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Episode: The Search for Sheree | Lying Liars | 6

Author: KSL Podcasts | Wondery
Duration: 01:16:22

Episode Shownotes

A jailhouse snitch tells the FBI that Cary Hartmann killed Sheree Warren. Cary tries to convince the parole board he's innocent. Sheree’s family members hold a memorial and have her declared legally deceased. Ogden police detective Shane Minor follows up on a longshot lead in the search for Sheree.Season 3

of Cold includes descriptions of rape, sexual assault, murder and domestic violence. Please take care when listening.Follow Cold Season 3: The Search for Sheree wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all 10 episodes ad-free only on Amazon Music. Or you can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+ in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App.Please support us by supporting our sponsors!BetterHelp - This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/COLD and get on your way to being your best self.Noom - Reach your goals by signing up for your free trial with our code, visitnoom.com/coldSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_06
This season of The Cold Podcast includes descriptions of rape, sexual assault, murder, and domestic violence. Please take care in listening. The TV network ABC premiered a new crime drama in February of 1989.

00:00:17 Speaker_27
Tonight, Burt Reynolds stars as B.L. Stryker.

00:00:24 Speaker_06
I'd never heard of BL Striker 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.

00:00:34 Speaker_06
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. The title character, B.L. Stryker, is a former New Orleans police detective.

00:00:49 Speaker_06
He retires to his hometown of Palm Beach, Florida, then, against his better judgment, finds himself pressed into service as a private investigator.

00:00:56 Speaker_04
Whatever problems Palm Beach has, Palm Beach can work them out.

00:01:00 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:07 Speaker_28
This is the fourth girl who's been attacked in the last six weeks.

00:01:11 Speaker_06
I'm a little surprised, having now seen it, that this episode aired on primetime TV. There are a couple of scenes that show the assaults.

00:01:19 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:32 Speaker_06
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.

00:01:41 Speaker_06
He told the agent he was locked up with a guy named Cary Hartman, who was serving time for rape.

00:01:47 Speaker_06
He said Cary had watched BL Striker, specifically the scenes depicting the sexual assaults, and quote, after viewing the show, Hartman acted in a different manner. That comes from a report the FBI agent wrote. It's never before been made public.

00:02:04 Speaker_06
He didn't go into detail about what different meant, but I can just imagine how someone like Kerry Hartman would have reacted to seeing a depiction of a crime not unlike his own on TV.

00:02:15 Speaker_06
The agent kept his new snitch's identity secret, assigning him the catchy nickname SU1815-C. I'll just call him Charlie. Charlie, the informant, and the FBI agent talked several more times in the days that followed.

00:02:31 Speaker_06
Charlie said he had heard Carrie Hartman talking about the disappearance of Cherie Warren. Former Roy City Police Detective Jack Bell had briefed the FBI on the Shari Warren case.

00:02:42 Speaker_14
Of course, Shari was on their list of missing people national list.

00:02:47 Speaker_06
And what Charlie described tracked pretty close to the theory Jack Bell had himself come up with during his years working the Shari Warren case.

00:02:56 Speaker_14
I always thought after Kerry became the number one suspect, I'd quit looking at Chuck. that Shuri had found out something about Kerry.

00:03:06 Speaker_14
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.

00:03:24 Speaker_06
Here's what Charlie said he had heard from Carrie. Cherie had gone to Carrie's apartment on the night of her disappearance. They had argued over Carrie's plan to go out drinking.

00:03:33 Speaker_06
Carrie had slipped Cherie a pill to incapacitate her, then later strangled Cherie and buried her body near a boulder and a pine tree. Kerry had driven Cherie's car to Las Vegas that night and flown home under a false name.

00:03:46 Speaker_06
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.

00:03:55 Speaker_14
They had the FBI process it.

00:03:57 Speaker_06
Before police in Las Vegas turned the car over to Cherie's estranged husband, Chuck Warren.

00:04:03 Speaker_14
Chuck went down and got it. They released it to him.

00:04:06 Speaker_06
Charlie told the FBI Cary had kept a diary with details about all the rapes he'd committed prior to his arrest.

00:04:12 Speaker_06
He said Cary had 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.

00:04:23 Speaker_06
I'd been told the detectives who had 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 Carey's old friend, Dave Moore.

00:04:36 Speaker_11
In fact, I remember when he first became a suspect, Chris had called my Uncle Don and myself down to his office.

00:04:44 Speaker_06
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... Explained what was going on.

00:04:55 Speaker_11
He says, I just want to lay it up front with you.

00:04:57 Speaker_06
So it's plausible Carey might have had prior warning of his arrest. I wanted to ask Zimmerman about this, but he declined my request for an interview.

00:05:07 Speaker_06
The most interesting bit of information Charlie the informant fed the FBI involved Carey Hartman and Ted Bundy. Charlie said Carey had a strange infatuation with Bundy.

00:05:19 Speaker_06
He said Carey dog-eared 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.

00:05:31 Speaker_06
Days ahead of the execution, Bundy had granted an interview to a detective from the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office named Dennis Couch.

00:05:39 Speaker_05
He was a defeated person. He was extremely fatigued and he indicated that He was appalled by the senselessness of it all.

00:05:49 Speaker_06
Bundy had confessed to several unsolved Utah murders.

00:05:53 Speaker_21
But Couch did not get the answer he was hoping for regarding another Utah murder, that of 21-year-old Nancy Barrett of Layton. Bundy insisted he had no part of that killing.

00:06:03 Speaker_06
Nancy Perry Barrett had disappeared from a gas station where she worked, a little south of Ogden, on the evening of July 4, 1975, just over 10 years before Sheree Warren vanished. Nancy resembled Cherie in many ways.

00:06:18 Speaker_06
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.

00:06:34 Speaker_06
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.

00:06:43 Speaker_06
The reason I'm sharing a bit of it with you now is because the FBI files say Charlie the informant, quote, learned Carrie Hartman was an acquaintance of Nancy Baird's, and Charlie said Carrie questioned why Theodore was accused of involvement in Nancy Baird's disappearance.

00:07:02 Speaker_06
He implied Carey Hartman might have killed both Nancy Baird and Sheree Warren. But could Charlie be trusted? This is Cold, season three, episode six, Lying Liars. From KSL Podcasts, I'm Dave Cauley.

00:07:47 Speaker_01
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00:09:29 Speaker_06
A few minutes ago, I described watching the first episode of an old TV show called BL Striker. A jailhouse snitch had told the FBI Carrie Hartman had watched it too.

00:09:41 Speaker_06
The show rankled me a bit when I watched it because of how it ignored the experiences of the fictional victims. The main character, Striker, made just one mention to a young woman about seeing a therapist after her assault.

00:09:54 Speaker_32
You mean a shrink?

00:09:56 Speaker_06
The episode didn't delve into the psychological trauma real-life victims face.

00:10:01 Speaker_32
We want them to be able to resume their lives and feel comfortable with that. And to do that, they have to gain some control back over their lives after they've been assaulted.

00:10:12 Speaker_06
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.

00:10:22 Speaker_22
Debbie Hinnick is a victim who says she wanted to testify. She wanted to get the guy who raped her. But she says it would have been nearly impossible without the help of the victim witness counselors.

