Hey there. I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films, and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the Insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app.

On February fourth, 2004, a website by the name of Facebook went live across America. Until that date, joining the site required a Harvard email address. But that day, Facebook went worldwide. By the end of the year, the site would have a million users, 600 million by the end of the decade. Today, everything from garden parties to presidential elections are discussed on Facebook. But in those first few weeks, the conversation of those early users was all focused on one topic, the disappearance of a high-achieving college student who His crashed car was found abandoned in rural New Hampshire. Her name is Mara Murray. Two decades after she went missing, her disappearance is still a regular topic of discussion passion, not just on Facebook, but on every social media platform that popped up in its wake. I'm Ashley Loeb-Blasingame, and you're listening to The Missing, a What's the Story? Original podcast series This episode, and all the episodes in the United States and Canada, are brought to you with the help of the DOE Network, a not-for-profit volunteer organization dedicated to returning the missing to their families and giving the name comes back to the unidentified. And with them, we've set up a simple way for you to share any tips, ideas, leads, or information which can be passed to the relevant authorities.

They believe that all of the cases in this series could still be solved. This is The Missing, Mara Murray. A quick word about this episode. It's a case you may well have read about or listened to elsewhere. There has been lots of discussion about it, but this, for Mara's sister, Julie, is the full story.

So my family grew up about 20 minutes, 25 miles south of Boston, Massachusetts, in a small town called Hanson, where There wasn't a whole lot to do other than play sports and do school work.

Julie is Mara's older sister, who has fond memories of the time they spent together.

It's a very small town, and we never locked our doors. There was no crime. We would play outside from the minute we woke up all the way till it got dark, and that was just normal. And of course, this was back in the '80s, too, and there was no social media or really even video games at that point.

Mara and Julie's love language was trash talk.

Well, the first The thing that comes to my mind is just the banter that Mara and I used to have as sisters. I'm two and a half years older, and Mara was the youngest for quite a while, and It was just constant banter back and forth. And that's what larger families like mine who didn't have a whole lot of money did to entertain ourselves. So I have very fond memories of just lot of smack talking between all of my siblings, and that's something that I miss maybe the most.

Mara, much like her older sister, was a high achiever.

She was so talented. She was an outstanding athlete. She was an all-star runner. She picked up sports very, very easily, loved to be outdoors, camping and hiking. She was was a phenomenal student as well, and she'd pick up math and high-level sciences quickly.

But Mara wasn't one to show off.

Despite her talent, she was always very humble, and she couldn't take a compliment, and she would blush and look down when anyone would ever acknowledge the amazing things that she was doing, both in the classroom and on the track.

During the kids' formative years, much of the Murray family's time was spent in the great outdoors.

Growing up, our memories were in the white mountains of New Hampshire, so we would take vacations up to New Hampshire multiple times a year. And we did have a big family, so camping was something affordable that my parents could do for us that didn't cost a lot of money. And it was really It's great for kids to be out there in nature and learn about camping and getting those additional responsibilities because with camping, it requires the logistics, it requires cleanup, it requires setup. Teamwork. We got those life lessons early just by camping. And that's where my most fond memories are from.

Mara, like the rest of her siblings, was encouraged to try out all kinds of sports. She was good at pretty much everything she tried her hand at. But one area she really shone in was track.

We were really good at it, and we excelled at a faster rate than our peers. We knew that that would help us get into college, whether it be partial scholarship or full scholarship, just through running alone because we were setting records beating so many other people. Coming from a big family with five kids and divorced parents, we knew that we needed to figure a way to pay for college, and running seemed to be the ticket.

Mara's parents separated when she was seven years old.

It wasn't as big of a deal as it could have been because my mother worked the 3:00 to 11:00 shift as a nurse, which meant my dad had to pick us up from school and practices. So we saw him all the time.

Running brought Mara and Julie closer together.

