MISSING: Maura Murray (NEW)
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Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And before you even think about skipping this episode because you think it's a rerun, don't. Yes, I covered the disappearance of Maura Murray before, back in 2018 when Britt was taking some time off as a new mom, which feels like forever ago. But that's when I dove into this case, which even at that point, I had been following for years. But this is not that episode.

Now, if you remember Maura's case or if you know about it from your own internet sleuthing, then you know that her case is one that has taken on a life of its own online. Even Britt knows all about it, which is why I, like, tapped her out for this episode. She has heard me tell this story time and time again. Though, to be fair, she has not heard this version. Because what's

what's fact and what's just rumor and lore being touted as fact has become hard to distinguish. But I think a lot of that changes today because for the first time in 20 years, we are getting Maura's full story from the person who knew her best in life and the person for whom Maura's story is more than just a story. It has been her life. And that person is Maura's sister, Julie Murray.

Julie partnered with someone all my crime junkies are probably extra familiar with by this point, Sarah Turney. In Sarah's own fight for justice in her sister's case, she met a number of other family members doing the same. And to give them the same platform, Sarah created a new show called Media Pressure. Media Pressure launches today, and the first season is the untold story of Maura Murray. So please watch.

While I'm talking to you, doing this intro, listening to theme music, make sure you go follow that show right now. Because even though Sarah and Julie were kind enough to give me an advance of the show to use as source material for this episode, there is no way I could fit all the information in nine episodes that they have into just this one single episode. And you're going to want to hear directly from the people who knew Maura best.

And I'm serious when I say hit the follow button, because after Maura's case, I've got some insider information on the other cases Sarah has lined up with other family members, and they are all stories you are going to want to hear. So, without further ado, this is the story you haven't heard about Maura Murray. On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, an alarm clock in a UMass dorm room was ringing incessantly.

I'm sure at first most of them in the dorm thought that a fellow student was sleeping in, but it kept going and going and going. There was no one in the room to shut it off. Because unbeknownst to anyone at that point, the student who lived in that room was missing.

When Laurie Murray answers the phone in her Hanson, Massachusetts home, on the other end is the voice of a man identifying himself as Sergeant Cecil Smith of the Haverhill Police. But what he's saying doesn't make any sense.

Smith is telling her that the day before, what would have been the evening of February 9th, his department had been called to the scene off the side of Route 112 in Haverhill, New Hampshire, where a 1996 black Saturn had seemingly hit a tree and then just been abandoned near the woods. A local resident, well, two actually, had called the accident into police, and one of them even talked to the driver, but by the time help arrived, that driver was nowhere to be found.

Sergeant Smith said the car had been locked, so they had to wait for a search warrant to go through it and find anything that might have had the driver's info on it. And he'd just gotten the go-ahead to do that this morning, and he had found that the car was registered to a Fred Murray in Weymouth, Massachusetts. And when Smith called that police department, he was given Lori's address in Hanson, so that's how he tracked her down.

Now, in an instant, Lori is filled with a sense of panic because even though the car is registered to her ex-husband, Fred, she knows that Fred had given the car to their youngest daughter, Maura. But 21-year-old Maura doesn't live at home at the time. She's away studying nursing at UMass. So Lori gives Sergeant Cecil Maura's cell and dorm numbers so hopefully he can reach her directly. But of course, no one will make contact with her that day or at all, even up to this point right now.

One by one, Lori's other kids learn what happened. First, the kids who still live in the house, and then her oldest daughter, Kathleen. And then Kathleen starts calling everyone, starting with their dad, Fred. Fred Murray had been at work that day and didn't get the message from Kathleen until 4.30 in the afternoon. By then, the family had a few more details to give him.

The car seemed to have been in a single-vehicle accident and sustained front-end damage to the bumper and hood on the driver's side. The driver's side windshield was cracked, and both airbags had been deployed. And hearing this, Fred's just as confused as everyone else. I mean, he didn't even know there was a town called Haverhill, New Hampshire, much less why Maura would be driving up there on a Monday night. And in that car, no less. Because you see, Maura's car had started giving out in a big way a couple weeks prior.

It was making this awful clugging noise and spitting out black smoke. According to a mechanic, that's because the cylinder had blown a gasket. It had been so bad that Fred determined it'd be better to put money towards a new car rather than continuing to dump it into this one, which was clearly on its last leg. And he and Moore had actually been looking for a new car together just days before. And he had been explicit with her. Do not drive the Saturn. It's not safe.

Now, he knew she'd been getting rides from other people to do her nursing clinicals, and she'd even borrowed his current car when he'd been in town helping her car shop a few days prior. So why now was she driving out of state? And where was she going? That's the million-dollar question we're all still asking today. Now, the rest of the day plays out in flashes for the family. Today, it's the way that they felt that they can recall better than anything else.

Fred says that those same feelings come right back up when he even thinks about it. His body remembers it in a way that he can't make it forget. But the actual events and the order of them, though, that's harder. In an episode of Media Pressure, the untold story of Maura Murray, Julie actually speaks with a psychologist, Dr. Seth Gill, and he describes this common trauma response like a mosaic. He says, quote, It's like you have all these little fragments of broken shards.

but they're not organized like our kind of everyday memories are, end quote. And he explains that that's because of the way our body responds to trauma. Like when you're in that state where there has been a shock to your nervous system, your body actually goes into survival mode.

Your body is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol floods your bloodstream and your whole body is focused on just keeping you alive in the here and now. So those higher functions like clear thinking or forming memories are basically offline as he described it.

And I found this to be a particularly fascinating part of Julie's own research into her sister's case. I mean, Britt and I say all the time that you never know how you're going to react in certain situations, but this puts like the real science behind it and gives me such a deeper respect for those who have not only experienced trauma, but those who are then asked to recall those early moments and then are criticized when their own memories fail them or contradict others.

So what calls Fred made or received and when that first day, it all kind of blurs together. But at some point, he does make a call to Maura's long-distance boyfriend, Bill Rausch, who is stationed in Oklahoma at the time.

But Bill has no idea where Maura is either, though he's on the same page as everyone in Maura's family at this point. Whatever happened had to have been something bad. And that feeling only grows more persistent when Fred tries and fails to get in touch with the local police. He makes a number of calls trying to get in touch with someone, anyone who can tell him anything. But hour after hour, no one calls him back. Not until 8 p.m.,

That's when he finally gets on the phone with Sergeant Cecil Smith.

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The sergeant seems annoyed at Fred's persistence and hesitant to give him any real information. Basically, all he gets is that Cecil says he'll get the New Hampshire Fish and Game officers out there to do a search sometime tomorrow if Maura doesn't show up before then.

And they're pretty sure she will because they're pretty sure this was like a DUI situation. They tell Fred that they'd found alcohol in her car, an open sky blue malt beverage, an opened or damaged box of wine, and a Bailey's nip. There's even a splatter of some kind of red substance on the driver's side door and the ceiling, which they think was the wine.

And they say that there was a Coke bottle outside of the car with some red liquid in it that smelled like alcohol. So basically, they think that when she crashed, she had taken off to avoid police. And they say she may show back up at home or at her dorm. So you know what? Really just don't worry at this point.

