Susan Powell: Part 1

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. It may be sensitive for some listeners. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We have a lot to get into in today's episode. I do want to just get through right now in true crime. We're going to get through pretty quickly. I'm mostly just going to talk about the Menanda's brothers, and then we're going to get into the episode. So this week has been a week for the Meninda's brother's case. So the La County District Attorney, who is named Nathan Hawkman, he is recently elected. He came out and he gave a big, long press conference, but basically he opposes their resentencing and he gave all the reasons why. You can go listen to the press conference if you want. It is an hour of your life that you will never get back. But the former district attorney was in support and recommended that the brothers get resentenced and possibly even be released. So I feel like at the end of last year, for the most part, the Menenda's brother, supporters, and their families. Of course, we're feeling pretty optimistic about everything because he was recommending resentencing. They were going to be scheduling hearing to conduct that, but then the election happened and this new DA came in, So we are kind of at a standstill right now because he is opposing it and giving all of his reasoning as to why he thinks that they should remain in jail. And honestly, I listened to his little press conference that he gave. I couldn't get through the whole entire thing, but it was just a lot and it really makes me feel very sad for people that have been victims of sexual abuse because he's basically, in my opinion, discounting a lot of that and saying, well, they lied about everything, and they spent their parents' money after they died, like there's no denying it. They did some not great things after the murders. We are clear on that they were also extremely young, and they were victims of horrible sexual abuse at the hands of their father for years. Not excusing their actions by any means, but they have been model prisoners. They have been in prison for a long time. They have really paid their dues. In my opinion. I know there are people that disagree with me on this, and that is fine. Your opinions are yours and mine or mine. That is what makes the world go round. And I just think that they have really done a lot of reflecting and growing, and they've done these their own projects in prison, and they have become entirely new versions of themselves because of what they've been through. It does not excuse what they did. However, I think we all need to have a little grace for two boys that were victims of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, who is a known predator. Back then, we didn't know it, and people made fun of them and ridiculed them and didn't believe their accusations. But Jose Menendez was a known predator, and there are many people that can back up those claims to this day. And I believe them. I believe Eric, I believe Lyle. I believe that they went through hell, and I believe that in their minds it was the only way out of the situation that they were in because he was powerful, he had money, he was their father, he was controlling, and they had been in the cycle of abuse for so many years, so they didn't see any other way out. I'm not excusing their behavior, but in their minds at that point in time, on that day, that was what they had to do. But despite what Nathan Hoffman is recommending, Gavin Newsom, who is the California Governor, has gone ahead and set a hearing date that will determine whether clemency goes forward, and that is scheduled for June thirteenth. Gavin Newsom said, so, on June thirteenth, we will have the Parole Hearing Board recommendation as it relates to the risk assessment and as it relates to the forensic psychologist, and that recommendation, that assessment, that independent analysis will help guide the decision making that my office is independently reviewing as it relates to the clemency application. So Gavin Newso went on to say that the recommendation will either side with the former La County District Attorney or the new current district attorney. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this all plays out. The support for the Menindas brothers is so real. I have always been kind of a supporter, not kind of, but I've always been a supporter of them having a lighter sentence because of all the sexual abuse claims and everything that's come out in subsequent years. I've always believed that they were sexually abused, even before it came out that he had sexually abused other people. So I've always been a supporter of them, and I'm still a supporter of them today. Like I said, you don't have to agree with me. We all think and process and feel differently about different things, and I have definitely grown and learned and changed my thoughts and feelings about a lot of different things. I used to be very pro death penalty, and I am not that way anymore because I'm evolving and learning and growing. We are all human, and we all evolve and learn and grow, and the same can be said for Eric and Lyle. They can do a really bad thing at a young age in their early twenties, they can go to prison for a long long time, and they can learn, evolve and grow, be model prisoners and get a second chance at life because at the end of the day, they have done nothing on the inside that proves that they are monsters. And that they are at risk for offending again. I do think it's going to be hard for them to reintegrate, but they have a really good support system surrounding them, so I hope with that that