And That's Why We Drink - E152 A Cute Bread and Breakfast and Emotional Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

Episode Date: December 29, 2019

Dear future children, please bring us grilled cheese sandwiches... we'll need them for the stories we're telling today! Em takes us back to Kansas City to cover the hauntings of the Sauer Castle and Christine brings us the intense and tragic story of the disappearance of Susan Cox Powell. We'd also like to offer this warning from Em's childhood: be sure to hide the fireplace pokers when you're trying chocolate cake for the first time... and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Use coupon code DRINK for $10 off your first FabFitFun box at www.fabfitfun.comGet an extra 30% off your first order at thredUP.com/drinkGet 10% off your first three months of Ritual at ritual.com/ATWWD

happy new year oh i think we're a little early on that one a little bit early happy new year week is this our last weekend of 2019 it sure is wow sunday before new year so it's the 29th of december this comes out new year's eve is here you know what's crazy about 2020 like this this new decade coming up okay what this is the decade where pretty likely we will meet our children we'll meet our children yeah like we'll have kids and stuff oh oh oh i was like meet them where okay i'm at the hospital i think i hope anyway okay you don't seem to care as much as i do you phrased it so weirdly like not like we'll have children but like we will meet them and i mean we will also meet them time travel into the future and i was like my first thought was literally oh my god so time travel is going to

be real so we can go into the future meet our children not oh we're going to have them in the present could be how it goes 2020 is going to be a weird decade i think my brain just doesn't automatically think like oh my children i don't know listen i'm excited to meet you kids um okay i'm kind of but not really i'm not like i'm not racing towards it i'll see you when i see you listen m's in 2019 is already thinking about it so i'm in i'm in i've been thinking about my kids for a long long time i'm thinking about geo most of the time so uh i'm a little distracted from that the roaring 20s are back guys that's what i'm actually that's what i thought you were gonna say because i'm pretty excited about that because the 1920s were like cool and all but like had a lot of fucking shit that you know let's ignore that the 2020s is where it's at now we got the new roaring 20s

got the new flappers, and that's us. Oh. I'm a flapper now. Sure. I guess I'm flapping right next to you. We're just flapping along. Since we do everything together, I guess I'm forced into this weird story. I guess we're flapping.

You just forced me to have children in the 2020s, so you know what? I just have a hunch about it. Okay. Well, we have children and we're flapping around. All right. It's going to be a good time for you guys, too. I'm sure of it about it. Okay. Well, we have children and we're flapping around. All right. It's going to be a good time for you guys, too. I'm sure of it. I'm sure.

For my children that are listening one day in this decade, by the way. I don't know if they'll be listening in this decade. They'll certainly be listening eventually. By the age of four. And I want to let you know, before you showed up, you're probably upsetting me and pissing me off today. You're probably annoying me. Go to your room.

I'm sure they're listening to this just because they want to hear if i was ever actually cool and they're probably ironically listening to this to quote me and hate me later they're listening to it so that they can use have find ammo against us so that when we say you can't swear they say well look at this episode or if we say oh you can't do this oh christine's drunk mom you're drunk in this episode like Like, I guarantee it. Kids, I don't know you yet, and I may not even be your parent yet, but let's just preemptively ground you right now because I'm sure you've done something this week I don't like.

Yeah, you are in big trouble. So just say sorry. Actually, if you're listening to me, go get me a drink. Yeah, I know I've actually taught you to make grilled cheese by now, so please bring me one. From Skillshare? Sure. If Skillshare, like, in the future is future is like a holographic thing you know on your hoverboard can you hoverboard a grilled cheese over to me please i would be thrilled i do a lot for you

kids so if you could just walk into the room right now and just say thank you i would appreciate it say i love you i love you back and say how beautiful we were if you're watching the youtube video say i looked really cool when i was young and i still look good you still look say you didn't change one bit exactly and then i'll unground you so let's make that deal show this video to me and i'll agree i promise grilled cheese and a drink and say we're beautiful and then you're good yep and also that goes for all of our listeners if you could please send me our p.o box our address for grilled cheese is that's really the way to my heart um also i just wanted to say before we get do you have any other updates no i'm happy to be spending my last week in 2019 with you even though last week before your

children arrive yeah our last week my due date is actually like new year's day so i'm getting ready blaze's birthday is the second so he really was almost a new year's baby oh i know he has i know i say it's every year and he is 1990 so he was like like 48 hours away from being an 80s kid that's true you're totally right he just missed the cut he just missed the cut hey uh yeah first kids of the 90s some might say oh yeah he has a hard time because i say this every year but like uh with christmas and the new years and then everyone's hung over and then january 2nd everyone's like we're done with the partying everyone's like we have to go back to work yeah we go back to work we need to sleep and go back to work um but uh he doesn't listen to this so i have some plans what are your plans can you tell

them if he doesn't listen i'm gonna throw him it's his 30th by the way 2020 so i'm planning on throwing him a surprise party that i have not been fucking invited to i haven't done i said i'm planning on i'm literally telling you right now em i know i just like to give you a hard time i'll be there okay well i uh i don't tell anyone guys don't tell him because it will really ruin it okay but also tell him not to listen to this episode just in case he will i can absolutely guarantee he will not okay gotcha um uh oh i want to say since we have no other updates um thank you to everybody i haven't said this yet who was very kind to me about my top 10 list because i know a lot of people were like first of all anthony is not gay he's bi so you know what i was wrong off on that

okay you gave me so much shit for that apparently there is an episode where he literally says, oh no, I date women. So still got a chance. See, Blaze doesn't listen and I take full advantage of it. Secondly, a lot of people are very kind about my just not understanding that it would be a strange thing to also be attracted to some women. Yeah. I just was like, what a surprise that anyone was surprised, I guess. Sexuality is a spectrum. Thank you. We're definitely going to learn a lot more about that in the second where

my children are um i like to think by the time that like 2050 rolls around like sexuality and i and gender aren't even a thing it's just like that's what i'm saying we're all floating around doing our thing we're actually flapping we're flapping around doing our totally 100 universal non-binary thing that's what i'm saying and so i it just never really like they were just automatically on the list and then when i said it it was just kind of like oh i guess people wouldn't know that about me so i don't know it's not somebody missed me and said you don't got to label that shit so i said i won't do that's true christine unlabeled 2020 2020 coming to theaters near you a whole decade of that get ready can you wait i can't okay i'm so sorry

let's talk about you again please we know that i need to be spoken about at least every 30 seconds um i will i said this last episode i feel like we should keep pushing it. But please, if you have not yet, go get our tickets for our live show. I have no idea at this point where we are ticket wise and how many people or how many spots are still open. But presumably there will still be some openings in some spaces. And we would love to try to get as many tickets sold as possible and see as many beautiful people as we can. You better be beautiful. If you're not, don't buy a ticket. Just don't even come.

No. But yeah, we're super super pumped 2020 tour sounds just super cool yeah 2020 we're gonna come at you big and we have a new logo and a tour name and a whole shebang we have by this point presumably figured out i just got butterflies and one i know i do too i'm retching um we're very excited we We're very nervous. So please buy tickets. We would love to sell out some venues and we would love to see you. Yeah. It just hit me a little bit that I have to be on a stage. We need some antacids in here. Kids, I need an antacid.

I know I told you to bring me a grilled cheese, but I'm having some dietary, dairy issues. That's the truth. That's probably true. I'm still probably going to be wearing this crones is cray t-shirt i imagine in the 2020s you and i at some point like live together just we just morph our homes it's gotta be i mean we basically do now so like eventually we're just gonna say oh stop with the pretending so to my kids go give aunt christina a hug and bring her girl cheese oh if we have children we have to live there's no way we're gonna function they're gonna be the weirdest fucking kids like they're just gonna be surrounded in crime and paranormal shit there's literally

robert the dolls and i'm gonna be like you can't touch that it will haunt you they're going to be the weirdest kids especially at a sleepover like i'm not allowed to touch dolls they're all cursed yeah i actually brought my doll with me it's a little it has a demon in it but don't worry just don't say don't say its name three times and we'll be fine also i brought a ouija board but my mom makes me do a do a chant beforehand so that nothing bad happens kids if you don't say its name three times and we'll be fine also i brought a ouija board but my mom makes me do a do a chant beforehand so that nothing bad happens kids if you don't have friends it's it's my fault not yours don't don't take it personal i fucked up yeah i was bound to fuck you up in some way actually i think your grandma's fault go talk to her not she did some stuff to me and i did

it to you call her up and that's the circle of life just flapping through it tell her if she didn't mess me up i wouldn't have messed you up so And that's the circle of life. Just flapping through it. Tell her if she didn't mess me up, I wouldn't have messed you up so bad. It's all grandma's fault. And then bring her a drink because she probably needs one. My mom has told me that when I have kids, she wants to be a nana.

So I'm assuming that's what we go with. Kids, tell your nana that it's all her fault. I'm assuming we're going with Oma just because, you know, the German tradition. Perfect. Yep.

All right. Now kids go away. I'm about to tell a scary story yeah this is not for your ears uh as like the stove where the grilled cheese is made is and the haunted dolls surrounding the stove but earmuffs earmuffs earmuffs so uh this is a a story that i covered at a live show that we have not released this was my story i did in kansas city um this is the story of the sour castle yay also since we're not going to kansas city in our 2020 tour um this is a nice

little homage to you because we did have a great time not personal just didn't fit in the schedule yes but we do love you and um i have a special place in my heart so we love you kansas city that's true i think in kansas city was where you got a one of our fans gifted you a shirt that was signed by fallout boy no you're totally right of course you have a soft spot for kansas city it's kids don't touch that that is mommy's even though i've turned it into a pillow and it's got all my drool and wine stains on it don't touch it anyway so this is the sour castle am i saying it? I'm sure that's a German word. Yeah. Sauer.

Okay. Sauer. I'm not going to say it like that. Just say Sauer. Sauer. That's pretty good. Did I do it? Yep. Okay.

Just say Sauer. How do you say castle in German? Schloss. Do you say that before or after? Is it like you say? You say Schloss. Sauer. Schloss.

Sauer. Like Schloss. No, Schwanstein. Oh, exactly like that right that's what the disney castle is based on it doesn't matter okay fun fact no bring it up let's hear it neuschwanstein like the big beautiful like cinderella's castle yes or the one in like the when it says walt disney and it has all the things that's the neuschwanstein how about that it's a beautiful place okay anyway sorry Go on. So I think this was the case.

At least it sounds like it looks like this was the case based on my notes. But I think Kansas City was actually one of our earliest shows. And the fact that we still use a projector at our shows and we still did. And that's why we draw, I think. Yeah, we must have. Right. I don't know if we I don't know. We're going to find out in my.

