True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Londonderry Ping

  Scouring the Web one day, I found an obscure site, Chris King’s First Amendment Page, which had published some information related to Maura’s disappearance. According to his Blogspot profile, King once worked for the attorney general’s office. He had a background in journalism, though he listed his current occupation as “Metaphysical Reductionist,” whatever that may be. Most of the blog was devoted to ridiculing law enforcement officials. But sometimes King investigated local crimes. While combing through documents related to Fred’s civil suit against the state, King found a search warrant that someone had mistakenly left in the public file.

  Here is the text of the warrant as it was published on King’s site:

  Supporting Affidavit for Issuance of Search Warrant I, Todd D. Landry, do hereby depose and say;

  1. That I am currently employed by the State Police and have been for the past ten years. Currently, I am assigned as a Detective at Troop-F in Twin Mountain, NH. I have received extensive training in the investigation of criminal matters.

  2. That on February 9, 2004 at 1927 hours the Haverhill, NH Police Department responded to a single vehicle motor vehicle crash on Route 112 in Haverhill, NH. Upon arrival, Sgt. Cecil Smith was unable to locate the driver of the vehicle. Subsequent investigation determined that the driver of the vehicle was MAURA MURRAY (d.o.b. 05/04/82), 22 Walker Street, Weymouth, MA.

  3. A witness at the scene later confirmed that the driver was MURRAY.

  4. An extensive search of the area has been conducted and MURRAY has not been located.

  5. During the course of this investigation, Cellular Telephone records have been obtained by Law Enforcement that were used by MURRAY. A representative from Sprint Corporate Security advised this affiant that during the late afternoon hours of February 9, 2004, an outgoing telephone call was made to Murray from the Londonderry, NH Sprint tower. This call had to have been made from within a 22-mile radius of the tower. The identity of this caller and telephone number has not been made as of this date.

  6. That identifying the caller of the telephone call could be pertinent to the ongoing investigation and may lead to the whereabouts of Maura Murray.

  Todd D. Landry

  Londonderry is a town way the hell on the eastern side of New Hampshire, just north of Massachusetts, off Route 93.

  I asked Lieutenant Landry if the search warrant was legit. Here’s what he wrote back:

  Mr. Renner,

  In response to your questions I offer the following:

  The investigation is and has been on-going since the night Maura Murray went missing. In order to protect the integrity of the investigation I am limited to what can be released. In conferring with the lead prosecutor that is overseeing the case I can only confirm that the first responding police officer that was on the scene was Sgt. Cecil Smith of the Haverhill Police Department.

  Thank You for your understanding in this matter.

  Respectfully, Lt. Todd Landry

  So is the warrant real? I think so. King, when contacted, stood by it. Also, it’s too esoteric to be made up. As a journalist I know that sometimes records that should not be made public are accidentally left in public files. While researching the terrible crimes of Akron serial killer Bob Buell, I once found secret grand jury testimony.

  If the warrant is legit, it means that someone called Maura from eastern New Hampshire shortly before she disappeared. Was it someone traveling up Route 93 from Massachusetts? The Kancamagus Highway, the road where Maura disappeared, is the main connector between Route 91 out of Amherst and Route 93 out of Boston. Was someone coming up the other side of the state to meet her in the middle? Was this my tandem driver?

  THIRTY

  The Man with the Knife

  Early on, a man named Larry Moulton claimed that his brother, Claude, killed Maura. He gave Fred Murray a knife he said was used in the crime. Fred used this evidence to support his “local dirtbag” theory and shipped it to the police to be tested for DNA. Larry died a few years later. Cancer.

  One of my Irregulars dug into Larry’s story and uncovered an interesting bit of family history. A woman named Jean Caccavaro disappeared from the side of Wild Ammonoosuc Road back in 1977, not far from the site of Maura’s accident. Jean was very similar to Maura in appearance. And a year after Jean vanished, Claude Moulton married Jean’s daughter.

