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Chapter 1: What led to Susan Powell's disappearance?
When someone goes missing, the headlines focus on what happened, but the truth often lives in the smallest details. I'm Sarah Turney. After my sister disappeared, I learned how those final hours, the last conversations, the last decisions can haunt families forever. And I'm Courtney Nicole.
After seeing crime impact my own family, I've learned how overlooked moments, missed red flags, and unanswered questions can change everything. Together, we're bringing those lived experiences into the work. This is The Final Hours, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios, a podcast that puts the moments before a disappearance under a microscope.
Listen to and follow The Final Hours wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday. This is Crime House. A mother of two disappears. Her husband has no idea where she could be. Her son says she went camping with them, but stayed behind. When detectives open her secret safe deposit box, they realize she knew she was going to die. But it was too late to save herself.
Today, we're getting to the case of Susan Powell. Hi guys, welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases. Once again, I'm Kaylin Moore. I'm going to be the one digging deeper into the timelines, the backstories, and the court files released on these cases. And I'm your internet sleuth, Morgan Absher.
I'm diving into everything I can find on Reddit and all across the internet to see those lesser known details and pull out the threads that just don't add up. Don't forget to share your thoughts on social. Want ad-free listening and early access? You can subscribe to CrimeHouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's get into this case and the clues that defined it.
This case came upon our radar when a listener actually put it in the comments. Yeah. They wanted us to highlight it as the missing person case of the week. And we started digging a little deeper into it and we were blown away. Yeah, it's a case that I had heard about for a long time.
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Chapter 2: What were the initial reactions of Susan's family and friends?
I mean, it was like all over the news when it was happening. But the more you dive into it, there's so many threads and rabbit holes you can go down. It just keeps getting weirder and weirder and more upsetting. So we're going to lead you through the whole thing today. Yeah, I literally just got the chills as you said that. I'm like, my legs.
I'm like, I might as well not shave my legs yesterday because I just got goosebumps. It is a really bizarre and gripping case. And it's just it is a bit tragic as well. Yes absolutely absolutely. Here we go.
As a reminder if you're watching on YouTube you're going to see some images that will help you put pieces of the case together and if you're listening you can follow us on our social media which everyone should just do anyways that's at clues podcast on Instagram. Definitely. Definitely going to want to check out socials and everything for this one.
There's a lot of interview clips and things we're going to be posting, so you don't want to miss those. And just a warning before we begin, this episode does contain some graphic descriptions of murder, stalking, domestic violence, child abuse, child death. There are also some brief non-graphic mentions of child sexual abuse material. So again, this is a bit of a heavy one.
Please listen with care. Listen with care, guys. Okay. This case begins on Monday, December 7th, 2009. A child care provider named Deborah Caldwell is starting to grow increasingly concerned. And that's because four-year-old Charlie Powell and his two-year-old brother Braden didn't show up for daycare at 6 a.m. like they normally do.
Deborah tries calling both of their parents, 33-year-old Josh and 28-year-old Susan Powell, but neither of them answer their cell phone or their landline. And not only that, but their cell phones are going straight to voicemail. So by 9 a.m., Debra's pretty worried at this point, and she thinks, I'll just go check in on this family.
Now, the Powells only lived a half mile away, but it's really snowy and it's icy in West Valley, Utah, this time of year. So she puts all of the other daycare kids in her van and she drives them all over to the Powells together.
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Chapter 3: What evidence was found in Susan's home after her disappearance?
Now, the Powells at the time owned a cute little suburban house at the end of a cul-de-sac. It had five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a two-car garage, and a big grassy yard. And when she gets there, she sees that the long driveway and the concrete steps leading up to the front door are covered with a thick layer of snow.
Now, Josh usually would leave for his computer programmer job at a trucking and warehouse company, and Susan would leave the house a little bit later for her job at Wells Fargo Investments. But the snow out front of the house is completely undisturbed. There's no tire tracks. There's no footprints. And after 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, that just feels wrong.
So Debra tries calling their work numbers next. Nobody answers at Susan's office. But someone at Josh's company picks up. And they're also wondering where Josh is this morning. So next, Deborah calls the family's emergency contacts. That's Josh's mom, Teresa Powell, and his 35-year-old sister, Jennifer Graves.
At this point, everyone is actually kind of having the same scary thought because no one knows where Josh is and they haven't heard from him that morning. And that's that everyone in town has been talking about this carbon monoxide poisoning case that happened. There's been a couple actually recent tragedies in the area of people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning in their homes.
