by Gregg Olsen
The insurance company decided not to wade into the muck and mire of Fort Powell and asked a Washington court to decide who should get the life insurance money.
* * *
Lawyer Anne Bremner is no Barbie doll. It is true that she looks like Barbie—slender, long-legged, and blond-haired—a kind of a legal-eagle Barbie brought to life. In a corner of her Seattle office, looking west over Puget Sound, there are several of the famed fashion dolls clad in tiny replicas of the suits Bremner wore in the courtroom in famous cases or as a TV commentator discussing Mary Kay Letourneau, Michael Jackson, Laci Peterson, Casey Anthony, and others.
But anyone who underestimates her learns she is a tough competitor in a courtroom. Since soon after Susan Cox Powell’s disappearance, Bremner worked pro bono for the Cox family. Early on, Chuck and Bremner discussed whether Steve might have had a role in Susan’s disappearance. It seemed to them that Steve’s sexual obsession with her had made him unhinged. They thought he had been nuts for years. Who tells his own children that sometimes people can’t let go and murder a loved one? Steve had twenty years earlier.
A co-worker of Steve’s had e-mailed Bremner a few weeks before Steve’s May 2012 trial, saying that around Thanksgiving 2009, Susan’s father-in-law had told her he was going to Utah to go camping with family. In the middle of winter? she asked. He said yes, it was fun. When he returned a week later, she asked about the trip. Steve told her they roasted marshmallows and sat around the campfire and sang songs. It was cold, but great. She said it was a week or so later that news broke about Susan being missing. When she had another visit with him in mid-December, he didn’t say a word about his daughter-in-law vanishing. Bremner wondered if they could prove Steve had been in Utah. Police were tight-lipped.
Knowing the way “The family” watched out for each other, it was possible that Steve might have been in Utah in the fall, without Susan or her friends knowing it.
The police found credible the reports of a Utah woman who told police that she had seen Steve and Josh in the Topaz Mountain area that fall—the spot where the dogs alerted on charred wood. The woman told police the men were not dressed for the outdoors, said they were looking for crystals, and were not friendly. She didn’t remember or see if there were children in the minivan.
* * *
Chuck stared at the debris as he moved slowly through the charred house and around the yard, kicking at the ground gently with the toe of one shoe. It was a couple of days after the funeral.
He was on a treasure hunt, looking for mementoes that might have belonged to his daughter or grandsons.
All he found was a stack of photographs that had barely survived the fire, the firemen’s hoses, and the weather since February 5.
The pictures had water damage and more than a few were scorched and melted together. Among them was a photo of Susan and Josh dancing at their wedding reception, and Josh at his graduation from junior college. But there were no photos of their nearly eight years of marriage. There were no pictures of Charlie and Braden, and none of Josh and Susan’s life in Utah except for one—a photo of what appeared to be the W. Sarah Circle house with two rose bushes in bloom near the front door.
All the other photographs were of family holidays with Chuck wearing a Santa hat; Susan with her teenage girlfriends; Susan hugging her nieces and nephews and dreaming of the day she would be a mother.
It was her life as if she had never married Josh.
51
This is a case about a secret. A secret that Steve Powell kept hidden until August 25, 2011.
—PIERCE COUNTY DEPUTY PROSECUTOR BRYCE NELSON, MAY 9, 2012
It wouldn’t have mattered if Steve Powell’s trial started at 5:00 A.M., Chuck and Judy Cox could barely sleep and were wide awake and ready to face him down in court. The family, including Chuck’s sister, Pam, and his mother Anne, ate a breakfast of oatmeal and cold cereal, mostly in silence. All had speculated about what the day might bring, but that morning they were inching toward—they hoped and prayed—some kind of truth. They piled into Chuck’s decade-old dark green Ford Windstar and drove south to Tacoma around 7:30 A.M. They didn’t wear buttons with Susan’s picture. There were no MISSING posters to hand out. They didn’t do anything to call attention to themselves.
