NH NH - Maura Murray, 21, Haverhill, 9 Feb 2004 - #12

[Tarik]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/salem-witch-gets-protective-order-against-warlock/

not sure this link will work, but isn't this the psychic that the podcast guys interviewed?

No, they interviewed Lori Bruno, not Lori Sforza.

 

[Fireweed]

No, they interviewed Lori Bruno, not Lori Sforza.

I thought they were the same person.

 

[Tarik]

I thought they were the same person.

They are the same person, my bad. Her full name is actually Lori Bruno Sforza. The article is very misleading though.

 

[Aleph]

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[Lolacat]

Not saying this is connected to Maura, but apparently a woman was stabbed to death in the White Mountains area in November 2001, her name was Louise Chaput.

Here:
https://appalachiantrailnoir.wordpr...c-womans-murder-on-n-h-trail-still-a-mystery/

Her body was found with multiple stab wounds just off the Glen Boulder trail on November 22nd 2001. Her murder remains unsolved.

Just thought it was interesting considering all the prior discussions about how unlikely it would be for Maura to run into a killer that evening. I wonder if this poor lady thought the same thing

 

[The Observer]

Twelve threads and a billion posts I am finally caught up.

He has become very unprofessional and it is sleazing up the online sleuthing of this case...

Funny considering all I seemed to have seen reading these threads were the same few posters target the people who are/were actually doing some sleuthing.

The post took on certain credence after a user named "Observer" replied that this was known to certain members of the family. Observer was tracked to the region of a small town where Fred's cousins lived...

FYI: This is not me.

Regardless whether you like Renner or his blog or the Missing Maura podcast, whether it's accurate or not etc. At least they're doing something to keep her name out there. It's getting people talking. Hopefully one day, a resolution. It's people like these that feed my true crime passion and love of investigations, and for that I'm grateful.

Re: The "My sister" comment Maura made and her call with Billy (if the 'breakdown' was not a ruse) I've wondered if she found out the person Billy cheated with to be her sister Julie. Adding to why she left the cheating email on top of the box in her dorm.

 

[Pettibon Junction]

Just thought it was interesting considering all the prior discussions about how unlikely it would be for Maura to run into a killer that evening. I wonder if this poor lady thought the same thing

Agreed. There are far too many unsolved murders and disappearances of women in that region of New England, with at least three unidentified serial killers operating over the past 30 years in New Hampshire alone, which is why it's hardly unrealistic to remain agnostic regarding the possibility of foul play.

 

[Caffeine]

With MM people for some reason assume when you speak of foul play, it somehow translates into a serial killer on the loose, and the likelihood of that is very slim.

Despite it being a slim chance it has happened before. At this point anything is possible and I certainly wouldn't dismiss the idea.

However, if foul play is involved, it doesn't necessarily have to be a serial killer. This person may have initially viewed her as an easy rape victim and approached it from that angle.

Perhaps the intent wasn't originally to kill her but things went awry.

But to automatically dismiss foul is naive and it doesn't simply entail a serial killer bumping into her and thinking "Look an easy victim!"

There could certainly be a sexual motive that led up to it.

 

[Pettibon Junction]

With MM people for some reason assume when you speak of foul play, it somehow translates into a serial killer on the loose, and the likelihood of that is very slim.

Despite it being a slim chance it has happened before. At this point anything is possible and I certainly wouldn't dismiss the idea.

However, if foul play is involved, it doesn't necessarily have to be a serial killer. This person may have initially viewed her as an easy rape victim and approached it from that angle.

Perhaps the intent wasn't originally to kill her but things went awry.

But to automatically dismiss foul is naive and it doesn't simply entail a serial killer bumping into her and thinking "Look an easy victim!"

There could certainly be a sexual motive that led up to it.

100% agreed.

 

[Fireweed]

What do you all think of the detailed list of items found in Maura's car that Renner dug up?

 

[Sternocleidomastoid]

I'll try to keep this entertaining and brief after catching up on a couple weeks of posts due to life circumstances.

For years, I've read comments by people who fault Renner for his supposedly single-minded hypothesis that MM is alive and in hiding somewhere. Now he apparently has come across something that changes his mind -- he says that, if true, the new info would make it much more likely that MM is dead. That's pretty damn inconvenient for someone who has already finished his book.

