A Connecticut woman went missing 2 years ago on hike in Japan. Her remains have been found

USA Today

19-05-2025

A Connecticut woman went missing 2 years ago on hike in Japan. Her remains have been found Patricia Wu-Murad was on a pilgrimage when she went missing on April 10, 2023. She was last seen in Totsukawa, 70 miles southeast of Osaka, and planned to hike the Kumano Kodo trail.
The remains of a Connecticut woman have been found after she went missing while hiking in Japan two years ago, her family confirmed on social media.
Family members of 60-year-old Patricia Wu-Murad, or Pattie, as her family called her, found out about the discovery on May 9. Her husband, Kirk Murad, announced the news over the weekend.
Wu-Murad went missing on April 10, 2023, and had last been seen at the Mandokoro guesthouse in Totsukawa, about 70 miles southeast of Osaka. Wu-Murad was planning to take the Kumano Kodo trail, an ancient pilgrimage route, according to her husband, Kirk Murad.
Some of Wu-Murad's personal items were found over a year later in September 2024, and the search for her included American and Japanese search and rescue experts, U.S. Embassy officials in both Japan and Washington D.C., and the FBI.
Then on April 27, 2025, a member of the U.S. search team returned to the area where Wu-Murad's backpack was found, according to Kirk Murad. The team member found multiple personal items of hers, as well as what he thought was a femur. He took the remains to Japanese police, and DNA testing later confirmed the remains were Wu-Murad's, her husband said.
'It offers a measure of closure, but many questions remain unanswered, including the exact circumstances and cause of Pattie's death,' Kirk Murad wrote online.
Personal items were found over a year after woman went missing
Wu-Murad set out to hike the Kumano Kodo trail in Japan in April 2023, according to a GoFundMe her family started to raise money for the search. People have made the pilgrimage to Kumano for over 1,000 years, according to the local tourism bureau.
The Kumano Kodo is a network of routes that stretch across the Kii Peninsula.
On Sept. 15, 2024, over a year after Wu-Murad went missing, a fisherman in Totsukawa village found her backpack in a stream, according to her husband. The fisherman found the backpack closer to a different trail than the one she was believed to be hiking on, Kirk Murad wrote.
Inside the backpack, the fisherman found a ziploc bag with the woman's email address and her family's home address. He reported the find to the Gojo Police Station and the next day, on Sept. 16, 2024, police retrieved the backpack and stored it.
'The backpack was mostly empty with the exception of the (ziploc) bag and gravel,' her husband wrote.
Police later found a shoe in a stream northeast of the guesthouse where she was last seen. Over the next few days, more items were found and family members were able to confirm they belonged to Wu-Murad, Kirk Murad said.
'This gave us hope that Pattie would finally be found,' Murad shared in October. 'However, since then, no more clues have surfaced, and we're back to being frustrated. We know this has been difficult for many of you, as Pattie touched so many lives.'
Efforts to find Pattie since her disappearance
Multiple Facebook groups have been made to support the search for Wu-Murad, including Help Find Pattie.
Her daughter, Murphy Murad, also started GoFundMe to raise funds for the search. As of May 19, the fundraiser has accumulated over $202,000 in donations.
Since then, her family has flown to Japan to work with local volunteers and rescue specialists from the U.S. According to her family, telecommunication companies couldn't track the E-sim in her phone because she did not have a Japanese number.
The case went cold until recently, and as her husband reflected on his frustrations with the lack of answers the family received, he thought of what his wife would say.
'I can imagine her (gently) smacking me in the head, and saying, 'snap out of it!' meaning, keep on moving forward,' he wrote in October. 'That's what we're all trying to do.'
Hiker was husband's 'wife and best friend'
Wu-Murad's husband spoke to Japanese news outlet Nara Shimbun in April 2023. The outlet reported that she was Taiwanese and worked as an engineer before retiring in 2020. She was on a pilgrimage and had previously completed one in Spain.
Murad said said online that she was his 'wife and best friend.'
Now, the family must work to bring her remains to the U.S., he said on May 17.
Wu-Murad was walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2022 when she came across a documentary crew. She just so happened to start a conversation with a crew member, her daughter shared on social media.
In a clip shared online, she called herself a planner and said she typically liked to know what's going to happen 'every step of the way.'
'Going to Camino, last time and this time, it has taught me that you have different life experience when you're more flexible,' she said during her interview. "You're open to new experience, new people, new everything.'
She recalled befriending a young Ukranian woman a year earlier.
"I think of her, " she said. "I think of how lucky I am that I am afforded to live a good life, to do the Camino. Their suffering ... I feel it. I do feel that it's my obligation to think of them and wish them well, and just thank God that I'm here."
Her daughter wrote a note to her in the GoFundMe description, lovingly calling her 'Mama.'
'In a time of chaos, thank you for reigniting everyone's faith in humanity,' she wrote to her mother. 'Thank you for bringing us together with such incredible people, you have shown us the true essence of why you love these trips so much.'
Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY's NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757. Email her at [e-mail].