by Gregg Olsen
* * *
Chuck’s phone rang while he was in a meeting at church. Someone had seen a posting on Facebook. Josh had blown up his house.
Chuck’s and Judy’s paths crossed without their knowing it. A friend drove him home to get Judy, but she had just left for church with her daughter Marie and grandson Patrick. The friend drove Chuck to Josh’s house and Chuck stood where he had before, the time he had tailed Griffin-Hall so he would know where Josh was living.
The house had burned fast. The roof was gone, the walls were gone, and by the time Chuck arrived it was mostly black smoke.
“I walked up to the sheriff’s deputy guarding the perimeter and I said, ‘I’m Chuck Cox, I’m foster parent and grandparent to these children. I need to know what happened. I heard stuff on the news.’”
Chuck thought that that the deputy would answer, “Don’t worry, the kids are safe.”
He didn’t.
“Just a minute,” he said.
The deputy walked over to a commander and conferred with him for a moment.
When he returned, Chuck didn’t need to hear the words. He could see it etched on the man’s face.
“They’re gone,” he said.
Chuck had seen a lot in his career as an FAA investigator. Crashes. Fires. Burned bodies. He didn’t stay long. He looked around at the neighbors, the police, the fire crew gathering around the smoldering scene.
“What shall I do now?” he wondered.
The answer was to go home to be with Judy.
Chuck didn’t know that at the same time he stood at the back of what was left of the house, Alina was at the front.
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I kept asking my friends, “How can a father do that to his kids?” And they said, “Judy—he wasn’t a father. He’s a psycho!”
—JUDY COX, SEPTEMBER 5, 2012
When Judy, Marie, and Patrick arrived at church they got a puzzled look from the bishop’s counselor. He stopped and asked if Judy had talked to Chuck, and told her that Josh had burned his house down, apparently with the boys inside. She turned and started running down the hallway back to the car, brushing past people she usually stopped to visit with. She grabbed Marie and Patrick and they got back into the car. Marie wanted to know what had happened, but Judy refused to tell her because she was driving. Judy finally couldn’t hold it back anymore and told her youngest daughter what had happened. It was a harrowing car ride but they made it home in one piece.
Chuck arrived home and the family sat and cried and prayed together.
Three hours passed before they heard from the police. Two officers came to the door and sat down to talk with them. Until that moment, Chuck and Judy had held out hope that maybe the boys had been found unconscious, taken to the hospital, and revived. Instead, they got the official word that they were dead.
The police officers mentioned something about a hatchet. Chuck and Judy wanted to know more, but the officers didn’t want to go into detail. They said Josh had hit the boys on the head to knock them unconscious before starting the fire.
The truth was so much worse than that.
* * *
Every Sunday, attorney Anne Bremner went to a walk-in Korean nail salon on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. It was her respite from representing not just the Coxes, but Amanda Knox and other high-profile cases. The routine never varied and neither did the color on her toes and nails—“Privacy Please.” On February 5 the polish was still drying when she got a call from a television station in Salt Lake City.
There had been an explosion, Josh’s house had blown up, and did she know if the boys were at the house?
She immediately dialed Chuck. She wanted to warn him of the news—which for some reason she thought had been an accident, maybe a natural gas leak. Even though she’d dealt with the worst purveyors of evil as a lawyer, she couldn’t imagine right then that it had been deliberate.
“Where are you?” she asked when Chuck answered his cell.
Chuck’s words were wrought with pain. Only a few syllables were needed before Bremner knew that he already had heard.
“I’m at the house, Anne. They’re all gone. They’re all gone.”
“Josh, too?”
“Yes.”
Bremner’s eyes flooded. She was full of anger, hurt.
“Thank God for that,” she said.
“We told them so. We told them he’d do something,” Chuck reminded her.
“We did,” she said.
Bremner spent the day issuing statements for Chuck and Judy, and the next day she went to their house with a huge pan of lasagna.
