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

by Gregg Olsen

  None of the Utah contingent was surprised that someone at Fort Powell had been picked up by the police. Kiirsi had heard from a Facebook friend in Canada that someone—no one knew who—had been arrested at Steve’s house. Kiirsi held her breath, hoping it was Josh. When a Salt Lake City television station phoned her for a comment, the producers said it was Steve who had been led away in handcuffs.

  Kiirsi was glad that at least one of the Powells had been arrested for something. Susan’s close friend hoped that with Steve in jail, Josh would “crumble and talk.”

  At least the children would be safe, Kiirsi and others thought when they found out the reason behind the arrest. Thankfully, Steve’s stash of sordid, voyeuristic photographs had been cause enough to remove Charlie and Braden from the home. The boys were placed in foster care with plans to reunite them with Chuck and Judy.

  Soon after the arrest, however, Josh had a visit with his sons. He wasn’t about to let go so easily.

  A state social worker observed father and sons and wrote about that first visit:

  When they came out from the visit room, Charlie was crying, but it only lasted a couple of minutes. Braden did not cry at all and did not show separation anxiety … foster dad reported that the boys did not want to go into the visit …

  Until his arrest, the police had urged Susan’s friends not to talk about Steve Powell, although there was plenty they could have said. Susan had given them an earful. Now that he was sitting in jail, they were given the go-ahead by the police, via Chuck, to tell what Susan had disclosed over the years. For the first time, they went public. Debbie Caldwell described how Susan had said that she refused to sleep in the same house as her father-in-law and didn’t want her children in his house. Debbie also knew about the time Steve suggested that he and Josh “share her” and how that “freaked her out.” Susan’s friends knew that she had insisted they move to Utah to get away from her creepy father-in-law.

  Now that they were free to talk about Steve, Kiirsi explained on her blog that Susan’s dad had asked them to be careful about pointing fingers at Josh, and to keep the focus on finding Susan. Kiirsi wrote how the only thing Chuck had ever accused Josh of was not cooperating with the police:

  I have done the same. Josh was my friend, too. I have never said he is “guilty” or that he “made Susan disappear” or anything like that. I have only said, “Josh, if you are innocent, PLEASE TALK TO POLICE and clear your name!”

  * * *

  As Debbie, Kiirsi, and others began to talk about Steve and the sickness that followed him like a shadow, Alina Powell took shots at each of their claims. And although Alina was never close to Susan, she called her “the daughter that Jennifer Graves never was” to her dad.

  As for Jennifer, she said she wasn’t astounded to hear about her father’s arrest. She had known since she was a girl that he kept a sizable stash of pornography. What she’d seen disgusted and haunted her. She’d vowed never to leave her own children alone with him.

  And she never, ever did.

  * * *

  A smirking Steve Powell was transported in handcuffs to the South Hill precinct, not far from Country Hollow. The sixty-one-year-old wore a light jacket, a black shirt, khakis, and running shoes. But he wasn’t going anywhere. The handcuffs were removed, then he was read his rights again, and asked if he would answer some questions. When he declined, he was moved to the Pierce County jail in Tacoma where he was booked. The police report made note of a “mocking grin” on his face.

  The next day, detectives checked the jail’s phone system to see if Steve had made or received any calls. Steve had, in fact, called home. Inmate conversations are routinely taped so police listened to the recording. Steve talked to Alina and Mike but spoke the longest with Josh, who repeatedly told his father not to say anything without an attorney present and to be aware that they were being recorded.

  Josh, it appeared, had been reading up on inmates’ rights.

  * * *

  Cox attorney Anne Bremner called it “hell week” for the Powells, but most of it really happened all in one day. Hearings related to Susan’s disappearance were held in three courtrooms in the County-City Building in downtown Tacoma.

