Author: Dave Cawley

Dave Cawley: Fifteen years have passed since the last time anyone saw Susan Cox Powell. The Facebook groups that once buzzed with tens of thousands of members, all clamoring for answers, are pretty quiet these days. Every once in awhile, someone new to Susan’s story will join and post a question, asking if this-or-that place has ever been searched. The comments will inevitably turn into a discussion of abandoned mines, caves, or “crystals.”

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): There was flowers and crystals that was colorful.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): That was what?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): That was colorful.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Colorful?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah?

Dave Cawley: I understand why many people think crystals are the clue that will lead us to the discovery of Susan’s remains. It goes back to what Susan’s son Charlie said during this police interview, the day after Susan came up missing.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): My mom stayed where a crystals are.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Where what are?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Where a crystals are.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): The crissals, crystals?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah, yeah.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Is that what you’re saying, crystals?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: I’ve seen people take this way too literally, assuming Charlie at four years old, had encyclopedic knowledge of places with crystal in their name, or picturing underground caverns with walls sparkling with gemstones. I think the truth of what Charlie was trying to say is much more simple.

Maybe it’s been awhile since you listened to Susan’s story. Let me refresh your memory about the basics. Susan’s husband, Josh Powell, took the couple’s two sons, Charlie and Braden, “camping” in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a snowstorm, on the night Susan was last seen. 

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): And we did a little campfire.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): So you have the campfire. What do you do with the campfire?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Just hung out for a few minutes, have a marshmallow or two and that’s about it.

Dave Cawley: Josh said he’d mixed the days up in his head, thinking it was a Saturday night into Sunday, instead of a Sunday night into Monday. When the boys didn’t show up for daycare on Monday morning, the daycare provider sounded the alarm. At the same time Josh was telling this story to police in West Valley City, Utah, Charlie was corroborating it.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Well, what did you do last night?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Go camping.

Dave Cawley: Charlie said camping is where you make s’mores.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): You hold a marshmallows over a fire with a stick.

Dave Cawley: The detective wanted to know if Charlie’s mom, Susan, was there when they roasted these marshmallows.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Who were you camping with?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): My dad and my mom and my, my little brother.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Dad, your mom and your brother?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: She asked who came home, and that’s when Charlie said Susan stayed behind, with the crystals.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your mom stayed where the crystals are?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Is that what you said?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Josh didn’t know Charlie was being interviewed, not until the lead detective on the case, Ellis Maxwell, confronted Josh with what Charlie’d said.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): One of our detectives just interviewed your children. And your children are telling our detectives that mom went with you guys last night. And that she didn’t come back.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): She did not go with us.

Dave Cawley: Two conflicting stories. Someone wasn’t telling the truth. It’s easy to assume Charlie’s story is the accurate one, because why would he lie? But the problem with cherry-picking pieces out of Charlie’s interview is it ignores the other things he said that didn’t make any sense. Like when he said he’d gone on an airplane to go camping, or to the beach on the way home.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): You went to an airplane yesterday?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah. And our airplane bring us to Dinosaur National Park.

Dave Cawley: Josh did not take his sons on an airplane the night he likely murdered Susan. And the family lived in landlocked Utah, hundreds of miles from the ocean. So what “beach” could Charlie’ve been thinking of? I’ve uncovered clues deep within a trove of Powell family photos and home videos that could help solve that riddle.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Charlie, where’s mommy?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Mommy’s gone.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She went over there, huh. Say, “Bye bye mommy.”

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Bye bye mommy.

Dave Cawley: This is a special bonus episode of Cold season 1: Beaches and Airplanes. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

Getting reliable information out of preschool-age kids is tricky, especially when they’ve experienced abuse or witnessed traumatic events.

Brianna Martinez: It’s a scary situation for kids. Maybe they have only talked to one other person about this or they’re not ready to talk about it and someone just found out. And now they’re being brought here to talk to a stranger about everything that’s happened, right?

Dave Cawley: That’s Brianna Martinez. She’s a forensic interviewer with the Weber-Morgan Children’s Justice Center in northern Utah. Children’s Justice Centers, or CJCs for short, are kid-friendly spaces where specially trained interviewers, like Brianna, can assist with investigations into crimes like child abuse or domestic violence. They’re also called Children’s Advocacy Centers in other parts of the country.

Brianna Martinez: It’s just a safe place for kids to come to kind of talk about what has happened to them. It’s not a police department or child protective services building. Just a safe place for them to talk.

Dave Cawley: Brianna was not personally  involved with the interview of Charlie Powell 15 years ago, but I wanted to get her perspective to help us understand what goes on behind the scenes with that kind of investigation. Here’s my interview with Brianna.

Dave Cawley (from interview recording): So why not bring a kid who has been through, let’s say abuse, to a police station? I think most people would imagine you, as an investigator, say a detective, you bring the person in, you sit them down in the cold, sterile interview room. Ask them questions. Why does that not work so well with kids?

Brianna Martinez: It’s intimidating, first off. And a lot of kids have trauma, they’ve been through a lot of things. Some kids may have had trauma with police officers in the past or child protective services in the past and that can bring up some previous trauma for them that could be scary. I mean, some kids even think they might be going to jail because they’re going to the police station. So this is just like a neutral place for them to come, where they know that they’re not in any trouble and they’re just able to kind of talk about what’s happened to them.

Dave Cawley: Building rapport. You sit down with a kid, I imagine you’re meeting them for the first time, pretty much every time—

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: —and you need to establish that they’re safe, that anything that they tell you is not going to come back to harm them. How do you go about building that rapport with somebody you’re interviewing?

Brianna Martinez: So, when they get here I’ll go out to the waiting room and I’ll introduce them. I’ll let them know that my job is to talk to kids. Then we go in the room and we’ll go over some of the rules for the interview. We’ll tell them, ‘If I ask you a question and you know the answer, then tell me. If you don’t know the answer, don’t guess or make things up. If there’s something that you don’t want to talk about, tell me that you don’t want to talk about it.’ Then we’ll ask them to promise to tell the truth. And then we move on to our rapport-building section, where we just spend some time getting to know the kid. Talk to them about things that they like to do, things that make them happy, something that’s made them sad. And let them know, ‘You can talk about good things and bad things that have happened to you.’ And in that portion of the interview, you’re kind of gauging where this kid is at in terms of talking to you, right? You can kind of see, like, ‘This kid’s pretty standoffish, they seem pretty reluctant. So I’m going to spend more time talking about the things that they like to do. Make ‘em more comfortable.’ After that portion, we’ll go through an episodic memory practice. They kind of refer to that as like the dress rehearsal of an interview, where we’ll talk to them about a really good day that they’ve had recently. For example, Christmas. ‘Tell me everything that happened on Christmas.’ And you’ll kind of work through that event. Like, ‘Ok, so you opened presents. Tell me everything about opening presents.’ And then you’ll move on throughout the day. And then that’s when we’ll transition over to the disclosure portion of the interview.

Dave Cawley: When you say “episodic memory,” I think I can understand what you mean by that but you’re basically asking about one specific episode. Something that’s happened, right?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: And I imagine older kids, teenagers, preteens, they’re probably pretty good at that. Younger kids, do you find that they struggle with times, places, stuff like that when you ask about episodic things?

Brianna Martinez: Specifics, yeah. They’ll struggle with a time something happened, or a specific date. But the details of the episode, they can give you. So they can tell you where it happened, what happened, who was there. And they can walk you through that whole episode but if I say, “What day did that happen on?,” it’s, “Mmm, Tuesday, Thursday, last week, yesterday.” So they struggle with time like that. But they’re able to tell you about the episode of Christmas, although they may not know what day of the month Christmas is on.

Dave Cawley: Understood. Part of the reason I ask that is I’m thinking about, y’know, an investigator, you’re probably very focused on some of those kinds of details and the way a child’s mind works, that just may not be there, right?

Brianna Martinez: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: So you really have to kind of think about how you approach those conversation and I think what you’re describing with episodic memory makes sense. You’re asking the child to describe it in their language, in the way that they understand it.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah. Yeah, and there are other ways to get that day and time specifically. And sometimes kids will say it, they just say it in their own way. For example, they’ll say, “Well it happened, we had just gotten the brand new blue couch.” So, that’s not a day or a time, but you can go and talk to other people and say, “What day did you get that blue couch?” Right? So you’re able to find out the day in another way. The kid is just not able to tell you that specific day that it happened.

Dave Cawley: Hmm. What are some of the considerations, concerns specific to kids versus any other kind of interview?

Brianna Martinez: So, when talking to kids just in a general day-to-day conversation, it’s a lot different than the way that you talk to kids in a forensic interview. For example, when you’re talking to a kid just about their day, you say, “How was school? Did you go to school? Did you do math?” Those are not the types of questions that we always ask in forensic interviews. So you’re focusing more on those open-ended questions. “Tell me everything that happened. Oh, you said you went to math. Tell me everything that happened in math.” And talking to kids obviously is a little bit different than talking to adults because they’re not on the development area that we’re at as adults, right? They haven’t gotten there yet. And so you kind of have to talk the way that they talk. Y’know, you have to use the words that they use. And you just have to kind of match their level when you’re talking to them.

Dave Cawley: You mentioned open-ended questions. I want to get a little more into that. So if I sat down with a kid and I wanted to know specifically about an event and I need a very—say I’m a detective and I have a very specific question about evidence I want to ask them and I drill on that, and the kid goes [I don’t know]—versus, like you’re saying, you kind of invite them to tell a story, it sounds like. From your experience, how are the differences in responses from kids based on those two different approaches?

Brianna Martinez: Well, the research shows that you get three to five times more accurate information from a child when you’re asking those open-ended questions than when you’re not. And with a kid saying, “I don’t know,” that’s their answer and that’s kind of what you have to take when you’re in a forensic interview with a kid. So what you want to do is ask those open-ended questions or just like, “Tell me everything that happened. Ok, you said this, then what happened? What’s the very next thing that happened, the very next thing?” And when you walk them through that episode of the event that they’re talking about, most of the time they’re able to give you the information that you’re looking for as a detective, right? When you go in and you say, “Did this happen, did this happen, did this happen,” you’re not getting that full story, as you say. You’re getting those bits and pieces of information that the child is giving you because of the way that you’re asking those questions. Whereas, when you say, “Tell me everything that happened from this point to this point,” they’re going to go through and narrate that whole entire event for you.

Dave Cawley: Is there a risk if you ask those really direct questions of, especially I’m thinking like a younger child, that they tell you what they think you want to hear?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah so, I mean there’s a difference between direct questions and leading questions. So for example, a direct question is, “What shoes are you wearing? What color is the car?” A leading question is, “You’re wearing a brown shirt, right?” So when you ask those leading questions, kids are going to be like, “Is that what you want me to say? Yes or no?” Like, “Oh yeah, I’m wearing a brown shirt.” Whereas, you say, “Tell me everything about the clothes that you’re wearing.” “Well, I have a brown shirt on. I have brown shoes on.” Things like that. When you ask those leading questions, it’s hard later on because it’s like, “Is that kid saying that because that’s actually what happened or are they saying that because I said that and I implied that that was something that was happening?” So you want to avoid those leading questions and instead open it up and say, “Tell me everything about your clothes.”

Dave Cawley: You have to be really careful doing what you do.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, you have to be really careful.

Dave Cawley: Do you ever find that, and especially with the younger kids, I’m thinking about the way even with my own relatives—nieces, nephews—you talk to them and it’s like, “What are they talking about?” They’re using, whatever they’re picturing in their mind and they’re telling you, you’re thinking, “That doesn’t make any sense.” Like, does that happen a lot in these kinds of interviews where they’re describing something that on the surface you don’t follow?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, there are times where they’ll say things that you’re like, “I’m not understanding.” And so that’s why you ask those follow-up questions and try to get more information from them. But, you do the best that you can and the child is doing the best that they can so you really just have to accept where they’re at developmentally. And they just may not be able to put it into words. And so you try to do those follow-up questions and you try to get more information from them but at the end of the day, whatever they can tell you is whatever they can tell you. And as a forensic interviewer sometimes you have to just accept what they tell you.

Dave Cawley: That’s what it is.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: In the case of Charlie Powell’s interview, he’d told the story to the best of his ability. It wasn’t his fault that that didn’t lead police to Susan. But what Charlie said the next time he met police definitely raised suspicion Josh Powell had something to hide.

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Dave Cawley: Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I believe Josh Powell was being honest when he said Susan didn’t go with him on the camping trip the night of her disappearance.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): She was not with us. And if my kids said that—

Tony Martell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): So your kids lie, then? Do your kids lie?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Sometimes they do.

Dave Cawley: It’s likely whatever happened to Susan occurred before Josh took Charlie and Braden out to the desert.

Police weren’t able to arrest Josh in December of 2009 because they didn’t have hard evidence to prove Susan was dead. You might recall Josh packed his boys into his minivan a little over a week later and moved to Washington state.

West Valley police wanted another crack at interviewing Charlie though, so they worked with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office in Washington to get a warrant. It authorized deputies to seize Charlie and Braden away from Josh, so they could be interviewed at a Children’s Advocacy Center in Tacoma. The same detective who’d first interviewed Charlie in Utah also conducted the second interview three months later, in March of 2010. But the result was less than ideal.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Charlie, has anybody talked to you about your mom?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Mmnm.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): No?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I not know where she is. She got lost in somewhere.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): She got lost somewhere? Tell me about your mom getting lost.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I not know where she got lost. I didn’t saw where she got lost.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): You didn’t see where she got lost?

Dave Cawley: Charlie squirms in a video recording. He tries to change the subject. The detective keeps turning back to the topic of camping and Susan’s disappearance. Charlie becomes agitated.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): We, we can’t talk about Susan or camping. I, I, I always keep these as secrets.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Did somebody tell you to keep a secret?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): No, only my brain did.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your brain did? What else did your brain tell you about the secret?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): My, my brain, my brain won’t tell me to say that.

Dave Cawley: It seemed likely Josh’d coached Charlie during those three months, to keep him from saying anything incriminating. Let’s go back to my conversation with Brianna.

Dave Cawley (from interview recording): What about when somebody you’re interviewing maybe seems evasive? Like either they don’t want to talk or they don’t want to talk about the thing that you’re there to talk to them about. How do you handle that?

Brianna Martinez: In my experience I’ve dealt with reluctance a lot. But we just remind them, my job is to talk to kids about things that have happened to them. I talk to lots of kids about things that have happened to them. And we kind of dive into that reluctance a little bit more when I can sense that it’s happening, or when they straight-up tell me, “I’m not comfortable talking about this.” Y’know, “Tell me more about not feeling comfortable. Tell me what you think will happen if you talk about what’s happened. Is there anything I can do to make you feel more comfortable?”  And there have been time where kids are like, “Nope. Not ready. Nope, don’t want to talk about it.” And you go through that reluctance with them and sometimes they’re just not ready. And when that’s happened in my experience and kids are just not ready, I let them know, “If there’s a time that you do feel comfortable and you do want to talk to me again, tell someone you trust and we can talk again.” So I leave that door open for them. And I have had kids come back that said, “I’m ready to talk about what’s happened.” So.

Dave Cawley: I’ve read though that second interviews are generally not the recommended approach. Is that right?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, it depends. In situations like that where we haven’t gotten a disclosure from the child and they’re telling me straight up, “I’m not ready to talk about this right now,” we haven’t talked about anything. And so it doesn’t matter if they come back again because there’s nothing that’s happened. It’s like we’re starting fresh again. But yeah, there are instances where we will get a disclosure from a child and the detective or CPS will want more information and so we really have to think about it and work through it and see like, “What information is it that you’re looking [for] from this child and can we get it somewhere else?” Because they’ve come in and they’ve told me everything that they can think of. Is it really worth going through a whole ‘nother interview just to get that one little piece of information. Another example though is kids will come in, make a disclosure, tell me that they’ve told everything, go home, live their life and then they’re like, “Oh wait.” Like, “I forgot to tell this lady something. I want to go back and talk to her.” So if that’s the case, and that does happen and we’ve talked about it and we decide that a second interview will be beneficial for the child, I’ll bring them in, I’ll talk to them about the information they want to give me, and then I’ll ask them about it. “What made you want to tell me about this now? What kept you from telling me about it last time we talked?” And we’ll just work through those things.

Dave Cawley: One of the things I read was, in a second interview it’s preferred to have the same person do the second interview. Is that right?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, yep.

Dave Cawley: What’s the reasoning behind that?

Brianna Martinez: The reason is, is I’ve already built rapport with the kid. I’ve already talked to them. And a lot of times when second interview happen, they happen relatively close to the first interview. Not always, obviously. But most of the time they happen relatively close. So when it happens close like that, kids usually remember you. You’ve already talked to them, you’ve already built rapport with them, they remember your face, they kind of know what’s going to be happening already. So.

Dave Cawley: In a situation like that, I’m imagining in a short timeframe, let’s say it’s even in the same investigation, what about the risk of having coaching? If they go back into, let’s say a home environment where a parent or caregiver or whatever says, “What did you tell that person?” And, “Don’t say this, don’t say that.” Can you tell when they maybe come back for a second interview that, hey, something’s gone on?

Brianna Martinez: You can tell that something has, especially if their disclosure from their first interview to the second interview is completely different. Sometimes kids will say, “This and this and this happened.” And then the next time they’ll come in and it’s like talking to a brand new kid. So when that happens, you really have to dive into it and ask those follow-up questions, y’know? If this is their disclosure now, you need to go in and ask, “Tell me more about that.” Get those details and then say, “So, I’m a little bit confused. Last time we talked, you told me about this. Tell me about that.” And see their explanation of why it changed from this day to this day, right? And then talk to the law enforcement and CPS and say, “Compare those two interviews because they are different.” And then they have to continue their investigation.

Dave Cawley: It’s their job to figure out what happened.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Wow, that’s tricky. The interview that I’m focused on happened in 2009—2024, 15 years. This field has changed a lot in that time. Is that fair to say?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, yeah. It has changed a lot.

Dave Cawley: A lot of focus on learning, a scientific approach to this. And I imagine that’s still going on.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, there’s research going on all the time. I’m constantly learning new things. But yeah, things have changed a lot. I haven’t been around that long. I don’t know what it was like back then. I have heard stories, I have listened to interviews and they are different. There was a lot more of those direct questions or leading questions back then, because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. And now we know that those open-ended questions are going to get you more accurate information from the child and so we really depend on those open-ended questions for those kids.

At the start of this episode, you heard a clip of Josh asking Charlie, “Where’s mommy?” And Charlie responding, “Mommy’s gone.” That video was recorded in April of 2008, about a year-and-a-half before Susan disappeared. Josh’d taken Charlie and Braden to visit Susan at her work on that day.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Show me, where are the ducks? Where do we need to go? Over that way? Oh, you want us to go this way?

Dave Cawley: Susan skipped her lunch so she could spend time with her boys. They went to a large pond right outside the Wells Fargo call center where she worked. That pond is always crowded with seagulls, geese and ducks.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Say c’mere ducks.

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): C’mere ducks.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Is anyone brave enough to get this big piece? (Laughs)

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Good job, Charlie. You’ve attracted them.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Stay right here with mommy.

Dave Cawley: Josh’s eyes are glued to the video camera. He shoots clips of the boys from several angles, while also criticizing Susan’s duck feeding technique.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Don’t crumble it, Susan.

Dave Cawley: There are a lot of little moments like this in Josh and Susan’s home videos, where Josh talks down to her. But it can be subtle, like in this next clip. Josh turns the camera over to Susan, so she can get a shot of Josh walking hand-in-hand with the boys over a small wooden bridge.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Walk with daddy.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): C’mere Charlie, hold my hand and then we’ll see if we can go find a fish. C’mere.

Dave Cawley: The boys don’t cooperate. They’re tired, and not all that interested in being movie props. Susan points the camera at Braden, as he fidgets with the plastic bread bag.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): He gives up. (Laughs) Alright—

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Get down on his level, y’know.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): —I’ve got to go.

Dave Cawley: From the outside, you probably wouldn’t pick up on Josh’s constant, low-level nagging of Susan as anything serious. But I think it reveals a lack of respect and affection. And that’s when he knows he’s being recorded.

Susan’s lunch break is over. She heads back into the office, as Josh loads the kids into their carseats. He starts the engine, then points the camera at Charlie.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Charlie, where’s mommy?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Mommy’s gone.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She went over there, huh. Say, “Bye bye mommy.”

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Bye bye mommy.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Where’s she going?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She’s going to that.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): To that building?

Dave Cawley: Josh starts driving away from Susan’s office.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Is it work?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Mmhmm.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Does mommy work in that building? What does mommy do for work?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She’s going up.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Upstairs?

Dave Cawley: Susan’s work sat in an office park right next to Salt Lake City International Airport. Sometimes after visiting Susan, Josh would drive over to a spot at the south end of the airport, right off the end of one of the runways.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Alright, we’re going to go see if we can look at the airplanes for a minute and then you get to go home to take a nap. Ok Charlie?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): I don’t want to nap.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): You don’t?

(Sound of a jet airplane passing overhead)

Dave Cawley: When they reach the airport in this video clip, Josh leaves Braden unaccompanied in the minivan, so he and Charlie can go watch the airplanes.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Tell me what you think of that airplane. C’mere, look at me and tell me what you think of it. C’mon.

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Airplane go vroom.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Do you like this place? Are you glad that you get to come to the airport?

Dave Cawley: I presented a theory in the finale episode of Cold season 1. I suggested Josh might’ve left Susan’s body near her work on that Sunday night in 2009, before heading out on the camping trip with Charlie and Braden. This home video, and others like it, reinforce my belief Charlie associated his mom’s workplace with airplanes. During that first interview with the detective, Charlie said he’d flown on a plane both on his way to go camping, and on the return.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): We went home in the airplane.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Oh. What about when you went last night camping? When you were all done, what did you do?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Umm, we went to a beach when we was all done.

Dave Cawley: To my knowledge, the only real beach Charlie’d visited before Susan disappeared was along the Puget Sound in Tacoma. And that’s obviously not where he was the night his mom vanished. Instead, I believe Charlie’s “beach” was probably the pond outside Susan’s work. And that lines up with what Josh said he did on his way home from the camping trip.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I thought—

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Mmhmm.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): —I thought she was at work.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Mmhmm. … You went to her work, right?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): To pick her up. What time did you get there?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Probably 5:35.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): 5:35?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Something like that.

Dave Cawley: But there’s a two-hour gap in Josh’s timetable that afternoon, from when left this first voicemail for Susan around 3:30…

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Anyway, hopefully you got to work ok. And, of course give me a call. We’re, I guess, planning on picking you up.

Dave Cawley: …to when he left her a second message, claiming to be in the parking lot outside her office.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Hello, I’m out here. So I’m—

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Right now.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): —just waiting for you. So anyway I’m in front. Ok, talk to you soon. Bye.

Dave Cawley: Josh wanted to convince police he thought Susan was at work. We can safely assume that was a ruse and he knew she was dead. It was after dark by the time of that second voicemail, so I doubt Charlie would’ve been able to tell where he was from the back seat of the minivan. But maybe he saw the pond, his “beach,” earlier than Josh would like us to believe. What if Josh was there during the daylight, during those two hours between 3:30 and 5:30?

Maybe Josh went to see if anyone had yet found Susan’s body, at whatever place he’d left her the night before. Upon seeing she was undisturbed, concealed under a blanket of fresh snow, Josh decided he could still pull off his plot. But he didn’t consider Charlie, who tried to tell us the following day where his mom was.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): And at night my mom stayed, sleep where a flowers and a crystals grow.

Dave Cawley: Whatever Charlie might’ve known about Susan’s death, he never developed the ability or opportunity to share it better than this. As we know, Josh killed his sons, and himself, on February 5^th, 2012. Charlie would be 19 going on 20 if he were alive today. I sometimes wonder what kind of young man he would’ve become, whether he’d have escaped his father’s poisonous influence and found the words to truly tell us where the flowers and the crystals grow.

