True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  Maura’s grandmother, Ruth, 91 years young, was downstairs, and we spoke quietly so she wouldn’t hear. Ruth, who was very close to Maura, never talked about the disappearance. About her sister Laurie, all Janis offered was that she was “an excellent mother … when the kids were little.”

  Janis always thought Fred was “a very odd duck.” He met Laurie at a Weymouth park one day, she said. He spotted her playing baseball and then introduced himself. He was in college. Laurie was just fifteen. “He pursued her until she went out with him.”

  The marriage fell apart when Laurie got pregnant with Kurt, said Janis. Fred was not Kurt’s father. Kurt’s dad was a man named Kevin Noble. In 1994, Noble was convicted of murdering his own brother after an argument over a loud radio turned physical.

  After the affair, Fred moved back to Weymouth, but he returned to Hanson daily to condition his daughters, training them to be champion runners. Maura’s little brother went by “Kurt Noble Murray” and maintained a cordial relationship with Fred all his life. Sometimes Fred even took him to the White Mountains with Maura. Fred took his girls hiking a lot.

  “They vacationed up there all the time,” said Janis. The Jigger Johnson camp, on the Kancamagus Highway, was their favorite spot. She shook her head as she thought back on it. “I always thought that was strange, Maura going camping up there with her father. They would share a tent. She was, what, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? If my dad had ever asked me to go camping alone with him and share a tent, I would have said, ‘What are you, nuts?’”

  Senator Ted Kennedy nominated Maura for West Point, said Janis (prospective cadets must appeal to high-ranking government officials to be accepted as a nominee). It was at West Point that Maura met “Mr. Nice Guy,” as she calls Billy Rausch. “He cheated on her for years. One of her sister Julie’s girlfriends. As if that wouldn’t get back to her.”

  When they were younger, Julie and Maura were inseparable, but after she moved out of the house to attend West Point, Julie Murray’s relationship with their mother deteriorated, said Janis—“Julie and Laurie didn’t talk for a long time”—and things were not great between Julie and Maura, either. After Maura went missing, Julie traveled up to help with the search only once, as far as Janis knew.

  “I’ve never been up there,” Janis said, scrunching her nose. “I never want to go.”

  She recalled how Kurt, whom Maura doted on and protected, was afraid of what he might find in New Hampshire. “Kurt was scared of finding a body,” she said. “He told me, ‘I don’t know what I’d ever do if I did find her.’”

  Janis believed Maura went up to New Hampshire to get away from Fred. “They had an argument about that car accident,” she said, meaning the late-night crash in Amherst that put Fred’s Toyota in the shop. “He really reamed her over it. But he claims it wasn’t why she left.”

  Janis thinks that after Maura got up there, someone took her.

  She leaned forward and whispered, “My gut tells me the police had something to do with it.”

  * * *

  I drove out to Fred’s house in Weymouth that night, expecting to find him at last. On all the court documents, Fred’s address is listed as 22 Walker Street. It’s a simple, white two-story home. But the house was boarded up as if no one had lived there for some time.

  It was almost dark and the place had a haunted look about it. So I left, promising to come back on my next trip to New England. During the day.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Baby Brother

  Maura grew up in a modest split-level on Joanne Drive in Hanson. The road ends in a cul-de-sac where everyone kind of knows each other’s business. It’s one of those places where everyone waves as you drive by.

  I knocked on the front door, but if anyone was home they didn’t answer. I was supposed to meet Fred, Jr., the oldest of the Murray siblings, for breakfast. But he’d called at the last minute and said he’d changed his mind. At the time, Fred, Jr., was deep for trouble and didn’t want to be around reporters. He’d been arrested for shoplifting Craftsman tools at a Sears. When the police walked him out of Sears to his vehicle to get his ID, they found three hypodermic needles under the floor mat.

  Next door to the Murrays were the Carpenters. Maura’s oldest sister, Kathleen, had married one of the Carpenter boys. But no one was home there, either.

  I went across the street and visited Linda Higgins. She had been friends with Laurie, Maura’s mother. “We traded flowers,” she said. “These are her irises by the mailbox.”

