Hey guys. Welcome back to my channel. If you are new here, welcome. We are here for another episode of Where Is, which is a series that I started a little while ago and it is about missing people and the idea is to just bring awareness to these cases, a lot of people don't know about them and not only that, these videos are very interesting to watch. If you saw my previous Where Is episode, it was for Kristen Smart and I just want to tell you guys this because it was really interesting. Right after I posted the video, very quickly after, I was contacted by some people in Kristen's family and I guess her mother was very happy with the video, had very nice things to say to me so
I feel like this series is headed in a good direction and I'm hoping that maybe we can help in some way. This episode is about to be one of the most interesting you will ever hear. This video is going to be so long, it's definitely snack worthy so grab yourself a snack. It's gonna be kind of confusing and there's so much information that I can't possibly cover it all so I'm going to try and put out what I think is the most important information. Stick with me because it is a fascinating case. If you are new here and you like missing person cases, you would like my channel. I also do conspiracy theories, mysteries, things like that, just kind of out of the box, interesting topics so definitely subscribe and stick around and if you are subscribed make sure to hit my bell, which is the little bell next to the subscribe button on your phone or computer, whatever, but let's get started. Today we are talking about the case of Maura Murray. It is unbelievably complicated, extremely frustrating and confusing. Normally when I research missing person cases, I normally have a theory that I tend to believe in more, like lean towards, but with this case it is so, there are so many possibilities and it really could be anything, so I'm not leaning in any direction as far as what I think happened to her. I first found out about Maura Murray years ago watching this thing on like ID discovery which is a show about missing people and it is very crazy because that episode didn't do the story justice at all. There is a lot of missing parts and a lot of sugarcoating. I have gotten most of my information on this from a podcast that is going to be turned into a documentary and it is fascinating. I highly recommend it, I'm going to leave a link to the channel below, you can watch it here on YouTube. The episodes are long, I've been listening to it for days but it is definitely worth the listen. So this is Maura Murray, she was a beautiful girl. She was born on May 4th 1982 in Hanson, Massachusetts. Her parents are Fred and Laurie Murray, although they did get divorced when she was pretty young, I think around the age of 6, maybe. Let me tell you something that will just hook you into this case. Maura disappeared on February 9th 2004 Maura got in a car accident on that day and when the police got to the scene of the accident, the car was locked and Maura was nowhere to be found, and that was the last that anyone has heard of what happened to her, so let me back up now and explain everything that led up to this. Maura was 5'7", she weighed about 120 pounds and she was a serious athlete, she was a runner. She wasn't currently on a team or anything but she used to run track. I believe she'd won state championships or had some type of records or something in high school. She was a good runner so she's a fast person. Now before I get any further, when she disappeared in 2004 I just wanted to point out that there was a serious difference in technology. The world was almost completely different than it is today which is crazy because it hasn't been that long but as we talked about in my simulation theory video, technology is moving at an extremely fast pace. But back in 2004, this was when Facebook was first starting, I was in 6th grade I believe, there was not this constant connection and the ability for cases like this to go viral and get pictures out. It just wasn't the same. Also, the technology was really old so it makes the investigation harder. Back then cell phones weren't even as common, not everyone had a cell phone, not everyone was texting on cell phones. This is like before even the Motorola RAZR came out, which was my first cell phone so just to put it into perspective for you how different everything was back then. There's not nearly as much of a digital trail on people as there is today when people go missing so the case is very complicated, very muddy and confusing and there's a lot of parts where things just don't make sense. Maura was like a good kid, good person, she was a nice person but trouble kind of seemed to follow her. Most of her family members and friends have talked about how she was bulimic, just had some behavioural problems. She got it trouble with the law a few times for stealing but overall a nice person but it almost seemed like she kind of had like two sides to her. So she used to go to West Point and her sister went there and graduated from there, Julie, who was kind of like the lead of the family. Her other sister, Kathleen, I believe, actually got in trouble for a marijuana grow operation and went to rehab and so she was kind of somewhere in the middle. Her sister was very successful so there was like a lot of pressure. Maura actually stole some makeup from West Point, something like a store, a gift shop or something and she got kicked out of the school because of it, it was like breach of conduct or whatever. So she actually changed schools and went to UMass Amherst and she was a nursing student. So three months before her disappearance when she was at UMass Amherst, she got in trouble for credit card fraud and the way that she said