The Search for Sheree | Talking Cold: Who Owns Your Case? | 11

Summary

Podcast Summary: Cold – The Search for Sheree | Talking Cold: Who Owns Your Case? | Episode 11 (April 24, 2023)

---

Episode Overview

This episode of Talking Cold, a companion series to KSL's Cold podcast, focuses on the complex topic of jurisdictional issues in missing persons and homicide investigations. Hosts Amy Donaldson and Sheryl Worsley discuss how overlapping police jurisdictions—and the administrative, political, and personal dynamics between agencies—can seriously hinder investigations, specifically using the 1985 disappearance of Sheree Warren as a case study. Guests Sheriff Aaron Kennard and former Roy Police Chief Carl Marino provide firsthand accounts of the challenges police face, the impact on victims' families, and the persistent problem of professional egos in law enforcement.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context: Sheree Warren’s Case and Jurisdictional Hot Potato

• Sheree Warren disappeared in Salt Lake City (1985), but because she was a Roy resident, both cities deflected responsibility.
• Salt Lake City PD argued Roy PD should handle the case, while Roy’s limited resources made thorough investigation challenging.
  • Quote:
    “The last place she was known that people knew where she was was Salt Lake. So the case should have been handled out of Salt Lake, but they said, no, she's a Roy citizen, and so we're not going to work it.”
    — Carl Marino [01:43]
• The lack of a clearly “owned” case led to stagnation and heartbreak for the victim’s family and community.

2. Jurisdictional Complexity in Utah Law Enforcement

• The Salt Lake Valley is a patchwork of cities (each with a police force), unincorporated county areas (handled by the Sheriff), and overlapping authorities.
• In the 1990s, a proposed “Metro Police Department” aimed to unify agencies and eliminate these turf wars, but political resistance (especially from mayors and local officials) killed the idea.
  • Quote:
    “A mayor really needs to have the power of being over a police department... a sheriff has total jurisdiction... A police chief works for the mayor. Whereas the sheriff is an elected official and works for, like, 750,000 people.”
    — Sheriff Aaron Kennard [06:55]

3. The Real-World Consequences of Jurisdictional Disputes

• Jurisdictional tension and reluctance to share information delay or prevent resolutions.
• Smaller police departments are often overwhelmed logistically and financially by serious cases that cross city boundaries.
• Key challenges: insufficient manpower, unfamiliarity with other city areas, and difficulty absorbing the extra investigative load.
  • Quote:
    “With Roy at that time, there were 17 officers... for Roy to fund a trip to Las Vegas, you're not going to send one, so you got to send two. So now you've sent, you know, 10% of your police department to Las Vegas ... Salt Lake could have easily absorbed the investigation.”
    — Carl Marino [25:31]

4. Ego and “Professional Jealousy”: The Human Barrier

• Both Kennard and Marino describe a culture where individual officers—and entire departments—are concerned about prestige, credit, and reputations. This often trumps the drive for collaboration:
  • Larger agencies fear “little guys interfering”;
  • Small agencies resent being bossed around;
  • Detectives may not share crucial info to protect their own egos or because they distrust the abilities of others.
• Quote:
  “Some of it is just straightly ego driven. ... One of the other things is, you know, I've talked to this detective from the other agency. I don't think he's capable... [or] they've got their own theory, they're going to complicate it.”
  — Carl Marino [19:39]

5. Information Sharing: Pros, Cons, and Progress

• 1980s policing: paperwork, red tape, multiple approvals, and hand-written reports all hindered timely coordination.
• Even with modern databases, turf wars and approval hierarchies inhibit broad information sharing.
  • Quote:
    “Back when I first started, all reports were handwritten. So if you wanted a copy of a report, you had to get approval from the detective... maybe a chief, to release a report to another agency. And you then have egos all the way up the line.”
    — Carl Marino [27:17]
• Technology and a younger generation of officers have improved collaboration, but the culture shift is ongoing.

6. The Debate Over Metro Police Departments

Pros:

• Better information sharing, more resources, comprehensive training, broader job diversity, quicker response to major events.
• Small departments can be spread dangerously thin.
• Quote:
  “When you have one or two police officers covering a city... That's clearly not a good situation, especially for her.”
  — Amy Donaldson [11:50]

Cons:

• Higher cost, potential for corruption and abuses to become systemic, challenge of maintaining transparency in a larger body.
• Quote:
  “Abuses are easier to cover when you're unwieldy like that and huge like that... I'm not going to say that it's automatic that with big also comes corruption, but it's also easier to cover when that happens.”
  — Sheryl Worsley [12:49]

