On the morning of Monday, December 7, 2009, a daycare provider in West Valley City, Utah, could not reach either parent of the two boys she was expecting. By late morning, police were inside the Powell house. In the living room, two box fans were running, aimed at a damp patch of carpet in front of the couch. Susan Powell’s purse was still there. Her husband and their sons, ages four and two, were somewhere in the West Desert, where the night had been well below freezing. Susan, 28, a stockbroker at Wells Fargo, has not been seen since.

A Marriage Under Strain

Susan Cox married Josh Powell in April 2001 at the Portland Oregon Temple. They settled in Utah, where Susan worked at Wells Fargo Investments and Josh drifted between jobs. Friends later told police the marriage had turned controlling. Charlie was born in 2005, Braden in 2007.

In June 2008, Susan wrote a handwritten will and placed it in a safe deposit box. It read, in part: “If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one.” The couple also held life insurance policies of roughly $1 million on each spouse. Looming over it all was Josh’s father, Steven Powell, who had made unwanted advances toward his daughter-in-law and, investigators would learn, kept thousands of secretly recorded images of her.

The Midnight Camping Trip

On Sunday, December 6, 2009, Susan went to church with the boys, made a last phone call at 2:29 p.m., and was seen by a neighbor around 5 p.m., feeling ill and heading to lie down. A neighbor heard a car alarm from the Powell garage at 11:45 p.m.

Josh’s account, given when he returned at 5 p.m. on December 7, was that he had left at 12:30 a.m. to take the boys camping at Simpson Springs, a remote Tooele County campground two hours away, in a snowstorm. In his minivan, officers found Susan’s phone with its SIM card removed, a generator, tarps, blankets and a shovel. Four-year-old Charlie told a detective his mother had come camping with them but did not come back. Police who drove to Simpson Springs on December 10 found no sign anyone had camped there.

A Rental Car and 800 Miles

Detective Ellis Maxwell interviewed Josh for about two hours on December 8. He blamed cuts on his hands on camping and asked for a lawyer. Police seized his van. That day Josh rented a car at the Salt Lake City airport and, over two days, put roughly 800 miles on it. He activated a new phone in Tremonton, near the Idaho line. On December 9, a search warrant turned up Susan’s blood near the couch, along with the insurance paperwork and her warning letter.

Josh never joined a search. In January 2010 he moved the boys to his father’s home in Puyallup, Washington. Utah investigators kept digging: mine shafts near Ely, Nevada, in August 2011, then the desert near Topaz Mountain that September, where cadaver dogs alerted but nothing was confirmed.

Steven Powell’s Arrest and the Custody Fight

On September 22, 2011, Pierce County deputies arrested Steven Powell on 14 counts of voyeurism and child pornography possession. His computers held thousands of images of women and girls filmed without their knowledge; his journals described an obsession with Susan. Six days later, a judge gave temporary custody of Charlie and Braden to Susan’s parents, Chuck and Judy Cox.

Steven was convicted of voyeurism in 2012 and sentenced to 30 months. In July 2015 he was found guilty of possessing child pornography and received five more years. He was released on July 11, 2017, and died in Tacoma on July 23, 2018. For Josh, the turning point came on February 1, 2012, when a judge ordered a psychosexual evaluation, including a polygraph, before custody would be reconsidered.

Super Bowl Sunday in Graham, Washington

On February 5, 2012, a caseworker named Elizabeth Griffin-Hall drove the boys to Josh’s rented house in Graham for a supervised visit. Charlie was seven, Braden five. The boys ran ahead to the door. Josh pulled them inside and locked it. She smelled gasoline and called 911. Within minutes, the house exploded.

Investigators found two five-gallon gasoline cans and a hatchet near Josh’s body. Autopsies showed both boys had suffered chopping wounds to the head and neck before dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. Josh had emailed his lawyer, “I’m sorry, goodbye,” just before the blast. The day before, he had withdrawn about $7,000 and donated the boys’ toys. Charlie and Braden were buried at Woodbine Cemetery in Puyallup.

A Case Closed Without an Answer

Investigators long suspected Josh’s brother Michael of helping. Weeks after Susan vanished, Michael abandoned his Ford Taurus at a wrecking yard in Pendleton, Oregon; a cadaver dog later alerted on the trunk, but DNA was inconclusive. On February 11, 2013, Michael jumped from a parking garage in Minneapolis and died.

On May 20, 2013, West Valley City announced the end of the active investigation and released more than 2,000 files. Police had chased 800 tips across 11 states, wiretapped Josh’s calls with his father for three months, and never cracked the brothers’ encrypted messages. Deputy Chief Mike Powell said Josh “was definitely involved,” but with no body and no crime scene, there was nothing to prosecute. Unlike the McStay family disappearance, where desert graves led to a trial, this case ended with every suspect dead.

The Cox Family’s Fight, and the Search Today

Chuck and Judy Cox sued Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services over the boys’ deaths. In July 2020, a Pierce County jury found the state negligent and awarded $98.5 million. Judge Stanley Rumbaugh cut it to $32.8 million; in April 2023 the Washington Court of Appeals restored the full amount; Chuck Cox expected the state to keep fighting.

In February 2022, Chuck Cox and “Diesel Brothers” star Dave Sparks excavated a collapsed mine about 30 miles from Josh’s claimed campsite; the bones recovered were animal. Dave Cawley’s KSL podcast “Cold,” launched in November 2018, remains the deepest public account; in December 2025 Cawley said the last credible lead points toward southern Idaho, where Josh drove after Susan vanished. Judy Cox died on February 18, 2026, after weeks in the hospital. She had kept her share of the insurance money in trust, in case Susan was ever found alive.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Powell case became a national argument about what child-protection agencies owe the children in their care. It also shows how a missing-persons case can collapse under its own weight: a husband who would not talk, a father-in-law who recorded everything, a brother who took a secret to his death. Like the disappearance of Maura Murray, it has no body and no charges, only a public file. And like the Jamison family disappearance, it turned on a family vehicle and empty country that has given up almost nothing.

Somewhere along the 800 miles Josh Powell drove in a rental car on December 8 and 9, 2009, there is a place he stopped, and no one who is still alive knows where it is.

Related Cases

• The McStay family disappearance — a family of four vanished, then graves in the desert.
• The Jamison family disappearance — an abandoned truck in the Oklahoma hills and years of silence.
• The disappearance of Maura Murray — a crashed car on a dark road, and no trace since.

Sources

• KSL: Police end active investigation into Powell disappearance; case documents released
• Deseret News: Detailed timeline of events surrounding Josh Powell, Susan Cox Powell
• KUTV: Timeline of the years since Susan Cox Powell went missing
• KIRO 7: Parents of Susan Cox Powell win appeal to reinstate $98.5 million verdict
• MyNorthwest: Mother of missing Susan Powell dies after 15-year search for answers
• East Idaho News: 16 years without answers, “Cold” host Dave Cawley on the Susan Powell case

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