Details Surrounding Susan Cox Powell's Unsolved Disappearance

"If I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one. Take care of my boys."

So Susan Cox Powell wrote in what she labeled her last will and testament, penned in blue ink on college-rule notebook paper and folded under a top sheet that read, "For family, friends of Susan all except for Josh Powell husband, I don't trust him!"

She dated it June 28, 2008, and about a week later signed up for a safe-deposit box at a nearby Wells Fargo, where she stashed the will, some savings bonds and a few other legal documents.

Susan was last seen alive on Dec. 6, 2009. Investigators opened the box on Dec. 15.

According to numerous accounts, including the 18-part 2018-'19 KSL NewsRadio podcast Cold, which probed the circumstances leading up to the 28-year-old's disappearance and sifted through everything that has happened since, Susan's marriage had become untenable. 

"I bike to work daily and have been having extreme marital stress for about 3 or 4 yrs now," Powell wrote in the will. 

"For mine and my children's safety I feel the need to have a paper trail at work which would not be accessible to my husband."

A devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she clashed with Josh and her father-in-law, Steven Powell. 

Steven had met wife Terri Powell, the mother of his five children, through the LDS Church, but he became a fierce critic of the faith and left the church in the mid-1980s. He and Terri divorced in 1992.

Terri and others swore in statements pertaining to the divorce that, over the years, Steven—once a friendly, fun-loving, basically normal guy—had turned belligerent and paranoid.





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