Dave Cawley: The TV network ABC premiered a new crime drama in February of 1989.
Announcer (from B.L. Stryker DVD): Tonight, Burt Reynolds stars as B.L. Stryker.
Dave Cawley: I’d never heard of B.L. Stryker until I came across a reference to it in the Sheree Warren case files. So, I did what any curious journalist would do: I ordered a DVD set off eBay.
Dave Cawley: It’s Friday night and I’ve got a cold beverage in one hand, got a bag of chips in the other. Let’s put this DVD on.
Dave Cawley (from home theater): The title character, B.L. Stryker, is a former New Orleans police detective. He retires to his hometown of Palm Beach, Florida. Then, against his better judgement, finds himself pressed into service as a private investigator.
Burt Reynolds (as B.L. Stryker from The Dancer’s Touch): Whatever problems Palm Beach has, Palm Beach can work ‘em out.
Dave Cawley: The plot of the first episode revolves around a serial rapist who sneaks into the homes of young socialites. The police turn to Stryker for help.
Michael O. Smith (as Chief McGee from The Dancer’s Touch): This is the fourth girl who’s been attacked in the last six weeks.
Dave Cawley: I’m a little surprised having now seen it, that this episode aired on prime-time TV. There are a couple scenes that show the assaults. They’re framed to avoid anything explicit, but something just feels off to me about watching a dramatization of a sexual assault as a form of family entertainment.
Not everyone shares my sensitivity. Case in point: a few days after this show aired, an FBI agent in Salt Lake City received a phone call from an inmate at the Iron County Correctional Facility in southern Utah. He told the agent he was locked up with a guy named Cary Hartmann, who was serving time for rape. He said Cary’d watched B.L. Stryker, specifically the scenes depicting the sexual assaults, and “after viewing the show, Hartmann acted in a different manner.”
That comes from a report the FBI agent wrote. It’s never before been made public. He didn’t go into detail about what “different” meant, but I can just imagine how someone like Cary Hartmann would’ve reacted to seeing a depiction of a crime not unlike his own on TV.
The agent kept his new snitch’s identity secret, assigning him the catchy nickname “SU 1815-C.” I’ll just call him “Charlie.” Charlie the informant and the FBI agent talked several more times in the days that followed. Charlie said he’d heard Cary Hartmann talking about the disappearance of Sheree Warren. Former Roy City police detective Jack Bell had briefed the FBI on the Sheree Warren case.
Jack Bell: Of course Sheree was on their list of missing people, national list.
Dave Cawley: And what Charlie described tracked pretty close to the theory Jack Bell had himself come up with during his years working the Sheree Warren case.
Jack Bell: I always thought after Cary become the number one suspect, and I quit looking at Chuck, that Sheree had found out something about Cary, whether it was the fact that he was raping these women or had other girlfriends, or the Supper Club, or something that she confronted him about and he whopped her with something.
Dave Cawley: Here’s what Charlie said he’d heard from Cary: Sheree’d gone to Cary’s apartment on the night of her disappearance. They’d argued over Cary’s plan to go out drinking. Cary’d slipped Sheree a pill to incapacitate her, then later strangled Sheree and buried her body near a boulder and a pine tree. Cary’d driven Sheree’s car to Las Vegas that night and flown home under a false name. It sounded plausible to the special agent. The FBI had, after all, helped investigate the car’s discovery in Vegas a little over three years earlier…
Jack Bell: They had the FBI process it.
Dave Cawley: …before police in Las Vegas turned the car over to Sheree’s estranged husband, Chuck Warren.
Jack Bell: Chuck went down and got it. They released it to him.
Dave Cawley: Charlie told the FBI Cary’d kept a diary with details about all the rapes he’d committed prior to his arrest. He said Cary’d been tipped off Ogden police were looking at him as a suspect and had trashed the diary to prevent detectives from finding it. This caught my attention when I first read it in the FBI files. I’d been told the detectives who’d investigated Cary had gone to great lengths to keep him from realizing he was on their radar. But I heard a different story when I sat down to talk with Cary’s old friend Dave Moore.
Dave Moore: Fact, I remember when he first become a suspect, Chris had called my uncle Don and myself down to his office.
Dave Cawley: Dave’s uncle Don Moore was a sergeant in the Ogden Police Department. And by “Chris,” he means Ogden police detective Chris Zimmerman. Dave said Chris…
Dave Moore: …explained what was going on. He says “I just wanted to lay it out front with you.”
Dave Cawley: So it’s plausible Cary might’ve had prior warning of his arrest. I wanted to ask Zimmerman about this, but he declined my request for an interview.
The most interesting bit of information Charlie the informant fed the FBI involved Cary Hartmann and Ted Bundy. Charlie said Cary had a strange infatuation with Bundy. He said Cary dogeared books about the serial killer and insisted on calling him by his proper name “Theodore,” instead of Ted. The state of Florida had executed Bundy just a few weeks earlier. Days ahead of the execution, Bundy’d granted an interview to a detective from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office named Dennis Couch.
Dennis Couch (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): He was a defeated person. He was extremely fatigued and he indicated that, uh, he was appalled by the senselessness of it all.
Dave Cawley: Bundy’d confessed to several unsolved Utah murders.
Joel Munson (from January 24, 1989 KSL TV archive): But Couch did not get the answer he was hoping for regarding another Utah murder, that of 21-year-old Nancy Baird of Layton. Bundy insisted he had no part in that killing.
Dave Cawley: Nancy Perry Baird had disappeared from a gas station where she worked, a little south of Ogden, on the evening of July 4th, 1975 — just over 10 years before Sheree Warren vanished. Nancy resembled Sheree in many way: a young mother, divorced but dating, working to get by while leaning on her parents for support. Police investigated Nancy’s ex-husband and her boyfriend, but both had alibis. Nancy Baird’s case remains unsolved, even today. Her body has never been found.
I plan to discuss Nancy Baird’s disappearance in more detail in a bonus episode at the end of this season. The reason I’m sharing a bit of it with you now is because the FBI files say Charlie the informant “learned … Cary Hartmann was an acquaintance of Nancy Baird’s.” And Charlie said Cary “questioned why ‘Theodore’ was accused of involvement in [Nancy] Baird’s disappearance.”
He implied Cary Hartmann might’ve killed both Nancy Baird and Sheree Warren. But could Charlie be trusted?
This is Cold, season 3, episode 6: Lying Liars. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.
[Ad break]
Dave Cawley: A few minutes ago, I described watching the first episode of an old TV show called B.L. Stryker. A jailhouse snitch had told the FBI Cary Hartmann had watched it, too. The show rankled me a bit when I watched it, because of how it ignored the experiences of the fictional victims. The main character, Stryker, made just one mention to a young woman about seeing a therapist after her assault.
Kristy Swanson (as Lynn Ellingsworth from The Dancer’s Touch): You mean a shrink?
Burt Reynolds (as B.L. Stryker from The Dancer’s Touch): Yeah.
Dave Cawley: The episode didn’t delve into the psychological trauma real-life victims face.
?? (from November 26, 1984 KSL TV archive): We want them to be able to resume their lives, uh, and feel comfortable with that and to do that, they have to regain some control back over their lives after they’ve been assaulted.
Dave Cawley: During the ‘80s, survivors of rape and sexual assault who chose to report in Utah were often paired with a counselor, to help them navigate the criminal justice process.
Jack Ford (From November 26, 1984 KSL TV archive): Debbie Hennig is a victim who says she wanted to testify. She wanted to get the guy who raped her. But she says it would’ve been nearly impossible without the help of the victim witness counselors.
