If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
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“You have no legal right to tell me I can’t see the boys in public,” Chuck said.
Josh gave him a nasty look and turned away, and Chuck decided to back down. He didn’t want to cause a scene and traumatize the boys. Chuck and Judy started to leave, but before they exited through the huge automatic doors at the front of the store, Chuck changed his mind. He was utterly ticked off. He and Judy turned around and went back to their original position, about thirty feet from Josh.
Josh saw them and moved the boys around to the other side of a nearby stack of plywood so that he could watch the Coxes and text on his phone at the same time. The Coxes were all but certain he was trying to reach his father. Maybe Steve and Mike could swoop in with their cameras?
“I think we’ve done everything we can do. Let’s go,” Chuck said.
Judy, heartsick over being so close to the boys but not allowed to give them a hug, agreed.
But in a last dig, Chuck got Josh’s attention and gave him a smile and a friendly wave good-bye.
* * *
Two weeks later, Chuck was served with a restraining order. Josh told a judge that Chuck had mouthed the words “You’re dead” at him, which Chuck adamantly denied. The judge issued a mutual-harassment order. That night Chuck explained to Judy how he was not about to let a little restraining order give Josh the upper hand.
“I have to stay five hundred feet away from his work, and he has to stay five hundred feet away from my work, and seeing as how he isn’t working that is not a problem,” Chuck told his wife.
“Well, it’s not like we want to hang around him,” Judy said.
“I have no desire to go near him. But he wants this so I can’t talk to the kids, ever,” Chuck said. “I may not be able to approach Josh, but I can still approach the kids. I can talk to the kids, you can talk to the kids, and my parents can talk to the kids.”
Their longing to hug the boys, however, would have to wait.
* * *
Josh flatly refused to talk to or cooperate with the police. By spring 2010, investigators knew that what little Josh told them had been lies.
They knew on Monday, December 7, after listening to voice messages left on his cell phone by police concerned about Susan’s whereabouts, that Josh had called Susan’s phone—which was in the car with him—and left a message asking if she needed a ride home. They knew that Josh had removed the SIM card from both his phone and his missing wife’s phone. They knew that a day later, Josh had rented a car and driven an astounding 800 miles. They knew it was Susan’s blood on the tile floor in the house. They had seen the note Susan had written and locked in a safe deposit box implicating Josh, should something happen to her. They knew that a day after his mother went missing, Charlie told the police that his mother had gone camping with them but hadn’t come home.
“Mommy stayed where the crystals are,” he had said.
And, even more heartbreaking, they knew three weeks after Susan disappeared that the four-year-old had told a Sunday school teacher, “My mommy is dead.”
Even though they knew all that, and more, they did not share their findings with Susan’s parents. Chuck and Judy Cox continued to publicly support the police department’s efforts to solve Susan’s mysterious disappearance. In private, however, they believed that the police had adequate cause to arrest Josh. The police had to put pressure on him.
Chuck Cox understood police procedure. He was, after all, an investigator, too.
“The only way you can break him,” Chuck told the West Valley City cops on several occasions, “is to arrest him. Put him in jail.”
“We’re building a case. Trust us,” the detectives repeated.
Chuck wasn’t convinced. “You’re letting him get away with this,” he said.
“We’re doing our job,” the police said, over and over. “We know this is frustrating, but we’ll get there.”
To the Coxes it seemed like a sad, broken record. Chuck and Judy didn’t see any reason to lambast the police in public, but at home they had to wonder.
“What are they waiting for?” Judy asked.
Chuck put his arms around her shoulders. Judy was in a world of hurt. They all were. The pain would never, ever go away. But letting Josh run free and keep their grandchildren away from them was nearly unbearable.
“We will get through this, Judy,” Chuck said.
Deep down, however, he really didn’t know just how they would get through any of it.
“I warned the police over and over, ‘He’ll kill himself and the kids,’” Chuck said later.
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There was some physical contact over the few days she was here. A couple of times she was taking Braden from me and pressed her soft breasts against the backside of my hands as she wrapped her arms around him to take him. I didn’t make any effort to move my hands.
—STEVE POWELL’S JOURNAL, JUNE 26, 2008
Steve Powell’s second meeting with the West Valley City police, the FBI, and this time the U.S. Marshals Service, too, was in May 2010. He let them into his house, again, without the benefit of a search warrant. As if he were proudly showing off a stamp or coin collection, the investigators couldn’t help but see the pornography out in the open. What was just a fraction of Steve’s pornography collection was visible on a table. In Steve’s trove they saw photos of a woman they instantly recognized as Susan. She had been photographed, unaware, in her underwear. The photos appeared to have been taken through a crack in a bathroom door. There were also pictures that appeared to be composites—images of Susan’s face Photoshopped onto nude female bodies. While there, the police removed the tracking device they had put on Josh’s van four months before when he was in West Valley City to rent out the house. They no longer needed to track him. They seemed more interested in his father. They should have been interested in his brother, Michael.