they will be successful if they do get clemency and they are released. So that is me now stepping off my soapbox officially. I will keep you guys updated on what happens in the subsequent weeks and months with what's going on with the Menanda's brothers. All right, switching gears. Last thing we're going to talk about. There is a gal who is twenty one years old. She is a University of Pittsburgh student and she went on spring break to Dominican Republic. Her name is Sudishka Kanaki and she is missing. Now there is a lot going on, as we know, when there's a crime or a disappearance or anything in another country, things can get a little difficult. And of course it is these different tourist attractions and their whole priority a lot of the times is protecting their image and making it so people want to still come there. We saw it a lot in a Aruba with Natalie Holloway and how they fiercely protected their image, and there was a heck of a lot that went on through that whole thing, through that whole enstigation, but this gal went missing. She was last seen on surveillance footage around four fifteen am on March sixth. She was spotted with seven other people entering the beach by a hotel. Her disappearance ended up being reported to the Dominican National Police the following day. Her dad said that she went to the beach on March sixth, early that morning, around four am with her friends and some other guys that they met at the resort. After that, her friends came back after some time and she ended up not coming back, and she ended up not showing back up anywhere. So there's been a lot of things popping out about she potentially could have drowned. They've been trying to search the waters, they're using helicopters, they're doing all the things try to find her. And there is also, of course the people that she was with and these other guys that they apparently met at the resort, and a local police source told an outlet that surveillance footage captured five women and one man leaving the hotel at five fifty five am, and she was believed to have stayed at the beach with another young man. At nine to fifty five am. The young man was captured leaving the beach in surveillance video, but she was nowhere to be seen. Now, her family very much thinks that there is more to this. The Dominican Republic is saying she probably drowned. Her family is saying there is something more going on. We do not think she drowned. We think that there could be foul play involved. So they have officially named kind of a person of interest allegedly, and he is named Joshua Ribe or rib I don't really know Rivee, and he is apparently the last person to see her, and he is one of the people that is captured on surveillance video with her. But it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. I also heard that somebody that helped with Natalie Holloway's investigation is also volunteering their time and services to help in the investigation. Here. It could have been a simple drowning. We are not saying that it's not. But if her family is saying that they think there's more to the story, then there might be more to the story and we need to listen to them. So I'm going to keep you guys updated on everything. There is actual video surveillance that has been released. I posted that onto my story yesterday on Facebook, so and Instagram. So I don't really know what is going on here, but I will stay on top of it. If anything comes up, I will let you guys know. And we are going to go ahead and get into today's episode. It is going to be a two parter and it's going to be a really tough one, so buckle up for it. Okay, guys, Today we are going to be jumping in to a very highly requested case, one that I think is pretty well known, but I know that there are some people that don't really know all of the details of it. You might know the premise behind the story, but you don't know the details, and that is what we're going to dive into today. So this was a story that I kind of had tossed around doing for Summer series twenty twenty five, but then I decided to do the Pike County massacre, So stay tuned for that. That's going to be starting in June. But I still very much wanted to cover the story. So today I'm going to be telling you about the still technically unsolved disappearance of Susan Powell. Now I say technically unsolved because Susan still has not been found. Her remains have not been found. She is presumed deceased, and we're going to get into all of that. But her family has yet to be able to officially lay her to rest, and her remains are still out there, and I know that her family would love nothing more than to be able to officially lay her to rest and be able to sort of navigate through what has been an incredibly horrific chapter of their life. So I do want to trigger warning this whole episode. It's going to be a really dark episode. I want to prelude the episode with, like I said, a giant trigger warning. This whole thing is bad, it's awful, and we're talking about domestic abuse, sexual abuse, awful things. This story is such a super important one to tell, though, because it's really important to recognize the signs of abuse in a relationship, whether it's physical, verbal, financial, sexual. There are all different types of abuse, and we're also going to talk about the importance of these different government agencies that are put in place to help and protect children who are in situations where there might be an unstable parent. We need to make sure that that unstable parent doesn't have access to the child until everything has been deemed safe and sound. This story is just infuriating from start to finish. All of that is