True Crime Addict, Page 2

  “You will learn to live with it,” she said. “You just have to.”

  “What about the crime writing?” I asked.

  She thought for a moment and then said, “I think it’s a good idea. Use it to channel that dark side. Your mind works like the people you chase after. Like a good detective. You’re a sociopath, too.”

  I left Roberta’s office feeling kind of numb. Driving home, I thought about what makes someone dangerous. Was it genetics? There was a case to be made there, I knew. But I pushed that line of thinking aside—I wasn’t ready to go there yet. Could a child’s environment make them good or bad? Were environmental factors, alone, enough to push a kid one way or another? My stepmother used to punch me. Was that why I needed to be medicated as an adult? I had fallen in love with Amy Mihaljevic when I saw her MISSING poster hanging on a utility pole when I was eleven years old. What was that all about?

  What I did was I went home and I hugged my son.

  How much of me is in Casey? I wondered.

  After he fell asleep I got to thinking about writing again. I wanted a big case. Nothing local. Something difficult. I remembered this episode of 20/20 I’d seen recently. It was a special report on two missing women. Brooke Wilberger and Maura Murray were college students who excelled in school and then vanished within a few months of each other, in 2004. Brooke’s case immediately struck me as an abduction. She’d been cleaning lampposts (helping her sister, who was a property manager) in the parking lot of an apartment complex in the Oregon town of Corvallis but never showed up for her lunch break. Her car was still in the lot and she’d left her car keys, purse, and flip-flops behind.

  Maura’s case was more baffling. A nursing student from UMass, about to be engaged. Vanished in the North Country after crashing into a snowbank. Police found no signs of foul play, no footprints leading into the woods. She simply disappeared before police arrived on the scene seven minutes after the accident. It didn’t feel like an abduction to me. But nobody knew where she was. And there was a second mystery wrapped around Maura’s disappearance like a serpent coiled around a pepper tree: What the hell was Maura doing in New Hampshire in the first place?

  FOUR

  All-American Girl

  The first thing you learn as a reporter is that nothing you read in the newspaper is true. Truth in reporting is a lie. Here’s how it really works: A reporter is assigned to gather facts on an event—let’s say it’s a crash involving two cars at the intersection of Main and State. The person driving Car A will have a different story to tell than the driver of Car B. And those stories will differ, sometimes greatly, with the statements of witnesses on the sidewalk. But what really happened? I mean, there must be an inherent truth, right? Maybe. But the reporter should never assume he knows which version is most accurate. The best a good reporter can do is gather all the information and present every side of the story. And you know what? Even then, the article will be junk. Because, invariably, a name will be spelled wrong or some little detail will be misinterpreted. The crash will be reported as happening at the intersection of Main and County or some shit. Or the writer will refer to one of the cars as a Saturn when it was really a Vibe. Every article you’ve ever read is a little untrue. I guarantee it.

  And still, you don’t go trying to solve a cold case without first reading everything that has already been written about it, even if you know it’s a bunch of bunk.

  I began my research into the disappearance of Maura Murray that fall of 2009, combing through old newspaper articles for the names of sources and avenues of investigation, mindful that some of what I was reading was incorrect. And slowly, a portrait of Maura Murray emerged.

  Everyone agrees that Maura was beautiful and we can accept at least that much as truth. Family photographs show a bright-faced young woman with dark brown shoulder-length hair, which she often wore in a tight ponytail. Apple cheeks and crazy dimples. A button nose. Skinny from running. A hundred and twenty pounds, soaking wet.

  Maura was from Hanson, Mass, a quiet town between Boston and the Cape. Too small for its own public high school, it shares one with Whitman, the town next door. Hanson is old by American standards, settled in 1632. It’s where Ocean Spray started harvesting cranberries. Hanson is lousy with cranberry bogs and swamps and thin tributaries reaching for the ocean. Random trivia: Rocky Marciano once owned a house on Main Street.