Dave Cawley: As a kid growing up on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, Josh Powell dreamed of becoming a self-made millionaire. But achieving that goal proved more difficult than young Josh expected.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 13, 2000 audio journal recording): At the moment, I’ve only got a thousand bucks in savings.

Dave Cawley: His first attempt to make it big was a woodworking “business,” he started in high school. He bragged to his friends about spending thousands of dollars on tools. He didn’t have clients enough to justify the expense, but that hardly mattered.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 13, 2000 audio journal recording): If I spend $400 on tools, it makes me frustrated in my own budgeting and I feel like, “What the heck, I might as well spend another $400 on something else that I want.”

Dave Cawley: Josh never made his million dollars. But he did take out a million-dollar life insurance policy on his wife, Susan Cox Powell. Then, on December 6^th, 2009, Susan vanished. That was 15 years ago. And she has still not been found.

There’s a single piece of evidence in Susan’s case that’s confounded me for years. It’s a hunk of twisted metal police found in the back of Josh’s minivan, the day after Susan turned up missing. The lead detective on the case, Ellis Maxwell, told me the metal object ended up with the FBI.

Ellis Maxwell: It was forensically tested and nobody could identify what that object was.

Dave Cawley: But now, I’m pretty sure I can. This is a special bonus episode of Cold season 1: Mystery Metal. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

If it’s been awhile since you listened to Susan Powell’s story, the details of the case might be bit fuzzy in your memory. That’s ok. We’re going to revisit some of the events that preceded Susan’s disappearance, as well as what happened in the first couple days of the investigation. And I think where I’d like to begin, is on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 25^th, 2009. It was the day before Thanksgiving. And a guy named Andrew Robinson was at work, at a business called Airgas.

Andrew Robinson: Airgas is a company that manufactures and produces gasses: oxygen, nitrogen, acetylene.

Dave Cawley: I mentioned Josh’s trip to Airgas in episode 3. That account was drawn from police case files. I hadn’t talked to Andrew about it myself when that episode first came out, six years ago. In fact, Andrew’s never before spoken publicly about his experience meeting Josh on that day, just a week-and-a-half before Susan disappeared.

Andrew Robinson: I do recall that day Josh came in and his demeanor.

Dave Cawley: Andrew’s Australian, if you can’t tell. He was living in Utah at the time, but moved back to Sydney a short time later.

Andrew Robinson: And I guess I lost touch with the story.

Dave Cawley: Andrew discovered this podcast about a year ago, and listened to Susan’s story.

Andrew Robinson: Listened to that with fascination. Learned a lot more about how the story had progressed.

Dave Cawley: He reached out to me, because he had some unanswered questions. I sent him copies of the case files where he’s mentioned, and Andrew said some of the detail in those police reports was wrong.

Our conversation got me thinking again about that melted hunk of mystery metal. Andrew’s story is key in understanding where it came from and what it might be. So I asked him to take us back to the start and share the story from his perspective.

Dave Cawley (from interview recording): What was your interaction with Josh when he came in?

Andrew Robinson: Just a regular business day. … It was extremely quiet. … Roundabout, 3:45, a gentleman came into the store. … I approached Josh and asked if I can give some assistance in particular that he was looking for. And he spoke back saying that he was just having a look around. … After 10 or 15 minutes, he hadn’t approached the counter, still looking around the aisles. I approached him again and asked him what it was, he said he was interested in welding equipment, what we had in the way of that. I asked what it was in particular that he wanted to weld. And he said he was interested in making jewelry. … So I guided him to the product that would be most suitable, a kit that we had for soldering and light welding.

Dave Cawley: And was that the kit that he ended up purchasing or did he want something else?

Andrew Robinson: Josh ended up purchasing a cutting kit, which is a little bit more involved. It does allow you to do light welding. It also allows you to cut material with oxyacetylene.

Dave Cawley: To you, I guess in retrospect, does that choice to upgrade seem at all strange given what he said he wanted to do with it?

Andrew Robinson: Yeah, that struck me as being odd. It was a little bit of overkill for some cutting equipment to be involved in the making of jewelry.

Dave Cawley: From what I understood talking to you before and reading through the reports, he hung around awhile.

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct. He entered the store 3:30, 3:45. It wasn’t until after 5 p.m. when we would be regularly closing that he left with the kit in hand and also some cylinders as well to allow him to use that equipment.

Dave Cawley: When you say cylinders, I mean, fuel. We’re talking about the oxygen and the acetylene gas that he needs to run the torch, is that right?

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct. It was a small bottle of acetylene and oxygen to go with it. But these cylinders weren’t actually correct in being able to hook up to the torch. The cylinders that were provided to him were more in line with what you would use for making jewelry.

Dave Cawley: So let me restate that and just make sure I understand correctly. When he’s in there on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving and he says he wants to do jewelry stuff, you and the other employee, you’re trying to accommodate what he tells you he’s wanting to do. So it’s a, maybe a smaller tank with a different fitting. He upgrades to this bigger setup that can do steel cutting, but he still has these other tanks and at some point after he leaves the store he must’ve realized that something isn’t what he wants for this larger setup that he ended up buying. Am I understanding that correctly?

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct, yes. Josh did return the next week after the holiday weekend to exchange those cylinders to ones more suitable.

Dave Cawley: Ok. So he’s back in the store and what ends up happening from there?

Andrew Robinson: He came back in. I didn’t deal directly with Josh at the time but reading the body language I could see he was a little bit irritated. People were scurrying around trying to satisfy his requirements.

Dave Cawley: Do you recall, I guess at that point, was there anything that, in your memory you thought, “Huh, that was weird?”

Andrew Robinson: Not at the time, no. No. I just thought that everybody is an individual, has their own mannerisms. Was not thinking of anything particularly sinister.

Dave Cawley: A day or so later, Josh created a new text file on his work laptop, and titled “Welding Instructions.” He ran a Google search for the exact phrase “btu per cubic foot versus heat acetylene versus propane.” BTU is an acronym for “British thermal unit.” It’s a measure of heat. Josh’s browser history showed he visited two websites with information about acetylene gas.

Andrew Robinson: I did get that impression from Josh that he didn’t have a great deal of knowledge regarding the use of the equipment.

Dave Cawley: On Friday, December 4^th, Josh moved the “Welding Instructions” document to an encrypted portion of his hard drive. That encryption was never broken or bypassed, so I can’t tell you what the Welding Instructions file contained. All I can say is that by the following Monday, Susan was gone.

On the morning of Monday, December 7^th, 2009, Josh and Susan both failed to show up for work. Their sons, four-year-old Charlie and two-year-old Braden, didn’t arrive at daycare. Police in West Valley City, Utah forced entry at Josh and Susan’s house, on a cul-de-sac called Sarah Circle. Detective Ellis Maxwell swept the house, noticing Susan’s wallet and keys in the master bedroom. But the family, and their minivan, were gone.

Josh reappeared with the boys in the minivan later that afternoon. Susan wasn’t with him. Ellis confronted Josh on the driveway outside of the house. He told Josh they needed to go to a nearby police substation, to talk.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): Has she ever tried to leave or ever wanted to get out of this relationship at all with you?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): Uh, no. I don’t, I mean, it’s come up.

Dave Cawley: Josh said he’d taken his sons out on an impromptu camping trip the night before, in the middle of a snowstorm. He said Susan stayed home.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): Do you think she’s in danger right now, do you think she’s hurt?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Ellis suspected Josh’d done something to Susan, but he didn’t have a body or a confession. So at the end of the interview, he escorted Josh back to the Sarah Circle house. Josh reversed the minivan into the cluttered garage. Then, Ellis left. Josh had the house to himself. Exactly what he did in the hours that followed remains unclear.

Ellis Maxwell: Neighbors told us he had the van backed up to the garage.

Dave Cawley: Those neighbors lived a few doors down, on the corner. They described seeing Josh pull the minivan partway out of the garage at about 11 p.m. on Monday night. But they couldn’t tell what he was doing. I suspect he was making space to set up the oxyacetylene torch. And I think he intended to use it to destroy any physical evidence linking him to Susan’s death.

Detective Ellis Maxwell interviewed Josh a second time on the afternoon Tuesday, December 8^th, the day after Susan was reported missing.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Ok. I have a whole lot of questions still. Alright? We need to find your wife.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I’ve already told you everything.

Dave Cawley: Rather than rehash this whole interview, let’s jump to the climax, when Ellis told Josh detectives were headed to the Sarah Circle house with a search warrant.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): We have your house. You’re not going to be able to go back to your house. Ok?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): What do you mean?

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your house is ours, for right now. We’re not going to let you back into that house.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Ok.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your car is ours. We’re not going to let you have your car.

Dave Cawley: The first thing the detectives did upon returning to Josh and Susan’s house was photograph everything. Those pictures are really important. What makes them valuable, is that Ellis had also photographed the house on Monday, before Josh was able to disturb anything. So by comparing the two sets of pictures, we can see what changed.

Ellis’ pictures from Monday show the oxyacetylene torch sitting on a cart in the garage. This tells us Josh didn’t take it with him on his “camping trip.” If I zoom in real close, I can see the tip of the torch, where the flame comes out, looks clean and shiny. But on Tuesday, that tip is covered in black soot. That’s proof Josh used the torch on that Monday night.

Meanwhile, you might remember Ellis’s search of the minivan on Tuesday turned up a melted metal object, some charred wire scraps and a few sheets of badly burned sheetrock, all contained in a plastic garbage bag, hidden in a floorboard compartment. This was presumably the remnant of whatever it was Josh burned.

Let’s go back to my conversation with Andrew, the guy from the Airgas store where Josh bought the torch. He happened to see Josh’s face on the TV news a couple days later.

Andrew Robinson: Yeah, that was the next time that I saw Josh was on the news the following week. … Being interviewed about his wife that’s gone missing. … Then I thought to myself, “Was that the guy that came into the store?” I went into my work the following day and I just wanted to verify that so I mentioned to my coworker and we pulled it up online. And he said, “Yeah, yeah. That looks like him.” And the way that he interacted with the journalist was very similar to how he interacted with myself and a coworker, very, I wouldn’t say as much as evasive but just very, almost vague.

Dave Cawley: So once you confirm that, “Hey, that’s the same person who was in here,” was there a question of, “What do I do?”

Andrew Robinson: Well, I just felt that it was something that needed to be brought to the attention to law enforcement.

Dave Cawley: So, as I understand, you end being the person to make the phone call to the West Valley City Police Department. Is that right?

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct, yes. The officer took my details and two officers came. They just wanted to know the interaction, whether we could provide evidence of the purchase in the way of a receipt and CCTV footage. And we had that arranged.

Dave Cawley: A police report about this interview says, quote, “Andrew said that he heard Joshua state on news interviews that he had been cutting open mine shafts on the Pony Express Trail.” Andrew told me that’s not accurate. He never heard Josh say that, because Josh didn’t say it. It is what Andrew suspected Josh might’ve wanted a steel cutting torch for at the time, and that’s what he said to the detectives.

Andrew Robinson: A thought that did come to my mind was what was his actual intent on the equipment that he purchased? … The upgrade in cylinder size would not be something that you would purchase for a little home jewelry making.

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Dave Cawley: A little earlier, I mentioned the police photos of Josh and Susan’s house, taken on Monday and Tuesday. They showed where the oxyacetylene torch was in the garage. But there’s another important difference between the two sets of images. 

On Monday, there’s an orange and black tool bag sitting on top of a chest freezer, next to the door leading from the garage into the house. But on Tuesday, that tool bag’s moved to a spot on the concrete floor, next to the torch. I think it’s likely the metal object Josh melted was in that bag. So let’s talk about where that bag came from, and what it likely contained.

During the second interview, Ellis asked Josh about his financial situation.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Give me a list of your checking accounts, credit cards that you guys have.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Well, she has, seems like she has a couple of accounts at Wells Fargo.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Ok.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Oh, and Home Depot. Yeah, she’s got a Home Depot card.

Dave Cawley: Susan’s Home Depot card was really Josh’s Home Depot card. He’d gone through bankruptcy in 2007, but rather than stop buying tools, he opened that credit card in Susan’s name and went on a Black Friday spending spree. One of the items he bought was a Ridgid-brand 18-volt cordless tool kit. And it came in a black and orange bag. That tool bag appears in a video Susan made a year-and-a-half before she disappeared, documenting the family’s assets, along with a bunch of other Ridgid tools.

Susan Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video recording): A Ridgid drill, some type of Ridgid sander and a Ridgid saw.

Dave Cawley: I found an old Ridgid catalog from that same time. It shows this 18-volt kit came in two variants. Both included a hammer drill, reciprocating saw, circular saw, flashlight and battery charger. The difference between the two was one kit included an impact driver. That’s like a smaller version of a drill good for turning screws or bolts. Josh bought one of these two kits, but it’s not clear which.

Susan Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video recording): All expensive stuff that we bought. A lot of it got bankrupted, a lot of it got added afterwards.

Dave Cawley: I can account for every one of those tools in police photos from after Susan’s disappearance. The only one I can’t find is an impact driver. So it’s possible the melted metal object could’ve been a Ridgid impact driver.

In the bonus episode “Project Sunlight,” I described discovering a file among Josh’s computer records from 2009. It was a transfer log, showing the names of documents Josh kept on an encrypted hard drive. There’s an entire folder labeled “Ridgid Tools,” with entries for warranty documents, a spreadsheet with the serial numbers, even photos. Unfortunately, I don’t have the documents and photos themselves, because again, they’re encrypted.

But what’s curious is when West Valley City police later seized Josh’s computers a second time in 2011, they held a copy of this same Ridgid Tools folder. The spreadsheet and photos aren’t in it. It appears Josh deleted them. For what purpose? We can only assume.

West Valley police turned the melted metal object over to the FBI in 2010. The bureau performed a metallurgical analysis. It showed the mystery metal was mostly steel, with lesser amounts of calcium and strontium. That last element, strontium, is a component in small electric motors, like the kind used in power drills and impact drivers. And remember, Ellis also found three short wire segments in the trash bag along with the mystery metal. Those wires were the right gage and length to connect a battery to a small electric motor, like inside an impact driver.

All this is to say, a lot of circumstantial evidence points to the mystery metal being the remains of a power tool. But I needed to test this theory. So I bought an old Ridgid impact driver secondhand and enlisted the help of a friend with an oxyacetylene torch to melt it.

(Sound of oxyacetylene cutting torch)

Dave Cawley: The orange plastic shell turned into a bubbling pool of black goo.

Dave Cawley (from video of impact driver experiment): I mean, that rear casing’s pretty well gone. I can see the, I can see the housing on the front. Look how sooty you are though.

Dave Cawley: It put off a thick smoke that coated the tip of the torch in soot.

Andrew Robinson: Plastic would cause that blackening. … Blackening can also occur from too much fuel in the flame, too much acetylene.

Dave Cawley: As the silvery steel body of the motor heated up, it glowed white. The metal softened. Some of it liquified.

Dave Cawley (from video of impact driver experiment): So right where you’re at should be kind of the joint between the motor and the transmission—

Peter D. (from video of impact driver experiment): I think you’re right.

Dave Cawley (from video of impact driver experiment): —if it cuts clean through there, that would probably actually be good.

Dave Cawley: The motor broke into pieces. It took more than an hour and quite a lot of fuel to reduce the whole thing to an unrecognizable chunk of slag. We doused it with water, then compared the result to police photographs of Josh’s melted metal object. It looks almost identical to my eyes. You can see the pictures yourself on our website, thecoldpodcast.com.

Andrew, the Aussie from the Airgas store also watched a video recording of the experiment. I asked his opinion about it, since he has much more experience with oxyacetylene than I do.

Andrew Robinson: I’ve been involved in the automotive industry so oxygen, acetylene for heating components, cutting components, welding components.

Dave Cawley: That torch, do you think, would’ve been capable of reducing, like a power tool to that kind of a shape?

Andrew Robinson: Definitely, yes. … The power tool is fairly light material, all in all, and that torch certainly would be capable of reducing that to a molten clump of different materials.

Dave Cawley: Did it seem plausible to you, based on the experiment, that that’s what that object could be?

Andrew Robinson: I believe there was a very close similarity. … To come across that, I think there was some motive it that. … Something involved was destroyed by Josh.

Dave Cawley: I can’t prove beyond a doubt Josh’s melted metal object was a Ridgid impact driver. But this experiment left me convinced the mystery metal was absolutely a power tool.

Andrew Robinson: Why would you destroy a, something like that? Unless for some reason he just wanted to see how long it would take to melt a cordless drill. But why? … Y’know, if he’d had the oxyacetylene torch for six months and he was playing around with it and he thought, “Oh, I wonder how long it takes to melt this thing,” and it’d been sitting there, but it only happened within a week. Maybe two weeks, max.

Dave Cawley: The only reason I can conceive why Josh would’ve taken the time and effort to destroy such a tool, the moment the eyes of police were off him, was if it somehow linked him to Susan’s murder.

Andrew Robinson: Whether he premeditated it—I’ll go to Airgas, I’ll buy this equipment because I’m going to do this, I’ll melt the, the weapon—I don’t believe that to be the case. But … it’s quite feasible that the destruction of that, believed cordless drill was involved somehow in Susan’s demise.

Dave Cawley: While searching through Josh and Susan’s photos and home videos, I found a clip from August of 2006, about three years before Susan disappeared. Josh and Susan’s first son, Charlie, was a year-and-a-half old.

Susan Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): Ready? See this saw? And we go vroom! Oh!

Dave Cawley: That’s Susan talking. She and Josh are showing Charlie how to use a Little Tikes-brand playset. It’s shaped like a miniature woodworking bench, complete with a toy table saw.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): Cut the wood. Oh, you did it. You did it. You cut the wood. You cut the wood, good job.

Dave Cawley: Charlie’s a little young for this playset. He doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of a table saw, and picks up a toy drill instead. He has trouble holding it steady as he pretends to drive holes into the workbench. Charlie makes drilling noises with his mouth while Josh micromanages Susan’s camerawork.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): You should get down and zoom into his face.

Dave Cawley: There’s a moment in the video where Charlie walks over to Josh. He presses the plastic drill bit against the bare skin of Josh’s foot.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): You’re drilling on my foot? 

Dave Cawley: Charlie flashes a grin.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): What, you think that’s funny?

Dave Cawley: But listen to what Josh says in response.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): That could really hurt someone.

Dave Cawley: I got chills the first time I watched this, because t his could’ve been a moment when the seed of an idea was planted in Josh’s mind.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): Ow, ow, ow. Drills hurt. Ow, ow.

Dave Cawley: When he conceived the idea a power tool could be repurposed into a weapon. And Susan watched it happen.

A personal note from me as this episode comes to a close. In the years since this podcast first launched, I’ve heard from many of you about how Susan’s story has the power to reveal the sometimes subtle signs of domestic abuse. If you see those in your own relationships, please consider calling 1-800-799-SAFE to speak with someone who can help.

Even if you think you don’t know anyone who’s experiencing abuse, statistics tell us you do. To honor Susan’s memory, please look up information about domestic violence resources in your area. Educate yourself on the red flags of coercive control. Read up about the lethality assessment protocol. Be ready to help the people you care about. Together, we can save lives.

Dave Cawley: Each swing of the pick brought a loud clank of metal against stone. Sweat dripped from the faces of the detectives who took turns heaving shovelfuls of dirt into an orange bucket. Next to them, standing over a blue tarp, CSI workers sifted loose dirt through a mesh screen, pausing to peer at any odd roots or rocks. What they really hoped to find were fragments of bone. Roy City police and Weber County crime scene investigators, along with search and rescue staff, conducted an excavation of a possible clandestine grave near Causey Reservoir in mountains of northern Utah on August 23^rd, 2023. They were looking for skeletal remains, possibly those of Sheree Warren.

Jason Romney (from Aug. 23, 2023 recording): How many years has it been, Dave?

Dave Cawley (from Aug. 23, 2023 recording): Since Sheree?

Jason Romney (from Aug. 23, 2023 recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley (from Aug. 23, 2023 recording): 38.

Jason Romney (from Aug. 23, 2023 recording): 38? Yeah, I would think after that time we might just be getting long bones, big bones.

Dave Cawley: Sheree Warren’s case, and these mountains that may hold secrets about her fate, have consumed my attention for quite some time. You’ve heard the result: the story of the search for Sheree is chronicled in COLD season 3. Through months and years of research, I honed in on this specific spot as a possible place to look for Sheree Warren’s remains. Circumstantial evidence suggests one of the two named suspects in Sheree’s disappearance could’ve known this place very well. There was also an outside chance this site could hold evidence related to the murder of Joyce Yost, the subject of COLD season 2.

These two cases, Sheree Warren’s and Joyce Yost’s, are likely unrelated, but they occurred in close proximity to one another, in space and time. Over the last nearly 40 years, they’ve bled into one another. We’ve now taken detailed looks at both in this podcast, and heard repeated references to Causey Reservoir.

Shane Minor: The Causey area’s about 20 miles east of Ogden, there’s a Causey Reservoir.

Stan Olsen (from May 24, 2004 police recording): Yeah, this is Causey Estates up here.

Bill Daines (from January 27, 2006 subpoena recording): Did you ever hunt in the Causey Reservoir area?

Rod Layton: Causey is a area up the canyon.

Jared Briggs (from December 15, 2006 Utah State Prison recording): And he scooped her body up and they drove to Causey.

Jack Bell: You got two reservoirs up there that are deep, Causey and Lost Creek.

Jack Hartmann (from January 27, 2006 subpoena recording): There’s some really steep trails going up to the righthand side off Causey.

Dave Cawley: That’s why Roy City police invited myself and several of my colleagues from KSL-TV, the Salt Lake City-based news station I work for, to watch as they excavated this site.

Dan Spindle (from August 23, 2023 KSL TV archive): Breaking news happening right now. Law enforcement agencies in Weber County are digging right now what appears to be at a burial site that might be connected to a four-decades-old murder case.

Dave Cawley: But if you’re not in Utah, or don’t watch the news here, you probably didn’t hear anything about this. So let me bring you up to speed. In this episode, we’ll review the evidence that points to the possibility of gravesite near Causey. We’ll go to the site of this dig, and I’ll share where the search for Sheree Warren stands, now that the dust has literally settled.

This is a bonus episode of COLD, season 3: The Causey Search. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley. 

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Dave Cawley: Let’s begin with a recap of the Joyce Yost and Sheree Warren cases. Both had their start in the area of Ogden, Utah back in 1985. Joyce’s case came first. That April, a man Joyce had never met followed her home from a club late one night. Doug Lovell confronted Joyce in the carport outside her apartment in the city of South Ogden. Lovell sexually assaulted Joyce, kidnapped her and held her captive.

Joyce, fearing for her life, promised not to tell anyone what Lovell’d done if he just let her go. He did. When Joyce made it safety at home in the early morning hours, she called her sister. This is Joyce’s voice, explaining what her sister said.

Joyce Yost (from April 4, 1985 police recording): She says “well you call the police.” And I said ‘I really don’t want to be put through the humiliation.” … She said, in fact the more she heard from me, the angrier she was getting and she says “well, you call the police right now,’ or she said, “if you don’t, I will.” So, I said “I will.”

Dave Cawley: Joyce soon met with detective Bill Holthaus. She told him her story. Holthaus believed Joyce, and he arrested Doug Lovell that same morning on suspicion of rape.

Bill Holthaus: He looked at me with an expression that got my attention. … But it just was like it froze the moment. And he said “this will not go to trial.”

Dave Cawley: Through a series of mistakes and mishaps, Lovell found himself out of jail while awaiting trial that summer. He tried to hire two hitmen, but both fell through. So, in August, 10 days before the scheduled start of the trial, Doug Lovell crept into Joyce Yost’s apartment through a window, startled her awake and slashed her with a knife. Lovell then took Joyce away in her own car and hid her body.

Weeks later, at the start of October, Sheree Warren walked out of her work at the headquarters office for the Utah State Employees Credit Union in Salt Lake City. She told a coworker she was going to meet her estranged husband at nearby car dealership. Afterward, Sheree planned to take her young son to her parents’ house in the city of Roy. She never made it.

