Category: Season 1 Transcript

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.

(Sound of light rain)

Dave Cawley: Standing at the top of Blowhole Hill, I can see storm cells sliding south across the Cedar Valley. Off to the west, the Tintic Mountains obscure my view of the Rush Valley. Beyond that, a sea of basin and range, stretching on across Utah and Nevada. It’s early March. Rain has already softened the ground. We’re eight miles off the pavement down a muddy, rutted dirt road.

Spencer Cannon: As you saw coming out here, there’s no fast way to get here. It takes the better part of an hour from Spanish Fork to get here. Anybody from anywhere in Utah County, the, the closest anybody would be in arrival time would be 35 to 40 minutes at the very best if somebody was coming from say Saratoga Springs or, or uh Goshen or Eureka or something like that.

Dave Cawley: If you’re not familiar with an of this geography, that’s okay. All you need to understand is we’re way off the beaten path, standing on the fringe of Utah’s West Desert next to a hole in the ground known as Nutty Putty Cave.

Spencer Cannon: The opening to the cave, it starts up on flat ground up here, flat rocky ground, and you go down into the ground about 15 feet and from there you have to go horizontal. And the only way to get through the first part of the opening, which is 10 or 15 feet long, is to either go flat on your back or flat on your stomach and just kind of move your way through carefully like that and then the cave opens up into some larger caverns.

Dave Cawley: West Valley City police case files indicate they received the first of many tips about Nutty Putty Cave on December 14^th, 2009, exactly one week after the date of Susan’s disappearance. People wondered if Josh might have disposed of Susan’s body not in a mine, but in the cave.

This is a bonus episode of Cold: Nutty Putty Cave. I’m Dave Cawley.

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Dave Cawley: Before looking at the plausibility of the Nutty Putty Cave idea, we have to determine if Josh was even aware of the cave. I can tell you with 100-percent certainty that the answer is yes. Here’s why: while sifting through hundreds of Josh Powell’s digital files, I came across a scanned copy of a postcard. The front showed a picture the Heart of Timpanogos, a rock feature inside Utah’s Timpanogos Cave National Monument. The postcard had never been mailed. I could see the address lines on the back side were blank. 

There was no stamp or postmark. What made this postcard curious were two lines scribbled on the back in Josh’s handwriting. They read:

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from undated postcard): Nutty Putty Caves in Eureka (south of Spanish Fork). Hole in the ground with maze.

Dave Cawley: I don’t know when Josh wrote those words or why. The postcard wasn’t dated. But it proved he was at the least aware of Nutty Putty. In addition, West Valley police located a few small, thumbnail images on Josh Powell’s laptop computer, the one they seized with a search warrant the day after Susan’s disappearance. One showed the opening of Nutty Putty. A timestamp showed it had been accessed on December 4^th, three days before Susan’s disappearance.

Another showed a man named John Edward Jones who had died in Nutty Putty Cave the night before Thanksgiving. The timestamp for that photo showed it was accessed at 5:25 p.m. on December 6^th, about the same time Josh was looking at the weather and information about Ely, Nevada.

John Jones’ death in Nutty Putty was, along with the disappearance of Susan Powell, one of the biggest Utah news stories of 2009.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): Since Tuesday night, rescuers struggled against the unforgiving topography of Nutty Putty Cave.

Dave Cawley: John had grown up in Utah, attending Brigham Young University before leaving for medical school at the University of Virginia. He was 26 and in his second year there when he, his then pregnant wife and their 14-month-old daughter came to Utah to visit family over Thanksgiving.

John enjoyed spelunking.

Leon Jones (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): He’s been in caves. I got pictures of him at the bottom of the Bloomington Caves, in a tight spot.

Dave Cawley: He’d explored other caves for fun. So on the evening of Tuesday, November 24^th, 2009, he and several friends entered Nutty Putty to probe its narrow passageways. But, while wriggling through one narrow stretch at about 8:45 p.m., John became stuck. He couldn’t go forward. He couldn’t go backward. It took some time for other members of his party to discover his predicament and exit the cave, where they could call for help.

Spencer Cannon: Yeah, we got notified late at night. It was after 9 p.m. That’s not uncommon. That, that happens, but where it was, we knew right away that there were a certain set of challenges that we would have to defeat right from the very beginning. Y’know, ggetting here, getting any resources here that we needed to try and effect a rescue, so there’s a major concern there.

Dave Cawley: That’s Utah County Sheriff’s Sergeant Spencer Cannon. Nutty Putty’s remote location meant it took time just for the first responders to get to there, let alone begin the rescue.

The rescuers knew a thing or two about Nutty Putty. It had a troubled history. In fact, Nutty Putty had been closed for several years prior to 2009, due to some close calls.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): After those earlier incidents, authorities considered closing the cave, instead they’ve allowed a caving group to manage it.

Spencer Cannon: We had two rescues within about a week of each other about four years earlier. One was, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 7 hours long. The other one was about 11 hours long. Uh, it wasn’t the exact same spot. John was stuck quite a bit further in along the same route where the other two had been rescued from.

Dave Cawley: The sheriff’s office called out its volunteer search and rescue team.

Spencer Cannon: Our search and rescue team has a number of members who are experienced cavers and uh, we had experience rescuing people from this cave relatively recently prior to this incident. The good thing about it is that, uh, if there is any good thing about having experience here, is that we, we knew what we were facing. So we knew from the outset exactly what equipment had to be here, what resources had to be here.

Dave Cawley: They went right to work. The members of John’s group told the rescuers where they would find their pinned friend.

Spencer Cannon: He was originally described to have been in an area called Bob’s Push which is just near the Birth Canal area, uh, both restricted physical features inside the cave that are challenging, but uh, it’s where a lot of people want to go when they go in the cave. He was actually beyond that in an unnamed, really unexplored part of the cave that uh, as far as we know nobody had been to. We know now that uh, John had been there, but uh, we don’t know that anybody else ever had been there.

Dave Cawley: Any hope they might have had for a quick and easy rescue evaporated once they reached John’s location.

Eldon Packer (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): Where he is trapped he is on a bend, so there is no there is no way to really get a hold on him to be able to pull him directly straight back.

Dave Cawley: “Constricted” doesn’t begin to describe the narrow space.

Eldon Packer (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): We’ve never seen anything this technical, this tough to get in and get this person out.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): The Rescuers had to squeeze through narrow twisting passageways. John Jones’ feet were sticking out, his head down, his body completely plugging a narrow tunnel 10 to 14 inches wide.

Spencer Cannon: We were fully confident when we got here that, uh, we’d be able to effect the rescue. It’s what, it’s what our search and rescue volunteers do. They, they don’t uh, go someplace expecting to not have the kind of success they want and it took quite a few hours, even, even 15, 20 hours into it we were still confident that uh, we’d be able to get John rescued and out of there.

Dave Cawley: John had become stuck while angled downward about 70 or 80 degrees, with his arms under his chest. The rescuers could see little more than his ankles. Only the smallest members of the rescue team could even reach the spot.

Spencer Cannon: The areas where they were down in there, uh, sometimes you were making another turn before you even finished the other one that you just came through. And in confined areas like that, you had to have small people.

Dave Cawley: The rescuers worked through the night and into the next morning. Nothing they tried seemed to work. As they tugged at John, his rib cage caught on a lip of rock. It was as if he’d been ratcheted into place.

John Hollenhorst (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): State senator John Valentine has been a volunteer search and rescue worker for 30 years. He says the problem the rescuers could not overcome was a small lip of rock, at a critical bend in the narrow tunnel.

John Valentine (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): The lip basically captured the center part of his body, so as you pulled against it, you were pulling like against a fishhook.

Dave Cawley: John was able to communicate with his rescuers, but not see them. They kept up a constant dialogue with him, seeking to buoy his spirits. Meantime, his family waited, hour after hour outside the cave.

Leon Jones (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): John is an incredible young man. And as an old guy I look up to John, umm, and idolize him. He’s a great example to me.

Spencer Cannon: We let them know that he was talking, he was singing church songs. We let them know that we had set up a communication line so that he could talk to his wife, uh, I think he even talked to some other family members as well.

We had that communication line up, partly already in there for the, for the rescue operation, the volunteers that were conducting it.

Dave Cawley: Most media trucks couldn’t make the final climb up the rocky slope of Blowhole Hill, so Spencer met reporters partway down the side.

Spencer Cannon (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): Anytime you’re in a position where you don’t have control over when you come and go, it’s gonna have an effect on a person emotionally.

Spencer Cannon: We were doing the best we could to make sure the media and then along that with the public knew exactly what was going on.

Dave Cawley: The rescue effort continued straight through the day on Wednesday. At one point, the rescuers rigged up a pulley system along the walls of Nutty Putty. They made progress inching John back up over the lip. 

Rescuer (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): He’s free of the tightest spot where gravity was really working against him and he didn’t have any leverage. There’s still some more tight spots in the cave, actually I think we got him past all the hard spots now.

Dave Cawley: But a rope failed and when it did, John dropped back into the trap more tightly than before.

Spencer Cannon (from November 25, 2009 KSL TV archive): We had him to a level spot where he wasn’t heading down hill with his head below his feet. Uh, during the course of that they have a raising system that uh, that was helping to hold him in position. Uh, one of the devices that is part of that system, uh, failed, uh, and uh, Mr. Jones actually ended up falling back into the area where he had been stuck for so long.

Dave Cawley: Best anyone could figure, John was about 125 feet below the surface. Pinpointing his position from above proved tricky. The place he was stuck was unmapped. Drilling to down to him might miss the mark entirely.

As Josh Powell was at Airgas that same afternoon, hounding employees about buying an oxyacetylene torch, exhausted search and rescuers were struggling with an unsolvable problem at Nutty Putty.

Spencer Cannon: I think that there were no options available that were not considered, even seriously considered.

Dave Cawley: Time and gravity conspired against them. John’s head-down position was precarious because it meant blood pooled in his head. His heart had to work extra hard to push that blood away from his brain. Consider it the cardiac equivalent of running a marathon while pinned in place. The strain, hour after hour, proved too much.

Eldon Packer (from November 26, 2009 KSL TV archive): We were able to send some, one of our cavers in close enough to him that they were able to check him, determine that he did pass away.

Dave Cawley: John died just before midnight on November 25, 2009.

Spencer Cannon: Yeah it was 11:56 p.m. on Wednesday night just before Thanksgiving day.

Dave Cawley: His death came just over 27 hours from the point at which he’d first been stuck. Even then, the fatigued rescuers questioned how they would ever manage to free him.

Spencer Cannon: Once John had been declared dead, there were discussions about “How do we get him out?” There were some rather distasteful discussions as well, things that nobody really wanted to do but ultimately the decision was made that uh, it was too much risk for the rescuers to remain there in an effort to get him out and the decision was made to leave him in place.

Dave Cawley: Leaving John’s body in the cave presented some unique considerations. For one, what would keep anyone else from disturbing his final resting place?

Spencer Cannon: Those issues were part of the discussion and uh, if the decision was made that he would have to remain in the cave, uh it then becomes a sacred place for the families. We did not want it to be disturbed for, for John’s sake, for the sake of the families and their uh, peace of mind and to make it a place that they can come back with at least fond memories of John.

Dave Cawley: The effort to rescue John had made headlines across the country. Deputies knew some people would be drawn to the site like birds to a pile of seed.

Spencer Cannon: Initially there had been a gate down at the, at the main entrance to the cave. That stayed in place initially.

Dave Cawley: Could that gate alone protect John’s remains, forever? The cave sat on public land, owned by the state of Utah. The county sheriff floated the idea of closing the cave, permanently.

Spencer Cannon: Yeah, there were a number of uh, uh, entities that were brought into that discussion. There was the officials from the Schools and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, the sheriff’s office, caving enthusiasts here in Utah County and around Utah—

Dave Cawley: The grotto, right?

Spencer Cannon: —the grotto, grotto clubs, we took input from everybody in, in making the decision. John’s family was included in that discussion as well.

Dave Cawley: The idea met immediate resistance, including from the man who’d first discovered and named Nutty Putty in 1960.

Alex Cabrero (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): These cavers understand the tragedy but think the cave could’ve eventually been reopened.

Daniel Kimball (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): Just because of a tragedy, doesn’t mean you have to close it down.

Kyle Parker (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): I think we should have a say on whether or not. We understand the risks in what we are doing and it’s something that we really love to do.

Dave Cawley: Those arguments did not prove persuasive.

Trevor Bradford (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): I think it was kind of a rash decision for them to just close it all at once.

Dave Cawley: At the end of the week, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office made the call.

Alex Cabrero (from December 3, 2009 KSL TV archive): 

The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration or SITLA which owns the lands said in a statement “while SITLA recognizes that some in the caving community disagree with this decision, SITLA believes that the consensus decision of the various government entities with responsibility for land management, public safety, and search and rescue to close the cave was the correct one.”

Dave Cawley: Nutty Putty would be sealed.

Spencer Cannon: Exactly how to do that was under discussion. What we ended up doing is our EOD folks, our bomb squad, went in. There was an opening not too far from where John was that kind of constricts the, it’s a constricture that you have to go through to where John is and they took a large amount explosives in there, placed them around that smaller opening, came out of the cave and then set that off and the idea was to cause all that rock to come down and close that part of the opening. That happened on the 1^st of December. Then uh, on the morning of the 2^nd of December, they had a load of concrete come out here — I believe it was about 30 yards — that was poured down into the main opening to give it as permanent of closure as you could get for it.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: You might be able to see where this going, but there’s a reason I came out to Nutty Putty myself to speak with Spencer Cannon about that tragedy, more than nine years later. The idea that Susan Powell might also be inside Nutty Putty Cave has persisted. It doesn’t work, for a few reasons.

Spencer Cannon: Susan was seen up until the 6th of December. The opening of, uh, Nutty Putty Cave was permanently closed with 30 yards of concrete and explosives on the 2^nd of December.

Dave Cawley: For the sake of argument, let’s say that wasn’t the case. I asked Spencer if he would ever attempt to take a low-clearance, front-wheel-drive minivan to the top of Blowhole Hill in December, in a snowstorm.

Spencer Cannon: Not in a hundred years. I, I, I would say it would be virtually impossible for a off-the-rack, off-the-showroom-floor minivan or passenger car to get up here. Even a small four-wheel-drive SUV would be very, very difficult. Something like a Nissan Rogue or a, even a Toyota 4Runner would have a hard time. Uh, something bigger — a full-size pickup truck or full-size SUV — it’s a challenge getting up here in those vehicles. But a passenger car or a minivan like that, it’s not going to happen.

Dave Cawley: Ok, but what if Josh parked at the bottom of the hill and pulled Susan’s body up the slope in a toboggan?

Spencer Cannon: From the place that you could conceivably get close to it to carry something up and hike up here, you’re better part of a half-mile at least and you still have to hike up another 200 or 300 feet in elevation to get to where the opening of the cave was.

Dave Cawley: Say he summoned Herculean strength to make that climb. Could he then have managed to get past the locked gate and push or pull Susan’s limp body through the narrow aperture of the cave’s mouth while flat on his stomach or back?

Spencer Cannon: That first part of it would be extremely challenging carrying something that is just a, a heavy mass over 100 pounds. Strongest of people would have a hard time doing it in that kind of a configuration. Yeah, anybody who’s been in this opening or been in the Nutty Putty Cave knows how difficult it is to get in there by yourself. To get in there with somebody else or something else, it’s just not reasonable, almost impossible to do given what it would take to haul weight in there that is completely unsupported.

Dave Cawley: Where there’s a will, there’s a way as they say, right? If Josh had somehow managed to defeat all of those obstacles, he would’ve had to do it while avoiding the notice of deputies who were parked just feet away.

Spencer Cannon: There are those, uh, smaller number, who might want to go inside and, and do something or collect something and so we had deputies here 24/7 from early on Thanksgiving morning until it was, uh, sealed on December 2nd with concrete and 24/7 we had somebody here.

Dave Cawley: After that, Josh would’ve had to chisel his way through solid concrete.

Dave Cawley: So what I’m understanding is in your mind, there is zero probability that Susan Powell is here.

Spencer Cannon: Zero probability.

Dave Cawley: Susan Powell cannot be in Nutty Putty Cave.

Dave Cawley: U.S. Marshal Derryl Spencer never expected the Susan Powell investigation to end up in his lap.

Derryl Spencer: I didn’t really suspect anything was gonna come of this. Umm y’know, it was quite a while from the time she went missing.

Dave Cawley: But about six months into the investigation, West Valley City police enlisted Derryl’s help. They were headed to Washington to surveil Josh Powell over Mother’s Day.

Derryl Spencer: In order for West Valley officers, y’know, to travel out of state and carry guns, they had to do it under the U.S. Marshals special deputization so I got involved in the case, uh, primarily as, as like the dad to take the team up there so that they can successfully operate.

Dave Cawley: That operation culminated in a consent search of Steve Powell’s South Hill home, which I described in episode 9 of Cold. But I didn’t explain exactly why Josh and Steve Powell agreed to let police into their home without a search warrant. Derryl Spencer was the reason.

The FBI’s mobile tracking order for Josh’s minivan had expired. The law required that the feds serve Josh with notice that they’d hidden a GPS device on his minivan. They also had to remove it.

Derryl Spencer: I had come up with the idea, y’know like, let, let me take it up there. I’ll knock on the door, we’ll see if he’ll answer the door and let’s tell him that, y’know, “hey I’m a U.S. Marshal and we’re trying to turn this into a missing persons investigation” instead of West Valley just coming after Steve Powell.

Dave Cawley: That’s just what Derryl did. Josh was suspicious.

Derryl Spencer: He starts yelling at me through the door, like “who is it?” And I said “I’m Derryl, I’m with the U.S. Marshals, y’know, can you come talk to me for a second.” He’s very hesitant to come to the door. Umm, immediately he’s like “are you a reporter?” And I just said “no, I’m not a reporter.” I had my creds out and I said “hey, if you’ll peek out the window I’ll show you my creds.” Like, I’m here for the right reasons. I said “I just, I just want to have a man-to-man conversation with you.” 

Reluctantly he did come to the door. He ate it up. He was like “yes, alright, c’mon, c’mon in.” So he invites me in the house. I tell him that I’m working very closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office out of the District of Utah. I make up some stories about how funding comes in about how I need to, to make sure that we’re being honest with each other. And I ask him for consent to search the house. And he, he, he doesn’t want to give it to me. He’s telling me that, uh, “y’know, I can’t really let you do that.” And I just said “Well you’ve, you’ve gotta meet me halfway. You need to show me that you’re willing to work with me.”

Dave Cawley: Josh and Steve argued about the idea, before finally calling Josh’s defense attorney, Scott Williams.

Derryl Spencer: I’m like “yeah, let’s give him a call!” And so Steve, no Josh calls him, gets him on the phone and just says “hey I’ve, I’ve got a U.S. Marshal in my house.” And I can, I can hear Scott, “tell him to leave right now.” Of course, what any, any defense attorney’s going to say.

Steve ends up on the phone, pulls the phone from Josh, ends up on the phone. He’s trying to control the situation. They’re kinda talking and I can tell that he’s talking Steve out of this, like, like I’m losing ground here. And so I’m just trying to be super calm and, and I said “would it make you feel better if I talked to him?” And so he’s like “yeah, you talk to him.”

So I get on the phone, umm, with the attorney and I’ll never forget, he tells me, he’s like “y’know what, if my client stole a candy bar, I would give you the same advice.” He’s like “you need to leave the house.” And I’m like “that sounds great,” I’m like “thank you, ok thank you.” And he’s like “Derryl,” like ‘cause he knows what I’m doing on the other side of the phone.

So I’m just trying to have them hear that this conversation’s going really well and he’s like “Derryl, you know that I cannot advise my clients to, I’m not going to tell them to give you consent.” And I’m like “that’s great.” I’m like “thank you so much.” And I said “well, we all know that it’s up to your client for the final word,” and I said “so I’ll just have direct communications with them and we’ll figure out the best way to do this.” And he’s like “Derryl—” I’m like “have a great day!” I’m like, “Feel free to call back if you need to talk to them again. And so I hang up the phone. I’m like “gentlemen, I think we’re good to go. I just need you to sign the consent form. (Laughs)” 

Dave Cawley: This is a bonus episode of Cold: Marshal Misdirection. I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad Break]

Dave Cawley: Derryl Spencer’s interactions with Josh and Steve Powell were good cop-bad cop on a grand scheme.

Derryl Spencer: I had told Steve and Josh, umm, that I had grabbed a bunch of U.S. Marshals and task force officers from the Seattle office. And so, when I really had a bunch of West Valley cops that were there. But I did not want them to know that. They hated West Valley, as you can imagine.

Umm, so I’m just like “look I just, I just grabbed a hodgepodge of, of Marshals and, and task force officers up here.” I said “they’re gonna help me so that we’re not here all day. It would take me, it would take me hours and hours.” I said “we just want to get this done.”

So we uh, I bring them in and I’m kinda just trying to hang out with Josh and Steve and keep them talking, keep ‘em comfortable. Umm, the task force officers, who were actually West Valley cops, come in and uh, y’know they start to search the house and everything. Umm, and they’re walking around and, and they’re badmouthing West Valley. Y’know and I’ve got a West Valley guy standing next to me and I’m just like “y’know, they are just the shadiest agency.” I said “as federal agents, we don’t even work with ‘em. We just, I understand where you’re coming from. And y’know, there’s just, we just have had the hardest time with them as well so I understand.” They were just eating it up. It was, it was hilarious. And uh, a very good friend of mine who’s a West Valley cop who I still hang out with every day, I’m, I’m just badmouthing West Valley right along with Josh and Steve and he looks at me and he’s just shaking his head. (Laughs) And I patted him on the back, I’m like “let’s get to work, Todd. C’mon.”

Dave Cawley: Derryl’s efforts to build a rapport with Josh and Steve bore immediate fruit. No sooner had the police left the house than Steve reached out.

Derryl Spencer: We finished and we got back together and we went to this little pizza joint just outside of Puyallup and Steve was already blowing up my phone with requests. And trying to like, help me out, give me ideas and stuff like this. And uh, he called me and I was, I was floored ‘cause we were eating dinner. I mean, I mean Josh is calling me already, it’s only been an hour.

Dave Cawley: Derryl had secured Josh’s permission to search the grounds of the Sarah Circle house in West Valley.

Derryl Spencer: And he calls me and he asks me if I can move some chairs for him while I was there. And I was like “sure, what do you, what do you need done?” And he had some chairs in one part of the back yard that he wanted moved into this shed. And I was like “ok, no problem.” So he’s, y’know, he’s already thinking we’re, we’re pretty good friends.

Dave Cawley: He used that friendship to look inside the shed, hoping to find any evidence.

Derryl Spencer: Y’know, we do an initial search and of course we’re looking for disturbed ground to see if maybe something would’ve been buried. Uh, we didn’t find anything at all interesting. Umm, but what I did find, in that shed up on a rafter up above, someone had etched with a knife, it said “here lies death.” Which was obviously somewhat concerning. I called the renters immediately and just said “hey, do you know this is here, do you know anything about this?” And she’s like “yeah, we’d seen it but it was here when we moved in.”

Nothing came of it. I don’t know why it was there. I don’t know who put it there. There was no, no, no empirical evidence that I could find that there was anything buried. There was nothing disturbed. Like, you could see the flooring in the shed. It looked very old.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: A bigger issue soon arose. Derryl’s involvement with the Powell case was a bit atypical. Marshals more often hunt down fugitives in far-flung location across the globe than investigate municipal missing persons cases. Derryl was juggling fugitive task force duties. He had traveled to St. Thomas in the U.S Virgin Islands to help take down a wanted drug cartel member.

Derryl Spencer: And while I’m getting ready to do this hit, Powell’s blowing up my phone. And I’m literally, like we’re getting ready to take down a cartel member (laughs) and I’ve got Powell blowing up my phone and I don’t want to miss these phone calls. And so I’ve got, y’know, the team lead that I work for on the SWAT team leader and I was like “hey, this is super important, I got to take this call.” And he’s like “hurry, we gotta go.”

Josh Powell (from May 24, 2010 voicemail to Derryl Spencer): This is Josh, I’m calling about that airbag problem.

Derryl Spencer: So, I end up talking with uh, with Powell and he’s extremely frustrated because he knows that we, that when the tracker was getting pulled that uh, we had, we had messed something up in the van and that he wanted me to fix it. And I said “well let me reach out, reach out to West Valley, we’ll see what we can do.” And he was, he was extremely upset by that.

(Sound of phone ringing)

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Uh, hello?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording):  Hey, Josh?

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Uh no, Josh, hello, who is calling?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): This is Derryl.

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh uh, Derryl, this uh, with the U.S. Marshals?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah, is Josh around?

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh yeah, he’s kinda in the middle of something, can I have him call you back maybe, or?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah, he’s got my number.

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Is this, is this about the airbag? He was wondering about that.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah, it is.

Dave Cawley: An airbag warning light had illuminated on the dashboard of Josh’s minivan.

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Does he need to call you back on that, or, ‘cause I, I could have him call you back in a, he probably would call you back in an hour or so maybe—

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Umm—

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): —is that fair Or is it just a message? ‘Cause I can give that to him.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Yeah give it to him. Umm, I’m out of the country right now so my, it’s hard for me to get cell phone service, so—

Steve Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh, I understand. Yeah, that makes it really hard.

Derryl Spencer: I contacted West Valley, y’know “hey we should, we should resolve this issue.” And they just kind of laughed at me. And I was, y’know, it’s fine, I get it. Like, I, I get that we’re in this investigation. But you’ve got to give to get. You’ve got give to get. And I was like “we should fix this for him.” Number one, like, we got, we got Charlie and Braden he’s driving around with in this van. If there’s an issue, like we should fix this. Like, it’s the right thing to do.

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Hello.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Hi Josh, it’s Derryl.

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh, hey Derryl.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): How’s it going?

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh, it’s good.

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Good.

Josh Powell (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): What’s going on? Did, did I hear that they might be willing to do something about the airbag, or…?

Derryl Spencer (from May 27, 2010 phone call recording): Oh yeah, we’re going to get it fixed. Umm, it’s just going to take a few days, mostly because of the holiday weekend.

Dave Cawley: As Derryl saw it, the airbag issue was a way to build trust and to keep Josh talking. But he found himself standing alone on an island.

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Hey is Josh there?

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Oh yeah, this is.

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Hey Josh, it’s Derryl. How are you doing man?

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Oh hey, uh, good. How are you?

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Good.

Derryl Spencer: I felt like I was having more positive communications with Josh and Steve than I was with some of the attorneys on this case (laughs) and some of the other, uh, players involved. So, it was frustrating. 

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): So I have, uh, pretty good news, but probably not as good of news as you’d like to hear.

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Ok, what’s going on?

Derryl Spencer (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): Uh, they’re definitely going to fix the airbag, umm, but you have to fill out a claim. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much headache I’ve gone through trying to get this through. Umm, so first thing tomorrow morning—

Josh Powell (from June 8, 2010 phone call recording): What is, what is a claim? I mean, is that like a very difficult process?

Dave Cawley: Josh and Steve had good reason to keep up their end of the conversation. They wanted Derryl’s help prying Josh’s digital data free from the clutches of West Valley police.

Derryl Spencer: They were trying to kinda use me as a proxy. They wanted, they were, they, like “Derryl, Derryl’s our guy. Derryl’s gonna be able to get us what we want.” And the whole time they wanted those hard drives back. They wanted those computers.

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): I need to bring them up to Josh though because the, the way the whole thing worked is, normally West Valley just won’t give property like this to anyone. So they’ve kind of gone out on a limb.

Dave Cawley: Josh grew tired of the game in short order. That is when Steve stepped in.

Steve Powell (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): If you wanna, y’know if you’re in the area sometime and wanna get together, Josh is a little hesitant because of the situation he is in, but I’m not hesitant at all. 

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Ok.

Steve Powell (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Y’know, I mean, it’s up to you though, y’know, obviously, and it’s your call.

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Well to be honest with you, I’m extremely interested, and I would love to hear what you have to say.

Derryl Spencer: Steve soon became the proxy. He wanted to communicate with me instead of Josh. He wanted to be in charge of the communications. Which was fine. Steve was extremely fascinating to talk to. It was uh, yeah, it was, I always felt dark and like I needed shower after getting off the phone with him.

Derryl Spencer (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): Y’know, I could go look at the FBI stuff, but I’d rather start fresh. I’d rather sit down and talk with you and Josh. Really hear about what you guys think should be done and then we’ll start exploring those avenues. So—

Steve Powell (from June 27, 2010 phone call recording): That’d be great. Yeah, we’d like to do that. I’d like to do that. Yeah.

Derryl Spencer: So he took over the phone calls. And when he didn’t like what I had to say and he didn’t like the direction of the conversation, he would defer to Alina and he would have Alina stonewall me.

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Hey, is Steve home?

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Umm, I’m sorry he’s not available right now.

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Well what—

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): (Unintelligible)

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): —what about Josh? This is, uh, Derryl with the Marshals. We met when I came up there a while ago.

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Sure. Umm, let me go see if Josh is available. 

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Ok. Thanks.

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): I’m sorry, I guess he’s not available either.

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Ok, umm—

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): I wasn’t sure.

Dave Cawley: During one call, Derryl told the Powells he had a trip planned to Seattle for some other business. He wanted to drop off a disc to Josh and maybe talk to Steve.

Derryl Spencer: And so he reluctantly agreed to, to have me come up. And I was like “I’m coming up anyway.” Which was not true. I was only going up there to meet him. I said “let’s just sit down and just, let’s just have this conversation.”

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Y’know, I understand if you guys are really trying to help, that’s wonderful, we appreciate it. It’s just hard for us as outsiders to tell, “ok are they really helping or is this another interrogation tactic?” Y’know what I mean? It’s like we don’t know if they’re, y’know, we just don’t know if you’re helping or not. So—

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): Right.

Alina Powell (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): But that’s good if you’ve got…

Derryl Spencer: The day before I was supposed to fly up there he had Alina call me and tell me that like if I wasn’t going to bring any of the computer stuff or any of the evidence or y’know any of these other items that were seized as evidence that, uh, he didn’t want to talk to me. And uh, at this point in time I had, y’know, I almost feel like I’m negotiating with the Powells at one level and then I’m also negotiating with West Valley. I’m like “we’ve got to give to get, gentlemen. C’mon, let’s work, let’s figure something out.” The most I could get West Valley to give me was a couple of family pictures on a CD. And I was like “ok.”

So when I called, Steve wanted to know what I was bringing. Like, I mean, I, I felt like, I felt like a pirate landing on the beach. I’m like, this is what we’re dealing with. Umm, so I just said “y’know I’ve got some family photos and some stuff like that.” And he’s like “well, we wanted computer stuff.” I’m like “I’m sorry, I just, this is, I’m working with West Valley.” And he basically tells me, he’s like “yeah, I’m not going to meet with you tomorrow.”

Derryl Spencer (from July 2, 2010 phone call recording): And, and don’t get me wrong, I understand where you guys are coming from. You have to be very selective because everyone you’ve delt with has been poking Josh on the forehead and I would hope by now Josh is starting to understand that, with me working with him on the airbag and with me, y’know, bringing photos up to him, I’m not going to ask him any questions, it’s not going to be like last time where we wanna go through the house. There’s nothing like that. 

Derryl Spencer: So Alina calls me back pretty late into the night and she’s like “ok, you can come up.” And I’m like “alright.” I’m like “well, can I talk to Josh or Steve?” And she’s like “no, they’re busy. They asked me to call you.” Meanwhile, I can hear these two having a conversation in their, y’know, their house was very small. And I’m like “well Alina,” I’m like “I can hear them talking behind you.” I said “I’m not sure why they’re, they’re using you to do the communications.” And I said “that’s fine. I like you.” And I said “You and I, you and I can, y’know, I’ll open up a dialogue up with you about any part of this any time you want.” And “y’know you can, you can talk to me whenever you want. You know that, right?” You can call me and stuff like that. She was like, she was pretty stonewalled. Umm, I mean, she was just doing what daddy said, told her to do.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: At the beginning of July 2010, Steve reserved a conference room at the South Hill Library, the same place he’d first met with West Valley detectives half a year earlier.

Derryl Spencer: We were supposed to meet at like 1 o’clock and then he, of course he’s got to be in charge of everything so he’s gotta, and I need to let him think he’s in charge of everything or he’s gonna start stonewalling me. And he starts dancing around the times. And then he wants to move it. Now he wants to move it, now he wants me to come earlier. And I just said “y’know,” I said “I’m just here relaxing.” I said “I’m just gonna go grab some food.” I said “just call me whenever you’re ready. I’m, I’ve got nothing going on the rest of the day.” So, (laughs), just play your game with yourself and let me know where we’re at. So when I told him that, y’know, him realizing that I was just “whatever, dude.” He’s like “alright, I’ll meet you there now.” (Laughs) Bravo Steve, well played.

Dave Cawley: Derryl wore a wire to that meeting.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): West Valley police department has been under a lot of scrutiny based on how they conducted themselves—

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —in, in totality.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): So, shortly before we came up and met with you last time, we were approached by the U.S. Attorney—

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Uh huh, yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —and we were asked to basically take a look at everything and report back to the U.S. Attorney’s Office what we thought.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah, ok.

Dave Cawley: Steve wanted to know if the Marshals were working for the Mormons.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Y’know, I’ve discussed it with family and everybody’s pretty suspicious of the Mormon church’s involvement in this and because, I mean frankly, they were very involved in my divorce and they were very, and they, and, and, most of the people that have been on the attack are Mormons here in this case too, so—

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Sure.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —it’s really a, they’re kind of a vicious attack group is what they are. And, and, y’know, that what they, even the bishop, y’know, my, my ex-wife, and my bishop too attacked me during my divorce and wrote things for the court and those kinds of things so I’m really suspicious but I’ll take your word for it.

