You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
and murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group
together with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer,
a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my
partner in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by Julie Murray, advocate
and sister of Mara Murray. But Julie, thank you so much for joining
us on mind over Murder today. Bro, thank you so much for having
me for the record. I just want everyone around the world to know that
Julie asked a question which sounded so serious. She just wanted to ask Kristin
Dilly if she knew who won the Army Navy game this year. For the
record, I did, now, and who would that be, Kristen,
That would be Army and who was grinning widely when she asked this question.
That would be me and miss Murray perhaps. Oh. Yes, Julie and
I first met a few months ago, and I remember, at the end
of a very pleasant electronic message exchange she finished off by saying something about unfamiliar
expressions, that something about go Army beat Navy, which is completely backwards from
my Navy family's perspective. Here it is several months later, and Julie is
still lording over me the fact that the cadets of Army West Point, it's
somewhere in New York, I think, beat the noble Midshipment of Annapolis.
So yes, for the record, Julie, my recollection is that Army did
win this year. I tried to keep it off record, but you brought
it up. We're very excited to have you joined us. Before we go
ahead and get in the big issues here that we want to talk about,
tell us a little bit about yourself and your family. Yes, so,
Julie Murray I'm one of Mar's Murray's sisters, and we grew up on the
South Shore, Massachusetts, relatively large family, two brothers, two sisters.
Both our parents were in the medical field. We were constantly playing sports and
competing with each other growing up as kids, always outdoors. This was back
before everyone had a tablet and cell phone, so that most of our time
entertaining ourselves outside, and there would be some heated battles, of course,
as there always is within a family, but it was great. Growing up.
We did a lot of hiking, camping in the White Mounts of New
Hampshire. Everyone in my family is an outdoor enthusiast, so we just loved
that stuff. Maura and I took a love for running pretty early on.
Our dad was a marathon or and I remember one kind of cute story was
my dad was training for his eighth or ninth Boston Marathon one time, wow,
and he came back from an eighteen mile training run, and I remember
Maura and I begging him to take us on a marathon, and so he
says, all right, girls, we'll go do this marathon. And what
he did was he took us around the community block. It was probably a
quarter of a mile and that we jogged behind him and when we got done,
he said, you just did your first My thought all your kids.
At this point we were probably I was probably six more maybe been. I
don't know, maybe seven and five because we're two years apart. But we
were just thrilled. And I think that's when our love for running started.
So we grew up running competitively in high school and I would set records and
more would come behind me and break all my records. Wow, that's actually
pretty cool, isn't it. Yeah. Yeah, she was a better runner
than I was. And then school work was very important to us in our
family. We knew we had too many kids to send us all to college.
So we figured, if we do well in school and we continue this
running thing, it will open some doors for us. And it did,
and I got accepted into west Point in nineteen ninety eight class of two thousand
and two. Maura followed right behind me and she joined in two thousand and
so we were at west Point together for some time, and Lamara decided it
wasn't the best fit for her, and the service academies are a beast and
it's not for everyone, and as good as Mara was and running and how
smart she was. The military aspect wasn't for her, and all the discipline
and rules and regiments. I loved it. She did not love it as
much. So then she transferred to University of Massachusetts, got accepted into the
very prestigious nursing program. Then one fateful night in February two thousand and four,
she disappeared and we haven't heard or seen from her since. Let's talk
a little bit more about the army thing. What put West Point on your
radar as a young person. We're probably going back to junior high or high
school. What made you decide I want to pursue West Point and join the
military. When I was a junior in high school, I learned about some
program at the United States Coast Guard Academy, and it was a week long
summer program where high school kids could come in and see what it was like
to be at the academy. And I went there and I absolutely fell in
love with and I loved the discipline, and I just loved everything about it.
