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Maura Murray Investigation 10 Years Later: Still No Evidence to Missing UMass Student

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Ten years after Maura Murray disappeared on a New Hampshire road, investigators and family members have still gained no progress in their search.

According to the Associated Press, the 21-year-old University Massachusetts - Amherst nursing student fibbed to her professors about a death in the family in order to leave school early. While driving home, she crashed on a back road in New Hampshire and has never been seen since.

Since Feb. 9, 2004, investigators said the last time anyone saw her was when her car spun out and hit a snow bank on Route 112 in North Haverhill just before 7:30 p.m.

"No one knows for sure where Maura is or what happened to her," Jeffery Strelzin, senior assistant attorney general, told the AP.

Murray's father Fred has maintained he believes his daughter was the victim of a crime and that keeping the case in the public eye may be the only way it can be solved.

"There's no letting go," said Murray, a medical technician in Bridgeport, Conn. "My daughter wouldn't want me to quit on her. She'd want me to keep trying to find out who grabbed her."

As a standout student, she briefly attended West Point Military Academy before enrolling at UMass - Amherst. Before her mysterious crash, she resolved a legal issue in which she used a stolen credit card and had another crash with her father's car.

Investigators believe her fake excuse to leave the campus was a ploy to get away for a couple days since she was reportedly having a rough time. Four days before she disappeared, she received a call while working at her on-campus security job. Her supervisor said she all of a sudden burst into tears, but the context of the call and caller has never been discovered. The supervisor had to walk her home after that shift.

She and her father shopped for a car and had dinner together two days before her disappearance and Marua was reportedly in "good spirits." Police found directions to a lodge in Vermont and discovered she had been calling several ones in both New Hampshire and Vermont.

She was heading east, but her accident left the 1996 Saturn facing west. Some theories have suggested she fled after the crash and has restarted her life, most likely in Canada. Her father says they were too close for her to do anything like that.

Lt. John Healy, a retired state police officer who has devoted countless volunteer hours to investigating the case, said he shares Mr. Murray's belief that Maura was a victim of a "crime of opportunity."

"In Maura's case, we're one step away from thinking alien abduction, it happened so fast," Healy told the AP.

"She got into the wrong car. She went to the wrong house," he said. "One minute she's there, 10 minutes later she's not."

CLICK HERE to read the AP's full report.

CLICK HERE to visit a Facebook page dedicated to Murray's disappearance.

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