No Autopsy, No Answer

For more than a century, Nebraska’s county attorneys have also served as coroners, determining whether unattended deaths should be investigated—“without oversight or assistance from a state medical examiner,” Destiny Herbers and Jeremy Turley report. In their investigative feature for the Flatwater Free Press, Herbers and Turley survey county attorneys and reveal the “differing philosophies” that govern their autopsy decisions; one, who “ordered just one autopsy during his 34-year tenure,” told the reporters, “There just weren’t any suspicious circumstances.” Herbers and Turley shape their report around the death of 56-year-old Pedtro “Pete” Chappell, whose death, flanked by questions, remains a black box to his family members. 

All of it — the surveillance video, the running faucet, the strange texts, the police misstep — plunged Denece further down a rabbit hole but brought her no closer to explaining Pete’s demise.

Months later, Denece continued to carry around a black folder containing police reports, call logs and some of Pete’s belongings. She told anybody who would listen about the findings of her amateur investigation, but wondered why the burden had fallen to her.

“I’m like, why am I playing Inspector Gadget?”