EP04 | The Strange Disappearance of Mary Day

In November 2003, police in Phoenix pulled over a pickup truck for a routine traffic violation. But when they ran the ID of the woman in the passenger seat, the system flagged a name that shouldn't have existed, Mary Day. Across state lines in Seaside, California, homicide detectives were stunned. For 22 years, Mary Day was a ghost, a 13-year-old girl who vanished without a trace. In fact, police were already digging up a backyard, closing in on the person they believed murdered her. Yet there she was, sitting in the back of a squad car, alive and breathing. But as investigators would quickly learn, the real mystery wasn't where Mary had been. It was whether the woman that was in the truck was actually Mary Day at all, or a brilliant imposter stepping into a dead girl's shoes. This is the story of the strange disappearance of Mary Day. I've been wanting to tell you the story of Mary Day for a while now. It's really a fascinating case, and there are parts of it that have stuck with me since I first came across it. And I'm really curious to hear what you think about this one when we get to the end. But before we get started, if you're enjoying the Real Unreal, please take a second to follow or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. I release new episodes every other Monday, and you can also follow the show on Instagram and TikTok for clips and updates and more from each episode. So without further ado, let's get into the story. It started as a completely routine police encounter on the streets of Phoenix. Officers pulled over a faded red pickup truck when they noticed it was sporting a stolen license plate. The police were expecting a standard auto theft arrest, but it quickly became something infinitely more bizarre. The woman sitting inside the pickup truck was 45 years old. She had a weathered face and a heavy accent and identification in the name of Mary Louise Day. But when local authorities ran that name through the database, a red flag popped. The name was tied to an active missing person investigation more than 700 miles away in the coastal town of Seaside, California. Phoenix authorities immediately picked up the phone and called the Seaside Police Department with what they thought was incredible news, saying, Hey, we found Mary Louise Day. We found the woman you've been looking for. Except the detectives in California weren't looking for a 45-year-old woman. By late 2003, they weren't looking for a living person at all. They had spent months building what they believed was a tight, undeniable homicide case. For over a year, Detective Joe Bertana had been consumed by the ghost of Mary Day. He knew the grim timeline by heart. Mary had vanished from her family home in 1981 when she was 13 years old. But the red flags didn't stop there. Her parents had never reported her missing. Decades went by before anyone outside the family even realized Mary was gone. And to understand why detectives were so certain Mary was dead, we have to look at the life she left behind. Mary Louise Day was born in February 1968 in Little Falls, New York, to Charlotte and Charles Day. She had two younger sisters named Kathy and Sherry, and theirs was not a particularly stable childhood. The girls spent time in foster care, and eventually Sherry was adopted by a foster family while Mary and Kathy returned to Charlotte. That separation meant that although the three girls were sisters, Sherry would grow up outside the household where Mary eventually disappeared. Charlotte subsequently married William Huell, an Army serviceman whose career meant the family moved repeatedly between military communities. Mary and Kathy's biological father, Charles Day, later died in an accident, and his death left the girls with Social Security survivor benefits as well as inheritance money that they were apparently entitled to receive when they became adults. According to Kathy, she and Mary knew about the inheritance and talked about the money privately. They even had their own code word for it, mohawk. It was the kind of obscure detail that would have meant absolutely nothing to anyone outside the family, but years later, Kathy would use that word as a test of whether the woman claiming to be Mary really shared her childhood memories. By 1980, the family was living in Hawaii, and there were already serious concerns about Mary's treatment at home. In December of that year, Mary was placed in protective custody amid allegations that William physically abused her. The following month, William was reassigned to Fort Ord in California, and Charlotte moved with the rest of the family to nearby seaside while Mary initially remained in protective custody in Hawaii. Several months later, however, Mary was released and returned to the Houle household in California. She wouldn't be there for long. There's a frustrating discrepancy over exactly when Mary disappeared. Some secondary accounts place it on June 15, 1981, while others give the date of July 15th. But without primary documentation that resolves the conflict, the safest thing to say is that Mary disappeared during the summer of 1981. She was 13 years old, and her sister Kathy was 11. So, according to Kathy, the whole nightmare started one evening when she and Mary were left home alone while the rest of the family was out. And during those few hours, William's beloved dog, Bubba Brown, became violently and gravely ill. When he finally came home and saw the dog, he instantly jumped to conclusions, convincing himself that Mary had intentionally poisoned the poor animal. He flew into a blind rage, and Kathy distinctly remembered William brutally beating Mary over