What Ever Happened to Mary Day?

- Early we's day was a girl that lived in C-Side. And about 1981, she disappeared. - What do you mean she disappeared? - She disappeared off the face of the Earth. (dramatic music)

- I just knew something was wrong in the house. Mary Gage, my sister. One day Mary wasn't California, and then she was gone. - Being about one night with Kathy and I asked her,

“you know, I was like, what happened with Mary, you know?”

And she was like, "Don't say anything. We're not allowed to talk about Mary." (upbeat music) When I was 18, and I was like, "I can, you know, "go and try to find her."

(upbeat music) - It's a very hard case to deal with. Other than the family, nobody knew she was gone. Didn't seem to really concern them. - She started running away.

He turned around, she was gone. He turned around, she was gone.

- I've never seen a case like this.

- My mother told me that there were a lot of places in California that you could bury a body and they'd never be found. I started believing she was murdered. (upbeat music)

- The dogs went into the backyard.

“We just had an indication from the cadaver dogs”

that was for human remains there. And our guys started digging, and my heart was pounding. We were looking for a little girl's body, and we found a little girl's shoe. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) - William told me that he didn't kill Mary Day, but his wife told him that he was possessed that night, in that he had a demon inside of him.

- I've never heard anybody say that before.

(gentle music) (grunting) - This is a crazy case. Mary disappeared, no trace of her for 22 years. - And then what happens?

- And then I got a phone call. He told me, hey, Captain, he says you sit and down. He said, you gotta let you know that they say that they found Mary Day, and I'm like, oh. (laughing)

This case just gets weirder and weirder. (dramatic music) - Seaside California detective, Joburtina,

first heard the name Mary Louise Day,

back in 2002. He'd been asked to lead the investigation into her disappearance. - The case was a tunnel of weeds that went all different directions.

Mary was 13 years old when she vanished in 1981, seemingly without a trace. - There was no evidence that she was alive. - Joe's boss at the time was Steve Cercone. - Not a trace of her as an adult.

No social security record of her having a job getting welfare benefits. We have nothing on this person's identity. - She didn't exist. - She didn't exist.

(gentle music) - Mary's existence came close to being completely erased. There's no record that her stepfather William Hool or her mother Charlotte had ever reported her missing. - It's hard to believe allowing a child to walk away

or a child go missing, and it's not reported.

“- I can't remember a time when a child was not reported”

by the parents. (dramatic music) - I couldn't understand how a mother could not go to the end of the earth to find her child.

who finally got authorities on the case.

“I wanted to know what happened to my sister, Mary.”

- Sherry was 10 when Mary would missing. As an adult, she filed a missing persons report and told the police about Mary's troubled childhood. - The information we have through the sisters is that it was a very dysfunctional household.

- In the early days, Mary Day, middle sister Kathy and Sherry were in and out of a foster home. Their mother could not take care of them. Sherry was adopted by the foster family. - We were separated when I was six years old.

- Mary and Kathy were returned to their mother's Charlotte.

By this time, Charlotte had married William Hool,

and the couple had two kids of their own. Hool was his soldier.

“The family moved around a lot from base to base.”

At one point, Detective say Mary's stepfather had been reportedly physically abusing her. - Children's protective services had taken custody of Mary. She was eventually turned back over to the family in my opinion, the system failed.

- At the time, Mary disappeared. Hool was assigned to Fort Ord, on the California coast north of Monterey. - They were living in seaside, which was kind of a military town at that time.

And that's where she was last seen. - Sherry, who kept in touch with her birth family, later visited them. - When I went to visit my family, I asked them what had happened to my sister, Mary.

Kathy was like, "Sh, don't say anything. "We're not allowed to talk about Mary." But Kathy did say her mother's Charlotte told them, Mary had run away. At the time, I wasn't sure what I thought,

except that it didn't make sense to me. - When Sherry grew up, she filed that missing persons report. By the time seaside police launched its investigation in 2002, there was little to go on. - The neighbors barely recalled the family living there.

Nobody really knew this family, and they sure didn't know Mary day.

