It was during this time that my son began to get violent.
At first we used the word “tantrum.” Oh, Casey’s just having a tantrum. He’ll calm down in a couple minutes. He was only three, after all. Three-year-olds have tantrums.
When Casey got mad, he raged, he wanted to hurt. He wanted to hit and kick and bite. And it was little things that set him off. Transitions, mostly. Time to stop playing and take a bath. Time to go to bed.
We had Casey evaluated by child psychologists at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. It was one of those places where a bunch of shrinks sit in one room and watch their subject through mirrored glass. My wife, Julie, and I stood with the doctors and watched Casey interact with a prompter. They gave him an intelligence test. When they were done, the lead doctor sat us down and explained that she thought Casey was “spectruming,” or showing characteristics of autism.
Maybe I was in denial, but I didn’t buy the diagnosis. My kid wasn’t remote like Rain Man. Autistic people tend to lack empathy. But when Casey was happy he could be the most loving little guy. He liked to snuggle at the end of the day, watch SpongeBob with me. Whenever he left someplace, he had to hug everyone in the room. And everything he was doing, I recognized. This was how I had acted when I was his age.
With Casey, I found that if I kept him busy, his tantrums were less frequent. We went to the zoo a lot. Sometimes we walked down to the river and threw rocks in the water until he was good and dirty. If he didn’t have something to focus his mind on, that’s when he ran into trouble.
I got it. Thirty years down the road of life, I still grew easily frustrated and depressed if I wasn’t on deadline. Without the rigid structure of newspaper reporting, I was becoming increasingly manic. The only thing keeping me sane, really, was the mystery of Maura Murray’s disappearance.
* * *
I’m a bit of an unsolved-mysteries junkie. The colder the case, the better, as far as I’m concerned. I once flew to Seattle on my own dime for a sit-down with the FBI agent in charge of the D. B. Cooper case (America’s only unsolved hijacking). I’ve spent years trying to bring Amy Mihaljevic’s killer to justice. In 2006, I spent two months researching the disappearance of two girls from Cleveland’s West Side: Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. I still wondered about them. I met with both the Berry and DeJesus families on that story. Do everything you can to find our girls, they said. In my experience, family members of the missing clamor for the attention of reporters. A simple statistic: The more media coverage a case gets, the better its odds of being solved.
Until Fred Murray, I had never heard of a parent of a missing person who turned down the chance for national exposure. I might have scuttled my plans for a book right there. Without cooperation from Maura’s family, what did I have? But the story had its hooks in me. It was unlike any missing-persons case I’d ever read about because of its weird mystery-within-a-mystery. Maura did not vanish on a normal day. She had broken her routine; she’d driven into the North Country. What was she doing up there? Where was she going?
I’ve always had better luck getting a source to talk if I showed up at their home. If they can see me, see how bumbling and affable I can be, they usually end up talking, even if they’ve told me no over the phone. But everyone connected to Maura’s case lived hundreds of miles away. Well, almost everyone. Maura’s boyfriend, Billy Rausch, was from Marengo, Ohio, a workaday town between Mansfield and Columbus, a ninety-minute drive down Route 71 from my house.
So I went to Marengo and found Billy’s childhood home, a ranch sitting on a small lot. I parked my car and walked around back, where a sliding glass door looked into a cluttered living room. Billy’s mother, Sharon, appeared in a long robe.
Sharon has reddish hair and sharp features and comes across as highly intelligent. Her love for Maura was apparent in the news clips I’d seen on YouTube. She had cared for the young woman from Mass who’d stolen her son’s heart, and had opened up her home to her.
“I’m James Renner,” I said. “I’m writing the book about Maura?”
Sharon nodded. “I know,” she said.
“Sorry to drop in like this, but would you have some time to talk about her?”
“Well, I’m a little under the weather right now,” she said.
Now that she mentioned it, Sharon looked tired. Worn out. But not sick. Maura’s disappearance had been seven years ago. Was she still carrying that tragedy around inside her, like a bad cold?
“Maybe when you’re feeling better, you could call me and we could set up a time to meet.”
“Sure,” she said.
I left my number and my book on Amy Mihaljevic’s case.
* * *
“I have to drive to New Hampshire,” I said to my wife one night when we were lounging on the couch at the end of the day. Julie rolled her eyes at me.
“The anniversary of Maura’s disappearance is next week,” I said. “I want to be there to see who drives by the scene of the accident. For the book.”
“I hate these stories. You always have to find some dead girl. It’s so codependent.”
“No one knows if she’s dead,” I said. “And she isn’t a girl. She’s grown up. There’s no dead kids in this one.”
“That you know of.”
“So…”
“So, what?” said Julie. “If you have to go, go. But I won’t be happy about it.”
“Thank you.”
“Just don’t do anything dangerous. Or stupid.”
A week later I was driving drunk down Wild Ammonoosuc Road, lost in its dark turns.