The seeds of Josh’s actions were planted well before the murder-suicide in Washington. They were present from his early childhood, cultivated by a father who himself had been raised in a tumultuous family environment.

Steve Powell made no secret of his own troubled upbringing. He included a story about the kidnapping game his parents had played in the biography section of his music website, stevechantrey.com.

“At an early age my mother made a unilateral and secretive decision to separate from my dad, and moved with my brother, my sister and me to Chillicothe, Ohio,” Steve wrote. “My dad found us after a few months, and my parents reconciled.”

In a previously undisclosed journal entry dated July 9, 2010, Steve was more candid. He made a stunning admission about the development of his own deviancy.

“My parents both contributed to the interruption and distortion of my emotional development,” Steve wrote. “My dad ‘kidnapped’ us when I was eight years old. His mother told us, ‘You will never see your mother again,’ and it took a year for her to find us. For the rest of our lives with her she kept us from our father and villainized him to an extreme degree.”