Episode Transcript
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Hey there, all you true crime fans. I'm Amanda.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: And I'm Corey.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: And we are back with part two of the Susan Powell case.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Happy new year, all you true crime fans.
Hopefully that this, this year will go better for everyone and it will be great and you will all have whatever you wish for.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Unless it's raining frogs.
I'm gonna say money, money, health, wealth and happiness.
But happy 2026, wealth, maybe some health.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: I don't care about being happy. If I have money.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: I kind of want to be happy.
I enjoy the happiness.
Well, again, we are going to get into part two of Susan Powell, but the cat is right here. Salem is now the podcast kitten. And I'm sorry if you hear her, she's a little bit choosing violence.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: But.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: I think with that we're going to jump right in.
So Susan Powell didn't just vanish into a void.
She disappeared into questions. And those questions have never gone away.
All right, Corey, before we go any further, I think there's something that we need to clarify. Not to justify anything, but just to explain how Susan ended up here.
When Susan met Josh, he didn't present as dangerous.
He was quiet, intelligent, technologically skilled.
Friends and family described him as reserved, even awkward, but not threatening.
And he came from a family that appeared functional on the surface. And at the time, there was nothing in his background that would have warned Susan or anyone else for that matter, of what would eventually unfold. And that's important because it didn't begin as something obviously unsafe.
It just became that over time.
So now I want to walk you through the night that Susan went missing and then what came after.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: I'm interested to hear this.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: On the night of December 6, 2009, Josh Powell would later tell police that he took his two young sons on a late night camping trip.
And when I was in the middle of a blizzard, it was in the middle of a blizzard. And when I say young, I mean the boys were born in 2005 and 2007.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: They were took your two year old and your five year old camping, right?
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Little.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: In the winter, in the middle.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Of a blizzard, in the middle of the night.
He claims that Susan stayed home and that when he returned the next day, she was gone.
No one ever saw Susan leave and no one ever heard from her again.
And almost immediately, Josh's story raised concerns.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: As it should.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Right. He took their children, a 2 year old and a 5 year old, camping in the middle of winter, late at night, with no prior plans, just surprise Camping, Right. Immediately there were questions about the timing the weather, the lack of preparation, and the decision to wake young children instead of just letting them sleep.
I mean, I have. Mine aren't little anymore. I mean, they're still young, but they're not little. And I still wouldn't wake them up in the middle of the night to take them somewhere they're not going back to sleep. That's a terrible idea.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: But even more troubling than Josh taking their children in the middle of the night on a supposed camping trip was his demeanor.
Friends, family, and investigators all described him as emotionally flat, oddly detached and focused on himself rather than on Susan being missing.
And actually, in. In the interview tape of him being questioned by investigators, he doesn't cry until he starts talking about himself and, like, what this is going to do to him.
And this is, like, a huge red flag.
So Susan wasn't reported missing by Josh.
I know everybody is shocked, but she was actually reported by a friend when she missed work and she couldn't be reached. Hmm.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: That's interesting.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Right. Like, that matters. That's a huge.
A huge red flag.
That meant that concern for Susan came from the people who knew her and not from the person who saw her last.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: When police arrived at the PAL house, Susan was gone.
But guess what wasn't her place, her belongings.
Nothing suggested that she'd planned to leave.
There's something that investigators noticed almost immediately when they arrived at the Powell house.
And this is one of the details that law enforcement has pointed to again and again.
The house had been recently cleaned.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: That's weird.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So when police entered the house, they noted that the carpets were wet.
And not, like, also weird. Right. Not just damp, like, not like somebody had spilled a cup of water, but, like, wet.
Wet in a way that suggested, like, active, recent, like, carpet cleaning.
And there was music playing really loudly in the house when they got there. There were fans placed, pointed towards the floor, and there were cleaning supplies that appeared to have been used the very recently.
And that matters because of timing.
