A
woman police describe as a high-end prostitute has been arrested on
suspicion of murder after allegedly injecting heroin into a tech
executive on his yacht in Santa Cruz and leaving him to die when he
overdosed.
The suspect, Alix
Catherine Tichelman, was charged with seven crimes, including
manslaughter, at the Santa Cruz County Court on Wednesday.
She has been appointed a public defender and her bail has been set at $1.5 million. She will wait a week before entering plea.
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported Tuesday that surveillance video from the boat shows 51-year-old Forrest Timothy Hayes losing consciousness.
Investigators
said the 26-year-old from Georgia made no effort to help Hayes, and
instead gathered her belongings and even gulped a glass of wine before
leaving.
Hayes's body was discovered the next day.
Tichelman was taken into custody last week after being lured back to Santa Cruz County in a prostitution sting.
Police say Tichelman provided heroin for Hayes, a Google executive, while they were aboard the 50-foot yacht.
According to Hayes's obituary,
he was a married father of five who had worked as an engineer at
Silicon Valley tech companies, including Google, Apple and Sun
Microsystems.
Hayes's obituary describes him as a "loving husband and father."
"More than anything
else he enjoyed spending time with his family at home and on his boat.
His brilliant mind, contagious smile, and warm embrace will be missed
and cherished in memories by his friends and family.," Hayes' obituary
says.
Police said that Hayes had an ongoing pay-for-sex relationship with Tichelman, but that relationship came to an end last November on his yacht in the small boat harbor in Santa Cruz.
Surveillance video from
his vessel shows Tichelman meeting Hayes on board and it captures the
crime itself when she allegedly injected him with a lethal dose of
heroin, police say.
"So cold and callous
was she that she stepped over the victim's body several times, one time
to retrieve a glass of wine and finish the contents of the glass of wine
while she's cleaning up her property, cleaning up evidence of the crime
there," Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark said.
Clark told NBC affiliate KSBW that investigators suspect Tichelman is involved in a similar case in another state that left a man dead.
It appears Tichelman expressed excitement about mass murders in a Facebook post last month.
A post from the time attached to her name read "It's really nice to
talk with someone about killing sprees and murdering people in cold
blood...and they love it too. no judgement. yay!"
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