00:10:33 Speaker_30
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?

00:10:47 Speaker_30
But they make you realize that you're just a victim of circumstance. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

00:10:52 Speaker_22
The man who attacked Debbie, Nathaniel Bell, was convicted of five separate sexual assaults on women.

00:10:58 Speaker_06
And by coincidence, Nathaniel Bell later ended up in the same sex offender therapy group as Carrie Hartman at the Iron County Correctional Facility. Nathaniel and Carrie didn't get along.

00:11:12 Speaker_06
One day in April of 1989, they were playing a game of handball with two other inmates at the jail's gym. Handball involves slapping a small rubber ball, bouncing it off the floor and walls of an enclosed court.

00:11:25 Speaker_06
It had been one of Carey'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.

00:11:36 Speaker_06
At one point, Nathaniel told Carey, quote, Nathaniel then served the ball, and Carey lunged for the return. Carey would later insist he'd only brushed against Bell, accidentally, but Bell would describe Carey punching him in the gut.

00:11:57 Speaker_06
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 Carey's jaw. Carey's eyes rolled back in their sockets.

00:12:12 Speaker_06
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 Carey unconscious. They called an ambulance.

00:12:30 Speaker_06
Carey ended up being okay, though it took stitches to close the nasty split on the back of his scalp. Clearly, Carey wasn't making many friends on the inside. He wanted out, and he had an idea how to make that happen.

00:12:50 Speaker_06
The jury that had convicted Kerry Hartman in the first of the four rape cases prosecutors had filed against him based its decision, in part, on a science called serology.

00:13:00 Speaker_06
Serology, the study of bodily fluids, could narrow a field of suspects based on their blood or saliva, but not pinpoint an individual.

00:13:09 Speaker_23
We do not give absolutes. We give probabilities. Serology has always been in that area.

00:13:16 Speaker_06
But by the end of the 80s, an emerging field of study promised to revolutionize forensic science.

00:13:22 Speaker_23
With DNA, our probabilities are a lot higher.

00:13:26 Speaker_06
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 can exclude them.

00:13:41 Speaker_06
Some people who have 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 Hartman could see it coming.

00:13:55 Speaker_06
He filed a civil lawsuit at the end of that year against the director of Utah State Crime Lab. He demanded an opportunity to have DNA analysis performed on the evidence gathered from the body of his victim.

00:14:07 Speaker_08
DNA fingerprinting can match a suspect to blood, semen, even a hair follicle left behind.

00:14:13 Speaker_06
DNA's admissibility as evidence hadn't yet been established in Utah law. Carey wanted to break new ground.

00:14:20 Speaker_08
Legal and science experts say it's only a matter of time before DNA evidence is used in Utah by both prosecutors and suspects.

00:14:30 Speaker_06
Kerry 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 Kerry would withstand any challenge. I had no problem with any DNA samples.

00:14:46 Speaker_06
The problem is I doubt that they saved that stuff. Reed told me it's common practice for police departments and crime labs to discard evidence once trials and appeals are all complete.

00:14:56 Speaker_06
Kerry's case was complete, so Reed didn't think the crime lab would have saved the swabs needed for any DNA analysis. But maybe they did. The judge didn't decide Carey's DNA lawsuit right away. So let me tell you about what happened in the meantime.

00:15:17 Speaker_06
Carey received a package in the mail from a woman named Teresa. I've mentioned her before. Carey had cold called Teresa a few days before his arrest in the rape investigation, giving her the old lingerie survey.

00:15:30 Speaker_06
She had remained on the line, then agreed to meet Carey for drinks. Teresa, it turns out, had stayed in touch with Carey after his conviction. The packaged Teresa scent carry contained a cassette tape sealed in plastic.

00:15:45 Speaker_06
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.

00:16:02 Speaker_06
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.

00:16:18 Speaker_06
The Utah Department of Corrections prohibited inmates from possessing sexual materials. Getting caught with incoming contraband put Carey in violation of a contract he had signed upon entering sex offender therapy.

00:16:30 Speaker_06
A therapist told Carey if he wanted to remain in the program, he'd have to consent to taking a plethysmograph.

00:16:37 Speaker_31
In Utah, all adult sex offenders take a test that may show if they're likely to re-offend.

00:16:43 Speaker_06
Think of it like a polygraph with some extra hardware.

00:16:47 Speaker_31
The tester in another room plays a videotape 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 videotape and hearing on an audiotape.

00:16:58 Speaker_06
A sort of sexual eye 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.

00:17:10 Speaker_29
These are hooked to the fingers. And then this is a respiration belt that goes around the chest. The third one is hooked directly to the penis. Ugh.

00:17:19 Speaker_06
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.

00:17:34 Speaker_06
Kerry Hartman 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.

00:17:53 Speaker_06
Completing sex offender therapy would be a hurdle Kerry Hartman would have to clear if he ever hoped for a chance of parole. But at that point in 1990, Kerry had a better idea how to win his freedom.

00:18:05 Speaker_06
That winter, a judge agreed to Kerry's request for DNA analysis in the rape case. The judge told the director of Utah State Crime Lab to ship the evidence to an outside lab in California. Kerry had convinced his own father to pay for the testing.

00:18:21 Speaker_06
That plan soon hit a snag. The crime lab director went to pull the evidence only to discover it had disappeared. Carey couldn't believe it. He suggested to a reporter from the Ogden Standard Examiner he had been framed.

00:18:35 Speaker_06
What possible reason can they have for losing the evidence? The setback left Carey with just one last hope for deliverance. Blaine Nelson, the second Ogden City rapist.

00:18:47 Speaker_25
I did what I did. I'm dealing with those problems.

00:18:50 Speaker_06
We talked about Blaine in the last episode. Ogden police had arrested him in the spring of 1988, just months after Carey's conviction. In October of 91, Blaine told the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole his problems had started with a drug habit.

00:19:05 Speaker_06
He said he had burglarized homes to get money for drugs. That escalated to rape, he said, when he began encountering single women at some of the homes.

00:19:14 Speaker_25
Drugs didn't make me do that, but they made the choice become a lot easier.

00:19:18 Speaker_06
Blaine calmly said he had sexually assaulted 74 women prior to his arrest, a stunning, horrifying number.

00:19:27 Speaker_25
Through what I was doing, I learned that a woman would do more for her children than she would for herself. And I use that to my advantage.

00:19:36 Speaker_06
Blaine had developed strategies to find new victims, mostly by looking at the yards of the homes he burglarized.

00:19:42 Speaker_25
If the yard looked messy, a lot of toys around, that gave me the indication that there was not a male present.

00:19:47 Speaker_06
His final victim also spoke to the parole board.

00:19:50 Speaker_24
I went to see him rot in jail. He lied under oath at his hearing, but not as for a fact.

00:20:07 Speaker_06
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 had taken such pleasure in terrorizing and humiliating her.

00:20:25 Speaker_24
I had painkillers in my purse from a broken hip. He did not touch those.

00:20:37 Speaker_25
Looking back on it, I still knew that I had a choice, even though I was on drugs.

00:20:44 Speaker_06
So that's Blaine Nelson. The reason why Kerry Hartman thought Blaine was his ticket out of prison is Blaine said he had committed Kerry's crimes.

