If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children

by Gregg Olsen

  —SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 28, 2008

  Susan Marie Cox, the third of four girls, was born on October 16, 1981, to Chuck and Judy Cox in New Mexico, where Chuck served as a staff sergeant working in the air traffic control tower at Holloman Air Force Base. Those early years had been good ones, living on the edge of the desert with roadrunners and the occasional lizard as visitors to the backyard of the first house the family had ever owned.

  Chuck left the Air Force after six years. When it came time to make a move, Chuck and family looked north. First, way north to a job in Alaska. Next was a stint in Vancouver, Washington, before the family finally settled in Puyallup, just east of Tacoma. Chuck became an investigator for the FAA, visiting crash sites and asking questions to find out why things went wrong. There were always answers.

  The Cox daughters all had their distinct personalities. As the oldest, Mary was the one who kept track of everyone and everything, a trait she would use later in life as a paralegal. Denise loved animals and called herself the black sheep of the family because she experimented with smoking and drinking and became pregnant at eighteen. Marie was the baby of the family—a role she played to her advantage. Susan, number three, was the dreamer, the girl who saw beauty in everything and everyone. All four played music and sang in the church or school choir.

  Of the sisters, Denise and Susan shared a particular interest in and love of animals, especially birds. At one time, the girls had a menagerie of twenty-seven parakeets, finches, and a cockatoo in their room—much to their mother’s dismay. Judy made the girls clean the cages twice a day, which Susan and Denise grudgingly did. At one time, the pair formed their own exclusive club, which they dubbed “The Bird Club.”

  As young teens, they dreamed of a business they could open together. It would be a combination hair salon—for people—and dog grooming business, for their customers’ pets. They wanted to call it “Beauty and Your Beast.”

  Susan wanted to make a career out of making people beautiful. She loved to color hair and experiment with her own hairstyles—sometimes to less than desirable results. She gave her mom and her sisters pedicures whenever they wanted them—or whenever she insisted they needed a little filing and polish.

  When Susan announced that she was going to beauty school neither Chuck nor Judy was surprised. Everyone had expected it. Susan had a veritable storage locker of makeup and hair supplies in her bedroom. When she started taking cosmetology classes, the back of her car was filled with smiling head models. It looked like someone had decapitated a team of cheerleaders. Years later, eldest sister Mary remembered the time she sat on a stool in the living room while Susan snipped and snipped away.

  “When Susan was going to school for cosmetology she had to practice on other people, so I was her dummy. I let her cut and color my hair. She told me to lean my head back rather than sit straight up and she ended up taking a lot more than I wanted. Let’s just say I told her she could never cut my hair again!”

  * * *

  Joshua Steven Powell was born on January 20, 1976, being one of five children born to Steve and Terri Powell in Spokane, Washington. Jennifer was the oldest, followed by Josh, Johnny, Mike, and finally, Alina. If Chuck and Judy’s marriage and family were a reasonable example of a family who knew how to work out its problems with love and faith, the Powells were at the other end of the spectrum. The very farthest end. And while the Powells had gone through a bitter divorce when Josh was a teenager, their lives together weren’t always acrimonious. At one time, Steve and Terri seemed very much in love. They loved the outdoors, reading, and spending time with others of their Mormon faith. Terri was eighteen and Steve was twenty-three and recently back from his mission service in Argentina when they were married in the Ogden, Utah, temple.

  Times were tough. Terri had three children—and a miscarriage—all in two and a half years and wound up hospitalized. She described their life as “lower middle class,” with Steve working nights at a grocery store before trying real estate. Many months they didn’t have enough money to get by.

  Over time, their love for each other, and Steve’s faith in the church, began to fracture. The consequences of the seismic shift were noticed by everyone, including friends and family. Many worried about what the Powells’ war with each other might do to their children.

  Josh, unlike his father and most Mormon young men after high school, did not go on a mission. By the time he was nineteen, his parents had been divorced for three years and he continued to live under his father’s roof, a man who by then was vehemently anti-Mormon and who made sure that his kids felt the same way. Josh, more than the others, seemed especially susceptible to the rants of his dad. He drank in, guzzled really, everything Steve said.

