Tomorrow is 19 years to the day that she disappeared, shocking her family and friends. Authorities still wrestle with this cold case and We all want to know, what happened on Feb 9th, 2004 to 21-year-old Maura Murray?
Maura was born on May 4, 1982 in Brockton, Massachusetts and was the youngest daughter of Fred Murray (a medical technician) and Laurie Murray's (a nurse). Maura grew up in Hanson, a small suburb on the South Shore of Massachusetts in a working class larger family. She has an older brother named Fred Jr., sisters Kathleen and Julie, and a younger brother Kurtis. Her parents divorced when she was six. Maura was an overachiever that excelled both academically (as a national honor society member) and athletically. At the same time, she was active in her local community where she became known for her kind-heart, signature dimples, and beautiful smile. She participated in nearly every sport, including competitive AAU basketball, which allowed her to travel all over New England as a teenager.
She was competitive, she consistently finished in the top tier of runners in the state of Massachusetts and broke several long standing school records. Selected as a Boston Globe All-Scholastic in cross country, Maura qualified for the U.S. National Scholastic Outdoor Championships in the 2 mile as a sophomore in 1998 finishing 33rd in the country.
She graduated at the top of her class at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School and had her pick of colleges, both academically and athletically. She decided to accept a congressional nomination from the late Senator Edward Kennedy and join her sister Julie at the prestigious United States Military Academy at West Point. She continued to excel in the rigorous military and academic program at West Point and established herself as a force on the cross country and track teams. During her second year at West Point, Maura decided the military was not for her and she transferred to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she decided to pursue a career in nursing.
On the surface, Maura’s life seemed ideal. She was a promising student at the University of Massachusetts in pursuit of a nursing degree; she came from a loving family, and shared a strong relationship with her boyfriend of a few years.
But it all was not as it seemed. In November 2003, around three months before her disappearance, Maura was caught fraudulently using a credit card number that was not her own. She had to have been desperate—she used the card only to order pizza.
On Saturday February 7, 2004, two days before her disappearance, Maura’s father Fred came to visit. While he was there, Maura borrowed his new car to go party at a local pub. At Around 3:30 A.M., while driving back to her dad’s hotel room, she hit a set of guardrails causing approximately $10,000 worth of damage on Route 9. The police responded to the scene, but they didn’t perform a sobriety test.
Maura knew that getting into trouble with the law would tarnish her professional record, threatening her dreams of becoming a nurse. Some believe this was a motive for Maura to disappear on her own.
The theory is extreme—and her family does not buy it. Since there was no ticket cited at the scene of the crash, there would be no reason for Maura to believe this was the end of the line.
Butt something changed in Maura after the crash that night.
By Monday morning, Feb. 9th Maura had packed up all her belongings in her dorm room at U-Mass, putting everything neatly in boxes and putting all the boxes on her bed along with a personal note she had recently received from her boyfriend. She went on the Internet and looked up directions and overnight accommodations in the Bartlett, NH area as well as Burlington, VT area. She printed out MapQuest directions to two different locations: one set that led to the Berkshires, the other to Burlington, Vermont. Throughout the day, she called vacation rentals in the northeast, asking about availability but nothing was booked.
Then Maura’s messages took a dark turn. She submitted her nursing homework electronically and sent e-mails to her supervisor at work as well as a college professor saying she would be absent from work and school for a week due to a death in the family.
But there was no death in the family.
She did not tell her family, her friends or her classmates that she was planning to leave school for the week.
At approximately 3:30 P.M., Maura Murray got in her car and left the UMass Amherst campus. Inside her vehicle were clothes, toiletries, some textbooks, and her birth control pills.
Soon after her departure, Maura was recorded withdrawing $280 from a nearby ATM, which was nearly all the money in her account. She then entered a liquor store, where she purchased wine, coffee liqueur, and vodka. Security cameras captured Maura at the ATM, providing some of the last confirmed sightings of her before the disappearance. According to authorities, she departed the Amherst/Hadley, MA area around 4:30 PM, and drove her 1996 Saturn north toward New Hampshire. In the footage, she was alone.
Whether Maura meant to temporarily escape the pressures of her life or disappear for good may never be clear. Upon leaving the liquor store, Maura drove north and then left Massachusetts.
At 7:27 PM, Faith Westman, a resident of Haverhill, NH called police and stated that there had been an accident near her home and that a car was stuck in a ditch. Maura was involved in a single vehicle accident on Rt. 112 in the town of Haverhill, NH. This accident was the second accident she had had in three days. The vehicle she was driving at the time of her second accident was also her father’s car, one that he had loaned to her to use while at school.
Meanwhile, an area bus driver who lived down the road came upon the scene of the accident. He noticed a young woman—whom he later identified as Maura Murray. He offered to help her. Maura seemed to be uninjured, and refused assistance, and stated that she had called Triple-A to come tow the vehicle. But there was no cell phone coverage in that area and Triple A was never called. When he stated that he was going to call the police to come and assist, Maura pleaded with him not to call the them. He knew there was no cell reception in that area so he rushed back home to call 911 for her. The call was placed at 7:42pm. When dispatch asked if she was injured, he told police that she appeared shaken up and that the airbags had deployed, but that he saw no blood.
