Welcome back to the Path Went Chilly from part two of our series on the
unsolved disappearance of Mary Agnes Gross. Robin, do you want to catch everyone
up on what we talked about in our previous episode. Well, this is
definitely one of the weirdest disappearances we've ever covered, because Mary Agnes Gross supposedly
went missing almost immediately after she was born. Her mother, Marlus, was
a single mother. She decided to separate from her husband seven months into her
pregnancy, but still decide she was going to give birth to her daughter,
Mary Agnes and raise her anyway. She went under anesthesia, gave birth,
but then was told a few hours later that Mary Agnes had died a short
time later, but the hospital acted very suspiciously like they only let her see
her daughter's body for about ten to fifteen seconds. She was not allowed to
see any photographs, and they held the funeral for while Marlus was still in
the hospital. Marlus a couple months later after she was released, she received
a photograph of a family holding a baby, which she thought might have had
a resemblance to Mary Agnes, because it seemed to resemble her ex husband and
there was no logical reason why someone would send her this photograph without any context,
but regardless, she had Marla's buried at a cemetery and would constantly visit
her burial plot over the next three years. But then in nineteen ninety three,
Marla's got very suspicious when she saw the headstone for another deceased infront named
Pamela Ray Dickey over Mary Agnes's plot and found out that the cemetery had no
records for a Mary Agnes Gross, so she started doing her own investigating finally
got a court order to exhume her daughter's grave, and they did find some
skeletal remains in there, but DNA testing proved that they did not belong to
Mary Agnes. And it also turned out that to the child, Pamela Ray
Dickie, who was in the next burial plot, her mother had given birth
to her in the exact same hospital and as the exact same day that Mary
Agnes was born. But Pamela Ray also died and as far as her family
knew, they were having a funeral, they buried her body right next to
Mary Agnes's grave. But it appears that something went horribly wrong either. There
was a major clerical air or as Marlos believes, they decided to take Mary
Agnes from her faker death and decide to illegally adopt her out to another family
who may have been the family that she saw in the photographs she received.
But unfortunately Marlos passed away without receiving any answers about what happened to Mary Agnes,
and it's unclear if she might still be alive somewhere under a new identity.
So when we left So when we left off on our last episode,
we were discussing the possibility that Mary Agnes was taken from her mother and adopted
out as part of some black market baby selling operation. Sadly, these type
of operations were not on common during the first half of the twentieth century.
But I have to concede that no one has ever uncovered any evidence to suggest
that they existed in the Worthington, Minnesota and the Worthington and the Worthington,
Minnesota era. In the Worthington, Minnesota area in nineteen sixty two, Worthington
had a population of just over nine thousand people at that time, and when
Mary Agnes's story started receiving coverage in the local newspapers during the mid nineteen nineties.
A number of the area's residents offered their comments. They described Worthington as
one of those small towns where everybody knew everyone, and they had a hard
time believing that multiple people would have been willing to orchestrate a conspiracy to steal
to steal a newborn baby away from her mother. In our last episode,
we made reference to a woman named Georgia Tan who ran an illegal operation which
involves stealing and adopting out children at a profit for over twenty five years.
The main reason Tan was able to keep this going for so long was because
she stole children away from poor families who could not afford to defend themselves in
court. And she also allegedly had a prominent local judge in her back pocket
who would always rule in her favor. But if you believe Mary Agnes Gross
was stolen and sold on the black market, the responsible parties actually had to
go to the trouble of faking her death in order to prevent her birth mother
from searching for and this would have required the cooperation of multiple individuals from not
just the local hospital, but the local funeral home as well. Now I
don't know what kind of money they would have made from an illegal adoption that
after splitting the cut of the profits, But after splitting the cut of the
profits among that many people, would it really have been worth a while?
Well, I'm wondering if it wasn't more for moral interest over financial gains.
So we kind of talked about this on the first episode. But when you
look at the nineteen fifties and sixties, when we know a lot of these
kind of scams were going on, I wonder if a lot of it was
more geared towards religious beliefs and moral beliefs at the time, that a single
mom like Marlis in this case, wasn't quote capable of raising the child and
or would not create the perfect home for that child, that a mother and
father were needed to raise the baby, and therefore to either take the child
and just out of compassion give it to another family because they would raise that
baby better, or manipulate and have a more sinister version for money as possible
as well. But I wouldn't put it past people to just say the best
home for that baby would be somewhere else. That's what I think too.
I think the conspiracy of many makes a lot more sense when it's not just
like a little bit of money in everybody's pocket, but it's literally their moral
compass that's saying this is the right thing to do. This is an unwedded
mother, she's not going to be the right person to raise this baby.
We need to give this baby to a two person household. Because if it's
in alignment with your religious beliefs and not just greed, I think people are
more likely to keep your mouth shut, like we did the right thing.