* * *
News of what police called a double murder–suicide spread to Susan’s world, and then to the larger world.
In West Valley City, just down the block from where Susan’s best friend lived, Kiirsi Hellewell had arrived home from church. A Salt Lake City reporter called her and said there had been an explosion at Josh Powell’s house in Washington. She thought he meant a verbal fight of some kind.
“Then he said, ‘A fire, a fire. I’m really sorry to tell you if you haven’t heard, but we’re getting reports that two children are dead, that it happened during his visitation,’” Kiirsi remembered. “And I just started crying and said, ‘I can’t talk to you right now.’” She immediately called Chuck. He said he would call her right back.
Kiirsi called Jennifer Graves. Kiirsi never would have predicted that she would become close to Josh’s older sister, but she had. When Jennifer sounded cheerful answering the phone, Kiirsi knew that she hadn’t heard the news. Kiirsi told her and Jennifer started crying hysterically.
Kiirsi knew she had to call Debbie Caldwell, but dreaded it. Kiirsi thought, Oh, I can’t call Debbie. She loves those boys like her own children and she had been more vocal than anybody about saying “You have got to get those boys out of there.” Debbie had called CPS when Josh moved to Washington. She had begged them to do a well-child check, and they’d said they couldn’t without evidence of danger or abuse.
Kiirsi texted Debbie and said she had to talk to her, that it was an emergency. Debbie called her right away. “And I told her. She just said, ‘No, no, no, oh, God, no.’”
Debbie, JoVonna, and some other friends gathered at Kiirsi’s to wait for more details from Chuck and to talk about Susan, Charlie, and Braden. Kiirsi cried out in grief when Chuck told her it was confirmed. An adult and two boys had died in the fire.
Chuck told Kiirsi that his one consolation was that the boys were with their mother again.
* * *
At church, Pastor Tim Atkins prayed that Josh’s visit with Charlie and Braden would go well. After the service a group of friends gathered at the Atkinses’ house for lunch.
At about one o’clock, someone from the church called and said he should turn on the news.
“My first inclination was that they had arrested him. So we turned on the news and we saw the fire. At first they were talking about two bodies, and then it changed to three. And we were devastated.”
It was only later that people realized that Josh might very easily have killed the Coxes, too, or the Atkinses, or Griffin-Hall, as well as Charlie and Braden.
Tim and his wife, Brenda, walked over to Steve’s house to see Alina. Her father was in jail. She was estranged from her big sister. Her nephews had been taken away from her. The families had been feuding for two years. And now her brother and his sons were dead.
Tim and Brenda sat at the dining table and talked with Alina and Johnny.
“We were just in shock and horrified, crying. Alina is telling us what happened and how she found out about the fire, and then there’s a knock on the door,” Tim said. It was two sheriff’s deputies, one trained to help families dealing with trauma.
Alina had told the 911 dispatcher about Josh’s voice mail, so the deputies wanted to take her cell phone. She played the voice mail message for them, and let them read the four e-mails Josh had sent, but she didn’t want to hand over her phone. She cri
ed and called it her “lifeline.” The detective said he knew it was a difficult day, but they needed the phone for their investigation. Frustrated, Alina said, “Why do you need it? It’s a suicide. You know who did it.” The detective reminded her that it was a homicide-suicide. The detective left to get a search warrant and returned to get the phone. The deputies allowed her to retrieve the numbers of friends and family, all the while watching to make sure she didn’t delete data from the phone.
It wasn’t until that afternoon that Tim wondered if he had received an e-mail from Josh. He found it in his in-box:
I’m sorry. Good-bye.
* * *
Elizabeth Griffin-Hall was shattered. She felt that she had, almost literally, driven Charlie and Braden to their deaths.
Her husband Larry Benson, and her supervisor Lyn Okarski, arrived at the burned-out house to take her home. Her five foster children, ages six to twenty, were waiting at her house on the Kitsap Peninsula with questions about what had happened to Josh, Charlie, and Braden.
