Welcome back to the Path. When Chili, I'm Robin, I'm Jules,
and I'm Ashley, let's jump right into this week's case. June twelfth,
nineteen sixty two, Worthington, Minnesota, twenty year old Marlous Gross gives birth
to a baby daughter named Mary Agnes, who is told by the hospital staff
of the child did not survive. Mary Agnes is given a funeral and buried
in a grave, but months later, Marla's is mailed a photograph of a
family holding a baby whom she believes as her daughter. After discovering a number
of suspicious discrepancies, Marla's petitions to have some bone fragments exhumed from Mary Agnes's
grave in nineteen ninety six, and DNA testing reveals that the remains do not
belong to her. Marla suspects that her child was stolen and sold in an
illegal black market adoption, but no one knows what actually happened to Mary Agnes.
After that, the Path went chilly. So today we're going to be
exploring one of the most bizarre mysteries we've ever recovered, the nineteen sixty two
disappearance of Mary Agnes Gross. Well, maybe we'll call this a possible disappearance.
The reason I've decided to revisit this one now is because five and a
half years ago, The Trail Went Cold released an episode about the disappearance of
Mary Agnes Moroney, a two year old girl who was abducted from her family
all the way back in nineteen thirty. Well, believe it or not,
he was recently announce that genetic genealogy had identified Mary Agnes as a woman who
died in Florida twenty years ago, so it looks like she lived her entire
life under a false identity without even realizing it. This set a new record
for the oldest case featured on The Trail Went Cold to be solved. But
it is not the only mystery I've ever covered involving a missing child named Mary
Agnes. Nearly three years ago, I released an episode of Mary Agnes Gross,
a newborn baby who supposedly died shortly after her mother gave birth to her.
But it's possible this many have been a completely fabricated cover story. The
story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries as a lost love segment, which generally aren't
the subject of Trail Went Cold or path went Chili episodes, but the circumstances
of this story are just so odd that will make an exception. After Mary
Agnes's death, she was buried in a grave at a local cemetery, which
was periodically visited by her mother, Marlus over the next three decades. But
things took a surprising turn when Marla suddenly showed up one day and saw a
headstone with the name Pamela ray Dickie over her daughter's burial plot it turned out
that Pamela Ray Dickey was a completely different deceased child who died shortly after being
born in the exact same hospital on the exact same day as Mary Agnes.
Marla started believing that some sort of cover up had been orchestrated by the hospital
and that her daughter might still be alive somewhere, so she managed to exume
mary Agnes's remains, and DNA testing would prove that they did not belong to
her. The prevalent theory is that Mary Agnes was taken away from her mother
and sold to another family in a black market adoption, prompting the hospital to
give Marlas the false impression that her child was dead. But if that's not
what happened. Then this whole mystery might be the result of a disastrous series
of mistakes and clerical errors. Either way, after hearing what happened in the
Mary Agnes Maroni case, I do believe there's a decent possible the Merry Agnes
Gross might still be alive somewhere today under a different identity. While this story
is quite a jigsaw puzzle, we're at least going to make an attempt to
put the pieces together on today's episode. This case, I want to say,
sounds crazy, like how could this happen? Except this is a fascinating
topic that has always interested me. I used to live in Missouri, as
you guys know, and I know there was a hospital there. The name
of the hospital was Homer G. Phillips, And in the nineteen fifties and
sixties there were several, several several cases of babies being taken away from low
income black or single mothers and being told that they died during childbirth right and
the baby no longer survived, and then the mothers were simply sent home with
nothing. They weren't given remains or anything. I know that there was a
group of black women about I think eighteen or twenty women that came forward and
said in that timeframe, this same hospital came in my room, told me
my child was dead and told me to go home. And now we're finding
out that these children exist around the country that were given away, adopted,
sold on these black markets because the hospital people, the nurses, they were
part of these schemes where they would not value a human life in that mother
or child connection and say, look, the child would be better off,
or I want the money, or these kinds of things. And so,
as crazy as it sounds, I don't think it was that. I mean,
it's abnormal, but I think it happened more than we'd like to think.
Well, I'm glad you confirmed that, because I wondered when I was
thinking about the possibility that they were holding this black market adoption scam and stealing
babies from their mothers after they were born, I wondered if that sort of
thing happened a lot during this time period. And here you are mentioning Missouri
during the nineteen fifties, which is not far off from Minnesota in nineteen sixty
two. So that only makes this theory that Mary Agnes might have been taken
from her mother all the more plausible. I know they did the same thing
in Ireland with those mother and baby homes. Do you either of you know
anything about those? Oh no, I've never heard about the ones in Ireland.
I know in Chicago. I think there's another famous hospital that was known
for these kind of schemes too. What happened in Ireland, well, basically
they were Catholic hospitals where unwed mothers would go and they would basically take their
kids away, just like what you described at what was the name of the
hospital again, it was Philip G. Homer, Philip G. Homers,
the Homer not vice versa Homer G. Phillips Hospital in Missouri, except in
the place of nurses, it was nuns. And so they were doing some
pretty unscrupulous things, not giving these young mothers the opportunity to raise their children,
and just like you said, not valuing that mother child connection. Instead,
they were giving them a way to like quote unquote good families where it
was like a married unit and either they weren't able to conceive a child naturally
or they wanted another child. And it's unclear in all cases if you know
money was exchanged or if it was just like this is a more respectable situation,
because I think there there was even more of a stigma associated with an
unwed mother raising a child in a predominantly Catholic country. Our story begins in
Minnesota in nineteen sixty two, and one of our central figures is twenty year
old Marlas Gross, who was on the verge of giving birth to her first
child. Marlus was married to the child's father, Layton Gross, but when
she was seven months pregnant, she decided to separate from her husband and move
in with her mother, Clara's are off in the small town of Bigelow.