  Born on May 4, 1982, Maura was the fourth of five children. Her father, Fred, was a nuclear medicine tech; her mother, Laurie, was a nurse. She had an older brother, Freddie, Jr.; two older sisters, Kathleen and Julie; and a little brother, Kurt. Maura liked to hike. Sometimes Fred took her camping in the White Mountains, on the sides of the great peaks with presidential names, just across the border into New Hampshire. At first glance, the Murrays appeared to be the quintessential Irish-American family—lots of kids and love to spare.

  In high school, Maura excelled in athletics and academics. She was point guard on the varsity basketball team as a freshman and built a legacy in track and cross-country. Talk to someone who lived in Hanson at that time and they’ll tell you how they remember seeing her running, always running, from one side of town to the other. She was the school’s star runner, and graduated fourth in her class. She was as comfortable in track gear as she was in a prom dress. She scored a 1420 on the SATs.

  After high school, Maura was accepted into West Point, following Julie to the prestigious military academy. She met her boyfriend, William Rausch, there. He was intelligent, but also a hunk—picture a Paul Walker type. They were a power couple. Maura spent three semesters studying chemical engineering at West Point before transferring to UMass, where she enrolled in the nursing program, earning solid marks. Billy, a year older, graduated from the academy and was stationed in Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, at the time of Maura’s disappearance. The papers said he was going to propose. For their honeymoon, they planned to stay in the White Mountains. At UMass, Maura worked two jobs in addition to doing her nursing clinicals: dorm security and as a part-time guard for the campus art gallery.

  Billy’s mother, Sharon, was interviewed for a four-part article titled “All-American Girl” that was posted on the missing-persons Web site, ProjectJason.org. “Smiling and quiet laughter are as natural to Maura as breathing,” she told the reporter. “Thank you notes from Maura were received by anyone who offered to her the slightest kindness. Maura’s favorite color is blue. She likes fruit and French-Vanilla Coffee for breakfast. She appreciates simple things like Gala or Fuji Apples or a ‘just ripe banana.’ A large salad with all of the fixings is Maura’s choice for lunch or dinner each day.”

  In the summers, Maura stayed with Billy’s family in rural Ohio. Sharon recalled one time when Maura leaned over to her husband and said softly, in her New England accent, “I see you have a sitting mower. I have always wanted to ride a sitting mower.” Billy’s dad taught her how to work the tractor and she spent hours buzzing around the property, clipping grass in the feral fields that bordered the yard.

  In the early dispatches during the weeks following Maura’s disappearance, nobody had an unkind word to say about the missing woman. The image they painted of Maura in the press was that of an angelic innocent, a diligent, hardworking young woman. No enemies in the world. Perfect to a fault.

  But that perfectly painted image doesn’t hold up when we consider Maura’s actions and behavior in the four days leading up to her disappearance.

  FIVE

  Past Is Prologue

  It was late Thursday, the fifth of February, 2004, and Maura was a few hours into her shift at the security desk in Melville Hall, a freshman dormitory on the UMass campus named for the guy who wrote the ultimate book on pointless obsession. Around ten o’clock, Maura got a call from her sister Kathleen on her cell phone. When Maura’s supervisor checked in on her around 1 A.M., she found Maura nearly catatonic. Something had deeply upset her, but Maura didn’t want to talk about it. All she could say was, “My sister.” The
supervisor escorted her back to Kennedy Hall, where Maura lived.

  On Saturday morning, Maura’s father arrived in Amherst. According to early reports Fred was helping her find a new car. Maura’s ’96 Saturn was on its last legs. At the end of the day, Fred treated Maura and a friend of hers to dinner and drinks at a local brewpub. Then Maura dropped Fred off at his motel and returned to campus in his car to attend a late-night party.

  At 3:30 A.M., as she was traveling back to her father’s motel, Maura crashed Fred’s car into a guardrail. Police arrived at the scene. The tow truck driver gave Maura a ride to where her father was staying, and she slept in Fred’s room that night.

  The next morning, Maura helped her father find a rental so that he could get to his job on Monday. At the time, Fred was working at a hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut, about two hours away, and living out of the Homestead Suites there.

