If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (3 page)

EM:
Do you think she’s in danger right now, do you think she’s hurt?

JP:
Don’t know … I don’t think she would do that.

EM:
You don’t think she’d do what?

JP:
I don’t think she would miss work.

Maxwell, who more than once mistakenly refers to Susan as “Sarah,” tries to get Josh to tell him who Susan’s friends are. But Josh can’t seem to think of anybody.

EM:
Let me tell ya something. You’re, I mean, you’re kind of being helpful but you’re not helpful, ’cause I mean I’ve been married and I know who … I can tell you who my wife’s closest friends are.

JP:
Ah, she talked to …

EM:
You know what I’m saying? And I actually know who her closest friends are and you’re telling me that you can’t tell me.

JP:
Okay, she talks to [redacted] a lot.

Maxwell asks Josh more pointedly if he is worried about Susan. For years to come, the West Valley City police would say that Josh never acted concerned about Susan, didn’t ask about the investigation into her disappearance, and never helped look for her.

EM:
… If you last seen her at midnight that’s the last time you’ve seen her, um, nobody else has seen her or talked to her since, so she’s basically been missing for about twenty hours.

JP:
Okay.

EM:
So where would you think she would be at? Does that concern you at all? I mean, just ’cause …

JP:
It, it does.

EM:
It does concern you?

JP:
Yes.

EM:
Okay, so help me try to figure out. I don’t live with you. I don’t live with her, okay. You guys have been together for what, seven years?

JP:
Um … it seems like maybe eight.

EM:
Okay, eight years. You know her a hell of a lot better than I do. First we’re taking a report at ten o’clock [in the morning].

JP:
Well, I think she would go to work.

EM:
All right, but she didn’t go to work, dude!

Josh was like a broken record. No doubt he’d been taken by surprise that he, Charlie, Braden, and Susan were discovered to be missing early that morning by Debbie Caldwell. He probably planned to arrive home before anyone knew he was gone, maybe dispose of Susan’s purse to make it look like she had left voluntarily, and later he would report her missing. He would have time to come up with a story. He’d lost that advantage.

EM:
What do you think? I mean we’ve talked quite a bit. What are you thinking? You thinking, where do you think she’s … you think she’s at a friend’s house, think she’s okay?

JP:
I don’t even know what to think …

EM:
Hum, I don’t know either … you didn’t take her out to Pony Express with you guys?

JP:
No.

Josh finally signed a consent form authorizing a search of his van. In the vehicle they found the electric generator, blankets, a gas can, tarps, and a shovel. They also recovered a circular saw, a humidifier, at least two knives, a tripod, a newly opened box of latex gloves, and a rake, but did not disclose the existence of those items for more than three years.

Except for the generator, there was no camping equipment. No sleeping bags, no provisions such as diapers or food—except for a few snacks—for a father taking his two young sons camping in a snowstorm.

At 9:00
P.M.
on December 7, twenty-eight hours after JoVonna Owings last saw Susan, the police let Josh and the boys leave the police department, take the minivan, and return to the house on W. Sarah Circle. When he arrived home Josh backed the van up to the garage door. Neighbors reported that he spent all night and early the next morning cleaning the vehicle and made dozens of trips from the van to the garage.

*   *   *

Down the street from the Powells’, Kiirsi Hellewell sat at her computer in a downstairs playroom filled with crafts and toys that shouted to the world she was a mother—and a busy one at that. Surrounded by her children’s photos, she went onto Facebook to see what, if anything, anyone had reported about the Powells.

Nothing.

Something did come, however, a little later that evening in the form of a phone call. It made her heart beat faster, her stomach turn somersaults.

“Josh is back,” a neighbor said.

“Are they okay? Are they okay?”

There was an uneasy pause.

“Susan is not with them,” the neighbor said.

Kiirsi felt a horrible, heart-sinking dread take over.

“Oh no,” she said, her voice shaking. “What has he done?”

It was a question that would be asked over and over for years.