Even though her marriage has come to an end, Marlus is still planning to
raise her child as a single mother, and if the baby turns out to
be a girl, she will be named Mary Agnes. On June twelfth,
Marlus went into labor and traveled to the nearby town of Worthington in order to
give birth in Worthington Regional Hospital. She was put under a heavy anesthesia for
the delivery and would later recall having vague images of seeing her newborn baby we
move around her little feet while being examined by her pediatrician, doctor John Stamb.
Marlas soon fell asleep, and when she woke up, doctor Stamb appeared
at her bedside and told her she'd given birth to a daughter, Mary Agnes,
but he also had some terrible news. The child was now dead.
According to doctor Stamb, mary Agnes had lived for an hour after her birth
before she passed away, though he would not provide any details about her exact
cause of death. Shortly thereafter, Marlus was wheeled out of the delivery room
into the hallway and wound up passing by a bassinette, which she believed contained
Mary Agnes's body. When Marlus begged to see her, the staff reluctantly let
her take a look for around ten to fifteen seconds. Marlus would later say
that Mary Agnes looked like she was sound asleep and did not appear to be
dead, as her skin did not have the purple color that stillborn babies normally
have. Regardless, this would turn out to be the only time and Marlis
was allowed to see her daughter, and the hospital would not allow her to
take any photographs of Mary Agnes's body. Marlis would later ask fl Shade,
the doctor who delivered Mary Agnes, if an autopsy could be performed in order
to get a better idea of how she died. Shade told her that it
was too late to do this because the funeral home had already picked up Mary
Agnes's body and embombed it. So this is what's really bizarre about this case,
is that they're actually allowing her to go retrieve a body. So is
there's another family that's also at somehow losing access to their child and or are
maybe given her baby instead of their deceased child. So this one's even more
bizarre than the ones where they say, listen, you're kind of an unfit
mom and there's a better moral circumstance, or we're going to get money for
your child. Here it sounds like Mary Agnes. It's like either they made
those decisions and said this deceased baby is going to be given to Marlous right
or and they knew knowing like did it or they switched them up. Is
that also a possibility. It is a possibility. It's possible that like while
Marlos was going down the hallway, she just happened to see them wheeling Mary
Agnes out of there, and once she pointed out, they were like,
okay, we should let her see her child, but only for a few
seconds, so that she doesn't really notice anything is wrong. Because even though
she got to see her body for a brief period of time, this really
wasn't standard practice for people who have given birth to stillborn babies, because a
lot of the time they'll still let you hold the body and spend a little
bit of time with the child before they take it away from you, whereas
and they do allow you to take photographs, whereas here they only gave her
ten to fifteen seconds, which was the bare minimum, which is one of
the reasons why she got suspicious. But if Mary Agnes died an hour after,
she's technically not stillborn. Correct, yeah, not stillborn yet. But
I find it curious that they only let her take a look at the body
for like a few seconds, because if that baby was alive and its chest
was moving, it wouldn't take her long to realize, Hey, that's my
baby, and my baby's alive. Why did you say that she was deceased?
So it seems like they would have some skin in the game in order
to be like, okay, quick, peek and then we wheel the baby
away, so she's none the wiser. I mean now it's a lot more
sensitive in the fact that like they allow the pictures to be taken and people
to process that grief. Like I can't imagine what it would be like for
a mother, Like Ash, you're a mother, what would have it felt
like for you in a situation where you would have given birth to Reagan and
then you know, you wake up and they're like, sorry, your baby
is passed, and no, you may not take any photos with her,
and you really can't see her only by chance when you're wheeled by in the
hallway. Oh, I can't imagine. I mean for me, it's like
the moment you see a plus sign on a pregnancy test. It's the love
and the energy that like, look, we have a baby on the way,
and so like even with miscarriages, I didn't I've never been in the
horrible nightmare of having to hold a child you birth and they're not alive anymore,
and or being told her not alive anymore. I've had four miscarriages,
and I know that that is hell on earth, where you know you're pregnant
and then you don't get to meet that baby. So I can't imagine carrying
a baby to full term, having them. I just remember the moment that
I had Reagan and held her against my chest, like my world was radically
changed, and then to be told an hour later she wasn't there. I
mean, it's the unthinkable. I can't even start to putt into words how
I would never know how that would make me feel, because it's such an
awful thing to think about. Was she alone in the delivery room or was
her mother Clara there as well? Sounds like she was alone, Like I
haven't heard any clarification about Clara being at the hospital, which I would think
she would be because she was living with her at the time, But Clara
has never confirmed that she was around when any of these strange events took place.
But she very well may have been alone. I know that they didn't
used to allow people in all the time, so that's a newer on stept
up allowing family members in the delivery room. A lot of like if you
talk to our grandparents or our parents, you'll have a lot of family are
like, yeah, we weren't allowed back there. It just seems like such
a traumatic thing to go through, to be put under and to have your
baby be gone, and to go through all that all on your own and
to just feel like you at that point would be incapable of processing everything and
you just be collapsing like inside of yourself because just the amount of grief and
trauma associated with a situation such as that, and it just seems so incomprehensible.
