So up until now, we discussed what brought Maura to the point of leaving, and what happened to her along Wild Ammonoosuc Road. I want to move us forward now into the search efforts that started for Maura on February 10th. At 12:36 pm the police issued a BOLO or a “Be On The Lookout” for Maura, stating her physical description and the fact that she would be wearing a dark coat, jeans, and carrying a black backpack. A message had been left for her father Fred around 3 pm but he, unfortunately, was out of state working and never received the message. Luckily, Maura’s older sister was able to contact their father at 5 pm to inform him of the situation. He reached out to the Haverhill Police Department and was told that if Maura didn’t return by the next morning, the Fish and Game Department would begin a search for it. It was at this point that police really started to refer to Maura as a missing person.
The next morning, Fred arrived in Haverhill before dawn broke. A few hours later, at 8 am, the Fish and Game Department, the Murrays, and some volunteers began searching the Wild Ammonoosuc Road area for Maura. A police dog was able to pick up Maura’s scent off the gloves that had been found in her vehicle, and being the super good dog they are, was able to track Maura’s scent 100 yards east of where her car had been found. However, this is where the scent stopped. This loss of scent right at the edge of the road led police to believe that Maura had been picked up by another person.
We are now at 5 pm that evening and Mauras’ boyfriend and his parents had arrived in Haverhill to help with the search. Upon their arrival, the boyfriend is interrogated by the police which is absolutely normal in missing persons and murder cases. There’s always a very good chance that it was someone close to the victim that caused the event to occur. However, he is cleared and able to join the Murrays for questioning. At this point, the police bring in their main theory: that Maura came to the area and disappeared to either run away and start over or to commit suicide. Maura’s family has always maintained that stance that Maura wasn’t suicidal.
The next evening on February 12th, Marua’s dad and boyfriend held a press conference regarding the disappearance and the next morning the first press coverage was published. That afternoon around 3:05 pm the police gave a statement that they believed that Maura was heading towards the Kancamagus Highway and that she was endangered and possibly suicidal. They also stated that Maura was under the influence at the time of the accident, but Butch Atwood, our helpful bus driver from the previous post, stated that he didn’t believe that Maura was impaired when he happened across her.
In a typical (although there is really no such thing as a typical missing person case) missing persons case, it is generally handled at a local and state level. In a rare turn of events, the FBI joined the search for Maura 10 days after she had gone missing. Once the FBI became involved, the search was expanded to cover the entire United States. Thanks to the involvement of the FBI, the New Hampshire Fish and Game were able to search for Maura using helicopters, thermal imaging, and cadaver dogs.
By the end of February, the family was tired. They had been searching for Maura for nearly a month but they were no closer to finding the missing young woman. The police handed the items that they had removed from her vehicle over to the family and on March 2nd, the Murray’s checked out of their hotel and went home. Fred would continue to search the area every weekend, even having trespassing complaints filed against him.
So this is sort of where we end. There have been subsequent searches for Maura since 2004 even through 2012. Nothing has changed, nothing has come up regarding her. There was one theory that passed around that Maura was possibly murdered by an unknown suspect in an A-frame house located near where her vehicle was found. Unfortunately, the evidence found by this mysterious person's brother was NOT collected by police, and thus it couldn’t be forensically tested. When I say “evidence”, the brother found some blood on the rug in the closet, and there were some wood pieces from the same closet that had both male and female DNA but as it was never tested by police we simply can’t verify if it was or was not Maura and some unknown assailant.
Unfortunately for the family, Maura has never been found. There is no closure, and there is no end. I hope that Maura is found someday so that the family may know peace and can hopefully put together the pieces of what happened to Maura after she disappeared from Wild Ammonoosuc Road.
Thank you for reading Let's Talk True Crime and I’ll have a new post for you all next time!
Comments
Post a Comment