48 Hours - What Ever Happened to Mary Day? - Encore

Episode Date: January 10, 2021

A 13-year-old girl vanishes in 1981. Detectives believe she was murdered. Years later, a woman appears and claims to be the missing girl. Is she an impostor? "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher reports. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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ConstantContact.ca 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 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, you know, I was like, what happened with Mary, you know? And she was like, shh, don't say anything.

We're not allowed to talk about Mary. When I was 18, I was like, I can, you know, 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. 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. I started believing she was murdered. The dogs went into the backyard. We just had an indication from the cadaver dogs that there were human remains there. And our guys started digging, and my heart was pounding. We were looking for a little girl's body 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. 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, Captain, he says, you sitting down? He said, 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. Thanks for watching! ALEKSANDRA Seaside, California, Detective Joe Bertina 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 waves 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 Sircone.

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. 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, Sherry Calgaro, Mary's sister, who finally got authorities on the case. I wanted to know what happened to my sister Mary. Sherry 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 their 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, 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. At the time Mary disappeared, Hul was assigned to Fort Ord on the California coast north of Monterey. They were living in Seaside, which is 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, 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 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 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. Martina 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 Martina, it's March 3rd, 2003. Roll camera. Bertina went to the Seaside home, Mary's last known whereabouts. He brought Kathy with him. Pictures used to be there of all of us. him. 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 it hurts Mary was at home along with Kathy when

the rest of family went out they had 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 hit now. And the fight was back here. I can hear her yelling. There's nothing we can do.

He hit her? He hit her? Yeah. 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. I'm not supposed to come over this way. 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. 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 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing.

The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military, and when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The best idea yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories

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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 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 you know 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. 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 hooks and chains, do you?

Oh, absolutely not. 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, you know, if I had did this and this and this... Her body language and then her sinking down in her chair

and saying words to the effect of, you know, sometimes you do things in your past and it comes back. I knew that there was something there. When was the last time you heard from Mary? Eighty-one. The last time you heard from Mary? Eighty-one. 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. It was gone, grabbing it. It was gone. How many times did she run away you know all these questions i can't answer okay when you was back in california did you guys take any kind of steps to find her we should have 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 a 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 Bertina 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, called 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, 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, 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. And I said, could it have been the throat? 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 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, okay, William, I believe you. You didn't kill her, but what about that demon inside of you? Could that demon have killed Mary?

And 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 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 gonna 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. He told me, hey, Captain, he says, you sitting down? I said, what happened? He said, no, he says, I'm just going to let you know that a 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's 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 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 Sircone, 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 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. When Detective Bertina 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 Bertina she had some awful memories. Did you want to talk about what happened that last night? It hurt. I'm sure it does. But what happened that last night? I'm so confused anymore. But what happened that last night? Is that when you started bleeding? I hit him to the coffee table. I think I have to laugh now. Maybe that's why I can put all the pieces together for 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 would you be able to prove who the hell I was? DNA. Oh, so sometimes they're alive, 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. Sherry 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 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. Phoenix Mary also said she never used her real name.

It's a name she said she made up. I did notice that she had magazines in the name of Monica Devereaux. Sherry'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.

saying it's not her. My God. 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 Bertina. 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 ballgame. Still, the case remained closed. But then in 2008, Steve Sircone, 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. 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 Hul and his family lived in this house In 2008, cadaver dogs alerted near a second home where the Hools 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. 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, which her body moved twice. Although the case had been closed, Sir Cohn 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, threw away her clothes, and that was it. Most damning, he says, are William'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 Hull. You just admitted Tanumat to a homicide and were letting him go. Clark also focused on that shoe detectives found. Another detective asked Kathy about it. I first asked, did you guys ever wear canvas tennis shoes?

And Kathy said, Keds? And she said, yes. And they 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, 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 far-fetched. 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 Goulds 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 Hulls knew that police were investigating Mary's disappearance, and they asked her secret sister to assume her identity. Sir Cone says the Hulls 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 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 accrued interest, that inheritance was now worth roughly $60,000. Sherry 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 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. It's a pronounced southern accent. Can I go to one place next ask if you don't mind? Go ahead, Mary. If you would have found my body,

how were you gonna 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. 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. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. The scary cult classic was set in the Chicago housing project. It was about this

supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. Candyman. Candyman? Now, we all know chanting a name won't make a killer magically appear. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. We're going to talk to the people who were there, and we're also going to uncover the larger story. My architect was shocked when he saw how this was created. Literally shocked. And we'll look at what the story tells us about injustice in America. If you really believed in tough on crime, then

you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill our women. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder. Early and ad-free on Wondery Plus and the Wondery app. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand,

lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still avert it. It just happens to all of them. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn.

When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. In 2017, Sherry 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 Sherry to visit Phoenix Mary in Missouri,

where she'd 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 hope was failing, the new acting chief of Seaside Police was determined to solve the case once and for all. Chief of Seaside Police was determined to solve the case once and for all. Judy Velaz 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. The laws tracked down Maury Kimmel. I got her when she was 15.

Very naive and innocent about her, almost like childlike. At the time, Maury 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 life. 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. Velaz 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 laws chalks up 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 Bertina saying she'd been lying about who she was, Velaz 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 Velaz came up with the smoking gun. One of Maury'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.

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 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 Velaz 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 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. 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. Sherry is finally at peace. It was all of a sudden it felt like I had a weight lifted off of my shoulders. It was just like, it's done, this is her. And that's pretty much the end of that story.

It's not that simple for Mark Clark. After 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 Poole murdered Mary Louise Day? Based on the evidence I've found, yes. As for Steve Sircone... 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. They were positive. Positive. Positive. They said, you know, our dogs don't lie. They don't lie.

Who was buried in those grave sites? Mary Day died nine days after Judy Velaz interviewed her. There was no funeral. Do you believe that the woman claiming to be Mary Day was really her? Hear more about investigator Julie Velaz's meeting with Mary at 48hours.com. An aspiring towboat captain. A mysterious death. He's lying across the bathroom in the dome and he's got blood everywhere. His girlfriend and friends say they found him. Police ruled out foul play. A mysterious death.

His girlfriend and friends say they found it. Police ruled out foul play, but there are troubling clues. It's a stage scene. They let somebody get away with murder. 48 Hours, next on CBS. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty. Her specialty? Representing some of the city's

most infamous gangland criminals. However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own. She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld and she's informing on them all. I'm Marsha Clark,

host of the new podcast, Informants Lawyer X. In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I've seen some crazy cases, and this one belongs right at the top of the list. She was addicted to the game she had created. She just didn't know how to stop. Now, through dramatic interviews and access, I'll reveal the truth behind one of the world's most shocking legal scandals. Listen to Informant's Lawyer X exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And listen to more Exhibit C true crime shows early and ad-free right now.