The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell

A solid, if somewhat pedestrian, overview of a case involving psychological abuse, sexual obsession, and murder

I want Josh to be with his boys, but I am also angry with him for murdering such a beautiful woman. She had her problems, and communication was a huge one. But she did not deserve to have her life ended at 28. That he could do such a thing once suggests that he could do it again. If things go too badly, he could murder the boys and hang himself to avoid going to prison.

- Steve Powell

Journal entry (December 8, 2009)

Every day that I was a part of the investigation, I was flabbergasted that we weren't getting support from the District Attorney's Office to go put handcuffs on this individual or to legally employ or put into play some sort of legal avenue that we could compel him to give us the answers to the questions we were asking. There was enough circumstantial evidence, I believe, to indict, and if they would have went to trial without the body, I firmly believe that any jury in any state anywhere in this country would have convicted him.

- Derryl Spencer, US Marshal

"The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell Bonus: Circumstantial Evidence"

When I started this podcast, I was well-aware of the fact that there's a hashtag that Susan's friends have been using since the very beginning, which is #FindSusan. That's a call to action, but I've also come to realise that, at least for myself, #FindSusan isn't just talking for me about physically locating Susan Powell's remains. As a reporter covering the story, I didn't know her, I never met her in real life, I didn't know the kids. But in doing the research, in some way, I feel like I've found Susan. I know who she is and what mattered to her, why so many people cared about her when she disappeared. So finding Susan, and helping other people find Susan, and recognising that her example has power, those are pretty important things.

- Dave Cawley

Facebook Live Q&A (February 1, 2019)

Sometime between 5:00pm on December 6, 2009 and 8:00am on December 7, 28-year-old mother of two Susan Powell disappeared from the home she shared with her husband Josh and their children in West Valley City, Utah. She remains missing to this day, no one has ever been charged in connection with the crime, and although the case is still officially open, West Valley police (WVPD) declared it cold in May 2013. It's generally assumed that Susan was murdered and disposed of by Josh, but her exact fate is unknown. He was declared a person of interest within hours of her being reported missing and was the only suspect the police ever had, although he doggedly maintained his innocence despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence. However, as anybody who knows anything about this case will tell you, this brief overview of the main facts doesn't even begin to hint at the dark underbelly – which includes incest porn, stalking, sexual obsession, the secret filming of minors, domestic abuse, financial control, religious hatred, and some of the worst music you've ever heard in your life.

Created, executive produced, and directed by James Buddy Day, The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell, which aired on Oxygen in North America and Sky Crime in the UK and Ireland, is a fine introduction to the subject, although it had the somewhat unfortunate luck of airing right in the middle of Cold: Susan Powell Case Files - The Untold Story, an exhaustively researched and staggeringly comprehensive podcast by Dave Cawley, an investigative reporter for KSL NewsRadio in Salt Lake City, Utah, although I think unilateral comparisons between the show and the podcast are a little unfair (the two-part show is under four hours, whereas the podcast is over 20, and that's not counting the various Facebook Live Q&As, the live show, and various other releases). And certainly, if you've already listened to Cold, you'll find very little of interest in Disappearance (except for the presence of one, admittedly important, interviewee who didn't respond to Cawley's invitations for an interview – more on her later). Going in the other direction though, if you know very little about the case, Disappearance is a very decent overview and introduction and should tell you whether or not you're interested enough before facing the more daunting deep dive of the podcast. It's got some noticeable aesthetic problems and makes a few rather ridiculous claims, but it's comprehensive, clear, and inclusive. And, just like Cold, it ultimately comes to focus on the years-in-the-making tragedy of Susan Powell and the fact that not all domestic abuse leaves bruises.

Susan Cox and Josh Powell met in 2000 at a singles ward in Puyallup, Washington (a singles ward is, in essence, a Church-organised meet-and-greet for single members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) between the ages of 18 and 30). Josh and Susan knew of one another through her sister Mary, in whom Josh had been interested until she turned him down, and two months after meeting, they were engaged. Susan came from a devout LDS family, but Josh's background was more fraught; his father Steve had left the church in the 1980s, leading him and his wife Terri to divorce in 1992. In court documents, Steve accused her of practising "witchcraft and devil worship," whilst she claimed he was obsessed with porn, exposing his children to it (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) on multiple occasions. Josh and Susan were married in 2001 and moved in with Steve in 2002, where it quickly became apparent that Steve had grown obsessed with his daughter-in-law, for whom he had written multiple songs. Although it was unknown at the time, Steve had taken to secretly filming Susan in public, and would often film himself masturbating to prior footage he'd taken of her. He would also keep items of hers that he had fished out of the trash, including used cotton balls, lipstick, panties, and toenail and hair clippings, and he had secretly read her journals. In 2003, he confessed his feelings to Susan, who firmly rejected him, but within hours, he'd convinced himself that she hadn't rejected him at all and that she was obviously in love with him.