Susan had disappeared overnight. And by the time police arrived the next day, parts of the home appeared to have been deliberately cleaned.
So I'm sure everybody listening felt the same way that investigators felt. And obviously, they found this very suspicious because this, you know, there was no innocent explanation offered for why a deep carpet cleaning would take place in the immediate window after Susan vanished.
This wasn't just routine housekeeping.
It was targeted, and it was recent.
But I will say police have been very careful in how they've described this.
They've never said that they found a Crime scene with obvious blood or signs of violence. But they have said they believe evidence may have been removed or destroyed.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: I mean, it sounds like it, to be honest. It sounds like they. And by they, I mean his family, because I'm pretty sure they're probably complicit in all of this.
Killed her, cleaned it up, and then fake campy.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah.
So in no body homicide cases, one of the most common indicators investigators look for is a post event cleanup.
Especially when it coincides with a disappearance and when the person missing left behind every single thing that she would need to leave on her own.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Mm.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: Susan's purse was still there.
Her phone was still there.
Her car was still there.
But parts of the home had been cleaned.
And to me, that suggests that something happened and someone wanted that gone.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Did they cut out the carpet on those wet spots and find what was underneath it or anything?
[00:08:47] Speaker A: I believe they did because he did find some small patches or spots of blood that they did confirm to be Susan's.
But it was nothing that would have indicated like a huge bleed.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Right.
Maybe they hit her on the head and she was bleeding.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yes. Or, I mean, it could have. It honestly, it could have been as simple as even a nosebleed.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: It was not a huge amount of blood.
But then that leads me back to your neighbor is at your house and you take a nap.
Maybe it wasn't a gory crime scene because maybe he didn't attack her, maybe he drugged her.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: That could be.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So the cleanup, combined with Josh's explanation of a late night camping trip and his refusal to report Susan missing and his lack of urgency afterwards, pushed investigators towards a conclusion that they've never backed away from. That Susan didn't leave, at least not on her own.
They believe she was killed and that whatever happened to her began inside of that home.
So investigators didn't just take Josh at his word about the camping trip. They examined the van that he used that night, and what they found actually changed the direction of the case.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: I can't believe we took a van camping in a snowstorm.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Right. But to me, that says, like, obviously you couldn't have gone too far off of a path.
I don't know. I don't drive a minivan, but I can't imagine that they're.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: You can't.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Fabulous in the snow.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: They're not, especially because it was 2009.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Right. But they actually brought in cadaver dogs and they alerted inside the vehicle, indicating the presence of human decomposition at some point.
And then again, police were very careful with how they described this, they didn't say that they found Susan's body, body in the van, but they did say the findings were consistent with the body having been transported.
Combined with the signs of the cleaning both in the home and in the vehicle. Investigators began focusing their searches on remote desert areas west of Salt Lake City.
Places reachable by car, places someone might go in the middle of the night.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: I wonder where her body is.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Me too. Because to this day, Susan has never been found.
But from that point forward, police stopped asking, where did she go? And started asking where was she taken?
And police even searched the PAL house more than once.
And what stood out wasn't what they found.
It was what they didn't.
During one of their several searches, investigators seized computers, hard drives, external storage devices, cell phones, and digital media they believed could hold answers.
Some of the data was analyzed, but some of it remains locked to this day.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Like, locked that they couldn't get in or locked that they didn't look or. How do you mean locked?
[00:12:24] Speaker A: The encryption on certain devices was so strong that investigators simply could not access it.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Huh.
I wouldn't have thought that he would have been that smart.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
So that means that there may be information like locations, searches, plans that police know exist but have never been able to see.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Have they tried, like, recently with the advances in people learning about how to break data encryption?
[00:13:03] Speaker A: I believe as recently as 2019, they had been working on it.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Oh, okay. So they're still trying.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: They're still trying. This is something that they've sent to, like, specialists, but given the final outcome of the story, you know, it's not. I don't think that investigators have that at the top of the list right now.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Right. Yeah.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: But there's something else that investigators discovered when they began examining all of Josh Powell's digital life.
