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

by Gregg Olsen

  Terri read Steve’s journal that detailed his explicit fantasies about a woman they both knew in their church. When she confronted him with the journal, he showed no remorse and reiterated that if he could, he’d take a second wife. Steve had veered into the land of Mormon fundamentalists, the outlaws who still practice polygamy.

  Terri saw all of it as reasons why she should have custody of the children, but in the end, it was Steve who prevailed. The boys, and later Alina, would be raised under his roof. For her part, Terri was kicked to the curb, penniless and heartbroken.

  * * *

  Little is known about Josh’s attempt at suicide when he was a teenager. Family members who were asked about it later seem to have only vague recollections of its occurrence. Even Terri blanked out under questioning by a lawyer when asked if she could recall what had happened and why. Teary-eyed, she conceded she knew something had happened, but she was unable to retrieve a single bit of specific information.

  It was as if a suicide attempt by a son were something a mother could forget.

  Brenda Kay Martin, who was married to Terri’s brother, wrote about the incident in a declaration she made in the Powell divorce case. Josh, she said, was about sixteen when it happened. The Powells phoned family members because the troubled teenager was acting strange in a way that indicated he might hurt a family member or himself. Brenda wrote:

  A few days after this incident he attempted suicide. Fortunately it didn’t work and only left a rope burn around his neck.

  * * *

  On the way back over the Cascade Range which divides Washington in half—the rainy west side and the arid land of the eastern side—Chuck talked nonstop about Josh and Steve and Terri.

  He was in shock, as was his mother and his sister Pam.

  “Reading this was like a revelation about Josh’s true character and his potential for violence,” Chuck said later. He was alarmed by Steve’s corruption of his own children and attacks on Terri. According to the records they’d just skimmed, Terri had been awarded custody of the two youngest, Mike and Alina, but Steve had constantly disregarded that ruling and his visitation limitations, and used his full-time income to buy his children’s loyalty, never missing an opportunity to demonstrate to his children the advantages of living with him.

  Steve had no rules. His mantra was “Do anything you want.”

  It was a game, but an unwinnable one for Terri. She wanted her children to know discipline, love, and the value of a routine.

  Not Steve. Chuck saw him as the ultimate Disneyland dad. He bought his children’s loyalty by giving them freedom and gifts, and making their mother appear to be a monster.

  Chuck felt a little sorry for Terri. She’d been no match for the cruel wrath of her former husband. She had no money, no resources. He knew that she loved her children, but there was no stopping Steve. He used a scorched earth approach in his quest to get rid of her, urging their sons to see her as pitiful and hapless, and encouraging them to ridicule her.

  She might very well be lucky to be alive, Chuck thought.

  “Josh is much more dangerous than we ever imagined,” Chuck said as they were on the interstate toward home. “Susan had no idea how messed up Josh was.”

  Pam and their mother sat silently. No one could argue against what Chuck was saying; what Chuck had just figured out. No matter what Susan thought she could do with her love for Josh, she could not undo the nightmare that his father had created.

  Steve had passed it on to Josh like a toxic gene.

  * * *

  Steve’s influence over Josh waned when he and Susan moved to Utah, but in the months leading up to Susan’s disappearance, not only had it resumed, it appeared to kick into overdrive. Father and son spent hours at a time on the phone. During that time, Josh became a mirror of his father. He hated Mormonism and he made threats. The boys, he insisted, belonged to him.

  He repeated a warning he’d given Susan before: If she divorced him, she would get the children over his—or her—dead body.

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  The boys were mean and they were wild. They were animals, just vicious. We had to teach them sharing. The psychologist called it “re-parenting.” We had to start over and give them some boundaries and teach them “this is how you treat people.”

  —CHUCK COX, OCTOBER 3, 2012

  Now it was time to fight for the boys. The battle over Susan and where she might be—dead or alive—had morphed into something more tangible. It was all about Charlie and Braden. The year before, the Coxes had heard from people who had glimpsed Charlie and Braden in a Puyallup store or in the neighborhood. They were thin, there were dark circles under their eyes, and they had vacant stares. Chuck was worried about their health and about Steve and Josh’s influence.

  He knew that Josh had undermined the investigation with a refusal to help the police. He wondered if Josh had done anything to keep Susan’s spirit alive in that house, for the sake of her sons.

  “I’m worried about everything he’s trying to do to erase their mother’s memory,” he told Judy in one of the long hours that makes up the “hurry up and wait” part of child-custody cases.

  “All that stuff he’s filling their heads with,” Judy said.

  “We just have to stop it,” Chuck said. “We have to for Susan’s sake and for their sakes.”

  There was no argument from Judy or any other person in the Cox family. While there was no evidence that Josh or Steve had molested the boys or that they had been exposed to their grandfather’s pornography, the Coxes were very concerned.

  During the first hearing concerning temporary custody, Assistant Attorney General John Long told the court about conditions in Steve’s house, including how Johnny Powell often answered the door naked or in a diaper, and about the noose that hung on his bedroom wall.

  Josh explained to the judge that it wasn’t a noose. It was a makeshift handle for a piece of exercise equipment that Johnny had made into part of an art display.

