On February 9, 2004, a 21-year-old distance runner and nursing student from UMass Amherst disappeared under mysterious circumstances after driving to Woodsville, New Hampshire. Maura Murray still remains missing two decades later.
The question that has bewildered everyone interested in Maura Murray's disappearance is this: What was this Dean's list student doing in Woodsville, NH on a Monday evening, a school night, at the start of the second semester?
Twenty years have passed and still no one knows why Maura drove north that afternoon, her journey ending with her second single vehicle accident in less than 48 hours. Furthermore, there has been no credible sighting of her since approximately 7:30 p.m. that evening.
As Maura navigated her 1996 Saturn around a wide turn just past a landmark called the Weathered Barn, on Rte. 112, also known as Wild Ammonoosuc Road, she seemingly lost control and slammed into a snow bank or possibly a tree. Although a few neighbors heard her crash, and a school bus driver returning from a ski trip, stopped within minutes of the crash and asked if she needed assistance, something strange happened. About twenty minutes later, her abandoned car was found by police on the wrong side of the road, facing west not east, as it should have. Officer Cecil Smith of the Haverhill Police Department arrived, responding to 911 calls from neighbors, Faith Westman and the bus driver, Butch Atwood, and noted that the car was locked and the young woman was nowhere in sight. A dirty rag hung from the tailpipe; Maura Murray had simply disappeared.
To add to the mystery, earlier that afternoon, Maura had informed professors and friends at UMass Amherst that there had been “a death in the family”. This was a lie. She had emailed this message to her both her nursing professors and her supervisor at an art gallery, stating she would be away for a week because of this family loss. Then, she packed up some personal items from her single resident dormitory, including clothing, running gear and nursing textbooks. From there, she got into her 1996 black Saturn and made two stops around Amherst. The last confirmed image of Maura is at an ATM, a set of grainy black and white stills, as she emptied almost the entire balance of $280 out of her bank account at 3:15 p.m. She was allegedly seen alone at a local liquor store where she purchased $40 worth of liquor including Kalua and Bailey’s Irish Crème; she also returned a large plastic bag of 70 cans, netting approximately $3.50. At approximately 4:30 p.m., she checked her cell phone voicemail then presumably began to drive north up route 91, destination unknown.
Maura's alleged next interaction was almost three hours later with that school bus driver, Butch Atwood, who lived across the street from the scene of single car crash on Rte. 112 in Woodsville, New Hampshire. Atwood told police that the young lady he spoke with refused help saying that she had already called AAA. However, Atwood (no relation to me) knew she was lying since there was no cell service in that area. He left her, went home and called 911 but by the time the authorities arrived, Maura, or the woman that he encountered, was long gone.
The reason for debate about this interaction is the fact that the young lady Butch Atwood spoke with didn't match up with the outfit or hair-style that Maura had in the photo below. This woman, according to Atwood, wore her hair down and had a dark jacket on with a hoodie. When shown Maura's photo, Atwood said it wasn't the same woman. He later retracted that statement and said it could have been Maura.
Now, it’s important to note here that the above narrative that I’ve provided above is not my own. In fact, it is one that I have constructed from what I have learned from various podcasts I’ve listened to, books and message boards I’ve read, and documentaries I’ve watched. To be truthful, there seems to be no consistent or verified account of the events surrounding Maura’s disappearance, evidenced by contradictory police reports, differing eye witness accounts, and distorted conspiracy theories from online armchair sleuths.
Only Maura can precisely tell us what happened on that evening in 2004. The case of Maura Murray’s disappearance now resembles the plot of a crime novel, one with a cast of characters, including a protagonist and many possible antagonists. Many individuals involved in her case, especially the armchair sleuths, have distorted the facts so much so that the Maura Murray of true crime obsession does not even resemble the real Maura Murray anymore.
Now let's pause here. You may ask yourself why I would want to blog about this missing woman whom I've never met? What connection could I possibly have with her?
It is true that I never had the pleasure being formally introduced to Maura but I should have. Maura grew up in Hanson, Massachusetts, 35 miles from my hometown of North Attleborough. However, any connection between us has nothing to do with the proximity to our hometowns.
