True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  She was really in good shape. No fat at all. Building athletic.

  She stay around 15 minutes in the shop talking (english). She acts a little weird. She had a little “backpack” (dont know the word). My friend talk about music and how the city was “made” (streets) … She did not wanted to go to big show. Just some little.

  You have some pictures on the net that are SOOOOO similar. I would never have contact police or you if my friend and I do not have a big suspicious. Hope it can help.

  Bye bye.

  :)

  Was it possible that we had crossed paths with Maura Murray in Canada?

  SIXTY-ONE

  Poker Face

  It was the pediatrician who finally figured out my son. This was halfway through Casey’s second year at the bad kids’ school. A kiddie psychiatrist had put him on meds, something called clonidine. The drugs had helped a little. He was less violent at home. But they made him so tired. And he was still being sent to that scary room with the padded walls most days. Out of an abundance of caution, we returned to his pediatrician. He’s an older man with a practiced manner, one of those adults who speaks to kids with respect. He wrote us a prescription for a drug called Intuniv. “This is what I’ve been giving kids for thirty years,” he said.

  A lot of writers, when searching for a deus ex machina to get their characters out of a precarious situation near the end of a story, will resort to a drug. A magic pill, perhaps, to help the protagonist along. Eat this to make you small.… But sometimes that’s how it is in real life, too.

  Casey simply stopped having bad days. He stopped hitting his teachers, stopped going to the “support” room. And while it’s still too early to tell if we’ve come through the dark tunnel, it’s a hell of a start.

  “Take me with you the next time you go to the mountains to find that woman,” he said to me recently. “I’ll help you find her.”

  * * *

  There’s a young man in a photograph with Maura that was posted on the family’s Web site. It was taken at a restaurant not long before she disappeared. The man is handsome and exotic. He looks slightly Asian. He is sitting beside Maura and they’re smiling. They seem to be enjoying each other’s company.

  His name is David Whalen. I wanted to talk to him, just to get more background stories about Maura, but when I went to track him down, I couldn’t find a Facebook page or an e-mail address or, really, anything other than his current ranking in the professional poker circuit. Over the last few years, David has made over $100,000 playing cards. Some of this is online poker, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much he’s banked. But it’s a lot. He’s good. And he keeps a very low profile.

  I posted his picture on my blog and asked him to contact me for an interview. I didn’t get any bites for months. And then I heard from a man named Sean, another high-stakes poker player, who often sat across from David at high-stakes tables.

  Admittedly I am not very well versed in the case overall but I saw a quick blip related to the “Londonderry Ping,” which I believe may have been the last outbound call to Maura’s phone. The first thing that jumped out to me about that particular region is the proximity to both the Rockingham Park and the Seabrook Race track. These places stand out to me due to them being places where one can find poker games. It’s relatively common for people who are regulars at Foxwoods (particularly those living in Central/Northeastern Mass.) to call in ahead and see what games are running at Foxwoods—if it’s not busy and game selection is poor some people would just opt to head up to Seabrook or Salem and play lower money games in exchange for saving time/gas driving to Foxwoods.

  I called Sean immediately. “Where is David now?” I asked.

  “Last I heard, he was living in Canada. Gambling tax laws are better up there and you can still get away with playing online. There are some good tables in and around Montreal. But I heard he was living outside the city.”

  “Where?”

  “Sherbrooke.”

  * * *

  We went on the hunt, my Irregulars and I. A lawyer named Sam, who runs another site devoted to Maura’s case, NotWithoutPeril, found David’s Twitter account. He was using the handle David Tadas, a shortening of his middle name. Combing through his tweets, I discovered some alarming messages:

  Well, if voluntary manslaughter is a crime, then yeah, I guess I’m a criminal.

  Oh, I get it, misread one girl for having a rape fantasy and all of a sudden I’m a “rapist.”

  If I ever get charged with murder, I’ll probably use the classic, “I Was Playing Simon Says,” defense.

  Holy shit, right?

  I posted some of the tweets on my blog. Later that day, David sent me an e-mail, using a temporary account linked to an IP address that tracked back to a computer in Connecticut.

  “I have noticed that you continue to post about me on your website,” he wrote. “It seems that you came across a picture of me in college and built a narrative about my potential involvement with Maura. Reading the posts/comments from strangers that speculate about my life based on ONE photo makes me nauseous. I was a friend of Maura’s in high school/college. We weren’t particularly close, but we did share some friends in common. This is the beginning and end of any useful information I can provide. I have a weird, silly, and yes, sometimes dark sense of humor. It horrifies me that someone would pour [sic] through 3+ years of tweets, cherry pick the weird/disturbing ones and use those to try to paint a portrait about me.”

  In a follow-up e-mail, David said the photograph was taken just after New Year’s. He had been with Maura and her high school friends at a house in Goshen, New Hampshire, for the night. It was the same house the police were so interested in when she disappeared. The perfect place to lay low.

