Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Josh Powell said he wouldn’t talk to the West Valley City police again; there was no point. Steven described his missing daughter-in-law as a woman who was “very sexually and financially motivated.” He said she told her friends about many sexual adventures before she married Josh.

  How Steven Powell could possibly know what Susan had told her friends was a mystery. But as time passed, Josh’s father would hint more and more broadly that he and Susan were sexually involved. It became clear that Steven was unnaturally obsessed with his daughter-in-law, just as Susan had told Kiirsa Hellewell.

  Susan Powell’s disappearance might have been dismissed by her husband and father-in-law, but no one else forgot it.

  * * *

  Another new year arrived: 2011. No one had seen or heard from Susan Powell, and any paper trail she might possibly have left was nonexistent.

  A long time after the fact, Robin Snyder, who worked in a Comfort Inn motel in Sandy, Utah, which is about sixteen miles south of West Valley City, had tried to contact detectives about a troubling incident on December 7, 2009, but no one had returned her call to a tip line. More than two years later, she tried once more to report what she had seen and heard.

  “This man and his two little boys came into our complimentary breakfast buffet at the inn,” Robin said. “I work there—help filling up the coffeepots, put out fruit and rolls, juice and that sort of thing. When I got to work about 6:30 that morning, they were sitting at a table.”

  One of the little boys had looked up at Robin and asked: “Do you know what happened to my mom?”

  “No,” she’d replied. “What happened to your mom?”

  The man, who she assumed was their father, kept his face averted as she talked to the older boy. But before he could answer, another guest asked for more coffee. When Robin Snyder turned back, she saw the man hustling the boys out the door to the parking lot. Later, she recognized images of the Powell family as the story broke on television, and said there was no doubt that they were the father and sons she had seen in the Comfort Inn.

  The Cox family’s vow to keep Susan’s memory alive was working. Everyone in America seemed to recognize Josh, Charlie, and Braden Powell.

  “The boys didn’t even get to eat their sweet rolls,” Robin Snyder recalled. “They all left, all of a sudden.” It had seemed at first as though the child had been telling her a joke, or about some incident involving his mother. She hadn’t taken his question in a literal sense. But now she wondered if he was indeed asking her where his mother was. Maybe he didn’t know what had happened to his mother.

  Worse, maybe he did. She decided that she would have to go to the West Valley City police in person and tell them about the incident.

  * * *

  During that brief encounter in the Comfort Inn, it couldn’t have been more than seven or eight hours since Josh supposedly left the house to take Charlie and Braden camping, and only about five or six hours since the sick neighbor woman on West 3945 South had overheard a couple arguing outside her window, and a vehicle racing away.

  Had Josh really gone on a freezing camping trip—or had he gone into the desert on a macabre errand, accomplished it, and then checked into the motel with his boys? Maybe he hadn’t even registered at the motel, but had pretended they were guests there to establish an alibi for the hours in between.

  The latter seemed likely. Charlie and Braden were older in 2011 and in the two years since their mother left their home, they were becoming much more verbal. For months Braden had said, “Mommy’s in the mine,” although he gave few details. At one point he suggested, “Maybe my mommy was looking for crystals.”

  Hunting for crystals was something Susan liked to do when they went camping in the west desert in good weather. Charlie and Braden could be confused about when they went camping. But as he grew older, Braden gave more details. Later he tried to explain what happened that frigid night to Steve Downing, one of the attorneys who represented Susan’s family.

  “We went camping,” he said. “Mommy was in the trunk. Mommy and Dad got out and then Mommy disappeared.”

  Braden was also a talented young artist and he drew lots of pictures at YMCA summer camp. One was chilling. It was of the Powells’ minivan. Josh was driving, and Charlie and Braden were in the backseat.

  But Susan was in the trunk.

  “Why was your mommy in the trunk?” Braden was asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know. My mom and dad got out, but my mom got lost.”

