Author: Dave Cawley

Dave Cawley: Greg Roberts saw his mother everywhere. He’d spot cars on the highway that looked like Joyce’s Oldsmobile…

Greg Roberts: Big white Delta 88. Huge car.

Dave Cawley: …and catch himself doing double-takes at stoplights, hoping to see her behind the wheel. The conversations he’d had with his mom, after her rape, replayed over and over in his mind. He agonized about what she hadn’t told him.

Greg Roberts: I talked to her real regularly but in the meantime, y’know, I was at school and she didn’t want to effect my schooling and grades and things that were going on so…

Dave Cawley: A single thought haunted Greg: he had not been there to protect her. He didn’t share this pain with anyone, save perhaps his sister and father.

Mel Roberts: He holds a lot of it inside of him.

Dave Cawley: Mel Roberts told me Greg bore this burden, the sense of guilt, in private.

Mel Roberts: The only time we’ll ever talk about it is if we’re just together alone. We don’t talk about it much when other people are around.

Dave Cawley: Greg had finished dental school and, at the end of 1990, wrapped up his residency with the Georgetown University Medical Service in Washington, D.C. He’d achieved his childhood dream and become not just a dentist, but an oral surgeon. The person who would’ve been most proud of him, who would have celebrated his achievement more than anyone, was not there. Nearly six years had passed since Greg had first faced the question of whether or not to drop out of school and move home to help search for Joyce. Mel had urged him to hold fast.

Mel Roberts: I still think it was the right decision. … There wasn’t a thing he could do by being there.

Dave Cawley: Now, at the start of 1991, Greg confronted a new choice: where to go next. Mel had settled down in Texas and he seemed likely to stay there. Kim and aunt Dorothy were both in Utah. And Joyce was, well, Greg didn’t know. Much of what he then knew about his mother’s disappearance had come to him secondhand. This was, after all, the age before Google. If you even had internet access at home, you paid for it by the minute and it tied up your phone line.

For years, Kim had cut articles about her mom out of the local newspapers and mailed them across the country to Greg. She’d promised to keep him informed of every development. This tether kept tugging Greg back toward South Ogden, toward where he’d last seen his mom in the summer in 1984, waving goodbye as he’d pulled away from her in his overloaded Honda Accord.

The time had come for Greg to return home.

This is Cold, season 2, episode 7: Shameless. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley. Back after this quick break.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Colleen Bartell struggled to get through to Doug Lovell. She’d been working as a licensed clinical social worker at the Utah State Prison since 1979, the same year Doug had arrived there on an armed robbery conviction. But they hadn’t met until 1989, when Colleen was assigned to manage the Merit Two program at the prison’s special service dormitory, or SSD. That’s where Doug was living.

Many of the inmates enrolled in the Merit Two program were there to work through mild cognitive or behavioral issues and they demanded much of Colleen’s time. As a result, she didn’t interact with Doug much at first. She hadn’t been the one to admit Doug to program, either, but knew from his file the ostensible purpose for his presence was treatment for depression. She noted he seemed guarded. That began to change about six months into Colleen’s assignment at SSD, round about the time Doug’s wife Rhonda filed for divorce. Little by little, he started to talk. Colleen figured it had just taken time for Doug to suss out if he could trust her.

Doug told Colleen he’d been wrongly accused and convicted. He said hadn’t raped Joyce Yost. Colleen focused her efforts on helping Doug address this denial. She wanted him to understand his minimizations of his own actions were impediments to his progress in therapy.

She continued to observe Doug as the weeks and months went on. She noted he was high-functioning and stable, something she couldn’t say for all of the inmates at SSD. He was not violent. In fact, he often mediated disputes between prison staff and other inmates.

Perhaps the best example of this came in August of ’91, when Jeff Pratt — the lead corrections officer at SSD — had a dangerous accident. Jeff placed a letter about it in Doug’s jacket, or file. Here’s what it said.

Andy Farnsworth (as Jeff Pratt): Letter of appreciation for Doug Lovell, inmate number 14679. On August 11, 1991, at approximately 1712 hours in the supply room at SSD, a defective can of insecticide sprayed on me in the face and eyes, causing a burning sensation. At that point I was blinded and not sure of the direction out. Lovell grabbed my arm and led me to the bathroom speaking precise directions in a calm voice to get me there quickly. Once in the bathroom, Lovell got the water going and helped me flush my face and eyes … credit Lovell for preventing any serious harm or injury to me.

Dave Cawley: Colleen transferred out of SSD about that same time. She took over another program, doing group-oriented substance abuse counseling. Doug applied to join. This was interesting, considering Doug claimed not to be using at that time. In fact, he said he’d been off pills since first arriving at the prison in 1986. But now he wanted Colleen’s help in figuring out why he’d become addicted in the first place. It was either progress, or a ruse.

Colleen denied Doug’s application for group drug abuse counseling. Not because she didn’t think he was being honest, but because she didn’t have room. Yet.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: South Ogden police sergeant Terry Carpenter had spent the summer of ’91 working to verify information he’d received from Doug Lovell’s ex-wife, Rhonda. He also spent a lot of time transcribing — by hand — the audio recording from the wire Rhonda had worn into the Utah State Prison.

Dave Cawley: And I know the quality of the tape that first time around—

Terry Carpenter: Is horrible.

Dave Cawley: —pretty rough.

Terry Carpenter: But I laid on the floor of my living room with my stereo and would push backward and forward and play ‘em and my poor little wife would help me try to understand what they were saying.

Dave Cawley: A copy of that tape would later go through enhancement at FBI headquarters, but it didn’t help much. Still, Terry was able to make out enough. He’d heard Doug mentioned Tom Peters and Billy Jack, the two men Doug’d hired to kill Joyce. Terry had already talked to Tom once at the Utah State Prison, but dropped by to see him again on September 5, 1991.

Terry Carpenter: ‘Kay, we’re recording this now so…

Dave Cawley: And this time, he put their conversation on tape.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): How you doing?

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): Oh pretty good. How about you?

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): I’m doing, alright.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): (Laughs) You’re doing alright.

Dave Cawley: Listen close, because this audio comes from an old cassette tape and Tom’s voice isn’t always clear.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): You getting any flak over our last visit?

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): Uh, a little. There is some concern.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): Is that right? Did he talk to you about it?

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): Yeah. Well, I talked to him, actually.

Dave Cawley: Tom told Terry that on the day of his last visit to the prison, Doug had confronted Tom and asked what he’d told the detective.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): At first he said, yeah, he said, ‘Man, I don’t know how you can do this to me,’ you know? I said, ‘I didn’t do nothing to you,’ you know? I says, ‘Really Doug, I ain’t done nothing.’ He said, ‘But you did.’

Dave Cawley: Tom had insisted he hadn’t said anything. Doug hadn’t been convinced, because Terry Carpenter had known about his having paid people to have Joyce killed. In this next clip, Tom tells Terry that Doug’d told him “When he started telling me these things, I knew it had to be you.”

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): What he said, he said, ‘Man,’ he said, ‘When he started telling me these things I knew it had to be you ‘cause you was the only one that knew.’ And he said, ‘But then he told me about some guns.’

Dave Cawley: Terry had told Doug he knew about the stolen guns. Doug had never told Tom about the guns, which he’d swiped with someone else.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): He never mentions this other guy’s name?

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): No, he never mentions nobody’s name.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): If you heard it, would you remember it?

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): Maybe. If I heard a name. Yeah, I mean, yeah I would probably know a man if I heard it.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): Well what I’ve understood is that it was Billy Jack.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): Yep, That’s what he said. Yeah. He did mention it. That’s right. He did say Billy Jack. Now, I said, ‘I don’t even know Billy Jack.’

Dave Cawley: This discrepancy had caused Doug a little bit of doubt, giving Tom cover. Tom said Doug had also asked him during their talk if he’d ever visited his father’s cabin.

Terry Carpenter: I think he asks him three or four times. ‘You remember my dad’s property? You remember my dad’s property?’

Dave Cawley: Tom told Terry he’d never been up to the Lovell family cabin, but speculated maybe that’s where Doug had buried Joyce.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): Could it be up there? I don’t know.

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): That’s a good speculation.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): I’ve been places with him. I mean, umm, to waterfalls. But God, I don’t know if I would even remember. But I know he hunts. He’s a—

Terry Carpenter (from September, 1991 police recording): He loves to hunt.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): And he’s been all over the mountains.

Dave Cawley: Terry again told Tom he needed his help. Joyce deserved justice. Tom agreed and described what he’d felt when he’d first learned Joyce was missing.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): But I remember when we found out about her, and I remember the flyers that come across me, very, like a band on my chest, you know? Because he’s already raped her once and then to go again and there he is and now he’s going to kill her, you know? So I thought, ‘That poor woman,’ you know? Her nightmare. A nightmare on top of a nightmare.

Dave Cawley: “A nightmare on top of a nightmare.” Tom said he was willing to help. In exchange he wanted Terry to pull strings and get him assigned to an inmate firefighting crew. That way, Tom could serve out the rest of his sentence outside the prison fences. Life inside had grown uncomfortable. Tom said Doug had once come up behind him in the chow hall and kissed him on the top of the head.

Tom Peters (from September, 1991 police recording): But I know it gives me chills when he puts his hands on me from behind and kisses mean top of my forehead. That does not feel good.

Dave Cawley: Tom called it the kiss of death.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Greg Roberts’ return to South Ogden allowed him to take care of some unresolved business. He went to court at the end of September 1991, and asked to have his mother declared deceased. Greg had heard from a life insurance agent in the months after his mom’s disappearance. She’d had a $10,000 policy and had listed Greg as the beneficiary. The company wouldn’t pay out though while her status remained unresolved. The judge’s order declaring Joyce deceased changed that. The insurance company wrote a check for $13,000, with the extra money being interest that had accrued on the principal. Greg would have given up every single penny of it to have his mother back.

Greg Roberts: It just changed a lot of things.

Kim Salazar: And nothing’s ever been the same.

Dave Cawley: Kim, Greg and those closest to their family held a funeral. They gathered at Washington Heights Memorial Park cemetery and placed a headstone for Joyce. The ritual helped draw them together in their ongoing grief.

Kim Salazar: She didn’t have a negative bone in her body. She was never cross. She was never foul or nasty. She was happy, she was beautiful, she was, she was the whole package. She was just wrapped up with the most beautiful bow.

Dave Cawley: They shared memories, regaling Kim’s growing kids with stories of their grandmother.

Kim Salazar: And my oldest daughter’s really the only one that has any real memories of her … because the other two were younger.

Dave Cawley: But after it was over, Kim’s husband Randy said it felt somehow hollow. They all knew their trauma was open-ended.

Randy Salazar: I remember telling Kim, like on Memorial Day and Mother’s Day, ‘Do you want to go take some flowers over to your mom?’ ‘My mom ain’t there,’ she says, ‘that’s just a rock.’ She says ‘My mom’s not there.’ I said ‘But it’s a place,’ y’know? And she said ‘No, she is not. I want to go where my mom is.’

Dave Cawley: Kim believed Doug Lovell knew right where her mom was. But prosecutors had still had not charged him with Joyce’s murder.

Kim Salazar: He had two 15 year-to-life sentences that both had a minimum mandatory, so they knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

Dave Cawley: She didn’t know Doug had a plan to beat that sentence and win his freedom.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: While Greg was going to court in September of 1991, so was Doug’s appellate attorney, Robert Archuleta. He filed a motion asking a judge’s permission to review the confidential pre-sentence report a probation officer had prepared on Doug after his conviction in the rape case. Doug intended to challenge the legality of his 15-to-life sentence by arguing the pre-sentence report had included unsubstantiated claims he’d killed Joyce Yost.

Judge Rodney Page held a hearing on Archuleta’s motion and, at the start of October, granted permission for the attorney to review the pre-sentence report. A short time later, Archuleta withdrew as Doug’s attorney. Now, I can’t say for sure — because Archuleta is deceased — but it’s possible what he saw in the pre-sentence report made him re-evaluate his decision to represent Doug. In Archuleta’s absence, Doug turned to one of his co-workers at the prison’s sign shop for legal advice. His name was William Babbel.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): I’m one of the head inmate litigators of this place. I’m suing the department every other day.

Dave Cawley: William had discussed Doug’s case with him at length, even before Archuleta’s withdrawal. He’d been helping Doug draft what’s known as a writ of habeas corpus. For that purpose, Doug had provided William with transcripts from the rape trial.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): When I first started looking at his legal stuff he said that, y’know, it was a consensual thing and I said (tape blips) … and I’ve read your transcripts. I said, ‘I’m not stupid, I can see right through this. Y’know, you might try that dodge with these guys but (tape blips) you’re gonna have to come clean.’

Dave Cawley: William said Doug did come clean, at least as far as the rape was concerned. He admitted he’d kidnapped Joyce and sexually assaulted her. He was guilty of that. On December 18, 1991, Doug had come to work at the prison sign shop with a new legal request for William. He wanted to know if it was possible to force South Ogden police to give back the pictures they’d taken from Rhonda’s apartment the prior June.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): And I asked him, ‘Well, who’s the cop that’s got the pictures?’ And he said, ‘Carpenter.’ I says, ‘That same one that come and talk to you?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And I says, well,’ can’t remember exactly what it was that we were talking about that led up to that, but I says, ‘can he stick you with this?’ And he said, ‘There’s no way.’ He says, ‘When she disappeared from the O club, or when she left the O club and then when she disappeared, I was surrounded by eight witnesses. He can never stick this on me.’

Dave Cawley: William had heard enough. The following day, he phoned South Ogden police and asked to speak with Terry Carpenter. Terry didn’t know William, but he headed down to the prison and sat down with him for this candid conversation, which you’ve been hearing.

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): Umm, how did you know to call me?

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Because him using your name. ‘[Expletive] Carpenter, sonofabitch is bothering my wife again.’

Dave Cawley: William didn’t much care for Doug.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): I’m the inmate’s inmate but this guy’s dirty as hell and anything that he says that I think you can use, you’re going to get.

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): Okay.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Because he’s slime.

Dave Cawley: Strong words, coming a guy like William Babbel. William was serving time for a crime that bore startling similarity to Doug’s. Unlike Doug, William never made good on the threat to kill the woman he’d abducted and raped.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Y’know, I’m here on an ugly crime myself. It’s not anything like this. And it’s, y’know I’ve done my little stipend for the state and got myself straight and got away from all the dope and [expletive] and I really regret the things I did. Y’know, but I talk to this guy and just watching him, y’know, he’s pond scum.

Dave Cawley: William did not ask Terry for any favors, as Tom Peters had. He didn’t want a kind word to the parole board or a transfer to a different facility. He just wanted Doug out of the way.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): He has no conscience, he has no remorse, he has no moral values. This guy’s morally bankrupt. He’s slime. He just is. And I’ve read the transcripts and I’ve read his testimony and heard all his bull [expletive] and I’m absolutely convinced that he either arranged her murder or did it himself.

Dave Cawley: William was living in SSD undergoing sex offender treatment. He believed Doug didn’t belong in SSD. He said Doug should instead be housed in the prison’s Uinta facility — maximum security — a place for killers.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): And y’know, anything I can do to help you send him across the lawn to Uinta 2 to let him sit over there and rot, y’know, I’ll do.

Dave Cawley: Terry asked William about his conversations with Doug. Had Doug ever described how Joyce’d died? No. Had he ever disclosed where Joyce’s body was? No.  But William said Doug had possibly dropped clues.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): There’s something that sounds like her name that uh, he’d told Holthaus.

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): (Tape blips) Something that sounds like her name?

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Or yeah, a place where he’d gone hunting that has the same, uh, sound as Joyce Yost’s name.

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): There’s a prominent place where people hunt deer that’s called Yost, Utah.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Yost is a ghost town, in the far north-western corner of Utah, near the Idaho and Nevada borders. It’s near a mountain range called the Raft River Mountains, a popular spot for deer hunting. Doug had told detective Bill Holthaus he remembered Joyce’s last name because it was the same as the town of Yost. Bill had testified to that during the 1985 trial. William Babbel, it seemed, had done his homework.

Perhaps the most interesting story William had to share though, involved an encounter he said he’d had with Doug the prior May.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): He said that somebody had come out and talked to him about this Joyce Yost coming up missing and he was concerned that he was gonna be questioned on, uh, this Sheree Warren’s, uh, disappearance too.

Dave Cawley: Terry perked up at the mention of Sheree Warren, the missing woman from Roy, Utah who’d disappeared just a short time after Joyce and whose car had turned up in Las Vegas. Terry had a hunch Doug Lovell might’ve had a hand in Sheree Warren’s disappearance, though he couldn’t prove it.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Y’know, and other than that one conversation—

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): Is he involved in that, Bill?

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): I think he is. I think he knows about it. And he says, ‘Well, they’ll never, they’ll never stick me with that because Cary Hartmann is the one that’s gonna end up eating that one.

Dave Cawley: I’ve mentioned Cary Hartmann before. He was Sheree Warren’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance in October of ’85. But by this point in ’91, Hartmann was in prison for a series of rapes he’d committed.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): Hartmann’s conviction carries a maximum prison term of from 15 years to life. … He also faces trial on three other rape charges.

Dave Cawley: Cary hadn’t been charged and convicted until 1987, more than a year after Doug went away for assaulting Joyce.

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): How, why does he know so much about Sheree Warren?

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): I don’t know. And that, uh, really struck me hard because I knew, uh, I was in a therapy group with Cary Hartmann—

Dave Cawley: William said he’d heard Cary’s side of the story while they were both in that sex offender therapy group in SSD. Cary had since been moved to a far-flung county jail and as far as William knew, Doug and Cary never crossed paths. William suggested if Terry wanted to get Doug talking, he should get Joyce and Sheree’s names mentioned together on the news.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): (Tape blips) Even if you could get somebody to dummy up some stories somewhere in, in print, y’know. Investigation on Sheree Warren’s top of the list. Y’know, stick it in the Tribune, have somebody stick it in the Tribune where he’s gonna see it, y’know or—

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): Does he go over the paper real close?

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Every day. We get the paper in the shop every day.

Dave Cawley: William said there were recorders on the phones at the prison. If police claimed to have found a woman’s body in the mountains near Ogden, Doug would probably call out and have someone go check and see if Joyce was still where he had left her.

Terry Carpenter (from December, 1991 police recording): They tie me a little bit as far as legalities of deliberately purporting something that we know not to be accurate and uh, so I have some, y’know, I have problems with that. I, I don’t know if I could slide something there or not. I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Terry confided in William he was ready to serve Doug with capital homicide charges any day now. Prosecutors had given him the green light. William said now was the time. Anything police had on Doug, they should use as soon as possible.

William Babbel (from December, 1991 police recording): Something you might want to do is when you rock this guy, is request that Corrections, y’know because it’s a capital case and you don’t want him talking to anybody, is sequester him in max and monitor his phone calls and monitor his mail and monitor everybody he talks to. See, they can put him in max so he can’t talk to anybody.

Dave Cawley: Terry made note of the suggestion, thanked William for his time and went on his way.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: A series of news articles about the Joyce Yost case appeared in Utah newspapers on Friday, January 17, 1992. Stories also played on TV and radio, stating police were “reopening” their investigation into Joyce’s disappearance. The Associated Press quoted Terry Carpenter as saying “We have some new leads in the case but it isn’t appropriate for me to discuss them.” Joyce’s son, Greg Roberts, figured Terry was working an angle.

Greg Roberts: He’s always uh, playing mind games with Doug Lovell. I think he’s been good at it.

Dave Cawley: The following day, Terry met with Rhonda Buttars on the outskirts of the Utah State Prison. She’d agreed to once again wear a wire inside the fences. Terry had a couple of reasons for wanting a second go-round. Most important was getting Doug to disclose the location of Joyce’s body, something he had not done during the first wire recording the prior June. Rhonda intended to ask questions more specific to that point this time.

Audio quality was the second reason. The audio from the first wire recording had bordered on unintelligible, as you heard in the last episode. Playing that garbled recording for a jury was not likely to have the hoped-for impact.

In the months since the first wire recording, Terry had managed to scrounge up a better piece of equipment. A former colleague of his by the name of Glen Passey worked as a special agent for the U.S. Secret Service. Glen had access to legit spy gear, including a little recorder from a Swiss company called Nagra.

Glen Passey (from January 18, 1992 wire recording) Okay, you’re on. Are we running?

Dave Cawley: The Nagra unit was the Swiss watch of field audio recorders: tiny and precise.

Terry Carpenter (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): This is, ah, Rhonda Buttars, Glen Passey and Terry Carpenter. We’re all just preparing to enter the Utah State Prison. We’re currently at the Academy, which is just east of the prison, across the freeway.

Dave Cawley: The Nagra tape wasn’t exactly hi-fi but it was an improvement.

Terry Carpenter (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Rhonda’s gonna drive over and we’re gonna follow her in. See you in a minute.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Bye.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda hadn’t been out to visit Doug in months. As she prepared to drive over, Elton John and Boy George wailed their duet of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” over the car stereo.

(Music plays)

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Think it hears, gets that? (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: The jokes and nervous laughter, as well as the music, ended when Rhonda reached the prison gate.

(Music ends)

She walked inside, her heel clicks echoing through the austere corridors.

(Sound of Rhonda walking)

Dave Cawley: Familiar ground. Rhonda knew where to go.

Prison guard (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): You’re here to see?

Rhonda Buttars: (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Doug Lovell.

Dave Cawley: She headed into the crowded visiting area and waited for the staff to bring her ex-husband out to meet her.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Hi.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Hi.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): How you doing?

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): How you doing?

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Good.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): In a dress?

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Yeah.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): What’s up with that? (Laughs)

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Can’t I wear a dress?

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Yeah, I like it.

Dave Cawley: They moved to a table and sat down. Rhonda told Doug she felt nervous because it’d been awhile. He laughed. He wasn’t nervous at all. They swapped some small talk, bantering about Doug’s weight. He’d dropped from nearly 200 muscular pounds down to about 175, on a diet of rice and tuna. Rhonda said eating was her favorite hobby, or maybe sleeping. Doug said his was sex. At one point, he complimented the way her legs looked in her dress.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Boy, I always loved your thighs. Long legs, but with meat.

Dave Cawley: If you couldn’t make that out, he said “I always loved your thighs, long legs but with meat.” Doug also brought up another of his favorite hobbies: watching country music on TV.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): And ah, by the way, Garth Brooks last night? Was bitchin.

Dave Cawley: The prior evening, NBC had broadcast an hour-long special called “This is Garth Brooks.”

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): They interviewed his, ah, wife, Sandy last night. And she said he had long hair, beard, just, you know, ah, and you know when he sings, he’s not a stander, he runs around. He and this other guy broke a guitar, you know, and he jumped off in the audience and you thought, ‘God man, he’s crazy.’

Dave Cawley: What’d most caught Doug’s attention though was the country artist’s performance of a single song.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): He sang that song, Shameless.

Dave Cawley: Garth Brooks’ cover of the Billy Joel song “Shameless” had appeared on his third studio album. It’d become a chart-topping hit at the end of 1991. The song included a stanza that goes like this:

“I’m shameless, shameless as a man can be. You could make a total fool of me. I just wanted you to know that I’m shameless.”

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): So anyway, ah—

Dave Cawley: Doug turned to the topic of the newspaper article, the one stating South Ogden police were re-opening the Joyce Yost case. He asked Rhonda if she’d seen it. She said she had. Doug said he thought her phone was bugged.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): And I think that they surfaced this story out hoping that, that I would get on the phone and say, you know, something that might be, incriminate me.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Really?

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Yeah. Yeah, I do. I don’t think there is, no person.

Dave Cawley: By “no person,” Doug meant police couldn’t have any source for information about what’d actually happened to Joyce other than himself.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Well they say they have, possibly somebody that can lead them, ah, to the body. Ah, to the remains. Which, ah, you know, first off, ah, you know, they don’t even know if, if she’s even deceased, you know?

Dave Cawley: He speculated the only reason police were chattering to the media about Joyce now was his writ of habeas corpus.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I feel really good about my writ. Real good.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda questioned just how Doug was managing to afford all of the legal fees. He said the writ wasn’t going to cost him a dime. He’d fired his attorneys and was working with an inmate who knew the law.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I, ah, I fired both Cook and Archuleta.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): [Unintelligible]

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): And ah, I went with this inmate. He really knows his law work.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Who is it?

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): William Babble.

Dave Cawley: Ah, William Babble, the “inmate litigator” who worked with Doug at the prison sign shop. Doug felt confident in his ability to go pro se, or to represent himself. He’d done it before.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): It’s like, you know that thing up there, that poaching thing? Nobody could have represented us better than me, because I knew what had to be said. And I’m telling you, I’m this close to saying, ‘I don’t want an attorney. I’ll do this myself.’ Because he is going to be…

Dave Cawley: If Doug decided he did need an attorney, he said he’d just use appointed counsel. And even then, he would call the shots.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): This is another thing about my attorneys. When they give me an attorney, he is gonna speak for me. I’m not gonna listen to no more, ‘I don’t want to do this, or we’re not gonna do this.’ I’ll, I’ll stand up and I’ll fire him. I’ll say, ‘Your honor, he’s not doing what I want him to do and he does not have my special interests in mind. Therefore, I want him terminated.’ And we’ll start this all over.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Right.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Because John [expletive] me. John, he [expletive] me royal, you know?

Dave Cawley: By John, he meant John Hutchison, the attorney who’d defended him in the rape case. Hutchison’s actions — or lack thereof — during the 1985 trial were what Doug’s writ was all about. He contended Hutchison had made several errors that had prejudiced the jury. They included failing to object to the testimony of Sharon Gess, the woman Doug had gone to the Pier 3 to see on the night he first encountered Joyce.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Remember that Sharon Gess gal that got up and testified that she was being, ah, stalked around or something by a little red car? That was highly, highly, ah, that was a reversible error by itself, right there.

Dave Cawley: When Doug’s writ went before a judge, he said he wanted Rhonda to testify for him. She would say she had been driving his car — the red Mazda — and not him.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): You had my Mazda RX-7 for awhile, but not, I don’t think during the time that Sharon said that she was being followed. Ah—

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I can’t remember all that.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I, I know, I, I’m just, I know. I’ll go over all that with you but I’m just preparing you now for what’s coming up months down the road.

Dave Cawley: Doug wanted Rhonda to lie for him, under oath. The point of this was to undermine what Sharon Gess had testified to and suggest John Hutchison should have pursued this line of attack during the trial.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Sharon Gess testifying, ah, saying that she was, ah, stalked around by somebody that she didn’t even say she could identify. All she said was it was a little red car with flip-up lights. Well now, how controversial is that? I drive a little red car with flip-up lights. And she didn’t say, ah, so you know that tainted the jury. I mean, that really tainted the jury a lot. And it could have been a reversible error.

Dave Cawley: But because Hutchison hadn’t objected during the trial, the Utah Supreme Court had refused to even consider this issue on appeal. Doug hoped to get the court to address it with his writ. Doug went on a little tangent here, bringing up his 1978 trial for the armed robbery at the U-Save Market.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Do you remember when Sherrill and Hooker and I did that robbery?

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Yeah.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Can you remember that gal that got up and testified that she, that she, ah, identified me?

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Oh yeah.

Dave Cawley: He’s talking about Kellie, the 18-year-old U-Save Market clerk who’d bumped into Doug behind the store that night while the robbery was taking place. Remember, she’d told police she’d startled a man after spotting him ducked down by the rear bumper of what turned out to be the getaway car.

Kellie told me — and police records reflect — she had reported exchanging words with Doug.

Kellie Sherrod Farr: He actually, I said hello and so did he because I startled him and he startled me.

Dave Cawley: Kellie had testified to that at Doug’s robbery trial in ’78, helping secure his conviction. Now, in ’92, Doug told Rhonda Kellie had lied for the police, saying “she did not identify me, I know she didn’t.”

