The Susan Powell Case Files | Mystery Metal | Bonus Episode 10

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Susan Powell Case Files | Mystery Metal

Podcast: Cold (KSL Podcasts)
Episode: Bonus Episode 10: Mystery Metal
Host: Dave Cawley
Date: December 5, 2024

---

Main Theme and Purpose

This special bonus episode of Cold revisits a rarely discussed but fascinating piece of evidence from the Susan Powell investigation: a mysterious chunk of melted metal found in Josh Powell’s minivan right after Susan’s disappearance in 2009. Host Dave Cawley reopens this cold lead, tracking its origins, connecting it with Josh’s suspicious pre-disappearance behavior, and investigating—both forensically and experimentally—what this “mystery metal” actually was, and why Josh wanted it destroyed. The episode also revisits the days leading up to Susan’s disappearance, giving listeners pivotal background details while exploring how circumstantial anomalies may point to Josh Powell’s guilt.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Josh Powell’s Background and Financial Picture

• Josh Powell, obsessed with becoming a self-made millionaire, made questionable financial decisions, including starting a failed high school woodworking business, overspending on tools, going bankrupt (2007), and then taking out a $1 million life insurance policy on Susan (00:00–01:05).
• Dave Cawley establishes a pattern: “He bragged to his friends about spending thousands of dollars on tools. He didn’t have clients enough to justify the expense, but that hardly mattered.” (00:38, Dave Cawley)

2. Introduction of the ‘Mystery Metal’

• The mystery metal was found in Josh’s minivan, the day after Susan disappeared, by police. It had been forensically tested by the FBI, but remained unidentified for years—until Dave’s recent investigation (01:46–01:51).
  • Notable quote:
    “It was forensically tested and nobody could identify what that object was.” (01:46, Detective Ellis Maxwell)

3. Josh’s Odd Trip to Air Gas—Eyewitness Account

• Andrew Robinson, an employee at Air Gas, recounts his encounter with Josh Powell on November 25, 2009, a week and a half before Susan’s disappearance (02:35–07:22).
  • Josh enters the store late in the afternoon, lingers for over an hour, and claims to need welding tools to “make jewelry,” but ends up buying a much more advanced cutting kit and cylinders used for steel cutting, which Robinson finds odd.
    • “Yeah, that struck me as being odd. It was a little bit of overkill for some cutting equipment to be involved in the making of jewelry.” (05:23, Andrew Robinson)
  • Josh returns post-Thanksgiving to swap the cylinders, seeming “a little bit irritated”—another red flag (07:12, Andrew Robinson).

4. The Timeline Around Susan’s Disappearance

• Josh googles welding instructions, creates an encrypted file, then moves those files to a secure partition days before Susan vanishes. No one has cracked the file to see its contents (08:05–08:41).
• Susan, Josh, and their sons are all missing on Monday, December 7, 2009; Josh later reappears without Susan, leading to the police’s initial interviews and searches (08:41–10:41).

5. Police Search and Evidence Gathering

• Photos taken on Monday show the torch in the garage, unused; by Tuesday, after police leave him alone in the house, the torch tip is sooty—proof it was used during that time (11:47–13:03).
• Melted metal, burnt wire, and charred sheetrock are found hidden in a garbage bag in the minivan’s floor compartment during the Tuesday search (11:47–13:03).

6. Identification of the Mystery Metal: Experiment and Analysis

• Dave traces the melted metal’s likely origin to an impact driver from a cordless tool kit Josh bought with a Home Depot card in Susan’s name (16:00–17:31).
• He notes that every tool from the kit can be accounted for except the impact driver. The metal found contains steel, calcium, and strontium—a combo consistent with power tool motors (17:31–19:39).
• Dave and a friend replicate the melting process with an oxyacetylene torch, reducing a similar impact driver to an almost identical chunk of slag, matching the evidence photos (19:39–21:31).
  • Notable quote:
    “That torch certainly would be capable of reducing that to a molten clump of different materials.” (21:17, Andrew Robinson on the melting experiment)

7. Why Destroy a Power Tool?

• Dave and Andrew discuss why Josh would go to the trouble to destroy a power tool right after police attention intensified.
  • “The only reason I can conceive why Josh would have taken the time and effort to destroy such a tool…was if it somehow linked him to Susan’s murder.” (22:33, Dave Cawley)
  • Andrew suggests the destruction was likely intended to hide evidence—possibly the weapon used in a crime (22:42–23:11).
• The episode further establishes that Josh had a habit of deleting records and encrypting files that might implicate him.

