If you’re wondering, “Is my relationship safe?” It’s important to look at patterns of abusive behavior. Physical abuse never happens without emotional abuse, so the first step is to understand the patterns of emotional abuse.

To discover if your husband is using any one of the 19 different types of emotional abuse, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

This Is the Second Episode With Dave Cawley
Warning Signs Your Husband Is Dangerous – Susan’s Story With Dave Cawley
Patterns To Look Out For In Your Relationship (THIS EPISODE)

Anne: I’ve invited Dave Cawley, an investigative journalist and host of the Cold podcast, back on today’s episode. We have already talked about season one of the Cold Podcast, which we re-aired last week. He calls that episode Signs your Husband might kill You. It’s important for every woman experiencing emotional and psychological abuse to recognize it, and know is my husband abusing me? Because physical abuse never happens in a vacuum.

Dave and I will talk as if you’ve heard all the Cold podcasts, seasons one, two, and three. And if you haven’t, don’t worry. You’ll still benefit from listening to our analysis as we discuss the themes of all three seasons. Welcome Dave.

Dave: Thank you so much, Anne. I appreciate being with you.

Anne: So the three seasons of the Cold podcast, Dave, you cover in season one, the murder of Susan Powell. In season two, the Murder of Joyce Yost. And in season three, the murder of Sheree Warren. And you started season three by introducing us to a man named Cary Hartman. You describe his abusive behavior toward women in the form of what some people might call prank phone calls. Law enforcement called it an obscene phone call.

Really, these phone calls abused the women who received them. Even if they didn’t realize it. And even if they didn’t define it that way. Can you talk about why these abusive phone calls define Cary’s character?

Dave: Sheree Warren disappears in October of 1985. She was dating this man, Cary Hartman at the time, and at first Cary Hartman is not on the radar of the investigators.

Dave: Police identified Cary Hartman as a suspect in a series of home invasion assaults a year and a half later. Where he literally breaks into women’s homes and attacks them, raping them. And so I actually start this story way before we ever meet Sheree with Cary Hartman’s first arrest in 1971.

Where he makes one of these calls, he tells this woman, basically a threat, that if he she will be harmed if he doesn’t get what he wants. And to your point, Anne, she was a victim. He abused abused her, right?

Anne: Yeah, at the time you interviewed her, did she recognize she was a victim of his abuse? Or did she just think like, oh, a criminal called me and I helped the police identify this guy?

Dave: At this point in her life, she was I wanna say about 86 years old when I interviewed her. Heidi Posnien, she’s an amazing woman, but her life experience was so different. I mean, she literally survived Berlin at the end of World War II as a child. And so her perception of how much risk she may or may not have been in at the time. I think it is different than you or I in the same situation.

And I think like many victims of abuse, she doesn’t like thinking about whether her husband is abusing her. When I sat down and interviewed her about it, it brought up bad memories even after all these years. It brought up emotions that she was uncomfortable with. You do this kind of thing.

Dave: Every day Anne, talking to people who have been through abuse. You know how difficult those conversations are. I was grateful Heidi was willing to take us there for the story. Because it allows the listener to begin to see the bigger picture. Like, what are the systemic things that are taking place in our society? That caused these kinds of things to be brushed off? It’s a minor crime, voyeurism, telephone harassment and nothing serious.

Anne: He has all these abusive episodes. Law enforcement doesn’t define them that way. There’s a difference between an obscene phone call, which is what they had written on their documents, right? And an abusive phone call. Like when people say something like, one out of every four women are domestic abuse victims in the state of Utah. Then women wonder is my husband abusing me and if so how do I divorce an abusive husband? They’re not saying a man abuses one out of every four women in the state of Utah.

Dave: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think, the investigators at the time, thought they caught him. He’s shamed, he’ll change. And if you have that perspective in law enforcement, you’ve gotta step back and look at it and say pattern wise, like what is happening here?

And with Cary Hartman, we know these phone calls escalated over time. He ends up calling thousands of women in a harassing way. Where he would try to get women to talk about their bodies, their clothing, in a way that titillated him. It’s still today thousands of victims who will never receive any measure of justice, and many probably brush it off. Eh, I just hung up on the guy.

Dave: And I think there is definitely a need to, at least from the perspective of a journalist. To think about how we talk about those kinds of situations, because we have to be objective. We have to be as unbiased as possible, but I think there’s also room for journalists to call a spade a spade. These are the actions that Cary Hartman took and you’re right, they are abusive. Let’s just call it what it is.

Anne: Yeah, I’m reminded of an interview I did with a man who spent, 10 years in prison for abuse. He considered himself an addict. And he said, I acted out in my addiction. That is how he described it. And I said, well, there’s another word for that. It’s that you were an abuser. And he was like, oh, I never thought about it like that. Women think that they can figure out how to deal with an addict husband not understanding that it’s abuse.

Dave: The, the focus on himself rather than on the person he was harming.

Anne: Yeah, If he’s an abuser, he hurts someone else, rather than he is an addict. He just acted out in his addiction.

Dave: Right, that’s a really good point.

Anne: Right?

Dave: I mean, part of the process for somebody who goes to prison for this kind of crime. If they will ever be paroled, it is usually that they have to go through some kind of therapy or treatment program. The DSM tailors this for mental health professionals trying to diagnose people.

Anne: It’s not about their victim. The DSM is thinking maybe we can get him to stop having this.

Dave: Paraphilic disorder.

Anne: There we go. Maybe we can get him to stop doing that, rather than maybe we should figure out how to protect other people from this person. And at least from all the victims I have interviewed, it has not worked. In fact, the domestic violence shelter will tell you that most of the time an abuser rehabilitation class, for example, makes them worse.

Dave: There is an argument that in some ways it might teach them to just be better about hiding it.

Anne: Exactly, and many accuse their victim of being an abuser, and then it gets confusing.

Dave: They learn all the language. They learn the terminology.

Anne: Exactly.

Dave: As far as the Sheree Warren case with Cary Hartman, as long as we’re talking about treatment. I mean, I think an interesting thing to note is that Cary Hartman ends up going to prison for 33 years in these cases. And during that time, they repeatedly require him to go through offender therapy. He needs to pass that. It is as a condition for release on parole.

Dave: They release Cary Hartman on parole in March of 2020. He got out of prison. And during the next four years, I lived in our community here in Utah, where I live and work. He was recently returned to prison because it was discovered he had been stalking a woman. According to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole while he was out.

Dave: So you have to stop and say, wait a minute. Did those 30 plus years in prison and repeat trips through offender therapy. Did they help Cary Hartman not harm people while back out in society? And it appears the answer to that question is no. So I wanna hope that those systems can work, but in this case specifically, it seems like it did not.

Anne: And me listening to that, at least the way you laid out the facts. As an abuse expert, I came to the conclusion that he figured out what the parole board wanted to hear. Victims wondering if their husband is abusive, might know their husband is saying what they want to hear. He went to offender therapy and eventually learned the words he needed to say. And he parrots that back to the parole board to their satisfaction, in order to be paroled.

I was so grateful they kept him in prison for so long. Because they could have let him out sooner. So that was a good part of the story, I thought.

Dave: Yeah, in conversations with law enforcement. People who investigated that case, or in the legal profession who tried that case in court, that came up repeatedly. They said, look, in a homicide, or let’s say a manslaughter, somebody who kills another person, they might do 10 years and get out. The fact that Cary Hartman was in for more than 30 years was a big deal, and the reason he was in so long is because he refused to accept responsibility.

And like you said, as a listener, I think it’s a fair takeaway to listen to all those years of him going before the parole board. And just slowly creeping forward.

Dave: The little bit of accountability he would take until he reached that sweet spot where they said, okay, that’s enough. We’ll let you out.

Anne: Cary Hartman is a scary guy, but how much scarier would he have been had he learned faster? Let’s say he had gone to offender therapy sooner and taken accountability sooner. And sounded better sooner. He could have been let out sooner. The scariest ones to me are the ones who know that’s what they need to sound like. In terms of my listeners husbands, that’s what they sound like in couple therapy.

