True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  “Like that shithead Butch Atwood,” Healy growled. “He gave three different versions of what happened that night. In one story, he got out of the bus to talk to Maura. In another, she was still in the car with the air bag in her face. In another, she was standing outside the car when they spoke.”

  Before Atwood died, Healy traveled to Florida to interrogate him.

  “He came to the door. Would not shake my hand. He just stood there, arms crossed. He didn’t answer any of my questions.”

  Atwood told Healy that he’d once been a cop, too. But Healy knew that the closest Butch had ever come to being a man in blue was working for the Department of Fish and Game.

  “He must have seen what happened to Maura,” said Healy. “I believe he was concealing the person who did it. And that person was someone Butch was afraid of.” But Healy wouldn’t tell me who.

  That statement gave me a shiver. It was the same thing the old man in the red car had told me.

  Another person Healy tried to contact was Rick Forcier, a contractor who lived in the trailer across the street from Butch. Several months after Maura went missing, Forcier came forward with a story about seeing a woman running east, down Wild Ammonoosuc Road, the night of the crash. He told police he’d only just now figured that it might be important info.

  “Forcier was a strange puppy,” said Healy. “We asked to search his property, but he wouldn’t let us.”

  Then Healy dropped a detail that might change the entire dynamic of Maura’s last drive. He didn’t think the damage to Maura’s car matched the accepted story of the crash. The Saturn’s hood was bent inward from above, on the driver’s side, and yet the headlight was not broken. “I do not believe that was the first accident Maura had that night,” said Healy. “The damage is consistent with a car running into the back of a semi, as if she hit it high on her bumper, when it was stationary. It’s another piece of the mystery.”

  We talked for more than an hour, going over the minutiae of the case, and Healy hardly paused to catch his breath. He loved talking about this riddle. It was only when I asked about Fred Murray that Healy got quiet for a moment.

  “Fred’s in a world of his own,” he said. “He’s a volatile man. I remember he was at the Wells River Motel one day and I came in the room to speak to another investigator. I tried to talk to Fred, but he acted like I wasn’t even there. I can’t fault the man. I don’t know how I’d act.”

  Days into the search for his daughter, Fred became hostile toward the local police, telling the media that the detectives were dragging their feet when they should be actively looking for the dirtbag who took his daughter. Healy thinks his open relationship with the detectives was something Fred took as an insult. Why share info with the police if the police weren’t sharing anything with the family?

  Being close with both sides, Healy knew when Fred lied to the press. Maura left West Point because she wanted to become a nurse, Fred would say when interviewed.

  “But I was told that when Maura left West Point it was not under the best circumstances,” said Healy. “It wasn’t just for a career change.”

  FOURTEEN

  What Really Happened at West Point

  “When something tragic happens, you don’t really want to say anything bad about the person. But everyone has skeletons in their closet.” That’s how Megan Sawyer began the conversation.

  Megan was a friend of Maura’s at West Point, a fellow runner, another young woman trying to power through the military academy’s tough regimen. She reached out to me when she heard I was working on Maura’s case and offered to provide a few answers.

  Megan was standing beside Maura when Maura got busted for stealing makeup from the commissary at Fort Knox. Yes: She attempted to shoplift from the most secure military facility in the United States. The MPs got her. Back at the dorms, Maura confided to Megan about the theft. “It was so stupid,” she said. “I only took five dollars’ worth of stuff.”

  Usually, Maura was quiet, Megan said. This was the most personal she’d ever gotten. “But you could tell there were some inner demons. She seemed sad.” She was also “insanely smart.” So smart, said Megan, that Maura often helped older sister Julie with homework.

  The daily routine back at the academy was harsh. Everyone had chores and duties. Most days, you woke up around 4:30 A.M. Clean bathrooms, take out the trash. Every day cadets had to read the newspaper front-to-back and you might be quizzed on current events. Outside of class (and conditioning for the track team), there was not much extra time.

  The dorms were coed. Two or three women would share a room, next to a roomful of men. In such close quarters, Maura’s bulimia was no secret. Megan heard her purging on more than one occasion. “She had issues with loving herself.”

