If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children (34 page)

Josh was never mentioned during the service, and his image didn’t appear in the photo tribute that showed his sons dressed in Halloween costumes as characters from Disney’s
Cars,
and in the arms of their mother and maternal grandparents.

When the time came, Chuck and Judy walked to the front of the sanctuary. Chuck, wearing a dark purple tie, gently touched the casket as he passed by it, then addressed the mourners.

“Throughout this trial we felt the support of so many people around the world,” he said. “We want to express our sincere gratitude. It helps us know there are good people in the world—good people who fight against evil. Everyone was doing everything they possibly could do to keep them safe. We thank you very much. We know they’re with their mother.”

When it was over, Chuck, Susan’s three sisters—Mary, Denise, and Marie—Chuck’s sister Pam, and Kirk Graves acted as pallbearers.

Later that evening, a vigil was held at Josh’s burned-out house. Kiirsi, Debbie, and others loaded into Jennifer and Kirk’s van and drove over. It was a need to be there—to see it, to make it real—that compelled them. But they also wanted to join with others in their grief for the boys. It was raining, as it had been all day, and most of the mourners had left by the time the Graves’ van arrived. As candles flickered, the Utah contingent moved toward the yellow tape of the crime scene barrier with the charred remains of the murder scene on the other side.

They studied the tributes strangers left behind. Stuffed animals, baseball gloves, balls, all sorts of little toys and bundles of supermarket bouquets circled the perimeter of the house.

Kiirsi was among the first to notice dozens of little white cards tucked into the wire fence. Gently, she pulled one out. The others did the same. And as the rain fell around them and blended with the tears on their cheeks they read the notes strangers had written on index cards and scraps of paper.

RIP you beautiful angels. You are now with your mommy again and forever.

In its own way, being there became affirming. While no one could deny evil was on one side of the fence, there was proof of goodness, love, and compassion on the other.

*   *   *

On Sunday there was a private, LDS funeral for Charlie and Braden. That morning, Chuck and Judy sat quietly at the dining room table and tried to eat their usual breakfast of oatmeal. They felt so wounded by everything that had transpired, but they could lean on the strength of their Mormon faith. They knew their family would be reunited once more.

“We’ll be with her and it will be a great reunion,” Chuck said to Judy. “And since we’ve done everything in our power while we’re here to help other people and keep the covenants we made in the temple, we’ll be a family forever.”

Judy spoke through her tears. “And because the boys were so young they’ll go to the Celestial Kingdom and they’ll eventually be reunited with Susan and she’ll be able to raise them.”

Chuck put his hand on his wife’s hand. “Something she didn’t get to do in this life,” he said.

Susan’s parents knew many were speculating about Josh’s soul. Was he in hell? The police, the community, and Susan’s friends—everyone called Josh and his actions evil.

He wasn’t going to get to the Celestial Kingdom, that’s for sure. And he probably wouldn’t reach the Terrestrial Kingdom—home to those who received Jesus but still failed in this life—or even the lowest glory, the Telestial Kingdom, where “liars, sorcerers, whoremongers, and adulterers” go.

“Josh knew what he faced in the afterlife,” Chuck reminded Judy. “He’d had instruction in the temple; he’d been married in the temple. He knew he would suffer more than he ever had in this life.”

“Well, he can’t hurt any of us where he is now—in outer darkness,” Judy said.

*   *   *

On Monday, Chuck and Judy buried their grandsons. The families had to negotiate time to pay their respects at the cemetery. After a graveside service at Woodbine Cemetery, the Coxes left and the Powells arrived for their own service. Then the Coxes returned for the lowering of the casket.

Before it was placed carefully into the muddy earth, Charlie and Braden’s cousins and a few aunts and uncles gathered around and covered the casket with stickers, mostly Spider-Man and other cartoon characters.

No villains, just heroes.

Only the good guys.

There is room in the burial plot for a second casket, for when Susan is found.

