by Gregg Olsen
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FOR SUSAN’S UTAH SISTERS
Kiirsi Hellewell
Debbie Caldwell
JoVonna Owings
Rachel Marini
Michele Oreno
Amber Hardman
Barbara Anderson
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris
About the Authors
Copyright
Prologue
In every way Chuck Cox is an unassuming man. He wears tan Dockers and plain, buttoned-up shirts, usually white or pale blue. He keeps his once-sandy hair, now gray, combed neatly. His eyeglasses are more about function than style. Chuck even drives a suburban mainstay, a minivan. As an accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration, he has seen some of the worst tragedies imaginable, but he has kept the grim mental images of crash sites separate from his life as a husband, father, grandfather, and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you passed Chuck on the street, he would have been just another pleasant face. A smile. A nod. A quick wave.
Judy Cox, like her husband, is in her mid-fifties. She wears her graying hair long, and has a light touch with makeup. Judy is the neighbor lady who always makes sure that the mail is picked up when someone is on vacation. Who watches out for others in her church ward. Who makes sure a missing dog is found, every letter is answered, and every phone call is returned. Judy lives with diabetes, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren.
Yet, these days, doing that is so very, very hard.
* * *
The Coxes live in Puyallup, Washington, a town that epitomizes suburban sprawl at its best and worst. Pockets of the city of 37,000 retain the small-town vibe of a once-burgeoning farming community. Most of those areas, however, are cordoned off by an array of franchise restaurants and strip malls like many once bucolic communities across the growing Puget Sound region.
The town with the tongue-twister name is named for the Puyallup Tribe of Indians. It is known for three things: as the site of the largest fair in the state; the two hundred varieties of daffodils sold around the world; and—less pleasantly—as the location of a temporary internment facility called Camp Harmony, where Japanese-Americans were interned before being sent to camps in California and Idaho during the Second World War.
Four years ago, life changed for the Coxes. It will never change back. Judy knows it every time she looks over from the compact kitchen at a table that will always have three empty places. No reminders are necessary, but they are everywhere. A strange black rock that Chuck keeps by his computer. A faded purple ribbon on the lamppost on their street corner. A continuous flow of sympathy cards and e-mails of support.
No one—least of all Chuck and Judy—could have guessed where their lives would go when their daughter went missing in December 2009. Neither could have imagined the horror that was in store for them, or that they would find purpose in enduring the greatest tragedy a parent can face.
Susan Powell, the third-youngest of the four Cox girls, disappeared from the West Valley City, Utah, home she shared with her husband, Josh, and their sons, Charlie and Braden. A few days later a friend of Susan’s told Susan’s distraught father about a secret diary Susan had been keeping. That she kept a diary at all didn’t surprise Chuck—she’d done so on and off through her teenage years and young adulthood. Susan wrote romantic fantasies as a teen and later, her dreams for the future. Writing helped her process what was going on in her life.
The friend, a coworker of Susan’s, told Chuck that Susan kept the secret diary in her desk at work.
“Where Josh can’t see it,” she said.
Chuck felt his stomach, already wrenched with pain, drop.
He had no doubts that whatever Susan was writing had to do with her husband—or maybe her father-in-law, Steve. There wasn’t enough paper in the world for Susan to write down everything she thought about Steve. More than anything, however, Chuck hoped that the diary would hold some clues to her whereabouts.
Judy, a woman of unshakable faith like her husband, prayed the diary would lead the police to wherever Susan was in time to save her.
Based on the tip relayed by the friend and the worried father, West Valley City police investigators found a small key in Susan’s purse during a search of the Powell residence. The key fit a safe-deposit lock at a bank a block from her office.
A detective slid the key into the lock and lowered his eyes into the open box. Inside was a single piece of lined notebook paper, folded over and crudely stapled. As if it had been done in haste.
The words on the paper would send a chill down the spine of even the most seasoned investigator. It was like a message from the afterlife. In Susan’s loopy, sweetly girlish handwriting, it said:
If I die, it may not be an accident even if it looks like one. Take care of my boys.
If that wasn’t enough, there was also a caveat, a finger-pointing accusation toward her killer.
Susan asked that whoever found the note not show it to her husband, Josh.
For mine and my children’s safety I feel the need to have a paper trail at work which would not be accessible to my husband … it is an open fact that we have life insurance policies of over a million if we die in the next four years.
It was dated June 28, 2008.
* * *
Over time that cruelly stretched for years, Chuck and Judy and others who loved Susan would discover secrets and lies that would plunge all of them into the darkest places imaginable. They learned firsthand that the most startling depravity in the world ca
n come from places close to home, even from a house in a gated community just a few minutes’ drive away.