Well, I don't see any. And that's why we draw stuff. Maybe we were just using the projector. Maybe. I don't know. That's weird. I don't think we we're gonna find out in my well i don't see any and that's why we draw stuff here maybe we were just using the projector maybe i don't know what's weird i don't think we did so my notes i back when we used a projector to make sure that i would actually click the slides at the right time i would put this massive highlighted dot in front of a bullet note so i knew to press the button back like a big red line and it's there which means that i must have used a projector maybe the projector was broken that day or something i don't know it was we were on our way out of using the projector at live shows

yeah um but anyway so if we used a projector then you're one of the only people who ever saw us using slides in our shows congratulations to you okay so sour castle again true to fashion i just picked this story before we started i have not not read the notes. So we're going to ride this ride together and it's going to be bumpy. Fantastic. Take your Dramamine now. Get ready. So we start apparently almost 150 years ago. Cool.

Because it literally says almost 150 years ago. So probably we've reached 150 now since it's almost 2020. Oh, maybe. We did this about a year ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this castle is apparently almost 100 years old um it is listed as one of the 10 most endangered buildings in kansas city this is where i probably told the audience to go oh ah oh ah thank you thank you so in 1858 there was an austrian man named Anton Sauer. Anton Sauer. Forget it.

Okay. And his wife, Franziska. Oh, that's my sister's name. It's Franziska and Francesca, the same thing. Like, is Francesca the German or Austrian name? I mean, it's like the equivalent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I'm assuming it's Franziska.

But it's Anton and his wife, Francesca, and their five kids immigrated to New York City to be near family in 1868 Francesca died and Anton was sick with TB tuberculosis my favorite consumption um he moved his family to Kansas City so he could be near the fresh air because apparently Kansas City had some of the freshest air in the country and you still do and at the time if you had consumption slash tuberculosis they thought the best way to heal yourself was to be out in the fresh air so that's why they ended up moving to this area got it he fell in love with his second wife there named mary who was a widow with two daughters wait what happened to francisca she died she died and then he also got tuberculosis

sorry i i i don't know how she died it just says in 1868 she died and then he contracted TB. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. So then once he moved to Kansas City, I think she probably died when they were in New York and then he was by himself and sick. So he brought his kids to Kansas City for tuberculosis.

Got it. TB and KC. There it is. That's probably exactly what you said there. Honestly, this is probably an exact reenactment that we don't even know we're reenacting everyone's like they're saying the thing and we're like are we doing the thing yep yep we are so he fell in love with his second wife mary who was a widow with two daughters um together they bought the property for their family of nine yikes that's a lot of people which oh which actually became a family of 14 because they had five more kids. Oh, wow. Did you like how I learned that with you?

Wow. I was like, oh, it gets bigger. So they used this property to build their mansion, and it was nicer than any mansion nearby. And it had a four-story lookout tower. Lord almighty, that sounds way fun. Wow. Four stories. Sounds like a lot of stairs, though.

You know an elevator was not in that place yet they had a four-story lookout tower a marble grand parlor fireplace fireplace wow a library and a music space that's fun that's kind of cute super cute the mansion also had a 12 foot ceilings love a good 12 foot ceiling that sounds not wildly tall yeah i'm like this kind of that's probably like a 10 foot ceiling yeah um i guess 12 foot back then was like a crazy that's true um had a four-story staircase made of walnut and oak a lot of trees died that day um that's a real tragedy imported chandeliers and furniture came from italy interesting fun fact it was built by the first trained architect in kansas city named asa bb cross

abc oh and it was known the building in the in this town was known to be quote the finest example of an italian villa in the entire state of kansas wow although there was like not much to compare to but oh so this is kansas city kansas not missouri kansas city kansas oh sorry guys um covered the wrong half of your city or actually I think it might have yeah in the entire state of Kansas okay yes sorry well we love both of you are we surprised like I'm I wish I could act shocked I just I wish I remembered if people reacted to that because I feel like they would have been like wait what they probably didn't and they were like this isn't that's why we drink i don't know why i'm surprised why are we yelling so uh fun fact a perk of this property is that it was very close to the santa fe trail which at the time was the main highway in the area

okay okay um in 1878 so 10 years after he got tuberculosis and moved there their infant daughter helen died yikes and was temporarily buried in the family garden temporarily oh dear a year later anton died in the master bedroom and was buried at union hill cemetery which apparent i remember that getting a lot of applause i weirdly was just about to say that sounds familiar and i was like why is everyone clapping for cemetery okay finally maybe that one's in missouri and they're like finally across the state they were trying to like help me break even um and so then his daughter was reburied next to him okay oh the baby the baby was buried next to him so in 1919 mary hanged herself in the house shit and one of their daughters named eve remained in the house

after her mother's suicide and she married william and had one child helen okay so now i guess she's running the house with her husband and daughter. Sure. And after they got divorced, Eve married John S. Perkins, who already had, oh wait, hang on a sec. Oh, she got divorced and then she married a new guy named John who already had six children of his own. So now he had, now she had seven kids in this house with her. They apparently had three more children together. So now it's a family of 12.

And then John died by suicide with a handgun at age 73 um eve and their son john jr what what had an infant daughter what her and her son had a daughter no wrong i think i read this wrong where eve married john perkins john dies even john perkins son john jr yeah even john's son not like thank god together oh my god i was like i'm doing something no no no no so they're the two couple their son had an infant i see right so john jr now has okay so this is like the fifth generation there's no incest in this so far as far as i can tell i was like i could not i know i did not read this i'm glad this didn't happen on stage

so even john's son john jr had an infant daughter cecilia and cecilia drowned in the swimming pool so there's a lot of death in this house terrible and like of generations across nevertheless john jr stayed with eve in the house and his two sisters eva and marguerite oh these are beautiful names some of my favorite names very elegant names yeah cecilia marguerite eva uh when you're just being nice to eva so she'll edit your parts better dude edit them better yeah because that's how this works just totally write over your voice with better content so when eve passed away in 1955 a man named paul berry he bought the house and lived there until his death in 18 in 1986 okay so he also died there paul had to regularly

when he was alive had to regularly shoo people from trying to break in or vandalize the building which became apparently a daily occurrence and in 1987 a year after he died another couple bought the mansion who wanted to turn it into a bread uh bed and breakfast i almost said bread and breakfast i like bread and breakfast so well yeah it's like additional like a side to your breakfast is more bread my grilled cheese extra bread uh okay so another couple bought an 87 they wanted to turn into a b&b with colonial characters attached to it obsessed so they wanted to like actually dress them up and have them reenacting things that people would do in different rooms colonial character to the house not like no like literal

like colonial williamsburg where you're walking around like i don't i no longer love this i'd rather be left alone really because i love it so much i mean maybe if i'm just watching but if i have to like interact i just if i'm at a bed and breakfast i'm like i just kind of i feel like you would you would interact with a colonial character the way that all of the women in the office did with ben franklin oh yeah i'd be like tell me more about do you wear boxers or pantaloons he's in his knickers saucy yeah that creeps me out that's how i imagine you would be at a colonial i think i would actually be like oh excuse me oh sorry yeah you'd be avoiding the rooms where they're going to interact i would be very uncomfortable so a year later it was ended up i guess the bed and breakfast

a lot of people felt that same way and it didn't work out well so in 88 it was sold to carl lopp who was actually a descendant of anton sauer so it went back into the family okay and carl wanted to restore the building and apparently it's a quote from carl this house was built by my great great grandfather and my great grandmother my grandmother and my mother they all grew up here so of course you would want to buy that house i would at least in the family so that's the history of it. But here are the ghosts. Oh, yay. It looks like there's a lot to talk about here. Perfect.

So here are all the ghosts. There's an apparition of a little boy that walks past the windows. That's nice. Super. There are the doors open and close on their own. The windows open and close on their own. There is a shadow figure of a woman hanging in the tower. Okay.

Okay. And this is all alleged let's be clear um well i think most ghosts are yes i just before someone who lives there is like that's not true it's like i'm not saying it is i'm just saying this is what the internet has told me i'm not saying it's true i'm saying the internet says it's true i'm saying there have been rumors and i'm reporting on the rumors i'm saying don't sue us please we don't we can't please don't sue us this is a fable okay uh there's a small operation and we can't afford that many lawyers we did our best so there is a shadow figure of a woman walking by and standing in the lookout tower and sometimes

she's crying i wonder if it's the same like can ghosts have two like two stories versions yeah yeah i wonder like if you like residually yeah maybe it's like i don't know that's a good question like maybe different clips of your life can all show themselves right like there's if you have the energy to do that or the energy of but then also like why would you as a spirit ever want to pick that residual energy like i want to pick the one that represents the actual death of my suicide so that everyone can watch yeah it seems like you wouldn't do that but maybe you can't pick maybe it's just that had so much energy to it that like that was the thing maybe like certain times of day maybe like if you could like if there's energy left of you like walking to a garden and smelling the flowers that only

happens in the morning but at night people can see you like in the lookout tower crying sure um every night crying in the lookout tower by day smelling flowers by night crying womp womp um so people have reported uh hearing a single gunshot which could have been from anton's son or son-in-law who shot himself right there are floating lights inside and outside of the building lights have also appeared in the lookout tower and people have said that they have heard a baby crying which might be Helen which was Anton's

infant daughter. People have come and said that the activity is the most intense in the attic. People have empathetic experiences of feeling emotions that are not

theirs in this house so they'll just start crying for no reason get angry for no reason. Scary to me. There's also a song that apparently is hummed or sang

throughout the house by a distant voice spooky there are strange sounds in the house mainly the sound of someone walking around upstairs but nobody's there which okay so footsteps sure the fireplace tools and cover will rattle and shake on their own that would terrify the fireplace yeah no fun fact i when i was a little kid i almost poked my eye out because my mom for the first two years of my life didn't let me have sugar and then on my second birthday i got to have chocolate cake for the first time oh and i lost my goddamn mind and i was sprinting around the

house and i fell into the fireplace tools and it and one of them i landed on only an inch away from my eyeball so i Like the poker? Yeah. So I had like this massive, for like the first like two or three weeks of my second year, I like had this massive black eye. Oh, God. Because I like really, really fell on it directly with my face. Children, I hope you're not listening. Children, this is why I don't give you chocolate cake until your third birthday.

