If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (29 page)

“Did you have any special meals on Thanksgiving?” Josh asked his boys.

Griffin-Hall knew he wasn’t asking if Judy had served turkey or ham, white potatoes or yams. Josh was asking
who
had been at the Coxes for the holiday and what they had talked about.

“No,” one of the boys said, clueless as to what their dad was fishing for.

“Did you see any special people?” Josh asked.

Griffin-Hall shot him a look. “Josh, that’s enough,” she said.

Josh ignored her. “Did you pray?” he asked.

Griffin-Hall was on the edge of exasperation, but held it in.

“Josh let’s turn this around and talk about what activity you have planned for today,” she said.

Finally, Charlie spoke up. “There was a lot of family there, and Thanksgiving is for family.”

Josh couldn’t help himself. The door was open for a dig at the Coxes and he pushed it wider.

“You were with the wrong family,” Josh said.

Griffin-Hall cut him off. “Josh, you can’t tell them they were with the wrong family. Can we get started on their activity?”

What he was desperate to tell his sons was that the day would come when they would never see “the Coxes”—which is what Josh wanted the four- and six-year-old to call their grandparents—ever again.

Josh specifically chose Sunday as his visitation day so Chuck and Judy couldn’t take the boys to church. Josh had spoken with Pastor Tim Atkins and his wife Brenda about being an alternative to the Coxes; maybe the boys could live with them. DSHS, however, said it wasn’t about to move the boys again but okayed a second weekly visit. So for eleven or twelve weeks, after being fingerprinted and cleared by DSHS, Tim picked up the boys on Wednesday afternoons from school or from the Coxes. They would attend his children’s Christian group, the Good News Club, and meet up with their dad at the Atkinses’. On Sundays Griffin-Hall brought the boys to Josh’s rental house.

Tim and Brenda had given Josh a Bible, and he often attended the Sunday evening service at Tim’s church, Faith Bible Church. They saw Josh laugh, they saw him cry, and they saw him worried and despondent.

The Atkinses asked Josh a lot of questions about the night Susan disappeared and the aspects of his story that didn’t add up. They advised him not to attack Chuck and Judy, to work toward reconciliation, and to talk with the police.

They might have been the
only
people in his life who urged him to talk to the authorities. His father hadn’t, nor had his brothers, Johnny and Mike, or his sister Alina. They supported his stalemate with the police and often led the attack against both the police and the Coxes through their Web sites, the release of Susan’s diaries, and media interviews.

One Wednesday afternoon, Josh and Tim sat at the Atkinses’ dining room table as their combined six children played and came and went.

“Josh, what are Chuck and Judy always saying?” Tim asked. “What is everybody saying?”

Josh didn’t answer, and just looked at the glass of soda in his hand.

Tim wanted an answer so he prodded Josh. “What are the people at the Bible church saying? What are our neighbors saying? They’re saying why don’t you just sit down and talk with the police?”

Josh thought for a moment. “I understand that,” he said. “But I’m not going to do that because of what happened when I did talk to them.”

Tim wanted to hear it once more. “Tell me again. What happened when you talked to the police?”

Josh looked at the pastor. “They tried to twist my words.”

“I understand that, Josh. I’m just saying that if you are sincere about reconciling with the Cox family, you have to demonstrate that you want to be reconciled. And one of the ways you demonstrate that is by sitting down and talking with the police.”

Tim never learned anything by chance about the night Susan vanished. Josh never slipped up or said anything incriminating. Tim had an understanding with CPS that, as a pastor, if he believed a crime had been committed, he would be obligated to report it. There was a lot Josh kept to himself, but over the two years he knew Josh, Tim never felt that the boys were in any danger.

The most uncomfortable moment occurred during the last visitation at the Atkinses’ home. Their three-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was absent, visiting with her grandparents. They were sitting around a table having a snack. Tim thought he would lighten things up a bit. He looked around at the group gathered at the dining table.

“Charlie and Braden, who is missing?” Tim asked.

Braden spoke right up. “Mommy is missing.”

Tim looked at Josh, and Josh looked at Tim. The air was sucked out of the room.