7. Reserve Officers and the Dangers of Insufficient Training

• In the 1980s, reserve officers (like suspect Kerry Hartman) could join with minimal vetting and training.
• Reserve officers augmented stretched departments but had much less authority and training than full-fledged officers.
  • Quote:
    “Back when I started, there was no requirement... The department would bring you on as a volunteer. They would provide you what training they thought you should have ... We didn't have the authority to make arrests...”
    — Carl Marino [33:07]
• The minimal barriers could attract those seeking authority for the wrong reasons.
  • Quote:
    “You get the ones that, this guy has a huge ego, he's never wrong, and, you know, as a chief, you just don't hire people like that.”
    — Carl Marino [37:49]

8. Changing Attitudes: Old-School Ego vs. Modern Collaboration

• The hosts and guests discuss the “Dirty Harry”/Clint Eastwood ethos that prevailed in past policing—a lone-wolf, anti-collaborative ideal that is now seen as counterproductive.
• The new generation is more willing to work as a team, share information, and avoid unnecessary turf battles.
  • Quote:
    “The feeling that we have to be better. We can't let those egos, we can't let those kind of problems hinder good police work.”
    — Carl Marino [31:51]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The damn homicides are not a political issue.”
  — Sheriff Aaron Kennard quoting a victim’s father, on the devastation jurisdictional squabbles cause [03:48]

• “There’s no statistic kept on the things that we should have done or could have done... the jurisdictional issues cause these problems, and they don’t have the other road. They can’t go down that road and say, if we had had this information or if we had shared that, you don’t know what somebody else knows.”
  — Amy Donaldson [10:25]

• “When you’re trying to solve crimes, it’s not a competition, except between law enforcement and whoever committed the crime.”
  — Carl Marino [23:01]

• “Unfortunately, the Dirty Harry guys don’t make good cops. And I think that’s probably one benefit that’s come out of the last few years of police being under the microscope and being criticized so heavily, is the feeling that we have to be better.”
  — Carl Marino [31:51]

• “The benefit [of larger departments] is if you have the kind of police department that is interested in, you know, a holistic type and a community oriented policing... Let’s make it something that is more holistic.”
  — Amy Donaldson [12:36, 13:51]

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:22 – Introduction to the episode’s theme: “Who owns your case?” and jurisdictional confusion in Sheree Warren’s disappearance
• 01:37 – Explanation of the “hot potato” jurisdictional handoff and initial resistance by Salt Lake City PD
• 03:22–04:53 – 1990s push for a Metro Police Department; Kennard on the pervasiveness of turf wars
• 05:58–10:59 – Sheriff Kennard on how jurisdictional roadblocks develop, persist, and why they’re hard to fix
• 11:11–13:51 – Pros and cons of creating a metro police department, including cultural and systemic barriers
• 15:05–18:20 – Carl Marino outlines his direct involvement with the Warren case and cross-agency breakdown
• 19:39–21:15 – Discussion of ego as a disabling factor in detective work and its ripple effect on investigations
• 23:01–25:31 – Egos, mistakes, and the minimal resources available to small-town departments
• 27:17–29:28 – Technological advances vs. human barriers in information sharing
• 29:28–32:19 – Generational change in law enforcement culture; influence of pop culture (Dirty Harry, The Sopranos)
• 33:07–36:56 – What are reserve officers? The risks of insufficient training and vetting
• 37:29–38:12 – Why reserves can be risky: potential for people seeking authority over service

---

Conclusions & Takeaways

The episode presents a thorough examination of the deep-rooted problems and slow progress in law enforcement collaboration, especially in complex cases like Sheree Warren’s. Through personal anecdotes, policy debates, and candid evaluation of police culture, “Who Owns Your Case?” challenges listeners to understand that investigative failures are often less about resources or intent, and more about power, pride, and outdated systems. The discussion ultimately encourages continued reform—both structural and cultural—to ensure that victims and families don’t fall through the cracks.

---

Transcript

[Amy Donaldson]

Hi, I'm Amy Donaldson.

[Sheryl Worsley]

And I'm Sheryl Worsley. And this is Talking Cold.

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

Phone records showed that he had made.

[Carl Marino]

Literally thousands of those types of calls.

[Amy Donaldson]

There's so much more that I could have asked and maybe they could have found that body.

[Carl Marino]

I went that way and she went that way and never heard from again.

[Amy Donaldson]

On this season of Talking Cold, we are going to dive deep into some really fascinating and very frustrating issues raised in the latest season of the Cold podcast. Hopefully you've all had a chance to listen to season three, the Search for Cherie.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Amy in case our listeners haven't heard Talking Cold before and don't know who we are, let's introduce ourselves.

[Amy Donaldson]

I'll start. I've been a journalist for a little bit over 30 years, most of that time spent in print journalism, and came over to podcasting about two years ago for ksl and I'm the host of.

