The Disappearance of Maura Murray: The Record Only

COLD OPEN0:00 to 0:40

The record gives Maura Murray nineteen minutes, from the first call to police to the moment an officer found her car empty.

A neighbor on Route 112 had reported a car stuck in a ditch. Shortly after, a school bus driver stopped, and the woman there, believed to be Maura, said she'd already called AAA.

He drove home and called police anyway. By 7:46, she was gone.

But the accounts of those nineteen minutes don't line up, not even on the clock. So this is the case told from the record, and nothing else.

THE FOUR DAYS BEFORE0:40 to 2:49

The first clock problem shows up hours before the crash, at an ATM off the UMass Amherst campus, where she was a student.

UMass police told the Boston Globe in 2004 that Maura took out cash there at 3:40 that afternoon. Her family's timeline puts it at 3:15, and says that was nearly all the money in her account.

Either way, the cameras at that machine, and at the liquor store she went to next, show her alone.

That afternoon closed out a strange few days.

On Thursday, February 5th, Maura was working a campus security job when a phone call upset her so badly she had to be walked back to her dorm.

UMass police said they traced it to one of her sisters. What was actually said, they still couldn't tell the Globe a month later. Her father had been told it was about a bad fight with a boyfriend, and he didn't think that would have rattled her much.

Then in the early hours of Sunday, she crashed her father's new Toyota into a roadside post. She told him about it later that morning.

Just after midnight on Monday, she ran MapQuest searches on her own computer for the Berkshires and for Burlington, Vermont.

That same day she emailed her professors that there'd been a death in the family. There hadn't been.

She called the owner of a condo in Bartlett, New Hampshire, a place she'd stayed before.

And she packed. UMass police said everything she owned was in boxes, and she'd even taken the art off her walls.

New Hampshire's Attorney General says she didn't tell anyone she was going north. That evening her black Saturn ended up on Route 112, about two and a half hours from campus, sitting in the eastbound lane but pointed west.

Hold on to that detail about which way it was pointing.

THE WINDOW ON ROUTE 1122:49 to 5:45

Faith Westman lived steps from that curve. She made the first call, and the first account we have already has a problem.

She said she saw what looked like a man smoking a cigarette in the car. Her husband later said it could have been a woman on a cell phone.

Another neighbor saw the car stopped with its lights flashing and someone walking around it.

Then Butch Atwood came by. He drove a school bus and lived about a hundred yards east. He pulled up beside the Saturn and asked the woman if she wanted him to call for help.

She said no, she'd already called AAA.

Now keep in mind, cell reception on that stretch was weak to nonexistent. Atwood knew it, and her answer struck him as strange.

He told police she looked shaken up, the airbags had gone off, and he didn't see any blood.

So he drove home and called police from there.

At 7:46 an officer pulled up to a locked car, and Maura was gone.

Inside, he found a box of red wine behind the driver's seat and stains that looked like wine on the door and the ceiling. There was red liquid on the ground and a soda bottle that smelled of alcohol.

Jeff Strelzin, the lead prosecutor in the investigation, told Boston Magazine in 2014, "It was obvious that she had been drinking."

There was also a rag stuffed in the tailpipe. Her father has said he suggested it, so the smoky exhaust wouldn't get her ticketed.

Police found no sign of a struggle, and no footprints heading into the woods.

So how long did that last stretch take? On the family's timeline, Atwood's call and the officer's arrival are four minutes apart. The Globe had police arriving seven to ten minutes after he called.

Maura left that car sometime after Atwood drove off, and the two accounts don't even agree on that last stretch. And none of the sources for this video say how long Atwood took to get home and pick up the phone.

Then there's direction. The officer asked Atwood to search west, toward the French Pond area, and a state trooper searched west too. As far as the family knows, nobody searched east that night.

Remember, the Saturn was sitting in the eastbound lane, pointed west. According to the Associated Press, she'd been driving east when she lost control, and the car spun around. Her father has said she was headed east, toward Bartlett, where she'd called about the condo.

WHAT INVESTIGATORS BELIEVED5:45 to 7:38

Police had to decide what those minutes meant, and their answer changed.

Two days after the crash, Haverhill police put out a release calling her possibly suicidal.

Her father, Fred Murray, was furious. He said they hadn't alerted other departments along Route 112 right away, hadn't interviewed every resident who could see the scene, and waited too long to talk to the condo owner in Bartlett.

By March, investigators had laid out four scenarios for the Globe, and they said every one of them had flaws.

Suicide was the least likely. She left no note, her grades were excellent, her medical records showed nothing, and her relationships looked sound.

Next was that she'd gone into the woods after drinking and died of the cold. But the dogs couldn't pick up her scent, there were no footprints in the fresh snow, and helicopters with heat-seeking equipment found nothing.

Third, someone picked her up in those minutes and hurt her. Investigators thought the odds of a violent stranger coming down that road at that exact moment were remote.

Fourth, a passerby gave her a ride, maybe to a bus station, and she left on her own.

All four depend on what happened after Atwood drove away, and no one on record saw where she went.

Fred tried to get the files himself. In 2005 he sued the state police to make the reports public. He lost at first, won an appeal that sent the case back, and in the end got almost none of the files.

Everything in this video comes from what's been made public. If you want more cases told straight from the record, hit subscribe.

WHAT'S BEEN RULED OUT7:38 to 9:01

Since then, the state has checked a lead her father pushed.

In 2019, Fred believed his daughter was buried under a house near the crash site. State investigators and FBI agents searched it and dug up the cement floor of the basement.

Strelzin told reporters they found "absolutely nothing, other than a small piece of what looks to be pottery, and maybe a piece of old piping."

In January 2022, the state asked the FBI to add Maura to its violent crime registry. That July, state police and Fish and Game searched off Route 112 in Landaff and Easton. The Attorney General said the search wasn't based on new information.

On the twentieth anniversary, the FBI produced an age-progression photo. The state said that wasn't based on new information either.

And in 2026, the head of the Cold Case Unit said they were using technology that wasn't available when she disappeared, and applying it to the existing evidence. As reported, the statement didn't say which tools, or which evidence.

Through all of it, the state's own summary didn't move. In 2024 it said searches by police and private citizens had turned up no positive results, and it still called the disappearance suspicious.

THE GAP9:01 to 9:38

Strip away the theories and you're left with that last stretch on Route 112. The published accounts can't even agree how long police took to get there after Atwood's call. Four minutes on the family's timeline, seven to ten in the Globe.

Think about what that does to a search. Someone on foot covers a lot more road in ten minutes than in four. And as far as the family knows, that night the search went in only one direction, west, away from where her father has said she was going.