by Gregg Olsen
Chuck said, “If she had been poisoned or sedated, it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”
Judy knew that her husband was right—Susan was a fighter. “Right, that’s how Josh was able to put her in the back of the minivan.”
And then, as if it was too much to bear, too hard to believe that Josh purposely killed Susan, Judy gave him an out.
“Or maybe Josh accidentally killed Susan, put her in the back of the van, strapped the boys into their car seats, and went looking for a place to leave her body?”
Chuck wasn’t sure, but there was a piece of the puzzle that always pointed to the possibility that he didn’t act alone.
The 800 miles. Chuck had a theory about that.
“When Josh rented the car and disappeared, he was running home to Puyallup but turned around and returned to West Valley City when his dad reminded him the boys were with Jennifer Graves and Josh would lose custody,” he said.
Judy could see that. Steve had always been a big stickler for the importance the law placed in “possession” of something, even children.
Susan’s parents went over every possible scenario. It was almost as if talking about the worst possible outcomes made them get used to the darkest ideas—like dipping one’s toes into the hottest bathwater.
“Or Josh drugged Susan,” Chuck said, “but she was alive and he kept her hidden.”
That was what Chuck had wondered when they saw Josh in January 2010, crying uncontrollably. Josh had arrived at the Coxes to drop off the boys for a visit. He couldn’t stop sobbing. Relations weren’t good enough—they’d never been good enough—for Chuck or Judy to reach out to Josh and to ask what was wrong. Later, they could come up with only one reason: What if Susan had been hidden, and Josh had been told that she had died?
It must have been something big to trigger Josh’s sudden emotional breakdown.
The Coxes had begged the police to arrest their son-in-law, even if it was on a lesser charge than murder.
“I told them the only way to break Josh is to put him in jail because he is weak. We were afraid of what he might do to the kids. But the world did not listen to what we said about Josh,” Chuck said years later.
The police had an idea about how to keep the pressure on Josh. It was something Chuck and Judy had never heard of before, but is known to many who search for missing loved ones—a “honk and wave.”
29
Putting this in my neighborhood is not appropriate. They’re trying to push an agenda.
—JOSH POWELL, AUGUST 20, 2011, TO MEDIA AT HONK AND WAVE
The morning of the honk and wave was a sunny one with beautiful blue skies and Mount Rainier looming over Puyallup’s South Hill neighborhood. Judy wore what had nearly become her uniform for a second summer: a T-shirt emblazoned with Susan’s photograph and the words SUSAN IS MISSING. Chuck wore the same shirt. He also brought along a copy of the temporary restraining order that allowed him to be in the same store or on the same street corner as his son-in-law. He just couldn’t approach Josh.
But he could approach his grandsons, which was what he and Judy wanted anyway. There really was very little to say to Josh. The Coxes only cared about two things: those little boys and finding Susan.
Chuck, Judy, Chuck’s mother Anne, and friends, all dressed in purple, held signs and a big banner:
REMEMBER ME? SUSAN COX POWELL, $10,000 REWARD.
That week, at the suggestion of the police, Chuck had called Kiirsi.
“You need to do a honk and wave,” Chuck said.
“What’s a honk and wave?” she asked.
“You get big signs and you stand on the corner and you say, ‘Honk if you remember Susan.’”
“Never heard of that,” Kiirsi said. “We’ll do it.”
Kiirsi had been ill—in fact, she’d been in the emergency room—and would remain ill all fall. It had started, she was sure, with the stress of Susan’s disappearance and worsened when Steve threatened to publish Susan’s diaries. It literally had made Kiirsi sick. Despite that, she began calling Susan’s friends and organized a honk and wave to take place simultaneously to the one in Puyallup.
