by Gregg Olsen
The day wasn’t going at all as Josh and Steve had expected. It had started so well. They’d both given early-morning network TV interviews and were scheduled to do more. It was going to be their day to drive the message of what was happening in Puyallup and Utah. It was supposed to be their opportunity to tell the world once more that Susan had been a tramp and an unstable one at that.
That’s not how it turned out.
In short order, the television news trucks began arriving and the news helicopters hovered overhead. As the raid unfolded, the Powell family members were moved to the backyard, secluded from view by a fence. The police had a little trouble with Alina, who left the house when they asked, but tried to go back in and argued with them.
Josh, Alina, Johnny, Charlie, and Braden spent the afternoon in the backyard with an officer assigned to watch them. Johnny never moved from his chair. Josh wandered around the yard, talking on his cell phone.
As the police searched the house, several of the officers noted one thing about the boys: Charlie and Braden were starved for attention. They were talkative with the police and seemed mostly oblivious to what was happening inside the house. Instead, they played with a ball in the yard. When Braden got tired, he climbed onto an officer’s lap. Charlie showed the officer a science book and bugs in the yard, and said the helicopter overhead looked like a dragonfly. The officer wrote in a report later that the boys were hungry and thirsty but Josh was oblivious to them and preoccupied with reading the search warrant.
When the officer asked if it was okay if they got some pizza and water for the boys, Josh was quiet for a long time before he finally agreed. Later that day, when Josh said he was taking the boys to McDonald’s, Charlie wanted the officer to go, too. The officer wrote that the boys seemed “thrilled” when a detective played catch with them. Charlie sometimes had one eye on his father and seemed “particularly anxious and worried.” Braden didn’t interact with any of the family members, the officer wrote—not his father, not his uncle, not his aunt.
Investigators found Susan’s diaries and much, much more. From Steve’s bedroom they recovered laptops, computer towers, cameras, boxes of photographs, a book titled When Opposites Attract, and his own journals, ten years’ worth of writings about his sexual obsession with Susan. A videotape from Josh’s college graduation—a ceremony for a degree he’d never finished—consisted almost exclusively of scenes panning up and down Susan’s body. From hundreds of still photographs Josh had of the graduation day it was easy to surmise that the operator of the video camera was Steve.
This time they didn’t overlook Steve’s “porn cabinet.” As described in a police report, Steve’s room held a plethora of the mundane and perverted:
Ziploc baggie of hair, [women’s] undergarments and hygiene products, photos of Susan Powell, 15 desk top and lap top computers, video tape of two minor females using the bathroom taken through an open window without their knowledge, blue/green winter gloves, the book “Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters,” CDs, flash drives, video cassettes, digital video recorder, packets of photographs, CDs with encryption keys, multiple notebooks, hard drives, three-ring binders, a box of journals, photo albums.
From Alina’s room, they took her parents’ 1992 divorce documents and her father’s financial records. The police also took CDs, flash drives, and “miscellaneous documents” from Josh’s room.
After more than nine hours, investigators left, but they weren’t finished.
Still determined to find out what Steve and Josh knew about Susan, shortly after the raid police exercised a search warrant on Steve’s safe deposit box at a Bank of America branch in Puyallup. Inside, they recovered an internal hard drive in a plastic bag with handwritten notes with a number of dates and Josh’s name on them.
* * *
Despite the events of the day, Josh kept a date to sit down with a reporter from Dateline NBC that evening.
That morning, Steve had made new claims about his flirtatious relationship with his missing daughter-in-law. He said that his only regret was that the sexual part of his relationship with Susan hadn’t gone further. In an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America, Steve insisted he and Susan were falling in love and even implied some type of sexual relationship had existed.
“Susan was very sexual with me,” he said. “We interacted in a lot of sexual ways because Susan enjoys doing that. There’s no question in my mind that the feelings were mutual.”
Nothing could shut Steve up about his thing for Susan. “It was definitely a romantic obsession. Yeah. You know, Susan’s a beautiful woman, and when a beautiful woman comes on to you like that, it is really hard to resist that kind of thing.”
In his Dateline interview, Josh, still wearing his wedding band, contradicted his father, admitting that yes, Susan had a flirtatious personality, but stating that she had not had a sexual relationship with his father. He did not seem too happy with his dad. Brother Mike admitted later that there was “tension” between Josh and Steve after the raid, because of the attention it brought to the family and because Josh was sick of hearing about his father’s obsession with Susan.
Both father and son once more affirmed that they’d had nothing to do with Susan’s disappearance and said they believed she had run away with another man.
Chuck and Judy were among the millions of Americans transfixed by the disturbing revelations. The Coxes watched the interviews downstairs in their family room, among quilts and comforters that people had made for them in honor of their missing daughter. On the wall above the sofa were portraits of their four daughters, who appeared to be watching the parents as they tried to make sense of the latest revelations. Both knew that Steve had been inappropriate enough with Susan that she and Josh had moved hundreds of miles to be free of him.
Chuck’s pulse quickened. “The man is sick,” he said, as Steve’s interview played on the TV screen.