  I immediately reached out to Larry’s surviving family to learn what I could about the Moulton brothers. At the time of Maura’s disappearance in 2004, Claude was living with a woman he had started dating when she was fourteen and he was thirty-four. They started sleeping together when she turned seventeen, she said. They lived in an A-frame house on Valley Road about a mile from where Maura was last seen—the same house to which Fred’s private investigators had taken cadaver dogs. One of the dogs had hit on a spot in the closet there. Days after Larry handed over the knife, Claude scrapped his red Volvo.

  After Larry went to the Murrays with the knife, Claude told family members that Larry had made up the story in order to get the reward money being offered for information about Maura’s disappearance. Larry had a history of drug use and was not an altogether likable guy.

  The Haverhill police took the tip seriously enough that they asked Claude to sit for a lie detector test, confirmed to me by several sources. But nothing ever came of it and Claude doesn’t appear to be a suspect any longer.

  After I posted about Claude’s link to Jean Caccavaro’s family and the odd similarities between that woman’s disappearance and Maura’s, I got a call from Jean’s ex-husband, James. He’s up in years now. Retired. Cantankerous.

  “Guess what?” he said. “Jean’s alive and well. How’s that for you?”

  For years, James Caccavaro was treated like a murderer by New Hampshire police, the prime suspect in his wife’s 1977 disappearance. But that changed when she returned from the dead in 1984. Jean had simply run away from her family to start a new life. He knows what it’s like to be the center of suspicion, and even though Claude is no longer with his daughter, James feels for the man in a way probably nobody else can.

  THIRTY-ONE

  22 Walker

  Like the Amy Mihaljevic case before, my investigation into the disappearance of Maura Murray was edging away from academic curiosity and into the realm of obsession. I thought about her disappearance all the time, working the clues around to fit them together into a logical narrative—the rag in the tailpipe, Maura’s breakdown at work, the Londonderry ping. The mystery was maddening. Enticingly so.

  I felt the pull of the North Country every day. I wanted to go back. I wanted to walk around the places she had been.

  In late October, I returned to Weymouth. That’s where Fred’s house was. 22 Walker. Maura had used that address for mail, too, even though she had lived with her mother in Hanson.

  Walker Street is a nub of a road and you can only go out the way you came in. Years ago, Fred’s father built the houses on Walker for his family, and some of the extended Murrays still lived there. Fred’s place was in foreclosure. Unpaid taxes.

  I walked around the side of the old house. Some of the windows were boarded. A rectangle of plywood was nailed across the side door and someone had come along and pried up the bottom. I looked into the kitchen. Opened cans of dog food were piled on the floor, reaching to the sink. Empty Coors boxes were stacked in large mounds, four feet high. Out back, the remnants of a shed where Fred’s brother had lived, according to neighbors, leaned against itself. Under planks of wood I found a bunch of mail addressed to Fred. Bills, mostly, and a municipal map of Killarney, Ireland. There were also handwritten notes related to Fred’s appearance on The Montel Williams Show. Under these I found some adult magazines. Penthouse, mostly. Inside one magazine I discovered two black-and-white school photographs of teenage girls. The girls’ names were visible. The girls were Fred’s cousins.

  The disordered mess disturbed me. It didn’t jib
e with the overly controlling image Fred Murray portrayed in public. I didn’t see any sense of control here. And the presence of those young girls’ photographs inside that adult magazine was troubling.

  I left a message on Fred’s voice mail, asking him to help me explain some of what I’d seen in Weymouth. But, of course, I never heard back.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Between the Lines

  Outside of the movies, I don’t know anybody who talks like Fred Murray. Maura wasn’t just abducted, she was “taken by a local dirtbag.” Fred wasn’t growing old, he was halfway to his “final reward.” The police “can’t catch a cold” and “the skunk is on their doorstep.”