00:20:54 Speaker_25
I confess to Ogden City Police of all my crimes, even crimes that other inmates in this institution is being held for at this time.

00:21:02 Speaker_06
Blaine said he had first made the connection on the day of his sentencing.

00:21:05 Speaker_25
When I was in Ogden City, I confessed to everything and I also did some interviews with the TV's.

00:21:12 Speaker_06
I'll remind you, one of the reporters who had interviewed Blaine that day was Kerry Hartman's friend, Larry Lewis.

00:21:19 Speaker_06
I don't know which reporter planted the seed, but Blaine told the parole board one of them suggested he might have committed Kerry's crimes.

00:21:27 Speaker_25
And I told him at that time that if that is the case, I will do everything I need to do to make that correction.

00:21:34 Speaker_06
The plot had thickened a couple months later when Blaine went to court in Iron County for sentencing on additional crimes he had committed there. Blaine had bumped into Carey at the Iron County Correctional Facility.

00:21:44 Speaker_25
He approached me and introduced himself and said there was a possibility that I was responsible for things that he had done.

00:21:51 Speaker_06
Blaine said he had started writing letters to all the lawyers, letting them know he wanted to confess to Carey's crimes.

00:21:58 Speaker_25
The response is from the authorities in Weber County that I am a liar. But Blaine insisted his motives were pure.

00:22:12 Speaker_06
Kerry Hartman had his own date with the parole board coming up. They couldn't let him out, not yet anyway, because Kerry had to serve at least 15 years.

00:22:22 Speaker_06
But the hearing would be Kerry's first chance to tell his side of the story to the people who might someday decide if he deserved a chance to rejoin society.

00:22:31 Speaker_06
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.

00:22:43 Speaker_21
Dear President Bush,

00:22:57 Speaker_16
I am incarcerated in the Utah State Prison System in Cedar City, Utah. I have proclaimed my innocence from day one.

00:23:05 Speaker_06
Kerry sent this letter to the president in December of 91. He explained the emerging signs of DNA analysis would have exonerated him if not for the ineptitude of the crime lab.

00:23:16 Speaker_16
Why would I go to all 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.

00:23:25 Speaker_06
Kerry told the president it was no mistake the crime lab lost the evidence. He smelled conspiracy.

00:23:32 Speaker_16
I'm not a fruitcake. I've had all kinds of tests to establish my sanity and I am as sane and level headed as you are with an IQ of 135.

00:23:42 Speaker_06
Kerry said his rights had been abused from the start. Police had the wrong man. The real rapist, Carey said, was Blaine Nelson.

00:23:51 Speaker_16
He has been directly linked to over 74 sexual assaults. The Ogden City Police cleared up 600 burglaries when they caught him.

00:24:00 Speaker_06
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 Carey was paying close attention.

00:24:15 Speaker_06
Kerry concluded his letter with a plea for help, begging the president to personally contact the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on his behalf.

00:24:24 Speaker_16
Thank you for your most valuable time and attention. God bless you, always. Respectfully, Kerry W. Hartman.

00:24:32 Speaker_06
And the president didn't come to Kerry's aid. Maybe because he had his hands full with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final end of the Cold War. And we are not fixing to get into the middle of that.

00:24:46 Speaker_06
It's no surprise, really, that Air Force One didn't make a stop in Utah on the day of Kerry's first hearing, before the parole board in January of 92. I have sought DNA testing for four years. This is Kerry's own voice from a recording of that hearing.

00:25:00 Speaker_20
I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this would prove my innocence.

00:25:04 Speaker_06
Kerry repeated almost word-for-word what he had said in his letter to the president.

00:25:08 Speaker_20
I'm not a fruitcake. I'm not a crackpot. I'm level-headed. I'm sane.

00:25:13 Speaker_06
Parole board member Heather Nelson Cook heard Kerry out.

00:25:17 Speaker_19
You make a very passionate and a very persuasive plea that you are innocent.

00:25:23 Speaker_06
But she told Carey she had studied his case with great interest and was aware of more than just the facts of the crimes that had put him in prison.

00:25:31 Speaker_06
She'd reviewed the pre-sentence report we talked about in the last episode, which included many other eye-popping comments about Carey's sexual proclivities.

00:25:40 Speaker_19
Some life-sharing parties, some third-party orgies, a lot of pornography, incidents where you have exposed yourself. What?

00:25:53 Speaker_06
None of this should have been a shock to Carey, 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.

00:26:04 Speaker_20
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. That's not in my makeup. It's not me.

00:26:19 Speaker_06
Heather, the parole board member, countered that Carey's M.O. was using psychological coercion, like threatening to kill the children of the women he had assaulted. Carey denied that, too. He said that's how Blaine Nelson operated.

00:26:32 Speaker_20
He was the man that was caught, convicted, and confessed to at least two of the crimes that I was charged with.

00:26:40 Speaker_19
Then a follow-up investigation was done, apparently, and the conclusions of that was that he hadn't.

00:26:48 Speaker_06
Kerry had collected sworn affidavits from three people who had each said they'd overheard Blaine taking credit for Kerry's crimes at different times and in different places.

00:26:57 Speaker_06
Now, Kerry spread those statements on the table, displaying them for the parole board.

00:27:03 Speaker_20
One, two, three affidavits of Blaine Melton stated that he committed the crimes I'm in here for. There they are.

00:27:14 Speaker_06
The affidavits didn't have the impact Carrie might've hoped. Blaine Nelson's admissions weren't a get-out-of-jail-free card.

00:27:21 Speaker_19
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 happens.

00:27:30 Speaker_06
Heather, the parole board member, told Carrie it didn't really matter anyhow. The parole board didn't have the power to retry his case. She couldn't let him out even if she believed him, which it seems she didn't.

00:27:44 Speaker_19
And as I look at 20 years of unusual, aggressive, deviant sexual activity, I do see you as a risk.

00:27:54 Speaker_06
She told Carrie 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.

00:28:09 Speaker_06
He had told the FBI Carrie Hartman killed Shuri Warren and was infatuated with serial killer Ted Bundy. But I didn't tell you about another intriguing claim Charlie made.

00:28:21 Speaker_06
Charlie said Carrie had offered the second Ogden serial rapist, Blaine Nelson, $50,000 to take the blame for Carrie's crimes.

00:28:29 Speaker_25
Because I've had so much time anyway, I have nothing to lose.

00:28:32 Speaker_06
And 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 had colluded with Cary.

00:28:43 Speaker_25
Detective Zimmerman from Ogden City come to the Okers and seen me.

00:28:48 Speaker_06
The Okers were a medium security housing unit at the Utah State Prison.

00:28:52 Speaker_25
And that's when he said that I was nuts. and would admit to anything when it was being paid off.

00:28:58 Speaker_06
But Blaine said it wasn't true.

00:29:00 Speaker_25
I signed a waiver in Iron County not to be moved in the same living quarters with Hartman for the possibility that if this did go to court that they would say we traded stories or many things. So I avoided that.

00:29:14 Speaker_25
And that's the last I've heard on the Hartman case.

