"MY SISTER"

**UPDATED**

There are 21 possible numbers Maura could have called at that New City destination on her cell log. That much I got, based on readily available prefix data by area code. But I missed something.

A sharp person in our group who goes by AWOLNATION (who only rarely posts) also got the provider data for each number. It breaks down like this:

Verizon - 11

Sprint PCS - 2

Land Lines - 8

Many thanks for this great contribution, AWOLNATION.

We can surmise that Billy had a Sprint PCS number. This because: (1) the affidavit that police used to obtain Maura's cell records shows that she had a Sprint PCS number, and (2) Sharon said she added Maura to the Rausch's family plan. (If anyone has a clean, definitive source for this, I would like to see it.) There is no guarantee that Billy was on the Rausch family plan, mind you, but it seems likely.  The following analysis stands, either way, although it would change a little it he were not.  To proceed, I assume he was.

This above data is subject to a caveat: it is from 2012. The wireless numbers could have changed providers since 2004, perhaps multiple times. Under the Telephone Portability Act of 1996, if you change service providers your former carrier is required, upon your request, to release it to your new provider. Providers make that process of requesting easy for you.

Transfers like that, however, probably evened out over eight years, in proportion to the overall market dynamics as reflected in the 2004 data (above), which is consistent with overall national market share data (in most markets Verizon has a lot more accounts than Sprint).  Thus the 2012 data gives us some idea of the mix in 2004 in New City.  As for the landlines, they likely were still land lines in 2012, even if providers changed. Prefixes are usually reserved entirely for wireless or entirely for land lines. Once established, this is logistically difficult (and expensive for the providers) to change. The land line providers don't matter to us because the only specific identities we have to consider are Julie and Billy, neither of whom were not physically in New City that night.

Thus viewed, the data supplied by AWOLNATION shows that among the 21 possible New City numbers Maura could have called, there were way more Verizon wireless than Sprint PCS numbers and there were around 35-45% land lines. 

This realization data puts a healthy constraint on the intuitive appeal of New City's proximity to West Point. Ironically, by so doing, it buttresses the reasoning of the original topic post (below), to the effect that Maura's New City calls on the 5th were to Julie.

To see that, scratch your chin a moment regarding the following three facts:

[1] The Department of Commerce defines the NYC metro area to include the entirety of New York City, as well as areas outside the city connected to its infrastructure (public transportation, trucking patterns, commuting patterns, supplier-retailer relationships, cultural affiliations, etc.)  This includes the Lower Hudson Valley and the entirety of Rockland County (where New City is located).  West Point lies about 5 miles north of the thus defined NYC metro area. This means that New City is geographically, demographically and culturally considered to be a part metro New York City.  It is less than 25 miles from mid-town Manhattan and only 15 miles away from Yonkers, the first municipality north outside of the Bronx, NYC's northern-most borough.  

[2]  Metro NYC contains 19 million people as of the 2010 Census.  Rockland County contains 315,000 them.  The population within 22 miles of New City, therefore, likely is somewhere between 6 and 10 million people, as it includes significant portions of West Chester County as well as half of New York City.  Julie and Billy, on the other hand, total 2 people.  Moreover, all of those millions of people live closer to New City than Billy and Julie did while at West Point.

[3] Many students at UMASS, and lots of people generally, hail from or once lived in this highly populated area around New City.  According to UMASS's undergraduate admissions page, of all states from which their undergraduates hail, New York sends the most.  New York state's population is concentrated heavily around New York City (thus near New City), the most populous city in the country.  On the numbers, Maura easily could have had an as yet unknown new boyfriend or new friend at UMASS or living Amherst.  That person could have once lived in this region or had relatives who do and got him or her a cell phone.  In fact, for all we know, Kate - native of Saratoga Springs, NY - had an aunt 2 hours south on the western side of the Hudson River Valley (i.e., in metro New York City) who got her a cell phone for college. 

[4] Meanwhile, amid all those multiple millions of candidates who - based on their proximity to New City - might have owned the one of the 21 possible numbers Maura called, only 13 (the cell phones) could possibly have been Julie. Only two (the Sprint cell phones) could have been Billy.

Bottom line: while relevant, the proximity between New City and West Point - statistically speaking - is not as significant as it is intuitively appealing.  That can bias us, in a way that creates a subtle form of circular reasoning.