It takes a special breed of a person to enjoy running, and Mara and I certainly did enjoy running. It's one of those things where you can't… There's no external motivation that could make runners run. In a way, I felt like we were born with a running gene because we just loved it. I typically ran the mile, and she typically ran the two mile, but we definitely trained together, and we were each other's number one fans. Now, when it came to cross country, where it was a single distance, a single race, Mara was a little bit better at those longer distances than I was. So there was a level of competitiveness. There always has been between us as sisters. But at the end of the day, we both wanted each other to do well.

In the summer of 1998, when it came time to figure out what she wanted to do after graduating high school, Julie decided to attend the highly selective United States Military Academy at West Point.

West Point is a service academy, and students, candidates who are nominated to attend don't pay. So it's federally funded. And once you get accepted, taxpayers pay your way. It's a military school. You go through your college experience with all of these additional layers of responsibility in terms of military commitments, leadership courses. You've got to take military training courses like survival, swimming, or how to disassemble a rifle, things like that. So there's a very heavy influence on the military, obviously. And then it's a leadership school at the end of the day. So it's taking young high school students and transforming them into the future leaders of the United States Army. So it's super prestigious. It's very difficult to get in.

And a few years later, Mara followed in her sister's footsteps.

Well, it was my persuasion. That's the bottom line. I mean, I would write back and call her and tell her how much that she would love it because to me, it It was like a game, and I loved it. I loved the physical component of it. I knew that Mara was in shape. I knew she was a great runner, and that would earn her instant respect.

Life at West Point is a very full-on experience.

The first summer is definitely the hardest, and it's called Beast Barracks. That's where you have all the hazing, the screaming, the marching around, the memorization, all of that stuff.

West Point's culture was not for the faint of heart.

New cadets at Beast Barracks have to march around. They have to have a closed fist. Say, for instance, a new cadet doesn't have a tight closed fist when they're marching and an upperclassman sees that, the upperclassman will stop that new cadet and get within inches of their face and just raise their voice and ask the new cadet why they didn't have their fist close. Then that would probably end up in a number of push-ups and reciting, memorized knowledge. It's just a shock to your system.

Discipline was priority one.

As a new cadet, one of the first things you learn is your four responses. It's, again, to instill discipline within the corps of cadets. The four authorized responses are, Yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, no excuse, ma'am, ma'am, I do not understand. A lot of times, the upperclassmen will mess with new cadets and ask them questions that require an answer that just can't fit into those four responses just to rattle the new cadet.

And then, just over a year after Mara started at West Point, something happened which changed everything. On September 11th, 2001, 19 members of Al Qaeda hijacked four commercial planes. One was brought down in rural Pennsylvania. Another was crashed into the Pentagon, and two were flown into the World Trade Center. It was the worst ever terrorist attack committed on US soil and resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 people.

When it happened, I remember I was in my psychology class, and everything just stopped. The bells went off to switch classes. Nobody switched, nobody moved. We just sat there. And then shortly thereafter, the academy went on lockdown, meaning all cadets had to remain in place. We couldn't go out into any of the central areas, common areas, because we weren't certain at that point whether West Point itself could be a target. And we knew instantly. We knew, Okay, our futures are changed. Our futures are not the way that we thought they were going to be. Never in a million years would any of us have ever predicted that we would graduate into war.

Meanwhile, Mara was struggling. She had made it through her first year at West Point, but it had been far from easy.

She wasn't having a good time there at all. I honestly can't say that she enjoyed any of it other than after beast barracks we started training together for the cross country team. That was probably the only reprieve that she got and the only time that she enjoyed herself at West Point was probably on the track or on the trails running. As an upperclassman, I was around during her beast barracks because I had my own responsibilities to handle One of those was being an upperclassman, teaching new cadets how to march and drill and all that. I was able to go visit Mara. One time, I went to go visit her and bring her cookies, which was a perk to have a sibling at the academy because you could do that type of thing. I found her just sobbing, crying in the middle of these barracks. I knew then that she didn't love it.

