A human skull is discovered on a hillside next to a busy Utah highway. Roy City police detective John Frawley digs into an abandoned box of Sheree Warren case files. Sheree’s ex-husband, Charles Warren, botches an opportunity to clear himself as a suspect in her disappearance.
This season of the cold podcast includes descriptions of rape, sexual assault, murder, and domestic violence.
Please take care in listening.
A human skull rolled down a brushy hill between a suburban neighborhood and a busy Utah highway.
The cranium came to rest in a litter of decaying leaves at the base of a barren scrub oak tree.
It sat there for some time, hours, days, months, before a man walking his dog caught a glimpse of it.
What you got there?
The man who initially found it walks along this frontage road every day and noticed something in the bushes.
He wasn't sure what it was at first, just that it appeared round and off white, out of place amid the drab remains of last autumn's long fallen foliage.
But it had captured his curiosity, so he went in for a closer look.
Only then could he see the unmistakable shape of the hollow eye sockets, the six teeth still stubbornly lodged into the maxilla.
This was once the head of a living human being, but judging by the brittle appearance of the bone, this person had been dead for quite some time.
The man, recognizing the skull as the partial remains of a person, recoiled, then pulled out his phone and called 911.
Davis county sheriff's deputies rushed to the site.
They put up crime scene tape.
As the frigid dark of the February night descended, a sergeant fielded questions from curious reporters, her face lit by the hard lights of the tv cameras, her breath turning to fog in the chill.
You don't know if an animal could have brought it from a different location.
There's so many factors that we're going to try to piece together and find the origin of this skull.
In other words, they didn't know much.
In the days that followed, crime scene technicians scoured the hill for more bones.
They uncovered a shallow grave at the top of that hill, just a few feet behind the backyards of several homes.