  The Murray family was always short on money, Linda explained. She did her best to send a little their way when she could, sometimes asking the Murray girls to babysit. Kathleen babysat for a while, but then the Higginses noticed someone had called a sex line during the hours Kathleen was watching the children. After that, Linda would only ask Maura to babysit.

  She remembered Maura going door-to-door once selling Cutco knives to earn spending cash.

  Laurie worried about Maura more than the other children, said Linda. “I remember Laurie saying, ‘Maura’s so smart. But she’s not street-smart.’” Maura always wanted to believe the best of people.

  I asked her how I might find Maura’s other siblings. “Her younger brother Kurt works at Lowe’s,” she said. “He’s probably there right now.”

  * * *

  I found Kurt resting in his car at the back of the Lowe’s parking lot. He was on break, listening to some tunes. A young man, dark hair, ripped, easy on the eyes. He didn’t seem surprised to see me in such a strange location. He climbed out of the car and leaned against its frame as we talked.

  Maura liked to play catch with him on the slow street outside their house, he recalled. Ground-ball drills. If he botched a play, she’d make him run laps.

  “We went on adventures in the woods, too. She’d take me to the river tucked in back there. We used to go on camping trips. Jigger Johnson was our favorite spot. Sometimes she’d go with her father and I’d come along. Sometimes they just went themselves.”

  When Kurt was there, he and Maura would jump off bridges into the water. There was a rope swing at Jigger Johnson. Maura was fearless, he says. “She’d always put on a show. She’d jump off that rope swing and do all these twists in the air before diving into the water.”

  Maura took Kurt along with her to Shaw’s when she shopped for the family’s groceries. She turned the chore into a game, leaving items at the ends of aisles for Kurt to race to and then return to the cart. She taught him to bargain-shop. She tried to turn him into a runner, too.

  “I hated running, so when she’d go running, I’d ride my bike along with her.”

  Kurt came home from school one day and the whole family was waiting in the living room. Maura was missing, they told him. Everyone packed up and drove to New Hampshire. They stayed at the Wells River Motel for a bit and then at a condo in Lincoln owned by Fred, Jr.’s boss. They were looking for Maura’s body in the woods. But Kurt never believed she’d killed herself.

  It made sense that Maura would have gone up there with the intention of clearing her mind, he said. “I think she needed a break. All this talk of suicide … why would she drive all the way up there to do it? Doesn’t make sense. That place was special for us. I think she went up there to take a breather and then something happened.”

  When their mother got sick, Kurt moved back home and took care of Laurie until the end, dropping out of school so he could work during the day to pay their utilities. The kid’s been through a lot more than his fair share, but he still has a quick smile and a laid-back disposition. I found him to be a little inspiring, to tell the truth.

  I asked him where Maura’s father was these days. He said Fred was living on the Cape, near Falmouth. He gave me Fred’s cell number. I left a message that night but never heard back.

  Later, Kurt friended me on Facebook, and that’s how I discovered that in 2010 he’d written a song about his sister’s disappearance. His lyrics suggest he and his siblings believe Maura
deliberately ran away.

  What have we done

  To make you turn your back on us and run.…

  Before I returned to Ohio, I dropped by Andrea Connolly’s house in Rockland, five miles away. Andrea was one of Maura’s close friends from high school, part of that inner circle of girls from Whitman-Hanson High. Andrea wasn’t around, but her mother was. She invited me in, gave me a drink, and called her daughter. Andrea said that Fred had told her not to talk to me. But her mother was kind enough to tell me a few stories.

  “Andrea could never go inside Maura’s house,” she said. “Maura would come out when you picked her up, before you got to the door. Wouldn’t let anyone inside. She never drove. She never had enough money for a car.”

  Andrea’s mother told me that about a year before the disappearance, Maura spent New Year’s Eve at the house of a friend of the Connollys in Goshen, New Hampshire, just a bit south of Haverhill. When the girls learned about Maura’s crash, they called the people who lived next door to the property in Goshen and had them check the house to see if Maura was there. She wasn’t. Still, she said, the detectives seemed very interested in that particular bit of information.