In 2004, Josh and Susan moved to West Valley City, primarily to get away from Steve. They had two sons, Charlie (b. 2005) and Braden (b. 2007), but by 2008, the marriage was falling apart. Seemingly unable to hold down a job for more than a few weeks, Josh had become increasingly controlling, especially financially, giving Susan less than $100 a week to shop for the four of them, and reprimanding her if she bought a more expensive brand of anything, even if the difference was only a few cents. And whilst he would routinely shell out hundreds of dollars for tools and computer equipment he didn't need, he was so tight with money that Susan had to start "borrowing" hotdogs from friends to feed her children. In a Facebook message to friend, she wrote,

he's mainly emotionally, verbally, and financially abusive. Basically I'm a single mother with this guy that lives with me and dictates to me what I can do in my spare time and takes my paycheck and spends the money

It later emerged that Josh had taken out a $1.5 million life insurance policy on Susan in 2008. Although Susan remained committed to her faith, Josh had followed Steve's path and largely rejected the LDS. As part of her religious beliefs, Susan was aghast at the prospect of divorce, but she recognised that things couldn't continue the way they were. In June 2008, on the advice of a divorce lawyer, she shot a video in which she went through the contents of the house, so that "if something happens to me, or my family, or all of us, our assets are documented." Police found the video in a safety deposit box along with a handwritten will in which she wrote,

I have been having extreme marital stress for about 3 or 4 years now. For mine & my children's safety, I feel the need to leave a papertrail @ work which would not be accessible to my husband […] I want it documented somewhere that there is extreme turmoil in our marriage. He has threatened to "skip the country", and told me straight out, "if we divorce, there will be no lawyers, only a mediator, and I will ruin you. I would be ruined too, but you would be destroyed and your life would be over and the boys will not grow up with a mom and dad." If something happens to me, please talk to my sister-in-law, Jenny Graves, my friend Kiirsi Hellewell, check my blogs on MySpace, check my work desk, talk to my friends, co-workers and family. […] If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one. Take care of my boys. I want my parents, Judy and Chuck Cox, very involved and in charge of their lives

The will was accompanied with a note reading, "for the family, friends of Susan, all except for Josh Powell, husband, I don't trust him!" Clearly, Susan feared the worst.

On the morning of Monday, December 7, 2009, the entire family was reported missing when the boys weren't dropped off at day-care and family and friends were unable to reach either Josh or Susan. Police broke into the home, finding it empty, but with no signs of a struggle, although they noted two fans blowing on a specific part of the couch, which had recently been cleaned. Trace amounts of what would later be confirmed as Susan's blood were also found on a tile in the kitchen. That afternoon, Josh and the boys suddenly reappeared, with Josh explaining he'd taken the boys camping the previous night and had been out of phone range when people had been trying to reach him. Claiming to have left the house at 12:30 am, with temperatures well below freezing and a storm nearby, he said that when he last saw her, Susan was asleep in bed. He was quickly declared a person of interest but despite hours of interviews and multiple searches of his minivan and the house, WVPD were unable to find any hard evidence linking him to the disappearance. In January 2010, he and the boys moved back in with Steve in Puyallup. Based on comments Josh had made to co-workers, police spent weeks searching disused mineshafts in the West Desert, but ultimately found nothing. Later that month, Josh's sister Jennifer suggested to police that she wear a wire and try to compel Josh to confess to killing Susan. At a family dinner, she took him aside but was unable to get him to admit anything. After a huge argument with Josh and Steve, Jennifer and her husband Kirk left, with Jennifer tearfully exclaiming, "my God, he killed her" as they drove away. She later explained she had seen his guilt in his eyes.