1
Every moment I step back and take stock of what I’m dealing with, it feels like a never ending cycle but I’m too afraid of the consequences, losing my kids, him kidnapping [them], divorce or actions worse on his part …
—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 5, 2008
Debbie Caldwell pulled up in her Ford Club Wagon—the one with fifteen seats to carry all the children who attended her day care—and observed how quiet her friend and neighbor Susan’s house seemed. It was 9:00 A.M. on Monday, December 7, 2009, and West Valley City, a suburb of Salt Lake City, was in the middle of a three-day winter storm. Freezing temperatures and four inches of new snowfall made the roads so icy that the local news described the streets as “mayhem.”
Susan, twenty-eight, and Josh, thirty-three, usually dropped Braden and Charlie at Daydreams & Fun Things Child Care as early as 6:00 A.M. When they didn’t appear that morning, Debbie started trying to reach the young parents. Susan was always prompt and conscientious. Josh was another story. He tested Debbie’s patience regularly, bringing the children late—which complicated the morning, since Debbie needed to know how many children needed breakfast. He also neglected to pick up the boys on time in the evening, cutting into Debbie’s time with her own family.
The other day-care parents avoided Josh because he talked incessantly and acted as if he was an expert on anything and everything. They had a nickname they called Josh behind his back: Rocks for Brains. One day, when Josh had given Debbie a hard time because Braden had lost his socks, one of the mothers said, “That idiot must have rocks for brains.” It stuck.
Charlie and Braden, ages four and two, respectively, had been attending Debbie’s day care for a year and a half, and like many women who had met the outgoing Susan, Debbie had become a confidante. Susan and her circle of friends were young, committed Mormon wives. Their children and their marriages came first. The friends had heard, because Susan told them, that Josh wouldn’t give her money to buy groceries and diapers, wouldn’t have sex with her, and wouldn’t go to counseling. One friend joked that Josh treated his pet parrot better than his wife and sons. Susan also voiced displeasure that he was spending too many hours on the phone talking with his father, who had left the Mormon church. Steve Powell, Susan told her friends, had been inappropriate with her—disgustingly so. Susan was so open with her complaints that her friends were feeling a bit apathetic. They’d heard it all so many times.
That morning, Debbie, forty-seven and the mother of four daughters, was on her way home from dropping the older children at school. She still had three toddlers in the car, and as she parked the van in front of 6254 W. Sarah Circle she told them she would just be a minute. She knocked on the front door several times. No answer. She expected to find Josh, harried anytime he had the slightest responsibility, getting the boys dressed, or more likely sequestered on his computer in the basement where he liked to hide. In any case, Susan would have phoned Debbie if there had been a change in plans.
By the time Debbie was at the Powells’ front door Monday morning, she had already called Susan on her cell phone. When there was no answer, she tried Susan’s work phone at Wells Fargo Investments and, finally, their home landline.
Again, no answer.
Debbie dialed Josh’s employer, Aspen Distribution, a trucking and shipping firm where he did computer programming. They said that Josh hadn’t shown up for work. When no one answered the front door of their house, she phoned the name listed as Josh and Susan’s emergency contact, his sister, Jennifer Graves.
“Hi Jennifer, this is Debbie Caldwell, Josh and Susan’s day-care person,” she said when she got Jennifer’s voice mail. “It’s nine o’clock. I’m at Josh and Susan’s house. No one is home, and they didn’t drop Charlie and Braden off this morning. Do you know what’s going on?”
A few minutes later, Josh’s mother, Terrica (Terri) Powell, heard the message. A quiet woman who never really got back on her feet after the divorce from her husband Steve, she lived with her daughter Jennifer, her son-in-law Kirk Graves, and the couple’s five children fifteen minutes south in West Jordan, Utah.
Terri conferred with Jennifer and they went over to the house. Finding it locked up tightly they tried both Josh’s and Susan’s cell phones, which went to voice mail. Then Terri phoned the West Valley City police to report the family missing.
* * *
The Powell residence looked like hundreds of others in West Valley City; maybe thousands. It was a white tract home with blue trim and blue shutters, and some stonework in the front. There was a tiny porch, a bay window, and a two-car garage. In the front yard was a wooden swing Josh had built for their two little boys. In back was playground equipment a neighbor had lent the family and a dormant vegetable garden. The garden wasn’t a mere hobby for Susan, it was a necessity. Occasionally its produce was the only thing Josh allowed his family to eat. Susan sometimes called friends to ask if she could borrow some hot dogs.
