a drag queen died in a london flat in 2023. after four detective teams and a protest outside scotland yard, we finally know why.

via SFist, Attitude and PinkNews

They were supposed to be doing eight shows. Heklina and Peaches Christ had taken Mommie Queerest to London in the spring of 2023, two San Francisco queens with a Joan Crawford parody and a shared flat, which is the most ordinary sentence you can write about a drag tour and the reason this one still hurts. On April 3, Peaches Christ found her in that flat.

It has taken until this week for anyone in a uniform to write down what happened next.

what the inquest found

An inquest gave the cause of death as acute mixed drug toxicity. SFist, reporting from the police press conference the San Francisco Chronicle covered, says the autopsy found cocaine, MDMA, meth, GHB and ketamine in her body, taken over roughly 48 hours; Attitude's reporting in the UK lists the same five. The Metropolitan Police said it "found no evidence to suggest third party involvement or that [the] death was suspicious," and closed the case.

That is the answer. It is not a complicated answer. It is close to the answer her friends were braced for in 2023, and it is worth saying plainly that nobody who loved Heklina has spent three and a half years insisting she was murdered. What they have spent three and a half years asking for is someone to actually look.

four teams, one file

According to Attitude, the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards has now found that two officers mishandled the case, and that the investigation was passed between four separate detective teams before it closed. Four. For a file whose conclusion was that nothing criminal happened.

"From the beginning, the London Met Police were unnecessarily secretive and dismissive," said Nancy French, her longtime friend and the executor of her estate. Peaches Christ put it shorter: "For me, trust was broken when the police failed us so profoundly."

The drag performer Crystal, who has pushed publicly for answers, told Attitude the whole affair "has been handled about as badly as you can imagine," and listed the frustrations in order: "the failures in investigating," "the lack of transparency with next of kin," and "the necessity of going to the media to get progress." The outcome, Crystal said, "confirmed a lot of my suspicions about how bias shapes our institutions." PinkNews notes what sits behind that sentence: the Casey review found this same force institutionally homophobic.

what her friends did

Here is the part worth keeping. CCTV of three men leaving the flat did not surface until January 24, 2025, nearly two years on. In March 2025 her friends organized a Justice for Heklina protest outside Scotland Yard, Peaches Christ and Ana Matronic among them. Queens on a pavement in London, in front of New Scotland Yard, because that turned out to be the fastest available route to a coroner's finding.

She was Steven Grygelko. She started Trannyshack in San Francisco in the late 1990s and ran it for the better part of two decades, co-founded Oasis in 2015, sold out of it in 2019 and went to Palm Springs, which is what you do when you have earned it. Thousands of people got their first drag show, their first bad decision and their first chosen family in a room she was hosting.

We wrote about Sophie Lee in this section on Monday, and the shape is familiar: when one of ours dies young, the institution goes quiet and the community starts making calls. By the account of the people who loved her, that is what moved this file. Three and a half years to write down one sentence, and the pressure came from a protest and a press campaign run by drag queens.

She would have had something to say about the wigs at Scotland Yard. That is the loss.