  This lent credence to a story a private investigator told me about what happened at Thanksgiving the year before Maura disappeared. Her mother, Laurie, had made fun of her in front of family members. She’d said, “Why did you make so much food if you’re just going to throw it up later?”

  Maura got a lot of stress from her sister Julie too. Megan told me that Julie could be tough on her kid sister, that she would belittle Maura for not studying enough, not running harder.

  Megan said that Helena Dwyer-Murray, the family spokesperson, told her to keep quiet about Maura’s troubles. “She told me, ‘Don’t say these negative things. Watch what you tell people.’” The message was clear: It doesn’t matter what happened to her in the past; the only thing that matters is that Maura is missing now.

  During her time at West Point, Maura went through basic military training, including survival skills. She could operate the machine gun on top of a tank. Based on what she knew of Maura, Megan believed her friend had what it took to start a new life.

  “If she wanted to make up another identity, she could do it,” says Megan. “If she wanted to disappear, she could. She never wanted to look bad in front of people. I think she probably thought, If I just disappeared, they wouldn’t think badly of me. I believe she’s alive. It’s just a feeling I’ve always had.”

  FIFTEEN

  Cracks in the Façade

  “I want to look for Maura’s body after I interview the detective, so I might not be back for a while,” I said. This was the summer of 2011, and my wife, Julie, and I were staying at the Nootka Lodge, a retro log-cabin motel in Woodsville, while I did research on the book. The lead investigator in the first weeks of Maura’s disappearance had finally agreed to meet me.

  “Well, have fun,” she said, sarcastically, on my way out.

  What would I do if I really did find her body, though? I wondered as I drove around Mount Washington that day. I’d seen dead bodies. Plenty. But only in autopsy photographs or in cushioned coffins at the end of a receiving line. Never outside. Never decaying. Never up close. I didn’t particularly want to go into the woods, searching. But I’d come all that way. I had to look. If only to make sure nothing was there. But first—Scarinza.

  In the beginning, John Scarinza was the face of the investigation, a spokesman for the state police; you’ll see him in those television specials on YouTube. I drove halfway across New Hampshire to meet with Scarinza. We got together at an out-of-the-way community building near his home. We sat at a conference table and talked about the case. Retirement suits Scarinza. He has the look of a young grandfather who still enjoys fishing and hiking, manly stuff, drives a big-ass truck.

  For Scarinza, the mystery began at 6 A.M. Wednesday, two days after Maura’s abandoned car was discovered in Haverhill. That’s when he got the call from the local police chief, asking for help. An assumed drunk-driving incident was starting to look like something more.

  “Put yourself in his shoes,” said Scarinza, defending Haverhill police chief Jeff Williams. “It’s not an unusual occurrence, finding abandoned cars after having too much to drink up here. That’s what it looked like. The officer on scene observes a box of wine that has spilled inside. The driver is gone. If yo
u’ve had too much to drink, you don’t want to sit down with law enforcement. But usually, you expect them to call in to the police the next morning, after they sobered up, looking for their car.”

  When the police couldn’t reach Fred Tuesday morning, they got a warrant to open and search Maura’s vehicle. Inside, they found a book titled Not Without Peril. “It’s an … interesting book,” he said.

  Not Without Peril was written by a journalist named Nicholas Howe, who, before he took to writing, worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club, protecting hikers on the Presidential Range. Howe rescued people who tried to tackle Mount Washington in the winter. Not Without Peril traces the most famous deaths ever to occur on the mountain, beginning with Frederick Strickland (the son of an English aristocrat) in 1849. It’s a bit prosaic unless you are an avid hiker, but I think what Scarinza meant when he said “interesting” is that the book is mainly about the fame that comes with dying on Mount Washington. When you die near the summit, your name is recorded in a ledger, revered by generations of hikers who make the pilgrimage each year. Your death means something if it happens there. There’s a sense of immortality that goes with it.

