by James Renner
The unsolved murders along the Connecticut River Valley began in earnest in 1978. On October 24, twenty-seven-year-old Cathy Millican visited the Chandler Brook Wetland Preserve in New London, to photograph birds. Someone stabbed her twenty-nine times and tossed her body into the marsh. In 1981, a thirty-seven-year-old woman named Mary Elizabeth Critchley was last seen hitchhiking near the Vermont/Mass border on Route 91. By the time her body was found, it was so decomposed that no one could determine the cause of death. There was also Bernice Courtemanche, a friendly sixteen-year-old nurse’s aide, last seen in Claremont on May 30, 1984. Her skeleton was found two years later off Cat Hole Road, in Newport. Four more followed: Ellen Fried, Eva Morse, Lynda Moore, and Barbara Agnew.
The abductions and “dump sites” were concentrated along a short stretch of Route 91 between the Mass border and White River Junction. Investigators attempted to find some connection between the women. All were white. Some worked for the local phone company. Courtemanche, Fried, and Agnew worked in area hospitals. Detectives wondered if their serial killer could be a tow truck driver, cruising rest stops and lonely roads. One woman’s body was found in deep snow, and only a very large truck or Jeep could have gotten to the site.
In 1988, the Connecticut River Valley Killer was nearly caught. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Boroski stopped at a convenience store in West Swanzey on her way home from the county fair. This was in the southwest corner of New Hampshire, a town with a covered bridge. Boroski was seven months pregnant, but that didn’t stop the man in the Jeep Wagoneer. When she returned to her car, he stabbed her twenty-seven times and left her for dead.
Boroski was a tough woman, though. With two collapsed lungs, a severed jugular, and a bleeding kidney, she drove to a friend’s house. She lived. So did her daughter, though the child suffered from mild cerebral palsy because of the attack.
A police sketch artist sat down with Boroski and got a good rendering of her attacker. Height: about 5 feet 8 inches. Maybe 160 pounds. Between thirty and forty years old, with sandy-blond hair and a high forehead. Detectives sent the composite sketch to the papers. And then the serial killer stopped killing. It’s possible he committed suicide or was sent to prison for another crime or simply moved away. Or the Boroski incident might have scared him so much he took a break. It wouldn’t have been without precedent.
Dennis Rader, the so-called BTK Killer—as in “bind-torture-kill”—took breaks from killing, too. The Wichita dogcatcher stopped murdering in 1991 and wasn’t caught until 2004. He quit preying on women because he was raising a family and his sadistic hobby was too time-consuming. He was about to begin again, he says, when police finally caught up with him.
Could the Connecticut River Valley Killer have resurfaced? Was he responsible for the abductions of Brianna Maitland and Maura Murray? Both women vanished just north of the predator’s old killing fields.
An excellent book on the Connecticut River Valley murders was published in 1993. Written by journalist Philip E. Ginsburg, The Shadow of Death is an intimate account of the search for one of America’s most prolific serial killers. Ginsburg’s primary source was one of the first independent criminal profilers, a gonzo psychologist named John Philpin, author of seven true crime books of his own and a frequent commenter on news programs when a girl goes missing.
I looked at Philpin’s press photo, and I saw my future. Worry lines concealed behind a grizzled beard; eyes that had peered beyond the pale. He’d be the first to admit the work weighs on him. I tracked him down one day and was not surprised to learn that he’d already consulted on the Maura Murray investigation.
Philpin does not believe that the Connecticut River Valley Killer has resurfaced. He believes he knows who is responsible for those crimes: a tow truck driver who committed suicide a while back. He thinks the key to finding out what happened to Maura is to learn more about her past. But it’s hard to really get an understanding of Maura’s past when you have to deal with Fred Murray.
