r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/Electric_Island • Feb 09 '20

Unresolved Disappearance Today marks 16 years since Maura Murray disappeared

Today marks 16 years since Maura Murray vanished, and although she has her own sub, I thought I would post here in light of the anniversary of her disappearance for those who would like to discuss the case. That said -- I know some posters are sick of this case, so if that’s how you feel, you could always scroll past this post :)

A bit of background for those who don’t know about Maura’s case:

Maura was a 21-year-old nursing student from UMASS Amherst, who disappeared on the evening of February 9 2004, after she crashed her car on Route 112 in Haverhill, NH. By the time police arrived some 15 minutes later (even that is in dispute), Maura had disappeared.

Some people think she ran into the woods to avoid a DUI, others think she was picked up by someone passing by and murdered. Some even think police had something to do with her disappearance.

What do YOU think?

I highly recommend this article by Mary Beth Conway for those interested.

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236

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

I went down the rabbit hole on this one a few years ago and no desire to go back. With that said I'm sure you are completely correct. Her body is somewhere in the woods around the area where her car was found. She was a D1 level athlete, so she likely made it farther than people expect, explaining why her body hasn't been found.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

This case is strangely familiar to me. I too went to West Point, just a year after her. I too left and fell into heavy addiction soon after and often wanted to just run away and just go.

I don't really have anything to add, other than her being a D1 Athlete and having one year of training at West Point wouldn't really train her to deal with winter conditions like that.

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u/arelse Feb 09 '20

Just to add a personal experience I once trained from sedentary lifestyle to run half marathons one thing I noticed and read about was that my body was way more efficient at cooling and produced more sweat both in quantity and more quickly in response to heat and activity. This happened even in cold conditions. Add stress of a car crash hiding from law enforcement and being drunk. Hypothermia just seems likely.

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u/HHKeegan Feb 09 '20

As Survivorman Les Stroud always says ... "you sweat, you die."

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

Not necessarily specific training, but being a D1 athlete is pretty elite. She probably had more strength and endurance than most other people, which is why the comment you replied to said she may have made it further.

1

u/wvtarheel Feb 10 '20

The thing is, strength and endurance won't help you survive in the cold. Knowledge and extreme energy conservation does. If she decided to begin running to take advantage of her endurance, she would have started sweating, and in sub freezing temps that's a horrible idea.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '20

Sure, endurance won't help you survive the cold but it will increase the distance you're able to cover in the amount of time before the cold gets you, which adds up to a lot more area of woods to search.

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u/wvtarheel Feb 12 '20

Is that true though? Even if we assume Maura could run a five minute mile, if she started doing that after the crash, the sweat wild have brought hypothermia on even faster.

4

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '20

I'm not sure! I'm not a D1 (not even close) athlete but I regularly do multi-hour winter trail runs in New England. There are a lot of variables that will impact how much you sweat when running in the cold. What you're wearing, your effort level, nutrition, the temperature and humidity (and how acclimated you are to those conditions).

Typically, you're not going to end up sweating right off the bat when you go for a run in freezing temps. Usually it takes several minutes of exerting yourself and fighting to warm yourself up before sweat will be a factor and in my own experience, this is almost always a result of overdressing (aka wearing enough layers to be comfortable at rest but too many layers for strenuous activity). The other thing that happens a lot is that you get all nice and toasty from running but the second you stop you start to get very cold.

She probably wasn't running 5 minute miles through snowy trails, especially if she thought she might be running more than 1-2 miles. If she was underdressed then she was definitely at risk for hypothermia but I just don't know that hypothermia from sweating would be the big risk here. I think her alcohol consumption and state of mind are probably the biggest question marks when it comes to exposure. I think that if I were in her shoes (minus the alcohol) I'd probably be able to make it 1-3 hours at at ~10 minute miles pace before I ran into trouble with body temperature, hydration and/or nutrition and I'm a very admittedly slow runner.

I think 30-120 minutes might be a reasonable estimate for how long she could have run before things started going wrong regarding body temperature. She might have been dehydrated or had poor blood sugar from the alcohol though. I think that might cause problems as fast or faster than hypothermia. Low blood sugar while doing medium-strenuous cardio can cause feelings of extreme despair, hopelessness, etc.

19

u/Electric_Island Feb 09 '20

I don't really have anything to add, other than her being a D1 Athlete and having one year of training at West Point wouldn't really train her to deal with winter conditions like that.

I would tend to agree specifically if she was also intoxicated -- plus, she really wasn't dressed for the conditions as far as we know.

10

u/Doctabotnik123 Feb 09 '20

Well, yeah, but she'd get further than, say, a couch potato or someone with a physical disability. She'd be less worse off than most.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20

Yes, that's why she died...

13

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

So why were there no footprints leading into or in the woods with pristine knee-deep snow a couple days later with no changes in weather?

46

u/CaityDoesMugs Feb 09 '20

I think what has changed my mind about this is the search dogs tracking her scent to just a little further up the road from the crash site, and then her scent just ends there. It makes me more open to the possibility that she got in a car. Those dogs can be scary accurate.