Or they might sound like that to clergy. And clergy might be like, yes, he’s repented. How do I help my listeners see, is this someone who is now safe or are you currently in danger? It’s so hard to idently if your husband is abusing you. At least, in danger of being emotionally and psychologically abused. In danger of an STD, being lied to is a concern when you’re supposed to trust.

Dave: So if I can segue off of that. In season one of Cold. When we talked about the case of Josh and Susan Powell, so this is a married couple. They’ve got two young sons, and there’s this extreme strife going on in their marriage. Susan is upset that Josh is controlling the money. He’s controlling her ability to spend time with friends and family, and she tries to drag him into therapy.

Dave: She tries to drag him in front of clergy. We actually have evidence from writings that Susan left behind after she was killed. She talks about, Josh says, if I call the police, if I call 9 1 1 and say he’s threatening me. When the police get here, he’s gonna be calm, I’m gonna be hysterical. And he’ll make me the one who’s irrational. She was conscious of these very things.

Moving forward, when we entered season two in Cold. There’s this story about Joyce Yost being murdered by this man, Doug Lovell. Doug Lovell goes to prison. He’s still in prison and had been sentenced to death twice. He’s had his death sentence overturned twice, and part of the reason is because since he went to prison. He has built relationships with clergy, people who go to prison to work with inmates, to help them hopefully become better people.

They prepare them to be released. Doug Lovell will not be released. He is, as I said, serving a death sentence or in limbo while they figure out whether his death sentence will go forward. But those relationships and the way he talks to clergy have allowed him to essentially create a group of supporters. who, when he goes to court, when he goes to trial, are willing to stand up in front of a judge or a jury and say, I believe Doug Lovell is a man with a good heart.

I believe he’s a man who’s changed. I believe he deserves a second chance. What we know is Doug Lovell murdered Joyce Yost and has refused to return her body.

Anne: Right, flat out manipulation Doug Lovell used to convince some people that he has a “good heart.” The evidence would be that he tells people exactly where that body is, which he has not done.

Dave: Right, that’s how you show true remorse in my mind, yeah.

Anne: In our community, we actually call this meatloafing. It’s from The Meatloaf song I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.

Dave: This is interesting, and it gets into the weeds of the court case. Lovell, there’s no question he’s responsible. He did admit to it, but that was part of a plea deal in 1993, where he was trying to get a chance for life with parole. At the time, Utah did not have a law that allowed life without parole, so the choice was life with parole or the death sentence. And he thought, if I admit to it, there’s this plea deal on the table. And I will have a chance of getting out of prison.

Before the case actually went to sentencing, though, the law changed, and the prosecutors pulled life with parole off the table. And at that point Lovell said, I don’t want to plead guilty anymore. And this is part of why that case ended up going through appeal after appeal. The death sentence ended up being rescinded because the appeals courts determined that Lovell was not appropriately advised of the rights he was giving up. So he goes back to trial in 2015.

The problem is that he’s admitted on the record that he killed Joyce Yost. That fact is not in dispute.

Dave: How do you go in front of a jury and say, yes, I killed this person. But and that’s where these religious leaders came in. They went before the court and said, in all those years, Lovell is a changed man.

Anne: Listening to the manipulative letters Doug Lovell sent those religious leaders was surreal. Because they sound almost exactly like the manipulative letters that so many of the victims I talk to receive. In fact, I have actually created a workshop to show women the patterns of these types of manipulative letters. It’s in my Betrayal Trauma Recovery Living Free Workshop.

So listeners, if you want to learn more about that, click that link. I show women how abusive it is, so they can identify the abuse. And then how to respond in terms of Doug Lovell. It was very unnerving to hear that these religious leaders fell for this type of manipulation. In fact, judges fall for this type of manipulation too.

There are cases in Utah where the abusive man is in jail, but he writes manipulative and abusive letters to his kids, and the victim is court ordered to show these manipulative, abusive letters to her own children. Which to talk about Susan Powell again. I mean, she was killed, but Josh Powell, her murderer, still had parental rights.

