Category: Season 2

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Douglas Lovell returned to the Utah State Prison in January of 1986, following four short years of freedom spent with his wife, Rhonda Lovell.

His earlier stay there, from 1979 to 1982 on an aggravated robbery conviction, had ended early thanks to a show of leniency from the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. The board had released Doug after he’d served just two-and-a-half years on a sentence of five years-to-life. The board had also seen fit to terminate his parole in August of 1983, effectively ending his post-release supervision.

Less than two years later, Doug had followed Joyce Yost home from a club, kidnapped and sexually assaulted her.

The sexual assault of Joyce Yost was a different category of crime. The sex offense carried a similar sentence of five-to-life, but with the added wrinkle of a 15-year minimum mandatory. This meant no amount of mercy from the parole board would end Doug’s time in prison early. His only hope for an early release would be to win an appeal of his conviction, something his attorney hoped to secure by characterizing the attack on Joyce as a “garden variety rape.”

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Rhonda Lovell

South Ogden police believed Doug had taken Joyce’s life to prevent her from testifying at the rape trial, but they’d been unable to prove it by that point in 1986. However, with Doug at the outset of a lengthy prison stay, the detectives were able to turn their eyes to his wife, Rhonda Lovell.

Doug Lovell and Rhonda Buttars had married two years earlier, in January of 1984. They’d conceived a son in late 1985, during the lead-up to the rape trial. Rhonda was still pregnant when, in March of 1986, South Ogden police sergeant Brad Birch arrived at her work bearing an arrest warrant.

Brad was at that time acting as lead investigator on the Joyce Yost disappearance. The warrant he brought with him to Rhonda’s office did not deal with Joyce’s case, though. It instead listed a charge of taking wildlife out of season, or poaching.

Brad had discovered that a fish and game officer had encountered Doug and Rhonda Lovell in the Monte Cristo Range east of Ogden the prior autumn, after Joyce Yost had disappeared but prior to Doug’s conviction in the sexual assault case.

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Poaching stop at Monte Cristo

The Monte Cristo region of northern Utah was a popular spot for summer camping, fall leaf peeping and winter snowmobiling. It’s frequented in the autumn months by hunters who seek deer and elk that spend time in the uplands. 

A state highway crossed the southern end of the range, connecting the rural communities of Huntsville on the west and Woodruff on the east. Monte Cristo’s popularity with hunters meant that highway corridor also drew significant attention from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, which patrolled the area in search of poachers.

One such officer had come across Rhonda Lovell sitting by herself in a vehicle on a snowy day in late 1985. He had stopped to talk with her and Rhonda had reportedly told the wildlife officer she was traveling alone.

A short time later, the same officer had observed Rhonda’s vehicle coming down the highway eastbound toward Woodruff. There appeared to be a second person with her. The officer stopped the vehicle and questioned Rhonda a second time. The man with her, she had supposedly said, was just a hitchhiker.

This seemed unlikely. Utah State Highway 39 was not a thoroughfare where pedestrians would often thumb rides. In fact, the man had not been a hitchhiker. The man with Rhonda during her second conversation with the wildlife officer was her husband, Doug Lovell.

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The lost records

The date of the encounter on Monte Cristo is not clear from available records. Some time passed between that day and the date when the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources is said to have discovered an animal carcass which had been poached in the Monte Cristo region. The agency screened charges with a prosecutor in Utah’s Rich County, which led to the filing of charges against Doug and Rhonda Lovell.

The charging documents filed in Rich County Circuit Court are no longer available, having at some point in the 35 years since been purged in accordance with state record retention rules. The probable cause statement which would have included an outline of the factual basis for the charges has not been preserved by the court.

In response to a public records request from the Cold team, Rich County Attorney Ben Willoughby said the county had only kept a scanned copy of a register of court cases from that time period. The document, titled Index to Criminal Register of Actions 1896 to 1998, included names, case numbers and years for criminal cases filed in the county’s court.

“However, it does not contain a case file for Rhonda Lovell,” Willoughby wrote in an emailed response to Cold’s record request. “The spot in the index where her case should be alphabetically referenced appears to have been whited out prior to being scanned.”

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Hunt for the Wildlife Resources officer

A subsequent public records request to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources likewise failed to uncover any paperwork underlying the arrest warrant, though that’s not unusual considering the age of the case, the lack of computerized record systems at the time and government rules which allow for the destruction of some paper records on a prescribed schedule.

The Cold team made contact with several current and former DWR employees in an attempt to identify the wildlife officer who encountered Rhonda Lovell in 1985. Those included sworn law enforcement officers known to have participated in poaching patrols of the Monte Cristo region in 1985. None specifically recalled being involved with the case or suggested who might have been.

