If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (33 page)

Through a blown-out window on the south side, investigators could see the bodies of two children. The bodies were partly covered by debris from the fire.

The house was still smoking and firefighters thought there was more accelerant in the house. A couple of firefighters went inside to spray more water on the fire, but stayed out of the room where the bodies were.

Videos and photographs were taken of the house. An exterior wall was removed to give investigators better access.

When the fire was out and the air quality tested, investigators looked again through the window in the back of the house. Two small children were lying on what was left of a box spring and mattress with remnants of a red comforter or sleeping bag. The Coxes were told that the boys’ hands were touching; the police were not sure if Josh has posed them, if it happened by accident, or if Charlie and Braden had reached for each other as they took their last breaths.

One of the boys, later determined to be Charlie, was on his left side. The majority of his clothing was burned off.

Debris was removed from Charlie’s body, using a hand trowel and broom. He was photographed and turned over. The exposed part of his body was red, burned, and blistered. A lot of his skin had burned away, and his left arm was mostly gone. The back of his skullcap was missing. They placed Charlie in a white cloth, then the sheriff’s deputy tenderly lifted Charlie into his arms and carried him outside.

When investigators returned to the room, they found a hatchet bent by heat and two knives on top of the mattress where Charlie had been. They were photographed and packed as evidence.

Braden was facedown, with a lot of debris from the fire covering him. They removed debris from his body and took photographs. As they were turning him over, they saw chop marks on the back of his neck. Like Charlie, Braden was missing part of his skull. Braden, too, was also placed in a white cloth and gently carried outside in the arms of the deputy.

There was so much debris from the fire that at first they didn’t see Josh’s body. For a few minutes, they wondered if he had fled the house before it blew up. But eventually they discovered him, lying on his back. His body, especially from his waist to his feet, was burned more than the bodies of Charlie and Braden. His penis was exposed and most of the skin on his legs was missing, with only bone and muscle tissue left. They wrapped his body in a cloth and used a stretcher to carry it outside.

After they had removed Josh’s body they found a melted five-gallon gasoline container where Josh’s buttocks and upper thighs had been. There was a cell phone in the ashes, and among the ruins was a large birdcage, but no sign of the parrot.

*   *   *

Charlie and Braden died of smoke inhalation, but the “chop injuries” also contributed to their deaths. Charlie was struck on his neck, and Braden was struck on both his head and neck. No determination was made about whether Josh had tried to kill the boys before he started the fire, or only meant to subdue them with the blows. He had scattered the gasoline from one of the five-gallon containers in various rooms of the house; the second one he sat on.

The boys were still alive when the fire began because soot was found in their lungs and esophagi. After striking the boys with the hatchet and laying them side by side on the mattress, Josh poured a mixture of gas and ethanol on them. Since they were still breathing, some went down their throats.

48

I think he must have just felt that there was only one way left to protect his sons from the pain from all the emotional and physical pain that they’ve been experiencing.

—ALINA POWELL, FEBRUARY 9, 2012, TO ABC

The double murder–suicide escalated the animosity between the families. The Powells saw Josh as a victim. The Coxes knew he was a murderer. The comments that caused the most head-scratching were from Alina. During an interview on
Good Morning America
, she portrayed her brother as a martyr, saying he had been “damaged by the lack of due process” and “harassed, abused, and lied about.”

“They were our boys. All three of them,” she said, as she fought off tears.

Alina had the support of an aunt and uncle, Maurice and Patti Leach, and their son Nathan, but no one else. Patti Leach (Steve Powell’s sister), praised Josh for the “restraint, patience and dignity” he displayed during the “ordeal.” They blamed religious bias, “the Internet kangaroo courts,” the news media, and “government agencies’ practices” for pushing Josh to the edge. Josh’s cousin, Nathan, called on the FBI to investigate how Josh had been “cyberbullied” on Facebook, possibly contributing to his decision to kill himself and his children.

Alina said she still didn’t believe that Josh had had a role in Susan’s disappearance.

*   *   *

It was a confession. That’s what the Coxes, the police, and Susan’s friends thought. By killing the boys and himself, Josh was admitting that he had killed Susan. One wouldn’t have happened without the other.