Debbie Henning (from November 26, 1984 KSL TV archive): They really made me feel a lot better. Because even though you know you didn’t invite it, you still feel guilty occasionally, saying “did I do something wrong? Did I invite this? Should I have done something differently?” But they make you realize that you’re just a victim of circumstance. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Jack Ford (From November 26, 1984 KSL TV archive): The man who attacked Debbie, Nathaniel Bell, was convicted of five separate sexual assaults on women.
Dave Cawley: And, by coincidence, Nathaniel Bell later ended up in the same sex offender therapy group as Cary Hartmann at the Iron County Correctional Facility. Nathaniel and Cary didn’t get along.
One day in April of 1989, they were playing a game of handball with two other inmates in the jail’s gym. Handball involves slapping a small rubber ball, bouncing it off the floor and walls of an enclosed court. It’d been one of Cary’s favorite pastimes, before his arrest and conviction. It’s not a contact sport, but this match included more than a little bumping and jostling. At one point, Nathaniel told Cary “you get in my way again, come hell or high water, I’m running over your [expletive] ass.”
Nathaniel then served the ball and Cary lunged for the return. Cary would later insist he’d only brushed against Bell, accidentally, but Bell would describe Cary punching him in the gut. A cheap shot. Especially because just a few years earlier, Nathaniel had been stabbed in the same spot.
Nathaniel pivoted and whipped his own fist against Cary’s jaw. Cary’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. He crumpled, his skull striking the solid floor with a thud. Blood began to bubble from his mouth and nose. A separate pool of blood spread from beneath his head. Guards rushed in to find Cary unconscious. They called an ambulance. Cary ended up being ok, though it took stitches to close the nasty split on the back of his scalp.
Clearly, Cary wasn’t making many friends on the inside. He wanted out. And he had an idea how to make that happen. The jury that’d convicted Cary Hartmann in the first of the four rape cases prosecutors had filed against him based its decision, in part, on a science called serology. Serology, the study of bodily fluids, could narrow a field of suspects based on their blood or saliva, but not pinpoint an individual.
Pilar Shortsleeve (from July 14, 1992 KSL TV archive): We do not give absolutes. We give probabilities. Serology has always been in that area.
Dave Cawley: But by the end of the ‘80s, an emerging field of study promised to revolutionize forensic science.
Pilar Shortsleeve (from July 14, 1992 KSL TV archive): With DNA, our probabilities are a lot higher.
Dave Cawley: It’s difficult to overstate how profound an impact DNA has had on the criminal justice system in the last 30 years. DNA evidence can today link suspects to crime scenes when no other evidence can, or, it exclude them. Some people who’ve served decades in prison have had their convictions overturned on the strength of DNA evidence.
But in 1989, that revolution was still just over the horizon. Cary Hartmann could see it coming. He filed a civil lawsuit at the end of that year against the director of Utah’s state crime lab. He demanded an opportunity to have DNA analysis performed on the evidence gathered from the body of his victim.
Steve Eager (from August 30, 1992 KSL TV archive): DNA fingerprinting can match a suspect to blood, semen, even a hair follicle left behind.
Dave Cawley: DNA’s admissibility as evidence hadn’t yet been established in Utah law. Cary wanted to break new ground.
Steve Eager (from August 30, 1992 KSL TV archive): Legal and science experts say it’s only a matter of time before DNA evidence is used by both prosecutors and suspects.
Dave Cawley: Cary insisted a lab would not find his DNA in the evidence swabs. Former Weber County Attorney Reed Richards told me he felt confident the conviction he’d secured against Cary would withstand any challenge.
Reed Richards: I had no problem with any DNA samples. Problem is, I doubt that they save that stuff.
Dave Cawley: Reed told me it’s common practice for police departments and crime labs to discard evidence, once trials and appeals are complete. Cary’s case was complete, so Reed didn’t think the crime lab would’ve saved the swabs needed for any DNA analysis.
Reed Richards: But maybe they did.
Dave Cawley: The judge didn’t decide Cary’s DNA lawsuit right away. So let me tell you about what happened in the meantime. Cary received a package in the mail from a woman named Teresa. I’ve mentioned her before. Cary’d cold called Teresa a few days before his arrest in the rape investigation, giving her the old lingerie survey. She’d remained on the line, then agreed to meet Cary for drinks.
Teresa, it turns out, had stayed in touch with Cary after his conviction. The package Teresa sent Cary contained a cassette tape, sealed in plastic. It was the album “Riptide,” by Robert Palmer, which included the radio hit “Addicted to Love.” Staff at the Iron County jail were suspicious. They tore off the shrink wrap, cracked the case and put the cassette in a tape player. They immediately realized someone had recorded over Riptide. In its place on side A was a recording of a woman reading sexually explicit stories. Side B contained something more, performative. I’ll leave it at that.
The Utah Department of Corrections prohibited inmates from possessing sexual materials. Getting caught with incoming contraband put Cary in violation of a contract he’d signed upon entering sex offender therapy. A therapist told Cary if he wanted to remain in the program, he’d have to consent to taking a plethysmograph.
Pamela Davis (from February 18, 1999 KSL TV archive): In Utah, all adult sex offenders take a test that may show if they are likely to re-offend.
Dave Cawley: Think of it like a polygraph, with some extra hardware.
Pamela Davis (from February 18, 1999 KSL TV archive): The tester in another room plays a video tape showing pictures of men and women of different ages. A computer is supposed to measure the subject’s arousal to what he’s seeing on the video tape and hearing on an audio tape.
Dave Cawley: A sort of sexual lie detector, used to find out what kind of stimuli a test subject responds to most strongly by measuring biometrics, including blood flow to the genitals.
Peter Byrne (from February 18, 1999 KSL TV archive): These are hooked to the fingers and then this is a respiration belt that goes around the chest. The third one his hooked directly to the penis.
Dave Cawley: This plethysmograph device might sound familiar if you’ve listened to season one of this podcast. A judge once ordered Josh Powell to undergo a plethysmograph examination. Josh instead killed himself and his two young sons.
Cary Hartmann wanted no part of this. Prison records show he ripped up a plethysmograph consent form. He told his therapist he hadn’t raped anyone and wouldn’t take the test. As a result, the therapist kicked him out of the program.
Completing sex offender therapy would be a hurdle Cary Hartmann would have to clear if he ever hoped for a chance of parole. But at that point in 1990, Cary had a better idea how to win his freedom. That winter, a judge agreed to Cary’s request for DNA analysis in the rape case. The judge told the director of Utah’s state crime lab to ship the evidence to an outside lab in California. Cary’d convinced his own father to pay for the testing. That plan soon hit a snag. The crime lab director went to pull the evidence, only to discover it’d disappeared. Cary couldn’t believe it. He suggested to a reporter from the Ogden Standard-Examiner he’d been framed.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from September 15, 1991 Ogden Standard-Examiner article): What possible reason can they have for losing the evidence?
Dave Cawley: The setback left Cary with just one last hope for deliverance: Blaine Nelson, the second Ogden City Rapist.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): I did what I did and I’m dealing with those problems.
Dave Cawley: We talked about Blaine in the last episode. Ogden police had arrested Blaine in the spring of 1988, just months after Cary’s conviction. In October of ’91, Blaine told the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole his problems had started with a drug habit. He said he’d burglarized homes to get money for drugs. That escalated to rape, he said, when he began encountering single women at some of the homes.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): Drugs didn’t make me do that, but they made the choice become a lot easier.
Dave Cawley: Blaine calmly said he’d sexually assaulted 74 women prior to his arrest. A stunning, horrifying number.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): Through what I was doing I learnt that a woman would do more for her children than she would for herself. And I used that to my advantage.
Dave Cawley: Blaine’d developed strategies to find new victims, mostly by looking at the yards of the homes he burglarized.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): If the yard looked messy, a lot of toys around, that gave me the indication that there was not a male present.
