Ok now some additional facts to mix in with my impressions of this case:
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The chapter of Nicholas Howe's book,Not Without Peril, which Mara had marked with a card was titled "A Question of Life or Death'' is book-marked with a Hallmark card and a photograph of Maura's brother Kurtis in a Little League uniform.
The intro to that chapter reads (I bolded parts for emphasis & transcribed as best I could. Please forgive any typos):
"We try to make our lives safe. For every hazard there are warnings and barriers,for every bold assertion there are fallback positions,for every fallible device there are back-up systems and redundancies. Children go forth to play girded with armor for their head,face,teeth,elbows,knees, and any other part that may suffer assault. I've seen a step ladder with eighteen warning labels pasted to it,another with a six part lesson on how to avoid falling off, with attendant diagrams. If all else fails we go to court;when a piece of bridge masonry fell through the top of a convertible,the driver sued the car company for making a cloth top that wouldn't keep out falling masonry. So when we talk about questions of life or death, we usually don't mean it.
There do come times,though,perhaps only once in a lifetime,when we're really up against it,
when there're no manual or guide or precedent,when we really do have to answer a question of life or death. The crew at Madison Hut had to do that one evening just as they were serving dinner to a full house,they were all college age and they were up against it."
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I think the intro tells why she brought the college books- to show they did not hold the answers to her need to escape.
The booze and the tylenol were to be left to show she could have suicided but chose not to do so. It was to say she felt she had to escape or die. Incidentally, the chapter that Maura Murray marked was about some people whose decisions all along the way could have changed their outcome between life or death and at one point they come to a trail that branches off in seven directions (pg 224).
Maura must have planned to stage a rented room with the Not Without Peril book & its bookmarks and the booze bottles & tylenol center stage, probably on the bed, and maybe the college books staged around in a circle or something.
Then she planned to have her friend follow a few minutes behind & pick her up and take her to her car so she could make her getaway and maybe have friend return to the room to retrieve her belongings. But the accident made those steps impossible to implement.
Instead her friend just picks her up on the road near the accident scene & takes her to her new waiting car and she is gone, seemingly without a trace. You might say Alice has stepped through the looking glass.
(Edited to add: When you dont' trust your car because its not running well you might well ask a friend to follow you when you have to move the car very far. I read that Maura's car wasn't running well & that would account for her having a friend follow her exact route only a few minutes behind- in case the car should break down.)
All of this is overly elaborate planning, which is in keeping with the long time fantasy theory.
In mild support of that theory: I read that one of her favorite movies was about someone who disappears to begin a new life. Maybe that's related or maybe not. But its a thought.
I think I have accounted for why she took the things she took with her in the car that night when she disappeared and why other things were not taken from the dorm but were left behind packed & ready.
I don't have a final solution but my overall impression at this time is that Maura is alive and that she may have suffered from a sort of mental condition that made her obsess about her escape fantasy until she was compelled to implement it and step through the looking glass.
She was involved with a one car accident where alcohol was present and she left the scene (as far as we can tell based on news reports.) I can not say when or if she will ever return. I think she probably did not go anywhere in the north but it is not impossible. I think she probably changed her hair color - maybe blonde? and that she probably went to be near a border of the U.S. probably someplace nice and warm and no mountains- the opposite of what she had been used to. But thats just speculation as is much of what I have presented here. At least I based that speculation on what few facts I had to work with.
That's all there is so far. I hope it helps.
[size=-1]Minor note:
Suggestion:One way to test whether Maura would likely have known that this ploy would not have worked is to actually have a student there take a survey of junior nursing students (without letting them know its in any way related to Maura's disappearance) and ask the junior level college students what they think would happen if they tried to use that excuse to go on a bender from work. And to ask them how the employer would or would not check up on that excuse.
(Side note about the mardi gras part of the reason for using the death-in-the-family excuse: I noticed the search for her possibly being in hotels was hampered by the fact that
"All the hotels are full this weekend because we have Mardi Gras.")[/size]
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End of Workup
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