  On September 23, 2011, Bremner served a temporary restraining order on Josh, stopping the Powells from publishing Susan’s diaries. Next came the child custody hearing, which seemed to go in the Coxes’ favor. Then Steve was arraigned on pornography and voyeurism charges. He pleaded not guilty to multiple counts and was held on $200,000 cash-only bail. His children did not have the money to spring him and they did not try to raise it.

  Bremner had learned about Steve’s arrest the night before from a jubilant Chuck when he texted:

  STEVE HAS BEEN ARRESTED! YAY!

  While there was cause for celebration, there were still many unanswered questions.

  35

  I know she is comfortable with me physically by her body language, and I think she would enjoy letting me see her all, but she has some mores that prevent that.

  —STEVE POWELL’S JOURNAL, MAY 3, 2003

  Sometimes the diarist is a liar and a big one at that. With her beloved orange and white cats at her feet, Cox family attorney Anne Bremner looked down at the journal entries logged by Steve Powell and shook her head. In a legal career that had spanned nearly three decades and put her on the frontlines of tabloid TV as an expert on outrageous crimes, she thought she’d seen it all. Steve’s dark fantasies and misguided attempts at literary redemption were too, too much. She looked out the window next to her desk as the sky around Seattle’s Space Needle turned dark. It fit her mood just then.

  In fact, she felt a wave of nausea. Every image, every word on her computer screen made her ill.

  Bremner flipped through the journals that detectives had seized in the raid on Steve’s house. It didn’t take her long to see that Steve was in a league all by himself, a Perv with a capital P.

  Shortly after Susan’s disappearance Steve may have stopped his incessant journaling about Susan’s unmatched beauty and his deep desires for her. Anne found it interesting that Steve’s journal was mysteriously missing the months just before, during, and after Susan went missing. Or maybe the police had kept those key months. Anne thought his yearnings and ramblings fell somewhere between a schoolboy crush and the worst possible pervert—the kind that ends up with a “peter meter” attached to his private parts by criminal and mental health professionals to gauge what excites him most. Who knew what sick images Steve would respond to?

  … A picture of a naked boy?

  … The image of a dog in heat?

  … A little girl on a swing set?

  There were all kinds of deviants out there. Bremner knew that. She also knew that sometimes deviants don’t look the part. A lot of women would have found Steve Powell attractive. He wasn’t necessarily the creep in the trench coat. He had gray hair with a trendy spike, a slender build, and blue eyes. He’d have fit right in at the CPA’s office just down from her law practice. He appeared harmless. But how he looked didn’t matter. Looks never did. Bremner had once defended police officers in a civil lawsuit surrounding the fallout of Seattle’s infamous schoolteacher and convicted child rapist, Mary Kay Letourneau. Letourneau was a pretty blonde with big eyes and a sweet smile. She served seven years for child rape.

  When Steve resumed writing his journal in March 2010, three months after Susan disappeared, he began to leave a trail about what could have happened to Susan in the pages of his Office Depot 3-Subject notebook.

  He would sit in his car and write during breaks from his job. He wrote one entry in Steilacoom—a Washington town southwest of Tacoma, famous as the location of Western State mental hospital—and another at the landing to McNeil Island, the site of one of the state’s most notorious prisons, both places where he conducted business as an employee of the Department of Corrections, selling furniture made by inmates to schools and offices. As the light reflected off the gray sheen of Puget Sound, St
eve wrote how Josh and the boys had taken a trip to Mount St. Helens, the volcano that had blown its top exactly three decades before. He pondered why Susan had fled.

  … if she is running due to criminal activity she may have settled into a comfortable assurance that she’s committed a “perfect crime.” Now whatever she did may prove her undoing.

  He went on to ruminate about how the FBI and U.S. Marshal had cleared Josh. It was only a matter of time before Josh would be “vindicated.”

  As Bremner read on, she saw the journal entries post-Susan’s disappearance as a bread-crumb trail to Steve’s vision of the truth, yet oddly juxtaposed with masturbatory fantasies.

  We believe that when she’s found, and even if she’s done something criminal, these same people will continue to blame Josh …

  To Steve, “these people” were the Coxes, the police, and Susan’s Mormon friends.

