‘We’re in limbo’: Painful reminders at home for family of missing Connecticut woman

STORRS — Murphy Murad is home. But her mom isn’t there to make her favorite meal.

“She would do surf and turf for me,” Murphy said. “Because red meat is really expensive in Singapore (where she lived), and I love steak and seafood.”

Her mother, Pattie Wu-Murad, designed the house where her family lives in Storrs. The kitchen was her favorite place. She loved to cook, and she spent a lot of time at the kitchen table, where there are still notes that she wrote, a dog toy she planned to fix, and her laptop.

Wu-Murad, 60, disappeared while setting out on a hike in Japan on April 10. Her husband Kirk and two of her children, Murphy and Bryce, went to Japan to try to find her. Murphy, 28, who was living in Singapore at the time, ended up coordinating the search and rescue effort for her mother.

They returned to the U.S. empty-handed, no leads, no clues to why Wu-Murad, an experienced hiker who had traveled around the world, had vanished.

The family’s two dogs, Milo and Blake, now are often under foot and looking for attention from Kirk and Murphy, who was visiting home for a little while before heading back to Los Angeles, where she is staying now. Pattie was retired and spent her days with the dogs. “They miss her,” Kirk said.

So does her husband, who finds that the smallest of household chores — sweeping the stairs, weeding the flower beds, filling the soap dispensers, things he never thought of before — are painful reminders of his wife’s absence.

“This is her house,” he said. “I just live in it.”

Murphy struggles at home as well; it’s hard to walk into the kitchen and not see her mom.

She’s also coming to terms with how she had to deal with trying to find her mother in a foreign country and how she put her emotions aside so she could think clearly, assuming a role that was far beyond her years.

“I’m actively in therapy,” Murphy said. “I know I removed myself so much as a family member, I want to make sure I’m taking care of myself and processing it in a way that’s helpful to myself and my family.”

Murphy, who grew up in Storrs and went to E.O. Smith High School and Southern Connecticut State University, where she played basketball, was living in Singapore when she discovered her mother had gone missing.

She was a basketball coach — like her father — working full-time at the Fastbreak Basketball Club. She was in a workout class when she got the call from her father, four days after her mother vanished.

‘Every second was so valuable’

After the initial shock, she started thinking about what she could do. She bought a plane ticket to Japan. She had friends in Japan; they started to collect information. Search and rescue would need to be involved as Pattie had potentially disappeared on a mountainous hike. Murphy started a GoFundMe page, which ended up raising over $200,000 to pay for search and rescue efforts and the family’s stay in Japan.

When her father arrived in Japan, the family went immediately to the police station. The police wanted a number to reach a family member. Murphy gave hers and after that, she became the point person for the police, the embassies, the search and rescue teams and her family.

“I would have meetings at the end of the day with our local search and rescue crew,” she said. “They’d go over the map where they searched, why they searched. They were incredible. We became really close. They were really invested.”

The first week, she never left the guest house. She wanted to go out on the trail to search for her mother but she knew she was needed where people could contact her immediately.

Early on, Murphy said, she had to separate her feelings from the search. There was a video conference with the consulate, the embassy and her family; there was tension, she said, between the family and the government official. An official called her out and said she did something wrong. Her family, including her father, went to her defense.

“In that moment, there was so many emotions coming from my family, and I matched them on it, but I knew if we just continued the conversation the way it was going, we weren’t going to get anything done,” Murphy said. “At that point, every second was so valuable.

“My family from home was really frustrated and I just stepped in and said, ‘Hey, I know emotions are running really high right now. This is what I said to you earlier, if this was misinterpreted, I apologize. We need to continue moving forward.’ I felt a switch. In the conversation itself, I felt very overwhelmed and the second I spoke, I almost felt like a robot. And that’s how I described myself the rest of the process. It’s hard to be emotionally involved and also make sure things were going to keep moving.”

Eventually, the search ended – after multiple search and rescue teams combed the 11.2-mile trail and found no trace of her – and the family left. Bryce went back to Chicago and Kirk and Murphy went to Singapore, where they stayed for a while, hoping something would turn up but eventually, they returned home.

“When we decided it, my brother and I ran into each other that night and we were both very emotional,” Murphy said. “We didn’t like the idea of leaving without answers. The primary emotion I felt was guilt: we were leaving Mom, and she was still out there.”

Kirk was grateful for the role Murphy took on in Japan.

“It saved me because I was too emotionally involved to take over,” he said. “I was ready to rip that lady from the embassy but like Murph said, it wouldn’t have helped anybody. She’s more able to control her emotions than I am.

“She’s an All-Star. Toughest role she’s ever taken on and she did it with intelligence and grace. She managed people of different cultures and different levels of government. We did everything we could, although the coach in me says we lost the game. ‘Til we find her, we’re losing.”

Bryce moved back home from Chicago and is working remotely. Murphy is figuring out what she wants to do next. Kirk, a former principal at Windham Tech and former girls basketball coach at E.O. Smith and Windsor, is going back to his job as a math coach in the Norwich school system Wednesday for the first time since April.

But the kitchen is still empty. Kirk never had to go grocery shopping before and he doesn’t like to cook; when Murphy came home earlier in the summer, there were no eggs.

“Who doesn’t have eggs?” Murphy said, gently poking fun at her father.

“Most of the time I was home in the past, it would have to do with my mom and she would kind of force me to be here. She would put together special events or dinners for me or the family.”

They are in limbo. They are still in touch with the police in Japan. If they get a lead, the local search and rescue team will go out and look, for free. But there are no clues and no leads, almost 20 weeks after Pattie disappeared.

“I still think she’s going to come home one day and say, ‘What is this? Why is this here? Why is there no food in the refrigerator?’ ” Kirk said.

“We’re in limbo. That’s a good word.”