[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WAVES ROARING]
Mary Louise Day was a girl that lived in Seaside.
In about 1981, she disappeared.
What do you mean she disappeared?
She disappeared off the face of the earth.
I just knew something was wrong in the house.
Mary Day is my sister.
One day, Mary was in California.
And then she was gone.
Laying in bed one night with Kathy, I asked her, I was like,
what happened with Mary?
And she was like, shh!
Don't say anything.
We're not allowed to talk about Mary.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When I was 18 and I was like, I can go and try to find her.
It was 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.
You turn 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.
[SIRENS]
[BARKING]
The dogs went into the backyard.
We just had an indication from the cadaver dogs
that there was no 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.
William told me that he didn't kill Mary Day.
But his wife told him that he was possessed that night.
And that he had a demon inside of him.
I've never heard anybody say that before.
[BARKING]
This is a crazy case.
Mary disappeared.
No trace of her for 22 years.
And then what happens?
And then I get a phone call.
He told me, hey, Kevin.
He says, are you sitting down?
He said, I've got to let you know that they
say that they found Mary Day.
And I'm like, oh.
This case just gets weirder and weirder.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Seaside California detective Joe Bertaina
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 tangle of weaves 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.
Mary's existence came close to being completely erased.
There's no record that her stepfather William
Houle 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.
I couldn't understand how a mother could not
go to the ends of the Earth to find her child.
It was this woman, Sherrie Calgaro, Mary's sister,
who finally got authorities on the case.
I wanted to know what happened to my sister Mary.
Sherrie was 10 when Mary went 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 Sherrie were in and out of a foster home.
Their mother could not take care of them.
Sherrie was adopted by the foster family.
We were separated when I was six years old.
Mary and Kathy were returned to their mother Charlotte.
By this time, Charlotte had married William Houle.
And the couple had two kids of their own.
Houle was a soldier.
The family moved around a lot from base to base.
At one point, detectives 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.
[WAVES CRASHING]
At the time Mary disappeared, Houle
was assigned to Fort Ord on the California Coast
north of Monterey.
They were living in Seaside, which was
a military town at that time.
And that's where she was last seen.
Sherrie, 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, shh, don't say anything.
We're not allowed to talk about Mary.
But Kathy did say her mother 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 Sherrie 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 recall 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.
Bertaina 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, cashing them.
Detective Bertaina.
It's March 3rd, 2003.
Roll camera.
Bertaina went to the Seaside home,
Mary's last known whereabouts.
He brought Kathy with him.
Pictures used to be there of all of us.
[CLICKING]
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 scab.
You're opening up, and it hurts.
Me and Mary were in here.
This is Mary's and mine.
Mary was at home along with Kathy
when the rest of the family went out.
They came home later that evening.
And while they were gone, the dog became sick
and was dying in the kitchen area.
When William saw that, he immediately
accused Mary of poisoning the dog.
He started yelling at us, and I got scared.
All hell broke loose.
This is the corner where he was hitting her.
And the fight was back here.
[SOBS]
I can hear her yelling.
There's nothing we-- we can do.
He hit her?
Last time I saw her, she had the blood coming out of her mouth.
Kathy said after Mary disappeared,
her parents ordered the kids to stay away
from one particular area of the backyard.
We weren't supposed to come over to this part.
You weren't supposed to come over here?
Who told you that?
My father.
The clues were adding up.
And detectives felt they could be
dealing with something much more sinister
than a runaway teenage girl.
[BARKING]
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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In 2003, the missing persons case of Mary Day
was quickly becoming a homicide investigation,
with police facing the grim task of digging
in the dirt where the cadaver dogs alerted.
And we kept digging.
And there was no body.
I said, well, it 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 four of 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 the 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 Houle 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.
You don't have whips and chains, do you?
Oh, absolutely not.
[CHUCKLES]
Darn.
I remember watching the interview
and realizing that she had something to tell us.
You know, life is full of regrets.
If you go back and say, if I did this and this and this.
Her body language and then her sinking down in her chair
and saying words to the effect of,
sometimes you do things in your past and it comes back.
I knew that there was something there.
When aws the last time you heard from Mary?
'81.
The last time she ran away.
Charlotte said Mary running away was no big deal.
She did it all the time.
Oh, what a mess.
It was like trying to get a nightcrawler out of a wormhole.
Just grabbing it, and it was gone.
Grabbing it, it was gone.
How many times did she run away?
All these questions, I can't answer.
OK.
When you was back in California, did you guys
take any kind of steps to find her?
