Month: December 2024

Dave Cawley: Fifteen years have passed since the last time anyone saw Susan Cox Powell. The Facebook groups that once buzzed with tens of thousands of members, all clamoring for answers, are pretty quiet these days. Every once in awhile, someone new to Susan’s story will join and post a question, asking if this-or-that place has ever been searched. The comments will inevitably turn into a discussion of abandoned mines, caves, or “crystals.”

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): There was flowers and crystals that was colorful.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): That was what?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): That was colorful.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Colorful?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah?

Dave Cawley: I understand why many people think crystals are the clue that will lead us to the discovery of Susan’s remains. It goes back to what Susan’s son Charlie said during this police interview, the day after Susan came up missing.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): My mom stayed where a crystals are.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Where what are?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Where a crystals are.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): The crissals, crystals?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah, yeah.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Is that what you’re saying, crystals?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: I’ve seen people take this way too literally, assuming Charlie at four years old, had encyclopedic knowledge of places with crystal in their name, or picturing underground caverns with walls sparkling with gemstones. I think the truth of what Charlie was trying to say is much more simple.

Maybe it’s been awhile since you listened to Susan’s story. Let me refresh your memory about the basics. Susan’s husband, Josh Powell, took the couple’s two sons, Charlie and Braden, “camping” in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a snowstorm, on the night Susan was last seen. 

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): And we did a little campfire.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): So you have the campfire. What do you do with the campfire?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Just hung out for a few minutes, have a marshmallow or two and that’s about it.

Dave Cawley: Josh said he’d mixed the days up in his head, thinking it was a Saturday night into Sunday, instead of a Sunday night into Monday. When the boys didn’t show up for daycare on Monday morning, the daycare provider sounded the alarm. At the same time Josh was telling this story to police in West Valley City, Utah, Charlie was corroborating it.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Well, what did you do last night?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Go camping.

Dave Cawley: Charlie said camping is where you make s’mores.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): You hold a marshmallows over a fire with a stick.

Dave Cawley: The detective wanted to know if Charlie’s mom, Susan, was there when they roasted these marshmallows.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Who were you camping with?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): My dad and my mom and my, my little brother.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Dad, your mom and your brother?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: She asked who came home, and that’s when Charlie said Susan stayed behind, with the crystals.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your mom stayed where the crystals are?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Is that what you said?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Josh didn’t know Charlie was being interviewed, not until the lead detective on the case, Ellis Maxwell, confronted Josh with what Charlie’d said.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): One of our detectives just interviewed your children. And your children are telling our detectives that mom went with you guys last night. And that she didn’t come back.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): She did not go with us.

Dave Cawley: Two conflicting stories. Someone wasn’t telling the truth. It’s easy to assume Charlie’s story is the accurate one, because why would he lie? But the problem with cherry-picking pieces out of Charlie’s interview is it ignores the other things he said that didn’t make any sense. Like when he said he’d gone on an airplane to go camping, or to the beach on the way home.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): You went to an airplane yesterday?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah. And our airplane bring us to Dinosaur National Park.

Dave Cawley: Josh did not take his sons on an airplane the night he likely murdered Susan. And the family lived in landlocked Utah, hundreds of miles from the ocean. So what “beach” could Charlie’ve been thinking of? I’ve uncovered clues deep within a trove of Powell family photos and home videos that could help solve that riddle.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Charlie, where’s mommy?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Mommy’s gone.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She went over there, huh. Say, “Bye bye mommy.”

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Bye bye mommy.

Dave Cawley: This is a special bonus episode of Cold season 1: Beaches and Airplanes. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

Getting reliable information out of preschool-age kids is tricky, especially when they’ve experienced abuse or witnessed traumatic events.

Brianna Martinez: It’s a scary situation for kids. Maybe they have only talked to one other person about this or they’re not ready to talk about it and someone just found out. And now they’re being brought here to talk to a stranger about everything that’s happened, right?

Dave Cawley: That’s Brianna Martinez. She’s a forensic interviewer with the Weber-Morgan Children’s Justice Center in northern Utah. Children’s Justice Centers, or CJCs for short, are kid-friendly spaces where specially trained interviewers, like Brianna, can assist with investigations into crimes like child abuse or domestic violence. They’re also called Children’s Advocacy Centers in other parts of the country.

Brianna Martinez: It’s just a safe place for kids to come to kind of talk about what has happened to them. It’s not a police department or child protective services building. Just a safe place for them to talk.

Dave Cawley: Brianna was not personally  involved with the interview of Charlie Powell 15 years ago, but I wanted to get her perspective to help us understand what goes on behind the scenes with that kind of investigation. Here’s my interview with Brianna.

Dave Cawley (from interview recording): So why not bring a kid who has been through, let’s say abuse, to a police station? I think most people would imagine you, as an investigator, say a detective, you bring the person in, you sit them down in the cold, sterile interview room. Ask them questions. Why does that not work so well with kids?

Brianna Martinez: It’s intimidating, first off. And a lot of kids have trauma, they’ve been through a lot of things. Some kids may have had trauma with police officers in the past or child protective services in the past and that can bring up some previous trauma for them that could be scary. I mean, some kids even think they might be going to jail because they’re going to the police station. So this is just like a neutral place for them to come, where they know that they’re not in any trouble and they’re just able to kind of talk about what’s happened to them.

Dave Cawley: Building rapport. You sit down with a kid, I imagine you’re meeting them for the first time, pretty much every time—

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: —and you need to establish that they’re safe, that anything that they tell you is not going to come back to harm them. How do you go about building that rapport with somebody you’re interviewing?