I think you can sleep easier at night when you say we did the right
thing. Oh yeah, totally. All that being said, there's also the
possibility that the motive for taking Mary Agnes away from Marla's was not a financial
decision, like we just said, but a moral one. So quite simply,
since this was nineteen sixty two, they may have felt this child did
not deserve to be raised by a single mother. There isn't any information out
there about Marlas's ex husband, Late and Gross and why their marriage came to
an end, but you'd have to think that something went seriously wrong if Marla's
decided to separate from him when she was seven months pregnant. By the time
this story started generating headlines during the nineteen nineties, Layton was already deceased,
so we never got to hear his side of the story. But it doesn't
sound like Layton was present when Mary Agnes was born, so I'm not sure
how much interest he had in his daughter. Whatever the case, it's no
big secret that the world did not have The world did not have the most
progressive attitude towards single mothers back in nineteen sixty two. Back in nineteen sixty
two, so if words spread around Worthington that Marlis was planning to raise a
child on her own, there might have been some people who believed it was
their moral obligation to take Mary Agnes away from her and placed a child with
a family. So any financial incentive to do this with secondary I am convinced
that has to be kind of what drives this. And like we talked about
on the last episode, is that this wasn't crazy late uncommon, Like there's
a lot of cities where we can look and we can see different motivations like
it maybe the race of the mother, the family dynamics, the single motherhood,
the income of the family being low income, all of those things a
Jewish family and people believing that the child should be raised in a Christian family,
and those kinds of complications they were happening across the country. Yeah,
like you said, it would be very difficult for that many people to keep
a secret if it was just financially motivated. But if it was a moral
thing where they all believed they were legitimately doing the right thing, then I
can understand why they would be willing to remain silent about it. And they
probably never dreamed that anyone would even hear about this story, that it would
be featured on Saw Mystery three decades later, and that we'd still be talking
about it on a podcast sixty years later. So if any of them are
listening, shame on you. And I don't think that anybody thought that Marlis
would fight for the truth, and they doggedly go after any kind of information
she could to confirm what happened to Mary Agnes from petitioning the court to try
to have Pamela ray Dicky's body exhumed, to like just I'm sure beating down
doors in general and asking a lot of questions. I bet they figured that
she would just kind of fade into the periphery and they would never hear from
her again. But boy were they wrong. One thing about this story which
strikes me is particularly strange is that Worthington Regional Hospital had a total of three
newborn babies die under their watch in a span of just over twenty four hours.
Mary Agnes, Pamelay, Dickie, and Julie Harride. I mean,
if this happened in a big city, that would be one thing, but
that seems like a pretty high infant mortality rate for a hospital in a town
of around nine thousand people. There isn't much information out there about Julie Horide,
but what's notable is the contrast between how her parents were treated following her
death and how things were handled with Marlus. The Horides claimed they were allowed
to spend some time with their deceased daughter's body and take photographs of her inside
her casket, whereas Marlus and her mother were forbidden to take photos of both
the hospital and the funeral home, and Marlos pretty much had to fight just
to see Mary Agnes's body for ten to fifteen seconds, and while Margaret Dickey
never got to see Pamela Ray's body following her death, she claimed that her
husband did. The way the Rides and the Dickeys were treated following the loss
of their child is exactly how you'd expect someone in their position to be traded.
But it sounds like quite a different story with Marlos, for sure.
I'm trying to look up right now the mortality rates in the sixties, and
from what I can see, infant mortality rates, so not just newborns,
but it says that there were about twenty six deaths per one thousand live births,
and that declined down to like ten infant deaths for every thousand births in
nineteen ninety, but twenty six per thousand babies born. It is wild that
there were three babies that night at the same hospital that passed away. I
mean, two is really, really, really high. And like you guys
said, there's not really a whole lot of ormation about Julie, but we
do know a lot about Pamela Ray Dickey. That her family followed that baby
from her birth, they were able to hold and grieve her. She looked
like the baby that they saw at the funeral home, and that they thought
they were preparing for their own burial of Mary Agnes, and then Pamela Dicky
has our headstone there, so we're I'm very convinced that Pamela Dicky passed away,
that Julie passed away. But Mary Agnes, those bones that were found
in her makeshift grave, they weren't Mary Agnes's. Where did she go?
Okay, Robin, I have a question for you. So this is a
small place, right, We're not having like a hundred berths a night.
I would think that maybe you're gonna have six a night. And if that
is the case, you're looking at a fifty percent infant mortality rate. Do
we know if doctor Shade or doctor Stam were involved with all of these infant
deaths that night. That's a good question. I don't have that information.
