True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  Fred moved away to Weymouth after he separated from Maura’s mother, but he often returned to Hanson to work out with his girls. “Fred was always there for them,” she said. “I remember seeing Maura and her sister Julie running laps at the school for him on Christmas. He’s an intense sort of guy.”

  Beth remembers Maura as a smart, energetic girl, always with a twinkle in her eyes. “She was hardworking. An incredible athlete. A beautiful girl, but very plain. She didn’t wear makeup. She kept things to herself. If there were problems she wouldn’t share them, even with her closest friends.”

  The week she disappeared, one of her friends tried to instant-message Maura to find out where she was. “They asked, ‘Where the heck have you been?’ And then a message came back: ‘This is the police. We’re looking for Maura. Do you know where she is?’”

  After that, Maura’s friends met in Worcester, to put their heads together, see if they could come up with an idea of what Maura might be up to. They talked about the time Maura went to Boston for the day and never told anyone. They wondered if she could be in Providence, where they liked to go clubbing. One of the girl’s aunts had a place in New Hampshire. That’s where Maura had partied on New Year’s Eve. Was that where she was heading? They all decided to take time off from school and help with the search.

  “Liz knew that Maura was in serious trouble when the week was up and she hadn’t come back,” said Beth. Liz had a breakdown during an interview with Investigation Discovery while filming a segment about the case. Liz hasn’t spoken publicly since. “They had to stop the cameras. Afterward, she asked me, ‘Where did that come from?’ I told her, ‘You buried it. It had to come out sometime.’”

  * * *

  That night, my wife and I had dinner at Boston’s Union Oyster House, the oldest restaurant in the United States. John F. Kennedy and Daniel Webster dined there. I destroyed some crabs while we talked.

  “Sometimes you come off a little obsessive,” Julie said, critiquing my interview with the Drewniaks. “You should slow down. Let them talk. And you need to remember to smile. You’re too serious. I think it made them nervous.”

  She was right. I was taking the case too personally, and it was affecting my interviews. This was due, in part, to Fred’s refusal to speak to me and his interference with my reporting, telling others not to return my calls. It made things difficult, when all I wanted to do was find his daughter. I needed to remember that these people who knew Maura did not owe me anything. Their friend was missing. Everyone close to Maura was in suspended animation until a body was found. Or until Maura came home.

  When leads dry up, sometimes it’s helpful to step back and look at the bigger picture. In cases of abduction, police detectives often look to similar crimes that have occurred in the past, in an attempt to find patterns of behavior, to determine if a serial predator might be responsible. Were there any disappearances similar to Maura’s in the area?

  As a matter of fact, there were.

  SEVENTEEN

  Molly, Holly, and Bri

  A month after Maura disappeared, and ninety miles away, another attractive brunette vanished following what appeared to be an auto accident near a dilapidated farmhouse. Brianna Maitland was seventeen, a wayward soul from East Franklin who talked often of putting that boring, blue-collar region of northern Vermont in her rearview. She had a skinny face and old-soul eyes that could draw in a man from across the room. She worked two jobs: washing dishes at the Black Lantern Inn in Montgomery, and waitressing in St. Albans. On March 19, 2004, Brianna—Bri, to her friends—took the exam for her GED. She left work that night around midnight, skipping dinner with coworkers to get some sleep.

  But she never showed up for her shift the next morning. When her roommate returned home two days later, there was no sign that Bri had ever come back from the Black Lantern Inn. Two more days passed before her roommate got worried enough to contact the girl’s parents. They hadn’t heard from her, either.

  Brianna’s father, Bruce, and her mother, Kellie, immediately drove to the police station in St. Albans to report her missing. They learned that a state trooper had found Bri’s 1985 green Olds two days earlier, crashed into a farmhouse on Route 118. The trooper assumed the car had been abandoned by a drunk driver, and had it towed to an auto shop. Bri’s father found her ATM card, migraine meds, and makeup still inside. Fearing the worst, he pried open the trunk with a crowbar, but it was empty.