8. Chilling Flashback – The Seed of an Idea?

• Dave finds a family home video from 2006 where Charlie, as a toddler, play-acts drilling Josh’s foot with a toy drill. Josh responds, “That could really hurt someone.” Dave reflects on whether this moment, chilling in hindsight, hints at Josh’s later, grim innovations (23:13–24:32).
  • Notable quote:
    “That could really hurt someone.” (24:29, Josh Powell in home video)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “It was forensically tested and nobody could identify what that object was.”
  – Detective Ellis Maxwell (01:46)

• “Yeah, that struck me as being odd. It was a little bit of overkill for some cutting equipment to be involved in the making of jewelry.”
  – Andrew Robinson (05:23)

• “That torch certainly would be capable of reducing that to a molten clump of different materials.”
  – Andrew Robinson (21:17)

• “The only reason I can conceive why Josh would have taken the time and effort to destroy such a tool the moment the eyes of police were off him was if it somehow linked him to Susan’s murder, whether he premeditated it... the destruction of that believed cordless drill was involved somehow in Susan’s demise.”
  – Andrew Robinson (22:33–23:11)

• “That could really hurt someone.”
  – Josh Powell (24:29, home video)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 – 01:05: Josh Powell’s background and financial situation
• 01:46 – 02:35: Introduction of the mystery metal
• 02:35 – 07:22: Andrew Robinson’s detailed account of Josh’s suspicious Air Gas purchase
• 08:05 – 08:41: Josh’s encrypted ‘welding instructions’ and related computer activity
• 08:41 – 10:41: Timeline reconstruction—Susan and family go missing, police search
• 11:47 – 13:03: Police evidence photos; discovery of mystery metal in minivan
• 16:00 – 17:31: The missing impact driver; tool kit bought with Susan’s card
• 19:39 – 21:31: Recreating the melting experiment; result matches police evidence
• 22:33 – 23:11: Theorizing Josh’s motive for destroying the tool
• 23:13 – 24:32: Home video flashback; implications of Josh’s comment

---

Tone and Delivery

Dave Cawley’s tone is methodical and investigative, guiding listeners step-by-step through his reasoning and discoveries. Eyewitnesses and experts—especially Andrew Robinson—are earnest, observant, and candid. The episode weaves documentary-style reporting, emotional reflection, and the cold precision of criminal investigation. There are moments of chilling realization, such as during the home video flashback.

---

Final Notes

This episode is a standout for its deep-dive into physical evidence and for illustrating how even small artifacts—a torch, a tool bag, a melted hunk of metal—can illuminate a wider, darker story. Cawley’s experiment and analysis show how tireless investigation can bring new clarity to a cold case, linking material clues to possible motivations and actions.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, visit thehotline.org or call 1-800-799-SAFE for confidential support.

For photos and more on this experiment, visit TheColdPodcast.com.

Transcript

[Dave Cawley]

This podcast includes discussion of domestic abuse and other forms of violence. While not explicit, it's probably a good idea to use discretion when listening. If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse at the hands of a loved one. Help is available in the United States. You can visit thehotline.org to be connected with free resources in your area. As a kid growing up on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, Josh Powell dreamed of becoming a self made millionaire. But achieving that goal proved more difficult than young Josh expected.

[Josh Powell]

At the moment, I've only got 1,000 bucks in savings.

