The Last Turn: The Disappearance of Maura Murray

On February 9, 2004, nursing student Maura Murray crashed on a desolate stretch of Route 112, spoke briefly with a passing bus driver, and vanished into the New Hampshire dark. Twenty-two years later, the case is still open — and finally moving again.

The Last Turn: The Disappearance of Maura Murray
On February 9, 2004, nursing student Maura Murray crashed on a desolate stretch of Route 112, spoke briefly with a passing bus driver, and vanished into the New Hampshire dark. Twenty-two years later, the case is still open — and finally moving again.
0:0017:28
Series: Missing Persons File Channel: Unsolved stories, quiet towns, and the evidence that still speaks. Published: 2026-05-17 Duration: ~17 min 28 sec Format: Solo narrator — cinematic documentary

Summary

On February 9, 2004, Maura Murray — a 21-year-old nursing student and former West Point cadet — drove north out of Amherst, Massachusetts into the White Mountains of New Hampshire and vanished. Her car was found crashed on Route 112 in Haverhill at 7:46 PM. A school bus driver had spoken to her minutes earlier; police arrived to find the car locked and empty. No confirmed trace of her has ever been found. Twenty-two years later, the case is still open — and in 2025, a fingerprint match brought a West Point classmate into the frame for the first time.

Chapters

TimeChapter
0:22Opening scene
1:34File introduction
1:40Who was Maura Murray
2:51The week before
4:42February 9 — the last day
6:21The crash — seven minutes
8:58What the car left behind
9:43Twenty-two years
11:38The fingerprint
13:372025–2026: new tools, new leads
15:22Closing reflection

