Author: Dave Cawley

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): I called about Crime Stoppers, the number?

Sheli Mann (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): About Crime Stoppers?

Dave Cawley: Weber County Sheriff’s dispatcher Sheli Mann took a call just after noon on April 3^rd, 1987.

Sheli Mann: I remember getting a call from an anonymous caller.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): I’m reporting a body that I found.

Sheli Mann (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): A body?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 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.

Sheli Mann: He was pretty vague.

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

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

Sheli Mann: He couldn’t really describe it because it was in a remote area and you would have to have a special map to find it.

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

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

Sheli Mann (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): You won’t give me your name?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): I, I’m just reporting it y’know so we could, no, of course not. I didn’t do, have anything to do with it, y’know?

Sheli Mann: He didn’t want to give me his name and number. So I asked him if he could just hold on for just a minute and I put him on hold and I was trying to find somebody but there was nobody in the building. By the time I got back to him, he’d hung up.

Dave Cawley: Sheli was 23, a couple of years into what would become a lifelong career as a dispatcher.

Sheli Mann: And I remember so many calls over the years that still stick with me. I feel like I have PTSD from a lot of calls.

Dave Cawley: This call wasn’t on that list. At least, not until Sheli heard it for the first time in more than 30 years in season 2 of this podcast.

Sheli Mann: It’s a little bit odd hearing my own voice after that many years. A little bit strange.

Dave Cawley: She hadn’t realized searchers never found the body.

Sheli Mann: And this one now will hang on to me forever. Wishing I could’ve done more.

Dave Cawley: The anonymous caller made two calls to police that day. The first went to Roy City police who were at that time investigating the disappearance of Sheree Warren. Maybe the anonymous caller knew Roy police were looking for Sheree. Maybe he lived in Roy. Or, maybe it was just coincidence. The man didn’t mention Sheree by name and the dispatcher, realizing the body was outside Roy City boundaries — not Roy police’s jurisdiction — told the man to instead call the Weber County Sheriff’s Office. That’s how he’d ended up talking to Sheli.

Sheli Mann: That was a long time ago.

Dave Cawley: Weber County mobilized its search and rescue team to look for the body in the days that followed, but they weren’t able to go far into the mountains around Causey because winter snow still covered the high country. Their search came up empty. In the last season of Cold, we explored how this anonymous phone call influenced the search for another missing Weber County woman: Joyce Yost. But in this episode, we’re going to hear why evidence I’ve since uncovered strongly suggests the body more likely belonged to Sheree Warren.

This is Cold, season 3, episode 4: The Supper Club. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

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Dave Cawley: One day after the anonymous caller reported finding a body in the mountains east of Ogden, an Ogden woman received an odd phone call of her own.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from April 4, 1987 police report): Hi! I’m calling to conduct a survey in an attempt to find some answers about the woman of the eighties: is she taller, shorter, thinner, heavier, etcetera.

Dave Cawley: This is a recreation, based on what the woman told police the caller said.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from April 4, 1987 police report): We feel it is important to ask her and get her feelings and opinions about the lifestyle she is living in the ‘80s.

Dave Cawley: The caller rattled off questions about family and fashion before turning to lingerie, anatomy and sexual preferences. Another woman received a similar call the next day, and another a week later. Ogden police detective Chris Zimmerman saw those calls going out from Cary Hartmann’s phone, thanks to the pen register he’d placed on Cary’s line. The pen register wasn’t a wiretap. It didn’t record the audio of those calls. But it did log every number dialed.

Zimmerman declined an interview for this podcast, but I’ve obtained his reports and personal notes from this case. Here’s what he wrote about it:

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 5, 1987 search warrant affidavit): Within a day of the numbers being recorded on the tape, I have called several of the numbers that were called. All ladies contacted state they did receive a magazine survey at the time listed on the tape, and all say the questions are the same wording dealing with female clothing, the female body and sex.

Dave Cawley: At the start of May, a woman named Teresa received one of the survey calls. She remained on the line through Cary’s questions, even the explicit ones. They agreed to meet for drinks at Sebastians, the same bar Cary had visited the night Sheree Warren disappeared. Zimmerman believed Cary had gone through the phone book, picking female names and calling them at random. He took his findings to Weber County Attorney Reed Richards.

Reed Richards: There were phone records that showed that he had made literally thousands of those types of calls, uh, which was pretty bizarre.

Dave Cawley: “Literally thousands” of lingerie survey phone calls. We’ll never know the total number, but police wrote in an average month during 1986, Cary’d made between 500 and 600 lingerie survey calls. Keep up that pace for a year you’d be looking at more than 6,000 phone calls.

Reed Richards: Talking to women about all sorts of goofy topics.

Dave Cawley: Goofy to Reed, terrifying to many of the women. One of those women spoke to detective Chris Zimmerman. She told him she’d recognized the survey caller’s voice. He was Cary Hartmann. They’d dated several years before and she’d heard him making lingerie survey calls back then. She’d been around Cary one time in ’86 and had fished in his coat pocket while he wasn’t looking. He’d carried a small black book full of names and phone numbers, along with notes about how various women had responded to the survey questions.

Reed Richards: It tends to indicate probably a guy that’s perverted. And that’s, I think, what he was.

Dave Cawley: Prosecutor Reed Richards was well aware of the rash of home invasion rapes that’d rocked Ogden City for more than two years. Detective Chris Zimmerman told Reed he could tie Cary Hartmann to at least a handful of those rapes.

Reed Richards: They were fairly unique. Uh, they all involved young women, usually 19 to 25. Uh, they were all women that were not with their husband, either separated or never been married. They all had young children. He would threaten to hurt or kill the child if the woman made any noise and he claimed to have access to police records and that if he, they went to the police he said he’d know and he’d come back and kill the child.”

The time had come to pull Cary in for questioning.

Reed Richards: So we had to strategize the best way to try to deal with that.

Dave Cawley: Cary still had friends within the ranks of the Ogden Police Department from his time in the reserves.

Reed Richards: We decided we’d find somebody that, that kind of knew him from his association with the police and that was a good interrogator and a fairly congenial guy and so we landed on, uh, Chris Zimmerman.

Dave Cawley: Ogden police detective Chris Zimmerman, the guy who’d issued a phony parking ticket to President Ronald Reagan. Zimmerman called Roy police detective Jack Bell, who was leading the investigation into Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Zimmerman briefed Jack on the new evidence that suggested Cary Hartmann had been making hundreds of lingerie survey phone calls.

Jack Bell: Exactly, and been going on for quite a while.

Dave Cawley: And Zimmerman believed Cary could be the Ogden City Rapist. Jack told Zimmerman he’d started to suspect Cary’d killed Sheree Warren.

Jack Bell: I was still looking at Chuck, but…

Dave Cawley: …but Jack hadn’t found any direct evidence linking Sheree’s estranged husband Chuck Warren to her disappearance. So Jack…

Jack Bell: …shifted gears from Chuck to Cary.

Dave Cawley: Detectives Jack Bell and Chris Zimmerman agreed to work together. They came up with a plan. Zimmerman would call Cary in to Ogden Police headquarters for an interview. While he was there, Jack and other detectives would serve a search warrant at Cary’s apartment. They would use the lingerie survey phone calls as grounds for the warrant. But while in the apartment, the detectives would keep an eye out for anything that might tie Cary to the rapes or the suspected murder of Sheree Warren.

In an odd twist, Cary called Ogden police himself the night before the detectives were to execute this plan. He phoned OPD to report his own case of telephone harassment. According to a police report, Cary said he’d received a rash of eerie phone calls. Cary was then dating a woman named Shauna. An anonymous source would later tell police Cary and Shauna had met through one of his lingerie survey calls. Shauna had started seeing Cary, despite still being married to a man named Roger Hall.

Court records show Shauna filed for divorce from Roger in January of ’87 and it’d not gone smoothly. Roger filed a half-million dollar civil lawsuit against Cary, accusing him of seducing Shauna into infidelity. The bad blood between Roger and Cary simmered for months. Cary believed Roger and his girlfriend’s brother-in-law — a guy named Melvin Feller — had both been calling his home phone and hanging up in an effort to annoy and intimidate him. He told an Ogden police officer he might just go take care of Roger himself, physically, if the police wouldn’t do anything. The officer urged Cary not to do anything rash.

Cary had gone to work the next morning and at noon stopped by a burger joint for lunch with two coworkers. Melvin Feller just happened to be there. Cary pulled out a pen and paper and started jotting notes, presumably to provide to police.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from May 5, 1987 personal notes): I was writing down his plate number when he said something smart-assed. I walked over to him and said “don’t mess with me.”

Dave Cawley: These are Cary’s notes, read by a voice actor.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from May 5, 1987 personal notes): He said “Shauna and you will never have anything.”

Dave Cawley: Cary had allegedly replied “see you dead.”

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from May 5, 1987 personal notes): I walked away. He provoked me again by saying something crude. … He called me a pervert and adulterer.

Dave Cawley: Melvin told police he’d called Cary a child molester. He reportedly said Cary had responded “I don’t molest children, I only molest women.”

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from May 5, 1987 personal notes): I again said “Melvin, leave me alone.”

Dave Cawley: Detectives’ notes say Melvin said Cary told him “you don’t know how easy it is to kill somebody.” Melvin left the restaurant. As he drove away, he shouted back “see ya, Cary Fartmann.”

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from May 5, 1987 personal notes): The man is a nut. Very childlike.

Dave Cawley: Later that evening, Ogden police detective Chris Zimmerman dropped by Cary’s apartment. He asked Cary to come down to police headquarters to talk out the whole situation with Roger Hall and Melvin Feller, the two guys Cary believed had bombarded him with harassing telephone calls. But when Cary arrived at Ogden police headquarters, Zimmerman instead confronted him about the lingerie survey calls. Here’s what Zimmerman wrote in his report:

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): He admitted to making these calls, stating it was a problem he had and it was a sexual problem and he had been making the calls for over seven years.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman brought up one of the rapes. He told Cary about the woman, who I’m calling Danielle, who’d remembered meeting him at the sewing machine repair shop, who’d later recognized his voice while at the bar where he worked, the Galleon.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I asked if he did do the sexual assault and he denied it. Hartmann stated he had no idea where he was at the time, but he had never raped anyone; he could not stand the word rape and he would never think of raping anyone.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman asked if Cary would take a polygraph. He said he would. So the detective drove Cary to a nearby testing facility. A polygraph examiner hooked him up to the machine and asked if he’d ever raped anyone, if he’d entered Danielle’s home. Cary answered no. The examiner said Cary’s physical reactions indicated deception.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I asked if he would like to take another test and he stated yes. Hartmann was allowed to leave and I advised him I would set up another test.

Dave Cawley: A short time later, Zimmerman received a phone call. Cary had arrived home to find his apartment trashed. While he’d been away, Jack Bell and a pair of Ogden detectives had served their search warrant. They’d taken Cary’s little black book, a day planner and a Playboy calendar. He was furious.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I explained they had to search the entire house and they were careful but it causes messes sometimes. Hartmann stated, “I feel like I’ve just been raped,” and he hung up the phone.

Dave Cawley: Cary returned to Ogden police headquarters on the morning of Friday, May 8^th for his second polygraph. Zimmerman had arranged to have an outside agency conduct the second test. He drove Cary to neighboring Davis County, where a sheriff’s deputy was standing by. They did three runs through. The results again showed deception, and much more strongly this time. That’s probably because the deputy tossed in a new question: had Cary had asked Danielle if she was 16 years old while having sex with her?

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): This was something only the victim, the police department and the suspect would have access to. It was never released to the media.

Dave Cawley: Cary denied ever having asked anyone their age during sex. He said he didn’t know Danielle and had never had any sexual contact with her. In a report, the deputy said in his opinion, Cary was “being deceptive in his answers.” With the polygraph done, detective Zimmerman faced a crossroads. He didn’t have enough for an arrest, so he could cut Cary loose, or try to turn up the heat. But to do that, he’d help. Because Zimmerman and Cary knew one another from Cary’s time in the police reserve, it made sense for Zimmerman to play “good cop.” So he introduced Cary to “bad cop,” a detective Cary didn’t know named John Stubbs.

Jack Bell: (Laughs) Uh, John Stubbs. A good detective. No two ways about it.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell told me Stubbs was an old-school cop: abrasive and intimidating. Stubbs died in 2017, so I wasn’t able to interview him.

Jack Bell: Guy could read, read people really well.

Dave Cawley: Stubbs grilled Cary for four hours. I wish I could play you audio of that, but it doesn’t exist. Ogden police just didn’t record their interviews back in the ‘80s. The best we’ve got is a report detective Stubbs wrote a couple weeks later. It says Stubbs asked Cary why he’d failed the polygraph. Cary reportedly said he didn’t know. Stubbs said “you failed because you lied during the test.” Stubbs wrote: “Hartmann, losing his temper now, said ‘ok, it made me remember some things about…’ At this point his eyes got rather large and he seemed to suddenly realize what he was saying and stopped himself mid-sentence. I said ‘it made you remember some things that you don’t really want to remember, didn’t it?’ Hartmann would not respond to that at all.”

Chris Zimmerman observed the interrogation through a pane of mirrored glass.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): Hartmann stated he didn’t have to rape girls. He stated that he has gone to houses and girls will let him in and then he would talk them into sex but he never had to force anyone.

Dave Cawley: It wasn’t quite an admission. Zimmerman wasn’t sure what to do. Once Stubbs had finished, Zimmerman took Cary to his car and started driving back toward Ogden police headquarters.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): About two minutes after I started driving, Hartmann said to me that he wanted me to know he didn’t rape anyone. I asked why he was remembering the part about the 16-year-old and he stated he wasn’t sure, he was trying to answer, and he wanted to tell me. At this time it appeared Hartmann wanted to confess, but couldn’t do it. I advised Hartmann that I felt he couldn’t confess because in his mind, Cary Hartmann didn’t do it, that another personality in Hartmann was making him do this. I then asked if that was possible and he said yes.

Dave Cawley: It seems a little strange for Zimmerman to’ve suggested this split personality idea out of the blue, but remember, he was playing good cop. By suggesting another personality had done the deed, Zimmerman was giving Cary an opportunity to say what’d happened without taking responsibility. They hadn’t quite made it back to Ogden police headquarters when Zimmerman suggested they drive by Danielle’s house, to see if it might jog Cary’s memory.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I stopped at the stop sign at 2450 Custer, Hartmann stated “this is it, this is real familiar.” … He said “this is scary, Chris!”

Dave Cawley: They pulled up to the curb.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I asked him to tell me how he got in and he said it was a window. … He stated he pulled off a screen and the window was unlocked so he went in. He stated he went in and laid on the bed beside the girl.

Dave Cawley: I won’t repeat the specific details of the assault, but Zimmerman wrote everything Cary said was “fairly accurate” compared to what Danielle had described.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): Hartmann stated that he really felt the girl enjoyed this so he didn’t feel he was forcing it. When I advised him that [she] probably didn’t fight because she was so scared, he said “oh great,” as if he was sad and disappointed.”

Dave Cawley: Cary reportedly admitted he’d first seen Danielle at his friend Dave Moore’s sewing machine repair shop.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I asked how he got her address and he stated he was good with numbers and he remembered everything.

Dave Cawley: They went to OPD headquarters. Zimmerman sat Cary down and they went through it again.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I then advised Cary that there were several other sexual assaults in the area around his house on 7^th Street … and I felt he did them. Cary immediately asked if he had hurt anyone. … He stated he couldn’t remember details, he wanted to but couldn’t.

Dave Cawley: Cary reportedly said he sometimes woke up exhausted in the morning, because he’d go out walking or driving at three or four a.m. Zimmerman knew many of the rapes had occurred around 4 a.m.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I asked how many times he had woke up in the morning and knew he had done something wrong to another girl … and he stated “a half dozen times or more, Chris.”

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman wrote “I questioned him on threatening the children, he wouldn’t deny it, he just stated he would never hurt a child, that he loves his children.”

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): He stated he was always nice and gentle and he used to have a problem with beating his first wives but he was over that.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman decided to take Cary out for another drive. He cruised by several of the victims’ homes. I don’t have time to go through them all, but will highlight this one:

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): I asked if he remembered any other girls and he said there was a pretty blonde he always saw at Kwik Mart. … I pointed to Kar Kwik at 7^th and Washington and asked if that is where he saw the blonde. He said yes and stated she lived right up the street.

Dave Cawley: This woman, who I’m calling Caroline, lived near Cary’s old apartment on Ogden’s 7^th Street. Zimmerman pulled the car around the block from the convenience store.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): As I turned, he pointed to the red brick duplex on the corner and told me she lived there. He then pointed to the correct door of the duplex when I asked which door. … He then stated “the curtains were open and I could see her.”

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman remembered having seen footprints in a flower bed in front of that same window the morning after the rape.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): We felt at the time the suspect had looked through the window. … He said he went in through the front door because it was unlocked and he turned off the TV because of the light. He stated he kneeled beside the couch and started to kiss her and it frightened her so he told her “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Dave Cawley: Again, I won’t repeat the details of the sexual assault itself. It’s only important to know Cary’s description mostly aligned with what Caroline had told police. She thought her attacker had come through the back door, not the front.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 10, 1987 police report): Hartmann stated that the girl really didn’t resist, that she really liked it.

Dave Cawley: They returned to OPD headquarters around 5:30 p.m. Zimmerman left Cary with his boss, Captain Marlin Balls, for a few minutes. Balls wrote in a report, Cary seemed concerned his friends would think he was a “real sleaze ball.” He acted grateful Zimmerman hadn’t treated him like a “dirt bag.” Cary’s friends included a lot of guys within the OPD ranks. He was actually planning on joining Balls, Zimmerman and others on a hunting trip to Idaho in a matter of days. Balls assured him it would just be a matter of time before this was all over.

Zimmerman returned and told Cary they were taking one more drive. This time, it was to the Weber County Jail. He booked Cary on suspicion of two counts each of aggravated sexual assault and burglary, for the attacks on Danielle and Caroline. The following morning, a judge set Cary’s bail at $30,000. Cary’s girlfriend, Shauna Hall, and his parents got a bail bondsman to put up the cash. He was out of jail in less than 24 hours.

Cary arrived home at his apartment Saturday evening to find a message on his machine. It was from Teresa, the woman he’d placed a lingerie survey call to a week earlier and then met for drinks. Teresa would later tell a detective she went to Cary’s apartment around 10:30 that night and found him “depressed.” He didn’t mention having been arrested, saying only “everything finally came to a head.”

Ogden police detective Shane Minor, one of the investigators on the Ogden City Rapist case, hosted a briefing for detectives of the Salt Lake City Police Department’s missing and murdered women task force on the morning of Monday, May 11^th, 1987. Shane and his colleagues had kept their information about Cary Hartmann off the books for months.

Shane Minor: That information we were working off of was kept pretty close. There was two or three of us that knew about it.

Dave Cawley: Now, Shane opened up. He gave the Salt Lake detectives each a sheet with Cary’s mugshot and a description of his truck, that not-so-pretty yellow Chevy pickup. The sheet said Cary owned a .357 magnum revolver and was known to walk the streets at night. It said he should be considered “unstable” and “unpredictable.”

Salt Lake police had three unsolved murders of young women they’d tied by ballistics to a single gun: a .38. A .357 can fire .38 rounds. But the Salt Lake detectives didn’t believe Cary was their serial killer.

Shane Minor: They just kind of discounted it because it was a little different than the other cases they were actively working.

Dave Cawley: Still, Shane asked the Salt Lake detectives to keep their eyes open. He told them the victims in the Ogden City Rapist cases feared Cary might try to find them.

Reed Richards: They didn’t want him coming after ‘em. So they, they all moved. Some of ‘em moved as soon as they came to police. But a whole lot more of ‘em moved once he was picked up and charged.

Dave Cawley: Weber County Attorney Reed Richards filed a series of formal charges against Cary that week, in connection with four of the rape cases. Cary remained a suspect in many more, but Reed focused on only those with the strongest evidence, with victims who seemed willing to endure the awful task of testifying.

Reed Richards: Y’know, there’s no two ways to look at it. If you have to go through a preliminary hearing that is open to the public and openly reported on — these aren’t kids and so they can report names and what they say, the whole works — uh, and then you’ve got to wait a few months, many months probably and then go through the trial and do the same thing, that’s why the last numbers I saw were maybe 70 percent of women don’t even want to report.

Dave Cawley: The most recent numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics are from 2020. They say 77 percent of rape or sexual assault victims don’t report the crimes to police.

Reed Richards: Because they don’t want to go through that. And of those that do report, a lot of ‘em back out midway through the process because they think “gee, this is just not worth it.”

Dave Cawley: The charges included aggravated sexual assault, a crime more serious than rape under Utah law because it included the use of force or threat of harm. Reed wanted Cary off the streets. Adding two new cases allowed him to secure an arrest warrant. Ogden police went and found Cary on Tuesday, May 12^th and tossed him back in jail. The additional charges also significantly upped Cary’s bail, to $105,000.

Reed Richards: Which in—whatever it was—’87 or ’88 was a ton of money. It still is.

Dave Cawley: Reed feared if Cary managed to get out again ahead of trial, it might spook the women he’d attacked into recanting. At the time, Utah didn’t have a law that would’ve allow Cary to be held without bail. Reed hoped 100 grand would be enough. The criminal charges caught the attention of reporters.

Shane Minor: It made a big splash in the news media and especially in the Ogden Standard.

Dave Cawley: The newspaper published a story about Cary’s arrest that week.

Shane Minor: Then we received a lot of, lot of different calls referring to him.

Dave Cawley: Detective Shane Minor heard from women who described having had contact with Cary in the past.

Shane Minor: And what they would describe would be a date-rape type of situation. Or where they had gone out with him for a period of time, had stopped and then he would show back up and take advantage of them.

Dave Cawley: Shane talked to Jan, the divorcée who’d loaned Cary money for his truck back in the fall of ’84. I described Jan’s brief relationship with Cary in episode 1. She told Shane the story of how Cary’d dragged her into a closet on the Weber State College campus after she’d broken up with him.

Shane Minor: Just how he treated them was, was horrible.

Dave Cawley: Shane’s notes say Jan told him she’d not reported being raped back then, because she’d feared no one would believe her.

Shane Minor: They had gone out with him and he could take advantage of ‘em and didn’t worry about any repercussions because they had been dating and so who’s going to believe them and at the same time he’s basically abusing them.

Dave Cawley: Some of the women described this kind of activity taking place at Cary’s apartment. Word of that got back to Roy police detective Jack Bell, the lead investigator on the Sheree Warren case.

Jack Bell: I wouldn’t call it a shock. I might’ve been a little surprised, but I wouldn’t call it a shock. It was enough to make us go back and talk to the ladies again.

Dave Cawley: By “ladies,” he means two women who’d lived above Cary at the time of Sheree Warren’s disappearance.

Jack Bell: And we got a completely different story from ‘em this time. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Cary had rented the basement of a house on Ogden’s 7^th street from May of ’84 through November of ’86. The house belonged to a woman who taught at Ogden High School named Kaye Lynn. She lived upstairs along with another renter, a fellow teacher named Mary.

Jack Bell: Two school teachers.

Dave Cawley: Jack told me he’d interviewed Kaye Lynn and Mary once before, over the phone, prior to Cary’s arrest.

Jack Bell: They couldn’t tell us too much the first time I talked to ‘em.

Dave Cawley: But he talked to them again the day after Cary’s return to jail.

Jack Bell: The second time, they claimed that the night Sheree disappeared, she was actually there. And they recall hearing a loud thump and then all went quiet.

Dave Cawley: Jack had Kaye Lynn and Mary each provide typewritten statements about what they remembered. I have copies of those, and I’ve also spoken with both women. Their statements from ’87 are more detailed than their memories now, so for this podcast, we’re going to focus on what they wrote. We’ll start with Kaye Lynn, her exact words read by a voice actor.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): Cary Hartmann came to interview for my rental apartment in the basement of my house and was, in the most part, an excellent renter.

Dave Cawley: Here’s Mary, again, through a voice actor.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): He did not pay his rent on time, which caused a problem with relations with the landlord.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): The one thing I hate about my house is how easy it is to hear the back door close, or people going up and down the stairs … It inevitably would wake us.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): Cary always had a girlfriend or two around. … You could hear them downstairs. Laughing or watching TV.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): The really objectionable part of Cary … was his constant sexual activity — obnoxious to me because he’d invariably … come home drunk and loud with a girlfriend and entertain them for a few hours sometimes, or overnight, or whatever.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): The noise was embarrassingly noticeable. So loud were the screams that once I thought they came from a lady next door or something.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): Occasionally one “close” girlfriend would come unannounced and catch him with another and there would be a fight, if he’d answer the door.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): At one time he had two steadies. One girl was a blonde … I never talked to her but she stayed overnight a few times. The other girl was Sheree Warren.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): She was a bit younger than the rest, but seemed very level-headed, higher class than he usually brought here, very embarrassed if I ever met her in the driveway as she was leaving.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): The first time I met her was in the summer of 1985. It was a weekend morning. I had slept in and a knock came to the front door. She asked me if Cary was home and I said, “if he doesn’t answer, he’s not.”

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): Usually she parked by the telephone pole in front of the house. … So we got used to her car and who she was.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): The last time I saw Sheree Warren was an October night in 1985.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): Cary was home that evening — unusual. I don’t remember anything in particular that night until I had gone to bed my usual 10:30 or so.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): A car pulled up. … I sat up and pulled the curtain open to see who it was. I saw Sheree’s car. It was parked out in the front of the house. … She knocked and knocked again. He got up and walked upstairs. She was crying when she said she needed to talk to him.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): As they went downstairs an argument ensued. … This was a king-sized one.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): I could hear them through a vent in the hallways as clear as if it were in the next room. I got off the couch and said to Kaye Lynn … that she had caught him with another woman and to come hear them.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): I could hear them just fine from bed. … I’d never heard Sheree upset before, but she was saying things like “how could you be with someone else,” “you lied to me.”

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): She said … people at work had told her that they had seen him with another woman. She asked Cary how he could do that after all she had done for him with his money problems and all.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): Cary was really yelling back at her. He said “hey babe, I don’t owe you anything.”

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): I could hear her crying and I left the vent and said to Kaye Lynn “did you hear that? He’s putting it all back on her.” I went back to the vent and that’s when I heard what I thought was him hitting the wall really hard with his fist, then he said “[expletive].”

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): I don’t recall any more sobbing, but the fight stopped.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): I went back to the couch and just sat there.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): I have no recollection of her leaving that night. I don’t remember hearing anyone go up the stairs.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): The next morning I went out to go to work as usual, but I can’t say if the car was there or not.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): Mary and I commented about the fight that next morning, but really forgot about it until the newspaper came out with the news that Sheree was missing two or three days after the fight.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): I saw an article in the paper which stated Sheree was missing and it mentioned Cary Hartmann had reported her missing. He hadn’t mentioned a thing to us. … I wrote a short note and stuck it on his door saying how sorry we were that this had happened and if we could help, let us know.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): He responded as soon as he came home and said that Sheree had plans to drive to Salt Lake and meet her ex-husband to work out something about the settlement or whatever and that he’d been busy doing something that evening and naturally didn’t expect her back. Then when she didn’t show up he had gotten really worried because the ex had been bad to her.

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. He took the following days off for aiding the police in the search for Sheree, he told me.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): He asked us to take some fliers and put them up at work. Very soon thereafter he said something about deer or elk hunting, and that he and his friends were going to go. [Larry] Lewis for KSL northern area news was his most common buddy that he did things with that we saw.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): He looked really terrible the following week. He was quiet and withdrawn … He did not have any more girlfriends after Sheree.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): I had a very suspicious feeling about Cary when we heard Sheree had disappeared. In fact, Mary and I had talked about not being surprised if they found he had done it.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): He got a job at the Galleon and so he took very late hours. But some nights he would come in at 2, 3 or 4 a.m. and get up and go to work at 6:30. I wondered how he did it. … He decided to move out in the fall of 1986. He was going to move into a condo. We figured he met a rich girlfriend and was moving in with her because he couldn’t make a $190 payment here.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): We were doing the yard and house fall cleaning and came upon a box in my storage room that Cary had left. It was a full box of the fliers that Cary had printed with Sheree’s picture and the reward that was offered for information. None were missing … the box was packed tight.

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from May 13, 1987 statement): There were hundreds of them. We talked about if we should call the police. But he had been so convincing about how he felt about losing her.

Frances Cooke (as Kaye Lynn Terry from May 13, 1987 statement): He had told us that he’d spent hours and hours posting these all over the area. That box had never been opened.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Two women who’d lived above Cary Hartmann in October of ’85 had told detective Jack Bell they’d heard a loud argument between Cary and Sheree Warren, followed by a thump. But were they sure it’d happened the same night Sheree disappeared? Jack told me yes.

Jack Bell: They said Sheree was there that night.

Dave Cawley: But his notes from the time are a bit more nuanced. They say one of the women, Mary, remembered this fight between Cary and Sheree taking place two days before the first newspaper report on Sheree’s disappearance. The other woman, Kaye Lynn, said two or three days. And that little bit of ambiguity was a problem.

Jack Bell: I think if those girls that he rented the house from would’ve come forward originally with that story, we might’ve got to the bottom of it quicker.

Dave Cawley: So why didn’t they? There are two potential answers. The first and most obvious: they didn’t feel safe speaking up until…

Jack Bell: …Cary Hartmann had been arrested as the rapist.

Dave Cawley: This makes perfect sense. The second possible reason boiled down to an issue of ego. Mary would years later tell an investigator she’d reported the fight between Cary and Sheree to a Roy police officer — but not Jack Bell — soon after it’d happened.

Jack Bell: That surprises me.

Dave Cawley: I know the name of the officer. Jack told me he and that officer never got along. And it’s possible this kept Mary’s tip from making it to Jack in the first few days after Sheree Warren disappeared. If not for that conflict of ego, the entire direction of Jack’s investigation might’ve changed.

Jack Bell: Especially if it would’ve come early. But damn.

Dave Cawley: As it was, the information arrived a year-and-a-half late, after Cary had lawyered up and was no longer available to Jack for questioning.

Jack Bell: Had no more contact with him.

Dave Cawley: On the same day Jack had talked to Cary’s former neighbors, he’d also heard from one of Cary’s old friends.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): How ‘bout Fred Johns?

Jack Bell: (Laughs) Fred Johns. Yeah, Fred was a little flaky. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: I’ve mentioned Fred before.

Jack Bell: And he knew Cary.

Dave Cawley: Fred’s the guy Cary’d briefly lived with during the mid ‘70s, between his two marriages. But as mentioned in episode 1, Fred had kicked Cary out of his house after Cary put the moves on Fred’s wife. Fred was leasing hunting rights on a chunk of mountain property between Causey and Lost Creek Reservoirs when Sheree Warren disappeared a decade later. I’ve previously made a metaphor to help you picture the geography around this area. It looks like a percent sign: two small circles separated by a diagonal slash. Causey’s the circle in the in the upper left, Lost Creek’s the circle in the lower right and the mountain between them is the diagonal slash.

There’s a dirt road that runs along that mountain, linking the two reservoirs, following the slash. The property where Fred Johns held hunting rights sat on that dirt road, at the top of the mountain. He had a cabin up there, near a canyon called Guildersleeve.

Jack Bell: Fred’s camp was at the head of Guilder, but off a little ways, wasn’t down right on the ridge.

Dave Cawley: Fred died in 2019 so I wasn’t able to interview him. But he did talk to Jack Bell after learning of Cary’s arrest.

Jack Bell: Let’s put it this way. Fred was fairly cooperative.

Dave Cawley: Jack’s memory of this conversation was a bit faded, so I’m going to draw from notes he made at the time.

Jack Bell: It’s a good thing I made some notes. They’re better than I thought I made.

Dave Cawley: (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: They say Fred described having seen Cary on the boundary of Fred’s leased property the Sunday after Sheree disappeared. Fred said he’d been driving that dirt road on the mountain between Causey and Lost Creek when he’d seen Cary’s truck. That ugly yellow Chevy.

Jack Bell: He knew Cary so he knew who he was when he seen him up there.

Dave Cawley: It was the opening weekend of Utah’s elk hunt and Fred was patrolling for trespassers. He’d found Cary and another man — Fred thought it was Cary’s younger brother, Jack Hartmann — loading a pair of three-wheelers into the back of Cary’s pickup.

Fred told detective Jack Bell he’d asked Cary what he was up to. Cary had supposedly told Fred he was breaking camp after hunting for elk down toward Causey. This hadn’t made much sense to Fred, for two reasons. First, he’d never known Cary to hunt elk, only deer and birds. Second, Fred had driven past that same spot the night prior and hadn’t seen Cary’s truck there. Fred had also not seen any rifles during this encounter with Cary, raising questions about what he’d actually been doing on the mountain.

Ogden police detective Shane Minor went back to Cary’s apartment a couple of days after Cary’s return to jail. The courts had given him another search warrant.

Shane Minor: We felt like we had enough to go back in.

Dave Cawley: Shane wrote the affidavit, but didn’t remember the details when we sat down to talk. I read the warrant back to him, nearly 35 years after he’d first written it.

Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): So that’s essentially the grounds for that second warrant.

Shane Minor: Yes. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: And you’re like “that’s all right.”

Shane Minor: That, yeah that brings back a little bit of the memory. I haven’t seen that stuff, uh wow, since then. But that, that sounds correct.

Dave Cawley: Safe to say essentially, you kind of have puzzle pieces that have been scattered on the table for a long time and now they’re starting to click together a little bit.

Shane Minor: Yes.

Dave Cawley: Shane was looking for a few things he’d seen in Cary’s apartment while serving the first search warrant a week earlier, including Cary’s .357 magnum revolver.

Shane Minor: Collected a few items, but uh, nothing, earth-shattering. I remember there was a gun, a holster.

Dave Cawley: Roy City police detective Jack Bell once again joined the Ogden cops in Cary’s apartment. He found a photo album full of pictures of Cary and his friends, a group some referred to as “The Supper Club.”

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): So what was the Supper Club?

Jack Bell: (Laughs) It’s where he’d have several of his friends over for quote dinner and wine and a couple girls, one or two girls and it was what we called in the old days a “bunch punch.” (Laughs) Gang bang, whatever you want to call it. But there was a lot of people — I shouldn’t say a lot, but — a couple handfuls, of guys involved.