going to make a lot more sense once I take you through the case of Susan Powell. And like I said, it's gonna be a tough one. It's also one of those cases that every time I hear the story, I learn new things about it and it just makes me extremely sad that so many different systems failed Susan, they failed her children, and the whole thing is just really, really sad and tragic. I did want to say that for my research, I watch a documentary on Hulu called Susan Powell, An ID Murder Mystery. It was very, very well done. It laid out the timeline of everything extremely well. I also have some sources cited below see those in my show notes, and I'm occasionally going to be putting in some interview clips that were featured on the show. So I did want to take a minute just to give them credit and I'm also going to link the show below in the show notes, so be sure to check that out. So we're going to go ahead and get into the Susan story. I very much want this episode to be focused on Susan and her children, Charlie and Braden, and the living victims that remain behind. Susan's family, her siblings, her friends, her parents Chuck and Judy Cox, who have done amazing things to keep Susan and Braden and Charlie's names alive and also try to help victims of domestic violence get out of dangerous situations that they may be in. So let's go ahead and dive right into Susan Palell's story. Susan Cox was born on October sixteenth of nineteen eighty one in New Mexico to her parents, Chuck and Judy Cox. She was the third of four daughters born to her parents. The family also made moves to Alaska as a child before they finally settled into a home in Washington State while Susan was still young. Susan is described as outgoing, optimistic, and she had boundless amounts of energy. Everyone loves Susan and she is described as the girl next door. Susan was extremely close to her parents and her sisters. They all had a very close relationship all throughout Susan's childhood into adulthood. She was raised in the LDS Church and she was also extremely devoted to her faith and in life. She knew she wanted to marry and she wanted to have children. Everybody loved Susan and she was a huge people person. Her future looked bright. She had plans, she had goals, she had dreams, and she was going to do anything she could to accomplish those goals and dreams. Joshua Powell was born on January twentieth of nineteen seventy six to his parents, Steven and Terry Powell, in Washington. He had two brothers, Michael and John, and two sisters, Jennifer and Alina. Terry and Steve eventually would divorce, and their divorce was very rocky, very rough, and for whatever reason, Steve primarily would have the children. The Powell household was described as deeply dysfunctional because Steve, who I'll referred to from time to time as creepy Steve, and I have to shout out Anne Bremner, that is what she calls him, and all of her presentation, she'll call him Creepy Steve, and it's just kind of stuck because we'll learn he very much was creepy Steve. That's just who he was. So he shared pornography with his sons, and he very much refused to discipline them, so they basically did what they wanted and they had no consequences for their actions. So Josh, who was twenty four years old at the time, would then go on to meet the very sweet and innocent nineteen year old Susan Cox at a dinner party in Tacoma, Washington in two thousand. They were both part of the LDS Faith and they were classmates in the LDS Church Institute of Religion course. They met at like a singles event dinner party. They married on April sixth of two thousand and one at a Mormon temple in Oregon. Josh would then go on to get a business degree and worked in it, and Susan was a trained cosmetologist, but she would go on to work for Wells Fargo. Josh and Susan did live with Josh's dad, Steve, temporarily after they got married so they could save money to buy a home and then they eventually would relocate to West Valley City, Utah, about two years after they got married, and West Valley City was a suburb of Salt Lake, Utah. They would go on to grow their family and they had to sons. Charles, who will call Charlie, that is what they called him, was born on January nineteenth of two thousand and five, and Brayden was born on January second of two thousand and seven. And we're going to get into what all took place, but that would make Charlie four and Brayden two. At the time of the incident that we're going to talk about. Josh is very much described as kind of a weird guy overall. He would do and say weird things, but once you got past that, he was okay. But he is also described as being a pretty good dad. So everything started on December seventh of two thousand and nine. Susan Powell had her regular morning routine. She would get up, get ready for work, get the kids ready, and she would drop them off at daycare by six point thirty in the morning. And she was very prompt, very punctual, and always on time. It was really, really rare that Susan would misdrop off time, and if she was going to be late, she would always call the owner of the daycare and give her a heads up that she was running behind or there was a change in plans. So the owner of the daycare was a friend of Susan, a family friend, and she knew something was wrong that morning because Susan was extremely late dropping off Charlie and Braden, and she knew that this was not like her. She never called, so it just didn't really make any sense. So the owner of the daycare tried to reach out to Susan's job and got no answer, and then she tried to reach out to Josh at his job and there was also no answer. So at this point she decided