But in that moment, Fred knows two things for sure. His daughter disappeared into the New England winter night almost 24 hours ago at that point, and no one seems to care enough to look for her. So Fred sets off for New Hampshire early in the morning, February 11th. As he takes the winding roads in the dark, this sinking feeling grows in his gut with each dip and turn in the road.

He's looking for a red barn. That's what he'd been told, that she crashed near a red barn just after a horseshoe bend. When he finally sees that flash of red among the white snow, a chill comes over him. Maura's car is long gone, having been towed away on the 9th. But the tire tracks leading in and then out of the bank just off the road tell him that he's at the right place. Except he's the only one there.

As the sun rises, Fred parks his car and begins walking in every direction looking for his daughter's prints in the snow. But there are none. And there would have been prints if she had been walking around. They had just gotten a snowstorm. And as far as I can tell, there was no fresh snow that night. So if she walked out, she would have been walking out into two feet deep of snow at least. There would have been some kind of track of her.

So knowing that Fred needs help, he heads to the police station to find out what's going on and what their plan is for finding his kid. But what little they had to say didn't put him at ease. No one had been out to search yet, though Fred didn't get really a straight answer as to why. And he said that police seemed vague with him, but they said they did have plans to start searching that day.

So while Fred's at the station, they send officers with dogs to go look at the area around the accident site. Fred kept asking to go back and look as well. He couldn't just like sit there. But they said that he should stay with them at the station until the officers were done. And then they could let him just know what they find. At some point, though, Fred needed some air. So he steps outside and it just so happens to be the same time that some state police officers and their canines are coming back from the scene.

So Fred intercepts them on their way in to ask them what they'd found. But the results are honestly void. These officers say that they took the dogs to the scene where the dogs followed, quote-unquote, Morris scent for about 100 yards or so, but then they just stopped, so nothing was found.

And they made mention that the conditions just weren't ideal for tracking dogs. Too wet, too cold, too much time had elapsed, they said. But I said that the results are void because the item that they used as a scent sample likely didn't even have Maura's scent on it. It turns out they used a pair of gloves from her car, but those gloves had just been given to her that Christmas. According to Maura's sister Julie, no one can even confirm that she had ever even worn them.

Fred was already growing more and more frustrated with how police were handling this situation. Because, I mean, he had been right there. Why hadn't they asked him which item to use? I mean, heck, he could have even brought something of hers when he drove up if nothing in her car was ideal. Like, why were they boxing him out instead of letting him help?

At least the dogs weren't the only option. By now, with still no sign of Maura, New Hampshire Fish and Game began their search of the area, spanning out several miles from the accident site. Officers on foot and in the air with heat-sensing technology spent hours looking for any sign of Maura. But there was none, which in and of itself is strange. Because if the prevailing theory is that she walked off, then how did she walk off without leaving a trail?

The officer leading the search, a man with close to two decades of experience conducting these type of searches, said that if she had left that roadway, they will find evidence of it. But all the footprints found by his team were either cleared or accounted for, meaning they weren't Maura's. The mystery was deepening, and the family's urgency was intensifying.

Throughout the day, the rest of Maura's family began flocking to Haverhill to help Fred's search. Left behind was Maura's mom, Lori. She had broken an ankle, so they decided that it would be better if she stayed back at the house in case Maura showed up there or tried to call. At the same time, Maura's boyfriend, Bill, worked on getting authorization to leave his post and help search. I guess the American Red Cross sometimes helps with that, so his mom reached out to them while he works directly with his command staff, and he was able to get there that Wednesday.

But it would take longer for Maura's sister, Julie, who was also on active duty because her unit had recently gotten deployment orders. And not that deployment orders are ever a suggestion, but keep in mind, this is just like two and a half years after 9-11. So trying to get someone to go to Iraq in your place was a big ask.

Once everyone was there, they gathered together at the police station for a meeting. They wanted to know what was being done, what the plan was. But not much had changed since Fred had been asking those questions earlier.

Tensions were running high and everyone's adrenaline was kicking in like I talked about before, so maybe that was a factor. But the family couldn't help but feel that the way the officers were acting was just off, particularly the actions of Chief Jeff Williams.

It seemed to the family like all of the officers were on the defensive, which felt like a weird position to take because the family thought that they were all supposed to be on the same team, team Finding Mora. But forget teams. The Murray family didn't even know the rules to this game. They'd never been in this position before. What family has?

This was their first time with a missing loved one, so maybe they needed to just readjust and think of the police as their coach. They'll tell them what to do, surely, because that's what they're there for. They've done this before.

Well, that wasn't how this was going to play out either. Interaction after interaction, it seemed to the family like police just wanted them to leave. But they wouldn't be leaving. Especially because they were more convinced than ever that Maura was in danger. Especially when Bill told everyone about a strange voicemail he'd gotten that he thinks might be from Maura.

Bill says that while he was going through security at the airport, a call came into his cell. By the time he had gotten all the way through security, he'd missed it, but there was this voicemail left. He said that all he could hear on the voicemail was breathing and then whimpering, and then it just ended. Fred listens to the voicemail, but all he can hear is static. And Julie will eventually hear it too, but it's just muffled noises that she says she can't make any sense of.

But when police hear it, they're less convinced. Sure, they'll see if they can track the call, but they don't think it's relevant because they're still pretty sure Maura chose to leave.

You see, they, or particularly Chief Williams, has come up with a theory. Maura was experiencing suicidal thoughts. You see, police say they'd been up to UMass to look through Maura's dorm, and they say it looked as though she'd been packing up her room, planning to leave and not return. And sitting out on top of one of the boxes was a printed out email from Bill apologizing for cheating on her.

So they say that, combined with the alcohol found in her car, they think that maybe she'd been drinking and driving, she crashed, and then she walked into the woods and laid down in the snow to succumb to the elements. Which, the whole thing was bonkers to her family. Not only did they not think Maura was in that state of mind, but more than that, the two predicating factors were totally taken out of context. That printed out email was from two years before Maura.

And by the way, it wasn't sitting out for someone to find. Julie says that they later found out the note was in a box with a bunch of other letters that she'd saved. And she wasn't packing up her room. She had just never fully unpacked. She had just moved into a single dorm that semester, literally 12 days before she disappeared.

And even all of that aside, say they were wrong and she's still upset about the email from two years ago and everything was too much. If she walked off and laid down to succumb to the elements like the police are saying, they would have found her. It makes no freaking sense because the first official day of searching is over and they found nothing. But there's no way they're going home.

Everyone gets hotel rooms a little ways away where the cell reception is better, and this becomes their command post, where they'll spend day after day and week after week, though they don't know that yet. When something happens to your car, you might say, No!

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The next day, the family had flyers printed, and they spent that entire Thursday putting them up everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, not just Haverhill, but the surrounding states as well. Police, meanwhile, were busy doing a press release, you know, three days later, telling people that Maura was missing, endangered, and possibly suicidal, which just felt like a slap in the face to Fred and everyone else.