  Art display?

  Johnny’s other artwork included the depiction of a female with a sword entering her vagina and exiting her stomach.

  More art?

  For the first time in a Washington State courtroom, it became a matter of record that Josh was a person of interest in his wife’s disappearance. Long told the judge that Josh had been uncooperative with law enforcement, leading Washington State authorities to believe that he was responsible for his wife’s disappearance.

  Before the hearing, Child Protective Services interviewed Josh. A much more detailed psychological exam would follow, but the report noted that he’d said there were no major difficulties in his marriage and that he’d told Charlie and Braden that their mother loved them, and showed them pictures of Susan.

  “I never hurt Susan, not intentionally,” he said in the interview. “We had our problems over the years.”

  He claimed that he had experienced no depression, anxiety, or sadness in the previous twelve months. Josh said contradictory things about how he was, or was not, supporting himself and his sons. At one point he said that he earned too much money, $5,000 a month, to have health insurance and that’s why the boys hadn’t had counseling. Another time he contradicted himself, saying that the attention of the media and court appearances dealing with the restraining orders had prevented him from earning enough money to meet all the needs of his sons, including medical coverage and mental health counseling.

  He was asked if he was interested in photography, too, like his father. Josh admitted he liked to photograph people’s legs in public. He added that he made sure he never got too close or showed faces.

  In the end, it went the way of the Coxes, like many believed it would and should.

  Josh took the judge’s decision hard.

  “I was expecting to take my sons home with me today,” he told Superior Court Judge Kathryn J. Nelson, in a reed-thin, shaky voice. Josh said he would prefer Charlie and Braden went to foster care than to Chuck and Judy Cox. He considered t
hem “the most dangerous people on the planet” and said the home of strangers would be better for Charlie and Braden.

  The blood wasn’t just bad between the Powells and the Coxes. It was lethal.

  Child welfare experts not involved with the case weighed in, giving their opinions to the news media. The only way for Josh to regain custody of his sons, they all agreed, was to be cleared as a person of interest in the disappearance of his wife, Susan, and prove he had no part in his father’s alleged pornography and voyeurism activities.

  * * *

  Braden wasn’t trying to kill his older brother, but he came close not long after the boys had moved in with their grandparents. After Steve’s arrest, Charlie and Braden had spent a few days with a foster family, and then had been placed with Chuck and Judy.

  The boys were taking a bath in the upstairs tub that their mother had used as a child when Chuck stuck his head in to check on them.

  Braden had his brother in a headlock and was holding his head underwater.

  Chuck hurled himself to the tub and pulled the boys apart.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  Charlie’s face was red and bubbles streamed from his nose and mouth as he coughed up water.

  Judy was right behind her husband and the two of them pulled the boys out one at a time.

  Chuck was sure that Braden had only been playing, but that in another minute or two Charlie would have been unconscious or worse.

  It was horseplay, that’s all, he told himself. Yet he wondered: Were the boys damaged in some deep and profound way by living with Josh and Steve? And when push comes to shove, how could they not be?

  Chuck and Judy had let the brothers bathe themselves out of fear and a sense of self-protection. They felt that Josh would make up some kind of hateful story about them abusing them sexually if they bathed them. It was a foolish reaction, but so many vile things had been threatened and said about Susan, and about the Coxes, that Chuck and Judy felt that they had targets on their backs.

  Charlie got ready for bed on his own and Chuck helped Braden put on his pajamas.

  The Coxes had bunk beds for the boys. Charlie slept in the top bunk and Braden in the bottom one. When Chuck left the room, they started laughing and giggling. A little while later, when the ruckus had gone on too long, Chuck returned to tell them to settle down.

  Charlie had stripped off every stitch of clothing and Braden was in his underwear. They were running around the room laughing.

  Chuck immediately picked up Charlie’s pajamas.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Who told you its okay to be naked?”

  “Our daddy,” the boys answered in unison as they continued to dash around the room.

  Chuck stayed cool, but deep down he felt very, very uncomfortable.

  “Okay, you’re not doing it here,” he said gently, but firmly. “There are rules and you’re going to follow them.” He helped them to get back into their pajamas and put them back to bed.

  That night he and Judy talked about it. They wondered if the boys were mimicking their uncle Johnny, who’d been seen naked around the house.

  “Maybe they think its normal,” Judy said.

  “But it’s not. And it’s nothing Susan would have ever taught her boys.”

  A little while later, they learned something else from Charlie. He and Braden slept naked with their father—and he was naked, too.

  “What has been going on in that house?” Judy asked, not really wanting an answer.

  Chuck knew that whatever it was, it was ugly. He also knew that the boys had come into his and Judy’s care just in time.

  They would keep them safe.

  * * *

  September in Minnesota was, fittingly, fire and ice. Lawns in Minneapolis were painted white with frost and a summer-long drought had torched tens of thousands of acres across the state when the West Valley police showed up to interview Mike Powell on the Saturday after his father’s arrest in Washington.

