by Gregg Olsen
Not surprisingly, many people felt rage at Josh. Kiirsi’s husband, John Hellewell, who was Josh’s closest friend, said that the murder-suicide showed that “all he ever thought about was himself.”
Kiirsi was blunt. She was furious with Josh. “If he’s going to take such a cowardly and selfish way out of this, I wish he would have left a note to explain what happened [to Susan].… If he wanted to kill himself, he could have done that, but how dare he do something so horrible, so evil as to murder the boys.”
* * *
On the morning after Charlie and Braden were killed, Chuck and Judy walked reporters through the new addition to their home, the room they had built for the boys. The bunk beds had the Cars and Spider-Man quilts on them. A stuffed dolphin was at the head of Charlie’s bed. Chuck talked about how Braden loved puzzles, how much he looked like his mother, and how his personality was like hers, “giggly and mischievous.” Charlie was very interested in science, and loved to observe bugs.
Charlie had made a paper snowman and hand-cut paper snowflakes. They were still taped to the window in the bedroom. Judy said that she would keep them, but they would give away some of the toys. They were just too difficult to see.
Most people would pull the curtains and turn off the phone, keeping their grief as private as possible, not invite reporters into their home. But Chuck and Judy had surrendered their privacy two years before in hopes that they would find their daughter. Now they wanted to keep the search for her alive and push for an investigation of Fort Powell.
Chuck almost never heard from the police in Utah. But the day after the fire Chuck got a call from West Valley City Police Chief Buzz Nielsen. He and a couple of detectives were in Puyallup to try to talk to Steve Powell, and to see where Josh had killed the boys. Nielsen had been watching the Super Bowl when he got the call about the fire.
Chief Nielsen wanted to talk to Chuck so they met up at Josh’s storage unit where investigators were looking for clues to the horrific deaths the day before, and to Susan’s disappearance.
The two men were quiet at first, stunned, really, as they looked over the remains of a marriage. The police gave Chuck some of Susan’s personal items, including a sewing kit and a drawing of a dinosaur by Charlie. As the men stood there, it was inescapable. The contents of the storage area held mementos of Josh and Susan’s life together. There were white and red signs proclaiming SOLD! from Josh’s washed-up real estate career in Utah, and hundreds of pounds of wheat in bags and plastic drums, along with gallons of water from the time Josh insisted that he and Susan make preparations for hard times—or maybe the end of time.
It was where most of the belongings ended up that Susan had documented in the poignant video she made detailing their “assets.”
Near the front of the locker was a white cardboard box. Chuck noticed it right away. It had “Susan’s Things” written on it, but someone had put a large red X through the words.
Susan was gone. Charlie and Braden were gone. And, of course, Josh, too. A large red X through an entire family.
Chief Nielsen and Chuck returned to the squad car. The veteran cop started to tear up as he spoke. “You were right all along,” he said, referring to Chuck’s warnings that Josh would kill the boys and himself.
As the chief tried unsuccessfully to hold back tears, Chuck wanted to scream: “I know I was right. I didn’t want to be right. How does that help? The boys are still dead. They can’t interrogate a corpse. How can this help find my daughter?”
But Chuck didn’t scream anything. Instead, his anger mixed with compassion.
Nielsen said that the police wanted to find out who had helped Josh get rid of Susan. “The investigation is far from over,” he promised.
“I knew he was talking about Steve and the entire group at Fort Powell—Alina, Mike, and Johnny,” Chuck said later. Chief Nielsen said his department was still determined to find Susan.
Publicly, Chief Nielsen said that they had “strong circumstantial evidence” against Josh and had hoped to file charges later in 2012. He said that Josh had not been aware of the progress of the investigation, so fear of arrest could not have been a factor in his killing himself and the kids.
Chuck, however, disagreed.