00:29:18 Speaker_06
Blaine hadn't heard anything more about Kerry Hartman, because neither police, the courts, nor the parole board had believed him. Kerry's M.O. had been a little different than Blaine's, and other evidence linked Kerry to his victims.

00:29:31 Speaker_06
I should note, Blaine had also tried to take credit for a crime attributed to a third serial rapist, a guy named Jerry Casita.

00:29:38 Speaker_25
also contacted one of his lawyers, nothing was done.

00:29:42 Speaker_06
Like Carey, Jerry Casita had latched onto Blaine's admission, using it as grounds for an appeal of his sentence. A judge held a hearing to try to get to the bottom of this mess. Blaine testified.

00:29:53 Speaker_06
He gave a first-hand account of the rape attributed to Jerry Casita. 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.

00:30:10 Speaker_06
I decided to write him, to ask if he still stood by his claim he had committed the crimes attributed to Carrie Hartman. Blaine wrote back, saying yes, he did stand by it.

00:30:20 Speaker_06
I wrote Blaine again, asking if the story told by Charlie, the FBI informant was true. Had Carrie offered Blaine 50 grand to take the fall as Charlie had claimed? Blaine said Carey, quote, never offered me at any time any money.

00:30:37 Speaker_06
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. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

00:31:02 Speaker_06
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00:31:14 Speaker_06
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00:31:23 Speaker_06
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00:31:35 Speaker_06
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00:32:15 Speaker_06
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00:32:39 Speaker_06
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00:32:55 Speaker_06
We've spent a lot of time over the last couple episodes talking about the Ogden City rapist case and Carrie Hartman's role at the center of it.

00:33:03 Speaker_20
Any type of physical aggression toward anyone, especially a female, it's so abhorrent, it's so terrible.

00:33:10 Speaker_06
It's drawn us away a bit from our focus, the disappearance of Sheree Warren.

00:33:14 Speaker_06
It's necessary though, because understanding how Carey Hartman treated other women at the time he was dating Sheree provides a lens that puts a sharper focus on his relationship with Sheree.

00:33:27 Speaker_06
Carrie objectified women, both strangers and romantic partners alike. We don't know what all Cherie endured during her time with Carrie, but it's now fair to ask how Cherie might have reacted if she had uncovered any of his dark secrets.

00:33:42 Speaker_06
Cherie's friend Pam Volk, who had worked with her at the credit union, told me she had married and moved away soon after Cherie disappeared.

00:33:50 Speaker_18
I felt bad because we had moved to Germany. So there wasn't, I mean, there wasn't really anything I could do anyway. But being so far away, it kind of felt, I don't know, it just made me feel a little bit guilty, I guess.

00:34:04 Speaker_06
Pam and her husband returned stateside a few years later. They were surprised to find no one seemed to talk about Cherie anymore.

00:34:11 Speaker_18
It didn't get a lot of attention, no. Not like missing cases do now.

00:34:16 Speaker_06
Cherie'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 Cherie's son.

00:34:32 Speaker_06
Cherie'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.

00:34:44 Speaker_18
It's frustrating, you know, and I feel so bad for her parents.

00:34:49 Speaker_06
I can't tell you why KSL didn't cover the story. It's possible the station's staff were all on more pressing assignments that day. I've worked as a newscast producer.

00:34:58 Speaker_06
Sometimes it's a judgment 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.

00:35:11 Speaker_06
But he aired a story about a California dad who had skipped out on paying child support.

00:35:16 Speaker_09
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.

00:35:24 Speaker_06
Larry, I don't need to remind you, was a personal friend of Carrie Hartman's. Other news media did attend the service.

00:35:31 Speaker_06
There's a clip from TV station ABC4 that shows Cherie's mom, Mary Sorenson, walking to Cherie's new headstone with Cherie's son, Adam.

00:35:40 Speaker_00
I tell him that God's watching over him. Our Heavenly Father's watching over his mother.

00:35:47 Speaker_06
Adam was just 10 years old in the clip, dressed in a little gray suit. He told me recently he had hated being paraded in front of the TV cameras. And that's part of why you're not hearing from him in this podcast.

00:36:00 Speaker_06
Mary Sorensen told the Salt Lake Tribune that day she intended to have her daughter declared legally deceased. Carey's oldest friend, Steve Bartlett, saw that story in the paper. You might recall Bartlett from the last episode.

00:36:14 Speaker_06
He was the special investigator for the Salt Lake County District Attorney who had exchanged letters with Carey after his conviction, urging him to reveal the location of Cherie Warren's remains.

00:36:25 Speaker_06
Carey had told his old friend he didn't know anything about it. The plight of Cherie's parents moved Bartlett. He decided to make one final effort to reach Carrie. He wrote another letter to his childhood pal.

00:36:41 Speaker_02
Please, please, please. If you know where Cherie is, and I really think that you do, Please, somehow, let somebody know so that the family can end their grief."

00:36:55 Speaker_06
Carrie's response dripped with indignant disdain.

00:36:59 Speaker_16
I feel sorry for you, Steve. Friends are very special and should not be taken so lightly. Let me tell you about Cherie. She was the most important lady in my life at that time, or any other time for that matter.

00:37:12 Speaker_16
I tried to find her with every bit of strength that I had at that time. I did everything that was in my power.

00:37:19 Speaker_16
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.

00:37:28 Speaker_06
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.

00:37:42 Speaker_06
That unlocked a life insurance policy Cherie had 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.

00:37:54 Speaker_06
Chuck arranged to have the money go to his and Cherie's son, Adam, and no one else. But that move hadn't absolved Chuck Warren of suspicion. He remained a suspect at that point in 93. So did Carrie Hartman.

00:38:11 Speaker_06
And there were even some who still thought a serial killer might have plucked Shuri off the streets of Salt Lake City. It was an idea Carrie's own private investigator had promoted.

00:38:21 Speaker_06
But former Ogden Police Detective Shane Miner didn't see much evidence to back up that theory. Just that she was seen in that parking lot of the credit union when she left that day.

00:38:30 Speaker_06
As you might remember, the Salt Lake City Police Department had lumped Shuri 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.

00:38:40 Speaker_06
They suspected a serial killer was on the loose, and they had formed a task force in 1986 in the hopes of catching him. I knew they were busy, they were doing a lot, and this case was, they grouped this case in with it.

00:38:53 Speaker_06
But Shane told me the Salt Lake detectives hadn't invested much attention on Cherie Warren's disappearance specifically.

00:38:59 Speaker_17
Because you'd get hit with, well, this is a missing person out of Roy, and like, well,

00:39:04 Speaker_06
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.

00:39:11 Speaker_17
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.

00:39:22 Speaker_06
The FBI had launched VICAP in the summer of 85, just a few months before Sheree Warren disappeared. VICAP is a database and analysis team dedicated to catching serial criminals by spotting trends in their behaviors.

00:39:35 Speaker_06
And so now that's kind of coming into play. 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.

00:39:50 Speaker_06
One of them described the disappearance of Shuri Warren. Only two months later, the Salt Lake Task Force publicly announced a suspect, Idaho spree killer Paul Ezra Rhodes.

00:40:03 Speaker_09
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. The three Salt Lake victims had likewise all been shot with a .38.

