SALT LAKE CITY — The second season of KSL’s investigative podcast series COLD, Justice for Joyce, concludes this week with the release of the season’s 13th episode.
The episode details the efforts of various KSL staff to contact death row inmate Douglas Lovell and request an interview with him about his murder of Joyce Yost in 1985.
“Whenever I am in the news, I know it is very upsetting to the family and loved ones of Ms. Yost,” Lovell wrote in a Nov. 9, 2019 letter, refusing one such interview request. “I believe an interview with you will most [sic] get back to Ms. Yost’s family. I hope you will understand and appreciate my decision.”
Doug Lovell wrote this letter to KSL’s Candice Madsen in November of 2019, declining a request for an interview about his murder of Joyce Yost.
KSL had made contact with Yost’s daughter Kim Salazar prior to reaching out to Lovell. In a follow-up letter, KSL informed Lovell that Yost’s family knew of and supported the interview request, in the hopes it might lead to the recovery of their mother’s remains.
Lovell did not respond to that follow-up letter.
“If he were trying to minimize our pain and suffering at this point, we wouldn’t still be on a 23B remand 35 years later,” Salazar said. “He’d be done. This thing would be done.”
History of the case
COLD’s second season has detailed the entire history of the Joyce Yost case, beginning on the night in April of 1985 when Lovell first saw Yost and followed her home from a club in Clearfield. Lovell had confronted Yost outside her South Ogden apartment, raped her, kidnapped her and then raped her again at his own home.
Clearfield, Utah police detective Bill Holthaus took this polaroid photo of Joyce Yost hours after her rape at the hands of Douglas Lovell.
Yost managed to convince Lovell to release her by promising not to report what he’d done. She then reneged on that promise, providing a detailed account of the rape to Clearfield police detective William “Bill” Holthaus.
“[Lovell] was quite the cad,” Holthaus told COLD. “Separated from his wife, chasing women around. He just struck me as a guy who didn’t respect women much.”
Holthaus had arrested Lovell, but a series of miscues and miscommunications allowed Lovell to remain out of jail ahead of a trial. Then, 10 days before the scheduled trial, Yost disappeared.
Disappearance of Joyce Yost
South Ogden police suspected Lovell had killed Yost, but lacked any firm evidence linking him to her disappearance.
A Davis County jury convicted Lovell of kidnapping and sexual assault, even in Yost’s absence. He began serving a sentence of 15-years-to-life in January of 1986.
Lovell was still incarcerated in 1991 when his ex-wife Rhonda Buttars provided South Ogden Sgt. Terry Carpenter a detailed account of how her ex-husband had killed Yost to keep her from testifying.
Buttars twice wore a hidden audio recording device into the Utah State Prison at the request of police, capturing Lovell making incriminating statements about Yost’s murder.
“We got so much information from [Buttars] that we would never have gotten without her,” Carpenter said in an interview for COLD.
