If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (6 page)

There was an artificial Christmas tree in a corner, half decorated. Susan had asked Josh again and again to get the rest of the ornaments down from a high shelf in the garage. He hadn’t done it yet and Susan would probably end up doing it herself. The presents her parents had mailed for Charlie and Braden were under the tree.

In a voice loud enough for her husband to hear over the din of his dinner preparation, Susan told JoVonna that she had recently been able to return to the temple. Josh was opposed to tithing, but Susan had started to keep some of the money she earned, and had resumed the practice, a requirement to enter the temple. She also said that she and Josh were having marriage counseling with an LDS Family Services counselor and had an appointment scheduled for the coming week. She was hopeful, but a little skeptical at the same time. Josh had stopped attending the sessions and wasn’t reading their homework, a book on marriage by a Mormon author.

This was a pattern of Josh and Susan’s that longtime friends knew
well.
JoVonna was just beginning to see it. Josh would publicly berate Susan and sometimes she would respond by being quiet or by standing up to him, as she had about the six Thanksgiving pies. She could get in her digs at Josh by making sure he overheard her complaining to friends.

“How are you feeling?” JoVonna asked. Susan had endured an ear infection for nearly three weeks, but there was something else there, too. Susan lowered her voice and talked about a miscarriage—but not so low that Josh couldn’t hear her. It was also possible that Susan didn’t want the children to overhear. JoVonna, who had suffered her own miscarriages, knew she would see Susan on Tuesday at a Relief Society dinner.

“I didn’t want to go into it that night because I felt that this should be a private conversation where I could talk with her and not have him butt in,” she recalled later. “He had a tendency to butt in.”

At one point, Susan indicated that she was chilly. Josh stopped what he was doing and brought her a blanket.

No matter what she’d heard—from Susan or Susan’s friends—JoVonna was charmed by the gesture.

Oh, how sweet that he would do that,
she thought at the time.

*   *   *

Josh took forever making his special version of “breakfast for dinner”—a hit among kids in every American home, especially when a dad dons the cook’s apron. It was true he had two little boys underfoot and little claim to knowing his way around a kitchen. The kitchen was small and tidy. The refrigerator was bare except for a couple of drawings Charlie had made for his mother and promotional magnets left over from Josh’s brief career in real estate. Susan loved wolves, and frequently wore an old wolf T-shirt, and a wolf plaque hung on a wall. There was plenty of stopping and starting, the sound of the mixer interrupting the conversation across the living room on the floral printed love seat that Susan had saved her money to purchase. Susan let Josh struggle in the kitchen, something that JoVonna admired. A husband didn’t need to cook every night, but he should be able to fill in when his wife was ill or too tired to make a meal. First the blanket, then the meal … Josh was really on his best behavior.

After a couple of hours of banging around in the kitchen, Josh served dinner. He put two pancakes on each plate and smothered them with canned apple pie filling. A spatula of scrambled eggs nested on top … and dinner was served. The women remained on the love seat to eat. Josh prepared the plates separately. He fixed one and took it to JoVonna, then returned to the kitchen to prepare Susan’s. He and the boys took the three chairs at the table.

“It was nice because the last time I had been there he had to dominate the conversation. He had to be the center of everything,” JoVonna said later. “When he came into a room it was all about Josh, what Josh had to say. This time it wasn’t like that, and I thought, ‘That’s really nice.’”

Between 4:30 and 5:00
P.M.
Susan said she was tired and retreated to the bedroom. JoVonna attributed Susan’s fatigue to the miscarriage and recent ear infection. She stayed until about 5:30
P.M.
working on the yarn. Josh busied himself cleaning the kitchen and washing the dishes. He instructed Charlie and Braden to go to the bathroom and get dressed for sledding in the freezing December air. When it became obvious that Josh and the boys were going outside, JoVonna knew it was her signal to leave.

When JoVonna left that evening the house was pristine.

