Missing
When Becky Hanna woke up on Wednesday, October 10, 2012, she headed downstairs to the kitchen and immediately noticed that her niece, Lizzi Marriott, wasn’t home. Lizzi was very responsible, and although there was no need for her to check in with her aunt and uncle, she almost always did so as a courtesy. She was an adult, though, and didn’t have a curfew. But Becky hadn’t heard her niece come in late or head out early.
She saw that Lizzi’s SUV wasn’t in the driveway and, checking the attic bedroom, noted that Lizzi’s bed hadn’t been slept in. She later told 48 Hours she was concerned but not particularly panicked. Becky respected her niece’s privacy and imagined she might have gone to a party or slept over at a friend’s dorm room. When push came to shove, Lizzi wasn’t her daughter, and it was a delicate balance to both adore the girl and to give her the space a college sophomore was entitled to.
The last sign of Lizzi’s presence in the house had been left on Monday night. Lizzi had said her class was taking a field trip to a tidal pool to study the aquatic life, and she told her aunt she needed some boots because the terrain would be rocky. At Becky’s urging, Lizzi borrowed her cousin’s pair and dashed off to UNH.
At the estuary, every slimy thing captivated Lizzi, just as it had at the New England Aquarium. Her lab partner didn’t find it nearly as interesting, though, and wandered away from the group—only to fall into a deep tidal pool. Lizzi turned when she heard the splash and went over to fish her partner out, but instead she found herself yanked in up to her thighs by the struggling student. The water was cold but not nearly as frigid as the chill from the wind blowing through her wet jeans when she climbed out. She shared this calamity with friends on social media, not in words that cut down her clumsy classmate, but rather with that self-deprecating tone that celebrated another of her harmless misadventures.
The tale had been her final post to her Facebook page.
When Lizzi returned home to the Hannas, she’d left a note of apology on the soaking boots by the door. The note was still there.
Her confidence in her niece aside, Becky still felt something wasn’t right about her absence on this Wednesday morning. Becky consulted the family calendar where Lizzi often wrote her schedule. For Tuesday night, Lizzi had noted that she had an evening chemistry class, then plans with a friend. “School til 9, might to a friend’s after, back at 12 at latest.”
Becky’s husband, Anthony Hanna, also tried to tamp down his concern. If Lizzi had stayed out all night, he rationalized, she’d come home eventually to change her clothes and freshen up, if not before class, then before her shift at Target later that night.
But Tony was anxious for another reason. He loved Lizzi’s spirit and friendly personality, but he’d sometimes worried she could be too friendly, too trusting.
Back in Massachusetts, Lizzi’s girlfriend, Brittany Atwood, was also uneasy. She had sent three more texts to Lizzi the previous night around nine P.M., but when there had been no response after “You’re so cute!”, she figured Lizzi had arrived at her destination and their conversation was over.
Brittany knew the friend Lizzi was visiting that night was Kat McDonough. They’d never met, but she felt a pang of jealousy whenever Lizzi would talk about Kat. Lizzi had introduced Kat through a text that listed all of the things they were both into.
“And she is bi!!!” Lizzi wrote, which rattled Brittany. Distance, new circles of friends, and time spent apart were always a dangerous combination for relationships. In October 2012, Brittany was living in a tiny apartment with her sister—an arrangement that wasn’t working out—and her girlfriend was in another state. Brittany would later admit that it was much easier for her when Lizzi was ten minutes away at her parents’ house in central Massachusetts. They’d had a great summer together, and she was still getting used to only seeing her girlfriend on the weekends.
She also was uneasy about her girlfriend’s affection for a guy she’d met who also worked at Target. Nate McNeal was one of the few people who were friends with both Lizzi and Kat. Like the two of them, he also considered himself a nerd—he was into video games and fantasy novels like A Game of Thrones.
Nate told journalists he had known Kat for much longer—his sister had been her friend in kindergarten—but he was much closer to Lizzi. The two of them texted jokes about killer octopuses leveling cities and destroying modern civilization.
“Can you speak fluent octopus yet?” Nate had texted Lizzi on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 9.
“Pfft, was I ever unable?” she wisecracked.
Nate laughed and typed back on the cracked screen of his iPhone. “Now we shall raise an army . . .”
Lizzi texted back that theirs would be an army of huggably betentacled cephalopods. Nate asked his aspiring marine biologist friend how terrifying it would be if someone gave steroids to an octopus.
“OCTOPUZILLAAA,” she texted back in mock terror.
They made a date to have lunch on Wednesday, but when he texted Lizzi to confirm the plans at 11:33 P.M. on Tuesday, she didn’t respond. At noon on Wednesday, he went to the restaurant anyway and waited for her for more than an hour. Lizzi had told him that Brittany was jealous of their friendship, and as he sat there waiting, he wondered whether the couple had quarreled about the lunch date being out of bounds, or whether Lizzi had simply forgotten their plans.
“Ay!” he texted Lizzi at 1:15, hoping pinging her would be enough to jog her memory about their tête-à-tête. Lizzi didn’t respond.
He tried again later. “L-sizzle? :D”
As the hours passed, Nate’s worry grew.
“Friend? Art thou okay?!” he texted, followed by the D: emoticon, an expression of great concern.
That evening, Lizzi didn’t turn up for her five-to-ten P.M. shift at Target. Calls to her iPhone went straight to voicemail.
On Thursday morning, when it was clear Lizzi hadn’t come home for a second straight night, Tony and Becky Hanna could no longer deny something was seriously wrong. As they struggled to think straight about what their next move should be, the wall phone in the kitchen rang.
Tony snatched up the receiver and Becky moved close, hoping to hear Lizzi’s apology ringing through the earpiece. Instead, she heard Lizzi’s father’s voice.
“Hi, Tony. It’s Bob. Have you heard from Lizzi?”
“No,” Tony replied to his brother-in-law. “We were just about to call you.”
—
Bob Marriott and his wife, Melissa, hadn’t known there was a problem until Brittany called them the morning of Thursday, October 11. She told them that Lizzi had not responded to any of her calls or texts for more than twenty-four hours, which was very unlike her, and that there hadn’t been any activity on her usually lively Facebook account.
The Marriotts knew Lizzi and Brittany were in constant contact with each other. They had hoped Tony and Becky knew what was going on, but now panic passed through the telephone like a contagion.
Lizzi’s father hung up the phone in utter disbelief. Bob was an engineer, but he found it hard to think analytically about the situation. Should they call the cops? Should they call the FBI? How long did Lizzi have to be missing before authorities could start looking for her? He could only guess at what those answers might be.
Later, recounting the day for CBS, the parents told how they each picked up a phone and began calling everyone they could think of.
No, she hasn’t shown up for work. No, she didn’t make it to her class. No, I haven’t seen but I’ll try to reach her for you.
After two hours of dialing with no results, Bob and Melissa Marriott could no longer just sit around their kitchen table. They got in their car and made the ninety-minute drive from Westborough to Chester, Bob driving while Melissa continued making calls.
When they arrived at Becky and Tony Hanna’s house in Chester, the foursome put their heads together about what they should do next. Tony pointed to the note Lizzi had written on the calendar for Tuesday.
“Going to a friend’s?” he said. “What friend?”
Brittany had told Bob Marriott all she knew about Lizzi’s Tuesday night plans, how after chemistry lab, Lizzi had said she was meeting up with her former Target coworker, Kat. Brittany wasn’t sure, but she thought Kat’s last name was McDonough and that she lived with her boyfriend somewhere near Portsmouth.
Around two P.M., Bob and Melissa talked to Nicholas McLellan, a patrolman from the tiny Chester Police Department. Officer McLellan contacted the county dispatch center to put a BOLO (“be on the lookout”) for Lizzi’s Mazda. He also had Dispatch trace the last GPS coordinates for Lizzi’s cell phone, which placed the device in Dover on Tuesday night.
After spending much of his day searching local databases and reaching out to the same people whom the Marriotts had already called, Officer McLellan was able to connect the dots between Kat McDonough and her boyfriend, and he retrieved the phone number for an apartment listed under S Mazzaglia in Dover.
