Welcome back to Mama Mystery. I am your host, Kelly.

And I am your co-host, Austin.

We are back for another true crime episode.

Before we get into today's episode, I want to point out that we are going to be doing more of those Mama Minute episodes, which I'm really excited about.

And we've been getting some really great responses and some messages from you guys. Some of them are asking for advice. Some of them are case

recommendations. Either way, I love it all. So please keep sending it. Mammistry.com, if you just

scroll down, there's a form there and you can write us a message. If you don't put your name on

there, I will not know who it's from. So don't use that to be mean to me, but you can use that

if you want to stay anonymous. So there's that, okay? Sounds good. Okay. So in today's episode,

we're going to talk about a case that quite frankly is both mind-blowing and tragic.

This is the story of Marie Carlson, a mother who was simply trying to get her life back together

but ended up entangled with the wrong people. She trusted them, believed in them,

and in return they took advantage of her in the most horrific way. And if things had gone slightly differently, this case might have remained unsolved.

The man responsible for this could have easily gotten away with it, but thanks to some

dedicated investigators, justice was eventually served.

Though even today, many questions still linger about how Marie's life came to such a

brutal end. So let's jump right into it and get comfortable of 1974 in the Philippines to a single mother.

For those who knew her, Marie's spirit and resilience were evident from an early age.

She was taken in by an American man who raised her

in the United States alongside his other children. And from the start, Marie formed an incredibly

close bond with one of her adoptive father's daughters, Esta. They were inseparable, the kind of bond

that made them feel like sisters, because deep down, they just always had this gut feeling that

...