Mystery haunts Susan Powell's friend

WEST VALLEY CITY — Kiirsi Hellewell sure never saw this one coming.

Two and a half weeks ago, on a cold but dry December Sunday, the 34-year-old mother of three walked home from church with her best friend, Susan Powell.

As Kiirsi turned toward her front door, Susan said "bye" and continued walking up the street and around the corner to her house.

She hasn't heard from Susan since.

And since later that night, neither has anyone else.

"It's like we're watching this horrible nightmare and all the time thinking, 'How can it be us? How can it be happening here?' " says Kiirsi, who has found herself thrust into the eye of the "Where is Susan Powell?" storm that is attracting national and even worldwide attention.

She and her husband, John, were — are — especially close friends of Susan Powell and her husband, Josh. They met five and a half years ago when the Powells bought a house in the same working-class neighborhood on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley just eight months after the Hellewells moved in.

"Something just clicked," says Kiirsi. "We got very close."

Both the media and the police have sought out the Hellewells in an attempt to learn more about the Powells — Susan because she's missing and can't respond and Josh because he isn't missing but won't respond.

Kiirsi is doing all she can think of to find her best friend. She organized a Facebook page (Friends and Family of Susan Powell) as a clearinghouse for information, comments and encouragement that has expanded to 9,000 members. She is dispersing "Missing" fliers from her front room to anyone and everyone who will take a handful or a boxful.

And out in the driveway, the family van is all gassed up, ready to search — if only some clue would arrive that would tell them where to start.

"It is so frustrating," she sighs. "We want to look, but we don't know where."

Equally frustrating is the enigma that is Josh Powell. In the days after Susan disappeared, right up until he took his two sons to Washington to elude the media and police and be with family over the holidays, Susan's husband took regular refuge in Kiirsi's front room, alternating between sobbing and setting up a Web site to help in the investigation.

He never finished either one.

"I just so wanted to ask him so many questions," says Kiirsi. "But I didn't know how."