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Mile Higher332: Young Girl Goes Missing, Parents Suspected of Murder & An "Imposter" Emerges: The Mary Day Case
Mile Higher332: Young Girl Goes Missing, Parents Suspected of Murder & An "Imposter" Emerges: The Mary Day Case
332: Young Girl Goes Missing, Parents Suspected of Murder & An "Imposter" Emerges: The Mary Day Case
332: Young Girl Goes Missing, Parents Suspected of Murder & An "Imposter" Emerges: The Mary Day CaseUpdate: 2025-02-06
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Timestamps:
Intro 0:00
Mary Louise Day's Early Life 4:31
Very Heightened Tensions 7:09
A Change of Scenery 10:44
William's Abuse Gets Worse 13:35
A Bizarre Stop in Utah 21:49
Suspicion Around Mary's Disappearance 24:51
Police Begin Investigating 27:10
William is Interviewed 36:04
Mary is "Found" Years Later 37:33
The Real Mary? 43:06
A Conversation about Dissociative Identity Disorder 44:57
The Sad Ending of Phoenix Mary 53:04
Mary's Sisters Still Aren't Sure 55:32
Was Phoenix Mary Real? The Truth 56:51
Final Thoughts & Outro 1:04:04
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Hosts:
Kendall: @kendallraeonyt
IG: http://instagram.com/kendallraeonyt
TW: https://www.twitter.com/kendallraeonyt
YT: https://www.youtube.com/c/kendallsplace
Josh: @milehigherjosh
IG: http://www.instagram.com/milehigherjosh
TW: https://www.twitter.com/milehigherjosh
Producer:
Janelle: @janelle_fields_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/janelle_fie...
TW: https://www.twitter.com/janelle_fields_
Podcast sponsor inquires: joshthomas@night.co
✉ Send Us Mail & Fan Art ✉
Kendall Rae & Josh Thomas
8547 E Arapahoe Rd Ste J # 233
Greenwood Village, CO 80112
Music By: Mile Higher Boys
YT: https://bit.ly/2Q7N5QO
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0F4ik...
The creator hosts a documentary series for educational purposes (EDSA). These include authoritative sources such as interviews, newspaper articles, and TV news reporting meant to educate and memorialize notable cases in our history. Videos come with an editorial and artistic value.
SOURCES CITED:
https://pastebin.com/XM5Kb5wS
https://stitchfix.com/milehigher
Timestamps:
Intro 0:00
Mary Louise Day's Early Life 4:31
Very Heightened Tensions 7:09
A Change of Scenery 10:44
William's Abuse Gets Worse 13:35
A Bizarre Stop in Utah 21:49
Suspicion Around Mary's Disappearance 24:51
Police Begin Investigating 27:10
William is Interviewed 36:04
Mary is "Found" Years Later 37:33
The Real Mary? 43:06
A Conversation about Dissociative Identity Disorder 44:57
The Sad Ending of Phoenix Mary 53:04
Mary's Sisters Still Aren't Sure 55:32
Was Phoenix Mary Real? The Truth 56:51
Final Thoughts & Outro 1:04:04
Mile Higher Merch: HTTP://milehigher.shop
Charity Merch for NCMEC: https://kendallrae.shop
Higher Hope Foundation: https://higherhope.org
Check out our other podcasts!
The Sesh https://bit.ly/3Mtoz4X
Lights Out https://bit.ly/3n3Gaoe
Planet Sleep https://linktr.ee/planetsleep
Join our official FB group! https://bit.ly/3kQbAxg
Join our Discord community, it’s free! https://discord.gg/hZ356G9
MHP YouTube: http://bit.ly/2qaDWGf
Are You Subscribed On Apple Podcast & Spotify?!
Support MHP by leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcast :) https://apple.co/2H4kh58
MHP Topic Request Form: https://forms.gle/gUeTEzL9QEh4Hqz88
Merch designer application: https://forms.gle/ha2ErBnv1gK4rj2Y6
You can follow us on all the things: @milehigherpod
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/milehigherpod
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/milehigherpod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MileHigher
Hosts:
Kendall: @kendallraeonyt
IG: http://instagram.com/kendallraeonyt
TW: https://www.twitter.com/kendallraeonyt
YT: https://www.youtube.com/c/kendallsplace
Josh: @milehigherjosh
IG: http://www.instagram.com/milehigherjosh
TW: https://www.twitter.com/milehigherjosh
Producer:
Janelle: @janelle_fields_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/janelle_fie...
TW: https://www.twitter.com/janelle_fields_
Podcast sponsor inquires: joshthomas@night.co
✉ Send Us Mail & Fan Art ✉
Kendall Rae & Josh Thomas
8547 E Arapahoe Rd Ste J # 233
Greenwood Village, CO 80112
Music By: Mile Higher Boys
YT: https://bit.ly/2Q7N5QO
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0F4ik...
The creator hosts a documentary series for educational purposes (EDSA). These include authoritative sources such as interviews, newspaper articles, and TV news reporting meant to educate and memorialize notable cases in our history. Videos come with an editorial and artistic value.
SOURCES CITED:
https://pastebin.com/XM5Kb5wS
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Transcript
00:00:00
(upbeat music)
00:00:02
- Hey, what is up everybody?
00:00:17
- And welcome back to my Ohio podcast.
00:00:19
Episode 332 and boy, do we have a wild one for you guys today?
00:00:24
This one is actually driving me insane.
00:00:28
I still, after thinking about it for days, cannot come up with a conclusion.
00:00:33
Like sometimes I'll start to think, oh yeah, yeah, this is what happened.
00:00:37
And then I'll go back to my brain.
00:00:39
I'm like, but wait, this, this, and this happened.
00:00:41
So how could that happen?
00:00:43
And I'm just some left confused.
00:00:45
- A real mystery.
00:00:46
- It is, it's a real mystery.
00:00:47
It's really frustrating.
00:00:48
And it's also very sad.
00:00:50
Just everything this whole family has gone through, is unbelievable.
00:00:55
- This case is definitely different in a lot of different ways.
00:00:58
And many cases we cover, I don't know if we've even covered a case quite like this one before.
00:01:03
- No.
00:01:05
Well sort of, I should have looked it up before we started.
00:01:09
I can't remember if Ian here with us for, remember we covered that one case where the boy was missing but then they thought they found him.
00:01:18
- Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
00:01:19
I can never remember the name.
00:01:22
- It was like some French dude.
00:01:23
- Yes, well he went to the prison over there.
00:01:27
- But it turned out to be an imposter.
00:01:28
- Yes.
00:01:29
- Was he a Frederick Bourdain?
00:01:31
- Yes, that's it.
00:01:32
- Yes.
00:01:33
- That was it.
00:01:34
- Yeah, it was the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay.
00:01:36
- Yes.
00:01:37
It's kind of similar to that.
00:01:39
So I mean, very different.
00:01:41
- Not really, but it has an imposter element to it.
00:01:45
'Cause basically we're covering the case of Mary Day.
00:01:51
And she disappeared in 1981 and for 20 years her family believed that she was dead, that she had been murdered.
00:02:01
- And she may have been.
00:02:03
- Which is still on the table.
00:02:05
Yeah, a woman gets pulled over in Phoenix with the same name, same birthday and claims to be this woman who's been missing all these years.
00:02:17
- And there's a good possibility she is.
00:02:21
- Exactly.
00:02:21
But then there's a good possibility she could have could be an imposter.
00:02:26
She could be.
00:02:27
- Or there's another explanation that's not quite as sinister as an imposter.
00:02:31
- Right, right.
00:02:32
- Yeah, it's bizarre, you guys.
00:02:34
- But the family, in this case, takes a little time to wrap your head around because there's a lot of different names, a lot of people.
00:02:42
- Yeah, we're gonna have our editor Tom draw you up like a little family tree diagram situation 'cause it's confusing, I continually feel confused.
00:02:52
- Charlotte Pressler is Mary Day's mother and she has quite an extensive history with men and having affairs and having children that she's seemingly doesn't keep track of.
00:03:07
Which makes us all a little confusing.
00:03:09
- She's just a massive shit.
00:03:10
- Yeah, piece of work, for sure.
00:03:12
- Yeah.
00:03:13
- So bear with us.
00:03:14
We'll explain all of them.
00:03:15
- Sure, you're probably like, guys, I'm confused already.
00:03:19
- Same.
00:03:20
- So are we.
00:03:21
No, we'll break it all down for you.
00:03:23
But the main name to that really matters in all this is Mary Day.
00:03:28
- And surprises, case really has gotten very little coverage.
00:03:32
- Yeah, well.
00:03:34
- I was surprised I hadn't heard of it.
00:03:35
- I mean, there's a lot of cases to be fair, from the 80s that don't get a ton of coverage.
00:03:39
- But this one has so many strange elements that you would think people would be more curious about it and that it would have had more coverage given the circumstances.
00:03:48
I don't know.
00:03:49
Surprising to me, I guess.
00:03:50
- Same.
00:03:53
I don't know.
