If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (7 page)

Susan appeared to understand what her mother was saying.

“I’m
going
to have fun,” she said. “I
am
making lots of friends. Josh just happens to be one of them.”

Judy pondered that for a moment. “Well, that’s fine,” she said, seeing that Susan was not about to abandon her interest in Josh Powell. “You can date him. But date others, too. Don’t get serious with Josh. There’re more guys out there. Take a year and really discover that.”

Judy could have said more. So could Chuck. It passed through Susan’s father’s mind to be straight up about the situation. Chuck wanted to tell his daughter to head for the hills when it came to her suitor, but as the father of four girls, he knew better.

“I knew if I said ‘Stay away from him,’ that’s exactly who she would go for,” Chuck said. “So you knew that wasn’t going to work.”

Even so, Chuck, the FAA investigator, grilled the young man about the kind of life he would offer Susan.

With Josh sitting across from him at the table, Chuck ticked off all the boxes. Yes, the boy had a job. Yes, he had an apartment where they could live. Yes, he was going to further his education by finishing college and getting a business degree.

Josh was alert, convincing, and solicitous. He said all the right things.

Chuck still wasn’t completely convinced, but he gave his blessing.

“That looks pretty good,” he said, a little halfheartedly. “Self-supporting and everything.”

He later told Judy that his first impression of Josh might have been wrong. Maybe there was hope for the couple after all?

“She’s marrying him,” Judy said, “because she feels sorry for him. Susan thinks she can make him happy, she thinks she can help him to change.”

In their engagement photo, which Chuck took in a rambling field near their Puyallup home, Susan sits on Josh’s knee, her head tilted and resting on Josh’s chest. They look very young and very happy, excited to begin their lives together.

*   *   *

Families of the bride and groom often meet before the wedding. They spend a little time together, if only for the sake of their children. Not so with the Powells and the Coxes. Chuck and Judy had met Josh a few times, but there had been no polite or celebratory get-acquainted parties or dinners between the families. Chuck sized up Josh’s family quickly.

They knew Steve was anti-Mormon, wrote anti-Mormon treatises, and considered himself an expert on a lot of things. “He likes to talk, and Josh likes to talk, and I didn’t really feel like being bombarded by somebody who thinks they know everything when they really don’t know anything,” Chuck said. “I didn’t make an effort to talk with him, and they never made any effort to talk with us.”

On that happy note, the families managed to tolerate each other over lunch at an Old Country Buffet restaurant in a Portland suburb a few hours before Josh and Susan were married. It had been decided in advance that Steve’s contribution to the day was to pick up the tab, but he grumbled about it.

“I heard Steve complaining that he had to pay just a little over a hundred bucks, and how dare he have to pay!” Judy recalled. “And Josh said, ‘Oh, come on Dad, just pay.’ And I was so tempted to go up there and say, ‘Maybe you’d like to help pay for the wedding and we’ll split it. My part is thousands of dollars and yours is a hundred dollars and you’re complaining?’ But I thought, ‘I don’t want to embarrass my daughter,’ and it’s the only thing that stopped me.”

*   *   *

On April 6, 2001, a couple of hours after the old Country Buffet lunch, Josh and Susan’s marriage was sealed for eternity at the commanding LDS temple in Lake Oswego, a few miles outside Portland. Most of Josh’s family couldn’t attend the actual wedding, since Steve had renounced the LDS church and, except for his eldest daughter Jennifer, his children had stopped attending church.

After a one-night honeymoon in a beautiful and historic hotel overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, the newlyweds celebrated at a reception at the Coxes’ ward in Puyallup. Josh spent most of it taking pictures. His sister, Alina, a heavyset young woman who acted like a servant to her brothers and father, shadowed the groom as he took photos. Chuck felt sorry for her.

“It’s like she doesn’t have a mind or a life of her own,” he said.

