Correction: Missing Mom-Utah story

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah (AP) — In a story May 20 about the Susan Powell investigation, The Associated Press reported erroneously the day that Josh Powell committed suicide. It happened on Feb. 5, 2012.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Police close Susan Powell case, offer new details

Police close active investigation of Susan Powell's disappearance, offer new details in case

By PAUL FOY

Associated Press

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah (AP) — For the first time, Utah police said Monday they believe Susan Powell's brother-in-law was "heavily involved" in getting rid of her body, even as they announced they couldn't solve the sensational case of a mother's disappearance after a nearly 3 ½-year investigation.

West Valley police said the focus shifted to Michael C. Powell after Josh Powell killed the couple's two boys and himself in a deliberately set house fire 15 months ago.

Police announced Monday they were closing the investigation of Susan Powell's disappearance, citing a lack of leads coupled with Michael C. Powell's suicide months ago. They also released the case file, which shows Josh Powell had an affair with a woman he met through a dating service.

The file includes other details, and contained emails from Susan Powell's father, Chuck Cox, who expressed hope his daughter might be found in the days after her December 2009 disappearance.

Cox believed Josh Powell poisoned his wife's pancakes before she was taken from the couple's house.

"The question is, where did he put her and will we find her before she does die?" Cox wrote in an email to Utah authorities, according to the police file. "One possibility is that she is still alive, but we need to find her before she does die, if the poison was not a fatal dose, she may ... be found."

The police file contains tens of thousands of pages of documents, photographs and video, and interview notes and voice mail messages.

In one file, police revealed they interviewed a West Valley City woman who said she made contact with Josh Powell on the dating service Live Links six or seven months before Susan disappeared. The woman, identified only as Kourtney in police files, said she knew Powell by the name John Staley, and didn't know he was married.

The woman said Powell gave her $800 over the course of their relationship — for reasons that weren't detailed in police reports — and that she only discerned his real identity after news broke of Susan's disappearance. The woman was interviewed by police in August 2010.

Police said they based their suspicion of Michael C. Powell's involvement partly on a car he left at an Oregon junkyard only weeks after Susan Powell disappeared. The junkyard is about 200 miles from a forest outside Salem, Ore., where authorities searched last week, looking for a body. The search turned up nothing, and police said they ran out of clues.

Deputy West Valley Police Chief Mike Powell — no relation — said authorities believe Josh Powell killed his wife, and that his brother later got involved in a cover-up. Michael C. Powell denied any wrongdoing while under investigation.

It wasn't until last August that Utah police discovered Michael Powell's Ford Taurus at the junkyard outside Pendleton, Ore. DNA recovered from the upholstery inside the car's trunk proved inconclusive, they said.

The Powell brothers used sophisticated computer encryption to communicate, according to West Valley City Deputy Chief Phil Quinlan. Investigators have been unable to decipher that encrypted communication, he said.

Investigators said they focused on the brother last year, when Josh Powell changed his insurance policy to list Michael Powell as a primary beneficiary, rather than his wife or children.

Michael Powell, an ardent supporter of Josh Powell, killed himself Feb. 11 by leaping from a parking garage in Minneapolis. He was interviewed numerous times last year after investigators determined he had sold his car for salvage value — a discovery that came nearly two years after Susan Powell's disappearance. Officials said he offered evasive answers about why he got rid of the car and how he had used it in the weeks after her disappearance.

His suicide left investigators without any person of interest in the case. While authorities believe the brothers were responsible for Susan Powell's disappearance, they said repeatedly Monday that they never had enough evidence to bring charges.

"This is a circumstantial case, yes," Quinlan said. His fellow deputy chief, Mike Powell, added, "We didn't have a body. We don't have a crime scene."

Susan Powell was reported missing more than three years ago after failing to show up for work. Her husband, Josh, maintained his innocence and said he had taken the couple's young boys on a midnight camping trip in freezing temperatures the night she was last seen.

Josh Powell eventually returned to the couple's hometown of Puyallup, Wash., where he got caught up in a battle with Susan Powell's parents for custody of the boys, 7-year-old Charlie and 5-year-old Braden.

On Feb. 5, 2012, he locked a social worker out of a rental home at the start of a supervised visit, attacked the boys with a hatchet and set the house afire. All three were killed in the blaze.

Days earlier, a court had ordered Josh Powell to undergo an intensive psychosexual evaluation in the custody dispute.

Josh Powell was never charged in his wife's disappearance, but unsealed documents say authorities found drops of Susan Powell's blood on a floor next to a sofa that appeared to have been recently cleaned, with two fans set up to blow on it.

