It's February 2004 in New England. Classes had just started at the University of Massachusetts, Amhurst. A talented Dean's List nursing student named Mara Murray is preparing for the semester ahead. On Monday, February ninth, she looks up directions to Vermont and New Hampshire and informs her professors of a death in the family. This is not true. She hastily packs a few things, picks up some alcohol, and with $280 on her person, heads north in her beat-up 1996 black Saturn sedan. She tells no one of her plans. Several hours later, at 07:30 PM, witnesses in a small rural town of Haverhill, New Hampshire, report a vehicle off the road. A local bus driver speaks to the young woman who declines help. When police arrive, minutes later, the Black Saturn is locked and abandoned. Mara Murray vanishes without a trace. My name is Julie Murray, and this is the untold story of my sister Mara. For the first time ever, I'm going to tell her story in my own words, in the words of those who knew her best, those closest to the investigation with exclusive interviews never heard before. For nearly two decades, her story has been co-opted by strangers, grifters, enthusiasts.

It's time to set the record straight. It's time to give my missing little sister a voice in her own story. Join me as I ask the difficult questions and strive to get closer to resolution in one of the most mysterious missing person cases of our time. Media Pressure presents the untold story of Maura Murray, like you've never heard before. Episode One, The Call. Mara is Missing. This is not your average true crime podcast. It's a story of raw emotion, deep heartache, and looming unanswered questions that continue to haunt my family. Now, I'm not a podcaster or professional storyteller, but I'm on a mission to tell the real story story and do right by my sister. Though it may not be perfect, I can promise you the story I tell looks nothing like the sensationalized versions you've heard in the past. I'll be honest, being vulnerable and sharing this is not the easiest thing for me, but it's what Mara deserves. And so I'm taking you on this very personal journey with me for one reason. Mara. My hope is that you walk away with a better understanding of the real people at the heart of the case and a desire to join my family in our search efforts because one listener could hold the key to unlocking this mystery and finally getting resolution from Mara.

The pressure's on. Someone knows. It's Christmas, 2003. I'm home after a year-long tour in South Korea as a young army lieutenant. I arrive in Hanson, Massachusetts, my childhood home, surrounded by family and excited to start the next chapter of my life. My younger sister, by two and a half years, Mara, is on winter break from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Mara was 21 years old, a Dean's List student studying to be a nurse, following in her mother, Lauryn's, footsteps. I missed the entire previous year, so we had a lot of catching up to do, and that we did. Little did I know this would be the last time I would ever see my little sister, Mara, again. In a month's time, she would be ripped away from my life without warning, without reason. Nothing could prepare me for the next chapter. My life would never be the same. That Christmas was a special one for many reasons. I hadn't been home in ages after my first assignment out of West Point. Nothing like a year-long tour in a foreign country to abruptly indoctrinate me as a naive, unworldly Army Second Lieutenant. I'll never forget arriving in Seoul, South Korea, alone after a 13-hour flight, lost the luggage, unable to decipher any of the airport signage written in Hangul, feeling completely overwhelmed.

I remember what Mara told me before I left. She said, Keep it together, Jules. The previous day, Mara and my dad drove me to Newark Airport. My eyes welled up with tears, hugging them goodbye, partially at a complete dread of the unknown, partially because I knew it would be a full year before I would be back. Mar saw the tears and said with a whimsical laugh, Are you seriously crying? My big sister instinct kicked in immediately as I regained my composure, saying emphatically, Save it, Mazza. Mazza, with a Z, was a nickname my mother gave to Mara. I don't know where it came from, but it was cute, and I liked it. She knew I was nervous, and this was her way of comforting me. Talking shit. Our typical exchange, one that felt familiar and like home. I smiled as she continued to smirk her signature dimples on full display, telling me to keep it together. And off I went. Here's the thing you need to know about Maura. She was quick-witted, always fast, with a clever quip. A standout athlete who rewrote the record book at her high school in track and cross country.

