Free Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors by Ann Rule

probably be killed. Dog owners are warned to keep track of their pets when they are in the west desert area.
    Now that Susan Powell had seemingly vanished into thin air, the thought that her body might lie at the bottom of a mile-deep mine shaft seemed possible. And horrifying.
    But which one—and where ? The West Valley City police detectives kept this option to themselves. They didn’t want to risk the lives of volunteers who might take it upon themselves to search for Susan in mine shafts. It was early in the probe, and they still hoped she might be alive or that they could find her in a less precarious spot. If that didn’t happen, they were prepared to go into the old mines themselves.
    *   *   *
    More than eight hundred miles away in Puyallup, Washington, Chuck and Judy Cox had no idea that their daughter was missing. On the morning of December 7, 2009, Chuck received a phone call at work from Jennifer Graves.
    “She asked if I had spoken to Susan lately,” Chuck recalls. “I told her I’d talked to Susan the week before. Then she told me that Susan, Josh, and the boys were missing! She asked me to talk to my other daughters to see if they had heard from Susan, and of course I said I would.”
    But Susan’s sisters hadn’t heard from her. Chuck called Jennifer back that afternoon to see if she knew anything and she said that Susan was still missing, although Josh had called her.
    “We were discussing what could have happened—and I had my phone turned to speaker. Judy was listening in.
    “Then Josh called Jennifer and she put him on her speakerphone—so we all heard him. She asked him where he was and told him everyone was looking for him. Then he told Jennifer what she knew was a lie. He told her the boys were safe and Susan was at work. She told him Susan wasn’t at work and straight-out asked him, ‘What have you done?’ ”
    At that point, the line went dead. All Chuck and Judy could do was wait. They knew the West Valley City police were at Josh and Susan’s house and hoped to find out what was going on after the police questioned Josh.
    “We didn’t hear anything until the next day,” Chuck said. “Josh called me just before noon. He said he didn’t have any idea where Susan was. The last time he saw her was eleven thirty Sunday night, and she was getting ready for bed. I didn’t challenge his story—because I might have inadvertently helped him come up with a more believable one. I also didn’t want him to know that we overheard his conversation with Jennifer.”
    Josh’s lack of concern alarmed Susan’s parents. He told them that the police had interviewed him a few times.
    Chuck and Judy were dumbfounded and frightened. They worried about what could have happened to Susan. They even half expected her to show up at their door. They knew that it was possible she and Josh had had a big fight and that she’d finally left him. Susan and Josh had been arguing recently about the endless phone calls between Josh and his father, Steven Powell. After hearing Josh talking for hours to his father, Susan was usually annoyed. Josh wouldn’t allow her to talk to her sister Denise for fifteen minutes, but he burned up the phone lines with Steven. Even though they had managed to move far away from her father-in-law, Susan still felt creepy if she even heard his name.
    Although the Coxes could understand why Susan would leave Josh, and separate herself from his family—except for Jennifer and her husband, Kirk Graves—they seriously doubted she would ever have left Charlie and Braden behind. Her boys were her life.
    Josh was summoned to the West Valley City police headquarters again on that same day—December 8. He agreed to come in, but he arrived nearly four hours late. Ellis Maxwell repeated the same general questions he had asked Josh the day before. And Josh gave him the same peculiar answers. He had gone camping with his sons, returning the next day. They liked to camp—winter or