The West Valley City police had encouraged the Coxes to stage their honk and wave near the Fred Meyer store at Steve Powell’s end of Puyallup. So they did. Television crews arrived on cue to interview Chuck. A microphone was clipped to his collar. And then, like a scene from some Lifetime movie, Steve Powell drove up, jumped out of his car, and brandished a video camera of his own. Josh’s father seemed to be in a mood for a confrontation.
Chuck stood there with his arms crossed and looked at Steve, whose face was red and twisted in anger. The two had not said a word to each other since before Susan and Josh had moved to Utah in 2004. In fact, it might have been their only exchange since their children married.
Steve pointed a finger at Chuck and then turned to the TV cameras.
“That guy is violating a restraining order!”
Barely blinking, Chuck reached for his copy of the document in his pocket.
Steve continued. “We were going to get a picture of Chuck Cox. We believe he’s in violation of a restraining order because Josh shops at this store.”
“We only want to find Susan,” Chuck said, leaning a little toward the microphone on his collar to make sure that every word was picked up. The cameras were obvious, but Steve seemed not to notice that Chuck was wearing a mic.
Steve didn’t say it in so many words, but it seemed clear to him that the agenda of the honk and wave was all about putting pressure on the Powells.
He was probably right about that.
“How is you coming here helping to find Susan?” Chuck asked Steve.
“It isn’t helping to find Susan,” Steve admitted. “How is your standing at our neighborhood market helping to find Susan, Chuck?”
“People see the flyers,” Chuck said, gesturing to the banners that Judy and his mother held.
Steve, dressed in a black shirt and jeans, looked around. All eyes were on him—the volunteers’, their children’s, shoppers’, and newspeople’s. He took a breath and issued an invitation to the television cameras.
“Is there any other question I can answer for anybody? I’m totally open to anything. We’ve got a lot of information about the Cox family, about Susan, a lot of it from her journals…”
Later, the Coxes would say a silent thank-you to Steve. His mention of Susan’s journals opened a Pandora’s box that would change everything for Fort Powell.
If Josh’s father thought that he could change the course of the dialogue by trashing Susan, he was mistaken. Instead, reporters kept circling back to the same question they had been asking for a year and a half: Why wouldn’t Josh meet with West Valley City police?
Steve grew increasingly irritated. He said that Josh had, in fact, cooperated with the authorities the day after Susan went missing. He pointed the finger of blame squarely at the West Valley City police.
“They handled it wrong,” Steve said. “And they know they handled it wrong. They know they screwed it up. I don’t think Josh will ever talk to the West Valley City police again. But he’ll talk to the FBI! They just have to call! They know our number! They have my e-mail!
“They [the FBI] believe she’s alive, they’ve told us that. And they said Josh had nothing to do with her disappearance,” Steve said.
If all that was great theater, great TV, it was about to get a whole lot better.
A familiar light blue minivan drove up and a shaky Josh Powell got out. Charlie and Braden remained inside the van, their faces pressed against the glass to take in the commotion around them. It was the first time that many of them had seen the boys in months.
It was the sad, broken Josh, the one who’d been photographed when his wife first went missing. His eyes were hollow and pooled with tears. Tears fell and he fidgeted nervously with his keys.
“Chuck Cox uses my sons as pawns in the media to drive whatever message he is trying to drive,” he said
to a television camera.
His voice broke a little as he insisted that he had cooperated with the Utah police. He said that he stopped cooperating, however, when police in West Valley City tried to get his sons to talk about what they had seen the night their mother vanished.
“They have attacked my sons,” he said. “I will protect my sons from anyone and everyone.”
Two young female cousins holding hands, Denise’s daughters, Clarissa and Dakota, approached the minivan, wanting to talk to Charlie and Braden. Steve stood between the girls and the vehicle and prevented them from saying hello to the boys.
“We just want to see our cousins,” Clarissa said.
“It’s not a good time,” Steve said, both hands raised, palms forward, forming a barrier between them and Josh’s minivan.
The girls stood there, confused. When was it going to be a good time?
