246\. What Happened to Mary Day?
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Hey everybody and welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. I'm the husband. Wow, it feels so good to be back recording. We took a little hiatus and we're traveling, but we're back. We're so ready. It's basically Christmas. Garrett's looking nice and tan. Thank you. And we have our black Christmas tree on set. So if you're listening on audio, just know

Boom! Christmas joy through your headphones. It feels like it has been a second, but I guess we did record in...

on our vacation. Yeah, we're back. We're recording. Hope everyone's doing well. All day seasons are coming up. I know I don't have much for you guys. Um, reminder bonus content, Apple subscriptions, Spotify subscription, Patreon, two bonus episodes, ad free. We were having some weird stuff the last couple of weeks, but should be good to go now with all that. Yeah. So we got, and can I just say something really quickly? Say it baby. Thank you.

Thank you to everyone who supports us on Patreon and Apple subscriptions. Like Garrett said, it is ad free over there. And a reminder that if we put a podcast out without ads, we do not get paid for our work. The platforms that you listen on do not pay us for putting podcasts up.

Only the ad companies pay us for putting podcasts up. So in order for us to keep the show running with all of the stuff we have going on now, we do have to put ads in the show. So thank you for being patient and engaging and supporting us through this journey. All right, Garrett, take it away with your 10 seconds. Look, I have a lot of 10 seconds, but I got one for you guys. Peyton and I were in Mexico. It was Peyton's birthday. I...

planned a you know like one of those like beachfront dinners we were at an all-inclusive resort and they have an option where you can pay extra and you can eat dinner like on the beach under this not cabana what would it be called like pavilion yeah pavilion sort of thing think of a bachelor date yeah yeah exactly um so paid extra to go have dinner um on the beach it was fun it was kind of weird at first because it was just us two and like

There was like a wedding next to us. It did feel like The Bachelor. Like, oh, what's up? How's it going? My name's Garrett. It's nice to meet you. Anyways, no, it was really fun. We had a good time. The food was actually probably one of the best meals we had the whole time. The steak was really good. Anyway, so we're there. We're eating. We get up to leave. We're kind of just hanging out. We order dessert. Dessert's at our table. All of a sudden, these giant raccoons

come over and they are not scared of us at all they come over they kick us out of our seats they jump on the table they start eating the dessert and Peyton's like screaming because she's like they can't eat the dessert they're gonna die and I'm like what the freak are these raccoons doing just eating artists it was we have a video all right we have a video the whole thing was wild we're gonna post a video on Instagram go and watch the video they were kind of cute

Oh, they were so cute. They were kind of cute. I know that seems crazy for a raccoon, but we were very close up to them. And you'll see on the video, they kind of use their paws like Daisy and they kind of have a cute face. But I was so scared because they were eating chocolate. Yeah. Are they alive? I don't know. Did they have a good meal that night? Yes. Yeah.

We'll never know. I would assume with how much chocolate they ate, there's no way they survived the night. You need to go watch the video on Instagram because... Like full handfuls of... Cake. Cake they just started eating from our table. And just kicked us right out of our seats. Like did not even care. That's my 10 seconds. We had a good time. We're back recording. We love you guys. So on that note, let's hop into today's case. All right.

Our sources for this episode are CBSNews.com, USAToday.com, TheCinemaholic.com, DailyMail.com, ParamountPressExpress.com, Heavy.com, and SandhillsExpress.com. So when you cover a lot of true crime cases like we do, you do start to see a pattern. I mean, it's been over four years of murder with my husband, and I think it is safe to say that we do see patterns.

suspicious patterns case to case to case you recognize signs you kind of pick up on the red flags for example when someone's child disappears kidnapping if you will and they don't report them missing you are like that's weird that's suspicious and if there's blood at the scene of the crime where the child went missing well then game over right and

But the case we are covering today calls a lot of those red flags, the things that we would normally be like, nope, it's like sign still delivered into question because the story we're covering, Mary Day's story is so full of twists and turns that it will make you realize just because we see patterns and have these preconceived notions about how things probably went in this true crime case,

it actually doesn't necessarily mean that that's what happened.