Then, one day, Mara was caught stealing makeup from a shop on campus. It was only $5 worth, and Mara admitted guilt immediately. For Julie, this was a clear cry for help.

Well, at West Point, there's a honor code, and the honor code states, A cadet will not lie, cheat, nor steal or tolerate those who do. So Mara obviously stole the makeup, but what she did was immediately own to it and take accountability. So because she violated the honor code, she did have to go through what we call an honor board, which is a committee of cadets that determine if another cadet broke, violated the honor code. I had many friends who went through the honor board process where they did way worse than stealing $5 worth of makeup, and they received various punishments and were not kicked out of West Point. Before Mara's committee was going to determine her punishment, that's when she decided to leave West Point.

Mara realized that she'd had enough and that a military career, particularly one that could see her go to war, wasn't for her.

So Mara applied to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she got accepted. Her credits from West Point, some of them transferred over, and she was accepted into the highly challenging nursing program.

Mara and Julie kept in touch.

This would have been 2002, 2003. Our main way to communicate was through AOL, Instant Messenger. Of course, after I graduated West Point, I went to South Korea, so I wasn't even in the country, and there was a time difference. So AOL was the best way for us to communicate.

It became pretty clear to Julie early on that the move had been the right choice for her sister.

She seemed much happier as opposed to her time at West Point, and she was on the dean's list in the nursing program, so she was doing really well.

Life carried on. Mara continued to Excel both academically and in athletics. She made new friends. She was in a good place. Then, one Tuesday evening in February 2004, everything changed.

I was at my apartment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was on Tuesday. I must have just gotten home from work. I honestly can't remember who called me, but it was somebody in my family, and essentially, the message was Have you heard from Mara? She's missing. Her car was found in New Hampshire, and she's not there. So that was the first message, and then it was just panic after that.

To make matters worse, Julie couldn't simply drop everything and head for New Hampshire at a moment's notice.

My unit was on deployment orders, so we were scheduled to go to Iraq. That was a whole another layer of challenges that I had to face because I obviously couldn't leave my family because it would have been for a year or a year and a half where I be in Iraq, and that just could not work. So I had to find someone to replace me, which took some time, and I finally was able to do that, and then I got my emergency leave.

By the time Julie was able to link up with her family, the authorities had begun putting together a timeline of the events leading up to the discovery of Mara's abandoned vehicle.

First, starting on the Thursday night before she disappeared, she disappeared on a Monday. And when she was working at a security desk job, she had some emotional breakdown that happened on Thursday night. And so we still don't know exactly what caused that emotional breakdown, but that seemed to be the first indicator that something wasn't right.

Mara's job was to check IDs at the reception of one of the dorm room buildings. At some point, During her shift, she became visibly upset. After telling her supervisor that she needed to end her shift early, she was escorted back to her dorm room. Her supervisor, concerned about Mara's welfare, asked her what was wrong. Mara just kept repeating the words, My sister, my sister. It later emerged that earlier that day, Mara had been on the phone with her older sister, Kathleen. Kathleen was in recovery from alcohol abuse and had relapsed. Could this conversation have triggered an extreme reaction from Mara? It certainly explained the repeated murmurings of, My sister.

That weekend, my dad went up to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from his traveling job in Connecticut to help Mara buy a new car.

Mara's car was in bad shape. Her exhaust was full of holes and smoking badly, to the point that her dad suggested sticking a rag in it.

So they go car shopping all day, and they identify a couple of cars that they liked, but they didn't purchase it because they thought they had it the whole day on Sunday to make that decision.

That night, Mara went to a dorm room party on campus.

