Family Shocked by Arrest of Airman Who Vanished : Mystery: Friends who presumed him dead in 1987 feel betrayed. His ‘widow’ was ready to remarry.

A shoe, a wallet, a skid mark and a battered bicycle--that was all Air Force Sgt. Doug Pou left behind on May 12, 1987, the day he vanished while taking a pre-dawn bike ride near his home in Albuquerque.

For 60 days, anguished airmen searched for their buddy, unwilling to believe the star of their elite Air Force para-rescue team could be gone. Friends posted flyers bearing his picture, while relatives hired a private detective and offered a $5,000 reward.

Finally, everyone gave up. The military declared Doug Pou dead, and those who had loved him went on with their lives.

This week, the sandy-haired man surprised them all. In San Diego on Wednesday, Air Force investigators arrested Pou--who was living there under an alias--and charged him with desertion.

Pou, pronounced pew, is now in jail at March Air Force Base in Riverside, awaiting trial. In addition to dishonorable discharge and other penalties, the airman could get up to five years in federal prison if convicted.

Perhaps more difficult for Pou, however, will be facing the wife, children, friends and other relatives he left behind--those who mourned him and let him go and now must find a way to explain what appears to be his staggering betrayal of their trust.

His wife, Suzy, who relocated to Washington state with the couple’s two sons, was going to remarry next month. But Pou has spoiled those plans: State law forbids the union now that her first husband has turned up.

Then there are Pou’s former teammates at the prestigious para-rescue school, housed at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. These are the gutsy people who pluck victims from sinking ships, burning airplanes and other dangerous spots. Trust is what binds them, and the news of Pou’s re-emergence has rumbled in and crushed spirits like a runaway train.

“The mood is devastation--complete devastation,” said Sgt. Bill Burton, a close friend of “the old Doug Pou” who led the search for his body. “This job is dangerous, and everything you do depends on your buddy, your friend. To have a brother pull something like this guy pulled . . . it just floors you. . . . We all just want to know why.”

James (Doug) Pou was one of those kids who seemed to excel at everything. He had both the 3.7 grade-point average needed to win honors and impress parents and the talent to letter in wrestling and make the track and football teams.

As the folks at James A. Garfield High School in Garrettsville, Ohio, remember it, there were few students whose prospects seemed brighter.

“He was just a great young man--polite, outgoing, respectful of adults,” Andrea Winchell, a secretary at the high school for 15 years, recalled in an interview. “Everybody liked him.”

The youngest of four children, Pou graduated from Garfield High in 1978 and landed a job as a diesel mechanic in Galveston, Tex., his hometown newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal reported in 1990. That didn’t interest him for long, however, and after an Air Force recruiter showed him a film on the risky adventures of the para-rescuer, he enlisted in 1979.

The grueling life suited him--and his brawny, 6-foot-3, 195-pound frame--perfectly. After attending para-rescue school, Pou was sent to Iceland. There, his many rescues included plucking a hiker from a glacier crevice and saving two British pilots whose plane had crashed during a blizzard, according to an article about Pou in Airman magazine.

From Iceland, he moved to Albuquerque in 1986 with his wife, Suzy, a onetime professional figure skater, and two young sons, Bryan and Timothy. Pou quickly climbed the ranks there, becoming an instructor in the para-rescue school.

“He was outstanding--the absolute best,” said Sgt. Michael Vogele, who was chief of training at the school at the time of Pou’s disappearance. “He just had what it took to do this extremely demanding job, and he was devoted to it. His future was extremely bright.”

Then came the events of May 12, 1987--a tragedy, it seemed at the time, that snuffed out a man full of promise at the age of 27.

As was his habit, Pou set out early that day on his racing bike. A fitness fanatic, he was training for a triathlon and planned to ride 27 miles along the Rio Grande. When he failed to show up to teach a class later that morning, his wife and friends became alarmed.

Retracing his bike route, they found the shoe and skid mark on a bridge over the river. Later, they discovered his bike and wallet near a dumpster nine miles away.

Sgt. Burton led the painstaking hunt for Pou’s body, an effort that involved scores of airmen as well as detectives from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department. After the Air Force officially called off the search, Burton and others pressed on after work hours--renting bloodhounds to search for clues and swimming an eight-mile stretch of the river each day.

“We even used avalanche probes to poke the sand to see if he might have been stuck under there,” Burton recalled. “We tried everything.”

No one knew for sure what had happened to Pou. Had there been an accident? Had he been the victim of foul play?

A private detective hired by Pou’s family concluded that he had been hit by a car and landed in the river. Vogele, meanwhile, was convinced he would “find Doug’s body in the desert someday, buried in a shallow grave.” “Unsolved Mysteries,” the television program, ran a segment on his case.

Ultimately, the military declared Pou officially dead so that his wife could collect survivor’s benefits. Time passed, but nobody forgot the airman who disappeared.

“We cross that bridge--twice--to get to the area where we do our jumps,” Burton said. “There hasn’t been one day in five years that I haven’t looked down at that river and wondered what became of Doug.”

Air Force officials will not talk about the circumstances surrounding his arrest, saying only that he was seized at a home in San Diego. So for now, the intricacies of Pou’s bizarre five-year hiatus remain a mystery.

While they wait for details, his friends and relatives are confronting a flurry of questions: Why would a man who had everything--a beautiful wife, two sons, a remarkably successful career, and the admiration of all his peers--give it all up?

Suzy Pou declined through her family to comment on her husband’s re-emergence. Her mother, Lois Schulte of Spokane, said “the poor soul” is “shocked” and distraught that her yearlong wedding preparations have been thwarted in such a horrifying way.

“When we first heard this, we all said, ‘That’s ridiculous, somebody has made up a real whopper of a story,’ ” Schulte said. “We just couldn’t believe it, after all the grieving and everything we’d gone through.”

Schulte, for one, says there will never be an answer to the mystery of Pou’s disappearance. “We’ll never know the reason because obviously it was a totally irrational act by a totally irrational person. He left a job he loved and a woman and children he loved. You can’t find an explanation for that.”

Pou’s friends, however, are in need of some answers.

“We’re hurt, very hurt,” said Burton. “He couldn’t have hurt us more if he’d shot us.”

Vogele agreed: “I can tell you one thing, Mr. Pou has a lot of explaining to do out here in Albuquerque.”

Times staff writer John Glionna in San Diego contributed to this story.