he saw her a few weeks prior she seemed to be in a “very sad and depressed mood.” Kristal’s mother had schizophrenia and was institutionalized, and Kristal suffered from trauma in her childhood. “The drugs had a serious impact on her mental health,” Ethan told me. She often stayed up all night or for several days in a row, he said.

One reason Kristal’s child was with the father, Eli, is that she was unstable, Ethan said. He described one incident when Kristal went on a vision quest with her daughter in the woods, possibly in Arizona, and someone found her nearly starved to death several days later, having visions.

Kristal’s landlord Ara found a cow skull with wax dripped on it in her apartment. Ethan said Kristal was deeply into the occult and into Madame Blavatsky and the theosophical society. She also studied Tarot. “She’d move her hands and wave her fingers in the air for hours doing rituals and mudras,” he said. Kristal’s adopted father Rodney said she’d meditate for many hours a day in the yard.