Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors Read online

  Josh’s mobile phone records showed that he had used his phone Sunday at 12:14 P.M., when he called his father’s cell phone.

  There was no more activity on Josh’s phone until 3:02 P.M. on Monday, when JoVonna’s son, Alex, called. Alex didn’t know what to say to a man he knew his mother had been trying to find all day and he hung up. But JoVonna called Josh only a minute later.

  She asked him where he was, and was he aware that Susan hadn’t come to work at all that day? Josh said he and the boys were just driving around the West Valley City area, and that he didn’t know that Susan had missed work.

  And then Josh drove about twenty miles before he called Susan’s mobile phone to leave a voice message for her—asking if she needed a ride home from work. At that point, he knew Susan hadn’t gone to work, so there was no point in leaving that message for her.

  JoVonna Owings had just told him that Susan never made it to work. And he must have seen Susan’s phone on the console in the minivan. It looked very much as though he was frantically trying to set up alibis for himself.

  Chapter Six

  Simpson Springs in Tooele County is about eighty miles south and west of West Valley City. It was once a main stop on the Pony Express route as stagecoaches and riders crossed through Utah in the mid-1800s. Simpson Springs was highly desirable then for the quality and plentitude of water available there.

  In modern times, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has a campground at Simpson Springs and the Future Farmers of America have constructed a replica of the original Pony Express station, but few tourists visit the historical site in the darkest days of winter. And hardly anyone camped overnight there in December.

  It was much too cold for tent camping, and even in the Powell minivan, the 10 degree temperature and fierce winds would have been hard on Charlie and Braden.

  Josh said the weather hadn’t deterred him from his quick trip with the boys; he and Susan often took them to the west desert to camp. He still couldn’t understand why the police had to be involved.

  The Utah detectives spread out, talking to everyone they could locate who had known Susan Powell: Amber Hardman, Kiirsi Hellewell, JoVonna Owings, Susan’s family, Josh’s mother and sister. Everywhere they went, they were told that Susan would never have abandoned her boys. They also learned that Susan and Josh had been having marital problems, financial troubles, and disagreements so wrenching that Susan was considering filing for divorce.

  West Valley City police chief Buzz Nielsen’s detective team also learned that Josh was the beneficiary of a number of insurance policies written on Susan’s life.

  “How much? How many?” Ellis Maxwell asked.

  The answer and then the validation by the companies who had written the policies was staggering.

  “One and a half million dollars . . .”

  Detective Larry Marx discovered that Susan Powell had opened a safe deposit box at the Wells Fargo bank on West Amelia Earhart Drive in Salt Lake City. It was in her name only and no one else could open it, and yet she had accessed the box only twice. Ellis Maxwell reviewed and evaluated what was in the safe deposit box.

  There was a folded letter inside, addressed to her “family and friends.” It was stapled securely all around the edges. Inside, Susan wrote a warning that the contents should never be shown or given to Josh, adding: “I don’t trust him.”

  The letter was titled “Last Will and Testament for Susan Powell,” and it was dated June 28, 2008, almost eighteen months earlier.

  Susan wrote that Josh Powell, her husband, had threatened to “destroy me” if they should ever get divorced. If that happened, she knew that her children would have neither a mother or a father.

  She wrote that they had been having marital problems for the prior four years—which meant the trouble had begun in 2004, shortly after they had moved to Utah. She asked that if something should happen to her, whoever read this letter should contact her sister-in-law, Jennifer Graves.

  Susan also stated that if she should die and it looked like an accident, someone should investigate. “It may not be an accident—even if it looks like one.”

  * * *

  As Susan’s disappearance moved to the top of the headlines and nightly news in the Salt Lake area, one man who had attended a Wells Fargo Christmas gathering of Susan’s fellow employees and their spouses in December 2008 recalled talking to Josh at that event. His wife, Amber, worked with Susan, and Scott Hardman strived to be polite, but, like many of Susan’s friends, Hardman avoided being stuck with Josh. Josh loved to argue and debate about almost anything. Their 2008 conversation hadn’t seemed that ominous at the time, but now Scott Hardman watched the barrage of media bulletins about Susan’s disappearance and felt uneasy. He called the West Valley City police and was put through to detective Larry Marx.

  Marx interviewed Hardman, taking notes. Scott recalled talking with Josh Powell a year before Susan disappeared. Somehow they had gotten on the topic of fictional television crime shows. Josh, who watched a lot of television, held forth on how he visualized the perfect murder and that he knew how to get away with it. The subject turned to how a killer could hide a victim’s body where it would never be discovered.

  Not exactly a Christmas cheer discussion, but that was Josh. Hardman couldn’t remember just what method of murder Josh would employ, but he did recall where Josh would hide a body.

  Hardman told Detective Marx that Josh had pontificated that an abandoned mine shaft would be the ideal place to dispose of a corpse. All one would have to do would be to throw a body in, knock some of the surface shaft timbers and rocks loose, and the deep hole would collapse in upon itself, burying everything on the bottom.

  “No detectives are going to risk their necks going down inside a mine like that,” Josh said. “It would be too dangerous. There are a lot of abandoned mines in the west desert, but the police wouldn’t take a chance on looking there.”