So to not have somebody to hold your hand at that time, it's
just so heartbreaking. So Mary Agnes's funeral would be held at the Benson funeral
Home the following day, but Marlas was unable to attend since she was still
recovering in the hospital. Her mother, Clara and Marlas's best friend, Judy
Bogus, wound up going to the funeral home instead and viewed Mary Agnes's body
in her casket. Oddly, Judy would describe the child she sigh, having
sparse, light colored hair, but when Marla saw Mary Agnes in the basin
at the previous day, she remembered her having a full head of dark brown
hair. Marlas had also noticed Mark saw Mary Agnes's forehead from the doctor having
used forceps during the delivery, but Judy claimed that the child in the casket
did not have these marks. The funeral director also told Clara that she was
not allowed to take any photographs of Mary Agnes's body, though she was able
to take a few pictures of the closed casket right before it was buried in
a grave at Saint Mary's Cemetery. When Mary Agnes was laid to rest,
Clara claimed she saw another family standing near the grave site who her crying and
seemed very emotional about the situation, but she did not recognize them. Oh
my god. Okay, so we know for a fact that there was another
family involved in this situation, because there's possibly two babies. So if we're
burying someone who is not Mary Agnes, it's very possible then that another family
is knowledgeable that their child died at birth or was born as a stillborn baby.
And and if they're grieving the burial and the death of this child,
and then they're gonna say, but the consolation is that we paid for or
convinced the hospital to allow us to raise this baby in our care who happens
to be this other woman's child. Like that's even more depraved than like a
mix up at the hospital or a nurse making a decision to sell the baby
on the black market. It's like this two families come in. One family
has a tragedy happen, and they go, hey, we've got this single
mom. Don't worry, you can have her baby. One week later,
Marlis was finally released from the hospital and went to the cemetery to visit her
daughter's gravesite for the first time. At this point, the burial plot was
nothing more than amount of dirt, but over the course of the next next
year, Marlus gradually saved up enough money to purchase a headstone with the name
Mary Agnes Gross on it. Things took an odd turn three months after Mary
Agnes's death, when Marlas was mailed an envelope containing a photograph. There was
no note or return address, but the photo featured what appeared to be a
family consisting of a father, mother, two older children, and a newborn
baby. When Marlas took a look at the baby's face, she thought it
bore a striking resemblance to her ex husband. She started wondering if the child
might be Mary Agnes, who was still alive somewhere, but neither Marla's,
her mother, nor anyone else they knew recognized the family. There would be
another strange occurrence the following year, when Marlas visited Saint Mary's cemetery and discovered
that the headstone she purchased for Mary Agnes had been moved. Instead of resting
directly on top of the burial plot, the headstone had inexplicably been shifted a
few feet to the side. But in spite of these odd events, Marless
would leave the area and move on with her life. She eventually got remarried
and had three sons, and while her second marriage also ended in divorce,
she would permanently settle in Soou Fall, South Dakota, under the name Marless
Thomas in order to raise your boys. How stressful you're sitting there trying to
process the grief of your baby. You're also divorced and young, and there's
been a lot of stress and trauma in her life. And here she is
at this gravestone grieving, and she goes weird, like the gravestone's been moved,
which has its own to me emotions attached to it, right, Like
that is the piece, that's the fixture that says, hey, my loved
one is buried here. To have it moved, surely there was some kind
of trauma associated with that, and it is kind of like, well,
I mean, it's not a massive problem. So she's saying, listen,
it is what it is, and she has to move on with her life,
like, I'm incredibly grateful she got a second opportunity at love, even
though it didn't divorce, but she got three awesome humans out of that.
So she got her rainbow babies and was able to kind of move forward with
her life, but always, you know, with the thought of Mary Agnes
in the back of her head, like what happened. But to put that
picture on top of it, guys, like, imagine getting that picture of
a family you don't know at your baby's grave site. How distirming would that
be? Indigo, is that actually my baby they're holding. The photo didn't
show them at the grave site. It was just a random family. And
that was the thing about it is that it was sent to her with no
context at all, Like they didn't specifically say, this is Mary Ages with
her new family. But that was the implication because why else would someone just
send like a random photograph of a family to her. So it almost seems
like someone had inside knowledge of something that was going on and just wanted to
send a message tomorrow list that I know what happened and your baby is still
out there somewhere. Oh well, they do meet the Dickey family like later
on life, and they're definitely not the family in the photograph. And the
Dickey family it sounds like they're completely innocent. They didn't have any involvement in
what happened to Mary Agnes. They went through a tragedy themselves, but I
don't see any indication that the Dickey family had any knowledge of what was going
on back then. Well, thank god, and I'm grateful that was at
the gravestone. I thought you said the families of the gravestone. I went,
geez, Louise, that's so disturbing. But even to get that picture
and to say that baby's a spinning image of my ex husband? Is that
my child? And it makes it really eerie that there's no context, there's
no return address, there's nothing. Is it someone from the hospital? Is
it someone who knows these families? Very very disturbing. It reminds me of
the Sauder children, where like the Saudery, it was like four or five
of them were thought to have burned up in that fire. And then later
there's a photo that's sent to the parents of two of the boys and Frankie
and I can't remember if the other one's name was, but either way,
it was like, WHOA looked exactly like what they would have looked like with
age progression, And there wasn't a lot of context. There was like a
couple different things written on it, and so there was. It just created
more questions than answers if they're alive, like why were they taken? And
all these sorts of other things. So I can only imagine what she was