  Bri’s disappearance quickly became national news. The phone at her parents’ home rang continuously. Most were calls from would-be psychics who salivate over stories like these and offer little in the way of helpful leads—Your daughter is being held in a barn by a big oak tree; Your daughter was taken to Montreal by a man with a tattoo on his arm; etc. But one call that Bri’s aunt Tammy answered was from a member of Maura Murray’s family.

  “They were asking if we had found anything,” she told reporters with Investigation Discovery.

  But detectives could find no link between the two cases. The investigation into Bri’s disappearance focused on Bri’s friends, who were involved in hard drugs. Bri had recently smoked crack cocaine, too, one told police. One of her alleged suppliers was a New York man named Ramon Ryans, who became the prime suspect after an anonymous tip to the police. They raided Ryans’s home and arrested him for the drugs and guns they found inside. Ryans claimed not to really know Bri, even though several of her friends had seen them together. The case has since gone cold.

  There’s another missing girl some investigators have tried to link to Maura’s case. Back in Massachusetts, a half hour from UMass down Route 9, you’ll find the town of Warren, which has the best swimming hole for miles around: Comins Pond, a largish body of water regulated by a reservoir. Sixteen-year-old Molly Bish worked as a lifeguard there in the summer of 2000. On the morning of June 27, her mother, Magi, dropped off Molly for another day at the pond. When the first swimmers arrived eight minutes later, they found Molly’s water bottle, sandals, and an open first aid kit. But the teenager was gone.

  In the fall of 2002, a hunter discovered a blue bathing suit in the woods around Whiskey Hill in Palmer, Mass, a short drive from Warren. An ex-policeman-turned-true-crime-author heard about it and wondered if the suit might have belonged to Molly. He returned to the woods and found the suit. It was Molly’s. The remains of her body were discovered scattered nearby.

  “She came home, bone by bone,” her mother told reporters.

  That true crime author, a fellow named Tim McGuigan, believes Molly’s abduction and murder may be connected to an even older cold case, the 1993 unsolved abduction of ten-year-old Holly Piirainen. During a visit to her grandparents’ cottage in Sturbridge, Holly and her brother visited neighbors to play with their new puppies. Only the brother returned. Holly’s shoe was found on the side of the road. Two months later, hunters found the girl’s body in the woods.

  Here’s the kicker: Molly Bish wrote to the Piirainen family, in 1993, when she was just ten years old. “I am very sorry,” she wrote. “I wish I could make it up to you. Holly is a very pretty girl. She is almost as tall as me. I wish I knew Holly. I hope they found her.”

  In the aftermath of their daughter’s murder, Molly’s parents created the Molly Bish Foundation, to teach children how to stay safe in a dangerous world. Molly’s father, John, regularly speaks at cold case training seminars.

  After Maura Murray’s disappearance went cold, the Molly Bish Foundation partnered with a group of private investigators, led by a Massachusetts P.I. named Tom Shamshak, to offer help finding new clues in Maura’s case. They worked closely with Fred Murray to find his daughter.

  It was around this time that Fred declared war on the State of New Hampshire.

  EIGHTEEN

  Murray v. State of New Hampshire

  Let’s talk about Fred Murray a bit.

  Think of every Boston cliché. That’s Fred Murray. A drinker. Ruddy Irish complexion. A forehead meant for bashing skulls. Sho
ck of thin white hair. People I spoke to described Fred as “volatile” or “a bit of a hothead.” Flashes of that temper can be found in the articles published after Maura’s disappearance, and the vitriol only intensified as time went on. He has a particular way of speaking and you can almost hear that thick-as-baked-beans Southie accent in the words the reporters found fit to print.

  “These guys can’t catch a cold,” Fred told the UMass student newspaper in 2005. He was talking about the detectives who were searching for his daughter. The cops were dragging their feet, he said, because they didn’t want to admit that there was a serial killer in town. “There’s a bad guy on their turf. The skunk is on their doorstep.”

