Marura Murray Part 1 (The Beginning and What It Means)

I want to share the information with you in a way that most people learned it during the time she went missing, through what we have learned now. 

Maura was born May 4, 1982, to Laurie and Fred Murray. She was the fourth child, having 3 older siblings and a younger brother.

At the age of six, Maura’s parents divorced, and Maura went to live with her mother primarily. Maura was a star track athlete in high school and was actually accepted into West Point. For those of you who may not know, West Point is the United States Military Academy in New York. It is a notoriously difficult college to be accepted into, but between good grades and athletics, Maura was a shoo-in.

By all accounts from family and friends of hers, Maura was an all-American girl. Beloved, and in the eyes of many, Maura was perfect. 

But as we came to find out, she was flawed like everyone else.

See Maura got caught attempting to steal a few small items from the commissary at Fort Knox. Ya know Fort Knox? One of the most secure places in the entire world. Maura got caught attempting to take makeup items she easily could have paid for.

Now before we pass judgment, I and many girls I knew, have done similar things. Taking little items to see if you can get away with it (I absolutely got away with it the first time. Thanks Hot Topic!), it doesn’t make it right but I can understand where Maura was coming from.

Luckily for Maura, she was able to leave West Point, rather than be expelled, and this is why she was able to transfer to UMass at Amherst to join their nursing program.

So now that we have some establishing background knowledge on Maura, let’s move into the details of what we know leading up to her disappearance.

I want to take you back to November 2003, 3 months before Maura disappeared. I realize that maybe some of you weren’t alive or were really young in 2003 (Yikes. I feel old!) so here are some fun facts:

1. The fifth Harry Potter book had been released

2. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was in theaters

3. And blink-182 was still on the radio. (Or as people say now “trending”).

Here we are in November 2003, and Maura was once AGAIN in trouble with the law. See Maura had been using a stolen credit card to order food from several different restaurants. Most often Domino’s Pizza. I LOVE pizza, but Maura ordered from them a lot more often than most people do, sometimes up to 3 times a day. Maura admitted to police that she had been using the stolen credit card, and she was placed on probation, as long as she had good behavior and didn’t get in trouble over the next 3 months the charges against her would be dropped.

Moving forward to February of 2004, Maura was working her part-time job on campus at UMass. She was a door greeter for a dorm essentially, checking ID’s, stopping people from coming in, etc. Maura had spoken to her older sister Kathleen that evening, however, it wasn’t known what they had talked about until Kathleen did an interview 13 years later in 2017 (which we will discuss later on).  Maura stayed at work after the phone call, but it was reported by her boss that Maura seemed to be in a catatonic state. She stopped checking ID’s and was letting anyone walk-through the doors. At 10:30 pm, Maura burst into tears and when her boss tried to ask what was wrong all Maura would say is “my sister”, over and over again. Something to do with her sister was bothering her. As stated earlier, we know that Kathleen and Maura had talked, and it finally was revealed that Kathleen had told Maura she was out of rehab. Kathleen was a recovering alcoholic and had left rehab that day, only for her fiance to immediately take her to a liquor store. It is speculated that when Maura was saying “my sister” to her boss, it is because she was processing the information that she had gotten from Kathleen.

2 days later, February 7th, Maura’s dad Fred came to Amherst to take Maura car-shopping. Maura had a beater car and it was in rough shape. So her father was going to help her get a new one. According to Fred, they were going to look around at cars that weekend, and then he was going to come back the weekend after to actually make the purchase for the new car. After car shopping, Fred, Maura, and one of her friends went to dinner, and then Maura dropped her dad off at his hotel room so that she could borrow his new Toyota Corolla to go to a party with her friends. 

Maura arrived at the party at 10:30 pm, and it is reported she left at 2:30 am. An hour later, on her way to return her father’s car, Maura had a single-car collision, crashing her father’s car into a guardrail on Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts, causing nearly $10,000 dollars worth of damage. There was an accident report completed by the responding officer, however, there is no record if a field sobriety test had been done. Maura and her father had been planning to spend the next day together, so I’m not sure what would have possessed her to return the car in the middle of the night when her campus dorm was much closer to the party she was at than his hotel room. Unfortunately, we can only speculate. So Maura is taken to her dad’s hotel, and she spends the rest of the night there with him. We have documentation that Maura called her boyfriend from Fred’s cell phone at 4:49 in the morning, but the contents of this call are unknown. 

Later that day, Fred would learn the extent of the damage to his car and of course, like any of us would be, he was mad. Maura was being irresponsible again and this time, it had caused an expensive amount of damage. Luckily, Fred’s insurance was going to be able to cover the cost of the damage. So he rented a car, took Maura back to her dorm, and then he left back home to Connecticut. He called her at 11:30 that evening, just to remind her that she needed to get some accident forms from the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and they agreed to talk again Monday night so that he could help her fill the forms out properly over the phone. This would be the last conversation Fred would have with Maura before she went missing. 

Now I want to segway us into the preparation and departure of Maura. As we can see, Maura had some stressors in her life. She had made some mistakes, her sister was relapsing, and her father was dealing with some pretty extensive car damage. Girl was having a really rough time. So, we are a little after midnight on February 9th, and we know that Maura used her personal computer to MapQuest directions to the Berkshires and Burlington, Vermont. The Berkshires is a region of mountains in western Massachusetts that is dotted with little tourist towns and villages. 