So I came home and I was so excited, and I told my
dad and he said, well, there's other service academies and So what really
sealed the deal for me was when I got a recruiting letter from West Point
cross country team, and then I went out there for a visit, and
of course I fell more in love with West Point than I did the Coastguard
Academy because I'm not a big fan of being on water, So west Point
it was in. West Point's a spectacular, beautiful location of the Hudson Valley
and it is a spectacular place to go to school. Full disclosure, my
dad actually went to the Coastguard Academy for a year and then he was homesick,
which is hard to believe. He then dropped out, went back home
to Lowell, Massachusetts, his hometown, went to Boston College for two years,
and then decided to take another run at the service academies and applied to
and was accepted to the Naval Academy. Was Maura's decision to follow in your
footsteps? Was that related to the fact that you were at West Point and
you were thriving, and she thought, I want to do that too.
I think for Maura, she got firsthand experience because she would come up and
visit me and come see my track meets. Because where we grew up in
Hampton. It was only a three and a half hour ride to West Point,
so it wasn't a big deal for Maura to jump in the car with
my dad and spend the weekend up at West Point with me. So I
think she felt and saw how much I loved it and how excited I was,
and the group of friends that I made, and just wanted to be
a part of something like that. My dad encouraged her to apply to all
the service academies, not air Force because it's out in Colorado. And also
Schmara was recruited by big name schools at Harvard and Yale and Brown, and
she said I'm going to West Point her So she re nomination and got Senator
Ted Kennedy to co sign her congressional nomination. Wow, that is impressive,
but it does sound like she could have had her choice of schools. She
was really being offered a lot of attractive options. And maybe you're being a
little bit modest, but you did say that she was an even better runner
than you were in terms of her ability on the track. Yes, her
body was just better suited for running. She was a little bit taller than
me, a little bit, wait, a little bit less. I'm a
little bit bigger through the shoulders, so she was better suited for it.
Runnings in our blood. So I ran, even though I wasn't probably the
best sport for me. So what were her events? Longer distance? The
two mile? She was great at cross country, two mile, five k,
five thousand. After you graduated from West Point, you did have a
career in the Army, tell us a little bit about that, and then
tell us about your decision to leave the Army. I graduate well before I
graduated, we have this thing at West Point called Branch Night. Basically,
it stacks up your class rank, your military rank, and your physical rank
into a ranking system, and so you get to choose, based on your
rank which branches you want your top three and I choose the ordinance branch at
the time, it's now the Logistics branch. It just randomly chose it.
I didn't really have any rhyme or reason for it, but it worked out
for me, and I was originally to be my first duty station was supposed
to be in Germany. At that time, as a twenty something year old,
I could not fathom being away, being out of the country for three
years. I thought it was it notunded like an eternity to me. So
I said, you know what, I'm going to trade this sweet Germany assignment
for this assignment in South Korea because it's only one year, and then I
can come back and get my state side assignment which I wanted, which was
four Brag. I've always wanted four break, and so I did that.
I graduated ship over to South Korea. Have no idea what the hell I'm
doing. I'm a second lieutenant, don't know anything. You go to West
Point and you learn all this leadership, but when you're put on the spot
and said to go on out and lead, you really you don't know what
you're doing. So you have to rely on your bench strength, which is
non commission officer corps. So I had a great non commission officer support team
behind me, and they showed me the ropes and kept me out of trouble
until I learned what I was supposed to be doing. And so I did
that for a year. And while I was in Korea, Mara was at
UMass in the nursing program, so we would communicate primarily through instant messenger back
in the day for text and all that, and it was good because her
schedule was all over the place and the difference in the time didn't make it
conducive to phone calls or anything like that, so we would just message and
that's how we stayed in touch. But then when I came back from Korea,
it was December twenty third, two thousand and three, and it was
right before Christmas, and I spent Christmas in Hanson, Massachusetts with my family,
and Mara was there. And that was the last time I saw Mara
was at Christmas in two thousand and three. And then I went to my
next assignment, which was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then within
weeks More disappears and I get my brand new assignment at Fort Bragg, and
I'm this platoon leader in charge of a platoon that's on orders to deploy,
and it was just so much stress all at once. I was just coming
into the unit and here I am having this major tragedy happened with Mara being
missing, and so thankfully I was able to get one of my fellow lieutenants
to take that platoon and on the deployment so that I could stay back because
at that point we really didn't know, we had no idea. We didn't
have any answers. We didn't know what was going on. I get to
say back a Fort Brag. It took me a while to get to New
Hampshire because there was all of this administrative work that needed to be done to
get myself cleared off that deployment. I finally get to New Hampshire and by
the time I got there, they still had no answers. And I go
back to Fort Brag and spend my next four years there making trips home when
I could, and as hard as a lieutenant to just take leave all the
time, so I didn't get up there as much as I wanted to.
