If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (20 page)

“Nothing would keep her from being with them,” Judy said.

Chuck knew differently. “Just Josh,” he said.

Susan’s father was well aware that Steve and Josh were starting to spin their theory that Susan had chosen to abandon her husband and young sons. The idea that she would then check in via the Internet to see how her family was faring was ludicrous.

In his journal Steve continued writing of his obsession with Susan—
never
about fears that she was injured or dead. Or what it could mean for his son to be pursued by police. Or about his grandsons’ confusion caused by their mother’s lengthening absence.

Instead, Steve was trying to figure out how and when she would return and what that would mean to him, especially if she had had an affair or was pregnant by the man she ran off with:

… I want to be a family with her and the boys, with Josh an important part of their lives. I even accept the possibility that she is soon to have another child, by an interloper … I am still convinced she loves me and is sexually attracted to me.

In addition, he worried if there would be room for her at his increasingly crowded house. Josh, Charlie, and Braden were always underfoot with their toys, the bird, and all the stuff Josh had collected over the years. Steve, who had created the noxious environment that fostered his adult children’s seemingly perpetual dependence, now lamented the fact.

How in hell do I unload this baggage? Alina and Johnny seem to be permanent fixtures in this house. Josh has no compunction about taking over as much of the house as he needs for him and the boys.

*   *   *

The YMCA day camp in Puyallup really isn’t much of a camp. It’s more of a day care for busy parents than anything else. Certainly, there are crafts and activities for the older kids and story time for the younger set. In the summer after Susan went missing, Josh brought his sons to the cluster of modular buildings for what he’d promised would be a fun break from Grandpa Steve’s house. Alina had been watching the boys and told people that she didn’t mind. But Josh thought better of it. He thought they could use some other activities. Sitting at home all summer wasn’t ideal in a household not really set up for little ones—a household with an uncle on meds, a caregiver aunt who’d been thrust into the role without any training, and a grandfather who was obsessed with pornography.

Josh probably had no idea that his fatherly gesture of sending Charlie, age five, and Braden, three, to camp would potentially provide strangers with a glimpse of what had happened on the snowy December night Susan disappeared.

Braden drew a picture of a car with figures inside, an image that left the women who were supervising the art project breathless from what they saw—or what they thought they saw in the little boy’s drawing.

“Tell me about your picture, Braden,” one woman said, gently prodding him.

“That’s us going camping,” he said, looking down at the drawing.

Another woman touched an index finger to a crude stick figure seated in the car.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“That’s Daddy.” He indicated the other figures in quick succession. “That’s Charlie, and that’s me.”

But that wasn’t everybody he’d drawn. There was another figure there, too.

He pointed. “Mommy’s in the trunk,” he said.

The women stayed calm. They thought they understood the meaning of what Braden was telling them, but they wanted to make sure.

“Why was she in the trunk, Braden?”

Braden looked a little confused for a moment. He didn’t really have an answer. He stammered a little and stumbled over his words, trying to make sense of his recollections.

He couldn’t articulate why she was in the trunk but he said they had stopped somewhere.

“Mommy and Daddy got out,” he said. “And Mommy never came back.”

The women would never forget that. They told their supervisor and eventually Chuck heard the story and told the police. A detective from West Valley City police met with the staff at the YMCA, listened, and told them that there wasn’t much they could do. Charlie had told a similar version of the story. It was interesting, even sad, but it wasn’t irrefutable evidence against Josh.

Braden took his drawing home to show his daddy.

*   *   *

When he enrolled Charlie in elementary school a few weeks later, Josh once more tried to cast himself as the misunderstood good guy, a devoted father who wanted only the best for his sons. He made it known that he was very interested in Charlie’s school life—so much so, that he wanted to join the school’s PTA. That was met with the same resistance as that of the members of the LDS ward, which he’d contacted for help with Charlie’s birthday party. Some parents vowed to start a petition prohibiting Josh’s participation. Others were thinking twice about joining. One said that Josh gave her “the creeps.” Finally, the PTA president issued a statement about Josh’s application:

Our PTA membership is open to anyone who would like to join and is interested in helping the children of Carson Elementary reach their full potential. All our volunteers are required to complete the background check through the School District before volunteering.

