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Title: True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray by James Jenner
Details: Copyright 2016, MacMillan Publishing Group
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "When an eleven-year-old James Renner fell in love with Amy Mihaljevic, the missing girl seen on posters all over his neighborhood, it was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with true crime. That obsession led James to a successful career as an investigative journalist. It also gave him PTSD. In 2011, James began researching the strange disappearance of Maura Murray, a UMass student who went missing after wrecking her car in rural New Hampshire in 2004. Over the course of his investigation, he uncovers numerous important and shocking new clues about what may have happened to Maura, but also finds himself in increasingly dangerous situations with little regard for his own well-being. As his quest to find Maura deepens, the case starts taking a toll on his personal life, which begins to spiral out of control. The result is an absorbing dual investigation of a complicated case that has eluded authorities for more than a decade and a journalist’s own complicated true-crime addiction."
Why I Wanted to Read It: While true crime in general gets my attention, the strange case of Maura Murray who mysteriously disappeared in 2004, leaving all sorts of strange clues, is a particularly chilling case that sticks with me.
How I Liked It: WARNING! THE BOOK CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF MURDER, SEXISM, CHILD ABUSE (INCLUDING SEXUAL ABUSE), ATTEMPTED MURDER, ATTEMPTED CHILD ABUSE (INCLUDING SEXUAL ABUSE), DRUG USE/DRINKING, SEXUAL ASSAULT, EATING DISORDERS, RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA, ABLEISM, POLICE BRUTALITY, AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE REVIEW MAKES MENTION OF THESE. PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.
Authors are pretty powerful to a book. That is, unless they aren't. Wait, what? No, it's true! The author can be both critical to the book's success or the reason why it fails. But you can hate a book but love the author. So can you love a book but hate the author? Does "death of the author" still work if the author is a character themself within the book? Let's read on and find out!
Before you meet Maura Murray, you need to meet this book's author, James Renner. I've talked before about memoir voice and creating a character and Renner sure has one: brash opinionated loose cannon (more on that later). His fascination and conviction with the Maura Murray case gets him into trouble both on and off the page. He's struggling with family secrets (his grandfather is a child molester and abuser) as well as personal ones (he was almost abducted by a child molester at thirteen, more on that later; in the present, he's coping with various ailments due to his line of work; there's also trouble at home with his son).
He probes not only many different aspects of the Maura Murray case, but other cases as well, including the murder of young Amy Mihaljevic, other murdered and/or missing young women and girls, and disappearances possibly related to Maura's. He talks to relatives, friends, and analysts, and floats and probes various theories. Ultimately, he ends up settling on what appears to be a theory of his own, but ultimately her case remains a mystery.
Before I go into the review, here is a very brief overview of Maura's disappearance. In February 2004, 21-year-old Amherst student Maura Murray was coping with both being caught using a stolen credit card months earlier, and more recently, crashing her father's car just before her disappearance while attending a dorm party (the damage would be covered by her father's insurance). Before she damaged her father's car a couple days before her disappearance, Maura notably was left in a distressed state one night after getting a call from her sister (more on that later). A couple days later, Maura searched maps to Vermont, and planned an absence from school for a week claiming a death in her family, but her room when searched was packed up into storage boxes almost entirely. Maura purchased $40 worth of alcohol and that evening, then crashed her car in Woodsville, New Hampshire. Several residents witnessed this and one offered to call AAA for her, but she declined all help, claiming she'd already called AAA (which had no record of her call). The resident called the police anyway at 7:43pm, but by the time they arrived at 7:46pm, she was already gone. Her car was inoperably crashed and several personal items were left behind. There was a witness who came forward later seeing her walking alone on foot not long after the crash that evening, but otherwise, that's it.
There's been many false leads over the years, including connections to other cases, but really, the case is still open, and we don't know (and may never know) what happened to Maura Murray.
So, I'm somewhat familiar with this case. But I was looking to learn more, thus picking up this book. Unfortunately, the author casts a pretty strong impression early on and it overshadows the case itself. He's at a strip club like a scene from a particularly hackkneyed movie, down to the dialog, where he connects with one of the dancers, with whom he gets to talking about the fact her sister was murdered. His opinions about the dancers set a tone for the book.
"Want a dance?"
I turned to find a young blonde standing beside me. She was dressed in red, lacy lingerie. Her taut skin, covered in glitter, shimmered in the sparse light.
"No thank you," I said.
I have a thing for brunettes. And I don't like skinny. Not even athletic, really. I don't usually even buy a lap dance. (pg 4)
"I'm Gracie." This woman wore a thin black dress that stretched past her knees. Dark hair. Her body was soft and it curved in a nice way. Not busty, but healthy. I noticed right away that her eyes were different. She wasn't hustling, not like the other women. Or, if she was, she was better at it. (pg 4 and 5)
But okay, you defend. He's at a place where the workers's bodies are literally part of their performance and the way they appeal to the patrons (like him, a married father). And I'd probably disagree with that a bit (the strip club workers are human beings and it's gross to talk about them that way), but hold on to your argument! More looks assessment of women is coming!
One day, while I was scanning Web sites about unsolved crimes at a neighborhood coffee shop called the Nervous Dog, the barista sat next to me and said in a whisper, "I have something important to tell you."
She was a country-cute eighteen-year-old with dark hair and a round face. The shop was nearly empty. Just me and one other customer. (pg 8)
Yeah, you need to describe the characters. But what does "country-cute" even mean?
Also, can we put down describing the sexual attractiveness of potential victims, if you please:
Everyone agrees that Maura was beautiful and we can accept at least that much as truth. Family photographs show a bright-faced young woman with dark brown shoulder-length hair, which she often wore in a tight ponytail. Apple cheeks and crazy dimples. A button nose. Skinny from running. A hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. (pg 17)
That note about her weight will be disgusting for reasons we learn later on and for which the author really should've thought about (a quick mention of her build to draw a picture is enough: "slender"). On top of that, none of this actually tells us anything about Maura. We can see the pictures for ourselves online, but this physical description doesn't describe her personality.
Beth remembers Maura as a smart, energetic girl, always with a twinkle in her eyes. "She was hardworking. An incredible athlete. A beautiful girl, but very plain. She didn't wear makeup. She kept things to herself." (pg 68)
That's a little better, but what a weird quote ("beautiful but very plain"). And yes, he does describe at least one man in the book as "cute", but in context it's a more diminutive assessment of the man's youth, not a rating of his sexual attractiveness.
But let's go back to the strip club and our intrepid reporter (at least in his mind), our author:
"You okay?" I asked.
[The dancer] nodded against my neck. "My name's Jennifer," she said. "I'm not supposed to tell you my real name. But my real name is Jennifer."*
"Okay."
______________
*Not her real name. (pg 6)
He helpfully shouts her out, kind of, in the acknowledgments, in a pretty disrespectful way:
I should thank the stripper who inspired me to push on with my reporting, whose real name is neither Gracie nor Jennifer. (pg 279)
Stripping is work and reducing someone to their job, especially when that job is such a demeaned profession, is insulting. "I should thank the woman I met in the strip club who inspired me to push on with my reporting, whose real name is neither Gracie nor Jennifer." would have been better, but the "should" sounds like a joke.
He does toss a somewhat defensive aside at the beginning of his story of the strip club (calling it a "nice place" for a "tittie bar"):
It's not like I got to strip clubs often. Maybe ten times in my life mostly for bachelor parties. I'd paid three women to spank my buddy onstage the day he turned twenty-one. I wasn't ashamed to be there. I like how strip clubs smell. Like jolly ranchers and scotch. (pg 4)
Away from the strip club experience, but speaking of the use of pseudonyms, a small note in the front of the book (that's easy to miss) makes a quiet note:
Certain names have been changed, whether or not so noted in the text. (from the copyright information)
So yeah, from this scant bit of the book we've seen, the author is sure not boring, right? But you haven't seen ANYTHING of his personality yet.
Turns out before he started investigating Maura Murray for this book, he took a risk on a politician's scandal and the newspaper he was writing for did not back him up.
