‘Cold’: The search for answers behind Utah woman Sheree Warren’s disappearance

COLD season 3 is currently exclusive to the Amazon Music streaming platform. The first two episodes are available now, with additional episodes set to release each week. Listeners can hear the season ad-free with an Amazon Prime account.

ROY, Utah —  Sheree Warren had separated from her husband, Charles Warren, six months prior to her disappearance. The couple had a 3-year-old son together and were sharing custody while Sheree Warren pursued a divorce.

On the morning of her disappearance, Sheree Warren handed off her son to Charles Warren at a Denny’s restaurant in Roy before she headed to work.

The Utah Employees Credit Union, Sheree’s employer, had temporarily assigned her to its headquarters at 660 South 200 East in Salt Lake City. Sheree Warren was training a newly hired branch manager from Richfield, Utah, on the credit union’s computer system.

That branch manager, Richard Moss, is the last person known to have seen Sheree Warren alive. Moss has never publicly shared his account prior to speaking with COLD.

“During the course of the day she told me that she was married,” Moss said. “She told me her ex-husband came into the Ogden office at one time and threatened to kill her.”

At about 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 2, 1985, Sheree Warren told Richard Moss she was headed to a nearby car dealership in Salt Lake City, Wagstaff Toyota, to meet her estranged husband and give him a ride back home to Ogden.

“I never saw what car she got into,” Moss said. “I never saw her again.”

Charles Warren

Sheree Warren’s mother, Mary Sorensen, reported her missing to Roy police the following day.

A Roy police detective named Jack Bell began investigating and quickly identified Sheree Warren’s estranged husband, Charles “Chuck” Warren, as a person of interest.

“He had a Toyota Supra and he was supposedly going to take the car down to Wagstaff’s Toyota,” Bell said. “Sheree was going to pick him up when she got off work and pick up her son.”

COLD has exclusively obtained Jack Bell’s case notes. They reveal Bell was never able to confirm whether Sheree Warren made it to the dealership. He interviewed Charles Warren on Oct. 4, 1985, and according to the notes, Charles Warren denied any knowledge of what had happened to his estranged wife.

“He called, according to Chuck, and canceled that appointment [with Sheree Warren at the dealership],” Bell said.

Charles Warren reportedly told Bell he’d spent the night of Sheree Warren’s disappearance at home with his first wife, who verified that story when contacted by COLD.

Cary Hartmann

Detective Jack Bell also interviewed a man named Cary Hartmann the day following Sheree Warren’s disappearance. Sheree Warren had been dating Hartmann prior to her disappearance.

Hartmann and Bell were acquaintances, having once been in the same grade at Bonneville High School in Washington Terrace.

“But I hadn’t seen or talked to him since I left Bonneville,” Bell said.

Hartmann was a former reserve police officer for Ogden City. Hartmann also had a criminal history related to a situation in 1971 in which Hartmann had made threatening phone calls to a woman in order to lure her to a campground in the mountains east of Ogden.

Detective Bell’s notes said Hartmann claimed to have spent the evening of Sheree Warren’s disappearance at a bar in Ogden called Sebastians. Hartmann told Bell he’d expected to meet up with Sheree Warren at the basement apartment he was renting on Ogden’s 7th Street after leaving the bar.

“His story was she never showed up and that’s when supposedly Cary [Hartmann] got concerned,” Bell said.

Records obtained by COLD reveal Hartmann had a history of domestic violence against two wives and several of his other romantic partners.

Sheree Warren’s car located in Las Vegas

A major break occurred in the case about six weeks into the investigation when security staff at The Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, located Sheree Warren’s car abandoned in their back parking lot.

“That opened up a whole new can of worms,” Bell said. “How did it get there? Which one of these two birds that I’m looking at have the opportunity to get it down there?”

Charles Warren provided consent for Las Vegas Metro Police to search his missing wife’s car. The Las Vegas detectives did not find evidence of foul play in Sheree Warren’s maroon Toyota Corolla.

They believed whoever left the car in Las Vegas wiped it of fingerprints.

“So somebody knew what they were doing when they left it there,” Bell said.

The Aladdin was one of the closest hotels to McCarran International Airport, known today as Harry Reid International Airport. COLD obtained airline timetables from October of 1985 that revealed someone could have potentially driven Sheree Warren’s car to Las Vegas on the night of her disappearance, then flown back to Utah and arrived before Warren was first reported missing.

The question at the heart of COLD season 3: The Search for Sheree is who?