Agreed, I don't envy Renner's conversations with his publisher at this point. Point goes to Renner's integrity if we know the whole story here.

The guys making the podcast and documentary do not strike me as knowing what they are doing....

To me, that's part of the charm. Two pairs of fresh outsiders' eyes on the case. We all basically love to discuss the case in the absence of new information ad nauseam, so I don't understand most complaints about the podcast. My only gripe is that they gave any credence to "psychics." Absolute hokum that casts severe doubt upon their critical thinking skills. Maybe they can have my horse stamp out what happened to Maura for the next episode.

What's relevant is finding out what happened to Maura and bringing peace to the Murray family once and for all.

That's absolutely an important goal, but I don't agree with the platitude that it should ever be the only goal. Maura was a member and product of our society. Learning from her case shouldn't be a privilege restricted to LE and family because whatever became of Maura will happen again.

Nothing to do with Maura but as a reference to the "she ran in to the woods" theory. This happened ~25 miles west of Maura's disappearance in fall of 2004. Jackman was just found after 11 years.

Hunter finds human remains police believe belong to fugitive (Oct 16, 2015)
http://www.wcvb.com/news/hunter-finds-human-remains-police-believe-belong-to-fugitive/35874774

This was my theory starting out and I sometimes have to catch myself getting too caught up in following other possibilities. I personally knew two people in high school who crashed their cars in essentially the same way as Maura while intoxicated. They ran far enough away to evade capture then safely coordinated for someone to pick them up. It's hard for LE to prove that they were driving the car after a few days of sobering up and hiding out. If this thought independently occurred to two dumb high schoolers in my life, it must not be an unusual one in that situation.

If Maura missed two days of these clinicals, there would not have been a search party called. The consequences of missing clinicals would have been purely academic in nature. Scoops is totally convinced that if Maura missed two days of school (even these you-miss-one-and-the-world-ends clinicals), that her parents and the police would have been called. That is not how things operate at a university. If Maura missed two days of clinicals then her grade would have suffered, or she would have been kicked out of the program, but FFS, she would not have been a "missing person".

I know that you're coming from a place of more higher education than most of the world and I think you're correct about almost all environments. I'll tell you that this would not fly in at least one prominent medical school. The consequences of missing a required activity were so severe that everyone would look around to make sure all of their friends were there 5 minutes before it began. We would incessantly call and text any friend who wasn't there until they answered so that we could cover for them once their absence was noticed. I once completely forgot I had to be in one day and was watching the news in my underwear. My phone started ringing off the hook and a friend reminded me of my slip up. I put on scrub bottoms and shoes then sprinted a mile and half to the hospital while getting dressed.

My point is that I would have been extremely concerned if any of the people I'd went through hell with hadn't showed up for a required school session. In order of phone calls, it would have been significant other, parents (white pages if needed), faculty, police department. Not sure if Maura's nursing school was more lax, but it's possible they weren't.

I also feel that there have been a lot things he dug up about Maura that have now just been "hanging" out there with no credible source for years. For example, Renner posted on his blog that Maura participated in orgies....

I doubt that many of us are totally comfortable with that particular aspect of Renner's investigation, but we have to ask why we single that out as a problem when most of the same arguments could be applied to so much other "dirt." It's cultural.

I just realized that it may seem like I'm singling you out here Fireweed, but if I am, it's not deliberate or malicious. You must just foster the most discussion with me. I appreciate your awesome response to my Renner questions weeks ago.

Agree with everyone's points about James Renner. I enjoyed his blog up until his claims of Maura being a "sociopath". Thats the point where it descended into utter farce for me. That is a very serious clinical diagnosis and to be throwing around labels like that which clearly hold a stigma in the society in which we live is highly irresponsible in my view. I work in mental health and its hard enough trying to encourage people to come forward or talk about their mental health issues because of stigma and social exclusion. Making it into some kind of salacious gossip that wouldn't look out of place on a daily mail headline is not helpful. On his blog, he didn't even spell psychopathy correctly. He is not in a position to be diagnosing serious mental health conditions of a person he has never even known, or met. Its fine to have suspicions about it, or to wonder about it, or to point out behaviour that might be dysfunctional, or to believe it internally, but to actually come out and publicly declare a diagnosis like its fact? No. Just NO.

