If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (11 page)

In the middle of one study session, Susan looked up and shook her head.

“Do you believe this?” she asked, letting out a sigh. “I never wanted to go to college. I never cared about that stuff. I just wanted to do hair and make people look pretty.”

Kiirsi turned the subject away from school to the baby and how Susan thought it would affect their marriage.

“I’m not worried,” Susan said. “I think he’ll be a good dad.”

Kiirsi wasn’t convinced. “Why do you think that?” Kiirsi asked.

“Because of the way he acts with our bird.”

The bird.

Josh had a parrot that went everywhere with him. On his shoulder. In the car. Everywhere that Josh went, the bird went, too, even to a New Year’s Eve party. The hostess couldn’t believe that anyone would bring an uninvited parrot to a party.

Josh nuzzled the bird. He talked baby talk to the bird. If a prospective father could be judged by the way he treated a pet—as Susan was suggesting—then Josh was in line for a Father of the Year award.

Charlie—named after his grandfather, Chuck Cox—was born January 19, 2005. Chuck and Judy went to Utah to be there when the baby was born. When the morning arrived and Susan knew she was in labor, Josh was too busy on his computer to drive her to the hospital, so Chuck and Judy did. When Josh finally showed up at the delivery room hours later, he had his laptop in tow. Whatever he was doing was much more important than comforting his wife while she had his first baby. When Susan called out for him, Josh barely glanced up from the screen. Annoyed and exasperated, Chuck took Josh by the sleeve and pulled him over to Susan’s bed and told him to hold her hand as Charlie was born.

“See, Dad,” Susan said later, looking up with a weary smile. “He does care.”

In 2006 Susan became pregnant for the second time. She had expected her parents to be overjoyed when she called them in Puyallup with the news; instead she was met by disappointment. It had nothing to do with a new baby, and everything to do with the fact that the bond between their daughter and Josh Powell would be that much harder to break.

Chuck was especially disenchanted.

“Why would you want to do that twice?” he asked.

Susan kept the cheer in her voice, though she knew what he meant. “Oh, Dad. Don’t say that,” she said.

Yet Chuck couldn’t be stopped, no matter how much he loved his daughter. She needed to hear it. “You have to get rid of Josh and get a real person for a husband,” he said.

Susan sounded hopeful in her last word on the subject during that call.

“Everything will get better,” she said.

Chuck was skeptical. He’d never forgotten how he had to drive Susan to the hospital when Josh was too busy.

Braden was born January 2, 2007.

*   *   *

Josh and Susan had a second car until Josh decided the gas and maintenance were too expensive. He didn’t factor in all the extra trips they would have to make in the van and how inconvenient it would make Susan’s life.

Or maybe he did.

“He bought Susan a bike,” Michele Oreno recalled later. “So she had to bike back and forth to work, which isn’t a short distance—about seven miles each way.”

It took Debbie Caldwell’s husband, Ken, to tell Josh just how crazy it was to have Susan ride a bike to and from work. It was too far. It was dark in the morning. It was an all-around bad idea. So Josh decided he would show them all that it was no big deal. He tried riding a bike to work—and quickly realized how arduous the task was. He spent $1,500 to motorize it. Josh’s experiment at bicycling ended after just a week or two, as soon as it got cold.

Next, Josh decided that driving Susan to work, then taking the Town & Country minivan on to his workplace was the answer. He was off work earlier in the afternoon than she was and was supposed to pick up the boys, and later, Susan. He usually left them stuck without rides. For some reason, Josh didn’t like Susan to be alone with the boys in the van. Her friends speculated it was because Josh was afraid she’d leave.

For Susan, dealing with Josh’s restrictions on spending was toughest around the holidays. She sent Rachel Marini an e-mail one year saying that Josh wouldn’t let her buy Christmas presents for their sons. It broke Rachel’s heart.

One thing Josh didn’t seem to skimp on, however, was life insurance. In the first few years of their marriage he and Susan held a million-dollar policy—$500,000 on each of them—from Beneficial Life. Two years later, they took out another policy, this one with New York Life. That policy’s payout was for $2.5 million—a quarter-million dollars on each boy, and a million each on Josh and Susan.