It's like police weren't listening to them, which just added to the growing concern. It seemed like police just had a theory and they were trying to make everything fit into that theory. Evidence be damned. But if police weren't interested in finding out what happened, then Fred would.

So that same day, he started canvassing the neighborhood around where Maura's car crashed, thinking that maybe he could get firsthand accounts from people of what they saw. I mean, Fred figured police probably had these statements already, but they weren't sharing much. So if people were willing to talk, he'd listen. But the thing is, Fred was wrong. As it turns out, police hadn't interviewed the immediate neighbors yet, except for that brief interactions they had on the night Maura disappeared.

So that, combined with what Fred begins to piece together over the next few days, paints an even more troubling picture around what happened to Maura.

Fred first goes to the home of Faith Westman. She was the first person to call 911 and report Maura's accident. Dispatch logs show that at 7.27 p.m., she reported hearing a loud thud nearby her home. When she looked out her kitchen window, she saw a dark sedan off the side of the road in the eastbound lane facing westbound on Route 112. So basically like the opposite direction that it should be facing.

Now, those logs show that she told the dispatcher she could see a man smoking a cigarette, but she can't tell if anyone is hurt. Without hesitation, Faith welcomes Fred into her home. And as Fred looks out the very kitchen window Faith had just a few days prior, she recounts the story to him, finishing by telling him the same thing she told dispatchers.

That while she was on the phone with them, she saw her neighbor, Butch Atwood, pull up by the car in his bus blocking her view. She kept looking out the window as he pulled away. And then once she saw police pull up about six or seven minutes after making that call, she stopped looking, figuring that there was nothing more she could do. Now, this whole notion of a man smoking a cigarette has always been strange because Maura didn't smoke.

And no one has ever found proof that she was with anyone else. Not a man, no one. It's possible Faith didn't actually see what she thought she saw. I mean, Maura was known for wearing her hair up most of the time. Julie says she never wore it down. So maybe from across the street, in the dark, it was just an assumption that her mind went to, that it was a man.

And as far as the cigarette, Faith's husband was in the room when she was making the call. And when he glanced out the window, he thought it was maybe just some kind of small red light from inside the car that she mistook for a cigarette. After speaking with the Westmans, Fred then went to speak with Butch Atwood, the bus driver. Now, Butch had initially called 911 around 742, but the line was busy and routed somewhere else. But the right agency had called him back close to 743.

The dispatch from that just reads, quote, one female, no personal injury, but shook up no idea where the female is, end quote. But piecing together statements Butch made later to the press and others, the full account is that he was on his way home in a school bus after dropping off students who'd gone skiing that day. And that's when he spotted a car on the side of the road.

When he opened his bus door, he saw that the driver was a young woman with dark shoulder-length hair. He says that she was shaken up and shivering, and there was some damage to her car, and it looked like the airbags had been deployed, but he didn't see any blood on her or any kind of noticeable injury. He offered to call police for her or at least let him warm up at his place just down the road, but she declined, saying that she had already called AAA. Now, he says he didn't push the matter, but he knew that was a lie.

You see, Butch lives on that road, had for some time, so he knows that there is no cell service right there. So he drives the short distance toward his house, not even 200 yards away, parks his bus, and then he still called it in. And I got a little hung up on this part. Butch's account versus the dispatch log. Because why does it say, no idea where the female is?

I know that from Butch's place, he probably couldn't see Maura or her car anymore. So maybe that's all he meant. Like he just didn't have eyes on her when they were speaking. Or maybe Butch was giving conflicting information. Because that seems to be something he kind of does. And it starts from the moment Fred shows up to talk to him.

When Fred gets there, he shows Butch a picture of Maura, making sure that that's the young woman he really saw. And initially, Butch says no. But then he later changes his mind about the girl that he saw having dark hair down to her shoulders. He also changes other parts of his story to reporters down the line as well. Sometimes he says he stays in his bus and talks to this girl who's still inside her car. Other times he's out of the bus and she's out of her car and they're talking to one another across the hood.

There are even a couple of other versions, but you get the gist. So I don't know what to make of Butch's story. But we know he did stop. That's corroborated by Faith Westman. One big takeaway, though, that I think is worth noting is that Butch told a reporter that the young woman he interacted with didn't seem intoxicated. Fred noted that, too, but he had an even bigger takeaway.

In talking to these neighbors, he was learning that outside of that initial night, police had not come back to talk to any of these people. His daughter had now been missing for days and they never bothered to circle back. In fact, according to Faith Westman, they didn't even really come question her that night.

She told Fred that at some point after she had walked away from her kitchen window when she thought police had everything handled, Sergeant Cecil Smith had walked over and asked a single question. Where's the girl? Which is an awfully strange question. Wouldn't you agree? Because Faith Westman said that she saw a man in the car. And remember, the car is supposedly locked and they had to get a search warrant to get in. If they had run the plate, that would have come back to Fred.

Now, Smith hasn't been to Butch Atwood's house yet, so the only way this works, him knowing that there was a girl, is that if he heard or got word somehow of the dispatch after Butch Atwood's call. One female, no personal injury, but shook up, no idea where the female is. But even then, Cecil Smith says, where's the girl? That dispatch could have been a 90-year-old woman, but he's looking for a girl.

Best case scenario, in my own mind, is that Cecil is of an era of old school misogyny where every woman, no matter who she is or how old, is just a little girl. But he's never explained why he asked that question. As Thursday dragged into Friday, Friday the 13th, Fred drove over to a Vermont police station to hang up some posters over there. He knew they'd probably already be aware of Maura's case already, but it couldn't hurt to have her face up for them to see and get familiar with just in case.

Well, imagine his surprise when they had no idea what he was talking about. Same thing happened when he went to the next station. And that one was the first station you'd hit going east from where Maura's car was found. Now, there had been at least two bolos at this point. But from what the officers at these other stations tell Fred, it seems that they had been briefed that she's just going to turn up any day now. Things just aren't sitting right.

The way police have been acting, the laissez-faire attitude, the defensiveness, it's beginning to feel to Fred like something is going on here. But that same day, police say they had gone up to Maura's dorm room to collect her computer and talk to people there who knew her. And they present Fred with even more evidence that they believe points to Maura running away or doing something to harm herself.

Earlier in the day, before Maura had set off on her mysterious trip that ended in a crash, Maura had been looking online for directions to Vermont and New Hampshire. She'd even called lodging places in each state, but it doesn't actually seem like she made any reservations. She sent some emails, including one to her professors, saying that there had been a death in the family and that she would be out for a few days. The thing is, there was no death in her family.

The officers also spoke with a woman named Karen May, who told them a troubling story from a few days earlier. Before Maura left campus for the final time, she was working one of her security shifts at Melville Hall. It was basically her job to check people's school IDs as they came in to, like, make sure they belonged there. It was a pretty cush gig. She got to sit at a desk, do her homework during her shifts. But something happened late that night that broke her routine.

Around 1 a.m. So this is February 6th.