They were there because they needed to be. Not because it was part of some media event designed to put the spotlight back on Susan’s case, but because there was a chance that Steve Powell on trial for anything might give them new details.
And maybe new leads.
Before the jury was seated, Judge Ronald E. Culpepper threw out the pornography charge against Steve after defense attorneys argued it required proof that Steve “initiated, contributed to, or in any way influenced the victims’ conduct”—something prosecutors couldn’t prove. Then the judge barred the evidence related to Susan from being presented, saying that the journals and photos were not relevant to the charges against Steve. The judge upheld as proper the search warrant that had led to the raid of Steve’s house the preceding summer.
The jurors were seated on May 8, 2012. Most admitted that they had seen media coverage of the Powells. One of Steve’s defense attorneys explained to the jury that the trial had “nothing to do with the case involving Susan Powell, Josh Powell, the children, or anything else.”
Susan was basically “removed” from the trial, because the judge feared her high-profile disappearance and the murder of her two sons would prejudice the jury.
If only.
Chuck didn’t lean over to tell Judy what he was thinking. He didn’t need to. Susan’s parents could see in the eyes of some of the jurors that now-familiar look of sympathy and recognition. They knew they were Susan’s parents. And they knew just what Steve’s son had done.
It’s lucky for Steve that Susan was excluded from the case, Chuck thought, though he was not happy about it. The judge’s ruling was also par for the course—it seems the prosecution is always handicapped in a system that puts all the rights in the hands of the accused.
After a few delays and the usual legal wrangling, the jury began hearing the voyeurism charges against Steve. He was accused of taking photographs of two young neighbor girls in 2006 and 2007 while they were bathing and using the toilet. The jury saw the photos Steve had saved on a disk.
It was a messy, sad, and tragic case. A sickening one for any trial watcher.
Chuck and Judy continued to sit in the courtroom every day. Anne Bremner, who had been retained by the mother of the girls, was seated next to the Coxes. A few rows away and to the back sat a stoic Alina Powell. She sat there scribbling notes as though she were a court reporter. She smiled at no one. No spark of recognition passed from her eyes when she looked around the room.
The mother of the girls, who were eight and nine when Steve pointed a telephoto lens at them in their most private moments, testified that she sometimes kept the windows open for cross-ventilation. She knew Steve only to wave to when he was outside mowing his lawn. The family had moved away in 2007. The mother didn’t know about the photographs until a detective found her in 2011.
It didn’t seem that anything would be learned about Susan’s case, unless—as Chuck hoped—Steve got angry and blurted out something incriminating because he was angry at himself, the world, and especially the Coxes. Chuck talked with Bremner about whether they should just bag it and go home.
Bremner didn’t think so. “You are standing in for Susan, but also for Steve’s other victims,” she said.
Chuck saw the point. There were plenty of victims. Some were known, like the girls across from the Powells’ house. But Steve had also filmed dozens of girls and women on streets and in parks around Puget Sound who would never be identified. They needed someone there for them.
Steve’s defense attorney tried to imply that someone else in Steve’s household—maybe his son Johnny—could have taken the bathroom photos. The prosecutor said that Steve had taken hundreds of photographs of the girls in their home whe
re they should have been able to assume they had privacy.
Every day Steve sat at the far end of the defense table, against a wall, wearing a blue blazer, and a shirt and tie. He never made eye contact with the prosecutor, witnesses, or the Coxes, and only occasionally glanced up at the judge. One day he turned and smiled briefly at his daughter as he was led out in handcuffs.
Steve didn’t testify during the trial, and he seemed to tune the whole thing out—he appeared blank, emotionless, impassive, sometimes scribbling on a tablet, rarely interacting with his two defense attorneys. When Bremner needed to serve him with a subpoena, he wouldn’t look at her or take the envelope. “He was kind of sheepish. I wanted him to look at me, have a little confrontation,” she remembered. “I handed it to him and he wouldn’t take it, so I put it down and said, ‘Here,’ and his lawyer said, ‘Thanks Anne, he’s been served,’ because they knew he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. But I was surprised at how feeble he was and shy and he knew exactly who I was. You could just kind of tell he drew into himself.”
