FRANKLIN COUNTY, Mo. — "MarkandKris."
That’s what Mark and Kristen Edwards' family members said anytime they referred to either member of the couple.
“It was always the duo name, that’s just how we thought of them,” said Julie Edwards, Mark Edwards’ sister. “They were always together.”
Volunteers on horseback found her partially nude body days later in a wooded area not far from her home.
She had been raped.
And strangled to death with a pair of socks.
Her son was just one month shy of his third birthday.
“People pass away and they get killed, and it's not flippant,” Julie Edwards said. “It's a stain on your life forever.”
This month, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced a newly-formed statewide Cold Case Unit had worked with Franklin County prosecutors to finally secure charges against Avery.
“This was the same man suspected of this 34 years ago, but there was no way to prove this man did this,” said Julie Edwards, refusing to say Avery’s name. “Our family’s biggest concern was that this man would do this to someone else as well.”
While the family was pleased to learn the case had not been forgotten, it has reopened old wounds, Julie Edwards said.
“It just brings it all back up,” Julie Edwards said.
She agreed to an interview with 5 On Your Side because she said her brother and nephew are still too emotional to talk about the case.
“Kris was in our family from the get-go,” she said during a Zoom interview with 5 On Your Side from her home in Ohio. “We just knew that Kris was different from any other girlfriends he had had and she made this indelible mark on our family.
“It was the right fit.”
Her older brother met his future wife at Principia School in Town and Country, a boarding school for Christian Scientists.
She was from Florida. And he was from Dayton, Ohio.
They married in a backyard ceremony in Ohio.
“That’s how weddings were, a little different at the time,” Julie Edwards recalled.
Photographs show she tied as much of her strawberry blonde locks behind her head as she could on her wedding day.
Usually, the tresses took up most of the frame of any picture she took, and barely fell past her shoulders.
The couple’s first, and what turned out to be their only child, Dustin, was born the next year.
“That was the thing, her beautiful, beautiful hair and we were like, ‘Is Dustin going to have her hair?’” Julie Edwards said.
The couple’s mutual love for horses brought them to manage a boarding stable near Queeny Park, and later to a 500-acre horse farm in Sullivan, Missouri.
“It was great, it was fun for them, they loved it,” Julie Edwards.
On the day she went missing, one of her husband’s cousins came to the farm to pick up Dustin and bring the toddler to his grandmother’s house in Ohio. Kris Edwards was preparing for a two-week Christian scientist class.
“Taking Class means you’re really getting serious about your Christian Science,” Julie Edwards said.
Once her cousin and young son left, Kris Edwards ran some errands to the grocery store and a gas station, Julie Edwards said.
“It was really hard for her because she was the last person in the family to see Kris,” Julie Edwards said of her cousin, Steph.
When her husband came home, he found the TV still tuned to a Wimbledon match – one of Kris’s favorite sports to watch.
A half-eaten Lean Cuisine meal on the table.
Her purse. Her car. Their truck. Their dog. All still at the house.
“It just didn’t make any sense,” Julie Edwards said.
Julie Edwards remembers the moment her mother told her Kris Edwards was dead.
“We were standing outside my mom’s home in Centreville by the air conditioner,” she said. “It was just the worst outcome you could even imagine.”
Early on, Julie Edwards said police suspected Avery was the killer.
“He followed her all day long,” Julie Edwards said. “He stalked her.
“There were witnesses that saw him come up to her at the gas station that day and someone saw him following her around the grocery store that day.”
But prosecutors couldn’t make the case against him.
So life for the Edwards family went on during the more than three decades the case sat cold.
At 27, Mark Edwards had become a widower and a single father.
Julie Edwards changed her plans to attend college in Boston and relocated to St. Louis to be closer to her brother and nephew and serve as a female presence in the young boy’s life.
Mark Edwards has since remarried, had another son, and relocated to Iowa where he works as an IT engineer for a school district.
Dustin, now 37, now lives in California.
“She just was a really great person, and I'm sorry that Dustin doesn't know her,” Julie Edwards said through tears. “That's the hard part.”
A church sermon summed up her feelings about her sister-in-law.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind,” she recited. “And I really think that's what Kris was, she was of a sound mind.
“And this isn't her. She's not led by fear. She's led by love.”
The investigation heated up again after Franklin County Sheriff Steve Pelton ordered investigators to reopen the case about a year ago.
Fear no longer gripped a key witness in the case, who told police she saw Avery rape and strangle Kris Edwards in a cabin not far from where her body was found. Avery and at least one of his other family members had threatened to kill the witness if she ever told the police what happened, Julie Edwards said.
Her information was enough for the state’s Cold Case Unit to secure charges against him.
“It's not really a resolution until the court gets done in my opinion,” she said. “So someone's been arrested, but it's not like he's been convicted yet.”
Julie Edwards said she is hopeful she will get to spend some time with her nephew and brother during the holidays.
Every time she sees her nephew, his striking resemblance to his mother shines through.
He has some of her curls.
