She was an “All-American Girl” and a model student, athlete, and daughter.
She graduated from Whitman-Hanson Regional High School and was a star athlete on the school's track team.
She was accepted into the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.
Maura studied chemical engineering for three semesters, then she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study nursing, where she completed her junior year.
She was planning to marry her high school sweetheart, Billy Rausch, who was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
November 2003, she admitted to using a stolen credit card to order food from several restaurants.
The charge was continued in December to be dismissed after three months' good behavior.
On February 5 2004, Maura spoke on the phone with her older sister, Kathleen, while she was on duty at her campus-security job.
Around 10:30 p.m., it was reported that Maura broke down in tears.
Her supervisor arrived at her desk, and Maura was completely zoned out and unresponsive with no reaction at all.
The supervisor escorted Murray back to her dorm room around 1:20 am. She asked what was wrong, and Maura said
"My sister."
On Saturday, February 7, Murray's father Fred arrived in Amherst.
He and Maura went car-shopping that afternoon, and later went to dinner with a friend of his daughter.
Murray dropped her father off at his motel room and, borrowing his Toyota Corolla, returned to campus to attend a dorm party, arriving at 10:30 pm.
At 2:30 am on Sunday, February 8, she left the party.
At 3:30 am, on her way to her father's motel, she struck a guardrail on Route 9 in Hadley.
There is no documentation of sobriety field tests being conducted.
Maura was driven to her father's motel and stayed in his room the rest of the morning.
At 4:49 am, there was a cell phone call placed to her boyfriend from Fred's phone.
Later that morning, Fred rented a car, dropped Maura off at the university, and departed for Connecticut.
At 11:30 that night, Fred called his daughter and they agreed to talk again Monday.
Midnight on Monday, February 9, Maura used her computer to search directions to the Berkshires and Burlington, Vermont.
At 1:00 pm, she emailed her boyfriend.
"I got your messages, but honestly, I didn't feel like talking to much of anyone, I promise to call today though."
She also made a phone call about renting a condominium in the same Bartlett, New Hampshire condo association her family had vacationed at in the past.
At 1:13 pm, she called a fellow nursing student.
At 1:24 pm, Maura emailed a work supervisor of the nursing school faculty.
She wrote that she would be out of town for a week due to a death in her family, even though no in in her family had actually died.
The email also stated that she would contact them when she returned.
At 2:05 pm, Maura called a number which provides recorded information about booking hotels in Stowe, Vermont.
At 2:18 pm, she telephoned her boyfriend and left a voice message promising him they would talk later.
Murray packed her car with clothing, toiletries, college textbooks, and birth-control pills.
Most belongings she packed in boxes and the removed the art from the walls.
On top of the boxes was a printed email to Maura's boyfriend indicating trouble in their relationship.
Around 3:30 pm, she drove off the campus in her black 1996 Saturn sedan.
Classes at the university had been canceled that day due to a snowstorm.
At 3:40 pm, Maura withdrew $280 from an ATM.
Closed-circuit footage showed she was alone.
At a nearby liquor store, Murray purchased about $40 worth of alcoholic beverages, including Baileys Irish Cream, Kahlúa, vodka, and a box of Franzia wine.
She also picked up accident-report forms from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Maura then left Amherst at around 3:50 pm.
4:37 pm she called to check her voice mail from her cellphone.
After 7:00 pm, a Woodsville, New Hampshire resident heard a loud thump outside of her house and peered through her window.
She could see a car up against the snowbank along Route 112, also known as Wild Ammonoosuc Road pointing west on the eastbound side of the road.
She called the Grafton County Sheriff's Department at 7:27 pm.
The woman claimed to have seen a man smoking a cigarette inside the car.
Later stated that she had not seen a man nor a person smoking a cigarette, but rather had seen what appeared to be a red light glowing from inside the car, maybe from a cell phone.
Another neighbor saw the car as well as someone walking around the vehicle.
She witnessed a third neighbor, school bus driver Butch Atwood, pull up alongside the vehicle.
The school bus driver noticed the young woman was not bleeding or visibly injured, but cold and shivering.
He offered to telephone for help, but she pleaded to him not to call the police and assured him she'd already called AAA.
AAA had no record of her calling AAA.
Atwood, skeptical of her claim, as he was aware of the spotty cell phone reception in the area, called the police after he got home at 7:43 p.m.
He was unable to see Maura's car, but did notice several cars pass on the road before the police arrived.
Another local resident driving home from work passed by the scene around 7:37 pm, and saw a police SUV parked face-to-face with Maura's car.
She pulled over briefly and did not see anyone inside or outside the cars, and decided to continue home.