* * *
In Utah, grief counselors at University Hospital in Salt Lake City began to get calls as soon as news spread. People not related to the victims were shaken up, and wanted to know how—or whether—to explain the horrifying crime to their children. A lot of people were furious that Josh had escaped “earthly justice” by taking his own life.
Susan’s friends were among those trying to figure out what to say to their children, who had known Charlie and Braden. Kiirsi had always been candid. “I told them exactly what happened,” she said. “I thought, ‘Am I going to try and sugarcoat this or keep things from them?’ And I said no. Because it has been such a huge part of our lives.”
Debbie Caldwell had not only her own kids to think of, she had a dozen day-care children who had known Braden and Charlie and whose parents had known Susan, Josh, and the boys. Most of the children had seen television coverage of the fire, and were prepared for Debbie to be sad. Debbie and the parents of the younger children decided not to tell them that Josh had killed the boys. “We just told them that the boys died because their house caught on fire,” she said. The older children had heard the terrible details at school. “They were allowed to talk freely and we just answered their questions honestly. We also told them that they will probably never meet another Josh in their lives because not all people are that bad. We have worked hard to help them understand that they are safe and their dads would never hurt them.”
* * *
On Monday, the day after the fire, investigators were still at the crime scene. Pierce County sheriff Paul Pastor—a man who had seen his share of shocking events as head of the second-largest sheriff’s department in Washington State—made remarks both direct and emphatic.
“This was something evil,” he told a TV station. “Let’s not refer to this, please, in public, as a tragedy. This was not a tragedy. This is a horrible murder of two little kids. Let’s not dress it up. Let’s not sanitize it. Let’s not distance ourselves from it. It is something wrong. It is something evil. Let’s say that.”
49
His funny, bright, compassionate personality lives on with all of us who knew him.
—JOHN HUSON, CHARLIE’S FIRST-GRADE TEACHER, FEBRUARY 11, 2012
He had a sharp mind and a big imagination. He was a budding puzzlemaster … with contagious, joyful energy.
—CHRISTIE KING, BRADEN’S PRE-KINDERGARTEN TEACHER, FEBRUARY 11, 2012
In a steady rain, two white hearses pulled up to Tacoma’s massive Life Center church. One brought the Cox family and the other carried the single casket holding the remains of Charlie and Braden. Rain was appropriate for the day, Saturday, February 11. Many of Susan’s close friends and their husbands and children from Utah had made the trip—Kiirsi, Debbie, Michele, and the Marinis. Some two thousand mourners, mostly strangers, came from all over western Washington. Alina later called it a “publicity service,” rather than a memorial service.
Some of the Powells were there too, but Terri, Alina, and Johnny were seated in the balcony section far from the Coxes and the boys’ casket—a request that they understood, but they felt slighted anyway. Josh’s brother Mike didn’t attend the memorial service. Steve Powell was in jail, and though state law allows an inmate to petition for release to attend a family memorial, Steve had wisely not done so.
Jennifer Graves and her family had made their choice long ago. They sat with the Coxes.
Many of the mourners wore purple ribbons and purple buttons with photos of Susan and her sons as they looked down at the single blue casket blanketed by a spray of flowers punctuated by Gerbera daisies in orange, Braden’s favorite color.
The minister of the Life Center church, Dean Curry, told the gathering that the Cox and Powell families had
been drawn together by the tragedy. While Chuck appreciated where the pastor was going with his sentiments, he knew he was wrong about that.
They hadn’t been and never would be.
Judy had her six-year-old granddaughter, Dakota, curled up on her lap. The little girl watched intently, while gripping a white stuffed duck and a pink and purple giraffe.
Country Hollow neighbor Pastor Tim Atkins told a story about praying before meals with the boys, and Charlie’s and Braden’s teachers spoke about how much Charlie loved science and how Braden would leap into his grandparents’ arms when they came to pick him up. A children’s choir sang “Amazing Grace” and a family friend who sold Mary Kay cosmetics with Susan at one time, Dawnette Palmer, sang an LDS hymn, “Our Savior’s Love.”
