by Ann Rule
Not without Susan’s body.
As it turned out, Josh, the apple, hadn’t fallen far from the tree as he’d downloaded sexually suspect sites into his computers. Steven Powell’s bedroom, closet, and bathroom yielded more items that showed his almost-psychotic fixation with Susan.
Ellis Maxwell and Gary Sanders had been designated as the only detectives at the Powell house who would sift through possible evidence to determine what would be seized. They began their onerous task.
The earlier search warrant had yielded the surreptitious photographs that Steven had taken of Susan. On August 25, 2011, there was more—much more. Searchers found several VHS and 8mm videocassettes, many with Susan’s name on them, women’s underwear, used tampons, a length of long brown hair that appeared to have been pulled from a sink drain, and more still photographs of Susan, both dressed and in her undergarments.
There were also several spiral notebooks where Steven had written about Susan. Although he began his notations sounding like a shy, insecure, lovesick schoolboy, he progressed rapidly to detailing his unbelievably salacious sexual fantasies about Susan. He used the most degrading four-letter words to describe parts of her body and his own frequent masturbation while he thought about her.
Steven Powell appeared to be convinced by his own delusions, believing that his daughter-in-law harbored lust for him! He hypothesized that when Susan sat quietly, looking away from him, she was actually masturbating in her mind and reaching silent climaxes because she was so sexually turned on.
A hundred. Two hundred. More than three hundred pages filled with typed entries or Steven’s sprawling handwriting. He read quiet seduction and temptation into everything Susan did.
Steven recalled in an early notebook that he had professed his love to Susan openly on July 13, 2003. He was dismayed and puzzled when she seemed to avoid him after that. If he saw her at all, she was with Josh.
In December 2003, Steven was helping Susan and Josh pack for their move to Salt Lake City.
“She was at least somewhat friendly, though not visibly happy,” he wrote in his spiral notebook. “Toward the end of the day, she was posing again, doing her sexual thing with me. She sat on the floor with her body facing me for about five minutes with her legs spread wide, and her right knee bent with her heel nearly touching her crotch. We had just unassembled her bird’s cage, and she was idly playing with the screws with one hand, picking them up and dropping them on the carpet . . . When Josh left the apartment for about five minutes, she turned her head to the right and held it there, so that I was facing her left profile and had opportunity to look her over and drink her image in. I just stood and stared at her, neither of us speaking, moving my eyes from her beautiful face to her crotch, her face to her crotch. Back and forth. She knew what I was doing, and I knew she was letting me do it . . .”
Steven concluded that Susan was deliberately responsible for his getting an erection and that she herself was agitated and aroused.
“When she gets aroused, she becomes quiet like that, and plays a little cat and mouse game. She plays the demure act, as if trying to avoid the attention she knows I am paying to her.”
This excerpt from Steven Powell’s journals is mild when compared to his other writings about Susan, his erections, and his masturbation sessions several times a day. He seemed to be in a perpetual state of priapism.
Steven had written a number of songs, all inspired by his “love” for Susan. The one that seemed to describe his obsession best was “I Will Love You in a Secret Way.”
For years he had peeked at her, stalked her, taken furtive photos of her in her most private moments, and frightened her as she sensed that his interest in her was nothing like what a father-in-law should feel for his son’s wife. Now, in this journal, it was Christmas Day 2003, and Steven panicked at the thought of Susan moving far away from him.
He wanted to see her one more time, and she had refused to come to his house again. Steven Powell had heard Josh mention shopping at Costco, so he drove to the mammoth store, hoping to get one more glimpse of Susan before she left the state.
“Pulling out of a parking space, I scraped someone’s bumper and had to deal with that,” Steven began. “Luckily, he accepted a twenty-dollar bill to buy a bottle of touch-up paint. I was agitated because I was afraid I would miss an opportunity to see Susan if she was at Costco. When I got to Costco, they were there! Their van was parked next to the tire-install bays and Josh was outside talking to someone.
“Susan was still sitting in the van, reading. Neither noticed me even though I drove by facing Susan and looked at her. I flipped around and parked where I could videotape her. It was too dark to get a good image of her in the van, but she got out to go into the store and I caught her from behind mainly. She turned around, apparently to yell something at Josh and I got a dark grainy shot of her face . . .”
Steven pasted many still shots from his videotaping in the spiral notebook to illustrate his memories. Susan was trapped, unknowing, within his cameras.
He didn’t leave. Neither Susan nor Josh was aware that Steven waited outside Costco for almost an hour, hoping to get more videotape shots of Susan. He did capture more grainy shots, some of which were of Susan looking over her shoulder. Steven wondered if she was looking at him, letting him know that she knew he was there.
Steven Powell went on for eleven more pages detailing his stalking of Susan at Costco. And then he added nineteen pornographic pages about how he lusted for Susan.
It would be an invasion of her privacy, of her very soul, to quote those pages, so I won’t. The two detectives—one from Utah and one from Washington—were appalled by Powell’s journals. He went on so long in his obscene fantasies that they almost became boring in their repetition. Oddly, he had made no effort to hide them, possibly thinking that the investigators would never come to search his house again.