During the volatile exchange between Steve, Josh, and Chuck, at least two plainclothes police officers, one from the West Valley City PD and one from the Pierce County sheriff’s department, looked on. Chuck knew he had been used by the police. They hoped that Josh would show up. He didn’t care. “I don’t mind that if that’s what it takes to find my daughter. But by the end of it I realized I was bait!” he said.
* * *
Two days later, on August 22, Alina Powell sent copies of seven pages of Susan’s childhood diary to the Associated Press. In an accompanying e-mail, Steve Powell wrote:
Susan is a lot more vulnerable emotionally than Chuck and Judy Cox would like people to believe.
That same week a judge temporarily barred the Powells from publishing any more of Susan’s diaries. On behalf of the Coxes, Seattle lawyer Anne Bremner, working pro bono for Susan’s parents, filed a civil lawsuit against Josh and his family.
The standoff between the Powells and the Coxes was now an out-and-out war.
Susan was still missing.
30
It is painful to me to be so in love with her and to want her so badly while she says she is committed to a marriage to someone who despises her.
—STEVE POWELL’S JOURNAL, JUNE 26, 2008
A couple of days before Chuck and Steve faced off on the Puyallup street corner, police had received a credible tip Susan’s body might be found in an area of abandoned mining tunnels and shafts near Ely, Nevada. And, as silent as they had been about the ongoing investigation and any progress in making a case against Josh or anyone else for that matter, the West Valley City police did something totally out of character. They invited the media to observe the search.
A caravan of satellite trucks and news cars snaked out of Salt Lake City to eastern Nevada, 250 miles away.
The West Valley City PD let reporters, the Coxes, the Powells, Susan’s friends, and many others think that there really had been a “credible” and “important” tip.
In reality, they were all being used once again, as Chuck Cox put it, as “bait,” although later the department would defend itself, saying there was merit behind every search.
Nearly fifty detectives and searchers set up a base camp at the historic Ward Cemetery, near the Ward Mine. It was desolate, a ghost town. The mine had operated until the 1960s but now abandoned mine shafts were all that was left behind a gravel pit off Highway 50, aptly known as “The Loneliest Road in America.” The area had been used as a dumping ground. Over the years people had abandoned old refrigerators, scrap metal, and other garbage. Someone had dumped a body, too. In 2010 the remains of a man were found.
The police cautioned the reporters to watch out for rats and rattlesnakes—and more important, not to fall down any mine shafts.
An odd news conference held in the desert was another clue that the search might have been intended to get a lot of coverage and “turn up the heat” on Josh. Sergeant Mike Powell—no relation to Josh and Steve—the spokesman for the West Valley City Police Department, was new to the job. Rapport between a police department and reporters is pretty common, but it was in short supply at the Ward Mine that day. The department was not sharing information about the search for Susan with anyone. They were on the defensive, with Susan’s friends, the Coxes, TV talk show hosts and others wondering when they were going to arrest Josh.
Sergeant Powell tried joking with the media but in the end he didn’t have much to say and the reporters weren’t permitted to ask questions. They soon began to suspect that they had been led on a wild-goose chase.
The Salt Lake Tribune called the news conference “awkward.”
A few days later a deputy editor of the paper wrote that it was clear that the police had “oversold” the search, and a columnist called it a “sideshow.”
Josh said that not only had he never been to Ely, Nevada, he didn’t know how to pronounce it. Both Josh and his father said they assumed the police had found Susan and Steve Koecher and were headed to Nevada to pick them up.
No such luck.
“We thought they really had something, and they just wasted everyone’s time,” Steve said.
After Susan vanished and Josh and the boys moved back to Puyallup, he used to take them along to meetings of the Gem and Mineral Club. The tip turned out to be about Josh’s “unusual interest” in a bag of rocks from Nevada that was raffled off during a fund-raising auction at the club. A club member had called the police and said Josh and one of his sons were “obsessively preoccupied” with the rocks.
