On June 27, 2008, Susan Powell was afraid for her life.
She’d just gone through the worst argument she and her husband, Josh, had ever had. The two had fallen out over faith and finances, and the shouting match had gotten so brutal that Susan had locked herself in the closet and threatened to call the police.
This was more than a just a marital spat. It was a fight that left her in such desperate fear that, the next day, she wrote up her last will and testament, emblazoning the outer cover with the warning: “For family, friends of Susan all except for Josh Powell husband, I don’t trust him!”
“If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one,” Susan wrote inside the will. “Take care of my boys.”
Susan Powell disappeared a little over a year later, on Dec. 7, 2009. Her body has never been found.
From the very beginning of the case, police suspected that Josh Powell was responsible for his wife’s disappearance. But they never pressed charges, and on Feb. 5, 2012, Josh killed himself and Susan’s two boys.
The problem was evidence. The only evidence they’d been able to gather was circumstantial. They couldn’t find her body, and, without it, they didn’t have hard proof.
Some of that evidence against Josh came from Susan herself. After that fight on June 27, 2008, Susan began documenting everything she could, convinced that her husband, in her owns words, “could easily take me out.”
She wrote up her last will and testament, specifically asking anyone who found it to look into her husband if she died. She had a friend, Kiirsi Hellewell, write up a detailed report on her fight with Josh. And she registered a safety deposit box her husband couldn’t access, filling it with documents she would need in the case of a divorce.
“I feel the need to have a paper trail,” Susan wrote in her will. “I want it documented somewhere that there is extreme turmoil in our marriage.”
Most of the “paper trail” of evidence she created has never been shared with the public. But now, for the first time, KSL’s Dave Cawley is sharing that evidence with the world on his podcast “Cold”.
In his third episode, he has shared parts the dozens of documents Susan left behind out of her fear that her husband would hurt, and he has conducted exclusive interviews with some of the people closest to her, sharing their stories about the woman at the center of one of Utah’s most heart-wrenching cold cases.
Listen to Cold on the KSL Newsradio website or on Apple Podcasts.
