Disappearance of Maura Murray

After midnight on Monday, February 9, Murray used her personal computer to search MapQuest for directions to the Berkshires and Burlington, Vermont. The first reported contact Murray had with anyone on February 9 was at 1:00 pm, when she emailed her boyfriend: "I love you more stud. I got your messages, but honestly, i didn’t feel like talking to much of anyone, i promise to call today though. love you, Maura" She also made a phone call inquiring about renting a condominium at the same Bartlett, New Hampshire condo association with which her family had vacationed in the past. Telephone records indicate the call lasted three minutes. The owner did not rent the condo to Murray. At 1:13 pm, Murray called a fellow nursing student for reasons unknown.

In February 2019, the fifteenth anniversary of Murray's disappearance, Fred Murray reiterated his belief that his daughter is dead, as well as his suspicions about the nearby house that cadaver dogs responded to, stating, "That’s my daughter, I do believe." In early April, excavation was done within the basement of the house. Fred Murray had previously wanted to search the home, but the owners did not cooperate. Following sale of the property, its new owners allowed several searches of the property since February. The excavation conducted in early April found “absolutely nothing, other than what appears to be a piece of pottery or old piping.”

On the Internet, Maura’s disappearance is the perfect obsession, a puzzle of clues that offers a tantalizing illusion—if the right armchair detective connects the right dots, maybe the unsolvable can be solved. And so every day, the case attracts new recruits, analyzing and dissecting and reconstructing the details of her story with a Warren Commission–like fervor.

In the years after Murray's disappearance, her case would receive media attention on 20/20 and Disappeared, and also garner significant speculation on Internet message boards and forums, with theories ranging from abduction to voluntary disappearance. In 2017, the case was the subject of a documentary series on the Oxygen network, which described Murray's disappearance as the "first crime mystery of the social media age”, having occurred days after the launch of Facebook.

On February 9, 2017, the thirteenth anniversary of Murray's disappearance, Strelzin wrote in an email to The Boston Globe: "It's still an open case with periods of activity and [at] times it goes dormant. There are no new updates to share at this time."

An episode of 20/20 compared Murray's case to that of Brooke Wilberger, who went missing in Oregon a few months after her disappearance and was later found murdered. Murray was referenced in two episodes on Disappeared, in both Season 1 (episode 6) and Season 4 (episode 7). In 2017, Oxygen produced a six-part television documentary miniseries titled The Disappearance of Maura Murray hosted by Maggie Freleng, a journalist.

—New Hampshire State Police Lt. John Scarinza

In 2014, on the tenth anniversary of Murray's disappearance, Strelzin stated that "We haven't had any credible sightings of Maura since the night she disappeared." In an article published in the New York Daily News, on the tenth anniversary of his daughter's disappearance, it was reported that Fred Murray believed she was dead, and had been abducted the night of her disappearance.

Murray's disappearance has been cited as "the first crime mystery of the social media age", and generated speculation from the media and the public, specifically on the Internet, in online forums and message boards. Writing for Boston magazine in 2014, Bill Jensen noted: "Now, at least online, it often seems as there’s no such thing as a cold case. But when Maura Murray disappeared, the social Web was in its infancy. There was no YouTube and no Twitter. On the day Maura went missing, Facebook was five days old. And so you can read the history of her case as a parable about the evolution of online sleuthing." In 2005, active discussion of Murray's disappearance was documented on websleuths.com, and in 2007, Facebook and Myspace pages were created dedicated to helping find her.

In early 2012, observers of the Murray case began taking note of a YouTube user named "Mr112dirtbag", who posted a series of online videos that some believed contained cryptic clues to Murray's disappearance. Both Murray's family and professional criminologists dismissed the videos as a "cruel and hideous" ploy for attention.

Police traced the vehicle to Murray, and initially treated her as a missing person on the belief that she may have wanted to disappear voluntarily. This speculation was based on her travel preparations (about which she had confided nothing to friends or family) and no obvious evidence of foul play. In 2009, Murray's case was given to the New Hampshire cold case division, and authorities are handling it as a "suspicious" missing persons case.

Murray's case was one of many cited by proponents of a statewide cold case unit for New Hampshire in 2009. Her case was subsequently added to the newly established cold case unit later that year. In 2010, Fred Murray publicly criticized the police investigation for treating the disappearance as a missing persons case and not a criminal matter, and has called on the FBI to join the investigation. Jeffery Strelzin said in February 2009 that the investigation is still active: "We don't know if Maura is a victim, but the state is treating it as a potential homicide. It may be a missing-persons case, but it's being handled as a criminal investigation."

The New Hampshire League of Investigators, ten retired police officers and detectives, and the Molly Bish Foundation started working on the case in 2006. Tom Shamshak, a former police chief and a member of the Licensed Private Detectives Association of Massachusetts, said, "It appears...that this is something beyond a mere missing persons case. Something ominous could have happened here." The Arkansas group Let's Bring Them Home offered a $75,000 reward in 2007 for information that could solve her disappearance.

