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Each swing of the pick brought a loud clank of metal against stone. Sweat dripped from the faces of the detectives who took turns heaving shovelfuls of dirt into an orange bucket.
Next to them, standing over a blue tarp, CSI workers sifted loose dirt through a mesh screen, pausing to peer at any odd roots or rocks.What they really hoped to find were fragments of bone.
Roy City Police and Weber County Crime Scene investigators, along with search and rescue staff, conducted an excavation of a possible clandestine grave near Qazi Reservoir in the mountains of northern Utah on August 23rd, 2023.
They were looking for skeletal remains, possibly those of Shuri Warren.
How many years has it been, Dave?
Sheree Warren's case and these mountains that may hold secrets about her fate have consumed my attention for quite some time.You've heard the result.The story of the search for Sheree is chronicled in Cold Season 3.
Through months and years of research, I honed in on this specific spot as a possible place to look for Sheree Warren's remains.
Circumstantial evidence suggests one of the two named suspects in Sheree's disappearance could have known this place very well.
There was also an outside chance this site could hold evidence related to the murder of Joyce Yost, the subject of Cold Season 2.
These two cases, Sheree Warren's and Joyce Yost's, are likely unrelated, but they occurred in close proximity to one another in space and time. Over the last nearly 40 years, they've bled into one another.
We've now taken detailed looks at both in this podcast and heard repeated references to Qazi Reservoir.
The Qazi area is about 20 miles east of Ogden.There's a Qazi Reservoir.
Did you ever hunt in the Qazi Reservoir area?Qazi is an area up the canyon.
and they drove to Causey.
You got two reservoirs up there that are deep, Causey and Lost Creek.
Really steep trails going up to the right-hand side of Causey.That's why Royce City Police invited myself and several of my colleagues from KSL-TV, the Salt Lake City-based news station I work for, to watch as they excavated this site.
Breaking news happening right now.Law enforcement agencies in Weber County are digging right now what appears to be at a burial site that might be connected to a four decades old murder case.
But if you're not in Utah or don't watch the news here, you probably didn't hear anything about this.So let me bring you up to speed.In this episode, we'll review the evidence that points to the possibility of a grave site near Kazi.
We'll go to the site of this dig, and I'll share where the search for Cherie Warren stands now that the dust has literally settled.This is a bonus episode of COLD, Season 3, The Causey Search.From KSL Podcasts, I'm Dave Cauley.
Let's begin with a recap of the Joyce Yost and Cherie Warren cases.Both had their start in the area of Ogden, Utah back in 1985.Joyce's case came first.That April, a man Joyce had never met followed her home from a club late one night.
Doug Lovell confronted Joyce in the carport outside her apartment in the city of South Ogden.Lovell sexually assaulted Joyce, kidnapped her, and held her captive.
Joyce, fearing for her life, promised not to tell anyone what Lovell had done if he'd just let her go.He did.When Joyce made it to safety at home in the early morning hours, she called her sister.
This is Joyce's own voice explaining what her sister said.
She said, well, you called the police.And I said, I really don't want to be put through the humiliation.She said, In fact, the more she heard from me, the angrier she was getting.And she says, well, you call the police right now.
And she said, if you don't, I will.So I said, I will.
Joyce soon met with Detective Bill Holthouse.She told him her story.Holthouse believed Joyce, and he arrested Doug Lovell that same morning on suspicion of rape.
He looked at me with an expression that got my attention, but it just was like it froze the moment.And he said, this will not go to trial.
Through a series of mistakes and mishaps, Lovell found himself out of jail while awaiting trial that summer.He tried to hire two hitmen, but both fell through.
So in August, 10 days before the scheduled start of the trial, Doug Lovell crept into Joyce Yost's apartment through a window, startled her awake and slashed her with a knife.Lovell then took Joyce away in her own car and hit her body.
Weeks later, at the start of October, Cherie Warren walked out of her work at the headquarters office for the Utah State Employees Credit Union in Salt Lake City.
She told a coworker she was going to meet her estranged husband at a nearby car dealership.Afterward, Cherie planned to take her young son to her parents' house in the city of Roy.She never made it.
Right now, police say they're investigating the disappearance, but have very little to go on.
What we're asking for is just to locate where she may be or any evidence to show that it or indicate that there is maybe some foul play involved so that we can do a different type of investigation rather than missing persons.
Roy's city police at first focused on Cherie's estranged husband, Charles Warren, thinking he might have killed Cherie over their ongoing divorce.
