Disappearance of Pregnant Marine Probed by North Carolina Authorities

Foxnews.com ^ | Tuesday, January 08, 2008

[ConorMacNessa]

JACKSONVILLE, N.C.

[ConorMacNessa]

[wideawake]

Beautiful woman. Sadly, it seems a foregone conclusion that she has been murdered.

[ConorMacNessa]

I would agree with you on that. She was waiting to testify - there’s the motive.

[edcoil]

Not reported by husband? Is he deployed or is she unmarried and prego?

[wideawake]

I see three possible motives:

(1) To prevent her testimony.

(2) To prevent the fatehr from having to pay child support.

(3) To steal her child (as you may recall there have been a few incidents of late-term pregnant women being eviscerated for this purpose).

If she has been murdered I hope it is for motive (3) - because that is the one possibility of the three that would leave her child alive.

[ConorMacNessa]

Story says nothing about marriage status.

[Bat_Chemist]

NC *Ping*

Please FRmail Bat_Chemist if you want to be added to or removed from this North Carolina ping list.

[wideawake]

Not reported by husband? Is he deployed or is she unmarried and prego?

Since her name is Maria Lauterbach and her mother's name is Mary Lauterbach, I would guess that she is pregnant and unmarried.

My sister in law - who was deployed in Iraq - informs me that many active duty female soldiers and marines have become pregnant out of wedlock because pregnancy prevents them from being deployed overseas.

[Tax-chick]

Aw, jeez.

[Bat_Chemist]

Agreed. May the perpetrators be caught. And flayed. Alive.

[mpackard]

My God, as the mom of 2 young women I cannot imaging what this family is going through. I pray that they get some closure soon.

[pandoraou812]

Prayers for Maria Frances Lauterbach & the hope is is found alive & well.

[gitmogrunt]

AWOL is a possibility.

[DB]

Well there’s still possibility 4, she doesn’t want to testify.

[wideawake]

Well there’s still possibility 4, she doesn’t want to testify.

One of the first things the police would do in a missing persons case is to check her phone records and her immediate family's phone records.

If she was on the run, the likelihood of her letting her mother think that she was dead are extremely low.

She would at least have let her mother know.

[PeteB570]

Cell phone by the gate and car at the bus station.

Bad news I’m afraid.

[freema]

Ping

[freema]

It is not clear why the disappearance wasn't made public earlier.

...Investigators are calling her disappearance suspicious, saying her mother reported that Lauterbach was going to testify about an incident she witnessed on base.

[usmcobra]

She's dead.

It's Official.

[freema]

Authorities said they were not concerned that Laurean would flee because they had information the pair carried on a "friendly relationship" even after she reported the assault to military authorities. There is no indication Lauterbach asked the military to protect her after she leveled the rape allegations, investigators said.

Steiner, however, said his niece didn't have any kind of relationship with her attacker, and that Lauterbach had been forced to rent a room off base because of harassment at Camp Lejeune.

"She was raped," Steiner said. "The Marines, unfortunately, did not protect her, and now she's dead."

I say NCIS needs it's feet held to this fire, as well as a few others. She was allegedly raped 8 months ago and nothing was done when she turned up missing. I've heard news reports that stated they wouldn't look for her until she'd been missing for 30 days. Why is the Onlslow County Sheriff's Department handling this? Because NCIS didn't?

This station is covering the story very well: http://www.witntv.com/