God forbid I should ever know what it's like to lose a loved one. Everyone grieves in their own way. But the Murrays have responded to the disappearance of their youngest daughter and sister in a very unusual way from the beginning and it is apparent to me that they simply do not want answers in this case any more.
I think of the parents and siblings of people like Holly Bobo and Amy Mihaljevic and Molly Bish, who have been relentless and involved with the search for their loved one. And then I consider the Murrays.
- Their is no organized online effort to find Maura. The "official" website is run by a woman who has no direct relation to the family (even though she calls herself an "aunt").
- Maura's mother was never involved with the searches in the weeks after her daughter disappeared.
- Some of Maura's siblings had very little to do with the searches.
- Fred's efforts to find his daughter were staged in the first year of the search. According to his former son-in-law and two volunteer searchers, Fred would sleep in, then go for a jog, then get breakfast, and then organize a short search for Maura, then return to the bar and hotel. When the cameras showed up, he acted manic, as if he needed to find her NOW. But when they left, he fiddled around. "If that were my daughter, I'd have been up at the crack of dawn," said his son-in-law.
- Most families of the missing release any and all information, in an effort to find their loved ones. The Murrays are very select about releasing clues, especially sightings. A cashier in Woodsville believes she saw Maura with two friends at the grocery store an hour before the accident. Fred knew about this credible sighting for 10 years. While they released other unlikely sightings, they never released this one.
- Maura's brother, Kurt, wrote a song in 2010, dedicated to Maura in which he says he believes she ran away to start a better life after something bad happened.
- Before I began this blog, Fred made it clear he did not want a book written about his daughter's case. He has asked several of Maura's friends to not talk to reporters.
- Instead of cooperating with police, Fred refused to speak to state detectives for two years and when he did, he brought two lawyers with him. He sued the state to get records in an effort to find out what they knew but refused to share info with them.
- Fred lied about the events of the weekend before Maura went missing. He lied to police and reporters, especially about how and when Maura arrived back at his motel and the sequence of events that occurred after she got there.
Fred's actions suggest his motivation to find his daughter was to find her before the police did.
This is not normal behavior.