A brilliant student graduating fourth in her class with astronomical SAT scores. You would never know it, though, because she was humble, unassuming, and kind. She wasn't perfect. She was human. In Korea, I lived on base and officer quarters, essentially a furnished studio in an old army barracks. It was exactly what you would expect. Linonium floors, stiff furniture with a sterile smell. It felt like living in a hospital break room. I did have the Internet, though, which is how I kept in contact with Mara through AOL Instant Messenger. My screen name was XFile 2002. Mara's was XFile Trial 59, showing our allegiance to our favorite show, The XFiles. Ironic would be an understatement, considering what happens next. Mar and I talked a lot about how excited I was to get my first real apartment on the outskirts of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Now, I don't have a flair for interior design, but living in army quarters gave me aspirations. I created an early 2000s version of a Pinterest board, but in hardcopy magazine cutouts, imagining a minimalist, black and white-themed apartment. I shared my idea with Mara, who knew I had exactly zero artistic ability. It really amused her, so she indulged me.

I've never shared this part of the story. See, when you have a high-profile missing sister, everything seems to become public property, and there's only a few precious memories that I have, so I've kept those to myself. But in order to give you a full picture of who Mara really was, I'm going to share this part of the story. Now, I distinctly remember her asking me a number of probing questions about my ridiculous black and white theme. She gave me a lot of shit about it, but that was Mara. She would say things like, You're so weird, but whatever. So everything is black and white? When I returned that I realized why she was being so inquisitive. She gave me a framed black and white photo of the Boston skyline. But in true Mara fashion, she added an extra touch and got it matted in black to make it stand out more. She didn't have the money as a broke college student working two jobs, and I knew it. And while most would have been satisfied with the picture as is, not Mara. She always went that extra mile for those she loved. I absolutely loved it.

It was a perfect photo to fit my theme. I gave her a heavily discounted cordyroid jacket from The Vill in Osan, Korea. A little over a month later, I received the call that would flip my world upside down. Sitting in my perfectly appointed black and white apartment, this call colored my life a permanent stormy gray. Nothing could be further from black white from that point forward. Mara is missing. In the early evening of February 10th, 2004, my family was frantically calling each other, asking if anyone had heard from Mara. I had not. Not since Saturday afternoon, 3:21 PM, to be exact. What do you mean, I asked. Panic started to surface. She's at school. Classes had just started. No, no. Her car is abandoned in New Hampshire. What? Why is her car in New Hampshire? We don't know. She's gone. What do you mean she's gone? Where is she? We don't know. Nobody knows.

My mind was swimming. I had no idea. What do you mean missing? Where is she? Nobody knows where Maura is.

Mara's car was found abandoned in the woods in New Hampshire, and she's not there. You don't know where she is. It It was surreal. It's hard to describe the feeling of being told that. There's a feeling of panic. Give me a second. She would not have not called or told us where she was or what was going on. That wasn't something that she would do. She would have told us. So at that point, it's starting to sink in that, Wow, this is real. Something has gone wrong here. We don't know where she is. We to get up there right now.

I didn't really know what was going on. I just remember that I was told that they found Maura's car up in New Hampshire, and Mara was missing. And nobody really knew what happened, why she was there. Everyone was confused, and we weren't really sure what we were going to do at that time. I do remember that Freddie and I looked at each other, and we both immediately agreed that we were going to go. I was 15 at the time.

I just remember you just said Maura's missing. I was like, What mean? Oh my God, what is going on? And it was like, does not compute. And I think it took probably a couple of hours for it to actually set in. I feel like I remember calling her and leaving a voicemail after your dad called me. It was that conversation I remember vividly. Not so much what was said, but I just remember what I was looking at and just not believing him at all. Those are the voices of my dad and brothers Freddie and Curtis. That last voice you I heard was Mara's UMass friend, Kate Markopoulos. She has never spoken publicly about the case until now. We'll hear much more from her later. See, the previous day, Monday, February ninth, 2004, was the last day anyone would ever hear from my sister again. Mara submits her nursing school homework assignment, looking up maternity terms in the wee hours of the morning, 3:32 AM. She then searches for directions to Vermont in New Hampshire. Mid-afternoon, she calls an information line at a ski resort in Stowe, Vermont, and a condo owner, Linda Salomon, in Bartlett, New Hampshire, a place my family had stayed at in the past.