Susan could never have guessed how dark her father-in-law’s mind really was. His scrutiny and imagination went far beyond anything she could have visualized. Did Josh know? Probably not. Once more, Steven Powell appeared to have no guilt about the way he coveted his son’s wife.
* * *
After Josh and Susan had moved to Utah, Steven began a new journal. Although he still proclaimed that Susan had opened up a new view of the world for him, a view that showed him that younger women did find him “sexy and attractive,” he noted that no woman could ever replace Susan, because they were meant to be together. “I am the voyeur,” he said. “She is the exhibitionist.”
But it didn’t take long before Steven Powell became fixated on another woman in her twenties. She worked for a company that often had booths at trade shows that Steven attended.
Joan* was a beauty contest winner, engaged to be married soon, and had been friendly to Steven—friendly as a woman might be to someone her father’s age. When he emailed her, she usually responded politely and kindly.
Now Steven believed that this new woman was coming on to him. As always, he began his journal entries sounding like an infatuated high school boy, but he soon descended into vulgarity and intensely disturbing scenarios.
In the hot August afternoon, Ellis Maxwell and Gary Sanders seized Steven Powell’s journals as possible evidence in Susan Powell’s disappearance, astonished by the sexual snake pit the search warrant was uncovering.
Chapter Ten
Susan’s journals were also in Steven Powell’s house. Her private thoughts since she was seven or eight through her marriage to Josh were, indeed, in her husband and father-in-law’s possession.
Moreover, Steven confessed in one of his journals that he had snuck into Josh and Susan’s apartment and read Susan’s journals. He had told neither of them about that intrusion, although he was unhappy when he didn’t find anything positive about himself.
Shortly after he arrived, Lieutenant Phil Quinlan of the West Valley City Police Department, who was at the Powell house for the search warrant, asked Alina Powell if she w
ould speak with him. She agreed, and they talked in the backyard. Quinlan asked if Alina had any information that might help them investigate the fate of her missing sister-in-law. Alina shook her head slightly. She told Quinlan that initially she had wondered if Josh might have had something to do with Susan’s absence. But Alina said she’d spoken about that with her brother in several candid conversations, and she had come to believe he wasn’t involved.
“I’m supporting Josh,” Alina said. “Unless there is any evidence that could prove he had anything to do with it.”
“If you found out anything like that, would you report it to us?” Quinlan asked.
She nodded and said she would. Then she asked Quinlan why police had been searching mines out in the area near Ely, Nevada.
“We had to,” the detective lieutenant answered. “We had some evidence that Susan might be there.”
“I think it was all a ruse to put pressure on Josh,” Alina argued.
All the while Quinlan talked with Alina, Josh kept wandering back to where the interview was taking place. He seemed to be concerned that his sister was openly speaking to law enforcement, and he kept urging Alina to leave the property with him. She hadn’t really said anything to implicate Josh, but apparently he was worried that she had.
When Josh left shortly with his boys to go to McDonald’s, Alina remained at her home.
* * *
Lieutenant Quinlan was one of the investigators who searched Steven’s bedroom. He tried to open a two-drawer filing cabinet with several keys on a nearby ring, with no success. When he drilled the lock with a power drill, the drawers opened easily. Quinlan stared at a curious object in the top drawer. It was flesh-colored and made of latex. As he looked closer, Quinlan saw it was a reproduction of female buttocks and genitalia. It had a labia, vagina, and anus.
Also in this filing cabinet were more pictures of Susan, including her wedding photos. But someone had cut Josh’s face out of the frames, so that only Susan’s face remained.
The search wasn’t over.
Beyond Steven Powell’s perverted obsession with Susan, the investigators were taken aback to find that he had other sexual perversions. The elder Powell was apparently a voyeur, watching and filming young females in his neighborhood. There were scores more photographs, forbidden shots of little girls and teenagers.
Susan’s was a missing-person case under the West Valley City Police Department’s jurisdiction and the evidence seized so far had to do with her. But now the search team had discovered a possible crime in Pierce County.
They found many, many computer file folders and subfolders containing pictures of prepubescent and slightly older girls. The shots had obviously been taken by someone in Steven’s bedroom, someone who had focused on neighboring houses in this subdivision, which had large houses on small lots. Building codes allowed for six-foot fences, but there was no protection from someone aiming cameras from an upstairs room.
Through Steven Powell’s window, and then a window in the next lot, across a room and down a hall, a camera had been aimed stealthily at two little girls in an upstairs bathroom.
There was no question of their innocence as they had taken baths, used the toilet, dressed, and undressed. They had no idea that a man old enough to be their grandfather was aiming a camera with a telephoto lens at them in their most private moments.
But that wasn’t all. Steven Powell’s files held what proved to be two thousand pictures he—or someone in his bedroom—had taken of young girls and those who appeared to be in junior high and high school. The camera lens had zoomed in to focus on their breasts, buttocks, and genital area.
Some of the teenagers were playing basketball in a driveway, and, in a few of the shots, a car’s license plate was visible.
The images were in subfolders labeled “Neighbors,” “Taking bath-1,” “Taking bath-2,” “Open window in back house,” and “Brandi* on 191st.”