  Maura used her personal computer on Monday to MapQuest directions to Stowe, Vermont. She searched for rental properties in the White Mountains area. Then she e-mailed professors and her boss at the art gallery, explaining that she would be gone for a week due to a “death in the family.” At 3:40 P.M. Maura withdrew $280 from a local ATM, essentially emptying her bank account. She was next seen at a neighborhood liquor store buying a significant amount of alcohol.

  Three and a half hours later, Maura crashed her Saturn into a snowbank on Wild Ammonoosuc Road in Haverhill, New Hampshire.

  Police who responded to the scene of the accident did not find any footprints leading into the woods. The car was locked, but an open box of wine could be seen inside and red liquid had stained the upholstery. The air bags had been deployed and the windshield was cracked on the driver’s side. By all appearances, it looked like a driver trying to escape a DUI, not an uncommon event. The cop assumed the driver would show up at the impound lot later, with a hangover, asking for his or her car back.

  The Saturn was towed away.

  Police attempted to contact Fred, the registered owner of the Saturn, the next day; by then, after speaking to Butch, they had realized the driver was probably his daughter, Maura Murray. At 12:36 P.M. they issued a BOLO—police-speak for Be on the Lookout—for women matching Maura’s description. The only number they had for Fred was for his home in Massachusetts. A message was left on his machine, explaining the developing situation in Haverhill. Kathleen would eventually get this message and phone her father as he was leaving work at five that afternoon.

  Detectives learned Maura had lied to her professors on her way out of Amherst: There had been no death in the family. When investigators got into her dorm room, they found all her belongings packed neatly into boxes. She’d taken the posters off her walls. It appeared she had planned to leave UMass and never come back.

  SIX

  The Gatekeeper

  By January of 2011, when I finally began my reporting, any urgency the police had once felt to find Maura Murray had died away. The ground searches had been suspended years ago. The media had lost interest, too. News of the case had faded to a trickle of information released through the official family Web site, MauraMurrayMissing.com. It’s one of those low-rent make-your-own sites, easy to build in a hurry. Pictures of Maura smiling with friends. Links to news articles. There was an e-mail address for the site’s administrator. I sent a message and a while later I heard back from a woman who first identified herself as Maura’s aunt.

  I preferred to speak to Fred Murray first. Maura’s father had led the searches into the North Country woods in the weeks after she went missing. “Aunt” Helena Dwyer-Murray promised to pass along my messages. In the meantime, I interviewed her for some background on the case and where it stood presently. We spoke over the phone and she brought me up to speed.

  Helena had never met Maura. Her late father-in-law and Fred’s father were brothers. The connection had no blood, but somehow she’d become the Murrays’ spokesperson. It happens. The families of the missing often need someone a little removed from the trauma to take the lead. Grief cuts sharper the closer you get to the victim.

  I had a lot of questions about Butch Atwood, the bus driver who was the last person to speak with Maura. If he was really concerned about her, why did he leave the scene of the accident? Could he have taken her? I had interviewed enough detectives to know that, statistically, the last person to see a missing woman is usually the best suspect.

  Atwood was on the family’s list of suspects, Helena said. She told me that Atwood moved to Florida not long after Maura disappeared. A private investigator working for the Murrays interviewed him, but I would never get the chance. Atwood passed away in 2009.

  Many of the key people involved in Maura’s investigation had scattered to the wind by the time I got involved. The lead detective, John Scarinza, was retired. The chief of police in Haverhill, Jeff Williams, was no longer chief. Maura’s mother, Laurie, had passed, too. She died on Maura’s birthday, in 2009.

  “And Fred? Depends on the day, really,” said Helena. “Nobody really sees the true Fred. But it shines through on some of these TV programs, the pain he feels.”

  “Why was Maura in New Hampshire that night?” I asked. “What’s the family think about that?”

  “She was heading to Bartlett,” she said, simply. “We think she was heading to Bartlett because that’s where she had stayed before, with Fred. But then she got in that accident. The roads up there are bad in the winter. The frost heaves are terrible.”

  “What do you think she was doing?”

  “I just think she was going away for a few days. I think she was upset and wanted a couple days off.”

  “What about suicide? Is that an option?”