that she was just going to drive to the Pale family residence and check up on things for herself. So upon getting to the home, the daycare owner realizes that there are no footprints in the snow. Now it had snowed overnight, so she was thinking they must be inside. There's no footprints, alluding to the fact that an anyone has come or gone from this property, so she of course knocks on the door. There's no answer, there's no sign of anybody. So she goes ahead and calls Josh's mom and sister and they come to the house, and at that point, everyone is trying to get in touch with Josh and Susan. No one is answering, so they decide they're going to go ahead and call the police and tell them what's going on or not able to get in touch with Josh or Susan. Nobody's at the house. We need help. When police get to the house, they kind of talk about what's going on, and Josh's mom and sister give them permission to enter the house, thinking that maybe they had some type of medical event, maybe they had succumb to some carbon monoxide poisoning, So they give law enforcement permission to enter the house and they end up breaking a window to get into the home. So when law enforcement goes in, everything seems to be pretty fine. There's no sign of force entry, there's no sign of Josh, Susan, or the boys, and everything just seems to kind of be normal. Everything is normal, except for the family is not there. They checked the garage and they noticed that the family car is gone. Now, Josh's family didn't know anything about them taking a day trip or going on any type of vacation, So none of this really lined up. Interestingly enough, Susan's purse, her keys, her wallet, her winter boots were all left behind at the house, So if she was going on a short little vacation with her family, why wouldn't she have taken those things with her. Another odd thing on the inside of the house that seemed to be a little questionable to investigators was that there were two box fans set up on the living room floor and they were on and they were in operation, and they were pointed towards the couch, which looked like it had been cleaned, So investigators thought this was a little odd considering no one was home. The authorities went ahead and put out a bolo be on the lookout for the Palace Chrysler van and everyone's just trying to navigate and figure out what's going on. Still, nobody is able to get in touch with Josh or Susan, and around seven pm, Josh Powell rolls up in the van with Charlie and Branden, but Susan is nowhere to be found. Where is Susan? Police immediately question him as he pulls up and Josh said that he decided to take a last minute trip with the boys to take them quote unquote winter camping, and basically said the boys wanted to go out and go camping, they wanted to have some moores, and he said that they did this all the time. It wasn't unusual for them. But I don't know, as an outsider looking in, I don't really think it's normal to take your young children, like young young children out into a snowstorm in the middle of winter. I am so so confused by that, But I digress. So when they questioned Josh, he said that Susan didn't go with them and that she should have been at work, but as we all know, she was not at work. Susan's friends and family tried everything they could to try to track Susan down or figure out where she might have gone, who she was with, but they very much came up empty handed until they talked to a friend of Susan's name Jovanna Ownings. So Javanna was good friends with Susan. They would get together at least once a month to do knitting projects. Javanna and Susan would do these knitting projects together, so the night before Susan disappeared, she was over at the Pale family home and she said everything seemed to be normal. There wasn't any mention of going out of town or taking a snow camping trip. She knew nothing of this. So they ended up bringing Josh down to the police station for an interview, and his kids were actually present at that time. They were present with him. In the interview, he said that the last time he saw Susan was probably around midnight the night before. He said that he thought that she went to bed around twelve thirty am. He said that they had discussed taking the boys winter camping so that the boys could have Somemores, so it was there that he loaded up the boys and drove off. Susan went to bed, and they went on their winter camping. When the investigator questioned him as to why he would do this on a Sunday night, knowing that the boys had school the next day and that he had work, he just said that he forgot and he thought it was a Saturday. He got mixed up on his days. Josh is very dry during this interview. He doesn't seem at all concerned that his wife is missing. He is just very matter of fact, this is what we did. She should be at work and she's not, so none of it really made sense. The investigators asked for Josh's permission to search the van, and he agreed. He had a lot of different things in his van. He had camping gear, he had a sled, a humid of fire, and numerous other things which you typically would use for camping, so that kind of checked out. They ended up having him come back the next day and they did another interview. This time it was without the kids. The kids were brought separately somewhere else to also be interviewed and asked about what had gone on. So they asked Josh again about Susan. They asked him again if he thought that she could be in danger or what her well being was, and he said possibly, not good. The detective then asked him who do you think could be a possible suspect. Do you have any idea where she might have gone off with if