  SIXTY-TWO

  The Bitter and the Sweet

  My grandfather passed away a few days after Christmas. A week before he died, he got a visit from a detective in Alliance who was investigating allegations of rape dating back forty years. My grandfather didn’t eat a bullet like I hoped he would. The cancer got him.

  There’s no real closure. This is an existential world, my friend.

  As of this writing, Maura’s disappearance is still unsolved. As hard as I tried, I didn’t get my Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ending. No meeting Harriet Vanger. Not yet.

  As I was finishing the book, it dawned on me that I had never spoken to the people who owned the Seasons Resort in Bartlett, New Hampshire, where Maura had tried to rent a condo the day she went missing. I tracked down one of the condo owers, Linda Salamone, at home. It was little more than a fact-checking call, but it led to another strange revelation. The condo Maura was interested in had two separate bedrooms. It was not a single rental. It was a rental designed for families or groups of friends.

  Fred and Maura used to stay together at the Seasons Resort when they traveled into the White Mountains.

  When Salamone was contacted by police detectives years ago, one of them told her that the case “had taken a turn” and they didn’t believe they needed the information she might have. The investigation, he said, was “going in another direction.”

  As I’ve said, Maura’s case is a unique double mystery: 1) What happened to her? and 2) Why was she in New Hampshire to begin with? I believe I’ve answered the second question. It’s obvious that Maura was running away. She had packed her belongings into boxes and left a message for her boyfriend. She’d returned her scrubs and bought herself a little time with professors by telling them that there had been a death in the family. She was never coming back. Maura was running away from her life and her family. I believe she thought that her credit card fraud and the identity theft associated with it were about to bury her. The charge would stick since she was going to be cited for the late-night accident in her father’s car. She would never be able to pass the background checks required to become a nurse. It was time to start over.

  But after that? What happened after the crash in New Hampshire?

 
After that, the best I can do is consider probabilities. The most likely explanation, the one that jibes with all the evidence, is that she was driving in tandem with someone who was aiding her escape. But who? Kate? Fred? I think the plan was for her to stay in New Hampshire for the night, perhaps so that her accomplice had time to travel up from Eastern Mass and meet her in the middle, on the Kancamagus Highway, and for them to travel into Canada in the morning. That other person could have been bringing her passport and other essentials from home. I think Maura made it to the rendezvous point (a restaurant, a gas station, a Dunkins) and was traveling behind her companion—or companions—when she got into her accident. The other driver doubled back, picked her up, and they continued on their way. Maura never expected that her disappearance would become national news, that her vanishing act would look so much like an abduction to some.

  Do Maura’s friends and family know where she is? I don’t know. But I am at a loss to explain their behavior. They do not want this book written. It is clear to me that they are no longer actively looking for Maura. A reader on the blog summed it up well:

  “To share a minor scare I had with one of my twins: When they were about three years old and just able to make their own choices, one of my girls wanted to go out in the back yard and get into the kiddie pool, but I told her to wait about ten minutes. The next thing I know she had disappeared. I looked everywhere in the yard.… Everywhere. I started to lose my mind. I ran screaming through the house, woke my wife up to help look. She searched through the house again and I jumped in our car and sped through the neighborhood screaming out of the window and praying out loud. I was in a total panic that I can’t relate to anyone unless they have kids. When I got back to the house my wife was in the front yard with our missing daughter. She said that she basically reappeared when she was running through the house looking for her. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and can never imagine being calm with a missing child. I would stop at nothing, sleeping only when necessary and never give up. That small incident was too much for me. Even retelling it is upsetting. I guess everyone is different but these peeps have always behaved very oddly, IMHO.”

  Perhaps Maura is still in southern New Hampshire, working off the grid. There are plenty of folks around Haverhill doing that very thing.

  I hope Maura ran away. I hope she found happiness elsewhere.

  * * *

  How do the rest of us go on without erasing our past mistakes and starting a new life? In a world of Ariel Castros and Amy Mihaljevics, how do we manage to move forward?

  I think the secret may be that, in order to maintain our sanity, we need to find a way to ignore the constant threat of violence. That’s not ignorance. No. I’m talking about a deliberate effort to turn our backs on bad news and to believe in grace, in eucatastrophe. To hope, even if you know better.

  My wife said to me a couple weeks ago that I had lost my sense of joy, that I never smiled anymore. It was a profound statement. I still consider myself a funny guy. When we met in school, I was the class clown. Teachers were always saying I smiled too much. I was the joker. These stories, these adventures into the darker side of human nature, stole that away, like a dementor’s kiss. I want to find my joy again.

  My kids bring me joy. Casey and Lainey.

  We have a wide backyard that looks into the woods that lead to the Cuyahoga. I keep the fence down in the back so the deer can sneak up to my house in the summers and nibble at the hostas. They’re bedding back there now, keeping warm for the winter. Casey spotted a buck the other day, out the back door.

  “Some people, they kill deer,” he said. “They shoot them. I would never kill an animal. They’re so pretty, Dad. Aren’t they? Why would anyone want to kill?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Thus, I give up the spear.