She doesn't make a reservation, though. Next, she emails her boyfriend, Bill Rouch, saying she loved him and she would call him later. At At 1:24 PM, Mara emails her professors about a fictitious death in the family, saying she'd be out for a few days. She placed a phone tag with Bill but doesn't speak to him. At 3:00 PM, she returns borrowed clothes to a fellow nursing school student, then packs some items, including toiletries, textbooks, birth control, and some clothes. At 3:15 PM, Mara appears alone on CCTV footage, withdrawing $280 from an ATM, leaving just shy of $20 in her account. At 3:43 PM, she purchases $40 worth of alcohol at a liquor store and recycles 79 cans worth $3.95. She picks up forms for an accident she had in my father's car two days prior, then heads north in her 1996 black Saturn running on three cylinders. Destination? Unknown. With no confirmed reservations. At 4:37 PM, Mara checks her voicemail for the last time. Several hours later, at 7:27 PM, a woman named Faith Westman hears a loud thud outside her home on a sharp dark corner in Haverhill, New Hampshire. She looks out her kitchen window to see a car off the side of the road in the eastbound lane facing the wrong direction.

She calls 911 to report the accident, and according to dispatch logs, stated she saw a man smoking a cigarette. While looking out the window, Faith sees a local bus driver approach the scene from the west. It's her neighbor, Butch Atwood, a big burly man in his late '50s, returning home from dropping students off at a ski trip. He stops and speaks to a young woman asking if she needed assistance, but the driver declined, saying she had already called Triple A Roadside Assistance. Here's the thing, though. There's no cell phone service there, and he knew it. So Butch invites her to wait at his home just a few hundred yards up the road. She declines. He continues home and places the second 911 call at 7:42 PM, 16 minutes after Faith Westman's call. He would later state that the driver appeared to be shaken up and shivering. It was frigid that night in the low 20s. He described her as a young woman with her hair down. Now, this detail is one that's been hard to reconcile over the years because my sister never wore her hair down. I just asked her how she was. She said she was shaken up.

I couldn't see any blood on her face. And she was shaking like this. I said, Okay, I'm going to go call the police. Three minutes later, at 7:46 PM, Haverhill Police Sergeant Cecil Smith arrives on scene to discover a locked and abandoned car on the side of the road facing the wrong direction. Airbags deployed, windshield crack, and a rag in the tailpipe. He notices a box of wine behind the driver's seat and sees red liquid aspersions on the driver's side door and the roof. He snaps at least seven photos documenting the scene. However, they've been withheld, but I've seen them. What he doesn't see is any sign of Mara in no footprint in the snow. As if that wasn't mysterious enough, listen to this. Another witness, Karen McNamera, known only as Witness A for years, was driving home from work that night.

Well, I'm Karen McNamera, that a lot of people came to know as Witness A. Long ago when I didn't even know that there was a Witness A or any of the chatter was going on on the internet. I had no idea.

So you didn't designate yourself as Witness A?

Oh, no.

She's passed by a police SUV 001, not once, but twice.

A police car passed me with its lights on, and I slowed down and pulled over, let him pass me. Then when I got out to Route 112, the same police car passed me a second time. I took a right onto Route 112, just as this police car was passing me. I know it was the same police car because I noted on the back of the car, it said 001. When I say police car, I it was an SUV. I drive an SUV. I often refer to it as a car, and that's been some point that some people have disputed, but it was indeed an SUV. I followed in the same direction as that police car was going. Its lights were on. When I got to the weathered barn at the Curve, the police car had stopped nose to nose to another car, a dark Sedan.

This vehicle is typically driven by the chief of police, Jeff Williams. Karen typically called her family back in cell phone range near the Beaver Pond. Her cell phone records indicate this call happened at 07:52 PM. But here's the deal. It takes a solid 15 minutes to get from the accident scene to Beaver Pond on a good day. I've driven it countless times, at all different times of day and in all different kinds of weather. That means Karen passed Mars, Saturn, nearly 10 10 minutes before the first responding officer, Cecil Smith, arrived at 7:46. After seeing Mara on the news, Karen contacts the police, but they're dismissive of her accounting, and Jeff Williams wasn't on duty that night. Coincidentally, years later, Williams is arrested for DWI in evasion by none other than Cecil Smith. We'll deep dive this later. One thing I know for certain, though, is whatever plans Mara had that night were out the window after the crash. It changed her entire set of circumstances, and now she's gone. But where was she going in the first place? And what happened to her? Will we ever know the truth? For the past 19 years, these are the questions my family wakes up to every day.