Jennifer and Kirk Graves were in shock. They had visited the Coxes at Thanksgiving and had spent time with Charlie and Braden. With the Coxes’ blessing, they hoped one day to adopt the boys. Chuck and Judy wanted to be grandparents again, not parents to two young children.

Not surprisingly, many people felt rage at Josh. Kiirsi’s husband, John Hellewell, who was Josh’s closest friend, said that the murder-suicide showed that “all he ever thought about was himself.”

Kiirsi was blunt. She was furious with Josh. “If he’s going to take such a cowardly and selfish way out of this, I wish he would have left a note to explain what happened [to Susan].… If he wanted to kill himself, he could have done that, but how dare he do something so horrible, so evil as to murder the boys.”

*   *   *

On the morning after Charlie and Braden were killed, Chuck and Judy walked reporters through the new addition to their home, the room they had built for the boys. The bunk beds had the
Cars
and Spider-Man quilts on them. A stuffed dolphin was at the head of Charlie’s bed. Chuck talked about how Braden loved puzzles, how much he looked like his mother, and how his personality was like hers, “giggly and mischievous.” Charlie was very interested in science, and loved to observe bugs.

Charlie had made a paper snowman and hand-cut paper snowflakes. They were still taped to the window in the bedroom. Judy said that she would keep them, but they would give away some of the toys. They were just too difficult to see.

Most people would pull the curtains and turn off the phone, keeping their grief as private as possible, not invite reporters into their home. But Chuck and Judy had surrendered their privacy two years before in hopes that they would find their daughter. Now they wanted to keep the search for her alive and push for an investigation of Fort Powell.

Chuck almost never heard from the police in Utah. But the day after the fire Chuck got a call from West Valley City Police Chief Buzz Nielsen. He and a couple of detectives were in Puyallup to try to talk to Steve Powell, and to see where Josh had killed the boys. Nielsen had been watching the Super Bowl when he got the call about the fire.

Chief Nielsen wanted to talk to Chuck so they met up at Josh’s storage unit where investigators were looking for clues to the horrific deaths the day before, and to Susan’s disappearance.

The two men were quiet at first, stunned, really, as they looked over the remains of a marriage. The police gave Chuck some of Susan’s personal items, including a sewing kit and a drawing of a dinosaur by Charlie. As the men stood there, it was inescapable. The contents of the storage area held mementos of Josh and Susan’s life together. There were white and red signs proclaiming
SOLD!
from Josh’s washed-up real estate career in Utah, and hundreds of pounds of wheat in bags and plastic drums, along with gallons of water from the time Josh insisted that he and Susan make preparations for hard times—or maybe the end of time.

It was where most of the belongings ended up that Susan had documented in the poignant video she made detailing their “assets.”

Near the front of the locker was a white cardboard box. Chuck noticed it right away. It had “Susan’s Things” written on it, but someone had put a large red X through the words.

Susan was gone. Charlie and Braden were gone. And, of course, Josh, too. A large red X through an entire family.

Chief Nielsen and Chuck returned to the squad car. The veteran cop started to tear up as he spoke. “You were right all along,” he said, referring to Chuck’s warnings that Josh would kill the boys and himself.

As the chief tried unsuccessfully to hold back tears, Chuck wanted to scream: “I know I was right. I didn’t want to be right. How does that help? The boys are still dead. They can’t interrogate a corpse. How can this help find my daughter?”

But Chuck didn’t scream anything. Instead, his anger mixed with compassion.

Nielsen said that the police wanted to find out who had helped Josh get rid of Susan. “The investigation is far from over,” he promised.

“I knew he was talking about Steve and the entire group at Fort Powell—Alina, Mike, and Johnny,” Chuck said later. Chief Nielsen said his department was still determined to find Susan.

Publicly, Chief Nielsen said that they had “strong circumstantial evidence” against Josh and had hoped to file charges later in 2012. He said that Josh had
not
been aware of the progress of the investigation, so fear of arrest could not have been a factor in his killing himself and the kids.