Then it came around the five year mark where you have to decide whether you
want to stay in the service or you want to get out, And at
that point, again we still didn't have any answers, and I didn't want
to risk having to leave my family again or get a duty station across the
country where it would be difficult for me to fly home if I needed to,
so I just opted to get out of the service. How did your
family feel about your decision to leave the Army as a young officer at the
five year point where you could have had a pretty stellar army career ahead of
you. How did they feel about your decision to not react? My mom
was thrilled. She didn't like it that I was traveling the world and it
was hard to get in touch with me. She wanted me a little bit
closer and a little bit more stable in terms of my future. So my
mom was thrilled. My dad was somewhat indifferent. He just wanted me to
be happy. So they were okay with a decision to step away from your
army career. By the way, is there somewhere in the dark recesses of
your family's history. Is there a decision point where you decided to go to
the dark side joining the US Army versus a nice place like Annapolis and the
Naval Academy. So I did apply and get accepted to the Naval Academy.
Of course you did, but I didn't. I didn't want to go with
the second best service academy. Oh man, my family is recoiling now.
But I did set myself up for this. Set yourself up for it.
Just as a reminder in case anyone's forgotten. I come from a Navy family,
and Julie and I do enjoy discussing this. Did Moura I ever consider
going to Annapolis? Nope, I guess didn't even apply second best. Probably
just wasn't getting cutter for you. It wasn't good enough for mar either.
No, but Maura didn't apply to anywhere else. I applied to the Naval
Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, West Point, Boston University. I think
I might have even applied to UMSS, maybe Boston College. But Maura applied
to one school, and that was West Point. I wanted to ask you
something. When you saw Maura at home Christmas two thousand and three, this
is just two months or so before she went missing. Was she troubled?
Did you feel like something was going on? I know you'd had this close
relationship, but you're communicating via instant message from Korea, and now you have
a chance to spend a few days together and maybe go running and talk.
Did it feel like her life was on track at that point or did you
feel like you saw any troubling signs about things that might have been going on
in her life Christmas? I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I
didn't notice anything. In fact, I thought she seemed really good. I
thought she was fitting in at UMass. I knew that she enjoyed the nursing
program. She really liked that, she liked working with people. She have
to go to clinicals and work in hospitals and work with patients. She absolutely
loved that. And one of our traditions and my family, as we always
do holiday morning runs. We did our Christmas morning run together and she was
pushing it a little bit with the pace, of course, but we chatted
just like we always did, and there didn't seem to be anything that I
noticed. Although I didn't know at the time what I know now, I
probably would have paid more attention, but I didn't notice anything different. I
thought she seemed much happier than she did at school at West Point. Tell
us if you would give us the basics. Assume someone knows nothing about Morea's
disappearance, and I know it's hard. We talk about the rabbit holes and
the Colonial Parkway murders's case, and there's so much depth to Mara's case.