[Dave Cawley]

His first attempt to make it big was a woodworking business he started in high school. He bragged to his friends about spending thousands of dollars on tools. He didn't have clients enough to justify the expense, but that hardly mattered.

[Josh Powell]

If I spend 400 bucks on tools, it makes me frustrated in my own budgeting and I feel like, what the heck, I might as well spend another 400 bucks on something else that I want.

[Dave Cawley]

Josh never made his million dollars, but he did take out a million dollar life insurance policy on his wife, Susan Cox Powell. Then, on December 6, 2009, Susan. Susan vanished. That was 15 years ago and she has still not been found. There's a single piece of evidence in Susan's case that's confounded me for years. It's a hunk of twisted metal Police found in the back of Josh's minivan. The day after Susan turned up missing. The lead detective on the case, Ellis Maxwell, told me the metal object ended up with the FBI.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

It was forensically tested and nobody could identify what that object was.

[Dave Cawley]

But now I'm pretty sure I can. This is a special bonus episode of Cold Season 1, Mystery Metal from KSL Podcasts. I'm Dave Cawley. If it's been a while since you listened to Susan Powell's story, the details of the case might be a bit fuzzy in your memory. That's okay. We're going to revisit some of the events that preceded Susan's disappearance, as well as what happened in the first couple days of the investigation. And I think where I'd like to begin is on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 25, 2009. It was the day before Thanksgiving and a guy named Andrew Robinson was at work at a business called Air Gas.

[Andrew Robinson]

Air Gas is a company that manufactures and produces gases. Oil, oxygen, nitrogen, acetylene.

[Dave Cawley]

I mentioned Josh's trip to Air Gas in episode three. That account was drawn from police case files. I hadn't talked to Andrew about it myself when that episode first came out. Six years ago, in fact. Andrew's never before spoken publicly about his experience meeting Josh on that day, just a week and a half before Susan disappeared.

[Andrew Robinson]

I do recall that day Josh came in and his demeanor.

[Dave Cawley]

Andrew's Australian, if you couldn't tell. He was living in Utah at the time, but moved back to Sydney a.

[Andrew Robinson]

Short time later and I guess I lost touch with the story.

[Dave Cawley]

Andrew discovered this podcast about a year ago and listened to Susan's story.

[Andrew Robinson]

Listened to that with fascination. Learned a lot more about how the story had progressed.

[Dave Cawley]

He reached out to me because he had some unanswered questions. I sent him copies of the case files where he's mentioned and Andrew said some of the detail in those police reports was wrong. Our conversation got me thinking again about that melted hunk of mystery metal. Andrew's story is key in understanding where it came from and what it might be. So I asked him to take us back to the start and share the story from his perspective.

[Interviewer]

What was your interaction with with Josh when he came in?

[Andrew Robinson]

Just a regular business day. It was extremely quiet. Round about 3:45 a gentleman came into the store. I approach and asked if I can give some assistance what it was in particular that he was looking for. And he spoke back saying that he was just having a look around. After 10 or 15 minutes he hadn't approached the counter. Still looking around the the aisles approached him again and he said that he was interested in welding equipment. What we had in the way of that. I asked what it was in particular that he was wanting to weld and he said that he was interested in making jewelry. So I guided him to the product that would be most suitable. A kit that we had for for soldering and light welding.

[Interviewer]

And was that the kit that he ended up purchasing or did he want something else?

[Andrew Robinson]

Josh ended up purchasing a cutting kit which is a little bit more involved. It does allow you to do light welding. It also allows you to cut material with obviously acetylene.

[Interviewer]

To you I guess in retrospect, does that choice to upgrade seem at all strange given what he said he wanted to do with it?

[Andrew Robinson]

Yeah, that struck me as being odd. It was a little bit of overkill for some cutting equipment to be involved in the making of jewelry.

[Interviewer]

From what I understood talking to you.

Before and reading through the reports, he.

[Dave Cawley]

Hung around a while.

[Andrew Robinson]

That's correct. He entered the store 3:33:45. It wasn't till after 5pm when we would be regularly closing, that he left with the kit in hand and also some cylinders as well. To Allow him to use that equipment.

