Motive?

Mods, please merge if there is not enough interest in this, but I would like to get a sense of the motive for Susan's disappearance.
Item: Josh was heavily in debt
Item: Susan apparently wanted to divorce him and take the children.

IF Josh disappeared his wife, he couldnt have been looking for an insurance payout unless she is found, right? Or, did he plan this for the long haul and figured he would have her declared legally dead at some point?

So if he disposed of her for some other reason, what would that have been? Something worth a whole lot of planning and elaborate deception....

How many cases can we count that has been motive for killing? Tons. We should list them all.

believe09 said:

Mods, please merge if there is not enough interest in this, but I would like to get a sense of the motive for Susan's disappearance.
Item: Josh was heavily in debt
Item: Susan apparently wanted to divorce him and take the children.
..

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Item: Control. I has been said that Josh was very controlling (wouldn't let Susan use the computer, didn't let her take the car to church that Sunday, etc), yet Susan was putting her foot down and set a deadline for him to get a Temple Recommend from the LDS Church, This is a church that apparently he had lost faith in, yet it can be very controlling of its members (what to drink & wear, when to fast, what to "volunteer" for, how much money to donate to the church, written documentation of member "worthiness", etc) -- seems to work for the believers, but I can imagine its not at all a good situation for those who have lost the faith.

1. Josh's control issues
2. finances
3. friends and church..........JEALOUSY
4. ulimatim on a divorse
5. greedy, wanted his boys
6. his father put thoughts in JP head

Hmmm...what am I trying to get to with this???

I am assuming that Josh did not expect Susan to be discovered as missing as soon as she was. I am assuming he intended to call her in when he was good and ready, which was some time after he and the boys returned.

So he had a follow up plan for after he killed her. If he killed her. Since she has not been easily found, I have to believe that he did not intend her to be found. So if he was looking for a "two for one" meaning he would get rid of his wife and get rid of his financial problems in one swoop, he picked the wrong master plan.

If he was trying to prevent being left (and thereby being humiliated), staging a disappearance is pretty strange given that he appears to be positioning himself as someone who was not measuring up to his wife's standards, so she took a powder on him.

Am I making any sense here?

Uhhmmmmmmmmm...........

All of the above and you add in a little UNBRIDLED RAGE!

The body disappearance is because he still believes the old saying, 'No body, no crime.'

He really should read more though. There have been several cases where there was a conviction without a body.

But seriously, during the Laci Peterson case we had a guest here on WS with his own thread. He was a legal person and at the time we didn't know who he was. We would ask questions and when he had time he would reply. No chit-chat on that thread......anyway, we found out a couple of years later it was Chris Darden.

Ok, back to the subject, he said that the reason perps disappear the body is it's the BIGGEST proof that a crime was committed. It's also well known that quite often, a perp unknown to the victim, is more than likely to 'leave the body' where the crime was committed. Moving a dead body is VERY RISKY. On the other hand, someone CLOSE to the victim is more likely to MOVE the body to take suspicion off himself.

I don't think killing Susan necessarily had a monetary motive. IMHO, I think it's more likely Josh was jealous of Susan's success both professionally and personally. She seemed to be a step ahead of him. If you go back and look at many of our previous cases, this is often the case. Laci was much more personable than Scott, Michelle Young was very successful and Jason was just a traveling salesman, Janet Abaora worked and Raven didn't because he was a looser, Brad Cooper was extremely successful in his field and liked to flaunt it and couldn't stand the thought his wife could make it on her own (he controlled her spending as well), Lori Hacking was successful and graduated from college while her husband lived a lie that he was attending college and then med school, in the March case he was a looser who worked for the wife's dad's law firm and was in jeoprady of loosing his job while she was a successful artist ie decorator, home designer (their home being her crowning success)............

I could go on,...............but the point is the wife is outgoing, successful, popular, and in about all the cases I've mentioned except Laci, there was divorce discussions going on. Thus the ultimate motive, IMHO, is control. If he can't have her, NO ONE will!

JMHO
fran

PS............from my friend who's husband attempted to kill her, his favorite saying to her at the end of every argument, "Remember, to death do us part." Seriously, it freaked me out!

PPS.........from someone else I know in such a relationship, he used to tell her he could take her out into the countryside and dump her body and no one would give a dam* and they'd NEVER find her.......

I'd absolutely agree with all of the above, and throw in blame. It's never his fault, it's all hers. He can't take responsibility and had been piling up a storehouse of excuses for this action along with options for carrying it out. Something perfect would be nice, if only there were no 'complications.'

