Hi, I'm Amy Donaldson.And I'm Cheryl Worsley.And this is Talking Cold.
Talking Cold is the podcast where we dive into the issues raised in the Cold podcast.On this episode, we want to give you some time to ask Dave your burning questions about season three.
Queenie is wondering why the guy Cherie was training with at work wasn't considered a suspect more seriously.Do you have some thoughts?
Yeah.And we're going to get to that.But we also want to discuss some of the journalism ethics that have come up this season.
And we are both journalists.So when we heard about a KSL-TV journalist who was a close associate of the rape suspect in season three and ended up covering the trial, we were kind of blown away.
We should disclose up front that we work for KSL.We are also examining what happens in our own shop.And all this happened back in the 80s before any of us were reporters.I was just a kid in high school.Come on.And Cheryl was younger than me.
We don't want to go into exactly who's oldest in the room.But yeah, there's all different managers here now.But we have had some discussions with reporters and managers from that era.
Joining us to talk about journalism ethics is Dr. Jean Norman, Associate Professor of Journalism at Weber State University.
Jean, before teaching journalism students, you worked 30 years as a journalist with your professional experience ranging from community newspapers to the Washington Post and USA Today.Thanks for joining us today, Jean.
The TV reporter, Larry Lewis, told Dave that he disclosed his relationship with the suspect, Kerry Hartman, to his news managers.So he was okay to cover the rape trial.
I asked to whom specifically Larry had disclosed.He said to KSL's assignment desk editor.
And at the end of that trial, my assignment editor, my supervisor, said I did a good job of being neutral.
Let's start there.There are so many red flags in my view.
Somebody who is a close associate of somebody in a rape trial should not be covering the trial, period, end of story.And I actually wonder, because Larry Lewis was so adamant about telling Dave that he was an acquaintance.
I disclosed that I knew Carrie, or I was an acquaintance of Carrie, while I was covering that trial.
I'm wondering if he told his boss that he was an acquaintance.If you're on a short staff day, it's an acquaintance.No big deal.
So kind of downplaying his actual relationship potentially.
We all know lots of people, you know?Not saying that he had been to the man's house multiple times for dinner, whether sex was involved or not, we won't go into maybe. We'll let Dave do that.We'll let Dave do that.
But even going to the man's house multiple times for dinner is a higher level than acquaintance.
Yeah, so it's unclear whether the disclosure to the manager, if it happened, was a full account of the actual relationship.
I guess I wonder how common that is where there's a disclosure made, you know, that there's some level of intimacy that would be troubling.
But if you just say, like, I knew this guy, we went to college together, but we haven't talked in 30 years, that might not trigger sort of an ethical… Ethical red flag.Red flag, yeah.Right, right.
I mean, I guess that, like, how close does a relationship have to be before you say, I can't do it?
I think anything beyond an acquaintance, anything beyond a past, I would say roommates in college would raise a red flag for me.But I also think that it's up to the editors to be really suspicious.
And I had one of those, a managing editor, who was so adamant about our ethics rules that when I wanted to join the homeowners association for my neighborhood, I went to him and said, Is it OK if I run for the Homeowners Association?
And he took 48 hours to think about it.So the onus really is on that news manager, that editor, in your case, to probe and ask some of those questions.
Well, I guess maybe we should just back up a smidge and say, what are the rules that govern this?What are we supposed to be doing?I happen to bring
the Society Professional Journalist Code of Ethics with me.I think Dave had referred to that.And those rules are, broadly, seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent.
I do want to ask, why does this matter?The general public hears some of these disclosures, and we've seen some high-profile ones we're going to talk about later.Does anybody but us care?
I mean, there isn't really some independent agency that holds us accountable.The people that hold us accountable are the bosses that ask the questions or don't ask the questions.
You're absolutely right.There is no independent agency that holds us accountable because we don't want to ever be accountable to a government agency.That is a conflict of interest in itself.
That violates our independence given to us in the First Amendment.So there is no independent agency.And it matters because journalists like to think that we hold the public trust. That is our role in society.
And if we are going to hold our heads high as journalists and say, you can rely on us, you can believe in what we say, that we are doing our best to give you facts that have been vetted, and we don't have skin in the game, you know, we're not trying to sway the news one way or the other, we're trying our best to be
objective, as objective as any human can be, then those ethics matter.
Yeah, but I'm talking about the disclosure.So if you're disclosing either to the public, I mean, I know why you have to disclose to your boss.It's basically what your company requires of you, right?We just had a conflict of interest training.