[Editor’s note: After this article was first published, a source came forward and stated the wildlife officer who’d stopped Rhonda Lovell was conservation officer LaVon Thomas. Thomas is deceased.]

It remains unclear how word of Doug and Rhonda Lovell’s encounter with the wildlife officer made its way to South Ogden police or why Brad Birch, and not the wildlife officer, served the arrest warrant on Rhonda on March 19, 1986. However, Joyce Yost’s daughter Kim Salazar said she was aware of the plan to arrest Rhonda before it occurred.

“I know that they were trying to get information [about Joyce] so they used this poaching as a way to talk to Rhonda, to put some pressure,” Kim said.

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Rhonda Lovell’s interview

Brad brought Rhonda to South Ogden police headquarters and sat her down in an interview room. He read Rhonda her Miranda rights. Then he and another detective, Terry Carpenter, began to ask questions.

“They kept saying, ‘If you know something [about Joyce Yost], we’ll let you go if you tell us. … Otherwise we’re going for a long ride.’ I said, ‘Well let’s go.’”

Rhonda Buttars (Lovell), on her 1986 interview with South Ogden police

Both Brad and Terry filed written reports following their interview with Rhonda. The reports said she denied having knowledge of or part in any poaching scheme. Rhonda reportedly told the detectives that Doug had been out of the car defecating when the wildlife officer had first approached her. She’d felt embarrassment over this, which is why she had instead claimed to be alone. She did not have an explanation for why she had later told the same officer Doug was a hitchhiker.

The reports said Rhonda claimed to have been headed to Woodruff with Doug at that time for a snowmobiling outing with friends. But she declined to identify those friends, saying she didn’t want to get them involved.

The detectives also took the opportunity to question Rhonda about the disappearance of Joyce Yost. Rhonda, the reports said, claimed no knowledge of what had happened to Joyce. She denied Doug’d had anything to do with it.

“Rhonda asked some questions about the trial which were answered by Sgt. Birch,” Terry’s report read. “Rhonda was asked if Doug had any firearms. She stated that he only had one rifle that she was aware of. That being a Weatherby 300.”

This was untrue, as Rhonda had been with Doug and his friend William “Billy Jack” Wiswell when they had buried a cache of stolen guns behind a cabin in Utah’s Deep Creek Mountains. The South Ogden detectives were unaware of that fact at the time.

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Rhonda Lovell’s stay in jail

At the conclusion of the interview, Brad and Terry informed Rhonda they would be taking her to the Rich County jail in Randolph, Utah for booking on the poaching warrant. They allowed her to make child care arrangements for her daughter before starting the 100-mile drive.

“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,” Terry told me in an April, 2021 interview.

Terry recalled Rhonda being cordial, in spite of the circumstances. His 1986 report had described her as “very sociable and willing to talk about anything else.”

Rhonda did not crack under the pressure. Her husband acted as her lawyer when their case went before a judge the following May. Doug Lovell succeeded in having the charges dropped.

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An anonymous call

Doug and Rhonda Lovell’s encounter with the wildlife officer would take on new significance for investigators a year later. On April 3, 1987, a man called police in Roy, Utah and reported finding a body in the mountains near Causey Dam. In a subsequent call to the Weber County Sheriff’s Office, the anonymous caller said he’d observed a woman’s purse next to the body.

Causey is accessed by way of the same highway Doug and Rhonda had been traveling at the time of the poaching stop at Monte Cristo.

Numerous searches of the area around Causey failed to turn up any human remains. The anonymous caller was never identified. Detectives who investigated the report believe the man was being honest but were unable to recover the body without his further assistance.

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Hear the the anonymous caller’s voice in episode 5 of Cold: Garden Variety

Episode credits
Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
Audio production: Nina Earnest
Audio mixing: Trent Sell
Additional voices: Saige Miller (as Rhonda Lovell), Ethan Millard (as Archie Smith), Alex Kirry (as Murray Miron)
Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
Cold main score mixing: Dan Blanck
KSL executive producers: Sheryl Worsley, Keira Farrimond
Workhouse Media executive producers: Paul Anderson, Nick Panella, Andrew Greenwood
Amazon Music team: Morgan Jones, Eliza Mills, Vanessa Rebbert, Shea Simpson
Episode transcript: https://thecoldpodcast.com/season-2-transcript/garden-variety-full-transcript/
KSL companion story: https://ksltv.com/460854/anonymous-call-may-have-led-to-joyce-yosts-body-near-causey/
Talking Cold companion episode: https://thecoldpodcast.com/talking-cold#tc-episode-5

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Marily Gren often overheard conversations among the attorneys and other staff at the Davis County Attorney’s Office. She was aware, working as a secretary there in April of 1985, of a particularly egregious case that had come in from Clearfield police. It involved a woman named Joyce Yost and the testimony she had given at a preliminary hearing.

