Regarding the column, “Don’t look for news in the latest documentary about Susan Cox Powell,” by Scott D. Pierce.
As Pierce notes, there have been other television programs about Susan Cox Powell. I have appeared in some, but not all.
I disagree with him about the value of HLN’s “How It Really Happened,” which premiered March 14. What I saw when I watched the program was the most intimate telling yet of Susan’s story. I could see and hear the effects of time passing. I saw the years of sorrow in the faces and words of her father, Chuck Cox, her sister, Denise Ernest, and her sister-in-law, Jennifer Graves. No other program has come close to showing the toll the murders of Charlie and Braden and Susan’s disappearance have taken.
The intimacy of the program is demonstrated in Graves’ heartbreaking lament about the chain of events that led to the murder of her nephews: “I didn’t solve it. I didn’t fix it. I didn’t stop it.”
Pierce complained there were no contemporary interviews with authorities. They have made their points in all the other programs. This one was different. It was personal. I don’t know if the producers meant it to be, but it was.
As far as there being “nothing new” in the program, details of the Cox’s wrongful death lawsuit against the state of Washington are important. The suit is an urgent reminder to other states to protect the children in their care, especially when a parent is a person of interest in a murder investigation.
Rebecca Morris, Co-author of “If I Can’t Have You – Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children,” Seattle, Wash.
