today's episode of the casual christmas is brought to you by crossout more about them in a little bit hello everybody it's future simon here i just finished recording this script and it's a good one it's an absolute cracker but it was originally going to go on decoding the unknown so you'll hear me make references to decoding the unknown on it but basically by the time i finished i realized that while this was written for decoding the unknown it absolutely belongs on this channel the casual criminalist so that is where you are seeing it and now let me introduce you to simon from about an hour ago thanks thank you to kevin for putting this together it's the disappearance of maura mari if you're new here what happens is uh i'm going to read this script that kevin has prepared for me i've never read it before i have no idea who maura murray is and uh well we're gonna discover together unless you already know in that case you're going to see me discover or you're gonna listen to something else right now either way let's just get going shall we [Music] a lot of internet fats have come and gone over the years from cursed chain letters passed via email to planking to the ice bucket challenge there's no shortage of these internet phenomena to look back on i remember like when i was a kid you'd get emails and be like if you don't pass this email on to five people you could have bad luck forever and and and child simon brain was like oh my better pass that email on to five people i know otherwise well that's bad luck forever because children are dumb few of these have had a longer shelf life than pogs though one that just stood up to the test of time is rick rolling with rick astley's iconic never going to give you up now available on youtube and stunning 4k quality because everything is funnier in high definition just look at bill o'reilly's face yeah the story behind the never going to give you up in 4k they didn't film that on film or whatever so someone used like ai to upscale it and like so it was you know essentially csi's zoom and enhance but in real life and it looks amazing one other internet sensation that is going stronger than ever is that of the armchair detective amethyst sleuths trying to solve crimes of missing person cases from the comfort of their own keyboard to be fair they're not without the success stories and simon has already done a video over on top tens about crimes that were solved thanks to social media oh my god i have absolutely no memory of that whatsoever sometimes when i'm doing the teleprompter ones it's just like in the eyes out the mouth i'm like crimes were sold by social media i must have done that by fight like five years ago people like simon you did it last week and i like yeah i did didn't i i'm just so dumb perhaps there are many more successes than the cove the ones covered in their videos published three years ago and it's well documented that simon is far too creatively bankrupt to resist doing a sequel to a popular video whenever possible that is absolutely true the existence of detectives is also responsible for entertaining plot lines on police procedural shows such as the entire netflix documentary don't with cats i'm having i'd never heard of that documentary until about a week ago and i swear i've heard about it four times in separate things and i'm like what is going on and it's not like one of those things you'd easily forget it's called don't [ __ ] with cats as far as i could tell after watching the entire series the show was about two internet detectives who played a major role in helping to solve a murder case but who were unhappy with the lack of recognition they received and thus decided to contact netflix to get the attention they so desperately demanded we'll ignore the fact that the show did far more to increase the celebrity of the vile murderer than it did their own and how truly disgusting and selfish the entire series was since everything the murderer had done was for attention and notoriety which he was being handed in spade still at least we can take solace in the fact that but the murdering piece is in a maximum security prison yeah i mean okay so those guys made the documentary to get attention or whatever i've not seen i'm assuming this what happened um because they wanted to sell it to netflix which is also fine like i'm like yo a guy is in prison forever who's a murdering piece according to kevin i assume so uh he's in prison forever because of these guys and if they want to cash in on a bit of that netflix money more power them go for it not all crimes investigated by legions of online detectives have a happy ending though in fact some don't even have an ending at all such as the case for the disappearance of more amare often referred to as the first crime mystery of the social media age who is more amare [Music] it turns out that is a much more complicated question than it appears on the surface before i get into the details of her life i want to make it clear that nothing being stated here is an attempt to character assassination it's quite possible that maura is a victim and i don't want to distract from that still it's important to have a clear picture of her and her mental state leading up to the disappearance as possible sorry for getting all serious on you there i'll try and make my next decide more comical in nature like normal maura was born on may the 4th 1982. may the 4th be with her i don't even like star wars but i know that one you see in hanson massachusetts to parents fred and laurie she had an older brother fred jr two sisters kathleen and julie and a younger brother kurt in case that didn't make it clear she was from an irish catholic family it didn't but now i know are these like super catholic names or irish catholic names what's her name maura i don't know i'd get i don't know i don't know catholicism particularly well there's a pope dude right her parents divorced when she was six and maura lived primarily with her mother but her father wait irish catholic family got divorced they're going to hell is that what works catholics can't are not supposed to get divorced or something right isn't that how it works isn't that why there was the whole protestant thing oh my god my history knowledge is bad but her father was still a major part of her life including at times as her track coach she and her sister julie were great friends but they were also very competitive with each other when it came to athletics maura excelled at both academics and athletics and seemingly had a pick of colleges when she received her exception to the acceptance the united states military academy at west point new york it was an easy choice for her especially since julie was already attending her freshman year there i suspect simon may know some of this but for our international viewers west point is a pretty big deal yeah this is where all the military officers get trained right i'm not sure for which branch of the service maybe all of them maybe one of them i'm not sure but i know it's very competitive it's a competitive school accepting less than 10 percent of applicants and it offers a free top-tier education room board books medical and dental care as well as a monthly stipend for other expenses what hang on yeah yeah it does but all of this is like yo you're gonna have to serve in the military afterwards which is uh that's kind of a cost because you might die like i'm pretty sure i had this i can't remember how it is but you can i mean university in the uk is not free anymore it was very cheap when i went it was like a thousand pounds a year or something very cheap i mean like days that is very cheap for a full education like a thousand i always have to preface that because i'm like a thousand pounds is a lot of money but it's not a lot of money for a year's worth of education i think nowadays it's like nine grand or something which is a huge jump in ten years oh my god when did i go to did i go to university in 2005. oh my god i'm sorry that that now i'm like 10 years no no fact boy you were well out of university 10 years ago um and now it's like 9 grand but the year after i went it increased to 3 which was a major jump and a lot of people didn't take a gap year in my year normally people take a gap year in the uk or not normally but a lot of people do before going to university but i remember thinking like yo if i take a gap year university is going to be nine grand overall over three years rather than three which i mean that seems like a lot of money that's a lot of money to to save so i did it afterwards this why are we talking about this oh yeah west point it's free because you've got to serve in the military and i think like in the uk if you sign up to do so many years in the military after university they'll pay for your university and stuff like that something like that i don't know how can a school in the united states offer such an amazing deal you may be wondering easy because you're not a student you're a cadet you're not a member of the us army but still it's a really good school by all accounts maura was the perfect all-american girl she began a degree in chemical engineering at west point but withdrew after three semesters one day when the students were on a trip to fort knox borah was caught stealing makeup from the commissary this was if i went to fort knox that's not what i would be stealing this was they keep gold in fort knox do they still or is that just in movies this was described as being out of character for maura but it was the seventh time she was brought before the disciplinary committee in 2001. totally out of character except for the other six times this time there was enough evidence for maura to be brought before the cadet advisory board and in january of 2002 the decision would be announced that she would be forced to withdraw if expelling a student for shoplifting a few dollars worth of concealer seems a bit harsh remember these are us army cadets and are held to an extremely strict ethical code maura transferred to the university of massachusetts amherst to study to study nursing yeah of course i'll give you a shoplifting you're not going to get expelled from a university unless you're in the military then they'll be like yo we own you because like you are you're in the military it's like however long you signed up for you're ours and if you steal you're out which sounds like a good way to get out of the military but then you can get like dishonorably discharged and stuff which that looks really bad i didn't realize that that was like quite as bad as it as it is on a cv maura stayed busy in her first semester at umass aside from the requirements of the nursing program she took on two part-time jobs was able to quickly make friends and also had a long-distance relationship with a boy named billy another west point cadet who she had begun dating while she was attending the school moore and i are the same age oh there you go kevin now i know you're 30 this 30th oh god again