Dave Cawley: Steve spoke in rapid-fire.

Derryl Spencer: I’m not sure if he took a breath the entire time. He had so much information. I let him, I, for the most part I just listened. I let him drive that interview. I, I didn’t really have to ask any questions. I mean, I did interject at some point here and there but it was like “uh, uh, uh, go on, it’s fine.”

Dave Cawley: Steve launched into the latest revision on his theory about Susan “absconding” with another missing person, Steven Koecher.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Susan left after Josh left and I don’t know if she left immediately but she probably didn’t wait too long. I’m guessing probably she waited a couple of hours to make sure Josh was long gone and I’m assuming that she and Koecher had some kind of a mutual friend or a contact there in West Valley City. That may be where they met or they could have met when she worked at Fidelity and he worked three blocks away at the, uh, at the Governor’s Office as an intern. So they, they could have met a number of places—

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Sure, yeah.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —all along the way. We don’t know, we don’t even know that they knew each other. We’re just assuming a lot of things. At least I am.

Dave Cawley: Steve claimed Susan and Koecher had gone first to California to get fake IDs.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): At least, at this point, my guess is, that she probably had some identities, two at least, maybe more, and uh, they wanted, they needed documentation, maybe driver’s licenses that didn’t have Utah on them, clearly. I mean, they’re not going to have a Utah driver’s license and look like they look. Y’know, I’m guessing that he probably stopped shaving on, on December 7th and he probably has a beard. These are guesses, obviously.

Derryl Spencer: The way he was telling me the story and the way he was telling me what happened was almost like he’d been rehearsing it for weeks.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): I think they both went to Sacramento and I think they, they were there, they got there the evening or the afternoon of the 8th and they were there on the 9^th. And on the 9th of December or on the 8th, I think they got married. So I’m saying, that’s my, that’s my conjecture. I think they went over there for documentation.

Derryl Spencer: And he was demanding that, like, I take a team of U.S. Marshals and almost get on a plane and let’s go to Brazil right now. And uh, y’know let’s, let’s put this together.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): I mean, to the best of your ability you, neither yourself or Josh, you don’t think Susan had a passport prior to her going missing?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording):  No, neither one of us know.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Josh never knew her at all apply to one, for it to be denied—

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): No—

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —or anything like that?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): —no, never, no. No, it wouldn’t get denied. I mean, if she’d applied for passport under her name, she’s, she hasn’t done anything. She’s never, that I know of, but I mean I, no, I don’t think so. I think that we probably, I mean I suppose she could’ve committed a felony at some point, I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

Derryl Spencer: I’m just like “and I need, I need evidence.” I’m like “Brazil’s a big country. I mean that’s, I mean, this is a needle in a haystack.” I’m like “can you prove to me that they’re there? Show me.”

Dave Cawley: In the middle of the interview, Steve’ phone rang.

(Sound of phone ringing)

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Let me see if that’s Josh. Hang on. Hello?

Dave Cawley: It was Josh.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah, Josh. I’m here in this meeting with the Marshals here. What’s up? I’m at the library. Did you want to come and pick that thing up and sign for it or whatever? It’s just a CD, right?

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): What’s, what’s on that?

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): A bunch of family photos.

Dave Cawley: Police had terabytes of his digital data and Derryl had brought that single 700 megabyte CD?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Now is this something that, yeah because see we have all kinds of photos and this might be just stuff we already have anyway. So it’s like, y’know, Josh just feels like it’s a slap in the face. It’s an insult. You’re talking about 5 terabytes of data and they’re sending this over. Y’know, it’s just ridiculous.

Dave Cawley: Derryl redirected Steve back to the topic of Susan and Brazil.

Derryl Spencer: Show me. I said “I’m going to take this information and I’m gonna have to sell it to people who pay my bills to go places.” And I said “what you’ve given me right now is not enough.” I said “this just sounds like a story at this point in time.” And so he tried his best to prove to me that, y’know, those two, umm, were in a relationship, that they were having an affair for quite some time and that they were, y’know, they ran away, they got married and then they went down, y’know, to uh, went down to Brazil.

Dave Cawley: Steve was careful to avoid the topic of his own lust for Susan, until Derryl asked him about it.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Is it true that Susan was in love with you?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Yeah. Yeah.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): That’s true?

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): That’s true.

Derryl Spencer (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Ok.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Y’know, girls fall in love with their high school teachers, y’know? They fall in love with their, y’know, it’s just a, it’s like an infatuation and that kind of a thing. So, that’s the truth, she was. And it didn’t really change.

Dave Cawley: Steve went on to claim, without any proof, that Susan had been suicidal, that she’d abused her sons and that she’d felt noncommittal about her religion.

Steve Powell (from July 7, 2010 wire recording): Y’know, Susan had every Wednesday and Thursday off and uh, and she’s claimed that she was going to the temple frequently on those Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Derryl Spencer: Y’know, Susan would go do temple work during the week and he told me that Susan never actually went to do that, that she was meeting with, with, with this Steve character. Umm, so y’know, I just took that for what it was.

Dave Cawley: Derryl’s interview with Steve proved fruitless. In the days and weeks that followed, Derryl went to work attempting to disprove the theory that Susan’s disappearance was linked to the Steven Koecher case.

Derryl Spencer: I was never able to confirm that she had attempted to get a passport, let alone had a passport, even under a potential alias that she might have used. Kinda the same thing with Steve. Was never able to corroborate any passport information. I had also kind of flagged the names with the State Department. They had no record of, of her leaving or coming and going from the country in any way, shape or form. So that also helped in kinda dialing, y’know, possibly. So I also ran Steven Koecher’s. There’s no evidence that he had left the country either. So, I felt like one of those probably would have tripped up the system at some level to show that they left the country. There was no corroborating, no empirical evidence to connect Brazil to Susan’s location at that point in time.

Dave Cawley: Derryl also did his due diligence with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Derryl Spencer: They were helpful. But they, y’know, the church does not keep a written record of, of temple work. At that point in time they didn’t, they might do that now. But at that point in time, they did not document who actually came and did temple work that day. Umm, I think the individual temple collected that information but there was not a database that we could pull to, to get that information so we’ve kinda discredited that as well.

Dave Cawley: In the end, the entire exercise with Steve Powell served as nothing more than misdirection.

Derryl Spencer: He was doing his, I mean it’s obvious. His goals were to derail the investigation, to steer us as far away from possible what was really happening and what was going on, just to get us away from him so that they could, y’know, live in the uh, peaceful Puyallup home that they had created. But that was obvious.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: As the summer of 2010 stretched on, Derryl kept pushing his colleagues at the West Valley City police department to go hands-on with Josh.

Derryl Spencer: I mean, I run a fugitive task force. My, my role in the community is a little bit different than a regular cop’s. I’m not here to help you cross the street. I’m not here to help you change a flat tire. My sole purpose, umm, Congress funds my task force, for us to chase down violent fugitives. And you don’t do that by hugging and holding hands. It’s a, it’s an aggressive job and we hurt a lot of feelings in the process. But y’know, sometimes if you ask nicely, people will just lie to you and want you to go away. So you need to, you need to think outside the box. And that’s constantly what we’re trying to do. And so that’s what I brought to this investigation.“Let’s, ‘kay, we haven’t done this, let’s do this. Hey, let’s, let’s get crazy today. Let’s be aggressive on this case. What, what do you say?” And uh, y’know, it was, it was frustrating because a lot of times I felt like I would bring these, these ideas to the table and it would be like “ok, sounds good.”

Dave Cawley: Derryl’s involvement also started to raise eyebrows up the chain of command. He and detective Ellis Maxwell were at that point several months into their hunt for Summer the stripper.

Derryl Spencer: So we’re getting to that point where the Marshal Service is just like “what are we doing here? Why are we spending thousands and thousands of dollars to, to allow you to work this investigation? We’re flying you all over the country to do these things. We’re paying overtime to task force officers.” I mean, the Department of Justice and Marshal Service was, was dumping a lot of money into this investigation and at one point in time, a higher-up in the investigative branch, uh, reaches out to us and was like “What are you guys doing? If they’re not going to help you work this case, you’re done.” Like “we don’t go out and solve, y’know, crimes and put this together.” So the headquarters was starting to realize like, this is out of our scope. If they’re not going to be more proactive, we’re not going to allow you to do this any more.

Dave Cawley: At the start of November 2010, West Valley police went to Puyallup.

Derryl Spencer: Right before this happens, Marshal Service basically says “you’re done.”

Dave Cawley: The police planned to confront Josh and Steve about Susan’s childhood journals.

Derryl Spencer: This meeting needed to happen. Like, I couldn’t let it be. So, umm, nobody really knows this but I paid for my own ticket to go up there. I just, I, I, I thought if I pushed headquarters a little bit more, they were going to flat out be like “no Derryl, don’t go.” Umm, and I didn’t, it’s almost like “mom says no, I’ll go ask dad.” I just thought “well, how about I don’t ask mom or dad and I just handle it.” So I paid for my own ticket. Umm, I’m on my own dime. Uh, Ellis was already up there and I said “get a double room, I’m crashing with you.” So I went up there, he picked me up at the airport super late at night.

Dave Cawley: So, Derryl returned to the Powell house on November 16^th, 2010 with West Valley police Lieutenant Bill Merritt, who he introduced as a U.S. Marshall. 

Derryl Spencer: I felt pretty good about this interaction with the Powells, for a couple reasons. Number one, I’m back in the house and so I think things are moving forward and we’re, we’re, we’re still facilitating conversation which is good, right? And I’ll never forget, uh, Charlie and Braden, the boys, were playing at my feet. And, y’know, I have two sons and so this was like “we’ve gotta fix this.” Like, “we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta make this right.”

Dave Cawley: They talked with Josh and Steve for about an hour and a half, making the case that the Powell family should provide the Marshals with Susan’s childhood journals.

Derryl Spencer: It was the first time I had seen it, but Josh was starting, starting to stand up to Steve and question him on things and they started to bicker, like pretty, pretty aggressively. Like, almost like, borderline domestic. And I’m just sitting on the couch and I’m just like so happy this is happening and watching these two, two argue and fight. The negotiations ensued about this whole thing, like “well can we just get a copy of it?” And then, of course now Steve and Josh are trying to pretend like they’re too computer stupid to figure this whole thing out.

Dave Cawley: The Powells never did end up handing over Susan’s journals and Derryl found himself off the case for good after that. A little over a year later, Josh murdered his sons and took his own life. Steve Powell was, at the time, in the Pierce County Jail.

Derryl Spencer: They went and interviewed him at the jail and he wouldn’t talk to them and he said, uh, he told investigators “if that damn Marshal would have done what I told him, this never would have happened.” So y’know, even at this stage in the investigation and the relationship I’d developed with these two jokers, like they’re still, they’re blaming me for this. Uh, which is, has never really sat well with me, not that, not that neither one of those individuals depict how I feel throughout the day but it was, it was pretty dark to kinda, like these, these, these guys are blaming me for this type thing, like, like I didn’t do my job well enough to find Susan.

Dave Cawley: Derryl Spencer should not bear the blame for what happened to the boys, even though he wishes he could have prevented it. Ultimately, responsibility rests with Josh.

Derryl Spencer: I think people underestimated the darkness and the demons that were Josh and Steve.

Dave Cawley: Derryl, a Marine who served his country in combat and who’s spent his career as a Marshal dealing with violent, dangerous criminals, told me he had the Powells pegged from the get-go. 

Derryl Spencer: I picked up on it right away. I’m like, these, these two, there’s something going on here. There’s, there, this is not right. This is, I did not have a good feeling and I immediately knew that they were capable of making a woman disappear. I could tell. In my gut, in my heart like I knew, like that this, they were involved in this. No doubt about it.

Dave Cawley: And Derryl doubts Susan’s body will ever be found.

Derryl Spencer: There’s no doubt in my mind. Not one sliver of, he did this. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no question in my mind. I knew this throughout the course of the investigation, umm, and it was so frustrating because I, I felt like we had enough evidence. Let’s get this, let’s get him into custody, let’s solve this problem and let’s build, let’s finish building the case from there. We have mechanisms, legal, just, mechanisms that we can take him into custody and hold him in a facility while we finish this investigation and we can get a better control of it. And I just didn’t feel like the district attorney’s office was supportive of that. They, y’know, we would present facts and then “here’s where we’re at.” And, and they kept denying it. And they kept denying it, which was frustrating. I’m not surprised how this ended. I’m just not.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I do need to be treated well. That’s probably one of the most important considerations in relationships.

Dave Cawley: Josh Powell’s recorded audio journals are one of the most unique and bizarre aspects of the Susan Powell case. When discovered by police, they provided nothing in the way of evidence. But they say so much about who Josh was and how he thought.

This is a bonus episode of Cold: Anatomy of an Audio Journal. I’m Dave Cawley, and I’m speaking with Dr. Matt Woolley, a clinical psychologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. At my request, Matt reviewed one of Josh’s audio journals from December, 2000. Now, we’re going to talk about it.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Susan has been really sweet to me. It’s been overall a really good relationship and in, in many ways, possibly the best relationship overall I’ve been in.

Dave Cawley: You and I are in a small group of people who’ve actually had the chance to listen to one of these Josh Powell audio journals in whole.

Matt Woolley: Yeah. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: What was that experience like for you?

Matt Woolley: Umm, kind of a mix of, of very interesting and tedious. Right? Because he does spend a lot of time just cataloging and kind of talking about the mundane aspects of his day and what he’s doing. The one we shared, the one I listened to, y’know, he talks about moving in to his apartment and then he describes the various things in his apartment.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): That apartment, 11016 Waller Road East, apartment F304, is a very comfortable apartment. It’s, it’s big enough to have parties with a lot of people, to eat comfortably, to watch movies comfortably. And I’ve been thinking lately that that apartment might be sufficient to start off a marriage in, if I were to get married.

Matt Woolley: He says some interesting things. Even how he says those things are interesting perhaps to a trained listener like a psychologist because it reflects certain aspects of his personality. But as far as them being full of juicy details, it’s just, y’know, he’s excited that he has a complete DVD collection of Disney and, y’know, the, the, the d—, the, the, the reasons behind why he’s talking about those things may be more interesting but I have to admit, it got a little tedious at times—

Dave Cawley: Here’s a bit—

Matt Woolley: —as anyone’s daily journal would, I would think. Right?

Dave Cawley: Right?

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): At this point, I’m honestly satisfied with my DVD collection, y’know, with a few exceptions. I’ve got a lot of Disney cartoons. I’ve got the Rogers and Hammerstine collection, some holiday and festive videos. Christmas, Mickey’s Christmas, umm, Miracle, It’s a Wonderful Life, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph, Christmas Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Charlie Brown holiday series with Christmas, Thanksgiving and, and Halloween.

Dave Cawley: One of the things that kind of blew me away about it when I first heard it is, this recording starts with Josh Powell saying, uh, “continuing on from…”

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Here is is, December 13^th, year 2000 still. I ran out of space on the card in this recorder. So I’m going to finish up this journal entry here.

Matt Woolley: Right.

Dave Cawley: …so he’s been talking before. And now he’s going to talk for another hour and 20 minutes.

Matt Woolley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: I mean, so, he’s committed a significant portion of his day to recording this material. And—

Matt Woolley: Right.

Dave Cawley: —you would think if you’re going to invest that much time and effort, it would be “today was a really big day and here’s why.”

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: And instead what we hear is “uh, y’know, I want to talk about my debt and, y’know, what I’m doing with my credit cards and…”

Matt Woolley: Right. And if you notice, I’d be interested if you saw this as well, but my feeling was the way he describes a lot of things are sort of literature-like. Instead of just casual conversation, the way you might efficiently speak about what you did that day, I think is where you were going with that is—

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: —he instead describes things in, in unnecessary detail in an, in sort of a narcissistic way, as if somebody is ever going to care about this. That it’s somehow important, precious information about him, eh, that some day future generations or other people might take a real interest in what he was doing that day. Just the mundane, everything would somehow be interesting and important. So I felt like it was very much a, y’know, it’s a narcissistic activity. It reflects back on himself his own self-importance that, that nobody ever would truly care about.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): So I need to spend a little more time taking care of this. I’ve got to scan a lot of papers to get, get rid of the actual paperwork. Then I’ve got to organize a bunch of files in my computer. And I’d really like to reformat my hard drive and re-install things a lot cleaner.

Matt Woolley: To him, in his mind and this, and this is fairly young in his, before his marriage, uh, kind of this developing delusion of his grandiosity.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): My current financial system of using multiple debit cards is something I’d came up with a few months ago. It seems like it was probably back in May or June when I came up with the idea.

Dave Cawley: And is this something, because I hear the question a lot from people who’ve listened the podcast and they’re surprised at all of these journals—

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: —you’ve got Josh keeping this audio journal. You have Steve writing just, y’know, all of these pages and pages of, of his journal. Uh, you even have Susan journaling a little bit—

Matt Woolley: Yep, yep.

Dave Cawley: —and, and so where does it cross the line from being “hey, that’s a little unusual” to “wow, that’s really strange” in your mind?

Matt Woolley: Well, first of all you have to put it in context. So, they both grew up in the LDS faith and in the LDS church journaling is highly encouraged. So, y’know, the fact that Susan kept childhood and adolescent journals wouldn’t necessarily be unusual, per se. But this, this complete cataloguing of his life, which is what he did not what she did, that’s where it kind of crosses over. Typically, journaling is a mundane activity for the journaler. And so people tend to be fairly efficient with it, if they journal at all. He liked technology and so he was drawn towards this new technology, well not necessarily new but he was on the edge—

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: —of digitally recording audio and video. But, umm, where it becomes, I think, uh, crosses a line from kind of odd to very strange is the number of hours that, that are, that are involved. Which, like you said, an hour, I don’t have an hour and 20 minutes in my day to, to do something fun—

Dave Cawley: I don’t, I don’t think many of us do, right?

Matt Woolley: —let alone, yeah. Right. And so that, just the, the sheer minutes and hours, literally hours involved in his audio and some video is incredible. And then the fact that they really are about very, uh, mundane sorts of things. He does get into describing what you might see in a journal a little bit more often like feelings and thoughts about things. However, then it becomes even more kind of this, as if he’s reading a book. It, it, he extends out his descriptions of things well beyond what you’d want to do if you were trying to efficiently record your thoughts and feelings.

And so I’d say those sorts of things combined, plus the fact that it’s really ego-centric, meaning the self. It’s all about him and his thoughts and his feelings about everything. Which, of course, somebody’s listening saying “well, it’s his journal.” But there’s very little indication that he is contemplating or processing the thoughts and feelings and behaviors of other people, other people’s motives in his life or what, how they think and how they feel. There’s really no indication that he’s thinking “oh, I wish I could make someone else happy today.” Y’know, it’s all about his own things, his, his description of how great his, I remember he said he spent $300 on a DVD player and I remember when they used to be expensive like that.

Dave Cawley: Right.

Matt Woolley: Right?

Dave Cawley: Right.

Matt Woolley: So he’s wanting to, y’know, kind of highlight that he has very nice things.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I don’t really regret the DVD player. It was, uh, about a $300 purchase and now I’ve got the, y’know, hundreds of dollars-worth of DVDs that I’ve accumulated over the last couple of months. I don’t think that was really a, a problem. I don’t regret it at all.

Matt Woolley: There at times is kind of a “poor me,” sort of picked-on, y’know, attitude that I’m, I’m special but people aren’t recognizing it. So I think all of those factors together really tip the scales into the fact that this is well beyond a typical journal, but the, the highlight is just the number of hours, is y’know, I doubt, y’know, the president has quite so much audio on him.

Dave Cawley: Right. I’m glad you brought up the point about how he seems to lack this empathy for other people. Uh, there’s one particular passage in my mind where he’s talking about “I’m trying to be more active with friends.”

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Up at UW Seattle it was really, you became a number. I didn’t like that environment. Down in Tacoma, I feel like I have an opportunity to make friends with people where I never could up in Seattle except in church.

Dave Cawley: It’s better now that I’m in Tacoma and I’m hosting these get-togethers where people come over, and isn’t this great.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I started a tradition of inviting people over every Sunday and after a few weeks that progressed into a tradition where we just get together as a group, pretty much the same core.

Dave Cawley: And then a little bit later in the recording he comes back and says…

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): People come over to my house and instead of eating what I’m offering them, they come in and say “oh” — they look in my freezer — “oh, I want to make orange juice to go with dinner.” And “I want to put this with my dinner.” Well, eventually when they start doing that, it gets extremely expensive to have these dinners and so I’ve felt like that has, uh, been a, a burden that I can’t take these days.

Dave Cawley: There might be some normal annoyance that most of us would feel at going, y’know, “I’m kind of a poor college student, I don’t have the resources.” But at the same time, there’s almost a shift in the way his voice sounds in my ear—

Matt Woolley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: —that this is more than just annoyance. Like, this is “how dare they?”

Matt Woolley: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s uh, they’ve gone out of bounds of his expectation and he wants to put them back in those boundaries. So, I think specifically he said people will get something out of the fridge and say “oh, I’d like to add this to the meal.” And we don’t know what those things were but, but most likely since he was a poor college student, it might’ve been salad dressing for all we know. Nothing that, y’know, people aren’t, y’know, unthawing his meat supply for the year.

Dave Cawley: It’s not steaks. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Woolley: Right, exactly. And so, I think absolutely there’s a shift in his tone and temper in his voice when he talks about this, this really bothers him. That “how dare they” is definitely a good way to describe the feeling you get when you listen to that shift. How dare they do something in my home that I didn’t intend? Y’know, they’re here to become my friends. And so there’s no reciprocity there and there’s also no acknowledgement that maybe he was popular for a minute. People enjoy being there. They’re comfortable enough to go into his fridge. A different alternative perspective would be like “oh, it’s awesome,” y’know, “people come over and they, they help themselves to stuff. I’m really making real friends.” But no, it was, he can’t control what they’re doing in his environment and it bothers him.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): At this point, of course, I’m only seeing Susan and I have been for about a month now.

Dave Cawley: This also is really important in my mind because we know that it’s during one of these Sunday dinners that he hosted that he and Susan really hit it off. He didn’t go into it as much in this particular recording but in some of the others that were used in, in Cold, you hear him describe, y’know, Susan after the meal got up and, and was cleaning the dishes—

Matt Woolley: Right.

Dave Cawley: —and that’s when we fell in love.

Matt Woolley: (Laughs)

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Uh, I think I might’ve asked for help doing to the dishes and she volunteered so we were doing dishes together and I guess she liked that so much that she decided she really likes me.

Dave Cawley: It’s so hard for my mind to understand a 24, 25-year-old guy who meets this, y’know, cute 19-year-old and in none of these recordings, this one included, does he ever say anything about, y’know, she is so, I, I am head over heels for her—

Matt Woolley: Right.

Dave Cawley: —she is so this, that or the other. It’s—

Matt Woolley: None of that typical language.

Dave Cawley: —it’s how she serves me, how she takes care of me.

Matt Woolley: Oh yeah, very specifically. Umm, he, I, I have, if you listen to what, this, this section and then the, the Cold episodes, you obviously see that he has a plan. He is attending church functions, uh, social functions put on by his church, with the primary goal of dating. Trying to find somebody. Complains that girls don’t call him back.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I sometimes have difficulty finding girls who are willing to return my phone calls, go out with me. I’ve had over the last, uh, three or four months, I’ve called a number of girls who never returned my phone calls or who always said they were too busy to go out with me.

Matt Woolley: He’s very much in, on the hunt so to speak, for finding a girlfriend and I assume then later a wife. And when he finds Susan, she has these traits that he just has been looking for. She’s very, uh, kind. He said she does, y’know, nice things for him.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): She’s the first girl I’ve known, that I’ve been dating, who has had a car, who comes to visit me. And y’know, in the past I’ve always been the one to pick up a girl, whether she’s visiting me or I’m visiting her, I’m always the one to do the driving so that’s a great thing.

Matt Woolley: He specifically mentions that she jumps in and does the dishes, that she washes her hands and puts everything back after she uses the bathroom. And it only takes a minute to do that.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): She also tends to help me clean up, like after we have a party or, or after we have dinner together at my place or something. She helps me clean it up and keeps the kitchen clean. Like when she washes her hands in the bathroom, she wipes up the sink. Which I do, too. I like to keep all that clean. It only takes a second to keep things looking really nice.

Matt Woolley: And it really is all about her serving him, her doing things for him. Her making him feel good and special. Respecting his things, the opposite of what the other guests were doing in the home. She’s putting things back, cleaning up, doing the dishes and then doing nice things for him. And then, in this journal that we listened to there’s also a section where, I mean, this is a hard-working girl. She works very hard. Uh, she goes to beauty school all day, works at J.C. Penney and then drives to his house to meet him and, and serve him again.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): It really shows that she cares. For her to come over here after her long day and make it a point to see me every day…

Matt Woolley: And so he’s, I think, just found the ideal, in his mind, person to feed his narcissistic self-perception that he’s special and deserves to be treated that way.

Dave Cawley: Yeah. There, as I recall, is a, a particular where he talks about when they started dating. And, uh, he almost sounds a little defensive in saying “well, this was really Susan’s idea,” and y’know, “I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give up all these other options.”

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): When I started getting serious with Susan, it was mainly her idea. I was very hesitant to get into a relationship because I was finally feeling confident about dating and I didn’t want to let go of all my relationships that I could potentially develop.

Dave Cawley: Right after he’s told us that he really has no other options because girls won’t give him the time of day.

Matt Woolley: (Laughs) Right, right.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Sometimes I feel like I can’t reach any girls anywhere, that for some reason or another, they won’t give me the, a chance to even go out with them.

Matt Woolley: But in his mind, being a special, precious person that’s deserving of adoration, he must have many, many options. He just hasn’t found them yet. Like—

Dave Cawley: Or, or convinced them yet.

Matt Woolley: Or convinced them yet, yeah. Let them, or given them the privilege. I mean, it’s all of that—

Dave Cawley: Right, right.

Matt Woolley: —self-absorbed, narcissistic thinking and uh, and he even kind of brushes her off at one point when, I think, was it the roommate or the friend was interested in her?

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: Y’know, he’s like “well,” y’know, “I just,” y’know, “he could have her.” Y’know, he was very nonchalant about it.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Tim and I were sort of flirting with her and Tim got her phone number and eventually called her. I was, I gave her my phone number, I didn’t, y’know, everyone was teasing me and I didn’t want to really get her phone number and do what everyone is teasing me that I always do. I didn’t want to be the second person to get it after Tim already got her phone number. Whatever the reasons, I just kind of let it go to some extent.

Matt Woolley: But of course, at that point when he’s saying that, she’d already come around to, to liking him so it was a no-risk way of brushing it off. He knew she was hooked on him.

Dave Cawley: Yeah. That’s a great observation, because there was a competition happening there, I think, for a short time for Susan’s attention between Josh and this particular friend.

Matt Woolley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: And, and it’s interesting to see the way, uh, he goes back and describes in some other recordings, y’know, when he and Susan met that friend was there and, y’know, was she paying attention to me? Was she paying attention to him?

Matt Woolley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: And this kind of, uh, this kinda tug-of-war about, y’know, if she pays attention to him, then she’s worthless and I don’t care about her.

Matt Woolley: Absolutely. Not worth going after. Where, y’know, I mean, that, that, y’know, male competition for a girl when you’re in college, of course, happens all the time. But you would probably have somebody in Josh’s position who’s a normally functioning person have a very different approach, which is like, “what can I do to win her?” Like, what can I do? Y’know, she’s seeming to pay attention to my roommate or my friend more than me, but I really like her. Y’know, she’s the light of my life. I’ve got to have her. I’m gonna do this and that. None of that.

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: None of that from Josh. Josh is just like “oh, well you’re, yeah, worthless. You, you have no value if you’re not all about me.”

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000? audio journal recording): I was feeling very frustrated about dating in general. I didn’t want to have anything to do with any girl. I was feeling like I might have too difficult a time finding someone who will treat me the way I want to be treated.

Dave Cawley: There was a section in the recording that I want to ask you about, umm, in particular because it really hit me when I listened to it the first time and it hasn’t really dulled as I’ve gone back and listened to it on, y’know, repeat listens. And that is this section where Josh describes Susan and her anger.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I’ve seen her upset, like that day we were moving and I’ve certainly wasn’t thrilled about that. I wanna see that, that she keeps those kinds of things under control and also the way she treats other people. Like, she comes up, she has an attitude with some people like her sister or some of her friends, that she just needs to keep that under control. Which, I just want to see that she’s doing that for quite a long time before I even feel comfortable with, with her completely. And partly I’m concerned about how she would treat me, if she would pull that attitude on me, which would be completely unacceptable. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t accept that at all. And secondly, I wouldn’t want someone to come up with some, any kind of attitude with, with our kids.

Matt Woolley: That’s the essence of it. It really isn’t about the kids. A part of a, a narcissist is, they feed themselves their own story, uh, over and over again and kind of reinforcing their own self-worth and their own self-importance. And part of that is being like a good person. Like, I’m better than the rest of you. I’m smarter. Uh, in this case, uh, I’m more righteous and moral. I’m above the rest of you. And so he would say things, in my opinion, in these audio journals, they’re really messages to himself. Like, oh I don’t know that I should choose a woman like this because it might be bad for my future children. But then he goes on to talk about what the real underlying thrust is, I want to get a woman who will serve me all the time, be subservient. And she has a little bit of her own gumption.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: And I, and I think that if we were, if we had been able to see, y’know, examples of what he’s talking about, it probably would’ve been a normal 19-year-old girl, oh I think he uses the word “attitude”—

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: —“she has an attitude.” Well, of course. She’s 19 and she’s an individual person. She’s gonna have a little attitude when people, when things don’t go her way. That’s—

Dave Cawley: And, and especially dealing with a personality like Josh’s.

Matt Woolley: Of course. He’s very controlling and—

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: —rigid and, and so yeah. When she pushed back on him a little bit, we don’t know exactly what that was—

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: —in dating, which I would assume was very normal and typical. The, the average person would probably look at that and say “oh yeah, that’s, she’s just being, she’s asserting herself as a normal human.” Uh, he, he did, he was worried about that. He was worried that “oh I may,” y’know, “I may not be able to control this woman the way I want to control her ‘cause she’s got a little bit of an attitude.” But then he turns it into this whole morphing of maybe she’d be abusive to the future children.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I mean, I think that would screw up my kids to have someone to have a mother who isn’t stable enough with them.

Matt Woolley: That sort of theme plays out later, when after she’s gone missing and the, the investigation is on, when Josh and his father Steve are going through her childhood journals trying to prove that she was abused and she was abusive to the kids and making these stories, just fabricating stories about her abusiveness. And you could see that he was toying with that idea before they were even married—

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: —as sort of an, uh, an out or an escape, a way to blame her for problems.

Dave Cawley: Right. Yeah, rather than self-reflect and go “maybe she’s upset with me because A, B, C, or D, it’s just because she has this problem—”

Matt Woolley: Right.

Dave Cawley: “—and she’s gotta get that solved—”

Matt Wooley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: “before,” y’know, “I will ever consider…”

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): So Susan is always talking about marriage with me. The other day she said something like “would you let me propose to you?” And I didn’t really know what to say so I didn’t say anything. But, uh, first of all, I wouldn’t want a girl to propose to me at all. I would find that probably very uncomfortable. And secondly, I’m not really ready to, to get engaged with Susan anyway. I at least want to get to know her over the long run and see how she is, if, if her, uh, personality changes. Like, I want to see how she can handle stress and, and whether she has patience and stuff in the long run.

Matt Woolley: I think if, people who’ve listened to your podcast, they’ll recognize a theme. And that is that he sees things as kind of a zero-sum game. As plus and minus. Things are either an asset to me or they’re a liability to me. And there, there is very little, if any, I don’t recall anything I’ve read or heard that would make me indicate he has true empathy. He fakes sympathy and empathy at times.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I was helping her move and she was in a really stressed-out mood and she wasn’t really being very nice. Well afterwards, and I was just somewhat understanding, I guess. I wasn’t being really rude to her in response but afterwards, she felt really bad so she was going out of her way to just make it up to me, do little nice things for me.

Matt Woolley: The way normal, typical, healthy adults interact is we may be upset with each other in our marriages or relationships but we can, y’know, calm down and empathize and realize “ok, I understand why he or she was thinking this way or that way or feeling this way or that way.” And that helps us compromise and work with people, make real, genuine connections. Umm, but he, he didn’t have that. There’s nothing that I am aware of that is an example of him doing that. It’s just “she needs to serve my needs and if she’s not serving my needs and I can’t make her serve me, then she goes from an asset to a liability.”

And that’s exactly what we see happen over time as she found her own voice, so to speak. Uh, started, uh contemplating the idea that maybe he wouldn’t change. Maybe they did need to divorce and I’m sure there were lots and lots of conversations none of us will ever be privy to that planted ideas in his mind that “she’s going to become a liability. She’s a liability now. I need to eliminate that liability.” But that goes way back—

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: —to this, uh, audio journal of shortly just, what, weeks after they met?

Dave Cawley: When Josh records this audio journal, they’ve been dating for about a month and they’re about a month away from being engaged.

Matt Woolley: Yeah. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: And it’s stunning to me that you hear Josh in this recording say “eh, y’know, Susan’s kind of been the one driving this and I don’t have this,” and less than a month later, he is, he is all in.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I realized that she was serious, that she wasn’t going to just start something and walk away. And at this point, I am confident that she, that she is sincere.

