Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / Disappearance of Susan Powell

Transcript

Disappearance of Susan Powell · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

0:07
Discretion, is it by him? Immediate murder. Slumped in the corner of
0:29
an interrogation room, Josh Powell provides little information about the possible whereabouts of his
0:35
wife and the mother of his children, reported missing twenty four hours prior.
0:40
By Josh's account, he'd taken their boys camping at midnight in the sub zero
0:45
Utah temperatures to make s'mores, leaving Susan behind. What Josh didn't know was
0:52
that his four year old son, with a detective across town, was telling
0:56
a different story. After listening the family members who had gone on camping,
1:00
counting mom, dad, and brother, Charlie, Powell changed the roll call
1:06
when he asked who came back, quote Mommy stayed where the crystals are.
1:11
Josh Powell and Susan Cox first met at an LDS church singles mixer when she
1:18
was nineteen and he was twenty four. According to friends, Josh was a
1:23
smug, loudmouth, but Susan fell hard for him. She liked the way
1:27
he took charge of the conversation and was unusually charmed by Josh's devotion to his
1:34
pet bird, a parrot named Trilly that he took everywhere as kids Susan and
1:40
her sister lovingly mothered a pair of bonded parakeets. Smitten, they married only
1:46
a few months later, and by day I mean Josh and Susan, not
1:49
the parakeets. After a two year stay at Josh's father's house in Washington to
1:56
save cash, the newly weds moved to Utah and picked up steady work in
2:00
stocks and it. Susan's warmth quickly made her a neighborhood favorite, and friends
2:07
learned to tolerate Josh. After a party one night, Susan confessed to a
2:12
buddy she dreamed about being pregnant with a boy. Maybe Josh could be a
2:16
good dad, the friend thought, ironically. The next morning, two pink
2:22
lines confirmed a child was on the way. While others softened to Josh,
2:28
Susan's father, Chuck Cox, was not buying it. The day his daughter
2:31
went into labor, Chuck remembers Josh waving him off as he played on one
2:37
of his souped up computers, refusing to drive his wife to the hospital.
2:42
Susan, on the other hand, spent her childhood fantasizing about becoming a mom,
2:46
and was later thrilled to add a second son Braden to their growing family.
2:51
The devoted mom dreaded her work day, but felt lucky to leave them
2:54
in a daycare run by a close friend named Debbie. On the snowy morning
3:00
of December seventh, Debbie Caldwell felt a pit of dread in her stomach when
3:05
six thirty am came and went with no sign of the Powell boys. After
3:09
all, Susan was the most punctual mom. Chalking it up to a slow
3:14
commute on the heels of the blizzard, she dismissed her fears. By nine
3:19
she'd learned that neither Powell had reported for work that day. She called Josh's
3:23
sister and rushed to the house. Debbie and Jennifer Graves arrived to find the
3:29
home locked and eerily quiet, no tire or boot tracks in the snow,
3:35
no movement within. Remembering that Susan had discussed repairing their broken furnace herself,
3:40
the women called nine one one in a panic, Fearing carbon monoxide poisoning.
3:46
Officers smashed a window and entered to find the house empty, no sign of
3:51
forced entry, no theft of Josh's expensive electronics, no bodies. The only
3:57
movement came from two box fans the living room, directed at a wet spot
4:01
on the rug and a couch that showed signs of being freshly cleaned. Josh's
4:08
sister checked the bedroom and discovered Susan's purse abandoned on the dresser, her keys
4:14
and wallets still inside. With more questions than answers, words spread fast.
4:19
Friends and officers flooded the home. Nine hours after one call, Josh pulled
4:26
their blue minivan into the now packed driveway with Charlie and Braden in the back
4:30
seat. He casually reported that the boys wanted to go camping, so he'd
4:35
taken into the desert west of Salt Lake City. He called Susan on his
4:41
way back in and offered to pick her up from work, but she had
4:44
not answered. Detectives escorted Josh and the boys to the precinct for an interview,
4:48
begot little more than shrugs and complaints about the broken window. For investigators
4:55
on site of the family home, however, a more sinister picture was developing.
5:00
Microscopic drops of blood were discovered on the floor by the couch and box
5:04
fans. An examination of the minivan uncovered Susan's pink cell phone buried deep in
5:11
the center console and missing its simcart. Josh's multiple hard drives were encrypted to
5:16
the point no expert could crack them. With no susan and no leads,
5:23
friends began piecing it all together, small fragments of her reluctant confessions to them
5:30
Josh was controlling. He changed the pin number to their joint account. Weekly,
5:34
he'd hand over a spreadsheet of items on sale at different stores and a
5:39
ten dollar bill to feed the kids for the week. He'd insisted that she
5:43
knit her own socks and forced her to ride her bike to work every day.
5:47
Meanwhile, Josh bought bags of junk food, electric cars, computer equipment,
5:53
and inexplicably several hundred pounds of wheat. Nine days into the investigation,
5:59
with little to show, police made the controversial decision to declare Josh a person
6:02
of interest. Shortly after, he packed up the kids and fled to his
6:06
father's home in Washington, and it wasn't long before the media latched onto the
6:12
mysterious tale of a beautiful missing mother and her silent husband. Josh hid from
6:17
cameras as her friends and family begged for her safe return, until one day
6:23
Josh came forward with a confession no one expected. Susan was troubled, he
6:29
claimed, secretly promiscuous, broken by an angry mother and an abusive father.
6:35