The official police log contradicts this and has Haverhill police arriving nine minutes later at 7:46 p.m.
When police arrive there was no one was inside or around the car that had hit a tree on the drivers side.
The left headlight was severely damage and had pushed the car's radiator into the fan, rendering it inoperable.
The car's windshield was cracked on the driver's side and both airbags had deployed.
The car was locked.
Red stains that looked to be red wine were on the inside and outside of the car.
Inside the car, there was an empty beer bottle and a damaged box of wine on the rear seat.
There was also a AAA card issued to Murray, blank accident-report forms, gloves, compact discs, makeup, diamond jewelry, two sets of MapQuest driving directions to Vermont, Murray's favorite stuffed animal, and Not Without Peril, a book about mountain climbing in the White Mountains.
Maura's debit card, credit cards, and cell phone were and still are missing, along with some bottles of alcohol she had purchased.
Between 8:00 to 8:30 pm, a contractor returning saw a young person moving quickly on foot eastbound on Route 112 about 4 to 5 miles east of where Maura's vehicle was discovered.
The young person was wearing jeans, a dark coat, and a light-colored hood.
The responding officer and the bus driver drove the area searching for Murray.
Just before 8:00 pm, EMS and a fire truck arrived to clear the scene. By 8:49 pm, the car had been towed to a local garage.
At about 9:30 pm, the responding officer left.
A rag believed to have been part of Maura's emergency roadside kit was discovered stuffed into the Saturn's muffler pipe.
At 12:36 pm, February 10, a "Be On the Lookout" report for Murray was issued.
She was reported as wearing a dark coat, jeans, and a black backpack.
The Haverhill Police Department told Maura's father that if Murray was not reported safe by the following morning, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department would start a search.
At 5:17 pm, Murray was first referred to as "missing" by the Haverhill police.
On February 11, Murray's father arrived before dawn in Haverhill.
At 8:00 am, New Hampshire Fish and Game, the Murrays, and others began to search.
A police dog tracked the scent from one of Maura's gloves 100 yards east from where the vehicle had been discovered.
It lost the scent, suggesting to the police that she had left the area to another car.
At 5:00 pm, Maura's boyfriend and his parents arrived in Haverhill.
He was interrogated in private, and then was joined by his parents for questioning.
At 7:00 pm, the police said they believed Murray came to the area to either run away or commit suicide.
Her family doesn't believe that that was true.
Maura's boyfriend had turned off his cell phone during his flight to Haverhill.
When he turned it back on he discovered he had received a voicemail that he believed was the sound of Murray sobbing.
The call was traced to a calling card issued to the American Red Cross.
On February 12, at 3:05 pm, the police reported Maura might be headed to the Kancamagus Highway area and she was "listed as endangered and possibly suicidal".
The police report also stated she was intoxicated at the crash site.
The bus driver had said she did not appear impaired.
A week after Maura's disappearance, her family expanded their search into Vermont, dismayed that authorities there had not been informed of her disappearance.
The FBI joined the investigation ten days after she disappeared.
The FBI interviewed her family and the Haverhill police chief announced that the search was now nationwide.
New Hampshire Fish and Game conducted a second ground and air search, using a helicopter with a thermal imaging camera, tracking dogs and cadaver dogs.
Was she murdered by a stranger?
In 2004, a man allegedly gave Maura's father a rusty, stained knife that belonged to the man's brother.
The man's brother supposedly had a criminal past and lived less than a mile from where her car was found.
His brother and his brother's girlfriend were said to have acted strangely after the disappearance.
The man's brother claimed he believed the knife had been used to kill Maura.
Several days later, the man's brother allegedly scrapped his Volvo.
On November 1, 2005, a user named "Tom Davies" logged into a message board called "Not Without Peril," which was dedicated to discussion of Maura's disappearance.
He claimed to have seen a black backpack behind a restroom at Pemigewasset Overlook, around 30 miles from Woodsville.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin stated that law enforcement "was aware of the backpack," but did not disclose whether it had been taken for forensic testing.
In October 2006, volunteers led a two-day search within a few miles of where Maura's car was found.
In the closet of a house 1 mile from the crash site, cadaver dogs allegedly went bonkers.
The house had formerly been the residence of the man implicated by his brother, who had given Fred Murray the rusty knife in 2004.
A sample of carpet from the home was sent to the New Hampshire State Police, but the results were never released to the public.
In 2009, Maura's case was given to the New Hampshire cold case division, and authorities are handling it as a "suspicious" missing persons case.
Did the boyfriend do it?
Three woman came forward to ask police to investigate Bill Rausch in relation to the disappearance of his girlfriend, Maura Murray.
One of the women lived in Lawton, Oklahoma.
