Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Maura Murray

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

At 7pm on a February night in 2004, 21-year-old Maura Murray crashed her car on a dark New Hampshire road and told a passing driver she was fine. Eleven minutes later, police arrived. The car was still there. Maura was gone. No footprints in the snow. No sign of where she went. In the first part of our 3-part series, host Katie Ring is joined by Crimes of Reddit hosts Sabrina Deana-Roga and Alexis Linkletter to break down the case.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe

at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. It's a little after seven on a February night in 2004 on a dark, empty stretch of road in Haverill, New Hampshire. There's two feet of snow on the ground and a black Saturn has slid off the pavement and into the trees. The airbags are blown, the headlights are off, and behind the wheel is a young woman who tells a passing driver that she's fine, that she's already called for help. He offers her a ride anyway, but she says no. 11 minutes later, when a police cruiser pulls up to that same spot, the car is still there. But the young woman is gone. No footprints

leading into the snow, no sign of where she went, nothing. Her name was Mora Marie. And more than 20 years later, no one has ever found her. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's most infamous crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still on us today.

Today, I'm joined by some very special guests, Sabrina DeAnna Roga, and Alexis Link Letter, the host of Crime House's newest show, Crens of Reddit. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us on, Katie. So excited to be here. Of course, Sabrina and Alexis will introduce this week's series for me. Then at the end of the episode, we're going to talk all about their show and how every Tuesday they're taking on some of Reddit's darkest stories, along with a special preview of Crimes of Reddit. You can follow right now wherever you listen to podcasts or find full video episodes on YouTube. This is the first of three episodes on the disappearance of Maura Murray.

Today, Katie is taking you back to the beginning. You'll learn all about who Maura Murray was, from the athlete and the honor student destined for great things, to her years at West Point and beyond, and to the quiet pressures building in her life before she vanished. To understand, Morah Murray, you have to start on the south shore of Massachusetts, in a big, close, competitive Irish Catholic family, where one of the best ways to earn your place was to lace up and run. Mora was born on May 4, 1982 in Brockton, and grew up mostly in the small town in the small town

of Hanson, about half an hour south of Boston. She was the fourth of five kids. Her mom, Lori, was a nurse. Her dad, Fred, worked as a nuclear medicine technician, and he was a runner, a serious one. Fred had run the Boston Marathon nine times, so in the Murray House, running wasn't just a hobby somebody picked up on the side. It was a bonding experience turned into a shared passion. Mora was competitive and as the second youngest, she worked hard to keep up with her siblings and it paid off. She grew up to become an incredible runner. When she was six, her parents divorced and she lived mostly with her mom.

But her dad stayed close and running was a big part of how they stayed connected. Fred was the one loading the kids into the car and driving them all over New England for their meets, weekend after weekend. And in a family of five athletic children, there were a lot of meats to drive to. Mora and her older sister, Julie, who was a couple years ahead of her, both ran cross-country and track, and both of them were good, especially Mora. But she wasn't just a runner. As a kid, she played just about every sport imaginable.

Her dad had taught her and her friends to shoot baskets back in third grade, and by the time she reached high school, she was good enough to start at point guard on the varsity team as a freshman. She was a solid softball pitcher, too, and soccer might have been her best sport of all, but running was her passion. Her sophomore year, Mora gave up everything else to focus on cross-country and track, and she took off.

At Whitman-Hanson Regional High School, she broke long-standing school records, finished near the top of the entire state, and as a sophomore, she qualified for the cross-country national championships, where she got 33rd place, running against the best high schoolers in America, most of them a year or two older than she was.

