Parole board calls Ogden sex offender a ‘substantial threat’ after he stalked woman
Nov 18, 2024, 4:02 PM | Updated: 7:22 pm
OGDEN — The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole has decided an Ogden sex offender presents a “substantial threat to public safety” after finding he stalked a woman while out of prison.
The decision means Cary Hartmann, 76, will remain in custody while the Utah Department of Corrections performs a new round of mental health and sex offender risk assessments on him.
Hartmann spent more than 30 years in prison for rape and sexual assault convictions dating back to the mid-1980s. He was released on parole in March of 2020, but was re-arrested after a Utah Adult Probation and Parole officer reported finding pornography on his phone in April 2024.
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During an evidentiary hearing in October, a lawyer from the Utah Attorney General’s Office told the parole board Hartmann made unsolicited sexual comments toward a woman he’d met at a gym several months after his release from prison. Hartmann also allegedly waited for the woman in the gym parking lot on multiple occasions, and showed up at her workplace uninvited.
The woman, Kate Bell, spoke exclusively with KSL following the evidentiary hearing and said Hartmann’s behavior made her feel unsafe.
“It wasn’t just the words he would say, it was how he was looking at me,” Bell said. “Just because he’s older doesn’t mean he’s not a threat to society.”
An investigator from the Weber County Attorney’s Office also told the parole board in October he believed Hartmann made an obscene phone call to Bell, using the service Google Voice to disguise his phone number. Similar obscene phone calls were an element to some of the crimes Hartmann committed in the 1980s. Hartmann also had a prior conviction for misdemeanor telephone harassment from 1971.
Hartmann denied having stalked Bell, but did not address the specifics of the allegations during the October hearing.
In a decision published Friday, board chair J. Scott Stephenson wrote a preponderance of the evidence showed Hartmann did stalk Bell, engaging “in a course of conduct that … would cause a reasonable person to fear for the individual’s own safety or to suffer other emotional distress.”
The board said investigators had not sufficiently proved Hartmann was the person who made the obscene call to Bell. Still, Stephenson noted Hartmann’s conduct included behavior that “repeats the cycle that led to past crimes.”
Hartmann was first sent to prison in 1987 after a Weber County jury convicted him on two counts of aggravated sexual assault, both first-degree felonies. The charges stemmed from allegations Hartmann, a former Ogden Police Department reserve officer, broke into a woman’s home at night and raped her.
Weber County prosecutors had also charged Hartmann in connection to three other similar assaults dating to 1986 and 1987. Those cases were resolved with a plea deal, in which Hartmann pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree felony rape in exchange for additional counts being dismissed.
Roy police also consider Hartmann a suspect in the cold case disappearance of his girlfriend, Sheree Warren, in October of 1985. The details of that case are covered in season 3 of KSL’s investigative podcast series, COLD.
