by James Renner
NINETEEN
My Baker Street Irregulars
There’s an old truism that goes, “Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made.” You hear it a lot in J-school, in circlejerk classes like Media of Mass Communication. What it means is that readers don’t want to know the details about how a reporter gathers information; all they care about is the story.
This may have been true when those editors were students. There was a time when the news was relatively unbiased, when you were not watching liberal news or conservative news, but news. Just news. Facts related to you by a friendly voice or simple words on the page. People like Geraldo Rivera and Rush Limbaugh were early adapters of slanted journalism, but the paradigm didn’t change until Fox News became a thing. Now you cannot watch the news or read the newspaper, not responsibly anyway, without wondering what the agenda of the writer, or producer, may be.
We may not have cared to know how the sausage was made in a time when we were guaranteed the meat was Grade A. But now some people are putting horseshit in there. Not to beat a dead metaphor.
In the last ten years, the average reader of news became aware of this. I think that’s why you see so much suspicion from commenters online. Once, we held journalists in high regard. Hell, Superman was a reporter. But we’ve come to distrust them. What’s their angle?
I’ve come to believe there’s only one way to establish credibility with readers, and that is to show them how you’re making the sausage. I think reporters should open up their research to all those interested and bring them along for the ride. That means scanning and posting the supporting documents you use to gather your facts. But I think it should go further. What I’d like to see is an open-sourced form of reporting, where journalists put notes and documents and pictures and sources in something like a readable Google doc as they are reporting.
Maura’s case was a good chance to test this idea. After all, she disappeared the same week Facebook launched—hers is the first great mystery of the social media age.
When I began to seriously investigate Maura Murray’s disappearance, I decided to open up my research to readers. In June of 2011, I created a blog. A Maura blog. As I interviewed new people, I posted summaries of our conversations online. When I received documents, I scanned them in so that any armchair sleuth could pick them apart.
The blog took off. People contacted me with new leads, new avenues of investigation I hadn’t considered. Some readers found details in documents that I had overlooked. Sometimes I used the blog to pose questions like, “Would it be possible to disappear in America today?” And I would get e-mails with links to documented stories of people who faked their own abductions. Better yet, sometimes I got e-mails from the people themselves, anecdotes of how they had considered running away when they were Maura’s age and how they would have done it. I wrote back and forth with a man on Reddit who had walked away from his life just to escape from his family.
Whenever Sherlock Holmes needed information, he asked an army of poor street kids to put their ears to the ground. The Baker Street Irregulars, he called them. He knew the kids could cover more ground than any one man. I came to think of these online sleuths as my own Irregulars.
It wasn’t just online sleuths, though. The blog was a lightning rod, pulling in sources close to the case whom I had not yet met. A couple weeks after the blog was up and running, I got a call on my cell phone from an unknown number. At the time I noted that the voice had a very distinct timbre. I wrote that he sounded like a rather large, well-educated African-American.
“I’ve been reading your blog,” he said. “I respect what you’re doing. And there’s information that needs to come out. I’m just not sure what the best way is to release that information to you.”
“I can keep your identity anonymous,” I said.
“It’s not me. It’s my girlfriend. I’m trying to get her to speak to you. But she’s reluctant to get involved. But enough time has gone by. Somebody should know about this information.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about what was going on with Maura before she disappeared.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re on the right track. I just wanted to talk to you and make sure you were legitimate. I’ll try to get her to talk. It’s really hard for her, though. I’ll try.” He hung up.
I wondered who this man might be. Was he the boyfriend of one of Maura’s friends? I got the feeling he was being sincere. He didn’t sound crazy, not like the psychics who sometimes called telling me about visions of Maura being held against her will in a drug den.
All I could do was hope his girlfriend would call back.
TWENTY
The Chief’s Demons
I returned to Hanson in late July. I brought a digital printer with me and spent an afternoon in the library of Maura’s high school, scanning pictures from yearbooks. Maura was quoted often in pages dedicated to cross-country.
“Work hard. Train early, before the season begins,” she recommended to incoming freshmen, a simple quote under her grinning photograph. “Keep a constant positive attitude and remember to always appreciate your team members.”
“We finally beat D-Y [Dennis-Yarmouth, Whitman-Hanson’s rival], yet did not make the state meet,” she said on another page. “With a little more hard work, combined with a lot less cutting practice and next year’s outstanding crop of freshmen, W-H Cross Country should rise not only to league champs but also state.”
When I was done, I drove up 93 to the Kancamagus Highway and then west past the accident site, into Haverhill. I met with Police Chief Byron Charles, who had been behind that desk for about six months. Charles had personally handled the search warrant of Maura’s car, but he wouldn’t speak much about the case since it was still an open investigation.
I pressed him on what the search of the vehicle revealed. He told me that, along with the spilled wine, they had also found a bottle of vodka and Kahlúa (Maura’s favorite mixed drink was the Black Russian).
“What do you think happened to her?” I asked.