Dave Cawley: As I understand it from talking not only to Jack, but also some of the people who attended these get-togethers, the Supper Club was just a group of friends who gathered every once in awhile for dinner and drinks. The members each hosted on a rotating basis. This probably started sometime in ’86, after Cary Hartmann moved out of the basement apartment on 7^th Street. The gatherings fell apart after Cary arrest. Some of the people I’ve talked to told me they didn’t recall anything sexual going on at those dinners. So Jack may not be accurate in describing the Supper Club as a purely sexual thing. But Jack had reason to believe from what he saw in Cary’s apartment at least some of Cary’s friends had taken part in sexual encounters together. They potentially included business owners and even a few men and women with close ties to the law enforcement community.

Jack Bell: One of ‘em’s wife did work for Ogden City, too.

Dave Cawley: I know some of the names, but I don’t know the extent to which they were involved. I did run them by Jack.

Jack Bell: You’ve definitely done your homework, which is good.

Dave Cawley: Standing there in Cary’s apartment, it started to dawn on Jack why so many of Cary’s friends had remained silent when Sheree Warren’d disappeared.

Jack Bell: It’s because these friends of his, most all of ‘em married and community ties, businesses and policemen and all that kind of stuff, have got too much to lose if it all comes out, what their connection is.

Dave Cawley: Jack raided Cary’s file cabinet. He found a folder of newspaper clippings about Sheree’s disappearance, along with other papers in Cary’s handwriting. Jack came across the paper Mary, one of the two ladies who’d lived above Cary at his old place, had described leaving on his door. It read:

Kira Hoffelmeyer (as Mary Courney from undated note): Cary, Kaye Lynn and I would like to tell you how sorry we are that your friend is missing. We all value friends so much and we feel so sorry that this is happening to you, our friend. If you need anything, please let us know. Good luck and let’s hope for the best.

Dave Cawley: This boosted Mary’s credibility, confirming at least part of what she’d told Jack a day earlier.

Jack Bell: Now, why didn’t they tell us that the first time? I, I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Again, it’s likely Mary hadn’t felt safe coming forward until after Cary was in custody. Jack thumbed through other papers. He saw pages and pages of Cary’s notes about his sessions with a palm reader. Cary’d dated one set October 9^th, 1985, exactly one week after Sheree’s disappearance.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 9, 1985 journal entry): Gamble with blue eyed girl. Big change. Two women. Love affair.

Dave Cawley: The most interesting bits of this to me were a few pages that appeared to be a question-and-answer exchange between Cary and the unnamed fortune teller.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 9, 1985 journal entry): Will we find her soon? Not soon. Will we find her with her car? Yes. … Is she hurt? Not hurt, she is in good health.

Dave Cawley: Why is this interesting to me? Cary might’ve asked these questions in earnest, hoping his fortune teller would help him figure out what’d happened to Sheree. If so, these notes could be evidence of his innocence. Or, Cary could’ve just been acting the part of the heartbroken boyfriend in front of the fortune teller in an effort to bolster his alibi.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 9, 1985 journal entry): Did Chuck do it? Yes. … Will I get her back alive? Yes, yes.

Dave Cawley: Shane worked through the apartment’s bedrooms. He was after Cary’s clothes, to see if any outfits matched those described by the rape victims, or if Cary’s boots fit the prints seen outside any of those women’s houses. He took three red flannel shirts, four pair of shoes, a pair of black denim pants and a down field jacket.

Shane Minor: Like I said, nothing really stood out but that kind of stuff was taken and seized out of his apartment.

Dave Cawley: One garment did stand out. It hung in the closet of the apartment’s second bedroom, the room Cary’s two sons slept in when over for visitation on the weekends. It was a women’s jacket, gray and made of suede leather. Jack Bell wondered: could it belong to Sheree?

Jack Bell: When we did the search warrant, we found her coat in his closet.

Dave Cawley: Finding a person’s outerwear in their romantic partner’s closet isn’t smoking-gun evidence of a murder. But, it did raise the question of how did the jacket get there?

Jack Bell: Because Sheree had never been in that apartment.

Dave Cawley: Remember, Cary’d moved about a year after Sheree disappeared. If she’d left this gray suede jacket at his place on 7^th Street, why wouldn’t Cary have given to her family after she disappeared? Why would he’ve instead packed it up and taken it to his new apartment, then tucked it the closet where detective Shane Minor found it while serving the search warrant?

Shane Minor: If it’s the jacket that she was wearing the day she went to work and last seen, then that tells us that that jacket ended up in Hartmann’s apartment.

Dave Cawley: Ok, so what? If Sheree’d been wearing that gray jacket as she left for work from her parents house on the morning of her disappearance, its presence in Cary’s apartment would suggest she’d met up with Cary after leaving the credit union office. It would mean Cary’d lied about not having seen Sheree that night. I told you last episode, this case boils down to a tale of two coats: Cary’s black parka or Sheree’s gray suede jacket. Cary’d gone out of his way to tell police and his private investigator Sheree’d been wearing his big black parka that morning, not this small women’s suede jacket detective Shane Minor found in Cary’s closet.

Shane Minor: So could that jacket have been left at a different time or was it the jacket she was wearing that morning?

Dave Cawley: We’ll come back to this question in a later episode. The gray suede jacket wasn’t evidence in the rape cases. It fell outside the scope of the warrant, so the detectives couldn’t just take it. Ogden police detective Chris Zimmerman would return to get it later, with another warrant. Meantime, detective Jack Bell went to talk to someone whose name he’d seen in Cary’s papers, someone he knew: Brent Morgan.

Jack Bell: He’s my taxidermist. I got a big elk hanging on the wall that he did for me. But at the time I didn’t know Brent knew Cary Hartmann.

Dave Cawley: You’ve heard from Brent Morgan already in this podcast.

Brent Morgan: He had two dispositions, or two people. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.

Dave Cawley: Brent’s the taxidermist who’d had his wedding on the mountain behind Causey Reservoir a year before Sheree Warren disappeared. Remember, Cary’d borrowed money from his girlfriend at the time to buy his ugly yellow truck, saying he needed the pickup to get to Brent’s wedding.

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

Dave Cawley: At the end of the ‘70s, a piece of the mountain directly south of Causey Reservoir opened up for development. Brent’d been one of the first to buy a lot in the new cabin subdivision called Causey Estates.

Brent Morgan: What they did when Causey Estates was developed … if you wanted to hunt, you had to buy a permit. So, being lot 89, I was able to secure five permits a year.

Dave Cawley: Brent told me Cary had come to him in September of ’85, before the start of the elk hunt, with a request: he wanted to borrow Brent’s key to the gate at Causey Estates.

Brent Morgan: He wouldn’t have been hunting because he couldn’t have got a permit without me giving it to him. I would’ve had to secure it for him and that did not happen.

Dave Cawley: But Brent had agreed to loan Cary his key.

Brent Morgan: Which I didn’t have a problem with at that time because, well there were other places I could go scouting that I didn’t need to be there.

Dave Cawley: Brent had thought Cary would use the key for a day, then return it. That hadn’t happened. By early October, Brent and his hunting party were ready to get on the mountain. But he couldn’t get his key back from Cary.

Brent Morgan: He either doesn’t answer or has an excuse. Y’know I, I had to get pretty rude with him because I said “look, you’re infringing on what I do.”

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): You only have but one key.

Brent Morgan: That’s correct.

Dave Cawley: And so I mean, you were basically locked out of your own cabin.

Brent Morgan: That’s correct.

Dave Cawley: Yeah. That would make, I would be a little frustrated.

Brent Morgan: (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Umm, do you remember when you got it back?

Brent Morgan: I don’t. I mean, I, I can’t tell you exactly when. All I know is, it wasn’t when I wanted it.

Dave Cawley: It wasn’t until Brent got to chatting with a neighbor a year or so later that he started to wonder what Cary’s purpose for holding onto the key might’ve been.

Brent Morgan: And then pretty soon Jack Bell knocks on my door and I’d known Jack almost as long as I’d known Cary. And he says “Brent  … I don’t want you talking to anybody else. I’m in the, I’m on this investigation. So any information from this point forward, I would like you to give it to me.”

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): Mmm. What went through your mind when he said that?

Brent Morgan: I’m going “oh poop.” (Laughs) With a little more stringency. But here again, the questions he asked me and the things that, y’know, it started making sense.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell had also owned a lot in Causey Estates. He told me Brent’s story of loaning Cary a key explained how Cary might’ve gained access to the spot where the elk hunting guide Fred Johns had described encountering him the Sunday after Sheree disappeared.

Brent Morgan: Yeah, that he give him the key to go up and go hunting, which we weren’t supposed to do. So I found that a little strange and Brent’s usually one that goes by the book.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell publicly named Cary Hartmann as a suspect in the disappearance of Sheree Warren in a story published in the Ogden Standard-Examiner the afternoon of Wednesday, May 14^th, 1987. Sheree’s estranged husband Chuck Warren hadn’t been ruled out, but a picture had also started coming into focus surrounding Cary’s possible role in Sheree’s suspected murder.

Jack Bell: There’s theories, but they’re just, y’know, they’re just theories.

Dave Cawley: Cary’s parents had retained a defense attorney, who told the newspaper he wouldn’t be surprised if prosecutors also charged Cary with murder. But prosecutor Reed Richards wasn’t prepared to go that far.

Reed Richards: When you have a case where there’s no body, the argument that the other side’s always gonna make, the defense is always gonna make is “you don’t know that she’s dead. Maybe she found a boyfriend that, uh, she decided she wanted to start a new life and took off and that’s why her car’s found in Vegas. They took it there and jumped on a plane and went to who-knows-where.”

Dave Cawley: Cary’s parents managed to once again get him out of jail on Saturday, May 16^th, by putting up their own property as collateral. That same day, Jack Bell and his partner, along with Ogden police detectives Shane Minor and John Stubbs, took a drive through Causey Estates. They headed up top on a twisting dirt road, passing through thick stands of aspen and pine.

Shane Minor: It’s just really remote. There’s, there’s a few dirt roads. But other than the dirt roads back then, uh, you almost need a, you’d need a horse to get into some of those areas. Or back then, a lot of people were starting to get these, uh, three-wheelers. If you had one of those you could access some of it or a horse.

Dave Cawley: Cary didn’t have a horse. But he did own a pair of three-wheelers. So did his friend and fellow former reserve officer, Dave Moore.

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): Did you ever have three-wheelers?

Dave Moore: I did. I had two.

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell and Chris Zimmerman went to talk to Dave at his sewing machine repair shop. Dave knew Zimmerman, having rode with him while in the reserves.

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): Did you know Jack Bell, by chance?

Dave Moore: I did.

Dave Cawley: How did you know Jack?

Dave Moore: Well, I had a place up at Causey Estates and he did also.

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Dave Moore: So he was, uh, he was an avid hunter and so I’d see him up there quite a bit.

Dave Cawley: Dave told the detectives he’d received a phone call the day after Cary’s first arrest from Cary’s girlfriend, Shauna. That’s when he’d learned Cary was in jail. Dave’d called the jail and asked to speak with Cary. He’d come on the line and reportedly said he’d done some things he felt ashamed of and would probably lose every friend he had. He’d asked Dave to give Zimmerman and Ogden police captain Marlin Balls a big hug on his behalf, saying he knew they were just trying to help.

Dave Moore: Cary was supposed to go bear hunting with, uh, Marlin Balls, Chris Zimmerman, Don Moore and I think there was about two or three other Ogden City police officers that were gonna go. And uh, after he was arrested he told me to tell Marlin and Chris that he was sorry and needed help and he messed up.

Dave Cawley: Jack asked Dave what he remembered about the night Sheree disappeared.

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): What went through your mind when you found out Cary was a suspect in that investigation?

Dave Moore: I was completely shocked. I didn’t even believe it. Just, every time that I’d seen him with her, they got along really good. So I, it was a shock.

Dave Cawley: Dave said Cary’d stopped into the sewing machine repair shop around 5:30 that evening. Dave had closed up, then headed over to the bar, Sebastian’s, with Cary for a couple drinks at 6. Dave couldn’t provide Cary an alibi for any time after about 9, when he’d left the bar and headed home. He believed Cary had left at that same time, on his way to meet up with Sheree.

In the last episode, you heard Cary’s statement to the private investigator which included a different timeline. Cary’d claimed he and Dave had met at the bar starting at 9. I showed Cary’s statement to Dave.

(Sound of papers shuffling)

Dave Moore: Interesting. But it definitely wasn’t 9 o’clock.

Dave Cawley: I asked him what he made of the discrepancy.

Dave Moore: It would’ve been earlier.

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): —it would’ve been earlier.

Dave Moore: Mmhmm. Much earlier.

Dave Cawley: Because you wouldn’t have been at the shop at 9 o’clock.

Dave Moore: No, no. I’m not there 10 after 6 (laughs) ever.

Dave Cawley: (Laughs) Man after my own heart.

Dave Moore: (Laughs) Yeah, no. Definitely not.

Dave Cawley: In other words, Cary Hartmann had no alibi for the time his former neighbors said they’d heard a fight between Cary and Sheree, a thump, then all going quiet.

Cary Hartmann returned to court on Wednesday, May 20^th. Weber County Attorney Reed Richards argued the bond put up by Cary’s parents wasn’t enough, because their property wasn’t worth what they’d claimed. The judge kicked the can, delaying his decision for a week. Cary would remain free until then. Cary wrote in his journal that day:

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from May 20, 1985 journal entry): The judge put the hearing off till the 27^th. Reporters were there. Video cameras, the works — awful.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell, meanwhile, was looking for Cary’s younger brother, Jack Hartmann. He’d arranged to interview Jack, hoping to ask him whether he’d been on the mountain behind Causey with Cary the Sunday after Sheree disappeared. But the interview didn’t happen.

Jack Bell: Nope. Don’t think I ever got to talk to Jack.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell wrote in his notes Jack Hartmann’s wife had called him to say they wouldn’t talk, on the advice of Cary’s defense attorney. We’re going to hear Jack Hartmann’s side of this story in a future episode. At the same time, Ogden police were talking to the Weber County Sheriff’s Office about the anonymous caller who’d reported finding a body near Causey Reservoir. Ogden detectives were operating on the theory Cary Hartmann had used his borrowed key for the gate at Causey Estates to drive Sheree up that mountain and dump her lifeless body. They suspected the anonymous caller might’ve stumbled across Sheree almost a year-and-a-half later. But prosecutor Reed Richards couldn’t charge Cary with murder based on speculation.

Reed Richards: We could’ve potentially filed charges then, but it was, it was probably 50-50 as to whether we’d even get a bind-over with the evidence we had, it was maybe enough for probable cause but certainly not enough for, uh, proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Dave Cawley: He urged the detectives to find the body reported by the anonymous caller.

Reed Richards: And the problem is we didn’t have details on who it was that called so there was no way to go back and, and find the body that they’d found. Which is a little bit odd, too.

Dave Cawley: The sheriff’s office issued a press release, inviting reporters from the newspapers, TV and radio stations to come get a copy of the tape.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): I called about Crime Stoppers…

Dave Cawley: The investigators hoped doing so would nudge the caller into phoning in again.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 dispatch recording): I’m reporting a body that I found.

Dave Cawley: KSL 5 TV reporter Larry Lewis went to Roy City police headquarters the next day.

Jack Bell: Yeah, well he come up to interview me.

Dave Cawley: This again is former Roy police detective Jack Bell, the lead investigator on the Sheree Warren case.

Jack Bell: We’d talked and, uh, he came up to interview me.

Dave Cawley: Larry remembers this differently. I’ll get to his side of this story in a moment. For now, just know it’d been a week since Jack had publicly named Cary Hartmann a suspect in the Sheree Warren case. But Larry hadn’t yet reported on that development. So it’s plausible Larry could’ve gone to meet Jack on the basis of doing a story about his friend Cary, the just-released anonymous call tape, or both. But Jack had other ideas. He and Ogden City police detective John Stubbs greeted Larry when he arrived.

Jack Bell: Larry’s name was one of the names of the people involved in this Supper Club. And I really wanted to talk to him about that.

Dave Cawley: The Supper Club was that group of Cary Hartmann’s friends who got together at one another’s homes for dinner and wine. Jack Bell believed some Supper Club members engaged in sexual activity together. It’s not clear to me today how widespread that was, or how many in the group knew about it. Jack needed to determine the nature of all Cary’s friendships. He intended to ask Larry some very direct questions.

Jack Bell: I told him that he ought to have his helper step out and he said “well why?” And I, as I recall, I said “because I got to read you your rights, Larry and talk to you about Cary Hartmann.”

Dave Cawley: Jack’s notes say Larry described having taken Cary’s three-wheelers into the foothills east of Ogden on the Saturday after Sheree disappeared, one day before Fred Johns claimed to have seen Cary and another man with a pair of three-wheelers on the mountain behind Causey.

Jack Bell: Yeah, Larry brought that up. Damn, I’m glad I took some notes.

Dave Cawley: The notes say Larry claimed Cary had told him they didn’t need to look for Sheree near Chuck Warren’s house, because police had already searched there. Jack wrote that wasn’t true and Cary had known it.

Jack Bell: Yeah, that’s accurate. I’m glad I wrote it down.

Dave Cawley: I felt a sense of shock reading those notes the first time, because I’ve met Larry Lewis. I called Larry in January of 2021, while working on season 2 of this podcast. The story of the anonymous caller had also come up in connection with the disappearance of Joyce Yost. I knew Larry had covered the Joyce Yost case, even using a clip of the anonymous call in this 1993 story about the search for Joyce’s remains.

Larry Lewis (from July 21, 1993 KSL TV archive): A mystery man called dispatchers six years ago saying he found a woman’s body while hiking in the woods. This is the man’s voice.

Anonymous caller (from July 21, 1993 KSL TV archive): What it, what it was, I’m reporting a body that I found.

Dave Cawley: But I’d had no idea at the time of Larry’s friendship with Cary Hartmann. On the phone, Larry’d told me he didn’t remember the Joyce Yost case. I explained the circumstances of the anonymous call and mentioned how he’d played the tape in another story, dating back to December of ’88.

Larry Lewis (from December 13, 1988 KSL TV archive): Investigators believe the body could be that of either Sheree Warren or Joyce Yost, two Weber County women who mysteriously disappeared in 1985 and are presumed murdered.

Dave Cawley: I even emailed Larry videos of these stories, to jog his memory. He replied, saying he didn’t remember the anonymous caller story at all. So imagine my surprise when detective Jack Bell told me he’d turned the tables on Larry back in ’87, when the anonymous call tape first went public.

Jack Bell: He didn’t do a story that day and he didn’t want to do a story. But I can’t imagine how shocked he was.

Dave Cawley: Larry Lewis didn’t ever air a story about Cary Hartmann being named a suspect in Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Which meant KSL, the company I now work for, failed to bring that story to the public. And Larry didn’t report on the anonymous call tape until more than a year-and-a-half after it first went public. I wanted to know why, so I went and knocked on Larry’s door.

(Sound of doorbell chime)

Dave Cawley (to Linda Lewis): Hi. Is Larry around?

Linda Lewis: Yeah, Larry.

Dave Cawley: I carried a microphone, backed up by a TV camera.

Larry Lewis: Uh oh.

Dave Cawley (to Larry Lewis): Uh oh.

Larry Lewis: Now what’d we do?

Dave Cawley: Well.

Larry Lewis: (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Um, so, I don’t know if you know who I am. I’m Dave Cawley.

Larry Lewis: Yeah—

Dave Cawley: We talked about—

Larry Lewis: —yeah, sure on the phone.

Dave Cawley: —a year ago.

Larry Lewis: Sure, yeah.

Dave Cawley: Since that time I’ve been working on Sheree Warren and Cary Hartman.

Larry Lewis: Ok.

Dave Cawley: So, I need to have a conversation with you about Cary Hartman.

Larry Lewis: Oh. Cary Hartman huh?

Dave Cawley: Cary, yeah.

Larry Lewis: That name sounds familiar. It’s been a long time.

Dave Cawley: I told Larry I knew he and Cary were friends. Larry instead used the word “acquaintances.”

Larry Lewis: So are, is this being recorded?

Dave Cawley (to Larry Lewis): It is.

Larry Lewis: Ok, oh, oh. I need to know what you’re after. I mean, what do you, what’s nature of what you’re asking?

Dave Cawley: I related to Larry the story Jack Bell had told me about their interview in May of ’87. Larry’s recollection was quite different from Jack’s. He said he hadn’t been working on a story that day and didn’t recall being read his Miranda rights.

Larry Lewis: Right. I, as I recall, I called detective Bell and said “I know Cary, I need, can I talk to you” or at least “do you want to talk to me about him?”

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Dave Cawley: I should note, before confronting Larry I did talk to the videographer he most often worked with during the ‘80s. The videographer told me he didn’t remember being there for this, but it’s something he definitely would’ve remembered. I asked Larry about what I’d read in Jack’s notes: that Larry’d gone on a three-wheeler ride with Cary the Saturday after Sheree Warren disappeared.

Larry Lewis: I might’ve. I mean, I did do that. (Sound of Larry’s fingers tapping on door) We did do a, he had two three-wheelers and he came by where I lived and we took a, a ride.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell’s notes say Larry’d explained that three-wheeler ride was for the purpose of looking for Sheree’s body. Even though police at that time had no reason to believe she was dead. But Larry omitted that detail in his conversation with me.

Dave Cawley (to Larry Lewis): And then the, the get-together group, the Supper Club group. You guys didn’t talk about that?

Larry Lewis: I, I don’t, no. I don’t. We didn’t have a, I didn’t call it as a Supper Club. Uh, there were a few people that played poker together and that was ‘bout it. Played poker a couple times.

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Larry Lewis: And that was it. Yeah we, yeah.

Dave Cawley: Ok. I, I have, uh, Jack Bell on record telling me that there was a group of Cary’s friends, uh, that he believed you were a part of that got together socially and involved some other activities with, with some young women.

Larry Lewis: Right. No. That wasn’t me.

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Larry Lewis: Poker was, was it. I knew of what you’re talking about. That those other guys did some things. I mean they had, had supper and, and y’know, umm, fraternized but it was without me.

Dave Cawley: Ok.

Dave Cawley: “Fraternized.” So was Larry Lewis just an acquaintance who played poker with Cary Hartmann a few times, or as, Jack Bell said, was he a good friend of Cary’s?

Jack Bell: He didn’t deny being part of the Supper Club, he said “I hope this never comes out.”

Dave Cawley: Jack and Larry’s accounts don’t line up. I’m not sure which is more accurate. You’ll have to decide for yourself which you find more credible. For me, learning a KSL TV reporter had a friendship with Cary and was in a position to potentially steer news coverage of the Sheree Warren case left me with some serious questions. Like, did Larry ever disclose his friendship with Cary to KSL? Or did he tell anyone he’d been questioned by police in connection with a story he’d covered? Jack Bell didn’t have the answers.

Jack Bell: Was the last time I seen Larry Lewis. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: But we’ll hear what Larry has to say about this in the next episode.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: The anonymous call tape remains one of the most frustrating pieces of the Sheree Warren — and Joyce Yost — cases. Jack and a team of nearly 20 searchers went up to Causey several weeks after the call. They scoured an unnamed canyon to the east of Causey Estates just over the hill from where Cary’s friend Dave Moore owned property.

Jack Bell: I’ve personally thought that she was probably dumped in that area, up there on that mountain somewhere.

Dave Cawley: But they didn’t find Sheree. In the years that followed, the anonymous call recording ended up in the hands of a Weber County Sheriff’s detective named Rod Layton.

Rod Layton: We believed it. I mean, he found a body.

Dave Cawley: But there’s just too much ground to cover.

Rod Layton: I thought “y’know, I’ve got to find the caller.”

Dave Cawley: The Utah Department of Public Safety produced a TV spot, complete with re-enactment of the discovery. It first aired in December of ’89, more than four years after Sheree Warren disappeared. Two-and-a-half years after the anonymous call.

Terry Pepper (from December, 1989 Crime Solvers TV segment): The caller stated that he had parked in the Causey Dam area up Ogden Canyon and had hiked 2 to 3 miles back into the mountains. While there, he discovered the decomposed remains of a body.

Rod Layton: Then we started to work. (Laughs) That’s when the work started. ‘Cause we received hundreds and hundreds of calls. “I know who this is. This is their voice.”

Dave Cawley: Rod spent years running down these leads. None panned out. The caller never revealed himself. The dispatcher who’d taken the call, Sheli Mann, told me she’s haunted by it.

Sheli Mann: How come nobody knows that voice? I don’t understand. I think it’s so unfair for somebody to call with information and just leave you hanging. They know there’s somebody out there but they’re not willing to help you find that person.

Dave Cawley: Maybe there are reasons for that. Jack Bell told me if Cary Hartmann killed Sheree Warren, the anonymous caller might’ve been someone who’d helped hide her body.

Jack Bell: You have to have a reason for calling and you have to have a reason for wanting to be anonymous.

Dave Cawley: Former prosecutor Reed Richards implied the same.

Reed Richards: Y’know, if somebody’s willing to make the call, why wouldn’t they follow up and help you find the body? That makes you wonder a little bit.

Dave Cawley: Especially because Fred Johns, the elk hunting guide who reported seeing Cary on the mountain behind Causey the Sunday after Sheree disappeared, said another man had been there with Cary. To understand why finding a body in the mountains around Causey is so difficult, we need to go back — way back — to October of 1943.

Announcer (from 1943 United News archive): American observers watch the shelling of Nazi positions in Acerno, a town in the path of the American advance in southern Italy.

Dave Cawley: Newspaper pages were full of stories about the Red Army routing Nazi forces from Crimea, of American marines battling their way through the Solomon Islands.

Announcer (from 1943 United News archive): Wave after wave reaches the beach.

Dave Cawley: But the war wasn’t the only thing happening in the world. Buried in the local pages of Utah’s dailies were a series of stories about a killer snowstorm that’d swept across the West during the opening days of the annual deer hunt. It’d started with frigid rain, which turned to wet, heavy snow in the high country. Newspaper stories described a search for a hunter named Rudolph Bertagnole who’d disappeared into the storm in the mountains behind Causey.

Bertagnole had gone to join three friends at a hunting camp near the top of Guildersleeve Canyon. At some point, he’d fallen ill and decided to head home. Bertagnole walked away from camp, into the forest, toward his truck. The storm lashed the mountain that night. The rest of the hunting party retreated the next morning, but were surprised to find Bertagnole’s truck, along with his rifle and gear, still parked on the mountain. Sheriff’s deputies and volunteers spent more than a week on foot and horseback, plunging through snow drifts. They came up empty. Bertagnole had vanished into the aspen and pines, into the cliffs and canyons.

43 years passed before, in April of ’86, a cougar hunter following his dogs through the canyon behind Causey entered a small rock alcove. He found human bones sheltered there.

Bruce Hartman (from May 16, 1986 KSL TV archive): Two femurs, what appears to be, uh, part of the pelvis.

Dave Cawley: Rod Layton was there for the recovery of those remains.

Rod Layton: We hiked in. It was about three miles. The body was, y’know, of course just bones. We found driver’s license. We found boots.

Larry Lewis (from May 16, 1986 KSL TV archive): The wallet they found with calendars and a Utah driver’s license positively identified the remains as Bertagnole’s.

Dave Cawley: Do you recognize that reporter’s voice? That’s Cary Hartmann’s friend Larry Lewis. He interviewed Bertagnole’s widow.

Mary Stirk (from May 16, 1986 KSL TV archive): This is wonderful. This is, uh, a relief.

Dave Cawley: KSL’s helicopter, Chopper 5, flew her up the canyon.

Rod Layton: I was actually at the site and I see the KSL helicopter coming back in and they literally get 10 feet away from the, the thing. They were right in the middle of the canyon and they just hovered right there and she could look in and said “there it is.”

Larry Lewis (from May 16, 1986 KSL TV archive): It’s believed Bertagnole hiked two to three days in the snow-covered mountains here and when he simply couldn’t go any further, he looked for the closest shelter. This shallow cave that provided him protection ultimately became the lost hunter’s grave.

Dave Cawley: Bertagnole’s name also came up in my conversation with Brent Morgan, the taxidermist, who knows that mountain as well as anyone.

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): Were you surprised that there could’ve been, uh, a hunter’s body there for 40-plus years unfound?

Brent Morgan: Heck yeah, the only reason they found him is it was a lion hunter. If the lion hunter hadn’t been following the dogs, they wouldn’t have found him then.

Dave Cawley: Bertagnole had become disoriented.

Brent Morgan: Got messed up and went the wrong direction. Ended up down on the bottom of Righthand Fork.

Dave Cawley: The Righthand Fork is one of the streams that feeds into Causey Reservoir. It flows through an area Brent and his hunting buddies call “the narrows.”

Brent Morgan: Anybody that saw our camp, they’d say “who are those idiots?” Because if you walked out of our tent and you’d go 10 to 15 feet, it could drop 1,000 feet straight down. They don’t call it the narrows for nothing. It’s ‘cause it is cliffs.

Dave Cawley: Few people ever travel that morass of cliffs, plunge pools and thickets.

Brent Morgan: The people that are at the narrows, they’re at the top looking down. They’re not interested in dropping down where it gets ugly.

Dave Cawley: I’ve hiked the narrows a couple of times myself.

Dave Cawley (from the narrows): My hiking pace has been really slow because I’ve had to stay up on these cliffs above the water course because of how narrow it is in most places.

Dave Cawley: The faint trail disappears, as the canyon walls close in, leaving you to walk through knee-to-waist deep pools of water. Willow branches scrape at you from all sides.

Dave Cawley (from the narrows): My legs and feet are just stinging right now. Even though I had neoprene socks on and wool underneath, it is cold. My feet are numb, I was stumbly so not a great situation.

Dave Cawley: No one’s carrying a body back through that canyon. The anonymous caller had to’ve been referencing a spot up higher, on the slopes above the narrows, perhaps closer to the ridge where the elk hunting guide Fred Johns spotted Cary Hartmann four days after Sheree Warren disappeared. I asked Brent Morgan about getting up onto the mountain above the narrows. He told me it’s private property and he no longer has access.

Dave Cawley (to Brent Morgan): Do you miss being able to get up into that part of the—

Brent Morgan: (Laughs) Is a 40 pound robin fat?

Dave Cawley: (Laughs) Sometimes I have to ask questions I know the answer to.

Brent Morgan: Ok. But that’s exact, yeah. There’s, when you spend as much time up there as I have with the friends that I cherish and the moments that we had up there, yeah. It’s something that’s hard to give up. And it’s not by choice, it’s by access.

Dave Cawley: Think back to that metaphor: the percent sign that resembles the layout of Causey, Lost Creek and the mountain between them. The mountain — represented by the slash in the percent sign — is privately owned. Cabin owners at Causey Estates, like Brent Morgan, they’re not able to access that land like they did during the ‘80s. Those who hunt that ground now are mostly led by guides who stick close to the road. So if the body reported by the anonymous caller is hidden on the mountain between Causey and Lost Creek, the chance of someone happening across it now seems infinitesimal.

Brent Morgan: But here again, you get back to the key, if everything was on the up-and-up, he would’ve just given me the key.

Dave Cawley: Mmm.

Brent Morgan: I mean, that is cut-and-dried right there. There had to be a reason why.

(Sound of tape recorder starting)

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): It’s now November 25^th, 1985 at 8 p.m. This is the case of Sheree Warren, she disappeared from Salt Lake City October 2^nd, 1985 approximately 6:30 p.m., from the Utah Employees Credit Union.

Dave Cawley: Nearly two months had passed since the disappearance of Sheree Warren. Her boyfriend, Cary Hartmann, sat down with a tape recorder.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): This is all the information I can possibly remember. If I don’t get it all today I’ll put it together piece-by-piece, there’s so much that’s happened for almost 8 weeks now. Kinda hard to remember every bit of it.

Dave Cawley: Cary recorded the tape for a guy named Michael Neumeyer, a private investigator. I’ve not been able to find the original but Neumeyer made a transcript of it. So you’re hearing Cary’s words, read by a voice actor.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Mike, to be quite frank with you, I don’t see anything short of a miracle, other than turning up possibly the remains if that’s the case, or her walking in the door.

Dave Cawley: Again, Cary recorded this for a P.I., not Roy police detective Jack Bell.

Jack Bell: Not sure why Cary did that.

Dave Cawley: Jack never received the tape. Like me, he’s only ever seen the 16-page, spiral bound transcript.

Jack Bell: Cary brought it in and it was in a, book form. It was all typed up. One of those that you can bind yourself. Neumeyer’s a terrible speller.

Dave Cawley: Michael Neumeyer had a lot in common with Cary Hartmann. Neymeyer’d served in the Navy and, after getting out, had taken a job with the Ogden Police Department.

Jack Bell: But he didn’t last too long and he come out here to Roy and he didn’t last too long here, either. So he started his own, I’m private detective business or whatever.

Dave Cawley: Cary had met Neumeyer at the NICE Corporation call center where they were both moonlighting in the fall of ’85. They became fast friends and the topic of Sheree came up in conversation. Neumeyer told Cary he’d worked a homicide case in the past. He volunteered to look into Sheree’s disappearance. Cary made handwritten notes about this conversation, and I have copies. They say “Newmire, private dick sort of, wants to help, all details needed, has some good leads, wants to remain underground for now.” So that’s why Cary recorded the tape, to tell his version of the story to Michael Neumeyer.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Mike, I’ve put together everything that I can think of up to date. … It’s just my opinion and I’m just giving you what you asked for as much information as I could.

Dave Cawley: Cary offered few solid details about his relationship with Sheree. He didn’t say how they’d met or talk about any of her interests or aspirations. He described himself simply as her “lover.”

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I took her into my folks home and down to my sister’s place in Salt Lake. Pretty soon she was a member of the family. Before anyone knew it, she was carrying the conversation and doing the dishes. A very exceptional young woman.

Dave Cawley: A man falling in love with a woman after she cleans his dishes. Where have I heard that before? A moment ago I mentioned Cary’s notes about Sheree’s disappearance. There’s another page where he wrote down the titles of two songs. The first was “Cherish” by Kool & the Gang. Its chorus repeats the lines: “cherish the love we have. We should cherish the life we live.”

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Now, this is the kind of lady that would come home after work. She’d be lying here on the couch in my bathrobe with some candles around the room, the music on and a drink waiting. She was a very affectionate, giving, generous, wonderful lady.

Jack Bell: Y’know, at the time he was madly in love, supposedly, and she’d wait for him to get home from work and have candles lit and wine poured and all this hoopla, bull[expletive], but (laughs) if she had some problems there with Cary, I hadn’t found anybody that she had shared ‘em with, y’know?