she was talking to anybody, and he said he really couldn't think of anyone. He didn't offer a lot and was very short and sweet with his answer, straight and to the point. He didn't offer anything in a day to what they were asking him. He then talked about the owner of the daycare and how she has a key to the pal family home. So he really isn't sure why they ended up having to break his window in order to force entry into the home when she had a key all along. So he was more focused on the fact that they broke a window to check on his family than about the fact that his wife is actually missing. Why do you care about that? That is so unimportant? It costs nothing to fix a broken window. So at the same time, the kids were at a counseling center talking to counselors who have experienced talking to children who could have been possible witnesses to a crime. So Charlie is four going on five, but he's very verbal and smart, and when he was asked, who went camping with you, Charlie says, my dad, my little brother, and my mommy. So this right off the bat contradicts what Josh said about taking just the boy out camping. They asked Charlie who ended up coming home with them, and he said, my dad and brother and mommy stayed there and stayed quote where the crystals are, Holy Molly. Once word comes back to the detectives interviewing Josh, the kids are saying that mom went with them and then didn't come back. They knew that they had to confront Josh with this information, and they did. They said, your children are telling a completely different story than what you have told us. But of course, because we're talking about Josh Pale. He continues to lie and says that Susan didn't go with them, and then said that his kids were lying. And when the detectives say, so, you're calling your kids liars, he basically said, yes, sometimes kids lie. I mean the rage I feel listening to this interview and listening to this man throw his children under the bus. Holy moly. I got mad all over again re listening to the interview. But at this point, they unfortunately didn't have enough on Josh to arrest him, so he was free to leave, but they told him you can't go home because they're actively processing your house as a possible crime scene. There were some blood droplets found between the area where the couch and the carpet were, but they were very minute and small, almost like somebody had sneezed and it was bloody. It was very very small particles of blood. They ended up scouring the area where Josh said that he had gone camping, looking for any evidence of Susan or possible remains. They seize laptops, computers, electronic devices from the Powell family home, and they found a lot of encrypted stuff on the computers taken from the Palell family home, very encrypted hard drives that made it very very very difficult to access them and get into which, of course, investigators wondered why were they so heavily encrypted and what was Josh Paell trying to hide that he went to such lengths to cover stuff up on these computers. Now, Josh worked in it, so he is very knowledgeable about all this stuff. But if you're just a normal, average, everyday person, you don't need to hide anything because there's nothing to hide. You're just living your normal life. Nine days after Susan disappeared, they made a decision to call Josh a person of interest. They said, he's not really helping the investigation, and he's even at the point where he's possibly hindering it and obstructing it. But they didn't really have a motive. Why would Josh want to kill Susan? So pretty much immediately after law enforcement announced that Josh was a person of interest. He decides, Josh Paell decides that this is the perfect time to pack up the house, take his children, and leave Utah and move to Washington and move in with none other than his father, Stephen Powell. I don't understand why you think that that is a good move, and that you think you're not going to look suspicious when you do something like that. Obviously he's doing everything he can to make himself look even worse, if that's even possible. Josh finally decides to speak out, and when he does speak out, it is actual insanity. The things that come out of this man's mouth, I think are lies that he truly believes in his mind to be fact in truth. Kind of like Lori Valo, Ruby, Frankie, all of those delusional humans that have like they live in their own delusion. It is twisted as can be. I'm going to play a clip of an interview that Josh Paell did speaking about Susan and her upbringing, and then we're going to talk about it. Very emotionally ambused as a child, her mother has some very very angry personality, her father. Is very manipulative, Okay, so we're going to unpack that right here and right now. Obviously, the things that Josh said in that interview clip are delusional, not true, actual blatant lies, and Chuck and Judy Cox were none of those things that Josh said. He is obviously deflecting, and the general public, especially nowadays, isn't dumb. They're not going to fall for that. When you're literally listed as a person of interest in your wife's disappearance and then you come out and you bash her parents, the people who raised her, you make yourself look even worse. There might have been people back when this was all going down that thought that Josh Powell was a stand up guy and that this interview was the god honest truth. But I think you're going to be hard pressed to find anybody nowadays that actually believes any of the garbage that comes out of this man's mouth. And while we're on it, if he's going to talk about being abusive and manipulative, he needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror, because