Meanwhile, in September 2011, Steve was arrested and charged after police discovered hundreds of hours of footage he'd recorded of women and girls without their knowledge, including videos and photos of his two eight-year-old neighbours, who he'd filmed from his window to theirs as they did such things as prepare to shower. As a result, he was convicted of 14 counts of voyeurism and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison (charges related to the possession of child porn were thrown out). As Josh and the boys were living with Steve at the time of his arrest, the boys were temporarily removed from Josh's custody and given to Susan's parents, although Josh was allowed supervised visitation. When images of bestiality and animated incest and child porn were found on a computer taken from his and Susan's home, Josh was ordered by the court to submit to a psychosexual evaluation and risk assessment, which would include a polygraph. Apparently believing that he wouldn't pass, and would thus lose the boys, on a supervised visit on February 5, 2012, Josh locked the social worker out of the home he was renting, bludgeoned his seven and five-year-old sons to death, and set the property on fire, dying in the subsequent explosion. In February 2013, Josh's brother Michael, who authorities believe helped Josh dispose of Susan's body, committed suicide by throwing himself from the roof of a building in Minneapolis. Shortly thereafter, WVPD declared the case cold. In October 2014, after the child porn charge was reinstated, the recently-released Steve was rearrested and sentenced to five years. He was released in July 2017 and died in July 2018 from heart failure. Susan has yet to be located or declared dead.

Hosted by Stephanie Bauer, Disappearance features most of the main participants in the case, with interviewees including Chuck and Judy Cox, Denise Ernest (Susan's sister), Jennifer Graves (Josh's sister), Det. Ellis Maxwell (WVPD lead detective), Det. Gary Sanders and Det. Ed Troyer (Pierce County PD), Derryl Spencer (US Marshal), Paul Pastor (Pierce County Sheriff), Dr. James Manley (Josh's court-appointed psychologist), Kiirsi Hellewell and Tara Allred (Susan's friends), Jovanna Owings (neighbour and the last person to see Susan alive), Jenn Oxborrow (Executive Director of the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition), Kirk Graves (Jennifer's husband), Meg Wade (Charlie and Braden's babysitter), Rose Winquist (Cox family PI), Anne Bremner (Cox family attorney), Elizabeth Hudson (Cox family investigative researcher), Chris Jones (KUTV), Ben Winslow (KSTU), and Nate Carlisle (Salt Lake Tribune).

The person who appears here who isn't in Cold is Alina Powell, Josh's sister. Unlike Jennifer, Alina is convinced of her brother's innocence and maintains that the police painted her father's actions in an overly negative light. Her involvement is the one thing the show has over Cold, if for no other reason than it shows the lengths of self-deception to which people are willing to go to defend loved ones. Hers is the only voice in the "Josh is innocent" camp, meaning it's an important addition in terms of balance, which is something that Cold does lack. As Alina points out, she has lost a lot – two brothers (both to suicide), a father, a sister (Jennifer is estranged from the surviving Powell family), a sister-in-law, and two nephews, and whilst one does feel for her in this respect, her attempts to defend Josh and Steve are absurd. For example, in the months after Susan's disappearance, Josh and Steve advocated a theory that she eloped to Brazil with a lover, Steve Koecher, a 30-year-old man who disappeared from Henderson, Nevada a few days before Susan disappeared from West Valley City. As part of this theory, they attempted to portray Susan as sexually aggressive and psychologically volatile, with Steve arguing that she would lead him on. Although the elopement theory has been thoroughly debunked, Alina believes that Susan really did lead Steve on, referring to "the version of Susan that the cops don't want the world to see" (a "version" which not a single other person corroborates). Concerning Steve's filming of the neighbourhood girls, Alina states,

there was never any photo dissemination, there was never anything that really led to them suffering a harm, no intimidation, or stalking, or harassment, or threats. There was nothing to say that he had ever tried to do anything to anybody. It was all pictures through an open window. If people are visible, they're visible. If you choose to be visible, people can see you. It's crappy and it's inappropriate but that's not what they made him out to be, they made him out to be some kind of monster

Yep, because secretly shooting eight-year-olds as they prepare to shower is definitely not monstrous. Alina also refers to the police investigations into Susan's disappearance as a "harassment campaign to damage our family that we'll never recover from". She has the second part right.

On that subject, the show does a good job of establishing just how screwed up the Powell family was. One of the first things we hear Steve say is, "she's the most beautiful thing that ever walked the earth", and later he states, "God, I worship her. She just turns me on. I'm in a perpetual state of turned on when she's around". Remember, this is a 58-year-old man talking about his then 26-year-old daughter-in-law as he secretly films her – a man so delusional that he convinces himself that Susan knows he's filming, and when she reaches down to scratch her leg as she gets into her car, she's actually 'performing' for his camera. As Det. Sanders says whilst showing Bauer through Steve's collection of Susan's trash, "he had a deviant mind and an evil intent". And the creepiness of the songs he recorded (under the name Steve Chantrey) is matched only by how laughably bad they are and how delusional he was about their quality – he firmly believed that the warbling "Light of Seattle" had the potential to become the Seattle equivalent of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" (1971) or "New York, New York" (1977).