[Sheryl Worsley]

The Letter and I've been in journalism for 20 plus years, most of that in newsroom management, but have managed the KSL podcasts unit for the last several years. This episode is all about policing issues. In season three of Cold, host Dave Cawley unravels the mystery surrounding Cherie Warren's disappearance. And one of the aspects of Dave's reporting that really caught our attention was the role of police, both in the investigation and in the life of one of the two suspects in Warren's disappearance. Kerry Hartman, A big question we have is who owns your case when you go missing or are murdered? That is what happens when there are problems with jurisdiction. Let's play a clip.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Carl saw how jurisdictional politics had made Cherie's case a hot potato from the start.

[Carl Marino]

The last place she was known that people knew where she was was Salt Lake. So the case should have been handled out of Salt Lake, but they said, no, she's a Royce citizen, and so we're not going to work it.

[Amy Donaldson]

All right. We want to acknowledge right up front that discussing jurisdictional issues is going to be confusing and maybe seem a little obtuse, but we want to explain to you why it's important in the lives of real people. When Cherie Warren disappeared from Salt Lake City in 1985, the Salt Lake Police Department was struggling to solve a string of murders and disappearances. Salt Lake is Utah's capital city and was at the time home to its largest police force. But Salt Lake City is just one of several cities in the Salt Lake Valley, most of which have their own police departments.

[Sheryl Worsley]

The valley includes patches of unincorporated communities, places that Aren't part of any organized city policing in those areas was the responsibility of the Salt Lake county sheriff's office.

[Amy Donaldson]

I covered the Salt Lake county sheriff's office in the 90s for the Deseret News. And it was in 1994 that Sheriff Aaron Kennard announced the creation of a cold case homicide task force. That was a little bit more than eight years after Sharia Warren disappeared. It was a cooperative effort, and each of cities and the sheriff's office pledged money and manpower to try to solve some of these cases. News reporters asked sheriff Kenned at a press conference if his task force would look at several Salt Lake city cases from the mid-1980s, like the Cherie Warren case or the three murders linked to a single.38 caliber handgun discussed in Cold Season 3. Sheriff Kenner said that Salt lake police chief Ruben Ortega told him not to interfere. Let's listen to a bit of that 1994 press conference.

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

What Ortega has commented to me and maintains that today is that these are active cases being investigated by Salt Lake city and that they would prefer that they handle them. And I will defer to them in that regard.

[Sheryl Worsley]

A lot of those cases never got solved in part because of this jurisdictional tug of war and this really upset victims families. In this clip, you hear the father of murder victim Christine Gallegos.

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

The damn homicides are not a political issue.

[Carl Marino]

It's homicide. I mean, you know, someone's dead.

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

The county commissioners are sympathetic, but say it's not the sheriff's case. He cannot go in and force Reuben Ortega to turn over a homicide, an ongoing homicide investigation to his people. If the sheriff, if the police chief is not willing to do that.

[Amy Donaldson]

So we reached out to sheriff Aaron Kennard. He was a Salt Lake city police officer for 20 years before he ran for sheriff. He was sheriff of Salt Lake county for 16 years. He spent almost in his entire 16 years advocating for a metro police department that would, you know, basically combine all of the smaller departments into one major police agency that served the entire Salt Lake county area. And it never worked. He still cares about these issues. He's retired now, lives out of state. So you're going to hear remote recording where I had a discussion with him about jurisdictional issues. So what. What impact would you say jurisdictional issues have on solving cases? Do they delay it or prevent it? Like what issues does it cause?

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

It causes a lot of issues because of the lack of cooperation. Sometimes it prevents immediate resolution because of cross jurisdictional boundaries and especially in apprehension. If we don't have the cooperation and the bad guys know that because when I was a detective with Salt Lake City and we were working in conjunction with South Salt Lake detective because we had a rash of burglaries close to the boundaries between Salt Lake City and South Salt Lake, we finally caught these burglars and in interviewing them, found out that they wanted to make sure that they were on the other side of the line rather than Salt Lake City. If they were in South Salt Lake or in another jurisdiction, they didn't have to worry so much about being caught because it seemed like Salt Lake City was more aggressive at the time.

[Amy Donaldson]

Did you see the jurisdictional issues cropping up when you were a police officer? Were you aware of them or was that something you became more aware of when you became sheriff?

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

Oh, I became aware of them the higher I went up in the ranks of the police department, because as I became a sergeant and then a lieutenant and as major incidents took place, it was very evident that there were people with different agendas and there was resistance to cooperation. And I couldn't figure that out. I didn't understand why that was the case, and I still don't today, other than I know now full well, having experienced it, really just the professional jealousies that are there that really cause all this issue.