Charles told Roy Police Detective Jack Bell he had cancelled his planned meeting with Cherie at the dealership on the evening of her disappearance and instead went jogging.A weak alibi, Detective Bell was never able to corroborate. He did.
Charles Warren wasn't the only suspect, though.Police also came to wonder if a former Ogden City Police Reserve officer named Kerry Hartman might have had something to do with Sheree Warren's disappearance.Kerry and Sheree had been dating.
Six weeks into the investigation, Sheree's car unexpectedly surfaced behind a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
That opened up a whole new can of worms.How did it get there? Which one of these two birds that I'm looking at have the opportunity to get it down there?
As Roy Police were trying to answer that question, Doug Lovell revisited Joyce Yost's body somewhere in the mountains, burying Joyce to prevent anyone from finding her.Then, snow fell, blanketing those same mountains.
In December, Doug Lovell stood trial for raping Joyce Yost. She didn't show up to testify.The jury convicted Lovell anyway and sent him to prison, but not for murder.
Without a body, South Ogden police were unable to link Joyce's disappearance to Lovell.Without a body, Roy police were unable to say what might have happened to Cherie Warren.
These two separate cases were still both under investigation when, in April of 1987, an anonymous man called Royce City and the Weber County Sheriff's Office to report finding a woman's body in the mountains near Qazi Reservoir.
Kazi is way out in the hills, about 20 miles east of Ogden and its suburbs of South Ogden and Roy.But the land around Kazi is rough and remote.Investigators needed more specific information if they ever hoped to find the body.
The anonymous caller wasn't willing to help. Weeks later, a witness told police he'd bumped into Cherie Warren's boyfriend, Kerry Hartman, on the mountain behind Kazi four days after Cherie disappeared.
And detectives learned several of Hartman's close personal friends owned property in Kazi Estates, a cabin community near the reservoir.
We had to have a key.There was a gate down right at Kazi Reservoir.
One of those friends, Dave Moore, was Carey's alibi for the night Sheree disappeared.
At the time, I didn't have no idea that he was using me as an alibi.
Another of those friends, Brent Morgan, told police Carey had borrowed his key for the gate at Causey Estates shortly before Sheree vanished.
Back then, there wasn't a lot of people up there.
Police searched around Kazi during the spring and summer of 1987, hoping to find the body the anonymous caller had mentioned.Those searches came up empty.
You take where he had my key.If he had access up there and could go up and down the roads, you can find the right place where you can, one, two, three, heave ho, and it's going to be in a spot where people aren't going to go.
Kerry Hartman, I should note, ended up in prison, but not because of anything to do with Sheree Warren.
Ogden City Police arrested him as a suspect in a series of home invasion sexual assaults around the same time as the anonymous call and the searches around Kazi.A jury convicted Hartman in one of those cases.
Years later, another clue emerged pointing toward Kazi, this time in the Joyce Yost case. In 1991, Doug Lovell's ex-wife Rhonda Butters told police on the night Lovell killed Joyce Yost, he took her up by Causey.
He said he made her drive up the canyon and they went up by Causey and got her out of the car and walked up this hill and it wasn't very far off the road.And he said he buried him as best he could.
Rhonda Butters' confession helped prosecutors secure a capital murder charge against Doug Lovell.
Butters wore a wire into the Utah State Prison and captured audio of her ex-husband as he described burying Joyce Yost in the mountains, covering her with leaves.
The only thing I'm nervous about is that one time that caller called in.I remember seeing it on TV.The way they projected this was, you know, you're the body of Joyce Yost.
Lovell cut a plea deal, hoping to avoid the death penalty by promising to take police to Joyce Yost's grave.In the summer of 1993, he led police to a mountainside east of Ogden.It held no signs of human remains. It was also nowhere near Causey.
Former South Ogden detective Terry Carpenter told me he believes Lovell lied about where he buried Joyce Yost.She is someplace else.
And honestly, to this day, I believe Sheree Warren's with her. Otherwise, if we go up and dig and find Joyce and find Sheree, that negates all the agreements that we've had with him of not executing him.And he knows that.
So he's not going to take us to Joyce.
I've looked for evidence that might link Doug Lovell to Sheree Warren.And I've not found any.Lovell himself denied having ever met Sheree Warren when this speculation first surfaced 30 years ago.
But there are those who hold to this theory even today.In 2004, Weber County investigators flew over the mountain behind Causey in a state helicopter.
