Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (12 page)

Chapter Ten

Susan’s journals were also in Steven Powell’s house. Her private thoughts since she was seven or eight through her marriage to Josh
were
, indeed, in her husband and father-in-law’s possession.

Moreover, Steven confessed in one of
his
journals that he had snuck into Josh and Susan’s apartment and read Susan’s journals. He had told neither of them about that intrusion, although he was unhappy when he didn’t find anything positive about himself.

Shortly after he arrived, Lieutenant Phil Quinlan of the West Valley City Police Department, who was at the Powell house for the search warrant, asked Alina Powell if she would speak with him. She agreed, and they talked in the backyard. Quinlan asked if Alina had any information that might help them investigate the fate of her missing sister-in-law. Alina shook her head slightly. She told Quinlan that initially she had wondered if Josh might have had something to do with Susan’s absence. But Alina said she’d spoken about that with her brother in several candid conversations, and she had come to believe he wasn’t involved.

“I’m supporting Josh,” Alina said. “Unless there is any evidence that could prove he had anything to do with it.”

“If you found out anything like that, would you report it to us?” Quinlan asked.

She nodded and said she would. Then she asked Quinlan why police had been searching mines out in the area near Ely, Nevada.

“We had to,” the detective lieutenant answered. “We had some evidence that Susan might be there.”

“I think it was all a ruse to put pressure on Josh,” Alina argued.

All the while Quinlan talked with Alina, Josh kept wandering back to where the interview was taking place. He seemed to be concerned that his sister was openly speaking to law enforcement, and he kept urging Alina to leave the property with him. She hadn’t really said anything to implicate Josh, but apparently he was worried that she had.

When Josh left shortly with his boys to go to McDonald’s, Alina remained at her home.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Quinlan was one of the investigators who searched Steven’s bedroom. He tried to open a two-drawer filing cabinet with several keys on a nearby ring, with no success. When he drilled the lock with a power drill, the drawers opened easily. Quinlan stared at a curious object in the top drawer. It was flesh-colored and made of latex. As he looked closer, Quinlan saw it was a reproduction of female buttocks and genitalia. It had a labia, vagina, and anus.

Also in this filing cabinet were more pictures of Susan, including her wedding photos. But someone had cut Josh’s face out of the frames, so that only Susan’s face remained.

The search wasn’t over.

Beyond Steven Powell’s perverted obsession with Susan, the investigators were taken aback to find that he had other sexual perversions. The elder Powell was apparently a voyeur, watching and filming young females in his neighborhood. There were scores more photographs, forbidden shots of little girls and teenagers.

Susan’s was a missing-person case under the West Valley City Police Department’s jurisdiction and the evidence seized so far had to do with her. But now the search team had discovered a possible crime in Pierce County.

They found many, many computer file folders and subfolders containing pictures of prepubescent and slightly older girls. The shots had obviously been taken by someone in Steven’s bedroom, someone who had focused on neighboring houses in this subdivision, which had large houses on small lots. Building codes allowed for six-foot fences, but there was no protection from someone aiming cameras from an upstairs room.

Through Steven Powell’s window, and then a window in the next lot, across a room and down a hall, a camera had been aimed stealthily at two little girls in an upstairs bathroom.

There was no question of
their
innocence as they had taken baths, used the toilet, dressed, and undressed. They had no idea that a man old enough to be their grandfather was aiming a camera with a telephoto lens at them in their most private moments.

But that wasn’t all. Steven Powell’s files held what proved to be
two thousand
pictures he—or someone in his bedroom—had taken of young girls and those who appeared to be in junior high and high school. The camera lens had zoomed in to focus on their breasts, buttocks, and genital area.

Some of the teenagers were playing basketball in a driveway, and, in a few of the shots, a car’s license plate was visible.

The images were in subfolders labeled “Neighbors,” “Taking bath-1,” “Taking bath-2,” “Open window in back house,” and “Brandi* on 191st.”

Some had been taken in daylight, some at night, and the dates on them spanned several years.