Seth answered the officer’s call, but denied that Lizzi had come to his apartment on Tuesday night. Seth claimed to have been home until around nine P.M., then left to go on a two-mile run. His legs began to hurt, he said, and he’d had to slow down and walk. He didn’t get home until ten.
Seth told McLellan there wasn’t anyone in the apartment when he got back. He said that his girlfriend, Kat, didn’t arrive home until midnight.
There was something about the conversation that McLellan didn’t like. He thought Seth sounded very nervous and had gone out of his way to put distance between himself and his apartment. Before McLellan hung up, he asked Seth to have Kat call him as soon as she could.
About twenty minutes later the officer received a call from Kat. She told him that, yes, Lizzi was supposed to have come over on Tuesday, but she’d never made it. She’d said her chemistry lab could go as late as ten P.M., Kat explained, so there had been no set time for her arrival. When ten o’clock rolled around, Kat said, she went outside the building to wait for her. They had plans to walk to a nearby cemetery.
“Why were you going to a cemetery?” McLellan asked Kat.
“We were going to take some pictures at night,” she responded. “I wanted to prove to her that ghosts are real.”
Kat said that she waited and waited but ultimately decided to go to the cemetery alone. She got back at midnight and went to bed.
McLellan wrote up everything he could and told his supervisors that there was something more going on with this missing persons case. The decision was made to get other agencies involved in the search for Lizzi Marriott.
An hour later, James Yerardi of the Dover Police Department knocked on the door of Seth’s apartment at Sawyer Mill. Both Seth and Kat were home. The officer explained that he was looking for Lizzi Marriott and was there to collect some information.
The couple sprang to life with niceties and invited the officer inside. Seth listened as Kat explained to Yerardi that she had been expecting Lizzi that night but that her friend had never shown up. Kat also said Lizzi had sent a text around nine P.M. saying her class was over, but that was the last time she’d heard from her. Yerardi made a note of the text message, a detail that wasn’t part of the story Kat told the Chester police officer.
Yerardi asked Seth and Kat to call the police station if they heard from Lizzi.
Then he asked, “Do you mind if I take a quick look around? Just to see that Lizzi isn’t hiding here?”
Seth and Kat said they didn’t mind and that he should take as much time as he needed. There wasn’t much to go through in the small apartment, but Yerardi scanned it efficiently, briefly inspecting the small kitchen and the living room/bedroom studio combo. With his foot, he poked around piles of dirty clothes and video game cases on the floor. He checked the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain, revealing more of Seth and Kat’s poor housekeeping.
The visit lasted only a few minutes. There was no sign of Lizzi in the apartment, and no sign of foul play. Officer Yerardi thanked Seth and Kat and left.
—
Lizzi’s family and friends began to mobilize. They gathered the most recent pictures of Lizzi they could find. She was smiling in every one of them. Full-color Missing posters were printed. The flyers were straightforward, the text framing Lizzi’s face, her blue eyes jumping out from the portraits they chose:
Lizzi Marriott: five foot five, blond hair and blue eyes, 130 pounds. Last seen driving a Mazda SUV with New Hampshire license plates. A $10,000 reward for information leading to her safe return.
Within hours, the posters were distributed to police and were plastered all over Chester, Portsmouth, and the sprawling UNH campus in Durham. Posters were even hung throughout the Sawyer Mill complex.
The local media took note of the pretty girl being sought on the posters and followed up with the police, suspecting there might be a story worth following.
The initial reports of Lizzi’s disappearance were relegated to the inside sections of New Hampshire’s Seacoast papers and the newspaper in Lizzi’s home town of Westborough, Massachusetts.
“I hope she’s with someone where she wants to be and that she’ll come home,” her father told a reporter.
The University of New Hampshire Police Department tracked down both Lizzi’s chemistry teacher and her lab partner. Both confirmed that she’d been in class on Tuesday, October 9. The investigators considered the possibility that she had never made it to her car or that something had happened after class that prevented her from arriving in Dover, and an officer spent the day canvassing UNH campus parking lots for Lizzi’s Mazda Tribute.