Josh was never mentioned during the service, and his image didn’t appear in the photo tribute that showed his sons dressed in Halloween costumes as characters from Disney’s Cars, and in the arms of their mother and maternal grandparents.
When the time came, Chuck and Judy walked to the front of the sanctuary. Chuck, wearing a dark purple tie, gently touched the casket as he passed by it, then addressed the mourners.
“Throughout this trial we felt the support of so many people around the world,” he said. “We want to express our sincere gratitude. It helps us know there are good people in the world—good people who fight against evil. Everyone was doing everything they possibly could do to keep them safe. We thank you very much. We know they’re with their mother.”
When it was over, Chuck, Susan’s three sisters—Mary, Denise, and Marie—Chuck’s sister Pam, and Kirk Graves acted as pallbearers.
Later that evening, a vigil was held at Josh’s burned-out house. Kiirsi, Debbie, and others loaded into Jennifer and Kirk’s van and drove over. It was a need to be there—to see it, to make it real—that compelled them. But they also wanted to join with others in their grief for the boys. It was raining, as it had been all day, and most of the mourners had left by the time the Graves’ van arrived. As candles flickered, the Utah contingent moved toward the yellow tape of the crime scene barrier with the charred remains of the murder scene on the other side.
They studied the tributes strangers left behind. Stuffed animals, baseball gloves, balls, all sorts of little toys and bundles of supermarket bouquets circled the perimeter of the house.
Kiirsi was among the first to notice dozens of little white cards tucked into the wire fence. Gently, she pulled one out. The others did the same. And as the rain fell around them and blended with the tears on their cheeks they read the notes strangers had written on index cards and scraps of paper.
RIP you beautiful angels. You are now with your mommy again and forever.
In its own way, being there became affirming. While no one could deny evil was on one side of the fence, there was proof of goodness, love, and compassion on the other.
* * *
On Sunday there was a private, LDS funeral for Charlie and Braden. That morning, Chuck and Judy sat quietly at the dining room table and tried to eat their usual breakfast of oatmeal. They felt so wounded by everything that had transpired, but they could lean on the strength of their Mormon faith. They knew their family would be reunited once more.
“We’ll be with her and it will be a great reunion,” Chuck said to Judy. “And since we’ve done everything in our power while we’re here to help other people and keep the covenants we made in the temple, we’ll be a family forever.”
Judy spoke through her tears. “And because the boys were so young they’ll go to the Celestial Kingdom and they’ll eventually be reunited with Susan and she’ll be able to raise them.”
Chuck put his hand on his wife’s hand. “Something she didn’t get to do in this life,” he said.
Susan’s parents knew many were speculating about Josh’s soul. Was he in hell? The police, the community, and Susan’s friends—everyone called Josh and his actions evil.
He wasn’t going to get to the Celestial Kingdom, that’s for sure. And he probably wouldn’t reach the Terrestrial Kingdom—home to those who received Jesus but still failed in this life—or even the lowest glory, the Telestial Kingdom, where “liars, sorcerers, whoremongers, and adulterers” go.
“Josh knew what he faced in the afterlife,” Chuck reminded Judy. “He’d had instruction in the temple; he’d been married in the temple. He knew he would suffer more than he ever had in this life.”
“Well, he can’t hurt any of us where he is now—in outer darkness,” Judy said.
* * *
On Monday, Chuck and Judy buried their grandsons. The families had to negotiate time to pay their respects at the cemetery. After a graveside service at Woodbine Cemetery, the Coxes left and the Powells arrived for their own service. Then the Coxes returned for the lowering of the casket.
Before it was placed carefully into the muddy earth, Charlie and Braden’s cousins and a few aunts and uncles gathered around and covered the casket with stickers, mostly Spider-Man and other cartoon characters.
No villains, just heroes.
Only the good guys.
