Murder Victim or Runaway: What Really Happened to Mary Day, the “Girl Who Died Twice”

What Happened to Mary Day?

While he was supervising the Mary Day investigation, Cercone was appointed chief of police in Seaside, after which he put Det. Mark Clark in charge.

But Clark, no closer to confirming whether “Phoenix Mary,” as they took to calling her, really was the Mary, left the investigation in 2008.

Fast-forward to 2017, when Sherrie found out that the woman she still couldn’t believe was her sister was dying of cancer in Warsaw, Mo. She called Seaside’s acting chief of police Judy Veloz.

As Veloz, now retired, said in the ID show, she went out to Warsaw and sat down with Mary, who was in hospice, for 90 minutes.

She still “didn’t recall” the beating, Veloz said, and “didn’t know exactly when or how” she left the house in Seaside in 1981. But she said that she’d been taken in by “an older lady” named B.J. Ward in Salinas.

Mary died nine days after their interview, Veloz said.

She told 48 Hours in 2020 that she was “100 percent convinced” that the woman she spoke to was Mary Louise Day. “No question.”

Back in Seaside, Veloz said in the 2025 ID show, she reached out to B.J. Ward, and B.J.’s boyfriend said he thought he might have a picture of Mary in storage.

Looking at the picture a few weeks later, Veloz said, she recognized the missing teen.

She called it “a real piece of evidence that Mary was not killed in 1981,” noting that the picture had been taken in 1983. And so, Veloz said, she had “nothing to do but close the case again.”