  “She had textbooks in the car with her. Tooth whitener. You don’t take tooth whitener or birth control pills with you if you plan to commit suicide.”

  Helena told me that when police got a warrant to search the car, they found expensive jewelry inside: a watch and a pendant. But Maura’s cell phone was missing. So was her backpack.

  I asked about friends of Maura’s who might know more. Helena mentioned two: Kate Markopoulos and Sara Alfieri. Both women were students at UMass in 2004. Both Kate and Sara had attended a party with Maura the weekend before she drove into New Hampshire. Then Helena said something odd.

  “Sara told Fred her story, but she will not talk about it with anybody else.”

  “Why not?”

  Helena would say nothing more about it, only that I shouldn’t bother trying to contact Sara on my own. “She’ll never talk to you.”

  Helena told me that Maura was not the only person who had vanished from that area of New Hampshire. In 2010, a forty-year-old man named Christopher Flynn disappeared not far from the scene of the accident. Flynn was from Massachusetts, too.

  “Haverhill, this place, it’s not a destination,” Helena said. “So what was he doing up there?”

  I heard back from Helena a couple weeks later. She called my cell as I was pulling into a car wash with my son—Casey loved going through the monster car wash in Cuyahoga Falls. What Helena said came as a surprise.

  “I spoke to Fred,” she said. “He does not want a book written about this. And he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  SEVEN

  Forget the Past

  It was during this time that my son began to get violent.

  At first we used the word “tantrum.” Oh, Casey’s just having a tantrum. He’ll calm down in a couple minutes. He was only three, after all. Three-year-olds have tantrums.

  When Casey got mad, he raged, he wanted to hurt. He wanted to hit and kick and bite. And it was little things that set him off. Transitions, mostly. Time to stop playing and take a bath. Time to go to bed.

  We had Casey evaluated by child psychologists at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. It was one of those places where a bunch of shrinks sit in one room and watch their subject through mirrored glass. My wife, Julie, and I stood with the doctors and watched Casey interact with a
prompter. They gave him an intelligence test. When they were done, the lead doctor sat us down and explained that she thought Casey was “spectruming,” or showing characteristics of autism.

  Maybe I was in denial, but I didn’t buy the diagnosis. My kid wasn’t remote like Rain Man. Autistic people tend to lack empathy. But when Casey was happy he could be the most loving little guy. He liked to snuggle at the end of the day, watch SpongeBob with me. Whenever he left someplace, he had to hug everyone in the room. And everything he was doing, I recognized. This was how I had acted when I was his age.

  With Casey, I found that if I kept him busy, his tantrums were less frequent. We went to the zoo a lot. Sometimes we walked down to the river and threw rocks in the water until he was good and dirty. If he didn’t have something to focus his mind on, that’s when he ran into trouble.

  I got it. Thirty years down the road of life, I still grew easily frustrated and depressed if I wasn’t on deadline. Without the rigid structure of newspaper reporting, I was becoming increasingly manic. The only thing keeping me sane, really, was the mystery of Maura Murray’s disappearance.

  * * *

  I’m a bit of an unsolved-mysteries junkie. The colder the case, the better, as far as I’m concerned. I once flew to Seattle on my own dime for a sit-down with the FBI agent in charge of the D. B. Cooper case (America’s only unsolved hijacking). I’ve spent years trying to bring Amy Mihaljevic’s killer to justice. In 2006, I spent two months researching the disappearance of two girls from Cleveland’s West Side: Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. I still wondered about them. I met with both the Berry and DeJesus families on that story. Do everything you can to find our girls, they said. In my experience, family members of the missing clamor for the attention of reporters. A simple statistic: The more media coverage a case gets, the better its odds of being solved.

  Until Fred Murray, I had never heard of a parent of a missing person who turned down the chance for national exposure. I might have scuttled my plans for a book right there. Without cooperation from Maura’s family, what did I have? But the story had its hooks in me. It was unlike any missing-persons case I’d ever read about because of its weird mystery-within-a-mystery. Maura did not vanish on a normal day. She had broken her routine; she’d driven into the North Country. What was she doing up there? Where was she going?