What Happened to Mary Day?

December 9, 2024

In this episode, Payton and Garrett unravel the mysterious case of Mary Day, a teenage girl who vanished after an argument with her parents. As years pass with no sign of her, mounting evidence points to foul play, prompting investigators to seek answers. Just when the case seems headed for closure, a jaw-dropping discovery changes everything. Tune in for a story filled with twists, turns, and the unexpected.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast! This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland—the husband.

Wow, it feels so good to be back recording. We took a little hiatus while we were traveling, but now we’re back and ready to go. It’s basically Christmas here. Everything’s looking nice and festive, and we even have our black Christmas tree on set.

If you’re listening on audio, just know—boom—Christmas joy is coming through your headphones! It feels like it’s been a while, but I guess we did record while on vacation. Anyway, we’re back, we’re recording, and we hope everyone’s doing well. The holiday season is coming up.

I don’t have much for you guys today. Just a quick reminder about bonus content—Apple subscription, Spotify subscription, Patreon—all offer two bonus episodes, ad-free. We had some weird tech issues the last couple of weeks, but everything should be good to go now.

Can I just say something really quickly? Thank you to everyone who supports us on Patreon and Apple subscriptions. Like Garrett said, it’s ad-free over there. Just a reminder: if we put a podcast out without ads, we don’t get paid for our work. The platforms you listen on don’t pay us for uploading podcasts; only the ad companies do. So, in order to keep the show running with everything we’ve got going on, we have to include ads. Thank you for being patient, engaging with us, and supporting us through this journey.

All right, G, take it away with your 10 seconds.

Look, I have a lot of 10 seconds, but here’s one for you guys. Payton and I were in Mexico for her birthday. I planned one of those beachfront dinners. We were at an all-inclusive resort, and they had an option where you could pay extra to have dinner on the beach under—what would it be called? Like a pavilion? Yeah, sort of like that. Think of a Bachelor date.

So we paid extra for it, and it was really fun. At first, it was kind of weird because it was just the two of us, and there was a wedding happening right next to us. It really did feel like The Bachelor—like, “Oh, hey, my name’s Garrett. Nice to meet you.” But no, it was a great time. The food was actually some of the best we had the whole trip. The steak was amazing.

Anyway, we were there, eating. We got up to leave and were just hanging out. We ordered dessert, and the desserts were sitting on our table. All of a sudden, these giant raccoons came over! They were not scared of us at all. They climbed onto the table, jumped into our seats, and started eating the desserts. Payton was screaming, like, “They can’t eat the dessert! They’re going to die!” And I was just standing there, like, “What are these raccoons even doing?”

We have a video of the whole thing. It was wild. We’re going to post it on Instagram, so go watch the video. Honestly, they were kind of cute.

Oh, they were so cute!

I know it seems crazy to be so close to raccoons, but we were right up next to them—you’ll see it in the video. They kind of use their paws like Daisy does, and they have these cute faces. But I was so scared because they were eating chocolate! I mean, are they alive? I don’t know. Did they have a good meal that night? Yes.

We’ll never know what happened to them. But with how much chocolate they ate, there’s no way they survived the night. You need to go watch the video on Instagram. These raccoons were grabbing full handfuls of cake from our table! They didn’t care at all—they just kicked us out of our seats like it was their dinner.

That’s my 10 seconds. We had a good time, though. We’re back recording, and we love you guys. So on that note, let’s hop into today’s case.

Our sources for this episode are CBSNews.com, USAToday.com, The Cinemaholic, Docomomo, PressExpress.com, Heavy.com, and SandhillsExpress.com.

When you cover a lot of true crime cases, like we do, you start to see patterns. I mean, it’s been over four years of Murder With My Husband, and I think it’s safe to say we’ve learned to recognize some suspicious patterns across cases. You pick up on red flags. For example, if someone’s child disappears—like a kidnapping—and the parents don’t report them missing, you think, “That’s weird. That’s suspicious.” Or, if there’s blood at the scene where the child disappeared, well, game over, right?

But the case we’re covering today challenges a lot of those red flags—things we would normally see as obvious signs. Mary Day’s story is so full of twists and turns that it makes you realize: just because we’ve identified patterns or have preconceived notions about how things probably went in a case, it doesn’t mean that’s what happened.

It’s 1968, and we’re in the sleepy town of Little Falls, New York. On February 19, 1968, Charlotte Presler and Charles Day welcome their first daughter into the world—a little girl they name Mary Louise Day.

Over the next three years, their family grows as they welcome two more daughters: Kathy and then Sherry. So now Charlotte and Charles have three daughters: Mary, the oldest; Kathy; and then Sherry. But life for the Day family is far from the idyllic picture of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Charlotte and Charles have their fair share of issues. While it’s unclear exactly what went on behind closed doors, we do know the three little girls were in and out of foster care during the first several years of their lives. At some point, Charlotte realized she needed to remove Charles from her life for good and decided to divorce him.

But instead of finding her way on her own and working toward regaining custody of her three daughters, Charlotte found a new man. His name was William Hul. Charlotte and William went on to have two more children together. Eventually, Charlotte did regain custody of Mary and Kathy, her two oldest daughters. However, by that point, Sherry, her youngest daughter, had already been adopted by her foster family. This meant the sisters would never live under the same roof again.

But Charlotte didn’t even seem to fight for Sherry, her youngest daughter, or feel the need to stay close to her. Two years later, she and her new family moved all the way across the country to Hawaii.

Charlotte’s new husband, William, was in the Army and had been reassigned to a base there. While Mary and Kathy might have seen the move as a fresh start—they were out of foster care and back with their mom—life wasn’t done throwing curveballs at these sisters.

Only a few months after the family moved to Hawaii, the girls received news that their father, Charles, had passed away. Ten-year-old Mary and 8-year-old Kathy learned that because of this, they would receive a substantial inheritance once they turned 18.

That’s when Mary and Kathy began dreaming of what life could be like when they were older and had access to the money. They stayed up late at night, whispering about their future plans together. They even came up with a secret code name for the inheritance: “Mohawk.”

Now, you’re probably wondering why two little girls would need a code word to talk about inheritance money. At 10 and 8 years old, who’s even thinking about money like that or fully understanding what it means? For them, I think it represented something bigger. After such a rough life—being in and out of foster care, moving all the way to Hawaii, and being separated from their youngest sister—it probably symbolized freedom.

But the reality of their situation in Hawaii, living with Charlotte, William, and their two children, was anything but hopeful. According to reports, the home was filled with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of William.

By December 1980, two years after moving to Hawaii, Mary was back in protective custody. It’s unclear whether Mary herself reported the abuse or if a neighbor or friend did, but she spent another significant amount of time out of her mother and stepfather’s care. Unlike her sister Sherry, however, this separation didn’t become permanent.

In January 1981, William was transferred to Fort Ord in Seaside, California. Just a few months after the move, Mary was released back into Charlotte and William’s custody. This marked the second time Charlotte regained custody of her daughter.

It’s hard to understand how something like this could happen. Given the family’s history, it’s difficult to imagine how returning Mary to this environment could be seen as safe. The abuse that had previously removed her from the home hadn’t gone away. It’s likely a reflection of how flawed the foster care system was, especially in the 1980s.

Regardless, Mary found herself on a plane to California. But as you can imagine, life didn’t improve for her. While she was reunited with Kathy, things were far from better. From what I can tell, neither Mary, Kathy, nor the couple’s other two children were ever enrolled in school after the move to California.

They had no friends in the area or anyone they could confide in about what was going on at home. It almost seemed intentional, by design. Only a few months after Mary moved back in with the family, something really strange happened in that home—something people would question for decades to come.

One evening in 1981, William and Charlotte went out to dinner, presumably leaving 13-year-old Mary to watch over her three younger siblings. While the parents were out, Kathy recalled William’s dog getting very sick and throwing up in the kitchen.

When William and Charlotte returned home a few hours later, William had already concocted his own theory about what had happened. He began screaming at the girls, blaming Mary for the dog’s illness and accusing her of poisoning it.

Kathy said this is when everything spiraled out of control. William followed Mary to a back bedroom, yelling and hitting her repeatedly. Kathy remembered seeing Mary in the corner of the room, covered in blood.

Seemingly, Kathy was then sent to her room and went to bed, not knowing what would happen to Mary next. The last image she had of her sister was of her, bleeding in the corner of that bedroom.

The next morning, Kathy woke up, as did the other two sisters—but Mary was nowhere to be found. Kathy, understandably alarmed, began asking questions. Where was Mary? What had happened to her? Was she coming back? Charlotte’s response was cold and vague: Mary had run away, and she probably wasn’t coming back.

Although Kathy was only 11 years old, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had happened to her sister. But what could she do? She wasn’t enrolled in school, meaning she had no teachers or other trusted adults to confide in. If Mary had truly run away, it was up to Charlotte and William to file a missing person’s report.

But days turned into weeks, then months, and no report was ever filed. No one told the authorities that Mary Day was missing.

This raises serious questions. How could Mary’s disappearance go unreported? With her not enrolled in school and the family new to the area, there was no one outside the household to notice her absence. This meant the only people who even knew Mary was gone were her siblings and parents.

So, did Mary truly run away that night? Or, after Kathy and the other girls went to bed, did something far more sinister happen to Mary?

Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

This question eats away at Kathy for years, and it probably only got harder when the family picked up and moved again—this time all the way back to their original home state of New York. For years, no one reported her missing.

Kathy wakes up one day, her sister's gone, and the parents are like, "She ran away," and that's that. Nothing more. That's that.

There is one silver lining in all of this, though: Kathy is now closer in proximity to her younger sister, Sherry—remember, the one who had been adopted by her foster family. 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 ask Mom or William what happened to Mary because, quote, 'We are not allowed to talk about Mary in this house.'"

That's insane.

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 her mother often said: "There were many places back in California to bury a body where it would never be found."

What? She would say that?

As the girls got older, the less they believed their sister had run away. Mary had done nothing to reach out to them, to try to come home, or to find them. To Sherry and Kathy, the truth about their sister seemed obvious. As they grew into adults, started thinking back on their childhood, and gained perspective, they believed that back on that night in 1981, Mary must have been murdered.

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 person's report for her sister.

Do you have to be 18, or did she just feel like she couldn't get in trouble?

I mean, I'm sure if she had gone earlier and said, "Hey, my sister's missing," they probably would have taken her seriously. But I think this was the most official way for her to file the report.

That makes sense.

This is 13 years after Mary goes missing. Sherry marches in and says, "My sister's missing. I need to file a report." Now, for whatever reason, police don't do much with this information. Maybe they figure that, since it happened over a decade ago, there's really not much to do now. But with Kathy's help, Sherry keeps pushing.

These two sisters rally together and decide they are going to solve this mystery. Finally, in 2002, Sherry gets the Seaside Police back in California to look into Mary's case. One of the first things they do is pull up Mary's social security number and history.

They find no sign that any of her information has been used since she went missing. She never opened credit cards, had no job history, collected no welfare benefits, and had no school records, paychecks, or arrest records. There was nothing. Mary had literally become a ghost.

This doesn’t bode well for a runaway theory.

When police speak to neighbors and people who lived in the area back then, they all say they barely remember Charlotte or William Hull's family at all, let alone a little girl who had run away from their home.

Police do find one thing that seems suspicious: Charlotte and William had still been cashing Mary's Social Security checks—the ones sent to her from her father's account after his passing.

So, that inheritance.

Uh-huh.

The police now think William and Charlotte also had a motive to kill Mary: money.

But things get really weird in 2003 when Kathy leads detectives back to their old home in Seaside. She says, "This is where we were living. This is what I remember about that night." She tells them that her mother and stepfather had been very strict about the kids not playing in one particular corner of the yard. They were scolded whenever they went near it.

Detectives decide to bring a team of cadaver dogs to the house. Shortly after arriving, all four dogs pick up a scent in the exact corner of the yard where the girls were forbidden to play.

Which is pretty remarkable, considering all these years have passed. They look into this case and seem to be getting answers pretty quickly.

The next step is having a team come out to excavate that part of the property.

Could you imagine the people living there now? They’re probably like, "What?"

Exactly. They’re probably thinking, "Are you kidding me? We didn’t even know a girl went missing, and now you’re alluding to the fact that she might be in our yard."

Not to be disrespectful to the victim, but could you live in that house?

I don’t know. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to the victim to wonder.

No, it’s not. It’s just... there’s a reason why some states have laws requiring disclosure about things like this, while others don’t.

So, they excavate the property. And what do they find?

Remains?

No. Close, though—they find a little girl’s shoe buried in that corner of the yard. There’s no sign of a body.

The team handling the cadaver dogs says, "Look, our dogs have never missed a mark before. At one point, there was a body buried on this property."

Especially since it wasn’t just one dog.

Right. Multiple dogs—four of them—hit on the same spot. And then they find a little girl’s shoe.

The investigators believe the body might have been moved at some point. That’s the only explanation for why the dogs would alert to a scent, but no body is found.

When one of the detectives shows Kathy a picture of the shoe, she admits, "Yeah, we had sneakers like that as kids."

At this point, detectives figure it’s time to track down the parents for an interview.

Keep in mind, it’s been more than 20 years since Mary Day disappeared. Shockingly, Charlotte and William Hull are still together. Detectives find that they’re now living in Kansas.

Because they’re evil.

Right. William had since left the Army and was working as a corrections officer at a local prison. Charlotte... I don’t know what she was doing. But the police decide to start with Charlotte first and see what they can get out of her about the day Mary disappeared.

Wow. Could you imagine? He’s a corrections officer, and he killed a little girl.

Based on what Kathy and Sherry have to say, Charlotte seemed complicit—or at the very least, aware—that something had happened to Mary that day.

When police confront Charlotte about her missing daughter, whom she never reported missing, here's what she says. She starts the interview by insisting that Mary ran away. In fact, she claims Mary had run away so many times as a kid that she had actually lost count. She describes Mary as a "nightcrawler, out of a wormhole, just grabbing it and it was gone."

But police aren’t letting her avoid the tough questions. The biggest one is: If your daughter ran away and didn’t come home—your young daughter—why didn’t you call the police? Wouldn’t you look for her?

Charlotte responds, "Well, we should have." Then she changes her tune, saying she thought the whole time that William had filed a report with the nearby Salinas Police Department.

Only, there’s no record of that ever happening.

Police also notice something odd about Charlotte’s body language during the interview. She’s slumped down in her chair for most of the discussion, saying cagey things like, "Well, you know, sometimes you do things in your past, and it just comes back."

If that didn’t raise police suspicions, what Charlotte says next certainly does. She states, "I mean, if she’s dead, she’s dead."

This is what she says about her missing daughter during the interview: If she’s dead, she’s dead.

Cops are like, You don’t even care. You’re not even worried about your daughter. You never reported her missing, and now you’re talking about her so callously and coldly. Charlotte’s tone is detached, almost casual, as though it’s nothing.

She’s not doing herself any favors—and she’s not helping William, either. He’s brought in to speak with police next, and his story isn’t much better.

William claims that on the night Mary vanished, they got into a fight about the dog, just like Kathy said. He was convinced Mary had tried to poison the dog to get back at him because she didn’t like him. After the fight, William says he went room to room checking on the kids. But when he got back to Mary’s room, she was gone. He says he told Charlotte, and they both panicked and called the police.

Again, though, there’s no record of that phone call.

As detectives press further, they realize William isn’t telling the whole truth. He changes his story a little while later.

In his first interview, he shifts his account, saying, "Okay, I actually hit her five or six times after I thought she poisoned my dog."

He admits to it.

Kathy had seen Mary in the corner, being hit and covered in blood.

William says, "Then she tried to run out of the house, but I wouldn’t let her go."

He admits to grabbing Mary, but says she fought back, kicking and screaming. At that point, William says, "I hit her in the throat."

Holy crap.

A little girl. She’s just a little girl.

William even demonstrates to detectives how he did it, making a shape with his hands like a martial arts move—a kind of karate chop.

He claims he might have used that on Mary, but insists, "I’m sure I didn’t kill her."

However, Charlotte told him the next morning that she saw the devil in William's eyes that night. He later told this to police, saying, "I didn't kill her, but the next morning my wife woke up and said, 'I saw the devil in your eyes last night.'" He claimed he was actually possessed that evening by some evil forces, as if he had been taken over. But he insisted that he didn’t kill Mary — perhaps a demon inside of him did.

Wait, so are they claiming that after he beat her, she ran away? Or no?

At that point, it sounds like they're not claiming that anymore. William had changed his story, saying, "I didn't kill her, but maybe a demon inside of me did." He pointed out that even Charlotte remembered seeing the devil in his eyes.

Oh gosh. So, I mean, William is practically admitting to murder.

Yeah, basically confessing. Police now have what is essentially a confession. They have a crime scene. Cadaver dogs had responded to decomposition, and soil samples tested were consistent with a body having been buried in the backyard. Not to mention, there were eyewitness statements from Mary's sisters. They had an entire case in front of them. The district attorney was literally getting ready to file charges.

Then, about nine months after those interviews, the absolute unthinkable happens.

It's November 2003, and over in Phoenix, Arizona, a police officer stops a pickup truck for having stolen plates. He takes the IDs of the passengers and the driver and 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. My brain is thinking a lot right now. Because, one, you have the dad who basically just confessed to murder, saying a demon inside of him murdered her. And then, on the other hand, the police pull someone over, and it's her exact name.

I know we're going to get to it, but it's also her exact age. I'm just going to assume she stole Mary's identity. But let's keep going.

There must be something in their system that pops up when they run it, like a flag that says Mary Day, who would now be 35, has a missing person report. Or maybe the case was talked about enough that the police in California were aware of the investigation. 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. They say, "Hey, we pulled over someone, and we think she's the missing person."

The missing girl.

When they see the license picture of Mary Day, it literally looks like an age-progression photo from the last picture taken of Mary when she was around 13 before she went missing. Not only does this woman have a driver's license tied to Mary's Social Security number, but she also looks just like the girl they were certain had been murdered.

Here's the thing, though — that driver's license Mary had that night had only been issued three weeks before she was pulled over.

Police find the timing a little suspicious, especially since they are about to press charges for murder. They’re 100% convinced her identity was stolen. So, they decide to do some due diligence. One of the Seaside, California detectives on the case, a man named Joe Bera, flies over to Phoenix to speak with Mary Day.

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 what appears to be the victim sitting right in front of him — alive and well — which probably messes with his head a little. 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.

When he speaks to her, he thinks there’s something a little off about her stories. This woman is telling him she ran away from home back in California that night and never looked back. From there, she lived on the streets and did what she needed to do 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 certain details vividly, while not recalling others at all. Joe finds this super suspicious. To me, though, that sounds like a normal childhood — some things stick, and some things don’t. I imagine that’s even more true if you’ve dealt with trauma.

But there’s also something about Mary’s demeanor that’s rubbing Detective Joe the wrong way. This is why he’s not totally sold, even after talking to her, that this is the girl who disappeared back in 1981. Look, Phoenix Mary isn’t under arrest. She hasn’t done anything wrong here, so she doesn’t have to speak with police if she doesn’t want to. She goes back to living her life, and Joe heads back to California some days later. Before he leaves, though, 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.

A few days later, Mary actually takes him up on it. She 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’s no way this is going in this direction.

Well, the soil has evidence of decomposition in the backyard.

Yeah, that too. There’s no way this is a setup. Something’s going on.

Mary says 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. She tells 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 says she can’t remember. She can’t remember anything about a sick dog, even when prompted by Joe. 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, this is trauma. This is trauma.

Because of this, Mary starts to get sort of frustrated with Detective Joe on this call. She throws him a curveball in a way he wasn’t expecting.

She says to him, "Okay, Joe, if you were to find my body, how are you going to be able to prove who the hell I was?" Joe replies, "DNA." Mary responds, "Okay, 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 existing DNA from Mary. She's been missing for two decades, so nothing is going to come up or match. Police figure the next best option is to see if she is a match as Charlotte's daughter. Joe isn't holding his breath that it will come back positive.

When the results from Mary's test come back, it confirms that Phoenix Mary is Charlotte's daughter.

Nope, I'm sorry. I don't believe this.

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." Sherry reaches out to Mary and even asks her if she wants to come stay with her family in North Carolina for a while. It's a pretty incredible moment.

Sherry, Mary, and Cathy have this beautiful reunion. But it's not time to roll the credits on this story just yet. The longer Mary stays with Sherry and her family, the more little things start to come up — things that get even her sisters to start questioning her identity again.

For example, Mary has this thick Southern accent. When experts listen to tapes of her speaking, they say this accent is so thick that she must have been living in the South during her formative years, up until ages 9 or 10, to have developed it. An accent alone isn't exactly a reason to write her off. But then, when Cathy talks to Mary about the inheritance their father left them, Mary has no idea what she's talking about. Cathy tries to clue her in with a mention of the "Mohawk" word, but Mary still doesn't know what she’s talking about.

Later, Sherry sees that Mary has a magazine with her address on it. But the name attached to that piece of mail isn't Mary's. It's addressed to "Monica Deo." This causes more suspicion. Why does her magazine have a different name on it? And why doesn't she remember things that she should? Now, Sherry and Cathy get together, and they're thinking, "Okay, were we wrong? Are we wrong again?" Their gut is telling them something is still off.

Only a year after moving in with Sherry, Mary is back on her own. When Sherry and Cathy express their concerns to police, they come up with another theory. Maybe Phoenix Mary isn't the original Mary, but a secret daughter that Charlotte had. When she learned that Mary had been reported missing, this secret daughter came forward and identified herself as Mary.

That’s kind of what I was thinking. The DNA confirms she’s 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 child, and gave it away. Charlotte had given her children 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, maybe she wanted a place to stay for free. I guess so. It's just — that's a wild theory.

Yeah, that's 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 plausible.

Police come forward, and they're like, "Is this what happened?" And she's like, "No, this isn't the case." She says 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." 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, "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, with the amount of time that goes by on this case.

During this time, in 2008, police are using cadaver dogs to search the area where Mary grew up. It's not related to this case — they're searching it for a different reason. However, the group of dogs hits on one particular yard. It's a home that belonged to William and Charlotte Hol after they moved out of their first house in Fort Ord.

Okay, 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 indicating that a body was once buried.

So detectives are like, "Okay, this family is burying a body, then re-digging it up and moving it with them when they move houses."

Crazy. 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 doubts 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.

Around this time, a new investigator in the Seaside Police named Judy V decides to take a fresh look at Mary's case. Even though it's technically closed, the police are like, "This is weird."

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. She wants to get her side of the story and set the record straight — what really happened to her all those years ago.

Again, in 2017, Mary is now dying of cancer, and police are reaching out to her. Mary tells Judy she chose the name Monica because she didn't want the police finding her and bringing her back to William and Charlotte's house. The accent and the new name were all a 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 Myy Kimmel. Myy said she met Mary in California about two years after she ran away. Mary was 15 when Myy invited her to come stay with her and her two young daughters. Myy 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 Myy'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 Hols. When that photo is given to a facial recognition company, it confirms with 99% accuracy that the 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. She finds that Mary needed to get a state-issued ID in order to get financial aid for a gallbladder surgery she needed. Apparently, a local nonprofit had been the one to help her track down her birth certificate.

What? No way. So it's true? It's Mary?

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

This is not where I saw this going, dude.

So, as she's dying, Judy, the new detective, is talking to Mary. It's an emotional and confusing time in her life, but she was always who she claimed to be. 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 she did, then?

She did run away. She got a second chance at life. The report came out just in time for Sherrie 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? Wait, time out. I need to ask some questions.

Do the sisters actually believe it was Mary?

Yes, they do. They now do because of that facial recognition proving 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.

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 beaten her so badly that night he just assumed 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. Like, you're thinking, "The parents killed her that night."

Yeah, but the cadaver dogs hitting on two houses they lived in? What was that 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."

All right, you guys, that was our very confusing episode for this week. We will see you next time with another one. I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

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