  I was, too. If Maura knew the place was empty in the winter, it would have been the perfect place to lay low for a while. And it would explain why, after searching for rentals, she apparently gave up without actually booking one.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  How an Abduction Happens

  When I was thirteen, a man tried to abduct me. In a Hollywood screenplay this would be the scene the director uses to explain why I became a true crime journalist—my origin story, as it were. But my fascination with human predators actually began a couple years before this. By the time I was thirteen, I was already obsessing over Amy Mihaljevic: riding my bike to area shopping malls, looking for the face of her killer in the crowds. And before Amy, there was my grandfather, whom we’ll get to soon.

  This thing that happened when I was thirteen I don’t talk about much. I give a dozen or so presentations about cold cases every year, mostly at local libraries. You’d think I’d use it as part of my shtick. But I don’t. It’s one of those stories that are hard to digest. People come to my talks to get scared. But a good storyteller knows that people need degrees of separation from true horror, and I think that separation is lost if I start talking about me and this thing that happened.

  My parents divorced when I was four, and my father got custody of me. My mother picked me up for visitation every other weekend. In 1991, she was living in an apartment in Old Brooklyn, a suburb of Cleveland not far from the city zoo. Across the street was a section of the Metroparks, a part of the “Emerald Necklace” that wraps around Cuyahoga County. Nearby was the Memphis Kiddie Park, which had a carousel, baby rockets, and a short roller coaster called the Little Dipper. In between the park and the carnival was a railroad track.

  I was thirteen and I liked to explore. I set off from my mother’s apartment one Saturday morning, crossed the street to the park, and made my way toward a creek that runs between cobblestone retaining walls. At the end of the parking lot was a concrete bathroom, and as I passed the men’s room doorway I noticed a tall man with dark hair standing just outside. He looked at me and fiddled with the crotch of his pants.

  Kids, like adults, are quite capable of rationalizing dangerous behavior. He must have an itch, I thought. But then he began tugging and I knew something was off about this situation. Still, I kept walking. I started down a grassy path into the woods. I turned and saw that the man was walking after me.

  I kept walking, willing myself not to panic. At a long, straight stretch of trail I turned again. The man was now about a hundred feet behind and walking briskly. I started to jog. I looked again. He was jogging now. And he looked angry. Angry that I was making him jog. For the first time I realized the danger I was in. There was nothing but more woods and the river this way. I couldn’t get back to my mom. This man was blocking my escape. I began to run.

  When I was thirteen, I was skinny as a rail, 120 pounds. I spent long days riding my bike over the backcountry hills around my father’s house. And I was a runner. I was fast. But this guy was faster than me. Skinny, fit, he tore after me. All pretense was abandoned. I knew what he was now. And he knew that I knew. And that was that.

  I saw the train tracks on my left. They led back to the apartments. It was a way out, maybe. I ran through the underbrush, tearing through skunk weed and berry bushes. In a moment I was on the tracks, running back toward the road, the white gravel between the ties kicking up behind my feet. The thin man was out of the woods now, too. He ran after me. It was clear that he would catch up to me long before I got to the road, before I got anywhere near the apartments. I looked for a way out. But the ground on either side had risen to sheer walls of rock, twenty feet high. A tight canyon.

  There was one chance: to scale the wall. If I slipped, or if I was too slow, that was it, man. That was it.

  I turned and dug my fingers into the rock and clay and pulled myself off the ground. I scrambled up as fast as I could. I didn’t slip. In ten seconds, I was all the way up. I looked down. The man stood on the tracks directly below me, looking up with eyes full of hate. I gave him the finger and then ran back to my mother.

  She called the rangers, but by the time they got there, he was long gone. The rangers told me to not come back to the park alone. “Those bathrooms are where the queers hang out,” one of them said. This was long enough ago that Ohio cops still didn’t differentiate between homosexuals and pedophiles.