Charles shook his head. “Seven years is a long time to be hiding,” he said. “I don’t know. I think, my best guess … I really don’t know. Nobody’s heard from her in seven years. That’s all I know. You should talk to Chief Williams. The former chief, I mean. The guy who was in charge when Maura disappeared.”
On the way to Williams’s house, I dropped by Cecil Smith’s place. Smith was the first cop on the scene the night of Maura’s accident. I found him in his front yard, tinkering with a mound of dirt beneath a radar dish. Smith had figured out how to build a green-energy generator to warm the water in his house using the captured radiant heat from rotting wood. He was a friendly fellow, anxious to bend my ear about the benefits of compost power. Eventually, we got around to talking about the accident.
“I don’t drink,” he said. “But I know what alcohol smells like, and the car smelled like alcohol. I could see it spilled all over the ceiling.”
Smith had his own theory about what brought Maura up to New Hampshire.
“It was her scumbag boyfriend that made her want to drive up here,” he said. “He came out in the news and was all, ‘We loved her.’ Well, fuck you. He was cheating on her. If it was a suicide, it was because of what he was doing to her. But if it was a suicide, where’s the body? Why drive all the way up here just to kill yourself?” Then he said with a weird smile, “You should really talk to Chief Williams.”
I found Jeffrey Williams’s house on Bradley Hill Road, a half mile up the mountain from where Maura got in her wreck. In front of his mansion is a big barn and on top of the barn is a golden calf weather vane. Something about the look of the place raised my hackles. I parked my car, walked to the front door, and knocked. Williams was already there and opened the door immediately. He’s a large man with a long scar eating up his right cheek.
“What?”
“I’m a journ
alist working on—”
Williams slammed the door in my face.
I returned to my car, took out a notebook, and wrote down my contact info, along with a better explanation about what I was doing. Before I could take it back to the house, he opened the door and shouted at me. “Get off my property before I kick your ass!”
When I got back to my hotel room, I Googled the former chief and got a sense of why he was so aggressive toward reporters.
Williams had been a police officer in Haverhill for most of his fifteen years on the force and made chief in 2001. Things started to go bad for him in 2009, when he crashed his Harley. It was a severe accident that resulted in several surgeries. Three months later, he attempted to flee from police while driving drunk in Woodsville. The press ran his photo in the paper. He resigned. The officer who pulled him over? Cecil Smith.
Williams was not the only one who threatened to kick my ass that day.
TWENTY-ONE
What the TV Guy Told Me
In this part of New Hampshire, everyone pitches in. It’s the frontier still, even with the new Wal-Mart. If you have a truck, you own a plow, and when it snows you go and dig out your neighbor and you don’t charge for it. People check up on each other. Most everyone owns a police scanner. And everyone seems to have a small business on the side: towing, compost energy, weed.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the local TV repairman was also part-time EMS. Dick Guy, “the TV Guy,” works out of a shop just behind the diner, where he fixes tube televisions. I wanted to speak to him because of this note I found in a police report: “Dick Guy mentioned that he had noticed a couple of odd things at the MVA [motor vehicle accident] that he is curious if HPD [Haverhill police department] was made aware of.”
I found him at work. He was anxious to talk.
“Everything about the scene of the accident was weird,” he said. “If she had just lost control of the car coming around that corner, she would have impacted the side of the curve. She didn’t. What really happened was she clipped the corner on her left. She sheared the snowbank clean off and continued on to the other side, where it turned the car around.”
Guy then drew a freehand map of what he saw that night, showing the sheared-off corner.
“To me, I’d say her car had stalled and she was trying to regain control as she came to the turn.”
The accident had not happened as it was reported in the papers. Guy’s version explained the inconsistent damage to the Saturn, the way the hood had smushed down on the driver’s side. Clipping the corner could have done that.
I returned to the crash site to review the physics of the situation. Yes—it could have happened like the TV Guy said. Again, I’m no expert, but it looked good. And the TV Guy had seen plenty of accidents as volunteer EMS, enough for him to believe that the accepted explanation of the accident didn’t make any sense.
While I was there, I walked to the house across from the weathered barn and spoke to Faith Westman. She’d become a character in the legend of Maura Murray’s disappearance because she was the last one to see Maura before she vanished, watching her off and on from her window. After hearing the crash, Faith called 911. It was that call that placed an exact time on the accident, actually—7:27 P.M. According to the 911 log, she told the dispatcher that she saw a man sitting inside Maura’s car, smoking a cigarette that night.
Faith was skittish and didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t like how there were always people stopping by around the anniversary. But eventually, she opened up to me, to set the record straight.
“I heard a crash and then I went to the window,” she said. “I saw the car. There was a red light in the car, which I thought might be the light from the end of a cigarette,” said Westman. “But I never saw a man and the red light could have been anything. Maybe a cell phone light as she was trying to find a signal to call someone.”
Another person who had a good view of the crash that night was John Marrotte, who lived across from Butch Atwood. I found him at home.
“I saw her get out and walk around the car,” he told me. “When I looked out again, the police were there. She was gone. I don’t know what happened. Only man who knows is up there.” He pointed to the sky.