The Coxes took photos, too, of Josh looking very young and gawky in a tuxedo and Susan pretty in her long white wedding dress. The gown was perfect for a temple wedding, with a modest, slightly rounded neck and long, lacey sleeves. Her parents bought the dress at a Tacoma bridal shop for $399 along with her pillbox hat with a trailing veil and the bouquet of white flowers she carried. The reception line included Susan’s sisters as her bridesmaids. They wore long dresses in Susan’s favorite color, purple. They stood with their parents to Susan’s left. To Josh’s right were his father and mother, his sister Alina, and his brother Mike. No one asked about Johnny, and Jennifer was absent; she had avoided her father since her parents’ divorce.

Susan overheard a conversation on her wedding day between Josh and his father that she passed along to her mother.

“Steve said, ‘Well, she’s no lawyer or doctor but she’ll do.’”

Judy looked confused. “What’s he talking about?” she asked.

Susan knew exactly what her father-in-law meant and she spelled it out.

“In other words,” she said, “I’m not going to make big money but I’ll do well enough that Josh won’t have to work.”

Judy was appalled by the remark, but it was the next thing the new—and flabbergasted—bride said that really shocked her.

“Steve said, ‘Josh, she’s going to divorce you someday.’”

Judy wondered what kind of father would say that to his son on his wedding day.

Who bets against love and marriage while the commitment is being sealed forever?

*   *   *

Josh and Susan moved into an apartment near Susan’s parents. Susan had earned a scholarship to Gene Juarez Academy, the Pacific Northwest’s premier cosmetology school. Later she worked at Regis Salon at a mall south of Seattle. She said she liked to help people look their best. But more than anything, Susan loved being an aunt to her older sisters’ children and dreamed of the day she would be a mother.

When money was tight, they lived with Josh’s father, Steve, an experience that would send Susan running.

Josh worked for Virco, the same manufacturing company as his father, selling and installing office furniture.

In the early days of their marriage, Josh and Susan seemed close, very much in love. Friends and family described them as happy, holding hands, and frequently kissing.

Susan was still giddy with love when, just before their second wedding anniversary, she handwrote a note to Josh on Valentine’s Day titled “Reasons I Love You.” On five pages of lined paper she listed 132 reasons. Within a couple of years some traits she found endearing would become irritating; others would be bittersweet reminders of the young couple they had been. Her “Reasons I Love You” included:

You want to talk about irrelevant topics until you’ve resolved the issues of the world

You’ll drive aimlessly

You want children

You pray for people

You show affection in public

You don’t care what others think

You love my family get-together occasions

You watch “Friends” with me for hours

You can be patient

You let me wax you

You hold me in the middle of the night

You calculate everything

You went to church when you didn’t feel like it was worth it

You pay tithing without question

You double-check locks

But while they didn’t know the full extent of the trauma and drama in Josh’s childhood, Susan’s parents were worried about Josh’s sometimes odd behavior. Occasionally, he seemed not to be all there. At other times, he’d be oddly evasive. He made a habit of arriving hours late to family functions, with no awareness that others were waiting for him. It appeared as if Josh either didn’t care about others, or was unable to empathize with anyone else’s problems. They didn’t give voice to their greatest concern, because to do so would have been almost too scary to say out loud. Chuck and Judy began to wonder if Josh’s aberrant behavior was an indicator that he might have a mental illness.

*   *   *

Earlier in the marriage, Josh had some ambitions though he was woefully bad at bringing them to fruition. Always chasing a better opportunity, a chance to make his mark in some grand scheme, Josh and Susan moved to Yakima and then Olympia to train to manage an assisted living facility. While their bosses always loved Susan, they couldn’t tolerate Josh. When the assisted-living job fizzled in late 2003, the young couple pulled up stakes and headed nine hundred miles south to West Valley City in Utah—not far from where Josh’s sister Jennifer and his mother Terri lived.

For Susan, the greater the distance from her father-in-law, the better. Steve had done and said inappropriate sexual things to Susan and she put her foot down: she told Josh they had to get away from his father. Nine hundred miles should do it.