  Whether his sons said anything to Josh about what they remembered, no one knows. If they had, that might account for what appeared to be the exacerbation of his nervousness. The bags under his eyes were puffier, and his whole face drooped.

  Despite their earlier support of Josh, the Cox family had long since come to believe that Josh had, indeed, hurt Susan and almost certainly killed her. It was a stab in their hearts every time Charlie talked about his mommy being “lost.”

  Chuck, particularly, vowed to keep the search for her before the public, and appeared on nationwide network shows as well as local shows. Susan’s photos became familiar to millions of people. And yet no one reported any sightings of her that seemed to fit.

  Susan had left absolutely no paper trail, and she hadn’t called anyone. If she was alive someplace in the world, it had been impossible to trace her whereabouts.

  In the summer of 2011, Josh and Steven Powell continued their campaign to convince the public that Susan had a sordid past.

  On July 14, Josh and Steven appeared on the Today show on NBC. They bragged that they were in possession of two thousand pages of Susan’s journal entries. During their interview, the cameras panned over a laptop computer in the background so the viewing audience could glimpse Susan’s handwriting in red and blue ink. Josh and Steven even allowed the show technicians to reveal some of the sections that Susan had written.

  Steven told the media that Susan’s journals were very important because she had detailed her relationships with many men and wrote about her “sexual fantasies.” He all but crowed as he said he and his son would be releasing more and more of Susan’s diary pages, and also upload them to the website they had set up in an effort to locate her.

  It was ridiculous; most of Susan’s “relationships with men” entries were about girlish crushes, and not even vaguely titillating.

  Detectives Gary Sanders and Ellis Maxwell were very concerned by the obstructive behavior Josh and Steven were demonstrating. They wouldn’t share Susan’s journals with the law enforcement departments who were desperately trying to locate her, but they were prepared to pick and choose from her personal thoughts and post them for the world to see.

  Steven Powell and his children believed that they were within their rights as they castigated Susan. They had not shown one scintilla of concern about her fate, but that may well have been part of Steven and Josh’s insistence that she had run off with the man who went missing in Utah/Nevada about the same time she did.

  The missing man—Steven Koecher, thirty, of St. George, Utah—hadn’t been seen since December 13, 2009. His car was found parked in a cul-de-sac in a posh neighborhood in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas. Wrapped Christmas presents were in the car. A security camera in a nearby home snapped frames of a man resembling Koecher walking away from that vehicle. Koecher’s mother told reporters that he hadn’t known Susan Powell. The only connection they had was the proximity of the dates they vanished, and Steven and Josh Powell had seized upon that coincidence to add weight to their espoused theory that Susan had run off with another man.

  Koecher is still missing as this is written. In the last year, his mother has been widowed and has lost her father to death, but she still keeps her Christmas tree lit year-round, hoping that her son will return. Koecher is blond, blue-eyed, and five feet, eleven inches tall.

  Aware that public opinion wasn’t on their side, Steven Powell claimed he had no idea why his family was unpopular. “Why don’t
people try to get to know us?” Steven asked rhetorically. “If they did, I think they’d like us.”

  Perhaps. Perhaps they would not have.

  Steven’s comments about how sexually involved he had been with his daughter-in-law became more snide and sickening. He actually told reporters that Susan was an “exhibitionist” who sometimes appeared partially undressed in front of him, that she flirted with him. In an interview with KOMO-TV in Seattle, he described his relationship with her as clearly romantic—and physical, stopping just short of saying they had been intimate.

  If only in his own mind.

  This, of course, warred with what Susan had told her closest girlfriends and her sister Denise. Steven Powell had made her skin crawl.

  Chuck Cox had reportedly heard that the West Valley City police expected to arrest Josh Powell in the summer of 2011, but it was the middle of August and Josh, Charlie, and Braden were still living with Steven.

  No arrests had taken place.