*   *   *

The following week word got around that Josh’s family planned to have him buried next to his sons. It wasn’t completely true, although Terri admitted she and Alina had looked at a plot up the hill from the boys. She had dropped those plans. But the rumor snowballed. In one afternoon, a local Crime Stoppers organization—a nonprofit composed of civilians and police officers—with the help of Seattle’s KIRO radio station, raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy the plots on either side of Charlie and Braden to ensure the boys’ murderer could not rest near them. They raised more money than they needed, purchased the plots, and put the remainder of the money aside for future projects.

Chuck and Judy Cox braced themselves for a legal fight. They prepared to file a temporary restraining order to prevent Josh’s family from burying him
anywhere
in Woodbine, the only cemetery in Puyallup.

Chuck even warned Josh’s mother, Terri.

“If you bury Josh there,” he said to her over the phone, “we’ll move the boys and you’ll never know where they are.”

In the end, Josh was cremated. His ashes are—naturally—back home, at his father’s house in Puyallup.

*   *   *

If Chuck and Judy Cox had even thought to hold their breath for Steve Powell to tell the truth about Susan’s disappearance, they’d have long since passed out from lack of oxygen. To the public, they were stoic and strong. But alone, in the house in which Susan had been raised and her sons had stayed while they’d prayed for their mother’s return, both cried a million tears. There were times when it was so painful even to talk about what had happened that the words lodged themselves in their throats. The media was a diversion. The love of friends, family, and strangers, a blessing.

And yet when they could find a moment to talk, a moment when the words weren’t eclipsed by tears, they talked about Susan, and about Steve and what he might know about her whereabouts.

Judy could see no reason for Steve to not disclose what he knew.

“Josh is gone,” she said. “There’s no need to protect him anymore.”

Chuck knew where Judy was going. He could also see the burden being placed on Steve to do the right thing—if ever there was a time in which to do it—was now. His grandsons were dead.

“What would Steve have to lose by telling the police whatever, if anything, he knew about Susan’s disappearance?” Judy asked once more.

She only wanted to know where her daughter was.

Steve, incarcerated in the Pierce County jail, refused to meet with West Valley City police chief Buzz Nielsen, the FBI, and the Pierce County sheriff’s department. Pierce County prosecutors—about to put him on trial for voyeurism and pornography—said they would even consider making a deal with Steve in exchange for information about Susan’s disappearance.

But two days after the fire, sixty-two-year-old Steve exercised his right against self-incrimination and filed a notice in Pierce County Superior Court that he would not speak to law enforcement.

Everyone had hoped that the death of his son and grandsons would soften him up.

It didn’t.

50

I don’t know why he’d think the marriage is worth staying in, I doubt only myself going to counseling would fix “all the problems.”

—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 11, 2008

Nine days after Josh murdered his sons and killed himself, Alina and Mike Powell contacted New York Life Insurance about collecting on the policies for their brother and their nephews. No one—except his brother Mike—knew that Josh had changed his beneficiary, removing Susan’s name and replacing her with his brothers and sister.

The Coxes knew about the $1 million policy Susan and Josh had purchased early in their marriage from Beneficial Life. It had been established as a trust. But the Coxes didn’t know that in June 2007—one month after filing for bankruptcy—Josh and Susan bought another policy, this one from New York Life, worth $2.5 million.

It was just three months later, in the fall of 2007, that Josh told his father that he fantasized about Susan being killed by a drunk driver. When Chuck learned of the big New York Life policy, he called it Josh’s “retirement plan.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind Josh’s plan was to take out the life insurance, she goes missing, and he has her declared dead after six years,” he told Judy.

Because Josh removed Susan’s name as beneficiary, and because Josh could be considered a “slayer,” he (or his family) may not be entitled to the proceeds of the policy. New York Life said it also has concerns regarding his competency at the time he made the changes.

The insurance company decided not to wade into the muck and mire of Fort Powell and asked a Washington court to decide who should get the life insurance money.

*   *   *

Lawyer Anne Bremner is no Barbie doll. It is true that she
looks
like Barbie—slender, long-legged, and blond-haired—a kind of a legal-eagle Barbie brought to life. In a corner of her Seattle office, looking west over Puget Sound, there are several of the famed fashion dolls clad in tiny replicas of the suits Bremner wore in the courtroom in famous cases or as a TV commentator discussing Mary Kay Letourneau, Michael Jackson, Laci Peterson, Casey Anthony, and others.

