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She Was Gone Before the Police Arrived. | Maura Murray –
On the afternoon of February 9th, 2004, Maura Murray packed the contents of her dorm room into her car. Textbooks, running gear, several days of clothes, her birth control, accident report forms her father had asked her to pick up that week. Then she emailed her professors. She told them there had been a death in her family and she would be away for a week.
There had been no death. She withdrew nearly every dollar in her bank account. She stopped at a liquor store. She loaded everything into her black 1996 Saturn and drove north out of Amherst, Massachusetts without telling a single person where she was going. 3 hours later, her car was in a snowbank on a rural road in northern New Hampshire.
A passing motorist spoke to her briefly. She declined help and said she had already called for assistance. Police arrived 7 minutes after the motorist left. The car was there. Maura was not. She has not been seen since. It has been 21 years. To understand February 9th, you have to go back 4 days. Maura Murray was in her junior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, enrolled in the nursing program.
Before UMass, she had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. She had received a congressional nomination from Senator Edward Kennedy to get in. She studied chemical engineering there for three semesters before deciding it wasn’t the right fit and transferring. At UMass, she was a Dean’s List student.
She was also an exceptional runner. In high school, she had qualified for the National Scholastic Outdoor Championships in the 2-mile event and placed 33rd in the country. She worked a campus job. She had a boyfriend, a man named Bill Rausch who she had met at West Point. By all documented accounts, she was functioning.
On the evening of February 5th, 2004, something changed. Maura placed a phone call to her older sister, Kathleen. The content of that call is not fully known. What is known is that shortly after Maura arrived at her campus security job visibly distressed. Her supervisor, Karen Mayotte, later described her sitting at her desk in a quasi-catatonic state looking straight through her.
When Mayotte finally got her to speak, Maura said two words, “My sister.” Mayotte walked her back to her dorm room. Two days later, Saturday, February 7th, Maura’s father, Fred, drove to Amherst. Maura’s Saturn had a blown head gasket and was running on three cylinders. It was producing visible smoke while driving.
The plan for the day was to find her a replacement vehicle. They went car shopping. They didn’t find anything. That evening, Fred Maura and a friend of Maura’s named Kate Markopoulos went to dinner. Afterward, Fred let Maura borrow his car, a Toyota Corolla, so she and Kate could attend a small party in one of the dorms.
Fred went back to his motel room. At 3:30 in the morning of February 8th, Maura crashed Fred’s car. Heading back toward the motel on Massachusetts Route 9 in Hadley, she struck a guardrail. The damage to the Corolla came to nearly $10,000. A responding officer filed an accident report. There is no documentation of field sobriety testing being conducted.
Maura was driven to Fred’s motel room. The following morning, Fred checked out. He rented a car and dropped Maura back to UMass campus before driving to Connecticut. That night he called her. He reminded her to pick up the accident report forms from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles so they could process the insurance claim together.
They agreed to talk Monday evening to go through the paperwork. Fred Murray never heard from his daughter again. The last documented activity for Maura Murray’s personal computer occurred sometime after midnight. Technically, the early hours of Monday, February 9th. She ran a series of MapQuest searches, directions to the Berkshire Mountains, directions to Burlington, Vermont.
No destination was saved, no route was printed as far as investigators could determine. At 1:00 in the afternoon, she emailed her boyfriend. The email read, “I love you more, stud. I got your messages, but honestly, I didn’t feel like talking too much to anyone. I promise to call today, though. Love you, Maura.
” At 1:13, she called a fellow nursing student. The reason for the call is unknown. At 1:24, she emailed her professors and her work supervisor. She told them there had been a death in her family and she would be away for a week. She said she would be in touch when she returned. No one in Maura Murray’s family had died.
Before sending that email, she had uploaded a class assignment. At 2:05, she called a condominium complex in Bartlett, New Hampshire. The call lasted approximately 3 minutes. The condo was in the same building where Maura’s family had vacationed together. The unit she inquired about was not available. At 2:18, she called her boyfriend and left a voicemail.
She said she would talk to him later. At 3:15, she withdrew $280 from an ATM. That was nearly the full balance of her account. She was captured on ATM surveillance footage wearing a dark jacket and jeans. She stopped at a liquor store. She purchased approximately $40 worth of alcohol. She had also at some point that day picked up the accident report forms from the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
PART 2 ‼️
Then she went back to her dorm room. When campus police later searched the room, it was nearly empty. Maura had packed the majority of her belongings into her car, her textbooks, her running gear, her birth control, several days worth of clothes, the accident report forms for her father’s insurance claim. Her sister, Julie, later noted that what Maura packed did not suggest she intended to disappear permanently.
She took the things a person takes when they plan to come back. Sometime after 3:00 in the afternoon, Maura Murray loaded her car, drove out of Amherst, and headed north on Route 91. She did not tell anyone where she was going. 3 and 1/2 hours later, her car was in a snowbank on a dark road in northern New Hampshire.
Route 112 through Woodsville, New Hampshire, is a two-lane road that runs along the Wild Ammonoosuc River. In February, in the dark, it is the kind of road that demands attention. Long straightaways and then without much warning, tight turns. The hairpin turn near Beaver Pond Road was one of those turns. A woman who lived nearby heard a loud impact at approximately 7:25 that evening.