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I know, Rhonda, that she did not identify me. I know she didn’t. I never seen her. But I know that the police had her get up and say, ‘We know this,’ you know, ‘blah blah blah, if you could just identify this, it’s the only way we can link this guy,’ ‘cause she was really the only one that could put me there.

Dave Cawley: Kellie has never heard this wire recording. When we spoke, I told her what Doug had said and asked if there was any truth to it.

Kellie Sherrod Farr: The cops didn’t coach me on anything.

Dave Cawley: Kellie had seen Doug obscuring the license plate on the getaway car.

Kellie Sherrod Farr: ‘Cause he was behind the car, crouched down.

Dave Cawley: Judge for yourself which of these two people you believe.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): You know that’s bull[expletive] and I think it’s the same thing with Sharon Gess. For one thing, I don’t think she was ever, ever followed.

Dave Cawley: It seemed there was little Doug detested more than a woman who contradicted him. He told Rhonda Sharon Gess had also lied for the police, saying “I did hit up on Sharon where she worked, but I don’t think she was ever followed by anybody.”

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Ah, you know, I did hit up on Sharon at, at a, you know where she worked, where she was a waitress, but I don’t think she was ever, ever followed by anybody.

Dave Cawley: Doug’s writ appealing his sentence also attacked other bits of evidence, like the blue Arrow-brand shirt Joyce said he’d given her after the rape. Doug wanted Rhonda to tell a judge he’d never owned any shirts like that.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): But anyway, the shirt. The shirt that you’ll testify to? Ah, as soon as you see it, you’ll, you’ll, I mean, my lawyer will ask you, ‘Have you, have—’

Dave Cawley: It seemed like a lot for Rhonda to keep straight. Doug had anticipated this. He told her his buddy William Babbel drafted a statement on her behalf.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): So, I’ll send you the state—, you won’t have to fill out a statement. I know that will save you some work. This guy already filled everything out. All you gotta do is get it signed and date it and have it notarized.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda told Doug she hated going to court for him. Stories in the newspaper always led to people asking her uncomfortable questions.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): You know, I just heard from people saying, you know, ‘They have new evidence. What’s going on? Na na na.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’

Dave Cawley: Doug did show some sympathy here.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I do. I do know you’re going through a lot, Rhonda, I do. I, I mean every day, five days a week, I imagine the phone rings a lot.

Dave Cawley: Doug said when he got out, he wanted to take Rhonda and the kids and move, maybe to Canada. He intended to go straight and invest in ostrich farm. He apologized none of the money from his mom’s life insurance had materialized the way he’d promised.

But while Doug daydreamed of the pine-dappled mountain slopes and picturesque Pacific coast of British Columbia, Rhonda worried about more immediate concerns. She told him she feared being arrested.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Rhonda, I think if they ever talk to you again, or me, they’re gonna have a warrant. And it’s gonna be yours, mine’s gonna be capital homicide and yours is gonna be conspiracy to commit. … The reason they would arrest you or me because they’re certain in their minds that we had something to do with it. They’re, they’re, they don’t know whether I, I did it or I had somebody do it. But they’re certain. The weakest point that they can find is you.

Dave Cawley: Doug promised Rhonda the police didn’t have anything. No body, no evidence, no witness.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): Rhonda, I don’t see how they can have anybody that can lead them anywhere. I am the only one that knows where she’s at.

Dave Cawley: I know that’s tough to make out. But what Doug said is “I am the only one that knows where she’s at.”

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I told you that I would never tell anybody, remember? No matter what. And I, I haven’t. I’ve never told anybody.

Dave Cawley: As if to prove this point, Doug mentioned the anonymous caller who’d phoned police in 1987, claiming to have found a woman’s body in the mountains east of Ogden.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): They’re, the way they projected this was, ‘We think we know where the body of Joyce Yost remains are.’ I know that’s a lie. I am the only one. The only one. You don’t!

Dave Cawley: The conversation had veered into dangerous territory for Doug. Rhonda pushed him, asking if he’d ever revisited the site. Doug said yes, to better conceal the body and to retrieve Joyce’s watch. The watch he’d tried to pawn in Salt Lake City.

“You were with me,” he said.

It’s not clear to me now, listening to this muffled audio, if Doug meant you were with me at the pawn shop or you were with me when I revisited the body. Either interpretation could be valid.

Rhonda questioned if Doug still worried, the way he used to each deer hunting season, that someone might stumble across Joyce’s remains. Doug said no, because she was high in the mountains and seven years of leaves would keep her covered. The only time he’d worried was when that anonymous caller had claimed to have found a body.

Doug ran through a list of people who might have given information to police. Roy “DJ” Droddy, he said, was a snake. Billy Jack perhaps, because he had known about the stolen guns. But Doug said Billy Jack didn’t actually know he’d killed Joyce. Neither did Tom Peters, for that matter. Rhonda was the only one who knew. The only one who could get him convicted and executed.

Visiting time was coming to an end. As Rhonda prepared to leave, Doug started questioning when she would be back with the kids. He suggested they come down the very next weekend. They began to argue.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): It’s gotta be Doug’s plan. You are like that, you are.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda complained he was being pushy, controlling and manipulative.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): You manipulate, Lovell.

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I do. I do.

Rhonda Buttars (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): I mean, that’s probably the worst, being a manipulator, than, I mean even trying to be in control. That’s fine, I think I’m that way too. I mean, who doesn’t want their own way?

Doug Lovell (from January 18, 1992 wire recording): You can’t be in control unless you manipulate.

Dave Cawley: “You can’t be in control unless you manipulate.” Finally, Rhonda stood to leave. Doug told her he worried about her. If worse came to worse, he said, the police might arrest her. If they did, the detectives would claim to have all the evidence in the world. But Doug promised there was no way they could have anything after such a long time. He was wrong. Rhonda was carrying that evidence out of the prison with her on a tiny little Nagra tape deck.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The platen on Doug Lovell’s typewriter spun, bringing a clean sheet of white paper into place. He put his fingers to the keys, then began pecking out a message to his ex-wife.

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): Rhonda, this is the hardest letter that I think I’ve ever had to write.

Dave Cawley: It was Sunday, May 10, 1992.

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): I have tried in every way I know how to be nice and a friend to you and at the same time be the best father I can be to Alisha and Cody, considering where I am at.

Dave Cawley: Doug had reached his breaking point. The typewriter clattered as he rattled off a list of grievances.

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): I asked you to sign and send back some papers to me that you knew were very important to my case. You said you sent them and yet I never received them, so I sent you another copy and guess what, I never received that one either. I wonder why?

Dave Cawley: Procedural blunders weren’t his real reason for writing. The intent, it soon became apparent, was more personal. He accused Rhonda of cheating on him…

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): I accepted that and went on with my life. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for you. You want to continue to make it hard, why?

Dave Cawley: …a rather brazen point of contention coming from a man convicted of sexually assaulting a woman while he and Rhonda were still married. He had other gripes.

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): I have written or sent a card to the kids every week for 2 1/2 years now, missing only two. I have sent money, Christmas & Birthday presents to the kids. I have tried in vain to call and arrange visits with them, only to be disappointed time after time. … The kids don’t write me, according to you they don’t want to come down & see me, our conversations on the phone are so distant I hardly even know them.

Dave Cawley: Doug couldn’t comprehend why.

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): But I have no chance of having any kind of relationship with them as long as you remain to be the type of person you are. … For the life of me Rhonda I’ll never understand why you act the way you do. I have done nothing to deserve the way I have been treated by you, nor has my family.

Dave Cawley: Doug had spent the better part of the prior year worried his ex-wife would crack. He knew she was the strongest possible witness against him if police made good on their threat to charge him with the murder of Joyce Yost. Yet, Doug had also become frustrated with Rhonda. So, he said, they were done. No more visits. No more phone calls.

Richie Steadman (as Doug Lovell): This has been damned hard for me to write Rhonda but I won’t and can’t let you roller coaster my life anymore by using our children.

Dave Cawley: The roller coaster car that was Doug’s life was at that moment perched at the very top of a precipitous drop, primed for the fall.

Dave Cawley: South Ogden police sergeant Terry Carpenter drove into downtown Ogden on the afternoon of April 10, 1991. He headed to a building on Washington Boulevard, which housed the offices of the Utah Department of Social Services. The offices where Doug Lovell’s ex-wife Rhonda worked.

Terry Carpenter: Kind of out of the clear blue went into work one day … and said ‘Rhonda, y’know, let’s level with each other.’

Dave Cawley: Terry saying this came out of the “clear blue” was perhaps an oversimplification. So let’s back up just a step. Terry was at that time in the spring of ’91 pursuing a longshot lead in the Joyce Yost case. It centered on a claim Joyce had died at the hands of a satanic coven. This tip had come from a woman named Barbara, as I described in the last episode. In this next clip, you’ll hear Barbara say she knew a contract had been put out on Joyce by a guy named “Love.”

Barbara (from April 1991 police recording): I was told that she, that there had been a contract and that her name was Joyce Yost and that I shouldn’t tell anyone or it would be pretty serious trouble.

Dave Cawley: Terry had spent weeks trying to verify this. He’d scoured a gravel pit, searching for bones. He’d told Barbara her information was the most valuable and pressing available in the case. There were no other leads.

Terry Carpenter (from March, 1991 police recording): If I had other leads that were more valuable and more pressing, those would be the areas I’d be concentrating on. Do you think I would have set on this group that you’re involved with for the last several weeks if I had something better that I had to work on? I don’t. This is the most prominent thing that is here right now and it’s very realistic and it’s very feasible.

Dave Cawley: But in truth, the coven lead was fast turning into a dead-end. Which is part of what prompted Terry’s impromptu visit to Rhonda’s work.

Terry Carpenter: You talk to both of them hoping at some point they may cross or that there might be some ties there or that there might be some indication that yes, Barbara’s telling you the absolute truth.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda and Terry sat down in the office break room. She told Terry about her divorce. They reminisced about the time — five years earlier —  when Terry had taken Rhonda to jail on the poaching warrant. Her story of that poaching situation had evolved somewhat in the time since. She now told Terry Doug had gone up to Monte Cristo the night before their encounter with the wildlife officer and shot two deer. He’d wanted to retrieve the antlers, so he’d dragged her up there the next day for that purpose.

Rhonda insisted again, as she had before, she had no knowledge of what’d happened to Joyce Yost. Terry fixed her with a stare. Then, he said…

Terry Carpenter: ‘We know that Doug killed Joyce. We know that you’re involved. We know that you helped him, to some extent. And provided that you didn’t pull the trigger, we can get you immunity.’ And she says ‘oh, he didn’t shoot her. He just stomped on her throat.’ And then she went ‘oh,’ like ‘I really blew it.’

Dave Cawley: This was not at all the break Terry might’ve expected. He had sudden clarity. The story Barbara had told about the coven was in no way true.

Terry Carpenter: She thinks Joyce Yost was killed by her dad and the coven and just didn’t happen.

Dave Cawley: It didn’t happen because Doug had killed Joyce himself. Rhonda had kept that secret for years. It’d gnawed at her. Ever since her divorce, she’d considered coming forward. But how could she do that without ending up in prison herself?

Terry Carpenter: And she almost immediately started to cry. And I says, ‘Rhonda, we can help you.’

Dave Cawley: Terry repeated his promise. He would do everything he could to secure immunity.

Terry Carpenter: And so we talked, and we talked and we talked and she got 2,000 pounds off of her chest.

Dave Cawley: Terry’s breakthrough with Rhonda had not come by way of intimidation, technology or clever tactics. It’d simply resulted from his offer of empathy and her willingness to trust.

Terry Carpenter: She’s (sighs) I mean, she’s, y’know I’ve interviewed hundreds of people and know she’s cleaning her soul. She’s telling me what the truth is.

Dave Cawley: That was no small step on Rhonda’s part. She knew what Doug’d done to the last woman who’d crossed him. Terry promised not to let that happen again.

This is Cold, season 2, episode 6: Here We Are. From KSL Podcasts, I’ve Dave Cawley. We’ll be right back.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Terry Carpenter had knocked the frost off the cold case of Joyce Yost’s disappearance. He took his breakthrough to the Weber County Attorney the day after his meeting with Rhonda Buttars.

Terry Carpenter: They’re excited. They’re finally willing to say we’ve got enough evidence now to go forward. But they still have to prove it.

Dave Cawley: That was complicated by the fact Rhonda and Doug had been husband and wife at the time of the Joyce’s murder. Utah law provided Rhonda spousal privilege, which meant…

Terry Carpenter: We can’t compel her to testify. She has to do that of her own free will.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda I should mention, did not respond to an interview request for this podcast. Neither did her children. But Rhonda showed her free will by meeting with Terry again on the evening of May 1, 1991, for an on-the-record interview.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Has anyone pressured you into doing this, Rhonda?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): No.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Have I made any threats against you?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): No.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Or promises to you, except the immunity?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): No promises except immunity.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Okay.

Dave Cawley: They went step-by-step through the events of the night Joyce Yost died. Rhonda described driving Doug over to Joyce’s apartment in her blue Pontiac 1000 hatchback sometime between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Her daughter Alisha, then four years old, had been in the back seat, asleep.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Can you tell me why you dropped him off?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): ‘Cause his intentions were he was going to break in Joyce’s apartment to kill her.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): ‘Kay. Did he tell you that?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Yes.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): You knew that that’s what he had planned to do.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Yes.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda said she and Doug had been there before. She’d taken her husband by Joyce’s apartment at least twice during the summer of ’85. He’d discovered the broken lock on window during one of those visits. On the night of the murder, Rhonda said she’d driven east on 40^th Street to the intersection with Evelyn Road. She’d flipped around and come to a stop about 350 feet up the street from Joyce’s apartment. Doug had popped open the passenger door and stepped out into the dark, telling Rhonda he would call her later. So, Rhonda went home. She put Alisha to bed, then went to sleep herself. Her phone rang hours later. Rhonda said it was probably sometime between 4 and 5 a.m. She answered. It was Doug. He told her he was “in the canyon.”

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): ‘Kay. Is that what he told you? ‘I’m in the canyon.’

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Mmmhmm.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): You remember that?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Yes. Because he said, ‘I’m in the canyon and by the time you get to the Wilshire,’ you know, ‘I’ll be there. We’ll probably meet there at the same time.’ And he said ‘I want you to follow me so I can ditch the car.’

Dave Cawley: The Wilshire Theater was a three-screen movie house, a kind of old community landmark in South Ogden, right on the main drag of Harrison Boulevard. The Wilshire was only two miles away from Doug and Rhonda’s apartment.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): But, okay, and then like I got dressed. Got my little girl, put her in the car and went to the Wilshire and he was already at the Wilshire, in the parking lot waitin’ for me. And so I pulled up to him—

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): What was he driving?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Joyce’s car.

Dave Cawley: Doug had a nylon stocking pulled over his hair and was wearing gloves.

“What took you so long,” he asked. “I beat you here and I came clear from the canyon.”

Doug ordered Rhonda to follow him. He started east, through a quiet neighborhood at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, headed up the hill. Rhonda followed the red glow of taillights up Combe Road to Melanie Lane. The street climbed until it could go up no more. They were at the edge of the city. Nothing above it but mountain: 4,000 vertical feet of scrub oak and scree.

Rhonda parked her car and waited while Doug steered Joyce’s car off of the asphalt onto a dirt track that disappeared into the brush. The track, out of sight of the road, climbed up to a squat water tank.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): He drove up by the water tower and I stayed on the road and waited for him to come down.

Dave Cawley: A car went past, leaving Rhonda to wonder what she’d say if anyone stopped to ask her what she was doing there. But that car didn’t stop. When Doug returned, he was on foot and carrying a large blue suitcase. He stuffed that into the back of the Pontiac before settling into the passenger seat. He instructed Rhonda to head back down to Highway 89 and go south. Rhonda noted her husband seemed a little nervous, but not much, considering what he’d just done. And yes, he told her the story as she drove.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): He said he broke in the apartment and she was laying on her bed and she was asleep. And it was, I think he said the TV was on and a light was on. It was like she fell asleep watching TV and he said he had a knife with him and when he and went to reach over to grab her by the mouth, so she wouldn’t scream that he cut her hand. And so, umm, he said he got her up and he was, umm, washing her hand and trying to get all the evidence and the blood and everything, so no one would know that she had been bleeding.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda said Doug had made Joyce strip the sheets after wrapping her hand. When he’d tried to mop up the blood on the mattress with the washcloth, he found it simply made the stain even larger. So, he’d flipped the blood-stained mattress and remade the bed with a fresh set of sheets.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): And she was, you know, begging him, y’know, ‘Let’s just call Birch and I’ll tell him whatever you want me to say, that you really didn’t rape me’ or whatever. But Doug was afraid that she would call Birch and then say that he was trying to rape me again. So Doug was just telling her, ‘It’s okay, I’m just gonna take you to some people and hide you out for awhile,’ ‘cause there was a court date coming up and he didn’t want her to be there, I guess.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda said Doug had made Joyce pack some clothes and makeup into a suitcase as if she were just going on a trip.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Doug kept telling her that, you know, ‘I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m just gonna take you to these people.’ So then, umm, I guess after he got her hand wrapped, umm, he got in her car and he said he made her drive up the canyon and they went up by Causey and he said, umm, he didn’t go far off the road. He just stopped the car and got out of the car and walked up this hill and it wasn’t very far off the road. And, umm, grabbed her neck and was choking her and then I think he stepped on her neck and stomped on it and smashed it.

Dave Cawley: By Rhonda’s account, Doug had killed Joyce with his own bare hands.

Terry Carpenter: How much of that’s true? I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Terry told me he believed Rhonda was being honest with him.

Terry Carpenter: Rhonda’s a, a meek, mellow person and there’s no way that she was making any of that up.

Dave Cawley: But he doubted Doug had been completely honest with her.

Terry Carpenter: We know that’s not how he killed her because of all the blood that was between the mattress. He killed her in the apartment. He didn’t take her up on the mountain to kill her.

Dave Cawley: But which mountain? Where was Joyce? Rhonda didn’t seem to know, aside from it being somewhere near Causey Reservoir.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): And said he, umm, buried her as best he could and he didn’t have any, anything to really bury her, y’know, like a shovel to dig a hole that I recall. And he said he didn’t bury her very deep. He just, you know, like put leaves or shrubbery or dirt over her. And she had her purse at the time, he said, and he dumped all of her stuff out by her, her purse and then just left it. And he was saying, ‘You know, that was a mistake.’ He shouldn’t have left her purse and her ID, everything that was in her purse was right there by her body.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda said Doug acknowledged he would have to go back and fix that mistake.

Terry Carpenter: And then he went back a week or so later because it was bowhunting season and was afraid somebody’d find her laying on the ground and that’s when he buried her.

Dave Cawley: But let’s not get too far ahead. As the eastern sky started to take on the soft hue of impending sunrise on the morning after the murder, Rhonda had chauffeured Doug to a vacant lot at the intersection of Highway 89 and Oak Hills Drive in the city of Layton.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): And then he got out and umm, there was a camp area and where there’s a fire he started the suitcase on fire. I don’t know if he did the suitcase. I can’t remember because the suitcase seemed like it would take forever to burn. I just remember the clothes, for sure. He burned the clothes.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda waited in her car as Doug tended the fire, the growing light of dawn gaining in intensity with each passing minute. Rhonda said she then drove him to a spot along the Weber River, where he tossed the suitcase into the water. Then, they went home. At some point that morning, Doug’d discovered his pants and shoes were stained with Joyce’s blood. So he and Rhonda had left the apartment and drove to a place where Riverdale Road crosses the Union Pacific Railroad’s Riverdale Yard. Doug ducked under the viaduct, where he found a large drum or barrel. He put his bloodstained Levis in it, then set fire to them and walked away.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): You indicated that Doug told you he was going up to get rid of Joyce. You knew that that’s why he was going up there. Had he ever talked about doing that before to anyone else?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Yes. He talked to his friend, Billy Jack.

Dave Cawley: Further evidence of Rhonda’s forthrightness.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Rhonda starts to talk about the fact that he’s paid people to do this. And so other names come out.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda told Terry how Billy Jack had sawed the barrel off of a stolen gun, chickened out and buried the weapon in a field near Joyce’s apartment. She told Terry about meeting with Tom Peters at his girlfriend’s place in Salt Lake City, how Doug had turned an entire workman’s comp check over to Tom in the hopes he would “take care” of Joyce. How Tom had taken the money but failed to do the job.

She described how Doug ended up trying to pawn Joyce’s wristwatch, the one he’d left with her body but later retrieved. No pawnshop would offer him more than 50 bucks, so he’d tossed it out the car window while driving down State Street in Salt Lake City one day. Terry asked Rhonda if she was concerned at all about what they’d discussed.

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): I’m worried about, if Doug finds out. I’m really scared.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): What would Doug do?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): He’ll have someone come after me.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): And what do you think they’d do?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Kill me.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): ‘Kay. You believe that, Rhonda?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recording): Mmmhmm. Yep.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda took a polygraph, which showed she was being truthful. And she continued to feed information to Terry. She told him Doug had not stopped calling her, in spite of their divorce. Terry asked if she would be willing to record those phone calls. Rhonda said yes.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Shirley Lovell — Doug’s mom — died as a result of a pulmonary embolism on Friday, May 17, 1991. She was 55 years old. The family planned funeral services for the following Tuesday, May 21^st, in Oak City, Utah, the tiny rural community where both she and Doug’s father had been raised and where Doug had spent his own early years.

Doug made an immediate request to the prison staff. He wanted to attend the funeral. The Utah Department of Corrections at that time classified Doug as a “level three” inmate. The medium-security ranking meant he had to remain within the prison perimeter at all times. Only level fives could leave the grounds. Still, Doug believed he had a strong case for an exception. His file, also known as his jacket, didn’t include any write-ups for serious violations. He was neat and polite. He didn’t brawl, he’d never tried to escape and he worked hard at his job in the prison sign shop. He’d become a leadman, with his own office.

Carl Jacobsen, who’d been one of his Doug’s guards when he’d first arrived at SSD back in ’86, often introduced him to visitors there. Carl had developed something of a rapport with Doug over the years. He’d since promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Managing visitation inside and outside the prison fell within Carl’s new responsibilities. Carl might’ve been the closest thing to an ally Doug had among the prison staff. But when he received the request for an off-site visit, it gave him pause. Doug, Carl believed, presented a flight risk. If given the opportunity, he might use the funeral to stage an escape.

While prison managers debated the question of whether to approve the funeral trip, Doug received a visitor at the prison. On the morning of Monday, May 20^th, his boss at the sign shop told him his attorney was waiting to speak with him. Doug was at that time working to appeal his sentence in court. A new lawyer, Robert Archuleta, had signed on to help him. But that’s not who was waiting for Doug when he made his way over to the prison offices. It was Terry Carpenter.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): Doug was advised of his rights per Miranda at which time Doug was asked if he understood each of these right and he stated that he did.

Dave Cawley: Terry didn’t make a tape recording of the conversation itself, but he did record these notes afterward.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): I asked him with these rights in mind would you be willing to talk with me and he stated no.

Dave Cawley: Terry told Doug that was fine, he should just sit and listen. He then explained new information had come to light about the death of Joyce Yost. He now knew enough to secure a capital homicide charge.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): Doug refused to talk about it and I told him that I knew that he was involved in this and he stated, ‘No, you’re wrong I don’t have anything to do with it, there is absolutely nothing that I know about the disappearance of Joyce Yost.’

Dave Cawley: Terry said he knew Doug had arranged to have Joyce killed and that a “payment was made.”

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): Doug shook his head, again denied any knowledge of it and stated he would gladly go to trial.

Dave Cawley: Terry had one other tactic to try. He told Doug the Department of Corrections was not going to let him attend his mother’s funeral. But he could make it happen.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): The time that I approached him, I approached him uh knowing that his mother had just passed away and hoping that there may be some feelings there of remorse or that he may be in a frame of mind more willing to talk to me regarding the death of Joyce Yost, knowing that she was also someone’s mother.

Dave Cawley: Terry said if Doug wanted to go, he had to first give up the location of Joyce’s body.

Terry Carpenter: He just flat adamantly denies anything. He doesn’t have anything to do with it. He has no knowledge of it and just flat tells me that I’m wrong.

Dave Cawley: Doug responded by saying, “[expletive] you.”

Terry Carpenter: You sit and look at him and know without a question that he’s lying to you and you can just flat see the devil in his eyes.

Dave Cawley: Doug told Terry he couldn’t keep him there then he stood and walked out of the room. Terry wasn’t done at the prison, though. He had the guards haul in another inmate: Tom Peters. He’d only just learned of Doug and Tom’s friendship from Rhonda.

Terry Carpenter (from May 1, 1991 police recording): How did he know Tom?

Rhonda Buttars (from May 1, 1991 police recordings): He knew Tom from last time when he was in prison.

Dave Cawley: Terry proceeded to tell Tom he was aware Doug had paid him to “take care” of Joyce Yost. Tom, in response, suggested a hypothetical. Suppose, he said, a friend came to another friend and offered to pay to have a woman taken care of. The second friend agrees to the point of taking the money, but with no intention of ever killing anyone.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): And then Mr. Peters’ tense changes and he says, ‘I took the money. At the time I was h—, I mean,’ and he says it just that way. ‘I mean this person at that time was a heroin addict and he took the money for the purpose of getting high on heroin and that’s exactly what I did. My girlfriend and I—’ and then he realizes again that he has changed tenses. He stops and he says, ‘This person and his girlfriend then took the money and went out and got high on heroin with no intentions whatsoever of having anything to do with the murder.’

Dave Cawley: Terry asked Tom if he would tell that story from the witness stand.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): And Tom thought for a minute and said, ‘No, I can’t deny it, it’s true but I will invoke my right.’ And I says, ‘you mean your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent to avoid incriminating yourself?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’

Dave Cawley: Tom said he had good reason to worry. Doug Lovell was not his friend.

Terry Carpenter (from May 20, 1991 police recording): Tom indicated to me that he was afraid of problems from Doug. He says, ‘If I can see him coming I’ll be ok, but Doug’s the type that he will come up and get you from behind.’

Dave Cawley: Shirley Lovell’s funeral came and went. Doug did not attend.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The swelter of the southern Nevada afternoon had started to recede from the Moapa Valley. Heat radiated from the scorched ground, even as twinkling stars emerged in the violet blanket of the clear desert sky. Ron and Deb Barney were at home in Logandale, a small community between I-15 and Lake Mead, about 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Just after 9 p.m. on May 23, 1991, they heard a knock at the door. When they answered, they found two men standing on the doorstep: sergeant Terry Carpenter and lieutenant Val Shupe of the South Ogden, Utah police department. The Barneys invited the officers inside to talk. Terry had learned Ron was one of Doug’s closest friends. He told Ron he’d soon be arresting Doug for the murder of Joyce Yost.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): Mr. Barney indicated to me that he didn’t believe in any way, shape or form Doug Lovell was involved, that he was a good person.

Dave Cawley: Terry did not record the conversation, again, only these notes after-the-fact.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): We talked in some detail about the fact that this good person had committed a series of armed robberies, that this good person had committed a very brutal rape upon a woman, that this good person had been poaching.

Dave Cawley: Deb scooted their kids to bed as it became clear the conversation was turning to more sensitive matters.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): He had some question about whether he raped the woman or not. Doug had told them that they actually had just had sex together and the woman wanted the relationship to go further and Doug said no and she got mad and screamed rape.

Dave Cawley: Terry countered this, explaining in some detail how the evidence showed Doug’s assault on Joyce had not been consensual.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): And I made the comment that, ‘Yeah, whenever Doug is on dope, that that’s what happens to him.’ And uh, Debbie immediately made the statement that, ‘Doug doesn’t do drugs.’

Dave Cawley: Terry said yes, Doug did do drugs, the prescription kind. There was the matter of Doug’s phony back injury during the summer of ’85, for which he’d obtained several prescriptions.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): Also indicated that the night that Joyce disappeared that Doug was taking a very strong drug at that time allegedly for his back which there is much in question as to whether the back problem is a legitimate deal or just a guise for him to receive some kind of drugs while he is in prison.