When the newspaper bigwigs back in Scranton got wind of the letter from [said politician] Coughlin's attorney, they spiked my story and told me to work on something else. The paper could not risk a lawsuit, said CEO Matt Haggerty. I told him that if he couldn't risk a lawsuit, he couldn't run a newspaper. He told me I was fired. I told him to go fuck himself. Then I e-mailed the article to every contact in my Rolodex. The story was picked up and reprinted online, circulated throughout the statehouse in Columbus. Slate picked up the Jerry Maguire-ish mission statement I sent to the employees of Scene on my way out. (pg 10)
Good thing he tells us all the witty things he said! And Jerry Maguire? Really?
By the way, in case you can't tell, the author is a SERIOUS REPORTER. He's got some NEWS for YOU about how life REALLY works on that front!
The first thing you learn as a reporter is that nothing you read in the newspaper is true. Truth in reporting is a lie. Here's how it really works: A reporter is assigned to gather facts on an event-- let's say it's a crash involving two cars at the intersection of Main and State. The person driving Car A will have a different story to tell than the driver of Car B. And those stories will differ, sometimes greatly, with the statements of witnesses on the sidewalk. But what really happened? I mean, there must be an inherent truth, right? Maybe. But the reporter should never assume he knows which version is most accurate. The best a good reporter can do is gather all the information and present every side of the story. And you know what? Even then, the article will be junk. Because, invariably, a name will be spelled wrong or some little detail will be misinterpreted. The crash will be reported as happening at the intersection of Main and County or some shit. Or the writer will refer to one of the cars as a Saturn when it was really a Vibe. Every article you've ever read is a little untrue. I guarantee it. (pg 16)
That first sentence had me rolling my eyes so hard my head hurts (also, we caught the "he" pronoun).
There's an old truism that goes, "Nobody want to know how the sausage is made." You hear it a lot in J-school, in circlejerk classes like Media of Mass Communication. What it means is that readers don't want to know the details about how a reporter gathers information; all they care about is the story.
This may have been true when those editors were students. There was a time when the news was relatively unbiased, when you were not watching liberal news or conservative news, but news. Just news. Facts related to you by a friendly voice or simple words on the page. People like Geraldo Rivera and Rush Limbaugh were early adapters of slanted journalism, but the paradigm didn't change until Fox News became a thing. Now you cannot watch the news or read the newspaper, not responsibly anyway, without wondering what the agenda of the writer, or producer, may be. (pg 82)
All the cool boys call it "J-school".
Also, that last paragraph? The news has always had a bias. Fox News does not market itself as "conservative" news, it markets itself as "fair and balanced" and the true alternative to the liberal biased news like their competitors. News didn't suddenly become biased in the 1990s. It went in a different direction, for sure, but you should always be questioning the agenda of the news you consume.
The author reveals some tricks of his trade:
I've always had better luck getting a source to talk if I showed up at their home. If they can see me, see how bumbling and affable I can be, they usually end up talking, even if they've told me no over the phone. (pg 29)
Given the fact multiple people get into altercations with the author in this book, some of them physical, I truly wonder if he really believes this.
We cross from pompous territory into pompous weird territory pretty quickly when the author attempts to replicate Maura's drive down the road where she crashed. He also insists on doing it drunk. He (sort of) explains his reasoning:
A week later I was driving drunk down Wild Ammonoosuc Road, lost in its dark turns. (pg 30)
My buddy Charles Moore has this creepy story he tells at dinner parties. He was a professional runner for some time and used to jog from one side of Cleveland to the other. One morning, he took a different route and encountered a young boy dressed in outdated clothes. The kid was dressed as if he were a newsie from 1920 or something. Well, the kid stopped, looked at him, and then disappeared. Some hear that story and think, Ghost. But if the universe is a simulation, maybe what Charles saw was a glitch. Maybe he'd reenacted some specific movement and a scene from long ago had been trigger to replay in front of him.(pg 40)
I wanted to trigger a glitch. I would re-create Maura's journey into New Hampshire in as much detail as I could manage. Ostensibly, I did this so that I could observe the things she saw and report on the particulars she experienced the night she disappeared. But on some level, I was entertaining the notion that I might be able to hack the simulation, if such a thing existed. The maybe by going through the same motions that Maura did, I might trip up the part of the code that knows what happened to her. Would I see Maura's "ghost"? Would I see the shadow of her killer offer her a ride?
I drank because Maura drank. The Jameson snuck up on me like it always does. My old editor introduced me to the stuff. Smooth. Woody. Mix it up with Coke to stay awake. Sip it to sleep. I drank enough to get tipsy. How drunk was Maura when she got off 91 at Wells River and drove east? They'd found an open box of wine, a bunch of liquor, and a soda bottle that reeked of booze in her wrecked car. Most likely, Maura was tipsier than I was, but I didn't want to push it. I still needed to observe. (pg 40)
Drunk-driving in any capacity, let alone down a dangerous residential street (it's very twisty) to fulfill a weird, not very creative or original theory (if our universes glitch, why would it always be people from the past? Wouldn't we see people from the future too, occasionally?) is... certainly something.
To be fair to the author, it certainly seems like many of the situations he finds himself in are set up to cause strife. Strife which with the author then fully runs and makes worse, however:
I found [former police chief at the time of Maura's disappearance] Jeffrey's Williams's house on Bradley Hill Road, a half mile up the mountain from where Maura got in her wreck. In front of his mansion is a big barn and on top of the barn is a golden calf weather vane. Something about the look of the place raised my hackles. I parked my car, walked to the front door, and knocked. Williams was already there and opened the door immediately. He's a large man with a long scar eating up his right cheek.
"What?"
"I'm a journalist working on--"
Williams slammed the door in my face.
I returned to my car, took out a notebook, and wrote down my contact info, along with a better explanation of what I was doing. Before I could take it back to the house, he opened the door and shouted at me. "Get off my property before I kick your ass!"
When I got back to my hotel room, I Googled the former chief and got a sense of why he was so aggressive towards reporters.
Williams had been a police officer in Haverhill for most of his fifteen years on the force and made chief in 2001. Things started to go bad for him in 2009, when he crashed his Harley. It was a severe accident that resulted in several surgeries. Three months later, he attempted to flee from police while driving drunk in Woodsville. The press ran his photo in the paper. He resigned. The officer who pulled him over? [The police officer who was the first cop on the scene the night of Maura's car accident] Cecil Smith [whom the author interviewed right before visiting Williams].
Williams was not the only one who threatened to kick my ass. (pg 88)
At a certain point I started to wonder if the author wasn't maybe actively courting just that.
"Get out of my store or I'm going to beat your head in."
This should have been enough motivation for me to leave. But can I be honest here? I'm the kind of guy who, when you tell me you're going to beat my head in, I'll say around to make you do it. I've got a real self-destructive streak, especially when I'm angry. It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm telling you this because I'm trying to paint the scene. Here was a guy with information that might be helpful to me, information that might be helpful to finding out what really happened to Maura Murray, and instead he wanted to act tough and try to scare me. So what I did was I smiled and I said, kind of laughing, "Why are you so angry, man?"
"That's it," said Bill. He reached under the counter, grabbed a long wooden rod, and came at me. I didn't budge. I didn't think he'd really do it. And if he did, he'd give me a hell of a story. He grabbed me by the shirt and pushed me out of his shop.
"Maybe we should call the cops," I suggested. "Maybe they'd like to know why a guy who works a mile from where Maura went missing gets so upset when someone comes by asking questions about her."
He swung the bat up, and I really did think he was going to lay me out for a second. He seemed to think better of it, though, as two bikers were watching us from under an umbrella in the parking lot. He turned and walked back inside. (pg 92)
When he's not actively looking for a physical assault charge, the author gives a voice to some truly unfortunate people with some truly unnecessary commentary:
I tracked [possible Maura Murray love interest assistant track coach] Hossein [Baghdadi] down pretty quickly, a name like that. I thought that even if there was any truth to [former Maura Murray teammate] Nast [Shams]'s hunch [that Maura had a relationship with Baghdadi], he was sure to deny the relationship or gloss over the prurient details.
"Yes," he said. "We slept together. But you have to know something. Maura Murray was a very promiscuous woman. I wasn't the only guy on that team she had sex with." (pg 113)
Number one, the author's subtle racism is noted (more on that later), number two, what a disgusting thing to say. And the way it's portrayed, like this is a bombshell in the case, is absurd. The guy trying to deflect suspicion and play down his connection to a suspicious disappearance. The idea of a woman in her twenties possibly (and that's a big "possibly") having multiple sexual partners in college doesn't tell you anything about her disappearance in this case. And yet the author kept on this angle (ew):
Baghdadi wasn't lying.