Dave Cawley: He recognizes at some point during that span of time that she meets those criteria that you’re looking for—

Matt Woolley: Uh huh.

Dave Cawley: —as you described, and if you don’t lock her in—

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: —she will leave.

Matt Woolley: Right.

Dave Cawley: And, and maybe it’s, uh, you and I talked a little bit about this kind of idea of a narcissist having a, a protective front—

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: —and maybe there is that, that, y’know, little piece inside, that voice that’s going “you gotta commit her before she finds out who you really are.”

Matt Woolley: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s absolutely the truth. Umm, I’m, I’m sure he was worried about he’s found the perfect girl for him, meets all his criteria, his check, checklist and she could get away.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Felt like I had to make a decision: either get with her exclusively, right then and there and let all these other girls go that I have tentatively scheduled dates with or that I’ve been talking to and that I’ve been planning to ask out any day now. Uh, I either had to let all of those girls go or get with her, to get with her. Or let her go to continue the things the way they were. So that was a very scary step.

Matt Woolley: One way to think of a, a narcissistic personality — and I’ll, I’ll just take a side-step and say personality as the psychologist thinks of it is our way of perceiving, understanding and interacting with the world. And it’s kind of auto-pilot. It’s how we do what we do when we’re not thinking about what we’re doing. It’s just us. And so it’s a very ingrained part of who we are. It is who we are. So most of our personality traits, quirky as they may be are healthy—

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: —and, uh, capable of us reflecting on them and realizing we may need to improve in certain areas of our life and if you’ve been married then you know there’s someone there to help you reflect on that.

Dave Cawley: Right, yeah, right.

Matt Woolley: And, and, and that can be a hard process—

Dave Cawley: Right.

Matt Woolley: —but a good one. And a, a narcissist typically you may think of them as somebody who’s not building a genuine personality structure. It’s kind of this facade, at least at first its this facade of competency. I’m special, I’m important. And it has to be perfect and pristine and, uh, elevated above everyone else because it’s false. Y’know, he was, a lot of people have told me “oh wow, he was very intelligent.” And we look through the things, we look through the report and we say “ok, he’s above average in intelligence.” But it was a particular kind. It had nothing to do with, uh, really creativity, flexibility, fluid intelligence wasn’t his thing. Interpersonal intelligence was not his thing. Uh, it was very much this mathematical type of intelligence. And it was, so kind of fits that cold exterior. His narcissistic armor, so to speak, this facade, is what he would invest all his time in. That’s who he’s talking to a lot of the time on these tapes is just building up this sense of “I’m special and precious.”

So you think of it as kind of a facade and the real person underneath kind of shrinks year after year after year. But at some point, y’know, when you’re still younger, you’re in your 20s, there may be some of that left that goes “Josh, you’ve gotta lock her down or she’s gonna get away. She’s gonna find out that you’re really not that great.” And so, over time that voice gets smaller and smaller as the narcissistic personality develops a thicker skin. And then the person essentially becomes that false person—

Dave Cawley: Hmm.

Matt Woolley: —in a way. And so I think absolutely he, he probably jumped on getting her locked down in marriage as quickly as he could because during the short period of time of dating, uh, she was demonstrating she needed, she could be who he wanted.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): She seems like someone I could be with because she’s got the same values in, uh, conserving energy, keeping the house clean, uh, which is important to me.

Matt Woolley: And what we know about Susan is she was attractive, uh, vivacious, energetic. Probably somebody that had a lot of offers for, for dating.

Dave Cawley: And she was just at 19 kind of entering that phase of her life where you would transition from maybe, y’know, boyfriend-girlfriend into, into some of these more serious relationships. And I think a lot of, uh, young adults in that, in that space, they go through a few relationships that, that fail and—

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: —and they learn along the way and they develop some of those skills.

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: And I personally look at, y’know, Susan and Josh and see that in some ways, marrying Josh when she did appears to have stunted Susan’s development a little bit.

Matt Woolley: Absolutely.

Dave Cawley: And it’s not until later in her, in her later 20s after she’s kind of had a, a gut full of it that she begins developing a little more independence in stepping out—

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: —and that puts her in conflict with her husband.

Matt Woolley: Oh yeah, very well said. Umm, that’s one of the, as, as a psychologist and working with people, umm, I’m always concerned when an 18, 19, even 20-year-old says they wanna get married. That, y’know, can work out, I know. Uh, however, that person is giving up, regardless of whether the marriage works out of not, which may be a product more of the two people developing a good dynamic together and, and one of ‘em not being a psychopath, umm, that uh, that you give up that personal development, that young adult experience.

You’ve gone, and we actually have a term for it. It’s called individuating or becoming your own self and you’ve been raised, uh, and learned all the good things and had all the support from your family, your community, etcetera. And now you’re on your own, to some degree. Uh, you’re off to college, being more independent, and you need several years of experience, uh, with taking care of yourself, managing your own finances and maybe most importantly: relationships. How do you handle friendships? How do you handle intimacy?

And so developing competency in your ability to have intimate connection with other people requires practice. It’s not something we’re born with, necessarily. Some people might be a little better at it than the rest, but we need practice. And unfortunately, the time that she could have been practicing that in dating through college, unfortunately she got married.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: And she got married to somebody that had, uh, very ill intentions for her.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): In the worst case, I would probably end up moving back in with my dad, putting all my stuff into storage. I would probably pay $150 to $200 a month to store everything I own and, of course, that wouldn’t be ideal either.

Dave Cawley: Let’s talk about the broader Powell family dynamics that, uh, I, I think are kind of hinted at in this audio journal. You hear Josh talking about some of his interplay with his dad. What did you take away from that?

Matt Woolley: Umm, so I think there’s that, umm, competition between father and son. Umm, and y’know, like most boys growing up, he when he was younger, y’know, probably wanted his father’s attention and approval and that sort of thing. But when the divorce happens, then something different kind of takes over and takes place and, uh, that’s often referred to as a closed family system. And what I mean by that is, there was a divorce and, uh, the, very contentious. All the kids except for Jennifer, I believe, went with, with the father, with Steve. Josh, there was a, a, maybe a few weeks or months there where he was trying, he and his younger brother were trying to spend some time with mom but she was trying to set some, what seemed like appropriate limits and boundaries to establish, she’s come from this chaotic situation, establish an appropriate home life, uh, and hoping that Josh would give in to. And so he wouldn’t do that and he went back into this family system with his, uh, father. And a closed family system is kind of like circling the wagons, y’know, it’s us versus them. The rest of the world is bad or wrong or evil, typically, and we only can trust each other. Uh, there’s a lot of indoctrination of, kind of delusional, paranoid beliefs, typically, that are happening, which we know, umm, boundary-less.

Steve appears also to be a true narcissist with, y’know, a lot of sexual deviancies and so he would be kind of primed to have no boundaries with his children, that they were a possession of him. He owned them and could do with them what he wanted and so, uh, as they were younger I’m sure there was a lot of abuse and very questionable things that happened to those children in that home, uh, exposure to pornography maybe being the least of the concerns. And we know there was reports of sexual abuse and, and fantasies and things that were just very inappropriate for a child’s development. Josh pushes back, as a teenager would. And so there creates this competition and as soon as Josh quits just following dad’s word to the letter, then Josh becomes an enemy or a liability instead of an asset to Steve. And then Josh becomes maligned by his father as, as soon as his father sees his fiancé and, and then Susan becoming his wife, he wants to possess what Josh owns. And because he’s a sexually deviant, uh, narcissist, then it’s it’s a sexual obsession that is just remarkable.

I mean it’s, it’s unbelievable. The documentation and the, the self-aggrandizing that he has around this. He’ll even tell everyone about it. And he puts his son down. So there’s this tug back and forth during the early years of the marriage. Uh, Josh feels, uh, I think, uh, rebellion against his father and does a very odd rebellion and that is that maybe going to church and becoming an active member of the church was actually a rebellious act against his father, right?

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I also have been praying almost every night and reading the scriptures at some point every day with, y’know, a few exceptions when I’ve, when I haven’t for one reason or another. But overall, I think I’ve done very well with those over the last many, many months.

Matt Woolley: His father at this point was a self-described anti-Mormon, very, taking every opportunity to run the church down publicly, personally. Uh, so the perfect rebellion against Steve, at that time, for Josh would be to become an active member of the church, number one. Number two, independent from his father. So back to the audio journal that we reviewed—

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Matt Woolley: — umm, he’s talking very, very detailed, very, a lot of detail in his conversation about his independence, so to speak. He has food, he has an apartment, he has things. He’s planning to decrease his debt and be self-sufficient. And so, he’s rebelling against Steve. Whereas, most fathers, a typically functioning father, would be, that’s what you hope. You hope that your kid, you’d be praising them but I’m sure Steve wasn’t. Steve wants Josh to be dependent on him because Josh is just an extension of the narcissistic father.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I keep a substantial food supply. I probably have the largest food supply of anyone in my ward.

Matt Woolley: The rebellion going to church, the rebellion by being individual, uh, an individual who’s independent, plays into that relationship. But then Josh has to eat crow several times and move home and there’s that tension. Uh, however over time, Josh tends to develop and become more like his father. He takes on those, uh, harder narcissistic traits and uh, starts to align himself more with his father against his own, uh, wife. It eventually comes out that Steve propositioned Susan and Josh does very little about that, if anything. Whereas, most husbands would be, they’d be ready to fight dad—

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: —right? Like, “you kidding me?”

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: Your dad is, y’know, propositioning and, and then it’s the music he writes and the videos he shoots and the fantasies he shares. I mean, this is just a really, uh, sick focus but it’s a, he wants to possess what Josh has and push Josh out. Josh is now a liability and so Josh is fighting back. But eventually, Josh loses and Josh’s personality becomes more like his father. He aligns with his father against Susan. Susan now becomes Josh’s liability. So it’s, it’s, it’s umm, an interesting study in generational narcissism and how narcissistic parents can influence narcissistic children and they eventually become aligned in their narcissism. Maybe not in all of their behaviors and attitudes, but certainly in their narcissism.

Dave Cawley: I, in my head I’m thinking about, y’know, two ends of the, of a magnet, right? If you take—

Matt Woolley: Uh huh. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: —two negative poles and try to push them together—

Matt Woolley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: —they’re gonna repel each other.

Matt Woolley: Yep.

Dave Cawley: But yet there’s also, there seems to be this attraction between them.

Matt Woolley: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a push-pull, very conflict-based but kind of like you can’t tear ‘em apart.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): Sometimes it feels to me like I do too much, that I’m giving away more than I can afford. Like, giving people rides up to Seattle and who knows where else when I really can’t even afford the gas.

Dave Cawley: We can draw this out and see what happens, uh, after Steve gets arrested where now Josh almost becomes the, the alpha, in a way. Umm—

Matt Woolley: Yeah.

Dave Cawley: —and this is going well beyond the audio journal but I do think it’s, because we’re talking about this interplay relationship, that when Steve goes to jail and Josh becomes kind of the de facto head of that household—

Matt Woolley: Mmhmm.

Dave Cawley: —now he’s the one who’s calling the shots. And I’ve talked to a number of people who were privy to, y’know, the jail phone calls and things of that time who said Josh really asserted himself as being the one who was in authority at that point, which I found interesting.

Matt Woolley: And probably, yeah, definitely an interesting observation and, but, but maybe somewhat predictable—

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: —because he’s been vying for that position. There’s not a healthy father-son relationship, where your dad becomes kind of a wise mentor in, as you, and is proud of you for having your own life. There’s none of that. The only way Josh gets any real validation is at first by pleasing his dad, and then later by taking over, becoming his dad.

Dave Cawley: Yeah.

Matt Woolley: And so once dad’s out of the picture, he’s like my, it’s my turn to shine as the narcissistic alpha of this family.

Dave Cawley: One of the, the final things I wanted to kind of touch on is, if we look at, if we look at Josh, especially y’know, in this early timeframe, I’ve had the question listening to these audio journals and reviewing, y’know, the divorce file, do you think there was a, a point in time, or could there be, y’know — if somebody has a child who’s exhibiting, uh, narcissistic behaviors as they’re growing — is there a way to step in and direct or channel that in a way that’s more positive.

Matt Woolley: Yeah, that’s a great question and something that, uh, came to my mind often listening to, to the podcast episodes and then the journals that we reviewed. So you have to look at what is personality? Personality is developmental. Uh, it develops through childhood and adolescence and starts to become more solidified in adulthood. In that context, the answer would be yes. You can see developing traits of maladaptive personality early in a child’s life, sometimes back to elementary school. Uh, so narcissism and, uh y’know, interpersonal coldness, uh y’know, lack of empathy, those things can, can be seen early on.

Uh for, for any clinicians listening, y’know uh, most clinicians would say “we want to rule out other causes of that.” Y’know, there often can be things like abuse and neglect involved in that process. So certainly, y’know, interventions that reduce or eliminate abuse and neglect, provide support, healthy self-esteem and concepts early on should be employed. I personally work a lot with older children, adolescents and primarily for the reason that they’re in this developmental period where things like, whether it’s an anxiety issue, a learning disability or their personality structure is, those things are developing. It’s a great time to get in and make interventions.

To reference current research, we know that some personality disorders tend to have a fairly high loading of genetic predisposition. So, we know that with narcissism specifically and, and antisocial personality disorder and others, there seems to be fair amount of heritability. Now, that’s not destiny. Heritability is not destiny but some of these kids who are born to parents who obviously have met those criteria are at much higher risk for exhibiting those behaviors. So, from a teacher’s point of view, a, a parent’s point of view, other people involved, we would want to pay attention and as those tendencies are exhibited, it’s a great time to consult experts: pediatricians, therapists, people who can help with normal life development, uh, and kind of getting kids course-corrected. However, the problem is, one of the other generational factors may be chaos.

Dave Cawley: Hmm.

Matt Woolley: And so a lot of these kids who are born to parents who are personality disordered in this way — narcissism, antisocial — they may have parents in jail or in trouble with the law who don’t live a calm, normal lifestyle. And so, they’re also in, not just having a genetic predisposition but they’re being raised in a chaotic environment. And I think we see that with the Powell boys. Unfortunately, the potential for them having a normal, healthy life was there but Josh and his family’s influence wrecked that. Y’know, created chaos, created a stressed-out mother who was riding her bike on the freeway to work and back and not having enough to eat and this sort of abusive, chaotic, uncertain environment is, uh, the perfect environment to grow narcissistic personality.

So listeners, people who are teachers, aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents, umm, if you are, uh, concerned at all about that, instead of just wondering and worrying, y’know, talk with a professional like your pediatrician, for starters. That’s usually easy access and then maybe consult with a child or adolescent psychologist. There’s a lot that can be done early in life to help a person grow and develop.

Dave Cawley: Dr. Matt Woolley, thank you so much for, uh, taking the time to speak with us about this. Fascinating, we could go on for hours, I’m sure.

Matt Woolley: Yeah, definitely. Maybe we should, uh, go out to dinner and continue the conversation.

Dave Cawley: That’d be fantastic. Thanks, Dr. Matt Woolley.

Matt Woolley: Thanks.

Dave Cawley: Josh Powell’s cell phone rang. It was his brother, Michael. Michael wanted to know what was up with the honk-and-wave event Josh’s father-in-law, Chuck Cox, was staging at that very moment. An event focused on Josh’s missing wife, Susan Powell. Josh and Michael’s father, Steve Powell, had gone over to the event outside the Fred Meyer grocery store in their Puyallup, Washington neighborhood to take photos. But Michael, who was living in Minneapolis, had heard Steve had lost his temper and was shooting his mouth off to reporters. This was a problem.

“We should get off the phone and deal with it,” Michael said.

Josh wasted no time. He hung up and tried to call his dad. It went to voicemail. He tried calling his younger sister, Alina, who had gone to the store with Steve. No answer there, either. He tried them each again, to no avail. Finally, on his third try, he managed to get Alina to answer. He asked her what was going on. Was it as bad as Michael was making it sound? Alina told Josh their father was engaged in a shouting match with Chuck Cox.

“It’s just not worth it,” Josh screamed into the phone.

His call waiting beeped. Michael was calling back. Josh put Alina on hold and answered his brother’s call.

“Hang up with Alina and call 911,” Michael said.

Josh did not do that. Infuriated, he hung up and went to his minivan. He sped out of the neighborhood, whipping around the block to the parking lot of the Fred Meyer store. There, he dialed Alina again. She answered and told him to get there right away.

“I’m already here,” Josh said. He told his sister he was angry Steve had lost his temper.

“You can’t control your own temper,” Alina said.

“I can keep my temper on camera,” Josh shot back.

Josh went to work trying to manage the situation. He found some reporters and pulled them away from the scrum, diverting attention from his father. It wasn’t easy, considering he had his two boys in tow, but he did it. Josh spent about 30 minutes settling the situation before calling Alina again, telling her to grab Steve and get out of there. Alina brushed him off. She said she wanted to go to the gym and relax in the pool. Josh could hear Steve, off to Alina’s side, agreeing. The pool sounded nice.

“Get your [expletive] home,” Josh ordered.

“Shut the [expletive] up,” Alina said, telling her brother not to yell at her.

This didn’t help calm Josh, who was already red hot over what’d happened. Steve had thin skin and Chuck Cox had gone right under it. This was off message, not how Josh wanted his family to behave in public. It made them look guilty. What’s worse, Charlie and Braden had seen some it, too.

Josh headed home. Once there, he called Michael back to let him know how it’d gone. Michael said this could work to their advantage. Two weeks earlier, Josh had gone to court to seek a domestic violence restraining order against the Coxes. A judge had granted a him temporary one. Michael said Chuck’s appearance at the honk-and-wave probably violated the temporary restraining order. So, Michael asked, had Josh done as he’d suggested and called 911? No. So the police hadn’t showed up at the honk-and-wave? No.

“This is a win for Chuck,” Michael shouted at his brother.

Josh said he wasn’t sure Chuck had violated the letter of the law in the temporary restraining order. Michael didn’t care. He told Josh to call 911 now. It wasn’t too late to paint Chuck as threat. Maybe they could still get him arrested. For that to work though, Josh would have to choose his words carefully. Michael told him exactly what to say. They hung up and Josh called 911. He made a bogus report against his father-in-law, accusing Chuck of stalking and accosting his family.

This call, one of hundreds involving members of the Powell family during August of 201, was captured on a wiretap. The wire was the linchpin of a major multi-state police operation I previously uncovered in Episode 11 of Cold. At the time, I knew these recordings existed. But I didn’t know the full content. Now I do.

This is a bonus episode of Cold: Justice Delayed. From KSL Podcasts, I’m Dave Cawley. Right back after the break.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: In July of 2020, retired West Valley City police detective Ellis Maxwell testified in Washington’s Pierce County Superior Court. Sort of. He in fact appeared via Zoom, an accommodation made by the court in light of the threat posed by Covid-19.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 21, 2020 court recording): Alright, Mr. Maxwell, can you hear me alright?

Dave Cawley: Uh, sort of.

Ellis Maxwell (from July 21, 2020 court recording): Yes I can. Can you hear me ok?

Dave Cawley: He in fact appeared via Zoom, an accommodation made by the court in light of the threat posed by the Coronavirus.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 21, 2020 court recording): Yes I can. Can you raise your right hand for me please?

Ellis Maxwell (from July 21, 2020 court recording): Yes sir.

Dave Cawley: Ellis’ testimony came as part of the civil trial between Susan Powell’s parents, Chuck and Judy Cox, and the state of Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services. The suit focused on the deaths of Susan’s sons, Charlie and Braden, at the hands of their father Josh Powell on February 5^th, 2012. For the moment, let’s focus on something specific Ellis said in his testimony.

Ellis Maxwell (from July 22, 2020 court recording):  My concern was the environment inside the Powell home, umm, for these children.

Dave Cawley: Cox family attorney Anne Bremner asked Ellis during cross-examination whether he’d had concerns about the welfare of Charlie and Braden before they were taken into state protective custody months before their deaths. Ellis said yes.

Ellis Maxwell (from July 22, 2020 court recording): This is, uh, August 2011. We’ve been investigating this case for some time—

Anne Bremner (from July 22, 2020 court recording): ‘Kay.

Ellis Maxwell (from July 22, 2020 court recording): —and learned a lot of information about Steven Powell, Josh Powell, the family members inside of the home … So yeah, the environment within the home was just concerning to me because of, and there’s other stuff I can’t discuss that’s protected.

Dave Cawley: To my knowledge, the only part of this case still “protected” is the wiretap. So imagine my surprise when, around the same time Ellis made that comment, I independently gained access to more than a thousand pages of wiretap transcripts. Nobody but a small handful of police have ever had access to these documents. To be clear: no source in law enforcement, past or current, provided me this access. I obtained it on my own.

I call them transcripts, but the documents are not always verbatim accounts of the conversations. They’re more summaries sprinkled with direct quotations. And the transcripts only include conversations that were deemed pertinent by investigators at the time. State and federal laws governing wiretaps place strict limits on what, when and how police can listen in on private communications.

In this episode, we’ll reconstruct several of the most consequential conversations involving Josh, Michael and Steve Powell during that critical period in August of 2011. As a refresher, you might want to re-listen to episode 11 of this podcast, Operation Tsunami, before following up with this one. Otherwise, prepare for a never-before-revealed glimpse into what the Powells were thinking, saying and doing during those days. You will come to understand why members of law enforcement tasked with working this case had reason to fear for the safety of Charlie and Braden, a fear Susan’s parents argued Washington social workers disregarded.

[Scene transition]

Josh Powell was going to be late. It was August 23^rd, 2011. Three days had passed since the disaster at the honk-and-wave. Josh was due in court in Tacoma for a hearing on his request for a permanent domestic violence protection order against Chuck Cox. The temporary restraining order authorized by the judge a couple of weeks earlier was about to expire. Josh and Chuck were both scheduled to appear before the judge at 3 p.m. It was already close to 2 and Josh wasn’t even close to ready to leave home for what, on a good day, was a 30 minute drive. Over his shoulder, Josh shouted to his younger sister Alina that he needed to go, now.

An inkjet printer made its vvvt-clunk-vvvt-clunk, spitting out page after page of paperwork. They were declarations of support Josh had solicited from his family. In fact, Josh and Michael had spent most of the morning talking about the declarations and Josh was on the phone with Michael right that moment, going through last-minute wording changes to his own statement for the court. Here’s a sample of what Josh had written.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from August 23, 2011 court declaration): In the past two years, I have primarily focused on protecting and loving my children, finding and working a regular job to provide for my children, engaging my children in fun and educational activities, and contributing to the search for Susan.

Dave Cawley: Since his wife’s disappearance, Josh had collected hours of video of himself with his sons. 

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): What are you writing?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): Mommy is a beautiful.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): That’s right.

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): Susan is beautiful.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): Yeah. How do you feel about your mommy? Do you love her?

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): Mmhmm. I’m happy about her.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): We sure love her.

Dave Cawley: Videos he planned to publish online, in an effort to present himself as a model father.

Charlie Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): Michael, I’m drawing a mess, a message to mommy.

Josh Powell (from May 28, 2010 home video recording): That’s right and we will put that on a website for mommy so, so if there’s any way possible she’s going to be able to see it, huh?

Dave Cawley: “Chuck Cox is going to try and paint me as a horrible murderer,” Josh said to Michael over the phone. Michael told his brother to keep calm and do what he’d learned to do while serving in the U.S. Army: remember your training.

Josh’s declaration spanned 11 pages. He painted his missing wife’s father as the ringleader of an online mob.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from August 23, 2011 court declaration): Cox’s followers have had us under surveillance and have been communicating information back to Cox about me and my sons. … There are numerous people acting in this capacity for Cox. People have claimed it is their right and obligation to keep me under surveillance claiming it is only to protect my children from me.

Dave Cawley: He went so far as to claim, without evidence, that Chuck Cox had once threatened to kill him during an encounter near Steve Powell’s home.

Rich Piatt (from August 23, 2011 KSL TV archive): At a confrontation at a Seattle-area Lowes earlier this year, Powell claims Cox mouthed the words “you’re dead” after Powell refused to let Cox hug their grandchildren.

Dave Cawley: “Nobody can deny that I am a tremendous victim,” Josh said to Michael. “Chuck’s whole intention is to push me to the edge.”

Josh had tasked Michael with collecting screen captures of conversations in the private Facebook group titled Where is Susan Powell? People there had been discussing the case of Josh’s missing wife, often speculating he had murdered her. Josh considered this evidence of harassment. He intended to hand printouts of those screenshots to the judge.

“It’s going to be funny when I walk in there and say all these people are lawbreakers,” Josh said.

Turning to his sister Alina, Josh asked how much was left to print. There were the screenshots, several news articles and Steve’s declaration. Too much. Josh let loose a string of profanities before lashing out at his sons who were underfoot.

“Go play,” he shouted. “Don’t make me tell you again!”

He shoved a handful of highlighters into his briefcase, along with as much of the paperwork as had finished printing.

“I’m headed out the door,” Josh said to Michael before adding “oh [expletive], this isn’t going to be fast enough.”

Josh hung up and went to his minivan. He steered out of his neighborhood, headed for Tacoma. He’d only been gone a few minutes when, from the driver seat, he picked up his cell phone and called Alina back at the house. She told Josh it was good he hadn’t waited around for the print job to finish. She’d stepped away to check on Charlie and Braden and when she’d returned, she’d discovered the printer had jammed.

“This is [expletive],” Josh said. “I’m [expletive] stuck behind someone doing 30 miles per hour.”

As if Alina could do anything about that. But Josh did need a favor from her. He asked Alina to read their dad Steve’s declaration to him over the phone. She didn’t have it. The file was on Josh’s computer.

“You have to tell me the password if you want me to be able to get in,” she said.

Josh gave it to her: ab1234. Then, he said, go to the R: drive, to a folder called “Susan missing archive,” then to a folder called “restraining order against the Coxes.” She did as he asked, reading him the pertinent document.

“Oh [expletive], there’s a sheriff behind me,” Josh said. “I hope I have enough time to park, pass the media and get into the court.”

Less than 20 minutes remained before the scheduled start of the hearing and Josh still had miles to go.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. I just got stuck at a light. Oh [expletive], oh [expletive]. Come on, come on. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Josh said. “Now I’m going 20 miles an hour again. [Expletive]! Problem is, even when I get there, I’m not sure how to park.”

Alina listened on her cell phone as her brother road raged. At the same time, she picked up the home phone and dialed the court.

“Good idea,” Josh said before adding, “I wish I had a [expletive] motorcycle today.”

He’d left his old Yamaha Radian to rust in the back yard of the home he and Susan had shared in Utah when he’d moved back in with his dad in January of 2010. In his declaration, he justified that move not as effort to evade the investigation into Susan’s disappearance, but instead as a way of protecting his sons from the media.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from August 23, 2011 court declaration): They were shining bright lights into my windows all hours of the night for live shows airing in various time zones. My sons slept with me, but they did not understand the bright lights and crowds. It was giving them nightmares.

Dave Cawley: Alina relayed the directions from the court staffer to Josh, guiding him on where to park. With that done, Josh told Alina, “I’m here. I’m going in.” The hearing did not go as Josh had hoped.

Rich Piatt (from August 23, 2011 KSL TV archive): Today, Cox’s attorney denied making any statement or gesture that could have at all been construed as threatening. Cox goes on to say that it’s outrageous that Powell lies under oath when Cox just wants to see the grandkids.

Dave Cawley: The judge refused to grant a restraining order. Instead, Josh and Chuck received mutual antiharassment orders. They were to leave each other alone for the next year. After leaving the court, Josh called Michael.

“I lost,” he said.

“[Expletive] it,” Michael said. “Publish the journals. I don’t think the judge is being fair.”

For months, Josh had been trying to get someone from the national media to publish Susan’s childhood journals. He believed they would damage her reputation, leading the public to see Susan as a flawed, immoral woman.

Scott Haws (from August 25, 2011 KSL TV archive): Y’see, last month Powell’s husband Josh and her father-in-law announced they would release her personal diaries in an attempt to prove she may have had the mindset to leave her husband and children for another man.

Dave Cawley: So far, no one had actually published them. If it was going to happen, Josh would have to do assume the risk of doing it himself.

“I don’t know what to say, Mike,” Josh said. “A lot of work for nothing. Now I’ve just gotten wasted in the media and public perception and everything else.”

“There is no public perception,” Michael said, “there is just a group of 50 people that don’t like you.”

Michael suggested maybe Josh should move again, to somewhere far away. When Josh asked where, he started singing The Beach Boys hit “Kokomo,” saying “Aruba, Jamaica.” Josh wasn’t going to leave, not without his family.

“I am already gone,” Michael said. He had moved to Minnesota a year earlier, in part to get away from the maelstrom that was Susan’s disappearance.

“If you clam up now and don’t talk to anyone, then this just goes away in two weeks,” Michael added.

“Then I lose,” Josh said. He was tired of losing, tired of maintaining appearances.

“[Expletive] this good guy [expletive],” Josh said.

“You ought to have a beer for once in your life,” Michael told his brother before adding, “It’s just a [expletive] game anyway.”

Then, Josh conferenced Steve in on the call. Steve had heard from a news producer in Utah that Josh had lost in court. Michael shrugged it off. He said they should all just pretend they got exactly what they wanted. Tell the media they were going out to celebrate. Invite them out for drinks. Josh agreed this was a great plan. He picked up the home phone and called a producer for Dateline NBC. He said he’d won and Dateline should rush a camera crew over to film their family’s celebration.

“I hate to gloat,” Josh said, “I just don’t care to have any relationship with the Coxes anymore. I have already done my grieving over the loss of that entire family.”

He didn’t bother to say if that included Susan.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Dateline was not able to make the party. But a producer for ABC’s Good Morning America named Jim Vojtech did. He stayed at the Powell home late into the evening and called Steve early the next morning, on August 24^th. The Powells had been flirting with ABC News about doing a big interview since the prior April, when a freelance producer had showed up on their doorstep and sweet-talked Alina into letting her inside. Steve wrote about that in a May 13^th, 2011 journal entry.

Ken Fall (as Steve Powell from May 13, 2011 journal entry): We were kind of thinking that the ABC budget was probably not too slim, so we suggested to Tonya that we all go on a ferry ride from Bremerton to Seattle, and then eat at Salty’s on Alki Point, a really nice restaurant.

Dave Cawley: Steve went on to write about how Vojtech had immediately flown up from California to join them for the dinner.

Ken Fall (as Steve Powell from May 13, 2011 journal entry): They had hired a 14-seat van with a limousine driver for the occasion. … We had a nice chat on the way to Bremerton, and had time along the waterfront while waiting for the ferry.

Dave Cawley: Josh, as he often did, carried his camcorder and filmed the boys.

Tonya Kerr (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Braden, go down the long way like J, like Charlie did.

Dave Cawley: Charlie and Braden scrambled over the rocks along the Bremerton Boardwalk, right down to the water’s edge.

Josh Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Don’t you boys dip your feet in the water. Braden, don’t step in the water.

Alina Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Well, at least they’re in swimming, y’know.

Josh Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Yeah.

Tonya Kerr (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): (Laughs) There you go.

Josh Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): They’ll, they’d be ok, we could run over to ‘em. But it would make it uncomfortable for ‘em for the rest of the evening.

Alina Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Yeah, no kidding.

Dave Cawley: Josh kept filming on the ferry and at Salty’s.

Steve Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Whatever, whatever you want to order, go for it.

Charlie Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Umm, I want, umm, shrimp…

Dave Cawley: The Powells went all out on dinner, knowing ABC was picking up the bill.

Josh Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): So you want a fresh fruit tart—

Charlie Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): Yeah.

Josh Powell (from April 20, 2011 home video recording): —you want crab and, and lobster. 

Dave Cawley: The dinner was not cheap, as Steve noted in his journal.

Ken Fall (as Steve Powell from May 13, 2011 digital journal entry): The dinner cost over $700.00, including the tip. To put that in perspective, we go out for hamburgers and can get a pretty nice burger at McDonald’s for $1.00.

Dave Cawley: The ABC News team, Steve wrote, had pushed for an interview on that April trip. They’d wanted to have something ready to air by the end of May. Steve had played coy, saying thanks for the dinner, but they just weren’t ready.

Part of Josh’s reluctance at that point stemmed from the fact that ABC News had so far declined his request to publish Susan’s childhood journals. Josh and Steve were at the same time pitching that idea to NBC News. They’d been talking to a producer there named Shelley Osterloh. Shelley was a former employee of the company I work for, KSL, and had developed a rapport with the Powells. Through the summer of 2011, Shelley coordinated with Josh and Steve on planned interviews for an upcoming episode of Dateline. On July 7^th, an NBC crew came to Steve’s house to film the boys and Susan’s journals.

Steve sat down with Dateline host Keith Morrison the next day at a hotel in Seatac for what turned out to be a three-hour interview. Here is what Steve said about it in his journal.

Ken Fall (as Steve Powell from July 9, 2011 digital journal entry): They went through about four tapes during the interview. It was a very quiet and secluded room. … They can’t tell us when they will run the Dateline program about this. There is more research to be done.

Dave Cawley: On July 9^th, Josh met Shelley and the NBC crew at Tacoma’s Titlow Beach, where he allowed them to again film the boys. So much for his argument that the media gave his boys nightmares. Charlie and Braden tossed stones into the water and watched as a train rumbled by on the tracks adjacent to the beach.

(Sound of waves)

Josh Powell (from July 9, 2011 home video recording): What’s on the train, Braden?

Dave Cawley: The real prize for NBC and ABC alike was not video of the boys. It was an on-the-record interview with Josh. But he’d so far refused to commit.