For Mora, running wasn't only. only something she happened to be good at. It was part of who she was, the thing she shared with her dad, the place she felt strongest and most in control. And that need for control would go on to be a theme woven into her life. But beyond the running, here's the part the people who loved her always came back to. As much as more accomplished, she was never the type to make any of it about herself. Her sister Julie has described her as the jokester of the family, the youngest of the older siblings,

on by a pack of competitive kids, giving every bit of it right back. To hold her own, Mora developed a fast, sharp sense of humor early. She was warm, clever, and by every account, she was deeply humble, the kind of person who sent handwritten thank you cards to just about everyone in her life, for even the smallest things. She and Julie were fierce competitors, but Julie has said that, more than anything, they were each other's number one fans. She considered Mora her best friend. And it wasn't only family who saw something special in her. Her teachers did too. One of her advanced placement calculus teachers called her one of his brightest students. A coach described her as organized and diligent, the kind of kid who just did what needed to be

done without being asked twice. In high school, Mora also spent her free time volunteering at the nursing home where her mother worked, not because she had to, but because she loved it. She had a blast talking with the older residents, hearing their stories and making them laugh. That instinct to take care of people would end up shaping the rest of her life. Because as talented an athlete as Mora was, she was an even better student. She graduated at the top of her class. She scored in the 95th percentile on the SATs. And between those grades and her times on the track, she had just about every door in the country open to her.

The Ivy League came calling, including Harvard whose coach was actively recruiting her. For most 18-year-olds, that would have been the whole dream. Take the scholarship, run for the big-name school, and coast towards whatever came next. But Mora wanted something harder. Her older sister, Julie, was already at West Point, the United States Military Academy, perched above the Hudson River in New York, and Julie loved it there. The discipline, the structure, the feeling of being part of something, bigger than yourself. There is also a very practical piece to it. West Point doesn't charge tuition.

Cadets attend for free with the oath that after you graduate, you owe the U.S. military years of active service in return. Think about Morris' position here, a young woman who needed help paying for college whose beloved older sister was telling her she'd found the best place on earth. For Mora, it wasn't a hard decision. She looked up to Julie and constantly wanted to keep up with her and follow in her footsteps. But despite free tuition, with the promise of future service, getting into West Point is not easy and was an achievement all on its own.

You don't simply apply there, you have to be nominated, usually by a member of Congress, and then clear a gauntlet of academic, physical, and medical requirements that flush most applicants out before they even set foot on campus. Mora earned her nomination

from a sitting United States senator, the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. That's the caliber of young person we're talking about. At 18 years old, Maura Murray was already operating at the very top of everything she tried. So in the fall of 2000, she turned down the Ivy League and followed Julie to West Point. Planning to major in chemical engineering, one of the most demanding programs at one of the most demanding schools in the country. By all indications, she was exactly the kind of person

who could handle it. The academics, the discipline, the punishing physical demands. This was someone who had never once met a challenge she couldn't simply outwork. But West Point was about to become the first thing in Morris' life to change that. Hey, Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive the Price's Right Fortune Pick has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at BetmGM. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games,

like Plinko, Clifhanger, and the Big Wheel into Fun Casino Game Features. Don't forget to download the BenMGM Casino app for exclusive access and excitement on the Price's Right Fortune Pick. Pull up a seat and experience the Price's Right Fortune Pick only available at BetMGMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Please contact Connects Ontario at 1866-531-2,600, to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I first met Quenetta when I started reaching out to women in prison. For years, I thought I knew why she killed a man. But the more I dug in, the more I realized that nothing was quite so simple. I was just so scared that I was about to die.

She did some things she shouldn't have did. She made a big mistake. What She Buried is available now on The Binge. Search for What She Buried wherever you get your podcast to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes all at once. Ad free. Every new cadet at West Point starts the same way with something called Beast Barracks. It's a six-week initiation designed to break civilians down and rebuild them as soldiers,

camping out in the field, weapons training, endless marching and running. Extreme sleep deprivation and being yelled at from before. sunrise until well after dark by upperclassmen whose entire job is to find your breaking point and lean on it. Beast Barracks flushes people out fast. Every single year cadets who look completely unshakable on paper decide within a matter of weeks that this just isn't the life for them and they go home. But Maura made it through. However, getting past the initiation didn't mean the hard part was over. In a lot of ways, it only was the beginning. The regular West Point routine was

punishing all on its own. Days that started at six in the morning and could stretch until 3 a.m. the next day. There were room inspections every single day. Beds made, floor spotless, every item in its exact place. The door left open for anyone to walk by and check. And constant hazing from the cadets above you. All of it built to keep you off balance and prove you could take it. There were bright spots, though. Mora ran track at West Point just like in high school. And because As Julie ran to, the sisters crossed paths on the team constantly, sometimes several times a day. For a freshman, a long way from home, that had to be comforting. But Julie had thrived in that world in a way, Mora just couldn't.