i'm feeling so old kevin you're 40 this year happy birthday surprise and a lot of people i went to high school with attended umass amherst i was hoping to be able to provide more insight into who she was as a person than is generally available but unfortunately no one i reached out to had known her in school i have a friend i did have a friend who worked for campus security the same job maura had so while there is an extremely high likelihood he knew her he's also a compulsive liar so it wasn't worth trying to contact him over this sounds like a great friend also to be fair you know university what was let's say 20 years ago for kevin um i had university 15 years ago basically if someone asked me did you go to university with this person i met hundreds of people at university there were hundreds of people in my like halls of residence in my classes and people would be like you were in the same hall as them and you took the same class and i'd be like okay it doesn't mean i remember them does it it was a long time ago and they obviously didn't make an impression they probably don't remember me they could be watching this video right now and be like who's that i went to university with that guy i didn't even know once again maura appeared to be a dedicated hard-working student but it didn't take long for things to turn take a turn for the worst in november of 2003 one of the residents of mora's dorm noticed a number of unexplained charges on her credit card from local restaurants uh how long can you get away with that for like oh god it could be a while i don't i know i i know i should and uh i just don't know you know it's like check your bank statements and it's like i just don't do that i know i should i just don't and also i don't know mostly i just use this app like um for spending and every time i spend money it's like so if someone was spending money uh and i was getting notifications that oh someone bought something at a restaurant i'd be like that's not me is it but back in the day i definitely wouldn't know it would take a lot it would be like i'd go to the atm and i wouldn't have any money and i'd be like oh god i don't think that was all me or maybe it was she contacted the police who in turn contacted the restaurant the next time an order was placed to pinocchio's pizza using the credit card the police followed the delivery driver to maura's door really you're using a stolen credit card to get delivery food to your house i thought you got into west point are you dumb i'm sorry i disappointed you after she signed the report receipt the police came in to arrest her she eventually admitted during found the credit card number on her receipt in the bathroom and used it to buy food that sounds absolutely insane today but in 2003 this technology technically may have been possible federal legislation was passed in 2002 that limited the number of digits on a printed receipt to the last five of the credit card number but businesses had until january of 2004 to comply this was absolutely a thing in the uk but it was i worked in a supermarket every time you sold something you'd be printed two receipts one goes in the till and one goes to the customer the one that goes to the customer has the digits starred out except for the last four the one that goes in the till has all of their credit card information so if you just took out that whole thing of receipts you would have that many people's credit card information which seems insane today because boy is that insecure and just one dodgy employee who doesn't understand that they're going to get caught good just walked away with all of those credit card numbers and bought tons of [ __ ] i remember i only found out about this because um our camera what it was like for some reason we needed to someone bought something and then it didn't go through on the till they'd already paid and then they'd left and my boss was just like well just pull out the receipt and just punch in their credit card numbers again and charge them for it and i'm like wait saying that now that doesn't sound like it should be allowed let's just say allegedly that happens no one cares this was like 20 years ago the most striking thing about this arrest was maura's mugshot obviously no one looks good or happy in a mug shot but maura's picture was more than that every other picture i can find of her shows her happy and smiling and looking like an average cheerful person are average people cheerful i don't know just thinking about that myself if there wasn't proof that this mug shot was her i honestly would not have recognized it as the same person she looks like she's ready to choke a shorty [ __ ] kepster i don't just mean that she looks unhappy which is to be expected or someone who was just caught committing credit card fraud she looks straight up threatening i'm not implying the maura was actually dangerous in any way but this picture seems to suggest a darker side of her psyche of than what people normally saw i'm kind of disappointed there's no picture kevin sometimes includes pictures for me and then i could be looking at her scary ass face you may be thinking that credit card fraud and identity theft are serious crimes and you'll be right but there's one thing you're not taking to an account and that's the fact that the perpetrator was an attractive white girl also the total credit card charges were under 250 in december of 2003 maura was ordered to pay back the stolen money and issued a continuance i don't know what that is and she was told that the charges would be dropped if she stayed out of trouble for three months but would the girl who couldn't resist trying to shoplift from fort knox be able to deny her unsavory urges all the way until march i recently discovered in another video i made that a suspended prison sentence at least this was uk law means that if you commit a crime during the suspension of that sentence the suspense the sentence becomes active so you could be like on a suspended sentence for like assault so they're like you go to jail for one year suspended so you don't actually have to go to jail but if you like shoplift during that year then you have to go to jail to serve the one one-year sentence and i'm like oh boy is that uh like normally i'm pretty incentivized not to commit crimes because you know you get punished for crimes but if they were like yo you do one naughty thing and you go to prison for the previous crime that you basically got away with i'll be like i'm just gonna stay home just in case i don't in just in case i accidentally commit crimes i'm not gonna drive in case i speed i'm not gonna do anything i'm just gonna stay at home and sit on my hands her final weekend [Music] maura was scheduled for a late night shift to the security desk in one of her dorms on thursday the 4th of may 2004 into friday morning wait i know i know that she didn't get really punished for this crime of like stealing the credit card numbers but should she and she didn't she can't she shouldn't get expelled for it but should she really be keeping a security job that seems like a job she could have after being a criminal it was an uneventful night except for taking a few personal calls on her cell phone one from her older sister kathleen and one from her boyfriend billy at 12 40 a.m friday morning maura received a phone call that was traced back to a campus phone around 1 am or his co-workers saw her sobbing uncontrollably they called the supervisor and by the time maura stopped crying she was just staring blankly completely unresponsive when asked what was wrong all she could do was point at her phone and say my sister her supervisor offered to keep her company but maura said she would be fine and just wanted to be alone and that her roommate was home anyway she didn't have a roommate the contents of the phone call with kathleen were not known until october of 2017. so that's a long time 2004 to do that's at 456. that's 13 years okay did snowden leak this uh when she finally gave a public explanation kathleen had been in a rehab facility for alcohol and drug abuse and had been discharged that day her fiance uh kathleen's fiance the sister was a piece of allegedly in my opinion who was not supportive of her sobriety and stopped at a liquor store on the drive home from rehab holy sh yeah yes agreed that is a massive piece of move yo if your husband wife friend that you live with etc wants to give up drinking and is struggling with it to the extent that they need to get help in rehab um how about you don't have any booze in your house how about you don't drink around them and if you want to go drinking guard drinking with your mates that's fine not saying you don't have to drink anymore but how about you don't do it in front of the vulnerable person is that too much to ask have the difference between and then and then stopping at the liquor store on the way home from rehab and [ __ ] me that's insane casadina told maura that she relapsed on alcohol and pills billy never said what his phone call tomorrow was about but the call was only seven minutes long to this day nobody knows who made the phone call from the campus phone or what it was about but there's some truly dark speculation about that night that we'll get to later so it was someone telling her that her sister had died did she overdose on this did we say that she'd relapse no she'd just relapse we don't know if she died okay i don't know well i guess we'll find out or at least speculate into it there was a major snowstorm and classes were cancelled at umass on friday there's not really any information about what she did on friday but amherst is a college town in the middle of nowhere so if the snow was bad enough to cancel classes then she probably stayed home saturday morning maura's father fred picked her up to go car shopping maura's eight-year-old saturn was in rough shape and always breaking down and she needed to be able to drive to get to her clinical work for nursing school it wasn't unusual for her father to come spend at least one weekend a month visiting her at college i guess old habits die hard for divorced fathers maura hadn't mentioned that her father was coming or that she was going car shopping to anybody that's not unusual by itself because it may have been a surprise for her afterwards that would be an awesome surprise we're going to buy you a car bill holy [ __ ] really sweet afterwards they picked up maura's friend from the track team kate and went out to dinner neither of them mentioned anything about car shopping in front of her now that is unusual i can't imagine being a 21 year old with a beat up car that always breaks down being surprised with a trip to a dealership for a new car and not immediately telling my friends when i saw them yeah how long could you possibly be keep silence about that you'd be like it's a very exciting purchase especially as like a young person i mean even now i get excited about getting a new car and i'm like what features does it have