They were operating on the assumption Carrie Hartman had killed Cherie Warren and left her body somewhere near Causey.
This would have been the road that I think he had access to.There's unlimited places where he could have dumped her along here.
Hard to think like a bandit, you know, would you have I picked a characteristic turn or rock or tree or something as a landmark.
A year and a half later, a detective named Shane Miner questioned Kerry Hartman about Cherie Warren's disappearance.Miner asked Hartman directly if he had killed Cherie and taken her body to Kazi.Did you kill Cherie?
Hartman said he didn't have any idea what had happened to Cherie.
You know what she was placed in an area
A year after this, in 2006, a prison informant started talking to police about Joyce Yost.He said Doug Lovell had drawn him a map of the place where he'd left Yost's body.
This is the lake.There's some gates up here and some property.
The informant claimed Lovell had taken Joyce Yost to Causey Reservoir.
See these circles here?He's telling me this is Huntsville and this is Causey.
Your head's probably spinning by this point.It's so much to keep track of, I know.Not all of these leads are credible.Sorting fact from fiction remains a major challenge in these two cases.
But what I hope you're seeing is a lot of circumstantial evidence points toward Qazi Reservoir as an important landmark in the disappearances of Shuri Warren and Joyce Yost.
My job involves taking scattered fragments of a story, spreading them out, and putting them in order.Sometimes the individual pieces don't look like much on their own.It's only when they're assembled that a picture emerges.
If done well, the story that comes out of this process should draw as close to truth as I can possibly get it.Perfect truth is nearly impossible to find.Often holes remain.
unanswered questions, like where is the body the anonymous caller reported finding near Kazi, and why couldn't anyone find it? I've struggled to come up with a satisfactory answer.
I've studied a century's worth of old maps, seeing the gradual development of trails and roads in the mountains around Qazi.I've read newspaper archives about the generations of sheepherding families who owned those hills.
I've hunted down aerial photographs of Qazi, from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, to the 1990s, even paying to have old films scanned at ultra-high resolution.
I've gone up into the air myself, by plane and helicopter, to study the thousands of acres of inaccessible private land behind Causey.
Through all this, I became very interested in a stretch of old jeep road.
In the 1980s, this trail linked Causey Estates, where Cary Hartman was known to spend time, to the spot on the mountaintop where a witness said he saw Hartman four days after Cherie Warren disappeared.
Much of the Jeep trail falls within the radius that anonymous caller referenced when he described finding a woman's body.
Is it in Weber County?It's over there by Causey Day.
As my focus narrowed onto this old trail, I came across something unusual in the aerial images and video I had collected.The trail climbs a hill heading east out of Qazi Estates.
At the top of that hill, I saw a pile of rocks, about 6 feet long and 3 feet wide. roughly the size and shape one might expect for a clandestine grave.It wasn't clear from the images I'd collected if the rock pile existed before the 1980s.
Those older pictures just weren't clear enough to tell.But I was able to determine the rock pile had sat undisturbed since at least the early 90s.
As we come up on the anomalous rock pile,
I was able to visit the rock pile myself.You should see how it stands out from the surrounding environment.I carried a camera with me to document the site and the old Jeep trail nearby.
And as you look around, you can see there are rocks on this trail, but there are no other piles of rocks of similar shape and size.So that is unique.This discovery presented a bit of a conundrum.
The code of ethics that guides my work as a journalist says I need to act with independence.I don't work for the police, and I don't automatically share everything I know with them.
But if this rock pile did mark a possible grave, it felt irresponsible to simply ignore it, or to publish that speculation without taking steps to find out for sure.
I shared images of the rock pile with a handful of trusted colleagues and sources, who all agreed my eyes were not mistaken.It did look like it could be a grave.Again, unnatural.Unnatural rock pile.
So I provided this information to Roy City Police Detective John Frawley, the lead detective on the Cherie Warren case.He thanked me for it.Some time passed.Then, in August of 2023, I received word Roy Police had news to share.
Good evening, breaking news out of Weber County, where police plan to conduct a major search related to a Utah cold case dating back to the 1980s.
It's a case we've covered extensively right here at KSL as part of the Cold Podcast.
We plan to be on the mountain with police as they explore this site tomorrow.Stay with KSL TV throughout the day for any breaking developments.
I had an exclusive invite to come along as police went to Causey to dig below the rock pile, looking for possible human remains. Don't make yourself the subject of your own story.This mantra is foundational for journalists.
