I just don't know what to make of this. A little background - Erinn Larkin is a woman who went to UMass with Maura Murray. She worked the same security job as Maura Murray. And she ran track on the same team. Her "Big Sister" was Maura's best friend - Kate Markopoulos. After the publication of my book, Erinn inserted herself into the investigation. She ingratiated herself with the Murray family and the admin of the official site, giving her access to information that filters in.
After I reported that Bill Rausch was under investigation by a Grand Jury in DC, she took aim at me, claiming I was lying and that the women he attacked were exaggerating. She posted my unlisted home address online, with a map to my house. Eventually I took down my blog just to have some peace.
Her blog makes every effort to direct the narrative of the investigation, going so far as to defame a man - allowing a guest on her podcast to literally accuse an innocent man of murdering Maura and using his name.
I've been confused by her actions for months and have had this inkling that I was missing or forgetting an important piece of it. So I went back to our first email exchanges. I found this email from Erinn in which she says she was at Bretton Woods skiing with her family and returned on Monday evening and may have driven past Maura's accident.
I had completely forgotten this. Why? Because she never brought it up again. Now, as a memoirist and journalist, if I'm coincidentally at the same location at the same time as the case I'm writing about, that becomes a big part of the story. An easy way in. But she never mentions it again. But she does tell a different story to Tim & Lance just a couple months later. Listen for a minute here:
Quote:
Tim: "How do you recall the day so clearly?"
Erinn: "I had been skiing in Bretton Woods and Waterville Valley the weekend before with my family and they were still there. And I had decided to come back for practice and for classes and I drove back the opposite route she had taken on that Sunday night and the next morning was really the first official day of Spring track that Monday and it was a morning practice and it was absolutely freezing and really awful not very fun at all and I got injured and it was actually an injury I got the day before skiing but it got a lot worse that day and it ended up that I was done running competitively in college after that."
It is absolutely clear that Erinn Larkin got caught in a lie here. But what was that lie's purpose? To sound cool - having driven by the scene when Maura disappeared?
I would imagine she will try to explain this away as a faulty memory but she was VERY specific in both the email to me in which she says she was driving along Rt 112 at the time of Maura's accident, and the interview with Tim and Lance, in which she has changed it to Sunday - because she reminisces about the cold weather and the first day of practice. Each are stated as fact. One or both of these must be a deliberate lie.
Now, compare that to Chief Cecil Smith for a moment. Cecil Smith went on the Oxygen special to explain the timeline of Maura's accident. Erinn called him a liar, picked apart his every word, said it was impossible for him to simply have forgotten key details... when he was suffering from Alzheimers. And then Cecil killed himself. His son believes online harassment like hers may have been on his mind, may have made matters worse for him in those last days/weeks, may have contributed to his decision in some way. Even if it was a drop in the bucket, how very sad.
This isn't the first lie, but it's the most egregious. In closing, here are few posts in which she claims that the Grand Jury never existed with the same confidence.
