Lawrence John “Larry” Powers was a 58-year-old man who disappeared on April 9, 2007, while in Arizona pursuing his longtime interest in gold prospecting. Powers, a male resident of Murphys, California, frequently traveled to Arizona and held interests in mining claims there. On the day he vanished, he was last seen in the Wickenburg and Salome areas of Arizona with fellow prospector Anthony Richards. The two men were partners in a remote mining claim near Bagdad in Yavapai County.
Authorities later established that Powers and Richards had been seen together the previous day at the Lost Dutchman’s Mining Association camp in Stanton, and on April 9 they visited gold-mining stores in Salome and Wickenburg. Those sightings became critically important because investigators would eventually determine that no reliable witness ever saw or heard from Powers again after that day.
Powers and Richards had been traveling and prospecting together for some time. Court records later showed that in February 2007 they traveled from their respective homes in California and Oregon to a remote 480-acre mining claim near Bagdad. Along the way they visited two acquaintances who were also gold-prospecting enthusiasts and who were selling a fifth-wheel camping trailer. Richards agreed to purchase the trailer for $2,000 and initially paid half of the price. During another visit shortly before Powers disappeared, the group drove through the area looking at potential prospecting locations. One witness later testified that Powers and Richards appeared to be having a disagreement, with Richards aggressively trying to persuade Powers about something Powers was firmly resisting. On April 9, Powers purchased a shaker table, a piece of mining equipment used to separate gold from surrounding material, for $1,895 at a prospecting store in Salome. That purchase would later become an important piece of evidence in reconstructing what happened immediately after Powers was last seen.
Within days, Richards returned alone to the acquaintances who were selling the fifth-wheel trailer and brought the newly purchased shaker table with him, offering it as the remainder of the payment for the trailer. When asked where Powers was, Richards gave a troubling account. According to testimony later described by the Arizona Court of Appeals, Richards said Powers had become violent, that he had taken Powers’s handgun away, restrained him with rope and left him at their mining camp. Richards indicated that Powers would be all right. When Richards subsequently appeared alone at a planned gathering of prospectors, however, his explanation changed: he said he had placed Powers on a bus back to California because Powers no longer wanted to remain in Arizona. Those explanations would eventually conflict with still other versions Richards gave to Powers’s family and investigators.
Back in Murphys, Powers’s absence slowly became impossible for the people who knew him to ignore. Near the end of April, a neighbor noticed that Powers’s normally well-maintained yard was being neglected and that his American flag, which he routinely took down each evening, had been left outside overnight for weeks. Concerned, the neighbor contacted Powers’s sister, Joan Shattuck. When they checked his property, Powers was gone, a garage door was unlocked and a light had been left burning inside the garage—circumstances considered highly unusual for him. Shattuck began contacting relatives and friends and learned that her brother had gone to Arizona with Richards. During a lengthy telephone conversation with Shattuck, Richards displayed considerable knowledge of Powers’s finances, complained that Powers owed him money and claimed that he had brought Powers safely back to his Murphys home after their Arizona trip. Richards also offered another account in which he said he had seen Powers at his Oregon home in early May. Investigators would later determine that none of the people they interviewed could verify that Powers had been alive after April 9.
The financial trail added to the growing concern. When Powers’s sister collected mail from his post-office box, she found uncashed checks, bills and bank statements showing unusual credit-card purchases in Arizona, California and Oregon after Powers had disappeared. Friends and relatives recorded conversations with Richards and provided them to law enforcement. Missing-person reports were filed in California and Arizona, and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office began examining the relationship between the two prospectors and the use of Powers’s property and financial accounts. Friends formally reported Powers missing in June 2007. Searches of the rugged mining country near Bagdad failed to locate him, and the investigation eventually grew cold. Powers’s family nevertheless continued pressing for answers, and in 2012 a California court declared him legally dead. A retired law-enforcement officer volunteering with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office subsequently began an intensive review of the case, interviewing approximately 50 people. None reported having seen or spoken with Powers after April 9, 2007.
By 2016, investigators had developed substantial evidence surrounding Powers’s property and finances. When detectives interviewed Richards at his Oregon residence, they found an all-terrain vehicle registered to Powers as well as a utility trailer and cart that had been purchased with Powers’s credit card on April 28, 2007, weeks after Powers was last known to be alive. Richards identified two people who he claimed had seen Powers after the Arizona prospecting trip, but both reportedly told investigators that they had not seen Powers following that trip. A grand jury investigation led to Richards being arrested in Oregon on charges including trafficking in stolen property, theft of Powers’s handgun and credit card, forgery and multiple counts of identity theft connected with purchases made using Powers’s credit. Yavapai County authorities publicly renewed their appeal for information, stating that the disappearance showed strong indications of foul play.
The investigation then shifted from trying to determine where Powers had gone to trying to find his remains. Investigators focused again on the remote mining claim near Bagdad. A drone survey revealed a suspicious depression or hole roughly 400 feet from the men’s campsite. On January 17, 2017, Yavapai County detectives used heavy equipment to excavate the location. Beneath the desert soil they discovered skeletal human remains along with clothing, shoes and rope. The recovery amounted to nearly a complete skeleton, and investigators also found three fired bullets in the soil beneath the remains. A forensic anthropologist compared the skull with dental records and identified the remains as Lawrence Powers. Examination of his skeleton revealed several injuries around the time of death, including significant fractures of ribs near his heart. Medical testimony later established that the injuries could have resulted from gunfire or blunt-force trauma, and the medical examiner concluded that Powers died as a result of homicidal violence. After nearly a decade of uncertainty, his family finally knew that Larry had not simply disappeared or voluntarily abandoned his life; he had been found deceased in the isolated mining country where he had traveled to prospect for gold.
The recovery of Powers’s remains transformed the long-running missing-person investigation into a homicide prosecution. Prosecutors presented evidence concerning the dispute over the shaker table and trailer, Richards’s admitted restraint of Powers at the campsite, his possession and use of Powers’s property, and the numerous conflicting explanations he had given about where Powers supposedly went after leaving Arizona. The State argued that those circumstances, together with the clandestine grave, Powers’s injuries and the bullets recovered beneath his body, demonstrated that Richards was responsible for his death. Although investigators were never able to establish every detail of precisely how Powers died, the Arizona Court of Appeals later found that there was sufficient circumstantial evidence for a jury to conclude that Richards either intentionally killed Powers or acted with extreme indifference to his life and then attempted to conceal what had happened.
After an earlier prosecution ended in a mistrial, Richards was tried again. In March 2022, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder, along with trafficking in stolen property, theft of a credit card, forgery and 19 counts of taking another person’s identity. The court imposed a combination of concurrent and consecutive aggravated prison terms totaling 31 years. Richards appealed, challenging among other things the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the murder conviction, but on May 23, 2023, the Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions and sentences. Lawrence Powers’s case therefore traveled an extraordinary and painful course: a 58-year-old prospector left California for the Arizona desert, was last reliably seen with his mining partner on April 9, 2007, and seemingly vanished; financial records, contradictory accounts and years of determined investigative work kept the case alive until his remains were discovered nearly ten years later in a concealed grave near the mining camp. What began as an unexplained disappearance ultimately became a homicide case in which Powers was identified, returned to his family and legally recognized as the victim of a killing, while the man last known to be with him was convicted of second-degree murder and related offenses after years of investigation and litigation.Last Seen: Apr 9, 2007