I spoke to three men who ran with Maura at UMass. Each told me a slightly different version of the same story. One had firsthand knowledge. The gist was this: In 2003, Maura and a close friend were invited to after-hours parties at the athletic pool with three select upperclassmen (who have gone on to become prominent businessmen). One of the guys had keys to the facility and they would all sneak into the pool late at night and drink. And swim. And have sex.
According to each of my sources, these pool parties were straight-up orgies. Maura had sex with all three men. In one night. One after the other.
"It's not a big deal," said one. "It was college. It was college hedonistic stuff."
Only one of the men involved in the gang bang ever spoke to police. after his ex-girlfriend suggested to local detectives that he might be involved with Maura's disappearance. But he swears he never spoke to Maura again after she left the team. (pgs 115 and 116)
Disgusting. What is the point of this? A group of creepy unnamed ("prominent businessmen") assholes eagerly playing Dear Penthouse with their college memories with a woman who is now missing and can't rebuke any of this. Again, what's James Renner's point in this story, other than breathlessly relating the salacious details of a sketchy story cribbed from PornHub by sketchy people? What does this have to do at all with her disappearance? Why is the word of these people apparently iron-clad? The lack of respect for Maura and/or her disappearance shows through, and it's going to show through a lot more before the book's over.
But back to the author, who's far more the main character of the book than his slutty, suspicious Maura could ever be.
The author runs a blog and puts a lot of stock into what his commenters (who he refers to as the "Baker Street Irregulars" after the street children in Sherlock Holmes who helped him solve crimes-- yes, the author sees himself as Sherlock Holmes because of course he does) think and their ideas and takes, and while certainly citizen journalism can be a boon to investigations, it can also reveal the nadir of humanity on many levels: you can guess into which category Renner's commentariat tends to fall (completely uncritically from him, I might add).
He gets a stalker, a creep who starts leaving bizarre videos and hacks (I assume; I would think a true crime writer would have a locked Facebook) into Renner's Facebook to publicly post Renner's personal pictures of his young child. The stalker has a variety of aliases, including "Beagle":
The Cymbalta keeps me calm. I’m a calm guy. I am. But there’s a freedom in blind rage once you give yourself over to it that is as welcoming as any drug. On the other side of rage is a certain calm. The eye of the hurricane. I found that place, at age eight, when I was beaten by my stepmother. Her beatings taught me where to find it. I had forgotten how good it felt to give myself over to that pure hatred, that realm of vengeance where you don’t care about consequence or morality. Beat me. Beat me. See if I care. You’re not getting tears from me. Not today. Today all you get is this smile. I didn’t want to call the cops, I realized. I wanted Beagle for myself. Because I knew him for what he was: a crazy man only pretending to be dangerous. And he had no idea who I really was: a dangerous man working really hard not to be crazy. If I had known, truly known, who Beagle was that night, I would have driven a thousand miles to his doorstep.
Instead, I got drunk. Good and drunk. Beer. Then whiskey until I forget myself and my anger. (pg 159)
He also handwaves Beagle and the whole situation pretty quickly when it turns out Beagle is just a crank.
One of the most revealing parts in the book is when the author's tactic of saying horrific, incendiary things to family and friends of the missing result in anger. He relates an accusation about Maura's father Fred (SO much more on him later) that's so horrific it's not reproduced in the text (presumably for legal reasons) that he "confirmed" by a rather sketchy-sounding ex boyfriend of one of Maura's sisters directly to Maura's brother. Maura's brother is so angered he's ready to fight but realizes that that could be exactly what this author wants, a great scene for his book. The result instead is a public letter from Maura's siblings that in no way mentions the author by name.
On my way to St. Albans in search of Kathleen Murray, I stopped for a bite and to check my e-mail. Several [commenters on the author’s blog] alerted me to an official statement that had been released by Maura’s siblings and posted to the Maura Murray Facebook page. My recent conversation with Fred, Jr., had drawn a response.
Over the past couple of years, a number of people have decided that personal gain by making unsubstantiated claims is more important than the fact a young girl is missing and a family is left shattered, still seeking answers. Maura’s story is not a fictitious account dreamed up by a screen writer. Instead, it is an actual case that still needs answers. Painting a story based upon conjecture and allegations, as well as sensationalizing to meet some Hollywoodistic standard, seem more important to some than a bonafide effort to help us discover Maura’s whereabouts. Recently, outrageous and completely false allegations vilifying our father and our family have surfaced during this difficult time. While some may give instant credibility to these allegations, there is never a mention of any investigation to determine the presence of any biases or motives to fabricate of these sources. We fell all sources of information, along with any persons of interest, should endure the same level of scrutiny to determine if derogatory facts exist which may call their credibility into question. We remain a united family struggling with the unconscionable burden of a missing loved one, a burden that we wish upon no one. Each and every day our family lives and relives this tragedy, the weight of which has affected us all, none more so than our father. We remain steadfast in our efforts to find our sister, and we thank all of those who have provided and continue to provide love and support along this difficult road.
Regards,
Kathleen, Freddie, Julie, and Kurtis
That letter stung. It did. It made me feel just like the sleazy reporter they make me out to be. I’m used to this kind of reaction from the families of murder suspects. But coming from the family of the person I was trying to find was a slap in the face. What bothered me most was the easy argument that I was out for personal gain.
By that time, I had spent over $500 on public records. I had traveled to New England four times. During each of those trips, I paid for hotels and food and gas. I had yet to receive even an advance on the book. My time would have been better spent writing a new novel.
I found it curious that Fred had not signed the letter.
Confused as ever, I got back in my car and drove north. (pgs 200 and 201)
As you might be figuring out, the author has decided Maura's father Fred is the villain of the book and gone about bending the information gathered to make it out that way. Given that the accusations were about Fred, it makes sense that he wouldn't be involved in the letter (Maura's mother died a few years after her disappearance). The fact this doesn't hammer home to the author the grief and anguish and trauma the family feels but instead is all about the author's feelings and defensiveness (he spent money working on a book that he hadn't even been paid for yet!) and yet still finding a way to bend it to support his pet theory to shape a book around is truly revealing of the author. And we're not done.
Speaking of making things about himself! The author's sister is stalked by an overzealous animal control officer who reminds the author a lot of Dennis Raider, better known as BTK. When his sister is in court to answer questions about her dog, her brother insists on being there and despite being asked to leave by the court, he makes a scene in the courtroom with an accusation about the stalking, and when the judge orders him out, he personally attacks the judge, yelling that "You're just a drunk!" based on rumors he knew about the judge. The author is then followed by court security as he leaves, and the overzealous officer (who turns out to be the son of the officer who'd run the police department's detective bureau for many years) throws him against the wall. The author reacts:
I felt hands on my wrists. I spun, grabbed [court security officer Anthony] Ciresi’s arm, and flipped him away from me. It was like tossing a bail of hay off a truck. I looked down at him as he picked himself up off the tiled floor, saw the fear in his eyes. Loved it. Loved it if nothing more than for the fact that for the rest of his career, when he feels like roughing up a perp, he’ll remember me and how easily I got the drop on him.
I was ready to pounce. I wanted a few swings at that smooth face before anyone could interrupt us. But that other part of me, that newer part of me, that part that is a father and a lover, stepped forward and spoke up: Don’t make it worse!
It gave Ciresi time to reach his belt. He pulled a weapon. At first I thought it was a gun. But then I noticed it was bright yellow. A Taser. It was aimed at my heart.
I raised my hands. “Okay,” I said.
“Turn around,” he growled. (pg 214 and 215)
The author lands in jail (after getting a witness to notice the officer's use of excessive force) with "Assault on a Police Officer."
Does it sound like the nepo cop is used to getting away with violations? Sure. Was the author also in the wrong and made a bad situation worse? Yes! I do wonder what happened with the sister's case, as it's not mentioned again.
Remember what I said about respect for Maura, a potential victim in this case? Yes, she might have disappeared on her own. Yes, researching her life might uncover objectionable things she's done (she did steal the credit card). But she may also be a murder victim and the author is just a little too cavalier about her.
