(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 1st, 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 3rd.
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.
[Ad break]
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 4th, 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 4th 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 6th, 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 10th, 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 21st 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 7th, 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 2nd 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.