She looked out her window and saw a black sedan that left the road, struck the snow bank, and come to rest facing the wrong direction. She noted a red glow inside the vehicle, possibly a cell phone. She called the Grafton County Sheriff’s Department at 7:27. Butch Atwood was a school bus driver who lived near the crash site and was heading home from work. He pulled over.
He walked up to the driver’s window. The woman inside appeared coherent, not seriously injured. He asked if she was okay. She told him she was just shook up. He offered to call police. She said no. She told him she had already called AAA. Atwood knew that wasn’t true. There’s no cell service on that stretch of Route 112.
He knew the dead zone well. There was no call she could have placed before he arrived. He drove home where he had better signal and called police at 7:43. Officer Cecil Smith arrived at 7:46. The car was there, doors locked, a box of red wine on the back seat, stains on the interior ceiling and door panel, a plastic bottle containing what appeared to be a red liquid.
No footprints in the snow around the vehicle. No sign of Maura Murray. The search conducted that night moved primarily westward, back the direction she had come from. No one searched east. No one documented why. There is one witness account from that night that has never been satisfactorily resolved. Her name is Karen McNamara.
Karen was driving home from work along Route 112 that evening, her regular commute. She left work at approximately 7:15. Before reaching Beaver Pond, where cell service returned, she noticed a police SUV come up behind her with its lights on. It passed her at high high She thought nothing of it. Then it passed her again.
The same vehicle marked 001 on the rear, moving east on Route 112. When Karen came around the hairpin turn, she saw SUV 001 parked nose-to-nose with the dark sedan at the crash site. She did not see any people. She drove on and called her family from Beaver Pond at 7:52. When she later saw Maura’s face on the news, Karen contacted police.
Her account created a problem. Vehicle 001 was typically driven by Haverhill’s Chief of Police, Jeff Williams. Williams was not on duty that night. Investigators told Karen that Cecil Smith had been driving 001 that evening. But a driver Smith had stopped for a traffic violation earlier that night later came forward.
He stated that when Smith pulled him over, Smith was driving a sedan, not an SUV. Karen McNamara’s account has never been formally retracted. Her call to her family, made after she passed the scene, was logged at 7:52. Smith’s official arrival was 7:46. Someone was at that scene before the official timeline accounts for.
The record does not explain who. Three categories of theory have been advanced over 21 years of investigation. The first, Maura Murray chose to disappear. In November 2003, she had been charged with using a stolen credit card to order food. The case had been continued by a court with the expectation of dismissal after 3 months of good behavior.
But a criminal charge, even a minor one, could have cost her a nursing license. She also had a suspended New Hampshire driver’s license for a prior speeding ticket, which some investigators believe is why she told that would not to call police. The MapQuest searches, the fake death email, the cash withdrawal, the packed car, taken together, they suggest preparation.
Her family disputes this entirely. Julie Murray points to the specifics of what was in that car. Textbooks, accident report forms for the insurance claim, birth control, running gear, items a person takes when they intend to return. And since the moment she disappeared, there has been no activity on her phone, no activity on her bank accounts, none for 21 years.
The second theory, she walked away from the crash and did not survive the night. It was February in northern New Hampshire. The temperature dropped well below freezing. The terrain off Route 112 is heavily wooded and in places inaccessible on foot. Against this, no footprints were found in the snow. The tracking dogs lost her scent at the road’s edge, not in the woods.
At the road. In September 2021, construction workers on Loon Mountain in Lincoln, about 25 miles east of the crash site, discovered human bone fragments. Two months later, New Hampshire State Police announced the results. Radiocarbon dating placed the estimated time of death between 1774 and 1942. Not Maura. The third theory, she accepted a ride and encountered the wrong person.
Former police chief and private investigator Lou Barry, hired by the Murray family, reviewed the full timeline and concluded she was probably a victim of foul play. His assessment was direct. He believed she had accepted a ride and got into the wrong car. A nearby resident named Rick Forcier came forward months after the disappearance.
He said he believed he had seen a woman running east on Route 112 that night toward traffic, toward a passing vehicle. The tracking dogs lost her scent at the road. In March 2025, a development emerged. A man named Stephen Baldwin, who had attended West Point during the same period as Maura before she transferred, was convicted in Ohio of running a fraudulent animal rescue charity, unrelated to Maura.
But when he was arrested in 2020, a fingerprint database search produced a match. An unidentified print found inside Maura Murray’s car in 2004 belonged to Stephen Baldwin. He was informed of this in 2024. When journalist James Renner reported the match publicly in March 2025, Baldwin confirmed it. He denied any involvement in Maura’s disappearance.
New Hampshire investigators have not publicly stated what, if anything, they have done with that information. The case remains open. The New Hampshire Cold Case Unit lists it as an active investigation. The FBI maintains a Violent Criminal Apprehension Profile. In February 2024, on the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, they released an age progression image showing what Maura Murray might look like today.
She would be 43 years old. Her sister, Julie, has said publicly that the family has come to accept they will likely never see Maura again. What they have not accepted and will not accept is never knowing what happened. Maura Ann Murray born May 4th, 1982 in Brockton, Massachusetts. Last seen February 9th, 2004 on the shoulder of Route 112 in Woodsville, New Hampshire.
7 minutes, a dark road, a locked car and 21 years of silence. If you have information about Maura Murray’s disappearance, the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit can be reached through the Attorney General’s Office. A tip form is available at the New Hampshire Department of Justice website. She deserves an answer.