That circular reasoning goes like this: "she and Billy were on the rocks" >> "yep, and then she took booze and a stuffed animal toward a resort" >> "well then, she was getting out of dodge to get away from him, get her thoughts together and maybe break up ... pretty obvious, case closed"  >> "oh, she called New City right before she got upset? Hmmm..."  >> "AHA! New City is only 22 miles from West Point!"  >> "see, I told you, it's all about Billy." 

Yeah, except that within that 22 miles radius there are another 6 to 10 million people.

Economists and quantitative researchers call that "facial validity": something that has so much intuitive appeal that it never gets investigated or analyzed on rigorous terms and lies there, unseen and incorrect, distorting your conception. (Sometime, by the way, if you want to tell someone they are drinking their own bath water but don't want to argue the point with them, just say "your point facial validity." It technically says their thinking is too shallow, but it sounds flattering. It can come in handy on ... eh, leave it alone John.)

Which brings us back to the original reasoning of this topic post. Without being premised on the New City destination of the calls, or on any theory of why Maura bolted, it shows that the facts we have in hand point hard and strong to Julie, who - only as a secondary matter in that analysis - could have had a New City number.  That is, the reasoning does not start with the idea that it had to be Julie or Billy and it is not driven forward by a thesis about why Maura bolted.  Compare that to the circular reasoning discussed three paragraphs above.

HOWEVER, Renner holds us hostage.  (Just kidding there James ... mostly).  If his source is as reliable as the so far not refuted argument in the original topic post, we have a complex situation to reckon with (as discussed in original topic post). One of our group - Debbie - has proposed an idea that could resolve that back to a simpler (and therefore more probably true) thesis.  But until we know about Renner's source (or at least how reliable it is), we can't move forward.

JAMES!  Speak!  Please!

______

Today, I go out on a limb. And I challenge Renner in so doing. Fingers crossed.

In discussing the upsetting call, two conclusions - as follows - often are stated, although not universally.

(1) The upsetting call was with Kathleen. UMass police Lieutenant Robert Thrasher has been quoted or referenced by multiple journalists - including Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory in his March 2, 2004 piece "Where Could Maura Be?" - as saying that the call was with "one of Maura's sisters" but that police have "not gotten an answer as to what it was about." This - together with a call to Kathleen being on Maura's cell phone records at 10:10 pm - has led to the conclusions that the call with Kathleen upset Maura. In her 2007 series, for example, Maribeth Conway says that "Maura did not get upset right away," instead beginning to cry three hours later. This indicates that Conway also reached this conclusion. Karen Mayotte's initial (and understandable) confusion in her first statement to Renner about time frames temporarily buttressed this conclusion.

(2) The New City calls were to Billy. This due to the sharp observation by one of our posters regarding New City's proximity to West Point, as well as the oft-discussed thesis that Maura's troubled relationship with Billy was a prominent impetus in her decision to bolt north on Monday the 9th.

I believe that both these conclusions are wrong.

If the call with Kathleen was the upsetting one, the scenario is too improbably bizarre. To wit, they talk for 28 minutes, get off the phone, Maura works and makes other calls for almost two hours, then at some point between about 12:15 am and 1:10 am, it dawns on her that she is devastated, existentially so. She becomes stunned, unable to speak, unconcerned about hiding her cell phone from her supervisor despite it being against regulations, unable to continue working and unable to walk back to her dorm by herself. Her upset was so steeply concerning to Karen Mayotte that she was thinking about ways to stay with Maura that night and made recommendations about counseling. It requires an improbable and complex scenario to conclude that somehow it took Maura two hours to recognize her devastation.

If therefore the upsetting call was with Kathleen, she must have called back later on the desk phone. This is technically possible, but equally unlikely. It is possible because although outgoing calls to numbers off campus typically are not possible on a hall desk phone, incoming calls are. (This because many entities may need to call a dorm's security desk for any number of reasons related to security's function. This includes parents, security colleagues, public health officials, public safety officials, etc.) Still though, it is unlikely that Kathleen later called Maura back on the desk phone, or even knew the number to Melville Hall, or would have had any reason not to simply call Maura on her cell. They had spoken via Maura's cell that night.