Josh’s friend and neighbor, Pastor Tim Atkins, might have been the only parent with children at Carson who was sympathetic to Josh. He tried to convince the others that Josh was trying to make his life better, trying to get back to something normal.

“Nobody would let him do that,” Tim later said.

By then everything Josh did became fodder for the tabloids and TV news shows. On CNN’s
Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell,
the host skewered both Josh
and
the PTA—Josh for thinking he would be welcomed with open arms, and the PTA for protecting his civil rights.

When one of the show’s guests, a family law attorney, speculated that the state’s child services division could request psychological testing of Josh, the TV host asked: “Maybe they’ll find out he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” The panel chuckled.

Josh wasn’t blind to how he was portrayed in the media. He joked that he “was a Marvel Comics super-villain.”

By November, Josh had attended a few PTA meetings, despite the objections of other parents. But like a lot of things—best intentions, passing fancy—the routine ended. Josh just wasn’t able to stick with anything for very long.

26

At one point Josh was being his usually rude, yelling and barking commands at me, old self and his dad was helping me take pictures and video of the blanket I was giving my mom that I made. After Josh left the room I told his dad, “the winds are going to change, I can’t take this crap from him anymore.” I told him that when Josh starts whining that I’m being unreasonable it’s b/c he’s so rude and never helps with the boys/house, etc. His dad told me that the entire family KNOWS how much I put up with.

—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JUNE 30, 2008

The Coxes returned to Utah in September at the invitation of Ed Smart. Smart was bicycling across the country to raise awareness for kidnapped children and to promote legislation that would require DNA samples to be taken from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony. Chuck and Judy stayed with Debbie and Ken Caldwell. The families had much in common. The Caldwells also had four daughters.

One night they were up late talking about those early hours after Susan had vanished. Something that had happened during that first week had been gnawing at Debbie. She recounted how she’d seen Josh at the December 10, 2009 vigil.

“I was talking to Charlie, and Josh walked over and just kind of picked up Charlie and took him away from me and said, ‘Oh, hi, we’re not going to be coming back to day care.’ I asked him why not.”

“What did he say?” Chuck asked.

“He said, ‘With everything going on…’”

“What kind of answer was that?”

“Right. So, I said, ‘You know you have to work, you still have to make a living.’”

Either Chuck or Judy could have said something about Josh not being used to working—something he usually left to Susan—but there was no need for that because Debbie knew Josh all too well.

Plus Debbie was on a roll anyway.

“And then he said, ‘Yeah, but we won’t have any money to pay you.’”

Debbie continued. “I said, ‘There are programs, we could figure something out.’ And then Josh looked at me and, well, he said, ‘No, no, no, I’m just going to have my family take care of them.’”

Chuck could tell that wasn’t the end of the story. Debbie Caldwell was on to something. Something big.

“Josh stopped payment on a check I should have received on December eighth,” she said, leaving her words hanging in the air.

That got Chuck’s attention. Judy’s, too.

“Hold on, Debbie, say that again?” Susan’s father asked.

“Right.” Debbie took a breath. “He knew the kids were not going to be in day care the following week. It means what you think it does.”

Debbie went on to explain that all the other parents paid her on Monday mornings, so she deposited their checks on Monday afternoons. Because Josh’s check always arrived on Tuesday from a credit union in Spokane, Washington, she would hold on to it and deposit it the following Monday with the other checks. On Monday, December 7, after alerting Jennifer and Terri that she couldn’t reach Josh or Susan, Debbie went to her bank with that day’s checks, plus Josh’s from the week before, which she had received on Tuesday, December 1. When she didn’t receive a check on Tuesday, December 8, she talked to her bank about it.

“The bank told me that Josh would have had to stop the check from being sent, by Thursday, December 3, at the latest and maybe earlier,” she said.

Chuck’s pulse quickened. He looked over at Judy. He knew she was thinking the same thing.