Dave Cawley: And how about the issue of the stolen guns, the ones Doug and Billy Jack had taken from the home of Cody Montgomery in May of ’85? The ones they’d buried behind the cabin near Callao.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): I asked Mr. Barney if he had any knowledge about Doug burying some guns. Ron paused for probably 10 seconds and stared at the table and then says, ‘Well yeah, he did tell me about some stolen guns, he buried them someplace. I’m not sure where he buried them.’

Dave Cawley: Terry already knew where the guns had come from and where at least some had ended up.

Terry Carpenter: And Ron was very hesitant to talk about them.

Dave Cawley: Doug had told the Barneys he expected a judge would soon overturn his sentence. They’d discussed having him come stay at their place in Nevada once he won his freedom. Terry asked if that’s really what they wanted, considering how Doug had been convicted of armed robbery, how he’d kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman, how he’d stolen guns and cars, how he’d poached deer.

Terry Carpenter (from May 23, 1991 police recording): With that understanding they began to think and Debbie made the comment that she was concerned about her children, that they had become fairly good friends with Doug and that they had some major concerns about Doug coming to live with them.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: In the week following his mother’s funeral, Doug Lovell came across a newspaper story that caught his attention. It dealt with another inmate at the Utah State Prison, a man named James Carlos Foote. Foote had been charged with sexually abusing a child in ’84, when he’d touched a six-year-old girl while lifting her into his truck. Foote, who had no prior criminal history, cut a plea deal and received a sentence of one-to-15 years in prison.

Parole board guidelines suggested the punishment for Foote’s crime should’ve been two years of incarceration. He’d gone before the board three times since arriving at the prison, and was each time peppered with questions about other cases of child sex abuse in which he might have been involved. Foote denied having any sexual contact with any other children. As a result, the board determined he was not being forthcoming and declined to grant him a release date.

Foote filed suit against the board, claiming his estranged wife — who worked for the Utah Department of Corrections — had added unfounded accusations about him abusing other neighborhood children to his file. He said the board was essentially punishing him for crimes he’d not been convicted of, depriving him of his constitutional right to due process. His lawsuit had made its way to the Utah Supreme Court in November of 1990. In its ruling in March of ’91, the high court justices unanimously agreed due process rules did apply to the board of pardons, same as to the courts.

In other words, Foote had a right to know what was in the file and to challenge it. So, in May of ’91, after serving more than six years, Foote filed a second lawsuit. That’s what’d landed his story in the paper and before the curious eyes of Doug Lovell. Doug saw parallels to his own situation. He believed Judge Rodney Page had sentenced him for murdering Joyce, not for kidnapping and sexually assaulting her. And Doug had not been able to review the pre-sentence report Page relied on when making his decision.

Doug had a friendly prison guard make a copy of the newspaper story. He placed it in an envelope and addressed it to Rhonda. Then, he called her… and Rhonda rolled tape, starting this recording.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hello?

Operator (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hi, will you pay for a collect call from Doug?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh huh.

Operator (from recorded 1991 phone call): Thanks, go ahead.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hi.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hi.

Dave Cawley: …not to discuss his own mother’s funeral, which Rhonda had attended without him days earlier, but to share the good news.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Because see now when I go to the board, they can’t even ask, they can’t even, they can’t even make a mere statement, y’know, ‘What do you know about Joyce?’ They can’t even ask that anymore because of what’s been ruled.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): And a lot of things are swinging now in my favor. And I think they’ve always been hoping that umm, y’know, that when I eventually went to the board, if I lost my appeal, if I went to the board, the board could say, ‘Hey, y’know, what about this?’ Y’know, and then keep me here for X amount of years longer. And now that can’t happen.

Dave Cawley: Doug had more good news for Rhonda. He told her about his new attorney, Robert Archuleta. Robert was already trying to track down a copy of Doug’s pre-sentence report, so they could go about challenging what was in it. That wasn’t the only update he had to share.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I guess Carpenter’s been assigned to the case.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Who?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Carpenter. Terry Carpenter.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda did not let on she was by then well acquainted with Terry Carpenter. Doug didn’t bother to ask, continuing right on describing their meeting the day before the funeral.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I said uh, ‘I got nothing,’ y’know, ‘I got no statement.’ Y’know, I told him, ‘If you want to turn the recorder on, I’ll tell you that, y’know what I’m gonna tell you right now. I don’t know anything about it. I wasn’t involved, directly or indirectly, in it.’ And I says, ‘And I don’t know and I don’t think anybody else even knows that this woman is deceased.’ I says, ‘Now, if you want me to make that kind of a statement, I will.’ And he says, ‘Well, that’s not what I’m looking for.’ I says, ‘Well then what you want is for me to say something that’s not true. Y’know, what you want me to do is say that I was involved in something that I wasn’t. And I can’t do that.’

Dave Cawley: Rhonda mentioned a detective had dropped by her apartment on the day of the funeral, but she wasn’t at home.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): So they’re probably trying to look for me, too.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, well and I’m, I’m surprised they haven’t got ahold of you by now. I figured you would have been the first one that they got ahold of.

Dave Cawley: At no point during any of this did Doug take a moment to express grief or sadness over the loss of his mother. The following week, after Memorial Day, he called Rhonda again. This time, he did want to talk about his mom, or at least her life insurance. Doug said it appeared he and his brother Russ were poised to split about $81,000. The money would mean he was all set for when he got out. Rhonda told Doug Carpenter had showed up at her apartment with a search warrant.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well, I got a visit last night.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Did you?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yep. They came and, they came and, uh, searched the house and went through everything.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Did you let them?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, they had a warrant.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Did they really?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yep.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): What’d they find, what did they take?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh, some pictures.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): What kind of pictures?

Dave Cawley: Hunting pictures. Polaroids of Doug, Rhonda and Billy Jack at the cabin near Callao.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I don’t know how many they took but they took some. I’m not sure which ones. I think, well, I think of, like, well, everybody. Y’know, your friends. They wanted to know their names and stuff.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): No kidding?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yep.

Dave Cawley: Doug didn’t seem to like this one bit.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Huh. Did they try to question you?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): No, not really. They just said they’d get back with me. They just wanted to do a search. That was basically what they were doing.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Huh.

Dave Cawley: The topic of the pictures would come up again and again in the days that followed. At one point, Rhonda told Doug his life would be easier if he just told the truth. He brushed off that suggestion, saying he wanted the photos back as soon as possible.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well, I don’t think they’ll keep them. Why you worried?

Dave Cawley: He didn’t answer the question. But he did urge Rhonda to come visit him that weekend. All of this action in the case had him wanting to talk to her, face to face. Not over the phone, where they might be monitored. So, it came as a disappointment when he called Rhonda on Sunday, June 2^nd. The weather was bad in Utah and Rhonda told Doug she wasn’t going to drive down to the prison for a visit. Maybe next week. Doug couldn’t wait. He took a risk and brought up, in a round-about way, the topic of Joyce.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): But umm, y’know you shocked me by something you said the other day.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): What?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): About the truth?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Why?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I, I just couldn’t believe you said that. It still blows me away, totally away.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Why, what do you mean?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): That you would ask me to do something like that.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well, why?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Do you know what you’re asking?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Huh uh. I guess not.

Dave Cawley: There was a lot of static on this part of the call and it’s difficult to understand, even after aggressive noise reduction. What Doug said there was shocked by Rhonda’s suggestion that he tell truth. He asked if she knew what she was asking. Rhonda said “I guess not.”

In this next clip, Rhonda tried a different approach, telling Doug she wondered how he lived with it. You’ll hear Doug say “in all honesty Rhonda, what I’ve been living with for years is far worse than that.” 

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I don’t know, I just wonder how you live with it.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well, in all honesty Rhonda, you know, what I’ve been living with for years is, is far worse than that.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): What does that mean?

Dave Cawley: What could Doug have possibly been referring to? Doug said he didn’t want to talk about it. It was a subject he only addressed with Kate Della-Piana, his prison therapist. Listen again and you’ll hear Doug say “on a scale of 1 to 10, this doesn’t even rate and I’ve lived with it for a long time.”

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): But I can assure you that, that this, doesn’t even, y’know on a scale of 1 to 10, doesn’t even, doesn’t even uh, doesn’t even rate. Y’know, and I’ve lived with it for a long time.

Dave Cawley: What ever this other mystery problem was, he didn’t provide specifics. He only would say it caused him a great deal of shame and guilt. At this, Rhonda again said it was perhaps time to spill his guts, to get it all out. Doug said “Get what out? I didn’t do anything.” This triggered an argument, with Doug telling Rhonda he worried about her and what she might do.

Doug Lovelll (from recorded 1991 phone call): I mean uh, you’ve never been through this, Rhonda.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well, excuse me. So should I do it just to experience it or what?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): No, no. Hey and umm, don’t try to fight with me—

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I’m not, man. Don’t try and fight with me.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I’m not.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, you are.

Dave Cawley: In frustration, Doug told Rhonda he didn’t know her anymore. She agreed, saying they just weren’t on the same wavelength. Time apart, she said, does that to people.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Doug Lovell’s new attorney called Rhonda Buttars late in the day on Friday, June 14^th, 1991.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hello?

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Is this Rhonda?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yes.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Oh Rhoda, this is attorney Robert Archuleta.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh huh.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): How are you?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I’m good, how are you?

Dave Cawley: Robert apologized for not having his notes in front of him, a fact made clear when he referred to Joyce Yost as Janet Riost. He explained he’d talked to Terry Carpenter about his recent visit to Doug at the prison.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): I did get some information out of this detective Carpenter. He said he’d talked with four people who’d had discussions with uh, with uh, with uh, Mr. Lovell about, I suppose, having her executed or murdered.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hmm.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): And, y’know, this guy, I think he’s lying to me about that.

Dave Cawley: That’s because Robert said Doug had consistently denied any involvement with Joyce’s disappearance.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Doug seems like a pretty nice guy to me.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, he is. He’s a good guy. Nice guy.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, that’s what I think, too. I mean, I don’t know anything about your relationship but otherwise he seems like a pretty good guy and he insists he didn’t do this. He says, ‘No, I didn’t kill anyone.’

Dave Cawley: Robert asked Rhonda if she’d ever been questioned by the police.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Ever? Yeah. Birch, umm, did years and years ago.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): And what’d you tell him, you didn’t know anything?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): And that’s pretty much true, isn’t it?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh huh.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): I mean, you didn’t know any more than you’ve told me.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Right.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda didn’t tell Robert about her more recent conversations with Terry Carpenter. She only mentioned Terry had showed up at her apartment with a search warrant. She explained how Terry had seized photos of Doug and his friends.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): And who were your friends?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Umm, they took some of Tom Peters, Billy Jack, Deb and Ron—

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Tom Peters, that’s it. That’s the one that they alleged. Uh, Billy Jack did you say?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh huh.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Who else?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Deb and Ron Barney.

Dave Cawley: Robert told Rhonda if Terry came back around asking any more questions, she should refuse to answer. He said the police were simply shaking the tree to see what might fall out.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): See they made some pretty outlandish things about them. They told me they think Doug has killed two people.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Oh really?

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh huh. Then somehow they, they’ve alleged in somewhere that he was part of this automobile theft ring.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hmm.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda played ignorant, saying Doug hadn’t really been in trouble with the law that much prior to the rape case.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): ‘Kay. Otherwise, did you have a pretty good marriage?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Robert Archuleta (from recorded 1991 phone call): It was alright?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): It was alright, yeah.

Dave Cawley: Later that same night, Doug called Rhonda. She told him about her conversation with Robert.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I feel like I was on trial. God, 20 questions, man.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): From him?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): The attorney?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, he’s, he’s, he’s good, Rhonda.

Dave Cawley: Doug said Robert wanted to represent him, if South Ogden police made good on the threat of filing a capital homicide charge. He’d given Robert marching orders, if that were to happen.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): ‘I want you to represent my ex-wife.’ I says, ‘I’m not worried about myself.’ I says, ‘I want her taken care of. I don’t want her to spend a night in jail. If, if bail, uh, if she’s arrested, I want bail, I’m going to get with Russ and dad, I want bail immediately arranged.’ And uh, and I told him, I says, ‘Don’t worry about defending me.’ I says, ‘I want her defended.’ And he says, ‘Well, y’know—’

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): So what’re you trying to say, that’s where I’m going?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): No, no, no.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): [Expletive]

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): No, Rhonda, I’m not. I am—

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I can’t deal with this [expletive], Lovell. I told you before. I can’t deal with it again. The nightmare, the hash over all this [expletive]. If they come and do that, I swear to God, I’m gonna freak out.

Dave Cawley: Doug promised Rhonda if she were arrested, she would be out of jail within hours.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I don’t care. It’s, it better not happen. I’ll be so friggin’ mad, you won’t even, oh God. See sparks coming out of my face. ‘Cause he’s scaring me. My voice started shaking, man. He says, ‘Hey, y’know, they sound like, y’know, they got something.’ And they told, that cop told him, ‘Hey, I’m arresting his ex-wife and three other friends.’ And I just went, ‘Oh that’s, that’s good to know.’

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well—

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): And goes, ‘Well, what’d they say to you?’ And I go, ‘Nothing.’

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Rhonda, you had nothing to do with it. I had nothing to do with it. None of my friends had anything to do with it. You have nothing to worry about. All they’re trying to do is shake something. They’re trying to shake a tree and seein’ if an apple falls.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Oh God, you sound like him.

Dave Cawley: Doug couldn’t reassure his ex-wife, try as he might.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): And I’m making all the arrangements for, for him to be there for you and for, y’know, to be bailed out.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Oh, well that’s comforting, Doug.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well, Rhonda, it may happen. It may happen.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I know, and that’s real comforting to know. I want to go there again, [expletive].

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Rhonda, I, y’know I was hoping you’d be, at least be comforted to know that I’m trying to do everything I can for you.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): No you’re not.

Dave Cawley: Doug told Rhonda they could talk about it more in person on Sunday, when she came to visit him. Their conversation was cut off anyhow. But he dialed Rhonda again first thing the next morning.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): What’re you wearing?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Huh?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): What’re you wearing?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): When?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Now.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): My jammas.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Really?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Mmmhmm.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hmm.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Why?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I just always like knowing what you’re wearing when I talk to you. I like to picture you.

Dave Cawley: This time around, he didn’t mention the attorney, his appeal, or Joyce Yost. He simply reminded Rhonda of her plan to come down and visit that weekend. And, he told her to tune into his favorite TV show later that night to see country music videos. Doug’s favorites were Lorrie Morgan and Patty Loveless. But he’d also just heard the Alabama song “Here We Are” from their 1990 album “Pass It on Down.”

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I listened to the words to it really close yesterday and it’s you and I to a T except for one line.

Dave Cawley: The chorus of that song goes: “We had to break it all down to build it back up, lean on each other when the times got rough, how we survive going through so much, baby you and I could write a book about love.” As for that one line that Doug said didn’t fit? “We’re still together after all this time.”

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Rhonda followed through on her promise to visit Doug that Sunday, June 16, 1991. Doug was almost up to 200 pounds, the extra weight in the form of muscle. Rhonda complimented him saying, “You look good.” He said, so do you. Then, he asked if she’d watched the country music videos. Rhonda said she had. He said Patty Loveless was beautiful and Rhonda resembled her.

Terry Carpenter: It’s kind of interesting ‘cause Rhonda’s pretty nervous.

Dave Cawley: Doug didn’t know it, but Terry Carpenter was also hearing his sweet talk. Rhonda had agreed to wear a recording device into the prison.

Terry Carpenter: I have one that we have hidden up in a bra strap on Rhonda.

Dave Cawley: It transmitted in real-time to a receiver, which Terry had with him in an observation room just above the prison’s outdoor visiting area.

Terry Carpenter: The location that I’m in, I’m able to be up above them and looking down into the room that they’re in.

Dave Cawley: Terry had also wired Rhonda with a backup, standalone recorder that was strapped to one of her thighs.

Terry Carpenter: There’s a couple of times that Doug would try to put his arm around her and she’d slap his arm away and he’d try to reach over and put his arm on her leg and she’d slap it away and wouldn’t. He’d look at her like ‘What’s the matter with you?’

Dave Cawley: Rhonda went on chatting. This was mostly performative, a show of normalcy, of boring routine for the other people scattered around in the visiting area. Doug dropped the pretense, once it seemed no one was paying them any attention. He leaned in and asked Rhonda, if he were charged with Joyce’s murder, would she testify?

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): In all honesty Rhonda, you know, it, I mean, it crossed my mind, but I didn’t believe it, you know? I mean, I just couldn’t picture you sitting on the stand testifying against me. Uh, and I couldn’t see Tom doing it either.

Dave Cawley: I know that’s pretty garbled, but Doug said “I just couldn’t picture you sitting on the stand testifying against me. And I couldn’t see Tom doing it either.” Much of this audio from this wire recording will be difficult to understand. I’ll interpret as necessary.

Doug reassured Rhonda he had never and would never tell anybody the truth of what he’d done to Joyce. In fact, he said he’d lied to his therapist, Kate Della-Piana, to throw her off the scent. And he said if the police tried to arrest Rhonda, he’d take care of it, just as he had with the poaching charge. Rhonda said she didn’t want to go through it, to have everyone at work talking about her.

Rhonda Buttars (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I don’t want to go through it. Do you hear me? I don’t want to go, I don’t want them coming to work again, or even if it’s home. Everybody’s going to find out again and I’m going to be the talk at work. I can’t deal with this, Lovell.

Dave Cawley: An exasperated Doug asked Rhonda just what she wanted him to do about it. How could he reassure her? Her answer was simple: tell the truth. Doug said that was not an option. If he came clean and admitted what he’d done to Joyce — both the rape and the murder — it would mean his life.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I committed a first-degree felony to cover another felony. It’s the death penalty. At the very least, they’re going to give me life without parole. If I cooperate with them, and go to them, they’re going to give me life without parole.

Dave Cawley: “I committed a first-degree felony to cover another felony. It’s the death penalty.” Rhonda said she didn’t understand. After all, murderers cut deals all the time. He’d probably just do an extra five years or something. No, Doug said. There’s a big difference between something like manslaughter, say when two guys are in a brawl and it goes too far, and what he’d done to Joyce.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I premeditated, premeditated. I planned to kill Joyce. I planned to end Joyce’s life. That’s premeditated capital homicide.

Dave Cawley: “I planned to kill Joyce, I planned to end Joyce’s life. That’s premeditated capital homicide.” Doug had just confessed to murdering Joyce Yost on tape. Rhonda asked if Doug believed in an afterlife. He said he did.

Terry Carpenter: And Rhonda says to him ‘Doug, you realize that your mom now knows that you killed Joyce.’ And his comment is ‘my mom knows now a lot worse about me than just Joyce.’

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Mom knows. Mom now knows far worse about me things than that, Rhonda. And I, and I, I know I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that when mom passed on, that I was correcting my life. I was doing everything I could, Rhonda, to correct my life, you know? And mom knew that I was pretty happy, you know? And I believe that she believed that.

Dave Cawley: “Mom now knows far worse about me things than that.” For the second time in just a matter of weeks, Doug seemed to imply his raping and murdering Joyce was not the worst thing he’d ever done.

Terry Carpenter: You tell me what can be worse than killing somebody, if he hasn’t killed multiple people.

Dave Cawley: What about Joyce’s body? Rhonda asked if someone might have found it. No chance, Doug said. He alone knew where it was. He said he hoped to someday share that location with his therapist, Kate, so Joyce’s family could have closure. But only if he could do it on his terms, in a way where he’d be protected. Otherwise, it would be the death penalty. Which brought Doug back around to the question of who could possibly testify against him. So, what about it, Rhonda?

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I want to. I want to know straight up. If, you know, [unintelligible] hits the fan, I mean, and it could get heavy, Rhonda, are you gonna ever testify against me?

Dave Cawley: “Are you gonna ever testify against me?” Rhonda said no, unless she had to. If she ended up in jail, he had better start talking. At this, Doug laughed. Police were fools, he said. He’d embarrassed them after the poaching arrest and he would do it again. But this was good. He felt reassured. He’d looked Rhonda in the eyes and heard her say she was not going to talk.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): But I, I just wanted to hear from you, y’know? Look at you, to hear it, you won’t testify.

Dave Cawley: Soon, he promised, everything would be back to the way it was before. He wanted to be out with her. He was sorry for their hard times, but he was correcting himself and would be back to the nymphomaniac he was at 17 years old.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I want to be out there with you, Rhonda.

Rhonda Buttars (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I want you out there too, D.L.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I mean, I want us out there. I want to be husband and wife again. And ah, I’ll be honest with you. It would break my heart if you ever got married again, because I know that no two people were more right for each other than you and I. And I know I’ve had some hard times out there and I know that I took some bad things out on you. And I’m sorry. All I can tell you is that I’m correcting all that now, and ah, will be back to myself where I was when I was 16, 17 years old. Yeah, I was a nymphomaniac back then.

Rhonda Buttars (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I remember Lovell.

Dave Cawley: Doug vowed to shower her with sweet, sweet romance. He told his ex-wife, the woman who alone could undo him with her testimony, she was his future. Rhonda responded by saying “then tell.” Doug said if he told the truth, they wouldn’t have a future together. Telling the truth was his “final straw.”

Rhonda Buttars (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Then tell.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Tell the truth? Rhonda, then we would never have a future.

Rhonda Buttars (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Yes we would. Aren’t you willing to find out what would happen if you say, what if by chance something comes out? I mean, make it vague, you know, ‘What if, what if I did do it? What would happen?’

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Okay. That’s, that’s a final straw. That isn’t something I have to deal with now.

Dave Cawley: If it came down to that, if Doug were cornered and forced to admit he’d killed Joyce, he promised Rhonda he would not reveal her role.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Now, if I came forward and tell the truth, then I’m gonna be on the news. I don’t want that. If I ever did tell the truth, Rhonda, I would never say that you knew anything about it. Ever. Okay?

Dave Cawley: What’s more, when he got out, Doug said he would be a reformed man. No more sleeping around, no more girlfriends, only Rhonda.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Y’know, I feel more loving and I feel more romantic.

Rhonda Buttars (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): I’ll believe it when I see it.

Doug Lovell (from June 16, 1991 wire recording): Well I, well I’m coming to you, Rhonda. Like I said, like a freight train.

Dave Cawley: “I’m coming to you … like a freight train.”  When they stood to leave, Doug planted Rhonda with a kiss.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Later that night, after Rhonda had returned home from the prison, she received a phone call.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I want to treat you like a lady and make you feel like a woman, 24 hours day and night.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hmm, scary.

Dave Cawley: It was Doug.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Well listen, thanks for coming down today. I, uh, did it help you any?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): It helped me tremendous, ‘cause there’s a couple things I needed to hear from you and uh, and I, I believe it. And it helped me a lot. And uh, I meant everything I said to you, Rhonda.

Dave Cawley: That included, Doug said, a promise to be together with Rhonda, Alisha and Cody as complete family.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Get ready for a train, okay?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hah. Yeah, your kiss blew me away.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): You’re gonna have a loose one on your hands.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Huh?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): ‘Cause you’re gonna have a loose one on your hands.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Your kiss blew me away.

Dave Cawley: The kiss.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): And the kiss was nice. And uh, I got goosebumps.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): (Laughs)

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): I did, I honestly did.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, it made me sweat.

Dave Cawley: The following weekend, on Saturday, June 22^nd, he phoned Rhonda again.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): When you gonna come down and see me again?

Cody (from recorded 1991 phone call): Umm, maybe tomorrow.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Maybe tomorrow?

Cody (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Alright, that’d be neat, huh?

Cody (from recorded 1991 phone call): Uh huh.

Dave Cawley: The recordings Rhonda made of these phone calls captured many conversations like this between Doug and the kids. I’ve chosen not to share almost any of that, out of consideration for their young ages and personal privacy. The clips I’m using here are only included because they provide important context regarding Doug, his methods of persuading Rhonda to visit him and his knowledge of the backcountry. To that last point: Doug asked Alisha if she’d enjoyed her time with her biological father the prior weekend. She said, “Not really.”

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Did you go up Ogden Canyon to camp?

Alisha (from recorded 1991 phone call): Huh uh, we went, I don’t know. But we went up there and umm, couldn’t find a place to camp so we just went back to his house.

Dave Cawley: Doug presumed it must have been too crowded for Alisha’s father. Doug said it would’ve gone differently had he been there. He knew how to get off the beaten path, away from other people.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Can you remember ever camping with me when you was little?

Alisha (from recorded 1991 phone call): No.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Can’t you really, honey?

Alisha (from recorded 1991 phone call): Mmmnmm.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): That’s too bad. Gosh, we use to, me and you and mom used to go up to some doozy places, honey. We used to four-wheel drive all the way up the mountain.

Alisha (from recorded 1991 phone call): I remember some of them. Like going up there and getting stuck.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): (Laughs) Yeah, we did that too. Do you remember spending the night in the creek?

Alisha (from recorded 1991 phone call): Nuh uh.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Remember, the truck got stuck in the middle of the creek, this, this little river and we had to spend the night in the truck and we was right in the middle of the creek?

Alisha (from recorded 1991 phone call): Mmmhmm and we had to sleep on the, in the truck. Mmmhmm.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): That was, that was a time I’ll never forget, honey. Believe it or not, I had a lot of fun. That was uh, that’s camping to me. I hate being around other people when I leave the, when I get up in the mountains I don’t like being around other people. That’s not, that’s not like camping.

Dave Cawley: Doug told Alisha he would try to arrange for her to go visit his dad’s cabin, just as soon as the rest of the family could get together. When Rhonda came back on the phone, Doug asked if she’d read the articles he’d sent to her.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yep.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): What’d you think?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Sounds good.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): It does, huh?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yep.

Dave Cawley: As I explained earlier, they dealt with a Utah Supreme Court decision and a lawsuit filed by a state prison inmate. Taken together, Doug believed they meant the state’s board of pardons would not be able to ask him about or even consider Joyce’s disappearance when he came up for a parole hearing.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): They don’t have, they don’t have the power anymore. The Supreme Court took it away from them. It’s like they held it, it’s like, ‘Na na na.’ And they went, ‘Whoa!’

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah. They had too much, I think.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah, they got way too much. Man, what they been doing with people here is [expletive].

Dave Cawley: Getting the articles to Rhonda, and getting her to read them, had taken no small effort on Doug’s part. Now, he wanted the newspaper clippings back for his own files.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Can you send me those articles back though?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: And in parting, he reminded Rhonda of his favorite Saturday night event.

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): Hey, you know what comes on at 10?

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): Oh God, what?

Doug Lovell (from recorded 1991 phone call): My country videos, Rhonda.

Rhonda Buttars (from recorded 1991 phone call): I know, what? Who?

Dave Cawley: Doug said Restless Heart would be on, but they probably wouldn’t play his favorite song. Roseanne Cash would sing her latest. Her hit single at the time was a song titled “What We Really Want.” Rhonda would like it, Doug said. The opening verse went like this:

“We tried to make ourselves pay for something we’ve never done. We threw the best parts of life away on street talk, strangers and drugs. What we really want is love what we really need is love.”

Kim Salazar: His decision that night in April of ’85 altered my life forever.

Dave Cawley: Joyce Yost’s daughter, Kim Salazar, was not satisfied. Doug Lovell, the man convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting her mother, was headed for sentencing. But not for Joyce’s murder.

Randy Salazar: She told the detectives, I remember her telling them, ‘I know that son of a bitch has something to do with it. I know he has something to do with it.’ And they told Kim, ‘We’re sure he is too but we just can’t, I mean, we can’t just go over there and tell him he has something to do with it. We have to figure something out here.’

Dave Cawley: Two years earlier, the Utah Legislature had established a system of minimum mandatory sentences.

Brian Namba: The reason we call it mandatory is the judge, if you got the conviction, the judge could not give him probation.