experiencing when she got this picture and was like, WHOA, that baby sure
looks like my ex husband. Over the next three decades, Marlos would periodically
return to Minnesota and visit Saint Mary's cemetery in order to pay her respects to
Mary Agnes. However, things took a surprising turn during the summer of nineteen
ninety three when Marlos went to her daughter's grave site and discovered that an entirely
new headstone was there. While Mary Agnes's headstone was still located a few feet
away, her actual burial plot now had a headstone resting on top of it
with the name Pamela Ray Dickey. To make things even stranger, it also
contained the exact same date as Mary Agnes's death, June the twelfth, nineteen
sixty two. When Marla spoke to the cemetery caretaker about this, she was
told that the headstone had originally been placed there in nineteen eighty nine. Records
showed that a Pamela Ray Dickey was buried in that plot, but there was
nothing on file for Mary Agnes Gross. In fact, the caretaker even admitted
that he always wondered why Mary Agnes's headstone was placed at that spot to begin
with, since as far as he knew, no one else besides Pamela Ray
Dickey was buried there. What in the world, so she might not have
even been buried there. They might have quote prepared a baby's body for burial,
and then Mary Agnes was never buried. There was no body actually placed
in that grave. Well, it sounds like, you know how Clara said
that there was a family at this grave side who looked emotional. It seems
very likely that was the Dickey family burying Pamela Ray like having her funeral,
and while Clara was there, she was under the impression that this was Mary
Agnes's funeral, but her there's nothing buried in her plot. It just turns
out that we only have a record for a Pamela Ray Dickie, but nothing
about Mary Agnes. Gross, Oh my god. So they've showed up to
a funeral and we're told it was Mary Agnes and it's actually they're attending someone
else's. So the Dicky famis on, who are these people over there as
well? Who paid for this funeral? But who paid for it exactly?
I'm just so confused how this even happens. It's like I would assume that
she would be paying for the funeral. These things don't come for free.
And just another thing we talked about earlier, which I don't know at the
time what was standard, But the funeral home saying that she wasn't allowed to
take photos of the body doesn't seem a little strange because you're paying for these
services, so why would you not be able to take photos of your child?
Oh yeah, like that's standard practice. Like why didn't they going to
step in and say you can't take photos of your deceased loved one? Like
why did they have the right to say that? So it's just another red
flag showing that they're just trying to cover something up. When Marlas contacted the
Worthington Police Department, she was told there was nothing they could do, so
this compelled her to start doing her own investigative work. Even though the cemetery
did not have any records for Mary Agnes, Marlus paid a visit to Benson
Funeral Home and she did find a record there which listed Mary Agnes Gross's burial
as taking place at four pm on June thirteenth, nineteen sixty two. However,
there was no actual burial permit on file or any documentation about who actually
paid for the burial and Mary Agnes's casket. When Marlas checked records from Worthington
Regional Hospital, she uncovered some unsettling discrepancies. Mary Agnes's birth certificate listed her
time of birth at six twenty three pm, and her death certificate listed the
time of death at six thirty pm, even though Marlus requilled her pediatrician,
doctor John Stamm, telling her that the baby lift for an hour after being
born. Furthermore, the certificate contained a handwritten note from doctor Stam stating that
Mary Agnes died at six to twenty pm, three minutes before the time of
her birth. The death certificate also stated that Mary Agnes died of anoxia,
which is the absence of oxygen, and it was signed by doctor John Stam
on June fourteenth, two days after her death. While some hospital records showed
that Mary Agnes never even got a chance to take a breath after she was
born, other records also showed that fl Shade, the doctor who delivered her,
gave her an Apgar score of four out of ten. In case you're
not aware of what that is, Apgar is an acronym for appearance, pulse,
grimace, activity, and respiration. Whenever a baby is born, a
doctor will give them a rating in each of these five categories on a scale
of zero to two. Well, doctor Shade gave Mary Agnes a zero and
three of the categories. He gave her a rating of two for her skin
color and heart rate, even though it's common for newborns to have a pale
skin color and a week or absent heartbeat and that they're unable to breathe.
By the time these discoveries were made, doctor Shade had already passed away,
and doctor Stam claimed that since so much time had passed, he had very
little recollection of these events, but he did say. All I can tell
you is that I worked with honest guys. If I certified a baby was
dead, that would be on my honor. The times alone really bothered me.
You have someone writing in handwriting that the baby was dead three minutes before
the birth was even recorded at six twenty three, right, So they're saying
she was dead at six twenty. Yet she remembers seeing her baby move.
She also remembers being told that the baby died an hour after her birth.
And yet even when you look at the death certificate that her death says that
she died at six thirty, So not a single fact lines up. And
then you add the Apgar scores and things like that, where they don't indicate
a deceased child, right or somebody who's on the verge of death. So
I'm very confused as to how they could document these things in such a sloppy
manner and expect no one to look into it and say, like, what
happened the doctor saying, listen, everyone was honest. I'm honest, So
if I wrote that, it must have been that way, you can't make
sense of the facts. You guys just told me. They probably figured no
one would ever look into this. They figured that Marlist would probably just accept
that her baby died and moved on and never dreamed that she would look at
the records thirty years after the fact. But even if there wasn't an intentional
cover up going on, that really doesn't bode well for the hospital because this
is very sloppy record keeping. The fact that they would have all these conflicting
times of death un lists Mary Agnes's death before the time of her actual birth,
so it really is not a good sign. And I can understand why
they would suspect that something shady was going on. I mean, after all,
one of the doctors was named doctor Shade, so that didn't make sense.