What my company wants from me, I understand. But I'm wondering, like, how much the public understands, like, I've heard this a lot, like on 60 Minutes, we're also owned by Disney.
They do an investigative report about Disney and then they say, or something connected, but also we're owned by the same company.And so they do these disclosures and then, like, people like my mom are like, why do you guys do that?
Is it building our credibility to do that?Or is it just so that we can't call each other out on it?
I hope we're building our credibility with that.My favorite disclosures, though, are the ones on John Oliver, where he says, oh yes, and we're owned by so-and-so, and then starts tearing into them.It's really priceless.
But the whole idea of transparency is to help our readers understand that, for one, we are human and we hope that they care.We hope that they can see that we're not trying to hide something from them.
When my children are trying to hide something from me, at least when they were younger, and trying to hide something from me, I wanted to know what they were trying to hide from me and why.
And now that they're adults and I'm finding out some of that stuff, it's really scary.Sorry, kids.But there's just a sense that the more we know, the more we can trust that the people are telling us truth.
I'm wondering like how – what's the difference between using a contact – like you say, we're people in the world.Where do I get story – people ask me, where do you get story ideas?I get them from my life.I'm standing in line.
I hear bus drivers talking and I say, oh, they're talking about going on strike and I say, hey, man, I'm a reporter.Can I get your phone numbers?And so I have made this contact through my – I'm on my own time doing a personal errand.
And this happens.I don't have a personal connection to them, so I don't think that's a conflict.But it does seem – and my husband has brought this up.He's a criminal defense lawyer, fairly high-profile guy in the community.
And there have been times where he's been telling me something that I've said.Oh, that's a story.Oh, we need to tell somebody. I've never done the stories that he's involved with.I've always handed them off to other reporters.
But I do know reporters who've done that, who've done a story that came from a friend or relative and which they were peripherally involved in.And sometimes they've said it's been cleared by an editor.Sometimes I find out later it wasn't.
But I'm just wondering, where do you see the difference in a Rolodex?It's not always these officials that you don't know.Sometimes it's your cousin or your aunt
professional journalists interviewing people who are too close to them, you know, covering people who are related to them.
My rule, the rule that I teach my students, because I teach at Weber State University now, and so the rule I teach my journalists, I call it the Norman rule, is don't interview anybody who can make your life miserable.
And then we go through, who can make your life miserable?But I mean, for students, any professors, any family members, their bosses, I mean, we go through all of the people who can make their lives miserable.
And I would say the same thing should apply to professional journalists, you know, who can make your personal life miserable?
So I'm going to push back on that a little bit because politicians can make your life miserable.So you're going to interview them, for example.
But not on a personal level.Correct.They can make your professional life miserable.
They can make your professional life miserable.
Who's going to make Thanksgiving uncomfortable? We're adapting the Norman rule.If you have to dine with these people, you know, I think, yeah.And I think if you, I think honestly, for me, ethics is also guided by your own compass.
There are times where I feel, I feel the discomfort.I feel the line.I mean, sometimes you like people that you cover. And they do things that you don't like, or that you have questions about, and you have to ask them questions.
And it's been personally painful for me.But I always say, it's not about me as a person.It's about me as a journalist.And this is a question I have to ask, and this is a story I have to do.
And you can have me, a person you know, and has covered you, and has some empathy for you, and understand your job.Or you can have the crime reporter come in, who doesn't know you, doesn't care, and is just going to go by the police reports.
Another very prominent case of this was Nina Totenberg came out with her memoir and talked about going to dinner with the Supreme Court justices.
Well, Nina Totenberg covers the Supreme Court for NPR and there was a lot of questioning when her memoir first came out about whether she was holding back news that she should have broken.
Because of that close relationship.
Because of going to dinner.
Most controversial was Ruth Bader Ginsburg was very sick.And Nina Totenberg knew because she had she was friends and did not report it.You know, that's when sometimes I just cannot be judgy about stuff like that.You know, I can.I'm terribly judgy.
I'm judgy about myself.I mean, I feel like there's times where I've made that mistake.
The latest example of something like that in my own life, if we had something happen in our neighborhood, A SWAT team was called out to our neighborhood, and the newsroom didn't know about it.So here I am.I'm like, well, they don't know about it.
I've told them that it happened.Are my hands clean?And then I find out what happened.So I'm like, now I'm in the position of telling on my neighbors, and the newsroom has not picked up the ball.
I ended up disclosing and saying, hey, cover it if you want to. Here's what I found out.