So it's 1968 and we are in the sleepy town of Little Falls, New York. On February 19th, 1968, Charlotte Pressler and Charles Day welcome their first daughter together into the world. A little girl they name Mary Louise Day. Now over the next three years, their family continues to grow as they welcome two mothers.

more little girls, Kathy and then Sherry. So together, Charlotte and Charles have Mary, the oldest, Kathy, and then Sherry. But life for the Day family was far from a perfect little Norman Rockwell painting. Charlotte and Charles, the parents, did have their fair share of issues. And while I'm not exactly sure what went on behind closed doors, I'm

I do know that the three little girls were in and out of foster care for the first several years of their lives. And it was during that time that Charlotte, the mother realized she needed to get Charles out of her life for good. And so she divorced her husband, but instead of finding her way on her own and working towards getting her three girls back from foster care,

Charlotte found a new man instead, and his name was William Houle.

Now, Charlotte and William go on to have two more children together. And then finally, Charlotte actually regains custody of Mary and her middle daughter, Kathy. But by that point, her youngest daughter, Sherry, had actually already been adopted by her foster family, which meant the sisters wouldn't be living under the same roof together again. But Charlotte didn't even seem to fight for Sherry, her youngest daughter, or

or even see the need to stay close to her because two years later, she and her new family moved all the way across the country to Hawaii. Charlotte's new husband, William, was actually in the army and had been reassigned to a base there. And while Mary and Kathy might have seen this as a fresh new start, they are out of foster care back with their mom. Life was not done throwing these sisters curveballs.

So only a few months after the family moved to Hawaii, the girls received news that their father, Charles, had passed away.

The 10-year-old Mary and 8-year-old Kathy learned that because of this, they would be receiving a substantial inheritance once they turned 18. And that's when Mary and Kathy began dreaming of what life could be like for them when they grew older. With money to come into, they stayed up late into the night whispering about their plans for the future together.

And they even had a secret code name for the inheritance when they talked about it. And according to Kathy, the word they used was Mohawk. Mohawk. All right. Now, you're probably wondering why two little girls would need to have a code word to talk about the inheritance money, especially at age...

10 and 8 years old. Who's talking about money that young? Like really understanding the concept of what that means. Well, I think to them it meant, you know, we've had this really rough life so far in and out of foster care, now moved all the way to Hawaii, separated from our youngest sister. It probably meant freedom to them. I guess...

considering the life they've grown up in. Yeah. It's a little bit different. The reality was the situation they were now in, in Hawaii at home with Charlotte and her new husband, William and their two kids wasn't a pretty one. Apparently there was a lot of physical, emotional and sexual abuse in the home from William. Okay.

So much so that in December of 1980, two years after moving to Hawaii, Mary was back in protective custody. And I don't know if it was Mary herself that reported the abuse or a neighbor or a friend, but I know that Mary spent another significant amount of time out of her mother and stepfather's care. Though, unlike her sister Sherry, it didn't stay permanent.

In January 1981, William was transferred to Fort Ord in Seaside, California. But just a few months after the move, Mary was once again released into Charlotte and William's custody. So this is the second time Charlotte has gotten her daughter back. Now, I have no idea how something like this could happen. I think with the history of this family, it probably isn't great for her to return, especially because the reason she was taken away was because of

the danger William was putting her in. I have to imagine that back in the 80s, the foster care system was even more flawed than it is today. But regardless, Mary finds herself on a plane to California. And as you can imagine, life didn't improve there for Mary. I mean, she's now reunited with Kathy, but life isn't better. From what I can tell, neither of the girls or the couple's other two children died.

ever enrolled in school in California. They had no friends from the area or anyone that they could talk to about what was going on at home, which sounds like it might have been by design this time because only a few months after Mary moved back in with the family, something really strange happened in that home.