Her supervisor, Karen May, was called because Maura was so upset she couldn't function. Karen described her as unresponsive, just muttering the words, my sister, my sister. Karen says that she escorted Maura back to her dorm and she was so concerned about her, like she didn't want to leave her alone. So she asked Maura if she wanted her to stay with her. But Maura's like, no, no, no, I've got a roommate who can be with me. It's fine.

But we know that that's not true. Maura had just moved into a single dorm. So it's likely that Maura just wanted to be alone. She didn't want to bother Karen anymore. At least, that's what Julie thinks. She describes Maura as a perfectionist. She hated letting people see any cracks in the image that she tried so desperately to portray, even if it was at her own expense.

She was the best in school, the best in track, and she thought she had to keep chasing the best to be the best. It's what had pushed her to go to the United States Military Academy, West Point, where Julie attended college. But that college didn't make her happy. Even though she was still crushing it from the outside, on the inside, she had been struggling.

Maura experienced, mostly in silence, disordered eating. It was her way of trying to control just one thing in her life when she was in an environment like West Point where she literally had zero control over anything else. And internalizing that pain caused her to act out, possibly as a cry for help when she didn't know how else to ask. And that had actually happened one time when her class went to Fort Knox for a week.

She and a friend went into this store on base, and as she was leaving, Maura pocketed something. No one remembers now what exactly it was. I mean, it was that insignificant, an eyeliner, nail polish maybe. But she was caught before she even got out of the store. And the friend she was with said that she could just see the shame and the fear on Maura's face. And when she asked Maura later why she had done it, Maura said she didn't know.

And I think that is the most honest answer. I think she needed a way out of West Point. But I don't think she had, or most of us at that age don't have, the emotional intelligence and maybe self-awareness to understand what's within our power to change. Or the ability even to recognize what it is that needs to change to make us happy.

But that cry for help, if that's what it was, to get out, worked. Not kicked out like you might read online, though. She was supposed to go before this honor committee to plead her case if she wanted to stay, but before they made their decision, she chose to step away from the school, even though it was very unlikely that she would have been dismissed for those actions.

She ended up transferring to UMass to their nursing program, and she joined that track team there. But she couldn't leave all her demons behind at West Point.

Disordered eating isn't something that just goes away overnight, and Maura was still struggling, as evidenced by the book that she had on overcoming disordered eating and the incident at UMass that got her in trouble. You see, while she was there, she had gotten another student's credit card number and had been ordering food late at night for delivery, which might have been times when she was binge eating. But no one except Maura really knows.

Now, she got caught in the act when campus security set up a little sting operation, but she admitted everything and was given probation. And that wasn't the last run-in she had with authorities before she went missing. There would be one more, or maybe two, but I'll get into that possible second one later. But here's the first we know about for sure.

The day before Maura went missing, Sunday, February 8th, at 3.30 in the morning, Maura crashed her dad's new car into a guardrail at a T-intersection about a mile away from campus.

Presumably, she was on her way back from a dorm party, headed to her dad's motel to return the car that she'd borrowed from him, and then they were supposed to go car shopping later that day. That's why he was in town. But obviously, car shopping didn't happen, because they had to deal with Fred's car now, which had been towed back to the motel.

Insurance rentals, accident reports. Her dad told her she's lucky she didn't get a DUI, but she insisted she had stopped drinking hours before. And the accident report seems to back that up. It says that Maura was inattentive and slid on some debris in the roadway. There wasn't even a sobriety test administered. Fred eventually found out that his insurance would cover that damage. He'd only be out like 500 bucks, but Maura was super distraught over putting him out.

No matter what he said or how many times he said it, he couldn't lighten the burden she felt over it. When he dropped her off at her dorm that Sunday, she sobbed as she got out of the car. She was supposed to call him on Monday night to go over the accident forms to kind of tie things up for the insurance claim. But instead of Maura calling on Monday, February 9th, he had gotten that call from his other daughter, Kathleen, telling him that Maura was missing.

So police pointed to all of this. Stealing at Fort Knox, stealing a student's credit card, breaking down at work, crashing her dad's car, her packed up room, lying about a death in the family, the bill cheating email. All of that, they say, pointed to someone who was at the end of their rope. Someone who would drink and drive and when they crashed, just walked away into the woods to die because it was all just too much. But Fred called bulls**t.

He didn't buy it. That wasn't his Maura. Yes, she messed up. She was a kid. I mean, my God, am I grateful every day that 21-year-old me didn't go missing because I was trying so hard to just figure my shit out. I was young and dumb. And if you took a snapshot of my life then, you could say all the same things about me that people have said about Maura. The only reason they don't is because I had the chance to grow up.

And that was taken from Maura. So yes, she messed up. But Fred has a feeling police's theory is just a cop-out. And the more he learns, the more evidence he finds to back that feeling up. Starting with Maura's car. On Thursday afternoon, Fred and Bill go with police to the garage where Maura's car had been towed. And this wasn't some big operation. It was literally in the personal garage of this dude named Mike LaVoye.

Now, when they walk in, all of Maura's belongings that had once been in her car were now laid out on the floor of the garage. And Maura's car itself is right there. Now, mind you, this is Fred and Bill's first time seeing the car since they had got to New Hampshire. And they're a little taken aback. Remember, they've been under the impression that her car went into a snowbank and hit a tree, but that doesn't...

doesn't totally add up when they're looking at it because the majority of the damage is to the front driver's side bumper and hood right above it, which it's so hard in audio, but like this is significant. I'm going to try and lay it out for you so it's a thousand percent clear. Just hang with me for one minute.

We can't 100% know which way Maura was traveling because no one knows where she was going. But based on some data points that we do have, I think it's widely accepted that she was traveling east. So that means as she is coming around the bend on Route 112, that red barn is on her right. Then just past the red barn is a cluster of trees that she was initially said to have hit. And to her left from that is Faith Westman's house.

So in order for Maura's car to only be damaged on the driver's side, that side has to go into whatever it is, call it a tree for now. But that side has to go into the tree first. But right now, as she's driving, the side that is damaged is the one close to the house, not the trees. So she would have had to spin around 180 degrees so that she's facing the other way and then go into the ravine and hit whatever. So you're with me, right?

And since you're with me now, let's just nix the whole idea of a tree right here and now, shall we? Because what Fred and Bill are looking at does not look like damage from a tree. The hood and headlight assembly were pushed backward, but the bumper and inner core were not displaced backward to the same extent. And the upper radiator support was bent as well. All that to say that the impact did not push back in this like perfectly vertical fashion. It seemed to have been angled.

And there were no fractures of the paint or any foreign material embedded in her car. Hitting a tree would have scraped the paint. You would expect to maybe even see some wood or something left behind. But the paint hadn't been chipped on either the bumper or the hood area. Now, I have seen a lot of people online say that they had similar damage to their cars when they hit a snowbank.

which might explain why there's no transfer of other materials and no paint chipping. Others say that they've had that damage when their car bumped into another car or like a trailer hitch that sat up a little bit higher. But I think that you still would probably see paint scuffs with that. And then there are a lot of people who wonder if she just didn't hit anything there, if this whole thing was staged and there was an accident at another time and place and this is all some elaborate cover.