And there's a lot of confusion surrounding this party. Was it actually a gathering or a big blow-out party. There's still a lot of unanswered questions regarding what happened at the party, if anything, because the host of that party hasn't been forthcoming with what happened. So Mara Cara leaves this gathering party at the dorms, and she gets into my dad's new car, a Toyota Corolla, and she totals it. So she drives into a T-intersection and totals the car. This would have been on Sunday, the day before she disappeared, about 3:30 AM. Police arrive. They don't cite her for DUI. They don't give her any medical treatment. They simply mark driver inattentiveness on the police report and send her on her way, and they tow the car. So the next day comes around, and instead of car shopping, they're now trying to figure out what to do with the damaged car. And my dad figures out that car insurance will cover it. So he gets a rental car. He tries to reassure Mara that it would be okay. Mara wasn't hurt, of course, but that we know of. But she was definitely distraught for causing so much damage to my dad's car.

Mara's father was due back in Connecticut that evening. After her to promise that she'd follow up on the insurance claim, he said his goodbyes, got in his rental car, and drove home. He would never see his daughter again.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films, and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's That's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the Insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app.

At 3:32 AM on the morning of Monday, February ninth, 2004, less than 24 hours before she went missing, Mara submitted an assignment for nursing school. For Julie, this alone seems like evidence enough that her sister didn't disappear on purpose. Who submits schoolwork the night before they vanished or kill themselves? It didn't make any sense. Then Mara looked up directions to Burlington, Vermont, and Barlett, New Hampshire. Both of these were locations that the family had vacationed in previously. Mara's Internet activity paused for a few hours at around 4:00 AM that morning when she presumably went to sleep.

Then mid morning on February ninth, the day that she went missing, she does some more Internet searches. She emails her professors saying that there's a fictitious death in the family, that there was no death in our family. Then she makes another couple of phone calls. She calls a condo owner. Her name was Linda Salomon, up in Bartlett, New Hampshire, which was a condo I have a condo complex that my family had stayed in before, but we hadn't stayed in that particular unit. But Mara does not end up making a reservation. Then she calls an information line called 1-800-GO Stowe, which is in Stowe, Vermont. It's a ski resort area. It was just information, so she did not book a reservation through that call either.

What was Mara planning that night? She clearly had decided that she needed to get away from it all for a couple of days to get out of Amherst and clear her head, perhaps. But why?

Then she returns some borrowed clothes to a nursing school classmate. She goes to an ATM and takes out $280, leaving just shy of $20 in her bank account. Then she goes to a liquor store and purchases about $40 worth of liquor, and she recycles 79 cans to redeem $3.95..

Was Mara self-medicating with alcohol? We know she was never breathalized following her car accident. Incident, but she had come from a party. This latest purchase seemed to suggest that whatever she was getting away from in Amherst, she planned to use alcohol to cope with it.

During this time, she's playing phone tag with her boyfriend Bill who was my West Point classmate, and he was stationed out at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, but she never connects with him that day.

Mara emailed Bill at 1:00 PM that day saying that she loved him, but that she didn't feel like talking to anyone.

Then after the liquor store, we know that she went either to the Massachusetts DMV or the Hadley Police Department to obtain the accident forms that my dad requested she get, so we know that she did that. Then at 4:37 PM, she checks her voicemail for the last time. That's the last known cell phone activity on her phone ever.

The next update concerning Mara's location comes at approximately 7:27 PM that evening when a resident of the small rural town of Woodsville gets in touch with the authorities to report a car accident.

It's in northern New Hampshire. It was about two and a half hours north of where Mara was going to school at Amherst, Massachusetts. It's a road called Wild Ammonuzic Road, which is very narrow. It's winding, it's bendy, it's turny. It was very dark. On the stretch of road that Mara's accident happened, there were many houses within proximity of the accident. So there was four major neighbors that were right there that actually all had eyes on.

The first witness to get in touch with the police was a woman named Faith Westman.

This witness hears a loud thud out their kitchen window, looks out the window, and sees a dark Saturn in the eastbound lane facing westbound. So basically on the opposite side of the road facing the wrong way.

