by James Renner
The most promising lead turned out to be that pen from Citizens Bank. A woman named Stef e-mailed: “In 2007 I worked as a teller for a bank that has branches in NY, PA, and New England. It would get pretty boring sometimes, and I am nosy, so during lulls I would go through the database and search for people I knew, famous people, random missing people, etc. One time I searched ‘Maura Murray.’ As of the end of 2006/early 2007, there was a Maura Murray, born May 4, 1982, with an active account opened in New Hampshire. If I recall correctly, it was attached to a car loan, and the account was active in that it was collecting payments.”
When I wrote back, she confirmed it was Citizens Bank that she worked for, adding: “Citizens Bank no longer does car loans, but they did then. To have one, you needed a checking account that was attached to the car loan. By ‘active,’ that meant there had been payments within the last 30–60 days on the car loan, because once a person was late and sent to collections, the account would read 0000 next to the name and be flagged. I just remember thinking it seemed strange it was a Maura Murray with the same date of birth and the loan was opened in NH, since that is where she had disappeared from.”
Of course, these answers only led to more questions.
* * *
After the bulldozers left, I reached out to Maura’s college friends: Sara Alfieri and Kate Markopoulos. But Sara and Kate were obstinately silent. I tried Kate’s childhood home and got her father. “She really should talk to you,” he said. He promised to have her call.
I found a list of Maura’s UMass teammates online, and the first person who replied to my messages was a woman named Nastaran Shams. That’s pronounced “Nast-ron” in New English, by the way, but she goes by “Nast.” Nast majored in psychology and microbiology at UMass and was also a multi-eventer for the track team.
“Maura was shy but extremely ambitious,” Nast told me one night over the phone. “She was just wonderful. Everyone who knew her loved her.”
Maura’s reputation preceded her, literally. Nast heard rumors about this big-deal runner chick who was transferring from West Point. And she was gorgeous to boot. But when Maura finally arrived, she carried no ego. Nast did the introductions and invited her to a party. Soon, Maura was friends with everyone on the team, and particularly close with Kate Markopoulos.
At the time, the young women on the track team liked to crash at a beat-up apartment off-campus, where they could drink and not worry about getting caught. When you’re a member of a collegiate track team, especially at a number-one party school like the Zoo, you become extremely close to your teammates. You eat with them. You condition with them every day. You hang out with them after practice. As Nast explained, “Sports in college is a kind of cult.”
Maura introduced her new friends to her beau, Billy Rausch. They hated him from the start and plotted ways to break them up—especially when Maura told them that he’d cheated on her. “Let’s just say we weren’t the biggest fans of that dude.” Of course, it wasn’t difficult to find men interested in hooking up with Maura.
“A bunch of guys had crushes on her,” said Nast. “She was an incredible runner. She was in incredible shape. She was extremely kind. And she was willing to go out and have a little fun.”
But Maura’s demeanor suddenly changed the winter before she disappeared. “I was told she’d been injured,” Nast said. “Then, I was told she was sick. We were gearing up for spring track and she wasn’t there. This was going into our senior year.”
After Maura went missing, nobody told the track team for a while. Nast heard a rumor that something bad had happened but didn’t know what. Kate had vanished, too; she’d stopped coming to practice. About a week later, they were told that Maura had disappeared in New Hampshire. Investigators showed up at practice. “Don’t mind them,” the coach said. “Just answer their questions, truthfully.”
“We didn’t see Kate at all,” said Nast. “I don’t know if she took a leave of absence or what. But Kate really closed up after that. She disappeared for a while. When she came back she’d lost all this weight. She kicked butt. She must have taken it out on the track.” Kate never talked about Maura again.
“All our lives would have been a little different if this hadn’t happened,” said Nast, who coaches track now. “Some of us have become more spiritual because of it. You either open up or you close up.”
I asked her if anything ever came of the men she tried to set Maura up with.
“Well,” she said. “There was this one. Hossein Baghdadi. He was our assistant track coach. Volunteer grad student. He had an interest in Maura. She had an interest in him. I’m pretty sure he and Kate and Maura hung out. But I think Maura wanted to keep that secret. Every time we were together and Hoss was there, they were really comfortable with each other. That indicated to me that they also hung out together outside of our group. But Hoss wanted to keep his position with the team. So it wasn’t something that could happen in the open.”
Crystal Therrien was Maura’s team captain at UMass. She said Hoss was not as nice as he let on. “He was very intense. He had a really cocky way about him,” she said. “He was not a very good leader. We’d be running hills and he’d try to motivate us by yelling, ‘Suck it up!’ I mean, yelling. That works for some people. But not me.”
It struck me how the people I’d spoken to in Hanson had described Fred in almost exactly the same words.
I tracked Hossein down pretty quickly, a name like that. I thought that even if there was any truth to Nast’s hunch, he was sure to deny the relationship or gloss over the prurient details.
“Yes,” he said. “We slept together. But you have to know something. Maura Murray was a very promiscuous woman. I wasn’t the only guy on that team she had sex with.”
