Killer Dads (22 page)

Figure 11.1. A handbill seeks the public's help in locating Susan Cox Powell after she vanished from her home in West Valley City, Utah, before Christmas in 2009.
Courtesy of Charles and Judy Cox.

The following day, Josh showed up for a second police interview four hours late. He offered the same account of events, and he didn't bother asking if police had made any progress in the search for Susan. He abruptly ended the interview and announced that he planned to speak to an attorney. That evening, Josh drove to the Salt Lake City International Airport to rent a car and made an 800-mile mystery trip over the next two days. His cooperation with police was over.

Charlie, then four years old, told detectives that “his mother went camping” with the family, but “for some reason she stayed at the campsite and didn't come back home with them,” according to the police report. A waitress told police that when the family came into her West Valley diner the night Susan went missing, Charlie asked her if she knew where his mom was. Weeks later, he would tell a daycare worker “with no emotion and with no hesitation, ‘My mom is dead,'” after the worker threatened to contact his parents because he was misbehaving, Chuck Cox told me. Charlie also explained at one point that “mommy was in the trunk” in a picture of a car he had drawn, a teacher told his grandparents.

Investigators quickly learned about the couple's marital problems. Three co-workers told police that Susan had told them that “if anything were to happen to her, they were to give police a file that she had hidden from her husband.” Detectives also found a safe-deposit key in Susan's purse that led them to a letter in a lock box addressed to her family and friends, titled the “Last Will and Testament for Susan Powell,” dated in 2008. She asked that whoever opened the note not show it to her husband because she didn't trust him, and that “he has threatened to destroy her if they get divorced and her children will not have a mother and father,” said the police case report. She added: “If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one.”

Police quickly suspected Susan's disappearance was a kidnapping and homicide, and Josh looked like their man—but investigators didn't have a body. Josh told a co-worker at a company Christmas party the previous year “that in order to get away with murder, he would hide a body in a mineshaft in the west desert of Utah,” stated a search-warrant affidavit. “He believed he could hide this from law enforcement as they would never search an unstable mine.” Within days, Josh was making arrangements to pack up his home and get out of Utah. A week after Susan vanished, Josh contacted the head of Charlie and Braden's daycare center to say that the “children would not be coming back,” and that the teacher “probably will not ever see them again,” according to a police report. The following day, Powell canceled all of his wife's chiropractor appointments. Two days later, he drained Susan's IRA. Police discovered that in the months leading to Susan's disappearance, Josh had taken out a $1 million life-insurance policy on his wife and
$250,000 each on Charlie and Braden. Just weeks after his wife's disappearance, before Christmas, Josh Powell and the boys moved back in with his dad and adult siblings Alina, John, and Michael in Puyallup.

But Josh wasn't safe from the investigation, as West Valley police continued to search for Susan and investigate his activities. In May, Utah detectives and police from Pierce County in Washington carried out a search of Steven Powell's home, where Josh was still living with the kids, and discovered a stunning, kinky twist in the case. Investigators discovered a cache of “multiple images” of Susan Powell, including several of her in her underwear, which appeared to have been snapped surreptitiously while she was in the bathroom during the time Susan and Josh lived in the home with Josh's dad to save money early in their marriage. Police also found images of nude women with Susan's face pasted over their heads, and photos of Steven Powell masturbating in front of images of Susan projected onto a television screen. Powell admitted to investigators that he took the photos himself or took copies of photographs from Josh's computer without his son's knowledge.

Steven told police that he and his daughter-in-law were in love, and that she was “very sexual” toward him—but that she had emphasized to him that their “flirtatious relationship could never be in the open due to her Mormon religion,” investigators revealed. He had urged his son and daughter-in-law to move back in with him in Washington, where Susan could serve as a wife to both men. “My biggest problem as well as my greatest pleasure lies in the fact that for over a year I have been madly in love with my daughter-in-law, Susan,” Steven Powell wrote in some 2,000 pages of personal journals Washington police would later recover in his Puyallup home in a second search. “What has driven me is primarily lust. I have never lusted for a woman as I have for Susan,” he noted. “I take chances sometimes to take video clips of her, which I watch regularly. She is an amazing woman. I hope I am right, that she is in love with me, but of course there is the problem of her being married to my son.” He wrote of taking photos of his daughter-in-law using mirrors to see her in the bathroom, and admitted many would find such behavior “sick.” It's “what might be considered sociopathic. I mean, who looks under the bathroom door with a mirror?” he wondered in his
journals. He raged when the couple moved from Washington to Utah. “I am now going crazy with desire for her, but I do not regret any of it,” he wrote. He referred often to his son's deteriorating marriage, and how poorly Josh treated Susan. “Theirs is truly a marriage made in hell,” he wrote. “It's hard to believe that two people could be so nasty to each other.” He didn't believe, however, that they would ever break up because Josh was financially dependent on Susan, and she desperately wanted to save the marriage.