Julie loved the order of it, the structure, the challenge, and that's part of what makes the stretch of Mora's life so painful to look at. She had come to West Point chasing her sister's experience, and the very thing that lifted Julie up started to grind Mora down. It wasn't long before she started to feel like she'd made a mistake. From the outside, she was still doing everything right, surviving a place engineered to chew you up and spit you out. But on the inside, the pressure was taking a real toll on her in ways that wouldn't be fully

understood until much later. Somewhere during her time at West Point, Mora developed an eating disorder. It may sound surprising on the surface, but eating disorders are closely tied to perfectionism as well as autonomy. Apparently, eating disorders are actually quite common in the army because it feels like the only thing some students and soldiers feel like they have control of. Mora was also a perfectionist, who was dropped into an environment designed to make you feel like you were never quite good enough, no matter how hard you pushed yourself.

From what her sister has said, she also felt a bit of bullying and peer pressure to achieve a certain physique. These are all hard things to carry at 19 years old, and she was carrying most of it alone, tucked behind the version of herself that still looked like she had it altogether. However, it wasn't long before the strain started showing up in other ways. In August of 2001, near the start of her second year, Mora was training at Fort Knox in Kentucky with her friend Megan when she walked into the post exchange,

which is basically an on-base convenience store, and slipped a lip gloss into her pocket. We're talking about something worth four or five dollars, something she could have easily paid for, An employee caught her almost immediately, but Mora didn't argue or make excuses. She admitted it right away. What she couldn't do was explain why'd she done it in the first place. At West Point, that kind of thing doesn't get handled quietly.

Cadets live under a strict honor code, and Mora had to go through a formal honor hearing over shoplifting. Over the years, it's often been reported that she was on the verge of expulsion because of it, but her sister Julie has pushed back on that. Julie has said she knew cadets who did far worse and were never kicked out, so a few dollars of lip gloss almost certainly wouldn't have ended Morris' time there. The fact that she owned up to it right away and took responsibility also played in her favor. Her sister Julie has said that reflecting back on it,

it may have been Mora's way of trying to get out without having to quit, a kind of subconscious escape hatch. Here was a young woman who was silently miserable, who didn't want to commit to years of military service, but who couldn't bring herself to just quit because that's not who she was. Getting caught doing something small might have given her the exit she couldn't give herself.

But whatever the truth of that, one thing is clear. Mora stayed. She kept going. The girl who'd never really failed at anything had stumbled, but she picked herself back up and pushed forward, the way she always had. And then one month later,

the world changed with the September 11th attacks. For cadets at the Military Academy, me, the fallout was immediate and deeply personal. Almost overnight, the country started moving towards a war in Afghanistan, which meant the promise every West Point student had made, that commitment to serve after graduation, suddenly looked a whole lot more concrete and a whole lot more dangerous. Here's how that deal works. In exchange for a free education, West Point graduates commit to five years of active duty in the military, plus three more years in the reserves. In peacetime, that's one kind of commitment, but by the fall of 2001, it wasn't peacetime anymore.

For a lot of soon-to-be officers, active duty now carried a very real chance of deploying into a combat zone, and that put Mora at a crossroads. If she stayed at West Point past the start of her junior year, she was essentially locked in. She'd owe the service whether she graduated or not. If she wanted a different path, she had a narrow window to take it. But leaving wasn't free either. walk away too late, and she'd be on the hook to pay the academy back for the entire education she'd already received. It was an incredibly hard decision with real consequences no matter which way she went. So Mora made her choice. On January 2nd, 2002, she withdrew from West Point. That