It didn't really say that at any sources I found. I mean, I'm
assuming that could be the case because I'm guessing that a lot of these hospitals
in small towns are not going to have a great deal of doctors. Different
doctors we could give birth. But if they were responsible, like for all
of these and they knew that, hey, there are two other infandess here
and we could use them to kind of cover up Mary Agnes's situation, then
maybe they felt this was a good time to fake her death. During the
brief time she saw Mary Agnes, Marlas said it only looked like the child
was sleeping, So the implication seems to be that Mary Agnes was still alive
at that point and they were going to go to great lengths to keep her
away from her mother. The fact that Marlas believed Mary Agnes was sleeping and
not deceased definitely gives off the impression that something shady was happening. But the
alternate explanation is that, sadly, perhaps Marla's was simply treated worse because she
was a single mother. The Horrides and the Dicky may have been given all
the time that they needed to gree for their child because they were married couples,
but since Marla's was not, the staff may believe that she was not
worthy of that same sensitivity. That's an awful mentality, but I could definitely
see people feeling that way back then. Julia Ride is listed on the find
a Grave website and it appears that she's buried at the same cemetery as Mary
Agnes and Pamela Ray. But if her parents were allowed to photograph the child
inside her casket and were present at her burial. Then I hope that eliminates
the possibility that some sort of catastrophic mix up took place and there's no chance
the remains found at Mary Agnes's grave site belonged to Julie. Well, remember
that when Marla's goes by and she sees that bassinette and she says, like,
please let me see my baby just for a second, and they let
her peer in. She said that baby looked healthy, it looked like it
was sleeping, and it also had that dark hair, whereas the baby that
her mother was shown and her friend was shown at the funeral home had that
really light hair just like baby Pamela did. And Pamela's parents were even able
to say, yes, the coffin that we buried our baby, and that's
the one that you saw as well, and come to find out they're at
the same funeral grieving one child. So I think it's pretty clear that Pamela
is a baby that they were shown, and Pamela is the one that was
buried that day, And it's just so much like Mary Agnes's family was told
like this is yours too, and everyone, like you said, thought that
this family would just move on and go away. And I know it doesn't
make a lot of sense to show Mary Agnes to Marlus if she was still
alive, because as possible, she might notice her breathing or something. But
I think it was just a situation where they just happened to be passing each
other on the hallway, and Marlus was asking so much just at least let
me see my baby for a moment. So they figured, well, if
we don't at least give her like a little taste or something, she's going
to get awfully suspicious. So we'll hold her up for like ten seconds and
let you see her and then move her away. But I do think there's
a good chance that Mary Agnes really was sleeping at that time and was not
dead, which it's true. It is sad because that's literally the only time
she ever got to see her baby in her entire life, and she's out
there not knowing that she has another mother who missed her so dearly like badgets
breaks my heart. Even if you overlook the hospital staffs rather cold behavior towards
Marlus, there are some weird discrepancies in the records about Mary Agnes's birth.
A lot has been made about the fact that the doctor who delivered Mary Agnes
gave her ratings of two on her app Gar scores for her skin color and
heart rate, even though some other paperwork states that the child was not breathing
at the time she was born. While those results might seem unlikely if a
newborn is unable to breathe, the alternate explanation which has been provided is that
Marlus was heavily sedated during the birth, and a baby which is delivered under
the effects of anaesthesia can initially give off the false impression that their heart rate
and skin color are normal, so this could explain the adding consistency in Mary
Agnes's app Our score. But the more troubling discrepancy are the times listed on
her birth and death certificates, which are six twenty three and six thirty pm,
respectively. If Mary Agnes was unable to breathe when she was born,
then as plausible as she could have died seven minutes later. Yet Marlaus's pediatrician,
doctor John Stamm, told her that Mary Agnes lived for one hour after
she was born, and he hand wrote six twenty pm as the time of
death on the exact same death certificate. Now, if you're looking for an
innocent explanation, perhaps doctor Stam was telling the truth when he said that Mary
Agnes was alive for an hour and he meant to write seven twenty PM on
the death certificate instead of six twenty. I mean Stam did not actually signed
the certificate until June the fourteenth, two days after Mary Agnes was born,
so enough time had passed for him to misremember things. It is possible that
these discrepancies were the result of sloppy clerical errors rather than an intentional cover up,
but the circumstances of mary Agnes's funeral and burial are make this story very
confusing, well exactly. I mean. The thing is that they showed up
and the moment that Pamela's family is there, and you know, Clara is
there with the friend saying, hey, can we see our baby now?
Can we take a picture? Can we pick out the casket? Like all
of these things that had to happen, and there's only one human baby present
there, do you know what I mean? Clearly someone had to go like,
wait a minute, someone already picked a casket for this baby. Wait
a minute, somebody already came in and viewed the body. Wait a minute,
why are there two mothers or two families coming here to see this child
when there's only one child here like that? It blows my mind that someone
didn't say this baby is Pamela, and yes, gross is written on the
top, but we're not sure what that's about because Pama's family's right there.
So as you'll recall, Mary Agnes's funeral took place the day after she was
born and was not well enough to leave the hospital by this point. So
I think one of the potential sources of confusion is the fact that her mother,
Clara, attended the funeral and Marlas is only sharing her account second hand.
By the time the story came to light during the nineteen nineties, I
believe Clara was already deceased, but if she had been able to provide her
own first hand account to these events, it might answer some questions. Marlus's
friend, Judy Voges, was present alongside Clara when she saw Mary Agnes inside
her casket at the funeral home, but the description she provided of the child
was much different than how Marlus remembered seeing her daughter at the hospital. Particularly
when it came to the description of her hair, the implication seems to be
that a completely different child besides Mary Agnes was inside that casket, and perhaps
this is who the remains which were unearthed three decades later, actually belonged to.
However, since the description Judy provided happened to match Pamela Ray Dickey,
the alternate theory is that the child in the casket was her. Yeah,
I definitely think there could be a mix up based on communication error, but
it was something this specific, I really do. I'm leaning more towards the
Pamela Ray Dickey being the real identity of the baby that Clara was shown.