From Susan’s friends the police learned that Steve had wanted Susan to act as a wife to both Josh and himself. Steve told police that he and his daughter-in-law were in love and claimed she was “very sexual” toward him. Steve told them that Susan had said their “flirtatious relationship could never be in the open due to her Mormon religion.”
They knew that the way Steve described his relationship with Susan was different from what she wrote in her private journal, the one found in her desk at Wells Fargo. Susan repeatedly described Steve as a terrible influence on Josh. She thought he was creepy.
Steve told a former girlfriend that the investigators in May had missed his self-dubbed “porn cabinet,” which contained more photos of Susan, her teenage diaries, and her Mormon temple garment underwear he’d stolen from a pile of laundry back when she and Josh had lived at his house in 2002. The former girlfriend had told the police as early as January 2010 that Steve was obsessed with his daughter-in-law. The West Valley City PD contacted her more than a year later, asking the woman to explain once more what she knew about Steve. She even had a map Steve had sketched of roads around where Susan might have disappeared.
The department admitted that they’d lost the notes she had sent.
* * *
Steve Powell’s fascination with pornography went back to the early years of his marriage, if not further. Back then, Steve had to sneak around to the back door entrance of an adult bookstore on the seediest side of Spokane to satisfy his lust. That was long before he could just go online and view whatever he wanted—or create pornography of his own.
When Terri Powell was eight months pregnant with Alina, she discovered a diary her husband had kept, that detailed explicit sexual fantasies about women they knew. Steve wrote about one particular woman and indicated that if her husband died, he’d step in and marry her. He even wrote a song about her.
Did Steve want them to be one big polygamous family? Terri burned the diary. But she explained her fears during their divorce proceedings.
I was concerned sometimes that he might even have it in his mind to harm her husband to put himself in the position that he desired.
Steve tried to dismiss her concerns.
“People are just animals anyway,” he said. “We ought to be able to have sex with anyone, any time we please.”
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You’re to blame!
That’s why I never sleep at night.
—A LYRIC BY STEVE POWELL
Steve Powell wrote dozens of love songs about Susan and over ten years filled seventeen spiral notebooks with his sexual obsessions. In her father’s defense, and to show that relations between Steve and Susan were not as weird as Susan described, Alina Powell made a point of noting on her Web site West Valley and Pierce County Malfeasance that the soprano heard backing up Steve on some songs was, indeed, Susan.
“Susan and Steve made beautiful music together,” Alina wrote without irony.
Alina, whose employment history included only brief stints as a dog groomer, video clerk, and fast-food worker, was quite comfortable behind her computer screen. She created an avatar named Misty for games she played. Sometimes Misty was a blonde, and sometimes she had dark hair. All in all, “I guess she would probably be considered prettier than I am,” Alina confessed. Misty could also float above the fray, something that might come in handy at Steve’s house. Alina posted regularly to Web sites and once guessed the number of her e-mail accounts at around two dozen.
On Mother’s Day 2010, Josh or someone purporting to be him, posted a message to Susan on his Web site, SusanPowell.org. It included photos of Charlie and Braden, and talked about how they planted flowers for their missing mother.
Happy Mother’s Day Susan. You are the beloved mother of two beautiful boys who remember you and miss you. We all hope you will come home soon. The boys love plants and gardening just like you so they planted flowers for your honor on Mother’s Day. We hope you like the pictures, and are thinking about us as much as we are thinking about you.
* * *
Chuck Cox nearly blew his top when he saw the posting.
“If Susan could come home, she would,” he said to Judy, while they huddled over the computer screen looking at the latest insult to their daughter’s reputation.
“She loved those little boys more than anything.”
“Nothing would keep her from being with them,” Judy said.
Chuck knew differently. “Just Josh,” he said.
Susan’s father was well aware that Steve and Josh were starting to spin their theory that Susan had chosen to abandon her husband and young sons. The idea that she would then check in via the Internet to see how her family was faring was ludicrous.
In his journal Steve continued writing of his obsession with Susan—never about fears that she was injured or dead. Or what it could mean for his son to be pursued by police. Or about his grandsons’ confusion caused by their mother’s lengthening absence.
Instead, Steve was trying to figure out how and when she would return and what that would mean to him, especially if she had had an affair or was pregnant by the man she ran off with:
… I want to be a family with her and the boys, with Josh an important part of their lives. I even accept the possibility that she is soon to have another child, by an interloper … I am still convinced she loves me and is sexually attracted to me.
In addition, he worried if there would be room for her at his increasingly crowded house. Josh, Charlie, and Braden were always underfoot with their toys, the bird, and all the stuff Josh had collected over the years. Steve, who had created the noxious environment that fostered his adult children’s seemingly perpetual dependence, now lamented the fact.
How in hell do I unload this baggage? Alina and Johnny seem to be permanent fixtures in this house. Josh has no compunction about taking over as much of the house as he needs for him and the boys.