”I guess I just don’t understand this one,” [the author’s wife] said. “Why her case? I get the Amy [Mihaljevic case to which the author devoted a significant portion of his career] thing. She was your first crush, yada, yada... But why Maura? Her family doesn’t even want you to do it.” She’d grown frustrated with the trips to New England, leaving her to parent two kids, and this was a long time coming. “Why can’t you just find something else to write about?”
“Because it’s the mystery of it. It’s not like Amy. I’m not in love with Maura. I don’t even think Maura was a good person. Nobody around her was a good person.” (pgs 226 and 227)
I'm not saying you have to deify the missing. But I am saying being the author of a book about her disappearance and deciding you think she wasn't a good person (and deciding to put that into the book) will lead you a certain way, like including disgusting suspect sexual rumors that really have no place in the book.
And the author thinks quite a lot of himself when it comes to other victims about whom he's written. Take 10-year-old murder victim Amy Mihaljevic. The author didn't just write a book about her, he still gives lectures.
When I finished telling my story [at a lecture about Amy Mihaljevic and trying to track down a suspect], a woman came up to me and gave me a hug. I stayed and signed books for a bit. And that’s when I noticed the man in the back of the room. He looked oddly familiar. It was Mark Mihaljevic. Amy’s father.
I ended up at his house that night and he microwaved me a hamburger. We sat at his kitchen table and ate burgers and talked about a lot of things, but not about his daughter. There is a happier parallel universe, I am fairly certain, in which this man is my father-in-law. (pg 242)
This just creeps me out. Don't do this.
Speaking of creeps, the author wants you to know where his mind's at, man.
At the start of every year, my wife’s school offers enrichment programs for teachers, short presentations in the multipurpose room that are meant to pep everyone up for the new semester. Sometimes the speakers tease the teachers with logic puzzles or riddles as a way to improve their attention skills. In the fall of 2013, one of the presenters posed a riddle meant to identify potential psychopaths. It was a funny exercise. Or meant to be.
Julie came home at the end of the day, wanting to share. She was curious to see how quickly I would solve it. Or maybe to see if I could solve it at all.
Here’s the gist: A single man attends his mother’s funeral. During the wake, he meets a fantastic young woman and falls madly in love. But he forgets her name and nobody he talks to afterward can identify her. How does he track her down?
“He kills his father,” I said, without missing a beat. “She’ll probably come to his funeral, too.”
Julie’s expression changed from jovial to shocked. “Jesus,” she said. “I thought you’d figure it out. But... but that was so quick. That’s how your mind works? I mean, that didn’t even enter my mind at all. You got it right away.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She shivered. (pg 246 and 247)
That's a pretty standard dumb joke attempting to be "dark".
If you're noticing a pattern here, in the author's "deducting" of facts? You're not imagining it.
A photograph of a young man with Maura has a pretty horrifying interlude which the author doesn't see as horrifying at all. He identifies the young man ("David") and tracks him down.
We went on the hunt, my [longtime internet commentators] 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 email, 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. (pg 265)
So let me get this straight. A bunch of gross dudes have lurid sex stories about Maura and her supposed proclivities and activities and it says more about her apparently than it does them. But the author hunts down a random young man in a picture with her, finds his Twitter, culls two standard murder jokes (it's Twitter) and one shitty rape joke (sigh) and decides that this is the smoking gun ("Holy shit, right?"). The author literally relates a murder joke/"riddle" his wife told him and how he got the answer earlier in the book, but some hackneyed Twitter jokes make this guy a suspect in Maura's disappearance? The man is then subject to all sorts of hideous speculation and harassment from the author's blog commenters and when he reaches out to provide information and correction and express rightful indignation about Renner's tactics, Renner continues to portray him in the most suspicious way possible. This says a lot about Renner's conclusions in this case, down to the assumption that a house associated with known friends of Maura's would be "perfect" to "lie low". Speaking of those deductions!
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 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 as 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. (pg 268 and 269)
The commentariat strikes again! Too bad that comparing responses to what you would do in a very different situation (an accident with toddlers compared to a twenty-one-year-old college student who may have disappeared voluntarily) is troublesome for a number of reasons, but claiming Maura's family doesn't want her found is equally disingenuous and insulting (it sounds a lot like many of them don't want to talk to a self-righteous loudmouth saying incendiary things for a reaction and then eagerly reporting their angry responses for his book).
So what exactly does the author think happened to Maura? He thinks she left voluntarily.
I was beginning to form a theory to explain Maura's vanishing act. There was another way it could have happened. She could have been traveling in tandem with another driver. The other driver would be ahead of her, leading the way east. After the accident, the second driver turned around and picked her up. If she knew the driver, it would have taken only a second for Maura to get in the vehicle and tell the driver to take off. That would would explain why no one saw it happen-- it was too quick. If someone forced Maura into a car, she would have screamed, alerting the neighbors. She would have fought back. She was not weak. She was a goddamn West Point cadet. A tandem driver explained everything. But if that's what happened, who was driving the other car? (pg 106 and 107)
But after a night of drinking, Maura crashed her father’s car into a guardrail while driving to his hotel room at three in the morning. She wasn’t charged with drunken driving, but a reckless op charge was in the works, according to the officer who responded to the scene. Maura was going to be cited for the accident, but she disappeared first. Did Maura think that the larceny charge [from the previous stolen credit card] would come back now that she’d gotten in trouble again? (pg 147)
So Maura is on the run from her life of crime and possibly trouble at home. Interestingly, the author rather cursorily checked out her boyfriend at the time and discovered that his sister died by suicide and the details are pretty wrapped up.
”Where’s the suicide note?” I asked the records officer.
“You can’t have it,” she said.
“Why?”
“The case is still open. Detectives are still investigating it for possible criminal charges.”
Well. Now I was intrigued. I had never come across a suicide that was treated as an open and active investigation. There were, I knew, two possible explanations for this. One: The detectives suspected there was another crime connected to Heather Rausch’s suicide. Two: They were keeping the suicide “open” as a way to keep the suicide note private. In the State of Ohio, many police files remain secret until a case is officially closed or a suspect is indicted. (pgs 164 and 165)
On a messageboard, the author claims a message traced to Maura's extended family (more on that later) claims she is voluntarily missing and living in Canada and this is well-known to the family. Sightings of Maura in Canada abound, apparently:
The same day, someone from the Houston, Texas, region posted a similar message on the Topix page from Saint-Étienne-de-Beauharnois, a small town outside Montreal. “Maura Murray was seen in Quebec City, Quebec Province. She is alive and well. Very well. Her new squeeze is a hunk.” (pg 256)
So Maura, fleeing a life of crime and also the book's villain, her father, who may or may not have done unspeakably horrible things to her. But wait! After a whole book's worth of villainizing, a last-minute tip has some horrifying information about Maura's boyfriend, who voluntarily spoke with the author and who it's clear the author had dismissed.
Numerous women, many co-workers, had horrible stories about physical assault at the hands of Maura's boyfriend. His threats had some fearing for their lives and it was clear he did not like women. This bombshell was clearly given last minute given the rest of the book, and the author, given a completely new avenue, tries his best to tack it on at the end, mentioning the vast secret hidden railroad of services (some not legal) to provide a new life for an abused woman, which could plausibly include her new life in a whole other country. The suggestion that Maura might have been pregnant adds a whole other angle to it. With that, the author notes,
Things I’ve learned about Bill [Rausch, Maura’s boyfriend, that allegedly violently physically assaulted many women, many of them co-workers, and friends of Maura’s noted his controlling influence] 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. (pg 278)
So! We have a hothead author who has shoved the potential victim to the backseat to be the star with his antics, most of them questionable. His prejudices on many levels as well as tangential rants about other cases and other subjects complicate the book, and his favoring of "anonymous internet commentator" on equal or higher footing with personal friends and family of the missing would be hilarious, if it weren't such a horrifying subject. His behavior is dangerous not only to himself but to the case and anyone even remotely connected to it. I don't like this author. To paraphrase a quote of his, I don't even think he's a good person.