*   *   *

Chuck Cox was curious and a little concerned. He and Judy wondered just where it was that Josh was living, and where Charlie and Braden were spending their time with their father for those three or four hours once a week. Often, before a visit, Charlie and Braden said they didn’t want to go see their dad.

Where did they go on Sundays? What was the place like? Were they safe there?

One time when Griffin-Hall arrived to pick up the boys, Chuck the investigator became Chuck the surveillance guy. He tailed her. He stayed a couple of blocks behind and when he sensed that she was about to turn into a cul-de-sac, he cut down a side street. It turned out that it ran behind Josh’s rental. Chuck sat and waited. At one point Josh and the boys came out to the backyard for several minutes, without Griffin-Hall.

Josh was never supposed to be alone with his sons, not even for a minute. Josh walked the boys around the yard, where it appeared that he was building an outdoor fire pit.

After the boys came home later that day, Chuck asked them if they had been alone with their dad, and they said yes. In fact, the boys had spied Chuck’s truck. He called DSHS and complained. He knew that whatever was said in Griffin-Hall’s presence made it into her notes. But if she was out of earshot—and she had been when the boys were in the backyard—then she wouldn’t be able to report what garbage, what lies, he might be telling them.

A little while later, a supervisor from DSHS told Chuck that they had talked with Griffin-Hall and that she was always with Josh and the boys, unless she was in the bathroom.

“Don’t worry about it,” the supervisor said. “The boys are being adequately supervised.”

Chuck highly doubted it and said so.

*   *   *

In some ways, Josh had more custodial rights than the Coxes did. He prevented them from taking Charlie and Braden to their ward, and because of the Boy Scouts’ long history with the Mormon church, he was able to prevent the boys from participating—just as Steve had stopped his own sons from being Scouts. Josh was also able to mandate that the Coxes couldn’t take their grandsons to the YMCA, Lowe’s, Home Depot, or to any event having to do with astronomy or rocks and gems “as these are all things he did/does with his boys.”

There were two traditions that the Coxes weren’t going to give up, and there was nothing Josh could do about it. They continued to pray at mealtime, and they still held family home evening, a Mormon tradition of families spending Monday evening together playing board games, making crafts, or cooking.

*   *   *

“They found Mommy in the desert,” Braden blurted out during one Sunday visit.

Charlie, Braden, and Josh were eating pancakes when Braden matter-of-factly delivered the news.

A lab had finished examining the charred wood found near Topaz Mountain in September, the debris that dogs had alerted on. The West Valley City police wouldn’t give any details on what had or hadn’t been found. Although the Coxes were careful not to talk about the investigation into their daughter’s disappearance in front of the children, Braden must have overheard something.

“What did you say?” Josh asked.

“They found Mommy in the desert,” Braden repeated.

“Who said that?” Josh asked.

Griffin-Hall tried to divert Josh from the talk of Susan’s disappearance. “Josh, we can’t talk about this during the visit,” she said.

Braden didn’t answer.

But Josh persisted. “Who said that?” he asked again, now agitated.

Both boys were quiet.

Griffin-Hall wrote in her notes that Josh seemed worried and anxious the rest of the afternoon. “He never recovered his equilibrium,” she said later.

In late November, Josh’s attorney, Jeffrey Bassett, received an e-mail from John Long, the assistant attorney general for Washington State who represented DSHS in the custody case:

We may need to slow up a bit on this case.

Utah police planned to release five or six images of computer-generated child porn found on Josh’s computer in 2009. Long suggested that Dr. Manley, the psychologist who had been assigned to evaluate Josh as part of his custody battle, review the images before they proceeded with the custody case. A hearing had already been postponed from mid-November to January, but Long wanted to make sure there would be time for the state, and Josh’s attorney, to deal with the child porn.

*   *   *

A few days later, on December 3, 2011, Josh sent a handwritten letter to his brother Mike in Minnesota. The missive was nothing if not specific. It notified Mike about a beneficiary change on his life insurance. If something should happen to him, Mike would receive 93 percent, Alina 4 percent, and Johnny 3 percent of a payout worth 2.5 million. There was no accommodation for his father, though Josh surely would have thought that his father’s future as a wage earner was particularly bleak since his imprisonment on the pornography and voyeurism charges. It was doubtful that employers would hire Steve for any but the most menial jobs.
Ever.
Although Terri had emerged during the custody fight as a supporter of Josh’s parenting skills, she was also left out in the cold.