The first reported contact Maura made on February 9th was at 1:00 pm, when she sent an email to her boyfriend that said: "I got your messages, but honestly, I didn't feel like talking too much of anyone, I promise to call today though." She then made a call to a condo association in New Hampshire her family had used before to inquire about renting, however, the manager didn’t want to rent the condo to Maura. At 1:13 pm, Maura called a fellow UMass nursing student, but we aren’t really sure what they talked about. 

11 minutes later, Maura sent an email to her work supervisor that she would be out for the week due to a death in the family, but would contact them when she returned. Now, we know this is a lie because no one in her family had died. At 2:05 pm, she called a number which provided listings for hotel rooms in Stowe, Vermont. The call lasted approximately 5 minutes but no one answered so Maura wasn’t actually able to book anything. At 2:18 pm she called her boyfriend and left a voicemail promising that they would talk later. 

After making these phone calls, Maura packed clothing, toiletries, her textbooks, and birth controls into her car. At 3:30 pm, Maura drove off the UMass campus in her 1996 black Saturn sedan. 10 minutes later, Maura pulled $280 out of the ATM, which almost all the money that she had. CCTV showed that she was alone at the ATM. Maura then went to a nearby liquor store and purchased $40 worth of alcohol including Baileys, Kahlua, vodka, and a box of wine. We do know that at some point after purchasing the liquor, Maura did actually pick up the forms needed from the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Maura left Amherst between 4 and 5 pm, presumably on Route 91 north. She called her voicemail at 4:37 pm, and this would be the last call she would make. We still, to this day, have no knowledge of where Maura was going or any evidence that she had actually picked a destination.

Finally. We are moving into Maura’s disappearance. A little after 7 pm, a woman in Woodsville, New Hampshire heard a large thump outside her house. She took a look out her front window and saw a car pressed up against a snowbank along Route 112 which is more commonly known as Wild Ammonoosuc Road. The car was facing the wrong way -it was east facing in the westbound lane. The lady who heard the accident called 9-1-1 at 7:27 pm to report that there was an accident in front of her home. From the log, the woman states that there may have been a man in the car smoking a cigarette. At the same time that she is on the phone with the police, another neighbor, one Butch Atwood, a bus driver who was on his way home from work, happens to come across the accident. 

When Butch Atwood came across the scene, he noticed that the young woman wasn’t injured. She was cold and appeared to be shaken up. He offered her his phone back at his house so she could call the police, and she said that “It’s okay. I’ve already called AAA, they’ll be here soon.” Butch didn’t push her, but he also knew that this was a lie. See, at that point on Wild

Ammonoosuc Road, there was no cell phone service. This was 2003, cell service was hard to come by, and there just wasn’t any at that point on the road. So Butch Atwood drives away, and when he gets home he also places a call to 9-1-1. 9 minutes after Butch left the scene, the police arrived.

According to the official police report, officers arrived on the scene on Wild Ammonoosuc Road at 7:46 pm. There was no one inside or around the vehicle, and the car had taken heavy damage. The damage was located near the left headlight and had pushed the radiator of the vehicle into the fan, causing the vehicle to become unusable. On top of that, the windshield on the drivers’ side was cracked and the airbags were deployed. The officer also noticed that the vehicle was locked which he considered odd based on the accident.

The officer then began to survey the car and the area and noticed that there was what looked like red wine around and inside of the vehicle. Once he was able to get in the car, the officer found an empty bottle of beer and a badly damaged box of wine. Along with alcohol, the officer found the following items: a AAA card issued to Maura Murray, the accident report forms that we’ve talked about a few times, gloves, some CDs, makeup, jewelry, the directions to Burlington, Vermont, and the novel Not Without Peril, which according to her father Fred, was Maura’s favorite book. Not found among the crash site were: Maura’s debit or credit card, cell phone, on top of being missing none of these items have ever been used since the day she went missing. The only other items missing from the vehicle were some of the bottles of alcohol that Maura had purchased but we don’t have clarification on which ones these were.

 As we go on in this blog and future posts, you’ll notice a theme: I am not huge on alleged sightings. Too many times people lie so that they can insert themselves into a case, which makes me not big on using them. However, I am ever understanding that not everyone lies and that occasionally alleged sightings can bring closure. So I will never hide them from you. With that said, between 8 and 830 pm on the day that Maura disappeared, there is an alleged sighting of a young person matching her description. A contractor driving home from work saw a young woman wearing dark jeans, a dark coat, and a light-colored hooded jacket underneath walking quickly eastbound on Wild Ammonoosuc Road. The construction worker didn’t report this sighting for 3 months because he forgot about it.

The responding officer and Butch Atwood both drove around the area that Maura had disappeared from, looking for her, trying to find her safe. A little before 8 pm emergency medical service and a fire truck arrive to clear the scene properly. When 8:50 pm rolled around, Maura’s car had been towed to a local garage. Around 930 pm the officer gave up his search, having gotten too dark for him to see anything. Authorities would officially declare Maura Murray “missing” at 12 pm the next day, almost a full 24 hours since the last confirmed sighting of Maura.

With this I unfortunately have to end! The Maura Murray case is long and expansive. So please, if you’re still interested, come back next week where Maura Murray part 2 will be ready! Thank you for reading Let’s Talk True Crime!