Where is Mara? Was she a victim of foul play? Did she succumb to the elements? Was it the work of a serial killer, suicide, or abduction? Investigative reporter Bob Ward has covered Mara's case from the beginning.

People don't just simply vanish into thin air. They don't disappear from the face of the Earth. Here we have Maura Murray leaving UMass under strange circumstances, and then she does exactly that after that car crash up in New Hampshire. Not a single sign of her. Where did she go? What happened? There are other missing persons cases, many others that I've covered, but none quite like this, because the window here where she disappears is so narrow. She's there, and then she's gone. And not only is she gone, there's no evidence of where she went, what direction she went. It is like she vanished into thin air. That's what makes Maura's case so different. But we know she did not vanish into thin air. We know something happened to Maura Murray, but it's unbelievable. After almost two decades, we still don't know what. You have this beautiful young woman with her whole future ahead of her. How can this happen to her? There's a school of thought that she ran away, that this whole thing, her leaving UMass and going up to New Hampshire and then disappearing and refusing help when it was offered to her, this whole thing was more of going off to take her own life.

And then there's the other side of it that she refused help and that somebody came along and took her, which is also possible. I don't know. Was she confused? Did she walk away? She was hurt. Maybe she got hurt in the accident. She didn't realize it. And she walked off into the woods, and she's still there, and we need to find her. All those possibilities I've considered over the years, I don't know. I don't have I have a theory on Maura Murray. People ask me all the time, What do you think happened to Maura? I honestly don't know. I talk to you and your dad and your family, and I think I've gotten to know who Maura Murray is. And it doesn't sound like she would go off in the woods and do something on her own like that. I haven't heard any evidence of that. Is it possible that she broke down and she was confused and she was approached for help, refused that help, and that person goes to make a call, and now she's and someone comes along? Yeah, I think that's very possible. I will say this. I think back in the day, back in 2004, maybe to 2006, I was less likely to believe that a stranger came and abducted her and took her because that window was so narrow.

But now, after all these other stories that I've done and all these other cases that I've covered where strange things happened, I don't think that can be discounted. It's very possible that Maura was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She just wanted to get away from UMass to clear her head for a little while, and then all this other stuff happens. It's mind boggling. So until we find Maura, the truth is we don't know. And I keep my mind open to all of these possibilities.

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Let's go back to that Tuesday, some 15 hours after Mars disappearance. At 10:20 AM A judge issues a search warrant for the vehicle to identify the driver. See, the night before, the car was towed to the personal garage of tow operator Mike Lavoy, where the warrant was executed. Months ago, I saw the search warrant for the first time, and what I learned shocked me. Not only did seven items have Mara's name on it, indicating they knew Mara was the likely driver early on Tuesday, yet didn't contact my family until early evening, but police also recovered a handwritten name and phone number. They never mentioned these bits of information to my family. When I contacted the owner of the number, they claimed this was the first time in 19 plus years anyone had ever mentioned that their number was found inside a high-profile missing woman's car. What's more is the family-owned a condo at Loon Mountain in Lincoln, New Hampshire, 25 miles from where Mara's car was found and in the direction she was traveling. They also had ties to our hometown of Hanson, Massachusetts, Burlington, Vermont, and law enforcement. Now, remember, Mara was looking at places to stay in directions to both New Hampshire and Burlington.

Let me be very clear. I'm not saying any of this is connected, but at the bare minimum, it should have warranted at least a call by authorities. After 19 years of fighting for my sister, this landed like a punch in the gut. So after the search warrant is executed mid-morning on February 10th, it would take almost six full hours before my family is notified. Six hours. It wasn't until Tuesday evening, February 10th, that we first learned of Mars disappearance. In shock, we're trying to make it make sense, but nothing made any sense. It still doesn't, nearly two decades later. I felt helpless hundreds of miles away. Honestly, the night's a blur in my mind. I can't say for certain who called who or in what order, but I will never forget the feeling. Sheer dread. I knew something was terribly wrong. The human mind is an incredible thing, especially Especially when it comes to trauma. The body has a way of protecting itself and shielding the effects of trauma, and everyone reacts differently. Looking back, I often question myself as to why I don't have a vivid memory of the most harrowing couple days of my life.