She went straight to her bedroom, stripped off all her clothes and asked her husband to throw them out. The purple sweater and black slacks were new, but she knew she could never wear them again. The smell of smoke clung to her and to the clothes. Then she took a scalding hot bath.
She never returned to work full-time. She never again accepted the kinds of difficult custody cases she had specialized in throughout her career.
* * *
Sheriff’s deputies went to inform Steve Powell that his son and grandsons were dead. Steve was an inmate of the Pierce County jail awaiting trial on charges of voyeurism and pornography. If the deputies expected he would show shock or grief, he surprised them. A sheriff’s department spokesman said Steve responded with vulgar language and called the deputies a few choice names, but didn’t seem emotional or upset when told of the deaths. He was placed on suicide watch.
Within a day or two, he was named a “person of interest” for the first time in the disappearance of Susan Cox Powell. The Coxes said they had a message for Steve: “Anything he knows, he should talk to the police now or tell us about it now. He doesn’t need to protect Josh. There is no point in him keeping back anything he knows.”
But Steve had nothing to say.
Josh sent e-mails and left voice mail messages before he died—but he did not find a way to tell his father good-bye. He left nothing that mentioned Susan. There was no note, no confession, not a word about his wife, missing for more than two years.
* * *
At a vigil in Kearns, Utah, that Sunday night, fifty people gathered at an elementary school and lit candles for Charlie and Braden. Kiirsi and Susan’s other close friends were present, but so were many who hadn’t known Susan, including the mayor of West Valley City.
At Charlie’s school in Puyallup, just up the street from the burned-out house, children, teachers, parents, and neighbors held a candlelight vigil for the boys. Children placed bouquets, candles, and handmade cards at a growing memorial. They told stories about the boys, cried, and hugged.
At the scene of the house fire, a metal fence kept people out and protected the crime scene, but purple ribbons appeared on the fence, on shrubs, and on trees. People also left stuffed animals and notes addressed to Charlie and Braden.
In Tacoma, dozens of people, including children the age of Charlie and Braden, lit candles in paper cups and pushed them out onto McKinley Pond, where they lit the dark sky until their flames died out one by one.
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I noticed as I turned the body that there were chop marks on the back of the child’s neck area. My impression was that the chop marks were consistent with finding the hatchet. Like the first child, this one was missing a large portion of the skull crown area with the brain exposed.
—PIERCE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT FORENSICS REPORT, FEBRUARY 5, 2012
The first thing the arson investigators did when they arrived at 1:37 P.M. Sunday was to walk around the perimeter of the house. It was clear, sunny, and fifty-five degrees, a beautiful Super Bowl Sunday. The house was still smoldering but there were no visible flames. A light wind was sending the smoke to the east and northeast.
The roof was completely burned away. Siding had blown across the lawn. All the windows were gone. Insulation was blown up into forty-foot evergreen trees. Doors were off their hinges, except for one lone French door near the rear of the house. Part of it was missing but it was still standing, shut. The front door that Elizabeth Griffin-Hall had pounded on, desperate to get Josh to open it, was gone. Plastic blinds from the windows had melted and been blown to a side yard. Josh’s minivan, parked in the garage, was a shell of steel. The fire had burned the house down to its two-by-fours. From any angle you could see straight through it.
Through a blown-out window on the south side, investigators could see the bodies of two children. The bodies were partly covered by debris from the fire.
The house was still smoking and firefighters thought there was more accelerant in the house. A couple of firefighters went inside to spray more water on the fire, but stayed out of the room where the bodies were.
Videos and photographs were taken of the house. An exterior wall was removed to give investigators better access.