“The dad has info he isn’t sharing,” Philpin said. “I never believed Fred. Not one word. There was something very wrong about that man. He created so many smoke screens nobody could get a handle on him. Fred wanted total control of Maura’s life. And there was an unnatural and unusual closeness between father and daughter.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Motive
Casey was expelled from preschool shortly after his Christmas program, for behavior that included hitting, biting, scratching, and running away. The coup de grace was when he walked up to the young woman who assisted his teacher and slapped her ass like he was Boss Hogg at the Boar’s Nest.
I asked him later, “Why did you do that?”
“She wasn’t being nice to me,” he said. “So I spanked her.”
I know what you’re thinking: It was learned behavior. It must all be learned behavior, right? The hitting, the running away … What must be going on behind closed doors? Yes, I did spank him. We tried everything, remember? Time-outs. Positive reinforcement. Diversion. And spanking. A quick swat on his tokus. He’d been spanked maybe five times in his life. We stopped because whenever we spanked Casey he became so offended by our actions that he grew even more belligerent. I was beginning to understand that, on some level, Casey considered himself our equal. Who were we to punish him?
I explained to my son how lucky he was that we didn’t spank him anymore. I told him how, when I was his age, my dad used to come at me with a belt or ask me to go get a thin branch from a tree out back. How my dad’s dad used to just fucking punch him until he quit whining. But the story didn’t slow Casey down any and the next time we visited my dad, he asked him about the belt because he wanted to see it.
“I think pain is funny,” he said one day, out of the blue.
We started seeing a counselor, a woman younger than my wife. Casey played with LEGOS while we talked about him. Hard to tell if any of it was getting through.
Julie found a new Montessori in Akron. The kind Indian woman who ran the place spoke to us in a gentle tone and assured us that no one in the history of her Montessori had ever been turned away based on behavior and Casey would not be the first. He lasted five weeks. When I came to pick him up that last day, I reminded her of what she had said to me when we met. She wasn’t kicking my son out, she explained. Her school just wasn’t the place Casey should be anymore.
Around this time I started smoking weed again.
My buddy Ben was having a rough time. He was a sitting juror on a capital murder case, the kind that was on the news every night. He was thinking about sending the defendant to prison for the rest of his life. And yet he was in awe of the defense attorney’s skill in the courtroom. “You ever get in trouble,” he told me, “you get that Roger Synenberg. Don’t forget that name. Roger Synenberg.”
Ben was from a town in Pennsylvania called Kecksburg, famous for the UFO that supposedly crashed there in 1965. A friend of his grew wonderful marijuana in the woods near the crash site. Couple times a year, Ben went home and brought back some of that Kecksburg Express. The first time I tried it, I didn’t feel a thing until Ben suddenly shrank before my eyes to the size of a midget. Kecksburg weed will fuck up a seasoned pot smoker. And oh the times we had.
It smelled like my childhood. Like going home. It helped me relax after spending the day hunting serial killers and missing women.
I got some interesting news around this time.
“I think there’s a second pink line here,” said Julie. She handed me the plastic wand. At first I didn’t see it. Then I did. It was faint. Very faint. But, yeah. There it was.
We had been trying for months, but I had started to think it might not be possible on the Cymbalta. The doctor confirmed it. Julie was pregnant.
I didn’t know what I was more afraid of: that it would be another boy, or that it would be a girl brought into a world full of dangerous men.
* * *
In January of 2012, I found a better motive for Maura to disappear—better than f
leeing after the Vasi hit-and-run.
I was blanketing the police departments in the areas near where Maura had lived with generic public records requests. In the newsroom, we called this “going fishing.” Sometimes it kicked up a new lead for an article, usually it was a waste of time. Low risk. High reward. I got lucky. A public records request to the Amherst Police Department found a larceny report. Credit card fraud. At the time of her disappearance, Maura was in a lot of trouble with the law.
On November 3, 2003, a UMass student contacted Amherst police. She’d checked her bank account online and had noticed charges to restaurants that she’d never been to: La Cucina di Pinocchio, Domino’s, and Papa Gino’s in nearby Hadley. Someone had racked up debt on her credit card, purchasing about $80 worth of pizza.