So, as you recall, when Clara took photos of this casket at the
cemetery, Pamela Ray's mother, Margaret later recognized it as the same casket her
husband had purchased for her daughter's burial, and when this casket was laid to
rest, Clara remembered another emotional family being at the grave site, and Margaret
would confirm that her own family was there that day. Therefore, Clara may
have actually attended Pamela Ray Dickey's funeral and burial without even realizing it. According
to Margaret. Her family did not recall seeing Clara at Pamela Ray's grave site
that day, Like given that they were not asked about this until over thirty
years later, they could have easily forgotten. And since Clara had photos of
the casket next to the burial plot that does confirm she was there. But
how in the world but these events are played out, did no one mention
either child's name during the entire funeral service. If this wasn't such a horribly
tragic situation, you'd almost think this was some sort of wacky misunderstanding from a
sitcom. Was someone completely oblivious to the fact that they're attending the wrong funeral?
I just cannot comprehend this whole situation. If this wasn't a deliberate cover
up to fake Mary Agnes's debt, then somebody must have screwed something up big
time. Yeah, it almost seems like there's too many moving parts for it
not to be a cover up. But then it's literally to this point of
like you had people all the way to the funeral home, and the people
burying this baby, the people performing the funeral, that no one mess this
up for you, like that this was a seamless plot. It seems very
complex, but I don't know. I do wonder how Clara could have gotten
images of the casket and things like that and seeing this baby is so perfectly
mirrored Pamela and then be wrong like that seems less likely than them saying,
hey, we're willing to kind of take the money from two families. We
know that that Mary Amis is in a better place and we're going to close
our mouth. But then that means what ten people were involved in that O.
This part is so confusing to me, and I don't know if it
is to you both as well. But what about the fact that Marla's is
unable to attend this funeral? Why is this funeral scheduled for one day after
Mary Egnus is born? Don't the parents typically dictate when a funeral service will
take place so that they can attend. Yeah, that's all so weird to
me? Is that that just seems like awfully premature to like have to do
it so quickly. I mean, even if it's not a baby, you're
unlikely to have a funeral for someone who died the day afterwards, Like,
why can't they just show more patients? Why not just say, give Marlas
some time to recover. But I'm guessing they must have pressured her or something
like that because her mother obviously agreed to go with it. So maybe it
was a case where we'll pay for the funeral if you can have it tomorrow,
but if you want to hold it off, then you're responsible for all
the expenses. So maybe that's why they decided to go along with this.
Yeah, that makes sense because it doesn't sound like Marlos would have had any
great type of resources. She just experienced a divorce and now she's going through
all this. So I think a lot of people when given the opportunity of
knowing what caskets cost, they're so expensive. So if somebody's saying we'll do
this for free for you, I can definitely see why you know, she
might, I'm sure, kind of begrudgingly, because of course she would want
to be there for her daughter's funeral, would just take them up on their
offer. Well, you also have to remember this is the nineteen sixties,
so I feel like the doctors were already pressuring her and pushing her around at
the hospital, like listen, the baby's already been embalmed, Like nope,
you don't get to see her, and there was already kind of this like
just being defeated and you're already experiencing trauma, but having no one really show
you empathy, your compassion, that if the body had really been taken an
hour later and embalmed like they're speeding this along. It's almost like I could
see these women in the case the friend Mom Marliss just being told there will
be a burial tomorrow if you want someone to show up, show up,
and them kind of being like okay, You're like, there's it seems like
they were steamrolled from the beginning. But don't you guys think in today's time,
you'd be hard pressed to be able to make arrangements for a funeral in
one day. There's just so many different details that need to be considered and
lots of forget that the same thing happened to Margaret Dicky, like she was
still in the hospital when Pamela Ray was buried, even though her husband and
her other children were able to attend. And this also would have been one
day after Pamela Ray died, So I think they probably faced the same thing
where they figured well in order to make this scheme work, we have to
have another child's funeral take place on the exact same day, so they probably,
even though the Dickies didn't think anything suspicious was going on, this was
probably intentional just so that they could pass give off the impression that Mary Agnes
was being buried even though the funeral was actually being held for Pamela Ray.
And the quicker they get that casket in the ground, the harder will be
to answer any questions. Yes, exactly, exactly, So let's try to
make some sense of this whole situation. When Marla's did her own investigation three
decades later, she found no records to indicate that Mary Agnes was buried at
Saint Mary's Cemetery, but she did find a record at Benson Funeral Home that
Mary Agnes was scheduled to be buried on that particular day. There's no indication
where this burial was supposed to take place, but you have to wonder if
Mary Agnes may have been buried at another location and Clara mistakenly went to the
wrong gravesite where Pamela Ray was being buried. Marla's also found it suspicious that
the name Gross just happened to be written on a card in Pamela Ray's funeral
records, but this card was apparently filled out after a nurse from the hospital
called them with information. If two separate deceased infants from the same hospital were
scheduled to be handled by the same funeral home on the same day, then
I could see someone haphazardly writing Mary Agnes's last name there for future reference without
any malicious intent. So Jules, you're saying that what they did is they
had this piece of paper and they basically were on the phone, They're filling
out Pamla's information, and they don't have any other paper around, so they
just write Gross in the corner, like a little note to themselves, and
then now it's forever a linked as like the same child. It's possible.