And let's just say it was a night that people would be questioning for decades. So one evening in 1981, William and Charlotte went out to dinner and presumably they left 13-year-old Mary to watch over her three younger siblings. Now, while the parents were out, Kathy remembered William's dog getting very sick and throwing up in the kitchen.

But when William and Charlotte returned a few hours later, William had conjured up his own theory about what had happened. And he started screaming at the girls because the dog got sick. But he mostly focused his wrath on Mary, who they had put in charge. He began accusing her of poisoning his dog.

And Kathy, her younger sister, said, that's when all hell broke loose. She said, William followed Mary to a back bedroom and began hitting her repeatedly in the corner. And Kathy said, the last time she remembered seeing her sister Mary was that night as she was in the corner covered in blood. Now, seemingly, Kathy was sent to her room and went to bed that night not knowing what happened to Mary next. The last thing she knows is

William beating her and her covered in blood in the bedroom. And then she sent to bed. So the following morning though, Kathy wakes up. The other two sisters wake up.

And Mary is nowhere to be found. So Kathy, of course, asked questions about her sister. What happened to Mary? Where is she? Is she coming home? But her mother, Charlotte, would only say Mary ran away and she's probably not coming back. So obviously, even though Kathy's only 11 years old,

She is nervous. She's scared that something bad has happened to her sister. But what's an 11-year-old really going to do about something like this? Especially because she doesn't go to school. She can't go tell a teacher. And if Charlotte and William did believe Mary ran away, then it was on them to file a missing persons report. Only days turned into weeks, which turned into months, and no one,

ever told the authorities that Mary Day was missing. That's illegal, right? Like neglect?

Yes. Right. I mean, like, obviously. But with Mary not enrolled in school and the girls being somewhat new to the area with no real friends, the only people that even knew Mary was gone was her siblings and parents, which makes you wonder, did Mary really run away that night or after Kathy and the other girls had gone to bed? Did something more sinister happen to Mary? Yeah, that's exactly what happened. So this question eats away at Kathy for years.

And it probably only got harder when the family picked up and moved again. And this time all the way back to their original home state of New York. So for years, no one's reported her missing. Kathy wakes up one day, her sister's gone and the parents are like, she ran away. And that's that like nothing. That's that. Okay. Yeah.

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Like simply say. So there is one silver lining in all of this though. And it's that Kathy is now closer in proximity to her younger sister, Sherry. Remember the one who had been adopted by her foster family. So Sherry gets to visit Charlotte and Kathy from time to time. She comes home to visit her birth mom and her sister, Kathy. And she's like, where's Mary? My oldest sister. What happened to Mary? But Kathy warns her, do not.

Do not ask mom or William what happened to Mary because quote, we are not allowed to talk about Mary in this house. That's,

Insane. So as the girls get older, they completely stop mentioning Mary's name altogether. But their mother drops some weird hints from time to time about what may have happened to her. For example, Sherry clearly remembers one bone chilling threat that her mother said often. And that was there were many places back in California to bury a body where it would never be found. What?

She would say that. And as the girls got older, the less they believed their sister had run away. She had done nothing to reach out to them to try and come home to find them. So to Sherry and Kathy, the truth about their sister seemed obvious as they grew into adults and started thinking back on their childhood and kind of getting out in the world. And they believe that back on that night in 1981, Mary must have been murdered.

So when Mary's youngest sister, Sherry, turns 18, one of the very first things she does is go to the police and file a missing persons report for her sister. Do you have to be 18 or she just felt like she couldn't get in trouble from...

I mean, I'm sure she had went and said, hey, my sister's missing. They probably would have taken her seriously. But I think this was like the most official way for her to file the report. I see that, yeah. This is 13 years after Mary goes missing. And Sherry marches in and says-

My sister is missing. I need to file a report. Now, for whatever reason, police don't do much with this information. I mean, they get that it happened over a decade ago. So maybe they figure there's really not much to do now. But with Kathy's help, Sherry keeps pushing. So these two sisters rile together and they're like, we are going to solve this mystery. And finally, in 2002, she gets the seaside police back in California to look into Mary's case.

And one of the first things they do is pull up Mary's social security number and her history. They find no sign that any of her information has been used since she went missing. She never opened credit cards up. She didn't have a job history. No welfare benefits had been collected. No school records, paychecks, arrest records. There was nothing. I mean, Mary literally is a ghost, which doesn't bode well for a runaway theory.

When they speak to neighbors and people who lived in the area back during that time, they all say that they barely remember Charlotte or William Houle's family at all, let alone a little girl who had run away from the home. But police do find one thing that seems suspicious to them.

Charlotte and William had still been cashing Mary's social security checks. The ones that were being sent to her from her father's account after his passing. So that inheritance, the Mohawk. So the police are now thinking William and Charlotte,

also had a motive to kill Mary. Yeah, money. But things get really weird in 2003 when Kathy leads detectives back to that seaside home. So she's like, this is where we were living. This is what I remember about that night. She tells them her mother and stepfather when they lived there were very strict about the kids not playing in one particular corner of the yard that they were scolded whenever they went near it.

So detectives get a team of cadaver dogs out to the house shortly after hearing that. And all four of those dogs pick up a smell in the exact corner of the yard where the girls were not allowed to play, which is pretty remarkable that after all these years,

They look into this case and honestly seem to be getting answers kind of quickly. So the next step is having a team come out and excavate that part of the property. Could you imagine the people living there? They're probably like, they're probably like, are you kidding me? We didn't even know a girl went missing. And now you're alluding to the fact that she's in our yard. Would that not in like a disrespectful way to the victim, but would that, like, could you live in that house?

Or would you, would it just be too hard? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think that's disrespectful to the victim because. No, I'm just saying, I mean, like there's a reason why. It's a heartbreak you didn't know. There's a reason why in some states. You have to disclose. You have to disclose. In some states you don't. Yeah. So they excavate the property and what do they find? Remains. No. No. Clothes? They find a little girl's shoe buried in that corner of the yard. There is no sign of a body.

Now the team handling the cadaver dog says, look, our dogs have never missed a mark before.

At one point, there was a body buried on this property. Especially because it wasn't just one. Right. Multiple dogs. All four of them or however many there were hit. And then they find a little girl's shoe. Yeah. They believe the body might have been moved at some point. That's the only way the dogs would have hit and there be no body. And when one of the detectives goes to Kathy and shows her a picture of the shoe they found, she's like,

She admits, yeah, we had sneakers like that as kids. So at this point, detectives figure, okay, it's time we track down the parents for an interview. So keep in mind at this point, it has been more than 20 years since Mary Day disappeared.

And shockingly, Charlotte and William Hull are still together. Detectives find that they're now both living in Kansas. Because they're evil. Williams since left the army and was working as a corrections officer at a local prison. And Charlotte, I don't know what she was doing, but police figure, they're going to start with Charlotte first. See what they can get out of her about the day Mary disappeared. Wow. Could you imagine he's a corrections officer and he...

Kill the little girl. Right. So based on what Kathy and Sherry have to say, I mean, to them, Charlotte seemed complicit or at least aware that something had happened to Mary that day. So please go to her about her missing daughter that she never reported missing. And here's what she says. She starts off the interview insisting Mary ran away. In fact, she says Mary had run away so many times as a kid that she had actually lost count.

She describes Mary as a quote, night crawler out of a wormhole and just grabbing it and it was gone. But police aren't letting her get away without asking some of the toughest questions. And the biggest one being, if your daughter ran away and didn't come home, your young daughter, why didn't you call the police? Why didn't you look for her? And she says, well, we should have. But then she sort of changes her tune and she says, actually, no.

I thought this whole time that William did file a report with the nearby Salinas Police Department.

Only they have no record of that happening. So according to police, there's also something really strange about Charlotte's body language during this interview. She is slumped down in her chair for most of that discussion. And she's saying cagey things like, well, you know, sometimes you do things in your past and it just comes back. But if that didn't convince police that something was up, then it might have been what Charlotte said next.

She said, quote, I mean, if she's dead, she's dead. This is what she says about her daughter in that interview. What? Who ran away. So... If she's dead?

She's dead. Okay. Cops are like, you don't even care. You're not even worried about your daughter. You never reported her missing. You're talking so callously and coldly about your daughter. Casually, like it's just nothing. So Charlotte's not doing herself any favors and she's not doing William any favors either because he's called in to speak with the police next. And what he says isn't much different than Charlotte though.

He claims on the night Mary vanished, they did get into a fight about the dog. Like Kathy had said, he was certain Mary was trying to poison the animal to get back at him because she didn't like him. And after that fight, William said he went room to room checking on the kids. But then when he got back to Mary's room, she was gone. And he told Charlotte and they both panicked and they called the police. Now, again, there is no record of this phone call.

But as detectives press further, they learn William isn't telling the whole truth because he changes his tune a little while later. So in his first interview, he changes his story. And this time he says, okay,

I actually hit her five or six times after I thought she poisoned my dog. So he admits to it because Kathy did see her in the corner being hit and covered in blood. Yeah. He says, and then she tried to run out of the house, but I wouldn't let her go. He says he grabbed Mary, but she fought back kicking and screaming. And William says at that point, I hit her in the throat. Holy crap.

crap a little a little girl she's a little girl man william actually makes this shape with his hands to detectives it's kind of like a like a martial arts move karate chop yeah and he says he may have used that on mary but he was sure he didn't kill her however charlotte told him the next morning that she saw the devil in william's eye that night

And he literally tells us to police. He's like, I didn't kill her. But the next morning, my wife woke up and said, I saw the devil in your eyes last night. And he thinks he was actually possessed that evening by some evil forces like he had been taken over. But he didn't he didn't kill Mary, but maybe a demon inside of him did.

Okay, wait. So are they claiming that after he did what he did, after he beat her, are they claiming she ran away or no at that point? It sounds like they're not anymore. They're not.

William has changed his story and said, I didn't kill her, but maybe a demon inside of me did because even Charlotte remembers seeing the devil in my eyes. Okay. So, I mean, William is practically admitting to murder. basically confessing. So police have what is essentially a confession. They have a crime scene. They have cadaver dogs who are responding to decomposition. Soil samples that have been tested are consistent with a body having been buried in that backyard. Not to mention we have eyewitness statements from Mary's sisters. I mean, it's,

They have an entire case in front of them. The DA is literally getting ready to file charges about nine months after those interviews when the absolute unthinkable happens. It's November 2003, and over in Phoenix, Arizona, a police officer stops a pickup truck for having stolen plates.

And he takes the IDs of the passengers in the car as well as the driver. And he runs them. One of the passengers is a 35-year-old woman named Mary Louise Day. Now, Mary Day could be a common name. I mean, Mary Day, sure. Okay, hold on. I'm just, my brain is thinking a lot right now. Because one, you have the dad who basically just confessed everything.

To murder. That a demon inside of him murdered her. And then you have, on the other hand, the police pull someone over and it's her exact name. I know we're going to get to it. And the exact age. I'm just going to assume that she stole Mary's identity, but let's keep going.

There must be something in their system when they run it that pops up that she hasn't like Mary Day, who would now be 35, has a missing person report. Or maybe the case was talked about enough that they knew the police in California were investigating this disappearance. I'm really not sure. But I do know that the lead detective on Mary's case gets a call that same night from Phoenix saying, hey, we pulled over someone and we think she's the missing person. Yeah. The missing girl. Yeah.

And when they see the license picture of Mary Day, it literally looks like an age progression photo from the last pictures taken of Mary when she was around 13 before she went missing. So not only does this woman have a driver license tied to Mary's social security number, she looks just like the girl that they were certain had been murdered. Here's the thing, though, that driver's license Mary had that night.

It had only been issued three weeks before she was pulled over. Police find that timing a little suspicious, especially since they are about to press charges for murder. 100% her identity was stolen. So they're like, we need to do some due diligence. So one of the seaside California detectives on the case, a man named Joe Bertana, flies over to Phoenix to speak with Mary Day.

So less than 48 hours ago, Joe was supporting the DA's case to file charges for murder. Now, this detective is in California looking at apparently the victim sitting right in front of him alive and well, which...

Probably messes with his head a little bit, but maybe because of how hard Joe had worked on that homicide case over the year, he has a hard time believing that this is Mary Day. So he calls her Phoenix Mary for now. He won't even refer to her as Mary Day. And when he speaks to her, he thinks there's something a little off about her stories. I mean, this woman is telling him, I ran away from home back in California that night and I never looked back.

And from there, she lived on the streets and just sort of did what she needed to to get by all of these years. She's pretty vague about where she's been all this time. But when Joe asks her some questions about her childhood, she remembers some details really vividly. And then she doesn't remember other things at all. And Joe finds this super suspicious, which to me is.

I mean, sounds like a normal childhood, like some things stick, some things don't. I imagine that happens even more. This is a setup, man. If you've dealt with trauma. But there's also something about Mary's demeanor that is just rubbing Detective Joe the wrong way, which is why he's actually not totally sold even after talking to her that this is the girl who disappeared back in 1981. But look, being

Phoenix Mary is not under arrest. She didn't do anything wrong here. So she really doesn't have to speak with police if she doesn't want to. So she goes back to living her life and Joe heads back to California some days later. But before that, he tells Mary to give him a call if she starts to remember anything. He wants to help her put the pieces of the puzzle together. And she actually takes him up on it. A few days later, Mary calls Joe to say she's had some pretty disturbing memories come up.

including the night that she ran away. Dude, I'm going to be mind blown if this is real. It's not. It can't be. There is no way that this is going this direction. Well, the soil has evidence of decomposition in the backyard. Yeah, there's no way this is a setup. There's something going on. So she says that that evening, as she's been thinking about it, she remembers her stepfather, William, getting angry with her and slamming her head into the bathtub.

Mary's crying on the phone as she's telling him these painful memories, telling Joe how she remembers bleeding, then getting her head slammed into a coffee table and then blacking out. When Joe asks her what the fight was over, Mary's like, I can't remember. She can't remember anything about a sick dog, even when prompted by Joe. And that bothers him too. It doesn't sit well with him that Mary doesn't remember what caused the fight. But again, in my mind,

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Because of this, Mary starts to get sort of frustrated with Detective Joe on this call because she throws him a curveball in a way he wasn't expecting. She says to him, quote, And Joe says, quote,

And Murray goes, OK, so since I'm still alive, can't you use DNA to prove who I am? Joe doesn't know if she's calling his bluff. But now that he knows she's willing to give DNA, he decides to do a DNA test. But here's the thing.

There's no old existing DNA from Mary. Yeah, so nothing's going to come up or match. She's been missing for two decades. So police figure the next best thing is seeing if she is a match as Charlotte's daughter. But Joe's not holding his breath that it will come back positive. But when the results from Mary's test do come back... What the freak is going on, dude? It confirms that Phoenix Mary...

Is Charlotte's daughter. Nope. I'm sorry. I don't believe this. So this confirmation is a game changer for Mary's sisters. They also had their doubts about Phoenix Mary at first, but now hearing that she shares their DNA, they're like, this is our missing sister. We found her.

So Sherry reaches out to Mary, even asks her if she wants to come stay with her family in North Carolina for a while. I mean, it's pretty incredible, really. Sherry, Mary, and Kathy have this beautiful reunion. But it's not time to roll the credits on this story just yet. Because the longer Mary stays with Sherry and her family, the more these little things come up. Things that get even her sisters to start questioning her identity again.

For example, Mary has this thick Southern accent. And when experts listen to tapes of her speaking, they say this accent is so thick that she had to have been living in the South in her formative years. So up until ages nine or 10 to have developed it, which, okay, an accent isn't exactly a reason to write her off, except when Kathy talks to Mary about the inheritance their father left them, Mary's like, what are you talking about?

And Kathy tries to like clue her in with the Mohawk word. And she's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And then later Sherry sees that Mary has a magazine with her address on it. Only the name attached to that piece of mail isn't Mary's. Hey, so who, who is this chick dude? Well, the name is on the magazine. It's Monica Devereaux. And she,

This causes suspicion because they're like, why does her magazine have a different name on it? And why doesn't she remember things? So now Sherry and Kathy get together and they're thinking, okay, were we wrong? Are we wrong again? Is something not right here? Their guts telling them something is still off. So only a year after moving in with Sherry, Mary is back on her own. And when Sherry and Kathy express these concerns to police, they come up with another theory.

Maybe Phoenix Mary isn't the original Mary, but a secret daughter that Charlotte had had. And when she learned that Mary had been missing, she came forward and identified herself as Mary. That's kind of what I was thinking. Because the DNA confirms she was related to Charlotte. And witnesses say it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that Charlotte had strayed from her marriage at some point, had another kid, gave it away, etc.

she'd given her children over to the foster care system before. Maybe Charlotte and William reached out to this estranged child once the police were getting close to arresting them. Maybe they paid her to pretend to be Mary so they could get away with it. Gave her Mary's birth certificate, her social security card, possibly even promised her some of the inheritance. Why would she move in though? That's what's crazy too. Like if you're... Well, maybe she wanted a place to stay for free. I guess so. It's just, that's a...

I mean, it's a wild theory. Yeah. That's it. I mean, sketchy. It is actually a wild theory. What are the chances that she has a secret daughter? No one knows about that can come in and save the day. I mean, it's plausible though. Considering who these people are. I feel like it's pretty possible. Police come forward and they're like, is this what happened? And she's like, no, this isn't the case. She hasn't used her birth name since she ran away from home. And Monica was the name she gave herself to protect herself. She's like, I didn't use Mary when I left. Okay.

And she says the accent is just part of my rebrand too. But still weird evidence keeps creeping up to show that Phoenix Mary is just not the missing Mary. Like at one point after Mary moved in with Sherry, she wrote an email to Detective Joe and it said something sketchy. It said, quote, I've been lying to you about who I am. And then there aren't any more details than that.

But in 2008, things really hit the fan. It's been five years since Missing Mary has resurfaced. So police never charged them with murder, obviously. The amount of time that goes by on this case. Yeah. During this time in 2008,

Police are using cadaver dogs to search the area where Mary grew up, and it's not related to this case. They're searching it for a different reason. However, the group of dogs hit one particular yard, and it's a home that belonged to William and Charlotte Houle after they moved out of their first Fort Ord house. So it's a different house from where she went missing, but these dogs randomly hit on this house.

So now you have not one, but two homes belonging to Charlotte and William where cadaver dogs are saying a body was once buried.

So detectives think, okay, this family is burying a body, then re-dinging it up and moving it with them when they move houses. That's wild. It's a commitment. So to test this theory, police excavate the property. And again, they find nothing. But now we have two potential crime scenes and zero arrests because as far as the law is concerned, Mary Day is alive and well. But the police and Mary's sisters still have their doubts. These are doubts that persist.

Until 2017. Mary is now 49 years old. She's living alone in Missouri and her health is failing. The parents have to be like 70 at this point. She's actually dying of cancer. And it's around this time that a new investigator in the Seaside Police named Judy Veloz decides to take a look at Mary's case with a fresh pair of eyes because...