  “Sometime mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Fred calls in to Haverhill police and explains that it’s his daughter’s car they have,” the detective continued. “His first sense is that Maura has gone to the North Country to commit suicide—to go off and die ‘like an old squaw’ is what he said to the police.”

  Chief Williams called Scarinza on Wednesday morning to see if the state police could get a chopper in the air. Scarinza reached out to New Hampshire Fish and Game, which had a helicopter equipped with FLIR cameras—military-grade, “forward-looking infrared” scopes, Scarinza explained. Soon, he was flying over Wild Ammonoosuc Road. I got a sense he enjoyed that part.

  “What you could see is what you couldn’t see,” he said. “I remember seeing this gorgeous red fox that stuck out against the snow below. You could see deer stands in the area. I’m seeing deer tracks in the snow. Just great detail. I would have seen human footprints in a second. It was good, clean snow and it hadn’t snowed since the accident. It made for good search conditions.” But there were no human tracks. Maura did not walk into the woods.

  Regardless, Scarinza said that the hills and valleys around Mount Washington were a good place to get lost. He recalled a case from early in his career where a woman from Massachusetts drove into the mountains and left a note behind saying she was going to kill herself. Fish and Game did an extensive search but couldn’t find her. Seven years later, a hiker stepped off the path to take a leak and found her skeleton. She’d sat down on a log, taken a bunch of pills, and then fallen backward onto the ground.

  In the summer of 2004, the state police conducted a second, more extensive search of the area—eighty troopers on the ground and a Fish and Game helicopter in the air. When the team discovered a skeleton at the top of Mount Kancamagus, Scarinza thought the mystery was solved. “I mean, it would be a huge coincidence to find someone else’s skeleton during the search for Maura Murray,” he said. “But it ended up being a man who disappeared twenty years ago.”

  These mountains are a kind of Mecca for people thinking about ending it. It’s the closest you can get to Heaven east of the Mississippi, after all.

  The state police took a bloodhound to the scene of the accident and used a “scent article” from Maura’s car to get the dog to follow her trail.

  “The bloodhound went a hundred yards east and then appeared to lose track of her scent,” said Scarinza. “Does that mean she got into a vehicle there? Perhaps. Does it mean that enough time had gone by that it wasn’t a scent opportunity for the dog? Perhaps.”

  In the summer, Maura and Fred often visited Jigger Johnson, a campsite just a little ways farther down the Kancamagus Highway, he said. They’d go hiking and share a tent. Sometimes, Fred splurged for a cabin in Bartlett. Sometimes Maura’s younger brother would join them, but mostly it was just Maura and Fred.

  When detectives asked specific questions about Maura’s past, though, Fred stopped cooperating with the investigation. “We asked, ‘What’s going on in her life that would cause her to leave UMass?’ Fred said, ‘It’s not important. She’s missing. Find her.’ But if we understood why she left, maybe we could understand where she was going.”

  Fred would know better than anyone else Maura’s state of mind in the days leading up to her disappearance. He’d visited his daughter that weekend. He was with her the morning before she drove into New Hampshire.

  “Fred comes down to Amherst,” said Scarinza, replaying the days leading up to Maura’s journey. “They’re all drinking quite a bit. Father goes to his hotel. Maura has his car. She leaves a party to go back to Fred’s hotel at three in the morning. Gets into a single-car accident. Why she doesn’t get arrested for drunk driving is beyond me. And why is she going to his hotel at that time a night? She has a dorm room. It’s weird.”

  Clearly something was troubling Maura. By all appearances, when she left on Monday, Maura was leaving for good. She’d packed her belongings into boxes. On top of the boxes was an e-mail from her boyfriend, Billy. When Scarinza read it, he immediately thought it was a pointed message that Maura had intentionally left behind. “Maura had found out Billy was cheating on her. That’s what the e-mail was about.”

  The more Scarinza looked into Maura’s background, the more the image of that “All-American Girl” began to disintegrate. There were reports that Maura had been found passed out, drunk, in the hallways at West Point. She may have had another secret, too.

