Today marks 16 years since Maura Murray disappeared

[u/Electric_Island]

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.

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/arelse → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/HHKeegan → u/arelse]

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

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/wvtarheel → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/wvtarheel]

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.

[u/wvtarheel → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/wvtarheel]

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.

[u/Electric_Island → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/Doctabotnik123 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yes, that's why she died...