Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors Read online

  Chapter Two

  In 2004, Susan Powell was pregnant with their first son, Charlie. This gave her even more reason to want her marriage to succeed. Josh and Susan decided to make a fresh start in Utah. Although Susan didn’t go into details with her family, they knew that she felt uncomfortable around her father-in-law and believed he intruded on her marriage too much. She hoped that moving out of state would lessen his impact on their lives. Susan and Josh hoped to find job opportunities in the Salt Lake City area and get themselves on a solid financial program.

  Chuck and Judy Cox worried about Susan, who was more than eight months pregnant and living far away in Utah.

  “We didn’t know if she could count on him when she went into labor or after the baby came home,” Judy recalls. “So we made a trip down there in January.”

  Charles Braden Powell was born on January 19, 2005. Susan’s parents’ instinct that she might need them was right on target. When she went into labor, Josh inexplicably said he couldn’t drive her to the hospital because he had something important to do. He asked Chuck and Judy to take her. They were happy to do that but hoped her husband would at least show up for his first child’s birth.

  When Josh did show up at the hospital two and a half hours later, he brought his laptop computer with him. What had been more important than being with his wife as she labored to deliver? Josh explained that he had to back up the hard drive on his computer!

  Indeed, he sat in a corner of the labor room and worked at his computer, barely noticing what his wife was going through. Chuck Cox watched, silently fuming.

  “When she was in transition and really in pain, I went over to Josh and told him to put his computer down. Susan needed him to hold her hand and comfort her. He kept delaying, I finally said, ‘Put your computer down, now!’ ”

  Josh finally complied when Susan was only a few pushes away from delivering, and she gave birth to Charlie in a few minutes. “See,” she told her father. “Josh was here when I needed him!”

  Chuck didn’t have the heart to tell her what really happened.

  Susan was thrilled to be a mother, and Josh appeared to be genuinely pleased with baby Charlie. He held the infant proudly, but he refused to let either Judy or Chuck hold him.

  “Charlie was his possession—he belonged to Josh,” Judy said. “And he shut us out completely.”

  * * *

  At first, Susan and Josh’s move seemed to be a good idea. They had bought a nice home in the 6200 block of West 3945 South in West Valley City. A close southwest suburb of Salt Lake City, West Valley City has a population of something over 130,000 and is the second-largest city in Utah. There were plenty of job opportunities there in 2004.

  Susan and Josh made friends with their neighbors, Kiirsi and John Hellewell, who were members of the Mormon church, and they connected with other members of the closest LDS stake.

  The Powells and Hellewells spent a lot of social time together, sharing picnics, barbecues, and movies. Kiirsi and Susan were soon best friends, and Kiirsi’s husband accepted Josh, saying, “If you’re friends with Susan, Josh is part of the deal.”

  Both Josh and Susan were hired by a brokerage firm, Fidelity Investments. She quickly became a trusted employee popular with her coworkers. But, once again, Josh Powell became too verbal in his opinions about the faults of his new employer. Once again, he was fired.

  It was only his first job in Utah, and Susan tried to believe it was just a wrong fit, and that Josh would soon find another position.

  While Susan stayed on with Fidelity, Josh decided that he’d be better off working for himself and chose a career in real estate, where he thought he had what it took to be a success. Using money that Susan had managed to save for opening a beauty parlor in their home, Josh bought signs, lockboxes, and other paraphernalia Realtors need. The housing market was going great at the time. People were remodeling and flipping houses, and buyers were actually bidding against one another for homes, standing in line to make the best offer.

  Josh sold a few houses, and he was enthusiastic about his success. He wanted Susan to get her real estate license, too, and join him in his business. As she usually did, she agreed to do that and got her license. She also went to work for Wells Fargo to ensure that they would have a steady, predictable income and medical insurance.

  At Josh’s suggestion, they took out life insurance policies—five hundred thousand dollars on each of their lives. If one of them should pass away, the other would have resources to pay for child care and other expenses.