The family later employed independent forensic experts to assess the scene and offer up their theories as to what happened at the point of impact.

We believe that she may have gone down into a small ravine, and that's what caused the damage. We did have a vehicle reconstructionist look at the car. The police report says that she hit a tree, but the vehicle reconstructionist disagrees with that and said the damage is not consistent with hitting a tree. So we think she may have gone into this ravine and then tried to back out. On the other side of the ravine was this two-foot-high snowbank, so that could have caused the damage to her car. Both airbags deployed and the windshield on the driver's side was cracked.

Whatever did occur, a few moments later, a man named Butch Atwood happened upon the scene.

So a few minutes later, after Faith calls it in, her neighbor, a man named Butch Atwood, was returning home from dropping students off at a ski trip. He's in a bus, and he stops by the Black Saturn and speaks to the driver, asked if she needs any help. The driver declines and says she called Triple A, but Butch knows that this could not be true because there's no cell phone service in the area. So he asked if she wants to wait at his house, which is a few hundred yards down the road east, and she says no. So he goes back to his house and he places the second 911 call at 7:42.

One can imagine many reasons why Mara may have turned down Atwood's help. She was a young, vulnerable woman in the middle of nowhere and was perhaps hesitant to accept the assistance of a man she did not know.

And And then minutes later at 7:46 is when the first responding officer shows up and the vehicle is locked and abandoned.

The police responded to what they thought was a straightforward accident scene, which quickly turned into a missing person case.

Not a whole lot happened that night, other than the police officer going to talk to both the Westmans and the Outwoods and asking what they saw and asking where the girl is. And they also looked... He also, the responding officer, looked around for a footprint, didn't see any footprints. Then fire and EMS showed up, and there was quite a number of people that were also looking around at the vehicle and then in the immediate area for footprints, but none were spotted that night.

The following morning at Amherst College, Mara's fellow students would soon learn of her absence.

Mara's dorm floor mates were complaining on Tuesday, February 10th, that there was this a farm that was going off incessantly, and it was annoying them. And so they called the RA, which is like a dorm assistant type person who had access to the room. And they go into the room. It was Mara's, and it was Mars, and it was Mars alarm clock going off. And of course, Mara wasn't there. But it's an image that does haunt me just thinking about that.

Meanwhile, the authorities hoped that Mara's personal items might reveal some clues to her current location.

Mara had textbooks showing that she was going to keep up with her school work. She had toiletries, she had CDs, she had a random assortment of clothes, but no dressy clothes. She only had a one singular sock. She didn't have any underwear. It was just a hodgepodge of things that she had, and it didn't seem like this was a well-thought-out plan. Using the word pack is a stretch, too, because it just seemed like a bunch of random stuff that may have already been in the car, to be honest. I mean, if she was going on a trip, she would certainly pack more than a singular sock. If she was going to an environment like New Hampshire in February, she definitely wasn't prepared for the elements. We know that she had a black book bag. That has never been found. Her keys have never been found. Her cell phone never been found. Books, I mean, IDs, credit cards, that stuff, never been found.

It took some time for the news about Mara's accident and subsequent disappearance to filter back to her family.

The car was actually registered to my dad, so the registration traced back to a 62-year-old man from Massachusetts. It wasn't until they executed the search warrant of the vehicle the next day on Tuesday that they identified Mara as the likely driver, because, of course, my dad has three daughters. There was no contact made with my father the Monday night, and it wasn't until Tuesday early evening that the Haverhill Police Department contacted my mother, and they got her number from calling my grandfather. It was a roundabout way to get a word to my family.

Julia remembers the numbness that quickly took hold when word of her sister's disappearance eventually made its way to her.

