Lizzi
On October 2, 2012, Elizabeth Marriott slowed down to make the final turn toward her aunt and uncle’s house. She had clocked nearly a hundred miles in her eleven-year-old Mazda Tribute that day alone—driving first to a full day of school at the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham, then to a friend’s house in Dover to hang out, and, finally, now home to bed. The fog was thickening, the dashboard thermometer number falling a degree at a time as her tires crunched over wind-drifted leaves.
As Lizzi reached the driveway, her foot instinctively hit the brake before she could make the turn, her heart jumping into her throat. Standing in the front yard was a large man wearing dark clothes. He was completely still, his arms hanging at his sides, his feet planted slightly apart. It was as if he had been waiting for her.
The man was facing Lizzi’s car and stood in silhouette, the front porch light glowing behind him. She couldn’t make out his face as she inched the SUV forward, and she soon realized why—the man was wearing a mask. And in his hand he held what appeared to be a large hook.
—
Lizzi Marriott had seen many unusual things along New Hampshire’s rural back roads since she’d moved in with her aunt and uncle to save on costs while she attended college nearby. Two days earlier, she’d spotted a Great Dane sticking its enormous head out the front window of a car Lizzi was passing, making it look like the dog itself was doing the driving. Three weeks before that, she’d encountered an endangered species, a Blanding’s turtle that had decided to quit crossing the road halfway across. Lizzi had pulled over, run to the rare turtle, and picked it up, snapping an iPhone photo of its leathery head tucked inside the shell before releasing it on the side of the road.
“Poor little muffin,” she wrote when she posted the photo on Facebook. “Now it’s safe to continue on its journey.”
Lizzi’s aunt and uncle, Tony and Becky Hanna, lived in the tiny town of Chester, an hour closer to campus than her parents’ house in central Massachusetts. Her hometown of Westborough, a classic New England town of just eighteen thousand within commuting distance of Boston, was small but distinctly modern and suburban, while Chester, a village established fifty years before the American Revolution, was the epitome of bucolic New England—merrily stuck in an era gone by. Residents still gathered at town meetings, where everyone voted on the local budget and decided whether the town’s part-time fire department should buy a new pumper truck.
Lizzi slept in a small, drafty attic bedroom with a crooked door and liked to complain that the room was haunted, blaming every bump in the night on some otherworldly presence (but never on any of the thriller/horror paperbacks she read under the covers for fun). The tap tap outside her window was likely water dripping onto the air conditioner; scratches at the door were probably the family’s tiger cat, and a scratch found on her cheek upon waking was also likely from the cat. “But let’s be serious,” she told her friends jokingly. “It’s far more likely to be a ghost.”
If there was anyone in the house Lizzi didn’t get along with, it probably was that cat, who could often be found hiding under Lizzi’s laundry or deep under the duvet on her bed. She was allergic to cats but couldn’t bring herself to shove it off her schoolbooks or even out of her room. Lizzi posted one time on Facebook that the cat had pounced from a hidden corner like a ninja, sending her running down the stairs spouting “a string of expletives that would make even sailor/rap artist hybrid blush.”
Rural life bemused and befuddled Lizzi. Growing up, she’d never had to stop her car for cows loitering in the middle of the road. She added a blaze orange vest and hat to her running gear after going for a jog in the woods, only to hear gunshots from hunters echoing around her; she hoped they would be enough to distinguish her from the deer. But even that wasn’t a traumatic turn, just another fun story to share with her friends.
“Have you ever had venison?” the Hannas asked their niece, cooking up the meat from someone’s deer hunt. Ever the risk-taker, Lizzi filled her plate.
“Don’t eat anything out of that pan,” they warned her. “That’s the heart.”
Lizzi stifled a shriek at the prospect of eating the dubious delicacy of deer heart and continued her meal like a good sport.
As they later related on the television show 48 Hours, it was important to the Hannas for Lizzi to feel like their rural house and its backyard menagerie of chickens and cows was her home too.
“I’m ho-ome!” Lizzi would announce each time she arrived at her aunt and uncle’s house. The Hannas made sure Lizzi was included in everything they did as a family. She went with them to the state fair and binged on fried food. They took her along to help them pick out the family Christmas tree and gave her a turn at the hacksaw while they cut it down. She rode a motorcycle and drove her uncle’s Dodge Ram 1500, the kind of muscle truck you might need for errands in Chester but never in Westborough. Her cousin showed her how to go four-wheeling through the woods on an ATV. The lesson consisted of: “This is the gas. These are the brakes. Now go!”
“Lizzi, come here,” her uncle called to her from the barn one afternoon.
He was welding a piece of metal and stopped to show her the molten seam he’d made.
“Put this on.”