[Amy Donaldson]

You were an advocate for creating like a Metro Police Department at Salt Lake County. What was the resistance?

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

The resistance came from the political leaders of all the respective agencies. A mayor really needs to have the power of being over a police department or a fire department. If they have those two big dogs in their portfolio, then they have what we call power. A sheriff has total jurisdiction and responsibilities for everything in the county. A police chief simply responds and does what is required of local law enforcement, but really works for one person, and that's the mayor or the city manager. Whereas the sheriff is an elected official and works for like I was working for 750,000 people at the time. The chief naturally did whatever the mayors.

[Amy Donaldson]

Wanted, but it seems like, does the public not aware, like, why? Why can't we fix this problem? These jurisdictional issues, why can't we fix them in Salt Lake County?

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

Well, the public is aware of it, but the public doesn't care enough because there are some downfalls in that. It may cost more, but you're getting more for your dollar. You're going to have more people. It's going to cost more to keep them there, and it's going to cost more to train, but you're going to get better trained people. And the public seem to think that well, we've got our own little police department. We can handle anything. Well, you may be able to until the big one hits, and then you need some help.

[Amy Donaldson]

And by big one, you mean like a homicide?

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

Well, like a multiple mass shooting homicide. Something wherein you don't have enough people to respond. You don't have. You know, a lot of these smaller police departments don't have a SWAT team. And if you have a hostage situation or school shooting and you've got to go in and immediately resolve the situation, and if they don't have the manpower to do this, then they have to call on others. And of course, we will all respond to the call for help. It doesn't matter. We're not going to worry about jurisdictional issues or anything of that nature. When that big call comes out for help, we roll.

[Amy Donaldson]

Do you think it affects the rate, the solve rate, like the. Do you think some crimes don't go or some patterns don't go get seen because there is so many agencies?

[Sheriff Aaron Kennard]

I don't have proof of that, Amy. I just have my own gut feeling and my own observations from having been a cop for 40 years, seeing, well, this could have happened better, faster. I don't know that I could ever show you that there was never a crime that was not solved or somebody was not arrested because of jurisdictional issues. I know for a fact that was a hindrance and a take, took more time and probably was not as easy as it should have been.

[Amy Donaldson]

You know, I think the thing that Sheriff Kennert is saying there, that I hear is there's no statistic kept on the things that we should have done or could have done. Right. So the jurisdictional issues cause these problems, and they don't have the other road. They can't go down that road and say, if we had had this information or if we had shared that, you don't know what somebody else knows. So that's. That's really the problem with trying to assess the real impact of jurisdictional issues is that there are no statistics on the ways in which we fail.

[Sheryl Worsley]

We don't keep track on cases that don't get solved because we can't get along.

[Amy Donaldson]

Yeah, it's. It's really not possible. All you can say is, like, we didn't cooperate and it didn't get solved.

[Sheryl Worsley]

So let's talk for a minute about what we think the pros and cons of a big metro police department are.

[Amy Donaldson]

Yeah, I mean, I think obviously Sheriff Kennard pointed out what is the biggest detractor, and that is money. If it costs more for a bigger department, people are not going to be as willing to jump on board. But I think if you reimagine the kind of department you created, like it takes longer to become a hairdresser than it does to become a cop. I think if you had some kind of educational requirement where people were, they were going to learn something, they were going to grow in this position, even at an entry level. I think giving a 19 year old a gun and a badge and that much power is part of the issue that you have.

[Sheryl Worsley]

So I think that would be a con, whether it's part of a Metro police department or a municipal police department.

[Amy Donaldson]

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think a larger police department has more training opportunities, they have more a diversity of jobs. You can find what you're good at, whereas if you have eight people in the department, you're just going to be doing every job. I'll give you an example. When I was covering night police, there was a police department that had one dispatcher on duty and she had to call a police officer in off the street out of patrol to cover while she went to the restroom and so, or go on a lunch break. I think that is clearly not a good situation, especially for her. Well, but especially, I mean, this is. The people on the street. Yeah. They're like, where's my police officer? Oh, you know, he's covering dispatch duty. Right. So when you have one or two police officers covering a city and you know, that was a busy city.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Yeah.

[Amy Donaldson]

You know, so I, I think that bigger is better for, for the general public if you have the kind of police department that is interested in, you know, a holistic type and a community oriented policing.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Yeah. And, and that's, that is key because I'll give you a con of a potential con for a Metro police department and that is abuses are easier to cover when you are unwieldy like that and huge like that. I'm not going to say that it's automatic that with big also comes corruption, but it's also easier to cover when, when that happens.