And it goes far beyond a few emails or browser searches.
Josh didn't just use computers.
He documented everything.
And I mean everything.
Police found that Josh had scanned and digitally archived receipts, bank statements, mail, personal letters, emails, documents related to finances, and day to day household records.
And this wasn't like occasional scanning. Like it was systemic. I'm talking everything and anything was documented digitally.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Okay. It was a lot of work.
Oh, yeah. I mean, investigators described it as exhaustive and intentional. It was crazy the way that Steve Powell vlogged everything.
Josh Powell scanned everything.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Why do you think he did that?
[00:14:44] Speaker A: I think he was really paranoid.
I think it was a control thing that he felt that, like, he couldn't control every aspect of his Life. So he would document it.
Mm, that's weird.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: It is weird.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: That is like a very paranoid, very deliberate thing to do. Like, do you have any idea how time consuming that would be?
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Yes, it's crazy. Can you imagine scanning in your McDonald's receipt?
[00:15:10] Speaker A: No.
Like, don't get me wrong, I have to save a lot of my stuff. Being self employed, right?
[00:15:16] Speaker B: I have.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: I have, like, the. The hard copy of a receipt, blah, blah, blah. But, like, after seven years, I dispose of that, and it's only what I use for business expenses. If Chris and I are like, hey, we're gonna go out to dinner, I don't save that receipt.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Right. We don't either.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: And I definitely wouldn't scan it in anywhere. I don't even know how to scan.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Something in your fancy printer copier. Probably could do it.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: I bet you're right. I bet it could. But still, like, where do you store that? How do you have.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: You don't have enough hard drive space. You have to. That's why you had external hard drives and flash drives and all that stuff. You saved all that on there, right?
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Like, I got a notification on my phone yesterday saying that I don't have any more storage space on my phone. And I was like, what do I do now?
I can't imagine, like, keeping every single email, every photo, every.
Every. Everything. I'm talking, like, handwritten mail, letters, notes, and I'm a note taker. Like, if you looked at my desk right now, you'd be like, oh, God, Amanda, what does all of your chicken scratch mean?
But, like, I keep it there until I'm done with it, and then it goes in the trash.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Right?
[00:16:30] Speaker A: He didn't throw it away. He scanned it in and saved it.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Do you think. Did he throw it away after he scanned it in, or did he keep the hard copies too?
[00:16:40] Speaker A: You know, I actually think he did throw away the hard copies because he kept the digital.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Because the house was messy, but it wasn't like a hoarder status. And if you kept everything that he had a digital copy of, I mean, it would be a hoarder house.
Yeah, but from, like, a law enforcement perspective, this mattered for two reasons.
First, it showed planning and control.
That Josh didn't, like, rely on memory. He created records.
And second, it created a digital footprint that investigators believed should contain answers.
If Susan left, if Susan planned to disappear, if Susan withdrew money, if Susan communicated intent, it would likely be there, and it wasn't.
So again, this level of documentation wasn't neutral inside the marriage.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: No.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Susan Actually, like, wrote about it, she complained about it, and that became a really big point of conflict between the two of them.
She described feeling monitored, controlled, and stripped of autonomy, especially when it came to money.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Was he in debt? Did he owe a lot of money? Did he have a gambling problem? Like, what was his deal?
[00:18:13] Speaker A: He did not have a gambling problem, but he was terrible with money. He. I believe they had filed bankruptcy at least once, and he, like, early on, he had applied for a credit card under her name and not stood out so much. So, like, she had to borrow money from her parents at one point.
And, like, he didn't see a problem with this. It was his stuff.
And, I mean, he was constantly, constantly buying new stuff and, like, big stuff. Like.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Stuff you should consult about.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Not hair supplies.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Right.
A pool.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: I mean, they didn't have a great car, so it was never, like. It was never that, but it was.