it, cornering her, and the last image that she ever had of her sister from that night was of Mary bleeding from her mouth. The next morning, Mary was gone. Charlotte said she had run away. And according to Kathy, the children were essentially told that Mary was no longer a subject of discussion. In fact, when Kathy kept pushing and trying to ask what had happened to her sister, Charlotte looked her dead in the eye and said, if she's dead, she's dead. And I think that tells us everything we need to know about the total lack of empathy inside that house. Unsurprisingly, there is absolutely no official record that Charlotte or William ever reported their 13-year-old daughter missing. Charlotte later maintained that William had reported a runaway report, but investigators were never able to find a single scrap of paper to prove it. So make of that what you will. There was also something incredibly strange about the backyard. Kathy remembered that right after Mary disappeared, the children were told they were strictly forbidden from playing in one particular area of the yard. She didn't know why, and at 11 years old, she had no reason to imagine that the instruction would ever even matter. What she did remember vividly was exactly where that area was. Mary's disappearance might seem almost impossible from a modern perspective because we're accustomed to the idea that a 13-year-old vanishing should set off alarms everywhere. But Mary had only recently arrived in California and she wasn't even enrolled in a school yet. The family had moved repeatedly, and the people around them didn't necessarily know that Mary existed. Without her parents initiating a search, there was no immediate missing child investigation to pull those pieces together. So Mary was able to disappear completely unnoticed simply because no one outside her own family was in a position to realize that she was even missing. But there was one person who kept wondering what had happened to her, her sister Sherry. Because she had been adopted by another family, Sherry wasn't living with the Hules when Mary disappeared. When she later visited and asked her mother where Mary was, she was told that Mary had run away. And when she asked Kathy, Kathy whispered that they weren't allowed to talk about Mary. And I don't know about you, but if a family institutes a strict don't ask, don't tell policy regarding a missing child, it seems like they probably have something to hide. And to the surprise of absolutely no one, that explanation didn't sit well with Sherry. Eventually, as an adult, she took matters into her own hands and reported her sister missing herself. Sources disagree over whether that first report occurred in 1992 or 1994. So the precise year remains unresolved. But what is absolutely clear is that it was Sherry, not Mary's parents, who eventually forced Mary's disappearance into the official system. So by 1999, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had created an age-progressed image showing what Mary might look like as an adult. So it wasn't until 2002 that Seaside Police began the investigation that would completely change the way authorities viewed Mary's disappearance. Detective Joe Bertana was assigned to the case in early 2003. Kathy walked the detectives through the old rooms of the house, reconstructing that final violent confrontation. But when Mary's stepfather was questioned, he acknowledged to the investigators that something physical had happened between him and Mary that night, though his version vastly differed from Kathy's. He admitted striking or pushing Mary around the upper chest, but he denied killing her. Instead, William offered a highly creative and theological loophole. He confessed that he had completely blacked out during the beating and claimed his wife Charlotte looked at him the next morning and told him he had been possessed by a demon. When Detective Bertana bluntly asked William if he thought that specific demon could have killed his stepdaughter, William looked him dead in the eye and said, Yes, I think the demon could have killed Mary. So after that bizarre interview, Bertana brought cadaver dogs to the property. And in the backyard, in the exact area that Kathy was forbidden to play in, the dogs alerted. Investigators dug into the dirt and pulled out a small child's shoe. By late 2003, Bertana was convinced that he was looking at a murder. He had questioned the parents, catching them in multiple glaring inconsistencies, from Charlotte's unproving claims that they filed a runaway report to William admitting to a level of demonic violence that completely contradicted her story. Bertana was actively building a homicide case until November of 2003, when a phone call arrived from the Phoenix Police Department, shattering his timeline entirely. After receiving that phone call, Detective Joe Bertana packed his bags and flew to Phoenix. He went into that interview room expecting a clear answer, but instead, he stepped into a maze. The stakes were incredibly high. He had been right on the cusp of charging Mary's parents with murder. But the law is clear. You can't prosecute a homicide if your supposed victim is sitting in a police station 700 miles away. He had to see for himself if this was a miracle or a masterful fraud sent to derail his case. There was nothing obvious about this woman's appearance that allowed him to rule her out. She looked enough like the age-progressed image of Mary that she could plausibly be the missing girl, but on top of that, she was holding a legitimate Arizona identification card bearing the name Mary Louise Day. But when Bertana looked closely at the ID, he spotted a massive red flag. The card