Law Enforcement:
We have been willing to criticize law enforcement in every way possible.
We say that they should have found her after the New Hampshire crash, alleging that they did not search for her, even though this is not true. She was searched for by officers and at least one resident. A BOLO was issued, and police in other towns were looking for Maura. The dispatch records reflect that law enforcement was checking to see if she had shown up at “the cottage,” which is what the local hospital was called. To my recollection, Sgt. Smith even secured her car as a crime scene, which to me suggests competence above and beyond what is to be expected.
We allege that they did not perform ground searches for Maura in New Hampshire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5L2BPg8IWg
This video shows the end of the official ground search on 2/20/2004. That is a pretty long ground search in such a rural area, is it not?
We question why they did not search hiking trails. I’m not sure they didn’t. Regardless, if Law Enforcement chose to use their resources to search remote and inaccessible areas rather than well-traveled public hiking trails, are they really at fault in this thinking? Wouldn’t Maura’s family, which included at least one experienced hiker, prefer to search these trails themselves and leave the more difficult areas of search to officers with more experience and better equipment? And if searching the hiking trails would really have been as simple and fruitful as has been suggested, wouldn’t some evidence of Maura have been found along these trails, presumably by hikers? Are we to believe that because police “found no evidence of foul play” during these searches, that this somehow makes foul play a less likely or impossible scenario? It’s not like they found evidence of suicide, accident, or death by natural causes. They can’t even prove that she’s dead, let alone draw conclusions about how she died.
We allege that Officer Ruddock of the Hadley Police Department didn’t arrest Maura Murray for DUI even though she was driving drunk. We accuse him of negligence in his official capacity so that we can believe that Maura was drunk at the scene of this accident.
We claim that the police haven’t been actively investigating this case since a few months after she disappeared, even though we know that the New Hampshire Department Cold Case Unit has been assigned to investigate Maura’s disappearance and that the whole purpose of this unit is to actively investigate cold cases. We presume, without evidence, that they are not performing the official duties of their jobs.
Are we to believe that the officers investigating this case just labeled this a suicide on Fred Murray’s say-so? That they refused to consider other possibilities because this was Fred Murray’s first thought? That no officers ever thought she might have been the victim of a crime before Fred Murray allegedly introduced the “local dirtbag” theory? Why do we impugn law enforcement, presuming to have special knowledge as to their thoughts, by suggesting that they believe what is told to them, rather than what the evidence indicates to them? Why should a theory hold more or less weight depending upon who introduced the theory?
If law enforcement has always been convinced that Maura committed suicide, why don’t they want to release the information they have gathered? Why would information that suggested Maura committed suicide hinder an investigation? If they know that this is what happened, why don’t they tell the public so that we can focus our search on areas that are conducive to this theory? Did they perform four polygraph tests to determine what people knew about her suicide? Did they search a residence looking for evidence that Maura had taken her own life?
Is there any officer of the law or investigative department we won’t presume is lying, mistaken or incompetent in this case, just to convince ourselves that we know more circumstances than we do? To convince ourselves that we know she killed herself, or we know she was drunk, or we know some other fact that we actually do not know?
Because we want to think that suicide is the best theory, that it is better than other theories, we assume that the police know this theory to be true and that the case remains open simply because they have not found her.
Why should we assume that law enforcement is bored with this case? Are you bored with this case? Don’t you think about this case all the time? Are we to presume that the investigators of Maura’s disappearance somehow lack the humanity that attracted us all to this case? Do we think that this case doesn’t keep them up at night? In fact, I would guess that some investigators think about this case so much that they sometimes read this board.
Are we really willing to criticize all of these departments just to convince ourselves that we know she committed suicide? And if she did, in fact, kill herself, isn’t this the scenario in which law enforcement is the
least responsible? Do we blame them for not tracking down an adult who left the scene of what we are willing to just assume was a DUI crash? For not preventing her suicide? For not discovering it? Do we blame them for not arresting Maura for drunk driving at the scene of the Hadley crash where a trained officer determined that she wasn’t drunk at all? Is this how they should have prevented her apparently indisputable suicide?
I just think it’s interesting that the suicide theory, in which the police are actually the least responsible for what happened to her, is the one that requires us to presume the most wrong-doing on the part of the investigators.
We want to think that law enforcement knows that this is a suicide, and that they have the information to confirm this. We think this because we want to believe that we, too, would know for certain that this was a suicide, if only we had the evidence that police are allegedly withholding from us. But we don’t know what they know or what they don’t know.
