If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children by Gregg Olsen & Rebecca Morris

Author:Gregg Olsen & Rebecca Morris [Olsen, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250025753
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

24

There was some physical contact over the few days she was here. A couple of times she was taking Braden from me and pressed her soft breasts against the backside of my hands as she wrapped her arms around him to take him. I didn’t make any effort to move my hands.

—STEVE POWELL’S JOURNAL, JUNE 26, 2008

Steve Powell’s second meeting with the West Valley City police, the FBI, and this time the U.S. Marshals Service, too, was in May 2010. He let them into his house, again, without the benefit of a search warrant. As if he were proudly showing off a stamp or coin collection, the investigators couldn’t help but see the pornography out in the open. What was just a fraction of Steve’s pornography collection was visible on a table. In Steve’s trove they saw photos of a woman they instantly recognized as Susan. She had been photographed, unaware, in her underwear. The photos appeared to have been taken through a crack in a bathroom door. There were also pictures that appeared to be composites—images of Susan’s face Photoshopped onto nude female bodies. While there, the police removed the tracking device they had put on Josh’s van four months before when he was in West Valley City to rent out the house. They no longer needed to track him. They seemed more interested in his father. They should have been interested in his brother, Michael.

From Susan’s friends the police learned that Steve had wanted Susan to act as a wife to both Josh and himself. Steve told police that he and his daughter-in-law were in love and claimed she was “very sexual” toward him. Steve told them that Susan had said their “flirtatious relationship could never be in the open due to her Mormon religion.”

They knew that the way Steve described his relationship with Susan was different from what she wrote in her private journal, the one found in her desk at Wells Fargo. Susan repeatedly described Steve as a terrible influence on Josh. She thought he was creepy.

Steve told a former girlfriend that the investigators in May had missed his self-dubbed “porn cabinet,” which contained more photos of Susan, her teenage diaries, and her Mormon temple garment underwear he’d stolen from a pile of laundry back when she and Josh had lived at his house in 2002. The former girlfriend had told the police as early as January 2010 that Steve was obsessed with his daughter-in-law. The West Valley City PD contacted her more than a year later, asking the woman to explain once more what she knew about Steve. She even had a map Steve had sketched of roads around where Susan might have disappeared.

The department admitted that they’d lost the notes she had sent.

* * *

Steve Powell’s fascination with pornography went back to the early years of his marriage, if not further. Back then, Steve had to sneak around to the back door entrance of an adult bookstore on the seediest side of Spokane to satisfy his lust.

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