[Interviewer]

When you say cylinders, I mean fuel.

We're talking about the oxygen and the acetylene gas that he needs to run the torch.

[Andrew Robinson]

Is that right? That's correct. It was a small bottle of acetylene and oxygen to go with it, but these cylinders weren't actually correct in being able to hook up to the torch. The cylinders that were provided to him were more in line with what you would use for making jewelry.

[Interviewer]

So let me restate that and just make sure I understand correctly. When he's in there on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving and he says he wants to do, you know, jewelry stuff, you and the other employee, you're trying to accommodate what he tells you he's wanting to do. So it's maybe a smaller tank with a different fitting. He upgrades to this bigger setup that can do steel cutting, but he still has these other tanks. And at some point after he leaves the store, he must have realized that something isn't what he wants for this larger setup that he ended up buying. Am I understanding that correctly?

[Andrew Robinson]

That's correct. Yes. Josh did return the next week after the holiday weekend to exchange those cylinders to ones more suitable.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so he's back in the store, and what ends up happening from there?

[Andrew Robinson]

He came back in. I didn't deal directly with Josh at the time, but reading the body language, I could see he was a little bit irritated. People were scurrying around trying to satisfy his requirements.

[Interviewer]

Do you recall, I guess at that point, was there anything that in your memory you thought, huh, that.

[Dave Cawley]

That was weird?

[Andrew Robinson]

Not at the time, no. No, I. I just thought that everybody is an individual, has their own mannerisms, was not thinking of anything particularly sinister.

[Dave Cawley]

A day or so later, Josh created a new text file on his work laptop and titled it Welding Instructions. He ran a Google search for the exact phrase BTU per cubic foot versus heat, acetylene versus propane. BTU is an acronym for British thermal unit. It's a measure of heat. Josh's browser history showed he visited two websites with information about acetylene gas.

[Andrew Robinson]

I did get that impression from Josh that he didn't have a great deal of knowledge regarding the use of the equipment.

[Dave Cawley]

On Friday, December 4, Josh moved the welding instructions document to an encrypted portion of his hard drive. That encryption was never broken or bypassed, so I can't tell you what the welding instructions file contained. All I can say is that by the following Monday, Susan was gone. On the morning of Monday, December 7, 2009, Josh and Susan both failed to show up for work. Their sons, 4 year old Charlie and 2 year old Braden, didn't arrive at daycare. Police in West Valley City, Utah, forced entry at Josh and Susan's house on a cul de sac called Sara Circle. Detective Ellis Maxwell swept the house, noticing Susan's wallet and keys in the master bedroom. But the family and their minivan were gone. Josh reappeared with the boys in the minivan later that afternoon. Susan wasn't with him. Ellis confronted Josh on the driveway outside of the house. He told Josh they needed to go to a nearby police substation to talk.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Has she ever tried to leave or ever wanted to get out of this relationship at all with you?

[Josh Powell]

No. I mean, it's come up.

[Dave Cawley]

Josh said he had taken his sons out on an impromptu camping trip the night before in the middle of a snowstorm. He said Susan stayed home.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Do you think she's in danger right now? Do you think she's hurt?

[Dave Cawley]

Hello? Ella suspected Josh had done something to Susan. But he didn't have a body or a confession. So at the end of the interview, he escorted Josh back to the Sarah Circle house. Josh reversed the minivan into the cluttered garage. Then Ellis left. Josh had the house to himself. Exactly what he did in the hours that followed remains unclear.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Neighbors told us he had the van backed up to the garage.

[Dave Cawley]

Those neighbors lived a few doors down on the corner. They described seeing Josh pull the minivan partway out of the garage at about 11pm on Monday, Monday night. But they couldn't tell what he was doing. I suspect he was making space to set up the oxyacetylene torch. And I think he intended to use it to destroy any physical evidence linking him to Susan's death. Detective Ellis Maxwell interviewed Josh a second time on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 8, the day after Susan was reported missing.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Okay, I have a lot of questions still, all right? We need to find your wife.