“A case that came in, a bad case,” Marily told me. “I wasn’t the secretary assigned to the Clearfield area but we all typed up the reports and you kind of knew about all the cases.”

A young prosecutor named Brian Namba had taken Joyce’s case. He’d been the one to question Joyce during that preliminary hearing, at which she’d described being followed home and sexually assaulted by a man she didn’t know. Police had identified that man as Douglas Anderson Lovell and arrested him on suspicion of rape.

The Joyce Yost testimony clearly established Doug had threatened to kill Joyce if she reported what he’d done. She’d reported him anyway.

Then, Joyce disappeared.

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Blood on the mattress

The scuttlebutt around the attorney’s office was that Joyce had likely been murdered by the man she’d accused of rape. Detectives from the city of South Ogden, where Joyce lived, had questioned Doug Lovell. He’d claimed to have no knowledge of Joyce’s whereabouts and had offered an alibi for the night she’d last been seen.

Police had searched Joyce’s apartment and found a blood-stained washcloth. They’d recovered her missing car near a water tank in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains days later. But Joyce’s location had eluded them.

During the search of the apartment, detectives had stripped the sheets from Joyce’s bed and collected them as potential evidence. It wasn’t until Joyce’s children and relatives went into the apartment weeks later though that they made a critical discovery the detectives had missed.

“The family went in to move the furniture out and they were the ones that discovered the blood on the bed,” prosecutor Brian Namba said. “That’s pretty unusual.”

The underside of Joyce’s mattress was stained with dried blood. The detectives had not thought to flip the mattress while stripping the sheets.

“Somebody said there was so much blood that a person probably wouldn’t live through loosing so much blood,” Brian said, “but that’s not conclusive enough to be able to tell the judge she’s dead.”

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Rape trial

Joyce’s disappearance complicated matters in the rape case. She was both the victim and the key witness, the accuser whose account was most likely to lead to a conviction. Her absence raised the very real risk that Doug Lovell might be acquitted.

The Davis County Attorney’s Office opted to press on with the prosecution.

“We were pretty resolute,” Brian said. “He could be a Josh Powell, easily. And so then he gets away scot-free from everything, which is his objective. And so you don’t want to give him what he’s trying to do.”

Brian needed to find a way to bring Joyce’s voice forward during the rape trial. He turned to Marily Gren with an unusual ask: could she play the part of Joyce Yost at the trial?

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Joyce Yost and Marily Gren

Marily was a secretary, not an actress. She had never met Joyce herself.

“Only thing I’ve seen mostly is that one picture of her that you see everywhere, a professional picture,” Marily said.

They were similar in age — Marily was 42 to Joyce’s 39 — but had lived very different lives. Still, she felt an empathy for Joyce and agreed to serve as her proxy on the witness stand.

“I hadn’t ever been in that type of situation but I’m a woman and she didn’t deserve it,” Marily said.

The job required that Marily read Joyce’s words from the transcript of the preliminary hearing. This was a challenging task, as the prosecution needed her to convey the feel of Joyce’s testimony without going too over-the-top. During the trial, Utah 2^nd District Court Judge Rodney Page warned Marily to avoid any theatrics.

“I was just to basically be neutral and read it, so I did,” Marily said.

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Joyce Yost testimony

Joyce Yost’s testimony from the preliminary hearing had included detailed first-hand accounts of her efforts to fight off the man who’d assaulted her. She had pointed to Doug Lovell and identified him as the man who had raped and kidnapped her. Marily mimicked that motion in Joyce’s place.

“I tried to get out of my car, realizing I was definitely in a situation that my life was at stake,” Joyce had said. “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.”

Brian Namba, the prosecutor, walked Marily through that and other difficult passages. Marily recalled it being a small part, but she was happy to help.

“One of the girls from the office was sitting behind some relatives of Joyce’s — and this is hearsay because that’s what this girl told me — but she said when I first started out, that they looked at each other and kind of rolled their eyes,” Marily said. “Towards the end they kind of got into it and she says she could tell that they thought I was doing a good job.”

Clearfield police detective William “Bill” Holthaus, the lead investigator on the case, shared that opinion. He’d sat in the courtroom and listened to Marily’s recitation of the Joyce Yost testimony.