[Amy Donaldson]

Sure. It can become systemic, which is why I think that maybe more important than the money aspect of it is to say if we're going to put more money into this, we're going to reimagine it. We're going to re, we're going to completely change the way we look at this. We're not just going to keep dumping money into the same system that we know can be corrupted. We're going to go ahead and re. Rework this like what do we want? Who do we want in these roles? What do we want to ask of them? Do we want them to have a two year degree?

[Sheryl Worsley]

And here are our safeguards to make sure when we screw up, we're not able to cover up for ourselves that there is some mechanism that comes in here and make sure that we are honest and clean.

[Amy Donaldson]

Yeah, because I think the problems with policing are very complicated and they're, they cross a lot of issues. So let's make it something that is more holistic.

[Sheryl Worsley]

So let's list some, some pros. These are really easy. I mean, better communication between departments, information sharing. I guess the thing for me is I don't understand why you need some great big metro police force in order for police to cooperate with each other. Can't we just have a giant database? Cannot we, can we just not unify like the dispatcher can't be on the.

[Amy Donaldson]

Same team even though we're wearing.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Can't we be on the same team even though we're, we're not from the same police department?

[Amy Donaldson]

Ideally, yes, that would be amazing, but that's not the way it works. Well, why, to find out why, let's talk to former Roy Police Chief Carl Moreno after this break. Today we're going to be joined by retired Roy Police Chief Carl Marino, who you heard from in the podcast.

[Carl Marino]

They had an opening for chief of police and I applied and they selected me.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And so that's how Carl became Detective John Frawley's boss just weeks after Frawley had reopened the Cherie Warren cold case.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Thanks for joining us, Carl.

[Carl Marino]

Thanks for having me.

[Amy Donaldson]

So Carl, will you give us just a little bit of background, your background with this case?

[Carl Marino]

Well, it's a convoluted mess. I've been involved with it three different times. Initially before I became a paid police officer, I was a reserve officer with Ogden and I was at my regular job one day and our reserve coordinator gave me a call and said, I need you down here at the police department immediately with your gun. And that's always, that makes you nervous. You think, you know, they're asking you to turn your gun and you've done something wrong. And I couldn't think, you know, it's not word. What did I get caught doing? I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong. And so I went down and Kerry had been a reserve officer before me and he had been issued the gun that I used and there had been some implications that he had threatened some of his victims with a gun and it was the gun I had. So they took that gun back as evidence.

[Amy Donaldson]

What was it like to realize that you had his gun?

[Carl Marino]

That was kind of. Kind of creepy. You're thinking, what did he do with it? And I believe that was about 85, 86. And then I worked at Salt Lake PD for most of my career for 21 years. And I was assigned homicide. And at that time, Rocky Anderson was our mayor. And it had come to his attention that there were a bunch of cases of young women in the mid-80s that had gone missing and or been murdered that hadn't been investigated properly. And I was assigned one of those cases along with another detective as a follow up to go back and relook at this cold case.

[Amy Donaldson]

Were you assigned Cherie's case?

[Carl Marino]

No.

[Amy Donaldson]

No. Okay.

[Carl Marino]

No. Salt Lake didn't even acknowledge that that was. That it happened.

[Sheryl Worsley]

And closing the loop on your experience after Salt Lake, you returned to Roy as chief?

[Carl Marino]

As the chief, yes. I went back to Roy as the chief and one of the detectives came to me and said, can we work this case?

[Amy Donaldson]

So it's basically spanned your entire career.

[Carl Marino]

It has.

[Amy Donaldson]

From the time you were reserved to now.

[Carl Marino]

Yeah.

[Sheryl Worsley]

You called that or Dave called that. I don't know if that was you or Dave. Kind of a hot potato. Should Salt Lake have done anything with Cherie's case?

[Carl Marino]

They should have. There's a lot of cases that cross jurisdictions and are hard to determine. Missing persons is a situation where wherever the person goes missing from, they could be a. In this case, where she was a Roy resident, still lived in Roy, Salt Lake should have been the lead agency. And cooperating with Roy is a joint investigation trying to tie it together. And then when her car turned up in Las Vegas, Las Vegas should have been brought in on. Should have been three agencies working it together. And it turned out that the only agency that actually worked it was Roy.

[Amy Donaldson]

So I guess you're kind of alluding to it, but like, how does. How do jurisdictional issues, when they crop up, how do they impact how a case gets resolved? If it gets resolved, how long it takes, how does it impact an actual case?

[Carl Marino]

Ideally, and you know, I've seen it more, say in the last 10 to 15 years, where agencies will cooperate. I worked a number of various task forces during my career and we did a lot of cooperation and I saw a huge benefit to that. But back in the 80s, it was still territorial. And you might have somebody like Salt Lake, and if they're tied into a case in Roy, they don't want to have the Little guys coming up interfering with their investigation and so they won't cooperate with the smaller agencies. Sometimes you won't have a smaller agency cooperate with a larger agency because I'm not going to have the big boys tell me what to do. And it gets fairly petty.