[Josh Powell]

I already told you everything.

[Dave Cawley]

Rather than rehash this whole interview, let's jump to the climax when Ellis told Josh detectives were headed to the Sara Circle house with a search warrant.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

We have your house. You're not going to be able to go back to your house, okay?

[Josh Powell]

What do you mean?

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Your house is ours for right now. We're not going to let you back into that house, okay? Your car is ours. We're not going to let you have your car.

[Dave Cawley]

The first thing detectives did upon returning to Josh and Susan's house was photograph everything. Those pictures are really important. What makes them valuable is that Ellis had also photographed the house on Monday before Josh was able to disturb anything. So by comparing the two sets of pictures, we can see what changed. Ellis's pictures from Monday showed the oxyacetylene torch sitting on a cart in the garage. This tells us Josh didn't take it with him on his camping trip. If I zoom in real close, I can see the tip of the torch where the flame comes out looks clean and shiny. But on Tuesday, that tip is covered in black soot. That's proof Josh used the torch on that Monday night. Meanwhile, you might remember Ellis's search of the minivan on Tuesday turned up a melted metal object, some charred wire scraps, and a few sheets of badly burned sheetrock, all contained in a plastic garbage bag hidden in a floorboard compartment. This was presumably the remnant of whatever it was Josh burned. Let's go back to my conversation with Andrew. The guy from the Air Gas store where Josh bought the torch. He happened to see Josh's face on the TV news a couple days later.

[Andrew Robinson]

Yeah, that was the next time that I saw Josh was on the news video the following week being interviewed about his wife that's gone missing. And I thought to myself, was that the guy that came into the store? I went into my work the following day, and I just wanted to verify that. So I'd mentioned to my coworker and we pulled it up online, and he said, yeah, yeah, that looks like him. And the way that he interacted with the journalist was very similar to how he interacted with myself. Very. Wouldn't say as much as evasive, but just very almost vague.

[Interviewer]

So once you confirmed that, hey, that's the same person who was in here, was there a question of what do I do?

[Andrew Robinson]

Well, I just felt that it was something that needed to be brought to the attention of law enforcement.

[Interviewer]

So as I understand, you end up being the person to make the phone call to the West Valley City Police.

[Dave Cawley]

Department, is that right?

[Andrew Robinson]

That's correct, yes. The officer took my details and two officers came. They just wanted to know the interaction, whether we could provide evidence of the purchase in the way of a receipt and CCTV footage. And we had that arranged.

[Dave Cawley]

A police report about this interview says, quote, Andrew said that he heard Joshua state on news interviews that he had been cutting open mine shafts on the Pony Express Trail. Andrew told me that's not accurate. He never heard Josh say that because Josh didn't say is what Andrew suspected Josh might have wanted a steel cutting torch for at the time. And that's what he said to the detectives.

[Andrew Robinson]

A thought that did Come to my mind was what was his actual intent on the equipment that he purchased. The upgrade in cylinder size would not be something that you would purchase for a little home jewelry making.

[Dave Cawley]

A little earlier, I mentioned the police photos of Josh and Susan's house taken on Monday and Tuesday. They showed where the oxyacetylene torch was in the garage. But there's another important difference between the two sets of images. On Monday, there's an orange and black tool bag sitting on top of a chest freezer next to the door, leading from the garage into the house. But on Tuesday, that tool bag's moved to a spot on the concrete floor next to the torch. I think it's likely the metal object Josh melted was in that bag. So let's talk about where that bag came from and what it likely contained. During their second interview, Ellis asked Josh about his financial situation.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Give me a list of your checking accounts, credit cards that you guys have.

[Josh Powell]

Well, she has. Seems like she has a couple of accounts at Wells Fargo.

[Detective Ellis Maxwell]

Okay.

[Josh Powell]

Oh, and Home Depot. Yeah, she's got a Home Depot card.