00:40:18 Speaker_09
In an interview with Salt Lake Police at the Idaho State Prison, Rhodes denied he had anything to do with the Utah killings. But investigators say he revealed some interesting facts.

00:40:27 Speaker_06
The connections were circumstantial at best.

00:40:31 Speaker_13
When Mr. Rhodes was arrested, those 38-357 handgun murders of female clerks in convenience stores that are similar to our type murders came to a drastic stop.

00:40:43 Speaker_06
That's correlation, not causation. A very weak form of circumstantial evidence. Rhodes 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. Rhodes wasn't their killer.

00:41:02 Speaker_06
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.

00:41:12 Speaker_06
It disbanded in 1991, leaving the three cases it had tied to the same gun unsolved.

00:41:19 Speaker_06
No evidence has emerged in all the years since to suggest Sheree Warren's disappearance is in any way linked to those other Salt Lake Task Force cases, as Kerry Hartman's private investigator had suggested.

00:41:32 Speaker_06
Former Ogden Police Detective Shane Miner had once briefed the Salt Lake detectives about Carrie Hartman, when it had seemed Carrie might have been a suspect for the Salt Lake Task Force.

00:41:42 Speaker_06
But by the early 90s, that speculation had died out, and Shane had moved on to other assignments. My focus had kind of drifted away from Hartman. Carriot at last accepted his life in custody.

00:41:55 Speaker_06
He spent a lot of time writing letters to his old friends in Ogden, like the taxidermist Brent Morgan.

00:42:01 Speaker_04
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,

00:42:15 Speaker_06
I don't want to have any more correspondence with you. Cary also stayed in touch with Dave Moore, who owned the sewing machine repair shop.

00:42:22 Speaker_11
He made a collect phone call to the store every Christmas Eve for about three years.

00:42:28 Speaker_06
And Cary made calls to his TV reporter friend, Larry Lewis.

00:42:33 Speaker_10
Yeah, 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.

00:42:47 Speaker_06
Larry's case of cold feet about Carrie Hartman didn't come on right away. I have prison records that show Carrie continued making calls to Larry for years.

00:43:01 Speaker_10
I didn't feel comfortable, you know, continuing the association. I think I sent him some handballs to wherever he was, and that was the end of it.

00:43:14 Speaker_06
Kerry 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 had served his minimum of 15 years.

00:43:29 Speaker_06
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.

00:43:43 Speaker_06
He'd been booted from treatment once before for refusing to play along, but now realized he'd have to try again. Here though, Carey ran into a problem. He couldn't get back into therapy unless he admitted to his crime.

00:43:57 Speaker_06
This is something Carey had insisted he would never do when he had gone before the parole board the first time in 1992.

00:44:03 Speaker_20
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. My sons repeatedly that I didn't do it, even though I don't see them.

00:44:19 Speaker_20
and all of a sudden turn right around and say, oh, yep, I did it, I was just kidding before.

00:44:24 Speaker_06
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.

00:44:34 Speaker_06
I wasn't on those calls, obviously, but based on the timeline, I can surmise Cary told his friends and family he was going to admit to the rape that had sent him to prison. But only that one.

00:44:47 Speaker_06
He then reapplied to sex offender therapy, admitting his guilt, and was accepted back into the program. But Carey's second round in treatment proved short-lived.

00:44:58 Speaker_06
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.

00:45:14 Speaker_06
It had come from a snitch, a prison inmate named David Westmoreland. He said Kerry Hartman had told him about the murders of two women. If the stories were true, Westmoreland wrote, he knew where to find the bodies.

00:45:31 Speaker_06
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 had handed off the Cherie Warren case after first promoting to sergeant a decade earlier.

00:45:42 Speaker_14
I took most of this evidence to OPD.

00:45:47 Speaker_06
The tip reignited Jack's dormant desire to find Cherie. He went to talk to Westmoreland himself. Let me give you some background on David Westmoreland. He murdered his own cousin in 1981.

00:46:02 Speaker_06
Westmoreland had first met Carrie Hartman 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. Yes.

00:46:17 Speaker_14
He said Cary told him the story of killing her.

00:46:22 Speaker_06
Jack's notes say Westmoreland claimed Cary killed two women. One of them was Cary's girlfriend. They'd been arguing over sex, Westmoreland said, so Cary had hit her with his flashlight.

00:46:34 Speaker_06
He had then allegedly driven her up a canyon, sexually assaulted her, and killed her by smacking her in the head with a jack from his truck.

00:46:42 Speaker_14
I think he said it was an accident. and they'd taken her up to this rest area.

00:46:50 Speaker_06
Westmoreland said Carey buried the body at a rest area along eastbound Interstate 80, midway between Ogden and Evanston, Wyoming, in a place called Echo Canyon.

00:47:02 Speaker_14
It was possible because of the location. and accessibility.

00:47:09 Speaker_06
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. We went up there. Jack brought dogs with him. We didn't find nothing.

00:47:24 Speaker_14
But we didn't do a lot of digging either.

00:47:27 Speaker_06
Because they had no clue where to even start. They didn't see disturbed ground, and the dogs gave no indication.

00:47:35 Speaker_06
Still, the exercise brought back memories for Jack of the psychic letter he had received after Sheree Warren disappeared, a letter Jack believed had really originated with Carrie.

00:47:47 Speaker_06
It had described a truck stop in the mountains and a burial spot near Red Rock Cliffs.

00:47:53 Speaker_14
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. On the psychic letter from 85? Exactly. So, boom.

00:48:18 Speaker_06
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.

00:48:32 Speaker_06
They seemed to line up with what David Westmoreland had told him.

00:48:36 Speaker_14
That's what I got out of what Carrie supposedly told Westmoreland. Where she was at was up there.

00:48:45 Speaker_06
The psychic letter had mentioned two guys stopping for snacks at a truck stop.

00:48:50 Speaker_14
The truck stop to me was at Echo Junction, the old Echo Café.

00:48:55 Speaker_06
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 a bust. No body.

00:49:11 Speaker_06
No Cherie. But the prospect of at last locating the remains of Cherie 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.

00:49:30 Speaker_06
Ogden Police Detective Shane Miner received an invitation.

00:49:34 Speaker_17
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 Shreve Warren case and how things had kind of dropped off after the rape investigations and stuff like that.

00:49:50 Speaker_06
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.

00:50:03 Speaker_17
It 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. Jack and Shane both knew the stakes.

00:50:16 Speaker_14
At one time, Bill Danes from the county attorney's office told Shane and I and somebody else, if we could find the body, he would give us a complaint.

00:50:28 Speaker_06
In other words, a murder charge against Carrie Hartman, if they could find Cherie's remains. Jack gave Shane his notes and walked him through the case.

00:50:39 Speaker_17
He relayed that information to me as far as the people he had talked to, pulled what reports they had.

00:50:46 Speaker_06
Jack had given his formal reports and evidence to Ogden police back in 1987.

00:50:51 Speaker_06
Ogden had taken over the case because the two women who had lived above Carrie Hartman had reported seeing and hearing Cherie at their house in Ogden the night she disappeared.

00:51:02 Speaker_06
Shane remembered Ogden police had opened their own case file at that time.

00:51:07 Speaker_17
So I went back and tried to find those reports. And that became problematic because I couldn't find the reports. They had changed the reporting systems.