00:03:54
I don't know what happened here, but we're gonna try to figure it out.
00:03:59
- Yeah, we're gonna be the ones to figure it out today.
00:04:01
By the end of this episode, we will have the answers.
00:04:04
No, we absolutely will not.
00:04:05
But I definitely wanna hear from you guys about what you think.
00:04:08
'Cause I know your opinions are gonna be all over the board.
00:04:10
I love reading the comments.
00:04:12
But yes, I'm your host Kendall.
00:04:14
- I'm your host Josh.
00:04:15
- We are joined by our production team, Janelle and Ian.
00:04:18
Hello.
00:04:19
- Hi.
00:04:20
- Hi.
00:04:21
(laughs)
00:04:21
- Okay, guys, should I just jump in?
00:04:23
There's a lot to get into here.
00:04:25
- Yeah, let's go back to the very beginning.
00:04:27
Talk about Mary Day and her family and how it all started.
00:04:31
- Yep.
00:04:32
So Mary Louise Day was born on February 19th, 1968 in Little Falls, New York.
00:04:37
And Little Falls has the second lowest population of any city in the state.
00:04:42
And most people know what another.
00:04:44
And that's why her mother, Charlotte, garnered quite a reputation over her time there.
00:04:50
Charlotte married her first husband, Hebert Pressler, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, not completely sure.
00:04:57
And a lot of information in this case was hard to pin down.
00:05:02
But for a while, she was believed to not have had any children with him.
00:05:06
But while Charlotte was married to Hebert, she had numerous affairs with men around town.
00:05:11
Most notably Mary's father, Charles Day.
00:05:14
After Charlotte and Charles had Mary in 1968, she divorced Hebert and then married Charles before having Mary's little sister Kathy.
00:05:21
However, Charlotte did not stay faithful to Charles either.
00:05:25
And she had Sherry in 1971 with a man named Ira Hoke.
00:05:29
Now, according to Sherry, Charlotte never wanted to be a mother.
00:05:34
And I mean, it's pretty obvious just by looking at this entire case, you'll come to that conclusion pretty quick as well.
00:05:39
But Sherry said, quote, she had sex, she got pregnant, and she got stuck with us.
00:05:44
While it's unclear what Charlotte did for work during this time, there are photographs that indicate that she could have been maybe a showgirl or at least met her romantic partners through the bar scene in Little Falls.
00:05:57
Although town is pretty small.
00:05:59
And you wouldn't imagine there'd be that much of a bar scene.
00:06:04
Yeah, teeny tiny town.
00:06:06
Yeah, yeah.
00:06:06
Out in the middle of New York between Albany and Syracuse.
00:06:11
Yeah, and it's mostly dive bars and stuff, so.
00:06:14
Yeah, and if you could even call it that really, I mean, most small towns have a dive bar too.
00:06:19
But can imagine she's making this prominent living in one of these dive bars.
00:06:25
Well, it's possible to, I believe in one of the interviews I was watching, they were saying that they think that that photo of her dressed in the showgirl outfit could have been like from a high school,
00:06:37
like a senior portrait.
00:06:39
So she may have not done that as a career at all.
00:06:42
It could, there was something about basically just that she, especially in high school, but in her early 20s as well, like she just really was obsessed with her beauty.
00:06:52
And so there were, she had a lot of these kind of portraits commissioned really, just to kind of like immortalize herself during this time.
00:07:00
And those are called like glamour shots, right?
00:07:02
Exactly, yeah.
00:07:03
And that was pretty popular back then.
00:07:05
I guess more so in like the 70s, 80s.
00:07:07
But yeah, I guess, yeah, that makes sense.
00:07:09
So not much is known about these first three men that we just mentioned.
00:07:12
Either Hubert seemed to have entirely left the picture.
00:07:15
Once Charlotte married Charles, Ira didn't really stick around to care for Sherry or just straight up did not.
00:07:22
And even Charles seemed to have given up custody of Marion Kathy once the couple divorced in the early 1970s.
00:07:29
Mary Kathy and Sherry were under Charlotte's care.
00:07:32
And she clearly did not want the responsibility of motherhood had absolutely no interest in being a mom in any capacity.
00:07:39
Yeah, and because of this, the children were not often enrolled in public school.
00:07:43
And it's really unclear as to what kind of homeschooling Charlotte gave them if she gave them any schooling whatsoever.
00:07:49
Probably zero.
00:07:50
Yeah.
00:07:51
Because Charlotte would usually leave the children at home to go out drinking in town at night.
00:07:57
And the young girls would be left to just care for each other.
00:07:59
Even while Charles and Charlotte were together, he was not present as a father figure.
00:08:04
When Charlotte attempted suicide, the three girls were taken into emergency foster care by the Waltz family.
00:08:10
And they enrolled the girls in school and seemed to generally care for them.
00:08:14
It's unclear how long the girl spent with the Waltz family, though it's pretty safe to assume that it was at least for a few years.
00:08:21
During this time, Charlotte officially divorced Charles and remarried a man named William Hool, who was just 17 at the time.
00:08:29
And it's unclear how old Charlotte was or even how they met.
00:08:33
But it seems to be pretty apparent.
00:08:35
Charlotte was quite a few years older than William.
00:08:41
In 1975, William joined the Marine Corps in a year later in 1976.
00:08:45
Charlotte regained full custody of her three children.
00:08:49
There's a family portrait.
00:08:50
If you're watching, I don't know.
00:08:53
Yeah, Charlotte looks definitely older.
00:08:55
I thought she looks old enough to be William's mother.
00:08:58
But maybe that's a stretch.
00:08:59
It's interesting looking at that photo of her because she doesn't strike you as the type of person we're describing here.
00:09:05
No, I think it was a lot of act going on to portray herself as this mother.
00:09:13
Yeah, I don't know.
00:09:15
The whole backstory just still doesn't make sense to me.
00:09:18
I'm like, are we missing something?
00:09:21
Or is this what Charlotte told everybody?
00:09:24
We just really don't know.
00:09:26
God, those poor kids are so cute.
00:09:28
Charlotte, remember the day that Charlotte came to pick them up?
00:09:31
During her time with the Waltz family, she had seen how a loving family actually cared for their children.
00:09:36
And so because of this experience, she really grew to hate her mother.
00:09:40
She said that on the car ride home, Sherry got up and peed on Charlotte's head from the back seat.
00:09:46
So imagine that.
00:09:47
I think that is so fucking awesome.
00:09:50
She shows you how much she truly hated her.
00:09:51
And she always refers to her as just her birth mother.
00:09:54
I'm like, you'll see as we go on.
00:09:56
It gets worse, yeah.
00:09:57
This bitch deserved it.
00:09:58
Oh, yeah, evil, yeah.
00:10:00
Obviously, after being peed on, Charlotte was very, very pissed off and she told William to turn the car around and go back to the Waltz's family home.
00:10:11
Once there, she grabbed Sherry, rang the doorbell and told the mother, quote, "Here, Shirley, you can have this one."
00:10:18
And at this point, Sherry was separated from her siblings for several years and was raised by the Waltz family.
00:10:25
God, it's wild how all that unfolded.
00:10:27
And she was happy to get away from her.
00:10:30
Yeah, and props to the Waltz family for just stepping up and helping out and taking Sherry in.
00:10:36
But how devastating for Sherry to be separated.
00:10:38
Separate from her sisters.
00:10:39
Right.
00:10:40
Horrible.
00:10:41
What kind of mother does that?
00:10:43
Really bad one.
00:10:44
So then in 1978, Charlotte gave birth to her in William's first child, Billy Jean, before he was restrained to a military base in Hawaii.
00:10:52
And then they had their second child, Charlotte's only boy.
00:10:56
And we actually don't know his name hasn't been public, but that happened a few years after moving away from Little Falls.
00:11:04
However, in 1978, after only a few months of living in Hawaii, Mary and Kathy's father, Charles Day, died in a car accident.
00:11:12
And it's unclear if Charles had any children outside of Mary and Kathy, but he left them in inheritance worth about $60,000 that they could collect when they turned 18.
00:11:22
And it's also important to note that Charlotte and William received checks from the government to support Mary and Kathy following Charles death.
00:11:29
Now, Mary and Kathy always wanted to escape from their mother, obviously.
00:11:33
And that inheritance money really became their salvation at the end of it all.
00:11:38
And even as little girls, they fear that Charlotte and William would somehow scheme their way into getting the money and making it so that they didn't get anything.
00:11:45
So they developed a code word that only they knew when it came time to collect.
00:11:50
And that word was Mohawk.
00:11:52
And that's important to remember.
00:11:53
As for Mary, she hated her mother and William and for good reason.
00:11:58
From at least the time that their family moved to Hawaii and also probably before that, William had been sexually and physically abusing Mary.
00:12:06
And this continued for two years until 1980, when the military base became aware of the abuse and placed Mary in protective custody for the rest of the family's time in Hawaii.
00:12:16
Although, he still got to keep his job unbelievable, but not surprising.
00:12:23
I don't know why.