The evidence of voyeurism and child pornography was now in the hands of Pierce County sheriff’s detectives. Identifying the victims, however, wouldn’t be easy. Some of the nearby houses were rentals, and several had been sold to new owners over the years.

Pierce County prosecuting attorney Mark Lindquist, Sheriff Paul Pastor, and their respective staffs had grown increasingly frustrated as the probe into Susan Powell’s disappearance moved at what seemed to them a snail’s pace for almost two years. Susan was, basically, a resident of Pierce County, as were most of her relatives and friends, and Lindquist and Pastor wanted to do everything their offices could to bring about arrest warrant(s) for whoever was responsible for her fate.

The problem was that the missing-person case was within the domain of the West Valley City police. Gary Sanders of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department had been involved with the case since three days after Susan vanished, and a few dozen lawmen and criminalists from the sheriff’s office had also taken part in this case, which had grown more convoluted and weird as time passed.

Prosecutor Mark Lindquist had said privately that if this had been his case, he would have charged Josh Powell with murder early on. “There is direct evidence. There is circumstantial evidence. There is motive,” Lindquist pointed out. “There is everything but the body.”

Mark Lindquist finally had probable crimes that had occurred in
his
jurisdiction that involved either Steven or Josh Powell. If exploring the story behind the thousands of clandestine photographs found in the August 25 search warrant should lead back to Susan, there might finally be a break in her case.

Lindquist and two of his deputy prosecutors—Mary Robinett and Grant Blinn—met with detectives from Washington and Utah. They devised a plan to locate the nameless victims, girls who probably hadn’t even known they
were
victims of a sexually obsessed man with a camera.

Gary Sanders and detective Bob Bobrowski from the West Valley City force suggested that they start with the subfolders with titles. Investigators would go to the neighborhood where Steven and Josh Powell lived and attempt to locate the girls caught in the voyeuristic photographs. It meant door-to-door canvassing, one of the oldest police techniques in law enforcement history. Yet it is also one that still can be counted on to elicit information.

Sanders, Maxwell, Bobrowski, detective Kevin Johnson, and sergeant Teresa Berg began by tracing the license plate that showed in some of the bedroom pictures through the computers at the Washington State Department of Motor Vehicles. The plate came back to homeowners who had once lived just across the street from Steven Powell. This would be where “Brandi on 191st” had resided.

On September 19, 2011, the canvassing team contacted Brandi’s parents, who had long since moved to Alabama. They stated unequivocally that their teenage daughters had
never
posed for any of the mystery photographs and that they certainly hadn’t given the mystery cameraman permission.

The detectives moved on to the house directly behind Powell’s residence. This was a likely target because Steven’s bedroom window faced the side of this residence where a window was on the same level.

No one was home.

Three hours later, Gary Sanders and Ellis Maxwell returned and spoke with Loretta Schaller.* She said she had lived there for less than a year and had no young daughters. She was renting the home from a man named Burt Mallett* and provided Mallett’s address. Mrs. Schaller agreed to let the detectives in to look at the layout of the house.

Upstairs, Sanders recognized the bathroom and its fixtures as the room where the younger girls, who appeared to be about seven and eleven, had been photographed. This bathroom, however, was on the far end of the residence from Steven Powell’s house and his bedroom window.

“The only line of sight to be able to photograph this bathroom would be from Steven’s bedroom window,” Sanders wrote in his report. “And the bathroom door of the other house would have had to be open at the time.”

Ellis Maxwell took pictures of the “target house’s” interior before they left. Then Sanders contacted Burt Mallett.

“We own it, but we only lived there for a little while,” Mallett said. “Then we rented it out.”

“To anyone with young girls?” Sanders asked.

“Yeah . . . to a couple that had two little girls—sometime around 2006 to 2008. Not sure which. I’m not very good with dates.”