It's drilled into our heads by professors and editors.But college didn't prepare me for a career in which journalism would take me on the hunt for human remains.
Finding this odd rock pile while looking for a clandestine grave around Kazi made me a subject in my own story. My managers at KSL recognized this, and they decided to assign a different reporter to cover the story of the dig.
I would still be there to watch and provide comment and context, but reporter Dan Rascone would put the story on the air.
News specialist Dan Rascone giving us exclusive access to this site and the operation.So Dan, tell us where you are, what you've been seeing there.This is a big operation.
Yeah, this is a major operation undergoing right now.
This wasn't the only ethical consideration.KSL also took a few steps to safeguard our independence.We decided we would provide our own transportation to and from the site, which meant finding someone with four-wheelers available on short notice.
We told police, if we came along, we'd have the freedom to share anything we saw or heard with you.They agreed. We met in the morning, as low clouds settled in the mountain valleys, catching sidelong rays of the rising summer sun.
Our caravan of SUVs headed east from the small town of Huntsville, driving up Utah State Highway 39, following the South Fork of the Ogden River to Kazi.
One by one, we drove across the dam to the gate for Kazi Estates, drawing curious stares from fishermen and paddleboarders. Another mile or two on dirt and gravel brought us to the bottom of a steep hill.
We parked, doused ourselves in sunscreen, and loaded equipment onto ATVs.Cameras, coolers, pop-up shades, and shovels.There weren't enough seats for everyone.
Some of us donned backpacks and hiked the remaining mile to the rock pile, grunting up steep switchbacks.We reconvened up top, on a saddle overlooking Qazi Estates.
The CSI team set up a laser scanner, a $40,000 piece of equipment designed to make a 3D model of the site.It sat on a tripod, rotating and beeping as we all waited.
They launched a small drone to collect more imagery from above.
If evidence of a murder came out of the ground, this would be crucial to show what the site looked like prior to its excavation.Another member of the team used a small handheld saw to cut back overgrown brush and branches around the rock pile.
With the ground clear, the CSI team set down their tarp and raised an awning over the rocks. As they did so, my KSL colleague Dan Rascone went to work conducting interviews.He asked Roy Police Detective John Frawley what would happen next.
It seems like a very methodical process.It's not like you just bring out the shovels and start digging.
No, we want to be very respectful.Also, there's a proper way to do this and so the Weber County CSI team is very professional and they're going to handle this.
I think what John was getting at here was if the search about to get underway turned up human remains, we all needed to remember what that might mean.
My mind turned to all the people I've met over the last several years who would be watching live coverage of this search on TV.We know there are families of
victims, missing women, Cherie Warren, Joyce Yost, another person who could potentially be up in this area.And they have, for the last four decades, wondered where are their loved ones?
And they're today watching and waiting to see what comes out of this.So that's really difficult.
So we could find a body today.
We won't know until Weber County CSI starts doing their work, but I don't think you get this team up here unless they think it's a reasonable possibility that they might recover human remains here.
At the same time, none of us wanted to presume an outcome that hadn't yet happened.
And if you find anything? If we find anything, we will slow down at that point and figure out what we have and what needs to happen then.We would obviously follow where the evidence leads us.We wouldn't want to make any predeterminations.
If we did find something, we want to keep an open mind and see where the evidence would lead us at that point.
A low roar began to rise from the south.
drawing near until a helicopter crested above the mountain and began to orbit overhead.It belonged to KSL, Chopper 5, the very helicopter that had helped find this odd rock pile in the first place.
Over the sound of the thrumming helicopter blades, the investigators began removing rocks from the pile and tossing them to the side. Stone by stone, they worked to expose the bare ground beneath.
They sent spiders scurrying, and even disturbed a hornet's nest.
To the pilot, we look like we found something.He doesn't know if it's lost.
Yeah, everybody runs from me.Something's going on.Something's going on.Game on.Game on.
With the rocks removed, we could see the pile had covered a divot, or depression.The ground under the pile sat 8 to 10 inches lower than the surrounding soil.
This, I had learned, could be a clue, because when a buried body decomposes, the ground above it may settle.I felt a sense of guarded optimism as the investigators began removing soil.They passed the loose earth off to be sifted.
The idea here is dirt will fall through, while larger items like teeth, bone chips, or cloth fragments will be caught by the screen.
It's not as easy as it might sound, because each bucket load of soil held hundreds of small pebbles too large to fall through.The CSI team had to visually inspect them.
