by James Renner
Barbara does not believe that Butch had anything to do with Maura’s disappearance. She said that Butch figured Maura was meeting someone up there and it was that person who picked her up. It was the only explanation for how she could vanish so quickly.
In March of 2009, Barbara went to take care of her sister in Massachusetts. While she was gone, Butch caught the flu. He couldn’t breathe. Doctors discovered that the arteries feeding his heart were blocked. They put in a stent, did three bypass surgeries. Shortly after returning home, Butch complained of stomach pain. He went back in. The doctors opened him up. His guts were full of cancer. They took out most of his upper intestine. Eventually they released him. Butch was home a week and a day before he died.
* * *
I needed to know more about Maura’s classmates at UMass, too. At the time she disappeared, Maura was completing her clinicals, a major requirement for her nursing degree. Clinicals are a way for students to gain firsthand experience in nursing before graduation. It’s the hardest part of the program, the moment where students finally find out if they can cut it or not. Maura was in a class of seventy, which was divided into smaller groups of six to eight. Bonds formed quickly. On top of this, Maura’s course load that last semester was brutal. She was taking classes in pharmacology, mental health, and maternity in addition to a research class.
With a little help from my Irregulars, I discovered the names of the other students in Maura’s clinical group: Christina Linscott, Noelle Lepore, Brian McKaskell, Patricia Johnson, and Martha Nagle. Maura carpooled with these students during her rotations, two days a week. They divided their time between Norwood Hospital’s labor and delivery unit and the Providence Behavioral Health Hospital in Holyoke, reporting to staff at 7 A.M. They were assigned patients and worked until 2 P.M. Then, they would carpool back to UMass. Classmates described Maura as “very quiet, reserved.”
After Maura disappeared, a detective came to speak to them, asking what they knew about her character. But there wasn’t much they could offer police. It wasn’t like Maura wanted to hang out after clinicals or anything.
Of course, I found an extra layer of weirdness while researching Maura’s clinicals. Everything about this case is odd. It’s always hard to know what is a clue and what is just another bizarre coincidence. Here’s what happened.
When I contacted Martha Nagle via Facebook I got this message back:
I’d like to help but I’m also related to Maura and I don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you. Only out of respect for Maura’s family. Thank you anyway. Good luck with your research.
That’s a red flag.
How, exactly, was Martha related to Maura? Martha was Asian-American, so it wasn’t by blood. A quick look at her background showed that she’d gone by many other names: Martha Park; Martha Vivar. I asked her to help me fill in the blanks. She told me that she was related by marriage.
I noted that at one time Martha had had connections to the tiny town of Taunton, Mass. As you may recall, Taunton was the neighborhood where someone called “Observer” had written on a Maura Murray message board in support of the theory that Maura was now living in Canada. I went back and reread the original GeoCities post. I noticed something unusual in the wording that I’d missed up till now. Here’s the pertinent section:
Sometime between 12 MN and 1 AM Maura driving her Saturn struck and critically injured the UMass student Petrit Vasi leaving him for dead.
That “12 MN” bit suddenly stuck out. I don’t know anyone who refers to midnight that way; I’m used to seeing “12 A.M.” But you know who does write it that way? Nurses. “12 MN” is medical dictation they teach to nursing students so that midnight is never mixed up with noon on patient charts.
I asked Martha if she was the author of that post.
Fuck you. How’s that for comment? she wrote.
It got me thinking about Canada again. Could Maura really be hiding in Quebec?
Can someone really disappear in this day and age?
FIFTY-NINE
How to Disappear
As a matter of fact, people do it all the time.
One of my favorite unsolved mysteries is the story of Joseph Newton Chandler. Chandler was an electrical engineer for a Cleveland chemical manufacturer. He put in twelve years before he was laid off in 1997. He kept in contact with a couple of people from work after that and lived in a studio on the East Side of town. Then in 2002, he ate a bullet in his bathroom.