Carole Mikita (from October 5, 1985 KSL TV archive): Right now police say they’re investigating the disappearance but have very little to go on.

Ben Glover (from October 5, 1985 KSL TV archive): What we’re asking for is just to locate where she may be. Or any evidence to show that it, or indicate that there is maybe some foul play involved so we can do a, a different type of investigation rather than missing persons.

Dave Cawley: Roy City police at first focused on Sheree’s estranged husband, Charles Warren, thinking he might’ve killed Sheree over their ongoing divorce. Charles told Roy police detective Jack Bell he’d canceled his planned meeting with Sheree at the dealership on the evening of her disappearance and instead went jogging, a weak alibi detective Bell was never able to corroborate.

Jack Bell: I wish he hadn’t looked so guilty to start with, but he did.

Dave Cawley: Charles Warren wasn’t the only suspect, though. Police also came to wonder if a former Ogden City police reserve officer named Cary Hartmann might’ve had something to do with Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Cary and Sheree had been dating.

Six weeks into the investigation, Sheree’s car unexpectedly surfaced behind a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Jack Bell: That opened up a whole new can of worms. How did it get there? Which one of these two birds that I’m looking at have the opportunity to get it down there?

Dave Cawley: As Roy police were trying to answer that question, Doug Lovell revisited Joyce Yost’s body somewhere in the mountains, burying Joyce to prevent anyone from finding her. Then, snow fell, blanketing those same mountains. In December, Doug Lovell stood trial for raping Joyce Yost. She didn’t show up to testify. The jury convicted Lovell anyway and sent him to prison, but not for murder. Without a body, South Ogden police were unable to link Joyce’s disappearance to Lovell. Without a body, Roy police were unable to say what might’ve happened to Sheree Warren.

These two separate cases were still both under investigation when, in April of 1987, an anonymous man called Roy City and the Weber County Sheriff’s Office to report finding a woman’s body in the mountains near Causey Reservoir.

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 Weber County dispatch recording): —a body?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 Weber County dispatch recording): Yeah, a body that I, that I, that I just happened across way up, y’know it’s way out, y’know it’s not in the communities or anything. It’s way out in the hills.

Dave Cawley: Causey is way out in the hills, about 20 miles east of Ogden and its suburbs of South Ogden and Roy. But the land around Causey is rough and remote. Investigators needed more specific information if they ever hoped to find the body. The anonymous caller wasn’t willing to help.

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 Weber County dispatch recording): Can I get your name?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 Weber County dispatch recording): No, I’m not interested in leading search parties or anything like that.

Dave Cawley: Weeks later, a witness told police he’d bumped into Sheree Warren’s boyfriend, Cary Hartmann, on the mountain behind Causey four days after Sheree disappeared. And detectives learned several of Hartmann’s close personal friends owned property in Causey Estates, a cabin community near the reservoir.

Dave Moore: We had to have a key. There was a gate down right at Causey Reservoir.

Dave Cawley: One of those friends, Dave Moore, was Cary’s alibi for the night Sheree disappeared.

Dave Moore: At the time I didn’t, had no idea that he was using me as a alibi.

Dave Cawley: Another those friends, Brent Morgan, told police Cary had borrowed his key for the gate at Causey Estates shortly before Sheree vanished.

Brent Morgan: Back then there wasn’t a lot of people up there.

Dave Cawley: Police searched around Causey during the spring and summer of 1987, hoping to find the body the anonymous caller had mentioned. Those searches came up empty.

Brent Morgan: You take where he had my key, if he had access up there and could go up and down the roads, you can find the right place where you can 1-2-3 heave-ho and it’s gonna be in a spot where people aren’t gonna go.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann, I should note, ended up in prison but not because of anything to do with Sheree Warren. Ogden City police arrested him as a suspect in a series of home invasion sexual assaults around the same time as the anonymous call and the searches around Causey. A jury convicted Hartmann in one of those cases.

Years later, another clue emerged pointing toward Causey, this time in the Joyce Yost case. In 1991, Doug Lovell’s ex-wife Rhonda Buttars told police on the night Lovell killed Joyce Yost, he took her “up by Causey.”

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): And he said he made her drive up the canyon and they went up by Causey. … And got her out of the car and walked up this hill and if wasn’t very far off the road. … And he said he buried her the best he could.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda Buttars’ confession helped prosecutors secure a capital murder charge against Doug Lovell. Buttars wore a wire into the Utah State Prison and captured audio of her ex-husband as he described burying Joyce Yost in the mountains, covering her with leaves.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 recording): The only thing I’m nervous about is that one time that caller called it. I remember seeing it on TV. … The way they projected this was “we think we know where the body of Joyce Yost’s remains are.”

Dave Cawley: Lovell cut a plea deal, hoping to avoid the death penalty by promising to take police to Joyce Yost’s grave. In the summer of 1993, he led police to a mountainside east of Ogden. It held no signs of human remains. It was also nowhere near Causey.

Former South Ogden detective Terry Carpenter told me he believes Lovell lied about where he buried Joyce Yost.

Terry Carpenter: She is someplace else and honestly to this day, I believe Sheree Warren’s with her. Otherwise, if we go up and dig and find Joyce and find Sheree, that negates all the agreements that we’ve had with him and not executing him. And he knows that. So he’s not going to take us to Joyce.

Dave Cawley: I’ve looked for evidence that might link Doug Lovell to Sheree Warren. I’ve not found any. Lovell himself denied having ever met Sheree Warren when this speculation first surfaced 30 years ago. But there are those who hold to this theory, even today.

In 2004, Weber County investigators flew over the mountain behind Causey in a state helicopter. They were operating on the assumption Cary Hartmann had killed Sheree Warren and left her body somewhere near Causey.

Shane Minor (from May 25, 2004 police recording): This would’ve been the road I think he had access to … there’s unlimited places where he could’ve dumped her along here.

Kent Harrison (from May 25, 2004 police recording): Hard to think like a bandit, y’know. Would you’ve, you’ve picked a characteristic turn or rock or tree or something to, as a landmark?

Dave Cawley: A year-and-a-half later, a detective named Shane Minor questioned Cary Hartmann about Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Minor asked Hartmann directly if he’d killed Sheree and taken her body to Causey.

Shane Minor (from October 20, 2005 police recording): Did you kill Sheree?

Cary Hartmann (from October 20, 2005 police recording): No.

Dave Cawley: Hartmann said he didn’t have any idea what’d happened to Sheree.

Shane Minor (from October 20, 2005 police recording): Do you know if she was placed in an area above Causey Estates?

Cary Hartmann (from October 20, 2005 police recording): No, I don’t have any idea.

Dave Cawley: A year after this, in 2006, a prison informant started talking to police about Joyce Yost. He said Doug Lovell had drawn him a map of the place where he’d left Yost’s body.

Jared Briggs (from December 15, 2006 Utah State Prison recording): This is the lake, there’s some gates up here and some property.

Dave Cawley: The informant claimed Lovell had taken Joyce Yost to Causey Reservoir.

Jared Briggs (from December 15, 2006 Utah State Prison recording): See these circles here? Uh, he’s telling me this is Huntsville here, the Huntsville area. Uh, and this is Causey.

Dave Cawley: Your head’s probably spinning by this point. It’s so much to keep track of, I know. Not all of these leads are credible. Sorting fact from fiction remains a major challenge in these two cases. But what I hope you’re seeing is a lot of circumstantial evidence points toward Causey Reservoir as an important landmark in the disappearances of Sheree Warren and Joyce Yost.

My job involves taking scattered fragments of a story, spreading them out and putting them in order. Sometimes the individual puzzle pieces don’t look like much on their own. It’s only when they’re assembled that a picture emerges. If done well, the story that comes out of this process should draw as close to truth as I can possibly get it.

Perfect truth is nearly impossible to find. Often, holes remain. Unanswered questions. Like, where is the body the anonymous caller reported finding near Causey, and why couldn’t anyone find it? I’ve struggled to come up with a satisfactory answer. I’ve studied a century’s worth of old maps, seeing the gradual development of trails and roads in the mountains around Causey. I’ve read newspaper archives about the generations of sheepherding families who owned those hills. I’ve hunted down aerial photographs of Causey from the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60, ’70s, ‘80s to 1990s, even paying to have old film scanned at ultra-high resolution.

I’ve gone up into the air myself, by plane and helicopter, to study the thousands of acres of inaccessible private land behind Causey.

Dave Cawley (from October 2, 2021 flight): This big flat top—

Richard Cawley (from October 2, 2021 flight): Yeah.

Dave Cawley (from October 2, 2021 flight): —when it narrows down on the eastern edge, we just want to stay to the right of the ridge—

Richard Cawley (from October 2, 2021 flight): Ok.

Dave Cawley (from October 2, 2021 flight): —and then we’ll cross over.

Dave Cawley: Through all this, I became very interested in a stretch of old jeep road. In the 1980s, this trail linked Causey Estates, where Cary Hartmann was known to spend time, to the spot on the mountain top where a witness said he saw Hartmann four days after Sheree Warren disappeared. Much of the jeep trail falls within the radius that anonymous caller referenced to when he described finding a woman’s body.

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 Weber County dispatch recording): Is it in Weber County?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 Weber County dispatch recording): It’s over there by, uh, Causey Dam.

Dave Cawley: As my focus narrowed onto this old trail, I came across something unusual in the aerial images and video I’d collected. The trail climbs a hill heading east out of Causey Estates. At the top of that hill I saw a pile of rocks, about six feet long and three feet wide: roughly the size and shape one might expect for a clandestine grave.

It wasn’t clear from the images I’d collected if the rock pile existed before the 1980s. Those older pictures just weren’t clear enough to tell. But I was able to determine the rock pile had sat undisturbed since at least the early ‘90s.

Dave Cawley (from May 29, 2023 recording): And as we come up on the anomalous rock pile—

Dave Cawley: I was able to visit the rock pile myself.

Dave Cawley (from May 29, 2023 recording): —you should see how it stands out from the surrounding environment.

Dave Cawley: I carried a camera with me, to document the site and the old jeep trail nearby.

Dave Cawley (from May 29, 2023 recording): And as you look around you can see there are rocks on this trail, but there are no other piles of rocks of similar shape and size. So that is unique.

Dave Cawley: This discovery presented a bit of a conundrum. The code of ethics that guides my work as a journalist says I need to act with independence. I don’t work for the police, and I don’t automatically share everything I know with them. But if this rock pile did mark a possible grave, it felt irresponsible to simply ignore it, or to publish that speculation without taking steps to find out for sure. I shared images of the rock pile with a handful of trusted colleagues and sources, who all agreed my eyes were not mistaken. It did look like it could be a grave.

Dave Cawley (from May 29, 2023 recording): Again, unnatural. Unnatural rock pile.

Dave Cawley: So, I provided this information to Roy City police detective John Frawley, the lead detective on the Sheree Warren case. He thanked me for it. Some time passed. Then, in August of 2023, I received word Roy police had news to share.

Mike Headrick (fro August 22, 2023 KSL TV archive): Good evening, breaking news out of Weber County where police plan to conduct a major search related to an Utah cold case dating back to the 1980s.

Deanie Wimmer (fro August 22, 2023 KSL TV archive): It’s a case we’ve covered extensively right here at KSL as part of the Cold podcast.

Mike Headrick (fro August 22, 2023 KSL TV archive): We plan to be on the mountain with police as they explore this site tomorrow. Stay with KSL TV throughout the day for any breaking developments.

Dave Cawley: I had an exclusive invite to come along as police went to Causey to dig below the rock pile, looking for possible human remains.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Don’t make yourself the subject of your own story. This mantra is foundational for journalists. It’s drilled into our heads by professors and editors. But college didn’t prepare me for a career in which journalism would take me on the hunt for human remains. Finding this odd rock pile while looking for a clandestine grave around Causey made me a subject in my own story. My managers at KSL recognized this. They decided to assign a different reporter to cover the story of the dig. I would still be there to watch and provide comment and context, but reporter Dan Rascon would put the story on the air.

Shara Park (from August 23, 2023 KSL TV archive): News Specialist Dan Rascon giving us exclusive access to this site and the operation. So Dan, tell us where you are, what you’ve been seeing there. This is a big operation.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 KSL TV archive): Dan Rascon “Yeah, this is a major operation undergoing right now.

Dave Cawley: This wasn’t the only ethical consideration. KSL also took a few steps to safeguard our independence. We decided we would provide our own transportation to and from the site, which meant finding someone with four-wheelers available on short notice. We told police if we came along, we’d have the freedom to share anything we saw or heard with you. They agreed.

We met in the morning, as low clouds settled in the mountain valleys, catching sidelong rays of the rising summer sun. Our caravan of SUVs headed east from the small town of Huntsville, driving up Utah state highway 39, following the South Fork of the Ogden River to Causey. One by one, we drove across the dam to the gate for Causey Estates, drawing curious stares from fishermen and paddle boarders. Another mile or two on dirt and gravel brought us to the bottom of a steep hill.

We parked, doused ourselves in sunscreen, and loaded equipment onto ATVs: cameras, coolers, pop-up shades and shovels. There weren’t enough seats for everyone. Some of us donned backpacks and hiked the remaining mile to the rock pile, grunting up steep switchbacks. We reconvened up top, on a saddle overlooking Causey Estates. The CSI team set up a laser scanner, a 40-thousand dollar piece of equipment designed to make a 3-D model of the site. It sat on a tripod, rotating and beeping as we all waited.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): We were trying to buy newer ones that don’t take as long.

Dave Cawley: They launched a small drone to collect more imagery from above. If evidence of a murder came out of the ground, this would be crucial to show what the site looked like prior to its excavation. Another member of the team used a small handheld saw to cut back overgrown brush and branches around the rock pile. With the ground clear, the CSI team set down their tarp and raised an awning over the rocks. As they did so, my KSL colleague Dan Rascon went to work conducting interviews. He asked Roy police detective John Frawley what would happen next.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 recording): What are you gonna, this seems like a very methodical process. It’s not like you just bring out the shovels and start digging.

John Frawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): No, we want to be very respectful, also. There’s a proper way to do this. And so, the Weber County CSI team is very professional and they’re going to handle this.

Dave Cawley: I think what John was getting at here was if the search about to get underway turned up human remains, we all needed to remember what it might mean. My mind turned to all the people I’ve met over the last several years who would be watching live coverage of this search on TV.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): We know there are families of victims, missing women—Sheree Warren, Joyce Yost, another person who could potentially be up in this area—and they have for the last four decades wondered where are their loved ones. And they’re today watching and waiting to see what comes out of this. So that’s very difficult.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 recording): So, we could find a body today.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): We won’t know until Weber County CSI starts doing their work, but I don’t think you get this team up here unless they think it’s a reasonable possibility that they might recover human remains here.

Dave Cawley: At the same time, none of us wanted to presume an outcome that hadn’t yet happened.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 recording): And if you find anything?

John Frawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): If we find anything, we will slow down at that point and figure out what we have and what needs to happen then. … We would obviously follow where the evidence leads us. We wouldn’t want to make any pre-determinations. If we did find something, we want to keep an open mind and see where the evidence would lead us at that point.

Dave Cawley: A low roar began to rise from the south.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Is that the Chopper?

Dave Cawley: It grew louder, drawing near until a helicopter crested above the mountain and began to orbit overhead.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): There will probably be some Arnold Schwarzenegger jokes going on. Get to the choppa.

Dave Cawley: It belonged to KSL: Chopper 5. The very helicopter that’d helped find this odd rock pile in the first place. Over the sound of the thrumming helicopter blades, the investigators began removing rocks from the pile and tossing them to the side. Stone by stone, they worked to expose the bare ground beneath. They sent spiders scurrying and even disturbed a hornet’s nest.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): To the pilot we look like we found something. He doesn’t know that it’s wasps.

Steve Haney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Yeah, everybody runs when it—(laughter)—he’s like “something’s going on, something’s going on.”

Mark Horton (from August 23, 2023 recording): Game on.

Steve Haney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Game on.

Dave Cawley: With the rocks removed, we could see the pile had covered a divot, or depression. The ground under the pile sat 8 to 10 inches lower than the surrounding soil. This, I’d learned, could be a clue because when a buried body decomposes, the ground above it may settle. I felt a sense of guarded optimism as the investigators began removing soil. They passed the loose earth off to be sifted. The idea here is dirt will fall through, while larger items like teeth, bone chips or cloth fragments will be caught by the screen. It’s not as easy at it might sound, because each bucket load of soil held hundreds of small pebbles too large to fall through. The CSI team had to visually inspect them.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): After this long, teeth look like these little rocks.

Dave Cawley: The closest analogy I can think of for this is it’s like looking for a single tiny piece of Lego in giant heap of bricks that are all a similar size and color. While this work was unfolding, the KSL team went live on the air to share it with the public in real time.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 KSL TV archive): Yeah, we’re high on a ridge right now just outside of Causey Reservoir. This, possibly a burial site for Sheree Warren. She disappeared back in October of 1985. We’re going to go ahead and bring in Dave Cawley here, of course with the Cold podcast. And Dave, tell us the significance of what is happening here right now.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 KSL TV archive): We’re seeing the detectives are using shovels and picks to pull soil off of this site, to see if there is anything of evidence related to Sheree’s case coming out of that. They’ve taken just a few inches off the top and it will be a really slow process over the next several hours.

Dave Cawley: I wasn’t surprised when no skeletal remains surfaced beneath the first few inches of dirt. It stood to reason if anything or anyone was buried here, it wouldn’t be right at the surface.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Steve, you just decide with Dave when you think you guys are at your limit.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): Not my call, so you guys make it.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): You’re not running the show?

Danny Hammon (from August 23, 2023 recording): Let’s go another four inches.

Kyle Curtis (from August 23, 2023 recording): Let’s dig it. Let’s dig it. We’ve got enough to dig right now.

Dave Cawley: Load after load of soil went through the screen. Only once or twice did the searchers pause, like when an old .22-caliber shell casing, maybe a century old, caught up in the mesh.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): .22 number 2, Jess.

Danny Hammon (from August 23, 2023 recording): Another .22 that deep?

Jess Pontius (from August 23, 2023 recording): Really?

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Is it the same?

John Frawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): Another .22 shell?

Kyle Curtis (from August 23, 2023 recording): I’m still going to say it could be falling off the higher shelf up here and rolling in.

Dave Cawley: Hour after hour passed. Scattered clouds crept across the sky, casting shadows that sat on the landscape like spots on a Dalmatian. The hole sank progressively deeper.

Kyle Curtis (from August 23, 2023 recording): I’d be pretty mind-blown if they could dig this far.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): Yeah.

Steve Haney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Yeah, no.

Kyle Curtis (from August 23, 2023 recording): I mean, I guess if you’re motivated, though. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: The excited, nervous chatter that’d pervaded earlier in the day faded away. A specter of disappointment loomed.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): Y’know, in another 40 years, someone’s going to find this rock pile and a whole other team’s going to come up here and do this all over again.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): You’ll be the old retired person.

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): I know, right?

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): You’ll like, say your war stories.

Dave Cawley: By midafternoon, the hole reached a depth of between two and three feet. The detectives who were taking turns with the shovels noticed a change.

Danny Hammon (from August 23, 2023 recording): So that color of dirt has been consistent all the way across and we’re at least 3 to 4 inches into it.

Jason Romney (from August 23, 2023 recording): No disturbance in the layer?

Dave Cawley: They reached a layer of soil that’d not been disturbed before.

Steve Haney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Yep. Let’s uh, let’s even that out to where—

Kyle Curtis (from August 23, 2023 recording): That level there?

Steve Haney (from August 23, 2023 recording): Yeah.

Kyle Curtis (from August 23, 2023 recording): ‘Kay, I agree with that.

Dave Cawley: Proof no one had previously dug a hole that deep at the site.

Danny Hammon (from August 23, 2023 recording): I was so optimistic.

Dave Cawley: It might’ve looked like one, but detective Frawley said the rock pile didn’t mark a grave.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 recording): Your reaction to that? I mean, I guess you were hoping to find something, maybe?

John Frawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): You’re always hoping to find something but I think like we’ve discussed as investigators, we keep going. Y’know, if there’s a place to dig, we’re going to dig. If there’s a place to search, we’re going to search. And we’re just not going to stop. So we will follow every tip and every lead.

Dave Cawley: I’m not going to lie. This outcome left me feeling deflated. In the time between my discovery of the rock pile and its excavation, I told myself not to build up any expectations. It was far more likely someone’s dog was under those rocks than a murder victim. Even if human remains were buried there, they could’ve belonged to a sheepherder, a pioneer, a fur trapper or an indigenous person. I knew this. Still, I couldn’t ignore the possibility no matter how low the probability. Maybe this would be a break. I’m human, so yeah, I allowed a little hope. But there was nothing. No bones of any kind.

Sweeping my eyes across that mountain as the police packed up their gear and raked loose dirt back into the hole, seeing the brush and trees spanning to the horizon, I felt a sting of futility. If Sheree Warren or Joyce Yost are up here, can we ever really hope to find them? Maybe not.

This is the real nature of cold case work. It’s perpetual disappointment. And yet, I refuse to accept a fatalistic view. This search mattered, for many reasons. It took one more location off the list of possibilities. It prompted new discussion about what happened to Joyce Yost and Sheree Warren. And it sent a message to their killers: we will not stop.

Detective Frawley said it well: if there’s a place to search, they’re going to search. If there’s a place to dig, they’re going to dig.

Dan Rascon (from August 23, 2023 recording): And is that what you do, too, on the Cold podcast?

Dave Cawley (from August 23, 2023 recording): Yeah absolutely. So, for the Cold podcast, our job is to tell these stories, to tell Sheree Warren’s story. To let the public know about what’s happened in the past and what’s happening right now. But that doesn’t mean that this case ends when our podcast ends, or that we stop paying attention. So, I myself, KSL, the Cold podcast, we’re dedicated to continuing to follow Sheree’s case and if we come across any new information, we will be out on the next mountain, doing the next search.

Dave Cawley: In every setback, I see progress. In every hole excavated, we plant a seed of new opportunity. A fruitless search is not defeat, it’s a step on the path toward truth. This will not be the last search.

Dave Cawley: Serial killer Ted Bundy spent years denying what he’d done. From his initial arrest in Utah…

Reporter (from November 21, 1975 KSL TV archive): You said you were surprised when you went to jail. For better or for worse?

Ted Bundy (from November 21, 1975 KSL TV archive): Hey listen, uh, we do have to go. Surprised? I don’t know. I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve never been in a jail before, never been arrested before.

Dave Cawley: …to Ted Bundy’s murder convictions in Florida…

Ted Bundy (from July 24, 1979 KSL TV archive): Police officers, they want to solve crimes and sometimes I don’t think really, they really try to think things through. … And they’re willing to take the convenient alternative. And the convenient alternative is me.

Dave Cawley: …Ted Bundy maintained his innocence. But Bundy wasn’t innocent.

John Hollenhorst (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): The Ted Bundy story is in part a historical odyssey stretching thousands of miles from one corner of the country to the other. It’s part crime drama, spanning most of two decades.

Dave Cawley: In Cold season 3, we heard how Cary Hartmann, one of the two suspects in the disappearance of Sheree Warren, had been fascinated by Ted Bundy.

John Hollenhorst (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): But most of all, it’s a psychological mystery about a man who lived in two worlds: an everyday world of shining opportunity and a dark world of madness and violence.

Dave Cawley: Ted Bundy was a charismatic young law student with a promising future in politics when he moved from Washington state to Utah at the end of summer in 1974. At that same time, police in and around Seattle were looking into a string of disappearances and deaths.

John Hollenhorst (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): The press began talking about a lookalike killer who seemed to select women simply because they were young and pretty.

Dave Cawley: By his own later admission, Bundy killed at least 30 women during the 1970s. To this day, many remain unidentified and in some cases, were never located.

Bundy’s final murders, in Florida, landed him on death row in 1979. A flurry of legal appeals followed but by 1986 it appeared Bundy would be executed. As the scheduled date approached, investigators from across the country traveled to Florida in the hopes of interviewing him about their unsolved cases.