this went down is she, I think got a receipt from like a trashcan and took someone's credit card number which, I don't know how old these freaking machines were back then but that's crazy, I think they may have even printed like numbers or barcodes on them. Anyway, she only used this for like food, there was like purchases for sandwiches and pizza, just like stuff on the campus and so it was under $250 so she didn't get arrested, they kind of let her off the hook, she was on probation at the time. They took this picture of her, the police did on the campus just for record of it and I don't know about you guys but she looks like a different human. She doesn't look like any of her other pictures and her eyes almost look evil or possessed or I don't know, maybe she was just terrified. Anyway so she was on probation at the time. The receipts show that she was buying larger quantities of food like two sandwiches or like extra large everything and it's possible that she was getting it for another person with her or she was bringing it to a party, I mean no one really knows but a lot of people have speculated that she was bulimic and as someone who was bulimic myself, if you haven't seen my eating disorder story I'll link it below but it seems pretty obvious to me that she did struggle with bulimia. I guess some of her family members used to give her shit for it, like they knew she was bulumic and say things like 'why would you eat that, you're just going to throw it up later' and just things like that, really nasty comments. So we need to talk about the days before the disappearance because that's where the bulk of the information is. There's actually really not much post-disappearance, there's not much clues or evidence. Often times with missing person cases the best information is what they were doing before, the days before leading up to their disappearance. So she disappeared on February 9th, we're going to go back to February 5th and this was a Thursday, a late night shift at her job. This was a Thursday night and she was working a late night shift. I believe she worked like some type of late night campus security job like I used to see RAs like running the front desk and they just check people's ID cards and like make sure no one weird is coming in the building, they're not like security guards but she was just basically working behind a desk and she had a phone call with her sister that night. No one for sure, since Maura's not here to tell us, knows exactly what they talked about, according to her sister it was a lot about her fiance, Kathleen's fiance, and she was having some issues with him and Maura was like just listening to her vent about it. So about 1 am, her supervisor went past her desk and said that Maura was sitting there, staring off into space, completely zoned out, blank stare, absolutely no reaction, with an open book in front of her. Her supervisor obviously was concerned and Maura was really upset, crying. When they asked her 'what's wrong', she said 'my sister' and so her supervisor walked her back right up to her room and said that she even felt nervous about leaving her in that state in her room but Maura told her that she had a roommate and so everything was fine, turns out she didn't even have a roommate. I don't want to get in too much of a tangent on this because this is totally just a theory, it may have nothing to do with Maura but it is very interesting to know. At 12:20 am, like right before Maura was freaking out there was a serious accident very close to the campus and a student named Treat, he was either ejected from a car or hit by someone and has no memory of anything, he had serious head trauma, didn't even know how old he was when the police asked him and there's many people out there that think that Maura took like a coffee break and possibly had involvement in that and that she wasn't really upset over her sister that she was upset because she hit and run or something along those lines. Now there is no evidence of this, this is just a theory but I though it was interesting, I thought I'd throw it out there. Remember Maura was on probation at the time for credit card fraud so it's possible she didn't want to get in any more trouble. So on February 7th, Maura's father, Fred, came to visit her at UMass and he said that he took her used car shopping, her car was kind of a clunker, kind of just falling apart so apparently they were car shopping. Now her father Fred, I cannot make up my mind on him because he seems like a very sweet guy and when she was younger, he was like her basketball coach, I guess they had a really good relationship. I don't know, I'm torn because he did have some sketchy behaviour during the case, does that mean he did anything? No, not neccessarily but it is kind of strange, his timeline of that day that he was visiting her is kind of odd. "I was up visiting her for the weekend. She needed a new car and we spent the afternoon looking around for a car to buy We decided what type. That night we went out to eat." He said that he took Maura and a friend to dinner after the car shopping and afterwards took them to a liquor store and at first he said he was in the car while they were in the liquor store, then he later said 'I was in the liquor store and I told them to hurry up in their selection process'. So no one really knows like what really happened that night. "She got a call from one of her friends and she was going back to the dorms to spend some time with her friend. She dropped me off at a motel I was staying at." He decided to loan her his brand new Toyota Corolla, brand new car, his daughter's been drinking and he gives her his new car, very strange. ".. took my car and on the way back from the dormitories she had an accident and the car was towed