And no lie, there was a time when I found myself with my tinfoil hat on wondering if that was the truth in all of this messiness. Maybe that would explain all the things that I can't. But this is a masterclass in not letting yourself get lost, that sometimes the simplest answer is the right one.

Because as I was scrolling through Julie Murray's TikTok, where she explains a lot of details around Maura's case, I saw a comment that said, the Westmans heard a loud bang and that's what made them look out their window. So there was an impact at the scene. And of course, duh, she hit something there. I'm just not 100% sure what. And spoiler alert, no one to this day is.

On top of all of that, there is this big crack in the windshield on the driver's side, and both airbags had been deployed. Now, you can physically drive a car with a cracked windshield and deployed airbags, but it does seem far less likely that someone would. And that's the other thing. As Fred is looking at all of this damage, he gets this idea to try and see if he can turn on the car. He knew about a spare key in one of the tire wells, so he pulls it out, gets into the car, and it starts right up, like

Like, first try. Which raises a question for Fred that we're all still asking today. If the car was drivable, why wouldn't Maura have just driven off? Now, maybe it didn't run for her. I've had cars where it's very hit or miss. A Saturn specifically, where it felt like a gamble every time I got to get in my car to go to work, wondering if I was going to have to spend 10 minutes trying to start it or if it's going to, like, take off right away and I'd get to work early enough to grab a coffee before going to my desk.

Or maybe Maura didn't even try and she just chose to leave her car there. Or maybe she never got a chance to see if it would run. Or maybe she had been drinking and was afraid that the damaged car was like a beacon and she'd be better off on foot. That was, after all, the theory police were pushing. And as Fred looked around, he saw the pieces that made them think that. The red staining on the driver's side of the car, like something had sprayed or splashed or spilled.

There were 109 items total from the car, some snacks like Twizzlers and pickles, some random toiletries, some clothes, textbooks, one of her favorite books, Not Without Peril, paperwork, running gear, car accessories, birth control with four pills missing, and over-the-counter medications.

She also had a Vermont area attractions map, an eastern Massachusetts road map, and three by five cards with handwritten directions to Burlington, Vermont. Which, if you're wondering like I was, Haverhill, New Hampshire is in the general direction from UMass to Burlington, Vermont. Like you would have to go north to get to both from her college, but you don't pass through Haverhill to get there, if that makes sense.

And there weren't any maps for New Hampshire, which is kind of odd. So alcohol, directions to another state, clothes. I mean, this was just adding to police's theory that her car was packed with things to take off.

But Julie says it all seems like random stuff she already had in her car. Though there was definitely something she did bring just for this trip. And that's the alcohol. There was a receipt for about $40 worth of alcohol. Kahlua, vodka, a nip of Bailey's Irish cream, and a six-pack of malt beverage.

Now, there was that Francia wine that was still in the car, too. But she had purchased that earlier when she had gone to that dorm party. And that's what police think was on her ceiling and her door. But the Kahlua and the vodka weren't among the items laid out on the garage floor. Police didn't list those items, which likely means that they'd never found them anywhere. The last big thing of note with Maura's car was the rag in the tailpipe.

Say rag in the tailpipe to any crime junkie and they will know you're talking about Maura's case. But this famed rag is just another red herring. Fred has explained this before, but you can hear it right from him in the Media Pressure podcast. He says that he was adamant with Maura about not driving that car because it wasn't safe.

But he told her if there was an emergency and you absolutely have to drive it and you're somewhere that you might get stopped by police, you can put a rag in the tailpipe to hide the billowing smoke that would surely get her pulled over.

If police thought showing Fred the car would get him on their side, thinking that she ran off to avoid a DUI and or take her own life, they were sorely mistaken. By Saturday, whatever faith the Murrays might have had in police was gone. And they knew that one thing and one thing only was going to get police to take this seriously. Media pressure.

Fred spoke to any outlet willing to run a story about Maura. And the print articles and TV coverage eventually pushed police to get out and do the canvassing that so far had only been done by Maura's family. Between Fred doing the interviews, though, and police doing the canvassing, Sergeant Cecil Smith finally completed his accident report. This happened on Sunday, February 15th.

At the 10-day mark, another ground search was conducted by New Hampshire Fish and Game. This time, they brought a cadaver dog. But still, there was nothing to be found. Eventually, during another search, they find a single pair of underwear spotted by Maura's other sister Kathleen off of French Pond Road, which wasn't far from where Maura crashed.

Eventually, during another search, police retrieved them and determined that they didn't belong to Maura through DNA testing. Though I don't know if they ever did any additional testing to determine who they did belong to or if once they knew they weren't hers, they just ruled they weren't relevant to the case. With that, the searches ended, or at least the official ones anyway. Police called it off and said that they'll go back and search again if and when they have more evidence that suggests they should.

It kind of felt to the family like they were wiping their hands of it. They even gave all of Maura's belongings back to the family, seemingly unconcerned about what could be potential evidence. This was even more of a sign to the Murrays that this department was in over their heads. Since very early on, the family had been asking, begging, pleading with the department to bring in the FBI, but the police refused.

So day after day, the family searched on their own with help from friends and loved ones. But in the early days, a good search only consisted of maybe less than 10 volunteers. Julie eventually made her way to be with her family, and she said that every day that their searches ended with nothing, she could see the fear on everyone's face intensify.

And that's because they knew that with each day, they had to start readjusting their expectations. The best-case scenario kept looking worse and worse. And eventually, they had to leave New Hampshire.

And that's one of the hardest parts for me to imagine. I mean, I think of it kind of like a bubble, this fragile little dome over a tiny town in New Hampshire where everything was about Maura and they searched for her. All the locals knew her name and her family's only job was to find her. But eventually that bubble pops and the real world that has been out there continuing on pours in like this flash flood.

You have to go back to work. You have to pay your bills and gas up your car and cook and eat like you did before. But nothing is like it was before. It has to feel like living in the twilight zone. How are people watching sports and going out with friends and laughing? Like, don't they understand how terribly wrong things are? A little over a month after Maura disappeared, another family would find themselves in a similar bubble in a similarly small town.

On March 19th, 2004, Breonna Maitland disappeared from a small Vermont town about two hours north of where Maura crashed. For a moment, police considered the idea of a serial killer and compared the cases, which might have been why, in June, they came knocking, asking to repossess all the items from Maura's car that they had previously released to the family. Lucky for them, the family had kept everything and were able to turn every item back over to police.

And so for a moment, it felt like they were finally starting to take Maura's case more seriously. But by the next month, police officially ruled out any connection between the two cases. And the Murrays didn't hear another word about the items that police had confiscated. Fred went back every weekend for the next year, and then more sporadically after that. But the trips never stopped.

He searched with volunteers and tried to collaborate with law enforcement. But collaboration is a two-way street, and the family wasn't getting much in return. In fact, not only were police unwilling to help the family like they wanted, but Fred would soon come to find out that they were threatening to arrest people who did try to help.

When you buy a new house, you might say, Shut the front door! Winning! No, seriously. Shut the front door. We own this house now. But you actually need to say, Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. That's right. The local State Farm agent is there to help you choose the coverage you need. Welcome to my crib. No one says that anymore, but I don't care. So, just remember, Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. State Farm, Bloomington, Illinois.