if i was like 20 i'd be like oh my god let's go for a road trip immediately let's do something fun after dinner fred drove them to a liquor store to buy alcohol for a party maura's friend sarah was hosting fred sounds like a legend of a dad not only is he buying you a car then taking you and your friend out for dinner he's also like you guys want to have some booze for that party later you'll be like yes dad are you kidding like yes and he's like i'll buy that for you legend the strange thing about this is that he initially told the police that he waited in the car but he later changed the story saying he told them inside the store to hurry up it's confusing and seems like a stupid thing to possibly lie or him at details about but it was not fred's dumbest decision i don't know if i i guess these kids his daughter's like 20 right or something like that so she's in america so she can't buy booze until she's 21. so i'd be like no no i definitely didn't buy booze for my kids it seems like a reasonable reason to lie after although if my kid was missing or whatever i'd be like do what you want just here's all the information after they bought the alcohol he drove back to the motel where he was staying and let moore and kate borrow his brand new toyota corolla to drive to the party but he insisted she returned the car later that night a cat and if i'd do that i'd be like here's a bottle of booze and here's my brand new car drive safely bring it back once you're faced don't let don't be out all night with it don't get just drink drive at home okay go on from the party that they just went to stock up on booze for yes okay kevin exactly the same thing i think against kate's wishes an intoxicated moorer left the party at about 2 30 a.m to return the car to her father is promised but not before driving straight through a t intersection colliding head-on with a guard rail and causing almost ten thousand dollars worth of damage to the car totaling it the response the dad's like look we're not going to car shopping anymore i've changed my mind i i okay i take what i said back about fred like he's a legend he does these nice things but it's like yo yo yo fred how about being a little bit more responsible i know it's cool i know he's probably he's divorced he's trying to be the cool parents but uh we took things too far fredo didn't we the responding police officer filled out an accident report but there is no documentation of any field sobriety test being conducted it's unclear whether the officer was extremely busy extremely lazy extremely incompetent or if borah was able to somehow persuade him oh my she got back into her father's motel and stayed in his room the rest of the morning calling her boyfriend from fred's cell phone at 4 49 a.m billy said that she'd called about wrecking her father's car and that he told her to calm down and get some rest as for the party itself the details are a bit hard to pin down initially both kate and sarah said that they did not remember who was at the party what happened who maura talked to or if she left with anyone it was as if they had completely blacked out oh my god okay yeah i mean i've been fairly drunk in my time and it's been departing like oh were you at that party yes you were at the bar yeah i think so but then i didn't get in my car and drive anywhere good lord over the years more has come out about the party but a lot of people involved have lied to journalists and so it's muddied the waters the main takeaways from the party seemed to be that maura took one of the guys at the party back to her room and that the police have already ruled out that that person and that the police already ruled that person out as a suspect people love to obsess about the party especially because it was shrouded in so much mystery for years but seeing as it's not really our business who maura chose to sleep with we could probably let it go there's a perfectly understandable reason why our friends may have been so cagey about revealing details of the party that doesn't implicate them in anything nefarious but we'll get to that later i'd also be being interrogated about this party it'd be like okay we need to know who's at the party i don't know we're not asking tell us who was at the party be like i just don't remember how do you know i was just i was really drunk officer i'm sorry i just don't remember i don't remember it at all late sunday morning fred finally learned about the damage to his car his brand new car turns out he was pretty chill about it remember car buyers gap insurance is your friend might want gap insurance he rented a car so he could drive back to connecticut for work the following day oh my god fred you know what you're too nice i mean i get you you want to be the cool parents but holy sh i want to be a cool parent but if my kids wrecked my car i'd be you're not having a car for at least a year and uh you need to not drink and drive i don't know what i would do i'm just thinking this through for the first time now but there would be consequences at 11 30 that night he called maura to remind her to obtain accident forms from the rmv it's like the dmv but we have a different name because we're massachusetts oh okay department of motor vehicles i know that one what do we call in the uk oh my god i don't know what it's called here in czech i don't know what it's called in the uk dvla department of vehicle something agency i don't know and they agreed to fill out the forms together the next night over the phone it's like does insurance cover the car if you're [ __ ] up like if i drive my car and crash it i don't i feel like and i fail a sobriety test i feel like the insurance company are gonna be like mate [ __ ] you we're not paying for that you got drunk and drove your car i don't think insurance would pay for that would it although this is america people drink drive all the time which blows my mind now just before we get into the rest of today's video let me tell you about today's fantastic sponsor crossout crossout is a free-to-play vehicle shooter game where players build their own vehicle and pit themselves against other players creations now crossout is one of those supposedly customizable games where it's like yeah yeah you could definitely customize it and in reality that means you get to choose the type of ammunition in one of the guns no no no i played crossout i played crossout a bunch and uh basically you get like a frame which is literally a frame it looks like some girders that have been stuck together and then you build your craft on top of that you put the wheels on you put the body on you put the turrets on you put the engine on everything you can make it crazy you battle other people who also have these crazy 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the link xo dot link forward slash exo casual criminalist well that's a hell of a link guys which i will also include below for your convenience and by doing that you get a free bonus starter set with three extra weapons or a powerful vehicle cabin and now back to today's video the disappearance [Music] maura's actions on monday february 9 2004 were peculiar to say the least shortly after midnight roughly an hour after speaking to her father maura searched mapquest oh my god this is 2004. for directions the berkshires and to burlington vermont her search history showed a number of pregnancy-related search queries including duramorph morphine epidural anesthesia fenergren and braxton hicks what is going on a professor later claimed years later that this had been an assignment in one of her nursing classes to look up pregnancy-related terms and then email them to their classmates okay it would be convenient and make sense but there's no evidence on a computer of these emails that we know of and there were two other specific items in the list that make me question this the first was brca1 gene short for breast cancer gene 1. maura's mother died of cancer in 2009 so it's possible that she had already been diagnosed at this point and maura was worried about about the hereditary implications the other old search item was nubian if she ditches what's nubian if she did suspect she was pregnant i'm guessing she also suspected who the father was and it was not the white as snow billy i don't know nubian should i know what that means this the state police also said that maura had done a number of searches regarding the effects of excess drinking on unborn fetuses okay look she thinks she's pregnant this isn't some nursing class thing anymore this got way too specific although i wonder like whenever i look through my search history for whatever reason i'm always surprised i'm like when the f did i search that whether she suspected she was pregnant or not it is important to note that she was taking birth control pills and there is no other evidence that she was pregnant the first reported contact maura had with anyone on the 9th was at 1 pm which isn't that surprising since we know that she was up past 4 am on her computer and classes had once again been cancelled because of snow billy had been calling her all day but she didn't answer she sent him an email at 1pm saying i love you more stud i got your messages but honestly i didn't feel like talking much of anyone i promised to call today though love you mora [ __ ] to beers when you really need them to know you care tell them with an email she made de beers make diamonds although i don't know like diamonds are just i don't know diamonds are such a con um but email's like it's more sentimental it's more touching write a letter that's nice she then made a phone call to inquire about renting a condo in bartlett new hampshire a family had vacationed there and rented from this condo association in the past but nothing was booked during the school she then emailed her work and teacher to let them know that she would be out of town for a week because of a death in the family and that she would let them know when she returned of course there had been no death at 205 she called a phone number about booking hotels in stowe vermont it was pre-recorded it was pre-recorded information so there was no person on the other end of the line she then called billy and left him a voicemail promising that they would talk later what is going on with you why are you suddenly going off on some crazy like i might be pregnant now i'm gonna go stay summer adventure at some point either during all of this or directly after maura packed up her entire room including the artwork on the walls and everything was placed neatly into boxes on her bed it was reported that there was an email between maura and billy that was printed out and placed on top of the boxes regarding billy having cheated on him months before but there is some dispute as to whether or not this is accurate the main point of contention seems to be that the original forensic examination of maura's room and laptop were done by the umass police who were deemed unqualified to make the sorts of