Nate McNeal was also contacting everyone he could in the search for Lizzi.
He texted Kat, “Hey have you heard from Lizzi lately? Or did she come over Tuesday night?”
“No. She was supposed to but never showed up,” Kat replied. “I’m worried as well.”
“Have you told the police that?”
“Yea they called and told me she was missing, i told them everything i knew.”
Nate frowned at the broken iPhone screen in his hands. He texted back a symbol meant to mimic the look he wore on his face:
[:
—
By Friday, October 12, as wider news coverage of the missing coed began to break, officials were beginning to doubt that Lizzi Marriott would turn up safe and sound. The investigation was in the command of the Chester police, but it was already crossing jurisdictional lines. With only five full-time officers and a handful of part-timers, the small-town department didn’t have the manpower for such an operation. It was time for the New Hampshire State Police to take control of the search.
New Hampshire’s state police are relied upon for more than patrolling highways for drunk drivers and speeders. Because of its great number of small towns and villages, close to two hundred communities rely on the NHSP to back up their local police forces. Even in cities with large departments, like Manchester or Portsmouth, the NHSP provides resources for large-scale investigations.
The NHSP can deploy crisis negotiators, bomb disposal units, and forensic analysts, but for the most part these towns lean on the state police for the everyday public safety services they can’t fully supply, from responding to car accidents or burglaries to domestic disturbances. Many municipalities without officers on nighttime duty route emergency calls to troopers, even though in some of the northernmost points of the state, those troopers could be an hour away.
The elite squad at the New Hampshire State Police is the Major Crime Unit, composed of seasoned veteran detectives and a forensic support staff ready for deployment anywhere they are called upon in the Granite State. Major Crime is most often in the news as the team that leads homicide investigations, and they work with local and federal authorities on cases like kidnappings, bank robberies, or police standoffs.
While assaults and robberies can be prosecuted by county attorneys, in New Hampshire, homicide cases can only be prosecuted by the state’s Attorney General’s office. Given concerns about Lizzi’s disappearance, the NHSP brought in the AG from the start. The level of coordination between the NHSP and the AG is critical to closing murder cases, with AGs involved even in the very early stages of an investigation, whether it be working with police at a crime scene, or responding to late-night calls to deliver emergency press conferences.
When the NHSP became involved in Lizzi’s disappearance, their first step was to acquire her cell phone records. Investigators quickly confirmed the text messages between Lizzi and Kat and between Lizzi and Brittany. The last message she sent to Kat was at 8:51 P.M.:“I’m at the outer door :).”
She sent one more text to Brittany at 8:55 P.M.—“You’re so cute!”—and that was the final message on the record.
Around 9:30 P.M., Lizzi’s iPhone had pinged a tower in Dover, indicating that, even if it wasn’t in use, it was powered on and within range of that tower. It certainly appeared from the records that she’d gotten as far as the door to the Sawyer Mill apartments.
Armed with what they knew, the Attorney General’s office called a press conference on Friday, October 12, at the Chester police station. The Marriott family joined officials from the state police and the FBI and Associate Attorney General Jane Young in seeking the public’s help in finding Lizzi.
Young took the lead. She said there was no evidence that anything “nefarious” had happened to Lizzi, but that all possibilities were open. Wet, falling leaves and darkened, unfamiliar roads could have caused her car to veer into the woods, Young said. She added that helicopters were searching all of the routes Lizzi might have taken and that a nationwide BOLO for Lizzi’s car had been issued.
Bob Marriott also spoke at the press conference and said that they planned to canvass popular college hangouts like Hampton Beach and off-campus bars with the hope of finding someone who knew something. He admitted the week’s events had left him in a fragile state but that family and friends in both states had given him shoulders to cry on when necessary.
Acknowledging his greatest hope—that Lizzi had taken off on a whim and was now afraid to return because of the fuss she’d caused—Bob Marriott just said, “Lizzi, come home.”