The Disappearance of Susan Powell: A Mother, a Mineshaft Story, and Two Sons Who Never Grew Up

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 3, 2026

Susan Cox grew up in Puyallup, Washington, the kind of person friends describe as vibrant and self-sufficient almost to a fault. She baked her own bread, grew a garden, canned her own vegetables, and still managed a full-time career as a stockbroker while raising two young sons. She met Josh Powell in November 2000 at a dinner he hosted for a Latter-day Saints institute course they were both taking, and the two married the following April. By December 2009, she was twenty-eight years old, working at Wells Fargo in West Valley City, Utah, and privately writing in a will that if anything happened to her, "it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one." Weeks later, she was gone, and the two people who might have been able to say what happened to her, her husband and the boys who were with him that night, would themselves be dead within two and a half years.

A Midnight Trip in a Snowstorm

On the evening of December 6, 2009, Susan walked home from church with her sons and a friend, and later that day told people she wasn't feeling well. That was the last confirmed sighting of her by anyone outside her own household. According to Josh, sometime after midnight, with Susan reportedly still not feeling well, he loaded their two young sons, Charlie, four, and Braden, two, into the family van and drove them out into the remote west desert of Tooele County for a camping trip at Simpson Springs, leaving Susan asleep at home. He said he last saw her around 12:30 a.m.

The story had problems from the moment police heard it. It was the middle of winter, with subfreezing temperatures, rain turning to snow. When investigators went looking for evidence of a campsite at Simpson Springs, they found nothing that confirmed anyone had actually camped there. Neither Josh nor Susan showed up for work the next day, and the boys never made it to daycare. When Josh returned home with the children around five that evening, Susan was not there. She had left behind her purse, her keys, and her phone, the objects most people would never willingly walk away from.

Investigators who searched the house on December 9 found a large wet patch on the tile floor near the couch, with fans set up around it as though something had been dried in a hurry. They found traces of blood matching Susan's DNA on that same tile, along with an unidentified male DNA sample. They found the life insurance policies, worth $1.5 million, that Josh stood to collect. And they found the will, with its unsettling line about accidents that might not be accidents at all.

The Children Who Said Otherwise

What made the case feel less like a mystery and more like a slowly closing door was what the couple's own sons eventually said. Charlie, the older boy, later told investigators a version of events that directly contradicted his father's account: that Susan had, in fact, gone with them that night, and had not come back. Weeks after the family relocated to Washington state, Charlie told a teacher, without prompting, that his mother was dead. Braden, still a toddler, drew a picture of a van with three people inside it and told daycare workers, "Mommy was in the trunk."

Josh's behavior after Susan's disappearance did little to help his case. He hired a defense attorney within the first week and skipped a scheduled police interview. Susan's cell phone turned up in his car with the SIM card removed, something he could never explain. He began withdrawing from her retirement accounts and cancelling her standing appointments as though he already knew she was not coming back. When police briefly impounded the family's van as evidence, Josh rented a replacement car and, over an unaccounted period of roughly eighteen hours, put more than eight hundred miles on it.

Moving to Washington, and Steven Powell

Just under two weeks after Susan vanished, Josh took the boys to spend the holidays at his father's house in Puyallup, Washington, and by January he had decided to move the family there permanently. That decision would eventually blow the case open in a direction nobody expected.

In August 2010, police searching Steven Powell's home for anything related to Susan's disappearance instead found more than a thousand secretly recorded videos of women and girls, some as young as eight, undressing, bathing, and using the bathroom. Among the material were images of Susan herself, taken without her knowledge over the years the family had lived near him, along with disturbing composite images superimposing her face onto other content. Susan's family later said that Steven had made unwanted advances toward her early in her marriage, that she had told Josh she never wanted his father in their home again, and that she had written in her own journal that she believed Steven was a pedophile. Steven was convicted in May 2012 on fifteen counts related to child sexual abuse material and voyeurism.

The discovery was enough to strip Josh of custody. Susan's parents, Chuck and Judy Cox, were granted temporary custody of Charlie and Braden, with Josh limited to supervised visits twice a week. A court-ordered psychological evaluation diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder and noted his paranoid statements to the boys about Susan's family and what he called "Mormon police" conspiracies. Investigators also found roughly four hundred cartoon images with incestuous, sexualized themes on a computer that had passed through the household, though a later review determined much of that material predated Susan's own purchase of the device.

February 5, 2012

Josh's supervised visits continued for months under the watch of a caseworker. On February 5, 2012, during one of those visits at the house he was renting in South Hill, Washington, Josh let the boys inside and then blocked the caseworker, Elizabeth Griffin Hall, from following them in. She called 911 from the doorstep. Within minutes, the house exploded.

All three, Josh, Charlie, and Braden, died in the fire. Investigators determined Josh had attacked both boys with a hatchet before spreading gasoline through the house and igniting it, and that the deaths were ultimately caused by carbon monoxide poisoning as much as the blaze itself. In the hours beforehand, Josh had sent goodbye emails to relatives, including instructions to his bishop about his finances and utilities, withdrawn thousands of dollars from his bank account, and given away his sons' toys and books. He had named his brother Michael as his life insurance beneficiary. It was, by every measure investigators could later reconstruct, planned.

What Was Never Resolved

Josh's brother Michael became a subject of scrutiny in his own right. Two weeks after Susan disappeared, he had sold a car for salvage under circumstances police found suspicious, and years later a cadaver dog alerted to the vehicle's trunk, though DNA testing proved inconclusive. Michael died by suicide in February 2013, jumping from a parking garage roof in Minneapolis. Months later, in May 2013, West Valley City police formally closed their active investigation into Susan's disappearance, stating publicly that they believed Josh had killed her and that Michael had helped conceal what happened to her body. No one was ever charged. No body was ever found.

Susan's family spent the years afterward doing what so many families in these cases end up doing: fighting in court for the right to be believed. They eventually won control of her estate. They sued the Washington child welfare agency that had continued to grant Josh visitation rights despite the mounting evidence against him, and in a later trial a jury found the agency negligent and awarded the boys' estates a combined $98 million, a number that changes nothing about what actually happened in that house. In 2022, a search crew went looking through a Utah mineshaft Josh had once mentioned, and found bones that turned out to belong to an animal, and clothing that has never been conclusively tied to Susan.

Susan Powell has never been found. She is presumed dead, murdered by the man who told police, calmly and specifically, a story about a midnight camping trip in a snowstorm that nobody else ever quite managed to believe.

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