  Peter Hyatt is a practitioner of “statement analysis”—finding the hidden subtext behind a person’s choice of words. This method of observing a suspect’s statement to suss out subconscious intentions harkens to the days of Sherlock Holmes but has come back in vogue thanks to a number of Internet message boards devoted to the idea. Hyatt has offered his insights on high-profile crimes, including the Amanda Knox case. He has written a handbook about statement analysis and offers training through his Web site. While his analysis may never be used as evidence in a court of law, it offers a unique perspective on Fred Murray’s choice of language, and a jumping-off point for Hyatt’s disciples.

  We exchanged messages about Fred’s official written statement to police. Here is what Hyatt said:

  “Something is very wrong. Note the dropped pronoun ‘I’ in the first paragraph, and then its appearance later. Note that in 29 lines, he takes 25 to introduce his daughter going missing. The overwhelming number of deceptive statements have lengthy introductions. There is something very bothersome about it. Do police suspect him? Is he just a lousy father, or is there more? They should suspect him.

  “It may be that he is deceptive due to purchasing alcohol, driving under the influence, etc., but the focus of that statement is he, himself, and not his missing daughter. At the Quality Inn, he wishes ‘not’ to be there. Was there anything untoward about their relationship?”

  Hyatt posted Fred’s statement there so that his readers, his own team of Irregulars, could parse through it.

  “Sounds like 3/4 fabrication,” one person wrote.

  “The ‘tale’ he tells is so out of order that it makes no sense.”

  “Why does he call his hotel room ‘the’ room instead of his room? Is it because he always intended to share it with his daughter?”

  “He feels a need to give a reason why he was visiting his daughter. May indicate his intent in going there is questionable (though not necessarily in the context of explaining to the police his reasons for visiting).”

  “He justifies why he was there. Akin to alibi building.”

  Another astute analyst noted something that occurs during Fred’s interview on the Montel show: Fred slipped into the past tense a few times. When he began to say, “We were buddies,” he stopped and switched to “We are buddies.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Petrit Vasi

  It’s difficult to tell exactly who started the rumor that Maura Murray almost killed Petrit Vasi. Most likely, it began with an anonymous post to one of the message boards devoted to her disappearance: Topix, Websleuths, The Charley Project. Or it might have started on the official Maura Murray Web site run by some of the Murrays’ relatives. If that’s the case, we’ll never know for sure, since the family took their message board down when posters began to speculate about Fred’s odd behavior. Whoever started it, the rumor has taken on permanence, because it gives Maura motive to flee.

  In 2004, a man named Petrit Vasi was studying economics at UMass. On Thursday, February 5, Vasi and a friend went into town for drinks. Later, Vasi waited outside for a car to pick him up. That’s the last thing he remembers.

  Police discovered Vasi’s limp body on the side of the road at Triangle and Mattoon, near the baseball field, at 12:20 A.M. There were skid marks in the road. It looked like Vasi had been struck by a car, or thrown from a vehicle while riding dangerously. He lay in a coma for several weeks. When he woke up, he told police he had no recollection of what happened to him.

  So how does this accident connect to Maura Murray?

  February 5 was the night that Maura had her breakdown and cried in front of her supervisor at Melville Hall. Message board commenters suggested that Maura’s breakdown was not caused by the phone call from her sister Kathleen; it was caused by her sneaking out to town for a coffee and striking Vasi on the way back. Maybe that’s how her Saturn really got damaged, and the accident in New Hampshire was staged to cover up the evidence.

  It was a long recovery for Vasi. According to an article in The Daily Collegian, it took him six months to walk again.

  I tracked down Vasi’s sister, Lorina, for an update. Years later, her brother was still not the same person he had been before the accident. The former economics student was working at a car wash in Boston.

  “We’ve stopped looking back on it,” she said. “It’s hard for everyone. We just look forward now, just thankful we didn’t lose him.”

  It was definitely a hit-and-run, Lorina said.

  But from what I learned of Maura’s job, it would have been very difficult for her to slip away and return without being noticed and reprimanded for it. There were supervisors touring the campus dorms that night. And Maura’s car was not parked nearby.

  So why is the Vasi theory still so popular today?