00:51:16 Speaker_06
The missing paperwork included reports about interviews with several members of Kerry Hartman's so-called supper club. Detective John Stubbs, for example, had been in the room when Jack had questioned KSL-TV reporter Larry Lewis.

00:51:31 Speaker_06
Stubbs had written a report and filed it under Ogden's Sheri Warren case number. So where was that report?

00:51:39 Speaker_17
I never could find that case report or the interviews that was done off of that.

00:51:44 Speaker_06
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.

00:51:54 Speaker_06
Or the papers might have been taken home by one of the investigators and never returned.

00:51:59 Speaker_17
Plus, there was a lot of technology change during that period of time, too, from handwritten notes to computer-generated information.

00:52:07 Speaker_06
I submitted my own public records request to the Ogden Police Department for anything filed under their Cherie Warren case number. The department searched its records archive and told me they couldn't find anything.

00:52:20 Speaker_06
Nothing on an unsolved cold case homicide. There's another possible explanation for what might have happened to the missing records. Cary Hartman did have friends in the Ogden Police Department.

00:52:36 Speaker_14
The fact that he had been a reserve in there, that's the way he made contact with these guys.

00:52:43 Speaker_06
And some stood to be embarrassed if their association with Cary became public knowledge.

00:52:49 Speaker_14
Yes, exactly. They wanted to stay right away from the Cary Hartman investigation.

00:52:56 Speaker_06
So I do wonder if someone, sometime, might have intentionally made those reports disappear. However it happened, the records are gone.

00:53:08 Speaker_06
The missing police reports meant Shane Miner didn't have significant pieces of the puzzle in his head when he set out to investigate the story of the snitch, David Westmoreland.

00:53:19 Speaker_17
When you're talking to inmates, you never know what their true motive is. So it's kind of difficult to really take factual information.

00:53:30 Speaker_06
Shane polled prison records. They verified Westmoreland had lived next to Kerry Hartman at the Iron County Correctional Facility.

00:53:38 Speaker_17
He knew Hartman and he did have some conversation with him. because there were some facts that he knew about.

00:53:43 Speaker_17
But then I also learned, with my experience, these guys are really clever at making things up and can build a story around whatever's told to them. Shane decided to re-interview Westmoreland himself.

00:53:55 Speaker_06
But a lot of his facts didn't really match up with what we had. Westmoreland once again described the rest area in Echo Canyon, the vending machine, and the concrete path.

00:54:06 Speaker_17
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.

00:54:15 Speaker_06
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. It was a truck stop area, trucks parked up in there. Not a very safe or secluded place to dump a body.

00:54:32 Speaker_06
Shane's doubt began to grow.

00:54:34 Speaker_17
You would have to drag a body up a cement pathway, and just uncharacteristic for a dump site if you're going to be dumping a body.

00:54:42 Speaker_06
Shane arranged to have a dog team come and rerun the search at the rest area, but the result didn't change. No sign of Cherie. The snitch, David Westmoreland, had drawn maps of the spot for Shane. I have copies of them and went to the rest area myself.

00:55:01 Speaker_06
I walked up that path, then stepped off into the dry grass. Let's see if I can step over this fence without getting any warped wire.

00:55:11 Speaker_13
There we go.

00:55:13 Speaker_06
I found what appeared to be 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.

00:55:32 Speaker_06
Earlier I told you about some FBI files and a jailhouse informant I called, Charlie, who had fed a special agent information about Carrie Hartman in 1989.

00:55:42 Speaker_06
Detective Shane Miner came across those same FBI reports as he worked the Cherie Warren investigation a decade later.

00:55:49 Speaker_17
But I didn't know who that person was and that took quite a bit of time to find out who he was too.

00:55:54 Speaker_06
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 Carrie Hartman watched that TV show BL Striker.

00:56:08 Speaker_06
The informant who said Carrie Hartman was obsessed with Ted Bundy. The guy who said Carrie killed Sheree Warren. His real name is William Babble.

00:56:21 Speaker_26
I'm at the Utah State Prison with one William Babble. Is that right? Babble?

00:56:27 Speaker_06
This audio comes from a 1991 police interview recording. William Babble, a.k.a. Charlie the Informant, told a detective he had been in Kerry Hartman's sex offender therapy group at Iron County in 1988.

00:56:40 Speaker_06
He'd heard Kerry reading his autobiography in the group sessions. And I know Kerry Hartman's story very well. And that's probably where William Babble gathered the information he had fed to the FBI.

00:56:53 Speaker_07
And I was there when Mr. Hartman explained that he had been with a psychic, and he knew where Sheree Warren was buried, what she was wearing when she disappeared, how she died. You know, the whole spiel about this girl's disappearance.

00:57:08 Speaker_07
You know, her car was found in Vegas. Somebody drove down and took it down there and flew home. And how could Kerry Hartman know all that shit unless Kerry Hartman did it?

00:57:16 Speaker_06
William Babble had told the FBI Kerry Hartman admitted to killing Sheree Warren. Three years later, he told a detective he'd only thought that was the case at the time.

00:57:25 Speaker_07
Because Hartman was living with her when she disappeared. Well, hardly never.

00:57:32 Speaker_06
Babbel said he now instead believed the person who killed Shuri Warren was a guy named Doug Lovell. That name should sound familiar if you've listened to season two of this podcast.

00:57:44 Speaker_06
Doug Lovell abducted and raped Joyce Yost, then returned months later and killed Joyce to prevent her from testifying in court about what he had done.

00:57:54 Speaker_07
What about Shuri Warren? I think he knows about her. Well, they'll never stick me with that because Cary Hartman's the one that's going to end up eating that one.

00:58:05 Speaker_06
I know this can get confusing, but what we're dealing with here is a snitch who at first said Cary Hartman had killed Sheree Warren, then later changed his story to say Doug Lovell killed Sheree. He had no evidence to back up either claim.

00:58:19 Speaker_06
Which means we should treat everything William Babble said with extreme skepticism.

00:58:24 Speaker_26
Did Robert Lovell give you a reason to tie him and Hartman together?

00:58:30 Speaker_06
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.

00:58:45 Speaker_06
I don't know that she'd ever met Doug. Sheree's friend and former co-worker Pam Volk told me she finds the Lovell killed Sheree theory hard to swallow.

00:58:54 Speaker_18
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, you know. And with no body, it's kind of hard.

00:59:11 Speaker_33
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00:59:18 Speaker_33
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00:59:28 Speaker_33
like a stunning new full cast production of George Orwell's 1984, heartfelt memoirs like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's Lovely One, the year's best fiction like The Women by Kristen Hanna, and Percival Everett's brilliantly subversive James.

00:59:45 Speaker_33
Another worthwhile listen is Amy Tintero's thrilling and twisting whodunit, Listen for the Lie.

00:59:50 Speaker_33
This laugh-out-loud funny tale follows Lucy, a woman who needs to clear her own name after a true crime podcast decides to probe into the worst night of her life, one she conveniently can't remember. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen.

01:00:05 Speaker_33
Go to audible.com slash wonderypod and discover all the year's best waiting for you.