I think you just run into these things all the time And I don't I don't know all of what Larry was thinking or not thinking or I mean, we don't really even know The level of their friendship is definitely dinner.
I mean to me the cutoff was always dinner if I'm having dinner with you We're friends.Yeah, if I'm having lunch with you, we're we're colleagues or handball.
So, you know, there's that too I just want to point out that we Dave and I asked two former KSL managers if they recalled Larry Lewis disclosing this conflict to them, and they did not remember it.
But there was at least one other manager in the mix who is now deceased.So we may not have a full picture of what actually happened.
I also want to say that I don't think the situation back then would have been allowed to happen today just based on the news managers that I know in the KSL newsroom today. And I'm not saying the managers back then were bad.
Several of them were still here when I started back in 1999, and they were great journalists.
But do you know of someone's friends?
They might not know that he was friends.Like, I don't know who your friends are.
What we're saying is there's a manager that was in the mix who is now dead who we can't ask.We don't have the HR records to show anything because nobody holds those records that long.So there are holes for questions that we can't answer.
We do know that the conflict was not disclosed to the audience in any archive tape that we could see.So what about that?It's one thing to disclose to a manager, but is there an obligation to disclose to an audience?
No, because you should be avoiding the conflict altogether.You should never be in the position of having to say, I'm out here covering this rape trial of a friend of mine.You should never have to say that.
I just want you to know we play handball on the weekends.I mean, can you imagine that disclosure?I want to hear that disclosure.
In news, you should never allow that to happen.Somebody else was in the newsroom who could have done that story.You know, swap assignments or whatever.
I'm convinced the only possible way this could have happened is if Larry's either did not disclose or disclosed in such a vague way that his manager didn't put two and two together.
We want to thank you so much for coming today and for talking to us about this subject.
Well, thank you.I don't get to play journalist very often.
Let's take a quick break.But when we get back, it's time for all your questions for the host of Cold, Dave Cauley. So we're excited to have cold podcast researcher, creator, host Dave Colley with us today.
And we wanted to ask all of the burning questions that not only we have, but the listeners have.So Dave, thanks for being with us today.
Absolutely.Yeah, it's fun.
Thanks for being in the office that you're required to be in.
Every day.No, that's not true.I work remote most of the time now.
That's true.Yeah, out in the woods.Sometimes.
So I'm going to dive in.We've got a question here from Queenie Ramone on Instagram.And Queenie is wondering why the guy Richard Moss Shuri was training with at work wasn't considered a suspect more seriously.Do you have some thoughts?
Yeah, this is. Not the first time I've heard that question and I actually wondered for myself Isn't the last person to see Shari Warren a pretty serious suspect in this case?
it is fascinating to me that there's no real record from the early case files of Richard being interviewed.
You're the first person I've ever talked to you know, eyeball to eyeball.
Jack Bell did tell me that, you know, he considered Richard Moss a suspect for a time, but that he looked into Richard Moss a little bit, thought he was an upstanding citizen and kind of moved on.
Now, you move that investigation forward several years.The sense that I get from talking to these investigators is that everybody's a suspect until you know who your suspect is.
I think the reason why you didn't see more focus put on Richard early in this investigation was you had Chuck Warren and Kerry Hartman, both of whom needed to be accounted for before you moved on in the eyes of the investigators to look at somebody like Richard Moss.
But wasn't it weird that Richard Moss never had a sit-down face-to-face interview with anyone?
I found that strange, especially because he was staying in Salt Lake City.So he, you know, he lives several hours away from the place where he and Cherie were doing this training.And after a few weeks, he went back home and
resumed his life in Richfield, Utah.
But for that period of time early in the investigation, when he was still undergoing that training, he was living out of a hotel in Salt Lake City, and there was no reason why a detective couldn't have gone and met him face to face.
I do think that was a miss on the part of Jack Bell and, quite frankly, the Salt Lake City Police Department.
I was just going to say, don't you think some of this is because Salt Lake City didn't really take the lead on the case?And so any of those leads that would have happened from the place where she went missing didn't get followed.
Yeah, absolutely.To understand, Royce City at the time in 1985 is a small suburb, and it's a suburb of Ogden, not of Salt Lake City.And they probably had a police force of less than 10.
I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but maybe three detectives.So Jack Bell doesn't have a lot of help, and he is busy running at Chuck Warren.
Salt Lake City Police Department should have, could have stepped in to do some assisting there.Why that didn't happen, I don't know, but I think we hear during the course of this season that there was probably some
jurisdictional, you know, we're better than than, you know, chasing after these missing women kind of attitude amongst some of those Salt Lake City cops.