couldn't have been an easy decision for her. Mora had turned down Harvard for this place. She'd come here to be with her sister. She'd survived the intense initiation rituals, and now she was walking away from all of it to start over somewhere brand new. For someone whose whole identity was built on finishing what she started, that must have been heartbreaking. But Mora kept moving forward and eventually landed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the western part of the state. UMass gave her a full-ride scholarship to run track,

so she'd have her identity as an athlete, but she was also going to change direction completely with what she studied. She decided to become a nurse just like. like her mom. It made sense on a lot of levels. Mora had always been drawn to caring for people, which you could see back in that nursing home in high school. And nursing offered something else that mattered to her. Flexibility, nurses can find work almost anywhere, which, as it turned out, was exactly what Mora was hoping for, because when she left West Point, she didn't leave everything behind. Mora carried a few things with her out of West Point. Her academic credits, a habit of

of keeping her room clean to military standards, the eating disorder she was still quietly fighting, and her relationship. His name was Bill Rauch. He'd been a cadet to a couple of years ahead of Mora in Julie's class. The two of them actually met through Julie shortly after Mora arrived at West Point in 2000.

By the fall of 2001, they were a couple. It didn't take long for them to get serious. Mora met Bill's family at an Army-Navy football game back in 2001, and she grew close enough with them that she'd spend big chunks of her summers, three, four, sometimes six weeks at a time at the Roush family home in Ohio. Bill graduated in the spring of 2002 and was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, about 1,700 miles from Massachusetts. So from very early on, this was a long-distance relationship and it ran hot and cold. They broke up and got back together at least once or twice,

but it was also a big part of the reason Mora leaned towards nursing in the first place. If she and Bill stayed together, a nursing career meant she could follow him wherever the army happened to send him. In fact, she already arranged to spend that coming summer of 2002 working at a hospital in Oklahoma just to be closer to him. In her own mind, she may have been building a whole future around Bill. At UMass, Mora threw herself into that new life. On paper, she was thriving. She made the deans list every single semester, competed on the track team, worked two jobs on campus, one at the security desk in the building called Melville Hall,

and another at an art gallery. She did all of it while carrying a full course load in a demanding nursing program, complete with clinical rotations that had her on her feet caring for real patients. It's hard to overstate just how much she was juggling. Most people would buckle under a fraction of it, but Mora made it look manageable, staying up late to get everything done, then getting up the next morning and doing it all over again.

To almost everyone around her, she looked like a young woman who had it completely handled. But underneath the surface, she was still struggling, and the people closest to her could see it. Friends noticed changes, little things like the way she started avoiding the shared bathroom in her dorm. They were also worried that the eating disorder she'd battled at West Point had followed her to UMass. Then, in the fall of 2003, something else shifted. Mora started taking impulsive risks again. the same kind of behavior that had surfaced back at the academy. It started with a speeding ticket.

The summer before her senior year on July 27, 2003, Mora was pulled over in New Hampshire going 99 into 65. She was driving her dad's car on a family trip up to Bartlett in the White Mountains. And the White Mountains will become important because they weren't just some random spot on the map to the Marys. They were practically a second home. The family had vacation there for years, camping. hiking, renting a cottage every summer. Mora and her dad used to drive up to that area several times a year

just the two of them to hike the mountains together. Moran knew that stretch of New Hampshire well, but that speeding ticket cost her. Her license got suspended in New Hampshire only for 30 days, but it came with a catch. To get it reinstated, she'd have to physically return to New Hampshire and take care of it in person. Annoying, sure, but not the end of the world. And Mora seemed to shake it right off. She threw herself into her first clinical rotations that fall, and she was doing well. But a few months later, she took another strange risk.

In October of 2003, Mora got caught using another student's credit card number over the phone to order a big pizza delivery. When the real cardholder noticed the charge on her statement, she reported it, and the police traced it right back to Mora. Again, Mora confessed the moment she was caught. No lawyer, no elaborate cover story, she simply admitted what she'd done. and agreed to pay it all back, about $79. The charge was set to be dismissed a few months later in February of 2004, as long as she stayed out of trouble until then.