You may not. I thought you were going to say until you're 30. I'm like, yes. No chocolate until you're not listening children this is why i don't give you chocolate cake until your third birthday i thought you say until you're 30 i'm like yes no chocolate until you're 30 um or i at least take the fire pokers and put them somewhere else when you're trying cake for the first time might be the better idea my mom was asking for it clearly clearly she wanted some trouble to happen just shoving cake in my mouth here's some sugar and some sharp objects that same birthday was the year where everyone in the 90s was obsessed with Barney. Me specifically. I'll still argue I was the number one Barney fan.

I will not debate you on that. That was also the year where all the parents were fed up with Barney in their house. And so on my second birthday, there was a Barney pinata. And my mom said all of the drunk parents that were like in their late 20s, early 30s were just beating the out of and all of the two-year-olds were going not party it's it's interesting when people buy pinatas of like very lovable characters and i'm like you realize they're about to bash them in it can't be good for their mental health i would think there's a sea of children who are traumatized because of my party i imagine that it didn't go well apparently i ended up in the hospital a comedy of errors.

Let's put it that way. Let's definitely call it that. The calm. No, no. I tried the opposite. Didn't work. Okay. So fire tools.

Oh, yeah. There's apparently one psychic who says that she felt a doctor who died there and could smell medicine and like the smell of a hospital when he was nearby. Oh, weird. Yeah. You would think I have distinct smells maybe the smell of like fried chicken will follow me like or just something really delicious i hope better than hospital smells i'm like there's a lot of things i'd prefer if you could be haunted by a

smell or if you could have a smell associated with you when you haunt people one day what smell do you want probably a food item mine's fried chicken for sure fried chicken or like a grilled cheese i know i can't i'm just i'm really what is sure. Yeah, fried chicken or like a grilled cheese. I know. I'm just, I'm really hungry. What is going on today? I'm really hungry for a grilled cheese, guys. We should get some. Let's get a grilled cheese. Dinner is going to be up soon.

We should get some grilled cheeses. I know, but yesterday when we ordered food, we just never recorded again. So we should probably finish this. But then we'll get grilled cheese. And then get grilled cheese. Okay. Do you have cheese? I can make, I make a fucking mean grilled cheese.

I don't even know. And not because Skillshare taught me. I ate all the bread this morning. God damn it, Christine. I didn't know we were going gonna be in this predicament so when i was uh in my early 20s which is not a thing i can say anymore um this is terrifying uh you'll be fine i chaperoned my uh cousin tanner i chaperoned him for his spring break when he graduated high school and i was i he came back alive. But beyond that, I wasn't a very I was gonna say you were the chaperone in your early 20s.

I made sure he had a terrible idea. Great fucking time. He had a blast. Oh, I believe it. Because the person in charge was the one causing problems. The one who always encourages everyone else to get wasted is the one who's chaperone. He definitely listens to the show now. So I remember there was one day where I think i lost him i don't really remember children you're not allowed to be

with with fungal m any longer by yourself there needs to be a chaperone for you and fungal m at all times i remember i got him i think his dad listens to this it is dad's very uh uj i think yeah uj i think uncle jeff who calls himself uj is my favorite um so uj actually is he really trusted me i'm about uj you should have known better i'm about to break that trust but he was like you're gonna keep them in line right and i was like yes sir and what did you do i just got them really really drunk like super drunk um but they had fun. But I made them so many grilled cheeses. That was the week where I learned how to master a grilled cheese. I'm pretty sure I made like 30 in the matter of a weekend.

It seems like I would like to go on spring break with you where you just get me drunk and feed me grilled cheese. I am a really fun person because, I mean, to be fair, UJ should have trusted me. And now I'm going to get people fucked up, but I'm going to make sure everyone's safe. You just said you lost him. will not believe this he lost himself uh-huh but like that's why i was fun at parties because even though i didn't drink like everyone had a blast because i would take care of everyone afterwards so you i would be fun to take care of you if you're drunk you get drunk and i will make you the best girl cheese of your life i promise listen i've gotten drunk so many times and i've never received a girl cheese so i never knew

until disappointed i never knew until today how much you really wanted i really want them always uh okay so moving on i'm not going to tell any stories about what happened that spring break because i think i still want my uncle to love me it's too late i think he came back alive he just graduated from a great school he's he's doing well in his life so i didn't cause any trouble there so oh psychics oh yeah the smell of fried chicken that's how we got where we are okay so neighbors have said that they all have heard laughter shouting and crying from the house um they have also heard yelps and screams as well as knocking sounds coming from all over the building there is a regular apparition of a

woman who paces the widow's walk up and down. Oh, no. Oh, my goodness. Many have actually seen another woman's apparition standing in the house staring at you from the top right window. I don't like that one. I don't like when they stare. No, I don't like when they know you. I like when alive people stare.

That's correct. Me neither. Although people do say I stare into the camera a lot and they play uh this like a blinking like a staring contest staring contest with me and i'm like i don't even realize i do that i think i'm just mesmerized by the light that is true you guys can't see it but we in the the camera's in the middle of a massive ring light right we can't even really see ourselves it's just like a big light yeah if we ever look washed out or too dark we can't tell because this thing's blinding us it's very blinding so on halloween the spirits of a man and a woman can be seen together in the tower weird um there are reports

of ghostly moans and people see fire in the tower and flickering lights throughout its rooms oh geez that's pretty intense that's like imagine a place that didn't seem to burn down you're right huh i don't feel like fire was ever really this has to be part of the urban legend part of this because i don't know of a it didn't seem like a fire story right who knows hmm i don't know that'd be weird if you like if you died in a very tame way and then now like now all of a sudden there's fire everywhere i guess if you're bored you're like i died in a boring way i better if i had that much power as a spirit where i could just conjure fire for no reason absolutely it's a good time um so cindy jones i don't know who that is was in oh i think this was like a witness to something i was like i hope so i was like i don't know who this person is okay so cindy was in the library one day with her father preparing her friend's

wedding talking about the spirits around like in this in in the castle apparently her dad had a story so he jumped in on this and said oh i know about the spirits at that castle apparently at one point her dad was repairing the ceiling there and part of the ceiling got loose and a picture flew out onto the floor oh no it was a picture of anton's granddaughter who not only looked like the bride because i guess they're oh yeah it's coming back now sorry jesus the wedding was happening at this castle well yeah i would imagine so i gathered but so the so the bride that was getting married in that castle that day a picture flew out of the ceiling bride cindy's friend oh okay and so a picture of anton's granddaughter came out of the ceiling that day and looked exactly like the bride and that was the day of her 20th death anniversary yikes she's like you better not

get married on my death day thank you very much uh cindy has been quoted saying i've been terrified and most of the time it's during the day my no she must work there i think she does work there okay listen we're all on this right did i not say it was gonna be bumpy you said she was a friend of the bride and now suddenly she's there every day she works there and as a friend of the bride sure we'll go it really does say friend's wedding it says friend's wedding oh okay all right uh a past me would would fight you on this but i don't know enough anymore i'm not fighting i'm just trying to solve the puzzle aren't we all so we're not doing a great job no no no so cindy has said i've been terrified and most of the time it's during the day my father-in-law laughs at me but he's also

had experiences that he can't explain i can't feel it but i wonder if it's just i can feel it but i wonder if it's just in my head um so apparently most of it is in our head and most of the stories are local lore um you say most of it's in our head yep well apparently most of it is in our head and most of the stories are local lore um you say most of it's in our head yep well apparently most of it is ghost shaming okay i think i wrote it in because i knew that when i'm on propranolol sometimes i forget things that i've prepared like not that i'm like only when you're on propranolol not now or any other time specifically when i'm on stage and i'm so nervous to be there if i have a line i want to say I'll just write it in to make sure I say it. Cause it's like,

I know I'm nervous. Oh sure. Yeah. So it's like, I'm just going to keep it here. So I think I had written that in. So I would make sure to say like, well,

most of it apparently is in her head. And most of the stories are local lore. Um, historian J. R. Russell is an author who wrote the 1975 article old mansion filled with legend, trying to disprove all the stories.

Okay. So there have literally been people for decades now trying to prove this. Interesting. Or disprove this. He says that most of the stories have no actual origin and they are stories told by people in the area. And after so long, they just kind of stick. Most of the stories of weird sounds and items in the house moving on their own are actually

the Kansas City wind. of weird sounds and items in the house moving on their own are actually the kansas city wind um if the windows are open things just kind of fly across the table and you just call it a ghost i'm pretty sure we were like is that true kansas city does that happen um and he says that all of the lights that people see are reflections of the windows are off of the windows um he says that the sounds of the people screaming are from the owner's dog who had a voice box accident and barks weird honey i forgot about imagine if you're so powerful though your barks despite your voice box having some issues honey you are still barking loud enough that the entire town believes a legend that's true you are literally the core of this

story you're doing a good job man to his credit though most of the stories seem to have come from when the jones family lived there so cindy may have been trying to market the castle oh okay so cindy not only worked there but also lived there yeah i kind of figured cindy is a pivotal person you were mad at me for correcting i just shut up i wasn't mad i just am ashamed me too so cindy lived there apparently so uh cindy is just as elusive character for all the people who've ever lived there i guess or ever entered the building so cindy uh may have been trying to market the castle originally when they were trying to sell it as it was haunted so that people would want to come um but most of her stories seem to happen only to her and only when she's alone including her saying that she got on a she got on a tape recorder apparently saying

like ghost sounds no and tried to be and tried to market it as if there were ghosts did she actually do that including her saying she got on a tape recorder oh she did so she said that she got like actually she admitted it she said that she got on tape the sound of ghosts, but it's probably her going, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Oh, I see. You know, Selena and I used to do that. We used to go, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, and then we would hide them in closets around the house,

and my mom was like, please stop wasting all of our batteries. You had such a weird, such a weird life. I love it. We literally had no, nothing else except. We didn't have the internet yet, guys. I had no other friends. So when asked to show it to others, to show this tape where she heard a ghost saying, literally had no nothing else except we didn't have the internet yet guys friends uh so when asked to show it to others to show this tape where she heard a ghost saying when asked to show it to

others she had magically lost this tape recorder so so it might not have even existed at all yeah she just says that she had it i imagine you didn't even have to record it i imagine she probably did record it and then realized after listening to it was like that's too alive i sound too alive in this true i sound too much like cindy in this tape it's too cindy i need to make it more spooky so beyond the spirits in this house there are also other legends about the property which jr russell the historian tried to debunk one is that buried treasures on the property so people think that it is in this area because after anton died a fence was being built around the land and a shovel that when they were building the fence around it a shovel hit a brick and found a brick foundation underneath

with unusual stones at each corner metal detector i i thought it as soon as you went so ready so apparently there's a brick foundation people didn't know about and there were some weird stones at every corner so each corner had arrows each corner stone because i found all the stones had arrows on them pointing in the same basic direction and people think those were lines they converge eventually to where the treasure is got chills goose cam another legend is that there is a secret tunnel to the river from the castle but the hill the castle sits on is solid rock and no tunnel i see so that's been like debunked right that one's been another legend is that a man that once lived on the property murdered his whole family and bury them in the backyard and then

died by suicide so another legend interesting legend but the timelines don't add up for this and no murders on the property have ever been documented yeah that's a big one you think that would have some that's a tall story tall tale so another legend is that this land was stolen from the shawnee tribe that's probably very believable wow what a legend that is i'm sure wow a legend that's also historical fact for most parts of the country okay got it that's a tribe. I probably already told this many times. The Shawnee tribe is the one where we live in Cincinnati.