*   *   *

Around 8:30
P.M.
a neighbor saw Josh return home and pull into the garage. Three hours later, Marco Bastidas, who lived one house away from Josh and Susan’s, was locking up his car when he heard an alarm sounding inside the closed garage at the Powell home. He couldn’t see any lights on in the house. After listening to the alarm for at least two minutes, Marco’s sister suggested he alert the neighbors. He was reluctant to bother Josh or Susan, and eventually the alarm stopped.

Another neighbor, ill in bed, later heard what sounded like a man and a woman arguing. She told the police her story, and regretted not getting up and looking out her window at the time to see who was yelling.

Was it Josh and Susan?

Sometime later, the Powells’ garage door opened and the family’s light blue minivan pulled out. There were no neighbors awake to see it.

5

He used to buckle me in and give me a kiss, hold doors open, sincerely worry if I didn’t put on a coat, buy groceries and help me cook/clean and/or cook/clean for himself. Hang out and talk together, watch movies and relaxing tv just for entertainment. Care and make time for being with friends/group dates etc. GO TO CHURCH! NOT be all radical about the latest huge world problems that all his rantings can’t fix, (although he thinks it can) But when we moved to Utah … and then we had Charlie, his priorities seemed to have changed.

—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 28, 2008

Susan Marie Cox, the third of four girls, was born on October 16, 1981, to Chuck and Judy Cox in New Mexico, where Chuck served as a staff sergeant working in the air traffic control tower at Holloman Air Force Base. Those early years had been good ones, living on the edge of the desert with roadrunners and the occasional lizard as visitors to the backyard of the first house the family had ever owned.

Chuck left the Air Force after six years. When it came time to make a move, Chuck and family looked north. First,
way
north to a job in Alaska. Next was a stint in Vancouver, Washington, before the family finally settled in Puyallup, just east of Tacoma. Chuck became an investigator for the FAA, visiting crash sites and asking questions to find out why things went wrong. There were always answers.

The Cox daughters all had their distinct personalities. As the oldest, Mary was the one who kept track of everyone and everything, a trait she would use later in life as a paralegal. Denise loved animals and called herself the black sheep of the family because she experimented with smoking and drinking and became pregnant at eighteen. Marie was the baby of the family—a role she played to her advantage. Susan, number three, was the dreamer, the girl who saw beauty in everything and everyone. All four played music and sang in the church or school choir.

Of the sisters, Denise and Susan shared a particular interest in and love of animals, especially birds. At one time, the girls had a menagerie of twenty-seven parakeets, finches, and a cockatoo in their room—much to their mother’s dismay. Judy made the girls clean the cages twice a day, which Susan and Denise grudgingly did. At one time, the pair formed their own exclusive club, which they dubbed “The Bird Club.”

As young teens, they dreamed of a business they could open together. It would be a combination hair salon—for people—and dog grooming business, for their customers’ pets. They wanted to call it “Beauty and Your Beast.”

Susan wanted to make a career out of making people beautiful. She loved to color hair and experiment with her own hairstyles—sometimes to less than desirable results. She gave her mom and her sisters pedicures whenever they wanted them—or whenever she insisted they needed a little filing and polish.

When Susan announced that she was going to beauty school neither Chuck nor Judy was surprised. Everyone had expected it. Susan had a veritable storage locker of makeup and hair supplies in her bedroom. When she started taking cosmetology classes, the back of her car was filled with smiling head models. It looked like someone had decapitated a team of cheerleaders. Years later, eldest sister Mary remembered the time she sat on a stool in the living room while Susan snipped and snipped away.

“When Susan was going to school for cosmetology she had to practice on other people, so I was her dummy. I let her cut and color my hair. She told me to lean my head back rather than sit straight up and she ended up taking a lot more than I wanted. Let’s just say I told her she could never cut my hair again!”

*   *   *

Joshua Steven Powell was born on January 20, 1976, being one of five children born to Steve and Terri Powell in Spokane, Washington. Jennifer was the oldest, followed by Josh, Johnny, Mike, and finally, Alina. If Chuck and Judy’s marriage and family were a reasonable example of a family who knew how to work out its problems with love and faith, the Powells were at the other end of the spectrum. The very farthest end. And while the Powells had gone through a bitter divorce when Josh was a teenager, their lives together weren’t always acrimonious. At one time, Steve and Terri seemed very much in love. They loved the outdoors, reading, and spending time with others of their Mormon faith. Terri was eighteen and Steve was twenty-three and recently back from his mission service in Argentina when they were married in the Ogden, Utah, temple.