He would buy, like, a chop saw.
I'm not saying that he used that on Susan. I'm just saying, in general, he would. And it wasn't just, like, one chop saw. It would be, like, three chop saws. And he would get these ideas in his head of, like, I'm gonna start a real estate business. I'm gonna go into real estate.
I don't know if you guys know this or not.
Real estate's really hard.
But getting into real estate in 2009, I mean, like, this wasn't just, like, a localized problem. The real estate market completely crashed. Like, we were in a recession in.
In 2009, and we didn't really come out of it until 2013ish is when, like, the housing market started to get better.
By then, Susan had already been missing.
So, you know, he just. He had these crazy ideas, and he would go all in. Susan wrote that Josh required meticulous tracking of spending.
Like, he even categorized individual grocery items.
And it's not because she needed it, but because he did. He wanted that control of knowing.
She bought three bottles of hairspray this year. What is she doing with all that hairspray?
[00:20:36] Speaker B: Right?
[00:20:36] Speaker A: She needed a new tube of mascara.
She bought body wash.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Right?
[00:20:43] Speaker A: And it was always what Susan did.
And Susan, like, it was never Susan questioning Josh of, hey, where'd this.
Where'd this new computer come from? It was always Josh saying, you were bad. You did this wrong. You overspent.
[00:21:01] Speaker B: Right?
[00:21:03] Speaker A: And so after Susan vanished, this digital behavior took on a whole new meaning.
Police believed that if Josh had planned something, it might be reflected digitally, most likely.
Right?
If Susan had Left voluntarily, there would be evidence of preparation.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: And if money was moved, moved, there'd be a record.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: But instead, investigators encountered a paradox.
Josh was someone who documented every single thing.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yet Susan disappeared and left no digital trail at all.
And that absence was loud.
So to make matters more frustrating, much of Josh's digital archive was encrypted.
Some devices were accessible, some were not.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: And investigators have stated that certain hard drives and files couldn't be opened. The encryption was super strong and super intentional.
And at that time, law enforcement couldn't break it. This meant that potential evidence may exist, but. But still, to this day, remains unseen.
Timelines may be locked away, and locations or plans might still be hidden. But I guess the good news is those devices still remain in evidence, just waiting.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: That's something, I guess.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: And this wasn't about tech savvy alone.
You know, anybody can encrypt something.
This was about control.
And it shifts from being control of Susan to now a control of Susan's remains.
You know, he had control over information, finances, records, and now ultimately, Susan's narrative.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: But Susan tried to push back against the control, and she wrote about it.
And after she disappeared, Josh retained control over her journals, her digital footprint, and much of the story that investigators were trying to piece together.
Susan's life was documented.
Her disappearance was not.
When investigators talk about Josh Powell, they don't describe a man who acted impulsively.
They describe someone methodical, someone who planned, someone who controlled information.
And that's part of why they believe Susan didn't disappear.
Her life was too thoroughly recorded for that.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: And over the months and years that followed, there were numerous searches for Susan Powell.
Searches included desert areas, mines, remote campsites, and locations tied to Josh's movement.
When I say that law enforcement looked for her, they spent thousands of hours trying to locate Susan. Susan's remains, and they never did.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: That's crazy to me, too.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: I mean, that it. It means that Susan's disappearance still remains unsolved, not because people stopped looking, but because there was nothing left to find.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: So we're gonna take a little segue here really quick, because oftentimes we. We talk about Susan. There's another name that's brought up, and that's Stephen Kosher.
Steven disappeared early in 2009, also in Utah.
His disappearance occurred within months of Susan's and in a geographic proximity.
Authorities have stated that there is no proven connection between the two cases, but the timing and location have definitely led to speculation, and we just need to be very Very careful here.
Because what is true is that both cases highlight how someone can disappear and how answers don't always come, even when the families never stop looking. If Steven's case is one you guys want us to cover, let us know in the comments.