[Amy Donaldson]

I mean, it seems like the incentive is to work together, like you were saying, with these task force and everybody wants to solve the cases. I'm assuming most police officers are in this line of work because they wanted to help people, they wanted to solve the cases. So why does it stall out? Why do these things happen? Why does it cause so many issues?

[Carl Marino]

There's multiple reasons. Some of it is just straightly ego driven. You know, I'm not going to let anybody else in on this. I want to be the one to solve it. Which is a fatal flaw. One of the other things is, you know, I've talked to this detective from the other agency. I don't think he's capable of investigating. So I'm not going to deal with him. He's going to just slow me down. I'm the one who can solve it or they can't solve it and they're just going to convolute it. They've got their own theory, they're going to complicate it and make it where it doesn't progress the investigation at all.

[Sheryl Worsley]

What are some of the cons in keeping that information so close to the vest?

[Carl Marino]

Mostly information sharing.

[Amy Donaldson]

Okay.

[Carl Marino]

You need to be able to share. There's little things that'll just click. You'll get one detective who will go and interview somebody and won't tell the other agency what they found out. The other agency might have trouble finding that person again to interview them, they get different answers. You need to compare the answers. You need to share the information. That's how you find people who are lying to you. And you know, as I talk to somebody, I hear something and it's like, okay, you know, that doesn't make any sense. And then somebody else will have another small piece of it. And when you hear that, it's like, oh, wait a minute. That ties in with what I have. And that's really how crimes get solved.

[Amy Donaldson]

Are most detectives protective or are most detectives pretty open at like, look, help. Do you see anything? I missed?

[Carl Marino]

Most of the detectives I worked with, I think were more concerned with doing a good job. I can think of several who. It was absolutely 100% ego driven. And they were the ones who wouldn't share information. You know, they, they. I can think of numerous Investigations where we were told to go out and do interviews, and we would never be told anything that was pertinent to the case. And these were large cases. And so when you talk to somebody and they start telling you something, you don't know what you're looking for. And some of these cases never got solved. And you wonder, had we been sharing, at least with the detectives who were working the cases, what would the outcome have been with that? But you do see that. You see egos where it gets very protective, and I'm not going to let anybody know what I'm doing.

[Sheryl Worsley]

You have mentioned egos. I'd like to dive into egos a little bit deeper, and we have a clip for that.

[Carl Marino]

We found out that there were a lot of mistakes made early in the investigation.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Carl told me, in his experience, cops often resist sharing information with the public, victims, witnesses, and even with other officers. And there can be good reasons for that. Giving out too much info can tip off suspects or taint an investigation.

[Carl Marino]

It's a balancing act. You've got to know what you can release.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But Carl told me police egos sometimes cause investigators to be overprotective. That can lead to turf battles that stymie investigations.

[Carl Marino]

When you're trying to solve crimes, it's not a competition, except between law enforcement and whoever committed the crime.

[Amy Donaldson]

When you talk about egos being involved, what exactly does that look like?

[Carl Marino]

I think you have to look at the personality of a police officer to start with. You know, to do the job that we do and to make the decisions and to be willing to put people in jail and live with the decisions you make. Police officers have a fairly strong ego to start with. And then when you start getting the competition of who's the better police officer, then it can start getting out of hand. And when it starts getting into who's the better detective, or is somebody going to look at my work and say, I didn't do the right thing, then people can get very protective of their ego, more than protective of the public.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Does that formulate into why Cherie's case was treated like a hot potato?

[Carl Marino]

I think that with Salt Lake, that was a big part of it. They had a number of missing women and murdered young women. It had every indication of being maybe a serial killer or just something that was out of control. You lean towards the serial killer because it's the same stereotype of victim. And so that's where you would go with that. And the sergeant that I had when we started working these cold cases said that the detectives from that time period, and that was before I got there, had big egos and they knew everything and they didn't like not being able to solve the case, so probably just didn't want to take another one that made them look bad.

[Sheryl Worsley]

You mentioned in the clip that there were some mistakes made, and I think you might have covered some of those. But could you tell us what you meant early on in the investigation about.

[Carl Marino]

Mistakes on Cherie's case? The big thing that I see is Salt Lake didn't get involved.

[Amy Donaldson]

So what does that mean for those of us who aren't familiar with the resources available to Roy versus the resources available to Salt Lake pd, which what does that mean to an investigation?

[Carl Marino]

Well, when you look at Salt Lake, you have about 400 officers at that time. There's more than that now, but you had about 400 officers. You had a detective division of about 80 people. With Roy at that time, there were 17 officers. And so even the money to come to Salt Lake, between Roy and Salt Lake, you've got a 30 mile trip each way. Then you don't know the area in Salt Lake, and so you don't know even where to look. You know, when I first came as a police officer to Salt Lake, I spent more time in Salt Lake my first week here than I'd spent my entire life. So I knew nothing about Salt Lake, you know, or when the car turned up in Las Vegas, you know, for Roy to fund a trip to Las Vegas, you're not going to send one, so you got to send two. So now you've sent, you know, 10% of your police department to Las Vegas to look into the investigation and how long can you send them there and how, you know, what's the expense for doing that? And so Salt Lake would, could have easily absorbed the investigation here, where for Roy, it was quite an expense and quite, quite a challenge for them to try and investigate it from there. All of their investigation ended up in Ogden and Roy.

[Sheryl Worsley]

I hear this a lot from police agencies that back in, you know, back in the dinosaur ages, when we didn't have computers, we couldn't cooperate because we couldn't compile all the data. How true is that? Is that a cop out or is it, or is it legit?

[Carl Marino]

No, there is. Back when I first started, all reports were handwritten. So if you wanted a copy of a report, you had to go get approval from the detective who had to get approval from his sergeant, maybe a captain, maybe a chief, to release a report to another agency. And you then have egos all the way up the line. And there may be old turf battles, even up to the chief level, and say, no, we're not going to let XYZ investigate our case and so we won't share information with them.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Has technology improved that situation?

[Carl Marino]

It has. And in a lot of the counties, you will have one type of report writing system. You're able to share all that information. It still goes back to a detective and a sergeant and a captain has to approve the release of that information. But the minute that you get that approval, you can look at everything that's there.

[Amy Donaldson]

How much of it is, you know, old turf battles and not wanting to share, and how much of it is we don't necessarily want other people to know how we do things.

[Carl Marino]

Both. There's a lot of that, you know, if. If a police supervisor thinks that his guys haven't done the right thing, he's not going to let any information out and let it possibly get to the media from another agency. And one of the problems that you see, it seems like it should just be natural that if it's in the. If a report is in the system, everybody should be able to see it. But to give you an example, I worked the Elizabeth Smart case, and the minute she returned, we had every agency in the county who was trying to get into the database to see what really happened. Completely unprofessional by every agency trying to do that. But they wanted to know the story. So that's why you keep control. You may have. Maybe you're investigating another officer in another department for something and you don't want them to be able to see what that is either. So there's pros and cons for why it has to be that way.

[Sheryl Worsley]

So we talked about what happened back in the 80s, and technology has improved things. What are some of the jurisdictional issues that persist today?

[Carl Marino]

You will still have individual egos, but for the most part, depending on every county that you go to, there's a lot of cooperation now. It's much better than it used to be. I think it's more a generational thing with the younger generation. They're less territorial. They're not like people my age and older who are more territorial. They're much more collaborative, just much more social.

[Amy Donaldson]

Do you think it has anything to do with Clint Eastwood?

[Carl Marino]

With what?

[Sheryl Worsley]

Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry?

[Carl Marino]

Harry?

[Amy Donaldson]

No. There was in the 80s, like this rogue. I can't work with anyone. You know, Bruce Willis was this guy. You know, I can't follow the rules. I have to do my own Thing. And I think it translated to some officers who kind of wanted to be that guy. Right.

[Carl Marino]

Well, I go back to the Sopranos or the Godfather, and if you read up on that, the Mafia said, they told us, they showed us how we should act. I think that's what TV's done. You know, like I say, if. If I watch most police shows, everybody's angry and everybody's shooting somebody, and, you know, they just hate everybody. And that's just not how it is. But you do get officers who identify with that, and that's how they. We're trying to weed that kind of person out. There's a lot of police officers who are very upset by what's come around in the last few years. But that's one of the things that's good, is that old mentality is not what police work was. You know, I always think of the Norman Rockwell painting of the runaway with a little kid, with his sitting there with the police officer. That's what a lot of us thought of when we became police officers. And then you get in there and it's no, we've got to be. We've got to.

[Amy Donaldson]

So you had the guys who wanted to be the normal Rockwell painting and the guys who wanted to be Dirty Harry. It is.

[Carl Marino]

And unfortunately, the. The dirty hairy guys don't make good cops. And I think that's probably one benefit that's come out of the last few years of police being under the microscope and being criticized so heavily is the. The feeling that we have to be better. We can't let those egos, we can't let those kind of problems hinder good police work.

[Sheryl Worsley]

I want to turn for a second and talk about reserve officers.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Kerry Hartman and his friend Dave Moore both filled out applications to join the Reserve Corps of the Ogden City Police Department during the summer of 1980. A police report would later note Kerry, quote, rode with officers more than an average amount of hours and. And was extremely interested in police work. Kerry himself described his time in the.