As such, you have to stretch a scenario like Play-Doh to conclude that the upsetting call was with Kathleen. The evidence and factual timeline we have strongly suggests it was not a call with Kathleen that upset Maura.

Maura has two sisters. Therefore - unless you think the UMASS authorities are lying or mistaken - the upsetting call was with Julie.

But Maura's cell records are not consistent with this notion, at least if you subscribe to conclusion that the New City calls were to Billy. Did, therefore, Julie call the desk phone? This again is unlikely, for most of the same reasons it is unlikely that Kathleen did, as discussed above. Thus, keeping the scenario in the simplistic likely range, the upsetting call with Julie almost certainly was over Maura's cell phone.

In a January 15, 2012 topic post, however, Renner confirmed that the New City calls were to Billy. The last of these calls is the only call proximate to Maura's upset. It is in fact so proximate that it seems obviously to be the source of the upsetting call. It is also the only one that could have been to Julie, unless she was in Amherst.  But as confirmed by Renner, that call was to Billy, right?

I don't think so. Observe that Renner named no source on the January 15, 2012 topic post. As such - and consistent with what he has asked me to do - no source means no fact. In that context, everything I can put on the table now leads to the upsetting call being from Maura to Julie at 12:07 am on Julie's New City cell phone.

Bear in mind that it is just as reasonable to think that the New City number belonged to Julie as to Billy in terms of the proximity of New City to West Point. They both were cadets and in the same class. In fact, it could be the case that West Point - like many institutions - had a deal in place with a New City account and hardware retailer to provide cut rates for cadets. In any case, the sequence of events and known (and sourced) facts described above make it more likely that the New City number belonged to Julie than to Billy.

Even beyond the exclusion of Renner's source, I would go so far to say that the evidence as linked together above is so strong that his source really needs to be validated. For if the above reasoning and his source both withstand scrutiny by our group on the blog, we are left with a difficult, complex and improbable scenario around the upsetting call.

Subtly, the concept of the upsetting call being with Julie is corroborated by the Murrays. We know that the Murrays generally want to dampen public discourse about Maura's life prior to the accident. They themselves so say. Yet Fred and Kathleen have spoken to multiple journalists at relative quotable length on one topic in Maura's personal life prior to the accident: that upsetting call. Specifically they have said, openly puzzled (as indicated their use of the rhetorical wondering aloud) that they cannot understand why the talk with Kathleen about a fight with her boyfriend would have upset Maura. Why talk openly about exactly one facet of her personal life while simultaneously and with some conviction espousing the general theory of - to paraphrase Fred - "her personal life before the accident is irrelevant ... she's missing, just find her?"

Here's why: they have seen Maura's cell records, uncamera-ed (i.e., without the black cover markings). They know who the New City number belongs to. They know Maura was talking with Julie. They probably therefore know what upset Maura. They make an exception in talking about that one facet of Maura's personal life before the accident not to inform but to subtly obfuscate. In this context, the conclusion that the call was with Julie actually serves to resolve a dissonance in the Murrays' stated attitudes about discussion Maura's personal life prior to the accident.

Still another way to see that Julie owned the New City number is to put yourself in the UMASS authorities' shoes. Can you conceive of them asking Julie if she was on the call that upset Maura and her replying "yes, but it is none of your business what it was about?" She would never have saddled that horse at all knowing she wasn't going to ride it, so to speak. It thus is clear they saw her number on their uncamera-ed versions of Maura's cell records.

In other words, the simplest explanation - given what we know (disregarding Renner's unsourced conclusion that the number belonged to Billy, for now anyway) - is that the upsetting call was to Julie at the New City number. This likelihood means that verifying Renner's source and information is important. For if both my reasoning and that source are solid, we have a complex and unlikely scenario surrounding that upsetting call.

In that context, two calls to action:

(1) James, we really need to know the source.

(2) Everyone else, we really need to consider if and where my reasoning goes off the rails. I don't claim all knowledge of the case. Am I missing something? Alternatively, do you have corroborating thoughts and facts? What do you think?

Finally, with the realizations above, some scenarios jump out of the sea of uncertainty, screaming out. For me, these align more simply with some other facts of the case than have previous conclusions and theories. In fact, it clarifies some things. But ... enough for today.