  While he decried the media’s prejudice against Josh on one page, he took the entirety of another page to chronicle what he called a “jerk off” session to a photograph of “Susan’s beautiful face.” He wrote how many seconds it had lasted and added an exclamation point to cap off the memory.

  Bremner had seen the sickest of the sick as a DA and in private practice defending victims. Steve was far off the charts. His sole existence seemed to be comprised of fantasies related to Susan.

  Another day, Steve filled the pages of his journal with more theories about what might have happened to Susan. Bremner saw this as theater of the absurd. It was hard to know who the journal was written for—Steve, or others who might read it later?

  He wrote how the recent visit with the FBI had left him with the feeling that they were holding back some crucial information about her.

  … something they were not telling us and that they had found her … maybe Susan and her boyfriend know they are being watched.

  Ultimately, Steve appeared to be full of hope. The feds had talked about Susan as if they knew her whereabouts. Steve could hardly contain his joy over the possibility that Susan was still out there, and better yet, on her way home. His muse, his inspiration, the love of his life, was probably still alive! Her return would be none too soon. The months since her disappearance had been the darkest time of his life. He noted how her vanishing had devastated him and almost ruined his health. He’d lost about twenty pounds the month she went missing.

  … Susan has been my reason for doing everything.

  Anne Bremner set aside the pages. She felt disgusted and angry. She thought of Chuck and Judy Cox and how they’d been kept in the dark about Steve’s obsession with their daughter. Susan had hinted at being uncomfortable at the Powells’ house but she hadn’t said anything that approximated her father-in-law’s own words on the plain pages of that Office Depot notebook.

  Every entry was about Susan.

  It was always about Susan.

  The veteran lawyer wondered if Susan had ever really confided in anyone about the depth of her father-in-law’s interest in her. Had she told anyone of the true twisted nature of his sexual obsession?

  Or had she even known?

  * * *

  As far as Bremner could tell, the word mudslinging was defined by the parties in Steve and Terri’s divorce case. Both sides unblinkingly fired point-blank at each other. Steve had insisted Terri was nothing short of a witch—and an unstable one at that—and Terri fired back that she was fearful for her life and for the safety of her children.

  Terri’s sister, Lisa Martin, was one of many who provided statements on Terri’s behalf. She wrote in a 1992 declaration about a conversation she had with Steve, Jenny, Mike, and Alina in the family’s living room in Spokane before the divorce. The couple had been fighting over which of the children would live with which parent if it came to that. The boys, it seemed, would stay with Steve. Jenny, an adult, wasn’t part of the divvying-up process, but it was suggested that she and her little sister Alina would go with their mother. Terri wanted ten-year-old Mike to live with her, too, away from Steve’s influence.

  It appeared that Steve wouldn’t concede to giving up any of the children. They belonged to him—not their mother. They were at a stalemate and the conversation took a very dark turn. Bremner looked down at the transcript of what Lisa said she had overheard Steve tell his children:

  “… there are people that can’t break up with their girlfriend or wife. These people have the idea that if they can’t have that person, then no one can. They go as far as killing them.” She noted that when Jenny asked how far he might go if Terri tried to divorce him. Steve said something to the effect of “I’d like to think I wouldn’t go that far.”

  The words were like a balled-up fist, a sucker punch to Bremner’s stomach.

  Who talks like that? Who says “If I can’t have you, no one can?”

  Steve Powell did. Josh Powell did. That’s who. There was no other way to look at it. The seeds of destruction had been planted in Josh’s head by his father, the Powell family’s self-appointed puppetmaster.

  36

  There have been times when I have been afraid of Steve and/or the boys because of their extremely hateful behavior.

  —TERRI POWELL, 1992 DIVORCE DOCUMENTS

  Chuck sat at their big dining room table, lost in thought about what he had learned about life inside that benign-looking two-story home with its broad front porch and dark wicker-style furniture. Susan had always said that Steve’s house in Country Hollow exuded “evil,” and now Chuck believed it.