00:12:24
I'm just like, was William, like how did that all unfolded?
00:12:27
Was William always kind of this predator?
00:12:31
Before he comes into this relationship, was this encouraged behavior by Charlotte?
00:12:35
Like, I just wonder what that dynamic was truly like.
00:12:39
Here's this younger guy with this older woman.
00:12:42
She has these daughters that live with her.
00:12:44
I'm just like, what kind of fucked up situation is that?
00:12:48
- Yeah, I mean, you'd be just slice it, it's fucked up.
00:12:50
- Yeah, which, again, this could have just been behavior that's maybe learned through his time in the military or just that time.
00:12:58
- Or his childhood.
00:12:59
- Or his childhood.
00:13:00
- We don't really have any information about that.
00:13:02
- I don't know, it's just a disturbing situation when as a mother, you're not doing anything about it.
00:13:12
- No, I'm sure she's allowing it to happen.
00:13:15
- She's probably completely fine with it.
00:13:16
Maybe even happy about it.
00:13:17
She was, and just wack as fuck on every level, it seemed.
00:13:22
But it's unclear if Kathy also faced abuse from William, but she certainly feared and hated her mother and William as well.
00:13:31
Charlotte would later say that Kathy tried to quote, "Turn Billie Jean against us."
00:13:35
- In 1981, William was restatient to Fort Ward in seaside California, which was at the time a small military town police mainly buy military police officers.
00:13:46
In the spring of '81, Mary was returned to Charlotte's care.
00:13:50
Charlotte and William did not want Mary to return to protective custody again as it would threaten the checks that they received after Charles's death.
00:13:58
So they decided to keep her hidden.
00:14:00
They never enrolled her in school and other families on the base said that they never saw Mary.
00:14:05
And Mary would run away constantly during this time, though she was returning to the family's home each time and it's safe to assume that the military police officers and the local seaside police officers were aware of the tendency for Mary to run away as they are the ones who returned her home.
00:14:21
However, that all changed only a few months later in the summer of 1981.
00:14:26
On or around July 15, Mary and Kathy were left home alone at the family's first home in seaside, while Charlotte and William took their other children to dinner.
00:14:36
And it's unclear how often this type of thing would occur, but William definitely preferred his children with Charlotte over Kathy and Mary.
00:14:45
Charlotte and William and their two children were only gone for a few hours, leaving Kathy and Mary in charge of William's dog named Bubba Brown.
00:14:53
And it's also unknown what really happened next, but Bubba Brown the dog became extremely sick at some point during the night.
00:15:01
At first the dog was vomiting, but soon he began convulsing and then foaming at the mouth.
00:15:06
And whatever had happened, the dog was likely going to die.
00:15:10
And this is when Charlotte and William returned home from dinner.
00:15:13
William, who is very fond of his dog Bubba Brown, immediately accused Mary of poisoning his dog while they were out for dinner.
00:15:23
At this point, Mary tried to run out of the house, but he grabbed her.
00:15:26
And since Mary had been physically abused by William before, she began kicking him to try and stop him from restraining her.
00:15:32
William said that he tried to hit her in the shoulder, but, quote, the hit may have slid off and hit her in the throat.
00:15:42
Kathy was watching all this go down.
00:15:45
And she watched as William backed Mary into a corner of the home and then continued to beat her.
00:15:50
He told Kathy to go to her room.
00:15:52
And the last time that Kathy ever saw Mary, Mary had blood coming out of her mouth.
00:15:58
So a very traumatic moment.
00:16:02
And then she's gone.
00:16:03
Yep.
00:16:04
Keep that in mind, because this event comes up later on.
00:16:09
And is it pretty important?
00:16:11
Yeah, pretty pivotal incident.
00:16:12
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00:16:22
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00:16:23
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00:16:25
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00:16:27
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00:16:29
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00:16:33
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00:16:37
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00:16:38
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00:16:48
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00:17:40
So the only people who know what happened next were Charlotte and William.
00:17:48
Clearly Charlotte had allowed William to abuse Mary when they were living in Hawaii.
00:17:51
And she likely didn't stop him this time either.
00:17:55
And regardless, after that night in 1981, nobody knows what actually happened to Mary Louie's day.
00:18:02
William and Charlotte told Kathy the next day that Mary had run away.
00:18:05
Although they never reported her missing to the seaside police or the MPs at Fort Ord.
00:18:10
And nobody at the base or in town even knew who Mary was because they rarely took her out of the house and they never enrolled her in schools, almost like she didn't exist.
00:18:19
Now Sherry, who is still with her foster family back in Little Falls, New York, had no idea what happened either.
00:18:26
Since her sisters had moved away from New York in 1978, she kept in close contact with them through letters and phone calls.
00:18:32
However, all of that just completely stopped after Mary went missing in 1981.
00:18:38
For Kathy, who was still stuck with Charlotte and William, she was never allowed to speak of Mary again.
00:18:45
Charlotte burned and destroyed every photo of Mary and every article of clothing that she had left behind.
00:18:52
And I'm sure a lot of you, you know, red flags, alarm bells are going off.
00:18:57
And you're thinking possible murder here, right?
00:19:00
'Cause that is actions we have seen parents take or just people in general when they have gotten rid of somebody to burn and destroy every trace of them ever existing.
00:19:11
It's kind of a strange thing to do that when obviously it's a strange thing to do when your child goes missing.
00:19:16
I mean, just not reporting them and not caring is strange enough as it is.
00:19:18
But then to try and get rid of their existence altogether, you know, it's just extremely disturbing.
00:19:25
Yeah, extremely suspicious too.
00:19:27
Well, I just feel like we've covered so many cases of parents who, after their children go missing, will leave the front door unlocked, will leave their room is completely untouched.
00:19:37
And, you know, of course everyone handles grief differently, but the general thing to do is expect for them to return at some point.
00:19:44
Yeah.
00:19:45
So to just get rid of everything is very strange, very, very strange.
00:19:49
And it's like, if they didn't do something to her, it just shows you how much they truly hated her, you know, to just want to act like she never was a part of their family at all.
00:20:01
And she, I mean, she did run away quite a bit.
00:20:03
So maybe in their minds they're like, she leaves, she's not coming back this time after this.
00:20:11
Yeah.
00:20:12
And I mean, still extreme, still a crazy way to react.
00:20:17
But, you know, just thinking about it from different angles, you know, maybe they truly thought, well, she's been wanting to leave for a long time, so maybe she'll just be gone this time.
00:20:29
And that may sound crazy for Josh to be like going there, but when you hear the rest of the story and like trying to make sense of their actions at the time is the only way to try and come to a conclusion of what could have happened.
00:20:40
Well, it's very easy to get tunnel vision on murder in this case, as investigators seem to do, especially early on.
00:20:48
Which there's good evidence because all the circumstances and the circumstantial evidence points towards that, the actions of the parents point toward it, the actions as reported by Kathy that night point towards that.
00:21:00
But then there's plenty of other evidence that point away from that.
00:21:03
Exactly.
00:21:04
It makes us so frustrating.
00:21:05
But anyway, Kathy remembered that before Mary disappeared.
00:21:09
She was allowed to play anywhere that she wanted in the backyard.
00:21:12
But after July, William took her and the other children to a spot next to the shed in the side yard and drew an invisible line until them to never go to that section of the yard again.
00:21:24
So there's another giant red flag.
00:21:25
Then the family remained in that home for a few more months until they were moved to another house on the base.
00:21:31
However, they only lived there for a few months before William was reassigned to another military base in upstate New York.
00:21:37
And after the younger children in Charlotte had been moved to New York, Kathy remembered that she and William took the final load of their belongings on a 40-hour road trip between California and New York in 1982.
00:21:49
She also recalled that after driving through Northern California, William pulled over somewhere in Utah just on the side of the highway.
00:21:58
And he opened the car door and told Kathy to, quote, look forward.
00:22:02
She said the smell of salt was overwhelming.
00:22:05
She said, William then went to the trunk and pulled out a large rolled up Oriental style rug that Kathy hadn't seen before.
00:22:12
He told her to look away.
00:22:13
And then he walked off the highway with it.
00:22:15
While Kathy doesn't remember how long William had been gone, she said it was, quote, "quite a while."
00:22:20
And when William returned, he was no longer carrying the rug.
00:22:24
The two never spoke about this event again.
00:22:27
While Kathy only remembered the situation later on in life, the route between seaside and New York mainly falls in her state 80 throughout most of the country.
00:22:34
Meaning they would have driven through the Bonville salt flats just outside of Salt Lake City.
00:22:40
And if the story is true, then it's possible the rug in its contents may still be out there.
00:22:45
Although this is a vast area, the Bonville salt flats.
00:22:49
We're talking like hundreds, if not thousands of acres of land down there.
00:22:56
One thing that we'll also come back to is, Kathy is the one providing all this information.
00:23:03
And it's difficult to corroborate her information with anybody else.
00:23:10
- Yeah, and she was so young.