I think when he said those things, he was talking about himself. He was not talking about Susan's parents. There's no way he also, throughout the interview basically tried to place blame on Susan and was alluding to the fact that Susan was very promiscuous and basically all of this was her fault. So Josh and his dad, Stephen Steve very much tried to paint their own narrative about Susan to try and deflect away from themselves. Josh and Steve went on to start a website called Susanpowell dot org, and they take this opportunity to try and spind the narrative that Susan had run away with a man named Stephen Kosher who had also disappeared around the same time as Susan, and that they basically ran away to be together, that they had willingly gone off disappeared off the face of the earth so they could be together. For anyone to say that this woman would leave her children behind to run off with this other man, it is unfound. Their claims are absolutely atrocious that they would actually do that, And isn't it interesting? When Josh was originally asked, do you have any theories about who might be involved, what might have happened to your wife? He had none, He had nothing, And then all of a sudden, he pulls this completely out of nowhere and decides that this is the narrative he's going to go and he's going to actually publish it online on a website. The delusion is so real with him, and again I think that they are both delusional enough that they actually believe their own lies. Was zero connection made between Susan and Steven's disappearance. On February fifteenth of twenty ten, Susan's family had had enough of all this foolery from the Pala side of the family, and they decided that they were going to hold a news conference. At this news conference, a family spokesperson gets up and they speak, and they basically said that over the last month or so, they had been able to piece together all of the details of the last few weeks from some of Susan's friends, and they basically said she was in an abusive marriage and she was very much struggling in her marriage to Josh. She never confided in her parents because she didn't want them to worry about her, but she had said little bits and pieces to friends here and there about her relationship with Josh and her marriage. Overall, friends said that once she got pregnant with Charlie that Josh and Susan's relationship shifted a little bit, and Josh started to treat Susan different. Chuck, who is Susan's dad, even shared an instance when Susan went into labor with Charlie and Josh was there, and Chuck said, hey, we got to go to the hospital. She's in labor. Get your stuff together and let's go, and Josh just really didn't have any sense of urgency to him at all, knowing he was about to have a baby. So Chuck took Susan to the hospital and Josh showed up two hours later. And when he did show up, he kind of put himself in the corner in a chair, pulled out his laptop. And Susan is actively in labor at this point, and Chuck went over and said, what are you doing. You need to go sit by your wife. She's about to have your baby. This is very odd behavior from a first time expectant father. He should be there at his wife's side to help her. Susan's friends also noticed how controlling Josh was over Susan and the different things that she did and what she bought, where she went Susan was per be passive and was not somebody who liked to start arguments, and she didn't want to fight, So a lot of this was pushed under the rug because she just wasn't that confrontational type of person. Josh would control her money, where she spent it, how she spent it. There were even times that she had to call friends to borrow food to actually feed her children because he wouldn't let her spend more than X amount of money on food for that week. But meanwhile, Josh is going on spending spreeze, buying a random crap for himself, buying himself snacks, hot cheetos, god knows what else. But all of those things were only things that he could have, and Susan and the kids couldn't have any of it. There was also an instance where he bought thousands of pounds of wheat, like big crates of wheat. I have no idea what he was doing with these, I don't want to know, but why are you buying all of this wheat? What are you possibly doing? No sense? With this news conference coming out and these new claims coming out, thousands of tips started to pour in in regards to Susan's disappearance, and one of them came in from a man who had had a conversation with Josh the year prior at a Christmas party, And I am going to play a little clip of him giving the tip to the police and then we're going to talk about it about how that way would be down mind me, like a vertical one, that would be the way of. The one because they're still on the table. So yeah, that tip is basically he had this conversation with Josh at a Christmas party, and a normal Christmas party conversation, Josh Powell decides to bring up what he would do to hide a body if he ever needed to hide a body, and that is what he said. This is very reminiscent of Scott Peterson, who also had this conversation with a coworker, colleague friend college for about what he would do if he were to ever try to dispose of a body. These people are so freaking dumb to even have these conversations. What is wrong with you? So by the summer of twenty ten, after this clip came in, police went ahead and launched a massive search in the west desert of Utah, searching all the mines and all of the desert land that they could. Now, of course, this is a huge, huge undertaking because at this point Susan could literally be anywhere. We are talking