I mean, it seems unlikely, but it is possible. Since Marlos was
still recovering in the hospital at that time. She seems to have no idea
who organized this funeral and paid for it, and there's no record of who
did so either. But I think there's a good chance that Worthington Regional Hospital
took care of everything. Since losing a newborn baby is one of the saddest,
most traumatic events a parent can go through, they are often not in
the right state of mind to be doing things arranging a funeral. So therefore,
it's not uncommon for hospitals to arrange the funeral and burial of a stillborn
child on the parents' behalf, sometimes completely free of charge, and they will
often be responsible for the decision making and the paperwork. Therefore, it would
not surprise me at all at the hospital made all the arrangements for mary Agnes's
funeral. And if you believe they were complicit in mary Agnes's disappearance and orchestrated
a cover up, perhaps they intentionally sent Clara to Pamela Ray Dickey's funeral in
order to give her the false impression that Mary Agnes was dead and have been
laid to rest. But that seems like an awfully convoluted plan that could have
easily fallen apart if Clara had bothered to ask the Dickey family why they were
attending her granddaughter's burial. And think about this too, y'all mentioned that like
a no point did they mentioned, And here we lay our Pamela Ray Dicky
to to rest, and then all of a sudden, Claire's gone like,
wait, who, Like they didn't say the baby's name the whole time.
That is a massive risk. I do find it very very interesting though,
that, oh, the baby that they saw doesn't even look like the baby
that she saw in the bassinete right, It had dark hair. She's all
the time, So we messed up on the birth certificate. I just can't
believe that Mary Agnes died and that when you go to her grave site there
is not a body there. There are little bones and a makeshift casket that
was not the one that they picked out for her to be buried in,
and those do not genetically link back to Marylis. So when Marlas went to
Saint Mary's Cemetery after her release from the hospital and visited Mary Agnes's grave site,
she claimed there was a fresh mount of dirt there for a burial plot,
so of course she had no reason to believe Mary Agnes was not there.
As far as Marlis remembers, she never saw a second burial plot or
a mount of dirt a few feet away at the spot where the child's remains
were were eventually exhumed. All those years later. Now, when Marlos purchased
a headstone for Mary Agnes One year later, it was subsequently moved a few
feet away from the burial plot, but no one knows who actually did that,
since the cemetery record showed the Pamela Ray Dicky was supposed to be buried
in that plot. Then I can understand why an employee would move a headstone
containing somebody else's name away. But did they place it at that particular spot
because they believe Mary Agnes was buried there? Or was it just moved there
at random? And it's a complete coincidence that the remains of an entirely different
child or beneath it. To me, when you look at this, what's
crazy is it eventually Pamela gets a headstone there right after Mary Agnes has been
moved? Oh yeah, yeah, Like did it get the headstone until like
a couple of years afterwards, Like where Marlos just suddenly showed up there many
years after the fact and say, hey, there's a headstone there for a
completely different person. But what's wild? Did Pamela's family not come when Mary
agnes Is headstone was sitting there? Were they the ones who maybe said,
like, wait a minute, our babies here, or yeah, I'm guessing
because it had been moved a couple of feet to the left. They didn't
figure that it was over our plot. They just probably just figured that it's
right next to ours. So that's maybe why they didn't get suspicious. But
I'm sure they still found it weird because Mary Agnes's headstone wouldn't have been there
when they had Pamela's funeral. Does anyone know how much gravestones cost? They're
pretty expensive, right, I hear they are, Yeah, very expensive.
I guess that makes sense while there was no gravestone put up initially by either
family. Yeah, it took like a year for Marlos to raise enough money,
and I think the Dickies didn't do it for a couple of years if
you think about it too. I mean, she was a single mom,
she'd just gone through divorce. Things like that. I would be really difficult
to put the money together to have that. Nowadays, it says that the
average headstone costs between one and three thousand dollars. One thousand and three thousand
dollars. I thought it was more than that. I would think it was
more than that obviously, ten grand or something. I don't know why.
I think it depends on how complex that might just be a straight simple headstone,
but like once you start putting pictures and shapes and symbols, Yeah,
because you've got to get like a stonemason to do it or something right.
I mean, I guess you can get a very basic one done with lettering,
but I mean, I don't know what you can. I mean,
I have no idea what technologies used for headstones. I don't know what I'm
talking about here, but it says it says some headstones can cost around twenty
five thousand dollars, so I guess it really can be. It's as elaborate
as you want to make it. I suppose, so a thousand to twenty
five thousand, yea all on the average. Wow, that's a huge range.
Unfortunately, by the time Marlis started asking questions, I believe the cemetery
had a completely different caretaker than whoever was working there during the nineteen sixties,
and this guy had no answers. He even said that he had no idea
why the headstone for Mary Agness Gross was there, since her name was not
in the cemetery record. Since DNA testing proved that the remains which were on
earth did not belong to Mary, Agnes or Pamela Ray Dickey. It seems
like this caretaker personally believed that they might have belonged to a deceased child who
was buried at that spot long before in nineteen sixty two, as records for
that particular section of the cemetery were incomplete, and it is easier to believe
than the idea of someone bearing a completely different infant at Mary Agnes's grave site
in order to fake her debt. It would also mean that Pamela Ray was
buried in her correct grave at the correct time, and the ADM five remains
which were found a few feet away have no connection to this story. But
if that's the case, then what actually happened to Mary Agnes? If she
really did die following her birth, where did her remains wind up? I
don't think she did die. I think that she was given to another family.
