Parole board calls Ogden sex offender 'substantial threat' after stalking woman

OGDEN – The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole has determined that an Ogden sex offender poses a “significant threat to public safety” after he was found to have stalked a woman while outside prison.

The decision means Cary Hartman, 76, will remain in custody while the Utah Department of Corrections conducts a new round of mental health and sex offender risk assessments on him.

Hartman spent more than 30 years in prison for rape and sexual assault convictions in the mid-1980s. He was released on parole in March 2020, but was arrested again in April 2024 after a Utah adult probation and parole officer reported finding pornography on his phone.

During an evidentiary hearing in October, a lawyer for the Utah Attorney General's Office told the parole board that Hartman made unwanted sexual comments about a woman he met at a gym months after his release from prison. Hartman allegedly waited for the woman in the gym parking lot on multiple occasions and showed up uninvited at her workplace.

The woman, Kate Bell, spoke exclusively to KSL after the evidentiary hearing and said Hartmann's behavior made her feel unsafe.

“It wasn't just the words he was saying, it was the way he was looking at me,” Bell said. “Just because he's older doesn't mean he's not a threat to society.”

An investigator with the Weber County Attorney's Office told the parole board in October that Hartman made obscene phone calls to Bell, hiding his phone number using the service Google Voice. Similar obscene phone calls were a factor in some of Hartman's crimes in the 1980s. Hartman was also convicted of telephone harassment from 1971.

Hartman denied stalking Bell but did not elaborate on the allegations during the October hearing.

In a decision published on Friday, board chairman J. Scott Stephenson wrote a preponderance of the evidence showing that Hartman stalked Bell, “engaging in conduct that … would cause a reasonable person to fear for the individual's own safety or cause other emotional distress. Distress.”

The board said investigators did not sufficiently prove that Hartman was the person who made the obscene calls to Bell. Still, Stephenson noted that Hartman's behavior “repeated the cycle that led to previous crimes.”

Hartman was first sent to prison in 1987 when a Weber County jury convicted him on two counts of aggravated sexual assault, both first-degree felonies. The charges stem from allegations that Hartman, a former reserve officer with the Ogden Police Department, broke into a woman's home at night and raped her.

Weber County prosecutors also charged Hartman in connection with three other similar attacks in 1986 and 1987. Those cases were resolved through a plea deal, in which Hartman pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree aggravated rape in exchange for additional charges. .

Roy police consider Hartman a suspect in the cold case of the October 1985 disappearance of his girlfriend, Sherry Warren. The details of that matter are contained in s.Season 3 From KSL's investigative podcast series, COLD.