“Sick and perverted,” Judy said. “He can’t get away with all of his lies.”
“He won’t,” Chuck said. “We won’t let him.”
Chuck had made that vow before. But as the darkness that had enveloped the Powell household for many, many years began to be revealed, he knew he’d had only an inkling of just how bad it was.
“He wanted to have Susan for himself,” Chuck said. “She told us that. She told us how Steve hinted that he’d wanted to share her with Josh. That she could be a wife to both.”
While there are some fundamentalist splinter sects of Mormons who practice polygamy and are fodder for cable TV dramas and sideshow TV, the Mormon church does not condone it, and most members are disgusted by the idea.
Judy shook her head. She was revolted by the suggestion. “Susan would never have done that.”
Chuck remembered how Susan had told him that Josh shrugged it off as if it were nothing more than one of his father’s outrageous statements.
“Steve was testing Josh and Susan to see how far they might go,” he said.
Chuck didn’t say everything that was on his mind. He worried about Judy. It was like she was being crushed, rock by rock, and would be unable to take all the nastiness that was coming out. He wondered to himself if Steve and Josh had conspired to kill Susan because she refused to submit to both of them.
“It was like the old saying, ‘If I can’t have you … no one can.’”
* * *
Mike Powell had been worrying. Had his car, the 1997 Taurus he’d been driving in December 2009, really been destroyed? That’s why he’d had it towed 100 miles on a winter day in Oregon. How could he get proof?
He didn’t just phone the salvage yard. He did what the Powells always do: find the most complicated way around a situation. And because of it, the WVCPD caught a rare break.
A detective was at a Boulder, Colorado, imaging company when Mike happened to call wanting to buy a high-resolution satellite image of the salvage yard so he could see whether his car had been cut up and sold in pieces, as he hoped it had been. It was
the first the police knew about Mike abandoning a car in December. They rushed to Pendleton, Oregon.
The car had been stripped of some parts, including the right front passenger door, taillights, and steering components. They brought in a cadaver dog that “intensely searched” the back of the vehicle and then indicated a positive “hit” for the scent of a body. The car was sealed in plastic by police, towed to a holding facility, and later processed by a forensics unit. Mike didn’t learn until later that the police had his car.
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When they were going to arrest Steve, they called me. “We’re going to be there, call your attorney, it’s time.” They were taking the kids, and we should get things in place.
—CHUCK COX, OCTOBER 3, 2012
On Thursday, September 22, 2011, a month after the honk and wave and the raid, the same neighbors who had decorated Country Hollow with purple streamers and photos of Susan looked on wide-eyed as a caravan of police cruisers pulled up to Steve Powell’s two-story house. Sirens didn’t sound, but the strobe of the cars’ blue lights indicated that something was about to go down. Something big. A few people stood outside to watch what was transpiring in the house that had become a lightning rod for trouble, the media, and the police. Others had front-row seats in their swivel recliners perched in front of family room windows.
A moment later, Steve was arrested in the driveway, read his rights, and placed in handcuffs. If he said anything, none of the bystanders could hear it. He seemed calm, almost as if he’d expected it. They confiscated his wallet and keys, his phone in case he kept more images on it, as well as a key fob security device for computers.
The charge was a doozy: possession of child pornography and fourteen counts of voyeurism.
For the past month, investigators in Utah and Washington had sifted through the thousands of photographs they had removed when they raided Steve’s house. Some were images of Hollywood stars. Some were graphic, like the images of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan caught by the paparazzi without any panties under their short skirts. Others were random and strange. A folder was filled with video stills from hair removal commercials. In an orderly fashion, Steve had labeled many of his photos and files, so one titled “Neighbors” caught the eye of investigators. Not only had Steve taken pictures of women and female minors without their knowledge—including Susan—but he had taken photographs of two neighbor girls, eight and nine years old at the time, using the toilet and taking baths. The sub-folders of “Neighbors” were titled “Taking bath—1,” “Taking bath—2,” and “Open window in back house.”
Comparing nearby homes in Country Hollow, police were able to determine which house he’d targeted. The family with the young girls had moved by then, but when the police tracked them down and showed the girls’ mother the photos, she recognized her daughters—and herself.
She had no idea that they had been the object of desire by a neighborhood creeper. It made her sick, angry, and determined that Steve Powell would never do that to any little girl again.
Steve, who left some neighbors with a disturbing vibe, was not just a weirdo living with a collection of adult kids. Steve was the neighborhood voyeur, maybe even a pedophile.
No one knew exactly what had gone on in that house, but it was curious that Charlie and Braden couldn’t wait to leave. To Susan’s boys, it might as well have been the arrival of the cavalry.