Shawnee Road. How about that? Mm-hmm. Uh, the, so there's records that show that in 1859, there was a native named Tom Big Knife who owned the property and continued to live there for several years until the 1860s when Anton bought the land from him. Okay. And the last local legend is that at the end of the civil war a woman who lived in this mansion was told her husband was coming back from war and he would be coming back on a particular ferry but when he didn't show up she thought he must be dead so she died by suicide he wasn't

dead he just missed the ferry i already know he caught another one and came home to her dead which again i guess is believable but as someone who has now read as of right now 152 stories like this i feel like 85 of them have been a bride waiting for her husband to come back from war it's like a trope and he then like misses misses the ship and comes back the next day and like because like it was 24 hours later she'd like died by suicide unbearable grief i feel like it happens it's kind of a trope by now um so many inaccuracies here one is on 1859 the land belonged to native american tom big knife um a married couple did not live there so when for the bride to have to debunk this it's right to debunk this one that the bride was there waiting for her husband so tom big knife

owned this property not a married couple the tower was built for the sours and nobody lived there before them so there's no way that she would have been there to have died by suicide there because the story goes that she died in the tower and also there couldn't have been oh and then some people will say well maybe it was a couple or um uh like a distant relative that was visiting the sour family at the time and maybe it happened when the sour family lived there but the family didn't own the place yet they didn't live there so no one related to the sours could have died there so tom big knife had it and then the sours and there was no couple in between got it okay so um a local in town named jason simmons he made

a facebook page to raise awareness of the castle to raise funds and restore it which kind of backfired because although a lot of people garnered interest it also brought a lot of vandals to the house yeah which means every time that Carl Lopp the descendant of the Sowers who now wants to restore the place it's like a local was trying to help Carl by saying like look at how great this castle is we should all want to raise funds for it but now the person who lives there Carl he keeps wanting to set up renovations but they keep getting pushed back because people keep breaking in oh my god people

stop it so it still isn't fixed up or at least at the time that I told the story in 2015 there's a Facebook message which is very long but I read it at the live show so I'll read it here too but it is a Facebook message from Carl Lopp discussing these i guess these incidents a message to whom to i guess the all those interested in the kansas city

area he posted to the group he posted to this facebook page that a local made to help raise awareness of it and then he jumped on to make a post so in 2015 carl lopp says from the mid-50s on the castle has been the subject of constant trespassing, attempted break-ins, dangerous encounters, and often violence. As a result, from the day I purchased the castle, I have attempted to keep a low profile for the castle, believing that the fewer people who knew about the castle, the better. And then this local was like, let's make a Facebook page. Everybody, look at it. Unfortunately, the Facebook page has brought the castle to the attention of thousands of people creating tremendous problems for the castle and the restoration efforts the constant flow of traffic with people trespassing on the property and trying to break in is a sad byproduct

of this facebook page really like shading this i like how now you're telling millions of people about it too so you're no that's why i'm putting it here so nobody go look at this don't do it don't do he's asking for his people to stop going. Please. Listen to classic Carl. Windows are shot out every month or smashed up by those that break in. My caretaker and dogs are harassed nightly and often threatened with physical violence. Who are these people who are like, oh, Facebook group about historical whatever. I'm going to shoot the windows in. Who's looking at historical?

I guess they're like looking for like places to like. Or maybe they just see it. Be hooligans. I don't know. Yeah, maybe it just becomes more well known and people who with bad intentions show eventually word of mouth gets to the wrong people yeah yeah while this has happened occasionally in the past the facebook page has accelerated the level of attention and therefore damage from the people wanting to encounter ghosts okay so it's people who hear it's haunted trying to break in shooting the windows okay very violent people trying to find the ghosts the police are called on almost nightly on almost on a nightly

basis to arrest people who are trespassing on the property but because of this i will dispel the myths that most people on this page enjoy fantasizing about there are no ghosts and no evil spirits inhabiting the castle or the property there is no buried treasure no secret tunnels no bodies buried there and nobody hanging in the tower sincerely carl g lopp so poor carl even if there is something there he probably felt obligated to like cover it up so it doesn't even matter like don't do that it could be the haunted place in the world don't fucking trespass and threaten violence and shoot windows out and harass the dog so at the end of this i am telling a haunted story that mayor may the location may or may not even be haunted according to him it's not although even if it is i would want to not tell that to people

if it meant keeping the place safe so yeah and like the people who live there and the dog and the dogs so that is the story of the sour castle yay thank you kansas city okay okay that was fun okay only one more story and then christine's gonna start eating grilled cheese i can't wait however you guys are in for a trip because this is probably maybe like the most the story that i've wanted to cover most throughout the entire podcast like what i am okay so wait have you done this before i have at a live show but i've revamped my notes i did not revamp my notes as you can tell i did not know who cindy was for at least 50 of that story incest and there was not in fact you added to the note you you unvamped

them i don't know what the opposite of reading i definitely i definitely unvamped them you unvamped them uh okay well blow me away then with your brand new research hopefully now i'm nervous is there incest in yours i'm hoping there's no incest nor uh cindy's but we'll find out together fingers crossed um so this uh is a story that i covered now speaking of like covering places that we're not going to because we feel bad and we and we we still love you even though you guys are maybe mad at us i promise uh it's not personal it's not you it's not on purpose but i'm covering a story from salt lake and uh this is a story that i had wanted to cover for ages.

And when we went to Salt Lake, I was like really excited to tell it. And I have since researched a lot more and gotten way more invested and involved in the story. And this is the story of the disappearance of Susan Powell. Okay. I don't remember this. Not at all? I don't think so. Okay, let's go.

A lot of disappearances on your side of this podcast. Eventually, you kind of lose track of them. To be fair, there's a lot of brides waiting on husbands in your story. disappearances on your side of this podcast eventually you kind of lose track of them to be fair there's a lot of brides waiting on that's fair husbands in your story you can probably start just placing bets if the story i'm going to tell is about a bride that's called a drinking game every time there's a bride that's true we need a new updated drinking game because the old ones i feel like send in your new rules because we would love some new rules that's fun yeah yeah okay so uh i just want to clarify that since i did these notes

in salt lake city i have listened to the cold podcast and it's probably i would say it's probably one of the best podcasts i've ever listened to um i binged it pretty quickly but uh it's like one of the most informative well-researched and well-done podcasts i've ever listened to and it is about this case um it's about this case only only yep wow okay it's very in-depth and very long so i i also want to preface i know a lot of people have suggested i listened to it and i couldn't tell you but i was or i had um but i also want to say like for those who love that show and have listened like this is not going to be nearly as much detail just because obviously that that podcast had like i don't know 18 episodes 18 hour

long episodes i can't fit that all but if you want more that's where to go it's so good so uh i also apparently back before i'd watched a documentary called susan powell and id murder mystery i love id i know good stuff huh love id three podcasts morbid generation y uh oh and cold I know. Good stuff, huh? Love ID. Three podcasts, Morbid, Generation Y, oh, and Cold Podcast. And I got information from Heavy.com, The Seattle Times, and The Salt Lake Tribune. So let's jump in. Got it. Susan Cox was born in 1981 and grew up in Puyallup, Washington in the LDS church. She was well-liked in our community.

She was very bright, fun, outgoing, had a lot of friends. And this is just like a fun fact about her and i remember my notes were very long and this show went way late and our manager came to the show and was like falling asleep in the audience so i'm sorry if you were there and we're like it is this is a long ass show oh yeah that's again that's another reason why we're we're not gonna do double shows at at these cities yeah we did two in one night and every time we did one that was we didn't do many but every time we did a live show that and then we did another live show the second show went so late that like not that nobody was laughing because it wasn't funny or entertaining

but people were literally falling asleep because it's so late it happened to work out that every time we had a second show it was at like it started at like 11 o'clock at night which meant it ended at like one in the morning it was ridiculous and it started at like 11 o'clock at night which meant it ended at like one in the morning it was ridiculous and people were like i just want to go to bed oh we had one show in nashville that started at like 11 30 or something that one was really wild that one was tough because it and it was pouring rain and we were just sitting there in this room like it was pouring rain and the the roof echoed so as we were talking there was just like and we kept making awkward jokes like yep there's the alien again and we were like this is so terrible so but also like

people were just falling we were falling asleep it was by the time people the people from that show got to have their meet and greet and walk away it was like two in the morning that was rough it was tough on all of us so anyway that's why we are not doing second shows in one night yeah because nobody's having fun even if you're trying your hardest to have fun especially our manager who was like i didn't know what i signed up for and we were like oops but so i the my point is that my notes were really long and i had to cut them back a lot at the time so now i'm trying to expand them back to what they were before gotcha and one of the fun facts that i loved is that growing up she really loved animals and she and her sister created the bird club when they were little precious it just was so sweet and she loved birds and she always

grew up with like parakeets and things um so just tells you a little bit about her uh susan's family cared deeply about being a part of the lds church and uh they were really strong about their religious beliefs by the time susan was 19 she was hoping to get married. She was ready to start a family within the church. Really important to her to stay in the Mormon church. In 2000, 19-year-old Susan attended a church gathering for singles. And that's where she met 24-year-old Josh Powell. They bonded over a similar interest, which is that Josh had a parrot. Oh.

Tweet, tweet. I'm interested. Tweet, tweet. Motherf tweet motherfucker let's fall in love you all right i get your d peppy i had to get my d peppy sorry i get my d pet tweet tweet um okay where are we right he had a parrot okay uh. So they bonded. She really liked him. And unfortunately, while Susan's upbringing was pretty sheltered and idyllic and happy, Josh's was pretty much exactly the opposite. So a little bit about his family. He was one of four kids, and his family, while initially being part of the LDS church, later on, the parents started having some pretty serious problems,

and they kind of stepped out of the church. After his parents got divorced, his mother and father would often kidnap the children from each other. Like, it was just a very contentious divorce and custody situation. Josh's dad, Steven, was very abusive toward the children. He mostly took it out on Josh. When the kids were, like, there were some examples. One of them being when the kids wet the bed, he would force them to take an ice bath. I do remember this.