Richard Bingham (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): Here in Utah he’s a suspect in the murders of Melissa Smith and Laura Aime. Also the disappearance of Nancy Wilcox and Nancy Baird. Salt Lake County Sheriff Pete Hayward has been involved in the case from the beginning.

Pete Hayward (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s responsible for the Smith girl and the Aime girl that was found in American Fork Canyon. Uh, we have two other girls that we feel strongly that he’d have to be considered as a prime suspect in and that would be the Wilcox girl and a young lady that was taken out of a gas station up in, I believe it was Layton.

Dave Cawley: It’s that last young woman we’re going to focus on in this episode. Bundy was only willing to talk if it played to his advantage. He intended to barter information about his crimes as a last resort to stave off execution. But he didn’t have to do that in 1986 because the courts granted him a reprieve.

Pete Hayward (from June 27, 1986 KSL TV archive): Bundy at that time made the comment that it wouldn’t be in his best interest to talk to us at this time. But did not say that he wouldn’t talk to us at all.

Dave Cawley: That narrow escape from the electric chair only added to the Bundy mystique.

Mary King (from July 2, 1986 KSL TV archive): Florida State Prison.

John Hollenhorst (from July 2, 1986 KSL TV archive): Bundy’s notoriety has prompted many hundreds of phone calls to the prison in recent weeks, mostly from women.

Mary King (from July 2, 1986 KSL TV archive): They want to talk to him, or they want to know his address so they can write to him, or they want to congratulate on us on having nerve enough to try to burn him.

Dave Cawley: This building of a serial killer into a cultural icon was gross then and it remains so today. And I’m hesitant to play into that by talking about Ted Bundy in this podcast. But it’s important to understand just how pervasive Bundy was in the minds of police and the public during the late 1970s and through the 1980s for the story you’re about to hear.

Florida scheduled a new execution date for Ted Bundy, in January of 1989. This time, Bundy’s legal challenges were swept aside. And so, with no other option to forestall his appointment with the electric chair, Bundy started to talk. He spoke with investigators in the hopes of delaying his impending death.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Ok, I’ve turned the recorder on.

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): We’ll do what we can.

Dave Cawley: That’s how a detective named Dennis Couch from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office in Utah ended up sitting down with Ted Bundy on January 22^nd, 1989. This audio comes from that interview.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): That’s my first and foremost reason for being here, for those three girls that are missing and—

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): And some more.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): From Utah?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: The tape recording of this interview is sometimes difficult to understand. But during their 90 minutes together, Bundy told detective Couch he was responsible for five murders in Utah.

Joel Munson (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): Along with the Kent and Wilcox murders, Couch says Bundy gave useful information that should help investigators solve the murders of Melissa Smith and Laura Aime.

Dave Cawley: Police had already found two of the bodies: those of Melissa Smith and Laura Aime. Bundy tried to tell them where they might find two others: Debra Kent and Nancy Wilcox. But that left one victim unidentified.

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Sorry—

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): No, that’s ok.

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): —you’re catching me when you are—

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Yeah, I’m just getting quite anxious myself, y’know.

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): I hear you, I hear you. We’re all up against some deadlines.

Dave Cawley: I don’t bring all this up simply to relive the past. I want you to hear what Ted Bundy said when detective Dennis Couch asked him about a specific unsolved case.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Further up was Nancy Baird who worked at a gas station. July 4^th.

Dave Cawley: The disappearance of Nancy Perry Baird.

Joel Munson (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): But Couch did not get the answer he was hoping for regarding another Utah murder, that of Nancy Baird of Layton. Bundy insisted he had no part in that killing.

Dave Cawley: Nancy Baird’s name might sound familiar. It came up in passing during our discussion of the Sheree Warren case in Cold season 3, but I couldn’t take too deep of a diversion into it then. So, we’re going to do that now.

Nancy Baird vanished from a gas station where she worked in East Layton, Utah on the evening of July 4^th, 1975. In the years that followed, many people came to the conclusion Ted Bundy abducted and killed her.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Do you recall, umm, what type of place it was she was working at or where it was located? On which highway?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): No, I didn’t have anything to do with that.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Nancy Baird?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): No.

Dave Cawley: Even today, Nancy Baird’s name appears in online lists of suspected Ted Bundy victims. Many of Nancy’s own relatives even believe Bundy killed her. But Bundy said he wasn’t responsible.

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Well that, no. I don’t know anything about that disappearance.

Dave Cawley: Nancy Baird’s body has never been found. The detective who interviewed Bundy, Dennis Couch, is retired now. I’ve talked to him. He declined my request for a recorded interview. But he told me he hadn’t been personally familiar with the details of the Nancy Baird case back in 1989, when he’d questioned Bundy. Nancy Baird’s disappearance had happened in a different county and deputies there had just asked detective Couch to show Nancy Baird’s picture to Bundy and ask what he’d done to her. Bundy’d seemed not to recognize the photo, or the name Nancy Baird.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Can we go back to Nancy Baird? You, you indicated that—

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Now, Nancy Baird, who’s that?

Dave Cawley: Days after the interview, on January 24^th, 1989, Florida executed Ted Bundy by electrocution.

John Hollenhorst (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): The prison was shrouded in darkness when smoke began to pour from the backup electrical generator used during executions. By then, demonstrators were arriving by the hundreds to watch the spectacle of a killer’s death.

Demonstrator (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): I would like to be right in there and see him fry.

Dave Cawley: Public attitudes about Ted Bundy were broadly negative, for obvious reasons. Yet many people who hated Bundy found themselves fascinated by the story. Bundy embodied a strange duality: an outward charisma protecting a depraved core. His execution was a major news event.

John Hollenhorst (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): The demonstrators invaded the media center. Some, wearing costumes, waving frying pans, sporting gruesome slogans. Songs about the despised serial killer added to the carnival atmosphere.

Crowd (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): (Singing) Now we’re all ecstatic Ted Bundy is dead.

John Hollenhorst (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): So the Bundy saga is over now, except those who will pick through it to figure out what it all means.

Dave Cawley: “What it all means.” It means a lot for the still-unsolved disappearance of Nancy Baird. In season 3 episode 6, I shared the story of a jailhouse informant who claimed Cary Hartmann had been seeing Nancy Baird around the time she disappeared. That informant was probably not credible, and I’ve not found any direct evidence linking Cary Hartmann to Nancy Baird.

But that story thread started me down a new line of investigation into Nancy Baird’s case. In the process, I obtained never-before-released case files. I spoke to relatives, witnesses and investigators. And I came to the conclusion Ted Bundy was probably telling the truth when he said he didn’t know anything about the death of Nancy Baird.

But Ted Bundy cast a long shadow and because of it, no one did any significant work on Nancy Baird’s case for decades.

This is a bonus episode of Cold, season 3: The Convenient Alternative. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

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Dave Cawley: The 4^th of July fell on a Friday in 1975. It marked the start of a long, hot holiday weekend. Many Utahns hit the road, hoping to escape the heat by heading to the mountains. Denzle Williams, on the other hand, spent the day at home with his wife and kids. He lived in a town called Kaysville, midway between the cities of Salt Lake and Ogden.

A little after 5 p.m. on the afternoon of July 4^th, Denzle drove from his house to a gas station a couple of miles up the road, in the neighboring town of East Layton.

David Williams: We had to get gas for a rototiller.

Dave Cawley: That’s the voice of Denzle’s son, David Williams. He was a few weeks shy of his 14^th birthday when he accompanied his dad on this errand in 1975. They drove together to the gas station which sat alongside U.S. Highway 89.

David Williams: The Fina station, I remember, it was, y’know, green and white.

Dave Cawley: Denzle pulled his Dodge Dart to a stop next to one of the pumps. David stepped out onto the blacktop, followed by his little sister, nine-and-a-half-year-old Jana. David and Jana told me as kids, the Fina station was a favorite stop for…

Jana Williams Grow: Pop and—

David Williams: Chips.

Jana Williams Grow: —chips and candy.

David Williams: Candy.

Dave Cawley: Jana dashed into the store, while David retrieved a small gas can from the car’s trunk. He filled it, then handed the hose off to his dad. Denzle started filling the car. He planned to take his son David golfing the next morning and wanted to start their trip to the golf course with a full tank.

David Williams: I was excited because I was a teenager able to go play golf with my father at that time, because we didn’t get out and do that very often together.

Dave Cawley: Denzle gave David his credit card, and told him to go inside and pay for the gas. This was long before technology allowed for pay-at-the-pump. David followed his little sister Jana through the door into the Fina station’s convenience store.

Dave Williams: As, as you walk in there were, I recall, two men at the end of the counter talking to Nancy.

Dave Cawley: Nancy Perry Baird, the clerk, was 23 years old. She was petite, standing only five-foot-two, and had long, strawberry-blonde hair. She appeared younger than her age and she caught David’s eye.

Dave Williams: I believe she had a halter top on and shorts. I’m like “oh, she’s cute.”

Dave Cawley: David stood there for a moment, holding his dad’s credit card, looking at the two older guys who were talking to Nancy.

David Williams: I didn’t want to interrupt this conversation they were having. The one guy, he did have kind of longer hair. Umm, like a, a Levi jacket that was faded. I think they both had longer hair.

Dave Cawley: Jana, meanwhile, wandered down between the shelves of candy, toward a case of chilled drinks.

Jana Williams Grow: And I do remember walking through the store and I just remember seeing one man.

Dave Cawley: After a moment, Nancy took notice of David. She paused her conversation with the two men at the counter and took the credit card from David.

David Williams: And as I was doing the transaction they were just kind of there.

Dave Cawley: Nancy placed the card on a device known as an “imprinter.”

David Williams: She takes it, puts it on a little uh, yeah machine.

Dave Cawley: In the days before tap-to-pay or even magnetic stripes on credit cards, clerks used imprinters—or click-clacks as they were sometimes called—to make physical rubbings of the raised letters and numbers on each customer’s card.

David Williams: And then she writes down how much it was. And if you bought anything else, she would add that to it. And then you had to physically sign the paper. And she gave you a copy and then she kept a copy.

Dave Cawley: As Nancy imprinted the card for David, Jana approached her brother carrying a bottle of raspberry soda.

Jana Williams Grow: I was getting a drink. You wouldn’t pay for it.

David Williams: Nope.

Jana Williams Grow: So I had to pay for my own. And I remember she was a very nice clerk.

Dave Cawley: David headed back outside into the heat with the credit card receipt, while Jana handed Nancy Baird the chilled bottle of soda. The total came to 29 cents. Jana counted out her pennies and she only had 28. With a smile, Nancy told her young customer not to worry about the extra cent. She’d take care of it. Jana then followed her brother outside, not realizing she would be the last person known to ever see Nancy Baird.

Except, I can already see the emails and DMs I’m going to receive from people who Google Nancy Baird’s name, then message me to say I’m wrong on this fact. Jana Williams wasn’t the last person to see Nancy Baird, they’ll say. If you look up Nancy Baird on NAMUS, the U.S. government’s missing and unidentified persons database, you’ll read Nancy was last seen by a “patrol officer” 15 minutes before her disappearance. There’s no mention in the database of David or Jana Williams. So which account is correct? They both are, sort of.

East Layton was a town with a population of about a thousand people in 1975. The little bedroom community, speckled with cherry orchards, sat against the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. U.S. Highway 89 crossed through East Layton from north to south, linking it to larger cities nearby.

The highway was the only reason East Layton had any tax base to speak of. There were only three businesses in the town, two of them being gas stations on opposite sides of the highway at a cross street called Cherry Lane. One of those gas stations was the Fina where Nancy Baird worked.

Nancy spent the first part of her life in the nearby city of Ogden. The Perry family moved to East Layton in about 1964. Nancy attended high school in Layton City proper, graduating in the class of 1970.

Toward the end of her senior year, shortly after her 18^th birthday, Nancy became pregnant. The father was a young man named Floyd Dee Baird, who was about six months older than Nancy.

Floyd and Nancy married in April of 1970. They welcomed their son that October. The young Baird family spent a few rough years together and ultimately divorced around the start of 1974. Floyd would later tell police he and Nancy remained on good terms after the split, finding they got along better as exes than they had as husband and wife. Nancy maintained custody of their son. She divided her time between caring for him and working to support herself and her child.

Going back through old newspaper archives, I found a help wanted ad for the Fina station from 1973. It advertised an hourly pay rate of $1.70. That’s about the same as a job offering $11.30 an hour in early 2023. Nancy probably made less than that, considering even today U.S. Census Bureau data shows adult women working full-time in Utah earn, on average, only 72% as much as their male counterparts.

And there’s evidence in the record to support the idea Nancy Baird was underemployed. Case files show she told an employment counselor in March of 1975 she felt unhappy and wanted a better opportunity for herself. But that opportunity hadn’t yet materialized when she headed to work at the Fina station on the afternoon of the 4^th of July, 1975.

She’d spent that morning with her parents, siblings and son at the house in East Layton where she’d grown up. Just before 3 p.m., Nancy left her four-year-old boy with her parents and drove to the Fina station a mile down the road.

She was scheduled to stay at the Fina until midnight, running the register on what promised to be a busy holiday evening. With any luck, she might catch a glimpse of fireworks out over the valley after dark.

(Sound of distant fireworks)

Dave Cawley: Nancy’d been on shift a couple of hours when, just after 5 p.m., a familiar face came through the door. It belonged to a guy named Dave Anderson, East Layton’s lone full-time police officer. His primary responsibility was writing tickets to lead-footed motorists on the highway. He often parked his patrol car outside the Fina station, as it provided an inconspicuous place to monitor traffic.

According to a report officer Dave Anderson later wrote, he stopped into the Fina station around 5:10 p.m. on the 4^th of July to buy a drink. He chatted briefly with Nancy, and said everything seemed “10-4.” That’s police dispatch code for “roger” or “understood.” In the context of this report, it appears Anderson meant “ok,” as in, he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

The report says officer Dave Anderson then received a radio call about a situation at the other gas station, just on the other side of the highway, kitty-corner from the Fina station. So, at about 5:20 p.m., Dave went to his car, drove across the four lanes of traffic, and confronted two men suspected of driving drunk. He reportedly pulled their licenses and radioed their information to dispatch.

This timeline provided by officer Dave Anderson in an official report put him at the Fina station during the same period of time David and Jana Williams, the two child witnesses, were there with their dad. But the Williamses never mentioned seeing a police officer.

David Williams: I’ve never read the report but what did surprise me when I, I heard is that there was an officer across the street and I don’t recall if they have a timestamp on that.

Dave Cawley: The two timelines conflict with one another. And when the story of Nancy Baird’s disappearance first made the news, it was officer Dave Anderson’s version that was publicly reported. But based on my review of the records, it seems likely officer Anderson left the Fina station before the Williams family arrived, because they did not see a police car there.

Jana Williams Grow: I remember thinking it was a, not very many, it was a quiet time.

David Williams: No, it was, there weren’t many vehicles there.

Dave Cawley: At about 5:30 p.m., while officer Dave Anderson was still across the highway dealing with the suspected drunk drivers, a woman named Bonnie Peck dropped by the Fina station. She was the manager, Nancy Baird’s boss. Bonnie went to the cash register to grab a few bucks, only to find an irritated man waiting there.

“Did you go for a beer or something,” he quipped.

Bonnie shot the man a quizzical look.

“Isn’t she here,” Bonnie asked, referring to Nancy.

Bonnie looked around and realized Nancy was not at the station.

Officer Dave Anderson reported he looked back across the highway at the Fina station at about 5:35 p.m. He saw a green van parked out front, with several “hippie types,” as he described them, milling around. Anderson said he drove back across the highway to the Fina station to “check it out.”

It’s not clear why he believed a van parked outside a gas station amounted to a situation that needed checking out. And officer Anderson’s report doesn’t say anything about these hippie guys and their van after that. Instead, he described stepping inside the convenience store to see a frazzled Bonnie Peck standing at the register.

“Have you seen Nancy,” Peck reportedly asked officer Anderson.

“Yeah,” Anderson said. He’d seen her about 15 or 20 minutes ago, when he’d bought a soda from her. She wasn’t around?

“No,” Bonnie said. But Nancy’s purse and keys were both still inside the Fina station, so it didn’t appear Nancy had left on her own. Officer Anderson peered outside and saw Nancy’s car. Another clue suggesting Nancy had not driven away by herself.

Officer Anderson picked up the telephone and dialed his chief, a man named Ray Adams. It rang with no answer. Anderson wrote in his report he then dialed the phone number of Floyd Dee Baird, Nancy’s ex-husband. Anderson didn’t explain how he knew who Nancy’s ex was, so this could be an indication he knew Nancy as more than just an acquaintance. In any case, Floyd Dee Baird didn’t answer, either.

Anderson keyed his radio, connecting with dispatch in the neighboring city of Layton. He asked an officer there to call the local hospitals, to see if Nancy Baird might’ve had a medical emergency. Then, with no better idea of what to do, officer Anderson stepped outside and started to search the area around station for any sign of Nancy.

The Fina station faced east, toward the highway and the Wasatch Mountains. To the north was Cherry Lane, a quiet street lined with single family homes. To the south…

David Williams: South was just an orchard.

Jana Williams Grow: Just vacant, yeah, it was an orchard.

Dave Cawley: A few small outbuildings sat on the edge of the orchard. Anderson poked around them, as well as a set of storage sheds tucked behind the Fina station. He didn’t report finding anything.

At around 7 p.m., an hour-and-a-half from when Nancy Baird was last seen, Nancy’s older half-sister Norma dropped by the Fina station to talk to Nancy. She instead ran into officer Anderson, who was still searching the grounds. Norma asked where Nancy’d gone. Officer Anderson didn’t have an answer.

Norma took officer Anderson up to her parents’ house. Anderson asked Nancy’s parents if anything had seemed amiss that day. They said no, Nancy’d been in good spirits. And they were still tending her four-year-old son. They didn’t think Nancy would’ve taken off without him.

Dave Anderson was out of his depth. He didn’t have the training or experience to know how to investigate a case like this. So he drove down to his police chief Ray Adams’ house and picked him up.

Ray Adams wasn’t much more of a cop than officer Dave Anderson. But Adams lived around around the corner from a Davis County Sheriff’s deputy named Bud Cox. Adams briefed Cox on the situation and asked what he and officer Dave Anderson ought to do about it. In a report, deputy Cox wrote he thought the situation warranted “serious investigation.”

“What if she doesn’t come back by morning,” chief Ray Adams reportedly asked.

Deputy Cox said in that case, they should perform an all-out search. Assume the worst and hold nothing back.

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Dave Cawley: Early on Saturday July 5^th, 1975, the morning after Nancy Baird vanished, a group of deputies and detectives from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office received a page. One of them was a man named Kenny Payne.

Kenny Payne: All the sudden we got a notice that says that Lieutenant Egbert wants a meeting with these people at 9 o’clock in the morning down at the Sheriff’s Office.

Dave Cawley: Kenny arrived at the sheriff’s office to find a group of about 10 of his colleagues there. East Layton’s police chief Ray Adams and the town’s lone full-time officer, Dave Anderson, were there, too.

Dave Cawley (to Kenny Payne): What was your opinion at the time of the East Layton Police Department?

Kenny Payne: Well, umm, inexperienced would be one.

Dave Cawley: Many of the Davis County deputies did not hold their colleagues from East Layton in high regard, for reasons we’ll explore in more detail a bit later. It’s enough to know for now East Layton lacked the manpower and know-how to run a major missing persons investigation. And that’s why the Davis County Sheriff’s Office stepped in to help.

Officer Dave Anderson briefed the deputies about the circumstances of Nancy’s disappearance. He told them she’d left her car keys and purse behind, with 167 dollars in cash still in her wallet. That struck Kenny as odd.

Kenny Payne: Then her just disappearing, you say “well ok that’s,” y’know, “something’s happened.”

Dave Cawley: Officer Anderson said the night prior, he’d gone to Nancy’s house and retrieved an address book containing names and numbers of Nancy’s friends. He’d also obtained a photo album, which included pictures of Nancy and some of the men she’d dated since divorcing her ex-husband, Floyd Dee Baird.

Sheriff’s lieutenant Dean Egbert handed out assignments. One of the deputies would go up in a helicopter to visually scan for any sign of Nancy along the highway. Others would make contact with Nancy’s friends and romantic partners, past and present.

Two names had risen to the top of that list: Floyd Dee Baird, Nancy’s ex-husband, and Dennis Forsgren, a recent divorcé Nancy’d spent time with. Deputies soon learned both men had alibis. Floyd Baird had gone to Jackson Hole, Wyoming with a friend for the 4^th of July holiday weekend. Dennis Forsgren was traveling as well, with his parents in Phoenix, Arizona. They’d both left the state at least a day before Nancy vanished.

Floyd Dee Baird and Dennis Forsgren are both deceased, so I can’t talk to them. But it’s clear from the case records they didn’t remain persons of interest very long. Their alibis were quickly verified.

The sheriff’s deputies did hone in on a third man though, whose alibi wasn’t quite as solid. His name was Monty Torres. So now, I’m going to tell you how deputies identified Torres as a person of interest.

Sheriff’s detective Kenny Payne received an assignment as well on that Saturday morning.

Kenny Payne: My assignment was to go up to Park City where Mr. Williams and his family were playing golf.

Dave Cawley: Earlier, we heard from the Williamses, David and Jana.

Kenny Payne: Apparently they were the last persons to see anybody in the store.

Dave Cawley: But how did investigators know this? The credit card receipts. East Layton police had retrieved receipts from the Fina station. They found the imprint of Denzle Williams’ card that Nancy’d made, using that imprinter device, mere minutes before she vanished. They’d called Denzle, only to learn he and his son David were not at home.

Kenny Payne: I asked the lieutenant, I said “ok, now what are they doing?” “They’re playing golf.”

(Sound of a golf swing)

Dave Cawley: Young David Williams was on the golf course with his dad when someone approached.

David Williams: The assistant or person up there came out and said “there is a detective who would like to talk to you about about, uh, a missing persons.” And we’re like “who?” And they indicated that it was this, this girl from the Fina gas station and we were the last people to see her.

Dave Cawley: Detective Kenny Payne joined the Williamses.

David Williams: Rode with us in the golf cart and interviewed my father and I. He would just talk to us after every shot.

Kenny Payne: 18 holes, y’know, and I didn’t want to give any golfing advice, ‘cause I don’t golf.

David Williams: We’d get in and he’d ask questions and that’s kind of what I remember.

Dave Cawley: It all seemed surreal to David Williams.

David Williams: And I was thinking “that’s got to be a mistake. I just saw her. I was just, I saw her, she was fine,” and I couldn’t believe, really, that she was gone.

Dave Cawley: I have a copy of a report Kenny Payne wrote about this interview. It says Denzle Williams described pulling up to the pump and seeing an older man entering the restroom at the Fina station.

David Williams: The restroom was a separate building.

Dave Cawley: The guy came out a couple of minutes later, while the Williams children were still inside paying for the gas and a soda. The restroom guy was tall, skinny, dark-haired and wore cowboy boots. He walked a bit funny, and might’ve been drunk. Denzle wasn’t sure where that older man ended up, but he didn’t recall seeing this cowboy enter the convenience store.

David Williams told Kenny Payne about the two men he’d seen inside the store. Kenny pressed for specifics about their appearances.

Kenny Payne: Y’know, we’d talk about eyes and then they’d get off and go hit the ball and then get back on. We’d talk about more eyes or more ears, hair.

Dave Cawley: David described them. The word “hippie” came up. I can’t believe I have to explain this, but for younger listeners, hippies were part of a counter-culture movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Think tie-dye, psychedelic rock, free love and anti-war sentiment.

The two men seen talking to Nancy Baird might not have been actual hippies. But they were bearded, with long hair and wore a lot of denim.

David Williams: Yeah, what they would say a hippie vibe that they—

Dave Cawley (to David Williams): Not uncommon.

David Williams: —right.

Jana Williams Grow: Right, right.

David Williams: Not uncommon in the ‘70s, right?

