All was still in the darkened Powell home. Daybreak was hours away.
Asleep in her bed, Judy Powell woke up to a light flicked on in the study. Then the light went off.
Something or someone was shifting through the rooms of their house in Turnagain Heights. A bathroom light switched on, then off. She thought her son had come upstairs to get something.
The light turned on again, and she heard cabinet doors or drawers banging open and shut. Then a figure began moving into the bedroom.
"I'm awake, but not completely awake, and it's dark. So I start talking to this person," Powell recalled in an interview Friday, about the events two days earlier. "Then he starts having a conversation with me and it takes me a few minutes to realize that that is not my son."
It was the first in a pair of bizarre botched burglaries executed minutes apart last week by two chatty men who couldn't seem to let sleeping homeowners lie. Ejected from the Powell home, police say the suspects slipped into a Spenard home less than a half hour later, woke the owner when their attempt at stealth fell flat, and began talking to the owner as police closed in.
They couldn't elude capture, not even by hiding in a child's bedroom.
Read the complete story at adn.com