Dave Cawley: That’s retired Davis County prosecutor Brian Namba. Under the law, Judge Rodney Page had to send Doug to prison for at least 10 years. Unless there were mitigating circumstances, in which case Doug would get no less than five. Or, if there were aggravating circumstances, he’d get no less than 15. Brian had filed a motion arguing in favor of the longer, 15-year term.

Brian Namba: So there’s a list of potential aggravating circumstances.

Dave Cawley: They included Doug’s pattern of stalking women, the extreme cruelty and depravity of his attack on Joyce, his history of violent offenses, his pending charges for car theft and his hostility toward Joyce’s family.

Brian also pointed out it was only because of Joyce’s hesitancy to testify about specific sexual acts during the preliminary hearing that the sodomy charge had been dropped.

Doug’s attorney, John Hutchison, didn’t file a motion of his own full of mitigating circumstances. Instead, he simply asked Judge Page to treat Doug’s convictions as misdemeanors, which would spare him prison time altogether. Hutchison argued it would be “unduly harsh” to send Doug away for so long, because of “the nature and circumstances of the offense and the defendant’s history and character.”

Judge Page reviewed a confidential pre-sentence report prepared by an agency called Adult Probation and Parole — or AP&P. It included background information on Doug, his family relationships, his criminal history, as well as the impact of his crime on Joyce and her loved ones.

Kim and her husband Randy had sat through Doug’s trial in December of ’85, a trial at which Kim’s own mother — the victim — was absent.

Kim Salazar: They had a woman on the stand and they had a picture of her, of my mom on the stand and they just had that woman read word-for-word what my mom had said during the preliminary hearing.

Dave Cawley: And they’d seen for the first time Doug’s wife, Rhonda.

Kim Salazar: I just remember being disgusted by all of their shenanigans. Y’know, in between. They just came off as this loving couple and it just wasn’t the case.

Dave Cawley: Doug’s convictions were about to put that loving relationship to the test.

This is Cold, season 2, episode 5: Garden Variety. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

We’ll be right back.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Doug Lovell returned to court for sentencing on the afternoon of January 16, 1986. Judge Rodney Page asked defense attorney John Hutchison if there was anything he wanted to say. John said he’d read the pre-sentence report and believed its recommendations were “disproportionately large to the nature of the evidence.”

Judge Page then turned to Doug and asked if he had anything to say.

“Just the fact that I’m innocent,” Doug said.

Judge Page told Doug he believed the case had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury had got it right. He then handed down the maximum for each of the two counts: no less than 15 years and possibly up to life. The sentences would run concurrently — at the same time — meaning the soonest Doug could hope to be released from prison would be 2001. This was a victory not only for the prosecution, but also personally for detective Bill Holthaus, who told me he remembered John Hutchison’s reaction.

Bill Holthaus: This was not on the record, this was afterwards. He said, ‘My client wants to appeal and I quit.’

Dave Cawley: I asked Bill what he made of that statement.

Bill Holthaus: That he knew he was guilty as sin and did his job and now he was done, is what I made out of it ‘cause I knew, I knew John pretty well. He’d go to bat for his client but he knew he was guilty.

Dave Cawley: But guilty of what? Sexual assault, or something worse? Randy Salazar kept hearing Doug’s words in his head: “she’s gone, buddy.”

Randy Salazar: I mean, that’s pretty much telling you that, y’know what, I had something to do with this.

Dave Cawley: Just days after Doug’s sentencing in the rape case, the city attorney in Washington Terrace dropped all charges stemming from Doug’s June 20, 1985 DUI arrest, the one where he was caught driving drunk toward Joyce’s apartment with a loaded handgun. The prosecutor said abandoning the case would be “in interest of justice” because Doug already faced a long prison sentence. He noted there were other serious charges pending too, presumably a reference to the car theft cases out of Salt Lake City. But Doug resolved those easily. He cut a plea deal and received no additional prison time — no penalty for stealing the car he’d used to kidnap Joyce Yost.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The Utah State Prison complex occupied a spot at the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley known as “Point of the Mountain.” It comprised several different buildings spread across a square mile of land. The oldest and in many ways most gloomy of them was the Wasatch facility. That’s where Doug began serving his time, on Wasatch’s A-block. Inmates on A-block were housed in cells with Alcatraz-style metal grill doors. This was a big change for Doug who, on his first stint at the prison from ’79 to ’82, had lived in SSD, the Special Services Dormitory.

Doug found himself housed next door to someone he’d met during those earlier years in SSD: a man named Roy “DJ” Droddy.

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Doug and I lived next door to each other on A Block and we become friends, reacquainted our friendship.

Dave Cawley: I’ll come back to Roy in just a moment. First, I need to acknowledge something significant Joyce’s daughter Kim Salazar had noticed during the rape trial.

Kim Salazar: Rhonda was pregnant with Doug’s baby by then. So she was starting to, y’know, look pregnant.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda Lovell worked for the state at an office in the Eccles Building in downtown Ogden. That’s where, on the morning of Wednesday, March 19, 1986, South Ogden police sergeant Brad Birch showed up to serve her with an arrest warrant. Kim had known this was coming.

Kim Salazar: I was in communication with them every day at that point.

Dave Cawley: Brad had learned about Doug and Rhonda having been questioned by a Utah Division of Wildlife Resources officer during a drive through the Monte Cristo mountains. The Rich County prosecutor had decided, on what evidence I can’t tell you, that Rhonda had been involved in poaching.

Kim Salazar: I know that they were trying to get information.

Dave Cawley: Brad told Rhonda they were going over to police headquarters to have a little chat.

Kim Salazar: Y’know, so they used this poaching as a way … to put some pressure.

Dave Cawley: Brad read Rhonda her her Miranda rights. Then, he began to pepper her with questions. This conversation was not recorded. My account of it is based on the written reports of Brad Birch and another detective, Terry Carpenter. Here’s what they said.

Rhonda said she didn’t know anything about any poaching. Doug had not shot any deer on the day of their drive and she hadn’t seen any dead animals. Doug did own a deer hunting rifle, she said — a Weatherby 300 — but she declined to mention the other guns he’d stolen with Billy Jack the prior May.

So, if Doug wasn’t up there to shoot deer, why had they gone to the mountains? Rhonda said they’d tried to go to Doug’s father’s cabin but they weren’t able to make it because they didn’t have a key for the gate. And anyway, the real purpose of their trip was to meet some friends on the far side of the mountain, in a town called Woodruff, to go snowmobiling. Who were these friends, the detectives asked. Rhonda wouldn’t — or couldn’t — provide their names.

Terry Carpenter: Y’know, we wondered about that a lot, how that happened and what went on.

Dave Cawley: Terry Carpenter’s memories of these events were a bit hazy when we spoke…

Terry Carpenter: I don’t remember all the details of that.

Dave Cawley: …which isn’t surprising considering just how long ago this took place. But that’s made it difficult to pinpoint just when the poaching stop occurred. The KSL TV archives show the winter season of ’85 had started strong in Utah.

Reporter (from November 14, 1985 KSL TV archive): It was 24 degrees at Brighton today with a 10-minute line at the Majestic ski lift.

Skier 1 (from November 14, 1985 KSL TV archive): We love it, it’s great.

Skier 2 (from November 14, 1985 KSL TV archive): It is glorious, absolutely glorious.

Reporter (from November 14, 1985 KSL TV archive): Is this the earliest you’ve ever skied?

Skier 1 (from November 14, 1985 KSL TV archive): This is the earliest I’ve ever skied, absolutely.

Dave Cawley: An intense storm had blanketed the high country with snow by mid-November.

Reporter (from November 13, 1985 KSL TV archive): Utah’s winter storm in the last two days left three feet of new snow at the Salt Lake ski resorts. It fell on top of several inches of hardpack snow already in the mountains.

Dave Cawley: So the idea Doug and Rhonda might have had a legitimate snowmobiling rendezvous planned was within the realm of possibility. But…

Reporter (from November 13, 1985 KSL TV archive): Those condition prompted a number of warnings about avalanche danger in the high country.

Unknown (from November 14, 1985 KSL TV archive): We were concerned about conditions and did ask that people stay out of the high country, that we were having problems.

Dave Cawley: …a storm this intense would have forced the Utah Department of Transportation to close the highway that crosses the Monte Cristo mountains.

The available evidence suggests Doug and Rhonda’s Monte Cristo drive happened after Joyce disappeared in mid-August but before the road was blocked with snow in mid-November. That period spanned Utah’s bow and rifle deer hunting seasons, when wildlife officers were on high alert for poachers.

I described Rhonda’s encounter with one such officer in the last episode.

Terry Carpenter: He drove past and noticed that Rhonda was in the car.

Dave Cawley: By herself. A short time later, the same officer had spotted Rhonda in the car again, but accompanied by a man. He’d stopped to talk to her again and Rhonda had claimed Doug was just a hitchhiker. But here, under the scrutiny of the South Ogden detectives, Rhonda had a different explanation for why she’d been alone when the wildlife officer had first approached her.

Terry Carpenter: Doug was out of the car for a minute going to the bathroom.

Dave Cawley: She’d been too embarrassed, she said, to explain this. Terry suspected a different reason for the discrepancy.

Terry Carpenter: It became apparent that she was afraid to say too much around Doug.

Dave Cawley: Brad warned Rhonda if she did not come clean, she was headed to jail. Not the Weber County Jail there in Ogden. They were going to take her way out to Randolph, on the other side of the mountains, an hour and a half drive away.

“Well, let’s go,” Rhonda said.

Terry Carpenter: Rhonda was seven or eight months pregnant. And so we transported her and tried in about every way to help her as much as we could.

Dave Cawley: I have a copy of the jail booking records. Rhonda is smiling in her mugshot. But she would later describe being miserable that night: 27 years old, husband in prison, several months pregnant, flat on her back on the floor of the jail.

Terry Carpenter: So that was my first contact with Rhonda.

Dave Cawley: The court scheduled a hearing for May 13^th on the poaching charge. Rhonda was ordered to appear, along with Brad Birch and Doug, who had to be transported up to Randolph from the state prison. Doug and Rhonda were reunited.

They went before the Rich County Circuit Court judge together. Doug told the judge he intended to act as their lawyer and he wanted to call his wife to testify. This was all a bit much for a minor poaching citation. The judge dismissed the case on the spot.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Utah’s minimum mandatory sentencing law was putting the state’s Department of Corrections in a pinch. The agency had only one prison in ’86 and it was fast running out of space. Planning was underway for a second prison, but as a stopgap the state began shipping some inmates out to county jails.

Roy “DJ” Droddy, who I mentioned a few minutes ago, was among them. He ended up in Duchesne County, home to Utah’s highest mountain peaks, hundreds of natural gas wells and a whole lot of dust and sagebrush. Roy hadn’t been there long before he reached out to South Ogden police. He claimed to have information about the disappearance of Joyce Yost.

Brad Birch drove out to the Duchesne County Jail on June 4, 1986 to talk with Roy.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): And Roy, what we talked to you about is your involvement with a Mr. Doug Lovell, is that right?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Correct.

Dave Cawley: Roy told Brad Doug had enlisted his help drafting legal documents for an appeal. They’d discussed Joyce Yost.

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): He told me that, ah, that that was the young lady he was accused of raping and kidnapping, back in April of ’85 and, ah, in August, ah, he killed her.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): He made that statement to you?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Yes.

Dave Cawley: Roy said Doug had denied raping Joyce, but admitted killing her.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Did he say how he killed her?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): No, he did not.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Did he say where?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): No, he did not.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Did he say that anyone was with him at that time?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): No, he did not.

Dave Cawley: The only real clue Roy was able to provide dealt with what he said were Doug’s efforts to conceal Joyce’s body.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): In talking about moving the body, when did he say that that happened?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Uh, in November, when he was, ah, he was stopped in November for poaching and it was during that time that he moved the body.

Dave Cawley: The poaching stop at Monte Cristo. The details of that were not public knowledge.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): And he said that he was stopped by fish and game officer?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Yes, ah, his wife was stopped and questioned first, and he was not in the vehicle. And the fish and game stopped him a second time, in which he was in the vehicle. He had just come from moving the body.

Dave Cawley: Roy said he hadn’t just learned this from Doug. He’d also heard it from Rhonda herself. They’d talked on the phone about it during the three weeks since the court hearing in the poaching case.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Do you think that she knew he was moving the body when they were there originally?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): In my conversations with her she said no, that she didn’t know, that she thought he was out going to the bathroom or having a bowel movement. She did not know that he was moving the body. I had known because Doug had told me previous to that, but Rhonda did not tell me until, ah, after she had been in jail.

Dave Cawley: Roy’s story, if true, would mean Joyce’s body was in the Monte Cristo Mountains about 30 miles northeast of Ogden. At that very time, in early June, the last bits of winter snow would’ve been melting off those mountain slopes.

I’ve not found any records showing police followed up on this lead. Terry Carpenter told me they tried, but said the information was simply too vague and the Monte Cristo region too vast.

Roy said he’d be willing to testify if the police could ensure his safety. Doug was a dangerous man who’d expressed a desire to have somebody else killed.

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Right. An officer by the name of John Holtman.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Something like that.

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Right. Right, correct.

Dave Cawley: There’s no person in this story named John Holtman. But to my ear, John Holtman sounds reasonably close to Bill Holthaus, the Clearfield detective who’d arrested Doug the morning after the rape.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Do you think he still has the ax to grind against that officer?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Yes.

Brad Birch (from June 1986 police recording): Do you think he still would do that if he had the opportunity?

Roy “DJ” Droddy (from June 1986 police recording): Yeah. Because, ah, Doug feels he’s lost a lot and uh, will continue to lose and he feels that the person responsible is this officer Holtman and he’s very bitter towards him.

Dave Cawley: I mentioned this to Bill.

Bill Holthaus: Disappointed he didn’t know my name, but— (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Grateful, disappointed.

Bill Holthaus: Just maybe a little bit.

Dave Cawley: Bill remembered getting a warning from Brad about a possible threat.

Bill Holthaus: It never came to any fruition. I was apparently, y’know, for sure I was a lot more careful after that for awhile. It went away like everything else. It’s not the first time that a law enforcement officer’s been threatened.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug Lovell wanted off A-block. He requested a transfer from the prison’s Wasatch facility to SSD. SSD inmates lived under less restrictive security, qualified for additional recreation time, had a greater array of employment opportunities available and so forth. Space in SSD was limited though and reserved for inmates who were taking part in its programs. Those included sex offender treatment and mental health support for offenders with intellectual disabilities. Doug didn’t have an intellectual disability. He was still publicly denying having raped Joyce, so he couldn’t exactly apply for sex offender treatment. Instead, his stated reason for application to SSD was depression.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): I was uh, I had a very, very low self esteem. I didn’t like myself, I still really don’t. There’s a lot of times I just, for the most part, I just hated me. I hated me and I resented people that, um, that cared a lot about me.

Dave Cawley: That’s Doug’s own voice, captured in a phone call to Rhonda. The prison at the time classified inmates as one of three personality types: Kappa, Sigma or Omega. That correlated to predator, victim or neutral. Doug was a predator-type.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): I’m really a proud person in the sense that I don’t like exposing myself to people and I don’t like letting people, I don’t like telling somebody that I have a problem.

Dave Cawley: Prison staff approved his request and moved him into SSD in the summer of ’87. He began seeing a therapist there, a young woman named Kate Della-Piana.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): When I first started seeing her, y’know, I says ‘y’know, Kate,’ I says, ‘y’know, I feel really bad about, y’know, the first few months that we spent together because I was blowing smoke up your butt.’ She says, ‘I know you were.’ She says ‘it was about to end, too.’

Dave Cawley: Kate did not respond to my interview request for this podcast. Doug also reconnected with an old friend in SSD: Tom Peters. This audio is tough to make out, coming off a very old analog tape, but listen close and you’ll hear Tom say SSD had a good atmosphere and he was able to help inmates with lower ability levels than his own.

Tom Peters (from September 1991 police recording): SSD is a very good atmosphere. It’s mental health. And I’m a psych, I work with the guys who are on the lower ability level than my own, you know? So I work with these guys. It’s very comfortable.

Dave Cawley: Tom had returned to prison in the spring of ’87 on a new set of theft cases. He and Doug often spent their rec time together playing tennis or lifting weights. They didn’t talk about what had happened to Joyce Yost.

Doug kept those kinds of secrets close.

Tom Peters (from September 1991 police recording): God only knows the things he’s done, you know?

Dave Cawley: So it surprised Tom when he started seeing Doug leaving those therapy sessions with Kate Della-Piana.

Tom Peters (from September 1991 police recording): When he goes to therapy with her he’s come out, you know, crying before. He says he’s talking about his brother’s death.

Dave Cawley: Royce’s death was a topic Doug rarely discussed.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): I was caught in between y’know Royce and a lot of situations. Even after he died, I was still, situations that he left me with. Left on my shoulders. And uh, when Royce was around he helped me deal with things, sometimes by not even talking about it. But he was there.

Dave Cawley: Doug had never even been candid about his brother’s death with Rhonda.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): Sometimes when you have secrets, you spend so much time and energy in trying to hide them.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda visited Doug at the prison regularly, bringing the kids Cody and Alisha with her. Only then, in their separation, had Doug started to see Rhonda as his best friend.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): I never thought I’d see that in a woman. And I never realized, y’know, up until now, until lately through my therapy just what the hell, what the hell I had out there.

Dave Cawley: There is another person Doug came to know around this same time, but you couldn’t call him a friend. His name was Carl Jacobson. Carl had taken a job as a corrections officer at the prison in ’83, just as he was turning 22 years old. His first assignment was on A-block, but he transferred to SSD midway through ’86, placing him there shortly before Doug arrived.

Carl’s duties in SSD included sitting in on group therapy sessions for inmates in the Merit Two program, which is what Doug joined when he arrived at SSD in ’87. Carl found Doug easy to manage. He would stop by Doug’s bunk when making his rounds each evening and they’d watch the 6 o’clock news together. Doug, in turn, learned Carl was someone he could safely feed information to when the situation warranted. A symbiotic relationship.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Roy City police dispatcher Betty Nicholas was at work on Friday, April 3, 1987, when, just after noon, she took a phone call. The caller, a man, told Betty he had found a body. He was an avid hiker, he said, and had been back in an area where few people go.

Betty asked the man’s name. He refused to give it, saying he didn’t want to get wrapped up in anything. She reassured him he wasn’t in any trouble, she just needed more information, like an address. All he would say was the body was decayed. 

Betty urged the man to call the Weber County Sheriff’s Office, the agency responsible for cases outside of city limits. She told him there were several missing women from the area whom police were eager to find. A little later that same afternoon, Weber County Sheriff’s dispatcher Sheli Tracy received a call from the same man.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): I called about Crimestoppers, the number.

Dave Cawley: He wanted information on how to get in touch with Crimestoppers, an organization that allows people to submit anonymous tips.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): Well what it, what it, what it was, I’m reporting a body that I found.

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 police recording): Mmmhmm.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): Huh?

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 police recording): A body?

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

Dave Cawley: The man said he’d parked his car near Causey Dam, an impoundment on the South Fork of the Ogden River about 20 miles east of Ogden, and hiked two or three miles back into the mountains behind the reservoir. That’s where he’d found the body.

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): There was a purse there.

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 police recording): There was, was it a lady?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): Well I assume the body was a lady’s but I didn’t open the purse or anything.

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

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): No, I’m not interested in leading search parties.

Dave Cawley: Sheli told the man she just needed his name and number so she could have an officer call him, to gather more specific information. He refused.

Sheli Tracy (from April 3, 1987 police recording): Can you explain to me where it’s at?

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): Well, if you had half an hour.

Dave Cawley: The man said he’d been in the area searching for “sediments” and would have to use a specialized geologic map to pinpoint the spot.

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

Anonymous caller (from April 3, 1987 police recording): I, I, I’m just reporting it. Of, of course not. I didn’t have anything to do with it, you know?

Dave Cawley: Sheli asked if he would wait on hold just long enough for her to grab an investigator. He agreed, but hung up before she returned to the call moments later.

Let tell you a bit about Causey Reservoir. Causey is surrounded by mountain ridges that rise 1,000, 2,000, almost 3,000 feet above the water’s surface. Beyond the reservoir and between the ridges are several canyons, the bottoms of which are thick with vegetation.

These canyons are cut in a 180-degree arc — from 12 to 6 on the face of a clock. Wheatgrass Canyon is at the top and Skull Crack Canyon is at the bottom. Wheatgrass ascends all the way to the base of Monte Cristo — the mountain near where Doug and Rhonda were suspected of poaching.

Skull Crack is home to a private cabin community called Causey Estates. The summer homes there are scattered among stands of quaking aspen and are only accessible through a locked gate. Between Wheatgrass and Skull Crack, to the east, are a series of canyons and ridges rarely visited except by hunters and ranchers. The anonymous caller had not indicated which of these canyons held the remains.

That didn’t stop sheriffs deputies from searching. They went out five days after the anonymous call and combed the area around Causey Dam with no results.

A month later, police in Ogden arrested a man named Cary Hartmann in connection with a series of four rapes committed in 1986 and early ’87.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): Prosecutors say their key evidence in the case against Hartmann are statements he made to police at the time of his arrest, information from police lab tests and a victim’s testimony.

Dave Cawley: Cary had previously worked as a reserve officer for the Ogden Police Department. Investigators had also discovered he’d been dating Sheree Warren at the time of her disappearance in October of ’85.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): She was last seen leaving her job at a credit union in Salt Lake to meet her estranged husband at a downtown auto dealership.

Dave Cawley: I mentioned Sheree in the last episode. Police at the time considered both Cary Hartmann and Sheree’s estranged husband, Charles, persons of interest. After Cary’s arrest on the rape charge, Ogden police Captain Marlin Balls phoned Weber County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Archie Smith with a tantalizing lead. A witness claimed to have seen Cary at Causey Estates the weekend after Sheree vanished.

Ball suggested the body the anonymous caller had found could be Sheree. So investigators visited Causey again on June 20, 1987. This time, they focused on the canyon adjacent to Causey Estates but again didn’t find anything. A few months later, a jury convicted Cary Hartmann in the first of the rape cases.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): The guilty verdict brought tears to family members and even some jurors in the courtroom. The victim agreed to shed her cloak of anonymity and talk with reporters about her feelings, she said as a way to help other rape victims.

Victim (from KSL TV archive): I think if I have the strength to finally be on camera that maybe it will give other people strength through me.

Dave Cawley: Cary Hartmann headed to the Utah State Prison on a sentence of 15-to-life, just like Doug Lovell. And, like Doug, he landed in SSD.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug kept his appellate attorney, David Grindstaff, busy during that summer of ’87. Doug still owed on the loan he’d taken out against his stolen Mazda. But responsibility for making those payments had fallen on Rhonda.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): He was in prison and she couldn’t make, she was gonna have a rough time making payments on it. Especially with the kids.

Dave Cawley: That is Susan, the loan officer who Doug had showered with yellow roses at the beginning of our story. She worked with Rhonda in arranging payments.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): She got really upset and she said that they were gonna file bankruptcy, which they did.

Dave Cawley: She worked with Rhonda in arranging payments. The appellate attorney, David Grindstaff handled that bankruptcy case. At the same time, David put together a brief for the Utah Supreme Court arguing Doug had been wrongly convicted.

He raised seven points on appeal. First, David said the testimony of Sharon Gess about having been stalked by a red car car with flip-up lights had prejudiced the jury. Second, he said the trial court had given the jury bad instructions regarding venue. Third, he took issue with Judge Rodney Page’s decision to tell the jurors Joyce had been missing for two months. Fourth, he said the prosecution hadn’t established chain-of-custody regarding Joyce’s dress, pantyhose, bra and the blue men’s shirt which were all admitted as evidence. Fifth, he said the sentence was too harsh because the state hadn’t proved Doug’s attack on Joyce rose to the level of “extreme cruelty and depravity” required by the law. Sixth, he said Doug’s trial attorney — John Hutchison — had failed to object to all of the above, meaning Doug was denied effective counsel. And seventh, he said the use of Joyce’s testimony during the trial had deprived Doug of his right to confront the witnesses against him.

The Utah Attorney General’s Office disputed every point. The Utah Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments for December 14, 1987. Rhonda wrote a letter to her husband a couple of weeks before that date. Here’s what it said.

Saige Miller (as Rhonda Lovell): I sure do miss you, honey. I want you home so bad. I can’t stand it. I love you so much. Baby, you are the best. … I hope the appeal will turn out good. I’m excited to go see what it will be like. I hope they hurry with the decision so I can get you home where you belong.

Dave Cawley: On the day of the oral arguments, Brian Namba sat and listened as David Grindstaff made his presentation to the justices.

Brian Namba: He called it a ‘garden variety rape.’

Dave Cawley: A garden variety rape. The comment caught the attention of Justice Christine Durham, the first and at the time only female justice on Utah’s highest court.

Brian Namba: I thought she was going to jump over the bench and strangle him for calling it a garden variety rape.

Dave Cawley: Oh, he said that in oral argument?

Brian Namba: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Brian told me he’d suspected Doug would try to downplay the callousness of the rape in his inevitable appeal.

Brian Namba: That’s why I filed a written statement, so that it would be in the record and always looking towards appeal and having the Supreme Court be able to have a tangible piece of paper with a list on it of things that are limited to the status of the rape and does not include anything having to do with potential murder.

Dave Cawley: Brian hadn’t wanted the Supreme Court thinking Doug was being punished for killing Joyce, even though he’d only been convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting her. On the flip side, the fact Doug had not yet been charged with Joyce’s murder festered like an open wound for her family.

Randy Salazar: Kim is not satisfied with the rape.

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s daughter Kim Salazar and her husband Randy had kept hounding sergeant Brad Birch.

Randy Salazar: Kim is so frustrated ‘cause every time she calls, y’know, there’s nothing they’ve got.

Dave Cawley: They weren’t the only ones in the dark. Detective Bill Holthaus often bumped into Joyce’s sister Dorothy and her kids around town.

Bill Holthaus: Y’know, I was approached a lot, let’s put it that way. ‘What’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on?’

Dave Cawley: Bill didn’t have anything to tell them. South Ogden police were investigating the disappearance, not Clearfield, and they weren’t sharing information.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: South Ogden police Sergeant Brad Birch promoted to lieutenant at the end of 1987. The move meant he no longer led the investigation into Joyce Yost’s disappearance.

Kim Salazar: My communication with them obviously became less and less over the years.

Dave Cawley: Kim Salazar had kept in touch with Brad and the rest of the detectives, including Terry Carpenter…

Kim Salazar: They were helpful, they were honest I think.

Terry Carpenter: But we were still at a loss as to what’d happened to Joyce.

Randy Salazar: Y’know, Kim’s on this all the time. Kim was constantly calling these guys. Seeing if they found anything out, seeing if they found anything out.

Dave Cawley: Kim and her husband Randy believed they knew right where Joyce’s killer was — the Utah State Prison — even if police couldn’t prove it.

Randy Salazar: But he is cocky down there. He’s very cocky.

Dave Cawley: Terry Carpenter soon moved in to the position Brad Birch had held before him.

Terry Carpenter: I was actually promoted to the detective sergeant and inherited the case.

Dave Cawley: Terry was an Ogden native. He’d attended Weber State College and had been inspired to pursue a career as a police officer by an older brother. He was 15 years into that career by the time he took over the Joyce Yost case.

Kim Salazar: Things had gotten very stagnant until he took over.

Terry Carpenter: Not that anybody had done anything wrong. They’d exhausted about everything that they could.

Dave Cawley: Terry didn’t have much of a direction to follow, at least at first. That changed a few months later, in March of ’88, when Terry received an unexpected phone call from a woman who wanted to remain anonymous.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Why don’t you, uh, why don’t you give me the name George.

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): George. Ok. I don’t have a problem with that at all.

Dave Cawley: “George” wanted a few details about the Joyce Yost case…

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): She had blonde hair and that she was raped.