Dave Cawley: The second song, “Come Back and Stay” by Paul Young, includes the lyrics: “since you’ve been gone, opened my eyes and I realize what we had together. Will you ever return?”

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I know at the time that I was going with Sheree, there was no one else in her life. She was very satisfied and extremely happy. I say that because of our relationship, was exceptional.

Dave Cawley: This is Cold, season 3, episode 3: Cherish the Love. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann’s statement to private investigator Michael Neumeyer included a new version of his account of the night Sheree Warren disappeared.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I was at my home which is at 690 7^th, Ogden, Utah. The phone rang, it was 4:30 PM.

Dave Cawley: Cary said he’d stopped by his apartment after finishing work at Weber State College for the day, before heading to his second job.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): It was Sheree. The conversation went something like this: she said ‘what are you going to do after work?’ I work part time out at NICE Corporation. I said “well I’m going to meet Dave Moore.”

Dave Cawley: Cary and Dave were friends. They’d served together in the Ogden Police reserve corp. Cary called Dave his “best friend.” He said he’d told Sheree he and Dave planned to rendezvous at a bar called Sebastians, next to the sewing machine repair shop Dave owned, at around 9 p.m. They’d have two drinks, then call it quits.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): She was kind of joking, “oh, I guess that will be about 4 in the morning.” I said no. I said “I’m going to have two drinks and I’s coming right home.” At this point and time, that little lady meant everything in the entire world to me. Drinking all night with the boys just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be and when I said two drinks and I was coming home, that’s what I meant. She said “that’s wonderful.” She said “I’ll be waiting for you at home.” And that’s the last word I ever heard from her.

Dave Cawley: Cary said he’d run a little late getting to Sebastians that night, arriving just after 9. He said Dave More was already there, waiting for him.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): We talked, had a couple of drinks. I decided at that time it would be a lot nicer to have Sheree down there. I called her at my home, no answer. … When the phone rang and she didn’t answer, I knew at that moment something was wrong. I called Sheree’s mother’s house. This was approximately 10, 10:30ish. She said “she’s not here, isn’t she with you?” That confirmed that I knew at that moment something was wrong and drastically wrong. That’s how well I know the lady.

Dave Cawley: Dave Moore told us in the last episode he remembered going to the bar with Cary at 6, not 9. So again, Cary’s story here is out of sync. And it’s not just off from what Dave said, it doesn’t line up with what Cary’d himself told detective Jack Bell the day after Sheree disappeared. Back then, he’d said he found out Sheree was missing the next morning, from Sheree’s mom. But Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen, told police she’d received two calls from Cary the night of. So here in this statement, Cary shifted his story to bring it into alignment with Mary’s.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I keep calling. I called all night. I came home approximately 10:30, 11, called her mom, called girlfriends. Nothing.

Dave Cawley: Sheree’d told her mom on the day of her disappearance she’d planned to pick up her son from her estranged husband Chuck after work. She’d then intended to bring her son home and have dinner at her parents’ house. But in this version of Cary’s story, he said Sheree had instead planned to meet up with him, leaving her son with Chuck that night, through the following day.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): What they do is Chuck has privileges as far as his son goes on Wednesdays and Thursdays, works out real well for her, picks him up on Wednesday and delivers him Thursday night.

Dave Cawley: Sheree was supposed to be at work early the next morning 40 miles south of home, in Salt Lake City.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Even if our relationship wasn’t good — and it was absolutely excellent — she had a brand new job, a big promotion. She would not leave her son and just take off.

Dave Cawley: Ditching her son to stay out late on a weeknight with Cary, potentially blowing her new promotion, would’ve been out of character for Sheree.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): This is not the type of lady that would not show up. If she was going to be a minute late, she would call. If she was going to be a half-minute late, she would call.

Dave Cawley: Cary said after calling Sheree’s mom, he’d dialed Roy City police dispatch to report her missing.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Dispatch then gave the report to, I believe, Jack Bell who now has the case. Obviously, because of the circumstances, there was no incriminating evidence of foul play to date.

Jack Bell: I didn’t put my finger on it right away, but later on, I felt like he hand-picked me to report it to because, ‘cause he knew me.

Dave Cawley: Jack now believes, in retrospect, Cary’d pushed him toward possible persons of interest.

Jack Bell: He uh, pushed away from himself whichever which way.

Dave Cawley: They included a credit union patron…

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): There is a man who came into the credit union and asked Sheree for a date. She went and had a drink with him at Sebatians. He’s a real weirdo. He bugged her a lot. Called her, wouldn’t leave her alone.

Dave Cawley: …as well as a guy Sheree had briefly dated after separating from her husband, before dating Cary.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I know this guy was involved in some drugs. To what extent, I don’t know. I know it was strong enough and often enough that it turned Sheree off and she told him to hit the road.

Dave Cawley: But Cary took a more pointed approach in talking about the last man known to have seen Sheree alive.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I think we need to look at this Richard Moss.

Dave Cawley: You heard from Richard Moss in the last episode. He was the branch manager Sheree had been training on the credit union’s computer system.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Well, Mr. Richard Moss of Richfield was working with Sheree those two day periods. She worked close enough with this guy, she went to lunch with him … They did go in Mr. Richard Moss’ car the first day. Now, this is a point that I must bring up. When asked, Richard Moss said “well, Sheree was driving a maroon 1984 Toyota.” … Point being, no one in that entire credit union knew what type of car she was driving … None of us knew but yet this Richard Moss knew all of a sudden. How did he know that when they went to lunch in Mr. Moss’ car? Kinda strange.

Dave Cawley: Cary was well aware his old high school acquaintance Jack Bell had already interviewed Richard Moss over the phone.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Richard Moss told detective Jack Bell, other people, Sheree told him “see you tomorrow, I’m going to Wagstaff, pick up my husband, he needs to get his car repaired and give him a ride home.” Now, why would she say that if Chuck got through to her with a phone call and canceled the appointment?

Dave Cawley: Why indeed?

Jack Bell: Unless she was just trying to brush him off — which is possible, I don’t know.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): This is one of the strange things that old Chuck has pulled.

Jack Bell: But Cary did everything he could do to promote Chuck Warren as being the guilty party in her disappearance.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Even if the guy didn’t do it, I pray to God he didn’t do it.

Dave Cawley: Jack had seen Chuck Warren as his prime suspect since the beginning, thanks in part to information provided by Cary. Cary used innuendo…

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): They were having some problems … with agreeing on a child support … court decided, I believe, that it would be $252. That’s based on Chuck’s earnings per year. Of course, he makes pretty good money.

Dave Cawley: …and Cary used hearsay…

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Seems a bit strange Chuck would drive an ’84, $13,000 Supra to Wagstaff Toyota on the whim of getting it repaired and no one ever seeing either of them. Seems very strange.

Dave Cawley: …so Cary could paint a picture using a palette of circumstantial colors.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Oh, and by the way, as of this moment that ’84 Supra is on a lot … for sale. Chuck’s pleading, the poor boy, the poor situation, ‘I can’t afford this, I can’t afford that.’ I know for a fact the man just took out a 22 or 23-thousand dollar second mortgage on his home. He did pay off that Supra.

Dave Cawley: Cary said a dispute over child support had stalled Sheree’s divorce.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): For some reason, Chuck come up with a figure of $181 and was paying that fairly regularly to Sheree at the point she disappeared. He did owe her $500. … She had him served again to try and straighten out this money matter. The man is very, very, very money-hungry. He’s a money person. That’s all he thinks about, supposedly.

Dave Cawley: By Cary’s account, money served as motive for Chuck Warren to kill Sheree.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): According to Sheree — and I believe her, if she said the sun wasn’t going to come up, I take bets … Chuck came into the credit union maybe a week or maybe two weeks before she disappeared. The credit union had members as well as staff. He told her, in so many words — I believe they were very pointed words — “I’m going to kill you. I will get even for you for this.”

Dave Cawley: We’ve heard this story a couple of times now, from Cary, from Sheree’s friend Pam Volk and from the last person known to have seen Sheree alive, Richard Moss. But this retelling of Cary’s version included a new detail.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): He flashed a gun, at least at Sheree. I blame this on her: she didn’t report it, to the police. Any of this. I tried to get her to. She wouldn’t do it. She wanted to keep things status quo.

Dave Cawley: Again, Cary’d told this story to detective Jack Bell about a week after Sheree disappeared. But there’s no mention of a gun in Jack’s notes of that conversation.

Jack Bell: Now, that wasn’t told to me.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Ok.

Jack Bell: That about Chuck comin’ in with a gun in his waistband. That was told to Mike Neumeyer. And, pshh, there’s another character.

Dave Cawley: Jack’s notes show Sheree’s boss confirmed Chuck and Sheree had been in some sort of confrontation at the credit union branch in Ogden a week or so before Sheree disappeared. So Cary’s story contained at least a kernel of truth. But I’ve talked to Sheree’s former boss myself. She didn’t remember seeing or hearing about a gun.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I was told by … ladies that work at the credit union with Sheree … they said that Chuck was very volatile. He was there, pleasant to talk to but yet he would explode upon getting irritated, mad. Strange personality. Done a lot of strange things.

Dave Cawley: Chuck Warren flashing a gun in a crowded credit union would’ve been more than strange. Any teller who saw it would’ve likely hit the hold-up alarm. But maybe Sheree’s the only person who saw it, and maybe Cary’s the only person with whom she shared that detail. Or maybe, Cary decided to embellish the story to push more suspicion onto Chuck Warren.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): My own opinion, I think Chuck knows something about it. Involved, to what degree? I can’t say. I think he knows something about it, definitely.

Dave Cawley: Cary’s statement was a master class in the not-so-subtle art of casting aspersions.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Chuck took off work, supposedly depressed and ill, the day after Sheree was missing. Supposedly went home, put all his vehicles in his garage, walked to the Ogden City Mall. … That computes to be a 60-block round-trip. That’s one heck of a walk. … This man is not a physical specimen. He’s not a jogger. He’s not an athlete. He’s not an average skier. Runner he’s not. This is completely out of character for him, this man.

Dave Cawley: The only positive thing Cary had to say about Chuck involved his signing the paperwork that allowed police to search Sheree’s car after it’d turned up in Las Vegas.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): The only thing Chuck has done to date as to lend a hand whatsoever, he did sign a consent search. We were hoping we’d find something incriminating in the car. That was not the case.

Dave Cawley: Cary summarized what Las Vegas Metro Police had found in the car. He mentioned the fingerprints they’d lifted from driver door window.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): They haven’t confirmed whatsoever whose prints they are. … Hopefully, Las Vegas will send prints up to us. We’ll be able to make a match up of those.

Dave Cawley: Cary used words like “us” and “we,” as if he was himself a police detective working the case. He’d clearly learned about the details of the car from detective Jack Bell. But Jack was beginning to regret how open he’d been in sharing information with Cary.

Jack Bell: To me it was more Cary’s manipulations. More of the same thing about hand-picking me to take the original report from him, because we knew each other in high school, basically.

Dave Cawley: Cary said he’d at first thought Sheree’s car might surface in the mountains east of Ogden.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): We were kinda of the opinion, Jack Bell and myself, that the car was dumped in the Causey, Pineview, Lost Creek — somewhere deep, something you can get a car into quickly.

Jack Bell: You got two reservoirs up there that are deep: Causey and Lost Creek on the other side.

Dave Cawley: The name “Causey” might sound familiar. It came up a couple of times in episode one. Causey Reservoir sits near the campground where Cary Hartmann tried to lure Heidi Posnien at the start of our story. And Causey’s near where Cary’s friend Brent Morgan, the taxidermist, had his wedding a year before Sheree disappeared. So Cary knew the Causey area well. But where is Causey in relation to Lost Creek Reservoir? Picture a percent sign, like on a keyboard: a small circle in the upper left, a diagonal slash and another circle in the bottom right. The top left circle would be Causey. The bottom right circle, Lost Creek. The slash between them is a mountain. In his statement to private investigator Michael Neumeyer, Cary Hartmann said he’d checked both Causey and Lost Creek for Sheree Warren’s car.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): There wasn’t a sign of any vehicle going down. You know, dragging rocks. They would have to do some skidding. Nothing.

Dave Cawley: Cary knew the area well. He’d deer hunted the hills around Lost Creek for years. He’d even taken Sheree to Lost Creek earlier that summer.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Sheree and I, my two boys, went fishing. Had a picnic up at Lost Creek Reservoir up near Croyden by the cement plant just past Devil’s Slide. Absolute fantastic, wonderful day. Couldn’t have been better. Sheree did everything. She put together the lunch. Fried chicken. She bought the beer, pop. She put it all together. She had her dad running around town getting ice for it. She wouldn’t let me do a thing. This is the kind of generous lady she was.

Dave Cawley: Not “lady she is,” but “lady she was.” Cary referred to Sheree in the past tense throughout this statement, even though she’d only been gone about a month-and-a-half. Police still believed she might yet be alive. Cary said he’d again searched for Sheree’s car at Lost Creek himself while up there for the deer hunt.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I took my three-wheeler and I scoured that thing. There wasn’t a part of that reservoir that I could get to that a car could get to that I didn’t check and double-check. Obviously not in there. … I’ve felt all along the car was not in the state. The reason being, we had 200,000 deer hunters. We had at least that many pheasant hunters there and no one saw a thing. Well, it turned out the car was in Vegas.

Dave Cawley: Cary had a theory about how Sheree’s car made it to Vegas.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I’m of the opinion that the lady has gotten in real trouble and she’s not with us any more. She has been dumped. She’s in Vegas and someone made Vegas their getaway and used their car to do it. … It had been there a long time, Mike. Jack Bell’s opinion, it had been there possibly right off the bat. It went right from Salt Lake to Vegas. Why someone didn’t spot it, I’ll never be able to answer.

Dave Cawley: In the last episode, we heard how Cary had told detective Jack Bell of a coworker of his who’d had a dream about Sheree. Cary repeated the story here, to private investigator Michael Neumeyer.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): You can take this for what you want, Mike. This man is extremely credible. This gentleman told me that three or four times in his life he’s woke up in the middle of the night with a startling, sinking feeling. A dream. Something comes to him in the middle of the night. … He told me — and he was writing this down when he was telling me — “Cary, I see Sheree in the company of a big man. Approximately six-two or three, 220 pounds. Blond, wide-set eyes, around Big Rock Candy Mountain down here around Beaver, Utah.”

Dave Cawley: Beaver is a small town that sits on Interstate 15, almost exactly halfway between Salt Lake City, Utah and Las Vegas, Nevada. Big Rock Candy Mountain is about 50 miles away from Beaver, near Richfield, where Richard Moss lived. Again, Richard was the tall, broad credit union manager Sheree’d been training the day she disappeared. Cary’s retelling of his coworker’s dream continued.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): He even described another person being there as being tall, thin, real dark hair, wearing a black jacket. Sheree is tall, fairly thin.

Dave Cawley: Sheree stood five-foot-five and that’s not tall. But pay attention to this bit about the jacket.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): She has dark hair and she has my black jacket on. He even described this man as stopping at a convenience store, buying a doughnut or two. Buying some gas.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d previously told detective Jack Bell Sheree’d left for work the morning of her disappearance wearing his black parka. And, he used this coworker’s dream to reinforce that idea. Why? This entire case could boil down to a tale of two coats, because there are conflicting accounts of what coat or jacket Sheree had on when she left for work the morning of her disappearance. We’ll get into this in more depth later in our story, but keep in mind: knowing what Sheree was wearing could help prove who killed her.

Cary’s coworker wasn’t the only person having psychic experiences involving Sheree Warren. Detective Jack Bell had also received an anonymous letter just days before Cary made his recording for the private investigator. The letter writer had claimed to have special abilities.

Jack Bell: I got some information from a psychic, supposedly, with drawings on it.

Dave Cawley: KSL, the news station I work for, had received a similar letter around the same time.

Jack Bell: Yeah, I knew there was one that went to KSL.

Dave Cawley: Jack should know, because KSL gave its letter to him back ’85. Cary Hartmann knew that, too. He described the psychic letter to KSL in his statement to the private investigator.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Jack Bell has in his possession a four-page letter of a lady that recounts her dreams … same thing in essence.

Dave Cawley: The “same thing” as Cary’s coworker’s dream.

Jack Bell: Said she was in the mountains by red rocks.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): She saw partying music, a laughing entertainment. She saw Sheree coerced out to a truck. Sheree, realizing what had happened, tried to get away. Struggled. Her neck was either snapped or strangled. Very gruesome.

Jack Bell: Described the pickup with two guys in it…

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): She said this gentleman drove a light-colored Ford four-by-four half-ton. Two tires mounted in rear bed on either side.

Jack Bell: …and a, uh, truck stop in the mountains.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): She saw this man stopping at a convenience store also. He knew the owner of the convenience store, or at least the person working there. Bought a can of Coors. Steel-rimmed mirrored glasses.

Jack Bell: There was a female body in the back of the truck. They got rid of it somewhere in the red rock area.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): This is really hard for me though. This lady saw a mutilated body tucked underneath an evergreen tree with some fall foliage over it. Cannot be seen from the road, by a boulder five to four-foot in diameter. Sheree’s body before it was mutilated was molested … in this lady’s letter. … the worst possible of all things that could happen.

Jack Bell: That was basically what I remember of that.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): It’s funny that two people completely separate of each other would describe this guy as blond, 220 pounds.

Dave Cawley: “Funny” is not the word I would use.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I have been in contact with some astrologers who have told me this, as of this morning. The lady told me … she determined Sheree’s body is 22 miles southeast of the last place she was seen, which would put it about Little Cottonwood Canyon.

Dave Cawley: This was Cary’s third separate reference to some form of psychic in this statement.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): She sees two men. Slightly built, friendly type, not the rough-talking truck stop cowboy type. Business type, business papers. … She said in her professional opinion the lady is not alive.

Dave Cawley: I don’t put any weight on these dreams or psychic stories as evidence. But I do find it interesting Cary described a big guy who was a bit cowboy and a bit businessman rolled into one. Richard Moss, the credit union manager Sheree was training on the day she disappeared, is tall and broad. And because Richard was the last person known to’ve seen Sheree alive, he was an obvious person of interest for police. We heard in the last episode Richard’s dad owned a livestock auction, but Richard had himself pursued a career in banking. He was a little bit country, a little bit “business type.” Jack Bell started to wonder if Cary was using the dreams and psychics to try and derail his investigation.

Jack Bell: I had started looking at Cary pretty serious. ‘Cause I was getting all this other stupid crap that, y’know, I knew wasn’t coming from Chuck, like the psychics and these pictures.

Dave Cawley: Cary had provided his private investigator with three separate psychic stories. All involved two male suspects, trauma to the neck or throat of a female victim and a disposal location in the mountains, possibly near red rock cliffs. The spot Sheree was last seen, as far as anyone knew, was at the credit union office in Salt Lake City. It was just a few blocks from the Toyota dealership where she’d planned to meet her estranged husband, Chuck Warren, at the end of her work day.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I’ll briefly touch on the Wagstaff Toyota situation. I’ve been down there three times myself with flyers that I’ve printed up. Not one salesman that I’ve talked to … remembers Sheree at all that night.

Dave Cawley: Cary said one of the first calls he’d made after learning Sheree was missing had been to a close friend of his.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): His name is Steven K. Bartlett, special investigator for the district attorney’s office.

Dave Cawley: When Cary says “the district attorney’s office,” he means the Salt Lake County District Attorney. Ogden and Roy are in Weber County, not Salt Lake County. Roy police detective Jack Bell was leading the search for Sheree, and Cary’d leveraged his high school acquaintance with Jack to get inside information about the case. But Sheree’d disappeared from Salt Lake City, which gave Salt Lake police a role in the search. And Cary was blind to what Salt Lake police were doing. That, presumably, is why he reached out to another of his childhood chums: Steve Bartlett.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I called Steve and said “Steve, we’ve got a problem.” I said “let’s get to work on it immediately.” I told him the severity of the case. Because of our relationship, Steve knew right off the bat something was wrong.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d fed Steve Bartlett with the story of Sheree’s disappearance, emphasizing she’d left work that night headed to meet her estranged husband at Wagstaff Toyota in Salt Lake City. Cary’d urged his old friend to investigate.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Steven … went down there and approached these people on the night shift, asked them the same question. They had not seen Chuck Warren or Sheree Warren anywhere on the premises or the car or any appointment any time that evening.

Dave Cawley: By contacting Steve Bartlett, Cary’d ensured he would be among the first to hear if Salt Lake police turned up any leads. Just another example of Cary using his friendships to know who investigators were talking to, what those people were saying and where officers were looking for Sheree Warren. He’d manipulated Steve Bartlett, just as he had detective Jack Bell.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Dreams can sometimes seem so vivid, we mistake them for reality. They linger as we wake. In those moments between sleep and waking, the content of our subconscious can seem all too real. That’s how a woman I’ll call Danielle felt as she came awake around 5 a.m. on the morning of March 23^rd, 1986. Danielle’s not her real name. I’m using the pseudonym to protect her privacy.

In the dream, Danielle felt something rough running over her cheek. Her arms seemed heavy, as if weighted down by cinderblocks. She opened her eyes, unfocused without contact lenses, to the familiar but darkened space of her bedroom. The dream should’ve ended in that moment, but it didn’t. Because Danielle had not been dreaming. A dark figure leaned over her, pinning her arms to her sides. A stubbled face pressed against hers, kissing her.

“Danielle,” the figure said, “Danielle.”

It had a man’s voice, carried on breath that reeked of alcohol and stale cola.

“Are you 16, Danielle” he asked. She didn’t answer. “Are you 16,” he repeated.

“No, I’m 30,” she said, confused and terrified.

She squinted, trying to make out his face.

“Don’t look at me, I’ll kill you,” he said.

She began to cry.

“Don’t make any noise,” he said.

“I’m a mother, please don’t hurt me,” she said

Her young son was not at home, thankfully. He’d fallen asleep at his babysitter’s and Danielle hadn’t wanted to wake him when she’d returned home that evening after a night out with a friend.

“Are you scared, honey,” the man asked. Danielle thought she detected a note of excitement in his voice at the idea of her terror.

“Yes,” she answered. “It’s normal for me to be scared.”

I’m not going to describe what happened next. It’s enough to know Danielle had feared for her life. She’d believed the man might injure or kill her if she’d resisted. Just hurry up and get this over with, she’d thought. The entire encounter lasted just minutes. She remained frozen in fear on her bed as the man left. She heard him walk through her kitchen, where he stopped just long enough to steal her purse. Danielle waited until all went quiet. She then grabbed her robe and ran from her home, pounding on a neighbor’s door in tears. The neighbor called Ogden City police.

This rape was the ninth in a string of similar, unsolved sexual assaults in Ogden dating back over two years. In each case, a man had entered a woman’s home uninvited, usually while she slept. This man had broken into Danielle’s home by prying out a window screen.

Shane Minor: Seems like they would check windows and doors.

Dave Cawley: Shane Minor was at that time a detective for the Ogden City Police Department.

Shane Minor: If a window wasn’t locked, pull the screen off, open the window, pry the window open.

Dave Cawley: Shane told me me the rash of rapes in Ogden had overwhelmed the lone detective assigned to handle sex crimes in the city.

Shane Minor: So then it started going out to others in the detective division was working those cases as well.

Dave Cawley: That’s how Shane Minor was drawn into the search for a man some were calling the Ogden City Rapist.

Shane Minor: They were quite active at night and out-and-about in the city.

Dave Cawley: The string of 10 or so attacks had not gone unnoticed by the press.

Shane Minor: They would occur throughout the whole city of Ogden. It wasn’t a specific area.

Dave Cawley: The Ogden Standard-Examiner, an afternoon newspaper serving the city and its suburbs, began reporting on the cases. Readers, women especially, were urged to lock their doors at night, to not go out after dark alone.

Shane Minor: These would happen between 11:30, midnight and 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning.

Dave Cawley: The idea of a serial rapist stalking the darkened streets put the entire community on edge. People were calling Ogden police with tips almost daily.

Shane Minor: Where somebody would be spotted outside of a house. Wasn’t necessary a burglary or break-in.

Dave Cawley: But catching the rapist in the act had so far proved impossible.

Shane Minor: I remember a period of time to where you’d get the, the case in the morning for follow-up and it got to be we were getting hit regularly enough, uh, we would work double shifts and go out at the city at night and stake the city out to see if they’re going to hit again.

Dave Cawley: One of the Ogden City Rapist attacks had occurred just weeks after Sheree Warren disappeared, in October of ’85. A couple more happened six months later, in March of ’86. Two more attacks came in May, followed by another in June.

In one of those cases, a man entered the home of a woman whom I’ll call Caroline. Again, that’s not her real name. Caroline had fallen asleep on her couch, watching an old war movie on TV. She’d started awake around 3:30 a.m. to the sound of a click and the TV going dark. She’d sat up. The shadowed figure of a man stood next to the TV. He’d darted across the room and grabbed her by the arms before she could get off the couch.

“I know you have two boys and what room they’re in,” the man had said. “Don’t piss around, I do have a gun.”

For a moment, Caroline thought she was being pranked. She called the man by the name Ben, telling him it wasn’t funny and to stop screwing around. He said his name wasn’t Ben. He’d been watching her and knew she was alone. He asked how old she was. Caroline reacted in a jolt of panic, trying to twist herself free.

“You’ll wake the kids,” he said. “I’ll blow their heads off.”

And so she stopped fighting. I’m not going to detail the further facts of this assault, either, but they were largely similar in style and sequence to what the other woman I mentioned, Danielle, had experienced. When it was over, the man instructed Caroline not to tell anyone what he’d done. He said he knew her and her husband — Caroline had been separated for a few years — and would return to kill them if she reported having been raped. She did it anyway, calling police from a neighbor’s home after the man exited. She told an officer the rapist had worn a thick coat, like a ski parka or military fatigue jacket. She hadn’t heard a car as he’d left. That morning, detectives found a boot print in a flower bed outside Caroline’s front window.

Shane Minor: And so then we started checking out a lot of those areas where we had report of sexual assaults or break-in type of rapes and seeing the same shoe print. So, that kind of gave us one lead.

Dave Cawley: Detectives believed the man had seen Caroline asleep on her couch while window-peeping. He appeared to have entered her house through an unlocked back door. Caroline went through a medical exam that morning, what’s often called a rape kit, but a few days later she skipped a follow-up appointment with police. A detective called to ask why. According to a report, Caroline said she no longer wanted to pursue the case.

Shane Minor: My experience was you can’t push ‘em into it and you’ve got to give them room.

Dave Cawley: Shane Minor told me he encountered this kind of reluctance from victims of rape and sexual assault often in his career.

Shane Minor: Yeah, and it’s just like you’re revictimizing them by having them go through it again, or as many times as they have to keep going through it, especially when it goes to court. I think a lot of people pick up on that, they see that, they just don’t want to go there.

Dave Cawley: The Ogden detectives did their best to build trust with the various women. They believed each might have important information that could help unmask the rapist’s identity. But they could only get that information by asking tough questions.

Shane Minor: They’ve been traumatized, so how do they know what’s important? They, they can give you the real basics but sometimes you need more than that to, uh, get to the facts of what happened.

Dave Cawley: The detectives had to be direct, but also empathetic. The women had to show great courage. The rapist’s threats carried weight, because the newspaper had recently told the story of a South Ogden woman named Joyce Yost who’d been sexually assaulted, reported it to police and then disappeared.

As the Ogden City Rapist investigation was ramping up in 1986, police elsewhere in Utah were beginning the hunt for a suspected serial killer.

OJ Peck (from July 2, 1986 KSL TV archive): There are a lot of missing girls, both inside and outside of Utah where it appears there might be foul play suspected.

Dave Cawley: A string of unsolved and, on the surface, unconnected murders of young women had plagued the northern part of the state during the mid-‘80s, evoking memories of serial killer Ted Bundy.

Richard Bingham (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): Bundy still owes Utah 10 years for kidnapping.

Dave Cawley: Bundy was by this time in ’86 firmly in custody, fighting to forestall his scheduled execution in the state of Florida.

John Hollenhorst (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): Bundy has repeatedly claimed his innocence. And his trip to the electric chair, if it comes at all, may be years away.

Dave Cawley: So Bundy couldn’t be responsible for these murders, which all took place after his incarceration. One of the most egregious had taken place on the streets of Salt Lake City, where in May of ’85 someone killed a 15-year-old girl named Christine Gallegos.

Tom Walsh (from June 26, 1986 KSL TV archive): Leah Gallegos does not get emotional when she tells of what happened to her daughter here.

Leah Gallegos (from June 26, 1986 KSL TV archive): That she was beaten, badly, stabbed until the knife broke and they couldn’t stab her anymore and then shot twice in the head.

Dave Cawley: Coroners recovered the bullets. They were .38-caliber rounds, the type used in many police revolvers. Just shy of a year later, a 20-year-old woman starting a new job as a 7-Eleven clerk died a similar death. It happened in the suburb of Layton, Utah, partway between Salt Lake and Ogden.

Larry Lewis (from April 25, 1986 KSL TV archive): Carla Maxwell’s body was discovered by a regular customer looking for his morning cup of coffee around 3:45. He found the victim behind the sales counter shot five times in the head and chest. … Layton’s police chief says the physical evidence is slim and won’t speculate over a motive. He does say the murder weapon was probably a .38-caliber revolver.

Dave Cawley: The killer didn’t steal anything from the store. The only item missing was Carla’s purse, which police believed the killer had taken as a trophy.

Larry Lewis (from April 25, 1986 KSL TV archive): Two communities are feeling the impact of this killing: Layton and Ogden, where Maxwell lived and went to school.

Dave Cawley: A few weeks later, people living in a residential neighborhood of Salt Lake City heard a burst of gunfire late at night. They came outside to find a woman named Lisa Strong dead on the sidewalk.

Norman Sharples (from May 12, 1986 KSL TV archive): And as we uh, came down, we looked across the road and we seen the body of the lady across the road, uh, over there. So as soon as we went and saw and it’s, uh, saw that she was, uh, dead, then we came back in the house and dialed 911 to call the police.

Dave Cawley: Strong was a 25-year-old artist and model who’d grown up in Ogden. She’d been walking home from work a bit after midnight when a man had accosted her. She’d tried to run, but the attacker had shot and killed her, for no apparent reason. Police recovered one of the slugs. It was a .38. So the crime lab had bullets from all three killings. Ballistic analysis showed a single gun had fired them all.

Tom Walsh (from June 26, 1986 KSL TV archive): Salt Lake police now say the Gallegos killing is tied to two others: the murders of Carla Maxwell of Layton and Lisa Strong in Salt Lake City.

Dave Cawley: Salt Lake police wondered if a Ted Bundy-style killer had once again found fertile hunting ground in their community. They formed a task force in June of ’86, in the hopes of capturing the killer. Christine Gallegos’ mom told TV station KSL she felt frustrated.

Tom Walsh (from June 26, 1986 KSL TV archive): Leah Gallegos says it’s unfortunate it took the murders of two more women before a task force was formed.

Leah Gallegos (from June 26, 1986 KSL TV archive): Well, they haven’t forgot her. I wouldn’t allow that. ‘Cause that guy needs to be stopped. He really needs to be stopped. How many more, y’know, two Ted Bundys?

Dave Cawley: But Salt Lake police captain O.J. Peck didn’t just limit his team to the three killings they had linked by ballistics. He sent out a letter to police agencies in states all across the West, saying they were “keenly interested” in any unsolved homicides involving female victims. They were looking for a Smith & Wesson or Ruger .38 or .357-caliber handgun, because a .357 can also fire .38-caliber rounds.  Captain Peck told the press they would examine any unsolved disappearances of women across the region.

OJ Peck (from July 2, 1986 KSL TV archive): And we’re looking at those at great length.

Dave Cawley: The task force put together a list of names. They included some that should sound familiar to listeners of this podcast, like Joyce Yost, Teresa Greaves and Sheree Warren. Two of the Salt Lake murders had taken place less than two miles from the credit union office where Sheree had last been seen. Which raised the question: could Sheree have died at the hands of a serial killer? The task force intended to find out.

Salt Lake City police invited Roy City detective Jack Bell, the lead investigator on the Sheree Warren case, to contribute to their task force. But Salt Lake would run the show. Jack had no problem sitting on the sidelines. He didn’t think a serial killer had murdered Sheree. By that point in the summer of ’86, Jack’s focus had shifted from Sheree’s husband Chuck Warren, to her boyfriend, Cary Hartmann.

Jack Bell: Cary seemed to do everything he could to make Chuck look guilty of Sheree’s disappearance. And, I must admit, he did a pretty good job for awhile.

Dave Cawley: Cary had been in Jack’s ear since the day after Sheree’s disappearance, repeating any rumor that seemed to cast Chuck Warren in a negative light. Jack told me some of it had borne out, like the claim Chuck had nearly killed his first wife Alice when they’d split. Chuck had allegedly beat Alice with a tire iron.

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

Dave Cawley: Gradually though, Jack had come to believe Cary was manipulating him, leaning on the fact they’d known each other in high school. A bit earlier, Jack mentioned having received a letter from an anonymous psychic. It’d described a woman being killed near a truck stop in the mountains. The writer had described red rock cliffs.

Jack Bell: My personal thought, thinking was all of these psychic stuff and all of these pictures were coming from Cary. At that time I thought he, for some reason, would like her to be found and not pinpointed to him, whether it was for her parents or who it was for.

Dave Cawley: Jack told me he’d given the psychic letter to Ogden police for forensic analysis, but never got it back.

Jack Bell: Whether it went to the FBI, I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Hmm.

Jack Bell: I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: And again, news station KSL had also received a similar psychic letter. KSL had turned its letter over to Jack, who in turn gave it to the Salt Lake City task force, along with a sample of Cary Hartmann’s handwriting for comparison.

Jack Bell: Now, have you been able to find that?

Dave Cawley: I tried to chase down both of these letters, by pestering sources and by filing a series of public records requests. Ogden City couldn’t find anything related to Jack Bell’s psychic letter. Salt Lake City police, on the other hand, did find a copy of the KSL psychic letter. It’d been missing from the Sheree Warren case file for 35 years.

The letter includes hand-drawn sketches. The first is of a woman, from the shoulders up. Next to her are the words “reddish hair,” “beautiful young mother,” and “maroon import,” an apparent reference to Sheree’s car. Another page includes a drawing of a pine tree, with the words “threw body over ledge, body rolled well under a large evergreen … Body is not able to be seen.”