In October 2006, volunteers led a two-day search within a few miles of where Murray's car was found. In the closet of an A-frame house approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) from the crash site, cadaver dogs allegedly went "bonkers," possibly identifying the presence of human remains. The house had formerly been the residence of the man implicated by his brother, who had given Fred Murray the rusty knife in 2004. A sample of carpet from the home was sent to the New Hampshire State Police, but the results were never released to the public. In July 2008, volunteers led another two-day search through wooded areas in Haverhill. The group consisted of dog teams and licensed private investigators.

In 2005, Fred Murray petitioned New Hampshire Governor Craig Benson for help in the search, and appeared on The Montel Williams Show in November 2004 to publicize the case. On February 9, 2005, the one-year anniversary of Murray's disappearance, a service was held where the car was found, and her father met briefly with New Hampshire Governor John Lynch.

In late 2005, Fred Murray filed suit against several law enforcement agencies, with the aim of seeing files on the case. On November 1, 2005, a user named "Tom Davies" logged into a message board called "Not Without Peril," which was dedicated to discussion of Murray's disappearance, and claimed to have seen a black backpack behind a restroom at Pemigewasset Overlook, around 30 miles (48 km) from Woodsville. Murray had owned a black backpack. Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin stated that law enforcement "was aware of the backpack," but did not disclose whether it had been taken for forensic testing.

On the evening of February 5, 2004, Murray spoke on the phone with her older sister, Kathleen, while she was on duty at her campus-security job. They discussed Kathleen's relationship problems with her fiancé. Around 10:30 p.m., while still on her shift, it was reported that Murray broke down in tears. When her supervisor arrived at her desk, Murray was "just completely zoned out. No reaction at all. She was unresponsive." The supervisor escorted Murray back to her dorm room around 1:20 am. When asked what was wrong, Murray said two words: "My sister." The contents of this call remained unknown until 2017, when Kathleen publicly explained the conversation: Kathleen, a recovering alcoholic, had been discharged from a rehabilitation clinic that evening, and on the way home, her fiancé took her to a liquor store, which caused an emotional breakdown.

At the end of February, the police returned the items found in Murray's car to her family. On March 2, the family checked out of their motel, exhausted from the search. Fred Murray returned nearly every weekend to continue searching. In April, Haverhill Police informed him of complaints of trespassing on private property. The March 2004 Disappearance of Brianna Maitland in Montgomery, Vermont, 66 miles (110 km) away from Murray's last sighting in Woodsville, drew comparisons from media and law enforcement due to the similarities in disappearances. However, state police have stated there are no links between the two cases.

In late 2004, a man allegedly gave Murray's father a rusty, stained knife that belonged to the man's brother, who had a criminal past and lived less than a mile from where the car was discovered. His brother and his brother's girlfriend were said to have acted strangely after the disappearance, and the man's brother claimed he believed the knife had been used to kill Murray. Several days after the knife was given to Murray's father, the man's brother allegedly scrapped his Volvo. Family members of the man who turned in the knife claimed he had made up the story in order to obtain reward money in the investigation, and that he had a history of drug use.

In November 2003, three months before her disappearance, Murray admitted to using a stolen credit card to order food from several restaurants, including one in Hadley, Massachusetts. The charge was continued in December to be dismissed after three months' good behavior.

In her car, Murray packed clothing, toiletries, college textbooks, and birth control pills. When her room was searched later, campus police discovered most of her belongings packed in boxes and the art removed from the walls. It's not clear whether Murray packed them that day, but police at the time asserted she had packed between Sunday night and Monday morning. On top of the boxes was a printed email to Murray's boyfriend indicating trouble in their relationship. Around 3:30 pm, she drove off the campus in her black 1996 Saturn sedan; classes at the university had been canceled that day due to a snowstorm.

Maura Murray (born May 4, 1982) is an American woman who disappeared on the evening of February 9, 2004, after a car crash on Route 112 near Woodsville, New Hampshire, a village in Haverhill. Her whereabouts remain unknown. She was a 21-year-old nursing student completing her junior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time of her disappearance.

Maura Murray was born May 4, 1982, in Hanson, Massachusetts, the fourth child of Frederick "Fred" and Laurie Murray. She had an older brother, Fred, two older sisters, Kathleen and Julie, and a younger brother, Kurt. Maura was raised in an Irish Catholic household. When she was six, her parents divorced, after which Maura lived primarily with her mother. Murray graduated from Whitman-Hanson Regional High School, where she was a star athlete on the school's track team. She was accepted into the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, where she studied chemical engineering for three semesters. After her freshman year, she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study nursing.