  In contrast to the volatile Powell family, Chuck and Judy Cox had been married for thirty-five years when Susan went missing. Chuck hadn’t been raised Mormon. He met Judy when they were sixteen and in high school in Medical Lake, Washington, just outside of Spokane. Judy was Mormon and Chuck was searching for a faith. Something clicked. Chuck discovered that the teenagers he saw who didn’t do drugs and treated people well happened to be members of the LDS. Chuck joined the faith at seventeen and he and Judy were married after high school. Like any family, over the years there were good times and challenging times in the Cox household—but it was infinitely more stable than Josh’s upbringing. The Coxes’ daughter, Denise, the “misfit” in the family, was a divorced mother of four and was in a custody fight over two of her children. That was about as bad as it got in the Cox family.

  * * *

  Susan was nineteen when she met twenty-four-year-old Joshua Powell and his buddy Tim Marini at an LDS singles event in Tacoma in 2000. Josh no longer attended the Mormon church, but he hadn’t turned against the faith yet. Plus, it was a good place to meet single young women. Tim wanted to date Susan but, unfortunately for him, she wasn’t the least bit interested. Susan had the kind of sparkling personality and energy that drew other people to her. She was a magnet. When Josh showed interest, Tim made the introduction and Susan agreed to go out with him.

  From the beginning the match was an odd one. Josh came from a troubled family. He talked so much that the room filled with his words. He could be annoying, but he could also be endearing.

  Susan laughed at Josh’s incessant ramblings, his preoccupation with everything from cameras to computers. He had big, grandiose plans for the future, a different plan every week.

  Judy and Chuck had some reservations about their daughter’s new boyfriend. They had met him before, when Josh tried asking out their oldest daughter, Mary. Josh had shown up at their house the night of Mary’s prom. She had a date and was at the dance but it didn’t matter to Josh. He planted himself in a living room chair intent on staying to chat with Judy about Mary, the weather, anything at all. Judy felt like she’d been caught in a steel-jawed leg trap. There was no getting rid of the kid.

  Finally, Chuck came home. In his typical no-nonsense fashion, he was direct when he told Josh that the visit was over.

  “You need to go now,” he said.

  Josh didn’t get it. He just sat there, looking blank-eyed. And kept talking.

  Chuck had never seen anything like it.

  Despite his peculiar nature, Susan fell for Josh. In some ways it was inexplicable. She was stunning, vivacious. His personality swung between stiff and remote, and gregarious and overbearing.

  Mary had tried to warn her sister when things turned serious. She thought Josh was just plain weird. So did their parents.

  “I have a bad feeling about him,” Judy said as she and Susan sat at the massive family table that filled nearly every square inch of the dining room.

  Susan didn’t want to hear a thing about it.

  “You need to date lots of people,” Judy said, choosing her words carefully, like she always did. “Kid, you got it made. You’re a pretty girl. You’re smart. You know what you want. You make friends easy. Just enjoy yourself. You can have so mu
ch fun.”

  Susan appeared to understand what her mother was saying.

  “I’m going to have fun,” she said. “I am making lots of friends. Josh just happens to be one of them.”

  Judy pondered that for a moment. “Well, that’s fine,” she said, seeing that Susan was not about to abandon her interest in Josh Powell. “You can date him. But date others, too. Don’t get serious with Josh. There’re more guys out there. Take a year and really discover that.”

  Judy could have said more. So could Chuck. It passed through Susan’s father’s mind to be straight up about the situation. Chuck wanted to tell his daughter to head for the hills when it came to her suitor, but as the father of four girls, he knew better.

  “I knew if I said ‘Stay away from him,’ that’s exactly who she would go for,” Chuck said. “So you knew that wasn’t going to work.”

  Even so, Chuck, the FAA investigator, grilled the young man about the kind of life he would offer Susan.

