Susan Powell disappeared in 2009. In 2013, the police declared it a cold case. For the last three years, a colleague of mine - an investigative reporter - has been looking into it himself. Here's what he's learned.
On December 6, 2009, Susan Powell disappeared. She has never been found.
The police, from the start, suspected that her husband, Josh Powell, had killed her. His only alibi was that, on midnight of the night of her disappearance, he'd taken the kids on an impromptu camping trip in the desert in the middle of a blizzard.
The evidence against Josh mounted steadily. Splatters of Susan's blood were found in the home. Josh's co-workers reported that he'd been telling them that, if he ever had to hide a body, he'd stuff it in an abandoned mine. And Susan's handwritten will was found, which specifically said: "If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one."
Her 7-year-old son, Charlie, told his grandparents that, when his dad drove them out into the desert on the night of her disappearance, "Mommy was in the trunk." He said that his father drove them out to a mine. "Mom and Dad got out of the car," Charlie said, "and Mom disappeared."
It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but without Susan's body, the police weren't confident enough to press charges. And so they sat on it for more than two years, slowly building up evidence, until, on Feb. 5, 2012, Josh doused his home in gas, attacked his children with a hatchet, and burned the building down. He and his two children burned to death.
The police never found Susan's body. They never found out how she died, and they never found definitive proof that the obvious -- that she'd been killed by her husband -- had happened. But with their lead suspect dead, they closed the case.
New Developments into the Case
All of that is old news. The news in this case comes from a colleague of mine, an investigative reporter named Dave Cawley.
Three years ago, Cawley filed a request with the police departments and got ahold of more than 10,000 pages worth of documents related to the case. Since then, he's made it his full-time job to talk to everyone involved, visit every possible crime scene, and try to keep the search for Susan Powell alive.
Some of the things he's learned are jaw-dropping. He's tracked down Josh Powell's first love, an ex-girlfriend who got away from him before he met Susan. She described how Josh killed her pet rats. She also shared Facebook posts she made, as soon as Susan disappeared, telling Josh to "come forward".
From Josh's old diaries and documents from his parents' divorce, he found out that his father groomed him to believe that women are "only good" for sex. Josh's father made videos of himself describing sexual fantasies of molesting his own daughter, and, when Josh married Susan, kept a collecting of creep shots he's secretly taken of her.
Apparently, that affected Josh. When Josh was a teenager, killed his 4-year-old sister's gerbils and made her stick her hands in the blood. He found out that his mother was trying to keep him away from her because she'd caught him and his brother sexually assaulting her.
He's learned a lot more than that, but he's not allowed sharing all of it with me yet. The station we work for is turning his investigative work into a podcast, and they're not letting him share it until they get the chance to put it.
Basically, he's found some pretty heavy evidence to confirm that Josh definitely did kill her - and, more than that, he's managed to stitch together an incredible psychological portrait of how he became a killer.
You should totally listen to the podcast he's created here: https://thecoldpodcast.com/ or on Apple Podcasts here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cold/id1441595858?mt=2.
Hope this doesn't come off as a shameless plug. I'm just super-impressed at the investigative work someone I'm lucky enough to know has done. Dave's spent 3 years doing practically nothing but looking into Susan Powell's case, and I figured people here would be interested in what he's done.
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