If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (19 page)

The media was quick to speculate Susan might finally have been found.

Eventually, dental records ruled out the possibility that the remains might be Susan’s.

*   *   *

Although they lived three miles apart near Puyallup’s main drag, the Coxes and the Powells were bound to run into one another once in a while.

Chuck made sure of it.

He wanted to know what Steve and Josh were up to and, most important, how his grandsons were coping. And he knew that the West Valley City police needed help to keep the pressure on Josh.

On a Saturday in late May, Chuck and Judy stopped at the Lowe’s not far from their home—and not far from Steve’s—on a hunt for strawberry plants. The store was so noisy that Chuck missed a text from friends alerting him that they had spotted Josh and his sons in the store. He knew that Josh liked to take the boys to Lowe’s on Saturday mornings when the home improvement chain had its “Build and Grow Clinics.” The free classes were designed to teach kids how to build a wooden toy, birdhouse, picture frame, or other small item.

Chuck turned a corner and there he was about thirty feet from Josh. Braden was in a shopping cart and Charlie was at his father’s side.

The boys spotted Judy first and Charlie ran excitedly over to her.

“Charlie! Charlie!
Charlie!
” Josh yelled. “Get back here!”

Chuck watched Josh as he dealt with the dilemma. How to regain control of the situation? To do that Josh had to keep Braden in the cart, push it the other way from Judy, and still get Charlie to obey him.

“Charlie!” he shouted. “Get over here right now!”

Charlie walked slowly back to his father and as the cart passed just inches from Chuck, the grandfather reached out and patted Braden. Josh’s head snapped toward Chuck. The Coxes watched as their son-in-law hurriedly picked up the unfinished project he and the boys had been working on and left the store like he was exiting a burning building.

Chuck and Judy decided that they would drop in to Lowe’s every once in a while, just coincidentally on a Saturday morning.

“We thought about showing up every Saturday,” Chuck said later.

“But we decided not to push things. We didn’t want Josh to feel we were stalking him,” Judy said.

*   *   *

About a month after that encounter, Chuck and Judy happened to be at Lowe’s on another Saturday morning getting more plants for their garden. They heard an announcement over the intercom that it was time for the crafts clinic.

“Heck, it worked last time,” Chuck said, looking at Judy. “Maybe we will see them again.”

Suddenly Chuck realized that he was about a foot behind Josh, practically breathing down his neck. Chuck immediately backed away. Judy regretted not giving Charlie a hug the last time they had seen him, and she wanted to now.

“Ask him if I can hug Charlie and Braden,” Judy said.

So that he didn’t startle Josh, Chuck said Josh’s name and he turned around. His eyes were filled with suspicion.

“Hi, Josh,” Chuck said. “Is it okay if Judy gives the boys a hug?”

Josh paused and looked around. “No,” he finally answered.

“Why not?” Chuck asked.

Josh shook his head. “Just no,” he said.

Chuck wanted an answer. “What can it hurt?”

“I have made my decision and now you need to go,” Josh said.

Chuck was hurt, but he was angry, too. Josh was acting like a control freak, a selfish jerk. Those boys were his and Judy’s link to their missing daughter. Where in the world could he get off with shutting down an offer of affection by their grandmother?

“You have no legal right to tell me I can’t see the boys in public,” Chuck said.

Josh gave him a nasty look and turned away, and Chuck decided to back down. He didn’t want to cause a scene and traumatize the boys. Chuck and Judy started to leave, but before they exited through the huge automatic doors at the front of the store, Chuck changed his mind. He was utterly ticked off. He and Judy turned around and went back to their original position, about thirty feet from Josh.

Josh saw them and moved the boys around to the other side of a nearby stack of plywood so that he could watch the Coxes and text on his phone at the same time. The Coxes were all but certain he was trying to reach his father. Maybe Steve and Mike could swoop in with their cameras?

“I think we’ve done everything we can do. Let’s go,” Chuck said.

Judy, heartsick over being so close to the boys but not allowed to give them a hug, agreed.