Police phoned the restaurants and asked the managers to review receipts for the nights in question. The pizzas, it turned out, were all delivered to Kennedy Hall.
Later that same night, the manager at Pinocchio’s phoned Officer Carlos Rivera at the Amherst police station. A woman had just called and ordered a pizza using the stolen credit card number. Rivera told the manager to make the delivery.
Rivera and another officer, David Pinkham, drove out to Kennedy Hall and waited. The pizza guy arrived. A young woman signed for the food. As soon as she handed the receipt to the driver, the policemen swooped in. It was Maura Murray.
When they walked her back to her room, Pinkham told her to come clean. Maura said she got the credit card numbers off a Pinocchio’s receipt she’d found on the ground. When Rivera pointed out that receipts from Pinocchio’s did not include full credit card numbers, she said she must have gotten it off a receipt from a different pizza place.
Pinkham asked Maura how she remembered the number. But Maura only looked at the ground. He told her to get whatever paper she kept the number on and give it to him. She fished through a drawer and came back with a note card that had the credit card number on it. There were other numbers on the card, too. Several. Maura told him they were her friends’ phone numbers.
Again, Pinkham asked her why she did it. But Maura wouldn’t answer. He took her picture and informed her that they would need her to come in to the station soon to make a statement.
On November 9, Maura sat down with Officer Rivera. From his report: “[Maura] acknowledged she had used the credit card illegally, but did not give a reason why. It is unknown how exactly the credit card number was retrieved.…”
Rivera told Maura that she would be charged with unauthorized use of a credit card, a misdemeanor that carried the possibility of a $500 fine and up to a year in jail. On December 16, Maura went to court and was found guilty. Luckily, the judge ordered that the charge be dismissed under the condition that Maura stay out of trouble for six months. Maura’s record would have been wiped clean in June 2004.
But …
But after a night of drinking, Maura crashed her father’s car into a guardrail while driving to his hotel room at three in the morning. She wasn’t charged with drunken driving, but a reckless op charge was in the works, according to the officer who responded to the scene. Maura was going to be cited for the accident, but she disappeared first. Did Maura think that the larceny charge would come back now that she’d gotten in trouble again?
Maura was studying to be a nurse. What hospital would hire her with a fraud charge on her record?
She kept her court appearances secret from friends and family. Billy never knew.
Here’s what we do know: The day before she disappeared, Maura gave her nursing scrubs to a classmate. She packed up her room. And by Monday evening, Maura was gone for good.
* * *
“It’s a girl,” the technician said, pointing to three black marks on a monitor. The black marks represented a vagina, I guess. Julie squeezed my hand and smiled, then clapped her hands and shouted, “Yay!”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The possible sum of my daughter’s life swept past my mind’s eye—all the intersections of trouble, the random acts of violence we never see coming, the decades of risk that awaited her. And I was responsible for her. There’s a fine line between delusion and vision, between paranoia and risk management. I’m constantly telling myself that just because I have a daughter doesn’t mean she’ll end up like Maura Murray. And it started that day.
“Well, all right,” I said. “All right.”
My wife wanted to name her Amy. But we couldn’t, because I’d written a book about a girl named Amy who’d been abducted and murdered. So we thought on it.
What will she look like? I wondered. What will my girl look like? And what will I do to protect her for the rest of her life? As a father, what wouldn’t I do to keep her out of trouble?
THIRTY-SIX
112dirtbag
On February 8, 2012, the eighth anniversary of Maura’s disappearance, I got a call from one of my Irregulars as I was watching TV with my family. The man’s name was Lance Reenstierna, a videographer from Boston who has his own company called Lucky Quarter Productions. “You gotta see this clip that just went up on YouTube,” he said.
Lance had a Google alert set for any new posts related to Maura Murray. Apparently, someone had used Maura’s name in the metadata of a short video that had been uploaded to YouTube that day from an account named “112dirtbag.” I pulled it up. The video is silent. It’s a single image on slow zoom: a pink ski lift ticket for Bretton Woods Mountain Resort, dated February 11, 2004. The Bretton slopes are north of Haverhill a bit, over by Mount Washington. The ticket is part of an “adult lodging package” purchased two days after Maura’s accident.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. Was someone suggesting that Maura had gone skiing? Was this some kind of evidence?
