If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (16 page)

This was just the first of many false alarms.

On January 7, a body wrapped in plastic and duct tape was discovered in a remote desert valley near West Wendover, Nevada, about 150 miles from where Josh claimed he’d gone camping.

That, too, brought phone calls to Susan’s parents in Puyallup. The deceased was described as five-feet-four—about Susan’s height. It turned out that this particular victim was a forty-six-year-old male. Before Susan’s disappearance, Chuck and Judy could only vaguely imagine the hurt that consumed a family with a missing child. It was a wrenching ache that just didn’t go away. They grieved for the family of the man.

That night they sent out a tweet of condolence to the family. By then Chuck and Judy understood that the world was full of missing people. Some, like that man, who’d never come home again. And even fewer, like Elizabeth Smart, who did.

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He said he was innocent and we took him at his word. We thought that’s for the police. He had not been charged. He had not been arrested. So our job as a Christian neighbor, we felt, is to pray for that, for the truth to be revealed, and let God handle those things with the authorities. Let the Lord handle that.

—PASTOR TIMOTHY ATKINS, MARCH 9, 2012

As bunkerlike as Steve Powell must have wanted his Country Hollow neighborhood residence to be, Josh Powell couldn’t dodge the police—from Utah
or
Washington—or the reporters, the purple ribbons, and even Susan’s picture, which would soon loom over Puyallup.

Finally, however, Josh caught a break. He met a peer who didn’t rush to judgment and assume he had murdered his wife.

Introducing Josh to Timothy Atkins might have been the best thing Steve Powell ever did for his son. Steve had no use for any religion. Tim Atkins knew that, of course, but when his neighbor called to suggest that he meet his son and grandsons who were moving up from Utah, Tim and his wife Brenda agreed. Tim was the pastor at Faith Bible Church, an independent church with about forty members in the nearby South Hill area of Puyallup. The two men had a few things in common. Tim was thirty-five; Josh turned thirty-four in January. Each had clipped dark hair and a goatee. And both men were fathers to young children. Three of Tim’s four children attended Carson Elementary School where Charlie would attend kindergarten.

The Atkins family had Josh and his sons over for dinner, and Josh and Charlie often stopped by after school. “He didn’t have a job at the time, so he’d come by the house,” Tim remembered. “We’d sit and talk and I’d open the Bible. I’d talk to him about putting his faith in the Lord Jesus, and share the gospel. He’d always thought of Christianity from the standpoint of Mormonism, and he was really against Mormonism so we were talking to him and trying to help him, even emotionally.”

Josh had lost a lot of weight, wasn’t sleeping, and appeared to be grief-stricken. Tim and Brenda had questions about Susan’s disappearance, and sometimes they asked about it. Like Kiirsi back in Utah, however, they didn’t want to frighten Josh away.

Tim refused to give in to media reports and neighborhood gossip. He and Brenda made a pact that they’d treat the young father as an innocent man. They weren’t there to judge him, but to help him and his two little boys. Tim had his suspicions, but he didn’t press Josh for answers right away.

“I told him that maybe there would be a time that he would be willing to open up and talk with us. And there was. On a number of occasions he would begin to explain what he thought happened,” Tim later said. “He said he thought she had taken off.”

Tim encouraged Josh to talk to the police, and take them to where he said he’d gone camping. And he made another point repeatedly: that Josh should reconcile with the Coxes.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said.

After doing his own reading and research, Tim created a list in his head of ten things about Susan’s disappearance that he thought were suspicious:

There was new snowfall overnight, but no car tracks or footprints leaving the house the next day.

Why would Susan leave her keys and purse in the house?

Who had locked up the house? Susan couldn’t have without her keys.

Josh was unwilling to meet again with the police.

Josh wouldn’t tell the police exactly where he had camped.

It seems strange to go camping in the middle of the night with two little boys.

Josh took their only vehicle. How would Susan get to work?

Josh said he lost track of what day it was.

Josh delayed contact with the Coxes while Susan was missing.

Josh wouldn’t say where he drove in the rental car.

