by James Renner
I thought about another of the world’s greatest mysteries—an abduction, no less—that occurred not far from here on a similar cold, dark night in 1961. Returning from vacation in Montreal, Betty and Barney Hill spotted a strange aircraft over the mountains while en route to Portsmouth. Curious, they followed the light into Franconia Notch, just below the Old Man in the Mountain. It was there, Betty and Barney later claimed, that they were abducted by the crew of a spaceship—humanoid aliens from the Zeta Reticuli star system. It’s the sort of story you laugh at during the day. But, at night, you can’t help but wonder.…
A turn appeared quickly out of the dark. My tires lost traction. Turn into the skid, I heard my old man say. I course-corrected and came out of the drift. Surely that turn was where Maura had left the road. But there was no weathered barn that I could see. Maybe it was back a ways, beyond the reach of my headlights. But there was no blue ribbon, either. Not here.
I drove back to the beginning of the Wild Ammonoosuc and tried again. Somehow, I ended up on French Pond Road this time, heading into the town of Swiftwater. Goddamn it. The dash read 7:45 and I still had no idea where this weathered barn was. I searched for another half hour, then gave up.
I made my way back to the Wells River Motel, across the border into Vermont. This hotel was the headquarters for the search for Maura Murray in 2004, a humble one-story white ranch building with theme rooms. The owner put me in the Teddy Bear Suite—beggars can’t be choosers. I got properly drunk and spent the night surrounded by stuffed bears, angry with myself for thinking I could trick the universe. What had I expected would happen? That the man Maura’s family believed abducted her would drive by and offer me a ride the same way he’d done for her, seven years ago?
ELEVEN
Never Take Rides from Strangers
I awoke the next morning to one of those fuzzy headaches where everything looks like it’s coming at you through a bronze filter. Took a warm shower. Shaved. Called home. Then I checked out of the motel and drove into Woodsville for breakfast at Shiloh’s, one of those catchall country diners that can still be found in the vast, empty spaces between cities. After some coffee and eggs I got back in the car and gave it another try.
I got my first real view of the White Mountains that morning. I was born and raised in Northeast Ohio, where the land is flat except for where it buckles up around the Cuyahoga River. My hometown was a pretty place to explore on the back of a Huffy bike, but I would never use the word “grandeur” when describing it. This part of New Hampshire, though … it fit into that part of my mind reserved for visions of Mirkwood and the foothills of the Lonely Mountain from The Hobbit. Back in Akron, I could take nature for granted. Here, nature persists. It clamors for your attention: the wide, frozen rivers; the expansive farms; the hills of pine that roll like waves all the way to the horizon. I was struck by the new colors of the trees and rocks and grass and water, as if I had been living in a three-color world and suddenly I had been transported into one of those new TVs, the ones with the fourth color that makes everything more vibrant. I was affected, too, by the size of the world, the distance I could see. That is grandeur: size. Mount Washington loomed over everything, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, 6,288 feet above sea level. It was formed primarily by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which carved great gulches through New Hampshire twenty-five thousand years ago, and it’s capped in rock and snow and ice. The mountain serves as the boundary between the northern Presidential range and its gentler, southerly sisters. The Native Americans called this mountain Agiocochook or Waumbeket Methna. This is history, and even sociopaths like me feel humility before it.
The drive along Wild Ammonoosuc Road was a different journey in the morning light, sober. This time, I kept going long after it felt as though I must have passed the place where Maura had crashed. On my left, the Swiftwater Stage Shop went by, a combo fill-up station and small grocery inside an old cabin. About a mile later, I found the weathered barn.
It’s not really weathered, this barn. It’s painted red and white and there’s a gravel lot beside it. It sits off the road at a sharp turn, almost a 90-degree bend. In the winter, the snowbanks are packed into glacial walls by the plows. Just after the barn, I spotted a giant blue ribbon tied to a thin fir tree. The story goes that Fred Murray had put the first ribbon there but that it had been replaced by family members and friends over the years, a quiet memorial to the missing woman, a reminder to locals that someone still cared.
I tried to imagine how the accident might have happened, how Maura had ended up in the snowbank on the right side, facing back the way she’d come. Early reports said she’d likely slid at the turn and crashed into the shoulder. But I couldn’t make that work in my mind. The centrifugal forces that gripped the car after the curve should not have allowed for this. Maybe she’d bounced from one side to the other, like a bearing in a pinball machine. (Granted, I’m no physicist.)
I turned around at Bradley Hill Road, a T-intersection about three hundred feet beyond the blue-ribbon tree, and then parked in the gravel lot behind the weathered barn. I retrieved my camera from the backseat and walked to the crash site. As I snapped away, a red car pulled up beside me and stopped. I waved at the driver, an old man hunched over the wheel. He rolled down his window.
“You here for Maura Murray?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I know what happened to her.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “Hop in and I’ll show you.”
Now, in hindsight, I realize how this looks. It’s a hundred kinds of bad, is it not? We’re taught in preschool that we should never, ever accept rides from strangers. And I suppose that goes double for strangers who show up at a crime scene. Obviously, I’m not getting into this man’s car.