[Dave Cawley]

Susan's Home Depot card was really Josh's Home Depot card. He'd gone through bankruptcy in 2007, but rather than stop buying tools, he opened that credit card in Susan's name and went on a Black Friday spending spree. One of the items he bought was a Ridgid brand 18 volt cordless tool kit, and it came in a black and orange bag. That tool bag appears in a video Susan made a year and a half before she disappeared, documenting the family's assets, along with a bunch of other rigid tools.

[Susan Cox Powell]

A rigid drill, some type of rigid sander, and a rigid saw.

[Dave Cawley]

I found an old rigid catalog from that same time. It shows this. 18 volt kit came in two variants. Both included a hammer drill, reciprocating saw, circular saw, flashlight, and battery charger. The difference between the two was one kit included an impact driver that's like a smaller version of a drill, good for turning screws or bolts. Josh bought one of these two kits, but it's not clear which.

[Susan Cox Powell]

All expensive stuff that we bought. A lot of it got bankrupted. A lot of it got added afterwards.

[Dave Cawley]

I can account for every one of those tools. Tools and police photos from after Susan's disappearance. The only one I can't find is an impact driver. So it's possible the melted metal object could have been a rigid impact driver. In the bonus episode Project Sunlight, I described discovering a file among Josh's computer records from 2009. It was a transfer Log showing the names of documents Josh kept on an encrypted hard drive. There's an entire folder labeled Rigid Tools, with entries for warranty documents, a spreadsheet with the serial numbers, even photos. Unfortunately, I don't have the documents and photos themselves, because, again, they are encrypted. But what's curious is when West Valley City police later seized Josh's computers a second time in 2011, they held a copy of this same Rigid Tools folder. The spreadsheet and photos aren't in it. It appears Josh deleted them. For what purpose, we can only assume West Valley City police turned the melted metal object over to the FBI. In 2010, the Bureau performed a metallurgical analysis. It showed the mystery metal was mostly steel with lesser amounts of calcium and strontium. That last element. Strontium, is a component in small electric motors, like the kind used in power drills and impact drivers. And remember, Ellis also found three short wire segments in the trash bag, along with the mystery metal. Those wires were the right gauge and length to connect a battery to a small electric motor, like inside an impact driver. All this is to say a lot of circumstantial evidence points to the mystery metal being the remains of a power tool. But I needed to test this theory. So I bought an old rigid impact driver secondhand and enlisted the help of a friend with an oxyacetylene torch to melt it. The orange plastic shell turned into a bubbling pool of black goo.

[Friend helping with oxyacetylene torch]

I mean, that rear casing is pretty well gone. I can see the housing on the front.

[Dave Cawley]

Look how sooty you are, though. Yeah, it put off a thick smoke that coated the tip of the torch in soot.

[Andrew Robinson]

Plastic would cause that blackening. Blackening can also occur from too much fuel in the flame, too much acetylene.

[Dave Cawley]

As the silvery steel of the motor heated up, it glowed white. The metal softened. Some of it liquefied.

[Friend helping with oxyacetylene torch]

So right where you're at should be kind of the joint between the motor and the transmission. I think you're right. A big cross platform. That would probably actually be good.

[Dave Cawley]

The motor broke into pieces. It took more than an hour and quite a lot of fuel to reduce the whole thing to an unrecognizable chunk of slag. We doused it with water, then compared the result to police photographs of Josh's melted metal object. It looks almost identical to my eyes. You can see the pictures yourself on our website, TheColdPodcast.com Andrew, the Aussie from the air gas store, also watched a video recording of the experiment. I Asked his opinion about it since he has much more experience with oxyacetylene than I do.

[Andrew Robinson]

I've been involved in the automotive industry. So oxygen acetylene for heating components, cutting components, welding components.

[Interviewer]

That torch, do you think would have been capable of reducing like a power tool to. To that kind of a shape?

[Andrew Robinson]

Definitely, yes. The power tool is fairly light material all in all, and that torch certainly would be capable of reducing that to a molten clump of different materials.