back, she told me about it in the morning." He also knew that she had alcohol, she was going to a party with it so I mean it seems like a very strange move to be like 'hey, why don't you take my brand new car', like most parents would be like 'how about I pick you up'. The party was on campus in a dorm and around 2:30 am she left and at 3:30 am on her way to her dad's motel to bring the car back but at around 3:30 am on her way to her father's motel she struck a guard rail and did about $10,000 of damage to his Toyota Corolla, got a tow truck and the tow truck driver apparently, I mean is very foggy about what happened but they think that the tow truck driver took her back to her father's motel. There was no sobriety taken so no one knows if she was drinking and driving but most likely she was. She went back to her father's motel and then this is really sketch, no one can figure this out. Fred, her father, has said that Maura came in to his hotel room and he didn't even know she was there until the morning. No one really can figure out if there was one bed in there or two beds. I guess some of the units at this motel had two beds but they think that they were in a room with one bed so it's kind of confusing of how she would get in there and how would she even be let in because she would have had to you know get like the manager from the motel and they probably would have called first before being like 'yeah, sure, let me like let you in in the middle of the night to someone's random room'. So it's kind of strange. At 4:49 am, there was a call made from Fred's phone to Maura's boyfriend and it''s very possible that Maura didn't have her cell phone with her or it was dead or didn't have service or whatever reason and she uses her dad's phone most likely to call her boyfriend and tell him that she was in an accident. Her boyfriend's name was Billy Rausch and they seemed to have a pretty close relationship, although like I said it's very hard to get information but it is widely believed that he was having affairs and she was having an affair actually with her track coach. There's not enough time in this video to get into that. So the next day, Fred obviously found out what happened to his car and no one knows where sure how he reacted, he may have been really overdramatic or yelled at her or freaked her out, I mean there's a possibility. "I, you know, wasn't that actually all that upset, I was concerned of how I was going to get back to my job because it was Sunday and all the car places are closed." He says he stayed relatively cool, he found out that his insurance covered the car and he just got a rental car and dropped her back off at the campus and headed back to Ken.. Connecticut, I almost said Kentucky. And that was the last time that he would see his daughter, sadly. At 11:30 that night he called her. He said that they agreed to fill out the insurance forms and have a conversation more about the whole situation that following Monday night. So we're finally at the day that she disappeared, February 9th 2004 That day, Maura had gone on her computer and went to MapQuest, old-school right, and looked up directions to Berkshire, I think, and Burlington, Vermont. At 1 pm, she emailed her boyfriend and she told him 'I got your messages, I don't really feel like talking to anyone right now, though, so anyway love you' and she signed off saying 'love you stud'. At 1:24 pm, she emailed her supervisor at the nursing school and told her that she would be out of town for a week because of a death in the family and there is no death in her family, her family has all confirmed that, no one knows what she was talking about so this was just a straight up lie. At 2:05 pm, she called this phone number that provided like information about hotel booking and ski stuff in Stowe, Vermont. It said that the call was about 3 minutes long and she, I don't think connected with anyone because I guess their phone lines were down that day so she just didn't make a reservation but was probably just listening to information. So no one knows exactly where she was headed or what her plans were at this point. She packed up like clothing and toiletries and you know just stuff that you would need, as well as textbooks and birth control pills. Once the police started investigating this, when they went to her dorm room they actually found that she had packed up like boxes, almost like she was going to move somewhere, her art had been taken off of the walls. At 3:30 pm, she left campus in her black Saturn Sedan. About 10 minutes later, she stopped at an ATM and withdrew like her whole bank account, it was like $280. There was footage taken at the ATM and she was alone at the time of the transaction. Then she went to a liquor store and purchased about $40 worth of alcohol. They have the receipts from it so they know what she bought, which I've heard it so many times I can probably remember it, it was like Kahlua, vodka, Baileys and a box of Franzia. It kind of looks like she was like running away, right. They also found on her computer that she was searching for stuff related to pregnancies, so a lot of people think that maybe she was pregnant. It did look like she was leaving like for good, like she had planned this out. What's strange is that she did pick up those forms, those motor vehicle forms. So it kind of leaves me thinking like maybe she had intended to come back. Her last recorded use of her cell phone was at 4:37 pm and she called to check her voicemail if you are young and you don't know this, back when cell phones first started, you had to call your voicemail and then like sit there and then delete it by pressing the keys or listening and so it was a whole different thing. So she called her voicemail, no one knows if there was a voicemail, if