Authors: Gregg Olsen,Rebecca Morris
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Murder & Mayhem, #Self-Help, #Death & Grief, #Suicide, #True Accounts
If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
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FOR SUSAN’S UTAH SISTERS
Kiirsi Hellewell
Debbie Caldwell
JoVonna Owings
Rachel Marini
Michele Oreno
Amber Hardman
Barbara Anderson
Contents
Also by Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris
Prologue
In every way Chuck Cox is an unassuming man. He wears tan Dockers and plain, buttoned-up shirts, usually white or pale blue. He keeps his once-sandy hair, now gray, combed neatly. His eyeglasses are more about function than style. Chuck even drives a suburban mainstay, a minivan. As an accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration, he has seen some of the worst tragedies imaginable, but he has kept the grim mental images of crash sites separate from his life as a husband, father, grandfather, and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you passed Chuck on the street, he would have been just another pleasant face. A smile. A nod. A quick wave.
Judy Cox, like her husband, is in her mid-fifties. She wears her graying hair long, and has a light touch with makeup. Judy is the neighbor lady who always makes sure that the mail is picked up when someone is on vacation. Who watches out for others in her church ward. Who makes sure a missing dog is found, every letter is answered, and every phone call is returned. Judy lives with diabetes, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren.
Yet, these days, doing that is so very, very hard.
* * *
The Coxes live in Puyallup, Washington, a town that epitomizes suburban sprawl at its best and worst. Pockets of the city of 37,000 retain the small-town vibe of a once-burgeoning farming community. Most of those areas, however, are cordoned off by an array of franchise restaurants and strip malls like many once bucolic communities across the growing Puget Sound region.
The town with the tongue-twister name is named for the Puyallup Tribe of Indians. It is known for three things: as the site of the largest fair in the state; the two hundred varieties of daffodils sold around the world; and—less pleasantly—as the location of a temporary internment facility called Camp Harmony, where Japanese-Americans were interned before being sent to camps in California and Idaho during the Second World War.
Four years ago, life changed for the Coxes. It will never change back. Judy knows it every time she looks over from the compact kitchen at a table that will always have three empty places. No reminders are necessary, but they are everywhere. A strange black rock that Chuck keeps by his computer. A faded purple ribbon on the lamppost on their street corner. A continuous flow of sympathy cards and e-mails of support.
No one—least of all Chuck and Judy—could have guessed where their lives would go when their daughter went missing in December 2009. Neither could have imagined the horror that was in store for them, or that they would find purpose in enduring the greatest tragedy a parent can face.
Susan Powell, the third-youngest of the four Cox girls, disappeared from the West Valley City, Utah, home she shared with her husband, Josh, and their sons, Charlie and Braden. A few days later a friend of Susan’s told Susan’s distraught father about a secret diary Susan had been keeping. That she kept a diary at all didn’t surprise Chuck—she’d done so on and off through her teenage years and young adulthood. Susan wrote romantic fantasies as a teen and later, her dreams for the future. Writing helped her process what was going on in her life.
The friend, a coworker of Susan’s, told Chuck that Susan kept the secret diary in her desk at work.
“Where Josh can’t see it,” she said.
Chuck felt his stomach, already wrenched with pain, drop.
He had no doubts that whatever Susan was writing had to do with her husband—or maybe her father-in-law, Steve. There wasn’t enough paper in the world for Susan to write down everything she thought about Steve
.
More than anything, however, Chuck hoped that the diary would hold some clues to her whereabouts.
Judy, a woman of unshakable faith like her husband, prayed the diary would lead the police to wherever Susan was in time to save her.
Based on the tip relayed by the friend and the worried father, West Valley City police investigators found a small key in Susan’s purse during a search of the Powell residence. The key fit a safe-deposit lock at a bank a block from her office.
A detective slid the key into the lock and lowered his eyes into the open box. Inside was a single piece of lined notebook paper, folded over and crudely stapled. As if it had been done in haste.
The words on the paper would send a chill down the spine of even the most seasoned investigator. It was like a message from the afterlife. In Susan’s loopy, sweetly girlish handwriting, it said:
If I die, it may not be an accident even if it looks like one. Take care of my boys.
If that wasn’t enough, there was also a caveat, a finger-pointing accusation toward her killer.
Susan asked that whoever found the note
not
show it to her husband, Josh.