Chuck, however, disagreed.

*   *   *

In Utah, grief counselors at University Hospital in Salt Lake City began to get calls as soon as news spread. People not related to the victims were shaken up, and wanted to know how—or whether—to explain the horrifying crime to their children. A lot of people were furious that Josh had escaped “earthly justice” by taking his own life.

Susan’s friends were among those trying to figure out what to say to their children, who had known Charlie and Braden. Kiirsi had always been candid. “I told them exactly what happened,” she said. “I thought, ‘Am I going to try and sugarcoat this or keep things from them?’ And I said no. Because it has been such a huge part of our lives.”

Debbie Caldwell had not only her own kids to think of, she had a dozen day-care children who had known Braden and Charlie and whose parents had known Susan, Josh, and the boys. Most of the children had seen television coverage of the fire, and were prepared for Debbie to be sad. Debbie and the parents of the younger children decided not to tell them that Josh had killed the boys. “We just told them that the boys died because their house caught on fire,” she said. The older children had heard the terrible details at school. “They were allowed to talk freely and we just answered their questions honestly. We also told them that they will probably never meet another Josh in their lives because not all people are that bad. We have worked hard to help them understand that they are safe and their dads would never hurt them.”

*   *   *

On Monday, the day after the fire, investigators were still at the crime scene. Pierce County sheriff Paul Pastor—a man who had seen his share of shocking events as head of the second-largest sheriff’s department in Washington State—made remarks both direct and emphatic.

“This was something evil,” he told a TV station. “Let’s not refer to this, please, in public, as a tragedy. This was not a tragedy. This is a horrible murder of two little kids. Let’s not dress it up. Let’s not sanitize it. Let’s not distance ourselves from it. It is something wrong. It is something evil. Let’s say that.”

49

His funny, bright, compassionate personality lives on with all of us who knew him.

—JOHN HUSON, CHARLIE’S FIRST-GRADE TEACHER,
FEBRUARY 11, 2012

He had a sharp mind and a big imagination. He was a budding puzzlemaster … with contagious, joyful energy.

—CHRISTIE KING, BRADEN’S PRE-KINDERGARTEN
TEACHER, FEBRUARY 11, 2012

In a steady rain, two white hearses pulled up to Tacoma’s massive Life Center church. One brought the Cox family and the other carried the single casket holding the remains of Charlie and Braden. Rain was appropriate for the day, Saturday, February 11. Many of Susan’s close friends and their husbands and children from Utah had made the trip—Kiirsi, Debbie, Michele, and the Marinis. Some two thousand mourners, mostly strangers, came from all over western Washington. Alina later called it a “publicity service,” rather than a memorial service.

Some of the Powells were there too, but Terri, Alina, and Johnny were seated in the balcony section far from the Coxes and the boys’ casket—a request that they understood, but they felt slighted anyway. Josh’s brother Mike didn’t attend the memorial service. Steve Powell was in jail, and though state law allows an inmate to petition for release to attend a family memorial, Steve had wisely not done so.

Jennifer Graves and her family had made their choice long ago. They sat with the Coxes.

Many of the mourners wore purple ribbons and purple buttons with photos of Susan and her sons as they looked down at the single blue casket blanketed by a spray of flowers punctuated by Gerbera daisies in orange, Braden’s favorite color.

The minister of the Life Center church, Dean Curry, told the gathering that the Cox and Powell families had been drawn together by the tragedy. While Chuck appreciated where the pastor was going with his sentiments, he knew he was wrong about that.

They hadn’t been and never would be.

Judy had her six-year-old granddaughter, Dakota, curled up on her lap. The little girl watched intently, while gripping a white stuffed duck and a pink and purple giraffe.

Country Hollow neighbor Pastor Tim Atkins told a story about praying before meals with the boys, and Charlie’s and Braden’s teachers spoke about how much Charlie loved science and how Braden would leap into his grandparents’ arms when they came to pick him up. A children’s choir sang “Amazing Grace” and a family friend who sold Mary Kay cosmetics with Susan at one time, Dawnette Palmer, sang an LDS hymn, “Our Savior’s Love.”