It's not just Steve that the show paints in a negative light, however. Early on, Hellewell recalls her first impressions of Josh – "he was very, very loud, very overbearing. His opinions were the only ones, and he was very obsessive" – whilst Judy Cox recalls a particular conversation with Susan prior to her marrying Josh; "I said, "go out and date like crazy for a couple of years and have fun." And she goes, "well, what about Josh?" I looked at her, and I said, "I'm sorry Susan, I look at Josh and I see darkness." Later in the first episode, we hear that Susan told Allred, "this is not the man I married", and that Josh had told her, "over my dead body will you leave me." And aside from suggesting that Josh wanted the life insurance money, the show also suggests that his monumental ego simply wouldn't allow him to let Susan leave him.

The show also focuses on the absurdity of Josh's alibi – that he had taken the children camping in the middle of a freezing night – and some of the inconsistencies in his story. For example, despite already knowing that Susan hadn't gone into work on the morning of December 7, Josh drove to her place of employment and called her mobile phone, leaving her a message to say he was waiting for her outside. As if that wasn't bad enough, that evening, police found Susan's mobile in his minivan, and he explained it by saying he'd borrowed it to get a number. But if he already knew she didn't have her phone on her, why was he ringing her to tell her he'd pick her up after work? Things like this would be almost comical if they weren't so deadly serious.

In tandem with this, the show looks at the perceived failure of the police. Not only was Josh never charged for Susan's disappearance, he was never even arrested, nor was Michael, whilst Steve's later arrest stemmed from unrelated charges. Cold goes into this in extraordinary detail, but, in essence, both the show and the podcast explain that WVPD's decision not to arrest Josh was partly tactical (they wanted to leave him on the street in the hopes he might lead them to solid evidence), and partly because the DA recognised how easily their litany of circumstantial evidence could have been dismantled by a defence lawyer (not only was there no body, but the police were unable to say where, how, or even if Susan had been murdered). Reading about the case online can be infuriating in terms of what seems like police ineptitude, and although I think the show lets him off too lightly, Det. Maxwell explaining some of the decisions certainly helps to put the whole thing in a better context.

We also examine the emotional fallout from Susan's disappearance, with people such as Jennifer, Hellewell, and Owings shown as still lamenting their failures to intervene in the marriage before it was too late. However, no one is more haunted than Allred, who is an emotional wreck, clearly missing her best friend, but also clearly blaming herself for not attempting to save her. In a story in which the Powells are almost pantomime villains, it's easy to become inured and forget these are real people, but the interviews with Allred pack a real emotional wallop and are probably the show's strongest moments.

In terms of problems, one thing that stuck out for me is that the show makes several inaccurate claims. For one, it claims that Alina's interview is the first time she has spoken publically about the case. It isn't – she's given numerous interviews over the years, especially during Steve's trials. The show also claims to have unearthed previously unknown evidence (an audio recording of Steve confessing his love to Susan). However, it wasn't unknown. In actual fact, it was discovered by Cawley during the making of Cold, who made it public a full seven months before Disappearance aired. Additionally, the show puts far too much speculative weight on this recording, arguing, "this is the motive for Susan's murder – the real reason for why Susan disappeared", without offering a sliver of evidence to back up that claim.

Elsewhere, there are some rather ill-advised aesthetic choices. For example, the show has the habit of repeating the same bit of information multiple times; we hear Terri's 911 call reporting the family missing on the morning of December 7, for instance, and then, not two minutes later, we hear the same call again for no apparent reason. This is also manifested in the repetition of video clips, some of which are used three times, and every time the show comes back from an ad break, it recaps what was said before the break, which is not only unnecessary, it's distracting and irritating. There is also an omnipresent generic soundtrack running throughout the entire show – as far as I can remember, the music never stops once. It's at a low volume, so it's not too distracting, but once you notice that it's there all the time, it's hard to ignore it. And, of course, when compared to Cold, the show is very simplistic and rudimentary. Aside from the above-mentioned audio, Cold unearths other previously unknown facts, such as pages missing from Susan's journal or the fact that the metadata for the animated child porn on the computer taken from Josh and Susan's home prove the porn was already on the machine when Susan purchased it second-hand. Compared to this, the only unique element offered by Disappearance is the Alina interview. However, as mentioned above, I don't really feel it's an entirely fair comparison - Cold was designed to be exhaustive, Disappearance was designed to be introductory. And that's exactly what it is.

Problems notwithstanding, I enjoyed The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell. It provides an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the case, and although, despite its claims, there's nothing revelatory here, it introduces the main characters and gives a solid overview of events.