Police used his birth certificate to track down next of kin. And that’s where things got weird. See, when they got Joe Chandler’s sister on the horn, she was quite surprised—her brother had died in a traffic accident in 1945. The guy who’d committed suicide in Cleveland had stolen her brother’s social security number in 1978 and had been living under an assumed name for twenty-four years. He left $82,000 in a bank account and, as best as detectives can figure, committed suicide because he’d been diagnosed with cancer.
Internet sleuths have suggested “Joe Chandler” was actually the Zodiac Killer. Some believe he was Jim Morrison (no joke). But the most likely true identity of Joe Chandler, in my opinion, is a guy named Stephen Campbell, who was an electrical engineer from Cheyenne, Wyoming, who tried to kill his wife’s lover with a homemade bomb. Campbell disappeared in 1982.
Some people, even people in very public positions, just want to disappear and start over someplace new. Olivia Newton-John’s boyfriend faked his own death in 2005 and was found living in Mexico five years later. Mystery matriarch Agatha Christie disappeared for ten days in 1926, in what many have proposed was an attempt to frame her cheating husband for her murder.
It’s a common fantasy, right? The idea that we might simply walk away from this life and live as someone new in some faraway place.
But it’s getting harder to pull off. With the Internet and all its various methods of invading privacy, it has gotten easier to track people down. Olivia Newton-John’s boyfriend was found by tracking an IP address that was monitoring one of the sites devoted to his disappearance.
It’s harder. But not impossible, given the proper motivation.
Some shelters and organizations for abused women have networks of well-placed contacts who help clients set up new identities to escape abusers. It’s an underground railroad that rivals the federal government’s witness protection program. In some instances, these contacts help women change their names, social security numbers, job history. Here’s the mission statement for the House of Ruth: The House of Ruth Maryland leads the fight to end violence against women and their children by confronting the attitudes, behaviors and systems that perpetuate it, and by providing victims with the services necessary to rebuild their lives safely and free of fear.
During the course of my research I was contacted by a social worker in a southern state who had read a post I’d written about the House of Ruth. She read through the rest of the blog, delving deep into the mystery of Maura’s disappearance, and came to believe it was possible that Maura had used this system to start a new life. My source said she was one of the “well-placed contacts” called on to hide victims of abuse. Sometimes she would get a call in the middle of the night and have to immediately drive to a location to pick up an abused woman. She would then help the woman disappear.
“Not all of what they do is 100% legal,” she wrote to me in a Facebook message after I verified her employment. “It’s a huge network of people worldwide that assist with whatever is needed when called upon. I can attest that these organizations are very good at what they do. This is a surefire way to disappear with little to no resources and no street sense, neither of which Maura seemed to possess.”
She believes Maura may have fooled one of these organizations in order to escape her legal troubles, something that this woman takes as a personal insult. But if that’s what she did, she could be very well hidden.
“You have a better chance of finding the Holy Grail,” the social worker wrote. “Tight-lipped is an u
nderstatement. People involved with these types of organizations have a lot to lose and keep better secrets than the Pentagon. I don’t know how you could explore this further but certain things are leading me to believe this is a really viable theory.”
But how could someone like Maura get by without using her social security number?
“Hypothetical: I let them ‘borrow’ mine. Good credit history, clean background, etc. Then, when they’re where they’re going, a new identity is set up and mine is returned to me. It really is like an underground railroad. And I would happily serve time in jail before giving anyone up. I would go to drastic measures to protect them.”
The idea of Maura “borrowing” someone’s social security number is intriguing. When my private investigator friend ran Maura’s background, he discovered that another social security number was somehow connected to her identity for a short time. It linked back to a woman named Lori, who still lived in Hanson, a few streets from where Maura grew up. I could never find a direct connection between Lori and Maura, but Maura does have a history of using someone else’s name and identity—at least to steal food. I wonder.…
SIXTY
Oh, Canada!
