Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (15 page)

When Chuck spoke to her and asked her to reconsider, Josh’s mother was surprised that they were upset about her plans. It hadn’t even occurred to her that burying the killer so close to his victims might be inappropriate.

It was a new problem for the city. Anne Bremner said she would seek a temporary restraining order to block any efforts to bury Josh near Charlie and Braden. “For him to be buried near those kids is unthinkable,” she said. “For God’s sake, for them to lose Susan first, and then the boys, and now this? Just give these people a break.”

Steve Downing, the Coxes’ other attorney, could scarcely believe the Powells’ plans, either, saying with black humor, “Same cemetery . . . different destinations.”

But when he spoke with the Coxes, he realized that they would never feel comfortable passing by Josh’s grave. The Powells’ plans had to be stopped.

Terrica and Alina seemed determined, and someone had to make a move quickly. Since Terrica hadn’t paid for the plot, Sheriff Paul Pastor and Pierce County Sheriff’s Department public information officer Ed Troyer came up with the money from their own pockets to purchase it immediately. Crime Stoppers, a longtime support group for police and victims of crime, helped. When the
Ron and Don
radio show on KIRO-CBS in Seattle told their listeners about it, they were overwhelmed with donations—fifty thousand dollars’ worth—from all over America.

The Woodbine Cemetery has voluntarily reserved the hillside for only children’s graves. Chuck and Judy Cox will use a portion of the money raised to buy a headstone for Charlie and Braden, and a Christmas Box Angel statue will be placed where it overlooks their graves. Richard Paul Evans’s book
The Christmas Box
was the inspiration for the statues. Today there are more than twenty-five in place in America, and nearly one hundred more are in the planning stages.

The Coxes and Pierce County Crime Stoppers, along with detectives on the case, have used part of the fifty thousand dollars as seed money to help carry out the Christmas Box Angel memorials, which will eventually cross this country.

On December 6 each year, vigils are held at all the Christmas Box Angel sites. That is the date of the death of the fictional child in Evans’s book, and is also celebrated as Children’s Day in many parts of the world.

Coincidentally, that is also the anniversary of Susan Cox Powell’s disappearance from her Utah home. Chuck and Judy Cox plan to have Braden and Charlie’s angel statue be in place by December 6, 2012.

Pierce County detective Gary Sanders and his fellow investigators on the Powell case asked Troyer’s group, as well as prosecuting attorney Mark Lindquist’s staff, to join them in another mission to commemorate the two small boys they could not save in time. It is called “Charlie’s Dinosaur.”

Sanders saw one of Charlie’s last drawings—a dinosaur—when the Pierce County detectives served a search warrant. The young detective envisioned a living memorial to Charlie and Braden.

Charlie’s dinosaur drawing has been transformed into the logo for “Charlie’s Dinosaur,” a project aimed at donating backpacks filled with school supplies, clothes, blankets, and food to children in need.

“
Whatever
they need,” Troyer says of his department’s detectives’ goal. “It has to be new; a lot of these kids have never had
anything
new in their lives.”

*   *   *

Josh Powell is not buried in the Woodbine Cemetery. He has been cremated and his family will put his ashes in an unknown location. With all the strong feelings and the anger at what he did, it would be an open invitation to vandalism for the public to know where his remains are.

Public information officer Ed Troyer announced that his department’s investigators had found that Josh Powell planned the destruction of his sons and himself very carefully. Since he was gone, the question of premeditation didn’t matter much in a legal sense. It is interesting, however, for those who study the psychology of abusers and killers.

Before the dread Sunday of February 6, 2012, Josh withdrew seven thousand dollars from his bank account, gave away Charlie’s and Braden’s toys, and took loads of books, papers, and other belongings to a landfill and a Goodwill store. He bought several five-gallon cans of gasoline and a small axe.

Josh had always lived through his computers, seemingly connecting with them more easily than he could communicate with people. He sent an email message to his attorney, apologizing for what he was about to do: “I’m sorry,” he typed. “Goodbye.”

He also wrote to his pastor and his family, saying, “I’m sorry. I just can’t live without my boys.”

Josh’s emails were coherent as he left instructions on how to handle his affairs after his death.

“He sent the emails only minutes before he set the fire,” Ed Troyer explained. “There was no way anyone could have stopped him.”

Josh Powell didn’t mention Susan in any of his final correspondence. Whatever he knew about where she was, he would take it to his grave.

If he hadn’t viewed the boys as his possessions, he could have chosen to kill only himself—but the boys belonged to him, and if he couldn’t have them, then no one could. He also could have planned a more humane way to kill them. Why he used an axe and fire, instead of sleeping pills or other methods by which Charlie and Braden could have gone to sleep peacefully and never have endured Josh’s “big surprise,” is puzzling. But he had, indeed, purchased the hatchet and gasoline for a specific purpose. A deadly purpose.

And appalling. He was angry at the world that was closing in on him, humiliating him, and taking away his power and control. Maybe he was even angry at his sons for wanting to be with anyone but him.

Chuck Cox was in church when he got word of the tragedy. His bishop drove him to the fire-gutted house.

“That house burned completely,” he remembers. “He wanted the whole place to go. They’re gone [Charlie and Braden], and I said, ‘Okay, what do I do now?’ ”

Chuck and Judy had always been aware that Josh was capable of doing something “drastic.”

“I knew that it was possible,” Chuck continued. “I knew that he was capable of doing something if he was pressured and pushed. If he felt there was no hope, he was capable of ending their lives and his life. But to do it in such a manner—by burning your own children—I just couldn’t believe that would’ve happened.”

In his jail cell, Steven Powell was notified of the deaths. He was stoic, but jail officials put him under suicide watch, just to be sure
he
wouldn’t do something drastic, too.

Alina Powell, Josh’s younger sister, blamed law enforcement and their “malfeasance” for causing the fiery deaths of Josh, Charlie, and Braden. She was convinced that both the Utah and Washington investigators had hounded Josh until he could take no more.

*   *   *

After Braden and Charlie were laid to rest, the recriminations continued to abound. Chief Thayle “Buzz” Nielsen flew up from West Valley City to offer any help he could, and tears filled his eyes as he spoke of the boys. It was not clear if it had been Nielsen’s decision to delay in arresting Josh Powell for so long—or that of Salt Lake County district attorney Sim Gill.

Too late. There was obviously nothing that could be done now that an entire family was either dead or missing. The consensus is that Susan is also dead. Her parents will probably never have the slight comfort of finding her body and giving her a proper burial.

More information on the physical evidence found in Susan’s disappearance was finally released after Josh murdered his sons. The West Valley City investigators revealed that they had located a comforter with Susan’s blood on it in a storage locker. This shocked her parents.

Chuck Cox decried the more-than-two-year wait for Utah authorities to arrest Josh. “If Josh had been in jail, the children would be safe.”

No one disagreed with that.

Pierce County sheriff Paul Pastor’s detectives
had
known about the macabre finds and details Chief Nielsen’s investigators discovered since December 2009, but there was nothing the Washington team could do. Susan’s disappearance wasn’t their case.

“Obviously,” Ed Troyer said, “it was frustrating. We were always waiting for the phone call to go arrest him.”

And that phone call never came. Buzz Nielsen’s detectives worked hard, sometimes around the clock, and they were frustrated, too. In a sense, from the beginning it was a game that no one could win. If any arrests were made too soon and there was no conviction, Josh Powell could have gone free, never again to be tried for Susan’s murder.

If they waited too long . . .

Well, of course, they did. And two innocent children died in a monstrous conflagration.

In this case, the risk of an acquittal was far outweighed by the terrible danger that stalked Charlie and Braden Powell.

What began with ice ended with fire. It didn’t have to be this way.

Epilogue

Steven Powell’s trial on voyeurism and pornography charges lay ahead. It had been postponed from November 2011 to March 2012, and actually began in Pierce County Superior Court judge Ronald E. Culpepper’s courtroom in May.

On Monday, May 7, 2012, Steven Powell went on trial on fourteen counts of voyeurism. The single charge of possession of child pornography had been thrown out. Powell appeared calm, almost disconnected, from the legal process taking place.

Alina Powell was there to support her father, and Susan Powell’s parents and family also attended the proceedings.

It wouldn’t be easy to pick twelve jurors and two alternates from the seventy-person jury pool; the Powell saga had had a great deal of publicity, both locally and nationally. Six potential jurors said they didn’t think they could be fair, and several others had reasons not to serve. Even so, Pierce County deputy prosecutors Grant Blinn and Bryce Nelson and defense attorneys Mark Quigley and Travis Currie managed to winnow out seven men and seven women who felt they could judge the testimony and evidence from each side without undue influence from pretrial media coverage.

Would Steven Powell’s explosive journals be allowed into evidence by Judge Culpepper? Having read some of his sexually obsessed entries about his daughter-in-law Susan, and other young women, I could understand why Blinn and Nelson wanted them in, but also doubted that Judge Culpepper would find them admissible. They had shocked and sickened me even after so many years working within the justice system wearing one hat or another, and surely their very vulgarity and depravity would strike many of the jurors as disgusting.

In the end, Steven Powell’s journals were not permitted in this trial. Seeing the small man in his suit, shirt and tie, his hair now snow white, no one would suspect what went on in his head.

Judge Culpepper went out of his way to keep Susan Powell’s “ghost” out of the courtroom. These legal proceedings did not involve her disappearance. He would allow very little—if any—testimony about Susan. And still, those in the gallery who knew her story felt her presence.

Whether the jurors did, no one knows.

In his opening statement, Deputy Prosecutor Nelson told jurors, “This case is about a secret. That secret is that Steven Powell is a voyeur.”

Prosecuting attorney Mark Lindquist’s team made every effort to spare the unknowing targets of Powell’s intrusive cameras from being upset. Pierce County Detective Gary Sanders narrated the series of photos that had been taken from a window in the defendant’s house, explaining that the angles, distances, and point of view could only have come from Steven Powell’s bedroom window. Sanders and other police personnel executing the search warrant had found a box in Steven’s bedroom with a CD containing the surreptitiously taken intimate pictures.

The gallery could not see the pictures of two young girls in their bathroom, and that was as it should be. They had been photographed taking a bath, undressing, using the toilet, and the powerful telescopic camera lens had often been focused tightly on their private parts.

Gary Sanders told jurors about tracking down the families who had lived in the Powell’s neighborhood in 2006 and 2007 until they located the little girls’ mother, and of how she reacted when she found out that someone had watched them stealthily.

Cross-examined by defense attorney Mark Quigley—who clearly wanted to suggest that there were three or four males living in the Powell house at the time who might have taken the photos—Sanders said whoever held the camera had to have been standing at the window of Steven’s bedroom on the second floor. And, of course, the pictures were found hidden in Steven Powell’s bedroom.

The woman whom I have called “Sally Mahoney” for her privacy’s sake and her two daughters, now in their teens, testified. “Sally,” “Lily,” and “Robyn” were identified by their initials, per Lindquist’s office’s attempt to preserve their identity.

Sally told jurors that she had never given any permission for her daughters to be photographed, and the girls testified that they didn’t know someone was watching and filming them.

Grant Blinn asked “Robyn Mahoney” if she ever felt afraid when she lived in the rental house near the Powell residence.

She shook her head. “I felt safe.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I was in my house,” she explained.

If ever children should feel safe, it
is
in their houses with loving parents close by.

Mark Quigley wisely declined to cross-examine either girl.

Jennifer Powell Graves, Josh’s sister who had long since sided with the Cox family, testified for the state about the males who had lived in Steven’s house in the middle years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Her recollection was that two of her grown brothers were not living there at the time.

She also testified that she had seen a journal entry, written in what she recognized as her father’s hand, that noted that the author enjoyed taking pictures of girls and women wearing skirts and shorts.

Steven Powell did not take the witness stand. That probably was a relief for his attorneys; he had blurted out so many odd statements over the past few years when he was interviewed by radio and television reporters, particularly about his belief that he and Susan Powell had had a special and secret sexual relationship.