  Fred wanted to know what the detectives had done, whom they’d spoken to. He sent Freedom of Information requests to the prosecutor’s office. Here’s a list of some of the items Fred requested:

  • A copy of the ATM video from the Amherst bank where Maura withdrew cash.

  • The surveillance video from the liquor store.

  • An inventory of items provided to police by members of the Murray family.

  • A copy of the computer hard drive from Maura’s dorm.

  But they refused to release any information because it was an open investigation. So Fred wrote to newly elected New Hampshire governor John Lynch:

  “I get nearly physically sick when I wake up each morning and the thought of how really little effort it would have taken to rescue my daughter automatically flashes through my mind,” he wrote. “It has been over three months since her disappearance and the only leads developed have been handed to the state police by others. Yet still these guys maintain that they don’t need any help.”

  Both Assistant Attorney General David W. Ruoff and Jeffery Strelzin, head of the AG’s homicide division, replied to Murray’s requests and reminded him that the files were investigatory notes, exempt from public records requests.

  In another letter to the governor, Fred asked Lynch to compel the police and prosecutors to release evidence in the case. “With no informational resources available I am left to desperately search for Maura all by myself. How can I do this if the police sit idly on the applicable evidence? Take, for example, her computer. If I could get it back, I might be able to discern who she contacted on that last afternoon and perhaps discover a new direction to follow. It’s one thing if Troop F isn’t willing to be part of the solution, but please don’t allow them to continue to be part of the problem.”

  When that didn’t work, Fred ambushed the governor. He approached Lynch at the statehouse, with several television cameras in tow. The stunt got him a sit-down with the governor, but law enforcement officials steadfastly refused to release their files because they did not want to jeopardize their investigation. So Fred just sued fucking everybody. Named in his civil suit were the governor, the attorney general, the commander of Troop F, and practically every department that had ever worked on Maura’s case. The court proceedings began in Grafton County Superior Court in January of 2006.

  Representing Fred was Tim Ervin, an attorney from Lowell, Mass, who also reps Bob Marley’s estate on issues of copyright and intellectual property.

  The superior court wasn’t having it. The court upheld the opinion of the detectives and did not release any information to Fred. So Ervin appealed and the case went to the state supreme court. This time, Ervin kicked a little ass. Their case set a public records precedent. Murray v. State of New Hampshire now compels law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire to go into greater detail about why certain records cannot be released. It forced the state police to go through their entire case file on Maura Murray’s disappearance and explain why each bit of information should be kept secret. This resulted in affidavits from a detective and an assistant attorney general that shed light on the investigation. Fred finally got some documents—a fraction of the file on his daughter, sure, but his lawsuit will help countless journalists and private investigators for decades to come.

  I spent $450 to purchase all the documents related to Murray v. State of New Hampshire. Reams of paper arrived on my doorstep one day and I spent a week reading through the volumes, parsing out important details and clues.

  It quickly became apparent that Fred’s argument that the police were not actively investigating his daughter’s disappearance was without merit. Detectives had compiled 2,938 records and hoped to use that information in future criminal cases. This included 254 source contacts, 106 interviews with witnesses, and reports from 66 separate law enforcement officials, including detectives from Vermont, New York, and Maine. A grand jury had been convened to issue subpoenas. There were search warrants. Police had gathered credit card history on a number of individuals, run background checks.

  The documents also revealed that police had given four polygraph examinations, though the identity of the people interrogated and the results of the tests remained secret.

  Most intriguing was the mention of a “one-party intercept.” This often means a wiretap.

  “The Maura Murray investigation is open and ongoing,” Troop F sergeant Todd Landry wrote in his affidavit. “Based on my experience with criminal investigations and the information in this case in particular, I have a reasonable belief that this investigation may lead to criminal charges.” Assistant AG Jeffery Strelzin put the likelihood of charging someone with a crime at 75 percent.