Full Transcript

[Opening music — 22 seconds]
Seven twenty-seven PM. February ninth, two thousand and four.
A black Saturn sedan sits crumpled against the shoulder of Route 112 in Haverhill, New Hampshire. The temperature is in the single digits. Snow is packed hard against the road. The nearest house is about a hundred yards east. The nearest town with a gas station is more than a mile away.
A school bus driver named Butch Atwood stops his vehicle. He sees a young woman walking around the car. She appears cold, shivering, but not injured. He offers to help. She tells him no. She says she already called AAA.
There is no cell reception on that stretch of Route 112. AAA has no record of any call.
Atwood drives home and calls 911 from his kitchen. He can see the crash site from his front porch. Fifteen minutes later, a police officer arrives. The car is locked. There is no one inside it. There is no one outside it.
Maura Murray — twenty-one years old, nursing student, former West Point cadet — was gone. She has not been seen since.
Missing Persons File. The Disappearance of Maura Murray.
To understand what happened that night, you have to understand who Maura Murray was. And she was, by any measure, exceptional.
She was born in Brockton, Massachusetts in 1982, the fourth of five children. She graduated fourth in her high school class, scored 1420 on her SATs, and set a freshman cross-country record that still gets mentioned whenever her name comes up. She was recruited by Harvard. She chose West Point instead.
At the military academy, she studied chemical engineering. Then, in the summer of 2001, something small went wrong. She was accused of shoplifting a few dollars worth of lip gloss at a base exchange store. A cadet honor board was convened. Before it could meet, Maura withdrew.
Her sister Julie said later that the punishment would not have been expulsion. Maura left anyway. Her brother Fred Jr. remembered: she was talented in everything she did. Schoolwork, athletics — top-notch. But she hated to disappoint. And she was her own worst critic.
She transferred to UMass Amherst and enrolled in nursing. She worked a part-time campus security job. She was dating an Army lieutenant named Bill Rausch, whom she had met at West Point. By early 2004, she was twenty-one years old and, from the outside, putting herself back together.
Then, in the span of four days, everything unraveled.
Thursday, February fifth. Maura is working the overnight security desk at UMass. At ten-thirty PM, her supervisor finds her unresponsive. Completely zoned out, the supervisor later said. No reaction at all. He escorts her to her dorm around one in the morning. He asks what is wrong. She says two words: my sister.
Her sister Kathleen had relapsed on alcohol that night after being discharged from rehab. Her fiance had driven her to a liquor store. It would be thirteen years before any of this was disclosed publicly.
Saturday, February seventh. Her father Fred visits campus. They go car shopping. They have dinner. Maura borrows Fred's Toyota Corolla to attend a dorm party.
Early Sunday morning, February eighth — three-thirty AM — Maura drives that car into a guardrail on Route 9 in Hadley. The damage comes to nearly ten thousand dollars. No field sobriety test is documented. Her father is notified. He tells investigators later: she was distraught. Quite distraught.
Fred's insurance covers the damage. He rents a car, drops Maura back at UMass, and leaves for Connecticut. That night, he calls to remind her to pick up accident forms from the registry.
What no one knows, at this point, is that Maura is already packing. Her dorm room is being emptied. Art removed from the walls. Belongings going into boxes. A printed email sits on top of the pile — addressed to Bill, hinting at something wrong between them.
Monday, February ninth. Classes are canceled due to a snowstorm. Maura is not sleeping in.
At three-thirty in the morning, she finishes her nursing homework and submits it. Her sister Julie would later ask: who puts in that kind of effort if they plan to disappear?
Through the afternoon, she moves methodically. She emails her professors claiming a death in the family. No death had occurred. She calls a condo rental near Bartlett, New Hampshire. She calls the Stowe, Vermont tourism line. She withdraws two hundred and eighty dollars from an ATM — nearly everything in her account. She goes to a liquor store and buys Kahlua, vodka, Baileys, and a twelve-pack. She picks up the accident forms for her father's car. She returns a classmate's borrowed scrubs.
At one PM, she emails Bill. She writes: I love you more stud. I got your messages, but honestly, I didn't feel like talking to much of anyone. I promise to call today.
She never calls. At four thirty-seven PM, she checks her voicemail. That is the last recorded use of her cell phone.
Sometime between four and five PM, she drives north out of Amherst. Her black Saturn sedan headed toward the White Mountains. Nobody saw her leave. Nobody was told where she was going.
The drive north would have taken two and a half to three hours. There are no surveillance cameras on that route. No gas station receipts. No toll records. For more than two hours, Maura Murray is simply gone from the record.
And then, at seven twenty-seven PM, a neighbor named Faith Westman calls the Grafton County Sheriff's Department. There has been an accident on Route 112, she says. Near the old weathered barn at the sharp corner. She will later describe seeing a glow inside the car — she initially says a man smoking a cigarette, then corrects herself. Possibly a cell phone.
The Saturn had struck a tree at the driver's side. The airbags deployed. The radiator was pushed into the fan. The car was not going anywhere.
Officer Cecil Smith is dispatched at seven twenty-nine. His estimated travel time: fifteen to eighteen minutes.
Within that window — before Smith arrives — two other people encounter the scene.
First: a local resident known in case records as Witness A. She drives past the crash site between seven thirty-three and seven thirty-seven. She sees a police SUV already there, parked nose to nose with the dark sedan. She sees no one inside or outside either vehicle. She briefly pulls over, then continues home. Her cell records later confirm she placed a call from the first area with reception at seven fifty-two — consistent with her timeline.
The official dispatch log places Officer Smith's arrival at seven forty-six. Nine minutes after Witness A passed the scene. The identity of whatever vehicle she saw has never been established.
Second: Butch Atwood. He stops at the scene. He sees the young woman walking around the car. She is cold. She is shivering. She asks him not to call police. She says AAA is on the way.
Atwood drives home and calls 911. He is on the phone with the dispatcher when he can still see the crash site from his porch. He estimates police arrived seven to nine minutes after his call at seven forty-two.
Seven forty-six PM. Officer Smith arrives. The car is locked. It is empty. There is no one on the road. There are no footprints leading clearly into the woods. Maura Murray has vanished from a location with almost no exits, in single-digit temperatures, in the dark, in a window the investigators themselves describe as approximately seven to ten minutes.
