Free Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors by Ann Rule Page A

summer.
    Josh’s response to the detectives was much less responsive than it had been. He asked to leave the interview prematurely, which he was subsequently allowed to do. He requested an attorney and said he wasn’t going to answer any more questions. This would, indeed, be the last good chance for Detective Maxwell and his fellow investigators to talk with Josh Powell about the night of December 6.
    Josh voluntarily surrendered his cell phone, but their technical experts discovered he had surreptitiously removed the sim card before he handed it over. With both his and Susan’s sim cards missing from their phones, any record of pings from cell phone towers was gone. This would have been a prime avenue to track Josh and the boys as they drove into the west desert to go camping as a snowstorm beat down on the blue minivan.
    Josh Powell might have been a difficult employee, frequently fired, socially inept—but he was very intelligent. His technical knowledge just might make up for his dim-witted alibis. He was an electronically savvy suspect.
    There was, however, one disturbing aspect to this second interview, something that made him look guiltier than before. Never once did Josh Powell ask about Susan. Nor did he ask what the investigators were doing to find her. It was almost as if he had dismissed her from his life. Where most innocent husbands would have been frantic, Josh Powell had moved on only two days after Susan disappeared.
    On that same day, detective Kim Waelty of the West Valley City police gently interviewed Charlie Powell. Charlie remembered that his mommy had gone camping with them.
    “But she didn’t come back home with us,” he said. “And I don’t know why.”
    He was only four, and Waelty didn’t question him further.
    Although he learned that the West Valley City detectives were talking with Josh, Chuck Cox said he couldn’t imagine that Josh would have hurt Susan. He knew his son-in-law was something of an oddball, but he couldn’t picture him being violent.
    *   *   *
    On December 9, 2009, the West Valley City Police Department contacted the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department in Washington State. Susan and Josh Powell had moved from Puyallup—in Sheriff Paul Pastor’s jurisdiction—and it appeared that most of their family members on both sides still lived there.
    Pierce County Sheriff’s Department captain Brent Bomkamp assigned detective Gary Sanders to work with the Utah detectives in the search for Susan Powell. From that date on, the two law enforcement agencies would cooperate and share information, even though the missing-person case had occurred in Utah and was the West Valley City department’s case.
    Armed with a search warrant for the house on West 3945 South, in West Valley City, the Utah investigators removed boxes and bags and what looked like computers. The detectives shook their heads when someone tried to ask them a question. From the beginning the Utah investigators were playing their cards very close to their vests, only grudgingly releasing information to the media, who clamored for something—anything—they could use by their deadlines. If the West Valley City officers had found anything significant in Susan’s disappearance, they weren’t saying.
    Nor was Josh talking much. He refused any more police interviews. Initially he’d talked to a few reporters, and the police investigators subpoenaed television stations for raw footage of those interviews—to study and learn exactly what he had said.
    With every day that passed, things looked more ominous for Susan. Police and volunteers searched the Simpson Springs area on the possibility that she might have gone along on the camping trip but hadn’t come back. But it was a vast area and there were so many places in the west desert where she—or her body—might be hidden.
    As always, the spouse or lover of a missing person is the first suspect. But Josh Powell had yet to be declared even a “person of