  * * *

  Since 2009, Chuck Cox had appeared on more than forty television and radio shows, including Good Morning America, Today, Dr. Phil, and Larry King Live, to fulfill his promise to his daughter that he would “shout her name from the rooftops” until she was found, and he wasn’t about to stop.

  On August 20, 2011, Chuck and Judy, along with members of their family and friends, stood in the Fred Meyer mega-store parking lot in Puyallup and handed out fliers with Susan’s photo and announced to shoppers that their daughter and sister was still missing.

  Suddenly Chuck Cox and Steven Powell met head-on. It was definitely not a friendly encounter. Steven confronted Chuck and began shouting that he was deliberately embarrassing the Powell family at the store where they shopped. That was true about the Fred Meyer store, but it was also the store where Chuck and Judy shopped regularly, too.

  Fred Meyer employees knew Josh Powell well; he was a problem customer, and clerks dreaded seeing him entering the store.

  “He’s always complaining,” a department manager said later. “Nothing suits him, he returns stuff—and I think everybody who works here knows him.”

  But the conflict in their parking lot had nothing whatsoever to do with Fred Meyer—“Freddie’s,” as north westerners call it. It was strictly between Chuck Cox and Steven Powell, and television reporters rapidly got word of it and clustered around them.

  Steven Powell accused Chuck Cox of humiliating his family, warning people against them—especially against Josh—and he was dismissive of any suggestion that Susan had come to harm.

  As he and Josh had been doing of late, Steven Powell smeared her reputation and continued in his monologue about how she had run off with another man, leaving his poor son to grieve.

  A few minutes later, Josh came driving up and joined them. Tears ran down his face as he maintained his stance as a cuckolded husband, left to raise two small boys alone, reviled by the public because of what his father-in-law was saying.

  Chuck Cox was angry; he had held his temper for twenty-one months, waiting and hoping for word of his precious daughter. Now he reminded Steven Powell that he was the one breaking a restraining order by showing up and interrupting them as they handed out fliers. He was clearly more in control of the situation than either Steven or Josh was, but he was upset, too.

  There seemed to be a disconnect of empathy on the Powells’ part as their voices rose. Beyond Josh’s showing up at the December 2009 vigil shortly after Susan vanished, neither he nor his father had demonstrated any concern for her family’s pain.

  More than ever, the Powells simply wanted it all to go away. In less than four months, Susan would be gone for two years. All that time without a word. Steven Powell was furious that Chuck wouldn’t just let it drop. Why did he have to keep talking about it, and handing out his damned fliers? Didn’t he know how upsetting this was to their mutual grandsons?

  Probably less upsetting than losing their mother.

  Neither grandfather was deterred by the media teams who stood by with mikes and cameras watching what one reporter called “a surreal scene.”

  Did either man know what was about to come to a head in this tangled case? When Josh drove up and broke into tears, it would seem so. The world was closing in on him.

  Chapter Nine

  The Utah police were searching in the west desert of Utah and also near Ely, Nevada. Breaking news bulletins shouted that “remains” had been found, and that they could be what was left of Susan. But the decomposed body was soon identified as a Mexican citizen—a male.

  Then there was another find of what looked like a human body. But that rumor kept diminishing. First, there was supposed to be a body. And then charred bones. And, finally, the news that only ashes were found. Unidentifiable ashes. Impossible to tell if they were human or animal. Or wood, for that matter.

  In the mines that were shallow enough to explore, searchers found nothing but rubble. They risked their own lives for several days, all to no avail.

  Susan might very well be at the bottom of a mine, but if she was, the person or persons who had hidden her there had made sure she would never be found.

  * * *

  In Puyallup, only five days after the parking lot argument, the case was about to explode wide open. Detective Gary Sanders had written an affidavit to obtain a search warrant to search Steven Powell’s house again. The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department was seeking permission to search for Susan Powell’s journals, photographs, digital media to “include but not limited to” laptop computers, desktop computers, or any type of device that could store digital media copies of Susan’s journals.

