2017 - 2024 Tab Media news •
There’s a new Oxygen show about the UMass student who went missing without a trace
‘How does a person disappear when there are people watching?’
Nobody knows what happened to Maura Murray, a 21-year-old nursing student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who allegedly went missing after her car crashed into a snowbank in Haverhill, New Hampshire in February of 2004.
The mystery of her disappearance is now being called the “first crime mystery of the social media age,” and Oxygen is set to air her story, The Disappearance of Maura Murray, on September 30, in a last ditch attempt to unravel it once and for all.
She told no one where she was going when she emptied her bank account, packed her things, and left.
She would be 34 today, but neither her, nor her body, was ever found.
When police found the car, they claim the windshield was cracked, the airbags were deployed, and a box of wine was spilled across the back car seat.
“Online psychopaths want to throw mystery and intrigue into the situation,” detectives explain in the trailer for the six-part documentary. If you’ve spent any time online with the case, “you’ve become obsessed with it,” they say, “and if not, you will.”
There are discussion pages dedicated to conspiracy theories, and thousands of people from different corners of the world trying to piece together her case.
Several witnesses swear they saw her outside her car after the crash, including a bus driver who claims she asked him not to call the police, telling him that AAA was on the way.
“How does a person disappear when there are three people watching?” asks reporter Maggie Freleng, who has been chasing Murray’s story.
Another woman went missing five weeks after, so some believe it was the work of a serial killer, but most can’t agree on anything. “My daughter wouldn’t want me to quit on her,” her father told the Associated Press, “She’d want me to keep trying to find out who grabbed her.”
In the trailer, others allege she was pregnant and running from that. Maura’s sister claims none of the police contacted her at the time of the disappearance, but since the case has reopened, clues in her texts, emails and social media have begun to surface.
“Nobody can be trusted,” say experts who have weighed in on the case, “Not her family, not the police.”
The trailer previewed at CrimeCon 2017
This is part of a “disappearance of” franchise by Oxygen, including The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway.