What Ever Happened to Mary Day?

20:27Did you think there was enough? I thought there was probably enough. I was not worried, really, because I thought we are building the case here. And then, just as the detective's confidence was growing, the case took an unexpected turn. Remember, police had no record of Mary Louise Day as an adult. There were no credit cards, no driver's license or ID recorded anywhere. There hadn't been a trace of Mary in more than two decades. Until police in Phoenix, Arizona made a traffic stop. I got a phone call. I was at home. I left work. He told me, hey, Captain, are you sitting down? I said, what happened?

21:17He said, no, I've just got to let you know that Phoenix Police Department in Arizona pulled over a car and they say that they found Mary Day.

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22:39November 2003, Phoenix, Arizona. It was a routine traffic stop, a pickup truck with stolen plates. when police ran the IDs of the passengers, one of them hit. A woman named Mary Day. He said, Joe, guess what? Mary Day's been found. And I was stunned. Investigators had put Mary Day into a missing persons database long ago. She identified herself with a Phoenix identification card, or Arizona state identification card. Back in California, Detective Joe Bertina felt like a ghost had just appeared. In his mind, Mary Day had been murdered more than 20 years earlier at the home of her parents. You talked to William and Charlotte in April of 2003.

23:36And then seven months later or so, a woman named Mary Louise Day just falls out of the sky. I was stunned. His boss, Steve Sircone, could not believe it. Joe went down there, and he met her, and he sent a picture of her, and we went, what? Wait a minute. No, all right, all right. It looked like it could be her. And I said, wait a minute, all these other bits of circumstantial evidence? The father almost confessing to something? Almost confessing to the murder of a little girl. And now, here was this woman, 700 miles away, with a valid Arizona state ID. Strangely, that ID had been issued only three weeks earlier, while the homicide investigation was underway.

24:24Well, you must have found the timing awfully suspicious. Yes, it was very suspicious. When Detective Bretina went to Phoenix, the woman he was sure had been murdered told him she had run away from her mother, Charlotte, and stepfather, William, when she was a teenager. She'd basically lived under the radar and by her wits ever since. But she seemed hesitant, and her story seemed sketchy. Later in a phone call, Mary told Bertina she had some awful memories. Did you want to talk about what happened that last night? It hurt. I'm sure it does. But what happened that last night? I'm so confused anymore, I don't know what's real or not.

25:13I remember you kicked surrounding my head into the tub. Is that when you started bleeding? When I was already bleeding, he hit my head into the coffee table. I think I have to laugh at it. Maybe that's why I can put all the pieces together to tell you. But she didn't remember anything about the sick dog. Was that troublesome to you? That was, yeah. Investigators say it was hard to pin down much of anything about her past two decades. They began to wonder if the woman with the freshly minted ID was really who she claimed to be. You refused to call her Mary Louise Day. We called her Phoenix Mary.

25:54In phone conversations, Phoenix Mary was sounding increasingly frustrated.

26:03Go ahead, Mary. If you would have found my body, how are you going to be able to prove you the hell I was? DNA. Oh, so since I'm still alive, y 'all can't prove who I am? There's no record of you ever being anywhere. It's like you haven't existed up until now. I'll be better off from just David and then y 'all can do the testing from there. I said, all right, let's get a DNA test on this woman. Let's let her prove that she's the daughter of Charlotte. We're going to disprove that she's married, of course, because there's no way that her DNA is going to match. Except it did match. I nearly fell on the floor.

26:47I couldn't believe it. The DNA came back positive to being a daughter of Charlotte. it. The case was closed. Sherry invited her long-lost sister to move in with her. In most cases, that would be the end of the story, but not in this case. So now DNA matches, case closed. Yeah, well, if it were that simple, right? Once Phoenix Mary moved in, Sherry started to have her own doubts. The first thing I noticed was she, it sounded like she had some weird Midwestern Southern accent. It's weird to me. The detectives had noticed that too. That's an interesting dialect you have, Mary. What do you mind? I don't know if I've ever quite heard that particular manner of speaking.

27:42Hey, y 'all still trying to prove who I am, girl? Yes, ma 'am, we are. Phoenix Mary also said she never used her real name.

28:00It's a name she said she made up.

28:10Sherry's sister Kathy was also unnerved. No, that's not Mary. Why? What makes you so sure? Something's off. You're telling me that your gut is saying it's not her. My gut. She says the woman claiming to be Mary didn't even remember that their birth father left them an inheritance they could collect at age 18. It was their shared escape plan, and they had a code word for it. Was there a code word or some sort of secret between you and Mary? Yeah, it was. It was called Mohawk. Mohawk was your secret word? Yep. And Mary did something else strange. She wrote a note to Detective Bertina. She emailed Joe and her email said something to the effect of, I've been lying to you about who I am.

