Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (10 page)

But then Steven changed his mind. He called Deputy U.S. Marshal Spencer and said that neither he nor Josh was interested in releasing Susan’s writings to the police, and that they didn’t intend to cooperate with the investigators any longer.

Josh had begun a website called susanpowell.org within a week or so of Susan’s vanishing. Now he and his father began to post excerpts from her journals going back to 1999, when she was in her mid-teens. They chose sections when Susan and her best friend, Brittainy Cornett, complained about their parents—not uncommon for teenagers—or wrote about crushes they had.

Josh and Steven were clearly setting out to destroy not only Susan’s image—but her family’s, too.

Rather than worry about Susan’s fate or trying to find her, both Josh and Steven Powell became more nasty in degrading her. They posted a link to a journal entry they believed Susan had written about Judy Cox, detailing what she considered “abuse.” As it turned out, Susan hadn’t written that at all: Brittainy had jotted it into Susan’s journal when she was upset with
her
mother.

In November 2010,
Salt Lake Tribune
reporter Nate Carlisle managed to obtain an interview with Josh, who had been avoiding the media
and
the police for almost a year. Now, he told the
Tribune
that Susan was an “extremely unstable” woman and that her mental illness had caused her to abandon him and their sons. The only way to get her to come back would be for the story of her disappearance to be dropped. As it was, he opined that she would probably be too embarrassed to face public opinion.

Josh blamed Susan’s family for her running away. They had always wanted her to be perfect, he said, “A saint with no fallibility.”

He told Carlisle that his wife’s family had to stop lying about him and learn to accept Susan’s flaws.

“She doesn’t have as much strength as they think she does,” he said, with tears in his eyes. But Josh insisted she was “a good person, and a good wife, and a good mother.”

Josh kept to the same story he’d given all along, reminding readers that it hadn’t been cold in his van that night, since he had purchased a generator and a heater only two weeks before. Josh was sure that Susan had gone with him to buy the generator. He couldn’t remember the name of the store, however.

Steven Powell backed his son up. He dismissed the damp carpet and couch in his son’s home. Susan had been cleaning them. As for the red splotch, he said it was “probably juice or something.”

Josh Powell said he wouldn’t talk to the West Valley City police again; there was no point. Steven described his missing daughter-in-law as a woman who was “very sexually and financially motivated.” He said she told her friends about many sexual adventures before she married Josh.

How Steven Powell could possibly know what Susan had told her friends was a mystery. But as time passed, Josh’s father would hint more and more broadly that he and Susan were sexually involved. It became clear that Steven was unnaturally obsessed with his daughter-in-law, just as Susan had told Kiirsa Hellewell.

Susan Powell’s disappearance might have been dismissed by her husband and father-in-law, but no one else forgot it.

*   *   *

Another new year arrived: 2011. No one had seen or heard from Susan Powell, and any paper trail she might possibly have left was nonexistent.

A long time after the fact, Robin Snyder, who worked in a Comfort Inn motel in Sandy, Utah, which is about sixteen miles south of West Valley City, had tried to contact detectives about a troubling incident on December 7, 2009, but no one had returned her call to a tip line. More than two years later, she tried once more to report what she had seen and heard.

“This man and his two little boys came into our complimentary breakfast buffet at the inn,” Robin said. “I work there—help filling up the coffeepots, put out fruit and rolls, juice and that sort of thing. When I got to work about 6:30 that morning, they were sitting at a table.”

One of the little boys had looked up at Robin and asked: “Do you know what happened to my mom?”

“No,” she’d replied. “What happened to your mom?”

The man, who she assumed was their father, kept his face averted as she talked to the older boy. But before he could answer, another guest asked for more coffee. When Robin Snyder turned back, she saw the man hustling the boys out the door to the parking lot. Later, she recognized images of the Powell family as the story broke on television, and said there was no doubt that they were the father and sons she had seen in the Comfort Inn.

The Cox family’s vow to keep Susan’s memory alive was working. Everyone in America seemed to recognize Josh, Charlie, and Braden Powell.

