On this episode of Washed Away, I’m gonna tell you about a John Doe whose story started out a lot like Mary Anderson’s… but recently ended very differently. This person also took their own life… in the month of October… in Seattle - but 12 years before Mary would check into her hotel room. The coincidences between this John Doe and Mary’s Jane Doe have led to theories about these cases possibly being connected, like maybe these people even knew each other!? But the main difference so far is that in this case, a family really was out there all along. Searching, hoping, and never giving up. And that’s how, after almost 4 decades, a John Doe became Mark Ashland.

On this episode of Washed Away, I'm going to tell you about the unusual death of Mary Anderson, a mysterious woman who claimed to have no relatives, no one to care about what happened to her and yet she's made a lasting impression on dozens of strangers, including myself. I'm Ashley Smith and I've been researching this case for so long that I now feel closer to Mary than anyone... both literally and figuratively. Because I've never been able to give up on a good mystery without learning every single detail available and because she was buried just a few blocks from my house in Crown Hill Cemetery.