“She read it just like Joyce had said it,” Bill said. “I think that had a little bit to do with the jury understanding what Joyce was saying, because it sounded like Joyce.”

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Rape trial verdict

The rape trial against Doug Lovell spanned two days. Marily had served as Joyce’s proxy on day one. Doug himself had testified at the start of day two. His testimony conflicted with Joyce’s. He did not deny that they’d had sexual intercourse, but insisted she had instigated and encouraged the encounter.

“He was quite the cad,” Bill said. “Separated from his wife, chasing women around and he just struck me as a guy who didn’t respect women much.”

The case went to the jury on the afternoon of the second day. Only an hour had passed before the jurors notified the judge they had reached a verdict.

Marily had by that time gone back to her secretarial work in the attorney’s office across the hall from the courtroom.

“I stepped out of the county attorney’s office to get a drink at the drinking fountain and [defense attorney John Hutchison] was coming back with Douglas Lovell,” Marily said. “He was telling Doug, ‘It’s not good when they come back so quick.’ And I remember bending over the fountain thinking, ‘Yes!’”

The jury found him guilty on both counts, having found the Joyce Yost testimony as relayed by Marily more credible than Doug’s account. But the verdict did not answer the question of what had happened to Joyce.

The words Doug uttered on his way out of the courtroom that day also left little doubt he was the person responsible for her disappearance.

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Hear what happened following Doug’s conviction in Cold episode 4: She’s Gone, Buddy

Episode credits
Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
Audio production: Nina Earnest
Audio mixing: Trent Sell
Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
Cold main score mixing: Dan Blanck
KSL executive producers: Sheryl Worsley, Keira Farrimond
Workhouse Media executive producers: Paul Anderson, Nick Panella, Andrew Greenwood
Amazon Music team: Morgan Jones, Eliza Mills, Vanessa Rebbert, Shea Simpson
Episode transcript: https://thecoldpodcast.com/season-2-transcript/shes-gone-buddy-full-transcript
KSL companion story: https://ksltv.com/460347/joyce-yosts-rape-case-first-prosecuted-without-victim-to-testify/
Talking Cold companion episode: https://thecoldpodcast.com/talking-cold#tc-episode-3-4

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Joyce Yost had made a serious accusation.

She’d told police on the morning of April 4, 1985 that a man she didn’t know had raped her, kidnapped her and then raped her again. Clearfield, Utah police detective Bill Holthaus had found Joyce’s report credible. It was buttressed by physical evidence.

Holthaus identified and arrested a suspect, Douglas Anderson Lovell, within hours of first meeting and interviewing Joyce. Prosecutors in Davis County filed criminal charges against Lovell the following day.

That meant Joyce Yost would have to again face the man who’d assaulted her. What neither of them knew was that Lovell had hatched a murder-for-hire plot to keep Joyce from testifying.

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Out on bail

Doug had, by Joyce’s account, threatened to kill her if she reported the rape. Yet a judge set bail at just $25,000. This meant Doug was able to convince his father, Monan Lovell, to secure his release by way of a property bond. 

Utah’s Second District Court scheduled a preliminary hearing in the case for June 12, 1985. Joyce would be expected to testify, presenting her account of the rape to a judge. Then, the judge would determine if the evidence supported moving the case to the next step, which is called arraignment.

Joyce confided in her ex-husband Mel Roberts that she feared taking the witness stand.

“We talked at length because she didn’t know what to do,” Mel said. “She was beside herself and I said ‘hang his ass.’”

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Billy Jack

Doug, meanwhile, did not want to return to the Utah State Prison.

He’d previously served time there on an armed robbery conviction between 1979 and 1982. That case, in which Doug had acted as wheelman in a hold-up at the U-Save Market on 7^th Street in Ogden, Utah, had hinged on the testimony of a lone female witness.

Joyce’s account of what Doug had done to her held similar potential to incriminate him. If heard by a jury, it would likely prove persuasive enough to tip the scales toward conviction.

Doug did not want to give her the opportunity to testify. He decided murder-for-hire was his best option for keeping Joyce quiet.

Doug had made connections during his time in prison. He called one of those friends, a man named William “Billy Jack” Wiswell, on the telephone toward the end of April. Doug told Billy Jack he needed help with a job.

Billy Jack was at the time living with a relative in Grand Junction, Colorado. Doug made the more than five-hour drive from South Ogden, Utah to Grand Junction the same day as the phone call.

On the return drive to South Ogden, Doug told Billy Jack the job was murder-for-hire. Doug needed Billy Jack to kill Joyce Yost. He offered $5,000 for the hit, payable after it was done.

