by James Renner
“None of this behavior was shocking to me,” said Margo. “This wasn’t out of character. He had two personalities. One that he showed when he was only around women and one when he had to be around the men. We had a name for each personality. We called the mean one ‘Bill’ and the happy-friendly personality, ‘Billiam.’ I never wanted to interact with him. It was like, I don’t know who you are but this is really weird.”
I spoke to his direct assistant, Melissa, too. “Bill and I shared an office,” she said. “At times, Bill became very erratic. He’d get very agitated sometimes. It was clear he didn’t like any woman with authority. He was very territorial. Very possessive.”
Melissa recalled when they were asked to travel to Ohio, where Bill’s parents lived, on a project for the V.A. She thought Bill would be excited to go home but he said he didn’t want to go. “I thought that was kind of odd.”
“He had a really crazy reaction when he learned I was pregnant,” said Melissa. He said he was happy for her, but the way he said it made Melissa uncomfortable. “You could tell he didn’t mean it. It was very awkward.” She’d brought sonogram pictures of the baby to show off to coworkers. She left them at her desk, in the office she shared with Bill, where he sat directly behind her. But when she returned later, they were gone. And she never found them again.
Finally, I spoke to Bill and asked him about Andie and Ray Group International. At first he denied knowing Andie. But after a couple minutes he said he did know her but was taken off guard by my questions. He wouldn’t speak to the allegations and said he left Ray Group International for another job.
I think back on what others told me about Bill’s relationship with Maura and see it in a new light.
Friends of Maura’s from UMass said that Bill was very possessive of her and they tried to break them up, unsuccessfully. One man who did get close to Maura for a time, Hossein Baghdadi, was concerned about their relationship, calling Bill “controlling.”
A reader of the blog recently found an old article about the case that had fallen off the Internet. In the article, Bill’s mother, Sharon, said that her son was the “prime suspect” early in the investigation and recalled talking to him after being questioned. “He said, ‘I feel as dirty as Scott Peterson. They think I’ve got something to do with it.’” Of course, I do know that the police will always immediately look at a boyfriend or husband as a suspect in a woman’s disappearance.
I think about that e-mail Maura left on top of the boxes in her empty room, the e-mail that talked about Bill cheating on her. And I think about what former lead detective John Scarinza told me, about how he believed Maura might have just learned she was pregnant when she disappeared. I think about the House of Ruth, that beautiful underground railroad for abused women seeking a new life. And then I think about Bill’s sister, Heather—who wanted to tell the sheriff about something illegal, according to the coroner.
Fort Sill is a twenty-six-hour drive from Haverhill, New Hampshire. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that anyone could make a manic round-trip drive to New Hampshire and not be noticed, especially an officer in the Army. Still, I asked Bill what he was doing at Fort Sill in the days leading up to February 9, 2004. Bill says he was with Charlie Battery, and was “in the field” helping with basic training. “I was out of cell phone range,” he said. He provided me with the names of two people who could verify that he was on base the whole time. I contacted both of these men. Neither called me back. Perhaps they just don’t see the point of talking to me about a day in 2004 about which they have little, if any, recollection.
A few weeks after this revelation, I managed to get my hands on the call logs from both Bill and Maura’s cell phones in the month leading up to her disappearance in 2004. After reviewing this information, I am confident that Bill, in fact, was at Fort Sill as he says he was. The records show that Bill was constantly calling offices around Fort Sill as part of his duties there. And at the time of Maura’s accident in New Hampshire, Bill was making calls—which means he was nowhere near the White Mountains, where there is no cell service to this day. But—of course—the records reveal some strange things.
The night Maura had the breakdown at work, during a snowstorm that shut down the university, she placed a call to Domino’s at 3:40 A.M. that lasted a couple minutes. This call is weird for several reasons. One, this is one of the restaurants where she used stolen credit cards to order food—why on earth would she ever call them again? Two, every source I’ve talked to says Domino’s closed at 3 A.M. on Thursday nights. But maybe it’s nothing.
More interesting are the calls placed by Bill. The day Maura vanished, the logs show that he was desperately trying to reach her throughout the day. He called her cell phone constantly but she never answered. He called Kate Markopoulos several times that day, too. At the moment Maura crashed into a snowdrift in New Hampshire, Bill was on the phone with a West Point professor—Bob McDonald—who used to host Bill and Maura at his house on occasion when they were cadets. Following this call, Bill made a flurry of phone calls to young women he knew in Ohio. I called them, too. “He was calling old girlfriends,” one of them told me. When I told her about the alleged assault at Ray Group International, she said, “I’m not surprised to hear this.”
Roaming charges show how Bill traveled to New Hampshire after Maura went missing, to help search for her, traveling to Vermont and Maine along the highways. He continued to try to reach Maura on her cell phone until the end of the billing cycle, in late February. He also continued to call Kate Markopoulos, but the length of these calls—usually under a minute—suggests he never reached her and she never called back. The calls to Kate Markopoulos stop after Bill called Sara Alfieri’s phone number on February 19. What he learned from Sara that day remains a mystery.
Things that I’ve learned about Bill these last few months suggest that Maura could have had a good reason to flee. And if she really was pregnant, as Lt. Scarinza believes, a child gives her motive to remain hidden, when custody and visitation could be an issue.
