by Gregg Olsen
She folded the note as small as she could and wedged it up inside the toe of a slipper. Josh and Steve wouldn’t think to look for a note, but Susan would find it when—and if—she put her foot in there and felt something.
“I knew it was a huge long shot and she was probably dead,” Kiirsi said years later. “But I couldn’t pass up this opportunity, just on the million-to-one chance she might be alive somewhere, demoralized, scared, and alone.”
* * *
In addition to Josh’s brother Mike, some members of the ward helped Josh pack up both a U-Haul truck and a U-Haul trailer. There was also a small contingent of pro-Josh friends. One, a young woman, in a show of solidarity with Josh, dropped her pants and mooned a TV news camera. She made the evening news.
One friend who helped with the packing later told the police of an incident that had horrified him. After making a trip out to the U-Haul, Josh laughingly called out, “I just loaded Susan’s head into the truck!” as if pieces of her had been in his garage all along. He said Josh also joked that ordinary floor stains were blood and seemed secretive about a cellar.
One friend who didn’t help with the move was Tim Peterson. Although he had seen Josh a couple of times since Susan’s disappearance, he became suspicious when Josh decided to move away. Tim wanted a swing set back that he had given Susan and the boys. After a scuffle between Tim and Mike, the police were called. Josh wisely stayed in the house and the police never saw him. The dispute ended with Tim taking the swing set. His last words to Mike that night were colder than a hurled snowball.
“Susan is gone … did you happen to notice Susan is gone? Because I don’t see you guys doing anything about it.”
18
If Josh did something to Susan or not I’ve always said this: his soul was in mega-agony, because if he did something he knew his damnation. He had been to the temple, and we get a lot of instruction in the temple, and it is a lot about the eternities and what is to come.
—MICHELE ORENO, MARCH 20, 2012
Josh’s out-and-out battle with the Coxes began the week he packed up his things in Utah to move to Washington. Josh could be stubborn and defiant, especially when backed up against a wall. He would not be pushed around. The first salvo of the war came innocently enough, however, from Chuck Cox. Susan’s father had asked Josh’s sister, Jennifer, and her husband, Kirk, to go to W. Sarah Circle to retrieve the photo albums that Judy had painstakingly made to document her daughter’s life, her babies, and her marriage to Josh. When Josh, who had promised to return the albums—in his own time—found out about the plan, he blew up.
“They will never get those photo albums, not ever, and that I’ll make sure of it,” he told Michele Oreno, who’d never really seen that type of personal outrage coming from her friend and neighbor.
“From that point on,” Michele said, “he was against Chuck.”
* * *
While few had managed to do so, somehow Michele had forged a bond with Josh. It had started at their first dinner when he and Susan argued about Steve for hours at Michele’s home, and she may have talked to Josh more than anyone else during the first weeks after Susan disappeared. Michele saw Josh just after he returned from his 800-mile trip in the rental car—although she had no idea he’d been gone for nearly twenty-four hours. Like Tim Peterson, she noticed the chapped and red appearance of Josh’s hands.
Michele asked him about this. “What did you do with your hands?”
Josh, who had been applying gobs of lotion, shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Just being out in the weather.”
Michelle had lived through many Utah winters and she’d never seen anything as bad as those red, raw hands just from being outside.
What had Josh been doing? she wondered.
Another time, before he left town for good, Josh went over to return some of Brent Oreno’s tools. Brent wasn’t home. Michele was never afraid of confronting Josh Powell—or anyone else—whenever the circumstances required a direct approach. She decided it was now or never. She was going to use her encounter with Josh to laser in on what had happened to Susan. She was conflicted, however. There was no denying that part of her cared about Josh. Twenty years older than he, it was partly the mother in her. And yet it went beyond that. It was also Michele’s deep belief that everyone is worthy of forgiveness and redemption.
Inside, Michele also hoped that maybe, just maybe, he’d blurt out the truth.
She hurled question after question as they sat in her comfortable kitchen. For his part, Josh, his eyes downcast, seldom met Michele’s gaze.
“Why are you moving, Josh?”
“I can’t take care of the boys on my own,” he said.
She knew that was true.
“Who’s going to watch them?” she asked.
“Alina will.”
Michele knew that solution wasn’t ideal. She thought Steve Powell was a class-A creep. Alina lived with Steve. In fact, as far as Michele knew all the grown Powell kids, with the exception of Jennifer, lived with their father.
“Why are you moving in with your dad?” she asked. “You know as well as I do Susan’s feelings about him. There is no way on this earth that she would want her babies to be in that house.”
Josh defended his father.
“My dad’s changed,” he said. “He’s really a good guy. He’s doing things differently.”
“Josh, don’t lie to me.”
“He’s changed. He has.”
Michele went in for the kill. She felt that she had nothing to lose. She loved Josh, but she was increasingly feeling that Josh had done something so evil, so despicable with Susan that soft-pedaling was not the way to deal with him.
“Josh, what is this you’re telling people about how you lost track of time? You don’t lose track of time. You knew darn well it was Sunday. Give me a break.”
“That’s what happened,” he repeated a couple of times.
Michele evoked Susan’s name, carefully so.