One interesting thing from the most recent podcast was the interview with "John Smith" the private investigator who claims that from looking at Billy Rausch's phone records, he thinks Billy was aware of the problems that Maura was having and he implies that Billy might know why she left UMass that night. He claims that Billy made 46 phone calls the day before Maura went missing and 52 phone calls on the day she went missing (this was all BEFORE anyone knew she was gone). He claims that a normal amount of phone calls for Billy on an average day would be approx. 17-20 so this amount is obviously above the norm for him. He makes it clear that he does NOT think Billy was involved in her disappearance as he was in another location, but simply that he might have known what was troubling Maura and perhaps been worried about it himself.

I worked in mental health for years, specifically suicidology, and have to tell you all that Lolacat is a really valuable resource from what I've read. He or she knows what they're talking about.

I'm mostly playing to Lolacat and other fellow mental health professionals here, but everyone is welcome to read on if you have a high boredom tolerance. I suspect that Renner's layperson diagnosis stems from a recent trend in popular psychology where the definition of psychopathy (sort of the artist formerly known as sociopathy) is diluted into the subclinical zone. See "The Wisdom of Psychopaths" by Kevin Dutton for an example of this. They seem to toss out DSM diagnostic criteria and lower the bar so that many different "kinds" of people fit into different fabricated categories of psychopathy. I actually suspect they are on to something with this. I'm not at all convinced that a CEO with primarily severe affective and interpersonal deficits should be in the same category as a serial killer with primarily antisocial and lifestyle deficits. So I don't think we've yet perfectly categorized mental illness, but that's irrelevant to this conversation.

From my perspective, Maura exercised questionable judgement, abused alcohol to some extent, had an eating disorder, and was possibly self-centered. If that combination of characteristics surprises you, you don't know enough women in their early 20s.

In my opinion, Maura most likely intended to kill herself when she set out on that drive. Suicides aren't reported in the media, so few of us have any idea how frequent they are or the mechanisms by which they happen. I'd be appreciative of someone fact checking this, but I think suicide is the third leading cause of death in Maura's age group, just behind motor vehicle accidents. Suicide doesn't happen like it does in the movies, there is rarely a big display. The family often vehemently denies it was even possible because we all expect there to have been "clues" beforehand. There usually are, but family are not equipped to interpret them and the possibility that they missed indications is too painful to accept. Maura packed up her belongings and returned the things that she had borrowed. The number of times Billy called her indicate that she was in distress. Odds are she intended to end her life like so many other poor souls.

This is a very basic, well-known part of the case, and if you're just hearing this now, you really haven't done enough research. There was a post on a messagboard devoted to Maura's case years ago, in which a person wrote that Maura fled to Canada after striking Vasi with her car. The post took on certain credence after a user named "Observer" replied that this was known to certain members of the family. Observer was tracked to the region of a small town where Fred's cousins lived.

There were also posts on Canadian messageboards, supposedly by a schoolmate of Maura's, who claimed they saw her near Montreal.

Look, I'm not saying these reports are definitive, but they deserve to be followed, like any lead. please do research before dismissing them entirely.

I tremendously appreciate your participation around here, thanks Mr. Renner. i actually cringed thinking about how I would need a couple of stiff drinks if I were you to read through the last 10 pages before I knew that you are still active here. I've even questioned your ability to diagnose psychopathology within this very post, but I still respect your efforts as the only person who has dedicated years of their life to this case. I hope that you don't confuse spirited debate with ill will.

 

[Pettibon Junction]

What do you all think of the detailed list of items found in Maura's car that Renner dug up?

Personally, I'd be careful about reading too much into it. In my experience, that level of mess isn't too out of the ordinary for many young post-adolescents, especially college students in flux between a fixed address (i.e., living at home with mom and dad) and college life. However, the sheer volume of contingencies that she apparently planned for in stocking her vehicle with those supplies, whether it was deliberate or just stuff amassed over the years of driving it, speaks to Maura's personality, which has always been described as meticulous and somewhat "type-A."

 

[Gene S.]