Brianna Martinez: So, when they get here I’ll go out to the waiting room and I’ll introduce them. I’ll let them know that my job is to talk to kids. Then we go in the room and we’ll go over some of the rules for the interview. We’ll tell them, ‘If I ask you a question and you know the answer, then tell me. If you don’t know the answer, don’t guess or make things up. If there’s something that you don’t want to talk about, tell me that you don’t want to talk about it.’ Then we’ll ask them to promise to tell the truth. And then we move on to our rapport-building section, where we just spend some time getting to know the kid. Talk to them about things that they like to do, things that make them happy, something that’s made them sad. And let them know, ‘You can talk about good things and bad things that have happened to you.’ And in that portion of the interview, you’re kind of gauging where this kid is at in terms of talking to you, right? You can kind of see, like, ‘This kid’s pretty standoffish, they seem pretty reluctant. So I’m going to spend more time talking about the things that they like to do. Make ‘em more comfortable.’ After that portion, we’ll go through an episodic memory practice. They kind of refer to that as like the dress rehearsal of an interview, where we’ll talk to them about a really good day that they’ve had recently. For example, Christmas. ‘Tell me everything that happened on Christmas.’ And you’ll kind of work through that event. Like, ‘Ok, so you opened presents. Tell me everything about opening presents.’ And then you’ll move on throughout the day. And then that’s when we’ll transition over to the disclosure portion of the interview.

Dave Cawley: When you say “episodic memory,” I think I can understand what you mean by that but you’re basically asking about one specific episode. Something that’s happened, right?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: And I imagine older kids, teenagers, preteens, they’re probably pretty good at that. Younger kids, do you find that they struggle with times, places, stuff like that when you ask about episodic things?

Brianna Martinez: Specifics, yeah. They’ll struggle with a time something happened, or a specific date. But the details of the episode, they can give you. So they can tell you where it happened, what happened, who was there. And they can walk you through that whole episode but if I say, “What day did that happen on?,” it’s, “Mmm, Tuesday, Thursday, last week, yesterday.” So they struggle with time like that. But they’re able to tell you about the episode of Christmas, although they may not know what day of the month Christmas is on.

Dave Cawley: Understood. Part of the reason I ask that is I’m thinking about, y’know, an investigator, you’re probably very focused on some of those kinds of details and the way a child’s mind works, that just may not be there, right?

Brianna Martinez: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: So you really have to kind of think about how you approach those conversation and I think what you’re describing with episodic memory makes sense. You’re asking the child to describe it in their language, in the way that they understand it.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah. Yeah, and there are other ways to get that day and time specifically. And sometimes kids will say it, they just say it in their own way. For example, they’ll say, “Well it happened, we had just gotten the brand new blue couch.” So, that’s not a day or a time, but you can go and talk to other people and say, “What day did you get that blue couch?” Right? So you’re able to find out the day in another way. The kid is just not able to tell you that specific day that it happened.

Dave Cawley: Hmm. What are some of the considerations, concerns specific to kids versus any other kind of interview?

Brianna Martinez: So, when talking to kids just in a general day-to-day conversation, it’s a lot different than the way that you talk to kids in a forensic interview. For example, when you’re talking to a kid just about their day, you say, “How was school? Did you go to school? Did you do math?” Those are not the types of questions that we always ask in forensic interviews. So you’re focusing more on those open-ended questions. “Tell me everything that happened. Oh, you said you went to math. Tell me everything that happened in math.” And talking to kids obviously is a little bit different than talking to adults because they’re not on the development area that we’re at as adults, right? They haven’t gotten there yet. And so you kind of have to talk the way that they talk. Y’know, you have to use the words that they use. And you just have to kind of match their level when you’re talking to them.

Dave Cawley: You mentioned open-ended questions. I want to get a little more into that. So if I sat down with a kid and I wanted to know specifically about an event and I need a very—say I’m a detective and I have a very specific question about evidence I want to ask them and I drill on that, and the kid goes [I don’t know]—versus, like you’re saying, you kind of invite them to tell a story, it sounds like. From your experience, how are the differences in responses from kids based on those two different approaches?

Brianna Martinez: Well, the research shows that you get three to five times more accurate information from a child when you’re asking those open-ended questions than when you’re not. And with a kid saying, “I don’t know,” that’s their answer and that’s kind of what you have to take when you’re in a forensic interview with a kid. So what you want to do is ask those open-ended questions or just like, “Tell me everything that happened. Ok, you said this, then what happened? What’s the very next thing that happened, the very next thing?” And when you walk them through that episode of the event that they’re talking about, most of the time they’re able to give you the information that you’re looking for as a detective, right? When you go in and you say, “Did this happen, did this happen, did this happen,” you’re not getting that full story, as you say. You’re getting those bits and pieces of information that the child is giving you because of the way that you’re asking those questions. Whereas, when you say, “Tell me everything that happened from this point to this point,” they’re going to go through and narrate that whole entire event for you.

Dave Cawley: Is there a risk if you ask those really direct questions of, especially I’m thinking like a younger child, that they tell you what they think you want to hear?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah so, I mean there’s a difference between direct questions and leading questions. So for example, a direct question is, “What shoes are you wearing? What color is the car?” A leading question is, “You’re wearing a brown shirt, right?” So when you ask those leading questions, kids are going to be like, “Is that what you want me to say? Yes or no?” Like, “Oh yeah, I’m wearing a brown shirt.” Whereas, you say, “Tell me everything about the clothes that you’re wearing.” “Well, I have a brown shirt on. I have brown shoes on.” Things like that. When you ask those leading questions, it’s hard later on because it’s like, “Is that kid saying that because that’s actually what happened or are they saying that because I said that and I implied that that was something that was happening?” So you want to avoid those leading questions and instead open it up and say, “Tell me everything about your clothes.”