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): That’s correct.

Dave Cawley: …and asked if it remained an open investigation.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Ok, why is the case open?

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): Why is it open?

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Uh huh.

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): ‘Cause we’ve never been able to conclude any kind of a location or a whereabouts.

Dave Cawley: “George” said she was speaking with another woman who’d possibly witnessed Joyce’s murder. She wanted an assurance of anonymity.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Now I’m getting a little paranoid ok, so—

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): I’m under—

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Why am I paranoid? You won’t put a tracer on this call, will you?

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): I understand that completely. That’s—

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Are you comfortable with that?

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): Yes.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Ok.

Dave Cawley: Terry told “George” any information she might have could prove valuable.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): She was murdered by some, a friend of the guy that raped her, who paid someone to kill her. And she was, she was tortured, and umm, killed in a satanic ritual.

Dave Cawley: She said Joyce’s body had then been burned and scattered.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Right now I can’t give you any more information. Although, umm, this person said they, they’d be willing to talk to you some time in the future.

Dave Cawley: Terry said he’d do whatever it took to protect this witness, if she would just come forward. George said that couldn’t happen, yet.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): And I appreciate your kindness.

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): Well, thank you. I appreciate your calling.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Ok, bye.

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): Alright, bye now.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: On July 14, 1988, the Utah Supreme Court issued its decision on Doug’s appeal. The five justices were unanimous. They dismissed every single one of his claims. Chief Justice Gordon Hall authored the opinion, in which he made direct reference to the statement from Doug’s attorney that the rape of Joyce Yost had been of the “garden variety.”

Brian Namba: That was a big mistake on his part. (Laughs). Justice Durham, I thought, boy if looks could kill. I’ve never seen her so mad. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: That again is Brian Namba, the prosecutor from the rape case. The chief justice wrote there was ample evidence in the record of Doug’s pattern of criminal behavior, as well as his extreme cruelty toward Joyce, to justify the two sentences of 15-to-life. Vindication for Brian, who’d made sure to include those details in his motions. It’d proven tricky, since he’d also had to avoid implying Doug was responsible for Joyce’s disappearance.

Brian Namba: But that’s sort of my strategy is to try to take some of that incendiary stuff out of it, y’know, because you’ve got to keep the record clean. … And so they can look at it and say, ‘Well maybe he did, but here’s all this other stuff that justifies what happened.’

Dave Cawley: The specter of Doug winning release came off the table, much to the relief of Joyce’s family and South Ogden police.

Kim Salazar: We knew he wasn’t going anywhere, so they had time.

Dave Cawley: Did they though? Doug still had two paths to freedom open to him. One went through the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, where he’d once before won an early release. The other went through the federal courts.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Weber County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Archie Smith had an idea. In September of ’88, he wrote a letter to a man named Murry Miron. Here’s what the letter said.

Ethan Millard (as Lt. Archie Smith): Dear Mr. Miron, I recently attended a psychological profiling course in Salt Lake City, Utah. The instructor … suggested that you are an expert in language analysis and may be able to assist us in a criminal homicide case.

Dave Cawley: Miron held a Ph.D in psycholinguistics, the intersection of how we speak or write and how we think. In the letter, Smith told the story of the caller who’d reported finding human remains near Causey in April of ’87.

Ethan Millard (as Lt. Archie Smith): The caller would not identify himself and we attempted through the news media to try to get the caller to call again with negative results. We searched the area three times with a large force and were still unable to locate a body.

Dave Cawley: Miron is deceased now, but had worked as a professor at Syracuse University and had advised the FBI on several high-profile cases, including the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Son of Sam serial killings. He claimed an ability to psychoanalyze a person based on little more than their diction and dialect.

Ethan Millard (as Lt. Archie Smith): I am sending to you a copy of the conversation of the caller with our dispatcher, maybe you can tell us a little about the person and how we can go about locating him.

Dave Cawley: Miron’s response came about six weeks later. Here’s what he wrote:

Alex Kirry (as Murray Miron): It is my evaluation that the caller is a high-school educated, white male approximately between the ages of 45 and 60. The dialect markers are consistent with those of a native of the Northwestern United States.

Dave Cawley: Miron said the caller’s claims had the “texture of truthfulness,” with the exception of the statements about his identity.

Alex Kirry (as Murray Miron): In my judgement, the caller did discover a body in an advanced state of decomposition sufficient to have masked the sex of the victim, but is misrepresenting his purposes for being in the area in which he found the body. It is not likely that he was searching for ‘sediments.’

Dave Cawley: Maybe, Miron said, the caller lived nearby or was working on some sort of geological survey. But he said a government employee wouldn’t show so much hesitation in assisting the authorities. It didn’t seem he had any reason for avoiding interaction with the police, beyond the disruption to his daily routine. Miron said appeals to the caller’s conscience would likely fail.

Alex Kirry (as Murray Miron): The caller evidences little moral outrage or indication regarding the fate of the victim or interest in seeing her killer brought to justice. Instead, he appears to be motivated by the pragmatic concern of making the most minimal effort which will discharge what he perceives to be his only nominal civic responsibilities.

Dave Cawley: Miron suggested police play clips of the tape on the news…

Larry Lewis (from 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: …along with reassurances they did not believe the caller was guilty of any crime.

Lt. Archie Smith (from KSL TV archive): We believe that he did in fact find a body and we desperately need him to lead us to that body.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): But that may be difficult.

Dave Cawley: Archie Smith enlisted the help of Utah Crime Solvers in putting together this public service announcement which also aired on television that winter.

Terry Pepper (from Crime Solvers segment): The caller stated that he had parked in the Causey Dam area up Ogden Canyon and had hiked two to three miles back into the mountains. While there he discovered the decomposed remains of a body. Because of a purse he found near the body the victim is believed to be a female.

Dave Cawley: The Crime Solvers segment involved a re-enactment of the body’s discovery, along with another plea for help.

Terry Shaw (from Crime Solvers segment): The caller’s description of the area where the body was located was very vague. Several searches of the area have proven unsuccessful. We need to hear from that caller or anyone who can identify the voice of the caller, if only for the sake of the victim’s family.

Dave Cawley: Utah Crime Solvers offered a reward for information about the location of the body or the identity of the anonymous caller. It did not help. The caller never came forward. To this day, he’s not been identified and the remains near Causey have not been located or recovered.

It’s worth noting though the call came in on April 3^rd, two years to the day after Doug’s initial attack on Joyce outside her apartment. And more importantly, Doug — who often watched the 6 o’clock news with prison guard Carl Jacobson — saw the Crime Solvers segment.

Terry Pepper (from Crime Solvers segment): Call Crime Solvers about this or any criminal activity. You will remain anonymous.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Rhonda Lovell continued writing her husband letters through the spring of ’89.

Saige Miller (as Rhonda Lovell): It’s just not the same with you not with us. Doug, I love you with all my heart and soul and I never want us to be apart from each other. I would die without you Doug. Us and the kids are one and we can never break that.

Dave Cawley: Doug had a job working in the prison sign shop. He didn’t earn much, but he sent her something every month.

Saige Miller (as Rhonda Lovell): I really appreciate the money you send to us. It helps out so much, honey. I don’t know how I’d survive if you didn’t send money.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda talked about how quickly the kids were growing.

Saige Miller (as Rhonda Lovell): I’ve been thinking about you extra today. We cooked hamburgers and hotdogs outside and it brought back a lot of memories. … It seems like yesterday when you were out on the deck cooking hamburgers for us. What I’d give to have it like that again. We were so happy, so carefree and alive.

Dave Cawley: All of this wistful talk over the idea of Doug winning his freedom. But with every passing month, it became more clear that wasn’t going to happen quickly, if at all. Doug’s therapist, Kate Della-Piana, had reached what seemed a breakthrough during summer of ’89. She’d managed to get Doug talking about the death of his brother, Royce.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): Royce was a very cold person and uh, he was very brutal with certain situations and I never could be like that but yet I tried to be.

Dave Cawley: But Kate was moving on from that position at the prison. Rhonda noticed that with Kate’s departure, her husband’s tone changed.

Saige Miller (as Rhonda Lovell): Why don’t you ever talk about Royce anymore? Just because you don’t see Kate anymore doesn’t mean you don’t talk about it anymore. Please don’t shut me out again, okay? Please talk to me, baby.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda had by then waited four years for Doug to come home. It proved too much. She wrote Doug another letter at the end of that year, telling him she intended to move on with her life. Doug shared Rhonda’s “Dear John” letter with Kate as she was arranging his hand-off to a different therapist.

Doug Lovell (from recorded phone call): She says I, I got a feeling that, y’know, maybe you and Rhonda will get back together. And she looks at me, kinda hoping, y’know that kind of innocent look on her face. And I says, ‘I don’t know.’ I says, ‘Y’know, I kind of think, y’know, that it’s possible that maybe too much has happened between us.’

Dave Cawley: Rhonda had hired an attorney. It turned out to be Steve Kaufman, the man whose band Joyce Yost had gone to see on the last night of her life. Rhonda filed for divorce in late December. In an affidavit, she cited “irreconcilable differences” rising from her husband’s incarceration. She wrote until the divorce was granted, Doug would have “a tendency to feel that he has a strong hold.”

Doug did not contest the divorce. He agreed to pay child support and gave up any claim on their shared property. He only asked that Rhonda hand over his clothing and his bedroom furniture, including his waterbed. By March of 1990, Rhonda Lovell reverted to Rhonda Buttars.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug and Rhonda had been divorced for only two months when, in May of ’90, a man named Drew Dunifer dropped by a pawn shop on Ogden’s 25^th Street. He brought two guns with him: one rifle and one shotgun. The shop, called 25^th Street Pawn, gave Drew $300 for the shotgun.

A few weeks later, an Ogden detective stopped by 25^th Street Pawn. He checked the shotgun’s serial number. It came back as stolen out of the town of Liberty five years earlier. It was one of the guns taken from the house of Cody Montgomery, Sr. You might remember Cody’s wife, Karen, described that burglary a couple of episodes back.

Weber County Sheriff’s detective Jeff Malan went to 25^th Street Pawn several days later and seized the shotgun. The statute of limitations had expired, meaning even if Jeff could figure out who’d stolen the shotgun, he wouldn’t be able to secure criminal charges. Still, he had a duty to return the gun to its rightful owner. And of course, he wanted to figure out how the gun had ended up at the pawn shop.

The shop’s records included Drew Dunifer’s contact information. Jeff worked backward from there. Drew did not respond when I reached out to request an interview, so I can only tell you what the detective’s report and handwritten notes show.

They say Drew told Jeff the gun had belonged to the son of the woman he was then dating. Her ex-husband had bought the shotgun from another pawn shop — The Gift House — in early ’86. When this girlfriend and her ex divorced later that year, the ex had given the shotgun to her son. The woman and her son had subsequently moved in with Drew. That’s how he came to possess the shotgun.

I need to be clear: there’s no suggestion Drew did anything wrong here.

Who had pawned the shotgun the first time, at The Gift House? No one could say.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The fifth anniversary of Joyce’s disappearance came in August of 1990 with no break in the investigation. But the anniversary brought with it fresh news coverage which breathed new life into an old lead. A bit earlier, I talked about how Sergeant Terry Carpenter had received an anonymous call in March of ’88. The caller had said Joyce’d died in a satanic ritual.

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): And then her body was burned.

Terry Carpenter (from March 1988 police recording): Her body was burned. Hmm. Do you know where this occurred at all?

“George” (from March 1988 police recording): Actually, I don’t.

Dave Cawley: Nothing much had come of that tip, until those news reports around the fifth anniversary. A different woman saw them and reached out to Terry.

Terry Carpenter (from August 1990 police recording): She wishes to explain some of the circumstances that she is aware of involving Joyce Yost. Is that correct?

“Kay” (from August 1990 police recording): Yes.

Terry Carpenter (from August 1990 police recording): Okay.

Dave Cawley: Terry agreed to give this woman anonymity.

Terry Carpenter (from August 1990 police recording): Ah, the other promise that I’ll make you is that when it comes times that we may want your testimony in court, I’ll clarify that with you before we reveal who you are.

Dave Cawley: I’m aware of this woman’s identity but have not had a chance to speak with her myself. As a result, I’m going to honor Terry’s promise of anonymity. I will simply call her “Kay.” Kay told Terry a convoluted story about a friend of hers, a woman named Barbara, who was part of a satanic coven.

“Kay” (from August 1990 police recording): She never went into detail. I know that she still had a goblet and candles and things that they used to use. They used to meet there at this house all the time.

Terry Carpenter (from August 1990 police recording): At the same house?

“Kay” (from August 1990 police recording): Yes.

Dave Cawley: The leader of the coven was supposedly a friend of Doug Lovell’s. Kay said Bee told her this friend had agreed to kill Joyce on Doug’s behalf.

Terry Carpenter (from August 1990 police recording): Did she say how they killed her?

“Kay” (from August 1990 police recording): She said beat, tortured, raped and stabbed.

Dave Cawley: Then, Kay said, the coven had driven Joyce’s body up Weber Canyon and disposed of it along an old dirt road.

“Kay” (from August 1990 police recording): Barbara said that she took her necklace off that she had been wearing and put it on the body. That it was the Italian, you know, the horn style, that style of necklace that was really big in the disco era. That she had put that on the body and that Joyce’s purse had been left with the body.

Dave Cawley: Kay’s account fell right in line with what that caller who’d asked to be identified as “George” had said in ’88, giving the bizarre story an air of credibility. But this claim of a ritualistic killing was also right in line with the popular media of the day.

Jane Clayson (from KSL TV archive): In the last four years, the Utah Attorney General’s Office says it has received dozens of reports of ritualistic abuse. Investigators say it exists, but it’s hard to prove.

Dave Cawley: A full discussion of the so-called “satanic panic” craze of the ‘80s and ‘90s is beyond the scope of this podcast, but prominent figures in media  — including Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera — were around this time broadcasting specials about the perceived dangers posed by satanic cults.

Jane Clayson (from KSL TV archive): But some experts say incidents of ritualistic worship and abuse in Utah are not widespread.

Unknown (from KSL TV archive): It happens, not to the degree people generally claim that it does and I think it often happens in response to publicity.

Dave Cawley: Terry did not dismiss the account, whatever his personal skepticism.

Terry Carpenter (from August 1990 police recording): This, ah, cult or this coven he was involved with, were there other people that participated the night that the killing took place? Except these that you’ve named?

“Kay” (from August 1990 police recording): Only, I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Kay offered to take Terry out to the house where the coven met. It sat next to a large gravel pit near the mouth of Weber Canyon, about five miles south of Joyce’s apartment. Terry was intrigued. He told news reporters he’d received information from an informant who said Joyce Yost had “met with violence.” The Deseret News published a story with the headline “Clues may aid in Ogden case.”

Terry Carpenter: You want to either prove or disprove every possible lead that you can come on.

Dave Cawley: Terry soon identified and located the woman at the center of the coven claim, Barbara. Terry began meeting with Barbara, attempting to get more information.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): I didn’t do anything, I was just there. I didn’t do anything.

Terry Carpenter (from April 1990 police recording): Okay.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): And I don’t even know what was done.

Terry Carpenter (from April 1990 police recording):  Listen to me. If that’s accurate and that’s the case, then I have no doubt in my mind that the county attorney will grant you immunity.

Dave Cawley: Terry discovered the call from “George” in ’88 had come from Barbara’s psychologist. While in therapy, she’d recovered a memory of a ritualistic murder. She claimed to have once seen a petite blonde-haired woman dismembered by men in black robes.

Terry Carpenter: She believed for all the world that Joyce was one of the sacrifices that her father was involved with and that Joyce was sacrificed and disposed of.

Dave Cawley: But the story seemed to shift with each telling.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): How’s it going to look when I’m on the witness stand and say ‘Gee judge, I can’t remember if I was there or not. Gee judge, I have multiple personalities.’

Dave Cawley: You heard that right. Barbara said “I have multiple personalities.”

Terry Carpenter: You could talk to her and you could look to her physically, eye to eye, and she would change mannerisms, she would change voices, she would change from being a total absolute prude to being a sloven, whatever you want to call her.

Dave Cawley: Barbara had been diagnosed with what’s now known as dissociative identity disorder. Which meant Terry needed to speak with whichever personality had witnessed the supposed coven killing. He met with Barbara and her psychologist, intent on drawing out this particular persona.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): Got your handcuffs ready? Pull out your gun. And that would hurt me, so don’t.” (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Barbara bounced between personalities in this audio recording of that meeting.

Terry Carpenter (from April 1990 police recording): Why did they bring her there?

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): To bring the antichrist.

Dave Cawley: She offered graphic descriptions of a ritual murder.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): They buried her in different places.

Dave Cawley: She at times mocked or threatened Terry.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): Am I hurting your feelings?

Terry Carpenter (from April 1990 police recording): No, you can’t hurt my feelings. How much hair does this guy have and what does it look like?

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): Well he certainly has more than you. I have to pick on you. You’re making me hurt.

Terry Carpenter (from April 1990 police recording):  You’re right. So that’s fair.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): Making me hurt bad.

Dave Cawley: At other times, she pleaded for Terry’s help.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): Carpenter, this hurts. Make it stop.

Dave Cawley: I’m being very selective about what I share from this recording, considering the circumstances. But it’s important to know the tape revealed Terry to be a cop who showed compassion. Part of that might be because his relationship to Barbara wasn’t just one of officer and informant.

Terry Carpenter: She was in my ward.

Dave Cawley: A ward is a local congregation of The Latter-day Saint church. Terry was at the time serving as bishop over his ward. That position of leadership in the church’s lay clergy had provided him ample opportunity to get to know Barbara’s various personalities.

Terry Carpenter: She would call as a little boy. She would call as a little girl.

Dave Cawley: But in his role as detective, Terry needed Barbara to give him names of the coven members. And so he had to press her.

Barbara (from April 1990 police recording): Don’t tell. I won’t tell.

Dave Cawley: Terry and a CSI team had already scoured the area around the coven house.

Terry Carpenter: I took canines in, I took cadaver dogs in there.

Dave Cawley: They’d found traces of blood. But forensic testing had revealed that blood didn’t even appear to be human. Near as the crime lab could tell, the blood had come from a chicken.

During a later search of a nearby gravel pit, the crime scene unit located a chip of bone. They likewise sent that off for forensic testing, which proved inconclusive. If the coven existed, and if they’d had something to do with the death of Joyce Yost, they’d covered their tracks.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Four days after Terry Carpenter’s meeting with “Kay,” Clearfield detective Bill Holthaus went into his office and found a slip of paper waiting on his desk. It was a “Phone-O-Gram,” a little form the secretaries used to scribble down messages. This Phone-O-Gram said Sergeant Carpenter from South Ogden had called for Bill regarding a person named “Joey.” Last name: S-C-H-O-S-T. Joey Schost. Bill called Terry back and Terry explained he was making a new push on the Joyce Yost investigation. He had a lot of people he needed to talk to about a new lead saying Joyce had died in a contract killing. Bill had been in the dark about South Ogden’s investigation for five years.

Bill Holthaus: I had no official involvement other than to occasionally ask South Ogden what was going on up until they put the task force together.

Dave Cawley: That was about to change. Bill said he wanted in.

Bill Holthaus: And there were little odds and ends that we did for South Ogden. Interviewing this person, interviewing that kind of person.

Dave Cawley: The biggest interview of the entire investigation was about to come, bringing with it a surprise break.

Dave Cawley: Kim Salazar hadn’t been able to reach her mom all weekend.

Kim Salazar: I couldn’t get ahold of her. Dot couldn’t get ahold of her and … we all always talked every day.

Dave Cawley: Kim arrived to work at Royal Studio on the morning of Monday, August 12, 1985 hoping to see Joyce there.

Kim Salazar: She wasn’t late for work. She didn’t miss work. Ever.

Dave Cawley: She called her husband, Randy.

Randy Salazar: And she told me that her mom didn’t make it. That she didn’t go to work and she’d been trying to call her and there was no answer and so I told Kim, I says, ‘Maybe she took off to Wendover again.’ I says, y’know what, ‘Let’s not, let’s not panic.’

Dave Cawley: Kim phoned The Stateline, the hotel-casino where Joyce liked to stay on her occasional outings to West Wendover, Nevada. Her mom wasn’t there, either. So, Kim next called South Ogden police.

Randy Salazar: Kim explained to them, y’know, but they already knew about the threat that she had had with the rape case and, and what was going on with Doug Lovell.

Dave Cawley: Near as Kim could tell, her mother had last been seen late on the prior Saturday night in her sister Dorothy’s driveway.

Randy Salazar: They wanted to know if it’d been 24 hours she’d been missing and, heck, nobody knew when 24 hours started, y’know?

Kim Salazar: By the next day, when there still wasn’t anything … I begged ‘em, just meet me over there. Go in and see what’s wrong, y’know, and so they met me over there but they made me go in. They didn’t go in first.

Dave Cawley: Kim wriggled into her mother’s apartment around noon on Tuesday, August 13^th, through a side window she knew didn’t latch tight. Then, she unlocked the door, allowing her husband and a South Ogden officer inside.

Randy Salazar: Everything was clean just like she kept it. I mean it was clean. Her house was always spotless.

Dave Cawley: No sign of a struggle.

Kim Salazar: Her apartment was always tidy.

Dave Cawley: Everything in the kitchen appeared as usual.

Randy Salazar: She had a, one of those automatic timers where the coffee had kicked on and made coffee and the coffee pot was full.

Dave Cawley: They went into Joyce’s bedroom.

Randy Salazar: All her jewelry and everything was on her dresser so it didn’t look like anybody came in and robbed her, y’know? And everything just looked like, everything looked just like normal, just like Joyce would keep it.

Dave Cawley: Almost.

Kim Salazar: The bed was made.

Dave Cawley: A single pillow sat at the top of the bed. It was a minor thing but Joyce’s bed usually had two pillows.

Randy Salazar: I know Joyce always used to fall asleep with the TV on. She always watched TV when the went to bed and fell asleep with the TV on.

Dave Cawley: That TV was right where it was supposed to be.

Kim Salazar: Her toothbrush, her cosmetics, all that stuff was in the bathroom.

Dave Cawley: The pink dress Joyce had worn to the Officer’s Club the prior Saturday night sat draped over the back of a chair.

Randy Salazar: Obviously, she came home, set the coffee pot and uh, and she had every intention of getting up and starting out her day and just never got to start it.

Dave Cawley: Kim looked in her mom’s closet. Joyce had so many outfits it was impossible to tell if any of them were missing. But she something did notice something else.

Kim Salazar: I found a washcloth down between the dresser and the door. … And it was dried up and crumpled, y’know, like it had fallen down between.

Dave Cawley: Detective sergeant Brad Birch arrived at Joyce’s apartment that same afternoon to perform a more thorough search. He stripped Joyce’s bed, discovering the sheets and the pillow sham didn’t match. He examined the washcloth, too. It was crusty, as happens when water slowly evaporates out of cotton. He smoothed it out. The front face had alternating stripes of pink, brown, green and gray. The back was tan, with several rust-colored stains: Dried blood.

This is Cold, season 2, episode 4: She’s Gone, Buddy. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley. We’ll be right back.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Word soon got back to Clearfield police detective Bill Holthaus — the lead investigator in the rape case — of his victim’s disappearance.

Bill Holthaus: Yeah, this is not a pleasant time. She vanished. South Ogden let me know that.

Dave Cawley: At a pre-trial conference on August 15^th — two days after the search of the apartment and five days before the trial was supposed to begin — the Davis County Attorney’s Office asked Judge Rodney Page for a continuance.

Bill Holthaus: We were convinced that bad things had happened. There’s no doubt in our mind. Joyce was not the kind to get up and walk away.

Dave Cawley: Judge Page gave the state a month, at the end of which he would either schedule a new trial or dismiss the case.

Brian Namba: I don’t think it really even entered our minds to dismiss, unless it was to dismiss to try to develop more evidence.

Dave Cawley: That’s Brian Namba, the prosecutor. He and Bill agreed Doug Lovell was likely responsible.

Bill Holthaus: I was sure he was involved when she was gone.

Dave Cawley: But was Joyce actually dead? And if so, how had he done it?

Bill Holthaus: At the time, I didn’t think he was, frankly, dumb enough to do it himself.

Dave Cawley: They had no body, no proof a crime had occurred. No corpus delicti. South Ogden police went and questioned Doug and his wife, Rhonda. They claimed to have been at a party the night of Joyce’s disappearance. There were witnesses, they said.

Bill Holthaus: There was an assumption at the time that maybe he paid somebody to get rid of Joyce.

Dave Cawley: Brian told Bill they were pushing ahead with the rape case, even if Joyce did not resurface.

Brian Namba: We were pretty resolute because we believed that he was responsible.

Dave Cawley: Brian told me dropping the prosecution would’ve only rewarded Doug.

Brian Namba: Once you’re, the train’s rolling as fast as it was going for us, I don’t think we really had much to lose.

Dave Cawley: Except a possible acquittal. Brian had to weigh that risk against letting Doug walk.

Bill Holthaus: To take him to trial without, without a body was a decision that wasn’t made lightly. We re-looked at everything before, before Brian made a decision to, to go to trial on that.

Brian Namba: He could be a Josh Powell, easily. And so, then he gets away scottfree from everything. Which is his objective. And so you don’t want to give him what he’s trying to do.

Dave Cawley: Brian told Bill they needed more. He needed to go back to the Pier III — the club where Joyce had dined the night of the rape — and find anyone else who might’ve seen Doug there.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Susan Yerage hadn’t seen or heard from Doug Lovell — the man who’d sent her unsolicited roses for two straight weeks — since he’d come into the credit union where she worked in April of ’85. He’d been in trouble then, due to police having impounded his Mazda, a car for which Susan had arranged financing.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): And I remember one time talking to him about the vehicle being, ah, they wouldn’t release it to us and about it being a stolen vehicle. And he brushed it off like it was no big deal, that that part was gonna get straightened out.

Dave Cawley: Now, in August, Doug returned. Susan didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. No debilitating back injury, for instance.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): He’d wait out in the lobby and then walk over and talk to me and at any time, never did I notice that he was having any health problems, or anything like that.

Dave Cawley: When last they’d spoken, Doug had told Susan he’d separated from his wife, Rhonda. And while separated, he’d had a one-night stand with a woman who’d then accused him of rape. Here, five months later, she asked how it was going.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): Well that, he said that him and Rhonda had got back together, that they were doing really well and that he figured that this whole thing with the rape thing was gonna be settled.

Dave Cawley: So too, he said, was the mix-up over the Mazda. It would all be taken care of.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): So I wasn’t anymore worried about the loan or what was going on with it, at all.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Rob Olsen often took walks along the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains to the east of his home in Uintah Highlands area of Weber County, Utah. His typical route took him past a water tank embedded in the mountainside on the north wall of Spring Creek Canyon. On just such a walk on Saturday, August 17, 1985, he noticed something unusual there: a white Chevy Nova parked behind the water tank. There was no obvious reason for the car to be there. A city work truck, maybe. But a little coupe? No.

Rob had seen that same car there once before, the prior Sunday, parked in the exact same spot. The next evening, on Sunday, August 18^th, he caught a story on the TV news about the disappearance of Joyce Yost. Joyce’s son-in-law Randy Salazar saw it, too.

Randy Salazar: And they did a missing report thing. They put it on TV. I think it was on every channel. They gave her license plate number.

Dave Cawley: The news mentioned police were searching for Joyce’s car: a white, two-door Chevy Nova.

Randy Salazar: People were reporting seeing her car all over the place.

Dave Cawley: Realization struck Rob Olsen. He phoned South Ogden police just after 6 p.m. A group of officers rushed up the hill to the water tank. They included Rob Carpenter and Mel Hackworth, the same officers who’d taken Joyce’s report on the night of the rape. A dispatcher also called sergeant Brad Birch and the on-call detective, Terry Carpenter.

Terry Carpenter: We knew that it was Joyce’s car and hoped to find anything that would lead us to what’d happened to her.