[Interviewer]

Did it seem plausible to you, based.

On the experiment, that that's what that object could be?

[Andrew Robinson]

I believe there was a very close similarity to come across that I think there was some motive in that something involved was destroyed by Josh.

[Dave Cawley]

I can't prove beyond a doubt Josh's melted metal object was a rigid impact driver. But this experiment left me convinced the mystery metal was absolutely a power tool.

[Andrew Robinson]

Why would you destroy something like that? Unless for some reason he just wanted to see how long it would take to melt a cordless drill. But why? You know, if he'd had the oxy acetylene torch for six months, you know, and he was playing around with it and he thought, oh, I wonder how long it takes to melt this thing. And it'd been sitting there, but it only happened within. Within a week, two weeks max.

[Dave Cawley]

The only reason I can conceive why Josh would have taken the time and effort to destroy such a tool the moment the eyes of police were off him was if it somehow linked him.

[Andrew Robinson]

To Susan's murder, whether he premeditated it. I'll go to Air Gas. I'll buy this equipment because I'm going to do this. I'll melt the weapon. I don't believe that to be the case, but that's quite feasible that the destruction of that believed cordless drill was involved somehow in Susan's demise.

[Dave Cawley]

While searching through Josh and Susan's photos and home videos, I found a clip From August of 2006, about three years before Susan disappeared. Josh and Susan's first son Charlie was a year and a half old.

[Susan Cox Powell]

Ready?

See the saw? And we go.

[Dave Cawley]

That's Susan talking. She and Josh are showing Charlie how to use a little Tykes brand playset. It's shaped like a miniature woodworking bench, complete with a toy table saw.

[Susan Cox Powell]

Cut the wood. Oh, you did it. You did it. You cut the wood. You cut the wood. Good job. Good job.

[Dave Cawley]

Charlie's a little young for this playset. He doesn't seem to grasp the concept of a table saw and picks up a toy drill instead. He has trouble holding it steady as he pretends to drive holes into the workbench, Charlie makes drilling noises with his mouth while Josh micromanages Susan's camera work. There's a moment in the video where Charlie walks over to Josh. He presses the plug plastic drill bit against the bare skin of Josh's foot.

[Josh Powell]

You're drilling on my foot?

[Dave Cawley]

Charlie flashes a grin.

[Josh Powell]

What do you think?

That's funny?

[Dave Cawley]

But listen to what Josh says in response.

[Josh Powell]

That could really hurt someone.

[Dave Cawley]

I got chills the first time I watched this because this could have been a moment when the seed of an idea was planted in Josh's mind.

[Josh Powell]

Ow. Ow. Ow.

[Susan Cox Powell]

Drills hurt.

[Josh Powell]

Ow.

[Susan Cox Powell]

Ow.

[Josh Powell]

Wow.

[Dave Cawley]

When he conceived the idea, a power tool could be repurposed into a weapon, and Susan watched it happen. A personal note from me as this episode comes to a close. In the years since this podcast first launched, I've heard from many of you about how Susan's story has the power to reveal the sometimes subtle signs of domestic abuse. If you see those in your own relationships, Please consider calling 1-800-799-SAFE. That's S A F E to speak with someone who can help. Even if you think you don't know anyone who's experiencing abuse, statistics tell us you do. So to honor Susan's memory, please look up information about domestic violence resources in your area. Educate yourself on the red flags of coercive control. Read up on the lethality assessment protocol. Be ready to help the people you care about. Together we can save lives. Cold is researched and written by me, Dave Cawley Audio production and sound design on this episode by Ben Kiebrick. Mixing and mastering by Ben Kiebrick. Michael Bondmiller composed our main theme with additional guitar stuff by, well, you know. Kold is a production of KSL Podcasts. Our executive producer is Cheryl Worsley. Special thanks to Paul Anderson of Workhouse Media and Dave Beazing of Sound that Brands. And as always, thank you for listening. Sam.