“The boys didn’t even get to eat their sweet rolls,” Robin Snyder recalled. “They all left, all of a sudden.” It had seemed at first as though the child had been telling her a joke, or about some incident involving his mother. She hadn’t taken his question in a literal sense. But now she wondered if he was indeed asking her where his mother was. Maybe he didn’t
know
what had happened to his mother.

Worse, maybe he did. She decided that she would have to go to the West Valley City police in person and tell them about the incident.

*   *   *

During that brief encounter in the Comfort Inn, it couldn’t have been more than seven or eight hours since Josh supposedly left the house to take Charlie and Braden camping, and only about five or six hours since the sick neighbor woman on West 3945 South had overheard a couple arguing outside her window, and a vehicle racing away.

Had Josh really gone on a freezing camping trip—or had he gone into the desert on a macabre errand, accomplished it, and then checked into the motel with his boys? Maybe he hadn’t even registered at the motel, but had pretended they were guests there to establish an alibi for the hours in between.

The latter seemed likely. Charlie and Braden were older in 2011 and in the two years since their mother left their home, they were becoming much more verbal. For months Braden had said, “Mommy’s in the mine,” although he gave few details. At one point he suggested, “Maybe my mommy was looking for crystals.”

Hunting for crystals
was
something Susan liked to do when they went camping in the west desert in good weather. Charlie and Braden could be confused about
when
they went camping. But as he grew older, Braden gave more details. Later he tried to explain what happened that frigid night to Steve Downing, one of the attorneys who represented Susan’s family.

“We went camping,” he said. “Mommy was in the trunk. Mommy and Dad got out and then Mommy disappeared.”

Braden was also a talented young artist and he drew lots of pictures at YMCA summer camp. One was chilling. It was of the Powells’ minivan. Josh was driving, and Charlie and Braden were in the backseat.

But Susan was in the trunk.

“Why was your mommy in the trunk?” Braden was asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know. My mom and dad got out, but my mom got lost.”

Whether his sons said anything to Josh about what they remembered, no one knows. If they had, that might account for what appeared to be the exacerbation of his nervousness. The bags under his eyes were puffier, and his whole face drooped.

Despite their earlier support of Josh, the Cox family had long since come to believe that Josh had, indeed, hurt Susan and almost certainly killed her. It was a stab in their hearts every time Charlie talked about his mommy being “lost.”

Chuck, particularly, vowed to keep the search for her before the public, and appeared on nationwide network shows as well as local shows. Susan’s photos became familiar to millions of people. And yet no one reported any sightings of her that seemed to fit.

Susan had left absolutely no paper trail, and she hadn’t called anyone. If she was alive someplace in the world, it had been impossible to trace her whereabouts.

In the summer of 2011, Josh and Steven Powell continued their campaign to convince the public that Susan had a sordid past.

On July 14, Josh and Steven appeared on the
Today
show on NBC. They bragged that they were in possession of two thousand pages of Susan’s journal entries. During their interview, the cameras panned over a laptop computer in the background so the viewing audience could glimpse Susan’s handwriting in red and blue ink. Josh and Steven even allowed the show technicians to reveal some of the sections that Susan had written.

Steven told the media that Susan’s journals were very important because she had detailed her relationships with many men and wrote about her “sexual fantasies.” He all but crowed as he said he and his son would be releasing more and more of Susan’s diary pages, and also upload them to the website they had set up in an effort to locate her.

It was ridiculous; most of Susan’s “relationships with men” entries were about girlish crushes, and not even vaguely titillating.

Detectives Gary Sanders and Ellis Maxwell were very concerned by the obstructive behavior Josh and Steven were demonstrating. They wouldn’t share Susan’s journals with the law enforcement departments who were desperately trying to locate her, but they were prepared to pick and choose from her personal thoughts and post them for the world to see.

Steven Powell and his children believed that they were within their rights as they castigated Susan. They had not shown one scintilla of concern about her fate, but that may well have been part of Steven and Josh’s insistence that she had run off with the man who went missing in Utah/Nevada about the same time she did.