  Just days before, they had recovered Mike’s Taurus from a salvage yard in Oregon but they didn’t share that information with him until late in the interview.

  Mike, almost thirty, was in a doctoral program for cognitive science at the University of Minnesota. It had been nearly twenty-one months since Susan had gone missing and the police hadn’t spent much time talking with him. He admitted that he was not close to Susan, although they had known each other casually in middle school in Puyallup. He also said he wasn’t all that close to Josh, and most certainly not as thick as thieves as it had appeared when he was in Utah running interference with neighbors like Tim Peterson or the media. He said he hadn’t even attended Josh and Susan’s wedding in Oregon, because of other commitments—although he is in photos of their reception the next day. Prior to coming to West Valley City to help Josh with the boys, and then to help him move, Mike said he’d last seen his brother in 2008. Most of their contact had been by telephone when they would talk for a couple hours at time.

  And yet, when Josh called “crying” for help in December 2009, Mike Powell was Johnny-on-the-spot.

  During the course of the police interview, he offered up nothing more than the Powell party line. He claimed that he was home in Puyallup the day Susan vanished—as was, he insisted, his father, brother Johnny, and Alina. Josh was a good guy, he said. Susan was a good mother—although she occasionally left Josh and the boys alone without saying where she was going. According to Josh.

  Mike really couldn’t recall much else.

  Then the police asked Mike about his 1997 Ford Taurus. What had happened to it? He stammered and he stalled. He was extremely nervous, evasive, and lied about where it had broken down. Then they broke the news to him—they had the car.

  At the salvage yard, a cadaver dog, trained to smell human remains, went right to the Taurus. Michael was badly shaken. “He was terrified,” Deputy Chief Phil Quinlan said.

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  [Josh] seemed to have a soul-deep hurt because of his dad’s erratic and explosive behavior.

  —TERRI POWELL, 1992 DIVORCE DOCUMENTS

  Josh was nine years old when Alina was born in 1985. Josh and his brother Johnny, who was two years younger, were seldom the caring big brothers they might have been had they been part of a normal family. It was too late. They had already been shaped in their father’s image. They had been exposed to pornography and taught to ridicule their mother, Terri, and they had no boundaries, including sexual ones.

  As their father had groomed them, so they groomed their younger brother—and eventually their little sister. When Mike was ten and his parents divorced, he’d already picked up a slew of bad habits—behavior that their father seemed to be a model for. Mike learned to swear, hate school and the government, bad-mouth people, and he dropped out of Boy Scouts; his father said the Scouts were too aligned with the Mormon church.

  Steve Powell’s boys were encouraged to be loners. Steve equated isolation with being “artistic.” The boys were young, impressionable, and they gobbled up everything their father said or did. Steve, who was antigovernment, was “thrilled” by incidents of flag burning. And his sons watched as he was “frantic” over the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff between federal agents and a family in northern Idaho. As it unfolded over eleven days on television, it was clear that Steve thought the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service should leave survivalist and federal fugitive Randy Weaver alone. By the time the siege was over, Weaver’s son and wife were dead, as were a neighbor and a marshal. Steve was all the more angry at the government.

  Terri was worried about the boys—all of them. But Steve wasn’t. When Johnny wandered around at all hours of the night in a dark hooded cape, practicing a creepy laugh and acting out bits and parts of medieval-type behavior, Steve saw it as his son being creative. Johnny was marching lockstep to the beat of a different drum—Steve’s own vision.

  Johnny suffered because, according to Terri’s affidavits, his father turned a blind eye, interpreting his
mental illness as his “artistic” nature. In his early twenties, Johnny suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized. He was also suffering from hallucinations, and as later testified by Alina, he was eventually diagnosed as bipolar with schizophrenic disorder.

  By the time they were teenagers, Josh and Johnny would taunt their four young cousins, who were all under the age of five and easily scared. Josh and Johnny liked to disrupt family activities, verbally ridiculing their mother and younger siblings as they watched a children’s video. They undressed and “examined” Alina and told her that if she lived with their father she could “watch them.”

  They didn’t say doing what—they just snickered.

  At one point, Josh and Johnny were arrested for shoplifting and ordered to do community service. Josh was later arrested a second time, for stealing from a convenience store, and was suspected of arson. Steve laughed when he heard Josh had killed Alina’s pet gerbil.

  Each item that Terri Powell included in the divorce papers would have been enough, but taken together, they suggested something more serious than merely acting out.

  Chuck Cox later considered what he learned about Josh from the documents:

  Stealing

  Killing his sister’s pet

  Threatening his mother with a kitchen knife

  Hitting and shoving his mother

  The suicide attempt

  Police called to the house

  These weren’t just warning signs of a troubled teen. Chuck believed them to be the genesis of whatever it was that his son-in-law had done to his daughter. He thought it all had begun long before that cold night in December when Susan vanished.

  Chuck could easily lay blame at Steve’s feet. He’d created a home of misery and dysfunction. He’d set it all in motion so many years ago. And yet, Chuck couldn’t completely let Terri off the hook. She’d tried to save Alina and keep her from Steve, but she’d given in and left her children with their father.