For me, it's driven by probably moral purposes and not financial gain.
But I do think that this other child who's in the spot where her headstone
was moved to would have been from that what do they call it baby Land
or the baby Yeah burial site, and that there were just these unnamed babies
who were buried in these little makeshift, small cheap caskets, and that's just
happens to be a coincidence that when you look where her headstone was, this
unremoved remains were there from that baby land. It's apparently not uncommon when you're
trying to exhume bodies to sometimes be horrified to discover that their additional bodies inside
the grave or the remains or not where they're supposed to I recently did an
episode on the Saint Louis Jane Doe, who was a child who was murdered
back in nineteen eighty three, and when she was buried at the cemetery,
the record keeping was just such a mess that when they tried to exhume her,
like three decades later, they found three separate bodies where her grave was
supposed to be, and none of them actually belonged to her, and they
had to do a lot of legwork to find out that she was actually buried
in a completely different section of the cemetery. So it's pretty horrifying to think
that your loved ones could be buried in the wrong place. But apparently that
wasn't uncommon for some of these older cemeteries, and it would not surprise me
at all if these remains belonged to a child that have been buried there like
a long time before Mary Agnes even died. I guess in the alternate explanation
is that Mary Agnes is actually buried in Pamela Ray's grave, But unless the
Dickey family consents to exhuming her remains, will probably never know. And I
can totally understand Margaret Dickey's decision not to disturb her daughter's grave, and she
has every right to say no. If they found out Pamela Ray was not
buried there, as we spoke about earlier, then I cannot imagine the pain
and devastation this would cause when you look at the big picture, I think
you could probably write off most of these oddities as mistakes and clerical errors and
assume that Mary Agnes's remains were lost somewhere. But the one thing which gives
me pause is the photograph of the family with the baby, which was an
anonymously mailed to Marlus three months after Mary Agnes's supposed death. Given that she
only saw her daughter for a couple of seconds, I'm not sure Marlos could
be a one hundred percent certain that the child and the photo was Mary Agnes.
But if she wasn't, why would someone just mail her a random family
photo with no note attached. I don't think there's a big risk that the
baby that was buried was not Pamela Ray Dicky. I mean, remember,
Marlos was mistreated in the hospital. She wasn't allowed to see her baby.
She wasn't allowed to grieve or spend time with the body of her a little
one. But the other families were, so they would have been able to
see their child. They would have noted that tuft of blonde hair and the
really light skin, and these kinds of things that Clara was able to document
with the friend at the funeral home, and so I believe they would have
likely seen her at the funeral home as well. Right, they would have
been able to go pick the casket out, see the little body go to
the funeral, so they followed the child's body the entire way. I don't
see there being a high risk of that actually being Mary Agnes. So Marlous
pushed forward the theory that perhaps it was the family themselves who sent the photo
in order to provide assurance that Mary Agnes was alive and in a loving home,
but that seems like a pretty risky thing to do since there was a
possibility of them being recognized. Unless this was just sent by someone who felt
like playing a very mean spirited prank, then the center could have been someone
who was involved in illegally adopting out Mary Agnes to this family. They may
have developed a guilty conscience and wanted Marlus to know that her child was not
dead. I guess the big issue is that since she lost this photo,
we really only have Marlus's word that it existed in the first place. Though
I certainly don't want to accuse her or making the whole story up, but
if the photo was real, it must be noted that Marlus was willing to
move on with her life for the next thirty years, and it was only
after finding someone else's headstone at what she believed was her daughter's grave site that
she decided to start digging deeper. Even if you believe the official story is
true and Mary Agnes really did die following her birth, that doesn't change the
fact that this child no longer seems to have a vinal resting place exactly.
I mean, the reality is that Marlis knew the likelihood of finding her baby
was rare. There wasn't enough information for her at the time to be able
to say, hey, this is a picture of my baby, right,
this is me and my child, Like look at her father's face and my
face and her as a baby, and here's the age progression. We didn't
have any of that for Mary Agnes. All we have is Marlus's DNA and
the hope that you know, genetic genealogy or something like that could help today,
But that Marlos passed away, so there's really going to be no justice
or any kind of idea of her saying I found and reunited with my child.