“Can you just tell me?” I asked.
“No. I have to show you.”
“Can I follow you in my car?”
The old man shook his head. “That’ll take too long. You interested or what? I have things to do.”
“Let me lock up,” I said.
I walked back to my car, reminding myself of all the reasons I shouldn’t be doing what I was about to do. This is the part in the horror movie where the audience groans because, really, how stupid can a person be?
But …
But he was old. Like, really old. Ancient. Looked to be about ninety. No joke. I’m not a big guy but I thought I could take a ninety-year-old man. Also, what are the chances, right? Would a serial killer really come back to the scene of the crime and ask a reporter to get into his car so that he could kill him, too? That’s ridiculous.
I wrote the man’s license plate number in my notebook and then slipped it under the driver’s seat. He probably wouldn’t murder me and use my skin for a man-suit, but if he did, I wanted someone to find him.
I got into the old man’s car and buckled my seat belt. He turned around and drove east.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ain’t gonna tell you my name,” he said.
Christ, I thought. Enough with the melodrama. “So what happened to Maura Murray?”
“I’ll show you what I think happened,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. His car had that smell cars get when you don’t clean them too often: dirt and grime, not really unpleasant. “That year, the snow was built up just like it is now. Enough snow on the ground you could track a person if they walked in it.”
He nodded to the left, at a ranch home with wood siding and a rack of antlers above the garage door. “That’s Butch’s place. Or was,” he said. Butch Atwood: the bus driver, the last person to speak to Maura before she disappeared. “Butch had an antique business, you know? Flea market. Sold old glass bottles, that sort of thing. He was sitting in his bus there, out front of the garage with a clear view of the girl’s car. He would have seen if she’d taken a ride with somebody. And maybe she did. And maybe the person he saw her get a ride with was someone he was ascared of. The
person I have in mind is capable of threatening Butch.”
“Who was it?”
The old man didn’t answer. We had been driving east for several minutes now, and had not passed another road. Just dense forest on the right, river on the left. If Maura had come running this way after the accident, there would have been no place for her to hide when another driver came along.
“Where in the world could someone hide a dead body around here?” I said.
“I’ll show you,” he said with a smile.
Finally, we came to another road that hooked right, up the mountain.
“This is Route 116,” he said. “Rough country round here. Ah, here you go.” The old man pulled his car to the side, by a guardrail. We got out and walked over to the ledge. We were on a short bridge above a deep gulley. Twenty feet below, a torrent of clear water shot around giant boulders crusted with ice, snaking down the mountain toward the Ammonoosuc.
“Right here’s a good place,” he said, looking into the gulley. “You could throw a body into that brook and it would keep in the ice until the thaw and then it would wash away down the river when the ice broke up.”
We stared at the water for some time and then returned to his car. We continued farther up Route 116.
“There was a woman’s body found in a brook in Swiftwater some years ago,” he said. “Epileptic woman, did work for this fella I want to tell you about. Housekeeping. I heard there was a pickup spotted by the girl’s accident that night. This fella, he drives a black pickup. He gets to drinking sometimes. And when he drinks, he gets mean.”
We stopped at a private drive that led farther up the mountain. But the old man didn’t say anything.
“Is this where he lives?” I asked.
The old man drove on. “I told you all I can tell you,” he said. “It may be all well. Maybe nothing to it. I just had something flash over my mind. That’s all.”
A few minutes later we arrived back at the weathered barn and he left me by my car. He didn’t say anything else. Just shook my hand and went on his way. I’ve thought about this encounter a lot over the years. And I’m still at a loss. Oh, I tracked him down, eventually. Used his license plate. I discovered he had a property dispute with the man he accused. That’s probably all it is—just bad blood between two weird men. But … I wonder.
When he was out of sight, I continued east down the Kancamagus Highway, making for Route 93. I could take it south into Eastern Mass. From there, it was a straight shot to Hanson, where Maura Murray was a legend long before her disappearance.
TWELVE
The Runner
I like Hanson. It reminds me of home. The roads are wide and the houses are not too close together. Lots of ponds for fishing and a couple places to get freezer meat and beer. Teens still party in the woods and ride dirt bikes over at “the pits” and hang out at the BK. People here live for Friday night football. Not so close to the ocean that you have to think about it all the time. I found this restaurant on Route 58, the Olde Hitching Post, that serves everything from Yankee Pot Roast to Shrimp Pignoli. I ordered crab cakes and a Diet Coke, and then drove out to Maura’s high school, Whitman-Hanson Regional.
This wasn’t the school Maura knew. This brand-new sprawling brick campus sits where the old cross-country course once was. But Maura is still a presence here. A records board hangs on the wall by the gym. The Murray girls are all over it. Julie and Maura hold the records for the 3.1-mile. In 1997, Julie ran a 19:10. Maura did it in 18:58. Julie was first. But Maura was better.
In the athletic office, I found two coaches who remembered Maura. Coach Mike Driscoll’s face lit up when he talked about his star runner. “She was extremely driven,” he said. “She always wanted to be the best. Her freshman year, she broke the record in the two-mile. I thought, Wow! She’s got big things going for her. Then she kind of matured and her speed was never the same. What she had was endurance. She was an icon.”