  Detectives Marx and Maxwell knew how perilous such a search would be. A conservative estimate of the number of old mines in Utah is between fifteen thousand to twenty thousand! Most of them have been scoured clean of coal, copper, garnets, or other minerals, and some of them are still burning at the bottom. The Utah Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program is striving to fill mines in, or at least place grates or fences around the openings on the surface. By 2012, they hoped to have blocked entrance to at least six thousand deserted mine shafts.

  If anyone stumbles into these mines, they will probably be killed. Dog owners are warned to keep track of their pets when they are in the west desert area.

  Now that Susan Powell had seemingly vanished into thin air, the thought that her body might lie at the bottom of a mile-deep mine shaft seemed possible. And horrifying.

  But which one—and where? The West Valley City police detectives kept this option to themselves. They didn’t want to risk the lives of volunteers who might take it upon themselves to search for Susan in mine shafts. It was early in the probe, and they still hoped she might be alive or that they could find her in a less precarious spot. If that didn’t happen, they were prepared to go into the old mines themselves.

  * * *

  More than eight hundred miles away in Puyallup, Washington, Chuck and Judy Cox had no idea that their daughter was missing. On the morning of December 7, 2009, Chuck received a phone call at work from Jennifer Graves.

  “She asked if I had spoken to Susan lately,” Chuck recalls. “I told her I’d talked to Susan the week before. Then she told me that Susan, Josh, and the boys were missing! She asked me to talk to my other daughters to see if they had heard from Susan, and of course I said I would.”

  But Susan’s sisters hadn’t heard from her. Chuck called Jennifer back that afternoon to see if she knew anything and she said that Susan was still missing, although Josh had called her.

  “We were discussing what could have happened—and I had my phone turned to speaker. Judy was listening in.

  “Then Josh called Jennifer and sh
e put him on her speakerphone—so we all heard him. She asked him where he was and told him everyone was looking for him. Then he told Jennifer what she knew was a lie. He told her the boys were safe and Susan was at work. She told him Susan wasn’t at work and straight-out asked him, ‘What have you done?’ ”

  At that point, the line went dead. All Chuck and Judy could do was wait. They knew the West Valley City police were at Josh and Susan’s house and hoped to find out what was going on after the police questioned Josh.

  “We didn’t hear anything until the next day,” Chuck said. “Josh called me just before noon. He said he didn’t have any idea where Susan was. The last time he saw her was eleven thirty Sunday night, and she was getting ready for bed. I didn’t challenge his story—because I might have inadvertently helped him come up with a more believable one. I also didn’t want him to know that we overheard his conversation with Jennifer.”

  Josh’s lack of concern alarmed Susan’s parents. He told them that the police had interviewed him a few times.

  Chuck and Judy were dumbfounded and frightened. They worried about what could have happened to Susan. They even half expected her to show up at their door. They knew that it was possible she and Josh had had a big fight and that she’d finally left him. Susan and Josh had been arguing recently about the endless phone calls between Josh and his father, Steven Powell. After hearing Josh talking for hours to his father, Susan was usually annoyed. Josh wouldn’t allow her to talk to her sister Denise for fifteen minutes, but he burned up the phone lines with Steven. Even though they had managed to move far away from her father-in-law, Susan still felt creepy if she even heard his name.

  Although the Coxes could understand why Susan would leave Josh, and separate herself from his family—except for Jennifer and her husband, Kirk Graves—they seriously doubted she would ever have left Charlie and Braden behind. Her boys were her life.

  Josh was summoned to the West Valley City police headquarters again on that same day—December 8. He agreed to come in, but he arrived nearly four hours late. Ellis Maxwell repeated the same general questions he had asked Josh the day before. And Josh gave him the same peculiar answers. He had gone camping with his sons, returning the next day. They liked to camp—winter or summer.

  Josh’s response to the detectives was much less responsive than it had been. He asked to leave the interview prematurely, which he was subsequently allowed to do. He requested an attorney and said he wasn’t going to answer any more questions. This would, indeed, be the last good chance for Detective Maxwell and his fellow investigators to talk with Josh Powell about the night of December 6.

  Josh voluntarily surrendered his cell phone, but their technical experts discovered he had surreptitiously removed the sim card before he handed it over. With both his and Susan’s sim cards missing from their phones, any record of pings from cell phone towers was gone. This would have been a prime avenue to track Josh and the boys as they drove into the west desert to go camping as a snowstorm beat down on the blue minivan.

  Josh Powell might have been a difficult employee, frequently fired, socially inept—but he was very intelligent. His technical knowledge just might make up for his dim-witted alibis. He was an electronically savvy suspect.

  There was, however, one disturbing aspect to this second interview, something that made him look guiltier than before. Never once did Josh Powell ask about Susan. Nor did he ask what the investigators were doing to find her. It was almost as if he had dismissed her from his life. Where most innocent husbands would have been frantic, Josh Powell had moved on only two days after Susan disappeared.

  On that same day, detective Kim Waelty of the West Valley City police gently interviewed Charlie Powell. Charlie remembered that his mommy had gone camping with them.