00:23:12
- Yeah, and so a lot of time elapses from when she's retelling these events to when they actually happened.
00:23:20
So just keep that in mind.
00:23:21
But after Kathy and William arrived in New York, she wrote a letter to Sherry informing her that they had moved back.
00:23:26
Charlotte reluctantly agreed to let Sherry spend time with her sister at the house.
00:23:31
And however, a Sherry grew older, she found the family's reaction, the conversations about Mary, a bit strange.
00:23:38
For one, William and Charlotte never brought her up.
00:23:41
Never a topic of conversation.
00:23:43
I was like, oh yeah, we heard from Mary, she's out, you know, living somewhere.
00:23:49
- Or even, I wonder what ever happened to Mary, nothing.
00:23:52
- Yeah, just nothing, no talk whatsoever.
00:23:56
And when she asked Kathy about their sister, she responded, quote, we don't talk about Mary.
00:24:02
- Yeah.
00:24:03
- In fact, Charlotte and William fiercely protected their secret.
00:24:06
When Kathy was 14, they kicked her out of the house for asking the younger children if they knew anything about what had happened to their older sister.
00:24:14
- Which also leads you to.
00:24:16
- Everything leads you to believe in, I mean, especially if you know other similar cases where parents take these types of actions, this has got to be,
00:24:28
they must have murdered her and are trying to cover it up.
00:24:30
- Because if she really ran away, would they take the extreme of kicking out another sibling, who even asks about her, you know, it's just, it's so bizarre.
00:24:39
- You would expect them to just be like, I don't know what happened to her.
00:24:41
She ran away, you know, her fault, whatever, you know.
00:24:45
- Something, something like that.
00:24:47
- No, they don't even want to speak about her.
00:24:48
They want to pretend she never existed and this whole event never happened.
00:24:51
So then in 1992, when Sherry finally turned 18, she actually reported Mary missing to the Fort Ord military police.
00:24:59
However, as we've covered before on this show, military police often cover up misdeeds and crimes committed by soldiers on the base to protect their reputation.
00:25:09
And on top of that, it had been 11 years at this point since the family last saw Mary and there was no official evidence to prove that she even lived with the whole family on the base in the first place,
00:25:20
which was crazy.
00:25:21
They really got rid of all evidence of her existence.
00:25:24
Fort Ord likely put Mary's case into the cold case file and didn't conduct any further investigations.
00:25:31
In 1994, Fort Ord shut down and all of its cold cases were transferred to the seaside police.
00:25:37
However, due to unknown reasons, seaside police did not begin their investigation into Mary's disappearance at this point.
00:25:45
And it's likely because her case was quite old then and they probably had a heavy caseload to work through before or after the base closed.
00:25:54
And it was around this time that Sherry ended up meeting a long-lost sister.
00:25:59
While asking Charlotte's sister about Mary, she revealed that Charlotte had a daughter named Jeanie with her first husband, Hubert Pressler.
00:26:06
After their divorce, Hubert retained full custody and Charlotte kept Jeanie a secret from the rest of the family.
00:26:12
And while Jeanie and Sherry became close, they began joking to anyone that they met, quote, "You could be my brother, you could be my sister because they both assumed that Charlotte could have had several children that they didn't even know about."
00:26:24
Sherry also believes that while Charlotte abandoned both her, Jeanie and Kathy, she, quote, "kept tabs" on all of her children.
00:26:33
In 1999, Sherry submitted Mary's case to Nick Meck, who generated this age progress photo of what she could look like at 31.
00:26:40
And if you are watching this episode on Spotify or YouTube, you can take a look at it.
00:26:45
- It's amazing what Nick Meck can do with just a photo.
00:26:48
Oh, we got to tour their facility.
00:26:52
We got to sit with the artists that does these.
00:26:54
And it's incredible.
00:26:56
And it takes a ton of time and work to do this.
00:26:59
- Hours and hours to do this.
00:27:01
- Yeah, the artists they have on their team are highly, highly skilled.
00:27:04
It is pretty incredible.
00:27:06
And it's only getting better as technology and business, you know.
00:27:10
- But while the case remained dormant for several years after this, the Nick Meck case number and calls from Sherry and Kathy eventually spurred the C.S.I.
00:27:17
police department to investigate the disappearance of Mary Louise Day in 2002.
00:27:21
But this is 21 years after she first won missing, which obviously is, makes it very difficult after this much time.
00:27:30
- Yeah.
00:27:30
- But Steve Sercone, who's in charge of investigations at C.S.I.D.
00:27:34
when Mary Day's case became active again, assigned C.S.I.
00:27:36
police officer of 20 years, Steve Britannia to the case.
00:27:40
Steve began by interviewing both Kathy and Sherry.
00:27:43
However, they didn't interview Charlotte and William at first as they had moved away from New York and were not in contact with their daughters at this particular time.
00:27:50
After taking statements from both Kathy and Sherry, specifically Kathy's version of the night that Mary went missing, Steve Britannia determined that this would likely be a homicide investigation.
00:28:01
He asked Kathy to fly from New York to seaside to investigate the home where the events took place.
00:28:07
Embodicam footage from when Kathy accompanied Officer Britannia, she can be seen recounting the fact that Mary was bleeding from her mouth when she last saw her and pointed out the section of the backyard that William had drawn that invisible line and kept,
00:28:21
you know, the kids from playing in.
00:28:23
While nothing jumped out to Officer Britannia initially aside from the horrifying events of Kathy's story, again, it had been 20 years since Mary's disappearance and there was no visible evidence that seemingly remained.
00:28:35
In order to properly investigate the backyard, Officer Britannia brought some cadaver dogs in to take them through the homes to see if they could detect human remains inside the home or in the backyard.
00:28:46
And when multiple cadaver dogs are brought into and enclosed space, instead of camusing a large area, they are brought through independently in order to avoid distractions, which makes sense.
00:28:57
And if multiple dogs hit the same spot, that spot is either dug up or forensically analyzed to find what that dog was indicating on.
00:29:06
So then four dogs independently hit on the same spot and it just so happened to be the exact area of the backyard where William told Kathy to avoid after Mary disappeared.
00:29:19
And Steve Sarkone said, quote, "Our dogs don't lie."
00:29:24
And we all know, I mean, if you've been a true crime consumer for any amount of time and have heard any cases with coverage about these dogs, I mean, they really are pretty spot on 99% of the time.
00:29:35
It's wild.
00:29:36
So for four of them to indicate on the exact same spot tells you a whole lot, right?
00:29:40
So seaside police officers began digging up that spot in the backyard and they found a belt buckle and they found a teddy bear and then buried several feet deep.
00:29:50
The police ended up finding a little canvas tennis shoe for a little girl.
00:29:56
And so of course, as soon as they see that, they're thinking like, well, they found her.
00:30:00
In fact, Sarkone actually quoted saying, well, we found her thinking that if they dug any deeper, they're certainly gonna come across Mary's body.
00:30:09
However, as they continued to dig, no body was found and this completely perplexed detectives Sarkone and officer Bertania.
00:30:19
Why would four dogs individually hit on a section of the yard without a body?
00:30:24
It just made no sense.
00:30:25
I mean, again, these cadaver dogs are extremely reliable, positively identifying bodies several feet deep with a 95% accuracy rate.
00:30:34
They've even been used to identify archaeological sites from the Iron Age, finding bodies buried over 3,000 years ago, which is mind blowing.
00:30:43
This is because cadaver dogs don't just detect the scent of human remains, but the scent of the soil has actually been changed by the presence of the remains buried there.
00:30:53
Even after the body has been removed, the scent of the soil remains detectable by cadaver dogs for at least six hundred and 67 days.
00:31:02
And that number is likely much higher.
00:31:04
There just have not been studies done to actually prove that yet.
00:31:07
But what this indicated was that at some point in time, a body had to have been buried in that spot.
00:31:14
Further testing of the soil deposits in that spot of the backyard by the body farm, which is part of the forensic anthropology center at the University of Tennessee, showed that human remains buried there affected the soil at some point in time.
00:31:28
The only problem was, without a body, seaside PD couldn't prove that Mary was the one who was buried there.
00:31:34
So with the testing and the cadaver dogs further building the case against William and Charlotte Hool, seaside police realized that they needed to track those two down and get their statements regarding the night that Mary disappeared.
00:31:46
In 2003, Detective Sercone and Officer Brutany found out that Charlotte and William were still together.
00:31:52
William had since left the army and had become a corrections officer at a prison in Kansas.
00:31:56
So in April 2003, they were finally able to question William Hool's.
00:32:02
Here's a clip of some of Charlotte's interrogation footage.
00:32:05
You'll notice her strange body language and her quote unquote regrets regarding the case.
00:32:11
Though she doesn't confess to murdering Mary.
00:32:14
Let's take a look.
00:32:15
You know, life is full of regrets.
00:32:18
If you go back and say, you know, if I hit the dissonance and this-- Oh, yes.
00:32:23
When the long been here.
00:32:24
OK.
00:32:25
So this was my problem.