Yeah, it just seems so strange. Maybe they thought that she was
this single mother without any resources and she wouldn't continue to look into it,
and if she did, they would be able to discredit her as being like
a quote hysterical woman, because that was a common diagnosis at the time.
And I think they probably just thought, Okay, she'll just move on with
her life. And I just keep going back to that like three minutes before
she was born, and then doctors Shade like doing the most being like if
I did if I certified a baby's deceased, it's on my honor. So
I feel like he's trying to like walk it back and make it look like
he's this really honorable guy. And I'm not saying that he wasn't a good
doctor, but it certainly appears that the mistakes were made by doctor Shade and
doctor stam Well. Believe it or not, it turned out that in an
addition to Mary Agnes, two other female infants were born at Worthington Regional Hospital
on June the twelfth, nineteen sixty two, and wound up passing away shortly
thereafter. One of the babies was named Julie, who belonged to a couple
named Charles and Betty Hurrah. But unlike Marlus, they claimed that the hospital
let them spend a decent amount of time with their child's body following your death,
and they were allowed to take photographs of Julie inside her casket and the
other deceased infants well. She happened to be Pamela Ray Dickey, the same
name on the headstone above Mary Agnes's burial plot. Marla's managed to get in
touch with Pamela Ray's mother, Margaret Dickey, who confirmed that she gave birth
to her daughter a few hours before Mary Agnes was born, but lost the
child the following morning due to lung failure. Margaret described Pamela Ray as having
fuzzy, light colored hair, and she seemed to match the description of the
child that Marlus's friend Judy Vogis, had seen in Mary Agnes's casket at the
funeral home. I am floord. I am going back to that family who
is basically having their own funeral for their baby, the Dickey family, while
Marlas and everybody else is going, Okay, we thought this was for Mary
Agnes. But when you look at this, there were three deaths in that
hospital all that night, which is also very odd, supposedly three deaths.
You know, infant mortality rates they've gone down significantly, but I can't imagine
three babies born at the same hospital dying that night, Like I wonder,
that seems incredibly high. Yeah, I mean, I know that the death
of Julie Harrid and Pamela Ray Dickie do seem legitimate, but the idea that
three of them could all die in the same day in a fairly small town
Worthington, Minnesota. Like this isn't a large, busy metropolitan hospital, Like
why are the odds that like three children would die on the same night.
It really doesn't paint the hospital on a flattering light that you could have such
a high infant mortality rate. And from a statistical point of view, if
you were going to steal a baby from somebody and pass it off as the
baby was either still born or died an hour after they were born, it
just seems like an odd night to choose it if you have two other deaths,
because you think if there was any kind of investigation into it, it
would look really bad on the hospital staff for sure. And what's what's crazy
is it? Like originally I didn't know that the poor Dickey family was having
a legitimate funeral for their baby who is deceased. Like they're really showing up,
but it sounds like at the at the at the funeral home, they're
showing Pamela's body to them as if it is Mary agnes Is and they're saying
like basically, we're you know, there's there's two funerals we're gonna have.
We're gonna convince two families that this one baby is who we're bearing for both
families. It's it's disgusting. So I'm not sure like where all of this
starts and goes wrong, but it sounds like throughout the process there's multiple people
who are creating this narrative for this family. I wonder if they double dipped,
like the funeral home, if they made both families pay for the casket
and both families pay for the funeral. Yeah, it sounds like the funeral
home was kind of shady in its own So it feels like if there's a
conspiracy here, that the hospital and the funeral home had to be in on
it. But here's where things get really strange. Remember how Marlas's mother,
Clara, claimed that she saw an emotional family she didn't recognize that Mary Agnes's
grave site when she was laid to rest. While even though Margaret Dickey was
not well enough to leave the hospital to attend Pamela Ray's funeral, she confirmed
that her husband, father, and four other daughters were at Saint Mary's cemetery
that day in order to burry Pamela Ray in the grave. Furthermore, when
Marla showed Margaret the photograph Clara had taken of what she believed was Mary Agnes's
casket. Margaret recognized it and confirmed that her husband had bought that casket for
Pamela Ray's burial. So yes, on the surface, it seemed like,
without even realizing it, both Clara and the Dickey family had simultaneously attended the
exact same burial and were each under the impression that they were watching their own
child get laid to rest. If things weren't confusing enough, when Marlas looked
at Pamela Ray's funeral records, she found a card which stated that a nurse
from Worthington Regional Hospital had called them with information about pamela raised death. However,
Marlos also noticed that Mary Agnes's last name Gross had inexplicably been handwritten in
the brackets in the card's upper right hand corner. Unbelievable, So like someone
had scribbled, hey, don't forget, like this is Mary Agnes Gross as
well, and it's like, why would they be putting that name on a
Pamela Ray's card. Mason looked like a conspiracy, doesn't it? It does,
yeah, exactly, So Marlos asked Margaret Dickey if she would be willing
to exhume Pamela Rai's burial plot, but she declined. However, Margaret did
say that she would consent to Marlos excavating the ground beneath Mary Agnes's headstone a
few feet away as long as Pamela raised Gray wasn't disturbed. Marlos hired an
attorney and spent nearly two years in core petitioning for Mary Agnes's gravesite to be
dug up before she was finally granted permission in November of nineteen ninety six.