Billy Jack accepted.

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Stolen guns

Doug and Billy Jack drove up Ogden Canyon and into the pastoral mountain town of Liberty on the evening of May 4, 1985. They parked on a dirt road as the sun set, watching the nearby farm houses. 

The windows of one nearby house remained dark, leading the two men to believe it was unoccupied. They slipped in through an open door in the garage. Once inside, they located a collection of rifles and shotguns. Doug and Billy Jack took all of the guns they could carry.

They intended for one of those guns, a Winchester, to serve as the instrument of Joyce’s death.

Billy Jack took the Winchester to the apartment in South Ogden where Doug was then living with his wife, Rhonda Lovell. He used a hacksaw to cut the barrel and stock off the shotgun, making it easier to conceal and use in tight quarters.

The two ex-convicts decided they would stash the remainder of the guns someplace safe.

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Cabin near Callao

Doug had spent some of his earliest years growing up on a farm in the central Utah community of Oak City, on the eastern fringe of Utah’s vast West Desert region. He’d also spent time hunting in the mountains of the West Desert, particularly the Deep Creek range near the isolated community of Callao.

An old wooden cabin in those mountains had become a favorite haunt of his. So he, his wife Rhonda and Billy Jack headed there over Mother’s Day weekend in 1985. Once there, Doug dug a hole in the ground and buried the additional stolen guns.

A Utah Highway Patrol trooper spotted Doug and Billy Jack near the city of Nephi while they were on their return trip home. Billy Jack was emptying his bladder on the roadside. The trooper cited both men on suspicion of driving under the influence.

The trooper did not know, nor did he discover, that the two men had just returned from burying the stolen guns.

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Murder for hire

Billy Jack set out with the sawed-off Winchester one evening in May of 1985. He walked north from Doug and Rhonda’s apartment toward Joyce Yost’s home, keeping the gun concealed in a fluorescent light tube box he’d fished out of a garbage bin.

Joyce was not at home when Billy Jack arrived, so he took up a position concealed beneath some bushes across the street.

“I just set there and wait,” Billy Jack would later tell police. “Drank a few beers, sit there and wait.”

Billy Jack did not see Joyce arrive home that night. He felt a pang of conscience and decided he could not kill a woman he’d never met and held no grudge against.

He buried the shotgun and then skipped town. But Doug Lovell had another friend he would next turn to in order to keep the murder-for-hire plot alive.

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Hear what happened when Joyce Yost testified in court in Cold episode 3: Nightmare on Top of a Nightmare

Episode credits
Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
Audio production: Nina Earnest
Audio mixing: Trent Sell
Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
Cold main score mixing: Dan Blanck
Additional songs: By Outrageous used with permission
KSL executive producers: Sheryl Worsley, Keira Farrimond
Workhouse Media executive producers: Paul Anderson, Nick Panella, Andrew Greenwood
Amazon Music team: Morgan Jones, Eliza Mills, Vanessa Rebbert, Shea Simpson
Episode transcript: https://thecoldpodcast.com/season-2-transcript/nightmare-on-top-of-a-nightmare-full-transcript/
KSL companion story: https://ksltv.com/459925/missed-opportunities-could-have-prevented-joyce-yosts-death/
Talking Cold companion episode: https://thecoldpodcast.com/talking-cold#tc-episode-3-4

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Content note: This article includes discussion of rape and sexual assault. Free resources are available for survivors of sexual abuse and violence through the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network hotline at (800) 656-HOPE (4673).

A fresh pot of coffee gave its invigorating odor to the otherwise somber air at police headquarters in South Ogden, Utah.

Bill Holthaus, a detective for the police department in the nearby suburb of Clearfield, arrived there well before sunrise on the morning of April 4, 1985 to investigate a case of rape involving a woman named Joyce Yost.

“I got a call from South Ogden PD telling me that they believed they had a rape, or a woman reporting a rape that occurred in our city,” Holthaus said. “Would I come in and interview her?”

Joyce wore a green velour jogging suit. The dress she’d been in at the time of the alleged rape was already gathered in a brown paper bag, taken as evidence by a South Ogden patrol officer at the time of her initial report.

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Joyce Yost and Bill Holthaus

“She was not the typical young rape victim that you see on television,” Holthaus told me of Joyce years later, during a conversation in May of 2020.

Joyce was, at the time in 1985, 39 years old. She was a mother of two adult children, as well as a proud grandmother. For years she’d been a fixture of the Ogden, Utah retail scene, selling Estée Lauder and other cosmetics at the ZCMI department store. She lived alone, having been twice divorced.