So terrible. Yeah, it's really, really, really fucked up. He would force them into an ice bath to try and quote unquote shock the behavior out. Wow. Super great. He also had an addiction to porn and he would force his children to watch from a very young age. Wow. His daughter actually said this.

I learned in the cold podcast. His daughter said one time they had gone on a trip together, just her and her father and in the hotel room he made her watch porn and explain how it made her feel. Yeah, that's the situation we're in. Is this the one where you fucking sing to me? Damn it, Christine!

It's like, when will they figure it out? When will they figure it out? Are we going to hold hands again? We are, aren't we? That's up to you. Do I consent to the hand-holding? I suppose. No, absolutely not.

Oh, my God. I'm so excited. Okay, great. Anyway. I told you it was coming. I warned you. Anyway, keep going. So, Josh, anyway, grew up in this household.

Obviously, it was tumultuous. It was toxic. It was abusive. And this manifested in his behavior household. Obviously, it was tumultuous. It was toxic. It was abusive. And this manifested in his behavior being extremely loud. He was obnoxious. He bragged about himself. He was constantly talking about himself. Like, he never, like, in a situation, people were always very put off by him because he would just turn everything to him and be, like, very much a know-it-all.

Like, he would know better than everyone else and just that kind of guy where you're like, ugh, not him again. Let's just say Susan's friends and family were not thrilled when she said that they were getting married they were like um and i don't know please don't not this guy i know he's a parrot but he does not have more redeeming qualities than that that's it so you get that we could take you to a pet store and like you get your own parrot oh my god um they were still really young obviously she was 19. He was 24. In order to save money, they lived with Josh's dad, Steve, for a while.

And two years later, they moved to a Salt Lake City suburb called West Valley City, and they bought a cute little house. And when Susan got pregnant with her first son, Charlie, Josh, she was very excited. And Josh just kind of began to change. He became more aggressive, controlling, one, one might say abusive. Uh, she was like, okay, maybe this is temporary. Maybe he's just in a bad place and like, we'll work it out. Uh, spoiler alert, that's not the case.

So one example of this is when Susan went into labor, her dad Chuck had come in to like be with her and he and Susan, she's like, I'm in, I'm, I'm in labor. And, uh, he's, he and susan she's like i'm in i'm i'm in labor and uh he's he and susan say josh we got to go to the hospital the baby's coming and he's on his laptop and he's like or his computer and he's like i'm actually really busy right now okay there's literally a tweet going around right now like i'm like i'm like a screenshot of a meme or something where some where the wife says i my water just broke and the husband says i just made this plate of nachos i'm sorry i saw you share that karen i just made okay but anyway i just made this grilled

cheese um come honestly can you just hold it in for like 10 more minutes like how long is this really gonna take right we both know you've got a couple hours yeah i've watched the videos uh yeah so it was basically like that uh but instead of nachos he was on his computer he was like obsessed with gadgets and technology and like hoarded them all for himself and would like he was just always on a computer um and they could not convince him to come he just wouldn't get off the computer so susan and her dad went alone to the hospital eventually josh showed up an hour and a half later he sat next to the window about 20 feet away from the bed just sat there on his laptop until chuck was like you motherfucker get over here your wife and my daughter are having a baby

and it is your baby right and she's terrified and you need she's about to go through the most like realistically statistically the most pain of her life and alone like don't make her do it squeeze a human out of it for the first time squeeze a human out of her for the first time and like you're just sitting there on your computer you don't give a shit unless you're finding a gadget that alleviates labor pain unless you're ordering more painkillers on the internet unless you're finding a machine that just takes the baby out without pain zap get out of here unfortunately after the baby was born and then their second brayden two years later uh things just got worse so josh became outright abusive no hiding it anymore he would

give susan ten dollars a week to buy groceries along with a list of the only things she was allowed to purchase uh he had trouble holding down a job so susan was responsible for making ends meet and her paycheck was the only steady paycheck coming in but then he controlled all the money so she wasn't allowed to use it uh he controlled the kids food he would only let them eat one time a day uh the kids actually one of the sons was actually diagnosed as malnourished because josh refused to let them eat and they were little they were like two and four and um he would refuse to feed them because he would say you're just gonna poop it out and it's like what are are you going to do?

Yeah, so he gets to eat the whole time. Right. Oh, yeah. He actually had his own pantry that were locked off just for him, his own food. Wow. But his own two-year-old wasn't allowed to eat food. So Susan actually was known to call her friends

and ask them to sneak hot dogs over, like raw hot dogs, just so the kids could eat something. It's really, really bad um so yeah he had his own pantry full of snacks uh he refused to buy christmas presents for the kids um and anytime susan tried to use the atm card he would change the pin number so no what she would do is every time she got her paycheck she would just squirrel away a little money so that she could at the end of the year buy christmas gifts for the kids meanwhile he was spending thousands of dollars on his computer equipment

and other odds and ends, like tools. He loved power tools and things, and he would just collect these really high-end items and just have them in the house. For example, one day he bought 3,000 pounds of wheat for no apparent reason. And there's a video of Susan kind of walking around and filming everything. She's like, I don't know, Josh, but all this wheat, what are we going to do with all this wheat like beyond eat it because we're not

allowed yeah we can't and like it's just buckets of wheat like what are you gonna do it's just so strange and like he would do that and then meanwhile be like but you can't have a piece of bread it's just really controlling and terrible and also wheat like it's like not even a gadget it's like not even right what are you like he's only buying it to prove that he can and right she can't and like where do you even buy that where do you buy wheat like a farmer i mean i guess you just go to a farm and buy it i guess we live in la we don't know these things um so anyway fast forward to monday morning december 7th of 2009 charlie and brayden are four years old and two years old respectively the owner of their daycare grows concerned when she realizes the boys haven't shown up for daycare and this is really odd

because Susan was very punctual and she always went to work and on time and so she would always bring them in and if if they weren't coming in if they were sick or something was going on she would always call and make sure so this has never happened before the daycare owner just has this bad feeling she called Susan's work no answer sheosh's job um and they tell her he hadn't come into work that day and so she starts to get nervous she's like neither of them have gone to work none of them are answering their phones the kids aren't here and then she remembers that um where am i i don't know oh sorry i got overwhelmed with my own story uh so it happens so she stops by their house first and she's like there's no answer at the door no footprints in the snow and then she gets nervous

because it doesn't look like anyone has come in or out so she thinks oh my god i remember like we had just they had just been talking about installing a new gas heater so she's like maybe it's carbon monoxide so she gets really nervous that like maybe it was installed wrong and maybe they were inside and maybe the you know gas had been left on got it so she calls the police and they break a window to get in they find no one in the house nothing is disturbed or out of place except that the family car wasn't in the garage which is strange because there were no tracks in the snow so they realize susan's purse is still in the house with her wallet and her keys. And her friends and family were like, she would never have just left without those things.

Right. It's just not normal. They also find a mysterious key hidden in her purse. Police notice that the couch had recently been washed to a point where two large box fans are blowing onto the couch and the carpet to dry them. Sorry, like really washed washed like freshly washed like we're still wet yeah exactly so there were these giant box fans like drying attempting to dry the couch and the carpet with the only other odd thing going on um so police issue a bolo for the pals minivan and uh they spend all day looking for them finally around 7 p.m josh just fucking pulls up to the house and everyone's like thank god like they're here except josh and boys are in the car but susan is

nowhere to be found police are like where the hell have you been and he says oh around midnight last night i decided to take the boys camping i just woke them up and was like we're going camping i don't believe you you don't i'm gonna i'm gonna just jump in now with my opinion on december 7th uh in salt lake you're not going camping in at midnight on a sunday that's strange i'm gonna i'm gonna put my chips on that one yeah all right if you're in you're in i'm in my no backsies no no takey backsies guys uh there was a snowstorm coming in so police were like why would you leave knowing there's a snowstorm in the middle of the night to go camping when you have work and school the next day and josh said oh

we do this all the time and by the way the boys really like s'mores okay p.s here's more validation for my story p.s they like s'mores not that they're allowed to eat them i guess ever yeah p.s they've literally never had sugar because they don't even have food i feed them wheat sometimes they love watching me eat s'mores so sad uh so then they're like well where's susan and he's like oh she's at work and they're like she's not at work bud uh he's like hmm i think she's at work they're like he's she's not at work it's like we're here for a reason because we cannot find yeah that's the point so where is she you don't seem concerned so they take him to the station to interview him they ask why on earth would he take two kids out in sub-freezing temperatures on a sunday night he says oh i forgot it was sunday i thought it

was saturday and throughout all this he's like super nonchalant he's like can i go home now uh he doesn't seem to care that his wife is just missing didn't show up for work so they bring him in the next day without the kids for a formal interview and he's just as nonchalant he either stares blankly or he robotically repeats the same lines over and over you can watch this video footage online um he's just like a never-ending talker and a know-it-all so the fact that he's just silent is very odd like his friends are like no he just fucking never stops talking he blabs constantly he knows everything and in this case he's just silent and so they're like something is going on here like if this is shady as hell then all of a sudden he gets really upset really upset

like just worked up and it's not because his wife is missing it's because police had broken a window to get into his house and he's like why would they break my window and they're like we were looking for your missing wife and he's like but you didn't have to break my window like he's just like very upset about this broken window and they like, that's the most emotion you've shown all day is that we broke a window at your house. Yeah. Okay. So police are like, listen, that shouldn't be the concern. At all.

At all. Even a little bit. And little does Josh know at this point that another detective is simultaneously interviewing his children separately. I see. When the detective asks four-year-old charlie this is chilling also you watch it on video footage uh who are you camping with he says my dad and my brother and my mom when she asked okay charlie when you came home from camping who came home with you he says my dad and charlie says and she says what about your mom and charlie says my mom stayed where the

crystals are good night he said because it's mom stayed where the crystals are good night he said because it's so pretty where the crystals grow good night goose cam of course when josh hears this he's like they're kids they don't know what they're what the hell they're talking about they're lying he literally called them liars actually uh but detectives are now like oh fuck we're on high alert um they obviously at this point have nothing to hold josh they have to let him go they canvassed a whole area where he had supposedly gone camping, but there'd been no, or there'd been fresh snowfalls. There were no footprints.

They really couldn't find much. They did find like a, I think he was like a sheep herder who said he had seen a literal shepherd. Yes. Which actually is what my last name means. Well, actually it's more like what Schaefer means. My name means slate, but I just go with shepherd. It's more interesting.

Um, that's fine like what Schaefer means. My name means slate, but I just go with shepherd. It's more interesting. That's fine. Do whatever you want. In the grand scheme of things, call yourself whatever the fuck you want. But, yeah, so he said, like, oh, I saw a sheep herder. And the sheep, they found the guy, and the sheep herder was like, yeah, I did see them in their minivan. So they think, like, this is just a weird way of him, like, covering his tracks. Like, he really was out there because this guy was like, no, I saw their minivan so they think like this is just a weird way of him like covering his tracks like he really was out there because this guy was like no i saw their minivan um so no tracks couldn't

figure anything out josh is at this point named a person of interest and he moves out in the middle of the night to washington okay he's just like goodbye and they're like that's not good bad bad bad call there bad sign bad sign meanwhile susan's family is trying to spread the word any way they can which is just pissing josh off he finally speaks out but what he says is shocking he says susan was extremely emotionally abused as a child he insults her parents he makes susan sound promiscuous rebellious problematic he basically says he wants to take her off the pedestal everyone thinks she's on wow but also didn't she have a great upbringing and he had the bad upbringing yes okay but like

also it's like your wife is this is not the way a normal person reacts this is not how we describe our wife when uh she's missing correct correct even if you really believe that like it just still doesn't make sense this isn't the time for right exactly exactly then this fucking shithead dad steve gets involved josh's dad the two of them make a website about susan's disappearance oh by the way josh loved to make websites that sounds right with all this gadget talk exactly and they were like really crappy like they weren't like well done but he called himself like a webmaster you know those people like that and he had one at one point. I remember it was called like For the Kids with two Zs, and he like made it.

I'm always crazy. 4-4-4. Shut up. Hey, I was like 11. This guy is too old for this crap. So they make up this website, and this is the theory that they post on this website. They say, so this guy steven kosher

had also disappeared from salt lake city around the same time so they invented this theory that she was having an affair with this guy steven kosher and they ran away together but everyone's like they have never met there is no connection between them there's no evidence of it not even a little bit like what does this guy have to do with this guy with her but so that was the theory they had kind of just concocted is that she they ran away to mexico and were having an affair um because they both disappeared around the same time wasn't true spoiler alert got it so susan's family and friends are just fucking pissed at this point they're like we're trying to find her and you're on the internet posting like fake stories about how she's having an affair and

we're just trying to find her alive hopefully um so in february 2010 the cox family which is susan's family uh holds a press conference they break the news that at this point they're like we have to say something they break the news that susan had been a victim of abuse at the hands of josh they divulge all the information i mentioned earlier about like controlling the money and not letting the kids eat and they also revealed that the abuse had gotten physical a few times and that she was scared of him obviously josh is not thrilled about this uh new update tips at this point start rolling in though one man calls police and says that at a christmas party in 2008 josh had told him that he had figured out the best way to hide a dead body to be fair it does sound like one of our conversations right but also like when you're

in the middle of an investigation where your wife is missing that's probably again not the time to talk about that he's really bad at reading rooms well no this was before like a year before oh the guy just says oh i remember one time at a christmas party just like what a convenient thing to remember and also what a convenient thing it suggests premeditation yeah it's just like not a good look most i would have at the very least deleted that like tried to hide my tracks of any early on thoughts of this to yeah he covers suspicion mostly like the most subtle guy in the world doesn't sound like put it it that way. But he and Susan actually loved like true crime shows. They loved Investigation Discovery.

They loved all those shows. But so what Josh would do all the time is say, oh, killers are such idiots. They always mess up. Like, I know how I know how to do it. Like, he would always say, I know better. I know better. And like, I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure is which every killer has said. Honestly, I think a lot of people think that way.

They're like, oh, what an idiot idiot he left the fingerprints at the crime he literally thought he was smarter than all them and you're reporting about him right now so clearly you're not smarter than them well we'll see oh god okay uh so i don't want him to be right in any way so well we'll see so in 2008 this he had been blabbing on about how he knew exactly how to hide a dead body and it was to throw it down a vertical mine shaft he said no one would ever find it there's so many mine shafts out in the utah landscape like no one will find it police take this tip very seriously because he was camping out right right yeah so they were like we're gonna start searching but this mining country there are tens of thousands of mines out in the desert like some of them thousands of feet deep

and also they're very dangerous. Like the ones that are closed off are closed off for a reason. Like you're not supposed to go in there. They're extremely dangerous. So it was very hard to search. There was one mine, though, called the Ironsides Mine that police were not able to search because someone had poured gasoline down there. And the fumes were so strong that searchers couldn't enter. So that was kind of an odd update.

One reason they took the leads so seriously is that the mines in the area tended to grow crystals. Oh, I see. After logging more than 6,000 man hours, police finally stopped their search. Person hours. Man hours. Hours. Just hours. They're labor hours. Labor hours uh police have to stop their

search empty-handed they're like there's only so much we can do six thousand hours of searching mines you know it's where are you gonna go from there so two years later they still have nothing on josh they're frustrated so they turn to the only other person who's kind of involved and who they think might have some information and that's josh's dad steve they're like he might be our way in since josh just will not give up anything so the powells and cox's at this point are on like full-out war with each other josh had filed a restraining order against susan's dad chuck and the cops are like we have this idea chuck so susan's dad why don't you organize a public event in an attempt to spread awareness about susan the event would take place so police like kind of followed josh figured out what grocery store he frequented then had chuck set up the the like march or like the it was like a

honking wave where like they're like help find susan and people like honk and just to draw awareness um so they had him organize this in front of the grocery store where josh went to oh my gosh chuck was like i didn't even know that's what they were doing i thought they were just telling me to hold this god in honor of susan he's like then later i was like oh they did it on purpose okay so uh they wanted josh to show up on camera because there were news crews and to get so upset that he said something incriminating. Kind of smart. Yeah.

They're like trapping him into this like situation. Emotional experience. Yeah. Knowing where he would get, knowing he would get pissed. So, of course, Steve does show up. News cameras are rolling and Steve starts screaming that Chuck is violating a restraining order. He brought a copy of it with him also. Okay.

Because they're at a shopping center that josh visits so this is like a rally to ways a rally to raise awareness about susan and josh is showing up like you can't do this this is a restraining order violation he's like i'm just talking about my daughter this is not about you this is not about like okay anything you did and josh is like fuck you you can't do this in my neighborhood. You need to shut this down. And then Steve, the dad, goes, oh, to Chuck, Susan's father, who's missing his daughter. He goes, do you really think this is going to do anything?

And meanwhile, you watch as Chuck is wearing a shirt with his daughter's face on it that says, like, help find Susan. And this guy's just screaming. And I'm like, do you really think this is going to do anything? That's so terrible it's terrible so then steve does a really dumb thing just like they had hoped so this is uh student's father-in-law josh's dad this idiot says well we have susan's journals and they confirm everything about how terrible of a father you were so police are like oh you have her journals interesting like putty in my hands correct fucking idiot he's such an idiot so they were like well interesting maybe we should know about this uh so they have their way

in they literally like the cold podcast plays all the entire like the interviews and they're so the police are so good at being like oh bud like tell us more about how much susan meant to you you know like just really playing him and he's so he just falls for it he just wants to talk about her he wants to talk about it just falls for it every time so finally they're like i mean we can look around right like we can check out your house like just to make sure i mean we know you have nothing to do with like we can check it out and he's like oh of course yeah totally so they come over and they're like we're gonna find these journals so they have their way in

they obtain a search warrant um and here we go this gets a little wild not only do they find susan's journals which he clearly has like he and josh have stolen and have kept at steve's house steve uh they also find steve's journals and in these journals it's tens of thousands of pages that he's written he writes everything down like obsessively wow and they find quite some disturbing information okay he reveals that he is madly in love desperately sexually in love with his daughter-in-law susan he wrote about wanting to share her with josh and that was his right to do so his right yes it was his right goodbye the next day he wrote about sniffing hair uh from her hairbrush that he collected uh quote what i've written this is

from his journal what i've written about susan represents the first time i've mentioned fetishes and what might be considered sociopathic i mean who looks under the bathroom door with a mirror i tend to think a lot of guys do so just gives you a little glimpse into what the fuck this guy was doing this whole time got it he said and remember they lived with with his dad when they were having money troubles when they first got married they lived and susan's friends later said that's why they moved like that's why they left because she couldn't be around her father-in-law anymore he was so creepy i was gonna say did she like him back but no okay no hell no uh well he thought she did he kept writing like she's resisting the the lds church

has brainwashed her she's resisting her sexual lust for me and it's like okay she's 19 like you are a fucking disgusting creep and like he has photos from the wedding where he's like zoomed in and like watching her and writing like she just wants me she doesn't want josh it's beyond um he actually there's actually a recording in the cold podcast that i didn't know about where he admits he's like i'm in love with you and they're driving she's driving and he's recording this and he has a camera they filmed everything it was really weird so he goes i'm in love with you and she's like 21 he's 54 and she's just like she's like steve i can't do this like i don't know what you're trying to do but like i can't do this and he's like well i just thought you've been giving me so many signs and

she's like goodbye she's like i don't know what you think you felt but like i didn't i wasn't trying to give you any i'm sorry if i misled you and he's like you gave me so many signs and the sign when police were like oh well like did she ever do anything like to give you the idea she was interested and he said yeah so she had wax she was learning to like wax her own leg like do waxing i guess um and she also cut hair and stuff like that so she was uh practicing her waxing and she had done it on her own legs and she's like oh my god feel like there's like no hair that and so he's like she wanted me to touch her legs all over and it's like fuck off and then oh there's one point where he literally

says they're like he said no she said she didn't say no she said i'm not interested but that's not that doesn't that's not no and it's like what the f this guy is so perverted if it's not a yes it's a no exactly if it's not a chant that's not a resounding if you don't know that and that is not information you're privy to chant it until you get it yeah yeah not yes equals no so essentially exactly so um anyway that's just some a little tangent but uh yeah yeah so her uh her hairbrush he's like i smell her hair i mean it's just so many things i can't even remember at this point. Along with the journals, in his closet, investigators find a collection of Susan's panties

that he would steal. Also, you know, in the LDS church, they wear these undergarments that are considered sacred, and it's part of what you wear. And he stole those out of her laundry. And if it's sacred in your community, yeah. They're religiously sacred. He would steal those out of her laundry and it's like those and if it's sacred and they're religiously yeah they're like religiously sacred he would steal them out of her laundry yeah which

is beyond he took uh tampons used cotton balls used tampons yes goodbye nail clippings then he would put them in ziploc bags with the date yeah oh my god can you imagine opening that closet oh my god what did he think was gonna happen when they came over he's like yeah you can come check out my house i wish i could just go from like cop to cop to cop and be like what's the weirdest thing you've ever seen i can't even imagine not like the most like you know tragic or horrific thing like what's just the weirdest thing you've seen toenail clippings with dates pretty fucking weird yeah use tampons with dates on it yikes and that's that

is dark that's really dark really fucked up um they also discovered that steve fancied himself a songwriter wait wait for it i know you i know you want me to do it now but put you put down your hand and let me lead up to it stop touching me okay okay hands off hands off not your arm lingered yes means i know okay sorry shouldn't linger uh he wrote some love songs about susan um the documentary actually played a recording of steve singing the songs uh the documentary watch but also the the podcast um it's so fucking sinister this meet like this music one of the songs is called susan with the sunlight hair and actually it used to be called i forget her name like pam or peggy or something with the sunlight hair he wrote it about a different woman

who was also married and not interested in him and then he changed the words to susan later on so like he just reused the song from a previous rejected love affair i say correct and um here are the lyrics no no we gotta insert we gotta lace the fingers yeah oh that's not how we hold hands is it that's better wait how do we how would we hold hands that's better okay i hate it i hate it just sing fast just sing Make some room for me within you. I don't know the tune either. Yes, you do. I don't. I know you do.

I know the chorus. Okay, just do it. For the moment I begin to smell the perfume in your hair and caress you everywhere. I'm missing you. Then it goes, I can love you in a secret way. I can love you each and every day there's nothing i can't see there's nothing you can't be it's not perfect but i'm missing you was that good i would like the next three therapy sessions paid for oh you can expense it um i don't actually know i literally i know i can love you in a secret

i don't know what the fuck the other tunes are so i want chris i want everyone to know that if you were not at the live show i was not prepared i didn't know i wasn't either i wasn't gonna do it but it was the second show after a lot of wine christine held my hand and also you looked me in the eyes the whole time and you said it a lot slower especially the part about somehow us being in each other it was very what's that what's that sentence because I hate it no we're holding some room for me within you there it is I hate that that was the that was your leading line too I was like it's only gonna get worse vomitous it's terrible so thank you I. Vomitus. It's terrible.

Thank you, I think. Am I supposed to thank you? You can do whatever your heart feels, which is probably throw up and run away. Okay. I really hate that I did this now on audio because I did it live and I was like, well, no one will ever have to hear it again. Now I'm like, why did I do that? Also, I'm like the most tone deaf person on the planet. No, you, for singing a really horrific song, you sang it well.

I wish I knew. I only heard the chorus, man. I think that's enough. I think it's enough. I don't think. I think we're okay. I think saying aw shucks before that is not needed. Too bad.

Okay, let's move on. Please. And then I write, it doesn't stop there. Oh, never mind. So so they're like he is deeply sexually obsessed with his daughter-in-law uh they find thousands of images and videos of susan he followed her all over town while she ran errands and in his journals he would like write accompanying every day that he did this he would write and he would say she knew i was watching and she liked it like she did it by the way. Like he would literally stalk her.

I hate that. So delusional that he would think he would write like, oh, she loves, she knows I'm like following her. I saw the way she like twisted her skirt or like flipped her hair. Like she knows I'm watching it. I mean, it is so beyond like upsetting. Like it's deeply, darkly upsetting. So he, right. so he filmed her while

she ran errands he would take videos of her across the room when she didn't know he was filming um and so this is obviously quickly why she was like we need to move out of here um he even had pictures of her face that he would superimpose on bodies of other women like you know collage like um and he was also physical with her so when she was in the kitchen he would often come up and put his hands up her skirt or try to brush up against her uh she imagine having to live with that i know i just can't because especially if it's so dark and sinister that you're like you can't escape it at any point and there's no i wonder how i mean i know she clearly knew that he was interested in her but i wonder if she knew about like the the stuff in the closet

i don't think it was that bad i don't think she knew that imagine if you just rolled into like you were like dropping off like laundry or like a book or something put it in his room and fucking found you found like your own tampons yeah my god i know i don't think she knew it was to that extent she just was like listen he said like he's clearly crossed too many lines and um i think he had enough sense to like journal about it rather than like say hey i have your toenail clippings like i think he kept that to at least he knew some things are best kept alone until the police show up and he's like here you go right yeah so uh she had revealed to her friends uh that that was the reason that they had left washington and

moved to utah but brought josh like at first he was kind of upset when he found out but then he like brushed it off and was like it's my dad it's not a big deal um and it gets worse so I'm sorry let's not gloss over that so so he's saying oh it's okay that my dad's touching on you like it's not it's not as bad as it could be if it were a stranger touching up on you it's someone that's not your husband touching up on you. Yep. And also, like, it's more worrying that it's someone you know. It's somebody that you said, no, I don't want this touching you, whether it's your relative or a stranger.

Regardless of your relationship, it's someone who, first of all, you're married to, so. You think you care a little bit. Yeah, someone that you're married to who's saying they are not interested they're not comfortable if this is like a like a more traditional style of marriage like you're probably monogamous like you probably wouldn't want your wife to be with them yeah i i just think if your wife or like for so many reasons you shouldn't it doesn't yeah right like it's obvious but like if your partner says i'm uncomfortable with this man touching me by the way it's your dad you'd think you'd be like there i would imagine there's only

additional layers of disgust here but that obviously like just goes to show how fucked up their whole relationship was like josh was raised by this guy and so you know i mean he's i mean and he was already to be fair he was already abusing her so he probably thought this was just one more thing to the docket and he did get really upset she said like he was furious and they moved he didn't talk to him for months and then um eventually he was like you know what like we just got to move on because like he just couldn't live without his dad i think he just created his own excuses in his head like got it oh he's done with it now don't worry like it won't come it's in the past or something yeah like we just have to move on and she was like no so it gets worse

i know it can't seem like it does but it gets so much worse um steve had also been taking photos and videos of two little girls who live next door fuck yeah through the windows of them it's spreading when they were on the toilet or taking baths um they were very much underage um i think they were one was 12 one was younger um this is obviously a felony so on september 22nd police arrested steve for child pornography and voyeurism he's sentenced to 30 months in jail oh i also want to add another thing i learned um from the other podcast uh is that like he had videos of himself masturbating to video secret videos he had taken of susan so like okay just he would literally film himself he like got off to himself getting off on this correct yes that's it's just a

lot of layers of problems meta in the worst way um so finally so he has this child pornography charge he goes to jail finally the cox family has ammunition to be like we want our grandkids back i mean think about this also there's two little children here the whole time like in the middle of right this nightmare without their mom so uh the the cox family's finally like we want our grandkids we want uh custody so they did get a temporary custody order to have them live with them instead of steve and josh but josh fucking hated this like he was he just hated that the cox family was like taking the kids taking control it wasn't even about the kids it was just like that they kind of won over him and like that it was a control thing i think um but it tries they

might even though uh steve was in prison in jail now they could not get him to admit anything about knowing where susan was so eventually they were like, I, we honestly, he believed she was still alive and that she was going to come back and they would get married like he, in his journals. So like he was very delusional. And I think finally they realized like he legitimately doesn't know what happened. Like he really, truly wants her to come back and marry him. And he's that delusional. He really believes it.

Wow. So the grandpa, the dad is just, they're like, he's not going toional he really believes wow so the grandpa the dad is just they're like he's not gonna help us very much right um back in utah susan's employer tells police hey just so you know susan had a safe deposit box here that no one else knew about then they're like how do we get in oh yeah remember that tiny little key we found in her purse that nobody knew right what it goes to uh so that key went to the safety deposit box when they opened it they discovered video footage it was like a vhs tape it was video footage i don't know if it's vhs tape it may have been digital at this point

doesn't matter uh video footage susan had taken on july 29th 2008 she had talked to a divorce attorney who told her to take video of all the assets in the house so that Josh couldn't hide them or anything. In the video, she says, I'm covering all my bases. You can watch this video, too. She's kind of like selfie-ing the camcorder. Got it. She says, I'm covering all my bases, making sure that if something happens to me or my family or all of us, that our assets are documented. Hope everything works out and we're all happy and live happily ever after as much as that's possible.

And then the video ends. It's just very e just very eerie because like she knew something was up she presumably yeah or she just was like oh hoping for the best and it's like okay unfortunately susan's attorney then instructed her to hide the tape somewhere uh somewhere nobody would ever have access to it especially josh uh but she did end up confronting josh and saying listen if here's a um god i just lost my words like a condition like if you don't shape up by our anniversary oh yeah oh i know i lost my time yeah an ultimatum thank you um she gave him an ultimatum she says if our marriage isn't working by april i'm out of here um and so at this point detectives are like kind of building a case against josh they're like okay it seems like he's involved especially after they found a letter in the safety deposit box was folded up and

stapled shut and on top of it it was written on top of it was written susan's last will and testament and then on the other side of the stapled letter it says do not show this to josh or give this to josh i do not trust him the will and testament said if anything happens to me it may not be an accident even if it looks like one oh shit yes so she like you said knew something was up around this time a guy at a salvage yard in colorado gets a call from a man who he gets this call and this man's like i need a satellite image of the salvage yard where uh and they're like why and he's like well i had my car towed there a long time ago i

just want to make sure the car's been destroyed can you send me a satellite image of the of the salvage yard interesting and they're like what's your name and he's like michael powell and that is josh's brother so this guy is watching the news and he's like weird that's the same name as like the guy who called and was super sketchy about getting an image of the salvage yard so the guy calls police he's like hey i recognize this name from your case um it turns out right when susan disappeared michael uh josh's brother had sold a car for scrap but the car was like in great condition like pretty new right he sold it for 200 bucks and paid to have it destroyed uh this didn't make any sense unless there was some

involvement they thought um cadaver dogs were sent to look at the car and they immediately alerted to the trunk indicating that there was decomp in the trunk but uh they didn't find anything however i will note that later on when uh brayden was in kindergarten i think he was in kindergarten uh he drew during craft time he drew a picture of all of them uh on a road trip and then there was a person in the trunk and they said who's that and he said mommy good night yep nope uh he also told his daycare instructor or his teacher i'm not sure which mommy's missing but we're not allowed to talk about that or camping i have a lot of secrets okay this kid i bet you do these poor children i mean so disturbed at this point like can you imagine i mean especially if your parents especially also if you're young enough and

it's dark enough like you'll just repress it. Totally. And eventually you're not going to be able to remember those secrets. Like I hope he told someone before he forgot. Yeah. So unfortunately, so they tested the car. They couldn't find Susan's DNA. Just was like another really frustrating false lead. Meanwhile, considering Josh's control issues, he is losing his mind that he doesn't have the kids. Like he's losing his mind that the Cox's have the kids.