Investigators also found life insurance policies on Susan Powell and determined that Josh Powell had filed paperwork to withdraw her retirement account money about 10 days after her disappearance.

"We have searched high and low for what happened to Susan Cox Powell," West Valley Mayor Mike Winder said. "What happened to Susan that night?"

Goat on the lam snarls NJ's Pulaski Skyway traffic

A goat escaped on one of the busiest roadways in northern New Jersey, leading police on a nearly two-hour chase.

Jersey City spokesman Stan Eason says it took five police officers to corral the goat Tuesday as it ran along the Pulaski Skyway. The goat kept jumping over the divider along the road, which carries thousands of vehicles daily to the Holland Tunnel.

The morning commute was snarled because of the goat. Police say four vehicles whose drivers were attempting to avoid the animal were involved in a minor accident. There were no injuries.

Officials are trying to determine where the goat came from. One of its ears is tagged with a U.S. Department of Agriculture tag, indicating the goat likely escaped a truck headed to a slaughterhouse.

Teachers credited with saving students in Okla.

Students who survived the powerful tornado in Oklahoma are recounting moments of fear and acts of bravery by their teachers.

The twister slammed two elementary schools in the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore. At least seven children were killed at Plaza Towers Elementary, but all appear to have survived at Briarwood Elementary.

Students at both schools recounted Tuesday that they had been ordered into the halls as the tornado approached. But in both cases, teachers then redirected at least some of the students to places that appeared safer.

Some students at Plaza Towers were crammed into the stalls of a bathroom. Some at Briarwood were ushered into a closet by a teacher.

Connecticut rail service to return to normal Wednesday after collision

After a nearly four-hour commute Tuesday morning, Orlando Cordero was thrilled to hear train service was returning to normal as workers were finishing repair to tracks damaged by last week's train collision in Bridgeport.

Regular commuter rail service from Connecticut to New York City, along with Amtrak service between Boston and New York, was scheduled to resume during Wednesday morning's rush hour on one of the nation's oldest and most heavily traveled railways.

Limited, slower train service was planned for Tuesday's evening rush hour for Metro-North and Amtrak.

Cordero, a 38-year-old lawyer from New Haven, considered staying with a friend in New York to avoid the long commutes since Friday's derailment of a Metro-North train and collision with another train.

But "I'm relieved," he said Tuesday. "I was anticipating that the delays were going to last the entire week. I'm very grateful that they're resuming service tomorrow."

The Metro-North crash at rush hour Friday evening injured 72 people, including one who remained in critical condition Tuesday. It snarled commutes for roughly 30,000 people who normally use the train, forcing travelers to navigate a patchwork of cars, trains and buses.

As of late Tuesday, one of the two damaged tracks was rebuilt and returned to service for Metro-North Railroad and Amtrak, officials said.

Metro-North expected to operate about half the regular Tuesday evening rush-hour service at a reduced speed of 30 mph, which officials said is standard for new track installations. The trains would use a single track for seven miles around Bridgeport, forcing delays.

"We recognize the critical importance of both Metro-North Railroad and Amtrak to the regional economy," Metro-North President Howard Permut said. "Although reconstruction and testing of the second track will not be completed until late tonight, enough work has been completed to allow us to operate this limited service in advance of resuming our regular schedule on Wednesday."

The track was rebuilt to current Federal Railroad Administration standards using all new materials and underwent rigorous testing, officials said. Railroad officials said the speed of the rebuilding effort was the result of hundreds of skilled people in multiple crafts working around the clock since Saturday night.

Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates Metro-North, said no major problems were reported.

"Ridership is up slightly over Monday on the buses," he said. "Other than that it is running as expected."

Connecticut lawmakers plan hearings on the crash on the rail network they say is in need of extensive improvements.

Members of the General Assembly's Transportation Committee said they have been briefed by state transportation officials over the years about the hefty investment Connecticut needs to make to fully upgrade the commuter rail line, including a couple of 100-year-old bridges that need to be replaced.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said resumption of rail service is "tremendously good news."

Some commuters used a shuttle train ran between New Haven and Bridgeport, where a bus connection to Stamford circumvented the accident scene, and finally customers boarded a train for New York.

Others drove themselves, and state officials nervously watched heavy traffic on two major arteries in southwest Connecticut, Interstate 95 and the Merritt Parkway.

But transportation officials were pleased that area highways were not as choked as they feared, Malloy said. He said commuters heeded his warning over the weekend about the prospect of highways becoming parking lots if all 30,000 of the usual train riders drove instead.

Federal investigators were expected to be on site for several more days. They are looking at a broken section of rail to see if it is connected to the derailment and collision. Officials said it wasn't clear whether the rail was broken in the crash or earlier.