29:05And that was new information. Oh my God, I said, oh, this is a whole new ball game. Still, the case remained closed.

29:23But then in 2008, Steve Sircone, now Seaside's police chief, got a phone call from investigators at the Army base in Fort Ord. Another set of cadaver dogs had been working on an unrelated matter and had found something. Fort Ord was a huge place, and he said, look, we brought the cadaver dogs out here, and they went over hundreds of homes. And he said, we got a hit on one of the homes. You'll never believe who was living in this house. He said, William Houle and his family lived in this house.

30:18In 2008, cadaver dogs alerted near a second home where the Hools had lived, the house they had moved to shortly after Mary disappeared. So what are you thinking, that a body has been moved by this family from one location to another? Yeah. Once again, police dug. And once again, they came up short. Was Mary moved twice? Was this little girl who may have been killed back in 1981, was her body moved twice? Although the case had been closed, Sir Cohn felt something was seriously wrong. I don't know. I don't know. But we have to investigate this. He hired Mark Clark, a retired homicide detective from nearby Salinas, California.

31:05Absolutely the most bizarre case I've ever come up against. Reviewing the evidence collected over the years, Clark was convinced there was a murder and missed opportunities. There's so many parts about this thing that could have solved this case back then that is really frustrating. He believes they let the parents off the hook too soon. Mom and dad say she ran away. Don't ever talk about her again. They tore up her pictures, threw away her clothes, and that was it. Most damning, he says, are William's own words. His comment was, I couldn't have killed Mary. My body would have done it, but it wouldn't have been me.

31:45It would have been that demonic personality because I blacked out. Clark says he would have arrested William Houle. You just admitted tantamount to a homicide and we're letting you go. Clark also focused on that shoe detectives found. Another detective asked Kathy about it. They first asked, did you guys ever wear canvas tennis shoes? And Kathy said, Keds? And she said, yes. And they pulled out the shoe and it's pretty chewed up, but you can tell that it's a tennis shoe with a canvas body to it. And she said exactly that. And he consulted with The Body Farm, a renowned research facility that studies what happens when bodies decompose.

32:28He says they found soil samples consistent with a body being buried.

32:36What do you think happened to Mary Louise Day? She was killed in 1981 and probably around July. Clark believes the woman now claiming to be Mary Day is an imposter. There's just too many things that point to Phoenix Mary Day being somebody else. But what about that DNA test showing she's Charlotte Houle's daughter? Well, Mark Clark has a theory that he says explains it all, even if it is a little far-fetched. He says Charlotte Houle had another daughter, a secret daughter, born before Mary and given up at birth. Clark believes Phoenix Mary is that secret daughter. So you think Phoenix Mary is the actual sister of Mary Louise Day, who goes missing back in 1981?

33:27Yes. He looked into Charlotte's background. There's some circumstantial evidence that Charlotte had a couple of marriages where she would be involved in extramarital affairs and become pregnant from those affairs. Clark says the Houles could have reached out to Charlotte's secret daughter when they felt they were in trouble. I believe she was somehow sought out by Charlotte and William to pose as Mary Day to avoid prosecution. It was an elaborate plot, he says. The Houles knew that police were investigating Mary's disappearance, and they asked her secret sister to assume her identity. Sir Cohn says the Hools had the wherewithal to do it.

34:17What if they took the birth certificate of Mary, which they probably had, and the Social Security card from Mary? What if they gave those cards to the other sister and said, You're now Mary. Clark says the scheme put an end to the investigation and also put money in Phoenix Mary's pocket. There was an inheritance. We thought the motivation would be the inheritance, because she could collect that inheritance. With a crude interest, that inheritance was now worth roughly$60 ,000. Sherry helped Mary get her cut. We reached out to William and Charlotte Houle. Through a relative, they said they had no comment.

35:04Mark says the imposter theory accounts for a lot of inconsistencies. For example, Mary's odd southern accent. The accent was really thick. Sherry and Catherine both said that Mary Day never had an accent. She has a southern accent. It's a pronounced southern accent. Can I go to one place to ask if you don't mind? Go ahead, Mary. If you would have found my body, how were you going to be able to prove you the hell I was? Mary did claim that she had spent some time in the South as an adult, but was only there briefly as a child when experts say it would have given her that accent. And I let four separate Southern dialect experts listen to the interview, and they all concluded that it would have taken living her formative years, up to nine or ten, in the South to acquire this Southern accent.