It was my trauma response. Block it out, turn it gray. But that feeling left an indelible mark. My dad was in Connecticut for his traveling job in nuclear medicine. I could hear the terror in his voice when he spoke. I'm trying to figure it out, Jules, but she isn't answering herself. My mother was crying a complete wreck. Growing up, my mother was the emotional one. She would literally tear up during every episode of Little House in the Prairie without fail. She didn't answer her dorm phone either. Someone called Bill, her boyfriend, an army lieutenant, and my West Point classmate, who was stationed at a training base in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. My dad tried to call the local police department, but had trouble getting someone to give him details.

Tried to get in touch with the local police, and that was very hard to do. I asked to be called back immediately, right now, and it took forever to get a call back. And so I kept calling. I was absolutely panicky. I was out of my mind, basically. And so eventually, I talked to the police, and I barely remember it.

Eventually, he speaks to Haveral Police Sergeant Cecil Smith, who told him a black 1996 Saturn, registered to him, was found the night before, locked and abandoned on the side of the road in a small town called Haveral. Panic-stricken, he explains that that's his daughter, Mara's car, a nursing student at the University of Massachusetts. Frustration rung out as a full 24 hours had already passed.

Cecil Smith. He was quite hesitant and seemed a little bit annoyed that I kept calling him, but he was stammering and not giving me full answers. It was quite upsetting and said to myself, I'm getting nothing here. I've got to go up. My daughter's missing in some unfamiliar place. I need to find out more. I need more. Somebody tell me what's going on. I knew right away I had to get there, but it's after dark, and I'm in Southwest Connecticut. So what am I going to do? I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't know what to think. I was in a state of panic, and that's unusual for me. But I had this hopeless feeling. Helpless feeling? Helpless is the word. There's nothing I can do. So I have to be there. I contacted work, said, It's been a horrible accident. My daughter is missing. I've got to go up and see what's going on, and I won't in to work. I had no choice. I told them I was going. I wasn't sure when I'd be back. And so in the middle of the night, around two o'clock or something like that, I took off in New Hampshire, and I got there at dawn to join the search.

And guess what? I was the search. Nobody had been notified except us, nearly 24 hours later. I remember the haunting ride when I got a little town of Woodsville. And I went through there. I'm on 302, and sure enough, there's 112. And I'm familiar with the 112, but not out there. And I heard there was a red barn. It was right around the corner from a red barn on a Horseshoe bend. I remember what a feeling, a sinking feeling I had as I'm driving up that road. And I noticed that the road was winding, dark, dipping and turning. It was treacherous. And it wasn't wet at that moment when I was coming there, but I could see if ever were wet, you were in big trouble there. And then all of a sudden, this feeling, this chill came over me. I came around a corner, look up ahead, and there's the Red Barn. I said, I'm here. Oh, my God, what am I going to find? I was basically quaking. And then I saw where the tire tracks went off the road. The tire tracks went down, but then, tire tracks were backed out. Tracks went in at an angle, 45 degrees, and then out at a 45-degree angle, back out onto a 112.

He headed east, it looked like. That's where the accident scene was. So I stopped there and my heart sank. The car wasn't there, of course, but I had this empty, scared feeling. It was panic, and I'm way calmer now talking about it than I would have been that morning talking about it. I was frantic, Joel. Absolutely frantic. My kids gone. I had this haunted, scary feeling.

My father arrived in Haverhill at dawn on February 11, 2004. Upon arrival, he pressured the local police to give him details on how the search was progressing. The Haverhill Police Department was four officers deep, and in my opinion, not equipped a resource to handle what would end up being one of the most complex missing person cases in the history of the state. To his utter devastation, he was the search. The police explained that this type of thing happens, and the driver usually shows up the next day. But the next day had already come and passed, and there was still no sign of Mara. Stunned and scared, he pleaded with them to search. Finally, 36 hours later, New Hampshire Fishing Game began the first search for Mara. While my dad was at the police station, the lead officer from the New Hampshire Fishing Game, Todd Bogardas, was provided a scent item without any consultation from my dad, a leather glove for Mara's car. A glove she received as a present from her boyfriend Bill just a few weeks earlier, one that we're not certain she even wore. The scent dogs track the scent up the road in an Easterly direction, then lost it in the middle of the road.