What was left in the car tells its own story.
Her AAA card. The accident forms she had picked up for her father that afternoon. Her gloves. Her compact discs. Diamond jewelry. Her favorite stuffed animal.
A book called Not Without Peril — about fatal climbing accidents in the White Mountains. MapQuest directions to Burlington, Vermont. A box of wine that had split open and soaked the rear seat.
What was not in the car: her black backpack, her cell phone, her debit card, her credit cards. Some of the liquor she had purchased that afternoon.
Her father would later say: she would not have left the jewelry and the stuffed animal if she had any choice.
A tracking dog, brought in on the eleventh, followed Maura's scent a hundred yards east from the crash site. Then it stopped. The handler said the scent suggested she had left in a vehicle.
What followed was twenty-two years of investigation — and of waiting.
The FBI joined the case ten days after her disappearance. Searches swept the surrounding area in winter, again in spring when the snow cleared. In July 2004, almost a hundred searchers focused specifically on finding her black backpack. They found nothing conclusive.
In 2006, cadaver dogs alerted strongly inside an A-frame house about a mile from the crash site. A carpet sample was sent to state police for testing. The results were never publicly released.
In 2009, the case moved to the newly formed New Hampshire Cold Case Unit. Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin said then: we don't know if Maura is a victim, but the state is treating it as a potential homicide.
In 2019, investigators excavated the basement of that same A-frame house, now under different owners. They found, in the words of one report, absolutely nothing, other than what appears to be a piece of pottery or old piping.
In September 2021, bone fragments were found at Loon Mountain, twenty-five miles east of the crash site. The Murray family waited two months for results. In November, the state announced: they were not Maura's. Radiocarbon dating placed them between 1774 and 1942.
Julie Murray wrote: my heart is heavy upon learning that these remains do not belong to my little sister.
In 2024, on the twentieth anniversary, the FBI released an age-progression photograph — what Maura might look like at forty-one.
Then, in March 2025, a development that nobody had seen coming.
Investigative journalist James Renner reported that a fingerprint found inside Maura's car had been matched through the national fingerprint database to a man named Steffen Baldwin — formerly Steffen Finkelstein — a West Point cadet who had been at the academy at the same time as Maura.
Baldwin had been arrested in 2020 in Ohio on animal cruelty charges — killing dozens of animals through what prosecutors called needless euthanasia while running a dog rescue charity. When his prints were entered into the national database, they matched the unidentified print in Maura's car.
According to Renner, New Hampshire State Police Cold Case detective Charles West identified Baldwin as his number one suspect and planned to travel to Ohio to interview him. West then abruptly resigned from the cold case unit, citing frustration with the public attention surrounding the case.
In the spring of 2024, the FBI visited Baldwin in prison. He confirmed the fingerprint match. He said the print was from a CD or a CD case — an innocent artifact from their time together at West Point. He denied ever visiting New Hampshire or UMass. He denied any involvement.
In March 2025, Baldwin was sentenced to fifteen and a half years in prison on the animal cruelty and fraud charges. Those charges are unrelated to Maura Murray.
No official agency has publicly named Steffen Baldwin as a suspect. No official agency has confirmed his fingerprint match on the record. The New Hampshire Department of Justice does not comment on what it calls the integrity of the investigative process.
Also in 2025, the UMass Amherst Police Department released its investigation file on the case — thirty-eight pages, publicly available. Renner reported that the records contain new details about the mysterious campus party the weekend before Maura disappeared, about possible motives, and about what appears to be a reference to her student ID turning up in a junkyard. None of that has been officially corroborated.
In August 2025, the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit doubled its staffing — from one part-time investigator to two full-time investigators. Maura's sister Julie had led a coalition of families to the steps of the state house in Concord, pushing for exactly this.
Julie told reporters: it's certainly a step in the right direction. But I hope that it's not just a symbolic gesture. My family's been let down in the past.
In October 2025, a private investigator named Lou Barry — a former police chief hired by the Murray family — named a drifter as a person of interest. Barry said the individual had a history of alleged violence against women and had previously encountered a woman on the side of a road, initially appearing helpful.
Barry concluded: the probability is that she was abducted — not necessarily against her will initially. I think she accepted a ride from the wrong person.
On February sixth, 2026 — the twenty-second anniversary of her disappearance — the New Hampshire Attorney General's office issued a statement. Investigators are actively utilizing advanced investigative techniques that were not available in 2004. The singular goal: bringing resolution to this case.
In March 2026, Julie and her brother Kurtis met with the new head of the cold case unit. They were told investigators are currently pursuing six new leads. The specifics have not been shared.
There is a question at the center of this case that has never been answered, and it is not the most obvious one.
Everyone asks where Maura went. But the harder question is: who was already waiting on that road?
The tracking dog followed her scent east, then lost it. She asked a stranger not to call for help. She vanished in ten minutes from a stretch of mountain road in northern New Hampshire with no cell signal, no witnesses, and no viable exits on foot.
Whatever she was running from — the crashed car, a strained relationship, her sister's pain, her own — she ran directly into something else.
Kurtis Murray said this year: at this point, I've lived more than half of my life without her.
Julie says she wakes up every morning asking the same question. She has been asking it for more than eight thousand days.
Maura Murray was twenty-one years old when she drove north on a snowy Monday evening and disappeared into the mountains. She has never been found. The case remains open.
If you have any information about Maura Murray's disappearance, the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit and the FBI accept tips at tips.fbi.gov. The case number is on the FBI ViCAP database.
This has been a Missing Persons File. Thank you for listening.
[Outro music — 30 seconds, fade out]

