If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (25 page)

We believe that when she’s found, and even if she’s done something criminal, these same people will continue to blame Josh …

To Steve, “these people” were the Coxes, the police, and Susan’s Mormon friends.

While he decried the media’s prejudice against Josh on one page, he took the entirety of another page to chronicle what he called a “jerk off” session to a photograph of “Susan’s beautiful face.” He wrote how many seconds it had lasted and added an exclamation point to cap off the memory.

Bremner had seen the sickest of the sick as a DA and in private practice defending victims. Steve was far off the charts. His sole existence seemed to be comprised of fantasies related to Susan.

Another day, Steve filled the pages of his journal with more theories about what might have happened to Susan. Bremner saw this as theater of the absurd. It was hard to know who the journal was written for—Steve, or others who might read it later?

He wrote how the recent visit with the FBI had left him with the feeling that they were holding back some crucial information about her.

… something they were not telling us and that they had found her … maybe Susan and her boyfriend know they are being watched.

Ultimately, Steve appeared to be full of hope. The feds had talked about Susan as if they knew her whereabouts. Steve could hardly contain his joy over the possibility that Susan was still out there, and better yet, on her way home. His muse, his inspiration, the love of his life, was probably still alive! Her return would be none too soon. The months since her disappearance had been the darkest time of his life. He noted how her vanishing had devastated him and almost ruined his health. He’d lost about twenty pounds the month she went missing.

… Susan has been my reason for doing everything.

Anne Bremner set aside the pages. She felt disgusted and angry. She thought of Chuck and Judy Cox and how they’d been kept in the dark about Steve’s obsession with their daughter. Susan had hinted at being uncomfortable at the Powells’ house but she hadn’t said anything that approximated her father-in-law’s own words on the plain pages of that Office Depot notebook.

Every entry was about Susan.

It was always about Susan.

The veteran lawyer wondered if Susan had ever really confided in anyone about the depth of her father-in-law’s interest in her. Had she told anyone of the true twisted nature of his sexual obsession?

Or had she even known?

*   *   *

As far as Bremner could tell, the word
mudslinging
was defined by the parties in Steve and Terri’s divorce case. Both sides unblinkingly fired point-blank at each other. Steve had insisted Terri was nothing short of a witch—and an unstable one at that—and Terri fired back that she was fearful for her life and for the safety of her children.

Terri’s sister, Lisa Martin, was one of many who provided statements on Terri’s behalf. She wrote in a 1992 declaration about a conversation she had with Steve, Jenny, Mike, and Alina in the family’s living room in Spokane before the divorce. The couple had been fighting over which of the children would live with which parent if it came to that. The boys, it seemed, would stay with Steve. Jenny, an adult, wasn’t part of the divvying-up process, but it was suggested that she and her little sister Alina would go with their mother. Terri wanted ten-year-old Mike to live with her, too, away from Steve’s influence.

It appeared that Steve wouldn’t concede to giving up
any
of the children. They belonged to him—not their mother. They were at a stalemate and the conversation took a very dark turn. Bremner looked down at the transcript of what Lisa said she had overheard Steve tell his children:

“… there are people that can’t break up with their girlfriend or wife. These people have the idea that if they can’t have that person, then no one can. They go as far as killing them.” She noted that when Jenny asked how far he might go if Terri tried to divorce him. Steve said something to the effect of “I’d like to think I wouldn’t go that far.
”

The words were like a balled-up fist, a sucker punch to Bremner’s stomach.

Who talks like that? Who says “If I can’t have you, no one can?”

Steve Powell
did
. Josh Powell
did
.
That’s
who
. There was no other way to look at it. The seeds of destruction had been planted in Josh’s head by his father, the Powell family’s self-appointed puppetmaster.

36

There have been times when I have been afraid of Steve and/or the boys because of their extremely hateful behavior.

—TERRI POWELL, 1992 DIVORCE DOCUMENTS

Chuck sat at their big dining room table, lost in thought about what he had learned about life inside that benign-looking two-story home with its broad front porch and dark wicker-style furniture. Susan had always said that Steve’s house in Country Hollow exuded “evil,” and now Chuck believed it.