had only recently been issued. So think about the timing for a minute. For over 20 years, investigators could find absolutely no paper trail for an adult Mary. She had completely flatlined from public records since the day that she went missing. Yet suddenly she walks into an Arizona DMV to get an ID at the exact same time that Seaside police are digging up a backyard and preparing to arrest her parents for murder. To a veteran detective, that timing didn't look like a miracle. It looked like a calculated cover-up. Then Detective Bertana sat down and started asking this woman about her life. She explained that she had simply packed up and escaped that house of horrors all those years ago. She totally backed up the rumors about the terrifying domestic violence that she'd been subjected to. But here's where things get super sketchy. Her memories did not match Kathy's at all. The ultimate red flag, she had absolutely no clue about the sick dog, which, as you know, is the entire reason Kathy believed their stepfather attacked Mary and caused her to disappear in the first place. When the woman was asked to fill in the blanks of her 22-year vanishing act, she couldn't do it. There was no clean chronology of where she had been or what she had done. And she couldn't name a single living soul who actually could verify that she existed during those decades. Her story didn't quite flow. It came in shattered, evasive fragments that just didn't add up. Bertana sat across from her completely unimpressed. He wasn't looking at her like a long-lost sister. He was looking at her through the lens of a homicide detective who had just unearthed a little girl's shoe from a suspicious backyard. The woman in Phoenix could feel his skepticism radiating across the table. So she decided to flip the script and challenge the basic logic of the police. She looked right at Bertina and said, Look, if you found a body you thought was Mary Day, you would use DNA to identify it. So why can't you use DNA to identify me right now? Honestly, it was a very good point. And it was exactly what investigators decided to do. They took a DNA swab from the woman in Phoenix and ran it against Mary's mother, Charlotte. Instead, the lab results came back and completely derailed the state's case. The woman in Phoenix was an exact match. She was, without a shadow of a doubt, Charlotte's biological daughter. For the Seaside Police Department, that single piece of paper was a total buzzkill for their investigation. The science had spoken, and you can't argue with a double helix. They officially closed the missing person file. Mary Day, the 13-year-old girl who vanished into thin air in 1981, had apparently just been driving around Arizona at 45. Sherry, the sister who had spent her entire adult life badgering the police to finally look for Mary, was absolutely overjoyed, to the point that she cleared out a room in her house and invited Mary to move across the country to live with her in North Carolina. Now, you would think this is the exact moment where the music swells and the credits roll and the broken family lives happily ever after, catching up on all the time they had missed. But the story didn't end there. Living under the same roof with Mary didn't bring Sherry any peace. Instead, it gave her a front row seat to a whole new set of red flags. And as they compared notes together over the phone, the sisters began to doubt this woman even more. One of the first things that bothered Sherry was her accent. The woman claiming to be Mary spoke with a noticeable Southern accent that neither Sherry or Kathy remembered from their childhood. That alone didn't prove anything. Accents can change over decades in different cities, but because nobody could piece together Mary's adult life, her sisters had no explanation for where it came from. Then Sherry started to notice mail and magazines arriving at the house addressed to somebody named Monica Devereux. When she asked Mary about it, Mary admitted that almost nobody from her adult life actually knew her as Mary Day. Monica Devereux was a name she had made up and used for years. For Kathy, the absolute breaking point was much more personal. She asked this woman about the inheritance from their biological father and dropped the private code word that she and Mary had shared as a kid, Mohawk. Mary looked at her blankly. She had absolutely no idea what Kathy was talking about, and that hit Kathy very differently than a forgotten date or an old address, because Mohawk belonged to a private piece of their childhood. And Kathy believed the real Mary would never forget that. Right then, she became convinced that the woman in Phoenix was a flat-out imposter. Then things took an even weirder turn. Mary herself contacted Detective Bertana and essentially told him that she had lied about who she was. While the exact phrasing of that conversation has never been fully established, investigators took it deadly seriously. Suddenly, the DNA results that seemed to have settled everything didn't look so final anymore. So DNA is a complex thing, and in this specific case, it had a massive loophole. The test had definitively proved that Phoenix Mary was Charlotte's biological daughter, but as detectives started scratching their heads, they realized that wasn't necessarily the same thing as proving she was Mary. The science could confirm maternity, but it couldn't confirm identity, especially in a family with multiple siblings. And that opened the door to one of the strangest theories in this entire story. The case essentially stalled out after the DNA results, but fast forward to 2008, a retired homicide detective named Mark Clark was brought in to take