Family of American Mom Missing in Japan Refuses to Give Up 5 Weeks After She Vanished

The desperate search for a Connecticut mom of three who mysteriously vanished in Japan on April 10 is intensifying with a team of volunteers set to redouble efforts to find the missing hiker, her husband tells The Messenger.

“I know it would be a huge miracle,” Kirk Murad says of finding his wife Patricia “Pattie” Wu-Murad, 60, alive more than five weeks after she disappeared while hiking the Kumano Kodo, a network of mountainous trails in southern Kansai, about 370 miles from Tokyo. “But that's what we have to hope for.”

On a conference call late Thursday from Singapore, Kirk spoke with U.S.-based search and rescue (SAR) professionals to plan the next phase of their mission to find his wife, who hasn’t been seen since she left a rural inn after breakfast for a day-long hike.

Though they’ve already spent weeks alongside local authorities scouring the Japanese wilderness, six SAR volunteers are now making plans to fly back to Japan to comb unexamined areas.

The team still believes Pattie most likely fell or took a wrong turn along the path of her day-long, 11.2-mile hike.

But there’s been no trace of her. “I wish I had a lead or a piece of clothing or a shoe that fell off or something,” Kirk previously told The Messenger. “But there's nothing.”

Friday, May 19, is Kirk and Pattie’s 33rd wedding anniversary. The couple had planned to celebrate with a trek in Spain that Pattie, an avid hiker and experienced traveler, recently made on her own.

Instead, Kirk only hopes for some encouraging news as he marks what is sure to be a difficult milestone in his marriage. "I want to find her," he says. "I want to put this mystery to bed."

That means that Kirk, his three adult children and others searching for Pattie are considering all possibilities, including that the horror of the her disappearance — now in its second month — could be the result of foul play.

A new lead came into law enforcement from a female hiker on the same trail that Pattie was to hike, Kirk tells The Messenger. 

The other hiker, from New York City, reported that two different Japanese men she encountered asked her to come home with them for tea and teach them English.

“She said it made her feel very uncomfortable,” says Kirk, noting that his wife is “a very trusting soul, but I don't know that anything happened.”

In fact, Kirk previously told The Messenger, "There's no evidence of anything."

To cover travel costs and other expenses of the volunteer SAR pros, Kirk hopes to quickly raise an additional $30,000 through an online fundraiser so they can make their way back to Japan from Hawaii, California, Montana and Wyoming by next week.

“Everyone on the call is ready to come,” says Kirk. “If we could afford 20, we’d have 20.”

“Every day that goes by,” he adds, “is time wasted.”

When they arrive, the U.S. searchers will rejoin members of Mountain Works, Japan-based SAR pros hired by Pattie's family, whose leader recently told Kirk, “We don’t even think she’s on this mountain.”

Despite that sobering assessment, Kirk insists, “This is a rescue operation, not a recovery.”