Dave Cawley: His final victim also spoke to the parole board.
Victim (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): I wish to see him rot in jail. (Cries) He lied under oath at his hearing. I know this for a fact.
Dave Cawley: I’m not going to identify this woman by name. But I’m sharing what she said because she believed Blaine wasn’t to be trusted. She didn’t think drugs motivated the man who’d taken such pleasure in terrorizing and humiliating her.
Victim (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): I had pain killers in my purse from a broken hip. He did not touch those.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): Looking back on it, I still knew that I had a choice even though I was on drugs.
Dave Cawley: So that’s Blaine Nelson. The reason why Cary Hartmann thought Blaine was his ticket out of prison, is Blaine said he’d committed Cary’s crimes.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): I confessed to Ogden City Police of all my crimes, even crimes that other inmates in this institution is being held for at this, at this time.
Dave Cawley: Blaine said he’d first made the connection on the day of his sentencing.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): When I was in Ogden City … I confessed to everything and I also did some interviews with, with uh, the TVs.
Dave Cawley: I’ll remind you, one of the reporters who’d interviewed Blaine that day was Cary Hartmann’s friend, Larry Lewis. I don’t know which reporter planted the seed, but Blaine told the parole board one of them suggested he might’ve committed Cary’s crimes.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): And I told ‘em at that time that if that is the case, I will do everything I need to do to, to make that correction.
Dave Cawley: The plot had thickened a couple months later, when Blaine went to court in Iron County for sentencing on additional crimes he’d committed there. Blaine’d bumped into Cary at the Iron County Correctional Facility.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): He approached me and introduced his self and said there was a possibility that I was responsible for things that he had done.
Dave Cawley: Blaine said he’d started writing letters to all the lawyers, letting them know he wanted to confess to Cary’s crimes.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): The response is, from the authorities in Weber County, that I am a liar, that I’m crazy. I will admit to anything.
Dave Cawley: But Blaine insisted his motives were pure. Cary Hartmann had his own date with parole board coming up. They couldn’t let him out, not yet anyway, because Cary had to serve at least 15 years. But the hearing would be Cary’s first chance to tell his side of the story to the people who might some day decide if he deserved a chance to rejoin society. He wanted to make an impression, so he reached out to someone he hoped might speak on his behalf: the President of the United States of America, George H. W. Bush.
George H. W. Bush (from January 20, 1989 inaugural address): There are times when the future seems thick as a fog, you sit and wait … but this is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through, into a room called tomorrow.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from December 9, 1991 letter to President Bush): Dear President Bush, I am incarcerated in the Utah State Prison System in Cedar City, Utah. I have proclaimed my innocence from day one!
Dave Cawley: Cary sent this letter to the President in December of ’91. He explained the emerging science of DNA analysis would’ve exonerated him, if not for the ineptitude of the crime lab.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from December 9, 1991 letter to President Bush): Why would I go to all of the trouble of having this testing done just to have the results come back saying that he is guiltier? That just doesn’t make sense.
Dave Cawley: Cary told the President it was no mistake the crime lab “lost” the evidence. He smelled conspiracy.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from December 9, 1991 letter to President Bush): I am not a fruit cake, I’ve had all kinds of tests to establish my sanity and I am as sane and level-headed as you are, with an I.Q. of 135.
Dave Cawley: Cary said his rights had been abused from the start. Police had the wrong man. The real rapist, Cary said, was Blaine Nelson.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from December 9, 1991 letter to President Bush): He has been directly linked to over 74 sexual assaults. The Ogden City Police cleared up 600 burglaries when they caught him.
Dave Cawley: Those numbers — 74 assaults and 600 burglaries — had only just come out at Blaine’s parole board hearing two months earlier. The local newspapers had published them. And clearly, Cary was paying close attention. Cary concluded his letter with a plea for help, begging the President to personally contact the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on his behalf.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from December 9, 1991 letter to President Bush): Thank you for your most valuable time and attention. God bless you always. Respectfully, Cary W. Hartmann.
Dave Cawley: The President didn’t come to Cary’s aide. Maybe because he had his hands full with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final end of the Cold War.
George H. W. Bush (from December 19, 1991 press briefing): And we are not fixing to get in the middle of that.
Dave Cawley: It’s no surprise really that Air Force One didn’t make a stop in Utah on the day of Cary’s first hearing before the parole board in January of ’92.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): I have sought DNA testing for four years.
Dave Cawley: This is Cary’s own voice, from a recording of that hearing.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this would prove my innocence.
Dave Cawley: Cary repeated almost word-for-word what he’d said in his letter to the President.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): I’m not a fruitcake. I’m not a crackpot. I’m level-headed. I’m sane.
Dave Cawley: Parole board member Heather Nelson Cooke heard Cary out.
Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): You make a very passionate and a very persuasive plea that you are innocent.
Dave Cawley: But she told Cary she’d studied his case with great interest and was aware of more than just the facts of the crimes that’d put him in prison. She’d reviewed the pre-sentence report we talked about in the last episode, which included many other eye-popping comments about Cary’s sexual proclivities.
Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): Some wife-sharing parties, some third-party, uh, orgies. A lot of pornography. Incidents where you have exposed yourself.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): What!?!
Dave Cawley: None of this should’ve been a shock to Cary, as he’d had opportunity to review the same materials. But it’s worth considering his parents were in the room and they hadn’t been privy to the pre-sentence report.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): Never, never have I used force in any way, shape or form toward any female in any form of sexual act in 20 or 30 or 40 years. Never. Never. It’s not in my make-up. It’s not me.
Dave Cawley: Heather, the parole board member, countered that Cary’s M.O. was using “psychological coercion” like threatening to kill the children of the women he’d assaulted. Cary denied that, too. He said that’s how Blaine Nelson operated.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): He was the man that was caught, convicted and confessed to at least two of the crimes that I was charged with.
Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): And a follow-up investigation was done apparently and the conclusions of that was that he hadn’t.
Dave Cawley: Cary’d collected sworn affidavits from three people who’d each said they overheard Blaine taking credit for Cary’s crimes, at different times and in different places. Now, Cary spread those statements on the table, displaying them for the parole board.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): One, two, three affidavits that Blaine Nelson stated that he committed the crimes I’m in here for. There they are.
Dave Cawley: The affidavits didn’t have the impact Cary might’ve hoped. Blaine Nelson’s admissions weren’t a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): He’s not the only one in the prison that’s taking responsibility for other people’s crimes. You’re aware of that. I mean it, it happens.
Dave Cawley: Heather, the parole board member, told Cary it didn’t really matter, anyhow. The parole board didn’t have the power to re-try his case. She couldn’t let him out, even if she believed him. Which, it seems, she didn’t.
Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): And as I look at, umm, 20 years of unusual, aggressive, deviant sexual activity, I do see you as a risk.
Dave Cawley: She told Cary he wasn’t going anywhere for at least another 10 years.
At the start of this episode, we heard about a jailhouse snitch I’m calling Charlie. He’d told the FBI Cary Hartmann killed Sheree Warren and was infatuated with serial killer Ted Bundy. But I didn’t tell you about another intriguing claim Charlie made. Charlie said Cary’d offered the second Ogden serial rapist, Blaine Nelson, $50,000 to take the blame for Cary’s crimes.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): Because I have so much time anyway I have nothing to lose.
Dave Cawley: That again is the voice of Blaine Nelson, the second Ogden City Rapist, from his 1991 parole board hearing. Blaine said police had believed the claim he’d colluded with Cary.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): Detective Zimmerman from Ogden City come to the Oquirrhs and seen me.