That alone can be a very painful and upsetting process. But even in
a rare event, I think that Mary Agnes did die at birth or shortly
after her birth, Marlos deserved the right to be able to bury her baby,
to know that she was safe, just like Pamela's parents said, our
baby is safe. We have given her this place of rest. We're not
going to disturb that. Marlos and Mary Agnes deserve the exact same kind of
adimacy. That she's safe now and I'm not going to ever have her hurt
again, exactly because she spent the better part of thirty years visiting that grave
site, completely believing that her daughter's remains were there, and I cannot imagine
what it's like to suddenly find out that, oh, there's another child in
there, and we have no idea where your baby is. But I can
see why Marlos would have felt that it cover up and an illegal adoption was
the best case scenario, since that would have meant Mary Agnes was still alive
and had been raised by another family. That's still a pretty tragic and heartbreaking
scenario, but it's better than the alternative, which is that Mary Agnes died
in childbirth and her remains are buried somewhere and no one has any clue how
to find them. We kind of go back and forth on both scenarios,
as there were enough black market adoption rings during this time period to believe that
something like that could have happened here. But on the other hand, this
illegal adoption would have required the collusion of one or more doctors, other hospital
staff, and the funeral director, and would that many people have been willing
to go along with all this. One of the biggest issues with this cover
up theory is that it seemed to hinge on the coincidental timing of another newborn
baby girl dying around the exact same time, which is something that probably could
not have been anticipated. And even though Pamela ray Dickey was born a few
hours before Mary Agnes, she did not actually pass away until the following morning,
and that does not seem like a lot of time to concoct a plan
to fake Mary Agnes's death. Now, could there have been a plan to
take the baby away from the single mother when she arrived at the hospital and
the idea was that, Okay, we know she's coming in. She doesn't
have a partner. This baby deserve street raised by a mother enough, because
that was critical back then. And so the plan's already in place, just
the way the doctor said, like, you can't see her, you can't
hold her, you can't take pictures of her. Oh, the baby's already
been embalmed. Her body's already gone. What if the plan had just been
Look she got there and we cremated her, or she's you know, like
we already buried her. Like could they have been that evil? Had there
not have been another baby that died? Did that just create an easier out
for them when they already had the motion in place. Yeah, you're probably
right. It seems like that would just make it pretty easy for them.
I mean, it does seem really convoluted and a little bit strange, and
so many people had to be involved. But I keep coming back to what
we've all spoken about earlier, as I agree with you Ash, I think
this was some kind of illegal adoption, but I do think that it was
driven more by morality than it was by financial gain. Because if these people
had these very strong religious beliefs or moral beliefs that a baby should be raised
by two parents, then I think that this situation with Pamela ray Dickey dying,
it just kind of provided an out and this very strange funeral situation where
you've got two families attending, And it's just really too bad that Marlos couldn't
have been there and we would have been able to have a first hand account
because it sounds just so bizarre, and like you both have said, nobody
said, you know, we're laying to rest Mary Agnes Gross or Pamela ray
Dickey. It's just we're laying the baby to rest. It's so confusing.
I'd love to see how this would have played out if Pamela Ray had not
died. Would they have just held a funeral and told, like Clara and
Judy that we're gonna have a close cass at funeral and we can't open the
casket under any circumstances to let her see her, because like, the theory
seems to be that they used Pamela's body in the casket and that they showed
that to Clara. But I wonder how it would have played out if they
wouldn't have had a baby's body in order to work with. Oh, maybe
they would have just said it had to be a close casket because she was
incredibly purple and it's too disturbing you can't see because they seemed to be,
like Ashley said earlier, steamrolling her like right for a minute one it was
like, you can't see your baby, you can't take any pictures. It
seemed like everybody was leading her around and telling her exactly what she needed to
be doing, and that what she wanted to do wasn't was in alignment with
their plans, so she better get on board. Yeah, I'm sure they
would have come up with any sort of excuse to prevent her from seeing her
daughter, even if they hadn't had Pamela Ray. However, if Mary Agnes
really was secretly adopted out to another family, then it's a major tragedy that
Marla's passed away without finding out the truth or getting the opportunity to reunite with
her daughter. If Mary Agnes is still alive today, then there's a good
chance she has no inkling that she was raised under a false identity. Now
I know of a number of cases in which babies have been abducted shortly after
their birth by a kidnapper who raised them as a own child to fairly recent
examples of this were the abductions of Carlina White and Kamaia Mobli, who were
both stolen from the hospital shortly after they were born, but as they got
older, they became suspicious over the fact that the person who raised them did
not have a birth certificate or any legal documentation to prove they were their child.
But the key difference is that those children were kidnapped by people who were
working entirely on their own, whereas if Mary Agnes was stolen, it would
have been done by people connected to the hospital who likely would have been able
to provide her new family with the necessary documentation. If Mary Agnes is still
alive, she may be well aware that she was adopted by her parents,
but is under the mistaken impression that the adoption was legal. And what's so
sad is that when you think about this, her parents likely wouldn't have known
either, right, Like I mean, in these cases where they took these
children and they gave them to these other families, I think oftentimes the other
parents thought, like, what a blessing, we have this beautiful baby,
and this amazing organization helped us, with this amazing doctor helped us. I
don't think many of them knew what actually had happened behind the scenes to get
them their dream. Maybe. What's also interesting is that in the photograph Marlos
received, the family had two older children in addition to a newborn baby.
Maybe this couple reached the point where they wanted another child who were unable to
have anymore, which is why they arranged for a black market adoption, and
since Marlos was a single mother, the people responsible thought she would be an
ideal target. Anyway, all these theories of what a black market adoption ring
our pure speculation, as no one ever found any evidence that this type of
thing was taking place in Worthington during this time period. This whole story may
very well just be a case of a terrible tragedy evolving into an unsolved mystery
because of bureaucratic incompetence. If there is a resolution to this case, someday,
it might occur through pure chance. You will know, anyone can upload
their DNA to genealogy websites these days, and this is the reason the Mary
Agnes Maroney case wound up being solved after nearly one hundred years. When Mary
Agnes went on to have children under her new identity, one of her daughters
decided to upload her DNA like this, and it wound up having an unexpected
genetic match to a member of the Maroni family. So the same situation you
could very well repeat itself and Mary Agnes Gross's case. Otherwise it may be
difficult to conclusively solve this mystery. All that being said, if you happen
to have any information about what happened to Mary Agnes Gross, or perhaps you
feel you might be Mary Agnes yourself, please contact the appropriate authorities. Jules
actually any final thoughts in this case. This case, it's fascinating to me.