judgments that they did i disagree with this because the umass police are police police know how to do this sort of stuff it's fairly basic this isn't like campus security that's all or mostly students the campus police are sworn police officers with jurisdiction on the school campus and some surrounding areas they may have been too quick and asserting that maura was pregnant especially given that she was a nursing student but i think they're more than qualified to tell me what a piece of paper says yeah they're logged into evidence there'd be a paper trail of this we can't question it reasonably at approximately 3 30 maura drove off campus in her saturn with toiletries textbooks and clothes and her birth control pills she's probably like oh man i could be driving a new car right now if i hadn't got totally faced and crashed my dad's car disappointed at 3 40 she withdrew 280 from an atm and the camera from the atm showed she was alone and does not appear to be panicked or stressed oh my god that's a lot of money i can't def as a student i'm like that would be i don't know not most the money i have in my bank account but a large chunk of it she went to a nearby liquor store and spent about 40 dollars on irish cream kalua vodka and boxed wine it's uncertain where she was running to or where she what she was running from but one thing was for damn certain she intended to be wasted for as much as possible sounds like she's having a party of some kind but she hasn't invited anybody at some point she picked up the accident report forms from the rmv that she promised to do on the phone that night with her father somewhere between 4 p.m and 5 p.m she started her drive north her final intended destination if she had settled on one remains a mystery at 4 37 she checked her voicemail and that was the last recorded use of her cell phone in woodsville new hampshire a bit after 7pm resident heard a loud thump outside she looked out the window and saw a car up against a snowbank along route 112. the car was facing backwards if you had another car accident in like three days come on what is wrong with you at 7 27 pm she called the sheriff's department to report the accident the roads were still really bad from the recent snowstorms and the road that she'd been driving on was particularly treacherous with numerous sharp turns at some point she seemed to have lost control of the car slid off the road and collided with a tree never gonna drive again i've never had a major car accident touchwood and i thought that was all superstition i'm not superstitious i don't know why i do that if i'm gonna have a car is i'm gonna have it i've had a few bumps and scrapes but nothing major if i had one in like two just one accident two accidents in like three days or two days i'd be like let's not drive for a little while and let's maybe take some extra lessons when the car finally stopped moving it was facing the wrong direction on the road the windshield was cracked and both airbags were deployed but overall the impact doesn't seem like it was that bad as someone who spun out on black ice and sat there helplessly while my car did a complete 360 before colliding headfirst into a tree i can say that the damage to my much larger car was far worse than the damage to a sedan and i was only going 30 miles per hour when i spun out yeah i hate driving on ice it's so scary and you're always like slip in and you feel the car being like and it does look like that weird breaking [ __ ] and you're like uh uh i don't like it also i grew up in the uk learned to drive in the uk where it's like it's like it doesn't really ever get that cold an hour i live in czech republic it's like you'll be driving down those back roads to be like -10 and everyone's just driving along like super competent driving in the ice and i'm like i'm gonna die another local resident butch atwood was driving a school bus home when he came upon the accident at about 7 30 he asked maura if she wanted him to phone for help but she asked him not to and said that she had already called aaa one police report also used the term pleaded rather than asked in regards to butch's account he knew that she was lying because this was a remote mountainous area in early 2004 so of course there was no cell phone reception indeed aaa had no record of any such a call he called the sheriff's department when he got home at 7 43 to record the accident though he could no longer see maura or the car from his house butch later expressed a lack of surprise that she didn't accept his help because he was an unshaven six foot tall 300-pound stranger rolling up on this girl in a school bus yes i wouldn't have taken your help either yeah to be alone out there it's gotta be scary right i mean i'd be scared and i'm a dude at 7 46 p.m a haverhill police officer arrived at the scene but maura was nowhere to be seen inside the car was a aaa cart the blank accident report report forms gloves cds makeup diamond jewelry driving directions to burlington vermont her favorite stuffed animal a book about climbing the white mountains called not without peril and the damaged box of red wine there were stains there were red stains outside of the car including on the ceiling which were believed to be the wine uh oh have you been drinking that box wine while you're driving along a day after having a ten thousand dollar accident in your dad's car because you were wasted um at that point that's not like i need to practice my driving that's like wasn't her sister in rehab so probably genetically in the family you need to uh get some help there if you're if you if you're drinking and driving i feel like you need help if you're drinking and driving and crashing car twice in two days you need like it's unquestionable if you crash your car because you're drunk you need help the box of wine appeared to have been opened before the crash and there was an empty beer bottle in the car and butchered reported that she seemed intoxicated and mumbling missing from the car was more as debiting credit cards cell phone and bottles of liquor that she had purchased none were located or ever or used ever again none of the traceable stuff anyway i'm sure that the vodka was put to good use the police office and butch dro the police officer and butch drove around looking for maura but they didn't find anything there was an alleged sighting of someone matching more's description description traveling on foot down 112 about four to five miles east of where the accident occurred unfortunately the report didn't come until three months later when the contractor that allegedly saw her was renewing his records and realized that the night he saw the young person on the road was the night of maura's disappearance that night the police did not issue any sort of missing person's report they were operating on the assumption that it was a drunk driver who fled the scene of the crime and that she would return once sobered up this is a surprisingly common occurrence in drunk driving cases because driving under the influence is a much more serious crime than fleeing the scene of an accident oh it's hard to fault the police on this decision they saw a crashed car with spilled and empty liquid containers valuables left inside the car and a witness who says the driver seemed intoxicated and they as they say in medicine when you hear hoof beats think horses not zebras they say that in medicine i'd say they say that in like i don't know day to day it's trying to gain for clever example that's all i got because i'm not that clever um yeah this i can't hold the police at all it's like yeah of course if i saw a crash car with bows spilled around the inside and no one there and i knew that this often happened because the driving thing is less uh the running away is less serious i'd be like yeah okay we know what happened let's just wait until the person comes back the problem is that i definitely if that was me but it wouldn't because i'm not this kind of idiot um i'm my own kind of idiot i'd be like okay let's go away hide from hide in the forest for a few hours sober up and then go back to the car and be like no no i don't know what happened officer i got a banging headache though around 12 30 the next afternoon the police issued a bolo for maura murray she was reported wearing a dark coat jeans and a black backpack this was a little late for my liking but i understand they wanted her to have a chance to sleep it off in case she had been trying to avoid a dui big brain at 3 20 pm the police called fred murray to tell him that his car had been abandoned i've seen some wild conspiracy theories about the police being involved in maura's disappearance based on the fact that they put out a bolo for her despite the fact that they never saw her car her and the car was registered in fred's name and i'd like to dispel those right now butch saw the driver was a female there was makeup and jewelry in the car and there was a aaa card with her name on it to anyone who proposed that theory i suggest you give up your career as an armchair detective and perhaps try your hand as an armchair quarterback instead anyway fred was out on state business and he didn't get the call so at around 5 pm one of his other daughters contacted him to let him know of the situation he immediately contacted the haverhill police department and was informed that if she would not was not reported safe by morning the new hampshire fish and game department would start the search good on you for delegating me yes fish and game departments it's amazing i guess they they're responsible for searching for like um uh missing people it's like what's that other famous one the secret service is also responsible for like counterfeit money and [ __ ] is that right or they were originally responsible for counterfeit money and now the president's bodyguard suspens essentially that's a weird one isn't it why don't we just give them proper names like anti-counterfeiting department and then bodyguards secret service is a kick-ass name for bodyguard so we can stick with that but for the counterfeiting money why don't they have a different team a different gang at 5 17 p.m on tuesday the 10th of february almost 24 hours after a crash hebrew police officers referred to maura as missing for the first time fred murray arrived in haverhill before dawn the next morning at 8am the murrays new hampshire fishing game and others began the search a police dog tracked the scent from maura's glove approximately a hundred yards from the car and then lost the scent the police think that this meant she got into another vehicle they believed she had come to the area to run away or commit suicide and hitching a ride would help her reach her destination at 5 pm that night billion it does seem reasonable that she's running away like i would say that's a distinct possibility i don't maybe suicide but i'd say that's a bit of a stretch it more just seems like she wants to escape her life i'm not sure what gives me