For mine and my children’s safety I feel the need to have a paper trail at work which would not be accessible to my husband … it is an open fact that we have life insurance policies of over a million if we die in the next four years.
It was dated June 28, 2008.
* * *
Over time that cruelly stretched for years, Chuck and Judy and others who loved Susan would discover secrets and lies that would plunge all of them into the darkest places imaginable. They learned firsthand that the most startling depravity in the world can come from places close to home, even from a house in a gated community just a few minutes’ drive away.
1
Every moment I step back and take stock of what I’m dealing with, it feels like a never ending cycle but I’m too afraid of the consequences, losing my kids, him kidnapping [them], divorce or actions worse on his part …
—SUSAN POWELL E-MAIL, JULY 5, 2008
Debbie Caldwell pulled up in her Ford Club Wagon—the one with fifteen seats to carry all the children who attended her day care—and observed how quiet her friend and neighbor Susan’s house seemed. It was 9:00
A.M.
on Monday, December 7, 2009, and West Valley City, a suburb of Salt Lake City, was in the middle of a three-day winter storm. Freezing temperatures and four inches of new snowfall made the roads so icy that the local news described the streets as “mayhem.”
Susan, twenty-eight, and Josh, thirty-three, usually dropped Braden and Charlie at Daydreams & Fun Things Child Care as early as 6:00
A.M.
When they didn’t appear that morning, Debbie started trying to reach the young parents. Susan was always prompt and conscientious. Josh was another story. He tested Debbie’s patience regularly, bringing the children late—which complicated the morning, since Debbie needed to know how many children needed breakfast. He also neglected to pick up the boys on time in the evening, cutting into Debbie’s time with her own family.
The other day-care parents avoided Josh because he talked incessantly and acted as if he was an expert on anything and everything. They had a nickname they called Josh behind his back:
Rocks for Brains.
One day, when Josh had given Debbie a hard time because Braden had lost his socks, one of the mothers said, “That idiot must have rocks for brains.” It stuck.
Charlie and Braden, ages four and two, respectively, had been attending Debbie’s day care for a year and a half, and like many women who had met the outgoing Susan, Debbie had become a confidante. Susan and her circle of friends were young, committed Mormon wives. Their children and their marriages came first. The friends had heard, because Susan told them, that Josh wouldn’t give her money to buy groceries and diapers, wouldn’t have sex with her, and wouldn’t go to counseling. One friend joked that Josh treated his pet parrot better than his wife and sons. Susan also voiced displeasure that he was spending too many hours on the phone talking with his father, who had left the Mormon church. Steve Powell, Susan told her friends, had been inappropriate with her—disgustingly so. Susan was so open with her complaints that her friends were feeling a bit apathetic. They’d heard it all so many times.
That morning, Debbie, forty-seven and the mother of four daughters, was on her way home from dropping the older children at school. She still had three toddlers in the car, and as she parked the van in front of 6254 W. Sarah Circle she told them she would just be a minute. She knocked on the front door several times. No answer. She expected to find Josh, harried anytime he had the slightest responsibility, getting the boys dressed, or more likely sequestered on his computer in the basement where he liked to hide. In any case, Susan would have phoned Debbie if there had been a change in plans.
By the time Debbie was at the Powells’ front door Monday morning, she had already called Susan on her cell phone. When there was no answer, she tried Susan’s work phone at Wells Fargo Investments and, finally, their home landline.
Again, no answer.
Debbie dialed Josh’s employer, Aspen Distribution, a trucking and shipping firm where he did computer programming. They said that Josh hadn’t shown up for work. When no one answered the front door of their house, she phoned the name listed as Josh and Susan’s emergency contact, his sister, Jennifer Graves.
“Hi Jennifer, this is Debbie Caldwell, Josh and Susan’s day-care person,” she said when she got Jennifer’s voice mail. “It’s nine o’clock. I’m at Josh and Susan’s house. No one is home, and they didn’t drop Charlie and Braden off this morning. Do you know what’s going on?”
A few minutes later, Josh’s mother, Terrica (Terri) Powell, heard the message. A quiet woman who never really got back on her feet after the divorce from her husband Steve, she lived with her daughter Jennifer, her son-in-law Kirk Graves, and the couple’s five children fifteen minutes south in West Jordan, Utah.