True Crime Addict

True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray by James Renner, 278 pages

On February 4th, 2004, Maura Murray left her dorm room in Amherst, Massachusetts for the last time.  She stopped at an ATM to empty out her bank account, then at a liquor store.  Four hours later, a passing motorist found her in her disabled vehicle on New Hampshire Route 112.  She declined his offer of help, claiming to have already called roadside assistance on her cell phone.  He called the police upon returning home, but when they arrived Murray was gone.  She has never been seen again, nor have her remains been located.

The Maura Murray disappearance is almost the ideal unsolved mystery, full of rabbit holes and enough fragmentary evidence to support endless speculation.  Even basic information like where Murray was going - she had searched for hotels in Vermont, but was headed in the wrong direction, her family had vacationed in Bartlett but Route 112 doesn't go there - and why - she had packed up her dorm room, as if she was planning on leaving permanently, but she brought several  textbooks with her, as if she was planning on spending some time on classwork - are unknown.  Meanwhile, complicating details and rumors have gradually trickled out - Murray had left West Point after being caught shoplifting and had subsequently been caught in Amherst using a stolen credit card number, Murray's boyfriend had cheated on her with a classmate and she had cheated on him with a track coach, she had totaled her father's car on her way home from a party a few weeks before her disappearance, a supervisor once found her nearly catatonic at work, a woman who saw Murray's car before police arrived reported that there was a man inside, on an anniversary of her disappearance a man calling himself "112dirtbag" released a YouTube video entitled "Happy Anniversary" which consisted of nothing but him laughing and winking - offering both tantalizing clues and maddening distractions to a remarkably large community of internet sleuths dedicated to finding the truth - or, at least, proving their pet theories.

James Renner's book is less about the unraveling of the mystery of Maura Murray than mapping the rabbit holes, and discovering that the underground realms they lead to can unexpectedly include your own unexpressed fears and pieces of your own buried past.  The title is "True Crime Addict" and not "Finding Maura Murray", the subtitle is not "The Truth Revealed" but "How I Lost Myself..."  This should serve as ample warning that Renner has chosen to write not about Maura Murray but rather himself looking for Maura Murray, indeed, himself as virtually the only person really interested in finding her.  Although this might have been interesting, his narcissism quickly becomes annoying, and his posturing exasperating by the time the book stumbles to its end.