that vibe that's the vibe i'm getting at 5pm the night billy and his parents arrived in haverhill and billy turned off his cell phone during the flight because that's what we did before airplane mode existed and during this time he received a voicemail yes there's another thing people i really still use voicemail like i was like i just realized i don't even have voicemail set up on my phone if someone calls me they don't get a voicemail they just get a boop boop when you know it times out and they either have to call me back or send me a text message and i prefer it that way voicemails when you listen to the voicemail he heard soft breathing crying a whimper and sniffling he called the number back and found it was from a prepaid calling card he was sure this call was from maura as she had used those cards frequently in the past for various reasons yes and also who else is going to be calling him and having a bit of a cry on the phone silently other than his missing kid that seems a bit like of course that's exactly what you would assume there were several how how many other calls do you get for people just phoning up and having to cry there were several more searches but very little ever came of it this case captivated people both because it was the first major crime of its type in the social media age maura's disappearance happening just five days after facebook launched and because there are so many believable possibilities for what happened fred became critical of the police and what he saw as their failings and while he continued to search every weekend for signs of maura he made numerous statements claiming that he believed she was abducted by some local dirtbag the youtube videos [Music] oh here we go i know something about this oh my god youtube's old right when is this was youtube round in 2003 when was this facebook was like 2004 2005. i don't remember i don't remember it doesn't matter let's move on youtube's old though it's kind of amazing when you're on there and you're like when was this video 15 years ago what before i get to the myriad of theories about what happened to maura there's one more thing i wanted to touch on first on february the 7th 2012 a user by the name of mr 112 dirtbag uploaded a video titled maura murray youtube.com the username is of course a reference to route 112 where maura crashed her car into fred calling her presumed abductor a dirtbag this video is 15 seconds long and it shows a ski pass purchased at bretton woods mountain resort located 40 miles from where maura disappeared two days later on february the 9th the 8th anniversary of her disappearance 112 dirtbag uploaded a video a second video titled happy anniversary the video shows a close-up of an old bald man with glasses laughing to the camera as the video progresses he laughs harder and harder with a maniacal tone after 52 seconds of this he abruptly stops laughing winks at the camera and then smiles as the video fades out and is replaced with the words happy anniversary on screen i don't think this is actually anyone who perpetrated any sort of crime the only crime is then being a [ __ ] weirdo the third of these videos was titled no hope for mental wannabe and is pretty much just four minutes of the guy who owned the channel playing synthesizer in the last few seconds of the video this image appears ooh i do have an image it's this um i will explain audio listeners it's a weirdly drawn creepy ass face um seems to be drawn in microsoft paint and then on the left there's a weird kind of z-shaped polygon like a shape with sharp edges with numbers 1 5 27 and 8 around it it looks weird the right eye momentarily winks and then the video ends the image is intended to correspond with the map with this map of the breton woods resort and then below that we have the map that looks like one of those uh skiing maps you get you know where they have the different routes on the ski mountains if you rotate the red polygon slightly the numbers line up with the numbers on the result map sort of anyway it's a pretty terrible drawing yes it's super creepy the face is believed to represent the golf course on the right number 11 on the map it takes a bit of squinting but if you take the river to be the lips you can okay that that i mean humans are good at seeing faces in everything and patterns and everything that doesn't look like the face that face is creepy though that face is creepy the first and third videos were each taken down by one one two dirtbag after a day and his entire channel is now deleted speculation immediately rampant people believed that this was the killer giving away the location of the body please police don't waste time pursuing this cause the problem is even if this is real even if this person actually did put the body out there and you go out there and you i guess spend a lot of money and don't find it or even if you do find it you're gonna get a lot of people who copy this behavior who don't know anything about crimes and then it's gonna waste a whole ton of money as police pursue all these crazy leads you gotta have something more to go on the police have something more to go on if they before they investigate this right this is of course not the case the police identified the man in the videos and have ruled him out as a suspect holy sh okay like so many other people in this video he was just a piece of [ __ ] in this video the video we're making which is full of pieces of [ __ ] i'm not even going to write down his name because he's either some sick bastard looking for attention or some absolute lunatic looking for attention based on his other online activity it definitely seems like the latter this was all just a hoax meant to taunt the family and give himself attention because well reasons it did create a spike in attention of maura's case which is potentially a good thing as it's still in an opening still an open investigation so it's good to keep the public's mark keep in the public's mind in case anyone somehow sees or finds anything that's just not the way to do it still given the impact it had at the time i thought it was worth mentioning plus it's a pretty creepy video the longer mysteries go unsolved the more false leads and hoaxes are bound to turn up i wonder how the police found who the uploader of the video was oh because he showed his face laughing at the camera maniacally so they managed to trace him somehow i hope he got some sort of punishment though this seems like you could be potentially wasting police time money the crimes of being a massive bell end the longer mysteries go unsolved the more false leads and hoaxes are bound to turn up and when something gets the attention that dirtbag did there will be copycats as well the most notable of these was another youtube channel created in october 2017 called moro murray loves me the first video posted to the channel was where i put maura it featured a video of a man walking around inside a barn the video is made using an app to make it look like it was filmed on an old vhs camcorder but it's clearly not these people need to get a life the second video was titled the end the video opens up with the words you were too slow then shows a map drawn by a blind three-year-old using ms paint to show you where the body allegedly was sounds like this whole thing was put together by a three-year-old the map is clear enough to be understood but vague enough to be useless it was the equivalent of sticking a thumb dag into the globe and saying this is where i buried the body these videos are largely considered to be disgusting hoaxes but unlike the 112 dirtbag videos the creator has not been identified and investigated so it is technically evidence but it's unlikely yeah it's super ridiculous and unlikely don't spend any money on it don't spend any thoughts on it this is not the answer i mean not you spending money on the police unless it'd be why would you be spy would you bring that up simon why would people listen and be spending money on this what are you talking about the theories [Music] so so so many theories there are so many details known about maura leading up to a disappearance but so little known after that seemingly every theory can be made to feel like it has some sort of validity this is the biggest problem as with no real evidence following her disappearance it's hard to disprove most of these theories you don't have to disprove them you just it's odd there is the responsibility of the people with the theories to prove them right i mean you can't disprove a ton of stuff most of the theories i'm going to present have a large number of variations to them but we aren't going to go into detail on every iteration that has been put forth over the past 18 years number one starting a new life the first theory is that maura was running away to start a new life some people propose the alleged pregnancy angle is a participate a precipitating factor but there's nothing substantive to lead to the belief that she was or even thought that she was pregnant considering she bought her brought her birth control pills with her for the trip it seems highly unlikely still she may have just been trying to start over as we discussed maura had been engaging in increasingly risky and impulsive behavior in addition to her shoplifting and identity theft she was also now potentially on the hook for dui a charge that would prevent her previous case from being dismissed either by luck or through desperation she managed to avoid a field sobriety test but she was not necessarily in the clear it's pretty crazy how by avoiding a field sobriety test you get less you're less likely to be charged with a crime it's literally sending the message if you have an accident run away boom go go go i'm super drunk there was also other impulsive behavior she had reportedly been involved in a relationship with the assistant coach of the track team and was rumored to have slept with several other members of the track team as well as potentially others like the guy at the party the friday before she disappeared as i said back then who she sleeps with is really none of our concern except that it was believed to be out of character for her this led to many this led many to believe that she might have been experiencing early symptoms of developing bipolar disorder and that manic episodes were causing her risky behaviors if true was never diagnosed but she was at the right age for onset to occur people in extended manic episodes have reported the desire to just give up and walk away from everything as well while there is definitely evidence to support the theory she was suffering from mental illness we are not licensed professionals who are qualified to make that determination and if we were we would understand that it is unethical for us to diagnose without the inability to talk to her she may have showed symptoms of a burgeoning bipolar disorder but that's about as much as we can say yeah i mean course we can't make a diagnosis but it does seem if that