  With Josh sitting across from him at the table, Chuck ticked off all the boxes. Yes, the boy had a job. Yes, he had an apartment where they could live. Yes, he was going to further his education by finishing college and getting a business degree.

  Josh was alert, convincing, and solicitous. He said all the right things.

  Chuck still wasn’t completely convinced, but he gave his blessing.

  “That looks pretty good,” he said, a little halfheartedly. “Self-supporting and everything.”

  He later told Judy that his first impression of Josh might have been wrong. Maybe there was hope for the couple after all?

  “She’s marrying him,” Judy said, “because she feels sorry for him. Susan thinks she can make him happy, she thinks she can help him to change.”

  In their engagement photo, which Chuck took in a rambling field near their Puyallup home, Susan sits on Josh’s knee, her head tilted and resting on Josh’s chest. They look very young and very happy, excited to begin their lives together.

  * * *

  Families of the bride and groom often meet before the wedding. They spend a little time together, if only for the sake of their children. Not so with the Powells and the Coxes. Chuck and Judy had met Josh a few times, but there had been no polite or celebratory get-acquainted parties or dinners between the families. Chuck sized up Josh’s family quickly.

  They knew Steve was anti-Mormon, wrote anti-Mormon treatises, and considered himself an expert on a lot of things. “He likes to talk, and Josh likes to talk, and I didn’t really feel like being bombarded by somebody who thinks they know everything when they really don’t know anything,” Chuck said. “I didn’t make an effort to talk with him, and they never made any effort to talk with us.”

  On that happy note, the families managed to tolerate each other over lunch at an Old Country Buffet restaurant in a Portland suburb a few hours before Josh and Susan were married. It had been decided in advance that Steve’s contribution to the day was to pick up the tab, but he grumbled about it.

  “I heard Steve complaining that he had to pay just a little over a hundred bucks, and how dare he have to pay!” Judy recalled. “And Josh said, ‘Oh, come on Dad, just pay.’ And I was so tempted to go up there and say, ‘Maybe you’d like to help pay for the wedding and we’ll split it. My part is thousands of dollars and yours is a hundred dollars and you’re complaining?’ But I thought, ‘I don’t want to embarrass my daughter,’ and it’s the only thing that stopped me.”

  * * *

  On April 6, 2001, a couple of hours after the old Country Buffet lunch, Josh and Susan’s marriage was sealed for eternity at the commanding LDS temple in Lake Oswego, a few miles outside Portland. Most of Josh’s family couldn’t attend the actual wedding, since Steve had renounced the LDS church and, except for his eldest daughter Jennifer, his children had stopped attending church.

  After a one-night honeymoon in a beautiful and historic hotel overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, the newlyweds celebrated at a reception at the Coxes’ ward in Puyallup. Josh spent most of it taking pictures. His sister, Alina, a heavyset young woman who acted like a servant to her brothers and father, shadowed the groom as he took photos. Chuck felt sorry for her.

  “It’s like she doesn’t have a mind or a life of her own,” he said.

  The Coxes took photos, too, of Josh looking very young and gawky in a tuxedo and Susan pretty in her long white wedding dress. The gown was perfect for a temple wedding, with a modest, slightly rounded neck and long, lacey sleeves. Her parents bought the dress at a Tacoma bridal shop for $399 along with her pillbox hat with a trailing veil and the bouquet of white flowers she carried. The reception line included Susan’s sisters as her bridesmaids. They wore long dresses in Susan’s favorite color, purple. They stood with their parents to Susan’s left. To Josh’s right were his father and mother, his sister Alina, and his brother Mike. No one asked about Johnny, and Jennifer was absent; she had avoided her father since her parents’ divorce.

  Susan overheard a conversation on her wedding day between Josh and his father that she passed along to her mother.

  “Steve said, ‘Well, she’s no lawyer or doctor but she’ll do.’”

  Judy looked confused. “What’s he talking about?” she asked.

  Susan knew exactly what her father-in-law meant and she spelled it out.