They lived with Jennifer Graves and her family for the first three months. “Susan was rather short with Josh. Very snippy and somewhat nagging,” she later wrote in a statement for police. “She would give Josh orders instead of asking in a loving spousal way when she wanted something. Josh was controlling. He didn’t want her to go to Relief Society [the women’s arm of the LDS church] activities while they were staying at my house, even though they had no children. Over the years, Josh got worse and I think Susan did too for a while. She was prone to yelling out of frustration. She said she hit him at least once and said he hit her back.… I talked it over with her during that time and encouraged her not to do that again because Josh is stronger than her and she’d lose that physical battle (not to mention it’s simply not appropriate).… There was a night (maybe 2–3 years ago) that she called.… I know we talked about how it was very bad for the children to be witnesses to the severe verbal fights they were having.”

*   *   *

Kiirsi and John Hellewell first met the new neighbors soon after Josh and Susan bought the house on W. Sarah Circle in 2004. John was an IT professional, and Kiirsi homeschooled their children. Josh and Susan were just starting out, and the couples became close. They spent a lot of time together playing board games, watching movies, and going on picnics and bike rides. Both families were active in the church. Josh and John were paired as “home teachers,” visiting families in the ward once a month to give a short spiritual lesson, offer a blessing, and to see if there was anything needed.

Josh was different from anyone the Hellewells had ever met before. It was almost like he had a traveling soapbox and at any moment he would stand up on it and ramble on about something he was doing. It didn’t matter if anyone else had any input, Josh didn’t seem to care.

“When they first moved here it was all about their house, because they were fixing it up,” Kiirsi later recalled. “They were putting in the world’s most amazing drip sprinkler system, and the garden, and this and that, and on and on and on about the sprinkler system and the garden for probably two or three months. We got so sick of hearing about it. We came to find out later Susan did most of the work but he’d take the credit for it.”

Early in their friendship Susan told Kiirsi the real reason behind the move to Utah.

“It was because of Josh’s father,” she said, gauging her friend’s reaction. “We had to get away from him.”

This time, Susan didn’t use the same old line about needing a fresh start when explaining the move, as she had told others. She told Kiirsi that to save money for a house early in their marriage, she and Josh had moved in with Steve. They’d slept in a dining room with a curtain hung for privacy. Then something had happened with Steve.

“I don’t know how to say this exactly,” she continued, “but I started to feel uncomfortable. Steve was always there. Always watching me. One time I caught him trying to watch me get dressed.”

“You didn’t,” Kiirsi said, her eyes widening.

Susan nodded. “There’s more. One time Steve tried to kiss me. After that, I told Josh that we had to move out.”

“No,” Kiirsi said.

If Susan had dropped a bomb, this next one was a cruise missile. “Yes. One time after we moved here Steve sent me a package, an envelope with what I thought were pictures of my favorite actor, Mel Gibson. You know what he did?”

Kiirsi had no idea. How could she? She’d never heard of a father-in-law hitting on his son’s wife. It was disgusting and vile. It was wrong in every way imaginable.

“Tucked into the photos were a bunch of other naked pictures,” Susan said pausing a moment for emphasis. They weren’t of Mel Gibson.

This was too much. Kiirsi found the whole idea of it crazy, revolting. As she listened to Susan, it was clear that Susan had slammed the door shut on any relationship with Josh’s father. Susan thought Steve was a creepy, sleazy, nasty man.

The Coxes had also heard bits and pieces of the story about Steve and the reason behind the move.

“What do you mean he made advances at you?” Judy asked when Susan announced they were moving away.

“I don’t want to go into it,” Susan said. She didn’t tell her parents, but in 2003, when Steve professed his love for her, he had tried to kiss her and touch her.

Judy pressed her daughter for details. “Susan, you should report it to the police.”

Susan couldn’t bring herself to do that. “This is my father-in-law we’re talking about.”

“I don’t care,” Judy said. She saw her daughter as the kind of person who would stand up for herself, someone who would right the wrongs. Why was Susan protecting Steve?

“What if he’s doing it to other people?” Judy asked. “You need to be one of those who step forward.”

Her father had similar advice.

“Call the police,” Chuck said. “Make a report. Do whatever you need to do. And certainly get away from him.”