Dave Cawley: You have to be really careful doing what you do.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, you have to be really careful.

Dave Cawley: Do you ever find that, and especially with the younger kids, I’m thinking about the way even with my own relatives—nieces, nephews—you talk to them and it’s like, “What are they talking about?” They’re using, whatever they’re picturing in their mind and they’re telling you, you’re thinking, “That doesn’t make any sense.” Like, does that happen a lot in these kinds of interviews where they’re describing something that on the surface you don’t follow?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, there are times where they’ll say things that you’re like, “I’m not understanding.” And so that’s why you ask those follow-up questions and try to get more information from them. But, you do the best that you can and the child is doing the best that they can so you really just have to accept where they’re at developmentally. And they just may not be able to put it into words. And so you try to do those follow-up questions and you try to get more information from them but at the end of the day, whatever they can tell you is whatever they can tell you. And as a forensic interviewer sometimes you have to just accept what they tell you.

Dave Cawley: That’s what it is.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: In the case of Charlie Powell’s interview, he’d told the story to the best of his ability. It wasn’t his fault that that didn’t lead police to Susan. But what Charlie said the next time he met police definitely raised suspicion Josh Powell had something to hide.

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Dave Cawley: Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I believe Josh Powell was being honest when he said Susan didn’t go with him on the camping trip the night of her disappearance.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): She was not with us. And if my kids said that—

Tony Martell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): So your kids lie, then? Do your kids lie?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Sometimes they do.

Dave Cawley: It’s likely whatever happened to Susan occurred before Josh took Charlie and Braden out to the desert.

Police weren’t able to arrest Josh in December of 2009 because they didn’t have hard evidence to prove Susan was dead. You might recall Josh packed his boys into his minivan a little over a week later and moved to Washington state.

West Valley police wanted another crack at interviewing Charlie though, so they worked with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office in Washington to get a warrant. It authorized deputies to seize Charlie and Braden away from Josh, so they could be interviewed at a Children’s Advocacy Center in Tacoma. The same detective who’d first interviewed Charlie in Utah also conducted the second interview three months later, in March of 2010. But the result was less than ideal.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Charlie, has anybody talked to you about your mom?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Mmnm.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): No?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I not know where she is. She got lost in somewhere.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): She got lost somewhere? Tell me about your mom getting lost.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I not know where she got lost. I didn’t saw where she got lost.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): You didn’t see where she got lost?

Dave Cawley: Charlie squirms in a video recording. He tries to change the subject. The detective keeps turning back to the topic of camping and Susan’s disappearance. Charlie becomes agitated.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): We, we can’t talk about Susan or camping. I, I, I always keep these as secrets.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Did somebody tell you to keep a secret?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): No, only my brain did.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your brain did? What else did your brain tell you about the secret?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): My, my brain, my brain won’t tell me to say that.

Dave Cawley: It seemed likely Josh’d coached Charlie during those three months, to keep him from saying anything incriminating. Let’s go back to my conversation with Brianna.

Dave Cawley (from interview recording): What about when somebody you’re interviewing maybe seems evasive? Like either they don’t want to talk or they don’t want to talk about the thing that you’re there to talk to them about. How do you handle that?

Brianna Martinez: In my experience I’ve dealt with reluctance a lot. But we just remind them, my job is to talk to kids about things that have happened to them. I talk to lots of kids about things that have happened to them. And we kind of dive into that reluctance a little bit more when I can sense that it’s happening, or when they straight-up tell me, “I’m not comfortable talking about this.” Y’know, “Tell me more about not feeling comfortable. Tell me what you think will happen if you talk about what’s happened. Is there anything I can do to make you feel more comfortable?”  And there have been time where kids are like, “Nope. Not ready. Nope, don’t want to talk about it.” And you go through that reluctance with them and sometimes they’re just not ready. And when that’s happened in my experience and kids are just not ready, I let them know, “If there’s a time that you do feel comfortable and you do want to talk to me again, tell someone you trust and we can talk again.” So I leave that door open for them. And I have had kids come back that said, “I’m ready to talk about what’s happened.” So.

Dave Cawley: I’ve read though that second interviews are generally not the recommended approach. Is that right?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, it depends. In situations like that where we haven’t gotten a disclosure from the child and they’re telling me straight up, “I’m not ready to talk about this right now,” we haven’t talked about anything. And so it doesn’t matter if they come back again because there’s nothing that’s happened. It’s like we’re starting fresh again. But yeah, there are instances where we will get a disclosure from a child and the detective or CPS will want more information and so we really have to think about it and work through it and see like, “What information is it that you’re looking [for] from this child and can we get it somewhere else?” Because they’ve come in and they’ve told me everything that they can think of. Is it really worth going through a whole ‘nother interview just to get that one little piece of information. Another example though is kids will come in, make a disclosure, tell me that they’ve told everything, go home, live their life and then they’re like, “Oh wait.” Like, “I forgot to tell this lady something. I want to go back and talk to her.” So if that’s the case, and that does happen and we’ve talked about it and we decide that a second interview will be beneficial for the child, I’ll bring them in, I’ll talk to them about the information they want to give me, and then I’ll ask them about it. “What made you want to tell me about this now? What kept you from telling me about it last time we talked?” And we’ll just work through those things.

Dave Cawley: One of the things I read was, in a second interview it’s preferred to have the same person do the second interview. Is that right?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, yep.