Like I said in episode one, I've always been really interested in these
cases that involve babies being taken from hospitals, these questions of nurses helping to
support religiously driven are morally driven companies that want to take babies from single parents
and give them away or make sure that children aren't exposed to low income families.
It's wild to me. One of the things in this case specifically,
though, is that Mary Agnes would be sixty one today. And as much
as it's kind of this interesting thing, like Robin you just covered the other
Mary Agnes who found out her real identity, or like we found out that
she was still alive and had grown up and then passed away right with this
very successful life, I wonder is it equally as exciting as it is horrifying
to be the individual who finds out this information, Because, like you said
before, even if I know I'm adopted, if I don't know that my
mom was desperately looking for me, that my mom had been so mistreated,
that maybe my parents hadn't been fully transparent with me, like I think that
oftentimes would create more trauma than it would cause any kind of joy, because
she can't talk to Maryliss anymore. Right, marylist is deceased, she may
not have her own parents alive to ask questions too, So I don't know.
In certain ways, I think it would be pretty tragic for Mary Agnes
to find out that her poor mom went through all of this and fought her
whole life and there's kind of no justice or ability to find out more about
that relationship. It's so heartbreaking to think that this woman could find out,
you know, while she's in her older years, and discovered that there was
this whole other family that she never got to experience, and now it's too
late. So I mean, everybody deserves to have the truth of where they
came from, but sometimes that truth comes with incredibly traumatic implications. And I
personally think that, you know, as we've spoken about throughout, I don't
think it was a bureaucratic error. I think that it was intentional on the
part of multiple people at this hospital, and I think that their driving force
was morality and that was what kept them to keep this kind of like conspiracy
of silence. And as far as we know, there could be more people
out there who gave birth at this hospital who you know, maybe suffered the
same type of faith that Marlo's did where their child was taken away, but
maybe they just didn't ask questions, and maybe there wasn't the evidence to support
that that baby could potentially still be alive. Like I think the photograph is
that one thing that Marlo's probably clung onto and was like, why would somebody
just send this to me? This isn't the age of the internet. This
isn't the time where people had access to that type of information in order to
prank other people in the way that they do today. So I can see
why she clung on to hope that maybe her daughter was alive, And it
just breaks my heart that she never got to see a resolution or find out
what happened to her daughter. There is like a bright spot in the story
that she was able to have three boys, but I'm sure that she went
to her grave always wondering what happened to her baby daughter, and if she's
alive out there being loved by some other family, and what did her life
turn out like, did she have children of her own, did she get
married, did she go to college? All these questions that a mother would
just love to know. The answers too, and would like to have experienced
those things with her daughter. So my heart really goes out to Marli's for
what she had to experience and never getting those answers. And I think,
like Robin had said earlier, if there is ever a resolution here, it
will be completely by chance. Yeah. When I saw the resolution in the
Mary Agnes Maroney case, it was like bitter sweet to hear that she did
live a good life, that even though she was stolen from her family,
she seemed to be raised by loving parents and went on to have a successful
career as a nurse, and she had children of her own, and everyone
described her as a very nice person and a very loving mother. And even
though she died before anyone find out the truth, in a way, that
might have been good for because the trauma of finding out that she wasn't who
she thought she was and had been stolen from her birth family would have been
too much. And the same thing could very well happen to Mary Agnes Gross,
who would be in her sixties if she's still alive today, and it
would probably come as a major shock if she found out who she really was.
But of course, even though we have a resolution in the Mary Agnes
Maroney case is still a major tragedy that her parents suffered this terrible trauma and
died without finding out the truth about what happened to their missing daughter, and
the same thing happened to Marlous Gross, but at the same type of the
events play out the same way. There could be a possibility that perhaps some
of Marlus's other sons have uploaded their DNA into a genetic genealogy database, and
maybe if Mary Agnes is with another family, someone from there has uploaded their
DNA, maybe Mary Agnes herself has, and one of these days they'll just
suddenly have a genetic match and they'll be able to find out the truth.
I mean, for all we know, maybe Mary Gross has already passed away,
but it would still be nice if they found out what actually happened to
her. But yeah, this is just such a weird story. And I
have heard a lot of child abduction cases, but this is one of the
only ones that I know of where they've someone has gone to the trouble of
faking a newborn baby's death in order to steal her from her mother. And
if that's actually what happened and that's a major travesty, and it put this
poor woman through a bunch of unnecessary trauma. And while it's good that she
got to live a good life in the long run with the other children of
her own, it's just so sad that she never got to find out the
truth about what happened. And if you do find out that Mary Agnes Gross
is still alive somewhere and we can finally conclusively solve this mystery, then that
will definitely be a good thing. Maybe lightning will strike twice for the second
Mary Agnes Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the
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