The closest analogy I can think of for this is it's like looking for a single tiny piece of Lego in a giant heap of bricks that are all a similar size and color.
While this work was unfolding, the KSL team went live on the air to share it with the public in real time.
Yeah, we're high on a ridge right now, just outside of Qazi Reservoir.This, possibly, a burial site for Cherie Warren.She disappeared back in October of 1985.We're going to go ahead and bring in Dave Cauley here, of course, with a cold podcast.
And Dave, tell us the significance of what is happening here right now.
We're seeing the detectives are using shovels and picks to pull soil off of this site to see if there is anything of evidence related to Cherie's case coming out of that.
They've taken just a few inches off the top, and it will be a really slow process over the next several hours.I wasn't surprised when no skeletal remains surfaced beneath the first few inches of dirt.
It stood to reason if anything, or anyone, was buried here, it wouldn't be right at the surface.
You just decide with Dave when you think you guys are at your limit.
Load after load of soil went through the screen.Only once or twice did the searchers pause.Like when an old .22 caliber shell casing, maybe a century old, caught up in the mesh.
Really?Huh.Is it the same?I'm still going to say it could be falling off the higher shelf up here and rolling in.
Hour after hour passed.Scattered clouds crept across the sky, casting shadows that sat on the landscape like spots on a dalmatian.The hole sank progressively deeper.
I'd be pretty blindfolded if they could dig this far.Yeah.
I mean, I guess you're motivated, though.
The excited, nervous chatter that had pervaded earlier in the day faded away.A specter of disappointment loomed.
You know, in another 40 years, someone's going to find this rock pile, and a whole other team is going to come up here and do this all over again.
You'll be the old retired person.
You'll say your war stories.
By mid-afternoon, the hole reached a depth of between two and three feet.The detectives who were taking turns with the shovels noticed a change.
So that color of dirt has been consistent all the way across.We're at least three, four inches into it.
They reached a layer of soil that had not been disturbed before.
Let's even that out to where... That level there?Yeah.Okay, I agree with that.
Proof no one had previously dug a hole that deep at the site.It might have looked like one, but Detective Frawley said the rock pile didn't mark a grave.
Your reaction to that?I mean, I guess you were hoping to find something.
You're always hoping to find something, but I think like we've discussed as investigators, We keep going.If there's a place to dig, we're going to dig.If there's a place to search, we're going to search.And we're just not going to stop.
So we will follow every tip and every lead.
Look, I'm not going to lie.This outcome left me feeling deflated.In the time between my discovery of the rock pile and its excavation, I told myself not to build up any expectations.
It was far more likely someone's dog was under those rocks than a murder victim. And even if human remains were buried there, they could have belonged to a sheep herder, a pioneer, a fur trapper, or an indigenous person.I knew this.
Still, I couldn't ignore the possibility, no matter how low the probability.Maybe this would be a break.I'm human, so yeah, I allowed a little hope.But there was nothing.No bones of any kind.
Sweeping my eyes across that mountain, as the police packed up their gear and raked loose dirt back into the hole, seeing the brush and trees spanning to the horizon, I felt a sting of futility.
If Cherie Warren or Joyce Yost are up here, can we ever really hope to find them?Maybe not.This is the real nature of cold case work.It's perpetual disappointment. And yet I refuse to accept a fatalistic view.This search mattered for many reasons.
It took one more location off the list of possibilities.It prompted new discussion about what happened to Joyce Yost and Shuri Warren.And it sent a message to their killers.We will not stop.Detective Frawley said it well.
If there is a place to search, they are going to search.If there is a place to dig, they are going to dig. And is that what you do, too, in the Cold Podcast?Yeah, absolutely.
So for the Cold Podcast, you know, our job is to tell these stories, to tell Cherie Warren's story, to let the public know about what's happened in the past and what's happening right now.
But that doesn't mean that this case ends when our podcast ends or that we stop paying attention.So I, myself, KSL, the Cold Podcast, we're dedicated to continuing to follow Cherie's case.
And if we come across any new information, we will be out on the next mountain doing the next search.In every setback, I see progress.In every hole excavated, we plant a seed of new opportunity.A fruitless search is not defeat.
It's a step on the path toward truth.This will not be the last search. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Michael Bonmiller composed our main theme, with additional music this season by Allison Leighton Brown.
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 Allison Vermeulen.
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.
Most of all, thank you for listening.
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