So, if I am getting a better handle on him...I can believe that the absence of Susan by his own hand is what softens the blow of appearing like a man whose wife left him because he was essentially a failure. At least as a companion and a wage earner that is.

He has no problem with the perception that he offed her, he is unconcerned for the most part that he is fleeing the state and putting as much space as possible between the home he shared with her (where she might be likely to return if she had left of her own volition) and her beloved boys.

So he must figure that she is quite well hidden.

I know I am stating the obvious to all of you....just trying to get the measure of the man.

fran said:

The body disappearance is because he still believes the old saying, 'No body, no crime.'

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Or maybe just "no body, no incriminating evidence".

I am guessing he could just get away with it, leave it a mystery that there was some non-zero chance that someone abducted and killed her (knowing that she would never turn-up saying how she left him and the children), and maybe everyone will eventually forget about it, somehow. Not sure this was any more thought-out than his real-estate marketing strategy.

Motive ~ She wanted a divorce.... and he found out she was planning it and to him - it meant to him .... "losing" and "failing" and she would get the kids, house etc... and that was not acceptable to him.

She was beautiful and would get the chance to date and find someone new and have her beautiful little boys with her and he would get "visits" ... and along with the fact that he always struggled to keep jobs and knew he'd have to pay child support etc. So his alternative was the unthinkable.

Now...I fear... he may have committed "the perfect crime" as some say.

I applaud the WVCPD for their hard work and long hours on this case..- but I feel they may have started just a few days too late and so now we may never know.

That's my opinion.... and I fear so many things could have been caught if he would have been tracked before he rented that car...and his house should have had the phone bugged within days of her disspearence... as in...quickly...but now they have to wait maybe weeks more due to holidays and lack of employees at the Utah state forensics labs as I read in articles.

So now they wait for all the forensics and may not have anything... because he possibly may just have planned this well enough that he may just may have gotten away with something horrible. Basically to make sure he is not ever seen as a "loser" and gets his kids........ in this sad case. I hope I am wrong. I have prayed many times that I am and that she is found alive.. but my gut feeling and my knowledge of Drew Peterson and Scott Peterson's cases... makes me fairly sure that we just may not know what happened unless someone gets Josh pressured into talking. He needs some major "tough love" from family and friends to get this guy to talk. I am frustrated...Ugh...

Bu the motive to me is that he did not want to fail again.

JP killing Susan for monetary gain doesn't work for me, as he was better off financially with her added income than without. If he had taken the time to plan this, wouldn't he have worked out how NOT to lose his job and his house at the same time?

Josh does seem to be the controlling type, and likely to be annoyed that his wife's career was more successful than his own. Combine this with the pressure she appeared to be putting on him to do more in the Church (i.e. getting his temple recommend).

He also liked to do whatever he liked whenever he liked, and Susan being a good mother would be far more responsible with the boys (i.e. NOT thinking it was a good plan to take them camping in the small hours in a snowstorm).

Does that add up to a motive for murder? I still can't see it as a pre-meditated murder, with such a fishnet alibi and ostrich behavior since.

I'm still of the opinion that Susan died as the result of an injury suffered during an unplanned fracas late on Sunday evening, quite possibly as the van's alarm was sounding, either hit by JP, or falling down and striking her head. Josh then panicked and decided to dispose of the body rather than turn himself in, and everything followed from that.

I still think he doesn't have an alibi because he was expecting not to need one before his plan got diverted. He was probably thinking he'd play the victim of jilted husband at the end of the week or whenever, claiming she was there and he went on this camping trip and she was gone when he came back.

RayO said:

Item: Control. I has been said that Josh was very controlling (wouldn't let Susan use the computer, didn't let her take the car to church that Sunday, etc), yet Susan was putting her foot down and set a deadline for him to get a Temple Recommend from the LDS Church, This is a church that apparently he had lost faith in, yet it can be very controlling of its members (what to drink & wear, when to fast, what to "volunteer" for, how much money to donate to the church, written documentation of member "worthiness", etc) -- seems to work for the believers, but I can imagine its not at all a good situation for those who have lost the faith.

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This is the first I've read that JP wouldn't allow Susan to drive the van to church. If this is true, one would wonder if he allowed her to have her own set of keys?

I had a boyfriend who would take away vehicle keys and lock them in the safe to control me which was really maddening since there were four kids between the two of us and the vehicle I owned could only hold two.

One day, he tried locking me in the yard by locking the gate. I told him he'd better unlock it post haste or I'd call the sherrif's department!