A Disturbing Email

A few days ago I received a very disturbing email from clemens21r@aol.com    

This blog receives a lot of mean and angry messages but this one is in its own special class. Here's a couple snippets:

b-Murray was a white trash ho.   Fucked the entire track team, including her "assistant track" coach (who is apparently now in Taiwan, putting that PhD of his to good use designing sneakers-I am sure it galled him to give up all of that  white, American, undergrad poontang, poor guy), and lord knows who else at UMASS and in the surrounding community.  Now, sadly (and admittedly) this does not differentiate her in the slightest from 99% of the white trash ho's currently attending universities and colleges in this country. However...

c-her little ho greek friend,Kate Markopoulos,    clearly KNOWS a hell of a lot more than she is letting on. You have established that.

 g-Maura Murray was fucking some local yoke, whom she met out at a bar while getting wasted (or possibly online), but I favour the random bar hookup for obvious reasons.   He either bought her a trac/burner phone to keep ole' Billy Boy and his mommy in the dark, or he just called her on her dorm phone.  Regardless, this is the guy with whom she planned to spend that weekend.    I am sure that he picked her up and scooted her away to parts unknown that night.  Now, whether or not he killed her...well, who knows, but I doubt it.    Something tells me she is still alive and the greek ho knows all of this.    It's a shame the cops can't water board her, 'cause requesting information from  her nicely doesn't seem to be getting the job done. 

First thing I did was forward it to the NH Cold Case unit. The second thing I did was reach out to the husband of a frequent reader of this blog, who knows a thing or two about backtracking emails. What he discovered was quite bizarre. Here's his response:

Whomever wrote it was in Northern New Jersey. That's as specific as I could narrow the location down as I don't have any contacts at Comcast (their ISP). I found one indication they are located in Manchester, NJ but that is unconfirmed. 

There is one very strange thing about this email: even though the email is plain-text (sent insecurely), there is an encryption fingerprint. What this means is that whomever wrote the email has email encryption software on their computer but, for whatever reason, chose not to encrypt this message. This is very uncommon and generally only found among security "nuts" in the IT world. What makes it even more bizarre is that they wrote the email by logging in to aol.com as opposed to sending it from a phone or email client such as Outlook. That in itself isn't strange but because of the encryption fingerprint, that means that the encryption software that they have on their computer is setup to secure whatever they do, which is a step beyond paranoid. Most encryption software won't touch anything you're doing unless you specifically tell it to ("encrypt this specific email", etc). Their setup seems to be reversed - it touches everything that's happening on their computer, and they have to specifically tell it to not encrypt something, like the email they sent you. 

When I started to poke around and see what else they had been doing with this email address, AOL had flagged the account with "Suspicious activity has been detected on this account. For your protection we are blocking access to this username." I can't say that I'm incredibly familiar with AOL's security policies or what they consider "suspicious activity", but I do know that in the IT industry, AOL is a joke - whatever this person did must have been rather severe to warrant AOL blocking their account entirely.  

That caught my interest, so I dug deeper and found that their email address has been placed on an alert list for RIPE in the Netherlands. RIPE is one of the organizations that essentially helps keep the internet running in Europe. Unfortunately, there were not details as to why they had been placed on this list. Making their shitlist means you were really causing some trouble. The odd part is that this was only instance I found this email address referenced. Normally if you're causing enough trouble to be put on a RIPE shitlist, whatever you've done has also landed you on dozens of other shitlists. Whatever this person did was very, very specific - not something like blasting out a bunch of spam to thousands of people. More like targeting one computer or network and successfully causing some damage. 

They were added to this RIPE list Apr 30, 2013 at 10:04:56 GMT. This specific list has since been deleted and they haven't reappeared on any of their other lists. This again goes to show that whatever they did was very specific - if it were inexact, they would have appeared on several of RIPE's lists.

And just when you thought this mystery couldn't get any weirder.

UPDATED - WHO ARE YOU?

What a great group of smart and thoughtful people here.

One of our group has emailed me with a caution regarding the potentially dangerous folks who are lurking around this case ... one in particular who has posted some nasty videos.  SO KEEP THAT IN MIND IF YOU CREATE A PROFILE OR USE A NAME.  First names, fake names and/or ID pics of your favorite sports team logo or flower are enough and the profile is not even necessary if you just consistently sign your posts.  All I hope for is some ID markers, not a revelation of who you are and where you live or whatever.  If you want to share more, feel free, but just be careful folks.