Dave Cawley: Kenny Payne learned Jana Williams had likely seen these two men as well. He asked Denzle if he could meet with the kids later that evening, so they could put together composite sketches of the men, to assist in identifying them. Denzle agreed.

Jana Williams Grow: I just remember he and my mom coming to me and saying “we have to go because you were the last one to see her.” Which really stuck in my mind, ‘cause that was a scary thing. I, I didn’t know how someone could take a pretty lady like that and she’d just gone missing.

Dave Cawley: Jana sat with her brother, parents and sheriff’s detective Kenny Payne on that Saturday night. Kenny brought a wood box with him. I brought a similar box when I went to interview Kenny.

Dave Cawley (to Kenny Payne): So Kenny, tell me what we’re looking at here.

Kenny Payne: This is an Identi-kit.

Dave Cawley: Identi-kits were invented in the 1960s. Police agencies could use them to create composite images of suspects, without needing to hire a sketch artist. Each Identi-kit composite started with an interview.

Kenny Payne: Did he have any particular facial features that really stood out?

Dave Cawley: Kenny posed this question to young Jana Williams.

Jana Williams Grow: I remember explaining his eyes. So I must have looked at his eyes and his eyebrows.

Dave Cawley: Each Identi-kit came with a booklet that served as an index for each part of the face. Kenny handed the booklet to Jana, while asking another question.

Kenny Payne: Can you look through some of these and find some eyes that look like what you remember? What they’d do is they’d say well “hey yeah, I really like this one.”

Dave Cawley: Each image in the booklet was coded by letter and number. E for eyes, L for lips, H for hair and so on. The investigator would take note of those codes, then dig into that wood box I mentioned a moment ago. It held a few hundred sheets of transparent plastic. Kenny calls them “foils.”

Kenny Payne: The foil is numbered down here at the bottom, if you look right here. See this is 01. Y’know, eyes.

Dave Cawley: By stacking and aligning the transparent foils, an investigator could build a two-dimensional face, feature-by-feature.

Kenny Payne: When you get all of this done, then you’ll be able to read a code across the bottom of it which is just a composite of all the, all the numbers that come across there and I umm, obviously wrote down the codes in my report.

Dave Cawley (to Kenny Payne): Mmhmm.

Kenny Payne: And I commend you for, y’know, tracing down an Identi-kit ‘cause that’s almost an impossibility anymore.

Dave Cawley: I failed to mention, when I first obtained the Nancy Baird case files, they included Kenny Payne’s report about building three Identi-kit composites based on the descriptions provided by the Williams family. His report had the codes, but not the images.

I soon learned I could recreate the images using those codes, if I could find an old Identi-kit. But that’s not easy, because they’re antiques and most were long ago destroyed. I spent months waiting for one to pop up on eBay. I can now tell you what those three composites Kenny Payne built back in 1975 looked like. There’s an old, craggy-faced fellow. He was the cowboy in the parking lot outside the Fina station.

Kenny Payne: But the ones who were talking, actually talking to Nancy were these two.

Dave Cawley: The composites of the other two “hippie type” men look very much alike. They used the same nose, lips, beard and age lines. Only their hair and eyes set them apart.

Kenny Payne: Y’know, I told the lieutenant, I said “they, they could very well be brothers.”

Dave Cawley: Davis County deputies compared the composites to the pictures in Nancy Baird’s photo albums. They noticed one of the two “hippie type” composites looked an awful lot like a man in one of Nancy Baird’s pictures. And that photo was marked with a name: Monty Torres.

I’ll stress here, Identi-kit composites were far from exact. They might get an investigator in the general neighborhood, but were far from photorealistic.

Kenny Payne: I wish they would’ve had better technology back in the, in the days. But they, we had what was best at the time.

Dave Cawley: I’m publishing these three Identi-kit composites from the Nancy Baird case at thecoldpodcast.com, so you can see them and judge for yourself.

Case files say deputies showed the photo of this man, Monty Torres, to their witness, Jana Williams. Jana “positively identified the picture of Monty Torres as one of the hippie type individuals.” Clearly, the Davis County detectives needed to talk to Monty Torres. They quickly learned Torres was at that time staying in Pocatello, Idaho, about two-and-a-half hours away. The deputies reached out to a detective in Bannock County, Idaho and asked him to find Torres and interview him. The detective did, and according to a report, the Idaho detective described Torres as acting “quite jittery.”

Monty Torres reportedly told the Idaho detective he had an alibi for the evening of July 4^th. He said he’d been vacationing at Lava Hot Springs, a resort and waterpark just outside of Pocatello. Torres gave the detective a name of someone who could supposedly confirm his story. But by the time deputies in Utah brought that man in for questioning, they learned Torres had already called him and coached him on what to say.

Here’s what Davis County sheriff’s lieutenant Dean Egbert told the Deseret News about it, his words read by a voice actor.

Aaron Mason (as Dean Egbert from July 10, 1975 Deseret News article): We are not satisfied with this deal in Idaho, and we are considering asking the man to undergo a polygraph test next week.

Dave Cawley: That’s exactly what happened. Deputies hauled Monty Torres in for a polygraph examination about two weeks following Nancy Baird’s disappearance. I’ve searched for records that would reveal the specific questions asked, as well as Torres’ responses, but I’ve so far been unable to find them.

All I can tell you comes from old news reports, that say all of the persons of interest in Nancy Baird’s disappearance had alibis or passed polygraph examinations. In other words, investigators believed Monty Torres excluded himself as a suspect by passing a polygraph. It surprised me to see how much weight the investigators placed on this single polygraph exam. Polygraphs are not fool-proof.

Kenny Payne: Your biggest thing is if I get to interview you face-to-face and umm, y’know when I start talking to you, I’m usually talking to you when I’ve got a loaded question and I, I know what the answer is. I’s just going to see what your answer is.

Dave Cawley: I can’t judge how convincing Monty Torres’ responses were during the polygraph, because I don’t even know what investigators asked him. But Kenny did tell me he recalled some division among investigators afterward.

Kenny Payne: Some people they ruled him right out and other people said “no I, I don’t think so.” And so I, y’know I, I haven’t given up on that one either.” (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: The story of these two “hippie type” guys seen talking to Nancy Baird just before she disappeared matters more than you might realize. What I’m about to say has never been publicly revealed. It’s been secret of the Nancy Baird case file for nearly 50 years.

Nancy had a friend named Deloris Drake, who lived in the city of Ogden. A Davis County sheriff’s deputy interviewed Deloris early in the investigation. Deloris said on the night of July 2^nd , less than 48 hours before Nancy Baird disappeared, she, Nancy and a friend of theirs named Peggy went out on the town. Davis County sheriff’s lieutenant Dean Egbert summarized Deloris’ account in a report. Here’s what he wrote:

Aaron Mason (as Dean Egbert from July 14, 1975 police report): Deloris mentioned Rigos and the Iron Horse.

Dave Cawley: Those were two bars in Ogden, where Nancy, Deloris and Peggy stopped that night. Peggy headed home around 10:30 p.m., but then Nancy and Deloris went back out…

Aaron Mason (as Dean Egbert from July 14, 1975 police report): …and had driven in the area of Washington Boulevard until approximately 2:30 and Nancy had taken Deloris home. At approximately 0300 on the morning of the 3^rd, Nancy had returned to Deloris’ apartment and appeared to be quite shaken and frightened … that this fellow named “Tom” in a yellow van had followed her home and was molesting her.

Dave Cawley: The report doesn’t say if the word “molesting” was a direct quote from Deloris, or the lieutenant’s interpretation. In this context, the word carries some ambiguity. “Molest” means to pester or harass, but it can also mean to physically sexually assault. It’s not clear which meaning lieutenant Egbert intended. In any case, he continued:

Aaron Mason (as Dean Egbert from July 14, 1975 police report): Deloris reported that Tom had said that “you’re going to [expletive] or else” as she opened the door. Deloris ordered this Tom from the premises and during the commotion, Deloris’ father, who lives across the street, had come from his home and that this time Tom had left in the yellow van.

Dave Cawley: This fellow “Tom” wasn’t alone.

Aaron Mason (as Dean Egbert from July 14, 1975 police report): There was also another individual who was riding a motorcycle.

Dave Cawley: Two men, one driving a Volkswagen van. Remember, East Layton police officer Dave Anderson reported seeing a van parked outside the Fina station moments before discovering Nancy Baird had disappeared. Earlier, you heard from David and Jana Williams, who as children were the last people known to have seen Nancy Baird alive. David told me he remembered reading the newspaper reports recounting officer Anderson’s version of events.

David Williams: The officer looks over and sees that there’s people that are trying to buy gas or trying to pay for snacks.

Dave Cawley: When I interviewed David and his sister Jana, I pressed them, asking if they remembered seeing any other cars outside the Fina station.

Jana Williams Grow: I don’t remember a lot of vehicles there.

Dave Cawley: David appeared lost in thought for a moment, as if seeking back through the fog of distant memory.

David Williams: I think there, there may have, like, a van, brown in color. Umm, that kind of looked like a hippie van which is, kind of, that was parked on the, uh, north side.

Dave Cawley: My ears perked up when David said this. He hadn’t mentioned a van when interviewed by detective Kenny Payne on the golf course back in 1975. And I’d scoured the archives of several Utah newspapers from the time. The articles published back then did not include officer Anderson’s detail about seeing a van. That tidbit was a guarded piece of the investigation, not publicly revealed. So I don’t think it’s possible for David Williams’ memory to have been tainted by news reports.

This is significant, for two reasons. First, it bolsters East Layton police officer Dave Anderson’s story of having seen a van from across the highway. But more significantly, this van at the Fina station could be the same one a man used to chase Nancy Baird to the doorstep of her friend Deloris’ house, less than 48 hours before Nancy disappeared.

Deloris told a deputy she recognized this man, “Tom.” She gave investigators his last name, Stone, and said he lived nearby. A solid lead and yet, the investigators appear to have done nothing with it.

There’s no indication in the Nancy Baird case files I’ve obtained East Layton police ever followed up on this lead Davis County uncovered about Nancy being stalked and potentially sexually assaulted two nights before she disappeared. In fact, on July 28^th, 1975, East Layton police chief Ray Adams told the Deseret News his department was “at a dead-end” in the search for Nancy Baird. The chief said they’d exhausted their leads and would have to brainstorm a new “route to travel” in the investigation.

That’s absurd. Less than a month had passed since Nancy’s disappearance and already East Layton police were ready to throw in the towel? What the public didn’t yet know was the tiny department with a staff of just four—a part-time chief, a full-time officer and two part-time reserve officers—was on the brink of meltdown.

Chief Adams needed an alternative explanation, other than his own department’s incompetence, to explain what’d happened to Nancy Baird. Only a couple of weeks later, a trooper 30 miles south on the outskirts of Salt Lake City would arrest a young law school student named Theodore Bundy.

John Hollenhorst (from July 24, 1979 KSL TV archive): For a long time, residents of Utah, Colorado and Washington have been following an incredible mystery story: a story of murder, imprisonment and escape. And all along there has been one fascinating question: could a handsome, articulate, intelligent law student—with a promising career in politics—could Theodore Bundy be a crazed sex killer, responsible for the brutal murders of perhaps dozens of young women all across the West?

Dave Cawley: Serial killer Ted Bundy’s downfall began in the state of Utah. In November of 1974, Bundy tried to abduct a woman named Carol DaRonch from a shopping mall in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Carol fought back and managed to escape, still carrying the handcuffs Bundy tried to place on her.

Richard Bingham (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): Bundy is also a suspect in the disappearance of Debi Kent from Viewmont High in Bountiful.

Dave Cawley: On the same evening as his failed attempt to abduct Carol DaRonch, Bundy drove north to the city of Bountiful, Utah. He kidnapped a teenage girl named Debra Kent, plucking her from the parking lot outside Viewmont High School. Police found a handcuff key on the asphalt there. It matched the cuffs from the Carol DaRonch case. But no one could find Debra Kent.

Ted Bundy wasn’t arrested until many months later, in August of 1975. He stood trial for the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch in early 1976. Bundy wasn’t charged with the murder of Debra Kent because police hadn’t been able to find her body. I attended the same high school as Debra Kent, though many years later. I remember hearing whispered conversations among classmates even then, in the late ‘90s, full of rumor and exaggeration about Ted Bundy.

Tiffany Jean: And it’s become such a big story, that there’s even become kind of a mythology built up about the case.

Dave Cawley: That’s the voice of Tiffany Jean. She’s a government archivist, based in Texas. In 2019, Tiffany watched a Netflix documentary called “The Bundy Tapes.”

Tiffany Jean: And I’d heard the name before. I think everyone’s heard that name before. I didn’t really know much about the case.

Dave Cawley: Tiffany found herself fascinated, particularly by cases like Nancy Baird’s, where Ted Bundy was suspected but never proven as the killer.

Tiffany Jean: Because he confessed to at least 30 murders, but only 21 have been identified. And that’s always been a special interest of mine is seeing if I could shed any light on who those other women could be.

Dave Cawley: Earlier, you heard clips from an interview Ted Bundy gave days before his execution. He admitted in that recording to killing Debra Kent.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Was she in any way dismembered? Was she buried whole, or?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Yeah. I mean, yes. You should find all of it.

Tiffany Jean: As far anyone can tell, all of his final confessions right before he was executed were truthful. And that’s because he had some self-interest. He was trying to keep himself alive by giving investigators true information to buy himself some more time. It was his bones-for-time strategy, is what it was called.

Dave Cawley: Bundy hoped police would search where he indicated, find Debra Kent’s remains, then pressure Florida into delaying his execution so they could look for other victims.

Tiffany Jean: He gave a pretty detailed description of where he buried her.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Did you go back down through Salt Lake again?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Oh did you?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Yes.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): And you went farther south?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Yup.

Dennis Couch (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Past Provo?

Ted Bundy (from January 22, 1989 police interview recording): Yup.

Dave Cawley: Florida never had any intention of delaying Bundy’s execution. Bones-for-time was a bust for Ted Bundy. Police did later search in the area he’d indicated.

Searcher (from May 6, 1989 KSL TV archive): Ok, let’s go.

Joel Munson (from May 6, 1989 KSL TV archive): Serial killer Ted Bundy said he buried the Bountiful youth somewhere in this area nearly 15 years ago. So with shovels in hand and metal detectors humming away, search and rescue crews went back to work. This is the sixth time they’ve combed the area.

Dave Cawley: It took several tries, but in the end they found a single human bone: a patella, or kneecap.

Allison Barlow (from July 29, 1989 KSL TV archive): They did find some unidentified human remains at the site where Bundy claimed he buried Debra Kent.

Dave Cawley: Years later, DNA analysis would confirm that patella belonged to Debra Kent. Ted Bundy had told the truth in his final days. And, as we’ve already heard, Bundy denied any knowledge of Nancy Baird during that interview.

Tiffany Jean: So when he denies Nancy Baird, that makes me think maybe he was actually telling the truth in this situation.

Dave Cawley: Over the last few years, Tiffany Jean has filed public records requests for case files in the states where Ted Bundy is known and suspected to’ve murdered women.

Tiffany Jean: And some of those turned into a fight. (Laughs) And I just, it was more on the principle than anything else, that they weren’t going to turn over these records that I really felt like they should.

Dave Cawley: In Utah, Tiffany repeatedly won the release of records, many of which had never before been shared publicly. She feels strongly, and I agree, it’s important these records be preserved and studied, with an emphasis on the unsolved cases. Records are a matter of putting facts ahead of mythology.

Tiffany Jean: I want to know what the real story of what happened. And when you’re reading only secondary sources, you don’t really get the whole picture. And that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted the whole picture.

Dave Cawley: Tiffany’s developed a repository of well-sourced, factual information about the crimes of Ted Bundy. She’s published portions of that on her website hiimted.blog.

Tiffany Jean: I just want the most complete archive of the case that exists, just kind of a, that’s kind of my goal at this point.

Dave Cawley: I reached out to Tiffany in 2022. I knew she’d requested the Nancy Baird case file from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office, and been refused, because it’s technically still an open case. I’d also requested the Baird case file and likewise been refused.

Tiffany Jean: I didn’t write a GRAMA appeal like you did, though.

Dave Cawley: GRAMA is Utah’s open records law. After my initial denial, I appealed by arguing Nancy Baird’s case was open, but not active. The public interest for transparency weighed in favor of releasing the records. That argument proved persuasive, and I became the first person outside of law enforcement to review the Nancy Baird case file in nearly 50 years.

Tiffany Jean: So you beat me. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: I shared what I’d obtained of the Nancy Baird case file with Tiffany. We both knew the public consensus has long been Ted Bundy was somehow responsible.

Tiffany Jean: Which is interesting, because in that case file that you shared with me, his name doesn’t appear at all.

Dave Cawley: This is true. But it’s worth noting all of the files in the records I obtained are dated July of 1975, weeks before Bundy’s first arrest.

Tiffany Jean: And that’s another thing that jumped out at me was how they really didn’t do enough work on this case, or maybe the record’s incomplete. But it doesn’t seem like they followed all the leads that were there at the time.

Dave Cawley: Former Davis County Sheriff’s detective Kenny Payne collected evidence from Nancy Baird’s apartment in the days following her disappearance.

Kenny Payne: Y’know, I remember going down to her house and umm, things that I was really interested in was trying to find something that would be identifiable to, to her.

Dave Cawley: Where East Layton police were tossing up their hands in defeat, Davis County detectives like Kenny Payne were thinking ahead to some day in the future when they might come across Nancy Baird’s remains.

Kenny Payne: And so what I wound up recovering was, uh, two hair brushes.

Dave Cawley: With strands of Nancy’s strawberry blond hair still tangled in the bristles.

Kenny Payne: They’re still in evidence down at the sheriff’s office.

Dave Cawley: Several weeks later, after Ted Bundy’s arrest, police in neighboring Salt Lake County worked with the FBI to scour Bundy’s car. The items they gathered also ended up in evidence boxes.

Con Psarras (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): In the boxes, clues to two killings and a glimpse of a bigger picture: hundreds of hair samples vacuumed from the interior of Bundy’s little green Volkswagen. The hair of at least 100 different people. How many of them victims?

Dave Cawley: Davis County sent Nancy Baird’s hair to the FBI for comparison to the hairs collected from Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle. The lab did not come up with a match. None of the hairs from the car belonged to Nancy Baird.

Tiffany Jean: So that kind of made me think maybe it wasn’t Bundy maybe it was someone that she knew she was willing to go with.

Dave Cawley: Who might Nancy have trusted? Perhaps a familiar young man dressed in a police uniform.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: One of the people I’ve most wanted to talk to about the Nancy Baird case is former East Layton police officer Dave Anderson, the man who first reported Nancy missing.

Dave Anderson is one of the only people who could’ve successfully lured Nancy Baird out of the Fina station during the narrow window of five or ten minutes between when she was last seen by David and Jana Williams and when her manager showed up and discovered she was gone. The chief should’ve sidelined officer Anderson until he could be cleared as a person of interest. But that didn’t happen. And I can’t confront former officer Dave Anderson about this, because he’s dead. Regardless, let’s explore officer Anderson’s background so you can see why I view him in such a critical light.

David Ray Anderson was born in May of 1951, the third of three children in his family. He never knew his older sister, because she died after being accidentally backed over by her father. But Dave Anderson did grow up with a brother, Earl, who was two years his senior.

When Dave was 8, his father moved their family to the city of Layton, Utah. Dave attended Davis High School, graduating in the class of 1969. That’s a different school and one year ahead of Nancy Baird, so I’m not sure if they would’ve crossed paths at that point.

A year later, in April of 1970, Dave married a woman he’d gone to high school with named Marilyn. He attended basic training for the United States Marine Corps that summer and in the fall, he and Marilyn welcomed their first child.

Dave’s parents moved away from Layton a short time later. They bought an old farm house 100 miles away, in the rural town of Nephi, Utah. Dave followed them, dragging his reluctant bride and their baby out to the countryside. The Andersons had a second child while living in Nephi. But all was not well behind the scenes. Dave Anderson’s marriage was on the rocks. His wife hated living in the sticks. And his older brother was about to throw the whole family into turmoil.

In June of 1972, Dave’s older brother Earl and a few other guys burglarized a business. Earl and his companions stole cash, credit cards, liquor and a handgun. Earl landed in the Utah State Prison on a felony conviction. Newspaper archives show while in prison in August of 1973, Earl set another inmate on fire, leaving that man with serious burns over most of his body. Prosecutors charged Earl with attempted homicide, and moved him out of the state prison to a county jail, for his own protection. It wasn’t enough. Retribution came in January of 1974, when a group of jail inmates jumped Earl. They allegedly forced Earl to swallow tranquilizer pills, then smothered him until he was dead.

Dave Anderson was just 22 when he buried his brother. I don’t know exactly how this experience impacted him, but it’s notable Dave immediately turned his career aspirations toward becoming a cop. And this was just a year-and-a-half before Nancy Baird disappeared.

Dave’s wife, meanwhile, had reached her breaking point. She separated from Dave and moved back home to Layton. A short time later, she filed for divorce. Dave followed his estranged wife and kids to Layton, finding a place of his own nearby. He enrolled in a criminal justice program at Weber State College and, in October of 1974, landed a job as a police officer for the town of East Layton. That was just 10 months before Nancy Baird disappeared.

As I said before, the majority of Dave’s hours were spent patrolling U.S. Highway 89. And he spent a lot of that time parked at the Fina station where Nancy worked. Anderson was a young, inexperienced cop with a complicated home life when he spoke to Nancy at the Fina station minutes prior to her disappearance. We have only his word that their conversation was polite.

It’s jump to go from there to seeing officer Dave Anderson as a suspect. But what piques my interest is what happened next: Anderson abandoned his budding law enforcement career just a couple of months after Nancy Baird disappeared. I’m not sure why.

Requirements to become a certified police officer in Utah during the 1970s were a lot more lax than they are now. Under the law at the time, a prospective officer was supposed to complete 200 hours of training at the academy within 18 months of being hired by a police agency. So when East Layton hired Dave Anderson as its only full-time police officer in 1974, it started a countdown clock ticking. He had a year-and-a-half to get certified, or he was out of a job.

Landing a spot at the police academy wasn’t easy. Prospective officers needed to be sponsored. So guys like Dave Anderson would often get hired by a small town, attend the academy on the town’s behalf, then quit the small town job to take a better-paying position at a bigger city department. Anderson’d probably hoped East Layton would sponsor him to the academy. But that never happened. I can’t find any record of him getting a police job anywhere else. He just walked away.

Anderson becomes very difficult to track after that point. Court records show his ex-wife, Marilyn, filed a lawsuit against him in 1989, seeking thousands of dollars in unpaid child support. Dave’s name appears in both of his parents’ obituaries during the early ‘90s. Then, he’s a ghost. I know he ended up just over the state line in Mesquite, Nevada during the early 2000s. But there, records show “officer” David Ray Anderson died in August of 2010. There’s no record to suggest he was ever challenged on the story he’d told about the disappearance of Nancy Baird.

Dave Cawley: It’s a windy day in the spring of 2023. I’ve spent the last few hours in the car with my boss and collaborator, Sheryl Worsley, headed to a remote community along the Snake River.

Dave Cawley (to Sheryl Worsley): Sheryl, for the record why don’t you state where we are and what we’re doing.

Sheryl Worsley: Well, we are, I’m not sure where we are, Dave. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Buhl, Idaho.

Sheryl Worsley: We are in Buhl, Idaho.

Dave Cawley: We’ve come, unannounced, in the hopes of talking to one of the other men who worked for the East Layton Police Department in 1975.

(Sound of seat belt click)

Sheryl Worsley: We’ll see. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: See what kind of reception we get.

Dave Cawley: His name is Thomas Jackson, Junior. As we walk toward his door, a tall white-haired man steps out.

Dave Cawley (to Tom Jackson): Hi, how you doing? Are you Tom?

Dave Cawley: Tom Jackson can see the microphone in my hand. He asks “uh oh, what did I do now” with a bit of a laugh.

Dave Cawley (to Tom Jackson): You did nothing.

