No tears for Steven Powell, but plenty left for Susan
What a remarkable year this was shaping up to be for local grief-weary families to find answers to long-unsolved murders.
Within a six-week span in May and June, a pair of Tacoma cold cases cracked open when detectives used DNA to arrest two suspects in the deaths of Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian. The girls were killed in 1986 in eerily similar but unrelated abductions.
Sadly, not every family gets resolution to the painful mysteries of children taken from them in the prime of life.
A summer of expectant justice for the Welches, Bastians and the local law enforcement community has turned into a summer of one more dead end for the loved ones of Susan Cox Powell.
The former Puyallup resident has long been presumed slain at the hands of her husband, Josh Powell, after she disappeared from their Utah home in 2009. But Susan’s fate remains shrouded, six years after Josh died and five years after police closed the investigation — a case we described at the time as a “slowly unfolding horror show.”
Now another key actor is gone. When Steven Powell, Josh’s father, died of cardiac problems Sunday at a Tacoma hospital, there was a sense of loss — not for the man, but for the last living link in a chain of deception and depravity.
“We believe a lot of secrets died with him,” Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said.
Susan’s family deserves better. They deserve to know what happened to the 28-year-old mother of two boys. They should be able to lay her to rest.
Police in two states believe Susan was murdered by her unstable, philandering husband. Her family back home in Washington, and at least one Powell sibling, believe that, too. With good reason.
But they not only have no body from which to obtain evidence, they also don’t have the presumed killer. With suspicion focused on him, Josh Powell returned to Pierce County, moved in with his father, lost primary custody of his sons, and killed them — and himself — in a ghastly hatchet attack and arson in 2012.
Steven Powell had his own catalog of horrors, but his death this week was anticlimactic by comparison. Shakespeare wrote that “cowards die many times before their deaths,” an apt characterization of the Powell family patriarch. Whatever credibility he had was buried years ago.
When Susan went missing, Steven Powell maligned her as a child-abandoning adulteress, even claiming on national TV that his daughter-in-law had come on to him. When police searched for evidence in the home father and son shared, they found journals chronicling Steven’s obsession with her.
Even more sick, they found images of neighbor girls he’d secretly filmed through their bathroom window. He was convicted of 12 counts of voyeurism. Two related child pornography charges were overturned, then refiled, and he was convicted of those in 2015; he got out of prison last year.
At his sentencing on the porn charges, he launched a scripted diatribe not in defense of himself, but of his dead son. Never mind that Josh Powell was the indisputable killer of Steven’s grandsons. Spewing conspiracy theories, he contended Josh was “an innocent man up to the last day of his life.”
A father so blind to evil was unworthy of sympathy then, and few tears will be shed for him now. A deathbed confession, tell-all book or inadvertent slip was unlikely. But Susan Cox Powell’s survivors can’t be blamed if they feel another door has closed, like when Josh Powell’s brother, Michael, committed suicide in 2013.
If they can’t find Susan on this earth, and if they’re not granted closure like the Welches and Bastians are finally tasting, we pray they at least find peace.
This story was originally published July 26, 2018 at 2:00 PM.