Lance called me again, a few minutes later. His voice was different this time. He sounded frightened. “A new video just went up from the same account,” he said.
I watched it while Lance stayed on the phone with me.
Slow dissolve into the face of an older man peering into the camera. His head is bald on top, the hair cropped short and gray on the sides. Large ears. He wears glasses and the lenses reflect the blue square of a computer screen. The man appears to be missing several teeth. Behind him is a concrete wall, barely lit. He is laughing. A chuckle that becomes a cackle. And then he stops. And smiles. A piano plays a melancholy tune in the background, Chopin’s Waltz No. 3 (op. 34 no. 2). Fade to black. Words appear onscreen: Happy Anniversary.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Who is that man?”
“I have no idea.”
I felt goose bumps break out over my skin. The hair on the back of my neck bristled. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. Was a killer reaching out over YouTube to taunt investigators on the anniversary of Maura’s disappearance? I decided to not say anything to Julie until I had more information. Every time I drive into the White Mountains, I have to assure her that I’m never in any real danger. I sent the link to law enforcement. Then I embedded the video on my blog. Who was this man? I asked. Did anyone know?
A short time later, 112dirtbag removed both videos and deleted his account. Luckily, Lance had already grabbed copies. I uploaded the two videos to my YouTube account and reposted. Whoever 112dirtbag was, he was having second thoughts about his confession, if that’s what this was. He must have gotten spooked when he saw the view count climbing and tried to go to ground. My Irregulars now had a common target. Soon, they were working together to uncover the identity of 112dirtbag. Someone posted the link on Reddit and a stream of people who had never heard of Maura Murray were suddenly poring over my blog.
One reader noted that the reflection in 112dirtbag’s glasses seemed to show my blog.
Somewhere along the line, people began to threaten the man, whoever he was. A lynch-mob mentality percolated in the comments.
One clever reader noticed similarities between 11
2dirtbag and the profile of a man who had posted on a Topix message board devoted to Maura’s disappearance. He was known as “Beagle” on Topix, and he sometimes wrote rambling posts blaming UMass researchers for Maura’s abduction, claiming they had harvested her eggs for scientific experiments.
Here’s an excerpt from one of Beagle’s posts:
“What do antioxidants (aka vitamins, nutritional supplements) do? They fight off free radicals. What do free radicals do? They reduce the length of the chromosomes telomeres.
Molly Bish, Maura Murray, and Lindsay Ferguson were attacked because they were, biologically, highly desirable organisms.”
Beagle’s profile photo resembled the scary laughing man who posted on YouTube as 112dirtbag. But it was hard to tell for sure, because the laughing man was cast in shadow in some dirty basement. I couldn’t help but wonder: Was he keeping women in that basement?
Then someone dug up a personal blog that Beagle had used as a diary, writing vignettes about his time spent homeless in Massachusetts, living out of his van and working as a Wal-Mart greeter near UMass.
On February 10, a new video was uploaded to YouTube, this time through the account “Mr112Dirtbag.” The most cryptic message so far, it was a computer-generated painting of a bald man’s head next to some symbolic code. Four numbers and a red zigzag. 1, 5, 27, 8. Was it a map to Maura’s body? What was Mr112Dirtbag trying to tell us?
One commenter noted that Mr112Dirtbag alluded to another cold case in the metadata of this newest post, which referenced a news article about the unsolved murder of Daniel Croteau, a thirteen-year-old boy whose body was found lying facedown in the Chicopee River on April 15, 1972. Chicopee is a short drive from Amherst. Was it 1, 5 for “15”? Did he reverse 72 to make 27? Was he claiming responsibility for this crime, too? Police had a good suspect for Croteau’s murder, a defrocked priest. Did they have the wrong man?