Dave Cawley: What’s the reasoning behind that?

Brianna Martinez: The reason is, is I’ve already built rapport with the kid. I’ve already talked to them. And a lot of times when second interview happen, they happen relatively close to the first interview. Not always, obviously. But most of the time they happen relatively close. So when it happens close like that, kids usually remember you. You’ve already talked to them, you’ve already built rapport with them, they remember your face, they kind of know what’s going to be happening already. So.

Dave Cawley: In a situation like that, I’m imagining in a short timeframe, let’s say it’s even in the same investigation, what about the risk of having coaching? If they go back into, let’s say a home environment where a parent or caregiver or whatever says, “What did you tell that person?” And, “Don’t say this, don’t say that.” Can you tell when they maybe come back for a second interview that, hey, something’s gone on?

Brianna Martinez: You can tell that something has, especially if their disclosure from their first interview to the second interview is completely different. Sometimes kids will say, “This and this and this happened.” And then the next time they’ll come in and it’s like talking to a brand new kid. So when that happens, you really have to dive into it and ask those follow-up questions, y’know? If this is their disclosure now, you need to go in and ask, “Tell me more about that.” Get those details and then say, “So, I’m a little bit confused. Last time we talked, you told me about this. Tell me about that.” And see their explanation of why it changed from this day to this day, right? And then talk to the law enforcement and CPS and say, “Compare those two interviews because they are different.” And then they have to continue their investigation.

Dave Cawley: It’s their job to figure out what happened.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: Wow, that’s tricky. The interview that I’m focused on happened in 2009—2024, 15 years. This field has changed a lot in that time. Is that fair to say?

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, yeah. It has changed a lot.

Dave Cawley: A lot of focus on learning, a scientific approach to this. And I imagine that’s still going on.

Brianna Martinez: Yeah, there’s research going on all the time. I’m constantly learning new things. But yeah, things have changed a lot. I haven’t been around that long. I don’t know what it was like back then. I have heard stories, I have listened to interviews and they are different. There was a lot more of those direct questions or leading questions back then, because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. And now we know that those open-ended questions are going to get you more accurate information from the child and so we really depend on those open-ended questions for those kids.

At the start of this episode, you heard a clip of Josh asking Charlie, “Where’s mommy?” And Charlie responding, “Mommy’s gone.” That video was recorded in April of 2008, about a year-and-a-half before Susan disappeared. Josh’d taken Charlie and Braden to visit Susan at her work on that day.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Show me, where are the ducks? Where do we need to go? Over that way? Oh, you want us to go this way?

Dave Cawley: Susan skipped her lunch so she could spend time with her boys. They went to a large pond right outside the Wells Fargo call center where she worked. That pond is always crowded with seagulls, geese and ducks.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Say c’mere ducks.

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): C’mere ducks.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Is anyone brave enough to get this big piece? (Laughs)

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Good job, Charlie. You’ve attracted them.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Stay right here with mommy.

Dave Cawley: Josh’s eyes are glued to the video camera. He shoots clips of the boys from several angles, while also criticizing Susan’s duck feeding technique.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Don’t crumble it, Susan.

Dave Cawley: There are a lot of little moments like this in Josh and Susan’s home videos, where Josh talks down to her. But it can be subtle, like in this next clip. Josh turns the camera over to Susan, so she can get a shot of Josh walking hand-in-hand with the boys over a small wooden bridge.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Walk with daddy.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): C’mere Charlie, hold my hand and then we’ll see if we can go find a fish. C’mere.

Dave Cawley: The boys don’t cooperate. They’re tired, and not all that interested in being movie props. Susan points the camera at Braden, as he fidgets with the plastic bread bag.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): He gives up. (Laughs) Alright—

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Get down on his level, y’know.

Susan Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): —I’ve got to go.

Dave Cawley: From the outside, you probably wouldn’t pick up on Josh’s constant, low-level nagging of Susan as anything serious. But I think it reveals a lack of respect and affection. And that’s when he knows he’s being recorded.

Susan’s lunch break is over. She heads back into the office, as Josh loads the kids into their carseats. He starts the engine, then points the camera at Charlie.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Charlie, where’s mommy?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Mommy’s gone.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She went over there, huh. Say, “Bye bye mommy.”

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Bye bye mommy.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Where’s she going?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She’s going to that.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): To that building?

Dave Cawley: Josh starts driving away from Susan’s office.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Is it work?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Mmhmm.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Does mommy work in that building? What does mommy do for work?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): She’s going up.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Upstairs?

Dave Cawley: Susan’s work sat in an office park right next to Salt Lake City International Airport. Sometimes after visiting Susan, Josh would drive over to a spot at the south end of the airport, right off the end of one of the runways.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Alright, we’re going to go see if we can look at the airplanes for a minute and then you get to go home to take a nap. Ok Charlie?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): I don’t want to nap.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): You don’t?

(Sound of a jet airplane passing overhead)

Dave Cawley: When they reach the airport in this video clip, Josh leaves Braden unaccompanied in the minivan, so he and Charlie can go watch the airplanes.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Tell me what you think of that airplane. C’mere, look at me and tell me what you think of it. C’mon.

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Airplane go vroom.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2008 home video recording): Do you like this place? Are you glad that you get to come to the airport?

Dave Cawley: I presented a theory in the finale episode of Cold season 1. I suggested Josh might’ve left Susan’s body near her work on that Sunday night in 2009, before heading out on the camping trip with Charlie and Braden. This home video, and others like it, reinforce my belief Charlie associated his mom’s workplace with airplanes. During that first interview with the detective, Charlie said he’d flown on a plane both on his way to go camping, and on the return.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): We went home in the airplane.