  During the appeal, Sergeant Landry answered a few specific questions on the stand. On cross, Ervin pushed Landry to reveal the target of his investigation.

  “But at this point in time, is there currently a person of interest that the state is looking at with regard to the Maura Murray case?” asked Ervin.

  “I think that’s a little too close, counsel,” the judge said. “If he says there’s a specific person, I think that kind of defeats the purpose of the kind of cloak that they’re attempting to—”

  Prosecutor Nancy Smith, who represented the State of New Hampshire, spoke up. Revealing anything more about Landry’s investigation, even in general terms, might identify suspects from a small community, she said. “The people—the identity of those people is fairly well-known.”

  It seemed Ervin had his answer. “Is the investigation into those individuals currently ongoing?” he asked Landry.

  “Yes,” he said.

  But if police had a prime suspect (or suspects), who was it? And why couldn’t they share that info with Fred?

  Here’s an interesting loophole in public records policy: Typically, as Fred discovered, reports related to an ongoing investigation are kept secret until charges are filed. However, his appeal forced the police to provide documents they could not argue would prove detrimental to their case if Fred were to see them. This included Fred’s personal statement to UMass police. After all, Fred knew about this document already; why shouldn’t it be provided? And once a record is released, it has to be released to everyone. Including me. I finally had Fred’s version of events during that weekend before his daughter vanished.

  “We were going to get her a car,” Fred said in his signed statement. “That is why I came up that weekend. We started in Hadley looking at cars, four-thousand dollars on my person.” Fred explained that he’d withdrawn the four thousand dollars in cash from several different ATMs on the way to UMass. Why didn’t he just write a check? I wondered. They never did buy a car that weekend and he has never revealed what happened to the money.

  After looking for cars, he said, they picked up Maura’s friend Kate Markopoulos and drove to the Amherst Brewing Company and had a few drinks. Then Maura drove him back to the Quality Inn and returned to campus for a party.

  “Maura was in bed when I woke up around 10 A.M. Maura woke around ten thirty. She told me about the accident.” Remember, Maura had crashed Fred’s Toyota on the way back to his hotel at three in the morning. Fred found a rental car to use to get back to Bridgeport and had his Toyota shipped to North Amherst Motors for repairs. Maura felt bad for letting him down, he recalled.
“At the motel she said, ‘This is the worst.’ We went back to the dorm. I told her, ‘It’ll get fixed.’ She went into the dorm, sort of slumped her way in.” Maura was supposed to go to the police station on Monday and pick up the accident report for the insurance company and then call Fred with an update. “I was sure she would call, because she wouldn’t let me down again. Late the next afternoon [Tuesday], I got a call from my daughter Kathleen telling me Maura hit a tree and was missing.”

  The UMass officer who filed Fred’s report was curious to know if Fred had provided the alcohol Maura took with her to the campus party the night of the accident. First, Fred denied it. Then he said he remembered going to Liquors 44 with Kate and Maura and telling them to pick up some wine but didn’t know if that had happened before or after the brewery.

  The reports show the growing frustration of detectives as they tried to get information from Fred about what happened to Maura in the days leading up to her disappearance. Fred said further detail wasn’t important. He wouldn’t say anything more about Maura’s past, or his own. Even the reporters covering the case got frustrated.

  From an article in the Whitman-Hanson Express: “One line Fred repeated throughout the day was, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ If you ask what he did for a living, or why Maura packed her things, or didn’t tell anyone where she was headed, he’ll just answer, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll never know why she came up here.’”

  In an interview with Boston’s WCVB, Fred said, “It doesn’t matter what brought her here to this point. Once she got here, something happened.”

  Healy and Scarinza told me that Fred refused to sit down for a formal interview with homicide detectives for two and a half years. When he finally agreed to do so, he brought his lawyers with him.