My hope was that these blogs and their comment sections could serve as an online Writers Room where people could openly discuss every aspect of these cold cases - clues, suspects, evidence. I thought that readers would be able to separate the blogs from traditional journalism. I thought they'd be able to read these thoughts and ideas and not prescribe guilt or innocence to specific people (the way reporters do in a traditional writers room). But as George Carlin once said, consider how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that. Real news sites sometimes took the names debated on these blogs and reported them as if they held as much meaning as an officially named suspect. Readers assumed that if a name was mentioned, they must be guilty.
This blog will cease to exist in May. I'm ending it now for a couple reasons. I feel I've taken my reporting on this case as far as it will go. I feel Kate Markopoulos and Bill Rausch know more than they've said. Their phone calls to each other in the days leading up to and following the disappearance speak volumes. I believe Fred Murray knows more than he's said and I will always suspect the $4,000 he took out from several ATMs the weekend before the disappearance does not pass the smell test. Neither does what I found at his house. But unless they share what they know, I don't believe we'll ever know what Maura was doing in New Hampshire that night or where she was going.
I believe the women who have come forward accusing Bill Rausch of sex assault and harassment. And I can say the police are aware of their stories, too. My hunch is that Maura was killed later in the week in New Hampshire, not near the site of the accident. But I really do hope she managed to get away.
Mostly, I don't have the stomach for this anymore. The meanness and lack of empathy in the comments section and in emails are unrelenting. People are mean when they can be anonymous. Mean to sources, mean to victims, mean to writers. Also, heartfelt conversations with other writers, most notably Jon Ronson and Kathryn Schulz, have caused me to reconsider the value - or lack thereof - of discussing these cases so publicly with an active audience/pitchfork brigade.
There are people who now define their lives by their obsession with Maura Murray. I don't intend to be like them. I have other stories I'd like to get to.
I still have some things to say regarding true crime and will do so in a new podcast soon - The Philosophy of Crime. I hope you tune in.
For those still interested in research, I will archive this blog and add it to my collection of material at the Special Collections Archive at the Kent State library, where anyone can read and review it in the future.
I hope this all meant something. We'll see.