Now, it's easy to hear shoplifting and stolen credit card and start drawing hard conclusions about someone's character, but there's important context here. There's a well-documented link between eating disorders and stealing. Researchers have found that a significant share of people struggling with bulimia have a history of shoplifting. Of course, that doesn't excuse it, but it does suggest that what looked like a run of bad decisions may have been tangled up with something Mora was fighting on the inside, something

she was still trying to hide. And it's important to remember who she still was underneath it all. That same October, Mora sent her mother her birthday postcard. In it, she wrote about how she'd finally come to understand what her mom had always meant about being on her feet all day, how now that she'd tried nursing herself, she could really picture her mother at work, how important her job was and the impact she had on her patients, getting them to laugh and making their day. It was warm, thoughtful, and completely, unmistakably, Mora. But in January of 2004, a new problem landed on her plate. Her car

started breaking down. Mora drove a black 1996 Saturn and it began acting up during a visit to her dad, who was working in Connecticut at the time. The engine had blown a gasket and was running on three cylinders instead of four. It was technically still drivable, but clearly on its last legs. For Fred, that wasn't just an inconvenience. It was a safety issue. Mora was going to be doing a lot of driving for those nursing rotations, and he wanted her in something more reliable before she got started. So he told her not to worry. He'd come up to Massachusetts soon, and the two of them would go find her a better car together. He planned to make the trip the first week in February. So that was Maura Murray in the winter of 2004.

21 years old, a deansless nursing student, a college athlete, a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend. A young woman who is also silently struggling, but her father was about to drive up for an ordinary weekend of car shopping, and it would be one of the last normal things she ever did. It's time to ring the alarm where I will be answering all of your questions and give my unfiltered thoughts on the case, so make sure to comment below. Morris seemed like she had everything going for her. Top athlete, smart enough for Harvard, the whole package. So why do you think she was struggling so much underneath?

I think that's one of the reasons Maura Marie's case resonates with so many people. From the outside, she looked like someone who had every opportunity. A standout athlete, accepted to West Point before transferring to UMass and academically capable. But external success doesn't protect someone from internal struggles. In the months leading up to her disappearance, there were signs that she was under significant stress, family issues, academic pressure, a recent car accident, credit card fraud-related legal trouble, and emotional strain in her personal life. None of these things alone explain what happened, but together they paint a picture of someone

carrying a heavy load. It's also a reminder that people are often much better at managing their image than their mental state. High-achieving people can feel an enormous pressure to live up to expectations, and when they stumble, they may experience intense shame or believe they have to handle everything on their own. We can't know exactly what Mora was thinking or feeling because she disappeared before she could tell her own story. But what her case illustrates is that someone can appear to have everything going for them while quietly struggling beneath the surface, a reality that is far more common than most people realize. The shoplifting and credit card thing. A lot of people online treat those as red flag.

like they say something dark about who she was. How do you read them? I really try to resist that interpretation, and here's why. When you actually look at those incidents, the pattern isn't some criminal mastermind. It's a young woman doing something impulsive and honestly kind of inexplicable, getting caught, and then immediately owning it every single time.

She never denied it. She never had an elaborate plan. They were typically very small thefts and never violent. To me, that's a sign of someone in distress, someone crying out for help without having to admit to their loved ones that they are struggling. And like I mentioned, there's a real documented connection between disordered eating and compulsive stealing. So I don't see these as character flaws. I view them more like symptoms, signs of someone struggling a lot more than the people around them realize.

I think using a lip glass and pizza order to paint more as some shady person does a real disservice to who she actually was. Mora's family has been really vocal over the years about wanting her remembered as a person, not just a case. Why does that matter so much, especially with this one? In preparation for this case, I listened to Mora's sister Julie's podcast series on her disappearance, and Mora's case was one of the first true crime cases that was sort of hijacked by internet sluice. Her disappearance was right around the time Facebook was becoming really popular, and people started posting there and doing their own investigations.