“Josh, what happened to Susan?” she asked, searching his face for some glimpse of something behind his facade.
He bowed his head. “I can’t say. I can’t say.”
“Do you honestly, in your heart of hearts, believe she is still alive?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I want to, I really want to.”
They talked for at least two hours, with Michele desperately trying to find out something about Susan’s whereabouts, hoping to trip up Josh, but she got nowhere. It was as if she were talking to a cardboard cutout of a human being. Josh Powell seemed to have absolutely nothing inside. No sorrow for his missing wife. No concern about where she might be.
Or if she was even alive.
“You need help, Josh,” Michele finally said, taking a different tack when it became clear that the ambush interrogation was getting her nowhere. “You need counseling. The boys need it, too.”
Josh, his eyes landing anywhere but on Michele’s, appeared to acknowledge that he knew he was in trouble.
“I feel empty inside,” he said.
Michele wasn’t sure what to think. She was sympathetic, but only to a point.
“I always thought he knew what happened to Susan,” she said later. “I didn’t know if he did it, but I knew he knew.”
Michele wasn’t done with her quest for the truth. She tried to reach out to Josh and e-mailed him three times after he moved away.
He never answered.
And she never forgot his answer to her most important question: What happened to Susan?
I can’t say.
Not “I don’t know.”
I can’t say.
* * *
Just before the new year, the still-smoldering body of a woman was found under a freeway overpass in Box Elder County, northwest of Salt Lake City. The remains were too badly burned to identify right away, but the police in Utah notified Chuck and Judy Cox. They didn’t want the Coxes blindsided by the media. La
ter, the Coxes would learn that it was not their daughter, but a fifty-five-year-old woman who had committed suicide by dousing herself with a flammable liquid and igniting it with a cigarette lighter.
This was just the first of many false alarms.
On January 7, a body wrapped in plastic and duct tape was discovered in a remote desert valley near West Wendover, Nevada, about 150 miles from where Josh claimed he’d gone camping.
That, too, brought phone calls to Susan’s parents in Puyallup. The deceased was described as five-feet-four—about Susan’s height. It turned out that this particular victim was a forty-six-year-old male. Before Susan’s disappearance, Chuck and Judy could only vaguely imagine the hurt that consumed a family with a missing child. It was a wrenching ache that just didn’t go away. They grieved for the family of the man.
That night they sent out a tweet of condolence to the family. By then Chuck and Judy understood that the world was full of missing people. Some, like that man, who’d never come home again. And even fewer, like Elizabeth Smart, who did.
19
He said he was innocent and we took him at his word. We thought that’s for the police. He had not been charged. He had not been arrested. So our job as a Christian neighbor, we felt, is to pray for that, for the truth to be revealed, and let God handle those things with the authorities. Let the Lord handle that.
—PASTOR TIMOTHY ATKINS, MARCH 9, 2012
As bunkerlike as Steve Powell must have wanted his Country Hollow neighborhood residence to be, Josh Powell couldn’t dodge the police—from Utah or Washington—or the reporters, the purple ribbons, and even Susan’s picture, which would soon loom over Puyallup.
Finally, however, Josh caught a break. He met a peer who didn’t rush to judgment and assume he had murdered his wife.
Introducing Josh to Timothy Atkins might have been the best thing Steve Powell ever did for his son. Steve had no use for any religion. Tim Atkins knew that, of course, but when his neighbor called to suggest that he meet his son and grandsons who were moving up from Utah, Tim and his wife Brenda agreed. Tim was the pastor at Faith Bible Church, an independent church with about forty members in the nearby South Hill area of Puyallup. The two men had a few things in common. Tim was thirty-five; Josh turned thirty-four in January. Each had clipped dark hair and a goatee. And both men were fathers to young children. Three of Tim’s four children attended Carson Elementary School where Charlie would attend kindergarten.
The Atkins family had Josh and his sons over for dinner, and Josh and Charlie often stopped by after school. “He didn’t have a job at the time, so he’d come by the house,” Tim remembered. “We’d sit and talk and I’d open the Bible. I’d talk to him about putting his faith in the Lord Jesus, and share the gospel. He’d always thought of Christianity from the standpoint of Mormonism, and he was really against Mormonism so we were talking to him and trying to help him, even emotionally.”
Josh had lost a lot of weight, wasn’t sleeping, and appeared to be grief-stricken. Tim and Brenda had questions about Susan’s disappearance, and sometimes they asked about it. Like Kiirsi back in Utah, however, they didn’t want to frighten Josh away.
Tim refused to give in to media reports and neighborhood gossip. He and Brenda made a pact that they’d treat the young father as an innocent man. They weren’t there to judge him, but to help him and his two little boys. Tim had his suspicions, but he didn’t press Josh for answers right away.
“I told him that maybe there would be a time that he would be willing to open up and talk with us. And there was. On a number of occasions he would begin to explain what he thought happened,” Tim later said. “He said he thought she had taken off.”
Tim encouraged Josh to talk to the police, and take them to where he said he’d gone camping. And he made another point repeatedly: that Josh should reconcile with the Coxes.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said.