Kim Waelty (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Oh. What about when you went last night camping? When you were all done, what did you do?

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Umm, we went to a beach when we was all done.

Dave Cawley: To my knowledge, the only real beach Charlie’d visited before Susan disappeared was along the Puget Sound in Tacoma. And that’s obviously not where he was the night his mom vanished. Instead, I believe Charlie’s “beach” was probably the pond outside Susan’s work. And that lines up with what Josh said he did on his way home from the camping trip.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I thought—

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Mmhmm.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): —I thought she was at work.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Mmhmm. … You went to her work, right?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Yeah.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): To pick her up. What time did you get there?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Probably 5:35.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): 5:35?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Something like that.

Dave Cawley: But there’s a two-hour gap in Josh’s timetable that afternoon, from when left this first voicemail for Susan around 3:30…

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Anyway, hopefully you got to work ok. And, of course give me a call. We’re, I guess, planning on picking you up.

Dave Cawley: …to when he left her a second message, claiming to be in the parking lot outside her office.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Hello, I’m out here. So I’m—

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Right now.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 voicemail recording): —just waiting for you. So anyway I’m in front. Ok, talk to you soon. Bye.

Dave Cawley: Josh wanted to convince police he thought Susan was at work. We can safely assume that was a ruse and he knew she was dead. It was after dark by the time of that second voicemail, so I doubt Charlie would’ve been able to tell where he was from the back seat of the minivan. But maybe he saw the pond, his “beach,” earlier than Josh would like us to believe. What if Josh was there during the daylight, during those two hours between 3:30 and 5:30?

Maybe Josh went to see if anyone had yet found Susan’s body, at whatever place he’d left her the night before. Upon seeing she was undisturbed, concealed under a blanket of fresh snow, Josh decided he could still pull off his plot. But he didn’t consider Charlie, who tried to tell us the following day where his mom was.

Charlie Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): And at night my mom stayed, sleep where a flowers and a crystals grow.

Dave Cawley: Whatever Charlie might’ve known about Susan’s death, he never developed the ability or opportunity to share it better than this. As we know, Josh killed his sons, and himself, on February 5^th, 2012. Charlie would be 19 going on 20 if he were alive today. I sometimes wonder what kind of young man he would’ve become, whether he’d have escaped his father’s poisonous influence and found the words to truly tell us where the flowers and the crystals grow.

Dave Cawley: As a kid growing up on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, Josh Powell dreamed of becoming a self-made millionaire. But achieving that goal proved more difficult than young Josh expected.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 13, 2000 audio journal recording): At the moment, I’ve only got a thousand bucks in savings.

Dave Cawley: His first attempt to make it big was a woodworking “business,” he started in high school. He bragged to his friends about spending thousands of dollars on tools. He didn’t have clients enough to justify the expense, but that hardly mattered.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 13, 2000 audio journal recording): If I spend $400 on tools, it makes me frustrated in my own budgeting and I feel like, “What the heck, I might as well spend another $400 on something else that I want.”

Dave Cawley: Josh never made his million dollars. But he did take out a million-dollar life insurance policy on his wife, Susan Cox Powell. Then, on December 6^th, 2009, Susan vanished. That was 15 years ago. And she has still not been found.

There’s a single piece of evidence in Susan’s case that’s confounded me for years. It’s a hunk of twisted metal police found in the back of Josh’s minivan, the day after Susan turned up missing. The lead detective on the case, Ellis Maxwell, told me the metal object ended up with the FBI.

Ellis Maxwell: It was forensically tested and nobody could identify what that object was.

Dave Cawley: But now, I’m pretty sure I can. This is a special bonus episode of Cold season 1: Mystery Metal. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley.

If it’s been awhile since you listened to Susan Powell’s story, the details of the case might be bit fuzzy in your memory. That’s ok. We’re going to revisit some of the events that preceded Susan’s disappearance, as well as what happened in the first couple days of the investigation. And I think where I’d like to begin, is on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 25^th, 2009. It was the day before Thanksgiving. And a guy named Andrew Robinson was at work, at a business called Airgas.

Andrew Robinson: Airgas is a company that manufactures and produces gasses: oxygen, nitrogen, acetylene.

Dave Cawley: I mentioned Josh’s trip to Airgas in episode 3. That account was drawn from police case files. I hadn’t talked to Andrew about it myself when that episode first came out, six years ago. In fact, Andrew’s never before spoken publicly about his experience meeting Josh on that day, just a week-and-a-half before Susan disappeared.

Andrew Robinson: I do recall that day Josh came in and his demeanor.

Dave Cawley: Andrew’s Australian, if you can’t tell. He was living in Utah at the time, but moved back to Sydney a short time later.

Andrew Robinson: And I guess I lost touch with the story.

Dave Cawley: Andrew discovered this podcast about a year ago, and listened to Susan’s story.

Andrew Robinson: Listened to that with fascination. Learned a lot more about how the story had progressed.

Dave Cawley: He reached out to me, because he had some unanswered questions. I sent him copies of the case files where he’s mentioned, and Andrew said some of the detail in those police reports was wrong.

Our conversation got me thinking again about that melted hunk of mystery metal. Andrew’s story is key in understanding where it came from and what it might be. So I asked him to take us back to the start and share the story from his perspective.

Dave Cawley (from interview recording): What was your interaction with Josh when he came in?