Sheryl Worsley: You didn’t do anything. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: We’re doing a history project on the Nancy Baird case. From way back in—

Tom Jackson: Oh, Nancy Perry Baird?

Dave Cawley: You got it.

Tom Jackson: When I was a cop? Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Sheryl Worsley: Yeah.

Tom Jackson: Oh, that’d be great. Uh, you want to come in?

Dave Cawley: Is that ok?

Sheryl Worsley: Is that alright?

Dave Cawley: He ushers us inside and makes space on the couch.

Tom Jackson: I’m glad you’re here. Man, this is, just been exciting to know that her case is still open and is, I’m tickled.

Dave Cawley: Tom Jackson was about four years older than Nancy Baird. And he confirms, they knew each other as kids.

Tom Jackson: She was a pretty gal.

Dave Cawley: Tom’d lived just down the street from Nancy. In fact, he’d even married one of Nancy’s friends, a neighbor girl. They’d stayed in the neighborhood, living just off Cherry Lane, a little ways behind the Fina station where Nancy’d worked.

Tom worked a full-time job, but around the start of 1975 also accepted a part-time position as a reserve officer for the East Layton police department. His reserve role was a little different than Cary Hartmann’s, which we heard about in Cold season 3. East Layton was a lot smaller than Ogden City, so it asked much more of its reserves. As a result, Tom worked a more regular schedule, received a paycheck, and wrote a lot of tickets.

Tom told me on the day Nancy Baird disappeared, he’d been driving around in one of the town’s two police cars.

Tom Jackson: I didn’t even hear anything on the radio about it.

Dave Cawley: Which is a little strange, since officer Dave Anderson did describe radioing dispatch about Nancy in his report. In any case, Tom said he’d stopped by the Fina station that evening and found his chief, Ray Adams, and officer Dave Anderson there.

Tom Jackson: I pulled in, I was like “what’s going on?” And they said “Nancy’s gone.” I said “what the crap, what?”

Dave Cawley: Tom remembered going to Nancy’s house and helping retrieve her address book. According to a report, Tom and the chief then went and looked around a place called Fernwood Park, as the dark of night descended. Why Fernwood? Well, it was home to a sort of “lover’s lane,” a place in the hills where couples would park their cars and make out. The police found no sign of Nancy there.

Records show Tom Jackson didn’t have any involvement with the Nancy Baird case after that. He intentionally opted out.

Tom Jackson: At that time, I don’t think I was, I don’t know, I wasn’t a good cop, I would say. I wanted to, I wanted to let someone else handle it. I didn’t want to mess it up.

Dave Cawley: In spite of this, East Layton sent Tom Jackson to the Utah police academy in September of 1975. That’s only about two-and-a-half months after Nancy Baird disappeared. Why did Tom go to the academy, instead of officer Dave Anderson? I’m not sure. Tom didn’t remember.

I’ve talked to one of Tom’s academy classmates. He said Tom struggled a bit, but Tom did graduate the academy and was certified to work in law enforcement. He replaced Dave Anderson as East Layton’s full-time police officer. At some point in the middle of all this, Tom talked to the Davis County Sheriff’s Office about next-steps in the Nancy Baird investigation. East Layton had jurisdiction. It was their call.

Tom Jackson: The county asked me, says “you want to handle this?” And I says “no way! All we are is just little hick town cops here so if we’re gonna find her, you guys is the ones that’s gotta do it.”

Dave Cawley: Tom knew the county had already tracked down several of Nancy’s boyfriends, working off her address book.

Tom Jackson: They had the book and whatever name was in there, they went after ‘em.

Dave Cawley: But the boyfriend leads ran dry, right around the time Ted Bundy entered the picture.

Tom Jackson: Yeah, there was suspicion of him.

Dave Cawley: Tom’s mind didn’t settle on Bundy, though. He figured Nancy’s abductor could’ve been much closer.

Tom Jackson: This person must’ve been someone she knew and had some trust in him. That’s the other reason why I thought it was one of the cops, that one cop.

Dave Cawley: Former officer Dave Anderson. Tom remembered Dave Anderson spending a lot of time at the Fina station.

Tom Jackson: He spent too much time looking at women, too.

Dave Cawley (to Tom Jackson): Thinks he’s a lady’s man, maybe—

Tom Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: —a little bit?

Tom Jackson: He was a good-looking guy, so I’m sure he thought so.

Dave Cawley: This description of former officer Dave Anderson reminded me of Cary Hartmann and his brief time in the Ogden police reserve corps, which we talked about during Cold season 3. There are some people who are drawn to law enforcement jobs for all the wrong reasons. Dave Anderson, it seems, might’ve been one of them. This idea was overlooked though, probably because the East Layton police department was itself in crisis. Its chief, Ray Adams, shouldn’t have been chief. He’d wasn’t a cop. He’d secured his position through the good ol’ boy system. State law required he attend the academy, but he wasn’t willing to take a leave from his full-time job to do that.

So, in April of 1976, Ray Adams vacated the chief of police position. He instead became a justice of the peace for the town, a form of low-level judge, a job for which Adams was also not qualified. Officer Tom Jackson departed the East Layton police department not long after that. He decided to leave law enforcement entirely, and went into private security work. So within about a year of the disappearance of Nancy Baird, the entire East Layton police force turned over.

Tom Jackson: Real Mayberry thing. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: There is one other point I need to acknowledge here: former officer Tom Jackson has a criminal record. In 1986, 11 years after the disappearance of Nancy Baird, Davis County prosecutors filed a criminal charge against Tom. He stood accused of sexually abusing two young girls. He pleaded guilty to a second-degree felony, which made him eligible for a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. But the judge only placed Tom on probation.

Tom’s wife divorced him in the years that followed. He left Utah, remarried, and then, in 1995, police arrested Tom Jackson again, this time on charges of lewd conduct with a child under 16 years of age. He again pleaded guilty, but the Idaho judge showed none of the leniency the Utah judge had. Tom received a life sentence. But Tom’s no longer in prison, clearly. He won an appeal that reduced his sentence to 15 years. He served that time, a fact he and I discussed at the start of our interview.

Tom confided he felt a bit nervous going on tape. He hoped I wouldn’t make a monster of him. I promised to treat him fairly. And Tom acknowledged his past complicates how we might see him.

Tom Jackson: I wouldn’t doubt if I was a suspect and all that. And that’s ok with me.

Dave Cawley: Because, Tom says, he’s taken polygraph after polygraph as part of his probation.

Tom Jackson: And one of the questions in there is “you committed any other crimes that we don’t know about?” And when I said “no, not at all.” And it come up true, so.

Dave Cawley (to Tom Jackson): I mean, it’s—

Tom Jackson: Y’know, that pretty much cleared me right there.

Dave Cawley: —it’s a lot of years, right? You would think if you were a suspect, someone would’ve come and talked to you a long time ago—

Tom Jackson: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Cawley: —right?

Tom Jackson: That’s true.

Dave Cawley: After Tom Jackson left his job at the East Layton Police Department a year following Nancy Baird’s disappearance, the town hired a new officer, a guy named Dave Davis. Town leaders quickly promoted Davis to chief. Davis told The Salt Lake Tribune he was “working wonders” with the small budget provided to him in a 1977 newspaper story comically headlined “Yes, East Layton has a police department.”

Gary McFarland: They just did not have the funding to take and keep somebody.

Dave Cawley: Chief Davis also inherited the Nancy Baird case. He did nothing with it until, in 1979, four years on from Nancy’s disappearance, Davis hired a new patrol officer named Gary McFarland.

Gary McFarland: And it came down to where it was just me covering 12 hours and the other, the chief would cover the other 12 hours. And there was a promise from the city that if I did that, they would send me to the police academy.

Dave Cawley: Chief Davis gave Gary former East Layton police officer Dave Anderson’s report about the disappearance of Nancy Baird.

Gary McFarland: There just wasn’t a lot. We were, y’know, a very small community. There was very few things going on. Property disputes, loose cows, loose, loose horses. (Laughs) That kind of thing. It just, that was, that was a pretty big case.

Dave Cawley: At this same time, Ted Bundy was standing trial for murder in Florida.

John Hollenhorst (from July 24, 1979 KSL TV archive): As the verdict approached, reporters, editors and photographers prepared for the climax of the trial. The Bundy case has generated vast amounts of publicity all over Florida and in the western states of Utah, Colorado and Washington. In all those places, Bundy is suspected of murders. All involving young women.

Dave Cawley: Gary, and many others, believed Ted Bundy might’ve killed Nancy Baird. It wasn’t much of a leap: Bundy had been in Utah the summer Nancy disappeared.

Gary McFarland: She had the appearance of some, the females that he preferred. That’s all we had, is the method of operation fit.

Dave Cawley: But that suspicion didn’t give Gary any direction as to where to look for Nancy’s remains.

Gary McFarland: It was becoming a cold case, basically.

Dave Cawley: A little kerfuffle erupted in East Layton around this same time. The mayor fired police chief Davis, who responded by telling the news media it was an attack on the entire department.

Dave Davis (from March 24, 1980 KSL TV archive): They may be looking into an outside agency to contract to and dissolve the police department as a whole.

Dave Cawley: I suspect you probably don’t much care about this small town political squabble, but I promise you, it’s relevant to the Nancy Baird case because of what happened in the end.

Gaylen Young (from March 26, 1980 KSL TV archive): Nearly 400 angry residents were in attendance at the city council meeting because mayor Delin Yates was not going to keep police chief Dave Davis on the job.

East Layton resident (from March 26, 1980 KSL TV archive): We don’t want a contract with Davis County. We don’t want a contract with Layton City. We want the police force we have with the responsible, interested service that we get from them.

Dave Cawley: This protest proved ineffective. East Layton dissolved its police department. Officer Gary McFarland, fresh out of the academy, no longer had a job. But it didn’t stop there. The residents of East Layton voted to disincorporate at the end of 1980. Their town ceased to be and neighboring Layton City swallowed it whole. The records of the East Layton police department were lost to time. All except for the report of former police officer Dave Anderson about the disappearance of Nancy Baird. Gary McFarland still had it.

Gary McFarland: It ended up with me. No direction as to what to do with it. But it was in my custody.

Dave Cawley: But with East Layton gone, who would inherit jurisdiction over Nancy Baird’s case? Did it belong to Layton City, which absorbed East Layton? Or did the Davis County Sheriff’s Office bear responsibility, given the work deputies there had done assisting East Layton early on?

Gary McFarland: Davis County provided a lot of the crime scene investigations because small communities could not provide that service.

Dave Cawley: As we saw with the Sheree Warren case in Cold season 3, victims fall through the cracks when police agencies fail to communicate. And that’s what also appears to have happened with Nancy Baird. No one took the initiative. It wasn’t Gary McFarland’s case, but he felt duty-bound to safeguard the reports.

Gary McFarland: Because it was one of those cases that you knew someday would have a lead.

Dave Cawley: Gary ended up taking another police job at a different agency. Year after year, he waited for a phone call that might break the case.

Gary McFarland: Nobody ever came forward. Nobody was ever found. Not one tip, not nothing.

Dave Cawley: Gary McFarland retired in 2012. He turned the East Layton police report on Nancy Baird over to the Davis County Sheriff’s Office.

Gary McFarland: They’d come up with some other theories, besides the only one that I ever came up with.

Dave Cawley (to Gary McFarland): Bundy?

Gary McFarland: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Is that what you mean?

Gary McFarland: Yeah, ‘cause I’m stuck on it. It will, until I’m proven different.

Dave Cawley: Gary still believes Ted Bundy is the most likely suspect in Nancy Baird’s presumed murder. But he knows that’s not the only theory.

Gary McFarland: The theories were that it was possibly a law enforcement officer that worked in East Layton.

Dave Cawley: The story we’ve heard so far leaves me deeply skeptical about any conclusion regarding Nancy Baird’s death being the work of serial killer Ted Bundy. To my mind, there are too many other plausible scenarios. And, Tiffany Jean, the archivist, told me she’s unsure as well.

Tiffany Jean: I, I looked at the case a little bit. And I thought that it didn’t quite fit his M.O., with what I know about how he operated.

Dave Cawley: What was different? For one, the location. Ted Bundy was never known to abduct a woman from a gas station during daylight hours.

Tiffany Jean: And while Bundy was capable of doing that, he mostly operated at night. And he mostly avoided places where he could be seen or picked out.

Dave Cawley: In his early crimes in Washington state, Bundy sometimes approached women while claiming to be injured, needing help to put something in his car. Would Nancy Baird have taken that kind of bait?

Tiffany Jean: It seems unusual that she would have been willing to leave her post to do that when there was no one else at the station.

Dave Cawley: Bundy liked to lure women to his car—a light tan 1968 Volkswagen Beetle—then handcuffed them or knocked them unconscious. If he’d done something like that with Nancy Baird, it probably would’ve happened right in the parking lot outside the Fina station.

Tiffany Jean: And that seems like kind of a big risk for Bundy to have taken.

Dave Cawley: None of the witnesses from the Fina station reported seeing a Volkswagen Beetle like Bundy’s. And the descriptions provided by the Williams children didn’t match Ted Bundy, either.

Tiffany Jean: So, that’s another reason that seems unlikely that it would have been him.

Dave Cawley: Nancy Baird vanished from the Fina station within the space of just five or ten minutes.

Kenny Payne: Yeah I mean she’s just, she’s just gone.

Dave Cawley: No signs of a struggle, no indication she ran away.

Kenny Payne: I mean she’s got a, a child at home.

Dave Cawley: So retired sheriff’s detective Kenny Payne gets why even some of his former colleagues believe to this day Ted Bundy abducted and murdered Nancy Baird.

Kenny Payne: But then you have to try and figure out whether or not the first thought of “it’s gotta be Ted Bundy” well no, what can you find that tells me a story?

Dave Cawley: What Kenny’s saying is the elements necessary to build a narrative about Ted Bundy killing Nancy Baird just aren’t there.

Tiffany Jean also shared another, more compelling reason why she questions Ted Bundy’s supposed involvement. Bundy, she told me, might have an alibi for the day Nancy Baird disappeared. And Tiffany could be the first person to ever piece it together.

Ted Bundy first moved to Utah in September of 1974, having come from Washington state to attend law school at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Tiffany Jean: He had a steady girlfriend who lived in Seattle who was originally from Ogden. And she was probably the reason why he came to Utah in the first place, because she had roots there. And eventually they planned on settling down there, if they ever got married. But y’know, he was not a good person. (Laughs) So in addition to everything else bad that he did, he also cheated on her quite a bit.

Dave Cawley: In June of 1975, just a few weeks before Nancy Baird disappeared, Ted Bundy met a young school teacher named Leslie Knudsen at a party in Salt Lake City. Bundy and Leslie started seeing one another.

Tiffany Jean: And they dated until August, she saw that he was arrested and didn’t want anything more to do with him.

Dave Cawley: Leslie spoke to investigators back in 1975, but she was never called as a witness in court and has kept a very low profile all the years since. Her story is not well known, even among Ted Bundy experts.

Tiffany Jean: But I was able to find her phone number, and an associate of mine called her. And this was back in 2019. And it took a little while for her to warm up and agree to, to speak at all. But she gave some, y‘ou ‘know, some kind of overall arching details about her time that she spent with him. And she mentioned that he had visited her family, and she’d introduced him to her entire family at a family reunion on the 4^th of July, 1975. And that struck me immediately because Nancy Baird disappeared on 4^th of July, 1975. And if Leslie Knudson was accurate in her recall, then Ted probably could not have done that, if he was with her, and being introduced to her entire family at their July 4^th family reunion. But it doesn’t seem like anyone else has ever put those together that he was with her on the day that this crime occurred.

Dave Cawley: I’ve listened to a recording of this interview with Leslie Knudson. There are legal and ethical considerations that prevent me from sharing the audio with you, but I can tell you what Leslie said: she and Bundy had “gone to the family ranch” on the 4^th of July. Leslie didn’t say where the ranch was, and she’s not responded to multiple messages I’ve left for her. But I did some genealogy research and can tell you Leslie’s maternal grandfather was a prominent sheep rancher in an area of Utah called the Uinta Basin.

When Leslie’s mother died, the obituary described how she’d spent “many summers in the Fruitland, Utah area on the family ranch.” Fruitland is in the Uinta Basin. This is likely where Leslie Knudson took Ted Bundy on the day Nancy Baird disappeared.

Tiffany Jean: And so it’d be pretty difficult for him to have done both things on that day because it would have been quite a drive.

Dave Cawley: More than 100 miles. Quite the drive, indeed. But once investigators in the Nancy Baird case honed in on Ted Bundy as a suspect, all efforts involving other persons of interest came to a halt.

Tiffany Jean: I was amazed at how many people went through that gas station in that tiny frame of time, within like 15 minutes. And nobody saw her leave?

Dave Cawley: My look into the Nancy Perry Baird case came about because a jailhouse informant once told the FBI Cary Hartmann had known Nancy. I haven’t seen any sign that tip was ever shared, investigated or corroborated. What I’ve learned, is there are other, more likely leads still left unexplored. But after nearly 50 years, so many people important to solving this puzzle are gone. And former East Layton officer Tom Jackson told me his health is on the decline.

Tom Jackson: One of the first people I want to see, other than my parents when I get to the other side, is Nancy. ‘Cause she has bugged me for so long. What could I have done to have been there for her? ‘Cause she’s, she was not the type, to’ve just bugged out and said, y’know, “I’m tired of the world.”

Dave Cawley: “She was not the type…” This is a common refrain we hear in so many cases of missing women, and to be honest, it’s getting under my skin. Because who is the type? Sure, people do run away, but in this podcast we’ve repeatedly heard how more sinister circumstances often surround the disappearances of women. It happened with Sheree Warren. Her disappearance, 10 years after Nancy Baird’s, bore many similarities. Both were young mothers, just out of unhappy marriages. Both were last seen at work. Neither just walked away. But in both cases, speculation about about serial killers distracted investigators, drawing attention away from more probable suspects.

Tom Jackson: And boy, whoever did it, he’s another Bundy.

Dave Cawley: Against the backdrop of turnover and jurisdictional dysfunction we’ve explored, it’s easy to understand how Ted Bundy filled a vacuum. His entrance to the scene took pressure off East Layton police. Nancy Baird’s friends and relatives were placated by the belief Bundy did it, even though no proof ever emerged to support that. But there are too many unexplored avenues of investigation for me to accept that conclusion. Like the man who stalked, “molested” and threatened Nancy a couple of nights before she disappeared. Or the two “hippie type” guys chatting with her at the Fina station moments before she vanished. Or even an East Layton police officer with a troubled past.

Until these other leads are closed, how can anyone accept taking “the convenient alternative?”

Dave Cawley: The world had gone into lockdown. Covid-19 had exploded into a full-blown pandemic. Schools and businesses were shuttered. Streets in cities across the United States were eerily quiet.

It was the spring of 2020, but at least one business in Ogden, Utah remained open: Dave Moore’s sewing machine repair shop. Dave and his brother, who co-owned the business, were trying to keep up with a sudden surge in demand for their services.

Dave Moore: We were extremely busy during when Covid broke out because everyone was staying home making masks.

Dave Cawley: Dave’s shop was still located right where it’d been in October of 1985, on the night when Sheree Warren had disappeared. The bar on the other side of the parking lot, where Dave’d gone for a drink with his friend Cary Hartmann that night, was still there too. But it’d changed names and owners several times over the decades. There’s a small office tucked in the back of Dave’s shop. Dave was working in the office one day that spring of 2020 when he heard someone come through the door onto the sales floor.

Dave Moore: My brother was down on the floor and uh, Cary came in and my brother’s not real fond of Cary, said uh “let me see if he’ll see you.” So he came up and I just walked down real briefly, said “hi,” y’know, “what’re you doing?” And he basically gave me the story that he was living in a halfway house and somebody donated a bed and a small TV to him and that was basically the conversation.

Dave Cawley: A modest new beginning for Cary Hartmann. Cary had just returned to Ogden after spending 32 years in prison. Dave had struggled over those years to reconcile the charming Cary he’d once known with the secretive man Cary’d revealed himself to be.

Dave Moore: To be honest with you, I didn’t believe he did it until he was convicted.

Dave Cawley: They’d remained in contact for awhile, but fell out of touch during the ‘90s. Years later, Dave wrote a letter to Cary.

Dave Moore: Just to see how he was doing. Just to see what the situation was and I basically wanted to know what, “what’s wrong with you?” Y’know?

Dave Cawley: Cary had not responded. So when Cary dropped in unannounced on Dave at work in early 2020, Dave hadn’t felt too eager to renew their old friendship.

Dave Moore: Yeah. We’d both changed.

Dave Cawley: Cary and Dave had been together at the bar on the evening of Sheree Warren’s disappearance, almost 35 years earlier. Cary’d tried to use Dave as an alibi. So it’s interesting one of the first things Cary did after getting out of prison was check up on his old friend. Cary’d told the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole before leaving prison he’d anticipated a tough transition.

Cary Hartmann (from October 29, 2019 parole board recording): I know there’s going to be rejection when I go out there in one form or another. Now, when I can’t handle that, that’s a risky situation for me. I know who I can call to say “whoa, my self-esteem is in the dirt.”

Dave Cawley: I wonder if Cary’s self-esteem took a hit when he realized he could no longer count Dave Moore as a friend. Another old friend of Cary’s, Brent Morgan the taxidermist, told me he also wants nothing to do with Cary. Which is saying something, because Brent and Cary grew up together.

Brent Morgan: If you go back to friends, I can remember him the farthest back because of the association of my parents and his parents.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d written letters to Brent’s mom for years after his conviction. And Cary’s own mother, Donna Hartmann, had kept in touch with the Morgans as well.

Brent Morgan: Donna was always after mom and myself to go and visit him and there was a couple of time I thought about it and I just didn’t want to.

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): Hmm.

Brent Morgan: Didn’t want to.

Dave Cawley: Cary’s mom, Donna Hartmann, had attended her son’s parole board hearings. She’d heard him say under oath he’d lied to his family about being innocent.

Cary Hartmann (from September 21, 2010 parole board recording): I was in denial. I couldn’t face up to what I’d done. I was wracked with guilt and shame.

Dave Cawley: But Brent Morgan told me Cary’d privately held to a different story: he hadn’t raped anyone and was only admitting to the crimes because otherwise, the parole board would never let him out of prison. Donna Hartmann died in 2013.

Brent Morgan: His mother went to her grave believing that he was innocent.

Dave Cawley: Cary’s dad, Bill Hartmann, had defended his son from the start. He’d paid Cary’s bail, put up his own money to fund DNA testing and also attended his son’s parole board hearings. But Bill Hartmann didn’t live to see Cary regain his freedom, either. Bill died in January of 2020, just two months shy of Cary’s release from prison.

Sheree Warren’s friend and former coworker, Pam Volk, hadn’t realized Cary was free when she and I met a year-and-a-half later.

Pam Volk: Is he out?

Dave Cawley (to Pam Volk): He is

Pam Volk: Oh, I didn’t know he was out.

Dave Cawley: Yeah, yeah.

Pam Volk: That honestly makes me a little nervous. Hmm, ‘kay. Well, interesting. And he lives in Ogden?

Dave Cawley: Yeah, he does. I know, because I paid Cary Hartmann a visit myself.

This is Cold, season 3, episode 10: Last Man Standing From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Sheree Warren’s dad, Ed Sorensen, told Salt Lake City TV station KTVX in 2019 he hoped to someday learn what happened to Sheree.

Ed Sorensen (from October 16, 2019 KTVX TV archive): Sure I’d love to know what happened, but I don’t think we’ll ever find out.

Dave Cawley: Roy City police were at the time actively investigating Sheree’s disappearance. The cold case remained in the hands of detective John Frawley, who still has the case today. John told me meeting Sheree’s family had changed his perspective.

John Frawley: Kinda sobering feeling that this family they didn’t get any answers.

Dave Cawley: Those conversations were driving John and his fellow detectives to keep digging. They wanted to at last be able to tell Sheree’s dad, Ed Sorensen, they were bringing his daughter home.

John Frawley: I don’t know how to explain that other than we want answers just as much as anyone else. It’s important to us.

