There’s a well-known saying: no parent should ever bury their child.
In the shocking story of Joshua Powell, the 36-year-old wound up being the reason his children, seven-year-old Charlie and five-year-old Braden, lost their lives in a terrible way. Unbelievably, there’s more to this dark tale.
It began on the night of December 6, 2009, in West Valley City, Utah. Susan Powell, the loving mother of Charlie and Braden, vanished without a trace.
Her disappearance was immediately thought to be the result of foul play. After all, the doting mother would never willingly leave her two sons behind. The community banded together to search for her, to no avail.
Her husband, Joshua, seemed as perplexed as everyone else at his wife’s sudden disappearance.
On the day of her vanishing, he’d taken the two boys on a camping trip in spite of the freezing temperatures and harsh weather.
When Joshua returned home with the kids, his wife was gone. Susan’s family was eventually alerted to her disappearance, and it immediately sent them into panic mode.
They knew, without a doubt, she’d never take off from the family home without her children. Joshua’s behavior in the days that followed caused a cloud of suspicion to hover above him.
The more investigators dug deep into Powell’s family life, the more they found it was a marriage bound by tension and quarreling.
This led to authorities questioning Joshua’s motives in taking his kids camping in such bitter weather. Was he the one to blame for Susan’s disappearance? The closer they looked, the darker things seemed to get.
Eventually, due to Joshua’s erratic behavior, Charlie and Braden were removed from his care.
The father-of-two didn’t take this lightly, and sadly, his two boys would pay for their father’s desire for vengeance.
Joshua Meets Susan
Joshua Powell was born in January 1976 in Puyallup, Washington. He was one of five siblings, though he was known to be cruel and antisocial to his sisters and mother.
At one point, he threatened his mother with a butcher’s knife and also harmed his sister’s pet gerbils.
Perhaps Joshua’s twisted behavior was, in part, caused by his father, Steven, who was reportedly a dysfunctional father.
He would share inappropriate content with his young boys, often watching adult material with them.
He wouldn’t discourage his sons’ antisocial acts, and this allowed Joshua to develop into a man with a warped view of how to treat women in a relationship.
He met his first real girlfriend, Catherine Everett, at church. The pair eventually moved in together, and this is when Joshua exposed his controlling side. He refused to let Catherine see her friends and family and would limit her movements.
She went to a friend’s house to flee the relationship and broke up with him over the phone.
When you learn just how wicked Joshua could turn when he wasn’t able to control the people in his life, you could easily argue that Catherine had a lucky escape.
In November 2000, Joshua met Susan Cox at a party, and the two hit it off. They quickly began dating and would marry in the spring of 2001. Charlie was born four years later, and Braden entered the world two years after that.
From the outside, they looked like the perfect family unit.
However, things would take a peculiar—and possibly dangerous—turn when the Powells moved in with Joshua’s father, Steven.
Unbeknownst to Susan, her father-in-law was infatuated with her. He would secretly record her on his camcorder and would take her used underwear from her laundry basket.
He would often spy on her when she used the shared bathroom. Without Susan’s knowledge or consent, Steven would read her journal and look through her items when she wasn’t around.
In 2003, he eventually told Susan how he felt about her, though the young woman firmly rejected him. This rejection was picked up by Steven’s ever-present camcorder microphone.
The awkward interaction led to the Powells moving out of state.
Around this time, Joshua’s controlling behavior got worse. Susan wrote about it in her journals and documented his violent outbursts.
In the summer of 2008, Susan recorded a video of the damage Joshua had carried out on their property. She also wrote a note explaining how her marriage was tumultuous and added ominously, “If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one.”
At the same time, Joshua was struggling financially. He was over $200,000 in debt and eventually declared bankruptcy.
Despite the happy facade, the couple were anything but.
Susan Powell’s Sudden Vanishing
Susan went about her day as usual on December 6, 2009. She attended church with her family and planned to spend the afternoon relaxing with her children.
The 28-year-old was last seen alive that afternoon.
Joshua took his children for a midnight camp adventure to Utah’s West Desert, despite their young ages (then just two and four) and the subzero temperature.
When he returned on December 7, his wife was nowhere to be found—at least, that’s what he told the police.
By the time Joshua came home with the children, Susan’s family had already reported that the whole family was missing since the boys hadn’t been dropped off at daycare, neither parent was contactable, and Susan hadn’t shown up for work.