I’m no handwriting expert, but I’ve seen a fair amount of Cary Hartmann’s writings. He tended to use block capitals or lower-case cursive. The psychic letter uses neither. Cary dots his Is with circles. The psychic letter writer doesn’t. So if the information in the psychic letter originated with Cary, it’s likely someone else did the actual writing.

My personal thanks to Salt Lake City records officer Candee Allred for digging deep and finding the missing letter. I can’t stress enough how important records are when looking into a case this old, because memories fade with time.

Jack Bell: It’s been so long ago, Dave and—

Dave Cawley: (Laughs)

Jack Bell: —you’re helping stir this old brain up a little bit, so.

Dave Cawley: So let me tell you about another paper record in the Sheree Warren case. It’s a report private investigator Michael Neumeyer wrote up and gave to detective Jack Bell. Neumeyer listed Chuck Warren as his top suspect, along with one of Chuck’s coworkers and a repo man who’d worked for the same credit union as Sheree. Neumeyer did not include Cary Hartmann as a suspect. In Neumeyer’s eyes, Cary was simply Sheree’s boyfriend.

Jack Bell: Yeah, that sounds like Neumeyer.

Dave Cawley: But here’s what’s most interesting to me: Neumeyer wrote Sheree was last seen wearing a black, John Weitz Casual Craft jacket, size 42. He went into detail, describing it as waist-length, with nylon lining, a zip collar and snap-down front. That’s a men’s coat, not the type of business attire Sheree would’ve worn to the office. It would’ve absolutely swamped her: a 42-inch chest on a woman who stood just five-foot-five and weighed 115 pounds would’ve looked ridiculous.

Richard Moss, the last person known to’ve seen Sheree alive, never mentioned Sheree wearing a black men’s coat. Even if he had, I doubt he would’ve known the exact make and size. No, that detail could’ve only come from Cary Hartmann. Private investigator Michael Neumeyer was describing Cary’s coat. Yet another indication Cary wanted, even needed people to think Sheree disappeared while wearing his black parka.

Former detective Jack Bell told me Michael Neumeyer’s report skewed in Cary’s favor, which isn’t surprising, considering where Neumeyer got most of his information.

Jack Bell: Cary hired him and Cary give him a pretty lengthy statement.

Dave Cawley: If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’ll just tell you: Jack didn’t have much respect for Michael Neumeyer. Probably because of what his report concluded. Hang with me here, because this is going to get complicated.

Neumeyer had seen a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, which quoted the mother of Salt Lake City shooting victim Christine Gallegos. She said she’d learned her daughter had told a convenience store clerk the night of her death she was going undercover to investigate the murder of a friend named Phillip Kerby. Kerby had vanished in October of ’84. His body surfaced days before Christine Gallegos’ death, uncovered by the most unlikely of means.

Lynn Packer (from May 5, 1985 KSL TV archive): A pig this morning escaped from its pen at an LDS stake farm east of Oakley. The caretaker found her rooting in a pile of rocks. Summit County sheriffs deputies were called to the scene. They found a body under the rocks. Detective Robert Barry suspects murder. He said it’s not likely someone would crawl under three feet of rock and die.

Dave Cawley: Detectives quickly pieced together what’d happened. They identified the remains as Kerby’s and arrested the caretaker’s brother, Jon Monson, on suspicion of murder.

Lynn Packer (from May 5, 1985 KSL TV archive): Sgt. Robert Barry says the dead man and the suspect were formerly coworkers at a Salt Lake auto dealership parts department.

Robert Barry (from May 5, 1985 KSL TV archive): We believe that the uh, the two individuals were involved in some type of a theft ring in Salt Lake.

Dave Cawley: Kerby and Monson had worked for Wagstaff Toyota, the same dealership where Sheree was supposed to meet her estranged husband on the afternoon of her disappearance.

Lynn Packer (from May 6, 1985 KSL TV archive): Officials suspect the two were using the church farm as a hiding place for stolen property.

Dave Cawley: The pair had been billing auto parts to the dealership, selling them on the side and pocketing the profit. But Kerby had developed cold feet and wanted out. Monson would later admit to killing Kerby to keep him from squealing. Again, Christine Gallegos’ death had come just 10 days after the discovery of Phillip Kerby’s remains. Her mom, Leah Gallegos, came to believe her daughter might’ve uncovered more about the Wagstaff Toyota theft ring and gotten herself killed in the process.

Cary Hartmann’s private investigator, Michael Neumeyer, adopted this theory as own, replacing Sheree Warren for Christine Gallegos. Maybe, Neumeyer suggested, Sheree had stumbled into a criminal conspiracy she wasn’t supposed to know about. I asked Jack Bell if the theory’d registered with him at the time.

Jack Bell: No, it didn’t register. Neumeyer didn’t register with me. I mean, he registered with me but he’s a flake.

Dave Cawley: Michael Neumeyer is no longer alive. I’m unable confirm whether he was, or was not, “a flake.” But his report did little to assist in the search for Sheree.

Jack Bell: It was basically Cary trying to cover his tracks a little bit. And uh, he picked a good one to, to go to.

[Ad break]

(Sound of machines, pipes and creaking door)

Dave Cawley: There’s a place on the campus of Weber State University, on the east side of Ogden, where if you have the right set of keys you can unlock a door that takes you into the gray underbelly of a building called the Swenson Gymnasium. You duck your head under pipes that run along the ceiling. You walk back to a space where the guts of the gym’s swimming pool hide. The pumps, drains, and pipes hiss and grumble, doing endless work rarely witnessed by anyone. It’s an unconventional place to record sound for a podcast, but I’ve brought you down here to meet a woman named Jaimie Schmalz.

Jaimie Schmalz: I should probably tell you how I realized who Cary Hartmann was.

Dave Cawley: Jaimie had spent her early 20s working as a hostess and cocktail waitress at a hotel bar in Ogden called the Electric Alley. It was one of Cary Hartmann’s haunts.

Jaimie Schmalz: I was standing there one night and he walked up to me and I don’t remember what he said, but I remember looking at him, and then him, I think he asked me my name and I kept looking at him and I was like “I know this guy from somewhere. He looks really familiar.” And so finally it dawned on me, I was like, you know my mom. ‘Cause my mom was a hairdresser. So come to find out, she cut his hair.

Dave Cawley: Jaimie told me Cary’d tried to flirt with her.

Jaimie Schmalz: But I didn’t really pay attention to that stuff. I mean, I was there to do my job, y’know?

Dave Cawley: Some time later, she mentioned having run into Cary to her mom.

Jaimie Schmalz: I remember her saying something like “just be careful with him.” And I was like “ok.” But I didn’t really think much of it. And he seemed like an ok guy.

Dave Cawley: A few years went by. Jaimie quit her job at the Electric Alley and went to school, enrolling at Weber State College.

Jaimie Schmalz: And one day I’m walking to my class and there appears Cary Hartmann. And he walks up to me and he starts talking to me and I don’t remember, ‘cause it’s been 30-plus years, but he says “hey, did you know that there’s a, a window in the swimming pool at the aquatics center?” And I was like “what do you mean?” And he was like “well there’s a window. You can see people swimming.”

Dave Cawley: This was true. It’s not there anymore, but the gym’s swimming pool did once have a viewing window below the water level. I’m not sure what it was for. Whatever the reason, access to the window was buried in the bowels of the building. Not just anyone could get down there. I’ve mentioned this before, but now it’s relevant to repeat: Cary worked for the college, running the steam boilers and maintaining the pipes that snaked through tunnels all beneath campus. He had the keys. Cary asked Jaimie to come with him to see the swimming pool window.

Jaimie Schmalz: And I was like “ok.”

Dave Cawley: They headed over to the gym. Cary opened that locked door and ushered Jaimie inside.

Jaimie Schmalz: And so we go in there and it’s underground in this basement and we had to walk clear in the very back. It was just him and I and we walk all the way in the very back and then there’s this window. And he’s like “see, anybody could watch you at any time and they could see what you’re doing in the swimming pool.” And I was like “ok.” I, I didn’t really, like (laughs) I don’t know if I was supposed to have a certain reaction but I just thought it was kind of strange and I think I might have said “that’s kind of creepy.”

Dave Cawley: Jaimie couldn’t tell me why she’d agreed to go with Cary, alone, to this secluded spot. She thought maybe he’d said something about being a cop. She couldn’t remember. Jaimie admits she’d been naive then and hadn’t questioned Cary’s motives, the way she does now.

Jaimie Schmalz: What was the purpose of taking me down there and showing me the window. Like what, like, did he get off on that somehow?

Dave Cawley: Jaimie told me Cary didn’t try anything that day under the pool. She thinks she knows why.

Jaimie Schmalz: If he tried to do anything, once I got away, I know him.

Dave Cawley: “Once I got away.” That presumes a lot. If Jaimie’d screamed, no one would’ve heard her over the noise. But clearly, that’s not what happened. She walked back out into the sunlight, perfectly safe. Looking back now, she’s not sure how.

Jaimie Schmalz: He got something out of it, me agreeing to go there.

Dave Cawley: While researching what Jaimie told me, I came across an article from May of ’86 in the archives of Weber State’s student newspaper, The Signpost. It said campus police had received reports from several women who’d come out of the shower at the gym and found a man sitting in the women’s locker room, watching them. It went on to say, “police believe this is the same man who watches swimmers in the Swenson Gym pool from a window below water level. Police Chief Lee Cassity said the man is thought to masturbate while watching the swimmers.” I couldn’t find any follow-up stories about this swimming pool voyeur, so I don’t know if he was ever identified or arrested.

Jaimie Schmalz: And then I’m at home one night and I get this phone call. And this man says “hi, I’m doing a survey on lady’s lingerie and women’s apparel. Can you help me out here?” And in my mind, I know I had had that phone call before and I hung up. And so I thought “ugh, I hung up on him before. Ok, I’ll do it this time.” So he just starts asking me questions and he said “ok, so we’re going to talk about lady’s underwear. Do you like briefs, thong or bikinis? What do you wear?” And so I was like “well, it depends on what I’m wearing.” And he was like “well, what do you sleep in?” I tell him and he’s like “ok.” And he start asking me other questions like what kind of nylons did I like? And I don’t remember the other questions until he said “well, so why don’t you tell me what your breasts are like. Are they firm, not so firm or saggy?” And I was like “ugh, that’s a little personal, don’t you think?” … And he just had this comeback, like, (fingers snap) on it, quick, quick … And so it seemed legit so I answered him and then he said “well, what about your areola? Is it the size of a, like, a dime, the size or a nickel or the size of a quarter?” And I said “what the hell does that have to do with lady’s lingerie?” And he was just like “well, we like to find out what women like and dut-dut-dut.” And then, like I said, I got really quiet, ‘cause I thought “is he masturbating?” Like, but I never heard anything. So a little bit later in the conversation, I all the sudden, I realize (pause) this sounds like Cary Hartmann. … And I think I may have even said to him, “your voice sounds familiar.” But I don’t remember what he said.

Dave Cawley: Jaimie’d had enough. She hung up on the man.

Jaimie Schmalz: After I hung up the phone, I felt like I just got goosebumps. I was really uncomfortable, I was scared.

Dave Cawley: But also, angry. She picked up her phone book, looked up Cary Hartmann’s name and dialed his number. His line was busy. Jaimie had forgotten this detail when we spoke, but I refreshed her memory by showing her a report written by an Ogden police detective named Chris Zimmerman.

Jaimie Schmalz: I did that! Now that he says that, I did that. I can’t believe I forgot that. That’s right. Oh my God. (Laughs) It’s like ‘you’re not gonna get me, [expletive]. (Laughs) Sorry, but, like you know what I mean?

Dave Cawley: We’ve met Zimmerman before. He was the Ogden detective who’d issued a prank parking ticket to President Ronald Reagan’s limousine. Jaimie told me she’d first met Zimmerman after a man had groped her on campus, sometime before this whole encounter with Cary Hartmann. Zimmerman had walked her through filing a report in that case.

Jaimie Schmalz: Because Chris had given me his card and he was a detective for Ogden City, I felt comfortable enough so I called him and I was like “I hope you don’t think I’m weird,” I said, “but I swear to God I just got an obscene phone call from Cary Hartmann.” And he was like “really?” And I said “yeah,” like, “I’m, I’m positive.”

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman was among the detectives working the Ogden City Rapist investigation. The rapist had struck again just days before. In that case, a woman had described waking around 3 a.m. to the sound of noise in her living room. She’d gone to investigate and found a strange man there. He’d come in through a window. She’d tried to fight, to push him out of the house.

“Make it easy for me,” he’d said. “I have a gun. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll hurt you and your baby.”

She’d stopped fighting, but warned the man her husband might come home soon. He’d told her that was a lie. He knew she was divorced or separated.

“I’ve been watching you for quite awhile,” he’d said. “I know where you shop. I know where you work. I know who your parents are.”

He’d forced her back into her bedroom. She’d noted an odor: he smelled greasy, as if he’d been working around a machine or engine of some kind. She’d asked the man who he was. He’d replied he was a cop, would know if she called the police and would come back to kill her and her baby if she did. He gave her advice on how to better secure her windows and doors, told her not to worry because she wouldn’t get pregnant, then as he was leaving, offered to send her money in the mail. Zimmerman, the detective, had gone on the news the next day and described this modus operandi.

Chris Zimmerman (from June 16, 1986 KSL TV archive): The only thing that we can come up with on that is there is a possibility that he follows the women, uh, around town, gets to know ‘em, gets to know information about them and then hits ‘em.

Dave Cawley: Jaimie Schmalz had seen detective Zimmerman on TV talking about the rape cases. She told him on the phone she felt afraid, because she fit the profile of the rape victims: single, in her 20s, with a child.

Jaimie Schmalz: And so he’s like “ok, well are you safe?” Like, “lock your door,” y’know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Dave Cawley: She asked if there was a connection between the rapist and Cary Hartmann’s lingerie survey phone call. Could the call be a prelude to an attack?

Jaimie Schmalz: He knew he was calling me. There’s no doubt in my mind.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman assured her there was no connection. That he knew of. That was about to change.

The Ogden City Rapist attacked yet another woman on October 20^th, 1986. The assault had many of the same hallmarks: the man entered the woman’s home as she slept, told her he was a police officer, claimed to have but didn’t show a gun, and threatened to kill the woman and her children if she didn’t cooperate. Ogden police detective Shane Minor and his colleagues had been trying for months to find a common thread.

Shane Minor: There was a couple different lists we had going of dates, uh, location, date, time of occurrence and the location. Started to compile those and then looking at the M.O. on how the person got in, kind of different things that happened once they were inside and trying to get some gist of if we’re dealing with the same person or if we’re dealing with more than one person.

Dave Cawley: Their lists included these commonalities: the victims were all single or separated with small children, the attacker used a “minimum amount of force,” he sometimes smelled of grease, often stole purses and would occasionally mention police department connections. The detectives also saw similarities in the specifics of the sex acts.

Shane Minor: The telephone calls came up. There was a rash of those. We didn’t know if those were the same, if that person played into the break-in rapes that had been going on.

Dave Cawley: That changed when detective Chris Zimmerman received a tip at the end of October. He wrote a report about it, but kept the woman anonymous. Even today, I don’t know her identity. The woman told Zimmerman she believed Cary Hartmann could be the Ogden City Rapist. She had personal knowledge that Cary had for years made obscene lingerie survey phone calls. She also said Cary lived just up the street from where one of the rapes had occurred. Zimmerman started digging. He knew Cary had been in the Ogden police reserve.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): In speaking with officers about Hartmann, they stated he liked to show his badge and tell people he was a cop.

Dave Cawley: That comes from a report Zimmerman later filed in the case. Zimmerman declined my request for an interview, so you’re hearing his words read by a voice actor.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): Due to the fact that Hartmann was a friend to some officers, this was kept as quiet as possible and it was decided no supplementary reports would be written until absolutely needed. All records were kept by me in note form.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman learned of Cary’s 1971 arrest for making harassing telephone calls to Heidi Posnien.

Heidi Posnien: He says ‘hi’… I can’t remember exactly.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): Hartmann started the call with a lingerie survey.

Dave Cawley: He read of how Cary’d tried to lure Heidi up the canyon, to campground near Causey Reservoir…

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): …using a threat of bodily harm to her husband.

Heidi Posnien: He would say if I try to call anybody then it wouldn’t be healthy for my husband because he’d do something to the Mustang.

Dave Cawley: Heidi had shown Cary mercy after his arrest in the canyon. She’d just wanted him to get some help. But that hadn’t happened.

Heidi Posnien: He was probably just a sick puppy.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman was aware of Cary’s connection to Sheree Warren, so he called Roy City police detective Jack Bell. They began to look at the whole arc of Cary’s behavior and saw a clear escalation from that encounter with Heidi in 1971 to where they then stood, 15 years later.

Jack Bell: Everything escalates.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Jack Bell: You’re right.

Dave Cawley: They talked about how the rapist had sometimes claimed to be a cop.

Jack Bell: Some reserves got a little badge-happy and thought they were real policemen.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman wrote Cary had been booted from the reserve after flashing his badge to get out of a ticket.

Jack Bell: That would definitely get you bounced out.

Dave Cawley: This differed from the official account, that Cary had resigned because he’d taken a job out of state. It seems likely that’d been a convenient excuse, a way of getting Cary out of the reserve without unnecessary embarrassment.

Zimmerman spent several days contacting each of the rape victims again, asking if any had received lingerie survey phone calls before the attacks. Several had. One told him not only had she received the call, she’d also been at the Weber State gym — where she taught gymnastics — hours before being attacked at her home. Zimmerman found other links between Cary and some of the women. One recognized Cary’s photo because he was friends with her husband. Another was a family friend to the Hartmanns. Yet another lived in the same apartment complex as one of Cary’s former girlfriends.

Shane Minor: Zimm had connected Hartmann to four victims.

Dave Cawley: Former Ogden police detective Shane Minor told me that represented only about a quarter of the rapes on the detectives’ lists. They needed stronger evidence, so Zimmerman took his findings to the Weber County Attorney. He asked the state court for permission to put what’s known as a pen register on Cary’s phone. It would record the number of every outgoing call. The pen register became active toward the end of November, 1986. Over the next five weeks, it logged more than 1,900 outgoing calls from Cary’s phone.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): These were placed on a computer printout. Approximately 200 of the calls were to friends or acquaintances.

Dave Cawley: These are Zimmerman’s words from a report, read by a voice actor.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): The others were picked at random, going through the phone book and picking last names with girls’ first names or first name listed as initials only. … I did contact several of the people called and they had received the lingerie survey.

Dave Cawley: Zimmerman noticed one number appeared multiple times. He called it and a woman answered. He explained who he was and asked if she’d received a lingerie survey call. She said no, but she knew who made them. Zimmerman had inadvertently called Cary’s second wife, Becky. I shared a bit of her story with you in episode 1. Zimmerman’s notes say Becky recalled Cary making obscene phone calls to random women while they were married. She mentioned Cary’d had a vasectomy. This caught Zimmerman’s attention, because it potentially explained why the rapist had told one of the women not to worry about getting pregnant. Becky said Cary’d been infatuated with guns and owned both .357 and .38-caliber revolvers, guns capable of firing the rounds used in the three unsolved murders under investigation by the Salt Lake City task force. And Becky’s new husband told Zimmerman Cary was infatuated with Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy (from July 24, 1979 KSL TV archive): It started out in Utah and it seemed like one case seemed to, one set of circumstances seemed to bootstrap another.

Dave Cawley: That’s Bundy’s voice in a phone call to a reporter in 1979, denying he’d ever killed anyone. Becky’s husband told detective Zimmerman Cary had even made his sons sit and watch a TV special about Bundy. I can’t say for sure, but based on the timeframe, it’s possible that show was a made-for-TV movie called “The Deliberate Stranger.”

Janice Waibel (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): Ted Bundy is being played by St. Elsewhere star Mark Harmon.

Mark Harmon (from February 5, 1986 KSL TV archive): There’s a whole lot of psychiatrists in this country who are still trying to find out what makes him tick, too. It’s a complex, person, y’know?

Dave Cawley: Ogden police began to suspect the Ogden City Rapist might also have studied the work of Ted Bundy.

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. … They’re willing to take the convenient alternative. And the convenient alternative is me.

Dave Cawley: Earlier in this episode, I told you about a woman I’m calling Danielle. She was among the many women whom the Ogden City Rapist had attacked. Ogden police had closed her case without an arrest, due to a lack of leads. But detective Chris Zimmerman re-established contact with Danielle again in November of ’86, about half a year following her assault. She told him she’d put it out of her mind and tried to move on with her life. Zimmerman told Danielle he needed her help. He showed her a spread of six pictures of men’s faces. Cary Hartmann’s picture sat among them. Danielle couldn’t pinpoint her attacker from those photos. It’d been too dark. She hadn’t been able to see well without her contacts. And he’d told her not to look at him. She just couldn’t be certain what he looked like

“I’ve seen one of them before,” she’d said, “but it’s nothing.”

Zimmerman asked her to explain. Any little thing could help.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): She stated that she was a barber and she had gone to Bob’s Sewing Machine a few weeks prior to her attack to have her scissors sharpened.

Dave Cawley: This again comes from a report detective Chris Zimmerman wrote.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): In the store, there was a white male working there and another white male standing there talking to him. The person who was standing there … was the person in the picture she had picked. This was Cary Hartmann.

Dave Cawley: Bob’s Sewing Machine was the shop where Cary’s friend and fellow former Ogden police reserve officer Dave Moore worked.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): There was discussion about whether she was single or married, where she cut hair and other personal information. [She] gave her name and address to them for the scissors receipt. Hartmann was standing right there when she gave the address and name.

Dave Cawley: The man who’d broken into Danielle’s home had awoken her by whispering her name into her ear.

Kevin LaRue (as Chris Zimmerman from May 21, 1987 report): She couldn’t identify the suspect by picture, but she was sure if she heard his voice again she would know him because his voice was very distinctive.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann had started a new job in the summer of ’86, a few months after the attack on Danielle. He still worked for Weber State College during the day but now tended bar at night at a place called The Galleon. Danielle and a friend went The Galleon one night in March of ’87, just shy of a year on from the night of her rape. As they sat and socialized, sipping their drinks, a man came on the intercom. It was the bartender. A jolt shot through Danielle. She recognized the voice. It was the same as the man who’d raped her: Cary Hartmann.

(Sound of an old telephone ringing)

Dave Cawley: Heidi Posnien rolled over in bed, reaching through the dark for the telephone.

Heidi Posnien: I was getting a phone call, it was probably around midnight.

Dave Cawley: She lifted the receiver to her ear and said a tentative hello, the word tinged by her distinct German accent.

Heidi Posnien: Voice on the phone said that he wanted to talk to me.

Dave Cawley: The voice belonged to a man. He introduced himself and said he was conducting a survey. He wanted to ask her a few questions. Like, what kind of lingerie do wear and are you as good in bed as everyone says?

Heidi Posnien: I said “who are you, what’s going on, what do you want?” And he hung up.

Dave Cawley: Heidi’s husband, John Posnien, stirred next to her.

Heidi Posnien: And then John said “who was that?” And I said “I don’t know, some guy wants to meet me. I—“ And he says “oh, some idiot.” Because I used to get a lot of those phone calls, especially when you work in the bar, y’know? You get people calling you and, and breathing heavy.

Dave Cawley: Heidi may’ve had her share of creeps calling in the past, but she’d soon learn this guy was different. Persistent. Dangerous. It was the spring of 1971. Heidi was a 36-year-old mother of two. She was by no means a push-over.

Heidi Posnien: Yeah, I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to defend myself in situations pretty good.

Dave Cawley: I’m sorry you’ve had to be in that situation.

Heidi Posnien: Many times, even when I was a child.

Dave Cawley: Heidi’s life story could fill an entire podcast on its own, but we’ll do the abbreviated version: she’d been born near the border of Germany and Poland in 1935. She told me her mother had fled an abusive marriage when Heidi was just a few years old, taking her to Berlin. But that move had carried them into the heart of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Announcer (from 1943 United News archive): The war in Russia enters its third year with Soviet armies pounding the Nazis from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

Dave Cawley: Heidi told me Hitler’s Wehrmacht had conscripted her father and sent him to the eastern front.

Announcer (from 1943 United News archive): But Hitler paid a price for this wanton destruction. That price was more than five-million Nazi soldiers.

Dave Cawley: Heidi’s father counted among those dead. Heidi survived and in the post-war years escaped Soviet-controlled East Germany to the west, where she met and married her first husband, a young American soldier. They had two children together. In 1958, Heidi’s first husband brought his little family stateside, to his native home of Provo, Utah, about 40 miles south of Utah’s capital, Salt Lake City. This was a huge adjustment for Heidi. At the time she spoke little English, had no friends or family in America and didn’t belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormons. She didn’t observe that faith’s prohibitions on coffee or alcohol. And she joked about this when we sat to talk, by taking sips from a little bottle.

Heidi Posnien: Looks like wine but it isn’t.

Rod Layton: (Laughs) That’s not your wine, eh?

Heidi Posnien: Not this early in the daytime. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Heidi’s marriage to the soldier fell apart. She soon found herself divorced, an exile in an unfamiliar country. She moved to a city called Ogden, about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. Ogden was a railroad town, with a rough-and-tumble history. Gambling halls, brothels and saloons used to line the street to its train station. The casinos and cathouses are long gone, but Ogden’s bars remain. Heidi found work as a waitress at one of those bars in the ‘60s.

Heidi Posnien: I had some altercations working in the bar where guys had made a pass and, in fact I, he was trying to push me in the corner and tried to kiss me and I bit his nose—

Dave Cawley: Oh my—

Heidi Posnien: —he was bleeding. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: —wow!

Heidi Posnien: He’s not gonna kiss me if I don’t want him to. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Good.

Dave Cawley: She met and befriended other German expats in Ogden. One introduced Heidi to a local businessman named John Posnien. John was himself the son of German immigrants. He’d inherited his father’s business, the Ogden Optical Company, and worked as an optician. He’d also inherited his father’s 1955 Ford Thunderbird convertible.

Heidi Posnien: And of course he impressed me with his Thunderbird. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: John and Heidi married. She took his last name, the one she still keeps proudly today: Posnien. Heidi showed me pictures.

Heidi Posnien: (Laughs) “That’s not a good picture of me, I’m laughing.

Dave Cawley: I think that’s a great picture of you.

Heidi Posnien: Oh, look at us, the bathing beauties.

Dave Cawley: John and Heidi Posnien moved to a little mountain town called Huntsville a few years into their marriage. They would take frequent drives in their Jeep, exploring the surrounding forest. On one such trip, they encountered a litter of baby bobcats separated from their mother. Heidi decided to adopt one of the little carnivores.

Heidi Posnien: I named him Charlie. They don’t meow. They go (hums). He could jump up on top of the refrigerator. And I would get some yard, y’know, and I’d throw it up at him and he’d paw it and I’d catch it.

Dave Cawley: The bobcat grew, becoming so large it would stretch out across the dashboard of John’s Thunderbird when Heidi took it out around town.

Heidi Posnien: And we’d go to the drive-in for a milkshake or an ice cream or something. He’d get a lick and I’d get a lick. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: I tell you all this to give you a sense of who Heidi Posnien was — a no-nonsense survivor with a soft spot for those in need — when she received that odd phone call from a guy asking about her lingerie late one night in 1971.

Heidi Posnien: Now that you know my background a little bit better, now you understand why I could handle it like that.

Dave Cawley: It’s important to understand, because of what happened next: the man called her again.

Heidi Posnien: He seemed to know my kids, he seemed to know that I had a Mustang.

Dave Cawley: John Posnien had by that time traded in his Thunderbird for a ’66 Mustang. The caller told Heidi the Mustang’s brakes might suddenly quit working if she didn’t agree to meet him.

Heidi Posnien: My throat was all dry and uh, I can’t remember what I said because I was pretty upset at that time. And so, and he says “and don’t have this phone traced. Don’t put a trace on because then it’s not gonna be healthy for you or for your kids.” So I knew that he knew us really well and that really made me mad. (Clears throat) In fact right now my mouth is dry just from thinking about that, y’know.

Dave Cawley: Heidi put the caller off, playing for time. He called yet again on Tuesday, June 1^st, 1971, and repeated his demand, telling Heidi he’d had his eye on her for at least three years. He mentioned having seen her at the Weber Club, a fancy social spot in Ogden.

Heidi Posnien: We used to go to the Weber Club quite often for dinner and cocktails and things like that. And whenever there was a party that’s where everybody met.

Dave Cawley: Heidi again managed to get off the phone without committing to anything, but it was clear the caller did not intend to leave her alone. So, Heidi told her husband John about the caller and his threats. John talked to a neighbor of theirs, a sheriff’s deputy named Halvor Bailey, who encouraged the Posniens to make a formal report. They did. I know, because I have a copy of it.

Heidi Posnien: And then I think John even talked to the sheriff down in Ogden.

Dave Cawley: They hatched a plan. When the man called again, the sheriff wanted Heidi to answer.

Heidi Posnien: And so they said “well, what you need to do is just go along with it and make a, make a appointment with him. A date with ever.” And I said “ok.”

Dave Cawley: The caller phoned Heidi again a final time on Thursday, June 3^rd.

Heidi Posnien: The phone was ringing like 10 o’clock in the morning and he says “are we still gonna meet each other?” And I said “mmm, yeah. Let’s do it.” And he says “oh? Well how come you changed your mind?” And I was trying to be really calm and collected, y’know, and I said “well you must be awfully interested in me” and I said “now I’m interested in you.” So he said “well, I’ll meet you someplace.” I said “you can’t right now because I’m on my way, uh, to a luncheon with my girlfriends.”

Dave Cawley: This was a lie, meant to buy time.

Heidi Posnien: John and the sheriff both said, y’know, “we got to have some time to set up to catch him.”

Dave Cawley: The caller suggested Saturday.

Heidi Posnien: And I said “no, I’ll be gone by then, I’m, I’m leaving for Europe.”

Dave Cawley: This was also a lie. Heidi said it would have to be Friday.

Heidi Posnien: And he says “alright, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Dave Cawley: The man told Heidi where to go: east out of Huntsville following the South Fork of the Ogden River, to a campground called Meadows, just below a lake in the mountains called Causey Reservoir.

Heidi Posnien: He said “what are you going to be driving?” I said “probably the Jeep.” And he said “I want to see you at quarter to 10.” And I said “alright.”

Dave Cawley: Heidi Posnien had a date. This is Cold, season 3, episode 1: Everything Escalates. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

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Dave Cawley: Season one of this podcast told the story of Susan Powell, her marriage to Josh Powell and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband and father-in-law.

Susan Powell (from July 29, 2008 video recording): Uh, this is me. … Covering all my bases, making that sure if something happens to me or my family or all of us that our assets are documented.

Dave Cawley: We may never know all the details, but I feel safe in saying Susan died in an act of domestic violence. Her body has never been found.

Season two focused on the disappearance of Joyce Yost. A man Joyce had never met followed her home one night, abducted her and raped her. Joyce reported the crime to police.

Joyce Yost (from April 4, 1985 police interview): He grabbed me by the throat and he, uh, was forceful and told me if I screamed or said anything that, uh, he would tear my throat open.

Dave Cawley: Then, the man who’d raped her returned and killed her, to keep her from testifying. Her body has also never been found.

Two stories: one about domestic abuse in all its subtle, insidious forms; the other about sexual violence and the ways the criminal justice system often fails to protect survivors who report. Two crimes with very different motives, but the same result: women who were disappeared by men. This season, you’re going to see those two topics wind together as we examine a truly unsolved case: the disappearance of a woman named Sheree Warren.

This is where you should hear a clip of Sheree, except no recordings of her exist, as far as I know. I asked her family if they had any old home movies. They didn’t. No journals or letters, either. So this season, Sheree Warren’s voice will remain conspicuously absent. It’s the frustrating truth of so many missing persons cases. The victims, who we most want to hear from, are, by the very nature of what happened to them, unable to speak. Memories of them fade over time until even their closest friends can only provide impressions of the people they were.

Sheree was born at Hill Air Force Base, just south of Ogden Utah, in 1960. She was the second of four kids in her family. Her parents were Ed and Mary Sorensen. Ed served as a Master Sergeant in the Air Force. During the ‘60s, that job took him to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada and to Vietnam. He received a Bronze Star medal for meritorious conduct. Ed spent 20 years in the service. Then, in 1972, he became a civilian employee of the Air Force. He and his family settled in the town of Roy, just outside Utah’s Hill Air Force Base.

Sheree attended school in Roy. She was a bright student, continuously on the honor roll. Her name appeared in the local newspaper when she placed in science fair and foreign language competitions. Her strong work ethic probably came from watching her parents. When Sheree was in high school, her dad enrolled in college while still working full-time. Ed received an associates degree the same year Sheree graduated from high school.

Not to be outdone, Sheree’s mom, Mary, helped support the family by working at a drapery company. Sheree grew up as part of an industrious, honest family.

We’ll get back to Sheree in a bit. But for the moment, we need to turn our attention to Heidi Posnien, the woman who’d received that odd lingerie survey phone call.

(Sound of rain and windshield wipers)

Dave Cawley: Rain drizzled over the canyon of the South Fork of the Ogden River. It pattered on the canvas top of Heidi Posnien’s Jeep as she drove up Utah State Highway 39 on the morning of Friday, June 4^th, 1971. She was on her way to meet the strange man who’d for weeks been calling her, demanding they go on a “date.” You can’t see it but I’m doing air quotes.

She turned right off the highway at the entrance to the Meadows Campground, crossed a short bridge over the river — barely more than a creek, really — and stopped next to a camper trailer on the far side. A pair of sheriff’s deputies dressed as fishermen stepped out to greet her.

Heidi Posnien: And I said “what should I do?” And he said “just pull across the street and then leave the Jeep parked like, this sideways.” You know what I mean?

Dave Cawley: As Heidi’s describing this to me, decades later, she’s using her hands to show the positions of her Jeep and the trailer, how the deputies told her to park next to them, but to reverse out after the caller arrived and passed by her position, to block him from getting back across the bridge to the road. She was the cheese on the mousetrap.

Heidi Posnien: And they said “make sure when he comes up, identify. Make sure that he’s the right person.”

Dave Cawley: Two miles down the canyon, back in the direction of Huntsville, her husband John Posnien waited at another campground called Magpie. The sheriff was with him, along with the deputy, Halvor Bailey. They all watched the highway as the clock ticked toward the time for Heidi’s “date” to arrive. A little after 10 a.m., a red and white, half-ton pickup truck passed Magpie going up the canyon toward Meadows. John Posnien saw a logo printed the truck’s door.

Heidi Posnien: And the dummy was driving his dad’s business truck. It said Hartmann Plumbing and when they drove past Magpie, John says he immediately knew who it was.

Dave Cawley: Hartmann Plumbing and Heating belonged to a man named Bill Hartmann. John knew Bill. They’d golfed together at the Ogden Golf and Country Club. Bill was also a fellow member of the Weber Club. The caller had told Heidi he’d seen her at the Weber Club. It clicked for John. He recognized the man at the wheel of the pickup as Bill Hartmann’s oldest son, Cary Hartmann.

The sheriff tried to radio the two undercover deputies who were with Heidi at Meadows, to let them know the caller would soon reach them. But the radio didn’t work in the narrow canyon. Heidi had no idea who the young man in the pickup truck was when he turned off the highway, drove across the bridge and stopped next to her Jeep.

Heidi Posnien: Because I’d never paid any attention to him before. I didn’t notice him before.

Dave Cawley: The young man rolled down his window. Heidi saw he had brown hair, green eyes and appeared clean-cut, like a cop or military man. Kind of forgettable.

Heidi Posnien: He says “hi.” I can’t remember exactly and, and then I said, what I said “why would you pick on an old lady like me?” And then he made some remark that I was sexy or pretty or something, y’know.

Dave Cawley: You’re not an old lady at this point though, right?

Heidi Posnien: No, gosh no. (Laughs) But I was way older than he was. I already had kids, y’know, teenagers. So yeah, I was an old lady. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann was 22 to Heidi’s 36. He hadn’t experienced the ravages of the Second World War, as Heidi had, but like many young American men of his generation, Cary’d served overseas during the Vietnam War. I have a copy of Cary’s resume, from years later, in which he described being stationed at a fuel depot in the port city of Da Nang in ’69. Cary wrote in the Navy he’d become “very efficient in the handling of small arms” and explosives.

Heidi Posnien: And he kept looking at that trailer and was getting a little nervous and he said “I’m gonna just pull up there. Why don’t you follow me up there.”

Dave Cawley: By “up there,” Cary meant farther into the campground, behind a line of trees, out of sight of the road. He drove past her, up around a bend. Heidi put her Jeep in reverse, pulled out and blocked the narrow road, just as the deputies had instructed. She then leapt from the Jeep and rushed into the safety of their trailer.

The deputies told her to stay put, then went to stand next to the Jeep. Heidi poured herself a cup of coffee with shaking hands. She listened for the sound of the pickup. It returned after a few minutes. Heidi peeked out the window as the deputies pulled Cary out of the truck and placed him under arrest. They frisked him, finding a small knife in his pocket. Then they tried to call their backup down at the Magpie Campground, only to discover their radios didn’t work in the canyon, either. So, the deputies piled into Cary’s truck and drove it, and him, down the canyon to meet with the sheriff.

Heidi Posnien: I stayed awhile because I was all (exhales, laughs) nervous, I guess. (Laughs) I’d had my coffee and then I got in the Jeep and drove down and they were already gone, so.

Dave Cawley: Only later did Heidi learn from her husband John what’d happened when Cary had arrived in handcuffs at Magpie. John, she told me, had turned to the sheriff.

Heidi Posnien: He says “boy I’d sure like to smack him in the mouth.” And he says “well, we look the other way.” So, so they had him already out and John punched him. And he, he was embarrassed. He looked down and he says “I wish you had a gun and shoot me.”

Dave Cawley: Really?

Heidi Posnien: Yeah, he said that because he was embarrassed, he was ashamed.

Dave Cawley: John Posnien had punched Cary Hartmann in the face, while the sheriff and his deputies looked the other way. Needless to say, this wasn’t legal. The deputies had then taken Cary to the Weber County Jail in Ogden, where they’d booked him on suspicion of making threatening phone calls. A minor, misdemeanor charge that didn’t quite match the gravity of the whole situation. Cary provided a handwritten statement, admitting to what’d happened.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from June 4, 1971 written statement): I called the lady and said would you meet me at a time and place, if not some harm would come to your husband’s car and possibly him.

Dave Cawley: That’s not Cary’s voice, but they are his words, read by a voice actor. Even today, Heidi downplays the seriousness of what happened.

Heidi Posnien: Well, because he really hadn’t done anything, other than met me.

Dave Cawley: But I’m here to tell you, there was something much more ominous behind those phone calls. Something that makes Heidi’s mouth go dry and her hands fidget when she really stops to think about it.

Dave Cawley: What do you think his intentions were that day?

Heidi Posnien: (Deep breath) Probably try to put, make a pass at me. And that probably would’ve had to knock him on his butt. And I probably would’ve been able to but when he had a knife, then it wouldn’t have been too good.

Dave Cawley: Heidi told me her husband John went to confront Cary’s dad, Bill Hartmann, following Cary’s arrest. John knew right where to look.

Heidi Posnien: Yeah, at the golf course. Because he was on the golf course. And he didn’t even come right away off the, the father, he still finished his game.

Dave Cawley: Really?

Heidi Posnien: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Huh.

Heidi Posnien: So he must have known things about his son already then.

Dave Cawley: Both John Posnien and Bill Hartmann are deceased, so I only have Heidi’s account of what she says John told her.

Heidi Posnien: John went there and said “hey, we need to talk to you about your son.” And he said to John “what the hell did he do now?”

Dave Cawley: John explained Cary’s lingerie survey phone call, how he’d pressured Heidi into a meeting by using threats, then showed up at the campground with a weapon.

Heidi Posnien: He said “well are you going to press charges?” and John told me, he said, uh, “well, if you get him some help, y’know, I know it’s your son. If you uh, get some help then I won’t press charges because, y’know, everybody deserves a break.”

Dave Cawley: Heidi and John thought Cary Hartmann was just a kid who’d made a dumb mistake. John’s fist had sent a message, they thought. They wanted to back that message up with a show of mercy.

Heidi Posnien: We didn’t know he was doing it with other people too, y’know? We had no idea.

Dave Cawley: Cary went to court a few days later. He had a lot going for him in the eyes of the judge: his parents were well-known in the community and were church-going people. Cary had no criminal history and was still in the Naval Reserve. And the judge could only sentence Cary for what he’d done, not what he might’ve done, had police not outsmarted him.

Heidi Posnien: What could’ve happened. That’s the part.

Dave Cawley: That is a dangerous situation.

Heidi Posnien: Exactly, exactly.

Dave Cawley: Cary received a slap on the wrist: six months probation. Heidi didn’t follow what happened to Cary after that. She moved on with her life.

Heidi Posnien: That doesn’t mean that I was not nervous and scared. I mean, it just, still right now my mouth is dry. So it still must be hanging on somehow.

Dave Cawley: A trauma that’s lingered for more than 50 years. This season isn’t about Heidi Posnien. As I said earlier, it’s about the disappearance of Sheree Warren. But there’s a reason we’re starting with Heidi instead of Sheree. It’s because Cary Hartmann — the man who tried to lure Heidi up that canyon — would years later meet, befriend and woo Sheree Warren. Cary Hartmann isn’t the only suspect in Sheree’s eventual disappearance. She had an estranged husband who’ll meet soon enough. But I want you to keep your eye on Cary, so you can see how he gained inside access to this unsolved cold case homicide investigation and steered it through its first days and weeks. Along the way, we’re going to see how Sheree Warren first crossed paths with Cary. Hold on, because from here, everything escalates.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann spent the rest of 1971 on probation for making those threatening lingerie survey phone calls to Heidi Posnien. While on probation, Cary proposed to a young woman. Her parents announced the engagement in the newspaper. But that was premature. The wedding didn’t happen because Cary’s bride-to-be called it off.

Three weeks later, one of Cary’s friends set him up with another young woman. I’ll call her Claire. I’m not using her real name in order to protect her privacy. Cary and Claire dated for a year. Claire’s home life during that time was turbulent. She and her dad clashed, physically. It got so bad, Claire moved out of her parents’ home. She fell right into Cary’s waiting arms, moving in with him. Their relationship turned sexual and Cary proposed marriage soon after that.

Three months into the engagement, Cary kicked Claire out of the apartment. He’d changed his mind. He told her to leave the ring he’d given her. She refused. So, when she came back a few days later to get her stuff, Cary allegedly grabbed her by the arm, twisted it behind her back, wrenched the ring from her finger and tossed her to the ground.

Claire had grown up a Christian, and was taught sex before marriage was a sin. She’d violated those beliefs with Cary. So when he’d cast her off, she’d felt embarrassed and damaged. She would later tell a detective Cary’d told her no one would want her. Claire’d felt she couldn’t return to her parents. A friend invited her to start over by moving to California. So that’s what she did. No sooner had she left Ogden than Cary turned on the charm. Claire would later say Cary’d somehow found her phone number in San Francisco and started bombarding her with flowery calls and messages. He said he wanted her back. He told her to return Utah. She accepted his apologies and in the summer of 1973, Cary and Claire became man and wife. Claire would later tell police she’d married Cary out of “pure guilt,” because she’d gone against everything she’d been taught by living with a man out of wedlock. She’d believed the untruths Cary’d planted in her head: that no one else would want her.

Cary took Claire to Las Vegas for their honeymoon, but blew all their money gambling. A week later, Claire allegedly caught Cary in bed with another woman. Not long after that, Cary hosted a dinner party at their apartment. Claire didn’t know about the party until she arrived home from work. She later told an investigator she’d found her husband naked in the bathroom with some of his guests. Claire sometimes overheard her husband making phone calls. He’d say he was from some company doing a survey, then start asking the women he called about the types of underwear they liked. If the women remained on the line, Cary would turn the questions sexual. Claire claimed to have once been on the line when Cary’d dialed a 12-year-old girl and made explicit comments about his own body. The girl hung up on him.

Claire told Cary she wanted a divorce just 10 months into their marriage. He’d allegedly responded by leaping over a banister and smacking her in the face. Claire later told an investigator the blow landed with such force, it knocked out a tooth. Claire said Cary’d then dragged her to their bedroom and pulled a .357 magnum revolver from his dresser drawer, putting the gun to his own head. “I’m a bad person. I’m no good. I don’t deserve to live,” Claire later described Cary as saying. She said Cary’d forced her finger onto the trigger, telling her he’d make it so she would spend the rest of her life in prison for killing him. She’d begged him to stop, promising to help him, to talk out their problems. Cary, at last, relented.

A few days later, Claire had Cary served with a restraining order. She called Cary’s mom, Donna Hartmann, to tell her all her son had done. Donna reportedly replied “oh honey, I should’ve talked to you a long time ago.” The separation did not go smoothly. Claire went back to Cary at least once before realizing she needed a plan if she intended to escape. She had Cary served with divorce papers while he was at work. She then went to the police. Officers stood by as Claire kicked Cary out of their place. She told him if he ever returned, she would kill him.

Cary bounced around a bit for the next year. He bunked for awhile at the home a friend, a guy named Allen Fred John. Most everyone just called him “Fred Johns,” so that’s how I’ll refer to him, too. Fred had job working security for a vast cattle ranch called Deseret Land and Livestock.

Don Judd (from October 2, 1985 KSL TV archive): With 200,000 acres, Deseret Land and Livestock is the state’s largest ranch.

Dave Cawley: Deseret occupies a giant stretch of the mountains between Ogden, Utah and Evanston, Wyoming. It’s home to some of the best elk hunting ground in the western United States.

Don Judd (from October 2, 1985 KSL TV archive): Deseret’s solution has been to sell hunting permits, 127 this year, ranging in price from 200 to 5,000 dollars.

Dave Cawley: Fred’s job was to keep trespassers out of Deseret during the elk season, preserving the animals for the ranch’s paying clients. Cary Hartmann didn’t remain roommates with Fred Johns very long. Fred ended up having to kick Cary out of his house, after Cary propositioned Fred’s wife. Put a little mental bookmark here, because Fred Johns will play a major role later in our story.

In the summer of ’75, Cary met a woman named Becky. I’m not using her full name in order to protect her privacy. Cary took Becky out one time and the date didn’t go anywhere. Six months later, Becky received an unsolicited, obscene phone call. She thought the voice of the male caller sounded familiar and asked if he was Cary Hartmann. He said yes, and that the dirty phone call was only a prank. I don’t know how, but Cary segued that obscene phone call into another date with Becky. They met and he turned on the charm.

Cary and Becky began dating more seriously at the start of ’76 and were married by that September. They went to Las Vegas on their wedding night — just as Cary had with his first wife — but this time, Cary surprised his new bride by allegedly inviting a sex worker to their hotel room. Becky felt mortified to learn her new husband wanted to have a threesome on their honeymoon.

Becky would later describe multiple instances of physical abuse during her years with Cary. She told an investigator Cary would become so angry, he’d knock her unconscious. He’d always seem apologetic afterward, sending her flowers. She started seeing a psychologist, thinking something was wrong with her. It took time, but Becky came to realize the problem wasn’t with her, it was with her husband.

Cary Hartmann was was a plumber by trade.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from undated resume): I have fit stainless pipe, carbon steel pipe, plastic pipe. All pipefitting under strict OSHA standards.

Dave Cawley: That again comes from Cary’s own resume. He’d never finished college, but he possessed a quick mind and a capacity for meticulous tasks. His time in the Navy had provided valuable technical experience. He used that to land jobs at major construction sites around the Western U.S. during the ‘70s.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from undated resume): National Lead, 50 miles west of Salt Lake City. A high security extraction plant working with extremely caustic acids.

Dave Cawley: Becky gave birth to her first child with Cary, a boy, in 1977. In May of ’78, Cary moved with his wife and their one-year-old son to San Onofre, California. He’d landed a job with a company called Bechtel, which was contracted to expand the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. These jobs only ever lasted as long as the construction project, and Cary would return to Ogden after each one.

He and Becky had a second child, another boy, at the start of 1979. Becky convinced her husband to get vasectomy soon after, a fact that will prove critical later in our story. A few months later, Cary was on the road again to Oceanside, California, a city about 40 miles north of San Diego. Becky joined him in June of 1980, driving from Utah to Southern California with their two children. They were accompanied on that trip by a woman who was then engaged Cary’s younger brother, Jack Hartmann. Becky would later tell an investigator that on their second night in Oceanside, she walked in on Cary as he was sexually assaulting their soon-to-be-sister-in-law. Becky intervened, but no one told Cary’s brother Jack what Cary had done.

Becky said Cary got her drunk one night in California, then left their apartment for awhile and returned with a young marine from one of the nearby Navy bases. He allegedly told the marine to do whatever he wanted to Becky, who was impaired, unable to consent or resist. Becky would later say she’d broken down and cried when she’d realized what was happening. The Marine had apologized and left.

Cary, Becky and the kids returned to Utah a short time later. To outside world, Cary and Becky appeared like a happy couple. They attended a Fourth of July celebration together in the town of Huntsville, Utah, where Becky bumped into Heidi Posnien.

Heidi Posnien: I think she had both kids. She had one in a stroller and one walking alongside of her.

Dave Cawley: Heidi knew Becky, because Becky was friends with Heidi’s daughter.

Heidi Posnien: And she was with her mom and with Cary.

Dave Cawley: But Heidi hadn’t seen Cary in years, since he’d tried to lure her up the canyon for that “date.”

Heidi Posnien: And she said “I want you to meet my husband.” And I thought “oh God.”

Dave Cawley: Heidi bit her tongue.

Heidi Posnien: By that time I really didn’t care to talk about it that much anyway. Y’know, it was done with.

Dave Cawley: She didn’t tell Becky what Cary had done to her.

Heidi Posnien: And y’know, then I felt like if I had told her she wouldn’t have believed it.

Dave Cawley: The story of Heidi’s encounter with Cary started with a lingerie survey phone call. Becky’s relationship and eventual marriage to Cary had also started with a similar call. I can’t help but wonder what might’ve happened had Heidi and Becky been able speak candidly when they’d met at this 4^th of July celebration. They did end up having that conversation, but not until years later.

Heidi Posnien: I said “didn’t you know that he was doing all these things on the phone?” She says “yes, he would lock himself in another room or bathroom or someplace and making phone calls.” But she says “I didn’t quite know who he was calling or who he was talking to.”

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Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann and his second wife, Becky, settled back into life in Ogden during the summer of 1980, after moving back to Utah from California. Cary began to flirt with the idea of a career change. He thought about becoming a cop, an interest he shared with one of his friends, a guy named Dave Moore.

Dave Moore: Played handball together and uh, went fishing together. Went hunting a couple of times. But mainly it was double-dates.

Dave Cawley: Dave had first met Cary years earlier, through Becky. She’d worked with Dave’s wife.

Dave Moore: She was dating Cary at the time when we went out and that’s how I met him.

Dave Cawley: Dave and Cary hit it off.

Dave Moore: Oh, he was a class act. I really liked him. Extremely nice to Becky and, yeah, they got along really good.

Dave Cawley: Dave’s family had deep roots in Ogden. His grandfather started a sewing machine repair shop there in ’47, just after the Second World War. The business had passed down to Dave’s dad, then to Dave and his brother. They still own it today. Dave was also friends with many in the ranks of the Ogden Police Department.

Dave Moore: My uncle is Don Moore and at the time he was a sergeant and a detective.

Dave Cawley: Dave was on a first-name basis with the captain over the Ogden police detective division, an officer named Marlin Balls.

Dave Moore: Marlin and Don and I, we would hunt, deer hunt together every year.

Dave Cawley: Their favorite place to go was a mountain between two reservoirs: Causey and Lost Creek.

Dave Moore: You paid to get in this Guildersleeve Canyon is what it was called. So yeah, we hunted up there for probably 12, 15 years. Just good times. We would take a 50-gallon barrel of gas and go up the week before and set up and stay for the whole 10 days, for the whole hunt.

Dave Cawley: Dave told me Cary Hartmann came along on a couple of these hunts.

Dave Moore: He hunted up there one, maybe two years. Uh, we took our kids up when they were fairly small so it was basically road hunting.

Dave Cawley: On those outings, Cary’d rubbed shoulders around the campfire with Dave’s friends in the Ogden Police Department. And Cary realized he wanted to be one of them. Cary Hartmann and his friend Dave Moore both filled out an applications to join the reserve corps of the Ogden City Police Department during the summer of 1980.  Reserve officers weren’t paid.

Dave Moore: You basically volunteered your time. They gave you a uniform allowance which basically cleaned your uniform.

Dave Cawley: Reserve officers could only act as cops when called upon by the chief. That mostly meant doing menial work like traffic control during parades and rodeos. Reserves worked under the direct supervision of full-time officers. Serving in the reserve could just be an expression of civic pride. But more often, it acted as a first step toward landing a paying job as an actual officer. The application for the Ogden police reserve included a questionnaire. One of the questions read “why are you applying for this position?” Cary wrote:

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from July 31, 1980 Ogden police reserve application): Because I want to learn police policies and most of all to try and help all the people that suffer from the bad guys.

Dave Cawley: He ran out of room, so Cary turned the page over and continued.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from July 31, 1980 Ogden police reserve application): I’ve always wanted to be a policeman. Maybe I can help right a few wrongs, including some of my teen years.

Dave Cawley: He didn’t bother to say what those “wrongs” were. The form asked about hobbies. Cary listed his as “hunting, handball and guns.”

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): How was Cary at handball?

Dave Moore: He, about like me. We were crummy. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Another line on the form asked “have you ever been questioned by police, arrested, charged, tried or convicted of any crime?” Cary checked “yes.” He didn’t describe the offense — his harassing calls to Heidi Posnien — only noting it’d happened 10 years earlier.

He admitted to having had his drivers license suspended. In fact, he’d been driving on a suspended license the day he’d gone to meet Heidi in the canyon. He admitted to having been fired from a job, to having stolen property from an employer, to having outstanding debts, to having once smoked marijuana. None of that, apparently, proved disqualifying.

Ogden police contacted Cary’s references, which included his father, uncles and a friend’s dad. They put Cary through a polygraph examination which revealed no indications of deception. Cary sat for interviews with some of the department brass. He received mostly middle-of-the-road scores from the interviewers. The few negative marks highlighted a “tendency to react impulsively or erratically,” and a need for “training in stress situations.”

It’s not clear to me how deeply Ogden police looked into Cary’s criminal history. What I do know, is on November 6^th, 1980, the chief sent Cary a letter welcoming him to the ranks. After he completed 30 hours of training, Cary Hartmann would become a reserve officer. The chief also accepted Dave Moore into the reserve at the same time.

Dave Cawley: Did you enjoy it?

Dave Moore: Yeah, I did. Yeah. There was no set schedule. You just went down when you felt like it.

Dave Cawley: Cary finished his training by the end of December. Ogden police issued him a badge, a utility belt, a set of handcuffs and a Colt Trooper revolver, all of which he started wearing beginning in January of ’81. It was hardly Cary’s only gun. He already owned a .357 magnum revolver, a .38 Detective Special, a deer hunting rifle and shotgun.

But all was not well in Cary’s life. That summer Becky filed for divorce. She’d secretly made a recording of Cary making one of his lingerie survey phone calls, by hiding a tape recorder under their mattress. Becky gave that tape to her attorney, to hold as leverage in case Cary tried anything. She then kicked Cary out of the house. Their divorce finalized by the end of ’81. Becky ended up with custody of their two sons. Cary Hartmann was once again single.

Dave Cawley (to Dave Moore): Did Cary date a lot of people in the time you knew him?

Dave Moore: Quite a few, yeah.

Dave Cawley: Yeah. I’ve heard that he was pretty social.

Dave Moore: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: But unlike in the past, Dave told me he and his wife didn’t double-date with Cary anymore.

Dave Moore: My wife would always call him ‘the devil in disguise’ with me. So… (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Why so? Wow, that’s—

Dave Moore: Oh just, drinking buddies and… (Pause)

Dave Cawley: …and because Dave’s wife was friends with Cary’s now-ex-wife Becky, and had heard about how Cary had treated her. I asked Dave if he’d worked directly with Cary when they were both in the police reserve corps.

Dave Moore: Not really. They pretty much put us with a regular patrol officer.

Dave Cawley: But while Dave and Cary didn’t serve shoulder-to-shoulder, it was clear Cary took to the reserve role with vigor. He forged his own friendships with many of the Ogden officers.  A police report would later note Cary “rode with officers more than an average amount of hours … and was extremely interested in police work.” He underwent additional training in special weapons and tactics — SWAT — and learned about investigative techniques. Cary himself described his time in the reserve like this:

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from July 31, 1980 Ogden police reserve application): Acted as back-up for partners in all types of situations, from traffic details to crowd control.

Dave Cawley: And Ogden did deal with some major crowds during Cary’s time in the reserve, most notably when President Ronald Reagan visited a state GOP picnic on September 10^th, 1982 in the Ogden suburb of Hooper.

Ronald Reagan (from September 10, 1982 archive recording): It’s good to be in Hooper. (Cheers) … You know, this is almost as big a crowd as an Osmond family reunion. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: These clips are courtesy the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Ronald Reagan (from September 10, 1982 archive recording): Now, just out in back here, before I came up, I was made a member of the Weber County Sheriff’s mounted posse. I’m greatly honored. I’m also relieved, because when they rode up I thought maybe I’d done something wrong and was going to get put in the slammer.

Dave Cawley: An Ogden officer filed a parking citation for the presidential limo. The ticket was issued to a “Ronnie Reagan” with an address on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. I’ve heard from a few people the officer responsible was a guy named Chris Zimmerman.

Dave Cawley: President Reagan was in town and somebody put a ticket—

Dave Moore: (Laughs) It was—

Dave Cawley: —and I heard it was—

Dave Moore: —and he got—

Dave Cawley: —Chris Zimmerman.

Dave Moore: —he got chewed out pretty good for it. But everyone else thought it was funny. Including Reagan.

Dave Cawley: (Laughs)

Dave Moore: Reagan got a kick out of it.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann wasn’t involved in the prank, as far as I know, but did soon find himself in his own sort of trouble with the chief. A deputy picked him up on a warrant for failure to appear in court in January of ’83. The booking record doesn’t say why he was supposed to be in court, but he paid a fine and was quickly released. Several months later, in May, Ogden police brass called Cary in for a meeting. They asked him to resign. The reason? They’d learned he’d taken a plumbing job in the city of Evanston, just over the state border in Wyoming. They said he couldn’t continue as a reserve while working in another state. This probably wasn’t the real reason, but it would allow Cary to save face. He turned in his gear. His dream of becoming a real police officer was over.

Pam Volk: He was working on the air conditioner or something at America First [Credit Union].

Dave Cawley: In the fall of ’83, a young woman named Pam Volk headed for the break room at the credit union where she worked. She passed by the open door of a utility room and saw a man she didn’t know. He said hello. She said hello back. Pam bumped into the man again, a few times, in the days that followed.

Pam Volk: And he would just, y’know, kind of stop me and say hi and talk to me a little bit and, umm, we became friends.

Dave Cawley: If you’re hearing a bit of hesitation in Pam’s voice, it’s probably because of who this man was.

Dave Cawley (to Pam Volk): Cary Hartmann.

Pam Volk: Mmm.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Pam was in her early 20s. Cary was 35 and working odd jobs as plumber and HVAC technician.

Pam Volk: He seemed like a really nice guy. He was very, umm, I guess he was pretty masculine.

Dave Cawley: Pam and Cary’s hallway encounters soon blossomed into a relationship. They began seeing each other outside of work.

Dave Cawley (to Pam Volk): Were you aware at the time of some of his extra-curricular activities?

Pam Volk: Not at all. Otherwise I would not have been with him whatsoever.

Dave Cawley: Pam would sometimes share tidbits about her time with Cary with a coworker, another young credit union employee named Sheree Warren. Sheree, as I mentioned earlier, is the focus of our story in this season of Cold. Pam and Sheree had first become friends after meeting through their work.

Pam Volk: I think we were both loan officers so we worked on the loan side. Umm, so we kind of hung out a lot talking about the loans that we were doing and helping each other and things like that.

Dave Cawley: They were, in Pam’s words, kindred spirits.

Pam Volk: We had fun. Like I said, we just, we’d like to go shopping and stuff. She loved clothes, so did I. I mean, y’know, I’m a girl, of course I love clothes.

Dave Cawley: Cary had even chatted up Sheree once or twice, while working on the credit union’s air conditioner.

Pam Volk: He’s unfortunately pretty personable.

Dave Cawley: But it hadn’t gone anywhere with Sheree, at least not right then. Sheree’s personal life was, at the time, complicated. She’d married a man named Charles Warren in February of ’81, just days after her 21^st birthday. Charles, or Chuck as he was better known, was 11 years older than Sheree. Chuck had taken Sheree to Las Vegas for their honeymoon.

Sheree and her new husband butted heads from the start. She and Chuck separated after just eight months of marriage. But while apart, Sheree’d learned she was pregnant. I don’t know what went through Sheree’s mind when she came to that realization. But I do know the pregnancy brought Sheree and Chuck back together, for a time. They had a son together in May of ’82, a boy they named Adam.

Pam Volk: Y’know, she just, she loved him so much.

Dave Cawley: This was around the same time Pam and Sheree first met. Sheree told Pam she felt torn.

Pam Volk: She was thinking about leaving and, y’know, a few things like that so she kind of talked to me about that a little bit.

Dave Cawley: Chuck worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad as a yard clerk. He made good money, but spent a lot of it buying and selling cars on the side. This’d frustrated Sheree, who was left trying to provide for herself and her son out of her own paycheck. Pam told me she didn’t see much of Chuck Warren during the time she spent with Sheree in the early ‘80s. Only one instance stuck out in her memory.

Pam Volk: We went to leave one day and her car had been stolen. She had a Toyota Celica, like a really nice one, and it had been stolen out of the parking lot. So I waited with her until Chuck came to pick her up. It was so weird, it was like, I mean out of a parking lot, y’know, that’s probably pretty busy.

Dave Cawley: Sheree and Chuck Warren were still married in ’83, when Pam first met Cary Hartmann at the credit union where she and Sheree worked. Pam told me her brief relationship with Cary soon fizzled.

Pam Volk: I don’t remember why we quit seeing each other. It was just, y’know, it just really wasn’t right.

Dave Cawley: Cary was going through a rough patch. He was behind on child support and owed money around town. In February of ’84, he wrote this in his journal:

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from February 15, 1984 daily journal): Bills are due. Things are really tight. I don’t know if I can survive.

Dave Cawley: Two days later, Cary’s own dad fired him from a plumbing job.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from February 17, 1984 daily journal): My whole world came crashing down on me today. I feel extreme, deep depression.

Dave Cawley: But deliverance was coming for Cary. A couple of months later he at last landed a job with the prospect of permanence: he hired on at Weber State College in Ogden to run the giant steam boilers that provided heat for all the buildings around campus. Working at Weber State put Cary Hartmann in contact with a cornucopia of co-eds. But it was an older woman, a staff member at the college, who caught his eye at the start of the ’84 fall semester. Her name was Jan.

Jan worked as a secretary in the college’s sociology department. She drove a Corvette. One day that September, she walked out to her car and found a note tucked under the windshield wiper. It said she had nice legs. Jan started receiving phone calls soon after from a man who described himself as her “secret admirer.” Jan was 46 at the time and a widow — her husband had died a few years prior — and the attention, frankly, flattered her.

The caller soon revealed himself to be Cary Hartmann, a man 10 years her junior. They began dating and Jan discovered her new boyfriend’s moods were unpredictable. Two weeks into their relationship, Cary reportedly told Jan a story about how he was being dragged to court by a plumbing supplier over an outstanding debt. She took pity and agreed to loan him $1,600. Only days later, Cary hit Jan up for another $1,600, saying he needed the money to put toward a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. He needed a truck with good tires, he said, to attend the wedding of a guy named Brent Morgan.

Brent Morgan: Well, he was a very good friend of mine.

Dave Cawley: Their parents had been friends going back to 1930s.

Brent Morgan: I’ve known him ever since, I mean if you go back to “who can you remember as your first friend” or your second friend or your third friend, that’s the way he would be.

Dave Cawley: Brent owned his own business, called Aspen Taxidermy.

Brent Morgan: That’s correct. I started in 1968. In fact my license is right here.

Dave Cawley: In ’79, Brent had purchased a lot in a new cabin subdivision just south of Causey Reservoir, a short distance from the Meadows Campground where Cary’d tried to meet Heidi Posnien years earlier. The place was called Causey Estates, and it’s going to play a major part in our story this season. For now, all you need to know about it is the cabins of Causey Estates were tucked into an isolated canyon called Skull Crack.

Brent Morgan: I mean, when we were building the cabin, I could spend a month and maybe not even hear anybody up close. They might be going up the top of Skull Crack but as far as over where I’m at, very few people.

Dave Cawley: There’s a place at the top of Skull Crack Canyon called Box Spring.

Brent Morgan: Yes, that’s correct. Right on the very top in the pines.

Dave Cawley: Brent chose to tie the knot at Box Spring on October 7^th, 1984. He invited about 50 of his closest friends and family to attend the wedding, Cary Hartmann among them.

Brent Morgan: And I’ll tell you it is a great view when you’re right up there on Righthand Fork and you’re looking out and nobody’s up there.

Dave Cawley: That’s because getting to Box Spring isn’t easy. Brent’s guests had to be waved through the gate at the entrance to Causey Estates, then bump their way up the dirt road to the top of the mountain.

Brent Morgan: I told everybody. I says “when you come, you’d better allow an hour to get up there. If you don’t allow an hour, you’re going to miss it.” Well, the gentleman that married me didn’t pay attention. He was 15 minutes late. (Laughs) ‘Cause he didn’t believe that it’d take an hour.

Dave Cawley: This is why Cary had told his girlfriend Jan he’d needed her money: to pay for a truck capable of getting up the mountain to Brent’s wedding. He ended up with a yellow, 1972 Chevy. It wasn’t what I’d call a pretty truck, the color landing somewhere between gold and mustard. But Cary spent a little extra on custom wheels and a noisy exhaust to make the truck his own. Brent told me he remembered the rumor going around back then was Cary was just using Jan for her money. But any time Cary’s friends tried to set him straight, he waved them off.

Brent Morgan: He says “you know I was gone for awhile.” I goes “yeah.” He says “I was in Vietnam. Well being in Vietnam, it did this and this and this to me.” He used that kind of as a crutch or an excuse.

Dave Cawley: Brent knew of Cary’s arrest in ’71. He also knew it’d resulted in no jail time.

Brent Morgan: There’s one thing I can tell you about Cary. He had two dispositions, or two people. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. He could be the nicest guy you ever wanted to meet and he’d do anything for you. But he also had that sinister side. So there was both sides to him.

Dave Cawley: How did you see the sinister side come out?

Brent Morgan: Well, it just, I mean it didn’t happen very often but it was, it was just, it wasn’t this nice guy and he just point-blank, and it’s like he had two personalities and if the bad guy did something, it’s like the good guy didn’t know it was happening.

Dave Cawley: Brent’s wedding on the mountain coincided with the opening weekend of the elk hunt in 1984. Many of his guests were elk hunters who’d had to make a difficult choice when asked to save the date.

Brent Morgan: But my good friends gave up their hunting to come and spend the day with me.

Dave Cawley: But this hadn’t been a conundrum for Cary.

Dave Cawley: Did you ever know Cary to be an elk hunter?

Brent Morgan: Not really, not really. I know he had a, a rifle ‘cause he hocked it. And he came to me and wanted me to loan him the money so he could get it out of hock.

Dave Cawley: Brent gave me a copy of a photo from his wedding. It shows Cary and his girlfriend Jan among the pines at Box Spring. Cary’s wearing a black shirt, brown pants, a leather belt stamped with his own name and an ivory-colored cowboy hat. After Christmas that year, Jan paid for the two of them to take a cruise to Mexico. She spent $2,500 on the vacation. Cary didn’t cover any of it. I don’t know what happened on that trip — Jan’s no longer alive, so I can’t ask her — but I know it broke her and I don’t mean financially. She wrote Cary letter in January of ’85, telling him they were through. She felt he’d used her. She’d made a mistake. She never wanted to see him again.

Jan would later tell a detective Cary’d showed up in her office on the Weber State campus a week later, acting like nothing was wrong. They’d stepped out into the hallway to talk. That’s when she said Cary grabbed her from behind and dragged her into a closet. She told him no. But he didn’t listen. Then, Cary allegedly forced himself on Jan, as she fought back. Jan didn’t report the assault, at least not right then. Years later, she would tell police she’d feared no one would believe her, since she and Cary had been dating. She’d felt too embarrassed, shamed and humiliated.

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Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann’s ex-girlfriend from the credit union, Pam Volk and her friend, Sheree Warren, had taken a vacation of their own to Hawaii around the same time as Jan and Cary’s Mexico cruise at the start of ’85.

Pam Volk: We went to both Maui and then we started on Oahu and then we went over to Maui.. At the time I was a drinker. We went to different bars every night and We went to a luau one night. But for the most part we pretty much just, like, laid on the beach and, y’know, watched people.

Dave Cawley: They spent a full two weeks on the islands. Sheree had the time to burn, because she’d just quit her position at the credit union where she’d worked with Pam. When she got back from vacation, Sheree was going to start a new position with a different credit union at a branch right next to the Weber State College campus.

Pam Volk: She was really really excited because I think she was going to like a manager training program. And that’s why she went up to that credit union is for the upward mobility. So I got the impression that she was pretty excited for that.

Dave Cawley: Pam and Sheree grew even closer as they spent time together in Hawaii.

Pam Volk: Yeah, we did. We had a lot in common. She, umm, I think she was still married to Chuck at the time.

Dave Cawley: Sheree hadn’t invited her husband Chuck Warren on this tropical getaway. Sheree and Chuck weren’t seeing much of each other by this point in ’85. They’d more or less separated again, still living in the same house but hardly talking to one another. But they’d made a deal: Chuck would watch their son while Sheree was on vacation, then she’d do the same for him when he took his own time off later that summer.

Pam Volk: It was really hard for her to leave her little boy, Adam.

Dave Cawley: Sheree’s son is a grown man now. I’ve had an opportunity to talk to him, and he doesn’t remember much about his mom. He’s also not interested in being in the spotlight, so you won’t hear from him in this podcast. Sheree’s siblings weren’t privy to a lot of her personal life during this time, either. Chuck Warren would later say he and Sheree had started seeing other people, but had agreed not to talk about it. So, Sheree Warren began to explore her independence. She’d been raised as a Latter-day Saint, by parents who placed great importance on their faith. Latter-day Saints are taught to abstain from alcohol. Sheree sought to define her own boundaries while in Hawaii.

Pam Volk: We’d gone to this bar and we got way too drunk. Umm not, we weren’t driving though so we were just walking and whatnot and then the next morning we woke up and it was probably about 10 or 10:30 and we’re like ‘we gotta get some food in us.’ So we walked to this cafe that had full breakfasts and we ate and Sheree promptly threw hers up because she just still had too much alcohol still in her stomach (laughs) and we decided this was not the day to go out and lay in the sun.

Dave Cawley: Do you know if that caused any friction with she and her family that she was drinking and things or did she try to keep it quiet or anything like that?

Pam Volk: I think she kind of kept that on the down low. She didn’t, y’know, advertise it or anything. Umm, but I, y’know I think her parents were pretty, pretty understanding.

Dave Cawley: Sheree was going to need her family’s support. She confided to Pam she intended to divorce her husband, Chuck Warren, soon after they returned to the mainland.

Pam Volk: And I don’t remember specifics. I just know that she wasn’t really very happy.

Dave Cawley: Sheree had Chuck served with divorce papers in May of ’85. She packed her things and left the house they’d shared.

Pam Volk: She’d moved into an apartment in Christoper Village and I’d go up and we’d hang out at her apartment and, and talk and stuff like that.

Dave Cawley: Something happened at the apartment not long after she filed for divorce. I’m not clear on what it was, I’m not sure if she even told her friends or family, but something spooked Sheree so bad she abandoned her lease and moved in with a cousin. She tried to find another apartment, but by the summer of ’85 was forced to move back in with her parents. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Sheree once again bumped into Cary Hartmann. They remembered having met before, when Cary was doing the HVAC work at the credit union where Pam and Sheree had worked in ’83. Sheree knew Cary and Pam had dated.

Pam Volk: And I had moved on and stuff and then he started dating Sheree.

Dave Cawley: But Sheree was still technically married.

Dave Cawley (to Pam Volk): Would it be safe to assume that she probably wasn’t, like, seriously dating him?

Pam Volk: Umm, yeah. I think that would be safe to assume that it wasn’t a serious thing. It was more just of a, kind of a fling, I guess.

Dave Cawley: A summer fling, with a man she knew very, very little about. A few months later, Sheree Warren would vanish.

Pam Volk: October 2^nd is the date of her disappearance and I’ll never forget that. Ever.

Dave Cawley: Not many people would think to look closely at the man she’d dated only briefly: Cary Hartmann. He appeared, at least outwardly, as an upstanding citizen. A veteran. A volunteer policeman. A blue-collar tradesman with a strong work ethic. Suspicion fell more readily on Sheree’s estranged husband, Chuck Warren, and for good reason. Chuck had skeletons of his own.

Pam Volk: I just thought, y’know, “I wonder if he, like, drove her across the desert?” I don’t, y’know, I hated my mind to go to places like that. But, umm, yeah. I kind of thought that he might have done something.

Dave Cawley: Police would come to learn Chuck Warren had a nickname, “Tire Iron Chuck,” rising from a brutal act of domestic violence in his past.

Pam Volk: I don’t know if I heard it from her or if I heard it as kind of just talk, but my understanding is that he came to the branch and he told her “if I can’t have you, nobody’s going to.” And that was shortly before she disappeared.

Dave Cawley: Sheree Warren had made some major changes in her life. In the spring of 1985 — at 25 years old — she’d filed for divorce from her husband, Charles Warren. Sheree had also quit her job and accepted a new, full-time gig with the Utah State Employees Credit Union.

Pam Volk: And now she was going to learn about a new credit union and get the opportunity to be in a management position. So she was really excited to be doing that.

Dave Cawley: That’s Sheree’s friend and former coworker, Pam Volk. We met her in the last episode.

Pam Volk: I think we just, I don’t know I guess we were just kind of kindred spirits.

Dave Cawley: Pam and Sheree had met while working at a different credit union a couple of years before. They’d both been married then, but by ’85, were back in the dating game. Sheree’d discovered she had no shortage of suitors.

Pam Volk: Yeah for sure, I mean y’know, young single guys come into the credit union all the time and, y’know, they would strike up a conversation with her and she’s very personable.

Dave Cawley: And pretty.

Pam Volk: She was taller than me, so probably about five-seven, very slim, dark hair, that she wore kind of curled back.

Dave Cawley: Sheree’s driver’s license listed her as 5-foot-5 and 115 pounds, with hazel eyes. I have a picture of Sheree from the summer of ’85. She sits against a black backdrop, wearing a bright red, scoop-neck blouse adorned with frills.

Pam Volk: She had very big eyes a beautiful smile.

Dave Cawley: In the picture, Sheree’s open-mouth smile reveals a chipped front tooth, one of those little imperfections that gives a person character.

Pam Volk: But she was, she was very attractive.

Dave Cawley: Sheree didn’t have a ton of free time for dating, between work and parenting. She had a three-year-old son, Adam, and caring for him was her top priority.

Pam Volk: That’s why when she disappeared it was like there’s, y’know, like they say about every mom, she wouldn’t leave her child. And she wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t have left Adam.

Dave Cawley: So, Pam and Sheree weren’t able to socialize quite as much together during that summer of ’85.

Pam Volk: We would sometimes go out out for drinks. We’d go shopping, we’d go to movies, umm, stuff like that when she didn’t have Adam, when Chuck had Adam.

Dave Cawley: Sheree and her estranged husband Charles Warren, or Chuck, were sharing custody. Pam told me Sheree hadn’t been one to trash talk her soon-to-be ex-husband, or anyone else, for that matter.

Pam Volk: And y’know, working with the public there’s a lot of mean things you can say about people. But I don’t remember her ever saying anything really mean about anybody. She was, overall she was just a really nice, kind, good person.

Dave Cawley: That’s not to say Sheree was a pushover. Her family and friends have told me she rarely backed down from a fight.

Pam Volk: She wasn’t a saint, but she was, she was awesome.

Dave Cawley: Sheree’s divorce had stalled by September of ’85. She and Chuck were at odds over child support. Sheree’s attorney was insisting Chuck pay more. Chuck worked as a clerk for the Southern Pacific Railroad in Ogden, Utah, on the graveyard shift. He often took their son, Adam during the day. Sheree would then pick Adam up after she finished her job in the afternoon and keep him overnight.

In the morning, Sheree would meet Chuck at a Denny’s restaurant near the I-15 freeway in Roy. He’d just be getting off his overnight shift. They’d chat over coffee, then Chuck would take their son for the day while Sheree went to work. And that’s how it went on the morning of of Wednesday, October 2^nd, 1985. Sheree pulled her car into the parking lot of that Denny’s a bit before 8.

Sheree and Chuck swapped custody. She said goodbye to her son, but before she could leave, Chuck asked her for a favor: he’d arranged to drop off his car for maintenance at a Toyota dealership 40 miles south in Salt Lake City, just a few blocks from the credit union office where Sheree was temporarily stationed for work. He asked if she’d be so kind as to pick him up at the dealership later that afternoon and give him a ride back home to Ogden. Sheree agreed. She and Chuck then parted ways. And Chuck Warren never saw his wife again. Or so he said.

This is Cold, season 3, episode 2: Go Ask Alice From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Sheree Warren arrived at the headquarters of the Utah Employees Credit Union in Salt Lake City on the morning of Wednesday, October 2^nd, 1985.  The office sat on the fringe of Salt Lake’s downtown business district, in a three-story building with attached two-level parking garage. Sheree pulled her maroon Toyota Corolla into a stall on the garage’s lower level and walked inside. It was her third day at the central office and her second day training a man named Richard Moss.

Richard Moss: This was her first experience training. She did know her stuff.

Dave Cawley: Richard lived in Richfield, a remote, rural town a few hours drive from Salt Lake in south-central Utah. He’d just hired on to run the credit union’s new branch there.

Richard Moss: We didn’t have computers back then. We had a mimeograph machine, y’know, a photo copy machine with mimeographs. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Sheree’s task was to bring Richard up to speed on the credit union’s state-of-the-art central computer system.

Richard Moss: And I’m not a very computer-literate person. Seems like you just get it down and then they get in and change it.

Dave Cawley: Richard had taken a roundabout path to the job of credit union manager. He’d spent a few years working for a bank in Salt Lake straight of college, in the mid-‘60s, but soon found himself lured back home to Richfield by his father. Richard’s dad was a cattleman who ran a large livestock auction. And he’d convinced his son to open a meatpacking plant.

Richard Moss: I came back here with the idea that I would build up the business. It was mostly custom processing.

Dave Cawley: But Richard soon realized meatpacking wasn’t his passion. By the early ‘80s, Richard found his way back to banking, taking a job with a private finance firm.

Richard Moss: When I went to work for Mortensen Finance, they didn’t have any computers.

Dave Cawley: The job didn’t provide health insurance or a pension. Richard had a wife and family to consider, so when opportunity knocked again, he answered.

Richard Moss: In 1985, the credit union put a wanted ad in the paper. They wanted to open an office and so I interviewed for the manager’s job and they hired me.

Dave Cawley: Richard needed a crash course on computer banking. So the credit union put him a training program with their new specialist, Sheree Warren, starting on Tuesday, October 1^st.

Richard Moss: She came from the Ogden branch. Was gonna spend, uh, two or three weeks there in Salt Lake training me as I recall.

Dave Cawley: Sheree was quite a bit younger than Richard, but had nearly as much experience in the banking industry. She started the training by having Richard enter numbers into a computer, over and over again.

Richard Moss: They gave us a stack of uh, deposits, checks. And we were entering those into the computer for each of the members’ accounts.

Dave Cawley: They didn’t chat much at first, because this work demanded concentration. But as time went on, Sheree began to open up to Richard.

Richard Moss: During those two days, she told me some things.

Dave Cawley: Sheree shared about her home life. She told Richard she had a three-year-old son, was divorcing her husband, and was temporarily living at home with her parents who often watched her little boy during the day. On their second day together — Wednesday, October 2^nd —  she’d stepped away at one point to call her mom, Mary Sorensen. Sheree later told Richard she was relieved because her mom told her a check she’d been waiting for had arrived in the mail. It was a refund for a deposit she’d made on an apartment, before deciding not to move in.

Richard invited Sheree to lunch with him at a restaurant called The Training Table that day. Over burgers and fries, she opened up even more about her personal life. Sheree told Richard her husband Chuck Warren liked to buy and sell cars as a side hustle. She said he’d gone through about 15 cars in just the handful of years they’d been married, leaving her frustrated over the financial mess.

Richard Moss: And her husband, 35 years old about, acts like a 19-year-old, gone through a lot of automobiles in the five years of marriage and I don’t even know what he did.

Dave Cawley: Even worse, Sheree related a story about how a few weeks earlier, Chuck had allegedly come into the Ogden branch where she was then working and made threatening comments over some sort of dispute related to their un-finalized divorce. Sheree told Richard she’d started seeing someone else while separated from Chuck that summer. This other guy worked for Weber State College and had two boys of his own.

Richard Moss: When she said she was seeing another guy, that startled me a little. Surprised me, I guess. Uh—

Dave Cawley (to Richard Moss): Why, why so?

Richard Moss: Uh well, because from my conversations, from my being with her, that just seemed like a little strange for her.

Dave Cawley: Richard’s surprise might have something to do with religion. He and Sheree were both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as Mormons. Marriage is a big deal for Latter-day Saints and there’s a lot of social pressure surrounding it, especially on women regarding traditional gender roles. Fully unpacking this dynamic would take far more time than we have. It’s enough to know Sheree’s candor showed she wasn’t afraid to be her true self, even if it ruffled Richard’s feathers.

Richard Moss: Everything I did with her was very professional. And the conversations were very free-going, I guess.

Dave Cawley: Mostly though, they just focused on business. They plowed through piles of deposit slips, typed in account numbers and double-checked the computer’s math.

Richard Moss: Work closed at 5:45 and you balanced and cleared up or, cleared up and, and then left by 6.

Dave Cawley: They ran into a problem on that Wednesday afternoon though. They couldn’t balance out because they had a check worth about $400 with no home. Sheree went down to the collections department to sort it out. The delay meant she and Richard didn’t wrap up until later than expected, around 6:25 p.m. The rest of the credit union staff had cleared out by the time Richard and Sheree walked out to the parking garage.

Richard Moss: She said that uh, she was going to meet her ex-husband at Wagstaff Toyota and give him a ride back to Ogden.

Dave Cawley: Richard’s car was off to the right, around the north end of the building. Sheree’s was to the left.

Richard Moss: I went that way and she went that way and never heard from again.

Dave Cawley: Wagstaff Toyota sat just three blocks from the credit union office. Richard, as it turned out, decided to stop by the dealership himself that evening.

Richard Moss: I have a brother-in-law who was a sales manager at Wagstaff Toyota. And uh, when, when I got off work I didn’t have anything to do and I went to Wagstaff Toyota to visit with Randy. And whether she ever got there, I, I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Richard told me he returned to work the next morning, expecting to continue his training with Sheree.

Richard Moss: And uh, she didn’t show up.

Dave Cawley: Sheree Warren had disappeared.

(Sound of door opening)

Dave Cawley: It’s a sunny morning in April of 2022 and I’m walking into the Roy City police department offices to meet with a former detective.

Dave Cawley (to receptionist): Hey, sorry. Snuck up on me there.

Receptionist: Oh, you’re ok.

Dave Cawley: Uh, I’m Dave Cawley from KSL. I was supposed to meet with Jack Bell here at 11.

Receptionist: Ok.

Dave Cawley: Jack Bell hasn’t worked for the Roy police department since 2009, when he retired as assistant chief, but he’s still known here.

Jack Bell: Is this the guy looking for me?

Receptionist: Yeah.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Uh huh. Scary, isn’t it?

Receptionist: Let me—

Jack Bell: (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: How you doing?

Jack Bell: Good, Dave. How are you?

Dave Cawley: Good. So uh, where can we sit? What do you think?

Dave Cawley: We find a quiet spot in what’s normally the jury room at the Roy City municipal court and settle in for what I’m sure will be an interesting conversation. I have a lot of questions for Jack about his work on the Sheree Warren case.

Jack Bell: This is a case that’s haunted me ever since and probably forever.

Dave Cawley: But before we get there, let’s spend a little more time getting to know Jack Bell. Jack’d started his career at the Weber County Sheriff’s Office in 1971.

Jack Bell: I was put in narcotics, very first. Knew nothing about law enforcement.

Dave Cawley: He took an undercover assignment, where he posed as a bartender at a place called the Hermitage Inn.

Jack Bell: And it was great because I hired on at $375 a month but working at the Herm, he paid me and I got to keep my tips.

Dave Cawley: The assignment involved buying marijuana and LSD from dealers, then passing their identities off to prosecutors for criminal charges. But Jack also had to be convincing by, y’know, tending the bar. So he came to recognize the regulars at “the Herm.”

Jack Bell: That’s where I seen Cary.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann.

Jack Bell: I never was friends with Cary, but we knew each other.

Dave Cawley: Jack and Cary had lived in the same neighborhood growing up. They’d been in the same grade at Bonneville High School, up until Jack’s junior year when his family had moved. I’ve dug up their old yearbook photos and I showed Cary’s to Jack.

Jack Bell: That looks very familiar. Of course everybody had that same hairdo when we was in—

Dave Cawley: Cary’s hair is short and brushed back in the picture, except for a floof that’s swept forward across his forehead. Man-bangs.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): (Laughs) Let’s see how yours looked.

Jack Bell: Oh, mine was a little different. That’s (laughs) ah.

Dave Cawley: Jack appears slim in his yearbook photo, with an angular jaw and piercing eyes.

Jack Bell: Yeah, I think that was sophomore picture.

Dave Cawley: You get the idea. Jack Bell and Cary Hartmann were once classmates.

Jack Bell: But I hadn’t seen or talked to him since I left Bonneville.

Dave Cawley: Jack excelled at the sheriff’s office, making sergeant within a few years. One night just before Christmas in ’78, Jack was giving a friend a ride home in his patrol car when he received a radio call. Two guys in a stolen pickup had opened fire on police officers in the city of Roy. Jack joined the chase, finding the stolen truck at the end of a dark country road in the county. The two men — who turned out to be career criminals recently released from the Leavenworth federal penitentiary in Kansas — began shooting at Jack and his passenger with high-powered rifles.

One of the bullets ricocheted, striking Jack’s friend in the chest. Jack returned fire with his sidearm, emptying the handgun, aiming toward the distant muzzle flashes. He thought he might’ve hit one of the gunmen in the leg before being forced to retreat. Jack’s friend ended up being ok, thankfully. Investigators later counted 37 bullet holes in Jack’s patrol car. The guy Jack’d shot that night ended up on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list, subject to a nationwide manhunt. Jack Bell had been in a gun battle with one of America’s most dangerous criminals and survived to tell the tale.

Jack Bell: It was a, not a good job for a family man, let’s put it that way.

Dave Cawley: Jack tried to make a change. He took a job as a trucker, but it didn’t stick. So, in 1984 he hired on as a detective for the Roy City Police Department. He’d been there just over a year when, around noon on Thursday October 3^rd, 1985, a report landed on his desk. A woman named Mary Sorensen had called Roy police dispatch to report her daughter Sheree Warren missing. Mary had actually called the police department the night before but a dispatcher then had told her she couldn’t file a report for someone who’d only been gone a few hours.

Jack Bell: Somebody had to be missing for 24 hours before they’d actually take the report.

Dave Cawley: It was actually worse than that. The dispatcher had told Sheree’s mom she couldn’t report her daughter missing until 48 hours had passed. But Mary Sorensen hadn’t accept that answer. She’d refused to wait getting back on the phone the next morning — on Thursday the 3^rd — explaining to a dispatcher why she thought the situation demanded immediate action.

Mary died in 2013. I wasn’t able to interview her for this podcast. So what comes next is pieced together from police reports and detective’s notes. Mary told Jack she’d last seen her daughter the prior morning, as Sheree was leaving their house in Roy with her son, headed for the Denny’s restaurant where she was supposed to hand the boy off to his father, Chuck Warren. Sheree had been wearing a red-and-white striped blouse, black slacks, and black high heels.

Mary knew Sheree had made it to work, because they’d talked on the phone a couple of times during the day. Sheree had called once around 11, asking if a check had come in the mail and they had talked again around 2. During one of those calls, Sheree’d told her mom her estranged husband Chuck had asked her to meet him at the dealership in Salt Lake when she got off work. Chuck’d said he’d bring their son, Adam. They could swap custody there, at the dealership. Sheree told her mom she’d agreed to do Chuck the favor, giving him a ride home to Ogden. It meant she and her son might be a little late getting home for dinner. But Sheree and Adam didn’t show up for dinner at all that night. Mary Sorensen didn’t know where either of them were.

That mystery had only deepened when, at around 8 p.m., Mary’d received a call from Sheree’s boyfriend, Cary Hartmann, wondering where she was. Mary said Cary’d told her Sheree had intended to meet up with him that night. This contradicted what Sheree had herself told her mom just hours earlier. And it’d seemed unusual to Mary, because Sheree didn’t often go out in the middle of the week. Cary had reportedly called Mary again later, around 10 or so, asking again if Sheree had made it home. Mary had told him no. And that’s when she’d first called Roy police to try and report her daughter missing.

Mary told police that following morning — Thursday, October 3^rd — she’d received a call from the credit union. They were trying to figure out why Sheree hadn’t shown up for work as scheduled. Detective Jack Bell looked over the information Mary’d provided. His mind immediately jumped to the old cliché.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Y’know, it’s always the, the husband, right? It’s always the—

Jack Bell: That’s looked at first.

Dave Cawley: Jack called the Southern Pacific rail yard in Ogden where Sheree’s estranged husband, Chuck Warren, worked. The staff there informed him Chuck had come in that morning but left early, at around 11:30.

Jack Bell: He had taken some time off.

Dave Cawley: Jack dialed Chuck’s home phone number. No one answered. So, he went to his car and drove to Chuck’s house, a two-story, orange brick home on Ogden’s east side, tucked against the foot of the Wasatch Mountains.

Jack Bell: Pretty nice place. And I’m sure he made pretty good money at the railroad. That was one of the better jobs at the time.

Dave Cawley: No one answered Jack’s knock at the door. He returned to his office, called Chuck’s number again and left a message on the machine instructing Chuck to call him as soon as possible. Jack then moved to the next name on his list: Cary Hartmann. He called Cary and asked him to come down to Roy police headquarters for a chat. Cary arrived around 2:45 p.m.

Jack Bell: Cary Hartmann come into my office to report her missing. And I said, basically, “I think we’re the wrong agency. You live in Ogden City was, she was living with you.” And he says “well, stayed with me sometimes but she was, uh, basically living with her mom in Roy.”

Dave Cawley: Cary seemed to encourage Jack to take the lead, even though Jack wasn’t sure he had jurisdiction. Cary leaned on the fact they were old acquaintances from high school.

Jack Bell: He started to tell me a few of the details about that she was in Salt Lake and training.

Dave Cawley: Jack’s notes from this conversation say Cary described his actions on the day Sheree disappeared like this: Sheree had left his apartment — not her parents’ house — around 7 a.m., telling him she wouldn’t be home until late.

Jack Bell: According to Cary, she said she was going to pick Chuck up right after work.

Dave Cawley: Then, Cary said Sheree had intended to take her son to her parents’ place.

Jack Bell: She was gonna come to his house up on 7^th street later that night. It’s actually a basement apartment.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d supposedly told Sheree he planned to stop off at a bar with a friend after he got off work at Weber State College that afternoon. Jack’s notes say Cary’d expected to meet up with Sheree after that.

Jack Bell: He was gonna meet Dave Moore at Sebastians for a drink or two and then come home and she was gonna be there.

Dave Cawley: We met Dave Moore in the last episode. He was Cary’s friend who owned the sewing machine repair shop, and who served in the Ogden police reserve with Cary. But here’s where our story gets messy, because I’m going to give you with three conflicting timelines about Cary Hartmann’s actions the night Sheree Warren disappeared: one from Cary, another from his friend Dave Moore and the third from Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen.

Cary told Jack Bell he’d gone to the bar after getting off work at Weber State College. He typically finished up there around 4 or 5 o’clock. Cary said Sheree had called and told him she wouldn’t be home until late, because she was going to pick up her husband from Wagstaff Toyota, then take her son to her parents’ place in Roy. Jack’s note say Cary’d expected to meet up with Sheree after that.

Jack Bell: His story was she never showed up.

Dave Cawley: But there’s an inconsistency here, because Cary worked two jobs. Most days, he went home from the college and showered before heading to his part-time job at a call center called NICE Corporation around 6. So did Cary go for a drink with his friend Dave Moore after getting home from Weber State, or did he go to his second job at the NICE Corporation, then go to the bar? It’s a three-hour difference. So, I asked Dave Moore to tell me what he remembered about that night.

Dave Moore: My store was about, oh just basically through the parking lot of Sebastian’s bar. And he came to the store, I closed at 6, he got there probably about 5, 5:30 and it was a week night so we went over and had a couple of beers. And I don’t recall the exact time that we left but uh, it was during the week, I was married and had small kids and my wife wouldn’t have put up with being out late.

Dave Cawley: By Dave’s recollection, Cary did not go to his second job the night Sheree disappeared. Dave also told me he didn’t remember hearing anything from Cary that night about Sheree.

Dave Moore: Had no idea that he was using me as a, uh, alibi.

Dave Cawley: Detective Jack Bell’s notes say Cary claimed he hadn’t realized Sheree was missing until the next morning, when he called Sheree’s mom and found out Sheree hadn’t made it home from work.

Jack Bell: And that’s when supposedly Cary got concerned.

Dave Cawley: But as we already heard, Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorenson, had said Cary’d called her twice on the night of Sheree’s disappearance — not the morning after — asking if she’d seen Sheree. Cary would later claim he’d gone to his second job before going to the bar, pushing his alibi later into the evening. But that’s contradicted by Dave Moore.

If you’re a little lost here, so was Jack Bell. He had Sheree’s mom telling him one thing and Cary Hartmann another. He missed these little inconsistencies in the moment.

Jack Bell: I missed quite a bit to start with because Cary wanted me to miss that and go after Chuck.

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Dave Cawley: Jack Bell wrote he was “finally” able to get ahold of Sheree Warren’s estranged husband Chuck Warren by phone at 5:10 p.m. on Thursday, October 3^rd, nearly 24 hours after Sheree’d last been seen leaving the credit union office. Chuck had at least one bit of good news: his and Sheree’s son, Adam, was still safely in his custody. But Chuck didn’t know why Sheree hadn’t come to get him. This didn’t make sense to Jack.

Jack Bell: None at all, because as fond as she was of her son.

Dave Cawley: Chuck showed little concern or urgency. He agreed to come and speak with Jack, but not right away. He promised to drop by Roy PD headquarters the next day, on Friday the 4^th. Chuck didn’t show up at Jack’s office until 3:30 p.m. They sat down and Jack asked Chuck to walk him through what’d happened two days prior, the day of Sheree’s disappearance. According to Jack’s notes, Chuck said he’d met Sheree at 7 a.m. that morning at the Denny’s restaurant in Roy to hand off their son. At that time, he’d asked if she would do him a favor later that afternoon.

Jack Bell: He had a Supra, Toyota Supra. Was supposedly gonna take the car down to Wagstaff’s Toyota, have it serviced and some work done on it. And Sheree was going to pick him up when she got off work. And pick up her son.

Dave Cawley: Chuck reportedly told Jack he’d then taken his son for breakfast, before dropping the boy off to be babysat. Then, Chuck had gone to see his ex-wife, Alice — the woman he’d been married to before Sheree — at her work.

Jack Bell: I know I was surprised to find out that he was back with his ex so soon after him and Sheree had split up.

Dave Cawley: Chuck said he and Alice had gone back to his house after lunch. At some point, Chuck had changed his mind about needing to bring the Supra down to the dealership in Salt Lake.

Jack Bell: According to Chuck, he called and canceled that appointment. And he supposedly called the office in Salt Lake where Sheree was taking her management training that he wasn’t coming.

Dave Cawley: Jack’s notes say Chuck claimed to have made this call to Sheree at 4:30 p.m. Jack would later confirm with the credit union’s switchboard operator Sheree had received a call around that time. Chuck had then told the detective he’d decided to go for a jog. He described running from his house in the northeastern corner of Ogden four miles to the heart of the city’s downtown, before turning around and walking another mile-and-a-half back toward home. He’d decided that was enough of this impromptu exercise, so he’d called his ex-wife-slash-girlfriend Alice and asked her to come pick him up. She did, at around 6:45, then the two of them spent the rest of the night together.

In the morning, he’d gone to work but left early and spent the day in downtown Ogden. He’d only realized Jack wanted to speak with him when he’d arrived home at 5 p.m. to find the detective’s message on his answering machine. Jack couldn’t seem to evoke much sympathy from Chuck for Sheree’s wellbeing.

Jack Bell: I was trying but he’s an introvert, basically. And I wasn’t getting very far with him.

Dave Cawley: Jack figured a spouse, even an estranged one, might express more concern for the plight of his child’s mother.

Jack Bell: He seemed just concerned about child support, how much he would have to pay.

Dave Cawley: Chuck handed off his and Sheree’s son to Sheree’s parents, either on Thursday night after talking to Jack, or by Friday morning at the latest.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): And they ended up with Adam for a little bit it seems like.

Jack Bell: Yes, they did. They had Adam at that time.

Dave Cawley: None of it seemed to add up for Jack, so he asked if Chuck would take a polygraph. Polygraphs, or lie detector tests, weren’t usually admissible as evidence in Utah’s criminal courts, even during the ‘80s. But they were a useful tool for investigators to apply pressure to suspects. According to Jack’s notes, Chuck said he’d think it over. That was not the answer Jack wanted to hear.

Jack Bell: He never cooperated hardly at all.

Dave Cawley: This stood in stark contrast to Cary Hartmann, who’d seemed almost too eager to help. Cary’d talked to Jack as if they were working the case together, as if Cary were himself just one of the cops. And as we’ll soon see, Cary was even willing to entertain more supernatural sources of information. But Jack had more reliable avenues to pursue while Chuck Warren mulled over the prospect of a polygraph. He made contact with the manager of the credit union branch where Sheree had worked prior to taking the new training gig in Salt Lake City. She told Jack of a confrontation that’d taken place at the branch a few weeks prior, when Chuck had come in and had a loud argument with Sheree over child support.

Jack talked to Pam Volk, Sheree’s friend and former coworker, who’d heard more or less the same story.

Pam Volk: I don’t know if I heard it from her, or if I heard it just kind of talk, he told her “if I can’t have you, nobody’s going to.” And that was shortly before she disappeared. And I mean, I’m not pointing the finger at him but it was, umm, it was like “oh ok, yeah, that’s not good.”

Dave Cawley: As I mentioned earlier, Sheree had even told a version of this story to Richard Moss, the man she’d spent two days training. Richard told me Sheree’s disappearance had thrown his training into disarray.

Richard Moss: (Sighs) Y’know, I think maybe for an hour or so we’re wondering “well, she should be here.” And that’s the way it went that day. They brought somebody else in and I spent some time with, things changed a little.

Dave Cawley: Richard was unaware of what was happening in Roy. He didn’t realize a missing persons investigation had kicked off until he received a phone call from Jack Bell.

Richard Moss: I got a call from a detective at some point and never met, you’re the first person I’ve ever talked to, y’know, eyeball to eyeball.

Dave Cawley: This caught me off guard when Richard said it to me. I’d driven a few hours to meet with him at his home in Richfield, apparently the first person in this nearly 40-year-old case to have done so. It’s a bit baffling to me no one bothered to interview Richard in person back in ’85, while he was living out of a Salt Lake City hotel room for his training. In any case, Richard told me he’d told detective Jack Bell on the phone about how he’d parted from Sheree in the parking lot behind the credit union office, after she’d told him she was headed to Wagstaff Toyota to pick up her estranged husband.

Richard Moss: And never gave it an, a thought ’til the next day when she doesn’t show up.

Dave Cawley: Jack told me Richard was a person of interest at this point, because his story and Chuck’s story didn’t line up. Remember, Chuck had claimed to have called Sheree at work around 4:30 to tell her he no longer needed a ride. But Richard said two hours later, Sheree had told him she was headed to the dealership.

Jack Bell: I don’t know whether Richard was hitting on her or whatever but as they rode down the elevator that night he asked her if she wanted to go to dinner. And she told Richard at that time that she had to go to Wagstaff Toyota, pick up her ex-husband.

Dave Cawley: Jack didn’t document this supposed dinner invitation in his notes. There’s no indication in the record Richard made a pass at Sheree. But it’s just odd Sheree would’ve told Richard she intended to pick up her estranged husband Chuck at the dealership if he’d managed to get through to her and cancel that rendezvous. It’s possible Sheree might’ve perceived a hypothetical invitation from Richard as something romantically-motivated. If so, she might’ve dodged by using the excuse of needing to pick up Chuck at the dealership.

Jack Bell: Right, exactly.

Dave Cawley: Jack tried to sort out whether Sheree ever made it to Wagstaff Toyota by speaking with staff at the dealership.

Jack Bell: There’s one guy thought she’d came down but wasn’t sure. But they knew that Chuck had called and canceled.

Dave Cawley: Jack had a mystery on his hands.

Jack Bell: The people at Wagstaff couldn’t tell me whether she came over or not.

Dave Cawley: Copies of Ogden’s daily newspaper, The Standard-Examiner, started hitting doorsteps as Jack Bell was concluding his interview with Chuck Warren. The afternoon edition on Friday, October 4^th, 1985 carried the first public report of Sheree Warren’s disappearance. The story quoted Jack as saying Sheree’s friends and family thought of her as level-headed, not someone who would run off without notice. The story noted Sheree’s car, a maroon 1984 Toyota Corolla, also remained unaccounted for. KSL-TV in Salt Lake picked up the story the following day.

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: The Standard-Examiner ran a follow-up story on Tuesday, October 8^th. It quoted Cary Hartmann, who told the reporter he thought highly of Jack Bell but feared the worst.

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 8, 1985 Standard-Examiner article): This is way beyond a missing person investigation. She is the most reliable and level-headed 25-year-old woman I’ve ever known.

Dave Cawley: That’s not Cary’s voice, but they are his words, read by a voice actor. Tips started to dribble in as a result of the news coverage. Cary wrote a note two days later, on October 10^th, that read:

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 10, 1985 personal notes): At 11:22, Jack Bell called and told me an anonymous female called and told him Chuck had taken a second mortgage. He paid off her car and got the title.