Even though it's technically closed, the police are like, this is weird. And Judy starts with the concrete evidence she has, that shoe. Judy says she can fit the shoe in the palm of her hand. It's tiny. So it's actually not a shoe that would fit a 13-year-old girl who might have been killed and then buried. So she feels like she can rule that piece out. But that's when Judy pays a visit to Mary. And she wants to get her side of the story and set the record straight.

What really happened to her all those years ago. So again, in 2017, Mary is now dying of cancer and police are reaching out to her again.

And Mary tells her she chose the name Monica because she didn't want the police finding her and bringing her back to William and Charlotte's house. And the accent, the new name was all the way for her to stay free of her past. But she also gives Judy one groundbreaking detail. She tells her the name of a woman who took her in at one point after she ran away. Her name was Maury Kimmel.

Now, Maury said she met Mary in California about two years after she ran away. Mary was 15 when Maury invited her to come stay with her and her two young daughters. Maury said she welcomed her with open arms and Mary fit in well with their family. But after only a year, Mary ran away one night without saying goodbye.

One of Maury's relatives even has proof of this story because she has a photo of Mary with the family just a little older than she was when she ran away from the Hools. And when that photo is given to a facial recognition company, it confirms with 99% accuracy that that girl in the photo is Mary Day.

If that isn't enough of a smoking gun, Judy also looks into the new license Mary had gotten before she resurfaced and finds that Mary needed to get a state-issued ID in order to get financial aid for a gallbladder surgery she needed. And apparently, a local nonprofit had been the ones to help her track down her birth certificate. What? No way. So it's true? Like this is, it's Mary? Yeah.

Well, sure, you have all those gaps in the memories, but Judy again is like, I know the first detectives didn't believe this, but Mary had dealt with substance abuse and alcoholism early on in life and it was traumatic. So what? This is not.

This is not where I saw this going, dude. So as she's dying, Judy, the new detective, is talking to Mary and she's emotional. It was a confusing time in her life. But she was always who she claimed to be. And with Judy's new report on Mary Day, the investigation is finally closed.

The police decide Mary Day never died back in 1981, despite what everyone thought. Why did the parents say that then? She did run away. She got a second chance at life. The report came out just in time for Sherry to read it, accept the truth, and make peace with Mary. All before Mary passed away from cancer that same year in 2017. So the case is closed and then Mary passes away. Does it end here? That's the end of the story.

What? Okay, wait, time out, time out. I need to ask some questions. Okay.

Do these sisters, do they still, do they actually believe it was Mary? Yes. They now do? They now do because of that facial recognition proving that that was Mary Day two years after she ran away. What are the chances that she was then killed two years after being proven alive? Is it weird that she didn't reach back out to her sisters if they were that close though? She ran away and wanted to start a new life. She was scared the state would return her to the family if she got caught.

I mean, I can't really deny it. It sounds like it was her with all the evidence. I can't see otherwise. I mean, if my stepfather was bashing my head into a coffee table and a bathtub, I might run away and never say anything, too. I just think it's weird that he said he killed her. I mean, so many years have gone by. Is there a chance that he had beat her so badly that night? You just assume she was dead? Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Holy crap. All right. Well...

This is why at the beginning I said sometimes these cases are so obvious. We just see the pattern. If a parent doesn't report a child missing and there's sexual, emotional, and physical abuse in the family with the history this family has had, it felt open and shut. You're like, the parents killed her that night. But in reality... Also, what's up with the cadaver dogs hitting on two houses they were at? What the...

For decomposition. Yeah, that's, I don't know, man. I'm confused. Okay. Yeah. But I mean, there's a lot of proof and Mary went to her deathbed saying, no, I really am Mary Day. Yeah. All right, you guys, that was our very confusing episode for this week. And we will see you next time with another one. I love it. I hate it. Goodbye.

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