Dave: Yeah, so let me set the table for that a little bit. Josh Powell, after his wife, “disappears” in 2009. Within a couple of weeks, he takes his two sons, Charlie and Braden, with him. He leaves Utah and goes to Washington state. And he lives under his father’s roof. A few things happen there.

Dave: The West Valley City Police Department has a circumstantial case that Josh murdered his wife, and that’s getting stronger as time goes forward. What they don’t have is direct physical evidence. Like a body linking Josh to Susan’s death. And so in the absence of that, the prosecutors would not give police an arrest warrant. The police are aware that these two boys are potentially at risk.

Early in the investigation, a detective from Utah contacts the Child Protective Services Agency in Washington and says, can you intervene in any way? And the state of Washington tells the West Valley City Police Department, unless there’s an allegation of like ongoing or immediate abuse happening, that’s not our job.

Anne: I mean, the likelihood that he killed his wife is like a hundred percent. So he’s a murderer, but he’s an appropriate caregiver for children.

Dave: Right, unless he’s charged and arrested, they don’t intervene, was the position at the time.

Anne: This letter of the law is a thing, and then there’s like, how do we actually protect people? I mean, someone who kills their wife is an abuser, but they’re not defining him as an abuser.

Dave: And this was the insidiousness of Josh Powell. Josh Powell was good at cloaking abuse in a way that it didn’t look like abuse from the outside, right? I think you and I rationally can sit back and say the act of murdering his children’s mother is abuse of those children until the police can prove it. The Child Protective Services workers in Washington weren’t going to do anything about it.

Dave: And so the investigation for her murder is mostly here in Utah. But there’s an aspect that’s taking place in Washington, and it culminates in the latter part of 2011. Because there’s a big police operation that we learn about in Cold season one called Operation Tsunami. And part of this whole investigation is the service of a search warrant at Josh’s dad’s house in Washington.

When police go in there searching, they discover Steve Powell was obsessed with his daughter-in-law, Susan. And they find all kinds of voyeur materials focused on Susan and other women. Steve Powell had been recording women without their knowledge, and among those were two neighbor girls who were underage. Under the definition of the law, this is treated as CSAM. Steve Powell is arrested at that time for two crimes, voyeurism and CSAM.

The state of Washington says, wait a minute. These two boys, Charlie and Braden, were in that house. This is an unsafe environment for those children. So they take temporary protective custody of Charlie and Braden. So it took the investigation to that point where there was a catalyst. There was an event that took place with the discovery of those voyeuristic materials. That triggered the state of Washington to take action.

Once those boys were in temporary protective custody, that didn’t mean they were going to stay there. Josh immediately starts a campaign to get custody of his kids back. And he was actually within a step or two of clearing every hurdle that the court put in front of him and was probably going to get custody of his children back.

Dave: And then police in Utah who were under a court seal. They couldn’t talk publicly about the case, even to other police agencies. They get permission from a judge to share evidence with the state of Washington family court, they send this information up. And it’s troubling enough that the judge in Washington says, before we give Josh Powell custody of his children, we are going to require that he undergo a psyhologial evaluation.

So they’re going to do a very invasive psychological evaluation. Looking into, is there anything happening with Josh in his mind that would put the kids in danger? Now, during this period, the court allowed Josh to visit the children. At first, the visit is required in a neutral third party secure environment. But over time, he convinces the court that he’s safe. That they can allow his kids to visit him at a home he had rented. And the judge did not revisit that idea, After this major change, right?

Requiring Josh to go through this invasive psychological evaluation. And within a matter of days during a court authorized supervised visit, we know Josh locks the supervised visitation coordinator out of the house. He murders his sons, a horrific ending to this entire investigation. They definitely know that Susan knew her husband was abusing her. She knew the answer was yes.

What about Susan’s parents? What could they do in the aftermath of that horrible event? They sued the state of Washington, the agency, and the individual social workers involved in that case. The case wound through the courts for a long time, more than 10 years before it’s resolved.

