(SCOTT THOMAS ANDERSON)

PLACERVILLE, Calif. May 25, 2022 — Before the interview was over, Crabtree threw a question at Richards he didn’t seem to expect. “If I were to get rid of a body up between your house and, let’s say Oroville, where would be the best place for us to look?”

“Oh God!” Richards blurted, “you’ve got all of the Sierra Nevada, all of the Cascades.”

He added, referencing El Dorado County, “There was Gold Hill – I gave him a map to Gold Hill.”

Lawrence Powers never made it to Oregon with Anthony Richards.

He certainly never had a chance to go to Gold Hill.

Investigators for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office had determined this much.

While Richards tried to throw law enforcement attention at searching El Dorado and Shasta counties in California, Yavapai’s detectives realized that the last place Powers was actually seen alive, by other people, was within their jurisdiction in Arizona. It was on a 600-acre mining claim in the craggy, high desert copper county surrounding Bagdad. The Sheriff’s search and rescue team began combing the remote landscape for a hidden grave.

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The Yavapai County Sheriff’s cold case unit gathered over a scar chopped into the rocky red earth along a hill.

It was January 2017 outside Bagdad, Arizona, and the investigators – flanked by cactus, sagebrush and desert-lit views of a broad copper country – were staring into the hole that their backhoe’s bucket had been cutting six feet down. Before them was something they’d been hunting for years: It was a man’s skeleton….

Beginning to exhume the bones, the detectives found three 9mm bullets below them…

The hunt for these remains had started long before in a different mining territory in Northern California. That’s where Lawrence Powers, a member of the Gold Prospectors Association of America, had first turned up missing. As the weeks went on, a worried sister’s intuition convinced a Sheriff’s detective to launch a probe that would take on a life of its own, ultimately spanning three states, multiple law enforcement agencies and 60 changings of the seasons. Lots of footwork would be done over time by investigators from the Golden State to the Copper State; and there would be many searches of this dry, unforgiving land where members of the cold case unit now peered at their hidden treasure of evidence.

As the remains were being put into two bags, Yavapai County Sheriff’s detective John McDormett knew it would take a medical examiner and forensic anthropologist to solve the final mystery. When Powers, a 58-year-old carpenter and outdoorsman, first vanished a decade before, his prospecting partner had assured everyone that the mercurial minor was just off the grid again, probably searching for gold along the dusty banks of California’s Feather River. But the collective effort from law enforcement that began in 2007, paired with the meticulous work of bone experts, ultimately convinced a jury in March 2022 that this wasn’t a case of a rugged pathfinder who’d had an accident while seeking fortune and solace, but rather it was the oldest story of the frontier itself: Two men head into a mining claim – only one man walks out.

The sentencing for that murder story was completed last week.

It was a searing afternoon in July 2007 when Calaveras Sheriff’s detective Josh Crabtree rolled his SUV through Murphys, California. He drove by its rust-tempered overhangs and a rock-and-brick bunker escaping the hills’ gravity for 148 years. Murphys lies at the heart of California’s Gold Country. Navigating Main Street, Crabtree passed a century-old, sunbaked hotel – another survivor from the roughneck world of the town’s early days. The hotel’s wagon wheel gate marked where the backstreets started opening on a wide, brushy expanse of oak woodlands. Crabtree was following up on a missing person’s report. He drove out into the weedy country. His SUV shook on grated cattle guards, bumping by lonely horse corrals and antique tractors littered against the manzanita and madrones. Finally, the investigator arrived at a house mostly hidden by walls of enclosing chaparral. Joan Shattuck, then 51, met him at the gate. It was her brother who had disappeared.

Friends say Powers had an uncontainable energy. He was a diehard skier, an experienced scuba diver, a motorcycle and dirt bike rider, a hard-charging drummer and a longtime helicopter pilot who loved gliding through the clouds. He was also a self-styled inventor. Powers lived in Murphys but also kept a mountain cabin up in Bear Valley and was building a second home in southern Calaveras. His wide circle of friends knew when he wasn’t framing walls, he might be indulging one of his newer hobbies, gold panning over the pebbles of the region’s creeks and rivers.

Powers wasn’t the first prospecting individualist to call the area home. In 1865, a young Mark Twain moved to Angels Camp and worked just eight miles south of where Powers built his house 120 years later. Twain’s vignette about the hardscrabble, highly eccentric gold addicts drinking their days away near Murphys, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” marked his first rung up the ladder to literary stardom. […]

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