  EPILOGUE

  There is no ending. Until there is.

  One day, I will be sitting at a kid’s gymnastics meet, or at lunch, or in front of the TV, and I’ll check my smart phone and Maura Murray will be a trending topic on Twitter and Reddit. She will have come out of hiding to tell her story. Or maybe some hunter will have finally found her remains off a trail below Mount Washington. Until that day, the mystery is fluid. A book is a static thing. Unchanging. But a mystery moves. It lives. It evolves. Even as we edited this book, it evolved. At the eleventh hour, I discovered new information about Bill Rausch that caused me to question his role in the case.

  Bill, I thought, was above suspicion—stationed at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma at the time of Maura’s disappearance—and, I had come to believe, one of the good things in Maura’s life. Just a few weeks ago, I gave an interview and said, “Maura was her best when she was with Bill.” Now this was thrown into question.

  On October 1, 2015, I received the following e-mail from “Ellen”1 “I prefer not to get involved but this case has been on my mind for a few years. It may be of interest to look further into Bill Rausch’s character by way of employment history, relationships with co-workers, and reason for employment changes.”

  Later, she wrote: “I’d start at looking at LinkedIn and making connections—2010/2011.”

  I looked at Bill’s employment history, again. In 2011, Bill Rausch was a director at Ray Group International, in D.C. He managed contracts in excess of $27 million and worked with Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, according to his LinkedIn profile. He left in May, 2011.

  “What happened at Ray Group International?” I wrote back.

  Ellen gave me the name of two coworkers, Margo and Sharon. Margo was the first one to tell me their story.

  “This happened in March, 2011,” she said over the phone, later that night. Margo, Carrie, and a third woman, Andie, had gone out for drinks after work to celebrate St. Patty’s Day. Afterward, around 10 P.M., Andie needed to return to the office for some things, but by then the building was closed and locked up for the night. Luckily, Carrie had a key.

  Carrie and Andie went in but when Carrie came out, Andie was nowhere to be found. Carrie went back in to find her. Margo got impatient waiting for them and crossed the street to go home. She looked back, though, and saw Andie come out of the building with Carrie. Andie looked upset. Margo texted Carrie: What’s going on with Andie?

  Carrie texted back that Bill Rausch had attacked her.

  “When I went back in after Andie, the office was completely dark,” Carrie explained. “I called out for her. She didn’t respond. Then the big wooden doors to the president’s office rattled, hard. Like someone trying to get out. Andie burst out and told me Bill had attacked her and was hiding under the president’s desk.”

  Eventually, I spoke directly to Andie.

  “Bill was strange around women,” she began. “He was so arrogant and he had been making inappropriate comments to me and the other women. I assumed he didn’t like me.”

  According to Andie, she had an odd encounter with Bill outside the subway one day a few weeks before the attack. She was coming up the elevators at the Metro on her way to work when Bill came up behind her and shoved her, hard, she said. She fell down. When she got to the office, she asked him about it. Why did he do it? But Bill acted like it wasn’t him.

  The night she came back to the office, after hours, Andie ran into Bill, who was married at the time. “He was clearly intoxicated. He said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ and then led me into the president’s office and locked the door behind us.” Once they were alone, according to Andie, Bill turned to her and smiled in a way that scared her. He said he knew that it was her he pushed in the Metro. She tried to leave. But Andie says he used his body to block her. He pushed her toward a wide table. Then, she said, he turned her around and pushed her facedown into the tabletop. She struggled. He pushed her down harder, she said.

  At that moment, Carrie came back into the office, looking for Andie. They could hear Carrie outside the door. Andie said that Bill let her go at this time. “He said, ‘Don’t say a fucki
ng word.’” Frightened for her life, Andie called out to Carrie. Bill made a “shushing” gesture to Andie, she said, and then hid his body under the president’s desk. They got the door open and Andie left with Carrie.

  Two days later, Andie said she went to the police station to fill out a report but ultimately decided not to.

  “She was afraid of repercussions from Bill and, in my view, young and worried about the implications to her career,” said Ellen.

  But Andie did take it to the president of Ray Group International. Her coworkers backed her up. Bill never returned to the office and left to work at another company a month later.

  Margo provided me with texts between her and Carrie from the day they spoke to the president of Ray Group International about Bill. Here’s some of what they said:

  Margo: I basically told them that I don’t feel safe, that Bill scares the crap out of me. I’m not the only one who feels this way and that Mike (the president) has no idea what Bill is actually like. I explained some of his erratic behavior in the past … I need to go for a walk but I basically aired out Bill’s dirty laundry re: he’s fucking crazy and a sociopath and doesn’t understand human emotion.”

  Most of Bill’s coworkers did not know that he was promised to marry Maura Murray. But Ellen says he once talked about her during a trip when he got to drinking one night. “He mentioned that they were in the midst of breaking up an engagement when she disappeared and, in retrospect, was glad that it worked out the way it did, which I took to mean how his life turned out, new marriage, etc.”