  “In other words,” she said, “I’m not going to make big money but I’ll do well enough that Josh won’t have to work.”

  Judy was appalled by the remark, but it was the next thing the new—and flabbergasted—bride said that really shocked her.

  “Steve said, ‘Josh, she’s going to divorce you someday.’”

  Judy wondered what kind of father would say that to his son on his wedding day.

  Who bets against love and marriage while the commitment is being sealed forever?

  * * *

  Josh and Susan moved into an apartment near Susan’s parents. Susan had earned a scholarship to Gene Juarez Academy, the Pacific Northwest’s premier cosmetology school. Later she worked at Regis Salon at a mall south of Seattle. She said she liked to help people look their best. But more than anything, Susan loved being an aunt to her older sisters’ children and dreamed of the day she would be a mother.

  When money was tight, they lived with Josh’s father, Steve, an experience that would send Susan running.

  Josh worked for Virco, the same manufacturing company as his father, selling and installing office furniture.

  In the early days of their marriage, Josh and Susan seemed close, very much in love. Friends and family described them as happy, holding hands, and frequently kissing.

  Susan was still giddy with love when, just before their second wedding anniversary, she handwrote a note to Josh on Valentine’s Day titled “Reasons I Love You.” On five pages of lined paper she listed 132 reasons. Within a couple of years some traits she found endearing would become irritating; others would be bittersweet reminders of the young couple they had been. Her “Reasons I Love You” included:

  You want to talk about irrelevant topics until you’ve resolved the issues of the world

  You’ll drive aimlessly

  You want children

  You pray for people

  You show affection in public

  You don’t care what others think

  You love my family get-together occasions

  You watch “Friends” with me for hours

  You can be patient

  You let me wax you

  You hold me in the middle of the night

  You calculate everything

  You went to church when you didn’t feel like it was worth it

  You pay tithing without question

  You double-check locks

  But while they didn’t know the full extent of the trauma and drama in Josh’s childhood, Susan’s parents were worried about Josh’s sometimes odd behavior. Occasionally, he seemed not to be all there. At other times, he’d be oddly evasive. He made a habit
of arriving hours late to family functions, with no awareness that others were waiting for him. It appeared as if Josh either didn’t care about others, or was unable to empathize with anyone else’s problems. They didn’t give voice to their greatest concern, because to do so would have been almost too scary to say out loud. Chuck and Judy began to wonder if Josh’s aberrant behavior was an indicator that he might have a mental illness.

  * * *

  Earlier in the marriage, Josh had some ambitions though he was woefully bad at bringing them to fruition. Always chasing a better opportunity, a chance to make his mark in some grand scheme, Josh and Susan moved to Yakima and then Olympia to train to manage an assisted living facility. While their bosses always loved Susan, they couldn’t tolerate Josh. When the assisted-living job fizzled in late 2003, the young couple pulled up stakes and headed nine hundred miles south to West Valley City in Utah—not far from where Josh’s sister Jennifer and his mother Terri lived.

  For Susan, the greater the distance from her father-in-law, the better. Steve had done and said inappropriate sexual things to Susan and she put her foot down: she told Josh they had to get away from his father. Nine hundred miles should do it.

  They lived with Jennifer Graves and her family for the first three months. “Susan was rather short with Josh. Very snippy and somewhat nagging,” she later wrote in a statement for police. “She would give Josh orders instead of asking in a loving spousal way when she wanted something. Josh was controlling. He didn’t want her to go to Relief Society [the women’s arm of the LDS church] activities while they were staying at my house, even though they had no children. Over the years, Josh got worse and I think Susan did too for a while. She was prone to yelling out of frustration. She said she hit him at least once and said he hit her back.… I talked it over with her during that time and encouraged her not to do that again because Josh is stronger than her and she’d lose that physical battle (not to mention it’s simply not appropriate).… There was a night (maybe 2–3 years ago) that she called.… I know we talked about how it was very bad for the children to be witnesses to the severe verbal fights they were having.”