Dave Cawley: Kim and Randy Salazar had themselves been calling South Ogden police multiple times a day.

Kim Salazar: Trying to get updates and see if they’d learned anything or , y’know, if they’d found the car, if they’d found her.

Dave Cawley: They called again after seeing that news report.

Randy Salazar: I called South Ogden police department to ask if they had found anything out on Kim’s mom and she, and the lady answered like this. This what she answered and said. ‘I’m glad you called me back.’

Dave Cawley: I have to acknowledge a discrepancy here. Randy and Kim each remember being the one on the phone.

Kim Salazar: I think she thought she picked up the call she had on hold with one of the detectives but she picked up the wrong line and it was me calling in.

Dave Cawley: But aside from this, their recollections are consistent.

Randy Salazar: And I said ‘Is there something going on with the Joyce Yost case?’ She said, ‘They found her car by the water towers.’

Kim Salazar: She said that the car has been found or, y’know, something to that effect.

Dave Cawley: They were stunned.

Randy Salazar: And then I told her, ‘Well, can we go up there?’ And then she asked who I was and I said ‘This is Randy Salazar.’ ‘Oh!’

Kim Salazar: Then she realized it was me and she was like ‘Oh my god.’ She just thought she was going to be in so much trouble.

Dave Cawley: The dispatcher had mistaken Kim, or possibly Randy, for one of the detectives.

Randy Salazar: She goes ‘You don’t want to go up there. Please do not go up there.’

Kim Salazar: Well, of course, then you’re wondering, ‘Well, y’know, where’s she?’ Y’know. ‘Why wasn’t she with the car?’

Randy Salazar: We had some other friends with us that were over to the house that day and uh, and one of the friends told her ‘Maybe somebody stole the car.’ Y’know? Kim said ‘Nah, nobody stole the car.’

Dave Cawley: Up on the hill, officer Steven Wallerstein was checking out the car in the fading daylight. Both doors were unlocked and both windows were rolled down. Several cigarette butts were in the ashtray — yes, cars used to come with ashtrays — and a bath towel sat wadded up on the driver seat. An empty plastic bag appeared to be stuffed between the driver seat and the driver-side door.

Wallerstein saw something on the floor behind the passenger seat: a one-pint Mason jar containing a thick white liquid. The lid wasn’t secured and much of the goo had oozed out onto the carpet, where it had begun to develop a crust. It looked like, and probably was, paint.

The water tank sat on a patch of unincorporated land, outside the boundaries of South Ogden. The Weber County Sheriff’s Office had jurisdiction. A couple of deputies arrived and told their South Ogden colleagues the area around the water tank was a magnet for teen delinquents, who liked to get drunk there. Proof of that was scattered all about: broken bottles and smashed cans. Brad Birch took notice of two particular Budweiser cans, sitting near the car. He took them, as well as the plastic bag from inside the car, as possible evidence.

The Nova’s gas tank was more than half full. But Detective Terry Carpenter told me something important was missing.

Terry Carpenter: There were no keys with it.

Dave Cawley: The police popped the hood and found a spare key hidden in the engine bay. As the sun set, they drove the Nova down the dirt path from the water tank to the pavement, and then to a service station.

Terry Carpenter: Actually took it to my garage, my father’s garage.

Dave Cawley: Terry moonlighted as a mechanic.

Terry Carpenter: We didn’t find a speck of blood. There was nothing in that car that we could tie it to.

Dave Cawley: All Joyce’s loved ones could do was wait.

Randy Salazar: We all knew. We all knew that it wasn’t good.

Dave Cawley: Brad returned to the water tank at first light the next morning with a man named Jim Gaskill. He was the preeminent local expert on forensic science, having helped establish Utah’s first crime lab a decade earlier. They brought search dogs, as well as items bearing Joyce’s scent. The dogs sniffed around the water tank, but came up with nothing.

Next, Brad and Jim went back to the service station to take a closer look at Joyce’s car. They lifted a few fingerprints. Then, they did the same at Joyce’s apartment. Unfortunately, none of the evidence seemed to indicate what’d happened to her.

Kim Salazar: We met them over at the South Ogden police station.

Dave Cawley: Kim interrogated the detectives about her mom’s car…

Randy Salazar: ‘Was the seat far enough for my mom or was it far enough for a man,’ she said.

Dave Cawley: …as Randy stood nearby.

Randy Salazar: And I heard her say ‘Well how the [expletive] don’t you know that?’

Dave Cawley: If the detectives knew, they weren’t going to let that information slip.

Randy Salazar: So I told Kim, y’know, ‘Maybe they’ll figure out.’ Well, she said ‘Well, this is something I think they need to measure now,’ she said, ‘because if they drove the car out of there, somebody moved that seat.’ And I thought, y’know, you’re right.

Dave Cawley: Randy told me he was impressed with Kim’s dogged demands for answers.

Randy Salazar: Kim was playing pretty darn good detective when this was going on. She already had things in her mind and question already and I was thinking ‘Hell, she’s doing some pretty good legwork here herself.’

Dave Cawley: South Ogden police went up to the water tank a third time that afternoon, with more dogs and more people. They scoured Spring Creek Canyon.

Terry Carpenter: We searched and searched and lo and behold found the keys 50 yards from where it was at, just in the sage brush.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s mail kept arriving at her apartment. No one was there to receive it. Her bills went unpaid. She owed money to the local newspaper for a classified ad, the one she’d placed when selling her Oldsmobile. The man who’d bought the car had paid Joyce with a check. Kim talked to the bank and learned the man had stopped payment after learning Joyce was missing. The bank also confirmed there’d been no activity on Joyce’s accounts after August 10^th. By late September, Joyce’s landlord told Kim and Randy they needed to cover her rent or clear out the apartment.

Kim Salazar: The power had gotten shut off. We didn’t know that and so everything in the fridge had spoiled.

Dave Cawley: The Salazars didn’t have hundreds of dollars to spare. They arranged to move Joyce’s things into storage.

Kim Salazar: When we had some manpower, y’know to get the furniture and stuff out, we went back and were moving all the furniture out.

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s sister, Dorothy, came to help, along with Dorothy’s daughter Cathy and Cathy’s husband, Paul, as well as some other extended family. First, they emptied Joyce’s closet.

Randy Salazar: I think Joyce had more shoes than ZCMIs had on stock. And she had more dresses and more makeup.

Dave Cawley: They packed Dorothy’s car full of Joyce’s clothes. Dorothy and Cathy then departed with that payload. Paul stayed behind to help Randy break down Joyce’s bed. South Ogden police had stripped the sheets weeks earlier, so the mattress was bare.

Randy Salazar: Both Paul and I lifted that up and he was on one end and I was lifting my hand up on the other and we had the mattress tilt like this and we looked at it and we looked at each other and said ‘Oh no.’ … The whole bottom of the bed was all bloodstained.

Dave Cawley: The bloodstain was about a foot in diameter. It had two lobes, one of them appearing darker. The other looked as if the blood had either wicked outward through the fabric or been diluted, say by wiping at it with a wet washcloth. Randy called to Kim, who was in the kitchen packing up her mother’s dishes. She came into the bedroom and saw the mattress. Dorothy and her daughter, Cathy, arrived back at Joyce’s apartment soon after. Randy and Paul showed them as well.

Randy Salazar: I had a bad feeling. I had a really, really bad feeling. And, and Paul had a bad feeling too. And uh, and we were both trying to convince Cathy and Kim, ‘Y’know what? We don’t know for sure that it’s because of that. Your mom might have, y’know, she could have had maybe her monthly or something in there, y’know?’ Y’know what, we both knew that it, it was more blood than that.

Dave Cawley: Kim saw something more…

Kim Salazar: The matching stain on the boxspring.

Dave Cawley: …suggesting the mattress had been flipped when the blood was still wet.

Randy Salazar: Then we started putting that washcloth together with the mattress.

Dave Cawley: Something terrible had happened in Joyce’s bedroom.

Randy Salazar: I remember Kim crying and Cathy start screaming. They both started screaming.

Kim Salazar: So we called Brad again. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Brad Birch told them not to touch anything until he arrived. South Ogden police were likewise stunned at the discovery.

Kim Salazar: Oh they were devastated. They were absolutely devastated that they missed something like that.

Randy Salazar: They were all looking at each other. ‘You didn’t turn the bed over?’ ‘You didn’t turn the bed over?’ And they all said to each other, ‘Nah, we didn’t turn the bed over.’

Dave Cawley: Weeks later, the crime lab would confirm the blood from the washcloth and from the mattress shared the same type. Joyce’s type: O.

Kim Salazar: I remember talking to him years down the road and he said we’ve never gone into another crime scene where we haven’t flipped a mattress. Even if it wasn’t warranted, we flip a mattress. It’s what we do.

Dave Cawley: Blood on the mattress did not itself amount to evidence of a murder. But it’s discovery came at a critical juncture in the rape case. The Davis County Attorneys Office was pushing ahead with the prosecution even in Joyce’s absence. Judge Rodney Page scheduled a new trial for December 11^th.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Police dispatch in Ogden, Utah received a phone call toward the end of October of ’85 from the owner of a pawn shop called The Gift House.

Keith McCord (from KSL TV archive): The Gift House has been serving the city of Ogden for almost 55 years and friendly is an understatement.

Scott Van Vanleeuwen (from KSL TV archive): Get yourself a cup of coffee and sit down and relax.

Dave Cawley: The Gift House occupied an orange brick building on the west end of Ogden’s historic 25^th Street.

Keith McCord (from KSL TV archive): Customers, friends and family come to the Gift House often. They browse the store, socialize and check in with the days events.

Dave Cawley: The owner, Scott Vanleeuwen, had worked in that storefront since 1961, before it even became a pawn shop. KSL TV profiled Scott and The Gift House in this 2013 story.

Keith McCord (from KSL TV archive): But aside from its dedicated friends and customers, the store like most pawn shops has a little bit of everything.

Scott Van Vanleeuwen (from KSL TV archive): Our business card says guns, gold and diamonds. That pretty well says it all.

Dave Cawley: Even today, the Gift House’s front windows advertise those three pillars of the business: guns, gold and diamonds.

Keith McCord (from KSL TV archive): (Sound of revolver spinning) And guns especially gives the place character.

Dave Cawley: On that October day, a man identified in police records only as “Scott” called dispatch and asked them to check a couple of serial numbers. They were from two guns: a 22-caliber lever-action Browning rifle and a 12-gauge Beretta shotgun. Both came back as stolen. They were among the pile of guns taken from the home of Cody Montgomery, Sr. in the town of Liberty six months earlier. The guns Doug Lovell and his buddy Billy Jack had buried behind a cabin in the Deep Creek Mountains.

Of course, police didn’t know that last bit at the time. All they knew was someone at the Gift House had a lead on the stolen guns. The dispatcher sent an officer over to pawn shop but by the time he got there, no one seemed to know anything about the guns. Police reports say the officer questioned Scott, who told him the guns weren’t there. He’d only received a phone call about them himself. He didn’t know who possessed them.

The officer passed his report off to a detective, who shared the information with the Weber County Sheriff’s investigator handling the stolen guns case. And then, nothing. The trail went cold.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: South Ogden police didn’t have much to go on by the time the two-month anniversary of Joyce’s disappearance arrived. They had her car, a bloody washcloth and a blood-stained mattress.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): The case is unlike any other missing person report South Ogden has ever handled. Usually cases like these are solved in a few weeks. This one has hung on two months.

Dave Cawley: Detective Sergeant Brad Birch went before TV news cameras.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): With all leads exhausted and nowhere to turn, police are now trying a long shot: a psychic.

Brad Birch (from KSL TV archive): We’ve found in some of the research that we’ve done in some other states they were able to locate items or locate missing persons or locate evidence located in areas that maybe the police hadn’t been able to find any other way. And if these people were able to do something like that for us, that’s what we’d be hoping for.

Dave Cawley: The reporter calling this a long shot was understatement.

Larry Lewis (from KSL TV archive): The psychics used personal items of Yost to try and get a feeling for the case. They examined this picture of her and her car keys. They also walked through her apartment to try to pick up any kind of lead on the case.

Dave Cawley: The most these “psychics” could say was they believed foul play was involved. Police weren’t alone in seeking help from less traditional sources.

Randy Salazar: Kim found a lady that was doing, she was a reader.

Dave Cawley: Randy Salazar told me this “reader” claimed be able to communicate with Joyce’s spirit. Kim went to see the reader several times, spending about $30 a pop. Randy ended up confronting his wife, saying he didn’t want to upset her…

Randy Salazar: ‘But Kim, all that stuff that lady’s telling you,’ I said, ‘is in the paper and on the news every day,’ I said. And she’d say ‘No it isn’t!’ And I said, ‘Y’know, it is, it is,’ I said. Y’know? … I said, ‘I’m not saying she’s a fake and, y’know, she probably feels your mom or whatever and,’ I says, ‘But,’ I says, ‘I’m not sure you ought to go to her anymore.’

Dave Cawley: Were these psychics offering anything of value, to either the police or to Joyce’s family?

Randy Salazar: If it was my mom, y’know what, I’d be wanting to go too. I says, ‘But you know, I’m just telling you: everything you’re telling me I hear on the news and I see in the paper.

Dave Cawley: No one who claimed to hear Joyce’s voice on the ether was able to provide a location for her body. But Joyce’s words would soon return to haunt Doug Lovell.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Clearfield police detective Bill Holthaus and his team were tightening up their case. They’d made contact with the owner of the Pier III, who told them Doug Lovell had hung around the joint for days before Joyce Yost had showed up there with Lex Baer on the night of April 3^rd.

Bill Holthaus: As I understood it, he was a regular. He was there quite often.

Dave Cawley: Doug had been obsessing over a woman who worked at the Pier named Sharon Gess.

Bill Holthaus: Sharon Gess, yes.

Dave Cawley: Sharon told police Doug had hounded her. She’d turned him down, saying company policy prohibited her from dating patrons. Every time Sharon had said no, Doug had grown more insistent. On the night of April 3^rd, that insistence had turned to anger. He’d made a scene before storming out of the club.

About 15 minutes later, someone had called the Pier and asked to speak with Sharon. It was Doug. He asked what time she got off work. She didn’t feel comfortable telling him, so she just said ‘late.’ He suggested they grab something to eat when she was done. Sharon said no, she’d prefer to just go home. Doug kept pressing until Sharon hung up on him. 

Sharon and the others who’d been at the Pier told police Doug had made passes on every woman there.

Bill Holthaus: He actually pursued Joyce there that night.

Dave Cawley: Which contradicted what Joyce had told Bill just hours after the rape.

Bill Holthaus (from April 4, 1985 police recording): Uh, do you remember seeing him at the Pier 3?

Joyce Yost (from April 4, 1985 police recording): I do not.

Dave Cawley: I asked Bill if he could explain this discrepancy.

Bill Holthaus: She actually didn’t want to admit that, y’know, she shined him off.

Dave Cawley: Maybe it was embarrassment or fear of not being believed. Only Joyce knows. But this revelation helped explain why Joyce had described asking Doug, as he was preparing to rape her the second time, if he’d been having relationship troubles.

Joyce Yost (from April 4, 1985 police recording): I said to him, I said, ‘Do you have a problem? Do you want to talk to me? Can I help you at all?’ Umm, I thought, y’know, was he having a fight with his girlfriend or something. He started to say something about some girl, then he quit.

Dave Cawley: Joyce had later revealed a tiny bit more to her daughter, Kim.

Kim Salazar: One thing that my mom had told me was that he told her that she was taking Sharon’s place.

Dave Cawley: Sharon told police she’d been seeing a little red car with flip-up headlights following her around town in the weeks prior to the rape. Sometimes when headed home after work, she’d see the car in the rearview and would go someplace other than home to prevent the driver from figuring out where she lived. This led prosecutor Brian Namba to wonder if Doug might’ve made a mistake. Perhaps he’d believed he was following Sharon that night instead of Joyce.

Brian Namba: It seems like to me that she was sort of similar in appearance. … But it seems like to me like they were both blondes and both the same, y’know, similar age.

Dave Cawley: As police were piecing this together, Doug’s defense attorney was busy preparing pre-trial motions. John Hutchison sent a discovery demand to the prosecutors, asking for copies of all the reports and audio recordings made by police. Brian wasn’t surprised.

Brian Namba: I think that that’s typical of him, that he would do his homework.

Dave Cawley: John also told Judge Rodney Page he feared media coverage surrounding Joyce’s disappearance might’ve already tainted the jury pool. He wanted Joyce treated as a “Jane Doe” during the trial.

Brian Namba: John is worried that if, if enough evidence leaks out to the jury that they would conclude that she was dead, they hold that against his client in the rape case. So he was trying to keep those facts out of the jury’s hearing.

Dave Cawley: Brian had his own concerns about the media coverage.

Brian Namba: By then I’ve had enough experience that I know that I don’t want to create issues for appeal. So I’m interested in keeping that away from the jury, but I still have to go through with my trial.

Dave Cawley: Brian argued against the Jane Doe idea but negotiated a compromise.

Brian Namba: The judge would simply tell the jury that the victim was not available for trial today for reasons unrelated to this case. Which, turns out to not be true. (Laughs) But that was our stipulation in order to allow the jury to deliberate fairly on the rape issue.

Dave Cawley: Brian also notified Judge Page he intended to use Joyce’s testimony from the preliminary hearing, by having a proxy read it from the stand during the upcoming trial. This was, at the time, an untested tactic.

Brian Namba: There is a rule of evidence that allows for it but it’s just, it’s just kind of, it’s really an unusual circumstance.

Dave Cawley: I’ll try to explain this without getting too bogged down in legal jargon. Typically, you can’t get on the witness stand and say “someone else told me… whatever” because that’s what’s known as hearsay. Utah’s Rules of Evidence are clear: hearsay is not admissible. Part of the reason for that is it’s impossible to challenge a claim of what some other person supposedly said, versus challenging the actual statement itself from the person who said it. And the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to confront their accusers.

But there are exceptions. Under Utah law, if a witness is unavailable for a hearing or trial, it is allowable to use their prior statements, so long as those statements were sworn and subjected to cross-examination. Like, for instance, when John Hutchison cross-examined Joyce during the preliminary hearing.

Brian Namba: Doesn’t violate the confrontation clause and it’s an exception to the hearsay rule because it’s a sworn testimony.

Dave Cawley: Had Doug Lovell waived his right to a prelim, Joyce wouldn’t have testified before vanishing and the case against him would’ve been much more challenging to prove.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug and Rhonda Lovell headed for the hills. They drove east, going up Ogden Canyon on Utah State Highway 39, into the Ogden Valley. They cruised past Pineview Reservoir and the small town of Huntsville, following the South Fork of the Ogden River.

This was a drive Doug knew well. It was the route to his family’s cabin. To get to the cabin, you had to turn off of the highway going west — just past the intersection that leads to Causey Reservoir on the east — onto a 10-mile-long dirt road that passed through locked gates.

Doug and Rhonda weren’t going to the cabin on this particular drive in late 1985. They continued up the highway, winding past beaver ponds. Conifers and quaking aspen replaced the sagebrush as the curvy two-lane road ascended to an elevation of 9,000 feet above sea level: the crest of the Monte Cristo mountains.

Utah’s Monte Cristo region is only accessible by car about six months out of the year. During the winter, the 19-mile stretch of SR-39 crossing the range is buried under snow. In the autumn, though, Monte Cristo belongs to hunters. They fan out from the highway when the aspen forest turns vibrant shades of red, orange and gold, stalking elk, moose and mule deer.

Bill Woody (from KSL TV archive): Hang on just a second. I’m state game warden. Need to check your license.

Dave Cawley: On Saturday, October 19, 1985, KSL aired a news story about hunting enforcement efforts underway in the mountains of northern Utah.

Reporter (from KSL TV archive): Bill Woody looks like a hunter and he acts like a hunter and he’s bagging prey just about as fast as he can.

Bill Woody (from KSL TV archive): Craig, it’s an untagged deer. No go, buddy.

Dave Cawley: I can’t say whether or not Doug saw this particular story. But the hunt was on his mind.

Bill Woody (from KSL TV archive): More manpower is what we need. More people out in the field doing the job. The same type of job, whether they’re out working plain clothes, or out working marked units. Both would do as good.

Reporter (from KSL TV archive): Woody will be out all this deer season looking for violations so fair warning.

Dave Cawley: Doug and Rhonda came to a stop at the side of the road. He opened the car door and brisk air, rich with the scent of pine, rushed in. Then, he stepped out and disappeared into the trees. Rhonda sat and waited. A Utah Division of Wildlife Resources officer passing through the area on one of those many hunting enforcement patrols saw her there and stopped to talk. Where was she headed? Was anyone else with her? Did she need any help?

She was fine. She was alone. The wildlife officer could see nothing wrong, so he moseyed along. Doug returned after a time. He and Rhonda resumed their drive. A truck bearing the logo of the Utah Department of Natural Resources fell in behind them on the highway. The wildlife officer had returned. He now wanted to know: who was this man with Rhonda?

The easy and honest answer — that Doug was her husband — was not the one she gave. She told the officer Doug was just a hitchhiker.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Late autumn had arrived in Las Vegas. The lightest of rain sprinkled from clouds, keeping temperatures unseasonably cool. A Las Vegas Metro Police officer headed down the strip, the row of high-rise casino hotels along Las Vegas Boulevard. He’d received word staff at the Aladdin had spotted a suspicious car parked in a lot east of the casino. It was the afternoon of November 11, 1985.

A layer of dust coated the red, four-door Toyota Corolla. Spiders had taken up residence in its wheel wells. The front passenger window was rolled down. The officer ran the car’s plate. The Corolla had been reported missing out of Roy, Utah, on the outskirts of Ogden, a little over a month prior. So had its driver, a woman named Sheree Warren.

Larry Lewis (from 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: The Aladdin’s records showed Sheree had never stayed there. Las Vegas Metro detective Robert Luke called Roy police the following day and informed detective Jack Bell, the lead investigator on Sheree’s case, of the discovery.

Jack Bell (from KSL TV archive): It means that either she drove the car there herself or somebody stole the car from her, abducted her and took the car there.

Dave Cawley: Roy police had been searching for Sheree and her car for more than a month.

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

Dave Cawley: Sheree, a 25-year-old mother, had spent the past nine months working for the Utah State Employees Credit Union at a branch near the corner of Harrison Boulevard and 42^nd Street in Ogden. That was just three quarters of a mile up the road from Joyce Yost’s apartment. It was also, coincidentally, the place where Doug’s wife Rhonda did her banking and near the spot where Doug had met up with Tom Peters when trying to cash his worker’s comp check in June of ’85.

Sheree had separated from her husband Charles the prior March, filed for divorce in May and moved back in with her parents, who lived in Roy. They often cared for Charles and Sheree’s three-year-old son while each parent worked.

Sheree had dated a few different men while separated, getting close with one by the name of Cary Hartmann. Cary was 37 — 12 years Sheree’s senior — and worked as a plumber at Weber State University in Ogden. He also moonlighted at a telemarketing firm and had in the past served as a reserve officer for the Ogden Police department.

Sheree had excelled at her job. The credit union had tapped her to take part in a new training program run out of the head office in Salt Lake City. She started that course on Monday, September 30^th.

A couple of days later, on the morning of Wednesday, October 2^nd, he met her estranged husband before work to hand off their son. Charles told Sheree he’d be dropping his Toyota Supra off to have some work done at Wagstaff’s, a dealership near the credit union head office in Salt Lake, later that afternoon. He wanted Sheree to pick him up and give him a ride back home to Ogden. She agreed.

Charles would later tell police that on that same afternoon, he’d called Sheree at work and told he’d changed his mind. He no longer needed a ride. But when Sheree left the office a couple of hours later, she told a fellow trainee named Richard she was headed to Wagstaff’s to pick up her old man.  She never made it.

Officer (from KSL TV archive): Probably ought to have a description of the vehicle. Have we got it here? Have we got it?

Dave Cawley: Her distraught parents had worked with police to post fliers around town in the days and weeks following her disappearance. Police scrutiny had quickly focused on Charles, who’d reportedly been in a dispute with Sheree over alimony. Police records show he’d refused to take a polygraph when pressed by a detective. The discovery of Sheree’s car in Las Vegas more than a month later though made the case much more perplexing.

Jack Bell (from KSL TV archive): There was some indication in the asphalt that the car left imprints. So that would lead to you to believe the car had probably been parked there when the weather was hotter.

Dave Cawley: Roy police detective Jack Bell asked Charles Warren to sign papers authorizing a search of the car, which he did.

Larry Lewis (from 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.

Dave Cawley: Las Vegas Metro police detective Robert Luke went to the Ewing Brothers tow yard on the north side of Vegas to search the Corolla on November 13^th. The interior was filthy, likely due to the car having sat with the passenger window down for so long. The grime made it next to impossible to lift any fingerprints. The only set visible were on the driver door window.

Luke found a pair of women’s sunglasses and Sheree’s check books in the glove box, along with a pair of prescription medications. One belonged to Sheree, the other to Cary Hartmann. The car’s trunk held some papers, a baby stroller, a bottle of face cream, a woman’s suit jacket and a set of sheets for a queen-size waterbed. No signs of a struggle. No clue as to where Sheree might be.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug Lovell stepped out of the shower on the morning of Wednesday, December 11, 1985, looking like a shadow of the man who’d attacked Joyce Yost eight months earlier. He’d gone from a lean 155 pounds to a downright slim 130 on a diet of prescription pain pills. As he dressed himself for court, his wife Rhonda put her arm around him and said everything would be okay. Doug wasn’t the only person unnerved that morning. Bill Holthaus felt it, too.

Bill Holthaus: It was the first time we prosecuted a rape case without a victim in the state of Utah. Y’know, we’re nervous.

Dave Cawley: The trial commenced with jury selection. This process, known to lawyers as voir dire, typically involves asking a pool of prospective jurors questions in open court. The prosecution and defense can then use challenges to whittle down the pool to just the number needed for the jury — in this case, eight.

Doug’s attorney, John Hutchison, wanted that done differently. He asked to do it individually, in the judge’s chambers. This way he, Judge Page and prosecutor Brian Namba could see if any of the prospective jurors knew the story behind Joyce’s disappearance without tipping off all of the others.

Brian Namba: There’s no way to know whether they may have heard rumors, y’know.

Dave Cawley: Judge Page agreed. He told each person in the jury pool the accuser — Joyce Yost — was absent from the trial for reasons unrelated to the case. But he also said she’d been missing for more than two months. The trial proper got underway once the jury was seated. The clerk read the charges, which had been consolidated to just two: aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault. Aggravated sexual assault might not sound as severe as rape, but under Utah law it’s the more serious of the crimes because it involves the use — or threat — of a deadly weapon.

Jan Schiller, the YWCA rape crisis counselor who’d sat with Joyce in those first hours following the rape, was among the potential witnesses waiting outside the courtroom.

Jan Schiller: I was called as a potential witness to the trial and was 25 and, umm, the executive director … and my mom insisted on being there with me. They’re like, ‘There’s no way we’re letting you go there by yourself.’

Dave Cawley: Lex Baer, the man who Joyce had spent the evening at the Pier with prior to the rape, took the stand first. Sharon Gess followed him, telling how she’d been stalked by a man driving a red car with flip-up headlights. Brian was careful in how he talked about Joyce, Sharon and the Pier. This due to advise he’d received from Bill Holthaus.

Brian Namba: Bill and I would talk over the case and we’d talk about Sharon and I’d call her a barmaid. And Bill would just hammer me and say, ‘Don’t call her a barmaid. You call her a hostess,’ y’know? ‘But she’s, you have to treat her with some respect.’

Dave Cawley: What he’s getting at here is the possibility of bias — even if unintended — against drinkers among some Davis County residents.

Brian Namba: In that kind of case in Davis County, you have to be careful that you don’t lose the case because these people live a lifestyle that’s different than your own.