When the police arrived at the Powells, Susan’s purse and phone were recovered, making her disappearance even more perplexing.
Joshua was quickly taken in for questioning. Investigators found it odd that he’d taken his very young children camping in such conditions, and when the police tried to find his alleged campsite, it seemed it didn’t exist.
Then, Joshua was quizzed about why he didn’t show up for work the morning of December 7. He claimed he thought it was still the weekend, hence why he didn’t drop the kids at daycare or go to work.
Once released from interrogation, Joshua’s behavior became erratic. He rented a Ford Focus and drove for hours on the freeways. For some reason, he put an additional 807 miles on the car’s odometer.
Still, strange behavior alone isn’t enough to charge someone with a crime. Plus, Susan was still just missing, and there was no real evidence to tie Joshua to any kind of offense.
Eventually, Joshua moved to Washington State with his sons, completely severing ties with Susan’s family. Subsequent police searches and investigations yielded no trace of Susan.
The Erratic Aftermath
Three years after Susan’s still-unexplained disappearance, Utah’s West Valley City police reignited interest in the case by releasing information that cast a highly suspicious light on Joshua.
After her disappearance, he liquidated Susan’s retirement accounts, stopped sending Charlie and Braden to daycare, and canceled his wife’s upcoming healthcare appointments.
Why would he do that if he thought she could come home?
On top of that, it was disclosed how he’d told his co-workers how he’d dispose of a body: In a mineshaft in the desert.
Additionally, it was also revealed that Charlie, four at the time of his mother’s disappearance, told the police that his mother had come on the late-night camping trip with them.
Only, for reasons Charlie couldn’t explain, she never came home with the rest of the family. The boy had reportedly told one of his teachers that his mother was dead.
Then, in the months after Susan’s baffling disappearance, Braden drew a picture supposedly depicting what happened the night the family went camping. Joshua, Charlie, and Braden were in the picture. Asked where his mother was, the toddler replied, “In the trunk.”
Over the years, Joshua became uncooperative with the police. He remained a person of interest in the case, though, and set up a website to maintain his innocence.
In doing so, he smeared Susan’s name, insisting she’d been having an affair and had run off to Brazil with her lover.
Joshua and his father would later say Susan had mental health issues, and this led to her running away. At one point, Steven Powell would say he and Susan had been falling in love with one another, though there is no proof of this. There is proof, however, of Susan’s rejection of her father-in-law.
By inserting himself into the investigation, Steven found himself under the spotlight of investigators. They learned that he had been obsessed with Susan, and so his computer and other items were seized for analysis.
It found he had been stalking Susan prior to her sudden disappearance; over 4000 images were taken of her without her knowledge, some of which were intimate.
He wasn’t the only member of the Powell family to be caught under the police’s radar. Cadaver dogs searched Joshua’s brother Michael’s car.
They alerted law enforcement to the scene of decomposing human remains in the trunk, though there was not enough evidence in the car to provide solid DNA results.
When Steven Powell was later arrested on material found on his computer, Susan’s father applied for custody of Charlie and Braden. He was granted short-term custody, giving Joshua time to move out of his father’s home in order to regain full custody.
He did so—or at least he rented a home nearby. It’s alleged he never truly moved in and only rented it to appease the courts.
This would signal the lead-up to the tragic fates of Charlie and Braden Powell.
The Explosion
On February 5, 2012, the case took an even more deplorable turn.
Joshua was granted visitation that Sunday and the social worker collected the boys from their grandparents and drove them to Joshua’s rented property.
This had happened multiple times before, and the father had always welcomed these visits with his sons and sent them back to their grandparents without a fuss once his time was up.
Today would be different.
As Charlie and Braden walked into the property, the support worker walked closely behind them. Joshua slammed the door in her face after ushering the boys in. None of her knocks or pleas were heeded—Joshua had taken his own children hostage.
Panicked, the support worker called 911. As she did, she realized she could smell gas.
While she sought help outside the property, inside, Joshua had attacked his sons. Then, he ignited the explosion, which ended all of their lives.
It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment attack, either. Joshua had planned this thoroughly. Leading up to this awful act, he emailed family and friends to express his anger over losing custody and apologizing for his actions.
Chuck and Judy Cox had already lost their daughter. Now, they were faced with losing their grandsons, possibly to the same man who killed their beloved Susan.
As of writing, Susan remains a missing person, though many believe she succumbed to the brutality of Joshua Powell.
By taking his own life, Joshua evaded justice.
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