00:32:29
I didn't do a lot of things I should have and I didn't do a lot of things I could have.
00:32:32
I would have non-stopal consequences.
00:32:37
I was married before.
00:32:39
Mary and Kathy are like children.
00:32:42
So you know who I'm talking about.
00:32:44
Villageing William, our children from this marriage.
00:32:47
So I had Mary, Kathy, villageing white.
00:32:50
She told them all of them.
00:32:52
I wouldn't talk to you right now.
00:32:54
OK.
00:32:57
Because Kathy has got the liching so brainwashed, come when those look off.
00:33:05
The only thing she wants to do is why don't you find Mary?
00:33:09
Where is she?
00:33:10
What did she do to her and blah, blah, blah?
00:33:13
And she got a final stop sentence.
00:33:15
She got me subsurbed.
00:33:16
So what was my time for her to marry?
00:33:20
Gay one.
00:33:20
Nice to meet you.
00:33:22
She ran away in her time with states.
00:33:23
Done.
00:33:24
Did you guys take the cast off to find her?
00:33:27
We should have.
00:33:29
Yeah.
00:33:30
We should have.
00:33:31
We should have.
00:33:34
I don't think we did.
00:33:35
I didn't handle the reason why I was looking.
00:33:38
My husband seems to think we can't replace, but Elma, there was never a follow up.
00:33:47
Uh-huh.
00:33:48
OK.
00:33:49
You know, they hear the story of the people that fought for the crack.
00:33:53
I think this will happen to her.
00:33:55
You know, we all look back, just like you said, and we made mistakes.
00:33:58
What I look back is I must end.
00:34:02
What I should have done, I really should have shot back and seen what happened to Mary.
00:34:07
I don't know.
00:34:11
I don't know why I did.
00:34:12
Fucking Charlotte Hooligan should be her name, 88.
00:34:16
Clearly, the line of questioning that she's going through and she's just trying to really, yeah, I don't know.
00:34:22
I have a lot of regrets.
00:34:23
She fell through the cracks.
00:34:24
It's a system's fault.
00:34:26
Not sure if we did anything.
00:34:27
Yeah, not sure if we called.
00:34:29
It's fucking absurd.
00:34:32
I hate her.
00:34:33
Yeah, and again, that's just a clip.
00:34:35
I'm sure there's more to that interrogation than what we just saw, and I would hope that they like pressed her more.
00:34:43
You know what I mean?
00:34:44
Yeah, certainly.
00:34:45
They were going pretty easy on her.
00:34:46
Again, I mean, after all these years is the first time they're getting a talk to her.
00:34:49
You know, they don't want to just have her get up and leave, so they're just trying to probe her a little bit.
00:34:55
Take what they can get, yes, yeah.
00:34:57
But you can see how investigators would be like, okay, she's hiding something.
00:35:02
She doesn't just not remember what happened.
00:35:06
There's more to the story here.
00:35:07
Is she hiding a murder or is she just trying to cover up her horrible parenting, right, right, lack of concern for her missing child, right, just hard to wrap your mind around.
00:35:18
And like you heard in the clip, she mentions, well, William thinks that he called the police, but it's very important to note that neither the Salinas Police Department nor seaside had any records indicating that William had ever placed a call to them about Marys' parents.
00:35:41
For Ord said they first knew about Mary when Sherry reported her missing in 1992.
00:35:45
So talking 11 years later, when Sherry first reported her missing, that's the only record that we have of anybody making contact about Mary going missing.
00:35:57
She also went on to say that the night Mary went missing, she was terrified of William and, quote, "Sauce Satan in his eyes."
00:36:04
Next thing they do is the police interviewed William, and they asked him about the incident following the dog getting extremely ill and how Maddie was at Mary.
00:36:11
And William said, quote, "On a scale of 1 to 10, I was at a 15.
00:36:17
He recounted hitting Mary in the throat, but stopped short of confessing to her murder.
00:36:22
Then police asked him if he was mad enough to have killed Mary, to which William responded that he would have never killed Mary.
00:36:29
But then the police remembered that Charlotte had said she saw Satan in his eyes.
00:36:33
And so they asked William if that devil could have killed Mary."
00:36:37
And William said, quote, "Yes, that demon could have killed her."
00:36:42
Quite a lot to take in.
00:36:45
I feel like I've definitely heard killers kind of use the six years before of like, I was possessed by a demon.
00:36:53
It wasn't me, it was the demon that was possessing me.
00:36:58
And of course that's the tactic that the officer is using in that situation to be like, well, could the devil have done it?
00:37:03
Right, right, not you, but yeah, it tells you a lot.
00:37:07
He's at a 15 level of rage.
00:37:10
He's saying that yes, the demon that was possessing me could have could have killed her, but I didn't kill her.
00:37:16
Yeah.
00:37:17
It's all very suspicious.
00:37:18
So I understand why they're going down this route.
00:37:20
They're like, yeah.
00:37:22
Seems very possible that these got, you know, William likely killed her and they and Charlotte covered it up with him.
00:37:30
And this is what happened.
00:37:31
Yeah, it feels pretty close to a confession.
00:37:33
And so yeah, they believe that this maybe really was the closest to a confession that they were going to get.
00:37:38
So seaside PD began working on trying to charge William and Charlotte with Mary's murder.
00:37:44
However, the DA felt like they didn't have enough to build a case against the rules, even though the investigators thought that they had plenty to use against them.
00:37:53
More than that, they still didn't have Mary's body, of course, and they couldn't prove what happened to her.
00:37:59
Then everything changed after a routine traffic stop in Phoenix, Arizona.
00:38:04
And a new twist would change this case forever.
00:38:07
And here's where things really start getting wild.
00:38:11
On November 25th, 2008, just seven months after police interviewed William and Charlotte, Phoenix police pulled over a pickup truck with stolen license plates.
00:38:21
After they ran IDs for the two passengers within, they immediately called Steve Sercone back in seaside.
00:38:27
One of the passengers had the name Mary Louie's Day.
00:38:30
And not only that, they had the exact birthday of the girl that they had been investigating for several years.
00:38:37
Steve immediately informed Sherry and Kathy that they had potentially found their sister.
00:38:42
And Sherry was quote, insanely happy.
00:38:45
And just imagine getting that call after all that time, I would, you would like pass out, be so shocking.
00:38:53
I wouldn't believe it.
00:38:54
Right, I'd be like, there's absolutely no way.
00:38:56
And it's like, I think, you know, she had the initial reaction of being insanely happy.
00:39:01
I'm sure there was shock issues too.
00:39:03
But like, you'd want to believe us, you know?
00:39:06
Right, however, that wasn't everything.
00:39:10
When Steve called Mary for the first time, he was surprised to hear that she had a thick Southern accent despite the fact that she nor anyone who she grew up with had lived in the South.
00:39:21
Her accent was so thick.
00:39:23
And speech experts actually determined that she would have had to have lived there in her formative years, at least until she was like nine or 10 to acquire an accent like that.
00:39:34
And on top of that, while she could remember that her parents were William and Charlotte, she couldn't remember the incident with Bubba Brown, the dog.
00:39:42
However, she did remember that she had left the house after being beaten by William.
00:39:47
And also, there was that inheritance that was left by her father Charles Day.
00:39:51
Mary had around $60,000 to collect, but she had forgotten about it and had even forgot the code word mohawk that she had created with Cathy for them to collect.
00:40:01
At this point, Cathy did not believe this woman was her sister.
00:40:05
'Cause on top of all that, while the birthday on her Arizona ID was Mary's birthday, she had used a different birthday entirely in other documents that she had signed.
00:40:14
But as far as the police were concerned, everything checked out on paper.
00:40:18
And Sherry was ecstatic to have her sister back.
00:40:20
She offered to have Mary come live with her in North Carolina and met her at the airport.
00:40:24
When Sherry saw her, she said, quote, "I was scared."
00:40:27
Mary had lived a hard life and appeared to shoveled when she first saw her.
00:40:31
While Mary lived with Sherry, seaside police kept in contact with her and they learned that she had worked odd jobs throughout the years getting paid under the table to avoid using her social security number.
00:40:41
And she used the name Monica DeVro after she had read it in a romance novel.
00:40:47
Still, the police couldn't shake that maybe this wasn't the Mary that they were looking for.
00:40:51
And they started referring to her as Phoenix Mary and questioned her about her life and accent.
00:40:56
They just simply couldn't believe that she would have resurfaced during this investigation after they had tried to find her for years.
00:41:04
Mary even started to get sick of them not believing her and said, quote, "Better off I was dead and you can just do the detecting from there."
00:41:11
Seeside police decided to do a DNA test.
00:41:13
And while her father Charles had been dead since the '70s, he had no way to collect his DNA, but Charlotte was still alive and they could test her DNA with Mary's.
00:41:21
The test came back conclusively that Mary was a daughter of Charlotte Hool.
00:41:25
Once again, the police felt like there was no other avenues despite their strong feelings that Mary Louie's day had been murdered.