about a ton of land coverage and mines and deserts and some minds that aren't accessible, some minds that are unstable and you're not able to really access them. So they did all that they could to try to comb through everything, and after a few months, investigators were no closer to finding Susan than they were before they started searching. And Josh Pal at this point is still roaming the planet free as a bird. And again, it's really hard to point fingers and prosecute when you don't have an actual body to prove that an actual crime took place. But in all of this, they started to really look at the people that surrounded Josh, the people who were supporting Josh, which were very few and far between. Josh's number one supporter in all of this was his father, Stephen Powell, Steve Powell, creepy Steve, as I referred to him earlier. And once they started digging in to who Stephen Powell actually was, this case ended up taking a whole new turn went down a crazy rabbit hole of disgustingness, And just when you think you know where things are going with this, you meet Steve Palell and you realize that you had no idea what creepiness lurks behind the person that Stephen Palll is. To talk more about that in a minute, but let's just say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So it is now two years later, in August of twenty eleven, and Susan is still missing. Her parents Chuck and Judy at this point are still begging for Josh to cooperate and help them find Susan. Nothing has really happened at all on that front. Josh has the children and he is still walking around free. He has not been arrested, nothing at all. Chuck and Judy at this point know that Josh is responsible for Susan's disappearance and likely her murder, and Josh is a horrible human if we haven't already made up our minds on that. But he actually goes as far as to file a restraining order against his former father in law, Chuck Cox, who's also the grandfather of he and Susan's children. Police at this point try to use this him filing a restraining order against Chuck to their advantage, and they encourage Chuck to organize a public event to try to draw attention to Susan's case to see if maybe Josh would break and say something that would implicate him in Susan's disappearance. They end up coming up with something called a honk and Wave, and it's basically Susan's family and friends supporters that come out. They stand on a street corner and they have signs and t shirts with Susan's picture on them, and they basically try to ask the public to honk wave in Susan's memory and to try again to bring attention to the fact that she's still missing and she is still out there somewhere. So they organize this for August twentieth of twenty eleven, and they do the event not far from the Pale family home where Steven and Josh are kind of living with the kids. So while they very much did this to raise awareness about Susan's case, of course, they're also trying to essentially poke the bear to see if Josh Powell reacts and to try to make him uncomfortable, which I applaud it. I think it is such a good idea. So, of course, this honk and Wave is taking place not far from where Stephen Powell lives and where Josh Powell lives. It is in this area. It's like a shopping center. There's a grocery store there. So all of Susan's friends and family are there, Chuck Cox is their news media is there. Chuck is giving an interview and is basically saying what their intentions are, what they're trying to do, and none other than Stephen Powell decides to pull up and he just bombards the interview that Chuck is doing. And I'm going to play a little bit of a clip from that interview that literally Stephen Powell happens upon coincidentally happens upon this honkin Wave and decides that he is going to go and confront Chuck Cos during this Honkin' wave event to try to bring awareness to Susan's case. And it is absolutely unhinged. So we're going to get a little bit of a glimpse into what kind of person Stephen Powell is. Why come here today, Well, I just came down here because we were going to get a picture of Chuck conks. We believe he's in violation of a restraining order because Josh johnsh shops at. This store, as this is our neighborhood store. And that's why the. Neighborhood when you came to yourself going store, we just wanted I wanted to We wanted to see if he was here. How is you coming here helping depliancus? It isn't helping appliances. How is your standing at our neighborhood market helping declian seas and John? People see the fines cuatures out in the in the media. If somebody is seeing. Hurt so I know it's probably a little bit hard to understand. There's a lot of traffic going by, because again this is happening literally on a street corner. But basically in that conversation, Stephen was saying that Chuck was in violation of his restraining order because he was in an area in a shopping center where Josh Palell shops and Chuck was not having it. He pulls out the restraining order and the details of the restraining order and it says that he's allowed to shop at the same stores that Josh Pall shops at. But if he sees Josh. He's not allowed to approach him. That is what is written in the restraining order, so he isn't breaking any rules of the restraining order. And Chuck does not back down. I love Chuck, he is amazing. So he very much called it out. If you are so concerned about this restraining order, then why are you here standing right next to me? That makes zero sense. And then the most craziest, wildest thing happens. Josh Paal emerges from a vehicle with his two kids. What is wrong with these people? They do the cre things. So then Josh