Several people believe they have come face-to-face with Maura Murray in the years since the accident on Wild Ammonoosuc Road. According to reports from the Whitman-Hanson Express, Maura was spotted in Barton, Vermont, in 2005. A young woman who looked like Maura attended a church service in town. She called herself “Raykel,” and abruptly left when the minister starting talking about Father’s Day. A year later a woman in the company of an older man mouthed the words “Help me” to a witness at a Cumberland Farms store in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. The witness thought it could have been Maura.
A cashier who worked at Butson’s grocery store in Woodsville believed she sold liquor to Maura less than an hour before her accident on Wild Ammonoosuc Road. She said Maura was with two other women, and one had dark hair just like Maura. She looked at their IDs. Two were from Massachusetts; one was from either New York or Connecticut. After she heard that Maura was missing, the woman reported the sighting to her supervisor. When Fred Murray heard about it, he caused a scene at the store, demanding the videotape before the police could see it. But Butson’s didn’t have surveillance. Strangely, the Murray family kept this sighting a secret until the woman contacted me in 2014 and they were forced to acknowledge the tip.
More recent credible sightings have come out of Quebec, Canada. There’s that infamous GeoCities post, of course. And there are two more.
On April 8, 2009, “Tourist in Canada” posted the following message on the Amherst, Massachusetts, Topix page from a computer in Brockton: “I saw Maura Murray alive and well in Sherbrooke, Quebec. I approached her and said ‘Hi Maura.’ She turned toward me and said ‘Hi,’ then gasped and looked like she was going to pass out from shock. I have no doubt this was Maura Murray. She is apparently alive and well and living in Canada. When I saw her she was with a very handsome young man.”
The same day, someone from the Houston, Texas, region posted a similar message on the Topix page from St-Étienne-de-Beauharnois, a small town outside Montreal. “Maura Murray was seen in Quebec City, Quebec Province. She is alive and well. Very well. Her new squeeze is a hunk.”
* * *
Around Thanksgiving, 2013, I got a call from Lance Reenstierna, the guy from Boston who had helped me preserve Alden Olson’s threatening YouTube videos. He had gotten “consumed” by Maura’s mystery and had taken some time off to work on other things so that his interest in the case didn’t become a full-blown obsession. But, he said, “I’m getting back into it. I’ve decided to make a documentary. Can I fly you out to Boston?”
Sure I could do Boston, I told him. Or, we could go on an adventure and actually try to find her. I filled him in on the Canadian sightings.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
In early December, I hopped a flight from Akron to Boston Logan. Lance, who has more than a passing resemblance to Peter Sarsgaard, picked me up and we drove north. Along for the adventure were two of his friends: Tim Pilleri and Josh Leonard. They’d worked together on various projects over the years and had once written and produced a popular mystery-dinner theater program together.
We were briefly detained at the border. Lance told the guy who checked our passports that we were on a pilgrimage to a famous Montreal church. I was convinced that my misdemeanor had pinged the guard’s computer and we would be spending the night in some secret Homeland Security jail. But the border agents were just curious about four dudes entering their country with a van full of camera equipment. After they thoroughly checked the vehicle, and confiscated a staple gun I had brought along to hang MISSING posters, they let us cross.
We drove to Sherbrooke first. It’s a college town with a brick-and-mortar center at the confluence of two major rivers, once home to the Mohawk and Abenaki tribes before it was pillaged by French Canadians. It reminded me of a mid-sized Pennsylvania city, something like State College or Wilkes-Barre, a quaint downtown with suburban sprawl surrounding it like slow cancer.
Sherbrooke is French-speaking, but the residents are kinder to Americans than the Québécois of Montreal (you can still find English menus here). None of us spoke a lick of French, and I found it disconcerting to wander around a town where I could not read signs or advertisements. I felt illiterate.
We fanned out around the downtown area, taping Maura’s MISSING posters to streetlamps and storefront windows. I went inside every bar, Tim surreptitiously capturing my interviews on his flip cam. I spoke in slow English to the proprietors. We didn’t get our first decent lead until I showed Maura’s photograph to the barista at La Brûlerie on rue Wellington. “Yes,” the young woman said, studying the picture. “I believe I’ve seen this woman. I think she came in here before.”