  “The searches she conducted on her computer before she left Amherst suggest Maura may have been pregnant,” said Scarinza. Maura visited a number of sites that talked about the dangers of drinking while pregnant. She may not have told anyone yet. “She was a very private person, even with her close friends.” He wonders about the phone call that upset her so much the night she was working at Melville Hall. He wonders if her sister Kathleen got the sense that Maura was knocked up; maybe that’s what came out in the conversation.

  By the time I got involved, the state police had invested six thousand hours in the case. The Department of Fish and Game, the AG’s office, the FBI, and the UMass police also devoted time. Scarinza and his team interviewed people in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine. Detectives traveled to places like Rochester, New York, to investigate sightings of Maura. The search for Maura Murray was a large operation, and it led nowhere.

  “At the point I retired, we didn’t even have evidence that Maura was the victim of a crime,” said Scarinza. “We’re not saying she wasn’t. We don’t know. Everything that was done was done in the event she was the victim of a crime so that we can present items as evidence later. My sense is that she is not still alive.”

  * * *

  I went back to that gulley the man in the red car had driven me to months before, the place he believed some killer had dumped Maura’s body. I parked the car and scooted over the guardrail. I found a footpath leading down to the water. It was steep and slow-going, and the thick canopy of oaks and evergreens overhead made it muggy. At the bottom, an icy mountain stream ran between great boulders left behind by the last glacier. The only way to continue was to stand on one boulder and then hop over to the next. The rocks were mossy and slick with runoff and dew. My shirt was soon soaked with sweat and the moisture of the air.

  And then the bugs found me. Primordial flies, bigger than any fly should be, landing on my neck and arms. I swatted at them, waved them away, but word got around: There was fresh meat in the gulley.

  If someone had deposited Maura’s body here, her skeleton would have been taken farther down the mountain with each spring thaw, when the ice breaks apart and a wave of water washes down to the Ammonoosuc in a violent torrent. There was a lot of junk down here, caught in eddies around fallen trees. I found a miner’s pickax. But no skeleton. No shirt or pants. No sign of Maura.

  By the time I got back to the car, a
n hour and a half later, I was in tears from the exertion of the hike. Such a stupid thing to do, alone. If I had slipped on a boulder, broken an ankle, nobody would have heard my screams.

  We forget how dangerous nature can be. We want to forget, I think. We don’t want to be reminded that nature is more deadly than man. Man can be cruel, but nature is indifferent. It is the unrivaled psychopath.

  I needed to be smarter about this investigation. I was already taking stupid risks, and I hadn’t even really begun.

  SIXTEEN

  The Clique

  I wanted Julie with me when I went knocking on doors in Hanson. It was time to speak to Maura’s friends, and I knew I would get further with my wife beside me than I would alone. Think about it: Here is a story of a missing woman. Murdered, maybe. And a reporter nobody knows has decided to write a book about it. Julie’s presence would make me less threatening, the interview not so much an interrogation, more of a friendly visit. It’s a tactic I’d used while reporting on the Amy Mihaljevic case with some success.

  The coaches I had spoken to told me that Maura’s best friend in high school was Liz Drewniak, the valedictorian of their class. Liz was the mother hen to a clique of several girls that included Maura Murray. Attempts to reach her via Facebook had not panned out. So after we left the Nootka Lodge, I drove down to Hanson and dropped in at the Drewniak home. We caught Liz’s parents as they were packing their car for a trip to the Cape. They invited us in and served us iced tea.

  Liz’s mother is an Elizabeth too, goes by Beth. “There were seven of them that hung out together,” Beth explained. “Liz and Maura and Andrea Connolly, Carly Muise, Katie Jones, Erin Devine, and Laura Gainey.” Katie and Liz were still in the area and Andrea was somewhere in Massachusetts, but the others were out of state or overseas. Fred didn’t want the girls to talk to me, said Beth.

  “Maura came from a dysfunctional family,” Beth explained. The Murrays’ marriage fell apart around the time the youngest child, Kurt, was born. “We used to have big birthday parties here. Liz and Maura’s birthdays are only a few days apart. One year we heard that Maura was not going to have a birthday party so we thought, Why not have a party for her, too?”