Dave Cawley (46:50)
Eleven years ago, Honda invented the ATC three wheeler, and ever since, folks have been inventing new ways to use it. Many hunters today will quarter a deer and haul it out of the forest on a four wheeler, but I didn't know if that would have been so simple with a more primitive three wheeler. Vintage three wheelers are narrower, weigh less, and are more maneuverable than four wheelers. People took them everywhere, cutting new trails and ripping up vegetation. It's mainly the small all terrain cycles, or ATCs that are at the heart of the problem. Popular with kids and adults alike, they're fun to ride and go almost anywhere. They're also dangerous. Most three wheelers didn't have suspension, meaning they couldn't carry as much weight and were rough to ride. They also had a tendency to tip or roll, causing injuries or even death. That's why manufacturers stopped making them in 1987. But you can still buy old ones secondhand, which is what I did. Former South Ogden police Detective Terry Carpenter, who I met while working on the Joyce Yost case in season two of this podcast, was able to secure permission for me to access the private land on the mountain between Causey and Lost Creek reservoirs. The slash in the percent sign Terry and I met at Lost Creek one morning in July of 2022. I unrolled a large map of the area across the tailgate of Terry's truck. So we're going to come up Kilfoyle all the way up to the corral, right? Right. And we're going to hang a left. Our target established, we headed up the mountain. Terry had the key to open the gate. It was a long ride, nearly 15 miles one way from Lost Creek. We came to the spot on the mountain where Fred Johns, the elk hunting guide, had told police he saw Kerry Hartman and another man, possibly Kerry's younger brother, Jack. On the Sunday after Sherry Warren disappeared, Terry Carpenter and I stepped out into the clearing on the ridge. Standing there in the summer sun, I tried to imagine we what reason Carrie might have had for coming to this isolated spot four days after his girlfriend vanished. He had reportedly told Fred Johns, the hunting guide he was looking for elk. But as we have heard from Cary's own brother, what did he hunt? To the best of your present recollection, just deer. Just deer. So was Kerry stalking elk? Or had he harbored more sinister intentions? To test whether an old three wheeler could have carried a human body from this roadside clearing deeper into the forest, I needed an object similar in size, shape and weight. I pulled three bags of rock salt out of Terry's truck. Each one weighed 40 pounds. I spread a set of painter's coveralls on the dirt, then poured the 120lbs of rock salt into the corner coveralls through a zippered opening on the chest. Cherie's driver's license listed her as 5 foot 5 and 115 pounds. So this is about as much as a human body would weigh. 120 pounds of rock salt. And it is not easy to move. Terry and I lifted the simulated body onto the rack mounted on the back of my three wheeler. One, two, three. I'm a reasonably fit guy, but this task felt more difficult than I had anticipated. Come around this side. You got it. Not just because of the weight. The simulated body proved unwieldy. Okay, that is a two person job. You are not doing that alone. I've never moved an actual deceased human body, so I'm not sure how well this approximated reality. But a second set of hands made a huge difference. I'm not sure I could have managed on my own. With the simulated body in place, I fired up the three wheeler's small engine and headed down the dirt road. Having so much additional weight over the rear axle took pressure off the single front tire, which in turn made steering less effective. The engine felt sluggish. The rear tires rubbed on the plastic fenders, but the frame didn't bottom out. And with enough extra extra throttle, the three wheeler did go. I rode about a Quarter mile to a place where I knew from my research an old jeep trail forked off from the road. Maps from the 80s showed that trail descending into a canyon called Pete Nelson Hollow. This was one of the places I believed it was plausible Kerry Hartman might have gone on that Sunday so many years ago, it appeared evident the jeep trail hadn't seen seen use in a long time. Trees had fallen across the path and the underbrush had reclaimed the old tire tracks. I decided not to try and ride down it myself because of the risk of getting stuck. Instead, I scouted the old trail on foot. This would be a pretty tough path to get a three wheeler down. You could do it, but you would need to be a pretty good rider. And with the extra weight from a body, it would not be a fun ride. That might have been different in 1985 when the path wasn't so overgrown. The old ATV trail ended at a set of springs where water rose out of the ground and created a series of murky pools. These springs feed into Kazi Reservoir. They were surrounded by thick fields of a poisonous plant called false hellebore. I crashed through it, finding it so dense I couldn't see down past my own waist. You might walk by a human body in this kind of environment and be 10ft away from it and not ever see it emerging. On the other side of the hellebore patch, I saw meadows of dandelions and clear views farther down into the canyon. If I had been on the three wheeler, I could have easily kept riding. It's hard to describe without being up here and seeing this landscape, just how futile it feels if you were trying to find a human body up here. Still, I found myself getting sucked into the moment. I wanted to abandon my experiment and instead wander searching for Cherie. I knew the odds of finding anything were slim, but irrational hope sometimes leads the mind astray. What if, I wondered, I just happened across a chip of bone or fragment of cloth, some remnant, but no, no delusions of grandeur. I hiked back to the three wheeler with a newfound knowledge of what I had only suspected before. Human remains could easily go undetected in these mountain meadows. And it's possible, I believe, somebody could have driven a three wheeler down from the ridge into this opening. If Kerry Hartman killed Cherie Warren, my experiment suggests it's plausible. He could have used one of his three wheelers to move her body into the backcountry on this mountain beyond where police might bother to look. But maybe there's another explanation for what Kerry was doing here. Four days after Cherie Warren disappeared. It's a question I would very much like to ask him. And Kerry, if you're listening, you have an open invitation to come give your answer. When I first met former Roy police detective Jack Bell, we didn't start off talking about the Cherie Warren case. Instead, Jack opened our conversation by talking about another case I wasn't familiar with from the mid-80s.