“She’d had a traumatic experience but probably not the first one in her life,” Holthaus said.

Bill Holthaus was in many ways Joyce’s contemporary. Both were transplants to Utah: Joyce from Minnesota and Bill from Michigan. Both had been raised as Lutherans and were not part of the predominant religious culture in Mormon-centric Utah. Bill was, at age 38, just two years into his police career.

He’d spent the prior 20 years serving in the U.S. Air Force, where he’d at times been required to interview subordinates about instances of sexual misconduct. He knew such interviews were often delicate.

“I did feel an empathy for her,” Holthaus said. “I thought that she was wronged. I did. But there’s certain questions you have to ask.”

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Joyce Yost audio tape

Holthaus pressed the record button on a small audio cassette tape deck as he and Joyce sat down to talk. A young volunteer rape victim advocate from the YWCA named Jan Schiller joined them, sitting by Joyce’s side.

The detective started out by asking Joyce to walk him through what had happened to her the prior evening.

“I met a gentleman friend at the Pier 3 at approximately 7 o’clock for dinner,” Joyce can be heard saying on the tape recording.

The audio tape of Joyce Yost’s interview has never been shared publicly prior to its inclusion in Cold season 2.

“We had a couple of drinks and we had dinner and we danced a couple of times,” Joyce said.

The Pier 3 was a supper club located in a strip mall in the city of Clearfield, just west of Hill Air Force Base. Joyce described leaving the Pier 3 at approximately 10:15 p.m. with her friend. They said goodnight to one another in the parking lot and went their separate ways.

“Then I went on home, not realizing anybody was following me, not really paying attention to see if anybody was following me,” Joyce said.

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Confrontation in the carport

Joyce told Holthaus that when she arrived at her apartment on 40^th Street in South Ogden at around 11 p.m. she pulled her Oldsmobile convertible into her stall in the carport adjacent to the four-plex. At the same time, a small, red Mazda coupe pulled in just beside and slightly behind her.

“I wasn’t just with somebody that was being a little bit forceful that I was going to be able to get rid of.”

Joyce Yost

The driver of the Mazda exited his car and approached her, opening the door of her car before she even had a chance to do so herself. He wedged his body between Joyce and the open car door, preventing her from closing it.

“He says ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ but he said ‘I noticed you at the Pier 3 and I was attracted to you and decided to follow you,’” Joyce said.

The man told Joyce he wanted to get a drink with her. She rebuffed the advance, suggesting they might instead get coffee another time. The man, who’d told Joyce his name was “Dave,” responded negatively.

“He grabbed me by the throat and he was forceful and told me if I screamed or said anything that he would tear my throat open,” Joyce said.

The man then proceeded to sexually assault Joyce. She fought back, breaking some of her acrylic fingernails in the process. She lost one of her earrings. The buttons down the front of her dress were also torn from the garment.

“I realized I was in a rape situation,” Joyce said. “I wasn’t just with somebody that was being a little bit forceful that I was going to be able to get rid of.”

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Joyce Yost’s voice

Jan Schiller, the rape victim advocate, did not say much during this interview. She hadn’t needed to, as Joyce had been composed, thoughtful and articulate.

“I was just so impressed with her,” Schiller told me decades later. “She really had a voice during that interview.”

Joyce went on in the tape recording to describe how the man had sexually assaulted her in her car, then dragged her to his car and shoved her head down into the passenger footwell. Joyce said he’d claimed to have a gun and threatened to shoot her if she put up any further struggle.

The man then drove to his house in Clearfield. On the way, Joyce’s other earring fell, unnoticed, onto the floor of the Mazda.

Once at the house, the man blindfolded Joyce, took her inside and repeatedly assaulted her again.

Over the space of the next hour or so, Joyce engaged the man in conversation. She succeeded in gaining his trust and in convincing him to let her go. Joyce promised the man she would not report what he had done if he would just return her home. He eventually agreed, giving her a blue men’s shirt to wear in place of her ruined dress.

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A Case of Rape

On the drive back to her apartment, Joyce said the man told her he was normally a nice guy, the type who sends roses.

Joyce had called her sister Dorothy Dial upon arriving home at around 2 a.m. She’d expressed fear, not only that the man might return to harm her also but that police might not believe her account.

“Even now 35 years later, most women still don’t report the rape,” Schiller said.

A 1974 made-for-TV-movie called A Case of Rape had left a strong impression on Joyce. The fictional film starred actress Elizabeth Montgomery as a woman who is twice raped by an acquaintance and then suffers public humiliation during the resulting criminal trial.