But it was also Steven Powell who tied these two together.
Later on in the investigation, Steve Powell actually reaches out to the FBI proposing this theory that Susan and Stephen Kosher ran off together to Portugal of all places, because Stephen Kosher had actually served a mission in Portugal at one time, and Susan had always talked about how she wanted to visit Portugal. So Steve Powell, her creepy father in law, wrote this letter to the FBI about how it was super plausible that the two ran off together. And again, you guys, there is no proven connection. They just happened to disappear around the same time in kind of the same area.
Steven.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: And they didn't know each other or anything?
[00:26:31] Speaker A: No, no. Steven was a Mormon. That doesn't.
But, like, just because he's a Mormon doesn't mean that he knew Susan.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: And so it was just like another way of Steve Powell inserting himself into her disappearance and into her life, which is just like, so weird, right?
[00:26:57] Speaker B: That is weird.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: So again, if you guys want us to cover Stephen Kosher's case, let us know because. Because that one is also such a sad case because to this day, he is still missing.
But let's get back to Susan.
And I mean, immediately, Susan's family was pretty clear about one thing, and that's that they didn't believe that she left voluntarily.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: She loved her children. She loved being a mom. She was planning for the future.
She. I mean, clearly in her writing, she had expressed that she was afraid of Josh.
She had told friends, and friends had even come forward after she went missing saying, yeah, no, she was afraid of her husband.
Somebody should look into this guy.
And not one single person described Susan as depressed, unstable, or wanting to disappear.
Right.
Instead, they described her as a woman who was. Was trying to survive.
Law enforcement has been pretty consistent on one point, and that's that they believe that Susan Powell was the victim of a homicide.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: And they didn't come to this conclusion based off of one piece of evidence.
It was the totality, her fear, her sudden disappearance, the belongings left behind, the suspicious cleanup, Josh's behavior and movements that didn't match his story.
All that together, investigators said those facts pointed not to disappearance but to homicide.
And they've also been very clear that Josh Powell was the primary person of interest.
But again, without Susan's body and without A confession.
Charges were never filed.
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Right. They really couldn't go ahead. There's no body, there's no crime scene.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Exactly.
And that legal reality is what would shape everything that followed.
So after Susan vanished, Josh refused to cooperate fully with investigators.
He declined to answer questions, and he, like, focused really heavily on portraying himself as persecuted, that he was the victim in all of this, and that he was being bullied by the police, and they were looking at him for no reason, and they needed to be out looking for Susan, not looking at him.
All while he's saying that, though, he still retained control of Susan's personal writings and journals, refusing.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: How did he get those?
[00:29:44] Speaker A: She lived in the house.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: She had them in a safety pasta box, I thought.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: No. So she. I mean, again, the amount of journals that she had was wild to think of.
You know, Josh, like, scanned everything she wrote, everything.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: So she had boxes of journals in the house.
She just had a couple notes, a couple pieces, pieces of paper, and the tape of her walking through the house documenting all of her belongings. That's all that was found in the safe deposit box. Oh, the journals, though, were at the house, and Josh refused to give them back to her family.
So Susan's voice stayed out of reach. And there's. There is another decision that Josh made very quickly after Susan disappeared.
So there was another decision that Josh made very quickly after Susan disappeared, and it's one that would shape everything that came next.
Josh decided to move the boys out of Utah.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: Now, it's weird.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Well, it's weirder when you find out where he moved them to.
Because not long after Susan vanished, Josh Powell took Susan's two sons, Charlie and Braden, and relocated to Washington, where his father, Steve Powell, was living.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: Hmm.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: And I'm not talking like a year or so, I'm talking like within months that she was reported missing, that they moved to Washington.
At this point, like, police had already believed that she was murdered and Josh was the primary person of interest and he took them to be with his father.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Mm.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: How. How do you rationalize that in your head? He's trying to persuade America at this point, because this isn't just like a small Utah based crime now. I mean, this is like a worldwide. Everyone knows of Susan Powell.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: You're trying to convince the nation that you are innocent, that you didn't kill your wife and you didn't leave her somewhere.