In doing everything he could think of to find his daughter, Fred tried embedding himself amongst the locals, hoping to hear a tidbit of information, a rumor that would give him some direction. Because at that point, they had none. And he did hear rumors over the years, some more terrifying than others. But one of the rumors Fred was hearing was that a man named John Smith might know something or might be able to help.

Smith himself had found a number for the Murrays and had left a message saying as much, telling them that he was former law enforcement and a local so he might be able to help them. But, I mean, with a name like John Smith, he wasn't surprised when he didn't get a call back. John Smith was surprised, though, when he got a visit from the New Hampshire State Police.

John tells Julie Murray in an episode of Media Pressure that Detective Bob Bruno and Detective Russell Hubber somehow got wind of John's offer to help. And they made a visit to him at work, asking him why he was so interested in the case. And he's like, listen, I don't have a dog in this fight. I just thought that the family might want help from someone who knows the ropes a little bit. But immediately, they told him to stop trying to help, stay out of it, or he'd be arrested for interfering with an investigation.

He tried to reason with them, but one just stood up and said, quote, we told you what we just told you. If you do this, we will arrest you, end quote. Now, John wasn't trying to get arrested, so he left it alone after that. Well, at least until Fred somehow hunted him down in a grocery store parking lot.

Fred was looking for help, but John explained why he couldn't give it. And Fred understood. I mean, he didn't understand why, but he understood not wanting to be arrested. So he left John there in the parking lot, crying and twisted up in knots because he didn't know what to do. But after a couple of weeks, John knew the thing he had to do was the right thing, even if the right thing meant he'd be arrested.

He never was arrested, though. I mean, no one did so much as come back to talk to him again. And so John has been working alongside the family ever since, all nearly 20 years by this point. In those 20 years, Maura's family has found out a lot.

Most of it just leads to more questions. And at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what they haven't found. And that's Maura. So I actually want to take a step away from the narrative timeline that I've been kind of walking you through. And I want to give you an account of what they've learned rather than when, because I think it will be easier to digest this way. And I'll start with the pieces they filled in about the timeline leading up to the day of Maura's disappearance.

So the first thing is that phone call, the one the night she left work, upset, saying, my sister, my sister. So we know this is a couple of days before Maura disappears. Maura has this breakdown, if you will, at like 1 a.m.,

Now, what we find out is that earlier that night at 10.10 p.m., Kathleen, her sister, had called Maura and told her she'd relapsed. Now, she had been at a rehab center and her fiance had picked her up and taken her straight to a liquor store, which would be terribly upsetting to hear. So that could explain it. But like I said, once you think you have an answer, if you examine it hard enough, you just end up having more questions.

Because Maura stayed at her shift after that for almost three more hours before she broke down. She even had a phone call with her boyfriend in between there, a seven-minute call at 12.07 where Bill says that she was completely fine. So was it her sister that she was upset about? Or did something else happen? I don't know. If anyone else talked to Maura that night, or if they know what happened, they have never come forward. Or at least the family has never been made aware.

If you're deep in this case, like I've been, you know there's this fringe theory that Maura was involved in a hit-and-run accident that night.

At 12.20 a.m., so after she would have finished talking to Bill, but before she left work upset, there was a hit-and-run accident nearby. People online will speculate wildly that Maura hit this person, and then she staged everything else to cover it up. But when you examine it, it just doesn't jive. Remember, Faith Westman heard a loud thud outside her window, and that's what made her call 911. And if that happened just past the midnight hour on Friday, why does Maura wait till Monday to leave?

Her car would have been out in the open for anyone to see when they were looking for the driver of a hit-and-run. There is zero evidence that Maura even left her station at work, much less hit someone with her car during her shift at work. And again, I know we want to fill in the void of information with theories, but accusing Maura of a crime with zero evidence is an example of how harmful we can be if not careful.

The next thing I want to move to is the party. So we don't know what upset her at 1 a.m. on Friday. So I'm going to jump to the dorm party that she goes to the following night. And you want to talk about online rumors? Jesus.

Okay, so she borrows her dad's car. Her and her friend Kate go to this party, which is in a dorm room, by the way. And Kate, who actually went on record with Julie for media pressure, you can hear her voice, and she normally does like zero interviews. She said this was a super chill thing. Maybe like seven or eight people, but she didn't even know many of them. Though she and Maura did know the person hosting the party, Sarah Alfieri.

Maura had worked with Sarah before. Now, Sarah has never spoken about the party or anything, not to anyone. She's never even responded to any of Julie's requests to speak with her over the years, not just for a podcast, but like even just talking to Julie before Julie had a podcast. And I think that silence is what leaves so much room for speculation. But I believe Kate when she said that nothing happened there.

According to a Seventeen Magazine article, Maura seemed tired to Kate. And when there were lulls in the conversation, she kept saying that she wanted to return her dad's car to him that night, which didn't really make a whole lot of sense. But at 2.30 a.m., Maura left telling everyone she was going to go to her room. But we know that's not where she went. And the truth is, I'm not sure if we know where she went right away. Because we know she ends up crashed a mile away from campus, but that's not until 3.30. There's an hour missing.

So did she pop in her dorm room first? Why not just sleep there and take the car in the morning? Why even borrow the car at all? Her dad could have come and gotten her in the morning. It's possible she had intentions to go somewhere else that night or maybe to someone. And there are a couple of things that make me think that might be a possibility.

Now, earlier reporting, like that Seventeen magazine piece, claims that Maura called AAA when she crashed. But I now know that's not true. Because according to Julie in Media Pressure, Maura left her cell phone in the dorms that night. It seems there was a UMass police cadet who kind of popped up out of nowhere and is now believed that maybe it was him who called the police. A little weird. Do I have more questions than I did before? Of course I do.

Now, the other thing is, Julie says there's a rumor that Bill left Maura a voicemail that night and asked, what happened with that guy? Julie actually confronted Bill about this, and he says he does not remember that. I only saw a transcript of his response. I didn't get to hear the words come out of his mouth, but it's weird to me. And so while we're talking about Bill, that's kind of my third bullet point, the boyfriend.

It's a little weird to me that in one breath, he tells Julie on media pressure that regarding Maura's friends, Kate and Sarah, he kind of knew Kate. Like he said once he brought up a buddy with him to visit and the four of them hung out, but that was like the most amount of time they'd ever spent together. And Sarah, he said he knew even far less than that.

But Julie points out in a later episode that according to phone records, in the time where him and Maura are like playing phone tag before she goes missing, like they're leaving voicemails, they're listening to them, calling back just to leave another voicemail, which according to Bill was about nothing in particular. He actually, again, according to the record, starts making a series of calls to Kate and Sarah.

But now, you know, 20 years later, to be fair, Bill says he doesn't know why he was calling them or if they even spoke. And listen, no doubt dude was in Oklahoma, and we know Maura ended up talking to him from her dad's cell phone after that crash in his car. But she didn't want to seem to talk to him after that because the two of them play phone tag. Like I said, they exchange voicemails, even emails the next day leading up to when Maura left her dorm for the very last time.