Dave Cawley: Many people who live in the county are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — more commonly known as Mormons — who abstain from drinking alcohol. Joyce was not a member of that faith, nor was she a teetotaler.

Bill Holthaus: Some people would say, ‘Well there she was at a bar, y’know, out clubbing or whatever.’ That’s why they have those places.

Brian Namba: He educated me on this, y’know, there’s a life beyond being a Mormon and not, and thinking a bar is a horrible place. Regular people go to the Pier. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: They didn’t want the jury casting judgement on Joyce for being at a club or for her own past work as a hostess.

Brian Namba: The other aspect of that is that you don’t want the judge to think that she’s this hardened person who was less worthy of being protected, umm, because she lives that, y’know, go-to-a-drinking-establishment kind of a lifestyle, that she’s taking risks that should have been foreseen somehow.

Dave Cawley: But how was Brian supposed to show what kind of person Joyce was, if Joyce wasn’t there herself to tell her story?

Brian Namba: The danger of doing that kind of a case is that they blow off the testimony thinking, ‘well, she didn’t even think enough of it to come here herself,’ y’know, ‘we’re not going to convict him on that.’

Dave Cawley: So, he moved to introduce Joyce’s testimony from the preliminary hearing.

Brian Namba: The defense attorney objected.

Dave Cawley: Judge Page mulled it over and said he’d allow it.

Brian Namba: John [Hutchison] could see the handwriting on the wall and was just backpedaling and trying to figure out how he could minimize the damage.

Dave Cawley: Brian called a secretary from the county attorney’s office to the stand, to read Joyce’s words.

Marily Gren: My name is Marily Gren, M-A-R-I-L-Y and my last name is Gren, G-R-E-N.

Dave Cawley: Marily was not an actress, unless you counted her having held a role in a high school play 25 years earlier. But Brian told me, she had “flair.” They’d talked through what the job would require.

Brian Namba: ‘You should be fluent and clear without trying to be,’ (laughs) y’know, ‘theatrical.’

Marily Gren: But that was one thing Judge Page cautioned strongly, no theatrics. And I was just to, y’know basically be neutral and read it. So I did.

Dave Cawley: And yet, a robotic reading of the transcript wouldn’t be right, either.

Marily Gren: I mean like, when you tell me to say my name, that’s how I said her name. It’s not too thrilling. Y’know? ‘Your name?’ Y’know. ‘Joyce Yost.’

Dave Cawley: Marily also needed to convey the meaning behind Joyce’s words.

Brian Namba: And I thought she did the perfect balance.

Dave Cawley: Marily’s recitation impressed Bill Holthaus as well.

Bill Holthaus: She was extremely professional. She read it just like, just like Joyce had said it.

Dave Cawley: Marily was 42 at the time of the trial, just a few years older than Joyce. She knew the details of the case, having heard conversation around the office. From the stand — in Joyce’s place — she could see Doug sitting across the courtroom.

Marily Gren: So I guess I did look at Doug Lovell.

Dave Cawley: During the prelim, Joyce had pointed to Doug from the stand and identified him as the man who’d raped her. Marily did the same.

Marily Gren: That wouldn’t have been dramatic, y’know. I could do that. Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s prelim testimony had included gut-wrenching descriptions of the initial assault in her car. Marily read them verbatim. I asked her to do it again, 35 years later.

Marily Gren (reading from Joyce Yost transcript): I tried to get out of my car, realizing I was definitely in a situation that my life was at stake. I just prayed for help and as I was getting out of my car I grabbed ahold of the horn and thought maybe if I honk the horn that one of my neighbors or somebody would hear. It didn’t work. He became very angry.

Dave Cawley: She paused here, reflecting on this part of Joyce’s experience.

Marily Gren: Anger, he had a lot of anger. I had forgotten that. But I guess people like that do, don’t they. … And it’s not at her, I don’t think. I think it’s anger at something else. But, it’s odd.

Dave Cawley: Marily concluded her read of the prelim transcript, slipping in one last touch before leaving the stand.

Marily Gren: I did get a sigh in there. (Laughs) At the end, at one place, I remember.

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s sister, Dorothy Dial testified next, followed by South Ogden police officer Rob Carpenter. They described Joyce’s immediate reaction to the rape, how she’d handed over her dress, bra, pantyhose and the blue men’s button-up shirt.

Then, it was Bill’s turn. John Hutchison went after Bill hard on cross-examination.

Bill Holthaus: I’d been on many cases with John, y’know. Umm, and he didn’t let up at all. Y’know, he knew how to push my buttons, but y’know, and I, I had to keep my cool. I mean, he’d ask little off-the-cuff questions just try to throw you off. He was good at it. He was a good attorney.

Dave Cawley: Court adjourned for the day. They took Thursday off, then returned on Friday, December 13^th. The state’s final witness, a forensics expert from the crime lab, talked the jury through the information from Joyce’s rape kit. Then, Brian rested his case. To her relief, Jan Schiller, the rape victim advocate, had not needed to testify.

Jan Schiller: They had a strong enough case without me and I don’t know that I could have added much to what the detective would have said.

Dave Cawley: Jan told me Joyce, even though she’d not been there, had been heard.

Jan Schiller: Obviously, Joyce could be a voice for herself. She was really, really wonderful.

Dave Cawley: John Hutchison next launched his defense. The bulk of his case sat on Doug himself. Under oath, Doug insisted he had not raped Joyce. Her family sat listening, incredulous.

Randy Salazar: And everything that he got up and said, c’mon, you could see you’re full of crap.

Dave Cawley: Bill Holthaus had heard this story before.

Bill Holthaus: It was pretty much word for word what was in my initial police report.

Dave Cawley: Only, with some added flavor.

Bill Holthaus: He was just, it wasn’t a big deal to him.

Dave Cawley: To hear Doug’s telling of it, Joyce had been flirting with him.

Brian Namba: And when he testified, I remember women saying, ‘Man, that guy thinks he’s God’s gift to women.’

Bill Holthaus: He was quite the cad. Separated from his wife, chasing women around and I, I, y’know, he just struck me as uh, a guy who didn’t respect women much.

Dave Cawley: Doug shed tears on the stand, saying “I did not physically harm her.” Doug said Joyce had gone willingly with him in the Mazda to his house. He insisted she’d been wearing her own dress — not his shirt — when he’d later taken her home. Bill’s own personal opinion of Doug crystalized in that moment.

Bill Holthaus: I’ll tell you what it struck me as at the time — can’t prove it — struck me he’d done it before. I mean, this was not a one, one-off thing. I mean, this was just a casual thing. Not the first, not the first woman that he influenced, y’know, or pushed to do something like that.

Dave Cawley: The defense rested. Judge Page gave the jury their instructions. Closing arguments followed and the jurors headed off to deliberate at 2:20 p.m. Brian Namba felt optimistic.

Brian Namba: You get some momentum and you feel pretty good but on the other hand, there’s, you always have some reason to worry that some people may be offended or, or just on the principal that we don’t have the victim here, she really didn’t say anything, that could result in a not guilty.

Dave Cawley: He received word the jury had reached a verdict just one hour later.

Brian Namba: When the jury came back quickly, I assumed that that was a good sign.

Dave Cawley: Marily, who had read Joyce’s testimony from the stand, was in the hallway of the courthouse as John Hutchison swept past.

Marily Gren: I stepped out of the county attorney’s office to get a drink at the drinking fountain and he was coming back with Douglas Lovell … and he was telling Doug, ‘It’s not good when they come back so quick.’ And I remember bending over the fountain thinking, ‘Yes!’

Dave Cawley: The jury found Doug guilty on both counts. Judge Page ordered the bailiff to take him into custody pending sentencing. This time, there would be no bail, no accidental early release. Bill Holthaus and Brian Namba both told me they believe Joyce’s testimony — and Marily’s read of it — were pivotal in securing the conviction.

Brian Namba: You have to engage the jury so that they feel her presence. And I think, I think she really accomplished that.

Bill Holthaus: We had all the evidence but it just, y’know, this had never happened before in Utah and you’ve got to have something that ties that evidence together and, and her testimony tied it together.

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s family gathered in a foyer outside the courtroom.

Kim Salazar: I wanted to wait until I actually saw them bring him out of the courtroom.

Dave Cawley: A pair of deputies escorted Doug, in shackles, down the hallway, right past where Kim and Randy Salazar were waiting.

Randy Salazar: He had like a smirk on his face like a, like he didn’t give a [expletive] that he was just found guilty of that so, so the closer he came, I mean, we were making pretty good eye contact, me and him and I looked at him and I said ‘You mother[expletive]er.’ And he stopped right there in his tracks and he looked at me and he said ‘She’s gone, buddy. She’s gone. You’ll never find her.’

Dave Cawley: The two deputies dragged their prisoner past while Kim and Randy rushed to tell Brad Birch what’d happened.

Kim Salazar: But I thought ‘We’ve got him now.’ Because he’s pissed, he’s, y’know, he’s boiling over. The one thing he thought he could get away with if she wasn’t there was this rape.

Dave Cawley: The detective went to question Doug about his comment.

Kim Salazar: He still wouldn’t talk.

Dave Cawley: Any little flame Joyce’s loved ones had been protecting, clinging to the idea she might still be alive, flickered out.

Greg Roberts: We all wanted to hold out hope that she was somehow still alive and to me, that was like the point when, those words out of Lovell’s mouth to Randy when he was pissed off outside the courtroom was when we basically knew she was gone.

Dave Cawley: Joyce’s son, Greg Roberts, had not been in the courthouse himself that day. He was still in Virginia attending dental school.

Greg Roberts: Well, I was just so distraught, I didn’t know what, y’know, if I should move home.

Dave Cawley: Greg’s classes went on break for Christmas and he decided to drive home to Utah. The more than 2,000 mile journey left him ample time to think.

Greg Roberts: I called my dad and I just said, ‘Dad, I think I want to move home, y’know, so I can help.’

Dave Cawley: Mel Roberts, Joyce’s first husband, encouraged his son to stay the course.

Mel Roberts: It was a hard, hard decision for him and it was even hard for me to tell him: don’t quit school.

Dave Cawley: Mel told Greg his mother would not have wanted him to give up on his dream.

Greg Roberts: If he’d have said, ‘well if that’s how you feel,’ I probably would have left school and just moved back.

Mel Roberts: And that would’ve been, y’know, that would have been tragic.

Dave Cawley: That Christmas at home allowed Greg to reflect on the two years he’d spent living with his mom while in college, sharing the very apartment from which she’d vanished.

Greg Roberts: Which always made me feel guilty because I feel like I, I left her there unprotected.

Dave Cawley: Gone were the decorations and the piles of presents spread so far out from under the Christmas tree one could hardly find a place to stand. There were no boisterous dinners with Aunt Dot, with long hours of laughter between the two sisters.

Greg Roberts: Joyce was the glue of this family. Everybody’s been pretty lost since she’s been gone.

Dave Cawley: Greg told his sister Kim he was thinking of staying, of not returning to dental school.

Kim Salazar: And I said no. I will make sure you know everything every day as it happens. If something happens, I’ll make sure you know.

Dave Cawley: So, after the holiday, Greg made the long drive back to Virginia where he would wait for word about the sentence soon to come for Doug Lovell.

Dave Cawley: Clearfield police detective Bill Holthaus had a search warrant for Doug Lovell’s Mazda RX-7. The car sat in an impound lot, where it’d been for four days, ever since Bill had pulled Doug out of it and arrested him for the rape of Joyce Yost. Bill suspected he might find a gun in the car, or possibly blood stains. He came up empty on both fronts. He did however located six capsules containing an unidentified white power. That wasn’t all.

Bill Holthaus: But in the process of doing the car, we noticed the VIN number.

Dave Cawley: A car’s VIN number is a unique identifier, like a serial number.

Bill Holthaus: Any police officer will tell you, there’s more than one VIN on a car. So uh, my, the other officer crawled up underneath and found the chassis VIN.

Dave Cawley: It didn’t match. The car had two different VIN numbers. Bill ran both through NCIC, the FBI’s national crime database. The chassis VIN came back as stolen. Doug Lovell’s little red Mazda was hot.

This is Cold, season 2 episode 3: Nightmare on Top of a Nightmare. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley. We’ll be right back.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Bill Holthaus had some questions for Doug Lovell about his Mazda…

Bill Holthaus: We had impounded his car, of course, I should say that.

Dave Cawley: …like why did it have two different VIN numbers? He confronted Doug a few hours after making that discovery. According to police reports, Doug claimed a few months earlier, he’d gone to a business in Ogden called Lincoln Auto, looking to buy an RX-7. Lincoln Auto had connected him with a guy named Marvin Fluckiger who ran a shop called Body Beauty in the city of Logan. Fluckiger had a blue RX-7 on his lot. The body was damaged beyond repair, but the frame and engine were still good.

Doug told Bill he’d initially planned to convert the wreck into a sandrail or a dune buggy. He’d obtained a loan for the car through America First Credit Union. You’ve already heard part of this story from Susan, the loan officer.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): It was to purchase an ’82 Mazda RX-7. And he wanted the check made out to the Marvin Flukinger [sic].

Dave Cawley: I have a copy of this check, which includes both Doug and Marvin’s names. Doug told Bill he paid Marvin to tow the wreck to a storage unit where he planned to do the conversion. Sometime later, Doug said he’d been shooting pool at a hole-in-the-wall bar and pizza joint called the Circle Inn when he a met a mechanic. This guy, Doug said, had offered to restore the wrecked Mazda for the low, low price of $3,000. Doug gave this guy the keys to his storage unit and two weeks later, went to claim his prize. The car, which had been blue, was now red.

Bill Holthaus: Make a long story short on that, the car was stolen.

Dave Cawley: As for the swapped VIN number, well, Doug said he didn’t know anything about that.

Bill Holthaus: We found out later that uh, he was partially involved in a stolen car ring.

Dave Cawley: I’ll go deeper into this in just a bit. First, let’s talk about how Doug’d managed to get out of jail. Following his arrest on suspicion of rape, Doug had told his family — as well as his wife, Rhonda — it was a misunderstanding. Doug would later say his father told him something along the lines of “No son of mine could commit rape.”

Doug didn’t have the money to post bail himself. He convinced his dad to do it for him. If Doug were to run, his dad would be stuck paying the full 25-thousand dollars. But Doug had no intention of running. Doug returned to the Ogden Main Branch of America First Credit Union after getting out of jail. He needed to talk to his “friend” Susan because he no longer had the car on which he was supposed to be making payments.

“I was just picked up by the police,” he told her.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): And so I explained to him the normal situation when a car’s impounded the notify the lien holder and then we go pick up the car. So I explained all that to him.

Dave Cawley: This raised the question: why had police impounded the car? Doug told Susan he’d been hustled by a woman. He’d gone to the woman’s apartment and spent the night with her.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): And that she was begging him not to leave. And that he finally left, went home to his apartment, got cleaned up and was going to work and the police picked him up on the highway. And that they’d impounded the car.

Dave Cawley: Doug told Susan the woman with whom he’d slept was now making a phony accusation of rape.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): And he did tell me all about … ‘she’s gonna prosecute me for rape.’ And he asked me what he should do. And I told him he needed to get a good attorney.

Dave Cawley: Doug had a different idea. He explained he’d separated from his wife, Rhonda.

Susan Yerage (from 1992 police recording): Y’know, he acted liked he needed someone to talk to and asked me if he, y’know, if we could go have a cup of coffee or go to lunch.

Dave Cawley: Susan felt no desire to interact with Doug in any kind of social setting. She told him no.

[Scene transition] 

Dave Cawley: Doug had other friends with whom to speak. One of them, William Wiswell, was living in Grand Junction, Colorado. Doug had first met William, who was better known by his street name “Billy Jack,” while in the Utah State Prison five years earlier. That’s where he was when, in late April of ’85, he received a phone call. Doug told Billy Jack he had a job for him and Billy Jack said he was game. Doug made the five-hour drive to Grand Junction that same day.

Billy Jack wasn’t a big man, only standing around five-foot-three. But he found Doug’s Ford pickup truck quite cramped as he slid onto the bench seat. He had to share the space not only with Doug, but also Rhonda and little Alisha.

Detective Bill Holthaus said Doug and Rhonda had been estranged at the time of the rape…

Bill Holthaus: He was at that time separated from his wife. He was living in uh, the house there down in Clearfield. She was living up in the apartment in South Ogden.

Dave Cawley: …but they’d reconciled since. Rhonda had rented a place at the Lake Park Apartments, less than a mile and a half as the crow flies from Joyce Yost’s apartment in South Ogden. Doug abandoned his house in Clearfield and moved in with Rhonda there. That’s where he was taking Billy Jack. They didn’t talk much on the long drive. Doug only mentioned the job after Alisha had dozed off, saying he’d pay $5,000 for Billy Jack to kill Joyce Yost.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Bill Holthaus kept in touch with Joyce in the days and weeks following the rape.

Bill Holthaus: I had, uh, two or three telephone conversations with her and two, I think only two times, uh, once I went to her apartment and spoke with her and uh, one time she came into the office.

Dave Cawley: She provided hair and blood samples for the crime lab during that office visit on May 9, 1985. Joyce’s ex-husband, Mel Roberts, told me she’d discussed the rape with him as well.

Mel Roberts: And it had a tremendous emotional effect on her.

Dave Cawley: Mel encouraged Joyce to move forward with criminal charges. She did, but also tried to shield her daughter and son from the details.

Kim Salazar: She didn’t let it define her. But I know, I can’t imagine as a woman not letting that eat you alive inside.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Bill, meantime, kept busy chasing down leads. He’d learned Doug’s Mazda had disappeared from a dealership called Carlson Cadillac in Salt Lake City in May of ’84. That case was still open and assigned to a Salt Lake City police detective named Ron Greenleaf.

Ron Greenleaf: It was my case to follow up on because it was on automobile, we called it dealer row.

Dave Cawley: Bill told Ron he was investigating a rape.

Ron Greenleaf: The suspect was Douglas Lovell and that he was in this red vehicle, which was stolen.

Dave Cawley: Ron headed up to Clearfield to take a look at the Mazda.

Ron Greenleaf: There’s 17 digits in a VIN number and they, every one of them means something.

Dave Cawley: Like where and when the car was built, what type of engine it came with and even what color it’d been painted at the factory. Ron brought a large book he called the “SVIN bible.” It contained the codes auto manufacturers used to generate VIN numbers, as well as the locations of “secret” VINs.

Ron Greenleaf: We confirmed that definitely that was the car. No doubt about it.

Dave Cawley: The detectives next turned their attention to Lincoln Auto.

Ron Greenleaf: Lincoln Auto is where he got the salvaged VIN.

Dave Cawley: Ron told me he, and many other Utah detectives who investigated car thefts back in the ‘80s, harbored suspicions about Lincoln Auto.

Ron Greenleaf: ‘Cause they would go out of state and you’d always see them on the freeway with car carriers taking damaged vehicles back and generally they were always high-end vehicles.

Dave Cawley: Those wrecked cars would then sit on the Lincoln lot.

Ron Greenleaf: Why would a junkyard in Ogden, Utah be accumulating high-end vehicles?

Dave Cawley: Ron leaned on the folks at Lincoln Auto and learned Doug Lovell had been involved in the transfer of another salvaged vehicle.

Bill Holthaus: There’s also a pickup truck that was involved. It was off another lot.

Dave Cawley: A white, 1985 Toyota SR5 pickup truck, stolen from Dan’s Used Cars in Salt Lake City in October of ’84. This was another of Ron Greenleaf’s open cases. Like the Mazda, the Toyota had gone through Marvin Fluckiger’s shop, Body Beauty, before receiving a new salvage title from Lincoln Auto. The detectives tracked down the Toyota and discovered it too had a mismatched VIN.

Ron Greenleaf: He’d, somebody, we didn’t know if it was him, we presumed it was him, had switched the dash VIN number. The VIN number on the dash.

Dave Cawley: I have to be careful here, as Marvin Fluckiger was never arrested or charged with any crime related to these vehicles, nor were the owners of Lincoln Auto. But investigators didn’t believe Doug had acted alone.

Bill Holthaus: The way they did it was they would go drive a car from a used car lot to test it. While they had it, they’d get copies of the keys made. They would come back later and steal the car. And that’s how they got the cars.

Dave Cawley: Stolen cars are tough to register, since they can be traced by their VIN numbers. A moment ago, Ron posed a rhetorical question about why a junkyard would want to stockpile fancy but smashed-up cars. One reason could be if they were running what’s known as a salvage switch or VIN swap scam. In that case, a thief would go to the junkyard seeking something very specific.

Ron Greenleaf: I would tell you all I want is the vehicle identification numbers, the VIN plates, and I want the title.

Dave Cawley: The thief could then graft the VIN plates from the salvage car onto the stolen one, before presenting the stolen car as if it’s the wreck after a rebuild. That way, the stolen car gets a new title under the swapped VIN number, which allows it to be legally sold and registered. In other words, it’s fraud.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The shadow of Ben Lomond Peak stretched out across the horse pastures of the Ogden Valley. The North Fork of the Ogden River babbled through the pastoral town of Liberty, on its way down toward Pineview Reservoir. To the north, the last light of day lifted from the slopes of the Powder Mountain ski resort and the mountains around it.

Doug Lovell had grown up hunting those hills. So on this evening — May 5, 1985 — he sat in familiar surroundings as the sky slid through the lavender hues of twilight. Doug and his friend, Billy Jack sat in a parked Volkswagen. They were hunting, but not for deer. Instead, they watched as the lights came on in the windows of the farmhouses. One house caught Doug’s eye. It remained dark. The house belonged to Cody and Karen Montgomery, a couple with deep family roots in the Ogden Valley.

Karen Montgomery: We had just built our home and we’d been there maybe two years.

Dave Cawley: That afternoon, Cody and Karen had taken their kids, including Jessica, Cody junior and Chad, to visit a relative.

Karen Montgomery: We were going to go down to Cody’s grandma’s just down the road and get a haircut.

Dave Cawley: Jessica was then six going on seven and wasn’t all that interested in tagging along with her little brothers.

Karen Montgomery: She just wanted to stay home and read her book.

Dave Cawley: That’s Karen, by the way. She convinced her daughter it was better to come than to stay home alone and the Montgomerys headed up the dirt road.

Karen Montgomery: It’s just across the field. You could see it from the field. Y’know, it was just, just walking distance. Very close.

Dave Cawley: But far enough for Doug. He and Billy Jack crept from the Volkswagen toward the open garage door of the house…

Karen Montgomery: We had left the garage door open because there’s nobody up here.

Dave Cawley: …and hit pay dirt almost immediately. Cody Senior had left a long gun against the wall of the mudroom. Doug snatched it.

Karen Montgomery: It’s a four-level split and the garage was open, so the door that he went into came in from the garage and that was kind of a mudroom. And then, next to the mudroom was the washroom, the laundry room, and then there was a basement right there.

Dave Cawley: Doug and Billy Jack spotted more guns in the basement. Cody Senior was storing his father-in-law Ted Hilstead’s collection of rifles and shotguns there.

Karen Montgomery: There was no door to the basement so you could just see right in the basement and they were just at the back.

Cody Montgomery, Jr.: Yeah, probably wasn’t too hard to find.

Karen Montgomery: No, it wasn’t.

Dave Cawley: The Montgomery family returned home around 10 p.m. As Cody Senior steered into the gravel driveway, his headlights swept across a shell belt, a piece of hunting gear that holds shotgun shells. Doug, or maybe Billy Jack, had dropped it on the way out of the house.

Cody Montgomery, Jr.: You guys knew right when we got there that something was off.

Karen Montgomery: Yeah, yeah. Dad could, dad knew ‘cause that thing—

Cody Montgomery, Jr.: Yeah, ‘cause the bullet belt was out.

Dave Cawley: Cody Sr. put the car in park and told his children to stay put.

Cody Montgomery, Jr.: ‘Cause we had to stay in the car, right? And then dad went through the whole house and crawled up in the attic and everything, like checked the whole, every corner of the house out before he’d let us in.

Dave Cawley: Karen followed her husband through the house. She could see someone had ransacked the master bedroom.

Karen Montgomery: I went in my bedroom and I could tell that my five-gallon jar of change was gone and our drawers and been gone through.

Dave Cawley: Far-flung and sparsely populated Liberty was not one of the most active areas for crime in Weber County. Response times were slow. Cody and Karen did a more detailed sweep while they waited for a sheriff’s deputy to arrive.

Karen Montgomery: We started looking around and went downstairs and noticed that the guns were gone and some other things were missing from downstairs.

Dave Cawley: The deputy made a list of the missing guns. There were seven in total: four shotguns and three rifles.

Karen Montgomery: I mean after, they told us ‘You probably won’t see the guns again’ and just, y’know, ‘We’ll keep you informed if there’s anything that happens, comes of it.’

Dave Cawley: Cody and Karen Montgomery wouldn’t hear anything more about their missing guns for years.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug and Billy Jack came away from that theft with more guns than they needed. The following weekend — over Mother’s Day — Doug, Rhonda and Billy Jack made a road trip out to Utah’s West Desert. They went out past Callao — a small farming community along the old Pony Express Trail — to an old homesteader’s cabin Doug knew about from hunting trips in the Deep Creek mountains along the Utah-Nevada border. They dug a hole just out back of the cabin and buried several of the guns. They’d left one at home: a Winchester 1200.

They were driving home and were about halfway back when, near the city of Nephi, Doug pulled to side of the highway to allow Billy Jack to empty his bladder. A Utah Highway Patrol trooper took notice, stopped and arrested Doug on suspicion of driving under the influence. Billy Jack ended up in the drunk tank as well, leaving Rhonda to bail them both out of jail.

Word of this DUI arrest did not get back to Bill Holthaus. Nephi sits about 100 miles to the south of Clearfield and in ’85, even police agencies next door to one another in Utah struggled to communicate.

Bill Holthaus: At that time, uh, we couldn’t talk to Ogden, we couldn’t talk to any of those other places except on one frequency. It was called statewide and you only ever used that for emergencies.

Dave Cawley: Doug and Billy Jack returned to Rhonda’s apartment after she bailed them out and reunited with the stolen Winchester. The Winchester 1200 came from the factory with either a 28 or 30-inch-long barrel. Billy Jack took a hacksaw and chopped it to make the weapon easier to conceal and use at close range. Getting caught with that illegally modified short-barrel shotgun would likely land Billy Jack in federal prison. He certainly couldn’t just carry the Winchester down the street to Joyce’s apartment. He needed to conceal it. So he fished a long, rectangular box — which had originally held fluorescent light tubes — out of a garbage can.

Doug provided Billy Jack with the details of the plot. He would go visit his dad in the evening, giving himself an alibi. Billy Jack, meantime, would walk up Washington Boulevard with the Winchester. They scouted out Joyce’s four-plex. Doug showed Billy Jack where she parked at night. They even stalked her one day, following her to her work 40 miles south in the Salt Lake Valley. Doug bought a box of shotgun shells while down there. He gave Billy Jack a handful to take with him on the agreed-upon night.

Dusk was coming on when Billy Jack set out with his fluorescent light box. He walked to Joyce’s apartment and took up position behind some bushes across the street. He could see Joyce wasn’t home. Her Oldsmobile was absent from the carport. So, he settled in and waited, drinking beer after beer, the Winchester close at hand.

Billy Jack at last asked himself if it was worth it and decided he couldn’t do it. He grabbed the box, heavy with its payload of blue steel, stood and started walking back the way he’d come. He’d gone about two blocks to the west when, in line of sight of South Ogden police headquarters, he ducked into a patch of trees. He found some soft ground beneath a large pine tree and dug into it with his gloved hands. The Winchester went into the hole, along with the shotgun shells and the gloves.