  Perhaps it has to do with this message posted to a GeoCities message board:

  Maura Murray is NOT a Missing Person

  Maura Murray has the right as every independent adult does to leave with her new boyfriend and start a new life. Maura is living a content and satisfying life in the Province of Quebec.

  Maura’s father Fred Murray never quite forgave her for being asked to leave West Point. It was his personal bragging point that he had two daughters at West Point. Maura’s dismissal damaged Fred’s ego and he never completely forgave her.

  Maura’s being asked to leave West Point and all the ensuing criticism by her father was the beginning of a certain line of thought for Maura, culminating in her leaving on Feb 9, 2004 to start a new life unencumbered by the constant criticism of her father. Maura’s relationship with William Rausch was near its end. According to Maura’s sister Kathleen, they were having “serious problems.” Maura had met someone new, who unlike William Rausch, had no West Point connections and therefore was not a constant reminder to her of her failure at West Point.

  On the night of February 5, 2004, Maura took a break from her job at the security desk at a UMass dormitory to go and briefly get coffee and some food.

  Sometime between 12 MN and 1 AM Maura driving her Saturn struck and critically injured the UMass student Petrit Vasi leaving him for dead.

  Around 1 AM—1:20 AM Feb 6 Maura had a complete emotional breakdown brought on by this hit and run accident. Maura’s breakdown was witnessed by a student who reported this to Maura’s supervisor, who then came and saw that Maura needed physical help to get back to her dormitory. The supervisor then physically helped Maura back to her dorm and recommended counseling.

  Between 2 and 3 AM on the morning of Sunday Feb 8, Maura had a second motor vehicle accident wrecking her father’s new car.

  Fred Murray’s new car was towed around 3 AM to his Hadley motel room. Maura arrived at Fred’s motel at the same time as a passenger in the tow truck. Fred was not happy with Maura to put it mildly. What happened in this motel room we’ll never know. The next day Maura left for good.

  Maura needed to disguise the evidence of the Petrit Vasi hit and run by staging another accident for the purpose of covering up the damage to her car from the Vasi hit and run. She and her new boyfriend travelled in tandem to Route 112 in NH (He was already in Southern NH). The accident was staged, she left her Saturn, walked down the road to where her boyfriend was waiting for her in his car. She disappeared, her only wish is that she be left alone to live her
life in peace. She is happy and contented and just wants to be left alone.

  In response to this post, a commenter who went by “Observer” wrote:

  This is common knowledge in certain circles of people who are close to the family.

  And this is where it gets really interesting.

  The moderator of the GeoCities forum wanted to find out who “Observer” was. So she contacted a CPA with a background in computers, James Leone, who knew how to trace IP addresses. Leone traced Observer’s post to a computer in Taunton, Mass. Then he pored over messages posted on the Topix page devoted to Maura’s disappearance, looking for anyone posting from the Taunton area. One avatar stuck out. She posted under the moniker “Citigirl,” and claimed to be related to Maura. Were Citigirl and Observer the same person? If so, who was it? Well, hold on to your butts: The Citigirl avatar was linked to a woman named Patti Davidson. Maiden name: Curran. Patricia Curran was one of the young girls in the photographs I had found in that adult magazine at Fred’s house in Weymouth.

  I called Patricia for comment, but my calls went unreturned.

  I started to wonder if it could all be true. Could Maura be laying low in Quebec? Did the family know? Is that why no one was eager for a book to be written?

  But then I stumbled upon some information about a series of murders that occurred not far from where Maura disappeared that made me question my theory of the tandem driver. Was it possible that a prolific New England serial killer, who had gone dormant for a decade, had returned?

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Shadow of Death Returns

  It’s possible the killings started as early as 1968 with the murder of Joanne Dunham, but nobody can say for sure. It was the beginning of summer, the end of classes. The pretty-as-pie fifteen-year-old was last seen walking away from the Raiche mobile home park in Charlestown, New Hampshire, heading for the bus stop. Her body was found the next afternoon on a roped-off dirt road in nearby Unity. She had been raped and asphyxiated.