And the last email she sent to him was at 1 p.m. on February 9th, and it read, quote, Now that whimpering voicemail that Bill received that he thought was Maura was eventually traced, police say. They attribute it to a Red Cross calling card.

Now, the logical jump to make is that they were contacting him back about the leave that he had been granted or was in the process of being granted or whatever. But the thing is, that's actually not logical. As Julie says in media pressure, quote, End quote.

Bill has never been considered a suspect in anything, at least not related to Maura. He has been convicted of a misdemeanor sexual assault in another case, though, years later. I'm not going to go into all of those details, though, because we're already probably like over an hour into this. I'm trying to keep it as concise as possible. Plus, there's even more I need to tell you about.

And that is something that a witness saw that throws everything that happened on February 9th on that road into question. Some of you know where I'm about to go and the rest of you buckle the... All right, this next bullet point, I just want to call the police. So the night Maura crashed in New Hampshire, a woman named Karen McNamara passed Maura on the side of the road on her way home from work.

Using different data points, it's determined that Karen drove past Maura after 911 was called, but about 10 minutes before official records show that first responders got to the scene. Okay, cool. No big deal so far. Maura's car is facing west in the eastbound lane, same as we've heard before. Except when Karen passes Maura's car, she says it was nose-to-nose with a police SUV.

It's an SUV that had passed her twice already, and she knows it's the same one because each time she saw it, she noted the number designation on the back, 001. Now, SUV 001 is Chief Williams' vehicle. You know, the guy who was dead set on calling this a suicide case.

Well, a couple of days after the accident, Karen sees Maura's case on the news. And honestly, if I saw a police car, I'd be like, what's the point of calling in? But freaking beautiful Karen, see something, say something. She calls and tells police what she saw. And they take her statement. And then, weirdly, they call her back, asking her, are you sure that's what you saw?

Now, she stuck to her story, not knowing what she saw was so significant, because the thing is, Chief Williams wasn't on duty that night. He was never even on the scene that night, wasn't even scheduled to work. Though, weirdly, the morning after Maura vanished, he did get a full roster of every single person who did respond, even though it seems police believed that at that point it was just a DUI situation.

Now, when this eventually comes out, the responding officer for Maura's case, Sergeant Cecil Smith, ends up saying that he was the one driving the chief's car that night. Just a simple mix-up, no big deal, except no. Earlier that night, he had stopped a man for speeding and ticketed him. This man, Dan, says that Cecil Smith was in a sedan, not an SUV.

Now, it would be great to check the police logs, except, oh, wait, that call isn't on the logs. But Dan's not making up this story. It was even in the local paper that it happened. And by the freaking way, the same time Dan is getting this ticket, it is on record that the 001 SUV is being pulled out of a snowbank. So he couldn't have been driving it then.

Now, there's another person who was ticketed by Sergeant Cecil Smith even closer to the time of Maura's crash. But that person refuses to talk to anyone. So the question becomes, was there someone at Maura's accident site before first responders? Or is it both? The New Hampshire League of Investigators looked into a report expressing that the SUV was in that ditch where it got pulled out because the chief was, quote, driving impaired.

Now, that ditch was really close to his house, so it's possible Smith, who we know is responding to calls that night, shows up, maybe switches vehicles for a little bit. And it's not outlandish to say that Williams was drunk driving because he eventually ends up leaving his post after he's finally arrested for drunk driving. By Cecil Smith, by the way.

But the question is, did police see Maura that night? Well, interestingly, the first Be On The Lookout issued for Maura by Cecil Smith says that they're looking for a 5'7 female, which was like on the freaking nose, exactly her height, even though Smith says that he never saw Maura. But then the second Be On The Lookout, Maura is now named Cecil.

Then they say she's 5'5", 120 pounds, with black hair past her shoulders, which is like all sorts of wrong. How does your description get worse after you have more info? Julie actually breaks down all these witness statements and timelines and who's where and what and why in so much detail throughout her series. So I am telling you, even if you feel you're getting a good picture, you have to go listen to media pressure. This is just your primer so you can go into it ready to take everything in.

So it's clear that police failed Maura and her family in those days from all fronts. The question becomes, was it nefarious or just negligent? Whatever happened to Maura's car, I think happened on that stretch of winding road. So let's keep our theories limited there. Now, I don't know if you know this. I didn't until Julie educated me. But most cars have a black box like planes do.

Morris shows the accident recorded two events within two one hundredths of a second while she traveled at a low speed. The first was called a non-deployment, so likely when she entered the ravine, and the second was a deployment, so that's when her car hit something.

Then it shows that there were seven tries to turn on her car, but those aren't logged with time. So it could have been done by Maura. It could have been done by the tow truck driver, police after they got the search warrant or before, depending on what you think. And we know at least one is her dad when he gets to the garage. So with all those turn ons, is it possible that her car crashed there, but then was moved slightly for some reason?

In the years after Maura disappeared, her family learned of more witness statements and more strange facts about her car. Some say they saw the car with the door open, presumably first responders hovering around, which is weird since the car was supposedly locked when police got there. Someone else says that they saw reverse lights from their window. And there is a white-colored scuff mark on the driver's side rear bumper of her car. Oh, and this was new to me.

Found in Maura's car was a random broken Chrysler car part. Not a Saturn like she was driving. Chrysler. You can see pictures of it on Julie's TikTok. I'm going to link out to her TikTok. It is one of the most informative places you can be if you want to learn about this case. But she like will break down everything for you. That's where she goes when like new things happen. You have to have to follow her.

Okay, are you overwhelmed yet? Yeah, same, but I have just a little bit more. I want to go into her car more, but take a deep breath because the outside of her car is a mystery, but the inside is filled with small mysteries as well.

In their fight for records, Maura's family did get a list of repossessed items. And there's a bunch of stuff any young person would have in their car in 2004. CDs, car charger, yada yada. But here are the important pieces. Her gas tank was almost completely full, meaning that she had to have filled up recently before her crash. But no one knows where she stopped or if anyone interacted with her.

She had schoolbooks with her. Why take schoolbooks if you're not planning to come back? She also had a New Hampshire driver's license reinstatement form because Maura's license was suspended in the state of New Hampshire. So maybe that's why she was going there. She also had the accident forms that she was supposed to get for her dad, the ones they were supposed to go over on the phone that night. So she stopped to get those before going out of town. That is not something you would do if you're planning to leave forever.

And then there is a handwritten name and phone number that police never even looked into or showed the family. Julie is the one who tracked this person down 19 years after Maura went missing. And it seems really freaking relevant to me because it turns out that this family owns a condo just 25 miles from where Maura crashed in the direction she was going.

Now, we know she bought a lot of alcohol and some of it was missing. But also, on the receipt for the alcohol, it showed that she traded almost 80 aluminum cans for $3.95. Again, more questions when you learn stuff. Where'd those come from? What does it mean? I don't know. Now, the book bag she was known to carry with her and her personal belongings like cell phone, wallet, ID, and keys are all presumably gone with Maura.