01:00:16 Speaker_06
I first met former Ogden police detective Shane Miner at a restaurant in downtown Ogden called the Union Grill. He'd agreed to talk to me about the Cherie Warren case over lunch, but he made no promises about ever going on the record. We took a seat.

01:00:31 Speaker_06
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.

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Shane keeps a low profile, which sounds funny in my head 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 Sheri Warren case.

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I later asked Shane if he would agree to an interview.

01:01:00 Speaker_17
I don't like talking in front of a mic in all the years that I worked. I think I rarely talked in front of a mic, so...

01:01:09 Speaker_06
or to a reporter even at all. F at all, yeah. Shane's not a glory seeker, but he has a deep sense of duty. That had come into play when he had first taken up the Sheree Warren case, more than a decade after Sheree disappeared.

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Would you have called that investigation a cold case at that point, in 98? Yes. Shane's not what I'd call exuberant, at least not when the recorder's rolling.

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But I can tell you, he feels a deep sense of responsibility to Cherie, a woman he never even met.

01:01:39 Speaker_17
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.

01:01:45 Speaker_06
And this is the only reason why, in the end, Shane agreed to let me interview him. It is helpful, even if maybe a bit painful for you. Yeah, probably. When Shane took over the Cherie Warren case in 1998, he found the file was in shambles.

01:02:03 Speaker_06
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.

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So Shane headed into 1999 with a new objective, reinvestigate the Cherie Warren case from scratch, narrowing it down to a single suspect. But who was that?

01:02:29 Speaker_06
Shane still had two plausible primary suspects, Cherie's former husband, Chuck Warren, and her now-incarcerated boyfriend, Cary Hartman. He needed a better understanding of both those relationships.

01:02:42 Speaker_17
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 and Roy. He set about filling in the gaps.

01:02:52 Speaker_17
Just trying to track down people that might have known her and get their spin on what was going on in that period of time when she was last seen and missing.

01:03:00 Speaker_06
Shane began with Cherie's parents. Ed and Mary Sorensen told Shane the story of the last time they had seen their daughter. Mary described what Cherie had been wearing that October morning. Black pants, a red blouse, and a gray suede jacket.

01:03:16 Speaker_17
Mrs. Sorensen thought that was what she would wear. and mentioned that she was still missing a gray purse.

01:03:22 Speaker_06
But hold on a second, because Jack Bell's notes about his first conversation with Mary Sorensen the day after Cherie disappeared didn't mention a jacket.

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Here, almost 15 years later, Mary described Cherie wearing the same type of jacket Shane had himself found in Carrie Hartman's apartment when serving the search warrants in the Ogden City Rapist investigation.

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This was problematic because it suggested Mary might have added that detail to her story after learning about the jacket from police. A possible feedback loop. More on that in a bit.

01:03:59 Speaker_06
Shane asked Cherie's parents what they remembered about Carrie Hartman.

01:04:03 Speaker_17
And they kind of laid out a lot different picture of the relationship between Hartman and in Cherie.

01:04:10 Speaker_06
They said Cherie's relationship with Kerry hadn't been serious. They'd only been going out a few months. That contradicted what Kerry had told several other people.

01:04:20 Speaker_17
Hartman's story is they'd been going out for a long period of time and were so madly in love with each other, yet nobody else says that.

01:04:29 Speaker_06
Sheree's parents' account also didn't jibe with how Carey had described his and Sheree's relationship in his statement to the private investigator Michael Neumeier.

01:04:38 Speaker_17
He had offered to help Hartman look for Sheree.

01:04:41 Speaker_06
You heard that statement in Episode 3.

01:04:44 Speaker_16
Mike, I've put together everything that I can think of up to date.

01:04:47 Speaker_17
It's a typewritten notebook and apparently it's from a recording. You read through there and it's just like Hartman's telling a story.

01:05:07 Speaker_16
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.

01:05:20 Speaker_16
She said, I'll be waiting for you at home.

01:05:22 Speaker_06
Shane tracked down Michael Neumeier and talked to him, too. Neumeier verified he had made the transcription of Carey's statement and even signed a copy to attest to its accuracy.

01:05:33 Speaker_17
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'd never seen that or heard the original recording.

01:05:43 Speaker_06
Neumeier said he had worked on Carey's behalf right up until Carey's arrest in the rape case. At that moment, Neumeier came to believe Carey had lied to him. Shane tracked down Cherie's former coworkers.

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Her old boss told Shane she remembered hosting a party at her house back in the fall of 85, just a few weeks before Cherie disappeared. Cherie had come and brought Kerry with her.

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At some point during the evening, Cherie had slipped away from Kerry and confided to her boss she was thinking of breaking up with him. Shane went to talk to Cherie's friend, Pam Volk.

01:06:18 Speaker_18
It was a little intimidating, but he just asked me a series of questions, I think, about Chuck and about Carrie and about Cherie.

01:06:26 Speaker_06
Pam told Shane she remembered Cherie calling Carrie kinky, saying that bothered her and that their relationship wasn't serious.

01:06:34 Speaker_17
But to listen to Hartman, she's with him all the time. She's got a lot of other things going on in her life besides him.

01:06:40 Speaker_06
Like her new promotion at the credit union. Shane called Richard Moss, the credit union manager Cherie had been training the day she disappeared. I think he made some handwritten notes that he sent to me.

01:06:52 Speaker_06
Richard, as it turned out, had written down his recollections of the last time he'd seen Cherie. He had kept those notes for years.

01:07:01 Speaker_17
So you look at the credibility of that versus somebody that goes years later. and then they're trying to remember. Some people have really good memory recall and other people don't have such good. So I believe that it was very credible on his part.

01:07:17 Speaker_06
I too have a copy of Richard's notes. I pulled them out after interviewing him. Could I impose upon you to kind of read this aloud for me? I'll record it. I wanted to see if what Richard told me matched what he had written all those years ago.

01:07:32 Speaker_13
She wore no rings on fingers, wore black slacks with black high heels. She had on a red and white striped blouse.

01:07:44 Speaker_06
button down front over the shoulder sleeve." Richard's notes don't mention any outerwear. As we've previously discussed, this case might all hinge on a tale of two coats — Cherie's gray suede jacket or Carrie's black parka.

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Knowing which Cherie was wearing when she left for work on the morning of her disappearance could help prove whether Carrie told the truth about not seeing Cherie that night, because the gray jacket later turned up in Carrie's apartment.

01:08:15 Speaker_06
Unfortunately, Richard can't resolve that question for us.

01:08:19 Speaker_13
She told me her ex-husband came into the Ogden office at one time and threatened to kill her.

01:08:28 Speaker_06
As far as I know, Richard had no reason to exaggerate this account of what Cherie had told him about her argument with Chuck Warren over alimony.

01:08:37 Speaker_06
Chuck, remember, had refused to cooperate with Detective Jack Bell from the very early days of the investigation. Shane had a different experience. He seemed quite open to me. Shane asked Chuck about that blow-up at the credit union branch.

01:08:53 Speaker_17
He told me about it. So it was stupid on his part, but it wasn't any type of physical fight, he was just upset.

01:09:00 Speaker_06
Shane's notes say Chuck hadn't intended to scare Sheree, but he had said something along the lines of, there are all sorts of ways to get even. It just didn't seem like he was holding anything back or hiding anything.