The wiretap records reveal Josh spent a lot of time talking to a small handful of news producers whom he believed were on his side. When West Valley police staged their search of abandoned mines around Ely, Nevada at the start of the wiretap, Josh told Shelley “they will not find anything out in Ely, that’s for damn sure.” He also told her that before speaking to some local news reporters a few days earlier, he’d put Visine in his eyes. This, presumably, to make it appear as though he’d been crying.

Josh was tiptoeing ever closer to granting a full-blown network TV interview. What appeared to push him over the edge was his loss in court on August 23^rd. He at that point conceded the need for a more powerful platform. So that how ABC’s Jim Vojtech ended up speaking with Steve the morning of August 24^th, firming up plans for an interview with Josh later that day.

He interviewed with ABC after getting off work that afternoon. And he talked to Shelley again that evening, after her flight landed. Josh told her he’d have preferred to do just a single interview with all of the networks at once. Shelley explained it did not work that way, because ABC and NBC were competitors. Josh was waffling about doing an interview with Dateline, saying he only wanted to talk about Chuck Cox, the Mormons and Susan’s journals. He knew NBC would ask him about Susan and their marriage, topics he did not want to discuss. But, in the end, Josh relented. He agreed to an interview with Keith Morrison, to take place the next day: August 25th. West Valley police had other ideas.

Scott Haws (from August 25, 2011 KSL TV archive): Next on KSL 5 News at noon, more fallout surrounding the mystery of Susan Powell. The search and who’s accusing who in a war of words.

Dave Cawley: More on that after the break.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Steve Powell awoke at about 5 a.m. on the morning of August 25^th, 2011. He couldn’t fall back asleep, so he rose, dressed and started his day. Steve had a business meeting scheduled around noon in Kennewick. It was about a four-hour drive, so he had to be out the door pretty early.

The meeting had come about as a result of an email he’d received a week or so earlier. It was a business lead, someone from Utah who had inquired about buying furniture from Washington Correctional Industries. Steve had been skeptical about it, wondering aloud in conversations with Josh and Alina if it might be a scam or a trap. The day prior, Steve had asked his boss if Correctional Industries, their employer, might send another salesman. Everyone else was busy. It had to be Steve.

So, on the morning of the 25^th, Steve drove up past Snoqualmie, joining I-90 and crossing the Cascades. Along the way, his phone rang. It was his daughter, Alina, back home. Alina told her dad about a call she’d received that morning from a producer at Inside Edition. Now they wanted to interview Josh or Steve, but Josh had said no. Steve said he couldn’t do it either, since he was on the road.

They talked about the events of the last few days. Two days earlier, as Josh had been preparing to go to court, Steve had received a phone call from a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune. She’d seen a newly published blog post from Susan’s friend and neighbor, Kiirsi Hellewell.

Kiirsi Hellewell (from August 23, 2011 blog post): Sunday night, news broke about Josh Powell’s father, Steve Powell, having “feelings” for Susan, his own daughter-in-law. I’ve been monitoring Facebook, Twitter, and other places online and have seen many comments on this issue by emotional and outraged people on both sides. I wanted to explain why I personally decided to finally break my silence and talk about these new allegations against Steve Powell.

Dave Cawley: That’s Kiirsi’s voice. She has generously agreed to read portions of that old blog post for use in this podcast. Kiirsi went on to write about how Susan had confided her early in their friendship regarding Steve’s many violations of her privacy.

Kiirsi Hellewell (from August 23, 2011 blog post): When Susan talked about Steve Powell, she expressed extreme disgust and even feelings approaching hatred. Then she told me why she felt this way.

Dave Cawley: Kiirsi spelled out the parts we now know: Steve’s voyeurism, Susan’s rejection of his of advances and the move to Utah to escape Steve’s influence.

Kiirsi Hellewell (from August 23, 2011 Kiirsi blog post): I was, of course, shocked, horrified and disgusted to hear about this. “That’s not all,” Susan said, “there’s more.”

Dave Cawley: Kiirsi then described a conversation she’d once had with Susan, in which Susan claimed to have received a piece of mail from Steve.

Kiirsi Hellewell (from August 23, 2011 blog post): Steve Powell had sent Susan several pictures of Susan’s favorite actor.

Dave Cawley: That was Mel Gibson, for the record.

Kiirsi Hellewell (from August 23, 2011 blog post): At first, Susan thought this was actually a nice gesture on the part of Steve Powell. She wondered if he had changed, and maybe become a kinder person. Then she saw what was sitting in the middle of the stack of pictures: several pictures of naked men.

Dave Cawley: Susan had thrown the pictures in the trash, in disgust. Kiirsi explained she’d provided this information to police in the first weeks of their investigation, but had kept quiet publicly so as not to interfere with their work. She didn’t acknowledge then, but told me just recently, police had given her the green light to share what she knew before she published this blog post.

Kiirsi Hellewell (from August 23, 2011 blog post): I did not want to expose what Susan told me in deep confidence about her father-in-law. But enough is enough. … I will speak up for her now and forever in not allowing this evil to go forward unchallenged.

Dave Cawley: This was part of the police strategy to get Josh and Steve talking on the wiretap. And it worked. Steve took the call from the reporter and was blindsided by her questions about Kiirsi’s blog. Steve did his best to dodge on the specifics, but he did admit to the reporter that a “sexual energy” had existed between he and Susan.

Sarah Dallof (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Susan’s parents and friends maintain there is no truth to Steve Powell’s statements, that Susan was so uncomfortable around her father-in-law that she moved her family to Utah.

Dave Cawley: Talking to Alina on the phone later that afternoon, Steve had said it wasn’t as if he’d sent photos of himself to Susan. And even if he had sent her photos out of one of his Hustler magazines, she probably would have enjoyed it. These were kinds of conversations Steve had with his youngest daughter.

As Steve continued to drive toward Kennewick, Alina asked him to leave his phone connected and on speaker when he went into the hotel for the business meeting. She would monitor and record on her end, to make sure he was safe. Steve did just that. But, the meeting went off without a hitch. No real surprises.

Afterward, Steve talked to Alina. They agreed the timing of the meeting was strange. Why were people from Utah wanting to talk to Steve this week, with everything else that’d been going on? Alina warned her dad not to get too comfortable. Then, at 20 minutes to 2, Alina heard a knock at the door. Pierce County Sheriff’s deputies and West Valley City police were outside with a search warrant. She narrated to her father as the officers pushed past her and entered the house.

“I knew something was up, I don’t think these people are legitimate,” Steve said. “Those [expletive] [expletive].”

Alina explained TV news stations were already parked outside. They’d arrived before the police had even started stringing up their yellow tape.

“I bet they are looking for my journals on Susan,” Steve said. “God only knows what they’re looking for. What, do they think I had something to do with her disappearance? It can’t be about my relationship with Susan. They have known about that.”

Sarah Dallof (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Neighbors have been unsure how to react as police from both Washington and Utah serve a search warrant and removed bags and multiple computers from the Powell home.

Dave Cawley: Josh had also been at home when the police had arrived. His phone started to blow up, but he ignored the incoming calls and messages. He didn’t start using his phone again until a couple of hours later, after he’d left the neighborhood with his boys. His first call was to his dad.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t have a job anymore,” Josh said, explaining how the police were taking anything capable of storing digital data. Steve asked if that included his hard drive.

“I’m sure,” Josh said.

“Maybe they’re going to arrest me,” Steve said.

“They’re not going to arrest you, dad,” Josh said. “They just want the journals.”

Sarah Dallof (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Josh Powell showed us the warrant which spelled out in detail, the seven childhood journals of Susan Powell they were looking for. As well as any electronic copies, passwords, and any other evidence relating to her disappearance.

Josh Powell (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): I had nothing to do with Susan’s disappearance. So, I’m not concerned about what they’re here for or whether they’re staying.

Dave Cawley: He drove south out of his dad’s neighborhood and into the neighboring community of Graham, where he stopped at Frontier Park and then called Michael. Michael’s first question was if Josh had copies of the journals saved in a safe location.

“Of course,” Josh said.

“Hey Josh, you may get a big settlement out of this thing,” Michael said. “These cops are getting sloppier and sloppier. You may be able to sue these people.”

Here, Josh conferenced Steve in on the call with Michael. Steve suggested $10 million would be a good number to go for. Josh was preoccupied though. He’d spotted a helicopter circling overhead and wondered if someone were following him. Michael said he’d even received a call from a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, the same one who’d questioned Steve about Kiirsi Hellewell’s blog. It had spooked him. He wasn’t sure how she’d even found his number. Maybe, Michael said, the police had given it to her. Then, he realized Minneapolis police might be headed for his condo right that minute. He went right to work making a backup of his computer and shuttling personal papers out to his car.

Josh’s call waiting beeped. It was Shelley Osterloh, the Dateline producer. Josh answered. He told Shelley he was ok. He had not been arrested.

“I don’t care if they take me,” Josh said. “They owe it to me to arrest me and let me have my day in court. I am talking about the entire investigation. I want them to show everything they have. The less they have on you, the more they [expletive] with you.”

The warrant raid had blown up Josh and Shelley’s schedule for the Dateline interview that afternoon, but he told her where she could find him. They met up early that evening. Steve, meantime, was talking to Michael as he continued to drive toward home.

“We are a year and nine months in and the police failed at finding Susan because they have not been trying. They have not devoted [expletive] to the investigation,” Michael said.

Then, Michael switched focus to talking about his brother.

“I don’t know what the [expletive] is going on with Josh. Remember when this [expletive] first happened and Josh was quiet and distracted? That made us nervous because he was not talking about what was going on. When there is a crisis, he becomes non-communicative.”

Steve told Michael that Alina was going to call the ACLU and tell them the police were attacking their family and trying to suppress their voice.

“It could be the Mormon church that is bankrolling this,” Steve added. “We need to figure out how to get the journals out there.”

“What’s going on with Josh,” Michael asked. “You know he keeps calling me and then he just sits there quietly. He just plays with the boys and he doesn’t say anything. He is [expletive] around and dropping calls. I just can’t talk to him.”

As if summoned, Josh dialed Steve right then. Steve conferenced him in with Michael. Josh asked where Steve was, but Steve said he did not want to say over the phone.

“Our phones have GPS and they could track us,” Josh said. “If they want it, they got it. They know exactly where I am at, too.”

Josh agreed with the idea of enlisting the help of the ACLU.

“Who wants to take on the corrupt police department,” Josh asked rhetorically before adding, “They will never arrest me.”

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: In another call later that evening, Michael told his dad he’d left his condo and probably wouldn’t return that night. It wasn’t safe. Michael told Steve not to do what his gut was telling him to do. Don’t talk to any reporters. Michael said they should only talk to achieve a specific goal.

“Just because you’re angry is not how to do it,” Michael said. “Nobody needs to know anything about this. Let’s not say anything until we speak to an attorney. I get dropped every time some [expletive] media person calls. I get dropped. Put the [expletive] brakes on everything.”

John Daley (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Salt Lake defense attorney Greg Skordas questions the wisdom of the man making damaging statements about Susan Powell.

Greg Skordas (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): I don’t see that helping anyone at this point.

John Daley (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Especially if they might be used by prosecutors if they were to bring charges.

Greg Skordas (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): All those statements can be used in, in some capacity down the road. And all those are recorded. And all those can be part of a case if the government choses to use those.

John Daley (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Skordas says his advice to both Powells would be to stop talking publicly.

Dave Cawley: Steve told Michael what was happening back at the house was a “family emergency.”

“We have a lot of family emergencies,” Michael said. “How come we have so many family emergencies? If they can do all this [expletive] without trial or evidence, makes me feel like an innocent person cannot defend themselves. Maybe we should all just become criminals and arm ourselves and next time the police come to find something they find a nasty surprise.”

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Josh stayed out late that night, interviewing with Dateline’s Keith Morrison. The next morning, he called his boss and told him about the police raid.

Sarah Dallof (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): West Valley police call it the most difficult case anyone in their department has ever experienced. A massive amount of evidence and a trail that lead them to Washington last night. 

Dave Cawley: He explained how detectives had seized his computers, including the one the company had provided. But not to worry. Josh said he’d gone out the night before and purchased a laptop. He’d be back up and running soon.

“I’m sure in time you’ll see all this on the news,” Josh said.

John Daley (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Josh Powell, calls the search grandstanding by West Valley. Still, he views it as a possible sign that police are considering his theory. That Susan ran away with another man.

Josh Powell (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): It is definitely a different angle than they’ve been purusing.

Dave Cawley: Josh’s boss was understanding, all things considered, and said he’d try to help keep Josh on the payroll. But Josh’s problems just continued to compound. That same morning, Chuck Cox had gone to court.

Sarah Dallof (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): The Cox family filed a restraining order today to block Susan’s journals from being published by the Powell family. They say, they’re pleased the police have them.

Dave Cawley: Later that afternoon, Michael called the house to check on everyone. Alina told him Steve had gone out to run errands, but Josh was at home. Michael asked to talk to him.

“Are you ok,” Michael asked when Josh picked up the phone.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “They know [expletive] well they can’t get me on anything related to Susan’s disappearance. I had nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t even feel safe talking on the phone,” Michael said, to which Josh agreed. But they did not hang up.

After a time, Josh turned to the topic of Steve’s comments about Susan and sexual energy to the Salt Lake Tribune reporter.

“I can’t believe he thinks this is ok or acceptable on any level,” Josh said. “Do you think this is ok?”

“Personally,” Michael said, “I don’t give a [expletive].”

“I can’t believe it,” Josh said. “This is the worst thing that has come out this whole time.”

“This is why I don’t keep a journal,” Michael said a bit later in the conversation.

Sam Penrod (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Steven Powell told reporters earlier this morning he is relieved West Valley police confiscated his personal journals. While admitting they contain embarrassing entries, he believes his journals will back up his claims that Susan Powell was romantically interested in him. 

Dave Cawley: “I know that Susan wants the journals published,” Josh said.

Here, Michael stopped his brother.

“You shouldn’t say to the judge what Susan thinks,” Michael said. “It makes you look like a jackass.”

“I’m not quite the dummy they say I am,” Josh said.

He went on to discuss his computer passwords, as if to prove the point, saying it was funny police were still trying to crack encryption on devices of his they’d taken almost two years earlier. He explained how he’d used long, unguessable passwords. A 20-character password, he said, was “virtually uncrackable.”

“Even if I knew my [expletive] passwords,” Josh said, “The police don’t have a right to make me tell.”

Bill Merritt (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): He is the only person that we need to talk to, that we still have questions for. We still need to interview. He is the only person that has not cooperated with us to the extent that we have everything that we need. 

Dave Cawley: That night, on something of a whim, Josh decided to skip town. A bit after midnight he loaded his sleepy sons into their carseats and drove off to go camping down south near Mount Saint Helens. He didn’t bother telling Steve about this. So, on the morning of Saturday, August 27^th, 2011, Steve awoke to find Josh and the boys gone. In a panic, he wondered if Josh might’ve been arrested during the night. Charlie and Braden, he feared, might already be in the hands of police or, worse yet, the Coxes. He soon learned Josh and the boys were fine.

Around noon, Steve called Michael and told him about Josh’s camping trip.

“[Expletive] him,” Michael said.

Michael wanted to know if his brother had dragged the media along for the trip. Josh had not, hoping to keep the outing private. Steve, not realizing this or not caring, had blabbed to a TV reporter from Utah about Josh going camping at midnight as, Steve said, Josh often did. Alina ratted out Steve about this when Josh called home early that same afternoon.

“That’s going to look stupid, like I’m just doing this for a show,” Josh said. “People are going think this is [expletive].”

Alina did not want to hear Josh whine. She told her brother she was going to hang up.

“Tell dad to quit saying that [expletive] in the media,” Josh said.

Alina told Josh that Steve had said it jokingly. Then, she made good on the threat and hung up on him.

Josh spent one more night out with the boys. Then, on the morning of Sunday, August 28^th, 2011, he phoned home while driving back toward Puyallup. Steve answered and apologized for telling the reporter about the camping trip. Steve took his contrition even farther. He said he needed to tell Josh about something the police had found in his bedroom.

“What are they going to find in your journal,” Josh asked.

Steve said he wasn’t sure. Mostly stuff that would show he was obsessed with Susan.

“For all these years,” Josh asked.

“Yes,” Steve replied. “She did things to titillate me.”

Josh agreed with this assessment, calling Susan a “seductress.” But he added he’d only ever seen her go to the point of mild flirtation, not all-out adultery. Like, for instance, the time nearly 10 years before when she’d invited Steve to feel her freshly waxed legs.

“I’ve had chicks do that to me before,” Josh said.

He had even documented one such encounter in his audio journals, describing a time when he and Susan were engaged and she was over at his apartment.

Josh Powell (from March 6, 2001 audio journal recording): Then I got here and Susan was sitting on the couch which was kind of unusual. She usually meets me at the door. She had a blanket on her. Turns out, she’d just waxed her legs. She was waiting for me to get home so she could show me. Discretely, of course.

Dave Cawley: Josh wasn’t understanding. Steve worried police might find reason in his journals to arrest him.

“What do you mean,” Josh asked.

Steve said they should wait until he got home to talk about it, a tacit acknowledgement someone else might be listening.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Josh said.

“I can’t believe what I’m saying,” Steve replied.

Josh tried to give his dad the benefit of the doubt, figuring it wasn’t as big a deal as he was making it out to be. It’s not like Steve had done anything illegal, right? Steve seized on this line of thought. Right! If anything, his obsession showed he cared for Susan, maybe even more than Josh. It exonerated him. Whatever had happened to Susan, it was her own fault. Here, Steve mentioned how Jennifer, his first child and Josh’s older sister, had as young woman occasionally walked around the house in her underwear.

“I hope you didn’t write anything incriminating about Jennifer,” Josh said.

“No,” Steve replied.

I have read Steve’s journals. And he did write an entry on May 19^th, 2005, describing a Sunday at least a decade earlier, before Steve had divorced his wife Terri. Steve had approached Jennifer while her mother was at church.

Ken Fall (as Steve Powell from May 19, 2005 journal entry): I came into the family room and saw Jenny in the little sewing nook, working on something. She had her back to me, so I looked carefully and saw that she had nothing on except bra and pantyhose. … I walked up behind her for a closer look, to see what she was doing and what she was wearing.

Dave Cawley: Steve went on to write about what’d gone through his mind as Jennifer had modeled the clothing she’d been making. Those thoughts do not need to be repeated here.

Ken Fall (as Steve Powell from May 19, 2005 journal entry): Suddenly the spell was broken when her mother arrived home from church. … That was my one and only truly erotic experience with Jenny.

Dave Cawley: Back to the phone call between Josh and his dad. Steve vaguely characterized these journals entries, telling Josh his sister had titillated him. Steve said he had felt similar feelings while reading through Susan’s childhood journals. If the police published his journals, Steve said, it could jeopardize everything. At this, Josh became angry. Not so much at what his father had thought or said in the past, but at the damage disclosure of those facts could do to Josh’s reputation in the present.

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” he fumed, before reiterating that he really hoped Steve hadn’t written anything sexual about Jennifer.

“I may have described some things about immodesty,” Steve said. He wasn’t sure and couldn’t check now because police had the only copy.

“[Expletive],” Josh said.

Steve again said they shouldn’t talk about this on the phone. But Josh was too irate to let it go. He asked his dad if he’d detailed anything illegal. Steve said he didn’t think so.

“Well there you go again,” Josh replied before calling his dad a “dirty old man.”

“Susan started it,” Steve said, “but I couldn’t stop.”

Steve said maybe he should get a restraining order to block the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office from publishing his journals. Josh called this a bad idea. It would make it look like they were trying to hide something, Josh said. The better approach was to try and get the journals invalidated as evidence.

“They can go [expletive] themselves,” Josh said, referencing the police.

He told Steve he shouldn’t have written all of that stuff. And he said, had he known about the dirty journals, he would’ve approached things differently. But he didn’t hold a grudge against his dad. With that, Josh told Steve he and the boys had arrived home. That’s right, the boys. In case you forgot, Charlie and Braden were in the minivan with Josh. They’d overheard it all.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Minutes later, Steve received a call from his son Michael. The audio blipped, leading Steve to joke police were probably recording their calls. Michael said if so, the cops should stop wasting their time and instead work on trying to find Susan. Of course, police were listening for just that very reason.

Steve put the phone on speaker, allowing Michael to hear both Josh and Alina. The four of them then discussed the search warrant raid. Michael said it had its positives. For one, it’d prompted him to organize and back up all of his data. But Josh wasn’t interested in silver linings. He griped over losing all of his photos and videos of the boys.

Alina Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): Do your little dance, Braden.

Josh Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): Oh it is a happy dance. That’s your happy dance? Oh, cute boy. Give me a kiss. Charlie.

Charlie Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): (Laughs)

Alina Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): Pshhh.

Josh Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): Alright Charlie. Is that your happy dance?

Charlie Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): Yeah.

Josh Powell (from November 15, 2010 home video recording): Good job. You are my special boy and I love you.

Dave Cawley: Then, there was the issue of dad’s journals. Josh had spent a few minutes thinking this over had come around on the topic. The journals, he said, would actually help ruin the public perception of Susan. He called her a “deviant,” but blamed that on her dad, Chuck Cox. Josh said Susan was a victim. At this, Steve chimed in he too was a victim.

“Let’s blame it all on the Mormons,” Josh said.

Then, Josh asked his dad if he’d ever written anything about raping Susan.

“No,” Steve said. “Just some touching.”

Josh and Alina agreed this was fine. They talked about pornography, the issue raised by Kiirsi Hellewell’s blog, with Alina saying she’d had issues about seeing male nudity until she was in her 20s. Josh too said it had taken him years to appreciate porn. Remember, this conversation was happening within earshot of Charlie and Braden.

As Steve went about shredding documents, Michael told his dad and brother they needed to stop talking to reporters.

“I have to sit here 1,700 miles away and listen to what you guys are going to say next.”

Michael said they’d overplayed their hand, telegraphing their moves to the police through the media. Now, their argument that the investigation was a hit job by the Mormons was worthless. The story was now about Steve and an affair.

Sam Penrod (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Susan Powell’s parents kept their emotions in check when told of these latest claims made by Steven Powell. Still they are very disturbed by Powell’s comments and say their daughter told them her father-in-law made unwanted advances.

Dave Cawley: Josh chimed in, voicing his frustration with Steve, saying he shouldn’t have talked publicly about his feelings for Susan. Doing so had put Charlie and Braden at risk.

Richard Piatt (from August 25, 2011 KSL TV archive): Susan’s friend and daycare provider, Debbie Caldwell, thinks about Susan’s two sons as police again search a place they’re calling home.

Dave Cawley: Michael told Josh he was just as much to blame. In fact, even more so than Steve. They’d both “got their [expletive] kicked” in the media.

Dan Medwed (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): It’s an unusual case.

John Daley (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Dan Medwed, a former public defender now University of Utah law professor says he’s never seen a case like it. A woman missing for months, her husband mostly silent, then both the husband, a person of interest, and his father start making comments alleging the woman was promiscuous.

Dave Cawley: “If you lose on one battle ground, you can lose the [expletive] war. It’s now a lost cause,” Michael said.

John Daley (from August 26, 2011 KSL TV archive): Medwed says he’s baffled by the comments, which he says lowers credibility and raises suspicions about both men, potentially turning scrutiny away from Josh Powell to his father. 

Dave Cawley: So what should they do from here, Josh asked. Michael said not to say or do anything until they could take their fight into the courtroom. This was advise Steve wasn’t sure he could take. He told Michael he wanted to get out in front of the journals in media. Maybe, he suggested, they could spin it into some kind of attack on the Mormons. Michael told his dad the police had conned him into violating himself. He couldn’t spin it. When Steve insisted he could, Michael became frustrated.

“I don’t want to keep cleaning up for you and Josh,” he said. “So instead of worrying about this, let’s focus on the legal battles.”

Michael said as upset as they all were over the search warrant, they’d feel even more angry if they lost in court.

“[Expletive] the media,” Michael said. “And you and Josh both.”

Within a year and a half of that phone call, Steve Powell would be in prison and Michael, Josh, Charlie and Braden Powell would all be dead.

[Scene transition]

(Sound of court hallway)

Dave Cawley: In February of 2020, I flew from Utah to Washington to attend the opening of the civil trial between Chuck and Judy Cox and the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. The Coxes had received instructions from their attorneys not to talk to the media. We made eye contact across the hall as I entered Pierce County Superior Court, but did not speak.

Their lawsuit centered on claims of negligence on the part of the DSHS case workers who’d taken Charlie and Braden into protective custody in September of 2011, just a few weeks after the phone calls I’ve just described. In opening arguments, Cox family attorney Ted Buck told the jury of 11 men and one woman that the social workers had ignored their policies and training by failing to perform domestic violence screening.

Ted Buck (from February 18, 2020 KSL TV archive): The state utterly failed to do that assessment. Instead, when they got to the point where there was a question, “is there any domestic violence question here,” they checked “no.”

Dave Cawley: The attorneys for the state — Lori Nicolavo and Joseph Diaz — disputed this, arguing Josh Powell’s murder of his children could not have been foreseen or prevented.

Lori Nicolavo (from February 18, 2020 KSL TV archive): West Valley PD had no evidence that would support that Josh would harm his boys. And that’s the question we’re looking at.

Dave Cawley: The trial was scheduled to run for a month. The state was partway through its defense when, in mid-March, a pandemic put the whole thing on pause. And so, Susan’s parents went back to waiting. Four months passed before, in mid-July, the Washington Supreme Court cleared the way for the trial to resume. Judge Stanley Rumbaugh called the jurors back into service.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 9, 2020 court recording): Game on. Monday. 9 o’clock. Room 100.

Dave Cawley: At a time when millions of Americans were still facing uncertainty over their jobs, housing and health, these jurors answered the call. They came back with masks. They sat socially distanced. They picked up their legal pads, full of months-old notes, and once again listened.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 14, 2020 court recording): Alright, please be seated. Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

Jurors (from July 14, 2020 court recording): Good morning.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 14, 2020 court recording): You’ve gotta shout it out, ok?

Jurors (from July 14, 2020 court recording): Good morning.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 14, 2020 court recording): Ok.

Dave Cawley: While working on Cold, I’d reached out to Washington’s child protective services agency in the hopes of interviewing the myriad of social workers who’d touched Charlie and Braden’s case. An agency spokeswoman asked me to submit written questions, which I did.

Then, radio silence. She never responded. I never was able to interview the social workers. So I found it fascinating to hear from people like Rocky Stephenson, the CPS investigator who’d been tasked with looking into claims of negligence leveled against Josh.

Rocky Stephenson (from July 16, 2020 court recording): Just a statement that he was a person of interest in a missing persons, uh, uh, that’s relevant, uh, and relevant to the safety of the children but, y’know, Mr. Powell still had all of his rights intact. He hadn’t been charged, he wasn’t really even a suspect in a murder investigation.

Dave Cawley: That, we know, was incorrect. Josh was, at that time, the sole suspect.

Rocky Stephenson (from July 16, 2020 court recording): Just because a person’s a, a, a person of interest doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re not going to treat them with all fairness and respect like we would everybody else.

Dave Cawley: And Paula Strickland, a social worker contracted by the state after CPS placed Charlie and Braden with Susan’s parents. Her job was to help Chuck and Judy Cox adjust to parenting two rambunctious little boys.

Paula Strickland (from July 23, 2020 court recording): Regardless of what anyone thinks, these kids loved their dad and — particularly, Charlie was very verbal about wanting to be with this dad — and they were angry. And they were scared. And we had sent them to the grandparents who they had heard a lot of negative things about.

Dave Cawley: Paula had had repeated interactions with both Charlie and Braden during the months between their seizure by the state and their deaths at the hands of their father. She described how, in her view, the boys had been programmed by Josh to hate and fear their maternal grandparents.

Paula Strickland (from July 23, 2020 court recording): Their dad had told them that, y’know, grandma and grandpa, y’know, were bad people, that they had abused their mother, that they had stolen her journal, that Mormons are bad people, that they destroy families. So there had been a lot of this sort of programming of these negative thoughts.

Dave Cawley: And as Paula was sharing these insights with the jurors, I was reading the secret wiretap transcripts that revealed just how right she was. In one conversation between Josh and Michael, Josh had bragged about how then four-year-old Braden had told him “daddy, [expletive] the Mormons.” In another recording, Josh told six-year-old Charlie that Chuck and Judy just wanted to control him.

“When Chuck Cox is out of our lives,” Josh had said, “you’ll make more friends because Chuck Cox is abusive.”

In yet another call, Josh explained how he’d taught his sons that the Coxes were “predators.”

“I have coached them,” Josh said.

Paula Strickland (from July 23, 2020 court recording): So a lot of the work that grandma and grandpa had to do was regain these kids’ trust and help them feel safe so they could settle down. And, y’know, that’s really when I say adjustment what I mean, is helping these kids find safety again when we had rocked their world.

Dave Cawley: I’m not going to go through a blow-by-blow of the trial here. But I will mention assistant Washington attorney general Joseph Diaz in closing arguments re-iterated the state’s view that at the time of Charlie and Braden being taken into protective custody, it was not a case of domestic violence.

Joseph Diaz (from July 29, 2020 court recording): This was not a domestic violence case. And as much as the plaintiffs want to make it so, it’s not. … Mr. Powell is the sole cause of the murder of his sons. It was not due to any negligence by the state of Washington.

Dave Cawley: The jurors began their deliberations on the morning of Thursday, July 30^th, 2020. The following afternoon, Judge Rumbaugh announced they’d reached a verdict.

Stanley Rumbaugh (from July 31, 2020 court recording): Question one: was the state of Washington negligent? Answer: yes. Question two: was such negligence a proximate cause of injury to the plaintiffs? Answer: yes.

Dave Cawley: The jurors calculated damages at $57.5 million dollars for each child. They assigned Josh responsibility for $8,245,000 of that, again for each child. Doing the math, the jury’s judgement against the state worked out to roughly $98.5 million. Chuck Cox, sounded relieved when I spoke to him over Zoom a couple of hours later.

Chuck Cox: Yeah, well I’m still in shock, so. (Laughs) We’ll see. Like I say, I’m just kind of waiting for the next thing and, whatever. 

Dave Cawley: The testimony had included hours of detailed descriptions of Charlie and Braden’s injuries. The big question was how long had each suffered between the start of the attack and the actual moment of death.

Chuck Cox: It was very hard. It was very, I left the rooms at, at times. … And they had their expert that said, “Oh yeah, as soon as you’re unconscious then you don’t feel anything.” Our Dr. Wecht said, “absolutely not, there’s been studies on it.” They’re saying “well, if you’re conscious, y’know, how do you know?” Well, these boys swallowed gasoline and that meant they must have been conscious ‘cause you cannot swallow if you’re unconscious.

Dave Cawley: Chuck offered thanks to his legal team — attorneys Anne Bremner, Ted Buck and Evan Bariault — for their handling of the difficult material. This fight, however, is not over. Weeks after the jury’s verdict, the state attorneys asked Judge Rumbaugh to overrule the high-dollar award, or grant a new trial. At a hearing on that motion on the very day of this episode’s release, Rumbaugh said the jury’s verdict had shocked the conscience of the court. He slashed the damages by two thirds, from nearly $100 million to just under $33 million.

Chuck told me afterward it was an insult to the jury and he intends to continue fighting for the safety of children.

Chuck Cox: We’ve done all that we can to help other people with children in care of DSHS. … That’s, that’s a positive outcome out of the tragedy. And there’s not much else you can do with it, because you can’t bring them back.

Dave Cawley: Josh Powell went to court in Tacoma, Washington on the first day of February, 2012. He wore a jacket, a blue shirt and tie and carried a crumpled brown paper sack from a FedEx Office copy center. It contained a typed statement for the court. This is what Josh wrote.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 1, 2012 statement): Having demonstrated my fitness as a parent, it is time for my sons to come home.

Dave Cawley: Josh had lost custody of his sons Charlie and Braden four months earlier, after police raided the South Hill home he shared with his father. Detectives were looking for evidence related to the unsolved disappearance of Josh’s wife Susan. Instead, they’d found his father’s stash of voyeur videos.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 1, 2012 statement): I was living with him at the time, however, within the first month, I established my own home and I have consistently proven my fitness as a stable and loving parent.

Dave Cawley: In court, Josh’s attorney Jeff Bassett told judge Kathryn Nelson his client had done everything she’d asked of him.

Jeff Basset (from February 1, 2012 KSL TV archive): He has been nothing if, uh, if, if not cooperative to the entire, uh, everything that’s been asked of him in this case.

Dave Cawley: Josh’d even gone so far as to endure a psychological evaluation.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 1, 2012 statement): I have proven myself as a fit and loving father who provides a stable home even in the face of great adversity.

Dave Cawley: Not so fast. Assistant Washington Attorney General John Long told the court police in West Valley City, Utah had just shared concerning new evidence.

John Long (from February 1, 2012 KSL TV archive): Based on some information that’s been provided, uh, by a criminal, uh, investigation, a judge overseeing the criminal investigation. Uh, I think it’s clear, uh, from that court order that these, uh, can be linked to, uh, Mister Powell.

Dave Cawley: No one came right out and said it in open court that day, but the evidence in question was a set of nearly 400 pornographic images. They were digital files, most of them small thumbnails. The majority were cartoons, showing characters from animated TV series, often depicting children and adults together. Detectives and the FBI had found the thumbnails on a computer taken out of Josh and Susan’s house in Utah, the day after she disappeared in December of 2009.

In court documents, police said the images belonged to Josh. They were wrong.

This is a bonus episode of Cold: Project Sunlight. I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Let’s go back again to Judge Kathryn Nelson’s chambers in Pierce County Superior Court on February 1^st, 2012. Josh Powell’s attorney Jeff Bassett pushed back against the claim of new evidence against his client. He wondered why detectives were only then raising the issue. If the cartoon pictures were so bad, he asked, why hadn’t police just arrested Josh when they’d first found them?