  While Judy quietly made dinner a few feet away, Chuck ruminated over the events of the day. It had been brutal. He and Judy had just returned from the first court hearing to determine who would have temporary custody of Charlie and Braden. Chuck was completely dumbfounded, a rare state for a man who’d been on a mission since his daughter’s disappearance. Josh and his lawyers insisted that Josh knew nothing about Steve’s unbridled interest in pornography.

  As part of the custody case, the state talked to Jennifer and her mother, Terri. Jennifer told caseworkers that her father’s pornography had been a sick part of her childhood. Her mother claimed to have forgotten about Steve’s hobby.

  Chuck saw the pornography as something inherently dangerous to the well-being of his grandsons and a very good reason—among many—to award custody of Charlie and Braden to him and Judy. Chuck talked it over with Judy and with their lawyer. It was clear that the police didn’t have time to look at Steve’s history of pornography and the role it might play in the custody battle. The police and caseworkers for the Department of Health and Human Services were mired in their own workloads and couldn’t or wouldn’t go to the trouble of digging into an old divorce case that had more than a thousand pages of documents.

  There was only one thing to do. The day after the custody hearing, Chuck, his mother Anne, and sister Pam loaded up the car and drove the long lonely stretch of I-90 east to the Spokane County Courthouse. At the time, they knew only a little of the story of Steve and Terri’s divorce, that Steve had retained custody of his three sons, including sixteen-year-old Josh. The devil, they were about to learn, truly was in the details.

  When they arrived, the trio agreed to split the job into thirds as they dissected what had gone wrong in the nineteen-year-long Powell marriage. Over the course of several hours, each of them found things that not only refuted Josh’s and Terri’s claims of having no knowledge of a serious porn problem, but provided a genuine glimpse into what had made Josh into the man he was.

  It all went back to Steve. Indeed, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  As Chuck began to see it, the divorce records explained the long pattern of family codependency and dysfunction that Steve had passed on to the next generation of Powells.

  The cycle began in Steve’s childhood. In the divorce documents, Terri wrote that he was the victim of a parental kidnapping. Steve didn’t deny the story that began when his mother separated from his father and took Steve and his three siblings to live in Ohio
. His father tracked them down and his parents reunited. But a few months later, as Steve wrote, “My dad made a unilateral and secretive decision to separate from my mom.”

  One weekend while their mother was visiting a relative, the children were taken to Steve’s paternal grandparents, who had moved to Idaho without their daughter-in-law’s knowledge. When seven-year-old Steve asked where his mother was, his grandmother said he was never going to see her again.

  “My older brother, my sister and I were inconsolable,” he later wrote. He was overheard telling a friend that the children had been kidnapped by their grandparents; his grandmother punished him by dousing his tongue with cayenne pepper and ordering him to stand in a corner.

  Steve was raised Mormon and in the early years of his marriage to Terri he attended church with her. That didn’t last long, however. In court papers, Terri wrote that when they were first married, “Steve worked hard, served God and me. He was very thoughtful, very devoted towards me.” But a few years later, Steve “began to change in many ways. He is a complete opposite of the man that I married.” She wrote that he was “full of himself,” “dominating any conversation,” “condescending,” “dogmatic,” and “verbally abusive,” taking delight in embarrassing her in front of her children. Terri was worried about Steve’s influence on his sons:

  For those who will listen to Steve, as the older boys have, he seems to have a powerful way of controlling … I know that Steve is persuasive in a most harmful, deliberate way. Steve’s manipulation of the kids’ thoughts and emotions is terribly difficult to deal with. They group together and stir each other up to almost a fever pitch at times.

  In the divorce documents Terri wrote about a time when Josh and Johnny had pushed and hit her, and an incident when Josh had threatened her with a knife. She stated that Steve used “overly harsh discipline” with Josh, but also encouraged their sons to mock and insult her.