Justice for Joyce Yost | Prelude: Corpus Delicti
Cold
KSL Podcasts
4.8 • 40.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2021
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Josh Powell became a murder suspect when his wife Susan Powell disappeared from their home in West Valley City, Utah on December 7, 2009. Police have never located Susan's body. Prosecutors never charged Josh with a crime, in spite of a large body of circumstantial evidence. Many Cold season 1 listeners have asked "why not?" Isn't it possible to win a murder case without a body? Part of the answer might rest with the case of Joyce Yost, another Utah woman who'd disappeared nearly a quarter of a century earlier.
Joyce Yost had never met the man who followed her home on an April night in 1985, who kidnapped and raped her. He threatened to kill her, but she went to police anyway. Then, she vanished. Joyce has never been found. Now, investigative journalist Dave Cawley delves into the decades-old case to uncover the details of a murder-for-hire plot to silence Joyce. Cold reveals flaws in the system that left Joyce unprotected, examines pitfalls of the death penalty and asks if there’s such a thing as justice for Joyce Yost.
Cold season 2 is available on Amazon Music, Wondery+ in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. You can also ask Alexa to play the Cold podcast on your Echo device.
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Survivors of rape, sexual abuse and sexual assault and their allies in the United States can connect with free resources at https://www.rainn.org/.
Additional case materials including photos, videos and a who's who list at https://thecoldpodcast.com/season-2/.
Episode credits:
- Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
- Audio production: Dave Cawley
- Audio mixing: Dave Cawley
- Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
- Cold main score mixing: Dan Blanck
- KSL executive producers: Sheryl Worsley, Keira Farrimond
- Workhouse Media executive producers: Paul Anderson, Nick Panella, Andrew Greenwood
- Amazon Music team: Morgan Jones, Eliza Mills, Vanessa Rebbert, Shea Simpson
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast includes discussion of rape and sexual assault, abuse, murder, and other criminal behavior. |
| 0:07.8 | Listener discretion is advised. |
| 0:12.8 | I'm Investigative Journalist Dave Cahley. |
| 0:16.0 | In season one of my podcast, Cold, I investigated the December 2009 disappearance of Susan Powell from West Valley City, Utah. |
| 0:25.4 | Her husband, Josh Powell, was the sole suspect in what police believed was Susan's murder. |
| 0:31.8 | But they didn't have any strong physical evidence. |
| 0:34.8 | You can't say that Josh is responsible for disappearance based off of any of that, |
| 0:41.3 | because we don't have any witnesses, we have no confession, and we have nobody. |
| 0:47.6 | Josh was never arrested or charged in connection with Susan's disappearance. |
| 0:52.0 | Everybody has certain rights, and we can't violate those rights. |
| 0:55.8 | And he killed himself in 2012 without revealing the whereabouts of her body. |
| 1:01.4 | Susan has still not been found. |
| 1:13.9 | The inability to locate Susan's remains proved to be a significant obstacle for prosecutors. |
| 1:20.1 | I personally received many questions from listeners asking why this was. |
| 1:26.8 | Why had they not charged Josh Powell? |
| 1:30.9 | Some went so far as to suggest no body homicide convictions happened all the time. |
| 1:36.7 | Is that true? |
| 1:38.2 | Or do prosecutors have to have a body in order to prove murder? |
| 1:42.0 | That's the ideal, but it is not always the necessary ideal for us to be able to put a case together. |
| 1:50.5 | There is a concept in the law known as corpus de laité, that is Latin for body of evidence. |
| 1:57.2 | The word body in that phrase doesn't necessarily mean a literal corpse. |
| 2:01.7 | Instead, corpus de laité just means the totality of the circumstances. |
... |
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