Sources

  6. People Magazine — Maura Murray Disappearance, 21 Years Later (Feb 2025) https://people.com/maura-murray-disappearance-what-to-know-8786014
  7. James Renner — Fingerprints Found in Maura Murray's Car Match Troubled West Point Cadet (Mar 2025) https://mauramurraymystery.com/fingerprints-found-in-maura-murrays-car-match-troubled-west-point-cadet/
  8. True Crime This Week — Special Report: Maura Murray and Steffen Baldwin (Apr 2025) https://truecrimethisweek.com/2025/04/special-report-maura-murray-steffen-baldwin/
  9. True Crime This Week — UMass Police Release Maura Murray Files (May 2025) https://truecrimethisweek.com/2025/05/special-report-umass-police-release-maura-murray-files/

Audio and music notes

Background music: "Route 112 — Investigative Ambient" — original instrumental generated via fal.ai MiniMax Music v2.6 for this episode. Minimal piano, sustained low strings, ambient drone, approximately 214 seconds. No vocals, no lyrics, no human voice. Used as a 22-second intro clip, 30-second outro with fade, and continuous low-volume bed (-26 dB) under narration throughout the episode. Generated by AI synthesis; not sourced from a commercial music library. No artist attribution or license to declare. Music generation prompt specified a non-looping reference to a real artist's style was explicitly avoided.
TTS narration: synthesized via fal.ai MiniMax Speech 2.8 Turbo, voice English_expressive_narrator. Single narrator, cinematic documentary tone.
Loudness normalization: target -18 LUFS applied at final mix.

Editorial notes

  • The Steffen Baldwin fingerprint match is reported by investigative journalist James Renner and confirmed by Baldwin himself (as reported by Renner). No official law enforcement agency has publicly confirmed or commented on this match. This episode presents it as reported, with that caveat clearly stated in the narration.
  • The January 2025 Reddit claim about belongings being found was assessed during research as unverifiable and absent from all official and credible journalistic sources. It does not appear in this episode.
  • The UMass Amherst police file (released 2024–2025) details referenced in the episode are drawn from Renner's reporting and episode descriptions of his True Crime This Week podcast; the full 38-page PDF has not been independently analyzed for this episode.
  • All quotes from family members and officials are drawn from verified published sources and are presented as accurately as possible. Inferences are flagged as such in the narration.

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