goes on to address the cameras he has tears in his eyes. He very likely just squeezed a bottle of vizine into both of his eyes so that it looked like he was upset. And then creepy Steve also decides that he is going to go on and say a little bit more. So I am going to play a clip of Josh's vizine tears interview, which is quite short, and then Stephen Powell saying his final piece about everything that he knows about Susan's life and what led up to her disappearance, and so on and so forth, and then we're going to talk about it. There are a lot of people who have done a lot of attacks against our family and my son's Cossa. Susan a lot of. My journals and a lot of them from you know, he lived with Susan three years before, tells. A lot that he's doing the journals. But the turnst concern what he knows. Is Again that last clip was probably a little hard to hear because you have the sound of all the traffic going by because they are literally standing on a street corner. But basically, what Stephen Powell says is that he has journals of Susan's that back up all of these claims, And basically it's saying that what's in these journals explains her relationship with her family and why she ended up disappearing, and it's basically backing up the claims that she ran off to be with this other man, is what they're saying. But my question is, Stephen Powell, if you have these journals that hold all these clues to what happened to Susan, why wouldn't you have come forward with this information before twenty and eleven. That just doesn't make any sense to me. So on August twenty fifth of twenty eleven, investigators were able to get at to raid Stephen's home and that's where they find all of the creepiness that is Stephen Powell. So not only did they find journals that were in fact Susan's journals, but they also find Stephen Powell's own writings and own admissions that he was in love with Susan Powell, his daughter in law. He talks about how he loves her and wanted to marry her and trigger warning gross how he would masturbate two thoughts about her. They continued their search and they found some really gross, unsavory things throughout his home. Again trigger warning to all of this. This is just not normal. They found Susan's underwear, they found used tampons, They found old cotton balls that she had used to maybe remove some nail polish. It was all bagged up, stored and dated. IW. That is so disgusting. That is not normal. Stephen Powell also was a musician. He was a singer songwriter, so to say, and he had written songs about Susan and had recorded some of them. You can actually hear him singing these songs and it's gross stuff. He talks about being in a secret love with Susan, and it's just weird all around. I don't even have words for it. So Stephen basically stalks Susan. He would take random pictures of her. He would follow her around town and he would take pictures of her face and then superimpose the pictures on bodies of other women. It was just abnormal stuff that men do in their basements, just weird stuff, right. So, Susan hadn't really told anybody about how creepy Steve was except for one of her close friends. She had confided in this friend, and she said that the reason that they moved from Washington to Utah was to get away from Steve because he was so obsessed with her. Susan would say that he would always try and sneak pictures of her. He would try to put a camera under the bathroom door while she was in using the restroom, and all of this would happen when Josh and Susan were living with Steve for those two years after they initially got married. He would also sneak up and try to touch her. It is disgusting, absolutely disgusting. So when Susan brought this up to Josh. His reaction was, Oh, it's not really a big deal. That's just how my dad is. And you know what, while we're on this topic, we need to talk about not giving the excuse of oh, that's just how they are, that's just their personality when somebody portrays really shitty, creepy behavior. Some people are just perverts. They're creepy, they're weird, nobody likes them, everyone's uncomfortable around them. And when you confront that that with the person that they're either married to or their friends will so often we hear the excuse of, oh, that's just how they are. But no, that's not just how they are. They are creepy, perverted, and they need to be handles as such. We don't accept poor behavior and just label it as a personality trait. I've dealt with this before in my real life, and I learned very very quickly that people that make excuses for other people's really poor behavior and creepiness are just as bad. And in this case, Josh Palell was just as bad as Stephen Powell, as we have already pretty much laid out, so we have a lot more to go on this whole Susan Powell saga. We have a lot more to talk about, a lot more to unpack with Stephen and Josh, and if you know the story, you know where the story is going, so we have a lot more to discuss. We are going to make this a two parter. I think I don't want the story to get lost in a super super long episode. This episode in itself is already forty minutes long, so we are going to go ahead and call this good for part one. I am going to tell you about Part two next week and be prepared for your mind to be actually blown with everything more that we have to talk about. This is such a wild story from start to finish, and it's not over yet because, like I said, Susan is still missing. So join me here next week for Part two of Susan Powell and we will see you then. I hope you guys have a great weekend and be safe and don't take creepiness as a personality trait. It is so overrated. Bye.