Dave Cawley: KSL-TV aired its first follow-up story a day later, on Friday, October 11^th.

Shelley Thomas (from October 11, 1985 KSL-TV archive): 25-year-old Sheree Warren of Roy disappeared nine days ago and today her family took the search into their own hands, offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to her return.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann paid a visit to Roy City police detective Jack Bell at his office at about four o’clock that same day. He brought a stack of fliers and told Jack he’d been handing them out around town.

Jack Bell: They were on yellow paper and it was a very good picture of Sheree.

Dave Cawley: Cary’d called in a favor to get the fliers printed for free. His former brother-in-law happened to run a printing shop.

Jack Bell: He had a whole box and he left some of ‘em here that we posted around.

Dave Cawley: Jack posted one of the fliers in a display case in the lobby of the Roy police headquarters. But the fliers weren’t the only thing Cary wanted to share with his old high school classmate, Jack Bell.

Jack Bell: He was telling me all about Chuck Warren and the divorce that they were going, uh, Sheree and Chuck were going through. And Cary said “the only thing that they are fighting over is child support and how much child custody was” over their little boy.

Dave Cawley: Jack made notes about this conversation.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): When he came in that time with those fliers, in your notes I read—

Jack Bell: Could you read my notes?

Dave Cawley: I could. Can you believe that?

Jack Bell: No, nobody else can. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Jack’s not joking, his handwriting is terrible. But not illegible. Most of the time. His notes say Cary described having heard tell of an argument between Sheree and Chuck a few weeks prior to her disappearance. It’d happened at the credit union branch where Sheree’d then been working. Chuck had come in and blown up, Cary said, over an attempt by Sheree’s attorney to increase the amount of child support Chuck had to pay. Jack had heard this story already, as have you. But for Jack, hearing it again from Cary seemed to lend him credibility.

Jack Bell: Cary was feeding me full of information about Chuck. And a lot of it seemed legitimate. The more I looked into it and I could see where could be getting that information from Sheree.

Dave Cawley: Cary reportedly said Chuck Warren had brothers who lived in Salt Lake, one of whom just happened to work for Wagstaff Toyota. There was something else. Cary reportedly told Jack one of his co-workers at Weber State College had had a dream about Sheree. In it, two men had driven Sheree into the mountains, broken her neck and tossed her off some cliffs. The coworker, according to Cary, had seen red rocks in the dream and believed the spot was near Big Rock Candy Mountain in south-central Utah. Which, as it happens, is not all that far from where Richard Moss lived in Richfield. Jack’s notes included one more potentially relevant detail. They read Cary “later told me that he was sure Sheree was wearing his black parka the day she disappeared.”

Jack Bell: If I wrote it down, he said that, y’know? If I wrote it down, then he said that.

Dave Cawley: Here’s why this matters. Sheree’s mom Mary Sorensen and Cary Hartmann had given conflicting accounts about where Sheree had spent the night prior to the day she disappeared. If Mary’s version was accurate, Cary would’ve had no way of knowing what Sheree was wearing that day. Unless Sheree had somehow ended up at Cary’s apartment after leaving work that evening.

Keith McCord (from October 11, 1985 KSL-TV archive): 25-year-old Sheree Warren was last seen in Salt Lake leaving the employees credit union where she works. Roy police have questioned 35 people since Warren’s disappearance nearly two weeks ago but no new evidence yet. Warren’s family is offering a five-thousand dollar reward into information on her whereabouts.

Dave Cawley: When Sheree Warren disappeared in October of 1985, police in Ogden, Utah were in the opening stages of an investigation into a string of home invasion rapes. Those’d started in ’84 and were happening across the city. Detectives were beginning to believe the attacks were the work of one man, who some were calling The Ogden City Rapist.

Jack Bell: We were all looking at the rape case a little bit ‘cause everybody knew a victim or two.

Dave Cawley: No one could say who the Ogden rapist was, and Jack Bell didn’t see any direct connection to his missing persons case.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): But you’ve got to look at that though, right?

Jack Bell: Right.

Dave Cawley: It’s on the table.

Jack Bell: Right. It’s on the table and…

Dave Cawley: …and at the same time, police in the suburb of South Ogden, just a bit to the east of where Sheree Warren lived in Roy, were hunting for another missing woman named Joyce Yost.

Jack Bell: What I listened to of your podcast on Joyce, was very professional.

Dave Cawley: The Joyce Yost case is covered in detail in season 2 of this podcast, but what you need to know here is Joyce’d been raped by a strange man and had then disappeared days before she was to testify at that man’s trial. Police believed she’d been murdered, but hadn’t found her body. And her suspected killer was out of jail, in the Ogden community, when Sheree Warren disappeared two months later. Jack Bell was aware of the Joyce Yost case, but wasn’t involved in the search.

Jack Bell: —other than at the start because she worked at our Elks.

Dave Cawley: Jack was keeping an open mind to all these possibilities surrounding Sheree Warren’s disappearance, but leads kept pushing him toward Chuck Warren. Case in point, he received a call from one tipster who said Chuck had once been violent with his first wife.

Jack Bell: Who, as the world turns, he was living with, Alice.

Dave Cawley: I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Chuck Warren had reunited with his first wife Alice after his second wife Sheree had filed for divorce.

Jack Bell: The more I got into Chuck, found out that when him and Alice had split, he’d beat her up pretty bad.

Dave Cawley: The story, as related to Jack, was that while Chuck and Alice were going through their divorce, Chuck had called Alice and said his car had broken down up the canyon. Alice had supposedly gone to help him, but when she’d arrived Chuck had struck her in the head with a tire iron. Alice didn’t report the alleged assault to police. Criminal charges were never filed against Chuck Warren. But Alice later told a detective investigating the Sheree Warren case she’d ended up in the hospital with a head wound that’d required stitches. In a formal report, Jack wrote the tire iron attack was “verified as having happened.”

Jack needed to take another crack at Charles Warren. He called Chuck on Monday, October 14^th and asked him to come back to Roy PD headquarters for a second interview. Chuck agreed. They again went through Chuck’s whereabouts the day of Sheree’s disappearance. Chuck told the same story as before: he’d canceled his plans to take the Supra to Wagstaff Toyota, had called Sheree to let her know he wasn’t going to Salt Lake and had then gone out for a jog. During their first interview, Jack had asked Chuck if he would take a polygraph. Chuck had seemed open to the idea. So, Jack asked again. This time, Chuck said no.

Jack Bell: I was surprised when he said he would take a polygraph. I wasn’t surprised when he backed out.

Dave Cawley: Jack had suspicion, not evidence. He believed Chuck might’ve killed Sheree. But it wasn’t enough to make an arrest. Chuck must have realized though he was the top suspect.

Jack Bell: ‘Cause I really got into Chuck.

Dave Cawley: The interview grew heated. Chuck, in so many words, said he was done talking to Jack. The next time he came around, it would have to be with a warrant. Jack responded that’s ok. He’d just go ask Alice instead. And that was it. The interview was over. Chuck Warren once again walked out of Roy police headquarters a free man.

Jack Bell: I didn’t have much to do with Chuck after that.

Dave Cawley: Jack immediately called Alice at the office where she worked in downtown Ogden. She agreed to talk with him on her lunch break. Jack didn’t wait. He went to his car and drove straight to meet her. Alice seemed open, at least at first. Jack’s notes say her account of the day Sheree Warren disappeared lined up with Chuck’s. She gave him an alibi.

Jack Bell: Alice says that night, that she disappeared, he was home with her all night.

Dave Cawley: But was Alice being honest? Jack intended to find out.

Jack Bell: Alice originally agreed to take a polygraph.

Dave Cawley: He scheduled an appointment with the polygraph examiner for two days later. In the meantime, Jack paid a visit to Sheree’s parents. He asked if she might’ve had reason to run, to leave without notice, to start a new life.

Jack Bell: They had no idea why she would disappear, why she would take off.

Dave Cawley: Ed and Mary Sorensen told Jack Sheree’s divorce had gone ok, with the exception of child support. The court had instructed Chuck to pay her $250 a month, but he’d only being sending $185. Jack’s notes say the Sorensens “did not really feel that Chuck would have done her any harm, but felt that anything was possible.”

Jack Bell: They weren’t very happy with Chuck, either. Y’know, they were, they weren’t defending Chuck, by any means.

Dave Cawley: The notes say Sheree’s parents described their soon-to-be-former son-in-law as a materialistic person and a man with a temper.

Jack Bell: Money was a big issue to Chuck. The Toyota Supra was Toyota’s fanciest car at the time, a sports car, so, those kind of things meant a lot to Chuck, I could tell.

Dave Cawley: Jack asked Sheree’s parents about her relationship with Cary Hartmann. His notes say Ed and Mary Sorensen didn’t know Cary well but thought of him as “friendly.” The talk of child support and Chuck Warren’s financial situation piqued Jack’s curiosity. He called Sheree’s credit union, to see if any transactions or withdrawals had been made since she’d disappeared. None had. Jack asked to be notified if that changed. Then, he received some bad news.

Jack Bell: I remember, I was so upset with myself when I got the radio call to come to the office and they told me to call Alice and she was not gonna take the polygraph.

Dave Cawley: Alice, the only person who could provide Chuck Warren an alibi for the night Sheree disappeared, was clamming up. But Jack didn’t intend to give up so easily. He drove to Alice’s work and made her boss drag her into his office. Jack’s notes say Alice confirmed she would not take the polygraph. He wrote “I then asked her why and she advised me that she and Chuck had talked it over and since neither one of them were guilty of anything nor had they any knowledge of what has happened to Sheree, they felt like they did not need to take any kind of test, nor did they want to discuss this case with me any further.”

Jack Bell: Whether he threatened her not to take it or what, I have no idea. I have no idea.

Dave Cawley: Alice never did talk to Jack Bell, but she did talk to me. Alice recently told me Chuck’d hired a lawyer after Sheree disappeared, and the lawyer’s the one who told them not to take the polygraphs. Alice and Chuck haven’t been together for decades. But Alice still maintains Chuck was at home, with her, the night of Sheree’s disappearance. Alice’s word is Chuck Warren’s only alibi.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Utah’s general season deer hunt in 1985 opened on Saturday, October 19^th.

Mark Scott (from October 18, 1985 KSL-TV archive): They’ve been lined up all day today at Ron’s Sporting Goods, picking up their last-minute hunting needs and of course, that all-important license. Why do you come here?

Man-on-the-street hunter (from October 18, 1985 KSL-TV archive): I like the country.

Dave Cawley: A couple of days later, on Monday the 21^st, Cary Hartmann received a phone call from one of his friends. He made a note about it, and I have a copy. Here’s what the note says:

John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 21, 1985 personal notes): Larry Lewis called at 5:30 p.m. … said a body had been found in central Utah today. I called Roy PD. Turned out to be not much info.

Dave Cawley: Larry Lewis worked as a TV news reporter for KSL in Salt Lake City. And full disclosure, I also work for KSL, but I started there years after Larry left the company. Larry had apparently called Cary on that October day in ’85 to tell him about a story assigned to another reporter that would be airing on KSL-TV later that same evening. Some deer hunters had come across human remains.

Robert Walz (from October 21, 1985 KSL-TV archive): The bones were found near Indianola, in southern Utah County where hunters noticed the partially buried skull.

Dave Cawley: The skull had a small hole, about as wide as a pinky finger, behind where the person’s right ear would’ve been. Investigators believed it might’ve been made by a bullet.

Robert Walz (from October 21, 1985 KSL-TV archive): Now are you suspecting foul play, or?

Gary Reed (from October 21, 1985 KSL-TV archive): Yeah, we will go on that assumption based on the location of the, of the hole in the skull. Umm, we’ll go on that assumption.

Dave Cawley: The hole suggested a possible murder. But if that was the case, who was the victim?

Gary Reed (from October 21, 1985 KSL-TV archive): All we have right now is speculation on our part as to age of the, of the bones and uh, like I say, there’s nothing we can really tell until we have some more from the medical examiner’s office.

Dave Cawley: The medical examiner’s office determined the bones were female, but believed they were hundreds of years old. They couldn’t say what’d made the hole. Investigators figured the remains were from an indigenous person’s burial site. Clearly not Sheree Warren. But those bones are still significant to the Sheree Warren case, because of what they revealed about Cary Hartmann: Cary was friends with KSL TV reporter Larry Lewis. And detective Jack Bell hadn’t known that at the time.

Jack Bell: It was before I knew.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): —so I’m like, for me, if I was friends with somebody who had their significant other disappear, two thoughts: one, I’ve got great access so I can do a story better than somebody else—

Jack Bell: Right.

Dave Cawley: —two, I have a conflict of interest—

Jack Bell: Right.

Dave Cawley: —so I should disclose that and—

Jack Bell: Right.

Dave Cawley: —let my bosses decide if I cover the story or not.

Jack Bell: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: I don’t know if that ever happened.

Jack Bell: Probably not.

Dave Cawley: We’ll dig into the ethical implications of Cary’s friendship with TV reporter Larry Lewis in future episodes. For now, I’ll just say the story of the hunters uncovering these bones, and Cary learning about it from his reporter friend, shows how good Cary was at extracting information from people. He did it to Jack Bell, too. Cary’d relied on the fact they’d gone to school together to get inside access to Jack’s investigation. He’d learned who Jack was talking to and what those people had said. Jack hadn’t realized at the time he was getting worked.

Jack Bell: Policemen aren’t perfect. We have to hire ‘em from the human race, y’know? (Laughs) And as hard as we try to do our job right and be as close to perfect as we can, we all screw up.

Dave Cawley: KSL TV reporter Larry Lewis didn’t personally cover the Sheree Warren case until a major break occurred six weeks into the investigation.

Shelley Thomas (from November 13, 1985 KSL-TV archive): Las Vegas police have turned up a possible clue in the mysterious disappearance of a 25-year-old Roy woman. A car belonging to Sheree Warren was found Monday in the parking lot of a hotel casino. Police are processing the vehicle now for possible leads in the case and our northern Utah correspondent Larry Lewis reports.

Larry Lewis (from November 13, 1985 KSL-TV archive): When Sheree Warren disappeared October 2^nd her friends and family believed then foul play was involved. They said Sheree wasn’t the type to run away, that she had everything to live for.

Dave Cawley: This next bit will sound familiar if you’ve listened to season 2 of this podcast. On Monday, November 11^th, 1985, security staff at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino on the southern end of the Las Vegas Strip contacted Las Vegas Metro Police to report a suspicious vehicle. They’d found a maroon, 1984 Toyota Corolla with Utah plates parked in a lot behind the casino, apparently abandoned. The car hadn’t moved in days. A Las Vegas detective ran the car’s license plate number against a national crime database and got a hit. It said the car belonged to a missing woman named Sheree Warren. Anyone who came across it should contact Roy police detective Jack Bell. A Las Vegas dispatcher called Jack that same afternoon to alert him of the discovery.

Jack Bell: It was kind of a shocker. Was it at Circus Circus parking lot?

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Aladdin.

Jack Bell: Aladdin. Yeah, that was a surprise. That opened, 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? Or did she drive it down herself and something happened to her? Which didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

Dave Cawley: Las Vegas Metro impounded the car and hauled it to a secure lot.

Jack Bell: I wanted to go down. My bosses — the assistant chief and the chief — wouldn’t let me go. I don’t know what I would’ve done but I wanted to go down and at least get some pictures.

Dave Cawley: The next morning, a Las Vegas Metro detective called Jack, so they could share information. He told Jack the car had been there for quite some time. Its wheels had sunken into the asphalt. Spiders had spun webs in the precious shade it provided from the desert sun.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): So are you, when you see that are you thinking that car went there probably right after she disappeared?

Jack Bell: Yes, I’m thinking it went down there the next day.

Dave Cawley: Las Vegas Metro couldn’t search the car without a warrant or permission from the registered owner, Charles Warren. Jack hadn’t talked to Chuck in a month. Their last meeting had not gone well. But to his surprise, Chuck signed his name to a consent form authorizing a search of Sheree’s car without any protest. Jack faxed the completed form to Las Vegas Metro Police, who began a detailed search of the car.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Do you remember what they found in that car?

Jack Bell: Not much, not much.

Dave Cawley: In the glovebox, the Las Vegas officers located Sheree’s check books, some receipts and bills, as well as two prescription slips: one in her name and one in the name of Cary Hartmann. In the trunk, they found a stroller, a woman’s shirt and a brown suit jacket, sheets for a water bed, fast food wrappers and some of Sheree’s office papers. There were no signs of blood, no indications of violence. The car’s passenger window had been rolled down when it was parked. Wind had at some point blown a thick coat of dust into the interior. It covered every surface, making it impossible to lift any finger prints from the dash or doors.

Jack Bell: Somebody knew what they were doing when they left it there.

Dave Cawley: They did find one partial set of prints, on the outside of the driver window. Las Vegas Metro assumed the prints were Sheree’s, but didn’t have anything to compare them to. Neither did Jack, for that matter. So he made a phone call to the FBI.

Jack Bell: And I think I just turned it over to the FBI’s office up here.

Dave Cawley: A special agent agreed to check the FBI’s identification files, to see if they had a copy of Sheree Warren’s fingerprints on record. They didn’t, meaning no one could say if the prints found on the car’s windows were Sheree’s or someone else’s. Word of the car’s discovery made it to the media. A TV station in Las Vegas filmed police going through the car. Meantime, KSL TV reporter Larry Lewis went to interview detective Jack Bell.

Larry Lewis (from November 13, 1985 KSL-TV archive): Investigators on the case have had no solid piece of information to go on. Today, that changed.

Jack Bell (from November 13, 1985 KSL-TV archive): It means that, uh, either she drove the car there herself or somebody stole the car from her, uh, abducted her and took the car there.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Interesting who the reporter was on that story, huh?

Jack Bell: Yeah, it was.

Dave Cawley: Jack did not at that time know Larry was a personal friend of Cary Hartmann’s.

Jack Bell: No. He didn’t let on, y’know, he didn’t let on.

Jack Bell (from November 13, 1985 KSL-TV archive): There was some indication in the asphalt that the car left imprints. So, uh, that would lead you to believe the car had probably been parked there when the weather was hotter.

Larry Lewis (from November 13, 1985 KSL-TV archive): Bell says the car’s discovery now broadens the investigation to include transients passing through Salt Lake. He says any evidence found in the car will be run through a crime lab with the hope of learning who drove it to Las Vegas. Larry Lewis, Eyewitness News.

Dave Cawley: This speculation about a transient possibly driving the car across state lines is what Jack had needed to convince the FBI to get involved.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): ‘Cause now you’ve got an interstate—

Jack Bell: Yeah, now it’s partially their jurisdiction.

Dave Cawley: But Jack suspected he’d already talked to the person who’d driven the car to Vegas, and it wasn’t a transient.

Jack Bell: Made me look a little bit again at Richard Moss because he lived halfway there.

Dave Cawley: Richard Moss, the last person known to’ve seen Sheree Warren alive. I asked Richard what he thought happened to Sheree after they parted ways outside the credit union office.

Richard Moss: Whether something bad happened, I do not know whether that occurred. But it was unusual from my experience in talking to her that day.

Dave Cawley (to Richard Moss): Do you remember what went through your mind when you heard the car was in Vegas?

Richard Moss: Surprised me, surprised me.

Dave Cawley: Why?

Richard Moss: Uh (laughs) why would that be in Vegas? I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Sheree had never mentioned anything to you about being a gambler, I take it.

Richard Moss: Mmnmm.

Dave Cawley: And that’s a long way from Wagstaff Toyota.

Richard Moss: (Laughs) Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: Detective Jack Bell briefly harbored suspicions about Richard Moss.

Jack Bell: But nothing come of that. Pretty upstanding citizen.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): So, you look at Richard, you don’t see anything there that jumps out at you.

Jack Bell: No, no.

Dave Cawley: Jack’s mind kept returning to Chuck Warren. In the weeks following the car’s discovery, Roy police would receive a tip from a credit union employee who claimed Chuck had taken out a cash advance in Salt Lake City the day Sheree was last seen. The tipster also said there’d been multiple charges on Chuck’s credit card in Nevada days before the car turned up behind the casino.

Jack Bell: Y’know, he coulda drove the car down and working for the railroad he had a train pass and could’ve rode the train back. But uh, there was no way to prove that. That’s one thing I was gonna ask Alice.

Dave Cawley: Chuck worked for the Southern Pacific, which didn’t operate a line between Ogden and Las Vegas. That route belonged to the competition: Union Pacific. In 1985, Amtrak offered once-daily passenger service between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City over Union Pacific’s rails. I’ve reviewed an Amtrak timetable from ’85 and it shows the outbound train departed Vegas at 9:05 p.m. and arrived in Salt Lake at 6:55 a.m. If someone had left Salt Lake in Sheree’s car immediately after she’d left work at 6:30 on the evening of October 2^nd and driven straight to Vegas, they wouldn’t have arrived until after that night’s Salt Lake-bound train had departed.

But it would’ve been simple, no big deal, for the person who took Sheree’s car to Vegas to fly back to Utah. The Aladdin was one of the closest casinos on the strip to McCarren Field, known today as Harry Reid International Airport. The lot where Aladdin staff found Sheree’s car sat just two-and-a-half miles from the airport terminal.

Western Airlines operated a major hub out of Salt Lake City. I found an old Western timetable for September and October of ’85 on eBay. It showed four daily departures between Vegas and Salt Lake, the earliest at 7:15 a.m. In other words, someone could’ve caught the first flight out of Vegas to Salt Lake on the morning of Thursday, October 3^rd and arrived in Utah around 9:30 a.m., hours before Sheree’s mom Mary Sorensen first made contact with Jack Bell to report her daughter missing. In the pre-9/11 world, a person could simply walk into the airport terminal the day of the flight, buy a ticket and go to the gate. The TSA didn’t exist. There were no kiosks where federal agents checked your ID. Airlines kept their own passenger lists, but there were no centralized databases.

Of course, Chuck Warren wasn’t the only person who might’ve taken Sheree’s car to Vegas. Only days after the car’s discovery, Jack received a tip from one of Sheree’s friends. She said Sheree’d been dating a man who belonged to an S&M sex cult. She didn’t know his name, but said Sheree was afraid of him. A day later, an Ogden police sergeant stopped by to see Jack. The sergeant said he’d heard Sheree’s boyfriend, Cary Hartmann, had engaged in group sex in the past. Jack began to wonder: just how much had Sheree known about her boyfriend? The Ogden police sergeant also told Jack he was aware Cary Hartmann had a history of domestic violence. Jack confirmed this by talking to one of Cary’s ex-wives.

Jack had two plausible suspects in Sheree’s disappearance, both with past allegations of violence against a romantic partner. Jack still leaned toward Chuck Warren, but a seed of doubt about Cary Hartmann was taking root in the back of his mind.

Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): Another thing you wrote on this is “from the very first day of Sheree’s disappearance, Cary spoke of Sheree past tense—”

Jack Bell: Past tense.

Dave Cawley: Jack didn’t yet know about Cary’s sordid past, starting with his attempt to lure Heidi Posnien up the canyon near Causey Reservoir, 14 years earlier. And Heidi, who we heard from at the start of our story, didn’t yet realize the young man who’d harassed and threatened her on the phone had only escalated in the time since.

Heidi Posnien: Well, he probably then wasn’t as involved yet, y’know? He probably was just at the beginning of some of his little tricks. That’s probably why he was so easy to catch. And that’s probably why I gave him a second chance, because, y’know I would’ve never thought he was gonna be the Ogden Rapist.

(Sound of light rain)

Dave Cawley: Standing at the top of Blowhole Hill, I can see storm cells sliding south across the Cedar Valley. Off to the west, the Tintic Mountains obscure my view of the Rush Valley. Beyond that, a sea of basin and range, stretching on across Utah and Nevada. It’s early March. Rain has already softened the ground. We’re eight miles off the pavement down a muddy, rutted dirt road.

Spencer Cannon: As you saw coming out here, there’s no fast way to get here. It takes the better part of an hour from Spanish Fork to get here. Anybody from anywhere in Utah County, the, the closest anybody would be in arrival time would be 35 to 40 minutes at the very best if somebody was coming from say Saratoga Springs or, or uh Goshen or Eureka or something like that.

Dave Cawley: If you’re not familiar with an of this geography, that’s okay. All you need to understand is we’re way off the beaten path, standing on the fringe of Utah’s West Desert next to a hole in the ground known as Nutty Putty Cave.

Spencer Cannon: The opening to the cave, it starts up on flat ground up here, flat rocky ground, and you go down into the ground about 15 feet and from there you have to go horizontal. And the only way to get through the first part of the opening, which is 10 or 15 feet long, is to either go flat on your back or flat on your stomach and just kind of move your way through carefully like that and then the cave opens up into some larger caverns.

Dave Cawley: West Valley City police case files indicate they received the first of many tips about Nutty Putty Cave on December 14^th, 2009, exactly one week after the date of Susan’s disappearance. People wondered if Josh might have disposed of Susan’s body not in a mine, but in the cave.

This is a bonus episode of Cold: Nutty Putty Cave. I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Before looking at the plausibility of the Nutty Putty Cave idea, we have to determine if Josh was even aware of the cave. I can tell you with 100-percent certainty that the answer is yes. Here’s why: while sifting through hundreds of Josh Powell’s digital files, I came across a scanned copy of a postcard. The front showed a picture the Heart of Timpanogos, a rock feature inside Utah’s Timpanogos Cave National Monument. The postcard had never been mailed. I could see the address lines on the back side were blank. 

There was no stamp or postmark. What made this postcard curious were two lines scribbled on the back in Josh’s handwriting. They read:

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from undated postcard): Nutty Putty Caves in Eureka (south of Spanish Fork). Hole in the ground with maze.

Dave Cawley: I don’t know when Josh wrote those words or why. The postcard wasn’t dated. But it proved he was at the least aware of Nutty Putty. In addition, West Valley police located a few small, thumbnail images on Josh Powell’s laptop computer, the one they seized with a search warrant the day after Susan’s disappearance. One showed the opening of Nutty Putty. A timestamp showed it had been accessed on December 4^th, three days before Susan’s disappearance.

Another showed a man named John Edward Jones who had died in Nutty Putty Cave the night before Thanksgiving. The timestamp for that photo showed it was accessed at 5:25 p.m. on December 6^th, about the same time Josh was looking at the weather and information about Ely, Nevada.

John Jones’ death in Nutty Putty was, along with the disappearance of Susan Powell, one of the biggest Utah news stories of 2009.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): Since Tuesday night, rescuers struggled against the unforgiving topography of Nutty Putty Cave.

Dave Cawley: John had grown up in Utah, attending Brigham Young University before leaving for medical school at the University of Virginia. He was 26 and in his second year there when he, his then pregnant wife and their 14-month-old daughter came to Utah to visit family over Thanksgiving.

John enjoyed spelunking.

Leon Jones (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): He’s been in caves. I got pictures of him at the bottom of the Bloomington Caves, in a tight spot.

Dave Cawley: He’d explored other caves for fun. So on the evening of Tuesday, November 24^th, 2009, he and several friends entered Nutty Putty to probe its narrow passageways. But, while wriggling through one narrow stretch at about 8:45 p.m., John became stuck. He couldn’t go forward. He couldn’t go backward. It took some time for other members of his party to discover his predicament and exit the cave, where they could call for help.

Spencer Cannon: Yeah, we got notified late at night. It was after 9 p.m. That’s not uncommon. That, that happens, but where it was, we knew right away that there were a certain set of challenges that we would have to defeat right from the very beginning. Y’know, ggetting here, getting any resources here that we needed to try and effect a rescue, so there’s a major concern there.

Dave Cawley: That’s Utah County Sheriff’s Sergeant Spencer Cannon. Nutty Putty’s remote location meant it took time just for the first responders to get to there, let alone begin the rescue.

The rescuers knew a thing or two about Nutty Putty. It had a troubled history. In fact, Nutty Putty had been closed for several years prior to 2009, due to some close calls.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): After those earlier incidents, authorities considered closing the cave, instead they’ve allowed a caving group to manage it.

Spencer Cannon: We had two rescues within about a week of each other about four years earlier. One was, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 7 hours long. The other one was about 11 hours long. Uh, it wasn’t the exact same spot. John was stuck quite a bit further in along the same route where the other two had been rescued from.

Dave Cawley: The sheriff’s office called out its volunteer search and rescue team.

Spencer Cannon: Our search and rescue team has a number of members who are experienced cavers and uh, we had experience rescuing people from this cave relatively recently prior to this incident. The good thing about it is that, uh, if there is any good thing about having experience here, is that we, we knew what we were facing. So we knew from the outset exactly what equipment had to be here, what resources had to be here.

Dave Cawley: They went right to work. The members of John’s group told the rescuers where they would find their pinned friend.

Spencer Cannon: He was originally described to have been in an area called Bob’s Push which is just near the Birth Canal area, uh, both restricted physical features inside the cave that are challenging, but uh, it’s where a lot of people want to go when they go in the cave. He was actually beyond that in an unnamed, really unexplored part of the cave that uh, as far as we know nobody had been to. We know now that uh, John had been there, but uh, we don’t know that anybody else ever had been there.

Dave Cawley: Any hope they might have had for a quick and easy rescue evaporated once they reached John’s location.

Eldon Packer (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): Where he is trapped he is on a bend, so there is no there is no way to really get a hold on him to be able to pull him directly straight back.

Dave Cawley: “Constricted” doesn’t begin to describe the narrow space.

Eldon Packer (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): We’ve never seen anything this technical, this tough to get in and get this person out.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): The Rescuers had to squeeze through narrow twisting passageways. John Jones’ feet were sticking out, his head down, his body completely plugging a narrow tunnel 10 to 14 inches wide.

Spencer Cannon: We were fully confident when we got here that, uh, we’d be able to effect the rescue. It’s what, it’s what our search and rescue volunteers do. They, they don’t uh, go someplace expecting to not have the kind of success they want and it took quite a few hours, even, even 15, 20 hours into it we were still confident that uh, we’d be able to get John rescued and out of there.

Dave Cawley: John had become stuck while angled downward about 70 or 80 degrees, with his arms under his chest. The rescuers could see little more than his ankles. Only the smallest members of the rescue team could even reach the spot.

Spencer Cannon: The areas where they were down in there, uh, sometimes you were making another turn before you even finished the other one that you just came through. And in confined areas like that, you had to have small people.

Dave Cawley: The rescuers worked through the night and into the next morning. Nothing they tried seemed to work. As they tugged at John, his rib cage caught on a lip of rock. It was as if he’d been ratcheted into place.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): State senator John Valentine has been a volunteer search and rescue worker for 30 years. He says the problem the rescuers could not overcome was a small lip of rock, at a critical bend in the narrow tunnel.

John Valentine (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): The lip basically captured the center part of his body, so as you pulled against it, you were pulling like against a fishhook.

Dave Cawley: John was able to communicate with his rescuers, but not see them. They kept up a constant dialogue with him, seeking to buoy his spirits. Meantime, his family waited, hour after hour outside the cave.

Leon Jones (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): John is an incredible young man. And as an old guy I look up to John, umm, and idolize him. He’s a great example to me.

Spencer Cannon: We let them know that he was talking, he was singing church songs. We let them know that we had set up a communication line so that he could talk to his wife, uh, I think he even talked to some other family members as well.

We had that communication line up, partly already in there for the, for the rescue operation, the volunteers that were conducting it.

Dave Cawley: Most media trucks couldn’t make the final climb up the rocky slope of Blowhole Hill, so Spencer met reporters partway down the side.

Spencer Cannon (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): Anytime you’re in a position where you don’t have control over when you come and go, it’s gonna have an effect on a person emotionally.

Spencer Cannon: We were doing the best we could to make sure the media and then along that with the public knew exactly what was going on.

Dave Cawley: The rescue effort continued straight through the day on Wednesday. At one point, the rescuers rigged up a pulley system along the walls of Nutty Putty. They made progress inching John back up over the lip. 

Rescuer (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): He’s free of the tightest spot where gravity was really working against him and he didn’t have any leverage. There’s still some more tight spots in the cave, actually I think we got him past all the hard spots now.

Dave Cawley: But a rope failed and when it did, John dropped back into the trap more tightly than before.

Spencer Cannon (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): We had him to a level spot where he wasn’t heading down hill with his head below his feet. Uh, during the course of that they have a raising system that uh, that was helping to hold him in position. Uh, one of the devices that is part of that system, uh, failed, uh, and uh, Mr. Jones actually ended up falling back into the area where he had been stuck for so long.

Dave Cawley: Best anyone could figure, John was about 125 feet below the surface. Pinpointing his position from above proved tricky. The place he was stuck was unmapped. Drilling to down to him might miss the mark entirely.

As Josh Powell was at Airgas that same afternoon, hounding employees about buying an oxyacetylene torch, exhausted search and rescuers were struggling with an unsolvable problem at Nutty Putty.

Spencer Cannon: I think that there were no options available that were not considered, even seriously considered.

Dave Cawley: Time and gravity conspired against them. John’s head-down position was precarious because it meant blood pooled in his head. His heart had to work extra hard to push that blood away from his brain. Consider it the cardiac equivalent of running a marathon while pinned in place. The strain, hour after hour, proved too much.

Eldon Packer (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): We were able to send some, one of our cavers in close enough to him that they were able to check him, determine that he did pass away.

Dave Cawley: John died just before midnight on November 25, 2009.

Spencer Cannon: Yeah it was 11:56 p.m. on Wednesday night just before Thanksgiving day.

Dave Cawley: His death came just over 27 hours from the point at which he’d first been stuck. Even then, the fatigued rescuers questioned how they would ever manage to free him.

Spencer Cannon: Once John had been declared dead, there were discussions about “How do we get him out?” There were some rather distasteful discussions as well, things that nobody really wanted to do but ultimately the decision was made that uh, it was too much risk for the rescuers to remain there in an effort to get him out and the decision was made to leave him in place.

Dave Cawley: Leaving John’s body in the cave presented some unique considerations. For one, what would keep anyone else from disturbing his final resting place?

Spencer Cannon: Those issues were part of the discussion and uh, if the decision was made that he would have to remain in the cave, uh it then becomes a sacred place for the families. We did not want it to be disturbed for, for John’s sake, for the sake of the families and their uh, peace of mind and to make it a place that they can come back with at least fond memories of John.

Dave Cawley: The effort to rescue John had made headlines across the country. Deputies knew some people would be drawn to the site like birds to a pile of seed.

Spencer Cannon: Initially there had been a gate down at the, at the main entrance to the cave. That stayed in place initially.

