Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  And then it was a New Year: 2010. Josh let their grandparents see Charlie and Braden for a short while in January, and then he balked. He refused to return Chuck and Judy Cox’s phone calls or emails. Worried, they drove to the subdivision where Josh was living and found their grandsons playing on a community swing set. They were allowed to spend half an hour visiting with them.

  After that, Josh told Chuck that they must never come to his neighborhood again, and that if he had anything to say, it had to be by email. That was self-defeating as Josh didn’t reply to their emails.

  On January 3, Charlie was attending a primary class at church in Puyallup. His world had changed so rapidly in less than a month. He was acting up some, and his teacher told him that she would have to go get his mom or dad.

  Charlie looked at her with no emotion on his face and said, “My mom is dead.”

  Crystal Lewis, his teacher, hadn’t known that Charlie was one of the children of Josh and Susan Powell, but suddenly it all became clear. The small boy with the blank face was dealing with a lot of pain.

  On April 10, Chuck and Judy were surprised to get an answer to an email. Josh said he would allow them to come to see the boys at Bradley Park—but they were not to bring anyone else. No cousins, no friends. They had no choice but to agree. As soon as the Coxes arrived at the park, the boys started running around. And then Steve and Michael Powell showed up, saying they just happened to be in the area.

  “For the next hour,” Chuck said, “we watched Charlie and Braden play on the swings and jungle gyms with fifty other children, while Josh and Steve took pictures of them.

  “After that, no more visits were allowed.”

  It was so painful for the sad grandparents. Sometimes, they caught fleeting glimpses of the boys. Once, they went to the Home Depot store and spotted them but Josh wouldn’t let them talk to their grandsons. On another Saturday, they decided to try again. Josh refused to let Judy hug Charlie and Braden, and he demanded that they leave the store.

  Josh subsequently filed a restraining order against them, claiming that Chuck was guilty of “domestic violence” because he didn’t leave the Home Depot on Josh’s orders. The judge, of course, tossed that out but did place anti-harassment orders on each of the Coxes “just to be safe.”

  It was bizarre. Susan had been missing for months, Josh was the main person of interest, and yet he still had custody of Charlie and Braden and made outrageous demands.

  * * *

  The weeks became months, and there were no sightings of Susan Cox Powell. Residents in the Salt Lake City area called the West Valley City detectives with various tips and theories, none of which were of much help. For chief Buzz Nielsen’s force, the growing media attention was almost threatening. They had followed other cases where alleged murder victims had vanished and seen those cases become media circuses. There was the Laci and Scott Peterson case near San Francisco at Christmastime in 2002. And then Drew Peterson, the Illinois policeman suspected in 2007 for the murders of two of his wives: Kathleen Savio, whose death in her bathtub had initially been deemed accidental, and Stacy Peterson, who had simply disappeared one night, leaving her children behind with Drew Peterson. Only eighteen months before, two-year-old Caylee Anthony had vanished in Florida weeks before her body was located, and her mother, Casey, became the “person of interest.”

  Laci’s and Caylee’s bodies were not found for some time after they were murdered; Stacy hadn’t been found at all.

  Now it looked as though the disappearance of Susan Powell was turning into the latest high-profile “possible homicide” case, and the police in the city of 129,000 didn’t want to make a mistake. They had never dealt with a possible homicide case where a victim’s body had never been found. They weren’t even convinced she was dead, and Chief Nielsen was worried that they couldn’t get a conviction without a body.

  There have been such convictions, and I have written about them, but out of the two thousand or more cases I have covered, bodyless murder cases are definitely in the minority.

  The West Valley City Police Department wanted to be sure that they didn’t rush into an arrest and trial without enough evidence for prosecutors to work with. If a defendant was found not guilty, double jeopardy would attach and he or she could never be tried again—even if Susan’s body was found.

  Both law enforcement veterans and laypeople grew impatient with chief Buzz Nielsen and his investigators, as they seemed to drag their feet. Josh Powell’s explanations of where he and the boys had been the night Susan disappeared seemed bizarre, even unbelievable. His affect was all wrong.

  After spending Christmas in his father’s house, Josh had continued to behave suspiciously. On January 8, he returned to West Valley City with a moving van and his brother John. Rather than stay in the last place he’d seen his wife, Josh and some of his relatives began to pack up the house on West 3945 South, preparatory to his move to Washington to live with Steven Powell. He put the house up for rent or sale and soon found a renter.

  To many, it felt as though Josh was erasing his life with Susan—indeed, that he was erasing Susan herself.

  Or, perhaps, he already had—and only Josh knew where her physical body was.

  The Powell case became the current darling of the national media—from the tabloids to People magazine to Nancy Grace. In an era where certain criminal cases have so many unresolved questions and news bulletins, news of the missing mother became for a while the next “big thing.”

  Josh now lived in Washington State, back in his father’s house, along with his brothers John and Michael, and his sister Alina. He wasn’t under arrest; he hadn’t even been called a suspect.

  Charlie went to a nearby school and Josh allegedly found employment, although he wouldn’t tell reporters where he worked.