And yet, I really enjoyed this book. All of these elements should make the book absolutely insufferable, and don't get me wrong, it definitely has its insufferable moments and plenty of them. But I found myself fascinated. Not just by the case (and this likely wouldn't be a good read for someone who hadn't at least read the Wikipedia page), but by how clearly the author is doing everything wrong with this case. The book could be a TV show, not of a crusading journalist detective the way the author envisions, but a pompous braggart blowhard wrapped within layers of logical fallacies, a role likely to be played by one of the great character actors of our time (Michael Shannon maybe?) who admits in interviews how much he truly hates the character. The internet commenters, the "Baker Street Irregulars" are characters themselves, and of all our worst impulses. Maura Murray's disappearance is said to be the first crime mystery of the social media age. If that's so, the worst impulses of social media are on display in this book: mob mentality, the comfort of internet anonymity to act without responsibility, the neglect of facts, baseless rumors, and especially an inflated sense of self.
There's a lot of talk in recent years about how true crime media is handled (and how it shouldn't be handled), particularly the role of the citizen detective and it's a subject well-worth discussing. This book makes an interesting and compelling study. And fortunately, you don't even have to like the author.
Notable: The book seriously went hard on the father as the villain prompting her disappearance and not doing enough in the aftermath. There's a lot here.
"Sometime mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Fred calls in to Haverhill police and explains that it's his daughter's car they have," the detective continued. "His first sense is that Maura has gone to the North Country to commit suicide-- to go off and die 'like an old squaw' is what he said to the police." (pg 63)
I'm, uh, not familiar with that expression, thankfully.
Maura's grandmother, Ruth, 91 years young, was downstairs and we [the author and Maura's aunt Janet, her deceased mother's sister] spoke quietly so she wouldn't hear. Ruth, who was very close to Maura, never talked about the disappearance. About her sister Laurie [Maura's mother], all Janis offered was that she was "an excellent mother... when the kids were little."
Janis always thought Fred was "a very odd duck." He met Laurie at a Weymouth park one day, she said. He spotted her playing baseball and then introduced himself. He was in college. Laurie was just fifteen. "He pursued her until she went out with him."
The marriage fell apart when Laurie got pregnant with Kurt, said Janis. Fred was not Kurt's father. Kurt's dad was a man named Kevin Noble. In 1994, Noble was convicted of murdering his own brother after an argument over a local radio turned physical. (pg 95)
That age gap and him pursuing her is definitely gross. The bit about Maura's half brother and his biological father is... a lot.
After the affair, Fred moved back to Weymouth, but he returned to Hanson daily to condition his daughters, training them to be champion runners. Maura's little brother went by "Kurt Noble Murray" and maintained a cordial relationship with Fred all his life. Sometimes Fred even took him to the White Mountains with Maura. Fred took his girls hiking a lot.
"They vacationed up there all the time," said Janis. The Jigger Johnson camp, on the Kancamagus Highway, was their favorite spot. She shook her head as she thought back on it. "I always thought that was strange, Maura going camping up there with her father. They would share a tent. She was, what, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? If my dad had ever asked me to go camping alone with him and share a tent, I would have said, 'What are you, nuts?'"
[...]
Janis believed Maura went up to New Hampshire to get away from Fred. "They had an argument about that car accident," she said, meaning the late-night crash in Amherst that put Fred's Toyota in the shop. "He really reamed her over it. But he claims that wasn't why she left." (pgs 95 and 96)
Just going to say sharing a tent with your father camping at that age doesn't sound strange at all? I've never even been camping, so I can't speak to this experience, but it's not like they're sharing a bed unnecessarily. At that age, had I camped with my father, I probably would've been afraid not to share a tent. This is clearly the author giving voice to something ridiculous (an from an ex-family member of Fred's) that paints his villain the way he wants him painted.
The author takes it upon himself to visit a property of Fred's looking to ambush-interview him and decides to do some exploring/trespassing. He finds some troubling things among the junk.
There were also handwritten notes related to Fred's appearance on The Montel Williams Show. Under these I found some adult magazines. Penthouse, mostly. Inside one magazine I discovered two black-and-white school photographs of teenage girls. The girls' names were visible. The girls were Fred's cousins.
The disordered mess disturbed me. It didn't jibe with the overly controlling image Fred Murray portrayed in public. I didn't see any sense of control here. And the presence of those young girls' photographs inside that adult magazine was troubling.
I left a message on Fred's voice mail, asking him to help me explain some of what I'd seen in Weymouth. But, of course, I never heard back. (pg 131)
That's disturbing if deliberate, but also disturbing is not only admitting to trespassing but putting it in your book.
Outside of the movies, I don't know anybody who talks like Fred Murray. Maura wasn't just abducted, she was "taken by a local dirtbag." Fred wasn't growing old, he was halfway to his "final reward." The police "can't catch a cold" and "the skunk is on their doorstep." (pg 132)
Fred sounds like any number of teachers I had throughout school (especially gym teachers), most of which I'm pretty sure had nothing to do with a missing persons case.
Peter Hyatt is a practitioner of "statement analysis"-- finding the hidden subtext behind a person's choice of words. This method of observing a suspect's statement to suss out subconscious intentions hearkens to the days of Sherlock Holmes but has come back in vogue thanks to a number of Internet message boards devoted to the idea. Hyatt has offered his insights on high-profile crimes, including the Amanda Knox case. He has written a handbook about statement analysis and offers training through his Web site. While his analysis may never be used as evidence in a court of law, it offers a unique perspective on Fred Murray's choice of language, and a jumping-off point for Hyatt's disciples.
We exchanged messages about Fred's official written statement to police. Here is what Hyatt said:
"Something is very wrong. Note the dropped pronoun 'I' in the first paragraph, and then its appearance later. Note that in 29 lines, he takes 25 to introduce his daughter going missing. The overwhelming number of deceptive statements have lengthy introductions. There is something very bothersome about it. Do police suspect him? Is he just a lousy father, or is there more? They should suspect him.
"It may be that he is deceptive due to purchasing alcohol, driving under the influence, etc., but the focus of that statement is he, himself, and not his missing daughter. At the Quality Inn, he wished 'not' to be there. Was there anything untoward about their relationship?"
Hyatt posted Fred's statement there so that his readers, his own team of [commenters], could parse through it.
"Sounds like 3/4 fabrication," one person wrote.
"The 'tale' he tells is so out of order that it makes no sense."
"Why does he call his hotel room 'the' room instead of his room? Is it because he always intended to share it with his daughter?"
He feels a need to give a reason why he was visiting his daughter. May indicate his intent in going there is questionable (though not necessarily in the context of explaining to the police his reasons for visiting)."
"He justifies why he was there. Akin to alibi building."
Another astute analyst noted something that occurs during Fred's interview on the Montel show: Fred slipped into the past tense a few times. When he began to say, "We were buddies," he stopped and switched to "We are buddies." (pgs 132 and 133)
Turns out you don't need internet commenters to jump to wild conclusions on very little evidence, but they're still there to help anyway! Seriously, this is absurd hokum. To be fair, there are members of law enforcement that fall under similar fallacies, but still.
Remember those photos the author found in the dirty magazine? Of Fred's cousins? That's relevant.
But first, one theory about Maura Murray is that she was involved in the severe injury of UMass student Petrit Vasi, who went into town with a friend for drinks and was waiting for a ride on February 5th, 2004, just a few days before Maura's February 9th disappearance. He was found unconscious but alive just after midnight, with skid marks on the road, and it looked like he'd either been hit by a car or thrown from a vehicle whilst riding dangerously. He was in a coma for weeks and the last thing he remembers is waiting outside to be picked up. As the conspiracy goes, fellow UMass student Maura had the disturbing phone call from her sister the night that Vasi was injured, and staged a follow-up accident to cover evidence. Vasi's sister insists the injury was a hit and run. The author dismisses this theory as Maura's job at the time was hard to slip away from and return to and not cause notice, with the addition of supervisors on the campus and her car not being parked nearby. With that in mind, the author wonders,
So why is the Vasi theory still so popular today?
Perhaps it has to do with this message posted to a GeoCities message board:Maura is NOT a Missing Person
Maura Murray has the right as every independent adult does to leave with her new boyfriend and start a new life. Maura is living a content and satisfying life in the Province of Quebec.
[...]
She disappeared, her only wish is that she be left alone to live her life in peace. She is happy and contented and just wants to be left alone.
In response to this post, a commenter who went by "Observer" wrote:This is common knowledge in certain circles of people who are close to the family.