If it is true JP wouldn't allow Susan to use the computer, drive the family vehicle when she wanted or buy the particular groceries she wanted to, she must have resented him. One can only take so much of that. I know I ended up absolutely despising the man who was so controlling with me to the point I loathed him with every fiber of my being but couldn't muster up the courage to leave.

He would even go to the phone box, unplug the jack then lock the phone box just so I couldn't call 911 on him!

If Susan told her friends about his controlling behavior, she probably didn't go into all the details. I'll be you anything she was planning to leave him and finally told him that night she had absolutely had it with him!

I don't think JP had a motive. I think this was a crime of passion.

IMO Josh had more than 1 motive.
As long as Susan was willing to stay with him, earning money, filling his need of controlling her I think he was ok with the situation. It was when he knew this was going to change that he began plotting. During the years he had several failures and now a divorce was going to be another failure. He would see this as her winning and him losing. She was going to be taking things that in his mind were his! His sons, his home, his van!
This thing (sorry can't call him a man) would not even let his wife and small sons ride to church that day, they had to walk in the cold and supposedly Susan had an ear infection I believe.
And I'm supposed to believe this is a loving husband and father? I don't think so. A man who is so uncaring as this Imo would not later be making dinner for the same people he did not take care of earlier in the day. There is a reason why he did that dinner!
How I wish there were recordings of phone conversations with his father the month before Susan disappeared. They would be horrible to listen to with their whiney voices but I believe they would reveal much.
Along with the loss of control and seeing this was the end of his marriage, I think another motive is just pure and simple rage, rage he had building up for a long time from all of his failures. He couldn't blame himself for all of them so they must have been Susans fault and she had to pay.

VB

Motive? For me it's an ultimatum that includes; "I’m Leaving With the Kids".

Enough said.

sniperacer said:

Motive? For me it's an ultimatum that includes; "I’m Leaving With the Kids".

Enough said.

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Why would that be a strong enough motive to commit murder just in it's self?

It did not mean she would get custody of the kids.

I have to say I totally disagree with your signature line.

Dr.Fessel said:

Why would that be a strong enough motive to commit murder just in it's self?

It did not mean she would get custody of the kids.

I have to say I totally disagree with your signature line.

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I'm with Dr F on this. The ultimatum (if it occurred) is really just the culmination of / outcome of all the issues the other posters mentioned above, not the real motive.

I think JP may be (or have) a personality disorder...JMHO.

Emotional detachment and very little regard for, or understanding of, others' feelings.
People are only of interest when they serve needs. After they have outlived their usefulness, they are thrown out like trash.
Cannot admit own flaws/failures, in fact does not even see them as flaws.
Blames others for difficult situations.
Inflated sense of self-importance.
Deep need for admiration.
Fragile self-esteem, vulnerable to criticism.
Poor impulse control.
Need to control others.
OCD tendencies.
Persistent lying.
Exaggerates talents and successes.
and the list goes on and on and on...

Mesmerized said:

I'm with Dr F on this. The ultimatum (if it occurred) is really just the culmination of / outcome of all the issues the other posters mentioned above, not the real motive.

I think JP may be (or have) a personality disorder...JMHO.

Emotional detachment and very little regard for, or understanding of, others' feelings.
People are only of interest when they serve needs. After they have outlived their usefulness, they are thrown out like trash.
Cannot admit own flaws/failures, in fact does not even see them as flaws.
Blames others for difficult situations.
Inflated sense of self-importance.
Deep need for admiration.
Fragile self-esteem, vulnerable to criticism.
Poor impulse control.
Need to control others.
OCD tendencies.
Persistent lying.
Exaggerates talents and successes.
and the list goes on and on and on...

Click to expand...

A Narcissistic Sociopath with Borderline Personality Disorder?

Well, honestly, if I had had a husband that was that controlling, he would have been dead before I was!

See, I have completely had the wrong end of the stick on this case...on the surface I thought that perhaps Josh was fundamentalist LDS...and that Susan was too challenging to his status as the "be all and end all" of the family unit. Has anyone read "Under the Banner of Heaven"? Before I dove into the case, that was my misconception...that he thought he had a right to bring her to heal in any way he deemed necessary, based upon his religious beliefs.

I have been disabused of this, so that got me thinking about what caused him to torpoedo the bread winner and the person who brought stability into their lives.

So, does anyone believe that he had friends or associates who might have helped him dispose of her, ala Drew Peterson....albeit unwittingly??