a fresh look at the stubborn file. Unswayed by the old lab reports, Clark began considering a wild possibility. What if Charlotte had another biological daughter who had been given up for adoption or lost contact with the family? If a secret sister existed, she would still test as a perfect biological match to Charlotte. That meant the original DNA results could be 100% correct, even if the real Mary had actually died back in 1981. Once you entertained that theory, all the odd details started fitting together. It explained why Phoenix Mary didn't remember Mohawk, why she had an accent, and why she had spent her adult life going by Monica Devereaux. It also explained why she couldn't produce a clean history of those 22 missing years and why she suddenly surfaced with a brand new ID, just as the murder investigation was heating up. Investigators looked into the inheritance money as a potential financial motive for someone to jump in and steal Mary's identity. It was the only hypothesis capable of explaining how Mary Day could be both dead and standing right in front of them at the same time. But then another piece of evidence surfaced that pulled the case right back towards murder. In 2008, the universe threw the detectives another bone, and it came from one of the most unexpected places. Cadaver dogs were working around the former Fort Ord military base on a completely unrelated case when one of the dogs suddenly went crazy and alerted at a house. When investigators pulled the property records, their jaws hit the floor, because, as it turned out, the Huell family had once lived in that house. This wasn't the seaside house where Mary had originally vanished from, but it was a completely different property that the family. Family had occupied because if you remember, William was active military and his army career kept them constantly moving from base to base. Shortly after Mary disappeared, they had packed up and moved right onto the Fort Ord base. For investigators who were already losing sleep over that first backyard discovery, this coincidence was beyond creepy. What are the odds that a family moves houses and a cadaver dog just happens to flag both of their backyards for human remains? But because this case loves a good roadblock, the second shovel went into the ground and came up entirely empty. There was no shoe, no hidden treasure, and absolutely no body. Legally, a dog pointing at a pouch of dirt couldn't prove that Mary or anyone else had ever been buried there. By this point, the entire investigation was a total split-screen reality. You had two completely different stories, and both had evidence to back them up. In version A, Mary survived a horrific childhood beating, lived off the grid for two decades, and randomly popped up at an Arizona DMV. And in version B, the real Mary died in 1981, and a secret sister stepped in decades later to hijack her life and cash in on her inheritance at the exact same time that the investigators were closing in on Mary's murder. The massive roadblock holding everyone back was that for years, absolutely everyone, from the cops to the sisters, had been trying to dissect Mary's adult life without actually knowing a single fact about what her life looked like. Her 22 missing years were an absolute mystery. So in 2017, a detective named Judy Velos decided to stop guessing and actually find out. By this time, Mary was living in Missouri and was gravely ill with cancer. Sherry didn't have the closure that she'd spent her entire life looking for, so she reached out to Judy Velos, who was acting chief of Seaside Police Department at the time. Velos didn't try to force the puzzle pieces into either of the old theories. Instead, she hit the reset button and looked strictly at only what could be proven. The first thing she did was take another look at the DNA. Everyone already knew definitively that Phoenix Mary was Charlotte's daughter. We know that the DNA showed that, but because the original test only looked at the maternal line, it left just enough room for the secret sister theory to become plausible. Velos ordered advanced testing to track the paternal line, and the results show that Phoenix Mary was a flawless genetic match to her late biological father, Charles Day. Now, if you're paying attention, your brain is probably saying, So what? The dad could have had other kids. And you'd be entirely right because this was what I was thinking. Matching the dad isn't an automatic smoking gun. But matching both specific parents completely vaporized Mark Clark's specific theory. He ultimately believed that the mother Charlotte had tracked down a secret love child from one of her old affairs and coached her to play Mary. But unless Charlotte had somehow managed to have a secret baby with her own ex-husband while completely hiding a full-time pregnancy from him, her other kids, and the state of California, the secret sister theory officially ran out of gas. The genetics proved this woman wasn't a half-sibling from a side relationship. She shared the exact same two parents as the missing girl. But to completely kill the doubts, what Velos actually needed was hard proof that Mary had been walking around and breathing after 1981. She needed a real life paper trail or human witness. The next step was that Velos re-examined the little canvas shoe that police had discovered in the backyard of Mary's seaside home. Back in 2003, finding that shoe right where the cadaver dogs barked was treated like this incredibly dramatic, emotional, gotcha moment for the cops. But when Velos actually stopped to look at the measurements, the whole illusion was shattered. The shoe was incredibly small, far too small to have