She knew Bill a few months after Maura Murray disappeared in 2004.
He visited the people who lived in her house, often.
Some of the people had ties to Fort Sill, where Bill was working at the time.
He was friends with the man she was seeing at the time, who warned her that Bill "had gone off the deep end" and that his girlfriend was missing.
One day, Bill found out that her man was not home for a while and he texted her and asked if he could come over.
There was a party at the house that night and she invited him over.
Once he arrived, he took her outside and grabbed her and started kissing her.
He suggested they go to a hotel and she agreed and went with him in the car.
At a stoplight, she says, Bill reached over and grabbed her by the neck and said that he was going to kill her like he killed Maura.
She reached over and dug her nails into him and told him that she'd rip his crotch off.
Immediately, Bill's demeanor changed and he became gentle and started joking.
They continued on to the hotel, but she decided not to have sex.
Bill supposedly explained to her that he was glad she never slept with him because the people he has sex with dies.
He mentioned how a girl he slept with before Maura had died in an accident.
Bill told her he was working on a book, titled
"You'll Never Be Happy Until You Realize That You Will Never Be Happy."
Bill lost his job at Ray Group International in 2011 after a woman alleged that he sexually assaulted her in the office one night and that he had assaulted her before.
She said she was going up the escalators on the Metro one morning and someone jogged up beside her and pushed her down.
Fellow commuters caught her before she could tumble to the bottom, but her dressed was ripped and she looked up and saw Bill at the top of the escalators.
When he assaulted her in the office, he began by saying that it was him who pushed her down that day, all the emotion gone from his eyes.
In fall 2011, the third lady was working as a bartender at the time.
She had sex with Bill one night.
She said it started consensual but quickly progressed to choking, that he wanted to hear her gasp for breath.
She too described the lack of emotion in his eyes and said that affter it was over, he was threatening that
"This never happened."
Bill supposedly claims that that incident never happened.
The lady supposedly has a picture of the napkin they used to communicate at the bar that night, containing his cell phone in his hand writing.
Feburary 11, 12, 13 and 14, 2014, Bill was calling Maura's cell phone, each call lasting a minute as it was likely going to voicemail.
The last call on the 15 at 4:53 was to Maura's phone, too and that one lasted from 3 - 4 minutes.
And after that call, Bill makes no further calls on his cell phone for four days.
There are no further calls from his cell phone until Thursday, February 19.
In 2007, Bill's sister, Heather, committed suicide in the home of their parents in Marengo, Ohio, by shooting herself in the head with a gun.
Supposedly the medical examiner of Morrow County, William Lee, said that in the days leading up to the suicide, Heather had wanted to speak to the police about a crime she knew about.
There is no record of her contacting the police about this.
Allegedly, when Billy was interview in Maura's disappearance, he was a prime suspect.
He was totally distraught and said
"I feel as dirty as Scott Peterson.
They think I've got something to do with it."
A fourth and then a fifth woman came forward later.
The fourth woman claims she and Bill had a brief relationship in 2006.
Said he was a pathological liar.
She said he spoke about Maura Murray only once, by saying he had a girlfriend who had "passed" but that they were broken up at the time.
She says Bill is extremely pushy, obsessive, arrogant, and controlling.
She said even his friends at Fort Sill called him, "Billy Liar."
The fith woman claims that she spent one night with Bill when they were both working in politics in Ohio in 2008.
That he was violent and degrading towards her.
They were at a bar with other political staffers one night when he sent me her a text saying that he wanted to go home with her and then another one that said
"I want to break you."
He came to her apartment after the bar and the language he used and the demands he made were threatening and demeaning.
They only spent the one night together, but the next day she was shaken and decided to google him.
That's when she saw the case about Maura.
She said that she was deeply disturbed and felt lucky that nothing more had happened to her.
DC Police are currently investigating his odd behavior and subpoenas have been served for files related to Bill's dismissal from Ray Group International.
Witnesses have appeared before a federal Grand Jury.
Maura's family's odd behavior..
In 2006, the non-profit organization Let's Bring Them Home, was contacted by members of Maura Murray's family and immediately put up a $75,000 reward for information that would bring closure to the case, but the reward was quietly rescinded later.
Supposedly, the money was taken back because of Fred Murray's behavior and Helena Dwyer-Murray's secrecy raised red flags
Fred was difficult, often hostile and very controlling to some members of the charity.
Helena was nice but they never felt like they was getting the full story.
She wouldn't answer direct questions unless it was on the phone, never in writing.
Another thing they found weird were the hang-up calls the tip line sometimes received.
Each hang-up was logged and the phone number traced and it went to a phone listed under Julie Murray's name.
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