Susan’s friends remember another day when she needed a babysitter for just an hour or two. But the meeting Josh took her to stretched into the night. Josh had apparently arranged for some legal work to be conducted that day, including the signing of a power of attorney. That way he would have written authorization to represent or act on her behalf in private affairs, business, or other legal matters should she become incapacitated. Or worse.

*   *   *

About three months after Josh and Susan took out the second life insurance policy, they made a trip to Puyallup. On September 6 and 7, 2007, Steve Powell wrote in his journal about a visit Josh and Charlie had made to his home. Braden, just eight months old, was at the Coxes with Susan because Susan didn’t like the boys around Steve. Steve wrote that Susan wanted another child, a daughter, but Josh didn’t want to have sex with her and wished he had ended their marriage years ago, before they had Charlie and Braden. Matter-of-factly Steve noted:

Josh talked on and on, very openly, about how he would love to get rid of her. He is not attracted to her. He said he daydreams about having someone come to his door to report that she was killed by a drunk driver …

While Susan prayed for a baby girl and tried out possible names she liked—Adeline, Jadeline, and Aubrey were a few—Josh was wishing her dead.

*   *   *

As far as anyone knew, Josh had never been physically abusive, although Susan told some friends she had once shoved him and he had threatened to hurt her if it ever happened again. Another friend recalled that Susan said Josh had shoved her, slapped her, and tried to lock her out of the house. If there was a physical altercation, there was no record of any police report or evidence that Susan sought medical attention. She did, however, call her sister. It was in the spring of 2007 when Denise picked up the phone to find Susan in tears. Between Susan’s sobs, Denise tried to make out what she was saying.

“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

Susan took breath. “Josh pushed me.”

Denise had been there—she’d made some bad choices in men. “Oh, no. Are you okay?”

Susan said she was all right, but she was frightened.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“You need to get away from him,” Denise said. “I’ll get in my car and come and get you and the boys.”

Susan turned down the offer. “No, no, Denise. It’s such a long drive. And he’ll get custody of the boys if we try and leave. He told me it would be kidnapping.”

And there was something else that Josh had told Susan.

“He said I’d get the boys over his—or
my
—dead body.”

*   *   *

Susan was not a coward. She often stood up for herself and she
always
stood up for Charlie and Braden. She tolerated Josh’s unpredictability and tirades because she was hoping that with counseling he would change. Susan was a pretty woman, maybe the prettiest in her ward. She wasn’t particularly vain, but she did pay attention to her looks. She played with her hair, did her nails, and carefully applied just enough makeup to look pretty but not draw attention to herself. When her husband ignored her, she tried even harder to win him over.

Although there were years when she carried some extra weight after the boys were born, Susan was very fit. She had exercise equipment in their basement, and according to Michele Oreno, Susan could “whip Josh’s butt anytime, any day. She was strong. She worked out and she was buff. Josh was a wimp,” she recalled.

None of Susan’s efforts to be attractive meant anything to Josh. After attending a sister’s wedding in Puyallup, Susan wrote in an e-mail that her sister wanted five children, and her new brother-in-law wanted twelve.

I’d be good with three but I’m not sure how that would come about.

Yet, just when Susan despaired of living the rest of her life without sexual intimacy or even casual affection, Josh would surprise her with some attention.

In an e-mail in July 2008, when their relationship was particularly rocky, she wrote:

… He even initiated some intimate time Wed night, shocker, I know. Funny, it’s been so long it feels like a dream or surreal. And yes, I still love him/care about him and think we can have a happy, loving, functional marriage and be a good example to our kids …

12

My 3 yr old told me for the first time yesterday, “mommy I can’t I’m too busy working” which is verbatim what his father tells me, and he was stomping around the house acting angry (which we both do) and gives scowls to me and others at church when being told no (which is I think another thing from his dad) …

—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 11, 2008

There is always help for Mormons who are struggling. Susan and Josh got help at least once by going to the “bishop’s storehouse,” one of many LDS food storage buildings around the country stocked with mostly nonperishables meant to support the faithful if the need arises.