“The boys are hungry,” she’d say.
Within minutes of Debbie’s call of concern, Josh’s sister Jennifer met the police at the Powell house. The police logged it as a “welfare check” call. Jennifer, a soft-spoken woman with long, brown hair and her father’s blue eyes, was shaken. There was fresh snow on the driveway and the steps to the door. After accounting for Debbie’s tracks, it was clear that no one had been in or out of the house for at least several hours. When police knocked and got no answer, she gave them permission to break a window. They all braced themselves. Salt Lake City had just had several deaths attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning caused by faulty furnaces and that was on their minds as they entered the house. There was loud music blaring from a stereo and two box fans were angled to blow air on a damp spot on the carpet and a love seat near the front window.
At first there was a sense of relief: Josh and Susan and the boys were not dead in their beds. But something was wrong.
They weren’t home at all. Where were they?
Jennifer went into the master bedroom. Despite the clutter, she noticed Susan’s blue leather purse on a table by the foot of the bed. It contained her wallet, credit cards, and keys. There was no cell phone. The house was messy, but that was normal. There was no sign of forced entry or a robbery, home invasion, or struggle. Susan’s red nylon snow boots, which she wore whenever she left the house, were in the living room.
West Valley City police issued a statewide attempt-to-locate bulletin so that law enforcement in other jurisdictions would be on the lookout for the Powells’ 2005 light blue Chrysler Town & Country minivan. The police sent Jennifer home so they could search the house.
Jennifer called Susan’s father, Chuck Cox, in Puyallup, Washington, nine hundred miles to the northwest, to ask if he had heard from Susan or Josh. He hadn’t, but he wasn’t alarmed. Josh was known to make impulsive, last-minute decisions and the family liked to go rock hunting or camping. Yet, Chuck agreed it was odd that neither Susan nor Josh had called their places of employment or day-care provider to say that they’d be away.
Jennifer phoned her father’s house, also in Puyallup, and talked to her younger sister, Alina. Jennifer believed that Susan had moved to get away from her father, Steve, because Susan said he had made sexual advances toward her. In the background, Jennifer could hear her father talking while she asked Alina if they had heard from Josh and Susan. Alina asked everyone in the house, but no one had heard from Josh or Susan.
Jennifer called Kiirsi Hellewell, Susan’s best friend, who lived down the street from the Powells. Kiirsi hadn’t talked to Susan since Sunday, when they had walked home from church together.
“Susan didn’t say they were going anywhere,” Kiirsi told Jennifer.
Kiirsi then phoned the Relief Society president—the head of their ward’s women’s group—and the two of them joined Jennifer at the Powell house and talked to the police.
“I
was still thinking at that time that maybe they went for a drive because Susan had posted on her Facebook page that they had gone to a work party on Saturday night and Josh had won a camera,” Kiirsi remembered some time later. “I thought, ‘Well, it would be just like them to drive up in the mountains and take pictures.’” Then she began to imagine a different kind of threat than the carbon monoxide poisoning Jennifer and the police had feared. “Maybe they slid off a cliff and they’re all dead at the bottom of it or stuck on some back road. Because knowing Josh, he’d drive on some back road in fresh snow.”
Word spread among friends and church members that the Powell family was missing. In the early afternoon Kiirsi sent a text message to JoVonna Owings, who knew Susan from the church choir.
Susan, Josh and the boys are missing. We don’t know where they are. They haven’t been seen since church.
* * *
But JoVonna Owings had seen the family. She’d been with them Sunday afternoon and would be critical to piecing together Susan’s last hours.
If our lives can be read in our faces, JoVonna’s said she had lived a tough life. Although she was about the same age as Susan’s mother, JoVonna was thin and wizened and appeared older. She had a huge heart and wore big glasses that nearly gobbled her face. After church on Sunday she had helped Susan with some crocheting and had supper with the family. Josh had even cooked—an unheard-of event. JoVonna was the last person to have contact with Josh and Susan on Sunday—and would be the first to have contact with Josh on Monday.
At about 3:00 P.M. on Monday JoVonna phoned Josh. There was no answer. Her son Alex, who occasionally babysat for Charlie and Braden, punched in Josh’s number on his phone. Josh answered, but Alex panicked and hung up without speaking. JoVonna grabbed her son’s phone and redialed. He answered again.
“Josh, where are you?” JoVonna asked. “What are you doing? The police are looking for you.”
Josh, who could be an absolute motor mouth, was silent for a moment.
“We’re driving around.”
JoVonna felt her heart race. “Where’s Susan?”