Can you give a sort of the brief overview of what happened? The brief
overview is that Marrow was twenty one. As I said, she was a
USS nursing student. On February ninth, two thousand and four, she turned
in her nursing school homework really early in the morning, I think it was
around three in the morning, and that nursing school homework assignment was to look
up pregnancy terms. So she looked up her terms and she sent it off
to her classmates. Then I'm assuming she gets some sleep, and then later
on in that day, maybe mid morning, she emails her professors and said
that there was a death in the family and that she would need to be
out of classes, and that was not true. There was no death in
the family. And then she contacted a fellow nursing school colleague and said,
hey, I want to return these clothes that I borrowed from you. And
she returned the clothes, and then she went to an atm she withdrew two
hundred and eighty dollars, leaving less than twenty dollars in her bank account,
and then she went to a local liquor store. She picked up approximately forty
dollars worth of liquor, and then she went I'm not sure of the exact
order of when she went to pick up the accident forms because two nights before,
she had gotten to an accident in my dad's new car, and so
she needed to get these accident forms for the insurance, and the insurance covered
that. So at some point during that day she did that because they were
found in her car. And then she sends email an email to her boyfriend.
Her boyfriend was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma at the time, and
she basically said, I don't feel much of talking to anyone, but I
love you. I'll call you later. Then at four thirty seven she checks
her voicemail and that would be the last phone activity on her phone. We
know that she got into her nineteen ninety six beat up black sedan that was
running on three cylinders and she headed north and the next data point we had,
approximately seven thirty PM, a neighbor saw a car off the side of
the road in a town called harl New Hampshire. When this neighbor looked out
the window called nine to one one said there's a car off the road.
While she was doing that, a bus driver his name was bitch Atwood.
He came around the corner that mars Mark spun out on that she didn't spend
out. She basically went off the road and stopped and asked if Marra needed
help, and mar said no, she had called Triple A, which could
not have been true because there was no cell phone service in the area.
Now I don't know to this day whether she was planning to call Trible A
and just told him that, or if she actually had called Triple or if
she attempted to call Triple A and then just lied to him to get him
to go away. So anyway, he goes back to his house, which
was right around right down the street, about one hundred and fifty yards,
and then by the time the first responding officer showed up, about fifteen minutes
max later, the car was locked at a bay and Maura was never seen
again. If I'm not mistaken, there's a Triple A card out in the
car, in other words, visible somewhere. I'm not sure where it was
in the car, but I know that she had multiple Triple A cards.
Several of the people that saw the car, some of them said they thought
they saw a young woman standing outside the vehicle. There's varying accounts. So
we have three witnesses. We have mister and missus Westman. They were the
first nine one one caller. Then we have the bus driver, Butch Atwood,
and then we have the Marats, who were further removed from where the
car was found, but they also looked out the window and saw the Westman's
say that they saw the driver, who we have to assume was Mara,
get out and go to the trunk area, and there's this flurry of activity
in the trunk area. And then Butch, the bus driver, said that
when he came up to the vehicle, Mara was still in the car and
he could only see from her neck up because the airbags had deployed. But
then he later changed that and said, no, I actually spoke to her
while she was standing up between the car and the snow bank, and we
spoke over the roof of the car. The Marauts just noted that they did
look out the window and see reverse lights on Mara's car at one time,
as if she was trying to maneuver the car into a better position or get
it out of there. I'm sure it's a thought that's occurred to you many
times since February of two thousand and three in now, and I'm sure it
will continue again. But do you have a theory as to what may have
happened to Mara. And I imagine if you're anything like Bill and I,
you've probably got multiple theories, and maybe they change a little bit from day
to day. Do you have a prevailing theory right at the moment as to
what might have happened at this point nineteen years later. I have to live
in reality, and I have to look at the evidence, and I have
to realize and take into account that there's been no credible sightings, no cell
phone activity, no bank activity, and no remains ever found. So for
me, sadly, that indicates that she was involved with foul play. And
as much as I hate to say, that's where I am, but it's
correct in that my theory has changed slightly over the years. What had it
started as, Yeah, I guess would be my question. It started at
as a little bit more hopeful, thinking maybe she tried to get help and
walk down the road and then went into the woods, or maybe she just
went into the woods. But we've searched the woods hundreds of times and we've
never found anything. Nothing of Mars has ever been found. You're listening to
Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.
