It was Bella’s first real experience in BDSM - the broad term for relationships involving bondage, dominance, submission and sadomasochism - and most of what she knew came from reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the bestselling novel by E.L. Then she called the officer back from the road. She jumped into her car and sped toward the Twin Cities. When one of the officers called Heather’s mother, Tracy Dettling, to say her daughter had hanged herself, Dettling’s mind flashed to her grandkids still in the house. Paul police have informally continued to call it a suicide, or possibly a “tragic accident,” and the medical examiner records still list Heather’s cause of death as “undetermined.”ĭibble wasn’t the only one who wondered if there was more to Heather’s death than what police said. Nearly four years later, the circumstances of Heather Mayer's death continue to remain a mystery. She waited for the day police might deliver the investigative findings that would make the rest of the pieces fit into place. She was 33 years old and worked as a policy specialist for a Twin Cities insurance company.ĭibble would revisit the scene of Heather’s death many times as she lay awake nights or paused at a stoplight. “And I had no indication of that at all.” “They had already made their minds up that her death was a suicide,” Dibble said in an interview. Dibble did anyway, but by then police had covered the woman with a dirty bedsheet, possibly contaminating the body. The officers told Dibble not to bother with bagging the victim’s hands to preserve DNA evidence or sealing the body for the autopsy - standard protocols for a potential homicide. As police questioned the others in the house, she learned at least one of them was lying.Īn excerpt from the South St. In hundreds of death scenes, Dibble had never seen a case of a woman hanging herself naked, especially with three kids upstairs likely to discover the body. The fact that she was otherwise naked struck her as important. A red dress hung off her shoulder like a scarf in what Dibble took for a clumsy attempt to clothe her. Full rigor mortis meant she had probably died hours before anyone called 911. Diamond-shaped imprints crisscrossed the woman’s throat, and they appeared to match the links of a utility chain with a Master lock that dangled from a pipe on the ceiling. She noticed a tattoo on the woman’s thigh, a black-ink illustration showing a female figure in lingerie with her hands bound behind her tailbone. Dibble turned her over and found bruising and lacerations smattering her back. Chains, sex toys, a whip, an empty tequila bottle and a polka-dot party hat spiraled in a mess around the woman’s nude body, which lay on the floor. Paul basement that looked like a dungeon.ĭibble went to work. On a busy July 4th weekend in 2019, she raced to the scene of a woman found hanged in a South St. Part I The hidden wounds on Richmond StreetĪs a death investigator, Breanna Dibble thought of herself as the eyes and ears of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office, responsible for detecting small details that could become important clues later.
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