*   *   *

Far away in Puyallup, Washington, framed photographs of Salt Lake City’s Temple Square adorned the Coxes’ split-level house, panoramic reminders of their faith. On Monday night, Susan’s parents, in addition to keeping in touch with Jennifer Graves, were also working the phones and the Internet. They knew that Josh had returned home with the boys, but had no idea of Susan’s whereabouts. The police told Chuck that they weren’t sure if a crime had been committed. If he thought the worst, even in that moment, Chuck didn’t tell Judy.

Susan’s father had faith that things would be all right. His daughter would be found safe and sound. He promised Judy. He believed it. He prayed for it.

Three miles southeast of the Coxes’ home, in Steve Powell’s two-story house in a modest, gated community called Country Hollow, Josh’s father, his youngest sister Alina, middle brother Johnny, and youngest brother Mike, must have heard about the call that morning from their oldest sibling, Jennifer. How they reacted is unknown. Maybe they weren’t concerned at all? Josh, it was true, could be impulsive and disorganized. It was part of who he was. He’d always been the kind of person who would come up with some grand scheme and then try to conjure a way to make it work—even though his track record was less than stellar.

Upstairs in thirty-year-old Johnny Powell’s bedroom, a carefully coiled rope noose hung on the wall along with disturbing renderings of a woman with a knife running through her vagina and exiting her stomach. Johnny, whom his father and sister Alina considered an artist, had a history of mental troubles.

That wasn’t all that was upstairs. In Steve’s bedroom down the hall from Johnny’s was part of a cache of more than a dozen computers. Inside those computers, and also in scores of notebooks and stacks of homemade music CDs, was incontrovertible documentation of an obsession the likes of which had seldom been seen by even the most experienced police investigator. In image after image, in song after song, diary entries that went on for reams of pages at a time, was the object of Steve’s obsession: a blue-eyed beauty, now the missing mother of two, Susan Cox Powell.

*   *   *

Moments after logging Josh’s and Susan’s cell phones into evidence, investigators discovered that both phones were missing the SIM cards—the data recorder of calls made and received.

If Josh Powell had thought he could thwart the detectives and the investigation with this obvious deception, he was wrong. It would take some effort to gather billing records from the service providers, but it could be done.

Evasive?

Lying?

Unconcerned about his wife’s fate?

Josh Powell didn’t know it, but he’d just nailed the trifecta, the traits of those who kill their spouses. It was so obvious.

But apparently it was not obvious to the West Valley City police.

*   *   *

That night, Jennifer Graves woke up in a panic. The phone was ringing. She knew it was Susan. Jennifer groped wildly for the phone by the bed, struggling to get to it in time to talk to Susan, find out where she was, and get her home. As she became more awake, Jennifer realized that the phone hadn’t rung. It was a dream.

She stayed up for hours, reliving the vivid scene over and over and wondering what her brother had done to his wife.

2

He will go to counseling for himself and/or meds to deal with his mental issues and if he refuses I will not ruin mine and my boys’ lives further and we will divorce and I hope it’s not as ugly as he claims it will be when we’ve talked about it in the past.

—SUSAN POWELL IN E-MAIL, JULY 11, 2008

Life in any home is a crazy quilt and sometimes the edges are frayed. The Coxes had experienced their ups and downs like any family. Long before husbands and children, the Cox girls tried their parents’ patience as teens often do. There was some sneaking around. There were alliances and feuds. There were the cover stories that sisters sometimes tell for one another. Susan and her sister Denise were especially tight. Susan, though younger, stuck up for Denise, who was the “wild” one of the Cox girls. When Denise found herself unmarried and pregnant at eighteen, her parents and her other sisters were anything but happy about it. Susan took a different tack.

“I’m going to be an aunt!” she said. “I’m so happy and excited, Denise!”

Susan’s move to Utah and the troubles in her own life had put distance between the once very, very close sisters. But still, when Denise heard that Susan was missing, she felt a surge of uneasiness. Susan was fun, but responsible. She would never run off and leave her kids. Denise recalled her last conversation with Susan the month before. It was small talk mostly. Later Denise would sit in a chair in her Bonney Lake, Washington, home and try to piece together all that had been said. Try as she might, she came up with nothing, except regrets.