TWENTY-SIX
Maura’s Lovers
Hoss is an attractive dude: olive-skinned, insouciant stubble, long-limbed and slim; a marathon runner. Over the phone, his voice was clipped and rushed, like he couldn’t wait to get to the finish line of our interview. We spoke only that once, long distance, me outside an Akron bar, him somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. But that short conversation was enough to get a better picture of Maura than a hundred articles written about her disappearance would have provided.
“We hung out at the end of the semester, in 2003,” he said. “Then she went home for the summer. She came back to Amherst once, in June, to visit me. We were in constant contact and then she just kind of fell off the face of the earth. I got this random e-mail about her boyfriend. They had started things back up. She left whatever we had.”
He got to know Maura well in those weeks. Enough to know that she came from a troubled family. “Maura didn’t get along with her mother,” he said. “She was angry with her mom. They had a falling-out. And she never mentioned her father. Not once. I never even knew her father was still alive.”
She didn’t have much respect for Billy, he said. “Billy wanted her to be in certain places at certain times so he could check up on her. He could be demanding. That’s just my impression. He seemed to be very chauvinistic.”
She and Hoss had a lot of fun while keeping the relationship on the down-low—watching movies at his house late at night, eating out. They planned to go camping in the White Mountains. Hoss knew the area well; he often went fly-fishing up there.
Lying in bed with Hoss, Maura sometimes talked about running away. “She said, ‘I wish I could disappear,’ but she never said how she would do it. I always thought Mexico.”
A few months before she really did disappear, he met Maura for lunch. “That was the last time I saw her,” he said. “I thought we could at least be friends.”
After Hoss got wind that Maura was missing, he spoke to a UMass detective, but it wasn’t clear to me that they ever discussed the sexual relationship. He wasn’t the only one, he kept reminding me. Maura dated other men on the team. Someone named Dave, he said; some guy called “Scrub.”
* * *
Baghdadi wasn�
��t lying.
I spoke to three men who ran with Maura at UMass. Each told me a slightly different version of the same story. One had firsthand knowledge. The gist was this: In 2003, Maura and a close friend were invited to after-hours parties at the athletic pool with three select upperclassmen (who have gone on to become prominent businessmen). One of the guys had keys to the facility and they would all sneak into the pool late at night and drink. And swim. And have sex.
According to each of my sources, these pool parties were straight-up orgies. Maura had sex with all three men. In one night. One after the other.
“It’s not a big deal,” said one. “It was college. It was college hedonistic stuff.”
Only one of the men involved in the gang bang ever spoke to police, after his ex-girlfriend suggested to local detectives that he might be involved with Maura’s disappearance. But he swears he never spoke to Maura again after she left the team.
TWENTY-SEVEN
BFF
If anyone had insight into where Maura was heading the night she disappeared, it was Kate Markopoulos, Maura’s best friend at UMass. But ever since Maura went missing, Kate has kept mum. She was quoted only once, in early newspaper accounts, and gave no useful information. When asked about her best friend, she kept it vague: “She took care of stuff on her own. That’s Maura.” She was never actively involved in the searches for her friend. After weeks of my trying to contact her, Kate finally called me one evening.
Kate provided a lot of inconsequential details. She and Maura liked watching Bottle Rocket, a movie about a couple of friends who steal some money and then go into hiding until they’re caught by police. They often went shopping together. She said that Fred was a nice guy.
“You could tell he loved her to bits,” she said. “She loved him. She talked about him all the time.” She knew that Maura and her dad would often go to the White Mountain area of New Hampshire together. They would go away for days sometimes.
Maura was planning to move to Oklahoma to be with Billy, she said. “But she wasn’t thrilled about moving. It was the middle of nowhere. She was going to get a job at a hospital; she was going to move because she loved him.”
What did Kate remember about the Saturday that Fred came to visit, the weekend before Maura disappeared? In newspaper and television interviews, Fred had stated that he was in Amherst that weekend with $4,000 in cash to help Maura look for a car. But Kate said neither Fred nor Maura mentioned car shopping that night.
After they dropped Fred off at his hotel, she and Maura returned to Kennedy Hall to party it up in Sara Alfieri’s dorm room, she said. “It was an even mix of men and women; pretty squished in there. I left around two, two thirty. One guy offered to walk me back to my place. Maura said she was going to bed. I didn’t know she was getting back into the car. That was the last time I saw her.”
In hindsight, Kate wondered if Maura might have been stressed about nursing school. Maybe it got to be too much and she left just to get away for a while, and then something else happened.
“The more I think about it, the more I realize I didn’t really know her,” she said.
Kate claimed she didn’t know about Maura’s fling with Hoss, even though Kate was sometimes the third wheel when the two got together outside practice.
The more Kate talked the more I got the feeling she was being deceptive. It was in her hesitant and measured answers. The careful wording. It felt to me that she was being overly cautious with her responses, and I did not understand why.
The detectives felt that way about Kate, too. Some got very angry with her and her faulty memory. “There were good cops and bad cops,” she recalled. “They kept saying, ‘What do you mean you don’t know who else was at the party?’ They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t remember.”