In these kinds of cases, some people, have good intentions, but unfortunately, some people use cases like this to gain clout. And many people who do that will also make false assumptions or narratives that are harmful to the victim and their family. When cases get as big as hers did, sometimes what happens is the victim can disappear from their own story. Julie felt that at times, Mora stopped being a human being who was loved and started being a puzzle for strangers to solve. She also said that all she's really asking for is a basic level of human decency for her family. And honestly, that's a low bar that a lot of people online have failed to clear. Because Mora's story has so many gaps in it that people

just fill them in with whatever they want. And in the process, they forget there's a real family sitting at the center of it reading every word. So I'll keep saying it throughout the series. Mora was a kid making nursing home residents laugh. She was the jokester of her family. She sent thank you cards to everyone. She blushed when you complimented her. And a lot of people actually see themselves in her. The pressure, the perfectionism, the mistakes that don't define you. That's who we should be keeping in mind through all of this. Not a headline, not a mystery, a person. That's what's going to matter even more as we get into what happened next. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Come back tomorrow for the next episode on Maura Marie. But first, I can't wait for you to hear

from Sabrina and Alexis about Crime House's newest show, Crimes of Reddit. Okay, first, I'd love to hear all about the show and why Reddit? Well, Reddit is sort of a town square where people can negotiate and sort of banter about elements of cases. But we're finding, too, that so many people who feel safe, being anonymous, are actually confessing to insane things on Reddit. And also I feel like Reddit is my go-to place for questions, like, of anything strange happening in my life. If someone on Reddit hasn't experienced it, then like, go to the emergency room, you know? Yeah.

You're in danger. It's just this place where people feel safe saying and confessing things that are maybe taboo to talk about publicly. Well, and people also feel safe to criticize, give honest advice that might not be quite so politically or nice because their name's not attached to it. So there's just like this raw human element that shows up on Reddit that you don't see anywhere else on social media. I actually like Reddit for researching cases because it's so interesting to hear everyone's perspectives. Yeah.

Especially there gets some like crazy conspiracy theories. But some of them I'm like, okay, there might be some merit here. No, seriously. It's such an interesting thought exercise on Reddit. And it's where, you know, former co-workers connect to things show up in like spill, TV. It's where people who went to high school with them show up in spill tea. Like, really people come forward because they feel safe, not sharing their name. But you get details you'd never get like in a documentary or in a podcast.

Well, I'm so excited for it. Tell me a little bit more about you guys. I've been podcasting for nine years now. Started with Two Girls One Ghost, which I co-host with Corinne, who I used to co-host, Crimes of With. Yeah, I'm just so fascinated by stories and storytelling and just the human experience, whether living or dead. And I've been podcasting for about nine years, too. I have a weekly podcast called The First Degree,

which I co-host with my best friend. And then since 2020, I was hosting a show for Investigation Discovery, a podcast called Unravelled, which primarily covered the Long Island serial killer case. I have a book about that case coming out in January of 2027. Yeah.

It's called Between the Devil and the Tide. All right. Last thing, before we get out of here, I want to hear your guys' thoughts on the more. Murray case and also what's it been like covering cases on Reddit where people are commenting in real time and giving their thoughts. Well, I think they both kind of go together with the Mara Murray case. There are people on Reddit and on social media kind of putting their ideas out there and their thoughts and pontificating what could have happened because that's the hardest thing about that case is there's just so much unknown. How does she just disappear?

And it's really one of the most divisive and controversial disappearances where, I've really heard about people feuding about this, people really getting into it, even in person, at some of the, like, CrimeCon, I think there was a whole thing between the journalist and Moro Murray's sister. It evokes so much emotion from people. That really spills over onto Reddit. I mean, that's where people really get fired up about the cases they're passionate about. And I think Moramari's story is the exact type of case that we see. I think hers was one of the first cases that became kind of the social media sluice because it was right when Facebook came out. And like everyone was posting updates and information and all of these speculations on Facebook.

Well, I'm really excited for your guys' show. And thank you for coming on. Thanks for having us. Again, everyone, make sure to follow Crimes of Reddit wherever you get your podcast and also follow them on YouTube. And remember to stick around for our special pre-examination. review on Crimes of Reddit. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your listening experience, join Crime House Plus and get all three parts of each week's America's most infamous crime stories dropped at once every Monday and ad-free. You also get the rest of the

crimehouse lineup ad-free and early and exclusive bonus episodes. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the America's most infamous crime show page. My mother-in-law suddenly passed away in a car accident last month at the same time, my stalker disappeared. Coincidence? Probably not. Probably not. Oh, that's so sad. Messed up.

