Items belonging to a Connecticut woman who went missing more than a year ago during a hike in Japan have been found, deepening the mystery of her disappearance and compounding her family’s pain.
It was April 10, 2023, when Storrs resident Patricia “Pattie” Wu-Murad vanished during a solo hike on a section of Japan’s Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail in the mountains of Wakayama. Days of searching by authorities, volunteers and family members turned up no trace of the 60-year-old experienced trekker.
Then last month, nearly a year and a half after Wu-Murad went missing, someone fishing in nearby Totsukawa village found her backpack near a stream, along with a single shoe, her family said this week. The backpack contained her email and her family’s home address written on a Ziploc bag. The fisherman reported the find to the Gojo Police Station, according to a post on the Facebook page Help Find Pattie, created to marshal the search efforts.
“The next day, on Sept. 16, with the guidance of the fisherman, police retrieved the backpack and stored it,” the post read. “The backpack was mostly empty with the exception of the Ziploc bag and gravel. After a further search of the area around the original site, police also located a single shoe downstream from where the backpack was found.”
The items were northeast of the Mandokoro guesthouse, the last place Wu-Murad had been seen, the page said.
Her husband, Kirk Murad, had dropped off his wife of 33 years at Newark Airport on March 4, 2023, according to the Hartford Courant. That was the last they saw of each other.
On April 10, she set off to hike 11.2 miles on the mountainous Kumano Kodo Trail, and four days later the U.S. Embassy notified Murad that his wife was missing.
“We don’t know if she got on the wrong trail,” Murad told the Courant on Sunday. “[Finding the items] just raises more questions than it gives answers.”