Joyce told her sister she did not want to go through a similar experience. Dial said if Joyce didn’t call police, she would. With this encouragement, Joyce agreed to file a report with South Ogden police.

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The supporting evidence

At the conclusion of the interview, Bill Holthaus went to Joyce’s apartment. He saw her car sitting in the carport with the driver door still open. He looked inside and noted the fragments of her broken fingernails, as well as a single earring and Joyce’s keys.

Joyce had attempted to stab her attacker in the eye with her keys during the initial assault in her car. She had missed and had instead struck the man on the side of the nose, causing a laceration. He had responded by pummeling her.

Holthaus photographed Joyce’s injuries, which included contusions on her neck and chin, with a Polaroid camera.

The detective then left Joyce and returned to Clearfield, intending to knock on the door of the home where Joyce had said the man had taken her.

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Arrest of Doug Lovell

Holthaus was about to exit I-15 when he spotted a red Mazda RX-7 matching the one Joyce had described getting on the freeway headed southbound. He radioed for backup and then pulled the Mazda over.

The man at the wheel of the Mazda had a cut along the side of his nose. Holthaus could also see a single earring in the passenger footwell of the car as he looked in through the open window. It was the match to the other earring he’d previously seen in Joyce’s car.

“So we took him into custody right there,” Holthaus said.

The man, soon identified as Douglas Anderson Lovell, had a different story to tell about what happened on the night he met Joyce Yost.

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Hear how Joyce Yost’s family responded to her sexual assault in Cold episode 2: A Case of Rape

Episode credits
Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
Audio production: Dave Cawley
Audio mixing: Dave Cawley
Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
Cold main score mixing: Dan Blanck
KSL executive producers: Sheryl Worsley, Keira Farrimond
Workhouse Media executive producers: Paul Anderson, Nick Panella, Andrew Greenwood
Amazon Music team: Morgan Jones, Eliza Mills, Vanessa Rebbert, Shea Simpson
Episode transcript: https://thecoldpodcast.com/season-2-transcript/a-case-of-rape-full-transcript/
KSL companion story: https://ksltv.com/459836/previously-unheard-audio-reveals-joyce-yosts-terrifying-story-to-police/
Talking Cold companion episode: https://thecoldpodcast.com/talking-cold#tc-episode-2

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One of the most enduring questions to linger long after the disappearance of Susan Powell was this: why had prosecutors not charged Susan’s husband Josh Powell with her murder?

The filing of formal charges against Josh would have allowed West Valley City, Utah police to arrest and detain him, potentially preventing the subsequent events that culminated with the Feb. 5, 2012 murder-suicide in which Josh killed his sons, Charlie and Braden Powell, while also ending his own life.

I heard this question often in the months following the conclusion of Cold’s first season. It came from listeners on social media, from people attending conferences where I was speaking about domestic abuse and even from members of law enforcement unaffiliated with the Powell case.

At the Governor’s Public Safety Summit, @ashergrey from KSL’s Cold Podcast discusses giving a voice to the vanished. #ColdCase pic.twitter.com/wkWO4TxsOn

— Utah Public Safety (@UtahDPS) July 30, 2019

Former West Valley City, Utah police detective Ellis Maxwell, the lead investigator on the Susan Powell case, told me during our interviews for Cold’s first season that he understood why people still raise questions like this.

“There’s a lot of people in the country, in the world that wanted answers,” Ellis said, “from the media all the way down to the Cox family because believe it or not, they didn’t know a whole lot more than anybody else.”

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A circumstantial case

The problem that police faced in the Powell investigation was a lack of definitive evidence.

Josh Powell’s actions in the hours and days following the discovery of his wife’s unexplained absence on Dec. 7, 2009 — including his evasive statements in interviews, his possession of Susan’s cell phone, his destruction of probable evidence and his still-unexplained 18-hour vanishing act in a rental car — made him the prime suspect in her presumed murder.

“You can’t say that Josh is responsible for her disappearance based off of any of that because we don’t have any witnesses, we have no confession and we have no body.”

Ellis Maxwell

Without the recovery of Susan Powell’s body, however, and the facts it might reveal about when, where and how she died, detectives were unable to present prosecutors at the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office with a conclusive story about how Josh might have carried out the crime.

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Body of evidence

“When you have a physical body that is the subject of a homicide, it’s placed in time and space,” District Attorney Sim Gill told me. “That body creates a narrative tale of logical possibilities.”

If there are too many logical possibilities, it becomes unlikely that a prosecutor will be able to secure unanimous agreement among a jury that any one person is guilty of a murder.