Neither could I. As Kate described it, Sara’s room was packed. A man who was there walked Kate back to her room. But afterward she couldn’t identify a single person other than Sara. And when pressed for specific things that happened during the party in the hours that she was there with Maura, her memory goes blank again: She doesn’t remember anything.
It was hard to reach Kate for follow-up questions. She worked odd hours at a bar in Saratoga Springs. After I sent an e-mail asking her again about the other people who may have been at the party that night, she wrote: “I understand it would be helpful if I could remember names but it is just not happening. It was long ago and I barely knew those people nor would I see some of them again.”
That last sentence is hinky. “Nor would I see some of them again?” Which of them did she see again?
After this awkward conversation, I placed Kate at the top of my short list of possibilities for the tandem driver. Hoss was on there, too. And Fred, for that matter. Nothing Kate told me made much sense.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned that Kate Markopoulos had a very good reason to avoid police and reporters.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Consider the Red Herring
There’s a clue I haven’t mentioned yet. It might be the most important clue in the whole case. Or it might be a red herring. I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s goddamn peculiar. The guy who towed Maura’s Saturn away from the scene of the accident in Haverhill found a rag stuffed into the tailpipe.
Mike Lavoie (say it, “La-voy”) was vegging on his couch when he got the call about the accident. He’s a likeable storyteller with a thick mustache and a goofy grin, the sort of guy who likes to razz his employees. But he doesn’t joke about Maura Murray. He was kind of sick of people asking questions about her by the time I found him. But after he cooled down, he told me how he jumped into his truck pretty quickly after the call that night and drove out to Wild Ammonoosuc Road.
He towed Maura’s car back to his place. The police told him to keep the Saturn in his garage—not his shop garage, but the garage at his house—under lock and key, until they could move it to the Troop F barracks. Lavoie noticed the rag in the tailpipe and pointed it out to Fred Murray when he came by to look at the Saturn a couple days after his daughter disappeared.
Fred explained that it was a rag he’d recently given to Maura to keep in her trunk. “He said that he told Maura to put it in the tailpipe to keep it from smoking. The car was not running well.”
Something about that statement did not ring true to me. I’ve driven some junk cars, and my father-in-law runs a body shop. I’ve never heard of someone blocking a tailpipe to keep it from smoking. I’m no expert, but I’m not real sure you’d want to do that. Plugging a tailpipe is a good way to make a car stall.
Detective Scarinza was equally befuddled by this bit of information. “I don’t understand that one at all,” he said. “That rag … Is it an attempt to kill yourself? Because it’s not going to work. But why the hell else would someone stick a rag up their tailpipe? It’s an anomaly.”
Dick Guy, the TV Guy, believes the rag is paramount. “There’s only two explanations for the rag in the tailpipe,” he said, his voice low, conspiratorial. “One: Someone stuffed it in there to get her to stall. Two: Someone put it in there after the accident to muddy the waters.”
“Muddy the waters.” That’s what a red herring does. In literature, a red herring is a device the author uses to mislead the reader, casting suspicion on a character to shield the identity of the true killer a bit longer. Linguists disagree on the origin of this expression, but it probably came from a sneaky trick criminals adopted to fuck with tracking hounds hundreds of years ago. A “red” herring is a herring that has been cured in brine, making it particularly smelly. A journalist in the 1800s claimed you could drag red herrings away from your trail to divert any hounds that were tracking you. But who would want to mislead police in Maura’s case? Her killer? Maybe. If you believe she was murdered. Maura herself? Someone who knows why she was in New Hampshire to begin with? How about someone who knows his fingerprints will be on the rag if it is ever tested?
Red herring or no
t, the rag in the tailpipe is fishy.
* * *
Let’s devour at least one more red herring while we’re at it.
Several news outlets reported that Maura called Billy a couple days after she disappeared. As Billy was traveling from Fort Sill to New Hampshire to join the search, Billy shut off his cell phone while walking through the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. There was a strange message when he switched it back on. Billy’s mother, Sharon, described the message to the Whitman-Hanson Express: “It was very short—consisted of a shivering, soft whimpering sound with labored breathing, as if someone was very cold.”
Billy, of course, tried to call back. He found that the call was made using a prepaid card that could not be traced. Sharon had purchased two AT&T calling cards and given them to Maura during the holidays.
Did Maura use one of these cards to call Billy? Was she lost somewhere, trapped in the cold, dying of hypothermia?
In online message boards, a lot of importance was given to this phone call early on. After all, it proves that Maura was alive for days after she vanished.
The thing about police investigations that can be frustrating for armchair sleuths is that detectives have no obligation to share information with the public. They tracked this clue down in the first month of the investigation.
“It was a Red Cross worker trying to reach out to Billy,” explained Scarinza. Red Cross officials act as liaisons to get emergency leave for enlisted soldiers. The caller didn’t want to leave a message, hoping to speak to Billy directly. “I verified that phone call. It’s verified. We spoke to the caller from the Red Cross.”
