Police evidence custodian retires after more than two decades serving Kalispell

Drugs, weapons, and abandoned bicycles: Susie Phillips saw it all in her 22 year career with the Kalispell Police Department.

Phillips, who was the first to hold the role in the department, retired last month after serving 18 years as the department’s evidence custodian.

While she began her work with the department as a dispatcher, as the amount of evidence collected grew, former Chief Frank Garner decided a full-time evidence custodian – responsible for logging, organizing, and maintaining the integrity of all the evidence linked to police investigations – was needed.

Phillips was interested, and after getting a couple of certifications in evidence handling, she hit the ground running. In the first few years, Phillips learned a lot from the detectives who had handled evidence duties before she came along.

As she gained experience, however, Phillips became a motherly figure to the department’s officers, teaching them about proper handling and labeling, and even putting them in their place when she felt something wasn’t done properly.

“I kind of thought of myself as their mom, because I worried about them when they were out on calls,” Phillips said in a recent interview of her relationship with the men and women in blue.

“I also had to be their mom when it came to disciplining them and checking their work to make sure they were packaging evidence correctly. I’m very picky about how things need to be neat and legible. I would send them a snarky email, with humor, asking them “Did you forget to do this?”

Eventually all the officers came to enjoy her presence, she said, even though she kept them on their toes.

“After an officer was there for a few months they would realize they have to keep Susie happy,” she said.

Phillips was also in charge of storing stolen or abandoned bicycles, a regular occurrence in Kalispell that she estimated added up to 50 bikes per year.

For bikes that went unclaimed, the department donated them to local charities to give to kids, college students, and others.

Among the less innocent things to come across Phillips’ desk were the drugs and weapons linked to local arrests.

When she started, Phillips said most drug seizures were cannabis, with the occasional bit of cocaine and meth. She said in recent years, however, that the amount of meth coming in as evidence has increased, and that she first saw opioids such as heroin and fentanyl in the last five years.

After evidence was no longer needed for an investigation, Phillips said that she was able to pull certain “bizarre” items aside for the department’s collection of weapons and drug paraphernalia.

Amongst the collection is a cannabis pipe designed to look like a lipstick tube and a scale designed to look like a Snoop Dogg CD. Phillips also described nunchucks, do-in-yourself clubs and flails and knives so thin they can hide in a wallet.

To Phillips, the scariest weapon she came across was a long gun mounted under the hood of a car, with the driver able to trigger it while driving.

“It’s been pretty fun,” Phillips said. “Never a boring day.”

But to Phillips, the hardest part about saying goodbye to the job is leaving behind her coworkers, who she described as “one big family.”

“They’re the most amazing people,” Phillips said of Kalispell’s law enforcement. “So kind and caring, and they really take their job seriously as far as protecting the community.”

Police Chief Doug Overman had lots of praise for the work Phillips did in her time in the department, as well as her character. Overman said her commitment to doing the job properly made the whole department better.

“An amazing person and amazing teammate,” Overman said. “She made sure to take care of people on an individual basis, she was extremely detail oriented and we’re gonna miss her a ton.”

In retirement, Phillips plans on spending lots of time with her three rottweilers, gardening, and visiting her daughter in Oregon. She plans on staying in the Flathead Valley, and says she’ll find some way to stay involved and keep busy, perhaps by volunteering with children at a local school.

And when it comes to seeing her police department family, Phillips expects to visit regularly.

“I’ll definitely go back and fill up their candy jars,” Phillips said.

Reporter Adrian Knowler can be reached at 758-4407 or aknowler@dailyinterlake.com