And then in the back seat, there was an empty beer bottle. And I guess the window on one of the sides of the car had been rolled down just a crack in the back, which like, what does that mean? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

If you move into theories about this case, there have been a ton. I know there are slightly conflicting statements from Faith Westman and Butch Atwood, but it's always one person, not a bunch of people in a car. So this idea of a window cracked and a beer bottle back there, the fact like people will talk about like, oh, maybe there were multiple people in the car. Like none of our witnesses say that.

Now, Butch obviously had the closest interaction with Maura. He is the bus driver who stopped to ask her if she needed help. But I told you before that his account kept changing. And, like, detailed accounts kept changing. In a 2004 Valley News article, he talked about shining a light on Maura and said she was behind the airbag struggling to get out of her car. But then other times he says she's standing and he's out of the car.

Now, what I haven't told you yet is that that same night when Maura goes missing, Butch went looking for her in his own car. He said he ended up at French Pond, which has stuck out to people because that was in the opposite direction that Maura was actually traveling and down like this dirt road. In 2010, that pond was searched. The search was headed up by the Massachusetts attorney, Terry O'Connell, who has helped the Murray family over the years.

He invited the police to join, but they were basically like, yeah, thanks, but no thanks. Just like, let us know if you find anything. But what was weird is that when they got there, there were a couple of New Hampshire fish in game trucks. Now, no one ever showed their face, but Terry knows that they were watching them because one of the people that was with their search party had a radio and they were picking up the department's signal. When someone asked where the game wardens were over the radio, they said, I'm still hovering over French Pond.

So they're being watched, but they go ahead anyways. They get this state-of-the-art dive team out there, and lo and behold, there is something at the bottom, three feet by five feet. It's too murky to see exactly what it is, so they decide that they're going to mark the spot and then come back after ordering some better equipment. But when they come back, that thing is gone.

Now, I don't think Butch is colluding with Fish and Game, who's colluding with the New Hampshire State Police and the Haverhill Police. This can't be that big. It is all just weird.

And if you've been listening to me long enough, on enough of my shows, you know what I keep saying. The lesson I keep learning over and over. If you look at any one unsolved case close enough, there isn't just one person that all the signs point to. There were always multiple people that if you only heard about that person in a silo, you would be willing to convict. But that is why we need due process because it cannot be all of them. It may be none of them.

Over the years, the family have heard and explored countless theories. That Maura was buried in the cement basement of a home nearby. Cadaver dogs were brought out there in 2019 and alerted. Ground-penetrating radar even picked something up. Police said all they found was pottery, though. But how much should we trust that? Because Julie later learned that they didn't dig in all the right areas.

In 2021, remains were discovered on Loon Mountain. For years and years, there has been a rumor about the, quote, Loon Mountain Three, three guys who supposedly didn't show up to work the day after Maura went missing and were said to have been involved. But the remains weren't Maura.

Like the Loon Mountain Three, though, there were longstanding rumors about a man named Claude Moulton. His brother Larry had contacted Fred and gave him a knife that he said was used by his brother to kill Maura. The knife got turned over to police, but the family has yet to hear anything about it.

After Mora disappeared, he ripped up the downstairs carpet, moved out of his house, and got rid of his car, which made for the perfect opportunity to search. The New Hampshire League of Investigators went in with permission from the owner, and cadaver dogs hit on a downstairs closet under the stairwell. There was a section of carpet upstairs that also became of interest to them. Samples were eventually sent to police, but guess what they heard back? Yeah, nothing. Nothing.

Down the line, the new owners did their own investigating. I guess they used luminol to test the closet, which you can just, like, get, by the way. Eric got it for me as one of my first birthday gifts when we were dating. Weird, but, like, that's how I knew he got me. Anyways, they test with their own luminol, and this closet, like, lights up. Further testing that was done showed that it was human blood in there, a mixture of male and female blood.

But they said they couldn't link it to anyone because it was too degraded. So even if it's not Morris, someone was hurt in that basement. The question is who?

It feels like almost anything is possible in this case. And the open-endedness, the mystery around why Maura was up there to begin with, it leaves so much room for people to speculate and insert themselves. I said this at the top, but this case has taken on a life of its own. Missing Maura Murray.

It's almost something people feel like they own or get to have a say in, forgetting that there are real people who every day wake up and go to bed actually missing Maura Murray. I have learned so much from Julie's accounting of her sister's case, and I think it is a reminder that no one knows any case like the people who lived it. No one owns Maura's story, but we get to be a part of it if we can do it in the right way.

Again, I can't say this enough times. You have to go follow the new podcast media pressure right now wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was wildly long, but there is still so much I left out. More sightings, more theories, someone Maura was instant messaging with who Julie caught in a kind of lie, maybe misremembering situation. Either way, after that, they ghosted her.

There will be nine episodes, and if you ever want to understand this story, you must hear every single one. And make sure to follow Julie on her social media. Her TikTok handle is at MauraMurrayMissing. I'm going to link out to all of her socials in our show notes. She posts updates all the time, so if you are not following, you are going to be behind.

I am so glad that Julie finally has the chance to tell you her family story in her way. And I want to thank her and Sarah for allowing me to share it with you as well. And I want to leave you with a thought. Julie has seen the best and the worst that the true crime community can offer. And she believes that there's a better way.

She started a campaign called Engage with Empathy. The goal is to close the gap between true crime content creators and consumers and then the real people behind the stories that we tell and consume. In her own words, she says, quote, End quote.

Empathy is how we change that. Because with empathy, we ask why. We create with purpose. We consume with purpose. And we always ask, are we hurting or helping? According to mauramurraymissing.org, the foundation of this campaign is simple. Care. C-A-R-E. C, center the victim. Centering the victim and those with the most at stake, balancing public interest with potential harm. A, avoid harmful speculation.

Consumers drive this industry. Vote with your clicks. Ask if this content furthers the case or simply entertains. R. Research responsibly. Be critical and curious of content, the veracity of sourcing, and do not accept subjective interpretations as indisputable facts. This helps eliminate the harmful proliferation of misinformation.

And finally, E, engage with empathy. Victims and families did not choose these tragic paths. Engaging them with a level of sensitivity is crucial in order to prevent exploitation and unfair public indictments of innocent people.

I recently saw a TikTok from Julie. Like I said, she updates that thing anytime something happens. And it was encouraging. She said that she had recently received one of the most empathetic communications from law enforcement that her family had received in the entire 20 years at this point.

She's hopeful for the first time. This is her goal, and she feels that they might be on a path to a better relationship with law enforcement, which could lead to better results in Maura's case.

Please visit their website, mauramurraymissing.org, to learn more about the Engage with Empathy campaign and how you can help. And don't forget to follow all of Julie Murray's social media accounts, which are linked in the show notes, and go subscribe to Media Pressure right now wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, CrimeJunkiePodcast.com. Don't forget to follow us on social at Crime Junkie Podcast on Instagram. And me and Britt will both be back next week with a brand new episode. But we also have some surprises coming this week. Some extra episodes we are highlighting for National Missing Persons Day. So make sure to follow our feed and come back tomorrow. Crime Junkie is an Audiochuck production.

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