Dave Cawley: The Oquirrhs were a medium-security housing unit at the Utah State Prison.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): And that’s when he said that I was nuts, and uh, would admit to anything and was being paid off.
Dave Cawley: But Blaine said it wasn’t true.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): I uh, signed a waiver in Iron County not to be moved in the same living quarters with Hartmann for the possibility that if this did go to court that they would say we traded stories or, or made things. So I avoided that. And that’s the last I’ve heard on the Hartmann case.
Dave Cawley: Blaine hadn’t heard anything more about Cary Hartmann, because neither police, the courts nor the parole board had believed him. Cary’s M.O. had been a little different than Blaine’s, and other evidence linked Cary to his victims. I should note, Blaine’d also tried to take credit for a crime attributed to a third serial rapist, a guy named Jerry Casida.
Blaine Nelson (from October 4, 1991 parole board recording): Also contacted one of his lawyers. Nothing was done.
Dave Cawley: Like Cary, Jerry Casida’d latched on to Blaine’s admission, using it as grounds for an appeal of his sentence. A judge held hearing, to try to get to the bottom of this mess. Blaine testified. He gave a first-hand account of the rape attributed to Jerry Casida. But Blaine’s version contradicted the victim’s own account. The judge determined Blaine wasn’t credible. That was 30 years ago.
Blaine is still in prison. I decided to write him, to ask if he still stood by his claim he’d committed the crimes attributed to Cary Hartmann. Blaine wrote back, saying yes, he did stand by it. I wrote Blaine again, asking if the story told by Charlie the FBI informant was true. Had Cary offered Blaine $50,000 to take the fall, as Charlie’d claimed. Blaine said Cary “never offered me at any time any money.”
“I am very ashamed at my past,” Blaine wrote, “and have tried to do the right thing. Truth is truth.”
That may be but after all these decades, it seems someone — either Blaine Nelson or Charlie the informant — lied.
[Ad break]
Dave Cawley: We’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple episodes talking about the Ogden City Rapist case and Cary Hartmann’s role at center of it.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): Any type of physical aggression toward anyone, even, especially a female—
Heather Nelson Cooke (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): Uh huh.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): —is so abhorrent, it’s so terrible.
Dave Cawley: It’s drawn us away a bit from our focus: the disappearance of Sheree Warren. It’s necessary though, because understanding how Cary Hartmann treated other women at the time he was dating Sheree provides a lens that puts a sharper focus on his relationship with Sheree. Cary objectified women, both strangers and romantic partners alike. We don’t know what all Sheree endured during her time with Cary. But it’s now fair to ask how Sheree might’ve reacted if she’d uncovered any of his dark secrets.
Sheree’s friend Pam Volk, who’d worked with her at the credit union, told me she’d married and moved away soon after Sheree disappeared.
Pam Volk: And I felt bad because we had moved to Germany ‘cause there wasn’t, I mean there wasn’t really anything to do anyway, but being so far away it kind of felt, umm, I don’t know. It just, just made me feel a little bit guilty, I guess.
Dave Cawley: Pam and her husband returned stateside a few years later. They were surprised to find no one seemed to talk about Sheree anymore.
Pam Volk: It didn’t get a lot of attention, no. Not like, not like missing cases do now.
Dave Cawley: Sheree’s disappearance had left her estranged husband, Chuck Warren, in legal limbo because their divorce remained unresolved. Chuck convinced a judge to finalize the divorce in May of ’91. The judge granted Chuck full custody of his and Sheree’s son. Sheree’s family held a memorial for her a year-and-a-half later, in October of ’92. I’d love to play you a news clip from that event, but KSL, the station I work for, didn’t go to the memorial.
Pam Volk: Uh it’s, it’s frustrating, y’know, and I feel so bad for her parents.
Dave Cawley: I can’t tell you why KSL didn’t cover the story. It’s possible all the station’s staff were all on more pressing assignments that day. I’ve worked as a newscast producer. Sometimes it’s a judgement call about what gets covered with limited staff and resources.
Reporter Larry Lewis, who covered stories in and around Ogden for KSL, was on shift that day. But he aired a story about a California dad who’d skipped out on paying child support.
Larry Lewis (from October 10, 1992 KSL TV archive): Then this week someone tipped the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office that he was in Utah and getting ready to fly out of state.
Dave Cawley: Larry, I don’t need to remind you, was a personal friend of Cary Hartmann’s.
Other news media did attend the service. There’s a clip from TV station ABC4 that shows Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen, walking to Sheree’s new headstone with Sheree’s son, Adam.
Mary Sorensen (from October 10, 1992 KTVX TV archive): I tell him that God’s watching over him, our Heavenly Father’s watching over his mother.
Dave Cawley: Adam was just 10 years old in the clip, dressed in a little gray suit. He told me recently he’d hated being paraded in front of the TV cameras. That’s part of why you’re not hearing from him in this podcast. Mary Sorenson told The Salt Lake Tribune that day she intended to have her daughter declared legally deceased.
Cary’s oldest friend, Steve Bartlett, saw that story in the paper. You might recall Bartlett from the last episode. He was the special investigator for the Salt Lake County District Attorney who’d exchanged letters with Cary after his conviction, urging him to reveal the location of Sheree Warren’s remains. Cary’d told his old friend he didn’t know anything about it. The plight of Sheree’s parents moved Bartlett. He decided to make one final effort to reach Cary. He wrote another letter to his childhood pal.
Aaron Mason (as Steve Bartlett from October 13, 1992 letter to Cary Hartmann): Please, please, please, if you know where Sheree is — and I really think that you do — please somehow let [somebody] know so that the family can end their grief.
Dave Cawley: Cary’s response dripped with indignant disdain.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from October 17, 1992 letter to Steve Bartlett): I feel sorry for you, Steve … friends are very special and should not be taken so lightly. … Let me tell you about Sheree. She was the most important lady in my life at that time, or at any other time for that matter. … I tried to find her with every bit of strength that I had at that time … I did everything that was in my power, and if that is not good enough for you and the rest of the people out there that still think I had something to do with her disappearance, then that is too bad.
Dave Cawley: A year later, in October of 1993, Sheree’s brother went to court and asked a judge to declare his sister legally deceased. The judge approved the request. In the eyes of the law, Sheree Warren was dead. That unlocked a life insurance policy Sheree’d had. You might expect I’m going to say her ex-husband, Chuck Warren, staked a claim on that money. But that’s not what happened. Chuck arranged to have the money go to his and Sheree’s son, Adam, and no one else.
That move hadn’t absolved Chuck Warren of suspicion. He remained a suspect at that point in ’93. So did Cary Hartmann. And there were even some who still thought a serial killer might’ve plucked Sheree off the streets of Salt Lake City. It was an idea Cary’s own private investigator had promoted. But former Ogden police detective Shane Minor didn’t see much evidence to back up that theory.
Shane Minor: Just that she was seen in the parking lot of the credit union when she left that day.
Dave Cawley: As you might remember, the Salt Lake City Police Department had lumped Sheree in on a list of other missing and murdered women. Salt Lake detectives had linked the deaths of three other young women to the same gun. They suspected a serial killer was on the loose and they’d formed a task force in 1986 in the hopes of catching him.
Shane Minor: I knew they were busy, they were doing a lot and this case was, they, they grouped this case in with it.
Dave Cawley: But Shane told me the Salt Lake detectives hadn’t invested much attention on Sheree Warren’s disappearance specifically.
Shane Minor: Because you’d get hit with “well, isn’t this a missing person out of Roy?” And they’re like “well.”
Dave Cawley: Shane said a lot of cops across the country were all in on the idea of using technology to hunt serial killers during the ‘80s.
Shane Minor: And that’s when all these serial murders like Ted Bundy and a lot of others was being kind of found out and they had tracked their whereabouts and all the different locations they had been.