  I think about this day a lot. What had that man planned to do with me? How had he planned to keep me from screaming? Was he just going to fondle me and be on his way or did he have murder in mind? Did he have a knife on his belt? How many times had he done this before? Who was he? Would I ever see him again?

  The thing that scares me the most is the way he looked at me in the end. Those eyes said it all. He was so angry. He was furious that I had managed to get away. Where did that hate come from? When did it start?

  I don’t think Maura Murray was abducted from the side of the road. I never did. Abductions are messy, like mine. Or they’re organized, like Amy Mihaljevic’s. And if they are organized, that means they were planned, meticulously.

  Amy Mihaljevic was abducted across the street from the Bay Village police station, in broad daylight. Her abductor had groomed her for days, calling her at home, promising to take her shopping to get a gift for her mother if she’d just meet him at the plaza. She waited for her abductor and went willingly with him.

  My attempted abduction had been messy because it wasn’t planned. I had run for several minutes and then escaped. Any number of people could have happened by to see me running away from that man.

  The one thing I know for sure about Maura’s accident on Wild Ammonoosuc Road was that it wasn’t planned. No way was it staged—not the dangerous way it occurred; not in front of several homes, full of potential witnesses. The impact was hard enough to deploy the air bags and really could have injured her. It wasn’t planned. And if it wasn’t planned, an abduction from the scene could not have been organized. It would have been messy, like mine. But she disappeared, and no one saw it happen. There were no signs of a struggle.

  No, this was no abduction.

  I was beginning to form a theory to explain Maura’s vanishing act. There was another way it could have happened: She could have been traveling in tandem with another driver. The other driver would be ahead of her, leading the way east. After the accident, the second driver turned around and picked her up. If she knew the driver, it would have taken only a second for Maura to get in the vehicle and tell the driver to take off. That would explain why no one saw it happen—it was too quick. If someone forced Maura into a car, she would have screamed, alerting the neighbors. She would have fought back. She was not weak. She was a goddamn West Point cadet. A tandem driver explained everything. But if that’s what happened, who was driving the othe
r car?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A Lucky Break

  On August 14, 2011, Akron was hit by a once-in-a-century downpour and sometime during that storm the front wall of my basement collapsed. That’s where I keep my books, my notes, and my writing. I was able to salvage the important stuff. My insurance wouldn’t cover a dime because it was flood damage (hydrostatic pressure: the two most evil words in the English language), and I was looking at fifteen grand in repairs. It could have been tragic, like move-back-home-with-your-parents tragic, except that I’d just received the advance on my first novel that week, a book I’d finished after I was fired from Cleveland Scene as a way to keep my mind busy. The novel told the story of a young man who worked for an alt-weekly and the odd crime he became obsessed with (“Write what you know”). The Man from Primrose Lane saved my house. There are no accidents; I’ve come to believe this. For the next six weeks, all my energy was spent rebuilding the cottage. There was no time to delve into the Maura Murray case. But while I was away, my Baker Street Irregulars were hard at work trying to make sense of the items I’d discovered in Maura’s abandoned car.

  A reader named Chris sent me an e-mail, explaining that it wouldn’t be weird for a young woman from Hanson to have a magnet from the Lynwood Café in her car. “It is absolutely Famous in eastern MA and throughout New England for its unique Pizza,” he wrote. “People come from 75+ mile radius to eat there or get takeout. Its sort of an old looking 4-way stop but its not ‘sketchy’ and does not attract weirdos or anything like that. Considering the new demographics of Randolph, its probably one of the safer areas of town due to it being on the Holbrook line.”

  An ambitious sleuth named Samantha grabbed the account number from Maura’s Stop & Shop card and ran it through the company’s Web site. “I was interested in seeing if I could pull up a list of items purchased under that number,” she wrote. “I could enter the card number, which was associated with Maura’s name, but it requested I register an online account to view any information. I did not feel comfortable doing that. However, the site automatically filled in fields for the registration form—I’m assuming based off of what Maura provided when she set up the account. It included the phone number and address for Fred’s house in Weymouth—and the e-mail address: aasic@aol.com.”