While Judy quietly made dinner a few feet away, Chuck ruminated over the events of the day. It had been brutal. He and Judy had just returned from the first court hearing to determine who would have temporary custody of Charlie and Braden. Chuck was completely dumbfounded, a rare state for a man who’d been on a mission since his daughter’s disappearance. Josh and his lawyers insisted that Josh knew nothing about Steve’s unbridled interest in pornography.

As part of the custody case, the state talked to Jennifer and her mother, Terri. Jennifer told caseworkers that her father’s pornography had been a sick part of her childhood. Her mother claimed to have
forgotten
about Steve’s hobby.

Chuck saw the pornography as something inherently dangerous to the well-being of his grandsons and a very good reason—among many—to award custody of Charlie and Braden to him and Judy. Chuck talked it over with Judy and with their lawyer. It was clear that the police didn’t have time to look at Steve’s history of pornography and the role it might play in the custody battle. The police and caseworkers for the Department of Health and Human Services were mired in their own workloads and couldn’t or wouldn’t go to the trouble of digging into an old divorce case that had more than a thousand pages of documents.

There was only one thing to do. The day after the custody hearing, Chuck, his mother Anne, and sister Pam loaded up the car and drove the long lonely stretch of I-90 east to the Spokane County Courthouse. At the time, they knew only a little of the story of Steve and Terri’s divorce, that Steve had retained custody of his three sons, including sixteen-year-old Josh. The devil, they were about to learn, truly was in the details.

When they arrived, the trio agreed to split the job into thirds as they dissected what had gone wrong in the nineteen-year-long Powell marriage. Over the course of several hours, each of them found things that not only refuted Josh’s and Terri’s claims of having no knowledge of a serious porn problem, but provided a genuine glimpse into what had made Josh into the man he was.

It all went back to Steve. Indeed, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

As Chuck began to see it, the divorce records explained the long pattern of family codependency and dysfunction that Steve had passed on to the next generation of Powells.

The cycle began in Steve’s childhood. In the divorce documents, Terri wrote that he was the victim of a parental kidnapping. Steve didn’t deny the story that began when his mother separated from his father and took Steve and his three siblings to live in Ohio. His father tracked them down and his parents reunited. But a few months later, as Steve wrote, “My dad made a unilateral and secretive decision to separate from my mom.”

One weekend while their mother was visiting a relative, the children were taken to Steve’s paternal grandparents, who had moved to Idaho without their daughter-in-law’s knowledge. When seven-year-old Steve asked where his mother was, his grandmother said he was never going to see her again.

“My older brother, my sister and I were inconsolable,” he later wrote. He was overheard telling a friend that the children had been kidnapped by their grandparents; his grandmother punished him by dousing his tongue with cayenne pepper and ordering him to stand in a corner.

Steve was raised Mormon and in the early years of his marriage to Terri he attended church with her. That didn’t last long, however. In court papers, Terri wrote that when they were first married, “Steve worked hard, served God and me. He was very thoughtful, very devoted towards me.” But a few years later, Steve “began to change in many ways. He is a complete opposite of the man that I married.” She wrote that he was “full of himself,” “dominating any conversation,” “condescending,” “dogmatic,” and “verbally abusive,” taking delight in embarrassing her in front of her children. Terri was worried about Steve’s influence on his sons:

For those who will listen to Steve, as the older boys have, he seems to have a powerful way of controlling … I know that Steve is persuasive in a most harmful, deliberate way. Steve’s manipulation of the kids’ thoughts and emotions is terribly difficult to deal with. They group together and stir each other up to almost a fever pitch at times.

In the divorce documents Terri wrote about a time when Josh and Johnny had pushed and hit her, and an incident when Josh had threatened her with a knife. She stated that Steve used “overly harsh discipline” with Josh, but also encouraged their sons to mock and insult her.