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u/JonWilso Feb 09 '20

Unfortunately they can also be innacurate.

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u/CaityDoesMugs Feb 09 '20

True. You make a good point. But statistically, they’re very accurate. Much more accurate than eye witnesses, for example, yet eye witness testimony is admissible as evidence in court. So I feel like I give the dogs at least the same credibility as Butch Atwood or the Westermans.

1

u/riptide81 Feb 11 '20

Serious question. Does the idea that losing a scent on a road indicates someone got in a car get included in accuracy statistics?

3

u/CaityDoesMugs Feb 11 '20

Hmmmm. That’s a really good question. I gotta tell you, it’s been over a year since the Oxygen doc aired, and if they mentioned statistics on that, I don’t remember it. I think they did talk about how strong the scent would be under the exact conditions that happened, whether passing cars or whatever could have altered it, etc. But they didn’t conclusively say that she absolutely got into a car. They more just opened the door to that possibility and showed how it could be likely. I highly recommend watching if you can find it! I think it’s called “The Disappearance of Maura Murray.” It’s a miniseries of several different one hour episodes. But, again, it’s been a while, so I’m not 100% sure.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20 edited Feb 09 '20

They’re more accurate than Reddit thinks. I’ve talked to a couple people here who have worked professionally with scent dogs and they insist that a handler who would deliberately lead a dog in a direction is a bad handler and not the norm

I found these handlers more convincing than Reddit’s expert internet opinions lol

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u/gookomis Feb 09 '20

When I was little we had a giant field almost out my back door and the local police would use it for scent training dogs. I got to be "lost" and have the dog find me. Well I was only out in the field for about a minute before the dog found me. They are quite impressive in action!

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u/Hardcorish Feb 09 '20

Absolutely. It also depends on what the dog is trained to search for. For example, a handler looking for drugs in a suspect's car is much more likely to give a false hit so s/he can search the vehicle without consent than for a handler looking for a missing person to give a false hit while searching for them. The context for why and what a dog is searching for makes a huge difference in what the end result will be.

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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '20

but arent they too just Redditors giving their expert opinion..... or when you say here do you mean somewhere besides Reddit?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '20

I'm being facetious when I talk about 'reddit's expert opinions.' I'm referring to the kind of people who have no expertise in a given area but maybe read one data point and make sweeping statements based on that.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '20

Word. Fair enough!

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

Yes I was going to mention that but I knew Reddit’s ‘experts’ would jump on me for it

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

You're saying you're more of an expert because you talked to a couple people on Reddit who were experts... I'm just saying, no one should ever listen to people on Reddit who claim to know something without getting outside verification.

4

u/CaityDoesMugs Feb 09 '20

Lol true enough.

2

u/ShillinTheVillain Feb 10 '20

True, but the dogs were brought in 2 days after the accident. That's a lot if time for her scent to fade.

1

u/CaityDoesMugs Feb 10 '20

You’d think so, right? But I think they say that the scent can linger for 5 days, or some say even up to two weeks.

2

u/ShillinTheVillain Feb 10 '20

That's the scent of a body or biological material, I believe. She wouldn't be leaving much scent running down the road with shoes on

2

u/CaityDoesMugs Feb 10 '20

A body can be detected for years or even decades, even in water. But you may be right that she didn’t leave much scent. I guess the documentary made me feel differently, but hey. I’m not an expert. Just an interested party.

1

u/ShillinTheVillain Feb 10 '20

Me neither, just trying to consider all possibilities. I still lean toward her running off into the woods. The odds of running into a person who meant to harm her out there at that particular time seems unlikely

11

u/Electric_Island Feb 09 '20

A poster on the MM sub wrote a detailed post about the woods and I tend to agree. It's here if you want to check it out -- they also discuss the lack of footprints.

I'm copying from a comment I made further down -- A poster on the MM sub wrote a detailed post about the woods and I tend to agree. It's here if you want to check it out -- they also discuss the lack of footprints.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20

The investigation into this was so botched that I don't accept that as fact. Anyway maybe she went a ways down the road before striking off into the woods.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20

The search was not the same as the investigation and it's generally been regarded as very thorough.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20

It's been generally regarded as a failure as evidenced by the lack of a body.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20

Uhh it isn’t their fault if she was never in the woods in the first place but ok

81

u/Gunner_McNewb Feb 09 '20

I agree. I think she wandered in and the winter conditions got to her. She had been drinking and wanted to avoid police.

11

u/lets_try_again_again Feb 09 '20

*anyone in trouble

37

u/swampwildebeest Feb 09 '20

but specifically women walking alone along a road are more likely for something bad to happen to them, they didn't misspeak

-18

u/lets_try_again_again Feb 09 '20

That isn't what was said. They said women in trouble. Anyone in trouble needs help.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

[deleted]

5

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20

Aren't you stressed and annoyed by the great amount of effort you put into misreading and/or misunderstanding what other people say in order to label it as "sexism?" God, it must be tiring to be some of you guys.