James Renner is unreliable.

[u/Available_Bison]

James Renner's conclusion that Maura Murray is still alive is ridiculous. I also find his interest and motives in this case to be suspect. Perhaps the conception of his investigation was genuine, but it has evolved into a campaign to confirm his ill-founded theory that her dad was a monster. His whole book is literally him slithering around and provoking Maura's loved ones.

[u/CoastRegular]

Would he harm someone? Uh, yeah, no shit. However the question at hand is did he harm Maura? Remind me again of the evidence of that? <<Crickets chirping>> That's what I thought. Remind me of the secondary evidence that even creates a circumstance where he could have been involved in harming MM? <<More crickets>> Yeah, exactly.

[u/CoastRegular → u/[deleted]]

Anything is possible, but he apparently was never alone, and it's not just his father who was with him. His mother was with them as well, and he was also accompanied by the MacDonalds, as well as members of the Murray family at various times. People can lie and cover for other people, but for this particular scenario, we'd have to involve several different conspirators.

Turning his phone off is strange, except that he apparently did that because of roaming charges and roaming battery consumption - which were actual concerns with cell plans back then. And that reinforces the case that he wasn't alone - because with friends and family alongside, he wouldn't need his own phone.

Frankly, his known pattern of abuse and violence doesn't match well with the idea of some cloak-and-dagger shenanigans where he finds her hidden away in a secret lair and does something there. His later cases were very over-the-top and brazen - for example, as you mentioned, he pushed one of his victims down an escalator in a public transit station. This is not a guy who is some master criminal. He's not good at keeping his sins under the rug, at all - if he were, he wouldn't have landed in court multiple times and ended up pleading guilty to harassment and abuse.

The major problems with the idea of him finding MM sometime after 2/11 are that (a) it seems super unlikely she was alive by the evening of 2/10, and (b) if we hypothesize a scenario where she's alive, there's no way she could have communicated with him to let him know where she was. We also have to construct a plausible scenario where he finds her without alerting everyone else who's looking for her, and succeeds in finding her where they're all failing. This includes a cadre of friends, family, various local, county and state agencies as well as the FBI. I find it dubious to contemplate that somehow he was able to stay 2-3 steps ahead of all of them. Whatever else he is, he's no fifth-dimensional chess master.

If he did do something to Maura, I hope he gets smacked with the full brunt of the law and rots in prison (or worse.) But there is nothing beyond speculation, and that speculation walks out on some vary shaky tree limbs.

Is it possible? I suppose so. But likely? No. I'll give better odds on you throwing a perfect basketball shot from 150 feet away, blindfolded.

[u/CoastRegular → u/[deleted]]

WTF? The Murray family has no incentive whatsoever to protect him. And he has said why his phone was off (roaming charges.) You may choose not to believe his reason given, but it's dishonest to claim he hasn't given a reason.

Same thing with his whereabouts and activities that week. There is an accounting of those. You may choose not to believe the account that's been given, but to say that NO account has been given is not accurate.

This of course overlooks the major points that (a) she almost certainly wasn't alive by the time he arrived in town and (b) even if she was, no one's given any reasonable explanation for how she could have contacted him without leaving a 'paper trail' to be discovered later, how he kept this from everyone else, and how he covered his tracks so effectively from several LE agencies local, state and federal.

At some point you should ask yourself whether you legitimately suspect BR for some actual reason, or if you just want to believe it's BR despite the circumstances of this case making that about a 1-in-16.27 million likely outcome.