We're back here at Mind over Murder when we talk about the potential for foul
play, and I know this is a dark place to go. There's these
three witnesses i'll call them that reported the varying versions of what they saw,
which this does happen where we can all witness an event and a recollection,
and I'm assuming these people are doing their best good faith effort to recall what
they saw. Do you feel like any of them would be involved in foul
play or do you think this is an unknown person. I would suspect that
any of the witnesses were involved. I do believe that maybe they saw something
that they didn't connect as being significant but may have been very significant. Unfortunate,
Butch passed away, so he was one of the main people. I
wish we could have pressed more for information and get exactly what the story was,
because he did tell different variations of the story. So it's hard to
say, but I don't suspect any of the witnesses were involved in any way,
but they may have seen something that could have helped us get some resolution
on this a little bit sooner. One of the things that we have found
in the Colonial Parkway murders. This happen with Bill and the other families as
I've worked with them for a while. Now, is that the Parkway murders
families have transitioned from parents standing in the media on law enforcement, LI is
on rolland now it's siblings. Bill lost his dad and so now it's it's
Bill who's in that role. Is that happening in your case or your parents
still taking an active role in there. My mother passed away. Unfortunately,
she passed away on Mar's birthday, which is another tragic twist to this hospital.
I'm sorry. And my dad is still very active. However, he
is also eighty years old. So he's active in the best ways that he
can be, which is talking to people, and he's very good. Yeah,
And so when leads come in, he wants to be spearheading the initial
contact with some of these people, not all, but some because when you
talk to my dad, you can see his pain and you can see his
desperation even to this day, nineteen years later, and his plea to these
people to just give him anything, any little piece that they may think is
insignificant, because we can then use those pieces to fill in this puzzle.
On the public side, it's been me who's been taking the lead role,
like I should say, in terms of media and doing podcasts and speaking engagements,
running the websites and facebooks and all that kind of stuff. So that's
been me. I do have help from my brothers. They're behind the scene
helpers. They don't want to be out there, but whatever I need,
they will drop everything and help me. So I feel pretty supported. And
also there's this whole group of people and supporters online that have just shown us
so much love and support over the years, and that has meant so much
to us. There some of them feel like family. I consider them some
of them family. They're always at all the vigils, and they're at all
the searches, and we keep in close contact, and so as tragic as
it is to someone go missing, you do get the silver lining of having
this new found family. How is your approach different from your father's approach,
Julie, You different people. You're fully a generation younger. You come at
this from a different point of view. How's your approach different from your father's.
I'm much more levelheaded. My dad is a father who lost his baby,
and he is a bulldog. When it comes to demanding answers, demanding
action, and he's been successful at that, and he goes about it in
a more of an aggressive way. I go about it in more of a
collaborative way. And I think we work well together because I think you need
both sides. When I go into a meeting with law enforcement, I want
to exchange ideas. I want to tell them what tips I have learned about.
I want to ask them what they can share with me, as opposed
to my dad, who just wants to demand what is being done. But
he's softened a little bit out of the year. I hope he doesn't hear
me say that, but I think we worked great. I think that hammock
works great, and the past couple of years is it's been very effective.
I will admit I've never met your dad, but I probably am speaking for
a lot of people. I really like your dad, and I admire your
dad. I've watched a number of interviews that he's done, and of course
the television series on Oxygen and so many more things. I just really have
a great positive feeling about your dad. I get where he's coming from,
and I think I can understand it. I appreciate his intelligence and his thoughtfulness
and his intensity in trying to move forward the search for your sister. Yeah,
and he's been unrelenting. Like I said, this has been going on
nineteen years this February, and he has not once ever let up. In
the beginning, he was up searching by himself, sometimes boots on the ground
for his daughter. He's my hero for that to be able to force yourself
to go do that. And if you just look at that in isolation,
just look at that alone. Does this man he's going to go look behind
this tree or in this well to see if he can find the remains of
his daughter. The trauma that goes along with that. Yeah, and then
compound that over nineteen years, I mean, that man is incredible. He's
still going stopping it. He wasn't even a kid then. He was very
dynamic and young looking. But I realized he was probably around sixty years old
when this happened. Yeah, sixty two. I believe you had mentioned a
couple of minutes ago about a wonderful supportive online community, and we have found
that to be the case as well. With the Colonel Parkway murders. I
think, as always happens with a high profile case, you also end up
running up against some of the more colorful characters of the Internet. Shall we
say, how do you deal with the huge influx of not only support,
but also tips, maybe crackpot tips. How do you deal with all of
that? We have our end ways that we have to deal with it.