Jeff Basset (from February 1, 2012 KSL TV archive): And I just think that we are allowing ourselves to be manipulated from outside sources on this case without cause.

Dave Cawley: Detective Ellis Maxwell, the lead investigator on the Susan Powell case, wasn’t in court that day. But he told me he’d tried to secure charges against Josh on those images. Prosecutors would not go for it.

Ellis Maxwell: I’m sure a lot of people were wondering, going “ok, well they’ve had this for several years but now they’re going to introduce it now.” Well that’s why.

Dave Cawley: Police also considered the images contraband, illegal to possess or view.

Ellis Maxwell: And so we had to go through the courts here and they made an exception to release the evidence to the State of Washington for review purposes and it was very specific to where only the judge and the attorney and the social workers and, y’know, it was a small scope, and I think one detective.

Dave Cawley: The judge’s order did not allow Josh to see the images. But it did grant permission for forensic psychologist James Manley to review them.

James Manley: The overall, umm, tone of these were incestuous.

Dave Cawley: James’d already delivered a report about Josh’s parenting capacity to the court in Washington. After viewing the images, he had new concerns. So, James authored a follow-up.

James Manley: I went down to the police station, talked with the guardian ad litem and the detective and the attorney general. Decided, it didn’t take much to decide but we entered a request or petition to the court for a psychosexual evaluation.

Dave Cawley: On the one side, Judge Nelson had Josh making the case for reunification. On the other side stood police, prosecutors and a psychologist, all arguing Josh might not be a safe father, based on these thumbnail images of cartoon incest pornography. Josh, for his part, seemed to make a vague reference to the pictures in his own typed statement to the court that day. He wrote:

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 1, 2012 statement): I have recently heard rumblings that some people are dipping deep down to the bottom of the barrel in a desperate effort to find and manufacture fault with me due to their attitudes.

Dave Cawley: The word “manufacture” there is significant. Josh seemed to imply that he believed police had fabricated the new evidence. His protest didn’t sway the judge. She told Josh he was not getting his boys back that day. Instead, Judge Nelson ordered him to take the psychosexual evaluation. You know what happened next. Days after the court hearing, Josh murdered his sons and killed himself.

Gary Sanders: When he was not only not given custody but then the stipulations that they put on him, the psychosexual and some other things, I think  he, that kind of cracked him.

Chuck Cox: The psychosexual evaluation was the end of the road for him. Because, with the revelation that, y’know, he had these pictures on his computer…

Anne Bremner: It’s explicit and it’s of concern. It’s very, very disturbing and so that was something else that they knew about him. And that was found by the West Valley police on his computer.

Dave Cawley: Only, I can now tell you, it wasn’t Josh’s computer. I’ve discovered that the computer in question belonged to Susan.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Let’s step backward in time to examine how I made this discovery and what it means about ownership of those pornographic images.

Susan Powell sent an email to an old friend on Christmas Eve, 2008, a little less than a year before her disappearance. In it, she vented about the rocky state of her marriage, expressing despair over its dysfunction. She also wrote that Josh didn’t allow her to go online with his computers.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from December 24, 2008 email): I love Facebook and Josh is still convinced using it or anything else on the web, automatically uploads evil and doesn’t trust me with most of his computers.

Dave Cawley: The only computer Josh allowed Susan to use at home was a Compaq brand iPaq, by then a nine-yearold model. In a July, 2009 Facebook message, she told another old friend the Compaq computer wasn’t all that useful.

Kristin Sorensen (as Susan Powell from July 13, 2009 Facebook message): The crappy computer I have access to at home is soo old and slow that I literally log into fb, walk away, click profile, walk away because it takes so long to load.

Dave Cawley: Josh, on the other hand, used multiple computers. He’d built a custom tower complete with a RAID array. Susan mentioned that machine in her July 2008 video documenting the family’s assets.

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): Here’s the kinds of pimping out stuff he’s done to his computer, he built it himself.

Dave Cawley: Josh also had a work-issued laptop that he often used around the house. But he didn’t seem to think his wife had much need for a computer of her own. 

Linda Bagley: The control that uh, Josh had over her, he wouldn’t let her do certain things.

Dave Cawley: In a July, 2009 email, Susan told her work friend Linda Bagley the only task Josh allowed her to use a computer for was tracking her spending.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from July 27, 2009 email): Having every year down to the penny of totals of each category is a priority with my husband and not me.

Dave Cawley: For years, Josh’d tasked Susan with scanning his documents. Susan told Linda doing Josh’s data entry was a waste of time. She wrote:

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from July 27, 2009 email to Linda Bagley): I enter on each receipt … if it was clothing for Josh, clothing for Susan, accessories for Susan, toiletries for Susan, shoes, cosmetics … groceries is broken down to listening each item or describing if it was produce, frozen, shelf stable foods, incidentals like batteries or non-consumables. … We categorize diapers versus wipes versus diaper ointment versus children’s clothing, children books, children toys, children movies etcetera, etcetera.

Dave Cawley: Susan begged Josh for a better computer throughout 2009. He kept telling her he would build her one, but never did.

Linda Bagley: It was always the best for him and the least they could do for her, but yet she earned as much or more income than he did.

Dave Cawley: Finally, at the end of August, the Compaq iPaq died. Susan felt cut off from her friends and family and she resorted to sneaking onto Facebook at the office. She told a coworker in an email she feared those internet sessions might cost her her job.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from September 12, 2009 Facebook message): I just found out, they might be doing “final warnings” and firing people for using “non work related websites.” … I value my job more than email. … I guess, let’s go back to the stone age of cell phones.

Dave Cawley: The solution had been staring Susan in the face for months. She knew of a family that had shut down an in-home business earlier in the year. That family owned several computers they no longer needed. Susan decided to buy one, without telling Josh. That presented a problem, though. At that time, Josh and Susan had only one car.

Linda Bagley: She didn’t get the car, it was him unless he didn’t have the, unless he had the day off maybe or something. It was always him.

Dave Cawley: So on September 18^th, 2009, Susan asked her daycare provider Debbie Caldwell to swing by in her Mazda Miata. When Debbie showed up, Susan plopped down into the passenger seat and told Debbie where to go. That night, Susan bought a computer of her own for $100.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention I know who sold Susan that computer. At this time, I’m opting not to report that detail.

Josh flipped out when he found out about Susan’s purchase.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from September 18, 2009 email): Josh immediately pounced on the computer … I told him it was my computer and not to mess with it.

Dave Cawley: The computer was a Dell OptiPlex GX270, far from top of the line. But Susan told her coworkers in this email that it was enough.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from September 18, 2009 email): It does what I need and that’s all I care about. I explained I wanted to do Facebook, Hotmail, PBS.org and let the kids watch movies and such.

Dave Cawley: Susan didn’t want her computer downstairs in the office, where Josh kept his computer. Instead, she cleared space in a small upstairs bedroom. And that is exactly where West Valley City police detectives found it less than three months later, when they entered the house with a search warrant.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The Dell computer next ended up at the FBI’s Intermountain West Regional Computer Forensics Lab, along with all of the rest of the digital evidence in the Powell case. I talked about the RCFL’s work in episode 12. As a refresher though, here’s FBI Supervisory Special Agent Cheney Eng-Tow.

Cheney Eng-Tow: The software we use goes in and retrieves deleted files, files that are in this so-called like unallocated space that the computer knows can use now. So we’re able to pull stuff that’s deleted and things like that.

Dave Cawley: That’s exactly where investigators found almost all of the cartoon pornography: in unallocated space on the Dell computer’s hard drive. The images had been deleted, likely as part of an automatic purge of web browser cache files. In other words, someone had visited a website hosting the images but had probably not explicitly downloaded copies of them.

Typically, computer files carry metadata that can tell you things like when the file was created, modified or last accessed. Forensic examiners can use that metadata to determine when files were downloaded from the internet. But that’s not always the case with deleted files. They’re often stripped of metadata. This presented a problem for West Valley police. When they and the FBI discovered the cartoon incest pornography in 2010, they opened a new case in the hopes of securing federal child pornography charges against Josh. Police records show a detective even screened the case with an assistant U.S. Attorney. But the AUSA refused to charge, pointing out that police could not prove Josh was the person who’d accessed the explicit cartoons.

The police, FBI and prosecutors all missed something, something that I recently discovered: a timestamp showing when at least some of those cartoon porn images were accessed. I need to take a second and explain how I discovered this. When the RCFL finished its work on the Dell computer’s hard drive, it turned over copies of its findings to West Valley police.

Cheney Eng-Tow: We provide an archive of all of the work that we do. … We also generate a digital report for them. That report will have all of the files that were deemed pertinent.

Dave Cawley: Deemed pertinent. That means the report only included copies of a subset of all of the files found by the forensic software. Now, I have a copy of this report. Reviewing it, I discovered that one of the explicit cartoons still held metadata. It showed the image had last been accessed on March 20^th, 2009. That’s six months before the Dell desktop ever entered the Powell house.

That’s not all. The report also included a database indicating all of the files that the forensic software had been able to see. It did not include copies of every file, but you can use the database to see stuff like file names, sizes, metadata and the location where the file had been stored on the file system’s directory.

I know this is all really dull, but just stick with me here. Knowing the date and time from the metadata on that one cartoon image, I was able to find references in the database to several internet cookie files from cartoon pornography websites. They were created just before 1 a.m. on March 22^nd, 2009. Again, six months before the Dell computer ever entered the Powell house. The prior owner had failed to wipe the hard drive when selling it to Susan.

This fact carries significant implications. It means neither Josh nor Susan could have been the person who downloaded the cartoon pornography. And because of that, the judge’s order that Josh undergo a psychosexual evaluation, an order that many people close to the case say broke Josh just days before the murder-suicide, was based on flawed information.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Josh was in a hurry. It was February 3^rd, 2009. He and Susan were making final preparations for a vacation to Washington. They planned to spend the better part of a month visiting their families and old friends in the state where they had first met and fallen in love. Before leaving their home in Utah, Josh wanted to finalize the legal trust he’d been working on with an attorney. He was becoming frustrated because the lawyer wasn’t responding to his messages. He complained to Susan about it in this email.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 3, 2009 email to Susan Powell): I can make a generic trust with that software program just to have something done before leaving.

Dave Cawley: Susan replied with an email of her own, urging her husband to worry about it later.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from February 3, 2009 email to Josh Powell): Seriously push for generic for now, we don’t need him delaying our entire vacation.

Dave Cawley: More practical concerns were forefront in Susan’s mind. She needed to find someone to watch their pet parrot, Triley, while they were gone.

(Sound of parrot squawking and Josh saying “hello” from undated home video recording)

Dave Cawley: Susan talked her sister-in-law Jennifer Graves into serving as the bird babysitter. But Josh just couldn’t shake his fixation with the trust.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 3, 2009 email to Susan Powell): Let’s plan to go over the language in detail while driving the bird to Jenny’s.

Dave Cawley: Susan made clear she wanted the legal stuff off Josh’s plate as soon as possible.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from February 3, 2009, work email to Josh Powell): I’m really really obsessed with the idea of leaving thursday early am to arrive by dinner so if that trust works-good.

Dave Cawley: The looming 15 hour drive didn’t seem to concern Josh much.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 3, 2009 email to Susan Powell): I also need to work on backing up data. I think I finally have a workable plan, but it will take time to process the files. I better start the process before leaving for Jenny’s.

Dave Cawley: Several months earlier, Josh had purchased a one terabyte Western Digital brand “My Book World Edition” external hard drive. He kept it in his basement office, connected to their home network by way of an ethernet cable. Susan even mentioned that hard drive in the video she made documenting the family’s assets in July of 2008.

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): And this is some type of backup device. It says WD on the side. I don’t know, it like shares the information somehow.

Dave Cawley: Josh’d come up with a method of syncing copies of his files from each of his computers to the external hard drive, over the home network.

West Valley City police detectives took the My Book World Edition hard drive when they raided Josh and Susan’s home with a search warrant the day after she disappeared. The same day they took Susan’s Dell desktop. Like the Dell, the My Book World hard drive ended up at the RCFL. But investigators couldn’t manage to get anything off of it. Josh’s network backup was locked with encryption. That encrypted hard drive is one of the last persisting mysteries in the Powell case. And for the first time, we have a clue of just what secrets it might hold.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Earlier in this episode, I mentioned Josh’s homebuilt computer tower. It’s the one with the RAID array that was in the basement office of the Sarah Circle house.

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): I think there’s like five hard drives, something about doing RAIDS. There’s those for all of the computer geeks.

Dave Cawley: Again, that is Susan’s voice from the video she made documenting her assets in the summer of 2008.

Josh’s RAID array computer also ended up at the FBI’s computer lab after Susan disappeared, but it didn’t appear to hold much in the way of evidence. Investigators flagged some family photos on it, as well as a single file named “vvdb1NetworkEncrypted.tdb.”

I have a copy of this file. At first, I couldn’t make much of it. I didn’t recognize the file format. A little Googling suggested it was probably some kind of database. But without knowing what program created it, there was little chance of viewing it. Maybe, I figured, something might show up if I tried to open the file as text. When I did, it revealed a single, extremely long line of letters, numbers and foreign language symbols. Almost incomprehensible.

Some dictionary words and even short phrases did jump out, but those foreign characters made it impossible to get a clean read. Scrolling what seemed endlessly toward the right, my eyes started to lose focus. That’s when it happened. A pattern began to emerge. The random placement of these foreign characters wasn’t actually random. On a hunch, I replaced all of those foreign characters with line breaks. That unreadable string of long text transformed into a neat list. Scrolling vertically then, I could see the list was roughly 70-thousand lines long. Each line was a discrete reference to an individual file.

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): We’ve got all sorts of files, this is all thanks to me trying to save them.

Dave Cawley: These were file paths. The very first line read “ViceVersa synchronization tracking.” ViceVersa is a file backup app.

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): There’s some tapes and DVDs and stuff to back up all the computer geek stuff, our family photos and financial information and…

Dave Cawley: I soon learned the .tdb file extension was short for tracking database. So the file I was looking at was how ViceVersa kept track of which items to synchronize. It was a log of what was copied from where, to where. The source, where the original files were copied from, and the target, where they were copied to, were both represented in the list. Looking through the database, I could see the source was called “tempbackupunorganized.” The target volume carried the name “mybookworld.”

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): My Book Work, World Edition. I think that’s the stuff I was looking at earlier that saves information.

Dave Cawley: That means the ViceVersa database file is very likely the table of contents to Josh’s encrypted hard drive.

A few takeaways were evident when I started studying the ViceVersa database file. Josh tended to keep his documents well organized, in a series of nested folders. They had orderly names like business, education, finances, insurance, housing and so on. Each individual file carried a descriptive name.

Many of the files and folders also included exact dates in their names. The formatting was always the same: four digit year, two digit month, two digit day. Josh’s documents dated as far back as the early 90s, when he was a teenager. The most recent files dated to September of 2009, three months before Susan’s disappearance.

Perhaps most important, I recognized some of the files. In fact, I already had copies of some of them, like Josh’s audio journals.

Josh Powell (from March 3, 2001 audio journal recording): So I went home, started working on my computer again. I pretty much need my computer for every aspect of my life right now.

Dave Cawley: But my copies of Josh’s journals came from hard drives West Valley police seized from Steve Powell’s house and Josh’s safe deposit box in Washington in 2011.

Josh Powell (from March 2, 2001 audio journal recording): Today I got up and started working on my computer. I decided better get Windows 98 installed on it so I can start using my scanner and stuff again.

Dave Cawley: So how did Josh have copies of those files in Washington in 2011, if police had seized all of his digital data from the Sarah Circle house in Utah right after Susan disappeared in 2009?

Josh Powell (from March 5, 2001 audio journal recording): None of this technology stuff is particularly esoteric to me.

Dave Cawley: The simple answer is off-site backups. So where did Josh stash his off-site copy?

Back to those emails Josh and Susan exchanged in February of 2009, before leaving on their road trip to Washington. In one, Josh told Susan he wanted a backup of his computer done before their meeting with the attorney. Here’s what he wrote.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from February 3, 2009 email to Susan Powell): I really intend to fully backup the computer and bring a copy.

Dave Cawley: Now, I can’t say for sure, but it’s reasonable to believe Josh might’ve placed this copy of his digital archive in a safe deposit box. Or maybe, he left it with a friend. If so, he could’ve retrieved it after Susan disappeared and carried it with him to Washington.

Evidence exists to support this idea. As I just mentioned, the Josh Powell journal files I received from West Valley City during my research for Cold came from devices police’d seized in 2011. But they line up with the ViceVersa database from 2009. The folder structure on Josh’s encrypted backup is almost identical to that of his archive as it appeared two years later. They both derived from the same original source.

That discovery raised an interesting question: could the digital data seized by police in 2011 hold the key to unlocking the My Book World hard drive from 2009? To find out, I’d need the help of someone with access to all of the digital evidence.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: At the start of October 2013, Susan’s dad, Chuck Cox, sent an email to West Valley police detective Ellis Maxwell. A man named Richard Hickman from a company called Decipher Forensics had reached out to Chuck, offering to help get into Josh’s encrypted drive.

Richard Hickman: I saw the news story about the hard drives being encrypted and the FBI having a hard time being able to crack the encryption and I thought of the uh, the cryptocurrency mining machines that we had in our office that we also utilized for password breaking for forensics from time to time. And so I thought “well, let’s, let’s reach out. Let’s see if we can maybe just donate some time on our machine.”

Dave Cawley: Richard co-owned Decipher with two other partners, Trent Leavitt and Mike Johnson. They had founded the firm in 2011.

Trent Leavitt: Decipher primarily was a computer forensic and cell phone forensic company. We would handle cases in civil litigation, worked with law enforcement as well, on anything from homicide cases to divorces. Sometimes, they were one in the same. And everything in between: intellectual property theft, employment law, civil litigation of all types.

Dave Cawley: That is Trent. West Valley City had declared the Powell case cold five months earlier. At Chuck’s urging, police reached out to Decipher to see if they could help decrypt the “My Book World” hard drive.

Trent Leavitt: I believe we met with detective Maxwell. Very nice guy, very easy to work with. He was actually very appreciative of our willingness to do this for free and try and move things along and get more answers.

Dave Cawley: Trent told Ellis about the machines they intended to use. Decipher had poured about $14,000 into building them. They were both contained in milk crates.

Richard Hickman: You just have this box, this milk crate box and we, we actually took a piece of wood across the side of it to be able to kind of act as a, like, the shelf. And then we just set down these four really powerful graphics cards that are just gaming graphics cards and hooked ‘em up that way.

Dave Cawley: These milk crates weren’t much to look at but they were necessary because the rigs consumed a lot of power and generated a great deal of heat. It required a full-size fan just to keep them cool.

Trent Leavitt: It generated enough heat in the winter that we would open up our windows and didn’t have to turn on the furnace in our office. It, it literally heated our entire office.

Dave Cawley: Ellis was impressed. He ran the idea up his chain of command and received an ok from the deputy chief. So, in December of 2013, West Valley gave the Decipher team a copy of the MyBookWorld drive. The arrangement came with a condition: Decipher had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They were not allowed to discuss their work.

Richard Hickman: And we didn’t talk about the fact that we were even doing it with anybody.

Dave Cawley: And, the deal required that they report any discoveries to Ellis.

Trent Leavitt: Anything that we find, per our agreement with West Valley City, y’know, when we originally started this, anything we found was to go back to West Valley City and to go nowhere else.

Dave Cawley: Confidentiality wasn’t an issue for Decipher. It was common practice with almost every case they worked.

Richard Hickman: Talking about a case, especially on camera, it’s weird. It’s very weird. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Trent and Richard are only discussing this now because West Valley City released them from the NDA, at Cold’s request. My thanks to West Valley for that.

Trent, Richard and Mike hooked up Josh’s encrypted drive up to their milk crate rig. They’d decided to run what’s known as a dictionary attack against the encryption.

Richard Hickman: We put together this strategy of combining a whole lot of, umm, password lists from previous data breaches and dumps that’d happened. Hackers will breach a company, they’ll pull their usernames and passwords and then they leak that to the internet. And so, all of those lists are publicly available. And so, we downloaded a lot of these lists of very common passwords. And then we created our own big combined dictionary, applied a whole bunch of rules to it to say “try the original password and then we’re going to swap all the As with @ symbols, Ss with $, Es with 3s, Is with 1s or !s, all of these different combinations. And, y’know, putting a one on the end putting or maybe combining two passwords and it created this massive dictionary that we knew and it, an our software showed was going to take forever to get through. But we thought why not? Let’s give it a try.

Dave Cawley: It didn’t take long before Decipher encountered some initial success. The tool they used for the dictionary attack came across a password.

Trent Leavitt: ap1124. Is that it?

Richard Hickman: Yep.

Trent Leavitt: I don’t know how I remember that, but some things you just don’t forget.

Richard Hickman: Yep.

Trent Leavitt: ap1124.

Dave Cawley: They plugged that six-character string into the encrypted drive, then attempted to access it. There was nothing there. The drive appeared to be empty.

Richard Hickman: With True Crypt, without getting really super technical, you can have multiple layers of encryption.

Dave Cawley: I’ll have more to say about this point in a bit, but for now, it’s enough to know that this discovery meant Decipher had to start all over again. They set the milk crate machines back to work.

Richard Hickman: It ran for a very long time.

Dave Cawley: The code-cracking software ripped through hundreds of millions, then billions of possible password permutations. Heat took its toll on the milk crate machines.

Trent Leavitt: And that thing would run around the clock, 24/7, for months, if not, y’know, close to two years before those things burned up. And still didn’t break it.

Dave Cawley: Ellis retired around that same time and a different detective, David Greco, took over as caretaker of the Powell case. 2016 passed. Still, no break. In August of 2017, detective Greco dropped in on the Decipher office to check up on things. Richard and another member of their team, Kaly Richmond, told him they still had the encrypted drive and were still working on it. They brought him up to speed on their early discovery, in a sort of good news/bad news kind of way.

Trent Leavitt: ap1124. That’s what we have to give you. It means absolutely nothing.

Dave Cawley: Two months later, in October of 2017, a private investigator working for Susan’s parents called Decipher to check in on things. Trent told the P.I., Rose Winquist, he didn’t have much to say. But he let slip they’d discovered a short password that didn’t provide access to any files.

Trent Leavitt: It’s really not a big deal. There’s nothing here.

Dave Cawley: Rose shared this information. I spoke to her on the phone on the night of October 25^th, 2017. She told me then Decipher had decoded a “first layer” on Josh’s encrypted hard drive. At the time, I contacted West Valley police, who confirmed the general thrust of what Rose had said. So, I broke the story on the 10 o’clock news that night.

Dave McCann (from October 25, 2017 KSL TV archive): KSL radio producer Dave Cawley on the phone with us tonight with the latest development and Dave, this has to do with a hard drive.

Dave Cawley (from October 25, 2017 KSL TV archive): It does, Dave. A company called Winquist Investigations is collaborating with Susan Powell’s parents, Chuck and Judy Cox, and they’re working with a Utah company called Decipher Forensics to try and gain access to a copy of one of Josh Powell’s hard drives.

Dave Cawley: I didn’t then understand then that Decipher was working for West Valley, not the Coxes.

Dave Cawley (from October 25, 2017 KSL TV archive): Private investigator Rose Winquist tells KSL they are in need of more resources now to devote to the effort. They’re reaching out to Amazon, hoping the internet giant can use its cloud computing platform to speed up this process.

Dave Cawley: The following day, Rose made the rounds, talking to other local and national media about the encryption.

Rose Winquist (from October 26, 2017 KSL TV archive): This is our biggest hope right now, is, is this computer and the other computers that the police have.

Ladd Eagan (from October 26, 2017 KSL TV archive): Calling it a “potential breakthrough,” a private investigator hired by the parents of Susan Cox Powell hopes a remaining hard drive gives them the clues they need.

Dave Cawley: The brass at West Valley City were not happy. It seemed to them that Decipher had violated the nondisclosure agreement.

Trent Leavitt: I received a phone call from, uh, I’ll just say an official at West Valley City and wanting to know why the press was starting to camp out at the, y’know, the front of the the doors. And I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Dave Cawley: Trent soon figured it out and went to work attempting to limit the damage.

Trent Leavitt: It violated the trust of another department. In our industry, word gets around pretty quick. When in fact, we didn’t violate the trust, someone else did.

Dave Cawley: But that damage was done.

Trent Leavitt: Obviously, in trying to be cooperative, we just did whatever West Valley City told us to do. And they said “Don’t say anything.” We said, “ok, we’ve been pretty good at that.” So we let West Valley City put out a statement. We just kept our mouth shut.

Dave Cawley: That didn’t keep Trent’s phone from blowing up.

Trent Leavitt: Dozens and dozens of phone calls. Probably from your station as well. And I had no comment. Y’know, I actually just started hanging up on people because I had work to do, and I wasn’t getting it done.

Dave Cawley: The Decipher team feared West Valley would demand the encrypted drive back, shutting down their effort. But the city didn’t do that. And the situation did have a silver lining. The renewed interest in the Powell case started the team thinking about how to whittle down that giant dictionary into something more manageable, a custom dictionary to Josh alone.

Richard Hickman: It’s a much more personalized dictionary, based on the information that we have about him. And so, we can take all of his computer information and even enter in manually information like his birthday, his kids’ names, his kids’ birthdays, family members and important life events and that kind of stuff.

Dave Cawley: But they could only build that custom dictionary if they had access to Josh’s other, unencrypted hard drives.

Trent Leavitt: During the course of that week, umm, our former business partner Mike Johnson said, “I’m positive, there’s more drives in this case that just didn’t give them to us. What if we took all of the drives” and like Richard talked about “created a dictionary of all the drives that aren’t encrypted?”

Dave Cawley: A few weeks after the leak, detective Greco dropped in on the Decipher office again to remind Trent, Mike and Richard they were still bound by the non-disclosure agreement. The Decipher team took the opportunity to ask for copies of all of the digital data from the Powell case. West Valley City agreed, in spite of the recent breach of trust. And, in 2018, the accounting firm Eide Bailly acquired Decipher Forensics. Trent brought the Powell drives with him to his new, state-of-the-art digital forensics lab.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The October 2017 leak had another unintended consequence. Rob Burton, an IT expert and self-described news junkie, had followed reports about the Powell case from the beginning.

Rob Burton: It affected me very personally, just like many of us here in Utah and nationally.

Dave Cawley: Rob was paying attention when the P.I., Rose Winquist, started doing news interviews about Josh’s encrypted hard drive.

Rob Burton: There was some local news media coverage of the encrypted hard drive that had made the news here in Salt Lake City as well as some podcasts.

Dave Cawley: It was Nancy Grace on her podcast “Crime Stories.” The show characterized the latest news as “a big development” and “the most hopeful lead” in the Powell case in years. Attentive, Rob listened. Several times.

Rob Burton: And as I heard the, the digital forensic details, it just didn’t quite line up.

Dave Cawley: Rob worked for a large corporate employer in Salt Lake City as an information security analyst and digital forensics specialist. He had expertise in this field.

Rob Burton: She kind of glossed over it. I don’t think she fully understood the details and the intricacies that were involved, especially with West Valley City.

Dave Cawley: At one point, a guest on the podcast mentioned there was nothing preventing police from making more copies of the encrypted hard drive and sharing those with other digital forensic experts. That started Rob thinking.

Rob Burton: I actually work in West Valley. My employer has a major IT office in West Valley and so hearing that, I wondered, “I wonder if I could get involved with that?”

Dave Cawley: Rob headed over to West Valley police headquarters on his lunch break one day.

Rob Burton: They were actually very positive, very favorable. I, I, I asked them specifically for the detective involved in the case and he wasn’t there at the time but I left him a message and then he called me back a few days later and met with me.

Dave Cawley: Detective David Greco made a fresh copy of the encrypted “My Book World” hard drive for Rob and delivered it to him at the start of January 2018. Just like with Decipher, Rob signed a nondisclosure agreement. He was gagged from talking about the project.

Rob Burton: In fact, as I started this project two years ago, being under NDA, I knew I just couldn’t just create a folder on my computer called “Susan Powell project” because I was under NDA and kind of had to keep it hidden. And so I named the folder on my computer Project Sunlight because I thought every good secret project has to have a good codename, right? Like you see in movies and TV shows and I named it Project Sunlight Because sunlight is the best disinfectant, I think.

Dave Cawley: Again, West Valley City has granted Rob a release from that NDA at Cold’s request. My thanks to the city for allowing Rob to share his story.

Rob Burton: And now that it’s a little more out in the open, I’m, I’m very relieved to be able to talk about it.

Dave Cawley: Once Rob obtained a copy of the encrypted hard drive, he started tinkering. He bought several computers second-hand and set them up to run a password-cracking program.

Rob Burton: I’ve basically built a small computer lab out of extra computers that I had and uh, that I’ve been able to acquire with some other video cards and then just running the software against it. It’s called Passware and it’s commercially available and it’s what law enforcement agencies also use.

Dave Cawley: Passware began plugging every possible password into the drive, one by one, as fast as it could. This is what’s known as a brute force attack, a different approach from the dictionary attack the Decipher team had first employed.

Rob Burton: There’s a couple different strategies when it comes to decryption, but brute force is kind of the last effort, really, the last ditch effort really, after several of the easier things have been exhausted. You’re really left with brute force. And that’s where you’re basically just trying combinations of letters, numbers, characters to try and brute force that password. To guess it. Password guessing.

Dave Cawley: Passware had only been running for a handful of weeks when something unexpected happened.

Rob Burton: One morning I came in and looked at that and it said “password found 1.” And I thought “oh, is that a bug, was that real?” And sure enough, yeah no, it really did find one password.

Dave Cawley: ap1124. The same password the Decipher team had discovered.

Rob Burton: But we mounted that and it’s blank. There’s no data there.

Dave Cawley: Earlier, I mentioned that I’d get back to the idea of this being an “outer layer” of encryption.

Rob Burton: Think of it as a box within a box.

Dave Cawley: Rob explained, the ap1124 password was the key to open the outer box.

Rob Burton: There’s a process known as plausible deniability that basically, it was used so that if someone was caught and had to give up the password to this drive, say by law enforcement — law enforcement arrests a suspect and convinces them to give up a password to the drive — they could say “ok, well my password is, here’s my password.” Law enforcement thinks “oh great, we’ve got the password to the drive, we can decrypt it.” They can decrypt that outer partition and it can be totally empty. And they think “oh, there’s nothing here.”

Dave Cawley: Cracking the outer partition password brings them no closer to discovering the hidden partition password.

Rob Burton: It’s a whole different password. There’s the outer password and there’s the inner password. So it’s starting over and it’s a much different layer of complexity.

Dave Cawley: ap1124 isn’t very secure, as far passwords go. Nowadays, many websites would refuse to let you use it because it’s not long enough, doesn’t include special characters and uses only lower-case letters. Richard Hickman and Trent Leavitt told me it’s likely the password Josh used on the hidden partition, if a hidden partition even exists, is much more complex.

Richard Hickman: There might not even be a second layer. It could just be, we cracked that top code and it was an empty hard drive.

Trent Leavitt: That’s possibility we’ve talked about.

Richard Hickman: We have no idea, so. We’d like to think that there’s something else to go after.

Dave Cawley: The ViceVersaPro database log I talked about earlier suggests there probably is something to go after. But the only way to know for sure is to either crack the second password or run the brute force attack until the end of time.

Trent Leavitt: No encryption is bulletproof. But if you can delay the amount of time it takes, then becomes improbable.

Dave Cawley: The way you increase the amount of time it takes is by using a long, strong password. Josh did provide police a password for one of his computers in 2011. It consisted of his birth date, his full name, his social security number, his user account name and a string of what appear to be random letters and numbers. It’s 59 characters, including upper and lower case letters, numbers, as well as hyphens, slashes and parentheses.

Rob Burton: However many characters long it may be exponentially increases the complexity and the length that it takes.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: West Valley police were sifting through the first round of digital data seized from the Sarah Circle house in the days after Susan disappeared when, in March of 2010, Josh Powell’s attorney Scott Williams sent them an email. Williams asked for the return of Josh’s computers and hard drives.

The sergeant in charge of West Valley’s major crimes unit told Williams that wasn’t going to happen. But the sergeant said if Josh had a particular file in mind, detectives could try to find it for him. That would go easier, he added, if Josh would cough up his password. 

Josh claimed he could not remember the password. In spite of that, he emailed over his file wishlist a few days later. At the top were his family photos. Here’s what he wrote in his email.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from April 5, 2010 email to Scott Williams): On the white hard drive, most of it will be in a folder called “photos” or “photos and videos” or similar naming. If possible, please send all photos, audio, and video files you can find. There will be some hundreds of gigabytes in total.

Dave Cawley: The “white hard drive” he’s talking about is the encrypted My Book World drive.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from April 5, 2010 email to Scott Williams): Everything that can be released from the white Western Digital drive would be greatly appreciated.

Dave Cawley: Josh called the photos and videos “unreplaceable,” even though he already had copies of them safe and sound in Washington. Is it possible then, that this request to police was just a ruse? A way of finding out if they’d managed to break into his encrypted archive?

A bit earlier, I described how I compared the ViceVersaPro database to the digital evidence seized by police in 2011 and discovered they lined up. But there were a few conspicuous omissions from the 2011 data. Files with names like “Gmail email account info” and “encryption instructions” were missing. This suggests that at some point after Susan’s disappearance, Josh performed an audit of his own files and deleted anything that might give away his passwords.

In a more curious omission, Josh appeared to have deleted any file that showed he once owned a set of Ridgid-brand power tools. Paperwork for all of his other tools was still present, but not the Ridgid tools. It’s not clear why he did that.