The missing man—Steven Koecher, thirty, of St. George, Utah—hadn’t been seen since December 13, 2009. His car was found parked in a cul-de-sac in a posh neighborhood in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas. Wrapped Christmas presents were in the car. A security camera in a nearby home snapped frames of a man resembling Koecher walking away from that vehicle. Koecher’s mother told reporters that he hadn’t known Susan Powell. The
only
connection they had was the proximity of the dates they vanished, and Steven and Josh Powell had seized upon that coincidence to add weight to their espoused theory that Susan had run off with another man.

Koecher is still missing as this is written. In the last year, his mother has been widowed and has lost her father to death, but she still keeps her Christmas tree lit year-round, hoping that her son will return. Koecher is blond, blue-eyed, and five feet, eleven inches tall.

Aware that public opinion wasn’t on their side, Steven Powell claimed
he
had no idea why his family was unpopular. “Why don’t people try to get to know us?” Steven asked rhetorically. “If they did, I think they’d like us.”

Perhaps. Perhaps they would not have.

Steven’s comments about how sexually involved he had been with his daughter-in-law became more snide and sickening. He actually told reporters that Susan was an “exhibitionist” who sometimes appeared partially undressed in front of him, that she flirted with him. In an interview with KOMO-TV in Seattle, he described his relationship with her as clearly romantic—and physical, stopping just short of saying they had been intimate.

If only in his own mind.

This, of course, warred with what Susan had told her closest girlfriends and her sister Denise. Steven Powell had made her skin crawl.

Chuck Cox had reportedly heard that the West Valley City police expected to arrest Josh Powell in the summer of 2011, but it was the middle of August and Josh, Charlie, and Braden were still living with Steven.

No arrests had taken place.

*   *   *

Since 2009, Chuck Cox had appeared on more than forty television and radio shows, including
Good Morning America, Today, Dr. Phil,
and
Larry King Live,
to fulfill his promise to his daughter that he would “shout her name from the rooftops” until she was found, and he wasn’t about to stop.

On August 20, 2011, Chuck and Judy, along with members of their family and friends, stood in the Fred Meyer mega-store parking lot in Puyallup and handed out fliers with Susan’s photo and announced to shoppers that their daughter and sister was still missing.

Suddenly Chuck Cox and Steven Powell met head-on. It was definitely not a friendly encounter. Steven confronted Chuck and began shouting that he was deliberately embarrassing the Powell family at the store where they shopped. That was true about the Fred Meyer store, but it was also the store where Chuck and Judy shopped regularly, too.

Fred Meyer employees knew Josh Powell well; he was a problem customer, and clerks dreaded seeing him entering the store.

“He’s always complaining,” a department manager said later. “Nothing suits him, he returns stuff—and I think everybody who works here knows him.”

But the conflict in their parking lot had nothing whatsoever to do with Fred Meyer—“Freddie’s,” as north westerners call it. It was strictly between Chuck Cox and Steven Powell, and television reporters rapidly got word of it and clustered around them.

Steven Powell accused Chuck Cox of humiliating his family, warning people against them—especially against Josh—and he was dismissive of any suggestion that Susan had come to harm.

As he and Josh had been doing of late, Steven Powell smeared her reputation and continued in his monologue about how she had run off with another man, leaving his poor son to grieve.

A few minutes later, Josh came driving up and joined them. Tears ran down his face as he maintained his stance as a cuckolded husband, left to raise two small boys alone, reviled by the public because of what his father-in-law was saying.

Chuck Cox was angry; he had held his temper for twenty-one months, waiting and hoping for word of his precious daughter. Now he reminded Steven Powell that he was the one breaking a restraining order by showing up and interrupting them as they handed out fliers. He was clearly more in control of the situation than either Steven or Josh was, but he was upset, too.

There seemed to be a disconnect of empathy on the Powells’ part as their voices rose. Beyond Josh’s showing up at the December 2009 vigil shortly after Susan vanished, neither he nor his father had demonstrated any concern for her family’s pain.