So everyone starts imagining that that could be what was going on. This time of year, the house would have been sealed up tight. Furnaces would have been running all day long. Even really small gas leaks could be life threatening. I mean, it's something I worry about all the time as an anxious person. Not everyone in the area has carbon monoxide detectors either.
So Teresa, Jennifer, and then Jennifer's kids race over to Josh and Susan's house just a few minutes away. And Jennifer's kids climb the fence and check the doors behind the house to see if they can get inside. But all of the doors are locked. So at 9.53 a.m., Teresa and Jennifer call the West Valley City Police for a welfare check.
The first officer arrives at 10.02 a.m., followed by a backup unit. And after trying a bunch of different ways to get in, the police officers break a window with Teresa's permission.
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Chapter 4: How did Josh Powell's alibi change over time?
And once they get inside, they realize there's not necessarily any trace of a carbon monoxide leak. In fact, no one is home. There's not a single person in the house. They notice that Josh's blue minivan is gone as well. And since there's no tire tracks in the driveway and snow fell overnight, they assume that the family's been gone since at least the night before.
So it's really weird that no one else in their life knew that they were going to be gone. And that's why at 1.30 p.m., the police decide that they're going to open a missing persons investigation. But let's rewind a little bit and meet the Powells before that snowy December day. So the mom of the family, Susan Powell, was born Susan Marie Cox in New Mexico.
Later, her family moved to Puyallup, Washington, near Tacoma. She planned to go to cosmetology school and work in a salon. She wanted to make women feel beautiful for a living. As for Josh, he also grew up in Puyallup. And then at 16, his parents got divorced. His father moved to Spokane, Washington, and his mother moved to Utah.
By 2000, Josh was studying at the University of Washington Tacoma's business school. And that's where he met Susan. Josh and Susan were both raised within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And they met at a singles event through their church. Josh was five years older, but he was interested in Susan right away. But she was not as interested as he was.
Plus, there was actually some history between Josh and Susan's family. So a few years back, Josh actually tried dating her older sister, Mary, who definitely was not into Josh. But Josh could not take a hint. He showed up uninvited to Mary's senior prom and then proceeded to follow her home. Like at the time, maybe it seemed like it was like a cute teenager-y thing to do.
But in hindsight, that's terrifying. Yeah, no, I wish I had one of my red flags from Two Hot Takes over here. Yeah. I'm like, no, you're a stalker.
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Chapter 5: What role did Susan's safety deposit box play in the investigation?
Showing up uninvited to someone else's prom and then following them home. And then when he gets back to their house, her dad has to basically kick him out because he won't leave. Mary told Susan about all of this. She was pretty concerned that Josh was interested in her younger sister now. Yeah. But over time, it seems like Josh just grew on Susan. She liked his ability to be himself.
She liked that he definitely didn't care what others thought. And that was apparent because of his behavior. By the end of 2000, the couple was engaged and they married in April of 2001 at a temple in Portland, Oregon. After that, Josh finished business school and Susan went on to beauty school like she wanted to do.
Then, Josh and Susan moved in with his father for a while, but they ended up moving out because things got a bit strained. And at the time, they weren't really telling people what happened. It just seemed like a little odd and tense in the house when they were living there with Josh's dad. They ended up moving to Utah in early 2004, and at this point...
They felt ready to start a family, and it was helpful because Josh's sister and mom were pretty close by to help out. Within a few months, Susan was pregnant, and their first son, Charlie, arrived in 2005, and then Brayden was born in 2007. By 2009, they had the American dream, by all intents and purposes. The house, the kids, the minivan.
They were also always out camping around Utah and Washington. And according to those around them, they had what appeared to be a perfect marriage. But for the people who knew them really closely, it did seem like there were a few cracks in the foundation. So friends and family knew that there were rough patches in this marriage.
Like, for instance, Susan had confessed to some of her friends that when she went into labor with Charlie, their firstborn... Josh declined to drive her to the hospital because he wanted to back up his computer's hard drive before he left the house. And when I read that sentence, I hunted down Matt and yelled at him about it. That's how mad I was. I was like, why would someone do this?
He's like, what are you mad at me for? As someone that's like eight and a half months pregnant right now, you're like,
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Chapter 6: What were the implications of the findings in Stephen Powell's home?
You just can't even fathom. I cannot fathom a situation where I'm in pain, I go to Matt, and he's like, one second, I have to back up the hard drive. What is so important that you're backing up your hard drives? That's exactly what I was thinking. But also, this is like 2005, 2007. There's not Uber or Lyft. You have to call a taxi. It's just a nightmare.