  “But she didn’t come back home with us,” he said. “And I don’t know why.”

  He was only four, and Waelty didn’t question him further.

  Although he learned that the West Valley City detectives were talking with Josh, Chuck Cox said he couldn’t imagine that Josh would have hurt Susan. He knew his son-in-law was something of an oddball, but he couldn’t picture him being violent.

  * * *

  On December 9, 2009, the West Valley City Police Department contacted the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department in Washington State. Susan and Josh Powell had moved from Puyallup—in Sheriff Paul Pastor’s jurisdiction—and it appeared that most of their family members on both sides still lived there.

  Pierce County Sheriff’s Department captain Brent Bomkamp assigned detective Gary Sanders to work with the Utah detectives in the search for Susan Powell. From that date on, the two law enforcement agencies would cooperate and share information, even though the missing-person case had occurred in Utah and was the West Valley City department’s case.

  Armed with a search warrant for the house on West 3945 South, in West Valley City, the Utah investigators removed boxes and bags and what looked like computers. The detectives shook their heads when someone tried to ask them a question. From the beginning the Utah investigators were playing their cards very close to their vests, only grudgingly releasing information to the media, who clamored for something—anything—they could use by their deadlines. If the West Valley City officers had found anything significant in Susan’s disappearance, they weren’t saying.

  Nor was Josh talking much. He refused any more police interviews. Initially he’d talked to a few reporters, and the police investigators subpoenaed television stations for raw footage of those interviews—to study and learn exactly what he had said.

  With every day that passed, things looked more ominous for Susan. Police and volunteers searched the Simpson Springs area on the possibility that she might have gone along on the camping trip but hadn’t come back. But it was a vast area and there were so many places in the west desert where she—or her body—might be hidden.

  As always, the spouse or lover of a missing person is the first suspect. But Josh Powell had yet to be declared even a “person of interest,” to use the more obscure term police use currently to identify those under suspicion for a crime.

  Josh Powell seemed nervous, but some members of the general public felt that any husband would be if his wife had disappeared. They were unaware at this point of his disinterest in her fate as he talked to detectives. Josh speculated to reporters that Susan might have gone off with another man, leaving him and the boys behind. No one who knew Susan Powell believed that.

  Moreover, Susan had left her purse and cell phone behind. Josh pointed out the message he’d left on her cell phone, trying to sound convincing that he had believed she had gone to work on Monday. It was there on his outgoing voice mail, saying “I’ll pick you up after work.”

  He would only have had to call from one cell phone in his Chrysler to another. Where he and the boys were at that point cannot be proven, although he claimed to be in West Valley City.

  It was undoubtedly the women of the Salt Lake City area who doubted Josh in the beginning. They knew that very few women run off with other men, leaving their purses, keys, credit cards, makeup, and cell phones—not to mention their beloved children—behind.

  Mothers don’t do that. Men leave—but mothers stay, except for the minuscule number of women who seem to have been born with no maternal instinct. And Susan Powell was not one of those.

  The Utah investigators felt the same way, although they didn’t reveal what lab tests had shown. They were fully aware that they were probably searching for a badly injured victim . . . or a body. The stains on the couch and floor of the Powells’ house had been analyzed and tested for DNA. Although the couch had been washed, criminalists discovered that the discoloration was human blood, and the DNA inherent in it was Susan Powell’s.

  Susan had bled on that couch, although it was difficult to pinpoint just when that had occurred. The fact that the sofa had been shampooed on the date she vanished suggested that she might very well have been injured in the house b
efore she was forced—or carried—out.

  From the neighbor’s description of someone arguing in the night, Susan was probably alive when she left her home.

  Chapter Seven

  Susan had been missing for only seven days when Josh called his day-care provider to let her know that Charlie and Braden wouldn’t be coming back. “You’ll probably never see them again,” he added.

  He also contacted Susan’s chiropractor and asked that all her future appointments be canceled.

  Three days later, on December 17, Josh used his power of attorney to withdraw Susan’s IRA accounts from the Wells Fargo bank.

  On December 19, Josh, with Charlie and Braden in tow, drove to Puyallup, Washington, through winter storms. He didn’t contact his in-laws, but Chuck and Judy Cox, along with their friends and relatives, were startled to see Josh during a vigil for Susan on December 20. Josh had Charlie with him, and they stood in the pouring rain as people lit votive candles in plastic cups.

  Josh let Charlie play with the cups, apparently unconcerned that he could be burned. Josh set himself apart from the Cox family, and they found it eerie to see him standing in the rain with an enigmatic expression on his face. The vigil honored Susan and the hope that she might be alive somewhere, but it also added to the agony to know that she wasn’t there.

  It was an odd, sad Christmas. The Coxes had short visits from Charlie and Braden, but only after one of Josh’s old friends talked him into it. He brought the boys to their grandparents for a few hours on Christmas Eve and delivered them again for Christmas Day dinner.

  Chuck and Judy wondered how Josh could have left the home he’d shared with Susan at Christmas. Wouldn’t it be more natural that he would stay there, waiting for her to come home or to at least have some word of her?