[00:32:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: And you move away from the only place that she would know to come back to.
So unless you knew that she wasn't coming back, why would you Move. And, like, don't get me wrong, he was under a lot of media scrutiny. I mean, everything that he did, it was on News Weekly or whatever, all the gossip magazines, all of that, like, he was being watched, as he should be. Right. You sort of put yourself in that situation of making yourself the prime suspect or the prime person of interest.
And so the timing of that move really mattered to police. Like, that was.
That was a really big red flag.
So from the outside, Josh could frame this as, like, a practical decision. He was going to go stay with family. He was getting help, the kids.
But from an investigator standpoint, and from Susan's family's standpoint, it raised serious concerns, as it should, moving the boys. It removed the boys from the jurisdiction where Susan disappeared.
It complicated the ongoing investigation, and it limited the immediate access for Utah authorities. Again, it goes back to.
He was so calculated, so meticulous, you know, not just in what he documents documented, but this created, like, a huge issue for investigators because he's not in trouble in. In Washington. You know, he's not on their radar. And again, I'm gonna bring up the cold podcast because he really did an excellent job. But there were. There's an investigator who was interviewed on that podcast. And like the secret operations that were done to try to catch Josh, we're talking, like, James Bond sorts of investigative tactics. But Josh moving the boys also meant that they were now living full time in the same house with Steve Powell, a man Susan had expressed fear about and discomfort recently.
And for Susan's family, I mean, this move was devastating. Their daughter was missing. They now believed that she was dead. And now their grandsons were gone, too, taken across state lines by the man that police suspected killed their daughter.
And this is part of why the Cox family fought so hard so early to get custody, because they weren't just grieving Susan. They were trying to prevent losing the boys as well.
[00:34:44] Speaker B: I feel bad for, like, the family, I feel bad for.
They really tried their best. And he's like, peace out. See you later.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah, bye.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Move away to a guy who's creepy.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: Like, really creepy. Mm. So once Josh and the boys were actually in Washington, the case entered a new phase.
Now Washington child welfare agencies became involved.
Washington family courts took jurisdiction over the custody, and Susan's disappearance in Utah became legally distant, even though it remained central to risk assessment. So that separation between where Susan vanished and where the boys now lived created cracks in the system, cracks that would widen over time.
Josh moving the boys to Washington, it wasn't illegal.
He moved them Legally, but it changed everything, and it reshaped who was responsible for protecting Charlie and Brayden. And it placed them in an environment that many people already believed was unsafe.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: That's bad.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: So I do want to say this, and I want it to be clear before we move on. Charlie and Brayden didn't lose their lives in isolation because first they lost their mother, and then the system that was meant to protect them was operating in a world where Susan's disappearance remained legally unresolved.
That unresolved loss created the conditions for what came next.
So when we come back, we will talk about how custody court decisions and oversight unfolded and how those failures led to irreversible consequences.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: It's so terrible, this whole thing.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, it's a horrible case.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: It really is.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: And it was horrible when it was just Susan missing.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: It gets worse.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: And you and I both know what's coming, and it gets worse.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: It does get worse.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: It's just. It's. It's a. It's a horrible case, and it should never have happened. And it is so wild to me to think that, like, we live in a world with people who actually think this way, you know, like, this isn't just.
This isn't just a story that we hear. And these are real fucking people.
He is a real psycho. You know, his dad was crazy. Psychos.
And, like, these people exist in the world, and you don't know that until you know that.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Right?
[00:37:16] Speaker A: And that's what's crazy to me.
But thank you guys so much for joining us this week. We will be back next week to talk more about Charlie and Braden. So happy 2026. I hope you have a beautiful day wherever you are, and stay safe.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Hey, all you podcast fans have the day you deserve.