Dave Cawley: John had come to believe Cary Hartmann held those answers. And he’d wanted to ask Cary about it.

John Frawley: So, I went down to the prison twice and then I met with him at AP&P. So three times.

Dave Cawley: AP&P is short for Adult Probation and Parole. It’s a state agency in Utah responsible for supervising people after they’re released from prison. John told me these interactions with Cary hadn’t proved very fruitful.

John Frawley: You know, I’ve been in a room with some, with some interesting people during this career and he’s one of them. It’s just very different.

Dave Cawley: We’ve heard several people over the course of this season describe Cary has having two personalities. He could come across as debonair or devilish, depending on the moment. John didn’t tell me which Cary he encountered. Cary’s release hadn’t come without strings. He had to abide by conditions set by the parole board.

John Frawley: As part of his parole agreement he was mandated to submit to random polygraph.

Dave Cawley: A lie detector, about whatever police wanted to ask him about. Random polygraphs are a standard condition of parole in felony sex offense cases in Utah. The results aren’t typically admissible as evidence in court, but they can help investigators figure out if they’re on the right track. Cary Hartmann had never taken a lie detector test about his relationship with Sheree Warren. He might end up back in prison on a parole violation, if he refused to cooperate now. John Frawley had Cary in a corner.

John Frawley: Oh man, yeah. He does not, he’s not happy with me.

Dave Cawley: John called in an FBI agent with decades of experience as a polygraph examiner. The agent sat Cary down and asked him a series of questions about Sheree’s disappearance.

John Frawley: And he did fail that polygraph test.

Dave Cawley: Spectacularly, or so I’ve heard. Roy police have refused to give me any records related to the polygraph. The FBI won’t even acknowledge such a report exists, which would be comical if it wasn’t so frustrating. This put John in something of a tight spot. He’s told me the polygraph report is important, but he’s also not at liberty to discuss it in detail. He could only give me this three-word summary without getting into trouble.

John Frawley: It shows deception.

Dave Cawley: Cary’s performance at the polygraph went so poorly, it made John rethink his entire take on the Sheree Warren case. From that point forward, he no longer saw Chuck Warren as his prime suspect. I asked John if that was so, why hadn’t he just arrested Cary?

John Frawley: It doesn’t give me what I need because I have two persons of interest.

Dave Cawley: Chuck Warren’s unwillingness, or inability, to provide a clear story about where he’d been after Sheree disappeared meant John couldn’t completely count Chuck out.

John Frawley: Yep. The two persons of interest are still Charles Warren and Cary Hartmann.

Dave Cawley: Chuck Warren never showed much interest in what’d happened to his estranged wife Sheree in 1985. He’d just moved on with his life. In the last episode, we heard Roy police detective John Frawley’s 2015 interview with Chuck.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): You say you can’t remember too much but, y’know, you’re doing pretty good. You—

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Well as you’re bringing it up, I can remember a few things.

Dave Cawley: John’d asked Chuck about Cary Hartmann.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Did you know about him at the time. I mean, did you know that she was dating him or?

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): (Exhales) I can’t remember.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Can’t remember that?

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Uh, I, yeah, I just can’t remember if she—

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Ok.

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): —uh, when he got arrested it seemed like, then I heard something about that she’d been dating him.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): That she’d been dating him, afterwards.

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): And I think that’s how I found out, but I don’t know.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): After—

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): She’d never said anything to me about it.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): ‘Kay.

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): And I’d never asked her—

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Right.

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): —so, y’know, ‘cause I was dating a lot of girls at the time.

John Frawley (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Right.

Dave Cawley: In case you didn’t catch that, Chuck said he’d been “dating a lot of girls” when Sheree’d disappeared. But we also know Chuck’d reunited with his first wife, Alice, during that same period.

By the time of John Frawley’s interview with Chuck 30 years later, Chuck was living with his third wife, a woman named Willow. She’d sat by Chuck’s side while John questioned him. Willow’d interjected at one point, saying she wasn’t surprised to hear Chuck’d acted unconcerned when Sheree didn’t show up looking for her son on the night of her disappearance.

Willow Hendricks (from June 23, 2015 police recording): He’s been a pretty easy-going guy, too. So when she didn’t actually come pick him up at that time he probably wasn’t too worried about it. She’d be there eventually.

Dave Cawley: The first time I heard this audio recording, I thought Chuck and Willow shared an odd dynamic. Chuck and Willow had lived together for about 10 years, but had only been married a year or so at the time of the interview. And they didn’t stay married long. Three years later, in 2018, Chuck filed for divorce. Court records show Willow tried to lay claim to a lot of Chuck’s property, including stuff he’d bought well before they’d married. Willow also refused to move out of Chuck’s house. He twice filed eviction lawsuits against her. She left under protest in early 2020, but didn’t stay gone. Willow soon convinced her ex-husband Chuck to let her back into his heart, his life and his house.

You might be wondering who you’re supposed to root for in all this. Neither Chuck nor Willow seem very sympathetic. But there’s a revelation I found in the court records that puts their squabble in a different context. Chuck filed a third eviction lawsuit against Willow in September of 2020. It says:

“Willow was supposed to help Chuck as he had been diagnosed with dementia. Willow has not been giving Chuck his medications.”

Looking back, the beginnings of Chuck’s mental decline seemed apparent five years earlier, during his interview with detective John Frawley.

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Well, I have trouble remembering how to say different words.

Dave Cawley: In the last episode, I told you how Willow was 27 years younger than Chuck. They’d met and moved in together years before the onset of Chuck’s memory problems.

Willow Hendricks (from June 23, 2015 police recording): He never used to be like this. “How do I do this, how do I do that.” Then he’d get frustrated with it.

Dave Cawley: But Willow had only married Chuck in a spur-of-the-moment Las Vegas Elvis chapel wedding after Chuck’s memory started failing. Willow Hendricks went to court herself. She asked a judge to appoint her as Chuck Warren’s legal guardian. That hadn’t sat well with Chuck’s brother and two sons, one of whom was also Sheree’s son. Court records show they intervened, trying to block Willow from taking control of Chuck’s assets. On February 1^st, 2021, a judge declared Chuck “incapacitated.” Under the legal definition, that meant Chuck could no longer provide for his own protection, health or safety. His ability to evaluate information, make decisions and provide for the necessities of life were impaired.

Chuck’s dementia meant whatever he might’ve known about Sheree’s disappearance was locked away where even he couldn’t get to it. And if evidence were to somehow emerge proving Chuck’d killed Sheree, no prosecutor would ever charge him. Chuck wouldn’t be able to aid in his own defense, or even understand what he was accused of doing.

I learned about Chuck’s condition early in my research for this season. I realized I wouldn’t ever have a chance to interview him. I couldn’t, in good conscience, knowing Chuck lacked the cognitive ability to understand the questions I would ask. And it’s a terrible lost opportunity. From February of 2021 onward, Chuck Warren was off-limits in the search for answers about Sheree’s disappearance.

A couple of months later, in April of 2021, an investigator for the Weber County Attorney’s Office brought Cary Hartmann to an office in downtown Ogden. The investigator, Steve Haney, introduced Cary to a criminal defense lawyer named Michael Bouwhuis. Michael was a public defender, who’d represented thousands of clients over the years. Haney’d called both Cary and Michael here as part of a plan he’d conceived. He hoped he might coax Cary into admitting to Sheree Warren’s murder, by making Cary an offer he couldn’t refuse.

What I tell you next has never before been revealed: Steve Haney, the investigator, handed Cary a letter from the county attorney. It offered Cary immunity from criminal charges, if he revealed the location of Sheree Warren’s remains. A promise: take us to Sheree and we won’t charge you with her murder. This is what’s known as “transactional immunity.” It’s sometimes used to obtain testimony from witnesses or accomplices — see season 2 of this very podcast for an example — but it’s almost never provided to the primary target in a major criminal investigation like this.

The wording of the immunity offer was broad. There were no hidden “gotchas.” It was a literal get-out-of-jail-free card for Cary Hartmann. The letter even said this promise of immunity did not depend on the successful recovery of Sheree’s remains. So long as Cary told the truth about what he’d done and made a good faith effort to show where he’d left her body, he wouldn’t face any consequences. The county attorney had already signed the letter. All it needed to become binding was Cary’s own signature.

Cary, I’m told, seemed suspicious and skeptical. He didn’t know Michael Bouwhuis, this lawyer the cop Haney said was supposed to represent him. Besides, Cary already had his own lawyer, a fact Haney hadn’t realized. Cary called his attorney on the phone. They talked, then informed investigator Steve Haney they needed time to discuss the offer. Cary then left, taking the immunity letter with him.

About a week later, Steve Haney received a follow-up phone call from Cary’s attorney. The lawyer reportedly said Cary was not going accept the immunity offer. But here’s the thing, as far as I know Cary still has the immunity letter. And he could at any time sign it, walk into the Weber County Attorney’s Office, admit to killing Sheree Warren and face no consequences. But maybe Cary doesn’t need to do that. After all, why would he need immunity for something he’s insisted he didn’t do? Maybe Cary just doesn’t like talking to cops. Perhaps he’d feel more comfortable speaking with a reporter. Let’s find out.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: The air feels stifling. I sit in the driver seat of a small Honda crossover, pulled into a parking stall at an apartment complex not far from the mouth of Ogden Canyon. It’s the same place where Cary Hartmann lived at the time of his arrest in 1987. It’s the apartment complex where police’d found a gray suede jacket, possibly belonging to Sheree Warren, when they’d searched Cary’s unit in the rape investigation.

For some reason, Cary Hartmann chose to move back here in 2020, after he left prison, following a short stint at a halfway house. I step out of the car…

(Sound of car door)

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Let’s go knock.

Dave Cawley: …and walk toward one of the three-story buildings. It’s the start of May, 2021 and Utah’s experiencing a spring swelter. Air conditioners whir as I pass by. I look at the numbers on the doors, counting up until I find the right one, stop and knock.

(Sound of door knock)

Dave Cawley: No answer. I look at the unit number again, comparing it to Cary’s public listing in the Utah sex offender registry. It’s the right place, I’m sure. But Cary doesn’t seem to be home. Or at least, he doesn’t answer the door. I expected this, and I’ve come prepared with a pen and notepad.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Ok, what is our date today?

Sheryl Worsley (from May 5, 2021 recording): It’s the fifth, Cinco de Mayo.

Dave Cawley: That’s the voice of my boss, Sheryl Worsley, who’s joining me on this outing.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Alright, let’s see. What do we want to say here? Uh, “Mr. Cary Hartmann”…

Dave Cawley: This isn’t the first letter I’ve written to Cary. I’d reached out to him once before, when he was still incarcerated. At that time, I was researching the murder of Joyce Yost for season 2 of this podcast. I’d come across the recording of William Babbel, aka Charlie the FBI informant. We heard from him back in episode 6.

William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police recording): I was in a therapy group with Cary Hartmann. And I know Cary Hartmann’s story very well.

Dave Cawley: William Babbel had told the FBI Cary Hartmann killed Sheree Warren. But Babbel later switched up his story and told a South Ogden police detective a different guy, Doug Lovell, killed Sheree.

William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police recording): He mentioned somebody, that he was afraid he was going to get questioned in a rape-kidnap-murder of somebody named Sheree Warren.

Dave Cawley: I’d wanted to know what Cary made of Babbel’s contradictory claims. Was William Babbel a liar? But Cary never responded to my first letter. So this is why I’m standing at Cary’s door. I’m carrying a transcript of the William Babbel police interview with me as I knock at Cary’s apartment. When he doesn’t answer, I tuck the transcript behind his screen door, along with the following note.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Mr. Cary Hartmann, my name is Dave Cawley. I am a reporter with KSL. I previously wrote you while you were still incarcerated, hoping to set up an interview regarding a story I was working on about the Joyce Yost case. I never heard back but would still like an opportunity to speak with you. I will be publishing a story next week that includes a claim Doug Lovell had some involvement with the disappearance of another woman whom you knew, Sheree Warren. I’ve included a copy of a police interview with a prison informant named William Babbel. I’d love to hear your thoughts about what William had to say. I look forward to hearing from you, Dave Cawley.

Sheryl Worsley (from May 5, 2021 recording): There you go.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): So be it.

Dave Cawley: Then, Sheryl and I walk back to our car and crank up the A/C. I’m about to put the car in reverse when I glance at the rearview mirror and freeze.

“Act cool,” I say to Sheryl, “but take a look to our left.”

As she does, I reach down and switch off the ignition.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): So we’re sitting in the car outside Cary Hartmann’s apartment, having just left a note in his, uh, door, telling him that we wanted to speak with him and Sheryl, what happened?

Sheryl Worsley (from May 5, 2021 recording): And he pulls up, backs into a parking spot and we’re like “we think that’s him.”

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Yeah. I recognized the car driving past in the rearview, being a Chevy Avalanche, which was what was listed as one of his vehicles on the Utah sex offender registry and, and you watched him get out.

Sheryl Worsley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Yep. It looks like it’s him. So we’re going to give him a second to get our note and we’ll try again.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Give him a door knock.

Sheryl Worsley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Yep.

Dave Cawley: We decide five minutes seems fair: enough time to read letter and skim the transcript. We wait, watching the clock, then go knock on Cary Hartmann’s door a second time.

(Sound of door knock)

Dave Cawley: The door opens just a crack. I can see the lights are off inside. It’s dark, cave-like, as if blackout curtains cover all the windows. But enough light shines through the crack in the door to illuminate a face I recognize in the shadows.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Hey Cary—

Cary Hartmann (from May 5, 2021 recording): (Unintelligible)

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Dave Cawley from KSL. I left you a note, uh, but then I saw you pulling in as we were getting ready to leave. Umm, can I talk to you for just a second?

Cary Hartmann (from May 5, 2021 recording): No, I don’t have anything to say.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Ok.

Cary Hartmann (from May 5, 2021 recording): You want to talk to me, you have to talk to my attorney.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Oh, who’s your attorney? I’d be happy to reach out.

Cary Hartmann (from May 5, 2021 recording): (Pause) Johnathan Porter’s my attorney.

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Johnathan Porter? Ok, thank you, sir.

Sheryl Worsley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Thank you.

Cary Hartmann (from May 5, 2021 recording): (Unintelligible)

Dave Cawley (from May 5, 2021 recording): Got it.

Dave Cawley: And that’s the entirety of my communication with Cary Hartmann. It struck me as odd Cary’d referred me to his attorney. At the time, I wasn’t aware Weber County had offered Cary immunity just a couple of weeks earlier. I did reach out to Cary’s attorney, by the way, but I received no response. Cary Hartmann won’t talk to me.

I did talk to former Ogden police detective Chris Zimmerman, the guy who’d made the rape case against Cary in 1987, around the same time I went to knock on Cary Hartmann’s door. Zimmerman told me he believes Cary’s paid his debt to society and deserves a chance to prove he’s a changed man. Zimmerman’s position surprised me. He’s not someone I expected would show Cary much sympathy. Zimmerman’s notes and reports include a lot of detail about what Cary reportedly did to his suspected victims back in the ‘80s. I haven’t shared all of what’s in them, mostly to avoid being salacious and to protect the innocent from additional trauma.

Zimmerman declined my request for an on-the-record interview, but I shared what he told me with former Roy police detective Jack Bell, the original investigator on Sheree Warren’s disappearance.

Jack Bell: What Zimmerman said about him doing his time is true. Because he has done more time for the rapes than he would for a manslaughter.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d spent 32 years in prison, more than double the 15-year minimum on his sentence. Over the course of this season, we’ve heard how the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole kept Cary in for a few reasons. They included Cary’s own refusal to accept responsibility for what he’d done.

Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): There is tremendous repression and denial going on. So strongly … that therapy would be completely a waste of time until there’s a change of, of your perception.

Dave Cawley: The parole board had at times feared Cary might revert to his past behaviors. And there was the matter of Cary’s possible involvement in the disappearance of Sheree Warren. But in the end, the parole board decided to send Cary back out into society. Jack Bell told me he doesn’t believe Cary Hartmann’s squared his debts.

Jack Bell: No I don’t feel like he’s done his time.

Dave Cawley: I also asked former Weber County Attorney Reed Richards, the prosecutor who’d first put Cary away, if he believes Cary’s paid his debts.

Reed Richards: Well, that’s an interesting discussion and I don’t know that I have an opinion on it.

Dave Cawley: Reed said he’d felt surprised, not that the parole board let Cary out, but instead that it kept Cary in as long as it did.

Dave Cawley (to Reed Richards): Why so? Tell me—

Reed Richards: Well, because it was 15-to-life. So generally people were doing 15 years and getting out. But I can say that if he had been convicted the same time of homicide and the rape cases, he probably wouldn’t have spent any more time than he spent.

Dave Cawley: You could make an argument Cary’s already received punishment for a crime he’s not been charged with. Would that mean Cary no longer bears responsibility, if he killed Sheree Warren?

Reed Richards: And I guess the other question is what would a court do with it anyway? Y’know, if you were to convict him now, he’s probably what, 75 or so?

Dave Cawley: Cary is 74 years old, at the time I’m recording this.

Reed Richards: Yeah. So what are they gonna do with him?

Dave Cawley: If prosecutors today charged Cary Hartmann with Sheree Warren’s murder based on the evidence at hand, and if that case went to trial and you ended up on the jury, odds are you wouldn’t hear a word about lingerie survey phone calls, the Ogden City Rapist investigation or the lies Cary told to the parole board over the years. Courts operate under rules of evidence. Those rules spell out what kind of information prosecutors can use to try and prove their case. The stuff I just mentioned would likely not be allowed, because it doesn’t directly tie in to Sheree Warren’s disappearance. And even if it did, a judge might still not allow it because of the risk it could prejudice the jury against Cary. This explains why the Weber County Attorney’s Office offered Cary Hartmann immunity. They were willing to give up on ever charging Cary, if it meant they might recover Sheree’s remains, for her family.

Reed Richards: Like with any person who’s lost a loved one, to have the body and know where the grave is pretty important. So yeah, I think there’s value in doing that even if you don’t prosecute.

Dave Cawley: But as we heard, Cary rejected the immunity offer.

Reed Richards: I’m not sure where you go at this point, unless you find the body somewhere. Umm, and even if you find the body, that doesn’t necessarily tell you who killed her.

Dave Cawley: That would depend on where. We have two likely suspects: Chuck Warren or Cary Hartmann. Finding Sheree Warren’s remains somewhere in the desert partway between Ogden and Las Vegas wouldn’t directly tie her death to either of them. On the other hand, finding Sheree’s remains buried in the back yard of Chuck’s house would clearly point toward him. Finding her remains on the mountain behind Causey Reservoir would point to Cary.

Most of my attention has so far focused on Causey, because we have a confluence of evidence all pointing that direction: it’s near where Cary Hartmann lured Heidi Posnien at the start of our story. It’s where his friends owned land and liked to hunt. It’s where the elk hunting guide Fred Johns spotted Cary four days after Sheree disappeared. And it’s where an anonymous caller reported finding a woman’s body…

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): I’m reporting a body that I found.

Dave Cawley: …remains that to this day have not been located. Let’s imagine that changed. Pretend somebody found Sheree’s remains on the mountain behind Causey, where the elk hunting guide sighted Cary Hartmann. How would we then interpret everything we’ve learned so far this season?

I’m now going to walk you through a step-by-step of what Sheree Warren’s murder could’ve looked like, based on the evidence and witness testimony we’ve gathered. There are gaps, which I will bridge with some speculation. Keep in mind: I’m not saying this is what did happen, I’m saying it’s one possible explanation of what could’ve happened.

On the evening of October 2^nd, 1985, Sheree Warren walked out of an office building in Salt Lake City. She told Richard Moss, the man she’d been training, she was headed to Wagstaff Toyota to pick up her estranged husband.

Richard Moss: It was about 6:25 that we finally balanced and left the office. We got to the parking lot, she went to the west. I went north.

Dave Cawley: But Sheree’s husband, Chuck Warren, wasn’t waiting for her at Wagstaff. He’d changed his plans at the last minute and decided not to take his Toyota Supra from his home in Ogden to the dealership in Salt Lake City.

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): I remember calling her to tell her I wasn’t coming.

Dave Cawley: Around that same time, Cary Hartmann dropped in at his friend Dave Moore’s shop in Ogden. Cary suggested they go grab a couple drinks at a bar across the way. Cary and Dave spent a couple hours at the bar, from about 6 to between 8 and 9 p.m. So Cary was at the bar when Sheree left her work 40 miles south in Salt Lake City.

Sheree would’ve headed toward Ogden, either straight from work or after realizing Chuck wasn’t waiting for her at Wagstaff Toyota. Given the drive time, Sheree would’ve arrived in the Ogden area around 7:30 p.m. at the earliest. Her daily routine was to meet Chuck at the Denny’s restaurant just off the I-15 freeway in Roy. But she’d been late getting out of work, so I don’t know if she would’ve gone there or not on this particular night. She didn’t have a cell phone, making it difficult to change plans on the fly. Chuck wasn’t at that Denny’s, in any case. He later told police he’d gone out for that “jog.”

Chuck Warren (from June 23, 2015 police recording): Uh, yeah. Yeah, I was out jogging. That’s what I was doing.

Dave Cawley: Maybe Sheree stopped at the Denny’s in Roy looking for Chuck. We know she didn’t go home because her mom, Mary Sorensen, said Sheree never showed up for dinner. Everything I’ve heard about Sheree suggests her top priority would’ve been picking up her son. So I believe she would’ve headed toward Chuck’s house. If you today ask your phone for directions from Roy to Chuck’s house in Ogden, it will route you up Ogden’s 7^th Street. That’s where Cary Hartmann lived at the time.

Give a little more drive time to get from Roy to Ogden and we see Sheree could’ve driven past Cary’s basement apartment around 8 p.m. or a little after. That’s around the same time Cary’s friend Dave Moore told me they’d left the bar, meaning Cary could’ve already been home by the time Sheree hypothetically drove past his place. She could’ve seen his yellow truck parked in the driveway at the top of the stairs that lead down into the basement.

The two women who’d lived above Cary, the teachers Kaye Lynn and Mary, later told police they believed Sheree’d stopped there that night. They told detective John Frawley they’d overheard a loud argument.

John Frawley: And the argument was Sheree had found out Cary Hartmann was dating someone else. And then during this argument they heard a loud thud. And then Cary Hartmann cusses and then they don’t hear anything after that.

Dave Cawley: Cary had a history of using physical force against his romantic partners. He outweighed Sheree by at least 50 pounds. It’s possible a single blow could’ve knocked her unconscious or even killed her. I can imagine Cary then in a panic, wondering who else knew Sheree was at his place.

Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen, told police Cary’d called her at around 8 p.m. Cary’d asked where Sheree was. She told Cary Sheree’d intended to meet Chuck at the car dealership, then come home for dinner. But Sheree hadn’t showed up yet. As far as we know, Mary didn’t say anything to Cary about Sheree having plans to stop off at Cary’s apartment that night. So Cary would’ve presumably known he was safe, at least for a little while.

After hanging up with Mary, Cary could’ve wrapped Sheree in his black parka before taking her up the stairs from the basement apartment and placing her in his truck. Where to then? He would’ve needed somewhere dark and remote. Maybe Lost Creek, where Cary’d spent time deer hunting with his brother and cop buddies in the past. Lost Creek was an hour-and-a-half drive away, most of it on the interstate. Too far, and too risky. How about Causey? The secluded confines of Causey Estates were only 45 minutes from Ogden. The route, along Utah state highway 39, wound through dark canyons. And Cary knew his way around Causey Estates. He’d spent time there with friends, like the taxidermist Brent Morgan.

Brent Morgan: And, uh, there’s a locked gate.

Dave Cawley: Brent just happened to have loaned Cary his key to the gate at Causey Estates a couple of weeks earlier.

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): Once he’s past the gate to get into Causey Estates, he can go up top.

Brent Morgan: That’s correct.

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Brent Morgan: That’s correct.