“He’d premeditated the whole thing,” he said. “This is hard evidence that proves premeditation.”

Debbie nodded. “I think so, too.”

None of them—Judy, Chuck, Debbie, Ken—felt happy in that sad, sick moment. There was no excited jumping up and down over the fact that they could now prove something that they’d already known. But there was some satisfaction in that moment. No denying that. Every one of them gathered in the Caldwells’ comfortable home loved Susan.

Every one of them wanted Josh to answer for what he’d done.

Chuck was convinced that the day-care check was evidence that Josh had arranged Susan’s disappearance. It was proof that she wasn’t injured in a scuffle with Josh, that she didn’t just hit her head and bleed, that Josh didn’t panic and dispose of her body.

It was planned.

The next day Debbie collected the bank statements from her day-care business that showed the Powells’ payment history and handed them over to the police.

According to the code that the WVCPD and Chuck had between them, the police told him what category the evidence fell into: “They said it is part of the case,” Chuck said, hoping Josh would finally be arrested.

And once more, the West Valley City police cautioned patience.

“We’re working it, Chuck and Judy. Trust us.”

*   *   *

Chuck liked to drive out into the Utah desert. It made him feel closer to Susan. When he was in Utah meeting with the police, following up on leads or attending vigils, Susan’s father drove for hours, sometimes by himself and sometimes with Ken Caldwell. Both had licenses to carry a concealed weapon, and both were trained shooters. Chuck would take his Smith & Wesson M&P Compact .40 caliber pistol, and Ken his Springfield XD Sub-Compact .40 or his Dan Wesson .357 Magnum, and do a little target shooting while they looked for Susan. Chuck had a hunch about an area north of Salt Lake City with dozens of little-used farm roads.

They drove every farm road off Interstate 84 from Tremonton north to a rest area in Idaho.

“We thought that would be a good meeting place for Josh and Steve,” Chuck said. “And we wanted to check out the area because I’d always felt kind of weird about that area. So we drove every ranch road that would have been accessible to a minivan.” They stopped and got out and walked the fields. Chuck also searched areas to the south, including Simpson Springs, where Josh said he had been camping, and investigated how roads that barely appeared on a map met up.

Rumor and gossip and police investigations had it that Steve may have helped Josh cover up the crime. That’s why Josh had needed the rental car, and perhaps why Steve had taken off work December 8–9: there was some unfinished business. But Chuck thought that Steve might have done more than that. Maybe he had instigated it. There was a rumor that Steve had made a trip to Utah a couple of months before Susan disappeared. Was he along on the short camping trip that Josh, Charlie, and Braden had made in the minivan in September—cut short because the boys got cold and uncomfortable and wanted to go home?

Chuck’s thoughts wandered to the possibilities.

Maybe Steve and Josh had prepared a grave for Susan before December, in the fall when the ground was soft enough to dig? If Josh covered it with a piece of plywood, then he could return to the spot with her body, remove the plywood, place Susan’s body in the grave, and cover it up. Or maybe he went looking for a bottomless, abandoned mine so decrepit that it would be impossible to search?

And if Josh was really lucky, the two boys in their car seats would be asleep during a midnight excursion to dump their mother’s body in such a desolate, sad place.

Chuck’s mind also went right to Steve Powell. No one would know until much later that it was someone else who had come to his aid.

*   *   *

The body was a female, maybe as young as thirty. She had had light brown hair, had been five-two to five-four in height, and had been wearing pink underwear, a jeans jacket, and a pink tank top. Dead since late 2009 or early 2010, her mummified remains were found on a remote corner of a sheep ranch near Laramie, Wyoming, in September 2010. WVCPD sent Susan’s dental records. It was not Susan.

The next month, a woman’s body was found near a highway in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She had reddish brown hair and was wearing a black sundress and a silver cross around her neck. The New Mexico police had a hunch it might be Susan. While sending Susan’s dental work to them, WVCPD detective Ellis Maxwell e-mailed: “You’re right, the similarities are so close it’s eerie! The eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, forehead and hair,” looked like Susan’s. He did point out, however, that members of LDS do not wear crosses.