Clark was absolutely flabbergasted (as was I - did this woman think that the owner would never come back?) and said he would get working on it.
Apparently he woke some people up - the lady originally said the police weren't too interested. (I find that hard to believe - Douglas County is well known around here as a strict law-and-order locale. I think what's more likely is that the police were as flabbergasted as everyone else and weren't quite sure where to start.)
One point Clark Howard made is, how did this squatter find out the owner was going to be gone? He thinks she must have had some confederates.
Another odd thing is that this crook threw out a lot of the owner's stuff - and won't say where she took it to. Very very weird.
One of my daughters is a police officer, and she said that if someone had called the police and told them that there was a stranger living in her house, the police would probably have thought the person making the report was the nut, rather than the person apparently legitimately installed there. What a Kafkian nightmare!
However, I have heard of this happening elsewhere, and the fact that she was charged with the crime of "home theft" indicates that there is some precedent for this bizarre situation. I guess the moral of the story is to leave a large slavering hound behind you whenever you go on vacation.