Dave Cawley: There’s no proof Cary visited Causey Estates on the night of Sheree’s disappearance. This is speculative and you should treat it with due skepticism. I don’t think it’s likely Cary would’ve spent too long at Causey Estates, if he’d gone there that night. It’s not likely he would’ve gone all the way up the mountain, because in this hypothetical scenario, Sheree’s car would’ve still been sitting on the street outside his place in Ogden. Every second it remained there, he would’ve been exposed. He would’ve needed a quick but safe drop site.

Brent Morgan: The thing you gotta understand about Cary is, he’s lazy, y’know, he’s not gonna do anything that’s too hard.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d spent the first part of that evening at the bar with his friend Dave Moore and Dave had owned a lot in Causey Estates at the time.

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): Pretty quiet back in those days?

Dave Moore: It was. Real quiet.

Dave Cawley: Cary would’ve known Dave’s lot at Causey Estates was unoccupied that night, making it a safe place to temporarily stash Sheree. Cary could’ve driven from his apartment in Ogden to Dave Moore’s lot in Causey Estates and been back home before 11 p.m.

Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen, told police she’d received a second call from Cary on the night of Sheree’s disappearance between 10 and 11. He’d again asked if Sheree’d made it home. Mary’d said no. In this hypothetical scenario, Cary could’ve made this second call to Mary Sorensen after returning from dropping Sheree’s body, using it to bolster his story: he hadn’t seen Sheree at all that night.

Next, Cary would’ve needed to get rid of Sheree’s car. He would’ve taken her keys and gone out to her Toyota Corolla.

Chuck Warren liked to go to Las Vegas. He’d honeymooned there, more than once. His brother told me Chuck’d gone to Vegas regularly. It seems plausible Sheree might’ve shared that detail with Cary. If so, it’s conceivable Cary might’ve chosen to take Sheree’s car to Vegas as part of an effort to frame Chuck. If Cary’d driven through the night he could’ve arrived in Las Vegas just before sunrise. A quick jog to the airport, a false name at the ticket counter and a breeze through the pre-9/11 security process could’ve put Cary on a plane and back in Salt Lake City by 9:30 a.m.

He would’ve then needed to get from Salt Lake to Ogden. A taxi cab’s one possibility, but I don’t think someone sneaking home from dumping murder evidence in another state would want to leave a random cab driver as a witness, if it could be avoided. A trusted friend or relative seems more likely to me, but to my knowledge no one’s ever come forward to say they picked Cary up at the airport. That’s one major hole in this hypothetical scenario.

Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen, reported her daughter missing to Roy police around noon on October 3^rd, the day after Sheree’s disappearance. Her report landed on the desk of detective Jack Bell. Jack’d first tried to get ahold of Chuck Warren but couldn’t find him. Jack’d then turned his attention to Cary, placing a call to Cary around 2:30 p.m. Cary would later claim he called Jack, not the other way around. Cary said he made that call from work, but his timecard told a different story. It said Cary’d taken that day off. In any case, Cary’d arrived at Roy police headquarters around 2:45. He’d told Jack he’d gone to the bar with his friend Dave Moore the prior evening. Cary’d said he hadn’t realized Sheree was missing until that morning, when he’d supposedly talked to her mom on the phone. This contradicted what Mary Sorensen described, about getting two phone calls from Cary the night prior.

In this first interaction between Cary Hartmann and Jack Bell, Cary didn’t say Sheree was supposed to be waiting for him at his basement apartment while Cary was at the bar. That implausible story came later.

The first newspaper report of Sheree’s disappearance published the next day — Friday — two days after Sheree was last seen leaving her work. Cary’s upstairs neighbors saw the article, and recalled the loud fight they’d heard. One of them, Mary, taped a sympathy note to Cary’s door. Cary responded by grilling Mary about whether she’d seen Sheree at the house at any point during the last couple days.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): He had been so convincing about how he felt about losing her.

Dave Cawley: Those are Mary’s words from her written statement, read by a voice actor.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): He told us at that time that he was sure it was her ex-husband.

Dave Cawley: The next day, on Saturday — three days after Sheree was last seen — Cary dropped by the home of his TV reporter friend, Larry Lewis. He asked Larry to go on a 3-wheeler ride looking for Sheree’s body. They’d taken the 3-wheelers into the foothills above the city. Larry would later say Cary’d said they didn’t need to look around Chuck Warren’s house because police had already done that, which wasn’t true.

Cary’d showed up at gatherings after Sheree disappeared, where her family prayed for her safe return. Detective Shane Minor had talked to people who said Cary’d claimed to be spending all his time searching for Sheree and handing out missing persons fliers.

Shane Minor: But then the question is, is he really, or is that just he wants people to believe?

Dave Cawley: He did pass some of the fliers around, to his friends and even his own brother, but remember, Cary’s upstairs neighbors ended up finding a full box of those fliers abandoned in his closet after he moved out, a year following Sheree’s disappearance.

Shane Minor: It seems like that would be pretty common. You would hear one side from Cary on what he’s doing, who he’s doing it with and everything they’re doing but then when you’d talk to the person he’s referring to, they’d describe it as quite a bit different, like none of that was taking place.

Dave Cawley: If Cary had left Sheree Warren’s body at Causey Estates on the night of her disappearance, he might’ve felt nervous in the days that followed, as he put on this ruse of searching for her. It was opening weekend of the annual elk hunt. Cary would’ve known many of the cabin owners of Causey Estates would be headed up the mountain. Cary might’ve decided to move Sheree deeper into the backcountry. It’s a theory his former friend, the taxidermist Brent Morgan, told me makes sense.

Brent Morgan: If he had access up there and could go up and down the roads, you can find the right place where you can 1-2-3 heave-ho and it’s gonna be in a spot where people aren’t gonna go.

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): But it’s gotta be a place that he can—

Brent Morgan: Get to.

Dave Cawley: —hypothetically get a body to, right?

Brent Morgan: That’s exactly right. And there are places up there where roads go to those type of areas. But it’s a big area.

Dave Cawley: Cary at this time still possessed the key for the gate at Causey Estates he’d borrowed from Brent. Back in episode 4, Brent told us he’d tried to get his key back, but Cary’d dodged him for days, not wanting to return it. So Cary could’ve gone back to Causey Estates early on Sunday, October 6^th — four days after Sheree disappeared — with his ugly yellow truck and another man. A man who resembled his younger brother, Jack. Because this is when the elk hunting guide, Fred Johns, would later say he saw Cary Hartmann trespassing on private property.

Cary could’ve retrieved Sheree’s body from Causey Estates and driven farther up onto the mountain behind Causey, to the middle of nowhere. Cary might’ve backed his truck into some trees off the side of the primitive dirt road. It would’ve provided cover as he transferred his his payload  from the back of his truck to one of his 3-wheelers. From there, Cary might’ve gone off into the brush until he found a protected, private place to once again abandon Sheree’s body, this time for good.

Back in episode 4, we met a former Weber County Sheriff’s detective named Rod Layton. He’d led the search for the anonymous caller who reported finding a body near Causey.

Rod Layton: I was the lieutenant over investigations division when I left.

Dave Cawley: Rod told me in his experience, most crimes, and most criminals, are not complicated.

Rod Layton: Don’t give these people more credit than they deserve for being smart or being motivated ‘cause they’re not.

Dave Cawley: Rod said this same logic applies to killers who try to cover their crime by concealing the victim’s body. They tend to act irrationally, out of fear.

Rod Layton: And they’re not smart and they’re lazy.

Dave Cawley: This assumption is common in law enforcement circles, and for good reason. It keeps investigators from wasting time on fantastical theories. Keep it simple.

Rod Layton: Do I think that this guy went up there, y’know, carried the body back a mile? No.

Dave Cawley: But the assumption might break down if your suspected killer is a person who knows this is how cops tend to think. A person with police training. A person who knows to take that one bit of extra effort. So I’m going to challenge Rod’s assumption here, because evidence suggests Cary Hartmann had the training, the means and the mindset to be an exception to the rule.

We’ve now explored a hypothetical scenario involving Cary killing Sheree, then later enlisting the help of an accomplice to move Sheree’s body to a place it wouldn’t be found on the mountain behind Causey.

Moving a body is not a trivial task. I wasn’t sure if the 3-wheeled ATVs Cary owned in 1985 would’ve been up to the job. If the answer is no, the whole hypothetical falls apart. If the answer is yes, it suggests Sheree’s remains could be on that mountain today, in a place where no one’s yet bothered to look.

I decided to buy a 3-wheeler and conduct an experiment. I wanted to know if it was feasible for someone to use a machine like the ones Cary Hartmann had owned to move a body off-road, into the backcountry behind Causey. But first, some context. Three-wheeled ATVs hit the market at the start of the ‘70s. By the ‘80s, they were exploding in popularity.

Announcer (from 1981 Honda TV advertisement): Eleven years ago, Honda invented the ATC 3-wheeler and ever since, folks have been inventing new ways to use it.

Dave Cawley: Many hunters today will quarter a deer and haul it out of the forest on a four-wheeler. But I didn’t know if that would’ve been so simple with a more primitive 3-wheeler. Vintage 3-wheelers are narrower, weigh less and are more maneuverable than four-wheelers. People took them everywhere, cutting new trails and ripping up vegetation.

Richard Bingham (from February 24, 1986 KSL TV archive): It’s mainly the small all-terrain-cycles or ATCs that are at the heart of the problem. Popular with kids and adults alike, they’re fun to ride and go almost anywhere. They’re also dangerous.

Dave Cawley: Most 3-wheelers didn’t have suspension, meaning they couldn’t carry much weight and were rough to ride. They also had a tendency to tip, causing injuries or death. That’s why manufacturers stopped making them in 1987. But you can still buy old ones second-hand, which is what I did.

Former South Ogden police detective Terry Carpenter, who I met while working on the Joyce Yost case in season 2 of this podcast, was able to secure permission for me to access the private land on the mountain between Causey and Lost Creek Reservoirs: the slash in the percent sign. Terry and I met at Lost Creek one morning in July of 2022. I unrolled a large map of the area across the tailgate of Terry’s truck.

Dave Cawley (to Terry Carpenter): ’Kay. So we’re going to come up Killfoil all the way up to the corral, right?

Terry Carpenter: Right.

Dave Cawley: Then we’re going to hang a left.

Dave Cawley: Our target established, we headed up the mountain. Terry had the key to open the gate.

(Sound of chain rattling and metal gate hinges)

Dave Cawley: It was a long ride, nearly 15 miles one-way from Lost Creek. We came to the spot on the mountain where Fred Johns, the elk hunting guide, had told police he saw Cary Hartmann and another man — possibly Cary’s younger brother Jack — on the Sunday after Sheree Warren disappeared. Terry Carpenter and I stepped out into the clearing on the ridge.

(Sound of bird song)

Dave Cawley: Standing there in the summer sun, I tried to imagine what reason Cary might’ve had for coming to this isolated spot four days after his girlfriend vanished. He’d reportedly told Fred Johns, the hunting guide, he was looking for elk. But as we’ve heard from Cary’s own brother…

Bill Daines (from January 27, 2006 subpoena recording): What did he hunt, to the best of your—

Jack Hartmann (from January 27, 2006 subpoena recording): Deer.

Bill Daines (from January 27, 2006 subpoena recording): —present recollection. Just deer?

Jack Hartmann (from January 27, 2006 subpoena recording): Just deer.

Dave Cawley: So was Cary stalking elk or had he harbored more sinister intentions? To test whether an old 3-wheeler could’ve carried a human body from this roadside clearing deeper into the forest, I needed an object similar in size, shape and weight. I pulled three bags of rock salt out of Terry’s truck. Each one weighed 40 pounds. I spread a set of painter’s coveralls on the dirt, then poured the 120 pounds of rock salt into the coveralls through a zippered opening on the chest.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): (Grunts)

(Sound of salt pouring)

Dave Cawley: Sheree’s driver’s license listed her as five-foot-five and 115 pounds.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): So this is about as much as a human body would weigh: 120 pounds of rock salt. And it is not easy to move.

Dave Cawley: Terry and I lifted the simulated body onto the rack mounted on the back of my 3-wheeler.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): One, two, three.

Dave Cawley: I’m a reasonably fit guy but this task felt more difficult than I’d anticipated…

Dave Cawley (to Terry Carpenter): I’ll come around this side. You got it?

Dave Cawley: …not just because of the weight. The simulated body proved unwieldy.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): Ok. That is a two-person job. You are not doing that alone.

Dave Cawley: I’ve never moved an actual deceased human body, so I’m not sure how well this approximated reality. But a second set of hands made a huge difference. I’m not sure I could’ve managed on my own. With the simulated body in place, I fired up the 3-wheeler’s small engine and headed down the dirt road.

Having so much additional weight over the rear axle took pressure off the single front tire, which in turn made steering less effective. The engine felt sluggish. The rear tires rubbed on the plastic fenders. But the frame didn’t bottom out. And with enough extra throttle, the 3-wheeler did go.

I rode about a quarter mile to a place where I knew from my research an old Jeep trail forked off from the road. Maps from the ‘80s show the trail descending into a canyon called Pete Nelson Hollow. This was one of the places I believed it was plausible Cary Hartmann might’ve gone on that Sunday so many years ago. It appeared evident the Jeep trail hadn’t seen use in a long time. Trees had fallen across the path and the underbrush had reclaimed the old tire tracks. I decided not to try and ride down it myself, because of the risk of getting stuck. Instead, I scouted the old trail on foot.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): This would be a pretty tough path to get a 3-wheeler down. You could do it, but you’d need to be a pretty good rider. And with the extra weight from a body, it would not be a fun ride.

Dave Cawley: That might’ve been different in 1985, when the path wasn’t so overgrown. The old ATV trail ended at a set of springs, where water rose out of the ground and created a series of murky pools. These springs feed into Causey Reservoir. They were surrounded by thick fields of a poisonous plant called false hellebore. I crashed through it…

(Sound of footsteps through underbrush)

Dave Cawley: …finding it so dense I couldn’t see down past my own waist.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): You might walk by a human body in this kind of environment and be 10 feet away from it and not ever see it.

Dave Cawley: Emerging on the other side of the hellebore patch, I saw meadows of dandelions and clear views farther down into the canyon. If I’d been on the 3-wheeler, I could’ve easily kept riding.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): It’s hard to describe without being up here and seeing this landscape just how futile it feels if you were trying to find a human body up here.

Dave Cawley: Still, I found myself getting sucked into the moment. I wanted to abandon my experiment and instead wander, searching for Sheree. I knew the odds of finding anything were slim. But irrational hope sometimes leads the mind astray. What if, I wondered, I just happened across a chip of bone or fragment of cloth? Some remnant. But no. No delusions of grandeur. I hiked back to the 3-wheeler with a newfound knowledge of what I’d only suspected before: human remains could easily go undetected in these mountain meadows.

Dave Cawley (from July 1, 2021 recording): And it’s possible, I believe, somebody could have driven a 3-wheeler down from the ridge into this opening.

Dave Cawley: If Cary Hartmann killed Sheree Warren, my experiment suggests it’s plausible he could’ve used one of his 3-wheelers to move her body into the backcountry on this mountain, beyond where police might bother to look. But maybe there’s another explanation for what Cary was doing here, four days after Sheree Warren disappeared. It’s a question I would very much like to ask him. And Cary, if you’re listening, you have an open invitation to come give your answer.

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Dave Cawley: When I first met former Roy police detective Jack Bell, we didn’t start off talking about the Sheree Warren case. Instead, Jack opened our conversation by talking about another case I wasn’t familiar with from the mid-‘80s.

Jack Bell: (Laughs) It’s a, a strange story. We had a, we had a serial bank robber.

Dave Cawley: This robber had committed hold-ups at a few banks and a pharmacy. He was a smooth operator, who’d worn a suit and trench coat. He didn’t make the ignorant mistakes many novice criminals do.

Jack Bell: We knew, had a pretty good hunch that this bank robber was an ex-cop, or a cop, y’know? He knew too much about how we did business.

Dave Cawley: Detectives hadn’t had much to go on aside from a photo that didn’t show the man’s face and a brief audio recording of his voice. Jack’d began to look — and listen — suspiciously at his fellow officers. He honed in on one particular guy he often saw working out at the city’s gym. One day, Jack made a surreptitious tape recording of this suspect.

Jack Bell: Taped this guy and turned it over to the FBI and their voice comparisons and, yeah. “I think you’re on the right track, this is, sure sounds like it.”

Dave Cawley: Jack’d grown more and more certain he had his man. But he had no evidence to support that, just a theory.

Jack Bell: Lo and behold.

Dave Cawley: The guy from the gym was not the bank robber. Jack’d been wrong. Hard evidence, including a confession, ended up pointing to a different guy, a former Roy City police officer named Boyd Wilcox.

Jack Bell: And his voice was perfect.

Dave Cawley: I didn’t at first understand why Jack wanted me to know about the mistake he’d made in the search for this bank robber, since it was unrelated to the disappearance of Sheree Warren. It wasn’t until more than two hours later in our conversation Jack came back to it.

Jack Bell: It’s like I told you about that bank robber. I mean, I left that gym that day convinced I had the right guy.

Dave Cawley: Jack was trying to warn me: be careful about what you think you know. Don’t let your theories get too far in front of your facts. The hypothetical scenario we’ve discussed in this episode probably does that. It requires some assumptions that go beyond the available evidence.

Jack Bell: You’ve gotta be broad. You can’t narrow it down, unless there’s absolutely evidence that somebody is guilty and it’s right there.

Dave Cawley: But narrow it down is exactly what Jack’d done at the start of the Sheree Warren case. He’d focused so much attention on Sheree’s estranged husband, Chuck Warren, he hadn’t seen the subtle signs Cary Hartmann might instead be responsible. Jack and I have talked several more times since our first meeting. He’s admitted he loses sleep after each of our conversations.

Jack Bell: None of us like to fail. And I feel like I failed.

Dave Cawley: Jack hadn’t at first noticed how Cary’s story shifted a little with each retelling.

Jack Bell: All Cary’s stories about her waiting there for him with candles and wine.

Dave Cawley: Jack hadn’t caught the significance of Cary slipping in references to Sheree staying over at his place in the middle of the week, even though that contradicted what Sheree’s parents said about her routine.

Jack Bell: He wants everybody to know this is her normal procedure and how much this lady’s in love with him, supposedly.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d made repeated references to Sheree wearing his black parka on the morning of her disappearance, but Jack hadn’t picked up on the potential significance of that. I’ll admit, that one’s not super obvious. It hadn’t seemed suspicious until police later found a gray suede women’s jacket in Cary’s apartment. It’s the “tale of two coats” we’ve discussed multiple times this season. And it leaves Jack wondering what other clues might’ve slipped under his nose during those critical early days.

Jack Bell: What did I miss? What did I miss? What did I miss? How many times have I asked myself that question?

Dave Cawley: Former Ogden police detective Shane Minor shared a similar sentiment with me, when we spoke about the search for Sheree.

Shane Minor: You’d hate to miss it and there’s been cases where I’ve worked and I’ve missed things and then you go back and when you realize what you missed, it’s like “I won’t make that mistake again.”

Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): Do you think this case is solvable?

Shane Minor: I think it’s a long shot but, hate to say it’s not. I think there’s a chance.

Dave Cawley: What would solving it look like? Is it just getting the answer? Is it getting a conviction? Is it finding a body?

Shane Minor: Well, my opinion on that would be, I think it’s solvable but an effective prosecution I think would be extremely difficult at this point in time.

Dave Cawley: We might someday get a definitive answer to the question “what happened to Sheree Warren.” But the window of opportunity to hold anyone accountable is rapidly closing.

Consider what might happen if a prosecutor were to try and charge Cary Hartmann with murder today, based on the current evidence. They would first have to clear the hurdle of convincing a judge probable cause existed to believe Cary committed the crime. The circumstantial evidence we’ve uncovered in this podcast likely achieves that. But it’s not likely to meet the higher standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt required for a criminal conviction.

In the U.S. justice system, the accused are presumed innocent unless and until they’re proven guilty. It’s up to the prosecution to present that proof. It doesn’t have to be absolute proof, but it must be enough to convince a judge or jury no other reasonable explanation exists. Apply that standard to what we know of Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Could a serial killer have abducted Sheree off the streets of Salt Lake City? Unlikely, but not impossible. That’s doubt, but maybe not reasonable doubt. Could Chuck Warren have killed Sheree in anger over their stalled divorce? Maybe he set up their meeting at Wagstaff Toyota as part of a plot. That’s doubt, and it’s reasonable, given what we know about how Chuck attacked his first wife with a tire iron during their divorce.

Convincing a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt Chuck Warren or Cary Hartmann killed Sheree would require more than just good a theory. It would take hard proof. Investigator Shane Minor spent years trying to find that proof.

Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): I’m not going to ask you to say a name but do you feel like you know who is responsible in this case?

Shane Minor: I think so. I think there’s one person knows exactly what happened. And I don’t think that person’s gonna admit to it. Maybe on his dying death bed. But I doubt it.

Dave Cawley: I don’t think Shane was talking about Chuck Warren. Sheree’s ex-husband Charles “Chuck” Warren died on October 22^nd, 2022, as a result of his dementia. Chuck’d lived most his life in Ogden, aside from a brief stint in Roseville, California during the ‘70s, working for the railroad. He had one brother, Richard, but they hadn’t been close for much of Chuck’s life. They only reconciled in Chuck’s later years. Richard told me Chuck’d been a car nut, whose favorite pastime had been taking long road trips all across the American West.

Chuck Warren’s death occurred very late in the reporting process for this podcast. It underscored to me Sheree Warren’s case runs a very real risk of soon becoming unsolvable. Earlier in this episode, you heard Sheree’s dad, Ed Sorensen, say he didn’t think he would ever know the truth of what happened to his daughter. Ed was right. He passed away in December of 2021.

John Frawley: People involved in the case are passing away. That’s, that’s happening.

Dave Cawley: That’s again the voice of Roy police detective John Frawley.

John Frawley: So yes, I, the clock is ticking, absolutely.

Dave Cawley: At the time I’m recording this, Cary Hartmann is still alive. He is the last man standing. And the evidence suggests Cary has never been fully forthcoming about his actions during the days surrounding Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Detective John Frawley told me he’s not giving up, but he needs our help.

John Frawley: If someone interacted with Sheree Warren, Cary Hartmann or Charles Warren on October 2^nd, 1985 and maybe they haven’t spoken to law enforcement, I would love to speak to them. Our ultimate goal is, y’know, getting a case filed and prosecution.

Dave Cawley: My job as a journalist is a bit different than a detective’s, or a prosecutor’s or a judge’s. I’m not trying to make an arrest, to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, or to decide guilt or innocence under the law. My role is to uncover and report truth. So as we bring our story to a close, allow me to share the truth I’ve found while investigating Sheree Warren’s case.

As I speak to you now, I’m looking at a picture of Sheree from 1970 or so, when she was about 10 years old. Sheree is staring into the camera lens. I see youthful curiosity and determination in her eyes. Sheree’s life held so much potential. She grew up and was just finding her own path when someone stole that life from her.

I’ve had a few people say to me “boy, Sheree sure knew how to pick ‘em” or “she had poor taste in men,” as if her murder was somehow her own fault. We have to stop doing that. Stop putting the blame on women when they’re lied to, manipulated or abused by the people who are supposed to love them.

More than half of the women who die by homicide in the United States each year are killed by a man who’s either their current or past intimate partner. Sheree had both a current partner and a past partner who became plausible suspects in her death. So I can’t tell you who killed Sheree, but I can say she’s not responsible for the heartless actions of the two men in her life. Sheree’s estranged husband, Chuck Warren, should’ve shown a bare minimum of human concern about her welfare. But he didn’t. He acted as if her disappearance came as a favor.

Sheree’s short-term boyfriend, Cary Hartmann, role-played the part of a respectable man while steering the investigation away from himself and terrorizing an entire community of unsuspecting women. We can only imagine what he subjected Sheree to during their brief time together.

Abuse in relationships doesn’t always lead to murder, but there are stories like Sheree’s where everything escalates until there’s no coming back.

We have to do better than this. That is my truth.