And this is where it gets really interesting.
The moderator of the GeoCities forum wanted to find out who "Observer" was. So she contacted a CPA with a background in computers, James Leone, who knew how to trace IP addresses. Leone traced Observer's post to a computer in Taunton, Mass. Then he pored over messages posted on the Topix page devoted to Maura's disappearance, looking for anyone posting from the Taunton area. One avatar stuck out. She posted under the moniker "Citigirl", and claimed to be related to Maura. Were Citigirl and Observer the same person? If so, who was it? Well, hold on to your butts: The Citigirl avatar was linked to a woman named Patti Davidson. Maiden name: Curran. Patricia Curran was one of the young girls in the photographs I had found in that adult magazine at Fred's house in Weymouth.
I called Patricia for comment, but my calls went unreturned.
I started to wonder if it could all be true. Could Maura be laying low in Quebec? Did the family know? Is that why no one was eager for a book to be written? (pgs 135, 136, and 137)
I mean, I clipped the quote for length, but the original comment supports the very theory the author debunked, that she was involved in the hit-and-run. So if it really is Maura's cousin (and that's a big "if"), she's essentially endorsing the debunked theory?
The author quotes no less than “one of the first independent criminal profilers, a gonzo psychologist named John Philpin, author of seven true crime books of his own and a frequent commenter on news programs when a girl goes missing.” (pg 141) to weigh in on the father:
”The dad has info he isn’t sharing,” Philpin said. “I never believed Fred. Not one word. There was something very wrong about that man. He created so many smoke screens nobody could get a handle on him. Fred wanted total control of Maura’s life. And there was an unnatural and unusual closeness between father and daughter.” (pg 142)
Remember the altercation with Maura's brother that spawned the public letter to which the author took such offense? Here's the backstory. The author was chatting with an ex-partner of one of Maura's sisters, an exceptionally chatty man with whom he introduces the reader thusly:
My first impression of Tim Carpenter was that he was the sort of guy who’d seen hard living. Tragically skinny. Thin, long face; patchy beard. Based on looks, he was the kind of guy who’d deck you for saying, “Hi.” But once he started talking, I was taken by his levity, his carefree old-hippie attitude, that openness you get from surviving hard times.
He started at the beginning. And I mean the beginning. Turns out Tim was adopted, born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers up in Burlington. He was part Blackfoot Indian, he said, which explained the stories his neighbors had about the tepee he built in his backyard. (pgs 194 and 195)
The topic moves to Maura and the disappearance.
”Help me with some answers,” I said.
Most of what [Maura sister Kathleen’s ex partner Tim Carpenter] had to say concerned the weeks after Maura vanished. Tim and Kathleen had driven up to Wells River right away to help Fred with the search.
“He was weird about it,” said Tim. “Me, if it was my daughter, I’da been outside at the crack of dawn, starting the searches every damn day. Him, he’d get up maybe 10 A.M. and I’d say, ‘We better get started.’ Then he’d stop about 5 P.M. and bring everyone to the restaurant and start drinking and it would be a party.”
Tim felt that, when the media was around, Fred would put on a show, act manic, like they had to find her right now, right fucking now. But as soon as the cameras were gone, he’d slow up and go back to normal, Tim said.
Later, Fred asked Tim to drive his truck to Maura’s dorm. By the time they got there, Fred had put everything Maura left-- a computer, clothes-- into boxes. They loaded the stuff into Tim’s flatbed and from there, everything went into his closet in Hanover. Fred was not interesting in picking through the material for clues, so Tim let another guy, a volunteer named Rick, look through it to see if he could find anything interesting.
“There was something Fred said once that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” said Tim. “I remember him pointing up to the mountain and saying, ‘She walked up there. We’ll find her at the top. Drunk and naked.”
The last he’d heard, Kathleen was still living up in Swanton or St. Albans. Maybe homeless.
We were wrapping up, so I asked Tim a tough question about Fred. He thought for a couple seconds, then nodded. “Twice, Kathleen got blackout drunk and said something about it,” he said. “But it was never something I asked about when she was sober.”
After that conversation I drove directly to Hanson, hoping to catch Fred himself, at his old house. But he wasn’t there. He’s lived on the Cape for some time now. I knew that. But Fred,Jr., was home. I told him what Tim had told me.
“Never happened,” he said, standing in the doorway. “You know what? I want to reach out and strangle you right now. But I know you’re goading me. You want me to kick your ass. That would make a good scene in your book.” (pgs 195, 196)
The fact the author doesn't specify what the "tough question" was is somewhat telling, as is his taking a sketchy ex-partner of Maura's sister at his word. Also, so much commenting on what people would've done versus what Fred did do overlooks the fact Maura's father literally helped change the laws of his state in his pursuit of his daughter's case:
The superior court wasn't having it [Maura's father Fred's case to gain information from law enforcement on his daughter's disappearance]. The court upheld the opinion of the detectives and did not release any information to Fred. So [Fred's lawyer] Erwin kicked a little ass. Their case set as a public records precedent. Murray v. State of New Hampshire now compels law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire to go into greater detail about why certain records cannot be released. It forced the state police to go through their entire case file on Maura Murray's disappearance and explain why each bit of information should be kept secret. This resulted in affidavits from a detective and an assistant attorney general that shed light in the investigation. Fred finally got some documents-- a fraction of the file on his daughter, sure, but his lawsuit will help countless journalists and private investigators for decades to come. (pg 77)
So for a father who either had something to do with his daughter's disappearance and/or didn't care about it, that's pretty impressive. I'm not saying this conclusively proves he was a good father and/or didn't abuse his daughter. But given that the author is just as fond of collecting stories of Fred's ambivalence about his missing child as he is of possible abuse, this is a pretty strange kind of ambivalence.
________________________________________
The author relates his story about almost being abducted as a teenager alone in a park. A creepy looking man touches himself while staring at the thirteen-year-old boy, then chases him, the author saved only by being able to outrun the perpetrator, just barely, and scale a rock wall to get away. Furious to be robbed of his victim, he stares up at Renner "with eyes full of hate" which Renner returns with the finger. Finding his mother who calls the rangers, no trace of the man is found. It's a genuinely horrifying story, but the author begins the chapter about it with a rather strange prelude.
The thing that happened when I was thirteen I don't talk about much. I give a dozen or some presentations about cold cases every year, mostly at local libraries. You'd think I'd use it as part of my shtick. But I don't. It's one of those stories that are hard to digest. People come to my talks to get scared. But a good storyteller knows that people need degrees of separation from true horror, and I think that separation is lost if I start talking about me and this thing that happened. (pg 101)
I mean... if people are at a lecture about true crime and talking to someone who has said he's talked to predators, isn't that pretty close enough to horror? I think the real reason is the author's discomfort with it which is a completely valid one. It's one thing to pour out the details in a book, it's another to retell the experience live and witness the reactions, and field any questions and responses after.
She [the author's mother] called the rangers, but by the time they got there, he [the potential abductor] was long gone. The rangers told me to not come back to the park alone. "Those bathrooms are where the queers hang out," one of them said. This was long enough ago that Ohio cops still didn't differentiate between homosexuals and pedophiles. (pg 105)
In case you thought the whole current conservative moral panic that "LGBTQ+ people are groomers/predators" is somehow a new phenomenon.
Then the author shares his story with the right person, and gets a tip.
I had a book signing in Bedford, I was at a booth in the city square, and the signing was pat of the city’s annual elf festival. A man came by and we struck up a conversation. Turned out he was a retired ranger for the Metroparks. I decided to tell him about the time I was nearly abducted from the woods on Memphis, by the kiddie park. His eyes grew wide. I could tell I had upset him.
“You ever looked into the former director of the Metroparks?” he asked me.
“For what?”
“Just do yourself a favor and check it out.”
I did. When I got home I pulled him up on Google. The former director’s name was Vern Hartenburg. Soon as I saw his picture, I knew. This was my boogeyman. The guy from the park that day who had chased me into the woods and down the railroad tracks. Hartenburg had been arrested for exposing himself in the Metroparks. To be specific, he was arrested at the park on Memphis Avenue. The same small park where he’d chased after me in 1991.
[…]
I had to meet this man.