She wished that she’d called her sister more often, that she had probed deeper into what was going on. Denise herself had been in an abusive relationship. She knew that it took a great deal of strength—and often the helping hand of another—to get out.

But by the time Susan and Josh had settled into married life in Utah, the pattern had been established. Talking on the phone with Susan often felt empty, one-sided. It wasn’t that Susan wasn’t an outgoing person with lots of news to share, but she didn’t. It was all surface conversation.

Denise knew the reason. Josh was always hovering nearby, listening to every word, making sure that his wife painted the picture of their lives that he wanted to believe was true.

That they were normal, happy, and safe.

When Denise heard that Josh and the boys had gone camping in the middle of the night, she gave her head a quick shake.

Who does that? Where is my sister?

She remembered a letter Susan had written to her in 2007, saying that she was afraid Josh would kill her before he agreed to a divorce.

*   *   *

Susan’s Utah friends said she would never have permitted camping in winter. A trip in the fall when it wasn’t nearly as frigid had been a dismal failure: the boys were cold and hungry and crying to go home, forcing Josh to cut the trip short. Susan, who had stayed home, didn’t say “I told you so.”

While camping in the middle of the night in record cold temperatures sounds unlikely at best, Chuck Cox was not surprised when he heard about the trip. Susan’s father knew Josh had a tendency to lose track of time and act on the spur of the moment. In the immediate days after Susan disappeared, Chuck called Josh “a super father” to the boys and said there was no doubt in his mind that they were safe with him. Chuck had helped the family financially when one or the other of them was unemployed. As far as he knew, the couple had worked through their problems. A family friend said there was no indication that the marriage had ever been abusive.

If Josh could play a game, denying any knowledge of what had happened to Susan, so could Chuck. When Chuck called Josh “a super father,” he was doing so to try and keep the lines of communication open with Josh. He didn’t really believe it.

*   *   *

On Tuesday, December 8, 2009, two days after Susan was last seen, Chuck finally received a phone call from Josh. His son-in-law’s voice was soft and he seemed upset. He said that Susan was missing and that he didn’t have any idea what happened to her. He made no mention of the Sunday dinner he had fixed or the late-night camping trip.

Chuck looked at the time. It was 12:30
P.M.
He knew that Josh was late for a meeting with the police, but purposely did not ask him any questions. If he did, he might tip Josh off to what the police were sure to ask. If Josh had done something to Susan, then it would be a mistake to give him a chance to come up with a lie. Chuck began to feel a sense of dread.

What had Josh been doing all morning? Why hadn’t he gone down to the police station first thing, like any other husband would have?

For his part, Josh didn’t know that his father-in-law had been on the phone with Jennifer the day before when he tested his excuses on her.

After the call ended, Chuck took a couple of calls from reporters inquiring about the circumstances in Utah. He had no idea at the time, but over the course of the next couple of years, he would be on every major network and in newspapers around the world. And no matter the airwaves or the newspapers, his message would always be the same: “Where is my daughter? Where is Susan?”

*   *   *

Josh stalled his second interview with the police. Jennifer and their mother arrived at the house. The boys hadn’t eaten. Josh kept going back and forth from the garage and putting items in the washing machine. Jennifer offered to help him, and vacuumed up the broken glass from the window. She tried to see what he was up to in the garage. She saw a sled with a pile of things on it, including cheap work gloves. Later, she asked herself, “Did he pull her body somewhere on the sled to get rid of her?”

After hours of delaying—his call to Chuck, his clean-up, reminder calls from the police, and his mother and sister nagging him—Josh finally arrived at the West Valley City Police Department, four hours late for his appointment.

While Detective Maxwell talked to Josh, other officers with search warrants arrived at the house and sent the two women away with Charlie and Braden. They went to Jennifer’s house in West Jordan, and later to a children’s center where child advocates talked to Charlie and Braden. It would be days before Jennifer saw or heard from her brother again.