Just disbelief, just complete shock. None of us knew why she'd be in New Hampshire on a Monday night in February. We were just so confused. It was just panic and chaos. My family members made their way up to New Hampshire that Wednesday, and they were talking to different people, talking to law enforcement. They weren't getting a whole lot. They were searching themselves, pinning up flyers. And during this time, I'm in Fort Bragg, in the dark, not knowing what was going My mother was sick and had a broken ankle. She was in our childhood home in Hansen, in case Mara showed up or called. So it was just chaos that first couple of weeks. And And with each passing day, it just got worse, and the fear, and the dread, and the panic just got worse and worse.

Meanwhile, the police were doing their best to pick up Mara's trail.

There were some houses, but there was thick forest, and there had been a previous snowstorm, so there was two feet of accumulated snow on the ground, so we would have seen footprints if she left the roadway, and we did not. They brought in two scent dogs, and they used a glove from Mara's trunk as the scent item, but they chose this glove without any consultation with my family. We're not sure if she ever even wore this glove, but the scent dogs tracked the scent in a Easterly direction away from the car and then lost it in the middle of the road.

Mara's family eventually made their own way to the scene, where they took it upon themselves to question the locals.

When we spoke to the immediate neighbors that first week, law enforcement had not spoken to those neighbors yet. It was almost a good 7-10 days before law enforcement even spoke to the immediate neighbors, which is insane pain.

Mara's loved ones understood just how vital the first few days are when it comes to a missing person case, and they found the lack of apparent progress progress deeply concerning.

Initially, it was very frustrating trying to deal with law enforcement. Of course, my family had no experience with something like this, so we just assumed that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing and speaking to neighbors. When we found out that they hadn't done that, we knew that we were just upset.

Before long, the Murray's relationship with police deteriorated.

Eventually, my dad sued the state of New Hampshire to gain access to the case files under New Hampshire's Freedom of Information Act. And he was ultimately denied But the relationship was not good because it was my family saying, You need more resources. Call in the FBI. In New Hampshire, saying, We're doing all that we can. Just be patient, sit back, and It wasn't good. But over the last several years, the personnel up there in the state of New Hampshire have turned over, and my relationship with law enforcement is much better.

There has been endless speculation about what happened to Mara that night. One theory is that she may have been intoxicated, which could explain how she crashed in the first place.

There's only one person that interacted with Mara that night, and that was Butch. And he's made... He since passed, but he did make a number of different comments, but went specifically directly asked Did she appear intoxicated? Butch said no. So when the police said that she appeared to be intoxicated in a press release, my family asked them, who's corroborating this information? Because that's not what the only witness said. And the police could not provide an additional witness or evidence to suggest that she was intoxicated. I'm not saying that she wasn't, but You just can't put it out there without evidence.

There's also one piece of eyewitness testimony from that night which always puzzled investigators.

The witness said that she saw a man smoking a cigarette, and that was within minutes of the accident. She said what she thought she saw. We don't know of any man being there smoking a cigarette. Whether she saw that or not, I'm not sure. Her husband disagreed and thought it looked more like a light from an interior object.

Was this mysterious figure the key to learning what fate befell Mara that night? Or was it simply, like the husband suggested, a trick of the light? Then there was the matter of the strange voicemail left on Mara's boyfriend's phone.

When her boyfriend Bill was in the airport going through security on Wednesday morning, he missed a call. And when he listened to the voicemail, it was this wimpering sound or so. That's what he heard. But when my dad listened to it, he just heard static. And my dad desperately wanted it to be Mara, but he just couldn't place it. And the police traced it back. They said they traced it back to a Red Cross calling card. So we don't believe that it was Mara.

The strange happenings around Mara's disappearance came to a head with the testimony of the final witness to come forward. One, Karen Magnimera.

