Susan Powell & Josh Powell: Evidence, Murder-Suicide, and Liability

The Susan Powell case began on December 6, 2009, when 28-year-old Susan Cox Powell vanished from her West Valley City, Utah, home; suspicion fell almost immediately on her husband, Josh Powell, who was never charged and who killed the couple’s two young sons and himself in a house explosion in February 2012. Susan’s body has never been found. In the years since, Washington state was held liable for negligence in the boys’ deaths, Josh’s father was convicted of voyeurism and child pornography, and the investigation into Susan’s disappearance remains open.

What Happened the Night Susan Disappeared

Susan Powell attended church with her sons — four-year-old Charlie and two-year-old Braden — on the morning of December 6, 2009. She made her last known phone call to a friend at 2:29 p.m. A neighbor saw her napping at home around 5:00 p.m. Later that night, another neighbor saw Josh pull into the garage around 8:30 p.m. and heard a car alarm from inside the closed garage at 11:45 p.m.¹

Josh told police he had left the house sometime between midnight and 12:30 a.m. with both boys for a camping trip at Simpson Springs, a remote campground roughly two hours away, in freezing December temperatures. He said Susan stayed behind, asleep. When the boys did not appear at daycare the next morning, family called police, who entered the home fearing carbon monoxide poisoning. Inside, officers found two box fans blowing on a wet spot on the carpet.¹

Josh returned home around 5:00 p.m. on December 7 carrying Susan’s cell phone with the SIM card removed. Also in his vehicle: a generator, a gas canister, tarps, and a shovel. Taken in for questioning by Detective Ellis Maxwell of the West Valley City Police Department, Josh said he could not remember the events of that night.¹²

Why Investigators Focused on Josh Powell

A December 9 search warrant on the Powell home turned up Susan’s blood on the floor next to a sofa. Investigators also found life insurance policies on Susan totaling $1.5 million. In a bank safe deposit box was a handwritten document Susan had titled “Last will & testament.” She had written: “If Susan Powell dies it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one.” The note laid out four years of marital problems and mentioned the life insurance policies Josh had taken out on her.³

Four-year-old Charlie told investigators the day after his mother disappeared that she had gone camping with them but “didn’t come back,” saying she “stayed at Dinosaur National Park.” Weeks later he told a church teacher, “My mom is dead.”²³

Roughly ten days after the disappearance, investigators learned Josh had filed paperwork to withdraw money from Susan’s retirement account.² A December 10 search of Simpson Springs turned up no evidence of the campsite Josh described.¹ Josh was seen cleaning his garage and minivan extensively, did not join search efforts, and showed no apparent urgency about finding his wife.

About a week after Susan vanished, police publicly named Josh a person of interest. Detective Maxwell believed the circumstantial case was strong enough to hold him, but the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office declined to file charges without a body. Josh Powell was never arrested or charged in his wife’s disappearance.²³

Susan’s Own Warnings and the Marriage Behind Her Disappearance

Susan had kept secret journals. In 2008, she wrote: “If I die, it may not be an accident even if it looks like one. Take care of my boys.” Another 2008 entry: “Will he do something irrational? Do I need to pack up kids and run… Will he hurt me and/or take the kids, hurt them?”⁴

Her writings and accounts from her family described a marriage defined by control. Josh restricted household food spending, declaring the family would eat only what they grew in their garden. He limited Susan’s access to the phone and computer, forwarded home calls to his own cell phone, and refused to let her have her own phone. Susan’s sister told police that Josh monitored their conversations, forcing her to call Susan at work to speak privately. In the fall of 2007, Susan told her sister that Josh had threatened to kill her before he would agree to a divorce. She described his “violent temper” and wrote that she believed he had bipolar disorder.⁴

By the fall of 2009, Susan had begun pulling away. She opened her own bank account, obtained her own computer and cell phone, and started taking the family car on her days off. To a friend she wrote, “I think he thought I would always be docile and do whatever he says… Now I’ve learned the mother bear protection/survival mode so I’m stronger than I think he ever thought would happen.” She disappeared weeks later.⁴

The 2012 Murder-Suicide

Josh and the boys moved in with his father, Steven Powell, in Puyallup, Washington, after Susan disappeared. In September 2011, police raided that home searching for Susan’s girlhood diaries and instead found thousands of covertly filmed images of women and girls — including images of Susan — along with photographs of two neighborhood girls, ages eight and ten, taken through a bathroom window. Steven Powell was arrested that November on 14 counts of voyeurism, convicted in May 2012, and sentenced to 30 months in prison.⁵⁶