I have one queued.Go ahead.Do you ever sleep?
Allie Barnes would like to know.Do you ever sleep?
I do.So it's a It's a hard thing to describe what happens when I get focused on a story.There are a lot of things in my personal life that get pushed to the side.You know, oh, I need to go get my oil changed.That's a small thing in everyday life.
I don't got time for that.So for the for the months or years that it takes to work on research, production, writing, interviewing, I become fairly singular focused on these stories.
And there are yeah, there are times when you don't sleep, there are times when the stuff you're encountering in the research is disturbing to a point where it causes some psychological impact.I'm not going to say that doesn't happen.
Thankfully, I take great value from what I believe to be the importance of the work and the stories and derive some comfort from that.
So, you know, when we're in the middle of a crunch trying to get a season out, trying to tell a story, especially I think with season three, for me, I felt like there was a very ticking clock element to it in that we're coming near to a point where this case I think is going to be unsolvable because all the people that would hold the information will be gone.
And so I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible.That means, yeah, you're going to have some sleepless nights.
Dave, this question comes from Marques Guedes on Instagram, and I apologize if I slaughtered that.And Marques Guedes wants to know, is anyone actively still searching for Sheree's body?
The trick with searching for Cherie right now is where.And I think this is similar to Susan Powell and Joyce Yost.A lot of these cases you might say, well, I think, you know, I think Susan is in the desert.OK, be more specific.
Give me a give me a place in time.And then for an investigator, who has active cases now, they have to justify that time to go chase something.
So if it's just a theory, they're probably not going to invest a heck of a lot of time going chasing that down.In the case of Shuri Warren, There have not been, to my knowledge, active searches for Sheree in many, many years.
That being said, part of the goal of season three was putting all the evidence on the table, reevaluating where could realistically Sheree be.
And then, you know, I can tell you that members of law enforcement working that case are listening to the podcast. And we are making contacts with people who are sharing ideas.And right now, as we're recording this, we're in the middle of winter.
So areas in the mountains are not able to be searched. But I have been told that there are some plans in place for searches in the future based on information that's coming forward.
That's so cool.That's really cool.So we'll update people as we can update them for sure.But not just the snowfall, which is preventing people from searching right now, but the vastness of the terrain is also an issue.
Vastness of terrain is a problem, so is property ownership.So this is an ethical situation I sometimes find myself in.I'm talking about, in a lot of these cases, places where a missing person's remains might be.
If that's on private property, I don't want to be encouraging members of the public, people to trespass to go search.
And it's frustrating, because there may be some value to saying, you know, put 100 volunteers on the ground and have them walk a tight pattern and see if they find something.
Well, if that's not public land, and we don't have permission from a property owner to do that, you're going to cause problems.
So with the Sheree Warren case, we are looking at, yeah, problems of access, problems of property ownership that complicate running that kind of effort.
Another question from the same person, how does Sheree's son feel about the podcast?And is he ever, have you ever talked to him about how he feels about the possibility that his father may have been involved in his mother's disappearance?
And I think that widens into a bigger question, which is like, how, what's your relationship like with these families in these podcasts?And how difficult is it to kind of walk that line?
Because it's sort of a public story, but also it's their personal loss.
It's been very unique with each case for me.Some family members in cases are advocates.They want to step up and use the platform to advance the goal of finding their missing loved one. Others are not interested in any way in being in that spotlight.
And I think in the true crime space, you see a lot of growing pushback from victim families who feel they're being exploited by a lot of true crime productions.I don't want to be in a position of doing that.
That being said, I also don't necessarily believe that
one family member, and I'm speaking hypothetically here, I'm not speaking specifically to any of the cases that we've covered, but they shouldn't be able to shut down reporting that's done in the public interest, right?
In the case of Sheree's son, because of his young age when this took place, he didn't have memories of his mother. So I've had a phone conversation with him.
He told me generally he supported what I was doing, did not want to be on record, and I respected that.I can tell you generally he grew up with his grandparents, maternal grandparents telling him that his father had killed his mother.
They didn't have proof of that.And I think their perspective, this being Shuri's parents changed over time.In that later, they came to believe Carrie Hartman had killed Shuri and
You can just imagine for a child being raised by his father while his mom's parents are telling him that, you know, the father might've killed him.That's a, that's a tough place, uh, for a person to grow.