There’s a shallow dirt lane that trails into the woods behind the scene of the accident. An old hermit lives back there. I checked with him. But his cabin was too far away to see anything that night.
I had hoped to speak to Rick Forcier, too. He was the man who lived at the corner of Wild Ammonoosuc and Bradley Hill, the guy who came forward months later with a story about seeing a jogger the night Maura vanished. But Forcier had moved away.
* * *
I stopped at the Swiftwater Stage Shop, a mile back toward Woodsville. The grocery and gas shop is run by Bill and Winnie. Bill, a medium-sized guy with a mostly bald head, was behind the register that day.
“Do you know how I can reach Rick Forcier?” I asked.
“No,” said Bill. “And I’m not telling you a damn thing.”
I was taken aback. I hadn’t even introduced myself. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m tired of answering questions about that girl. And you’re trying to make a buck.”
“I’m not—”
“Get out of my store or I’m going to beat your head in.”
This should have been enough motivation for me to leave. But can I be honest here? I’m the kind of guy who, when you tell me you’re going to beat my head in, I’ll stay around to make you do it. I’ve got a real self-destructive streak, especially when I’m angry. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I’m telling you this because I’m trying to paint the scene. Here was a guy with information that might be helpful to me, information that might be helpful to finding out what really happened to Maura Murray, and instead he wanted to act tough and try to scare me. So what I did was I smiled and I said, kind of laughing, “Why are you so angry, man?”
“That’s it,” said Bill. He reached under the counter, grabbed a long wooden rod, and came at me. I didn’t budge. I didn’t think he’d really do it. And if he did, he’d give me a hell of a story. He grabbed me by the shirt and pushed me out of his shop.
“Maybe we should call the cops,” I suggested. “Maybe they’d like to know why a guy who works a mile from where Maura went missing gets so upset when someone comes by asking questions about her.”
He swung the bat up, and I really did think he was going to lay me out for a second. He seemed to think better of it, though, as two bikers were watching us from under an umbrella in the parking lot. He turned and walked back inside.
After I calmed down, I felt a little bad for the guy. He has a business to run, after all. And it probably does get old, the endless questions about the woman who vanished down the road, especially when the woman’s father often tells reporters how he’s convinced that some “local dirtbag” kidnapped her.
Bill is no dirtbag. Neither is Forcier. Though I never spoke to Forcier directly—he’s not interested in talking about the case anymore—I’ve seen his low-budget, cringe-worthy music videos on YouTube. He’s a goofball. I’ve spoken to a number of his friends and family and the picture they paint is of a folksy musician, prone to exaggeration, always wanting to tell a better story than the next guy. That’s what I believe his sighting was. Just a story that got out of hand. Whoever he saw jogging that night, if he saw anyone at all, was almost certainly not Maura Murray.
* * *
Before I left New Hampshire, I drove out to Troop F’s barracks over in Twin Mountain. The officers of Troop F protect and serve the citizens of Coos and Grafton counties and also the people who visit the White Mountain National Forest. Their jurisdiction covers three thousand square miles, but their office is no bigger than a Sizzler. Seven years after Maura’s disappearance, her Saturn was still sitting in their evidence lot, out by the Dumpsters.
The car didn’t look so bad. Its left front end was crumpled where it must have hit the c
orner of the turn (if the TV Guy’s interpretation was accurate). The windshield was cracked on the driver’s side. But the car was far from totaled. I had driven worse in college.
I took some pictures. Tried the door handle—locked. Peered in the windows. There were a few things worth reporting. First of all, I could see the red stain in the ceiling upholstery. Wine? I noticed a pen from First Citizens Bank resting on a seat, a parking permit with the picture of a green tree, an empty food container from a grocery store, a Stop & Shop loyalty card. There was also a tag or sticker from a pizza place called the Lynwood Café.
TWENTY-TWO
Aunt Janis
The Murrays were not interested in being interviewed for the book, so I tried the other side, the Mehrmans. Maura’s mother—maiden name: Laurie Mehrman—died on May 4, 2009, Maura’s twenty-seventh birthday. I used her obit to find Laurie’s sister, Janis, who lived in Weymouth, where they had grown up.
Weymouth is a blue-collar burg with a view of the Boston skyline. It’s an old town, the second-oldest European settlement, in fact, founded in 1622 by the guy who started Plymouth. Only, things didn’t go so well in Weymouth. The colonists hadn’t accounted for the harsh winter and when supplies ran out, they stole from the Indians. Things got nasty. Myles Standish tried to mediate things. When that didn’t work, they just murdered the local chiefs. Lots of blood spilled here.
This was where Fred met Laurie.
I found Janis at home, and she invited me in for a glass of wine. She was nervous and overly chatty, but quite welcoming. We sat on floral-patterned sofas and spoke about Maura, whose pictures were placed throughout the room.
“Every spring break, every summer, Maura would come here,” said Janis. “Christmas, Thanksgiving, she was here.”
Maura was a very shy young woman, but she also had a temper, Janis said. Though she didn’t get angry easily. Maura kept her emotions bottled up inside, but when it got to be too much, hoo boy. Look out.