According to the letter, the change had been made to ensure that Charlie and Braden would be taken care of if something happened to Josh. It was clear that Josh trusted only Mike. He told his brother that he was afraid Alina and Steve would “squander” any large amount of money he left them.

No one knows for sure what Mike’s response was to the letter. He had to know that Josh was unstable. He knew about Josh’s teenage suicide attempt.

Despite the scrawled letter from Josh, Mike Powell didn’t do anything. Not one thing. He didn’t call Josh to see how he was coping with the most recent court setbacks. He didn’t reach out to ensure that his brother was doing all right, or that his nephews were safe.

In retrospect, Mike admitted later it seemed that Josh was contemplating suicide again.

When the boys visited Josh the next day—Sunday, December 4—Josh had numerous boxes of ornaments and a Christmas tree ready to decorate. When Charlie looked through the boxes, he found a stocking with Susan’s name on it. Josh told him to put it back in the box, but Charlie set it on the floor by the tree where it remained for the rest of the visit, never far from him and Braden.

*   *   *

The police had been tapping the phones of all the Powells for months, long before Steve was arrested. Now that Mike and his abandoned car had the attention of the WVCPD they stepped up their investigation of Josh’s younger brother, the one who they thought kept his distance from the family craziness. He defended his father and brother, but he seemed to live his own life. During the first weeks Susan was missing, Chuck Cox wrote the WVCPD worrying that Steve Powell was holding her prisoner. As for other family members, Josh might help his dad but, Chuck added, Mike would never go along with it.

The police got search warrants to increase surveillance of the family and to monitor Josh’s and Mike’s computers. They knew the two didn’t trust phones, but probably discussed the investigation over the Internet. But Josh and Mike were using sophisticated computer encryption to communicate. No one—not the police, the FBI, or even the software manufacturer—could decipher it.

42

The reviewed images indicate someone’s fantasy-laden view of having sex with children.

—DR. JAMES MANLEY, JANUARY 31, 2012

James Manley sat in a room at the Pierce County sheriff’s office in downtown Tacoma. The psychologist, a sexual deviancy expert, and Detective Gary Sanders looked down at a few dozen of the 400 images that Utah police had found on Josh’s computer in December 2009. The pornographic images played out like a kind of twisted, disgusting, version of Cartoon Network. Well-known cartoon characters from the Simpsons to the Flintstones to Superman to Dennis the Menace were depicted in a wide array of sexual activities including incest, group sex, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sodomy.

It was a subset of child pornography, the likes of which are rarely seen by law enforcement, much less by the parents who let their kids watch cartoons.

Captain America, Catwoman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rugrats, characters from
Family Guy
, and
Jungle Book
and SpongeBob SquarePants—every one of them doing the nastiest things imaginable. Some were hand drawn, others were computerized, anime, or photographs. Some had identifying logos indicating where the cartoons and 3-D images had originated. Web sites trumpeted exactly what they were.

Toon porn.

The majority featured depictions of incest or child molestation. There were also photographs of female frontal nudity. One had the head of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson Photoshopped onto a nude figure. Some drawings showed bondage. Some showed beasts having sex with a woman. Others depicted sex involving mother on son, mother on daughter, or father on daughter. In one, there were two adults on a bed praising a girl who was fellating a boy. In another, a girl was fellating a penis with a caption that read “Come on Daddy, come on, let me finish what I started, you’re gonna like it.”

While these were not photographs of real children and couldn’t be legally defined as child pornography, Dr. Manley wrote that they communicated an approval of sex between an adult and a minor.

“The fact that such a collection of images from different sites were collected suggests a high degree of interest,” he wrote. The collection of images revealed a pattern of “poor sexual boundaries between the [Powell] family members. If these are Mr. Powell’s images, it gives rise to great concern.”