Dave Cawley: The FBI had launched VICAP in the summer of ’85, just a few months before Sheree Warren disappeared. VICAP’s a database and analysis team dedicated to catching serial criminals, by spotting trends in their behaviors.
Shane Minor: And so now that’s kind of coming into play.
Dave Cawley: The FBI published a VICAP alert in the February, 1988 edition of the bureau’s monthly magazine. It included nine case summaries about missing and murdered women in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. One of them described the disappearance of Sheree Warren. Only two months later, the Salt Lake task force publicly announced a suspect: Idaho spree killer Paul Ezra Rhoades.
Larry Lewis (from April 29, 1988 KSL TV archive): Rhodes is on death row in Idaho for the murders of two convenience store clerks and a school teacher last year. All three female victims were shot with the same .38-caliber handgun.
Dave Cawley: The three Salt Lake victims had likewise all been shot with a .38.
Larry Lewis (from April 29, 1988 KSL TV archive): Rhoades denied he had anything to do with the Utah killings. But investigators say he revealed some interesting facts.
Dave Cawley: The connections were circumstantial, at best.
Jim Bell (from April 29, 1988 KSL TV archive): When Mr. Rhoades was arrested, those .38/.357 handgun murders of female clerks in convenience stores that are similar to our type murders, uh, came to a drastic stop.
Dave Cawley: That’s correlation, not causation, a very weak form of circumstantial evidence. Rhoades was never charged in connection with the Utah murders, and Idaho executed him in 2011. In any case, the Salt Lake task force had it wrong. Rhoades wasn’t their killer. The Salt Lake detectives had started with a conclusion, then worked backwards trying to find evidence that could support it. When that didn’t work, the task force floundered. It disbanded in 1991, leaving the three cases it’d tied to the same gun unsolved. No evidence has emerged in the years since to suggest Sheree Warren’s disappearance is in any way linked to those other Salt Lake task force cases, as Cary Hartmann’s private investigator had suggested.
Former Ogden police detective Shane Minor had once briefed the Salt Lake detectives about Cary Hartmann, when it’d seemed Cary might’ve been a suspect for the Salt Lake task force. But by the early ‘90s that speculation had died out and Shane’d moved on to other assignments.
Shane Minor: My focus had kind of drifted away from Hartmann.
Dave Cawley: Cary’d at last accepted his life in custody. He spent a lot of time writing letters to his old friends in Ogden, like the taxidermist, Brent Morgan.
C. Brent Morgan: Everything that he talked about in there was “poor me” or this that and the other. But I sent him a letter back and I basically said “until you come to realize or rationalize what you’ve done, I don’t want to have any more correspondence with you.”
Dave Cawley: Cary also stayed in touch with Dave Moore, who owned the sewing machine repair shop.
Dave Moore: He made a collect phone call to the store every Christmas Eve for about three years.
Dave Cawley: And Cary made calls to his TV reporter friend, Larry Lewis.
Larry Lewis: Yeah, and I, I poured cold water on his communications with me. It just wasn’t right. I didn’t feel comfortable knowing that he’d been convicted of that and, uh, y’know, I pretty much ended, y’know, our relationship.
Dave Cawley: Larry’s case of cold feet about Cary Hartmann didn’t come on right away. I have prison records that show Cary continued making calls to Larry for years.
Larry Lewis: He wanted to continue reaching out. I didn’t feel comfortable, y’know, continuing, y’know, the association. I think I sent him a hand, uh, some hand balls—
Dave Cawley (to Larry Lewis): Ok.
Larry Lewis: —to wherever he was. And that was the end of it.
Dave Cawley: Cary still hoped to get out of prison, but the only pathway remaining ran through the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. The board alone held the power to keep Cary in for life, or to let him out once he’d served his minimum of 15 years. The deciding factor would be Cary’s own behavior in the meantime. The board did not reward defiance.
Cary would have to complete sex offender therapy before the board would ever consider letting him out. He’d been booted from treatment once before for refusing to play along, but now realized he’d have to try again. Here though, Cary ran into a problem: he couldn’t get back into therapy unless he admitted to his crime. This is something Cary had insisted he would never do when he’d gone before the parole board the first time in 1992.
Cary Hartmann (from January 17, 1992 parole board recording): I can’t tell the judge that I didn’t do it, tell my family and look them in the eye that I didn’t do it, and my sons repeatedly that I didn’t do it — even though I don’t see them — and all of the sudden turn right around and say “oh yep, I did it. I was just kidding before.”
Dave Cawley: Cary had no choice but to eat crow. Prison records show he requested permission to call all of his immediate family, as well as several friends and attorneys, in May of 1995. I wasn’t on those calls, obviously, but based on the timeline I can surmise he told his friends and family he was going to admit to the rape that’d sent him to prison. But only that one.
He then re-applied to sex offender therapy, admitting his guilt, and was accepted back into the program. But Cary’s second round in treatment proved short-lived. He got booted again less than two years later, after jail staff found pornography in his cell.
A clerk at Utah’s 2nd District Court in Ogden received a letter at the start of January, 1998. It’d come from a snitch, a prison inmate named David Westmoreland. He said Cary Hartmann had told him about the murders of two women. If the stories were true, Westmoreland wrote, he knew where to find the bodies. The letter found its way to Jack Bell, who by that point had made captain at the Roy City Police Department. Jack told me he’d handed off the Sheree Warren case after first promoting to sergeant a decade earlier.
Jack Bell: I took most of this evidence to OPD.
Dave Cawley: The tip reignited Jack’s dormant desire to find Sheree. He went to talk to Westmoreland himself. Let me give you some background on David Westmoreland. He murdered his own cousin in 1981. Westmoreland had first met Cary Hartmann a few years later, in ’88, when they were housed in cells next door to one another. They’d bumped into each other again at the Iron County Correctional Facility around 1995.
Jack Bell: Yes. And he said Cary told him a story of killing her.
Dave Cawley: Jack’s notes say Westmoreland claimed Cary killed two women. One of them was Cary’s girlfriend. They’d being arguing over sex, Westmoreland said, so Cary’d hit her with his flashlight. He’d then allegedly driven her up a canyon, sexually assaulted her, and killed her by smacking her in the head with the jack from his truck.
Jack Bell: I think he said it was by accident and then taken her up to this rest area.
Dave Cawley: Westmoreland said Cary buried the body at a rest area along eastbound Interstate 80, midway between Ogden and Evanston, Wyoming, in a place called Echo Canyon.
Jack Bell: It was possible because of the location and uh, accessibility.
Dave Cawley: Westmoreland described the burial site as up a concrete footpath from the rest area’s vending machine, near a patch of trees surrounded by blue flowers.
Jack Bell: We went up there.
Dave Cawley: Jack brought dogs with him.
Jack Bell: We didn’t find nothin’. But we didn’t do a lot of digging, either.
Dave Cawley: Because they had no clue where to even start. They didn’t see disturbed ground and the dogs gave no indication. Still, the exercise brought back memories for Jack, of the psychic letter he’d received after Sheree Warren disappeared. A letter Jack believed had really originated with Cary. It’d described a truck stop in the mountains and a burial spot near red rock cliffs.
Jack Bell: But, if you’re standing there out of your car at that rest area and you look straight across the highways, at the red rock across there, it’s exactly what was drawn on this letter.
Dave Cawley (to Jack Bell): On the psychic letter from ’85?
Jack Bell: Uh huh, exactly. So boom.
Dave Cawley: The walls of Echo Canyon are made up of orange stone. So as Jack Bell stood at the rest area in the canyon and looked across the Interstate at those orange cliffs, the details from the psychic letter bubbled up in his brain. They seemed to line up with what David Westmoreland had told him.