Steven’s arrest triggered a chain of custody changes. Charlie and Braden were placed in the protective custody of Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), and Susan’s parents, Chuck and Judy Cox, became their foster parents. Josh received court-mandated supervised visitation.⁷

In November 2011, DSHS learned of incestuous depictions of minors on Josh’s Utah computer, a history of sexually abusing his sister, molesting another girl, animal cruelty, past suicide attempts, and threatening his mother with a knife. Even so, DSHS social workers moved the supervised visits to Josh’s rental home in Graham, Washington, contrary to agency policies against visits in a noncustodial parent’s home, and increased visitation from once to twice per week in December 2011.⁷

At a dependency review hearing on February 1, 2012, a judge denied Josh’s motion for custody and ordered him to undergo a psychosexual evaluation. The boys’ therapist, Lori Narigi, recommended that visits be supervised only by trained DSHS staff. On February 3, Chuck Cox called social worker Forest Jacobson to warn that Josh was “backed into a corner” and that the boys were in danger. Jacobson assured him that “continued visitations would be fine because nothing had happened in the past.”⁷

On February 5, 2012, visitation supervisor Elizabeth Griffin-Hall of Foster Care Resources Network brought Charlie and Braden to Josh’s rental home. When the boys reached the door, Josh let them inside, looked at Griffin-Hall, and slammed the door, locking her out.⁸⁹¹⁰

At 12:16 p.m., the house exploded. Griffin-Hall told dispatch, “He exploded the house.” Law enforcement did not arrive until 12:30 p.m., 22 minutes after the 911 call.⁸¹⁰

Investigators found that Josh had struck the boys about the neck with a hatchet before dousing the house in gasoline and igniting it. The coroner determined that fire and smoke inhalation caused the deaths. The three bodies were found together in a back bedroom. Before the killings, Josh had emailed his sister, Alina, about handling his finances and left a voicemail stating, “I’m not able to live without my sons and I’m not able to go on anymore.”⁸ Detective Maxwell later called the murder-suicide an “admission of guilt” in Susan’s disappearance.²

Washington State Held Liable for the Boys’ Deaths

Chuck and Judy Cox sued DSHS, alleging the agency’s negligence led to Charlie and Braden’s deaths. A Pierce County Superior Court jury found DSHS liable and awarded $98.5 million, calculated based on the children’s conscious pain and suffering during the attack. DSHS presented no alternative damages figure at trial.¹¹

Judge Stanley Rumbaugh later cut the verdict by two-thirds to roughly $32.8 million, saying the original award “shocks the conscience of the court.” The Cox family rejected the reduction and opted for a new trial on damages. On April 18, 2023, a three-judge panel of the Washington State Court of Appeals reversed Rumbaugh’s reduction and reinstated the full $98.5 million verdict, ruling that the judge had “intruded on the jury’s constitutional prerogative” by reweighing the evidence and that the award was “within the range of substantial evidence in the record.” The court found nothing to suggest the jury had been motivated by “passion or prejudice.”¹¹⁷

Policy Changes in Washington

An August 2012 DSHS child fatality review found that state social workers had failed to consult with law enforcement before permitting Josh to host supervised visits at his home while police were actively investigating Susan’s disappearance. The committee recommended that DSHS coordinate with detectives before altering parent-child contact arrangements tied to active criminal investigations, and that social workers immediately reassess visitation when a court orders a psychosexual evaluation.¹²

In April 2013, the Washington legislature passed SSB 5315, which codified several of those recommendations. The law requires DSHS to make concerted efforts to consult with law enforcement when a parent is a suspect in a violent crime investigation with child safety implications, mandates reassessment of visitation when a parent is ordered to undergo a psychosexual evaluation, authorizes the agency to restrict visitation pending court approval if a safety assessment indicates a risk, and requires ongoing domestic violence training for caseworkers handling dependency cases.¹³

Steven and Michael Powell

Steven Powell was charged separately with possession of child pornography after an initial dismissal was overturned on appeal. A jury convicted him in July 2015, and he received a five-year sentence. He died on July 22, 2018, at a hospital in Tacoma, Washington, from heart complications, at age 68.⁶¹⁴ Trial jurors had reviewed journal entries in which Steven admitted he “enjoyed images of Susan Powell the most.”¹⁵