On most Saturdays between 1996 to 1999 we literally “ran” in the same circles of MIAA high school track and field and cross-country. Before Maura was the subject of true crime blogs, she was a highly successful runner, earning a Boston Globe “All-Scholastic” status and even setting a record at the prestigious Catholic Memorial Invitation at Franklin Park. She was a top finisher in the 1998 Eastern Massachusetts X-C Championships, seizing 7th overall (19:21 5K) and leading her Whitman-Hanson team to the All-State Championships. She grabbed 13th overall the next week out at the Gardner Golf Course. The previous spring, Maura had finished 9th in Massachusetts in the 2-mile (11:35.42). At Nike Nationals, she had set a PR and school record of 11:29 the previous June. Her senior year, Maura ran a 5:19 mile to finish 8th in Massachusetts, matching her sister, Julie's time from the previous year. The bottomline is that Maura was fast and a star on the rise. I had achieved similar success as a high school runner then later college, but by the 1998-99 school year, I was 27 years old, an English teacher and head track and field and cross-country coach at Mansfield High School, on my way to my own Boston Globe “Coach of the Year”. My running days were over but for Maura Murray she was on a trajectory to become part of a NCAA D1 program.
Cut to fourteen years later, a post about Maura’s disappearance appeared on my Facebook page, put up by my late friend and Boston Herald sports journalist, Joe Reardon. Joe was a bit obsessed with true crime cases, when he wasn't covering especially local ones like the disappearance and murder of Molly Bish, a terribly disturbing story. The strange details of Maura's disappearance immediately grabbed my attention.
Joe's post made me dig deeper into the case. Besides a few phone records from her dorm room phone and cell, indicating that she had called to see if there were vacancies at condos to rent near ski resorts in Stowe, Vermont, and Bartlett, New Hampshire, it seems she had no clear destination. Investigators found printed MapQuest directions to Burlington, Vermont, in her car but it seems that Haverhill, New Hampshire was a completely indirect route to get there. Some have speculated that she decided to take route on the backroads to Bretton Woods ski resort or even to areas around Mount Washington. Some of have claimed that Loon Mountain was her destination; Fred Murray, her father, claims Bartlet, NH was a place that they had spent time in and she was headed there.
When she went missing in 2004, it was something only a small group of people seemed to know about. In fact, it was a solid eight years before I even heard about Maura Murray's disappearance. The information came to me in the form of a Facebook post that my friend and Boston Herald journalist, Joe Reardon put up in 2012. Granted, back in 2004, I had moved away from Massachusetts and out to California, about halfway through her Maura’s junior at UMass Amherst. At that time, I was in graduate school at USC, my son was not even three months old, I was teaching at a Catholic school, and my wife and I were living in a two-bedroom rent control apartment in Santa Monica. The Patriots had just won their second Super Bowl, Tom Brady his second MVP, and a new social media platform called Facebook launched that week from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. Coldplay won a Grammy for their album, Clocks, and Scott Peterson was about to face a trial for allegedly murdering his pregnant wife, Lacey. To be honest, that was probably the only true crime case I knew about at the time and a disturbing one at that. However, that February, it seems only a handful of people knew about Maura Murray's disappearance.
Back in Boston, not many seemed to know of the disappearance of this young lady either. In fact, the first mention in the Boston Globe article was on February 14, 2004, five days after she went missing. Now, in 2024, you would think that Maura's case would be something your average Massachusetts denizen would know about but sadly, people still are in the dark about her disappearance.
Since I read Joe’s post over twelve years ago, I’ve fallen deep down the rabbit hole that is Maura’s mysterious cold case, fruitlessly searching for answers as to how she disappeared without a trace. And I'm not the only one a bit obsessed with her case. If you take a moment to peruse Reddit, Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok and many other social media platforms and media you'll find that these have become fertile ground for the discussion and debate about what happened to Maura Murray. Many community forums share theories and discuss evidence in a rather friendly, logical, and congenial manner; others have attacked the Murray family, law enforcement, her friends, her boyfriend at the time, and even Maura herself for "suspicious behavior".
However, to be fair, most individuals out there have good intentions and truly want to find out what happened to Maura. These would include her family, friends, some devoted bloggers and podcasters, and law enforcement, and myself. All we seek is closure; closure for her family, her friends, and the Maura Murray community at large. That said, I’ve come to the conclusion that Maura's disappearance does not resemble the shape of the 400-meter oval track that she once traversed around. Twenty years later it seems more like a marathon with no discernible finish line.
Before Maura became the subject of all of this true crime analysis, she had been a highly student-athlete at Whitman-Hanson High School. Academically she was a powerhouse student: 4th in her class with an almost perfect score on her SATs. Athletically, she ranked in the top thirty-three 2-milers in the U.S. at one point. With a resume like this, as you can imagine, many top universities, including some top Ivy League schools, took interest. Ultimately, she was accepted and decided to attend West Point, the sole nominee of Senator Edward Kennedy that year. Maura joined her older sister, Julie there and attended the U.S. Military Academy a year and a half, competing in cross-country and track and majoring in chemical engineering.