  Where Chuck Cox had once been quoted as saying that he didn’t think Josh would have hurt Susan, he no longer felt that way. He couldn’t understand why his son-in-law wouldn’t cooperate more with the police in Utah; he was the last to see Susan. Surely Josh knew things—no matter how seemingly unimportant to the case—that might help find her.

  Steven Powell joined Josh in saying that they believed Susan was promiscuous, and that she almost certainly had gone away with a lover. When they learned that Steven Koecher, a Utah man in his thirties, had vanished within the same time frame that Susan had, both men suggested strongly that this was her secret lover.

  That was ridiculous. Police found no links whatsoever between the two. They had lived some distance apart, and Susan never knew the missing man. Only Steven and Josh Powell insisted there was a connection.

  * * *

  Susan’s family organized media “blitzes” to keep people looking for her. There was always the danger that people would forget about Susan and they didn’t want her to be forgotten. If she was alive somewhere, if she was suffering from amnesia after a physical domestic violence incident, they wanted to keep her face in front of the public so that someone, somewhere, might recognize her.

  The Coxes retained two attorneys to represent them. One was a Seattle attorney whom they had seen frequently on television, Anne Bremner, and she would prove to be expert in keeping Susan’s case alive.

  Anne is very attractive, tall and willowy with long blond hair, a natural for television. Most readers will have seen her on one national show or another; she has appeared on dozens of shows to comment on criminal cases and give her analysis of case law.

  She spends many hours each month flying all over America. She has no hobbies; she has no time for them—but she loves her cats.

  I have known Anne for more than twenty years, and I’m well aware that she has a soft and giving heart, and she is an attorney who fights for the underdog. She probably works too many cases pro bono (without charging the client) than she should, but she is the epitome of what a lawyer should be—smart, clever, and interested most of all in justice. Such a stance hasn’t made her rich, but it has given her the satisfaction of k
nowing she has done the greatest good for the most people.

  Bremner has worked for decades on the state’s side of criminal trials. She is far from anti-police; in fact, she has been the legal counsel for the Seattle Police Department for many years. Anne graduated from Stanford and received her law degree from the University of Puget Sound. From 1983 to 1988, she was a King County deputy prosecuting attorney, and she specialized in trying defendants in sex crimes. She won two hundred of those cases, taking dangerous offenders off the streets.

  She is a trial attorney who has spent twenty-seven years working on highly visible cases. She represented Washington State attorney general (later governor) Christine Gregoire, and was the attorney for the Des Moines, Washington, police department in the case of elementary teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who was arrested and convicted of second-degree rape of one of her students, Vili Fualaau, then thirteen. Anne Bremner was also on Amanda Knox’s defense team of lawyers, when the University of Washington student was jailed in Italy on charges that she was an accessory in the murder of her roommate. After being in prison for years, Amanda Knox was finally acquitted.

  In another landmark case, Bremner spoke for the city of Seattle in a national test case by the American Civil Liberties Union involving the riots that accompanied the World Trade Organization convention in 1999.

  Now Anne Bremner stepped in to help Susan Powell’s family in their almost hopeless search for their daughter. Either Anne or her paralegal, Misty Scott, vowed to be there for the Coxes in court, or, if necessary, at their home to help them bear up under the stunning revelations that occurred frequently.

  Steve Downing, the Coxes’ other attorney, would do his best to help Chuck and Judy Cox and Jennifer and Kirk Graves have reasonable visitation with Charlie and Braden. Anne Bremner volunteered to speak for them pro bono, and file civil suits if that was what was needed.

  The West Valley City detectives had discovered a good deal of evidence—both physical and circumstantial—that would have spurred on most law enforcement agencies to seek arrest warrants. But chief Buzz Nielsen didn’t want to move ahead with charges too rapidly.

  Nielsen’s detectives had found no unidentified fingerprints in the house on West 3945 South, a common occurrence when both a victim and a suspect share the same house. They expected that they would find Josh’s, Susan’s, and the little boys’ prints. The only way Josh’s prints would have been of important evidentiary value would be if they’d been left in blood.

  Only the Utah and Pierce County, Washington, detectives knew what was embedded in Josh’s computers, seized with a search warrant by the West Valley City police shortly after Susan disappeared. There were disturbing files. A computer technician discovered them on the hard drive; they were pornographic with incest themes, peopled with children’s cartoon images of familiar characters like SpongeBob SquarePants, the Simpsons, and Superman. Only they weren’t funny; their content was clearly adult-to-child incestuous acts. The investigators and child psychologists who were contacted later feared that children could watch these cartoons and believe that such activities were normal—even funny.

  What was going on in Josh Powell’s mind?

  * * *

  On May 11, 2010, Steven Powell gave the West Valley City investigators consent to search his house in Puyallup, Washington—the house where he, Josh, John, Alina, Charlie, and Braden were currently residing. There were several Utah detectives participating as well as FBI Special Agent Gary France. Steven gave France permission to look in a locked cabinet in his bedroom.

  Inside, France discovered image after image of Susan Powell. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise to the officers who searched for something that might lead to Susan; Steven had been interviewed by investigators a number of times and he never held back on his “love” and infatuation with his daughter-in-law.