He built a find Susan website and filled it with family photos and salacious accusations,
6:43
namely that she'd fled to Brazil with a secret lover. Horrified, the
6:46
Cox family hosted a televised press conference in detailed the emotional and physical abuse Susan
6:53
suffered at Josh's hands. Callers flooded the tip lines. Most explosive was a
6:59
call from got Hardman, an acquaintance who relayed a troubling conversation he'd had with
7:03
Josh at a Christmas party. The secret to hiding a body, Josh insisted,
7:09
was to dump it down a vertical mind shaft in the Utah desert,
7:14
so unstable, virtually unsearchable, fool proof. Over the last decade, cops,
7:20
cadaver dogs, and citizen detectives have dedicated tens of thousands of hours scouring
7:27
Utah. Based on that one tip, Josh's morbid holiday proclamation may have been
7:31
rights. No signs of Susan have ever been found, with no body and
7:36
no breaks in the case, cops made a desperate move, hoping Josh would
7:42
snap. With animosity between Josh and his father in law worsening by the minute,
7:46
police encouraged Chuck to host a hawk and wave. Sure Enough, as
7:51
cameras rolled and Chuck held a sign with remember me emblazoned above Susan's photo,
7:58
Josh and his father drove into the frame. A verbal altercation ensued, ending
8:03
with Stephen Powell boasting that he has proof of his daughter in law's instability at
8:07
home in the form of her journals. That was just the slip police hoped
8:13
for. They conducted a raid on Stephen's home and recovered boxes of personal diaries.
8:18
Far more interesting, however, were the journals of Stephen himself. Pages
8:24
and pages detailed how frequently he masturbated thinking about his daughter in law, how
8:31
he worshiped her. A search of his closet revealed ziplock baggies labeled with dates
8:37
and stuffed with her underwear, used cotton swabs, tampons, thousands of photos,
8:41
and many surveillance style were mixed in with seductive magazine shots featuring Susan's head
8:48
pasted on the model's body. Stephen couldn't be arrested for obsession, but the
8:54
videos he'd recently taken of the underaged neighbor girls bathing and using the toilet were
8:58
a different story. Taken in on charges of child pornography and voyeurism, cops
9:05
were sure he'd turn on his son. Stephen did not fold, but it
9:09
gave the Cox family the ammo they needed to challenge Josh's custody of their grandchildren.
9:15
A vicious court battle followed, hinging on disturbing details about Josh's violent childhood
9:20
and the bombshell revelation that one of his PCs contained graphic pornography featuring popular cartoon
9:26
characters and incest fantasies. Pending results from a psycho sexual evaluation, the judge
9:33
limited Josh to supervised visitation. Days later, the boys raced into his home
9:39
with their assigned social worker following behind. Josh stopped to make eye contact and
9:45
smirked at the supervisor before slamming the door in her face, shouting to the
9:50
boys about a surprise for them as he locked her out. The next sound
9:54
was a child's scream. During the gut wrenching nine call that followed, the
10:00
dispatcher dismissed the social workers, pleased for help. As she listed off the
10:03
address, gave Powell's estimated height, panicked as the smell of gas hit the
10:09
air. Before hanging up, the operator told her deputies have to respond to
10:13
emergency, life threatening situations first. Moments later, the home exploded, igniting
10:20
an inferno that would push firefighters back for hours. While Josh could count on
10:26
the silence of his father, the strength of his hard drive encryption, and
10:31
the vast mysteries of the Utah Desert, there were two liabilities he'd lost control
10:35
of. He bashed Charlie and Braden repeatedly with the butt of an axe,
10:41
drenched the house in gasoline, sat on the can and lit the match.
10:46
Josh burned alongside what could have become the most damning evidence of his crimes,
10:52
his sons. That is ten Minute Murder for today brief and bingeable true crime.
11:13
My name is Joe, I'm the host, and thank you for listening.
11:16
If this is your first time listening to Ten Minute Murder, please subscribe
11:20
now so that you can catch up on all the back episodes and never miss
11:24
any of the new ones. Connect on social media see the visuals of what
11:26
we're talking about here in the podcast, and if you like this episode,
11:31
please leave a rating and review on Apple or any place that's possible. Your
11:35
positive feedback is very much appreciated. All things related to ten Minute Murder you
11:39
can go to ten minute Murder dot com. And I don't know if you
11:43
could tell, but about halfway through that episode, I took a sip of
11:46
water, and one moment before I'm young and free and live in LaVita Loca,
11:50
and the next my body forgets how to be a person. I nearly
11:54
drowned myself, and thank god it was just tap water from a glass and
11:58
not from a bottle. As you know how the local news would have tried
12:01
to make it cute, like death by Dasani, which is embarrassing because then
12:07
people would think that I drink Dasani. All right, and our quick question
12:11
for today comes from Mark and Michigan. And by the way, one are
12:15
these questions almost never about true crime. I mean, I'm not complaining,
12:18
but it's kind of weird. Okay, Hey, Joe, what gives you
12:22
the ick? And I'll tell you Mark, It's it's pretty simple being called
12:26
n I can deal with honey, sugar, sweetie, but not hon.
12:31
I don't know what it is about Houn. That bothers me so much.
12:35
Especially being in the South. People are overly nice to you and affectionate.
12:39
They'll give you those sappy nicknames, like if you order some food through a
12:43
drive through and they hand it back to you. Here you go, hun
12:46
No, just don't do that. All right. That's gonna do it for
12:50
today. Thank you so much for listening to ten minute Murder