What the police didn’t say is that a phone tap had picked up Josh talking about Ely, Nevada. That’s why they publicized the search for Susan and hoped it would “turn up the heat” on Josh.
* * *
Even with credibility issues, another search got attention. Although it was conducted by the same police department that seemed incapable of advancing the Susan Powell case, this one didn’t seem staged.
About a month after the Nevada search, the attention shifted to an isolated desert near Topaz Mountain, 135 miles from West Valley City and about thirty miles southwest of Simpson Springs. It’s another popular rock-hounding area, and friends said that Josh and Susan had visited the area. In fact, police were taking their cues about where to search from photos they had found when they searched Josh and Susan’s home and one of Josh’s computers.
The news media covered this search, too, but this time there was no caravan arranged by the police. More than one hundred search-and-rescue personnel from two counties and various agencies volunteered. With ATVs and search dogs, over several days teams scoured trails and dirt roads looking for rocks or sagebrush that had been disturbed, clothing, or anything else that seemed out of place. While searchers wearing hard hats with lights rappelled into old mine shafts, other teams dropped cameras into two silver mine shafts at least a half mile deep.
On the third day of the search, Chuck Cox arrived. Searchers had found something—maybe human remains. It was at least the fifth time in twenty-one months that hopes were raised that Susan had been located at last.
But the week ended in more heartbreak and confusion. Initially, the media reported that dogs had found human bones. Headlines around the world speculated they were Susan’s. Then there were reports that they weren’t bones but, more accurately, human remains.
Finally it was explained that the dogs did alert, but on charred wood. The wood was in a hole that had been used as a fire pit, about two feet wide, two feet deep, and three feet long. Police speculated that the wood may have been used to burn human remains or bloody clothing. Despite the police stating that they were “disappointed and frustrated,” Chuck Cox believed the finding might be important. The police told him the charred wood was “part of the case.”
He was sad and hopeful at the same time when he phoned Judy to tell her the news.
“How do we know if it is Susan?” Judy asked.
Chuck let out a quiet sigh. “We don’t. I think they might have found the place where Josh burned the clothes or burned something.”
Police sent some of the wood to be analyzed to dete
rmine if accelerants had been used to start the fire. Chuck was told that it was possible to get DNA from burned wood, although it depended on the heat of the fire and how long it burned.
After they had excavated the fire pit, Chuck picked up a nearby rock. It was a little bigger than a fist. It was not particularly interesting, although when held in the right light, it sparkled a little. For some reason, the rock seemed important and Chuck took it home to Puyallup. He knew it had nothing to do with his daughter’s case, but somehow it seemed a part of her. He’d always felt sad, lonely, whenever leaving Utah, as if he was leaving Susan behind. By bringing that rock home, it felt like he was bringing Susan home.
He put it next to his computer. He needed no reminders of Susan, but the rock with its little sparkle told him that even if she wasn’t found, she was with him.
31
In several of these images the two females are unclothed and taking a bath, using the bathroom or getting ready for the day.
—PIERCE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT INCIDENT REPORT, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011
On a sunny August afternoon a few days after the honk and wave and three days after the search of the Nevada desert, more than twenty detectives from the West Valley City Police Department and the Pierce County sheriff’s department descended on Country Hollow and Steve Powell’s house. This time they had warrants. Calling it “part of the ongoing homicide investigation,” they were after Susan’s diaries and more. That morning a judge had issued a search warrant on the grounds that it was “very reasonable to infer that Josh and Steve discussed the disappearance” of Susan. That and Steve’s decision to show her diaries on national television and send pages to the media had given the police what they needed to get inside.
Police had done a little conniving and arranged for Steve to be out of town on business. A defiant Josh Powell answered the door. An officer patted him down and instructed him to sit in a chair on the lawn. While the police searched his 2005 minivan for the fourth time, Josh called his father to let him know what was going on at home.