ever fit a 13-year-old girl. Now the dogs weren't wrong. They were absolutely onto something which is a massive problem in and of itself. The science proved that a body had been there, but the shoe couldn't have pointed to Mary. The department was so hyper-focused on nailing a conviction for one specific teenage runaway that they completely walked past the evidence pointing to an entirely different hidden tragedy. Still, even with the backyard theory failing to prove anything about this case, Velos needed hard proof of where Mary had actually been since 1981. So she flew down to Missouri and sat by Mary's hospice bed for a 90-minute interview. Mary's memory was still pretty hazy, and she still couldn't give a perfect step-by-step account of the night she ran away or explain every single year that followed. But this time, she dropped actual clues. She started giving Velos real names of real people who had known her during those missing decades. And one of those names led to the exact breakthrough that the police have been chasing for 15 years. Now, if you try to map out exactly whose couches Mary was crashing on during her decades out of the public eye, you might think the police records read like a badly written soap opera. Depending on which dusty file you pull, the names seemed to bounce all over California. While some early police leads pointed to a woman named Maury Kimmel, other files were an older lady named BJ Ward over in Salinas was the one taking Mary in. To the original homicide detectives and Mary's deeply suspicious sisters, this tangled paper trail looked exactly like calculated identity fraud orchestrated by her mother. But the reality was much more simple. Mary was living with BJ Ward inside a house owned by Maury Kimmel. Because when you're a traumatized teenage runaway looking to stay off the grid, your housing arrangement doesn't typically come with a formal lease. It just involves crashing with whoever has a spare bed in a house owned by whoever isn't asking too many questions. But honestly, the logistics of their living arrangements didn't even matter to acting chief Judy Velos. What mattered was that she had finally tracked down real living humans, completely independent of the Toxic Hill family, who could place Mary in the real world long after the date that she was supposed to have died. For years, the single most persuasive argument against Phoenix Mary was that she had a giant black hole where a paper trail should be. Now Velos was filling that void with actual witnesses. And then came the holy grail of true crime plot twists, a physical photograph. BJ Ward's boyfriend dug through storage and pulled out an unseen photo of Mary as a living, breathing teenager, comfortably dated around 1983. Just to make sure they weren't being catfished by an 80s Polaroid, the department sent the image to a facial recognition company. The result? A 99% software match confirming that the girl in the photo was Mary Louise Day. That single photo effectively destroyed the old homicide narrative. Whatever horrific abuse went down in that military household, Mary had successfully survived it and walked away. And the second police started treating Mary's missing years as a timeline of survival rather than automated proof of her murder, the details that once looked incredibly shady started looking kind of tragic. Take that infamous Monica Devereaux alias. Skeptics thought it was a deeply calculated cover identity. The truth? Mary openly admitted she made it up so Child Protective Services wouldn't send her back to her parents. And where did she get the glamorous name Devereaux? She stole it straight off the cover of a romance novel that she was reading at the time. Sure, her adult memories remain totally fragmented. And yes, she had a bizarre accent, but those are the classic psychological side effects of an undocumented life plagued by severe trauma and coping mechanisms, not necessarily evidence that she was a secret clone developed by her mother to execute a grand inheritance conspiracy or to avoid responsibility for a murder. The second goes for the terrifying backyard cadaver dogs. The dogs absolutely hit on the scent of human decomposition. But because no human remains were ever found, Mary was now scientifically proven to be walking around in 1983. Those backyard alerts could no longer be used to print a murder warrant. By the time Chief Velos closed the book on the investigation, the conclusion was inescapable. The woman found in Phoenix wasn't an actor or a long-lost twin. She was, without a doubt, Mary Louise Day. For Mary's younger sister Sherry, this grand conclusion finally put an end to a lifelong search that had repeatedly taken the most bizarre twists and turns. For decades, Sherry had been the only person in the family actively asking where her missing childhood sister had gone. Then Mary miraculously reappeared, which created a completely new problem. Sherry literally had the exact person she had been searching for sitting right in front of her the entire time, and she still couldn't be entirely sure it was actually Mary. Cut to 2017, Mary is in a Missouri hospice care facility, battling cancer and actively dying. Sensing time was running out, Chief Valos made the trip to interview her. For 90 minutes, Mary laid out her survival timeline, filling in the giant structural blanks that had kept the rumor mill churning for decades. Velos looked at the evidence, verified the timeline, and looked at the 1983 photograph. And with that, the math finally checked out. Sherry traveled to Missouri to see her dying sister one last time. Armed with the actual verifiable police data instead of local gossip and incorrect