- Mary had never been enrolled in school in California,

and her parents never told anyone she was gone. Mertina says they had at least one reason to keep quiet. Mary had been getting government checks because her birth father had died in an accident. - They were taking Mary's social security checks

and cashing up. - It's take to over time now, but it's March 3, 2003. Broad camera. - Vertina went to the seaside home. Mary's last known whereabouts.

He brought Kathy with him.

“- That's what she said to me there about a bunch of people.”

- Kathy was just 11 when she last saw her sister. That day lives in my head a lot. It feels like you're opening up a scavenger opening up in it, it hurts. - Mary was at home, along with Kathy,

when the rest of family went out. They came home later that evening, and while they were gone, the dog became sick. It was dying in the kitchen area. When William saw that, he immediately accused Mary

of poisoning the dog. - He's our young medicine, I got scared. I'll help real quick. - This is the corner where he was heading out. - And the fight was back here.

- I can hear it yelling. There's nothing we can do. - He hit her. - Last time I saw a shed, the blood coming out of mouth.

- Kathy said, after Mary disappeared,

from one particular area of the backyard.

- That's what's called as part. - You were supposed to come over here. - We told you that. - My father. - The clothes were adding up.

“And detectives felt they could be dealing”

with something much more sinister than a runaway teenage girl. - They brought in a team of cadaver dogs. Dogs trained to find human remains. - As the dogs went into the backyard,

they each hit on one particular spot near a tree. We started to dig. As a father, my heart was pounding. And as we dug, I saw, a little girl's shoe.

My heart started pounding even more.

And I thought, here we are, we found her. - In 2003, the missing person's case of Mary Day was quickly becoming a homicide investigation with police facing the grim task of digging in the dirt with a cadaver dog's alerted.

- And we kept digging. And there was no body.

“I saw a little must be here and they kept digging.”

- They were sure that a body had been there. - They were positive. They said, our dogs don't lie. And for them independently, hitting on the same spot before we dug.

The dog handler said, it's been moved. At this time, there was no question that parents were the suspects in the possible homicide of a little girl from 1981. We knew that we had to find the parents.

- They found them in Kansas. It was more than 20 years after Mary disappeared. Her stepfather William Hool had left the army and was now at a Kansas prison working as a corrections officer.

He and Charlotte were still together. She agreed to talk with local detectives about the daughter who vanished so long ago. - They don't have hopes to change today. - The last little we lost.

(laughing) - I remember watching the interview and realizing that she had something to tell us. - You know, life is full of regret too. If you go back and say, you know if I had been dissonous.

- Her body language and then her sinking down on her chair and saying, where's the effect of, you know, sometimes you do things in your past and then it comes back.

I knew that there was something there. - What's left of her's Mary? - Eight months. - Last time she ran away. - Charlotte said Mary running away was no big deal.

She did it all the time. - Oh, a lot of the mess. It was like trying to get up. Not crawling around a wormhole just grabbing it and it was gone, grabbing it just nothing.

All right. How many times did she run away? You know, all these questions I can't answer. - Okay. When you was, I can't afford it.

“Did you have to take care of yourself to find her?”

- We shouldn't have. We shouldn't have. - It's you. - My husband said we found a place report with a slain of police department.

If we did, I don't remember my brother. - There is no record of a report. - I couldn't understand a parent. Number one, not reporting their child is run away. But number two, treating this case.

They status of their missing daughter as basically no big deal.

It didn't seem to really concern them. They were not really, really surprised at us being there. - Detective Brutina later questioned Mary's stepfather William. - I just asked him, tell me about the last time that you saw Mary.

He told me that while he was going room to room, checkin' eyes on the kids and he discovered Mary wasn't in there. - bedroom. He told Charlotte, she panics. He panics, call the police.

And he knew I wasn't buying that. I said, William, she runs away all the time.

I never got a good response.

“- The detective pressed whole and brought up the story”

of the sick dog. - And he said five or six times, you know, she did, she poisoned my dog. And I was really angry. She tried to run out of the house.

I didn't want her to go, so I caught her to be pushed out of the front door. She was kicking me, punching me, so I pushed her. And when he's doing this, he's making a choking. Just with his hand and it's like a hand strike

that I've seen before. It's a martial art technique.

So I asked him, where did you hit her with that?