Some had been taken in daylight, some at night, and the dates on them spanned several years.
The evidence of voyeurism and child pornography was now in the hands of Pierce County sheriff’s detectives. Identifying the victims, however, wouldn’t be easy. Some of the nearby houses were rentals, and several had been sold to new owners over the years.
Pierce County prosecuting attorney Mark Lindquist, Sheriff Paul Pastor, and their respective staffs had grown increasingly frustrated as the probe into Susan Powell’s disappearance moved at what seemed to them a snail’s pace for almost two years. Susan was, basically, a resident of Pierce County, as were most of her relatives and friends, and Lindquist and Pastor wanted to do everything their offices could to bring about arrest warrant(s) for whoever was responsible for her fate.
The problem was that the missing-person case was within the domain of the West Valley City police. Gary Sanders of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department had been involved with the case since three days after Susan vanished, and a few dozen lawmen and criminalists from the sheriff’s office had also taken part in this case, which had grown more convoluted and weird as time passed.
Prosecutor Mark Lindquist had said privately that if this had been his case, he would have charged Josh Powell with murder early on. “There is direct evidence. There is circumstantial evidence. There is motive,” Lindquist pointed out. “There is everything but the body.”
Mark Lindquist finally had probable crimes that had occurred in his jurisdiction that involved either Steven or Josh Powell. If exploring the story behind the thousands of clandestine photographs found in the August 25 search warrant should lead back to Susan, there might finally be a break in her case.
Lindquist and two of his deputy prosecutors—Mary Robinett and Grant Blinn—met with detectives from Washington and Utah. They devised a plan to locate the nameless victims, girls who probably hadn’t even known they were victims of a sexually obsessed man with a camera.
Gary Sanders and detective Bob Bobrowski from the West Valley City force suggested that they start with the subfolders with titles. Investigators would go to the neighborhood where Steven and Josh Powell lived and attempt to locate the girls caught in the voyeuristic photographs. It meant door-to-door canvassing, one of the oldest police techniques in law enforcement history. Yet it is also one that still can be counted on to elicit information.
Sanders, Maxwell, Bobrowski, detective Kevin Johnson, and sergeant Teresa Berg began by tracing the license plate that showed in some of the bedroom pictures through the computers at the Washington State Department of Motor Vehicles. The plate came back to homeowners who had once lived just across the street from Steven Powell. This would be where “Brandi on 191st” had resided.
On September 19, 2011, the canvassing team contacted Brandi’s parents, who had long since moved to Alabama. They stated unequivocally that their teenage daughters had never posed for any of the mystery photographs and that they certainly hadn’t given the mystery cameraman permission.
The detectives moved on to the house directly behind Powell’s residence. This was a likely target because Steven’s bedroom window faced the side of this residence where a window was on the same level.
No one was home.
Three hours later, Gary Sanders and Ellis Maxwell returned and spoke with Loretta Schaller.* She said she had lived there for less than a year and had no young daughters. She was renting the home from a man named Burt Mallett* and provided Mallett’s address. Mrs. Schaller agreed to let the detectives in to look at the layout of the house.
Upstairs, Sanders recognized the bathroom and its fixtures as the room where the younger girls, who appeared to be about seven and eleven, had been photographed. This bathroom, however, was on the far end of the residence from Steven Powell’s house and his bedroom window.
“The only line of sight to be able to photograph this bathroom would be from Steven’s bedroom window,” Sanders wrote in his report. “And the bathroom door of the other house would have had to be open at the time.”
Elli
s Maxwell took pictures of the “target house’s” interior before they left. Then Sanders contacted Burt Mallett.
“We own it, but we only lived there for a little while,” Mallett said. “Then we rented it out.”
“To anyone with young girls?” Sanders asked.
“Yeah . . . to a couple that had two little girls—sometime around 2006 to 2008. Not sure which. I’m not very good with dates.”
By checking databases, Gary Sanders determined that a John and Sally Mahoney* had lived in the house from June 2006 to August 2007. They currently lived in a house they had purchased a short distance away. When he drove to their home, Sanders encountered Sally Mahoney and her daughters, Lily* and Robyn,* as they pulled into their driveway.
Sanders instantly recognized Lily as the older girl in the surreptitious photos. He approached Sally and asked if he could speak to her without her daughters being present. She sent the girls into the house and Sanders explained why he was there. He first showed her pictures where her daughters had clothes on. She identified them easily, but then she asked him if there were other photos she didn’t know about. When he told her there were—images of her girls bathing, changing their clothing, and using the toilet—she began to cry.
The thought that someone had taken pictures of her vulnerable little girls was devastating to Sally Mahoney. She said she had never given her permission for her daughters to be photographed in the nude, in their own bathroom. She was appalled that someone had done so.
“My youngest daughter, Robyn, was afraid about being in the bathroom upstairs, with the door shut—I don’t know why,” she explained. “So I told her she could leave the door open and shout down to me to be sure I was there and they were safe.
“Now, I guess they weren’t safe at all,” Sally added, with tears streaking her face.
The investigators continued to call on nearby homes, and they found other residents who recognized the teenagers in the photos they held out.