The judge did admit one of Steve’s journal entries, from August 17, 2004:
I enjoy taking video shots of pretty girls in shorts and skirts … I sometimes use these images for self-stimulation.
The mother of the victims spoke in the courtroom and looked directly at Steve when she told him that her children had lost their sense of security. “Shame on you,” she said. “Even though my girls didn’t know you were watching them, I know that someone was watching you. You better pray that He forgives you because I can’t.”
While Steve didn’t smirk, he didn’t acknowledge the witness or what she had to say, either.
Steve’s oldest daughter, Jennifer, testified against him. Prosecutors couldn’t ask her if she thought he had taken the photographs, but outside the courtroom she said she had no doubts. On the stand she was asked to identify photos of her father’s house and talked about its layout. She also was asked to identify a passage from Powell’s diary that was shown to the jury. She said it looked like her father’s handwriting. She couldn’t see her father from where she was sitting as she gave testimony but she and Alina exchanged glances. They hadn’t spoken in more than two years.
* * *
They looked like a happy family on a sunny winter day, two young boys on playground equipment, their proud parents and grandfather looking on.
On the day her father’s case went to the jury, Alina released a Web site with home videos meant to vindicate Steve Powell and show that he and Susan got along just fine. The site, West Valley and Pierce County Malfeasance, with the subtitle “False claims about Susan and Steve,” used family moments caught on video showing Josh, Susan, their sons, and Steve at a park, on a state ferry, and at a Puget Sound beach to illustrate that her father had a healthy relationship with Susan, despite the claims of the police, the Cox family, Susan’s friends—and Susan herself.
Alina couldn’t have predicted the “upside” of her video Web site. Susan’s sister, Denise Cox, cried because she had never seen the videos and called them “bittersweet.”
Susan was laughing and playing with her children, pushing Charlie on a swing, helping Braden down a slide, and carrying Braden on her shoulders. She wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to Steve and seemed to keep her distance from him. She was focused on her children.
Susan was so alive.
* * *
After deliberating just over six hours, the jury found Steve Powell guilty on all fourteen counts of voyeurism. Prosecutors wanted Steve sentenced to ten years in prison due to the youth of the victims. Instead he was sentenced to just thirty months behind bars, followed by thirty-six months of probation. He was ordered to undergo sex offender treatment, and must register as a sex offender.
After a recess, Judge Culpepper made an unusual move and addressed what one attorney called “the pink elephant” in the room: the case of Susan Powell. The judge acknowledged that people want someone to punish. “Mr. Steven Powell—so far as I know—there’s no information he was involved in that,” the judge said, referring to Susan’s disappearance.
Acting on behalf of the mother of the girls, Bremner filed a civil lawsuit against Steve, seeking undisclosed damages on behalf of the two girls for invasion of privacy and “severe emotional distress.” Bremner said that the family doesn’t expect to get much in the way of damages from Steve, but they hope it keeps the pressure on him to finally talk about what happened to Susan.
Chuck and Judy were disappointed not to learn what, if anything, Steve knew about Susan’s disappearance.
“The one thing that really kept me together is knowing that they won’t get away with this,” Judy said later, after some time had passed. “In the beginning it really bothered me,” she said, stopping and searching for the right words. “I wanted, not revenge, but I really wanted justice. And I want justice now but I’m also thinking I probably won’t receive it, the way the justice system is.”
Not surprisingly, the lone contingent from Fort Powell wasn’t happy with the trial’s outcome. As the Coxes and the lawyers shuffled to the doors, Alina stayed in the courtroom by herself, in tears. She’d held hope that this mess would go away and her father would come home. On the way out, the Powell family’s greatest defender told reporters that her family had been persecuted and what she personally had lost in the last two and a half years: “… a sister-in-law, a sister, a brother, two darling nephews, and a great father…”
But as grateful as the Coxes were that some justice had finally visited the Powell household, it didn’t do anything for their hopes of finding their daughter.
Susan was just as gone as she had been on that December night in Utah, almost three years before.
52
I love my boys, I live for them.
—SUSAN POWELL, HANDWRITTEN LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT, JUNE 28, 2008
Days after the first anniversary of his brother’s and nephews’ deaths, Mike Powell committed suicide. Minneapolis police said the thirty-year-old graduate student jumped from a seven-story structure on February 11, 2013, landed on a sidewalk, and died immediately.
It was shocking and confusing. He did not leave a suicide note or a will. At the time of his death, Mike was embroiled in a legal battle in U.S. District Court for Western Washington with Chuck and Judy Cox over Josh and Susan’s $2.5 million insurance policy. The day he killed himself, Mike had filed a response to a development in the case. He had been a fierce defender of his brother and felt the voyeurism charges against his father had been “fabricated.”
Back at the Monroe Correctional Complex where Steve was jailed, a Department of Corrections staffer had Steve brought to her office. She told Steve that she had received a phone call from the coroner’s office in Minneapolis. He immediately said, “Oh my God, oh my God.” Just as he had when he learned about Josh’s, Charlie’s, and Braden’s deaths, Steve didn’t show any emotion when he heard the details of Mike’s suicide. He immediately started to blame law enforcement for his son’s death.
The next day, staffers noted that Steve did not appear to be upset or depressed, but did appear to be “pouting.”
Federal agents had visited Steve in July 2012 to talk about Susan’s disappearance. Steve told Alina they threatened to cut off Mike’s graduate school money. After Mike died, Steve concluded that the agents had given his son psychotropic drugs that made him commit suicide. It was all a conspiracy involving the FAA, the FBI, Chuck Cox, and the members of the LDS faith. Naturally.
Alina and her mother Terri are the executors of Mike’s estate, which could still profit from Josh and Susan’s life insurance. Susan’s friends, family, and neighbors have a term for that kind of insurance payout: “blood money.”
Josh and Mike’s sister Jennifer Graves was informed that she wasn’t welcome at a service held for the second brother she had lost in a little over a year. She was crushed.
* * *
Mike Powell didn’t kill himself over a life insurance d
ispute. He knew he had become the focus of the Susan Powell investigation.
Chuck Cox had received a tip in January 2013. The caller was a relative of the Powells who said that one of Steve’s sisters and her husband had rented a house on 180 acres of thickly wooded forest outside of Salem, Oregon, in late 2009. The entire Powell clan had access to the property. Chuck passed on the lead to the police. Now that they knew about Mike’s broken-down car in Oregon, they quickly planned a search.
Just five days after Chuck shared the tip with the police, Mike Powell killed himself. Chuck believes that a relative must have told him about the pending search.
For two days in mid-May 2013, the police, cadaver dogs, local law enforcement, and volunteers combed the 180 acres. Chuck was on site and was optimistic. It was a huge piece of land, secluded, and familiar to Mike. He could have easily brought Susan’s body to the property after he met up with Josh in Utah on December 8–10, 2009. The dogs found some remains on the property, thought to be animal bones. The search warrant for the property did not cover the house or crawl space, so Chuck hopes to return.
It was the last WVCPD search for Susan. The next week, detectives from the WVCPD went to Washington State to meet with Chuck and tell him painful news: They were closing the active investigation into Susan’s disappearance. That meant that, finally, they would open most of their files. Chuck and Judy Cox would learn details of their daughter’s last day and would hopefully learn just what the police had been doing for three and a half years. Many wondered if the search for Susan had suffered because the WVCPD was embroiled in a scandal involving a rogue narcotics squad and a fatal shooting.
On May 20, a police department spokesman, the West Valley City manager, the deputy chief, the mayor, and others crowded a stage at a news conference. They said they had left “no stone unturned” in their investigation. They searched for Susan on foot, horseback, in the air, and on water and under water. They searched deserts, ponds, rock quarries, a swamp, 400 mines, and a landfill. They investigated 800 tips in eleven states and conducted 900 interviews.