She put the welder’s mask he handed her over her face and followed his directions as she guided the torch. The mark she left was serviceable enough, and she handed the tools back to Tony.
“I guess I’m a welder now,” she said chipperly as she walked off. It was simply another happy moment in the continuing adventure of her life.
—
Lizzi Marriott was born on June 10, 1993, and grew up to be a fresh-faced and undeniably beautiful girl with sandy shoulder-length hair, a broad smile, and wide-set light blue eyes. Her eyes were usually the first thing people noticed, and “ocean” was the color often ascribed to them, mostly because Lizzi herself had always loved the ocean.
Her mother would take the family to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, for summer vacations, and while her younger brother played in the sand, Lizzi played in the tide, spending hours examining the shells and seaweed deposited by the Atlantic surf.
Before Lizzi was old enough to read books herself, one of the adults in her life would read aloud to her while she sat beside them, a finger on her nose and a thumb in her mouth. According to the MetroWest Daily News, her aunt tried to get her to stop sucking her thumb, reminding her that she was almost old enough to go to school, but young Lizzi would just laugh and turn on the charm that would become the hallmark of her personality.
In high school, Lizzi had a tight group of friends and was popular with everyone. She stood out in a way that was endearing and sweet, never using being well liked to her advantage the way teenage girls are wont to do.
Lizzi was cheerful, loving, and affably ditzy. She loved Harry Potter and all things magical and embraced fantasy literature, sci-fi, and so-called “nerd” culture. She also had a great voice, which won her a music scholarship. Students remembered how, during workouts in the school gym, with music blasting and students running laps, Lizzi would always jog in the opposite direction of everyone else singing a completely different song out loud. For the junior prom, she made up her mind to sew her own dress. She looked stunning in it, and was crowned junior prom queen.
Her funny stories and winning personality drew people to her like a magnet. People found Lizzi Marriott lovable, witty, and trusting. Very trusting. It may have been that she was too eager to look on the bright side of life and see the best in people, making it hard for her to detect when she was being taken advantage of. But there are worse Achilles’ heels to have.
—
Lizzi never lost her interest in the ocean and marine life. On the dashboard of her car, she kept a collection of thumb-sized toy animals: dolphins, penguins, sea lions, and whales. Wherever she went, her aquatic friends came with her.
As often as she could in high school, Lizzi would volunteer at Boston’s New England Aquarium. A premier research facility and metropolitan tourist destination, the aquarium was the perfect place for a young adult to feed her curiosity about marine biology. The aquarium’s signature feature is an immense cylindrical tank, forty feet wide and four stories tall with a walkway that corkscrews around it where visitors can take in marine life at various depths and watch human divers plunging in to check on or feed certain specimens—or spot clean the Plexiglas.
Lizzi’s duty was working at the aquarium’s Edge of the Sea Touchtank exhibit, the oceanic equivalent of a petting zoo. She’d stand at a shallow, man-made coral pool and answer questions about the creatures crawling around. Visitors were encouraged to touch the hermit crabs and the patchwork collection of starfish, but even many adults were hesitant to reach in and stroke a moon snail or try to handle a sea urchin. Lizzi would joyfully lead the way, reaching into the water past her elbow and plucking out a horseshoe crab and showing that it was nothing to be afraid of.
According to her college application, visitors’ questions varied from “What does this creature eat?” and “How old is it?” to (her personal favorite) “Are clams alive?” Visitors were often surprised to hear she wasn’t a trained marine biologist, just a high school kid with a passion for the ocean.
Lizzi’s best-loved visitors were children, whose reactions to scaly, snappy, or hidden creatures suddenly crawling out of the rocks were priceless. Even when tiny hands inadvertently splashed poor Lizzi, salt water mottling her clothes and dripping from her bangs, it was impossible to dampen her spirit. She was even charmed by the rambunctious kids who preferred to attack her with their souvenir squid puppets than to try petting one of the Touchtank’s lobsters.
It may have been at the aquarium where Lizzi first fell in love with cephalopods, those gelatinous multilegged swimmers like cuttlefish, squid, and octopi. It was definitely where she made her mind up that she wanted to become a marine biologist.
Lizzi had her eye on the University of New Hampshire, a top-notch school for marine science with a laboratory on the shore of the Great Bay Estuary. But attending the University of New Hampshire isn’t cheap. Lizzi decided that for her freshman year, she would instead attend the nearby small Manchester Community College, where her uncle Tony Hanna taught welding technology. He vouched that it was a good place to earn some required credits at a fraction of the cost. If accepted to UNH, Lizzi could transfer there later and graduate with significantly less debt.
