Where is Susan Powell? Wife of Josh, mom of two very young boys, Charlie and Braden. She disappeared on a very cold December night, 2009. The next day when he reported her missing Josh said he took their sons camping at midnight in below freezing weather, and when he returned he found her gone.
A likely story, the skeptics said. Camping in December? He’s gotta be lying.
News reports say when West Valley City, Utah, police checked the Powell home there was a wet spot on a rug where a red stain had been removed. Josh was using fans to dry it.
Blood. He killed her and then he cleaned up.
Police impounded his van, looked for evidence. Josh rented a car, logged hundreds of miles on the odometer. Where did he go?
He took her body, dumped it somewhere far away.
It’s frustrating for the public. People called the West Valley City cops to demand they arrest Josh. “We don’t have enough evidence,” the cops told the news media. They also had no body. No body, no real evidence, no case.
Josh moved back to Washington State to live with his father, Steve. He had Charlie and Braden, and Susan’s parents were upset. They are media savvy. They kept the case public, and the heat on Josh.
In 2013 the cops said they had given up. The West Valley police said they had no more leads, they’ve searched and they’ve talked to people and they’ve examined evidence and yet Susan is still missing, and oh, by the way, Josh, the main suspect, is dead and so are his boys.
Josh fought Susan’s parents for custody rights. The boys were removed to Susan’s parents’ custody, and Josh was granted limited visitation rights. On Super Bowl Sunday, 2012, the social worker brought them to a house Josh had rented solely for the purpose of seeing his boys. He took the boys, slammed and locked the door in her face. Then he took a hatchet and in an inhuman act so egregious I can hardly write it he struck the boys down and set fire to the house. He had enough gasoline in the house that it exploded. He and the boys were dead.
That’s your proof of guilt. By his actions he admitted he killed his wife.
Josh’s father, Steve, was in prison. He is a pervert, a voyeur. He took sneaky-pete photos of little neighbor girls and was charged and sent up. When Josh and Susan lived with him Steve was obsessed by Susan. He wanted her, and made no bones about it. He asked if he could share her with Josh. It was why Susan wanted Josh to move them to Utah, where they could be away from Steve and his obsession.
Steve had something to do with it. He is a sick bastard, lusting after his daughter-in-law. Josh killed Susan, and Steve had something to do with it. We don’t know what, and maybe he’ll tell us what he knows.
Steve remained tight-lipped.
Josh’s brother, Michael, rented some woodsy property in Oregon. Cops searched there, just like they had searched other areas, campgrounds in Utah, the desert in Nevada. They found nothing.
They won’t find her because Josh was too smart. He threw her down an old mine shaft or a well and no one will ever find her body.
Josh’s brother, Michael, killed himself by jumping from a Minneapolis building.
He knew what happened. He was covering for Josh. His conscience got to him. He couldn’t stand the guilt.
It’s infuriating. Four people (at least that we know of) are dead, and probably Susan, also, and the mystery of where she is is not solved. The mystery is a jigsaw puzzle. There are so many pieces. People are taking the pieces, turning them this way and that, trying to figure where they all fit together. But when they put the pieces on the table there are too many missing.
When West Valley Police announced they had nowhere else to go with the mystery, they had other problems unrelated to Susan Powell. The Attorney General was throwing out cases because West Valley’s narcotics squad had screwed up.Cops were suspended. The police chief retired. The city advertised for a new chief, someone to come in and clean house and put the department back into a position of public trust.
Too bad they had some bad drug cops, and a high profile missing person's case that had dragged on and on and on and cost the police department millions to investigate, according to them, and still went nowhere. On TV and in mystery novels somebody would have figured it out, the public thinks. They’d have found her skeleton and identified her through DNA. You know, like CSI or Bones. Fiction is just so much more satisfying.
But this isn’t fiction. Too bad for the image of the West Valley Police that because of television programs people expect mysteries to be solved quickly and conclusively. Quick resolution — or any resolution at all — is sometimes impossible in real life. And so the question is still out there, where is Susan Powell?
She’s in heaven, say her faithful fellow Mormons. She’s in heaven with Charlie and Braden, free from care, in the loving arms of Jesus. And Josh...? Well, he’s somewhere else.
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