theories, Sherry finally let her guard down and accepted that the woman in the bed was really her long-lost sister Mary. Sadly, Mary passed away just nine days after that final interview. When you step back and look at it, there's a cruel, tragic irony to the shape that Mary's life took. At just 13 years old, she vanished from a highly abusive military household. The adults who were legally responsible for her well-being didn't even bother to call the police to report her missing. Think about that. The parents didn't care. The system wasn't looking. And the only person holding a torch for Mary was Sherry, a sister who had herself been removed from that toxic household through adoption. And after all those years, when Mary finally turned up alive, the circumstances of her disappearance were so suspicious, and the murder narrative investigators had built was so convincing that simply appearing in person wasn't enough to settle the question of what had happened to her. There are pieces of Mary Day's story that remain unresolved. And I think the story is better served by leaving them that way, rather than forcing everything into a clean explanation. One thing we do know is that severe childhood trauma is well known to create protective gaps in memory, which explains the blurry timeline surrounding Mary between 1981 and 2003, rather than any malicious intent. While the physical evidence and inconsistencies remain unchanged, the surrounding narrative shifted from framing a murder mystery to mapping out a heartbreaking story of survival. What ultimately established Mary's authenticity wasn't one magical piece of evidence. It was the accumulation of evidence that finally put a life into those missing years. Biological evidence, independent witnesses, and perhaps most powerfully, a photograph of Teenage Mary taken after the night she was supposed to have died. Mary had spent 22 years living largely outside of the identity that she was born with. And when she finally returned to it, she found a police department and even members of her own family struggling to believe that she was who she said she was. She had disappeared once at 13, but in a strange way, she had to come back twice. First by being found alive in Arizona, and then by proving that the life she had lived in between really belonged to Mary Day. So now the official record states that Mary Day wasn't murdered. She was just a 13-year-old girl who escaped a house of horrors and managed to avoid being found by the system. Case closed, everyone can go home, but there's just one little grim detail that I can't really shake. When the police initially dug up the Huell's backyard, they found a little canvas shoe. Except we know now that it couldn't have belonged to 13-year-old Mary because it was a toddler's shoe. But the cadaver dogs still barked at the exact spot, and the forensic scientists still definitively proved that human remains had decomposed in that soil. On top of that, cadaver dogs had flagged a completely different military property that William Huell had lived at years later. So if the remains in the soil weren't Mary's, whose were they? Because think about the toxic culture of that household. When Mary's sister tried to ask what had happened to her sister, their mother Charlotte looked her right in the eye and casually shut her down with a chilling phrase: If she's dead, she's dead. Who says that to their child? It makes you wonder if William Huell had a history, maybe a quiet trail of undocumented victims everywhere his military career took him, and Charlotte knew it. If she was already covering for a predator, her complete silence suddenly makes perfect sense. Maybe she didn't report Mary missing because she probably assumed that William had killed her. And when the cadaver dog started barking decades later, Charlotte didn't care whose body was actually under the house. She just wanted the police to stop digging. And if you want a piece of family lore that drives this secret killer theory completely over the edge, look no further than a bizarre road trip the family took to New York in 1982. Mary's sister Kathy later recalled William suddenly pulling the car over in the middle of a barren stretch of the Utah desert. He opened the door, pointedly told Kathy to look forward, and went around to the trunk. From the back of the car, he dragged out a large, tightly wrapped oriental rug. Kathy watched him march out into the hot desert sand with it, only for him to return a while later covered in dirt and entirely minus the rug. They never spoke of it again. Now, normal people don't go hiking into the salt flats to throw out their old home decor. And when you couple that desert road trip with a yard full of human decomposition and a toddler-sized sneaker, the puzzle pieces start looking incredibly dark. Now look, obviously, this is just a theory. It's a massive what-if about what might be an entirely different case. But honestly, given the sheer volume of secrets kept inside that house, this is my theory. And with a family history this dark, it's hard not to ask questions. We'll probably never know how human remains got into the backyards of those properties or who they belonged to. But as the book officially closes on Mary Day, those are the questions that keep me up at night. And on that deeply unsettling note, that's gonna do it for us today, folks. Thanks so much for listening to The Real Unreal. If you want to discuss the story more or check out photos, head over to the comments section of YouTube or social media and make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss our next episode. I'd love to hear what you guys have to say. And until next time, stay curious.