Where this was said
Joyce's Letter: Strangulation, Drugs, and a Dark Past
At 12:20 · chapter starts 11:00
This is the bombshell chapter of the episode. Ashley nearly missed it because Joyce's handwriting was difficult to read — but buried in the case file was a letter Joyce wrote to her boyfriend David Arthur, found in her purse at Stevens Hall. In it, she describes a dinner outing with the meditation group, then drops a devastating aside: she had discovered that Mark once stayed at a mental institution for trying to strangle people. [1] — Ashley Flowers "Joyce's own handwritten letter to her boyfriend revealed that Mark Wadley had once been institutionalized for trying to strangle people — a…" 12:00 In the same paragraph, she writes that she suspected him of being an informant who helped law enforcement with a major drug bust two years earlier. Ashley notes that neither allegation appears anywhere else in the case file, no investigator past or present seems to have pursued either claim, and if Mark was indeed a CI, there may have been institutional reasons to protect him from scrutiny. The letter gives the whole meditation group theory a darker, more menacing dimension.
Joyce's own handwritten letter to her boyfriend revealed that Mark Wadley had once been institutionalized for trying to strangle people — and that she suspected him of being a police informant in a major drug bust. Neither allegation appears to have ever been investigated by police, past or present.
Joyce's own letter revealed that Mark Wadley had once stayed at a mental institution for trying to strangle people — a detail investigators apparently never followed up on.
Joyce's letter suggested Mark Wadley may have been an informer to law enforcement in a major drug bust two years before her disappearance, raising the possibility someone wanted to protect him.
In one of her final conversations, Joyce told her friend Kay that she was afraid of sealing someone's coffin with what she knew. She spoke cryptically about understanding chemistry 'too well' — possibly a reference to drugs — and said she was scared of hurting someone by talking. Kay never got to hear the secret.