And he said, well, in the upper chest. I said, could it have been the throat? He said, well, it may have slipped off and hit her, hit Mary in the throat. I wanted to know on a scale of 110 is anger.

When he had done this, when he had struck Mary. He said, on a scale of 110, I was a 15.

“I said, this angry, I think you may have killed her.”

And he looked at me and said, no, I didn't kill her. But the next day, my wife Charlotte told me that that night, she saw Satan in my eyes. And she said, I was possessed by a demon. And then it dawned on me, that he's admitting

but not admitting that he killed her. But I said, okay, William, I believe you. You didn't kill her, but what about that demon inside of you? Could that demon have killed Mary? He looked at me and said, yes, the demon could have killed her.

- When he walked out, did you think you were letting a killer go? - Yeah, yeah. Joe said, yeah, we don't have a body, but he said, this guy came so close to confessing that it was his closest. He's ever had anybody come.

- Is that enough to go to a prosecutor and say, I don't know if we're ever going to get the body, but we have a lot of the pieces of the puzzle? - Yeah, the DA wasn't ready to file at that time. - Did 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 detectives confidence was growing, the case took an unexpected turn. Remember, police said, 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 and Phoenix, Arizona, made a traffic stop. - I got a phone call, I wasn't home, I left work. He told me, hey, Captain, he says, you sit and down,

and he said, what happened? He said, no, he says it's just going to let you know that Phoenix Police Department and Arizona pulled over a car and they say that they found Mary Day. - Hey, it's Jen Hatmaker.

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- November 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 hit put Mary Day into a missing person's database, long ago. - She identified herself with a Phoenix identification card. Or Arizona, the 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. And then seven months later or so, a woman named Mary Louise Day just falls out of the sky. - I was stunned.

- His boss, Steve Circone, could not believe it. Joe went down there and he met her, and he sent a picture of her.

No, all right, it looked like it could be her. And I said, "When will all these other bits of circumstantial evidence?" - The father 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. - We must have found the timing, awfully suspicious. - Yes, it was very suspicious. - When Detective Bertina went to Phoenix, the woman he was sure had been murdered told him she had run away from her mother's 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 really talk about what happened that last night?”

- Hey, work. - I'm sure it does, but what happened that last night? - I feel completely fine, I don't know what's real or not. - But she didn't remember anything about the sick dog. - Was that troublesome, too?

- That was, yeah. - Investigators say he was hard to pin down much of anything about her past two decades. - Well, I don't know what happened. - Yeah, I know what happened.

- I don't know what happened, I don't know what happened.

- I don't know what happened, I don't know what happened.

- I don't know what happened. - And out 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 Dad.

- You called her Phoenix Mary. - In phone conversations, Phoenix Mary was sounding increasingly frustrated. - And I know one question, if you don't mind. - Go ahead, Mary.

- If you would have found my body,

“how would you come to have the truth in the L.I. words?”

- Me and A. - Also, it's been tough to go out the L.I. 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.

- No, there you are, so I'm just dead and then you all can get it detenthing come out. - 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 Mary, of course,

because there's no ways that her DNA is going to match. - Except, it did match. - I really fell in the floor, I couldn't believe it. The DNA came back positive to being a daughter of Charlotte. - The case was closed.

Sherry invited her long-law 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 interesting. - I like to have Mary. - What do you want? - I don't know if I've ever quite heard

that particular manner of speaking. - Hang on, it's gonna kind of feel good, I am girl. - Yes, ma'am, we are.

- Phoenix Mary also said she never used her real name.

- Take nothing, now is me and Mary. I take that name up to you to get up. - What name would they know you'd buy? - Mine could never have. - It's a name she said she made up.

- I didn't notice that she had. - The magazines in the name of Monica Defero. - Sherry's sister Kathy was also unnerved. - No, that's the 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”

and inheritance they could collect at age 18. - It was their shared escape land 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, yeah. - And Mary did something else strange. She wrote a note to Detective Bertina.

of, "I've been lying to you about who I am." And that was new information.

“Oh my God, I said, "Oh, this is a whole new ballgame."”

