Jennifer called Chuck to tell him that Josh and the boys had returned from a “late night camping trip.” And, Jennifer told Chuck, Josh didn’t know where Susan was.
* * *
After being trapped by the police in his driveway, Josh followed Detective Maxwell to the West Valley City Police Department to tell his story once more. The police wanted Charlie and Braden to come to the station, too.
The recorded interview began at 7:15 P.M. with Detective Maxwell, Josh, Charlie, and Braden in a room. During the two-hour interview, Braden and Charlie can be heard in the background wanting a soda, which Josh forbids. Finally, a victim advocate takes the boys out of the room to watch them and keep them occupied.
Asked to relate the events of Sunday, a nervous Josh couldn’t remember what Susan was wearing, and explained again how she had been tired and had laid down. Later she had gotten out of bed and they had hot dogs and watched The Santa Clause 2. Or maybe it was The Santa Clause 3. Braden had fallen asleep, so Josh took just Charlie sledding at a park near Whittier Elementary School, although in one version of his story both boys went sledding. When they got home, Susan was watching TV. Josh read the boys a story, then he began to clean the couch with his new Rug Doctor, a vacuum cleaning system he had spent several hundred dollars on a couple of weeks before.
Then Josh had decided to take the boys camping. Susan didn’t want to go. He’d “gotten a late start” and left after midnight. Despite the warnings of cold, snow, and ice, Josh said he, Charlie, and Braden had gone to Simpson Springs, about two hours southwest of Salt Lake City, elevation 5,100 feet. They had slept in the car, tried out a new electric generator for heat, and taken firewood with them so they could make s’mores. They made them, but without the chocolate. He’d forgotten that ingredient.
Ellis Maxwell: So where do you think she’s at?
Josh Powell: I don’t know.
EM: Has she ever done anything like this before?
JP: No, not missing work.
EM: Has she ever left like this, left you and abandoned the kids?
JP: I mean, you know for, for the day but not, not when it’s a work day.
EM: Um, huh, okay … why would you, why did you miss work?
JP: Um … Somehow I was thinking I didn’t go to church therefore tomorrow would be Sunday and therefore I didn’t find at that time I realized it, I was already stuck in a snowstorm so …
Detective Maxwell is alternatingly friendly and incredulous of Josh’s story.
EM: Did you guys have any arguments, any fighting the day before, the night before?
JP: No …
EM: Explain your relationship to me, then?
JP: Really, um …
EM: Explain to me how … what about your guys’ relationship … what it consists of and stuff like that.
JP: I mean, you know it’s pretty good. I mean, we sometimes have disagreements but …
EM: Yeah, everybody has disagreements, right?
JP: I think so.
EM: So nothing.
JP: It’s not like, it’s not like we get into screaming fights or anything.
EM: Yeah.
JP: Well, not usually … it’s happened a couple of times.
EM: Yeah.
JP: But you know it’s very, very rare.…
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.
* * *
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About the Author
Author photograph taken at Couth Buzzard Books in Seattle by Sharon Berg.
Rebecca Morris is the New York Times bestselling author of Bodies of Evidence and If I Can’t Have You – Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance and the Murder of Her Children (both with Gregg Olsen). They are also the authors of a series of books, Notorious USA, about infamous crimes in every state. An award-winning reporter who worked in journalism in New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington she is also the author of Bad Apples – Inside the Teacher/Student Sex Scandal Epidemic. She lives in Seattle.
To contact her and read more about her work, follow her on FACEBOOK, TWITTER or visit her website at:
www.rebeccatmorris.com
Don’t miss Bodies of Evidence, Notorious USA’s first box set and New York Times bestselling collection about the criminals from our neck of the woods (the Pacific Northwest). Like all of our collection, Bodies of Evidence is available as an eBook on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.
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