She was leaving work the night that Mara disappeared. And while she was traveling east on her way home, she was passed by a police SUV 001, not once but twice. And so this police SUV passes her with lights on and then passes her again, which was an odd thing to happen. As she approaches the weathered barn corner there where Maura's car was found, she sees the same SUV, 001, parked nose to nose with Mara's Black Saturn. And so she slows down a little bit and she looks and she's thinking to herself, Should I stop and help? Well, the police are already there, so it doesn't make sense for me to stop and help. And then she goes and continues on her way. Come to find out, based on her cell phone record, which the first place where she got cell phone signal, and still to this day, the first place you get cell signal, is at this place called Beaver Pond. And so she was able to look at her cell phone records after the accident was on the news, and she placed that cell phone call at 7:50 05:52 PM. But the issue here is that Beaver Pond is a good 10 to 15 minutes.

I've driven it many times. I could do it in 14 minutes in perfect conditions. But you're not going to do it faster than, say, 10 minutes. We know that this police SUV 001 was on scene before the first responding officer showed up at 7:46. That's It's always been a big question mark. People have tried to rewrite history and say, Well, actually, the responding officer was there earlier. He just didn't respond in. But I'm going with what's documented in the police log, and that's 746 is when he logged in. The other issue is that the responding officer said that he was in the SUV, but he typically wasn't. That was usually reserved for the chief of Police. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of confusion around everything about the night my sister disappeared, and that's certainly something that I still have questions about.

The best guess the authorities have been able to make is that soon after her accident, she got into a passerby's vehicle.

No belongings found, no remains found. So that It leads me to believe that she maybe had trusted the wrong person, and whoever gave her a ride out of there did her harm. That's what I believe.

Mara's disappearance created a vacuum in the lives of Julie and the rest of the Murray family, one that threatened to suck in all of their happiness.

I mean, it changed our entire lives in an instant, and We've never been the same. It's changed everything. Having to live 20 years beside this unknowing, this ambiguous loss because we still don't have Mara and we don't have answers, it profound It only impacts every aspect of your life. It's been a struggle. It's been a nightmare at times, but we don't have a choice. I mean, we're in it. We still don't have Mara, so we have to continue to hold out hope and continue to investigate and talk about her to make sure that she doesn't get forgotten.

Mara Murray's disappearance coincided with the launch of Facebook. She was the first major missing person case of the social media age, and many rumors and theories about her fate were shared across the fledgling platform. Sadly, none of that speculation led to any meaningful leads.

I mean, 20 years is long enough. If you know something, come forward, please, or my family is begging you or desperate for some answers. Living in this gray area for so long is so difficult. And so if there is somebody out there who may know something, they may think that what they know is insignificant. But if we get enough of these bits of pieces of information, we might be able to put this together and solve this mystery.

The Missing is a What's the Story original podcast series. It's hosted by me, Ashley Loeb-Glassingame. And this episode is made with the support of DOE Network. They're a nonprofit volunteer organization who are dedicated to returning the missing to their families and giving the names back to the unidentified. They believe this case is one which could be solved, and it could take just one person to come forward with information. They've set up a dedicated email address where you can share tips, leads, or information. Missingpodcasttips@doughnetwork. Org. You can also visit their website, www. Doughnetwork. Org, to find information on hundreds of unsolved missing persons cases. For more images and detail on this episode, you can visit www. Themissingpodcast. Org. All of this information and the ways to get in touch are in the show notes. This episode was produced and edited by Jack O'Kennedy. Executive producers for What's the Story are Darryl Brown and Sophie Ellis.

At the heart of this violent, bloody case is a love story, a very unusual love story. The Ruxton case This is different.

Any investigation before the Ruxton case was ancient history. It changed the way that we investigate serious crimes. Beyond Recommission is a new limited series coming to the Small Town Dix podcast feed on July 19th. Don't miss it. Don't forget, if you want to hear The Missing completely ad-free and get them first, then join The Missing Plus. Your subscription helps to keep the show on air. It isn't funded by any major platform, and it grows purely by word of mouth and support from listeners. You'll get exclusive access to series you can't hear anywhere else, as well as early access to all episodes of The Missing completely ad-free. Signing up is really easy. Just search Missing Plus in Apple Podcasts or follow the link in the show notes..