Julie Murray grapples with an unceasing question, one that haunts her every day: What happened to her sister?
“Twenty-two years is a long time to live inside a question mark,” she said at a rally near the State House on Friday. “My sister Maura disappeared in February of 2004. I’ve spent more than two decades learning how to carry a question that may never get answered.”
Maura Murray, a 21-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was last seen in Haverhill, a rural North Country town near the Vermont border. She is believed to have gotten into a single-car accident on Route 112, but by the time police arrived at her black Saturn sedan, Murray had disappeared. To this day, no one has seen or heard from her.
Her family has not stopped pushing for answers. Four years ago, they helped form the New Hampshire Coalition of Families of the Missing and Murdered. Each year since, the group has gathered at the state Capitol to share their stories and push for change.
“Families like ours continue to speak out for our loved ones, hurting ourselves every time we have to relive the trauma,” said Julie Murray. “It’s like resetting a misaligned bone fracture: painful but necessary for proper healing. It’s the sacrifice we must make to ensure our loved one’s stories are not forgotten.”
The coalition had been hopeful that Senate Bill 621 would pass this year, “establishing a homicide cold case commission for the purpose of acting as an intermediary between the Department of Justice and the family of cold case homicide victims,” according to the bill’s description.
However, it was voted down “with the argument that it would compromise investigations,” Murray said. The coalition wants communication, not sensitive information, she said. They seek regular updates on their loved ones, even if the report is that there’s no new information. Anything but “the wall of silence many of us have battled for years.”
The state renewed its commitment to the missing and murdered last year with the addition of two new full-time investigators to its Cold Case Unit, run through the Attorney General’s office. Since last fall, the team solved the case of Concord woman Judith Lord, who had been killed by her next-door neighbor five decades ago in her Concord Gardens apartment, they determined. Investigators were also able to identify the remains of Rea Rasmussen, one of the victims in the Bear Brook murders.
Still, over 100 families are waiting for answers about their unsolved cases. Murray said she appreciates the work that’s happened and that families feel their relationship with the Attorney General’s office has “genuinely improved.” However, she said, “what’s been done is commendable, but it’s still nowhere near enough.”
For Carey-Ann Wilson, whose cousin Trish Haynes was murdered in 2018 — her body stuffed into a washing machine found in a Grafton pond two months later — the quest for information has been a long and painful one.
Like Murray, she wants to see increased communication between authorities and the families still waiting for answers.
“We believe trust and transparency strengthen, not weaken the pursuit of justice,” she said at the rally.
Her cousin’s case is not considered cold: it hasn’t had any periods of inactivity that would qualify it as such, according to Ben Agati, chief of the state’s Homicide Unit. After five years with no leads or active investigation, a case gets reclassified as cold.
Wilson’s experiences of feeling alone and misunderstood by society at large align with those of other families in similar situations.
“Unless you’ve experienced that kind of loss, it is difficult to explain what that really means,” said Wilson. “People often say that grief gets easier with time. Unresolved grief is different. Time doesn’t answer questions. It doesn’t tell you what happened. It doesn’t answer why.”
Maura Murray’s brother Kurtis spoke about the toll that public perception around his sister’s disappearance has taken on his life.
“Many will never know what it is to have their families villanized by online sleuths in online forums to be used for profit and to be used as a sick form of entertainment, no consideration given for what’s being done to those left behind,” he said.
The coalition’s mantra is to be “a voice for the voiceless.” Jane Boroski, who considers herself a living cold case victim, said it’s important to keep people’s stories alive. She was stabbed 27 times at a gas station in 1988 by someone who she believes to be the elusive Connecticut River Valley serial killer, who claimed the lives of seven women in New Hampshire and Vermont in the 1980s.
Boroski, aged 22 at the time, was seven months pregnant. She and her unborn daughter both survived the attack. The man who stabbed her — or any of the other women — was never found.
“If we stop talking about all those unsolved cases in the Cold Case Unit, the people forget about them,” Boroski said. “They even think they’re solved, which they’re not. The media forgets about them, and then law enforcement forgets about them, and the cases remain unsolved.”
Cold Case Unit Chief R. Christopher Knowles reiterated his team’s dedication to uncovering answers for families.
At the rally, he had a message for the public: “You have the power to help these families. One person can make all the difference.”
Science, he said, is rarely enough on its own to crack these cases. Often, a person holds onto an important “piece of information they believe may not matter or they’re too scared to come forward,” Knowles said.
“That passing comment you overheard years ago, sudden change in someone’s behavior, a conversation that never quite made sense, a lingering suspicion you’ve had to yourself —any one of those things could be the missing piece that finally brings answers to families that have waited far, far too long,” he said.
People have the ability to submit a tip, including anonymously.
- Cold Case Unit Tip Line: (603) 271-2663
- Email: coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov
- Online: Submit a tip at www.doj.nh.gov/criminal/cold-case