But in a last dig, Chuck got Josh’s attention and gave him a smile and a friendly wave good-bye.

*   *   *

Two weeks later, Chuck was served with a restraining order. Josh told a judge that Chuck had mouthed the words “You’re dead” at him, which Chuck adamantly denied. The judge issued a mutual-harassment order. That night Chuck explained to Judy how he was not about to let a little restraining order give Josh the upper hand.

“I have to stay five hundred feet away from his work, and he has to stay five hundred feet away from my work, and seeing as how he isn’t working that is not a problem,” Chuck told his wife.

“Well, it’s not like we want to hang around him,” Judy said.

“I have no desire to go near him. But he wants this so I can’t talk to the kids, ever,” Chuck said. “I may not be able to approach Josh, but I can still approach the kids. I can talk to the kids, you can talk to the kids, and my parents can talk to the kids.”

Their longing to hug the boys, however, would have to wait.

*   *   *

Josh flatly refused to talk to or cooperate with the police. By spring 2010, investigators knew that what little Josh told them had been lies.

They knew on Monday, December 7, after listening to voice messages left on his cell phone by police concerned about Susan’s whereabouts, that Josh had called
Susan
’s phone—which was in the car with him—and left a message asking if she needed a ride home. They knew that Josh had removed the SIM card from both his phone and his missing wife’s phone. They knew that a day later, Josh had rented a car and driven an astounding 800 miles. They knew it was Susan’s blood on the tile floor in the house. They had seen the note Susan had written and locked in a safe deposit box implicating Josh, should something happen to her. They knew that a day after his mother went missing, Charlie told the police that his mother had gone camping with them but hadn’t come home.

“Mommy stayed where the crystals are,” he had said.

And, even more heartbreaking, they knew three weeks after Susan disappeared that the four-year-old had told a Sunday school teacher, “My mommy is dead.”

Even though they knew all that, and more, they did not share their findings with Susan’s parents. Chuck and Judy Cox continued to publicly support the police department’s efforts to solve Susan’s mysterious disappearance. In private, however, they believed that the police had adequate cause to arrest Josh. The police
had
to put pressure on him.

Chuck Cox understood police procedure. He was, after all, an investigator, too.

“The only way you can break him,” Chuck told the West Valley City cops on several occasions, “is to arrest him. Put him in jail.”

“We’re building a case. Trust us,” the detectives repeated.

Chuck wasn’t convinced. “You’re letting him get away with this,” he said.

“We’re doing our job,” the police said, over and over. “We know this is frustrating, but we’ll get there.”

To the Coxes it seemed like a sad, broken record. Chuck and Judy didn’t see any reason to lambast the police in public, but at home they had to wonder.

“What are they waiting for?” Judy asked.

Chuck put his arms around her shoulders. Judy was in a world of hurt. They all were. The pain would never, ever go away. But letting Josh run free and keep their grandchildren away from them was nearly unbearable.

“We will get through this, Judy,” Chuck said.

Deep down, however, he really didn’t know just
how
they would get through any of it.

“I warned the police over and over, ‘He’ll kill himself and the kids,’” Chuck said later.

24

There was some physical contact over the few days she was here. A couple of times she was taking Braden from me and pressed her soft breasts against the backside of my hands as she wrapped her arms around him to take him. I didn’t make any effort to move my hands.

—STEVE POWELL’S JOURNAL, JUNE 26, 2008

Steve Powell’s second meeting with the West Valley City police, the FBI, and this time the U.S. Marshals Service, too, was in May 2010. He let them into his house, again, without the benefit of a search warrant. As if he were proudly showing off a stamp or coin collection, the investigators couldn’t help but see the pornography out in the open. What was just a fraction of Steve’s pornography collection was visible on a table. In Steve’s trove they saw photos of a woman they instantly recognized as Susan. She had been photographed, unaware, in her underwear. The photos appeared to have been taken through a crack in a bathroom door. There were also pictures that appeared to be composites—images of Susan’s face Photoshopped onto nude female bodies. While there, the police removed the tracking device they had put on Josh’s van four months before when he was in West Valley City to rent out the house. They no longer needed to track him. They seemed more interested in his father. They should have been interested in his brother, Michael.