In hindsight, this is something we deeply regret not having input on, as we would have suggested that they use something she actually wore, like her running shoes or gear that was found in the car. Keep in mind, this search happened 36 hours after she disappeared on treated roads in the middle of winter. So I've never given much credence to the validity of this. Massachusetts attorney Terry O'Neill, assisted my family and spent an enormous amount of time and effort on Mara's case. He weighed in on the sent item. So when Fred finally convinced him to search for his daughter, he did two days later. He was on Wednesday. Now they are saying they used a canine to conduct a search by utilizing Mara's clothes. That scent is not going to be there two days later on that He said, The dog lost it 100 yards up the road. Trying to place that theory of got into somebody's car or did something like that. That scent is not going to be there. Right. One of our biggest complaints was, we don't even think she ever wore those gloves. She got those gloves for Christmas. They were leather gloves, fancy.

They didn't consult us and say, Hey, family of this missing woman, what did she normally wear? Because we would have said, take any pair of running shoes, take any piece of running gear, because she wore it every day. And so there was another missed opportunity there. Right. Meanwhile, the rest of my family mobilized and made their way up to New Hampshire. My poor mother was sick and had a broken ankle, and she wasn't mobile, so she remained at our childhood home in Hansen in case Mara showed up or called there. This was very hard on her, and she devastated. Here's what my brother's had to say.

She was totally devastated, obviously. She wanted to be up there herself. She was not physically able to. It's as simple as that. She knew that she would be better off staying here in order to answer the phone if Mara might call. Me and Curtis were able to cover a lot of ground because we were young and healthy, and that's what we did. And We would call mom every night and say, This is what we did. We searched up and down the Cankamagas Highway. We searched in North Conway. We searched here, we searched there. We haven't found anything. She was beside herself, just horrified. What do you say? It's a nightmare. Just thinking about it makes me feel terrible about her having to be here and not being able to be up there with us, helping in the search. But that's just how it had to be. That's not what she wanted. She was not physically able to be there.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, mom, to her family was everything. She sacrificed everything for us. I know that she wanted to be part of the searching. Her instinct was to go. She elected to give Freddie and I the car so that we could go up and cover some ground because she knew that she wouldn't be able to. But she was panicked. You don't want to hear that your daughter's up in a remote area in New Hampshire by herself and is now missing. It was in a car I think the first night she was still in shock. It wasn't until later that you could really see the emotions and the dread set in, especially. There was a lot of news media attention. It was very difficult for her to face all of that. People don't realize how hard mom took the situation and how guilty she felt about not being able to search and be part of all of that. She had a picture of Mara above where she slept, and she used to stare at that nightly with tears in her eyes. She couldn't really do much other than be on the couch and be stationary because she was so sick.

That ate her alive because her kids were everything. That's why we are the way we are, because a lot of our family values came from her. To watch her be so sick and to have the added emotions and the guilt and the worry because all she wanted to do was be better or to feel better. It was very, very tough to watch. Just to see what it did to her, there was hard It was heartbreaking. It really was.

I think not being able to join the search effort affected her to where she blamed herself and never fully recovered. We all went through episodes of blaming ourselves for one reason or another. Mara's boyfriend, Bill, got advanced leave from his training base and flew up to join the search effort. While in line at the airport security, he missed a call to his cell phone. When he listens to the voicemail, he hears what he describes describes as Wimpering Sobbing Sounds. He's convinced it's Mara. But police say they trace the call back to a Red Cross calling card. We'll get into this later. Bill's parents, Bill Senior and Sharon, drove from Ohio to pick Bill up at the airport in Connecticut and headed north. They were joined the next weekend by Bill's West Point sponsor family, Rob and Christine McDonald, who had grown to love Mara while she was dating Bill. My older sister Kathleen and her fiancé Tim drove up along with my brothers Freddie Jr. And Curtis. I was slated to deploy to Iraq when I arrived at my unit at Fort Bragg. It was immense pressure to try to defer or get a replacement for my position.