was something that's i worry there's always that is it out of character according to her family or is it out of character according to her friend group because i don't know there are certain things you don't tell your family you know like uh sex sex sex and violence sex sex sex uh yeah and so maybe it was more in character than they thought i don't know but also the the bipolar disorder does sound entirely reasonable there's also the matter of billy while it's out of our business who maura chooses to sleep with as a boyfriend billy would absolutely think it was his business fair enough i hate to keep going back to this well but it turns out billy is also also a giant piece of allegedly he was reportedly very controlling and would call maura constantly to check up on her i mean uh if he's a boyfriend is it controlling to be like uh i'd rather you didn't sleep with other dudes um and it sounds like he actually had a reason to be concerned because she was is that i don't know if she didn't answer her phone he would call whatever friends she had said she was going with to make sure she wasn't lying okay that's already not cool my dude that's not cool already he's not a cool guy kevin and i say page but things have only gotten worse here are some of the alleged highlights about billy a few months after maura's disappearance billy was heading to a hotel with a girl he picked up at a party at a red light he allegedly reached over grabbed by the neck and said i'm going to kill you like i killed maura holy sh dude what are you up to in 2011 billy was fired from his job for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman in the office on st patrick's day in valen on valentine's day of 2018 billy had to call 9-1-1 because his mistress received a contusion to her head billy killed her right now i'm like oh my god billy killed her he said he killed her he has a history of violence i'd make a joke about spending valentine's day with his mistress but i'm guessing his wife was happy not to spend it with him in 2019 billy's mistress won a civil protection order after he began stalking her in which she was ordered to pay for her security system and attend 22 domestic violence classes the felony sexual assault case from 2011 is finally to begin proceedings well by the time this episode drops they will have probably begun all of these things are so far allegations only the one civil suit has gone to trial other women have come forward about billy as well though i believe all will pass the statute of limitations okay there we go the common themes in these reports however is that he liked to have his victims pretend to be mora and whether they played along or not he enjoyed choking them calling them mora and calling them names like and always ending the encounters with the sentence this never happened billy psycho i would like to reiterate these are allegations and he has not yet been convicted as a sexual criminal not yet and he might not be uh because my editorial opinion is not meant to be taken as assertion in fact i would also like to reiterate that billy is indeed a giant piece of in kevin's opinion and look let me chime in in this in my opinion does rather seem to be doesn't he in my opinion as an individual this is nothing based on fact i don't know him but he does seem like a bell doesn't he even if i was stating that as fact and not as an opinion in order to prove defamation someone would have to prove that my statement was false and good luck with that one given all these alleged allegations and one writer's personal opinion it would not be a surprise if maura wanted to escape the track coach with whom she had been having a relationship also claims she confided in him that she wanted to run away and start a new life and the billy's controlling nature was one of those reasons all of this seems to add up fully like even the excessive drinking because of stress and pressure and wanted to go and start a new life unlike this seems to be what happened and then obviously at some point something goes terribly wrong that all speaks to her motivation but the theory is that she succeeded some versions of oh yeah of course it could go totally right but i don't think she's competent enough for it to go totally right and for her to never be discovered because disappearing has got to be really hard like i've seen breaking bad it costs loads of although he was really wanted by the police not for like a dui but for being a massive criminal um but i still think it's really hard to disappear isn't it especially in today's world you need like id and some versions of this theory state that she did it alone and others claimed that she claimed that she was aided by her father this was helped early on by a number of reported sightings of maura in vermont and canada though i believe most if not all of these sightings have been discredited suggestions as to how she escaped especially how she managed to disappear completely in such a short window of time before the cops arrived and despite two neighbors looking out at their windows very wildly which brings us to the next theory the tandem driver this theory purports that there was someone driving with her to her destination in a separate vehicle either they were lagging behind and drove up on the accident or they were in the lead and doubled back after seeing that she was no longer behind them this theory has several variations as well it was a friend helping her escape to a new life it was someone she was going on a romantic getaway with or it was multiple other people and they were all going to get drunk and party for a few days no matter what the variation they all had one thing in common there's not really any evidence to suggest this aside from the awkward situation of taking two cars for some reason it isn't great at explaining how she disappeared slight unseen i don't know taking two cars kind of makes sense though like every every time i went to like go or go to like a party or go to a place like i mean not now i'm a family man and stuff it's like obviously just go with my family but like back in the day if i was going to a party or something i was like no i want to drive because i want to be able to leave when i want i don't want to have to rely on a friend for a lyft home who's like still drunk the next day and it's like i don't i can't drive just yet i can't drive i don't feel good i'm drunk and then it's like you don't end up leaving like this was such a bane it's such a pain in the ass it's like four o'clock in the afternoon on a sunday and you're like yo can we go home now where whereas i'd always be like no i got my own car i'm not gonna get super faced and i'm gonna drive home nice and early so i can enjoy my sunday that's why people take two cars that's why i would take my own car whoever was driving with her had to have been far enough away that they did not arrive at the crash for several minutes after the bus driver had already rolled up on maura and left but was not so far away that the cops got there first considering maura had printed out two different sets of map quest again this was 2004 directions indicating that at least she did not know how to get where she was going it would stand to reason that she would either follow the other car or the other car would follow her and her directions oh my god i just realized i remember printing out i don't think it was mapquest but google early google maps and you'd print out directions and they'd have like the different steps and i'd remember having these on my passenger seat to be like okay go here go here i mean i get that people used to read maps in the past but that was i never had map reading and then tom tom came along i don't know if you had tomtoms in america they were like these devices that you stick on your windshield like before we all did like on our phone or like garmin garmin's another one i feel like that's maybe more american i never heard tom tom mentioned in movies but garmin and then they came along and they were like a hundred pounds or something i was like i'm not buying that but i'd borrow my parents at every opportunity in either situation it seems unlikely that they would have wound up separated by long enough of a distance for the crash and the encounter with butch to take place plus if maura were driving with another car on such a long journey it's hard to believe there would have been no phone calls between the two the crash happened at roughly three hours into the drive if it were me there's no way i would have made it that long without calling the other car to figure out where to stop and take a piss or grab some food this theory really only explains how she vanished from the scene of the accident and it doesn't even explain that very well yeah when the dog lost the trail early on she could have just got a lift with someone else like she could have hitchhiked or whatever this that seems like a more likely explanation than like yeah they were all going together it's like but there's no evidence of that it just seems like you made up a crazy theory not a crazy theory a reasonable theory but there's just no evidence to support it and it just doesn't seem that likely butch did it gonna claw away i've forgotten who butch is gonna cross over this one quickly and with good cause there are some out there that think butch the bus driver who showed up to the accident did it oh yeah okay uh he abducted more in his school bus drove to his home where his wife was and then called the police and spent the night searching for her while with them either dead or tied up on the school bus in his driveway a hundred yards from the scene of the crime with his wife still home that's a bold strategy carton let's see if it pays off for him that didn't happen you'd have to be a massive idiot maybe he's a massive idiot but i don't think so and again there's no evidence for this poor butch he was the good guy number four abducted by a stranger another possibility is that after butch drove off maura was abducted by a stranger driving by there are a couple of ways that this could have gone down schumer started taken off on foot when police dogs were brought in and given the scent from her gloves they followed it a hundred yards from the car before losing the trail a hundred yards in the opposite direction of butch's house there we go it wasn't butch was it someone or someone's in a passing car could have pulled up and abducted her or she could have gotten into the car willingly yes there was only a seven minute window and this would have either uh have to have been someone extremely optimistic or someone who had been following her possibly after she stopped somewhere nearby for a bathroom break butcher noted that he could no longer see the crash from his house when he called the police but that several cars drove down the road something that makes this slightly more credible is the possibility that after declining help from butch mora realized that the police would be there soon either