Back to that email Josh sent police. He told them he also wanted a complete copy of his workissued laptop. 

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from April 5, 2010 email to Scott Williams): And if possible, please find the image that is displayed on the desktop and include it. Or just photograph the computer with the desktop picture showing to try as a memory aid.

Dave Cawley: A memory aid. To what, remember his password?

Kaly Richmond, a member of the digital forensics team at Eide Bailly, recovered Josh’s desktop at Cold’s request. The photo was not what I expected. It’s just a stock image of a chameleon. Whatever it might have meant to Josh, I can’t say. But I can say this: after all of this time spent analyzing the digital data and searching for clues, it’s clear Josh Powell was not some computer genius.

Trent Leavitt: He created some websites. There’s eight year olds that create websites and not, they’re not prodigies. Anyone can get a book and create a website. It’s just sitting down and going through the book.

Dave Cawley: Josh did have aptitude when it came to tech.

Rob Burton: He wasn’t really the smartest but he certainly utilized whatever was available at the time.

Dave Cawley: He could run a database, but cryptography was not his specialty. He was no hacker.

Trent Leavitt: There’s not that many true hackers in the world, from a percentage standpoint. But if you work in technology, people think you’re a hacker and it’s just not the case.

Dave Cawley: TrueCrypt, the program Josh used to encrypt the My Book World hard drive, was available for free on the internet in 2009.

Rob Burton: You didn’t have to be the smartest or the most technical savvy. You could just download it and use it.

Dave Cawley: TrueCrypt is just as strong today as it was a decade ago. There’s no simple shortcut or backdoor to discovering Josh’s password.

Richard Hickman: Just because the resources and technology are a little bit better today doesn’t change the fact that that encryption, in the first place, was top notch and that it’s still going to take that many permutations to get through it.

Dave Cawley: Even if investigators some day make into the drive, they will have to contend with the fact that ViceVersaPro, the program Josh used to back up files to the My Book World drive, also applied its own layer of encryption.

Rob Burton: You hook it up to your home router. You back up several computers. Josh was very meticulous, it sounds like, in doing that.

Dave Cawley: This is how digital forensics works. It’s a constant process of coming up against hurdles and finding ways overcome them. Some solutions are technical. Some are rooted in human nature.

Trent Leavitt: I don’t care who you are, decryption’s not easy.

Dave Cawley: Or fast. And at this point, with Josh, Michael and Steve Powell all dead, there’s no expectation on the part of law enforcement that decrypting the My Book World drive will lead to anyone being held accountable for what happened to Susan. But there is hope that some small clue might lead police to Susan’s body.

Trent Leavitt: If it were my daughter, I’d go to the ends of the earth, just like, uh, the Cox family has done for years now, to make sure I’ve exhausted every avenue possible, if that were my daughter.

Dave Cawley: That is why this effort continues.

Trent Leavitt: Everything that we’ve done on this, everyone that’s participate in helping this, no one’s been compensated for it, at all. It’s just to try and help the Cox family as much as possible, in any way that we can.

Dave Cawley: Trent Leavitt and Kaly Richmond at Eide Bailly, along with Richard Hickman, Mike Johnson and the rest of their old Decipher Forensics team, are still brainstorming new approaches.

Richard Hickman: I would love to see someone else able to do it. If they know a hacker out there that knows how to get into True Crypt, I’d love an introduction.

Dave Cawley: And Rob Burton, now part of the effort, is providing his time and insight to Project Sunlight.

Rob Burton: I as a corporate investigator, I’ve got a little extra time on my hands. I’m not constrained by international terrorist cases or, or other criminal cases that tie up law enforcement resources. And so I have a little extra time that I can devote to this. I, I think it’s worth it and I want to continue and I want to just throw additional resources at it. And as technology improves, software gets better, hardware gets better, I think that we’ll get there eventually. And it’s definitely worth the effort and worth trying. We gotta do what we can.

Dave Cawley: Summer had its claws in Salt Lake City. September sun scorched the pavement. The noontime heat made the air appear to wobble. Jeff Lewis stepped into his truck, a red GMC Sierra pickup, outside of his office in an industrial park south of Salt Lake City International Airport. He knew the lunch hour traffic would be bad on the Bangerter Highway, so he opted to take a back road south toward the 201 freeway. Jeff’s route took him down Gramercy Road, to 1820 South, then to an intersection with Bangerter just north of the 201 onramp.

Jeff Lewis: Just before I got onto Bangerter at the intersection, umm, I was sitting at the red light with one vehicle in front of me and it happened to be a little minivan.

Dave Cawley: A blue, 2005 Chrysler Town and Country.

(Sound of traffic on Bangerter Highway)

Dave Cawley: Both the minivan and the GMC were in line, waiting to make right-hand turns onto the southbound lanes of Bangerter. The light turned green.

Jeff Lewis: The minivan started to pull forward and turn right and so I naturally looked left as I was pulling forward and I ran into the back of the minivan.

Dave Cawley: The Town and Country minivan had come to a full, unexpected stop. The GMC hadn’t been moving all that fast, but its front bumper hit the van’s lift gate.

Jeff Lewis: I was just thinking “what are you doing? The light was green, you were going right and then you slammed on your brakes. What were you doing?” Y’know? And yeah, I was upset, too.

Dave Cawley: The minivan did not budge. It hung halfway out in the rightmost lane of Bangerter Highway, frozen. A surge of frustration went through Jeff as it became clear the minivan was not going to pull over.

Jeff Lewis: I pulled around him and then pulled on to Bangerter and pulled over to the right and he pulled up behind me.

Dave Cawley: Jeff put his truck in park, pulled out his phone and dialed 911.

Jeff Lewis: Instantly, my first instinct was to call the cops. Uh, been in a little fender bender, didn’t know what really was going on, uh, the guy was kinda acting weird by not really getting out of the way of traffic. We weren’t really even going very fast, maybe three to four miles an hour.

Dave Cawley: A dispatcher took Jeff’s information as he walked around the front of the pickup.

Jeff Lewis: There wasn’t really any damage to my truck. A couple little scrapes on the front bumper, nothing big.

Dave Cawley: The dispatcher told Jeff a trooper would head his way. He ended the call and glanced over to see the driver of the minivan walking toward him.

Jeff Lewis: He kind of gave off this really weird vibe by the way he approached. Uh, it was kind of like he was a little bit standoffish, uh, just a little bit different. Not like a, a normal person.

Dave Cawley: The minivan driver stuck out his hand, as if he wanted to shake Jeff’s. He introduced himself at the same time. “My name,” he said, “is Josh.”

Jeff Lewis: And I actually told him “I’ve just called the cops, I’d appreciate it if you stay over there by your van” and “I’m calling my insurance right now.” And he said “oh, oh you’ve called the cops.” And I said “yeah I’ve, I’ve, they’re on their way. They’ll be here any time.”

Dave Cawley: This is a bonus episode of Cold: The Car Crash Con. I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: Three months before Susan Powell disappeared, Jeff Lewis was involved in a minor fender bender with Susan’s husband, Josh Powell.

Jeff Lewis: Something was really off. I didn’t feel comfortable with the guy. Y’know and, and rightfully so, I was probably, I was pretty upset.

Dave Cawley: Josh had brake-checked Jeff at they were making a right-hand turn from 1820 South onto the Bangerter Highway in Salt Lake City on September 2^nd, 2009. Jeff had called 911, then his insurance agent.

Jeff Lewis: Meanwhile, I look over and Josh is on his phone and walking around, acting like no big deal, kind of over by his vehicle. Umm, and then a cop pulled up.

Dave Cawley: Utah Highway Patrol records show the cop — a state trooper — arrived six minutes after Jeff called in to report the accident.

Jeff Lewis: As soon as Josh looked over and saw that there was a cop pulled up, all the sudden his back started hurting and he kind of started holding his lower back and limping back to his vehicle. And he actually got back into his van on the passenger side. The cop got out of his vehicle, walked up to me and asked me “what was that?” And I said “I don’t know, he was perfectly fine while we were waiting for you.”

Dave Cawley: Jeff told me the trooper warned him if Josh asked for an ambulance, he’d have to call for one. Jeff couldn’t believe it.

Jeff Lewis: It wasn’t even enough to really, when I hit him, to really make my head whiplash or my neck whiplash or anything like that.

Dave Cawley: The trooper gave both Jeff and Josh paperwork to fill out. They each wrote out their individual accounts of the crash. Just over 10 years had passed from the day of this crash to the afternoon that Jeff and I sat down for this interview.

Jeff Lewis: Y’know and, and my memory’s a little foggy. It’s been a little while.

Dave Cawley: Thankfully, the paperwork from that day a decade ago has survived. I have copies of both statements and asked Jeff to read Josh’s words.

Jeff Lewis: Josh’s says that “came to a full stop at a red light. Pulled forward and came to another full stop to traffic. Got rear ended.” That was it.

Dave Cawley: Jeff’s version of events included a bit more detail.

Jeff Lewis: Umm, mine. “Was in lane waiting to pull out onto Bangerter. Car in front of me pulled forward to go. I looked left and he’d stopped. I was only going about 3 to 4 miles per hour. Jumped out to see if he was ok and he said he was just fine.” So, it’s a little bit different.

Dave Cawley: Standing on the side of the highway that day, Jeff couldn’t imagine why Josh would need medical treatment.

Jeff Lewis: And so the cop walks over and probably about three minutes later walks back to me and says “well, here comes the ambulance.” Five to ten minutes later, a fire truck and an ambulance pulls up. They pull him out of the vehicle like he, as if he couldn’t even walk. They put him on a stretcher, put him in the ambulance and, and uh, hauled him away.

Dave Cawley: Josh ended up at the Granger Medical Clinic in West Valley City that afternoon, where a doctor diagnosed him with a neck sprain.

Jeff Lewis: I talked with the police officer after and uh, he actually apologized to me and said “y’know what?” This is right after the recession and he said “we’ve seen a lot of accidents.” And he goes “I’m not necessarily saying that he purposely caused the accident, but it looks like he did. And we see these kinda accidents quite a, quite a bit because some people can claim, y’know, doctor bills and, and they’re hurt and distressed and 20 to 30 thousand dollars off of insurance for a settlement.”

Dave Cawley: Utah court records show Jeff received a citation for following too close. He had to pay a $170 fine.

Jeff Lewis: Went home and I didn’t really think anything of it after that.

Dave Cawley: Until three months later, when he spotted a face that seemed somehow familiar on the TV news.

Jeff Lewis: At first, y’know, they were talking about the disappearance of Susan Powell and her husband Josh Powell. They had ‘em on the news and I said “I know this guy. I know this guy.” Didn’t hit me right away but all of the sudden I was like, I was digging through my stuff and I found the incident report and sure enough, it was Josh Powell.

Dave Cawley: It came as a shock. Jeff realized Josh and Susan Powell lived exactly a mile and a half west of him in a straight line.

Jeff Lewis: What’d happened is my insurance called me, umm, it was right around the same time, and they told me that he’d claimed that, y’know of course some vehicle damage. Uh, they paid out for that, I want to say it was about $3,000, which, honestly, $3,000 isn’t, isn’t much damage. Uh, he had a little scrape and a little ding on the, the back of the van, nothing real serious. Umm, they also paid out the ambulance ride.

Dave Cawley: This is backed up by paperwork. An estimate prepared by Rocky Mountain Collision Repair a week after the crash pegged the cost of fixing the minivan at $2,934.

Jeff Lewis: He also tried to claim pain and suffering and they did not pay out the money that he was asking for for that.

Dave Cawley: Pain and suffering. From a fender-bender. A little love tap at less than five miles per hour.

Jeff Lewis: And at the time, my insurance agent actually told me that there was other cases that he’d been involved that was very similar to the same accident. I don’t have any proof on that. That was just what my insurance agent told me.

Dave Cawley: Jeff didn’t have any proof. I do.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Let’s step back in time and look at Josh Powell’s second suspicious car crash. Six and a half years before that rear-end wreck on Utah’s Bangerter Highway, and 585 miles away as the crow flies, Josh sat at the wheel of a different minivan. This time, it was his 1997 Plymouth Grand Voyager. Susan sat shotgun. They didn’t have their boys with them, because Charlie and Braden had not yet been born.

Susan Cox Powell (from February 2, 2003 home video recording): They say when you want to have kids, get a dog. But we didn’t want a dog, so we got a bird. We don’t want kids yet though, either.

Dave Cawley: Josh and Susan had been married just over two years. They were then living in Yakima, Washington, working as live-in managers at a retirement center. This is from a video Steve Powell shot, when Josh and Susan first moved in to their on-site apartment.

Steve Powell (from February 2, 2003 home video recording): Yeah well, you don’t want kids until you’ve been in this place long enough to, y’know.

Susan Cox Powell (from February 2, 2003 home video recording): Take the experience with us and find a better job.

Steve Powell (from February 2, 2003 home video recording): Exactly, so. Yeah. So…

Dave Cawley: On May 12^th, 2003, the Powell’s minivan rolled north along Rudkin Road in the little city of Union Gap, just south of Yakima. Off to the right, traffic whizzed by on I-82.

(Sound of traffic on I-82)

Dave Cawley: Rudkin, a frontage road, had a posted speed limit of 25 miles per hour.

Bob Powers: It wasn’t like we were going 60 miles an hour down this road. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Josh wasn’t even doing 25 as he crept past the Outback Steakhouse, Best Western and truck stop.

Bob Powers: There was no one else on the road at all, no other cars.

Dave Cawley: Bob Powers was also headed north on Rudkin that afternoon in his 1993 Lexus ES340.

Bob Powers: I had come up on him after a, after a turn on the roadway and went “why is he going so slow? There’s nobody in front of him in the,” y’know, he’s obviously lost, is what I’m saying to myself. Y’know, that’s what you say to yourself. Obviously lost.

Dave Cawley: Bob slowed. His focus drifted. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted an odd looking home at the side of the road.

Bob Powers: For whatever reason I’d taken a look at the building and happened to notice that it, y’know that it was, y’know just a ugly roof.

Dave Cawley: As a real estate investor, Bob had something of an interest in odd properties.

Bob Powers: And the minute I’d looked back, y’know he’d, he’d stopped. Y’know, it was very abrupt and I didn’t understand it at all. No need to be stopping. There’s, there, there, clear roadway ahead, no stop lights, no stop signs. No right or left turn opportunities. There was no reason for him to be stopped dead, dead center in the middle of the road.

Dave Cawley: Bob’s right foot stabbed the brake pedal. It wasn’t enough. The Lexus skidded into the back of the minivan.

Bob Powers: Y’know, I think by the time we would’ve even connected we, we had to have been, what was it I said before, might have been going five miles, ten miles an hour or something. It’s gotta be slower.

Dave Cawley: The front driver-side corner of the Lexus hit the van’s rear bumper, just right of center.

Bob Powers: It just couldn’t have been much. It was just a really soft uh, y’know, connection, enough that it, enough that it surprised you but not enough that it jolted you.

Dave Cawley: Airbags did not even deploy, in either car. Josh would later describe whipping his head backward against the headrest. Susan lurched forward against her seatbelt. Her muscles tensed. She didn’t feel pain, only a rush of anxiety. Concerned, she turned to check on her husband. Josh seemed ok, but maybe just a little dazed. Susan popped the buckle on her seatbelt and stepped out of the minivan’s passenger door. She checked herself. Nothing seemed broken or even sore. Josh got out of the van as well, as Bob was stepping from the driver door of his car.

Bob Powers: Got out of the car and uh, I uh, said “well we probably should take each other’s information and uh, let me, let me call and file a report.”

Dave Cawley: Bob had a few years on Josh. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this younger man.

Bob Powers: I, I do remember him being just somewhat aloof, umm, didn’t seem to be very animated. Kinda odd, y’know, in a, I mean, kind of quiet, didn’t really talk much. Y’know, sort of, uh, participated in the information exchange but didn’t really have much more to add to the conversation. So I call, I was actually the one who called the police.

Dave Cawley: Meantime, they checked their cars for damage.

Bob Powers: What I remember is, wasn’t much damage at all.

Dave Cawley: A Union Gap police officer arrived. He looked at the two vehicles. Then, he wrote up a report. It noted damage to the front driver corner of Bob’s car, but no damage of any significance to Josh’s minivan. The officer wrote Bob a ticket for following too close.

Bob Powers: I was cited for umm, for the uh, incident. Y’know, had a citation written and didn’t feel it was my fault because I felt like it was an abrupt, y’know, stop.

Dave Cawley: All these years later, I found a scanned copy of the officer’s report among Josh’s personal files. I showed it to Bob.

Bob Powers: That’s interesting. Mmhmm.

(Sound of papers shuffling)

Dave Cawley: Josh told the officer that he’d been making a left-hand turn. The officer drew a diagram of the crash, based on Josh’s description.

Bob Powers: I find this interesting, this diagram. This is, this is a, they did this to indicate what the individual had said, that he was starting to take a left turn. But this is not true. This cannot be possible, y’know.

Dave Cawley: The area to the left of where Josh had stopped on Rudkin Road was blocked by a cyclone fence and a locked gate surrounding a fruit warehouse. I’ve been unable to find any indication that Josh and Susan ever visited or had business at that warehouse. That wasn’t the only oddity on the police report.

Bob Powers: Says no injuries were reported.

Dave Cawley: No injuries. That makes what happened next even more odd. Josh handed Susan the keys and sat down in the passenger seat. She took the wheel and steered north to Memorial Hospital in Yakima. When they arrived, Susan told the emergency department staff she was fine but her husband needed an evaluation. Josh went through an exam and x-rays. He received a prescription for ibuprofen and Vicodin. The doctor also told him to take it easy for a few days at work: no heavy lifting, no pouring coffee for the retirement center residents, that kind of thing

Susan awoke the next morning in pain. The adrenaline had worn off and her body ached. But she didn’t go the ER, as Josh had. Instead, she stopped by a clinic right around the corner from their work. A tech took some x-rays and nothing seemed wrong so Susan went home with just some Celebrex, which she never ended up taking. Looking through the records now, it seems that would’ve been a logical place for this story to end. But it didn’t.

On the second day after the crash, Josh convinced Susan they needed to see a chiropractor. He’d found one in the yellow pages so they went in for an evaluation. Afterward, Josh informed his bosses he couldn’t do any physical labor, doctor’s orders. Also, he’d be missing a lot of work while receiving treatment.

Josh and Susan spent the next month and a half seeing the chiropractor, two or three times per week. That wasn’t all. The chiropractor wrote them prescriptions for massage therapy. All of the bills went to Josh’s auto insurance. They were coming to the end of their treatments when July 13^th rolled around. That was the day Steve Powell confessed his feelings to Susan, in the voyeur video recording first revealed right here in the Cold podcast. You might remember, Steve had accompanied Josh and Susan to a trucking company in Kent, Washington. Josh wanted to get his CDL and was toying with the idea of working as a trucker.

Josh Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Well, ‘cause we’re thinking of moving to Colorado—

Unidentified woman (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Oh, are you really?

Josh Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): —and I thought, of all the things, I want to get a trailer—

Unidentified woman (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Uh huh.

Josh Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): —to put our stuff in, because I hate moving it in and out of storage.

Unidentified woman (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Right, right.

Josh Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording):  And so if I had a trailer, I’d like to have a way to move it without having to hire someone—

Unidentified woman (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Sure.

Josh Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): —even if I had to rent the truck.

Unidentified woman (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Right, right.

Dave Cawley: In the video Steve shot that day, Josh sat behind the big steering wheel, using using his arms and upper body to maneuver the semi. He didn’t wince or show any outward sign of pain as he twisted, worked the stick shift and waved goodby to his dad.

(Sound of idling semi truck)

Josh Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): See you later.

Steve Powell (from a July 13, 2003 home video recording): Ok, bye.

Dave Cawley: Yet just three days later, Josh pulled out the Yellow Pages again. He believed, according to medical records, that his recovery had plateaued and he wanted to try a different chiropractor. That meant a new round of evaluations, x-rays and manipulations. Josh and Susan went in together, three times a week, just like before. At every visit, the chiropractor billed the insurance for “exercise training” and “neuromuscular re-education.” He even sold Josh on the need for $170 dollars in special pillows and back braces, sending those bills to the insurance as well.

Bob Powers, the driver who’d hit Josh, had no idea any of this was happening.

Bob Powers: They get treatment for what? Nothing? (Laughs) That’s what it seems like.

Dave Cawley: Bob went to court, fighting the ticket he’d received. He brought photos with him, showing tall weeds covering the fence line that Josh was supposedly turning left into.

Bob Powers: Well, there’s no place where he could have been taking a left turn. It was total falsehood. That why I went and took photos is just so I would have whatever information I might need and, and uh, went to present it to the judge and he uh, he said “I think we’re going to rule in your favor.” (Laughs) So he dismissed the ticket.

Dave Cawley: Josh and Susan’s medical bills kept coming. By August, Josh’s auto insurance provider, Pemco, decided it needed to figure out if all of this really was necessary. The company ordered independent medical evaluations for both Josh and Susan. Josh talked to his chiropractor about it. He kept notes. Here’s what he wrote.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from September, 2003 personal notes): He said we had to sue in order to show a strong effort to get more money or he would make us pay all of the invalid charges out of our money. … He gave me literature to ‘prove’ that I should. I told him I don’t think that is necessary.

Dave Cawley: The independent medical exams, or IMEs, took place on August 19^th, 2003, more than three months after the crash. The specialist who did the IMEs described Susan as “very pleasant.” He did not use any such language for Josh. I have copies of paperwork from this IME. On a page listing symptoms, Josh checked boxes for severe or frequent headaches, shaking or twitching in limbs, loss of motion in joints, spine abnormality and excessive worry or anxiety. Susan put a giant slash across the entire form, as if to say she didn’t have any serious symptoms. 

The IMEs revealed Susan was fine. Although she sometimes had neck stiffness, she didn’t require any additional treatment to return to her pre-crash condition. Josh was another story. The specialist wrote Josh was “neurologically and orthopedically intact.” But, because of his insistent complaints about pain, Josh would probably benefit from six more weeks of treatment.

Pemco said Josh would have to pay for the pillows himself. It also denied coverage for the exercise training and neuromuscular re-education, finding those were unnecessary and not related to the crash.

Bob was stunned when I described the extent of the claims to him.

Bob Powers: My goodness. And here it’s been, what, 16 years ago? First I’ve heard of it.

Dave Cawley: Josh argued every detail of the bills with the insurance companies and chiropractors. His own records show he negotiated his portions of the bills down to just fractions of their total amounts. Bob’s insurance, State Farm, had quickly paid out $1,300 to replace the dinged rear bumper on Josh and Susan’s minivan. Josh hounded State Farm for more. He claimed there were new problems with the minivan that cropped up after the crash, like bald tires and a malfunctioning door lock. State Farm refused to pay for additional repairs.

The negotiation dragged on for months. In the end, State Farm reached a settlement with Josh. It paid out roughly $13,000 to cover medical expenses. Josh pocketed about half — $6,160.

Bob Powers: Wow. (Laughs) Good income for a couple of months back then, maybe.

Dave Cawley: It’s fair to raise a question here about Susan’s involvement in this claim. I turned to Susan’s journal, hoping to find insight about her side of this experience. But, there are two pages missing from it. The gap in time spans from March 2003 until August 2003, the exact period of time during which this crash and insurance claim took place. It’s also the period of time during which Steve Powell told Susan he was in love with her, and she rejected him. So, one could understand why she might not want this story in her journal.

The entries that followed the missing pages simply described a desire to escape. Here’s what Susan wrote on August 29^th, 2003.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from an August 29, 2003 journal entry): Literally every work day we have numerous reminders of why we want to go. Badly. Hopefully soon, our misery can be put to an end. So then we can be living where we want. Happy what we’re doing and sooner able to move on, find a job for Josh and start a family.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: All of Josh and Susan’s missed work time resulting from the crash had soured their relationship with the owners of the retirement center. They transferred to another center in Olympia at the end of the year, but it didn’t help. So, in January of 2004, Josh and Susan moved to Utah. They were both unemployed at first, but survived off of that $6,100 settlement check.

After a few weeks, Josh and Susan both picked up temp jobs. Josh lost his almost immediately. Susan’s temp position didn’t provide health insurance, so Josh applied for a private plan that February. He listed his occupation as “manager” on the paperwork, failing to disclose he was actually out of work and receiving unemployment. He also wrote on the form that he and Susan were both in “great health.” He explained away all those chiropractic treatments, saying they were just the result of an auto accident.

The agent who handled Josh’s application told him she needed records. He argued with her at length. In processing notes, the agent described Josh as “quite difficult to work with.” But he did cough up the records, eventually. After reviewing them, the insurance company offered Josh and Susan coverage, with a 15% markup. Josh did not take that  very well. He pushed back, saying he’d only gone through all those weeks of spine-cracking on doctor’s orders. The agent told Josh they could reconsider the rate in two years, provided he and Susan remained healthy. The insurance company viewed it as an already generous offer, the best they could do.

He wasn’t happy, but Josh swallowed it. The internal processing notes show only then did the health insurance rep raise the question: What, exactly, did Josh manage? The agent called Josh to ask, only to learn he was “now between jobs.”

[Ad Break]

Dave Cawley: These two car wrecks six years apart exhibited a surprising symmetry. Both were low-speed, rear-end collisions caused when Josh Powell came to unexpected stops in front of other drivers. In both cases, the other drivers insisted there was no apparent reason for him to have stopped. Josh claimed injuries from both crashes, in spite of the fact that neither of the other drivers were injured. Josh sought months of chiropractic and massage therapy care following each crash, billing those visits to auto insurance. In both cases, the insurance companies ended up ordering independent medical examinations, which raised doubts about the necessity of the treatments.

Twice is quite the coincidence.

Bob Powers: And, and you’ve indicated that there was some other, at least another one of these kinds of incidents? Two other incidents? Wow.

Dave Cawley: One before, one after.

Bob Powers: Wow.

Dave Cawley: Three times and it’s no longer a coincidence, it’s a trend. So let’s look at Josh’s third suspicious crash. It happened during the summer of 2000.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): It was a really nice summer. I, I was actually content. I was happy the way things were going.

Dave Cawley: That’s Josh’s voice, from his audio journals. It was four months before he met Susan. He’d been living with his dad in South Hill, Washington but had just found an apartment of his own in Tacoma.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): It’s a really nice apartment. Two bedroom apartment, it was brand new when I moved in.

Dave Cawley: Josh had a lot going on. He was working long days installing furniture, struggling to stay ahead of his debts.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): All told, I think I’m paying out close to $2,000 a month just to live.

Dave Cawley: He’d made new friends at church and anticipated going back to school that fall. His prized possessions were his computer, his entertainment center and his Plymouth Voyager minivan.

Josh Powell (from December 13, 2000 audio journal recording): I might have to let my van go, which is costing me $310 in insurance and payments, which is not much.

Dave Cawley: On the afternoon of June 8^th, 2000, Josh drove that minivan north up Meridian in Puyallup. A young woman named Nichole Lyons was right behind him in her 1998 Jeep Wrangler. Nichole lived in the Puyallup area but worked out west, in DuPont. She took a van pool to work each day, leaving her Jeep in a parking lot near Puyallup’s South Hill Mall.

Nichole Lyons: Just right near a little strip mall that used to be a mattress store, for some reason what’s ringing bells.

Dave Cawley: She’d pulled onto Meridian on her way home that day only to find traffic backed up.

Nichole Lyons: Afternoon, y’know, commuting traffic. I would imagine it was around 5, y’know 5ish, 5:15 maybe because that’s when I would have gotten back to my, y’know, van pool spot and then pulled out into the road. So that’s what I recall.

Dave Cawley: And come to an immediate stop, as bumper-to-bumper traffic sat waiting for the light at 39^th Avenue to change. The car in front of her, Josh’s minivan, crept forward. So did she.

Nichole Lyons: Thought he was going but he wasn’t.

Dave Cawley: Nichole’s Jeep hit Josh’s minivan.

Nichole Lyons: I rear-ended him just ever so slightly. Really we were going, the, y’know, the miles per hour was like, y’know, two or three, (laughs) maybe. I mean, it was very much we had just started going and then immediately stopped and had impact.

Dave Cawley: Nicole and Josh each pulled off the road, into a parking lot.

Nichole Lyons: Then he seemed from what I recall to be in a hurry.

Dave Cawley: They checked for damage. By design, the Wrangler’s front bumper wasn’t entirely flat. It had two prongs on it, one of which had hit the rear bumper of Josh’s minivan.

Nichole Lyons: I mean, I think there was a little indentation in his bumper from the prong of my vehicle. There was not any damage to my vehicle, whatsoever.

Dave Cawley: They had a quick conversation.

Nichole Lyons: I think there was some talk of do we even want to exchange information and we ended up exchanging information.

Dave Cawley: Josh scribbled Nichole’s license plate and phone number on a paper copy of her auto insurance card, which he kept. He also wrote out his own description of crash. He later scanned both papers into his computer, though Nichole had no way of knowing that.

Nichole Lyons: And I wasn’t sure that he was even going to even turn it in or file a claim.

Dave Cawley: It wasn’t a big deal, as far as she could tell. No police, no ambulance. No problem.

Nichole Lyons: He seemed completely fine. And very, y’know, like I said, in a hurry, “let’s exchange information” and get on his way.

Dave Cawley: The next day, an insurance adjuster came to look at the minivan. He figured the rear bumper cover would need to be replaced, at a cost of about $560, parts and labor. Records obtained by this podcast show the actual cost to repair came in below the estimate, at $452.

Repairs to Josh’s body cost a good deal more. He started seeing — can you guess? — a chiropractor. She wrote Josh had a mild to moderate cervical/thoracic strain or sprain. In other words, neck and back pain. She referred him to a massage therapist to receive two massages a week for the next six weeks. Josh didn’t want to pay for this, though, so he called Nichole’s insurance, Progressive, and started badgering them for money. Here’s what he wrote in his notes.

Eric Openshaw (as Josh Powell from June 6, 2000 personal notes): We talked and I tried to negotiate, but he didn’t negotiate at all until I forced the issue. Then he offered $400 cash and $500 medical. I told him that doesn’t even cover the here and now, medically.

Dave Cawley: The day after writing that, Josh went to the office of a personal injury lawyer in Puyallup. He hired the firm on the spot, agreeing to give them a third of anything they recovered from Progressive. Nichole had told her Progressive agent her side of the story.

Nichole Lyons: I also called it in to my insurance and talked with them and gave a statement of what happened. And then, that was it. I don’t, I don’t remember getting any additional pieces of information from that.

Dave Cawley: Josh’s attorney spent a few weeks gathering up the medical records, then sent a demand letter to Progressive. It said Josh had incurred about $1,500 in medical expenses. It also said he deserved $6,500 in general damages. As such, they wanted Progressive to cough up $8,000. A month later, Progressive settled, agreeing to pay out less than half that amount, about $3,400. That more than covered the medical bills. The attorney took his cut of around $1,100 dollars, leaving Josh with a check for $728. Nichole never knew.

Dave Cawley: Would it surprise you to learn that he claimed, uh, injury out of that crash?

Nichole Lyons: Yeah, that would be surprising. I don’t remember there being any concern of injury.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Alright, with all of that background, now we have to look at the paperwork Josh filed with his car insurance company after the crash on Bangerter Highway in Utah back in September of 2009. Josh wrote that he had whiplash. One of the questions on the form asked if he’d previously been treated for “similar symptoms.” He checked no.

Bob Powers: I actually had no idea that, that this guy had made any claim whatsoever with my insurance company until you guys had, y’know, come up with that information. I thought it was pretty revealing.

Dave Cawley: Josh’s own records prove he’d claimed whiplash after that 2003 crash in Yakima, when Bob Powers rear-ended his van.

Bob Powers: I called my State Farm agent and said “did, did this really all happen? I mean, did they actually get some kind of payout?” And he of course told me the extent of the payout. And I says “you’ve got to be kidding me, Joel.” I says “how come there wasn’t there follow up by you guys because I, I, that, that following too close ticket was dismissed at court. I would think you’d have no obligation.” And umm, he says “well, we try to take it out of your hands and not have you, have you worry about it whatsoever and that’s why we haven’t informed you.”

Dave Cawley: While State Farm didn’t share the details of Josh’s 2003 claim with Bob, the company did enter those records into a fraud-prevention database. They were available to Jeff Lewis’ insurance company as it investigated Josh’s 2009 claim.

The 2009 crash happened three months before Susan disappeared. Josh was still undergoing treatment for his “injuries” when his wife vanished. And in the months that followed, the insurance companies ordered another independent medical exam, which I described in episode 6 of Cold. The paper trail from that IME revealed Josh was diagnosed with a rotator cuff strain or partial tear just 10 days after Susan disappeared. He blamed that injury on the crash, even though there was no mention of it in any of the prior medical records.

Jeff Lewis: Yeah, it was, it was an act. He claimed shoulder injury? When the cop pulled up, he was holding his back. It was all an act.

Dave Cawley: Again, that’s Jeff, the guy who rear-ended Josh three months before Susan disappeared.

Jeff Lewis: When I saw him on the news and his wife was missing, uh, my gut feeling was is that he was trying to get insurance money. Right away when I see this, I’m going “man, this guy got rid of his wife for money.”

Dave Cawley: On the surface, none of these crashes seem like much. But taken together, they paint a picture of Josh Powell. Willing to scam the insurance system for a few thousand bucks. Or, in Jeff’s view, maybe a million bucks: Susan’s life insurance.

Jeff Lewis: And then it comes out that, y’know, she did have an insurance policy. And so that’s exactly what I thought he did.