Andrew Robinson: Just a regular business day. … It was extremely quiet. … Roundabout, 3:45, a gentleman came into the store. … I approached Josh and asked if I can give some assistance in particular that he was looking for. And he spoke back saying that he was just having a look around. … After 10 or 15 minutes, he hadn’t approached the counter, still looking around the aisles. I approached him again and asked him what it was, he said he was interested in welding equipment, what we had in the way of that. I asked what it was in particular that he wanted to weld. And he said he was interested in making jewelry. … So I guided him to the product that would be most suitable, a kit that we had for soldering and light welding.

Dave Cawley: And was that the kit that he ended up purchasing or did he want something else?

Andrew Robinson: Josh ended up purchasing a cutting kit, which is a little bit more involved. It does allow you to do light welding. It also allows you to cut material with oxyacetylene.

Dave Cawley: To you, I guess in retrospect, does that choice to upgrade seem at all strange given what he said he wanted to do with it?

Andrew Robinson: Yeah, that struck me as being odd. It was a little bit of overkill for some cutting equipment to be involved in the making of jewelry.

Dave Cawley: From what I understood talking to you before and reading through the reports, he hung around awhile.

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct. He entered the store 3:30, 3:45. It wasn’t until after 5 p.m. when we would be regularly closing that he left with the kit in hand and also some cylinders as well to allow him to use that equipment.

Dave Cawley: When you say cylinders, I mean, fuel. We’re talking about the oxygen and the acetylene gas that he needs to run the torch, is that right?

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct. It was a small bottle of acetylene and oxygen to go with it. But these cylinders weren’t actually correct in being able to hook up to the torch. The cylinders that were provided to him were more in line with what you would use for making jewelry.

Dave Cawley: So let me restate that and just make sure I understand correctly. When he’s in there on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving and he says he wants to do jewelry stuff, you and the other employee, you’re trying to accommodate what he tells you he’s wanting to do. So it’s a, maybe a smaller tank with a different fitting. He upgrades to this bigger setup that can do steel cutting, but he still has these other tanks and at some point after he leaves the store he must’ve realized that something isn’t what he wants for this larger setup that he ended up buying. Am I understanding that correctly?

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct, yes. Josh did return the next week after the holiday weekend to exchange those cylinders to ones more suitable.

Dave Cawley: Ok. So he’s back in the store and what ends up happening from there?

Andrew Robinson: He came back in. I didn’t deal directly with Josh at the time but reading the body language I could see he was a little bit irritated. People were scurrying around trying to satisfy his requirements.

Dave Cawley: Do you recall, I guess at that point, was there anything that, in your memory you thought, “Huh, that was weird?”

Andrew Robinson: Not at the time, no. No. I just thought that everybody is an individual, has their own mannerisms. Was not thinking of anything particularly sinister.

Dave Cawley: A day or so later, Josh created a new text file on his work laptop, and titled “Welding Instructions.” He ran a Google search for the exact phrase “btu per cubic foot versus heat acetylene versus propane.” BTU is an acronym for “British thermal unit.” It’s a measure of heat. Josh’s browser history showed he visited two websites with information about acetylene gas.

Andrew Robinson: I did get that impression from Josh that he didn’t have a great deal of knowledge regarding the use of the equipment.

Dave Cawley: On Friday, December 4^th, Josh moved the “Welding Instructions” document to an encrypted portion of his hard drive. That encryption was never broken or bypassed, so I can’t tell you what the Welding Instructions file contained. All I can say is that by the following Monday, Susan was gone.

On the morning of Monday, December 7^th, 2009, Josh and Susan both failed to show up for work. Their sons, four-year-old Charlie and two-year-old Braden, didn’t arrive at daycare. Police in West Valley City, Utah forced entry at Josh and Susan’s house, on a cul-de-sac called Sarah Circle. Detective Ellis Maxwell swept the house, noticing Susan’s wallet and keys in the master bedroom. But the family, and their minivan, were gone.

Josh reappeared with the boys in the minivan later that afternoon. Susan wasn’t with him. Ellis confronted Josh on the driveway outside of the house. He told Josh they needed to go to a nearby police substation, to talk.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): Has she ever tried to leave or ever wanted to get out of this relationship at all with you?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): Uh, no. I don’t, I mean, it’s come up.

Dave Cawley: Josh said he’d taken his sons out on an impromptu camping trip the night before, in the middle of a snowstorm. He said Susan stayed home.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): Do you think she’s in danger right now, do you think she’s hurt?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 7, 2009 police interview recording): I don’t know.

Dave Cawley: Ellis suspected Josh’d done something to Susan, but he didn’t have a body or a confession. So at the end of the interview, he escorted Josh back to the Sarah Circle house. Josh reversed the minivan into the cluttered garage. Then, Ellis left. Josh had the house to himself. Exactly what he did in the hours that followed remains unclear.

Ellis Maxwell: Neighbors told us he had the van backed up to the garage.

Dave Cawley: Those neighbors lived a few doors down, on the corner. They described seeing Josh pull the minivan partway out of the garage at about 11 p.m. on Monday night. But they couldn’t tell what he was doing. I suspect he was making space to set up the oxyacetylene torch. And I think he intended to use it to destroy any physical evidence linking him to Susan’s death.

Detective Ellis Maxwell interviewed Josh a second time on the afternoon Tuesday, December 8^th, the day after Susan was reported missing.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Ok. I have a whole lot of questions still. Alright? We need to find your wife.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): I’ve already told you everything.

Dave Cawley: Rather than rehash this whole interview, let’s jump to the climax, when Ellis told Josh detectives were headed to the Sarah Circle house with a search warrant.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): We have your house. You’re not going to be able to go back to your house. Ok?

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): What do you mean?