From a report written by a detective at the scene:
A detective called out to me and as I turned around I saw Braden running for me with his arms reaching out and a big smile on his face. He immediately hugged me and I picked him up. He told me that he was happy to see me again. I saw Charles near the van and he went to [another detective], who picked him up. Charles was interested in seeing the police lights and did not want to be put down. Neither of the boys had shoes on … I then went just inside the door, where I knew the shoes were kept … I saw Mr. Powell [Josh] in the garage and he glared at me, but he did not call out to Charles. Charles took no notice. Once inside Charles helped pick out shoes for him and Braden … Braden was chatty and giggly. He hugged me and told me he loved me. I explained that [a CPS caseworker] was going to take them to a babysitter for a sleepover. Neither of the boys seemed concerned and they were never upset. In fact, they were quite happy to be going. They did not ask for their father or any other family member. Charles did ask if [the babysitters] were Mormons. I told him no and he seemed pleased.
Charlie and Braden, in their pajamas, were placed in a police car. The boys went as though they were off to a friend’s for a night’s stay, not two little boys being dragged from their home.
Josh didn’t come out of the house—not when his father was arrested, and not when the boys were taken into protective custody. Alina, however, was agitated and loud in her protestations about what was happening. The police asked Johnny to get his brother, and Josh finally emerged from the house. To the observers in the neighborhood, it did not appear that Josh was upset by his father’s arrest. Even stranger, he didn’t seem bothered by the police taking his sons.
Josh did not ask to hug Charlie or Braden or even tell them good-bye.
When the police left, the neighbors watched Alina and Josh stand in the driveway. And then, for the next half hour, they watched Josh repeatedly kick his van.
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Josh hates her so much he even wishes she were dead. He even talks about it occasionally, fantasizing that she might have an accident. That worries me too, since couples who die in murder-suicide are not that rare.
—STEVE POWELL’S JOURNAL, JULY 1, 2008
Alina stood transfixed while her brother took out his frustration on the vehicle. To many of her neighbors, Alina was a tragic figure, a kind of overweight Wendy to a band of Lost Boys, which included her dad. She was there to do whatever it was they needed. And she did so with a sullen expression and fierce loyalty.
Josh paid Alina 800 to 900 dollars a month to watch Charlie and Braden, a little more when she added piano lessons. Sometimes Josh had jobs for a few weeks here or there, but often he did not work. He could afford to pay Alina and cover incidentals because he had closed the bank accounts in Utah and he had cashed out Susan’s IRA.
Alina had her own mind, though many thought she was completely under the sway of her father. After Susan went missing, Alina wondered if her brother was responsible for her disappearance. In time, however, she rejected that outright. She became his great defender, joining Josh in his belief that the West Valley City police were harassing him and that the Coxes were telling lies about her family.
That she would side with the men in her family was no surprise to any who knew her background.
* * *
Alina was born into emotional chaos. Terri Powell was pregnant with Alina when she learned of Steve’s fantasies about another woman. It made her ill and her doctor ordered bed rest. Terri waffled on her plans and desires for a divorce and by the time of Alina’s birth, Terri decided Steve had “changed.”
The couple stayed together for seven years more. Terri finally gave up and filed for divorce. It was a nasty one, lasting a grueling two years and having a devastating effect on the five children. Jennifer, the eldest, was working and saving to attend junior college. The two older boys, Josh and Johnny, were already influenced by their father in ways that had observers worried. Mike, ten, and Alina, just seven, were caught in the middle of the mess. Terri held nothing back. She was desperate to protect her youngest child from her brothers and father. According to letters from family members and Terri’s own statements in the Powells’ 1992 divorce records, the older boys regularly tormented Alina, one time resulting in bruised ribs. The environment was hostile in every way, and that hostility manifested itself in the ways it often does. Alina gained a lot of weight, and began to act insecure and “clingy.” Terri, who filed for custody, said that Alina was “afraid to be left with Steve and the boys.” Terri wrote that Josh and Johnny had “examined” Alina with her panties off when
she was four.
Steve’s influence on his kids didn’t weaken after he finally moved out. Terri was horrified to learn that Mike was sleeping in Steve’s bed. By age ten, according to divorce papers, Alina was hiding her father’s pornography in embarrassment when she visited his house. Steve made her sleep in his room and Alina confided to her mother that she was afraid of taking a bath there.
In an affidavit, Terri wrote that Alina had said:
Mama, I know that Daddy and the boys really don’t hate me. They just act like they hate me. I know that in their hearts they really love me. Someday they’ll act like they love me.
In trying to win custody of her two youngest, Terri wrote that Steve
… made many promises, telling her [Alina] that she would never be lonely, and that she would have far more freedom with him.
While Terri prevailed and retained custody of her daughter, it was only short-lived. There were too many rules at her mother’s house, and it was emotionally hard for both Alina and Terri when the girl went back and forth to her father’s on weekends. Eventually, Terri gave in and let Alina go live with her father and her brothers. Later, like Mike and Josh, Alina attended college. And, like her brothers, she always moved back home.
Now, she was in her mid-twenties, caring for her young nephews, watching over schizophrenic/bipolar Johnny, and living at her father’s house.
Still waiting to feel loved and still hoping not to feel lonely.
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He’s got a pretty sick problem there.
—JENNIFER GRAVES ON HER FATHER’S ARREST, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011, TO THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE