If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (10 page)

As for the allure of camping there in the coldest time of the year, a Web site promoting winter sports sponsored by a Provo newspaper put it this way:

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the only person on the Earth? Some people may ask what it would be like if only a handful of people were left on the planet. You can get close to that answer by going camping during the winter.

As Josh explained to investigators working Susan’s case, people don’t go camping at a place like Simpson Springs in the hot summer. People go there in winter.

When asked if he could remember seeing or talking to anyone who could back up his story, Josh shook his head. He and the boys were there alone. Then Josh remembered they had seen a sheepherder early on the morning of December 7.

Police could never corroborate the actual camping trip, complete with s’mores, but they did find two sheepherders who remembered a silver van on the lonely road early that morning.

After the search, West Valley City police captain Tom McLachlan told reporters that fresh snow hid any potential evidence. They couldn’t prove or disprove that Josh had been there. Josh was “cooperative and not a suspect, nor a person of interest,” he reiterated.

“It could take years, if ever, to identify his campsite,” Assistant Police Chief Craig Black said. “We would really like to go on a two-hour road trip with Josh.”

*   *   *

It wasn’t exactly the trip they imagined, but the next day, Friday, December 11, the police put a tracking device on Josh’s car. They followed him as he drove from West Valley City to the parking lot of a strip club in Nevada. The name of the club was American Bush. It’s closed now, but in 2009 it was a storefront in West Wendover, a town of about 4,000 just across the Nevada border from Utah. It’s a straight shot west from Salt Lake City on I-80, which continues to California. Other roads out of West Wendover lead to Las Vegas, 366 miles south.

American Bush offered topless dancers and private lap dance rooms. Someone who worked in the casino end of the business told police Josh visited a few times, would lose money, and get angry.

Josh had his two sons with him on December 11 and he knew he was being followed. He tried to evade police surveillance by driving in circles, repeatedly taking on-ramps and off-ramps and sometimes going east and then cutting back and heading west. In response, police called in aerial surveillance to follow the van.

Was Josh playing with the police? Probably.

On the way back to West Valley City they followed him to a gravel pit where he stayed for two hours. Police searched it after he left but found nothing.

The WVCPD still wanted to take Josh on a road trip, one where they would share a police car and he would take them to the exact spot he and the boys had camped.

Wasn’t it time he helped search for Susan?

10

… Fast for me this Sunday. I’ve got family and friends doing that for me. My parents are ready to help pay any lawyer fees/mediator (since I think its required) and if I am supposed to divorce him, I will know with assurance and somehow the divorce won’t be as ugly as I fear (like him kidnapping the kids and taking me for broke…).

—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, NOVEMBER 31, 2008

Chuck Cox wiped tears from his eyes as he spoke to more than a hundred of Susan’s friends and neighbors at the Hunter 36th Ward. It was Saturday, December 12, six days since his daughter had gone missing. Chuck had flown in from Seattle the day before to meet with police investigators and to attend this special gathering of people who knew and loved Susan. He was running on adrenaline and the hope that things wouldn’t end up with the worst possible conclusion. He hadn’t wanted to leave Judy, who was terribly worried about their missing daughter, but he made sure there was a friend or family member with her night and day. Judy had turned fifty-five years old the day Susan was reported missing—there was no celebration.

There would be no celebrating anything until Susan came home.

Chuck thanked everybody for their help. Josh and Charlie and Braden were there, but the boys didn’t sit with their grandpa. In fact, they didn’t sit at all. Josh seemed not to have control of his young sons. They were running loose, almost as if they were at a party.

Afterward, Josh and Chuck hugged. It was an awkward, stiff embrace. In an instant, Chuck let go in order to stifle a nearly overwhelming urge to wrap his hands around Josh’s neck and scream out “What have you done with my daughter?”

But he didn’t, of course. The impulse surprised him,
stunned
him. Chuck knew better. He knew that he had to keep his cool, keep his distance.

Josh, he was sure, would be arrested soon.

After the ward meeting, a coworker of Susan’s told Chuck that Susan had kept a journal at work, and Chuck alerted the police. As he talked to the media outside the church, Chuck commented that Josh’s midnight camping trip might sound weird, but the important thing was to not stop looking for Susan. As photographers and television cameramen captured Josh’s every move, Chuck suggested that the police stop focusing solely on Josh as a suspect and said that he didn’t think Josh was capable of hurting his daughter.

Chuck was being careful. He wanted to find his daughter, and to do that, he believed he had to keep his enemy close.

*   *   *

One by one, however, Josh and Susan’s friends were turning away from Josh. As many saw it, he simply didn’t behave like a husband desperate to find his wife. He wasn’t prodding the police to let him help or turning to his friends and family in his anguish. He appeared depressed about something, but didn’t seem worried about Susan. He hung his head and avoided making eye contact with the reporters. His brother-in-law, Kirk Graves, stood by him. At a news conference on that same Saturday, Kirk stated that portraying Josh in a negative light was harmful to the case.

“I can tell you that the pain he feels is real. I could feel it,” he said.

The Powell family hoped to find Susan alive, he said. Josh was letting Kirk do the talking. When reporters persisted in asking Josh where Susan was, Kirk cut short the interview. It was the last time Kirk gave Josh the benefit of the doubt.

During his visit to Utah, Chuck Cox had dinner with Ed Smart, fellow Mormon and the father of Elizabeth Smart, who at age fourteen was abducted from her Salt Lake City bedroom and found nine months later. Ed had reached out to Chuck earlier that week when Susan first went missing. Although Ed’s daughter had been found, the Salt Lake City police and the FBI were criticized for ignoring information that could have led them to find the girl earlier. Like the West Valley City Police Department, Salt Lake City police discouraged family members from seeking public help in finding her abductors and encouraged them to leave the search to the pros. Chuck Cox asked Ed how his family had made it through the ordeal. He also wanted advice on what the Cox family could do to help find their daughter.

Ed Smart had been there. He didn’t hesitate to tell Chuck that it was family and faith that sheltered them. He also said something that Chuck would put into practice.

“Keep her name and face in front of the public,” he said.

That same weekend, Josh hired Salt Lake City defense attorney Scott Williams. That way he could stave off more meetings with the police by saying his attorney had advised him not to speak to them. One of Williams’s previous high-profile defendants was Wanda Eileen Barzee, who had been convicted, with her husband Brian David Mitchell, of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart.

*   *   *

The long horrible first week of Susan’s disappearance ended at the same place as her last day, at church. On Sunday, December 13, the ward invited LDS grief counselors in to help both the congregation and Josh. Cornell Porter, president of Salt Lake Hunter Central Stake, said that the ward was supportive of the family and not speculating about Josh’s role in Susan’s disappearance. Josh skipped the normal three-hour Sunday service, but he made an appearance and accepted the prayers of his neighbors, and talked to an LDS counselor.

Kiirsi Hellewell watched as Josh cried on and off throughout the day, while he muttered over and over, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

*   *   *

About that time, Josh called his brother, Mike, and his sister, Alina, and asked them to come to West Valley City.

Not to help search for Susan.

Not to comfort him.

Not even to comfort Charlie and Braden.

He wanted Alina there to cook, change diapers, do the laundry, and think up ways to distract his sons.

Mike and Alina would later share different memories of their week in West Valley City. Mike said he saw Josh in tears, and that the boys had asked “Where’s Mommy?” more than once.

Alina said that the boys didn’t seem too concerned about Susan’s absence. Mike and Alina claimed they never asked their brother about his possible involvement in Susan’s disappearance.

Their most important task was to help Josh get out of town without the media or the police knowing.

In a ruse, Alina and Mike stayed behind while Josh and the boys slipped away and drove north to Washington.

Mike and Alina’s own road trip back would be eventful.

11

I came home from work on Sat and felt so depressed I couldn’t make decent dinner for my boys. (the only protein we have is hot dogs, me making eggs or planning ahead and soaking beans and doing the beans and rice thing) so I just kept trying to disguise their food with sour cream and ketchup etc. and finally laid down in my bed and went to sleep (around 7 pm) …

—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 7, 2008

Josh insisted that Susan’s paychecks go into their joint account via direct deposit, and because he was continually changing the password on the account, she often didn’t have money to buy groceries or diapers. Josh closely monitored Susan and required her to make a record of every penny she spent.

She explained it this way in an e-mail to a friend in July 2008:

… he said I lied b/c I bought $90 instead of $30 worth of groceries, one of his examples was $0.25/lbs. for watermelon was too expensive. I looked at the receipt, it came to $3.35 and just yesterday he bought a watermelon for a flat price of $4 (I remember the one I purchased as larger than his).

Money, sex, and food were ways through which Josh controlled Susan. The other ways included not letting her drive the family vehicle and, most hurtful, chipping away at her relationship with their boys.

Susan didn’t know how to handle her husband’s streak of passive-aggressive games, and his overt attacks against her role as a mother.

“Do you want to go to boring, boring church with Mommy, or do you want to stay home and have cake with Daddy?” he asked one time.

Charlie and Braden loved their mother, but the lure of cake with Daddy was too much. Josh would win his little battle and grin ear to ear when he did so. Susan would be reduced to tears. And once again she would wrestle with her doubts about their marriage and its survival.

*   *   *

Not long after moving to West Valley City, Josh and Susan had dinner at the home of Michele and Brent Oreno. The Orenos were parents to six children ages thirteen to thirty-one. Like John Hellewell, Brent was a computer programmer.

During dinner, Josh proudly told Michele and Brent about a spreadsheet he had made to track household expenses.

“Susan had to research what was on sale at what store. Then she had to come home and put it into the computer, what she spent on every single item,” Michele recalled years later. “And he was really ticked off because the week before she had spent two cents more on a can of peas than he found it for at another store. He was serious. And it got so he wouldn’t give her money for food or anything.”

When Susan complained about the budget, Josh told her she needed to be more resourceful.

“We’ve got a garden,” he said. “You figure something out.”

So in the beginning, Susan did. She learned to bake bread, and to puree her own baby food when the time came for that. If Josh’s game playing and unreasonable edicts were meant to crush her, he had failed.

It was during that dinner, when both couples were forming their first impressions of the other, that Michele and Brent heard all about Susan’s father-in-law.

Susan asked her new friend if her father-in-law had ever made advances on her.

Michele was shocked by the question, by the very idea that any father-in-law would do that.

Josh, on the other hand, dismissed the specifics of Susan’s charges and supported his father.

“Susan, he’s not all that bad. He’s got some good points,” he said.

Michele wondered what kind of good points a man might have if he’s trying to seduce or molest his son’s wife.

Josh tried to pooh-pooh the incident that sent them down to West Valley City in the first place, when Steve came on to Susan and proclaimed his love for her. “Susan,” Josh said, “that’s just the way my dad is. You know how he is.”

“I know he’s an evil man,” she countered.

Finally, at one o’clock in the morning, Brent stopped the discussion and everyone said good night. It had been a long evening for all.

*   *   *

As soon as the Powells moved to Utah, Susan began working on finishing their basement so that she could have a hair salon in the house. She already knew her plans would always take second place when it came to the dreams and ambitions of her husband—no matter how ill conceived.

During the hot summer of 2004, Susan was pregnant, studying hard for the stockbroker exam called a Series 7, and answering the phones at Fidelity Investments. She wanted to make more money. In reality, she had little choice. Josh’s résumé was a catalog of short-lived positions.

She found refuge during the Utah scorcher at Kiirsi’s air-conditioned house, a few doors down. Not only was the temperature more comfortable, it gave her a little distance from Josh, who “worked” at home. He was trying to get a business going creating Web sites and marketing materials.