So my mother-in-law and I have never had a good relationship. She has tried to sabotage my relationship with my husband since the day she met me. I wasn't good enough for her handsome and successful boy. Which is a crime on its own of like women protecting their sons like this and being obsessive with their children. My handsome successful boy. Vomit. You can think your child is successful.

without being obsessive. And you can think they're handsome without babying an adult man. Yeah. I contemplated ending my relationship several times, but my husband always showed that he is on my side and I love him. Okay, that's good. A few years ago, I started getting very threatening and scary emails and texts from a Pax.

So Pax is the name of the texter emailer. This Pax knew everything about me. It didn't matter how many emails and phone numbers I changed. They or he always found me. I made several reports, but nothing happened. My husband tried everything to trace these emails. Nothing came out of it. Okay, so this is going in the direction of what's that documentary, where like the mom was...

That documentary unknown number. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so this is the direction it's going in because I went, when you read that, like, subreddit or the title of the post, I thought it was going to be like the stalker accidentally killed the mother-in-law. But now we're like, oh. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, to torment your own high school daughter is so deranged. It's like that is a dangerous, dangerous woman. And we'll talk about how tangled relationships are when you even find out your parent is doing something like this, how hard it would be to accept. But the husband in this situation was really helpful in trying to get to the bottom. Which I appreciate. Great husband.

Green flag there. Totally. So no matter what, Pax always found her. And she was under the impression that Pax was a guy based on the language that was being used. And the original poster says, I made several reports, but nothing happened. And this past year, I basically never left the apartment alone, saying that she got so scared of this. She was afraid to leave the house. To be alone, yeah. So she says, I haven't received a single threatening text or email from Pax in a month. After a few days, I wasn't surprised. I felt like I always knew it was my mother-in-law deep down. My husband hasn't reacted yet.

He's consumed with his grief and I don't want to bother him, especially when he bitterly told me, you must be very pleased now when we heard the news and I tried to comfort him. He apologized later and said he was just feeling guilty that he loved and chose me more than he loved her. Well, that's so complicated. Yeah, that's so complicated. And also it would be one thing to find out your mom was this like PACS person while she's still alive.

But to be dealing with the grief of losing your mom, regardless of how complicated your relationship is, like you could hate your parent. And if they die, people still have so much grief and that like feeling of loss. It's primal. Yeah. I mean, they're the most foundational relationships human beings can have. I mean, they mold who we are. and we feel totally intertwined with them. So it makes total sense like it's impossible to let go.

Oh, that's so sad. So she continues. Okay. Now I'm waiting for my husband to connect the dots. Will he get it? If he does, will he talk to me about it? I don't know if I will ever bring it up to him. I won't relax and go back to my normal life just yet.

But I know in my heart that it's over and I can't be happier about my life. Yeah. And she's entitled to feel that relief because she was being tormented by this woman. Also, I'm curious if, and maybe this will be in updates, but when, like, you lose someone and you, like, start to go through their things, do they find anything that proves? I've actually heard a lot of stories like that. Yeah. Where, you know, one story I heard was this woman was dealing with, like, constant people stealing her identity constantly. And, like, basically her financial life was in ruins. And when her mom died, she found all the documents that it was

her mom. And then it's like you can't do anything with the anger because they're gone. Yeah. Crazy. So do you think you'd tell the husband or do you think you'd wait? I would wait because I would empathize so much with their processing the grief and then I would be able to like sit with my relief of it being over, but I wouldn't want to throw that on them. Right. What about you? I think I would have started accusing the mother-in-law the second I suspected it. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of like, I'm not, I can't be calculating like that. Yeah. So my husband at the time of her death would have already known that I thought it was her. I do agree with that. But I think if you didn't put it together until after, I wouldn't choose then. Yeah, I wouldn't choose that. Yeah,

to bring it up for the first time. Yeah. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.