she deleted it. Not a single person knows where she was headed or what she was going to do or what her plan was, no one knows anything about what she was doing. She was on Route 112 in Haverhill, New Hampshire and she got into an accident and when the police found her car, it was facing west in the eastbound lane so it's almost like she spun out of control. She was in the middle of the White Mountains, these are very, very twisty roads, it would be very easy to lose control of your car, if you've never driven in the mountains before it is hella scary, especially in the dark. I hate driving in the mountains at night, it freaks me out so much. "And so the car wasn't running properly. It impacted right down here, there was a big snow bank here. It's so dark here, if you look in this direction you can't see your hand in front of your face." The first person to come across her when she got in this accident was this man named Butch and he was a bus driver, a school bus driver, and he pulled up. "I just asked her how she was, she said she was shaken up, I couldn't see any blood on her face and she was shaking like this. I said 'okay, I'm gonna go call the police'." And she told him not to call the police because she had AAA on the way which we later found out that she never called AAA because there was no service out there, especially in 2004, there's not even service there today. "The bus driver told us she didn't appear to be hurt, he offered to call the police for assistance and she really asked him not to, she said that she had called AAA but it being in the location of the mountains he also knew that there was no cell phone coverage there." And so she lied to him. He figured 'okay, well that's kind of strange' and he went home and he called the police so I think it was about 8 minutes later the police arrived at the scene of the crash, it was like very shortly after it happened. and when they got there, the car was locked, no one was in it, the bottle of Kahlua was gone, maybe taken with her, maybe thrown out, who knows. And there was no trace of Maura Murray. There was actually another witness, there's a house right near the crash site and this woman saw the whole thing happen from her kitchen window. She said that she saw a second person in the car smoking a cigarette. She later retracted that and said maybe it wasn't, maybe it was her cell phone reflection in the mirror so it seems like she doesn't really know. The bus driver, Butch, said that he didn't see anyone else, the she was the only person there and they've done investigations on him, he's I think pretty much considered innocent. When the impact happened, the car's radiator was pushed into the fan and the car was inoperable so she couldn't like drive away or anything. They found a diet coke bottle in the car that smelled of alcohol. They believe that it was filled with wine because there was red liquid found on the ceiling of the car and on the driver's side door which indicates to me an accident like whoo, you know, spilling your drink so I mean we have no for sure on anything here but it's pretty widely believed that she was drinking and driving. So that could mean that she didn't want to get in trouble, remember she's on probation, and maybe she knew she was going to get busted for drunk driving if he called the police. Maybe she felt like 'there's nowhere to go, the police are eventually going to find me' so she just hid in the woods, just ran, remember she's a runner. And another thing to note is that when the police first came up on this accident they don't know that this is going to be a missing persons case. It's not very uncommon for people who get in drunk driving accidents to ditch their car and run away and then a few days later make up some excuse like I had a seizure or whatever, I guess it happens all the time so they figured she just ran away from the scene because she was drunk driving and like hit. So no one is actively looking for her this wasn't like a crime scene yet. Also it's pretty cold up there, about 30 degrees. It was a kind of a warmer day I guess but there was like light flurries of snow. So it kind of sucked to just run off into the woods in the snow. Another strange aspect is when the police interviewed Butch, who was the bus driver that came up upon her, he saw a picture of Maura and said "that's not the girl that I saw." Later on he said "yeah, that's probably her", you know maybe she just looked like she had after her car accident which is totally possible. The windshield had a crack in it, like someone's head hit it. So they towed her car and and it was impounded and it's really weird, it is still sitting out in the open like in this field, I don't remember exactly where but wherever they took the car and it's still there, like people go and like take pictures with it, it's very strange, it's like still just out there, as far as I know it's still there. "The area's like a second home to Maura she's come here to the region with her family since she was a kid." Going back to the father and his kind of strange behaviour, when the police contacted him the next day one of the first things he said to them was "if you find a rag in the tailpipe, I told her to put it there because her car wasn't running very well." Now I don't know much about cars but it is a very strange thing to tell your daughter to put a rag in the tailpipe. No one knows if the rag was soaked in anything, a lot of people have thought maybe it was like chloroform or something that leaked through the exhaust and like almost made her out of it and crash or I don't really understand cars to be honest. As far as I know, that is a very strange to do. There are people out there that say that they have done this and it's like an old trick. No one knows if there were