From Susan’s friends the police learned that Steve had wanted Susan to act as a wife to both Josh and himself. Steve told police that he and his daughter-in-law were in love and claimed she was “very sexual” toward him. Steve told them that Susan had said their “flirtatious relationship could never be in the open due to her Mormon religion.”

They knew that the way Steve described his relationship with Susan was different from what she wrote in her private journal, the one found in her desk at Wells Fargo. Susan repeatedly described Steve as a terrible influence on Josh. She thought he was creepy.

Steve told a former girlfriend that the investigators in May had missed his self-dubbed “porn cabinet,” which contained more photos of Susan, her teenage diaries, and her Mormon temple garment underwear he’d stolen from a pile of laundry back when she and Josh had lived at his house in 2002. The former girlfriend had told the police as early as January 2010 that Steve was obsessed with his daughter-in-law. The West Valley City PD contacted her more than a year later, asking the woman to explain once more what she knew about Steve. She even had a map Steve had sketched of roads around where Susan might have disappeared.

The department admitted that they’d lost the notes she had sent.

*   *   *

Steve Powell’s fascination with pornography went back to the early years of his marriage, if not further. Back then, Steve had to sneak around to the back door entrance of an adult bookstore on the seediest side of Spokane to satisfy his lust. That was long before he could just go online and view whatever he wanted—or create pornography of his own.

When Terri Powell was eight months pregnant with Alina, she discovered a diary her husband had kept, that detailed explicit sexual fantasies about women they knew. Steve wrote about one particular woman and indicated that if her husband died, he’d step in and marry her. He even wrote a song about her.

Did Steve want them to be one big polygamous family? Terri burned the diary. But she explained her fears during their divorce proceedings.

I was concerned sometimes that he might even have it in his mind to harm her husband to put himself in the position that he desired.

Another time, Terri found a hard-core magazine in eight-year-old Mike’s bedroom and confronted Steve about his lapse in good parenting.

Steve tried to dismiss her concerns.

“People are just animals anyway,” he said. “We ought to be able to have sex with anyone, any time we please.”

25

You’re to blame!

That’s why I never sleep at night.

—A LYRIC BY STEVE POWELL

Steve Powell wrote dozens of love songs about Susan and over ten years filled seventeen spiral notebooks with his sexual obsessions. In her father’s defense, and to show that relations between Steve and Susan were not as weird as Susan described, Alina Powell made a point of noting on her Web site West Valley and Pierce County Malfeasance that the soprano heard backing up Steve on some songs was, indeed, Susan.

“Susan and Steve made beautiful music together,” Alina wrote without irony.

Alina, whose employment history included only brief stints as a dog groomer, video clerk, and fast-food worker, was quite comfortable behind her computer screen. She created an avatar named Misty for games she played. Sometimes Misty was a blonde, and sometimes she had dark hair. All in all, “I guess she would probably be considered prettier than I am,” Alina confessed. Misty could also float above the fray, something that might come in handy at Steve’s house. Alina posted regularly to Web sites and once guessed the number of her e-mail accounts at around two dozen.

On Mother’s Day 2010, Josh or someone purporting to be him, posted a message to Susan on his Web site,
SusanPowell.org
. It included photos of Charlie and Braden, and talked about how they planted flowers for their missing mother.

Happy Mother’s Day Susan. You are the beloved mother of two beautiful boys who remember you and miss you. We all hope you will come home soon. The boys love plants and gardening just like you so they planted flowers for your honor on Mother’s Day. We hope you like the pictures, and are thinking about us as much as we are thinking about you.

*   *   *

Chuck Cox nearly blew his top when he saw the posting.

“If Susan
could
come home, she
would,
” he said to Judy, while they huddled over the computer screen looking at the latest insult to their daughter’s reputation.

“She loved those little boys more than anything.”