01:09:13 Speaker_06
Chuck told Shane he'd only realized later in life what he'd lost by not working to salvage his marriage to Cherie.

01:09:20 Speaker_17
One of the things he said about Cherie was probably the best thing that ever happened to him and he was really stupid for doing what he did.

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Chuck wasn't able to remember what had prevented him from taking his Supra down to the dealership in Salt Lake on the afternoon of Cherie's disappearance.

01:09:35 Speaker_06
But Shane told me everything else Chuck said was consistent with what he had learned from other sources.

01:09:42 Speaker_17
Again, this conversation was in 1999, and it's pretty similar, I think, to the conversations he had with Bell back in 85 and what Sorensen had told me.

01:09:53 Speaker_17
There wasn't nothing that he said that would set me off that I would say, oh yeah, you're a suspect in this.

01:09:59 Speaker_06
Which left Shane focused on just one person. Carrie Hartman. He decided to go talk to Kaylynn and Mary, the two women who had lived above Carrie at the time Cherie disappeared.

01:10:13 Speaker_06
They once again described how their former neighbor, the Nighthawk, had kept odd hours and two-timed all his girlfriends.

01:10:21 Speaker_17
Yeah, I mean, a lot of what they talked about was just consistent with what we knew about Hartman's habits.

01:10:27 Speaker_06
They repeated the story of the loud argument they had heard between Carrie and Cherie at the house. Shane needed to pin down exactly when that had happened.

01:10:36 Speaker_17
Their statement referred to a couple of days before her disappearance came out in the paper. He headed to the county library to look through old periodicals.

01:10:46 Speaker_17
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 was right around October 2nd.

01:10:59 Speaker_06
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 had made it to Carrie Harkman's apartment on the night she disappeared.

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The best, and perhaps only, evidence that might place Sheree Warren with Carrie Hartman on the night of her disappearance was a jacket. There was a grey suede jacket.

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The jacket Shane had found in Carrie's apartment while serving a search warrant there in May of 1987. Sheree Warren's mom, Mary Sorenson, hadn't mentioned a grey jacket when she had first reported her daughter missing in 1985.

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Roy Police Detective Jack Bell wrote in his notes, police showed Mary Sorensen a picture of the jacket after they found it in 87.

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Jack wrote Mary, said the gray jacket, quote, belongs to Cherie and is the jacket she had on the last time she had seen Cherie. That jacket was put into the OPD evidence. A decade passed.

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Then in September of 1999, Detective Shane Miner invited Cherie's parents and her sister Marcy to come to Ogden Police Headquarters.

01:12:18 Speaker_17
And I had that jacket pulled out of evidence and they looked at the jacket and Mrs. Sorenson identified that jacket as something that she would wear.

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the day that she went missing and went with what she was wearing and identified that as Cherie's jacket.

01:12:33 Speaker_06
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.

01:12:46 Speaker_06
It had been 12 years since police had showed Mary a photo of the gray jacket. Ogden police should have written a report about the gray suede jacket when they had first seized it out of Carrie Hartman's apartment.

01:12:57 Speaker_06
They should have invited Mary to come look at it in person back then. But I haven't been able to find any report like that. Any insight as to why that identification didn't happen in 87? I don't know.

01:13:11 Speaker_17
I can't tell you. If I could have found the reports that were generated in 87, there might be an answer in that. But what I could find, I don't know.

01:13:22 Speaker_06
Another clue lost in the missing Ogden police records. Shane had one more idea.

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Maybe the jacket harbored an invisible secret, a drop of blood or a strand of hair, something that might prove the jacket belonged to Cherie and that she had met with violence while wearing it.

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Where Carrie Hartman had insisted DNA evidence would exonerate him, Shane Miner hoped it might do the opposite. If he could find Cherie's DNA on that jacket, it would prove it was hers.

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If he could find Carrie'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.

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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.

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In the first episode, Stryker is drawn into a case involving a serial rapist who escalates to murder.

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So there's no prints, right? No fibers from the jacket? You ain't got nothing.

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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.

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He reveals he's killed Stryker's love interest, which results in Stryker and the journalist duking it out man to man. In the midst of the melee, Stryker pulls a gun and shoots the killer to death. It's all neat and tidy. We know who the killer is.

01:15:22 Speaker_06
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.

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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.

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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. Cherie needs us to persevere.

01:16:14 Speaker_06
And at least a degree of accountability is coming on the next episode of Cold.

01:16:22 Speaker_15
This would have been the road that I think he had access to. So, I mean, there's unlimited places where he could have dumped her along here.

01:16:31 Speaker_34
Hard to think like a bandit, you know, would you have picked a characteristic turn on a rock or tree or something as a landmark?

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If you have information about the disappearance of Cherie Warren, now is the time to share it. You can reach me by emailing cold at ksl.com or contact the Roy City Police Department at 801-774-1063.

01:16:57 Speaker_06
I also want you to know, if you've experienced abuse or sexual violence, you're not alone. There are trained experts ready to listen and help.

01:17:06 Speaker_06
In the United States, survivors of rape and sexual assault can connect to free resources through the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network at RAINN.org.

01:17:17 Speaker_06
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse in any form, you can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org. Cold is a production of KSL Podcasts and Wondery, in association with Workhouse Media.

01:17:37 Speaker_06
Cold is researched, written, and hosted by me, Dave Cauley. Audio production and sound design by Ben Kebrick and Aaron Mason. Mixing and mastering by Ben Kebrick.

01:17:48 Speaker_06
Michael Bonmiller composed our main theme, with additional music this season by Allison Leighton Brown. Additional voices in this episode provided by John Green and Aaron Mason.

01:18:00 Speaker_06
My personal thanks to our editorial team, Amy Donaldson, Andreas Martin, Ryan Meeks, Becky Bruce, Kira Faramond, Kellyanne Halverson, Josh Tilton, and Felix Bunnell.

01:18:12 Speaker_06
For Amazon Music and Wondery, Managing Producer Candice Manriquez-Wren, Producer Claire Chambers, Senior Producer Lizzie Bassett, and Executive Producer Morgan Jones. Special thanks to Kale Bittner and Alison Vermeulen.

01:18:27 Speaker_06
With Workhouse Media Executive Producers Paul Anderson and Nick Piniella. And for KSL Podcasts, Executive Producer Cheryl Worsley. For pictures and more, go to our website, thecoldpodcast.com and follow us on social at The Cold Podcast.

01:18:45 Speaker_06
Most of all, thank you for listening.

01:18:56 Speaker_03
From the award-winning masters of audio horror.

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I see a face right up against the window. Bleach white, no hair, black eyes, a round hole for a mouth. It's flat, Taylor. It's completely flat. I don't know what that is. I don't know what kind of a head is flat.

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Comes the return of Dark Sanctum.

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What is that coming under the door? It's blood.

01:19:23 Speaker_03
Seven original chilling tales inspired by the Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt.

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Get back in your car. Lizzie, it's okay. I'm here now. Josh, get in your car!

01:19:41 Speaker_03
Starring Bethany Joy Lenz, Clive Standen, and Michael O'Neil. Welcome to the Dark Sanctum. Listen to Dark Sanctum Season 2 exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.