We should have.
But you didn't.
My husband said we filed a police report with the Salinas
Police Department.
If we did, I don't remember.
There is no record of a report.
I couldn't understand a parent, number one, not reporting
their child as runaway.
But number two, treating this case,
the 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 Bertaina later questioned Mary's stepfather,
William.
I just asked him, tell me about the last time
that you saw Mary.
He told me that, well, he was going room
to room checking on the kids.
And he discovered Mary wasn't in the 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.
Why did you panic?
I never got a good response.
The detective pressed Houle and brought up
the story of the sick dog.
And he said five or six times, you know what 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
before she got 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--
A choking?
Yeah, a gesture with his hand.
And it's like a hand strike that I've seen before.
It's a martial art technique.
So I ask him, where did you hit her with that?
And he said, well, in the upper chest.
And I said, could it have been the throat?
And he said, well, it may have slipped off
and hit Mary in the throat.
I wanted to know on a scale of 1 to 10
his anger when he had done this, when he had struck Mary.
And he said on a scale of 1 to 10, I was a 15.
I said, you're 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.
And I said, OK, 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 he said, yes.
The demon could have killed her.
When he walked out, did you think
you were letting a killer go?
Yeah.
Joe said, yeah, we don't have a body.
But he said, this guy came so close to confessing
that it was as close as 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 detective's confidence was growing,
the case took an unexpected turn.
Remember, police had no record of Mary Louise Day as an adult.
There were no credit cards, no driver's license
or ID recorded anywhere.
There hadn't been a trace of Mary in more than two decades.
Until police in Phoenix, Arizona, made a traffic stop.
I got a phone call.
I was at home.
I left work.
And he told me, hey, Captain, he says, are you sitting down?
And I said, what happened?
He said, no, he says, just going to let
you know that Phoenix Police Department in Arizona
pulled over a car.
And they say that they found Mary Day.
What do you make of William and Charlotte's stories?
Hear Charlotte's unusual response
to police searching for her missing daughter on Facebook
at 48 Hours.
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 has been found.
And I was stunned.
Investigators had put Mary Day into a missing persons database
long ago.
She identified herself with a Phoenix identification card.
Or Arizona state identification card.
Back in California, Detective Joe Bertaina
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.
Yeah.
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 Cercone, could not believe it.
Joe went down there, and he met her.
And he sent a picture of her.
And we went, what?
Wait a minute.
No.
All right, all right.
It looked like it could be her.
And I said, wait a minute, all these other bits
of circumstantial evidence--
The father almost confessing to something.
Almost confessing to the murder of a little girl.
And now here was this woman 700 miles away with a valid Arizona
State ID.
Strangely, that ID had been issued only three
weeks earlier, while the homicide investigation was
underway.
Well you must have found the timing awfully suspicious.
Yes, it was very suspicious.
[SIREN BLARING]
When Detective Bertaina went to Phoenix,
the woman he was sure had been murdered
told him she had run away from her mother
Charlotte and stepfather William when she was a teenager.
She'd basically lived under the radar.
And by her wits ever since.
But she seemed hesitant, and her story seemed sketchy.
Later in a phone call, Mary told Bertaina
she had some awful memories.
Did you want to talk about what happened that last night?
It hurts.
I'm sure it does.
But what happened that last night?
I'm so confused anymore.
I don't know what's real or not.
I remember he kept slamming my head into the tub and it hurt.
Is that when you started bleeding?
I started bleeding, and hit my head onto the coffee table.
I think I blacked out.
Maybe that's why I can't put all the pieces together
to tell you.
But she didn't remember anything about the sick dog.
Was that troublesome to you?
That was, yeah.
Investigators say it was hard to pin down much of anything
about her past two decades.
They began to wonder if the woman with the freshly minted
ID was really who she claimed to be.
You refused to call her Mary Louise Day.
We called her Phoenix Mary.
In phone conversations, Phoenix Mary
was sounding increasingly frustrated.
Can I throw one question at you, if you don't mind?
Go ahead, Mary.
If you would have found my body, how
were you going to be able to prove who the hell I was?
DNA.
Oh, so since I'm still alive, y'all can't prove who I am?
There's no record of you ever being anywhere.
It's like you have an existing up until now.
So I'd be better off if I'm just dead and then y'all can do that
detecting from there.
I said, all right, let's get a DNA test on this woman.
Let's let her prove that she's the daughter of Charlotte.
We're going to disprove that she's married, of course.