By checking databases, Gary Sanders determined that a John and Sally Mahoney* had lived in the house from June 2006 to August 2007. They currently lived in a house they had purchased a short distance away. When he drove to their home, Sanders encountered Sally Mahoney and her daughters, Lily* and Robyn,* as they pulled into their driveway.

Sanders instantly recognized Lily as the older girl in the surreptitious photos. He approached Sally and asked if he could speak to her without her daughters being present. She sent the girls into the house and Sanders explained why he was there. He first showed her pictures where her daughters had clothes on. She identified them easily, but then she asked him if there were other photos she didn’t know about. When he told her there were—images of her girls bathing, changing their clothing, and using the toilet—she began to cry.

The thought that someone had taken pictures of her vulnerable little girls was devastating to Sally Mahoney. She said she had never given her permission for her daughters to be photographed in the nude, in their own bathroom. She was appalled that someone had done so.

“My youngest daughter, Robyn, was afraid about being in the bathroom upstairs, with the door shut—I don’t know why,” she explained. “So I told her she could leave the door open and shout down to me to be sure I was there and they were safe.

“Now, I guess they weren’t safe at all,” Sally added, with tears streaking her face.

The investigators continued to call on nearby homes, and they found other residents who recognized the teenagers in the photos they held out.

Still, most of the hundreds of pictures were of the younger girls—Lily and Robyn Mahoney. They weren’t sexually mature; they were innocents, preyed upon by eyes they didn’t see. Robyn must have sensed that someone evil was watching her. Perhaps that was why she insisted on leaving the bathroom door open. Ironically, that open door was where the telephoto lens snaked through.

*   *   *

The time had finally come. Patrol cars parked along the street near the Powells’ tan and white house shortly after 11
P.M.
on September 22. It was dark out and there were no whirling blue lights or wailing of sirens to announce the presence of law enforcement officers outside.

Gary Sanders asked one unmarked patrol unit to drive by the Powells’ house to see if there were vehicles in the driveway. They made three passes and noted only two cars, but they weren’t the ones driven by Steven Powell. On the fourth pass, the patrol officers saw Steven Powell pull into the driveway and emerge from his Department of Corrections state-owned van.

At 11:14
P.M.
on September 22, 2011, Steven Powell was arrested on a Pierce County Superior Court warrant. He was booked into the Pierce County Jail in Tacoma twenty minutes later. He was arraigned the next morning and charged with fourteen counts of voyeurism for the photographs he’d furtively taken of young girls, and one count of possession of child pornography. Bail was set at two hundred thousand dollars.

He did not comment or protest his arrest.

Back at the house he owned, John, Michael, Alina, Josh, Charlie, and Braden now lived for the first time in years without the man who had wielded absolute authority over them.

Chapter Eleven

Chuck and Judy Cox were worried sick about their grandsons. They had had virtually no contact with Charlie and Braden for months, and they wondered what was going to happen next. They wanted very much to have Susan’s little boys with
them,
where they could be sure they were safe.

Within days of Steven Powell’s arrest, workers from the Department of Social and Health Services removed Charlie and Braden from the house they had been living in since a few weeks after their mother disappeared. Everyone—except for the Powell family, including, of course, Josh—was concerned about what the secrecy, probable brainwashing by their father, the police presence, and the loss of their mother were doing to the boys. Charlie was now six, and Braden, four.

Judy and Chuck Cox received many emails, letters, and calls from people who wanted to help them keep the boys safe.

“I got a call from a marine officer,” Judy recalled. “He said he had six children himself, and he offered to ‘take Josh out’ if we said the word. Of course I told him that we didn’t want that—that we would never be part of anything violent. But I thanked him for his consideration.”

Shortly after Steven Powell’s arrest, Braden and Charlie were temporarily placed in a foster home while their situation was assessed.

Josh wanted them back, but Chuck and Judy Cox intervened, asking to have the boys stay with them. Luckily, their grandsons spent very little time in the foster home before Pierce County Superior Court judge Kathryn J. Nelson ordered that they be placed with the Coxes until the best place for them to be was determined.