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In a case of he said, she said, who is a judge or jury to believe when “she” isn’t actually there to say anything?
The disappearance of Joyce Yost 10 days before she was scheduled to testify in a felony kidnapping and sexual assault trial left prosecutors in an unusual position. They faced the task of trying the case without a victim in court acting as the accuser and key witness.
“It was the first time we prosecuted a rape case without a victim in the state of Utah,” former Clearfield police detective William Holthaus said. “We were pretty nervous.”
SALT LAKE CITY Elizabeth Smart would have preferred a life of anonymity.
But after her kidnapping from her Salt Lake home at age 14 in the middle of the night, followed by nine months of captivity and constant sexual assault, she said returning to normal life could not happen.
Smart, who now runs the Elizabeth Smart Foundation while raising children of her own, endured nine months of sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of Brian David Mitchell, who is now serving a federal prison sentence for kidnapping and sexually assaulting Smart. Almost two decades later, Smart discussed her own healing and her advocacy work as a guest on Talking Cold, the companion podcast to Cold.
KSL TV
OGDEN A man with a distinctive stammer phoned police 34 years ago and claimed to have found a body in the mountains near Causey, a reservoir on the South Fork of the Ogden River. I didn t touch the body or anything because I didn t want to get fingerprints on it, OK, the man told a dispatcher, but I noticed there was a purse there.
The man refused to identify himself or provide more specific information about where police might find the body, saying only that it was two to three miles back from the reservoir. The man hung up when a Weber County dispatcher told him she needed to put him in touch with an investigator.
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Salt Lake County Jail
Police and prosecutors had at least three opportunities following the April 3, 1985, rape of Joyce Yost to prevent the man who had sexually assaulted her from making good on his threat to return and take her life.
Breakdowns in communication between multiple individuals, agencies and Utah’s courts allowed the suspect, Douglas Anderson Lovell, to repeatedly leave custody before he at last returned to Yost’s apartment and killed her.
Lovell has spent the last 35 years in prison and faces the death penalty for killing Yost days before she was to testify against him in court. Yost’s body has never been located.