Dave Cawley: Could that gate alone protect John’s remains, forever? The cave sat on public land, owned by the state of Utah. The county sheriff floated the idea of closing the cave, permanently.

Spencer Cannon: Yeah, there were a number of uh, uh, entities that were brought into that discussion. There was the officials from the Schools and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, the sheriff’s office, caving enthusiasts here in Utah County and around Utah—

Dave Cawley: The grotto, right?

Spencer Cannon: —the grotto, grotto clubs, we took input from everybody in, in making the decision. John’s family was included in that discussion as well.

Dave Cawley: The idea met immediate resistance, including from the man who’d first discovered and named Nutty Putty in 1960.

Alex Cabrero (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): These cavers understand the tragedy but think the cave could’ve eventually been reopened.

Daniel Kimball (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): Just because of a tragedy, doesn’t mean you have to close it down.

Kyle Parker (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): I think we should have a say on whether or not. We understand the risks in what we are doing and it’s something that we really love to do.

Dave Cawley: Those arguments did not prove persuasive.

Trevor Bradford (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): I think it was kind of a rash decision for them to just close it all at once.

Dave Cawley: At the end of the week, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office made the call.

Alex Cabrero (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): 

The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration or SITLA which owns the lands said in a statement “while SITLA recognizes that some in the caving community disagree with this decision, SITLA believes that the consensus decision of the various government entities with responsibility for land management, public safety, and search and rescue to close the cave was the correct one.”

Dave Cawley: Nutty Putty would be sealed.

Spencer Cannon: Exactly how to do that was under discussion. What we ended up doing is our EOD folks, our bomb squad, went in. There was an opening not too far from where John was that kind of constricts the, it’s a constricture that you have to go through to where John is and they took a large amount explosives in there, placed them around that smaller opening, came out of the cave and then set that off and the idea was to cause all that rock to come down and close that part of the opening. That happened on the 1^st of December. Then uh, on the morning of the 2^nd of December, they had a load of concrete come out here — I believe it was about 30 yards — that was poured down into the main opening to give it as permanent of closure as you could get for it.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: You might be able to see where this going, but there’s a reason I came out to Nutty Putty myself to speak with Spencer Cannon about that tragedy, more than nine years later. The idea that Susan Powell might also be inside Nutty Putty Cave has persisted. It doesn’t work, for a few reasons.

Spencer Cannon: Susan was seen up until the 6th of December. The opening of, uh, Nutty Putty Cave was permanently closed with 30 yards of concrete and explosives on the 2^nd of December.

Dave Cawley: For the sake of argument, let’s say that wasn’t the case. I asked Spencer if he would ever attempt to take a low-clearance, front-wheel-drive minivan to the top of Blowhole Hill in December, in a snowstorm.

Spencer Cannon: Not in a hundred years. I, I, I would say it would be virtually impossible for a off-the-rack, off-the-showroom-floor minivan or passenger car to get up here. Even a small four-wheel-drive SUV would be very, very difficult. Something like a Nissan Rogue or a, even a Toyota 4Runner would have a hard time. Uh, something bigger — a full-size pickup truck or full-size SUV — it’s a challenge getting up here in those vehicles. But a passenger car or a minivan like that, it’s not going to happen.

Dave Cawley: Ok, but what if Josh parked at the bottom of the hill and pulled Susan’s body up the slope in a toboggan?

Spencer Cannon: From the place that you could conceivably get close to it to carry something up and hike up here, you’re better part of a half-mile at least and you still have to hike up another 200 or 300 feet in elevation to get to where the opening of the cave was.

Dave Cawley: Say he summoned Herculean strength to make that climb. Could he then have managed to get past the locked gate and push or pull Susan’s limp body through the narrow aperture of the cave’s mouth while flat on his stomach or back?

Spencer Cannon: That first part of it would be extremely challenging carrying something that is just a, a heavy mass over 100 pounds. Strongest of people would have a hard time doing it in that kind of a configuration. Yeah, anybody who’s been in this opening or been in the Nutty Putty Cave knows how difficult it is to get in there by yourself. To get in there with somebody else or something else, it’s just not reasonable, almost impossible to do given what it would take to haul weight in there that is completely unsupported.

Dave Cawley: Where there’s a will, there’s a way as they say, right? If Josh had somehow managed to defeat all of those obstacles, he would’ve had to do it while avoiding the notice of deputies who were parked just feet away.

Spencer Cannon: There are those, uh, smaller number, who might want to go inside and, and do something or collect something and so we had deputies here 24/7 from early on Thanksgiving morning until it was, uh, sealed on December 2nd with concrete and 24/7 we had somebody here.

Dave Cawley: After that, Josh would’ve had to chisel his way through solid concrete.

Dave Cawley: So what I’m understanding is in your mind, there is zero probability that Susan Powell is here.

Spencer Cannon: Zero probability.

Dave Cawley: Susan Powell cannot be in Nutty Putty Cave.

Dave Cawley: U.S. Marshal Derryl Spencer never expected the Susan Powell investigation to end up in his lap.

Derryl Spencer: I didn’t really suspect anything was gonna come of this. Umm y’know, it was quite a while from the time she went missing.

Dave Cawley: But about six months into the investigation, West Valley City police enlisted Derryl’s help. They were headed to Washington to surveil Josh Powell over Mother’s Day.

Derryl Spencer: In order for West Valley officers, y’know, to travel out of state and carry guns, they had to do it under the U.S. Marshals special deputization so I got involved in the case, uh, primarily as, as like the dad to take the team up there so that they can successfully operate.

Dave Cawley: That operation culminated in a consent search of Steve Powell’s South Hill home, which I described in episode 9 of Cold. But I didn’t explain exactly why Josh and Steve Powell agreed to let police into their home without a search warrant. Derryl Spencer was the reason.

The FBI’s mobile tracking order for Josh’s minivan had expired. The law required that the feds serve Josh with notice that they’d hidden a GPS device on his minivan. They also had to remove it.

Derryl Spencer: I had come up with the idea, y’know like, let, let me take it up there. I’ll knock on the door, we’ll see if he’ll answer the door and let’s tell him that, y’know, “hey I’m a U.S. Marshal and we’re trying to turn this into a missing persons investigation” instead of West Valley just coming after Steve Powell.

Dave Cawley: That’s just what Derryl did. Josh was suspicious.

Derryl Spencer: He starts yelling at me through the door, like “who is it?” And I said “I’m Derryl, I’m with the U.S. Marshals, y’know, can you come talk to me for a second.” He’s very hesitant to come to the door. Umm, immediately he’s like “are you a reporter?” And I just said “no, I’m not a reporter.” I had my creds out and I said “hey, if you’ll peek out the window I’ll show you my creds.” Like, I’m here for the right reasons. I said “I just, I just want to have a man-to-man conversation with you.” 

Reluctantly he did come to the door. He ate it up. He was like “yes, alright, c’mon, c’mon in.” So he invites me in the house. I tell him that I’m working very closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office out of the District of Utah. I make up some stories about how funding comes in about how I need to, to make sure that we’re being honest with each other. And I ask him for consent to search the house. And he, he, he doesn’t want to give it to me. He’s telling me that, uh, “y’know, I can’t really let you do that.” And I just said “Well you’ve, you’ve gotta meet me halfway. You need to show me that you’re willing to work with me.”

Dave Cawley: Josh and Steve argued about the idea, before finally calling Josh’s defense attorney, Scott Williams.

Derryl Spencer: I’m like “yeah, let’s give him a call!” And so Steve, no Josh calls him, gets him on the phone and just says “hey I’ve, I’ve got a U.S. Marshal in my house.” And I can, I can hear Scott, “tell him to leave right now.” Of course, what any, any defense attorney’s going to say.

Steve ends up on the phone, pulls the phone from Josh, ends up on the phone. He’s trying to control the situation. They’re kinda talking and I can tell that he’s talking Steve out of this, like, like I’m losing ground here. And so I’m just trying to be super calm and, and I said “would it make you feel better if I talked to him?” And so he’s like “yeah, you talk to him.”

So I get on the phone, umm, with the attorney and I’ll never forget, he tells me, he’s like “y’know what, if my client stole a candy bar, I would give you the same advice.” He’s like “you need to leave the house.” And I’m like “that sounds great,” I’m like “thank you, ok thank you.” And he’s like “Derryl,” like ‘cause he knows what I’m doing on the other side of the phone.

So I’m just trying to have them hear that this conversation’s going really well and he’s like “Derryl, you know that I cannot advise my clients to, I’m not going to tell them to give you consent.” And I’m like “that’s great.” I’m like “thank you so much.” And I said “well, we all know that it’s up to your client for the final word,” and I said “so I’ll just have direct communications with them and we’ll figure out the best way to do this.” And he’s like “Derryl—” I’m like “have a great day!” I’m like, “Feel free to call back if you need to talk to them again. And so I hang up the phone. I’m like “gentlemen, I think we’re good to go. I just need you to sign the consent form. (Laughs)” 

Dave Cawley: This is a bonus episode of Cold: Marshal Misdirection. I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad Break]

Dave Cawley: Derryl Spencer’s interactions with Josh and Steve Powell were good cop-bad cop on a grand scheme.

Derryl Spencer: I had told Steve and Josh, umm, that I had grabbed a bunch of U.S. Marshals and task force officers from the Seattle office. And so, when I really had a bunch of West Valley cops that were there. But I did not want them to know that. They hated West Valley, as you can imagine.

Umm, so I’m just like “look I just, I just grabbed a hodgepodge of, of Marshals and, and task force officers up here.” I said “they’re gonna help me so that we’re not here all day. It would take me, it would take me hours and hours.” I said “we just want to get this done.”

So we uh, I bring them in and I’m kinda just trying to hang out with Josh and Steve and keep them talking, keep ‘em comfortable. Umm, the task force officers, who were actually West Valley cops, come in and uh, y’know they start to search the house and everything. Umm, and they’re walking around and, and they’re badmouthing West Valley. Y’know and I’ve got a West Valley guy standing next to me and I’m just like “y’know, they are just the shadiest agency.” I said “as federal agents, we don’t even work with ‘em. We just, I understand where you’re coming from. And y’know, there’s just, we just have had the hardest time with them as well so I understand.” They were just eating it up. It was, it was hilarious. And uh, a very good friend of mine who’s a West Valley cop who I still hang out with every day, I’m, I’m just badmouthing West Valley right along with Josh and Steve and he looks at me and he’s just shaking his head. (Laughs) And I patted him on the back, I’m like “let’s get to work, Todd. C’mon.”

Dave Cawley: Derryl’s efforts to build a rapport with Josh and Steve bore immediate fruit. No sooner had the police left the house than Steve reached out.

Derryl Spencer: We finished and we got back together and we went to this little pizza joint just outside of Puyallup and Steve was already blowing up my phone with requests. And trying to like, help me out, give me ideas and stuff like this. And uh, he called me and I was, I was floored ‘cause we were eating dinner. I mean, I mean Josh is calling me already, it’s only been an hour.

Dave Cawley: Derryl had secured Josh’s permission to search the grounds of the Sarah Circle house in West Valley.

Derryl Spencer: And he calls me and he asks me if I can move some chairs for him while I was there. And I was like “sure, what do you, what do you need done?” And he had some chairs in one part of the back yard that he wanted moved into this shed. And I was like “ok, no problem.” So he’s, y’know, he’s already thinking we’re, we’re pretty good friends.

Dave Cawley: He used that friendship to look inside the shed, hoping to find any evidence.

Derryl Spencer: Y’know, we do an initial search and of course we’re looking for disturbed ground to see if maybe something would’ve been buried. Uh, we didn’t find anything at all interesting. Umm, but what I did find, in that shed up on a rafter up above, someone had etched with a knife, it said “here lies death.” Which was obviously somewhat concerning. I called the renters immediately and just said “hey, do you know this is here, do you know anything about this?” And she’s like “yeah, we’d seen it but it was here when we moved in.”

Nothing came of it. I don’t know why it was there. I don’t know who put it there. There was no, no, no empirical evidence that I could find that there was anything buried. There was nothing disturbed. Like, you could see the flooring in the shed. It looked very old.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: A bigger issue soon arose. Derryl’s involvement with the Powell case was a bit atypical. Marshals more often hunt down fugitives in far-flung location across the globe than investigate municipal missing persons cases. Derryl was juggling fugitive task force duties. He had traveled to St. Thomas in the U.S Virgin Islands to help take down a wanted drug cartel member.

Derryl Spencer: And while I’m getting ready to do this hit, Powell’s blowing up my phone. And I’m literally, like we’re getting ready to take down a cartel member (laughs) and I’ve got Powell blowing up my phone and I don’t want to miss these phone calls. And so I’ve got, y’know, the team lead that I work for on the SWAT team leader and I was like “hey, this is super important, I got to take this call.” And he’s like “hurry, we gotta go.”

Josh Powell (from May 24, 2010 voicemail to Derryl Spencer): This is Josh, I’m calling about that airbag problem.

Derryl Spencer: So, I end up talking with uh, with Powell and he’s extremely frustrated because he knows that we, that when the tracker was getting pulled that uh, we had, we had messed something up in the van and that he wanted me to fix it. And I said “well let me reach out, reach out to West Valley, we’ll see what we can do.” And he was, he was extremely upset by that.

(Sound of phone ringing)

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Uh, hello?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording):  Hey, Josh?

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Uh no, Josh, hello, who is calling?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): This is Derryl.

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh uh, Derryl, this uh, with the U.S. Marshals?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah, is Josh around?

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh yeah, he’s kinda in the middle of something, can I have him call you back maybe, or?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah, he’s got my number.

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Is this, is this about the airbag? He was wondering about that.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah, it is.

Dave Cawley: An airbag warning light had illuminated on the dashboard of Josh’s minivan.

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Does he need to call you back on that, or, ‘cause I, I could have him call you back in a, he probably would call you back in an hour or so maybe—

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Umm—

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): —is that fair Or is it just a message? ‘Cause I can give that to him.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah give it to him. Umm, I’m out of the country right now so my, it’s hard for me to get cell phone service, so—

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh, I understand. Yeah, that makes it really hard.

Derryl Spencer: I contacted West Valley, y’know “hey we should, we should resolve this issue.” And they just kind of laughed at me. And I was, y’know, it’s fine, I get it. Like, I, I get that we’re in this investigation. But you’ve got to give to get. You’ve got give to get. And I was like “we should fix this for him.” Number one, like, we got, we got Charlie and Braden he’s driving around with in this van. If there’s an issue, like we should fix this. Like, it’s the right thing to do.

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Hello.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Hi Josh, it’s Derryl.

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh, hey Derryl.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): How’s it going?

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh, it’s good.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Good.

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): What’s going on? Did, did I hear that they might be willing to do something about the airbag, or…?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh yeah, we’re going to get it fixed. Umm, it’s just going to take a few days, mostly because of the holiday weekend.

Dave Cawley: As Derryl saw it, the airbag issue was a way to build trust and to keep Josh talking. But he found himself standing alone on an island.

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Hey is Josh there?

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Oh yeah, this is.

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Hey Josh, it’s Derryl. How are you doing man?

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Oh hey, uh, good. How are you?

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Good.

Derryl Spencer: I felt like I was having more positive communications with Josh and Steve than I was with some of the attorneys on this case (laughs) and some of the other, uh, players involved. So, it was frustrating. 

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): So I have, uh, pretty good news, but probably not as good of news as you’d like to hear.

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Ok, what’s going on?

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Uh, they’re definitely going to fix the airbag, umm, but you have to fill out a claim. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much headache I’ve gone through trying to get this through. Umm, so first thing tomorrow morning—

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): What is, what is a claim? I mean, is that like a very difficult process?

Dave Cawley: Josh and Steve had good reason to keep up their end of the conversation. They wanted Derryl’s help prying Josh’s digital data free from the clutches of West Valley police.

Derryl Spencer: They were trying to kinda use me as a proxy. They wanted, they were, they, like “Derryl, Derryl’s our guy. Derryl’s gonna be able to get us what we want.” And the whole time they wanted those hard drives back. They wanted those computers.

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): I need to bring them up to Josh though because the, the way the whole thing worked is, normally West Valley just won’t give property like this to anyone. So they’ve kind of gone out on a limb.

Dave Cawley: Josh grew tired of the game in short order. That is when Steve stepped in.

Steve Powell (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): If you wanna, y’know if you’re in the area sometime and wanna get together, Josh is a little hesitant because of the situation he is in, but I’m not hesitant at all. 

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Ok.

Steve Powell (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Y’know, I mean, it’s up to you though, y’know, obviously, and it’s your call.

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Well to be honest with you, I’m extremely interested, and I would love to hear what you have to say.

Derryl Spencer: Steve soon became the proxy. He wanted to communicate with me instead of Josh. He wanted to be in charge of the communications. Which was fine. Steve was extremely fascinating to talk to. It was uh, yeah, it was, I always felt dark and like I needed shower after getting off the phone with him.

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Y’know, I could go look at the FBI stuff, but I’d rather start fresh. I’d rather sit down and talk with you and Josh. Really hear about what you guys think should be done and then we’ll start exploring those avenues. So—

Steve Powell (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): That’d be great. Yeah, we’d like to do that. I’d like to do that. Yeah.

Derryl Spencer: So he took over the phone calls. And when he didn’t like what I had to say and he didn’t like the direction of the conversation, he would defer to Alina and he would have Alina stonewall me.

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Hey, is Steve home?

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Umm, I’m sorry he’s not available right now.

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Well what—

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): (Unintelligible)

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): —what about Josh? This is, uh, Derryl with the Marshals. We met when I came up there a while ago.

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Sure. Umm, let me go see if Josh is available. 

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Ok. Thanks.

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): I’m sorry, I guess he’s not available either.

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Ok, umm—

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): I wasn’t sure.

Dave Cawley: During one call, Derryl told the Powells he had a trip planned to Seattle for some other business. He wanted to drop off a disc to Josh and maybe talk to Steve.

Derryl Spencer: And so he reluctantly agreed to, to have me come up. And I was like “I’m coming up anyway.” Which was not true. I was only going up there to meet him. I said “let’s just sit down and just, let’s just have this conversation.”

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Y’know, I understand if you guys are really trying to help, that’s wonderful, we appreciate it. It’s just hard for us as outsiders to tell, “ok are they really helping or is this another interrogation tactic?” Y’know what I mean? It’s like we don’t know if they’re, y’know, we just don’t know if you’re helping or not. So—

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Right.

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): But that’s good if you’ve got…

Derryl Spencer: The day before I was supposed to fly up there he had Alina call me and tell me that like if I wasn’t going to bring any of the computer stuff or any of the evidence or y’know any of these other items that were seized as evidence that, uh, he didn’t want to talk to me. And uh, at this point in time I had, y’know, I almost feel like I’m negotiating with the Powells at one level and then I’m also negotiating with West Valley. I’m like “we’ve got to give to get, gentlemen. C’mon, let’s work, let’s figure something out.” The most I could get West Valley to give me was a couple of family pictures on a CD. And I was like “ok.”

So when I called, Steve wanted to know what I was bringing. Like, I mean, I, I felt like, I felt like a pirate landing on the beach. I’m like, this is what we’re dealing with. Umm, so I just said “y’know I’ve got some family photos and some stuff like that.” And he’s like “well, we wanted computer stuff.” I’m like “I’m sorry, I just, this is, I’m working with West Valley.” And he basically tells me, he’s like “yeah, I’m not going to meet with you tomorrow.”

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): And, and don’t get me wrong, I understand where you guys are coming from. You have to be very selective because everyone you’ve delt with has been poking Josh on the forehead and I would hope by now Josh is starting to understand that, with me working with him on the airbag and with me, y’know, bringing photos up to him, I’m not going to ask him any questions, it’s not going to be like last time where we wanna go through the house. There’s nothing like that. 

Derryl Spencer: So Alina calls me back pretty late into the night and she’s like “ok, you can come up.” And I’m like “alright.” I’m like “well, can I talk to Josh or Steve?” And she’s like “no, they’re busy. They asked me to call you.” Meanwhile, I can hear these two having a conversation in their, y’know, their house was very small. And I’m like “well Alina,” I’m like “I can hear them talking behind you.” I said “I’m not sure why they’re, they’re using you to do the communications.” And I said “that’s fine. I like you.” And I said “You and I, you and I can, y’know, I’ll open up a dialogue up with you about any part of this any time you want.” And “y’know you can, you can talk to me whenever you want. You know that, right?” You can call me and stuff like that. She was like, she was pretty stonewalled. Umm, I mean, she was just doing what daddy said, told her to do.

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Dave Cawley: At the beginning of July 2010, Steve reserved a conference room at the South Hill Library, the same place he’d first met with West Valley detectives half a year earlier.

Derryl Spencer: We were supposed to meet at like 1 o’clock and then he, of course he’s got to be in charge of everything so he’s gotta, and I need to let him think he’s in charge of everything or he’s gonna start stonewalling me. And he starts dancing around the times. And then he wants to move it. Now he wants to move it, now he wants me to come earlier. And I just said “y’know,” I said “I’m just here relaxing.” I said “I’m just gonna go grab some food.” I said “just call me whenever you’re ready. I’m, I’ve got nothing going on the rest of the day.” So, (laughs), just play your game with yourself and let me know where we’re at. So when I told him that, y’know, him realizing that I was just “whatever, dude.” He’s like “alright, I’ll meet you there now.” (Laughs) Bravo Steve, well played.

Dave Cawley: Derryl wore a wire to that meeting.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): West Valley police department has been under a lot of scrutiny based on how they conducted themselves—

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —in, in totality.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): So, shortly before we came up and met with you last time, we were approached by the U.S. Attorney—

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Uh huh, yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —and we were asked to basically take a look at everything and report back to the U.S. Attorney’s Office what we thought.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah, ok.

Dave Cawley: Steve wanted to know if the Marshals were working for the Mormons.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Y’know, I’ve discussed it with family and everybody’s pretty suspicious of the Mormon church’s involvement in this and because, I mean frankly, they were very involved in my divorce and they were very, and they, and, and, most of the people that have been on the attack are Mormons here in this case too, so—

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Sure.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —it’s really a, they’re kind of a vicious attack group is what they are. And, and, y’know, that what they, even the bishop, y’know, my, my ex-wife, and my bishop too attacked me during my divorce and wrote things for the court and those kinds of things so I’m really suspicious but I’ll take your word for it.

Dave Cawley: Steve spoke in rapid-fire.

Derryl Spencer: I’m not sure if he took a breath the entire time. He had so much information. I let him, I, for the most part I just listened. I let him drive that interview. I, I didn’t really have to ask any questions. I mean, I did interject at some point here and there but it was like “uh, uh, uh, go on, it’s fine.”

Dave Cawley: Steve launched into the latest revision on his theory about Susan “absconding” with another missing person, Steven Koecher.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Susan left after Josh left and I don’t know if she left immediately but she probably didn’t wait too long. I’m guessing probably she waited a couple of hours to make sure Josh was long gone and I’m assuming that she and Koecher had some kind of a mutual friend or a contact there in West Valley City. That may be where they met or they could have met when she worked at Fidelity and he worked three blocks away at the, uh, at the Governor’s Office as an intern. So they, they could have met a number of places—

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Sure, yeah.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —all along the way. We don’t know, we don’t even know that they knew each other. We’re just assuming a lot of things. At least I am.

Dave Cawley: Steve claimed Susan and Koecher had gone first to California to get fake IDs.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): At least, at this point, my guess is, that she probably had some identities, two at least, maybe more, and uh, they wanted, they needed documentation, maybe driver’s licenses that didn’t have Utah on them, clearly. I mean, they’re not going to have a Utah driver’s license and look like they look. Y’know, I’m guessing that he probably stopped shaving on, on December 7th and he probably has a beard. These are guesses, obviously.

Derryl Spencer: The way he was telling me the story and the way he was telling me what happened was almost like he’d been rehearsing it for weeks.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): I think they both went to Sacramento and I think they, they were there, they got there the evening or the afternoon of the 8th and they were there on the 9^th. And on the 9th of December or on the 8th, I think they got married. So I’m saying, that’s my, that’s my conjecture. I think they went over there for documentation.

Derryl Spencer: And he was demanding that, like, I take a team of U.S. Marshals and almost get on a plane and let’s go to Brazil right now. And uh, y’know let’s, let’s put this together.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): I mean, to the best of your ability you, neither yourself or Josh, you don’t think Susan had a passport prior to her going missing?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording):  No, neither one of us know.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Josh never knew her at all apply to one, for it to be denied—

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): No—

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —or anything like that?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —no, never, no. No, it wouldn’t get denied. I mean, if she’d applied for passport under her name, she’s, she hasn’t done anything. She’s never, that I know of, but I mean I, no, I don’t think so. I think that we probably, I mean I suppose she could’ve committed a felony at some point, I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

Derryl Spencer: I’m just like “and I need, I need evidence.” I’m like “Brazil’s a big country. I mean that’s, I mean, this is a needle in a haystack.” I’m like “can you prove to me that they’re there? Show me.”

Dave Cawley: In the middle of the interview, Steve’ phone rang.

(Sound of phone ringing)

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Let me see if that’s Josh. Hang on. Hello?

Dave Cawley: It was Josh.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah, Josh. I’m here in this meeting with the Marshals here. What’s up? I’m at the library. Did you want to come and pick that thing up and sign for it or whatever? It’s just a CD, right?

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): What’s, what’s on that?

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): A bunch of family photos.

Dave Cawley: Police had terabytes of his digital data and Derryl had brought that single 700 megabyte CD?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Now is this something that, yeah because see we have all kinds of photos and this might be just stuff we already have anyway. So it’s like, y’know, Josh just feels like it’s a slap in the face. It’s an insult. You’re talking about 5 terabytes of data and they’re sending this over. Y’know, it’s just ridiculous.

Dave Cawley: Derryl redirected Steve back to the topic of Susan and Brazil.

Derryl Spencer: Show me. I said “I’m going to take this information and I’m gonna have to sell it to people who pay my bills to go places.” And I said “what you’ve given me right now is not enough.” I said “this just sounds like a story at this point in time.” And so he tried his best to prove to me that, y’know, those two, umm, were in a relationship, that they were having an affair for quite some time and that they were, y’know, they ran away, they got married and then they went down, y’know, to uh, went down to Brazil.

Dave Cawley: Steve was careful to avoid the topic of his own lust for Susan, until Derryl asked him about it.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Is it true that Susan was in love with you?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah. Yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): That’s true?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): That’s true.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Ok.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Y’know, girls fall in love with their high school teachers, y’know? They fall in love with their, y’know, it’s just a, it’s like an infatuation and that kind of a thing. So, that’s the truth, she was. And it didn’t really change.

Dave Cawley: Steve went on to claim, without any proof, that Susan had been suicidal, that she’d abused her sons and that she’d felt noncommittal about her religion.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Y’know, Susan had every Wednesday and Thursday off and uh, and she’s claimed that she was going to the temple frequently on those Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Derryl Spencer: Y’know, Susan would go do temple work during the week and he told me that Susan never actually went to do that, that she was meeting with, with, with this Steve character. Umm, so y’know, I just took that for what it was.

Dave Cawley: Derryl’s interview with Steve proved fruitless. In the days and weeks that followed, Derryl went to work attempting to disprove the theory that Susan’s disappearance was linked to the Steven Koecher case.

Derryl Spencer: I was never able to confirm that she had attempted to get a passport, let alone had a passport, even under a potential alias that she might have used. Kinda the same thing with Steve. Was never able to corroborate any passport information. I had also kind of flagged the names with the State Department. They had no record of, of her leaving or coming and going from the country in any way, shape or form. So that also helped in kinda dialing, y’know, possibly. So I also ran Steven Koecher’s. There’s no evidence that he had left the country either. So, I felt like one of those probably would have tripped up the system at some level to show that they left the country. There was no corroborating, no empirical evidence to connect Brazil to Susan’s location at that point in time.

Dave Cawley: Derryl also did his due diligence with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Derryl Spencer: They were helpful. But they, y’know, the church does not keep a written record of, of temple work. At that point in time they didn’t, they might do that now. But at that point in time, they did not document who actually came and did temple work that day. Umm, I think the individual temple collected that information but there was not a database that we could pull to, to get that information so we’ve kinda discredited that as well.

Dave Cawley: In the end, the entire exercise with Steve Powell served as nothing more than misdirection.

Derryl Spencer: He was doing his, I mean it’s obvious. His goals were to derail the investigation, to steer us as far away from possible what was really happening and what was going on, just to get us away from him so that they could, y’know, live in the uh, peaceful Puyallup home that they had created. But that was obvious.

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Dave Cawley: As the summer of 2010 stretched on, Derryl kept pushing his colleagues at the West Valley City police department to go hands-on with Josh.

Derryl Spencer: I mean, I run a fugitive task force. My, my role in the community is a little bit different than a regular cop’s. I’m not here to help you cross the street. I’m not here to help you change a flat tire. My sole purpose, umm, Congress funds my task force, for us to chase down violent fugitives. And you don’t do that by hugging and holding hands. It’s a, it’s an aggressive job and we hurt a lot of feelings in the process. But y’know, sometimes if you ask nicely, people will just lie to you and want you to go away. So you need to, you need to think outside the box. And that’s constantly what we’re trying to do. And so that’s what I brought to this investigation.“Let’s, ‘kay, we haven’t done this, let’s do this. Hey, let’s, let’s get crazy today. Let’s be aggressive on this case. What, what do you say?” And uh, y’know, it was, it was frustrating because a lot of times I felt like I would bring these, these ideas to the table and it would be like “ok, sounds good.”

Dave Cawley: Derryl’s involvement also started to raise eyebrows up the chain of command. He and detective Ellis Maxwell were at that point several months into their hunt for Summer the stripper.

Derryl Spencer: So we’re getting to that point where the Marshal Service is just like “what are we doing here? Why are we spending thousands and thousands of dollars to, to allow you to work this investigation? We’re flying you all over the country to do these things. We’re paying overtime to task force officers.” I mean, the Department of Justice and Marshal Service was, was dumping a lot of money into this investigation and at one point in time, a higher-up in the investigative branch, uh, reaches out to us and was like “What are you guys doing? If they’re not going to help you work this case, you’re done.” Like “we don’t go out and solve, y’know, crimes and put this together.” So the headquarters was starting to realize like, this is out of our scope. If they’re not going to be more proactive, we’re not going to allow you to do this any more.

Dave Cawley: At the start of November 2010, West Valley police went to Puyallup.

Derryl Spencer: Right before this happens, Marshal Service basically says “you’re done.”

Dave Cawley: The police planned to confront Josh and Steve about Susan’s childhood journals.

Derryl Spencer: This meeting needed to happen. Like, I couldn’t let it be. So, umm, nobody really knows this but I paid for my own ticket to go up there. I just, I, I, I thought if I pushed headquarters a little bit more, they were going to flat out be like “no Derryl, don’t go.” Umm, and I didn’t, it’s almost like “mom says no, I’ll go ask dad.” I just thought “well, how about I don’t ask mom or dad and I just handle it.” So I paid for my own ticket. Umm, I’m on my own dime. Uh, Ellis was already up there and I said “get a double room, I’m crashing with you.” So I went up there, he picked me up at the airport super late at night.

Dave Cawley: So, Derryl returned to the Powell house on November 16^th, 2010 with West Valley police Lieutenant Bill Merritt, who he introduced as a U.S. Marshall. 

Derryl Spencer: I felt pretty good about this interaction with the Powells, for a couple reasons. Number one, I’m back in the house and so I think things are moving forward and we’re, we’re, we’re still facilitating conversation which is good, right? And I’ll never forget, uh, Charlie and Braden, the boys, were playing at my feet. And, y’know, I have two sons and so this was like “we’ve gotta fix this.” Like, “we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta make this right.”

Dave Cawley: They talked with Josh and Steve for about an hour and a half, making the case that the Powell family should provide the Marshals with Susan’s childhood journals.

Derryl Spencer: It was the first time I had seen it, but Josh was starting, starting to stand up to Steve and question him on things and they started to bicker, like pretty, pretty aggressively. Like, almost like, borderline domestic. And I’m just sitting on the couch and I’m just like so happy this is happening and watching these two, two argue and fight. The negotiations ensued about this whole thing, like “well can we just get a copy of it?” And then, of course now Steve and Josh are trying to pretend like they’re too computer stupid to figure this whole thing out.

Dave Cawley: The Powells never did end up handing over Susan’s journals and Derryl found himself off the case for good after that. A little over a year later, Josh murdered his sons and took his own life. Steve Powell was, at the time, in the Pierce County Jail.

Derryl Spencer: They went and interviewed him at the jail and he wouldn’t talk to them and he said, uh, he told investigators “if that damn Marshal would have done what I told him, this never would have happened.” So y’know, even at this stage in the investigation and the relationship I’d developed with these two jokers, like they’re still, they’re blaming me for this. Uh, which is, has never really sat well with me, not that, not that neither one of those individuals depict how I feel throughout the day but it was, it was pretty dark to kinda, like these, these, these guys are blaming me for this type thing, like, like I didn’t do my job well enough to find Susan.

Dave Cawley: Derryl Spencer should not bear the blame for what happened to the boys, even though he wishes he could have prevented it. Ultimately, responsibility rests with Josh.

Derryl Spencer: I think people underestimated the darkness and the demons that were Josh and Steve.

Dave Cawley: Derryl, a Marine who served his country in combat and who’s spent his career as a Marshal dealing with violent, dangerous criminals, told me he had the Powells pegged from the get-go. 

Derryl Spencer: I picked up on it right away. I’m like, these, these two, there’s something going on here. There’s, there, this is not right. This is, I did not have a good feeling and I immediately knew that they were capable of making a woman disappear. I could tell. In my gut, in my heart like I knew, like that this, they were involved in this. No doubt about it.

Dave Cawley: And Derryl doubts Susan’s body will ever be found.

Derryl Spencer: There’s no doubt in my mind. Not one sliver of, he did this. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no question in my mind. I knew this throughout the course of the investigation, umm, and it was so frustrating because I, I felt like we had enough evidence. Let’s get this, let’s get him into custody, let’s solve this problem and let’s build, let’s finish building the case from there. We have mechanisms, legal, just, mechanisms that we can take him into custody and hold him in a facility while we finish this investigation and we can get a better control of it. And I just didn’t feel like the district attorney’s office was supportive of that. They, y’know, we would present facts and then “here’s where we’re at.” And, and they kept denying it. And they kept denying it, which was frustrating. I’m not surprised how this ended. I’m just not.