Dave Cawley: I wasn’t sure what I’d find when I first set out to identify the driver who hit Josh on that September day in 2009. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to. There wasn’t enough detail. All I knew was someone crashed into Josh’s minivan on or near the Bangerter Highway. I scoured the West Valley City case files, but came up empty-handed. I checked court records for any case connected with Josh Powell on that date. There weren’t any. I submitted public records requests to multiple police departments, asking for reports of any crash involving Josh’s minivan on or around that date. None had any. It hadn’t occurred to me then that the Highway Patrol might have jurisdiction. While I wasn’t able to identify Jeff, it turned out he was listening to Cold.

Jeff Lewis: My wife actually found it and said “you’ve gotta listen to this” ‘cause she knew the little bit of a background of being in an accident with Josh Powell. So she said “you’ve gotta listen to this podcast. They mention you in this.” And I’m like “wha? They don’t mention me. What are you talking about?”

Dave Cawley: Jeff reached out, indirectly, by leaving a review for the podcast.

Jeff Lewis: On your KSL podcast, I did leave a comment saying “hey, you can reach me. Umm, I’m the guy that got in an accident with him. I’ve been brought up a few times.” And uh, that was probably January of this year.

Dave Cawley: The comment was soon buried and I never saw it. Months went by. Season one of Cold came to an end. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that I needed to find this driver. So, I turned to social media.

In the minutes immediately after the September crash, Josh’d snapped a photo from the passenger seat of his minivan. It showed the truck that’d hit him, that red GMC Sierra, as well as the other driver. The photo was still on Josh’s phone when detective Ellis Maxwell took it from him the day after Susan disappeared.

Ellis Maxwell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Let me see your phone.

Josh Powell(from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Why?

Ellis Maxwell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Let me just see your phone. I’m going to hang onto it until we’re finished.

Josh Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): ‘Kay.

Dave Cawley: When digital forensics investigators went through Josh’s phone with a search warrant several months later, they recovered the picture. Nothing about it raised suspicion.

Jeff Lewis: I don’t think there was ever a sense of urgency to find me, y’know I had a minor brush-in with this guy.

Dave Cawley: And Jeff didn’t come forward on his own back then because he didn’t see how his encounter with Josh could have any relevance. He had no way of knowing that Josh’d used that crash to obtain a prescription for cyclobenzaprine, a muscle relaxant capable of knocking someone off their feet. He didn’t know about Josh’s suspicious shoulder injury, or the IME that suggested Josh was scamming the insurance company.

I had a copy of Josh’s photo, the one from his phone. Over the summer, I uploaded it to Facebook and Instagram, along with a plea for help identifying the man it showed.

Jeff Lewis: My wife actually shot me a picture of me standing outside of my truck. And I said “what the heck, where did you get this?” And she says “well it’s on Facebook. It’s on the, uh, Cold podcast Facebook.”

Dave Cawley: Jeff and I at last connected. He also provided documentation, which I was able to verify as authentic. He was the guy.

Jeff Lewis: But I just, y’know, always found it very interesting, umm, listening to the podcast, uh, being in an accident with this guy, I followed the case. Umm, it’s a heartbreaking situation.

Dave Cawley: When we spoke, Jeff shared feelings of frustration and remorse over how the entire situation had unfolded following Susan’s disappearance.

Jeff Lewis: I felt like, y’know as a father, that uh, the system had completely let those kids down. Umm, there was nothing they could do about Susan, but they, I feel like those kids could’ve been saved.

Dave Cawley: Josh Powell’s car crashes and the petty insurance claims he filed pale in comparison to tragedy of what eventually unfolded in the Powell family. But they help us understand his behavior. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see the troubling ways in which he attempted to use people. It didn’t matter if those people were the strangers behind him in traffic, or the two children he shared with the woman he mistreated and likely murdered.

Dave Cawley: About a month before Susan Powell disappeared, she hosted a party at her home on Sarah Circle in West Valley City, Utah. The party wasn’t for a birthday or anything like that. It was a sales pitch. Susan had become interested in a multi-level marketing company called Wildtree. She wrote about it in an email to her work friend Linda Bagley in October of 2009.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from October 9, 2009 email): I went to a wild tree party, kind of interested in their product, or just the menu concept.

Dave Cawley: Wildtree pitched itself as a health-oriented meal planning service. Customers bought menus, oils and herbs for Wildtree recipes through representatives, who in turn received price breaks for bringing additional buyers and sellers into the organization.

Tempted by the prospect of getting Wildtree for cheap, Susan agreed to host a party at her own home on the night of November 4^th, 2009. She urged Linda to come.

Kristen Sorensen (as Susan Powell from October 9, 2009 email): It’s settled. I’m having a party b/c Josh didn’t get to taste it and it sounds like it would have something for you.

Dave Cawley: Social sales pitches were not really Linda’s kind of thing, but she went along with it to help her friend. Linda even ordered some Wildtree food. But in the days and weeks that followed the party, her package failed to arrive. Then, Susan disappeared. The Wildtree product at last delivered, it went to Josh. Detectives swarmed Susan’s office, interviewing her coworkers. Linda was among them.

Linda Bagley: I’d mentioned it in the, to the police that I had this product and that she hadn’t given me and I said I’d probably never see it. So, (laughs) but I had gotten Josh’s number and I called him and I left him a voicemail.

Dave Cawley: In her voicemail, Linda asked if there was any way she might be able to pick up her food order. Josh didn’t respond. He had other things on his mind at that point. Less than two weeks after his wife’s disappearance, Josh packed their sons Charlie and Braden into the family minivan and headed to Washington State. Linda figured that was the end of it. Then, a month after her friend vanished, something strange happened to Linda.

Linda Bagley: I was taking, uh, the weekend off … So I was in Idaho, at Costco with my mom actually and the phone rings and I look at the, umm, number and it says Josh Powell. And I’m like “ah,” y’know, “what do I say, what do I do, I got to act calm.” Y’know? I answered the phone and he said he’d found the stuff and he would be happy to drop it off.

Dave Cawley: Linda told Josh she was out of town, but he wasn’t bothered. He said he was back in Utah for a few days and would drop it off at her work. As I’ve recently learned, it was one of many, many drops Josh made after his wife vanished.

This is a bonus episode of Cold: Dumpster Drops. I’m Dave Cawley.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: On the afternoon of January 7^th, 2010, Josh Powell stopped by the Wells Fargo call center where his missing wife Susan had worked. He ran into a security guard in the lobby and explained he had a package that he wanted to deliver to Linda Bagley. But Linda was in Idaho, as she’d told Josh on the phone.

Linda Bagley: I don’t know if he didn’t believe me and he was testing me, y’know, to see if I just didn’t want to see him or something. But he asked for me, even though I told him I wasn’t going to be there.

Dave Cawley: The security guard explained Josh could leave the package with the head of security, but that person was out of the office at the moment. Josh said he would wait. And so he did, right in the lobby. Word spread among Susan’s coworkers.

Salt Lake City dispatcher (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): 911, what is your emergency?

Dave Cawley: One even called 911.

Richard (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Josh Powell is in our building.

Salt Lake City dispatcher (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Who’s Josh Powell?

Richard (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Well, you’ve seen the news, the guy that supposedly abducted his wife and went camping with the kids.

Salt Lake City dispatcher (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Ok.

Richard (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): I mean, he’s not causing any problems but I’ve, we’ve seen him all over the news and stuff and he’s sitting down in our lobby just sitting there.

Dave Cawley: The coworker told a Salt Lake City police dispatcher it might be a good idea if detectives in neighboring West Valley knew Josh was there. The dispatcher contacted West Valley to ask if Josh was wanted.

West Valley police (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Yeah, no. As far as I’m aware, he’s just a person of interest. And the last I heard, he wasn’t — I mean, just between you and I — he wasn’t even living here, so—

Dispatcher (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Yeah, that’s what I, I mean, I’ve heard things just through work but not anything like, I don’t watch the news to see what they’re saying because, who knows anyway. So—

West Valley City police (from January 7, 2010 911 call recording): Yep.

Dave Cawley: The truth of the situation was, West Valley detectives had a good idea of where Josh was thanks to a GPS tracker they’d hidden on his minivan. But that was a closely guarded secret.

 When Linda returned to work, her boss’ boss asked her to come in for a sit-down with the head of security.

Linda Bagley: And so it’s like “ok.” And the security guy came in and he says, umm, “Josh Powell stopped by and wanted to give this to you and can you tell me more about what’s going on here?” (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Why was Linda receiving a gift from Josh Powell?

Linda Bagley: I think they suspected me for a minute as being maybe a mistress or another “oh here’s the sideline, oh look we found this new possible thing that,” y’know.

Dave Cawley: The head of security told Linda Josh had acted very odd, even becoming emotional. He asked her why.

Linda Bagley: Like “maybe you’d know more about why he would feel that way.” Y’know, and I’m like maybe he was thanking me because I didn’t accuse him and, (laughs) and y’know, I came out trying to be neutral and, and on his side like he wasn’t, hadn’t done anything, even though I suspected, I, I felt from the beginning that he had done everything that I still feel he did.

Dave Cawley: Linda did her best to explain, it was not a gift, just some product from a multi-level marketing thing she’d gone to. She eventually had to explain that again to West Valley police.

Linda Bagley: And they’re like “oh, ok.” But I think they suspected something more than there was. (Laughs)

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: I mentioned the GPS tracker detectives placed on Josh’s minivan on December 8^th, 2009, the day after he returned from his outing on the Pony Express Trail claiming to have no clue where Susan might be.

Ellis Maxwell: So he’s got the umm, GPS tracker on his van.

Dave Cawley: Detective Ellis Maxwell, West Valley’s lead investigator on the Powell case, talked about the tracker in episodes 4 and 5 of Cold. It’s how police had known Josh took a drive out to West Wendover, Nevada and to a gravel pit on the Friday after Susan’s disappearance. Curious behavior that ultimately led detectives nowhere.

Ellis Maxwell: Just another situation, another possibility that we may catch a break or, uh, collect some more information to assist with the investigation and uh, he does nothing.

Dave Cawley: The particular device tucked away on Josh’s minivan wasn’t just some Garmin unit attached with duct tape. It had a specialized battery, capable of powering the tracker for weeks at a time. It also had a cell phone radio, so it could communicate with a server any time it was in range of cell towers.

Ellis Maxwell: We’ve got what’s called geo-fencing. And you can set boundaries. So if he crosses one of those boundaries then it will send you an alert.

Dave Cawley: Detectives would actually receive SMS text messages when the tracker left Salt Lake County or crossed state lines, for example. Every fix recorded by the tracker included a time stamp, right down to the second. If the tracker stopped moving, it could power itself down to save battery. Then, if it detected motion, it could power itself back up again. And police could log in to the server and see the tracker’s position in very close to real time.

Data from that GPS tracker was not included in the case file documents released by West Valley police when the Powell case went cold in 2013. To my knowledge, it’s never been examined by anyone outside of law enforcement. When I obtained copies of the tracking files several months back, that’s what I set out to do.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Former FBI agent Greg Rogers spent most of his 30 years with the bureau serving undercover. He worked narcotics cases. He infiltrated biker gangs and militia groups. He posed as a hit man, repeatedly.

Greg Rogers: You’d be amazed how much work there is in that area.

Dave Cawley: To be honest, he kind of still looks the part: longer gray hair, leather vest, though it’s now under a sports coat now. I shared my findings from the review of the GPS data with Greg in part because he didn’t work the Powell case himself. I needed an objective perspective from someone who knows the tech and the tactics.

Greg Rogers: Police departments have analysts and somebody should have been tracking this information every day that should have been their job. Where’s he going? Where’s he stoppin’? And then the next logical question is “why is he doing that” and “what are we going to do based on his activity?”

Dave Cawley: Greg is also an expert on the criminal mind. He teaches a course at Utah Valley University to would-be cops.

Greg Rogers: I teach on criminal profiling and the, y’know, serial killers, psychopaths. So it’s, yeah, so it’s always been a real interest of mine.

Dave Cawley: By the time Greg and I sat down to talk, I’d already spent weeks going through the data. In December 2009 alone, the GPS device recorded tens of thousands of data points. To make sense of them, they needed to be reformatted. Twice. Only then could I bring the information into Google Earth with all of the metadata intact. It’s tedious work.

Point by point, I retraced the van’s moves, looking for anything that might have escaped the attention of investigators ten years ago. Some of the trips at first seemed random, until I noticed a pattern having to do with dumpsters. The first significant discovery appeared on Monday, December 14^th, 2009, one week after Susan disappeared.

The GPS tracker powered up just after 10 a.m. that morning, having detected motion. It moved west, away from the Powell family home on Sarah Circle, down 4100 South to a state highway on the far western side of the Salt Lake Valley called U-111. The minivan turned left onto U-111 at a T-intersection, heading south. It cruised along for about six miles, until it reached 7800 south. There, it pulled into an apartment complex called Serengeti Springs. At 10:23 a.m., the minivan pulled up to a dumpster in a back corner of the complex and stopped. Less than a minute later, it started moving again. It went directly back to Sarah Circle.

I showed this to Greg and asked what he made of it.

Greg Rogers: My guess would be that Powell had items that he believed contained DNA or other forensic evidence, and he’s getting rid of them. Based on the time and the fact that it’s a condo complex, people are coming and going, it wouldn’t look unusual for him to get out of the car with the garbage bags, be throwing them in a dumpster. Just look like anybody that lives there. Be a whole different thing to be trying to remove a body from your car to put in a dumpster. So my guess is he was using that dumpster to get rid of items from the home where I, of course, believe that he, uh, murdered Susan. That would be my first guess, that he was getting rid of whatever he used in that. He’s obviously had done enough research to know what would contain DNA and what could be harming to him. And he, he must have believed there was a search warrant coming.

Dave Cawley: In fact, West Valley police had already served two search warrants at the home. They’d also searched Josh’s van twice the week prior, once with his permission and the second time with a warrant. You might remember, it was during the warrant search of the minivan the day after Susan disappeared that detective Ellis Maxwell found a pair of trash bags.

Ellis Maxwell: When we get his van, not only did he clean it all out but he also had the garbage from inside the kitchen of the home, the garbage sack was in the van.

Dave Cawley: The second trash bag, tucked away in a storage space behind the minivan’s driver seat, held the melted metal item and burned drywall panels mentioned in Cold episode 5, the likely evidence that Josh had destroyed the night before with his oxyacetylene torch.

Ellis believed Josh had intended to toss those trash bags somewhere far away from the house, where detectives wouldn’t find them. But Ellis found them first. Based on the GPS data, it seems likely Josh had yet other items he wanted to ditch in a dumpster days later.

Back to the tracking data. On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 16^th, 2009, the minivan left the Sarah Circle house on another drive across the Salt Lake Valley. This time, in west south and east. It took a circuitous path into Sandy, a suburb nestled against the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. At 3:02 p.m., the minivan pulled into a parking stall at Flat Iron Mesa Park.

Dave Cawley: What do you see there?

Greg Rogers: Yeah, same thing, a dumpster and it’s no accident that these are not close to his residence.

Dave Cawley: Another dumpster.

Greg Rogers: Flat Iron Mesa, this is a big dog walking park. There’s a lot of people there. There’s gonna be a ton of cars, he could pull in there anytime you wanted to and walk over to that dumpster and wouldn’t attract any attention at all.

He’s not showing up at midnight. He’s not trying to uh, be there when nobody’s there, he doesn’t care. He’s picking places where, you know, he could open the back of his car, grab a garbage bag, walk to a dumpster and wouldn’t raise any suspicion at all.

Dave Cawley: The minivan left the park at 3:04 p.m., after a stop of just two minutes. It headed north, to the intersection of 900 East and 4500 South. The minivan came to a stop within line of sight of another dumpster behind a Walgreens pharmacy. The minivan circled the Walgreens, slowing as it went by the dumpster, but it didn’t actually stop.

Greg Rogers: That’s by a business?

Dave Cawley: Mmhmm.

Greg Rogers: That’s not by a, uh, residential neighborhood or a park. I bet there’s probably some signage on that dumpster that it’s not for public use or something like that. He didn’t want to attract attention. So he didn’t want to pull up there and put something in that dumpster. Because, somebody could have walked out of that business and said, 

“hey man, that’s, that’s our business.” And then they grabbed the bag. That’s a problem for him. So my guess is he got up there and saw that that was walled in and it wasn’t, you know, just publicly accessible. So he just kept driving.

Dave Cawley: Right into downtown Salt Lake City. At 500 South and Emery Street, it pulled into the parking lot of a church and once again cruised by, but did not stop at, a dumpster. Looking at satellite imagery, Greg noticed the dumpster outside the church was surrounded by a wall and fence.

Greg Rogers: You can see that it’s got doors on it that are closed, they may be locked. He’d already decided what dumpsters, what types of dumpsters he was going to use. And if he didn’t like what he saw, he just kept driving. He didn’t he didn’t have to be anywhere.

Dave Cawley: Instead of stopping at the church, the tracking data showed the minivan hopped a couple of blocks south to Poplar Grove Park. It pulled into the parking lot at 4:05 p.m. and remained there for about 12 minutes.

Greg Rogers: He obviously had more than one bag. He hit more than one dumpster. He had things all divvied up. He had a plan that he thought was genius. It was “this is how I’m going to hide this stuff. The cops are never going to figure this out.”

Dave Cawley: There aren’t any dumpsters at Poplar Grove Park. But on any day of the week, any time of year, there are plenty of garbage cans.

Greg Rogers: Public place, other cars there. People probably walking their dogs around there and be as you well know, when people are walking their dogs they pick up after their dogs, they use the garbage cans. Wouldn’t be at all unusual a walk up to one of those garbage cans and throw a bag in it.

Dave Cawley: Three confirmed stops near dumpsters or garbage cans, with several other dumpster drive-bys during the first two weeks following Susan’s disappearance. Yet, there are no mentions of this in West Valley police case files.

Greg Rogers: Question is, why wasn’t somebody on him and why weren’t they going through those dumpsters?

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: The following day, on Thursday, December 17^th, 2009, West Valley police served their third search warrant at the Sarah Circle house. Josh wasn’t at home at the time. He’d left his boys there with his brother, Michael.

The GPS tracker revealed Josh didn’t go far. The minivan circled the neighborhood around the time detectives appeared at the house. It parked outside of one church, then another. To Greg, it appeared Josh was keeping an eye on the investigators.

Greg Rogers: Has an obvious need to be, uh, up to speed with what’s going on. Because a guy like Josh thinks he’s, uh, immeasurably smarter than these people that are working him, or that are working that case. So he’s just keeping tabs.

Dave Cawley: As the detectives tore through Josh and Susan’s medicine cabinet, the minivan headed east up 4100 South to Meier and Marsh Professional Therapies. It stopped there for over an hour and a half. That’s the physical therapy visit during which Josh was diagnosed with a rotator cuff strain or tear, an injury that escaped the notice of police.

Later that afternoon, Josh went to the bank where Susan had kept her handwritten last will and testament in a safe deposit box. Detectives had been there days earlier, emptying out the box. Josh spent more than hour at the bank, arranging to have Susan’s retirement accounts cashed out. On his way home, he drove by another dumpster outside Hunter Junior High School, then parked across the lot from it for 20 minutes.

Josh spent a good chunk of Friday, December 18^th, 2009 meeting with his attorney in downtown Salt Lake City. The tracking data showed the minivan parked outside the attorney’s office for over three hours. On his way back home, Josh stopped at the Mountain America Credit Union branch on 5600 West in West Valley City. That’s where he Susan did most of their banking. Financial records obtained by police with a subpoena showed that’s when Josh withdrew Susan’s final paycheck, which had come in a week earlier by direct deposit. He took $450 of it as cash and moved the remaining $227 into his checking account. Josh was preparing to leave Utah.

Greg Rogers: He was getting ready to go, no question. He’s getting ready to go after those search warrants. There’s nothing for him here. Y’know, he’s, you know, he’s gonna lose his job. Y’know, it was a lifelong pattern of his to retreat to his father’s house. And so that was going to happen.

Dave Cawley: Josh departed home shortly before 10 p.m. that night. The tracker showed that he drove to the parking lot of a strip mall at 5600 West and 3500 South. He parked next to a pair of dumpsters from 9:56 p.m. to 9:59 p.m.

Greg Rogers: Anything he thought could hurt him and those search warrants, he had bagged up and ready to go. And so he’s just, he’s just getting rid of stuff.

Dave Cawley: Then, the minivan headed north toward Interstate 80.

Greg Rogers: But then again, it begs the question how do you do that when they’re running search warrants and, yeah. Why isn’t someone following you around and doing dumpster dives after you’ve been there?

Dave Cawley: We don’t know whether or not West Valley police ever did dive these dumpsters, but if so they didn’t take any photos or keep any notes. In an email, police spokeswoman Roxeanne Vainuku told me “the absence of a location being documented in a log does not equate to investigators being unaware of the location.”

Just before reaching the freeway onramp, the minivan flipped a U-turn. It went right back to that same set of dumpsters. Had Josh forgotten something? Or perhaps checking to see if police were there, digging through the garbage?

They weren’t, but Greg couldn’t understand why not when I showed him the tracking data.

Greg Rogers: If you suspect that he’s going to all these dumpsters and you see all this tracking thing that the next thought should be “we need to find out what he’s throwing in there.” You don’t even need search warrants. Once he chucks it in the dumpster, it’s, you can dumpster dive.

Dave Cawley: Unless police didn’t happen to be watching the tracker at that time.

Greg Rogers: Somebody should have been, their whole job should have been this tracker.

Dave Cawley: Again, West Valley police spokeswoman Roxeanne Vianuku, by email, told me “any location where Powell visited, was subsequently visited by an investigator.” She added that during periods when Josh wasn’t under physical surveillance, the tracking data was downloaded “each day.”

Greg Rogers: And when you’ve got this tracker on him, it’s easy surveillance. You’re not going to get burned. Because you don’t need to be, y’know, following him close in a car. You could have planes up or you could even be a mile away with your laptop saying “oh look, he just hit another dumpster.” And then you send guys to that dumpster.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: After one last stop at the Sarah Circle house, the minivan made its way back to the freeway. It took the onramp to eastbound I-80 at 10:42 p.m. A late start for the long drive to Washington. The minivan cruised east to I-15, then north. Josh stopped for gas at a Pilot Travel Center in the town of Marriott-Slaterville, paying cash, then continued north to Tremonton. He took the split for I-84 westbound there.

The clock ticked past midnight. At 12:22 a.m. on Saturday, December 19^th, 2009, the minivan pulled off the freeway on Utah exit 20, just east of Rattlesnake Pass. It stopped briefly next to some roadside weeds, crossed under the freeway, doubled back and then took the westbound onramp at 12:28 a.m.

To Greg, it looked like perhaps Josh — or one of the boys — had just needed to relieve himself.

Greg Rogers: Pit stop or, which is probably what happened, but he could have also been cleaning himself, because he’s leaving unannounced, they’ve just run all these warrants. I’m sure he had some suspicion that they were following him to see if he was taking off. He might’ve even believed that, uh, they would attempt to arrest him if he was trying to leave the state. Who knows. But, having traveled with young children myself, (laughs) it could have just as easily been “hey dad, you know?” Yeah.

Dave Cawley: The minivan crossed the border into Idaho at 12:44 a.m. The GPS tracker sent out a text alert to the detectives. In West Valley case records, detective Ellis Maxwell wrote that the tracker lost cell service a short time later.

Josh continued driving. There’s very little to see between the town of Snowville, Utah and the Snake River near Rupert, Idaho, especially after dark. No towns, no truck stops and in 2009, limited cell service. But after crossing the Snake at 1:31 a.m., the minivan entered the fertile expanse of southern Idaho farmland between Burley and Bliss. It’s a region known as the “Magic Valley.” The minivan cruised right past a pair of off-ramps leading to Burley, logical places for a driver to pull off if gas or a pit stop were needed.

At 1:44 a.m., the minivan came to an abrupt stop at the side of the highway. It remained there for 10 minutes. Too short a time to sleep or even, say, to change a flat tire. So why did Josh stop?

It’s not clear.

Josh pulled back onto the roadway at 1:54 a.m., continuing west. The minivan passed by another freeway exit without stopping. It traveled seven miles until, at 2:01 a.m., Josh slammed on the brakes right as he passed over the top of the Milner-Gooding Canal. It was a rapid deceleration, from more than 70 miles per hour to a full stop about 335 feet past the bridge. The minivan remained there for five minutes.

Two strange stops in southern Idaho, just before and just after 2 a.m.

Greg Rogers: Those are unusual times for pitstop for the kids. My guess is, the age of those two boys they were asleep. So it’s, it’s very interesting. It’s by a canal. It’s a great place to dump something. Nobody’s ever going to find that if you know what you’re doing.

Dave Cawley: The canal in question diverts water from the Snake River to farms and ranches. It typically only flows from mid-March to mid-October. I recently visited the site. The canal wasn’t flowing, having been shut off for the winter. Still, a foot or so of murky green water occupied the bottom of the concrete-lined trench. Thick, high weeds surrounded its banks. Anything tossed in those weeds, or in the canal itself, would disappear from view of the traffic just feet away on the freeway.

Greg Rogers: I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he was still just getting rid of whatever he was getting rid of, ‘cause we have no idea what the murder weapon was. So, knife, gun, we know he’s not opposed to killing someone in a violent manner because he killed his children with an ax. But, could have been a ligature. Could have been a, a rope. Uh, you throw a rope in that canal, it’s gone. It’s never gettin’ found. And six minutes is plenty of time to walk from that car to that water.

Dave Cawley: This is speculation. There’s no evidence left to tell us one way or another what Josh Powell was doing during these two stops. But the time and location are suspicious.

Greg Rogers: He clearly had some reason for doing it. And he didn’t want people to know where he was stopping and the times he was doing stuff and, umm, y’know, again he, he had a plan that we’ll never know what it was but I can assure you that he thought it was absolutely brilliant. Wasn’t, he was getting tracked. But yeah, so, but he didn’t know that. So yeah.

Dave Cawley: He was getting tracked, but these two stops in Idaho and the December dumpster visits in Utah are not mentioned in West Valley police case files. I’m not sure if they were ever discovered by investigators or searched by dogs or detectives a decade ago.

Greg Rogers: From the beginning, everybody knew this was going to be a case you were going to have to prove on circumstantial evidence, the chances of finding the body were very slim.

Dave Cawley: I should point out, both locations are well within the range of the 807 miles traveled by Josh in a rental car 10 days earlier. You might remember he was unaccounted for for 18 hours. He came back on the grid while traveling south through Tremonton, Utah, as if returning from Idaho.

Greg Rogers: Proving a, a first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt without the body, without a murder weapon is difficult. So, but had you found bags full of forensic evidence that he’s getting rid of, that’s pretty helpful. I wasn’t aware that they had this tracking information. And to be brutally honest, being polite, it’s uh, it’s stunning. He was getting rid of evidence, no question.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: The remainder of Josh Powell’s December, 2009 drive to Washington State proved uneventful. He pulled off at a couple of rest stops, likely to sleep. And he started using his financial cards again once he was in Washington State.

A few weeks passed before Josh returned to Utah in the minivan. On that drive in early January of 2010, the minivan did not make any inexplicable stops on the side of the highway. It only ever left the interstate for gas, fast food or pit stops.

Josh arrived back at the Sarah Circle house with his brother, Michael on January 6^th, 2010. Media cameras were waiting when they pulled into the cul-de-sac.

Jennifer Stagg: I had been keeping in very close contact with a lot of sources who knew him and, uh, people who were very in-the-know. I guess, family members of both he and Susan and close family friends.

Dave Cawley: KSL TV reporter Jennifer Stagg had worked the Powell story from the beginning. She’d received a heads-up from a source about Josh’s travel plans.

Jennifer Stagg: I was so personally invested in this story because I had built relationships with everyone involved. Y’know, I had a relationship with his sister, Jennifer Graves. I had a relationship with the Hellewells.

Dave Cawley: But Josh wasn’t feeling talkative. He avoided the cameras. The next day, he dropped off Linda Bagley’s Wildtree order at Susan’s work, as I mentioned at the start of this episode. Then, on the morning of Monday, January 11^th, 2010, Josh drove the minivan from the Sarah Circle house to a strip mall at 5600 West and 3500 South. This was the same place where he’d stopped on his way out of town in December. Once again, the minivan made repeat visits to a series of dumpsters. And once again, there’s no indication these dumpsters were searched by police. To be fair, the media didn’t catch it, either.

Jennifer Stagg: He was really, really hard to track.

Dave Cawley: But of course, no reporter had a GPS tracker hidden on the minivan. The minivan also visited a U-Haul store on that Monday morning. That’s where Josh rented the truck and trailer he used to empty out the house.

Jennifer Stagg: The turning point for me was when he packed up and moved out of his house.

Dave Cawley: Once again, Josh didn’t talk to the reporters who stood at the curb, observing as his soon-to-be former neighbors loaded the U-Haul.

Jennifer Stagg: I think I actually asked him at one point, like, “if Susan’s missing, what if she comes home and you’re not here? What if she comes home and you’re not here?” And he didn’t answer me. He just kept going. But in my head, that’s what I’m thinking, like, “you don’t pack up your house and move out of state with your kids if your wife is missing,” right?

Dave Cawley: When Josh and Michael departed Utah in the U-Haul, they left Josh’s minivan in the garage of the Sarah Circle house. The GPS tracker went dormant.

This next period in late January is when Josh’s sister Jennifer Graves went to confront him in Washington while wearing a wire. In that recording, Josh discussed the drive in the U-Haul.

Kirk Graves (from January 22, 2010 wire recording): Did Mike drive part of the way? Did he really?

Dave Cawley: He told his brother-in-law Kirk Graves that he and Michael and traded off time at the wheel.

Josh Powell (from January 22, 2010 wire recording): Yeah, Mike shouldn’t be driving the truck.

Kirk Graves (from January 22, 2010 wire recording): Is that one of your new toys, Charlie? Oh my goodness.

Kirk Graves (from January 22, 2010 wire recording): I’m not sure Mike should be driving anything. But—

Kirk Graves (from January 22, 2010 wire recording): (Laughs) He does have kind of a bad track record, doesn’t he?

Josh Powell (from January 22, 2010 wire recording): I’m just kidding. He’d probably drive just fine but, but he’s just not comfortable in the truck so it is…

Dave Cawley: Josh needed to get his minivan back, and he needed to finish getting the Utah house ready for renters. So, Josh boarded a Southwest Airlines flight on the evening of Thursday, January 28^th, 2010. Before flying out of SeaTac, he called his Utah neighbors John and Kiirsi Hellewell. He asked them to pick him up from Salt Lake City International, which they agreed to do.

Kiirsi Hellewell: I was thinking, if I try to pretend to be his friend still and stay on his good side, he has a lot more chance of talking to me than if I scream in his face and grab his coat and say “where’s Susan?”

Dave Cawley: But John and Kiirsi were playing both sides. Kiirsi sent an email to West Valley police detective Ellis Maxwell to let him know Josh was coming back into town. John sent a text to Jennifer Stagg.

Jennifer Stagg: I mean, nobody wanted to get to the truth more than they did, right? And so they very much we’re working with me, closely. And so yeah, they were like “come (laughs), be here at this time.”

Dave Cawley: Josh’s flight arrived at around 9:30 p.m. Jennifer and a TV photographer were waiting.

Jennifer Stagg: I kind of wanted him to know that we were keeping close tabs without spooking him. And then, yeah, we headed over to baggage claim and waited for him to come down that escalator.

(Sound of escalator)

Dave Cawley: The escalator she’s talking about carries passengers down from the TSA security checkpoint to the baggage carousels.

Jennifer Stagg: And you can see everything below. And I have jet-black hair. I’m pretty recognizable. And the minute his eyes went on me, you saw that, like, it was like a ghost. He went white. And he knew why I was there. We made eye contact, yeah? We made eye contact and he was kind of like “oh my gosh.” You saw this moment of like “what is happening?” And I think at that moment he realized that we were following him, like, we were tracking everything that we could that he was doing and it definitely spooked him.

(Sound of baggage carousel)

Jennifer Stagg: There’s nowhere to hide and it puts you kind of right in the middle of the action at the bottom of that escalator so, yeah, there was no way getting around talking to me in some way.

Dave Cawley: Josh had no need to wait around. He hadn’t checked a bag or even packed a toothbrush. He dodged Jennifer’s questions while looking for John Hellewell.

Jennifer Stagg: I realized pretty fast he was not going to talk to me and then he just bee-lined out of there.

Dave Cawley: Josh turned to John and asked “how did they find out?” John replied “someone on the plane must have recognized you and called.”

In Josh’s absence, Susan’s friends and neighbors had plastered the front of the Sarah Circle house with purple ribbons and paper hearts. Paint on the windows carried messages like “we miss you” and “we love you Susan.” Signs on the front lawn read “we will find you” and “we will bring you home.” These messages confronted Josh when he arrived at the house. He took out his camera and took photos of the decorations.

The next day, West Valley police obtained another search warrant for Josh’s minivan. On the prior searches, they’d failed to pull the air filter from the engine bay. Detectives hoped the filter and door jambs might hold dust or particles that could show where the van had been when Susan disappeared.

They took the minivan to serve the warrant. Josh complained to his dad about it, as Steve Powell later told the FBI.

Steve Powell (from February 24, 2010 FBI interview recording): Y’know, when they first got there they wanted his, his van again and they took the air filter out I guess and don’t ask me what that’s all about since he’s gone all the way from Utah to, to Puyallup and back in the van since this tragedy began.

Russ Johnson (from February 24, 2010 FBI interview recording): Oh yeah? When, when did he do that?