- Still, the case remained closed. But then, in 2008, Steve Cercone, now C-Sides Police Chief, got a phone call from investigators at the Army Base in Fortaward. Another set of cadaver dogs had been working

on an unrelated matter and had found something. - Fortaward 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 Hool and his family lived in this house." (soft music) In 2008, cadaver dogs alerted near a second home where the ghouls 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. (soft music) - 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,

Cercone 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. - Absolutely, 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 through her clothes.

And that was it. - Most damning he says are Williams' own words. - His comment was, "I couldn't have killed Mary." By body would have done it, but it wouldn't have been me

who would have been that demonic personality 'cause I blocked out. - Clark says he would have arrested William Hool. - You just admitted, tantamount to a homicide and we're lucky you go.

- Clark also focused on that shoe detective's found. Another detective asked Kathy about it.

- Like first ask, you guys ever were canvas tennis shoes

and got them said kids? And she said yes, and it 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. He says they found soil samples consistent

with a body being buried. - What do you think happened to Mary with that? - 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 the thing it's Mary Day being somebody else. - But what about that DNA test showing she's Charlotte Hull'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 Hull 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? - Yes. - He looked into Charlotte's background. - There's some circumstantial evidence

that Charlotte had a couple of marriages where she would be involved in the extramarital affairs and become pregnant from those affairs. - Clark says the ghouls 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.

the ghouls knew that police were investigating Mary's disappearance

and they asked her secret sister to assume her identity.

“- Sir Contes, the ghouls are aware with all to do it.”

- What 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 the crude interest, that inheritance was now worth roughly $60,000. Sherry helped Mary get her cut. - We reached out to William and Charlotte Hall through a relative, they said they had no comment.

Mark 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. He's pronounced southern accent. - I don't know where a place is, if you don't mind. - Go ahead Mary. - If you were to find my body,

“how would you can be able to prove you to 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. - And 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. - There are about 130 of us.

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They are simply the main thing. Our whole story is about Shopify. It starts now at a cost-in-losen test of Shopify.com. In 2017, Sherry Calgaro still wanted answers about the woman claiming to be her sister.

- Basically everyone that's ever met her.

Has allowed it outside of my own doubts. We took Sherry to visit Phoenix Mary in Missouri, where she has been living for a few years. - I'm hoping that she will admit she will confess to us. Who she really is.

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

As Mary's help was failing, the new acting chief of C-Cyphalise was determined to solve the case once and for all. Judy the law's 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. At 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 law's 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. Mary said she began calling herself Monica

when she ran away because she didn't want police

Mary also mentioned a new name.

“Mori, a woman she knew in those early days”

on her own in California. The law's track down Mori Kimmel. - I got her when she was 15. Very naive in a sense about her. I was like childlike.

At the time, Mori had two young daughters of her own. - She just won my heart and my girls loved her. - You know that may have been the only and the best family life she ever had in her. - I'm realizing that now.

I wanted to nurture her, I know. - But after about a year, one day, Mary was gone. - I was heartbroken. - The law's 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 non-profit had helped Mary track down her real birth certificate.

The laws chopped up Mary's foggy memory to trauma and a lifelong battle with alcohol. - Those gaps in memory. To me, it can be legitimate, especially if someone's even an alcoholic from the time.

They've been a teenager. - As for that email, Mary sent to detect of her tino, saying she'd been lying about who she was. The law says 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 was still a severe alcoholic in using, and then the law's came up with the smoking gun.

“What if Mary'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 this is the same person. - Correct.

It's a probability that's the same person. - The top photo is Mary before she disappeared. The other photo is the one that Judy Velaz dug up. - What are the numbers telling? - And the numbers are telling us that is the same person.

- He says that's a 99% probability. With that photo, Judy Velaz submitted her report and closed the Mary Day investigation. This time, for good. After all these years,

the woman at the center of this case

finally agreed to meet with me.

This is the Mary that I met. Fragil, 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. - Sherry is finally at peace. - It was all the sudden that felt like I had a weight lift off my shoulders.

It was just like, it's done. This is hurt. 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 who all murdered Mary Louise Day?

- Based on evidence, I would found yes. - As for Steve's or cone? - 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. Those cadaver dogs were on to something.

- Positive.

They said, our dogs don't lie.

They don't lie.

Who was buried in those grave sites?

- Mary Day died nine days after

“C.S. police detective Judy Veloss, interview her.”

(upbeat music)