{"id":784,"date":"2022-05-26T16:36:16","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T23:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/?p=784"},"modified":"2022-05-26T16:36:16","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T23:36:16","slug":"vindicating-the-vanished-fifteen-years-after-a-modern-day-gold-seeker-in-california-went-missing-detectives-across-the-west-close-an-investigative-saga-and-get-a-murder-conviction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/05\/26\/vindicating-the-vanished-fifteen-years-after-a-modern-day-gold-seeker-in-california-went-missing-detectives-across-the-west-close-an-investigative-saga-and-get-a-murder-conviction\/","title":{"rendered":"Vindicating the vanished: Fifteen years after a modern-day gold seeker in California went missing, detectives across the West close an investigative saga \u2013 and get a murder conviction"},"content":{"rendered":"
(SCOTT THOMAS ANDERSON)<\/pre>\n
PLACERVILLE, Calif. May 25, 2022 \u2014 Before the interview was over, Crabtree threw a question at Richards he didn\u2019t seem to expect. \u201cIf I were to get rid of a body up between your house and, let\u2019s say Oroville, where would be the best place for us to look?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh God!\u201d Richards blurted, \u201cyou\u2019ve got all of the Sierra Nevada, all of the Cascades.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added, referencing El Dorado County, \u201cThere was Gold Hill \u2013 I gave him a map to Gold Hill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lawrence Powers never made it to Oregon with Anthony Richards.<\/p>\n
He certainly never had a chance to go to Gold Hill.<\/p>\n
Investigators for the Yavapai County Sheriff\u2019s Office had determined this much.<\/p>\n
While Richards tried to throw law enforcement attention at searching El Dorado and Shasta counties in California, Yavapai\u2019s 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\u2019s search and rescue team began combing the remote landscape for a hidden grave.<\/p>\n
—-<\/p>\n
The Yavapai County Sheriff\u2019s cold case unit gathered over a scar chopped into the rocky red earth along a hill.<\/p>\n
It was January 2017 outside Bagdad, Arizona, and the investigators \u2013 flanked by cactus, sagebrush and desert-lit views of a broad copper country \u2013 were staring into the hole that their backhoe\u2019s bucket had been cutting six feet down. Before them was something they\u2019d been hunting for years: It was a man\u2019s skeleton….<\/p>\n
Beginning to exhume the bones, the detectives found three 9mm bullets below them…<\/p>\n
The hunt for these remains had started long before in a different mining territory in Northern California. That\u2019s 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\u2019s intuition convinced a Sheriff\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
As the remains were being put into two bags, Yavapai County Sheriff\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t a case of a rugged pathfinder who\u2019d 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 \u2013 only one man walks out.<\/p>\n
The sentencing for that murder story was completed last week.<\/p>\n
It was a searing afternoon in July 2007 when Calaveras Sheriff\u2019s 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\u2019 gravity for 148 years. Murphys lies at the heart of California\u2019s Gold Country. Navigating Main Street, Crabtree passed a century-old, sunbaked hotel \u2013 another survivor from the roughneck world of the town\u2019s early days. The hotel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t framing walls, he might be indulging one of his newer hobbies, gold panning over the pebbles of the region\u2019s creeks and rivers.<\/p>\n
Powers wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s vignette about the hardscrabble, highly eccentric gold addicts drinking their days away near Murphys, \u201cThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,\u201d marked his first rung up the ladder to literary stardom. […]<\/p>\n
READ MORE\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n
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\u201cIf I were to get rid of a body up between your house and, let\u2019s say Oroville, where would be the best place for us to look?\u201d
\nRichards blurted, referencing El Dorado County, \u201cThere was Gold Hill \u2013 I gave him a map to Gold Hill.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":""},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":786,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions\/786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inedc.com\/22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}