The round beneath Mary Agnes's headstone was excavated and some bone fragments making up nearly
fifty percent of a skeleton for an infant girl, were found. Before they
were exhumed. Some woodchips were also found, along with the apparent outline of
a disintegrated tiny casket in the clay. DNA testing was performed on one of
the leg bones and compared with the sample of Marlus's blood. The results show
no genetic connection between them, conclusively establishing that the remains of the deceased child
did not belong to Mary Agnes. Dear God, So there's a third baby
who's kind of caught up in this mix somebody had a deceased child who was
buried in this kind of makeshift casket here, but it's not Mary Agnes and
clearly Pamela's and her little casket right next to this makeshift grave site exactly.
And that's the weirdest part of this story is that even if there was no
conspiracy involved and this was just like a clerical era, a tragic mix up,
who to the remains of that child belonged to? Because it's not Mary
Agnes and it's not Pamela Ray, do we know who else? Well?
Like, how many other births were there that night? Like can trace down
the other families who also delivered at that hospital that evening? Well there was
the other one, the hair Rides, who gave birth to a child named
Julie who died as well shortly after birth. But I think you were able
to track down where she was buried and confirmed that that child was not her.
Margaret Dickey also consented DNA testing, which revealed no genetic connection between her
and the remains, ruling out the possibility that they belonged to Pamela Ray.
So who could this unidentified child have been? Well, that particular section of
Saint Mary's cemetery was known as Babyland because a number of deceased infants were buried
there. During her visits to Mary Agnes's grave during the nineteen sixties, Marlas
did remember seeing some headstones in that section, which were no longer around by
the time the grave site was exhumed in nineteen ninety six. According to the
cemetery caretaker, since records for Babyland were incomplete, the remains could have belonged
to an unidentified child who was buried at that spot long before Mary Agnes died.
In spite of these new revelations, Margaret would still not consent to exhuming
Pamela Ray's gravesite, stating she's laid there for thirty four years without being disturbed
and she's not going to be now. I don't blame her. I mean,
as a as a mom, that's all you can do when you're a
child passes away, is like, I want them safe, I want to
know where they're buried. I want to make sure that I did everything I
could to like create the most peaceful environment for her after her death. And
so, I mean, that would be a very difficult decision of saying okay,
do I emotionally go through to help this other family or do I keep
my family and myself at peace. I mean, I can't fault her there
by saying no, not now, we're not going to disturb our child's burial
spot. It's easy to judge, I think, unless you're in that situation
and be like, well, why wouldn't you just help those people out?
But I agree with you, Ash, I think in a situation like that,
you can't judge the Dickey family because it's so much trauma and to lose
a child. But then your only resolution is they're late in their final resting
place, never to be disturbed. So the idea of having to disturb that
body that's at rest is just so disruptive to their healing and to their journey.
So I can understand where they were coming from. I mean, from
Marlst's perspective, I'm sure she's thinking like, why won't you just do this
and help me out? And please just let me know definitively if this is
Mary Agnes. But I can understand how both sides will feel a certain type
of way. This was a terrible trauma as well for the Dickey family,
and here there are thirty four years after losing their child, being told that,
hey, you have a mystery going around associated with you, and there
might be the wrong child buried in your grave. And can you imagine though,
if they did zoom Pamela Ray and they found out that the remains did
not belong to her, and now they had no idea where Pamela Ray was,
that would be like huge trauma for them to like not know. So
maybe they're just feeling that if we found out that Pamela Ray was not in
that grave, then the shock would like we kill us. Yeah, I
mean, and I think you have to give them grace and say, I
mean, like the older I get, I've always been the person that's like,
yes, yes, if I can help you, yes, or if
I can take on your pain or if I can help you heal, yes,
But the older you get, or like the more trauma you go through,
it's like to preserve my family and my health and my kind of mental
space, Like sometimes I have to say no, and I have to say
my health and my mental stress, my grief is more important because it's what
saves me or what provides for my family. So like I can't give all
of me to everyone who needs me to do that. If that makes any
sense, well, there's nothing left of you. If you keep giving to
everybody else, you have enough people in your life who you have to consider
and who you have to give your love to that there will be nothing of
Ashley left. And I think probably the Dickey family felt the same way,
because I can't even imagine what it would feel like when you've basically you're at
piece. It's thirty four years later, and I'm sure it's still something that
they think about all the time. But to find out that you don't know
where your daughter is, if it isn't her remains, that would just open
that wound again. And people at this point had moved on with their lives,
so I can completely understand why they just said hard, stop no.
Marla suspected that after Mary Agnes was born, individuals from Worthington Regional Hospital conspired
to orchestrate some sort of cover up in order to take her child away and
take her debt. Marlas's theory was that the responsible parties were involved in some
sort of black market baby selling operation and illegally adopted Mary Agnes out to another
family, likely the same family featured in the photograph, which was anonymously mailed
to her months later. In April of nineteen ninety eight, Marla's year on
an episode of Unsaw Mysteries in order to share a story, hoping that Mary
Agnes might still be alive out there somewhere, completely unaware that she was living
under a false identity. But unfortunately, the segment never led to any conclusive
answers, and Marlus would pass away in August of twenty twelve at the age
of seventy. If Mary Agnes Gross is still alive at the time of this
recording, she would only be a few months away from turning sixty one years
old. However, the exact circumstances of what actually happened to her remain unknown.