If that is the case, then I hope Maura Murray remains missing.
NOTES
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
1. Not her real name.
Epilogue
1. names have been changed to protect sources
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should thank the stripper who inspired me to push on with my reporting, whose real name is neither Gracie nor Jennifer.
Karen Mayotte was my first major interview, and she provided great insight into the beginning of this mystery.
Without the inside information provided by Lieutenant John Scarinza and private investigators John Healy and Tom Shamshak, my job would have been much more difficult.
Thank you to the begrudging but welcoming community surrounding the site of Maura’s accident in Haverhill, most notably Faith Westman and John Marrotte. I’m sorry for helping to make your little stretch of quiet New Hampshire so popular.
If my fiction editor, Sarah Crichton, had not taken a chance on my writing by shepherding The Man from Primrose Lane, I would never have been able to find the time and resources to devote to the adventures contained in this book.
A special thanks to my readers: Brandy Marks, Maggie Antone, and Alyssa Carter, who proofread an early version of this book and provided very helpful notes about how to make it better.
My agent, Yishai Seidman, showed me how to find the better, leaner story within the manuscript.
My editor at Thomas Dunne Books, Nicole Sohl, took a chance on me and this story, and has my gratitude.
I also wish to thank Katie Bacon, Liz and Beth Drewniak, Mike Driscoll, Keith Erwin, Mike Lewis, Jeffery Strelzin, Ed Lanpher, John Green, Gnomini and the rest of my Irregulars, Cecil Smith, Dick Guy, Janis Mehrman, Kurt Noble, Tim Carpenter, Rick Graves, Nastaran Shams, Bill Rausch, Hossein Baghdadi, Crystal Therrien, Mike Lavoie, Chris King, Todd Landry, James Caccavaro, Dan Marks, Lorina Vasi, John Philpin, Dr. William Lee, Roger S
ynenberg, Dominic Coletta, Psychic Jean, Megan Sawyer, Barb Bressler, Joline Renner, Barbara Atwood, Lance Reenstierna, Tim Pilleri, Josh Leonard, David Whalen, Peter Hyatt, Jess Hicks, John B., Tyler from Pittsburgh, and Linda Salamone.
Anyone with information related to this case should contact the police directly at [email protected].
ALSO BY JAMES RENNER
NONFICTION
Amy: My Search for Her Killer
The Serial Killer’s Apprentice
It Came from Ohio …
FICTION
The Man from Primrose Lane
The Great Forgetting
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES RENNER is the author of The Serial Killer’s Apprentice and several other works of nonfiction. His true crime stories have appeared in the Best American Crime Writing anthology, as well the Cleveland Scene and Cracked.com. In 2015, his method of using social media to solve cold cases was the subject of a CNN profile. He has also written two novels, The Man from Primrose Lane and The Great Forgetting. He lives in Akron with his wife and children. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2. Paramour
3. Full Disclosure
4. All-American Girl
5. Past Is Prologue
6. The Gatekeeper
7. Forget the Past
8. Last Shift at Melville
9. The Zoo
10. Hacking the Universe
11. Never Take Rides from Strangers
12. The Runner
13. Private Eyes
14. What Really Happened at West Point
15. Cracks in the Façade
16. The Clique
17. Molly, Holly, and Bri
18. Murray v. State of New Hampshire
19. My Baker Street Irregulars
20. The Chief’s Demons
21. What the TV Guy Told Me
22. Aunt Janis
23. Baby Brother
24. How an Abduction Happens
25. A Lucky Break
26. Maura’s Lovers
27. BFF
28. Consider the Red Herring
29. The Londonderry Ping
30. The Man with the Knife
31. 22 Walker
32. Between the Lines
33. Petrit Vasi
34. The Shadow of Death Returns
35. Motive
36. 112dirtbag
37. Mr. 1974
38. Family
39. Bad Rabbit
40. An Overdue Visit
41. Outliers
42. More Trouble in St. Albans
43. The Zaps
44. Silver Linings
45. Confrontations
46. “Drunk and Naked”
47. Graves
48. Borderland
49. I Saw Your Think
50. Eucatastrophe
51. Contempt
52. Hard Time
53. Beagle Strikes Back
54. The Fool
55. Everybody Lies
56. Billy, Don’t Lose My Number
57. Closure Is for Doors
58. Failed Tests
59. How to Disappear
60. Oh, Canada!
61. Poker Face
62. The Bitter and the Sweet
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Also by James Renner
About the Author
Copyright
Certain names have been changed, whether or not so noted in the text.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
TRUE CRIME ADDICT. Copyright © 2016 by James Renner. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Renner, James, 1978– author.
Title: True crime addict: how I lost myself in the mysterious disappearance of Maura Murray / James Renner.
Description: First edition.|New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049511|ISBN 978-1-250-08901-4 (hardback)|ISBN 978-1-250-08902-1 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Renner, James, 1978–|Murray, Maura, 1982–|Journalists—United States—Psychology—Case studies.|Missing persons—United States—Case studies.|Criminal investigation—United States—Case studies.|BISAC: TRUE CRIME / General.|BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.
Classification: LCC HV6762. U5 R45 2016|DDC 363.2/336—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049511
e-ISBN 9781250089021
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First Edition: May 2016