  And yet the photographs of Susan had clearly been taken by someone without her knowing it. They were egregious invasions of her privacy. Even though she probably hadn’t known about Steven’s stalking with a camera, she must have sensed something dark and chilling while she lived in his house. It was no wonder that she had been uncomfortable—even afraid—of Steven Powell, and that she had done her best to avoid him, even going so far as to want to leave her own family and move far away to another state.

  In some of the images Susan was clothed, but in others she was in various stages of undress. It appeared that the photographer had been able to peer through a slightly open door and watch her when she thought she was alone. One photo showed her in her underwear in the bathroom, doing her hair, while another view was of her in a dress with her legs slightly apart—enough to reveal her panties. There were some odd totally nude photos where Susan’s head had been pasted over the original models’ heads.

  There were other pictures, this time many shots of a man’s erect penis while he was masturbating. And as the camera drew back, the man masturbating to Susan’s image on a television screen was Steven Powell. He simulated oral sex with an unknowing reflection, but it was still shockingly invasive.

  Special Agent France found a number of videotapes labeled “Susan” in the locked cabinet, along with women’s undergarments.

  “Where did you get these pictures and tapes of your daughter-in-law?” Gary France asked Steven Powell.

  “Some I took,” he answered easily, “and some I copied off of Josh’s computer without him knowing.”

  Steven Powell didn’t seem embarrassed about his sexual obsession with Susan. Rather, he appeared almost proud of the “secret love” he believed they shared.

  Police detectives see any number of shocking things that laymen never encounter, but Steven’s fantasy sex life shocked those who searched his house.

  They didn’t know at that point that they had only seen the tip of the iceberg.

  Chapter Eight

  West Valley City detective Ellis Maxwell and Pierce County detective Gary Sanders had shared what information they knew as the months passed. Maxwell said that his department had recovered one of Susan’s journals early on from her office at Wells Fargo in December 2009. This diary had begun in January 2002. Susan noted inside that she had kept personal journals since she was eight years old and that those were “packed away.” The one she kept at the Wells Fargo office described the arguments and unhappiness in her marriage to Josh Powell, troubles that had apparently begun in 2005 and continued until the last time she made an entry, on October 26, 2009—less than six weeks before she vanished.

  Susan had also written about her father-in-law in a time period that began in December 2002 and continued to 2007. Obviously, even the move to Utah in 2004 hadn’t succeeded as far as her escaping Steven Powell was concerned.

  Susan wrote that Steven was a negative influence on Josh, that he was a pedophile, and she commented on how hard it was for her to forgive Steven for what he had said to and about her.

  “I don’t want him in my life, in Charlie and Braden’s lives,” she wrote. “I really, really wish that Josh would cut his father completely out of his life!”

  Josh and Steven Powell had told friends and even the media that they had about seven to nine of Susan’s journals in their possession. When the Utah detectives had asked for the originals and/or copies of those journals to help them in their search for her, Steven Powell said he would give them only copies. And there was a proviso before he would do even that. He wanted the most recent of Susan’s diaries that the West Valley City police had.

  But then Steven changed his mind. He called Deputy U.S. Marshal Spencer and said that neither he nor Josh was interested in releasing Susan’s writings to the police, and that they didn’t intend to cooperate with the investigators any longer.

  Josh had begun a website called susanpowell.org within a week or so of Susan’s vanishing. Now he and his father began to post excerpts from her journals going back to 1999, when she was in her mid-teens. They chose sections when Susan and her best friend, Brittainy Cornett, complaine
d about their parents—not uncommon for teenagers—or wrote about crushes they had.

  Josh and Steven were clearly setting out to destroy not only Susan’s image—but her family’s, too.

  Rather than worry about Susan’s fate or trying to find her, both Josh and Steven Powell became more nasty in degrading her. They posted a link to a journal entry they believed Susan had written about Judy Cox, detailing what she considered “abuse.” As it turned out, Susan hadn’t written that at all: Brittainy had jotted it into Susan’s journal when she was upset with her mother.

  In November 2010, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle managed to obtain an interview with Josh, who had been avoiding the media and the police for almost a year. Now, he told the Tribune that Susan was an “extremely unstable” woman and that her mental illness had caused her to abandon him and their sons. The only way to get her to come back would be for the story of her disappearance to be dropped. As it was, he opined that she would probably be too embarrassed to face public opinion.

  Josh blamed Susan’s family for her running away. They had always wanted her to be perfect, he said, “A saint with no fallibility.”

  He told Carlisle that his wife’s family had to stop lying about him and learn to accept Susan’s flaws.

  “She doesn’t have as much strength as they think she does,” he said, with tears in his eyes. But Josh insisted she was “a good person, and a good wife, and a good mother.”

  Josh kept to the same story he’d given all along, reminding readers that it hadn’t been cold in his van that night, since he had purchased a generator and a heater only two weeks before. Josh was sure that Susan had gone with him to buy the generator. He couldn’t remember the name of the store, however.

  Steven Powell backed his son up. He dismissed the damp carpet and couch in his son’s home. Susan had been cleaning them. As for the red splotch, he said it was “probably juice or something.”