Losing his mind that he doesn't have the kids. Like, he's losing his mind that the Cox's have the kids. The grandparents are trying everything in their power to give the kids a normal life, to prevent Josh from getting the kids back. Kids were, like, really disturbed at this point. Chuck says that every time they went to bed, they insisted on going to bed in the same bed naked. And he's like, why? And he's like, well, Daddy doesn't let us wear clothes to bed. And, like, they said, well, where does he sleep? And he's like, daddy doesn't let us wear clothes oh no and like uh

they said oh well where does he sleep he's like he sleeps in between us in bed with no like the whole thing was just like oh no chuck was like we were trying to give them some normalcy because they were not normal like they were not being raised in a normal household right um so at this point uh chuck is like we cannot let them go back to j. So he's like, we're going to go through Josh's parents' divorce paperwork and find anything we can to, like, build a case that we want custody of the kids. Because, like, even though Josh is like cuckoo, it's really hard to get custody from, like, an actual parent. Sure. So they go through the divorce paperwork and what they find is shocking so on top of all the abusive situations i described earlier about josh's childhood like the ice baths the pornography they discovered that steven also encouraged the boys to kick and beat their mother okay once she had asked josh to show her more

respect and he had responded by saying you have to earn respect mom what have you done to earn my respect oh my goodness and this was like all documented in the divorce paperwork. Because she's like, my children are abusing me. My husband's abusing me. Like, it's just. Wow. Started from a young age. Josh also killed his sister's gerbil. At one point, he attempted to take his own life by hanging.

Just very troubled childhood. Susan's friends remembered Susan telling them. Sorry. Susan's friends remembered Susan telling them that once Josh had threatened that if she ever ever left him that he would do to her what his dad did to his mom as in like beat her destroy her basically uh more than beat her up you know i mean get the kids get like just destroy got it um beat her too i'm sure and so this is obviously more motive so the custody hearing um took place and josh argues his side but then the state prevents an argument sorry presents an argument challenging josh's fitness as a parent this is what it is it is incestuous child pornography but animated uh on his hard

drive so they had gone and encrypted or decrypted his hard drives and they found animated porn that was incestuous and this was enough to bring up as a red flag to be like no he can't go home with them with him they can't go home with him and i will say like it's much more complicated than that and like the legal system was all involved in the layers of getting that to court so it's a lot more than that but essentially that's what ended up happening is they found this you know pornography and they were like he's not fit as a parent if he has incestuous pornography. Got it. So he was allowed, however, supervised visitation rights with the kids.

And actually, he was told he had to take a psychosexual evaluation like he was. And this really fucked him up because he's like, I'm I don't need to be evaluated. I'm fine. Like giving my kids and they're like, not only do you not get your kids, now we have to psychosexually evaluate you because you're that fucked up. And so he is obviously pissed. But he does get supervised visitation rights for the meantime, only with a social worker present. He's humiliated. He's pissed off.

But he takes advantage of the supervised visits. And on February 5, 2012, Charlie and Brayden's grandparents have no choice but to let them of the supervised visits. And on February 5th, 2012, Charlie and Brayden's grandparents have no choice but to let them go see their dad. So the social worker takes the kids to Josh's house. He's waiting outside and the kids run up to see him. The social worker falling behind. And when the boys get inside, Josh takes one look at the social worker,

smiles at her, and then shuts the door and locks it. Oh, shit. The social worker panics. She hears through the door and locks it oh shit the social worker panics she hears through the door charlie i have a surprise for you and then she begins to hear brayden crying uh and as the door shuts she also gets a whiff of gasoline fuck so she immediately calls 911 but the dispatcher does not seem to be very concerned um she tells the dispatcher she smells gasoline uh she tells him he's she's moving her car out of the driveway because she's like there's gasoline i don't know what's going on

and he keeps being like sorry so like is this your kid and she's like no i'm the social worker i'm here to be to supervise dispatchers like first day he just was very much like nonchalant like he later said too chill way too chill he later said he thought like it was the mother and it was like but she kept saying i'm the social worker he's not supposed to have the kids and she's like his name's josh powell and i guess the dispatcher didn't recognize the name and it just was like very bad like he he just didn't dispatch police at one point the call dropped and then she called again and he kept saying what's the address she's like i don't know i think it's this and he's like well is it or is it not and oh my gosh just like really frustrating to listen to so eventually and she's like so patient on the phone i would be

losing my god in my i know he literally says um okay i'll just i'll just tell the story from what i wrote uh so i don't mess it up so she says i'm moving my car out of the driveway finally after several minutes um i think it was like eight minutes later, the dispatcher agrees to send police. She asks how long it'll be, and he says, I don't know, ma'am. They have to respond to emergency life-threatening situations first. And she yells, this is life-threatening. Or she says, this may be life-threatening.

I'm afraid for their lives. And then the call just ends. And moments later, the house explodes. Okay. Finally, it takes a long time. I think 22 minutes after the call, first responders arrive at the scene. Oh, my God. The fire at this point is too strong.

It takes several hours until they can get into the house. The house was fully turned to ash, like completely annihilated. Chuck rushes over the grandpa and tells one of the firefighters i'm the grandfather and the man says hold on a minute and goes to talk to someone he returns moments later and says they're gone so charlie and braden had both um died of smoke inhalation but they had hatchet marks on their skulls so what happened is josh had knocked both boys unconscious with an axe to the back of their heads then spread gasoline all through the house and over them and then he sat on a five gallon can of gasoline and lit the gas and the house exploded and the boys were found holding hands

god um 20 minutes before setting the fire josh left a voicemail for his family for one of his sisters the voicemail said hey this is josh and i'm calling to say goodbye i am not able to live without my sons and i'm not able to go on anymore i'm sorry to everyone i've heard to goodbye so please turn to the only one they can think of who's left is josh's brother michael the one who had dropped the car off at the salvage yard right but before they can interview him on february 11 2013 michael powell jumped off a seven-story parking garage to his death wow so within a year of finishing finishing his prison sentence steve powell died of a heart attack so all three of them took any answers they had to their graves wow when police examined steve's journals after his death they discovered an entry dated one day after susan's disappearance that read

i feel like josh did a truly stupid thing and probably disposed of her body in a truly grotesque way. I think he probably went to some former industrial land just west of West City Valley. No, sorry, West Valley City and cremated her. Josh's life with Susan was utterly miserable. Evidently, this tragedy is my answer for why Josh hung on. He wanted to do it his way and avoid a messy, costly divorce. Okay, his way is better, I'm sure. Right. Susan Powell, at this point, is still missing, but is presumed dead by the West Valley City Police. Her cause of death is obviously unknown, but many theorize Josh killed her and had been planning to for a while.

I think we can all understand why people presume that. Police consider the case open, and they continue to follow any promising leads. uh police consider the case open and they continue to follow any promising leads in 2010 susan's family and friends created the susan cox powell foundation who's i'm amazed they kept the powell in there i would have been like right fuck that uh the susan cox powell foundation whose mission is to assist families of missing persons and to support domestic violence prevention efforts with a special emphasis on recognizing the early signs of abuse because there were so many times where it seemed like little things but it it ended up in the big picture being much more than it seemed uh the actually interesting thing i learned from that cold podcast too since i've done this

the first time is that the 9-1-1 dispatcher david lovrak he was like reprimanded obviously for the way he handled the call right he was like extremely troubled by it as you can imagine right um and he now works as a speaker who trains 911 operators oh wow isn't that interesting yeah like the proper response um and that kind of thing and what signs to look for wow so uh susan's dad chuck has not given up hope he still hopes to find susan's body he doesn't believe she's alive but he believes that someday they might find her he believes that more information may lie in josh's encrypted hard drives which still have not been cracked by police and it sounds like pretty basic but like listening to how they've done it they spent i mean like because he encrypted them with these insane like computers can't crack them like they had computers

running and running trying every combination and they can't they can't crack the code so they tried um they haven't been able to do it yet he's actually lobbied major tech companies in an effort to help investigators gain access to the drives and that's something i think they're still working on at least they were when i did this um in september so i i also think the fact that he went to such lengths to encrypt all of these hard drives right there i mean it's got to be something pretty awful if you really want it to be just so secret so secret and he actually saved everything he saved every single receipt every single piece of paper like everything was scanned and saved and he had hundreds of hard

drives like he saved every little scrap of their lives so hopefully at least in that way there's something that they can maybe trace right um so if you i just want to add if you or anyone you know is experiencing domestic abuse of any kind even if you're not totally sure um in the u.s you can contact the national domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or visit the hotline.org where they have an anonymous chat available 24 7 365 and that is the terribly tragic tale of the disappearance of susan powell and then people applauded sort of they were like um i don't think we want to plus well and our manager was like wow what have i gotten myself into oh yeah that was one of the that was the first night that he ever came to one of our shows and was like i thought i signed up

for a comedy show that was the second time he ever met us and we were like welcome hello well that was like the second time we ever met i think it was wow anyway thanks for listening to that yeah sorry i know that was kind of long but no i'd been waiting to cover that for like years and then when soli came up i was like i'll do it there and then i wanted to wait longer to like retell it so you forgot i did everything but the singing which has apparently been burned could someone forget that that's been burned into your mind well i think we all need an emotional grilled cheese oh god that sounds good uh if any of that was pleasant for you please come get tickets to our live show um we are definitely not doing stories like this anymore will i sing maybe we our format is very different um but if you would

like to see us live i don't know why but please come please do it we will be there we would like you to be there um and then there i've been telling christine every single time we sign off i'll say and she knows that i was hoping you would say why she says we and i say drink and you would think that'd be where we close off but christine's always got to have the final say i don't do it on purpose for the last if you listen to like the last like 30 episodes a bit and that's why we drank and then christine goes i just feel like it needs a punctuation like an exclamation point so we're gonna do it in reverse this time and i'll probably also i'm just like i feel like an asshole because i'm like i need the final word i guess but it's just i feel like it's that like how did like christine christine also has to like lean over and turn off the recording and there's that

weird second in the middle so i think it's your your filler i'm filling the gap because i'm too anxious so just like let us sit in silence for that like four seconds okay i'll say drink and as i say drink you you turn it off and that's why we drink wait yeah you go yeah do it again and that's why we drink you still took too long