An ABV hit

A Guardian FFM showing ambient breathing valve

A Suffocation hit: We are puzzled as to why the niece of a casino owner was killed. She was 19 y/o and had been visiting for the summer. Taryn had been at a party with her a week or so back and said she was smart, funny, confident and a delight to be around. Everyone not aware of the details thinks she died from some sort of an undiagnosed medical condition. She was an experienced diver and was out of the water when she died. They found her sitting on a bench on the pool surround of her uncle’s home leaning back against the wall dressed in the same style and color neoprene DUI wetsuit that her aunt wears. She was wearing all her equipment; booties, flippers, gloves, hood and weight belt and was ready to dive. She had suffocated while wearing her new gold silicone Ocean Technologies Guardian FFM similar to the one shown at the top of this entry. Her ambient breathing valve, (ABV) the knurled knob on the right side of the visor, was closed and the valve on her air tank (which was full) was turned off.

When her uncle found her she had been dead at least several hours and there was nothing the EMTs could do. Her uncle who is a sports diver thought she had been adjusting the fit and testing the seal on her new mask, the mask bag was beside the bench, and had some sort of seizure and that’s what he EMTs assumed also, until someone thought of looking at the security video to try and establish her time of death. That showed a woman in a bikini with a pareo around her hips, carrying a tote and wearing a wide brimmed sun-hat coming from the direction of an outside door from the back of the property and walking toward the teen. The teen is seen adjusting the straps on her head harness, closing the ambient breathing valve (ABV) which allows the diver to breathe ambient air while on the surface to save the air in her tank, then tugging on the straps again and opens the ABV to get air. The woman walks up to the girl pulls a squeeze bottle from her tote and sprays fluid onto the ABV. The teen’s hands start rise to her mask then drop back on her lap and her head slumps forward and she starts to topple forward off the bench. Sun-hat steps forward and catches the teen and pushes her back against the wall. As sun-hat turns you can see that she is wearing a cheek filter gasmask that had been hidden by the wide brim of her hat. Sun-hat reaches over and closes the ABV and makes sure the air valve on her tank is turned off so no air can get inside the teens mask. Sun-hat looked at the dive watch on her right wrist and stands there waiting for 7 minutes and 28 seconds before leaving in the direction from which she entered. From a close look at the video sun-hat seemed to be wearing latex surgical gloves, the gasmask may have been an old Czech M10 and was wearing sueded sole well worn white leather ballet slippers that left no prints.

Speculation: The uncle, a friendly competitor of mine, and I have worked some local charity events together and he knows of my interest in women’s violent deaths in Vegas. He wasn’t asking for my help, well not exactly, just for my thoughts about how this sort of thing could have happened to his family. He said after seeing the video the forensics people are testing for anesthetics, but haven’t come up with anything so far. Spraying the anesthetic into the ABV would have concentrated the fumes directly into the masks face cavity where there would have been no escaping the gas. I wondered about the contractor getting the wrong house, but it was daylight and all the homes are plainly marked though well separated so there is a lot of privacy in that neighborhood so hitting the wrong house seems very unlikely and the contractor was prepared to quickly immobilize a woman in dive gear with a minimum of effort. That she spent more than seven minutes watching her target die seems to suggest that she knew she had plenty of time with little fear of being interrupted and the watch on her right wrist indicates she might be left handed.

At this point I think the only reasonable scenario is that it was the right house, but the wrong woman was hit. It has to be that. It’s not like the teen was a high-profile celebrity or had stolen state secrets or something. She was just a pretty girl who would have been a second year student at Princeton this fall and her father is a doctor. The way I see it, everyone knows her aunt and uncle are into SCUBA diving and she was the same size and with probably a better figure (mostly hidden by the neoprene suit) than her aunt and was wearing a wetsuit identical to her Aunt’s. So in a hood and mask sun-hat couldn’t have seen that the teen’s hair color was different from her aunts. If it looks like a duck and acts like a duck it must be a duck, right? Not this time!

But if that’s what happened why would someone want to put out a contract on the aunt? She is 28 y/o with a lot of energy and personality and the 3rd trophy wife of her 52 y/o husband. They have been married less than a year and (rumor has it) she is making him very happy in bed. So happy that he has stopped sleeping around and they are talking about starting a family. She is very athletic and body conscious spending a lot of time at the gym and diving and is the youngest sister of the teen’s mom who lives in New Jersey with her husband. So where’s the motive for offing auntie? Oh, yeah, and auntie (trophy wife #3) has disappeared. Her husband said a small carryon bag and her passport is missing.

Taryn has a copy of the security video, but there is almost no action and certainly no struggle, just sun-hat walking up, the anesthetic sprayed on the ABV, the teen’s raised hands and slumping forward then sun-hat pushing the rubber clad teen back against the wall and closing her ABV. It’s probably too passive an off to be a big seller as a snuff video, but Tanaquil thinks it might appeal to the discriminating rubber fetishist collector who enjoys the subtleties of a female diver assassination, especially if the wrong woman was snuffed!