A sealed container holding fingerprint evidence recovered from Sheree Warren’s car in 1985 sits on a desk at the Roy City Police Department on Sept. 23, 2022. A storage container holding floppy disks seized from Charles Warren’s house in December of 2015 is next to the evidence bag. (Dave Cawley/KSL Podcasts)
The search for Sheree Warren had sat cold for nearly a decade. But an unexpected discovery reignited the investigation at the start of 2015. A man walking his dog along a busy Utah highway spotted a human skull in a patch of oak brush.
Deputies from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office responded to the site and soon located a shallow grave at the top of a nearby hill. From it, they recovered the skeletal remains of an unidentified woman.
The discovery led to police across northern Utah reviewing their cold case files, looking to see if the Jane Doe might be one of their missing people. A detective in the city of Roy named John Frawley did the same. He took a dusty box of Sheree Warren case files off a shelf and began to read.
“I just became fascinated with it,” John Frawley said in an interview for COLD. “I felt like there was more I could do on it.”
Roy City police detective John Frawley talks about missing woman Sheree Warren, who disappeared from Salt Lake City, Utah on Oct. 2, 1985.
John met with Sheree’s family to collect DNA for comparison purposes. He learned Sheree’s mom, Mary Sorensen, had died just shy of two years earlier.
“What we’re driven for is to get the family some answers,” John said.
Detective John Frawley only had the Sheree Warren case for a few weeks before the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services obtained a dental record match on the unidentified remains. The bones did not belong to Sheree Warren.
Instead, the remains located alongside U.S. Highway 89 were those of Theresa Greaves. Like Sheree, Theresa had disappeared in the 1980s. Police had long suspected she’d been murdered, but no suspects were ever identified.
For Roy police and the Sheree Warren investigation, the news came as another in a long line of setbacks. John’s supervisor told him he could return the box of old case files to the records department. But John wasn’t ready to give up on the case and soon discovered he had an ally.
In March of 2015, Roy City hired Carl Merino to serve as chief of police. Merino told his detective to forge ahead with the Sheree Warren investigation.
“That’s what I wanted to do,” John said.
Hear where detective Frawley went next in Cold season 3, episode 9: A Picture in the Lobby