***

To folks who post often - or even at all - I hat-in-hand invite you to either create a profile (even with a phony name) or just sign a first name to your posts (even a fake one).

It would help me and others to better "know" our "colleagues" here by the nature of their thoughts and experiences.  If you can add a picture of you or anything, all the better to enhance that association.  Moreover, to the extent that we all have even synthetic identities here, the tighter I think the forum will be in terms of the vitriol trolls invading and wasting time with misinformation or personal attacks.

If you'd like to go so far as telling a bit in your profile about how you came to Maura's case and what it means to you, I'd like to know.  I have related a bit of this in my own profile and you can email me if you want to know more of my story. My own connection to the case is deeply emotional on the one hand but also strangely uncanny on the other.

Lastly if career or personal experience or the way you reason/think about things gives you an expertise or perspective in a particular area or approach to knowledge, I'd like to know that too.  It would be nice to have a heads up on to whom I can direct specific questions to as I need help.

In that context, by what folks have told me in the more than 150 emails I have gotten in the last two weeks, we have among us several lawyers, doctors, quantitative researchers/statisticians, GIS and software experts, an Internet data and marketing research expert and lots of other interesting backgrounds.  We also have folks who know the area around Haverhill well, some prominent people who can't use their real names, and some folks with professional or personal experience that is highly relevant to issues related to Maura's state of mind and what she may have been going through.  Perhaps most importantly, we have people are are good at articulating ideas from different perspectives and who know A LOT about this case.

Mostly what we have among us is logical, candid thinkers more interested in the case and clarity of perspective than anything else.  It is a tribute to James that he rallied this environment given what history tells about the fate of Maura Murray blogs.  For what it's worth, we also have a pretty well known musician.

So James has really got something rolling here.  I'd like to know folks more as that knowledge will help me to learn from you and hopefully do the best possible job gathering our expertise into reference materials for James.

So, no comments can be posted on this one. Just think about it.  Put your finger thinking into the case if you are wanting to post.  Thanks much ...

UPDATED - Did Maura Run East?

I have been watching Topix for substantive nuggets amid the vitriol regarding my posts.  Someone on Topix pointed out a foolish mistake I made in "Did Maura Run East" analysis.  Franconia Airport has no commercial service.  Unless Maura knew somebody in the glider association that it is home to, who then ... glided her to Toronto, this airport is irrelevant.

My apologies to you all for not having researched this better in advance.  The central point of the analysis stands but that extension falls.

Incidentally, citigirl also pointed out that Bradley Hill Road to 116 to 112 is hillier than 112 to the same point.  I checked this out.  Indeed the alternate route rises at 5.6% for 2.3 miles, dips suddenly then rises suddenly as it crosses a creek, then goes down hill about 5.6% back to 112.  This is a great observation by citigirl who clearly has one of the best commands of this case factually of anyone out there, but in the end it does not change the analysis.

This for three reasons.  [1] I used a really slow running rate in the first place, one benchmarked (with the help of an expert on running) on road running, thus including hills.  [2] A fit runner (unlike most of us) gains as much or more speed on a downhill as she loses on an uphill.  [3] Even if overall it affected her speed to some degree, four of the six scenarios involve the direct route on 112 and even if you add 30 seconds a mile to an unthinkably slow 9:30 per mile that only adds 2:30 to her total time.  

Thus the larger point of the table stands even if the assumption fails on hills.  But the assumption, being slow in the first place and with Maura being a runner, does not fail.

I really hope citigirl might become willing to lend her expertise to my methods.  She knows a lot more about this case than I do.

***

Rick Forcier reported an evasive-seeming person in a hoodie running on Route 112, four to five miles east of the Saturn accident scene, between 8:00 and 8:30 pm on February 9. Rick likely is not a suspect. Police searched the trailer he was living in after he sold it and nothing happened thereafter.

The relevance of Rick's report is often dismissed. For one thing, he did not offer it right away. Moreover, he has a morbid sense of humor, it has been alleged by some that his story changed across multiple interviews, and many have reasoned that the time frame was too tight for the person he saw to have been Maura.