Doug wasn’t happy when he came home from his dad’s house and discovered the hit had not happened. Billy Jack said it wasn’t his fault, Joyce had never arrived home. Doug told Billy Jack he needed to try again. They scouted Joyce’s apartment once more and Doug gave Billy Jack about $50, a down payment on the $5,000 that was to come. Billy Jack told Doug he would take care of it. Then, he used the money to get drunk. Over Memorial Day weekend, he thumbed a ride and hitchhiked his way out of town.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Doug’s arrest for DUI on the way back from buying the guns put him in a bind. If word of it got back to his bosses at the Ideal Cement company, he’d lose his job. Hardly a day had passed since Billy Jack’s disappearing act at the end of May before Doug came up with a plan. He went to work and, while there, claimed to have tweaked his back.

The injury — if there even was one — wasn’t serious. But Doug filed for worker’s compensation. He went in for a medical exam and exaggerated the severity of his pain. The doctor prescribed muscle relaxers, which he took. Doug then went to another doctor, under the guise of seeking a second opinion, and then another. He collected scripts for Percodan, Percocet and Valium. He took those, too. In fact, so great was his phantom pain that he received more muscle relaxers and even Halcion, to help him sleep at night.

Doug consumed those pills at sometimes two to three times the prescribed dosage not because he was in pain but because he’d become addicted.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: At the start of June, Doug’s mind turned to another man he believed capable of killing Joyce: Tom Peters.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): Doug’s a dangerous man. He’s a very dangerous man.

Dave Cawley: Doug and Tom had met at the Utah State Prison in ’79. Tom’d had a reputation there as a bruiser, a so-called debt collector. He’d done time in maximum security prisons in both California and Colorado. Tom was also acquainted with Doug’s accomplices from the robbery at the U-Save Market: Sherrill Chestnut and Ray Dodge.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): When Doug first got busted, he got busted armed robbery with, ah, some of the older, rougher guys around Salt Lake. I’m not from Salt Lake, but as I came and did time here I got to know them.

Dave Cawley: Tom had lived with Doug and Rhonda for a time in ’83 after getting out of prison. Tom’d actually had a wife then, but wasn’t welcome to live with her because he also had a series of girlfriends. Tom would later tell police he and Doug spent those weeks in ’83 carrying out a string of petty burglaries.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): It was like a gas barbecue pit and stuff. … It was somebody’s front porch, not porch, in their garage thing, you know? Very little things.

Dave Cawley: By the spring of ’85, Tom had moved in with Becky, one of those girlfriends, on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. Doug called Tom at Becky’s place that June and told him he needed help taking care of a woman. He was willing to pay to make it happen. Tom’s ears perked up at the mention of money.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): I told him, ‘How much?’ ‘Cause see that’s the problem with that dope. You just don’t, money’s, I handled hundreds and hundreds of dollars all the time. Scheme, scams, you know.

Dave Cawley: Tom had a nasty heroin habit. Doug and Rhonda drove down to visit Tom at Becky’s apartment.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): He was even on Percodans I believe at the time. He was a totally different person than what I seen before. And so was Rhonda. She was a totally different lady. I remember her very sweet.

Dave Cawley: Tom hadn’t known Doug to use drugs before but found him now angry and erratic.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): See, when he first come to see me, he had a big scar down his cheek, you know? And he said this woman’s saying he’s raping her. That he raped her and he’s all wild you know?

Dave Cawley: Doug was due in court in just days — on June 12^th — for a preliminary hearing. He wanted Joyce gone before she could testify. He had a fresh worker’s compensation check for $800. It was Tom’s if he wanted it, as a down payment.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): Becky was sitin’ there. Rhonda was on the couch. Rhonda and her and Doug and me, and they were uptight ‘cause of money, you know. And I’m trying to make some promises, you know?

Dave Cawley: Tom told Doug he would do it. Tom didn’t intend to carry out the hit. He just saw it as an opportunity to secure his next fix.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): I only got some dope is all I got, I’m just a dope fiend. That’s all I was then. Just a street dope fiend, where I would lie to anybody for the dope.

Dave Cawley: Tom talked it over with his girlfriend, Becky, after Doug and Rhonda left. They hatched a plan. Tom would take the money, use half of it to buy heroin and take the other half to Las Vegas or Wendover. He’d gamble it, double it back to the original amount, then return the $800 to Doug and say ‘sorry, can’t do it.’

Tom drove up to Ogden a few days later. He met up with Doug near the Utah State Employees Credit Union branch on 42^nd Street and Harrison Boulevard, where Rhonda did her banking.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): ‘Cause he was trying to cash a check, too … to pay me.

Dave Cawley: Next, they rolled down 40^th Street to scope out Joyce’s apartment. Doug and Rhonda had already gone and cased Joyce’s apartment themselves. On one of those trips, Doug had discovered the back window on the east side of the Joyce’s unit didn’t latch tight. He could slide it open from the outside.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): And then he says, he said ‘You can go to the window’ and I believe he said ‘There’s a window open. Or even go up to the door, you know, and just, you know, burglar your way in,’ you know? And ‘Pack her stuff, and pack her stuff. Act like she just disappeared.’

Dave Cawley: Tom understood Doug wanted him to make it appear as though she’d skipped town. Doug said to take Joyce up into the mountains. They agreed on a date. Doug knew his family would be gathered at his dad’s cabin on this particular night. He arranged to be there with Rhonda, to provide an alibi. Once at the cabin, Doug kept flipping on a portable AM radio so he could listen to the hourly news. He expected to hear something about a murder in South Ogden. That news report never came.

Tom Peters had purchased a gram of heroin with the money and headed to Nevada to gamble the rest. His plan to double the money failed.

Tom Peters (from 1991 police recording): He come back a couple of times and it wasn’t done, but I had already, I didn’t win in the Vegas. I didn’t win, you know the story. I didn’t double his money and come back and give him money, I spent it all. We partied and got dope and, anyway, he called a couple of times and said ‘What’s happening?’ But the money’s already gone. And he did say, ‘Well, it’s gonna be done. If I have to do it myself, it’s going to be done.’

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Joyce Yost went to court on June 12, 1985. The preliminary hearing was an opportunity for a judge to review the evidence and decide if it was enough to advance the case to arraignment, where Doug would enter a plea. Detective Bill Holthaus had no doubt it would be.

Bill Holthaus: It was very, very good evidence.

Dave Cawley: Joyce and Bill were the only two witnesses called to testify at the prelim by the prosecutor, Brian Namba.

Brian Namba: It was a pretty serious case for an attorney with as little experience as I had. It was, uh, probably the most serious case that I’d had up to that point.

Dave Cawley: Brian was just a few years out of law school. He’d only been with the Davis County Attorney’s Office for about a year. Doug also had an attorney, one who was much more seasoned: John Hutchison.

Brian Namba: John was a very colorful guy.

Dave Cawley: Hutch, as people called him, had a bit of a reputation.

Brian Namba: I think that his rough exterior was intimidating to young attorneys. When I first met him I was somewhat intimidated by him.

Dave Cawley: John often showed up to court in moccasins and a Nehru jacket. He had long hair.

Brian Namba: Y’know he was sort of a hippy in the early years, that he refused to wear a necktie and wore beads and things like that when he went to court. (Laughs) But an excellent attorney, an excellent legal mind.

Dave Cawley: He rarely advised his clients to waive their right to a preliminary hearing.

Brian Namba: The defense attorney can use the preliminary hearing as a tool of discovery to find out what the witness is going to say, to limit what the witness can say when they get to a trial and to help them to be able to prepare some sort of a defense.

Dave Cawley: That’s how Joyce came to sit on the witness stand on that June day. It was the first time she’d seen Doug since the night of the rape.

Kim Salazar: I went with her. I didn’t go into the courtroom, though. But I was there with her.

Dave Cawley: That’s Joyce’s daughter, Kim Salazar. She and her husband Randy had turned out to support Joyce.

Randy Salazar: I do remember her, her saying she didn’t want to get on the stand. ‘Cause Doug told her if she told anybody that he promised … he’d come back and kill her. … But I just always tried to tell her that I loved her and, man, and I stood behind her and, y’know, yeah. So that’s what she was afraid of.

Dave Cawley: Joyce had not revealed the rape to her son Greg Roberts, who was at that time attending dental school in Virginia, until the time of this court hearing.

Greg Roberts: Maybe that’s why she called me and told me.

Dave Cawley: Joyce hadn’t wanted what’d happened to interfere with Greg’s studies.

Greg Roberts: Yeah, I think I got a muted story for sure from her. She didn’t really let on much and that, everything that was going on surrounding it.

Dave Cawley: Joyce had been more candid with Mel Roberts, her ex-husband.

Mel Roberts: She was concerned about going forward with it, with charges. And I said ‘You owe it to yourself and to Kim and Greg to hang that sonofabitch.’

Dave Cawley: She’d told Mel she feared having her private life dissected in public.

Mel Roberts: Y’know, and she was prepared to be drug through the mud because you know they’re going to. And I said, ‘You just have to take it with a grain of salt. I mean, you know it’s not true.’

Dave Cawley: Bill Holthaus listened to her testimony.

Bill Holthaus: I remember that it basically went to script. I mean, Brian asked the questions that were in my police report.

Brian Namba: She portrayed a really nice image. She was very likable. But I think she was embarrassed about the whole thing. She didn’t really relish the thought of testifying and so she did leave some things out.

Dave Cawley: He walked her step-by-step through the story. Her responses were not as detailed as they’d been the night of, but they were consistent. That is, until Brian asked if the assault had included anything other than “normal” sex. Joyce said no. Brian had read the reports. He knew what Doug had forced Joyce to do.

Brian Namba: When she wouldn’t say it voluntarily, the tightrope as a prosecutor to have to walk is that you’re not allowed to ask leading question of your own witness.

Dave Cawley: Joyce couldn’t bring herself to talk about it in open court.

Brian Namba: So when she didn’t volunteer it, I had to try to figure out ways to ask the question using different words but without leading her and that was kind of difficult.

Dave Cawley: Brian tried to rephrase. John objected, but was overruled.

Brian Namba: The judge kept giving me a chance because he knew what was in the probable cause statement on the information but she just wouldn’t say it. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: This was a blow to the state’s case, but not a fatal one. John took his turn questioning Joyce. Hadn’t she offered to go have coffee with Doug? How had she identified his car if she hadn’t seen its license plate?

Bill Holthaus: Mr. Lovell’s attorney, umm, attempted to trip her up on a couple three things. It didn’t work.

Dave Cawley: The point of greatest substance in John questioning revolved around the medical exam Joyce had undergone, what’s known as a rape kit. The doctor’s and nurse’s notes, along with the forensics gathered during that exam, had been passed to the police, prosecution and defense. TThey’d become part of the record of the case. However, that’s not the same thing as being public.

I will again acknowledge here, as I did last episode, that Joyce is not able to provide consent for release of this information. I have personally reviewed the rape kit records but am only revealing a sliver of what they say in this forum because they are factually relevant and were discussed in open court.

Defense attorney John Hutchison asked Joyce if she knew whether or not the doctor had observed any vaginal tearing, a possible indicator of forcible sex. Joyce replied she didn’t know. The doctor’s report did not mention any vaginal tearing. But then remember, Joyce had cooperated with her attacker following the initial barrage in her car.

Joyce Yost (from April 4, 1985 police recording): Because I was taking a certain amount of physical abuse along with this and uh, decided to cooperate.

Dave Cawley: So the absence of those other injuries was not unexpected. There was another issue with the rape kit evidence. The crime lab had tested oral and vaginal swabs collected from Joyce. The vaginal swab contained traces of seminal fluid. The oral, however, did not. That meant the state had no physical evidence to support the sodomy charge.

There’s a good reason why that swab came back negative. The doctor’s notes stated while Joyce hadn’t showered following her assault, she had taken a drink of water. These two factors — Joyce’s reluctance to testify to the sodomy and the lack of supporting evidence — led to the judge dismissing the sodomy count.

Bill Holthaus: But she held up well during preliminary, other than there were some things she didn’t want to talk about.”

Joyce left the hearing recognizing her reluctance had hurt the prosecution’s case.

Kim Salazar: She knew that there was things she didn’t say that she probably should have said but she was ashamed and she wouldn’t say it.

Dave Cawley: It was her nightmare scenario, like the scenes in that TV movie she’d watched, A Case of Rape. Yet, she’d faced it. Kim’s husband Randy said his mother-in-law had shown tremendous courage.

Randy Salazar: This man had ruined her life and her kids’ life and, and y’know what? She wasn’t scared of him anymore. She was, she was telling the truth. And everything you told me that you were going to kill me? ‘Well [expletive] you.’ You know what? ‘You’re going to prison for what you did to me.’

Dave Cawley: As for Doug, he would remain free on bond at least until his arraignment hearing on June 20^th.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: John Hutchison showed up in court on June 20th without his client. Doug, he said, was unavailable and “incapacitated” by a back injury. The story of the back injury had taken on a life of its own. Doug now had crutches and doctors notes aplenty. Bill Holthaus thought it was all baloney.

Bill Holthaus: Never saw any indication there was anything wrong with this health at all. … He was thin to begin with. He wasn’t a heavy kid … actually, y’know I thought of him as being in pretty good shape.

Dave Cawley: John asked the judge to postpone the arraignment. The judge agreed to a one-week delay. Doug was not convalescing at home. He’d taken Rhonda’s car that day, driven up to a mountain reservoir called East Canyon and spent time drinking beer and boating. When Doug’d returned home that evening, Rhonda had discovered he’d smashed up her car while driving intoxicated.

“I’m going to kill Joyce Yost,” Rhonda would later say he told her.

Later that night, police received a 911 call from a man who lived in the same apartment complex as Doug and Rhonda. He’d seen a blue pickup truck crash into a parked flatbed in the parking lot of the Lake Park Apartments. Those apartments sit on the west side of U.S. Highway 89. The road, which also goes by the name Washington Boulevard, is one of the primary north-south arteries of Utah’s Weber Valley. And it serves as the dividing line between the communities of South Ogden to the east— where Joyce lived — and Washington Terrace to the west. Because the 911 call came from a location just a hundred or so feet on the west side of that dividing line, the dispatcher sent out an officer from Washington Terrace.

Officer TJ Harper received the information at about 11 p.m. He drove his patrol car over to the complex and spotted the blue Ford pickup truck turning northbound onto Washington Boulevard. He radioed for backup and pulled the truck over. Harper would write his official report he noted the smell of alcohol as he approached the truck.

“How much have you had to drink tonight,” Harper asked.

“A couple of beers,” came the reply.

“Did you hit another vehicle back there at the Lake Park Apartments,” he asked.

“No, but some guy says I did,” the driver said.

Harper told the driver — Doug Lovell — he appeared to be intoxicated and would have to take a field sobriety test.

A couple more patrol cars showed up about this time. They’d come not from South Ogden but instead from the city of Riverdale, even farther to the west. Harper put Doug through a few quick tests, which Doug failed. He then placed Doug under arrest. The two Riverdale officers began the process of impounding the pickup truck.

Officer Steve Hallowell took a look inside the cab. He spotted a handgun under the driver seat: a Beretta model 950BS, also known as the “Minx.” This tiny semi-automatic pocket pistol fired .22 caliber short rounds. What it lacked in punch, it made up for in sheer sneakiness. Hallowell slid the magazine out of the gun. There were six rounds in the clip as well as one in the chamber, ready to fire.

State and federal law prohibited Doug from possessing firearms, let alone a loaded, concealed handgun while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident. This was, at very least, a violation of the terms of his pre-trial release in the rape case. What none of the officers seemed to realize that night was Doug had skipped court earlier that same day.

Bill Holthaus: At that time, there was very little communication between Davis County and Weber County. We didn’t have the same radio frequencies.

Dave Cawley: The Washington Terrace and Riverdale officers apparently did not know Doug stood accused of a kidnapping and rape. They didn’t piece together he’d been headed toward Joyce’s apartment when they’d stopped him and found the little mouse gun. And once again, no one bothered to tell Clearfield police detective Bill Holthaus…

Bill Holthaus: So I, I doubt they even really knew much about our case at that time. And I didn’t know anything about the DUI up there at all.

Dave Cawley: …or Davis County prosecutor Brian Namba.

Brian Namba: You didn’t have a lot of intelligence going on from one person to the other, one agency to the other.

Dave Cawley: Had someone with knowledge of the Joyce Yost case been involved in or informed of this DUI arrest, they might have realized he was on his way to Joyce’s apartment to kill her.

Brian Namba: The county sheriff, they had enough cars that they would have briefings when they had shift change. But the smaller agencies, it’s just one officer turning over the keys to the other officer and saying, ‘Well, this is what happened tonight.’

Dave Cawley: It was after midnight when officer Harper booked Doug on suspicion of DUI, leaving the scene of an accident, carrying a concealed weapon and illegal possession of a firearm by a restricted person. Prosecutors in Weber County filed formal charges later that same day. Again, no one bothered to communicate this to Brian Namba, the prosecutor handling the rape case in neighboring Davis County.

Brian Namba: Y’know, they didn’t have a lot of computer communication going on in those days. just paper. And they probably just never found out about it.

Dave Cawley: So it was that Doug Lovell, an ex-con with a history of violence, who was out of jail on bond while awaiting trial for rape, who police had caught with a loaded firearm, was allowed to bail out of jail. Again. And Joyce had no idea about any of it. One week later, on June 26^th, Doug went before Utah 2^nd District Court Judge Rodney Page for his arraignment in the rape case.

Brian Namba: The purpose of arraignment is for the defendant to just declare whether he’s guilty or not guilty.

Dave Cawley: He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Brian Namba: He would have heard what the evidence is against him at the preliminary hearing and when he declares that he’s not guilty, then that sets the stage for us to set trial.

Dave Cawley: Judge Page scheduled the trial for August 20^th. Brian Namba asked the judge to compel Doug to provide blood, hair and saliva samples to be used in forensic tests. Doug’s attorney objected. But Judge Page issued an order to make it so. Judge Page also signed what’s known as a hold order. I have a copy of this document. It reads “the defendant is ordered held until further notice of this court.” Clear language from the judge saying keep this guy locked up until I say otherwise.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: A week and a half later — on July 8^th — the situation with the stolen Mazda came to a head. Salt Lake City police detective Ron Greenleaf had obtained an arrest warrant.

Ron Greenleaf: Possession of a stolen vehicle.

Dave Cawley: There were two separate charges, one for the Mazda RX-7 and the other for the Toyota pickup. Ron drove up from Salt Lake late that afternoon and arrested Doug.

Ron Greenleaf: He was very talkative, but not, didn’t give me one iota of information regarding this case or the stolen vehicles. It was just like, y’know, how’s the weather? Gee, this is fun, y’know. Haven’t been outside for awhile. … Wish I wasn’t in handcuffs. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: They arrived at the Salt Lake County Jail. Ron walked Doug in through the sally port. He then hung around, waiting and watching as Doug went through the booking process. That didn’t finish until a little after midnight.

Ron Greenleaf: He just said, ‘I guess I’ll be seeing you, huh, in court?’ And I said, ‘Yes, you will.’ (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Ron didn’t see Doug in court. Jail records show staff there let Doug walk at 1:45 a.m. on July 9^th, a little over one hour after he was booked. This, even though the felony car theft charges would’ve been more than enough for a judge to revoke his bail in the rape case.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Meantime, the Davis County Attorney’s Office was trying to find Doug to serve the court order demanding he provide blood and hair samples. He wasn’t in the county jail where, according to Judge Page’s hold order, he was supposed to be. Detective Bill Holthaus went to work tracking him down. Bill went to Doug and Rhonda’s apartment in Washington Terrace on July 17^th. He knocked on the door and was surprised when Doug answered.

Bill figured, in that moment, that the hold order must have been rescinded. He told Doug they needed to go to the hospital for the blood draw. Doug said it wasn’t a good time. He was babysitting his wife Rhonda’s then-four-year-old daughter, Alisha.

Bill Holthaus: The mother was not there.

Dave Cawley: Rhonda worked for the state at an office in downtown Ogden and was gone during the day. Maybe Bill could come back another time, Doug suggested.

Bill Holthaus: I was not willing to come back another time. So I told him that we can take the daughter with us.

Dave Cawley: Doug and Alisha piled into Bill’s police car. They drove around Hill Air Force Base, to a hospital in the city Layton for the blood draw. On the drive back, Bill took a route that went past the base’s South Gate.

Bill Holthaus: At that time, there was a large, there was an F-105 on a stanchion which was there for everyone to see and the young girl made a comment about the airplane.

Dave Cawley: Bill asked Alisha if she would like to see the plane up close, an offer she eagerly accepted.

Bill Holthaus: This was not her fault, y’know, that we were in this situation. So I, I stopped to show her the airplane.

Dave Cawley: As Alisha looked, wide-eyed, at the sleek jet, Doug and Bill began to talk.

Bill Holthaus: We had a conversation about the case and Douglas said something to me about, ‘This isn’t going to trial.’ And y’know, ‘This is, nothing’s going to come out of this.’ And I said, ‘I believe it is, I believe we have the evidence for it to go to trial.’ He looked at me with an expression that got my attention.

Dave Cawley: Bill did not startle easily.

Bill Holthaus: It just was like it froze the moment.

Dave Cawley: The two men looked each other in the eyes. Bill saw an intensity in Doug’s expression that he still, to this day, struggles to put into words.

Bill Holthaus: And he said, ‘This will not go to trial.’

Dave Cawley: An odd thing for Doug to say, considering a trial date had already been scheduled. It was just a month away.

Bill Holthaus: And I simply said, y’know, with the young girl there I didn’t want to get into a, y’know, a shouting contest. I said, ‘I believe it will.’ And I let it go at that.

Dave Cawley: The exchange left Bill troubled.

Bill Holthaus: That uh, led me to believe that he could become violent.

Dave Cawley: He reported this concern up his chain of command.

Bill Holthaus: I did mention that to the attorneys following that. And I did mention that to South Ogden at that time.

Dave Cawley: He told Joyce about it as well and urged her to go stay someplace safe.

Bill Holthaus: I think she believed that she was able to take care of herself.

Dave Cawley: Joyce did not heed this advice. She declined urgent invitations to stay with her daughter Kim and Kim’s husband Randy.

Kim Salazar: She had to have some fear. But she didn’t ever let on that she was afraid.

Dave Cawley: Randy didn’t realize the latch on one of Joyce’s apartment windows was broken.

Randy Salazar: You could just slide it open.

Dave Cawley: Even from the outside.

Randy Salazar: If I would have known that, I would have, I mean, I would have put that, I mean, I never even heard of it.

Dave Cawley: Doug Lovell was well aware.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The heat of the afternoon struck Joyce Yost as she followed her daughter Kim to the parking lot outside Royal Studio, a photography business in Ogden where Kim worked. It was Saturday, August 10, 1985.

Joyce had just taken a job at the studio as well, having quit her position selling fur for the Weinstocks department store. The pay was better and her commute was only four miles, instead of 40. Kim’s shift at the photo studio ended earlier than her mother’s on that hot summer Saturday.

Kim Salazar: I always got off early on Saturdays. We only worked until like noon but she stayed there all day and so she walked me out and I remember I had actually thought about asking her if she would watch the kids that night because we were going to go some where but then she told me that they were going to go out to the base to listen to Steve play in the band so I never, y’know, asked her to babysit the kids.

Dave Cawley: Steve was the adult son of Joyce’s close friends Gordon and Terry Kaufman.

Joyce had also made plans for the following day. A guy friend she’d been seeing, John Gibson, was coming over to barbecue. Joyce finished her shift later that Saturday afternoon and went out to her car. It wasn’t the big Oldsmobile anymore. She’d sold that days earlier and in its place purchased a white, 1976 Chevy Nova.

She went home, changed into a pink dress, then drove the Nova over to her sister Dorothy’s house on Fern Street in Clearfield. Dorothy later described the events of that night in a police interview.

Dorothy Dial (from January 1992 police recording): She drove, ah, to my place and we got in my car and went to the officer’s club.

Dave Cawley: Joyce told Dorothy she’d sold the Oldsmobile. The check she’d received from the buyer was in her purse. Joyce and Dorothy carpooled to the club together, leaving the Nova parked outside Dorothy’s house.

Dorothy Dial (from January 1992 police recording): Well, it’s, my car as a sticker and she, she, base sticker and hers didn’t and it was just easier to do it that way.

Dave Cawley: They spent the next several hours socializing, dancing and listening to the band.

Steve Kaufman: They liked us as long as we weren’t too loud. And people could get out and dance on the dance floor. They’d have a good time. They’d dance on most every song.

Dave Cawley: Steve Kaufman, the frontman, had put the group together years earlier, in 1964.

Steve Kaufman: Started in 8^th grade at Mt. Ogden Junior High School and basically was a way to get girls to like you.

Dave Cawley: The band is still together today, under the name “Outrageous.” But in ’85,  they were called “Still Rain.”

Steve Kaufman: We opened for everybody from The Monkeys to Jan and Dean, Johnny Rivers, Tommy James and the Shondels, Three Dog Night. All kinds of different groups. Mommas and the Pappas.

Dave Cawley: Still Rain had flirted with going big time in the mid ‘70s, but here a decade later they mostly just gigged on weekends. The Officer’s Club at Hill was a regular venue.

Steve Kaufman: The club had a big bar and those guys in the Air Force, so these were all officers and their wives and their friends.

Dave Cawley: The O Club often booked Still Rain on back-to-back nights — Friday and Saturday — for four hours each night.

Steve Kaufman: I don’t know how I did that. But, I didn’t know any better. I mean, you know, been, that’s all I was, I was a rock and roll guy. Music was everything.

Dave Cawley: Joyce was only five years older than Steve, but he remembered thinking she must have been even older since she socialized with his parents.

Steve Kaufman: My parents lived at a place called The Apartments which was over by the old McKay-Dee Hospital. And it was kind of a, a big fancy new complex and it had a wonderful outdoor pool. And every Sunday, that’s where a lot of people had church. (Laughs) At that pool. For those who weren’t going to one. And Joyce was always over there hanging out.

Dave Cawley: It had been awhile since Joyce had been over to the Kaufman’s. Terry kept hoping to catch up with her, but they were seated on opposite ends of the table. They weren’t able to chat from that distance over the noise of the band.

Joyce and Dorothy danced their last dances as the clock approached midnight. They said their goodbyes as the band wound down their final set. Then, the two sisters went out to Dorothy’s car and drove back across the freeway into Clearfield. The weather had turned while they’d been at the club.

Dorothy Dial (from January 1992 police recording): It was very nice, ah, when we went out there, it was warm. It was hot. But when we left to come home, which I think was about midnight, it had turned real cold and windy.

Dave Cawley: Joyce, in her pink dress, was not prepared to stand out in the icy wind chatting with her sister.

Dorothy Dial (from January 1992 police recording): No, we said goodnight out in the driveway and see you later and she got in her car and left and I went into my house.

Dave Cawley: Joyce drove to her apartment, where she parked the Nova in the carport. She went inside, changed out of her dress, flipped on the little TV on her dresser and settled down to bed. The Kaufmans had remained at the Officer’s Club a little while longer to talk with their son.

Steve Kaufman: My parents were very supportive and they would often bring friends and stuff to hear us and would come hear the band. They liked hearing the band.

Dave Cawley: Gordon and Terry didn’t leave the club until a bit after midnight. Their route home took them past Joyce’s apartment sometime between 12:30 and 1 a.m. Terry noticed light in Joyce’s kitchen window, suggesting she might still be awake. She turned to her husband, who was driving, with a suggestion.

Terry Kaufman (from April 1992 police recording): ‘Let’s stop and talk to Joyce. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her too much tonight because she was sitting down at the other end of the table’ and I hadn’t seen her for, oh maybe a couple of months to talk to her, ‘And let’s just visit with her and find out how she’s doing.’ And he looked at his clock and thought it was, I think he said it was around 12:30 or 20 after 12. And it’s kinda late and we were going into Salt Lake the next day so we said let’s, let’s wait and do it maybe tomorrow or the next night. We’ll come down and talk to her and visit with her. And I noticed the light on in her kitchen. That’s why I suggested maybe stopping because I knew she was still up.

Dave Cawley: They didn’t stop. If they had, Joyce might still be alive today.