After doing his own reading and research, Tim created a list in his head of ten things about Susan’s disappearance that he thought were suspicious:
There was new snowfall overnight, but no car tracks or footprints leaving the house the next day.
Why would Susan leave her keys and purse in the house?
Who had locked up the house? Susan couldn’t have without her keys.
Josh was unwilling to meet again with the police.
Josh wouldn’t tell the police exactly where he had camped.
It seems strange to go camping in the middle of the night with two little boys.
Josh took their only vehicle. How would Susan get to work?
Josh said he lost track of what day it was.
Josh delayed contact with the Coxes while Susan was missing.
Josh wouldn’t say where he drove in the rental car.
Josh gave some short answers to some of the questions, and mumbled his way through others, but he never changed his story. He looked Tim and Brenda in the eye and said he didn’t know what had happened to his wife.
Although he had been vehemently critical of the Mormon church long before he left West Valley City, Josh surprised Tim and Brenda when he took Charlie and Braden to attend Sunday school at a Puyallup ward. That lasted only a couple of weeks.
A disappointed and angry Josh told Tim the reason why.
“Everyone thinks I’m guilty,” he said. “They are treating me like I killed Susan. I didn’t kill her. I don’t know what happened to her.”
There was, likely, another reason why Josh stopped taking the boys to church.
Rachel Marini, despite living in Utah, had kept her finger on the pulse of what was happening in Puyallup. She talked to a friend who was a member of the ward.
“Charlie was being a pain in the Sunday school class,” the friend said. “And the teacher said, ‘Look, if you don’t stop, I’m going to go get your mom and dad.’”
Charlie, who’d taken to acting out in the weeks following his mother’s disappearance, looked at the teacher.
“My mom’s dead,” he said.
* * *
The Coxes weren’t blind when it came to Josh and his need to control every moment of his disintegrating life. But they might have been a little naïve about the lengths to which Josh would go to maintain a toehold on his old life.
It was a damp, cold January afternoon when Chuck and Judy bundled up and drove over to Steve’s house to see their grandsons. They were concerned about the boys and, of course, they were missing Susan.
Country Hollow’s gates were wide open as usual, and the Coxes drove right in. Near the entrance, they quickly spotted Josh and the boys at a park. Chuck parked and he and Judy walked over. Almost immediately the smiles on their faces from seeing the boys melted away.
Josh stood and faced them while Charlie and Braden hung back.
He was stone-faced. “This is not acceptable,” he said.
“We were nearby,” Chuck said, although that wasn’t true. Their hearts ached for the boys and they just wanted to see them. It was strange that they’d have to lie about that kind of thing, but Josh was acting like they were there to do the boys harm or something else completely absurd.
“You can’t just drop by. From now on you’re going to have to e-mail me to make arrangements.”
Both Chuck and Judy were taken aback. E-mail? Is it really getting to that?
In fact, it was, and it was about to get worse.
* * *
Even after they knew the rules, Josh made it difficult for the Coxes to see their grandsons. Both boys had birthdays in January and Chuck and Judy asked if they could have a party for Charlie at their house.
“No,” he said flatly. “We’re having a party at my dad’s. You can come to that.”
It wasn’t ideal. After all, Steve Powell would be there.
Chuck decided to spend the day helping a friend and he and Judy didn’t attend the party.
Rachel heard through the grapevine that Josh had contacted the ward for help with the
party. Specifically, Josh wanted the ward to invite some other kids to attend Charlie’s fifth birthday party. Braden’s third had recently occurred, too, but at that age it wasn’t as crucial to have a bunch of other kids around.
As every parent knows, a fifth birthday is one of the biggies.
Ordinarily it would have been no big deal for the ward to help out. On the surface, the circumstances warranted it. The dad was new in town. His wife was absent. His little boy was having a birthday party.
But word had circulated that Josh was that Josh Powell and some members were reluctant to have their children around him.
“I feel badly, but I have to think of my family first, right?” one member asked Rachel.
Rachel could see the conflict. She didn’t know what she’d do if she had a little one invited to a possible killer’s home.
When Josh got the word, he dumped the ward and stopped going to church. He and his boys threw themselves deeper into his father’s world. Steve Powell, who despised the Mormon Church, must have felt victorious.
* * *
Josh was not above doling out favors—for reasons of his own. Out of the blue, he called the boys’ great-grandparents, Anne and John Cox, and invited them over for a visit. Chuck’s sister, Pam, was visiting her folks at the time, so she came along. While Anne and John talked awkwardly with Josh and Steve, Pam curled up on Steve’s sofa with Braden on her lap and read from the only book with photos and illustrations on hand, World Psychology.
“The police have cleared me,” Josh said. “I’m no longer a person of interest in Susan’s case.”
Steve nodded and smirked in that manner that made Anne Cox sick to her stomach. She and her husband knew that was not the case at all.
Josh hadn’t been cleared of anything. And why would the police tell him that?
After a while, Charlie moved over to the dining table where he’d begun to assemble some kind of an art project—paper and glue were taking shape in that way that five-year-olds can do. In one moment it’s a bird, in another, a dinosaur. Whatever it was, the boy was quite pleased with his creation and was happy that his great-grandparents were there.