  Susan was pregnant again, and very happy about it. She called her mother in mid-2006 and impishly told Judy, “Seven. Lucky seven! Guess what’s happening?”

  Judy had six grandchildren at the time, and she quickly figured out that Susan and Josh were going to present her and Chuck with a seventh one.

  Susan gave birth to Braden Timothy Powell on January 2, 2007. That was the second time that she and Josh had lost out on an income tax exemption by days, but it didn’t matter. Charlie had dark hair and blue eyes, and it looked like Braden would be blond like his mother, with the same blue eyes that both she and Josh had.

  One of Susan’s friends would comment later that Josh’s eyes had been as blue as Charlie’s, but they began to change. Sometimes they were almost black.

  Again Susan and Josh were happy with their new baby. Both the little boys seemed very intelligent and they were ahead of most babies in talking, walking, and showing other signs of maturation. Josh was often mean and demanding in the way he treated Susan, but he showed affection for his sons.

  With his few house sales accomplished, Josh had dreams of glory about becoming one of the most successful Realtors in the Salt Lake City area. Without much planning, he bought a huge ad in the DEX Yellow Pages for ten thousand dollars, assuring Susan that it would bring a flock of house hunters to them. When she demurred, he explained that he didn’t have to pay for the ad for a few months, not until after his ad was actually published. Josh figured he could well afford the ten thousand dollars by then.

  When the new edition of the DEX directory came out, however, Josh was livid. Some of the phone numbers for his business were wrong, and he hated the pictures that appeared in the ad. He was right to be upset; house hunters who called the wrong numbers wouldn’t reach him, and probably wouldn’t bother trying to find his office. The directory printers had made a major error.

  Josh went to Chuck Cox and asked him what he should do.

  “I told him the first thing he should do was to be sure he had the phone directory company’s admission of their mistake in writing so he would have proof,” Chuck said. “That letter would be ‘gold,’ I said.”

  With the wrong phone numbers in print, Chuck felt that Josh would be off the hook for the money he owed on the ad. He knew Josh couldn’t afford such an expensive ad in the first place for what was only a fledgling company. Josh got a letter from the customer service manager, who was fired. The company started the collection process and Josh buckled.

  “He didn’t take my advice,” Chuck recalls. “He filed for bankruptcy instead!”

  It turned out that Josh and Susan had other debts that Josh couldn’t pay. They had bought their house in West Valley City when they first arrived in Utah. They could make the mortgage payments at that time because they both had jobs. But, of course, Josh’s steady employment ended shortly after that. Susan was the main breadwinner.

  Josh had run up all the credit cards they had to the maximum limit, and those creditors were hounding them for payment, too.

  Although Susan was embarrassed to ask her parents for more help, she had no choice but to stand behind Josh when he asked them for a loan.

  “We gave them five thousand dollars,” Chuck says, “so they wouldn’t lose the house and they could pay their overdue mortgage debt. Susan promised to pay us back, and after Braden was born, she went right back to work at Wells Fargo. She was making payments to us as soon as she could.”

  J
osh took a job as an assistant to an accountant, but he never varied from his usual path. He complained to Susan that he was much smarter than his boss, and he soon made that clear to his employer, too. He lost his job.

  It was not a good time to be jobless. By 2009, the bottom had fallen out of the economy, scaring off house hunters who discovered that loans were drying up. Many recent home buyers found themselves upside down with their mortgages. Josh didn’t sell any more houses.

  Charlie and Braden were very young—only four and two. Susan would have loved to work part-time and be able to stay home with her children. Her goal was still to have a beauty parlor in their home, but she didn’t manage to save any money. With a business in her home, she could make money and be with the boys, too.

  As always, Susan was the main wage earner in the family. Even so, she had to use the money Josh doled out, and then explain everything she bought to him. She wasn’t even allowed to withdraw money from the bank; Josh kept changing the PIN number so she wouldn’t have access to it.

