Milton police are reopening the investigation into last year's death of a local concert hall owner following the recent arrest of a high-end call girl from metro Atlanta who California police said injected a Google executive with heroin and left him to die.
Channel 2 Action News reported that the call girl, Alix Tichelman, was dating Dean Riopelle at the time of his death last September, and had been arrested two weeks before Riopelle died for biting the 53-year-old owner of Atlanta’s Masquerade concert venue.
While news reports last fall indicated that Riopelle died of an apparent heart attack, an investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s officer told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday that Riopelle died of “heroin, Oxycodone and ethanol toxicity.”
Tichelman was arrested two week’s before Riopelle’s death, and booked into the Fulton County Jail on charges of battery-family violence and false report of a crime. Jail records show she was released on $5,000 bond the following day.
In addition to owning the Masquerade, Riopelle, performing under the stage name "13," was a member of the local fetish-themed band, the Impotent Sea Snakes. He was in the news in March 2013 when he proposed to build an exotic animal preserve on his Hopewell Road property in Milton.
Tichelman, 26, is facing drug and manslaughter charges in California in connection with the November death of Google executive Forrest Hayes.
Hayes, 51, died of an apparent heroin overdose aboard his yacht in Santa Cruz, Calif.
She was arrested last week after being lured back to California in a prostitution sting, and is being held on $1.5 million bond.
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