[Carl Marino]

Reserve like, acted as backup for partners in all types of situations, from traffic details to crowd control.

[Sheryl Worsley]

And you're kind of unique because you've worked this case and you were a reserve officer and just directly after one of the named suspects in the case, Kerry Hartman. Can you tell us what a reserve officer is? And then the second question, how much training does it take to become one?

[Carl Marino]

Well, back when I started, there was no requirement. A department would bring you on as a volunteer. They would provide you what training they thought you should have, and then they Would use you depending on what their need was. I was with Ogden City as a reserve and they actually had a pretty good training program. Chief Randy Watt, who just retired a couple years ago as the chief back then, was the trainer for the reserve Corps and he did a phenomenal job of trying to train us and get us a basic understanding. We didn't have the authority to make arrests, but we could work with regular officers and go out with them and, you know, we just were a backup is what it was.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Did you have weapons training?

[Carl Marino]

We did, yes, there was. We got all of that kind of, you know, arrest control, all of that kind of stuff. But we didn't get the, all the legal training. So we didn't make the decisions on who had broken which laws. We had a general idea, but that decision was made by a fully trained police officer. We were there, like I say, we were there as a backup.

[Sheryl Worsley]

So you were with someone always, right?

[Carl Marino]

Always.

[Amy Donaldson]

Did you have to pass a background check?

[Carl Marino]

We did.

[Amy Donaldson]

We had to have a background checkground check. And then how long would you say it would be? Like, was it months? Was it weeks, the training that you went through?

[Carl Marino]

We would be trained. We were being trained twice a week. And then once you got through the initial phase, which took us about two months, then you'd have monthly trainings that you would have to attend. Just that kept up to date, kept refreshing you.

[Amy Donaldson]

And when you were out as a reserve officer, did you feel equipped to deal with what your responsibilities were as a reserve officer?

[Carl Marino]

As a reserve officer, I wouldn't have wanted to be out on my own and making the decisions that a full time officer made. I absolutely not. And it wasn't the same type of a background investigation that a full time police officer goes through.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Why do police departments lean on reserve officers? Why do they do it?

[Carl Marino]

It's a force multiplier. Most police departments that have reserve corps don't pay them, but a lot of them do because they'll pay them part time. And usually now what you see is with the reserve officers, they're a. A full police officer that either has worked or does work for another agency and it's a chance to get extra money. Most of them though are full time police officers and they go out on their own, they take a car and.

[Amy Donaldson]

Do, you know, are they still common around the country, these reserve officers?

[Carl Marino]

Not as much as it used to be. It's used.

[Amy Donaldson]

It used to be very common in the 80s 90s, right?

[Carl Marino]

Yeah, it was used to supplement, you know, Ogden used theirs for any parades or like the rodeo for security there, they could put reserve officers there, cut down tremendously on their overtime budgets. But now for the most part, to become a category 2 or a police officer, most people are putting themselves through the academy, which is about a 78, 7 to $8,000 bill, to train yourself and then the agencies will hire you. There's a limited number of state trained where the department hires you and sends you through the academy on their own.

[Amy Donaldson]

Why? Why did you do it?

[Carl Marino]

My father and my brother had both been police officers. It's kind of a family business type thing and always had an interest. But I couldn't afford to live off what a police officer made. And the company that I worked for, I was a sales industrial sales rep. And they restructured commissions several years in a row and supposedly to our betterment. But every year it went down and finally it got low enough that I could afford to take another pay cut and become a full time police officer.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Which is what I wanted to do in most cases. Cases somebody who wants to do a job, that's usually a good thing, right? But in some cases, do you find that there are or were people who wanted to be a reserve officer so they could flash a badge and have authority?

[Carl Marino]

Yes, that is one of the drawbacks to reserves. You get the ones that this guy has a huge ego, he's never wrong and you know, as a chief, you just don't hire people like that.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Thanks again to Carl Marino and Erin Kennard for joining us. We'll be back with another episode of Talking Cold.

[Amy Donaldson]

If you have a comment for us or the Cold Team, you can call us with your questions or comments at 801-575-4399. Leave us a voicemail with your reaction and we might play it on the show.

[Sheryl Worsley]

Production is by Nina Ernest and mixing by Trent Sell 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 Kael Bittner and Allison.

[Amy Donaldson]

Vermeulen with Workhouse Media executive producers Paul Anderson and Nick Panella and KSL Podcasts executive producer Cheryl Worsley.

[Sheryl Worsley]

For pictures and more, go to our website TheColdPodcast.com and follow us on social hed podcast Cold is a production of KSL Podcasts and Amazon Music in association with Workhouse Media.