“When you don’t have that physical body, when that forensic piece is missing, there is a whole host of logical possibilities and if I have more than one logical possibility in any realistic sense, I have reasonable doubt,” Gill said.

That’s not to say a body is an absolute necessity in every single homicide prosecution.

Had prosecutors charged Josh Powell with the murder of his wife, they would have likely done so in Utah’s Third District Court.  It’s useful then to look at the existing body of case law in Utah’s state court system involving no-body homicides.

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The case of Rudy Rebeterano

There is no definitive list of no-body murder prosecutions in the state of Utah but a review of archived news reports and court decisions has revealed at least three such cases which resulted in convictions prior to Susan Powell’s disappearance in 2009. The earliest of those was State v. Rebeterano.

The Rebeterano case involved the disappearance of a man named Mike Johnston. He had been at a bar in the city of Brigham City on the night of July 21, 1981 when he met a woman named Debbie Griffiths. They’d spent time socializing together, both at the bar and at another person’s home.

Johnston escorted Griffiths back to the motel where she was staying with her ex-husband, Rudy Rebeterano, at about 5:30 a.m. on the morning of July 22. Rebeterano was waiting for them there.

A fight erupted between Johnston and Rebeterano, during which Griffiths fled and contacted police. Griffiths would later say she saw Rebeterano carrying a large bundle out of the apartment, which he placed into the trunk of Johnston’s car before driving away in that vehicle.

Police arrived a short time later and entered the apartment. They located fresh blood, which was of the same type as Johnston’s. Officers found a white bedsheet missing from one of the beds. A kitchen knife, which Griffiths had seen Rebeterano using to peel potatoes the prior evening, was also unaccounted for.

Johnston’s car turned up later that same day a few blocks away from the motel. Blood stains were present on the rear bumper and in the trunk. A little over two weeks later, a maintenance worker found a blood-stained knife on the roof of the motel.

Rudy Rebeterano submitted to a polygraph examination. The examiner asked Rebeterano “did you stab Mike” and “did you cut Mike with a knife.” Rebeterano answered “no” to each question. The polygraph results suggested those answers were not truthful.

Rebeterano was then arrested, charged and convicted of second-degree murder.

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Corpus delicti

Rebeterano appealed his conviction, challenging both the admissibility of the polygraph as well as the very notion that Mike Johnston was dead. Police had not then, and have still not today, located Johnston’s body. This, Rebeterano’s lawyer argued, meant the prosecution had not met the burden of proof. Corpus delicti had not been established.

Corpus delicti is a Latin phrase which translates to “body of the crime.” In legal circles, it’s understood to mean the facts must establish a crime has occurred before a person can be tried for that crime.

The Utah Supreme Court in its review of Rudy Rebeterano’s appeal said “apparently no case in Utah has decided whether production of a corpse is necessary in a homicide case to prove the corpus delicti.” The high court justices examined the law, both in Utah and across the United States, before finding that production of a body was not mandatory for establishing corpus delicti in a murder case.

“The mere disappearance of a victim would not ordinarily be sufficient to support a conviction,” Justice I. Daniel Stewart wrote, before going on add “…even though the evidence was circumstantial, it was sufficient to establish that Mike Johnston was intentionally killed by criminal means.”

In other words, the Rebeterano decision established that under Utah law murder can be proved without a body, so long as the totality of the circumstances surrounding the person’s disappearance shows the crime has occurred.

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Cold season 2

The Rebeterano case is not the focus of Cold season 2. But that April, 1984 decision from the Utah Supreme Court did set precedent. It established the framework for what would come a little over a year later when a woman named Joyce Yost disappeared from her apartment in South Ogden, Utah.

Season 2 of the Cold podcast will take you inside the no-body homicide investigation triggered by Joyce Yost’s disappearance. Audio tapes never before made public will allow you to hear Joyce, in her own voice, describe the events which preceded her death.

You will learn why police suspected one man, Douglas Lovell, yet were unable to arrest him at the time. You will see how some individuals and institutions gave, and continue to give, Lovell every opportunity to evade the ultimate penalty.

And together we will explore the most critical question: is there such a thing after all this time as justice for Joyce Yost?

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Hear Joyce Yost’s voice for the first time in the Cold podcast season 2, exclusively on Amazon Music.

Episode credits
Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
Audio production: Dave Cawley
Audio mixing: Dave Cawley
Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
Cold main score mixing: Dan Blanck
KSL executive producers: Sheryl Worsley, Keira Farrimond
Workhouse Media executive producers: Paul Anderson, Nick Panella, Andrew Greenwood
Amazon Music team: Morgan Jones, Eliza Mills, Vanessa Rebbert, Shea Simpson