13 years later, a family’s heartbreaking search continues
LITTLETON, N.H. — There are a few fleeting minutes — just moments really — as Fred Murray rises in the early morning when the darkest of nightmares is banished to the corner of his consciousness.
“I wake up. It takes just a few seconds and then it crosses my mind,’’ he said. “I’m aware. It hits me. It’s a constant pall. To tell you the truth, it really isn’t any better than it ever was.’’
Thirteen winters ago, his youngest child, Maura Murray, crashed her clunker of a car, a 1996 Saturn, on a sharp turn on Wild Ammonoosuc Road in nearby Woodsville.
The 21-year-old Hanson native apparently lost control, slamming into a snowbank. When a passerby stopped and offered help, Murray, then a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, waved him off. She told him that AAA road service had been summoned. All set, she said. The man, who lived nearby, drove off and called police anyway.
Seven to 10 minutes later, when the cruiser arrived, Maura Murray — a straight-A nursing student, a standout athlete, a former West Point cadet — was gone. Like the central character in a bad made-for-TV movie, she’d vanished without a trace.
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