because she suspected he was going to ignore her request not to call the cops and do it anyway or because she realized one of the other residents of the area may have already done it she may have also wanted to ride all along to escape a perpetual potential dui and just wanted to get in a vehicle that wasn't a school bus being driven by a 300 pound man this one is sounding super reasonable this one seems like the most likely i mean she has to have gotten away from somewhere assuming that the police dog was you know competent smelling [ __ ] which i assume it is um this one seems super credible so far one of the main arguments used to refute this theory is the tight window and how extremely coincidental it would have been for a killer to happen to drive by get in her car and disappear especially if she was taken by force yeah i feel that's yeah like obviously this is a thing that serial killers do or killers do they abduct people like this but also for all of the mysterious stuff that was happening before and all the weird stuff to just combine with this rather than it being a completely normal situation just seems super unlikely i think she got in the car willingly i don't think she was murdered in the car but obviously she disappears at some point right so what happened oh i kind of disappointed that well i mean i know it's not solved but i want to know what happens stupid this ignores the fact that such an act may have been completely premeditated uh i'm not contending that someone had conspired to abduct mora specifically just that they planned to abduct someone the road was notoriously dangerous and there had just been a major storm making it even more treacherous all the killer would have to do is hide somewhere nearby and wait if this happened the abduction was clean like that of an experienced serial killer to that end five weeks later in montgomery vermont less than 90 miles away 17-year-old brianna maitland disappeared in almost identical circumstances a car was found crashed on the side of the road and no trace of briana was ever found the police immediately dismissed the idea of a serial killer and deemed the incidents unrelated uh i wouldn't be doing that that seems like exactly the same circumstances why would you do that while there is no firm evidence of a serial killer even if maura is dead or just made herself disappear in january 2022 she was added to the fbi violent criminal apprehension profile the vicap registry is a database of victims of serial killers and local law enforcement agencies can request the missing persons and other potential victims be added to that database as well actually the abduction thing i mean was that serial killer thing going on nearby i'm like well that doesn't sound that unlikely doesn't it that seems entirely plausible i mean it's a lot more plausible than some of the other stuff suicide [Music] it's unclear exactly what maura's plan was upon leaving umass or how concrete a plan she even had there are several signs to point to the fact that she may have planned to commit suicide she had tidied up her room packing everything into boxes she had made sure to return a borrowed lab coat to a fellow student even though they had insisted she didn't need to yet but tidying up of personal affairs like this is consistent with people who intend to commit suicide her potential destinations were places of comfort for her like the condos where her family vacationed or the white mountains where she and her father had hiked these oh no this is gonna be the most likely option isn't it that's sad these are the sorts of destination and also with the mentals the mental stuff the mental difficulties oh man this is probably the option isn't it that's kind of a bummer i was kind of i mean obviously i didn't hope she was abducted i don't know why that's sadder i guess because it's so much more like it's a failure of like a serial killer is yeah sure it's a failure of law enforcement but it's also like [ __ ] psycho serial killers are [ __ ] being psychos whereas suicide's like more a failure of the system it's like a failure of her support group and the health service and whatever to like make sure she's okay i think is that that doesn't make sense that i should be should be sad if she gets killed by a serial killer right or does it make i don't know look let's just leave it alone am i making at all any sense these are the sorts of destinations that someone would choose for that occasion along with the other items i mentioned inside her car there was also a bottle of sleeping bills reportedly thailand or pm combining sleeping bells and alcohol is a common form of suicide i'd love to know more concrete numbers on how common but google has decided to preempt all my searches into the matter by telling me that help is available by giving me the phone number for the national suicide prevention hotline thanks for looking out for me business daddy uh yeah i'm kind of with google on that one um i think most people i don't know not most people but people googling that probably do need to be presented with the national suicide prevention hotline which i like while there is a case to be made for this argument and at the very beginning fred murray reportedly considered it a possibility there's also evidence that it either that either it wasn't maura's plan or that she had not yet decided among the personal effects she brought with her were her birth control pills which indicates long-term planning or habitual behavior she also picked up the accident report forms to fill out for her father though she may have intended to fill those out and mail them while there may have been questions about her mental state it's important to note that taking off like this wasn't completely unprecedented her friend said that one day in high school she decided just to hop on the train to boston instead of going to school just for the hell of it oh my god i wish i had the balls to have done that like i love ferris bueller's day off that is such a brilliant movie and i'm always like god damn i was just always i'm just i'm just a coward i'm like i would i never did that i don't think i ever i don't think i ever intentionally bunked off school which is what we call it in the uk when you uh playing truant i don't think i was ever truant from school and i kind of regret it i know what i've got into trouble but and they'd always be like well that's going to go on your record the record all of that kind of [ __ ] is just something you realize when you're an adult doesn't matter at all like nothing what you do as a child really matters i mean i guess it does sometimes like but only when you're a bit older it's not like skipping school is gonna [ __ ] up your career i'm not saying people should skip school but maybe just once just for the day get on the train go somewhere else deal with the consequences don't show your parents this if you're listening it afterwards i'm not endorsing this i'm just saying it's something that i probably regret doing because then instead of telling you about how i'm a coward i'll be telling you a cool story like ferris bueller's day off wouldn't i i'm not saying do this nor am i i don't know stop it simon it's hardly a pattern of behavior but the fact that there is prior evidence of her saying this noise and just going away in her own with no warning is a reasonable indication that her decision their february was not the result of a full-on mental breakdown along the lines of suicide is the theory that she went off into the woods and succumbed to the elements there is going to be a body found i already thought about this i'm like someone's going to find that although america is really big and there's probably not there no vermont vermont's nature and stuff but it's small i've got a friends from vermont i've got a couple of friends from vermont and i think it's small but i know there's a lot of nature because they're always talking about how much nature there is in vermont the witness who claimed months later to have seen her jogging down the road four to five miles from the crash site said that she turned down a dirt road when she saw him approach it's possible that she ran off got lost and died of exposure but given how frequently and thoroughly the area was searched it's unlikely that her remains would not have been found number six the a-frame house on a personal note i really hate the name of this theory it's called the a-frame house because the roof the house has an angled roof resembling the letter a no what other building has this stellar roof every single [ __ ] house in the entirety of new england and most of america if our houses had flat roofs that'll bend leak and even collapse under the weight of the heavy snow accumulation rant over i feel like flat roofs are not very common but right like because it's like well if there's gonna be snow on them that's not good although then you can have a roof deck which is cool that's pretty cool i uh my uh i have a little holiday house and the entire roof not the entire roof but most of it's flat so why is there never a snow problem up there i'm just thinking about that now it snows heavily where it is but it's never an issue and i don't know why fascinate it's probably just built really strong i guess that's how they do it but it's really nice to sit up there because it's just this big open deck it's cool fascinating story simon on to the theory itself the particular house was about half a mile from the crash site and was the home of claude moulton aged 38 and his girlfriend of four years age 18. in 2004 fred murray received a knife in the mail from claude's brother larry ok claude and his girlfriend had been said to be have been acting strangely after maura's disappearance and larry believed that the bloodstained knife we found in claude's gov box was used to kill her the police had originally refused the knife when fred offered it to them as evidence but they later accepted it family members claimed that larry had a history of drug use and made the story up to try and get reward money still a few days later fred was given the knife claude scrapped his car and he had previously refused to let the police search his property this is really weird and random law enforcement never received law enforcement never released any information about the knife most likely because even if it was tested and found to have more as dna on it there was no proper chain of custody and it would not have been able to have been used to establish probable cause for a warrant really that's not enough there's no way to verify if i was a judge i'd be like yeah get into that guy's house searching for a body we got to lose there was no way to verify the knife was found in the glove box and even if it was there's no way to know what happened between then and it being received by the police if larry's story is true then it's more than a little disappointing the police could not act but not as disappointing as it would have been to find