Maura Murray

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Route 112 runs east from the Vermont border through dense woods and scattered farmhouses, rising and curving along the Wild Ammonoosuc River. In winter, after dark, it is one of the loneliest roads in New England. There are long stretches without a single house, without a single light, and — in 2004 — without a single bar of cell phone service.

On the evening of February 9, 2004, at a sharp left-hand bend in the town of Haverhill, a black Saturn sedan slid off that road and crashed into a snowbank.

A man who stopped to help spoke briefly with the young woman behind the wheel. She told him she was fine. She asked him not to call the police.

Within roughly ten minutes, the first officer arrived on the scene. The car was locked. The young woman was gone.

Her name was Maura Murray. She has never been found.

Maura

Maura Murray was twenty-one years old, a junior in the nursing program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She had grown up in Hanson, Massachusetts, one of five children, the daughter of Fred and Laurie Murray. She was smart, athletic and driven — a standout runner in high school who had gone on to the United States Military Academy at West Point, before transferring to UMass to pursue nursing.

People who knew her described her as quiet, disciplined and kind. She ran constantly. She worked part-time as a security guard at a campus dormitory. She had a long-distance boyfriend, Billy Rausch, a young Army officer stationed in Oklahoma.

To all appearances, she had her life in order.

But in the days before she disappeared, something was very wrong.

The Week Before

On the night of Thursday, February 5, 2004, Maura was working at the security desk when she received a phone call. Shortly afterward, her supervisor found her in a state that was later described as nearly unresponsive — distraught, crying, unable or unwilling to say what had happened. The supervisor walked her back to her dorm room. Maura never told anyone what the call was about. Her family has said they don’t know either.

That weekend, her father, Fred, drove out to Amherst to visit her. They went car shopping together and had dinner. On Saturday night, Maura borrowed her father’s car — a nearly new Toyota Corolla — to go to a party. At about 3:30 in the morning on Sunday, February 8, driving back alone, she hit a guardrail on Route 9 in the town of Hadley and badly damaged the car. Police responded. No one was hurt. Fred Murray headed home and told his daughter to call him that night so they could talk about the insurance paperwork.

She called him that night. It was the last time he ever spoke with her.

Monday, February 9

The next day, Maura did a series of things that, taken together, have been picked apart by investigators, journalists, and amateur detectives for two decades.

Shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, she sent an email to her boyfriend, Billy, saying she had gotten his message and would call him later. Not long after, she sent an email to her professors and to her supervisor at work. She wrote that there had been a death in her family and that she would be away for about a week.

There had been no death in her family.

She used her computer to look up directions to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts and to Burlington, Vermont. She called a condominium rental agency about properties in Bartlett, New Hampshire, a resort town in the White Mountains. She packed up nearly all of her belongings in her dorm room into boxes — so thoroughly that investigators later said the room looked as if she had been planning to move out.

At around 3:40 p.m., she withdrew $280 from an ATM, nearly all the money in her account. She stopped at a liquor store and bought about $40 worth of alcohol, including a box of wine.

Then she got into her car — a black Saturn sedan that had belonged to her father — and drove north. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going.

The Crash

Around 7:27 that evening, a woman who lived in a house on a curve of Route 112 in Haverhill heard a loud thump outside. She looked out the window and saw a car that had gone off the road and was facing the wrong direction against a snowbank. She called the police.

A few minutes later, a school bus driver named Butch Atwood, who lived nearby, came upon the crash on his way home. He stopped his bus beside the Saturn. He saw a young woman inside, cold, shivering, but, he thought, not seriously hurt. He asked if she needed help. She said no. She said she had already called AAA. Atwood knew there was no cell service in that area, and he told her so. He offered to call the police for her. She asked him not to.

Atwood drove the short distance to his home. Neighbors also saw the Saturn and a figure moving around it, smoking or moving about the car — accounts differed. At about 7:46 p.m., Haverhill police Sergeant Cecil Smith arrived on the scene.

The car was empty and locked. The windshield was cracked on the driver’s side. The airbags had deployed. Inside, there was a box of wine that had spilled, staining the roof and the door with red liquid. There were her belongings — clothes, books, CDs, gloves, a backpack with toiletries, printed driving directions, and a book about mountain climbing tragedies.

There were no footprints in the snow that clearly led anywhere. No one saw a car stop to pick her up. No one saw her walk away.

The Search

Because Maura was an adult who had apparently left the scene of an accident on her own, the police at first did not treat the situation as an emergency. They issued a “be on the lookout” notice for her the next afternoon. It was not until Wednesday, February 11 — about thirty-six hours after the crash — that a full search began, with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, search dogs and a helicopter.

Fred Murray had driven up before dawn on Wednesday and begged police to begin. He later said he believed the delay had cost them everything.

A tracking dog was given one of Maura’s gloves to sniff. It followed her scent east along Route 112, away from the car, for about a hundred yards. Then it stopped, and seemed to lose the trail entirely. To many people, that suggested only one thing: at that spot, Maura got into a vehicle.

But whose?

The Questions

The disappearance of Maura Murray has become one of the most discussed missing-person cases in America, especially since the rise of internet forums and true-crime podcasts. That’s partly because there is so much — and so little — to go on.

Was she running away? The packed dorm room, the false email about a death in the family, the empty bank account, the directions and rental inquiries all suggest that Maura intended to go somewhere and not come back for a while. Some have suggested she wanted to escape a problem in her life — whatever was behind that phone call on February 5 — and start over. But if so, where did she go, with no car and no money beyond a few hundred dollars, on foot, at night, in winter?

Did she go into the woods? Some believe Maura, upset and perhaps intoxicated, walked away from the crash to avoid the police and became lost in the forest, dying of exposure. But the woods were searched, again and again, over years. No remains have been found.

Did someone pick her up? The scent ending a hundred yards up the road suggests that Maura got into a car. It may have been someone she knew and had arranged to meet, someone she didn’t know who offered her a ride, or someone who meant her harm. Investigators have looked at local residents, a few people with violent records, and many tips. Nothing has led to her.

Was she harmed? Over the years, there have been searches of properties in the area, including excavations prompted by tips, and investigators have looked at possible connections to other cases, including the disappearance of a Vermont teenager named Brianna Maitland a few weeks later. Authorities have said they have found no link.

What remains is a set of facts that won’t add up. A careful, disciplined young woman who, over the course of a few days, seemed to come apart. A crash on a lonely road. A brief conversation with a stranger. Ten minutes.

A Father’s Search

Fred Murray never stopped looking for his daughter. He walked the woods around Haverhill himself, year after year. He pushed for the case files to be made public. He sued the state for access to records. He pressed police to search places they had dismissed. He gave interviews to anyone who would listen.

He said, more than once, that he didn’t care about the why. He just wanted to bring her home.