DARK DESCENT: Loving family and friends and career success Couldn't derail the despair plaguing Greensboro economic developer David Powell.

• Author: Martin, Edward

When the wind blows from the east, the air smells of salt here, two blocks from the Atlantic. During a distinguished career, Orville Powell managed Winston-Salem, Durham and other cities and as a professor, lectured Indiana University students on how to run a town. His remaining wreath of hair gone white, he'd retired with wife Dianne to a two-story cottage at Kure Beach south of Wilmington.

On a warm spring afternoon, though, his voice is cracking. "There's a note on the door saying, 'Don't come in,' but we went in anyway," he tells a 911 dispatcher. "There's a gun beside him." Desperation rises in his voice. "My wife's upstairs with him. I can't talk anymore. I need to be with her." The phone goes silent as the dispatcher records his words.

"My son," says Powell, 81, "has committed suicide."

David M. Powell, 52, wrote a note to shield from his parents, to whom he'd retreated when his business and family worlds fell apart, what he was about to do. As his days dwindled, he lived a double life. Both ended here April 22.

One, in this beach town and nearby Wilmington, was under a new name that disguised personal and legal troubles. He was Finley Powell, a wealthy out-oftown investor and new owner of a live-performance theater, dabbling in the entertainment business. The other identity that he had left behind was of a prominent Greensboro business leader and family man. As president and CEO of the 12-county Piedmont Triad Partnership, he'd played a major role in dozens of deals, among others, assembling 1,800 acres for a $100 million industrial megasite.

Hopes for the region's manufacturing sector were high when Powell came to Greensboro in late 2010, packing a solid resume. "The Triad was delighted," says Gayle Anderson, former president of the WinstonSalem Chamber of Commerce. "We felt he'd be a terrific asset. That was true across the board."

Powell engendered optimism. "The Triad hasn't leveraged its regional assets as it needs to," he told Business North Carolina in 2010. High Point University President Nido Qubein, who headed the committee that hired Powell, says he was given free rein to help revitalize a region that hasn't grown as fast as Charlotte and Raleigh. "We didn't tie his hands." Powell's experience is a cautionary tale for nonprofit boards, which promote both personal initiative and fiduciary responsibility.

Fraud investigators allege that in 2011, barely a year after being hired, Powell embezzled the first of what would total at least $238,000 from the partnership. He resigned in January 2015, telling his board he wanted to return to private business. A year later, in January 2016, he was indicted by a state grand jury and arrested on four counts of felony embezzlement and obtaining property by false pretense. He was released after posting $100,000 bail.

Now, what emerges from interviews, indictments, police and court documents, and other sources is that Powell's business and private behavior puzzled and concerned professional contacts and frightened loved ones. Family members and friends and his criminal-defense lawyer, Greensboro's Locke Clifford, say Powell's behavior was influenced by depression and mental illness.

He was secretly unhappy in his high-profile job, says. a business friend, who asked to remain anonymous. "He made it clear PTP was not his only interest, that he did not really want to be a regional economic developer." His LinkedIn profile listed Powell as a business consultant, followed by his day job. He chafed at intrigue and infighting between partnership members supposed to work for the good of the region. "He wanted to make deals," the friend says. Powell gradually estranged crucial economic-development allies in the Triad and elsewhere.

"A number of us just took him off the list, so far as reaching him or trying to interact with him," says one. "I'd meet with him to talk about a project or something, and go through all that, then I wouldn't hear from him for months."

Another prominent Triad executive had similar experiences while working with Powell at both the partnership and in the megasite deal. "He'd disappear and be gone for extended periods of time, in the middle of deals," the executive says, declining to be identified because of ongoing projects. "We didn't know what he was doing, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to. I have absolutely no way to prove it, but yes, I believe there was mental illness involved."

A mystery central to David Powell's life is likely to remain...