So I guess you could say the path went chilly, you know.
I would normally say, yeah, the path is cold. But what's so
fascinating is that in this case, there's zero way from Mary Agnes Gross to
know that anything was out of the ordinary. If she was taken from the
hospital the day she was born, and she was given to a new family,
or she was raised by a different family, she would never have any
reason to think anything had happened to her. Even if eventually they talked about
you were adopted, we were blessed to get you on when you were born,
There's just no way for her to know except now in twenty twenty three,
just like you just talked about the other Mary Agnes Robin, that her
case was solved, Like we know this missing baby was living this full life
under this other identity DNA, and these genealogy websites would be one way that
Mary Agnes one day could go wait, who am I? But again,
imagine the trauma that would come with that, Like, imagine what would happen
when you were raised your whole life not knowing what happened, and all of
a sudden being sixty some odd years old and saying, wait, I did
this fun genealogy thing, and all of a sudden, I'm not related to
anyone. This is not the story that I was told. And what's wild,
guys, is that the family who would have taken her in may have
zero concept either that anything shady had happened. They could have been going through
an adoption agency that was, um, you know, a depraved organization who
said, listen, we're gonna get our children anyway we can we get the
money. I don't care who it hurts. So a family that raised her
as a happy, healthy child may have had zero concept that anything had gone
wrong either. So do you guys think that this is like an organized potentially
an organized adoption ring where they're taking money from people, or do you think
that it's more like what is the name of this hospital again, the Worthington
Hospital, Worthington Regional Hospital, right, or this one? Okay, I
thought you were bringing to the one that Ashley mentioned from before. Yeah,
this this hospital, Worthington Hospital. I mean, I don't know about the
types of people that worked there, but I'm just wondering if it's possible that
it could be like the mother and baby homes where it might not be as
as organized in that they're taking money from the individuals kind of setting up these
situations, or that it could be like what Ashley had said earlier on where
a family loses a child and they're like, hey, you know, we've
got a solution for you type of a thing where it's like there's no money
is exchanging hands, but they feel like they're making the morally correct decision to
put a baby into like a two parent household. That would make sense to
me because you when you think about how many people would have to be involved
in something like this, there wouldn't be much money in it for them because
even if they were paid, would have to be split up with a bunch
of different people. But if it's like a bunch of individuals who think we're
doing the morally right thing, then they'd be willing to do it without any
compensation. Or what about the idea that perhaps a nurse or a doctor there
wanted a child and they couldn't have a child, and so they decided,
hey, this is my chance, Like this is a unwed mother, this
is someone who doesn't quote deserve to raise a baby, and I want one.
That would make sense, and that would also explain if that photo draft
that Marlos received was legitimate of the family with the baby, that it would
have to be someone who had inside knowledge, and that would make sense if
it was like another family where it was a nurse or a hospital employee,
you couldn't have a child, and that's how they were able to obtain a
photograph of them. And given the time period too, I don't think it
would be too difficult to get your colleagues to help cover that up, because
the baby would be going to like a quote loving home with two parents who
could provide for the baby. So I have to admit that, even though
I pretty much consider myself to be an Unsolved Mysteries encyclopedia, this is one
case which took me completely off guard when it was uploaded onto the show's official
film right channel on Amazon Prime several years ago. I just figured it was
going to be your standard lost love story about a mother trying to reunite with
a child who was separated from her a long time ago. But I didn't
expect this to become such a bizarre, intriguing mystery. I mean, the
whole thing could very well be the result of a colossal screw up, and
Mary Agnes's remains might still be buried somewhere in Saint Mary's Cemetery in an unmarked
spot. But it's also possible that there was some sort of conspiracy to take
Mary Agnes from her birth mother and illegally adopt her out to another family.
A good chunk of the Lost Love's cases featured on Unsolved Mysteries wound up being
solved, but I think this one was at a tremendous disadvantage because there were
no photographs available of Mary Agnes. On numerous occasions, these cases got solved
because the right person just happened to be watching the Unsolved Mystery segment on television
and were shocked to see an old photograph of someone they recognized on screen.
Sometimes it was even the person in the photo recognizing themselves, but that just
wasn't an option in this particular case, because Mary Agnes's family was specifically forbid
from taking pictures of her body after she died. The keen in this mystery
probably would have been the photo without Marlous received of the unidentified family holding the
baby resembling Mary Agnes, but unfortunately she lost it a long time ago.
While the show did produce a reenactment to Marlo's receiving the photo, the picture
they used during the filming of the scene was not the real one. I
can't help but think that if the family portrait had been displayed on national television,
somebody might recognize them. You might be wondering how Marlos could lose something
so potentially important That in the years following Mary Agis's death, she got remarried
and had three more kids and moved around quite a lot as she spent time
living in Washington, California, and South Dakota. So I can see how
that photo might go missing during one of those moves. Well, poor Marlas.
Poor Marlas. If she's anything like me, I put quote important things
in quote special places and then I can never ever remember where they are,
and so I feel empathy for her there because it's like I have had certain
things and I'm like, oh my god, I will never lose this,
and then I can't, for the life of me find it. I mean,
it's simple to do. It is one of those things where like it's
so critical, how could she lose it? Well, the same way,
I have never been able to find a Social Security card in my life,
for birth certificates or anything else because I never remember where my special hiding places
are. I hid a very expensive pair of diamond earrings somewhere for safekeeping,
and luckily my husband doesn't listen to this, so he's not gonna find out.