a treasure trove of evidence that would have been thrown out of court for an illegal search and seizure so do it legally go get it find that body with such a high profile case i can't fault the police for wanting to play this one by the book to avoid losing a conviction on a technicality then again even if the evidence couldn't be used in court there's no justice like angry mob justice except there is through the courts legally i don't think anyone's going to like go to the house and murder these people they're just gonna be like known as the pieces of she got away with murder claude and his girlfriend eventually left town and the new owners of the a-frame house allowed it to be investigated cadaver dogs were brought in and they were very insistent about a particular closet in the house indicating the possibility of human remains while carpet samples were to be tested for blood and human remains the investigation was being run by the murray's private investigator john smith not by law enforcement the samples were given to the new hampshire state police and they had again and they have again not made any comments regarding this evidence maybe call the cops when the dogs go nuts instead of just taking the samples yourself the floors and carpets have since been replaced i'm like this is a bit of a stretch isn't it there was a knife found in a glove box the guy was behaving strangely that's all they don't know they should have tested the knife because even if it's not used in court i would like to know and uh the the dogs the cadaver dogs smelling at the cupboard it's like i don't know how accurate are those cadaver dogs does that they just smell dead people maybe it was another dead person maybe it wasn't a dead person at all maybe it was a i don't know whatever ten years later in 2016 john smith returned to the house i like he's called john smith who was john smith again he's the private investigator it's the most generic ah wait john smith is like uh why is it is it john smith or is it joe bloggs like we have our in the uk we have our own equivalent of john doe and i can't remember i think it's joe bloggs actually but john smith is also a super generic name the house was now uh they returned to the host uh with the host of a podcast dedicated to more murray that's kind of fun i mean morbid but i i feel like such a lame podcast i just sit in my house say my office record some videos i don't go outside even the house was now abandoned so they went upstairs to the closet again and took wood chips to be tested this time they were tested privately rather than being handed over to the police the wood chips from the closet tested positive for human blood there were two sets of dna one male and one unidentifiable which means that it cannot be ruled out that it's more as blood unfortunately barring significant advances in technology that is as bad as we can that is as much as can be determined from the degraded samples throughout the course of researching and writing this i did not have any agenda or theory that i wanted to put forward my goal is always to state the facts still if we're on the same page that this is a very clear front-runner for most likely theory be sure to get into the comments and let me know oh dude i don't know if i'm on the same page with you about this i don't know if on the same page kevin i think oh but then where did she go okay here's what i think is the most likely theory and it's a sad theory they're all sad theories because she's probably dead um is she had the car crash she wanted to run away she started heading up the road a car comes past she puts out her thumb she gets in the car she hitchhikes to the nearest town where she commits suicide and in a place where her body won't necessarily be found i don't know jumping into a river something like this that's my theory that's my front runner i think the d the blood and stuff it's like i don't know although who has blood stains that's like really intense like of course like people cut themselves and stuff but then it's not like the stain stays there in the cupboard forever and why would you be in a cupboard something suspicious happened there i don't know if it's my front rather though patrice bassey [Music] on friday february 6th 2004 at approximately 2 15 a.m umass student petri vassey was struck by a car a few minutes off campus in a hit-and-run he was in a coma for a month this was the same night that maura had a 1am breakdown there is already a solid foundation for why she may have wanted to get away but there are some who believe that maura was the one who struck vasey maura's shift then i was from 8 00 p.m to 2 a.m it's expected that for a six hour shift she would get some sort of break by massachusetts state law she would be offered a 30-minute meal break she can waive that right but if they did not offer any other breaks then it is unlikely she would with the snowstorm come in that night she could have planned to use a break to run to the store and grab some food or liquor to stock up for the impending snow day from classes if she took her break at midnight a very logical time to take one in an 8 a.m to 2 a.m shift nah take it earlier would i i don't know i always would want to wait and then take my break as late as possible but then there are other times you're like yeah but then but then it doesn't really break it up very much does it i'd want to do it close to the middle maybe slightly after the middle because if you take it at 12 this is not interesting at all i'm just going to stop talking about taking breaks at work it's not interesting i'm sorry while the parking lot her car would have been in was a 14-minute walk away maura was a track athlete up against a ticking clock running or jogging to her car could have been easily could have done it in half that time she had a phone call with billy that began at 1207 am and lasted for seven minutes the area where bassey was hit was approximately a six minute drive from her parking lot if either if either the drive took her slightly longer or she was on the phone with billy for a minute before getting into the car getting the car into drive that could put her in the area distracted on the phone at the time of the hit-and-run at that point she would have ditched her plans to pick up whatever vittles littles i don't know that would i guess supplies she had intended drive back to drive back to a closer parking lot right next to her work and either cut her break short or take five minutes or so to settle herself before going back inside at 12 40 year moore received a phone call from an unknown caller on a campus phone this could have been anything from a casual hey did you happen downtown to uh from someone who informed her that the accident was much more severe than she realized to someone who witnessed the incident and intended to blackmail her this entire account of events is absolutely plausible and it gives a much better explanation for why she was sobbing followed by a catatonic state than it resulting from the conversation with her sister over two hours earlier this seems legit doesn't it but again there's no evidence there's no really strong evidence it's just like super circumstantial but that feels like that's the sort of reaction you'd have to that that phone call right that he has absolutely no recollect oh he survived i don't know why i assume he died that's great i was a coma for a month of course no you read this like two minutes ago whistle he had no idea who hit him and he had never met maura prior not that this would have been targeted or anything just a careless accident from driving while on the phone oh my god maura you crash two cars because you're drunk in two days and also hit and run holy [ __ ] but it sounds like he's a bit sick of being asked about it if she was somehow involved we'll never know the only other person who would possibly know is billy and given what we know about him i would not consider him a credible source of information one of the major driving forces pushing this theory forward is the belief that fred helped his daughter run away it's possible explanation for why neither of them mentioned shopping for a car in front of kate at dinner i can't imagine a father that would go to the lengths it would take to help his daughter start a new life and then lie about it very publicly including multiple national television appearances would be the same father then that seemingly encouraged her to drive the car home drunk the day after she had had such a traumatic experience that she needed to run away from ultimately while i include this section because the potential connection to vassi has been receiving increased attention so i feel obliged to i think it's ultimately immaterial maura already had a desire to run away and start a new life and not without cause this would absolutely have added an increased sense of urgency but there's no way to know that february 9th would have been the day wouldn't have been the day that she ran away whether this happened or not wrap up this is an ongoing investigation with a lot of attention focused on it so much of the information in this is a bit of a moving target people's stories have changed new developments have come out and details included in this script may have changed between the time of writing and the time that you're watching or listening to it what i can say is this moramari was a talented but troubled girl who decided to pack her things and get away maybe for a week maybe forever her true intentions and the details of what happened may never be known it is my opinion that after crashing her car while drunk an offense she couldn't risk due a present legal situation she likely declined the help of a kindly but off-putting stranger and instead chose to accept a ride from a younger couple with whom she felt more safe unfortunately for her looks can be deceiving whether by negligence incompetence or much more likely by a strict adherence to evidentiary rules important leads were seemingly never followed up on and the potential evidence was destroyed or became unusable maybe i'm wrong if an infamous robber can escape capture for 50 years spending most of that time living five minutes away from me who's to say that maura too couldn't have escaped and found a peaceful life somewhere as well i think it's super unlikely kevin sadly sadly although i don't think she was murdered i think she uh probably committed suicide um yeah interesting kevin's on a different page for me let me know i wish we could do like polls in the comments i'd be super interested where people come down on this one uh also i you already know this but i've made the decision to publish this on casual chromeless because this is clearly a casual criminal script so right now i'm gonna say goodbye to you and then i'm gonna record a new intro to this video which you've already seen there's a video weird thank you for watching rate review subscribe like all of that stuff and i'll see you next time [Music] you