Because there's no way that her DNA is going to match.
Except it did match.
I nearly fell on the floor.
I couldn't believe it.
The DNA came back positive to being a daughter of Charlotte.
The case was closed.
Sherrie invited her long lost sister to move in with her.
In most cases, that would be the end of the story.
But not in this case.
So now DNA matches.
Case closed.
Yeah, well, if it were that simple, right?
Once Phoenix Mary moved in, Sherrie
started to have her own doubts.
The first thing I noticed was it sounded
like she had some weird Midwestern Southern accent.
It's weird to me.
The detectives had noticed that, too.
That's an interesting dialect you have, Mary.
What do you mean?
I don't know if I've ever quite heard that particular manner
of speaking.
Then y'all still trying to prove who I am, huh?
Yes, ma'am, we are.
Phoenix Mary also said she never used her real name.
Nobody knows me as Mary.
I gave that name up years ago.
What name would they know you by?
Monica Devereaux.
It's a name she said she made up.
I did notice that she had magazines in the name of Monica
Devereaux.
Sherrie's sister Kathy was also unnerved.
No.
That's not Mary.
Why?
What makes you so sure?
Something's off.
You're telling me that your gut is saying it's not her.
My gut.
She says the woman claiming to be Mary didn't even
remember that their birth father left them an inheritance they
could collect at age 18.
It was their shared escape plan, and they
had a code word for it.
Was there a code word or some sort
of secret between you and Mary?
Yeah, it was.
It was called Mohawk.
Mohawk was your secret word?
Yep.
And Mary did something else strange.
She wrote a note to Detective Bertaina.
She emailed Joe.
And her email said something to the effect 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 ball game.
Still, the case remained closed.
But then in 2008, Steve Cercone, now Seaside's police chief,
got a phone call from investigators at the army base
in Fort Ord.
Another set of cadaver dogs had been
working on an unrelated matter and had found something.
Fort Ord was a huge place.
And he said, look, we brought the cadaver dogs out here,
and they went over hundreds of homes.
And he said, we got a hit on one of the homes.
You'll never believe who was living in this house.
He said, William Houle and his family lived in this house.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In 2008, cadaver dogs alerted near a second home
where the Houles had lived.
The house they had moved to shortly after Mary disappeared.
So you're thinking that a body has
been moved by this family from one location to another?
Yeah.
Once again, police dug.
And once again, they came up short.
Was Mary moved twice?
Was this little girl who may have been killed back in 1981,
was her body moved twice?
Although the case had been closed,
Cercone felt something was seriously wrong.
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 are so many parts about this thing that
could have solved this case back then that
is really frustrating.
He believes they let the parents off the hook too soon.
Mom and Dad say she ran away, don't ever
talk about her again.
They tore up her pictures, threw away her clothes.
And that was it.
Most damning, he says, are Williams's own words.
His comment was, I couldn't have killed Mary.
My body would have done it, but it wouldn't have been me.
It would have been that demonic personality,
because I blacked out.
Clark says he would have arrested William Houle.
You just admitted tantamount to a homicide,
and we're letting him go?
Clark also focused on that shoe detectives found.
Another detective asked Kathy about it.
They first asked, did you guys ever wear canvas tennis shoes?
And Catherine said Keds?
And she said, yes, and 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 Louise Day?
She was killed in 1981 in probably around July.
Clark believes the woman now claiming
to be Mary Day is an imposter.
There's just too many things that point to Phoenix Mary Day
being somebody else.
But what about that DNA test showing she's
Charlotte Houle's daughter.
Well, Mark Clark has a theory that he says explains it all.
Even if it is a little farfetched.
He says Charlotte Houle had another daughter,
a secret daughter.
Born before Mary and given up at birth.
Clark believes Phoenix Mary is that secret daughter.
So you think Phoenix Mary is the actual sister of Mary Louise
Day, who goes missing back in 1981?
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 extramarital affairs
and become pregnant from those affairs.
Clark says the Houles could have reached out
to Charlotte's secret daughter when
they felt they were in trouble.
I believe she was somehow sought out by Charlotte and William
to pose as Mary Day to avoid prosecution.
It was an elaborate plot, he says.
The Houles knew that police were investigating
Mary's disappearance.
And they asked her secret sister to assume her identity.
Cercone says the Houles had the wherewithal 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 married.
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 accrued interest, that inheritance
was now worth roughly $60,000.
Sherrie helped Mary get her cut.
We reached out to William and Charlotte Houle.
Through a relative, they said they had no comment.