  To be sure Susan didn’t “overspend,” Josh instructed her to go through weekly supermarket ads and check off the cheapest items offered. Then he told her what groceries she could buy, and he entered a list of those items on a spreadsheet in his computer. When she returned home, he scanned all her receipts into his computer to be sure she hadn’t spent more than he’d allowed. If she went even pennies over the list he’d authorized, he would rail at her.

  Trying to stay on such a frugal budget, Susan found it almost impossible to feed her family properly. She planted a ten-by-forty-foot garden. She grew everything from green beans and carrots to watermelons and pumpkins. By cooking fresh produce from her garden in the summer and foods she canned in the winter, she hoped that Charlie and Braden would have enough to eat.

  Susan made everything from scratch when she cooked. For her, pumpkin pie meant growing the pumpkin, roasting it, scooping out the seeds, and also making the crust.

  Susan was a vegetarian, and luckily her little boys liked carrots better than candy. She froze and canned the bounty from her garden and their fruit trees.

  Josh was even more tightfisted when it came to other purchases. When Susan spent six dollars on shoes for Charlie, Josh was furious with her. She wasn’t allowed to buy socks; Josh told her to knit them. But he complained if she spent too much money on yarn, especially when she knit baby bonnets, booties, and sweaters for her friends, one of her biggest pleasures.

  When their day-care mom saw that Charlie and Braden often came to her without socks, she bought each of them a dozen pair. Susan was a little embarrassed but grateful.

  Susan had to ask Josh’s permission to drive their blue minivan, so she usually bicycled to where she had to go. And she rode a bike without gears to help on hill climbs. Most of the roads she traveled had no real shoulders so it was dangerous for her, but she rode on the pavement on busy streets.

  No one but her best friend, Kiirsi, and a few others knew how Susan was struggling. Susan finally told her sister Denise how stingy Josh was, and Denise was appalled. None of the Cox family really knew how bad things were; Susan was too proud to tell them, and she didn’t want them to resent Josh if somehow they managed to pull their marriage together.

  Josh spent hours on the phone almost every day talking with his father, but he resented it when Susan took or made calls to Denise. Susan and Denise, the two middle daughters in their family, had always been close. They’d shared confidences, fun, and had even managed to breed parakeets and fish when they were in their teens.

  “Those two once had twenty-seven parakeets,” Judy Cox marveled.

  One of the times Susan really grew impatient with Josh was when he disapproved of her phone conversations with Denise.

  “You talk to your father for hours, and he fills you full of how hateful Mormons are,” she argued. “And then you won’t let me talk to my sister? That isn’t fair.”

  Jennifer Graves, Josh’s older sister, saw what was going on, and while she loved her brother, she felt sorry for Susan. Jennifer saw that Josh was “regressing,” going downhill as the years passed. With every year, he was more of a failure at every job he had and in turn he seemed to control Susan more.

  Personal power meant everything to Josh Powell, and the less he had, the more demanding he became. His appearance had changed so much in the seven years since he and Susan were married. He had bags under his eyes, and his face had a pinched look about it. Josh affected a wispy beard and mustache, and he usually had a frown on his face. The fresh-faced, teenager-like man that Susan had married had disappeared.

  Chapter Three

  The summer of 2008 was especially bad. Susan didn’t mind working while Josh stayed home with their little boys, but she knew they needed to see a marriage counselor. Her husband was so “angry, irrational, and unpredictable” that after one prolonged fight, Susan threatened to call the police. He was beginning to frighten her. But when she said they had to get counseling, he adamantly refused, using one excuse after another.

  At first he complained that there was no point in counseling, because he knew what they would say.

  “Then do it [what they say],” Susan retorted.

  Next he said counseling would be too expensive. When Susan said Wells Fargo would pay for counseling, Josh claimed that their private lives would become public—everyone would know—and they wouldn’t be able to get any more life insurance or health insurance with that on their record.