Jack Bell: That’s what I got out of what Cary supposedly told Westmoreland, where she was at was up there.
Dave Cawley: The psychic letter had mentioned two guys stopping for snacks at a truck stop.
Jack Bell: The truck stop, to me, was at Echo Junction, the old Echo Cafe.
Dave Cawley: Echo Junction is a small town at the foot of the canyon. It’s all but abandoned today, but was once a bustling place where people headed to the mountains might stop for a drink. But Jack Bell’s search at the Echo Canyon rest area was bust. No body. No Sheree. But the prospect of at last locating the remains of Sheree Warren proved a powerful siren song for police. Jack Bell figured the time had come to give the cold case a fresh look. So, he organized a reunion. Ogden police detective Shane Minor received an invitation.
Shane Minor: I got a call from Chris Zimmerman, who was the Roy police chief at the time and went out and met with him and Captain Bell about the Sheree Warren case and how things had kind of dropped off after the rape investigations, stuff like that.
Dave Cawley: Shane was at that time working with the FBI on a violent fugitive apprehension team. He’d developed relationships with agents and officers across Utah. It made him the obvious choice to take over the search for Sheree.
Shane Minor: Seems like everybody’s resources were somewhat limited so, I think that was another way of potentially bringing in some resources to try to look at this.
Dave Cawley: Jack and Shane both knew the stakes.
Jack Bell: At one time, Bill Daines from the county attorney’s office told Shane and I and somebody else if we could find a body he would give us a complaint.
Dave Cawley: In other words, a murder charge against Cary Hartmann, if they could find Sheree’s remains. Jack gave Shane his notes and walked him through the case.
Shane Minor: He relayed that information to me, as far as the people he had talked to. Pulled what reports they had.
Dave Cawley: Jack’d given his formal reports and evidence to Ogden police back in 1987. Ogden had taken over the case, because the two women who’d lived above Cary Hartmann had reported seeing and hearing Sheree at their house in Ogden the night she disappeared. Shane remembered Ogden police had opened their own case file at that time.
Shane Minor: So I went back and tried to find those reports and that become problematic because I couldn’t find the reports. They had changed reporting systems.
Dave Cawley: The missing paperwork included reports about interviews with several members of Cary Hartmann’s so-called Supper Club. Detective John Stubbs, for example, had been in the room when Jack had questioned KSL TV reporter Larry Lewis. Stubbs had written a report and filed it under Ogden’s Sheree Warren case number. So where was that report?
Shane Minor: I never could find that case report or the interviews that was done off of that.
Dave Cawley: Shane told me he thinks the missing records were just lost in the shuffle, misplaced as the Ogden Police Department moved to a new headquarters building in the early ‘90s. Or the papers might’ve been taken home by one of the investigators and never returned.
Shane Minor: Plus, there was a lot of technology change during that period of time, too. From handwritten notes to computer-generated, uh, information.
Dave Cawley: I submitted my own public records request to the Ogden Police Department for anything filed under their Sheree Warren case number. The department searched it records archive and told me they couldn’t find anything. Nothing on an unsolved cold case homicide. There’s another possible explanation for what might’ve happened to the missing records. Cary Hartmann did have friends in the Ogden Police Department.
Jack Bell: The fact that he’d been a reserve in there, that’s where he’d made contact with these guys and…
Dave Cawley: …and some stood to be embarrassed if their association with Cary became public knowledge.
Jack Bell: Yes, exactly. They wanted to stay right away from the Cary Hartmann investigation.
Dave Cawley: So I do wonder if someone, sometime, might’ve intentionally made those reports disappear. However it happened, the records are gone. The missing police reports meant Shane Minor didn’t have significant pieces of the puzzle in his head when he set out to investigate the story of the snitch, David Westmoreland.
Shane Minor: When you’re talking to inmates, you never know what their true motive is. So, it’s kind of difficult to really take it as being factual information. (Laughs)
Dave Cawley: Shane pulled prison records. They verified Westmoreland had lived next to Cary Hartmann at the Iron County Correctional Facility.
Shane Minor: He knew Hartmann and he did have some conversation with him because there was some facts that he knew about. But then I also learned, uh, with my experience, these guys are really clever at making things up and can build a story around whatever’s told to them.
Dave Cawley: Shane decided to re-interview Westmoreland himself.
Shane Minor: But a lot of his facts didn’t really match up with what we had.
Dave Cawley: Westmoreland once again described the rest area in Echo Canyon, the vending machine and the concrete path.
Shane Minor: And I was unfamiliar with what he was talking about so I drove up there after we interviewed him. I found the rest stop that I think he was talking about.
Dave Cawley: Shane walked up the steep path to the overview where a few months earlier Jack Bell had stood looking across the interstate at the orange cliffs.
Shane Minor: It was a, a truck stop area. Trucks parked up in there.
Dave Cawley: Not a very safe or secluded place to dump a body. Shane’s doubt began to grow.
Shane Minor: You would have to drag a body up a cement pathway and just uncharacteristic for a dump site if you’re gonna be dumping a body.
Dave Cawley: Shane arranged to have a different dog team come and re-run the search at the rest area. But the result didn’t change: no sign of Sheree. The snitch David Westmoreland had drawn maps of the spot for Shane. I have copies of them, and went to the rest area myself. I walked up that path, then stepped off into the dry grass.
Dave Cawley (at Echo Canyon rest area): Let’s see if I can step over this fence without getting any barbed wire. There we go.
Dave Cawley: I found what looked like the spot Westmoreland had described, tucked behind scrub oak and thistle. It did not seem like a place someone could bury a body and have the grave go unnoticed for more than 30 years.
Earlier, I told you about some FBI files and a jailhouse informant I called “Charlie” who’d fed a special agent information about Cary Hartmann in 1989. Detective Shane Minor came across those same FBI reports as he worked the Sheree Warren investigation a decade later.
Shane Minor: But I didn’t know who that person was and that took quite a bit of time to find out who he was too.
Dave Cawley: We’re going to take a slight detour for the next few minutes, as I reveal the true identity of “Charlie,” the FBI informant: the snitch who said Cary Hartmann watched that TV show, B.L. Stryker. The informant to said Cary Hartmann was obsessed with Ted Bundy. The guy who said Cary killed Sheree Warren. His real name is William Babbel.
Terry Carpenter (from December 19, 1991 police interview): I’m at the Utah State Prison with one William Babel. Is that?
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): Babbel.
Terry Carpenter (from December 19, 1991 police interview): Babbel.
Dave Cawley: This audio comes from a 1991 police interview recording. William Babbel, aka Charlie the informant, told a detective he’d been in Cary Hartmann’s sex offender therapy group at Iron County in ‘88. He’d heard Cary reading his autobiography in the group sessions.
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): And I know Cary Hartmann’s story very well.
Dave Cawley: And that’s probably where William Babbel gathered the information he’d fed to the FBI.
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): And I was there, uh, when Mr. Hartmann explained that he’d been with a psychic and he knew where Sheree Warren was buried, what she was wearing when she disappeared, how she died. Y’know, the whole spiel about this girl’s disappearance. Y’know, her car was found in Vegas, somebody drove down and took it down there and flew home. How did Cary Hartmann know all that [expletive] unless Cary Hartmann did it?
Dave Cawley: William Babbel had told the FBI Cary Hartmann admitted to killing Sheree. Three years later, he told a detective he’d only thought that was the case at the time.
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): ‘Cause Hartmann was living with her when she disappeared.
Terry Carpenter (from December 19, 1991 police interview): Mmhmm. Yep, that’s true.
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): But I don’t think Hartmann did it.