I found Hartenburg in the gated community of Lakeside, on the shores of Lake Erie. It’s a Christian commune of sorts, and he was working as a general landscaper for the place while his wife was away on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He rode over to my van in a golf cart and we talked through the window.
I told him I recognized him as the man who had tried to snatch me away from the Metroparks, in Old Brooklyn. He shook his head. Said he didn’t know anything about it. Then he told me a story about how he was sexually assaulted as a kid and how he had been raped for years. It was that abuse that compelled him to act out later, he explained. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done.”
I asked him why, of all the moments in his life, he decided to have himself committed to a mental hospital just days after Amy Milhaljevic was abducted. That was a hell of a coincidence, I said.
Hartenburg shrugged. “It was just when all that abuse caught up with me,” he said.
I drove away, more confused than ever.
Only one man abducted Amy, and yet there were so many likely suspects in the case. What did that say about the world? What sense does any of it make? (pgs 244 and 245)
I mean... unlike the author, I try to have sensitivity towards victims. But he would really recognize a man he saw only briefly decades earlier, in a fight or flight situation, and has been heavily suggested that this particular man is his would-be abductor? Also, the tenuous connection to another pet case of the author's is perhaps a way for him to safely distance himself and maintain sanity, but also really, really unnecessary.
________________________________________
A not inconsiderable amount of the book is devoted to both the author's mental health and to his son's autism and the author has some very unfortunate ignorance in a lot of different directions.
Turns out I had contracted secondhand post-traumatic stress disorder, the kind embedded war journos sometimes get. That was an idea that took me a long time to accept, by the way, and I still feel guilt when thinking about it. After all, I never served in a war. What the hell do I have to complain about that's so terrible? And yet, there was no denying the symptoms. (pg 12)
Okay, I realize he's addressing here his own ignorance of PTSD. But you can get PTSD from anything, honestly. Often people who have been through things generally agreed upon to be traumatic (repeated physical child abuse, an attempted abduction) don't feel they experience symptoms, but something more arguable, at least to some (covering and being closely involved with a disappearance and murder of a child) can still effect the same symptoms.
The author sees a therapist who has a really, really questionable assessment.
"Don't get too upset," said Roberta. "You may have the psychopathy of a dangerous man, but so do many cops. In fact, a lot of CEOs would have scored the same as you, or worse. Donald Trump is probably a sociopath. But it's what makes him so successful." (pgs 13 and 14)
You're just like many cops! (Yikes.) But Donald Trump being "successful" because he's a sociopath... gigantic oof. I don't care if this therapist said that pre-2015, get a new therapist.
Far more troublesome is his son's autism diagnosis.
Maybe I was in denial, but I didn't buy the diagnosis. My kid wasn't remote like Rain Man. Autistic people tend to lack empathy. But when Casey was happy he could be the most loving little guy. (pg 16)
The 1988 film Rainman might be famous, but it's not accurate autism representation on many, many, many different levels.
"Autistic people tend to lack empathy" is total, complete, utter ableist bullshit (seriously), revealing a complete misunderstanding of how autism works and printing that in 2016 is staggeringly irresponsible.
Also, given some of the author's behavior in this book, I somewhat wonder if he himself isn't on the spectrum (not that that's in any way an excuse), and it's worth noting that autism is genetic.
The Native Americans called this mountain Agiocochook or Waumbeket Methna. This is history, and even sociopaths like me feel humility before it. (pg 45)
Don't do that.
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From icky feelings to "Seriously?!" the author went some places he shouldn't.
It wasn't just online sleuths, though. The blog was a lightening rod, pulling in sources close to the case whom I had not yet met. A couple weeks after the blog was up and running. I got a call on my cell phone from an unknown number. At the time I noted that the voice had a very distinct timbre. I wrote that he sounded like a rather large, well-educated African American. (pg 84)
This is tricky, as AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is indeed a thing. But saying someone sounds like a certain race (particularly "a rather large, well educated African American) is... kind of dodgy. This at least is relevant, as this caller claims his girlfriend has information about the disappearance and when the author tracks down one of Maura's sisters, she's got a boyfriend that fits the author's perception of what the tipster looks like (smoking gun?).
When I contracted Martha Nagle [a student in Maura’s clinical group at UMass] via Facebook I got this message back:
I’d like to help but I’m also related to Maura and I don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you. Only out of respect for Maura’s family. Thank you anyway. Good luck with your research.
That’s red flag.
How, exactly, was Martha related to Maura? Martha was Asian-American, so it wasn’t by blood. A quick look at her background showed that she'd gone by many other names: Martha Park; Martha Vicar. I asked her to help me fill in the blanks. She told me that she was related by marriage.
I noted that at one time Martha had had connections to the tiny town of Taunton, Mass. As you may recall, Taunton was the neighborhood where someone called “Observer” had written on a Maura Murray message board in support of the theory that Maura was now living in Canada. I went back and reread the original GeoCities post. I noticed something unusual in the wording that I’d missed up until now. Here’s the pertinent section.Sometime between 12MN and 1 AM Maura driving her Saturn struck and critically injured the Umass student Petrit Vasi leaving him for dead.
That “12MN” bit suddenly struck out. I don’t know anyone who refers to midnight that way; I’m used to seeing “12 A.M.” But you know who does write it what way? Nurses. “12 MN” is medical dictation they teach to nursing students so that midnight is never mixed up with noon on patient charts.
I asked Martha if she was the author of that post.
Fuck you. How’s that for comment? she wrote.
It got me thinking about Canada again. Could Maura really be hiding in Quebec?
Can someone really disappear in this day and age? (pg 249)
The author is great at seeing "red flags", not so much at sensitivity. "How, exactly, was Martha related to Maura? Martha was Asian-American, so it wasn’t by blood." Seriously? Biracial people don't all look a certain way, adoption is a thing, and once again given the author's approach, someone doesn't want to talk to him.
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. (pg 263)
"Exotic" and "slightly Asian". Seriously. And yes, this would be the friend of Maura's with the unfortunate Twitter jokes the author ripped apart with his internet commentators.
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Maura was from Hanson, Mass, a quiet town between Boston and the Cape. Too small for its own public high school, it shares one with Whitman, the town next door. Hanson is old by American standards, settled in 1632. It's where Ocean Spray started harvesting cranberries. (pg 17)
I hate when authors do this. The author is an American. He is writing about America. There is no need to add the qualifier "old by American standards" except to sound pretentious.
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At times I'm not sure if he was trying to sound trite or mocking the kind of Dateline drivel that populates true crime. Either way, oof.
At first glance, the Murrays appeared to be the quintessential Irish-American family-- lots of kids and love to spare. (pgs 17 and 18)
Talk to someone who lived in Hansen at the that time and they'll tell you how they remember seeing her running, always running, from one side of town to the other. She was the school's star runner, and graduated fourth in her class. She was as comfortable in track gear as she was in a prom dress. She scored a 1420 on the SATs. (pg 18)
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The Collegian ran a lengthy update on the search for Maura the following semester, which included a brief interview with Laurie, Maura's mother. Older sister Kathleen was also interviewed, and the reporter asked about that disturbing phone call the night of Maura's breakdown: "It was just a phone call. It made no difference to me," said Kathleen. "It was just Maura calling me. That was that. I told her about my day and quarreling with my fiancé. I don't know what I could have done to upset her. Seriously, I think she just wanted to get out of work." (pg 36)
Update! In 2017 (so after this book was published), Maura's sister revealed she was a recovering alcoholic and her fiancé had taken her to a liquor store, triggering an emotional reaction. Obviously she wouldn't have wanted that public, but given the suspicion around the phone call, she must've realized it had to be.
Speaking of phone calls that loom large over the (online) investigation, supposedly Maura's boyfriend got a call from her phone that sounded only like someone sobbing!
The thing about police investigations that can be frustrating for armchair sleuths is that detectives have no obligation to share information with the public. They tracked this clue down in the first month of the investigation.
"It was a Red Cross worker trying to reach out to Billy," explained Scarinza. Red Cross officials act as liaisons to get emergency leave for enlisted soldiers. The caller didn't want to leave a message, hoping to speak to Billy directly. "I verified that phone call. It's verified. we spoke to the caller from the Red Cross." (pg 122 and 123)
Which makes another red herring in the case that the author debunks all the more debunkable. A point of the case was Maura's boyfriend receiving a call from her phone that was only what sounded like sobbing! Was it Maura, begging for help? Nope, it was a Red Cross worker and investigators can prove it.