36:01And there was that email that Phoenix Mary sent, saying she wasn't who she claimed to be. After about a year of living with Sherry, Mary moved out on her own. But the mystery just wouldn't die. Another detective was about to take a crack at the case. We have to be very careful, all of us in law enforcement, not to make our story fit our ideas or what we believed happened.

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38:53In 2017, Sherry Calgaro still wanted answers about the woman claiming to be her sister. Basically everyone that's ever met her has a lot of doubts. I have my own doubts. We took Sherry to visit Phoenix Mary in Missouri, where she'd been living for a few years. I'm hoping that she will admit, she will confess to us who she really is.

39:24Okay, good luck. Bye. Bye. Mary was living here and suffering from late-stage cancer. She wasn't up for any more visitors that day.

39:40As Mary's help was failing, the new acting chief of Seaside Police was determined to solve the case once and for all Judy Velaz chipped away at the idea that Mary Day was murdered For starters, additional tests showed Mary's DNA matched not only Charlotte, but also the birth father and then there was that little girl's shoe i put it in the palm of my hand and i mean it fit in the palm of my hand it was very small i had a hard time believing that a 13 year old would have to be i mean i saw her stature in the picture she wasn't that short the laws also traveled to mary's home she says mary herself filled in the gaps she wanted to convince us she was Mary, and it seemed sincere.

40:33Mary said she began calling herself Monica when she ran away because she didn't want police to take her back home. Mary also mentioned a new name, Maury, a woman she knew in those early days on her own in California. The laws tracked down Maury Kimmel. I got her when she was 15. very naive and innocent about her, almost like childlike. At the time, Maury had two young daughters of her own. She just won my heart and my girls loved her. You know that that may have been the only and the best family life she ever had in her entire life. I'm realizing that now, you know. I wanted to nurture her, you know.

41:21But after about a year, one day, Mary was gone. I was heartbroken.

41:32Velaas discovered that Mary had moved around a lot, city to city, living on the margins. Honestly, when I talked to her, she just seemed like a survivor. She also solved the mystery of why Mary suddenly got that Arizona ID. She needed state aid to pay for surgery. She had her gallbladder taken out that led her to obtain her proper driver's license, or ID, in the name of Mary Louise Day. A local nonprofit had helped Mary track down her real birth certificate. The loss chalks up Mary's foggy memory to trauma and a lifelong battle with alcohol. those gaps in memory to me can be legitimate especially if someone's been an alcoholic from the time they've been a teenager as for that email mary sent to detective for tina saying she'd been lying about who she was the losses mary sent a follow-up email writing quote i'm not sure myself what i was trying to say in that email again from someone who is still a severe alcoholic and using.

42:42And then Velaz came up with the smoking gun. One of Maury's relatives had a photograph. The picture really did it. It's Mary, she says, and it was taken at least a year after the alleged murder. We took the photo to True Face. See it? I see this. A state-of-the-art facial recognition company. CEO Sean Moore. So we're going to look at the results of our face matching algorithms on the images that you all sent us. Okay, and it's trying to see what? It's trying to see the probability that we're matching a young picture with one of the older pictures. So, if this is the same person? Correct. It's a probability that's the same person.

43:25The top photo is Mary before she disappeared. The other photo is the one that Judy Velaz dug up. What are the numbers telling you? And the numbers are telling us that it's the same person. He says that's a 99 % probability. With With that photo, Judy Velaz submitted her report and closed the Merry Day investigation, this time for good.

43:53After all these years, the woman at the center of this case finally agreed to meet with me. This is the Mary that I met. Fragile, but not feeble. It was clear from seeing her in person that this was a woman who had not had an easy life. Still, she didn't seem to be trying to hide anything. In fact, she said it's very frustrating trying to prove who you are when there is no proof.

44:27Sherry is finally at peace. It was all of a sudden it felt like I had a weight lifted off of my shoulders. It was just like, it's done. This is her. That's pretty much the end of that story. It's not that simple for Mark Clark. I've seen the report. I'd be lying if it didn't make me second guess my investigation. Even though he can't prove his theory, he can't quite shake his old hunch that Mary is an imposter. Do you believe that William Hull murdered Mary Louise Day? Based on the evidence I've found, yes.

45:10As for Steve Sircone... I will admit that once I read Judy's report and I saw that picture, I definitely leaned towards the identity of Mary as being Mary Louise Day, the little girl that we were looking for. Still, he says, he is certain of one thing.

45:36Those cadaver dogs were on to something.

45:43They were positive. Positive. Positive. They said, you know, our dogs don't lie. They don't lie. Who was buried in those grave sites?

46:03Mary Day died nine days after Seaside Police Detective Judy Velaz interviewed her.

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