On a quiet Sunday evening in December 2009, Susan Powell put her sons to bed and lay down to rest. She never got up again.

Her husband, Josh, told police a strange story: that he'd loaded their two young boys into a minivan at midnight and driven them into the Utah desert to go camping, in the middle of a snowstorm, without her. When he came home the next day, Susan was gone. Her purse, her keys, her whole life sat untouched in the house behind him.
Within a week, police named Josh Powell a person of interest. He was never arrested. He was never charged. For more than two years he lived as if none of it had happened, giving interviews, fighting for custody of his sons, and quietly shielding a father who had been obsessed with his daughter-in-law since the day she married into the family.
Then, on a Sunday morning in February 2012, the story that had gripped a nation ended the only way it ever could have: in fire.
The True Story of Susan Powell follows the case West Valley City police could never close, from the last ordinary hours of Susan's life through the disappearance that made headlines for a decade, the father-in-law whose secret obsession unraveled on national television, and the devastating final act that took two more lives and every remaining chance at justice with it. Drawing on search warrants, custody records, and years of public reporting, this is the story of a woman the system was supposed to protect, and the husband nobody could ever quite prove had failed her.