Looking closely, however, the time frame was not too tight. In fact, the timeline of events is precisely consistent with Rick's statement.

To see this, first consider the following premises:

• Corroborating it with my former cross-country coach (the legendary Bruce Lehane at Boston University, who has coached 100s and 100s of male and female runners in his distinguished career) I came up with an assumption about how fast Maura might have been able to run that night. As a benchmark, on a slower, aerobic training off-day, without especial strain, an average to good female collegiate distance runner covers 6-9 miles at a pace around 7:40 per mile, at what's known as a "conversational pace." Exerting a little more effort, they'd move at seven minutes per mile, but without much strain. Eight minutes a mile would be slow and nine minutes a mile would be very slow, to the point where a female collegiate runner in a training scenario likely would not bother to run at that point. So lets assume Maura moved at nine minutes per mile that night, given that she was in blue jeans and less than ideal conditions. With the urgency that almost certainly accompanied her departure, this is reasonable. I can corroborate this with my personal experience.  When I was a competitive runner, I once found myself running along a road at night in the dead of winter in hiking boots and jeans.  I was able to maintain a pace about half a minute slower than a "conversational" normal training pace. Thus, there is a good chance Maura was moving faster than nine minutes per mile that night, but she probably was not moving slower than that.
• As a New England runner, Maura would have been familiar with running on snow covered roadways at night in the winter. This is the plight of student distance runners. The team typically gathers after 3:30 pm, after classes. After a meeting, stretching and a few warm up strides, the distance runners embark for a 45 to 90 minute jog when already it is almost dark, with it often being dark and a busy traffic hour by the time they return.
• Maura could have taken two routes away from the accident scene to get to the stretch of road where Rick saw the evasive-seeming runner in the hoodie. In addition to Route 112, she also could have taken Bradley Hill Road to Route 116, back to Route 112. This alternate route would have put her first on 112 near the middle of Rick's "four to five mile range," 4.6 miles east on Route 112 from the scene. Nonetheless, it involves only 1/2 mile more distance (i.e., via it, she would have had to jog 5.1 miles). This because Bradley Hill Road and a portion of Route 116 are much straighter than Route 112. Please refer to the first two images with this post, a map and a legend.
• The earliest Maura could have departed the scene was about 8:34 pm. This was five minutes after Faith Westman's call, thus giving her enough time to have talked with Bruce Atwood (which could have occurred as early as 7:25 pm), get out of the car, gather her thoughts and self, walk a short distance, then begin running. See the timeline posted to Renner's blog on Saturday the 11th.
•  The latest Maura could have departed the scene was 8:46 pm, or seconds before Officer Smith arrived. See the timeline posted to Renner's blog on Saturday the 11th.

Now, please refer to third image, provided with this post, Table A. It shows that under each of the eight possible scenarios stemming from the above reasoning, Maura had enough time to jog to any point of Rick's "four to five miles east" range estimated by Rick, by as early as 8:10 pm and no later than 8:32 pm.

But what about the scent dogs tracking her 100 yards east then losing the trail? That fact certainly tends to suggest Maura did not run east and was not the person Rick saw.

I am no expert on this topic. But I know that if you watch a slow motion film of a good runner, their feet are touching the ground a surprisingly low percentage of the time. Thus, I wonder: if she bolted at that point - perhaps seeing a police car approaching - was her scent dispersed more so than it had been in the first 100 yards, possibly increasing its further dispersal over the next two days, before the dogs were brought to the scene? Moreover, perhaps she was carrying something bearing a scent specifically similar to those new gloves (like a new hat), which she stuffed into her back pack at that point, or cast aside, which was then later carried by some wind into a creek or somehow otherwise lost onto the record of evidence. 

Ultimately - as more than one person asserting knowledge of scent tracking dogs has said - it is difficult to conclude anything given that two days had passed. The possibilities here require some further research, if anyone is an expert or knows one.

For now, we can say there are at least two bodies of evidence that indicate that Rick indeed could have seen Maura running on 112. Think of that possibility! She might already have been five miles away (a) before the Saturn was towed, (b) when Officer Smith had been looking around nearby the scene for the driver for at most 36 minutes, and (c) 57 minutes before he left the scene.