  Susan made an appointment with her bishop. She was living a life of despair, trying to save her marriage, even though most women would ask, Why? She was almost in tears when she arrived for her appointment.

  The bishop opened their session with a prayer, and Susan realized she was rambling as she told him about the emotional chaos in her home. To her surprise, he agreed with her on all points.

  “Josh has mental issues,” she emailed a friend, “and isn’t dealing with reality. My bishop agrees I’m a stressed, overworked, neglected/abused mother down to her last straw.

  “And then my bishop said, ‘What can I do to help?’ ”

  Susan wanted counseling so much—not together with Josh at first—but for herself and Josh separately. She believed Wells Fargo would cover most of that under her health insurance. The bishop assured her that the church would pay the twenty-dollar-a-session copay that was Josh’s current reason to refuse counseling.

  For a time, she had hope. It was nearly the Fourth of July in 2008. When Josh asked her why she’d gone to see the bishop, she told him she’d asked for help on groceries and bills and Josh was okay with that.

  Susan was working full-time, bicycling to work and back. It took her forty minutes in the morning and fifty minutes after work because the last mile was all uphill. Josh was still unwilling to go to counseling. Instead, she told friends that he gave her a list of things that would have to change in their marriage “so he won’t be stressed . . . and everything will magically be all right.”

  Josh accused her of spending ninety dollars on groceries instead of the thirty she’d really spent. Her garden had yet to come to fruition, and Josh complained that watermelon at twenty-five cents a pound was too expensive, but then he spent more for one that was smaller.

  “You have utter contempt for me because I don’t have a job!” Josh shouted at Susan. He accused her of thinking he wasn’t a man.

  She denied it, but it did no good.

  Josh no longer went to church. “We were with our friends while they were doing family scriptures and he looked bored, uninterested, and like he was finding reasons to leave the room,” Susan wrote.

  Kiirsi Hellewell recalled how Josh would make it almost impossible for Susan to go to church. “He’d belittle her, and tell her she shouldn’t pay tithes or go to church. He would fight her over everything she did as far as her faith. When she was trying to get the kids up and ready for church by herself, Josh would say things like ‘You want to go to boring, boring church with Mommy—or
do you want to stay home and have cake with Daddy?’ ”

  He often criticized her to the little boys, and young Charlie sometimes shouted at her, “Can’t you see I’m busy—trying to work?” Words he echoed from hearing his father’s complaints.

  Susan’s life was getting harder and harder.

  “I don’t know how you can help, except talk with me,” she emailed a close friend. “And be another individual that would know about the situation if questioned b/c things went crazy later. Sad that I’m this paranoid.

  “My huge problem is I don’t know what to believe or what to do. I don’t want to divorce or separate or take the kids somewhere and [he’d view] that as an act of war . . . My current tactic is to pretty much not make waves and try to ignore the problems. I read mystery books checked out at the library and [try to] be a good mom for the boys. I came home from work on Sat. and felt so depressed that I couldn’t make a decent dinner for my boys.”

  Susan was concerned that Charlie and Braden weren’t getting enough protein. Hot dogs were the only meat products she could afford, although she sometimes had eggs on hand. Beans and rice took several steps to prepare—culling, soaking, and a long time cooking. Often she was just too tired to do all that.

  She was frustrated that Josh didn’t stick to the food budget he demanded of her and then made impulse purchases like “cheap donuts and individual yogurt servings.” Susan would have suffered his wrath if she dared to buy something like that. She wouldn’t have anyway—but that money could have gone to buy meat for the boys. She did her best to give the boys a proper diet with what she had in her cupboards.

  “I just kept trying to disguise their food with sour cream and catsup, etc.,” she emailed. “And I finally laid [sic] down on my bed and went to sleep around 7 P.M. I had only gotten 4 hours sleep the night before so I’m sure Josh just thought I was tired . . . I took another nap (out of depression) the next day, but I’m sure he has no clue/doesn’t care.”