Police/missing person\'s Josh Powell (l) and Susan Powell (r)
Susan Cox Powell was last seen alive on December 6, 2009 at her home in West Valley City, Utah. The mother of two boys, Charlie and Braden, disappeared, never to return, in a case that has gone cold. One big factor in the case running out of leads is that the person who some believe is the most likely suspect in her disappearance — her husband, Josh Powell, is dead.
In the months before her sudden disappearance, Susan wrote a letter and made a video saying “Josh threatened to ‘destroy her’ if she filed for divorce. She then said that if she dies ‘it may not be an accident, even if it may look like one.’ The letter was kept in Susan’s safe deposit box, which only she had access to,” KUTV reported.
On December 6, 2009 Susan took her sons to church, saw a friend, and made a phone call to a friend in the afternoon. That was the last time anyone outside of her family saw or heard from her, according to KUTV.
Josh told police he took his sons, then 2 and 4-years-old, camping sometime around midnight that night, when it was below freezing and there was a snowstorm, KUTV reported. By the time he and the boys came home in the late afternoon on December 7, Susan had been reported missing when she failed to show up at work and to drop off her children at daycare. according to KUTV.
While police considered Josh a person of interest, he was never charged in the disappearance of Susan, and she has never been found.
Three years after Susan disappeared, her husband killed himself and their two young sons in a murder-suicide.
According to the Susan Cox Powell Foundation:
On February 5th, 2012, Charlie Powell age 7 and Braden Powell age 5 died of smoke inhalation when their father Joshua Powell committed suicide by burning down the house he rented. During the first supervised visit following Josh’s failure to regain custody of the boys, Joshua locked the visitation supervisor out of the house, then attacked Charlie then Braden with a hatchet and set the house ablaze. Joshua left messages with his attorney and family members stating he was sorry “for all the people he had hurt”.
Some Believe Josh Poisoned Susan
According to Susan’s father, Chuck Cox, she was a dedicated mother who never would’ve abandon her kids, nor would she be okay with her husband taking her two small children on a camping trip in the middle of a freezing cold night, Newsweek reported.
Cox believes his son-in-law, Josh, poisoned his wife the night she died when he made her pancakes for dinner, according to Newsweek. It was rare for him to cook.
“My theory of what happened?” Cox told Newsweek, “Josh poisoned her somehow on that day through the pancakes that he made,” he said. “And then he either disposed of her by dropping her off in the snow somewhere or he killed her and dropped her in the snow somewhere.”
Investigative reporter Dave Cawley who covered the case in-depth on his podcast, “Cold,” also thinks Josh killed Susan. According to My Northwest, Cawley believes the murder was planned years in advance when Josh took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on Susan. With the marriage being on the rocks and Susan planning to leave Josh by April of 2010, according to My Northwest, Josh hastily killed his wife.
Cawley suspects Josh poisoned Susan to incapacitate her, then used a power tool to kill her since blood spatter was found on the walls of the family’s home. While a body would be needed to collect the insurance money, Cawley suspects things went awry and Josh felt like he had to hide the body so as to not be considered a murder suspect, My Northwest reported.
But possibly the best clues come from Susan’s children, who may have been with Josh if and when he killed their mother and disposed of her body.
In the months after Susan’s disappearance, the boys seemed to have an idea about what happened to their mother.
4-Year-Old Charlie Powell Said his Mom Was In a Mine
Anne Bremner represented Chuck and Judith Cox in the disappearance of their daughter, Susan. She told HLN 4-year-old Charlie had been saying things about his mother’s whereabouts shortly after she went missing, according to CNN.
“I know that to be true in this case because as recently as Christmas, the boys told their grandparents, ‘Mommy’s in the mine. If we go to the mine, we’ll find Mommy,’” she said.
KUTV reported that Charlie told police he did go camping with his father and brother, but he also said Susan was with them but didn’t go back home with her family. According to Susan’s parents, Braden, who was only 2-years-old when his mom disappeared, drew a picture of a van with three people in it, but told his daycare teachers, “mommy was in the trunk.”
KSL News Radio reported, “The day after Susan Powell disappeared, her four-year-old son, Charlie, told the police that he knew exactly where his mother was. She had joined the family on a midnight drive, he told them, and she’d stayed at a place the boy called “Dinosaur National Park. ‘My mom stayed where the crystals are because it has so much pretty where the crystals grow.’”
Charlie and Braden were murdered by their father during a supervised visit in Washington where Josh moved with the boys shortly after Susan’s disappearance. The Cox’s were in a custody battle with Josh over the boys, according to the Kitsap Sun, and locked the social worker who was supervising the visit out of the home before the house exploded with Josh, Charlie, and Braden inside.
NEW: A jury found Friday that Washington state officials were partially responsible for the deaths of missing Utah woman Susan Cox Powell’s two sons at the hands of their father, and awarded $98 million to the sons’ estates. t.co/Da5AnlehxR
In the wake of Charlie and Braden’s murders, the state of Washington state was made to pay $98 million to the boys’ estates after a jury found Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services were in part responsible for not protecting the boys from a man who many believe killed their mother, according to the Associated Press.
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