But anyone who underestimates her learns she is a tough competitor in a courtroom. Since soon after Susan Cox Powell’s disappearance, Bremner worked pro bono for the Cox family. Early on, Chuck and Bremner discussed whether Steve might have had a role in Susan’s disappearance. It seemed to them that Steve’s sexual obsession with her had made him unhinged. They thought he had been nuts for years. Who tells his own children that sometimes people can’t let go and murder a loved one? Steve had twenty years earlier.

A co-worker of Steve’s had e-mailed Bremner a few weeks before Steve’s May 2012 trial, saying that around Thanksgiving 2009, Susan’s father-in-law had told her he was going to Utah to go camping with family. In the middle of winter? she asked. He said yes, it was fun. When he returned a week later, she asked about the trip. Steve told her they roasted marshmallows and sat around the campfire and sang songs. It was cold, but great. She said it was a week or so later that news broke about Susan being missing. When she had another visit with him in mid-December, he didn’t say a word about his daughter-in-law vanishing. Bremner wondered if they could prove Steve had been in Utah. Police were tight-lipped.

Knowing the way “The family” watched out for each other, it was possible that Steve might have been in Utah in the fall, without Susan or her friends knowing it.

The police found credible the reports of a Utah woman who told police that she had seen Steve and Josh in the Topaz Mountain area that fall—the spot where the dogs alerted on charred wood. The woman told police the men were not dressed for the outdoors, said they were looking for crystals, and were not friendly. She didn’t remember or see if there were children in the minivan.

*   *   *

Chuck stared at the debris as he moved slowly through the charred house and around the yard, kicking at the ground gently with the toe of one shoe. It was a couple of days after the funeral.

He was on a treasure hunt, looking for mementoes that might have belonged to his daughter or grandsons.

All he found was a stack of photographs that had barely survived the fire, the firemen’s hoses, and the weather since February 5.

The pictures had water damage and more than a few were scorched and melted together. Among them was a photo of Susan and Josh dancing at their wedding reception, and Josh at his graduation from junior college. But there were no photos of their nearly eight years of marriage. There were no pictures of Charlie and Braden, and none of Josh and Susan’s life in Utah except for one—a photo of what appeared to be the W. Sarah Circle house with two rose bushes in bloom near the front door.

All the other photographs were of family holidays with Chuck wearing a Santa hat; Susan with her teenage girlfriends; Susan hugging her nieces and nephews and dreaming of the day she would be a mother.

It was her life as if she had never married Josh.

51

This is a case about a secret. A secret that Steve Powell kept hidden until August 25, 2011.

—PIERCE COUNTY DEPUTY PROSECUTOR
BRYCE NELSON, MAY 9, 2012

It wouldn’t have mattered if Steve Powell’s trial started at 5:00
A.M.
, Chuck and Judy Cox could barely sleep and were wide awake and ready to face him down in court. The family, including Chuck’s sister, Pam, and his mother Anne, ate a breakfast of oatmeal and cold cereal, mostly in silence. All had speculated about what the day might bring, but that morning they were inching toward—they hoped and prayed—some kind of truth. They piled into Chuck’s decade-old dark green Ford Windstar and drove south to Tacoma around 7:30
A.M.
They didn’t wear buttons with Susan’s picture. There were no
MISSING
posters to hand out. They didn’t do anything to call attention to themselves.

They were there because they
needed
to be. Not because it was part of some media event designed to put the spotlight back on Susan’s case, but because there was a chance that Steve Powell on trial for
anything
might give them new details.

And maybe new leads.

Before the jury was seated, Judge Ronald E. Culpepper threw out the pornography charge against Steve after defense attorneys argued it required proof that Steve “initiated, contributed to, or in any way influenced the victims’ conduct”—something prosecutors couldn’t prove. Then the judge barred the evidence related to Susan from being presented, saying that the journals and photos were not relevant to the charges against Steve. The judge upheld as proper the search warrant that had led to the raid of Steve’s house the preceding summer.