any fingerprints on the rag or what it was. They, I guess, actually removed the tail pipe and also removed the muffler and the exhaust system. Her cellphone and her debit card and credit cards were not found in the car. So, the next day the family was informed about what happened obviously. Billy, her boyfriend, drove there and his family as well, they were really close with her. His family was paying for her AAA and for her cellphone and they really thought the two of them were going to get married so they were really involved and they would visit with her all the time. She was kinda like family to them. There was this really strange phone call that Billy got and it was just a random number and it was just someone like breathing softly and then hung up. This obviously freaked him out for a while and I still see this all over the internet but they actually have confirmed, which this is from James Renner's blog, James Renner is a great source so I will put his blog below too, he really, really knows what he is talking about. They have actually have confirmed that it was actually one of the first responders calling him and there wasn't service. They searched with helicopters and dogs and no one found her. "We're going to be encompassing about a half a mile radios to start. Again we are looking for any signs so had she gone to the woods, she had to have left some sign behind." "The state police brought a dog and the dog was given a glove but it was a brand new glove that Maura had just gotten for Christmas but if they had asked me, I'd have given them something that she used all the time like running gear or something like that. The dog followed the scent up to about here were the the dog lost it." "We did an intensive search of the crash scene area for evidence that she may walked into the woods. Nothing like that was uncovered." And that's where pretty much everything ends. "Her family and friends are trying not to lose hope. Haverhill police have been working with state police and Fish and Game to find Maura, while her family and friends have been driving all of the region, posting these missing person signs hoping someone may give them a clue as to where she is." "..just looking for something, somebody just to come out and say something." "Cathleen Murray has spent the last three days searching for her sister, 21 year old Maura. The UMAS college student hasn't been seen since Monday night when she crashed her 96 black Saturn on Route 12 in Woodsville. Police arrived to find the car but no sign of her." "She might be afraid that she is gonna get in trouble but we just want to let her know that it's fine, we just want her to come home." "..just a great person, we want her to come home, safely." "She is the best. I mean she's got a lot of family, a lot of friends and we just, we love her, we just want to see her." There is really no for sure theory about what happened, there is not one that like leads the others. There is so many different things that could have happened to her, she could have been abducted, she could have had someone with her abducting her, she could have been running away. There is many people that think they seen her. There been sightings, none of them been confirmed sightings but there are a lot of people that think she lives in Canada even like her friends people have said that they think that she just went and started a new life and maybe she is, maybe she's out there and she's alive and she doesn't want to be found, obviously, it's been years, you would've come forward but maybe she really did start a new life and it's possible that she did have something to do with that guy that died on campus and the guilt scared her away, that combined with her dad's car and possibly being pregnant. But this is all speculation at this point. There's totally a possibility that she got picked up, there's a possibility that she even died out in the woods. One thing if you look up Maura Murray, you're going to find this creepy guy, I think his name is Alden. He made this really weird video on the anniversary of her death on YouTube. It was taken down. His username was like 'dirtbag' something. He put out this video just laughing hysterically. I'm going to put in a little bit of it but it's scary, just want to warn you. And then it just says 'happy aniversary' at the end. Her family has completely dismissed this, said to just ignore it, anyone who's like seriously investigating this case doesn't take him seriously. It's more of something where this guy knows that he's going to get a rush out of people by scaring them with this or get some kind of sick enjoyment, you know, gets off on this so they don't really think he's actually connected to it. I really hope that one day there's a better lead or maybe it even gets solved, maybe Maura is really out there. If you're going to do some more research on this, just to point out, Wikipedia is edited by users, that's where everyone seems to go for stuff like this. There's a lot of false information on the Wikipedia page about this. If you have any information about Maura, if you recognise her, if you think you know anything, a tip, anything, I will leave all that information below of how to get that to the right people. Here is a picture of Maura, like I said she was 5'7", 120 pounds. Beautiful smile, beautiful girl and just a very, very sad story. Anyway, I hope you guys are having a good day and that you found this case interesting. Be sure to hit the like button if you want to see more missing person cases. I definitely have a lot that I can talk about in the future. Make sure to give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more missing person videos, be sure to subscribe if you're not already and I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.