Personally, I'd be careful about reading too much into it. In my experience, that level of mess isn't too out of the ordinary for many young post-adolescents, especially college students in flux between a fixed address (i.e., living at home with mom and dad) and college life. However, the sheer volume of contingencies that she apparently planned for in stocking her vehicle with those supplies, whether it was deliberate or just stuff amassed over the years of driving it, speaks to Maura's personality, which has always been described as meticulous and somewhat "type-A."

I agree. Hard to draw conclusions from that list. I would be curious to learn more about the 3 x 5 index cards with directions. Directions to or for what? And if the cards are handwritten, is it Maura's handwriting or did someone else write them?

 

[xjd]

What do you all think of the detailed list of items found in Maura's car that Renner dug up?

it's interesting for sure. could say a lot or could say nothing! for example, in my trunk are a lot of car repair/maintenance items like power steering fluid, screwdrivers etc. it's just handier to have them there when fixing something.

Renner's post points out that there is a lot of shampoo on the list, and speculates that the Head and Shoulders indicates a man. i don't think it's unusual and some people (especially women) like to switch between multiple shampoos from time to time, including dandruff ones. maybe for her to have packed so many in the car is strange, now i wonder if she left any personal hygiene products back at the dorm? if not, that would seem like she was not planning to come back.

and the cellophane pouch could be cigarettes or could be from chewing gum. or both!

and btw, is it Spring already? i thought Renner wasn't going to post to the blog until then? :thinking:

 

[Pettibon Junction]

Renner's post points out that there is a lot of shampoo on the list, and speculates that the Head and Shoulders indicates a man. i don't think it's unusual and some people (especially women) like to switch between multiple shampoos from time to time, including dandruff ones.

My girlfriend has no fewer than five different shampoos/conditioners in the shower at her house, one of which is for men's dandruff control. Incidentally, this is the main shampoo she uses so no, I'd agree that it's not an unusual thing to find in a woman's toiletry bag.

 

[stephsb]

I lol'd when I saw the speculation that using head and shoulders indicated a man. I have eczema and complained to my derm about how dry and itchy my scalp will get, in hopes they would give me a prescription shampoo, and they told me try head and shoulders first, which worked really well. It's also super cheap, which is certainly appealing to most college students...i had more than one friend that would just buy whatever shampoo was on sale that week. I don't think the shampoo bottles tell us much of anything, other than she washed her hair lol.


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[Lamima]

I am a woman that uses Head N Shoulders. I also, at times, may switch back and forth with 'good' shampoo so I might have 2 types in my travel bag. But there were 3 on the list, right? And I noticed a travel toothbrush and also a regular toothbrush, which I find odd. I'd only bring 1. Unless 1 was in the car before, left in there in case she sleeps over somewhere (then maybe 1 of the shampoos as well). And since she brought birth control, I'd say that leads away from being suicidal and possibly also rules out the pregnancy theory. Yeah, I am in the camp of her running away from DUI accident and getting lost in the cold woods and dying there (or accepting a ride from a bad guy).

Why no mention of the alcohol? It says list of items found in car (not trunk).

 

[Max17]

it's interesting for sure. could say a lot or could say nothing! for example, in my trunk are a lot of car repair/maintenance items like power steering fluid, screwdrivers etc. it's just handier to have them there when fixing something.

But there's nothing resembling a winter emergency car kit, lots of stuff for summer. No flashlight, batteries, ice scraper/snowbrush, [thermal] blanket, real winter clothes, flares etc...

Edit: Saw some posts on Twitter that State Police has removed Maura's car from where it has been sitting for many years. Yes, yes, unverified info but what is up with that!?

 

[EmiLove832]

The list of items would be a lot more helpful if we knew how much was left in the shampoo bottles and if all the toiletries were together.

It's hard for me to imagine having an eight of this stuff in my car. My car is always clear of stuff so if it were me with this much stuff, it would definitely indicate I was traveling somewhere for a stay.

The items that aren't listed are more concerning. No socks, no underwear?

 

[nycpizzaparty]

Is it not possible that the goal of putting the rag into the tailpipe was to try to start a car fire? I think there could be a few reasons for trying to do this: destroy evidence of DWI (alcohol spilled all over, alcohol in container, etc.), distract police from something, etc. Is that mechanically possible?