A Marriage of Secrets: The Susan Cox Powell Case

0:00 A husband tells the police that he took his two toddlers camping at midnight in a blizzard on a work night and he comes home without his wife. That's the story Josh Powell gave to investigators in 2009 and it fell apart piece by piece. (electronic music) (electronic music) (electronic music) (electronic music) A social worker named Elizabeth is standing on a front porch in Graham, Washington, and she can smell gasoline through the door of the house.

1:02 It's February 5th, 2012. She just saw a man pull his two little boys inside for a routine supervised visit, and the door slam shut in her face before she could follow inside. Within minutes, she's calling 911, and within minutes after that, the whole house is going to blow apart. To understand how this father got to that point, you have to go back to a young woman in Washington state who just wanted to keep everybody around her happy. Susan Cox was born in 1981, the third of four daughters in a devout LDS family, warm and perceptive with an instinct for smoothing things over before they turned into real problems.

1:44 She met a guy named Josh Powell through an LDS Institute course, and they reconnected at dinner at his place in Tacoma in November of 2000. By every account, he came on charming and attentive, flattering enough that a 19 year old wouldn't think to question it. What Susan couldn't have known is that Josh had been keeping audio journals around that time. A psychologist who later reviewed them found something that reads less like a guy falling for someone and more like a guy working through a checklist. He'd basically been hunting for a wife with specific traits. And when Susan showed up, he said that she checked those boxes. They married in April 2001.

2:25 Within weeks, they moved in with his father. That one decision to move in with Josh's father shaped the rest of Susan's life. Josh's father, Stephen Powell, might be one of the strangest people you'll ever run into in a true crime story. Police released more than 2,700 pages of his journals after his conviction, describing an obsessive fixation on his daughter-in-law almost from the moment that she moved in. He installed a mirror under the bathroom door to watch her, took her underwear and toenail clippings, and built a fantasy version of Susan out of a pillow and one of her photographs. He filmed her at family gatherings and from his van in parking lots, narrating out loud these fantasies as he recorded.

3:10 In 2003, he told her how he felt and recorded that conversation, too, without her knowledge. Susan turned him down flat. Stephen wrote afterward that he still believed that she was attracted to him. Susan and Josh moved to Utah not long after, partly to put distance between themselves and Stephen, but Josh never cut his father off, though, and he kept in close contact with him for years, so that distance was never really something that existed. Stephen Powell exposed his kids to pornography, young, and taught them to look down on church and authority, according to his ex-wife's divorce filings. Josh's sister, Jennifer, later wrote a memoir, describing a brother who found satisfaction, hurting small animals as a kid.

3:53 She's also the sibling who broke away, wore a wire to confront Josh, and became a domestic violence advocate herself. What was really going on inside the marriage of Susan and Josh, we'll never really know the full scope of. But Josh ran the finances completely, racked up over $200,000 in debt, and filed for bankruptcy in 2007, while Susan was working at Wells Fargo Investments without any real access to her own accounts. He decided which grocery stores that she could shop at and told her to bike to work to save gas. In July of 2008, Susan filmed a video diary and hit it in a safe deposit box at her own branch, pointing a camera at holes punched into the walls, and jewelry that Josh had destroyed in a rage.

4:38 She said it plainly, "I'm an abused wife. I just don't have the bruises." That line follows this case for the next 15 years. In June of 2008, more than a year before she disappeared, Susan wrote out a will stating her marriage was an extreme turmoil, then added a line that reads like a message left over for whoever found it. If she died, it might look like an accident, even if it isn't. She wrote that Josh had threatened to destroy her if she ever left. She stayed anyway, because that's what coercive control does, abuse with no bruises and no police report. And in 2009, the law barely had a name for it.

5:19 December 6, 2009, Susan went to church that morning with her boys. Her neighbor and friend, Jovanna, came over for lunch that afternoon and left around 5 p.m. The last confirmed sighting of Susan Cox Powell alive. Her purse, wallet, and ID all stayed at the house. Her phone turned up in the minivan. Josh's story to the police was that he'd bundled their sons up, ages 2 and 4, put them in the van at midnight, and driven them to the Utah desert to camp. In a blizzard that was going on on the day before a work day, and then he came home to find Susan Gone. Police searched the campsite that he described and found nothing.

5:59 No tire tracks, no fire ring, nothing resembling a December camping trip. Therefore, your old later confirmed the camping trip had happened, but told the police that his mom came to, and she did not come back. Their five-year-old months later at daycare drew a van with three people in it and told staff, "Mommy was in the trunk." Two days after Susan vanished, while detectives served a search warrant at his house, Josh slipped out of the police station and disappeared for 18 hours, leaving his phone behind and renting a car. He came back, having put 807 miles on that car, though he told detectives it was closer to 300 miles. Years later, a journalist named Dave Cawley working on his podcast called Pull GPS Data from the Family Minivan and found two unexplained stops on a stretch of highway in rural southern Idaho near a canal feeding into the Magic Valley farmland.