Coach Keith Erwin, a young man with clipped dark hair, went to school with Maura. He was a senior when she was a freshman. “She was very soft-spoken,” he recalled. “But she would give you the shirt off her back.”
“The last time I saw her,” said Driscoll, “she was running for UMass. She seemed so happy to be away from West Point.”
Both men remember Maura’s father. Fred was the constant shadow behind both girls.
“Fred was a pretty good baseball coach around here when I was growing up,” said Driscoll. “His teams were always the best. Fred coached Maura, too. He was always leading her in extra workouts. She adored her father. She would do anything for him.”
“You would always see her dad at races,” said Erwin. “And sometimes, I’d see Maura out at Luddam’s Ford, fishing from the shore with Fred.”
When news of Maura’s disappearance made its way to Hanson, her coaches were shocked, but hopeful.
“Honestly,” said Driscoll, “I hope she was meeting someone up there and that she’s still around.”
I thought that was an odd statement to make, given the things they’d just told me about Maura’s relationship with Fred. If she had run away, why wouldn’t she tell her father?
THIRTEEN
Private Eyes
Few people know the particulars of Maura’s story as well as John Healy. When I interviewed him, he was sixty-two and retired from the state police, a grizzled man with a high forehead, a gumshoe from central casting. When her case first threatened to go cold, Healy mustered a group of private eyes to reevaluate the mystery. I gave him a call shortly after returning to Ohio, and he gave me an earful. He was living in a house in the woods of Warner, New Hampshire. At the time, he was busy trying to get a convicted rapist out of prison.
“He didn’t do it,” said Healy. “This broad made it up. I put a lot of people in jail when I was a cop. I can’t sit by and let an innocent man rot in prison. That sticks in my craw. This one, it sticks with you, too. Maura’s disappearance. And, for me, it was about my daughter, Melissa. She’s blind in one eye. One day she was sitting in her room at college and she looks up and a black guy is standing there. He got scared. Backed out, disappeared. There but for the grace of God goes my daughter. I needed to do this case. I don’t know if I did it for the Murray family or me.”
The first thing Healy did was talk to Jeffery Strelzin, the chief prosecutor for the New Hampshire AG’s office. He’d known Strelzin when the lawyer was a teenager. Healy wanted his blessing before starting. After he got it, Healy e-mailed other private eyes in his organization, expecting to hear back from a couple. A dozen responded, a civilian force to rival the official investigation.
“I went out to the scene to get a feel for the area. Then we conducted interviews. Did backgrounds on everybody. We interviewed the entire fire department who responded to the accident the night Maura disappeared.”
Then came the ground searches. Healy explained how the volunteer searches you see on TV news reports are logistical nightmares. To do it well, you need to feed and house the volunteers. Medical staff should be on hand for emergencies. Then there’s the problem of communication. Everyone needs a charged walkie-talkie. You need a staff just to organize the volunteers, to corral them into grid patterns, and to take a head count at the end of the day. The searches for Maura Murray’s body—because that’s what they were looking for by then—were daunting due to the mountainous terrain: deep gullies; wide rivers; steep drop-offs. Unforgiving country. A family donated their summer home to house his crew. A school provided beds for twenty men. Merchants delivered free water. They set up a command post with a private area for the Murrays, out at the Mountain Lakes estates.
Healy also brought in cadaver dogs. “The dogs hit on a piece of rug in an abandoned A-frame house,” said Healy. “It was an empty house and the former resident had a history of domestic violence. It was probably drops from bloody noses. I’m ninety percent sure it had nothing to do with the case, but I still sent the information to police.”
Healy a
nd his team developed a more accurate time line of the moments surrounding Maura’s disappearance. Based on the 911 calls and the logbooks of the cops who arrived on scene, Maura vanished quickly. “The window of opportunity between the human who last saw her, Butch Atwood, and when the police arrived and found her missing was three to five minutes.”
One night, Healy parked at the weathered barn and counted cars to see how often someone drove by. Between seven and eight o’clock he counted a total of eight cars, almost all of which turned onto Bradley Hill Road, across from Butch Atwood’s house. “The chances of someone just driving by are very, very remote, unless they lived there,” he said. “There’s no destination around there. It’s very dark, very rural for miles. Not a lot going on. No cell phone service.”
Word on the street was that Maura had traveled into the North Country to commit suicide atop Mount Washington. “The rumor started because Maura gave her nursing scrubs away before she left Amherst, and giving away possessions is something suicides do just before. But what happened was she had borrowed those scrubs. She was just returning them.”
When Healy spoke to Kathleen about that odd phone call the night of her sister’s breakdown, he had trouble getting any solid information out of her. “You can’t really talk to Kathleen,” he explained. “She was drunk that night and she was drunk when I tried to talk to her about it.”
It took a year of working the case before Healy became convinced that Maura had not run away. He believed stress in Maura’s life had percolated until the young woman simply needed a mental health day, a chance to get away, set her mind right. “I think Maura was scared that she was becoming her sister.”
Healy believes Maura was murdered. And he thinks some witnesses saw more than they let on.