So those relationships, I, I try to tread lightly and respectfully while also letting these people know, you know, I'm not here trying to exploit your trauma, but I do need to acknowledge that, um, this was the situation, right?
The fact that Shari had a three-year-old son and that he was left behind is evidence that she wasn't taking off to start a new life because everything we know about Shari is that she would not have left him behind.
Well, talk about the difficulty in telling someone's story.
I mean, this story is about Sheree Warren, and you've done a very good job having a victim-centered approach and telling stories that tell people who these women were in as broad a way as we can so that we can appreciate their loss, right?
So how do you tell stories like Sheree's when you have family members who don't want to talk, and for their own reasons, and we're going to respect that, but how do you do that?
Sheree Warren, in many ways, feels less like somebody I know than Susan Powell or Joyce Yost, because I didn't have the opportunity to, as with Susan, read her journal or study several years' worth of her personal correspondence with friends.
I didn't have the anecdotes from interviewing people that she interacted with every day. Sheree was also younger, you know, Joyce lived much longer and because of that had more of a life to talk about.Sheree, you know, being 25 and the length of time
between when she disappeared to now is a problem.When I talked to her family, I asked, do you have photos, old home videos?None of that material was available.So it is a challenge.I want to tell stories that are victim-centered and victim-focused.
But unless you have somebody who is willing to step forward and speak on behalf of this missing person, that becomes incredibly difficult.
This comes from Callie Esprit.Could her ex-husband not identify what jacket she was wearing that morning when she met him with their son?Or the guy she was working with, would he be able to say which jacket she was wearing?
So this listener is actually asking, like, isn't there some way to confirm outside the mom what she was wearing that day so you have a better idea?And I would also ask you to broaden that.Like, how difficult is it with eyewitness?
Like, you know, do you remember what I wore yesterday?
Yeah, that's we did see each other yesterday.
I don't recall what you wore yesterday I barely recall what I wore and even if I were to tell you I might get some details wrong This question about what was sherry wearing the morning She disappeared is important because as we talked about in the season it potentially tells us whether or not she met up with Carrie Hartman later because this
Graceway jacket ends up in Carrie's apartment.We can't account for how it got there, other than Cherie's mom said that that was the jacket Cherie was wearing the morning that she left for work.
Now, Mary Sorensen was the lone witness who said that's what Cherie was wearing.We know that she did see Richard Moss at work.He provided police with notes that he made that talked about what Cherie was wearing.He did not mention a jacket in those.
Chuck Warren did do a custody exchange with Cherie that morning.He could have potentially said that as well.But early in the investigation, remember, police did not yet know about this discrepancy with a jacket at the time.
Chuck said he wasn't going to have any more contact and didn't want to do the polygraph in that So they don't think you becomes important.
You may not know at the moment.
They didn't know it until later, right?And so here I come years and years later.I'm looking at this situation I want to go ask Chuck Warren about it.
Chuck Warren has dementia ethically I can't interview him and ask him because even if he told me oh, I remember she wore that I can't take that as fact, so Richard Moss potentially could, you know, say, oh, she was wearing that.
But I think you would see that in a in a court of law, if you were to try to introduce that as a witness, verifying the passage of time, and the fact that he didn't say that originally, probably would not stand up.
And people might weigh a mom's testimony more than a coworker's testimony as far as that goes.
Yeah, I think there are just a lot of reasons why that becomes a really challenging question.I mean, I could show Richard a picture of the jacket, I've seen the jacket, and ask him, do you recall something like this?
But am I now planting that memory for him?Maybe.Yeah, tough.
One last one, and this comes from Reddit.Did anyone check with the car dealership to see if Charles Warren actually had an appointment the day Cherie was last seen?
Jack Bell told me that he did talk to staff at Wagstaff Toyota.They confirmed that Chuck Warren had had an appointment and canceled it.But again, we go back to the problem of the poor records.
There is no report that was written stating who he talked to or who would have told him that.
Unfortunately.The long jog.
The long jog.The long jog.
Thanks for joining us today, Dave.
Hey, thank you for the opportunity.
What a great discussion with Dave.You can count on him and the entire COLD team to come back with updates if there are developments in the Cherie Warren case and in our first and second seasons, too.
I also want to thank Associate Professor of Journalism at Weber State University, Dr. Jean Norman, for joining us.Very illuminating. Production by Nina Ernest and Ben Kebrick, with mixing also by Ben Kebrick.
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 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.Cold is a production of KSL Podcasts and Amazon Music in association with Workhouse Media.
If you like cold, you can binge all episodes ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.
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