There is room in the burial plot for a second casket, for when Susan is found.
* * *
The following week word got around that Josh’s family planned to have him buried next to his sons. It wasn’t completely true, although Terri admitted she and Alina had looked at a plot up the hill from the boys. She had dropped those plans. But the rumor snowballed. In one afternoon, a local Crime Stoppers organization—a nonprofit composed of civilians and police officers—with the help of Seattle’s KIRO radio station, raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy the plots on either side of Charlie and Braden to ensure the boys’ murderer could not rest near them. They raised more money than they needed, purchased the plots, and put the remainder of the money aside for future projects.
Chuck and Judy Cox braced themselves for a legal fight. They prepared to file a temporary restraining order to prevent Josh’s family from burying him anywhere in Woodbine, the only cemetery in Puyallup.
Chuck even warned Josh’s mother, Terri.
“If you bury Josh there,” he said to her over the phone, “we’ll move the boys and you’ll never know where they are.”
In the end, Josh was cremated. His ashes are—naturally—back home, at his father’s house in Puyallup.
* * *
If Chuck and Judy Cox had even thought to hold their breath for Steve Powell to tell the truth about Susan’s disappearance, they’d have long since passed out from lack of oxygen. To the public, they were stoic and strong. But alone, in the house in which Susan had been raised and her sons had stayed while they’d prayed for their mother’s return, both cried a million tears. There were times when it was so painful even to talk about what had happened that the words lodged themselves in their throats. The media was a diversion. The love of friends, family, and strangers, a blessing.
And yet when they could find a moment to talk, a moment when the words weren’t eclipsed by tears, they talked about Susan, and about Steve and what he might know about her whereabouts.
Judy could see no reason for Steve to not disclose what he knew.
“Josh is gone,” she said. “There’s no need to protect him anymore.”
Chuck knew where Judy was going. He could also see the burden being placed on Steve to do the right thing—if ever there was a time in which to do it—was now. His grandsons were dead.
“What would Steve have to lose by telling the police whatever, if anything, he knew about Susan’s disappearance?” Judy asked once more.
She only wanted to know where her daughter was.
Steve, incarcerated in the Pierce County jail, refused to meet with West Valley City police chief Buzz Nielsen, the FBI, and the Pierce County sheriff’s department. Pierce County prosecutors—about to put him on trial for voyeurism and pornography—said they would even consider making a deal with Steve in exchange for information about Susan’s disappearance.<
br />
But two days after the fire, sixty-two-year-old Steve exercised his right against self-incrimination and filed a notice in Pierce County Superior Court that he would not speak to law enforcement.
Everyone had hoped that the death of his son and grandsons would soften him up.
It didn’t.
50
I don’t know why he’d think the marriage is worth staying in, I doubt only myself going to counseling would fix “all the problems.”
—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 11, 2008
Nine days after Josh murdered his sons and killed himself, Alina and Mike Powell contacted New York Life Insurance about collecting on the policies for their brother and their nephews. No one—except his brother Mike—knew that Josh had changed his beneficiary, removing Susan’s name and replacing her with his brothers and sister.
The Coxes knew about the $1 million policy Susan and Josh had purchased early in their marriage from Beneficial Life. It had been established as a trust. But the Coxes didn’t know that in June 2007—one month after filing for bankruptcy—Josh and Susan bought another policy, this one from New York Life, worth $2.5 million.
It was just three months later, in the fall of 2007, that Josh told his father that he fantasized about Susan being killed by a drunk driver. When Chuck learned of the big New York Life policy, he called it Josh’s “retirement plan.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind Josh’s plan was to take out the life insurance, she goes missing, and he has her declared dead after six years,” he told Judy.
Because Josh removed Susan’s name as beneficiary, and because Josh could be considered a “slayer,” he (or his family) may not be entitled to the proceeds of the policy. New York Life said it also has concerns regarding his competency at the time he made the changes.