Susan also was always seen knitting and crocheting, which is like a
normal very cute hobby to have but it was actually because josh wouldn't allow her to buy anything so she had to make all of the kids clothing their socks their hats everything because she needed to save money and part of the reason why she had to save so much money is because in 2007 josh filed for bankruptcy and he declared over two hundred thousand dollars in debts
The couple, it seems like they were in marriage counseling trying to work through these problems. They seem like very big problems to have, but they were trying to work through it. But then came the morning of December 7th, 2009, when the Powells disappeared.
So back on December 7th, it's about 2.30 p.m., seven and a half hours after the kids missed their drop-off time at daycare, Detective Ellis Maxwell arrived at the Powells' house. He noticed there was no sign of forced entry, no signs that the house had been ransacked or anything, had been taken, but it did seem that the family had left
in a rush, leading us to our first clue, which is kind of like the state of their home. The radio was still on, the kids' toys were scattered about the living room, and Susan's purse was still there with her keys, credit cards, cash, cameras still inside. But the detective did notice that her cell phone and driver's license were missing.
There were also two large box fans on, and they were blowing from different directions towards a recently cleaned patch of the living room carpet, as well as the couch. The detective even found a carpet cleaning machine nearby in the primary bedroom. Now, alarm bells are clearly ringing. All of you listening, you're like, oh my God, yeah, something happened here.
And so when detectives look further and notice that Josh's cell phone is also missing from the house, they know something is up. So Detective Maxwell subpoenaed for both Josh and Susan's records, bringing us to our second clue. Josh's phone was last active at 12.14 p.m. on Sunday, December 6th, the afternoon before the disappearance.
And that's when Josh had made a phone call to his father, Stephen. Susan's phone was last active at 2.29 p.m. on Sunday when she called a friend of hers, Giovanna. At this time, you could only really get a location of a cell phone based on CSLRs, which is cell site location records, which only updated when the phone sent or received a caller text.
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Chapter 7: How did the investigation evolve over the years following Susan's disappearance?
So it wasn't like all of the data we have today where like Google is literally tracking our every footprint, like all of these apps have location data. Little different back then. And because of the fact that there was no activity on either cell after they left the house, they had no idea where they were.
They didn't know whether their phones were off or they just didn't make or receive any calls at that time. The cell records couldn't and didn't say. But both cell phones were definitely turned off by the following morning. when Debra had called from daycare. By that point, Detective Maxwell was getting a very, very bad feeling about this case. And things were about to get a lot more complicated.
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Chapter 8: What was the outcome of the investigation into Susan's case?
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A year from today isn't that far away. Get started now at HelloAlma.com slash clues. That's HelloAlma.com slash clues. Yeah, so Detective Maxwell and his team spent the most of that first day interviewing the Powells' friends and family, just trying to get any more information he could.
He also uploaded their profiles to a national missing persons database and called local hospitals to look just for any unidentified patients that matched the Powells' descriptions. He got nothing. Throughout the day, Josh's family kept trying his cell phone to see if he would turn it back on. And finally, at 5.27 p.m., he answers. And that's because his sister Jennifer called.
When Jennifer asked what was going on and why he hadn't gone to work, Josh told her that he did. Obviously, that's a lie. We know that that's a lie. His work was just as confused as everyone else in his life. But Josh picks up the phone and is like, what do you mean? I was at work. So she ends up telling him that she talked to his boss. She knows he wasn't at his job that day.
And that's when he tells her a new story. He says, oh, actually, I took the boys camping, but I got caught off guard by the snowstorm and we didn't make it back home in time. And then Jennifer asks about Susan because she's also missing as well. And he gets even cagier. First, he said that Susan was at work. And then, of course, that's another lie. So Jennifer calls him out on it.
She's like, we know that Susan's not at work either. Like her job hasn't heard from her either today. And Josh then takes that story back as well and goes, oh, well, then I actually don't know where she might be. Then he asked Jennifer, quote, what else do you know? Before he says that he was close to home and he was going to meet her there soon.
Like, let me try to get my story straight before you catch me in any more lies. Literally. That's exactly what I was thinking. Come on. Exactly. So right away, Jennifer goes to Detective Maxwell and she tells him how weird Josh is being on the phone. And then 20 minutes later, Josh still doesn't make it back.
So Detective Maxwell uses Jennifer's phone to call Josh again because now they know that he'll at least pick up for Jennifer. Yeah. When he answers, Detective Maxwell introduces himself and he asks why he wasn't back home yet. And that's when Josh said that he needed to feed his kids first. And then he started just ignoring and deflecting all of the questions that were aimed at him.
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