But I don't know where the life of me where they are. I
like torn everywhere apart, and I know that I put them somewhere because I
thought it would be quote safe so I can definitely relate to Marla's there and
you ash because I put things in places where it seems like such a good
idea at the time, but I can never remember where I've hidden it.
So our next podcast episode is going to be about the missing diamond earrings,
right, Yeah, information out there and maybe solve this guy. I want
her husband where those beautiful diamonds I got you? And she's like, not
tonight, they're too expensive. I don't want to lose them. I mean
it all fairness. I really like wearing bracelets, but like I have lots
of necklaces and earrings, so I never really wear I'm not a huge jewelry
person, so they've usually sit in a box. So luckily I can get
away. That's right now. Unsolved Mysteries also aired a couple of lost Love
stories about black market operations where babies were stolen from their parents after they were
born and adopted out to other families for a prophet. The most infamous example
is probably Georgia Tan, who ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society. She was
believed to have stolen and adopted out over five thousand children over the course of
twenty five years. Before she died of cancer in nineteen fifty. The show
also produced a segment about some newborn children who were stolen by a nurse named
Ethel Nation, who worked in San Antonio, Texas during the nineteen fifties and
sixties, and would often coerce single mothers into giving up their babies so she
could sell them on the black market to couples who were unable to have children
of their own. And even though Robin mentioned that the aforementioned Mary Agnes Maroney
case was recently solved, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about her
abduction. We do know she was taken from her family by a woman who
claims she was representing a social worker. It's possible she wanted a child of
her own and decided to raise Mary Agnes as her own daughter. But she
also might have been involved in a black market adoption ring and sold Mary Agnes
to another family. Sadly, these types of operations involving stolen children were not
uncommon during the first half of the twentieth century. Absolutely insane, and I
do think a lot of it goes back to that moral compass right and like
our skewed views of race and ses and two parent households and things like that,
because even religiosity in a way, like if it's a Jewish family and
they think they should be raised in a Christian family, right, you did
have hospitals that were making those decisions, adoption agencies that were taking children again
family's wills or conning people into giving up their children. It is devastating.
One of the most horrific things I think you could do to somebody. And
I'd sort of throw in a wrestling tie in. But Ric Flair, the
very famous professional wrestler, is also a Georgia tan baby because she had him
taken from his biological mother and adopted him out to a rich, well off
family who had no idea that she was running this illegal operation. She thought
it was legit. So Rick Flair grew up in this nice family, found
out years later that he'd been stolen from his birth mother, and to this
day he's never reunited with her. So it can happen anyone, are you
so good? Yeah, So it's like pretty crazy that like someone who was
one of these children who was stolen from his birth mother grew up to be
one of the most famous professional wrestlers of all time. Wow, I had
no idea, no me neither. And one of the things that's really sad
is that this is such a difficult topic to talk about because adoption was also
one of those things that was kind of taboo back then, like you didn't
want people to know that you couldn't have your own child unless you were doing
it just some of the goodness of your heart. Like families that were struggling
with fertility. It was this kind of very shameful thing, like why can't
we have a baby? We want a baby so badly, And so adoption
wasn't talked about a lot. You didn't have parents really celebrating with children in
the sixties, like you're an adopted child, like we do now right,
like I picked you, You're that special. We didn't talk about adoption.
That was something that was more of a kind of hush hush thing. And
so that complicates these issues so much that conversations that could have been had that
probably should have been had, and it would have created more healthy family dynamics
and understanding. Even adoption in general was kind of this shadowy idea back in
the fifties and sixties. Well, I think burying the truth was sort of
tied to the shame of the parents, and I think particularly the shame of
the woman, because oftentimes fertility issues, even though a lot of times it
would be because men were you know, there's sperm can wasn't high enough,
the woman would be blamed. The woman would be blamed by you know,
their in laws as well and society as a whole. So to be able
to have an open conversation like today, that people can talk about their infertility
issues, as difficult as it still is, that just wasn't the case then.
So I totally agree with you Ash. I think that people in those
situations would often just be like, yeah, we had a baby, and
then people would be like, kind of don't ask, don't tell any questions
about it, and then they bury the truth and they don't tell that child
ever any of the circumstances because they then feel shameful about their situation and how
they were unable to conceive on their own. And then by the time they've
waited too long, they feel like, hey, it's been X amount of
years. My mom, like her mom, basically had lied to her about
who her father was until my mom was forty years old. She found out
who she thought was her father was not her father, and he was an
awful, awful man, let me tell you. So she was happy to
find out that he wasn't her biological father, but it was because of my
nana's shame, the shame that she had sex at a time when she wasn't
married, and that was a huge thing. And so even in her years
up to when she died, trying to get accurate information out of her about
that and about who her birth father was was nearly impossible because her shame superseded
my mom's need at her right to know about her birth father, even just
for health or genetic reasons. So that's something that my mom is still grappling
with today. So I can understand from that perspective what these families went through
and why they kept it a secret, and why we're so much luckier now
that these things were being talked about more openly. Oh yeah, that type
of scenario was the basis of so many lost love segments and unsolved mysteries.
People finding out, like a lot of adults finding out when they got older
that the person they thought was their parents was not actually their parents. So
they were trying to track them down so, but these stories we're just so
common way back in the first half of the twentieth century. So I think
that about brings an end to Part one. Join us next week as we
present part two of our series on the disappearance of Mary Agnus Gross Robin,
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