News

Actions

Volunteers will reexamine West Desert mine in renewed search for Susan Cox Powell

Posted at 1:20 PM, Jan 04, 2019
and last updated 2019-01-04 15:29:11-05

SALT LAKE CITY — A renewed search for Susan Cox Powell, a young West Valley City mom who disappeared in December 2009, will take place in an abandoned mine shaft in Utah’s West Desert over the next month.

“[The mine shaft] appears to not have been completely searched before,” said Utah Cold Case Coalition co-founder Karra Porter in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune. “We think it’s a likely spot to find her.”

Experts with the unnamed company conducting the search believe it’s possible there are bone fragments, clothing or jewelry linked to Powell in the mine shaft. They will also search a few nearby shafts.

The site where the search is focused is within a few miles of the area where Susan’s husband, Josh Powell, said he took his two sons camping on the night of Susan’s disappearance. Josh Powell was the sole person of interest in his wife’s disappearance. He killed himself and his sons in February of 2012.

Porter told The Salt Lake Tribune that the Utah Cold Case Coalition received a tip last month from a man “who had a lot of information about West Desert mines” and the searches that took place there in 2010, The Salt Lake Tribune reports.

The coalition is also co-hosting a volunteer-driven search for Susan Cox Powell scheduled for April 6. That search will focus on an area southwest of Dugway. More than 800 people have volunteered to participate, according to the event posting on Facebook.

No trace of Susan has ever been found in the nine years since she vanished.