Dave Cawley: The air filter didn’t hold anything useful, but the warrant service wasn’t a total bust. While police had the van, the FBI also planted a second GPS tracker on it. This was a major win for police, because their original court order authorizing the GPS tracking was due to expire in just days. The federal order for the second tracker extended that ability for at least another month and a half.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the tracking files from the FBI’s device. The final date for which I currently have tracking data is February 7^th, 2010.

That date happens to be an important one.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Just after midnight on that Sunday morning, the minivan made its way north up 5600 West, as if it were headed to Susan’s work or Interstate 80. This time, it didn’t go either of those places. Instead, the minivan turned west onto California Avenue. It went about half a mile, stopping just shy of the entrance to the Salt Lake Valley Solid Waste landfill. It pulled into to a small parking lot under a high voltage power pole. A green sign at the entrance of the fenced lot read “recycling drop-off center.” The minivan pulled up to a set of large industrial dumpsters and stopped. It remained there for 14 minutes.

Afterward, Josh grabbed some Del Taco and drove back to the Sarah Circle house. Then, he hit the road for Washington. Another late-night departure. The minivan made three unusual stops as it passed through Utah’s Weber Valley in those early morning hours. First, it exited northbound I-15 at 12th Street, turned around and jumped right back on the freeway. It did the same thing at the next exit to the north, Pioneer Road.

I showed this to Greg Rogers, the former FBI undercover agent.

Greg Rogers: That just looks like cleaning to me.

Dave Cawley: “Cleaning.” Josh making sure he was not being followed.

The third stop came at 2700 North in the community of Farr West. The minivan left the freeway and drove directly to the back side of a burger restaurant. It pulled up at a dumpster. Next, the minivan moved east. It drove into the lot of a plumbing supply store and once again stopped at a dumpster.

Remember, this happened a full two months into the search for Susan.

Greg Rogers: Classic paranoia, even though this is later, they’re still searching his vehicle. And he is thinking all day every day about what could they find in my, in my house or in my, any of my cars, anywhere else that they could put on me. So, that’s what he’s doing. He’s just coming up with, stuff he hadn’t thought of earlier.

Dave Cawley: Police had served three search warrants at Josh and Susan’s house. They’d searched his van repeatedly. And Josh had made multiple suspicious trips to dumpsters. What could he have possibly still had to dispose of at that point?

Greg Rogers: At this stage of the game he’s already gotten rid of anything he thinks that’s got DNA on it or that’s linking him to the homicide. But uh, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have other stuff that he doesn’t want law enforcement to ever find. Yeah, and as we know from his father’s behavior and his, hiding an SD card in your house, finding that on a search warrant, that’s tough. You don’t have to be very bright to hide that where it’s not going to be located by law enforcement. He could’ve had stuff like that, from who knows what uh, his, his and his father’s predilections with cameras are well known. It could have been something that simple, which is very easy to hide, much more difficult to locate.

Dave Cawley: West Valley police did catch a whiff of what Josh was up to, or at least a small piece of it. Case records show that the next morning, detective David Greco logged in to check the tracking data. He noticed the midnight stop at the recycling drop-off near the county landfill. Police rushed out to inspect the site. They peered into each of dumpsters: one for cardboard, one for plastic, one for glass. But no evidence. Unfortunately, the case records suggest they missed catching the stops at dumpsters farther the north, out of town, in the Weber Valley.

Looking at the data now, 10 years after Susan’s disappearance, it seems a critical oversight. When I notified West Valley police of these findings, police spokeswoman Roxeanne Vianuku told me by email “the hindsight of a reporter in 2019 does not always equate to mistakes made by investigators a decade ago.”

I’ll be the first to admit, it’s a lot easier to see this stuff in hindsight once you know what you’re looking for. Detectives at the time had a lot on their plates. They were already searching mines, interviewing and re-interviewing friends and neighbors, serving subpoenas and pouring over records. I asked Greg if GPS tracking might sometimes lead overworked investigators to feel they have a safety net.

Greg Rogers: That’s one way to look at it but it’s incorrect.

Dave Cawley: Greg said it’s not enough in criminal cases to just show where a person went. It has to be backed up with other evidence, like photos, eyes-on surveillance, a wiretap or a dumpster dive to recover discarded evidence. But think about all of the dumpsters I’ve described in this episode. There’s a pattern of behavior there. Certainly, prosecutors could have used that against Josh in a criminal trial, right?

Greg Rogers: They’d bring it up. But you know, the defense attorney would say? Good defense counsel would get up on cross examination right after the, some cop said “he went to this dumpster went to that dumpster.” I wouldn’t want to be that police officer because the question you’re going to get on cross is “well, did you check what he put in the dumpster? Did you actually see him put anything in the dumpster? Can you say, for sure that he even did put anything in the dumpster?” The answer to all those questions is no. The prosecutor may not bring it up for that reason, because they would know you’re going to get pounded for not checking those dumpsters. That’s a, that’s a huge misstep.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: A few minutes ago, I mentioned the decorations Susan’s friends and neighbors had placed outside the Sarah Circle house in Josh’s absence. We can only guess what he must have thought about them.

Josh Powell (from February 24, 2010 video recording): Clearly, it’s a targeted, no doubt a hate campaign.

Dave Cawley: Apparently we don’t have to guess. Josh recorded this video to tell us what he thought of all the posters, fliers and ribbons.

Josh Powell (from February 24, 2010 video recording): And we believe that that is because they want to spread hate.

Dave Cawley: Josh filmed this from the driver seat of his minivan after returning to Washington in February. He and his brother Michael drove around their neighborhood, noting how people had taped fliers with Susan’s name and face to mailboxes, light poles and signposts. This made him angry, because the fliers were placed where he was sure to see them.

Josh Powell (from February 24, 2010 video recording): So, clearly it’s not an effort to find Susan. It’s clearly a target effort to act as a reminder for us and our neighbors.

Dave Cawley: At one point in the video, Josh even described the fliers as “an assault.”

Josh Powell (from February 24, 2010 video recording): Charlie and Braden don’t understand why the people keep doing this. And they don’t really need to understand the full situation. And it’s sick for these people to try to push this situation on them.

Dave Cawley: Again, Josh recorded this in Washington, not Utah. But it sheds light on how he viewed the broader community’s response to Susan’s disappearance. He believed the so-called “hate campaign” went back to one man: Susan’s dad.

Josh Powell (from February 24, 2010 video recording): Clearly, Chuck Cox needs to get his organization under control. If he doesn’t know about this, fine. But he will be aware of it soon ‘cause we’re gonna be telling him.

[Scene transition]

Dave Cawley: Josh Powell made one other drive between Washington and Utah that deserves a closer look. I mentioned it in episode 9 of Cold. It occurred just before Mother’s Day, in May of 2010. You might remember, police were surveilling Josh as he made an unexpected trip from his dad’s house to the Sarah Circle house.

Derryl Spencer: Josh left the house and we started to follow him and we followed him all the way back to Salt Lake City. So that was, I mean, I literally drove to Puyallup, Washington one day and then we drove back to Salt Lake the next day.

Dave Cawley: That’s U.S. Marshal Derryl Spencer, who took part in the operation with West Valley officers.

Derryl Spencer: Extremely hard to watch him ‘cause y’know he’s of course driving exactly 65 miles an hour the whole way and (laughs) to follow someone clandestine, y’know secretively, through multi-state was extremely difficult, but we did it.

Dave Cawley: The FBI’s tracking order was expiring.

Derryl Spencer: We couldn’t lose him because we didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing.

Dave Cawley: What Josh was doing was grabbing the last of his and Susan’s personal belongings from the Sarah Circle house.

As Josh approached the Salt Lake Valley on Utah’s Legacy Parkway, he started snapping photos on a Nikon DSLR from the driver seat of his minivan. Police didn’t realize this until more than a year later, after they seized Josh’s computers from his dad’s home with a search warrant on August 25^th, 2011. That’s when they recovered copies of those photos.

The pictures Josh took have never been released. I was able to retrieve copies with the help of digital forensics experts Trent Leavitt and Kaly Richmond from the firm Eide Bailey. They donated time, expertise and equipment to the effort.

The camera Josh used did not have GPS capability, so there are no coordinates hidden in metadata. But I’ve managed to geolocate all of them using a combination of Google Earth and Street View imagery. They show Josh did not drive directly to his and Susan’s home in West Valley. Instead, he first pulled into the International Center, a business park west of Salt Lake City International Airport.

He took a few photos in the parking lot of an office building on Wright Brothers Drive, then went around the block to the Wells Fargo call center where Susan had worked. Timestamps on the photos show he only stayed there for about two minutes. Then, he drove to his old work at Aspen Logistics. All along the way, Josh took pictures, of nothing in particular. Just streets, road signs and traffic. Same thing after he left Aspen and drove to the Sarah Circle house. Pictures of nothing.

Josh packed the minivan to the brim. When he departed for Washington late that same night, a roof box and an old bicycle were on top. A tow hitch cargo carrier hung off the back, loaded down with two large, blue plastic barrels. Police tailed him into Idaho, keeping an eye from a distance.

Derryl Spencer: That made it extremely easy to watch him from a distance ‘cause you had, y’know this, this large 55-gallon drum on top of a minivan cruising, y’know, northbound on 65. So, y’know, I’m glad the, that the uh, blue 55-gallon drum was there to help us out.

Dave Cawley: Police surveillance logs showed Josh pulled off of I-84 at exit 194 in southern Idaho at about 2:20 a.m. He slept there until 10:30 a.m.

That exit is just two miles beyond the canal where Josh had stopped for five minutes at 2 a.m. on his December 2009 drive to Washington.

After waking on that May morning, Josh proceeded westbound on I-84 toward Boise. He’d only gone about 10 miles before he stopped. He took his camera, stepped out of the minivan and walked into the weeds alongside the interstate. Josh took four photos of a farmer’s field. On it were irrigation sprinklers, covered in ice. Maybe it’s a clue. Or maybe it’s unrelated to anything having to do with Susan.

Greg Rogers: He could’ve been driving by this and thought, as, as unusual as it would seem to you and I, he could be driving by that and go “oh, that looks cool.” And he believes he’s a phenomenal photographer, and he likes the ice the way it’s coming off the wheels of the watering stuff and so he’s like “yeah, I’ll stop and take that.”

Dave Cawley: Greg Rogers, the former FBI undercover agent, told me he doesn’t believe Josh’s brain functioned the way yours or mine might.

Greg Rogers: You have to understand he, he has no remorse at all for killing Susan. All of this that’s happening to him now is just inconvenient. But it has nothing to do with him feeling badly about what he did. So if he sees something that interests him, y’know, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he saw that was a cool pic.

Dave Cawley: A few hours down the road and Josh stopped again. This time in Oregon, north of Ontario in rural Malheur County. He shot more photos of the scenery at the side of the road. I mentioned these shots in episode 15 of Cold. Since that time, I’ve had the opportunity to visit the site myself. It sits at the crest of a hill, surrounded by more hills. Ranch land of the old Oregon Trail. A vista bare of trees. To the east, the land falls away into a tributary of the Snake River called Wheel Gulch.

Josh took 11 pictures there: many of his van, others of the landscape, one of a soaring hawk. The photos have not previously been published, but you can see them now at thecoldpodcast.com. Ask yourself as you look at them: what might have Josh been thinking as he stood there, wind in his hair, road noise roaring behind him? Was this just his art?

Greg Rogers: That would make perfect sense to him. To you or I, we’d think “wow, how can you be interested in art or photography or” you, you murdered your wife brutally. But to an absolute psychopath, that’s just an inconvenient fact.

(Sound of wind chimes at Woodbine Cemetery)

Dave Cawley: Our story now returns to where it started: the Woodbine Cemetery and Puyallup, Washington. On December 6^th, 2012, Susan’s family and friends gathered at the cemetery to mark the third anniversary of her disappearance. A new monument stood at the top of the hill, above Charlie and Braden’s gravesite. The bronze angel with outstretched wings and arms stood atop a large stone block. It was an Angel Of Hope, a reference to the novel “The Christmas Box” by author Richard Paul Evans.

Nancy: It’s a calm place for me. It feels right that these boys are here because it’s so quiet and calm. Because when I met them it wasn’t quite that way.

Dave Cawley: This monument in Puyallup has become a special place to reflect for people who knew Susan, Charlie or Braden. People like Nancy from the Puyallup Gem and Mineral Club. Or Pierce County Sheriff’s detective sergeant Gary Sanders.

Gary Sanders: Y’know it’s, it’s one of those bookmarks in your, in, in your long line of memory that forever will be there so, periodically, y’know yeah, pay your respects. And the Christmas angel that’s there and it’s a beautiful place, umm, and hopefully they’re at peace now.

Dave Cawley: This is Cold, Episode 18, Angel of Hope. I’m Dave Cawley. Back after this.

[Ad break]

Dave Cawley: The sting of loss has never gone away for the people who loved Susan and her boys, friends like Amber Hardman.

Amber Hardman: They were happy boys. Crazy, happy boys, like boys should be. (Laughs) Right? We’d show up and, umm, they’d always be running around playing, sometimes in their underwear. Y’know, just crazy boys. (Laughs)

Dave Cawley: Or Linda Bagley.

Linda Bagley: One of the biggest things I remember about Susan that was something to look up to for me was the service she did for others. She was coloring people’s hair, cutting people’s hair, not charging them. For those that were older, for those that were, needed it maybe that didn’t have the funds, she did all those things for people. And she did all those things for her family, all the service she did for her family and stuff and, and that is something to be admired.

Dave Cawley: Or Debbie Caldwell.

Debbie Caldwell: Charlie liked bugs. He liked to find bugs. He was outdoors, umm, intrigued by things, so he was always looking for things. Now, Braden was all about cars and blocks. So as long as I had the cars and blocks, that was great. But Braden actually had quite a little witty personality. He was kind of a teaser. He liked to tease. You could see that in his personality. That was kind of like Susan, too.

Dave Cawley: Josh’s older sister, Jennifer Graves, still grieves for what should have been: seeing Charlie and Braden grow into bright, happy young men.

Jennifer Graves: The boys’ murder wasn’t the end. It did, it did close a chapter for me, though. Because the single biggest single thing that I was concerned about was the boys. I wanted them to get out of that situation and not continue to perpetuate this violent cycle that was continuing through my family. And I wanted them to be able to have a, a normal, loving family relationship as, as much as possible.

Dave Cawley: I’ve mentioned Jennifer’s book, A Light in Dark Places, a few times during this podcast. Jennifer told me she hoped that in writing it, she might inspire women in situations like Susan’s to escape.

Jennifer Graves: Part of the motivation for writing my book was trying to instill that courage in others. And that recognition of a bad situation and realizing, the realization that it shouldn’t go on. There needs to be a change in that situation, and sometimes it can be corrected. Sometimes with help people can change and, and you can fix the situation and end up with a good and positive marriage and, and family situation. But sometimes, it isn’t possible. Sometimes the right decision is to get out.

Dave Cawley: Susan’s dad, Chuck Cox, has a similar goal.

Chuck Cox: I would guess probably around 100 people at least have made differences in their lives to prevent themselves from being caught in that same trap. And that’s the reason, the only viable reason for doing it from now on is to let people know about the danger signs that were there.

Dave Cawley: Now-retired detective Ellis Maxwell has also spent the last few years working on a book.

Ellis Maxwell: I thought I could have that thing written in six months but it’s tough because I catch myself basically just start working the case again and analyzing this data and analyzing that and it becomes really taxing. I mean, I’d sit down and I’d start typing and I’ll type and type and type and do this and do that and then next thing you know, I can’t sleep for two, three days.

Dave Cawley: Ellis told me our conversations have helped.

Ellis Maxwell: Sittin’ here and, y’know, meeting with you and answering your questions and sharing some insight has, it’s actually been, uh, beneficial for me and it’s helped me kinda get through my own struggles from doing it. ‘Cause it’s, it’s always going to be there, it’s never gonna go away.

Dave Cawley: But Ellis is just one of many, many people who took part in the Powell investigation. A lot of them still carry the weight of their experiences in a private.

Ellis Maxwell: Everybody involved in the case has, uh, has struggled at one point or another with and, y’know, ‘cause it’s really super challenging and all of ‘em, not just me, y’know, are gonna have to answer questions and live with this case for the rest of their lives as well. Especially when people learn that, how close to the investigation they were.

Dave Cawley: Of course, a key element of that struggle arises from the absence of answers.

Ellis Maxwell: There’s answers that I’ll, uh, never ever get and, y’know, there’ll never be any justice, uh, held against anybody for their actions and y’know the likelihood of, uh, Susan ever being discovered is in my personal opinion, uh, very super low.

Dave Cawley: This is the part where I’m supposed to say I’ve cracked the case, that I’ve found Susan, that she can at last rest in peace with her boys. I’m sorry. I can’t do that. I wish I could. Instead, I’m going to do what reporters are trained not to do. I’m going share my personal views, what I think likely happened to Susan. But I stress, this is a theory. It’s based on evidence and inference but is ultimately nothing more than an educated guess, one that is subject to change. Here goes.

I believe Josh Powell killed Susan. I believe it was crime he considered for quite some time, likely more than two years. I say that because of the steps he took as early as 2007 to obtain life insurance in her name, to establish a trust that would guarantee his access to that money and to secure power of attorney so he could take legal action in her name.

We know from Steve Powell’s journals that Josh spoke in 2008 of wanting Susan to have an “accident.” We know from Susan’s handwritten will that she feared Josh would kill her and that he would try to make it appear as though it were an accident. It seems likely that Josh had threatened Susan’s life repeatedly. Recognizing that danger, Susan had told an old friend in a November, 2008 Facebook message she was ready to make a hasty escape with her sons.

Kristin Sorenson (as Susan Powell from August 15, 2008, Facebook message): I have friends he would never think of if I need to leave in the middle of the night or whatever, a safe deposit box, docs on file, etcetera.

Dave Cawley: Susan had toed right up to the brink of divorce. Her efforts to assert her independence howled around Josh like warning shots over the bow of a ship. He knew what was coming. Josh would not tolerate a divorce. He’d seen just how ugly his own parents’ split had been. He also viewed Susan as his property and their two sons as extensions of himself. Under no circumstance would he allow her custody of them.

For Josh, killing Susan would’ve seemed to solve two problems. It would’ve rid him of a wife he no longer wanted and, if done properly, would’ve paid his bills for years to come.

I’m not sure why December 6^th, 2009 was the date he chose to take the final step, but Susan’s impending April deadline for divorce seems a probable factor in the decision.

As for the act itself, I believe Josh used some sort of drug or substance to incapacitate Susan. I can envision a scenario in which Josh intentionally brake-checked another driver a few months before that December day, causing a crash. We know for a fact that after that fender-bender on September 2^nd, Josh obtained a prescription for a drug that would do the job: cyclobenzaprine.

The script he filled the day of the crash was for 40 pills, enough to last about a week. When police later found the bottle in the Sarah Circle house in December, it still held 32 pills. If Josh had been in such pain from whiplash, wouldn’t he have taken more? And how many cyclobenzaprine pills would he’ve needed to crush up and put into the cream cheese on Susan’s pancake — the one he personally prepared for Susan on December 6^th — to leave her feeling tired? 

Susan once mentioned in a Facebook message Josh did not have a gun.

Kristin Sorenson (as Susan Powell from August 15, 2008, Facebook message): No weapons aside from power tools and kitchen knives.

Dave Cawley: It seems plausible that Josh might have used one of his tools, perhaps an electric drill, to kill Susan.

Susan Cox Powell (from July 29, 2008 home video): Every tool case, I mean he’s a tool dream guy. There’s a Bostich nail gun, a Milwaukee drill, a Rigid drill, some type of Rigid sander and a Rigid saw.

Dave Cawley: Josh might’ve used the Rug Doctor he’d acquired to steam clean any blood that made it onto the carpet or couch cushions. Perhaps that job took longer than he anticipated. In his rush, he could’ve missed a spot: the swipe mark of Susan’s blood on the upper head rest of the couch. There were also those small drops of Susan’s blood on the tile floor next to the couch that he failed to notice, perhaps scattered by a spinning drill bit.

It would’ve also taken time to wrap Susan’s body, a necessary step to prevent the spreading of forensic evidence. It’s possible he used one of the several tarps he kept in the garage. Maybe he used the tree wrap he’d purchased to lightly bind Susan’s arms and legs together, leaving no marks or residue, as duct tape might.

In this scenario, Josh would’ve grabbed Susan’s cell phone and powered it off, understanding the risk of it being tracked as he moved her body away from the house. But in his rush to clean and dump the body before heading out on his camping trip, which was to be his alibi, he might’ve overlooked Susan’s wallet, purse and keys. That, in and of itself, might not have been a big problem in his mind. I believe Josh expected he’d have time to return home and tie up loose ends before himself reporting Susan had not come home from work.

He probably didn’t account for Debbie Caldwell. Josh did not like Debbie much. If he’d ever bothered to get to know her better, he might’ve realized that she took the wellbeing of her daycare kids very seriously, that Charlie and Braden’s unexplained absence would cause alarm.

Debbie Caldwell: He didn’t think of the welfare and the wellbeing of the kids.

Dave Cawley: It’s likely Josh was on his way home to finish cleaning up on the afternoon of December 7^th when he took that first phone call from JoVanna Owings. He learned at that moment police were already looking for Susan. Worse yet, they’d already been in the house.

JoVanna Owings: I still can’t figure out how he thought. It leaves me at, at a loss.

Dave Cawley: In another phone conversation that afternoon, Josh asked his sister Jennifer Graves, what she knew. 

Jennifer Graves: Just more evidence. More evidence that he had this preconceived plan and was involved in her disappearance.

Dave Cawley: If he’d hidden the murder away until he could return home and dispose of it, he might have feared that police had already found it. So Josh went on the defensive. His plan appeared to hinge on the idea that Susan had gone to work. In order to sell that story, he drove south to Point of the Mountain and called her phone, the one he knew was with him in the minivan, to leave this message.

Josh Powell (from December 7, 2009 voicemail recording): Anyway, hopefully you got to work ok and, umm, of course give me a call. We’re I guess planning picking you up, but let me know ‘cause, umm, if you have plans afterwards or whatever.

Dave Cawley: Josh then drove north to Salt Lake City and parked outside of Susan’s work, knowing full well she’d not shown for her shift that day and would not be coming out for a ride home. I place a lot of weight on this. Establishing that Susan had gone to work seemed critical to Josh. He insisted on it from his very first interactions with detective Ellis Maxwell.

Ellis Maxwell (from December 7, 2009 police interview recording): So where, where would your wife be at? Where would you think she’d be at?

Josh Powell (from December 7, 2009 police interview recording): I don’t know. I’m just thinking on her way to work. But not for this long.

Dave Cawley: That insistence leads me to believe Josh intended for Susan’s body to be found and for her death to have appeared as either an accident or as a random act of violence, one for which Josh had an alibi: he was in the desert, witnessed by sheepherders, when it happened.

Susan being found and her death being someone’s fault would’ve been necessary if Josh intended to claim the life insurance. In this scenario, Josh would’ve left Susan’s body somewhere near the Wells Fargo call center where she’d worked. Charlie, if he was awake and in the minivan at the time, might have seen an airplane taking off from nearby Salt Lake City International Airport. And that could explain his perplexing comment to police on December 8th about having flown in an airplane to go camping.

Kim Waelty (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): How did you guys get to where you were camping?

Charlie Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Umm, we got in a airplane and a airplane went to Dinosaur National Park.

Kim Waelty (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Oh, you went to an airplane yesterday?

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

Dave Cawley: After Josh’s first interview with Ellis Maxwell on the night of the 7^th, he’d have returned home still convinced he could make the plan work. His top priority would’ve been the destruction of the murder weapon. I believe Josh took the weapon, again, possibly a power tool, and used his oxyacetylene torch to obliterate it in the garage of the Sarah Circle house.

Next, Josh would’ve sanitized everything: the Rug Doctor, the minivan, the soiled washcloths he’d left in the bathtub. He’d have stayed up all night to do it, even missing his morning appointment with police to make sure he did not miss anything. I believe Josh went in to his second interview with Ellis on December 8 cautious, but confident.

Ellis Maxwell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): She’s left your boys, she’s left you.

Josh Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): (Snorting) No, I don’t think she did.

Ellis Maxwell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): You don’t think so?

Josh Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): No.

Ellis Maxwell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Help me. Where should we look for her?

Josh Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): I think she would have gone to work—

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

Josh Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): —she would have tried to work.

Ellis Maxwell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): Alright.

Josh Powell (from December 8, 2009 police interview recording): I mean, that’s what she would have been in the process of doing.

Dave Cawley: By the end of that interview, Josh would’ve known the plan, like his wife, was dead. Ellis knew he’d killed Susan, but not how. And he didn’t have the evidence. When Ellis confronted Josh with Charlie’s statement about Susan having gone camping with them, Josh recognized the police did not yet know what had actually happened. Because Susan had not gone out to the West Desert with them. At that point, Josh would’ve known if he were to survive, the plan had to change. Susan would have to disappear forever.

So, on the night of December 8^th, Josh obtained the rental car. He drove to the ATM outside of his bank in West Valley and withdrew about $600 in cash.

I believe it’s plausible Josh could’ve then returned to where he’d originally left Susan’s body, retrieved it and moved it to a place where it would be safe from discovery. Somewhere within a slightly less than 400-mile radius of West Valley City, Utah. Probably up north, in one of the dark stretches of southern Idaho. In that frantic process, he strained his shoulder.

During this timeframe, Josh told his own father the same story he’d told the police. Steve Powell was skeptical. But he had no foreknowledge of the murder and no hand in its execution.

Steve Powell (from February 24, 2010 FBI interview recording): I think we’ll find her, I really do.

Dave Cawley: Over the course of the following weeks and months, Steve concocted an alternate reality in mind, rather than face the horrible truth that his son had murdered the object of his unrequited obsession.

Steve Powell (from February 24, 2010 FBI interview recording): I mean Josh, I, I, I am totally comfortable that he had nothing to do with it.

Dave Cawley: The only person Josh confided in was his brother, Michael. Michael’s phone records suggest he was aware of his brother’s plan and, when it went awry, accepted the task of helping Josh manage the mess. I do not believe Michael met Josh on December 8th or 9th, while Josh was unaccounted for in the rental car. I do not believe Michael disposed of Susan’s body. I say this, because Steve Powell’s journals describe Michael as being home in Puyallup on those days.

Michael Powell (from October 20, 2012 deposition recording): I got the impression that the first day he was expecting her to come back because she occasionally left and sometimes he didn’t always know where whereabouts for periods of, y’know, a few hours or, or whatever. And umm, as time went on, I got the impression that he was just getting more and more upset and distraught. By the end of the week, he was in tears. And that’s when I remember, because that’s when, uh, I went down there.

Dave Cawley: So how do I account for Michael’s later paranoia about his Ford Taurus, or the cadaver dog hitting on the car’s trunk?

Dave Lindell: You know I guess you have to wonder, was it purely because of possible car problems he wanted to sell the car, or did he just want to get out of the car? ‘Cause I remember that when we checked the car out, we couldn’t really find that much wrong with the car.

Dave Cawley: I find it likely that while Utah, Josh tasked Michael with disposing of some piece of secondary evidence. Perhaps clothing Susan had been wearing when she died or something similar. Michael might’ve even been taking that object back to Washington in the Taurus when his car broke down. I can imagine Michael’s fear, standing along the side of I-84 between Ontario and Baker City while in possession of murder evidence, wondering if an Oregon state trooper might at any moment pull up behind him. I can picture Michael flinging whatever that item was into the grass alongside the highway before limping the car the rest of the way to Baker City. It would then make sense for Josh to stop at that same spot five months later and take photographs, to ensure whatever it was Michael dumped could not be seen from the interstate.

I do not believe Susan’s body is in Utah’s West Desert. I don’t think Josh disposed of her in a mine. So where is she? 

Louis Amodt: Could be in a borrow pit right next to the freeway, somewhere between here and Wendover. Who knows?

Dave Cawley: After all of this, I can only guess.

Ellis Maxwell: Y’know, so I have empathy for the Coxes. I mean that’s, I can’t imagine, y’know, losing a child and, y’know, never being able to see them again or put them to rest or not ever have any answers. That would be something I wouldn’t, uh, wish upon my worst enemy. That’s just horrible.

Dave Cawley: Find Susan. It remains a hope, a wish, a command, a desperate plea. Final thoughts after this.

[Ad break] 

Dave Cawley: The question of where to find Susan Powell is no longer the one that most bothers me. To understand why, I need to share something that happened shortly before this podcast first launched. It was October 22^nd, 2018, three weeks from Cold’s debut.

I arrived home from work on that chilly autumn evening, ready to unwind. In an idle moment, I pulled my phone from my pocket and began scrolling through tweets. I spotted one from the University of Utah. It said “Alert: shooting on campus. Secure-in-place.”

Brian Wahlin (from October 22, 2018 KSL NewsRadio archive): We don’t believe there’s an active threat at this point in time, but don’t have that 100% confirmed.

Dave Cawley: I called the news director at KSL Newsradio, my friend Marc Giauque. He was on his way to the station. He had dispatched a reporter to the scene.

Marc Giauque (from October 22, 2018 KSL NewsRadio archive): The shooting happened earlier today they did find one person deceased. That victim identified as a woman and they did identify a suspect as well. 

Dave Cawley: I grabbed my keys, went to my car and raced back to work.

Dave Cawley (from October 22, 2018 KSL NewsRadio archive): The situation as it is ongoing at the University of Utah campus this evening, because of a shooting that happened, fatal shooting, uh, just around 9 p.m. Police are on scene. They are looking for a suspect who has not been located.

Dave Cawley: We came to learn over the following hours and days that Lauren McCluskey, a student at the university, had been shot and killed outside of her dorm by a man named Melvin Shawn Rowland.

Dale Brophy (from October 23, 2018 KSL NewsRadio archive): A couple hours into the investigation we learned that suspect had gotten off of campus in a vehicle. He was picked up. Through an investigative lead at approximately 1:15 in the morning, the suspect was located by Salt Lake City police department downtown off of 600 South. A foot pursuit ensued. The suspect ran into a church, at which time he took his own life.

Dave Cawley: Lauren’s and Susan’s stories are different. Yet, they are the same. Both women lost their lives to a romantic partner. Both women had come to Utah from Washington: Susan to escape her father-in-law, Lauren to perfect her talents as a gifted runner.

Lori McDonald (from October 23, 2018 KSL NewsRadio archive): Lauren was an outstanding student scholar and an accomplished student athlete and the students, staff and faculty who knew her are feeling a profound loss.

Dave Cawley: Melvin had lied to Lauren about his age. Lauren was 21, Melvin was 37. He’d also lied about his status as a convicted felon and sex offender on parole. He’d served time in prison after raping a teenage girl.

One of Lauren’s friends had learned Melvin’s secret and warned her. That’s when Lauren broke off their brief relationship. But Melvin would not leave Lauren alone. He used technology to terrorize. He bombarded Lauren’s phone with text messages, using spoofed phone numbers to make it appear as though the texts were coming from Melvin’s friends. In fear, Lauren called police for help.

Lauren McCluskey (from October 12, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): I got a text about, y’know, asking if I wanted to go to a funeral. His funeral. And I think they’re trying to lure me somewhere.

Dave Cawley: Yet, Lauren also doubted her own instincts.

Dispatcher (from October 12, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Ok, and is there a protective order between you guys or is he just an ex of yours? 

Lauren McCluskey (from October 12, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Just an ex.

Dispatcher (from October 12, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Ok. And are you trying to avoid him? Or not necessarily?

Lauren McCluskey (from October 12, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Umm, I would say it’s more just his friends.

Dave Cawley: That changed when, in an email, Melvin threatened to publish intimate photos of Lauren unless she transferred a thousand dollars to his account. She did. Then, Lauren again contacted police. She just wanted the harassment and extortion to stop.

Lauren McCluskey (from October 13, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Do you know when an arrest would be made?

Dispatcher (from October 13, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Umm, you can talk to an officer, if you want? I can arrange that, if you want that.

Lauren McCluskey (from October 13, 2018 University of Utah police dispatch call recording): Ok. Yeah, that sounds good.

Dave Cawley: But Melvin was not arrested. Police failed to piece together his status as a parole violator. A week elapsed before, on the night of October 22^nd, he snatched Lauren in the parking lot outside her dorm, dragged her into the back seat of a car and shot to her to death. Lauren was on the phone with her mom when it happened.

Matt McCluskey (from October 22, 2018 911 call recording): My daughter, Lauren McCluskey, was talking to her mom and then she just started saying “No, no, no, no, no.” And it sounded like someone might have been grabbing her or something.

Dave Cawley: I didn’t know Lauren, but her death shook me. Lauren McCluskey and Susan Powell should both be alive today, along with many, many other women who’ve been killed at the hands of a husband, a boyfriend, a date, a coworker or even just an acquaintance. So I’m less concerned with the question “where is Susan” than I am the question “why does this keep happening?”

One particular passage from Susan’s emails has resonated with me. She wrote it in November of 2008, a little over a year before her disappearance. She said:

Kristin Sorenson (as Susan Powell from November 15, 2008 Facebook message): I’m finding out more and more that family and friends were seeing the red flags long before I did and of course I wish they would have said something.

Dave Cawley: Susan, I make this pledge to you: I resolve to treat the women in my life with respect, compassion and understanding. I vow to believe any woman who expresses through words or actions a concern for her safety. I promise to call out and condemn abusive, manipulative or controlling behavior any time or place I encounter it. And if I ever fail to live up to this standard, I invite those who know me to hold me accountable.

We can do better. We can be better.

To anyone who is listening, I would be honored if you would join me in making this same commitment.

My name is Dave Cawley. Thank you for listening to Cold.