Josh’s brother Michael Powell died by suicide on February 11, 2013, after jumping from a building in Minneapolis. He was 30 and a doctoral candidate in cognitive science at the University of Minnesota.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

Where the Case Stands

Susan Powell’s remains have never been recovered. Starting days after she vanished, West Valley City police searched hundreds of abandoned hard-rock mines across Utah’s West Desert — the Simpson, Dugway, Thomas, and Fish Springs mountain ranges — using ATVs, snowmobiles, borehole cameras, and specialized lighting. A multi-week operation with the Utah Department of Natural Resources began in January 2010, and a public search near Ely, Nevada, followed in August 2011. The focus on mines came in part from a comment Josh made to a coworker in 2008 that mines would be ideal places to hide bodies, together with his known interest in the West Desert.¹⁹

In February 2022, a privately funded team found bones and clothing in an abandoned Utah mine, but DNA testing confirmed the bones were not human and a recovered pair of pants was linked to a male.²⁰ West Valley City police declared the case cold in May 2013.¹⁹ Utah declared Susan legally dead on November 14, 2019; she had been presumed dead under Utah law since the fifth anniversary of her disappearance in December 2014.²¹

One unresolved piece of evidence is a Western Digital hard drive seized from Josh’s home on December 8, 2009, encrypted with TrueCrypt. Josh claimed he could not remember the password. In 2013, Decipher Forensics cracked the top-level encryption with a dictionary attack but found the partition apparently blank, suggesting a nested encrypted volume. Password-cracking software ran for nearly two years before the hardware failed. The effort continued under a volunteer project called “Project Sunlight,” led by cybersecurity analyst Rob Burton.²² Investigators also determined that Josh and Michael used sophisticated encryption for their communications. Neither the FBI nor the Secret Service has been able to decipher those messages.²³

Chuck and Judy Cox became advocates for domestic violence awareness and child welfare reform after losing their daughter and grandsons. Chuck said publicly that he believed Susan’s body would eventually be found.²⁴ Judy Cox died on February 18, 2026, more than 16 years after her daughter’s disappearance.²⁵

1
KUTV. Timeline: What We Know in the 10 Years Since Susan Cox Powell Went Missing
2
ABC News. Susan Powell Disappearance, Young Sons’ Horrific Death Haunts
3
NBC News. Court Documents: Susan Powell’s Blood, Hand Written Note Expressing Fear
4
KATU. Susan Powell’s Diary Foreshadows Family Tragedy
5
NBC News. Steven Powell Sentenced to 2 1/2 Years for Voyeurism
6
Pierce County. Steven Powell Criminal Charges and Convictions
7
Washington Courts. Cox v. Department of Social and Health Services, No. 55438-1-II
8
COLD Podcast. Killing Susan’s Sons: Murder-Suicide Full Transcript
9
ABC News. Josh Powell Told Sons “Surprise”
10
CBS News. Josh Powell Murder-Suicide: 911 Dispatcher Reprimanded for Handling of Emergency Call
11
The News Tribune. Cox Family Awarded $98.5 Million in Powell Wrongful Death Suit
12
NBC News. State Social Workers Faulted on Young Sons’ Visits in Josh Powell Case
13
Washington State Legislature. SSB 5315 Bill Report
14
KJZZ. Father-in-Law of Missing Utah Woman, Grandfather to Her Slain Children, Dies
15
ABC News. Steven Powell Guilty on Voyeurism Charges
16
ABC News. Josh Powell’s Brother Commits Suicide
17
Oxygen. Who Is Michael Powell and His Connection to the Disappearance
18
Deseret News. Cold: Josh Powell’s Brother Lied Under Oath
19
COLD Podcast. Scouring the Desert
20
KING 5. Bones Found in Utah Mine Not Susan Powell
21
FOX 13 Now. Trial Begins Over the Deaths of Susan Cox Powell’s Children
22
COLD Podcast. Project Sunlight
23
KOMO News. Investigators Still Trying to Crack Computer in Susan Powell Case
24
MyNorthwest. Cold: Susan Powell 10 Years After Disappearance
25
FOX 13 Now. Mother of Susan Cox Powell Dies After 15 Years of Searching