Police ruled Heather Mayer’s death a suicide.* Her mother set out to prove them wrong and uncovered an escalating tale of violence, perpetuated by a man Heather met in the BDSM community:
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. Dibble did anyway, but by then police had covered the woman with a dirty bedsheet, possibly contaminating the body.
“They had already made their minds up that her death was a suicide,” Dibble said in an interview. “And I had no indication of that at all.”
The woman’s name was Heather Mayer. She was 33 years old and worked as a policy specialist for a Twin Cities insurance company.
Dibble would revisit the scene of Heather’s death many times as she lay awake nights or paused at a stoplight. She waited for the day police might deliver the investigative findings that would make the rest of the pieces fit into place. It never came.
Nearly four years later, the circumstances of Heather Mayer’s death continue to remain a mystery. South St. 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.”
Dibble wasn’t the only one who wondered if there was more to Heather’s death than what police said. 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. She jumped into her car and sped toward the Twin Cities. Then she called the officer back from the road.
“Did he do this?” Dettling demanded.
*Trigger warning for intense descriptions of domestic violence.
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