Dave Cawley: Babbel said he now instead believed the person who killed Sheree Warren was a guy named Doug Lovell. That name should sound familiar if you’ve listened to season 2 of this podcast. Doug Lovell abducted and raped Joyce Yost, then returned months later and killed Joyce to prevent her from testifying in court about what he’d done.
Terry Carpenter (from December 19, 1991 police interview): What about Sheree Warren?
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): 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 know this can get confusing, but what we’re dealing with here is a snitch who at first said Cary Hartmann had killed Sheree Warren, but then later changed his story to say Doug Lovell killed Sheree. He had no evidence to back up either claim. Which means we should treat everything William Babbel said with extreme skepticism.
Terry Carpenter (from December 19, 1991 police interview): Lovell ever give you a reason to tie him and Hartmann together?
William Babbel (from December 19, 1991 police interview): No.
Dave Cawley: I’ve talked to a lot of people about both the Sheree Warren and Joyce Yost cases. I’ve examined both case files. There are some parallels and crossover points, but I’ve yet to find any hard evidence that would link Sheree Warren to Doug Lovell.
Pam Volk: I don’t know that she’d ever met Doug.
Dave Cawley: Sheree’s friend and former coworker Pam Volk told me she finds the Lovell-killed-Sheree theory hard to swallow.
Pam Volk: It just breaks my heart that nothing has been able to be found out. I mean, I understand if there’s not evidence, there’s not evidence, y’know. And with no body it’s, it’s kind of hard.
[Ad break]
Dave Cawley: I first met former Ogden police detective Shane Minor at a restaurant in downtown Ogden called the Union Grill. He’d agreed to talk to me about the Sheree Warren case over lunch, but he made no promises about ever going on the record. We took a seat. Shane picked a spot where he could put his back against the wall and keep an eye on the door, not a surprise for a guy who spent decades investigating violent crimes in the city.
Shane keeps a low profile, which sounds funny considering he’s both tall and broad-shouldered. He told me he’d always avoided reporters during his police career, but we spent more than three hours that day discussing the Sheree Warren case. I later asked Shane if he’d agree to an interview.
Shane Minor: Uh, I don’t like talking in front of a mic. In all the years that, uh, I worked, I think I rarely talked in front of a mic, so.
Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): Or to a reporter even at all.
Shane Minor: If at all, yeah.
Dave Cawley: Shane’s not a glory-seeker. But he has a deep sense of duty. That’d come into play when he’d first taken up the Sheree Warren case, more than a decade after Sheree disappeared.
Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): Would you have called that investigation a cold case at that point, in ’98?
Shane Minor: Yes.
Dave Cawley: Shane’s not what I’d call exuberant, at least not when the recorder’s rolling. But I can tell you he feels a deep sense of responsibility to Sheree, a woman he never even met.
Shane Minor: You almost have the feeling like “well if there’s something you can contribute to it one way or the other, then you have to do that.”
Dave Cawley: And this is the only reason why, in the end, Shane agreed to let me interview him.
Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): It is helpful, uh, even if maybe a bit painful for you.
Shane Minor: Yeah, probably. (Laughs)
Dave Cawley: When Shane took over the Sheree Warren case in 1998, he found the file was in shambles. Pieces were spread across multiple departments or missing altogether. Only a handful of potential witnesses had provided detailed statements over the years. Shane knew no prosecutor would ever file charges based on a case that disorganized. So, Shane headed into 1999 with a new objective: re-investigate the Sheree Warren case from scratch, narrowing it down to a single suspect. But who was that? Shane still had two plausible primary suspects: Sheree’s former husband, Chuck Warren, and her now-incarcerated boyfriend, Cary Hartmann. He needed a better understanding of both those relationships.
Shane Minor: There was none of that information, really, in the report other than she was in the process of a divorce and was living with her mom and dad in Roy.
Dave Cawley: He set about filling in the gaps.
Shane Minor: Just trying to track down people that might’ve known her and get their spin on what was going on at that period of time when she was last seen and missing.
Dave Cawley: Shane began with Sheree’s parents. Ed and Mary Sorenson told Shane the story of the last time they’d seen their daughter. Mary described what Sheree’d been wearing that October morning: black pants, a red blouse and a gray suede jacket.
Shane Minor: Mrs. Sorensen thought that was what she would wear and mentioned that she was still missing a gray purse.
Dave Cawley: But hold on a second, because Jack Bell’s notes about his first conversation with Mary Sorenson the day after Sheree disappeared didn’t mention a jacket. Here, almost 15 years later, Mary described Sheree wearing the same type of jacket Shane had himself found in Cary Hartmann’s apartment, when serving the search warrants in the Ogden City Rapist investigation.
This was problematic, because it suggested Mary might’ve added that detail to her story after learning about the jacket from police. A possible feedback loop. More on that in a bit. Shane asked Sheree’s parents what they remembered about Cary Hartmann.
Shane Minor: And they kind of laid out a lot different picture of the relationship between Hartmann and, and Sheree.
Dave Cawley: They said Sheree’s relationship with Cary hadn’t been serious. They’d only been going out a few months. That contradicted what Cary had told several other people.
Shane Minor: Hartmann’s story is they’d been going out for a long period of time and we’re so madly in love with each other, yet nobody else says that.
Dave Cawley: Sheree’s parents’ account also didn’t jibe with how Cary’d described his and Sheree’s relationship in his statement to the private investigator, Michael Neumeyer.
Shane Minor: He’d offered to help Hartmann look for Sheree.
Dave Cawley: You heard that statement in episode 3.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): Mike, I’ve put together everything that I can think of up to date.
Shane Minor: It was a typewritten notebook and apparently it’s from a recording.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): I was told by ladies that work at the credit union with Sheree, they said that Chuck was very volatile. He was there, pleasant to talk to but yet he would explode upon getting irritated, mad.
Shane Minor: You read through there and it’s just like Hartmann’s telling a story.
John Greene (as Cary Hartmann from November 25, 1985 statement): That little lady meant everything in the entire world to me. Drinking all night with the boys just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be and when I said two drinks and I was coming home, that’s what I meant. She said “that’s wonderful.” She said “I’ll be waiting for you at home.”
Shane Minor: Shane tracked down Michael Neumeyer, and talked to him, too. Neumeyer verified he’d made the transcription of Cary’s statement and even signed a copy to attest to its accuracy.
Shane Minor: I had a conversation with him about getting the original recording and he said he would try to get one for me but he never did and I never, never seen that or heard the original recording.
Dave Cawley: Neumeyer said he’d worked on Cary’s behalf, right up until Cary’s arrest in the rape case. At that moment, Neumeyer came to believe Cary’d lied to him.
Shane tracked down Sheree’s former coworkers. Her old boss told Shane she remembered hosting a party at her house back in the fall of ’85, just a few weeks before Sheree disappeared. Sheree had come and brought Cary with her. At some point during the evening, Sheree‘d slipped away from Cary and confided to her boss she was thinking of breaking up with him. Shane went to talk to Sheree’s friend, Pam Volk.
Pam Volk: Umm, it was a little intimidating. But he just asked me a series of questions, I think, about Chuck and about Cary and about Sheree.
Dave Cawley: Pam told Shane she remembered Sheree calling Cary “kinky,” saying that bothered her and that their relationship wasn’t serious.
Shane Minor: But to listen to Hartmann, she’s with him all the time. She’s got a lot of other things going on in her life besides him.
Dave Cawley: Like her new promotion at the credit union. Shane called Richard Moss, the credit union manager Sheree’d been training the day she disappeared.
Shane Minor: I think he made some handwritten notes that he sent to me.
Dave Cawley: Richard, as it turned out, had written down his recollections of the last time he’d seen Sheree. He’d kept those notes for years.