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your house is ours, for right now. We’re not going to let you back into that house.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Ok.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Your car is ours. We’re not going to let you have your car.

Dave Cawley: The first thing the detectives did upon returning to Josh and Susan’s house was photograph everything. Those pictures are really important. What makes them valuable, is that Ellis had also photographed the house on Monday, before Josh was able to disturb anything. So by comparing the two sets of pictures, we can see what changed.

Ellis’ pictures from Monday show the oxyacetylene torch sitting on a cart in the garage. This tells us Josh didn’t take it with him on his “camping trip.” If I zoom in real close, I can see the tip of the torch, where the flame comes out, looks clean and shiny. But on Tuesday, that tip is covered in black soot. That’s proof Josh used the torch on that Monday night.

Meanwhile, you might remember Ellis’s search of the minivan on Tuesday turned up a melted metal object, some charred wire scraps and a few sheets of badly burned sheetrock, all contained in a plastic garbage bag, hidden in a floorboard compartment. This was presumably the remnant of whatever it was Josh burned.

Let’s go back to my conversation with Andrew, the guy from the Airgas store where Josh bought the torch. He happened to see Josh’s face on the TV news a couple days later.

Andrew Robinson: Yeah, that was the next time that I saw Josh was on the news the following week. … Being interviewed about his wife that’s gone missing. … Then I thought to myself, “Was that the guy that came into the store?” I went into my work the following day and I just wanted to verify that so I mentioned to my coworker and we pulled it up online. And he said, “Yeah, yeah. That looks like him.” And the way that he interacted with the journalist was very similar to how he interacted with myself and a coworker, very, I wouldn’t say as much as evasive but just very, almost vague.

Dave Cawley: So once you confirm that, “Hey, that’s the same person who was in here,” was there a question of, “What do I do?”

Andrew Robinson: Well, I just felt that it was something that needed to be brought to the attention to law enforcement.

Dave Cawley: So, as I understand, you end being the person to make the phone call to the West Valley City Police Department. Is that right?

Andrew Robinson: That’s correct, yes. The officer took my details and two officers came. They just wanted to know the interaction, whether we could provide evidence of the purchase in the way of a receipt and CCTV footage. And we had that arranged.

Dave Cawley: A police report about this interview says, quote, “Andrew said that he heard Joshua state on news interviews that he had been cutting open mine shafts on the Pony Express Trail.” Andrew told me that’s not accurate. He never heard Josh say that, because Josh didn’t say it. It is what Andrew suspected Josh might’ve wanted a steel cutting torch for at the time, and that’s what he said to the detectives.

Andrew Robinson: A thought that did come to my mind was what was his actual intent on the equipment that he purchased? … The upgrade in cylinder size would not be something that you would purchase for a little home jewelry making.

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Dave Cawley: A little earlier, I mentioned the police photos of Josh and Susan’s house, taken on Monday and Tuesday. They showed where the oxyacetylene torch was in the garage. But there’s another important difference between the two sets of images. 

On Monday, there’s an orange and black tool bag sitting on top of a chest freezer, next to the door leading from the garage into the house. But on Tuesday, that tool bag’s moved to a spot on the concrete floor, next to the torch. I think it’s likely the metal object Josh melted was in that bag. So let’s talk about where that bag came from, and what it likely contained.

During the second interview, Ellis asked Josh about his financial situation.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Give me a list of your checking accounts, credit cards that you guys have.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Well, she has, seems like she has a couple of accounts at Wells Fargo.

Ellis Maxwell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Ok.

Josh Powell (from Dec. 8, 2009 police interview recording): Oh, and Home Depot. Yeah, she’s got a Home Depot card.

Dave Cawley: Susan’s Home Depot card was really Josh’s Home Depot card. He’d gone through bankruptcy in 2007, but rather than stop buying tools, he opened that credit card in Susan’s name and went on a Black Friday spending spree. One of the items he bought was a Ridgid-brand 18-volt cordless tool kit. And it came in a black and orange bag. That tool bag appears in a video Susan made a year-and-a-half before she disappeared, documenting the family’s assets, along with a bunch of other Ridgid tools.

Susan Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video recording): A Ridgid drill, some type of Ridgid sander and a Ridgid saw.

Dave Cawley: I found an old Ridgid catalog from that same time. It shows this 18-volt kit came in two variants. Both included a hammer drill, reciprocating saw, circular saw, flashlight and battery charger. The difference between the two was one kit included an impact driver. That’s like a smaller version of a drill good for turning screws or bolts. Josh bought one of these two kits, but it’s not clear which.

Susan Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video recording): All expensive stuff that we bought. A lot of it got bankrupted, a lot of it got added afterwards.

Dave Cawley: I can account for every one of those tools in police photos from after Susan’s disappearance. The only one I can’t find is an impact driver. So it’s possible the melted metal object could’ve been a Ridgid impact driver.

In the bonus episode “Project Sunlight,” I described discovering a file among Josh’s computer records from 2009. It was a transfer log, showing the names of documents Josh kept on an encrypted hard drive. There’s an entire folder labeled “Ridgid Tools,” with entries for warranty documents, a spreadsheet with the serial numbers, even photos. Unfortunately, I don’t have the documents and photos themselves, because again, they’re encrypted.

But what’s curious is when West Valley City police later seized Josh’s computers a second time in 2011, they held a copy of this same Ridgid Tools folder. The spreadsheet and photos aren’t in it. It appears Josh deleted them. For what purpose? We can only assume.