Fort Bragg was a line unit in the thick of the deployment cycle. I didn't have the same flexibility as, say, a training unit, so it took me quite some time to find someone to take my place. Now, this was back when deployments were 15 months long, and no one wanted to leave their loved ones for 15 months. At this point in my young army career, I didn't want to show up to my unit and say, I can't go on this deployment. Someone go for me. But I had to be there for my family. So thankfully, I got someone to take my spot. I was sure that they would find Mara the next day, but the days kept ticking away, and we developed more questions than answers. It was torture. While my family pressed for answers that first week in New Hampshire, authorities were alerted of Mara's disappearance at UMass. It was then we began to learn a bit more about the events leading up to her appearance. I'll summarize those details here, but it won't do them justice. I'll dissect each detail in a future episode. But as an overview, Mara suffered an emotional breakdown the Thursday night before she disappeared.

While working at her security desk job checking IDs at the dorm, she became visibly upset and needed to end her shift early. She was escorted back to her dorm by her supervisor. The only explanation she could must her was repeated the words, My sister, my sister. Our other sister, Kathleen, spoke to Mara much earlier in the night talking about relapsing. See, Kathleen was struggling with addiction and went to a rehab clinic for help. When her fiancé, Tim, picked her up, he took her directly to a liquor store. Yeah, let that sink in for a minute. Mara also spoke to her boyfriend, Bill, that night. The nature of their conversation is still unclear. What we don't know is who else Mara spoke to that night. Did the call with Kathleen earlier caused her that much emotional distress? And what exactly did she mean by, My sister? What we do know about the mysterious call is UMass police Detective Brian Davies told the Caledonian record in an article printed on February 27, 2004, that his department was actually able to track the phone call, saying, We know the location. We have not been able to identify to whom she was speaking.

To me, that indicates the upsetting phone call was most likely from the dorm line. So who was it? On Saturday, my dad visited Mara at UMass to go car shopping because her car was down a cylinder. That night, Mara attended a dorm room party that is also shrouded in mystery. The host of the party claimed she was asleep the entire time and had not been forthcoming about what happened at the party, if anything. But what happened after the party is deeply disturbing. Instead of walking a short distance to her dorm room, Mara decides to drive my father's new car back to his motel. She crashes head-on into a guardrail, causing significant damage to my dad's new car. Police arrive and don't administer any field sobriety testing, nor do they cite her. The accident report simply indicates driver inattentiveness. Additionally, and this could be important, she wasn't given any medical treatment. The next day, my dad learns that his insurance would cover the damage and he gets a rental. He drives Mara back to the dorm, reassuring her that it would be okay. Insurance would cover it. But Mara was her own worst critic, visibly upset with herself, softly crying in the passenger seat.

He tells her to pick up accident forms the next day in a column to discuss. Mara walks away from my dad, head down, shoulders slumped, and makes her way into the dorm. This would be the last time my dad would ever see Maura again.

It's got to be frustrating that the same possibilities that you were dealing with the Wednesday afterwards are still all in play.

Exactly the same thing. 100% the same thing. There's no question about whether I'm going to look for her. This is my kid. My kid wants me to look for her. I'm going to look for my kid. I don't know what happened to her. I mean, I don't have Mara. I don't have a body. I have to think in these terms, but the case certainly isn't over.

The case certainly isn't over. It was just the beginning of the longest marathon of our lives, one we didn't sign up or train for. Mara disappeared the same week Facebook launched, and her case was deemed the first missing person case of the digital age. This was a blessing and a curse. With a click of a button, social media gave us the ability to reach a widespread audience to raise awareness and keep her case alive. But like all powerful tools, it has its downside. Online slews tore into the details of her case with a rabid obsession, undeterred by the residual harm caused by proliferating wild speculation and misinformation. Today, her case is shrouded in misinformation, but I'm here to change that. Over the next several episodes, I'll break down the details of the case in the efforts to find my sister. Join me next episode as I start from the beginning. If you have any information regarding the disappearance of my sister, Mara Murray, please contact the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit at 603 3223-3648, or visit maramurrymissing. Org. Special thanks to my friend Sarah Turney, whose trust and guidance made this project possible.

Media Pressure is a Voices for Justice Media Original, and is executive-produced by Sarah Turne. This series includes original music from my brother, Curtis Murray, as well as Blue Dot Sessions. I'm your host, Julie Murray. For more information about media pressure, visit mediapressure. Com. For more information about my sister, Mara's case, visit maramurrymissing. Org.

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