00:41:32
There was a sight in her old backyard and when Kathy was asked if they used to wear the cell shoes that were dug up in the spot, she said quote, exactly that.
00:41:40
And there were other issues as well.
00:41:42
While living with her sister, Sherry said that Mary had two distinct personalities.
00:41:46
Sometimes she would see her sister downstairs with her hair and makeup done, dressed well, cheerful and smiling.
00:41:53
And on those days, she was Mary.
00:41:55
However, sometimes she quote, physically looked like a different person.
00:42:00
She was unkept, walked with a hunch and appeared very haggard and quote, looked at us like she was going to kill us.
00:42:08
And on those days, Sherry called her Monica.
00:42:11
Mary was also an alcoholic and Sherry started finding liquor bottles inside of her baby's dresser.
00:42:17
Very interesting place to stash them.
00:42:19
Due to this, she moved Mary into her own home in Fayetteville.
00:42:24
Sherry recounted one incident where Mary called and asked her to come over immediately.
00:42:28
And when she got there, Mary threw a beer bottle at her head completely unprovoked.
00:42:32
Mary was also showing strange signs towards the seaside police when she emailed them out of the blue, saying that she was lying to them about who she was.
00:42:41
And she would later write back and say she didn't know why she sent that email.
00:42:45
And when Steve Sercone became chief of police at seaside, he assigned Mark Clark to the case, who developed his own theory.
00:42:52
While she was certainly a daughter of Charlotte Hulme, as the DNA test proved, he believed that she could be one of the children that Charlotte had earlier in life and maybe kept hidden from the rest of the family,
00:43:04
like Sherry's older sister, Jeannie.
00:43:06
- A Sherry believed that Charlotte kept tabs on all of her children.
00:43:09
The police theorized that once the homicide investigation began, Charlotte reached out to this other daughter.
00:43:14
Since Phoenix Mary's driver's license was only issued three weeks before she was pulled over, Charlotte could have given her Mary's social security number and offered her inheritance money if she pretended to be Mary Louise Day.
00:43:26
On top of that, there is more evidence for the murder theory.
00:43:29
In 2008, seaside police were investigating an unrelated case with cadaver dogs at the now abandoned Fort Ord.
00:43:35
The dogs hit on one house, which just so happened to be the home of William Hul after they had left the house Mary disappeared from.
00:43:43
Could Mary's body have been moved from the first house to this other house before he hit it in the Bonville salt flats?
00:43:50
While this is certainly an interesting theory and would explain Mary's laps and memories in strange accent, there were other theories as well.
00:43:58
Since the abuse Mary suffered from William was so severe, like beating her head against a coffee table the night she disappeared, it's not unlikely that she could have developed a case of mild amnesia.
00:44:09
According to a study from 1999, it says quote, childhood abuse, particularly chronic abuse, beginning at early ages, is related to the development of high levels of dissociative symptoms,
00:44:19
including amnesia for abuse memories.
00:44:22
Is a possibility?
00:44:24
- Yeah.
00:44:24
- Certainly.
00:44:26
Certainly with everything that she goes through.
00:44:27
- Among others, yeah.
00:44:28
- Yeah, on top of that, Mary had also been in alcoholic since her teenage years.
00:44:34
And studies show that heavy, prolonged alcohol use can lead to gaps in memory.
00:44:38
Plus, both abuse and alcoholism could lead to psychological issues like dissociative identity disorder, which was previously known as multiple personality disorder.
00:44:48
And the development of multiple personalities.
00:44:51
Mary's strange accent and Monica's personality could be symptoms of that, rather than a secret identity.
00:44:58
This whole conversation of does she have this or not is interesting to me, and honestly, probably never know, but I could definitely see her having it.
00:45:07
It is relatively rare around like 1% of the population, which I think is somewhat in line with schizophrenia, if I remember correctly.
00:45:17
But anyways, another interesting piece here is that women are more likely to be diagnosed than men.
00:45:24
And also, typically the age is around like 30 years old to be diagnosed, but you can start showing symptoms before that, but a big piece of DID is trauma,
00:45:35
especially in childhood.
00:45:38
That salt abuse, physical, sexual, mental, is very, very common.
00:45:45
And also just having like a very disturbed childhood, you know, being thrown in different environments, which she was, you know, being neglected, which she was having a fucked up family dynamic,
00:45:57
which she was.
00:45:59
So, I don't know, could she have had it?
00:46:02
Yeah, she definitely could have.
00:46:03
I mean, that would explain, or like at least help explain the accents, yeah.
00:46:09
Yeah, it would make a lot of sense.
00:46:11
So, I wonder, I don't really know much about this, but is it involuntary?
00:46:18
The different personality, so the personality's just come and go just randomly, are they able to kind of move between the different personalities or just depends.
00:46:28
Do you know what I mean?
00:46:29
I thought you were, 'cause I was like the different, yeah.
00:46:32
I don't know the answer.
00:46:32
She has this, and she's, as far as we know, according to, you know, the interviews that police did, they only had experience with, let's just say this one personality that was the one that had this other accent that everybody was like,
00:46:47
this is kind of weird.
00:46:48
This is not how could she have obtained this accent?
00:46:51
And maybe she switched that off, you know, when she was at home.
00:46:56
I don't know.
00:46:57
I don't know if it works that way or if it's just kind of random.
00:47:01
I believe that that depends on the person and also there's points and times where one of them may be really prevalent for a while and then one of them hasn't come shown itself for a long period of time.
00:47:18
And then I think it kind of just depends on the person in the situation.
00:47:22
I'm, to be honest, I'm not super familiar with DID, but I think, I don't think it's like, oh, this situation,
00:47:32
I'm choosing to bring this, you know, person forward or this one.
00:47:36
I don't think it's like you can just decide and use it to your advantage.
00:47:40
I guess that's what you're asking.
00:47:42
- Yeah, I guess it's called switching.
00:47:44
- Yeah.
00:47:45
- And it looks like it can be triggered by stress-specific situations or even seemingly random factors.
00:47:50
- Yeah.
00:47:51
- So it just really depends.
00:47:51
- I think it just depends on the person.
00:47:52
But I don't think she, if she had this, was going in, you know, oh, in this specific, if I'm going to talk, if I'm being pulled over right now or whatever, I'm going to bring, I'm going to switch to this person because,
00:48:05
yeah, I don't think that's how it works.
00:48:08
Like, again, I'm not, to be honest, I guess I'm not super familiar with it.
00:48:12
- I think that would potentially explain the strange email, though, that she did send police, you know.
00:48:18
If it's brought on by stress, random factors, whatever it may be, suddenly she's like, I'm not, Mary, I'm not this woman, they think I am.
00:48:26
She sends it off and later, she's like, I don't know why I sent that.
00:48:29
- Yeah, because she's in that moment, genuinely in a different personality.
00:48:31
- Yeah, right.
00:48:32
- And these personalities are not just slight tweaks to your main personality, they're full on.
00:48:38
- They have like backstories and all different characteristics, different accents, different ages, or this person's personality is six years old when in reality, the person's 50 years old.
00:48:50
- Right.
00:48:51
- I think that's a lot of where the trauma comes in of, you're bringing forward completely different personalities based on different events that you experienced throughout your life.
00:49:07
- So you can have a younger personality based on a traumatic experience that happened around that age.
00:49:13
Interesting.
00:49:13
It's really fascinating.
00:49:15
- Yeah, it's very fascinating.
00:49:16
And yeah, I wish, I don't, I think it's also commonly like very misunderstood.
00:49:24
And I read that a lot of times, it's misdiagnosed as ADHD first.
00:49:31
- Really?
00:49:32
- Which why?
00:49:33
- I don't know.
00:49:35
- That makes no sense.
00:49:36
- I need to look into it more.
00:49:38
- But it does sound like this could explain the memory gaps.
00:49:43
- Yes.
00:49:44
- Yeah.
00:49:44
- Because it's possible.
00:49:46
- Yeah, true, true, you know.
00:49:48
- Trauma in general.
00:49:49
But it seems like it's possible the term is altars is what they call it for the different personalities.
00:49:57
But it's possible she was, if she experienced something with a different altar that if she then switches to another altar that she may not remember with that altar experienced.
00:50:12
- Right.
00:50:13
- At some other point in her life.
00:50:14
So it seems like it could be a plausible explanation for what happened and why she doesn't remember all these things.
00:50:25
But I don't, it's weird because there's things she does remember in certain places.
00:50:33
And she remembers getting odd jobs.
00:50:34
And then the fact that she did change her name to Monica DeVro, which happened to have the same initials.
00:50:43
Because there's like little tidbits of info that might lead someone to believe she was actively trying to avoid detection.
00:50:52
You know what I mean?
00:50:53
- I'm blind.
00:50:54
- And could, I don't know if somebody had the idea would they be able to switch between these altars and then also follow some type of plan,
00:51:05
which we'll get into this theory here in a minute that somebody lays, you know, like this is what you're gonna do if we're talking about this person being imposter, you know what I mean?
00:51:16
Versus the actual Mary Day.