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Few people know the particulars of Maura's story as well as John Healy. When I interviewed him, he was sixty-two and retired from the state police, a grizzled man with a high forehead, a gumshoe from central casting. When her case first threatened to go cold. Healy mustered a group of private eyes to reevaluate the mystery. I gave him a call shortly after returning to Ohio, and he gave me an earful. He was living in a house in the woods of Warner, New Hampshire. At the time, he was busy trying to get a convicted rapist out of prison.
"He didn't do it," said Healy. "This broad made it up. I put a lot of people in jail when I was a cop. I can't sit by and let an innocent man rot in prison. That sticks in my craw. This one, it sticks with you, too. Maura's disappearance. And, for me, it was about my daughter, Melissa. She's blind in one eye. One day she was sitting in her room in college and she looks up and a black guy is standing there. He got scared. Backed out, disappeared. There but for the grace of God goes my daughter. I needed to do this case. I don't know if I did for the Murray family or me." (pg 52 and 53)
Speaking of racism and insensitivity. Really, nothing about this from the author? "This broad"? Seriously? A note of when anyone's race is mentioned in a story: it better get relevant really quickly. A BLACK GUY CAME IN THIS AWFUL COP'S DAUGHTER'S DORM ROOM! Did he threaten her? Did he do anything? OR DID HE HAVE THE WRONG ROOM AND WAS EMBARRASSED AND NOW HER RACIST FATHER HAS A STORY TO TELL FOREVER. This kind of critical thinking (and the author's inclusion of the story) really makes you wonder about the rest of the book.
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The dorms [in Maura's college] were coed. Two or three women would share a room, next to a roomful of men. In such close quarters, Maura's bulimia was no secret. Megan heard her purging on more than one occasion. "She had issues with loving herself."
This lent credence to a story a private investigator told me about what happened at Thanksgiving the year before Maura disappeared. Her mother, Laurie, had made fun of her in front of family members. She'd said, "Why did you make so much food if you're just going to throw it up later?" (pg 58)
That's indeed hideous and also a great reason why the author really didn't need to comment on Maura's weight when describing her, let alone in a way that praised her thinness and attributed it to her running.
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"The searches she conducted on her computer before she left Amherst suggest Maura may have been pregnant," said [lead investigator John] Scarinza. Maura visited a number of sites that talked about the dangers of drinking while pregnant. She may not have told anyone yet. "She was a very private person, even with her close friends." He wonders about the phone call that upset her so much the night she was working at Melville Hall. He wonders if her sister Kathleen got the sense that Maura was knocked up; maybe that's what came out in the conversation. (pg 64)
I mean, if you're going to judge people by their internet searches. In 2016. Seriously.
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Scouring the Web one day, I found an obscure site, Chris King's First Amendment Page, which had published some information related to Maura's disappearance. According to his Blogspot profile, King once worked for the attorney general's office. He had a background in journalism, though he listed his current occupation as a "Metaphysical Reductionist," whatever that may be. (pg 124)
Intrigued and apparently more willing to do a several second internet search than the author, a "metaphysical reductionist" is
"In the metaphysics and philosophy of mind literature, reductionism is usually taken to be the view that all sciences are reducible to physics, or even that all entities are reducible to entities describable in the language of physics." - x
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Early on, a man named Larry Moulton claimed his brother, Claude, killed Maura. He gave Fred Murray a knife he said was used in the crime. Fred used this evidence to support his "local dirtbag" theory and shipped it to the police to be tested for DNA. Larry died a few years later. Cancer.
[...]
I immediately reached out to Larry's surviving family to learn what I could about the Moulton brothers. At the time of Maura's disappearance in 2004, Claude was living with a woman he had started dating when she was fourteen and he was thirty-four. They started sleeping together when she turned seventeen, she said. (pg 128)
Another red herring, but nothing about Claude being a child molester?
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When I finally told my wife about [the man stalking and harassing the author online and claiming to be connected to various horrific crimes including Maura Murray’s disappearance] Beagle, she asked me if there was anything to be worried about-- if he might want to harm me, show up at our house with a gun or something. I reminded Julie was my first editor, Pete Kotz, told me when I was researching the Amy Mihaljevic murder for Scene. “You got nothing to fuckin’ worry about. Nobody ever goes after the journalist,” he said. “If they get made at what you wrote, they’ll go after your source. But you? You’re fine.” (pg 157)
I'm pretty sure that's not true at all. I've seen a certain former President threaten reporters all the time and urge his supporters to go after them.
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J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t care that some critics viewed his eagles as bad writing. He knew enough about the world, the violent world of wars and murder, to know that there is always hope. He even had a word for it. Here’s how he explained it:
“I coined the word ‘eucastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears. And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth; your whole nature, chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.” (pg 187)
An interesting concept.
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In 1988, the Connecticut River Valley Killer was nearly caught. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Boroski stopped at a convenience store in West Swanzey on her way home from the county fair. This was in the southwest corner of New Hampshire, a town with a covered bridge. Boroski was seven months pregnant, but that didn’t stop the man in the Jeep Wagoneer. When she returned to her car, he stabbed her twenty-seven times and left her for dead.
Boroski was a tough woman, though. With two collapsed lungs, a severed jugular, and a bleeding kidney, she drove to a friend’s home. She lived. So did her daughter, though the child suffered from mild cerebral palsy because of the attack. (pg 140)
This is where we have to be careful when writing about true crime. Saying that because someone survived a horrific attack, they're "tough" implies that those who did not were in someway weak (and possibly deserved their fate) thus putting the responsibility/blame on the victim. Don't do it.
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Casey was expelled from preschool shortly after his Christmas program, for behavior that included hitting, biting, scratching, and running away. The coup de grace was when he walked up to the young woman who assisted his teacher and slapped her ass like he was Boss Hogg at the Boar’s Nest.
I asked him later, “Why did you do that?”
“She wasn’t being nice to me,” he said. “So I spanked her.”
I know what you’re thinking: It was learned behavior. It must all be learned behavior, right? The hitting, the running away… What must be going on behind closed doors? Yes, I did spank him. We tried everything, remember? Time-outs. Positive reinforcement. Diversion. And spanking. A quick swat on his tokus. He’d been spanked maybe five times in his life. We stopped because whenever we spanked Casey he became so offended by our actions that he grew even more belligerent. I was beginning to understand that, on some level, Casey considered himself our equal. Who were we to punish him?
I explained to my son how lucky he was that we didn’t spank him anymore. I told him how, when I was his age, my dad used to come at me with a belt or ask me to go get a thin branch from a tree out back. How my dad’s dad used to just fucking punch him until he quit whining. But the story didn’t slow Casey down any and the next time we visited my dad, he asked him about the belt because he wanted to see it.
“I think pain is funny,” he said one day, out of the blue.
We started seeing a counselor, a woman younger than my wife. Casey played with LEGOS while we talked about him. Hard to tell if any of it was getting through.
Julie found a new Montessori in Akron. The kind Indian woman who ran the place spoke to us in a gentle tone and assured us that no one in the history of her Montessori had ever been turned away based on behavior and Casey would not be the first. He lasted five weeks. When I came to pick him up that last day, I reminded her of what she had said to me when we met. She wasn’t kicking my son out, she explained. Her school just wasn’t the place Casey should be anymore.
Around this time I started smoking weed again. (pg 143)
Watching someone's horrible parenting decisions is bad enough, but someone's horrible parenting decisions they casually put in a bestselling book that their child will someday read... wow. (Side note: wow, relating horrific child abuse stories to children so they'll act better once they see how lucky they are failed with an elementary school student! WHAT ARE THE ODDS!)
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Ben was from a town in Pennsylvania called Kecksburg, famous for the UFO that supposedly crashed there in 1965. A friend of his grew wonderful marijuana in the woods near the crash site. Couple times a year, Ben went home and brought back some of that Kecksburg Express. The first time I tried it, I didn’t feel a thing until Ben suddenly shrank before my eyes to the size of a midget. Kecksburg weed will fuck up a seasoned pot smoker. And oh the times we had. (pgs 144 and 145)
Casually using the word "midget" in the year 2016. Huh.
Final Grade: A-
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