6:54 Those stops were never searched. Josh drove back to that road in 2010 and photographed it. To this day, that stretch of highway is considered the most credible lead in this whole case. Josh's younger brother, Michael, lived with Stephen in Washington at the time and his whereabouts that first week were never pinned down. He showed up in Utah days later to help Josh pack. He stayed through the search warrant and later helped Josh move out of the state for good. Police concluded that he was likely involved in covering something up, though they could never prove it. In February 2013, about a year after Josh died, Michael jumped from a parking garage in Minneapolis, taking whatever information he might know with him.

7:37 West Valley City police threw a massive amount of manpower at this case, clearing more than 400 abandoned mind shafts across the Utah desert, not a number that you'd expect to attach to a missing person case. They logged 361 pieces of evidence and traded over 20,000 emails internally. Still, the 18 hours lost when Josh walked out of that police station may turn out to be the 18 hours that decided everything. And I know you're wondering, why did they let him walk out of that police station? And the reason is you have to have evidence to hold someone. You have to charge someone to keep them in custody. If they're there and they're not under arrest and they're not being detained, they can leave at any point.

8:18 And that's what Josh did. The years that followed turned into a drawn out custody fight. In 2011, Stephen Powell was arrested on voyeurism and child pornography charges tied to filming two neighbor girls and arrest that finally got Charlie and Braden into the grandparents care. Josh was ordered to complete a psychosexual evaluation and polygraph before he could regain custody, a process that would likely have exposed more than he could survive. On February 1, 2012, a judge denied his request. Four days later, a social worker brought Charlie and Braden to Josh's rental home for that visit. Josh met them at the door, told them he had a big surprise waiting for them inside.

9:00 He then pulled them in and locked the door. In the 24 hours before, he had withdrawn $7,000 in cash, given away the boy's toys, and emailed instructions on where to find that money. Inside, he attacked both boys with a hatchet, then doused the house and gasoline to set it off. All three of them died, officially of carbon monoxide poisoning since the gas filled the house before the explosion hit. All of that, while the social worker was locked outside. Susan Cox Powell has never been found. Her mother, Judy, spent the rest of her life hoping otherwise and passed away still hoping this past February. Her father, Chuck, has spent over a decade pushing this case forward.

9:44 And in 2020, a jury awarded the boys' estates $98.5 million. After finding Washington's child welfare agency negligent for allowing the visit to even happen, what keeps pulling the investigators back is how much Susan documented on her own. The video, the will, the one line about the bruises. She built a paper trail for a crime nobody had proven yet, because on some level, she already knew. Her case has helped push coercive control toward becoming its own recognized criminal offense in places that never even had a name for it before. Somewhere, along a quiet stretch of highway and southern Idaho, near a canal most people have never heard of, there's still a search that's never happened.

10:28 Susan Cox Powell is still out there, and this case is waiting on someone to go find her. (chanting) Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, binge-able true crime stories. I'm Joe, hello, and I'm the host, here's an email, subject from the other side of it, Joe. My brother is serving 22 to life. I'm not going to tell you his name or what he did, but I'm writing to let you know that I listen to your show and I've never once heard anybody in this genre think about people like me. The families on the other side, we don't get episodes, we get looked at at the grocery store.

11:10 He did it. I'm not one of those sisters who says that he didn't. He did it and he should be where he is, but I still drive four hours every other month because he's my brother and I still love him. I don't want you to cover his case, God know. I want you to know that we're listening to, and when you talk about a killer's family, like they may have been part of it, somebody out there flinches. I'm not accusing you personally because I've never actually heard you do it, but it does happen. You seem to be better than most about this. That's why I sent you the email. Rachel in Indiana, in Rachel is in quotes, so I'm assuming that's not her real name. Rachel, thank you for taking the time to send the email, and yeah, I don't make it a habit of talking about the killer's families in a way that makes it look like they were involved unless there is evidence pointing to the fact that they are involved.

12:00 And I will never, like in this case, that I just got finished talking about, Josh Powell's brother was more than likely involved in the cover-up of what happened. That's coming from the police, not coming from me. So me personally, I won't speculate on if I think that he was involved in the cover-up because I don't know. I know what the police said, and that's what the police believe. I don't think it does anybody any good for me to sit and speculate on things like that. So that's why I don't talk about that. And I do think you're right. There is not a lot of attention given to families of the person that did the crime. They have to be going through it as well, although I reserve my empathy, the majority of it, for the victim's families.

12:40 And I'm not gonna apologize for that, because at the end of the day, your brother is still alive. Whoever he did something to is not. Their family doesn't have them in their lives. You get to go see him every other month. You can write him letters. So I do have empathy for what you're going through, but I reserve the majority of it for the victim's family. Again, thank you for the email, and thank you for listening. Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome, get comfortable, because there are literally hundreds of episodes where you do power through. You can go to 10minuteMurder.com and get the links to where you can listen all over the place, as well as follow the show on social media, and send me an email if you want to.

13:20 10minuteMurder.com. If you're an OG listener, been listening for a long time, I really do appreciate you so much. More than I can even say with words, and keep doing what you're doing, please. Keep sharing the show with your friends and your family, rating it five stars, wherever that's possible, and just listening, interacting with the content that I put online, and letting me know what you think about certain things. Sending me cases as well, that's a huge help. You OG listeners, I love you so much. And that's gonna do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10minuteMurder. See you next time. (soft music) [Music]