Terri read Steve’s journal that detailed his explicit fantasies about a woman they both knew in their church. When she confronted him with the journal, he showed no remorse and reiterated that if he could, he’d take a second wife. Steve had veered into the land of Mormon fundamentalists, the outlaws who still practice polygamy.

Terri saw all of it as reasons why she should have custody of the children, but in the end, it was Steve who prevailed. The boys, and later Alina, would be raised under his roof. For her part, Terri was kicked to the curb, penniless and heartbroken.

*   *   *

Little is known about Josh’s attempt at suicide when he was a teenager. Family members who were asked about it later seem to have only vague recollections of its occurrence. Even Terri blanked out under questioning by a lawyer when asked if she could recall what had happened and why. Teary-eyed, she conceded she knew
something
had happened, but she was unable to retrieve a single bit of specific information.

It was as if a suicide attempt by a son were something a mother could forget.

Brenda Kay Martin, who was married to Terri’s brother, wrote about the incident in a declaration she made in the Powell divorce case. Josh, she said, was about sixteen when it happened. The Powells phoned family members because the troubled teenager was acting strange in a way that indicated he might hurt a family member or himself. Brenda wrote:

A few days after this incident he attempted suicide. Fortunately it didn’t work and only left a rope burn around his neck.

*   *   *

On the way back over the Cascade Range which divides Washington in half—the rainy west side and the arid land of the eastern side—Chuck talked nonstop about Josh and Steve and Terri.

He was in shock, as was his mother and his sister Pam.

“Reading this was like a revelation about Josh’s true character and his potential for violence,” Chuck said later. He was alarmed by Steve’s corruption of his own children and attacks on Terri. According to the records they’d just skimmed, Terri had been awarded custody of the two youngest, Mike and Alina, but Steve had constantly disregarded that ruling and his visitation limitations, and used his full-time income to buy his children’s loyalty, never missing an opportunity to demonstrate to his children the advantages of living with him.

Steve had no rules. His mantra was “Do anything you want.”

It was a game, but an unwinnable one for Terri. She wanted her children to know discipline, love, and the value of a routine.

Not Steve. Chuck saw him as the ultimate Disneyland dad. He bought his children’s loyalty by giving them freedom and gifts, and making their mother appear to be a monster.

Chuck felt a little sorry for Terri. She’d been no match for the cruel wrath of her former husband. She had no money, no resources. He knew that she loved her children, but there was no stopping Steve. He used a scorched earth approach in his quest to get rid of her, urging their sons to see her as pitiful and hapless, and encouraging them to ridicule her.

She might very well be lucky to be alive, Chuck thought.

“Josh is much more dangerous than we ever imagined,” Chuck said as they were on the interstate toward home. “Susan had no idea how messed up Josh was.”

Pam and their mother sat silently. No one could argue against what Chuck was saying; what Chuck had just figured out. No matter what Susan thought she could do with her love for Josh, she could not undo the nightmare that his father had created.

Steve had passed it on to Josh like a toxic gene.

*   *   *

Steve’s influence over Josh waned when he and Susan moved to Utah, but in the months leading up to Susan’s disappearance, not only had it resumed, it appeared to kick into overdrive. Father and son spent hours at a time on the phone. During that time, Josh became a mirror of his father. He hated Mormonism and he made threats. The boys, he insisted, belonged to him.

He repeated a warning he’d given Susan before: If she divorced him, she would get the children over his—or her—dead body.

37

The boys were mean and they were wild. They were animals, just vicious. We had to teach them sharing. The psychologist called it “re-parenting.” We had to start over and give them some boundaries and teach them “this is how you treat people.”

—CHUCK COX, OCTOBER 3, 2012

Now it was time to fight for the boys. The battle over Susan and where she might be—dead or alive—had morphed into something more tangible. It was all about Charlie and Braden. The year before, the Coxes had heard from people who had glimpsed Charlie and Braden in a Puyallup store or in the neighborhood. They were thin, there were dark circles under their eyes, and they had vacant stares. Chuck was worried about their health and about Steve and Josh’s influence.