On the other side of town later that night, we were canvassing rue Therrien outside Bar Studio Sex, a darkly lit strip club, and I showed Maura’s picture to a man loitering outside.
“I know her,” he said.
“This woman?” I asked. “Where is she?”
“She’s in the morgue,” he said, and walked away. I jogged after him.
“You really know this woman?”
“Yes. I knew her. Couple years ago. She OD’d, man. I’m American, you know. I came here because I was being spied on. The government, man. They’re after me.”
This man was not sane, I quickly realized. Or maybe he was tweaking. Whatever was going on with him, he was far from a credible witness. He told me a little more about his conspiracy theories and then continued down the road, talking to himself.
The next morning, we stopped at a fitness center called Maxi Club, located behind our hotel. When I showed the manager Maura’s photo, she didn’t hesitate. “This woman came in three weeks ago,” she said. “But I haven’t seen her since.”
We drove to St-Étienne-de-Beauharnois then, discovered it was little more than an intersection with a candy store, and returned to Sherbrooke for the night. Although we were getting leads there, we felt it was in our best interest to visit Quebec City before returning home the following day.
* * *
Fuck, Quebec City is cold. Like brutally cold. Arctic Circle cold. It’s so far north of Akron that the sun sets an hour and ten minutes earlier there. It is home to half a million Canucks.
Quebec was once “Kebec,” an Indian word meaning “where the river narrows,” fitting because the St. Lawrence River squeezes around the city before emptying into the Atlantic. Tall fort ramparts still surround the oldest quarter, Vieux Québec. Driving through downtown, one sees a strange mishmash of European and American architecture that becomes decidedly more tacky the farther your drive downhill.
We visited grocery stores and gas stations and bars. Our group became separated at one point, and during that time Tim and I happened upon a hipstery section of the city, full of pubs and narrow shops along St-Joseph Est. The
re was a vintage album store there called Le Knock-Out and I left a couple flyers with the woman behind the counter. She was a total punk and seemed quite curious about who we were and why we were so interested in this missing woman, but her English was very broken and it was hard to understand half of what she was saying.
A week later, I got an e-mail from her.
2 of us maybe saw Maura Murray in Quebec on monday december 2 and saturday december 7. We speak with a girl who looks like the one you’re looking for. The similitude with pictures are soooo intense. And her speach was weird … I think you have my phone number.
Roxann
I wrote back right away, and she gave me a little more:
Just let you know that the girl we have seen here in QC look like the pictures of Maura Murray but older of course! She looks like around 34 … Like I said in another email. It’s someone who looks like the girl but older. That’s it. And I do not look for something back or visibility or anything like that. I don’t care about that. I just wanted to do my citizen job. The girl here was muchhhhhh look like the picture but older. Just that.
One of my friend was with me on that monday. He speachs english: he speaks with that girl. She was on bicycle (bike) in snow. sportive girl.
I did not want to communicate with you at that time because you did not identify. But i talk with the police. He talked with NH police and i thought you too because the police told me you gave him my number phone.
In fact, she asked for live music on monday here in Quebec. We (friend and I) told her that here, in qc, there is nothing on monday and tell her for thursay ou friday. She said she will not be there … she really want it MONDAY. And on saturday, i see her in bike on another street. Alone, in the snow with her bike. I notice it because she told us she would not be there and that clash me.
She is REALLY look like the picture. We both (friend and I) have a great visual memory. She enters the record store slowly, watching. She was discreet. We wanted to give her a map with the name of venue of artist and she refused telling she was ok. She told us that here, in QC, people do not know their town, not like another places (that supposed she travels). She speaks at “I” and not “WE”. She has a suit for winter, but cheap one, not a big “sportive.” One colour suit. I know a lottt of people here so that I notice her on the street the saturday. She did not have make up.