In some days it's easier than others. How do you deal with the more
colorful side of the Internet. It's hard. It's hard not to engage with
trolls because sometimes you don't know their trolls until later on. My practice is
to not feed the trolls, and so I stay away from sites like Reddit
and things like that where people can hide behind anonymity. Places like windwork are
a little bit less egregious, I would say, because tend to there's not
that many as many fake accounts. But as big as mars Case is in
my world, mars Case is my world, it's a relatively smaller case in
the grand scheme of things. So what tends to happen with these cases is
you get a loud voice, a few loud voices, and they dominate the
conversation, dominate the narrative, and when you introduce a competing narrative. In
a setting where you've got somebody that thinks that they own the case, then
they feel like their influence over the case is in jeopardy, and so that
results in attacks. That's been difficult in challenging to try to introduce competing narrative.
It's my own sister. I know her best, so I should be
able to say, hey, this is misinformation, or let me correct this
wild speculation. This didn't happen. And sometimes by doing that, I put
myself out there as a target for attacks, and that's not the way it
should be. I think it's getting better, but it doesn't need to change
because there should be a discussion. She's still missing. No one's found her,
nobody, no one person has the answer. So the more people we
have working together in concert, the more likely we're going to find Mara and
find out what happened to her. I try to combat the misinformation with better
information, and that seems to work, and that does debtail very nicely,
I think into the next discussion point that we want to bring up, which
is your Engage with Empathy campaign, which we did an episode about here on
the podcast and which we wholly support one. So can you tell us a
little bit about engage with empathy and what sort of motivated you to start that.
Yes, I've learned a lot over the last nineteen years, and one
key thing is that there are three main elements at play. So there's the
investigation, there's the people left behind, and then the media, so creators
and consumers. When you unravel these three, you'll find that there's codependencies.
Take for instance, the investigation. What warms up a cold case, awareness,
credible leads, But that burden, as we talked about earlier, usually
falls on the shoulders of the families left behind, and so day in and
day out, and sometimes for decades. In our cases, we show up
for our loved ones, raising awareness, posting on social media, being vulnerable,
putting ourselves out there, and sometimes, as I said before, the
result is we become the target ourselves. And as it is physically and mentally
exhausting, what keeps us going hope? And what's the secret ingredient for hope
empathy? And so that's where we circle back to that third element, the
media, the creators and consumers with missing and murdered unsolved cases, we have
to rely on the media to keep these stories alive, but we're in a
vulnerable position. So Engaging with Empathy is a way to bring awareness to this
disturbing trend that we're seeing all over the place, especially in recent times of
exploitation, speculation, the proliferation of misinformation all over the The motivation for the
Engage with Empathy campaign was so that I could raise awareness to hey, there's
some things that are going wrong here and we can do this better. And
so it's more of a guiding light for creators and consumers to not extinguish that
hope. And so it all comes full circle, and that is the impetus
behind the Engage with Empathy campaign. Now that hashtag engage with Empathy, which
we've both used, Kristen and I and lots of other people have used.
In my mind, you're the first person I saw use that hashtag. It's
either you or Sarah Attorney. I think, both of whom were people that
I greatly admire. This was something that you very consciously decided to create.
It feels very grassroots. Were you the first to use it? Yeah?
I even talked to Sarah about it before I launched the campaign on our website.
