She Vanished On Halloween While Getting Candy, And Her Killer Sent A Map Of Where He Left Her Body To The Police

It was October 31st, 1985, and 11-year-old Mary Stiles had on her pink Care Bear pajamas. She wore her hair in pigtails and carried a bottle as part of her Halloween costume: she was a baby.

At 4 p.m., Mary wanted to head down to the main office of her apartment complex to get some candy along with her friends, and she asked her dad, Gary, for permission first.

Mary and her family lived in the Woodhollow Apartments located in Baytown, Texas, and it was a safe place. Gary didn't think twice about letting Mary go, so off she went.

What was supposed to be an exciting start to trick-or-treating that evening would become the last time Mary's family ever saw her.

Darkness set in and dinnertime arrived, but Mary still hadn't come home, so her family set out to look for her. Mary's 14-year-old sister Carrie was supposed to babysit that night and canceled so she could join the search.

Mary's family ended up calling the police after being unable to locate her, and the authorities stopped every car going in and out of the apartment complex to check for Mary.

Hours turned into days, and despite the best efforts of the police officers, there was no sign of Mary anywhere. Nine days after she disappeared, a bizarre letter was mailed to the Baytown Police Department.

URGENT MARY STILES was written on the front of the envelope, and inside was a hand-drawn map of where her body was, a confession from her killer, who wrote, "I killed her," and an article about Mary going missing.

The map depicted the woods behind Mary's apartment complex, and the last lines read, "find her and give her a decent burial." The killer signed the note, "the madman who wishes he never was."

Kit Leong - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only - pictured above are Halloween decorations at night

Authorities followed the clues and were taken right to the body of Mary, who was just 150 yards away from her home. She was in the fetal position, covered with leaves and branches.

Mary had been strangled and stabbed in her neck four times. She had one of her socks shoved down her throat. She had put up a fight, as there were defensive wounds on her hands.

The unsettling letter was the only thing investigators had to go off of, and on December 3rd, there came a second one, and the killer, who called himself "the madman" again, expressed that he was in unbearable pain. He had sent along another article regarding Mary.

On December 4th, police received the third letter, in which the killer wrote, "There will be another before I die." On December 5th, another letter came, outlining a series of clues for the police and a riddle. Cryptic meanings and ties to Egyptian mythology were in it.

The killer demanded that the answer to the riddle he gave them about a weigher of hearts should be printed in the local paper on the front page.

Thinking that the right answer to the riddle was "Anubis," the police put that word into an article so nobody would know what was going on, except for the killer.

The answer was incorrect, and the killer sent a letter telling them they shouldn't get it wrong again. A letter with a second riddle arrived at the police department, and they added the answer to another edition of the paper, waiting for more information from the killer.

The FBI helped create a profile by then and revealed the killer was not an adult, but a child around the age of 15 or 16, whose grades were slipping and who felt a tremendous amount of guilt. The FBI said the killer had to have known Mary and lived close to her.

Since the killer was communicating by mail, authorities put several mailboxes in the area under surveillance. On December 11th, a 16-year-old boy named Joseph Lee Fordham rode up on his bicycle to a mailbox at the apartment complex where Mary's family lived.

He slipped a letter inside, which was an exact match to the letters that had been sent by Mary's killer. Joseph's stepsister was best friends with Mary. He lived in the same apartment complex as Mary and would walk her home after dark. He had developed a dark obsession with Mary.

The knife used to end Mary's life was found in Joseph's bedroom, and upon being interviewed, he confessed to killing the little girl in Care Bear pajamas, but he never gave a reason why he did this.

Joseph was tried as an adult and found guilty of murdering Mary. He was sentenced to 25 years behind bars, and he got out after less than eight years due to overcrowding at the prison.

He lay low, and in 2014, right before his parole was up, he vanished and was later located in a hotel room trying to take his life by U.S. Marshals. He went directly back to prison for violating his parole.

Mary's big sister Carrie, who became a journalist after her murder, was able to ask Joseph via his parole officer why he tried to die that day.

"It just wasn’t long enough," Joseph replied, speaking to the sentence he received for what he did to Mary. That ultimately gave Carrie peace. She managed to forgive Joseph, and one of her daughters was actually born on Halloween.