00:51:18
I don't know, you know, so it's like, 'cause some of the things that if this is the real Mary Day with the ID, there's some of the things that she did are kind of weird to me that she would be able to do those things,
00:51:35
but not remember a few things.
00:51:36
I don't know.
00:51:37
- You can't consciously switch.
00:51:40
Like you don't have the decision to switch identities depending on, you know, the different scenarios and environment that you're in.
00:51:49
So that's why it's so weird to me to think, if she had this, I don't think she was using this to her advantage to like get away with, do you know what I'm saying?
00:52:00
- Yeah, I don't think so either.
00:52:01
- Or that her mom was having her use this to her advantage because they don't get to choose when they switched the identity.
00:52:10
So.
00:52:11
- I also think just the monica name and trying to avoid detection, regardless of if that could be an alter of hers, but it also just for purely practical reasons.
00:52:21
She doesn't know if her mother and William are still looking for her when she first comes away.
00:52:25
- Right, right, that's a good point.
00:52:27
- And she hates them and wants to stay away from them by all means.
00:52:30
So it also could be as simple as that, as simple as like, I just want to use different birthdays, different names to avoid any sort of detection while I'm on the run.
00:52:39
- Yeah, which makes total sense and is very valid.
00:52:43
Yeah, I'm curious to anyone out there who has experience with dissociative identity disorder, whether that's you who have it yourself or someone in your life kind of your take on it, 'cause I'm sure you guys would understand it better than we do.
00:52:55
- Yeah, definitely.
00:52:57
- The human brain is just so complex, mysterious and interesting, so much we still don't know.
00:53:04
And still, none of these theories could be proved and without hard evidence proving Phoenix Mary to be an imposter, seaside police couldn't continue their investigation.
00:53:14
There would be no new developments in Mary's case for years.
00:53:18
And then in 2017, new seaside chief of police, Judy Velaz, received a call from one of Mary's younger siblings.
00:53:26
Mary was dying of cancer in hospice and wanted to be believed.
00:53:31
After trying to overdose on Tylenol multiple times and continuing to be violent around Sherry's family, Mary moved back to Arizona and actually married a man who his name is actually not been public,
00:53:43
but Mary and this man moved to Warsaw, Missouri where he was abusive to her according to police reports.
00:53:50
And it's unclear if they were still living together while she was dying.
00:53:54
Judy, who had never been assigned to Mary's case before, looked at all the evidence with fresh eyes.
00:54:00
- First thing she did was look at the shoe that had been dug up in the backyard.
00:54:03
And Judy said that the shoe, quote, fit in the palm of my hand and was much too small to belong to Mary when she disappeared at age 13.
00:54:12
She also could not find any records indicating that Charlotte had any additional children.
00:54:16
And the timing of her acquiring the license was also not very suspicious.
00:54:21
As it turned out, that Mary needed to get this ID in order to qualify for critical gallbladder surgery she needed done and a local nonprofit had helped her require her original birth certificate.
00:54:31
Judy also tracked down a woman named Mori Ward, who had taken care of Mary when she was 15.
00:54:36
A family friend took Mary to the home and she lived with Mori and her children for a year.
00:54:41
And when Mary left, Mori was, quote, "heartbroken."
00:54:44
An old boyfriend of Mori's even had a photo of Mary from 1983, so two years after her disappearance.
00:54:51
And for 48 hours documentary into Mary's case, this photo was tested against old photos of Mary before she disappeared using technology and these photos match, confirming that they were the same person with 99% accuracy.
00:55:05
Finally, Judy felt that the only thing left to do is go to Missouri and speak to Mary herself.
00:55:11
And she did.
00:55:12
Judy said that Mary, quote, "just seemed like a survivor."
00:55:16
Judy said she just wanted to be believed, and quote, "it's very frustrating to prove who you are when there is no proof."
00:55:22
Nine days after Judy went interviewed Mary, Mary Louise Day died.
00:55:28
And there was no funeral, which is very sad.
00:55:31
- That's horrible.
00:55:32
So there were two documentaries at this point in time that had been done on this case.
00:55:37
And while Sherry believed that Mary was her missing sister at the end of the 2017 48 hours documentary, she now has her doubts.
00:55:46
For one, the documentary claimed that Mary's DNA was also tested against her father's DNA, even though he had no other children and there's no other record of his body being exhumed.
00:55:57
And then there's a new documentary, actually in this newer series.
00:56:01
It's on HBO Max, is it produced by-- - Produced by Discovery ID.
00:56:07
And it's called The Curious Case of.
00:56:09
It's like a spin-off of this larger investigative series.
00:56:13
- Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
00:56:15
I actually really enjoyed their episode on this.
00:56:18
But in that new documentary on this case, the series did not make this claim.
00:56:24
Charlotte and William are still alive.
00:56:26
And at the end of this new documentary, Sherry confronts her mom in a nursing home about what happened to Mary and she denied everything.
00:56:33
And oh my God, that scene is just heartbreaking.
00:56:37
I mean, my heart truly goes out to Sherry.
00:56:40
It was just devastating watching her.
00:56:43
I mean, they didn't film inside in the nursing home in the interaction, but they filmed her coming out and just standing in the parking lot.
00:56:48
And you can just see the pain that she's going through.
00:56:50
It's just horrific.
00:56:52
Kathy, Mark Clark, and Steve Sarkone believe Phoenix Mary was an imposter.
00:56:58
However, Judy believes she was the real Mary, Louis Day.
00:57:01
And thinks everyone else is just too attached to the murder theory.
00:57:05
Still, it's more than likely that there were bodies buried at both of William's properties in California.
00:57:11
Without evidence or further testing and investigation, we may never know who they truly were or what happened to Mary, Louis Day.
00:57:20
So I hate to leave you guys with that conclusion, but truly, there really are no answers at the end of the day, even though there is compelling evidence for both potential outcomes here.
00:57:33
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some evidence in circumstantial evidence.
00:57:36
Yeah, I guess it's more substantial on the homicide side.
00:57:38
'Cause there's no evidence pointing to Mary Day being murdered.
00:57:44
Right.
00:57:45
'Cause there's no physical evidence.
00:57:46
Yeah, I mean more circumstantial evidence.
00:57:48
But it is strange that human remains were detected in two locations where William lived.
00:57:54
By four dogs.
00:57:56
And so.
00:57:57
And then they just happened to dig up that area and there's a child shoe there.
00:58:02
Yeah, which seems like if there's no way it would have been Mary's shoe, but it's like who shoe was it?
00:58:09
Well, it could have been Mary's shoe.
00:58:10
Well, she was 13 at the time she disappeared.
00:58:12
And this was a tiny little like...
00:58:13
True, but it could have been from when she was younger.
00:58:15
But then who was it?
00:58:17
Yeah.
00:58:18
God, this drives me nuts.
00:58:19
And then, of course, the whole recollection about the carpet being buried.
00:58:25
And I mean, that may not have actually happened, but what the fuck was that?
00:58:29
Well, 'cause so much of this comes back to Kathy and what Kathy has said happened.
00:58:34
But again, we're hearing these things 20 years later.
00:58:40
So how reliable is that those events that she's recalling?
00:58:45
But we do know for a fact that William admitted that this demon came over him and the demon would have killed her.
00:58:55
And I mean, that's, I think, pretty compelling.
00:58:57
And then not to mention that we know the way that they acted about their missed, their runaway child.
00:59:04
Who acts like that?
00:59:06
Who burns their photos and all their clothes and tells the rest of the family you cannot speak about her again and tells the kids, which I guess that part we don't know for sure happened about not being able to play on a certain side of the yard.
00:59:19
But all of that just so crazy to me, like it feels it has to be homicide.
00:59:25
But I guess there really are evil people out there, horrible parents that wouldn't care if their child ran away.
00:59:30
But would she really have not collected on anything and not remember, but then you bring in all her trauma and the potential, the ID.
00:59:39
And the alcoholism is, I think, a big part from a young, young age.
00:59:44
I think there's a possibility, William, a bad and evil human.
00:59:51
- I think that's, yeah, I would just say that's possible.
00:59:54
He's involved in other things unrelated to Mary that he's trying, they've tried to sort of set all this up so that to protect themselves from other things that happened or cover up other things that went on.
01:00:09
- There was a different body buried in that.
01:00:10
- Right, it's possible that, yeah, I mean, it's possible he murdered somebody else and-- - Maybe Kathy's whole story about the carbon, everything is true, but it wasn't Mary.
01:00:19
- Right, right, could have been something else entirely or that just never happened.
01:00:24
And that's just a, you know, somebody misremembering something that happened 20 years ago.
01:00:32
- 'Cause when you look at the DNA at element of things, I mean, that's pretty conclusive.
01:00:37
But the potential is just another child that, you know, Charlotte had that was hidden from the family that aligns with her personality in her past behaviors.
01:00:47
So that really could be a possibility.
01:00:50
- Well, it's just sad that it seems like the system failed.
01:00:53
Mary, it failed this entire family, failed Kathy.