I said, Hey, Sarah, I'm doing this campaign. I just
want you to be aware it's going to be called Engage Empathy and we're gonna
post and start hashtagging everything with it. And she totally loved the idea and
has supported it fully. Yeah, we both think she's amazing, and I'm
not surprised that she was all over it because she had done some panels and
discussions about ethics and true crime, which I think is certainly related. I
didn't think I'm not criticizing at all. I'm totally supportive, and I know
Kristen is too. But I think engage with Empathy draws people in a little
bit more because that's something that I think we can all understand and you articulate
why this is important. I think for ethics and true crime, I think
there's a lot of people and we consider ourselves quasi journalists here. It might
over murder, but I think a lot of people that write about a report
about true crime, they would think, of course, I wouldn't be unethical,
and so I think that word ethics has a little bit of a sharp
edge to it, whereas engage with empathy. Those three words together you think
to yourself, Okay, yeah, I want to show support for families and
survivors. I recently did a TikTok or some stupid TikTok trend that I'm doing
new put me on to TikTok and it was the theme is say something where
there's no pushback or there's nothing that you can say why it's not a good
idea. So I did one that says, list the reasons why engaging with
empathy is not something you should do, And if you think about it,
there's absolutely no reason why one wouldn't engage with empathy. It's free, it
doesn't have any barriers to entry. Anyone can do it. You feel better,
the person you're engaging with feels better. Just a no brainer to me.
But some people want to go online and troll vulnerable people like myself,
and it just doesn't make sense to me. So I wanted to call it
out. Even in the very recent Idaho four case, that everybody is just
following like nothing that I've ever seen. You have a lot of people who
were slagging various people in that case. That roommate, for example, the
surviving roommate DM, she took a ton of flak online for essentially surviving.
She survived, and she just got torn apart by the internet. Our friend
doctor Ramsland also got dragged through the mud because she happened to be her teacher
and she did not notice, as if she had a crystal ball that he
was going to turn into a spree killer. There have been a lot of
times watching the coverage with Idaho for and then also Delphi, where I've just
looked at everybody and been like, oh my gosh, can we please take
a minute and engage with empathy? Be better people? I feel so bad,
especially right at the moment for that a surviving roommate who is just getting
dragged across social media for no reason that I can possibly understand. Yeah,
And that's so as part of the gage engage with Empathy campaign, I came
up with a kind of quick way to remember what some of the main pillars
are of it, and the last one talks about it. It's at the
eve and care. Using the care principle, where it's engaged with empathy,
we can prevent this exploitation that's happening, and these public indictments of totally innocent
people's happening. It happened in my case, it's happening now currently as you've
mentioned in the Idaho case, where people are invading these people's privacy and making
public decisions and private things public, and then the Internet goes crazy and tries
to make them complicit and a quadruple murder. You're ruining lives by doing that.
We were really disturbed when people were throwing out different potential suspects names,
and these are armchair detectives that are just deciding it must be involved. So
it's these would be people that law enforcement would likely look at, former girlfriends,
former boyfriends, people that had relationships with some of the victims or the
survivors. But to out these people and docks, these people start posting people's
names, addresses, phone numbers, a bit about their schedules or how their
lives intersected with these victims. It was so unbelievably irresponsible, not to mention
trashing the fraternities and sororities that some of the Idaho four were members of.
The whole thing got so kind of malevolent. Almost were just throwing dirt at
all of these people who've just suffered a phenomenal loss. They lost four dear
friends in the most horrible way I can imagine. And of course ninety nine
point nine percent of that crap that was thrown around on the internet was wrong.