Shane Minor: So you look at the credibility of that versus somebody that goes years later and then they’re trying to, to remember. Some people can remember, have really good memory recall and other people don’t have such good, so, I believe it was very credible on his part.
Dave Cawley: I, too, have a copy of Richard’s notes. I pulled them out after interviewing him.
Dave Cawley (to Richard Moss): Could I, could I impose upon you to, kind of read this aloud for me—
Richard Moss: Mmhmm.
Dave Cawley: —and I’ll record it?
Richard Moss: Yeah.
Dave Cawley: I wanted to see if what Richard told me matched what he’d written all those years ago.
Richard Moss (reading notes): She wore no rings on fingers. Wore black slacks with black high heels. She had on a red and white striped blouse. Button-down front, over the shoulder sleeve.
Dave Cawley: Richard’s notes don’t mention any outerwear. As we’ve previously discussed, this case might hinge on a tale of two coats: Sheree’s gray suede jacket or Cary’s black parka. Knowing which Sheree was wearing when she left for work on the morning of her disappearance could help prove whether Cary told the truth about not seeing Sheree that night, because the gray jacket later turned up in Cary’s apartment. Unfortunately, Richard can’t resolve that question for us.
Richard Moss (reading notes): She told me her ex-husband came into the Ogden office at one time and threatened to kill her.
Dave Cawley: As far as I know, Richard had no reason to exaggerate this account of what Sheree had told him about her argument with Chuck Warren over alimony. Chuck, remember, had refused to cooperate with detective Jack Bell from the very early days of the investigation. Shane had a different experience.
Shane Minor: He seemed quite open to me.
Dave Cawley: Shane asked Chuck about that blow-up at the credit union branch.
Shane Minor: He told me about it. Said it was stupid on his part, but it wasn’t any type of physical fight. He was just upset.
Dave Cawley: Shane’s notes say Chuck hadn’t intended to scare Sheree, but he’d said something along the lines of “there are all sorts of ways to get even.
Shane Minor: It just didn’t seem like he was holding anything back or hiding anything.
Dave Cawley: Chuck told Shane he’d only realized later in life what he’d lost by not working to salvage his marriage to Sheree.
Shane Minor: One of the things he said about Sheree was probably the best thing ever happened to him and he was really stupid for doing what he did.
Dave Cawley: Chuck wasn’t able to remember what’d prevented him from taking his Supra down to the dealership in Salt Lake on the afternoon of Sheree’s disappearance. But Shane told me everything else Chuck said was consistent with what he’d learned from other sources.
Shane Minor: Again this conversation was in 1999 and it’s pretty similar I think to the conversations he had with, uh, Bell back in ’85 and what the Sorensens had told me. There wasn’t nothing he said that would set me off that, that I would say “oh yeah, you’re a suspect in this.”
Dave Cawley: Which left Shane focused on just one person: Cary Hartmann. He decided to go talk to Kaye Lynn and Mary, the two women who’d lived above Cary at the time Sheree disappeared. They once again described how their former neighbor, the nighthawk, had kept odd hours and two-timed all his girlfriends.
Shane Minor: Yeah, I mean a lot of what they talked about was just consistent with what we knew about Hartmann’s habits.
Dave Cawley: They repeated the story of the loud argument they’d heard between Cary and Sheree at the house. Shane needed to pin down exactly when that’d happened.
Shane Minor: Their statement referred to a couple of days before her disappearance came out in the paper.
Dave Cawley: He headed to the county library, to look through old periodicals.
Shane Minor: The first one I could find was a little clip on October 4th. And then there was a follow-up one the next day or two after that. So a couple of days before that is right around October 2nd.
Dave Cawley: October 2nd: the night Sheree Warren disappeared. But “right around” wasn’t close enough if Shane intended to convince a prosecutor, let alone a jury, Sheree’d made it to Cary Hartmann’s apartment on the night she disappeared. The best, and perhaps only, evidence that might place Sheree Warren with Cary Hartmann on the night of her disappearance was a jacket.
Shane Minor: There was a gray suede jacket.
Dave Cawley: The jacket Shane’d found in Cary’s apartment while serving a search warrant there in May of 1987. Sheree Warren’s mom, Mary Sorensen, hadn’t mentioned a gray jacket when she’d first reported her daughter missing in 1985. Roy police detective Jack Bell wrote in his notes police showed Mary Sorensen a picture of the jacket after they found it in ’87. Jack wrote Mary said the gray jacket “belongs to Sheree and is the jacket she had on the last time she’d seen Sheree.”
Shane Minor: And that jacket was put into the OPD evidence.
Dave Cawley: A decade passed. Then, in September of 1999, detective Shane Minor invited Sheree’s parents and her sister, Marcie, to come to Ogden police headquarters.
Shane Minor: And I had that jacket pulled out of evidence and they looked at the jacket and Mrs. Sorensen identified that jacket as something that she would wear the day that she went missing. It went with what she was wearing and identified that as Sheree’s jacket.
Dave Cawley: Notice how Shane says “something she would wear.” There’s a little ambiguity there, but I think that’s coming more from Shane Minor than Mary Sorensen. Shane’s doubt makes sense when you consider the passage of time. It’d been 12 years since police had showed Mary a photo of the gray jacket. Ogden police should’ve written a report about the gray suede jacket when they first seized it out of Cary Hartmann’s apartment. They should’ve invited Mary to come look at it in person back then. But I haven’t been able to find any report like that.
Dave Cawley (to Shane Minor): Any insight as to why that identification didn’t happen in ’87?
Shane Minor: I don’t know. I, I can’t tell you. If I could’ve found the reports that were generated in ’87, there might be an answer in that. But what I could find, I don’t know.
Dave Cawley: Another clue lost in the missing Ogden police records. Shane had one more idea: maybe the jacket harbored an invisible secret. A drop of blood, or a strand of hair. Something that might prove the jacket belonged to Sheree and that she’d met with violence while wearing it. Where Cary Hartmann had insisted DNA evidence would exonerate him, Shane Minor hoped it might do the opposite. If he could find Sheree’s DNA on that jacket, it would prove it was hers. If he could find Cary’s blood on the jacket, it might be enough to convince prosecutors to file a murder charge against him.
Ogden police submitted the jacket to Utah’s state crime lab. A criminalist applied a chemical reagent to the fabric, then stood back and watched for any sign of a reaction. Nothing happened. There was no blood on the jacket.
We started this episode talking about that old TV show, B.L. Stryker. In the first episode, Stryker is drawn into a case involving a serial rapist who escalates to murder.
Burt Reynolds (as B.L. Stryker from The Dancer’s Touch): So there’s no prints, right? No fibers from the jacket. You ain’t got nothing.
Dave Cawley: But I didn’t tell you how it ended. It concludes with Stryker confronting the serial rapist-slash-murderer. Spoiler alert: the bad guy turns out to be a disgruntled journalist. He reveals he’s killed Stryker’s love interest, which results in Stryker and the journalist duking it out, man-to-man.
(Fight noises)
Dave Cawley: In the midst of the melee, Striker pulls a gun and shoots the killer to death. It’s all neat and tidy. We know who the killer is. We understand his ham-fisted motivation. We’ve seen justice served. A wistful sax begins to wail as we see Stryker on the beach sometime later, jogging off into the sunset. Roll credits.
TV and movies have conditioned us to expect these kinds of endings. But real life rarely delivers them. Investigations, especially no-body cold case homicides, are exercises in frustration and disappointment. We’ve now reached a low point in the story of the search for Sheree Warren. You might feel there’s no chance of ever getting to the truth. But I’ve not given up, and I hope you won’t, either. Sheree needs us to persevere. And at least a degree of accountability is coming.