Times were tough. Terri had three children—and a miscarriage—all in two and a half years and wound up hospitalized. She described their life as “lower middle class,” with Steve working nights at a grocery store before trying real estate. Many months they didn’t have enough money to get by.

Over time, their love for each other, and Steve’s faith in the church, began to fracture. The consequences of the seismic shift were noticed by everyone, including friends and family. Many worried about what the Powells’ war with each other might do to their children.

Josh, unlike his father and most Mormon young men after high school, did not go on a mission. By the time he was nineteen, his parents had been divorced for three years and he continued to live under his father’s roof, a man who by then was vehemently anti-Mormon and who made sure that his kids felt the same way. Josh, more than the others, seemed especially susceptible to the rants of his dad. He drank in, guzzled really, everything Steve said.

In contrast to the volatile Powell family, Chuck and Judy Cox had been married for thirty-five years when Susan went missing. Chuck hadn’t been raised Mormon. He met Judy when they were sixteen and in high school in Medical Lake, Washington, just outside of Spokane. Judy was Mormon and Chuck was searching for a faith. Something clicked. Chuck discovered that the teenagers he saw who didn’t do drugs and treated people well happened to be members of the LDS. Chuck joined the faith at seventeen and he and Judy were married after high school. Like any family, over the years there were good times and challenging times in the Cox household—but it was infinitely more stable than Josh’s upbringing. The Coxes’ daughter, Denise, the “misfit” in the family, was a divorced mother of four and was in a custody fight over two of her children. That was about as bad as it got in the Cox family.

*   *   *

Susan was nineteen when she met twenty-four-year-old Joshua Powell and his buddy Tim Marini at an LDS singles event in Tacoma in 2000. Josh no longer attended the Mormon church, but he hadn’t turned against the faith yet. Plus, it was a good place to meet single young women. Tim wanted to date Susan but, unfortunately for him, she wasn’t the least bit interested. Susan had the kind of sparkling personality and energy that drew other people to her. She was a magnet. When Josh showed interest, Tim made the introduction and Susan agreed to go out with him.

From the beginning the match was an odd one. Josh came from a troubled family. He talked so much that the room filled with his words. He could be annoying, but he could also be endearing.

Susan laughed at Josh’s incessant ramblings, his preoccupation with everything from cameras to computers. He had big, grandiose plans for the future, a different plan every week.

Judy and Chuck had some reservations about their daughter’s new boyfriend. They had met him before, when Josh tried asking out their oldest daughter, Mary. Josh had shown up at their house the night of Mary’s prom. She had a date and was at the dance but it didn’t matter to Josh. He planted himself in a living room chair intent on staying to chat with Judy about Mary, the weather, anything at all. Judy felt like she’d been caught in a steel-jawed leg trap. There was no getting rid of the kid.

Finally, Chuck came home. In his typical no-nonsense fashion, he was direct when he told Josh that the visit was over.

“You need to go now,” he said.

Josh didn’t get it. He just sat there, looking blank-eyed. And kept talking.

Chuck had never seen anything like it.

Despite his peculiar nature, Susan fell for Josh. In some ways it was inexplicable. She was stunning, vivacious. His personality swung between stiff and remote, and gregarious and overbearing.

Mary had tried to warn her sister when things turned serious. She thought Josh was just plain weird. So did their parents.

“I have a bad feeling about him,” Judy said as she and Susan sat at the massive family table that filled nearly every square inch of the dining room.

Susan didn’t want to hear a thing about it.

“You need to date lots of people,” Judy said, choosing her words carefully, like she always did. “Kid, you got it made. You’re a pretty girl. You’re smart. You know what you want. You make friends easy. Just enjoy yourself. You can have so much fun.”