It wasn't any of those people. Now, no one's been proven to
be an offender here, but they've arrested someone and they seem to be indicating
that Koburger is the eating suspect. Then I think they'll be able to build
a strong case against this man. That means that all the other garbage that
was thrown around and damaging people's reputations was meaningless and stupid, and I could
just keep going on. One thing that really struck me is the food truck
video footage where people are slowing it down and zooming it in and then just
throwing all these people out there into the public arena for discussion. And a
similar thing happened to Maura in that there is people that were seeing in photos
with Maura, and then those people were posted online and their names were put
out there and their mothers were called just because they were seen in a photo
with my sister before she went missing. It just blows my mind that people
think that is okay to do. And here she is attending a large state
school which I happened to be a graduate of the u mess is even bigger
now than it was when I was there. But there are thirty thousand students
there between graduate and undergraduate students, so that's a very large university community.
And the fact that someone would be in a picture with Mora Murray, all
that means is that they were in a picture with Mora Murray a particular place,
at a particular time. She probably had a lot of friends and a
lot of classmates and knew a lot of people. What does that mean.
It doesn't mean anything but to start digging into these people's backgrounds as if somehow
they are suspects because they showed up in a picture with a missing girl,
it just seems absurd. What it also does is it alienates other people from
coming forward and saying, oh, I noticed something or I have information to
tell you. They're not going to be as likely to do that. If
they think that they're going to be a per public discussion their own personal lives,
They're going to do a little cost benefit analysis and decide that it's not
worth it. Right absolutely, who suffers. Who suffers. Mara suffers,
the families suffer, and the investigators on some level might suffer because there could
be information that they might be able to use to move this case forward.
That's a great point yep. In about a month here, February twenty twenty
three, you'll have reached the nineteenth anniversary of Mara's disappearance. What are your
plans for that? Is there anything that you do to mark the day in
particular that's like just for you? No, I don't do anything just for
me. Actually, February ninth is a rollercoaster of emotion for me, but
I don't feel it until the next day because I have so much that I
have to get done. But what my family has done since the first year
is we go up to the scene of the accident. There used to be
this big tree there and there was a blue ribbon that my dad tied around
the tree and it had our missing poster up there, and we would spend
about ten to fifteen minutes with supporter and locals that supported the cause and just
say a quick prayer, have a moment of silence. And that has evolved
into with the COVID restrictions and everything. We did it virtually a couple of
times, and so I asked that people light a candle and share it on
social media so that we could essentially light the sky up formara, so that
works pretty well. And then now we're in a hybrid of both. My
family will go up to the site. The tree has been cut down,
but we still go to the site. We spend about ten minutes there.
It's freezing cold in New Hampshire in February, so we don't spend a whole
lot of time there and we don't want to be disruptive to any of the
neighbors or anything like that. And we have candles, We have our moment
of silence at seven thirty. Well we're doing that. People online can virtually
do the same thing and share in that moment with us. It's been really
great the last couple of years. We've had so much support from all over
the world. It's really heartwarming to see that. But this year we've rented
out a lodge in the area so that people can come back and get warm
and have a chat with each other. And some of these people have never
met each other in person or my family, so it gives a chance to
interact with some of these people, put a face to a name, and
it's been for building relationships that have lasted almost or almost two decades now,
and then you're also doing electronic billboards in Massachusetts in New Hampshire. Tell us
about those. Yes, we recently had a volunteer reach out to some communications
departments in based out of Boston, and they asked whether there was any space
available and what the pricing was, and so we had multiple agencies offer space
for digital billboards all over Massachusetts, and there's a few in New Hampshire,
but the space is the space is more limited there. But yeah, I
mean there's over ten right now live with Mars face. Well, that's amazing.
Asking for tips about the case. If you know something, reach out
to the New Hampshire take Place. It's pretty cool. There's one right on
the main thoroughfare in ninety three north into Boston. You can't go into Boston
without seeing more. So that's pretty because you never know somebody might know something,
will remember something exactly. Yeah, Julie, thank you so much for
joining us today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. This
was great. I wish we had more time. We could talk forever about
this stuff. We'll have to do it again. Yeah, that's gonna do
it for this episode of Mind Over Murder. We'll see you next time.
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our
executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela
Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod. Mind Over Murder is distributed
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Five six. Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.