01:00:57
- But the parents above all else.
01:00:58
- Yeah, and the military failed.
01:01:00
I think the military bear some responsibility here for not investigating 'cause I think this really comes back to, we'd probably have more answers if not the entire truth had this been investigated in 1981,
01:01:12
or even a few years after it's a complete shame that this one undetected for 20, or 10 years or whatever it took for Sherry to finally come and report her missing in '92.
01:01:25
And by that time, you've got a lot of ground to cover to figure out what happened.
01:01:33
And not only that, these people are moving around they're doing this and that.
01:01:36
And who knows what type of evidence could be disposed of or buried.
01:01:42
So it's just difficult 'cause I think none of this should have happened in the first place, but it should have been investigated far earlier and we probably would be sitting here with more answers than we have if it had been done.
01:01:57
- Those kids should have never left the care of the Waltz family.
01:02:01
- So it's like what system failed here?
01:02:04
And they kept them out of school and so there's protections in place to stop things like this from happening.
01:02:11
And just none of that ever happened.
01:02:14
And I think it was because William was in the military, they're living on military bases and so they're kind of isolated from the civilian world somewhat.
01:02:23
And who was what context of William have with in the military?
01:02:28
Who is he involved with?
01:02:29
Did he have like ins with military police officers who covered some of this up?
01:02:34
And I mean, this case just reeks of conspiracy to me that there was some conspiracy here to cover up,
01:02:44
whether it be a murder is one thing, but just abuse and sexual crimes against children is another thing.
01:02:51
And both are horrible and should have been prosecuted should have been investigated and just weren't.
01:02:59
So it's very difficult to figure out what happened because there's just not enough here to go off of other than somebody's memory, right?
01:03:09
And memory is a tough thing.
01:03:11
- Yeah.
01:03:12
- It's tough to remember things a year ago, let alone 20 years ago.
01:03:17
- Just so much time has passed now that, yeah, I really don't think we'll ever have an answer.
01:03:22
- I think I hate that for.
01:03:24
- Yeah, and when kind of looking at the general consensus among people who have learned about this case is that they believe that this was Mary Day,
01:03:35
this was the real Mary Day, who surfaced in Phoenix because I think when you look at her circumstances, I think it makes sense in a lot of ways.
01:03:47
Is there some things that are weird and don't fully add up?
01:03:51
Yeah, but I think there's enough to, you know, kind of come to somewhat of a conclusion that this is likely her.
01:03:58
And like, it's, I think-- - You think so?
01:04:00
- I think so because I think the other parts of it are, again, doesn't fully explain the parents' actions.
01:04:07
I think their actions were extreme in any case, but if these kids are being severely beaten and sexually abused, I think they would have a reason to try and make them disappear, to try to avoid investigation and avoid,
01:04:20
'cause they know they're in trouble no matter what.
01:04:22
They're committing crimes no matter what, whether it went as far as a murder occurring is another thing.
01:04:29
But I think they have enough motive to cover up her existence because of what happened.
01:04:36
I mean, if Williams slamming her head against a coffee table to the point that she's, you know, in serious need of help, unconscious, she's got brain damage,
01:04:47
she's got blood coming out of her mouth.
01:04:49
I mean, that's really-- He's going away a long time for that type of crime, whether she survives or not.
01:04:55
So I think there's enough motive for them to cover it up.
01:04:57
And I think William and Charlotte just shitty people and just evil people that don't, that never cared about their kids, didn't want to be parents.
01:05:06
Charlotte wanted to run around and sleep with whoever, she never, being a parent was never something she wanted to be associated with.
01:05:14
It just happened as a result of her actions.
01:05:16
And so she's just trying to deal with it the best way she felt like she could, and that was just get rid of them, make it so bad so they leave and leave my presence so I don't have to worry about them.
01:05:28
And I can just continue being shitty old me.
01:05:32
And I think that's what she did.
01:05:34
And because I'm like, if you talk about the imposter theory, I just, I don't know I want to give Charlotte and William that much credit that they would somehow like concoct this conspiracy with a hidden daughter who hasn't zero motive to keep this up for so many years.
01:05:52
And another thing that has stood out to me throughout all of this is it would be a different situation if she had come to them and been like, I am Mary Day.
01:06:01
Here I am after all this time.
01:06:03
That would make me question it even more.
01:06:05
But the fact that she just was happened to be pulled over and they they run her name and her birth date and make that connection makes it even more hard to believe that this was some type of concocted plan.
01:06:16
Yeah.
01:06:17
And as we've seen in other imposter cases, authorities are pretty good at figuring out if they're an imposter, you know, in most cases, they're able to like dig into it enough to figure it out.
01:06:27
And this was one of those cases where they had a very difficult time coming to a conclusion.
01:06:34
But either way, even if you land on Mary, Phoenix Mary, being the real Mary Day, it leaves you still with so many unanswered questions about everything else.
01:06:45
It's just, oh, it's so frustrating.
01:06:47
And God, I just don't know what to think.
01:06:50
I guess, I guess I'm probably like 90% believe that Phoenix Mary is Mary Day.
01:07:00
There's still that part of me that's like, there's so much weirdness.
01:07:03
But we've seen weirder things.
01:07:05
Yeah.
01:07:06
Yeah.
01:07:06
Look at our man who's found outside of a burger king didn't know his identity.
01:07:11
You know, like stuff like this does happen, is it rare?
01:07:14
Yes, but it does happen.
01:07:16
And the DNA is just so strong.
01:07:17
Yeah, if the DNA wasn't there, I would be more suspicious.
01:07:23
But because it's clearly one of her daughters and all the other circumstances combined, I just, it's hard to deny that.
01:07:32
I just don't think there's enough concrete evidence for imposter theory or murder theory to really lean that way.
01:07:40
And just wish so badly.
01:07:42
There was a conclusive answer for the rest of the kids, you know, as it was heartbreaking seeing Sherry and Kathy, just you can just tell the told it,
01:07:52
all of this has taken on them and then everything that they have been through in their lives.
01:07:56
And then Mary, whether she's Phoenix Mary or Mary Day herself, it's just, she's lived such a tragic life clearly and had such a horrible end.
01:08:04
And clearly has been through unbelievable traumas.
01:08:07
It's just so fucked up.
01:08:09
Yeah, and what pisses me off is that there's no justice or accountability for fucking Charlotte and William.
01:08:16
Yep.
01:08:17
When they should be held responsible for this.
01:08:20
And I wish they, I wish ever.
01:08:22
And again, because of the time that's passed and the lack of evidence, they're not, they, you know, police really tried hard to get the DA to, you know, go after them,
01:08:32
but they're like, there's just not enough evidence to point to a crime being committed to all sort of hearsay.
01:08:38
But that's the real crime at the end of the day is that you have two people who committed crimes that have not been held responsible.
01:08:46
And Charlotte, especially her, you know, put her kids through hell.
01:08:51
Yep.
01:08:52
And what does she have to say for herself?
01:08:54
These poor kids and you can ask to come into the world.
01:08:57
And here they are having to deal with these two and other parents as well.
01:09:02
Other fathers, I should say.
01:09:04
I just don't feel like Charlotte is, Charlotte and William were smart enough to like pull off a grain conspiracy and hide a body and all these other things.
01:09:12
Just the actions of what we hear from the time.
01:09:14
It's just so hard.
01:09:15
I don't know.
01:09:16
I don't know.
01:09:17
It's wild.
01:09:18
This one like really blew my mind.
01:09:20
Definitely want to hear from all of you.
01:09:21
Oh, and I want to hear from you too as well.
01:09:24
Do you have any final thoughts or a percentage where you lie or anything like that?
01:09:29
I'm pretty convinced this was her.
01:09:31
Like the DNA is what really sells them.
01:09:36
I think it's probably, I mean, I don't know, 98% I guess.
01:09:39
Yeah, pretty confident.
01:09:41
Yeah.
01:09:43
I'm about there as well.
01:09:44
I think I understand why the siblings are more or less unsure, though, because for them, like the Mary that they know was a 13 year old girl,
01:09:56
not this woman in her 30s who's dealing with severe psychological issues.
01:10:01
Right, so much time had passed.
01:10:03
Right.
01:10:03
And so for them, like, yeah, Mary did die, you know?
01:10:07
And so I think it's just, I mean, it would be difficult for me to try to reconcile that.
01:10:12
Yeah.
01:10:13
Yeah, I don't blame them for thinking that at all.
01:10:15
No, no, no one bit.
01:10:16
But I do think like Phoenix Mary was Mary Day.
01:10:20
Yeah.
01:10:21
Agreed.
01:10:22
Well, let us know what you all think.
01:10:25
I wish there could be answers.
01:10:28
I don't think there ever will be in siblings.
01:10:29
Sadly, I know.
01:10:31
But yeah, that's where we're going to leave it today.
01:10:34
As always, we'll see you guys next week with another one.
01:10:37
Till then.
01:10:38
Keep on taking your mind and mind to my all-hour.
01:10:40
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