West Valley police turned the melted metal object over to the FBI in 2010. The bureau performed a metallurgical analysis. It showed the mystery metal was mostly steel, with lesser amounts of calcium and strontium. That last element, strontium, is a component in small electric motors, like the kind used in power drills and impact drivers. And remember, Ellis also found three short wire segments in the trash bag along with the mystery metal. Those wires were the right gage and length to connect a battery to a small electric motor, like inside an impact driver.

All this is to say, a lot of circumstantial evidence points to the mystery metal being the remains of a power tool. But I needed to test this theory. So I bought an old Ridgid impact driver secondhand and enlisted the help of a friend with an oxyacetylene torch to melt it.

(Sound of oxyacetylene cutting torch)

Dave Cawley: The orange plastic shell turned into a bubbling pool of black goo.

Dave Cawley (from video of impact driver experiment): I mean, that rear casing’s pretty well gone. I can see the, I can see the housing on the front. Look how sooty you are though.

Dave Cawley: It put off a thick smoke that coated the tip of the torch in soot.

Andrew Robinson: Plastic would cause that blackening. … Blackening can also occur from too much fuel in the flame, too much acetylene.

Dave Cawley: As the silvery steel body of the motor heated up, it glowed white. The metal softened. Some of it liquified.

Dave Cawley (from video of impact driver experiment): So right where you’re at should be kind of the joint between the motor and the transmission—

Peter D. (from video of impact driver experiment): I think you’re right.

Dave Cawley (from video of impact driver experiment): —if it cuts clean through there, that would probably actually be good.

Dave Cawley: The motor broke into pieces. It took more than an hour and quite a lot of fuel to reduce the whole thing to an unrecognizable chunk of slag. We doused it with water, then compared the result to police photographs of Josh’s melted metal object. It looks almost identical to my eyes. You can see the pictures yourself on our website, thecoldpodcast.com.

Andrew, the Aussie from the Airgas store also watched a video recording of the experiment. I asked his opinion about it, since he has much more experience with oxyacetylene than I do.

Andrew Robinson: I’ve been involved in the automotive industry so oxygen, acetylene for heating components, cutting components, welding components.

Dave Cawley: That torch, do you think, would’ve been capable of reducing, like a power tool to that kind of a shape?

Andrew Robinson: Definitely, yes. … The power tool is fairly light material, all in all, and that torch certainly would be capable of reducing that to a molten clump of different materials.

Dave Cawley: Did it seem plausible to you, based on the experiment, that that’s what that object could be?

Andrew Robinson: I believe there was a very close similarity. … To come across that, I think there was some motive it that. … Something involved was destroyed by Josh.

Dave Cawley: I can’t prove beyond a doubt Josh’s melted metal object was a Ridgid impact driver. But this experiment left me convinced the mystery metal was absolutely a power tool.

Andrew Robinson: Why would you destroy a, something like that? Unless for some reason he just wanted to see how long it would take to melt a cordless drill. But why? … Y’know, if he’d had the oxyacetylene torch for six months and he was playing around with it and he thought, “Oh, I wonder how long it takes to melt this thing,” and it’d been sitting there, but it only happened within a week. Maybe two weeks, max.

Dave Cawley: The only reason I can conceive why Josh would’ve taken the time and effort to destroy such a tool, the moment the eyes of police were off him, was if it somehow linked him to Susan’s murder.

Andrew Robinson: Whether he premeditated it—I’ll go to Airgas, I’ll buy this equipment because I’m going to do this, I’ll melt the, the weapon—I don’t believe that to be the case. But … it’s quite feasible that the destruction of that, believed cordless drill was involved somehow in Susan’s demise.

Dave Cawley: While searching through Josh and Susan’s photos and home videos, I found a clip from August of 2006, about three years before Susan disappeared. Josh and Susan’s first son, Charlie, was a year-and-a-half old.

Susan Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): Ready? See this saw? And we go vroom! Oh!

Dave Cawley: That’s Susan talking. She and Josh are showing Charlie how to use a Little Tikes-brand playset. It’s shaped like a miniature woodworking bench, complete with a toy table saw.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): Cut the wood. Oh, you did it. You did it. You cut the wood. You cut the wood, good job.

Dave Cawley: Charlie’s a little young for this playset. He doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of a table saw, and picks up a toy drill instead. He has trouble holding it steady as he pretends to drive holes into the workbench. Charlie makes drilling noises with his mouth while Josh micromanages Susan’s camerawork.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): You should get down and zoom into his face.

Dave Cawley: There’s a moment in the video where Charlie walks over to Josh. He presses the plastic drill bit against the bare skin of Josh’s foot.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): You’re drilling on my foot? 

Dave Cawley: Charlie flashes a grin.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): What, you think that’s funny?

Dave Cawley: But listen to what Josh says in response.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): That could really hurt someone.

Dave Cawley: I got chills the first time I watched this, because t his could’ve been a moment when the seed of an idea was planted in Josh’s mind.

Josh Powell (from August 31, 2006 home video recording): Ow, ow, ow. Drills hurt. Ow, ow.

Dave Cawley: When he conceived the idea a power tool could be repurposed into a weapon. And Susan watched it happen.

A personal note from me as this episode comes to a close. In the years since this podcast first launched, I’ve heard from many of you about how Susan’s story has the power to reveal the sometimes subtle signs of domestic abuse. If you see those in your own relationships, please consider calling 1-800-799-SAFE to speak with someone who can help.

Even if you think you don’t know anyone who’s experiencing abuse, statistics tell us you do. To honor Susan’s memory, please look up information about domestic violence resources in your area. Educate yourself on the red flags of coercive control. Read up about the lethality assessment protocol. Be ready to help the people you care about. Together, we can save lives.