  Searchers would also seek images or papers that contained password information to access encrypted digital media. And “any other fruits or instrumentalities determined to be evidence of the crimes of aggravated kidnapping, homicide, and obstruction of justice.”

  Photographs and videotape of the interior and exterior of the Powell home, garage, or other structures on the property would be searched for, along with three Dodge Caravans and a light blue Chrysler Town and Country minivan.

  The search warrant was granted on August 24, 2011, by a Pierce County Superior Court judge.

  On August 25, at least fifteen law enforcement officers, some from the West Valley City, Utah, police department and some from Pierce County, met for a briefing at Pierce County’s South Precinct. They were told what to look for at Steven Powell’s house and what was to be seized (if located). A tentative time to execute the search warrant was being discussed at 2:15 that afternoon when Ed Troyer, the public information officer for the sheriff’s department, got a phone call from a television news team saying they had heard “something was going to be going on at the Powell residence.”

  Troyer notified Ellis Maxwell, who conferred with Gary Sanders. They agreed that they should move ahead with the search warrant as soon as possible. Neighbors around Steven’s tan and white house witnessed a group of squad cars parked in front, and then a phalanx of officers gathered near the front door.

  One of Steven’s male relatives answered the door naked. Steven Powell was not at home, but Josh, Charlie, and Braden were, along with Alina and John Powell, Josh’s siblings. It was a very hot afternoon, and once the residence was secured, the Powell family members were asked to wait outside, where it was a bit cooler. Embarrassed by the stares of neighbors, Josh asked if they could move to the backyard. That was fine with the search team; they particularly wanted to avoid upsetting the little boys.

  Charlie and Braden knew Pierce County detective Teresa Berg and leapt into her arms when she arrived, and they also seemed secure with Adam Anderson, the head of the Forensic Unit.

  Luckily, they were young enough that they didn’t understand what was happening.

  Alina Powell was angry at the intrusion and kept going back into the house, staring down the officers who asked her to stay in the backyard. It was all very uncomfortable—but there was no other way to do it. The investigators couldn�
�t take any more risks that Steven or Josh might destroy possibly vital evidence.

  Gary Sanders and Ellis Maxwell logged in the names of all the law enforcement personnel who entered the house, noting their times of arrival and departure.

  What would they find inside? In the prior search warrant, now more than a year in the past, Steven Powell had been agreeable and seemed to hold nothing back. In fact, he had actually seemed pleased that the FBI agent came along on that search. But since then, Steven had grown annoyed and resistant to requests from both Utah and Pierce County detectives.

  After Adam Anderson had finished taking photos of everything stipulated in the search warrant, the men and women searchers swarmed over the house. Once again, seasoned detectives would be taken aback by what they uncovered as they combed the contents of every room.

  At 3 P.M., Josh Powell asked if he could have his mobile phone and Bluetooth, and Ellis Maxwell went to Josh’s bedroom and returned with them. Then Josh said he wanted to take his sons and leave. Gary Sanders and Maxwell searched the blue minivan, found nothing of evidentiary value, and released it to Josh.

  Josh told Charlie and Braden that they were going to McDonald’s, and he was allowed to leave with his boys.

  Josh didn’t come back until after the investigators left. Ellis Maxwell noted that Josh had not asked one single question about how the investigation into his wife’s disappearance was going, or if this search warrant meant that the detectives had new information.

  The main intent of this massive exploration was to find anything inside that might have evidence bearing on Susan Powell’s vanishing. The “surreal” sense of this case was exacerbated. The law enforcement officers didn’t find as much as they thought they might about the night of December 6, 2009, when Susan vanished, but they found items that shocked even veteran investigators.

  For almost two years, everyone had focused on Josh Powell, the oldest of the Powell sons. But West Valley City chief Buzz Nielsen had often said that he didn’t feel confident enough in the evidence they had to arrest Josh.