In 1981, Mary Day disappeared from her parents’ home in Pennsylvania. It was assumed that she ran away. But over the years, her sisters began to suspect that she might have died at the hands of a family member. Then, just as an investigation got underway to prove she was murdered, she reappeared in Phoenix, Arizona. But was this the real Mary Day, or someone claiming to be her?
TRANSCRIPT:
It was November 2003, and a cop in Phoenix, Arizona, was just sitting in his cruiser, waiting for drivers to speed by.
That’s when a pickup truck pulled out a little too quickly. The cop decided to follow it and ran its plates. Turned out that those plates were stolen.
He pulled the truck over and asked for everyone’s identification. Besides stolen plates, nothing out of the ordinary. Just a routine traffic stop.
That is, until he ran the I.D. for one of the passengers. Her name was Mary Day, and she had been dead for twenty-two years.
Mary Louise Day was born in February 1968 in Little Falls, New York, to Charles and Charlotte Day.
Her mom had been married multiple times and had three girls: Mary, Kathy, and Sherrie. Mary was the oldest.
All three girls had a rough childhood. They were in and out of foster homes since Charlotte wasn’t able to properly take care of them.
Eventually, Charlotte and Charles divorced. She then married William Houle, who was in the Army. Mary and Kathy went to live with them, but Sherrie stayed at her foster care home.
In 1978, Mary and Kathy’s father, Charles, died, leaving them an inheritance they could collect when they turned eighteen.
By spring 1981, Mary, Kathy, Charlotte, and William were living in Seaside, California. Sherrie was living with her adopted family in New York.
According to Charlotte, Mary would run away a lot, and the cops would always bring her back.
William had a dog he loved that lived with the family in California. One night, he and Charlotte went out, leaving the girls alone with the dog.
When they got back home, the dog was extremely sick, throwing up and foaming at the mouth. William immediately accused Mary of poisoning the dog and started to beat her.
Kathy watched from the hallway. According to her, he beat Mary so badly that she was bleeding from her mouth. Eventually, William ordered Kathy to go to her room.
Kathy went looking for her sister the next day, but Charlotte told her that Mary had run away again. She was twelve years old.
But this time, her disappearance wasn’t reported to the police. In fact, Kathy was told not to play in a certain part of the backyard anymore.
Charlotte even made an offhand comment about Mary, saying, “If she’s dead, she’s dead.”
During all this time, Sherrie had stayed in touch with her sisters. She heard about Mary running away, but her not coming back home… that was weird.
The whole way Charlotte and William treated the situation was weird, too. It’s like they just wrote Mary off, and that didn’t sit right with Sherrie.
So, she started looking into it. She suspected that William had murdered Mary.
In 1992, she reported Mary missing to the Fort Ord Military Base Police. Fort Ord was where William and the family were stationed.
The base closed down a couple of years later, and all the cold case files were transferred to the Seaside police.
By 1999, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had created an age progression of Mary Day.
And then in 2002, the Seaside police started to look for her, twenty-one years after she went missing.
Police Detective Joe Bertaina led the investigation. He had Kathy take him to the Houles’ home in Seaside, and she showed him the corner of the backyard where she wasn’t allowed to play.
The police brought in cadaver dogs on four different occasions. Every dog alerted the police to the specific corner that Kathy pointed out.
After digging in the ground, they found traces that a body had been there and a little girl’s shoe. But, no body.
That’s when the police brought in Charlotte and William for an interview. It no longer seemed like a missing person case. It was starting to look like a murder investigation.
When Charlotte was interviewed, her body language showed that something was troubling her. She talked about how life is full of regrets and how sometimes you do things in your past that come back to haunt you.
She said that William had filed a police report when Mary went missing in 1981, but there was no record of the report. During the whole interview, she kept acting like Mary’s disappearance was no big deal.]
They brought William in next. He told police he would’ve never hurt Mary. But, if a demon possessed him, then maybe he could have. In fact, he said that Charlotte had told him that he looked like he had Satan in his eyes when he was beating Mary.
Detective Bertaina believed that William was admitting that he killed her. But, again, there was no body. Until…
November 2003 and that traffic stop in Phoenix, Arizona.
From her disappearance in the eighties up through the investigation looking for her, there was never any record of Mary being alive. No credit cards under her name. No Social Security number. No welfare benefits. No driver’s license.
Detective Bertaina’s boss at the time was Steve Cercone. He was confident that the district attorney was about to file a murder case against William Houle.
But then he got a phone call. The Phoenix police said they found Mary. This was seven months after the detectives interviewed Charlotte and William.
Remember, no trace of Mary for decades. Parents get interviewed. Mary shows up.
And she didn’t just show up. She came with an Arizona identification card that had been issued just three weeks before that traffic stop.
The detectives started calling her “Phoenix Mary” because they were extremely suspicious she was an imposter.