* * *
The YMCA day camp in Puyallup really isn’t much of a camp. It’s more of a day care for busy parents than anything else. Certainly, there are crafts and activities for the older kids and story time for the younger set. In the summer after Susan went missing, Josh brought his sons to the cluster of modular buildings for what he’d promised would be a fun break from Grandpa Steve’s house. Alina had been watching the boys and told people that she didn’t mind. But Josh thought better of it. He thought they could use some other activities. Sitting at home all summer wasn’t ideal in a household not really set up for little ones—a household with an uncle on meds, a caregiver aunt who’d been thrust into the role without any training, and a grandfather who was obsessed with pornography.
Josh probably had no idea that his fatherly gesture of sending Charlie, age five, and Braden, three, to camp would potentially provide strangers with a glimpse of what had happened on the snowy December night Susan disappeared.
Braden drew a picture of a car with figures inside, an image that left the women who were supervising the art project breathless from what they saw—or what they thought they saw in the little boy’s drawing.
“Tell me about your picture, Braden,” one woman said, gently prodding him.
“That’s us going camping,” he said, looking down at the drawing.
Another woman touched an index finger to a crude stick figure seated in the car.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“That’s Daddy.” He indicated the other figures in quick succession. “That’s Charlie, and that’s me.”
But that wasn’t everybody he’d drawn. There was another figure there, too.
He pointed. “Mommy’s in the trunk,” he said.
The women stayed calm. They thought they understood the meaning of what Braden was telling them, but they wanted to make sure.
“Why was she in the trunk, Braden?”
Braden looked a little confused for a moment. He didn’t really have an answer. He stammered a little and stumbled over his words, trying to make sense of his recollections.
He couldn’t articulate why she was in the trunk but he said they had stopped somewhere.
“Mommy and Daddy got out,” he said. “And Mommy never came back.”
The women would never forget that. They told their supervisor and eventually Chuck heard the story and told the police. A detective from West Valley City police met with the staff at the YMCA, listened, and told them that there wasn’t much they could do. Charlie had told a similar version of the story. It was interesting, even sad, but it wasn’t irrefutable evidence against Josh.
Braden took his drawing home to show his daddy.
* * *
When he enrolled Charlie in elementary school a few weeks later, Josh once more tried to cast himself as the misunderstood good guy, a devoted father who wanted only the best for his sons. He made it known that he was very interested in Charlie’s school life—so much so, that he wanted to join the school’s PTA. That was met with the same resistance as that of the members of the LDS ward, which he’d contacted for help with Charlie’s birthday party. Some parents vowed to start a petition prohibiting Josh’s participation. Others were thinking twice about joining. One said that Josh gave her “the creeps.” Finally, the PTA president issued a statement about Josh’s application:
Our PTA membership is open to anyone who would like to join and is interested in helping the children of Carson Elementary reach their full potential. All our volunteers are required to complete the background check through the School District before volunteering.
Josh’s friend and neighbor, Pastor Tim Atkins, might have been the only parent with children at Carson who was sympathetic to Josh. He tried to convince the others that Josh was trying to make his life better, trying to get back to something normal.
“Nobody would let him do that,” Tim later said.
By then everything Josh did became fodder for the tabloids and TV news shows. On CNN’s Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, the host skewered both Josh and the PTA—Josh for thinking he would be welcom
ed with open arms, and the PTA for protecting his civil rights.
When one of the show’s guests, a family law attorney, speculated that the state’s child services division could request psychological testing of Josh, the TV host asked: “Maybe they’ll find out he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” The panel chuckled.
Josh wasn’t blind to how he was portrayed in the media. He joked that he “was a Marvel Comics super-villain.”
By November, Josh had attended a few PTA meetings, despite the objections of other parents. But like a lot of things—best intentions, passing fancy—the routine ended. Josh just wasn’t able to stick with anything for very long.
26
At one point Josh was being his usually rude, yelling and barking commands at me, old self and his dad was helping me take pictures and video of the blanket I was giving my mom that I made. After Josh left the room I told his dad, “the winds are going to change, I can’t take this crap from him anymore.” I told him that when Josh starts whining that I’m being unreasonable it’s b/c he’s so rude and never helps with the boys/house, etc. His dad told me that the entire family KNOWS how much I put up with.
—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JUNE 30, 2008
The Coxes returned to Utah in September at the invitation of Ed Smart. Smart was bicycling across the country to raise awareness for kidnapped children and to promote legislation that would require DNA samples to be taken from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony. Chuck and Judy stayed with Debbie and Ken Caldwell. The families had much in common. The Caldwells also had four daughters.
One night they were up late talking about those early hours after Susan had vanished. Something that had happened during that first week had been gnawing at Debbie. She recounted how she’d seen Josh at the December 10, 2009 vigil.
“I was talking to Charlie, and Josh walked over and just kind of picked up Charlie and took him away from me and said, ‘Oh, hi, we’re not going to be coming back to day care.’ I asked him why not.”