James Renner's Blog, page 34

Family dynamics

Since Fred Murray refuses to ever answer questions about what was going on in Maura's life prior to her disappearance, people are left to speculate on messageboards about just what sort of person Maura was and what life at home in Hanson was like. At this point, I am pretty convinced the answer to what happened to her lies in the puzzle of her past. And, after some effort, I'm beginning to see a little of what that life was like.
According to Maura's aunt, Janis Panttila, Fred Murray was always an "odd duck." Fred met Laurie, Maura's mother, when he was in college and Laurie was a 15 year-old high schooler. The parents didn't like him. But he was persistent. They married. Had four kids: Fred Jr., Kathleen, Julie, and Maura. Laurie had another child, Kurt, with a man named Kevin Noble. The marriage dissolved around this time and Fred moved back in with his parents while Laurie lived at the home in Hanson with the kids.
"My sister was an excellent mother...when the kids were little," says Janis, fighting back emotion. She doesn't like to speak ill of her sister but says as she got older, drinking became a problem. She never remarried. Neither did Fred. On May 4, 2009, Laurie died after a fight with cancer. It was Maura's birthday.
Growing up, Maura was very close to her aunt Janis and her grandmother and spent most spring breaks and summers at their house in Weymouth. "She was a very very shy young woman and just the most beautiful girl. And she had a little temper."
Though Fred no longer lived with the family, he was a constant presence. He pushed the girls to run. And took them on overnight camping trips in the North Country. Their favorite place to stay the night was at the Jigger Johnson Campground. Jigger Johnson is on Highway 112 (aka Wild Ammanoosuc Rd., about forty-five minutes East from where Maura's car was found). It's the only campsite in that area with showers and it is open year round for a small fee.
"I always thought it was strange that Fred would take the girls up there on their own. They would be 14, 15, 16 years old, camping together. If my Dad had ever asked me to go camping with him I'd have said, 'what are you, nuts?'"
In Janis' window is a green electric candle which she keeps lit for her missing niece.

Forget Butch Atwood and Rick Forcier

Rick Forcier
Butch Atwood
Once you get past the published news reports on Maura Murray's disappearance, you might find yourself reading through various messageboards where people have written thousands of posts about this unsolved mystery. On these unregulated boards, people can post rumors with no verification and name "suspects" with little fear of libel charges. Two of the most commonly named suspects are Butch Atwood and Rick Forcier. And, in my opinion, neither one had anything to do with Maura's disappearance. In fact, both tried to help in their own ways.
First, Butch Atwood. He was the bus driver who stopped to ask Maura if she needed any help shortly after the accident. He offered to call the police but Maura pleaded with him not to. She said she had already called Triple-A. Of course, having lived in Haverhill for some time, Butch knew this was a lie--phone reception is for shit up there, even worse in 2004. Ask anyone up that way about Butch being involved and they will laugh at you. You see, Butch was a fat man. Morbidly obese. Maura could have easily have run from him. Secondly, Butch's house was not vacant. He lived with his mother and common-law wife at the time. They were home. He was seen sitting in his bus. Oh, and he--or his wife, rather--were the ones who called the cops. Butch was never a viable suspect, in my opinion. He has since passed away.

Then there's Rick Forcier. He lived across from Atwood, on the corner of Bradley Hill Rd. and Wild Ammonoosuc. At the time, he lived in an ugly trailer next to the house he was constructing in his spare time. Today, only the house remains, and it's a beauty. Forcier becomes part of the story several months after Maura's disappearance when he comes to police and mentions he might have seen Maura running near East down Ammonoosuc the night she disappeared, on his way home from work. People were immediately suspicious, wondering why Forcier waited so long to come forward.
I spoke to Diane and Rusty Cowles, who lived across from Forcier on Bradley Hill and still see him to this day. Forcier explained to them that it was only when he was going over his bills that he pieced together that he had been working in Franconia the night Maura vanished and must have been coming home about a half hour after the accident. He thought back on that night and figured it must have been the same evening he saw what he thought at the time was a teenage boy in a hoodie crossing the road quickly in front of him, near 116, several miles East of the crash site. He wondered if it could have been Maura.
Of course, Forcier is at least a little responsible for some of the suspicion people have about him. When people asked him about it, he liked to joke that Maura was living in his house and that "she's a great cook," according to the Cowles. That was Forcier's sense of humor. When the police started asking pointed questions and demanding to search his trailer, he figured his ex-wife might have shared that joke with detectives.
Rusty Cowles says eventually Forcier sold his trailer and had it trucked away. When he did, the state police pulled the truck over and searched the trailer from top to bottom, a clever way to get around a search warrant. Forcier has since moved away from Haverhill to be closer to his kids. He has not responded to a request for an interview.
Niether of these individuals seem like viable suspects to me. I'm a little confused why Fred Murray made such a big deal about them.

Maura was in New Hampshire for New Years, 2004.

Consider this rumor officially confirmed.
The mother of Andrea Connolly, one of Maura's close friends from Whitman-Hanson, tells me detectives were very interested in the news that Maura spent New Years Eve at a house owned by Connolly's friend in Goshen, New Hampshire, a month before she disappeared. Nobody was living there the week Maura went missing, but they did call up to neighbors to have them check the house. But it was empty.
Goshen is about an hour and a half drive from Haverhill.