It was settled. There were no dorms at the community college, so Lizzi would move in with the Hannas in Chester during the school year. She would live in the “haunted” bedroom in the attic, the room with the crooked door. Lizzi kept in constant touch with her parents in Massachusetts on the phone and through social media. Bob and Melissa Marriott knew their daughter was in good hands with Bob’s sister’s family.
On school breaks, Lizzi would return to Westborough to spend time with family and friends. While at home, she got a part-time job at a grocery store, where she clicked right away with a kind girl behind thick glasses. Brittany Atwood loved everything about the radiant Lizzi.
Displaying an extraordinary level of self-assuredness, Lizzi “came out” to her friends and family as bisexual and felt ready to have a relationship with a woman. Her family was supportive, and Brittany quickly became a fixture at family gatherings. When it was time to return to New Hampshire, Lizzi and Brittany agreed to keep their long-distance relationship going.
After completing her freshman year at community college, Lizzi applied to the UNH marine science program. In her application essay, she described her role interacting with the public at the New England Aquarium and how the volunteer job helped her work toward her goals.
“My visitors don’t see me as some teenage girl,” she wrote. “Instead they see me as an intrepid ocean explorer. They see an adventurer who plunges fearlessly into the unexplored depths of the tank, bringing bizarre new animals into the light of day!”
She continued, “Some day, I’m determined to be a prominent figure when it comes to protecting our oceans. I want to help everyone when it comes to learning the wonders of our surrounding waters. But until then, I’m more than happy to be the intrepid ocean explorer, arm deep in the tank.”
Lizzi was accepted into the program and began her studies at UNH in the fall of 2012.
But even with financial aid and a free place to live, she still needed to make extra money, so in the summer of 2012, Lizzi had taken a job at a Target store in Greenland, New Hampshire, not far from the UNH campus in Durham.
Lizzi quickly entranced her new coworkers with her bubbly personality. She was the sort of person who turned even the mundane tasks of work into play, and it was impossible to bring her down. Just as splashing children had been a source of joy at the aquarium, Lizzi also found her department store customers a never-ending source of amusement.
One day, a man asked Lizzi where the exit to the store was. She bit her tongue and pointed that he was standing directly in front of it. A family who apparently spoke only French wandered in to browse the store’s merchandise. Lizzi couldn’t discern what they were saying until they stumbled onto a Big Bang Theory T-shirt. They kept yelling “Bazinga!” at one another and giggling. Lizzi giggled too.
While she was working at the checkout one night, an old man in a fedora took his change, looked Lizzi square in the eye, and said, “Behave yourself, now,” before walking away, muttering under his breath. Lizzi was nonplussed. Perhaps she seemed so pleasant that people thought she must be up to no good.
One night, a mother with a screaming baby rolled into the section where Lizzi was folding shirts. The woman, probably immune by now to the sound of her son’s cries, ignored the child while she browsed the racks. Instead of pitching her own fit about this reversal of fortune, Lizzi played peekaboo with the child across the shelving and made funny faces. The boy settled down and the mother never knew why. Writing about the incident on her Facebook page, Lizzi said “Cry-sis (Hah! Puns!) averted!”
—
Soon, between school and work and stealing the occasional trip back to Massachusetts, Lizzi’s life was a controlled blur, but after her first month at UNH, she got into a groove. She was racking up the miles on her Tribute, accompanied on her hour-plus commutes only by the plastic marine life resting on her dashboard. She needed to post her schedule in the Hannas’ kitchen to keep things straight and to let them know whether to expect her for dinner on any given night.
Her drive home to Chester the night of October 2, 2012, was the end of another marathon day—Lizzi had finished her evening chemistry lab, then gone to a new friend’s apartment to watch The Avengers. She’d briefly met her friend’s boyfriend, who seemed to want her to come back again. They’d made plans to watch movies again the following week.
It was at the end of that late-night drive when she pulled into the Hannas’ driveway to find a threatening man waiting for her in the front yard. He wore a mask over his face and brandished some kind of hook or weapon in his hand. The intruder was broad shouldered and sinister, standing still in the fog.
As the circle of her headlights crawled up the man’s body, Lizzi widened her eyes in disbelief and let out a bark of nervous laughter.
The man wasn’t a man at all, but a scarecrow, a straw man wearing her uncle’s welding gear. The family had done some early Halloween decorating, the front porch of the house full of pumpkins and buckets of mums.
“Thank you, Mr. Scarecrow, for not limiting your scare tactics to crows,” Lizzi wrote in sharing the whole incident on Facebook after she flopped into bed that night. “I’m really feeling the love.”
The scarecrow, the “ghost” in her room, the noises in the night: None of those things could hurt her. Loving her life and living every day to the fullest, she was safe with her family in New Hampshire with no boogeyman in sight.
A week later, Lizzi Marriott disappeared.