Josh gave some short answers to some of the questions, and mumbled his way through others, but he never changed his story. He looked Tim and Brenda in the eye and said he didn’t know what had happened to his wife.

Although he had been vehemently critical of the Mormon church long before he left West Valley City, Josh surprised Tim and Brenda when he took Charlie and Braden to attend Sunday school at a Puyallup ward. That lasted only a couple of weeks.

A disappointed and angry Josh told Tim the reason why.

“Everyone thinks I’m guilty,” he said. “They are treating me like I killed Susan. I didn’t kill her. I don’t know what happened to her.”

There was, likely, another reason why Josh stopped taking the boys to church.

Rachel Marini, despite living in Utah, had kept her finger on the pulse of what was happening in Puyallup. She talked to a friend who was a member of the ward.

“Charlie was being a pain in the Sunday school class,” the friend said. “And the teacher said, ‘Look, if you don’t stop, I’m going to go get your mom and dad.’”

Charlie, who’d taken to acting out in the weeks following his mother’s disappearance, looked at the teacher.

“My mom’s dead,” he said.

*   *   *

The Coxes weren’t blind when it came to Josh and his need to control every moment of his disintegrating life. But they might have been a little naïve about the lengths to which Josh would go to maintain a toehold on his old life.

It was a damp, cold January afternoon when Chuck and Judy bundled up and drove over to Steve’s house to see their grandsons. They were concerned about the boys and, of course, they were missing Susan.

Country Hollow’s gates were wide open as usual, and the Coxes drove right in. Near the entrance, they quickly spotted Josh and the boys at a park. Chuck parked and he and Judy walked over. Almost immediately the smiles on their faces from seeing the boys melted away.

Josh stood and faced them while Charlie and Braden hung back.

He was stone-faced. “This is not acceptable,” he said.

“We were nearby,” Chuck said, although that wasn’t true. Their hearts ached for the boys and they just wanted to see them. It was strange that they’d have to lie about that kind of thing, but Josh was acting like they were there to do the boys harm or something else completely absurd.

“You can’t just drop by. From now on you’re going to have to e-mail me to make arrangements.”

Both Chuck and Judy were taken aback.
E-mail? Is it really getting to that?

In fact, it was, and it was about to get worse.

*   *   *

Even after they knew the rules, Josh made it difficult for the Coxes to see their grandsons. Both boys had birthdays in January and Chuck and Judy asked if they could have a party for Charlie at their house.

“No,” he said flatly. “We’re having a party at my dad’s. You can come to that.”

It wasn’t ideal. After all, Steve Powell would be there.

Chuck decided to spend the day helping a friend and he and Judy didn’t attend the party.

Rachel heard through the grapevine that Josh had contacted the ward for help with the party. Specifically, Josh wanted the ward to invite some other kids to attend Charlie’s fifth birthday party. Braden’s third had recently occurred, too, but at that age it wasn’t as crucial to have a bunch of other kids around.

As every parent knows, a fifth birthday is one of the biggies.

Ordinarily it would have been no big deal for the ward to help out. On the surface, the circumstances warranted it. The dad was new in town. His wife was absent. His little boy was having a birthday party.

But word had circulated that Josh was
that
Josh Powell and some members were reluctant to have their children around him.

“I feel badly, but I have to think of my family first, right?” one member asked Rachel.

Rachel could see the conflict. She didn’t know what she’d do if she had a little one invited to a possible killer’s home.

When Josh got the word, he dumped the ward and stopped going to church. He and his boys threw themselves deeper into his father’s world. Steve Powell, who despised the Mormon Church, must have felt victorious.

*   *   *

Josh was not above doling out favors—for reasons of his own. Out of the blue, he called the boys’ great-grandparents, Anne and John Cox, and invited them over for a visit. Chuck’s sister, Pam, was visiting her folks at the time, so she came along. While Anne and John talked awkwardly with Josh and Steve, Pam curled up on Steve’s sofa with Braden on her lap and read from the only book with photos and illustrations on hand,
World Psychology.