Figure 11.2. Charlie poses for the last school photo of his life. He would later die in a home explosion and fire set off by his dad, Josh Powell.
Courtesy of Charles and Judy Cox.

Still, he fantasized he had a chance with Susan. “I wasn't going to turn down an opportunity with this beautiful woman, even though she was my son's wife,” Powell said in a televised interview.
2
Detectives discovered in
pages from Susan's journal that she kept stashed at her Wells Fargo office that she was, in fact, disgusted by Steven Powell. She described him as a “negative influence” on Josh, and a “pedophile,” and talked of “how hard it is for her to forgive Steven Powell for what he has said,” recounted the police report. “Susan states she does not want Steve Powell involved in her life, her children's life, and how she wishes Josh Powell would eliminate Steven Powell from his life. There were no positive writings about Steven Powell in Susan Powell's journal.” Friends said the couple's move to Utah was triggered by Susan's disgust with her father-in-law and her desperation to flee his attention.

As troubling as Susan's photos found in Steven Powell's bedroom were, police also found images of popular cartoon characters having incestuous sex with adults on a laptop belonging to Josh. Despite concerns by social workers, Charlie and Brandon remained in the sole custody of Josh. He zealously guarded the boys from Susan's parents and didn't allow them to visit their grandsons.

As the investigation into Susan's disappearance continued, Steven and Josh forged an ugly new narrative of Susan. It was a skewed, paranoid perspective of his wife that Josh had nurtured in his mind over the years of a flirty, mentally unstable, over-sexed woman with a wandering eye who had “utter contempt” for him. Josh and his dad told reporters that Susan likely ran away with a man from West Valley who had vanished two months before she did and that they married in Brazil. In media interviews, Josh appeared angry and disdainful of his wife. “She's a very sexual person,” he said in one TV appearance. He and his dad claimed to have Susan's teenage journals proving she was preoccupied with sex, and they threatened to print them.

As difficult as it was for them to believe, Susan's parents soon became convinced that their daughter had been murdered by Josh with the knowledge, if not the help or instigation, of Steven Powell. Like Josh, Steven had failed to show up for work the day Susan vanished and the following day. The Coxes were horrified that Josh, the prime suspect in Susan's disappearance, retained sole custody of their grandsons. They spoke out in the media against the situation and challenged Josh's custody of the boys as West Valley police continued to investigate Susan's disappearance.

In August 2011, investigators executed another search warrant in Steven Powell's home, seeking “love songs” he had boasted to the press he had written to his daughter-in-law, as well as the diaries written by Susan he claimed to have. That's when they uncovered his own journals stretching back ten years, and an additional thousands of photos, not only of Susan, but also of women whose pictures were snapped surreptitiously and filed under topics such as “skirts,” “through the bathroom” and “breasts.” Among the photos were pictures taken from Steven Powell's bedroom of two sisters next door, ages eight and nine, through their window into their bathroom as the girl took baths, changed, and sat on the toilet. Within days, Washington's Pierce County sheriff's deputies arrested Steven Powell, and he was charged with voyeurism and child pornography.

After their paternal grandfather was busted, Braden and Charlie were removed from his house to a foster home, then placed with Susan's parents. A psychological evaluation was ordered for Josh, though the findings underscored that “Joshua Powell has not been charged with any crime related to either his wife's disappearance or related to the charges with which his father is currently in custody.” However, the assessment noted, Powell “is currently the only person of interest in his wife's murder.” Officials were further troubled by the fact that Steven Powell had spoken publicly about his sexual obsession with his daughter-in-law, yet Josh stayed with his sons in his father's home. “When asked if he would have turned in his father if he did have knowledge of child pornography, Joshua Powell hesitantly replied: ‘Only if it were a threat to children,'” the evaluation noted. Josh instead seemed “fixated on his in-laws and what he perceives as their unjust vendetta again him.” The report also touched on a disturbing drawing by Charlie Powell showing a child stick figure bending over as an apparent adult figure stands behind him, evocative of a sexual assault. The image is crossed over with a large
X
and the words: “Don't play with me.” Charlie was reluctant to discuss the drawing in therapy and insisted neither of the figures in the drawing was him. “Charlie continues to state he doesn't have friends, doesn't want friends, likes to do stuff alone when he is at school,” the psychologist's report stated.

The social-service department was also “concerned” by various
statements made by the boys and their dad. “Charles and Braden have been heard, during the short time they were in foster care, making statements about ‘Mormons trying to steal them,' ‘Mormons trying to harm them,' and that they ‘hate Jesus.' Given the children's age, it would seem that these ideas were not generated of their own mind/opinion,” the report stated. Charlie also “told school personnel how to kill an animal and cover it up so that it couldn't be discovered.”