If Maura Murray ran into the trees as you suggest surely she would have been found? I think she faced foul play. I follow her sister on TIK TOK who posts about updates and theories. A woman just going missing in a space of a minutes brings up big red flags. I think she was kidnapped.
The woods in that part of rural New Hampshire are vast and dense, and a lot of the woodland where she vanished has never been searched as the local landowners won't allow it (not necessarily dodgy as New Hampshire is a very privacy obsessed, anti-government interference kind of place - their state motto is "Live Free or Die"). And realistically it's very, very hard to find a dead body in woods that dense. It's not uncommon for bodies to lie undiscovered for years, despite searches. It's not like woods in England which are more open and where police do fingertip searches in a line.
I feel so sorry for her sister, but both Maura and their other sister had serious problems and alcohol was involved. Maura had a mental health episode a few days before she went missing that caused her supervisor to become concerned, and was unable to speak except to say the words "my sister." The sister later clarified that she'd lapsed after getting out of rehab that same day and it was her relapse that had caused Maura's episode. This is not the same sister who does the TikToks, but it must have been so incredibly stressful and traumatic for the whole family.
But Maura's problems with aren't her fault or her responsibility, and Maura clearly was struggling with personal problems and likely did have a problem with alcohol. She crashed her car driving drunk twice in a short space of time. She'd been arrested and pled guilty to credit card theft three months before her disappearance. She was caught on a liquor store's CCTV four hours before she vanished buying beer, wine, and multiple bottles of spirits. Some of what she purchased were found empty in the car, meaning she'd been drinking at the wheel, and two bottles of spirits were missing, so either she or someone else removed them from the car after the crash. Unless she stopped on the journey to throw them out but that seems unlikely.
Some of her personal belongings including her wallet and cell phone were also missing, which seems to rule out forcible abduction.
The gap between Maura crashing her car, speaking to the woman whose house she crashed outside (who then went inside to phone the police), and the police showing up, was less than 20 minutes. We know that numerous cars plus a school bus passed during those 20 minute, and the bus driver stopped the bus and came out to briefly talk to Maura who begged him not to call the police and lied that she'd already called AAA. And the place where she crashed her car is surrounded by woods, but it's also residential; the woman who did call the police could see the crashed car from her window.
It just seems really implausible that a kidnapper just happened to come along in that less than 20 minute window, saw a girl alone, and decided to stop his car on a reasonably busy road in full view of local houses, and somehow managed to either overpower or coerce her into the car, and also paused to take two bottles from the car. Stranger abductions are just so vanishingly rare and the timeline and circumstances are so tight and risky.
The only way I could see it happening is if a man stopped to offer her a lift and she got in voluntarily because she was scared the police would show up and she'd be arrested, and somehow she/the driver decided to bring the bottles along, and he tried to party or get sexual with her, she refused, and he killed her either in anger or by accident and dumped the body. I don't think that's impossible.
(Has the quote function vanished??)