However, according to her sister, Julie, the military life was not for Maura and she ended up transferring to UMASS-Amherst in January 2003 as second semester sophomore. There Maura opted to pursue a nursing career, like her mother, and continued competing as a member of the cross-country and track teams. Most of the narrative shared by her family portrayed Maura as an All-American kid. Just about every photo I’ve come upon showed a smiling, beautiful, Irish-American girl.
Whether it came from the arm-chair sleuths, Author James Renner's blog, or internet message boards like Reddit, a darker image of Maura Murray suddenly seem to surface after she went missing. One eerie photo that I stumbled upon was an October 2003 mug shot; the second were the stills from her ATM footage. That girl did not look the same. Perhaps it was the black-and-white images that distorted her once happy face; perhaps it was something darker.
The first event that seemed to shatter Maura’s seemingly flawless public persona came almost two years earlier when she made the decision to steal a $5 lip gloss from the Fort Knox commissary on a 2001 trip with other West Point cadets. Allegedly, she told a friend later, “I don’t know why I did it; I had the money to buy it.” She was caught, detained, and had to go through an honor code violation hearing back at West Point. One podcast, Mile Higher, even claims she had six other honor code violations at West Point and was ultimately dismissed as a student. All of this is up for debate. However, a fact we can undeniably verify is that she transferred out of West Point, on January 2, 2003, to UMass for the Spring semester.
At UMass, things seemed to be going well. She was a member of the track and cross-country team, on academic scholarship, according to her sister, Julie, and a dean’s list student. She continued her relationship with Bill Rausch, a future lieutenant in the U.S. Army, someone she met around the time of that judicial process she went through at West Point.
However, in late July, a series of much more serious incidents occurred. Maura was pulled over and ticketed $360 for driving 99 miles an hour in New Hampshire, after dropping her boyfriend off at the Manchester, NH airport. Her license was suspended in that state up until her disappearance in February 2004. There was online speculation that she had the reinstatement forms in her Saturn and intended to pay the fine while up in NH.
The second incident that shattered her “All-American” girl image, was when she was charged with credit card theft in October of 2004, after she was caught in a sting operation for ordering food and pizza off of a list of stolen credit card numbers.
Then, in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 8, 2004, she was involved in a single-vehicle accident that that caused $10,000 damage to her father’s new Toyota Corolla. This was just two days before she disappeared. Even though no DUI test was conducted, the single car accident at 2:30 a.m. in Hadley, MA, occurred after a dinner with her father and a UMASS teammate at the Amherst Brewery, then a purchase of alcohol at a local liquor store, and confirmed attendance at a UMASS party; all seem to indicate that she may have been impaired. The climax of these unfortunate events was lying to her professors about a “death in the family”, leaving UMASS, and crashing her 1996 Saturn in Haverhill, NH on February 9, 2004, never to be seen again. Armchair sleuths have had a field day with Maura's behavior in the days before her disappearance, but we have to ask ourselves: How relevant were all these events to her ultimate disappearance?
Twenty years later and Maura Murray is still missing and there are few clues to her whereabouts or evidence that she is even alive. You may have even seen her smiling face on a digital billboard campaign placed on local Massachusetts highways or perhaps watched or read news reports acknowledging the 20th anniversary of her disappearance. Every morning, as I drove Rte. 195 through Fall River, MA, I would see her smiling face on the digital billboard pictured below. It was haunting since I knew the story of the beautiful girl on that sign.
However, there are still so many people, not only in Massachusetts, but nationally, who don’t know a single detail about Maura Murray's case. I've even spoken with alumni from UMASS, some who attended during Maura's time period and the had never heard of the case, even though the Daily Collegian had covered it from almost the first day.
I guess this is why I wanted to begin my blog with her story because I know that someone out there knows what happened to her in 2004. If they weren't involved, maybe someone told them a story about their interaction with Maura that night. Maybe someone will develop a conscience after twenty years and want to share their story to clear their guilt. Maura is owed that much; her family is owed that much.
Stay Tuned for Part II of "Disappear Here" We will exam the online armchair detectives and conspiracy theories surrounding the Maura Murray case. Have they helped or hurt the case?
Author's Note: This blog is dedicated to the memory of Joe Reardon. He was a friend, former distance runner for Braintree and Bridgewater State, loving father, brother, son, and a dedicated sports journalist for the Boston Herald, where he dedicated his career to reporting on scholastic track and field and cross country. Joe also had a good heart and took interest in cases like Maura's as he covered her races for The Herald and lived on the South Shore. As a father, he hoped and prayed for Maura's safe return some day or at least closure for her family. He passed away unexpectedly in 2024. RIP, my friend.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Maura Murray, please contact:
NH STATE POLICE MAJOR CRIME UNIT
Email Address: coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov
Phone: (603) 271-2663
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