In April 2005 Susan wrote in her journal that the church was paying for their groceries and utilities. Josh and Susan were given some meat in addition to vegetables and canned food. In return for the food, they agreed to perform a service for the church. Susan did, but Josh, who had been asked to do some gardening for his ward, never did. None of the Powells’ friends had ever heard of anyone reneging on such a commitment.

In good times and bad—including when they earned a decent income together—controlling the finances was a way for Josh to exert authority over Susan.

Things became even more serious after Charlie and Braden were born. When he was about a year old, a doctor diagnosed Charlie as malnourished. The backyard garden that Josh thought could feed the family was not enough for a baby. Susan bought some supplements to feed the boy.

One time Rachel Marini overheard Josh say something about Charlie’s dietary needs that nearly knocked her off her chair.

“He gets one meal a day at day care. That’s all he needs. You can give him formula and that is it. You are not wasting my food on him because he’s just going to poop it out!”

Who in the world talks like that about their own kids?
Rachel wondered.

When Susan and Josh were helping Rachel and Tim move into their home in American Fork—the first and one of only a handful of houses Josh sold as a Realtor—Susan began to cry as she helped unpack groceries and kitchen items. She told Rachel that she had never seen so much food.

“He’d take her to the grocery store and give her $20 and say ‘Buy the food for the week for the family,’” Rachel said later. “And then he’d go buy whatever he wanted. So he was allowed to spend money on whatever he wanted, but she wasn’t.” Josh also forbade Susan spending money on makeup or yarn, what he called her “crap.”

And despite his constant Ebenezer Scrooge routine, at the time of Susan’s disappearance thousands of dollars’ worth of chairs and desks filled the couple’s garage on W. Sarah Circle. It was office furnishings that Josh had grabbed when he had worked as an installer for Virco, an office furniture company his father was a salesman for at one time. The garage was also crammed with remote-controlled cars, box after box of batteries, and expensive tools. Anyone who knew their money woes would have understood right away: money—whatever they had—had been spent on Josh.

Susan scrimped for almost a year to get a washer and dryer, and later, a love seat for the living room.

“She gave up so much stuff to finally get her love seat,” Rachel said. “That was a big deal to her.”

It was the same love seat where Susan and JoVonna sat and crocheted on December 6. The same love seat confiscated by police. The love seat near where the blood was recovered after Susan vanished.

*   *   *

Before Susan could begin work as a stockbroker, Josh got the brainstorm to get a license to sell real estate and he wanted her to help him, so she studied and got her license, too. He suggested they work together, which was code for his real plan—that Susan would do the difficult work.

Josh first sold homes through Prudential, then switched to HOMEnet Real Estate, which took a smaller percentage of his profit. When Rachel and Tim Marini moved to Utah, Josh sold them their house in American Fork. It seemed like a good start, but despite Josh’s hopes, it wasn’t the harbinger of great sales to come. He didn’t have the upbeat, can-do personality that is the hallmark of most successful agents.

“He was a pain,” Rachel recalled later. “He was very inattentive. We would call him and say, ‘Hey, we’re really interested in this house.’ He’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll go look tomorrow.’” They had to prod him to get him to move more quickly.

Chuck Cox thought just
maybe
Josh would do well in real estate. No employer could stand him for more than two weeks, and that’s about all the time a client would have to spend with him.

Mike Khalaji worked for HOMEnet. Since Josh worked out of W. Sarah Circle, he went into the broker’s office only on occasion, which suited Mike and others in the office just fine. As Mike saw it, Josh was a compete braggart, the kind of guy who wouldn’t shut up about all of the amazing things he was doing.

Josh’s career selling houses turned out to be very expensive. He was more interested in promoting himself than in finding clients and selling houses. He asked his father to create a radio jingle for him, and Steve did.

Come home to your castle

Call Josh Powell Realtor!