Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (14 page)

“He needed three different kinds,” Laurie remembers. “I think it was a tomato, an ear of corn, and peas or string beans. I suggested that he draw and color them himself because he was such a good artist. And he did a really good job. When he was finished, he brought his drawings over to me, and, of course, I admired them.

“When I started to hand them back—because he always wanted his projects back—he said, ‘No.’ I asked him why, and he told me they were for me. He grinned and said I could keep them! I know it doesn’t sound like a huge move forward—but, for Charlie, it was. He finally felt safe enough to share.”

The boys’ great-aunt Pam, Chuck’s sister, read to them before they were tucked in. Everything seemed more normal than it had been for a long time.

Sunday turned out to be an uncommonly sunny day for western Washington in February, especially since there had been blizzards and power outages earlier in the week in the mountains. Usually, Charlie and Braden were eager to go to Josh’s house, but, for some reason, this time they weren’t.

It was a relatively new place for them; Josh Powell had told authorities that he’d moved out of his father’s house in Puyallup and into a rental in Graham, Washington. It would be just for him and his boys.

No one knew that he didn’t really live in the house in the middle of a cul-de-sac; it was barely furnished, although he had enough furniture in the living room and kitchen to make it
look
as if he lived there. Caseworkers assumed that he just hadn’t gotten around to unpacking yet.

There had been any number of things that Josh Powell did between his court date on Thursday and Sunday morning. He didn’t broadcast his activities, but in retrospect, they demonstrate how carefully he prepared for what he was about to do. But no one could see that from the other end.

He wasn’t crazy—not in the legal or medical sense.

In many states, supervised visits with children or estranged spouses don’t take place in private homes. That isn’t always the case in Washington. The ideal situation is to have a central place where involved parties won’t meet. Visits are often staggered, particularly when one parent delivers a child or children to the other in a very intense custody battle. One can come in a door, leave the children with a social worker, and the other parent enters fifteen or thirty minutes later through a different door. That helps to defuse potential arguments. Indeed, in Montana, if one parent is even late for a visit, supervising caseworkers are instructed to call police at once so that feuding parents won’t run into each other.

And there should be security officers present to protect all parties. Marriages that began with promises of love forever can become dangerous, particularly when the parents are fighting over where their children will live, who will support them, and numerous other problems.

Of course, in the Powell case, there was no mother fighting to keep her children with her. Susan was gone. Even so, experts on supervised visits would never allow a woman supervisor to go to the private home of a man known to be upset and angry by a recent judge’s ruling.

There are all different degrees of people referred to as
social workers.
Some may be kind people who have had a weekend of “training” to prepare them for their assignments—which can include supervised visits. I was a social worker for more than a year after I graduated with a BA degree from the University of Washington. I worked for the Washington State Department of Public Assistance and handled mostly welfare applications, client visitations, and monthly welfare checks for those who qualified. My daughter, Laura, who works in another state, went to college for seven years to attain a master’s degree in social work. She has counseled children, their parents, and geriatric clients. She has also overseen supervised visitations, but only in a neutral building with safety procedures in place and adequate security, and never in a private home.

In Washington State, Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law SB 5020 on April 15, 2011, which protects professional social workers in the state. The legislation prevents someone without a degree in social work from working in a job titled “social work.” Only those with a degree from an accredited school of social work will be allowed to fill those positions. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) is hoping all states will follow suit.

*   *   *

Elizabeth Griffin-Hall is a sweet-faced, plumpish woman in her sixties. In February 2012, she worked for a company that was under contract to Washington State’s Child Protective Services which provides human services workers to accompany children in supervised visitations. She has neither a four-year degree nor a master’s degree, although she has undergone training provided by her employer. Although the media continually referred to Griffin-Hall as a “social worker,” that term was not accurate.

For Charlie and Braden Powell, she was like another grandmother, someone who cared for them, cuddled them, and went along when they visited their father. There is no question that Griffin-Hall loved the boys and was quite involved with them emotionally.

On the morning of Sunday, February 6, Charlie and Braden balked at going to their father’s house. Usually they were anxious to go—but this Sunday morning, they wanted to stay with Chuck and Judy Cox. They didn’t know about the strange test the judge said their father had to have, and if they had known, they wouldn’t have understood it. But they felt safer all the time with their grandparents and their mom’s relatives, and they didn’t want to leave.

Chuck and Judy had to coax the little boys to get dressed for the visit, reminding them how much fun they had with their dad. They didn’t want to make them go to visit Josh, but it was the law, and they had to follow Washington’s guidelines.

Josh said negative things about them to Charlie and Braden and they didn’t want to confuse their grandsons, so they tried to speak as well of Josh as they could.

Finally, Charlie and Braden changed out of their pajamas and said they would go with Elizabeth Griffin-Hall to Josh’s house. Griffin-Hall carefully put them into car seats and fastened the straps. They began to get a little more enthusiastic about their weekly visit as they got closer to the town of Graham.

They didn’t have anyone else with them; there was no deputy to stand by for backup. It would have been a prudent idea to have law enforcement protection, considering how angry Josh Powell had been after court three days before.

It wasn’t very far to Josh’s new rental. Griffin-Hall pulled in front of Josh’s house and unbuckled Charlie and Braden, following closely behind them as they ran toward the front door.

Josh opened the door, and the boys ran in. Griffin-Hall recalls that Josh looked “kind of sheepish,” in the glimpse she saw of him. He had opened the door just enough for his sons to get inside, and then he slammed it in her face. Hard.

She could hear Josh telling Charlie, “I have a really
big
surprise for you!”

And then she heard Braden cry out in pain. She thought at first that he must have tripped or banged his foot on something; he’d injured it a few days before.

Elizabeth banged on the door and the windows, asking Josh to let her in. But he didn’t. She ran around the house to look into the windows but couldn’t see what was going on.

And then she smelled gasoline. What could that mean? There is something frightening about any strong smell that emanates from where it shouldn’t be. Gasoline smells inside a house? They had to come from inside; there were no cars around that were running, nobody outside lighting a trash fire. Her car was turned off.

When she got no response at all from her knocking and pounding, Elizabeth Griffin-Hall ran back to her car where her purse and cell phone were. She didn’t have the physical power to try to break into Josh’s house, and she couldn’t see anyone else around.

She called 911.

What happened next was a tragedy of errors. For some unfathomable reason, the operator who monitored Griffin-Hall’s call didn’t take her seriously. True, she was frightened and spoke very rapidly. But many 911 callers do. She told him that she was in front of Josh Powell’s house, that her two charges were inside on what was supposed to be a supervised visit. But she couldn’t get in, and she smelled gasoline. She tried to find the address, although she could feel herself panicking and had trouble locating it in her purse or her car. She dropped the slip of paper with the address on it, and had to pick it up. The 911 operator sounded impatient.

Griffin-Hall did not immediately respond to the questions he asked her—probably because they made little sense to her. What did it matter when Josh’s birthday was or how much he weighed? As she failed to answer, the operator paid less attention to her comments about Josh’s court hearing, that he was a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, and how she feared for the boys. Desperate, she asked how long it would be before deputies could get there.

And the operator said, “We have to respond to life-threatening emergencies first, ma’am.”

She told him that this could very well be a life-threatening emergency, but he didn’t seem to comprehend what she was saying. That was not all his fault. She spoke breathlessly and it was somewhat hard to make out her words. Still, the 911 operator’s repeated questions about who was supervising
her
were patronizing and puzzling, and she couldn’t make him understand that
she
was the supervisor in this situation.

“I tried to get in,” she told the 911 operator. “I begged him to let me in . . .”

She gave the address once more, and finally she believed that help was on the way.

But it was too late. She had been on the phone six minutes. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered how quickly deputies and the fire department vehicles were dispatched. From where Elizabeth Griffin-Hall stood in front of the house next door to Josh’s, she watched in horror as a tremendous roar shook Josh’s house, and flames and smoke boiled out, shooting twenty feet or more toward the sky.

Clearly in shock, Elizabeth tried calling her supervisor, and then the fire department dispatcher because she hadn’t seen a fire truck yet. She gave the address again and answered more needless questions. She knew in her heart the boys were gone; they couldn’t survive in that burning hellhole. But she didn’t want to accept that yet.

In the end, she just hung up. Neighbors huddled along the street, watching in horror. They didn’t know who lived there. Most of them thought the house was empty, which was understandable since Josh had never actually moved in.

Graham Fire Department deputy chief Gary Franz told reporters that the roof was gone when they got there. It didn’t take them long to “tap” the fire as they knocked down walls that had turned to cinder. Franz commented that Elizabeth Griffin-Hall was lucky to be alive. If she hadn’t gone out to her car to grab her cell phone, she undoubtedly would have died, too.

The firefighters found three bodies: an adult and two small boys.

Josh Powell looked to have been sitting on a five-gallon gas can when he lit a match. It had virtually melted into him, and he was burned beyond recognition. He would ultimately need to be identified by a forensic dentist to be sure it was really him.

Charlie and Braden had suffered “chopping” wounds to their heads and necks from an axe, although forensic pathologists would determine they were not fatal wounds.

Miraculously, the little boys lay beside each other, with no visible burns at all. They were holding hands.

Postmortem examination would prove that all three of them had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

*   *   *

Probably everyone in Washington and Utah can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Charlie and Braden Powell had perished in an explosion and conflagration, set by their own father. It was like when Mount St. Helens erupted, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

I was standing at my kitchen counter when a friend called to tell me. I refused to believe it, but then I had to. I was angry at first, asking over and over in my head,
Why didn’t they have deputies backing them up?

Like everyone else, I wanted to blame someone. Anne Bremner called to tell me that Chuck had already arrived at the burned-out shell of the house, and that her paralegal, Misty Scott, was at the Coxes’ house. Chuck and Judy were in shock but they were holding together. They had been through so much loss. I didn’t see how they could survive this.

Anne and I had planned to have dinner together on that awful Sunday night, and we did—but we just stared at each other in wordless denial as Anne’s cell phone rang constantly with calls from television and radio shows, and news services.

The only comfort was that we both believed that Charlie and Braden were now with their mom.

Chapter Thirteen

Fourteen hundred mourners attended memorial services for Charlie and Braden. Their teachers brushed back tears as they remembered them, what an exceptional artist Charlie was, how they both loved bugs and frogs and ducks. They were such new little souls, and their lives had been blighted by the man who had destroyed them—almost from the beginning.

The boys were buried in a single casket in Puyallup’s Woodbine Cemetery. One day, if they should ever find Susan’s remains, Chuck and Judy Cox would lay her to rest with her little boys. Her relatives had a graveside service, and were even gracious enough to allow Terrica Powell and her children to have their own small ceremony of remembrance there. But they were horrified when Josh’s mother wanted to bury Josh close to Charlie and Braden in the same cemetery!

With some of her family, Terrica Powell visited Woodbine and chose a plot that overlooked the boys’ grave. A grave was quickly dug and plywood put over it, but the Powell family hadn’t yet paid for it when Chuck found out about their plans. The Cox family threatened to sue the city-owned public cemetery if they allowed the man who killed their grandsons to be buried there.

Once again, they sensed Terrica Powell’s almost complete lack of sensitivity in some areas. Why on earth would she think they could ever have any kind of peace visiting their grandsons when Josh’s remains were so close?