“The police have cleared me,” Josh said. “I’m no longer a person of interest in Susan’s case.”

Steve nodded and smirked in that manner that made Anne Cox sick to her stomach. She and her husband knew that was not the case at all.

Josh hadn’t been cleared of anything. And why would the police tell him that?

After a while, Charlie moved over to the dining table where he’d begun to assemble some kind of an art project—paper and glue were taking shape in that way that five-year-olds can do. In one moment it’s a bird, in another, a dinosaur. Whatever it was, the boy was quite pleased with his creation and was happy that his great-grandparents were there.

When Pam flipped to a page showing an illustration of a woman, Braden pointed at the figure’s chest and looked up at her.

“Mommy has an owie,” he said.

Alarmed, Pam glanced over at the others, but no one else had heard him.

Mommy has an owie?

When it came time to leave, Braden grabbed his aunt’s arm and refused to let go. Charlie begged them to stay longer, but it was clear that Steve and Josh hadn’t intended a longer visit and they needed to leave.

Charlie started to cry and ripped up his art project.

It didn’t matter that he put his heart and his soul into that project; it was clear to the Coxes that he was hurting, and tearing that up was a way to deal with the pain.

They left Country Hollow stunned by the bizarre household, the creepy vibe that Steve gave them, and Josh’s insistence that he’d been absolved of any suspicion by the West Valley City police. But more than anything, it was what Braden had said to Pam that had them reeling.

When the trio told Chuck and Judy their story, Chuck went for his phone to notify the West Valley City police and emphasized the need for another interview with Charlie and Braden.

“They know something about what happened to their mother,” Chuck said. “You need to talk to them.”

*   *   *

Interviewing children and keeping the interviews admissible to the courts is no easy endeavor. The annals of crime are littered with cases in which coaching young witnesses has been alleged, and proven. The West Valley City police knew all of that, and followed rigorous protocol when investigators interviewed the boys in Puyallup in early 2010. There was no leading, no pushing, just a gently probing conversation with Charlie and Braden while a child psychologist and investigators from Pierce County looked on.

A conspiracy of silence appeared to be reigning over the Powell household.

“Do you know what happened to Mommy?” an investigator asked.

“It’s the big secret,” Charlie said.

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Each day is kind of like a depression. But I choose to get up and think positive, and have hope and faith that she’ll be found alive.

—JUDY COX ON
DR. PHIL,
FEBRUARY 16, 2010

Josh’s sister, Jennifer, knew that she had to face her father. No matter that she’d had a zillion reasons to avoid him since she was a teenager. He had mistreated her mother, introduced her brothers to pornography, and she thought—as the police did—that he probably had a hand in her sister-in-law’s disappearance.

It was an icy Friday night in January when Jennifer and Kirk Graves made the surprise visit to Country Hollow. It was a first for Kirk, too. In fact, in their sixteen years of marriage, Kirk had managed to avoid his father-in-law when they found themselves in the same state. Although the Graves had been friendly with Josh and Susan, Josh had distanced himself from Jennifer since Susan’s disappearance. But now she had driven 900 miles to ask Josh face-to-face the question she felt only he could answer: What had he done to Susan?

According to a page Josh added to
SusanPowell.org
titled “Jennifer and Kirk Graves ousted from family because of her hysterical behavior,” Steve and Josh “tried to be hospitable,” even inviting Jennifer and Kirk to stay for dinner. Jennifer had arrived with “a preconceived notion of Josh’s guilt” and hid her “true reason” for visiting: she wanted to confront Josh. After dinner, Josh and Jennifer went into another room in the house to talk. While Mike lurked and listened in so that he could back up his older brother’s version of events, Jennifer asked Josh where he had hidden Susan’s body and if he had ever loved Susan.

What no one knew except for her husband was that Jennifer was wearing a wire. She had gone to the police to offer to tape a conversation with Josh. The police got a court order allowing the secret taping. They called it “Operation Puyallup.” While Jennifer was in her father’s house, detectives in nearby unmarked police cars listened in.