Mark says the impostor theory accounts
for a lot of inconsistencies.
For example, Mary's odd southern accent.
The accent was really thick.
Sherrie and Katherine both said that Mary Day never
had an accent.
She has a Southern accent.
It's a pronounced Southern accent.
Can I throw one question at you if you don't mind?
Go ahead, Mary.
If you were to find my body, how were you
going to be able to prove who the hell I was.
Mary did claim that she had spent some time in the South
as an adult. But was only there briefly
as a child, when experts say it would have given her
that accent.
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 10
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 Sherrie,
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.
In 2017, Sherrie Calgaro still wanted answers
about the woman claiming to be her sister.
Basically everyone that's ever met her.
Has a lot of doubts.
I have my own doubts.
We took Sherrie to visit Phoenix Mary in Missouri,
where she's been living for a few years.
I'm hoping that she will admit, she
will confess to us who she really is.
OK, good luck.
Bye.
Mary was living here and suffering
from late stage cancer.
She wasn't up for any more visitors that day.
As Mary's health was failing, the new acting chief
of seaside police was determined to solve
the case once and for all.
Judy Veloz chipped away at the idea
that Mary Day was murdered.
For starters, additional tests showed Mary's DNA matched
not only Charlotte, but also the birth father.
And then there was that little girl's shoe.
I put it in the palm of my hand.
And I mean, it fit in the palm of my hand.
It was very small.
I had a hard time believing that a 13-year-old would have
to be--
I mean, I saw her stature in the picture.
She wasn't that short.
The laws also traveled to Mary's home,
she says Mary herself filled in the gaps.
She wanted to convince us she was Mary.
And it seemed sincere.
Mary said she began calling herself
Monica when she ran away, because she didn't want police
to take her back home.
Mary also mentioned a new name, Maury,
a woman she knew in those early days on her own in California.
Veloz tracked down Maurie Kimmel.
I got her when she was 15.
Very naive innocence about her.
Almost like childlike At the time
Mary had two young daughters of her own.
She just won my heart, and my girls loved her.
You know that that may have been the only and the best family
life she ever had in her entire--
I'm realizing that now, you know?
I wanted to nurture her, you know .
But after about a year, one day, Mary was gone.
I was heartbroken.
Veloz discovered that Mary had moved around a lot, city
to city living on the.
Margins
Honestly, when I talked to her.
She just seemed like a survivor.
She also solved the mystery of why Mary suddenly
got that Arizona ID she needed state aid to pay for surgery.
She had her gallbladder taken out.
That led her to obtain her proper driver's license.
Or ID, in the name of Mary Louise Day.
A local nonprofit had helped Mary track down her real birth
certificate.
The lost chunks of Mary's foggy memory to trauma
and a lifelong battle with alcohol.
Those gaps in memory, to me can be legitimate.
Especially if someone's been an alcoholic from the time
they've been a teenager.
As for that email Mary sent to Detective Bertaina
saying she'd been lying about who
she was 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 is still a severe alcoholic and using.
And then the smoking came up with the smoking gun.
One of Mowry'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.
OK.
And it's trying to see what?
It's trying to see the probability
that we're matching a young picture with one of the older
pictures.
So if this is the same person, correct it's.
A probability that it's the same person the top photo is Mary
before she disappeared the other photo
is the one that Judy Veloz dug up.
What are the numbers telling you.
And the numbers are telling us that it's the same person.
He says that's a 99% probability.
With that photo, Judy Veloz 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.
Fragile, but not feeble it was clear from seeing her in person
that this was a woman who had not had an easy life still
she didn't seem to be trying to hide anything.
In fact, she said it's very frustrating
trying to prove who you are when there is no proof.
Sherrie is finally at peace.
All of a sudden, it felt like I had a weight lifted 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 Houle murdered Mary Louise day?
Based on the evidence I've found Yes.
As for Steve Circone, 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.
[MUFFLED BARKING]
Those Cadaver dogs were on to something.
They were positive.
Positive?
Positive.
They said, our dogs don't lie.
They don't lie.
Who is buried in those grave sites.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Do you believe that the woman claiming to be Mary Day
was really her?
Hear more about investigator Julie Veloz's meeting with Mary
at 48hours.com.
Known as the doomsday mom, her two children murdered.
Laurie started referring to her children
as zombies inside the Lori Vallow Daybell trial, how
the jury found her guilty.
48 Hours, Saturday, on CBS.
Listen to the my life of crime podcast with me, Erin Moriarty.