The Cox-Powell Tragedy

While I know that this case has made the national news recently, since Susan Cox Powell's disappearance happened here in Utah not too long after we moved, I have witnessed every step played out on our local news.  And while it appears that the story still has not come to an end, I finally feel the need to comment on it.
For those of you who don't know the whole story of Susan Cox Powell's disappearance and the following events, let me try and sum it up.  Susan went missing a little over two years ago.  Her husband, Josh, claimed that they had had a fight around 11 pm, she had left, and he had decided to take his two young sons, who were aged 2 and 4 at the time, camping.  In the middle of the night.  In a snowstorm.  Because they wanted to make s'mores.  Since day one, everyone, from the police to the local media to the average Utahn, has found this explanation awfully fishy.  But by the time the police were able to search the campsite Josh claimed to have visited with his boys, most evidence had been erased by the falling snow.

The local media harped on the fact that Josh was the only "person of interest" in the case.  Josh claimed Susan ran off on her own.  Susan's family, the Coxes, along with many of her friends, said that she was a loving and dedicated mother who would never have abandoned her children.  Searches went on for weeks.

After about a month, Josh took his young sons and moved to Oregon, to live with his father, Steve.  The Cox family kept up a campaign, looking for Susan and hoping she could be found.  Friends and family accused Josh of being controlling and potentially dangerous.  The Powell family, however, launched a website that accused Susan of being promiscuous and mentally unstable, with her teenaged diaries and one of the main pieces of evidence regarding her character.  However, one member of the Powell family, Josh's sister, sided with the Coxes, and publically stated that she believed her brother had killed Susan.

This stalemate continued for well over a year.  Every time a body was discovered somewhere, the local news wondered if it was Susan Powell.  Last summer, however, Utah police claimed they had new leads, and began searching an area of BLM land for evidence.  Cadaver dogs identified a spot that initial reports claimed was "a shallow grave."  The local news, without even pretending to maintain objectivity, did stories on whether the distance from the Powell home to this site was within the range of miles recorded on Josh's car after Susan's disappearance.  But after a few days and a full excavation, the human remains were not forthcoming -- there were just some small chips of charred wood that needed analysis, and the most the police could say was that the dogs had picked up on human decomposition, possibly of body fluids, if not a whole body.

In September, police got a warrant and were able to search the Powell's home in Oregon.  They took computers, diaries, and other evidence.  Child pornography was discovered in Steve Powell's posession, along with images he had secretly taken of women over decades, including images of Susan. Steve was arrested on charges of voyeurism and child pornography and put in jail. It came out that Josh's father often flirted with Susan sexually; her friends claimed it made her very uncomfortable, while he claimed that she was a very flirtatious, sexually aggressive woman.  At this point, my friends started to wonder whether Steve was the one who actually killed Susan.  The investigation of these images spilled over to Josh himself, and the children were taken out of his custody. The were put into temporary foster care, but the Coxes, Susan's parents, got custody of the boys very quickly.  Then, last week, a hearing to determine whether Josh could regain custody of the boys ended with the judge ruling not only that the boys stay with their grandparents, but that Josh needed to go through a psychosexual evaluation.

And then, as I was knitting in front of the Superbowl game last Sunday at a friend's house, one of the other guests received a call.  His exclamations of surprise caught everyone's attention, and he delivered the news that Josh had just blown up his own home with himself and his boys inside.  The social worker who was supposed to supervise the boys arrived with them, was locked out of the house, and then Josh blew everything up.

Okay, so that was a pretty long summary.  But it covers over two years of developments!  Anyway, now I'll finally get to my point.

Along with everyone else, my greatest reaction to this story has been, "Why would he kill his boys?"  My first reaction was, the antipathy between the Cox and Powell families was so strong, that he did it out of spite.  He would take his sons with him simply to keep them away from their grandparents.

But a day or two later, as the local news was reviewing the story from beginning to end, the images of Josh presented another possible explanation.

From day one, Josh has always had a face with a peculiarly hangdog expression.  He honestly looks like the human version of Droopy Dog.  And while he has that expression of sadness, in early interviews on the local news, he never seemed convinvingly upset about his wife's disappearance -- just very downcast in general.  And as they zipped through the story on the news, showing a series of images of Josh taken over the past two years, that expression became more unhappy over time.  The final image, of Josh at the unsuccessful custody hearing, showed a man who had large, dark bags under his eyes, and whose primary expression was one of desperation, a man at the end of his rope.

It made me wonder, was Josh trapped in circumstances he hadn't intended?  Was his killing of Susan an accident or a crime of passion, that he then tried to cover up?  Was his father perhaps the actual killer, and he then protected him?  Did he somehow begin a chain of events that spiraled further and further out of control, until he felt that the only way for him and his boys to escape was through death?  I certainly wouldn't excuse even an accidental death, because he chose to take steps to cover up that killing.  But it made me feel a twinge of sympathy for this man, who may have felt guilt and horror over his actions, and finally thought suicide was the only way out.

But now more details about the boys are coming to light.  They had recently talked about and drawn pictures of their mother in the trunk of a car.  Now, it is easy for memories to be planted, especially in young children, but the police are now claiming that Josh killed the boys to prevent them from saying more about their mother's disappearance.

And the most disturbing detail that has come out in the last few days are the results of the autopsy.  Josh tried to kill them before the explosion, hacking at their necks with a hatchet, but not killing them.  Perhaps this was once again the bungled act of a father who was trying to save his children from a worse death in a fire.  He only had a few minutes in the house with the boys before he caused the explosion, so he didn't have time to drug them, or use some other slow-acting method.  But I can't imagine intentionally making your children's last moments those of pain and fear.  And that spark of sympathy I felt is being erased.  Now I see a man whose selfishness destroyed not only his own life, but the lives of his wife and sons as well.