When the fire was out and the air quality tested, investigators looked again through the window in the back of the house. Two small children were lying on what was left of a box spring and mattress with remnants of a red comforter or sleeping bag. The Coxes were told that the boys’ hands were touching; the police were not sure if Josh has posed them, if it happened by accident, or if Charlie and Braden had reached for each other as they took their last breaths.
One of the boys, later determined to be Charlie, was on his left side. The majority of his clothing was burned off.
Debris was removed from Charlie’s body, using a hand trowel and broom. He was photographed and turned over. The exposed part of his body was red, burned, and blistered. A lot of his skin had burned away, and his left arm was mostly gone. The back of his skullcap was missing. They placed Charlie in a white cloth, then the sheriff’s deputy tenderly lifted Charlie into his arms and carried him outside.
When investigators returned to the room, they found a hatchet bent by heat and two knives on top of the mattress where Charlie had been. They were photographed and packed as evidence.
Braden was facedown, with a lot of debris from the fire covering him. They removed debris from his body and took photographs. As they were turning him over, they saw chop marks on the back of his neck. Like Charlie, Braden was missing part of his skull. Braden, too, was also placed in a white cloth and gently carried outside in the arms of the deputy.
There was so much debris from the fire that at first they didn’t see Josh’s body. For a few minutes, they wondered if he had fled the house before it blew up. But eventually they discovered him, lying on his back. His body, especially from his waist to his feet, was burned more than the bodies of Charlie and Braden. His penis was exposed and most of the skin on his legs was missing, with only bone and muscle tissue left. They wrapped his body in a cloth and used a stretcher to carry it outside.
After they had removed Josh’s body they found a melted five-gallon gasoline container where Josh’s buttocks and upper thighs had been. There was a cell phone in the ashes, and among the ruins was a large birdcage, but no sign of the parrot.
* * *
Charlie and Braden died of smoke inhalation, but the “chop injuries” also contributed to their deaths. Charlie was struck on his neck, and Braden was struck on both his head and neck. No determination was made about whether Josh had tried to kill the boys before he started the fire, or only meant to subdue them with the blows. He had scattered the gasoline from one of the five-gallon containers in various rooms of the house; the second one he sat on.
The boys were still alive when the fire began because soot was found in their lungs and esophagi. After striking the boys with the hatchet and laying them side by
side on the mattress, Josh poured a mixture of gas and ethanol on them. Since they were still breathing, some went down their throats.
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I think he must have just felt that there was only one way left to protect his sons from the pain from all the emotional and physical pain that they’ve been experiencing.
—ALINA POWELL, FEBRUARY 9, 2012, TO ABC
The double murder–suicide escalated the animosity between the families. The Powells saw Josh as a victim. The Coxes knew he was a murderer. The comments that caused the most head-scratching were from Alina. During an interview on Good Morning America, she portrayed her brother as a martyr, saying he had been “damaged by the lack of due process” and “harassed, abused, and lied about.”
“They were our boys. All three of them,” she said, as she fought off tears.
Alina had the support of an aunt and uncle, Maurice and Patti Leach, and their son Nathan, but no one else. Patti Leach (Steve Powell’s sister), praised Josh for the “restraint, patience and dignity” he displayed during the “ordeal.” They blamed religious bias, “the Internet kangaroo courts,” the news media, and “government agencies’ practices” for pushing Josh to the edge. Josh’s cousin, Nathan, called on the FBI to investigate how Josh had been “cyberbullied” on Facebook, possibly contributing to his decision to kill himself and his children.
Alina said she still didn’t believe that Josh had had a role in Susan’s disappearance.
* * *
It was a confession. That’s what the Coxes, the police, and Susan’s friends thought. By killing the boys and himself, Josh was admitting that he had killed Susan. One wouldn’t have happened without the other.
Jennifer and Kirk Graves were in shock. They had visited the Coxes at Thanksgiving and had spent time with Charlie and Braden. With the Coxes’ blessing, they hoped one day to adopt the boys. Chuck and Judy wanted to be grandparents again, not parents to two young children.