Dave: The individual social workers were deemed immune because they were state employees and working on behalf of the state in that capacity. They couldn’t be held individually liable, but the agency could.

Susan’s parents ended up taking that case to trial. So a jury in Pierce County, Washington hears weeks and weeks of testimony. About all the details of the ins and outs of this back and forth with the criminal investigation with the family court in the state of Washington. Long story short, they end up giving a verdict. And they say the state of Washington was negligent in allowing the children to be in Josh Powell’s custody while he went through this process.

And they awarded Susan’s parents $100 million, give or take in damages. Of course, nothing that helps them bring the kids back. But their hope was that it would inspire some kind of change. Part of the reason we know as much as we do about what happened in the state of Washington behind the scenes is the law there. It required an inquest when Charlie and Braden were murdered in 2012. And the law also required the results of that inquest to be made public.

Transparency is one part of it, but the action to say, okay, these are the things that failed. Let’s fix those, is the next step. And I think that’s where often we see agencies and individuals drop the ball. They can acknowledge that yes, a murdered child is a bad outcome. But what are you going to do about it? That’s where we often fall flat.

Anne: Just recently, within the last couple months, there’s a victim. Her perpetrator has 27 protective order violations. This is in the state of Utah right now. So she reported one of these violations in Salt Lake City, and they didn’t do anything about it. So the department over that heard about it somehow, and gave her a call. Now this is a victim who’s been working with the domestic violence shelter Safe Harbor for more than three years. And she can’t even divorce this guy.

They’re still in custody court, but the department that oversees things interviewed her and did a lethality assessment. They called her back like a week later and said, we have the findings for you. You’re at a really high risk. Holy cow, this is bad. And we’ve come to the conclusion that you need services from the domestic violence shelter.

Dave: That’s it?

Anne: And she’s like, what? I’ve already been going to Safe Harbor for three years. That’s the state of domestic violence services, it’s like going around in circles. There’s how it’s supposed to work, and then there’s how it’s actually working. A lot of victims will tell you that when they tell other people that the system isn’t protecting them. People generally assume you must have done something wrong. Like maybe you didn’t fill out the right form. How else can someone prove that their husband is toxic.

Not realizing you can do everything right and still not get the help you need. It is so difficult when trying to identify if their husband is abusive. And that’s such a fine line for me as an educator. We need to give women hope that they can move toward a better life. But also be aware of all the obstacles they might face.

Dave: And Anne, I think about this a lot, because from my perspective as a journalist, I tell these stories. Part of the reason to do it is to educate, but there’s a parasocial relationship between myself and a listener. Somebody listens to me for hours talking about these cases. And I’ve had the experience many times of somebody listening, going, oh my gosh. What he’s talking about, like this story, this is my life.

And reach out to me, and in many cases, they’re asking for just somebody to hear them. But other times they’re more specific, like, help me, you seem like an expert. You seem to know what’s going on. What do I do in this situation? And I feel so ill-equipped. I want to help. So I’ll try to connect them with domestic violence resources, and I have to ask myself, did I actually help that person? It’s so hard.

Anne: Yeah, here at Betrayal Trauma Recovery we have Group Sessions, and Individual Sessions, and Workshops for women to learn safety strategies. Whether they’re married or not. All of these tools can help a woman to know if her husband is abusing her. I mean, it’s my mission to ensure that they get the help they need. Speaking of abusive partners in both Season One and Season Three of the Cold Podcast, an abusive partner plays a role.

In season one it’s Josh Powell, and in season three, Chuck Warren is an abuser. He married Sheree Warren. I can say that because I can see the markers and the things that you reported. He is also a suspect, and in every single season, every single perpetrator.

Anne: And Chuck Warren as well, has a history or patterns of objectifying women. With Cary Hartman, there ares tons of evidence of the obscene phone calls and assaults.

Like what was going on in the eighties in Ogden, by the way. Like that was wild. I was like, holy cow. I mean, season three, there are three serial rapists in Ogden. Anyway, all the guys in seasons one, two, and three show a pattern of objectifying women. Can you talk about that?

