With a badly disarticulated set of remains, bone chips or a single tooth might be all that’s left. The connective tissues holding the skeleton together break down in the later stages of decomposition, leading to scattering of individual bones. … He could have been telling the truth that she was here and simply was either moved from that spot - a bear certainly could have done that, a mountain lion could have done that - or through the process of disarticulation scattered to the wind.ĭave Cawley: Disarticulation is when a body comes apart. Michael Bouwhuis: And so if Doug left her at the spot where he took the authorities, the way that they processed the scene would have produced nothing. Michael Bouwhuis: …the challenge is that after eight years there wouldn’t be hardly anything left, if anything at all.ĭave Cawley: In an interview for our companion podcast Talking Cold, Michael said he learned the police in ’93 had not consulted a forensic anthropologist before they started sticking shovels in the ground. Michael Bouwhuis: Let’s suppose that he did remember exactly where he’d put the body…ĭave Cawley: This is Michael Bouwhuis, the attorney who represented Doug during his 2015 murder trial. Terry Carpenter: We, we just exhausted every effort we could think of hoping that we could come across something that might produce Joyce.ĭave Cawley: What’s most frustrating is the uncertainty. Terry’s eyes grow distant as he talks about that search back in the summer of ’93. It’s obvious people come here with some regularity. I pick my way into the oak brush at one point and find a rusted out metal drum surrounded by partially burned scrap lumber. Terry Carpenter: Anything that would indicate there was a disturbance there, we dug in those areas and we, with the permission of the Forest Service we dug that area to try to locate what we thought might be Joyce’s grave.ĭave Cawley: There are signs of recent use all over the place: campfire rings, beer cans, shell casings. It’s still large - say, three or four acres - but not so expansive as to make a search impossible.

I’m impressed in this moment how much smaller the terrain makes the search area seem compared to what I’d pictured. To my left, the ground drops away to a valley. I can see the east face of Mount Ogden four miles off in the distance, the ski runs carved through the trees below the peak still decked with winter snow. These, these have been added since then.ĭave Cawley: We come to a clearing. Terry Carpenter: This is one of the first places that he, this was all flat. We walk a path between thick patches of oak brush, up and over a berm a hundred feet or so from the road.

Right up in here.ĭave Cawley: It’s May of 2021 and I’ve met Terry here on a bluebird Saturday so he can show me where Doug Lovell claimed to have buried the body of Joyce Yost. Terry Carpenter: He says this is where it was. I’ve just finished putting a microphone on Terry Carpenter, tucking it under his collar in a futile effort to shield it from the breeze. Dave Cawley: I’m standing at a gravel pull-out on the side of the Old Snowbasin Road.

Barney campfire sing along transcript