This possibility brings another into plainer view: that Maura found prior unreserved lodging that night. To wit, by the time Rick saw her - if that was her - she was fewer than seven miles away from the Pinestead Farm Lodge on Route 116 (to the north) and within ten miles of the Wilderness Inn Bed & Breakfast in Woodstock (and many other lodgings near it), down Route 112. Please refer to the 2nd map picture provided and the picture of the legend.  She easily could have gotten to these places in the next two hours - by 10:30 pm - alternately running and walking. And she had somewhere between $240 and (maybe) $4,240 on her person.

Just on the other side of I-93 from Woodstock is Lincoln, NH and a Greyhound Bus Station, with service to - among other cities - Montreal and Toronto. Just 3 miles north of the Pinestead Farm Lodge on Route 116 is the Franconia Airport. If Maura reached the nearest accommodations east, in Franconia or Woodstock, one has to wonder what she did the next morning.

I don't argue that it actually went down this way. Who can know at this point what happened? My purpose is to flesh out the facts and analyze what is possible or prohibited. Thus yet again, we have yet another possibility among the wide vector of them, each with their own supporting facts and contra-indications. 

TIMELINE - February 5-9, 2004

Hey Everyone,


At last, we have a working timeline!

• The table (5 pages) is the time line.
• The next 5 pages are the source notes, cross-referenced to the time line.
• The last page is a list of analysis topics that I will offer posts about in the coming weeks, based on the time line.  It also is cross-referenced to the timeline.

(If you would like copies of the files emailed to you, email me at John88Green@yahoo.com).

As you are read the timeline, some details or conventions might be confusing.  Don't worry too much about that now.  The follow up posts will better orient you.  Just focus on the flow of the facts and the time frames and how the pieces fit together.

A caveat ... this is version alpha.  I surely have not located all sources.  There may be better or even contradictory ones out there.  For example, I can't find an authentic original of the Grafton County Dispatch logs, which often are reproduced and quoted.  I may also have mad some errors in reasoning, such as where I inferred time frames.  And I may have left out an important event or two.

Par for the course.  For now, the point is that we have a working, detailed time line.  It will evolve.  Some have already expressed in email a willingness to review it for omissions and alternative or contradictory sources.  Thank you in advance. That process will tighten it up.  In particular, if you are familiar with a source or know a lot about a specific issue in the case, let me know where my efforts need perfecting.  In the end, as this product evolves, it will give James a good reference point as he writes, and all of us one as we think and chew and hypothesize.

But don't feel obligated to do review it critically.  Mainly I hope that by just looking it over, your sense of the flow of events is as edified as much as mine was by creating it.

Have a great weekend.  More to come next week.

Changes to the Method of Our Investigation

I am still processing the events in Cleveland. I covered the Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus abductions for The Free Times back in 2006. Like the police and the FBI, I had the name of the girl last seen with Gina, Arlene Castro. I can't help wondering if maybe I'd pushed a little harder for info about the girl and her family... How could anyone imagine what her father, Ariel Castro was up to?

The moment I heard that Amanda, Gina, and Michelle Knight had returned from the dead, I understood that I had underestimated the evil that men can do.

In the Maura Murray disappearance, I have dismissed the theory that Maura was abducted by a dirtbag from New Hampshire. She was only alone for seven minutes, after all. The odds that a serial killer happened to drive by in that short window--and avoid being seen--seemed too astronomical. But look at Ariel Castro. He proved that sometimes evil can take advantage of those astronomical odds.

So, let's have a look at that theory. If you live in Bath or Swiftwater or Haverhill, do you know of any men who board up their windows and put padlocks on their doors? Have you noticed any single men buying food in bulk at McDonalds or the grocery store?

I'm changing something else. I'm letting other people add to the investigation into what happened to Maura Murray.

Beginning tomorrow, John Green will be contributing analysis of the evidence in this case. He's been sharing some insight through emails and it should be shared. The first thing he's doing is creating a very specific timeline of Maura's activities before her disappearance.

Let's figure this one out.

Amanda Berry/Gina DeJesus/Michelle Knight Found ALIVE after decade abducted.

I've written about these missing girls in The Serial Killer's Apprentice. Updating this developing story out of Cleveland tonight: amymihaljevic.blogspot.com

Never give up hope.