At 7:46 P.M. an officer arrived at the scene. He was curious to see that the car had been locked, its windshield cracked, and the airbags deployed but Maura was nowhere to be found. There was a box of red wine behind the driver’s seat, as well as stains on the ceiling and door, and an empty soda bottle that smelled as though it had once been filled with alcohol.
The bus driver who stopped and spoke with Maura didn’t think she seemed intoxicated. Nevertheless, there is the theory that Maura had been drinking that night. A shaken and inebriated Maura may have left the scene of her own accord. She may have stumbled into the dark woods and lost her way. Or—as Maura’s father maintains—she may have encountered a dangerous individual, who wished to do her harm.
Investigators are also aware of some additional stresses that were occurring in Maura’s life at the time of these events to include a difficult long distance relationship with her boyfriend in Oklahoma.
At the accident scene in Haverhill, there were no signs of any struggle, or any other evidence, which would indicate that a crime had been committed. At the time of Maura’s disappearance, there was approx. 2½ feet of snow on the ground. Searchers were able to easily distinguish deer and moose tracks in the area, and the snow cover greatly assisted the searchers in eliminating possible area’s where Maura could have traveled off of the main roads in the area. The snow greatly aided the search from the air, also due to the fact that any person who would have wandered off the road and into the woods would have left a trail that would readily be seen from the air.
The officer asked the bus driver for assistance locating Maura and suggested he drive west of the accident scene and search some of the roads in the French Pond area. A state trooper also responded to the scene and also searched the roads west of the accident site. Fire and EMS also responded to the scene. EMS was dismissed within minutes, perhaps because there was no one at the scene to treat. The eight firefighters briefly searched in the accident scene before proceeding back west and returning to the fire station. As far as anyone is aware, no one searched east of the accident scene.
The following day, at 12:21 P.M., police issued a BOLO (“Be On the Look Out”) for the young woman. The bus driver's short conversation with Maura was the last known sighting. Since that time, there has been no trace of her and no activity on her cell phone or bank accounts.
Maura’s family, especially Fred, view the police’s investigation as substandard. They point to their slow response and failure to thoroughly investigate every lead as the reason why Maura’s fate remains a mystery. The police, meanwhile, have criticized Fred’s involvement in the investigation. A 2014 article in Boston Magazine cites Jeff Strelzin, chief of the homicide unit at the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and the lead prosecutor in the Murray investigation, who said, “Fred [Murray] has been a difficult person to deal with from the beginning.” Strelzin went on to describe Fred’s anger at the police as understandable but misplaced.
As relations between Maura’s family and the police soured, rumors of infidelity and secret lives surfaced among armchair detectives and internet sleuths intent on cracking the case.
Investigators believe that Maura was headed for an unknown destination and may have accepted a ride in order to continue to that location. Investigators are hoping to speak with anyone who may have given Maura a ride sometime after 7:30 pm on Feb 9th in or around the Haverhill, NH area. Also, if anyone has any personal knowledge of why Maura was leaving school, where she was headed, or what her intended destination was, this information would be extremely helpful to assist investigators in locating Maura.
James Renner, author of True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray, claimed to have evidence that Maura and her boyfriend were cheating on one another. Others believe that Maura may have been pregnant, bulimic, or both, and fled to escape judgment from her loved ones. Theories then split over whether she simply got lost and perished somewhere in the woods, purposefully disappeared to begin a new life, or if someone snatched her along Route 112.
On April 3, 2019, authorities dug up part of the basement of a home on Route 112 in an attempt to find evidence in the search for Maura Murray, but no credible evidence was found.
Associate Attorney General Jeff Strelzin said the home had been a target of increased speculation by private citizens who thought there might be a body in the basement. Ground-penetrating radar used by private citizens indicated that the ground under the basement had been disturbed, Strelzin said. Search dogs also indicated there might be something in the area, but Strelzin said law enforcement officials did not believe there was enough credible evidence to get a search warrant.
The current homeowners allowed state police and FBI agents to search the basement, but Strelzin said they found no remains.
"What happened today is that a team of over a dozen agents and detectives went into that basement," Strelzin said. "They cut that area, removed the concrete and then searched several feet down and covered the area and beyond where that disturbed ground had been, and they located absolutely nothing. other than a small piece of what looks to be potentially pottery or maybe a piece of old piping.
DEVELOPMENTS
The FBI created a Violent Criminal Apprehension Profile for Maura Murray in Jan. 2022.
"It is a way for multiple agencies and different jurisdictions to share information," Maura's sister Julie Murray said.
In Sept. 2021, authorities found bone fragments at the base of Loon Mountain, but the remains were not identified as belonging to Maura Murray.
In July 2022, officials conducted a fresh ground search of a large area of Route 112. They said they received no new information to prompt the search and did not reveal if any evidence was found.
If you have any information that could assist in the ongoing investigation please contact the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit at (603) 223-3860 or email [email protected].
If you would like to contact the Murray family you can do so at their site: mauramurraymissing.org