Detective Bertaina went to Phoenix to interview her. She told him that she had run away from home and that she basically had been living under the radar the entire time. She told him she remembered the beating, but that she didn’t remember anything about a dog getting sick.
Phoenix Mary agreed to a D.N.A. test to see if she was Charlotte’s daughter. The detectives thought the test would disprove that.
But it did the opposite. Phoenix Mary was Charlotte’s daughter. Case closed.
After that was proven, Sherrie invited Mary to move in with her. She immediately sensed that something wasn’t right.
First, Mary’s accent was weird. It was a Midwest or Southern accent. Second, Mary kept receiving mail at the house under the name Monica Devereaux. It’s the name she told the detectives that she lived under after running away from home.
Kathy also had her doubts. She said that Mary didn’t remember that their birth father had left them an inheritance that they could collect at eighteen. It was their shared escape plan. They even had a code word for it.
But Mary didn’t know the secret word, which was “Mohawk.”
Mary also did another strange thing. She wrote a note to Detective Bertaina that said, “I’ve been lying to you about who I am.”
But since the D.N.A. matched, the case remained closed.
Then, in 2008, Cercone got a call from investigators at Fort Ord. A set of cadaver dogs was working on an unrelated case and found something.
They got a hit on another home that William Houle and the family had lived at. Once again, they dug up the ground and found nothing.
Just one more thing. Kathy had a memory of driving with William when they were moving back to New York. On the way there, he stopped in Utah and took a rug from the trunk of the car. He told Kathy to look ahead the whole time. She said he took the rug out to the desert, and that he came back covered in dirt but without the rug.
Sherrie described Phoenix Mary as someone who acted like she had multiple personality disorder. Mary was also dealing with alcoholism and could be violent at times. Eventually, Sherrie kicked her out to protect her own children. Mary ended up moving back to Arizona.
Then, in 2017, Judy Veloz was the new Seaside chief of police. She decided to revisit the case after she got a call from someone telling her that Mary was now living in Missouri and was in hospice care for cancer.
Veloz went there to interview her. She learned that the reason Mary suddenly got an Arizona I.D. was that she needed state aid to pay for gall bladder surgery. She said a local nonprofit had helped her track down her real birth certificate so she could get the I.D.
Mary also talked about that note she sent to Detective Bertaina, the one that said she was lying about who she was. She told Veloz that she had sent a follow-up email, writing, “I’m not sure myself what I was trying to say in that email.”
Veloz believes Mary’s foggy memory is due to trauma and a lifetime battle with alcoholism.
Finally, Mary also mentioned a woman named Morie Kimmel who took her in at age fifteen in California. Veloz tracked down Morie.
Morie also had two daughters who loved Mary. But then one day, Mary disappeared again. Was there any proof that she had lived with Morie?
Yes, there was a photo of Mary with Morie’s two daughters. A facial recognition group confirmed that there was a ninety-nine percent probability that it was Mary Louise Day in the photo.
That sealed the deal for Veloz, and she closed the case.
Buuuuuutttttttt…. There are a few questions remaining. Maybe even some possibilities.
Let’s lay out again what we have here. A girl goes missing. The parents never report it. The sister is told never to play in a specific part of the backyard. Years later, cadaver dogs sniff out that part of the year, and a kid’s shoe is found.
Both parents are questioned by police and act weird and nonchalant about the whole thing. Then, seven months later, the missing girl, now a grown woman, miraculously appears. D.N.A. tests show she’s the mother’s daughter.
But here’s a possibility. Maybe Phoenix Mary is another daughter of Charlotte’s, someone she had before the original Mary.
Charlotte was known to have numerous affairs. In fact, it later came out that Charlotte had a daughter named Jeanie before she had Mary. Could there have been another daughter before Mary that the family didn’t know about?
And Charlotte was know to keeps tabs on all her children. Maybe she contacted another child and asked her to pretend to be Mary after the police interview. That would explain the D.N.A. match.
But let’s go back to that shoe. When Veloz looked at it, she noticed that it was too small for a twelve-year-old’s foot. So, who did it belong to?
There’s the possibility that Charlotte and William had another child who died and was buried in multiple backyards. Maybe even eventually rolled up in a rug and buried in the Utah desert. But wouldn’t Kathy at least remember another sibling?
Finally, there’s the photo of Mary with Morie’s two daughters. It was taken a year after Mary went missing. It’s kind of like the smoking gun of this whole thing.
But the original detectives and Sherrie still can’t shake the feeling that Phoenix Mary is who she says she is. Even with all the evidence, they feel that something is off.
Extreme trauma can often cause people to block out certain memories. Maybe that’s what happened here and why Phoenix Mary can’t recall specific things related to the family. Years of abuse and neglect changed her mentally. The Mary who Sherrie knew was no longer the same person. It’s sometimes really hard to accept the fact that people you love change.
Mary Louise Day died from cancer in 2017. There was no funeral.
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