Dave: Yeah, all of them are different in their own ways. Josh, when I started looking into his background, his youth, and his relationship with Susan. There are a lot of indicators that Josh was, in many ways, wasn’t interested in physical touch.. But Susan, his wife, would write about this. He wouldn’t hold her hand, he wouldn’t kiss her. He would always find an excuse for it, I’m gonna get sick. So he had something going on, right?

And the problem with Josh is the evidence I talked about earlier. They sent it to Washington State in the child custody proceeding. They found it on a computer in the Powell home. The belief of the investigators at the time was that it was material belonging to Josh.

What we know is Josh Powell’s father was absolutely deviant in his views toward women generally, and to Susan specifically. There was a dynamic back and forth between Josh and his dad. Josh was aware of his father’s inappropriate advances on Susan, his wife, and he did nothing to stop it.

Anne: A lack of interest in your partner is definitely a characteristic of excessive exploitative content use. This is one thing help to know if you are experiencing abuse from your husband. Because they’re masturbating all the time, and they’re not into it with a real person. So even though that is a marker, in Josh’s case, there was no evidence.

Dave: Directly for him, you can understand why the police would believe it, given what you said.

Anne: Yeah, exactly.

Dave: Season two and season three, both take place in Ogden, Utah in 1985. I find it fascinating that Doug Lovell, who first assaulted and then murdered Joyce Yost, operates at the same time. Cary Hartman, we know, is attacking women. And you’ve got Sheree divorcing Chuck Warren at the time. In a lot of ways, very similar to Susan Powell, right? There’s a custody issue going on. Chuck Warren, we later find out, was soliciting who are also victims, right?

And did Sheree know about that? Probably not, so he’s lying to her, presumably, which is a form of abuse. There was a lot of that kind of dynamic going on, and part of the reason with Sheree’s case in particular. I wanted to focus on the immediate aftermath of Sheree’s disappearance. You know, the first days, weeks, months, her estranged husband, Chuck Warren, looks like Josh Powell. He looks like a really strong suspect.

He’s not forthcoming. There are stories about him having done a horrific act of physical abuse against his first wife. Sharee’s his second wife. You can understand why law enforcement is looking at Chuck.

Dave: Holy cow, this looks like all those abuse markers, and it’s the same story we’ve seen. Then all of a sudden, Cary Hartman comes into orbit over here, and you realize Sheree had this unlucky confluence of bad men in her life. If Chuck Warren was a more standup guy. If he was a better husband.

I think the investigation would’ve more quickly focused on Cary and some steps that I believe or suspect Cary took to potentially obscure his activities. Around the time that Sheree disappeared. They would’ve looked at it much sooner than 15 years later, as we see happen. I’m not somebody who likes to stand up on a soapbox and say, every man is a bad person.

Anne: Me either. We do need to help victims figure out if their husband is abusive.

Dave: But I also like to stand up and say, guys, we gotta do better than this. Even if you are not harming your wife, your partner, you probably know somebody who is. You talked about those statistics, the one in three or one in four women who will experience domestic violence in their lives.

If I can turn that around from like a man’s perspective. How many of the guys I would consider friends are at home behind closed doors doing those kinds of things? And what behaviors am I maybe seeing but choosing not to react to? Or am I just putting those blinders like we all have a role in seeing it for what it is, calling it what it is, and standing up to it.

Anne: Dave thank you so much for all of your hard work to bring these really important stories to light. And helping victims identify if their husband is abusive.

Dave: You’ve been a supporter and booster, if I can say that for a long time. That’s not lost on me. You’re doing the work in the trenches. I mean, what I say when I talk about how hard that is. And I just hope for your sake, that you find ways to cleanse yourself of it from time to time, because it’s so hard. So thank you for the work you do and all the women you’ve helped, honestly.

This kind of work takes a toll on you. And while I feel a strong obligation to continue building on the work done in these three seasons of this Cold podcast, I also need to watch out for my own emotional and mental health. I’m hopeful I can again, as you say, help educate people so that we don’t have to keep telling these kinds of stories.